Thomas Molnar – Department of Plant Biology
McDonald’s just announced one of its biggest menu changes in years
Donald Schaffner – Department of Food Science; Rutgers Cooperative Extension
The one way fast food may actually be ‘good’ for you
Donald Schaffner – Department of Food Science
One of the last Obama-era climate reports had a troubling update about the rising seas
Robert E. Kopp – Rutgers Energy Institute
Donald Trump and his team are dodging climate science
Jennifer Francis – Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences
Scientists react to Earth’s warmest year: ‘We are heading into a new unknown’
Jennifer Francis – Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences
The ‘five-second rule’ for eating food? Scientists just demonstrated how gross it is.
Donald Schaffner, Department of Food Science
‘The extraordinary years have become the normal years’: Scientists survey radical Arctic melt
A group of scientists studying a broad range of Arctic systems – from sea ice to permafrost to the Greenland ice sheet – gathered in D.C. Wednesday to lay out just how extreme a year 2016 has been so far for the northern cap of the planet… “For Northern Hemisphere snow cover, the spring of 2016 set a new record low,” said David Robinson, who runs the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab. “We lost the snow earlier than any time in record…throughout the Northern Hemisphere,” Robinson said.
Claim that jet stream crossing equator is ‘climate emergency’ is utter nonsense
Two bloggers have made a stunning claim that has spread like wildfire on the Internet: They say the Northern Hemisphere jet stream, the high-altitude river of winds that separates cold air from warm air, has done something new and outrageous. They say it has crossed the equator, joining the jet stream in the Southern Hemisphere. One said this signifies that the jet stream is ‘wrecked’, the other said it means we have a ‘global climate emergency’. To be clear, the hypothesis that global warming is destabilizing the polar jet stream is a legitimate idea that has been published in peer-reviewed journals,though it remains controversial. But even the scientist who developed the hypothesis, Jennifer Francis, a professor of meteorology at Rutgers University, suggested it had been misapplied by Scribbler and Beckwith. “I’d say cross-equator flow cannot be unprecedented, maybe not even all that unusual,” she said.
The oldest white oak tree in the country is dying — and no one knows why
Well before Columbus sailed to the New World and even before Gutenberg invented the printing press, there grew a great oak tree in a land that would one day be called New Jersey… “We had great hopes,” said Dennis Jones, the pastor at Basking Ridge Presbyterian Church. “All eyes were on the tree to see how it would green.” When it didn’t last month, when even more of its upper branches stayed bare, other experts were consulted. They tested the soil, probed the tree’s roots, checked for beetles and disease. Jason Grabosky, an ecologist at Rutgers University, inspected the tree in mid-June and declared it, after more than 600 years, to be “in a spiral of decline.”
