The Great Beyond

Power problems on the International Space Station will be somewhat mitigated by a successful repair job on one of the station’s solar panels. This still leaves a tear in one panel and a problem with a key joint to be solved.

Still, a successful spacewalk has now repaired the motor that keeps one set of panels pointing towards the sun (press release). The repair team had to work in darkness as they were working with live cables on the panels. Sunlight could have generated power that would electrocute them.

The cause of the joint problem is still not clear. "We did not see any smoking guns as a result of our inspections today, It’s going to take a detailed analysis of all the data we have, including a metallurgical and chemical analysis of the samples we have taken, to really put the pieces of the puzzle together,” says flight director Kwatsi Alibaruho (Houston Chronicle).

Until enough power can be generated by the panels a Japanese lab scheduled for installation is in mothballs.

After the motor was installed astronaut Dan Tani apparently said, “Hey. It works!”

It’s nice to hear those words being used in reference to the ISS solar panels again...

Power problems for space station - October 29, 2007
More space station woes - October 31, 2007
Space station solar panels: one fixed, one to go - November 05, 2007
Someone’s got it in for the ISS - December 14, 2007

Image: astronaut prepares to inspect joint / NASA TV

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A quick update on the Pope. After his recent pronouncement about the dangers of being seduced by science he’s now warning that human dignity has been “shattered” by the prospect of cloning (Reuters).

This is strangely reminiscent of a recent statement from a group of Catholic bishops in the UK that has stirred up much ire amongst scientists.

In a speech to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which used to be called the inquisition, the Pope said freezing embryos, embryonic stem cell research, and the prospect of human cloning had “shattered the barriers meant to protect human dignity”, according to Reuters.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Bats in the United States are dying from a mysterious disease at such a rate that they face extinction.

“What we’ve seen so far is unprecedented. Most bat researchers would agree that this is the gravest threat to bats they have ever seen,” says Alan Hicks, leader of a New York Department of Environmental Conservation investigation into the problem (press release).

In some caves more than 90% of resident bats have succumbed to ‘white nose syndrome’, named after the fungus that covers the noses of some victims. Bats suffering from the problem seem to have run through their fat reserves months before they should be emerging from hibernation, says the DEC.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this is that the syndrome has now reached the abandoned mine where half of New York’s endangered Indiana bats hibernate. “There are an awful lot of bat people, even a month ago before we had half of this bad news, all saying the same thing. We’ve never seen anything like it, and we’re all scared,” Hicks told Bloomberg.

Some are already drawing parallels with the colony collapse disorder that is devastating US bees.

There’s a great piece on this in Schenectady’s Daily Gazette.

Image: DEC

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The latest set of photos beamed back by NASA’s Messenger probe have revealed more interesting features from Mercury. Earlier this month photos from Messenger showed huge cliffs, now the mission has found a strange ‘spider’ feature and been forced to increase estimates of the size of a massive basin on the planet.

“This flyby allowed us to see a part of the planet never before viewed by spacecraft, and our little craft has returned a gold mine of exciting data. From the perspectives of spacecraft performance and manoeuvre accuracy, this encounter was near-perfect, and we are delighted that all of the science data are now on the ground,” says Sean Solomon, principal investigator for the mission (press release).

The Spider

This feature – of a type not seen before on Mercury or on the Moon – consists of over a hundred narrow trenches radiating out from a central point. An impact crater in the middle may explain this feature, which NASA says resulted from the breaking apart of materials that filled the Caloris Basin (where the feature resides) after its formation.

But it may not. “The Spider has a crater near its centre, but whether that crater is related to the original formation or came later is not clear at this time,” says James Head, science team co-investigator at Brown University, Providence. Infuriatingly there are no other explanations at this time.

Caloris Basin

As well as being home to the Spider the basin itself has surprised scientists. Data from the last Mercury mission in 1975 led to the belief that the basin was around 1,300 kilometres across. Now it looks like this estimate will be revised upwards by up to 250 km.

“Understanding the formation of this giant basin will provide insight into the early history of major impacts in the inner Solar System, with implications not just for Mercury, but for all the planets, including Earth,” says Robert Strom, of the University of Arizona.

More
Photo and presentation details from the NASA team

Images: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington/Brown University

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The stress of watching football matches can bring on a heart attack, according to researchers in Germany. On days when the national team played in the 2006 world cup there were 2.66 times more cardiac emergencies in Munich.

“Viewing a stressful soccer match more than doubles the risk of an acute cardiovascular event. In view of this excess risk, particularly in men with known coronary heart disease, preventive measures are urgently needed,” say Ute Wilbert-Lampen and colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Thankfully for sports fans ‘preventive measures’ don’t seem to include banning unhealthy people from watching sport. Instead Wilbert-Lampen wants consideration given to dishing out beta-blockers, aspirin and other drugs to fans with pre-existing heart problems and maybe giving “behaviour therapy for coping with stress”.

Continue reading "Watching football can kill you" »

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An increasing number of tourists is generally thought to be the greatest threat to the Galapagos ecosystem. But they are unlikely culprits in the latest problem: a person or persons unknown has massacred 53 sea lions for no obvious reason.

The animals’ bodies were found within a kilometre of each other on the island of Pinta, according to AFP. “The sea lions, including 13 pups, died because of a strong blow from someone. It was a massacre whose motives the prosecutor’s office must clarify,” says Victor Carrion, an official with the Galapagos National Park.

The BBC points out that the animals are a vital part of the Galapagos food chain. Although they are sometimes hunted for their skin or for use in Chinese medicine the bodies were intact, ruling this out as a motive.

Conservation on the islands has increasingly taken second place to tourism in recent years and there have been high profile conflicts with fishermen, notably in 2000 and 2004. This new development represents a further blow to their ecosystem.

Image: Galapagos sea lions / NOAA

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A pair of students has traced the distinctive mating sound of a California hummingbird to its tail feathers. Although the birds who lost their tails for the research won’t appreciate it, their sacrifice has ended a long running debate.

Some have argued that the chirping sounds made by the Anna’s hummingbird are vocal. However Christopher Clark and Teresa Feo of UC Berkeley used a nifty 500-shots-per-second camera to record the birds during display dives in mating season and found the chirp coincided with a 60 millisecond spreading of birds’ tail feathers (research abstract in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, news coverage in Telegraph, AFP, Independent).

To check it was definitely their plumage causing the sound, the pair pulled the tail feathers off several birds - the press release assures us they grow back - and trimmed the feathers of others. Birds they interfered with were unable to chirp. They then took some of the feathers they’d removed to a wind tunnel and found a wind speed equivalent to the birds’ diving caused the feather to flutter at a frequency equivalent to the highest note on a piano (C four octaves above middle C).

“This is a new mechanism for sound production in birds. The Anna's hummingbird is the only hummingbird for which we know all the details, but there are a number of other species with similarly shaped tail feathers that may use their tail morphology in producing sounds,” says Clark.

More
Listen to the chirp
Video of Anna’s hummingbird diving

Image: display dive compiled from high speed video / Christopher J. Clark and Teresa Feo/UC Berkeley

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It’s always nice to see science becoming art, especially when it’s done as nicely as this. Jenn Schmitt has got 96 different printmakers to come up with their own visual interpretations of various elements and put them together into a periodic table (hat tip: Good Morning Silicon Valley). They’ve even tackled the elements for which no obvious picture suggests itself.

You can view the full table in its glory on the Periodic Table Printmaking Project website.

Individual element pictures range from charming and literal (a balloon and the Sun for Helium) to rather more abstract (a rooster for Gallium). It’s also nice to see that artists can also be geeks – the picture for Nickel is a graph of the value of the amount of Nickel in a nickel over six months of 2007.

Images above: hydrogen and helium.

“Knowing how the world around you works makes life so much richer. So the connection of art and science is an important one to me,” Schmitt says in an interview.

Other periodic tables we like
It’s a table, and a periodic table
Comic book periodic table
BBC’s ‘Look Around You’ spoof
Chemsoc’s Visual Elements table
CSRRI’s x-ray properties table

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Politicians in America are demanding to know why a government agency apparently tried to suppress scientific evidence about health risks following Hurricane Katrina.

The allegations centre on trailers erected as temporary accommodation for those whose homes were destroyed when Katrina devastated New Orleans. Many trailers have been found to have levels of formaldehyde far higher than permitted.

Now it seems the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which took charge after the hurricane, attempted to control the outcome of a report on the issue from the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

“The evidence that FEMA ignored, hid and manipulated government research on the potential impact of long-term exposure to formaldehyde on Katrina victims now living in travel trailers is hard to ignore. Honest scientific studies don’t start with the conclusion, and then work backwards from there,” says Brad Miller, the chair of the House of Representatives subcommittee investigating the issue (press release).

According to a press release from Miller’s subcommittee, FEMA attempted prevent consideration of long-term exposure in the report. This would be a bizarre move given those living in the trailers would obviously be subjected to long term exposure. Some people are still living in them now, more than two years after Katrina.

FEMA has denied the charges. “Any and all allegations that FEMA ignored or manipulated formaldehyde-related research are unfounded and false,” CNN quotes Carlos Castillo as saying.

CBS points out that if this is all true it means the Centers for Disease Control, which runs ATSDR, has been compromised. As CDC is, in its words, “one of the nation’s most respected agencies” the fallout could be considerable.

Bart Gordon, chair of the House Committee on Science and Technology, warned, “Our Committee has been looking closely at ATSDR for some time and we believe the report on formaldehyde in FEMA trailers may be just the tip of the iceberg. As Chairman, I assure you this will continue garnering the Committee's attention for some time to come.”

This is far from the first time concerns have been raised over the trailers. US politician Henry Waxman has been banging on about it for quite some time.

Image: Katrina approaching Florida / NASA Visible Earth

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Given its devastating impact on Europe some people have assumed that the Black Death was so virulent that it killed without regards to victims’ health. By looking at hundreds of skeletons, researchers with a taste for the macabre have disproved this supposition.

“A lot of people have assumed that the Black Death killed indiscriminately, just because it had such massive mortality,” Sharon DeWitte, a paleo-pathologist at University at Albany in New York, told Reuters.

For a new paper in PNAS, DeWitte and her colleagues analysed 490 skeletons from victims of the 1349 London outbreak of plague, called Black Death as it caused unsightly black patches on the skin. They looked for lesions on bones (which can be caused by malnutrition) in these remains and also in a control sample of bones from non-epidemic cemeteries from Denmark.

Continue reading "A plague on the weak" »

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George W. Bush gave his last State of the Union address as president last night, and already the pundits are dissecting what it means for science, technology and health issues.

The answer, of course, is relatively little, since Bush is on his last 12 months in the job. But his address is still significant in that it sets the tone for what Bush will continue to work for as he winds down his presidency. After all, he remains the leader of the most powerful country in the world, even if no one in Washington is paying attention to anyone who’s not named Obama, McCain, Romney, Giuliani or Clinton.

The old joke is that expectations are set low on purpose for the speech, and that Bush met them. The folks over at Science Progress have a pre-speech look at how science and technology played in prior State of the Union addresses. The short answer: energy and innovation are big, stem cells and carbon emissions are not. Last night Bush remedied that, if only to mention embryonic stem cells in the context of the human skin reprogramming work last fall that conservatives have seized on as a reason not to fund embryonic stem-cell work.

