Category Archives: News

News, Scientific American

Hitting Rock Bottom

Fishing boats have dragged nets across the seafloor in pursuit of bottom-feeding fish and crustaceans since the Middle Ages. In recent decades, motorized fishing fleets, powered by government subsidies, have taken heavier nets deeper and farther offshore. The annual haul from international waters in 2010 was reported to be worth more than $600 million.

To see how bottom trawling is changing the ocean’s bottom, ecologist Antonio Pusceddu of the Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy, and his team took seafloor sediment samples at trawled and untouched sites off Spain’s northeastern coast between 500 and 2,000 meters below the surface. They then counted the number of individuals and species in those samples and measured the amount of carbon in the sediment. Continue reading Hitting Rock Bottom →

IEEE Spectrum, News, Oaxaca

Mexico Opens Its Grid to Competition

As part of a wider reform of its energy market, Mexico is privatizing its energy regulator and will begin allowing private companies to sell energy to, and add capacity to, its electricity grid. The country’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, enacted the laws (English summaries) on Monday, August 11th (Spanish pdf). Petroleum and electricity have been state monopolies in law since the 1917 constitution and in practice since the late 1930s, when Mexico succeeded in expropriating foreign energy firms’ holdings.

Continue reading Mexico Opens Its Grid to Competition →

IEEE Spectrum, News

What Do Women in Engineering Want?

For years, psychologist Nadya A. Fouad of the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee has been asking women in engineering what they want. She and organizational psychologist Romila Singh, also at U-W Milwaukee, conducted a National Science Foundation-supported survey asking over 5,000 female engineers their reasons for leaving—or staying—in the field. On Saturday, 9 August, at the American Psychological Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Fouad presented their latest analysis of that data. Those who leave, she reports, turn out to be just as confident and successful as those who stay. They may, however, be more likely to have encountered belittling or undermining from colleagues and a lack of support from their supervisors.

“I really want the narrative to not just be: ‘Women don’t have confidence, women need to lean in,'” Fouad says. “With all the will in the world, if the climate doesn’t change, women can lean in, but they will still get pushed back.”

Continue reading What Do Women in Engineering Want? →