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
Work that could lead to the first ever transgenic model of human disease in a non-human primate is unveiled in Nature this week.
Researchers from the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre in Atlanta report progress towards creating a primate model of Huntington’s disease with rhesus macaques. It’s not a full model of Huntington’s, but it’s major advance.
“Although only a ‘proof-of-principle’, their achievement is a step forward, and will undoubtedly be welcomed by those involved in developing a cure for this distressing condition,” note Stéphane Palfi and Bechir Jarraya in a related News and Views article. Palfi and Jarraya also note that the research “opens the way” to other models using non-human primates, including for familial forms of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
Chris Ross, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told New Scientist the work was “amazing”.
Continue reading "Towards a transgenic model of Huntington’s " »
The Creative Review has an awesome video vaguely reminiscent of Spike Jonze which was apparently made for the European Union’s Marie Curie programme, which funds researchers to work in countries outside their own.
According to the visual communication magazine’s blog it was directed by Roderick Fenske:
Apparently, Fenske’s father was a scientist who impressed upon the young lad that science was never boring if you just talked about it in the right terms. And so he created a humorous metaphor that was not only educational but reminded people about how much fun science could be. Thus was “Chemical Party/Electricity” born.
More proof that chemistry is the greatest of the sciences…
You can also watch the video on the World’s Fair blog.
Tens of millions of brittlestars have been found atop an underwater mountain off the coast of New Zealand.
The starfish-like creatures are protected by a four kilometers per hour current that scientists from the Census of Marine Life say brings food and sweeps away fish and other potential predators (AFP, Reuters, Fairfax Media).
“We were excited to see such a huge assemblage of brittlestars on the Macquarie Ridge seamount,” says Ashley Rowden of New Zealand National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (press release). “Not only is it amazing to see a vast array of one type of organism but the implications of the find for our understanding of the relative uniqueness of seamount assemblages are potentially far-reaching.”
Continue reading "Brittlestar Spectacular found under the sea" »
In a horrific example of ageism, children aged 3 to 12 can compete to name an iceberg currently floating off Antarctica.
Aged hacks are excluded from the contest, which will see the winner's pick for the 150 km long berg officially recognized by the US National Ice Center. The initiative is part of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in the UK, reports the Times.
Entries will be judged by Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, and children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, says the festival website. The competition opens on May 22.
The name indicates that this iceberg is a piece of a larger chunk that was the 19th detected by NIC in ‘quadrant C’ of the Antarctic, see NIC:
The letter of the quadrant, along with a sequential number is assigned to the iceberg. For example, A-38 is sequentially the 38th iceberg found by the NIC in Antarctica between 0-90W (Quadrant A). When a currently identified and named iceberg breaks apart, the new division(s) are also named. These "new" icebergs include the "host" iceberg's original name and an alpha suffix to identify it as a product of the original iceberg. Therefore, if A-38 breaks into three pieces, the three new icebergs would be designated as A-38A (the host iceberg with a revised alpha suffix), A-38B, and A-38C.
Image: C19A on March 18 / NOAA
What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...
The North pole of Mars is colder then previously thought, according to new data from NASA. This means any Martian Inuit-types would have to be deeper under the surface than previously thought, assuming they need liquid water to survive.
“We found that the rocky surface of Mars is not bending under the load of the north polar ice cap,” explains Roger Phillips, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder (press release). “This implies that the planet's interior is more rigid, and thus colder, than we thought before.”
The finding is detailed in a new paper in Science.
Phillips also found layers on the poles, with fine layers of ice and dust separated by thick layers of pure ice. This was likely caused by changes in the tilt of the planet’s axis, from the LA Times:
When the planet tilts strongly on its axis, the surface ice erodes and is covered by a layer of dust, Phillips said. Then, "every million years or so," he said, the planet tilts less, meaning less sunlight falls directly on the pole. At that point, a layer of clean ice is laid down.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the surface is cold, just that the lithosphere is.
More
Any Possible Mars Water or Life Is Deep Below Surface – National Geographic
Radar map peels back secrets of Martian north pole – AFP
Brrr! Mars colder than previously thought – Space.com
Image: north polar ice cap on Mars / NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems
Japanese inventor Gennai Yanagisawa is planning a flight of his one-man helicopter in the city of Vinci, Italy later this month. The flight will honour Leonardo da Vinci, who Yanagisawa credits as the inspiration for his device.
“The concept of my helicopter comes from Italy, and I’ve always wanted to fly it in da Vinci’s birthplace,” Yanagisawa told AP. “I’m very excited.”
Although AP says his GEN H-4 is the world’s smallest helicopter, Yanagisawa actually claims on his website that it is the smallest co-axial helicopter (one with two contra-rotating rotors, rather than a tail rotor). There’s a great gallery of images of the Inspector Gadet-esque device on his website too, along with a history of the device.