Energy popped up in its usual framework as well, with Bush praising Congress – well, at least acknowledging it – for passing a massive energy bill late last year. This time, he renewed calls for his usual technology-oriented solutions to climate change: coal-fired power plants that sequester carbon, an expansion of nuclear power, plus a little twist in the shape of a $2-billion international clean technology fund to “help developing nations like India and China make greater use of clean energy sources”. Not a word, as climate advocates point out, about mandatory emissions caps for the US.

Bush also called on Congress to restore funding for the American Competitiveness Initiative, a doubling of research in the physical sciences proposed in his 2006 address that got derailed late last year in last-minute budget negotiations. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has told the research community that she is still committed to these sorts of budget increases, but it remains to be seen what will happen in the next round of budget negotiations.

Finally, Bush called for a doubling of funding to fight AIDS in Africa. The $15-billion PEPFAR program would bump up to $30 billion over the next five years, if Congress approves the spending. Which may, in the end, be the most positive news for science Bush leaves behind – except, of course, that a third of PEPFAR monies must go to programs that promote abstinence, an approach public health advocates generally decry.

Image: Bush delivering State of the Union Address / White House photo

Posted by Alex Witze
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Clearly the Pope enjoyed the last time he got a bunch of scientists riled (Great Beyond post from earlier this month). His latest pronouncement seems sure to do it again.

This time the Pope seems to have waded into my favourite topic in the philosophy of science – reductionism. “Man is not the fruit of chance or a bundle of convergences, determinisms or physical and chemical reactions,” he boldly declared to scientists at a Paris meeting (Canada’s National Post).

He might have got away with this if he hadn’t gone further, saying “In an age when scientific developments attract and seduce with the possibilities they offer, it’s more important than ever to educate our contemporaries’ consciences so that science does not become the criteria for goodness.”

Now I’ve never thought science was in danger of becoming ‘the criteria for goodness’, but leaving that aside nothing in this latest speech is necessarily more controversial than previous Pope pronouncements (which generally reiterate the old “science can’t know everything” argument). As both the National Post and Reuters point out though, coming so soon after his last conflict this is sure to reignite debate between the pontiff and scientists.

Obviously I’m biased though, having long ago been ‘attracted and seduced’ by the possibilities offered by scientific developments. Is that so wrong?

More
The editor of New Humanist looks at the last row
The Lancet examines ‘the Pope’s mixed record on science’ (subscription required)

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Maximum respect to the clever people at Wired who have decoded the secret messages in Craig Venter’s new synthetic chromosome. Released last week, the genome contained “watermark” sequences to differentiate it from the genomes of natural examples of Mycoplasm genitalium to prove it was truly synthetic.

It’s hard to write a catchy message using just the four letters found in DNA; but every DNA sequence can be translated into a lists of amino acids (give or take the odd stop codon), and each amino acid has a one letter symbol. 20 amino acids thus allow you to write pretty much anything you might want to, if you’re willing to use some creative spelling.

Here’s Wired’s reading of the watermarks

VENTERINSTITVTE
CRAIGVENTER
HAMSMITH
CINDIANDCLYDE
GLASSANDCLYDE

Authors on the paper in Science included Venter, Hamilton Smith, John Glass, Clyde Hutchison and Cindi Pfannkoch.

Wired thinks it is disappointing, although perhaps not unexpected, that the team went for personal glory over something more profound. But signing your work is hardly an ignoble act. What do you want: “The eagle has landed”? “We come in peace for all mankind”? “One small step for a Ham”? I’m just grateful they didn’t insert the number of their patent application in roman numerals...

My boss points out that Wired has a track record in messages encoded in gene sequences.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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According to a group of geologists we humans have changed the Earth so much we should stop calling this geological age the Holocene epoch. Instead they want us to call it the anthropocene (press release).

In Nature in 2002 Paul Crutzen wrote an article stating, “It seems appropriate to assign the term 'Anthropocene' to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene — the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia. The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with James Watt's design of the steam engine in 1784.”

Then in 2003 Nature ran an editorial headlined, “Welcome to the Anthropocene” (subscription required) and we revisited the topic again in 2004.

Now researchers have decided to really push for the adoption of the new title.

Continue reading "In this day and age..." »

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Today’s claim to be filed in the ‘WHAT!’ section is that wearing a cycle helmet with some lamps in it for ten minutes a day can cure dementia.

OK it is a bit more complicated than that; but at root this is what scientists from the University of Sunderland in the UK are saying. Before we go any further we should point out that this hasn’t been tested in humans, there doesn’t seem to be any peer-reviewed research on it in humans, and there is a commercial company behind this which markets similar products to cure cold sores and wrinkles.

A press release from the university says that research has shown that regular exposure to low level infra-red light can improve learning performance and “kick-start the cognitive function of the brain”.

Continue reading "Can shining lights on your head cure dementia?" »

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There’s an interesting article in The Guardian today about how travellers to Mars could be protected against the solar wind that would otherwise smash into their DNA with nasty consequences. This article follows up on a whole series from other sources last year, and details a neat step towards creating a shield for space travellers.

Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England found that a magnet placed into a beam of high-energy particles designed to mimic solar wind deflected the wind around it. This isn’t necessarily hugely surprising but it does mean that the research team can claim their method is a viable way of shielding spaceships going to Mars from the solar wind.

“We now have actual measurements that show a ‘hole’ in the solar wind could be created in which a spacecraft could sit, affording some protection from ‘ion storms’, as they would call them on Star Trek,” Bamford says in the Guardian.

This work first got wide publicity last year, when New Scientist ran a piece on it although at that time it was up in the air whether it would work. In that article Frank Cucinotta, NASA's chief radiation health officer, also said this approach could have drawbacks compared to simply adding layers of material to block particles. Chief amongst these if that if the system breaks you have no shield at all.

Bamford’s work also appeared on a number of blog posts, and if you can get the Rutherford lab’s latest podcast to work you can listen to her on there too.

Image: artist's concept of future crew exploration vehicle / NASA/John Frassanito and Associates

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Tonight may be your best chance to see asteroid TU24, a giant rock that is definitely not going to smash into Earth.

Despite claims from some sections of the internet that we could all be obliterated by the 250 metre diameter monster, TU24 will actually sail safely past Earth, some 538,000 kilometres away at about half past midnight. You will need a telescope to see it though, at that distant the rock will be 50 times fainter than it would need to be to be visible (NASA press release).

These really rather rubbish images have been released by NASA, with each pixel representing about 20 metres. Next week we’re promised higher resolution snaps.

The Bad Astronomy blogger recently got quite incensed about a video claiming TU24 would hit us. Today he has fired back with his own video, saying, “I am fed up. For those who haven’t been following this saga, some doomsayers have been claiming that an asteroid named 2007 TU24 poses a grave threat to Earth. These fearmongers are completely wrong, scaring lots of others, and are apparently unwilling to listen to reason.”

This is however going to be the closest an asteroid of this size gets to Earth until 2027, says Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office (in Reuters, The Times, Fox, and others). Doomsayers can take heart though, the caveat “known” should be added in front of the word asteroid. There could still be a rock we haven’t seen yet on a course to make us the next dinosaurs...

UPDATE
If you feel the need for another video you can watch scientists at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office discussing the rock.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Scientists went toe to toe with the Catholic Church last week over legislation on embryo research that is currently making its way through the UK’s parliament.

A statement from the assembly of Catholic bishops in England and Wales read out in catholic churches claimed the legislation would, “allow scientists to create embryos that are half human, half animal. For example from the egg of a woman and sperm from an animal. To do this would be a radical violation of human dignity.” A number of scientists came out to denounce this as downright false.

“The Catholic Bishops’ statement on hybrids is not a radical violation of human dignity as they claim - it is a radical violation of the truth! The cloning technique removes all the animal DNA in the nucleus of an unfertilized egg and replaces it with an adult human cell that can then be reprogrammed to generate embryonic stem cells. It is a sperm free process,” says Chris Shaw, a professor of neurology and neurogenetics at King’s College London (via the Science Media Centre, no online press release).

Continue reading "‘A radical violation of the truth’" »

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

Continue reading "Weekly round up" »

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Recently the Great Beyond featured a whole post of science related songs. Now another one has popped into my inbox.

Although this isn’t a new song and it’s about maths rather than science, today is a Friday. This seems reason enough to give a post over to the genius that is The Klein Four Group’s ‘Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)’

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Brazil is preparing to call on the army in a bid to stop Amazon deforestation. New figures show deforestation increased markedly in the last five months, which is surprising as last year the government said deforestation was slowing.

As well as using the army to carry out inspections, new initiatives include a moratorium on any new deforestation requests, holding businesses that buy commodities from destroyed areas responsible for deforestation, and making landowners prove they maintain preservation areas (Reuters).

There are two sets of figures floating around for the last five months of last year. The first set, derived from the DETER satellite system, say 3,200 square kilometres were felled (Reuters uses these). A second set are estimates of the true damage that will be unveiled when better images become available and these put the damage at 7,000 sq km (AFP and the Guardian use these).

The raw numbers are available from Brazil’s national space research institute. Perhaps the most troubling thing is the massive increase in the rate of loss: 243 sq km disappeared in August but this was up to 948 sq km in December (press release, in Portuguese). Dalton de Morrison Valeriano, the institute’s Amazon programme coordinator, says that the system used for these numbers usually comes out between 40 and 60% below the system that makes detailed annual calculations. He puts the variation on the 7,000 sq km figure at 1,400 sq km.

Continue reading "Army sent in to save rainforest" »

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Comet samples returned to Earth by a NASA mission are forcing scientists to revise their ideas about the comet they sent it to.

Comets are thought to form out in the suburbs of the solar system, and researchers expected the Stardust mission to Wild 2 to return with samples of the “pre-solar” dust that would have been found out there. Hence the name.

Boy were they wrong – Wild 2 has a composition more like that of an asteroid and the researchers found material characteristic of the inner solar system, according to research published in Science.

“The material is a lot less primitive and more altered than materials we have gathered through high altitude capture in our own stratosphere from a variety of comets,” says study author Hope Ishii (press release). “...It’s a reminder that we can’t make black and white distinctions between asteroids and comets. There is a continuum between them.”

Continue reading "No stardust for comet mission" »

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The long running saga of NASA’s “drunken astronauts” may finally be wrapped up. On the off chance you’re not bored by this epic, the latest report found a “single isolated incident of perceived impairment of a crew member which occurred in the final days before launch, but not on launch day or within 12 hours of a launch or aviation event”.

This follows on from the last report in August last year which was “unable to verify any case in which an astronaut spaceflight crewmember was impaired on launch day”. That report came after another in July which stated “two specific instances were described where astronauts had been so intoxicated prior to flight that flight surgeons and/or fellow astronauts raised concerns to local on-scene leadership regarding flight safety”.

So first there were two, then were none, now there is one.

The report is actually part of a wider inquiry into astronaut health, as the Orlando Sentinel does a nice job of explaining.

Other news coverage: CNN; NY Times; Space.com.

Image: Punchstock

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Claims of huge importance for a newly discovered human skull have been undermined by some experts.

There has been a fair bit of excitement in China on the state news service about the 100,000 year old skull found in Henan and the excitement was catching for Reuters and the Guardian. Shan Jixiang, director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, told China Daily, “It is the greatest discovery in China after the Peking Man and Upper Cave Man skull fossils were found in Beijing early last century, and will shed light on a critical period of human evolution.”

Dennis Etler, a palaeoanthropologist at Cabrillo College, California, told the Guardian, “This is a crucial period in human evolutionary history, but we know almost nothing about it. Anything coming from that period is of great interest to the outside world. This sounds like a breakthrough.”

