The Great Beyond
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It turns out that the mysterious circle of giant stones that stand in the south west of England are, and have always been, tombstones. This latest news from Stonehenge has picked up loads of coverage since the announcement by Mike Parker Pearson and National Geographic, yesterday.
Over here in the UK we’re used to our universities looking like paupers compared to America’s. Hell, every university looks like a pauper compared to the Ivy League.
But the University of Oxford has had enough. It wants to raise £1.25 billion (US$2.5bn) for new buildings and faculty (press release).
Even this won’t be enough to push the university up into the big league. Bloomberg points out that Harvard’s endowment stood at $34.9 billion on 30 June while Oxford’s stood at a paltry £3.4 billion (US$6.7bn).
Continue reading "University of Oxford says: show me the money" »
Bacteria are thriving on rocks right at the bottom of the ocean. In fact, they’re thriving by eating the rocks and they could be the biggest bacterial food web on the planet
Cara Santelli and colleagues report in this week’s Nature that prokaryotic cell abundances on seafloor basalt rocks are between three and four orders of magnitude greater the sea water above them. Three orders of magnitude!
“Initial research predicted that life could in fact exist in such a cold, dark, rocky environment,” says Santelli (NSF press release). “But we really didn't expect to find it thriving at the levels we observed.”
The team also looked at the bacterial diversity of the rocks and found it equivalent to that of farm soil. They looked at rocks around the East Pacific Rise and Hawaii and found the same thing at both locations.
“A 60,000-kilometre seam of basalt is exposed along the mid-ocean ridge spreading system, representing potentially the largest surface area for microbes to colonize on Earth,” says fellow author Katrina Edwards (USC press release).
As the Deep Sea News blog notes:
Take awhile for that to sink in...because what that means is that our understanding of carbon cycling and deep-sea systems is missing an entire food source and web.
Image: NOAA/WHOI
City folk have better carbon footprints than their country cousins, according to a new report.
Produced by the Brookings Institution, the report is all over the US press although it doesn’t yet appear to be online. Researchers looked at electricity, heating and transportation in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in 2005, according to AP. They then compared this data to the US national average.
While urbanites put out 2.47 tons of carbon dioxide on average, the overall US figure was 2.87 tons, a clear 0.4 ton victory for the concrete junglists. The worst area looked at was Lexington-Fayette, at 3.4 tons, while the best was Honolulu at 1.3 (Gannett News Service).
There are a few other surprises out there.
Continue reading "City better than country for carbon footprints " »
Sometimes science just disappoints you.
Apparently giant flying reptile Azhdarchid didn’t swoop down from the skies and flap off with its terrified screaming prey writhing in its vicious beak. Instead the ptersosaur was a ground based stalking animal, according to researchers at the University of Portsmouth (Guardian, Xinhua, Science News).
“Azhdarchids first became reasonably well known in the 1970s but how they lived has been the subject of much debate,” says Darren Naish (press release).
As so many different feeding strategies have been suggested, Naish and colleague Mark Witton sat down and had a detailed look at the beast. “All the details of their anatomy, and the environment their fossils are found in, show that they made their living by walking around, reaching down to grab and pick up animals and other prey,” he says.
In a new paper in PLOS One Naish and Witton set out a number of problems with other explanations: Azhdarchids don’t have cranial specialisations such as shock absorbing for skim feeding, their jaws are dissimilar to sediment probers, and their footprints show they had small feet which would be unsuitable for wading.
Continue reading "Giant flying reptile not much of a flyer" »
A serious problem has arisen on the International Space Station. The toilet, which uses a fan to move waste in the absence of gravity, is broken.
“Troubleshooting continues on the Russian ASU toilet facility,” notes the latest status report. “Almost all system components have been changed out at this time, including the separator with no improvement in function.”
The NY Times notes that the solid waste collector is working normally but the liquid waste collector isn’t.
