The Great Beyond

What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

September 28, 2007
Creationist film row / Accordion news: smoking ban benefits bands / Bizarre radio burst baffles astronomers / Oxygen is older than we thought

September 27, 2007
China dam threatens ‘catastrophe’ / Quantum computing advances

September 26, 2007
Europe debates creationism / No place like home for crocs / New species found in Vietnam / Nasa prepares for Dawn

September 25, 2007
Acupuncture 'better than medicine' / Nutrients drive frog deformities / Public view of global warming pt 2 / New nuclear plants proposed / Rapid bird flu test

September 24, 2007
Three tales from NASA / HIV vaccine setback

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
Climate Feedback: Lovelock and Rapley’s cure for global warming
Nascent: the Nature Podcast is reborn!

Ones that got away
James ‘DNA’ Watson interviewed, in the Union Tribune
How drugs get their names, in the Indianapolis Star
Why cars should look more like animals, in the Daily Telegraph

The Great Beyond will be back on Monday.

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Richard Dawkins is annoyed. Having been interviewed for a film entitled ‘Crossroads’ about science and religion he was surprised to find he was actually appearing in ‘Expelled’, a film promoting intelligent design (NY Times, Spiegel). “At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front,” he told the Times. This isn’t the first time Dawkins has had trouble with a creationist film crew.

It’s not just Dawkins though. Leading science blogger PZ Myers also features in the film and has previously written about how underhand the interviews were, and how the producers responded to his complaints. “We were lied to, and they tricked us. It's that simple. They ought to simply 'fess up to it — it's not as if we can take legal action against them or do anything to suppress their movie, since we all signed quite legal releases,” he states in his comments on the NY Times piece.

In a press release from last month Walt Ruloff, co-executive producer of the film, said: “The incredible thing about Expelled is that we don't resort to manipulating our interviews for the purpose of achieving the 'shock effect,' something that has become common in documentary film these days. People will be stunned to actually find out what elitist scientists proclaim, which is that a large majority of Americans are simpletons who believe in a fairy tale.”

But don’t believe this blog. As the Expelled website will tell you “‘Big Science Academy’ is proud to have the support of the ‘Mainstream Press’ in stifling the rise of freedom of speech in our science classrooms. In so many ways, ‘Big Science’ and ‘Big Media’ are on exactly the same page, when it comes to making sure that dissenters and troublemakers are properly expelled.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Smoking bans have an unintended consequence, according to research in this week’s BMJ. John Garvey, a medic in Ireland, found that accordions played at traditional music sessions in previously smoke filled pubs were cleaner and possibly sound better as a result of the ban in that country (AFP, LA Times). “One repairer commented that the deposition of dirt could be substantial enough to affect the pitch of the reed,” his letter in the BMJ states.

“It’s a remarkable analogy in that you’ve got an instrument that’s basically performing much the same way as the lung and responding much the same way as the lung,” said Kirby Donnelly, head of environmental and occupational health at Texas A&M’s School of Rural Public Health (Health Day).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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An “entirely new” astronomical phenomenon has been announced this week by scientists analysing radio telescope data. With only one observation though no one has any real idea what it is or what it means. Researchers discovered a powerful burst of radio waves when going over some old data. And despite their best efforts they haven’t been able to find anything similar (press release 1, press release 2).

“Their first response was, ‘Ooo, can we observe this event again?’ They spent several days staring in the same direction but it didn't deign to reappear,” said John Reynolds, an astronomer contacted by the team who discovered the pulse (The Australian). Despite this, the researchers say in their paper in Science that “hundreds of similar events could occur every day and act as insightful cosmological probes”.

“We think there are probably many of these bursts every day that we are just not detecting because we don't have the right kind of surveys of the sky looking for them,” study author Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University told Reuters. “We think it has got to be some sort of catastrophic event happening in another galaxy - like two stars colliding and merging or maybe a black hole. Something kind of exotic.”

