Welcome to Science Saturday, where the Overnight News Digest crew informs and entertains you with this week's news about science, space, and the environment.
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This week's featured story comes from Discovery Networks.
Chimps, Other Apes Laugh Like People
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
June 4, 2009 -- Humans aren't the world's only laughers, according to a new study that determined gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos all enjoy a good chuckle too.
The propensity of great apes to giggle suggests the last common ancestor of humans and non-human great apes also laughed around 10 to 16 million years ago. The ability then evolved among subsequent primate relatives, leading to distinctive ways of chuckling in each.
More science, space, and environment news after the jump.
Slideshows/Videos
Discovery Networks: Flashback: Images in the News, June 1-5
Laughing apes, grilled mammoth, and witch bottles made our biggest news this week.
Discovery Networks: News: Apes Giggle Like Humans
Apes laugh similar to humans, according to new research exploring the evolution of laughter. James Williams takes a look at the video.
Discovery Networks: News: Chimps Invent Brush Tool
Chimpanzees in the Congo were recently recorded using a new kind of tool to scoop up termites. Jorge Ribas reports.
Discovery Networks: Prehistoric BBQ
A roasting pit is found that appears to have last cooked two mammoths.
Discovery Networks: Dinos: Tracker Finds Dinos Underfoot
Dino tracks abound in the backyard of our nation's capital. An expert dino tracker takes James Williams on a hunt for the ancient footprints.
Discovery Networks: Space: Ingredient For Life Found Far, Far Away
Methane, a building block for life, has been discovered for the first time on a planet 63 light years away from Earth. James Williams looks into what the big deal is.
Wired: Space 2.X: The Private Rocket Race Takes Off
By Dave Bullock
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at SpaceX’s facility. This is how the private sector builds a rocket capable of space travel.
Wired: Video Tour: The Library of Dead Animals
By Alexis Madrigal
BERKELEY, California — Jim Patton walks to a cabinet and pulls open a drawer. Out slide two neat rows of chipmunks, impeccably preserved. Officious handwritten tags tell the story of each and every animal’s capture. In a screwtop container on the tray, a half-dozen chipmunk skulls rattle, picked clean of all their tissue by a beetle colony housed downstairs
Patton is director emeritus of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and he clearly relishes guiding people through the bewilderingly and impressive collection. The MVZ is a premiere research institution with a broad, deep set of well-preserved specimens ranging from tiny shrews to huge bears.
Reuters: Mummies found in Peru
June 5. - Archeologists discovered 33 Incan mummies, mostly women and girls, who appear to have been sacrified about 600 years ago.
Astronomy/Space
Science News: Astrometry nabs an exoplanet
By Ron Cowen
Researchers for half a century have tried — and failed — to use the motion of stars moving across the sky to discover planets that lie beyond the solar system. Now a team has finally used the method, known as astrometry, to find one of these orbs. The newfound extrasolar planet, six times heavier than Jupiter, orbits the low-mass star VB 10 some 20 light-years from Earth, report Steven Pravdo and Stuart Shaklan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the July Astrophysical Journal.
Reuters: NASA clears space shuttle for June 13 launch
By Irene Klotz
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA managers cleared the space shuttle Endeavour on Wednesday for a June 13 launch on a mission to outfit the International Space Station with a Japanese-built outdoor porch for science experiments.
Slated to last 16 days, the flight will be among NASA's lengthiest space station servicing missions and, with five spacewalks and simultaneous use of three robotic cranes, one of its more complex.
"I don't think there are any easy flights from now till the end," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for space operations. "This one is unique in that it has all the robotics activity."
Agence France-Presse via Discovery Networks: Astronauts Prone to Severe Space Headaches
June 2, 2009 -- Astronauts who have no history of bad headaches can be prone to disabling attacks while in space, a phenomenon that suggests "space headaches" deserve a medical category all of their own, neurologists said on Tuesday.
Contrary to prevailing theories, headaches in space are not caused by motion sickness, they said.
Instead, the problem could lie in an increase in blood flow to the head, causing painful pressure on the brain.
Wired: Remembering the Voice of Space Flight
By Brandon Keim
Though Paul Haney’s voice hasn’t been heard in a NASA broadcast since 1969, it echoes in the minds of generations of Americans whenever we think of mankind’s voyage into space.
