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 Discovery Networks.
Flashback: Images in the News, June 15-19
June 19, 2009 -- A space shuttle couldn't get off the ground, but two probes managed to lift off for the moon. Plus scientists think they may have figured out why the sun has been so mysteriously quiet.
Browse through images from these stories and more in this week's Flashback slide show.
More on these and other science, space, and environment stories after the jump.
Slideshows/Videos
Discovery Networks: Space: Top 5 Cases For Martian Life
Life on Mars? James Williams looks at 5 reasons scientists think it's possible.
Discovery Networks: 2057: Future Soldier
By 2057, soldiers will deploy with flexible full-body armor and "invisibility cloaks."
Discovery Networks: Dinos: The Futurist: Retro-Engineering Dinos
Flip a genetic switch and turn a bird into a dino? Not quite, but not so far off either. James Williams gets the story from paleontologist Jack Horner.
Wired: Psychedelic Sunspot Video Useful for Science, Too
By Alexis Madrigal
Behold the first complete simulation of a sunspot, the product of a new 76-teraflop supercomputer that’s allowed scientists to model the sun’s magnetic processes in unprecedented detail.
The beautiful virtual sunspot (see video below) was built using new observations about the structure of the sun. It represents an area 31,000 miles by 62,000 miles to a depth of 3,700 miles. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research used a wealth of equations that describe the interactions of particles in the environment to calculate the dynamics of the sunspot at 1.8 billion individual points.
"Advances in supercomputing power are enabling us to close in on some of the most fundamental processes of the sun," said Michael Knoelker, director of NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory and co-author of a paper on the work appearing in Science Thursday. "With this breakthrough simulation, an overall comprehensive physical picture is emerging for everything that observers have associated with the appearance, formation, dynamics and the decay of sunspots on the sun’s surface."
Wired: See Them While You Can: Endangered Butterfly Gallery
By Brandon Keim
With so many creatures facing extinction, it’s heartening to read of the Large Blue butterfly’s resurgence.
One of six members of the Maculinea family, it was once found throughout England but had vanished by the early 1970s. That’s when University of Oxford ecologist Jeremy Thomas went to study the island’s last remaining population.
Before Thomas’ work, scientists knew the outlines of Maculinea arion’s fascinating life cycle. After hatching from eggs laid on thyme flowers, the tiny caterpillars fall to the ground and secrete chemicals that make them smell like ants, who promptly mistake them for ant larvae and bring them back to the colony. Under the ants’ protection, the caterpillars spend the next 10 months feasting on real ant larvae, then build cocoons near colony entrances. Two weeks later the butterflies wriggle free, walk out and make a winged getaway.
Astronomy/Space
Wired: Mysterious Gamma-Ray Bursts May Have Ties to Failed Black Holes
By Betsy Mason
Gamma-ray bursts are the most massive explosions in the universe since the Big Bang, and yet scientists still know relatively little about them. Dark bursts, such as the one in the center of the artist’s rendering above, remain especially mysterious.
New research published last week on the arXiv website, and not yet peer reviewed, suggests that gamma-ray bursts may be the result of a strange effect that can stop a black hole from forming.
Science News: Supernova may be in a new class
By Ron Cowen
Just in time for July 4, astronomers say they have found a new type of stellar firecracker.
Stars that die an explosive death generally fall into two categories: young, massive stars that collapse under their own weight and hurl their outer layers into space, and older, sunlike stars that undergo a thermonuclear explosion. But the stellar explosion recorded in January 2005 and known as SN 2005E doesn’t fit either class, according to a new analysis reported online June 11 at arXiv.org.
The explosion ejected only a small amount of material — the equivalent of 0.3 solar masses — and erupted in the halo of an isolated galaxy, a region devoid of any star formation. These findings suggest that the explosion, or supernova, did not arise from the collapse of a massive star, report study coauthors Hagai-Binyamin Perets and Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and their colleagues. A massive star would have cast off much more material and would have erupted in a star-forming region. Since stellar heavyweights are so short-lived, they can’t move far from their birth site.
Discovery Networks: Sun: Just Warming Up Now
Irene Klotz, Discovery News
June 18, 2009 -- Scientists have been puzzled by the lack of sunspots on the surface of the sun. But now they may have figured out an explanation.
A slow-moving river of gas snaking deep within the sun's interior took longer than expected to reach the critical zone where sunspots are born.
Normally, sunspots reappear about every 11 years at the start of a new cycle of solar activity. Last year, the sun was spot-free for 266 days of the year, marking the quietest period of solar activity in a century.
Discovery Networks: Mars Lake Held as Much Water as Lake Champlain
Michael Reilly, Discovery News
June 18, 2009 -- Nestled in a valley near the Martian equator, scientists have discovered the striking remnants of an ancient lake.
Though dry and frigid now, the traces it left behind hint at a water body younger than any other on the planet, and its sediments are a prime target for finding fossilized alien life.
When Mars coalesced billions of years ago it was much warmer, and probably wet. Features that appear to be eroded river deltas more than 3.7 billion years old dot parts of the planet's surface. Researchers have speculated they are evidence of lakes -- and primitive life may have once existed on the surface.
Agence France-Presse via Discovery Networks: Moon Probes Blast Off to Scout for Water
Jean-Louis Santini, AFP
June 18, 2009 -- NASA blasted two probes into space Thursday on a landmark lunar exploration mission to scout water sources and landing sites in anticipation of sending mankind back to the moon in 2020.
