The Great Beyond

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

Monday November 26
Dinosaur of the day: Buffalo-head-smash-o-saurs / Elephants hate hunters, don’t mind farmers / Antarctic ship sinking fears / Indonesia: WHO can whistle for bird flu samples / Give us $3 billion, say marine researchers

Tuesday November 27
Gorillas use “weapons” / Fossils will/may/won’t delay Australian water plant

Wednesday November 28
NASA’s new map of the big white / Climate change ‘will undermine poverty progress’ / Flying foxes can’t handle the heat

Thursday November 29
Turkey may roast Dawkins’ atheism book / Are 25% of all US bird species at risk?

Friday November 30
To boldly go ... to the voting booth / A Christmas card from Hubble / Female antelope won’t take no for an answer / Don’t mess with Texas education

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
Climate Feedback: the climate podcast, episode 1
The Niche: Shenanigans at California’s stem-cell institute
In the Field: Brendan Maher blogging live from American Society for Cell Biology 2007

Ones that got away
The science of cheese, in the NY Times
The scientists inside Pakistan’s nuclear program, in the WSJ
Was Proust a neuroscientist? No, says Slate

Video of the week
Wasp voodoo rituals and cockroach zombies in the French Polynesian Islands, from Nature

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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UPDATE - The actual email has now surfaced (pdf, via Dallas Morning Herald).

Attitudes to education differ round the world, but things are looking pretty odd in Texas right now. The director of the state’s science curriculum is claiming she was forced out for forwarding an email. Its content was not a risqué joke or a sleazy photo: it was a note about a forthcoming lecture by a philosopher who has been heavily involved in debates over creationism.

The Statesman reports that the Texas Education Agency had recommended firing Chris Comer for repeated misconduct and insubordination (the details of which are unclear) before she resigned. But Comer and others are saying she was forced out for seeming to endorse criticism of intelligent design. An agency memo, according to the Statesman, said: “Ms Comer’s e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker's position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.”

In other news, a new international ranking of the science ability of 15 year olds has been conducted by the OECD. The US is below average, a little under Latvia. Finland tops the chart. Those with spare time might find it interesting to compare this chart of the new OECD ranking, with this chart of belief in evolution.

More on Comer below the fold...

Continue reading "Don’t mess with Texas education" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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You might think that being pursued by amorous females would please a male antelope no end. Not so, according to a paper published this week. Some males even resort to physical violence to repulse the advances of their would-be-mates.

“A general tenet of sexual conflict theory is that males have higher optimum mating rates than do females and therefore should be more persistent when it comes to mating,” writes Jakob Bro-Jørgensen, of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, in Current Biology (abstract). “However, in promiscuous species, females might benefit from high mating rates as a result of increased conception probability with favoured males, whereas favoured males benefit from mating selectively because of sperm depletion.”

He found that in-demand males tried to balance their ‘mating investment’ equally between females. If they were pursued aggressively by females they thought they had mated enough with in the past they would counterattack to avoid having to mate. “I was interested to see that in cases where the male antelope was free to choose between females, he deliberately went for the most novel mate, rather than the most high-ranking,” notes Bro-Jørgensen (press release).

Sex and wildlife in one story? The world’s press was always going to respond...

Continue reading "Female antelope won’t take no for an answer" »

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Today’s pretty space picture is a new snap from the Hubble Space Telescope. This is spiral galaxy Messier 74, a feature that amateur astronomers find so hard to detect in the night sky that it has been nicknamed ‘The Phantom Galaxy’.

Located about 32 million light-years away, there are around 100 billion stars in the galaxy (press release).

Image: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

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Potential future president Barack Obama may have lost some votes among space enthusiasts this week. The democrat wants to take a fairly hefty amount of money away from the Constellation programme for manned moon missions and spend it on education.

“That would be very destructive. There’s so much more we could do for education by having a visionary space program than by just throwing it away into the educational bureaucracy,” Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society (and a former school teacher), told MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.

Last month Hilary Clinton released her space policy, which seems on the face of it less like bad news for Moon-and-Mars enthusiasts. However in a recent piece at The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman takes a close look and concludes she too is going to cut science and exploration budgets at NASA (via Space Politics).

Meanwhile Republican Mike Huckabee, the choice of Chuck Norris, has been making more positive noises.

