The Great Beyond

Northern and Southern California have finally gotten their acts together and decided to quantify earthquake magnitudes in the state the same way.

For the past six years, the groups of scientists that collect seismic data for northern and southern California have been using slightly different ways to calculate a parameter called ML, or local magnitude. This is a minor problem because, um, the state is supposed to be working as one under the rubric of the California Integrated Seismic Network.

ML is actually the original magnitude scale as defined by Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg in 1935. It quantifies magnitude as how much a tremor makes the needle on a seismograph jitter; a 1-centimeter jolt measured 100 kilometers away, for instance, means the quake must be magnitude 3. ML remains useful as one among many of the magnitude scales that have sprung up over the years.

Yet researchers in both halves of California have used slightly different ways to determine ML. It all adds up to a roughly 0.15-magnitude difference when looking at 100 earthquakes – so don't worry that some big quake will rip through San Francisco and get drastically underreported. Fixing the reporting difference is "more to unify the magnitude reporting in the state than anything else,” says Peggy Hellweg, operations manager for the seismology laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Southern California has finally gotten the new reporting system up and running in the past few weeks; Northern California is still working on implementing it.

Posted by Alex Witze
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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week...

Continue reading "Weekly round up" »

Posted by Nicola Jones
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The press seems to be finally picking up on news that NASA’s Mars Space Laboratory (MSL), designed to look at mineralogy on the red planet and hunt for signs of life, is in trouble.

AP reports that Mike Griffin, NASA Administrator, told a congressional hearing on 13 Feb that the heat shield on the craft’s rover will have to be redesigned, pushing costs up and possibly delaying the craft’s proposed 2009 launch. Interested parties picked up the copy (Mars Society; Space.com).

It seems surprising that NASA, of all organisations, can’t get a heat shield right (this one was originally modeled on the space shuttle, apparently).

Aviation Week were on the case at the time of the hearing, although they don’t put a price on the extra work, which AP says will be between $20 and $30 million.

Aviation Week also followed up with a bleak prediction about the spiralling cost of the mission, now expected to hit $2 billion.

Apart from that, there wasn’t much coverage between the hearing itself and the AP copy – perhaps because the news was overshadowed by the United States deciding to shoot down a spy satellite (Nature News).

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Reports this week announced that researchers have ‘solved the mystery’ of how Maya Blue was made (National Geographic News, New York Times), off the back of a paper published in the journal Antiquity. The vivid pigment, which was painted on human and other sacrifices, has been a focus of interest for decades. Although the main ingredients of the pigment – indigo and clay – have long been known (see this 1966 paper in Science), archaeologists have wondered about the details of how, when and where it was made.

The paper describes the study of a particular pot of incense in which researchers discovered flecks of clay and indigo. The slow-burning incense resin provided the heat needed to create the paint, and, according to LiveScience, might have been a key ingredient in binding the other ingredients together. The bowl was then chucked into a sinkhole thought to be a portal to the spirit world. The location and the incense suggest that “the production of the ancient Maya blue was based on the performance of the religious rituals” (The Chicago Tribune). Although the find may not be too surprising, the bowl appears to be the first artefact to show evidence of the pigment production process.

The recipe behind Maya Blue also made news in 2002 (National Geographic). That team patented a number of ‘Maya Blue’ recipes in 2006, including one that involved a combination of indigo, clay, and resin.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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China is considering scrapping its one-child policy (Reuters; Guardian report from their Beijing correspondent)

The policy, implemented in 1979 to combat overpopulation and accompanying environmental problems, has been variably enforced over the years, and extremely controversial, leading to discrimination against some sub-populations (including females).

There have been calls to scrap it before: in March 2007 some 30 delegates at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference called on the government to abolish the one-child rule because "it creates social problems and personality disorders in young people." (AsiaNews) An aging population, increasing gender bias, and changing attitudes to family size (apparently most couples now want fewer than 2 children anyway, Reuters) have been posited as reasons for change.

The latest reports originate with comments by family planning chief Zhao Baige, who told reporters she wanted an "incremental" change in the policy (BBC). CNSNews suggests the conversation has been spurred by increased attention on Chinese human rights in the run-up to the Olympics there.

China’s media carries a related story about how the negative population growth seen in Shanghai since 1993 looks set to switch over to positive growth soon (Xinhua; Shanghai Daily). This is because the single-child generation is growing up, and now having children of their own: by the current rules, if a man and woman are both the single child in their families, they are allowed to have two babies.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Over on Nature Reports Stem Cells, there’s a blog posting about a company’s recent claim that they can reprogramme adult cells into embryonic-like stem cells, without the viral vectors normally used to do this. This should make the cells less likely to cause cancer: quite a big deal in terms of using such cells in future therapies. But the company hasn’t published their results (just a press release), so it’s unclear exactly what they’ve done or what to make of it. Yet.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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National Geographic has announced the winner of their planet-naming mnemonic competition. Ten year old Maryn Smith’s winning entry to remember the ‘newly designated planets’ (here listed as Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Eris) is: My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants.

This cutesy story got a smattering of pick up from the wire story by AP (CNN; FOX, etc).

But wait a minute – that’s 11 planets. I seem to recall that there are, in fact, just eight planets in our Solar System, following an enormous hoo-ha about the expulsion of Pluto from the planet list. According to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), Pluto is a ‘dwarf planet’, distinct from planets, as are Ceres and Eris. Although the debate still rages.

So this is a mnemonic of the 8 planets AND the 3 dwarves. Which is nice. But the IAU may award dwarf status to quite a few other bodies in the Solar System sometime soon. Last time we wrote about this at least one astronomer was pushing for 4 dwarves. And there are some 70 to 2,000 potential contenders for dwarf planet status. Are we going to see new mnemonics for those? They will be tongue twisters in the extreme.

Read further into the story and you’ll see that the competition was linked to a new National Geographic book. “Maryn's Aladdin-inspired phrase will appear in the National Geographic children's book 11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System, written by Harvard University physicist David Aguilar,” says The Great Falls Tribune. Their lengthy story covers into the ten-year-old’s classmates' entries in great depth, with nary a mention of the fierce debate about what constitutes a planet. It claims that “A new name-remembering aid was needed since Pluto was reduced to a dwarf planet and Ceres and Eris were upgraded to planet status.” Hmm.

Of course the IAU doesn’t necessarily get the final say on what kids and their teachers will call ‘the planets’. But have these ten year olds been mislead and confused by this competition?

Katharine Sanderson
Image: NASA

Posted by Nicola Jones
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The UK government has reached an agreement with the Gemini Observatory that will allow British astronomers to retain access to both of its 8-metre telescopes.

In November, the government shocked astronomers by announcing its intent to withdraw from the project. Subsequent negotiations to retain access to just one telescope, located atop Maneau Kea in Hawaii, failed. By early this year, British astronomers feared that their access to Gemini might be lost forever.

Those fears were premature, as neither side really wanted to break up the partnership. According to an agreement announced last night, the UK government will stay in the collaboration. But they'll sell some of their £3.5 million worth of annual observing time in order to save money.

That means that the UK's astronomers will have less time to peer through Gemini, but they won't have to give it up all together.

credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Sheffield University professor and media darling Noel Sharkey took the spotlight at a policy conference yesterday, warning that wars and terrorist attacks may soon be conducted by robots that can think for themselves. The conference, sponsored by British defence think-tank Royal United Services Institute, was organized specifically to discuss the ethical and legal implications of using unmanned vehicles for defence and security.

Most media reports led with Sharkey’s message that the world is on the verge of a robotic arms race (New Scientist). The Register took a derisive tone. Others have paid it more ‘serious’ attention (Xinhua; FOXnews) (Our favourite headline prize goes to the Inquirer for ‘Robots should be armless’) Alan Boyle (of Cosmic Log, MSNBC) sets up interesting tension between Sharkey and fellow panellist Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech. While Sharkey is calling for an international ban on military use of autonomous robots until rules can be worked out, Arkin is actively working on creating robots with a ‘sense of right and wrong’.

Even if robots can be made with a ‘conscience’, the quesiton remains as to who will be held responsible for an autonomous robot’s actions in the field. We might avoid certain ethical implications if roboticized weaponry only targeted other weapons, but war, Sharkey has written, isn’t so simple:

In reality, a robot could not pinpoint a weapon without pinpointing the person using it or even discriminate between weapons and non-weapons. I can imagine a little girl being zapped because she points her ice cream at a robot to share. (Gaurdian)

Concerns may not be entirely unwarranted. Military use of unmanned vehicles is on the rise. The US army, for instance, is set to convert roughly one third of their ground vehicles to remote operation by 2015. Thousands of robots with varying levels of autonomy and unmanned aerial vehicles assist troops in Iraq.

Sharkey is not alone in his concern. The legal framework for dealing with war crimes has many potential loopholes when it comes to advanced robots, consultant Chris Elliot told the crowd. Instead, “the real court in which you are judged is the court of public opinion, trial by CNN,” Elliot said. With prices of electronic equipment so low, Elliot added, chances are likely that long before nation-states join the fray, robots that test our ethical limits will be put into use “by people who don’t feel constrained by the law or by public opinion.”

Posted by Nicola Jones
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The Official Richard Dawkins website tells us that the (in)famous evolutionary biologist / aetheist and campaigner for ‘reason in science’ will be retiring from his post at Oxford in September (having reached the Chair's mandatory retirement age).

I’m really not sure who could possibly replace him as the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science (especially since that post was invented for him).

In the blogosphere rumours are hot for American evo-devo biologist / atheist PZ Meyers. Myers himself confirms on Pharyngula (his own blog) that he has been invited by Dawkins to apply, “but he [Dawkins] also invited Lawrence Krauss and Carolyn Porco. The competition is a bit intimidating,” he writes. Krauss is a physicist and prolific writer; Porco is a planetary scientist, more famous for spreading the word of science through pictures than words (she is leader of the imaging science team for the Cassini space mission to Saturn). Krauss is currently a columnist for New Scientist.

