The Diversity Within

Check out this story from the LA Times that describes the miraculous treatment of a common and debilitating intestinal infection using fecal transplants.  Yes, you read that correctly: fecal transplants.  This medical advance is a direct result of our growing appreciation for the immense diversity of microbes that inhabit the human body ecosystem.....and the important ecosystem services this diversity can provide. Check out these two recent scientific articles describing recent advances in our understanding of the human microbiome:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7402/full/nature11234.html
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0032118

And this link to the Human Microbiome Project: http://commonfund.nih.gov/hmp/

And this cool interactive feature from Scientific American (were the picture above comes from): http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=microbiome-graphic-explore-human-microbiome

Times they are a Changing

The federal government has just released a draft of the nation's third climate assessment report, a comprehensive analysis of the latest and best peer-reviewed science on the extent and impacts of global warming on the United States.  The conclusions aren't very reassuring.  The country is hotter than it used to be, rainfall is becoming both more intense and more erratic, and rising seas and storm surges threaten U.S. coasts.  Also,the assessment warns that with the current rate of global carbon emissions, these impacts will intensify in the coming decades.

The global policy response to this looming threat has so far been an abject failure.  And the recent performance of our own national government in dealing with the relatively mundane and simple task of agreeing on a budget for next year does not offer much hope that nations will cooperate to take any meaningful action on climate change any time soon. Yet, humans are capable of fixing large looming global problems when they set their mind to it.  The most recent example has been the international response that curtailed the use of Chlorofluorocarbons, which were eating away at the earth's protective ozone coating.  The latest data suggest that as a result of this international effort ozone in the upper atmosphere is on the mend.  We were able to act  in time to keep our ozone; will we act in time to avert catastrophic disruptions to our climate?