The launch marked "America's first step in a lasting return to the moon," a NASA official said moments after a rocket carrying the probes launched at 5:32 pm (2132 GMT), a day after the US space agency scrubbed the shuttle Endeavour launch for the second time in a week because of a nagging hydrogen fuel leak.
The liftoff of the dual LRO and LCROSS missions atop an Atlas V rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida occurred one month shy of the 40th anniversary of NASA's historic first landings on Earth's natural satellite in 1969.
Discovery Networks: Fake Skin Flying on Moon Probe to Study Radiation
Irene Klotz, Discovery News
June 19, 2009 -- NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which blasted off for the moon on Thursday, will not only scout out safe spots for astronauts to land, it will let them know how the harsh radioactive environment might impact their bodies.
LRO is carrying patches of fake human tissue that will help NASA assess radiation risks to future crews and develop countermeasures.
The spacecraft's primary job is to spend a year taking high-resolution images of the moon's surface so NASA can find safe and scientifically interesting places to land future crews.
Reuters: Gas leak delays space shuttle launch for second time
By Irene Klotz
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA canceled the launch of space shuttle Endeavour on Wednesday for the second time after a potentially dangerous hydrogen gas leak surfaced while the ship was being fueled for flight.
An identical problem stymied a launch attempt on Saturday. Technicians had replaced seals in a hydrogen vent line in hopes of stemming the leak.
The next opportunity to launch Endeavour will be on July 11.
Agence France-Presse: Europe Working to Extend Space Station
June 16, 2009 -- The European Space Agency said Tuesday it was in talks to extend the life of the International Space Station and get seats for its astronauts on future flights to the orbital outpost.
"From a technical standpoint we are working on keeping the station alive at least up to 2025," ESA's director of human spaceflight, Simonetta di Pippo, told AFP on the sidelines of the Paris Air Show.
The International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled to be completed in 2010 after a 12-year assembly effort, leaving only five years before the facility, which has cost tens of billions of dollars, is scheduled to be scrapped.
Reuters: New Mexico breaks ground on commercial spaceport
by Tim Gaynor
PHOENIX (Reuters) - New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson broke ground on Friday on construction of Spaceport America, the world's first facility built specifically for space-bound commercial customers and fee-paying passengers.
The $198 million project, which is being funded by the New Mexico state government, is located on a remote high-desert range near the town of Truth or Consequences.
British tycoon Richard Branson's space tours firm, Virgin Galactic, will use the facility to propel tourists into suborbital space at a cost of $200,000 a ride.
Wired: Do You Have the Right Stuff to Be a NASA Pillownaut?
By Alexis Madrigal
NASA will pay you $160 per day to lie in bed — and they’ve got plenty of takers.
Lying on your stomach at a slight downward angle for months on end used to stand in for the effects of nearly no gravity. Now, the scientists at NASA’s Human Test Subject Facility in Galveston, Texas, are trying a new type of bed rest to simulate the moon’s gravitational field. They put you, face up, on a bed tilted up at exactly 9.5 degrees with your feet planted on a panel. Do the trigonometry, and the experiment places just about the same amount of gravity on your feet as the moon would.
"Obviously, there’s no magic switch to turn off gravity," said Ronita Cromwell, senior research scientist heading up the project. "What we’re doing is removing some of the effects of 1 G and achieving one-sixth G along the long axis of the body."
Reuters: France wants replacement for Ariane 5 space launcher
PARIS (Reuters) - France wants Europe to start looking into a space rocket launcher to replace Ariane 5 at some point between 2020 and 2025, President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said on Saturday.
The Ariane-5, which is billed as a cost-effective launcher for large satellites, has launched satellites for European telecoms operators, telescopes and scientific space observatories.
But it was time to start working on Ariane 6, the president's office said in a statement.
Evolution/Paleontology
Reuters: Giant sperm shows size matters for some animals
by Ben Hirschler
LONDON (Reuters) - Tiny mussel-like creatures living 100 million years ago made giant sperm longer than their own bodies, proving size has always mattered for some animals when it comes to sex, scientists said on Thursday.
Giant sperm are still around today. A human sperm, for example, would have to be 40 meters long to measure up against a fruit fly's. The insect is only a few millimeters in size but can produce 6 cm-long (2.5 inch) coiled sperm.
Scientists have been unsure if such gigantism is a freakish one-off.
Science News: Bird in the hand
By Sid Perkins
The hands of a newly discovered dinosaur species provide fresh support for the notion that birds are closely related to dinosaurs, researchers say.
Many paleontologists contend that theropods — a group of bipedal dinosaurs that, with rare exception, dined on meat — didn’t die out 65 million years ago with the rest of their kin. Analyses, those scientists say, show that this group lived on and gave rise to modern-day birds. But hardcore skeptics of that theory have long noted that the bone arrangement in birds’ wings doesn’t match the arrangement of bones in the hands of dinosaurs, says James M. Clark, a vertebrate paleontologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Now, fossils of a new theropod species, described by Clark and his colleagues in the June 18 Nature, reveal that some theropods indeed had birdlike hand-bone arrangements.
Discovery Networks: Dinosaur Looked, Behaved Like a Parrot
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
June 17, 2009 -- Polly might have craved a huge cracker back in the Cretaceous Era, since researchers have just identified an over 3-foot-long dinosaur that looked, ate and behaved very similar to today's parrots.
The new dinosaur, Psittacosaurus gobiensis, resembled a modern parrot on steroids, but it was likely not a close relative.
"Psittacosaurus discovered the delights of nut eating 110 million years ago, at least 60 million years before the first parrot arrived," lead author a Paul Sereno told Discovery News.