Whether we ought to go to Mars is not a decision that I would want to make, but I would certainly want to make sure that we expand the space program, because every one of us who are sitting here tonight have our lives dramatically improved because there was a space program ... [W]e need to put more money into science and technology and exploration.

Now, whether we need to send somebody to Mars, I don't know. But I'll tell you what: If we do, I've got a few suggestions, and maybe Hillary could be on the first rocket to Mars.

Given that this is the man who recently remarked that “Science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn’t. So I'll stick with God if the two are in conflict,” it’s intriguing to wonder what if anything evidence of the evolution past life on Mars would do to his belief structure once he’d paid the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to send people to examine it.

Not so positive is Republican Thomas Tancredo: “That’s why we have such incredible problems with our debt, because everybody's trying to be everything to all people. We can't afford some things, and by the way, going to Mars is one of them.” Easier to say when you have no hope of winning.

Image: Barack Obama

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A quarter of all US bird species are at risk, according to a new analysis by conservation groups. The 2007 ‘WatchList’ from the National Audubon Society and the America Bird Conservancy say 178 species in the continental US and 39 in Hawaii need “immediate conservation help”. We had a look at the numbers...

“We call this a ‘WatchList’ but it is really a call to action, because the alternative is to watch these species slip ever closer to oblivion,” says Greg Butcher, co-author of the new list (press release, report home page, report PDF).

The list was last produced in 2002. Since then it has grown 10%, as noted in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Reuters quotes Butcher thus: “Unfortunately we've been seven years in an administration that really doesn't believe in the Endangered Species Act, so they've sort of been looking for excuses not to list species that should be added to the act.”

This does lead to us asking the question of how endangered these species actually are. On the one hand the Bush administration may not have been as rigorous as it could have been over endangered species*. But the report’s other author, David Pashley, says “Adoption of this list as the ‘industry standard’ will help to ensure that conservation resources are allocated to the most important conservation needs.”

This could be problematic as there is a gold standard conservation list already – the IUCN Red List. Helpfully the Audubon report includes a comparison to the IUCN, saving me the trouble. So how do they match up? In a word – badly...

Continue reading "Are 25% of all US bird species at risk?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Prominent atheist scientist Richard Dawkins is again making headlines. The Turkish publisher of his book ‘The God Delusion’ this week announced he was to be questioned by a prosecutor to determine whether the book is “an attack on religious values” (AP has the story, massively syndicated).

Turkey has troubled relationships with science, religion, and censorship. On the one hand it is a secular state, where the religion of a politician’s wife is a huge issue. At the same time much of the country is avowedly religious, Turkish creationist Harun Yahya being a prime (if perhaps extreme) example. Censorship is also a reoccurring theme – earlier this year Yahya succeeded in blocking access to a swathe of the blogosphere and the trials and tribulations of author Orhan Pamuk have also been high profile. See the FP Passport blog for a quick round up.

If you haven’t read the book, the first chapter is free on Dawkins’s website. A CNN poll on the question “Do you believe Richard Dawkins’ book ‘The God Delusion’ insults religious values?” currently stands at Yes 32%, No 68%, with 3,359 votes.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It’s not a good time to be a flying fox. Justin Welbergen, from the University of Cambridge, has just published some new research on them and he thinks climate change means they are all going to die.

The issue for the animals, which are not foxes at all but fruit bats, is that they’re just not that good with heat. This is a bit of a problem if you live in an Australia that is getting slowly hotter. Welbergen and his colleagues found that temperature extremes caused mass die-offs, with females and the young being especially vulnerable. When temperatures reached 42.9°C, thousands of the bats keeled over and flapped no more (paper should appear here today).

Climate change may also be benefiting some types of the bat, by allowing them to expand their range by reducing the number of cold nights, which they can’t tolerate. “If so, this provides an example of how climate change may act like a double-edged sword,” write Welbergen and co, “it can cause a species to expand its distribution in response to a reduction in the number of cold nights, while putting the same species at an increased risk from extreme warm events.

It has been acknowledged before that climate change is causing changes in species distributions. Nature Reports Climate Change had an article on this recently, noting that in Australia some possums have been getting so hot they fell out of their trees.

Continue reading "Flying foxes can’t handle the heat" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This year’s edition of the UN Human Development Report makes bleak reading. Unless we deal with climate change, it says, efforts to reduce poverty will stall then reverse, the poorest countries will suffer first and not even the richest countries will escape global warming. Efforts to improve health and education are also threatened (summary PDF, full report PDF).