One other blogosphere nomination goes to Armand Leroi (biologist, author, and presenter of the UK television documentary series "Alien Worlds" and "What makes us Human"). Any other suggestions?

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Posted on behalf of Jeff Tollefson:

Judging by the press coverage, it would appear that the Bush administration just turned green. A flurry of stories has hit the press after James Connaughton, a senior environmental advisor, suggested the White House would be willing to “enter into an international agreement” on climate change, “if other countries do, too.” That’s according to the New York Times. The BBC focused on three words - “binding international obligations” - uttered by Daniel Price, a national security advisor to President George W. Bush.

Although it remains unclear what, exactly, this means, it is perhaps telling that such statements could grab headlines around the world. The administration seems eager to clarify what it considers misunderstandings about its position on global warming (namely the general perception that it will stop at nothing to quash or at least cripple any international treaty to protect its industry friends). Bush’s critics aren’t going to buy it, of course, but they appear to be more than happy to watch the president try to wiggle out of what has become an increasingly lonesome political corner.

The problem here is that there isn’t much new. In trying to explain the president’s call for “aspirational” climate goals last year, Connaughton used similarly vague language. Under Bush’s plan, countries could institute various voluntary and regulatory measures at the national level. Those commitments would become binding under an international treaty, he said.

So are those the same “binding international obligations” that Connaughton discussed this week? The answer would appear to be no: Most stories suggest that “binding obligations” refers to various proposals to reduce emissions by some percentage by a specific date.

If that were the case, this might be newsworthy. But Connaughton’s suggestion that major developing nations (think China and India) would have to do the same is, if interpreted literally, a tad unrealistic. It also goes against the administration’s entire strategy for global warming, which has up until this point emphasized a decentralized approach based on various national strategies that could be developed by countries according to their specific needs and resources.

Oddly enough, this is one area where the Bush administration’s arguments seemed to (quietly) resonate. Following the principle of “common but differentiated” responsibilities for poor and wealthy nations, many in the climate community had already come to accept the idea that a one-size-fits-all approach simply would not work. If, on the other hand, Connaughton meant to say that major developing nations could sign up for various national policies as opposed to strict emissions targets, the question is then whether the United States would be able to do the same thing. If that were the case, nothing would have changed.

Where does all this leave us? I’m not sure. Connaughton says he is trying to reframe the administration’s position on climate change by emphasizing what it is willing to do, rather than what it is not willing to do. If would be easier to evaluate if the administration would offer some numbers.

Posted by Alex Witze
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South Africa, which has for years struggled to fit its elephants in amongst all its people, has announced that it will resume culling the animals when their hungry numbers threaten to destroy the enclosed reserves in which they live. Since 1995, when the ban went into effect, numbers of elephants have risen from less than 10,000 to more than 20,000 in that country (The Independent; Washington Post)

South Africa is very much a special case when it comes to elephants. In most of the continent, elephants are still in danger from poachers (and it may even be getting worse: The tusk detective) South Africa's elephants are just a small fragment of the total number of African elephants, which is very likely more than 500,000 (IUCN data, with cool distribution map).

When I went to South Africa last year, I heard representatives of the parks department express a lot of frustration at the condemnation of elephant culling that rains in from around the world. After all, these parks officials said, who are these people to tell us how to deal with our own domestic problems? Alternative management strategies all have their problems: contraception takes a long time to take effect, while forests are being ripped up now; "letting nature take its course" isn't particularly natural, since all the elephants are trapped inside small parks, and would be quite bleak, as elephant herds starved to death; knocking down fences to let elephants expand makes them the problem of poor rural people whose fields would bear the brunt of elephantine appetites. It is a knotty problem, to be sure, and a highly emotional one.

A deer cull in New Jersey pushed many of the same emotional buttons earlier this month (New York Times) but got much less press. I guess deer are just not as compelling as elephants. And that is South Africa's tourism blessing and public relations curse.

Read our feature on managing elephants in South Africa, "Africa conservation: Making room".

Emma Marris. Image credit Emma Marris

Posted by Nicola Jones
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After the launch of the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Life, media attention (see the Nature story with comments attached) drove so much traffic to the site that it crashed (AP, whose headline I have stolen; Techshout).

The encyclopedia's website logged 11.5 million hits over 5.5 hours, including two hours of down time, according to the site organisers.

This amusing point has generated even more press… will that too take down the site? It was live and well, if slow, when I checked today. Let’s all check and see what happens.

I still find it amazing when over-popularity ‘breaks’ a site. We experienced this ourselves with our eye-catching story on ‘How to make a zombie cockroach’, which apparently many, many people could not resist clicking. Who can blame them. (We’ve made it free again for 4 days so you can try to crash us again).

Meanwhile, some knowledgeable bloggers are putting together detailed critiques about the 'encyclopedia' (iPhylo; bbgm)

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Talk about being a picky eater. It turns out that one species of butterflyfish – the yellow and black striped snorklers’ favourite – would rather starve to death than switch to eating a different sort of coral. This is a problem, since the coral they currently prefer is quite likely to go extinct with climate change.

The more technical way of describing this is to say that Chaetodon trifascialis has a highly specialized feeding habit: it is an obligate specialist for Acropora hyacinthus (press release). Remember those technical terms next time a toddler spits her mashed broccoli back at you. The researchers confirmed the butterfly fish’s fussiness by keeping some in a tank without their preferred food. The fish died.

Apparently this butterfly fish is also in danger by aquarium collectors, who frequently don’t cater to the fish’s tastes. These fish also die.

The paper itself (Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology) seems to carry a more subtle message than the press release or any of the media coverage: they additionally tested whether this obligate specialist did better than a generalist butterflyfish when given its ideally preferred diet. It didn’t. “Increased dietary specialization, therefore, appears to be a questionable strategy,” they unsurprisingly conclude, “as there was no evidence of any increased benefits to offset increases in susceptibility to disturbance.”

I have an inherrent belief that diversity is a good thing and species should be preserved, but even I have my limits. Come on butterfly fish… learn to like your sprouts.

The Australian covers the issue of fish and climate change more broadly (Fishy signs we fail to fathom). Wired has a video (Of fish. In a tank. Eating coral). International Animal Rescue is perhaps contemplating going to the rescue.

Image courtesy of ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies

Posted by Nicola Jones
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An intriguing paper in Physical Review Letters this week reports on an international team’s efforts to dig deep into the Standard Model of physics. The paper itself (PRL) is very technical (not to be attempted by the faint-hearted). But the Edinburgh University press release on the work (not available online, sorry) gets the quote-of-the-day prize for this succinct summary:

Professor Richard Kenway of the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics said: “Although the Standard Model has been a fantastic success, there were one or two dark corners where experimental tests had been inconclusive, because vital calculations were not accurate enough. We shone a light on one of these, but to our enormous frustration, nothing was lurking there.”

According to the press release, the team used a supercomputer to compare recent experiments studying the decays of bottom quarks to be compared with earlier, strange quark experiments (that’s experiments on strange quarks, not strange experiments on quarks). The comparison result agrees with the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics and implies that the particle-anti-particle asymmetry (technically known as "CP-symmetry violation") seen in these two different decay processes have a common origin.

In other words they confirmed the six-quark theory of particle-anti-particle asymmetry.

In other, other words they confirmed what they thought they knew about quarks, and didn’t find anything new. That may be disappointing to people looking to push the boundaries of physics, but I must admit to being a bit relieved: surely we have enough mysteries in the world of particle physics, thanks very much, without turning up new ones.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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In all but the most severely depressed patients, there is no evidence that new-generation antidepressants work any better than placebos. So says a large metanalysis that combed through 47 published and unpublished studies on several Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), published in PLoS Medicine yesterday. This class of drugs includes Prozac.

The bold headline ‘Antidepressants don’t work’ obviously caught the attention of the press (Google news search yields at least 250 hits today; almost all from the UK) and the public, and for good reason. It’s important to keep in mind that professionals already knew these drugs don’t have a huge effect for many (more below). But the extent to which the drugs were found to be effective as a placebo is striking. They did seem to work in extreme cases, but not for the reason one would expect: “The main finding among severely depressed people was that they ceased to respond to a dummy placebo pill, not that they showed a particularly heightened response to anti-depressants." (BBC)

Current UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines already advise non-medicinal treatments for mild depression, including exercise and sleep management or psychological interventions. “Antidepressants are not recommended for the initial treatment of mild depression, because the risk–benefit ratio is poor,” they state. “Where mild depression persists after other interventions, or is associated with psychosocial and medical problems, consider use of an antidepressant.”

As Anne Robinson tells us in a Guardian post, there is “no need to panic”. “People who are already on antidepressants and getting better should stay on them and then tail them off gradually when they feel ready. Those who are considering taking them will want to think twice. But none of that's new and none of it is reason to panic.” This ‘not new’ statement sits rather ironically aside the Guardian’s choice for front page.

It’s with moderate depression that the case gets interesting. NICE guidelines say: “In moderate depression, offer antidepressant medication to all patients routinely, before psychological interventions.” It is unclear whether that should now be changed. Lead study author Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University, who was one of the consultants for these guidelines, says the new analysis suggests prescriptions “might be restricted even more” (Guardian).

(see UPDATE below the fold)

Continue reading "Antidepressants 'no better than placebo'" »

Posted by Nicola Jones
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After 17 year’s of service, solar mission Ulysses is at its end. The craft, which has been circling the Sun since 1992 tracing solar wind and studying the Sun’s poles, is about to run out of power and fall below a critical temperature of 2 degrees Celsius, at which point its hydrazine fuel will freeze.

Sadly a cleverly hatched plan to try and save power in the aging craft hasn’t worked out for NASA.

Mission scientists decided to temporarily turn off the craft’s transmitter, hoping to shunt this power over to the scientific instruments and the heater. They planned to turn the transmitter back on only when data was ready to be sent back to Earth. This would have made it possible to run Ulysses for up to another two years.

