The Great Beyond

Researchers in the US have finally worked out how the aggressive and slightly-scary Humboldt squid avoids turning itself into calamari when eating.

Because it has a pretty squidgy body and a very hard beak, you might expect the squid to do just as much damage to itself as its prey when chomping down on a passing fish or scuba diver.

“You can imagine the problems you’d encounter if you attached a knife blade to a block of Jell-o and tried to use that blade for cutting,” says Frank Zok, author of a new paper on squid beaks in Science (press release, paper). “The blade would cut through the Jell-o at least as much as the targeted object.”

Obviously this doesn’t happen with the Humboldt, or the animals wouldn’t be swarming like roaches across our seas. In fact the squids have a neat trick – a graduated tissue where the base of the beak is 100 times softer than the tip.

Continue reading "A peak at a squid-gy beak" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Last year’s sinking of the M/S Explorer, a cruise ship off Antarctica has prompted a gaggle of environmental groups to demand tougher curbs on who can voyage to the southern oceans.

The Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition wants the International Maritime Organisation to make sure only ice strengthened ships are allowed to take tourists into Antarctic Waters. ASOC also wants ships using heavy oil banned, leaving only vessels using marine gas, which would dissipate more rapidly in the event of a spill.

"We fear that if nothing changes there will be a major disaster. We could see a very large oil spill or a large loss of life - or both,” says an ASOC spokesman (Daily Telegraph).

The groups also wants more limits on the amount of sewage and dirty water ships can discharge in the Antarctic.

A new document from ASOC lists last year’s sinking of the M/S Explorer alongside a number of other incidents:

2006 tourist ship M/V Lyubov Orlova grounds in the South Shetland Islands
2007 tourist ship M/V Nordkapp grounds in the South Shetland Islands
2007 tourist ship M/S Fram breaks down and drifts into a glacier before escaping
2007 trawler Argos Georgia loses power and engines; parts have to be airlifted to it
2007 whaling ship Nisshin Maru suffers serious accident in an “ice covered area”

“These recent incidents demonstrate the potential for serious loss of life and adverse impacts on the marine environment from vessels operating in the Antarctic,” says the document.

Continue reading "Groups call for tougher Antarctic ships, standards" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“NGC 2397, pictured in this image from Hubble, is a classic spiral galaxy with long prominent dust lanes along the edges of its arms, seen as dark patches and streaks silhouetted against the starlight.”

This image was requested by astronomers at Queen’s University Belfast for a study of supernovae. It includes a view of supernova SN 2006bc taken when its brightness is decreasing.

The Queen’s team will tell this week’s National Astronomy Meeting that it seems stars with masses seven times the mass of the Sun can explode as supernovae while the most massive stars “may collapse to form black holes either without producing a supernova or by producing one that is too faint to observe”.

ESA press release.

Image: NASA, ESA & Stephen Smartt (Queen’s University Belfast, UK)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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What's been on the Great Beyond this week...

Continue reading "Weekly round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Tomorrow from 8.00 pm local time is Earth Hour, where we’re all being encouraged to turn off electrical gubbins to save the planet. I was hoping to get some kind of statement about the movement off the official website but it’s running so painfully slowly that I’d still be waiting for it to load now.

The event started in Sydney, where last year 2.2 million people “reduced the city's energy consumption by a whopping 10.2% during that hour – equivalent to taking 48,000 cars off the road”, says the WWF.

The general reception from the world’s media has been positive, but in Australia there’s a right blue going on.

“Earth Hour may see people switch off their lights for just one hour on Saturday night, but organisers believe the environmental message will be everlasting,” says the Sydney Morning Herald.

In a good old-fashioned newspaper war Australia’s Herald Sun (prop: R. Murdoch) has launched a full on attack on the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s, The Age. “Earth Hour proves that what threatens us is not so much global warming, but lousy journalism”, it says, before going on to claim that global temperatures have fallen since 1998, a claim that Aussie blogger Tim Lambert deals with here.

The Age says:

Let’s dispel some misconceptions. Turning off lights and appliances tonight will not in itself do anything much to stem the rise of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.
Earth Hour organisers acknowledge this. Cutting energy consumption for an hour is a symbolic step. Like all symbolism, it is easy to mock.

It’s not just down under where it’s all kicking off...

Continue reading "Oz papers go to war over Earth Hour" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Of all the physics conspiracy theories out there, my current favorite concerns the Large Hadron Colldier (LHC), a proton-proton collider near Geneva, Switzerland that will hopefully discover some exciting new physics. Conspiracy nuts have suggested that it might also inadvertently destroy the Earth (or maybe even the entire Universe).

I'll spare you the details, which can be easily dug up with a little Googling, but basically the cranks think that the collider will also cook up either an exotic particle or a tiny black hole that will suck up everything around it. It's pretty much bunk, as others smarter than I have said (here for example).

But that hasn't stopped Walter L. Wagner, a botanist and self-proclaimed nuclear physicist, from filing suit in US District Court in Hawaii to stop the LHC before it destroys all we hold dear. Wagner wants a "full-scale safety analysis" to be conducted of the collider before its start up, hopefully later this year. A few years back, Wagner raised the same concern about the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. But all it ended up doing was producing these pretty pictures (and some valuable science too).

Incidentally, Wagner's in a little legal trouble of his own. According to the Honolulu Advertiser, he and his wife were just indicted for allegedly taking illicit control of some property owned by the World Botanical Gardens, which he helped found.

I'm guessing not even the LHC can make his problems disappear.

Credit: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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There’s a story doing the rounds at the moment that Colombian rebel group FARC is planning to make a ‘dirty bomb’ out of uranium. This story first blew up last week and has been recycled ever since, and it’s not really true.

The government has seized 30 kg of “radioactive” depleted uranium according to a number of reports. Except depleted uranium is barely radioactive. It’s dangerous alright, but only when made into tank shells.

It is toxic, but so are most heavy metals. You’d be better off making a dirty bomb out of mercury than DU.

The head of Colombia's armed forces says a buried cache of uranium was found thanks to information from those close to an arms dealer whose name was found on a computer belonging to deceased rebel Raul Reyes (Bloomberg). “It’s exactly the same material listed on Reyes’ computer. Why the FARC were so anxious to obtain this material we still don’t know,” says General Freddy Padilla.

Pro-FARC news agency ANNCOL has rubbished the claims.

Below the fold are a couple of people who got it right about depleted uranium.

Continue reading "Colombian uranium nonsense" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The world’s earliest sound recording has been successfully played back, nearly 150 years after it was created.

In 1860, roughly two decades before Edison’s phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville scratched a recording of French folk song Au Claire de la Lune onto paper blackened by smoke using his phonautograph.

Well, it’s supposed to be Au Claire de la Lune and my colleagues insist it sounds like it. To me it sounds like a recording of an owl being played underwater on a particularly cheap pair of speakers. It’s so bad that the newsreader on the BBC’s Today programme couldn’t stop laughing, even though her next item was an obituary.

Make up your own mind: here’s the 1860 recording.

Regardless of the quality, it’s still pretty amazing that the recording could be played back. To do this Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni, of historians’ group First Sounds, took high resolution scans of the piece of paper and then produce a digital version playable with a virtual stylus (press release). The New York Times has probably the best article on the topic. It’s well worth a read.

Image: a phonautograph / Library and Archives Canada

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Last week US biologist and blogger PZ Myers was unceremoniously evicted from the cinema where he was about to view the film Expelled, dismissed by many scientists as creationist propaganda (see last year’s post for more on Expelled). However the film’s producer, who had Myers kicked out, failed to expel his fellow cinema-goer, one Richard Dawkins.