The South China Morning Post even reckons this find “may bury ‘Out of Africa’ theory” (subscription required).

This conclusion isn’t backed up by other experts. Wu Xinzhi, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told AFP, “It is far from the greatest judging from points such as the completeness, the time, and the significance of problems it can explain. So far, it just can prove that there were human beings living in Henan about 80,000 to 100,000 years ago and the shape of their heads was roughly what the skull shows.”

And in his brief blog note on the topic, biological anthropologist Greg Laden says it is “interesting, but not necessarily earth-shattering”.

We’ll come back to this when a peer review publication surfaces...

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Yellowstone Park has supplemented its popular still-shot Geyser Webcams with a live video feed of Old Faithful, one of the two most famous geysers in the world (the other being in Iceland). This promises not only Old Faithful but will also point at other geysers, including Beehive, Lion, and Giantess, when these are erupting.

“When bison, elk, coyotes, or the occasional bear wander into the camera’s view, live video images will be transmitted,” adds the park website.

Old Faithful is so named due to its regularity. Maybe this new webcam will reveal whether park rangers are putting soap powder into it – a common trick to make geysers erupt...

Other Yellowstone webcams are available here. For those of you who don’t want to wait, a video is embedded for your viewing pleasure.

Hat tip: Reuters

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You’ve got to hand it to Richard Branson, he knows how to get good publicity. Unveiling the design for his planned tourist spaceship has put him in the headlines in a way not seen since, oh I don’t know, he decided to buy that bank a few months ago.

Some pretty pictures of SpaceShip2 and the carrier plane that will haul it up part way to space have put him in just about every news source in the world today (examples: AP, AFP, PA, Independent, NY Times, Wired). “The designs of both the mothership and the new spaceship are absolutely beautiful and surpass any expectations for the future of commercial spaceflight that we had when first registering the name Virgin Galactic in 1999,” he says (press release).

Bizarrely, his Virgin Galactic company claims that burning through fuel to put rich tourists into space will be “environmentally benign” (press release). “[W]e are all very excited about the prospect of being able to develop a bio-fuel solution for the space launch system ...” says Branson.

The carrier plane White Knight Two will begin flight testing in 2008 but as a number of people have pointed out, there is still no date for when the 200 (and counting) people who have forked out $200,000 to get into space will actually start going. Progress has been delayed after an explosion at Virgin’s testing site last year (Nature – subscription required).

More images below the fold...

Continue reading "Private space plane designs unveiled" »

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Earlier this month we brought you the strange tale of a creationist who wanted $60,000 for a rare mastodon fossil. A few days ago it sold at auction for $191,200, which the Dallas News manages to mention without coming near the fact that the director and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum who put it up for auction claims to be “the world’s only creationist field palaeontologist”.

The sale is good news for the uniquely qualified man in question, Joe Taylor. He told AP he would be closing his museum if the auction didn’t raise enough money to cover $136,000 he owed following a legal dispute over another fossil (alluded to in our original blog post).

“We’ve struggled so long here just to keep this thing going. We’re kind of losing interest. You can just tread water for so long,” Taylor said before the auction.

While this is good for Taylor then, it is rather less good for the average scientific level of US museums, which would have undergone something of a fillip if Mt. Blanco had closed.

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A lot of interest has been sparked by a new study, in Geophysical Research Letters, suggesting that warmer oceans could mean fewer hurricanes hitting the United States. Researchers used past observations to show that increases in sea surface temperature led to increases in vertical wind shear in the region where most Atlantic hurricanes develop. This coincides with less hurricanes making landfall in the United States (research abstract). More wind shear means embryonic storms get torn apart before they can grow bigger.

“Using data extending back to the middle nineteenth century, we found a gentle decrease in the trend of US landfalling hurricanes when the global ocean is warmed up. We looked at US landfalling hurricanes because it is the most reliable Atlantic hurricane measurement over the long term,” says study author Chunzai Wang, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (press release).

But the AP highlights critics, who have taken aim at the use of landfalling hurricanes.

Continue reading "Hurricanes gone wild" »

Posted by Alex Witze
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Last week AP and NasaWatch broke the news that engineers were worried Ares, the replacement for the shuttle, could shake itself to pieces in the first few minutes of flight. “They know it’s a real problem. This thing is going to shake apart the whole structure, and they’ve got to solve it,” AP was told by Paul Fischbeck, of Carnegie Mellon University, who analysed risks for NASA in the past.

According to AP, acceleration pulses from gas vortices in the solid rocket booster powering the Ares launcher match the natural frequencies of the motor’s combustion chamber. This kind of resonance is bad – as any physics student shown footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge can testify. I don’t know if this is quite the same thing as the pogo oscillations that plagued the Saturn V rockets, but it sounds similar and it’s worth noting that Ares is nicknamed ‘The Stick’.

Later, NasaWatch got hold of a NASA memo that seemed to show that the Ares launch had been delayed by 12 months (blog post, memo). However Griffin has denied this. His slightly tetchy denial is rather convoluted but he says this is not a delay but a “re-phasing” of milestones (NasaWatch blog post). Clear on that?

Image: artist's rendition of an Ares I rocket on launch pad / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Sometimes you just have to hold your hands up in despair.

Various newspapers in the UK have taken a photo from one of NASA’s Mars rovers, blown up a rock feature and posed the following questions:
Does this show there's life on Mars? (Times)
Bigfoot on Mars? NASA captures alien figure (Telegraph)
...continued in a similar vein by The Sun, freepaper Metro, the Daily Express, and others. I’m sufficiently upset about this to deny them the linkage.

It’s a rock.

If you don’t believe me here’s what the respected Bad Astronomy blog says: it’s a rock. In full BA says: “First, puhlllleeeeze. A man? It’s a tiny rock only a few inches high. It’s only a few feet from the rover!”

Here’s the full NASA image from which the above was clipped:

I’m off to find a random feature of a NASA photo I can zoom in on and claim it’s an orang-utan. That will ingratiate me with the news editor -- and if we’re making stuff up I want a whole zoo up there.

Images: NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Allegations of shady dealing and suppression have emerged from an ongoing meeting on Arctic oil exploration. On Monday a report from the Arctic Council, made up of eight countries, warned that any spills would be hugely damaging to wildlife.

Reuters notes that the report was supposed to be out in 2007 and cites “sources familiar with the process” saying that Sweden and the United States blocked publication of “policy recommendations”.

A report in the UK’s Independent newspaper is more forthright: “The United States has blocked the release of a land-mark assessment of oil and gas activity in the Arctic as it prepares to sell off exploration licenses for the frozen Chukchi Sea off Alaska ...”

The Independent says it has seen the missing recommendations and they suggest conducting proper research on environmental impacts before signing off new oil projects in ecologically sensitive areas. Which hardly seems a statement worth censoring. But it quotes one of the lead authors as saying, “They blocked it. We have no executive summary and no plain language conclusions.”

The report is online and there is a bit of a hint that some last minute modifying may have been done. The contents page lists a preface as appearing on page III and an ‘OGA Executive Summary and Recommendations’ as appearing on page V. However the first page after page II is page IV. The first page after that is the start of the introduction.

More
Presentations by meeting delegates, including one by report's lead author

Image top: polar bear, Arctic Ocean, north of western Russia / NOAA
Image bottom: sea ice studies in southern Chukchi Sea / NOAA

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Sad news reaches the Great Beyond regarding the airship that explorer Jean-Louis Etienne was hoping to fly to the North Pole, researching ice thickness as he went (see previous post).

It appears storms uprooted the airship’s moorings at the Fayence aérodrome in France. After being carried away by the wind it crashed into a house. Although no one was hurt, the airship is “dead”, a spokeswoman tells us.

There is a brief press statement on Etienne’s website.

We’ll try to bring you more tomorrow.

UPDATE
The story is now on AFP, Reuters, and Bloomberg.

“The airship is destroyed, it can’t be repaired. I feel like crying,” Etienne told reporters (AFP). However Reuters says another expedition may be put together to measure the ice thickness.

Image: artist’s impression of airship

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A lot has been written over the years on the link between violent culture and violent crime. Most of this has focused on the possibility that playing violent games or watching violent movies makes you more aggressive, a finding backed by some lab studies but not others.

Now researchers have found the opposite is true – at least in the short term. It seems that when violent movies come out violent people go and see them, meaning they’re not on the streets drinking, fighting and generally running amok.

Researchers in California looked at the relationship between blockbuster movies and assaults on the days these movies are released. They found violent crime decreased on days when larger numbers of people went to see violent movies, compared to days with less violent movies showing. If the audience for violent movies went up by a million people, violent crime dropped by about 1.2%, they say in a new research paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (abstract).

Continue reading "Watching Die Hard cuts street crime" »

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Europe and the US could be headed for a trade war over climate change.

In a speech yesterday José Barroso, president of the European Commission, said he would be ready to force companies outside the EU to buy carbon allowances to ensure that companies inside were not disadvantaged by Europe’s tougher emissions targets (speech).

While this apparently went down well with the audience (of European businessmen) it hasn’t gone down so well with America.

Reuters highlights that US Trade Representative Susan Schwab said that an earlier version of the EU plans seemed to be an excuse to close the European market and amounted to something like protectionism. More worryingly, the notes for speech delivered by Schwab last week contains the statement, “The unilateral imposition of restrictions can lead to retaliation, and dramatically impact economic growth and markets worldwide – while accomplishing nothing or worse when it comes to advancing environmental objectives.”

Continue reading "Climate change trade war" »

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Cockroaches conceived aboard a Russian space mission are true Olympians -- better, stronger, faster than their non-space faring relations, according to a Russian news report.

Since they were born last October they grew faster than expected, researcher Dmitry Atyakshin told RNA Novosti on January 17th. “What is more, we have found out that the creatures... run faster than ordinary cockroaches, and are much more energetic and resilient,” he says. There doesn’t seem to be a research paper as yet though.

This was picked up this week by New Scientist, which asks “Could these positive effects be due somehow to the effectively weightless environment during conception, or to a healthy dose of radiation?”

This isn’t the first time space has made things nastier. Last year research appeared to show that weightlessness made bacteria deadlier (Nature – subscription required). The Foton-M mission that took the roaches into orbit also had a number of other experiments on board. Stand by for super mouse. It’s also worth remember that there are roaches tucked up in Robert Bigelow's space hotel.

Here at the Great Beyond though I'm not worried. After all we already have robots that can lead the horrible insects to their doom, and failing that we'll just turn them into zombies with trained wasps.

More
Our columnist Phil Ball thinks more missions should be like Foton-M
Fish in space help studies of balance disorders – Nature on another Foton-M project.
BoingBoing post, with the usual amusing comments

Image: High detail closeup of a cockroach photo by Joăo Estęvăo A. de Freitas / via Wikimedia

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A sign language dictionary of science terms has been created to help deaf children by researchers in Scotland.

“The scientific vocabulary for deaf children has developed simply because we needed it. People realised that there weren’t enough deaf teachers in schools and that finger spelling doesn’t work for complex subjects. You have to be able to understand the English first and then the concept and that can all be very difficult,” Rachel O’Neill, of the University of Edinburgh, told The Times.

The paper says the “simple but descriptive gestures” brought “gasps of recognition” from deaf children and their teachers when they were demonstrated last week. Videos of the terms have all been made available online.