Unfortunately, this cunning plan proved to be a dud. A test revealed that the transmitter couldn’t be turned back on. And, to make matters worse, the fault seemed to lie with the power source of the transmitter, meaning there was no extra power to shunt over to the heater after all. "The decision to switch the transmitter off was not taken lightly. It was the only way to continue the science mission," said Richard Marsden, ESA project scientist and mission manager (press release). Its life expectancy is now down to only a few months.

New Scientist points out the irony of a spacecraft orbiting the Sun freezing to death. Discovery News rings the death bell for the craft. Elsewhere the annoying habit of humanizing inanimate objects continues, as the lump of metal is tagged as ‘brave’ (AFP).

Last time we heard from the Ulysses team the craft was bagging some good data from the solar cycle switch by flying over the pole at an opportune time.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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The US Defense Department (DoD) says they've completely destroyed an errant spy satellite, which they shot down last week.

President Bush ordered the shoot down amid fears that the satellite's unused hydrazine fuel posed a potential health risk to anyone who happened to be in the area where it came down. Nobody would dispute that hydrazine is dangerous, but a lot of experts doubted that the stuff would land anywhere near populated areas.One independent analysis puts the chances at one in several thousand.

It now appears that the hydrazine menace has been safely contained. The same cannot be said for the political debris created by the satellite. A few stories are talking about the diplomatic fallout from the hit. Interestingly, it appears that the US is going to try and smooth some ruffled feathers by sharing its data with China.
credit: DoD

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Okay, it isn’t really ‘stop-the-presses’ news that global warming, pollution and over-harvesting are threatening the worlds’ fish stocks. But a UN report out last Friday (In Dead Water, pdf) hammers home some statistics on the dangers, and has some good graphics highlighting some of our oceans’ bigger problems.

The report’s key findings include:
• Over 90 % of the world’s temperate and tropical coasts will be heavily impacted by 2050.
• Currently there are an estimated 200 temporary or permanent ‘dead zones’ - areas of de-oxygenated water. That’s up from around 150 in 2003.
• Up to 80 % of the world’s primary fish catch species are exploited beyond or close to their harvesting capacity.
• Alien invasive species are increasingly associated with the polluted, overharvested and damaged fishing grounds. The concentration of ‘aliens’ unsurprisingly relates to the world’s major shipping routes (see pic).

This caught the attention of many (AP), including the Jamaican Gleaner, which is worried about hot times ahead. The Africa Science News Service flags an interesting shark tagging project in the wake of the report.

Continue reading "Dead in the water" »

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Amid a fair amount of hype, a Virgin Airlines 747 has flown from London to Amsterdam using biofuels (BBC
| AP in USA Today | Bloomberg in the NYT). Not, when it comes down to it, very much biofuel – 20% of the fuel for one of the four engines, which sounds like 5% overall to me. And given that as far as I know Virgin doesn’t normally fly empty jumbos from Heathrow to Schipol, this ends up sounding like quite a lot of old-fashioned jet fuel being burned for no particularly good reason.

Continue reading "Biofuel flight hype" »

Posted by Oliver Morton
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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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Over on his blog Chad Orzel, a physicist at Union College in Schenectady, NY, asks how $3 billion could best be spent on science.

This is how much the Human Genome Project cost over its 13 years. Interestingly Orzel wouldn’t spend the money on physics, saying “if I had to choose from all areas of science, it's a no-brainer to throw all the money at public health-- eradication of malaria, cures for major diseases, etc”.

Even if the field is narrowed down to physics he wouldn’t go for particle accelerators, saying “is discovering the Higgs Boson going to materially improve the lives of anyone other than the heads of the collaboration that makes the first discovery and gets the Nobel? Not really.”

If I had three billion dollars to throw at a single area of physics, I'd probably go for high-temperature superconductivity. It's a phenomenon that's still not understood all that well, and the potential impact is huge. If somebody could find a way to make mass quantities of material that superconducts at or near room temperature, that would be one of the most revolutionary physics developments since the transistor.

Debate continues in the comments of his post.

Not that $3 billion is really much in the grand scheme of science. For example, the National Institutes of Health spends $28 billion a year on medical research.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Scientists have for the first time measured the force needed to move one individual atom.

In the latest issue of Science, researchers from IBM and the University of Regensburg in Germany detail how they used an atomic force microscope to measure the vertical and lateral forces exerted on individual atoms by the probe tip of the microscope probe (research paper, related perspective paper, IBM press release, Regensburg press release).

It seems to move a cobalt atom over a smooth platinum surface requires a force of 210 piconewtons. Moving a cobalt atom over a copper surface takes only 17 piconewtons. By contrast, IBM’s press release points out lifting a penny requires nearly 30 billion piconewtons.

Continue reading "Moving atoms is easy, measuring the moves less so" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A dead dolphin is drawing attention once again to controversial sonar trials off the California coast. The Navy and environmentalists have been battling over whether the tests should go ahead; tests have been legal, then not-legal, then legal again, then not-legal again as judges, the president and others all weigh in.

While this was going on a test took place at the end of January.

Now it has emerged that a dolphin washed up dead on the shore of San Nicolas Island as the Navy was wrapping up its tests (LA Times). The Times says it was a northern right whale dolphin Lissodelphis borealis (not to be confused with the northern right whale Eubalaena glacialis).

Continue reading "Have sonar tests claimed another cetacean victim?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Water disputes in the United States have taken a bizarre turn, with one state attempting to redraw its borders to capture access to the Tennessee River.

Georgia’s water supply is in trouble and it would really help if it could access the river, which currently lies a kilometer or so north of the state. So politicians have decided to claim that the people who originally drew up the border with Tennessee got it wrong, setting it south of the rightful boundary on the 35th parallel.

Helpfully, if these politicians are right, redrawing the border will give Georgia access to the river. “This is a serious effort to secure our border and begin a discussion of water sharing,” says state senator David Shafer (Chattanooga Times Free Press, Walker Country Messenger).

Behind this slightly comical development is a serious issue. The US is running out of water (see Nature story on the west running dry and recent post on Vegas running dry).

But this is Friday, so let us get on with the ‘you couldn’t make it up’ details…

Continue reading "Singing politicians fight for water" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Japanese scientists have identified the hormone controlling a caterpillar’s amazing switch in appearance from what looks like a bird dropping to what looks like a leaf.

In the early stages of their lives swallowtail caterpillars look like unpleasant bird droppings. Later they change to resemble green leaves, before finally becoming butterflies.

Ryo Futahashi and Haruhiko Fujiwara report in this week’s Science that they have discovered the hormone that governs this change. They found that levels of ‘juvenile hormone’ decrease at the end of the bird dropping phase. Treating caterpillars with a similar compound stopped them from taking the next step and becoming leaf-mimics.

“We found that juvenile hormone works as a switch for the camouflage pattern. That is a novel aspect of this hormone,” Fujiwara, a researcher at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Japan, told Reuters.

And here’s a quote ripe for being taken out of context by intelligent design proponents. Alfried Vogler of the UK’s Natural History Museum told New Scientist the elegance of having one switch for the whole change was admirable: “If we had to design a system to do this, we would design it in the same way.”

Image top: stages of swallowtail larvae / Ryo Futahashi
Image bottom: larvae in situ / Ryo Futahashi

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It must have seemed like a great idea at the time, at least until science got involved. Rather than powering your floor lamps by nasty, carbon footprint increasing mains electricity why not use gravity?

That’s what Virginia Tech student Clay Moulton thought. So he designed the Gravia, a metre high lamp powered by a slowly falling weight that users would lift to the top. As the weight falls, the theory goes, it can be used to power LEDs – producing 600-800 lumens, about the same as a 40-watt bulb over a period of four hours (press release).

Although it hasn’t been built, Gravia even came second in a Greener Gadgets Design Competition. Websites praised it.

Then people started crunching the numbers…

One person noted on a Slashdot discussion:

The drop is 58" according to the plan [core77.com]. This gives about 0.022W at 100% efficiency.
For reference, the highest efficiency LEDs that I know of get 131 lumens per watt. If we're generous and allow them 150 lumens/watt, they still need 4W of power. This would require a drop of 255 metres using the 50lbs of weights he claims. Since we can't really go above 1.5m high, we'll need almost 4 tonnes of weights.

Later some estimates of the number creep up to 24 tonnes (ZD Net). It doesn’t seem likely this light is going to be in your shops anytime soon. We’re expecting a statement from Virginia Tech soon…

Read the university response in full below the fold.

Continue reading "Heavy work for green light" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Ultrasound scans may have pinpointed the location of the G spot, according to an article in this week’s New Scientist. Unfortunately, some women appear not to have one.

“For the first time it is possible to determine by a simple, rapid and inexpensive method if a woman has a G spot or not,” says Emmanuele Jannini at the University of L'Aquila in Italy.

Jannini conducted scans of nine women who said they have vaginal orgasms and 11 who don’t. Women in the first group were found to have thicker tissue in the area between the vagina and urethra where the G spot is thought to lie. His research is published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Continue reading "Ultrasound scans ‘find the G spot’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Giant pythons could take over America according to the US Geological Survey. Already established in Florida, they could be menacing the west coast by 2020.

Maps showing areas where Burmese pythons would be comfortable reveal the snakes, which can grow to over 6 metres, are already capable of surviving across much of the southern United States. Global warming could even see them expanding their range up to the Capitol by 2100.

“Wildlife managers are concerned that these snakes, which can grow to over 20 feet long and more than 250 pounds, pose a danger to state- and federally-listed threatened and endangered species as well as to humans. Several endangered species have already been found in the snakes’ stomachs,” says Bob Reed, a USGS wildlife biologist (press release).

Continue reading "Giant pythons to put the squeeze on California?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A total eclipse of the moon will take place tonight (Wednesday 20th Feb), or tomorrow morning if you’re reading this in Europe, Africa or western Asia. Find out if you can see it using NASA’s handy Javascript Lunar Eclipse Explorer or check the map.