Haney, who died last Thursday at 80, was the original broadcast voice of Mission Control. He provided live commentary during the Apollo and Gemini spaceflights of the 1960s, his measured tones a perfect counterpoint to the moments’ natural drama.
Evolution/Paleontology
Wired: "Missing Link" Could Add Mediterranean Chapter to Story of Human Evolution
By Brandon Keim
It didn’t have a TV special, book deal or media-friendly pimping from the mayor of New York City, but a 12 million-year-old skull recently unearthed in Spain just might end up actually deserving the label of "missing link."
The skull possesses a combination of primitive features previously unseen in a primate, along with a flat, anatomically modern face — the earliest such face in the fossil record. These characteristics qualified it as the founding member of a new genus and species, Anoiapithecus brevirostris
Wired: Fossil Teeth Hint at Animal Adaptation to Global Warming
By Brandon Keim
Amidst predictions of global warming-driven global extinctions, a dietary analysis of ancient teeth suggests that animals may prove more adaptable than expected.
The tale of the teeth, collected at two sites in Florida and spanning a transition between extreme temperatures during an ice age climate cycle, runs counter to the standard narrative of animals as unable to adjust their behavioral patterns.
"One of the main assumptions is that species niches are conserved. Here we’re showing that the diets vary and change," said Larisa DeSantis, a Florida Museum of Natural History zoologist. "These niches are not the same. The animals were not doing the same thing constantly through time."
Biodiversity
Reuters: Public asked to help monitor life on earth
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) - Scientists asked people around the world on Monday to help compile an Internet-based observatory of life on earth as a guide to everything from the impact of climate change on wildlife to pests that can damage crops.
"I would hope that ... we might even have millions of people providing data" in the long term, James Edwards, head of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, told Reuters of the 10-year project.
He said scientific organizations were already working to link up thousands of computer databases of animals and plants into a one-stop "virtual observatory" that could be similar to global systems for monitoring the weather or earthquakes.
Wired: Can We Count on Native Bees to Replace Honeybees?
By Alexis Madrigal
Counting sheep might put you to sleep, but counting bees is exciting work, say the ecologists organizing a nationwide citizen science project to survey the nation’s bees.
More than 65,000 Americans have signed up to plant sunflowers and watch the bees that come to them as part of the Great Sunflower Project, which was masterminded by San Francisco State University biologist Gretchen LeBeun.
Over the last month, participants in the project received a packet of Queen Lemon sunflower seeds from LeBeun, and the first bee sightings are beginning to trickle in from around the country.
Biotechnology/Health
Agence France-Presse via Discovery Networks: Chinese Researchers Create First Pig Stem Cells
June 3, 2009 -- Chinese researchers said on Wednesday they had created versatile stem cells from pigs, a ground-breaking achievement that could open up new paths for combating human disease.
Doctors led by Lei Xiao, of the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, took adult cells taken from a pig's ear and bone marrow and reprogrammed them so that they became so-called pluripotent stem cells.
These are cells that, like the coveted stem cells found in embryos, can differentiate into any type of cell in the body.
Science News: No rest for weary fruit flies
By Tina Hesman Saey
A new strain of fruit flies bred to have trouble getting shut-eye may open researchers eyes to the genetic causes of insomnia.
Not so long after scientists discovered that fruit flies sleep, Paul Shaw of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues bred a strain of Drosophila melanogaster to have many of the characteristics, and complications, of insomnia in people. Shaw’s team bred 60 generations of fruit flies, selecting for flies that slept the shortest amount of time. The resulting insomniac fruit flies may help scientists find genetic roots of the sleep disorder, the team reports in the June 3 Journal of Neuroscience.
There is a fine line between insomnia and sleep deprivation, says Thomas Roth, a sleep researcher at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Insomniacs lack the ability to fall asleep and sleep well (though Shaw and his colleagues think such people may be protected from many of the negative effects of sleeplessness). Sleep deprived people, however, simply stay up too late, not getting the sleep they need to function properly. Most attempts to mimic insomnia in animals fail to match some hallmarks of the disorder in humans, especially hypersensitivity to light, sound and other stresses.
Science News: Autism care takes biological toll on mothers
By Bruce Bower
PARK CITY, Utah — Mothers with teenagers or young adults living at home face plenty of stress. If the young home-dwellers have been diagnosed with autism, the emotional intensity of caregiving surges dramatically in the mothers and may undermine the functioning of a critical stress hormone, a long-term study suggests.