Cue a mass blogosphere feeding frenzy (see here, here, here, and here).

But would you have spotted Dawkins? Or even Myers? Now you can test your knowledge of key figures in the new Great Beyond Super-Scientist-Spotting Quiz!

CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE QUIZ

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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After last week’s news that organic material had been found in the atmosphere of a planet in a totally different solar system I find it hard to get hugely excited about organic molecules being found by the Cassini mission orbiting Saturn; but NASA scientists are apparently over the moon. (press release).

The moon in question is Enceladus, which is getting so much attention these days Saturn’s other satellites are said to be getting quite upset. Hunter Waite, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, explains the latest reason for the scientist’s fawning devotion to the winsome lump of ice:

A completely unexpected surprise is that the chemistry of Enceladus, what's coming out from inside, resembles that of a comet. To have primordial material coming out from inside a Saturn moon raises many questions on the formation of the Saturn system.

This implication is that Enceladus might have formed in a slightly different way to the rest of the moons and planets.

Continue reading "Saturn’s moon does comet impression" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Both South Korea and Japan have impounded suspect shipments of Italian mozzarella after finding high levels of dioxins in the tasty dairy product.

But Italy has hit back, with agriculture minister Paolo De Castro declaring, "It would be an error to infer anything from this and create a dangerous panic. That would turn this story into a negative campaign that unfairly compromises the image of an excellent product and which risks becoming heavily penalised in Italy and abroad.”

He even went as far as to say the cheese found in Korea wasn’t Italian but “fake” mozzarella, presumeably from an international network of cheese fraudsters. We blame the danes…

However Italy has since shut down cheese production at a number of farms after finding higher than allowed levels of dioxin. The EU is also mulling a ban on mozzarella amid concerns the problem could be linked to piles of uncollected rubbish resulting from a strike in Naples or even illegal dumping of toxic waste by the Mafia.

So the last thing Italian cheese makers need is this to be given a catch name and become another massive food safety scare. Too late! Canada’s Globe and Mail has declarded it “Mad Buffalo cheese disease”, and noted "Not only is mozzarella a dietary staple, it is a symbol of Italy's glorious food culture. Shame on mozzarella translates into shame on Italy."

Italian coverage

Image: Photo courtesy PDPhoto.org

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Quirin Schiermeier

If an ice shelf breaks up and no one alerts the media, has anything really happened?

The British Antarctic Survey has released photos showing that a sizable part of the Wilkins ice shelf off the Antarctic peninsula is currently “hanging by a thread”, supported by a thin strip of ice between two islands (press release, news coverage from BBC, VoA, Reuters, blogs).

However a massive chunk of 400 square kilometres has already broken off the same shelf, says Matthias Braun, a remote sensing expert at the University of Bonn.

Last July Braun saw the first evidence for a large crack in the Wilkins ice shelf in images from the Japanese ALOS sensor. A big chunk of ice started to break away on February 28, at the end of the Antarctic summer.

As shelf ice is floating on the ocean, its melting has no immediate effect on sea level height. However, loss of shelf ice allows Antarctica’s huge glaciers to flow faster towards the coast and any acceleration of glacier flow does contribute to sea level rise. The destabilization of the Wilkins ice shelf adds to such concerns.

Continue reading "If an ice shelf breaks up and no one alerts the media, has anything really happened? " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The space shuttle Endeavour landed at Kennedy Space Center late yesterday, in a near-dark touchdown. In the process it provided us with this rather fine picture (credit NASA).

Only about a fifth of landings take place in the dark, according to AP.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Giant pandas are notoriously lazy lovers. Even the threat of imminent extinction has failed to raise their libido levels from their current pathetic lows.

In the past zoo keepers have even resorted to showing the stupid animals porn in the hope that this would encourage them to save themselves. Now they have a new weapon.

According to Chinese state media the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding is preparing male pandas for intercourse with a “rigorous ‘sexercise’ program”, which strengthens their pelvic muscles and “boosts the animal's sexual stamina”. The story has been picked up widely.

“We use apples to lure male pandas to stand up and walk for a while in a standing position to increase the strength of their hips so that they are more powerful while mating with female pandas,” says Yang Kuixing, chief of the base’s maternity ward.

Other methods are also employed. “We arrange love-making between two excellent pandas in front of inexperienced pandas, which have never had sex. It does work,” says Fei Lisong, deputy chief of the base.

Image: A panda in Washington zoo contemplating its future / US FWS

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Crockett and Tubbs just don’t cut it anymore, so Miami police could soon be deploying hovering drones to keep an eye on the locals.

The slightly disturbing Micro Air Vehicle weigh 6 kg and are “capable of vertical takeoff and landing with transition to sustained high-speed flight”, according to their manufacturer Honeywell. Miami/Dade police are clear to use the drones after the Federal Aviation Authority granted them an airworthiness certificate last month (press release).

“Our intentions are to use it only in tactical situations as an extra set of eyes,” police department spokesman Juan Villalba told Reuters. MAVs could be used by SWAT teams dealing with hostage taking, he added.

Not everyone is happy though.

Continue reading "Miami prepares for police drones" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A retired American professor has succeeded in triggering an investigation into her claims to own a patent on technology vital to a host of modern technologies.

Gertrude Neumark Rothschild claims a veritable rogues’ gallery of modern electronics companies have infringed her patent on LEDs in products including “mobile devices, instrument panels, billboards, traffic lights, HD DVD players (e.g., Blu-ray disc players [sic]), and data storage devices”, according to a statement from the US International Trade Commission.

The ITC, a federal body which looks after US trade issues, voted to investigate the claim last week. In total, 30 companies are involved, including Nokia, Pioneer, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba. Rothschild has already settled a similar claim against Philips (Forbes).

If Rothschild is successful in her claim products from these companies could be banned from the US.

ARS Technica notes:

There’s little to indicate that Dr. Rothschild has decided to launch such an endeavor as a means of commemorating her imminent octogenarian status. This isn't the first time, however, that the good doctor has filed suit against major companies she felt were engaged in patent infringement. She previously filed suit against both Toyoda Gosei and Philips Lumined over their alleged infringement of US Patent No. 4,904,618 ("Process for Doping Crystals of Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors") and 5,252,499 ("Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors Having Low Bipolar Resistivity and Method of Formation"). The suits were eventually settled out of court.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A bizarre geek-fight has erupted in the blogosphere over which types of invertebrates are coolest, Echinoderms or Molluscs.

Back on the 20th of March The Intersection blog mused on sea cucumbers and squid, concluding, “No contest! Cukes would eat squid for breakfast...”

This drew a scathing response from some quarters, with Craig McClain on Deep Sea News delivering this cutting put down to the sea cucumber fans:

It’s just hard to get excited about a sea cucumber that either feeds on sediment muck or filters muck out of the water column and not much else. Or an organism whose idea of fun is spewing its organs all over you or creating poop trails.

However the echinoderm faction fought back. Even comics were enlisted and the Snail’s Eye View blog tried to settle the matter with reference to the ultimate arbiter: a google fight. Mollusca comfortably won.

Currently both sides appear to be licking their wounds. A summary of the war to date is here.

Having spent the weekend playing with octopus in the Med, the Great Beyond is committing the full weight of Nature’s reputation behind the mollusca cause. (This may be career jeopardising, by the way, as I have not the slightest right to claim the Nature name in this way.)

Images: Punchstock / NOAA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Sharks appear to monitor local weather conditions, and take the marine equivalent of heading for higher ground when storms threaten. Of course being in the sea this involves diving deeper to avoid the inclement weather.

This has raised the possibility in some minds of using sharks to monitor the weather.

