Photo Story: Cultivating Curiosity at NOAA’s Aquaculture Science Camp - NOAA Fisheries (.gov)

Reading brain scans. Understanding human immune systems. Hands-on training in anesthesiology. These are just a few of the possibilities for experiential STEM learning in the years ahead for more than 300 Greater New Haven public school students — the newest cohort of Yale Pathways to Science — who gathered recently in Woolsey Hall for orientation. What is Yale Pathways to Science? Yale Pathways to Science supports Yale faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates in developing and executing STEM programs for public middle and high schoolers in New Haven, West Haven, and Orange, all at no cost. (Students are nominated for the program by their math or science teachers, or by a school administrator, and then apply for admission.) How many programs are offered each year through Yale Pathways to Science? Each year, Yale Pathways to Science facilitates Yale community members in hosting more than 250 events for students, spanning topics such as biology, chemistry, physics, and earth and climate science. Students select their level of engagement, registering for events depending on their schedules and interests.

Fisheries science is the study of fish and other harvested aquatic animals, the ecosystems they live in, and the people who catch, farm, manage, and depend on them. Aquaculture is the farming of aquatic organisms (fish, shellfish, and aquatic plants) under some degree of human control, and the research that supports it is usually treated as a close companion field. Together they sit where biology, ecology, quantitative modelling, economics, and public policy meet. The central practical question is how to take food and value from aquatic systems without destroying the populations and habitats that produce it. A fishery is a combination of a resource (a fish or shellfish population), the people who harvest it, and the rules and markets around that harvest. Fisheries science therefore studies three things at once: the biology of the animals, the condition of their environment, and the behaviour of the human system that exploits them. A fisheries biologist might spend one month measuring otoliths (ear stones) to estimate fish age, and the next month in a meeting about how many animals can be landed next season.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.