Biodiversity
Wired: Op-Ed: Microbes May Be More Networked Than You Are
By Yuri Gorby
When we think of networks, we think of humans and the cables we’ve run around the world to connect our species. Figuring out how to move electrons has transformed human society, but we are not the only species on earth that lives in a wired world.
A few years ago, microbiologist Gemma Reguera of Michigan State University reported that a certain type of bacteria could use rust to grow electrically conductive appendages. Shortly thereafter, my lab showed that many more bacterial species also had the ability to grow nanowires. The oxygen-making cyanobacteria that "invented" photosynthesis produce conductive nanowires in response to limited amounts of carbon dioxide. Heat-loving, methane-producing consortia of microorganisms even appear to produce nanowires that connect organisms from separate domains of life.
We are slowly, yet steadily, realizing that many (perhaps most?) bacteria produce nanowires. And the extracellular structures connecting bacterial cells into complex integrated communities create a pattern that looks suspiciously like a neural network.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation via Discovery Networks: Australian Forests Best at Locking Up Carbon
Anna Salleh, ABC Science Online
June 16, 2009 -- Mountain ash forests in Australia are the best in the world at locking up carbon, a new study has found.
And one of the authors said climate change negotiations should give more attention to protecting forests like these.
Environmental scientist, Brendan Mackey of the Australian National University and colleagues report their findings in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Science News: Downside of red-hot chili peppers
By Susan Milius Web edition : Friday, June 19th, 2009
MOSCOW, Idaho — Sometimes it’s good to be not so hot.
Capsaicinoid compounds, which give chilies their culinary kick, have the happy effect of discouraging a seed-rotting fungus that grows on plants. But new work has found that protecting seeds has a downside, says David C. Haak of the University of Washington in Seattle. In wild chilies, tests linked pungency with vulnerability to drought and to attacks by ants that devour the seeds, he reported June 14 at the Evolution 09 meeting.
Chili heat may turn out to be an example of populations adapting to particular local circumstances, an important concept in evolutionary theory, Haak says.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation via Discovery Networks: Antivenoms Can't Stop Deadly Jellyfish Sting
Anna Salleh, ABC Science Online
June 15, 2009 -- A long-used box jellyfish antivenom is unlikely to actually save lives, suggests new Australian research. And one expert says findings like this mean we need to improve our testing of antivenom effectiveness.
A team publishing online in the journal Toxicology Letters say venom from the box jellyfish acts so rapidly that any antivenom is unlikely to be protective.
"The box jellyfish is by far the most lethal organism in the world," says clinical toxicologist Geoff Isbister of Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin.
Discovery Networks: Carbon Credits Could Help Orangutans, Elephants
Emily Sohn, Discovery News
June 19, 2009 -- Carbon markets were designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The system could also be a financially feasible way to save tropical forests, according to a new study that estimated how much it would cost to prevent logging in Borneo's forests.
What's more, an established market would help buoy orangutans, pygmy elephants and other threatened species.
"I think it's our best chance we've ever had to conserve forests," said Oscar Venter, a conservation biologist at the University of Queensland in Australia. "There is a big potential positive here for the twin objectives of climate mitigation and biodiversity protection."
Agence France-Presse via Discovery Networks: Mekong River Dolphin Nearly Extinct
Patrick Falby, AFP
June 18, 2009 -- Pollution in southeast Asia's Mekong River has pushed freshwater dolphins in Cambodia and Laos to the brink of extinction, a conservation report said Thursday, sparking a furious government denial.
The WWF said only 64 to 76 Irrawaddy dolphins remain in the Mekong after toxic levels of pesticides, mercury and other pollutants were found in more than 50 calves who have died since 2003.
"These pollutants are widely distributed in the environment and so the source of this pollution may involve several countries through which the Mekong River flows," said WWF veterinary surgeon Verne Dove in a press statement.
Biotechnology/Health
Scebce News: Seeking genetic fate
By Patrick Barry
"RESISTANT" shouts the title of Lindsay Richman’s post. Apparently, she was elated to learn that her DNA reduces her susceptibility to norovirus infections, the principal cause of the common stomach flu.
So she posted a comment on a discussion board on the website for 23andMe, a company based in Mountain View, Calif., that specializes in the fledgling industry of personal genomics. To get a glimpse of her own DNA, Richman had sent the company $400 and a vial of her spit. From her point of view, what happened next was a mystery — a black box. But a few weeks later, out popped her results on a password-protected website, complete with social networking tools for sharing and discussing her genetic inheritance with other customers.
In the string of online responses to Richman’s post, others who share her genetic good fortune compared notes on the last time they’d had any symptoms of stomach flu. Richman, a 26-year-old real estate agent in New York City, hasn’t had stomach flu since she was 8, she wrote.
Science News: Gene silencing in colorectal cancer may prove useful
By Nathan Seppa
A gene that is frequently switched off in colorectal cancer cells seems to help the cancer but may also make it easy to detect, scientists say. Conveniently, the modification that silences the NDRG4 gene can often be spotted in stool samples, providing an inexpensive test, the researchers report in the July 1 Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
What’s more, the molecular change sometimes shows up in growths called polyps, which can be precancerous. If further research shows that the genetic aberration in polyps is also detectable in stool samples, doctors might one day be able to screen vast numbers of people for colorectal cancer risk before resorting to more expensive colonoscopies, says study coauthor Manon van Engeland, a molecular biologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
"Colonoscopy remains the gold standard" for detecting precancerous polyps and colorectal cancer itself, she says. But in developing countries where few people receive any form of screening, she says, "you could use this biomarker to preselect those people needing to undergo a colonoscopy, and that could be very quick and cost-effective."