Over a five-year span, women who had children with autism living at home reported many more challenges in their daily lives than women caring for typically developing teens and young adults, reported psychologist Marsha Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin–Madison on June 4 at the annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society. Moms of children with autism spent nearly all of their time on caregiving activities, experienced an inordinate amount of daily fatigue, often got into arguments at home and at work, and reported having negative feelings far more often than positive ones.
Analyses of saliva samples collected from women near the end of the study period showed that those caring for offspring with autism produced unusually low levels of the stress hormone cortisol throughout the day. In mothers caring for teenage or young adult children free of developmental problems, cortisol levels rose sharply throughout the morning and then declined to a level that still remained well above that of mothers tending to kids with autism.
Science News: Huntington’s protein may have a crony
By Tina Hesman Saey
Researchers may have discovered how a neuron-killing protein selects its victims — it has an accomplice.
Scientists identified a mutant form of the protein huntingtin as the culprit in Huntington’s disease in 1993. The protein is found in every cell in the body, but it only turns deadly in brain cells — particularly cells in the striatum, a part of the brain that helps control movement. Why mutant huntingtin preferentially kills those cells has been a mystery.
Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore report in the June 5 Science that a protein called Rhes may goad huntingtin into killing brain cells in the striatum, leading to Huntington’s disease. If confirmed, the finding could provide new avenues for developing therapies to treat the fatal neurodegenerative disease, says Nancy Wexler, president of the Hereditary Disease Foundation and a Huntington’s disease researcher at Columbia University.
Science News: Nicotine’s role in SIDS
By Laura Sanders
Exposure to cigarette smoke in the womb may dampen a baby’s fight-or-flight responses, leaving the newborn vulnerable to sudden infant death syndrome, a study in rats suggests. It has been known that babies exposed to the smoke have a higher risk of the syndrome, in which seemingly healthy infants inexplicably die. The new study, appearing June 3 in The Journal of Neuroscience, may explain why, the researchers report.
"SIDS is a complicated disease, and this is why you need these kinds of studies," comments Ernest Cutz, a pediatric pathologist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
Researchers led by Colin Nurse, a neurobiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, studied chromaffin cells, which are located in the adrenal gland of both rats and humans. In alarming situations — like when a baby is, for any number of reasons, not getting enough oxygen — these cells flood the body with chemical signals called catecholamines. These signals, which include adrenaline, stimulate the fight-or-flight response. "Catecholamines are very important alarm mechanisms that wake a baby up," Nurse says.
Science News: Protein caught in the act
By Laura Sanders
Researchers have illuminated a once-hidden developmental process. A fluorescent signal pinpoints the activity of a protein in fruit flies, allowing researchers to see exactly when and where this protein does its job.
"The idea of watching life at the molecular level within a cell in an intact organism is really fascinating," says study coauthor Akira Chiba.
Discovery Networks: Synthetic Fibers to Reverse Blindness
Eric Bland, Discovery News
June 1, 2009 -- Synthetic fibers can now be embedded with three, and possibly more, drugs or proteins. The new fibers could be woven into a variety of materials that have unique and novel properties -- such as reversing blindness.
"The ultimate idea is to implant this material into the eye," said Bin Dong, a scientist from Drexel University who, along with Gary Wnek and Meghan Smith of Case Western University, detailed their work in the journal Small.
"One protein will eat the scar tissue away, and the other will help induce the differentiation of retinal progenitor cells," said Dong.
Climate/Environment
Science News: Cultivation changed monsoon in Asia
By Sid Perkins
The dramatic expansion of agriculture in India and southeastern China during the 18th century — a sprawl that took place at the expense of forests — triggered a substantial drop in precipitation in those regions, a new study suggests.
Winds that blow northeast from the Indian Ocean into southern Asia each summer bring abundant rain to an area that’s home to more than half the world’s population. But those seasonal winds, known as monsoons, brought about 20 percent less rainfall each year to India and southeastern China in the 1850s than they did in the early 1700s, says Kazuyuki Saito, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. That decline, he and his colleagues contend online June 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the result of deforestation in the region.
