The Great Beyond

Posted on behalf of Amber Dance

The huge "dead zone" of oxygen-poor water in the Gulf of Mexico failed to reach record size this year. Scientists had predicted that this hypoxic zone would swell to 8,800 square miles (Reuters, 15 July) due to floodwaters that poured tonnes of fertilizer into the Mississippi River, which empties the Midwest’s agricultural runoff into the Gulf. But it ended up rating a mere 7,988 square miles (still nearly the size of Israel) and thus ranks as second-biggest since scientists started tracking it in the 1980s. 2002 keeps its place as the worst year, with an 8,500-square-mile dead zone (Washington Post).

Increased corn farming, for ethanol, meant farmers used lots of fertilizer this season. When the rains hit, they rinsed the fertilizer into the river. This spring 83,000 tons of phosphorus rode the Mississippi to the Gulf, 85% higher than average levels. Those nutrients, as they do every year, sparked an algal bloom. When the algae die and sink to the bottom, bacteria feast on their remains. With so many bacteria slurping so many dead algae, the bacteria suck all the dissolved oxygen out of the water faster than it can diffuse back in. Fish and crustaceans rush toward airier waters, including the coastline, in an underwater stampede some Louisiana seafood lovers call a “jubilee.”

But this year, Hurricane Dolly stirred the dead zone like a big pot of soup, aerating water that would otherwise have been oxygenless. Thus by the time scientists finished measuring it, the zone was smaller than predicted.

It should shrink further in the fall, with cooler weather, fewer algae and more storms mixing the waters.

Image (2004 data, for illustration purposes only): NOAA

Posted by Alex Witze
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Posted on behalf of Tim Sands

Good news if the small furry creature in your life has had a nasty spill recently - perhaps taking a tipsy tumble after a night out with one of the hard-drinking cousins we reported on earlier this week. Two studies are hot on the trail of injury treatments for our murine friends, with potential benefit for us too, naturally.

Researchers at the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center, University of Louisville show us why putting injured rats in wheelchairs may not be the best way for them to heal up, as reported in New Scientist and picked up by our red-top pals elsewhere.

Continue reading "Rodent rehabilitation round-up" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

Gary McKinnon, the "biggest military computer hack of all time" (BBC), has lost his battle to avoid extradition to the United States on charges of hacking into 97 US military and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002.

US officials have reportedly said McKinnon should “fry” for his hacking, which was done with a 56k dial-up modem.

Continue reading "UFO-obsessed hacker loses extradition battle" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Posted on behalf of Tim Sands

The BBC is reporting the live capture of a fish from 2300m below the surface of the North Atlantic – that’s 900m deeper than the record for the catching a live fish. The unlucky creature was a Pachycara saldanhai, a species first described in 2004 (paper). It was hauled to the surface in a pressurised container. The scientists-cum-fishermen also caught shrimps of three species right down there, as well as at a slightly more modest 1700m.

Continue reading "High pressure fishing trip" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Two huge chunks of ice, covering 7 square miles (18 square kilometres), have snapped off Canada’s northern quarters. The break up, at the Ward Hunt ice shelf off Ellesmere Island, is the biggest break-up of ice in the region in three years.

Scientists involved are being coy about using the GW words, instead saying that now our climate is different, there ain’t no way the ice is going to rebuild itself every year. Elsewhere, other scientists are saying that it’s definitely climate change, and it’s happening fast.

The news has travelled far, although some reports, probably originating from the short AP report, only mention one, rather than two chunks.

Continue reading "Holy cracking ice sheets! Canada is breaking up!" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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The air in Beijing is still dirty, and the Olympic planners aren't happy about it.

Since 20 July, cars on the city's roadways have been restricted to an odd/even license-plate restriction - but that doesn't seem to be helping the city's notorious smog, media reports note (Los Angeles Times). A local environmental official apparently said last weekend that the city had reached its air-quality goals for the Games -- but an outside expert notes that two air-monitoring stations downtown seem to have been dropped from that analysis, to be replaced with stations in Beijing's far outer reaches. Officials are already talking about kicking in extra pollution-control efforts, such as shutting down 220 more factories or yanking even more cars off the roads (Washington Post).