“You don’t have to stay up until dawn or anything obnoxious like that,” David Morrison, of the Lunar Science Institute at the NASA/Ames Research Center, says in The Mercury News’s coverage.

Starting at 8:43 pm Eastern time a shadow will begin to creep across the face of the Moon as its eastern edge moves into the Earth’s shadow. Total eclipse begins at 10:01pm and lasts just under 50 minutes (NASA Lunar Eclipse page).

USA Today has a comprehensive viewer’s guide. Sky and Telescope also has a nice outline of what you can expect to see.

Image: lunar eclipse seen from Apollo 15 / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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They’re big, they’re ugly, and luckily they’re a long way away. An Australian research cruise in the icy waters off Antarctica has discovered a whole host of giant sea beasts, including worms, crustaceans and sea spiders (press release, news coverage in Reuters, Xinhua, AFP).

“Gigantism is very common in Antarctic waters – we have collected huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates,” says voyage leader Martin Riddle (press release).

Many of the species are likely to be new to science.

Sadly the cruise’s purpose is to conduct a census of marine life so we can see just how badly the ecosystem will be ruined by climate change (census website).

“This survey establishes a point of reference to monitor the impact of environmental change in Antarctic waters. For example, ocean acidification, caused by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, will make it harder for marine organisms to grow and sustain calcium carbonate skeletons,” says Riddle.

This would be a tragedy given how cool some of the things he found are. While some are branding them “monsters”, others putting in the less judgmental “mysterious”, we prefer Voice of America’s line: “wondrous”. While we’re just discovering all these things it’s worth noting that a warming Antarctic will make many of the food for invading crabs and sharks (see Nature).

More pictures and video links below the fold.

Continue reading "‘Monster’ giant beasts found in Antarctic waters" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The controversy over whether pre-college school standards in Florida should include mention of evolution has come to a somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion. New science standards voted in by the state education board will mention evolution, but only as a theory (Reuters).

Board member Roberto Martinez was unhappy about the addition of the word theory: “We’re watering down the best possible standards we could have.” Others disagreed, with fellow board member Donna Callaway saying the change was “a very minimal addition” (AP, or watch the video archive of the debate). There’s a nice run down of Martinez vs Callaway on the Orlando Sentinel blog:

Callaway said, “You’re saying there is only one theory.”
Martinez: “I say that evolution is a fact and it is a fundamental fact.”
Callaway: “There is a great difference of opinion in the world...There may be other theories ... This is a point of debate.”
Martinez: “It’s not a point of debate or controversy in the mainstream scientific community.”

The Miami Herald also has some great quotes from them, including this frankly baffling one from Callaway: “If we decide that we’re going to hide this debate and we’re going to hide the controversy, and we’re going to hide the fact that thousands of people disagree, then we better get with the witness protection program.”

Approved by four votes to three, the new standards are getting a reasonable response so far among supporters of the teaching of evolution (aka people who understand science). Comments from blogosphere below the fold…

Continue reading "Florida backs evolution in schools (kind of)" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The disease killing off America’s bees may finally be about to smash into the mainstream: it’s about to start taking some ice creams off the menu. At least according to Haagen-Dazs, the ice cream firm with the made up name, which is putting $250,000 into studying the problem.

So-called Colony Collapse Disorder has been something of a mystery since bees started dying in 2006 (see Nature). Honey bees pollinate a huge number of crops and the ice-cream company says 40% of its flavors use ingredients in some way dependent on the insects, such as wild berries, pecan nuts and pears (press release).

“Honey bee health and sustainable pollination is a major issue facing American agriculture that is threatening our food supply and endangering our natural environment,” said Diana Cox-Foster, a bee researcher at Penn State (Haagen-Dazs press release).

Continue reading "Bee disease ‘threatens ice-cream’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Fighting over ownership of the Arctic has taken a strange turn, with an American submariner claiming in today’s New York Times that his work was vital to Russia’s ‘flag on the pole’ stunt last August.

You may remember the Russian expedition that placed a titanium flag on the sea floor underneath the North Pole. This triggered a whole hailstorm of interest in a UN convention that will allow countries to extend their national boundaries beyond current limits and claim thousands of kilometers of the sea floor (see Nature coverage links below).

Now Alfred McLaren, a retired US Navy submariner, says he developed a polar dive plan and shared it with the Russians, drawing on federal polar data including ice thickness water depth and salinity. McLaren told the Times the Russian link came through his work with a polar tour company that planned to run tourist trips to the North Pole sea floor.

“I wrote the procedures for the dive,” he tells the paper.

However, the Russians are having less than none of it: “Talk is cheap. But real operation, this is different,” says Anatoly Sagalevitch, the expedition’s chief scientist.

The full article is well worth a read.

Nature coverage of the issue
Russia at forefront of Arctic land-grab, Aug 2007
News feature: Geology: The next land rush, Jan 2008
Arctic mapping redraws borders, Feb 2008

Image: North Pole / Image by Allen Lunsford, NASA GSFC Direct Readout Laboratory; Data courtesy Tromso receiving station, Svalbard, Norway (via NASA Visible Earth)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The latest installment of our occasional series celebrating songs about science comes via the Green Gabbro blog (a gabbro is a type of rock). Geologist Maria Brumm has a rundown of love songs for geoscientists.

Sadly, she finds “As it turns out, geological love songs are hard to find - and when you do find them, they’re likely to be depressing (or else they’re a ‘hot lava’ orogeny). Plate tectonics for some reason always moves us apart, never together.”

Here’s one of her selections, Uncle Tupelo performing their song New Madrid:

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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As hundreds of movies have gleefully told us, our eventual subjugation by robots is inevitable. According to a new interview with Ray Kurzweil we’ll be helping by implanting them into our own brains (BBC).

Founder of the Kurzweil Technologies company, Kurzweil is a futurologist who has actually got things right in the past including when computers would beat humans at chess. So his claims may stand a closer look. As well as speculating that we will soon be embedding nano-robots into our bodies, he thinks machines themselves will achieve ‘human level intelligence’ by 2029.

“We’re already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that. … We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” he told the BBC.

Even though he apparently counts Alien and The Matrix as among his favourite movies, he added this caveat: “But that’s not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us.”

Mind you if those robots want to get up to our level they’re going to have to get serious. The latest one to come to the Great Beyond’s attention monitors your brainwave patterns and does an interpretive dance based on the results (that’s the video above, in case you were wondering). It’s part of an exhibition entitled BRAINWAVE: Common Senses, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York (featured recently in Nature; subscription required).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Bad news for alien hunters looking for little green things on Mars: the planet is simply too salty for life (or at least ‘most life as we know it’), according to results beamed back from NASA’s Opportunity rover. And it has been for billions of years.

Researchers simulated conditions on the Red Planet based in part on minerals found by Opportunity. They now believe the quantity of minerals dissolved in water would have made life on Mars hard, to say the least.

“This tightens the noose on the possibility of life,” says Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team (press release). “Life at the Martian surface would have been very challenging for the last 4 billion years. The best hopes for a story of life on Mars are at environments we haven’t studied yet – older ones, subsurface ones.”

On reading this it instantly springs to mind that there are extreme bacteria on Earth that love salt. Surely something like that could have lived it up in these conditions? Not really - the Red Planet, according to Knoll, is more like the Dead Planet.

Continue reading "Is there life on Mars? No." »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Oh boy. A woman in California is paying $150,000 to have her recently deceased dog cloned.

By a member of Hwang Woo-suk’s research team.

And the dead mutt is called Booger.

Oh boy.

According to media reports the dog is being cloned by a company called RNL Bio. Their website has links out to all the media reports but no press release (at least in English, Korean readers please correct me on this).

The Korea Times says RNL Bio will deliver the cloned pit bull to Bernann McKinney, Booger’s former owner, in February next year. Booger was apparently particularly precious to McKinney as he saved her life after another dog bit off her arm (Daily Mail).

Continue reading "$150,000 for that doggie in the window" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Poor old sharks. Vilified as ruthless killers long before Jaws, their plight continually fails to excite the public in the way that threats to the polar bears or the whales do. Make no mistake though, sharks are in serious trouble.

“As a result of high and mostly unrestricted fishing pressure, many sharks are now considered to be at risk of extinction,” Julia Baum, part of conservation group the IUCN’s shark unit told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (press release).

In total 9 species of shark are to be added to the endangered list later this year, on top of the 126 already on the IUCN's famous ‘red list’. According to wikipedia, that’s out of a grand total of 360 species of shark on the planet.

Of particular concern to experts is the practice of ‘finning’, where just the fins are cut off sharks and the rest of the animal is dumped overboard. A number of news sources point out that fins can go for nearly $300 a kilogram in China, where they are eaten as a delicacy.

Continue reading "SOS: Save our Sharks" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This morning, AFP and Reuters are reporting that Iran has put something into "orbit". Specifically they say that the Kavoshgar I rocket, which launched on 4 February, is transmitting data to earth from an orbit of around 250km.

There's a few problems with this claim. First, as we reported, the Kavoshgar I appears to be a single-staged rocket that could climb to the edge of space, but it lacks the thrust to reach the roughly 8 km/sec that it would need stay there. Furthermore, the space geeks over at Arms Control Wonk speculate that the rocket suffered a guidance failure during launch.

So what gives? I can't find the original Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting service report that the wires seem to be working from, but other Iranian sources here and here indicate that the rocket simply transmitted data on its way up. That seems like a far more reasonable claim.

Interestingly enough, the Iranians now say that they will attempt a launch of a real satellite later this summer. Stay tuned...

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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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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If we’re lucky, this image of Carl Sagan may soon be adorning letters from America. The Sagan Appreciation Society has launched a petition to create a stamp honouring the astronomer and this is one of the proposed designs.

“As Carl was America's science populariser, it seems fitting that he be bestowed with a populist kind of honour,” say Patrick Fish, Sagan Appreciation Society founder. “Carl wasn't just an astronomer, physicist and the world's pre-eminent science teacher. He was arguably the first exo-biologist, one of the fathers of global-warming awareness, a peacemaker, and a brilliant author who could make science sound like poetry.”

Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow, says in the Ithaca Journal, “Carl was an avid stamp collector as a boy, and we treasure the albums he made then. They’re filled with his handwritten notes in the margins — perhaps the earliest evidence of his passion for the diversity of Earth’s cultures. So this particular tribute to Carl would have held special significance for him, as it does for me.”

The society plans to submit the petition and designs to the US Postal Service’s Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, which recommends about 25 new subjects a year for commemorative stamps.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A strange scandal over what has been labelled a “baffling failure of peer review” shows no sign of abating, even though the paper that sparked the row has been withdrawn.

Bubbling under in the bloggosphere for a few weeks now, the episode has begun to attract the attention of the traditional press.

Our starting point is a paper in the peer-review journal Protemoics with the slightly odd title, ‘Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence’. All that’s left on the journal page is the retraction notice but you can read an abstract here.

Continue reading "Peer review, ‘a mighty creator’ and an almighty row" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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If you’re ever feeling insignificant, like nothing you do has any effect, think again. A map released this week shows just how much impact humans have on the ocean. (press release)

The work comes out of the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and was published in Science.

Human activities across the globe were tallied to get the final picture. The depressing thing is the amount of yellow on the map – areas of medium to high ‘impact’ (where ‘impact’ means things like over-fishing or pollution). The worst-affected areas include the North Sea and Japanese waters, which make up the 40% of the oceans that are heavily effected. Unsurprisingly, coral reefs sit in some of the worst damaged areas, while Arctic zones remain relatively untouched (so far).

Science has covered the story itself, with links to the map in Google Earth style.

Or you can listen to the story via NPR, where they also have an animated version of the map set to music.

National Geographic sums it up well by shouting: “No pristine oceans left”.

While the world rots, the Scots fear for only themselves:

And it’s nice to see that even lifestyle magazines like Marie Claire are picking up such stories – though admittedly you have to read them in the middle of adverts for hair products.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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For yet another year the 14th of February has followed the 13th. And for yet another year a whole host of people have produced Valentine’s Day themed science stories.

This features the researchers over at Northwestern University who have been looking at what men and women want in a partner. It has been assumed that men go for looks and women money (at least by whoever wrote this press release). But this isn’t backed up by new research which found good looks were the “primary stimulus of attraction for both men and women”, and both sexes also like “a person with good earning prospects”.

Continue reading "Valentine’s Day special / Gorillas in the midst (of a tryst)" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The UK today launched its new space strategy (press release). Already it’s being criticised by people who want more commitment to manned exploration and others who want less. The latter want space exploration money spent on propping up the UK’s threatened physics and astronomy research communities instead.

Instead of going to the Moon, the strategy outlines plans to set up an international facility focusing on satellites for monitoring climate change and commercial applications as well as working on robotic space exploration. Not that the government has ruled out putting humans into space. Instead they have produced a report on their strategy which announces a review of human spaceflight.

You can listen to science minister Ian Pearson discuss manned spaceflight on Radio 4’s Today Programme. “What we’ve said is we will have a review that will look at all the options,” he says.

You might think that you’d want to review the possibility of getting involved in human spaceflight before you produce a space strategy, but nevermind.

Continue reading "UK space strategy draws fire" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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News breaking today reveals tiger woes continuing in both India and Indonesia.

A report from the Traffic conservation group, the IUCN and the WWF reveals that Indonesia has failed to stop body parts of the stripy cats being sold. The group found teeth, claws, skin and bones on sale in 10% of 326 shops surveyed in 2006 in Sumatra. It believes at least 23 tigers must have been killed to supply these items (report PDF).

“This is down from an estimate of 52 killed per year in 1999–2002. Sadly, the decline in availability appears to be due to the dwindling number of tigers left in the wild,” says Julia Ng, lead author on The Tiger Trade Revisited in Sumatra, Indonesia repot (press release).

Traffic says there are only 400 to 500 Sumatran tigers left, the beast list listed by the IUCN as critically endangered.

However Tonny Soehartono, the forestry Ministry director of biodiversity conservation, questioned whether the parts being sold were actually Sumatran tigers and asked if DNA tests were used. “The TRAFFIC report is not balanced. The fact is that we work hard to protect Sumatran tigers,” he says in The Jakarta Post.

In Reuters’s coverage though he admits that the government does need to do more. Best local spin on this story comes from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in the United States: Atlanta’s tigers facing oblivion in wild. The AJC is currently front runner in the Great Beyond’s ‘Aberdeen Man Lost At Sea’ Prize*.

Over in India things aren’t much better.

Continue reading "Tigers in trouble twice over" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Rachel Courtland:

We’d like to think we’re making informed, balanced decisions when it comes to elections. But what if we’re not? In December, University of Washington researchers released preliminary findings showing a distinct disconnect between “unconscious” and explicitly declared preferences for presidential candidates. While 42 percent of test-takers said they would vote for Senator Barack Obama in the Democratic primary, the proportion dropped to 25 percent in a variation of Implicit Bias Test -- a test that, since its introduction in 1998, has measured what researchers say are nearly universally-held biases, particularly in matters of race and gender. Senator Hillary Clinton fared better in the test for unconscious preferences, taking 48 percent of voters when only 34 percent explicitly said they favored her.

The new test, which you can take here, works by measuring tiny variations in how long it takes a subject to sort words into categories like “good” and “bad” while being shown images of presidential candidates.

The test is not universally loved among social scientists, as the results may not correlate with any real-world behavior. And Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, who helped develop the test, worries over her own results. In a recent commentary in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she notes that the results tell her “that I may not be fully aware of who I am or wish to be. What I take away from such a fracture in my own mind is a skepticism that I am color-blind or that I can look past gender to the truly competent candidate.”

Be forewarned: the test is long, so set aside some time to take it. I didn't get through it all the first time.

Posted by Alex Witze
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America’s gambling mecca is facing up to some pretty unpleasant odds today. Researchers reckon the huge lake that feeds water to Las Vegas and other parts of the Southwestern United States could be dry by 2021.

They put the chance of Lake Mead suffering this fate at 50%.

“We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us. Make no mistake, this water problem is not a scientific abstraction, but rather one that will impact each and every one of us that live in the Southwest,” says Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (press release).

In a paper in Water Resources Research they use Federal Bureau of Reclamation records of past water demand combined with calculations of scheduled water allocations and climate conditions to conclude that there is a net deficit of 1.2 billion cubic metres of water per year from the Colorado River system (PDF; subscription required). This system includes Lake Mead and supplies water to a number of cities, including Vegas.

Continue reading "Even money on Vegas running dry in 2021" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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If you’re nervous about nuclear security you might want to stop reading now, the following will not be reassuring.

A new report from the US Congressional watchdog questions the security situation at a number of research reactors and raises the unpleasant spectre of terrorism. Another report from the same body also highlights just how many security problems there have been at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

There are 37 nuclear research reactors in the United States and of these 33 are regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office questions the assessment the NRC has made of terrorism risk.

It suggests the commission has not considered some of the most damaging types of potential attacks and not considered that large amounts of radioactive material could be released. “NRC’s security assessment may underestimate the potential consequences of an attack because it used assumptions and analyses about reactor security and terrorist capabilities that we believe are questionable,” warns the report (report summary, report pdf).

Continue reading "‘Terrorism risk underestimated’ at US nuke reactors" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A new species of dinosaur that played the trumpet has been unearthed in Mexico. Given the lack of fossils from the region the find has got people pretty excited.

“To date, the dinosaur record from Mexico has been sparse,” says Terry Gates, of the Utah Museum of Natural History (press release).

Colleague Scott Sampson adds, “This is the first dinosaur that can be officially named from the country of Mexico. It’s tough to find fossils in most places, but it’s more difficult in Mexico because not a lot of rock is exposed.” (Daily Utah Chronicle.)

Some media reports are also playing on the fact this ‘puts Mexico on the dinosaur map’.

Researchers from the museum think the specimen was probably about 8 metres long. They’ve named Velafrons coahuilensis after the sail shape on its head (Velafrons = combination of Latin and Spanish meaning "sailed forehead, coahuilensis = the beast was found in the Coahuila state north Mexico).

Continue reading "Dino of the day: beach-bum-trumpeter-osaurus" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Katharine Sanderson

It might have passed you by, but at the Grammys last week a bunch of mathematicians and their algorithms walked away with a gong. The award was for “best historical album”, and was a remastering of the only known bootleg recording of Woodie Guthrie, the American folk musician (press release).

The award went to Kevin Short, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire, and engineers at Jamie Howarth’s company Plangent Processes who developed algorithms to remaster a particularly fragile and crackly tape recording of Guthrie performing in 1949 (buy it here).

Apparently the software developed by the team recreates the machine on which the original performance was recorded and so can cancel out the wobbles and strange speed delays caused by the flimsiness of the tape. Here’s an explanation of the process with sound effects and all on NPR – explaining that the acetate tapes break down into vinegar, which causes the warping we hear as a that rather disturbing wah-wah effect.

Or go straight to the before and after sounds of the Grammy winning Guthrie performance.

Congratulations to maths.

Image: Kevin Short holding the album and his Grammy medallion / Douglas Prince, UNH Photo Services

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This image was put out yesterday by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It shows new stars in the ‘Rho Oph’ star-forming region 407 light years away from Earth.

“Rho Oph is a favourite region for astronomers studying star formation. Because the stars are so young, we can observe them at a very early evolutionary stage, and because the Ophiuchus molecular cloud is relatively close, we can resolve more detail than in more distant clusters, like Orion,” said Lori Allen, lead investigator of the new observations (press release).

Colours in the image reflect the relative temperatures and evolutionary states. Youngest stars, surrounded by dusty disks of gas from which they are forming, are red. Older stars are blue. The white patch in the centre right is a region where the cloud is glowing infrared from heating of dust by the young stars on the right hand edge of the cloud.