Back in 2001 it was observed that some sharks moved into deeper water before the approach of a hurricane (research paper). Lauren Smith, a marine biologist at the University of Aberdeen, is now testing the ability of sharks to spot bad weather both with in the field monitoring and by putting dogfish into a hyperbaric chamber (press release).

“How many other students get the chance to put a shark in a chamber to study its behaviour?” she asks (Daily Mail).

Continue reading "Sharks trigger perfect news-storm" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Climate change is threatening to drive Australia’s iconic, cute, venomous and bizarre species out of existence, according to the WWF. Not only that, but nasty invasive species like the cane toad will thrive, rampaging across the fair almost-continent in a terrifying orgy of environmental destruction.

Well that may be slightly overplaying it but it’s close enough.

“Australia already has the worst rate of mammal extinction in the world. Almost 40 per cent of mammal extinctions globally in the last 200 years have occurred in Australia,” says Tammie Matson, WWF’s species program leader (press release; news coverage in Adelaide Now, The Age). No mention is made of the fact that, in a globalising world, you might expect the species endemic to a relatively small region that had previously been pretty isolated to do worst. Would it have been better in some way if the extinction burden had been spread more widely?

Continue reading "Climate change ‘threatens Oz wildlife’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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What's been on the Great Beyond this week...

Continue reading "Weekly round up - March 20, 2008" »

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Nature made a big splash about water resources and management this week (check out the special; all free for a week). Yet more water news keeps dribbling out – probably because tomorrow is ‘World Water Day’, according to the United Nations (there’s some confusion about this actually; World Water Day is on 20 March each year, but 22 March in 2008, for reasons we can’t explain. But no matter).

The inventor of the ‘virtual water’ concept – a calculation method that determines how much water lies behind food production and other activities – has won the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize (Reuters; Stockholm International Water Institute). Congratulations to John Anthony Allan of the University of London, whose idea runs through modern water policy (and our special report).

The UN itself announced that it’s going to start using Lake Geneva to heat and cool its offices (AFP).

And a conference of the Israeli Water Association concluded that the government has failed to implement decisions reached six years ago to manage the ongoing water crisis (Haaretz.com).

On the lighter side of World Water Day, Dancing on Ice presenter Holly Willoughby campaigned for shorter showers and water conservation by… stripping off and taking a public shower in Trafalgar Square – where there is a giant fountain. No water being wasted there, then.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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The ‘Splatellite’ project, in which US officials rammed a missile into a runaway satellite to prevent it from crashing into anything important, like people (see Great Beyond posting; news story; analysis – subscription required), was a complete success, according to Pentagon officials at a US Navy briefing. “None of the debris was larger than a football”, Rear Admiral Alan Hicks said. (Reuters) There have been no reports of any splattelite bits hitting Earth, he added.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Everyone, from star singers to stargazers, is getting tattoos. But have you always fancied some ink but never been able to decide what to get?

Look no further than this photoblog, compiled by the prolific science writer Carl Zimmer when he's not busy filling us in on the rather more important science issues of the day. It's a veritable gallery of the geeky, including tats of mathematical functions, molecular structures, and even an ECG trace of a heart arrhythmia, all lovingly preserved in indelible Indian ink, presumably as a memento should their wearers ever decide to give up being scientists.

Bonus points go to the brave soul who attempted to turn themselves into a walking version of the entire tree of life. That must have been almost as painful and painstaking as evolution itself.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Blood, like any perishable product, has a 'use by' date. But should that date be changed?

A study of 9,000 heart surgery patients in the United States now suggests that using blood older than 2 weeks for transfusion ups a patient’s chances of blood poisoning and organ failure, making him or her 64% more likely to die than those who get newer blood (New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) paper). Those given older blood had a 2.8% death rate during their stay in hospital, compared to 1.7% in those with fresher transfusions (Medical News Today).

"Blood should be classified as outdated earlier than current recommendations," lead researcher Colleen Koch told New Scientist.

The current UK regulations state that blood can be stored for 28 to 49 days depending on the method of collection, processing and storage (The Blood Safety and Quality Regulations 2005). In the United States blood can be stored for up to 6 weeks, though the median storage time is 15 days (LA Times). Reducing that time period might make for safer blood supplies, but it would also seriously reduce the amount of blood available; bad news since blood is already in limited supply. “Fresher blood? Patients take what they can get” says MSNBC.

The better solution may be to do fewer transfusions, reserving them for emergency cases only. The LA Times says such policy shifts are already underway, along with other measures to limit transfusions, such as ‘blood scavenging’ during surgery and drugs that limit operative bleeding. An accompanying editorial in the NEJM discusses these issues.

FDA officials (who regulate blood guidelines in the United States) have been variously quoted as calling the study "provocative" (MSNBC) and "narrow and non-randomized" (LA Times). Regulations are unlikely to change soon.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Posted for Katharine Sanderson

Nature today carries an article about the detection of methane in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet, HD 189733b, using the Hubble space telescope. This is nicely spun as “organic matter found on alien Earth” by ESA.

“This is a crucial stepping stone to eventually characterising prebiotic molecules on planets where life could exist”, said Mark Swain of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, USA, in the press release.

Hang on, let’s not get overexcited here: this is a great result, and hats off to the researchers for getting such a tricky measurement. Detecting anything so far away and so obscured by the brightness of its parent star, is a major achievement.

But I would urge caution, if not a few pinches of salt.

Continue reading "First organic molecule found on extrasolar planet" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The UN has issued a grim warning on the “critical” bird flu situation in Indonesia.

“I am deeply concerned that the high level of virus circulation in birds in the country could create conditions for the virus to mutate and to finally cause a human influenza pandemic,” Joseph Domenech, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s chief veterinary officer, warned yesterday (press release, news coverage from the US, Russia, India, Europe).

Indonesia has a worse H5N1 problem than any other country, with 31 out of its 33 provinces infected, and the virus endemic in Java, Sumatra, Bali and southern Sulawesi. Current vaccines may be failing to protect the 1.4 billion chickens in Indonesia from the disease

“The human mortality rate from bird flu in Indonesia is the highest in the world and there will be more human cases if we do not focus more on containing the disease at source in animals,” says Domenech.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The much hyped Tesla electric sports car finally went into full production this week. This year’s batch of the $100,000 vehicles is already sold out (press release, news coverage).

Although electric vehicles have been around for some time, the humble British milkfloat for example, they have up to now been slow, short range or merely comical. By contrast the Tesla does 0-60 in under 4 seconds, can travel over 300 km and looks like something you wouldn’t die of embarrassment if you were spotted in.

Whether this marks the real arrival of the electric car is far from clear however. And the Tesla is in no way ‘zero emission’, as the company claims...

Continue reading "Tesla roadster: dawn of the electric age or misfire?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Arthur C. Clarke has died in Sri Lanka aged 90. Science has lost not just one of its great popularisers but also one of its great minds.

As well as his immensely popular books, Clarke came up with ideas that have had a profound influence on our lives – such as geo-stationary satellites – and introduced his readers others that may yet be just as influential – such as the space elevator.

Nature had the honour of Clarke writing the first science fiction story to be published in our journal. Improving the neighbourhood details another species’ relief at the destruction of humanity, whose history contains “countless episodes of violence, against their own species and the numerous others”.

It also notes: “It is quite surprising what they were able to achieve, as massive individual entities exchanging information at a pitiably low data rate — often by very short-range vibrations in their atmosphere!”

The Earth has now lost one of our most thoughtful ‘individual entities’ and the information he exchanged with us will be sorely missed.

Nature’s podcast team put together an item for his 90th birthday last year, which we are making available again today as a celebration of his life.