They are brilliantly direct, and even those with no grasp of sign language (such as me) can understand terms such as air resistance. If this proves difficult there are explanatory videos in sign language alongside.

Image: Alamy

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US federal officials have recommended killing about 30 ‘nuisance’ sea lions a year near one particular river in Oregon in order to keep them from gobbling up salmon (NOAA). Some of these salmon are endangered; the sea lions are not. The proposal, which hasn’t yet been passed, would see officials try to scare the California sea lions away from the fish first, resorting to lethal methods on problematic animals only after deterrence fails.

There’s a good level of debate in the press as to whether this plan would actually work (Oregonian, with great pictures and graphics; Scripps News, with a good dose of comment from biologists on why the sea lions are targeting salmon, specifically, and how many they might be eating).

Sea lions are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, but they can still be killed legally under certain circumstances (ABCnews).

Sharon Young, reportedly the lone dissenting member of the panel which made this recommendation, is quoted in much of the press coverage pointing out that killing some sea lions won’t do anything to solve other problems facing the fish – including fishing. "What it's mainly going to do is kill some sea lions out of frustration without dealing with the more serious problems facing the fish," she says (Technocrat).

It all comes full circle: overfishing has previously been blamed for a reduction in the Stellar sea lion population, as a lack of food may have been taking down their numbers. At the time we wrote our feature on this topic in 2005 (see Is this any way to save a species?) there was no proof of how fish numbers affect those sea lions. It seems now there’s no proof of how California sea lions affect fish numbers either.

NewWest is making no bones about its attitude to the news (see Sea Lion Slaughter On The Columbia). On the other end of the spectrum, others remind us that the recommended number for the kill is less than what some of the local states has asked for (FoxNews). Opinion at the Columbian is that the scheme is worth a shot, literally, even if those shots might accidentally hit innocent bystanders (seriously).

NOAA’s Fisheries Service is asking for public comment until 19 February.

Image: California Sea Lion / NOAA

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Nature Reports Stem Cells has an interesting blog post on a death during a stem cell trial against the fatal and rare condition Batten disease. An independent group monitoring the trial decided that the death was due to the disease, not the treatment, which involves implants of neural stem cells from foetuses -- note that's not embryonic stem cells, and not patient-matched stem cells, about which there is so much potential excitement these days (see
Human embryos cloned from adult cells). The trial will continue, and Nature Reports Stem Cells has some good background on that.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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For 2008, officially the year of the frog (see Year of the what?; subscription needed), the Zoological Society of London has expanded its list of Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) animals to include amphibians (Reuters; New Scientist). The programme prioritises threatened creatures sitting on relatively isolated branches of the evolutionary tree (or, as their press release puts it, “the world’s weirdest and most endangered creatures”). They’ve assessed mammals (we last wrote about that when highlighting some odd, and very cute, Mongolian creatures, and we also have a feature on conservation priorities; subscription needed for both), and now they’ve done amphibians. Highlights include “a gigantic, ancient relative of the newt (pictured), a drawing-pin sized frog, and a blind see-through salamander.” (from the press release; pic credit International Cooperation Network for Giant Salamander Conservation)

Full lists can be found on the EDGE site (which seems to be down at the moment, but should be back up soon).

Such attention is surely a ‘good thing’, even if most of it is limited to a burst of press activity about the poor ugly creatures that need our love (Metro). But I’m keen to see if this, or any other amphibian conservation pushes this year, actually result in saving some frogs. There has been tonnes written over the past few years about the plight of amphibians doing very poorly indeed in the face of fungal infections and climate change, and we have published stories about lab experiments that seem to point the way to saving them; but there’s no news as yet of any extensive real-life projects aiming to save them. We wait in anticipation.

The top 10 ‘weird’ amphibians, taken from the EDGE press release, below the fold:

Continue reading "World’s weirdest amphibians" »

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

Continue reading "Weekly round up" »

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Researchers have solved a mysterious problem that seemed to defy Darwinian logic.

Sheep living on an island off Scotland with dark coats are bigger than their fellow sheep that have light coats. This should make them more likely to survive the bitter Scottish winters and thus it might seem likely that dark sheep would come to make up a greater proportion of the woolly population.

However the proportion of dark sheep is actually declining. “If being big is good and dark sheep are bigger we would expect the frequency of dark sheep to increase. This presents an evolutionary problem,” Jon Slate, a researcher at the University of Sheffield, told Reuters.

In the latest issue of Science Slate and colleagues have solved this problem. Bigger, they found, isn’t always better. They looked at a small portion of the Soay sheep genome which contains the coat colour gene and some others that are usually inherited with it. They found that some of the other genes that occur with the dark coat gene have negative effects on health – such as reduced reproductive success – that outweigh the benefits of being larger (research abstract, press release).

Continue reading "Black sheep really are bad" »

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Since the end of last year reports have been surfacing of a mysterious die off among rare gharials in India. These quite cute (to my mind) crocodile-type animals are listed as critically endangered and there are now real fears they may go extinct due to this mass mortality.

In December it was reported that two or three dead gharials were being pulled daily out of the Chambal River. The Indian branch of the WWF says 50 of the reptiles have been found dead on one 25 km stretch of the river. However a new article in the Times of India puts the number at 81.

Only about 1,300 are thought to be present in the wild. “This is extremely disturbing news. We are alarmed at this development and hope that immediate remedial measures are initiated to prevent further loss,” says Ravi Singh, CEO of WWF-India (press release).

Continue reading "Save the gharial!" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Alison Abbott

On Tuesday the Vatican announced that, following a spate of protests that had escalated into a political firestorm, the Pope would not be addressing the University of Rome La Sapienza at the inauguration of its academic year. The story has had a fair amount of international pick up (BBC, New York Times) and yesterday riot police watched as students marched through Rome demanding ‘Freedom for the University’ (Reuters).

The Italian press is nearly unanimous in saying that the physisicts who called for the invitation to the Pope to be withdrawn and the few dozen students protesting against the visit in student-y ways were wrong. Academic opposition was an unacceptable assault on freedom of expression, and Ratzi’s (as he is known) voluntary withdrawal from the event was regrettable (eg L’Unita)

Prime minister Romano Prodi said the actions ‘provoked an unacceptable tension and a climate which dishonours the traditions of civilisation and tolerance of Italy’, and key politicians lost no time in joining in with similar statements. Research minister Fabio Mussi, told parliament that it was a big mistake for the mission of the university which is “a place to receive, not to reject; it’s not necessary to agree with the Pope, but to respect his right to speak..” (See Corriere Della Sera.)

Continue reading "Pope pulls out" »

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Posted on behalf of Rachel Courtland:

Big fluffy costumes are not typical attire on Capitol Hill, but at a House of Representatives hearing today, a couple of people dressed as polar bears kept edging in the camera sights. At issue was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s postponement of the decision on whether to list the polar bear as an endangered species. The agency’s director, Dale Hall, says the delay is simply intended to give his staff more time to get solid language in place. But the decision will now likely come after Feb. 6, when another agency in the Department of Interior, the Minerals Management Service, puts a large chunk of polar bear habitat in the Chukchi Sea up for lease for off-shore oil and gas drilling.

At the start of the hearing, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said the timing of decisions creates a “drill first and ask questions later” situation, enabling oil and gas companies to skirt thorny endangered-species regulations that might impede drilling. “If we get this wrong, we will be accelerating the day the polar bear becomes extinct.” Markey said he plans to introduce legislation that would force the Interior Department to rule on the endangered status of the bear before leasing drilling rights in the Chukchi.

The biggest concern to the committee was the potential for oil spills, which can be fatal as bears tend to lick oil off their fur if exposed. The Minerals Management Service estimates the potential for a Chukchi spill, over the lifetime of the project, at more than 30 percent -- a number some committee members said seemed large, though it’s difficult to quantify the risk to bears. The Service’s director Randall Luthi said he did not favor the postponement of the Chukchi lease. He told the committee his agency has already taken into account potential environmental impacts and that the bears are already protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Image: NOAA

Posted by Alex Witze
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A new species of parasite that makes ants change colour to resemble berries has been discovered in Central America. Researchers behind the finding think this is part of a strategy to fool birds into eating the ants, thus distributing the parasite.

(As an aside, this is tame compared to Leucochloridium paradoxum which invades a snail and makes it glow to attract birds.)

Back in 2005 Robert Dudley of UC Berkeley noticed that some members of a colony of black ants had bright red abdomens. He took them back to the lab and showed them to Michael Kaspari and Stephen Yanoviak, who thought they were a different species.

“Robert didn’t think so, and we made a bet over beers,” says Kaspari (press release). “Then Steve opened one up under the scope and - wow! I lost the bet.”

When opened up the red ants were full of hundreds of nematode eggs. “It’s just crazy that something as dumb as a nematode can manipulate its host’s exterior morphology and behaviour in ways sufficient to convince a clever bird to facilitate transmission of the nematode,” says Dudley.

Continue reading "Parasite turns ants into tasty looking berries" »

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The jewel in the world’s coral reef crown is threatened by devastating predatory starfish, according to conservation groups. Researchers found that Crown of Thorns starfish have “almost completely destroyed” some areas of reef at Halmahera in Indonesia, at the centre of the so-called Coral Triangle between Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea (press release 1, news coverage in The Age, AFP, Reuters).

“The heart of the Coral Triangle is broken,” says Tasrif Katawijaya from the Wildlife Conservation Society (press release 2). Surveying of Halmahera was being conducted for the WCS and ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

Apparently the outbreak is likely caused by poor water quality. It could, warns the WCS, be an early sign of widespread decline in the reefs.

“The main cause of damage to the corals was the Crown of Thorns starfish. We witnessed a number of active outbreaks of this coral predator. There was little to suggest that the reefs have been much affected by climate change as yet: the threats appear far more localized,” says Andrew Baird, of the ARC centre of and James Cook University.

On his blog Rick MacPherson, program director for the Coral Reef Alliance, takes a longer look at the COTs (as the starfish are apparently known to conservationists) and what the new report adds. [Shameless plug: MacPherson is also on Nature Network.]

Image: crown of thorns starfish / Wildlife Conservation Society

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Why is one of the world’s greatest rivers drying up? Well it’s got nothing to do with the giant dam built on it, according to the Chinese government.

Water levels on the Yangtze are currently the lowest on record, and records began in 1866. This is according to China Daily, quoting the Changjiang Times (which I can’t read as it’s not in English, sorry about that).

Officials say less rainfall is to blame for the levels, which have led to many ships running aground. The Yangtze River Water Resource Commission says, “The lack of rain is the major reason for the drying-up of the Yangtze.”

The newspaper though also notes that large amounts of water were stored behind the controversial Three Gorges Dam last month, leading to a 50% lower volume of water flowing downriver.

Whatever the truth of this matter it highlights once again the problems with the dam, which even China has admitted “could lead to catastrophe” (Great Beyond post from last year). “The major worry is for aquatic species and birds. If the water level goes too low they will lose a huge level of habitat,” says Li Lifeng, director of the freshwater programme of WWF China (Guardian)

See also
Three Gorges dam set in stone – Nature from May 2006
Yangtze River's Three Gorges 2 mln years in the making - Xinhua
China's longest river at lowest in 142 years – Reuters
Parts of China's Yangtze at lowest level in 140 years: report – AFP

Image: dam in partial completion / NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using ASTER data made available by NASA/GSFC/MITI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, via Visible Earth.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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There’s much excitement in certain sections of the US press over NASA’s latest toy. Although it isn’t a new announcement and it hasn’t done any science yet it is quite cool, so I’re happy to play along.

