Why Did So Few in Montecito Evacuate?
Santa Barbara Independent, 1/16/2018
Cara Cuite is a human ecologist at Rutgers Universitywho heads a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-sponsored project on best practices in storm communication. "You need to make people believe they're at risk and take it seriously," she said. Just as important, Cuite explained, is clearly communicating to people what action they should take to protect themselves. "Once you have their attention, tell them what to do," she said. "Being told they're at risk without telling them how to reduce that risk just triggers a stress response without action."
42nd Rutgers Home Gardeners School is March 17
Morning Ag Clips, 1/17/2018
Whether your outdoor plans include festive gatherings with friends or peaceful moments of solitude, get your yard or garden ready with expert training at the 42nd Annual Rutgers Home Gardeners School.Registration is now open for this once-a-year event, which will be held on March 17 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Rutgers University Cook/Douglass campus in New Brunswick, N.J... Expert speakers from commercial horticulture and landscape design firms, as well as faculty and staff fromRutgers Cooperative Extension, provide attendees with the opportunity to learn from highly-respected professionals with a wealth of experience.
Found shackled and emaciated, children of torture suspects are freed
CNN, 1/17/2018
David, 57, and Louise, 49, are accused of holding their children captive in their Perris, California, home in filthy conditions, some of them shackled to beds with chains and padlocks. The 13 siblings range in age from 2 to 29. All looked like children, police said, and officers were surprised to learn that seven of them are adults...Daniel Hoffman, a professor of nutritional sciences at Rutgers University, told CNN that growth is essentially halted at the age at which undernutrition begins. "The problem is not having enough energy or micronutrients -- key nutrients like zinc, folate, iron -- for an extended period of time," he said. "Kids can become 'stunted,' meaning they're shorter than should be for their age. If you lack micronutrients, you can meet energy to live everyday and even have a normal body weight, but growth can still be stunted."
Nuclear Anxiety Is Becoming A Hallmark Of The Trump Era. Here's What Would Happen In The Worst-Case Scenario.
Buzzfeed, 1/17/2018
A botched ballistic missile warning in Hawaii, a canceled nationwide seminar on nuclear casualties, and a president who can't stop tweeting at North Korea have people thinking about the unthinkable: a nuclear attack on the US... If North Korea continues weapons development over the next five years,Rutgers University atmospheric scientist Alan Robocktold BuzzFeed News, it would likely mirror estimates of casualties from a nuclear war between Pakistan and India. Such a war involving about 100 warheads would directly kill 20 million people and starve another billion as smoke and dust would cripple global agriculture for several years, by obscuring sunlight and dropping global temperatures. Robock and his colleagues are starting a $3 million effort to fully model the atmospheric effects of a nuclear war between North Korea and the US.
Oyster farms survive Delaware Bay icebergs
The Press of Atlantic City, 1/18/2018
Brian Harman, of the Cape May Salt Oyster Co., feels like his company has dodged a bullet - in this case, one made of ice...Aquaculture Extension Program Coordinator Lisa Calvosaid oysters go into dormancy in the winter as a survival technique. "They are not actively feeding and not putting a lot of energy into respiration," said Calvo, who runs Project PORTS: Promoting Oyster Restoration Through Schools for Rutgers. Oysters' shells close tightly, protecting their internal fluids. This year's extreme cold could have caused more damage, were it not for the ice that formed over the bay. "We had very, very low wind chill temperatures," Calvo said. "Had the ice not been there, and had they been exposed to the air, there would have been more of a threat of freezing."
Self-healing concrete uses fungus to fill cracks
New Atlas, 1/18/2018
If cracks in concrete can be fixed when they're still tiny, then they can't become large cracks that ultimately cause structures such as bridges to collapse. It is with this in mind that various experimental types of self-healing concrete have been developed in recent years. One of the latest utilizes a type of fungus to do the healing. Inspired by the human body's ability to heal itself, the concrete was created by CongruiJin, Guangwen Zhou and David Davies from New York's Binghamton University, along withNing Zhang from Rutgers University.It incorporates spores of the fungus Trichoderma reesei, along with nutrients, that are placed within the concrete matrix as it's being mixed.
N.J. State Golf Association Unveils Hall of Fame
Tap Into Warren, 1/21/2018
The New Jersey State Golf Association, with 118 years of golf history behind it, is proud to announce the formation of the NJSGA Hall of Fame. The inaugural class boasts the most prominent names in that 118-year period including both famed players and those who have made a unique and lasting impact on the game of golf... Other inductees includeDr. Ralph Engel, founder of the Rutgers' Turfgrassschool.
Master gardener education series classes open for enrollment
New Jersey Herald, 1/22/2018
TheRutgers Cooperative Extension (RCE) Master Gardener programis a volunteer program offered in New Jersey through Rutgers Cooperative Extension, NJ Agriculture Experiment Station (NJAES), and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in cooperation with the individual county government. The program is designed to increase the availability of university-based information to local communities and individuals through trained adult volunteers known as Rutgers Master Gardeners.
Fungus-infused concrete offers prospect of self-healing buildings
Cosmos Magazine, 1/22/2018
A hybrid building material comprising concrete and a species of fungus called Trichoderma reesei could one day result in self-healing buildings. A team of biologists and materials scientists led byJing Luo of Rutgers Universityin New Jersey, US, has demonstrated that serious problems caused by cracks in concrete can be eliminated by adding spores into the matrix. "When cracking occurs, water and oxygen will find their way in. With enough water and oxygen, the dormant fungal spores will germinate, grow and precipitate calcium carbonate to heal the cracks," explains Jin.
Artificially cooling planet may pose threat to plants, animals
Reuters, 1/22/2018
Spraying chemicals into the earth's upper atmosphere to reflect more sunlight away from the planet could be one means of coping with runaway climate change, some scientists say. But employing the controversial "geoengineering" technique carries a range of risks - including that if such spraying was unexpectedly stopped, a rapid surge in heat on the planet would have "devastating" effects on plants and animals, according to a study published Monday. "If geoengineering ever stopped abruptly, it would be devastating. So you would have to be sure that it could be stopped gradually, and it is easy to think of scenarios that would prevent that," said co-authorAlan Robock of the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
How Engineering Earth's Climate Could Seriously Imperil Life
Wired, 1/22/2018
A study out today in Nature Ecology & Evolution models what might happen if humans were to geoengineer the planet and then suddenly stop. The sudden spike in global temperature would send ecosystems into chaos, killing off species in droves... "You'd get rapid warming because the aerosols have a lifetime of a year or two, and they would fall out pretty quickly," says study co-authorAlan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. "And then you'd get all this extra sunlight and you'd quickly go back up to what the climate might have been without the geoengineering." We're talking a rise in land surface temperatures of almost a degree per decade. "Even if you do it over five years, you're still going to get this rapid warming," he says.
N.J.'s winter has been nasty so far. Will the snowstorms keep on coming?
NJ.com, 1/22/2018
A blizzard at the Jersey Shore, and a white Christmas in parts of northern New Jersey. Yes, Mother Nature has so far provided a cold and snowy winter, despite the current string of mild days. And the cold, hard truth is we still have a long winter ahead of us. Although many Garden Staters might say this has felt like a brutal winter, with the frequent snow and a series of Arctic cold snaps,New Jersey State Climatologist David Robinsonsaid the total amount of snow that has fallen so far is not unusually high in most of northern and central New Jersey.
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