“Ultimately, climate change is a threat to humanity as a whole. But it is the poor, a constituency with no responsibility for the ecological debt we are running up, who face the immediate and most severe human costs,” said Kemal Derviş, administrator of the UN Development Programme (press release PDF).

More droughts, floods and storms are already reinforcing existing inequalities in standards of living, says the report. Climate change must be tackled now. “The world lacks neither the financial resources nor the technological capabilities to act. What is missing is a sense of urgency, human solidarity and collective interest,” says the UN (report home page).

The annual report also ranks the UN’s members in terms of their development, using life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income. Top of the pile this year is Iceland, bottom is Sierra Leone. As Reuters notes, per capita GDP is 45 times higher in the former than in the latter. Without fail this ranking brings a rash of stories where countries celebrate or mourn their position – details and full ranking below the fold.

Continue reading "Climate change ‘will undermine poverty progress’" »

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Those bored of playing with Google Earth may be interested in NASA’s new toy – a stunningly detailed map of Antarctica. Claiming to be ten times more detailed than previously available equivalents, the map was painstakingly constructed by the stitching together of 1,100 hand-selected photos from Landsat satellites (NASA press release).

The map was produced in collaboration with the National Science Foundation and the British Antarctic Survey. It’s already attracting media attention (BBC, Bloomberg, ABC, Herald Sun, Wired).

“This innovation, compared to what we had available most recently, is like watching the most spectacular high-definition TV in living colour versus watching the picture on a small black-and-white television,” says Robert Bindschadler, chief scientist of the Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at Goddard (NSF press release).

Continue reading "NASA’s new map of the big white" »

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A rare fossil site near the planned location of a billion dollar desalination plant has thrown Australia into a tizzy.

The media is in some disagreement about whether the fossils will actually have an impact on the construction:
Dinosaur bones won’t stop desal plant - The Age
Dinosaur bones may delay desal plant - Herald Sun
Dinosaur find dries Australia water project - Reuters

According to the Herald Sun the bones were first documented back in 1994 but had been a secret till last week. It was only then that it was realised that the department in charge of the desalination plant probably didn’t know the fossils lay in the path of the in- and out-flow pipes.

Local MP, and member of the recently defeated Liberal Party, Ken Smith wants a full assessment of the environmental impact of the proposed plant. “It’s like boring through the tombs of the ancient emperors in Egypt or drilling holes through the Terracotta Warriors in China after they had been discovered,” he told Reuters.

Continue reading "Fossils will/may/won’t delay Australian water plant" »

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Researchers in Cameroon have seen gorillas use tools aggressively, and they’re targeting humans, according to the Daily Telegraph. The apes were observed throwing clumps of grass, earth, and in one case a stick, at humans.

“The area is largely isolated from other gorilla groups, but there are herdsmen on the mountain”, Jacqueline Sunderland Groves of the University of Sussex told the paper. “In one encounter a group of gorillas threw clumps of grass and soil at the researchers while acting aggressively. Another gorilla threw a branch. A third encounter saw the gorillas throwing soil at a local man who was throwing stones at the apes.”

Throwing earth at someone throwing stones doesn’t sound likely a hugely clever military tactic. It is a bit depressing that they might have learned this behaviour from people throwing stones at them - not to mention a little strange to think that there are people out there who think throwing stones at gorillas is a good idea. I’d think twice before enraging a gorilla, and the risk of it throwing earth at me would not be what I was afraid of.

Tool use in gorillas is actually a fairly new discovery. It was first seen in the wild in 2005 when some gorillas in northern Congo were seen testing water depth with a stick and using a shrub’s trunk as a stabilizer and then a bridge (research paper).

It’s not immediately clear where the Telegraph story comes from, but it’s got some bloggers intrigued. Wired, where I first noticed this, thinks it heralds a Planet of the Apes-esque takeover. This point and innumerable other references to the films have also been raised in the comments section of this Digg entry (don’t click the links though – there seems to be some nasty malware lurking there).

Image: Getty

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An international group of marine scientists met at the weekend to ask for $3 billion. This money, says the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans, could establish an ocean monitoring network featuring data-gathering buoys, research vessels, animal tracking and robots (press release pdf). It would also, they didn’t say, keep them in research grants for years.

Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and chair of the POGO Executive Committee, thinks the money is a good investment: “A continuous, integrated ocean observing system will return the investment many times over in safer maritime operations, storm damage mitigation, and conservation of living marine resources, as well as collecting the vital signs of the ocean that are needed to monitor climate change.”

The BBC picks up on Haymet’s claims that such a system could help prevent catastrophes like the recent tsunami that hit South East Asia. Although the international community has said it will construct a monitoring system, Pogo doesn’t think it’s happening fast enough. The group is going to make the case for more investment at a meeting of the international Group on Earth Observations in Cape Town, South Africa.

Spending more money on oceanography strikes me as a great idea. The seas are, as the Reuters’ coverage of this funding request notes, “as little understood as the Moon”. And they produce brilliant pictures like the one illustrating this article. However the key question here is the opportunity cost – what else could we spend this money on? Discussion of this sort is often missing when requests of this sort are made.

Image: a tiny octopus courtesy of Matt Wilson/Jay Clark, NOAA NMFS AFSC

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Indonesia has told the WHO it won’t be getting any more bird flu samples unless there are guarantees in place that ensure developing countries get access to affordable vaccines. The country wants a “material transfer agreement” to prevent samples it provides being used for commercial gain (Reuters). This demand appears to have stalled talks being held in Geneva.

“Talks hit a deadlock because the health minister was relentless in pushing for a material transfer agreement for each virus sample, but not everyone agreed to that," a spokeswoman for the country’s health ministry told Reuters. “We hope that negotiations will continue. But for her [the Indonesian health minister] one thing remains unnegotiable. We will not send samples overseas without an MTA.”

The WHO is not happy. “A pandemic will reach every corner of the earth and it will do so within a matter of months. The sharing of currently circulating viruses is the only way to monitor the emergence of drug-resistant strains,” said its director general Margaret Chan (AFP).

Indonesia is also angry about another set of samples that have already been taken out of the country...

Continue reading "Indonesia: WHO can whistle for bird flu samples" »

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Last week the tourist ship MS Explorer sank in the Antarctic. According to shipping newspaper Lloyds List, a number of problems with the vessel were uncovered in a recent inspection. The paper says five deficiencies were discovered, including lifeboat maintenance problems, and apparently “watertight doors were described as ‘not as required’, and the fire safety measures also attracted criticism”. In Canada’s The Star, Sander Calisal, University of British Columbia professor emeritus, also questions why the ship went down.

All the passengers and crew got off safely and apparently in high sprits, declaring it all to be an adventure and even taking time out to get engaged. But there are some pretty serious questions to be answered here, not just about the Explorer but about tourism in Antarctic in general.

Continue reading "Antarctic ship sinking fears" »

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Elephants can recognize differences between human ethic groups, according to a paper published last week. Lucy Bates, of Scotland’s University of St Andrews, found that Kenyan elephants distinguish between Maasai and Kamba men using colour and smell clues.

“In the Amboseli ecosystem, Kenya, young Maasai men demonstrate virility by spearing elephants, but Kamba agriculturalists pose little threat,” she notes in her paper in Current Biology. “Elephants showed greater fear when they detected the scent of garments previously worn by Maasai than by Kamba men, and they reacted aggressively to the color associated with Maasai.”

To determine this, the researchers presented different elephant families with clean, unworn, red cloths and red cloths worn by either adult Kamba men or adult Maasai men for five days. When presented with the Maasai cloths the elephants took off away faster, moved further away, and took longer to relax after stopping.

Blooger Greg Laden has had similar experiences:

I've traveled literally hundreds of kilometers by foot together with Efe (Pygmy) hunters in the Ituri Forest. We see very few animals. The few we do see are attacked, killed, and eaten. Well, a lot of them actually get away, but that is the idea.

But I've also traveled many kilometers (not as many) alone. I would see many animals, and yes, they would run (or climb or whatever) away, but not as desperately. They knew I was not really one of the hunters, although I tried my best to look tough and hungry.

Left unexplained is what he was doing walking hundreds of kilometres with pygmy hunters. PZ Myers has also posted about this research, although his post is limited to the view that “Elephants are racists! They discriminate against people with sharp pointy spears!” Commenters on this post describe similar experiences to Laden, albeit with rabbits and crows, and an absence of hardy pygmies.

Image: Getty

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Today’s dinosaur holds the auspicious title of “largest horned dinosaur ever discovered in Alberta”. Eotriceratops xerinsularis was discovered near the famed Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump – where Native Americans would kill buffalo by chasing them over a cliff.