According to AP, a “bag-like” back-up system is in operation. “Like any home anywhere the importance of having a working bathroom is obvious,” says NASA spokesman Allard Beutel.
MSNBC says a “major new unit” will be launched later this year. I suspect it can’t arrive soon enough for the ISS crew.
Image: Corbis
American kids are fat. But at least they don’t seem to be getting any fatter.
A major study published this week by the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that 16.3% of kids aged between 2 and 19 were either at or above the 95th percentile on BMI-for-age growth charts between 2003 and 2006. That’s a science-y way of saying they’re too damn big – they meet one of the definitions of paediatric obesity.
Over the same period, 31.9% were at or above the 85th percentile and 11.3% were at or above the 97th percentile.
However, the study didn’t find any significant trend between 1999 and 2006.
This is a rare example of a gynandromorph moth, recently hatched at the Natural History Museum in London. While the left wings of this Antheraea frithi are female, the right wings are clearly male.
“Gynandromorphs are incredibly rare,” says museum moth researcher Ian Kitching (press release). “We only have 200 such specimens in our collection of some 9 million butterflies and moths.”
Sadly for this poor moth, there really is a dividing line down its body. The female half has a partial set of female organs and the male half a partial set of male organs. Neither function.
“The bilateral gynandromorphy that this moth shows is the result of an error involving the sex chromosomes at the first cell division,” says Kitching. “Sometimes, such errors occur later in development, whence the gynandromorphy is mosaic and the separation into the two sexes isn't so clearly defined.”
Image: Natural History Museum
The first DNA sequence of a human woman has been announced by the Leiden University Medical Centre.
In keeping the growing tradition of self-sequencing, a la Craig Venter, the subject of this sequencing was one of LUMC’s own employees: clinical geneticist Marjolein Kriek. “If anyone could properly consider the ramifications of knowing his or her sequence, it is a clinical geneticist,” says team leader Gert-Jan B van Ommen (press release in Dutch, English mirror on ScienceDaily).
There’s no publication of this genome yet and it doesn’t seem to be in GenBank. It’s also not yet clear why Kriek was selected, unless she was the only female member of Ommen’s team.
Yesterday NASA Watch noted that the twitter feed for NASA’s Phoenix probe was proving immensely popular and was then standing at number 63 in the Twitterholic rankings. By the time I checked in today it had risen to 42, crushing former Black Flag-man Henry Rollins under its gently settling robot feet.
The last update from Phoenix as this post went up read:
Sun is still up (in the arctic land of Martian midnight sun) but got to get some sleep now. I'll see you all on Sol 2.
Unlike the Mars rovers, Phoenix doesn’t yet have a LiveJournal page. Nature’s Eric Hand has all the Phoenix updates you might desire though.
As reported pretty much everywhere, NASA's Phoenix lander made it down to Mars OK, and has already started sending back pictures. Emily Lakdawalla is blogging up a storm from JPL at the Planetary Society blog, and Nature's own Eric Hand is doing great work from Tucson, where the science operations team is.
The landing seems to have been a touch down range of what was anticipated, with parachute deployment a little later than foreseen and the spacecraft ending up close to the edge of its "landing ellipse", which is to say further from the nominal aim point than expected. That doesn't seem to be of the remotest concern to anyone, though. What's exciting is that the system for landing using retrorockets rather than airbags (as used by all the other landers since the 1976 Vikings) seems to have worked perfectly.
The landscape looks very much as expected, with a texture which is distinctly different from that seen by previous missions and which seems to bode well for the chances of finding ice underneath.
What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...
Do you want to follow the NASA Phoenix mission’s doom descent to the red planet? If all goes well the probe will rise from the flames of its hypersonic entry on Sunday.
Nature’s Eric Hand is blogging the tears, joy and science live from the University of Arizona’s special Phoenix nest in Tucson. His first post should be up before you can say ‘touchdown’ on our In the Field blog.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
NOAA’s hurricane predictions for this year say there is a 65% probability of an above normal season.
