Pin the name on the jellyfish

Pin the name on the jellyfish
Ever wonder how the Stupidogobius aurich fish got its name? Or the Chaos chaos protozoan?

They are real species - and now it's your turn to give the rarely seen and studied Bonaire banded box jellyfish a scientific name.

Here's the back story: Vicki Carr, a visitor to Bonaire in the Caribbean in 2001, was able to videotape the colorful animal and showed the images to a Florida science teacher. Soon, it seemed that everyone wanted to find out if this bizarre jellyfish was a new species.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spent years searching for clues in scientific articles, preserved jellyfish in natural history collections. They even extracted DNA from the Bonaire jellyfish to compare with other species' DNA. Now, scientists are convinced the Bonaire is a new species, of the genus Tamoya.

So here's your part: Go to www.yearofscience2009.org/themes_ocean_water/general/jellyfish.html to submit a potential species name. A winning name will be announced after June 23.

Names have to be in Latin letters (not Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, and so on). No accents, apostrophes, or hyphens. The name has to be more than one letter long. It can be a word or name, and can be in any language.

Sometimes scientists choose a name that describes a unique feature or behavior, or where the organism is found. Sometimes the name honors a person, or sometimes they are just plain silly. Stupidogobius anyone?

And if you are feeling vain - there is no rule against naming a species after yourself. But you are probably not going to make it into the finals.

UNH uses garbage to go green
Colleges all over New England are going green by doing everything from installing solar arrays to illuminating campus paths to starting grassroots groups to pressure politicians to pass carbon-limiting laws. There is even an effort to make students take shorter showers to save on hot water.

But few are doing as much as the University of New Hampshire. The 5 million-square-foot campus is getting up to 85 percent of its electricity and heat from a nearby landfill's methane gas.

It's the first university in the country to use landfill gas as its main fuel source.

Called Ecoline, the project gets its methane from a landfill at Waste Management's Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise in Rochester. Methane, a greenhouse gas about 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide, is a natural byproduct of decaying waste and is collected via 300 extraction wells.

After the gas is purified and compressed, it travels through a 12.7-mile pipeline to UNH's power plant, where it is replacing commercial natural gas.

The project cost $49 million but some of that will be returned by selling excess power back into the region's electricity grid and selling renewable energy certificates to other companies.

UNH has pledged to lower its greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2080.