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Helping to Preserve New Jersey’s Raritan River

March 20, 2013 By

James Loring and Gretchen Wittenborn Johnson have a dream to clean up New Jersey’s Raritan River. To that end, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson are endowing a new chair position in water resources and watershed ecology at Rutgers University in the department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources at the university’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. Endowing the position was a way to knit together several interests of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson that focus on the restoration and preservation of the river. Part of that stewardship, they say, is a greater focus on the relationship between the land and water in and around the Raritan.

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Filed Under: Environment/Natural Resources, Faculty, In the News, SEBS

People Who Taste Too Much

March 19, 2013 By

There is a good reason why kale evokes such strong feelings in different people. What is harshly bitter to some 25% of the world – often classified as "supertasters" – is barely bitter to about another third. The rest of us fall somewhere in between. Such stark differences in how we perceive taste are programmed into our DNA…Beverly Tepper, a professor of food science at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J., found in a study that women who don’t taste PROP tend to be heavier than those who are supertasters.

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Filed Under: Faculty, Food/Nutrition/Health, In the News, SEBS

Map Plots Rising Seas Street by Jersey Street

March 6, 2013 By

While superstorm Sandy revealed the Northeast’s vulnerability, a new map by New Jersey scientists suggests how rising seas could make future storms even worse…”We are not trying to unduly frighten people,” said Rick Lathrop, director of the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis at Rutgers, who led the map’s development. “This is providing people a look at where our vulnerability is.”

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Filed Under: Environment/Natural Resources, Faculty, In the News, SEBS

Planting Seeds for a Better Oyster Harvest

January 27, 2013 By

New Jersey was once home to a booming oyster industry, as evidenced by the Victorian mansions along Cape May erected by fishing barons and coastal communities such as Bivalve and Shell Pile that took their names from the plentiful natural resource lining Delaware Bay…In some ways, the most recent push for New Jersey oysters can be dated to the early 1990s, when the industry was struck by the parasitic shellfish disease known as Dermo, which didn’t affect humans. "It was a crisis point. The industry was going to collapse," said David Bushek, director of Rutgers University’s Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory, in Port Norris, N.J.

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Filed Under: Faculty, Fisheries/Aquaculture, In the News, NJAES, Research, SEBS