There’s a really nice post on the Bad Astronomy blog about the photos, which goes into why “one of the most amazing things we have learned in the centuries of the scientific pursuit of astronomy is that stars are born, they live out their lives, and that they die”.

Want more? Researchers have also uncovered “what may be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies ever seen in the middle of the cosmic ‘dark ages’, just 700 million years after the beginning of our universe”. Image below the fold.

Continue reading "Pretty astronomy pictures" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A tiny flying dinosaur reptile* has been unearthed by palaeontologists working in China. This new species of pterosaur has a wingspan of just 25 centimetres, making it one of the smallest ever found.

As Wired notes, “to judge by the illustrated rendition, it was very adorable”. The NY Times agrees, calling it “the cutest little 120-million-year-old flying reptile you could ever hope to see”

It’s not clear how big and how ugly the thing would have got if it had stayed alive a bit longer. Study author Xiaolin Wang, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, notes in the PNAS paper presenting the animal that it has several features indicating it is not fully grown. For instance some of its cranial bones are unfused.

However Wang insists it is not a hatchling just out of the egg, in part because several bones which are generally fragile in juveniles are well preserved. Named Nemicolopterus crypticus, the fossil was unearthed in western Liaoning, in the East of China.

Continue reading "Dino of the day: mini-flying-cute-osaurus" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Today is the 199-th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday. Unfortunately some people still think Darwin’s ideas aren’t good enough to be taught in schools. Or maybe they’re too good.

In Florida they are about to vote on school education standards that declare evolution a “fundamental concept underlying all of biology” and one that is “supported by multiple forms of scientific evidence”. If accepted this will be the first time schools have been required to mention evolution, according to local papers (eg Bradenton Herald).

At a meeting on Monday discussing the standards one opponent likened Darwin to Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, and another claimed because of evolution he had evidence an orange was “the first cousin to somebody’s pet cat” (Florida’s St Petersburg Times).

As the Orlando Sentinal notes:

Evolution has been a cornerstone of biology for more than 100 years, but don’t try to tell that to many of the thousands of people who posted comments on Florida's Department of Education Web site. “The last time I went to the zoo, the monkeys weren't evolving into man,” read one comment.

Darwin Day links for people who do understand science are below the fold.

Continue reading "Happy Birthday Charles" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Last December the Great Beyond featured a warning from the WWF that global warming threatens penguins. At the time we said there was no new science but it was a good time to visit the issue as it coincided with the Bali climate change meeting. Well now there is some new science.

In a new paper in PNAS Yvon Le Maho and colleagues report the results of their nine year study into King penguins on Possession Island in the southern Indian Ocean. They found that high sea surface temperatures from El Nino events reduced the availability of small fish and squid on which the penguins rely. Survival of adult penguins also dropped off.

“Our findings suggest that king penguin populations are at heavy extinction risk under the current global warming predictions,” states the paper.

It predicts a 9% reduction in the adult population for every 0.26 degree Celsius rise in sea surface temperature. Current predictions are for a 0.4 degree rise over the next 20 years, meaning the King penguin is going to be in for a rough ride.

Continue reading "Climate pressure on ‘two-footed bio-indicators’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A former Boeing engineer was arrested yesterday over allegations he passed secret information on the space shuttle and other projects to the Chinese government.

Dongfan ‘Greg’ Chung, 72 was indicted last week on charges of economic espionage and “acting as an unregistered foreign agent” (that’s a spy in layman’s terms). According to the Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment Chung passed trade secrets relating not just to the shuttle but also to the C-17 military transport plane and the Delta IV rocket.

“Mr Chung is accused of stealing restricted technology that had been developed over many years by engineers who were sworn to protect their work product because it represented trade secrets,” says US Attorney Thomas O’Brien (press release). “Disclosure of this information to outside entities like the PRC [People’s Republic of China] would compromise our national security.”

The DOJ says the Chung case is linked to another investigation which last year saw Chi Mak and members of his family convicted of “providing defence articles to the PRC” (more details). A love of ‘the motherland’ rather than money is the suspected motivation in the Chung case.

“We have had so many Chinese space and military technology cases, it’s crazy. Space is part of China’s military modernization plans, so we have had collection efforts targeted at space, aerospace and military technology,” says Dean Boyd, spokesman for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, in the Orlando Sentinel.

More news coverage
U.S. announces spy charges – Reuters
Ex-Boeing Worker, U.S. Employee Charged in Spy Cases – Bloomberg
Orange County man is accused of being a spy – LA Times

Image: NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Today the notion of a “science debate” took another baby step toward becoming reality: Organizers announced that they had set a date (April 18), a place (the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), and invited the leading US presidential candidates John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Now we wait and see who says yes.

In the meantime, the drive for a science-themed debate has garnered an impressive list of supporters, from co-chairs Vern Ehlers and Rush Holt (the rarely-sighted species otherwise known as physicists in Congress) to organizations like the National Academies and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Even Phil Campbell, the editor-in-chief of Nature (and my boss’s boss), has signed on. As an editorial in the current issue of Nature puts it: “Such is the groundswell of support that their call is starting to feel like an idea whose time has come, and indeed it may prove to be so.”

But there is also some skepticism emerging. David Goldston, a Nature columnist, advances the notion here that the debate may end up backfiring against its organizers unless it’s clear from the start what they hope to accomplish. The column has gotten a bit of pickup in the blogosphere (though no response from the organizers as of yet) – see for instance Andy Revkin’s DotEarth and John Lynch’s Stranger Fruit.

Lynch in particular takes issue with the Nature editorial, which goes on to say that “the proposed debate can be seen as an attempt by various elite institutions to grab the microphone and set the agenda from the top down.”

What do you think? Is a science debate the way to raise the profile of science in an election where Iraq and the economy dominate? And what would you hope to gain from such a debate?

Posted by Alex Witze
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The BBC seems to have spotted something missed by the rest of the media world: the European Space Agency wants to rename its planned Mars rover.

Currently the rover – scheduled for launch in 2013 – is called ExoMars. However Jean Jacques Dordain, ESA chief, thinks a new moniker is called for and he’s asking his agency to come up with one.

A major reason for this seems to be that the rover is going to be much more expensive that originally planned. The BBC says Dordain will ask European ministers to nearly double its 650 million euro budget.

“In 2005, it was mostly a technological mission with some scientific passengers,” he says. “...Now we have a scientific mission as much as a technological mission, meaning that the ExoMars 2008 is heavier, is more complex and is more costly.”

Apparently he thinks a new name will make it more likely the ministers will say yes to a bigger budget.

“I am asking [my officials] to find a different way to define ExoMars because if we say ‘this is ExoMars’, for most of the ministers it means ‘over-cost’,” he says. “And this is not over-cost because we are not speaking at all of the same mission; it is a completely different mission. This is to try to make ministers understand that this is not over-cost.”

This sounds like a perfectly reasonable plan to me. As a name suggestion, ExoMarsTwo would nicely sum up both the project and its new budget...

Image: ExoMars rover concept / ESA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Somewhere off the coast of Puerto Rico a silent robot is flying under the sea. Launched by researchers at the famous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution the robot glider has now been at sea since December and crossed the 4,000 metre deep Virgin Islands Basin over 20 times.

Eventually oceanographer Dave Fratantoni envisages fleets of gliders, all collecting scientific data and beaming it back to researchers. “Gliders can be put to work on tasks that humans wouldn’t want to do or cannot do because of time and cost concerns. They can work around the clock in all weather conditions,” he says (press release).

Unlike previous designs, which relied on batteries, the new type ‘Slocum’ glider* is environmentally friendly. Its power comes from differences in sea temperatures.

LiveScience has the best explanation of how this works:

When it moves from cooler water to warmer areas, internal tubes of wax are heated up and expand, pushing out the gas in surrounding tanks and increasing its pressure. The compressed gas stores potential energy, like a squeezed spring, that can be used to power the vehicle.

The glider then uses this energy to change its buoyancy, becoming denser to glide into the depths, becoming less dense to glide back to the surface.

Continue reading "Success for wax powered robot sea glider" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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UPDATE - Congratulations to Schlegel. He sucessfully completed his spacewalk yesterday. "I'm holding on to Columbus. It's a good feeling," he said (Florida Today). Watch the Reuters video on YouTube.

Another delay hit the installation of Europe’s Columbus space laboratory last week. Astronaut Hans Schlegel fell ill shortly after last week’s shuttle launch, meaning the start of the module’s installation has been set back by a day.

The European Space Agency says his condition is “not life- or mission-threatening in any way, but that could affect his efficiency during a spacewalk”. So another astronaut will take Schlegel’s place on a space walk to install the module on the International Space Station.

Installation of Columbus will now begin today. Rex Walheim and Stanley Love will install the impressively named ‘Power Data Grapple Fixture’ on the lab which will later allow the robot arm on the ISS to grab Columbus and move it into position (NASA press release).

A number of news sources say Schlegel should get a spacewalk on Wednesday and doctors are confident he’ll be up to the task then.

The nature of Schlegel’s illness has not been disclosed but it has been stated that the rest of the crew are not at risk of contracting it. Florida Today speculates that he has space adaptation sickness.

More
Previous Great Beyond posts on Columbus:
- Shuttle launches, press rejoices, February 08, 2008
- Shuttle and Euro lab grounded, December 10, 2007
Nature News on Columbus
BBC News video ‘inside Europe's science laboratory’

Image: Columbus / ESA - D. Ducros

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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The debate over whether biofuels are actually good continues. This week two studies published in Science come down on the ‘they’re not so great’ side.

In the first, Timothy Searchinger and colleagues argue that those who think using biofuels instead of petrol will reduce greenhouse gases have failed to account for farmers clearing forests and grassland to replace the cropland diverted to biofuels. They say that rather than a 20% reduction in greenhouse gases, a wholesale switch to corn-based ethanol “nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years”. (Research abstract.)

In the second paper Joseph Fargione and colleagues say converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food-based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a ‘biofuel carbon debt’. This would release “17 to 420 times more CO2 than the annual greenhouse gas reductions these biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels”. (Research abstract.)