The vagaries of weather may now be the best hope for clear skies at the opening ceremonies. Never one to leave weather to chance, the government has amassed a massive cloud-seeding program that in most years is targeted at bringing rain to drought-parched farmers, but for 8 August may be used to cause damp-looking clouds to rain out before reaching the Olympic stadium. China's weather-modification schemes are fascinating in scale -- more than 30,000 people are employed to operate 35 specially equipped planes, 7,000 anti-aircraft cannons and 5,000 rocket launchers (see earlier Nature feature on this, subscription required). If there's a cloud that looks like it's even thinking about raining, these are the guys to take it out.

Weather weenies can get their meteorological fix with a new daily newspaper called the Olympic Weather News, put out by the China Meteorological Administration (China Daily). Sadly it appears you can only get a copy in Beijing.

Posted by Alex Witze
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Record gasoline prices are raising the spectre of fuel shortages here on Earth, but there's no energy crisis on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. A paper in this week's issue of Nature show's that there is at least one very very big lake of liquid ethane on Titan. Scientists had already spotted lake-like features on the moon, but this is the first direct evidence of liquids on its surface.

Maybe it's the fact that it's liquid, or maybe it's that ethane is an organic molecule, or maybe it's just soaring fuel prices, but whatever the reason, this discovery's been getting a lot of press.

Image: NASA

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Green and red glasses at the ready, people – the European Space Agency’s Mars Express has sent back the highest resolution pictures ever taken of Phobos, one of two Martian moons, and some of them are in stereo.

They’re great pics, and I don’t mean to put a downer on things ESA, but they look much the same as the pictures you made in 2004. Then in April this year, NASA’s HiRISE camera took some good snaps as well.

Why not look between all three and try and spot the difference? I confess I struggled. No doubt to the scientists the improvement in resolution is crucial – and I’m sure it is going to help the Russian’s amusingly named Phobos-Grunt sample return mission, due for launch in 2009, because with these new images they’ve managed to pinpoint potential landing sites in close detail.

Maybe I’m getting old and jaded by space pictures, but that said I can recommend a visit to Nature News’s slideshow of images marking NASA’s 50th birthday earlier this week.

Picture credit: ESA/ DLR/ FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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“We believe this may have been a targeted burglary of a shark”
Police hunt the criminals who have stolen a rare fish, from Reuters.

“The cuddlier, the costlier”
Corporations are buying species names, from the Toronto Star.

A mysterious disease is killing Newfoundland’s moose.
And “anything that affects moose in Newfoundland will almost certainly affect moose anywhere in North America”, from the Telegraph-Journal.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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For those of you who haven't picked up the Washington Post or New York Times today, a scandal is rocking the US political scene. Alaskan senator Ted Stevens, the Senate's longest-serving Republican ever, has been indicted on seven counts of perjury for taking over $250,000 in undisclosed gifts from Veco Oil.

The gifts apparently include a new first floor for his house (which was added, extravagantly, by lifting the entire house off the ground), and a Viking range grill, which any American will tell you is a very nice grill indeed.

A good BBQ set may have been one reason why the 84-year-old senator campaigned relentlessly (and ultimately in vain) to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. He was much hated by environmentalists, although he had recently begun supporting one version of climate change legislation that has been circulating congress over the past year or so.

But "Uncle Ted" is really famous for funneling US tax dollars up north. Most memorably, Stevens pushed hard for a $400 million "bridge to nowhere" that would have connected the city of Ketchican Ketchikan to nearby Garvina Island. But he was also a capricious funder of science… so long as it was in the great State of Alaska.

We've written about a few of his pet projects: a massive, $120 million dollar study of stellar steller sea-lions that yielded little, and a giant antenna known as the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), which is studying the aurora. A lot of people, though, suspected it was some kind of government mind-control project.