The toy is question is what you get when you shoehorn a 2.5-metre infrared telescope into a Boeing 747. In NASA lingo: “the world’s largest airborne observatory”, or the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, which will be based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. SOFIA flew over the Bay area for the first time on Monday, startling local residents, and impressing local journalists. “Talk about a souped-up airplane,” gushed The Mercury News.

“It can do science no other NASA observatory can do. It’s almost as good as going into space,” Tom Roellig, the SOFIA project scientist, told the paper.

Interestingly none of the coverage seems to mention the massive cost over runs (see Nature – subscription required). Equally, there is no mention in either the papers or the NASA press release that this is a joint project with Germany, and Germany had to talk NASA out of cancelling the project in 2006 (Nature again). NASA mentions in passing that the telescope is “German-built”, but doesn’t say that it was paid for by the Germans and represents about 20% of the project’s costs.

Continue reading "NASA’s amazing flying space observatory" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA’s Messenger probe has snapped this close up image of Mercury, a rather better one than the initial sliver shot taken on approach. This is the first time a probe has visited the planet since Mariner 10 in 1975.

Nature’s previous coverage of the mission from January 10th should tell you all you need to know, now here are the latest pictures.

Although it may look rather like the Moon, the January 14th shot below has what NASA calls “a variety of intriguing surface features”. Note the small craters 270 metres across, one of the highest and longest cliffs seen on Mercury curving from the top centre down across the right side of the photo, and the impact crater where part of the cliff near the top of the shot has been destroyed. (Although NASA doesn’t note why these features are “intriguing”.)

More
Messenger homepage
Animation of flyby (large file)
Mercury amazes scientists – Baltimore Sun
Latest Flyby Gives New Views of Mercury – NY Times

Images: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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With the US presidential campaign in full heat of battle, now's the time that many science-oriented groups are trotting out related websites. It's not hard to find the candidates' positions on science and technology summarized in different areas -- in addition to the summary chart Nature ran earlier this month, you can also find a rundown at the AAAS election site or Popular Mechanics' Geek the Vote. (Does Mitt Romney (right) really mean it when he says he'll increase energy, fuels, materials and automotive-related research to $20 billion annually? He does when he's campaigning in Michigan....)

But real hard-core politicos should check out the new wiki-style site from Scientists and Engineers for America. They're calling it the SHARP network for 'science, health and related policies'. It's got not only the presidential candidates and their stances on science issues, but also every member of Congress. You can enter your zip code or click on your state to get a list of your elected representatives, plus their stances on energy, health care, innovation and more.

The site isn't perfect - I checked out my senator, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, and there's no mention yet of her longstanding work to bolster funding for NASA. But that's exactly why the SHARP site is a wiki - anyone can upload relevant information and improve the entries. Staff members will monitor the site to make sure it doesn't go too off-topic, but it seems the perfect opportunity for students or school groups around the country to adopt their local representatives and flesh out their entries to better inform the voting public.

If you'll excuse me, I think I need to go do some uploading.

Image: Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters

Posted by Alex Witze
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A genetically modified carrot delivers 41% more calcium to the body, Texas scientists have shown. Kendal Hirschi and colleagues had previously engineered the carrots to have a two-fold higher calcium content, but it was unclear whether consumption of this marvel of science actually increased the amount of calcium in the body of the eater.

Now, in a paper that should shortly appear in PNAS, they report that people who ate 100g of their ‘super carrots’ absorbed 41% more calcium than those who ate boring old normal carrots. This could help to treat osteoporosis, notes the briefest press release ever.

Whether these carrots will overcome consumer scepticism about GM foods remains to be seen. “Much more research needs to be conducted before this would be available to consumers,” admits Hirschi (BBC).

“As far as I know, this is the first time any one has taken a GMO and done human feeding studies to shown enhanced health effects. I think consumers will have a better impression of GMO foods if more studies like this are initiated,” Hirschi adds in an online Google comment.

Continue reading "All hail the super carrot!" »

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A new paper in PLoS Biology by Claudio Stern and colleagues reports that two proteins bind together to help determine the timing of the development of different parts of the vertebrate embryo.

Their names? BERT and ERNI...

While the research itself is interesting, we’re amazed that the press release from Stern’s university managed not to mention the connection to one of the world’s most successful children’s TV programmes - a connection which, to some extent, reflects the proteins’ functions “Our work shows that the proteins BERT and ERNI have an antagonistic relationship: BERT is stronger and overrides ERNI’s suppression of the Sox2 gene, which has a crucial function in setting up the nervous system,” says Stern.

(Hat tip: Stranger Fruit)

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Conflicts over this year’s whale hunt by the Japanese have escalated, both in diplomatic circles and on the high seas.

An Australian court has declared the hunt illegal, claiming it is taking place in the ‘exclusive economic zone’ over which only Australia has rights. Meanwhile the militant Sea Shepherd conservation society claims two activists were tied to a mast by whalers after boarding their ship to deliver a letter.

This year’s hunt was already more controversial than usual due to a plan to catch humpback whales, although this was later abandoned.

Australia’s Federal Court ruled that the hunt was illegal as it was taking place in the Australian Whale Sanctuary (Sidney Morning Herald). However the sanctuary is not recognised by Japan.

Continue reading "Whaling fight turns ugly" »

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Australia has returned a 750 kilo cache of illegally imported fossils to China.

“Some are believed to be up to 450 million years old, and are valued up to $100,000. However the rarest are considered priceless because of their value to China’s scientific and cultural heritage,” says Australia’s rock star environment minister Peter Garrett, making his second appearance on the Great Beyond in as many days (press release PDF).

Collected by officials over two years, the fossils included dinosaurs, mammals, reptiles, eggs and crustaceans. All will be returned for preservation and research, says Garrett, although they will doubtless have lost much of their scientific value by being taken away from the context their locations could have provided.

“China is working very hard and seriously on the conservation of its natural and cultural heritage. Such reckless risk-taking will not escape the punishment of the law,” says Zhang Junsai, China’s ambassador (Reuters).

Strangely, according to The Australian no one has been prosecuted for importing the fossils in the first place

Other seizures returned recently under Australia’s 1986 Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act include 130 kilograms of fossils returned to the Argentinia in August 2007, 16 Dyak Skulls returned to Malaysia in May 2007, and an Asmat human skull from Papua returned to Indonesia in December 2006 (press release pdf).

More photos.

Image: Keichousaurus head / copyright to the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts

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As debates over sex education rumble along in America and elsewhere it’s nice to know that teenage pregnancies were also a problem for the last species to dominate Earth. And we can learn a lot from the youthful liaisons of the dinosaurs.

Researchers at UC Berkley looked at medullary bone in dinosaurs. This bone is found in the bone marrow cavity, where it provides calcium for egg shells in expectant females. Fossils containing this bone, combined with other studies of the skeletons, allowed the researchers to determine that three dinosaurs sampled - a Tenontosaurus, an Allosaurus, and a T. Rex - were fertile at 8, 10 and 18 years respectively (PNAS research abstract, live soon). This is important as it does not fit with a model that involves scaling up reptile growth to dinosaur sizes.

“What’s really cool about it is that now we can understand so much more about dinosaur biology - about their growth rates, their ages and sexual maturity, their size and life span, and compare it with modern animals,” says researcher Sarah Werning, of UC Berkeley (SF Chronicle).

Such early maturity could also be a survival strategy in a species that had a high adult mortality. Dinosaurs, it seemed, lived fast and died young.

Continue reading "Dinosaur of the Day: Pregnant-teenager-o-saurus" »

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NASA is hailing a “a case of exquisite timing” as the Ulysses probe it runs with ESA flies over the Sun’s north pole just days after the start of a new solar cycle was confirmed.

“This is a wonderful opportunity to examine the Sun’s North Pole at the onset of a new solar cycle. We’ve never done this before,” says Arik Posner, Ulysses program scientist (press release).

NASA researchers think the poles could be vital to understanding the solar cycle, in part because when sunspots break up the decaying magnetic fields they leave behind end up at the poles. They hope to learn more about some previous, and strange, observations such as why the magnetic north pole was about 80,000 degrees cooler than the south during previous measurements.

This will be Ulysses’s fourth visit to the sun’s poles, having previously visited in 1994-95, 2000-01 and 2007. It has now long exceeded the voyaging of its Greek namesake, who was only travelling for a paltry ten years; it has also gone a fair bit further, voyaging out as far as Jupiter before swinging out of the ecliptic and back towards the sun,

“Each flyby revealed something interesting and mysterious, but this one may be most interesting of all,” says NASA (press release).

More
Great Beyond post on new solar cycle

Image: artist impression of Ulysses / ESA

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A zoo in Ohio has forked out $35,000 for what is believed to be the longest snake in captivity anywhere in the world. Columbus Zoo and Aquarium says it doesn’t buy animals very often – preferring to get them through exchanges or donations – but it decided the huge python was worth it due to its ability to draw in visitors (AP).

The snake has the rather inappropriate and totally inaccurate name ‘Fluffy’. According to AP it eats two 4.5 kilo rabbits a week and measures 7.3 metres (24 feet).

However Fluffy was nearly lost to the zoo and Ohio residents may have Samuel L. Jackson to thank for it staying. The beast was originally due to go back to its breeder Bob Clark in November, says the Columbus Dispatch. However the cargo company that was due to carry the 140 kg snake went out of business and finding an alternative giant-snake courier proved difficult.

The delay allowed time for the mega-bucks deal for Fluffy to be struck. “A lot of companies hesitate to transport snakes, especially since the movie Snakes on a Plane,” Pete Fingerhut, the zoo’s associate director, told the paper.

Image: ‘Fluffy’ / Columbus Zoo and Aquarium

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The first of a series of regular passenger flight to Antarctica took place on Friday, establishing the first regular service between Australia and the white continent.

A blue ice runway was built at a cost of $41 million, according to AFP, although there is no indication of how long it will last or how it was decided this would be cost effective. I’ll try to find out. The wire service says this feat of engineering will bring scientists and other Australian Antarctic Division staff - but not tourists - to Antarctica on a weekly basis in the warmer months between October and March.

Before the flight, environment minister and former Midnight Oil lead singer Peter Garrett said, “This is a tremendously exciting time in Australian Antarctic history. A permanent direct air link with Antarctica has been a long-held dream. To be able to fly scientists and other Antarctic personnel to Antarctica in a matter of hours, rather than 10 or more days by ship, opens up a whole new chapter in our scientific effort on the frozen continent.” (Press release.)

The BBC has an AFP derived photo gallery of the flight.

Image: Antarctic Peninsula Ice Shelf / NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio via Visible Earth

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More news from this year’s slightly apocalyptic AAS: a giant cloud of gas is speeding towards the Milky Way at 150 miles per second. It’s going to hit in 20 million to 40 million years so your children’s, children’s, children’s ... [repeat 800,000-odd times] ... children could get to witness a spectacular display.

Our reporter at the conference, Alex Witze, has the low down:

Scientists have known about the cloud since 1963, when astronomer Gail Smith identified it before dropping out of research. At the time, no one knew whether the cloud was headed for us, away from us, or something in between.

New observations from the Green Bank radiotelescope – the big dish in the West Virginia mountains that’s surrounded by a zone of cellphone silence, so as not to interfere with the telescope – have pinned down the cloud’s trajectory.