Astrophysicist Valerie Connaughton, from the University of Alabama, though cautions that no radio burst have ever been associated with these events (Science Now). Over at Space.com there is the suggestion that if these bursts are numerous they could help filter data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, and thus help detect the gravity waves predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity. The story is also covered by Sky and Telescope.

Image: Visible-light (negative greyscale) and radio (contours) image of Small Magellanic Cloud and area where burst originated / Lorimer et al, NRAO/AUI/NSF

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Rocks from a core nearly a kilometre long show oxygen appeared on Earth millions of years earlier than previously thought. In the past it was thought oxygen first appeared somewhere around 2.3 or 2.4 billion years ago – known as the Great Oxidation Event – but the new rock cores show there was at least a whiff of oxygen around 100 million years earlier (Reuters, AP).

A group of researchers from Maryland found unexpected variations in sulfur chemistry in a section of a 908m long rock core of Mt. McRae Shale from Australia’s Hamersley Basin. Another team from Arizona State University then found corresponding variations in metal abundance. Taken together these indicated the presence of oxygen in a section of the core dated as older than the Great Oxidation Event.

“The Mount McRae record of sulfur isotopes captures the widespread and possibly permanent activation of the oxidative sulfur cycle for perhaps the first time in Earth's history,” write Alan J. Kaufman and co. in this week’s Science. “The data suggest that oxygenation of the surface ocean preceded pervasive and persistent atmospheric oxygenation by 50 million years or more.” Ariel Anbar’s team found the same rock was enriched with the metals molybdenum and rhenium. Reactions involving oxygen probably weathered these metals out of crustal minerals into the oceans, before they went on to form part of the shale. ”These findings point to the presence of small amounts of O2 in the environment more than 50 million years before the start of the Great Oxidation Event.”

The instant reaction might be ‘so what’ – at most this pushes back our estimates of when oxygen appeared by less than 5%. However the finding could have important implications for life on Earth. The Great Oxidation Event saw Earth go from oxygen-poor to oxygen-rich very quickly. These new findings could suggest ancestors of plants were producing oxygen before this event. “What we have now are new lines of evidence for oxygen in the environment 50 to 100 million years before its big rise,” says Anbar (NSF press release).

“We believe that these findings are a significant step in our understanding of the oxygenation of Earth because they link changes in the environment with that of the biosphere,” adds Kaufman (UM press release).

Image: new findings reveal the importance of oxygen in the environment shortly before the deposition of this massive formation of iron oxide--rust--in the Hamersley Basin in Western Australia / AD Anbar, ASU

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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China has admitted that the massive, and massively controversial, Three Gorges Dam has all the makings of an environmental disaster. “If no preventive measures are taken, the project could lead to catastrophe,” unnamed officials are quoted as saying in state news source Xinhua. Critics have been saying since before construction of the dam began that it would cause huge environmental damage. Previously however China has played down these concerns, lauding the power it will generate and the protection against flooding it offers.

A two-day forum in Wuhan this week heard that erosion caused by the dam was already triggering landslides. Huang Xuebin, head of the Headquarters for Prevention and Control of Geological Disasters in the Three Gorges Reservoir, claimed waves up to 50 meters high had been triggered by landsides into the reservoir created by the dam (Xinhua). This claim of 50 m high waves is repeated by AFP, the Independent, and the Guardian, although it seems highly fanciful. Problems with pollution and erosion are also being reported.

Previous reports have highlighted the damage done to the environment and to archaeological sites by the damming process, which created a 40 cubic kilometre lake. Nevertheless, the confession that the still-unfinished dam is doing any damage is unusual. The Times calls it an “unprecedented admission of blame” and it has generated massive interest from the world’s press (WSJ, Guardian, Sidney Morning Herald, BBC, AP).

A full briefing on the dam from last year is on Nature News (subscription required). Some key numbers:
Length: 2.3 kilometres
Cost: US$25 billion (official estimate)
Completion date: 2009

Image: 60 km stretch of Yangtze River with construction site of the Three Gorges Dam to the left / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Scientists in the UK have made a major step in quantum computing by demonstrating that superconducting electrical circuits can be used to send information between two stores of quantum information (AFP, Reuters). The advance is detailed in two papers in this week's Nature – one by Silanpaa and colleagues and the other by Johannes Majer and colleagues.