In 1700, forests covered between 40 and 50 percent of India and China. But by 1850 that proportion had shrunk to between 5 and 10 percent, Saito says. The substantial decline in forests dramatically reduced the amount of moisture pulled from deep in the soil and sent skyward by trees — moisture that typically would have joined that present in the monsoon winds flowing from the ocean. The overall reduction in moisture, in turn, triggered a substantial slump in soil-dampening precipitation, the researchers note.
Reuters: Pacific islands seek low-cost storm protection
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Pacific islands are trying low-cost ways to protect crops and coasts from cyclones that are a bigger threat -- for now -- than rising sea levels that could wipe low-lying nations off the map.
Pacific island delegates at June 1-12 talks in Bonn working on a new U.N. climate treaty say that shifting storm patterns linked to global warming are stoking more "king tides" which bring salt water onto farmland and into fresh water supplies.
"Our immediate concern is cyclones," said Ian Fry, representing Tuvalu which is among the most vulnerable with an average height of 2 meters (6 ft 6 in) above sea level.
Geology/Geophysics
Science News: The iron record of Earth’s oxygen
By Sid Perkins
Iron is a gift from above.
Its atoms were forged by nuclear reactions inside massive stars that exploded, seeding our galactic neighborhood with the raw materials for planets over billions of years before the solar system formed.
Although iron is, by weight, the most abundant element in the solid Earth, most lies hidden in the planet’s core, which may be one immense, silicon-tainted iron crystal (SN: 1/12/02, p. 22). Less than 6 percent of Earth’s crust is iron, but fortunately for the voracious appetite of Industrial Man, the element is plentiful in oxide-rich ore deposits, including banded iron formations.
Agence France-Presse via Discovery Networks: Ancient Antarctic Mountains Found Under Miles of Ice
June 3, 2009 -- Millions of years ago, rivers ran in Antarctica through craggy mountain valleys that were strangely similar to the modern European Alps, Chinese and British scientists reported on Wednesday.
In a study published by the British journal Nature, the scientists described a vast terrain that had been hidden beneath ice up to two miles thick for eons, until new imaging technology recently uncovered them.
"The landscape has probably been preserved beneath the ice sheet for around 14 million years," the paper said.
Discovery Networks: Undersea Volcanic Eruptions Spotted in Action
Michael Reilly, Discovery News
June 5, 2009 -- A crack team of "rapid response" volcano experts scrambled to the South Pacific Ocean last month to find something rarely seen by human eyes: an underwater eruption exploding into the inky, cold depths and spewing lava onto the ocean floor.
The realm of underwater volcanic eruptions is a strange, uncharted one. As much as 80 percent of the planet's volcanic activity is thought to occur on the sea floor, but scientists are rarely able to witness the events.
One of the few other undersea volcanoes recorded by researchers was when a series of eruptions near the island of Guam in 2004 vented droplets of liquid carbon dioxide and formed pools of liquid sulfur.
Discovery Networks: Earth Losing Atmosphere Faster than Venus, Mars
Irene Klotz, Discovery News
June 2, 2009 -- Researchers were stunned to discover recently that Earth is losing more of its atmosphere than Venus and Mars, which have negligible magnetic fields.
This may mean our planet's magnetic shield may not be as solid a protective screen as once believed when it comes to guarding the atmosphere from an assault from the sun.
"We often tell ourselves that we are very fortunate living on this planet because we have this strong magnetic shield that protects us from all sorts of things that the cosmos throws at us -- cosmic rays, solar flares and the pesky solar wind," said Christopher Russell, a professor of geophysics and space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Wired: Earth Gets Billion-Year Life Extension
By Alexis Madrigal
The Earth could be habitable for another 2.3 billion years, extending previous estimates of life’s horizon by more than 1 billion years.
King Fai Li and his colleagues at Caltech hypothesize that Earth’s atmospheric pressure has always varied, and that it could fall in the distant future, keeping Earth from frying for far longer than previous research had shown.
If the new idea proves correct and can be extended to other planets with biospheres, it could increase the chances that earthly civilization finds extraterrestrial life by doubling the percentage of time that planets could be inhabited.
Discovery Networks: Huge Waves Detected in Atmosphere
Irene Klotz, Discovery News
June 4, 2009 -- Researchers have detected giant, fast-moving waves of air, caused by thunderstorms and other disturbances, above Poker Flat, Alaska, where a new radar is churning out the first three-dimensional images of upper atmospheric phenomena in the polar region.