The cloud is called Smith’s Cloud, after its discoverer. “This is most likely a gas cloud left over from the formation of the Milky Way or gas stripped from a neighbour galaxy. When it hits, it could set off a tremendous burst of star formation. Many of those stars will be very massive, rushing through their lives quickly and exploding as supernovae. Over a few million years, it’ll look like a celestial New Year’s celebration, with huge firecrackers going off in that region of the Galaxy,” says Felix Lockman, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (press release).

My boss the SF fan says he thinks this is part of the scenario behind Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space books

Image: Green Bank Telescope image of Smith's Cloud, which is headed toward a collision with the Milky Way / Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF

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Previously we’ve featured songs about giant isopods and Tom Lehrer’s take on Wernher Von Braun. Now - following the inspired ‘Scientists for Better PCR’ song shown here - it seems time to tackle the whole issue of songs about science.

While the PCR song has lyrics that are both informative and hilariously earnestly delivered, it is an advert and therefore cannot really be accorded top prize. So we have rounded up the best science music we can find for your listening pleasure below the fold.

Continue reading "Songs about science" »

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Some dinosaur delights for your delectation

Crocodile rocks

Engineering techniques applied to the skull of a Baryonyx fossil have shown that this dinosaur ate in a way reminiscent of the Indian fish-eating crocodilian gharial, with the skull bending and stretching. “On excavation, partially digested fish scales and teeth, and a dinosaur bone were found in the stomach region of the animal, demonstrating that at least some of the time this dinosaur ate fish,” says researcher Emily Rayfield. “Moreover, it had a very unusual skull that looked part-dinosaur and part-crocodile, so we wanted to establish which it was more similar to, structurally and functionally – a dinosaur or a crocodile.”

Her team compared Baryonyx, a theropod dinosaur, an alligator, and a gharial. “[A]lthough Baryonyx and the gharial have independently evolved to feed in a similar manner, through quirks of their evolutionary history their skulls are shaped in a slightly different way in order to achieve the same function. This shows us that in some cases there is more than one evolutionary solution to the same problem,” says co-author Angela Milner, of the UK’s the Natural History Museum (press release, research abstract from the Journal of of Vertebrate Paleontology, Daily Telegraph news coverage)

Rayfield, and some of the techniques used here, appear in a recent Nature News piece on sabretooth skulls.

Shipshape and Bristol fashion

Another story out of Bristol, this one concerning the reappraisal of Thecodontosaurus.

Continue reading "Dinosaurs of the Day – Baryonix, Bristol, more" »

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

Continue reading "Weekly round up" »

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In the complex world of biology, getting rid of one of your predators might do you no good at all.

Acacias on the savannah supply ants with thorns to nest in and nectar to drink. In return, the ants swarm against herbivores that eat the acacias. But when Todd Palmer, a zoologist at the University of Florida, and colleagues fenced off the trees from large herbivores they found that both trees and ants did badly (research paper in Science).

Ten years of herbivore-exclusion meant less nectar and housing was provided to the ants – why provide room and board to a lodger you don’t need? Unfortunately for the acacias that meant another ant species got a foothold on the trees, and trees occupied by this new species “suffered increased attack by stem-boring beetles, grew more slowly, and experienced doubled mortality relative to trees occupied by the mutualistic ant”, Palmer et al report.

“Throughout sub-Saharan Africa these large mammals are threatened by human population growth, habitat fragmentation, over-hunting, and other degradation, so we have to wonder how their loss will affect these ecosystems. The last thing you would think is that individual trees would start to suffer as well, and yet that’s exactly what we see,” says Palmer (press release).

African animals are always a good bet for news reporters and this story is no exception: coverage in Scientific American, NY Times, Telegraph, BBC, SF Chronicle, AFP.

Image top: African savannah scene / Robert Pringle
Images lower: Giraffes around the ant-plant / Todd Palmer ; Elephants around the ant-plant / Nathan Gregory ; Ants around the ant-plant / Todd Palmer

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Posted for Katharine Sanderson

Stay calm, Mars isn’t going to be hit by an asteroid on January 30th as feared, so say astronomers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena.

In fact, Mars is more at risk from a peppering of spacecraft containing human visitors – with Russia’s latest claim being that they’re going to beat everyone to the red planet (Interfax).

The single source for the story is a Russian academic, Lev Zelyony, who reckons that Russia’s vast experience in manned space flight will allow a Russian to step onto Mars by 2025 at the latest. That’s a full 12 years ahead of America’s current estimate, 2037. Given the European Space Agency has plans to get humans on Mars by 2030 it’s going to get crowded up there.

Zelyony appears to be upset that Russia lost the moon race, and doesn’t want to see the same thing happen with Mars.

No official statement from the Russian government seems to be available to corroborate these claims. But we have been told how much Russia’s fake Mars habitat experiment will cost - $15 million. The Mars500 experiment will see six people encapsulated for 520 days to see how they cope with the stresses of isolation. For the privilege, volunteers will be paid 50,000 Euros. Maybe I’m just tight-fisted, but that doesn’t sound like very much for almost two years of a life.

Image: Artist’s impression of ESA’s ExoMars rover / ESA

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Another story from the American Astronomical Society conference – using the Hubble space telescope researchers have created what they say is the highest resolution map of dark matter ever seen.

Not that you can actually see the dark matter, which is of course invisible. Alex Witze is blogging the conference for Nature over on In the Field:

A team led by Meghan Gray, of the University of Nottingham, and Catherine Heymans, of the University of British Columbia, used gravitational lensing ... to measure how dark matter in space distorts the light from a massive cluster of galaxies known as Abell 901/902. This is a big thing: more than 2.6 billion light-years away, it measures a whopping 16 million light-years across and is composed of more than a thousand galaxies.

The concentrations of pink stuff shows where the dark matter lies.

Gravitational lensing involves looking at how light from distant galaxies is bent by the gravitational field of the dark matter around the galaxies. In this case, observing these distortions enabled the reconstruction of the dark matter distribution in the cluster. The new map is claimed to be 2.5 times shaper than a previous (ground-based) survey, and also quite pretty.

“For the first time we are clearly detecting irregular clumps of dark matter in a supercluster. Previous studies were only able to detect fuzzy, circular clumps, but we’re able to resolve detailed shapes that match the distribution of galaxies,” says Heymans.

Further reading
University of British Columbia press release
University of Nottingham press release
Hubble site
News coverage in The Guardian, National Geographic, Wired
More AAS stories on In the Field

Image: detail from dark matter map / NASA, ESA, C. Heymans (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), M. Gray (University of Nottingham, U.K.), M. Barden (Innsbruck), and the STAGES collaboration

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Posted for Nicola Jones.

Okay, we still don’t know the answer to that question (sorry to tease you), but we do now have another good sample of one beast’s skin, helping to determine what it was like in most ways except colour.

The fossil of a plant-eating Psittacosaurus (aka ‘parrot-lizard’) unearthed in China shows a folded layer of skin where the cross-section could be examined. This revealed that the beast had tough, scaly skin with more than 25 layers of collagen - similar to that of today’s sharks and reptiles.

The perhaps-more-interesting question of whether scales or early prototypes of feathers topped this skin is more tricky...

Continue reading "What colour were dinosaurs?" »

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Climate change is being blamed for problems at the annual ice festival in Harbin, China. Huge intricate sculptures are disappearing before the thousands of tourists that flock to the festival get to see them.

“"The average temperature of winter in Harbin is 5 degrees Celsius higher than historical records,” says Yin Xuemian, a senior meteorologist at the Heilongjiang Observatory (Reuters). “In December 2002, ice lanterns in Harbin melted right after they were sculpted. [In 2006] Lots of money and energy were spent on redoing the sculptures. As the temperature rises, the period of ice and snow activities have shortened dramatically.”

AFP says this year’s festival has been a big success. Participants are concerned though, one told China Daily, “We’re all worried that the things will just collapse.” The festival is supposed to run until February. “We're worried it won't last that long this year,” Sun Lei, an official involved in the festival, told the BBC.

A rise of 5 C is pretty large. Estimates are generally far lower although these tend to be averaged over large areas. See Late-Twentieth-Century Climatology and Trends of Surface Humidity and Temperature in China.

Alternatively, you can geek out with the raw data from NASA's GISS Surface Temperature Analysis, which allows you to make maps of the trends. There’s even monitoring data from Harbin itself, although this isn’t totally up to date.

Image: Getty

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It’s nice to see Richard Dawkins back to arguing about science, rather than religion. In this week’s New Scientist he picks a fight with fellow biologist Edward Wilson over the origins of altruism.

Dawkins is a supporter of kin selection – which holds that helping your relations spreads the genes that you share with them and therefore this explains why we see altruism such as worker ants forgoing reproduction for the good of their kin.

New Scientist reports that a new paper from Wilson in BioScience rejects kin selection as the explanation of insect altruism, “in a move that has baffled evolutionary biologists worldwide” (subscription required). He thinks eusociality – where there is a queen supported by non-reproducing workers – appears after insects are forced to be flexible in their behaviour and then continues to evolve through ‘group selection’ because cooperating animals do better than animals that don’t cooperate.

New Scientist gives the example of solitary wasps who can become either queen or workers when forced to next together. If the dispersal of offspring is then blocked for some reason then bingo: eusociality. If this new colony is better than solitary competitors it will continue to prosper.

Rubbish, says Dawkins:

Continue reading "Harsh words over fellow feeling" »

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After all the arguments last year over whether NASA’s astronauts flew while drunk, it’s interesting to see the more relaxed attitude towards space boozing in other countries.

This video apparently shows cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko demonstrating the properties of liquids in zero gravity by drinking vodka on board the ISS. It’s not in English but a commenter on NASA Watch says: “This thing appeared to be Ukrainian VODKA. After this cosmonaut proposed a toast to New Year holidays and drank vodka. Drinking vodka in weightlessness already has a big resonance in Ukrainian media.”

This version of events is support by another blog post on the topic. The drinking incident is about two minutes in on this clip.

If any Russian or Ukrainian readers can supply some sources from their countries we would be very grateful.

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If black holes are cool, how much cooler are rogue black holes? That’s what scientists have discovered “roaming around the Milky Way” (press release).

Nature reporter Alex Witze was at the AAS meeting where the finding was announced by astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, and blogged about it over at In the Field:

Her research team discovered the errant black holes – each of which is 100 to 1,000 times the mass of our sun -- by studying clumps of ancient stars known as globular clusters. These are rough environments, in which black holes are constantly sinking toward the center of the cluster, occasionally meeting in a violet merger that throws one or the other of them out of the cluster at speeds up to 9 million miles per hour. Holley-Bockelmann’s computer simulations show that scientists haven’t spotted nearly as many black holes getting kicked out of globular clusters as one might expect. And so, she says, there must be extra black holes lurking there, invisibly -- some of the biggest rogues ever spotted in our galaxy.

There is evidence for huge ‘super-massive’ black holes sitting in the middle of galaxies and for very small holes produced from giant stars. Holley-Bockelmann’s work modelled “intermediate mass” black holes, whose prevalence and life stories are less clear.

She found that when two black holes rotating at different speeds or of different sizes combine the new, merged black hole gets a massive kick, speeding off at up to 4,000 kilometres per hour.

Other black hole news from AAS: the biggest black hole ever detected! It clocks in at 18 billion times more massive than our sun (Space.com).

Image top: black hole / NASA

Image lower: mid-sized black holes merge with smaller, star-sized black holes and receive a hefty velocity kick / Vanderbilt

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The reasons behind the troubled state of coral reefs are explored by a swathe of new studies. Unsurprisingly they conclude it is all our fault.

