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.
Meteor Blades' Green Diary Rescue celebrates Daily Kos eco diarists 6 days a week!
H/T to Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse for this phrasing.
This week's featured story comes from The Oil Drum.
Peak Oil Day - July 11
by Richard Heinberg
On July 11, 2008, the price of a barrel of oil hit a record $147.27 in daily trading. That same month, world crude oil production achieved a record 74.8 million barrels per day.
More science, space, and environment stories after the jump.
Slideshows/Videos
Discovery Networks: Flashback: Images in the News, July 6-10
July 10, 2009 -- How did dinosaurs grow so large? What did Copernicus really look like? How do Americans really feel about science?
Discovery News tackled these questions and more this week. To find out the answers, take a tour of this week's top stories in our Flashback slide show.
Photo Synthesis on Scienceblogs: Rocks that ROCK!
Introducing a month long exploration of natural wonders seen by a woman who always has a camera on hand. We begin exploring with the wonders of minerals.
Photo Synthesis on Scienceblogs: Crystal Persuasions
The lure of minerals is irrepressible when one sees fine crystals on display. This post is the first of four in a row featuring crystals seen at rock and gem shows in Arizona. The Tucson Rock and Gem Show is one of the oldest and largest of all such shows, with famed international reputation. The images shown in these posts display fine specimens on display and available from vendors. Most photos were taken with various point and shoot cameras using available light and no special preparation for the best photography conditions. Each image has a link where interested visitors to this blog may see larger, better versions and technical details about the minerals.
Astronomy/Space
Science News: Pairing off in the early universe
By Ron Cowen
It’s usually nice to have a companion. And in the lonely, dark expanse of the early universe, even some of the first stars had soul mates, new simulations reveal.
Previous studies had indicated that the first stars were extraordinarily massive — at least 100 times as heavy as the sun — but were also loners (SN: 6/8/2002, p. 362). Now, more detailed modeling, including a careful consideration of how atomic and molecular hydrogen interact at low densities, reveals that at least 5 percent and perhaps as many as half of these heavyweights were gravitationally bound to similar-mass companions, says Tom Abel of Stanford University He and his colleagues, Matthew Turk of Stanford and Brian O’Shea of Michigan State University in East Lansing, report their findings online July 9 in Science.
Biodiversity
Science News: Pseudo pores help fling spores
By Rachel Ehrenberg
Botanists have had the moss pulled over their eyes for more than a century when it comes to explosive spore discharge in a thick, soft plant that thrives in soggy places. Sphagnum’s spores don’t eject from their capsule because of the dramatic buildup of several atmospheres of pressure, but instead eject when the capsule cell walls dry and buckle, researchers report online and in an upcoming New Phytologist.
Science News: Megafish Sleuth: No Steve Irwin
By Janet Raloff
Yesterday I wrote about meeting Zeb Hogan, the megafish sleuth. Later, I went home and watched his televised hunt for the elusive 1,000-pound giant stingray. The National Geographic channel appears to be grooming this conservation biologist as the next wildlife adventurer. Sort of its version of a Steve Irwin for the life aquatic.
But Hogan’s no Steve Irwin. And at least for me, that’s not a bad thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved watching Irwin’s adventurous exploits. Especially his wrangling big vipers, which could elicit nail-biting tension. And after his death from too close an encounter with a big stingray, we now know those thrilling exploits were anything but safe, staged pseudo-drama.
Science News: Monster stingrays: Field notes from a global wrangler
By Janet Raloff
Tonight, couch potatoes with access to the National Geographic channel can watch a biologist pursue some of the biggest fish on Earth: giant stingrays. Since 2006, National Geo has been funding Zeb Hogan’s research on "megafish" — global treks to study freshwater behemoths that strain our vocabularies for appropriate superlatives. When the University of Nevada-Reno scientist was in Washington, recently, I sat down with him at the National Geo office (just down the street from ours) to learn what drives this scientist and what he hopes to learn.
We focused on those stingrays.
Science News: Turtles make sense after all
By Susan Milius
Turtles may be weird, but according to new research, they’re not that weird. Their funny arrangement of shell and shoulder is just the same old land-dweller vertebrate stuff — with a little fold.
At first a turtle embryo grows much like a chicken or mouse. But then the developing body wall makes a critical fold, and the usual body plan starts to become an unusual turtle, Hiroshi Nagashima of Kobe University and his colleagues report in the July 10 Science.
Nothing else has a body plan like a turtle. Its ribs don’t grow inside its chest as a cage but instead fuse in the developing skin layer on its back to create one bony armored covering.
Biotechnology/Health
Science News: Caloric restriction extends life in monkeys, study finds
By Tina Hesman Saey
People who believed calorie restriction wouldn’t extend life in primates might now have to declare themselves a monkey’s uncle.
