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
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (2)

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
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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" »

Posted by Mike Hopkin
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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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