More media reports below the fold…

Continue reading "Biofuels debates rages on" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The space shuttle Atlantis launched successfully yesterday, carrying the Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station. This is something of a relief for journalists who have been writing about the pending launch for months.

Space.com would like you to believe that the 7 metre long, 13 tonne module is Europe’s “first piece of orbital real estate in space”. This is doing a great disservice to the mighty European Space Agency, which points out in its press release that, “Although Columbus is ESA’s major contribution to the ISS, it is neither the first, nor will it be the last to be launched.”

ESA has already provided a data management system, several research equipment racks, part of the ISS freezer, the Harmony connecting module and the ‘Microgravity Science Glovebox’ (pictured left). So there.

Even so Daniel Sacotte, ESA’s Director for Human Spaceflight, Microgravity and Exploration Programmes, says, “The launch of Columbus marks the onset of a new era. We have long waited for this moment in European human spaceflight and space-related sciences.”

Continue reading "Shuttle launches, press rejoices" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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GlaxoSmithKline shares are down and the company thinks it’s our fault – we, here, being the media.

GSK saw sales of diabetes drug Avandia drop off after studies linked it to heart attacks. Now it has issued a profit warning for 2008 (details from: WSJ, NY Times, BBC, FT).

“My wish for the media is to be more sophisticated when they report scientific news. Debates now are being thrown into the public domain before scientists have given their opinion,” the Guardian quotes the company’s soon to retire CEO J P Garnier as saying at a talk this week.

A slide for the talk declares:

Media translation of scientific facts
Incidence: Less than 5 out of 10,000 patient years
As reported: “43% Increase in Heart Attacks”

Let’s have a look at this in an official Great Beyond analysis…

Continue reading "Dear Mr Garnier…" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Another row has blown up over Japan’s ongoing whaling mission, this time over gorey photos of a catch released by the Australian government.

“I guess when I saw the photos I just felt a bit of a sick feeling as well as a sense of sadness,” said Australia’s ex-rock star environment minister (The Times and others). “It’s very disappointing. It’s distressing when you think that it can take up to 15 minutes after a harpoon actually hits a whale for the whale to die. It’s even sadder when you consider there’s a calf involved.”

Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research has denied that the photo, taken by customs vessel the Oceanic Viking actually shows a mother and calf.

“The photographs taken by the Oceanic Viking and which major Australian newspapers published today shows two minke whales, but they are not a mother and her calf as claimed by the media. Our research program requires random sampling of the Antarctic population, and therefore there will be a range of sizes,” says Minoru Morimoto, director general of the ICR (press release).

This statement was interpreted thus by The Advertiser: Japan: We kill them all. Other news media in Oz and across the world have also weighed in. The Australian public is certainly all fired up.

Continue reading "Pictures spark new whale row" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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There’s much excitement in the UK media over a story broken by New Scientist that nerves can be grafted over injured sections of spinal cord in rats.

At a conference in New York, John Martin of Columbia University described how he and his colleagues cut motor nerves away from the abdominal muscles they normally connected with. They then stretched the cut ends of these nerves down past injury sites on the rats’ spines and glued them in place, says the magazine (subscription required).

Later the researchers found their grafted nerves had begun to form connections with motor nerves below the injuries. “Zapping the spinal cord above the injury made the lower limbs of the rats twitch, showing that motor signals had begun once again to pass along the entire length of the spine,” NS reports.

Giorgio Terenghi, of the University of Manchester in the UK, told the BBC, “It’s a very good idea, but the key thing is how much function they will be able to restore using this technique.” The research has not yet been published in a journal.

How much function is being restored in rats, let alone humans, is unclear at the moment. Nevertheless it is predictably being hailed as a potential cure for victims of paralysis (eg, Daily Mail, Guardian, PA).

RelatedRecent Nature medicine paper on recovery after spinal injuries.
Great Beyond post on the above paper.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The UK government will no longer use goats to test submarine escape procedures, it has been announced.

Goats were being used by the Ministry of Defence to investigate the risk of submariners getting decompression illness – the dreaded ‘bends’ – after bailing out of submarines. Goats’ respiratory systems are apparently similar enough to humans’ to make the experiments worthwhile.

Animal rights campaigners have previously complained about the experiments.

“The testing programme was aimed at improving the accuracy of the information relating to the likely probability and consequence of decompression illness following escape from a submerged submarine in varying depths and internal submarine pressures,” said defence minister Derek Twigg in a written statement to Parliament. “This requirement has now been achieved, and the review has concluded that the remaining associated areas of uncertainty in submarine escape and rescue relate to events that are considered highly unlikely, and do not therefore need to be addressed by means of animal testing.”

According to a ministry official the goats were put in decompression chambers rather than actually submerged. “They were never placed under water and they were not alone. Other goats were in there too,” the official told the Guardian.

This would mean they were not placed in the frankly awesome submarine escape training tower which the Royal Navy sometimes lets divers play in (video).

The story was also picked up by the Daily Telegraph, AP, BBC)

Other goat news: rare Himalayan goats facing death because of heavy snow (Hindustan Times, AFP, Reuters).

Image: USDA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Doctors aggressively pushing down blood sugar levels in diabetic patients have found their treatment appears to increase deaths in high risk patients. This finding could call into question the entire approach to treating these patients.

The ACCORD trial of 10,000 type 2 diabetics was supposed to continue for 18 months more but the National Institutes of Health pulled the plug after 257 patients whose blood sugar was intensely lowered died, compared with 203 patients who received standard care.

“A thorough review of the data shows that the medical treatment strategy of intensively reducing blood sugar below current clinical guidelines causes harm in these especially high-risk patients with type 2 diabetes. Though we have stopped this part of the trial, we will continue to care for these participants, who now will receive the less-intensive standard treatment,” says Elizabeth Nabel, director of the NIH National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (press release).

Experts are keen to stress that lowering blood sugar levels is beneficial to diabetes but the new results mean it is unclear how low you should go. “It’s profoundly disappointing. This presents a real dilemma to patients and their physicians. How intensive should treatment be? We just don’t know,” says Richard Kahn, chief scientific and medical officer for the American Diabetes Association (Washington Post).

Continue reading "Confusion after diabetes study abandoned" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The claws are out in the world of cat science (sorry about the pun). After Dutch authorities seized three cats sold as an ‘allergy free’ breed an almighty row has broken out.

They were supposedly sold for $40,000 by LifeStyle Pets as being “scientifically-proven hypoallergenic cats” and the Dutch seized them under suspicion they may actually be an endangered breed. LifeStyle’s website says its ‘Ashera’ cats were developed “by blending two exotic feline bloodlines with a domestic breed of cat ... genetic monitoring is used to standardize breeding and ensure that the defining features of the Ashera remain exceptionally consistent”.

But another cat breeder has come forward to say he thinks these ‘Ashera’ cats are nothing of the sort. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Chris Shirk of Pennsylvania’s Cutting Edge Cats saw pictures of the seized cats in the Dutch press. He thinks they are so-called Savannah F1 cats, of which he recently sold three to another breeder.

The plot gets even thicker...

Continue reading "Psssst. Wanna buy a hypoallergenic cat?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This rather awesome video comes to the Great Beyond’s attention via Deep Sea News. It shows a massive (and I mean massive) six-gill shark having a look at some bait and the submersible filming it 1000 metres under the surface.

The two laser dots in the film are 15 cm apart, meaning the whole shark is about five and half metres long. As University of Hawaii researcher Jeff Drazen says on the commentary “Holy crap. Oh my God! It’s huge! ... This guy’s got a metre wide head.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Jeff Tollefson

The primary election results from “Super Tuesday” are still trickling in, but one thing is clear: all of the leading presidential candidates in the United States endorse mandatory limits on greenhouse gases. Given the past seven years of obfuscation and, many claim, outright obstruction from the administration of President George W. Bush, this will come as a relief to scientists and many policymakers in the US and abroad.

The news comes from the right side of the political spectrum. While leading Democrats have formulated official and strong positions on global warming, the Republican field until now has been a bit of a mixed bag – in part because little attention has been focused on the issue. But with voters in 21 states weighing in, the GOP candidate with the strongest and clearest position on global warming, John McCain (pictured), came out with a commanding lead. (NY Times).

The Arizona senator bucked Republican leaders on the issue long ago, and is currently sponsoring legislation that would create a cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to roughly 60% below 1990 levels by 2050.

On the Democratic side, the battle between New York senator Hillary Clinton and Illinois senator Barack Obama will continue in the coming weeks – and perhaps months. Both, however, have endorsed cap-and-trade programs to cut emissions 80% below 1990 levels by mid-century.

UPDATE
Those who like to listen as well as read news can hear the UK's Radio 4 Today Programme discuss which Democrat is greenest on this audio clip (13.44 minutes in) - Ed.

Image: John McCain 2008 / www.JohnMcCain.com

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Joshua Lederberg died on February 2, at the age of 82.

Lederberg won half the 1958 Nobel Prize for medicine “for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic material of bacteria”, thus pretty much fulfilling the ambitions he wrote down at the age of seven.

“He was in his 20s, going to Yale and getting his PhD and discovered that not only did bacteria have genes, which was not appreciated at the time, but that the genes can be transferred from one bacterial cell to another. This allowed the total mapping of all the genes in the bacterial cell,” James Darnell, a genetics researcher at Rockefeller, told Bloomberg.

“The only real competition for domination of the planet are the viruses. We’ve beaten everything else, but the viruses are going to be the tough ones,” Lederberg said in 1989 (Washington Post).

As well as the work that led to his Nobel, Lederberg also named the science of “exobiology”, working with NASA on missions to find life in space from the early 1960s; he was an adviser to the administrations of presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Carter, and worked on the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. In the 1960s he wrote a weekly column for the Washington Post.

Profile and documents here, tributes and obituaries below the fold.

Continue reading "Joshua Lederberg dies" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Who knew that penguins have hot heads and sloths have cold noses? Some quirks of animal body heat have now been captured in a strangely compelling set of photos taken at London Zoo.

