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.
Eco-Friendly Fireworks Offer Safer Pyrotechnics
Emily Sohn, Discovery News
July 2, 2009 -- Fireworks are fun, exciting and often free to watch, but there may be a hidden cost: The flashing displays can harm the environment and pose risks to human health.
Now, scientists are working on a new generation of kinder, gentler pyrotechnics. While still explosive and dramatic, these fireworks produce less smoke and use fewer toxic metals that end up in soil and groundwater.
More science, space, and environment stories after the jump.
Slideshows/Videos
BBC: Race to save rare cave carvings
Experts have been trying to find out why ancient carvings in a mysterious chalk cave in Royston town centre are slowly disappearing.
New Scientist: Computer reveals stone tablet 'handwriting' in a flash
Identifying individual carving styles on ancient tablets takes years of training – and even then can be up for debate – but now a computer can do it in seconds
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above links.
BBC: Honeybee mobs overpower hornets
By Victoria Gill
Japanese honeybees form "bee balls" - mobbing and smothering the predators.
This has previously been referred to as "heat-balling", but a study has now shown that carbon dioxide also plays a role in its lethal effectiveness.
In the journal Naturwissenschaften, the scientists describe how hornets are killed within 10 minutes when they are trapped inside a ball of bees.
BBC: Thais flock to panda cub
Residents of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand have been flocking to the city's zoo for their first sight of a 6-week old panda cub.
It is the first time a panda has been bred in captivity in Thailand.
Over half a million Thais entered a competition to name the new arrival.
BBC: Wildlife threat at African reserve
Much of the wildlife in one of Africa's most important reserves is nearing extinction, according to a study of key animal species.
Giraffe numbers are down by 95% in the Masai Mara reserve in south-west Kenya because of an increase in people living around the park, and there are concerns the trend might be irreversible. Peter Greste reports.
BBC: Dolphin 'superpod' spotted off Wales
A "superpod" of hundreds of dolphins has been captured on film off the coast of Pembrokeshire by conservationists.
Eight volunteer members of the Sea Trust came across the "mile-long wall of dolphins" near the Smalls Lighthouse in the Irish Sea.
The charity's founder Cliff Benson described the spectacle as "awesome".
BBC: Ariane launches giant satellite
The world's biggest commercial telecommunications satellite has been put into orbit by an Ariane 5 rocket.
The TerreStar-1 satellite - which weighs just under seven tonnes - will provide next-generation mobile voice, video and data services to North America.
Discovery Networks: Dinos: Dinosaur Mummy Has Skin, Guts
The most intact dinosaur mummy is about to be unveiled to the public. Discovery News' Kasey-Dee Gardner gets a sneak peek.
Astronomy/Space
Agence France-Presse via Discovery Networks: Astronomers Identify New Class of Black Hole
Astronomers on Wednesday said they had identified an intermediate class of black hole that could explain how supermassive, light-sucking monsters develop in the heart of galaxies.
Their find -- a black hole more than 500 times the mass of the sun, on the fringe of galaxy ESO 243-249 -- is reported in the latest issue of Nature, the British-based science journal.
In terms of size, it lies between supermassive black holes, which can be billions of times the mass of the sun, and relative toddlers, which are between three and 20 solar masses.
Science News: Baby Milky Way modeled
By Ron Cowen
BLOIS, France — Like a proud papa showing off a picture of his newborn, cosmologist Ben Moore of the University of Zurich in Switzerland displayed an image of a galaxy that he says looks just like a newborn Milky Way. These days, with the sharp eye of Hubble and other telescopes, that may not sound like much of a feat. But the image Moore unveiled June 23 at the Windows on the Universe meeting was produced in a supercomputer and is the highest-resolution simulation ever attempted of a galaxy’s assembly.
Science News: The Star That Ate a Mars
By Charles Petit
For several years, UCLA astronomers have studied GD 362, a peculiarly dirty white dwarf star 165 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. Now they are pretty sure why the atmosphere of this dense, hot but slowly cooling ghost of a once much larger star is so polluted. It ate a planet.
