News

Wrapping up the week in nature science we learn valuable insights from the arachnid family that could help innovate visual technologies, unearth a growing trend for cultivating in the clouds and take a look at the new mapping technology globally evaluating the health of coral reefs.

Science Now reporter Elsa Youngsteadt, explores the leap of understanding scientists have made into optical abilities of the jumping spider. With their keen vision and deadly-accurate pounce, jumping spiders are the cats of the invertebrate world. For decades, scientists have puzzled over how the spiders’ miniature nervous systems manage such sophisticated perception and hunting behavior. A new study of Adanson’s jumping spider (Hasarius adansoni) fills in one key ingredient: an unusual form of depth perception.

Read the Full Story ’3D Vision for Tiny Eyes’

In other news, Dickson Despommier reports on the growing trend for high-rise farming. Writing for Scientific American the journalist examines the motivation behind vertical farming. Farming is ruining the environment, and not enough arable land remains to feed a projected 9.5 billion people by 2050. Growing food in glass high-rises could drastically reduce fossil-fuel emissions and recycle city wastewater that now pollutes waterways. A one-square-block farm 30 stories high could yield as much food as 2,400 outdoor acres, with less subsequent spoilage. Existing hydroponic greenhouses provide a basis for prototype vertical farms now being considered by urban planners in cities worldwide.

Read the Preview Story ‘Growing Skyscrapers: The Rise of Vertical Farms’

Finally, we turn our focus on a light reflecting living reefs. The NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center describe a new mapping method being used to detect detrimental change in coral reefs. Over dinner on R.V. Calypso while anchored on the lee side of Glover’s Reef in Belize, Jacques Cousteau told Phil Dustan that he suspected humans were having a negative impact on coral reefs. Dustan—a young ocean ecologist who had worked in the lush coral reefs of the Caribbean and Sinai Peninsula—found this difficult to believe. It was December 1974.

But Cousteau was right. During the following three-plus decades, Dustan, an ocean ecologist and biology professor at the University of Charleston in South Carolina, has witnessed widespread coral reef degradation and bleaching from up close. In the late 1970s Dustan helped build a handheld spectrometer, a tool to measure light given off by the coral. Using his spectrometer, Dustan could look at light reflected and made by the different organisms that comprised the living reefs. Since then, he has watched reefs deteriorate at an alarming rate. Recently he has found that Landsat offers a way to evaluate these changes globally. Using an innovative way to map how coral reefs are changing over time, Dustan now can find ‘hotspots’ where conservation efforts should be focused to protect these delicate communities.

Read the Full Story Detecting Detrimental Change in Coral Reefs