Silanpaa and co connected their storage mechanisms for quantum information (qubits) via a cavity in which an electromagnetic wave had been established. Majer and co did a similar thing, but using ‘virtual’ photons (“weak perturbations of their cavity's quantum light field” according to an accompanying News and Views article, subscription required). As if quantum computing wasn’t difficult enough, another paper from last week’s Nature is also relevant, one authored by Houck et al. They detailed a ‘single-photon gun’ that can be used to generate and guide photons in an electrical circuit

What does this all mean though? Basically, for quantum computing to work we need to be able to transfer information stored in qubits to other qubits. Previously this had only been done between qubits that were (relatively) close to each other; this work shows it can be done over (relatively) large distances. Here’s what the News and Views piece makes of it all: “these papers represent confident steps towards the ultimate goal of a viable, large-scale quantum computer.”.

Yale, where many of these researchers are based, has a press release on this too.

Image: “coplanar waveguide cavity connecting two superconducting phase qubits at each end” / Michael Kemper

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Europe’s human rights body is considering declaring the teaching of creationism as science a potential threat to human rights (Reuters). The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, responsible for the European Convention on Human Rights, will next week vote on a resolution entitled The dangers of creationism in education. This calls on member states to “oppose firmly any attempts at teaching creationism as a scientific discipline”.

“The aim of this report is not to question or to fight a belief. It is not a matter of opposing belief and science, but it is necessary to prevent belief from opposing science,” assembly member Anne Brasseur told Reuters.

The resolution, which if accepted would not be binding on council members, states

If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights which are a key concern of the Council of Europe. ... The war on the theory of evolution and on its proponents most often originates in forms of religious extremism which are closely allied to extreme right-wing political movements. The creationist movements possess real political power. The fact of the matter, and this has been exposed on several occasions, is that some advocates of strict creationism are out to replace democracy by theocracy.

Although creationism and intelligent design are not as prevalent in Europe as they are in the United States there have been controversial cases (eg The Guardian). A previous version of the report drew some criticism from ID proponents but the usual suspects on both sides seem strangely silent this time. Tune in next week for the fireworks...

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Relocated crocodiles do a reptilian impression of homing pigeons, swimming hundreds of kilometres to get back to their old haunts (The Australian, ABC, UPI). This is bad news for those advocating relocating dangerous crocodiles that threaten humans to distant regions – they’ll probably just come back. Craig Franklin of the University of Queensland found one beast swam 400 kilometres in 20 days to get home. “We often thought crocodiles tired very quickly but here we show very clearly that they are capable of moving marathon distances for days on end,” he said (UQ press release).

Franklin and colleagues, including the late ‘crocodile hunter’ Steve Irwin, moved three large Crocodylus porosus 56, 99 and 411 km away from home. “All crocodiles spent time around their release site before returning rapidly and apparently purposefully to their capture locations,” they report in the PLOS One journal (paper, PLOS press release).

Crocodiles probably use factors such as its position to the sun, magnetic fields, sight, and smell to navigate, according to Franklin. “Crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are any other reptile so they are possibly using navigation systems similar to birds.”

Image: Irwin and team from Australia Zoo restraining crocodile / Craig Franklin

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A survey in a remote region of Vietnam has discovered 11 species previously unknown to science (press release). The survey of the ‘Green Corridor’ also yielded 10 other species that may also be new - explaining why the Times hails 21 new species and Reuters, AFP, the Guardian, the Saigon Times, and Reuters again hail 11. “You only discover so many new species in very special places, and the Green Corridor is one of them,” said Chris Dickinson, WWF’s Chief Technical Adviser in the area. “Several large mammal species were discovered in the 1990s in the same forests, which means that these latest discoveries could be just the tip of the iceberg.”