"We probably have a destroyed world here," says Michael Jura, coleader of the UCLA team. Apparently a planet with the mass of Mars — a billion trillion metric tons or so of rock, iron, dissociated water and other ingredients — was dismembered and atomized, its remains now bobbing in the thin but dense, 10,000 kelvins atmosphere that GD 362’s powerful gravity holds close around itself.
Like a specimen on the ultimate autopsy table, the supposed planet has its insides spread wide for inspection. It would thus appear to provide science its first look at the composition of an alien, rocky and roughly Earthlike planet in an exosolar planetary system. In fact, the material marring GD 362 appears to closely match what you would get by grinding up Earth, Mars or Venus, the UCLA team and collaborators report in a paper to appear in The Astrophysical Journal.
Deutsche Welle: NASA, Europe to turn off solar probe that kept on keeping on
NASA and the European Space Agency, often stuck with lifeless satellites and multi-billion euro lenses that won't open, are set to pull the plug on a robotic solar probe for quite the opposite reason.
Wired: Lunar Probe Sends First High-Res Images
By Betsy Mason
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sent its first images back to Earth after activating its cameras June 30.
The LRO has both a low-resolution wide-angle camera and a high-resolution camera. These shots were taken at the boundary between night and day, capturing shadows that exaggerate the terrain. Though the surface appears very rough, it is actually similar to the highland area where Apollo 16 landed and explored with a rover.
Wired: NASA Satellite Maps 99% of Earth’s Topography
By Alexis Madrigal
The elevation of nearly every place on Earth is now available, thanks to a NASA satellite mission.
By analyzing 1.3 million images collected by a Japanese instrument aboard the spacecraft, the agency created a topographic map covering 99 percent of the globe in a giant grid of measurements. Each point is spaced 98 feet apart.
"This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world," said Woody Turner, a NASA scientist who worked on the project, in a press release. "This unique global set of data will serve users and researchers from a wide array of disciplines that need elevation and terrain information."
Discovery Networks: Inflatable Tower Promises Easy Access to Outer Space
Eric Bland, Discovery News
An inflatable tower nine miles tall and tethered to a mountain top could cut the cost to launch spacecraft, reduce the need for geostationary communications satellites, and improve cell phone signals.
"This structure could be made of commercially available materials," said Brendan Quine, who, along with Raj Seth and George Zhu at York University in Toronto, Canada, wrote an article detailing their tower in the journal Acta Astronautica.
The tower itself would be 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) tall, 230 meters (754 feet) across, and weigh approximately 800,000 tons, or about twice the weight of the world's largest supertanker when fully inflated with a variety of gasses, including helium.
Evolution/Paleontology
Associated Press via the Asbury Park Press: Myanmar fossils may shed light on evolution
By MICHAEL CASEY
BANGKOK, THAILAND — Fossils recently discovered in Myanmar could prove that the common ancestors of humans, monkeys and apes — known as anthropoids — evolved from primates in Asia, rather than Africa, researchers contend in a study released Wednesday.
The 38 million-year-old pieces of jawbones and teeth are part of a growing body of evidence that is helping scientists to understand the origin of primates, said Dr. Chris Beard, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and a member of the team who found the fossils near Bagan in central Myanmar in 2005.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above article.
Science News: Long-lasting daddy longlegs
By Sid Perkins
Scientists have unearthed the fossils of two new species of harvestmen, a delicate type of creature better known to many folks as daddy longlegs.
Science News: Flexible molars made chewing champions out of duck-billed dinosaurs
By Jenny Lauren Lee
Duck-billed dinosaurs may have been the sheep of their ecosystems, instead of the deer.