The pictures were taken by Steve Lowe, described in the press release as an amateur photographer, although I don’t know many of those who carry around thermal imaging equipment (well, there’s the serial killer in Red Dragon, but he hardly counts). They are quite cool, and the UK press has welcomed the opportunity to put more cute animals on their pages (Guardian, Telegraph, Times, BBC).

“While these amazing pictures may be more reminiscent of something from the Tate Modern, they give us a unique perspective on how animals regulate their body temperatures,” says David Field, zoological director. “Thermal imaging technology can also be used in veterinary diagnostics such that infected areas will sometimes appear very hot.”

They can also reveal why animals indulge in some of their more laughable behaviour, he says in the Independent: “Everyone makes fun of flamingos standing on one leg, but you can see that it's a brilliant way of staying warm while staying upright.”

Full photo gallery from London Zoo

All images: courtesy of Steve Lowe.
Top: Mexican red-kneed bird eating spider
Middle left: sloth (with cold nose)
Middle right: South African black-footed penguins
Bottom: flamingos

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Tomorrow sees polar bear habitat in the Chukchi Sea go up for sale in the United States. Oil exploration rights are being auctioned by one branch of the Department of Interior before another branch can rule on whether the polar bear deserves protection as an endangered species.

Nature’s Rachel Courtland blogged about this last month but as the decision nears the US media is getting ever more excited...

The LA Times says the ruling on the bear’s endangered status could come as soon as this week, perhaps making it the “first species to be listed as threatened with extinction primarily because of global warming. It also says that groups representing oil and gas industry parties are threatening their own legal actions should the bear actually be listed.

This could backfire badly as the polar bear is loved more than perhaps any other animal thus far adopted by the green movement. As activist Kassie Siegel notes: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. And then there is the polar bear.”

Continue reading "Polar bear decision looms" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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In my country the cost of train tickets regularly exceeds the average speed of the trains. So I get unreasonably excited by announcements like this: a 360 kilometre per hour train has been unveiled in France.

France is already the one country that can give Japan a run for its money in the train stakes so this new machine could make travelling in Europe even more pleasant. The first customer for this new machine though is not France at all but in Italy (press release).

Of course you are obliged to nod to climate change in any transport story these days so the train’s manufacturer Alstom says the new rolling stock uses 15% lower energy consumption than its main competitors. If it runs in France it will be running on nuclear electricity anyway.

Continue reading "All hail the super train" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Last week the fragility of the internet was exposed by massive outages in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent. After two high speed data cables from Europe to Asia were cut some countries lost 70% of their capacity for internet traffic. Iran seems to have lost all of its connection.

Some initial reports said the problem was just with one cable. Now at least three are down and it hasn’t taken much for the internet conspiracy theories to get going.

Initially blame was placed on a ship’s anchor for severing two lines – FLAG Europe-Asia and SeaMeWe4. However the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said right after the cuts happened that the cables were over two kilometres away from each other, meaning one ship is unlikely to have caused both breaks (press release 1). Now the ministry says no ships were even in the area where the cables were cut (press release 2).

Continue reading "Internet cable cuts continue" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Researchers have drawn up a list of climate ‘tipping points’ we are in danger of tripping this century. Even a small amount of human induced climate change could push these vital parts of the planet over the edge, says Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia.

The really bad news: Lenton thinks some of the tipping points are under ten years from happening.

“Society must not be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change,” he says (press release). “Our findings suggest that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under human-induced climate change. The greatest threats are tipping of the Arctic sea-ice and the Greenland ice sheet, and at least five other elements could surprise us by exhibiting a nearby tipping point.”

In a new paper in PNAS Lenton and his colleagues coin the term ‘tipping element’ for “large-scale components of the Earth system that may pass a tipping point”. Below the fold you can find the full list and media coverage links.

Continue reading "Climate change tipping points outlined" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Beatles' song Across the Universe is being beamed into space by NASA today as an over-determined celebration of: the (week of the) 50th anniversary of the launch of Explorer 1, the first US satellite; the 45th birthday of the Deep Space Network (DSN), the collection of antennas that receives the data from interplanetary missions; and the exact 40th anniversary of the recording of the song (NASA press release).

Quote of the moment goes to Paul McCartney, who apparently gave his permission to use the song saying: “Send my love to the aliens.” (For more rocking SETI, see this post on our sister blog, In the Field)

It’s not at first totally clear why NASA is doing this… other than to garner massive press attention. The north star, at which the transmission is aimed, is not a particularly likely place to find aliens. And any responding ditty would not get back for most of a millennium. The DSN is not being given over to a concerted “active SETI” programme blanketing nearby stars with the sounds of the 60s (indeed, there’s reason to be leery of all active SETI attempts, as we discussed in an editorial a few years back).

Anyway, I’d like to think this to be a genuinely felt attempt to keep the public interested in space and NASA, rather than just an advertising gimmick (like when Pizza Hut delivered a pizza to the ISS, or when a golf-club company asked an astronaut to take a shot).

However, AP notes that, “Perhaps coincidentally, the song's launching comes a day before the release of the DVD of the Julie Taymor movie named after the Beatles hit.” Sigh. To go all the way down that (long and winding) road, here’s the link to the film.

Pop Quiz:

1) What song did “Active SETI” proponents beam out to space in 1999 and again in 2002?
2) Which group was commissioned to write the musical signal to be sent back to Earth by the ill-fated Beagle 2 when it landed on Mars?
3) The anticipated February maiden launch of ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle will carry an iPod with a winning playlist for astronauts; what’s the top song?

Answers below the fold...

Continue reading "Send my love to the aliens" »

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Some genetically modified mice have the dubious pleasure of being the first lab rodents able to catch a cold (bbc). Researchers twiddled with a cell receptor (ICAM-1) that is attacked by 90% of the 100 known strains of rhinovirus – viruses that cause the common cold, some allergic attacks, chronic bronchitis and emphysema. The result was a strain of mice susceptible to sniffles

The paper (subscription required) doesn’t specifically say the mice get runny noses and crave chicken soup, but it does talk about ‘mucin secretion’, airway inflammation, and an immune response. Previously rhinoviruses only affected higher primates, making comprehensive research on small animals impossible, which could be one of the reasons a cure for the common cold remains so famously elusive.

AFP takes the opportunity to put in some backstory on the Common Cold Unit, which experimented on British volunteers from 1946 to 1989. It never cracked the problem, but it apparently provided various people with a cheap if eccentric holiday destination (Telegraph blog post).

The ICAM-1 story is one of those that, once you’ve seen it, you don’t understand why it hasn’t happened before. Perhaps there’s little money for drug companies in curing the cold, which must boost sales of all those sniffly-sneezy-so-you-can-sleep medications. Personally I’d actually be a little sad if we managed to eradicate the cold, as it provides such a delicious excuse to be pampered for a day or two. I won’t be selfish though; since there are far more serious rhinovirus infections, I’ll support the search for a cure.

A big thumbs down to anyone who said the mice have flu; that’d be caused by influenza virus, not rhinovirus (in thenews; mirror).

For those interested: a nice piece about cold research by Marek Kohn originally published in a special issue of The Big Issue called The Big Tissue.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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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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In what is being hailed as the first study inspired by hit US comedy Seinfeld, researchers have proved you really shouldn’t dip your chip if you’ve already sampled it.

The controversial habit of biting off half a chip – or crisp as we say in the UK – and then re-dunking the remaining half actually does transfer bacteria from the mouth of the ‘double-dipper’ to the dip itself.

“The way I would put it is, before you have some dip at a party, look around and ask yourself, would I be willing to kiss everyone here? Because you don’t know who might be double dipping, and those who do are sharing their saliva with you” Paul Dawson, microbiologist at Clemson University, told the NY Times, which broke the story. It seems to me the reasons you don’t run round kissing everyone at parties aren’t solely to do with bacteria, but I’ll let that pass.

A team of Clemson undergraduates undertook to test whether double dipping transferred bacteria found that sterile water acting as dip contained “a significant amount” of bacteria as a result of this practice. A PDF of this reseach is available on Dawson’s website, it says

Whether the amount of contamination is dangerous to the dippers’ health or not is still debatable and can depend on multiple external factors including the type of chip/dip or the relative health/illness of the person whose mouth provided the bacteria. Next time you take a bite of your chip, however, and are tempted to commit a second dip, keep in mind that the numbers have been calculated, and the bacteria are having just as much of a party as you are.

The results will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Food Safety.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Scientists have discovered a new species of elephant shrew in Tanzania. The grey-faced sengi is so large, by elephant shrew standards, that it proved too big for the traps that Francesco Rovero, of the Trento Museum of Natural Sciences in Italy took to catch it.

After the weirdly cute animal was caught on film in 2005 by Rovero, he returned to Tanzania’s jungle with Galen Rathbun to catch one. After finding their traps too small they improvised with twine snares, eventually catching four of the animals.

“I got these images, and said to myself: ‘Boy, these look strange’. But you can’t describe something new based just on photographs, so in March 2006, we went back in and collected some specimens,” says Rathbun, of the California Academy of Sciences (BBC). The Times says Rathbun is known as ‘the elephant-shrew guy’ due to his long study of them.

Continue reading "Scientists catch new elephant shrew, then kill it" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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I’ve had some quite cool presents in my time but no one has ever named a species after me. Then again, I’ve never done anything as impressive as Roy Orbison and unlike Michael Cousins I’m not about to marry someone who goes around discovering species.

First up Orbison: Quentin Wheeler, an entomologist at Arizona State University, announced to an Orbison tribute concert this month that a new species of beetle would be named Orectochilus orbisonorum in honour of both the late, great Orbison and his widow, Barbara (press release).

LiveScience reckons the bug looks like it’s wearing a tuxedo, although I’m not entirely convinced. ASU says a paper on O. orbisonorum will appear shortly in the journal Zootaxa.

Continue reading "Roy Orbison joins the insect world" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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