Author Archives: Jeff
Antarctic frost flower paper submitted
Moments ago I finally submitted the final frost flower paper from my PhD, a paper which first found life as Appendix 2 in my dissertation. Once upon a time I thought this particular project was going to be the central … Continue reading
70 Degrees South film tour
I only just learned about 70 Degrees South, a documentary film project funded by Rutgers University and the National Science Foundation. The documentary features the science and scenery of the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research Project. In support of the … Continue reading
Polar science on Reddit
I’m a member of the Association of Polar Early Career Researchers (APECS), an international group of young(ish) scientists that tries to raise awareness on Polar issues. In recognition of International Polar Week the US branch of APECS, US-APECS, is going … Continue reading
Some climate fun with Google Earth
My postdoctoral adviser at Lamont showed me something really cool today that I suspect is pretty common knowledge (it was new to me!). Google Earth has a feature that allows you to view historic aerial/satellite photos for any point on … Continue reading
Dimension reduction with PCA
I recently had an interesting problem that I think I successfully solved using principal component analysis (PCA). PCA is one of a family of multivariate statistical methods known as ordinations. Frankly it, and related techniques, scare me a little. They’re … Continue reading
Got the reviews blues
I’ve got this cool idea Think about it everyday Put it in a proposal Then NSF took my idea awaaaay I’ve got the review blues… We got some surprising reviews back yesterday on a proposal to NSF Polar Programs. We … Continue reading
Sea ice biogeochemistry methods review
I was excited to learn that our long awaited sea ice biogeochemistry review was published today in the journal Elementa. Many of the contributors to the project are members of the SCOR working group Biogeochemical Exchange Processes at Sea Ice … Continue reading
DHPS: Taking a dip in the DOC pool
An interesting paper was recently published by Durham et al. in PNAS: Cryptic carbon and sulfur cycling between surface ocean plankton. The all-star author list includes members of the Armbrust Lab at the University of Washington, the Moran Lab at … Continue reading
Paper published on psychrophile alkane hydroxylases
We just published a paper in BMC Genomics on the occurrence of genes coding for alkane hydroxylases in the genomes of psychrophilic (cold loving) bacteria. This paper does a couple of interesting things and fails to do several other interesting … Continue reading
DIAMOND – A game changer?
A very exciting paper was published in Nature Methods a couple weeks ago by Benjamin Buchfink and colleagues: Fast and Sensitive Protein Alignment Using DIAMOND. The paper debuts the DIAMOND software, touted as a much-needed replacement for BLASTX. BLASTX has … Continue reading