Patterns of tiny scratches in the fossilized teeth of Edmontosaurus, a type of hadrosaur, suggest the dinos had more complex jaw movements than previously thought, and may have eaten grass-like plants instead of trees, researchers report online June 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Discovery Networks: Fossil Feathers Revealing Extinct Moa's True Colors
Michael Reilly, Discovery News
A new stash of fossil feathers is yielding a wealth of information about Moas, the extinct giant birds that once roamed ancient New Zealand.
In a unprecedented discovery, Nicolas Rawlence of the University of Adelaide and a team of researchers found they could extract DNA from the feathers' shafts, and use the genetic material to prove the feathers belonged to four species of the flightless Moa, including the Heavy-footed Moa Pachyornis elephantopus.
The team's study was published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Academy B: Biological Sciences.
Biodiversity
Deutsche Welle: Reduced biodiversity puts planet at serious risk
Research has found that habitat destruction and, to a lesser extent, over-hunting are putting life on earth "under a serious threat," according to a new report issued Thursday by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The analysis of the Red List of Threatened Species, conducted every four years, comes ahead of an international deadline next year for governments to determine how successful they have been in reducing biodiversity loss.
"Considering that only 2.7 percent of the 1.8 million described species have been analyzed, this number is a gross underestimate, but it does provide a useful snapshot of what is happening to all forms of life on earth," the IUCN said in a statement.
Deutsche Welle: Ecuador wants rich nations to pay to preserve UNESCO biosphere reserve
Ecuador has vowed not to drill for oil in the Amazon if rich nations will compensate it. Known as the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, Ecuador’s foreign minister is feeling optimistic about its future after a trip to Berlin.
Yasuni National Park in Ecuador is one of the most bio-diverse places on Earth, and has even been declared a world biosphere reserve by UNESCO. Some 644 species live in just one hectare of its 982,000-hectare sprawl. It is also home to 2,000 Huaorani indigenous people.
It also sits atop Ecuador's largest known oil reserve, around 850 million barrels worth an estimated $6 billion (4.3 billion euros).
Discovery Networks: Cancer: Another Threat to Wildlife
Emily Sohn, Discovery News
Cancer patients come in all shapes and sizes, including whale, sea lion and Tasmanian devil.
In these wild animals and others, cancers are significant killers, according to new research, and human pollutants probably play a role. The work suggests that cancer might be an overlooked conservation threat.
A closer examination at the causes and pathways involved might also give scientists insight into our own health.
Discovery Networks: Predatory Dingoes Promote Diversity
Emily Sohn, Discovery News
The world's longest fence stretches for 5,000 kilometers (more than 3,000 miles) from one side of southern Australia to another. The fence was designed to keep sheep-eating dingoes out of a third of the country, but the barrier has had some other surprising consequences.
On the dingo-free side of the fence, according to a new study, overall biodiversity is actually lower than it is on the side where dingoes are free to roam. The research suggests that invasive predators, once they've established themselves, play an important role in the food web and might actually be good for conservation.
The finding could affect efforts to both control and reintroduce predators in other parts of the world, too, including wolves in the western United States.
Biotechnology/Health
Agence France-Presse via Discovery Networks: Mystery of Salamander Limb Regrowth Solved
Scientists on Wednesday shed light on how the salamander, one of nature's great oddities, is able to regrow an amputated leg.
The insight may one day help researchers to replicate the achievement among people, they hope.
All living creatures have the ability to regrow some part or parts of their body, but the salamander tops the list for regenerative agility.
Deutsche Welle: Birth control pill for men could be available soon, says WHO
Women have been awaiting it for years, and, according to researchers, it looks like the pill for men is finally in sight. The other good news is that is doesn't seem to have any side-effects.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is currently testing a hormonal birth control pill for men. Michael Zitzman, who is heading the study, told Deutsche Welle that it will likely be available to the public in 2012 at the earliest.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation via Discovery Networks: Vegans Have Lower Bone Density
Nicky Phillips, ABC Science Online
Vegans have lower bone densities than non-vegans, researchers have concluded.