Science News: Gene plus stress equals depression debate
By Bruce Bower
The last thing depression investigators need is another dead-end research downer. Efforts to find genes that directly contribute to depression have come up empty. And a research team now concludes, after a closer inspection of accumulated research, that a gene variant initially tagged as a depression promoter when accompanied by stressful experiences actually has no such effect.
By showing that follow-up studies collectively don’t support the study that launched this line of research, two new analyses debunk the proposed pathway to depression. The chances of becoming depressed rise as stressful events mount, regardless of genetic makeup, report statistical geneticist Neil Risch of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues.
The new studies, published together in the June 17 Journal of the American Medical Association, also demonstrate the difficulty of replicating reports of any gene variants that appear to work with environmental triggers to foster psychiatric disorders. Individual studies typically lack the statistical power to detect gene-by-environment interactions correctly because most candidate genes and stressful events exert modest effects on mental ailments at best, the scientists say.
Science News: A role for Merkels
By Tina Hesman Saey
Tender touches come courtesy of skin cells with an unromantic name: Merkel cells.
Scientists have debated the role of Merkel cells in the skin since they were first discovered in 1875. Now a study in the June 19 Science, led by researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, shows that the cells are essential for transmitting the sense of light touch, the kind of touch that helps distinguish between velvet and Velcro.
Though researchers know a lot about Merkel cells, no one has been able to say with certainty what they do. The cells are scattered sparsely around the body in clusters of 10 to 20, and only about 0.1 percent of skin cells are Merkel cells, says neuroscientist Ellen Lumpkin, a leader of the study along with Huda Zoghbi. The cells are more prevalent in touch-sensitive areas such as fingertips and lips, and have characteristics that could make them touch receptor cells, similar to hair cells in the ear that sense sound. A cluster of Merkel cells forms connections with a single sensory neuron that is found in skin structures called touch domes, and Merkel cells make a chemical called glutamate which can be used to communicate with nerves.
Science News: Estrogen may reprogram prostate cancer gene in black men
By Laura Sanders
WASHINGTON — A new study shows how chemical tags on DNA may lead to higher rates of prostate cancer in black men. And estrogen may play a role, researchers reported June 12 at a meeting of the Endocrine Society in Washington, D.C.
"It may be that estrogen can reprogram the genome," says study coauthor Wan-yee Tang of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.
Science News: CT scan nearly as good as regular colonoscopy
By Nathan Seppa
Undergoing a virtual colonoscopy might be just the ticket for people at high risk of colorectal cancer who need screening every few years, a new study finds. By spotting 85 percent of polyps, computed tomography scans offer a way to detect the precancerous growths in a way that is less invasive than a conventional colonoscopy, a European team of researchers reports in the June 17 Journal of the American Medical Association.
A slew of tests over the past decade have shown that CT scanning can be useful in detecting polyps (SN: 12/6/03, p. 355). The scans aren’t quite as thorough as a conventional colonoscopy, widely considered the gold standard for colorectal cancer screening. In the conventional procedure, a doctor uses a flexible tube fitted with a tiny scope to inspect the colon. The flexible device can also snip off any polyps found during the procedure, making colorectal cancer highly preventable (SN: 11/11/00, p. 312).
But flexible-scope colonoscopy carries a risk of colon perforation, requires some degree of sedation and causes discomfort. For these reasons, many people delay or avoid getting the procedure. About half of the people in the United States due for a colonoscopy or other colon screening test haven’t gotten one, says radiologist Daniele Regge of the Institute for Cancer Research and Treatment in Turin, Italy.
Agence France-Presse via Discovery Networks: Cancer Linked to Missing DNA
Marlowe Hood, AFP
June 17, 2009 -- Scientists reported Wednesday the first link ever found between cancer and a type of genetic defect, called copy number variation, characterized by missing or extra bits of DNA.
The breakthrough came in a study on neuroblastoma, a devastating pediatric disease of the nervous system that accounts for 15 percent of all cancer deaths among young children.
Researchers led by John Maris of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia discovered that a copy number variation (CNV) on chromosome 1 can play a key role in the development of the disease, which strikes most commonly in infancy and is often fatal.
Climate/Environment
Science News: White House releases report on climate change
By Sid Perkins
WASHINGTON — Climate change is already having detrimental effects in the United States, and those effects are probably going to get worse, a new federal study suggests.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program released the report, titled "Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States," June 16 during a White House-hosted press conference.
John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the report includes the most up-to-date scientific findings on the impacts of climate change. "It is clear that climate change is happening now," he said.
Science News: Fire
By Solmaz Barazesh
Earth is a fire planet. Ever since the first plants appeared — and provided fuel — more than 420 million years ago, fire has flourished in Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere. Some scientists even think that long before humans, fire carved out entire landscapes, clearing dense forests to make way for grasslands.
In recent years, the fingers of flame have extended their reach over more of the Earth’s surface. Wildfires are occurring more often and becoming more severe, a perplexing change in fire patterns that threatens to transform ecosystems, reduce biodiversity and even alter climate. To stamp out the flames, researchers have to understand why fire is spreading and figure out how to fight fire with science.
Fire has many faces. It helps some ecosystems thrive but destroys others. It helps people clear land but can also destroy homes and take lives. Sometimes useful, sometimes destructive, fire is always unpredictable — and that makes it a difficult subject. "Understanding fire is a science, and until now, the science of fire hasn’t been properly recognized," says ecologist David Bowman of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia.
