The Missouri Department of Conservation and the Nature Conservancy together put on trips to see a stable population of prairie chickens lek during the Spring on land owned by the Conservancy near Eagleville, Missouri. I met up with the volunteer guide, Bill, and about six other chicken fans at 5am, a full hour before dawn. We hiked up a hill a short distance to a small wooden blind, which looked like a children's clubhouse with all the windows on one side.

From these windows we watched the sun rise over the rolling hills of the area, most of which are covered in crops like maize and soy. Meadowlarks sang out sweetly. Presently eight male prairie chickens, each about two pounds but looking larger thanks to their fluffy feathers, descended and began displaying. Each chicken would stretch his white-ringed neck out tall, then flip its tails up in a fan and raise two whiskery-looking feathers up along its head until they looked like horns. At the same time it inflated two tennis-ball-sized shiny orange sacs on each side of its necks and made a noise that Bill described as “a long low lonesome moan”.

The chickens paired into twos and preformed this amazing display, and occasionally went after one another by brief running charges and by hopping into the air with the aid of their wings and kicking one another. Their feet are not barbed like roosters, so these brawls are mostly for show.

Only on this day there was no audience for all these antics which went on for well over an hour. It is late in the season and the few hens have apparently all already mated and crept into the tall grass to make their nests on the ground. These males just can't give up the dancing.

Because this population of birds is so small, conservationists worry about inbreeding, and are considering moving in some chickens from Kansas, where they are more numerous, to boost numbers diversify the gene pool. (“They are few enough,” says Bill, “that a severe hailstorm or a harsh winter where they couldn't get anything to eat could wipe out the whole mess.”) They have put radio collars on many of them, and long antennas were visible on a few of the birds.

The sheer obliviousness of the birds was somehow moving to me. They are totally unaware that humans are planning their fate, tracking and numbering them and watching them from blinds. They are totally unaware that they just cling to survival as a species. They are even unaware, or at least undeterred, by the lack of hens. No, they just keep it up, the puffing and strutting and moaning and charging with their expressions fierce under orange eyebrows.

That’s it from me on this prairie chicken expedition. Perhaps, for the real action, I’ll try to catch them earlier next year.

- Posted on behalf of Emma Marris

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The prairie was once one of the iconic ecosystems of North America. An undulating expanse of grasses, grazing bison and periodic cleansing fire stretching across hundreds of miles, it was called by “the inland sea” by James Fenimore Cooper. The prairie was also an obvious place to farm by removing a bouquet of native grasses and replacing them with rows of grasses dear to human stomachs—our domesticated grains. “Habitat loss” is too puny a term for what happened to the prairie. Only 4% of the original tallgrass prairie - the ecosystem most closely associated with the prairie chicken - remains.

Along to the brink with the prairie went its fauna, including the prairie chicken. There are four species of prairie chicken: the greater, the lesser, the Attwater, which lives in coastal Texas in tiny numbers, and the Heath Hen, which is extinct.

I am off to see the Greater Prairie Chicken (Tympanuchus cupido) ‘lek’. The lek is kind of like a nightclub, public promenade, or grocery store—a place where males strut their stuff for the benefit of the females, which generally give them a great number of unimpressed looks and pretend to ignore them until they finally give in and pick one. It is a great convenience to prairie chicken researchers and enthusiasts that they are a lekking species, for it means that they reliably show up at the same spot day after day to preform their competitive mating displays.

I am eager to see these birds in action, and not just because their display is said to be fantastic. It is something to see a species so rare and short of its former population and range. I'll report back on what I see.

- posted on behalf of Emma Marris

Continue reading "Preparing to meet the prairie chicken" »

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:01 PM | Permalink

New website gives smaller African projects a bigger profile.

by Michael Hopkin

[This story was published here because the Nature News website was experiencing technical problems. You can now also find this story on our news site, which has resumed normal service.]

...(continued)...

