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Physical Laws Shape Biology
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IN THE PERSPECTIVE “A DYNAMICAL-SYSTEMS VIEW OF STEM CELL
biology” (12 October 2012, p. 215), C. Furusawa and K. Kaneko discuss
the relevance of dynamic systems biology approaches and the
concept of “attractors” to understand cell differentiation and proliferation.
We share their excitement in using computational models that
apply physical laws to cell fate decision.
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Climate Science Documents
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Physically based assessment of hurricane surge threat under climate change
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Storm surges are responsible for much of the damage and loss of life associated with landfalling hurricanes. Understanding how global warming will affect hurricane surges thus holds great interest. As general circulation models (GCMs) cannot simulate hurricane surges directly, we couple a GCM-driven hurricane model with hydrodynamic models to simulate large numbers of synthetic surge events under projected climates and assess surge threat, as an example, for New York City (NYC). Struck by many intense hurricanes in recorded history and prehistory, NYC is highly vulnerable to storm surges. We show that the change of storm climatology will probably increase the surge risk for NYC; results based on two GCMs show the distribution of surge levels shifting to higher values by a magnitude comparable to the projected sea-level rise (SLR). The combined effects of storm climatology change and a 1 m SLR may cause the present NYC 100-yr surge flooding to occur every 3–20 yr and the present 500-yr flooding to occur every 25–240 yr by the end of the century.
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Physiological plasticity increases resilience of ectothermic animals to climate change
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Understanding how climate change affects natural populations remains one of the greatest challenges for ecology and management of natural resources. Animals can remodel their physiology to compensate for the effects of temperature variation, and this physiological plasticity, or acclimation, can confer resilience to climate change1,2. The current lack of a comprehensive analysis of the capacity for physiological plasticity across taxonomic groups and geographic regions, however, constrains predictions of the impacts of climate change. Here, we assembled the largest database to date to establish the current state of knowledge of physiological plasticity in ectothermic animals. We show that acclimation decreases the sensitivity to temperature and climate change of freshwater and marine animals, but less so in terrestrial animals. Animals from more stable environments have greater capacity for acclimation, and there is a significant trend showing that the capacity for thermal acclimation increases with decreasing latitude. Despite the capacity for acclimation, climate change over the past 20 years has already resulted in increased physiological rates of up to 20%, and we predict further future increases under climate change. The generality of these predictions is limited, however, because much of the world is drastically undersampled in the literature, and these undersampled regions are the areas of greatest need for future research efforts.
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Physiology and Climate Change
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Studies of physiological mechanisms are needed to predict climate effects on ecosystems at species and community levels.
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Phytoplankton Calcification in a High-CO2 World
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Ocean acidification in response to rising atmospheric CO2 partial pressures is widely expected to reduce calcification by marine organisms. From the mid-Mesozoic, coccolithophores have been major calcium carbonate producers in the world’s oceans, today accounting for about a third of the total marine CaCO3 production. Here, we present laboratory evidence that calcification and net primary production in the coccolithophore species Emiliania huxleyi are significantly increased by high CO2 partial pressures. Field evidence from the deep ocean is consistent with these laboratory conclusions, indicating that over the past 220 years there has been a 40% increase in average coccolith mass. Our findings show that coccolithophores are already responding and will probably continue to respond to rising atmospheric CO2 partial pressures, which has important implications for biogeochemical modeling of future oceans and climate.
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Piccirilli, Mike
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Expertise Search
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Pilarczyk et al 2006.pdf
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TRB Library
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PEK-RIC
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Pilsbry 1891.pdf
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PEK-RIC
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Pilsbry Rhoads 1896.pdf
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PEK-RIC
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Pine Forests
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