Geology/Geophysics
Discovery Networks: Ancient Volcanic Blasts Kicked Off Modern Ice Ages
Michael Reilly, Discovery News
June 19, 2009 -- A series of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions gave the planet its polar ice caps, and kicked the ancient climate into a freeze-thaw cycle of ice ages that persists to this day, according to a new theory.
Though we have come to view polar ice as a permanent feature (effects of human-induced global warming notwithstanding), ice on Earth has a checkered past.
Until around 34 million years ago the planet was much warmer than it is today; the Arctic was a vast swamp, Antarctica's mountains were speckled with just a few tiny glaciers. There were no such things as ice caps.
Science News: Carbon dioxide not to blame in ice age mystery
By Sid Perkins
Scientists have peered back in time with a new analytical technique to see atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide more than 2 million years into the past. The findings indicate that a long-term decline in the levels of that greenhouse gas isn’t to blame for a geologically recent shift in the frequency of ice ages, scientists say.
The record of ice ages in North America stretches back 2.4 million years (SN: 2/5/05, p. 94). Until about 1.2 million years ago, ice ages in the Northern Hemisphere occurred about every 40,000 years, says Jerry F. McManus, a paleoclimatologist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. But for the past 500,000 years or so, ice ages have occurred, on average, only once every 100,000 years, he notes.
Several explanations for this shift have been proposed, but one of the most popular ones — a long-term decline in carbon dioxide levels — isn’t to blame, McManus and his colleagues suggest in the June 19 Science.
Discovery Networks: Taking the San Andreas's Temperature, From the Sky
-Michael Reilly
I don't blame the folks at NASA who created the new earthquake sensing tool, UAVSAR. Despite the terrible acronym, their new airborne radar system is pretty sweet -- it's designed to measure tiny changes in elevation along faults throughout California, including the big mama of them all, the deadly San Andreas.
There's probably no better place to measure strain along one of the world's most lethal faults than several thousand feet in the air, where it's nice and safe. And in a luxurious Gulfstream III jet, no less!
If you're going to fly around detecting seismic hazard, do it in style, I always say.
Psychology/Behavior
Science News: Mosquito fish count comrades to stay alive
By Bruce Bower
Mosquito fish don’t just count on each other for protection from predators — they literally count each other for such protection. These guppylike fish can use numerical information to identify the larger of two nearby groups of fellow fish, report psychologist Marco Dadda of the University of Padova in Italy and his colleagues in an upcoming Cognition.
That’s a useful skill to have, the researchers say. Larger groups, or shoals, offer a more effective shield against bigger fish with empty bellies.
The researchers allowed individual mosquitofish in a tank to see groups of other fish, but barricades prevented them from seeing an entire group at once. When viewing fish one at a time in each of two groups, mosquito fish spent much more time near larger groups, Dadda and his colleagues report. The fish preferred groups of three over two fish and groups with eight fish over four fish.
Discovery Networks: 'Genius Fish' Strategizes Like Humans
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
June 17, 2009 -- The Einstein of the fish world may be the nine-spined stickleback, suggests new research that determined this common European fish possesses an unusually sophisticated capacity for learning not yet documented in any other animal, aside from humans.
The unassuming, small-headed fish proves tiny brains can yield "surprising cognitive abilities," according to project leader Jeremy Kendal, whose team discovered the stickleback can compare the behavior of other fish with its own experiences in order to make better choices.
This learning method, known as "hill-climbing," is necessary for cumulative culture and was thought to be unique to humans.
Wired: Keeping an Open Mind to Animal Homosexuality
By Brandon Keim
When it comes to same-sex sexual behavior, scientists need to keep an open mind.
Sure, it’s widely recognized that the animal kingdom is full of male-on-male and female-on-female action, from fruit flies on up to bottlenose dolphins and, of course, Homo sapiens.
But though the origins and evolutionary consequences of homosexuality are varied, biologists tend to oversimplify such behavior, write University of California at Riverside biologists Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk in a same-sexuality review published Tuesday in Trends in Ecology & Evoloution.
PhysOrg.com: What really prompts the dog's "guilty look"
What dog owner has not come home to a broken vase or other valuable items and a guilty-looking dog slouching around the house? By ingeniously setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed as to whether their dog had really committed an offense, Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York, uncovered the origins of the "guilty look" in dogs in the recently published "Canine Behaviour and Cognition" Special Issue of Elsevier’s Behavioural Processes.
Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute a "guilty look" to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed guilty. Instead, people see ‘guilt’ in a dog’s body language when they believe the dog has done something it shouldn’t have - even if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offense.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above article.
Discovery Networks: Sonic Twittering Helps Shrews Find Their Way
Michael Reilly, Discovery News
June 18, 2009 -- Shrews use a primitive form of sonar to navigate their cluttered habitats of underbrush, according to a new study.
Though scientists have known for decades that shrews emit audible twittering calls, they have been puzzled as to whether they are used for communication, or for contending with the dense hay and grass, or dark tunnels that fill their environment.
Bjorn Siemers of the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Germany and a team of researchers captured seven common shrews (Sorex araneus) and nine greater white-toothed shews (Crocidura russula). They tested the animals' behavior in hay layers of varying thickness, and used scent indicators to see whether the shrews changed their calls when they detected the presence of another animal.
Wired: How to Stop Yourself From Staring
By DeAnne Musolf
People with disfigurements would probably rather not have strangers staring relentlessly at them. And many starers surely wish they could stop. But experts believe it’s a Herculean effort to control such gaping, because it’s triggered not by insensitivity but by instinct.