Much more below the fold

Continue reading "RIP Arthur C. Clarke" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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March is the month in which the Arctic sea ice heals as much as it ever will. Even so, the outlook remains grim, scientists reported today.

The floating skin of ice atop the Arctic Ocean expands and shrinks seasonally, with its minimum occurring at the end of the summer in September and the maximum at the end of the winter in March - i.e., now. Currently the sea ice extent isn't the smallest it's ever been at this point in the year -- that dubious distinction goes to the winter of 2005-2006. But at a NASA-sponsored teleconference today, researchers cautioned that even though the extent of the ice isn't at a record low, the amount of perennial ice -- the ice that sticks around from year to year -- is. As of February, only about 30 percent of the sea ice was old stuff that had been around for more than a year.

It may sound like a technicality, but researchers say the age of ice is a good indicator of how robust the ice cover is. The thinner and younger the ice, the more likely it is to melt the following summer. A decade ago, roughly 50 percent of sea ice was the old stuff, and the amount has been dropping steadily ever since (see graphic).

Starting in April, you can watch the progression of this summer's sea ice melt at the National Snow and Ice Data Center's website here. Bookmark it now.

Posted by Alex Witze
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An amateur archaeologist has found an “unprecedented” collection of stone tools by sifting through materials dredged from the bottom of the North Sea (quote from National Geographic; story from ScienceDaily press release). Jan Meulmeester of the Netherlands found 28 stone ‘axes’ (small pieces of stone that have obviously been shaped by human hands into a useful blade) along with remains of animals that they probably butchered in a mass of sand scooped up by a UK construction materials supplier. They are thought to be 100,000 years old, from a time when Britain was not an island and this part of the world was not underwater.

Stone axes like this are hardly uncommon in the British countryside. But it’s odd to find them at sea. National Geographic tells us that “Fishermen have pulled the occasional stone tool or bone from the North Sea, but this trove—dug 8 miles (13 kilometers) off the coast near Great Yarmouth in the United Kingdom—suggests something far more than a random find.”

Apparently the dredging industry’s trade association, The British Marine Aggregate Producers Association, has signed a deal with English Heritage to help ensure that artefacts from English waters get found and preserved (press release). As such it’s slightly confusing why such finds haven’t been made before, and why this one was made in Holland… It also poses the question of whether there’s any dredging going on off the coast of Cornwall, and whether this deal might up the odds of someone finding an infamous gold medal that was apparently chucked into that part of the sea. Dredging News Online (which really exists, with the excellent URL www.sandandgravel.com) has this story, but sadly doesn’t answer my questions.

National Geographic says the find “proves that artifacts from that ancient period remain exceptionally well preserved below the seafloor”. Clearly stone isn’t going to rot or anything while underwater… but perhaps researchers were worried they might be eroded into shapeless pebbles? It doesn’t say.

Image courtesy of Wessex Archaeology

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Researchers have filmed geckos trying to run up walls and taking tumbles when the going gets too tough for their sticky feet. The resulting videos show the ninja-style tail-flipping actions used by the geckos to stay in place or land the right way up (paper; press release; sample news story on BBC; videos by New Scientist on YouTube).

The researchers first report on just how a gecko manages to stay on track when climbing a vertical surface and its front feet hit a slippery patch. The answer? It braces itself with its long tail. As its front hands go flying off – an action that would peel a human climber off her perch – a gecko uses its tails to lever the top half of its body back towards the wall (see pic below). Not such a surprising result, really, but the videos are good fun to watch (YouTube). The researchers say they’ll be using the results to help better design wall-climbing robots (though I can’t help thinking that a wall-climbing robot would do better if it’s ‘tail’ also had feet… ie if it was just a long, flexible millipede).

The more beautiful still photos (see top snap) show how a gecko rights itself when free-falling towards the ground. Cats twist their bodies to ensure that they land on their feet; geckos instead use their tails to whip their bodies around. The freeze-frame still photos of this action (see below) are not wholly illuminating to the casual observer (I can’t really tell what the tail is doing by looking at these snaps alone, though I'm happy to believe the researchers can). But they look darn cool nonetheless.

Top picture credit Robert Full/UC Berkeley, copyright PNAS/NAS 2008
Images courtesy of National Academy of Sciences, PNAS (Copyright 2008).

Posted by Nicola Jones
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A mystery involving Napoleon, Humphry Davy, warring countries and an apparently angry spouse is nearing resolution.

Last week the Royal Society of Chemistry revealed a letter detailing the trouble Davy had getting to Paris to collect a medal from Napoleon at a time when France was fighting a protracted war with Britain. The letter, from a French navy officer to the general secretary of the Institut de France, explained that the British blockade of French ports made it impossible to tell Davy he had been awarded the medal to “promote and share scientific knowledge” (RSC press release).

Davy did eventually travel to France and claim his medal and the RSC wanted to know where it was. After asking the public this question a relative of Davy came forward to say Davy’s wife had thrown it into the sea after his death.

Continue reading "Where’s Humphry’s medal?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The world’s glaciers are losing ice faster than ever before.

New figures from the UN Environment Programme, based on about 30 ‘reference glaciers’, show the average rate of melting and thinning more than doubled between 04/05 and 05/06 (data set). Those who rely on meltwater from glaciers, such as the half a billion residents in the Himalaya-Hindu-Kush region and the other quarter billion downstream could be in serious trouble a few years from now.

“The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight,” says Wilfried Haeberli, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (press release).

Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director, is making even louder ‘warrrrrgh!” noises. He says: “There are many canaries emerging in the climate change coal mine. The glaciers are perhaps among those making the most noise and it is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and takes notice.”

Continue reading "Glacier melt speeding up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A South Korean professor is withdrawing two research papers after apparently admitting he forged data on anti-aging techniques.

Kim Tae-kook, who is called Tae Kook Kim in some coverage, has been suspended from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology since February. He has said he will retract papers in Science and Nature Chemical Biology which early this year raised suspicions of fraud (BBC, AP, Yonhap).

However, in an email to a reporter from Science he stated that a “certain party has twisted this current situation to take an advantage of it”, implying he has not entirely admitted culpability (Science; subscription required).

Continue reading "Research at centre of fraud claims to be withdrawn" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Jeff Tollefson:

Like many recent meetings on energy policy, the National Academies’ Summit on America’s Energy Future, in Washington this week, felt a bit like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for newcomers. Everybody has taken the first step and acknowledged the problem, but there is plenty of confusion regarding the next 11 steps. The challenge is that nobody can open up a little book to figure it out.

The nation’s first energy secretary, the iconic James Schlesinger, set the tone early on with a grim analysis lightened only by a healthy dose of dark humour. He rattled off a host of frightening statistics (to meet projected oil demand in the next couple of decades, we would need to develop the equivalent of nine Saudi Arabias), while outlining a new generation of geopolitical issues surrounding the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia. And then there’s global warming.

On that, Schlesinger compared people to frogs who are perfectly happy to sit in a pot of water as it is brought to a boil – so long as this process proceeds slowly. “We are watching the water being heated very slowly,” he said. “The reality is that the public has to be hit on the head with a two-by-four.” Negotiating the political and technological roadblocks to engineering a sustainable global economy will be tricky, Schlesinger said. “I only take comfort from the belief that the handwriting on the wall is a forgery."

Continue reading "Hot talk about our energy future" »

Posted by Alex Witze
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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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Today is Pi day – in American nomenclature March 14th is 3.14. The official Pi day website is com-π-ling a list of people’s favourite Pi day activities, most seem to revolve around the remarkably obvious eating of pies.

