Readers discuss net-zero carbon emissions and glass frogs

for good measure

Cutting carbon dioxide emissions to curb climate change and reach net-zero is possible but not easy, alexandra witz reported inNet-zero path,SN: 1/28/23, p. 22,

A report from Princeton University’s Net-Zero America project, released in 2021, estimates that wind and solar power generation will need to roughly quadruple by 2030 to achieve the United States’ goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Needed, witz informed of. In the most ambitious scenario, “wind turbines would cover an area the size of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma combined,” she wrote.

Reader Mary Sweeney Noted that while technically correct, the statement quoted above may be misleading. “What the Princeton report actually says is that the visual footprint of the turbines will be equal to the combined areas of the states listed above. In other words, this figure for land use was arrived at by considering a much larger area from which very tall turbines would be visible, ” Sweeney wrote. Actual land use will be only a small fraction of the visible footprint.

vanishing act

A glass frog hides almost all of its red blood cells in the liver when it sleeps, which increases the animal’s transparency, Susan Milius reported inglass frogs make their blood disappear,SN: 1/28/23, p. 6,

Reader lane yeager Wondered what criteria the researchers used to determine transparency in frogs.

Biologists think about transparency a little differently than physicists, say Jessie Delia of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. “If individual tissues are transmitting more than 90 percent of the light, they are — as far as biology goes — relatively completely transparent,” he says. The green dorsal skin of glass frogs “gives them a kind of diffuse transmittance, like filtered light if you look at the canopy of a tree on a sunny day.”

What’s more, the translucency of glass frog skin appears on a continuum. The clearest viewing skin is on the abdomen, which helps explain why it was taken delia A few years to pay attention to the phenomenon of cell-hiding in sleeping frogs. delia Frogs are often seen sleeping in the woods, their less-translucent backs turned outward as the frogs cling to leaves. “It wasn’t until I saw them sleeping in captivity on glass that I could actually see their stomachs,” he says. From there, “you can see directly into their organs.”

Since frogs can pack their red blood cells together without forming a clot, the reader Mara Chen-Goldberg Wondered, could the discovery aid blood clotting treatments for humans?

Many people are asking the same question, delia They say. It appears that the frogs somehow inhibit the typical vertebrate blood-clotting process. “But at this point, we don’t know whether that mechanism will be directly translatable to human medicine,” he says.

Improvement

,A clever fox catches fish, surprising researchers,SN: 11/5/22, p. 4) incorrectly stated that fishing in foxes had not previously been observed. While the study featured in the story describes the first record of red fox fishing, a study published in 1991 polar research Previously reported fishing in arctic foxes in Greenland. I also came across this wrong fact year end roundup In science news‘ December 17, 2022 and December 31, 2022 issue.