Actually, in this case, re-discovered is more appropriate. According to one report, US fossil hunter Barnum Brown first noticed the partial skeleton of the 68-million year old monster, but decided it wasn’t worth his while to stop and examine it (Globe and Mail).

Eotriceratops xerinsularis is the earliest known member the Triceratops group, and shares their distinctive horns and solid frill (abstract of research paper). “Until we found Eotriceratops, there was a significant gap in our knowledge about the dinosaurs that lived in Alberta and North America from 69 to 67 million years ago. The discovery of Eotriceratops is an important step in helping us understand the history of latest Cretaceous dinosaur evolution on this continent,” says Don Brinkman, head curator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum and one of the discovery team (press release).

The thing was not in great condition when found. Dave Eberth, another researcher from the Tyrrell told the Edmonton Journal, “Basically, it’s a road kill. It looks like somebody ran over it in a Cretaceous Hummer.”

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

Monday November 19
Cyclone and early warning in Bangladesh / Noah’s flood brought farming to Europe / Cloning pioneer abandons human embryo work / It's all about me

Tuesday November 20
Son of a what? / This is your brain on a migraine

Wednessday November 21
Conflict-of-interest claims in California / The presidential space race

Thursday November 22
Termite guts spilled / Star with a carbon atmosphere / A vague sort of climate pact for Asia / The new urban scourge: turkeys

Friday November 23
Attack of the killer jellyfish! / The trillion tonne mudslide (almost) / Mirrors help phantom limb pain

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
Action Potential: Infants inherently interpret intentions?
Nautilus: Changing the way scientists are trained

One that got away special
London’s Science Museum has a new game. No really – it’s fun...

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Phantom limbs are always good value for a news story. The whole concept of people missing limbs still feeling them, and feeling pain in them, is baffling.

A study published this week in the prestigious NEJM examines the even stranger concept of ‘mirror therapy’, where the amputee is shown a mirror image of their existing limb in the position their missing limb once was. This appears to be the amputated limb and some previous studies have suggested this can help with pain relief (Ramachandran 1996 and MacLachlan 2004, for example).

The new study took 22 amputees and assigned them to either mirror therapy, therapy with a covered mirror or mental visualization (ie, no mirror). After four weeks everyone in the first group reported decreased pain, in the other two groups results were mixed. After four weeks everyone was switched to mirror therapy and all groups reported positive results after another four weeks.

“The majority of people got some relief. The range went from some relief to completely gone. We were surprised that the effect was so strongly positive,” Navy neurologist Jack Tsao told Reuters. “It’s certainly my hope that more rehab centers will try this.”

Now someone just needs to work out why it happens. There are some theories. The paper notes it could be to do with mirror neurons being activated in the hemisphere of the brain contralateral to the missing limb. It could also be due to visual input of a supposedly moving limb. However the paper concludes: “the underlying mechanism accounting for the success of this therapy remains to be elucidated”. This is medical speak for “we really don’t know”.

Image: Getty

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There’s big and there’s big. “It was one of the largest movements of material ever to occur on our planet,” says Peter Talling of the University of Bristol (press release), putting the underwater landslide he and his colleagues have been studying off the coast of Africa firmly in the second category. “This mass was ten times that transported to the ocean every year by all of the Earth’s rivers. The flow was sometimes over 150 km wide, spread across the open sea floor.”

An analysis by Talling and his colleagues in this week’s Nature shows that the flow, which occurred thousands of years ago, extended 1,500 kilometres and carried 225 billion tonnes of sediment.

Bizarrely, the flow travelled hundreds of kilometres before it started to deposit any sediment. Only when it encountered a minute change in gradient on the ocean floor did it start ditching billions of tonnes of material. Although the change of gradient was abrupt its miniscule size is startling - from 0.05˚ to 0.01˚.

Coverage
The “mother of all mudslides”, in the Daily Telegraph
“The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period of 10 years”, from the BBC

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Aquaculture off the Northern Irish coast has been devastated by a swarm of jellyfish that left 100,000 salmon dead. Stock worth £1million were suffocated in their cages by the swarm, which is estimated to have covered 25 square kilometres of sea and been up to 10 metres thick (Reuters, BBC, Guardian, AP). Some reports say there may have been billions of the mauve stinger jellyfish.