"People have been envisioning doing this project for 40 years," said Eric Donovan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. "There's just a lot going on in this region that we don't understand."
The radar combines 4,096 small antennas, each with its own transmitter, on a single instrument, rather than one giant dish equipped with one powerful transmitter. Rather than physically rotating the radar to point in different directions, the steering is done electronically by slightly phasing each of the antenna elements differently.
Psychology/Behavior
Wired: Altruism’s Bloody Roots
By Brandon Keim
By favoring acts of battlefield selflessness, Stone Age warfare might have accelerated the development of altruism.
A computer model of cultural evolution and between-group competition primed with data taken from studies of mankind’s hyperviolent early years suggests a bloody origin for a celebrated modern behavior.
"Altruism will be strongly favored if it leads groups to win wars," said Sam Bowles, a Santa Fe Institute economist and institutional theorist, and author of the study, published Thursday in Science. "That would counteract the way that selfish individuals usually dominate the altruistic ones in their groups."
That the ability to put others’ well-being ahead of one’s own could have such brutal origins seems counterintuitive. Then again, so is altruism. Genes are supposed to be selfish, not self-sacrificing.
Discovery Networks: Some City Rats Roam Far From Home
Emily Sohn, Discovery News
June 3, 2009 -- Urban rats rarely stray from their own alleyways, found a new study, but a few adventurous individuals make city-wide treks.
Understanding how rats move around may aid efforts to eradicate them, said lead researcher Gregory Glass, an infectious disease biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The mangy rodents spread diseases, damage buildings, and cause psychological stress.
"It's a public health issue at a number of different levels," Glass said. "People just don't like rats running around."
Science News: No brainer behavior
By Susan Milius
In a somewhat different world, Consuelo M. De Moraes would be revolutionizing vampire fiction.
Her lab at Penn State University studies predators that entangle prey in a tight embrace, pierce victims’ tissue and suck out nourishment. In the last few years, De Moraes and her colleagues have found that the predators even hunt down prey by scent.
Creepy as her predator, Cuscuta pentagona, is, it is also, frankly, a plant. Better known as five-angled dodder, its orange tentacles bypass the porcelain throats of young women in favor of the slim stems of young tomato plants. De Moraes and other researchers are showing that plants behave and misbehave as dramatically as animals. But there’s still not much hope for a feature-length dodder movie.
Archeology/Anthropology
Discovery Networks: Mammoths Roasted in Prehistoric Kitchen Pit
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
June 3, 2009 -- Central Europe's prehistoric people would likely have been amused by today's hand-sized hamburgers and hot dogs, since archaeologists have just uncovered a 29,000 B.C. well-equipped kitchen where roasted gigantic mammoth was one of the last meals served.
The site, called Pavlov VI in the Czech Republic near the Austrian and Slovak Republic borders, provides a homespun look at the rich culture of some of Europe's first anatomically modern humans.
Wired: Skulls vs. DNA: Zeroing In on American Origins
By Lisa Grossman
Ancient Argentinian skeletons may help resolve a raging anthropological debate: whether or not early Americans came from a single original population.
"We don’t know how people got to the New World, when, or who they were," said anthropologist Judith Habicht-Mauche at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Those questions are very much up for grabs right now and very controversial."
The controversy centers around two conflicting sets of data. Studies of skull shapes noted that people in South America 14,000 years ago looked different from the people that were there 8,000 years ago and from modern Native Americans. Some anthropologists think that means there were at least two migrations to South America. The first group, Paleoamericans, had long narrow skulls and small eye sockets and was closely related to Northeast Asians. The second, Amerindians, had short broad faces, larger eye sockets, and was related to Southeast Asians.
Reuters: Peru finds human sacrifices from Inca civilization
Reporting by Marco Aquino; Writing by Dana Ford; Editing by Peter Cooney
LIMA (Reuters) - Researchers at an archeological site in northern Peru have made an unusually large discovery of nearly three dozen people sacrificed some 600 years ago by the Incan civilization.
The bodies, some of which show signs of having been cut along their necks and collarbones, were otherwise found in good condition, said Carlos Webster, who is leading excavations at the Chotuna-Chornancap camp.
The sprawling 235-acre (95-hectare) archeological site is 12 miles outside the coastal city of Chiclayo, near the ancient tomb of Sipan, which was one of the great finds of the last century. The sacrifices were made just decades before Spanish explorers arrived in what is now Peru.