People become transfixed due to the work of the amygdala, a primitive part of the brain evolved to sort faces into "safe" or "potentially unsafe" categories. When the amygdala cannot process a face that doesn’t fit any it has previously encountered, it simply freezes like a computer unable to process a command. Scientists say that regaining composure requires serious conscious effort.
But with practice, you can regain control of your brain, according to neuropsychiatrist Joshua Freedman at UCLA. And the same technique could help handle other involuntary emotions such as anger and fear.
Archeology/Anthropology
Vero Beach 32963: University of Florida: Epic carving on fossil bone found in Vero Beach
BY SANDRA RAWLS, CORRESPONDENT
In what a top Florida anthropologist is calling "the oldest, most spectacular and rare work of art in the Americas," an amateur Vero Beach fossil hunter has found an ancient bone etched with a clear image of a walking mammoth or mastodon.
According to leading experts from the University of Florida, the remarkable find demonstrates with new and startling certainty that humans coexisted with prehistoric animals more than 12,000 years ago in this fossil- rich region of the state.
No similar carved figure has ever been authenticated in the United States, or anywhere in this hemisphere.
Daily Echo (UK): New Forest discovery thought be one of oldest ever made in UK
By Chris Yandell
TWO 6,000-year-old tombs have been unearthed in Hampshire in one of the biggest archaeological finds for years.
The discovery, thought to be among the oldest ever made in the UK, is set to shed new light on the life led by the county’s earliest settlers.
Flint tools and fragments of pottery have already been retrieved from the Neolithic site at Damerham in the New Forest.
The nationally important find has been made by a team of experts from Kingston University in London.
Xinhua: China to begin third excavation of terracotta army site
XI'AN, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists will begin the third excavation of the famous terracotta army site on Saturday, hoping to find more clay figures and unravel some of the mysteries left behind by the "First Emperor".
Archaeologists hoped they might find a clay figure that appeared to be "in command" of the huge underground army, said Liu Zhancheng, head of the archeological team under the terracotta museum in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi Province.
"We're hoping to find a clay figure that represented a high-ranking army officer, for example," he told Xinhua Tuesday.
The Guardian (UK): Archaeologists find skulls on route of new road
The skulls of scores of young men have been found in a burial pit on the route of a new road in Dorset.
So far 45 skulls, believed to be almost 2,000 years old, have been found, and more may be found as the pit is emptied. Archaeologists have called the discovery extraordinary, saying it could be evidence of a disaster, a mass execution, a battle or possibly an epidemic.
The bones recovered so far are still being examined but most appear to be of young men, and are believed to date back to the late iron age or early Roman period. They may be evidence of a fatal encounter between the invaders and the local population, buried at a site which had ritual significance for thousands of years before they died.
Xinhua: Two tonnes of ancient coins found in history-laden Chinese province
XI'AN, June 10 (Xinhua) -- More than two tonnes of ancient coins dating back to as early as the Tang Dynasty (618-907) have been unearthed on a playground of a primary school in Shaanxi Province, northwest China.
Zhao Aiguo, director of the cultural relics protection and tourism bureau in Liquan County, Shaanxi, told Xinhua Wednesday that the coins were found when workers were excavating the grounds Tuesday for construction of another building.
They reported their discovery to the bureau and soon more than 70 archaeologists, officials and police were sent to the site.
The Times of London: Aztec temple promises to yield one of antiquity’s great treasures
Nancy Durrant and Ben Hoyle
Archaeologists working amid the smog and din of Mexico City may be on the verge of unlocking an extraordinary time capsule.
The leaders of a team exploring a site opened up by earthquake damage believe that they have found the first tomb of an Aztec ruler. If they are right the site may yield one of the great treasures of antiquity, the sort of haul that fires the imagination of people far beyond academic circles.
The Journal: Battle of Flodden remembered
IN just three hours of savage, face-to-face fighting in a Northumberland field, 15,000 men lost their lives in the most brutal of ways.
The scale of the butchery in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden, near the village of Branxton, is astonishing in an age well before the mechanised killing capabilities of modern artillery.
At the end, the Scots King James IV, most of his accompanying nobility and 10,000 of their countrymen lay dead.
Now the first steps have been taken to plan how this momentous battle’s 500th anniversary should be marked in just over four years’ time.
For the clash was hugely important in many ways. It was the last medieval battle to be fought on British soil and influenced the future of European history.
The Associated Press via the Washington Post: Centuries-old slate discovered at Jamestown dig
By ZINIE CHEN SAMPSON
The Associated Press
Monday, June 8, 2009; 3:36 PM
RICHMOND, Va. -- Archaeologists have pulled a 400-year-old slate tablet from what they think was an original well at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, a historic preservation group announced Monday.
The slate is covered with faint inscriptions of local birds, flowers, a tree and caricatures of men, along with letters and numbers, according to Preservation Virginia, which jointly operates the dig site with the National Park Service. It was found May 11 at the center of James Fort, which was established in 1607 along the James River in eastern Virginia.
Calgary Herald: Divers hope to identify 1812 warship in Lake Ontario
A team of divers is set to plunge into Lake Ontario near Kingston, Ont., next week in a bid to confirm the discovery of a legendary Canadian-built ship from the War of 1812, the HMS Wolfe.
In collaboration with marine archeologists from Parks Canada, the divers plan to take detailed measurements, drawings and photographs of a sunken wooden sailing vessel that appears to match the size and last known location of the famous 32-metre sloop: the flagship of British naval commander James Yeo and star of a dramatic 1813 battle west of Toronto that helped thwart the U.S. invasion of Canada.
