ESPM professor Neil Tsutsui was the featured guest for May's Ars Technica Live, where he talked about his work studying the behavior and commucations strategies of ants. There are many different kinds of ant colony behavior and there is a huge range of survival strategies among ants. Tsutsui also discussed his interest in citizen science and his work with Backyard Biodiversity and iNaturalist. Video available in the link.
NPR's Valley Public Radio | May 15, 2018
A new policy in China leaves huge amounts of the US's recyclables without a destination, directly impacting San Joaquin Valley recycling collectors. But these policies have consequences beyond just recycling companies. Here in California, if too many recyclables end up in landfills, entire cities could end up in violation of state laws that require waste be diverted away from dumps. O’Neill says this is an opportunity to redesign the entire recycling industry. “It means they have to get a lot more creative and really start pushing for better infrastructure at home to recycle a lot of the paper and plastic that we produce,” she says.
Forbes | May 14, 2018
In 2011, federal standards became “footprint based,” meaning vehicles are regulated based on the product of their length and width. Vehicles with larger footprints are subject to more moderate efficiency targets. It suggests that this feature may have incentivized automakers to super-size their cars to comply with the fuel economy regulation without actually improving fuel economy. A new study co-authored by ARE assistant professor James Sallee seeks to explore whether such size-based regulations were actually effective. The analysis shows that automakers indeed respond to the incentive created by size-based fuel economy regulation—they make bigger cars to achieve compliance at the lowest cost, often at the expense of actual gains in efficiency. The evidence makes it difficult to argue that size increases were purely in response to consumer demand for larger vehicles.
Washington Post | May 12, 2018
When the Department of Transportation mapped noise across the country last year, it found that 97 percent of the population is subjected to man-made noise. Experts are pointing to rising complaints, more lawsuits, more people with hearing problems, and studies showing that noise has negative health effects. A study co-authored by ESPM professor Rachel Morello-Frosch found that people in poorer and racially segregated neighborhoods live with higher levels of noise, and communities where at least 3 in 4 residents are black had median nighttime noise levels of 46.3 decibels — four decibels louder than communities with no black residents.
SF Chronicle | May 08, 2018
Bigger, more intense forest fires, longer droughts, warmer ocean temperatures and an ever shrinking snowpack in the Sierra Nevada are “unequivocal” evidence of the ruinous domino-effects that climate change is having on California, a new California Environmental Protection Agency report states. “If I were going to look across North America, ground zero for climate change is the Arctic. It is just changing really, really rapidly,” noted ESPM professor Steven Beissinger. “But California is an important laboratory to understand the effects of climate change on biodiversity.”