March 2021
RealClear Science
“As humanity enters what the United Nations has designated the Ocean Decade, we do not know the total amount of marine life, the biomass, in the oceans. Many experts firmly believe the abundance of marine life is diminishing. However, we have time series for only a few taxa, and these make up a small fraction of the total amount of life. We have only crude, uncertain estimates of biomass by trophic level.”
2021
The Rockefeller University
“From microbes to mammals, near shore to mid-ocean, and seafloor to seabirds, humans want and need to know about ocean life. Obvious benefits have derived from more accurate means of locating high-value wild fish for food or for protection in the interests of recreation and conservation. Fishers and dive shop operators may use the same information for opposite purposes. Surveyors have traditionally monitored sea life by observing seafood markets and trawl nets, by diving with goggles and clipboards, and more recently by deploying sonars and cameras, and sieving bits of extracellular DNA shed in seawater.”
January 2021
Consortium for Ocean Leadership Symposium
October 2020
Academic Influence
“Top earth scientist Jesse H. Ausubel discusses his role in the first census of marine biodiversity, determining species abundance through filtering ocean-borne DNA, climate change, and his role in organizing large-scale scientific observations. Director of the Program for the Human Environment and senior research associate at The Rockefeller University, chair of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and a former executive of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ausubel talks with Dr. Jed Macosko, academic director of AcademicInfluence.com and professor of physics at Wake Forest University.”
May 2020
2013
Rockefeller University
“Quantitative modeling of social systems shows a large component of automatic drives in the behavior of individual humans and human society. Studies of the formation and breakdown of 20 diverse empires operating over almost 3,000 years describe these processes with utmost clarity and paradigmatic simplicity. Taking territorial expansion as the basic parameter, we show that it can be represented in time by a single logistic equation in spite of the complicated sequences of events usually reported by historians. The driving forces of empire, leading to expansion and saturation at 14 days of travel from the capital, can be reduced to testosterone and progesterone.”