The new species include a snake, two butterflies, five orchids, and three other plants, according to the WWF, which made the announcement today (although these animals were actually discovered between 2005 and 2006). Of the orchids, three are leafless and live on decaying matter.

Pictures
New snake species, white-lipped keelback / Raoul Bain / WWF Greater Mekong
New butterfly from the genus Zela / Alexander Monastyrskii
Rare leafless orchid / Leonid Averyanov / WWF Greater Mekong
As yet unnamed aspidistra / Leonid Averyanov / WWF Greater Mekong

Main image: rainforest in the Green Corridor, Annamite Mountain Range, Vietnam / Leonid Averyanov / WWF Greater Mekong

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The long-delayed Dawn space probe may finally get off Earth soon (Space.com, AFP, AP). NASA is moving towards a 27th September launch for Dawn, which will visit the rocks Vesta and Ceres in the asteroid belt (press release). After launch the probe will unfurl solar panels 65 feet wide, tip to tip, fire up one of its three ion engines and accelerate away from Earth very slowly (more from NASA). After many delays and threats of cancellation Dawn is finally looking likely to get off the ground (see Nature – subscription required).

Results from Vesta and Ceres may shed light on the process of planetary formation – hence the name Dawn: it is designed to study objects dating from the inception of the Solar System,. These are the two biggest objects in the asteroid belt and details of the differences between them could provide key insights. “In my view, we’re going to be visiting some of the last unexplored worlds in the inner solar system,” said chief engineer Marc Rayman. The Christian Science Monitor goes into detail on Vesta and Ceres, and why they are so important, despite being ‘tiny, planet wannabes’.

If Dawn is successful this will be the first time that a space craft has orbited two bodies in the solar system (excluding the Earth and the Moon). This has been made possible due to the ion engines, which accelerate xenon ions to super-high speeds and spit them out to provide thrust (Dawn info pdf). NASA says at maximum thrust each engine produces “about the amount of force involved in holding a single piece of notebook paper in your hand” and at at maximum throttle it would take Dawn four days to reach 60 miles per hour. Anyone thinking any jalopy can do better should be warned though – after a year Dawn will hit 5,500 miles an hour having burned through only 15 gallons of fuel, according to Reuters.

Image: Artist concept of Dawn / William K. Hartmann courtesy of UCLA

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A new study appears to show that sticking needles in people is better than conventional therapies for relieving back pain. This has generated a lot of heat from the world’s media, who have been quick to claim that acupuncture is better than those pesky drugs doctors make you take (extended list below). Researchers in Germany found that after 6 months of treatment 47.6% of those with chronic low back pain given genuine acupuncture felt better, compared with 44.2% of those given sham acupuncture, and 27.4% given conventional therapy (abstract).

‘Real’ treatment involved using traditional Chinese acupuncture principles. Sham treatment involved the painful sounding ‘superficial needling’ at ‘non-acupuncture points’. Conventional therapy was a combination of drugs, physical therapy and exercise.

Does this mean acupuncture is ‘better than medicine’? This is dangerous ground for those selling acupuncture, which makes specific claims about the therapeutic benefits of putting needles in certain places. If fake acupuncture works just as well then they’re all going to be out of a job.

There’s an interesting piece how acupuncture does appear to have a measurable effect on the brain on Nature for subscribers.

Headlines
Needles 'are best for back pain' (BBC)
Study: Acupuncture Works for Back Pain (AP)
Acupuncture 'provides twice the pain relief of standard medicine' (Daily Mail)
Back Pain: Moving the Needles (NY Times)
Acupuncture helps back pain, don't ask how (Reuters)
Got a backache? Get acupuncture (AFP)

UPDATE

Blogs having a field day:
DC’s Improbable Science says there has been “a real orgy of bad science reporting about this interesting paper” and includes the interesting titbit that the BBC story is now very different to its original version.
Bad Science goes into full on geek mode about the placebo effect. “Back pain is clearly a problem which requires more than simply pharmaceutical pills. The question is whether an elaborate, expensive, gimmicky and theatrical placebo ritual is an effective use of money, or whether other, cheaper, more pragmatic, honest psychosocial interventions might be more appropriate and cost effective.”