Also celebrating pi day:

A remarkably indepth article from the BBC
Freep.com is running a Pi-themed haiku contest. Somehow they have missed the opportunity to call it a pi-ku contest. Fools!
The NY Times is also running a poetry of Pi competition, and offering a pi-rize
Rush-Henrietta Central School students smashed their maths teachers in the face with pies, which seems quite harsh (Democrat and Chronicle).
Nature article from 2007 on Pi day

Today is also international ‘Talk Like A Physicist Day’ – March 14th is Einstein’s birthday...

Continue reading "Thank God it’s π Day" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Two different bits of hi-tech space kit have malfunctioned embarrassingly this week.

First up: the flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus turns out not to have been the total success it first appeared. A software hiccup meant the Cassini probe’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer failed to collect data when it flew through a geyser spewing from the moon (see Nature’s pre flyby coverage for more on the mission). The other four instruments measuring fields and particles did work, according to Reuters.

“An unexplained software hiccup with Cassini's Cosmic Dust Analyzer instrument prevented it from collecting any data during closest approach, although the instrument did get data before and after the approach,” explains NASA (press release).

Continue reading "Call the space repair man" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A light has been shone on a gene that controls the shape of tomatoes.

In this week’s Science, a team of US researchers report that duplicating the SUN gene - named for the Sun 1642 tomato variety in which it was found – causes these fruit to have an elongated shape.

“We are trying to understand what kind of genes caused the enormous increase in fruit size and variation in fruit shape as tomatoes were domesticated,” says Esther van der Knaap, crop science expert at Ohio State University (press release). “Once we know all the genes that were selected during that process, we will be able to piece together how domestication shaped the tomato fruit — and gain a better understanding of what controls the shape of other very diverse crops, such as peppers, cucumbers and gourds.”

Most of the coverage of this focuses on the fact that scientists have found a gene for wonky tomatoes. Actually van der Knaap’s team have produced something more interesting.

Continue reading "Too much sun makes tomatoes wonky" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Katharine Sanderson

Alligators have developed a special pelvic thrust to help them roll over.

So say researchers at the University of Utah and I am slightly disappointed that the headline “Croc and roll” has not been used by a single press outfit. You’ve got to love a good cliché now and again.

Alligators work the muscles in their diaphragm, pelvis, abdomen and ribs to shift their lungs, and so change their buoyancy. This allows them to perform the devastating dives and rolls that they use to kill their prey without the use of flippers or fins. Sneaky, no?

“The secret to their aquatic agility lies in the use of several muscles, such as the diaphragmatic muscle, to shift the position of their lungs,” says researcher C.G. Farmer (press release). “The gases in the lungs buoy up the animal, but if shifted forward and backward cause the animal to pivot in a seesaw motion. When the animals displace gases to the right or left side of the body, they roll.”

Continue reading "The secret of sneaky alligators' roll over" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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An international team of researchers appears to have proven the old adage about shorter men being insecure.

The team asked 100 men and 100 women how jealous they were in their relationships and asked another 119 male and 230 female students their responses to someone flirting with their partner.

“Taller men tended to be less jealous when confronted with socially influential, physically dominant, or physically attractive rivals,” the researchers write in a paper in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. By contrast the least jealous women were of average height.

The story has been getting wide pick up in the media after being originally publicised by New Scientist. Women’s magazine Marie Claire is asking its readers, “Does your man suffer from ‘short man syndrome’?” Currently the poll stands at yes 22%, no 78%.

Original research in the Nature office does not support a height-jealousy axis. One short Nature reporter said: “I’ve had several girlfriends cheat on me and I didn’t really care.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A British property developer has unveiled an ambitious £25 million project to preserve the world’s butterflies inside a massive geodesic dome.

Clive Farrell wants his 100 metre wide dome to house 10,000 tropical butterflies when it opens in 2011 (press release).

“Butterflies are like the canaries in the coal mine,” he says. “When their environment is under stress, they are the first to suffer and disappear. ... Drastic butterfly losses are continually being reported as we destroy their natural habitats at a frightening pace.”

The Telegraph notes that the dome will be big enough to house seven Stonehenges and will contain a replica of a lost Mayan city, the story is also covered in The Times, the Independent, and PA. Butterfly World – which is a commercial venture – is being back by two of the grande dames of British nature: David Attenborough and David Bellamy.

Continue reading "£25m dome to save butterflies" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A Polish physicist and priest has won the annual million-dollar Templeton Prize for “progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities”.

Michael Heller walks away with $1.7 million for investigating questions including whether the Universe needs to have a cause (press release). This is the largest annual prize given to an individual (just bigger than the $1.6m Nobel), and comes from the same foundation that has previously funded studies into whether prayer can heal the sick, and how a nun's religious experience looks under a brain scanner.

“I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence,” Heller told the New York Times.

According to the London Times:

His theories do not so much offer proof of the existence of God as introduce doubt about the material existence of the world around us. He specialises in complex formulae that make it possible to explain everything, even chance, through mathematical calculation.

Continue reading "Physicist-priest wins $1.7 million prize" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Jeff Tollefson:

As far back as 2005, there were a few lonely calls within the US electric utility industry to strike a deal on global warming legislation -- quickly, while Republicans had a solid grasp on both chambers of Congress and the White House. Now Democrats command both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but the door to compromise has just been slammed shut again.

Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a leading Democrat on environmental issues, offered an unusually candid confirmation Wednesday of what has become the conventional wisdom in Washington -- and it seems that Democrats and environmentalists are in no mood to bargain.

Senate Democrats plan to take up the leading climate bill, authored by Republican John Warner of Virginia and Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, in June. Supporters say the bill would reduce emissions by almost 19 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and roughly 70 percent below 2005 levels by mid-century. Many think Democrats are likely to come up short by a few votes, unless the bill is revised to make it a little more palatable to industry. But Boxer balked at the idea. If the bill is weakened in any way, she said, the leadership will simply pull it off the floor and wait until next year.

“We think, looking ahead, we are going to have a stronger House, a stronger Senate, and a stronger president,” she said. “We have the leverage right now.”

Indeed, Democrats are facing an unhappy electorate and a downtrodden Republican party in November, and they fully expect to gain seats in both chambers. The Democratic case is less clear for the presidency, but the presumed Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, has bucked his own party for years in pushing for action on global warming. Boxer said she is perfectly willing to wait until next year and work with “a president who gets it.”

This hard-line stance is, in the end, unlikely to matter too much. Things are stalled in the House, where leading Democrats have yet to even release a bill. Given that Congress only has a few months to go before the campaign season kicks off in earnest, the window for action is small and closing quickly.

So the Senate discussions in June will be little more than a dry run, but it will give everybody an idea of where everybody else stands – and provide plenty of fodder for campaign advertising come fall.

Posted by Alex Witze
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In perhaps the weirdest computer developments of the year so far, a team of US scientists have managed to hack into a pacemaker. They not only hacked in but managed to mess around in ways that you really wouldn’t want them messing if it was your heart the device was stuck in (read the research paper pdf).

Technically the device they hacked wasn’t just a pacemaker, but an ‘implantable cardioverter defibrillator’, which not only sets a beat but can shock a heart back to the right rhythm. In the US over 100,000 people have such devices (AP).

“Using our own equipment (an antenna, radio hardware, and a PC), we found that someone could also turn off or modify therapy settings stored on the ICD,” write the researchers in a series of FAQs.

“Such a person could render the ICD incapable of responding to dangerous cardiac events. A malicious person could also make the ICD deliver a shock that could induce ventricular fibrillation, a potentially lethal arrhythmia.”

The researchers however insist there is nothing to worry about, they are merely highlighting a loophole that needs to be looked at.