Agence France-Presse via Yahoo!News: US team to recover WWII bomber from Pacific lagoon
by Giff Johnson Giff Johnson – Thu Jun 11, 11:02 am ET
MAJURO (AFP) – A team of US salvagers is preparing to recover a rare World War II US naval torpedo bomber which has lain submerged in a Marshall Islands lagoon since 1942.
The bomber is one of two TDB Devastator planes ditched in Jaluit Atoll during an attack on Japanese forces in early 1942, said Van T. Hunn, a retired US Air Force officer heading The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) team.
"There is not one of these planes above water or in a museum anywhere," said Hunn.
The Moscow Times: Sunken S-2 Soviet Sub Found in Baltic Sea
STOCKHOLM -- After a decade-long search, a team of Baltic Sea divers has discovered the wreckage of a Soviet submarine that sank with dozens of sailors aboard during World War II, one of the divers said.
They found the S-2 submarine near the Aland Islands between Sweden and Finland in February but only announced it this week because they wanted to confirm the identity of the vessel, team member Marten Zetterstrom said.
He said all 50 crew members died when the vessel exploded in 1940, probably after hitting a mine. He declined to give the exact location.
Salt Lake Tribune: Looters move artifacts and destroy their value
By Brian Maffly
A federal informant may have spent nearly $336,000 to buy 256 artifacts allegedly looted from ancient burial sites in the Four Corners region, but their value to Utah's heritage goes beyond appraisal.
Scientists say that the suspected looters essentially erased that value when they removed relics such as an atlatl weight, turkey feather blankets, sandals and loincloths from the spots where Ancestral Puebloans left them centuries ago.
"If they are rooted out of the ground and put over the fireplace, they have limited value," said Kevin Jones, Utah's state archaeologist. "They are pretty and that's all."
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above articles.
Physics
Reuters: "Big Bang" collider set for autumn restart: CERN
by Laura MacInnis
GENEVA (Reuters) - The giant sub-atomic particle collider built to reproduce "Big Bang" conditions is set to restart this autumn, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Friday.
Scientists believe they have figured out how to prevent a repeat of the problems that caused the 10 billion Swiss franc ($9.2 billion) Large Hadron Collider to be shut down just nine days after it was switched on last September, CERN expert Steve Myers said in a statement.
Science News: Proposed quantum motor runs with a kick
By Laura Sanders
Physicists have proposed a way to get their quantum motor running. An electric motor could be built from just two atoms held in a ring by lasers, a theoretical study published online June 8 in Physical Review Letters contends.
The new motor proposal "might be hard to implement, but it has the core of a good idea," comments Ian Spielman, a physicist at the Joint Quantum Institute in College Park, Md.
Electrical motors, like the ones in fans, convert electric current into mechanical motion, such as spinning blades. "The idea of a quantum motor is exactly the same as a mechanical motor," says study coauthor Alexey Ponomarev of the University of Augsburg in Germany. "You have an electromagnetic force that launches it."
Science News: Shifting nanoparticles cause creep
By Jenny Lauren Lee
Concrete creeps. And now scientists think they know why.
New measurements suggest that the rearrangement of nano-sized concrete particles is responsible for the way buildings, bridges and other load-bearing concrete structures deform over time, a process technically known as "creep." The new insight could allow engineers to make stronger and longer-lasting concrete, researchers report in a study to be published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Creep limits the life span of a building or bridge, deforming its structure and leading to instability, says Franz-Josef Ulm of MIT, a coauthor of the study. "It’s a little like chewing gum," Ulm says. Gum will stretch and compress if a constant force is applied. "Concrete does exactly that, but at a much larger scale."
Discovery Networks: Sonic Black Hole Traps Sound Waves
Eric Bland, Discovery News
June 17, 2009 -- A black hole created by Israeli scientists won't destroy Earth, but it could make our planet just a little bit less noisy.
Using Bose-Einstein condensates, the scientists created a black hole for sound. The new research could help scientists learn more about true black holes and help confirm the existence of as-yet to be discovered Hawking radiation.
"It's like a black hole because waves get sucked in and can't escape," said Jeff Steinhauer, a scientist at the Israel Institute of Technology and the corresponding author of the article recently posted on the ArXiv.org pre-print Web page. "But in this case we use sound waves instead of light."
Discovery Networks: 'Cloak of Silence' Tech Could Hide Submarines
Eric Bland, Discovery News
June 15, 2009 -- A new invisibility cloak for sound could help doctors find tiny tumors or hide submarines from enemy sonar.
"Our focus is not about dampening noise, but to guide sound waves around structures," said Nicholas Fang, a professor a the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and coauthor, along with Shu Zhang and Leilei Yin, on a paper that appears in the journal Physical Review Letters.
For example, "if we have a coating on a submarine that bends acoustics waves before they hit the surface, guiding them around the submarine smoothly, then you won't be able to detect a submarine using sonar."
Science News: Microswimmers make a splash
By Laura Sanders
Michael Phelps, one of the greatest swimmers of all time, propels himself forward by hurling water behind his body. If he were the size of a bacterium, though, that strategy wouldn’t make much of a splash. In a microworld Olympics, Phelps would go home medalless.
At tiny scales of 10 micrometers and below, life is largely conducted as if in a thick fluid, where every motion is immediately dampened by the highly viscous muck. Here, where water seems to take on the consistency of honey, the coasting inertia that helps carry Phelps through the water is simply nonexistent.