“In 30 years, I’ve never seen anything like it. It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jelly fish and there was nothing we could do about, it, absolutely nothing.” says Northern Salmon Company managing director, John Russell (Telegraph).

The sea was so thick with jellyfish that workers could not even reach the cages. This type of jellyfish is not normally found in UK waters so the swarm could be evidence of global warming, according to some of the news reports. However Reuters quotes Russell as saying that such jellyfish blooms do occur every 10 or so years, and that last week’s could have been down to higher-than-normal water temperatures.

Continue reading "Attack of the killer jellyfish!" »

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“There was a case where I live [on Boston's North Shore] where some turkeys marched up onto a front porch and essentially kept a number of elderly women confined. They were afraid to go out.” So says bird expert Chris Leahy of the Massachusetts Audubon Society in National Geographic’s piece on the comeback of wild turkeys, now thriving in urban America. This wins our ‘thanksgiving story of the year’ competition.

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Leaders of 16 Asian countries, including top polluters China and Japan, committed to “stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the long run”, says Reuters. The ‘pact’, struck at the East Asia Summit (EAS) in Singapore, does not set caps on emissions or otherwise quantify what efforts might be made to reduce the impacts of climate change (though it does promise they will “work to achieve an EAS-wide aspirational goal of increasing cumulative forest cover in the region by at least 15 million hectares of all types of forests by 2020”); and leaders emphasized that economic growth remains a priority for them.

"Climate change has to be addressed -- but they cannot leave people in absolute poverty," Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told Reuters. "This is a declaration of intent, not a negotiated treaty of what we are going to do to restrict ourselves.”

The declaration is posted on the ASEAN website.

At the same meeting, Japan pledged to provide US$2 billion over the next five years in aid of fighting environmental problems in East Asia (Japan Times).

Behind-the-scene details can be found in the AFX report on Forbes’ website, which adds that the countries are in favour of nuclear power, and has some interesting notes on how a goal for reducing energy intensity by a set value was dropped after apparent objections from India.

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Star light, star bright, first star… with a pure carbon atmosphere was reported in Nature last night.

Actually the researchers report finding 8 weird stars in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, whose characteristics can be explained by a model of a star with a pure carbon atmosphere.

As stars’ helium burns off, leaving behind ashes of carbon and oxygen, they usually turn to white dwarfs: a core of carbon and oxygen surrounded by an atmosphere of hydrogen or helium. But these big boys seem to be bare dwarf cores, with no helium or hydrogen in the atmosphere – just carbon (press release). No one knows why. One theory is that the stars have evolved from those not quite massive enough to explode as supernovae.

The discovery was made by researchers who were frantically trying to explain the weird data coming from some particularly hot white dwarfs. "Out of pure desperation, I decided to try modeling a pure-carbon atmosphere. It worked," says Patrick Dufour of the University of Arizona, Tucson (press release).

"It will be a challenge to try to explain how they form and what does this tell us about stellar evolution," Dufour told Reuters.

There are plenty of weird star types out there, including ‘runaway’ stars that have abnormally high speeds relative to the stuff around them, really big stars that are rapidly blowing apart, and ‘carbon stars’, which have more carbon than oxygen and so take have a sooty atmosphere and a red appearance.

Such a discovery happens about ‘once a decade’ according to an expert quoted in Science’s coverage of the story.

Artists' concept of the surface of a carbon-atmosphere white dwarf star. Credit: M.S. Sliwinski and L. I. Slivinska of Lunarismaar

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The future of biofuels may lie in fast-growing woody plants, which theoretically could provide a more environmentally friendly and efficient source of fuel than things like corn. But breaking the cellulose in such plants into compounds usable for fuels is tricky. Scientists have long sought to learn a lesson from termites on how best to digest these woody bits. Now scientists in Nature report a metagenomic analysis of the bugs that live in the guts of 150 termites guts from a Costa Rican rainforest, producing a catalogue of about 1,000 bacterial enzymes that could be useful for future biofuel efforts.

There’s big potential here: a termite's intestines can theoretically turn one sheet of paper into two litres of hydrogen, Andreas Brune of the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, told the press (eg Reuters). But it’s a way off yet. Cataloguing the enzymes of interest is just the first step.

Nature has written about this specific Costa Rican project before, in a feature about biodiversity mining. And we have a good collection of news features on the future of biofuels.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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