Image: Punchstock

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Run off from farming is driving up numbers of horrifically deformed frogs (AP, Reuters, Wisconsin State Journal, Rocky Mountain News). New research from the University of Colorado at Boulder shows that nitrogen and phosphorus used to increase crop yields are leading to the amphibians sprouting extra legs and other malformations (research abstract). “You can get five or six extra limbs. You can get no hind limbs. You can get all kinds of really bizarre, sick and twisted stuff,” evolutionary biologist Pieter Johnson told Reuters.

The problem first came to light in the 1990s when a group of Minnesota school children stumbled across a pond full of deformed frogs. Suspects included pesticides, parasites and UV rays. Actually, according to Johnson and colleagues the extra limbs are caused by trematode parasites – parasites that are increasingly prevalent due to farming run off (press release). By constructing artificial ponds to recreate frog / parasite habitats they determined the key role of nutrients.

Nutrients promote algae growth; algae growth increases snail populations that host parasites; snails then release the parasites into ponds and lakes; here they prey on tadpoles, causing cysts in developing limbs which cause the malformations. The finding could be important for other parasite-spread problems linked to nutrient supply, including cholera, malaria and West Nile virus.

Image: University of Colorado & Peiter Johnson

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At the end of last month we highlighted a new paper showing that the public really do believe in global warming. That study wasn’t good enough for the BBC though – they wanted their own research (story, followed up by Reuters, PA). Over 22,000 people were surveyed for the BBC in 21 countries to coincide with the UN summit on climate change (coverage of that is over on Nature News). Of this sample of the world’s population, eight out of 10 think “human activity, including industry and transportation, is a significant cause of climate change” (pdf).

Strangely 9 out of 10 of those surveyed think action is necessary to combat global warming, which would seem to imply that at least 600 million people (one in ten of the world’s population) believe we should be actively attempting to change our climate against natural processes. Leaving that aside, the public view seems to be in line with scientists: global warming is real. Now if only they could be convinced on homeopathy and astrology.

As an interesting aside BBC Head of News Peter Horrocks said recently he thought the weight of scientific opinion behind climate change being caused by man was “not overwhelming”.

Image: The Andes Mountains / NASA

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The first application to build a new nuclear power reactor since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident has been filed in the United States. Wittily titled energy company NRG Energy wants to build two new reactors in Texas (San Antonio Express, Daily Texan, Dallas Morning News). If things go the company’s way the Advanced Boiling Water Reactors could be online in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

“It is a new day for energy in America,” said David Crane, the company’s president and CEO (press release). “... But equally, this announcement heralds a new day for the environment. Advanced nuclear technology is the only currently viable large-scale alternative to traditional coal-fuelled generation to produce none of the traditional air emissions - and most importantly in this age of climate change - no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.”

Not so says Ken Kramer, director of the Austin chapter of the Sierra Club – one of America’s largest environmental groups. He told the Star Telegram that nuclear power still involves significant carbon-dioxide emissions in the mining of uranium and construction of the facilities. The proposed reactors will be on the site of an existing nuclear plant but this is unlikely to make them uncontroversial. Still, the Wall Street Journal reckons this might just be “a nuclear renaissance” and it says regulators are expecting up to 29 applications in the next 15 months.

Image: Artist’s impression of the new units / NRG

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One of the biggest problems in controlling pandemics is working out exactly how far they’ve actually spread. Determining who has got bird flu, SARS, or the latest disease-du-jour is vital. So a new handheld disease detector that can quickly sort the infected from those with colds, flu or plain hypochondria is potentially hugely important (AFP, Reuters, Bloomberg).

