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The results of Smithsonian‘s 7th Annual Photo Contest were announced earlier this week. The winner in the Natural World category, Hidden frog (above), was taken last September by Laurie McAndish King of Novato, California:

King was experimenting with a new camera in a local Mendocino County garden when a frog paused for a moment on the leaves of a nearby plant. She snapped; it hopped. “I’ve gone halfway around the world looking for new experiences,” she says. “This photo will always remind me of the beauty in my own backyard.”

It’s an important lesson—you don’t need to go very far to find fantastic things—and one that plays out in the photo that won the Grand Prize, Young monks from Myanmar. For the photographer, Kyaw Kyaw Winn, from Yangon, Myanmar, monks are a common sight, but he found something particularly special.

Keep looking around. If you find something interesting and manage to capture it in a photo, consider sending it in. Our 8th Annual Photo Contest runs until December 1.

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Wild muscadine grapes, courtesy of Flickr user The Natural Capital

First it was pet turtles and now it’s wine grapes—I just can’t stop thinking about what it means to be native. The United States ferments 700 million gallons of wine each year, most of it from the sugary mash of Vitis vinifera, a grape species imported from the Old World. Yet North America boasts a total of six grapes, including the subtropical muscadine (Vitis rotundifolia), the cold-hardy frost grape (Vitis riparia) and the fox grape (Vitis labrusca) from the Northeast. What gives?

About 7,400 years of Vitis vinifera winemaking, as I wrote for Scientific American last year. But just because V. vinifera happened to be the first grape humans began domesticating, doesn’t mean it has to remain the ne plus ultra of the grape world.

The online wine magazine Palate Press has an interesting article about American pioneers like the late Elmer Swenson of the University of Minnesota who hybridized the Frost grape with the European grape to develop the St. Croix. The University Web site says “it is still too soon to judge its wine quality potential.”

Other researchers, such as Bruce Reisch of Cornell University and independent breeder Lon Rombough, are trying to create new grape cultivars for homegrown wines. But so far the grapes’ potential has been limited to niche markets and growing regions where the climate is too warm or too cold for V. vinifera. “Most people have never heard of a Frontenac or a Muscadine, much less know how to match one with a steak or a penne pasta,” David Mark Brown writes at Palate Press.

In fact, America’s favorite oenophile, Thomas Jefferson, tried and failed to grow European grapes at Monticello. According to a new book, The Wild Vine: A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine, Jefferson should have gone local. Just a few years before his death in 1826, a Virginia physician named Daniel Norton succeeded in hybridizing V. vinifera and a Midwestern native, Vitis aestivalis. The Norton is still grown in Virginia and is the cornerstone of the Missouri wine industry.

Brendan Borrell will be guest blogging this month. He lives in New York and writes about science and the environment; for Smithsonian magazine and Smithsonian.com, he has covered the ecology of chili peppers, diamonds in Arkansas and the world’s most dangerous bird.

An Argo float in the ocean (courtesy UCSD)

“If you want to know if the globe has warmed, you want to look at the upper ocean,” says John Lyman, a NOAA/University of Hawaii oceanographer. That’s because the oceans have a very large heat capacity (about 1000 times that of the atmosphere) and take up about 80 to 90 percent of any excess heat from, say, excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. (The rest of the energy goes toward melting ice and warming the land and air.)

Lyman led a team of oceanographers in an analysis of the heat stored in the upper 2,000 feet of the seas. They found that since 1993 the oceans have sucked up about 0.64 Watts per square meter of energy per year. Added up over 16 years, that’s equivalent to the energy found in 2 billion Hiroshima-size bombs—or the amount of energy used if every person on the planet left 500 lightbulbs (100-Watt) on continuously since 1993.

In the study, which appears in tomorrow’s issue of Nature, Lyman and his team analyzed data from multiple sources to see if a warming signal could be found. Ocean temperature data is messy. The main source for many years has been from XBTs–expendable bathythermographs–that were designed in the 1960s not for gathering climate data but for the Navy to measure the thermocline (the depth in the ocean where temperature quickly changes) for using sonar. That data, however imperfect, was later drafted into use by oceanographers in ocean temperature studies. More recently, they’ve been relying on a network of 3000+ Argo floats around the world that were designed specifically for measuring temperature and salinity in the upper ocean.

The data is also messy because the oceans don’t behave the same from year to year or basin to basin. “Heat shifts around in the ocean,” says Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environment Laboratory. If you look at only a specific place or too short a time, you won’t notice any warming.