But the news isn't all bad, with the study finding an animal-free diet doesn't translate into more fractures.
The findings, published today in the American Journal of Nutrition, came out of a review of previous studies that included more than 2,500 individuals.
Wired: Meet Dento-Munch, the Robot That Bites
By Alexis Madrigal
Like mechanized dentures, a new chewing robot will test the toll that munching takes on novel artificial teeth materials.
Designed at the University of Bristol, the machine, pictured, has 6 degrees of freedom of motion. This makes it more like your own jaws and teeth than previous simulators of the chewing experience.
Climate/Environment
Discovery Networks: L.A. Traffic Causing Premature Births: Study
Michael Reilly, Discovery News
As famous for its traffic jams as it is for Hollywood star power, the Los Angeles, Calif. area has another dirty little secret: Air pollution is sickening pregnant women who live near roadways, more than doubling their risk of a premature birth, according to a new study.
Scientists have known for years that smog plays havoc with residents' health. Asthma, blood pressure and a host of cardiovascular diseases all get worse in people exposed to high levels of air pollution.
Now Jun Wu of the University of California, Irvine and a team of researchers have shown that the effects are amplified for pregnant women living within three kilometers (1.9 miles) of a major roadway.
Science News: Bad Breath
By Janet Raloff
Tasteless. Invisible to the eye. Air contaminants less than a tenth the size of a pollen grain are nevertheless dangerous.
Even on a clear, sunny day, many tens of thousands — and potentially millions — of tiny particles cloud every breath you take. Some are nearly pure carbon. But reactive metals, acids, oily hydrocarbons and other organic chemicals jacket most of these motes.
Epidemiologists have been calculating human tolls by comparing how many people die when particle numbers in the air are high against mortality figures on cleaner days. Over the past couple of decades, those data have been implicating tiny airborne particles in the deaths of huge numbers of people each year — even where concentrations of these microscopic contaminants never exceed levels permitted by U.S. law.
Science News: Concerns over bisphenol A continue to grow
By Janet Raloff
Women may want to reconsider that popular style accessory, certain hard plastic water bottles available in fashion-coordinating colors. New animal studies link the chemical bisphenol A, which leaches from such polycarbonate plastics and food can linings, with heart arrhythmias in females and permanent damage to a gene important for reproduction. Other recent research suggests that human exposure to BPA is much higher than previously thought.
In animals, fetal exposures to BPA can be especially risky, sometimes fostering brain, behavioral or reproductive problems (SN: 9/29/07, p. 202). Canada and some states are moving to ban polycarbonate plastic in baby bottles for that reason. But the new heart data suggest that even adult exposures to BPA might cause harm.
Science News: Plastics ingredients may shrink babies
By Janet Raloff
An ingredient of the shrink-wrap plastic used to package foods may also shrink babies. Or so a provocative new study suggests.
The data, although far from definitive, would seem to justify further research — and pronto — on possible fetal stunting by phthalates, a family of widely used plasticizers and solvents.
Science News: How killer whales are like people
By Janet Raloff
At a green-chemistry conference at the University of Maryland, last Thursday, filmmaker/diver/marine explorer Jean-Michel Cousteau described the back story for his latest documentary: Call of the Killer Whale. He and his crew were interviewing scientists who study these top predators — the most widely distributed marine mammal on the planet — when they learned that this species is also heavily contaminated with certain toxic industrial contaminants. Indeed, Cousteau learned, these orcas appear to hold record levels of some pollutants.
Science News: Climate change shrinks sheep
By Susan Milius
Climate change now hits home for tongue twister fans. Shorter, sweeter winters shrink sheep, scientists say (slowly).
Female wild Soay sheep on the remote North Atlantic island of Hirta have shrunk by about 5 percent during the past two decades, says Tim Coulson of Imperial College London’s campus in Berkshire. To see what’s driving that change, a weight loss averaging 81 grams per year, Coulson and his colleagues applied a new analytical approach to a mountain of data. It turns out that evolutionary forces favor the opposite trend, toward bigger sheep. But environmental changes have softened winters, overwhelming those evolutionary effects, the team reports online July 2 in Science.