Researchers in Singapore have developed a ‘mini-lab’ that can identify H5N1 (bird flu) in under half an hour, compared to several hours for existing methods (AFP). The new test is also cheaper. “Compared to commercially available tests, the bioassay is equally sensitive and is 440% faster and 2,000–5,000% cheaper,” the researchers say in their paper in our sister publication Nature Medicine (abstract).

A throat-swab from a potentially infected individual is combined with magnetic particles. A liquid drop containing the sample is then manipulated using magnetic forces to separate out viral RNA. This is then isolated, purified and concentrated before being analyzed. “The novelty of our method lies in the way that the droplet itself becomes a pump, valve, mixer, solid-phase extractor and real-time thermocycler. Complex biochemical tasks can thus be processed in a fashion similar to that of a traditional biological laboratory on a miniature scale,” said study author Juergen Pipper of the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore (press release pdf).

Image: IBN

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It’s been a busy weekend for NASA stories: the space agency has announced the discovery of caves on Mars, said yes to a ‘black hole finder’ satellite, and given preliminary approval to resurrect a British space probe for a mission to the Moon.

Mars caves

With now almost standard hyperbole the Mars caves have been hailed as potential shelters for future astronauts or reservoirs of life (AFP). Actually though this story first appeared in March this year (Nature, subscription required). All that’s new is the results have now been published (abstract).

Images from the Mars Odyssey orbiter show dark circles on the surface of the planet up to 250 meters wide (press release). As these were cooler than the surrounding surface during the day and warmer at night researchers think they could be openings to underground caverns. “Their thermal behavior is not as steady as large caves on Earth that often maintain a fairly constant temperature, but it is consistent with these being deep holes in the ground,” said astrogeologist Glen Cushing of the Northern Arizona University.

Image: NASA. Explanation.

Continue reading "Three tales from NASA" »

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HIV researchers suffered a blow at the weekend when drug company Merck pulled a major vaccine trial (BBC, AFP, AP, NY Times, press release). Testing of the V520 vaccine was stopped after it was found to be ineffective. “It is a huge disappointment because this vaccine has shown promise all the way through, but it's only when you get in on these big trials that you start to see how the vaccine behaves. Although in earlier studies we saw beautiful immune responses, it doesn't look like this immune response translates into something that could protect people against HIV infection,” said Glenda Gray, one of the principal investigators (AFP).

The vaccine used a weakened version of a common cold virus carrying three synthetic HIV genes. The trial enrolled 3,000 HIV-negative volunteers at high risk of HIV infection at sites around the world. An interim analysis conducted on half of these people found no benefit from the vaccine. There were 24 cases of infection in the 741 participants who received the vaccine and 21 cases in the 762 who didn’t.

Image: HIV virus / Getty

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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

September 21, 2007
Velociraptors: less scary than thought / Drought makes rainforest greener / Pimp my moon buggy

September 20, 2007
Adieu Moore’s Law? / Worshiping in space / Bluefin tuna fishing ‘ban’

September 19, 2007
A barcode for every animal / Farewell to the stethoscope / Mystery illness follows meteor / NASA needs YOU

September 18, 2007
Californian car climate change court case / Yale returns ‘borrowed’ artefacts / Steel shield for Chernobyl

September 17, 2007
California's new stem cell supremo / Who’d be a whale? / Northwest passage in ice opens / Was dark matter hot or cold?

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
Spoonful of Medicine: would grad students do anything for their PIs?
The Sceptical Chymist: six degrees of scientist separation
The Niche: why words are weapons in the stem cell debate

Ones that got away
Wired goes ‘Inside Baghdad’s Forensic Bomb Squad’
Relentless squid attack ecologist (Juneau Empire via KSJ)
WSJ looks at outside-the-box awards for cancer research

The Great Beyond will be back on Monday.

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Velociraptors were not the lizard-like beasts we all thought. Researchers have discovered they were actually just “unusual looking birds”, even to the point of having feathers. ‘Those dinosaurs from Jurassic Park’, as the world’s press has determined they must be called, were actually just killer turkeys according to the Guardian, free-paper Metro, and others. (Only Reuters’s coverage doesn’t mention Jurassic Park in the first line.)