Interestingly enough, one of those people is Nick Begich, the brother of Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich (Democrat), who might win Steven's seat in the Senate if he resigns. If that were to happen, it could spell big trouble for HAARP.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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A technique developed to catch serial killers could help in bee conservation, if Nigel Raine has anything to do with it.

Raine, a researcher at Queen Mary, University of London's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, is applying a technique called geographic profiling to the buzzing, stinging insects.

Geographic profiling aims to help police find the area that a serial criminal might call home, by analysing the locations in which linked crimes occur and exploiting the fact most serial crimes happen close to the perp’s home, but not too close (as readers of Silence of the Lambs will remember). This behaviour is also seen in bees - they don’t forage in the area immediately around their hive to reduce the risk that the nest will be found by predators and parasites.

So bees are perfect for testing the GP technique which will help criminologists perfect it - “something which is impossible to do with criminals, for obvious reasons”, says Raine – and the technique can also help find bee-homes (press release).

Continue reading "What bees have in common with serial killers" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A high-profile discovery of T Rex tissue is nothing of the sort, according to a paper published today in PLOS One.

Thomas Kaye of the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle says what have previously been presented as remnants of blood vessels are actually just modern bacterial slime.

“Mineralized and non-mineralized coatings were found extensively in the porous trabecular bone of a variety of dinosaur and mammal species across time,” write Kaye and colleagues. “They represent bacterial biofilms common throughout nature.”

Continue reading "Not-dino of the day?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It weights 536 kilos and Madagascar wants it back.

A giant, uncut emerald on display in Hong Kong was actually illegally exported from Madagascar, according to officials from that country. “We need the stone back ... It’s a treasure of Madagascar,” says Luc Herve Rakotoarimanana (AP).

Madagascar thinks the gem was illegally exported as ‘green jade’ and shipped to Hong Kong through the French colony Reunion Island (HK Finance Standard). “(The stone) has been extracted from Madagascar with an exploitation license authorized only for beryl and not for the emerald,” says a statement (AP).

A spokeswoman for the gallery displaying the stone, BaoQu Tang Modern Art Gallery, says the emerald belongs to a French company called Orgaco and that this company had already seen off a legal challenge on Reunion.

My pickier colleagues require me to point out this is an emerald conglomerate, and not an individual gemstone.

Photos

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Yesterday four US Senators told Environmental Protection Agency head Stephen Johnson to resign as they had “lost all confidence” he could follow the law.

“One would be hard-pressed to think of an agency ever quite as demoralized as the EPA is these days,” my colleague Alex noted.

Well today there’s more EPA bashing...

Continue reading "It’s beat up the EPA day!" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Tim Sands

There has been news this week of two new drugs that could slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Both studies were announced at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease in Chicago. The drugs target different proteins that underlie the degenerative symptoms of the disease.

The first team from Aberdeen University in the UK and Aberdeen spin-out company TauRX Therapeutics based in Singapore, unveiled the drug called Rember that dissolves the bundles of tau protein fibres that cause brain cell death, leading to the disease symptoms.

The drug is based on the chemical methylthioninium chloride, better known as the commonplace lab dye, methylene blue, and the BBC reports that the effect of the drug on tau was discovered 20 years ago by lead researcher Claude Wischik in a lab accident. If so, the accident was a happy one as the phase II clinical trial on 321 patients showed that patients treated with the drug did not show any significant decline in cognitive function over the course of 19 months, while patients without the drug showed a marked decline.

Continue reading "Remember Rember" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Meredith Wadman

Turns out that there’s a government-induced mistake in the numbers underpinning a recent ad campaign by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. (See PETA's website and press release and our coverage). It attacks the US Food and Drug Administration for abusing dogs. PETA’s numbers were skewed by a data-entry error at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the agency that issues official numbers on animal use.

PETA had calculated that in 2006, the latest year for which figures are available, about 65,000 dogs were sacrificed in the United States for pharmaceutical research. That number was predicated on total dog use for all purposes of 87,424--- a number arrived at by totaling the USDA numbers in each category.