Continue reading "Social networking site aims to help fight malaria" »

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In cancer, it’s typically not the primary tumour that kills – it’s the metastases. Little wonder, then, that a major topic at the meeting was developing drugs not to shrink the primary tumour, but to stop it from spreading.

Danny Welch from the University of Alabama at Birmingham presented data on an interesting protein called KISS1. (Welch claims the protein is so named because he lived near Hershey, Pennsylvania at the time of its discovery. For you international readers, Hershey, Pennsylvania is the home of Hershey’s, the chocolate company that makes ‘Hershey’s kisses”.)

Anyway, KISS1 inhibits metastasis, but the fascinating thing is that it does so without preventing the spread of tumour cells. Instead, it keeps the metastasized cells from flourishing in their new environment. In other words, if you inject KISS1-expressing tumour cells into mice, they’ll form a primary tumour and cells from the primary tumour will migrate to the lungs. And then they’ll just sit there, lost and lonely.

Continue reading "AACR: Kiss, Kiss" »

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 08:27 PM | Permalink

In 1889 Stephen Paget came up with the ‘seed to soil’ theory to explain why some cancers seem to spread to specific organs, rather than just invading the body at random. He said that perhaps there were features of the soil (the organ) that determined whether the seed (the cancer) took root there. Some soils simply aren’t hospitable to some seeds (having gardened in the heavy red clay of North Carolina, I can attest to that…)

Quite a few speakers evoked the seed to soil theory in talks about metastasis. One such speaker, Sara Sukumar of Johns Hopkins University, mentioned it while talking about her rapid autopsy program. The program is meant to test the assumption that the characteristics of the original ‘primary’ tumour will be shared by its metastatic offspring. There is some evidence to support this: gene expression patterns in some breast cancer tumours have been shown to resemble gene expression in their distant metastases, for example. But Sukumar says our understanding of this relationship is hindered by a lack of tissue to study because researchers often have only a single biopsy from each patient.

Continue reading "AACR: Seeds, soils, and rapid autopsies" »

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 07:32 PM | Permalink

Economists? Are cold-hearted, says the dictionary of accepted ideas. Now, Richard Tol, an environmental and energy economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin is also a bit of an enfant terrible in his guild. So I, for one, was not surprised that his whistle stop at the EGU sent some palpable shockwaves through the large and well-filled lecture hall D here.

Tol talked about the economic impact of ocean acidification on the tourism industry. People ‘purchase’ the service of coral reefs (which are beginning to severely suffer from rising ocean acidity - a result of increased CO2 uptake by the seas) by going scuba diving in, say, the Caribbean, he explained. Coral reef tourism is however only a small part of the global tourism industry. The economic damage caused by less people coming to places like Belize or Martinique, although painful for these island communities, will amount to no more than 10 to 70 million dollars per year, he argued. A mere trifle.

But his reasoning drove some people mad. After the session Tol was heavily attacked by angry listeners for his (allegedly) deliberately playing down the environmental problems associated with ocean acidification. He had a hard time trying to explain that he didn’t mean to say that other impacts, such as on biodiversity, fisheries or coastal protection, did not matter from an economic standpoint. The sole reason why he focused exclusively on recreation was that impacts on tourism are the only ones that economists can currently hope to determine with reasonable reliability. But his point didn’t really get through.

The current rate of ocean acidification is something the world hasn’t seen in 20 million years, said one biologist. Neither has it ever seen democracy arriving in China, Tol replied.

So, are economists – or is Tol – outfitted with a cynical, die-hard materialist view of the world? No, they aren’t. What this little argy-bargy really goes to show is that the (much-needed) inclusion of economists to the climate debate is sometimes hampered by fear of contact between the two academic communities. That’s bad. So mind, rumours of economists lacking heart and soul are greatly exaggerated.

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier at 06:38 PM | Permalink

With all the excitement about the imminent turning on of the LHC, people are forgetting that the Tevatron at Fermilab will be nipping at the LHC's heels for a while. Brian Winer, of Ohio State University, gave an update on the Tevatron and explained how the scientists there are using every trick they can think of to wring more sensitivity out of the machine, such as using artificial neural networks to combine information from two different detection experiments. Also, the Tevatron has been running long enough now, at high enough luminosities, that they are getting enough collisions to make interesting statistics.