Discovery Networks: Ancient Humans Knew Sustainable Fishing
Michael Reilly, Discovery News
June 1, 2009 -- Early humans living off the coast of California may have been the first "farmers" of the sea.
By managing sea otter populations they maximized their harvest of abalone and mussels, making them pioneers in the art of sustainable fishery management, according to a new study.
Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon and team of researchers collected thousands of shells from ancient settlements of the Chumash people in the Channels Islands near Santa Barbara, Calif., dating back to around 12,000 years ago.
Discovery Networks: Urine, Fingernail-Filled 'Witch Bottle' Found
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
June 4, 2009 -- During the 17th century in England, someone urinated in a jar, added nail clippings, hair and pins, and buried it upside-down in Greenwich, where it was recently unearthed and identified by scientists as being the world's most complete known "witch bottle."
This spell device, often meant to attract and trap negative energy, was particularly common from the 16th to the 17th centuries, so the discovery provides a unique insight into witchcraft beliefs of that period, according to a report published in the latest British Archaeology.
Lead researcher Alan Massey, a former chemist and honorary fellow of Loughborough University, believes "the objects found in witch bottles verify the authenticity of contemporary recipes given for anti-witchcraft devices, which might otherwise have been dismissed by us as being too ridiculous and outrageous to believe."
Physics
Science News: Mechanical systems all tangled up
By Laura Sanders
Researchers have linked the vibrations of two separated atom pairs, catching sight of a strange quantum effect called entanglement in a system that approaches the scale of everyday life. This new link between two pairs of oscillating ions, reported in the June 4 Nature, "pushes the bounds on where entanglement can be seen," says study coauthor John Jost of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s campus in Boulder, Colo.
Quantum entanglement, a mysterious connection between far-flung particles that Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," has been confined to the microscopic world inhabited by tiny particles including photons, atoms and "other things that are not easy to relate to," Jost says.
The springlike, oscillating connection between two tiny atoms shares mechanical properties with macroscopic systems such as violin strings and pendulums in grandfather clocks. By entangling the motion of one pair of atoms with the motion of another pair, Jost and his colleagues may open the door for "quantumness" to creep into the real world.
Reuters: U.S. judge recommends returning treasure to Spain
By Jim Loney
MIAMI (Reuters) - A U.S. judge said a shipwreck found by an American treasure hunting company is the Spanish warship Mercedes and its loot should be returned to Spain, but the firm said on Thursday it would contest the non-binding decision.
The recommendations on Wednesday by a magistrate judge in Tampa, Florida, marked the latest step in a lengthy battle between the treasure hunters, Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc, and the governments of Spain and Peru over nearly 600,000 silver and gold coins valued at some $500 million.
The Spanish government hailed the decision from Magistrate Mark Pizzo, which called for the treasure to be returned to Spain within 10 days. But it was simply a recommendation to a U.S. district court judge, who will issue a final order.
Chemistry
Discovery Networks: 'Impossibly Perfect' Crystals Found in Nature
Eric Bland, Discovery News
June 4, 2009 -- Neither glass nor crystal, quasicrystals have symmetries once considered to be impossible for solids.
Now, 25 years after successfully creating artificial quasicrystals in the lab, scientists from Princeton University and elsewhere have found perfect quasicrystals in nature, locked inside a rock from a Russian mountain range.
"The latest issue surrounding quasicrystals has been could nature ever make them?" said Paul Steinhardt, a professor at Princeton University and a co-author on the paper describing the find, in this week's issue of Science.
Science News: Pesticide may seed American infant formulas with melamine
By Janet Raloff
Infant formulas purchased from stores in Canada show widespread tainting with traces of melamine, a toxic constituent of plastics and other materials. In China, the fraudulent use of melamine as a protein replacement in infant formulas resulted in the poisoning of more than 1,200 babies last year, six of whom died. Canada’s widespread contamination, however, appears unintentional and to stem from a very different source.
Chemists with Health Canada in Ottawa report they have yet to identify the source of the pollutant they’ve just turned up in 71 of 94 samples of infant formula. In a report of their findings, however, just published online ahead of print in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Sheryl Tittlemier and her colleagues do finger one key suspect: the insecticide cyromazine. It’s legal for use on food crops and animal forage — and melamine is one of its breakdown products.