A 20-year study found that Rhesus monkeys fed a nutritious, low-calorie diet have fewer age-related diseases than counterparts on a normal diet, researchers report July 10 in Science. Also, MRIs reveal less shrinking with age in areas important for decision-making and controlling movement in the brains of calorie-restricted animals, report Ricki Colman and Richard Weindruch, both of the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and colleagues.
These results show that calorie restriction helps preserve primates’ bodies and brains, says Luigi Fontana, of Washington University in St. Louis and the Italian National Health Service in Rome. Calorie restriction has already been shown to extend the lifespan of mice and dogs, as well as yeast, fruit flies and worms.
Science News: Migraines vs. breast cancer
By Janet Raloff
I’m known as the migraine queen. And with upwards of 70 such headaches each year, the name is unfortunately all too apt. But I’ve just learned of an apparent up side to my neurological disorder. Women with migraines are about 25 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than are those who don’t regularly suffer from these killer brain attacks.
Science News: New drug hits leukemia early
By Nathan Seppa
A new drug can halt budding leukemia in mice by binding to a key protein on the surface of blood cells predisposed to becoming cancerous, researchers report in the July 2 Cell Stem Cell.
This and other studies have paved the way for preliminary testing of a version of the drug for people with acute myeloid leukemia, a particularly lethal form of the blood cancer. Fewer than one-third of patients diagnosed with this leukemia survive for five years.
The promising drug is an antibody that blocks a receptor called CD123 found on the surface of stem cells at risk of developing into leukemia cells, called leukemia stem cells. Normal blood stem cells serve as the templates for blood cells and various immune cells, but aberrant versions of these stem cells fail to develop properly and instead result in leukemia.
Climate/Environment
Associated Press via First Coast News: Florida Keys Could Be Lost To Rising Seas?
Posted By: Mike Lyons
KEY WEST, FL (AP) -- Treasure salvors searching for an 18th-century wreck in the Florida Straits a few years ago made a fascinating but little noticed discovery. Not buried treasure. Buried land.
Some 35 miles west of Key West, in 45 feet of water under a five-foot layer of dense mud lay an 8,500-year-old shoreline not unlike today's coast of the Florida Keys. There were well-preserved mangroves, pine cones and pine tree pieces, some amazingly still fragrant when brought to the surface.
"Looking at it, I was thinking: 'Wow, this could be the shoreline of Big Pine Key,"' said Corey Malcom, director of archaeology for the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above article.
Archeology/Anthropology
jp.dk (Denmark): Illness brought down early human rival: scientist
Scientists seeking to uncover the mystery of what happened to the Neanderthals should look to the modus operandi of another great die-off 30,000 years later, argues a Danish expert in an article submitted to the Journal of Archaeological Science.
In the article, professor emeritus Bent Sørensen of the University of Roskilde wrote that disease carried by Homo sapiens migrating out of Africa was responsible for the gradual extinction of our prehistoric cousins in the same way that European illnesses ravaged Native American populations in the sixteenth century.
‘Modern humans brought illnesses they could survive themselves, but for Neanderthals they were deadly,’ Sørensen said.
BBC: US criticised over Babylon damage
American troops and contractors caused substantial damage to the archaelogical site at Babylon in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, a new UN report says.
The report says key structures were harmed and the site was subjected to "digging, cutting and levelling".
Copenhagen Post: Students uncover hundreds of Iron Age remains
There was a sensational find when Århus archaeology students uncovered the bones of around 200 bodies dating from the Iron Age
What was supposed to be a simple three week long research exercise for archaeology students at the University of Aarhus developed into a unique excavation project.
Remains of more than 200 bodies have been found at the dig site near Skanderborg in Jutland dating from around 2,000 years ago.
Associated Press via Physorg.com: Israeli archaeologists discover ancient quarry
(AP) -- Israeli archaeologists have uncovered an ancient quarry where they believe King Herod extracted stones for the construction of the Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Monday. The archaeologists believe the 1,000-square-foot (100-square-meter) quarry was part of a much larger network of quarries used by Herod in the city.
The biggest stones extracted from the quarry would have measured three yards (meters) long, two yards (meters) across, and two yards (meters) high.
The archaeologists said the size of the stones indicates they could have been used in the construction of the Temple compound, including the Western Wall, a retaining wall that remains intact and is a Jewish shrine.
Culture24.org: Experts hold summit to unravel mystery of rebel Roman fortress in Norfolk
By Ben Miller
Last week (June 25 2009) a summit was held at the University of Nottingham to discuss new revelations on the mysterious Norfolk town of Caistor St Edmund.
A buried Roman province which caused sensation when RAF pictures of the site appeared on the front page of The Times in 1929, Caistor was adjudged to have been a densely-occupied urban area, abandoned by the Emperor of the struggling empire in 5AD.