“The velociraptor might have looked like a big chicken with a long tail, claws and teeth,” according to lead researcher Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York (Bloomberg). “There is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors. If animals such as velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be they were very unusual-looking birds.” he added (various).

Norell and colleagues found ‘quill knobs’ on a raptor fossil unearthed in Mongolia in 1998 (Science: abstract, full text). These knobs are fixing points where feathers meet bone and are found on many modern birds. “A lack of quill knobs does not necessarily mean that a dinosaur did not have feathers. Finding quill knobs on velociraptor, though, means that it definitely had feathers. This is something we’d long suspected but no one had been able to prove,” said co-author Alan Turner (in The Times, AFP, BBC and others).

Kudos to The Sun for their imagining of what the dinosaur looks like (if only in their art editors mind).

Image: (A) Dorsal view of right ulna of Velociraptor (B) Detail of red box with arrows showing six evenly spaced feather quill knobs / Science

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In one to file squarely under the ‘you what?’ heading researchers have found that a major drought made the Amazon greener, not browner. Satellite observations showed a ‘green-up’ in response to an intense drought in 2005. “These findings suggest that Amazon forests, though threatened by human-caused deforestation, fire, and possibly by more severe long-term droughts, may be more resilient to climate changes than ecosystem models assume,” according Scott Saleska and colleagues’ Science paper (abstract).

Some models predict that global warming could kill off the Amazon rainforest by causing “intense drought” (Live Science). The forest should respond to drought by cutting evaporation from its leaves and cutting photosynthesis. In a feedback loop this reduces the amount of water in the atmosphere, perpetuating the drought.

Actually, during the 2005 drought trees used water from deep roots to take advantage of the cloudless skies and have a bit of a growth spurt, explains the Arizona Daily Star. “If you anthropomorphize a little bit these trees are not dumb. They’ve been living here tens of millions of years,” Saleska, an ecologist at the University of Arizona, told the paper. However this only works for a while. “You take away enough water for a long enough time, the trees are going to die,” he adds.

There is a wonderful extended feature on the whole issue from last year on NASA’s Earth Observatory website.

Image: Getty

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NASA has unveiled details of new plans for its moon base, including high speed pressurised vehicles that can be driven without bulky spacesuits. “They’re basically habitats on wheels. If you can picture this thing, it's kind of a combination between a spacesuit and a sports car,” according to Mike Gernhardt, NASA's lead for extravehicular physiology systems and performance projects (Space.com). NASA is also considering shipping one mega-module base to the moon, instead of alternative plans’ suggestions for a modular system that could be assembled in situ (NY Times).

Back to the buggies ... which will have exterior mounted spacesuits drivers can enter via hatchways. Capable of handling two-week moon excursions of up to 600 miles with astronauts protected from radiation by a layer of water (NY Times) they will also have seats that can fold down into beds according to Gernhard (Space.com again). Current estimates of cost are “more than a Ferrari”, a quote Space.com attributes to Gernhard and the Times to Geoff Yoder, an official working on the lunar plans.

Florida Today call this the “RV-like approach”. It says this is important as astronauts in spacesuits take “a physical beating” with cuts and blisters after just a few hours in suits. Maybe NASA should fund more flexible spacesuits?

Image: NASA

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Since it was coined by Gordon Moore in 1965 the doctrine that holds that the number of transistors that can be put on a computer chip will double every two years has been one of the most oft quoted scientific laws in existence. Now it seems, the end is in sight – Moore himself said this week he thinks the rule will only hold for another few years (Reuters, Wired, The Inquirer). “Another decade, a decade and a half, I think we'll hit something fairly fundamental,” Moore, co-founder of chip-maker Intel, said at a conference on Tuesday.

This ‘something fairly fundamental’ is the laws of physics. IT companies are simply running out of space on chips to put more transistors, according to Reuters. As Nature noted in its coverage of the law’s 40 birthday (subscription required):

If his law is extrapolated to the middle of the twen