One huge study on coral reefs in 13 countries has shown the impact of growing human populations. Monitoring of reef life at 322 sites in the Caribbean found that the number of people living nearby was the main driver of coral death and loss of fish biomass (press release 1).

“It is well acknowledged that coral reefs are declining worldwide but the driving forces remain hotly debated,” says Camilo Mora, of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

Previously the finger has been pointed at other sources including global warming. “In essence, all the factors — climate change, overfishing, agricultural land use — affect the reefs the same amount. And all these factors are related to each other because they are caused by humans,” says Mora (press release 2).

Reuters thinks the study shows that new and larger-scale approaches are needed to save reefs. The paper should appear soon in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.

In other reef news, a paper in Nature Geoscience says that the increasing acidity of the oceans due to global warming will be bad not only for coral but for another important part of the reef ecosystem - crustose coralline algae.

Continue reading "Reef deaths are our fault" »

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“You don't die from it, but you wish you could,” according to a sufferer from Dengue fever we quoted in 2002. Actually, he’s not quite right - about 22,000 people did die of it last year, although this is a small percentage of those who contract it. And now America is being told to brace itself for possible future outbreaks. According to an article published today in JAMA (extract, press release) the incurable and sometimes deadly disease could soon become a fixture in the continental United States

Dengue is one of the world’s “most aggressive re-emerging infections”, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and David Morens, his senior scientific advisor. After being absent for decades it is again striking US citizens, fuelled by an increase in air travel to infected regions and global warming increasing the range of the mosquitoes that carry it. It is already increasing in frequency along the Texas-Mexico border and “returning with unprecedented severity in US tropical territories and commonwealths such as Puerto Rico” the two doctors write.

“This is an important problem, and our options for control and prevention at the moment are not very good. It’s easy to forget when a disease has been away for a long period of time,” Morens told Bloomberg.

On a broader scale, it’s worth noting that dengue is already a serious problem in other countries (such as Singapore) and that there are 50 to 100 million annual cases worldwide, leading to 500,000 hospitalizations and 22,000 deaths, mostly in children.

Other news coverage
Tropical dengue fever may threaten U.S.: report – Reuters
Incurable dengue disease could spread in US: researchers - AFP

See also Nature's more recent special feature on dengue.

Image: Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries dengue / photo by James Gathany, via CDC

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The Federal Aviation Authority has uncovered what would seem to be a fairly major flaw in Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. Apparently a passenger with a laptop and a bit of cunning could hack into the plane’s crucial systems.

According to the FAA the problems stems from the fact that the entertainment systems on the 787 are connected to the pilots’ computers. Needless to say they’ve asked for some changes to be made before they certify the plane as safe, to prevent someone turning their laptop’s flight simulator into the real thing.

The possible flaws came to light in the Federal Register – a giant list of memos from US government agencies (read the entry in question). Experts say the problem is real, and therefore pretty scary.

In the Times, David Learmount, safety editor of Flight International, says, “The FAA is obviously very concerned about this. It’s not the kind of organisation that fires shots across the bows if it doesn’t think it was needed.”

On Wired, network security analyst Mark Loveless says, “This is serious. This isn’t a desktop computer. It’s controlling the systems that are keeping people from plunging to their deaths. So I hope they are really thinking about how to get this right.”

The 787 is Boeing’s newest passenger plane and, thankfully given this news, there are none carrying passengers yet.

Image: 787 / Boeing

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My attention has been drawn to an intriguing new company which promises “truthfulness in alternative medicine”. In their own words:

FairDeal Homeopathy is a company set up to provide you with effective* homeopathic remedies at a fair price. Unlike many homeopathic companies and practitioners, we won't lie to you either.
*Guaranteed as effective as all other homeopathic remedies.

Their products, they say, work through the placebo effect which is “still not fully understood, but is very effective for certain conditions† ... †Requires belief”. Once you fill in a form with your age, symptoms and “anything else you feel we should know” they’ll send you a remedy, for the very reasonable sum of £4.99.

The testimonials page – which the website says is designed for people to “spew vitriolic abuse” – has only one comment so far: “Your product arrived next day, and I was cured of my nasty headache within hours! Well done FairDeal Homeopathy - much better results than I'd get from those so-called ‘scientists’!”

OK, so this is probably a spoof, but it’s the best spoof I’ve seen so far this year.

Image: Getty

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Posted for Heidi Ledford

The US Supreme Court heard opening arguments yesterday for a controversial case concerning the method used to execute criminals by lethal injection. The case specifically concerns executions in the state of Kentucky, but would have ramifications for the other 35 states that use the method*.

A lawyer for two death row inmates is arguing that the three-drug cocktail used for lethal injections could violate the US Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments

The verdict may not be decided for months, and early reports indicate that the court is split on the matter. Medical journals, however, are not. Several, including the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA have all published commentaries weighing in against lethal injection, continuing their tradition of opposing the death penalty.

Continue reading "Lethal injection under scrutiny" »

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See also: Solar cycle update – Ulysses visits pole

A rather hysterical press release from the US warns us that a sunspot heralds a new solar cycle that could “bring down power grids, disrupt critical communications ... threaten astronauts with harmful radiation ... knock out commercial communications satellites and swamp Global Positioning System signals”. Run for the hills!

The US Space Weather Prediction Center says the 11 year cycle of solar activity will reach a maximum by 2011 or 2012 with accompanying sunspots and solar storms. Not that this gives us time for complacency: “devastating storms can occur at any time”, says the press release. In addition, “Routine activities such as talking on a cell phone or getting money from an ATM machine could suddenly halt over a large part of the globe.”

Last year the centre, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the cycle was likely to start in March this year. The intensity of a solar cycle is measured by the maximum number of sunspots, so the first sunspot gives us the first reading of this cycle .

“This sunspot is like the first robin of spring. In this case, it’s an early omen of solar storms that will gradually increase over the next few years,” says the centre’s Douglas Biesecker (press release).

Further reading
New Scientist has more detail on all this.
Solar cycle intensity data from NOAA can be found here.
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center
Nature news feature from 2006 on solar storms

Image top: solar cycle montage / NOAA
Image bottom: first official sunspot of new Solar Cycle 24 / NOAA

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In something of a no-win situation for science a creationist fossil hunter is selling of a massive – and massively rare – fossil mastodon for tens of thousands of dollars. So either a valuable specimen disappears into private hands or public research money goes to a man whose museum proudly declares it is “Digging up the facts of God’s Creation: One fossil at a time.”

The fossil in question is a four-toothed mastodon head of a size never before uncovered - roughly a metre on each side. Opening bids must be at least $60,000. and online bids are now being taken. A floor auction is scheduled for 20 January in Dallas (auction page).

The mastodon is currently in the possession of the impressively bearded Joe Taylor, director and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum in Crosbyton, Texas, and “the world’s only creationist field palaeontologist”. His views are unorthodox enough that at first I thought his museum’s website was a spoof. For a start it provides the opportunity to purchase casts of ‘ancient Peruvian burial stones’ that prove humans and dinosaurs co-existed. Then there’s this:

We believe that evolution is an old-fashioned theory not substantiated by facts, and that what the Bible says is more scientifically accurate. Our museum shows that there was a worldwide flood only a few thousand years ago.
...
Q. Do you think Noah took dinosaurs on the ark?
A. Absolutely. We can show you why.

So how important is this fossil? The man behind the *Megalania1859 blog says only two other known mastodon fossils have the extra vestigial tusks, a hangover from “shovel-tusker” ancestors. It is, he says, “Truly a remarkable find.”

Sadly, as PZ Myers points out, “We can’t win this one. Even if it’s bought by a reputable museum and studied scientifically, it still means that this creationist is going to get a huge chunk of change to use in promoting more lies.”

Interestingly, according to the Help Joe Taylor website a previous disagreement over the ownership of a fossil find means he needs rather a lot of money.

Pictures of the beast and more on the Mt Blanco website.

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Although any cure for injuries in humans is some way off, new work that restores mobility to mice after spinal injuries seems pretty exciting.

“When spinal cord damage blocked direct signals from the brain, under certain conditions the messages were able to make detours around the injury,” says UCLA researcher Michael Sofroniew, who led the work (press release). “The message would follow a series of shorter connections to deliver the brain’s command to move the legs.”

Until now it was thought that the only way for function to be restored was for long nerves from the brain to the base of the spinal cord to re-grow. Instead Sofroniew found that ‘propriospinal relay connections’ bypassed injuries, like drivers faced with an accident taking different routes rather than waiting for the crash to be cleared (Nature Medicine abstract).

Continue reading "Surprising recovery in mice after spinal-injury " »

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After last year’s story about heat-waves causing bats to drop out of trees, another form of extreme weather is also leading to animals doing good leaf-in-autumn impressions. A cold snap in Florida is causing iguanas to fall out of their arboreal homes.

Robert Yero, park manager at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park, told the Miami Herald the lizards lapse into suspended animation when they get too cold. Putting them in the sun for a bit brings them back to life provided they’re not too far gone.

AFP says the iguanas thrive at 35 C but last week temperatures hit just 4 or 5 C. “When the temperature falls below about 60 F (15 C) they become less able to move around. At temperatures below about 40 F (5 C) they become completely immobile and begin to suffer serious stress,” Perran Ross, of the University of Florida, told AFP.

Last week temperatures hit that 5 C mark.

This is not bad thing for Florida’s wildlife though, Kenneth Krysko, of the Florida Museum of Natural History, told AP. “It is a good thing. They're not native, and they're considered a nuisance.”

Especially when they’re falling on your head, one assumes.

Image: iguana in Florida / photo taken by Ianare (via WikiMedia)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Australian animal rights groups are getting hot under the collar over proposed new government guidelines that recommend the killing of young kangaroos by picking them up and bashing their heads on the tow-bars of ‘utes’ (pick up trucks). The proposed code also suggests a close range shotgun blast may be appropriate (Reuters).

“I think we all love kangaroos. The problem is that there are too many,” a government spokesperson told Reuters. “What we are talking about here is responsible environmental management, because if we don’t do something you won’t have pastures and viable farming.”

After the mothers have been shot, young kangaroos – or joeys – also have to be put down. Previous guidelines made no suggestions as to how this should be done for those that had left their mothers’ pouches but are still dependent on them (Canberra Times). The existing guidelines are here.

Even the recommended ways of putting them down can seem horrific (especially to city-bound media types whose main interaction with wildlife is in the supermarket meat isle). There’s very rarely a “nice” way of killing any animal. Maybe it’s no bad thing that we’re occasionally forced to confront this fact.

Image: Corbis

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Today’s ‘you what?’ claim is that insect attacks finished off the dinosaurs. A husband and wife team makes the outlandish claim in a book published this month by Oregon State University.

George Poinar, who holds a courtesy professorship (a step below being a full professor) at Oregon State University, thinks that the appearance of biting insects and the spread of disease could have brought down some of the mightiest animals ever to have roamed the earth. “Other geologic and catastrophic events certainly played a role. But by themselves, such events do not explain a process that in reality took a very, very long time, perhaps millions of years. Insects and diseases do provide that explanation,” he says (press release).

Poinar has previously reporting finding the leishmaniasis pathogen in the gut of one insect from the late Cretaceous and organisms that cause malaria in another. Blood-sucking insects could have caused epidemics that wore down dinosaur populations. The book also points out that a change in plant life from traditional dinosaur meals such as ferns and cycads to flowering plants involved co-evolution with new pollinating insects.