Associated Press via Google News: Afghan mine clearers rescue artifacts
By HEIDI VOGT – 5 days ago
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan (AP) — On a rocky hillside in central Afghanistan, men in visored helmets and protective blue smocks gently scratch the earth for land mines — or shards of pottery from the sixth century.
Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. But this valley presents a challenge to deminers because of its history, from Silk Road traders to Buddhists who carved towering statues destroyed by the Taliban.
So deminers here double as amateur archaeologists, protecting the dirt as well as the people who will walk on it. Rather than exploding mines in the ground, the deminers ease them out gently with a strap around the explosive. And they spend as much time excavating bits of pottery or rusted jewelry as mines.
Lincoln Journal Star: Pipeline work turns up possibly rare artifacts
By JOE DUGGAN
A recent archaeological discovery in northeast Nebraska may belong to a group of early humans whose presence is little known in the state.
Artifacts from what could be a more than 1,000-year-old village were found this spring during pre-construction of the Keystone Pipeline project southwest of Hartington, said Terry Steinacher, an archaeologist with the Nebraska State Historic Preservation Office.
Based on a preliminary review, the arrowheads, stone flakes and animal bones may have been left by people referred to as the Plains Woodland Tradition, Steinacher said Tuesday.
Associated Press via bnd.com: Archaeologists intrigued by Chesterfield site
CHESTERFIELD, Mo. -- Archaeologists digging at a site in west St. Louis County believe it was once a major market center for Mississippian Indians.
Last year, Chesterfield workers excavating soil to build a retention reservoir cut into the ruins, exposing thousands of artifacts that included decorative pottery, ear spools, arrowhead and tool fragments, and beads used to make necklaces.
Those involved in the dig hope to develop a more complete picture of what has been called Mississippian culture, a people who thrived from 1050 to 1400 then mysteriously disappeared.
BBC: Medieval finds at university dig
The remains of an 11th Century dog were found during the dig
Roman pottery, medieval remains and 11th Century dog bones have been found at the heart of Cambridge University during an archaeological dig.
The dig has been taking place beneath a tearoom in the university's central offices, known as the Old Schools.
It was one of the events marking the 800th anniversary of the university.
The Age (Australia): Reburial project in crisis
Paola Totaro
July 6, 2009
The ambitious project to exhume, identify and rebury 400 Australian and British World War I soldiers found in a mass grave in a French battlefield is in crisis after a Defence Department decision to use a cut-price contractor.
Heavy rain and poor planning for drainage and toxic groundwater dispersal have derailed the dig, silting soldiers' remains and graves and potentially lifting artefacts out of their resting place at Fromelles, the site of one of the war's fiercest battles.
An emergency meeting was held on site last week in an attempt to salvage the archaeological project — including the pledge to DNA-test the bodies to identify them.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above articles.
Science News: Maize may have fueled ancient Andean civilization
By Bruce Bower
Prehistoric communities in one part of Peru’s Andes Mountains may have gone from maize to amazingly complex. Bioarchaeologist Brian Finucane’s analyses of human skeletons excavated in this region indicate that people living there 2,800 years ago regularly ate maize. This is the earliest evidence for maize as a staple food in the rugged terrain of highland Peru, he says.
Maize agriculture stimulated ancient population growth in the Andes and allowed a complex society, the Wari, to develop, Finucane contends in the August Current Anthropology. Wari society included a central government and other elements of modern states. It lasted from around 1,300 to 950 years ago and predated other Andes civilizations, including the Inca.
Physics
Science News: Capping the length of extra dimensions
By Ron Cowen
Red alert: Scientists are shrinking branes.
A team of theoretical physicists and astronomers has calculated that any hidden extra dimension beyond our familiar three-dimensional space, a world known in physics parlance as a 3-brane, must be less than 3 micrometers. The researchers base their findings on the recent discovery of one of the smallest and oldest black holes ever found.
The new limit is less than half that of previous limits on the length of an extra dimension, Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his colleagues report in a study posted online June 30 (http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.5351).
Chemistry
Science News: Graphene gains nearly perfect liquid status
By Rachel Ehrenberg
Some things always hold true — the amount of time it takes to find your keys, for example, depends on how late you are. Similarly, the rate that electrons collide in a given material is closely linked to its temperature. But graphene — a sheet of carbon that’s only one atom thick — doesn’t conform to such rules. Over a wide temperature range, graphene’s electrons should become a strongly interacting swirling soup, scientists report online July 6 in Physical Review Letters.