Deutsche Welle: Warming Rhine River poses environmental danger
Between Germany and the Netherlands, the Rhine is on average three degrees warmer than 100 years ago. Ecologists warn of serious consequences for nature and wildlife.
Science News: Ozone hole trims polar water’s CO2-absorbing power
By Sid Perkins
The ozone hole over Antarctica does more than let a little extra ultraviolet light reach ground level: It boosts ocean acidification in the waters surrounding the icy continent and reduces the amount of carbon dioxide emissions those waters can absorb.
Recent research has indicated that the oceans surrounding Antarctica aren’t absorbing nearly as much planet-warming CO2 from the atmosphere as they did in previous decades (SN: 5/26/07, p. 333). In one of those studies, scientists speculated that meteorological effects of the high-altitude ozone hole over Antarctica, including strengthening of winds at sea level, might be to blame. Now, results of computer simulations bolster that notion, researchers report online June 20 in Geophysical Research Letters.
Discovery Networks: Rainforests More Fragile Than Estimated
Michael Reilly, Discovery News
The Amazon rainforest, one of the planet's most precious and besieged natural resources, is even more fragile than realized.
If the planet warms even a moderate amount, a new study predicts that as much as 40 percent of it could be condemned to vanish by the end of the century.
A crippled Amazon could hasten global warming. If a significant portion of its trees die off, their vast stores of carbon would be emitted back into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, pushing the climate further into dangerous levels of warming.
Science News: Losing Louisiana
By Sid Perkins
Residents of Louisiana, take note: If engineers don’t divert sediment-rich waters from the Mississippi River to help replenish a sinking river delta, about 10 percent of your state will slip beneath the waves by the end of this century. However, even if the engineers do try to abate the subsidence, the Mississippi doesn’t carry enough sediment to offset more than a small fraction of that loss, a new analysis suggests.
Over the past few centuries, about a quarter of the wetlands in the Mississippi River delta have been lost to the ocean, says Harry Roberts, a marine geologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Several factors have contributed to that loss, he notes, including sea-level rise and the settling of land as ancient sediments gradually become compacted under their own weight. Now, Roberts and colleague Michael Blum — now at the ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company in Houston — use computer models to estimate the effect that these processes will have on the Mississippi delta in the next few decades. The news, reported online June 28 in Nature Geoscience, isn’t good.
Science News: Dirty snow may bring green burst to mountain peaks
By Susan Milius
Kicking up more dust in deserts may bring unnaturally synchronized spring greening to mountain peaks.
Livestock grazing, mining and other human activities in dry lands churn up extra dust that winter storms sweep away and dump on distant alpine slopes along with snow, explains Heidi Steltzer of Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Darkening the snow speeds up the spring melt of the snowpack, but Steltzer and her colleagues now find that it won’t speed up the first sprouts of spring. Premature bald spots instead stay wintry until certain signs of spring pass a threshold, the researchers report online June 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Once temperatures lose their sting, these delayed plants suddenly burst forth together.
Science News: New cyclone predictor
By Sid Perkins
Warmer-than-normal sea-surface temperatures in the central Pacific lead to stronger, more frequent tropical storms and hurricanes in the North Atlantic, a new analysis suggests. Unlike the more familiar El Niño, or warming in the equatorial region of the eastern and central Pacific, trends in central Pacific warming alone are more predictable and may offer forecasters a more accurate method of anticipating hurricane activity during the upcoming year, scientists say.
The sea-surface warming characteristic of El Niño typically stretches along the equator from the coast of South America to the international date line, with the largest temperature anomalies in the eastern Pacific. During El Niño episodes, the number of tropical storms and hurricanes — both called cyclones — is lower than average across the North Atlantic, says Peter J. Webster, an atmospheric scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. But when the equatorial sea-surface warming is concentrated only around the international date line, hurricane activity is much higher than normal, Webster and his colleagues report in the July 3 Science.