Combining the data from several sources and all over the globe, however, reveals a warming trend that is six times larger than any uncertainty in the data. “This is clearly a human-caused warming signal,” says Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Willis calls the oceans “the bellwethers of how we’re changing the global climate,” but warmer seas are more than a warning sign: they have serious consequences. About one-third to one-half of sea level rise can be attributed to the thermal expansion of ocean water. Warmer oceans also lead to faster melting of glaciers and even more sea level rise. And some ecologists warn that warmer water could have an effect on the phtyoplankton and zooplankton at the base of the oceanic food chain, with unknown consequences for the fish and other organisms we eat.

Puerto Rican parrots at Rio Abajo (photo by Brendan Borrell)

Last Friday, David Logue, an old friend and biologist from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez took me out to see the island’s imperiled parrots and explain how deciphering their duets could improve efforts to save them.

The Puerto Rican parrot (Amazona vittata) is the only extant parrot native to the United States and is considered one of the most endangered birds in the world. When Christopher Columbus arrived on the island in 1493, there were probably a million Iguaca–as the locals called them–but as colonists chopped down forests, their numbers plummeted. By 1968, just two dozen animals remained.

That’s when the U.S. Forest Service launched its captive breeding project in the El Yunque National Forest. Then, in 1989, the Puerto Rican Department of Natural Resources got in on the act, establishing an aviary at the Rio Abajo State Forest where Logue has brought me to meet his soon-to-be graduate student, Brian Ramos. For the last 11 years, Ramos has been working at the aviary and has nearly mastered the art of avian matchmaking.

After disinfecting our feet, Ramos guided us out a muddy track to the flight cages where the emerald-feathered birds are allowed to mingle. Birds bond with one another by performing a duet–a song-like conversation between the male and female–and Ramos allows the couples with most enthusiastic duets to mate with one another. Currently, the aviary has 198 birds in captivity and is pumping out as many as 30 new chicks each year.

While Ramos has a great record, he thinks he can do better. After all, just 68 birds currently survive in the wild. “We have many fertile pairs, but not all of them are able to raise their chicks,” he says. “I want to have a better understanding of which birds to choose for mating.”

So in the fall, Logue and Ramos will begin filming parrot pairs and recording their duets together to look for subtle clues about how well they are able to work together. Logue, who has studied such duets in black-bellied wrens in Panama, says a key variable in these duets is how quickly the female responds to the male and vice versa. To me, it just sounds like a bunch of random squawking, but Logue insists there’s a logic to this cacophony.

Brendan Borrell will be guest blogging this month. He lives in New York and writes about science and the environment; for Smithsonian magazine and Smithsonian.com, he has covered the ecology of chili peppers, diamonds in Arkansas and the world’s most dangerous bird.

A Kentucky science fair (courtesy of flickr user DrBacchus)

Last week I was a judge for the local EnvironMentors Fair (a science fair with an environmental theme). Thirty-one high school students were competing for scholarship money, the chance to compete at the national fair this week and, of course, bragging rights. This was the first time I’d been to a science fair since I’d competed in them back in middle school. It was fun and far more interesting than I had expected. There were projects on plenty of topics that were of personal relevance and interest—electronics recycling, local water pollution, how neighborhood income is related to tree cover, and even the carbon footprint of fashion. Would I do it again? Of course, and I look forward to it.

How can you become a science fair judge? This is one question for which Google does not have an easy answer. I suggest you try calling your local school and find out if they need volunteers; they’ll probably jump at the chance. Or if you’ve got a local EnvironMentors chapter, that’s another good option. It’s a great way to help kids to continue their interest in science.

And I have a few tips for students participating in future science fairs (though if you want more detailed advice, check out this list from a 5-time judge):
* Pick something that you’re passionate about, whether it’s computer gaming, environmental justice or fashion. It comes across positively in your work (and worked well for some contestants in the Intel Science Talent Search 2010).
* Ask a clear question in your research and then try to answer it. Your project will be better for it, even if—perhaps especially if—the answer isn’t what you thought it would be.
* Pictures, props and graphics help to explain your research, sometimes more than words.
* Don’t worry if you’re nervous. The judges were you, many years ago, and we understand the nerves. Just take a deep breath, collect your thoughts and continue.
* And don’t forget to enjoy yourself. Science should be fun.