Continue reading "Hacking the heart" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The World Conservation Union / IUCN, guardians of the famous ‘Red List’ of endangered species, has decided that having two names is too confusing.

“From today we are just IUCN,” says its press release. “If you need to explain, it stands for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.”

But read further down the press release and things get complicated again: “A partir d’aujourd’hui, notre nom devient simplement UICN.” [Translation: From today, our name is simply UICN.]

IUCN, UICN? Couldn’t they have fixed this at the same time?

Bizarrely though, if you put UICN into the Google Translator and set it to convert French to English, it changes it to IUCN.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The rosy/communist* image of ants sacrificing personal success for the good of the colony has been dealt a hefty blow by a paper in this week’s PNAS. It seems it is not just human populations who are subsidising their queens...

Researchers have discovered that some ants appear to cheat the system by making their offspring more likely to become breeding queens, rather than have to endure the drudgery of a worker’s life.

“The accepted theory was that queens were produced solely by nurture: certain larvae were fed certain foods to prompt their development into queens and all larvae could have that opportunity,” says Bill Hughes of the University of Leeds (press release).

“But we carried out DNA fingerprinting on five colonies of leaf-cutting ants and discovered that the offspring of some fathers are more likely to become queens than others. These ants have a ‘royal' gene or genes, giving them an unfair advantage and enabling them to cheat many of their altruistic sisters out of their chance to become a queen themselves.”

Continue reading "A royal sex scandal in the ant world" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Transport networks in the United States could be devastated as a result of climate change, according to new reports from government experts and independent scientists.

Rising sea levels, surges, and subsidence will impact on coastal roads, railways and airports. And according to a new report from the US National Academies the current use of previous decades' experience by transport planners is no longer good enough (report summary; full report; sample press coverage from AP, Reuters).

“The time has come for transportation professionals to acknowledge and confront the challenges posed by climate change, and to incorporate the most current scientific knowledge into the planning of transportation systems,” says Henry Schwartz, chair of the committee that drew up the report (press release).

Continue reading "Road, rail and air links under climate cosh" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Nanoparticles from diesel fumes alter brain activity, according to the researchers behind a new study. Several sections of the media have picked this up:

Pollution ‘alters brain function’ – BBC
Diesel fumes can affect your brain, scientists say – Reuters
Pollution alters brain function: Study – Times of India

Paul Borm from Zuyd University in The Netherlands put ten volunteers in a room for an hour, where they were exposed to diesel exhaust. They were also exposed to clean air so the trial was blinded. After 30 minutes changes in the brain’s electrical activity were recorded on electroencephalographs (research paper published in Particle and Fibre Toxicology, abstract / pdf).

“We believe our findings are due to an effect nanoparticles or ‘soot’ particles that are major component of diesel exhaust,” says Borm (press release). “These may penetrate to the brain and affect brain function. We can only speculate what these effects may mean for the chronic exposure to air pollution encountered in busy cities where the levels of such soot particles can be very high.”

The EEG showed a stress response, signalling a change in the way the brain was processing information. This continued after the volunteers had left the room, although measurements were only continued for an hour so it’s not clear for how long.

It isn’t hugely surprising that your brain starts behaving differently when you’ve been doing the equivalent of sucking on a tailpipe for 30 minutes, and ten people is hardly a large study. Still, as Ken Donaldson, a respiratory expert from the University of Edinburgh, told the BBC, “... such physiological changes do warrant investigation because there could indeed be a long-term effect. It's a very interesting, and potentially important, study."

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This is just too cruel. Ko San was unveiled as Korea’s first astronaut last year to great fanfare. Now he has been dropped for breaching Russia’s strict training facility rules, apparently accidentally.

According to Associated Press Ko committed two offences: accidentally sending his training manual home (and thus outside the training facility) and obtaining another manual he was not supposed to have via a Russian colleague. “The Russian space agency has stressed that a minor mistake and disobedience can cause serious consequences,” Lee Sang-mok, a minister at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology says.

According to the BBC the Russian Federal Space Agency requested Ko be dropped.

This is good news for Yi So-yeon, who has been selected in his place.

Continue reading "Russia forces Korea to replace astronaut" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Entries in this year’s Wellcome Image Awards go on display tomorrow in London (here). The annual award for images created by scientists has thrown up some truly remarkable winners this year.

My favourite: Annie Cavanagh’s fly standing on sugar crystals.

“I think it’s really important to express science for the public in an artistic fashion so that they relate to something that they think is beautiful as well as scientific,” says Cavanagh, who works for the School of Pharmacy, part of the University of London.

More images from the collection – which will also go on show in Tokyo later this year – below the fold. One criticism: it would be nice to have a little more detail from the artists on how these amazing images were created.

Continue reading "Are you ready for your close up?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A senior member of the Vatican has drawn up a new list of mortal sins, and science features prominently. Not all of science of course, but Catholic researchers might face some tough choices.

In an interview with the Vatican’s newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, senior cleric Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary which is in charge of confession, was asked “What are the new sins in your opinion?” Along with drug use and social injustice he listed genetic manipulation and experiments on humans.

Girotti also gave a speech on the subject and is quoted in the Times as saying, “You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbour’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos.”

Continue reading "Genetic modification joins lust on mortal sins list" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Heidi Ledford

It’s no secret: for years now, the US National Institutes of Health has had a tough case of biobank envy. The United Kingdom has a biobank. So does Japan. And Canada, Iceland, Denmark, and Germany. But a national biobank would come with a hefty pricetag and the United States hasn’t yet committed to the project, although Francis Collins has published a commentary or two about the need for one.

Still, it never hurts to be prepared. Last Saturday, researchers held the first of five town-hall meetings to find out how the US public would feel about participating in a national biobank. The inaugural meeting was in Kansas City, Missouri, with additional meetings to come in Arizona, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi.

A national biobank would compile medical information from hundreds of thousands of participants, and would store blood and other biological samples for future analysis. Such problems inevitably raise questions about privacy protection and so, for the past few years, researchers like Joan Scott of Johns Hopkins University have been consulting the public to learn what concerns would-be biobank participants would have.

Continue reading "The traveling biobank show" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Parents in the UK are fine-tuned to be suspicious of childhood vaccines, thanks mainly to massive publicity over reported links between the measles mumps rubella (MMR) jab and autism. So pushing a human papillomavirus vaccine to prevent cervical cancer was always going to be a tricky prospect, not least due to fears in some sectors that it will encourage children to go out and have sex.

Now Gardasil, one HPV vaccine, is on the market. The UK government is keen on it, but given recent history you’d think advisors would pick their words pretty carefully.

Continue reading "Vaccination and the choice agenda" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Climate change could lead Europe into a conflict with Russia, according to a report from Europe’s foreign policy leaders.

The report won’t be officially presented to the European Council until Friday, but it’s already all over the media. Apparently Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European Council’s foreign policy chief and the European commissioner for external relations respectively, warn that competition for energy and the “threat multiplier” of climate change is likely to produce “potential conflicts”.

First picked up last week by Reuters, AFP, and others, the report hit the front page of the Guardian today, prompting another round of coverage. It states:

Climate change is best viewed as a threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability. The core challenge is that climate change threatens to overburden states and regions which are already fragile and conflict-prone. The risks include political and security risks that directly affect European interests.

The report cites several examples of climate-linked conflict, including fighting over resources in Darfur, migration due to flooding in Bangladesh, and arguments over who owns the energy riches of the Arctic (see here for a story about Russia’s stunt of planting a flag on the seabed at the North Pole).

From the extracts being quoted, though, the report doesn’t seem to go further than other discussions of the subject have; see here for a Nature Reports Climate Change feature from last year on the topic. However fact that diplomats of Solana’s level are saying this is something of an escalation.

