Ken Caldeira Carbon Footprint of Beef
Nature 'due south roundup of the papers and issues gaining traction on social media.
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Beef is of a sudden big on social media, thanks to two recent papers investigating the global furnishings of livestock farming. Researchers are also buzzing nearly the mystery of vanishing clinical-trial results, and a humorous accept on bookish life.
2 papers brand the case that beef production has a bigger bear upon on greenhouse-gas emissions and on the use of nitrogen and water than does the production of pork and poultry, for instance. Tim Thomson, a dr. and molecular biologist at the Molecular Biology Institute of Barcelona, tweeted: "Practise not imitate Americans: Eat less beefiness and you volition mitigate environmental costs of diet." Just Jared Decker, a beef-cattle geneticist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, tweeted that cattle take a relatively small carbon footprint compared to other industry sectors, adding: "Wouldn't changing transportation & energy be more important?"
The bad news for beef came from several directions. A newspaper in the journal Climatic change concluded that beefiness and dairy cattle account for 74% of global greenhouse-gas emissions from livestock. One of the authors, climate scientist Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, used Twitter to share another accept on the data: "Eating beefiness heats the Earth 10 times more than eating chicken or pork."
Reached for further comment, Caldeira agreed that the emissions from manufacture and energy dwarf those from livestock agriculture. "If the global energy system did not use the sky as a sewer, we would not be overly concerned nigh greenhouse-gas emissions from the agricultural sector," he said. Still, he added, the finding that beefiness is less climate-friendly than chicken or pork suggests a concrete activeness that people can easily take. And that, Caldeira says, could explain why his tweets on this topic were amidst his most retweeted. "Papers seem to resonate when the trouble is elementary and understandable, and when the conclusions are simple and clear."
Another report concluded that producing beefiness uses 28 times more land and 11 times more irrigation water than eggs, poultry, pork and dairy production. It besides creates half dozen times every bit much nitrogen pollution per calorie consumed in the United States. "Beefiness: it may gustatory modality great just it's awful for the environment," tweeted Conor McGowan, a wildlife biologist at Auburn University in Alabama.
In a follow-upwards interview, Decker stood up for beef. He cited a 2002 Nature review by Jared Diamond, which suggested that we owe at to the lowest degree some of our success as a species to the domestication of animals, including cattle. Merely Decker also hopes that the latest round of research volition spur changes in farming methods, including refinements to feeding practices and genetics to reduce the environmental footprint of beef production. Compared with other types of livestock farming, "the beef industry has been slower to adopt new technologies," he said. "That needs to change."
Caro, D., Davis S. J., Bastianoni, S. & Caldeira, Grand. Climatic Change http://doi.org/tvw (2014)
Eshel, Thousand., Shepon, A., Makov, T., & Milo, R. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. U.s. http://doi.org/tvx (2014)
Researchers on social media never seem to tire of discussing shortcomings in the clinical-trial arrangement. Lately, much of the talk centred on a newspaper that investigated 400 randomly selected U.s. clinical trials. All of the studies had been designated as 'completed' for at least iv years, but only seventy.v% had published results in whatever journal or on the website ClinicalTrials.gov. The other 29.5% of trials were essentially invisible to the world. The results of industry-funded studies were almost half as probable every bit other studies to be published, the analysis found. Mark Fleury, associate director of science policy at the American Association for Cancer Inquiry, tweeted: "Need this data in public sphere!"
A 1998 abstract entitled 'Directed evolution of a full professor' is making the rounds online again — a reminder of the scientific importance of a good express mirth. The spoof abstruse, written by molecular biologists Karen Ottemann and Sharon Doyle at the Academy of California at Berkeley, describes an try to abound successful professors in the lab. First author 'A. 50. Nighter' and colleagues reported subjecting a grouping of "graduate student clones" to "several rounds of random mutagenesis followed by selection on minimal money media". The surviving clones who could "piece of work for long hours with vending machine snacks equally a sole carbon source" were labelled 'postdocs'. Eventually, full professors were identified by their "propensity to talk incessantly almost their own research" and their "inability to judge" how much fourth dimension it should take to consummate bench work. The abstract gained new attention this month when Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis, tweeted it to his nearly 24,000 followers without revealing when the abstract was published. "I decided not to annotate on the date," he explained in a later tweet, "since it was still neat."
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Woolston, C. Beef'due south big touch on Earth. Nature 511, 511 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/511511e
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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/511511e
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/511511e
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