"In all instances in which melamine was detected, concentrations observed were below the standard of 0.5 micrograms per gram set by Health Canada for infant formula," the researchers note. Indeed, levels ranged from 4 to 346 nanograms per gram (or parts per billion) of assayed formula. Based on the concentration present in even the most contaminated product, Tittlemier’s group calculates that a baby’s likely intake of the kidney-toxic chemical would only come to about 1 percent of the allowable intake.
Science News: Unexplained atmospheric chemistry detected
By Sid Perkins
Unidentified chemical reactions taking place in some polluted air may be a source of hydroxyl radicals, data from a new field study suggest.
Hydroxyl (OH) radicals result from a series of sunlight-stimulated reactions in the atmosphere involving ozone, nitrous acid and hydrogen peroxide. The highly reactive hydroxyl radicals, which typically persist in the air no more than one second before they combine with volatile organic chemicals and other gases, help the atmosphere cleanse itself, says Franz Rohrer, an atmospheric chemist at the Jülich Research Center’s Institute for Tropospheric Chemistry in Germany.
Field data gathered in China’s Pearl River delta during the summer of 2006 hint that unknown reactions taking place in some polluted air can generate substantial — and unexpectedly large — amounts of hydroxyl radicals, Rohrer and his colleagues report online June 4 in Science.
Energy
Reuters: New clean energy 2009 investment seen sharply down
Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Peter Blackburn
LONDON (Reuters) - New investment in clean energy will total $95 to $115 billion in 2009, representing a drop of 26-39 percent from last year's total of $155 billion, data published by research group New Energy Finance showed on Friday.
The clean energy sector including wind and solar power enjoyed more than fourthfold growth in investment since 2004 but has suffered a sharp fall as a result of the financial crisis.
"It is disappointing that 2009 will look likely to show such a significant fall in new investment in clean energy. However, the good news is that it does look as though the worst is past," Michael Liebreich, chairman and chief executive of New Energy Finance said in a statement.
Agence France-Presse: Efficient New Light Unfolds Like Paper
June 5, 2009 -- The next time your lamp needs a new light bulb, you might change the lamp shade instead of the light bulb.
New research out of Germany and published in a recent issue of the journal Nature shows that cheap and thin organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) can create white light as bright as any compact fluorescent bulb for nearly half the electricity as many compact fluorescent light bulbs.
"This uses cheap, well-known, and well-established materials," said Sebastian Reineke, a coauthor on the paper from the Institut fur Angewandte Photophysik.
Science, Space, Environment, and Energy Policy
Reuters: House farm panel sets hearing on U.S. climate bill
Reporting by Charles Abbott; Editing by David Gregorio
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House Agriculture Committee scheduled a meeting next week to review a climate-change bill the committee leadership has criticized .
A priority of House Democratic leaders, the bill would set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020. House leaders aim for a floor vote on the bill later in June or in July.
Reuters: U.S. lawmakers seek more nuclear power in bill
By Ayesha Rascoe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers on Thursday sought to increase incentives for nuclear power and energy efficiency in a measure that would require utilities to generate a certain amount of electricity from renewable sources.
Nuclear power is not currently considered a renewable electricity source in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee bill. Under the bill, a percentage of utilities' total power production would have to be dedicated to renewables.
The committee adopted an amendment offered by Ranking Member Lisa Murkowski that excluded any increases in capacity at existing nuclear power plants and new nuclear plants from measures of utilities' total production for the renewable electricity standard.
Reuters: U.S. tells California to cut water use to save fish
By Peter Henderson
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Californians' thirst for water has pushed salmon and other fish to the brink of extinction, a federal agency ruled Thursday as it directed officials to cut water supplies to cities and farms to save several species.
California's rivers used to brim with trout, salmon, sturgeon and more, but the federal, state and local governments built a monumental system of dams and pipelines in the most populous state that turned a desert into productive farmland and left some rivers dry.
The state faces a water crisis and a third year of drought. Add climate change and a growing population to the mix, and the fate of some salmon runs looks untenable without change, the National Marine Fisheries Service said in a report ordered as part of a long-running court battle over the salmon.
Science Education
Science News: Women faring well in academic research
By Janet Raloff
Women applying for jobs in science, engineering or math departments at research-intensive universities fare at least as well as men — and sometimes better — a new National Research Council report finds. A higher proportion of women applicants are brought in for interviews and a higher proportion of the women interviewed are offered jobs.