There might be some merit to Poinar’s ideas. But the pick-up by a number of news sources is surprisingly uncritical for fairly extravagant claims not tested by peer review.

Here are the problems as I see them...

Continue reading "‘Insects finished off the dinosaurs’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

Continue reading "Weekly round up " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It’s a big week for power station news. OK, that might not sound hugely interesting but bear with me. The outcome of decisions about to be made could influence the future direction of a chunk of the world’s power supply – and the carbon emissions, global warming and potential catastrophes that come with that.

UK and US debate coal

Here in the UK the first new coal power station in decades moved a step closer after a local council in Kent gave its approval to the project. Although the council couldn’t really have blocked it, a lack of opposition from them smoothes the way slightly.

Environmental groups are unsurprisingly not so thrilled about the idea, although the company behind the plan insists it will actually reduce emissions by replacing current, dirtier coal plants – see their website. News coverage in The Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph.

As the Boston Globe notes, coal is also hitting the headlines in the United States where Massachusetts, where the state is debating whether to provide millions of dollars in incentives for upgrading of coal power plants to cleaner technology (via Knight Science Journalism Tracker). If this passes, environmentalists claim, it would provide an incentive for coal at the expense of renewable sources.

The nuclear option

Continue reading "Going power mad..." »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Tonight will bring what is expected to be the most spectacular meteor shower of the year. The Quadrantid event will be visible in Western Europe and eastern North America, peaking sometime in the early morning. Already this has triggered newspapers to urge their readers to look skywards (Fox has one of the better items on the Quadrantid).

NASA scientists will observe the shower from a Gulfstream V jet. “We will fly to the North Pole and back to compensate for Earth’s rotation and to keep the stream in view throughout the flight,” says Peter Jenniskens, a principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center (NASA press release).

A fact curiously absent from the NASA press release, but related by a number of news sources, is that the Gulfstream in question is the private jet of Google. The space agency has an agreement with the company that allows Google to park a jet at one of its air fields in return for several million dollars and the occasional loan of a plane for science work.

This is just the latest in a series of super rich geeks sponsoring space projects, including Google’s funding of the Moon X-Prize. You have to wonder at what point the Google boys are going to get bored of letting people have fun with their money and say “let’s do it ourselves”.

Google founds its own space agency? Watch this space.

Image: NASA shot of previous Quadrantids

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Despite the fact we’ve been looking at them for ages, the planets can still spring a surprise or two when you look closely. Today’s surprise is that the cold north pole of Saturn actually hosts a hot ‘cyclone’ (NASA press release).

Scientists had already seen a hot spot at the south pole in 2005; but since it is summer in the southern hemisphere of Saturn (and has been for the best part of a decade) that’s not surprising. The north pole, though, has been in the shade for as long as the south has been in the sun, so the source of its heat is something of a mystery

Leigh Fletcher, co-author of the paper on the new finding in Science, thinks the hot spots are caused by air moving towards the poles, then being compressed and heated as it descends. “The driving forces behind the motion, and indeed the global motion of Saturn’s atmosphere, still need to be understood,” says Fletcher, a planetary scientist from the University of Oxford (Oxford press release).

And the mysteries don’t stop there – there is still no explanation for a strange hexagon feature surrounding the north pole. Although this was first seen back when in the 1980s no-one yet knows why it is there.

Infrared data from Cassini show the hexagon extends higher into the atmosphere than was previously thought. “The mystery is... why on earth — or why on Saturn even — do we see a hexagon around the north pole, and not around the south pole?” Fletcher told SPACE.com.

Cassini is pulling a flyby on Saturn’s moon Titan on the 5th of January. Stay tuned for more strangeness.

Image: NASA/JPL/GSFC/Oxford University

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Researchers probing a virtually unexplored forest on the Costa Rica-Panama border have discovered three new species of salamander.

Led by Alex Monro, a biodiversity expert at the Natural History Museum in London, the three expeditions to the La Amistad National Park recorded 5,300 plants, insects and amphibians.

“Finding so many new species in one area is exciting. Particularly as this is probably the only place in the world you can find these animals,” says Monro (press release).

Two of the Salamanders are from the Bolitoglossa genus. The Times says they were so slow-moving it was amazing they were able to find mates and too feed. However a tongue that can shoot out, catch an insect and be back in their mouths in seven milliseconds helps with the latter.

The other species is a type of dwarf salamander, measuring only 3cm in length according to the Natural History Museum. Which makes the thumb in this picture huge...

At present the species are unnamed.

Image top: dwarf salamander / A Monro
Image bottom: bolitoglossa species 1 salamander / A Monro

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Here is the Great Beyond’s prediction for 2008: the more human genomes we get, the more arguments we’re going to get. Here’s an example...

Back in November the Taipei Times published an article entitled Most Hoklo, Hakka have Aboriginal genes, study finds. This claimed DNA testing showed 85% of non-aboriginal Taiwanese people (Hoklo and Hakka) have aboriginal ancestry.

The first stage of the project consisted of analyzing the DNA of 100 Hoklo and Hakka - 58 men and 42 women. Of these, 67 percent were found to have Aboriginal ancestry through DNA comparison techniques. An additional 18 percent were found to have Aboriginal ancestry through HLA chromosome typing, bringing the total to 85 percent.

Then in December politician Ma Ying-jeou made some disparaging remarks to some aboriginal Taiwanese (see China Post, Taipei Times) and it all kicked off...

Continue reading "Row over Taiwan’s genetic makeup" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It's Arctic ice time again. A paper in Nature on Arctic warming is getting some interesting and possibly somewhat misleading media pick-up. In their paper Rune Graversen and colleagues at Stockholm University use statistical analyses to try and understand what processes are important in the recent warming of the Arctic. One of their findings is that a substantial part of the warming is seen at altitude, rather that at the surface -- "A remarkable result," Graversen told National Geographic News. "I think nobody expected that."

As that report and others (AFP, New Scientist) point out, the surprise is that this work diminishes the role of the "ice-albedo feedback" in recent Arctic warming. In theory less ice means more sunshine is absorbed, rather than reflected back into space, which means more warming, which means less ice, and so on and so on -- a positive feedback that could be a powerful amplifier of climate change. But that effect would be felt most nearer the surface, not at altitude (The fact that some of the amplified warming takes place in the dark lends further weight to the argument).

Continue reading "Arctic amplification" »

Posted by Oliver Morton
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Male macaque monkeys appear to ‘pay’ for sex with females by grooming them.

“When the opportunity arises, male macaque monkeys groom females to ‘pay’ for sex,” says Michael Gumert of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (New Scientist – subscription required).

According to New Scientist a female would normally have sex 1.5 times per hour but after being groomed this increases to 3.5 times per hour. Maybe I have a low libido but those numbers seem incredibly high and missing a caveat such as “at peak mating times” or at least “during waking hours”.

The abstract of the research in question says grooming mainly occurred when females were sexually active, adding, “Moreover, male-to-female grooming was associated with an increase in female rates for all forms of sexual activity, where in contrast, female-to-male grooming was associated with decreased rates of mating in the groomed males.”

Commenting on the research, Ronald Noë of the University of Strasbourg, says, “ There is a very well-known mix of economic and mating markets in the human species itself. There are many examples of rich old men getting young attractive ladies.”

Other people following up the New Scientist piece include the Scotsman, AFP and the Sun. Best headline award (predictably) goes to the last of those: Monkeys ‘pay’ to do business

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Co-founder of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Bert Bolin has died aged 82 of stomach cancer, just months after the IPCC shared the honour of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Bolin, who was a meteorologist and also served a stint as scientific director of the European Space Agency, was invited to accept the prize but was too unwell to travel.

“Bert Bolin will be best remembered by scientists for his pioneering studies of the carbon cycle and the coupled interactions between the atmosphere and terrestrial and marine ecosystems,” said David Karoly of the University of Melbourne, a lead author on the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, in a press release for the Science Media Centre. In the early 1960s, Bolin and Charles David Keeling together demonstrated that fossil-fuel emissions indeed contribute significantly to the global distribution of the gas, for example. “However, his lasting legacy to humankind will be his masterful parenting and leadership of the IPCC from its birth in 1980 to its adolescence.”

Bolin’s name appears many times in Nature, as a meteorologist but also as a commentator on climate change policy (see Nuclear Radiation Measurements During the International Geophysical Year(1957); Interactions of biogeochemical cycles (1981); Next step for climate-change analysis (1994); Berlin and global warming policy (1995))

The current leader of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, was highlighted in 2007 as Nature’s ‘newsmaker of the year’.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Every year Edge asks a bunch of the world’s brightest people a question. This year they’ve asked them what they’ve changed their minds about over the last 12 months.

Scientists of note feature highly and the list is dangerously involving – this post should have been up hours ago but I got sidetracked finding out why Alan Alda has changed his mind about God (twice!) and why my boss has changed his mind about human spaceflight.

Continue reading "I changed my mind..." »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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All those who have been staying up late at New Year parties better watch out: not getting enough shut-eye could lead to diabetes. Researchers from the University of Chicago found that disturbing the ‘slow wave sleep’ – deep sleep in layman’s terms – of healthy young adults for three nights made them less sensitive to insulin.

This resulted in reduced tolerance of glucose and increased risk of type 2 diabetes, they report in PNAS (study abstract should appear here later).

“Previous studies from our lab have demonstrated many connections between chronic, partial sleep deprivation, changes in appetite, metabolic abnormalities, obesity, and diabetes risk. These results solidify those links and add a new wrinkle: the role of poor sleep quality,” says Eve Van Cauter, one of the study authors (press release).

The finding comes on the heels of another study published last month that found people who reported sleeping for five hours or less nightly were more likely to have diabetes than those who typically got seven hours kip. Sleepy-heads who stay in bed too long were also at risk – nine or more hours was also linked to diabetes (press release).

Continue reading "Lack of sleep linked to diabetes" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Nonja, believed to be the oldest orangutan in the world, was found dead on Saturday morning. “She was a grande dame and I think she knew it,” said Ron Magill, spokesman for the Miami Metro Zoo, Nonja’s home (Reuters, BBC).

Nonja was born in Sumatra and moved to Miami in 1983. The Miami Herald has possibly too much detail about the cause of her death for those that are interested.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA experts say the risk of an asteroid smashing into Mars is higher than they previously thought. Last week the agency said the probability of asteroid 2007 WD5 hitting the red planet was 1.3%. After further number crunching it now says it is more like 3.9% (press release).

Although this is an unusually high percentage, it is still most likely that WD5 will miss the planet.

This is going to upset Don Yeomans, head of the agency’s Near-Earth Object Program. He told Fox News he was looking forward to a smash. “I think it’ll be cool. Usually when an asteroid is headed toward Earth, I'm not rooting for an impact,” he said.

Set your alarms though: “In the unlikely event of an impact, the time would be 2008 January 30 at 10:56 UT (2:56 a.m. PST) with an uncertainty of a few minutes,” says NASA.

See also
Great Beyond on the original announcement
Slashdot on the shortening odds:

“At this rate, the impact’s likelihood will exceed 150% in just a few days.”
“Actually, Murphy's law says that not only will the asteroid miss Mars, it says that the asteroid miss will be precisely enough to whip the rock around to a new orbit. One precisely timed and angled to aim it towards Earth where it will impact on some particularly inconvenient location.”

Image: composite image of the planet Mars taken by Hubble Space Telescope / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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