As early as this summer, Winer expects that Fermilab will be able to to statistically rule out the existence of a 160 GeV Higgs boson, one of the theoretically likely masses for the so-called “God particle.” (Barring a positive detection, of course.) It will be a lot harder for them to detect a lower-mass Higgs boson before the LHC starts pumping out data. But who knows?

As a tantalizing treat, Winer put up a picture, a couple years old, of a detection of a particle that had the perfect characteristics of the Higgs. Only problem was, the particle was four times as likely to be noise.
Now, if they could only get four or five more detections in the same spot, then they'd be in business.
Winer repeated the exhortation of a colleague: “We're one good idea away from finding this thing.”

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I came across an interesting little poster the other day. John Stewart, a physics professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, decided to look at lexical trends in physics textbooks. He used a method developed by the late, great Don Hayes, a sociologist at Cornell University, who looked at trends in all sorts of texts -- from school books to SATs -- to explain both the dumbing down of America and the jargoning up of science and technology.

Stewart examined trends between two physics texts, Halliday and Resnick 3rd edition, published in 1988, and Halliday, Resnick and Walker, 7th edition, from 2004. The lexical difficulty -- a measure of the book's readability -- increased by almost a grade level. The newer edition was prettier -- the amount of blank space in the book doubled -- but the addition of another author may have made the textbook worse, something along the lines of too many cooks in the kitchen. Stewart's conclusion? "The old Halliday and Resnick was a better object to read," he says. "It's very noticeable."

Now I haven't seen the 7th edition, but I do remember Halliday and Resnick 3rd edition -- it was the physics textbook I used in college. And it was plenty tough to read. I didn't realize I had it so good.

Posted by Eric Hand at 03:37 PM | Permalink

NCI director John Niederhuber was around today to answer questions from conference attendees. First, though, he gave everyone the hard truth about the budget.

The data:
Number of years that funding for NCI has remained flat: 4
Rate of biomedical research inflation (apparently slightly higher than the overall rate of inflation in the United States): 3.8% per year
Percent decrease in purchasing power at the NCI since 2004: 15%

Niederhuber said that for the first few years of flat funding, NCI tried to cope with its shrinking budget by trimming the size of their grants rather than decreasing the number of awards. Those days are over, he said today, and this year NCI will offer fewer of their competing research project grants. Niederhuber also said that he was not optimistic about the possibility of any future budget increases, "no matter which party takes over the White House".

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 10:09 AM | Permalink

Global sea levels could rise by up to 1.5 metres by the end of the century, Svetlana Jevrejeva of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool told the EGU this morning.

Jevrejeva and her team reconstructed seal levels for the past 2,000 years, and then used a non- linear equation relating sea levels to temperature change to predict future sea level rise. Unlike the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), whose most recent prediction of sea level rise is three times smaller, the team incorporated into their prediction the rapid response to global warming of large ice sheet’s, such as Greenland’s.

Interestingly, Jevrejeva arrives at an even higher range (0.8 to 1.5 metres) than had Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, just prior to the release of the 2007 IPCC report . Using a similar semi-empirical approach, but assuming a linear relationship between temperature and sea level change, Rahmstorf projected sea level rise in 2100 of 0.5 to 1.4 meters above the 1990 level. In a technical comment published in Science, Jevrejeva and others criticized his approach for “not meaningfully” contributing to quantifying uncertainties in the prediction of future sea-level rise.

The global sea level currently rises by 3.5 millimetres per year, as the combined result of thermal expansion of ocean water, glacier melting, and changes in the global hydrological cycle. Sea level rise by 1.5 meters would result in the loss of most of Bangladesh, and threaten low-lying regions around the world. In China alone, some 100 million people would need to be displaced if sea level were to rise by one meter or more.

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier at 10:07 AM | Permalink