Looks like we’re taking more than our share of the vegetables: human activities eat up nearly a quarter of the planet’s plant growth. A study of human impact on ecosystems found that we consume 23.8% of Earth’s land-based net primary production. Agriculture makes up more than half the consumption. The rest is other forms of land use and human-caused fires. This is an unprecedented dominance of the biosphere by a single species, and shows how risky large-scale biofuels production could be for the ecosystem.

J. Craig Venter of human genome mapping fame has pulled off a major feat: the first genome transplant operation, albeit in a humble bacteria. Researchers at Venter’s private research institute transplanted all the DNA from one bacteria into another bacteria, which converted the recipient cells into replicas of the donor cells. The move is a step toward creating synthetic bacteria and viruses that could be used to make drugs and biofuels and clean up pollution. Here’s Scientific American’s write up.

Spring comes to the Arctic two weeks earlier, on average, than it did a decade ago thanks to global warming. Global warming affects the Earth’s poles much more strongly than it’s lower latitude regions. A study of plant flowering, insect emergence and bird egg laying shows that for some species Spring arrives as much as 30 days earlier.

Home is where the temperature is right as far as plants are concerned, even when great expanses of Arctic Ocean are in the way. An Arctic Island plant study shows that the limiting factor for species migration during climate change is the local climate, not how far the seeds have to go to get there.

The Arctic could be ice-free in summer as soon as 2020. A study of Arctic ice measurements from 1953 to 2006 predicts ice-free summers 30 years earlier than the previously predicted 2050-to-early-22nd-century window. This is not only bad news for polar bears, it accelerates global warming: dark ocean waters absorb more solar heat than reflective ice cover.

Humans can be motivated to work harder without even knowing it. The trick is to subliminally suggest that greater rewards await greater efforts. A brain imaging study showed that subjects worked harder when images of higher amounts of money were flashed to them subliminally than images of lower amounts.

The interactions among plants and insects in a field turns out to be a good measure of the impact of global warming, and the outlook is not promising. Things looked good early on in a field study of grasslands that simulated coming climate change. For two years production and diversity increased. But after five years the grass took over and plant diversity fell by half. Flowering plants in particular were suppressed, leaving insects with far less food.

Collaborative tagging sites like del.icio.us are examples of systems that harvest crowd intelligence. The collective behavior of thousands of people acting independently produces a solution.

It turns out that even though people are acting intelligently and independently, collaborative tagging behavior follows two simple rules: the rich get richer, i.e. more popular tags get more popular, and recent tags are picked more frequently than older tags.

Hmm. If something can be modeled it can often be reverse-engineered. So what happens when someone comes up with an algorithm that does “collaborative” tagging automatically?

It turns out that subliminal distractions throw off your game more than the consciously annoying kind. A study found that subliminal visual distractions impaired task performance more than visual distractions that subjects consciously perceived. It looks like subliminal visual distractions get past the parts of the brain that filter out visual noise.

Some animals hunt cooperatively, but usually the teamwork involves the same species. Scientists have found an example of cross-species cooperative hunting in the Red Sea — groupers and giant moray eels.

Groupers hunt in open water and moray eels hunt in coral reefs. Prey fish fleeing groupers often take shelter in coral reefs and prey fish fleeing moray eels often take to open water. This sets the stage for a strategic partnership.

The scientists saw groupers signaling moray eels by approaching the eels and shaking their heads from side to side. The eels then followed the groupers and they hunted together. Sometimes during the hunt, groupers stood on their heads to signal that prey was hiding in particular crevices.

The theory is the partnership works because groupers and moray eels swallow their prey in a single bite so there is no fighting over carcasses to sour the relationship.