More crazy flying below the fold, including this man:
The universe is twice as bright as previously thought, as dust has been dimming our view. This could herald a bout of revisionism in some parts of astronomy.
Although it has been previously known that dust blocks some of the light we see from far off stars, Simon Driver and colleagues have come up with a surprising figure for how much.
“For nearly two decades we’ve argued about whether the light that we see from distant galaxies tells the whole story or not,” says Driver, a researcher at the University of St Andrews in Scotland (press release). “It doesn’t; in fact only half the energy produced by stars actually reaches our telescopes directly, the rest is blocked by dust grains.”
In a recent issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, Driver’s team reports combining a new model of dust distribution with actual observations of 10,000 nearby galaxies (abstract, full paper pdf on arXiv).
“When we look out into deep space, at the millions of other galaxies, it is as though we are wearing cosmic sunglasses – we’re only seeing half the show,” says fellow author Alister Graham, of Swinburne University in Melbourne (Swinburne press release).
A study in this week’s Nature shows that the H5N1 strain of bird flu seems to be developing drug resistance [wrong link fixed]. This, say the authors, means stockpiles designed to be used in a pandemic need to be made up of more than one drug.
Researchers led by Steve Gamblin, of the National Institute for Medical Research in London, used X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of mutants of H5N1. They found that the drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) was not very useful against them, but zanamivir (Relenza) was still good. (Needless to say, Relenza’s producer Glaxo is pretty happy.)
“In order not to be outflanked by the virus, it will be necessary to have stocks of both existing drugs,” says Gamblin (BBC). “There is a huge imperative to develop further drugs and it is likely a future pandemic will need to be tackled using a three or four-pronged approach, much as we tackle HIV today.”
Tiny ‘crazy rasberry ants’ are staggering over Texas, eating endangered chickens, filling up swimming pools, trashing electrical equipment and generally behaving like spring break students after a few too many.
The ants don’t have a proper name yet, due to “confusion regarding the taxonomy of the genus” according to Texas A&M University’s Urban Entomology website. This has left them with the name Paratrechina sp. nr. Pubens [species near: ie a paratrechina ant something like the pubens type].
In the meantime they’re being called ‘crazy’ because they don’t walk straight and ‘rasberry’ after one of their first opponents, a pest controller called Tom Rasberry.
“They’re just running wild,” says Patsy Morphew of Pearland (Houston Chronicle). “... They crawl through the eaves of the house and go into the bathroom. You know what it’s like to sit down on the commode with crazy ants running everywhere?”
Brazil’s environment minister quit her job this week. If environmentalists are right, this is a bad thing for the Amazon.
Marina Silva said her attempts to protect the forest were meeting with “growing resistance ... in important sectors of the government and society” (Bloomberg).
Reuters believes the resignation is a major blow to the eco-credentials of president Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva. “He is increasingly conservative,” Christopher Garman, head of the Latin America practice at Eurasia Group, told the newswire. “He has caved in to the view that the Amazon has to be developed in some form or fashion.”
“Brazil is losing the only voice in the government that spoke out for the environment,” says Sergio Leitao of Greenpeace in Brazil (AP). “The minister is leaving because the pressure on her for taking the measures she took against deforestation has become unbearable.”
Continue reading "Concern after Brazil loses environment minister" »
An Australian mantis shrimp can see six different types of polarisation, according to researchers, adding to the crustacean’s already impressive list of ocular abilities.
Gonodactylus smithii was already known to see things in the ultraviolet and infrared. Now Sonja Kleinlogel and Andrew White, of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt and the University of Queensland respectively, have shown that the shrimp can detect four linear and two circular polarisations (press release, research paper in PLOS One).
Basically they have some ability to detect the direction in which light waves are oscillating. See here for an explanation of linear and circular polarisation.
“The mantis shrimp is a delightfully weird beastie,” says White. “They’re multi-coloured, their genus and species names mean ‘mouth-feet’ and 'genital-fingers'; they can move each eye independently, they see the world in 11 or 12 primary colours as opposed to our humble three, and now we find that this species can see a world invisible to the rest of us.”
The details of how they did this research are not carried in the press coverage. It’s a bit gory, so if you winced at Un Chien Andalou stop reading now...
UPDATE 2: It has emerged that, as per our prediction, Richard Dawkins did bid for the letter. "What surprises me is the extraordinarily low estimate the auction house originally gave," he says (Guardian). "In a way, I'm delighted that such a thing should be so highly valued."
UPDATE - The letter sold to an anonymous bidder for £170,000, over 20 times more than expected. With fees included the actual price is over £200,000.
Einstein’s often-debated views on religion look to have been made clearer by a document up for auction tomorrow.
“The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish,” he writes in the 1954 letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind.
Bloomsbury Auctions, which is selling the letter, expects it to go for between £6000 and £8000 (press release). If you don’t have that much spare change, you can always read Einstein’s 1940 Nature article ‘Science and Religion’ (subscription required).
Posted for Jeff Tollefson
Following months of bad news on biofuels, a non-profit research institute is injecting a bit of optimism into the public debate by highlighting an old crop that can simultaneously provide both food and fuel: sweet sorghum (Reuters).
The timing couldn’t be better, given the ongoing global food crisis and the now ever-present worries about where our next gallon of fuel will come from. One report went so far as to suggest sweet sorghum might be the perfect bioenergy crop researchers have been looking for.
That might be going a little far, but sweet sorghum would appear to have some promising qualities, not the least of which is its ability to grow in dry climates. Mark Winslow an agronomist with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, more easily known as ICRISAT, went over some of the details this week with Nature.
Continue reading "Move over sugarcane - here comes sweet sorghum" »
So how did this one slip in under the radar? The Times reckons that researchers at Cornell University not only created the world's first genetically engineered human embryo, but also that they presented it at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's conference last year.
One wonders how the ravening press pack, always on the lookout for a controversial story, managed to miss one that hit two of the biggest news buttons — GM and human embryology.
On Monday UK newspaper the Guardian, known to many as the Grauniad due to its penchant for mistakes, ran the following correction:
We misspelled a number of elements in the periodic table printed in part VI of the Science Course supplement distributed with the paper on May 1. We meant Iron (not Irone); Praseodymium (not Praseodynium); Neodymium (not Neodynium); Neptunium (not Neptuniam); Americium (not Americum); Seaborgium (not Seoborgium); and Darmstadtium (not Darmstadium).
Oh how we chortled. Then someone suggested I check if Nature has ever made similar boobs...
The strange links between different senses have been demonstrated again, this time by a new study showing that a car sounds louder when it’s painted red.
Researchers in Germany asked 16 people to rate the perceived loudness of the sound of an accelerating car played through headphones. Noises were accompanied by one of four pictures of an Aston Martin V8 coloured red, blue, dark-green or light green.
In the latest issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America they report that “it seems that in most cases the sounds associated with images of red or dark-green vehicles were rated louder than those combined with light-green or blue ones”.
The differences are small: around 1 dB and with a maximum observed difference of 3 dB. But they were statistically significant, which supports similar previous findings with trains, say Daniel Menzel, of the Technische Universitat Munchen, and colleagues.
They suggest in their paper, fairly reasonably, that people probably associate some colours with sports cars – such as red and dark (“British racing”) green – and so subconsciously expect them to be louder. They do not say that this will now lead to the of-so-boyish pranksters who present the BBC’s Top Gear devising a competition for the loudest paint job. But you just know that it will…
Image: Getty
A new virtual telescope has been launched by Microsoft, to rival Google Sky. In a similar fashion, users of the free WorldWide Telescope can whiz around a collection of ground- and space-based observatory data.
“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” says Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (press release).
This product has been in the works for a while. Way back in 2001, Jim Gray of the Microsoft Bay Area Research Center wrote in Science, “Our goal is to make the Internet act as the world's best telescope--a World-Wide Telescope.”
Microsoft is releasing the WorldWide Telescope as a tribute to Gray, who went missing while sailing off the coast of California last year (SF Chronicle, Reuters, or see Wired's definitive piece on the search for Jim Gray).
We’ve just been sent a link to this rather excellent dinosaur game. This was closely followed by a slight drop in office productivity.
As creator Richard Grillotti told ShackNews in an interview last year, “I started sketching and I sketched dinosaurs. ... All of a sudden that sprung up. ‘Dinosaurs! And you’ve got to escape this wall of doom! Cool, that sounds fun.’”
It is fun. Can you outrun the extinction while munching on pesky mammals seeking to overthrow your cold-blooded (probably) dynasty?
Apologies for the headline, I couldn’t resist.
Image: screen grab of Dino Run
Posted for Jeff Tollefson
Republican Presidential candidate John McCain made his first major climate address on Monday, largely reaffirming a position on climate change that has long separated him from his Republican colleagues.
The speech was widely interpreted as an effort to distance himself from President George W. Bush and “woo” independent voters. McCain endorsed cap-and-trade regulation and called for a return to 2005 emissions levels by 2012, a return to 1990 levels by 2020, and a reduction of “at least” 60 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050.
That puts McCain roughly in the same neighbourhood as the leading climate legislation in the Senate, which would reduce emissions by roughly 19 percent by 2020 and 70 percent by mid-century, compared to 2005. That bill is expected to come up for a vote in June, but McCain didn’t say which way he’ll go. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both called for an 80 percent reduction by mid-century.
Some environmentalists gave McCain due credit, but others refused to cede ground. The Sierra Club said McCain’s climate policies, “like President Bush,” offer “more of the same.”
No objective analysis could bring a reasonable person to such a conclusion, of course, given that President Bush has yet to outline a plan of any kind. But perhaps facts are malleable when the White House is at stake.
At least the Climate Progress blog ignored his speech and focused on the location: a training facility for Vestas Wind Systems.
Citing McCain’s multiple votes against renewable energy legislation, the blog suggested that “Conservatives like McCain … are the main reason McCain has to go to a Danish wind turbine manufacturer to give a climate speech.”
Image: stock photo / John McCain 2008
Not content with being a Biblical plague, locusts have given us another reason to despise them. According to researchers from the US, Australia and the UK the actual reason they swarm has a horrific cause: they’re cannibals...
In a new paper in Current Biology Iain Couzin and colleagues suggest that mass locust migrations are driven by “abdominal biting and the sight of others approaching from behind”. Basically, when they get hungry young locusts start to bite each other, those bitten start to run away. Others get spooked and the sight of another locust approaching sets them off (paper abstract, BBC coverage).
In their paper the researchers report that ‘abdominal denervation’ reduces the probability that individuals will start moving and increases cannibalism. Occluding their rear vision has similar impacts.
"Cannibalism is rife within marching bands of locusts," says Couzin (press release). "No one knew until now that cannibalistic interactions are directly responsible for the collective motion exhibited by these bands."
As young locusts often precede flying swarms of adults, which are harder to kill, knowing what causes their movements could help in controlling them he says.
Image: USFWS
Last week former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson used his column in the Washington Post to rubbish the idea that the Bush administration has been hostile to science.
“There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a ‘war on science’,” he wrote.
He goes on to accuse liberals of playing politics:
Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science." Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.Liberal views are "objective" while traditional moral convictions are "biased." Public scrutiny of scientific practices is "politicizing" important decisions.
Cue an online bunfight...
Most sensible people think of trapdoor spiders with a mix of fascination and trepidation. Not East Carolina University biologist Jason Bond, he apparently thinks of peace, justice and musical innovation.
Bond has just named a new species of arachnid after musician, and greatest living Canadian, Neil Young. Actually he seems to have named it in December last year and there’s no obvious reason it’s only just been press released. Nevermind, it’s a cool looking spider,
“With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice,” says Bond (press release).
Different species of trapdoor spiders are apparently differentiated based on differences in their genitalia, but Bond also checked with DNA that Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi is a distinct species. Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi has already been added to the sizeable list of ‘animals named after celebrities’ on wikipedia.
Earlier this year Roy Orbison had an insect named after him. And University of Aberdeen researcher Nikki King named a new fish she discovered after her fiancé.
The first entry on Jason Bond’s lab blog implies that he has a wife called Kristen. He had better hope she doesn’t find out that Neil Young got the species name in advance of her... [UPDATE - see comment below.]
Neil Young gets new honor -- his own spider – Reuters
Sneaky Spider Named for Rocker Neil Young – LiveScience
Image: ECU news services
What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...
News that survival of babies born before 24 weeks has not improved over the past decade has swamped the UK press today (eg. BBC), despite this being largely a confirmation of a study published last month (EPICure).
This emotive topic gathers extra interest and importance because of legislation governing when an abortion is legal (currently up to 24 weeks, and about to be debated; TimesOnline; Guardian). It seems we may have reached some limit – at least for now – in our ability to help premature babies to survive. The good news is that the proportion of babies who survive at 24 and 25 weeks has improved.
The work was done by David Field and colleagues from the University of Leicester, and was published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The study looked at data from 1,000 births in the Trent region of England from 1994-1999 and 2000-2005. For 25-week-old babies survival went up to 63% from 52%; for 24-week-old babies, it rose to 41% from 24%; for 23-week-old babies it stayed steady at just under 20%.
Given that the weather on our own planet is always such a huge topic of conversation (unusually hot and sunny in London this week, by the way), I can see that the weather might be intrinsically interesting even on other planets. All the more reason then, perhaps, to just play the news straight. So why do so many stories about space weather get jazzed up with newly-invented words or over-stretched metaphors?
Last night we had news of ‘iron snow’ on Mercury. Cool. Iron snow, really? We’ve had methane rain (on Titan), so I read on excitedly to hear about this devastating weather phenomenon, imagining lumps of metal whacking into the ground, or flakes of it gliding softly to a rusty blanket of iron. But no. This snow is apparently inside the planet’s core. Come on. You can’t have snow INSIDE a planet. That’s just silly. (But still kind of cool, so here are some links to the story: Discovery; Innovations)
We’ve also seen ‘smust’ on Titan (Nature), and, back on Earth this week, ‘vog’ in Hawaii (AP).
by Heidi Ledford
So what does a swinging Nature reporter do on a Thursday night? Given yesterday’s news that there was an online protein folding game (Economist;MIT Technology Review), isn’t the answer obvious?
The game is called Foldit, and it lets users manipulate different parts of a protein (amino acid sidechains, beta sheets, and helices) to optimize its 3-D structure. A tutorial guided by a cartoon image of protein structure guru David Baker (University of Washington), complete with his trademark unruly ‘Einstein-the-early-years’ hair, teaches you a few basics: bring your sheets together to allow hydrogen bonding between them, and don’t let your amino acid sidechains bump into each other.
Wannabe structural biologists can download it here. Baker and his colleagues previously designed a program called Rosetta@home that harnesses idle computers to solve protein structures. But users who downloaded the program watched as their computers cranked away evaluating different structural possibilities and began to wonder: might a human do better? The Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s press release quotes Baker: “People were writing in, saying, `Hey! The computer is doing silly things! It would be great if we could help guide it.”
So now the skeptics get to try their hand. I gave the game a quick try, just enough to make it through the tutorial and take a stab at the first challenge puzzle: a beginner’s task based on a protein from a bacteria that can cause strep throat. (Somewhere around the sixth or seventh puzzle in the tutorial my mind started to wander and I turned on the webcast of the mock news program Colbert Report from the previous night. I finished the puzzle somewhere between when Stephen Colbert declared: “Scientists are so snooty” and when he shocked himself on a homemade electromagnet.)
Overall, I’m hooked. Not cancel-my-weekend-plans hooked, but I’ve definitely found a new way to procrastinate. I’d say you don’t necessarily learn a whole lot about protein structure, but really, did you want to? And if you did, they provide a separate tutorial that covers the details. Meanwhile, the game does give you that conceptual sense of how elegant (and frustratingly delicate) protein structure can be.
According to one press release, the high score could earn the winner a Nobel Prize for medicine. But I won’t hold my breath.
How ‘green’ are you? Now there’s a very simple (and therefore surely inaccurate, but probably not too misleading) online questionaire you can take (from National Geographic), to make you feel smug or worried about your carbon footprint (most of us in the London office wound up with a smug, above-average Greendex score, though that’s probably because none of us own a car…).
Working out the environmental pros and cons of various activities is notoriously difficult and at times counterintuitive. A report in Nature once concluded, for example, that it’s better to use a styrofoam cup than a mug for your daily coffee, until you had used the same mug over a thousand times -- that’s thanks to the high-energy-use manufacture of ceramic, and the hot water and soap needed to wash your mug; in contrast styrofoam is easy to make, and causes no problems in landfill other than taking up space (Nature abstract, full text not online; New Scientist story). At least with carbon emissions there’s no need to quantify some amorphous ‘bad’ thing like ‘taking up space in landfill’ – carbon emissions are carbon emissions (well, the carbon could be in methane or carbon dioxide, with differing climate effects, but lets not be too picky). But it’s still hard to assess with simple questions like “Do you own a car” exactly what this means for your emissions.
Nonetheless, I’m all for raising awareness of carbon footprints – so long as it doesn’t make people who get a ‘good’ score think they don’t need to strive for improvement.
Here are some more, similar surveys:
Carbon offset survey, run by Environmental Economics MSc students at Imperial College, London.
Test your knowledge on environmental questions, with a quiz from Yale University, Forbes, and the BBC.
Tell us of your favourites…
The audience at the 2008 Electric Aircraft Symposium in Silicon Valley late last month was given a “vision of the future” in which everyone has a personal car/plane that they can drive or fly (or read the paper while it drives/flies itself, actually), and which will be the “greenest form of transportation” (BBC; Wired). When will this future be? Oh, in 20 years or so they said.
Sounds great. But people have been predicting a helicopter-in-every-garage for decades; inventors have been working on flying cars, of the type intended for the masses, since at least the 1930s. Check out this cover of Popular Mechanics from 1951…
Is that vision now really going to come true? Technologies have improved of course, and companies offering up this vision seem to have abounded in recent years (eg Register, 2007; see a full list in the Roadable Times).
I’m not holding my breath yet. And I can’t help but wonder, if you can make self-flying battery-powered planes for everyone that are smart enough to avoid hitting each other in flight, why not just make smarter, self-driving, battery-powered cars? The main reason for gridlock is not so much the number of cars on the road, but delays in reaction time and other inefficiencies of the all-too-human drivers. Solve that and I don’t think you need to fly.
Flowers have been found to have several tricks up their, um, sleeves when it comes to attracting pollinators, according to two reports we spied today.
First off, they wave at passing insects to attract their attention (BBC).
John Warren from the University of Aberystwyth was apparently inspired by watching flowers waving about in the wind at his daughter’s birthday, and wondering why they risked having their slender stems snapped by such movement. Not finding much in the literature, he set out to find an answer.
In a study of 300 specially grown flowers of varying stem lengths, tall wavy flowers attracted more pollinators, they found (Journal of Evolutionary Biology). Sadly the story doesn’t say by how much, nor is this mentioned in the freely available abstract… though the abstract does add that insects stayed on wobbly flowers less long than they did on stationary ones. (If only Wordsworth knew there was a reason for his host of daffodils "fluttering and dancing in the breeze" his poem might have been different).
Secondly, researchers have found just how effective orchids can be at mimicking female wasps, as a way to lure male wasps in to collect their pollen (Reuters). Not only do they attract the boys (which was already known), but they also seem to excite them enough to cause an ejaculation (releasing “copious sperm” according to the report). Obviously this is a waste of time and energy for the wasps, but apparently it helps the orchids, somehow – I guess by increasing stickiness? “Orchid species provoking such extreme pollinator behavior have the highest pollination success," they report in The American Naturalist.
Photo by Keith Weller, USDA
How does a history of abuse leave its mark on the brain? A grim new study from PLoS ONE finds differences lurking in the brains of people who were abused as children and then committed suicide. The differences were epigenetic, meaning that rather than finding changes in the DNA sequence, there were differences in the frequency with which a chemical group, called a methyl group, is attached to certain regions of the DNA. This chemical modification can reduce expression of genes: in this case they looked at epigenetic changes to a gene that is critical for production of proteins and found that not only were there more methyl groups, but those methyl groups correlated with reduced gene expression. The implications are that abuse as a child may have led to these epigenetic changes which, in turn, could impact a critical function in the brain.
Reuters quotes Eric Nestler (University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas) as saying that drugs and psychotherapy might be able to reverse the epigenetic changes. Interestingly, the researchers found no correlation between these epigenetic changes and psychiatric diagnoses.
The researchers (Moshe Szyf of McGill University in Montreal and colleagues) compared 18 suicide victims with a history of childhood abuse to 12 patients who died from other causes. Overall, it strikes me as a complicated question to tackle, and one that might require more than a dozen samples to really pick apart. For example, New Scientist says that Szyf is now comparing his results with suicide victims who were not abused to determine whether the epigenetic changes were the result of abuse or suicide. Seems like an important control to do, and in fact it’s interesting how we’ve all homed in on the ‘child abuse’ angle when the paper stresses the ‘pathophysiology of suicide’ rather than abuse.
But it’s an interesting start, and follows on previous work in animals, including the fascinating study from several years back showing that mouse pups neglected by their mothers showed more stress later in life and harbored epigenetic changes in their brains.
The birds are taking over. A crow patrol is scouring the streets of Kagoshima, Japan, according to a New York Times report. The birds' crime is not murder (the name for a group of crows) but instead causing blackouts by roosting among the power lines and reportedly “frightening away residents”. The patrol has been hired by Kyushu Electric, and tasked with looking for ways to reduce the city’s population of the noisy black birds.
Japan has apparently seen massive increases in the mythically (and to some extent experimentally) quick-witted birds, which have apparently been out-foxing the patrols by building dummy nests. (In a less quick-witted way, the blackouts happen when a peckish subject explores a high-voltage power line). This clash between Japanese city life and Corvus species parallels recent complaints by UK farmers that ravens have gone predatory on their herds; pecking lambs and calves to death in a black feathered frenzy. The Zooillogix blog gives the UK press a hard time for sexing up the story
Still the events do call to mind Alfred Hitcock’s 1963 classic The Birds, a remake of which, starring Naomi Watts, looks to be slated for 2009. Corvus species like crows, rooks, and ravens hold a special place in the scary bird category even if Hitchcock’s climax starred seagulls. Of course in the United States the only thing eerie about crows lately is their absence. Their susceptibility to west Nile virus has decimated US crow populations (Nature, sub required).
Check out these maps highlighting where all the neurotic people live in the United States (and the extroverts, and the most agreeable people, etc), as published in Richard Florida's latest column (Boston Globe). The result is fascinating in a water-cooler kind of way. Look! All the neurotic people are in New York! Those open to new experiences cluster in California, etc. etc.
But we at Nature are left wondering exactly how these maps were made… It doesn’t say in the article how precisely how the data was collected, or if there might be a bias, for example, due to people living in cities being more involved in the study than others. It also doesn’t say whether the maps have been normalized for population density, though we hope they have. Okay, this is a column: you don't expect that kind of detail in a column. But then where can you get it? (I can't find a paper on the subject... Richard - help us out!)
The five personality traits highlighted are standard in psychology; you can take a test to assess your personal scores in these five traits online here (warning: you need to agree to a few conditions and it’ll take a while).
Florida is a regular columnist and “professor of business and creativity” at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. The field he is exploring here is that of ‘psychogeography’, which seems to be an emerging trend in social sciences.
As the death toll from the cyclone and resultant storm surge in Myanmar climbs (now some 22,000 according to the state media), aid efforts are still being hampered (LA Times).
The cyclone is being called the worst to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 died in Bangladesh (multiple sources). NASA has some satellite photos of the area taken before and after the storm, showing the extent of flooding (pictured here; NASA).
Why were things so bad? The storm was a severe one: peak wind speeds were 215 km/h (wikipedia), which makes it a category 4 storm in a scale of 1-5. But damage was exacerbated by the high density of people on the coast and the storm surge of up to 3.5 metres caused by the winds, said ASEAN secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan (BBC). Storm surges of up to 5.5 metres can be typical of category 4 storms. Warnings were issued by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, which named the storm in late April (history of warnings linked to in wikipedia, initially targeted at Bangladesh more than Myanmar). But commentators on BBC radio complained there was only a few hours of warning for the people affected. For the moment it’s hard to tell exactly what happened on the ground.
Pitsuwan has also blamed a destruction of natural mangroves along the coast for the excessive damage (BBC again). There don’t seem to be any supporting claims from ecologists or storm specialists as yet, though mangroves were thought responsible, in part, for limiting damage in Sri Lanka from the Asian tsunami in December 2004.
The NY Times ‘dot earth’ blog highlights the trajectory of the storm as plotted on Google Earth, and puts in a shout to maintain Earth observation satellite systems, including systems to consolidate and use the data.
As if China doesn't have enough to deal with ahead of the Olympics. Added to the problems of Beijing's polluted air, protests in support of Tibet, and the daft mission to take the Olympic torch up mount Everest being hampered by the weather, CNN is reporting an outbreak of the deadly enterovirus 71 in the city of Fuyang, south of the capital.
Continue reading "Paralysing virus strikes China ahead of Olympics" »
Canada is set to launch the first dedicated space satellite to watch for near-Earth objects (Vancouver Sun). The question is: do we really need one?
A number of Earth-bound telescopes are already used to spot and track near-Earth objects (NEO), including under the auspices of Nasa’s NEO Project. Commentators in New Scientist argue that the space-based telescope (called NEOSSat) will have better luck spotting asteroids that are within Earth orbit: these also tend to stay in line with the Sun, meaning they are only visible in the sky close to sunset or sunrise, when background light tends to drown them out. But they are also more likely to hit us, the article says.
But ground-based satellites can spot these too, even if it is a little harder. Alan Harris of the Space Science Institute in Boulder Colorado, US, told New Scientist he doesn’t think the project will add too much to what’s already available.
But hey, it’s only costing $10 million. And statistically Canada (the second largest country after Russia) has a lot of area sitting waiting to be struck by an asteroid, so maybe that makes them keen to get in on the game… even if there aren’t that many people actually living in most of it.
More news in the ongoing battle between sea lions, salmon, and people: six sea lions have been found shot in Oregon, presumably as a result of annoyed fishermen blaming the animals for a lack of fish (Reuters; NY Times).
We have written about this issue before: in January, US federal officials recommended killing about 30 ‘nuisance’ sea lions a year in this river, to keep them from gobbling up salmon. Officials went ahead with that, but in the face of a lawsuit from the Humane Society they have been instead trapping animals and transporting them to nearby zoos. It looks like someone took advantage of these traps to shoot the captive animals before they could be spirited away.
The trapping programme has been entirely put on hold while the killings are "investigated by Washington, Oregon and our fish cops", National Marine Fisheries Service spokesman Brian Gorman told Reuters.
From the archive:
While sea lions in Oregon seem to be to blame for declining fish stocks, the opposite may be true in Alaska, where declines in fish seem to be have caused sea lion populations to crash (see Conservation biology: Is this any way to save a species?). Working out what-is-eating-what in this ecosystem, and how one crash causes another, can be a thorny issue (see Where have all the seals gone?).
What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...
Posted on behalf of Lauren Young:
South Africa has lifted a 13-year ban on elephant culling, to help manage the flourishing pachyderm population.
Elephants were once close to being wiped out in many parts of the continent, but have more than doubled in number in South Africa since 1995. The Agence France-Presse says a government assessment report suggests this could lead to the “loss of crops and infrastructure” and the “infection of livestock as a result of elephants having breached veterinary fences, thus allowing the mingling of wildlife and domestic stock and direct injury or loss of human life”.
Culling, with strict provisos, has been legalized as a last resort, the government asserts. Yet some conservationists have condemned the action, warning that it may encourage ivory poachers and could threaten populations elsewhere.
The Associated Press cites the example of Congo’s Virunga National Park, in which 14 elephants have been killed since mid-April by angry residents, rebels and soldiers. Emmanuel de Merode, director of the conservation group WildlifeDirect, has described it as “part of a widespread slaughter across the Congo Basin”. He argues it is due to the “liberalisation of the ivory trade…and the increased presence of Chinese operators on the ground, who feed a massive domestic demand for ivory in their home country”.
Other ways of curbing the elephant numbers include relocation and hormone based contraception, although these are thought to be less effective.
Image: USFWS
The toxic byproducts of Canada’s massive exploitation of tar sands have hit the news in a big way. The reason: 500 dead ducks.
On Monday 28 April a flock of the birds saw what they probably thought was an inviting pond where they could spend a few peaceful hours paddling about, and maybe being fed bread by those men in hard hats. Unfortunately for the ducks, the pond was a ‘settling basin’ of the Syncrude oil company, where toxic water and by-products from its oil operations on the tar sands collect. Five made it out alive.
Propane-powered noisemakers are supposed to scare off birds from the ponds, but due to extreme weather they hadn’t been deployed, said Syncrude. “We take a lot of pride in having systems in place to prevent birds from landing on settling basins and storage ponds. So we’re very saddened and sorry that this occurred,” said Tom Katinas, President and CEO (press release).
This hasn’t been nearly enough for Canada, where existing environmental concerns about the tar sands are bubbling to the surface and Syncrude is looking like ... well ... a sitting duck.
Continue reading "Duck deaths highlight tar sands problems" »
Baby birds babble before they learn to speak properly, just like human babies. Intriguingly, according to a new study published this week in Science, a totally different part of the brain seems to be used in babbling than is used in proper, adult speech patterns.
When researchers at MIT disabled part of the brain used in learning called the LMAN (lateral magnocellular nucleus of the nidopallium) the young birds stopped babbling. However, young birds who had an area called the high vocal centre or HVC disabled continued to babble, despite the HVC being a key area for singing in adults
When the researchers shut down the HVC in adult birds, they stopped singing and reverted to babbling (press release).
“The main point of our finding is that the child-like behaviour of young animals may not be just because they have an immature form of the circuitry that makes adult behaviours, but because they have special circuits in the brain that purposefully drive their exploratory and random-looking behaviours,” says author Michale Fee (Daily Telegraph).
“I suspect that there is a similar process going on in the brain of the human infant as he learns how to speak and how to convey meaning.”
That experiment could be harder to get ethical approval for.
Audio clips and more news coverage below the fold...
There’s a great story today in the LA Times about US lawmakers and their cars.
According to journalist Richard Simon, “a little-noticed amendment to last year’s energy bill ... requires House members who lease vehicles through their office budgets to drive cars that emit low levels of greenhouse gases”.
This means the big, gas-guzzling monsters beloved of true Americans are out, and the cuddly, slightly-eco-friendlier models beloved of Europeans, Hollywood actors and hippies are in.
The best part of Simon’s story though is the quotes...
Continue reading "Keep your damn eco-cars, say US politicians" »
A man has re-grown a severed fingertip with the help of ‘pixie dust’ made from pig guts, according to some news reports. Others are suspicious.
The claims say Lee Spievak (or Spievack – there’s some disagreement), from Ohio, lost part of a finger to the propeller of a model airplane. He was told it wouldn’t grow back but thanks to miracle magic ‘pixie dust’ he now has a full finger. The dust is actually an ‘extra cellular matrix’, manufactured by a company called ACell from the insides of pigs.
In fact versions of this story said the same things in February on a CBS story. Oh, and in AP February last year, with many of the same quotes. How odd...
University of Pittsburgh researcher Stephen Badylak, who developed the matrix, is quoted as saying, “One way to think about these matrices is that we have taken out many of the stimuli for scar tissue formation and left those signals that were always there anyway for constructive remodelling,” he explains (BBC).
Rubbish, says Simon Kay, professor of hand surgery at the University of Leeds.
A new genus of rather ugly parasitic plant should finally be named this year, two decades after a lone example was first examined by botanists.
The weird thing, a type of Orobanchaceae, has completely lost its chlorophyll and leaches nutrients and water out of its host tree.
In 1985 a researcher named Wayt Thomas from the New York Botanical Garden first obtained a sample of the plant in Mexico. It remained unidentified until 20 years later when George Yatskievych, of the Missouri Botanical Garden, set out to find it.
“I’ve always been interested in plants that don’t fit the preconceived notion of what
plants should be,” he says (press release pdf). “The specimen collected by Dr Thomas was so unusual that I had to see for myself what it looked like alive.”
A paper in this week’s Nature predicts that, rather than warming, North Atlantic sea surface temperatures may actually decrease slightly in the next decade. What’s more, the paper suggests global surface temperatures may not actually increase either.
Has global warming stopped? Is this a nail in Al Gore’s coffin?
Well, no.
Despite headlines such as ‘Doubt is cast over global warming’ and ‘Global warming could stop NATURALLY for ten years, say scientists’ that is not what this paper is about.
Those big oil companies, they’re just not doing enough to cut carbon emissions. But don’t take my word for it.
The Rockefeller family have a bone to pick with Exxon Mobil, the company that grew out of their ancestor’s oil giant Standard Oil, over its failure to give greater backing to alternative energy. “They are fighting the last war and they're not seeing they’re facing a new war,” says Peter O’Neill, great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller (Chicago Tribune).
Although the Rockefellers don’t own a huge amount of Exxon, their attack is likely to cause some embarrassment to the company, given the weight that still attaches to their name. Again though, don’t take my word for it.
“Clearly this has more impact than coming from a corporate activist who owns five shares,” says Buie Seawell, chairman of the department of business ethics and legal studies at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business (Denver Post). “The name gives a lot of credibility to what they’re doing, and it’s significant that the family has a historic equity stake.”