Geology/Geophysics
Agence France-Presse via Discovery Networks: Trees Buffered Earth From Iceball Fate
Vegetation helped save Earth from runaway cooling that would have encased the planet in ice, according to a study published on Wednesday.
The paper sheds light on the big natural mechanisms that over hundreds of millions of years have swung the globe like a pendulum between deep chill and intense heat.
Discovery Networks: Solved: Why Blind Faults Make Big Quakes
Michael Reilly, Discovery News
It's a mystery of earthquakes that takes a deadly toll on humans: faults buried several miles deep in Earth's crust breed more damaging earthquakes than their surface counterparts. Over the years, unusually powerful shaking born from these "blind" faults has brought cities from California to Japan to their knees, without explanation. Until now.
Blind faults reside in rock layers perfectly suited to violent rupture, according to a new study. And when they strike, they focus explosions of energy toward the surface, jarring the nearby vicinity with a violence that can belie their modest size.
"When a rupture spreads in an earthquake, it's traveling almost like a sonic boom," explained Paul Somerville of URS Corporation in Pasadena, Calif. "Waves of energy are right on top of one another, traveling nearly 10,000 miles per hour; these are near shock wave conditions."
Psychology/Behavior
Agence France-Presse via Discovery Networks: Pigeons Make Good Art Critics
Pigeons may sometimes appear to randomly target city sculptures with their droppings, but according to a new Japanese study they also have the potential to become discerning art critics.
Researchers at Tokyo's Keio University say they have found that the birds have "advanced perceptive abilities" and can distinguish between "good" and "bad" paintings, recognizing beauty the way humans do.
The team -- which previously published research saying that pigeons can tell a Monet from a Picasso -- was seeking to find out whether the animals may also be able to prefer one to the other.
Wired: Penguin Parents Won’t Chip In to Help Handicapped Spouse
By Hadley Leggett
Tired of your partner not helping out with the kids after you’ve had a tough day at work? At least you’re not a handicapped penguin parent trying to fish with a Plexiglas box strapped to your back.
Penguin pairs are known for their elaborate collaboration in raising chicks under harsh Antarctic conditions. But it turns out penguins will take teamwork only so far. When French scientists handicapped one bird from each of 46 pairs of Adélie penguins, partners of the unlucky birds didn’t step up to help out their mates, or to provide extra food for their chicks.
"In Adélie penguins, when one mate was handicapped, no compensatory care was observed from the partner," researchers from the Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien reported Tuesday in Animal Behaviour. "As a consequence, handicapped individuals and offspring both supported the whole additional breeding cost of the handicap."
Wired: Make Like a Dolphin: Learn Echolocation
By Hadley Leggett
With just a few weeks of training, you can learn to "see" objects in the dark using echolocation the same way dolphins and bats do.
Ordinary people with no special skills can use tongue clicks to visualize objects by listening to the way sound echoes off their surroundings, according to acoustic experts at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain.
"Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you," Juan Antonio Martinez said in a press release. "Within another couple weeks you can tell the difference between trees and pavement."
Wired: Why You Can’t Keep Your Foot Out of Your Mouth
By Brandon Keim
It’s one of the more frustrating aspects of human nature: The harder we try not to say or do or think something, the more likely we are to slip — and often at the worst possible time. But maybe science can help.
More than a decade after the inability of a Dostoevsky protagonist to stop thinking about a white bear inspired his first experiments, Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner has become one of the world’s foremost experts on what are now known as ironic processes.
Using ingenious experiments to reveal the brain’s hidden machinations, Wegner and others have found that our brains expend steady, conscious effort to avoid talking about ex-girlfriends on first dates, sending putts off the green, or letting slip the real reason you were late for work.
