AMNH is now screening a new IMAX film focused on the rescue of orphaned elephants in Africa and orangutans in Borneo.  The film, Born to be Wild, explores the efforts of two women, Dr. Biruté Mary Galdikas and Dame Daphne M. Sheldrick, as they and their teams rescue, rehabilitate, and return these incredible animals back to the wild. Recently, New York Times photographer Andy Isaacson traveled to Borneo to see Dr. Galdiakas and her team in action. As he says in his NYT Green blog:

As their forest shrinks, orangutans are coming into closer contact with humans — a potentially perilous encounter. The Nature Conservancy and 19 other private organizations recently found the rate at which orangutans in Indonesian Borneo are being killed to be higher than previously thought. From 1,970 to 3,100 are killed annually, on average, enough to drive the species toward extinction in 10 to 15 years, their survey found. Orangutan populations do not recover quickly: the average interval between births is about eight years.

…

If the orangutans have an Eden, it is Tanjung Puting National Park, 1,174 square miles of peat and freshwater swamp forest on the southern coast of central Kalimantan. Last month I traveled there and visited Camp Leakey, founded inside the park in 1971 by Biruté Mary Galdikas, a student of the paleo-anthropologist Louis Leakey and the world’s foremost authority on the orangutan.

See Mr. Isaacson’s full photo essay here.

And if you have a chance, stop by and see this heartwarming film!  (Get tickets at AMNH.org)

Looking for resources about climate and climate change?  Here are a few we think are great:

- NOAA’s Climate site compiles climate change data from around the globe.  Check out their Climate Change Impacts page for an overview, including multimedia and lesson/unit plans.

- NASA’s Global Ice Viewer uses real data to show changes in ice patterns over both poles.  It includes videos, maps and interactive media ready for classroom use.

- Meet the researchers and educators on the JOIDES Resolution, a scientific research vessel dedicated to exploring the sea floor.  JOIDES has a number of videos and activities for kids and teachers.

- CLEAN (the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network) is an NSF-funded project that brings together vetted climate research and data from a number of sources.  It’s part of the National Science Digital Library, a great resource for teachers of ANY science topic.

- Can you successfully run a company while reducing CO₂? This web-based game from Allianz is designed to raise awareness about the needs to balance concerns for profit and climate change.

If you’re looking for something to do on the lazy day after Thanksgiving, why not join NASA in celebrating the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory?

An artist's rendering of "Curiosity". Photo from NASA.gov

Carrying the Mars research rover dubbed ‘Curiosity’, NASA’s Alliance Atlas V begins a nine-month journey to the red planet this week. According to NASA, “The launch window is scheduled to open at 7:25 a.m. PST (10:25 a.m. EST) on Nov. 25. Curiosity’s arrival at Mars’ Gale Crater is anticipated in August 2012. During the nearly two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether a selected area of Mars offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life and preserved that evidence, if it existed.”

You can watch streaming video of the launch on NASA Television or on the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory Ustream channel.  Or follow along with the launch on twitter: http://Twitter.com/MarsCuriosity.

On Tuesday, the Museum got a visit from some of the stars of its newest exhibition.

NASA astronauts Michael Massimino and John Grunsfeld, crew members on mission STS-125 to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, joined Curator Michael Shara for a Q&A in the Cullman Hall of the Universe on Tuesday, November 15. The astronauts’ repair mission is featured in one of the dioramas of the Museum’s special exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, which is curated by Dr. Shara.

Hayden Planetarium Director (and co-author of our course, The Solar System) Neil deGrasse Tyson emceed the event and fielded questions from the audience and Twitter as over 1,000 viewers tuned into the live stream of the Q&A on amnh.org.

Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration offers a vision of the future of space travel as it boldly explores our next steps in our solar system and beyond. The exhibition takes visitors on humanity’s journey to explore the next frontier, either ourselves or via robotic proxies, which have already traveled to every planet in our solar system. Future missions highlighted in Beyond Planet Earth, once limited to the realm of science fiction but today discussed by leading scientists and engineers, include building a space elevator on the surface of the Moon, deflecting a hazardous near-Earth asteroid, and traveling to Mars—perhaps even establishing colonies there.

The exhibit opens tomorrow – get your tickets now!

The New York State Department of Education has selected the American Museum of Natural History to launch a pioneering Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program this fall.

“The Museum is proud to be the first museum in the United States to offer a master’s degree program to prepare science teachers,” said Ellen V. Futter, President of the American Museum of Natural History. “The Museum’s new Master of Arts in Teaching program extends the Museum’s formal roles both in improving the teaching of science and addressing the national crisis in science education, and will be an important new component of the Museum’s longstanding graduate training, including, most notably, the Richard Gilder Graduate School, the only museum-based Ph.D.-granting program in the country.”

