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6 days ago | 
noozhawk.com | Karen Telleen-Lawton
With the continuing federal assaults on science, you might think climate science research has ground to a halt. Fortunately, UCSB academic inquiry shows that’s not the case. The scarcity of Lithium inspired two UCSB professors, Rachel Segalman and Ram Sechadri, in their determination to design batteries using sodium (Na). In nearby labs, engineering groups tackle carbon emissions from training AI models and streamline machine learning’s efficiency by moving data.
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6 days ago | 
noozhawk.com | Karen Telleen-Lawton
Skip to content Posted inLocal News With the continuing federal assaults on science, you might think climate science research has ground to a halt. Fortunately, UCSB academic inquiry shows that’s not the case.
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2 weeks ago | 
noozhawk.com | Karen Telleen-Lawton
My favorite AI chatbot from Anthropic is adept at self-analysis. I queried Claude: “How will workers earn a living when their jobs are taken over by AI?”Claude was circumspect about this “complex and important question.” This led to a long thread exploring how ancient societies dealt with such major disruptions. Claude’s initial response was to describe several potential paths for workers displaced by AI. Job transformation rather than elimination is one option.
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1 month ago | 
noozhawk.com | Karen Telleen-Lawton
Peru’s Marañón River was granted personhood in 2024, a decade after I made her personal acquaintance. In 2015 I spent two weeks with my husband and other global volunteers gathering research data with Earthwatch in the Amazon’s Loreto region. Dr. Richard Bodmer, the principal investigator, invited grad students and volunteers for field research, as he had every year since 2009.
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1 month ago | 
noozhawk.com | Karen Telleen-Lawton
Among the thousands of participants in the Hands Off! rally April 5, I spied a woman whose sign read, “It is so dire even the introverts are here!”I applaud what likely required a large measure of courage for her to march in a large crowd, plus hold a sign publicizing her feelings. Action and voice are strictly necessary in a functioning democracy. One consequence of our frenetic lives and the chaotic political climate, however, is that solitude is rare.
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2 months ago | 
noozhawk.com | Karen Telleen-Lawton
What do you think this photo depicts: 1) a filter; 2) a paint brush; 3) a seed; 4) an LED bulb or 5) part of a brain? Before I visited the Pritzlaff Conservation Center at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, the intricate hexagonal design would have swayed me to conjure it was some sort of filter. A brain I could also believe. If you guessed a paint brush, you would be closer. It is a future paint brush: the seed of a paint brush shrub.
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2 months ago | 
noozhawk.com | Karen Telleen-Lawton
After two plastic-bashing columns (Plastic is Permanent Pollution and Plastic Part II Solutions), I’ll wrap up this little series with some beneficial uses of plastics. The idea emerged courtesy of bird ingenuity – coots in the Netherlands, specifically. Common coots are wetland birds familiar in marshes around the globe. They are resourceful in finding common objects for use in nest-building.
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2 months ago | 
noozhawk.com | Karen Telleen-Lawton
I asserted in a recent column that the Precautionary Principle had been violated in the proliferation of the permanent pollution of plastics. The feature documentary “Plastic People – the Hidden Crisis of Microplastics” outlines more graphically the effect of this self-inflicted invasion. For the sake of hope, this column will peek at some approaches to solutions. Locally, Santa Barbarans do a relatively decent job of recycling.
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Feb 24, 2025 | 
noozhawk.com | Karen Telleen-Lawton
I am still a bit bleary-eyed from movie-watching at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF). While I belly-laughed at comedic dramas such as Magic Hour, I was most inspired by the rich diversity of documentaries highlighting important issues, such as “Desert Angel,” “Out of Plain Sight,” and “In the Red.”Again and again, ordinary people in diverse situations rose to the extraordinary by listening to the truth of their internal compasses.
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Feb 10, 2025 | 
noozhawk.com | Karen Telleen-Lawton
The Precautionary Principle has stuck with me since econ grad school days — mostly because I rarely see it practiced. At its core it involves discerning and designing for what could go wrong before new technologies are introduced. Had this principle been applied to plastics, we might have saved some of our current angst. We now know this verity: Plastic is permanent pollution. When petroleum-based plastics breaks down — in a landfill, on the side of the road, or in the ocean — they don’t decompose.