Science News: 2-year-olds possess grammatical insights
By Bruce Bower
Two-year-olds know more about grammar than they can say. Budding toddlers recognize the difference between nouns and verbs in simple sentences, even though the kids don’t utter such sentences for at least another year, say Anne Christophe of the Laboratory of Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics in Paris and her colleagues.
Children begin to use two or more words at a time by age 2, but their statements are typically incomplete and show no signs of grammatical knowledge. Yet upon hearing a sentence in which a noun incorrectly replaces a verb, or a verb incorrectly replaces a noun, toddlers display split-second brain responses that signal awareness of the rule violations, Christophe’s team reports in a paper published online June 29 and set to appear in Developmental Science.
Science News: You Are Who You Are by Default
By Tina Hesman Saey
You may not be riding the latest social wave on Facebook or MySpace, or tweeting your every impulse to fans on Twitter. But your brain is hooked on networking.
Vision works because different brain regions link up to connect the dots of light and color into a meaningful picture of the world. Language depends on networks of neural circuitry that make sense of the words you hear or see and that help you generate your side of the conversation. Networks of nerves control the motion of your muscles, allowing you to move smoothly and, when necessary, swiftly.
Networks are the "in" thing for brain scientists, as surely as they have been for online social butterflies.
Science News: Schizophrenia risk gets more complex
By Laura Sanders
Large collections of common genetic variants, rather than the harmful actions of just a few key mutations, probably predispose people to schizophrenia, three large genetic studies suggest.
The studies, all published online July 1 in Nature, sifted through mountains of genetic data from patients with schizophrenia and people without the disease looking for spelling differences in the sequence of letters that make up the genome. The studies also turned up specific chromosome regions that probably play a role in the disease. Understanding such genetic factors, estimated to account for 80 percent of the total risk of getting schizophrenia, may ultimately lead to better treatments.
Archeology/Anthropology
Deutsche Welle: Mesopotamian vase sheds light on Germany's artefacts trade
The case sounds more like an esoteric crime novel than a simple legal tussle, involving as it does archaeologists, rare-coin dealers, customs officials, and the Iraqi embassy in Berlin.
At its heart is a golden vase just six centimeters high that may or may not have its origins in ancient Mesopotamia.
The vase is currently being held by Michael Mueller-Karpe, an archaeologist at the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz, Germany. Three years ago he was charged with providing the court with an expert opinion on the provenance of the object, which is at the center of a lawsuit over fencing illegally trafficked goods.
New Kerala.com: Excavation at 3000 yr old Vietnam site reveals ancient child deaths
Washington, July 3: An archaeological excavation in southern Vietnam of a site more than 3000 years old has shed new light on how the death of young children was viewed by community members and uncovered the oldest clear evidence of rice agriculture in the region.
The excavation, led by Professor Peter Bellwood and Dr Marc Oxenham from the ANU (Australian National University) School of Archaeology and Anthropology, studied a site 3-4000 years old named An Son.
New Scientist: Computer reveals stone tablet 'handwriting' in a flash
by Ewen Callaway
You might call it "CSI Ancient Greece". A computer technique can tell the difference between ancient inscriptions created by different artisans, a feat that ordinarily consumes years of human scholarship.
"This is the first time anything like this had been done on a computer," says Stephen Tracy, a Greek scholar and epigrapher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who challenged a team of computer scientists to attribute 24 ancient Greek inscriptions to their rightful maker. "They knew nothing about inscriptions," he says.
Tracy has spent his career making such attributions, which help scholars attach firmer dates to the tens of thousands of ancient Athenian and Attican stone inscriptions that have been found.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Angkor's temples and climate change doom
By Sen Lam for Radio Australia
The ancient civilisation based at Angkor in Cambodia collapsed in the late 16th century because of problems with a very modern ring to them, research by an international team indicates.
The Greater Angkor Project, based in Sydney, is preparing a paper arguing that extreme climate change and the failure of Angkor's complicated water systems were to blame.