The new 5.5-year-long study, performed at the behest of Congress, looked at how men and women fare in getting hired and advancing in academic research jobs in the sciences and engineering. Based on original research, it analyzed conditions that existed in 2004 to ’05 at the nation’s top research universities. It polled 1,800 faculty in 500 research departments.
Science News: Professional master's in science is 21st century MBA
By Sheila Tobias
One hundred years ago (in 1908), a group of higher educators launched a new professional master’s degree called the MBA. Their aim: to meet the anticipated needs of 20th century business, which would be characterized, they thought, not by product specialty but by bigness. Today, MBA programs graduate about 90,000 students per year and are considered to have provided a singular advantage to American business.
Will the Professional Science Master’s, the science-based professional degree created nine decades after the MBA, manage to meet the needs of 21st century private and public enterprises? That’s the view (and hope) of the directors of 134 PSM programs at 71 universities, their employer partners and the 2,500 math/science graduates now enrolled.
The PSM is intended for math and science graduates bent on careers at the intersection of science and management. In large public and private enterprises, PSMers serve as lab and project managers and/or work in close collaboration with specialists in finance, intellectual property or regulatory affairs. In smaller startups, they carry responsibilities in both science and management. And in the public sector, their value is just now beginning to be recognized.
Science News: Think like a scientist
By Bruce Bower
Fresh-faced researchers swarm around Deborah Lucas, buzzing with enthusiasm and frustration. They have gathered to appraise terrarium-style models of a local pond ecosystem that groups of two or three have painstakingly assembled in large jars. Lucas leads a discussion that includes how to determine the causes of unanticipated die-offs of plants and animals in some jars, what hypotheses to test in sustainable models, the usefulness of quantitative measures of plant growth devised by some teams, and the extent to which each model corresponds to an actual pond ecosystem.
Despite having launched ambitious projects, none of the assembled investigators will publish research papers or present posters at scientific meetings. Cut them some slack — they’re sixth-graders. Deborah Lucas is their teacher.
These 11- and 12-year-olds are getting anything but a typical grade school science education. And that suits them just fine. Lucas’ class vividly illustrates how research exploring links between everyday thinking and scientific reasoning is inspiring novel efforts to teach young people how to think like scientists.
Reuters: Girls worse at math? No way, new analysis shows
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Girls can do just as well at math as boys -- even at the genius level -- if they are given the same opportunities and encouragement, researchers reported on Monday.
Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts studies showing girls can do as well as boys on average in math -- but cannot excel in the way males can.
They also said it is a clear rebuttal to Larry Summers, who as president of Harvard University said in 2005 that biological differences could explain why fewer women became professors of mathematics. Summers is now chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama.
Science Reporting
Reuters: NASA to invite "twedia" to launch
By Irene Klotz
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA, which has tiptoed into the new world of social media with Twittering astronauts and Facebooking rovers, is taking the next step with an invitation-only outreach to "the twedia" to cover a space shuttle launch.
There are so many details to work out that the so-called TweetUp, originally planned for next week's launch of space shuttle Endeavour, has been rescheduled for the August flight of shuttle Discovery, said Michael Cabbage, a spokesman for the U.S. space agency.
NASA figures it can handle between 100 and 150 Twitterers and bloggers in a makeshift media site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Science is Cool
Wired: Cirque du Soleil Founder Headed to Space
By Aaron Rowe
The fire-breathing founder of Cirque du Soleil, Guy Laliberté, aims to become the first Canadian space tourist.
He hopes to visit the International Space Station for twelve days in September, thanks to arrangements made with the Russian government by Space Adventures, a private company that provides training and services for aspiring cosmonauts.
Wired: One Giant Bounce for Mankind
By Lisa T.E. Sonne
Almost 40 years after the historic Apollo 11 mission, we’ll hear voices from the moon again. This time, celebrities, ham radio enthusiasts — and perhaps even you — will join the astronauts’ voices.
A massive project to bounce voices from Earth to the moon and back to another spot on Earth will be launched June 26. Several former astronauts and other famous people have signed on, and so can one lucky Wired Science reader.
We’ve secured a spot for one Tweet to be bounced off the moon, so send your most space-worthy 140 characters to @wiredscience or e-mail betsy_mason@wired.com. The winner can go to a moon bounce station to personally send the message to the moon.