Drawing on the Museum’s unique resources and long history in teacher professional development, the 15-month MAT program is being launched as part of a specialized pilot program to help address a critical shortage of qualified science teachers in New York State, particularly in high-needs schools, by offering coursework with a specialization in Earth science for teachers of grades 7 through 12.  The MAT program, which is supported by funding provided in part by the New York State Education Department and the National Science Foundation, will model and test new approaches that can be replicated across New York State and nationally.

The Museum will begin the planning process for the new MAT program this fall, with the first class of teachers slated to begin coursework next summer.

Last week, the National Research Council released its new Framework for K-12 Science Education, the culmination of a multi-year study to determine the key scientific ideas every 12th grader should know when they graduate. The framework was developed by a 18-person committee of experts from the fields of science and education. Education Week reports that the NRC framework advocates:

promoting a greater emphasis on depth over breadth in understanding science and getting young people to continually engage in the practices of both scientific inquiry and engineering design as part of the learning process. [Also,] promot[ing] what the panel calls greater “coherence” in the teaching of science as students progress through school, with the core scientific concepts revisited at multiple grade levels to build on prior learning and help facilitate a deeper understanding.

Many in education see this study as a major step in including science in the nationwide push for common standards.

One of the great things about scientific research is that it’s never finished (even after we’ve completed a great new course). The following guest post is by Climate Change authoring scientist Dr. Drew Shindell, who wanted to expand on one idea in the course: the role the Sun plays in the complex system of climate change. For more on the science of climate change, sign up for our summer session!

Continued pursuit of the Sun’s role in climate change

By Dr. Drew Shindell

In a world with many uncertainties, we can at least be sure that the Sun will rise every morning. Not only that, but that it’ll be about as bright as is was yesterday. But since the Sun puts out so much energy, ‘about as bright’ can still mean a substantial change. To put it in context, the increased carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution has reduced the outgoing energy from the Earth to space by ~1.6 W/m². The incoming solar energy absorbed by the Earth is about 240 W/m², so even a very small change could be important for climate.

So how much has the Sun’s output changed during the last century, and how much does it contribute to global warming? Three new papers continue a long ranging scientific investigation into this difficult but important issue. Before discussing the new results, some introduction to how past solar output is estimated is warranted.

Direct observations of the Sun’s output from satellites only began in 1979. Prior to then, various ‘proxies’ must be used. The most common are sunspot numbers, as the data set for these is thought to be quite accurate and extends back several centuries (since the perfection of the telescope in the early 1600s), and chemical isotopes from ice cores whose production depends upon the solar magnetic field. The sunspot number is given as the number of distinct spots plus 10 times the number of sunspot groups. It’s not obvious that this exact definition, developed in 1848 as an indicator of total ‘activity’, is directly proportional to output. In fact, it’s not the sunspots themselves that are driving the output at all, since the dark sunspots are areas with less output, while during period of greater sunspot activity the total output increases. Modern observations show that the dark sunspots are accompanied by bright spots know as ‘faculae’, and that the net effect of the greater bright and dark areas is dominated by the bright spots. In fact, both the dark and bright spots represent clusters of magnetic field activity, and it is the variation in this magnetic activity that underlies the cyclic variations seen in modern measurements. In contrast to these ‘active’ areas, the rest of the Sun’s area has less pronounced magnetic activity and is know as the ‘quiet’ area. The production of isotopes in the Earth’s atmosphere by incoming galactic cosmic rays is an indicator of solar output since the Sun’s magnetic field variations affect how easily cosmic rays can reach the Earth. The activity level of the Sun, and hence the sunspot number, has had a fairly regular cycle of about 10.5 years during recent decades.

Despite these shortcomings, during the satellite era with direct observations, the sunspot index has been a fairly good indicator of total solar output, and the sunspot record agrees fairly well with the isotope record over the long term. However, the difficult part comes in when trying to use these records to estimate solar output in earlier times, as they show distinctly different behavior during earlier centuries. In particular, there are several so-called ‘grand minima’, when sunspot activity departed markedly from it’s regular cycle, nearly ceasing for long periods. One of the key times is the Maunder Minimum, from about 1650-1710, when there were very few sunspots. The real question then is what do sunspot or isotope records tell us about how much different the Sun’s output was during a long Grand Minimum?