But a data entry error in the USDA report --- picked up by sharp-eyed folks at the the Foundation for Biomedical Research -- elevated 2006 dog use in Wisconsin by an order of magnitude. The number of dogs in the “no pain, no [pain] medication” category was reported as 24,109. It should have been 2,999. Correcting that reduces total 2006 dog use to 66,314 and pharmaceutical dog use to about 48,400.

PETA says it will correct its number just as soon as USDA corrects its own on its website (where the server is down as I write this.) “It is frightening that the USDA's incompetence is matched only by its indifference to the suffering these numbers represent,” says Jessica Sandler, the director of PETA’s Regulatory Testing Division.

“We will post an amended report to our Web site very soon with a brief explanation of the error,” says Jessica Milteer, a USDA spokeswoman.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The fighting between Congressional Democrats, led by Senator Barbara Boxer, and the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency just keeps heating up. Today, Boxer and three other senators called for Stephen Johnson to resign, saying they had "lost all confidence" in his ability to follow the law.

Johnson, of course, is the agency chief who went against his scientific staff's recommendations to allow California to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions in advance of any potential federal regulations. An agency deputy head has in recent weeks claimed that Johnson was actually leaning toward granting California its waiver until the White House pressured him otherwise. (Washington Post) Other emails that the White House didn't like - notably the one saying that greenhouse gases endanger the public - it simply refused to open.

To cap things off today, Boxer et al also sent a letter to the US attorney-general asking for an investigation as to whether Johnson lied when testifying in front of Congress on global warming. Meanwhile, agency staffers have been told not to talk to the media, politicians, or just about anyone about anything. All questions must go through the public affairs office (Washington Post).

One would be hard-pressed to think of an agency ever quite as demoralized as the EPA is these days.

Posted by Alex Witze
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Slideshow: NASA turns 50
Nature takes you on a slideshow tour of the agency’s triumphs and tragedies.

Q+A: Edward Weiler
As NASA celebrates its fiftieth birthday, Nature looks to the future with the space agency's returning science chief.

Italy picks businessman to head space agency
Move seen as shift from research to commerce and defence.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

The kipunji was originally discovered in 2003/2004 on the strength of a rumour of a shy and unusual monkey from villages in the southern highlands of Tanzania. Now, after 2,800 hours of field work, the results of the first head count are in – there are only 1,117 of these honk-barking monkeys, and they live in two isolated forests with a total area of just 6.82 square miles.

Several years after it was first discovered, researchers managed to get enough evidence to announce it as a new species, a year later it was further hailed as a whole new genus, the first new monkey genus in over 80 years.

Although the kipunji has already been listed among the World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates it hasn’t yet made it onto the World Conservation Union’s (ICUN) Red List as "critically endangered", which is where WCS think it should be because of the threats to its habitat.

“The kipunji is hanging on by the thinnest of threads,” says Tim Davenport, Tanzania Country Director for the Wildlife Conservation Society. “We must do all we can to safeguard this extremely rare and little understood species while there is still time.”

With the rate of extinction already thought to be underestimated, it seems likely it will be only a matter of time before the kipunji joins the other 114 primate species classified as threatened with extinction on the ICUN Red List.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Russian scientists’ first attempt to set a new record by diving 1,637 metres to the bottom of Siberia’s Lake Baikal appears to have failed.

As reported on Nature a research team is hoping to take Russia’s venerable Mir submersibles to the bottom of Baikal to find gas hydrate deposits and take water and sediment samples.

This morning Russian news sources announced a new record for freshwater manned dives had been set. But by this afternoon the claim was withdrawn: only a paltry 1,580 metres had been achieved...

Image: MIR stock photo / NOAA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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‘Georgia’s lab apes languish in post-Soviet limbo’ – more on the problems of apes in former Soviet Union from Reuters (see also ‘Stalin's space monkeys’ from the Independent in April).

‘The world’s first practical jetpack’ on the NY Times.

‘Air tanker drops in wildfires are often just for show’ says the LA Times.

Quote of the week: “My other ride’s a spaceship”.
(Slogan on plane at the Virgin Galactic unveiling.)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A Lego interpretation of what happens when particle physics goes wrong...