There’s a 25 percent probability of a ‘near normal season’, leaving just a 10% chance of a quiet year (press release). In full-on statistics mode the agency goes on to state there is “60 to 70 percent chance of 12 to 16 named storms, including 6 to 9 hurricanes and 2 to 5 major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale)”.
This pretty much accords with predictions from controversial Colorado State University hurricane man William Gray. Gray has been predicting eight hurricanes with four of these being major.
We may be witness something of a change in the world of the storm seers though...
Scientists have found ‘corrosive water’ off the coast of North America, a result of carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere. This is reputedly the first time acidified ocean water has been detected on the continental shelf of the western United States and – surprise, surprise – it’s that climate change that’s causing it.
“Acidification of the Earth’s ocean water could have far-reaching impacts on the health of our near-shore environment, and on the sustainability of ecosystems that support human populations through nourishment and jobs,” says Richard Spinrad, assistant administrator for oceanic and atmospheric research at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In Science oceanographers report the first in what is planned to be a biennial sequence of observations and studies of carbon along the west coast of North America. “Our results show for the first time that a large section of the North American continental shelf is impacted by ocean acidification,” says the paper.
What’s halfway between a frog and a salamander? According to Canadian researcher Jason Anderson, it’s Gerobatrachus hottoni, which walked the Earth almost 300 million years ago.
“It’s a perfect little frogamander,” says Anderson, a researcher at the University of Calgary (Reuters).
The frogamander, he says, will settle what has been a bone of some contention: whether modern amphibians, frogs and salamanders all evolved from one ancient group of temnospondyls.
“The dispute arose because of a lack of transitional forms. This fossil seals the gap,” says Anderson (press release). This ‘missing link’ is reported in this week’s Nature.
It’s a good week for dino news. First up: the first ever dinosaur tracks on the Arabian Peninsula.
“No dinosaur trackways had been found in this area previously. It’s really a blank spot on the map,” said Anne Schulp of the Maastricht Museum of Natural History (press release).
In the journal PLOS One, Schulp and colleagues report finding the tracks of one large ornithopod dinosaur and 11 sauropods in Yemen. The tracks were first spotted by a Yemeni journalist in 2003, 50 kilometres north of the capital of Sana’a (which, incidentally, is one of the most beautiful places on Earth).
There may be more to come, the paper notes:
Taken together, these discoveries present the most evocative window to date into the evolutionary history of dinosaurs of the Arabian Peninsula. Given the limited Mesozoic terrestrial record from the region, this discovery is of both temporal and geographic significance, and massive exposures of similarly-aged outcrops nearby offer great promise for future discoveries.
Continue reading "Dinosaur round up: Yemen, Colorado, Alaska" »
Swiss inventors have unveiled an amazing jumping robot, which they claim could explore inaccessible areas on other planets or help rescue missions here on Earth. Inspired by the grasshopper, the 7 gram robot can jump 27 times its body size, 1.4 meters (Daily Telegraph, MSNBC).
“This biomimetic form of jumping is unique because it allows micro-robots to travel over many types of rough terrain where no other walking or wheeled robot could go,” says Dario Floreano, of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (press release). “These tiny jumping robots could be fitted with solar cells to recharge between jumps and deployed in swarms for extended exploration of remote areas on Earth or on other planets.”
A tiny battery powers an equally tiny motor that tensions springs. These then power the robot’s jumps. The robot, which appears not to be named at the moment, is being presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation today in Pasadena.
More highlights from the conference below the fold.
NASA has released a map of 100 explosions on the Moon, observed in just the last two and half years (news coverage). If you want to live up there, you’d better get a hard hat.
“They’re explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the Moon,” says Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center (press release). “A typical blast is about as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT and can be photographed easily using a backyard telescope.”