Image: NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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An amazing tale of survival has emerged from the forests of Liberia, where camera traps have revealed that pygmy hippos have endured despite two civil wars and a 90% loss of their habitat.

Only one hippo was snapped walking past one of the automatic cameras, and later returning for a second photo call, but given the rarity of these animals that’s quite a find, according to Ben Collen, a researcher at the Zoological Society of London.

“The pygmy hippo is an extraordinary, mysterious creature that has almost never been seen in the wild,” says Collen (press release). “We were delighted to discover that a population still persists there, but remain highly concerned for the species, which continues to face significant threats from poaching and habitat degradation.”

According to the ZSL, forestry and mining have devastated the Upper Guinean forest and only 10% of it now remains. Of this remnant 40% is in Liberia.

On his story about the trip, on the ZSL’s Edge of Existence website, Collen says

We believe these to be the first photographic records of wild pygmy hippos in Liberia, and perhaps the second ever globally (the only previous picture we can trace is from Sierra Leone, in 2006). It’s fantastic, but only the start. Our cameras remain in the field, and we only downloaded a subset of the cameras before we returned.

Previous EDGE story on the Great Beyond: World’s weirdest amphibians

Image: ZSL

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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Researchers examining Australian damselfish have found small fry with asymmetrical ear bones are less likely to make it back to their reef homes after a stint out at sea (research paper, press release). This could be because fish at sea listen for the sounds of home in order to navigate (see the BBC coverage for more on this angle).

Stress factors such as temperature and acidity will probably increase the number of fish with funny ears, they say. Increased acidity reduces the amount of calcium around for making ear bones, and having to regulate internal pH against changing water pH will also have a negative impact (Reuters, New Scientist).

As warmer and more acidic oceans are likely to result from global warming, more fish are going to be swimming around lost.

“Five years ago we used to see them [damselfish] in the thousands; now they are not so plentiful. A lot more work needs to be done, but I suspect it has something to do with the development of ears in the fish,” says paper author Monica Gagliano, of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (The Australian).

Another study out of AIMS this week finds that Porites corals’ growth has slowed by 21% over the last 16 years (press release, research paper).

Image: NOAA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Earlier this week an interesting maths press release popped up in my inbox. Despite the nice premise – researcher solves problem that has vexed community for 140 years – I didn’t cover it.

The reason for this was the actual research paper was nearly a year old. Who, I reasoned, would want to read about something a year old. Well plenty of people did cover it, and there has since emerged and interesting twist...

Science’s coverage adds a classic science bun-fight: a row over who actually got there first.

Continue reading "Who really solved 140-year old maths problem?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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We were pretty critical of the Sea Shepherd conservation group this week after their chemical attack on the Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru.

Now Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin, is claiming the Japanese shot him. The bullet, he says, was stopped by a protective vest he was wearing (BBC, CNN, press release).

Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research has denied anyone fired at a man it calls “Sea Shepherd cult leader Paul Watson”. It says member of the Japanese coast guard threw thunderflashes in response to escalating violence from the anti-whaling protesters.

Continue reading "Shooting claim in whaling fight" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Are you getting bored of these yet? Below the fold, a slight change of emphasis as we shift from songs about science to songs by scientists. Richard Feynman demands orange juice and the British Antarctic Survey come over all creative.

Continue reading "Songs about science part V: singing scientists" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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If you read Brendan Maher’s Nature feature from a week or so ago you would have come across this rather arresting introduction:

In 1987 Rip Ballou taped an ice-cream carton to his arm. The young US Army doctor was doing his bit for science; inside the carton five hungry mosquitoes set about doing theirs.

Now you can undergo a similar experience. A new research facility is being set up in Seattle: the Human Challenge Centre. What they plan to ‘challenge’ volunteers with is malaria.

After being given a potential malaria vaccine, victims, sorry test subjects, will be bitten by infected mosquitoes. Then researchers from the Malaria Vaccine Initiative and the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute will see if the vaccine is any good (press release pdf).

Fox News thinks you’ll get about $2,000 for taking part, AP thinks it could be up to $4,000.

Continue reading "Get malaria, get paid" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Humans have an innate ability to spot snakes, according to University of Virginia researcher Vanessa LoBue.

She asked both adults and children to find a target picture from a set of nine images, these targets were either snakes, flowers, frogs or caterpillars. Both young and old detected the snakes faster than the other three (research abstract).

Snakes ... why did it have to be snakes? Here’s why: “Our finding matches with the evolutionary theory that humans have a pre-disposition to quickly identify a snake. Throughout the course of human evolution, humans who could quickly visually detect the presence of snakes were able to survive and reproduce, thereby passing this capability on in the gene pool,” says LoBue (Feb 29th press release; hat tip yesterday’s LiveScience story).

She believes that the three-year olds used in this research wouldn’t have had much negative experiences of snakes and says those with no fear of snakes were just as quick to identify them. This might suggest an inate ability but I’m not entirely convinced it can’t just be explained by exposure to negative portrayals of snakes (the Jungle Book movie anyone?).

More snakes
Man wins right to keep 50 snakes in his house (WESH)
Cold snakes fall out of trees (Nature)

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Scientists in Germany are facing jail for calling themselves ‘Doctor’, despite having PhDs.

According to Chemical & Engineering News at least seven researchers working for the high-profile Max Planck Society are facing charges of impersonating a doctor, which carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail. Under Germany law, the magazine says, only those who have received a doctoral degree from a European institution can call themselves doctor without special permission.

“I am not allowed to be publicly listed as ‘Dr. Baldwin’. To obey the law, I must refer to myself as ‘Ian Baldwin, PhD, Cornell University, Ithaca (NY)’,” says Dr Ian Baldwin Ian Baldwin, PhD, Cornell University, Ithaca (NY), a director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology who was charged in January.

Someone should make sure and warn holidaying Italians. It’s not uncommon for the title Dottore to be attached to people with mere undergraduate degrees there.

And someone should definitely update Wikipedia, which currently states: “In German speaking countries, all holders of doctorate degrees are appropriately addressed as ‘Dr X’ in all social situations.”

Spot the difference: left = a medical doctor (NIH) / right = a scientist (Getty)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Climate change sceptics wrapped up their latest high-profile conference yesterday. This should be fun.

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change was organized by the Heartland Institute. In its own words the institute is there to “to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems”.

In the words of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Dateline Earth blog it is “probably the biggest basher around when it comes to the thought that maybe, just perhaps, humans might be affecting the climate”.

Every indication is that this conference was not in the slightest bit interested in discussing the true state of play with regards global warming (there are already conferences for that sort of thing). This was an opportunity to sceptics to reinforce their scepticism, and nothing was going to change their minds (see Real Climate’s pre-conference post for more on this).

So with that in mind I’ve divided this blog post into two parts. If you don’t believe in global warming: read part one. If you totally believe in global warming: skip to part two.

Continue reading "Climate sceptics and a multiple choice blog post" »

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When is it non-violent to throw acid at someone? When he’s a Japanese whaler, apparently. Crew on the Sea Shepherd group ship the Steve Irwin hurled a number of unpleasant projectiles at the Nisshin Maru on Monday.

Quite how serious the projectiles were depends on your point of view. The BBC makes them sound not too bad, calling them “containers filled with a mild form of acid made from rotten butter” along with what the protesters call “slippery chemicals”.

This acid is butyric acid and it is extremely smelly (see the Molecule of the Day blog). Here’s some of the safety information on it:

Harmful if swallowed or inhaled. Corrosive. Extremely unpleasant smell may cause nausea. Liquid may burn skin and eyes. Readily absorbed through the skin. Severe skin, eye and respiratory irritant.