Below the fold: if the Large Hadron Collider doesn’t start up on time we’ll know why. They’ve all been too busy making rap videos...

Continue reading "Video post: particle physics in Lego and rap" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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University employees in the California system are anxiously waiting to see if their pay gets Terminated

State governor and part-time cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger has mooted the idea of cutting all state employee pay to the minimum wage of $6.55 an hour until a state budget can be passed. Back pay would be issued once a budget cleared the legislature and allowed normal financing to resume (LA Times).

Latest reports say the move may be signed off by Schwarzenegger on Thursday. Since this suggestion came to light last week there have been dark mutterings in the UC system.

“I have authoritative information that UC will invoke their autonomy from the State should this happen, and instaclassify their employees as not subject to the order,” said Steinn Sigurðsson of Penn State’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, on his blog Dynamics of Cats. “Don’t know if CSU or CCs would be exempt, I’d guess not, since their funding is much more tightly coupled to State funding and they are on the wrong side of the tuition income cycle.”

Continue reading "Crush your employees, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations at their paycheques..." »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It’s quite a binge. A treeshrew in Malaysia has subsisted on alcoholic nectar for millions of years, according to research published this week in PNAS.

And six other species also appear to pop in on the animal's local bar. According to the researchers behind the work this is the evidence for species other than humans having chronic alcohol intake.

“We discovered that seven mammalian species in a West Malaysian rainforest consume alcoholic nectar daily from flower buds of the bertam palm, which they pollinate,” write Frank Wiens and colleagues. “The 3.8% maximum alcohol concentration that we recorded is among the highest ever reported in a natural food.”

One of these species, the pentailed treeshrew, appears to handle its drink though. The researchers observed no wayward, intoxicated behaviour from the creatures even though their alcohol doses would make a human tipsy. What is not clear is whether the shrews benefit from the alcohol or how they deal with the risk from continuously high blood alcohol levels.

Continue reading "Animal drinking den found in Malaysia" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Virgin Galactic, the company arguably farthest along in the world of private space travel, rolled out its new aircraft today. WhiteKnightTwo will serve to carry SpaceShipTwo up to 50,000 feet -- beyond which the smaller craft is on its own to fire its rocket engine and soar up to the edge of space.

It's been nearly four years since Paul Allen bankrolled Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites team into winning the Ansari X Prize, $10 million for flying a pilot to suborbital space in the same craft twice within two weeks. Virgin is hoping to test WhiteKnightTwo this fall, then roll out SpaceShipTwo for tests next year. The ultimate goal: paying customers, likely launching from a spaceport in New Mexico.

Image: Virgin Galactic

Posted by Alex Witze
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Stats reveal bias in NIH grant review
Alternative system could make ‘fairer’ funding decisions for a quarter of awards.

Consent issues restrict stem-cell use
Some human embryonic cell lines may not be eligible for research.

Age makes Moon crater attractive site for lunar base
Dating of Shackleton crater suggests it may offer supply of ice.

Scientists to dive to the bottom of the world's deepest lake
Russian team explores the depths of Lake Baikal.

Stars may not be so fine-tuned after all
A change in nature’s fundamental constants could still allow star formation.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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New California laws will force ships to use low-sulphur fuel, saving lives and reducing pollution on land according to the state’s Air Resources Board. The laws also open the door to a major legal brawl.

In steps beginning in 2009 ocean-going vessels within 24 nautical miles of California's coast will have to use lower-sulphur (or low-sulfur as they would say) fuels in their engines and boilers, in place of heavy and dirty bunker oil. The board says around 2,000 vessels will be subject to the rules, which will be the strictest in the world (press release).

“This regulation will save lives,” says board chairman Mary Nichols. “At ports and all along the California coast we will see cleaner air and better health.”

If the rules stand up to legal scrutiny they will have an impact across the whole of the United States. As the LA Times points out about 40% of all marine freight into the US comes through ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Whether it will stand up to legal scrutiny remains to be seen.

Continue reading "California clamps down on ships' sulphur" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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