NASA started up its Moon explosion monitoring towards the end of 2005. As they were planning to send astronauts back there “it seemed like a good idea to measure how often the Moon was getting hit”, says Rob Suggs, also at the Marshall centre.
The NASA team found there is no time of year when impacts fall to zero. Meaning if, and it’s a big if, there is to be a space colony on the Moon, they’ll need some form of protection.
Meteoroids hit the Moon so fast, normally at least 13,000 m/s, that they heat up the surface enough that it glows. Hence you get an ‘explosion’ despite a lack of oxygen.
Video of an impact below the fold.
Posted for Mike Hopkin
After two days of debate, not to mention weeks of rancorous lobbying, British MPs have voted on four controversial pieces of fertility legislation in the ways that research advocates and pro-choice campaigners had wanted. Parliament rejected calls, mainly from religious groups, to remove the more permissive aspects of Britain's new legislation on fertility and embryology.
Of most interest to the research community will be the decision to go ahead with legalizing the creation of hybrid embyros, potentially giving researchers a much more ready supply of embryonic stem cells.
Coming at the end of a highly charged debate - witness the contrasting takes of the liberal Guardian and conservative Daily Mail - the vote will undoubtedly be seen in some quarters as a victory for science over religion.
Continue reading "British fertility debate ‘a vote for science over religion’?" »
The Archaeological Institute of America has elected Harrison Ford to its board of directors, on the basis that he has “played a significant role in stimulating the public's interest in archaeological exploration” (press release, news coverage).
We expect to shortly to have it confirmed that the American Mathematical Society is electing Matt Damon, that Jude Law and Ethan Hawke are being recruited as senior advisers to the National Human Genome Research Institute and that the American Institute of Mining and NASA are jointly honouring Bruce Willis. More news of nominations from our readers eagerly expected…
Pesky British hacks. Let’s say you produce a scientific study with a conclusion like “exposure to cell phones prenatally-and, to a lesser degree, postnatally-was associated with behavioural difficulties such as emotional and hyperactivity problems around the age of school entry”.
Before you know it we’ll be putting out headlines such a ‘Warning: Using a mobile phone while pregnant can seriously damage your baby’ and ‘Mobile phone danger to unborn child: Use could cause behavioural problems’.
This has seriously annoyed the author of that study.
“That’s clearly not what we wanted to suggest, and we think that there is no reason that pregnant women should be very alarmed at the findings we have,” says Jorn Olsen, professor of epidemiology at UCLA (America’s ABC News).
Continue reading "Researchers hit back a mobile phone research reporting" »
If you're going to take grants from the US Air Force, be careful who you work with. That's the lesson for J. Reece Roth, a retired engineer accused of supplying military secrets to China via his graduate student. According to the Associated Press, the 70-year old, formerly of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, has been indicted on charges that he violated the Arms Control Export Act and defrauded the Air Force.
I wrote about the case in 2006, when Reece Roth first came under suspicion of passing secrets. The good professor was working on ways in which ionized gas, known as plasma, could be used to reduce drag on a wing. The idea could potentially be used to shorten the length of takeoffs and landings for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. He had worked with a Chinese graduate student named Xin Dai, which he claimed the Air Force knew about.
But the United States seems to think otherwise. In its complaint, the government says they were never notified of Xin's work on the project. They also allege that Roth took sensitive documents with him on a 2006 trip to China.
Roth isn't talking now because of the indictment, but back when I spoke to him he denied both charges: "This whole thing has been an Orwellian experience," he said.
If convicted, it could get worse for the former engineer. He would face more than 150 years in prison and millions in fines.
Image: an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle/USAF
If you happen to be flying over a Melbourne suburb in the near future and you see a giant white kangaroo, don’t be alarmed. It’s science.
The 32-metre by 18-metre cardboard ’roo is part of an experiment to measure albedo, the amount of light reflected back into space.
“We call it our kangaroo from space because two satellites flew over [and] what they were doing was measuring the amount of light reflected from our kangaroo,” says Patricia Vickers-Rich, of Monash University (AFP). “We were supposed to put out a square... and we thought, ‘Well, why don’t we do an animal?’”
Today’s scientific disappointment: a giant rodent thought to weigh over 1,000 kilograms that once rampaged along the South American coast was not actually that big, according to a Canadian researcher.
Earlier this year the Proceedings of the Royal Society B carried a paper detailing the monster rodent Josephoartigasia monesi, based on a 53 centimeter-long skull discovered in Uruguay. Researchers Andrés Rinderknecht and Ernesto Blanco said their beast was a fair bit larger than the previous king rodent, the weedy 700 kg Phoberomys pattersoni.
But in this week’s Proc B, Virginie Millien takes issue with this claim, saying the body mass of J. Monesi “may have been overestimated” (I’ll link to the papers when they’re published online).
“J. monesi is certainly the largest rodent ever described, but, based on these calculations, its body mass may have been as low as 350 kg,” she says.
Continue reading "Rodent of unusual size ‘not quite so unusual’" »
Birds on Gough Island in the South Atlantic are being threatened by an invasive population of mice. Not just any mice though, as the Guardian reports...
What is horrifying ornithgologists [sic] is that the humble house mouse which landed on Gough has somehow evolved to two or even three times the size of an ordinary British house mice [sic2], and instead of being a vegetarian, eating insects and seeds, has adapted itself to become a carnivore, eating albatross, petrel and shearwater chicks alive in their nests. They are now believed to be the largest mice found anywhere in the world.
The mice, which sometimes attack bird nests in groups, are completely out of control, the paper warns. This story first surfaced in 2005 but it has been given added legs now that two birds from the island, the Tristan albatross and the Gough Bunting, have been listed as critically endangered on the IUCN’s Red List
Continue reading "Super-evolved mega-mice threaten island birds" »
A worrying number of American teachers appear to be pushing creationism and intelligent design on high school biology students.
“Three different survey questions all suggest that between 12% and 16% of the nation’s biology teachers are creationist in orientation,” write study author Michael Berkman and colleagues in PLOS Biology. “Roughly one sixth of all teachers professed a ‘young earth’ personal belief, and about one in eight reported that they teach creationism or intelligent design in a positive light.”
They conducted what is claimed to be the first ever nationally representative survey of biology teachers’ views on evolution and found 16% of them believe “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so”. This is way down on the general population, which picks this option 48% of the time.
Still these views appear to be filtering through to lessons, with 18% of teachers spending at least an hour on creationism, 5% spending at least three hours and 3% spending over six hours.
Continue reading "‘At least 12% of US biology teachers are creationist’" »
NASA looks set to refuse any more funding for the Gravity Probe B project. Launched in 2004, the probe has been collecting data in an attempt to measure the Earth’s warping of space-time (probe website).
A NASA ranking of 10 astrophysics missions was posted on Steinn Sigurðsson’s Dynamics of Cats blog on May 17th.
“Bottom line here is that NASA funds are too tight, so some operating missions are being reviewed for descoping or shut down,” says Sigurðsson, who works at Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. “Looks like GP-B [Gravity Probe B] will close shop, and expect RXTE to shut down in early 2009 as tentatively scheduled.”
New Scientist says nine of the missions will have their lifetimes extended. “Gravity Probe B didn't make the cut because the panel doubted further analysis of its results would yield significant new information,” it says.
According to NS, data from GP-B was “unexpectedly noisy” due to solar flares and the team wanted more money to try and clean it up.
A full listing of the ten:
1. Swift
2. Chandra
3. GALEX
4. Suzaku
5. (Warm) Spitzer
6. WMAP
7. XMM
8. INTEGRAL
9. RXTE
10. Gravity Probe-B
“Under this rank order, at nominal budget requests, the $ runs out at Spitzer,” says Sigurðsson.
Image: concept of Gravity Probe B / NASA