Four of the crew of the Nisshin Maru who have injuries might dispute the “non-violent claim”. “Sea Shepherd is not an environmental group. It is a terrorist vigilante group that operates outside of the law,” says Minoru Morimoto, director general of Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research (press release).

Continue reading "Acid attack on Japanese whaling ship" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We tend to think of hibernation as response to the cold; but for some fish it’s a response to the dark. Hamish Campbell, lead author of a paper on the new discovery in PLOS One (coverage in Daily Telegraph, Reuters) says that hibernation in the Antarctic cod (Notothenia coriiceps) is due to low light not low temperatures – which are pretty steady all year round in the Antarctic.

“It seems unlikely that the small winter reductions in water temperature that do occur are causing the measured decrease in metabolism,” says Campbell, formerly of the UK’s University of Birmingham and now at Australia’s University of Queensland (press release). “However, there are big seasonal changes in light levels, with 24 hour light during summer followed by months of winter darkness – so the decrease in light during winter may be driving the reduction in metabolic rates.”

By monitoring the cod’s swimming, growth, feeding and heart rate Campbell and colleagues found the fish were dormant for much of winter, only returning to summer levels of activity for a few hours every 4-12 days. This, they can’t resist suggesting, is equivalent to “‘putting themselves on ice’ during winter months until food resources improved”.

However, as fellow author Keiron Fraser of the British Antarctic Survey points out, “The hibernation-like state they enter in winter is presumably a mechanism for reducing their energy requirements to the bare minimum. The interesting question we still have to answer is why these fish greatly reduce feeding in winter when food is still available.”

Watch the BAS chainsawing through the ice and collecting fish on this video.

Image: British Antarctic Survey

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Sweeeet. Two researchers from the United States have uncovered what happens in brain of a jazz pianist when he or she goes off on an improvisational spree. And it looks as if all inhibitions are switched off in the name of music.

Charles Limb and Allen Braun put jazz musicians in an MRI machine and got them to play things they already knew on piano and to improvise. They then subtracted the results for memorized tunes from the results from improvisation, which should reveal only the parts of the brain used when riffing.

Cool fact: Limb and Braun had to create a special piano with no metal parts that could be used inside the MRI machine’s powerful magnetic fields (pictured below).

Creative juices flowing not only shut down the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain linked to self-censoring, but also fired up the medial prefrontal cortex, linked to self expression (research paper).

Continue reading "This is your brain on jazz" »

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NASA has taken snapshots of avalanches down a steep Martian slope. Researchers were actually looking at the Northern-spring thaw in the planet’s carbon dioxide frost when they spotted the cloud of dust and ice resulting from the rock and ice fall (NASA press release, news coverage from USA, China, Australia).

This cloud can be seen in the middle of the right hand side of this false colour picture. The top of the cliff is on the left of the picture – the white stuff is carbon-dioxide frost). Slightly lower down the slope, to the right of the frost, the pink/brown layers are ice and dust (more details from NASA).

Continue reading "Avalanche on Mars: Film at 11" »

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The troubled body in charge of a large chunk of UK physics funding has just announced what it likes and what it doesn’t. Faced with something of a budget shortfall (see Nature from December, January, January again, and again) the Science and Technology Facilities Council has now ranked its projects.

STFC’s new Programmatic Review document rates projects as high, medium-high, medium-lower, and lower priority. “Obviously those in the lower categories are those most at risk,” the document says, ominously (PDF).

So what does it seem UK physicists can do without? Here are some of the lower priority projects:

Gemini [ground based telescope]
UKIRT [“world’s largest telescope dedicated solely to infrared astronomy”]
Ground-based Solar Terrestrial Physics facilities
CLF lasers for science programme [provides lasers for science]
High Performance Computing Operations

Luckily for some of those about to get their marching orders, the STFC is quick to point out it’s not because they're not doing good science. It’s because some of the lower priority projects don't have “strategic fit to STFC”.

Continue reading "UK Physicists – check your job security here" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This headline isn’t the start of a joke. Meet the first known six legged octopus.

Obviously it can’t be called an octopus, even though that is its species (actually a lesser octopus, Eledone cirrhosa). As the Daily Telegraph points out: “‘Octopus’ meaning ‘eight-legged’, it would be similar to talking about a ‘three-wheeled bicycle’.”

So staff at Blackpool Sea Life Centre have named it Henry the Hexapus. He ended up in their aquarium after being found in a lobster pot off the north coast of Wales, although they didn’t notice the missing legs until later.

Henry is thought to result from a genetic defect rather than an unfortunate encounter with something sharp.

“We’ve scoured the internet and talked to lots of other aquariums and no-one has ever heard of another case of a six-legged octopus,” says displays supervisor Carey Duckhouse (various, including Blackpool Gazette, AFP).

Image: courtesy of Blackpool Sea Life Centre

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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If you are reading this blog as a distraction from submitting research for publication, it’s your lucky day. Martijn Schuemie and Jan Kors of the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam have come up with a tool to make life easier.

Rather than racking your brain to decide which journal is most likely to publish your work, their computer program – called Journal/Author Name Estimator or Jane –will take a paper’s title or abstract and tell you where to take it.

“With an exponentially growing number of articles being published every year, scientists can use some help in determining which journal is most appropriate for publishing their results, and which other scientists can be called upon to review their work,” Schuemie and Kors explain in a paper from the Bioinformatics journal.

Evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen, who is also academic editor-in-chief at PLoS Biology, reckons Jane is “freaky and cool” (blog). Over on Nature Network one of our editors, Maxine Clarke, is not so enthused:

I think it is possibly quite counter-productive to use this kind of text-based comparison system on its own. At Nature, for example, we are looking for novel results, not something similar to what we have just published.
...
I just tried out Jane and was advised to submit my paper to the Saudi Medical Journal—the abstract I used had nothing to do with medicine, and why Saudi I have no idea!

Continue reading "Picker produces paper publication proposals" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A skin secretion from a bizarre shrinking frog could one day help people with diabetes, according to Yasser Abdel-Wahab.

Abdel-Wahab, a researcher at the University of Ulster, is the lead on a team that has found a synthetic version of a peptide secreted by the paradoxical frog to prevent infection seems to stimulate insulin release (news coverage from BBC, PA, The Times, Belfast Telegraph).

The paradoxical frog, Pseudis paradoxa, is so called because it shrinks with age. While tadpoles can be nearly 30 cm long adults rarely exceed 4 cm.

It’s not clear exactly how the researchers demonstrated that the peptide stimulates release of insulin. The results will apparently be presented at this week’s Diabetes UK conference but the press release doesn’t say whether it was tested in animals or in Petri dishes.

“Now we need to take this a step further and put our work into practice to try and help people with Type 2 diabetes,” says Abdel-Wahab (Ulster press release). “More research is needed, but there is a growing body of work around natural anti-diabetic drug discovery that, as you can see, is already yielding fascinating results.”

Prize for getting the obvious pun in first goes to the Daily Mail:

The treatment of diabetes could be about to take a leap forward with the help of a South American frog.

Image: Yasser Abdel-Wahab / University of Ulster

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Null Hypothesis blog has just hosted an entire (albeit entirely virtual) festival of songs about science.

Pick of the bunch: Jonny Berliner’s bleak analysis of cosmology, ‘Dark Matter,’ is great. Just download the whole thing though, it’s all well worth a listen.

On show here, another track featured on festival, Professor Science performing ‘Sweet Home Apparatus’, an ode to the Golgi apparatus. Someone needs to organise this festival in the real world...

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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