"It’s like looking at a completely different world," says Piotr Garstecki, a physicist at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
Energy
Wired: High-Altitude Wind Machines Could Power New York City
By Alexis Madrigal
The wind blowing through the streets of Manhattan couldn’t power the city, but wind machines placed thousands of feet above the city theoretically could.
The first rigorous, worldwide study of high-altitude wind power estimates that there is enough wind energy at altitudes of about 1,600 to 40,000 feet to meet global electricity demand a hundred times over.
The very best ground-based wind sites have a wind-power density of less than 1 kilowatt per square meter of area swept. Up near the jet stream above New York, the wind power density can reach 16 kilowatts per square meter. The air up there is a vast potential reservoir of energy, if its intermittency can be overcome.
Even better, the best high-altitude wind-power resources match up with highly populated areas including North America’s Eastern Seaboard and China’s coastline.
Science, Space, Environment, and Energy Policy
Wired: Scientists Tell Obama Where to Go — to Sea
By Brandon Keim
President Barack Obama has said all the right things about safeguarding the oceans. While campaigning, he promised to improve their management and research. Last Friday, he gave an Ocean Policy Task Force 90 days to develop a comprehensive oceans policy.
Of course, it was just four-and-a-half years ago that the bipartisan Commission on Ocean Policy presented its sweeping recommendations to President Bush, who responded by creating a Cabinet-level Committee on Ocean Policy. The committee is now defunct.
Whether Obama’s promises will amount to more than another round of bureaucratic chair shuffling remains to be seen. If so, it will be tragic. For years scientists have warned the oceans are in crisis, teetering on the edge of breakdown. Overfishing has all but eliminated many once-common species, disrupting aquatic ecosystems and unleashing plagues of jellyfish. Agricultural runoff and warming temperatures are causing oxygen levels to drop, leaving once-rich coastal areas lifeless. Greenhouse gases threaten to turn ocean water acidic, literally dissolving the world’s corals and tiny, foundation-of-the-food-chain shellfish.
Science Education
Not all news in science education is good. Just look at the next two stories, and see if you can find a connection.
Science News: Asia: One reason America can’t afford to jettison good teachers
By Janet Raloff
I just listened to a disturbing news story on National Public Radio, this morning, about how budget cuts may force a Los Angeles middle school to fire half of its teachers. The riffed staff — reported to be mostly young, passionate and well educated — will be replaced with more senior teachers who had initially turned down a chance to teach at this innovative start-up (but who will now come anyway after losing their jobs at other LA. schools).
One anecdote that pointed to the school’s inventive approach to turning low-income inner-city kids on to math: a staff-written horror video starring the seventh-grade faculty. A "crazed kidnapper named Pythagoras" gives ransom messages that can be solved only through the use of math. The kids loved the story — and the Pythagorean Theorem became indelibly etched into their gray matter.
I can understand California’s budgetary dilemma, but the problem is that the real losers when schools sideline good teachers — young or old, new or experienced — is always our children. And can we really afford to jettison caring, passionate and well-trained educators at a time like this?
Louisville Courier-Journal: Creation Museum's attendance exceeds expectations
PETERSBURG, Ky. -- A school bus hissed to a stop near a giant concrete dinosaur perched outside the Creation Museum, a $27 million, 70,000-square-foot natural history museum-meets-Biblical theme park.
Three dozen middle school students tumbled out the doors, stretching after the 113-mile drive from Westside Christian School in Indianapolis for a field trip to augment their science lessons.
Inside, the students learned from displays that, contrary to mainstream textbooks, science supports the Bible's accounts of the Earth's creation in six days; that the Grand Canyon was created suddenly in Noah's flood; that dinosaurs and humans lived together; and that animal poison did not exist before Adam's original sin.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above article.
Science Reporting
Science News: ‘CRAP’ paper accepted for publication
By Janet Raloff
Philip Davis decided to test whether open access journals — which make the author pay for publication of research findings — employ first-rate peer review. Or might they be tempted to accept less than stellar manuscripts, at least as long as authors are willing to pony up the publication fee?
For the experiment, Davis, a Cornell grad student, together with a friend at the New England Journal of Medicine, used a computer program to develop a totally bogus (if grammatically correct) paper, and on January 29 submitted it to The Open Information Science Journal, which for some reason seems to be abbreviated TOISCIJ.
Two weeks ago, Davis received word that "your submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ." (From the stilted language of that acceptance, you might be tempted to suspect it also had been written by computer, using grammatically challenged software.) As long as the authors sent the publisher a check for $800 (to a post-office box in the United Arab Emirates), Davis learned, his paper would be published.
Science is Cool
Discovery Networks: Obama Fly Swat Reveals President's Impressive Hand-Eye Coordination
Jennifer Viegas
Yes, President Obama can swat flies, thanks to good inherited hand-eye coordination perfected by eating right and shooting hoops during off hours.
The Commander in Chief's skills were put to the test Tuesday during an interview with CNBC's John Harwood. As the two men were discussing the country's economic crisis, a fly that had been buzzing around the room throughout the interview began to zero in on Obama. It's hard to say why, but insects often gravitate toward certain odors, such as cologne components, food on the breath of an individual or just a person's unique body chemistry. According to Purdue University studies, mosquitoes tend to bite people who have recently consumed a banana, while yellow jackets hate hair spray. Honeybees dislike sweet scents, even though they hang around honey.
The fly wouldn't let up, and began to get on the president's nerves. Like a patient spider, Obama waited for it to land on the back of his left hand. Down came his right hand on the fly. Down went the insect.