That finding suggests that graphene’s electrons are behaving like a nearly perfect liquid — highly turbulent with extremely low viscosity. Such properties emerge as graphene approaches the "quantum critical point," a phase transition that breaks the rules of ordinary physics. While a block of ice melts into water only within a narrow temperature range, the transition to a perfect liquid is believed to happen at a wide range of temperatures above this quantum critical point.
Science News: A new low for nano ice
By Jenny Lauren Lee
A block of ice melts at 0° Celsius. But chip a few molecules off that ice block and they will begin to melt at a much lower temperature — almost 180 degrees cooler.
Nanoparticles of ice were thought to melt at much lower temperatures than ice in bulk, but not this low, say researchers from Germany, France and China in a report to appear in Physical Review Letters.
"This is a pretty big deal for understanding water," comments physicist H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University.
Science News: Molecule gears up
By Laura Sanders
A single snowflake-shaped molecule atop a gold sheet can turn like a gear. By building this most basic component of a machine, researchers reporting in an upcoming Nature Materials have created a building block for complex miniature devices.
"This is another cog in the wheel for the development of molecular machines," says James Tour, a chemist at Rice University in Houston.
Carlos Manzano of the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering in Singapore and his colleagues built the gear out of hexa-t-butyl-pyrimidopentaphenylbenzene, which has a central core with six rings jutting out and is only nanometers wide. One of the six rings differs slightly from the others, allowing the team to track the molecule’s rotation.
Science, Space, Environment, and Energy Policy
Science News: Collins nominated to head NIH
By Janet Raloff
Today, President Obama confirmed his intent to nominate geneticist Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. This federal agency’s $30 billion a year research budget is dwarfed only by R&D spending on defense.
"Dr. Collins is one of the top scientists in the world," the president said in a prepared statement. "His groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease. I look forward to working with him in the months and years ahead."
NIH is an institution Collins knows well, having worked there for the past 16 years. He arrived in 1993 to direct the National Human Genome Research Institute, which focused on sequencing the entire human genetic blueprint — a feat it accomplished in 2003. His work has also uncovered several genes linked to disease, including ones that play a role in cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington's disease, an endocrine cancer syndrome, and "adult onset" (type 2) diabetes. Although Collins resigned his post at NIH’s genome research center last year, he has continued to work with people there. He also has been putting the finishing touches on a book, due out next year: The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine.
Science News: What’s in your bottled water?
By Janet Raloff
At a House oversight hearing in Washington, D.C., yesterday, the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog arm of the Congress, reported some disturbing news about the purity of bottled water. If the water harbors chemical contaminants, there’s little certainty that the Food and Drug Administration will learn about them. Which is curious, because FDA is the agency charged with regulating bottled-water quality.
The new GAO investigation was conducted at the behest of the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. It was probing data available about the quality of bottled water, which racked up revenues of $11.2 billion, last year, in the United States alone. That figure translates into annual per capita sales of some 28.5 gallons.
The new investigation found that "FDA does not have the specific statutory authority to require bottlers to use certified laboratories for water quality tests or to report test results, even if violations of [water-quality] standards are found." Moreover, noted John Stephenson, who directs GAO’s Natural Resources and Environment Office, his agency’s year-long investigation found that FDA doesn’t make bottled water companies provide information on the quality of the source water they use, on any contaminants detected or on potential health effects associated with any pollutants tainting their products.
Science News: Court backs EPA on controlling airborne particles
By Janet Raloff
An appeals court ruled yesterday that the Environmental Protection Agency had employed a valid approach to designating which areas of the country should take responsibility for controlling fine particulates — miniscule airborne motes that can be inhaled deeply into the lungs.
The opinion affects what had started out as a host of lawsuits brought by three states, nine cities and counties, and 10 groups representing power companies. By the time these suits had reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, they had been rolled into a single package known as Catawba Co., N.C., et al., v Environmental Protection Agency.
In regions where particulate air pollution exceeds federal standards, EPA can require especially strict controls on emissions of specks 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller. This pollution is known as PM-2.5. At issue in the current suit was who would be asked to ratchet down emissions when pollution values exceeded federal limits: just the municipality where air pollution was too high, this town and its surrounding county, or a whole metropolitan area that included potentially dozens of surrounding counties?
Science is Cool
Science News: Statistical tests suggestive of fraud in Iran’s election
By Julie Rehmeyer
An American statistician says strong statistical evidence backs up the claims of Iranian protestors that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory in the June election was fraudulent.
Walter Mebane of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor analyzed Iranian election data and found anomalies strongly suggesting that ballot boxes were stuffed with extra votes for Ahmadinejad. Mebane also identified 81 towns where further investigations are likely to find evidence of fraud.
"This suggests that the actual outcome should have been pretty close," says Mebane, who described his analysis on a paper posted on his website June 15 and updated June 29. The official results showed Ahmadinejad getting almost twice as many votes as his closest rival.