The new study of Shapiro et al finds a very large decrease in solar output during the Maunder Minimum, while the new results of Schrijver et al find a very small change. How can they differ so greatly? Well, lots of assumptions are required about what the Maunder Minimum Sun was really like. Shapiro et al make the assumption that in addition to the variation in active regions, there is a background change in the Sun so that every part of the Sun was only as bright as the dimmest part of the modern ‘quiet’ area observations during the Maunder Minimum. Though possible, this is certainly not the case for the modern solar mimina that we have observed, during which there is a still a large amount of magnetic activity in ‘quiet’ areas. Shapiro et al find a value of ~1 W/m² for the forcing between the Maunder Minimum and the modern mean. They then assume that the background ‘quiet’ areas changed through time with the long-term average solar magnetic field, and therefore follow ice core isotope records (an ‘active’ region indicator). There are no observations to support this link, and there are no proxies for the ‘quiet’ areas themselves, so this remains quite speculative.

In their work, Schrijver et al instead argue that the recent 2007-2009 solar minimum, which was unusually long by modern standards and contained many days with a nearly sunspot free Sun, demonstrates that even during an extended quiet period, a minimum level of activity is maintained that is greater than many have assumed. Though the modern aspect of their study is based on observations, it is a leap to infer that the recent minimum, though unusual, was necessarily analogous to the Maunder Minimum (which the authors acknowledge). Hence the Maunder to modern forcing based on their work is only ~0.1 W/m². Another new paper, by Foukal et al., argues that the relationship between solar activity and solar output becomes non-linear at low sunspot numbers, leading to an intermediate level of Maunder to modern forcing. Solar forcing between ~1750 and the present (the interval typically used for climate change assessment) is typically estimated to be about half that of the Maunder to the present.

So where do we go from here? It’s difficult to say how progress will be made in unraveling the historical trends, but there are some additional data that may help. For example, photographic evidence can tell us more about the ‘quiet’ Sun. This indicates that there was still substantial magnetic activity in ‘quiet’ areas during solar minima in the early 20^th century (as there is today), which seems to argue against the assumptions of Shapiro et al that such activity was greatly reduced. However, without more direct data, uncertainties about long-term forcing are likely to remain substantial even as most of our estimates continue to show fairly small values.

What we do know very well is what the Sun’s output has been doing during the last 32 years – declining slightly. Yes, the output between the regularly occurring solar minima, when variability is least and so determination of a mean value is easiest, has gone down over recent decades. That’s the same time period during which global warming has been the most rapid. Early in the 20^th century a brightening Sun may have indeed contributed to warming temperatures, but the impact of increasing greenhouse gases was likely at least 10 times greater. Even earlier, when the Sun was behaving more unusually and the Industrial Revolution hadn’t yet happened, solar variability was an important driver of climate change. In modern times, however, though our star is clearly variable, the influence of changes in it’s output has been overshadowed by human activities.

Shapiro, A. I., W. Schmutz, E. Rozanov, M. Schoell, M. Haberreiter, A. V. Shapiro, and S. Nyeki, A new approach to the long-term reconstruction of the solar irradiance leads to large historical solar forcing, Astron. Astrophys. 529, A67 (2011).

Schrijver, C. J., W. C. Livingston, T. N. Woods and R. A. Mewaldt, The minimal solar activity in 2008-2009 and its implications for long-term climate modeling, Geophys. Res. Lett. 38, L06701, doi:10.1029/2011GL046658 (2011).

Foukal, P, A. Ortiz, and R. Schnerr, Dimming of the 17^th Century Sun, Astrophys. J. Lett. 733:L1, doi:10.1088/2041-8205/733/1/L1, 2011.

The jaw of the "t.rex" leech

From the AMNH newsdesk: proof that AMNH is one of the top research institutions in the country.

According to a ranking compiled by the International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) at Arizona State University, two of the top 10 new species cataloged in the last year were discovered by scientists at AMNH.  One of the Top 10 is Tyrannobdella rex (which means “tyrant leech king”), a new species of blood sucker with ferociously large teeth lining a single jaw, discovered by Dr. Mark Siddall and the team in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology.

The other Top 10 selection, a new species of pancake batfish (Halieutichthys intermedius), was found in the Gulf of Mexico in waters encompassed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This discovery, partly the work of John Sparks, a curator in the Department of Ichthyology at the Museum, was first published in the Journal of Fish Biology.

Congratulations to Dr. Siddall, Dr. Sparks and all of the amazing scientists, post-docs and researchers involved in these finds!

The last time anthropologists Donald Johanson and Richard Leakey shared the stage at the American Museum of Natural History was 30 years ago, for a debate on human evolution that is remembered more for their televised rivalry than for the details of their arguments.  Last week, Drs. Leakey and Johanson were back together at AMNH not to debate evolution, but to celebrate it.  The conversation, entitled Human Evolution and Why It Matters, was moderated by CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and covered topics from the overwhelming fossil evidence supporting the theory of evolution to where they believe research may take physical anthropology in the future.

The full 90 minute event can be viewed here: