The Great Beyond

Following last years dramatic ice sheet retreat in the Arctic the world’s media has got very excited about the possibility of an ice free North Pole this year.

“The North Pole may be free of ice for the first time in history,” University of Manitoba research David Barber told Canwest News on June 23rd. “This is a very dramatic change in the High Arctic climate system.”

However this item seems to have been rather unfairly ignored, and it was the Independent’s front page item last week that really got things going. “Exclusive: No ice at the North Pole” screamed the massive headline.

Experts are bit more cautious about this claim...

Continue reading "An ice free North Pole?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The International Whaling Commission’s meeting in Chile wrapped up last week. So what happened to claims made beforehand that this meeting might make actually progress, rather than re-hashing the same old arguments?

You will be shocked to hear that peace did not break out.

Japan has become so annoyed at the resistance to controlled commercial whaling that it might pull out of the IWC altogether. “The world is witnessing the death of an international organisation,” says Japan’s delegate Glenn Inwood, whose suspiciously un-Japanese name comes from the fact he’s a native New Zealander (Daily Telegraph).

This follows a rather-predictable row at the meeting, where Australia’s environment minister Peter ‘Burning Beds’ Garrett said Japan’s current whaling, which it claims is for scientific purposes, is “in reality commercial whaling operations prohibited by the moratorium” (ABC Radio Australia).

Other IWC meeting news

Greenland’s attempt to gain permission for indigenous whaling of humpbacks was rejected (Daily Telegraph, AP).

Australia’s opposition party brands meeting a failure for government and Garrett (ABC, The Age)

National Geographic asks ‘Why Is Japan Whaling's Bogeyman When Norway Hunts Too?’ A Greenpeace spokesperson replies Japan is the “head of the zombie and needs to be cut off”. What the Norwegians feel about being relegated to miscellaneous zombie body parts is not reported.

The BBC still thinks peace will win out.

Image: NOAA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The US government is to pay $5.8 million to a bio-defence researcher named as a ‘person of interest’ in the 2001 anthrax incidents.

In return Steven Hatfill has agreed to drop his claim that his privacy was violated by government officials (background on Wikipedia).

Steven Hatfill was identified in the press as a suspect in the incidents, and was at one point under 24-hour surveillance. Earlier this year US Judge Reggie Walton said, “There is not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr Hatfill had anything to do with this.” (LA Times).

Despite agreeing to pay Hatfill millions in an out of court settlement the US Justice Department issued the following statement:

The United States does not admit to any violation of the Privacy Act and continues to deny all liability in connection with Dr. Hatfill’s claims. (AP, and others.)

Continue reading "US pays $5.8 million in anthrax lawsuit" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Chinese authorities have finally admitted that a photo of a super-rare South China Tiger was faked.

Doubts have been aired before about the veracity of the photo, which was unveiled to great fanfare last year.

Now the photographer, farmer Zhou Zhenglong, has been arrested for fraud and his reward of 20,000 Yuan (about $3,000) has been revoked.

According to China Daily Zhou allegedly used a photo of the tiger borrowed from another farmer to create his fakes. To add credence to his clams he also allegedly used a wooden model of a paw to create tiger footprints.

Reuters points out that this is the latest scandal of official endorsements of wildlife photos. “In February, the chief editor of a Chinese newspaper quit after one its photographers faked a prize-winning photo of endangered Tibetan antelopes appearing unfazed by a passing train on the Qinghai-Tibet railway,” it notes. See this Nature Correspondence from the zoologists investigating the impact of the railway on wildlife for more on this.

With the news about the Amazon 'lost tribe' photos that were actually no such thing still fresh, it seems you just can't trust photographers any more.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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What's been on The Great Beyond this week, plus a few extras...

Continue reading "Weekly round up" »

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This week there are 56,400 fewer unique species in the sea thanks to humans. Don’t get depressed though; this is a good news story.

The Census of Marine Life has announced that its huge list of marine species is half-way to completion, with over 120,000 species validated. As part of this process the scientists putting together the World Register of Marine Species have identified 56,400 aliases, including 56 for just one species: the Breadcrumb sponge, or Halichondria panacea*,

“Convincing warnings about declining fish and other marine species must rest on a valid census,” says Mark Costello, co-founder of the register (press release pdf). “... It will eliminate the misinterpretation of names, confusion over Latin spellings, redundancies and a host of other problems that sow confusion and slow scientific progress.”

Continue reading "Ocean census reveals the beast with 56 names" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A massive outbreak of algae is threatening to destroy the Chinese Olympics’ sailing event.

The sea off the city of Qingdao has been turned green by the algae and a vast number of fishing boats have been drafted in to deal with the problem. Have a look at AP’s photo gallery for an idea of the scale of the problem, which has led both AFP and Bloomberg to note that this is not quite the ‘green Olympics’ China had in mind.

“It’s a climatic disaster and we can only hope the heavens will be kind to us in August,” Wang Haitao, sailing spokesman for the games told Bloomberg. “We can only haul the blue-green algae manually and we're doing all we can with our arms full and by the boat-load.”

Michael Jones, director of Australia’s sailing team, says the boats should be able to deal with the problem. They have previous experience, he told Radio Australia.

“First year we were there we had a massive problem with jellyfish. I have just never seen so many jellyfish and the size and density of them in my life, and so again they mobilised a fleet of, we are talking 200-300 so of junk type boats, and they just worked day and night trawled the area.”

AFP points out that Qingdao means Green Island.

Image: stock photo / Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Spanish parliament is to back legal rights for great apes, that’s gorillas, chimpanzees and orangs.

The parliament’s environmental committee has thrown its weight behind the Great Ape Project, which aims to provide apes with a “the right to life, the freedom from arbitrary deprivation of liberty, and protection from torture”. As the resolution passed by the committee on Wednesday has cross-party support it is expected to become law, says Reuters, and experiments on great apes will be outlawed.

Although there are not thought to be any such experiments taking place there is no law stopping them in Spain. Legislation will also outlaw their use in shows and circuses and the animals may only be kept in conservation centres. However the government has denied this amounts to ‘human rights for apes’ (El Pais).

Continue reading "Spain to give apes rights" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Exxon Valdez oil spill just got a lot less costly, for Exxon at least. America’s highest court has slashed a fine imposed on the company from $2.5 billion to $507 million (Supreme Court pdf).

The case concerned punitive damages on the company, rather than compensation for real damage. The court found that these punitive damages could not exceed the value that had already been put on compensation, which was $507 million.

The money would have gone to fishermen and native Alaskans, and it had already been reduced from an initial award of $5 billion. While commerce groups and Exxon have welcomed the decision, the ruling has not gone down well in some other quarters.

Liberal group People for the American Way, for example, say: “Exxon was responsible for one of the greatest environmental disasters our country has seen, and the Supreme Court let them off with a slap on the wrist.”

Ross Mullins, fisherman and founder of the Prince William Sound Fishermen Plaintiffs' Committee, told the Dallas Morning News, “It is so depressing to me that this case has finally come to this place. My faith in our legal and political system is at a very low point.”

Exxon-Mobil’s 2007 profits were just over $40 billion and the highest ever for a US corporation.

Alaskan responses below the fold.

Continue reading "Valdez spill fine slashed" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It’s been far too long since the Great Beyond had a pretty space picture. Today’s is newly released by the Gemini Observatory and shows conjoined spiral galaxies 90 million light years away and 60,000 light years apart.

NGC 5427 (left) and NGC 5426 (right) are linked by an “intergalactic bridge” which the observatory says acts as a feeding tube so they can share gas and dust. They’re already too close for comfort and the observatory’s press release says “the mutual pull of gravity has already begun to alter and distort their visible features”.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Fossils of a four-legged fish have filled in our understanding of the evolution of land-based vertebrates.

Initially described in 1994, early specimens of Ventastega curonica were fragmented, and hard to interpret. New examples from Latvia have now allowed researchers to reconstruct the head, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the ugly looking beast (press release, research paper in Nature).

The editor’s summary in Nature notes that the new work shows Ventastega has the skull shape of an early tetrapod but the proportions of a fish. It provides new insights in the evolution of early land-dwelling vertebrates (called tetrapods) some 370 million years ago in the Late Devonian period.

"From a distance, it would have looked like an alligator,” says study author Per Ahlberg, of Uppsala University in Sweden (BBC). “But closer up, you would have noticed a real tail fin at the back end, a gill flap at the side of the head; also lines of pores snaking across head and body. In terms of construction, it had already undergone most of the changes from fish towards land animal, but in terms of lifestyle you are still looking at an animal that is habitually aquatic.”

Ahlberg speculates that it was crawling around on sandy banks and eating stranded fish in tidal creeks (AP).

Ted Daeschler, paleontologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, explains to National Geographic that although we have a general outline of the transition between fish and tetrapods there’s a lot we don’t know. It’s like building a house, he says: “We’ve got the frame built. We know what the rooms are shaped like. But we haven’t put in the electricity, installed the lamps, or put Sheetrock on the walls.”

Picture upper: Philip Renne and Per Ahlberg
Picture lower: Ventastega in side view / Per Ahlberg

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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At Nature we recently got very excited by the platypus genome, and now another important genome sequencing project has been announced.

Not quite so important from a biological science perspective, but important to millions of sweet toothed people and the developing-country farmers who rely on their appetites. The US Agricultural Research Service has announced a new partnership with IBM and Mars (of the bars fame) to sequence the cacao genome in five years.

Mars is putting up the money and IBM is going to use one of its supercomputers to analyse the genome. An end result could be drought and disease resistant cacao trees with higher yields.

“Sequencing the genomes of agriculture crops is a critical step if we want to better understand and improve a crop,” says Judy St. John or the US Department of Agriculture (Reuters).

I was initially worried that Mars might end up owning the genome of chocolate. But according to the NY Times the results will be freely available through the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture.

For those interested in such things, the platypus genome was picked up as a story by about 350 news websites. So far the chocolate genome story has featured on about 170.

IBM video announcement

Headline watch
Unwrapping the Chocolate Genome – Washington Post
Another genome project? Sweet . . . – The Chronicle Herald
Sweet deal: Companies and U.S. team up to map cocoa DNA – Retuers

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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In a little over 50 days a land speed record may be broken on the salt flats of Utah. In an unusual twist though the Inspiration car will not attempt to beat the jet-powered Thrust SSC’s 1,200 km per hour.

This is a steam-powered record attempt.

Officially unveiled yesterday after years of development, Inspiration will use liquefied petroleum gas to turn a tonne of water into steam, hopefully powering it up to 280 km per hour. Currently the record stands at 230 kmph.

The Guardian thinks it’s a ‘flying kettle’. Popular Mechanics says it’s ‘Jules-Verne-meets-Batmobile’. And of course, there is an eco-aspect to this. The people behind the project say:

With growing public concern about the buildup of toxic and smog producing gasses produced by internal combustion engines, a trend is emerging toward more ecologically friendly technologies for such sectors as public and private transportation. ...

With these issues in mind, the decision was made to create a vehicle that would set a new land speed record, incorporating new technologies to bring excitement to the arena of ecologically friendly technologies. In the process of setting the land speed record it is hoped that additional attention to green vehicle technologies will be generated.

“I’m not saying we're all going to be driving steam cars but the technology could have other uses,” says engineer Matt Candy (Guardian).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A student in America has worked out how to turn his face into a remote control.

PhD student Jacob Whitehill, of UC San Diego, used facial recognition technology to monitor the expressions of test subjects watching video lectures. By detecting confusion, he believes, lectures can be slowed or even replayed over difficult sections.

“If I am a student dealing with a robot teacher and I am completely puzzled and yet the robot keeps presenting new material, that's not going to be very useful to me,” says Whitehill (press release). “If, instead, the robot stops and says, ‘Oh, maybe you’re confused,’ and I say, ‘Yes, thank you for stopping,’ that’s really good.”

In a paper to presented at an upcoming conference he reports that his system predicts subjects' self-reported difficulty scores correctly 42% of the time. It’s not quite so good at preferred viewing speed, with only 29% accuracy on this.

Only eight people were involved in the pilot study, where Whitehill confirmed results from previous research showing that people blink less during difficult parts of the lecture. So there’s a lot of work left to do, but Whitehill believes his system could be trained to react to individual users’ expressions.

Are Californian students really too lazy to use a remote? Any readers from that demographic are welcome to comment on this question below.

More
Video of the face-mote
Whitehill’s work on automatic attractiveness detection and its online dating potential
“Developing a Practical Smile Detector”

Image: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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According to the New York Times the White House has come up with a novel way of avoiding potentially tricky environment reports: not opening its mail.

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The Times goes on to say that the documents resulted from a Supreme Court decision that the EPA had to decide if greenhouse gases were a danger to health or the environment. After being confined to “e-mail limbo” a watered-down report with no conclusion will come out this week, it says.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Hundreds of California’s endemic plants could be driven out of the state by climate change, according to a new study.

Researchers calculated that two-thirds of the plants could have their range reduced by 80% by 2100. Changes in rainfall and higher temperatures will drive redwoods north and send oaks packing for the Oregon border, say the authors of a new paper in PLOS One.

“Part of me can’t believe that California's flora will collapse over a period of 100 years," says study author David Ackerly. “It’s hard to comprehend the potential impacts of climate change. We haven't seen such drastic changes in the last 200 years of human history, since we have been cataloguing species.”

The researchers looked at data from 16 state plant collections and used two climate models to see where Californian species would have to move to survive. They say we should prepare for the change by establishing corridors between several potential “refuges” for species, such as mountain foothills.

Continue reading "Californian plants can’t take the heat" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This is one of the best chemistry videos, nay one of the best videos, full stop, I’ve ever seen.

The video accompanies a paper (abstract here, subscription needed for full paper) in Organic Letters about a photochromic molecule (one that can change between different forms when hit by light of some kind) that flips back and forth really quickly when UV light is shone on it.

The molecule changes from colourless to green, and that’s pretty much the best thing about it – so look at the video.

If you want to know more about the chemistry, which you might, then I can tell you that the molecules are hexaaryldiimidazole derivatives, and are a cyclic systems containing naphthalene units.

These kind of materials are used in spectacle lenses that change colour in bright lights. But really, just watch the video, that’s all you need to know.

[Hat tip: The Chem Blog]

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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After getting the scoop of a lifetime last week – finding ice – Phoenix is now ready to start doing some experiments of the chemical kind (press release).

This is the first ever chemistry experiment to be done on polar Martian soil. But I don’t think Phoenix will be using pipettes and test tubes, or even a Bunsen burner.

Phoenix’s lab is called MECA (microscopy, electrochemistry and conductivity analyzer) and will be able to test the Martian soil’s acidity and salt content, and the instrument can also check out the different isotopes of elements present, and work out if there are any organics there.

So far, Phoenix has been digging and baking – but this foray into chemistry is a pretty exciting step forward in working out what it is really like up there.

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Crocodiles can natter before they’re even born, according to a brilliant new study.

Writing in Current Biology researchers show that baby crocs use calls from inside their eggs to synchronise their hatching. Mother crocs also listen in for the calls, and swiftly dig up buried eggs when they hear them, according to Amélie Vergne and Nicolas Mathevon of Université Jean Monnet in France.

“We can well suppose that hatching synchrony can be of vital importance for crocodiles,” says Mathevon (press release). “Indeed, most mortality occurs early in life and hatching vocalizations might well attract predators. Therefore, adult presence at the nest and its response to juvenile vocalizations may offer protection against potential predators.”

The methodology of this research is simply awesome.

Continue reading "Crocodiles talk before hatching" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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US presidential candidate John McCain has upped the green rhetoric in his fight with Barack Obama, pledging to support “heroic efforts in engineering” to reduce oil dependency.

McCain also used a speech in California yesterday to propose a $300 million prize for battery technology that could succeed current hybrid and electric cars (speech transcript, good coverage in the LA Times).

“This is one dollar for every man, woman and child in the U.S. -- a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency -- and should deliver a power source at 30 percent of the current costs,” he said.

Other proposals from McCain in the speech include $5,000 tax credits for Americans buying zero-emission cars and the conversion of vehicles to use alcohol fuels instead of gas.

“Think of all the highest scientific endeavours of our age -- the invention of the silicon chip, the creation of the Internet, the mapping of the human genome,” said McCain in his speech. “In so many cases, you can draw a straight line back to American inventors, and often to the foresighted aid of the United States government.”

McCain’s rival Obama has previously backed government support to domestic auto industry to enable it to produce more fuel-efficient cars (Obama energy plan pdf).

Reuters quotes one of Obama’s economic advisers, Jason Furman, saying McCain “had the chance to make a difference for energy security and America's families [in Congress]. And he consistently not only didn’t make a difference but has stood in the way of the people like Senator Obama who have been trying to improve our energy security.”

Image: stock photo / John McCain 2008

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Using a clever bit of retrospective stargazing researchers have managed to date Homer’s classic work The Odyssey. Another team has used a similar technique to shift Julius Caesar back in time by a few days.

First up: The Odyssey.

Marcelo Magnasco and Constantino Baikouzis identified four astronomical events in the epic poem and calculated dates within 100 years of the fall of Troy that would fit in with the events described around Odysseus’s return home and the ensuing slaughter of men propositioning his wife. April 16, 1178 BCE was what they came up with (press release).

This is handy because it ties in with a previous theory that dates an eclipse possibly described in The Odyssey to the same date. Some have previously argued that the poem does not make reference to the eclipse at all and that the phrase “the Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world” is not an actual description of events (LA Times).

But Magnasco and Baikouzis’s work seems to offer support to the eclipse theory.

Continue reading "Look to the ancient skies..." »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It was twenty years ago today, Dr. Hansen taught politicians to play.

Jim Hansen, the scientist who is a perpetually clear and principled voice on climate change, was back in Washington today for the 20th anniversary of his famous 1988 testimony on global warming. Back then, in a planned-to-be-sweaty hearing room during a stifling heat wave, Hansen told senators that global warming was real, it was happening, and humanity was to blame. Today, on a slightly cooler though still muggy summer day, he told most of official Washington we are now at the point of a “planetary emergency.”

Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York City, has never been one for mincing words. Recently he has been talking about how the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 385 parts per million, is far too high – and that we should be aiming instead for a maximum level of 350 parts per million. This raises eyebrows among climate analysts who think even 450 parts per million is an optimistic scenario for what society can achieve.

Still, Hansen received a warm welcome in town. At a luncheon at the National Press Club, he received a standing ovation before even speaking. (To which the thoughtful, taciturn Hansen responded: “It’s not a time to celebrate.”) In the afternoon he addressed a joint Congressional committee on global warming, citing climate tipping points such as shrinking Arctic sea ice and the potential extinction of species as reasons to act now to curb the increase in greenhouse gases. (For the text of his presentations see his website here.)

Continue reading "He wants you all to sing along" »

Posted by Alex Witze
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Some of our non-British readers may not be familiar with reality TV show I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here, where D-list celebrities are slowly voted off the show by viewers.

Which means they may be slightly baffled by I’m a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here!

Funded by the Wellcome trust as a way of getting teenagers interested in science, this is a website where school children can ask practising scientists questions. Based on their answers they can then vote for their favourites, with the scientist with the lowest number of votes being evicted.

The winner takes home £500 and (presumably) a smug grin and the first victim has just been voted off.

Below the fold – why any teenage readers should vote for Peter to win.

Already booted off is embryonic stem cell researcher Heidi.

I'd vote for Peter, who currently works on “polymers that act as artificial muscles”, just on the basis of this Q&A:

Q: what would you do if you were not a scientist?
A: Own a restaurant and be an evil Chef
Q: Is it possible for a monkey to reproduce with a human?
A: I'm not a zoologist so can't comment. Although looking at some people you often wonder!
Q: do u actually like this competition or do u think its a waste of time?
A: There has been some really interesting things discussed. It does take quite a bit of time but trying to explain science is never a waste of time. Even if only one more person decides to do science that is a plus!

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Rock music is bad for art, according to Russian researchers.

Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, says concerts in the nearby Winter Square have damaged the sculptures housed in his museum, and possibly the building itself too.

According to the Independent, Piotrovsky was so concerned that he reached an agreement with the Rolling Stones to keep the noise down when they played in the square last year. The paper says he was “distressed” when Paul McCartney’s 2004 concert shook the museum’s windows (and maybe also by the fact he played some Wings numbers, but that’s my speculation).

According to a currently unpublished three-year study from the museum, every 10 concerts above 82 decibels “add an extra year” to the life of the work, say both the Daily Telegraph and the Independent (in suspiciously similar sentences – below the fold). In terms of artificial aging, rather than expanding lifetime, presumably.

Rock concerts can easily top 100 decibels and many places that host them have sculptures: the Independent cites Somerset House and Knebworth in the UK. Before we once again blame the evils of the world on rock music though, it’s worth noting a performance off Wagner can top 90 decibels.

Continue reading "Bringing the house down" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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What’s the worst thing that could happen from an outbreak at a top-security bio lab? According to the US Department of Homeland Security, over $4 billion of damage. And although it’s unlikely, outbreaks do happen.

The US wants to build a new ‘National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility’ to conduct research on livestock diseases at the highest level of security – biosafety level 4.

As the report website seems to be down at the moment, here’s a quote from it as detailed in the Kansas City Star:

The risk of an accidental release of a pathogen is extremely low, but the economic effect could be significant for all sites. Response measures to minimize risks and quickly contain any accidental release would also greatly reduce the potential economic loss.

At the moment there are no labs in the US for BSL-4 livestock work, says DHS. Existing government facilities on Plum Island, New York, are too small and have “an outdated physical structure that makes it unsuitable for zoonotic disease research that must be conducted at the highest level of biosafety”.

But, as AP has reported, a new environmental impact statement on possible locations says putting the new lab in Kansas or Texas could mean damage of over $4 billion in the unlikely even of an outbreak from the lab. This compares badly to the $2.8 billion cost of an outbreak from Plum Island.

Continue reading "New lab comes with $4bn outbreak risk" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, have taken a bit of time off from trying to get their shiny new toy up and running to address concerns that it might inadvertently destroy the planet. Their conclusion? It won't.

For those in need of an reminder, Walter Wagner, a Hawaiian botanist-cum-physicist indicted in February for identity theft, is suing the LHC and its partners because, he says, the particle accelerator could destroy the earth any one of a number of ways. It might create microscopic black holes that could swallow us all. Or it could make particles called "strangelets" that will turn the entire earth into a big blob of "strange" matter.

The new report rightly points out that there are plenty of places in the universe where particles collide at far higher energies than they will in LHC. There are also collisions right here in our upper atmosphere caused by cosmic rays—high-energy particles from deep space. So far at least, none of this has caused the planet to vanish.

To physicists, this whole debate is pretty silly, but it's good that they're taking the time to respond. Wagner and his cronies have been getting a lot of press, and it's important that the public know that the LHC is the least of the world's problems.

Image: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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What's been on The Great Beyond this week, plus a few extras...

Continue reading "Weekly round up " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A new report says nine million Australian adults are overweight.

The Australian press has been quick to declare their country “world’s fattest nation”. The Age, for example, says, “The latest figures show 4 million Australians — or 26% of the adult population — are now obese compared to an estimated 25% of Americans.”

“Overweight and obese people now make up the vast majority of us and these are the drastic measures now needed to bring these numbers down,” says report author Simon Stewart, head of preventative cardiology at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute (press release 1).

Just one problem – it doesn’t seem to be true that Australia is fatter than the US...

Continue reading "Don’t worry Australia, you’re not fatter than America" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It’s been a busy week in the whale world. High intrigue, political machinations, allegations of scamming, guilt, sorrow and (of course) climate change.

In advance of the International Whaling Commission meeting next week, here’s a worldwide whale watch round up...

Japan: Greenpeace Arrests

Police have arrested two Greenpeace activists over allegations they stole a box of whale meat. It seems these arrests relate to a box of meat the pressure group produced last month, which Greenpeace claimed had been stolen from the controversial ‘scientific whaling’ fleet.

“We’ve uncovered a scandal involving powerful forces in the Japanese government that benefit from whaling, and it’s not surprising they are striking back,” says Jun Hoshikawa, a Greenpeace Executive Director (press release). “What is surprising is that these activists, who are innocent of any crime, would be arrested for returning whale meat that was stolen from Japanese taxpayers.”

Hoshikawa called the arrests “an intimidation tactic by the government agencies responsible for a scandal”.

Japan Police Arrest Greenpeace Activists Over Stolen Whale Meat – Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aeULB9Q5sKlk&refer=japan
Greenpeace activists arrested over whale meat theft – Australia’s ABC

Chile: Don’t use the W word!

Continue reading "Whale watching worldwide" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Jason sequel is in space! No, not the truly awful slasher movie. Jason 2, the US-European satellite that will provide us with unparallel information about sea surface height, has successfully blasted off (Eumetsat press release).

“Sea-level measurements from space have come of age,” says Michael Freilich, director of the Earth Science Division part of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (NASA press release). “Precision measurements from this mission will improve our knowledge of global and regional sea-level changes and enable more accurate weather, ocean and climate forecasts.”

Jason-2 is part of a move from research satellites to operational satellites sending back reliable data streams for practical application, as weather satellites do, as well as for science (see these Nature articles).

According to NASA, Jason 2’s instruments are a vast improvement on those of its predecessor (Jason 1, as if you needed to be told). For example it will be able to collect data to within 25 km of coasts, compared to 50 km. Its measurements will help scientists determine speed and direction of ocean currents and how much of the sun’s energy is being stored in the water.

NASA explains:

The ocean’s surface has hills and valleys, too [like the land], varying in height by as much as two meters (6.5 feet) from one place to the next. Currents flow around these hills and valleys just as wind blows around high and low pressures in the atmosphere. Shaped by currents, winds and Earth’s gravity, the surface of the ocean tells a larger story about its most basic functions – how it stores vast amounts of energy from the sun, how it moves that energy around the globe and how it works together with the atmosphere to create our weather and climate.

At the moment Jason 2 is preparing to enter orbit 60 seconds behind Jason 1, so the instruments of the two satellites can be calibrated.

“It is not a revolution between Jasion-1 and Jason-2; it is an evolution, because the main objective is to ensure continuity,” explains Francois Parisot, the Jason-2 project chief at Eumetsat (BBC). “Nevertheless, there are some improvements in the instruments. We hope to make better measurements closer to the coast [and over inland waters and rivers]; and also, we will deliver near-realtime products - products that will be available within three hours of the measurements.”

More
NASA video – we have separation!
Eumetsat: Global ocean data for global monitoring
Eumetsat: Launch description
News coverage: AFP, AP, China Daily

Image top: blast off! NASA TV
Image lower: separation of Jason 2 from Delta II rocket second stage. NASA TV

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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If you thought watching snooker on a black and white TV was hard, imagine what it’s like for a doctor trying to spot cancer in the brain. So it’s a great step forward that researchers have worked out how to make MRI scans in colour.

At the moment the medical scans come only in black and white and use magnetic ‘contrast agents’ to improve the image. Obviously you can colour them in afterward with the hi-tech equivalent of a box of crayons but this isn’t hugely helpful.

However, in this week’s Nature Gary Zabow and colleagues in the US detail new contrast agents that can be tuned to produce different signals on an MRI scan by changing their shape. These agents could also be modified to ‘tag’ particular cells or tissues (research paper, press release).

Continue reading "Medical scans get a splash of colour" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A man has been cured of skin cancer after injections of five billion clones of his own immune cells, according to a mass of media coverage. This is one of those “whoa” moments, both in an ‘amazing’ way and a ‘not so fast’ way.

Cassian Yee, of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and colleagues in the US, took a type of white blood cell called CD4 T Cells from their patient; selected ones that target his melanoma; grew loads of them; and put them back in the patient (research paper in the NEJM). No tumours were found in the man two years after treatment, despite previous cancers being detected in his body.

“We were surprised by the anti-tumor effect of these CD4 T cells and its duration of response,” says Yee (press release). “For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study.”

Continue reading "Can cloned cells cure cancer?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week Nature publishes the genome of amphioxus. So we’re bringing you a song.

Why should you care about amphioxus? As Nature’s own Henry Gee says in his News & Views article, “One might be forgiven for never having heard of the amphioxus, a small, vaguely fish-shaped creature, which spends most of its life buried in sand filtering detritus from seawater.”

However, if you read his full article (subscription required) you can find out why this genome is actually of “preternatural importance” as amphioxus is the most basal chordate. You could also check out this week’s Nature Podcast, which also goes into it (pod-page, direct link to MP3).

To celebrate this genome, the Great Beyond would like you all to head over to the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division of the University of Chicago and listen to their official theme: The Amphioxus Song. If it baffles you, head on over to the annotated version.

Lyrics below the fold.

Continue reading "Songs about science VII: ‘It’s a long way from Amphioxus’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Forgive us for only just having noticed this but the Encyclopaedia Britannica has done something of a U-turn.

Having railed against user input, they’re now coming over all Wiki on us. As Silicon Valley’s The Mercury News notes, “Soon you, your family, friends - and even that nut case down the street - can publish in the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica.”

“By inviting a larger range of people to contribute and collaborate, we can produce more coverage,” says Britannica spokesman Tom Panelas.

According to Wired there will now be three type of content, entries from Britannic experts, user generated content, and the official encyclopaedia which will use elements of both.

In 2005 a Nature investigation found Wikipedia surprisingly close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This study has it all, sex, chimps, shouting, and the chance to make references to Sex and the City.

Researchers from Germany, Uganda and Scotland have found chimpanzees use ‘copulation calls’ in a rather clever way.

Simon Townsend, Tobias Deschner, and Klaus Zuberbühler found females seem to “advertise receptivity to high-ranked males, confuse paternity and secure future support from these socially important individuals” while at the same time avoiding a kicking from high ranking females for moving in on their men.

The researchers found females called “significantly more” when they were with high-ranking males (that’s ‘with’ in as in actually in flagrante). But they were pretty quiet when senior females were around.

Continue reading "Chimps’ canny coquettish calling " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The N prize? What’s that? Something 14/24 times as good as the X-prize? Nope, it is – in its own words – “a challenge to launch an impossibly small satellite into orbit on a ludicrously small budget, for a pitifully small cash prize.”

Details as follows: £9,999.99 is in the prize pot for anyone who proves that they’ve put a small satellite into orbit that weighs between 9.99 and 19.99 grams. This teeny satellite has to complete at least nine Earth orbits, and cost no more than £999.99.

It wasn’t surprising, therefore, to read in an interview with the instigator, Paul Dear, a biologist specialising in single-molecule genomics, at the MRC in Cambridge, that a bottle of Pinot Grigio had a lot to do with the prize’s inception.

So far, the smallest satellite made is the CubeSat – measuring about 10cm by 10cm by 10cm and weighing around one kilogram. And costing a lot more than £999.99. At a meeting arranged by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council last year, a low cost mission seems to have been defined as anything less than million pounds.

So how on earth could a ten-gram satellite be made for under a thousand pounds? One suggestion I heard is to send a flashing bicycle LED-lamp up there and claim it is transmitting Morse code. Not bad, not bad. Someone else wondered if a great big sheet-like structure (made out of tin foil, perhaps?) might do the trick to maximise the surface area so that a lightweight body could be picked up by radar.

I can’t wait to see who wins. But I think Dear can sleep safely with his ten grand stashed under his mattress for some time yet.

Image: NASA

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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A huge haul of dinosaurs has been uncovered in Utah. It is, says the Salt Lake Tribune, a veritable ‘logjam’ of 148 million year old remains.

In three weeks of excavations, researchers from the Burpee Museum of Natural History have uncovered four long-necked sauropods, two carnivorous dinosaurs and a possible herbivorous Stegosaurus in a quarry in the southeast of the state (press release).

National Geographic says the discovery “sheds new light on a Jurassic landscape dominated by dinosaur giants”. Scott Foss, a palaeontologist at the Salt Lake City office of the US Bureau of Land Management says the quarry is part of the Morrison formation, “where all the big sexy dinosaurs that we grew up learning about are most commonly found”.

Continue reading "‘Big sexy’ dinosaurs of the day" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Having recently come across Wordle, a “toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text”, I wondered what would happen if you ran scientific things through it.

This is what happens. [Hat tip: Good Morning Silicon Valley.]

This is the entirety of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (text from Darwin Online). Below the fold is the human genome.

Click on any image for a larger version.

Continue reading "In the beginning was the word..." »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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British universities are turning a blind eye to cheating, plagiarism and manipulation of markings. That’s the message from former chair of the academic council of the University of London.

In a speech this afternoon Geoffrey Alderman will warn that pressure to do well on league tables is causing lecturers to drop standards, leading to a rocketing number of first class degrees awarded (this is the best you can get at most universities in the UK).

“I have heard it seriously argued that international students who plagiarise should be treated more leniently than British students because of ‘differential cultural norms’,” says Alderman in a text of the speech made available early (quoted in The Independent and the BBC). “It is indeed rare, nowadays, for habitual plagiarists to be expelled from their universities.”

Below the fold: cheating around the world.

Continue reading "Cheating across the world" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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In a study published in PNAS this week two researchers report that the brains of heterosexual men and homosexual women are slightly asymmetric, with the right hemisphere larger than the left. Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström also found that the brains of gay men and straight women are not slightly asymmetric.

Here come the headlines...

Gay men and straight women share brain detail – Reuters
Scans see 'gay brain differences' – BBC
Study Says Brains of Gay Men and Women Are Similar – Scientific American
Study: Gay Men, Straight Women Share Brain Characteristics – Fox News
Gay men and straight women have similar brains, study says - LA Times

Interestingly no-one seems to have gone with a ‘Straight men and gay women have similar brains’ headline. So I’ve done it.

In their study Savic and Lindström used PET scans of the brains of 90 people. They looked at the connections of the left and right amygdalae. Crucially, the study says “The results cannot be primarily ascribed to learned effects, and they suggest a linkage to neurobiological entities.”

Continue reading "Straight men and gay women have similar brains" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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UPDATE: The first edition Copernicus went for $2.2 million. Dalton’s book went for a bargain $18,750.

If you want to grab yourself a piece of science history you better get to New York on the double. Some of the most important books ever published are coming up for auction today.

Christie’s in New York is selling off the Richard Green library of what is, with amazing understatement, called ‘Important Scientific Books’. Described by the auction house as ‘a physician and amateur astronomer’, Green started collecting scientific books in the 70s. Boy did he build up a good collection (press release pdf).

The star of the show is a first edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, described by Christie’s as “arguably the finest copy in private hands”. With no hyperbole, this can be described as one of the most important books ever published, and the finest exploration ever of the phrase “the world doesn’t revolve around you, you know”.

The NY Times notes in a June 10 article:

Its cover is dented and stained. The pages are warped. You could easily imagine that this book had sat out half a dozen revolutions hidden in various dank basements in Europe.

In fact this book, published in 1543, was the revolution. It was here that the Polish astronomer laid out his theory that the Earth and other planets go around the Sun, contravening a millennium of church dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe and launching a frenzy of free thought and scientific inquiry.

If you’ve got between $900,000 and $1,200,000 it could be yours. If that’s a bit rich for you a second edition is estimated to go for between $60,000 and $80,000.

More highlights below the fold.

Continue reading "Super science books sale" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Jeffrey Goldberg over at The Atlantic jumped into an fMRI machine for the sake of science … er … journalism, testing the claims of so-called neuromarketing – using the results of these brain mapping exercises to inform market research. The result is an amusing essay on his own doubts about what the pictures of his brain reveal about his feelings on Jimmy Carter, the Yankees, or Bruce Springsteen.

OK, but what if the sight of Golda Meir provoked feelings of sexual arousal? What if the sight of David Ben-Gurion provoked feelings of sexual arousal? What if it turned out that I actually feel disgust at the sight of Bruce Springsteen? To think of all the money I’ve wasted on concert tickets and T-shirts.

Still, in the current issue of Nature Nikos Logothetis, at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, in Tuebingen, Germany, reviews the limitations of fMRI’s use in cognitive neuroscience. While critical of the overinterpretation of fMRI mapping which is still based on the assumption that blood oxygenation levels can really pinpoint areas of metabolism and neural activity that can be temporally associated with, he concedes that fMRI is not “a worthless and non-informative ‘neophrenology.’”

Check out his podcast conversation with Keri Smith.
Neuromarketing certainly seems the most egregious of areas where overinterpretation is at play, and some of Goldberg’s results reveal what sounds more like tea leaf reading than anything else. Joshua Freedman, a practicing psychiatrist and partner in FKF Applied Research, which has been developing the fMRI-based market research processes, offers some explanations for Goldberg’s reward centre activity in response to pictures of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

He asked me some questions about my view of Jewish history, and then said: “You seem to believe that the Jewish people endure, that people who try to hurt the Jewish people ultimately fail. Therefore, you derive pleasure from believing that Ahmadinejad will also eventually fail. It’s very similar to the experiment with the monkey and the grape. It’s been shown that the monkey feels maximal reward not when he eats the grape but at the moment he’s sure it’s in his possession, ready to eat. That could explain your response to Ahmadinejad.”

Posted by Brendan Maher
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NASA is a step closer to the spacesuits astronauts will wear on the moon in 2020. On Friday it announced that Houston-based company Oceaneering International would be making its suits.

The contract, worth up to $745 million, is for two configurations of the space suit (press release, news coverage).

“Configuration One will support dynamic events such as launch and landing operations; contingency intra-vehicular activity (IVA) during critical mission events; off-nominal events such as loss of pressurization of the Orion crew compartment; and microgravity EVAs for contingency operations,” says NASA. “... While preparing to walk on the moon, the astronauts will construct Configuration Two by replacing elements of Configuration One with elements specialized for surface operations.”

As The Hartford Courant notes, this means NASA is “abandoning Hamilton Sundstrand as its spacesuit supplier after more than 40 years”. Hamilton is based in Hartford.

“We were very deeply hurt that we did not get the contract,” the paper quotes Donald Rethke, a Hamilton consultant, as saying. “To me, it’s the end of an era.”

The world’s fashion writers have yet to comment on the suits but we think configuration one is the look to go for: pleasingly retro, aggressively functional and flattering looks make it the must-have this season. By contrast configuration two ticks all the fashion no-no boxes: bulky, makes even super-fit astronauts look fat, has a terrible rucksack accessory and is a truly awful blue colour.

Shown left: configuration one (Image: NASA)
Shown right: configuration two (Image: NASA)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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In a totally shameless attempt to get some free publicity [brand whose name we won’t mention] has broadcast an advert into space.

The winning advert was made by Matt Bowron as part of a competition run by [brand whose name we won’t mention]. You can watch it on the embedded video below the fold.

“The signal is directed at a solar system just 42 light years away from Earth, in the ‘Ursa Major’ or Great Bear Constellation,” says Tony van Eyken, director of the European Incoherent Scattter facility that is broadcasting the message (Environmental Graffiti). “Its star is very similar to our Sun and hosts a habitable zone that could harbour small life supporting planets similar to ours.”

How much the facility, which normally studies the Earth’s magnetosphere, is getting paid to do this hasn’t been disclosed.

Continue reading "Advertising to aliens" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Space shuttle Discovery landed safely on Saturday despite the now seemingly obligatory last-minute scare*.

The day before touchdown a small metal clip was spotted floating away from the shuttle’s rudder. NASA decided it was still safe to attempt landing (BBC). The clip apparently only holds the rudder in place during launch, and isn’t needed for re-entry (Reuters).

This mission of the aging shuttle installed a massive section of a new Japanese lab onto the International Space Station and, more importantly, fixed the station’s toilet. “We’re really glad to be involved in making the space station a bigger and more capable place,” said shuttle Commander Kelly Mark (NY Times). It’s thought he was referring to the lab rather than the toilet.

The end of this mission means there are just ten shuttle voyages left before the fleet is retired. Last week the White House issued what the Houston Chronicle called an “unusually strongly worded” statement, rejecting efforts from Congress put up $2.9 billion for three extra flights.

More
NASA ‘Landing 101’
NASA landing blog
Landing videos
More photos

*The NY Times’ article ‘Concerns as Object Floats Past Shuttle’ now seems to have disappeared, and ‘No Problems Seen for Shuttle Landing’ is in its place.

Image: NASA/Kevin O'Connell,Scott Haun

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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What's been on The Great Beyond this week, plus a few extras ...

Monday 9 June
Leaving Earth ... 40 years ago / Nervosa rex / Biomass boosting / Beep beep, 500 trillion times a second

Tuesday 10 June
Trade in dead tigers alive and well / Nobel prize leads to new reward: a long-lost relative / Acid Jacuzzi roundup

Wednesday 11 June
Bye, bye blackbird

Thursday 12 June
Name that tune in three elements / Diary from an Arctic icebreaker / Alas, poor Pluto

Friday 13 June
2,000-year-old seed makes good / Sniffing out a good story / "Nature unhinged" / Chillin' out at the LHC

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
In the Field: Phoenix lander starts to 'shake and bake' Martian dirt
The Sceptical Chymist: Should scientists have a life outside the lab?

Ones that got away
Scientists blame drilling for Indonesia's mud volcano, from the AP
Leatherback turtles hit Texas' Padre Island, from the Austin American-Statesman
Videos of the week: Fire, ovulation, and a beluga birth

Posted by Alex Witze
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Researchers have coaxed a 2000-year-old seed into germinating. The result: a happy, healthy date palm tentatively named ‘Methuselah’. It’s an impressive feat, and surpasses the record previously held by a 1300-year-old lotus seed found in the bed of an ancient Chinese lake. All in all, I’ve come to realize that my jubilation at germinating my five-year-old arugula seeds this spring was perhaps a touch overenthusiastic.

National Geographic had this three years ago, but today’s media flurry is in response to a paper published in Science this week. Some of my favorite highlights from today’s coverage: New Scientist refers to it as a ‘Jesus-era seed’, and the LA Times gets the researchers to speculate on how the seed ended up buried in the ruins of a Herodian fortress overlooking the Dead Sea. “These people were eating these dates up on the mountain and looking down at the Roman camp, knowing that they were going to die soon, and spitting out the pits," study author Sarah Sallon of the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center in Jerusalem told the LA Times. "Maybe here is one of those pits."

So how do these seeds manage to last so long, emerging triumphant after centuries of background radiation and exposure to harsh weather? Sallon and her colleagues suspect that the dry heat of the Dead Sea region may have played a role. Others have postulated (for instance here and here) that the lotus seeds might be especially good at resisting the DNA-damaging effects of radiation. And for a fun and more conceptual take on the issue, check out Olivia Judson’s recent blog entry on mutations and natural variation. (She gets to the lotus bit towards the end, but the whole column is worth a read.)

Photo by Guy Eisner / Courtesy of Science Magazine

Posted by Heidi Ledford
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A story is doing the rounds about the coffee aroma and sleep deprivation. But I smell a rat.

It’s an interesting question: can the aroma of coffee stimulate the sleep-deprived brain into action? Yes,
according to researchers in South Korea, Germany and Japan who put rats in a cage with a couple of centimetres of water, forcing them to stay awake. They then put the sleepy animals somewhere dry and wafted the smell of roasted coffee beans under the noses of some of them.

Levels of messenger RNA in the brains of the sleep-deprived rats were reduced for 11 genes involved in brain functio; after smelling the coffee, this function was restored for nine of the genes. It isn’t known if these particular genes have any role in human wakefulness, but the suggestion that the smell of coffee be piped into factories seems to have pricked the imagination of a number of reporters; here, here and here for example.

Continue reading "Sniffing out a good story" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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M. Night Shyamalan’s new film, "The Happening" (movie site | IMDB ), opens this weekend: the reviewers are not being kind. It is apparently an ecological fable in which nature (the concept, not the journal) starts killing people – a bit like the lift in “De Lift”, but, you know, everywhere. Trees are reportedly the ringleaders. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw breaks into his panning of the film (“abysmal acting, terrible direction, muddled script … decisively the wrong side of the laugh-with/laugh-at divide.”) to add extra demerits for its use of science.

Elliott superciliously drones that: "Science will come up with some reason to put in the books but in the end it'll just be a theory. We will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding." For this typically fatuous anti-rational, anti-scientific piece of smuggery, Shyamalan deserves a clip round the ear.

Continue reading ""Nature unhinged"" »

Posted by Oliver Morton
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The summer may be getting warm, but the Large Hadron Collider is cooling down.

The world's largest particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, is entering the final testing phase of its superconducting magnets, which will be used to steer protons around the ring and smash them into each other at energies of up to 7TeV. In order to work, the magnets must be chilled to 1.9 Kelvin, and that requires a huge network of vacuum pumps, cryostats and electrical feedthroughs, all of which need to be made air-tight.

It's been slow going, but as you can see (right) the 32Km ring is finally approaching the requisite temperatures. Once there, each sectors' magnets will be powered up and tested further. Then it's off to the races!

If you want to follow how it's all going yourself, then check in here.
Image: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Best song of the 80s? Gold by Spandau Ballet. But it seems that the frilly-collared Spandau boys were far from original in their lyrical choice. According to a survey undertaken by Santiago Alvarez, in the department of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona, the most popular elements referred to in music are, from the top; silver, gold, tin and oxygen.

I was amazed to hear that tin was so high in the elemental hit parade, until a quick survey of the Nature News team opened my eyes to its prevalence elsewhere than in the Wizard of Oz (incidentally the tin man’s song never mentions his eponymous metal).

How could I have forgotten the brilliant And the band played Waltzing Matilda, by Eric Bogle (and also performed by the ever-slurry Pogues), with the line “They gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun”. And a quick google search shows that even soft-focussed Katie Melua mentions tin in her song What it says on the tin. I’m not sure that the suggestion that tin’s ranking was due to the Belgian cartoon character Tintin is right, though.

Other gems plucked from the minds of the Nature News team include: platinum wheels in Minnie The Moocher; lithium in Nirvana’s Lithium; silicon in the Boomtown Rats' I don't like Mondays; hydrogen and helium in They might be giants' Why does the sun shine? and almost every single element there is in the genius elements song by Tom Lehrer.

Iron has to be way up there too, what with all those rockers – "Iron man, by Ozzie and friends,” one Japan-based member of the team enthused when asked what element-containing song sprang to mind.

I’m very impressed that the New Journal of Chemistry published this comprehensive opinion piece, which goes much further than simply being a survey of a “musical cyberstore”, as suggested in the press release.

Continue reading "Name that tune in three elements" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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We'd be remiss if we didn't point out our excellent colleague Quirin Schiermeier, a reporter with Nature's news team, has been aboard the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen for the past week, as part of a major study on Arctic sea ice. He's been sending back diary entries about life aboard ship; check it out here. A Flickr set of images from the trip is here.

Image: Quirin Schiermeier atop the sea ice in Franklin Bay, approximately 70 degrees north, 125 degrees west

Posted by Alex Witze
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Pluto, demoted two years ago from a planet to a 'dwarf planet', has another moniker. Pluto, it seems, is now a 'plutoid'.

Yes, the International Astronomical Union is at it again. In an unexpected development (see comments), the IAU's executive committee has approved the term 'plutoid' for the following bodies: "Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the Sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighbourhood around their orbit." Yeah, that.

This all of course follows the outcry in 2006 (Nature story here, subscription required [Update: our blogging on the subject, though, is free to all...]) when the IAU kicked Pluto out from full-fledged planetary status. The newly designated plutoids include two objects currently: Pluto and the other big icy object that is known to orbit out there, called Eris. Ceres, which meets the criterion of size, doesn't qualify since it orbits in the asteroid belt. Got it?

Not all planetary scientists are thrilled. Alan Stern, NASA's former science chief who led the team that discovered two moons of Pluto, told the Associated Press: "It's just some people in a smoke-filled room who dreamed it up....Plutoids or hemorrhoids, whatever they call it. This is irrelevant." David Morrison of the NASA Ames Research Center told Space.com: "This seems like an unattractive term and an unnecessary one to me."

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

Image, of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon: Dr. R. Albrecht, ESA/ESO Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility; NASA

Posted by Alex Witze
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The British press has leapt on a story about a new family tree of birds (Times | BBC | Google )

All sounds very jolly, but this family tree is actually a doomsayer, used to predict the decline of beloved British birds. On the basis of their analysis, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, researchers from Imperial College say the blackbird may soon be a species under threat (paper | press release). The reasoning is that a number of the blackbirds’ close relations, such as the the song thrush, are already in trouble. This decline of related birds, says researcher Gavin Thomas, is a warning sign that blackbirds are going to become endangered in the future, based on the physical similarities of the birds and their positions in the family tree he has devised.

So the new research can be seen as an early warning system for birds, and might help conservationists do something in advance to save the allegedly-threatened birds from a dangerous decline. Maybe someone should stop the singing of the nursery rhyme “Sing a song of sixpence”, to avoid any pie-related exacerbation of their predicted dwindling numbers.

Posted on behalf of Katharine Sanderson

Image: Blackbird photo from Foxypar4 on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons licence

Posted by Oliver Morton
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According to several reports in the British press (see here, here and here), investigators for the UK-based Environmental Investigation Agency had little trouble procuring illegal tiger wine from so-called wildlife rescue centres in China.

The wine, made by steeping a tiger carcass in cheap booze, is used by many for medicinal purposes, but it has been banned in Chinese domestic trade since 1993 as well as under the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangereds Species. At the Nature offices we weren’t too surprised by the news that tiger parks are apparently flouting those rules. A freelancer who worked on a tiger story for us, Jerry Guo, had no problem tracking down two bottles when he was writing about the Hengdaohezi Feline Breeding Centre (story here, subscription required) – not one of the two parks visited by investigators.

Jerry just asked around at the train station until a taxi driver agreed to take him to a store that specializes in wildlife products. He also saw 200 carcasses in a freezer that a researcher willingly offered were meant for the illegal wine trade -- something he hoped would offset the costs of saving the tigers. While it’s nice to hope that these parks offer some refuge for the dwindling wild population of tigers, the reality of what goes on is far darker.

Posted on behalf of Brendan Maher

Image: C. Jennings

Posted by Alex Witze
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The Associated Press in Salt Lake City, Utah, has been carrying the news that the city's most famous scientific resident, Mario Capecchi, was reunited with his half-sister after more than six decades apart.

Capecchi, of the University of Utah, shared last year's Nobel prize for physiology or medicine for his contribution to the development of designer 'knock-out' mice. News of the award made television in Austria, where Marlene Bonelli was watching at home. She saw a face that seemed familiar, the face of a brother she thought had died in World War II. She consequently read Capecchi's life story in 'Dolomiten', her local newspaper, and was certain the famous scientist was her older brother.

Bonelli then contacted the newspaper, which sent photographs of her to Capecchi in Utah. "Looking at the pictures it was obviously my sister," Capecchi said, noting her resemblance to his mother. The siblings separated by a war were finally reunited on May 23 -- but had to communicate through an interpreter. "She doesn't speak English and I don't speak German and neither of us speaks Italian, although I can get away with it in a restaurant," Capecchi said. A video of their reunion is available here.

Their mother, Lucy Ramberg, was an anti-fascist activist in the years leading up to the war. "In 1939 the Germans were already keeping track of my mother. The Italians jailed her and she knew she couldn't keep the child," said Capecchi. He was 2 when Marlene was handed over to friends in Austria. Capecchi himself endured a hard-knock life; his mother sent him to live with a poor family with what little money she could make from selling her possessions. When the money ran out, he was sent to live with his abusive father who abandoned him soon afterwards. A young Capecchi, not much older than four, was left to fend for himself on the streets of Bologna, scrounging for food to survive.

Following her release after the war, Ramberg found Capecchi on his ninth birthday in a hospital suffering from typhoid and malnutrition. They then set off on a journey that would see them arrive in the US to a new life, a life for Capecchi that would entail a brilliant scientific career.

Posted on behalf of Tony Scully

Image credit: Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Posted by Alex Witze
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On Sunday, Nature published a paper sort of previewing the future of the oceans if CO₂ levels continue to rise. To recap, Jason Hall-Spencer at the University of Plymouth and colleagues conducted a survey of aquatic life around CO₂-spewing ocean vents. In addition to being an excuse to go diving off the coast of Italy, the work showed that corals, urchins and other organisms could not live in the acidified shadow of the vents. The group theorized it may be bad news for future oceans.

The work got a fair bit of pick up in British papers, as well as overseas. But for real science envy, check out the BBC's video of the team as they swan around what Hall-Spencer himself describes as "a 300-meter-long Jacuzzi."

Would that we were all so lucky that we could dive in the name of science.
Image: Riccardo Rodolfo-Metalpa

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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My co-workers will not be surprised to hear me admit that I am an unabashed space geek. When I was little my mom, who was an astronomy major at Wellesley, used to take me out with our cute red Edmund AstroScan to look at the Pleiades. In college I interned at Sky & Telescope magazine, and just about died of excitement when I got to do a feature story on the meteorite of Ensisheim. And I even managed to marry an astronomy writer, whose brother and sister-in-law work for NASA.

So I'm just about the prime target audience for a new six-part series on the Discovery channel, called When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions. The first two hours debuted last night; the remaining installments will come over the next two Sundays. The heavily-promoted series promises rare footage, behind-the-scenes access, yada yada yada ... the sort of thing a TV channel needs to promise to draw in viewers who've watched NASA footage for decades.

But this series actually delivers.

Continue reading "Leaving Earth ... 40 years ago" »

Posted by Alex Witze
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How do you make a two-year-old piece of neuroscience more news-y? With a dinosaur, of course.

A team of British neuroscientists has received a £1.1m to launch a follow up study on possible genetic factors in depression and anxiety disorders (University of Aberdeen press release). The research is focused on enhancer regions in the genome which are remarkably similar in humans, mice and chickens, suggesting that natural selection has kept them in shape for over 300 million years. This implies that dinosaurs had the same enhancers, and so led to an ingenious spin on the story by Craig Brown in The Scotsman

Dinosaurs were nervous rex

A GENETIC link between dinosaurs and humans could provide the key to developing a treatment for depression, according to Scots scientists.
Experts have discovered that the component in human DNA which triggers depression also existed in prehistoric beasts – and would have helped determine their moods.

Here's the original article: Davidson et al, Molecular Psychiatry 11, 410–421(2006)

Posted on behalf of Tony Scully

Image: "Dinosaur Nights", used under a Creative Commons licence from Flickr user Niznoz

Posted by Oliver Morton
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Over at Canada's Financial Post, Lawrence Solomon is excited about the increase in biomass over the past two decades.

Planet Earth is on a roll! GPP is way up. NPP is way up. To the surprise of those who have been bearish on the planet, the data shows global production has been steadily climbing to record levels, ones not seen since these measurements began.

GPP is Gross Primary Production, a measure of the daily output of the global biosphere --the amount of new plant matter on land. NPP is Net Primary Production, an annual tally of the globe's production. Biomass is booming. The planet is the greenest it's been in decades, perhaps in centuries.

Judging by his record Mr Solomon likes to find new, surprising stories that over turn the evil IPCC-led consensus on climate science. Not clear, though, that he's very successful: this is neither new nor surprising. The work cited seems to be a 2004 paper by Steve Running and colleagues on monitoring NPP using the MODIS satellite data set (BioScience 54, 547-560 (2004) -- pdf), so it's hardly news. What's more, everyone studying carbon dioxide levels agrees that there are "biological sinks" -- places where more carbon-dioxide means more biomass, either because of the direct carbon-dioxide-fertilisation effect (it is, after all, plant food) or because the climatic effects are to the benefit of plants. Growth in sinks = growth in biomass. And a billion tonnes of carbon or so flowing into sinks every year will add up, over time. No denying that.

Continue reading "Biomass boosting" »

Posted by Oliver Morton
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Computing has entered the petaflop age: John Markoff reports in the New York Times that the IBM "Roadrunner" system at Los Alamos has nipped into petaflop territory, clocking up 1.026 quadrillion operations a second. Interestingly for the petaflop buffs, this system doesn't use the same chips as IBM's previous recordholders in the supercomputer stakes

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”

We had a little story on taking this approach further with millions of low-cost processors in our coverage of climate modelling a few weeks back. Apparently Roadrunner will be warming up with some climate models before it gets down to the real business of simulating the first few shakes of a nuclear explosion. Way to prioritise, guys.

Continue reading "Beep beep, 500 trillion times a second" »

Posted by Oliver Morton
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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

Monday June 02
‘Carbon scrubber’ breakthrough / Buzz Lightyear, toilet and Japanese lab lifted to space / And the winner is ... Melting Bob / Scammers get scientific

Tuesday June 03
Europe says Sanofi-Aventis blocked investigators / Papua New Guinea forests under threat / Mini planet found far away / NASA PR ‘mischaracterized climate change science’

Wednesday June 04
Astronomers perform galactic limb surgery / Biofuel row at UN food meeting / When did humans get to New Zealand?

Thursday June 05
No rest for Phoenix / Iceland polar bear shooting row / Kibo brings more hope to space

Friday June 06
McCain is a Martian! / Cane toads killing crocs / Orogeny by jerks

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
Climate Feedback: Quirin Schiermeier is taking a trip on a research icebreaker
Nascent: ‘WikiProteins is a bit rubbish’

Ones that got away
UC Davis has a professor of beer, from the LA Times
Can ‘friendly bacteria’ save the frogs? From the BBC

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Mountains appear to be pushed up faster than we thought, according to a group of researchers who’ve been looking hard at the Andes.

If the work is right our understanding of mountain formation made need some tweaking (National Geographic, PA, New Scientist, Reuters).

In this week’s Science the team review several recent studies, and conclude that rather than rising slowly over 40 million years, “recent studies of the Andes indicate that their elevation remained relatively stable for long periods (tens of millions of years), separated by rapid (1 to 4 million years) changes of 1.5 kilometers or more”.

This, says author Carmala Garzione of the University of Rochester, supports a controversial theory of orogeny – mountain building - called delamination.

Continue reading "Orogeny by jerks" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Already invasive, rampaging and poisonous, cane toads have another crime added to the charge sheet this week: croc killers.

Saltwater crocodiles seem unaffected by the toads but new evidence has emerged that this is not the case with freshwater crocs. Mike Letnic, of the University of Sydney, says there has been a 75% reduction in their numbers in an area in Australia’s Northern Territory where the toads recently arrived, and the bodies are pilling up (press release).

“When we first went in we counted about 700 crocodiles [in the area] and found no dead ones at all,” Letnic says (Cosmos, and a similar quote from AAP). “But then we went back … after the cane toads had started moving through. This time we found less than 400 crocodiles … and, in the space of a week, we found over 30 dead.”

Continue reading "Cane toads killing crocs" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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US presidential candidate John McCain says he wants to see humanity on Mars. He told a group of Florida newspapers that Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles have shaped his thinking on this issue.

“As a very young boy, I was intrigued by and read Ray Bradbury, and my favourite ... is The Martian Chronicles,” said McCain (RawStory). "I am intrigued by a man on Mars and I think it would excite the imagination of the American people."

He also said he would be a champion for NASA, and would consider running the Shuttle past the current 2010 cut off date (AP). Money, it seems is no object, so long as NASA has some firm priorities.

“Yes, I’d be willing to spend more taxpayers dollars,” he said (Washington Post’s The Trail blog).

Jeff Foust's Space Politics blog says McCain’s comments sound “a little bit like what Barack Obama has been saying”.

Image: NASA Glenn Research Center (NASA-GRC)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The hatch on the second part of Japanese lab Kibo has been opened by the denizens of the International Space Station.

Yesterday, at 5:05 pm EDT, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide officially opened the lab, the name of which means ‘hope’ in Japanese, for science and to applause down in the JAXA headquarters. He also hung a ‘noren’ – the sort of cloth curtain you may have seen in front of Japanese restaurants – above the hatch.

“We have a new hope on space station,” he says. “It’s a beautiful module. It looks pretty empty because we don't have lots of racks inside. It looks empty, but it’s filled with dreams.” [NASA, JAXA has a slightly different translation.]

Initial problems with the module’s air conditioning were resolved after a couple of hours.

A third part of Kibo, allowing experiments to be subjected to space rather than a nice pressurised lab, is scheduled for delivery next year. AFP says, “When completed, Kibo will allow astronauts to carry out experiments in medicine, biology and biotechnology, material production and communications, both in a pressurized environment and completely exposed to space.”

Japanese coverage
Yomiuri Shimbun (in English)
Asahi Shimbun (in Japanese)
Yomiuri Shimbun (in Japanese)

Image: Inside Kibo / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Iceland has defended shooting dead a polar bear that appears to have travelled 300km from Greenland (video, not suitable for Knut fans).

The 250 kg beast was originally going to be tranquillised, but weather conditions put a stop to that.

“There was a lot of fog in the area and the bear was moving into the fog. We couldn’t risk losing him and there was no time to wait for anaesthetics, so we had to shoot him. It was for the safety of the public,” Police Superintendent Stefan Vagn Stefansson told Icelandic radio (Reuters).

Although some reports are saying the bear swam from Greenland, it seems more likely it was carried on drifting ice. “When polar bears have come to Iceland they have usually travelled most of the way on icebergs that continuously drift south along Greenland's east coast,” notes Vísindavefurinn, a science website run by the University of Iceland, in a 2005 article ‘Could a polar bear swim from Greenland to Iceland?’.

Continue reading "Iceland polar bear shooting row" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Katharine Sanderson

Meanwhile, up on Mars, Phoenix isn’t getting a moment’s rest. And neither are the earthling space reporters, with the media still going nuts over the recently-landed Mars mission.

My favourite quote is in the New York Times from PI Peter Smith, talking about Phoenix’s stationary stance: “Five years ago when we started this mission, I was somewhat worried that we didn’t have wheels,” he said. Whoopsie. Good news, then that they think they’ve already seen ice (YES! ICE! ) right beneath the lander

This dig has been delayed twice already. This report from the Telegraph seems a little unfair, suggesting as it does in the headline, that it is Phoenix’s fault. Not so. The delay is because the communications satellites that relay instructions to, and information from, Phoenix keep getting turned off.

Still, it’s all looking good for a dig later today, so watch this space, and Eric Hand’s constantly updated blog for the latest on the search for life signs of life. Oh, and if you’ve had enough already of Phoenix, Space.com have got a story about whatmight happen next on Mars.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute/SSV [watch video animation of Phoenix digging here].

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The New Zealand press is getting excited about a study that says humans arrived on the island 1,000 years later than previously thought.

Carbon dating of rat bones and seeds the rats had chewed on puts human arrival somewhere between 1280 and 1300.

“East Polynesian islands preserve exceptionally detailed records of the initial prehistoric impacts on highly vulnerable ecosystems, but nearly all such studies are clouded by persistent controversies over the timing of initial human colonization, which has resulted in proposed settlement chronologies varying from 200 BC to 1000 AD or younger,” write study author Janet Wilmshurst and her colleagues at Landcare Researc, in PNAS.

“...Radiocarbon dates on distinctive rat-gnawed seeds and rat bones show that the Pacific rat was introduced to both main islands of New Zealand 1280 AD, a millennium later than previously assumed.”

Continue reading "When did humans get to New Zealand?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The head of UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has called on world leaders to cough up $30 billion to avert future wars over food, at the UN food summit in Rome.

In a wide-ranging look at the world’s ills FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf pointed out that the world spends $1,200 billion on weapons and excess consumption by the obese is valued at $20 billion.

“Against that backdrop, how can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find US$30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life?” he said. “It is resources of this order of magnitude that would make it possible definitely to lay to rest the specter of conflicts over food that are looming on the horizon.”

Diouf also took aim at the world’s current favourite whipping boy: biofuels.

Continue reading "Biofuel row at UN food meeting" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Apparently our galaxy has only 50% of the spiral arms we originally thought it did.

Early models of the Milky Way gave it a spiral structure, with four arms named Norma, Scutum-Centaurus, Sagittarius and Perseus.

“For years, people created maps of the whole galaxy based on studying just one section of it, or using only one method,” says Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin, who is presenting the galactic limb surgery at the current American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis (press release). “Unfortunately, when the models from various groups were compared, they didn't always agree. It’s a bit like studying an elephant blind-folded.”

Using a mosaic of images from the Spitzer telescope Benjamin counted the stars in various areas. While there were more in the Scutum-Centaurus Arm direction, there were no more where there should have been in the Sagittarius and Norma regions. Perseus got camera shy and can’t been seen in the images used.

Continue reading "Astronomers perform galactic limb surgery" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Anyone looking for reasons to be cynical should have a glance at this: NASA’s Office of Inspector General report into allegations of political interference with the agency.

Our investigation found that during the fall of 2004 through early 2006, the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public through those particular media over which the Office of Public Affairs had control (i.e., news releases and media access).

In a previous post about political interference in the Environmental Protection Agency, I remarked that “the shocking thing about this is how unsurprising it is”.

Well, I’ve rediscovered my ability to be shocked. America: these people “reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized” science to sway your opinions. I’d call that lying. They lied to you about one of the most important topics in science.

Continue reading "NASA PR ‘mischaracterized climate change science’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Sky-watchers have found the smallest planet yet outside our solar system orbiting a normal star 3,000 light years away. OK, it’s still three times bigger than Earth, but it represents an impressively accurate piece of astronomising nonetheless.

The planet has been given the catchy name MOA-2007-BLG-192L and is in orbit around a low mass star. National Geographic thinks this is a ‘shot in the arm’ for those looking for ET.

"This discovery is very exciting because it implies Earth-mass planets can form around low-mass stars, which are very common," said Michael Briley, a National Science Foundation astronomer (press release). “It is another important step in the search for terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of other stars, and it would not have been possible without the international collaboration of professional and amateur astronomers devoted to measuring these signals.”

Continue reading "Mini planet found far away" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Papua New Guinea’s forests are going fast. A new satellite analysis reveals that in 2001 accessible forests in the country were being cleared or degraded by 362,000 hectares a year (press release).

A new report on The State of the Forests of Papua New Guinea from researchers at the University of Papua New Guinea Remote Sensing Centre and the Australian National University warns that by 2021 83% of accessible forests and 53% of total forests will be gone or badly damaged (report in huge pdf form).

“The unfortunate reality is that forests in Papua New Guinea are being logged repeatedly and wastefully with little regard for the environmental consequences and with at least the passive complicity of government authorities,” says Phil Shearman, the report’s lead author.

Continue reading "Papua New Guinea forests under threat" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The European Commission has opened a formal investigation into pharma company Sanofi-Aventis, over allegations the company obstructed its investigators.

According to the Commission, the company refused to let its investigators examine and copy certain Aventis documents at one of its French sites without a search warrant. Under EU law, it says, such a warrant is not required.

“An initiation of proceedings does not imply that the Commission has proof of an infringement [of the law],” says a press release.

The investigation itself was announced in January and centres on “whether agreements between pharmaceutical companies, such as settlements in patent disputes, may infringe the EC Treaty's prohibition on restrictive business practices”. In addition it is looking at whether misuse of patent rights and vexatious litigation is creating “artificial barriers to entry”, ie stopping other companies getting involved in the market (press release 2).

Pharma Times notes:

Commissioner Kroes’ investigators have now questioned around 100 companies. Then, in mid-May it was announced that the probe was being broadened to include approximately 80 other bodies, including associations of doctors, pharmacists and patients, and the drug price regulators of the EU member states, thus making this potentially the widest antitrust investigation ever conducted by the EU.

The Times thinks Sanofi-Aventis could be fined 1% of its 2007 sales, some £221 million, if found guilty. AFP has a different take, saying:

Sanofi can look at a precedent in January when the European Commission slapped a 38-million-euro (56-million-dollar) fine on German energy group EON for breaking a seal on a room that contained confiscated papers.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It seems internet fraudsters have tired of pretending to be African despots and Spanish lottery syndicates. Now they’re pretending to be academics.

Into various Nature inboxes has popped the following message:

I am Dr. Robert Pasteiner, the head of department of clinical pharmacology and director of research, at the University of London. I write to solicit your assistance in a project of mutual benefit.

In February 2003, a research grant of (US$58.5 Million) was given to my department, with me, leading a team of other clinical pharmacologists, by the pharmaceutical society of United Kingdom, to conduct a research on Vector-borne diseases in Scotland and Ireland. The research has since been concluded (specifically in May 2006) we only spent US$36.2 Million, leaving a total balance of US$22.3 Million.

An under-spend of 38% on a government research project? Our hard-nosed reporter smells a rat on this one. Read on for our exclusive interview with Dr Pasteiner...

Continue reading "Scammers get scientific" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Last month we brought you the chance to name an iceberg (provided you were aged between 3 and 12).

The winning entry came from Max Dolan, age six, who decided the huge floating ice cube should be called ... Melting Bob (press release). Other notable entries included Kangaroo Desert, White Fright, Vast Tip and Antarc-Ticker.

In The Times he explains the background to the name: “Because of global warming, ice melts. And it goes up and down in the sea, so it bobs.”

He adds, via the BBC, “It’s huge and cool.”

One question remains to be settled though: is Melting Bob cooler than Mr Splashy Pants?

Image: C19A on March 18 / NOAA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The latest space shuttle mission took off at the weekend.

Mission STS-124 is the second of three missions aiming to attach Japan’s Kibo lab to the International Space Station. This one carries what will be the biggest module of the ISS, Kibo’s Japanese Pressurized Module (NASA press release).

In fact, the JPM is so big the shuttle couldn’t fit standard equipment for examining launch damage into its cavernous hold. It will have to pick up laser measuring equipment at the ISS to do a proper inspection and see if there was any damage to its tiles that might jeopardise the craft during re-entry (AP).

A cursory inspection though revealed no obvious damage (Houston Chronicle).

In addition to Kibo-bits, Discovery is also taking Buzz Lightyear to the ISS, but not beyond. There is one more vital thing it has lifted into space: spare parts for the ISS’s malfunctioning toilet (Daily Telegraph).

Image: NASA/Fletch Hildreth

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A physicist at Columbia University in New York says his team has taken a major step in creating a ‘carbon scrubber’.

If he’s right, Klaus Lackner’s work may help us suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and combat global warming. OK, we still need somewhere to put all that carbon dioxide, but one thing at a time.

“I wouldn’t write across the front page that the problem is solved, but this will help,” he told the Guardian. “We are in a hurry to deal with climate change and will be very hard pressed to stop the train before we get to 450ppm. This can help stop the train.”

Continue reading "‘Carbon scrubber’ breakthrough" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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