BBC: Castle bones may belong to knight
Archaeologists believe that bones discovered at Stirling Castle may have belonged to a knight killed in battle or during a siege in the early 1400s.
It is thought that despite the warrior's relatively young age of about 25, he may have suffered several serious wounds from earlier fights.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above articles.
Agence France-Presse: Road Threatens Site of Ancient Afghan City
Marc Bastian, AFP
An important archaeological site in northern Afghanistan that was occupied by humans as far back as the sixth century B.C. is being threatened by the construction of a road, archaeologists warn.
The picturesque Cheshma-e-Shafa gorge in the northern province of Balkh is just one of several ancient sites faced with destruction by a post-Taliban push for development, they say.
This is despite laws in place to protect the country's heritage.
Physics
Discovery Networks: Gravity's Imprint Sought in Big Bang Glow
Irene Klotz, Discovery News
A search for gravitational waves stemming from the creation of the universe commences this week with an array of new detectors sensitive enough to measure signals as faint as a billionth of a volt.
The experiment, called QUIET, is the latest attempt to find theoretical ripples in the expanse of space caused by the Big Bang explosion some 14 billion years ago.
Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravity waves which would have alternatively compressed and expanded space in one direction and then another, disrupting space and time. The effect is similar to what happens when a rock falls into a smooth body of water.
Science News: Mass mismatch makes mystery for proton’s strange cousin
By Jenny Lauren Lee
A heavy, strange cousin of the proton has been seen a second time, but it seems to have lost a little weight. The omega-b-minus, also called the omega-sub-b baryon, is a three-quark particle related to protons and neutrons. It has been observed at the Collider Detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, scientists announced in a paper submitted to Physical Review D and available online at arxiv.org. But CDF’s measurement of the particle’s mass is significantly lower than a previous measurement, leaving researchers wondering what caused the discrepancy.
"One or both of the measurements are missing the mark," says CDF physicist Pat Lukens, a coauthor of the paper.
Discovery Networks: Lasers to Seek, But Not Destroy, Subs
Eric Bland, Discovery News
Shooting laser beams at a submarine won't destroy it, but new technology being tested by the U.S. Navy could help find enemy subs.
"Instead of dumping hardware (into the ocean) you could shoot a light pulse into the water and generate acoustic signals," said Ted Jones of the Naval Research Laboratory, who presented his results at a recent meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.
"With this, you could do communications, acoustic navigation beacons or sonar."
Chemistry
Science News: Salt stretches in nanoworld
By Rachel Ehrenberg
Inflexible old salt becomes a softy in the nanoworld, stretching like taffy to more than twice its length, researchers report in the June 10 Nano Letters. The findings may lead to new approaches for making nanowires that could end up in solar cells or electronic circuits. The work also suggests that these ultra-tiny salt wires may already exist in sea spray and large underground salt deposits.
"We think nanowires are special and go to great lengths to make them," says study coauthor Nathan Moore of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. "Maybe they are more common than we think."
Metals such as gold or lead, in which bonding angles are loosey-goosey, can stretch out at temperatures well below their melting points. But scientists don’t expect this superplasticity in a rigid, crystalline material like salt, Moore says.
Physorg.com: How chemistry can reveal the secrets of ancient worlds
Led by Professor Richard Evershed from the University’s School of Chemistry, the team has developed new methods of forensic-style chemistry enabling the extraction of chemical information from organic molecules that have been preserved in archaeological artefacts and geological deposits for hundreds, thousands or even millions of years. Using this information the team is able to unravel key aspects of the lives of ancient peoples, particularly their diet and agricultural practices.
Richard Evershed, Professor of Biogeochemistry at the University, said: "While the archaeological record is extraordinarily incomplete, by combining molecular, isotopic and archaeological information we can build up pictures of how people lived in a way that was impossible until now. We use the latest analytical chemical techniques in a forensic approach because of the thousands of years that have passed since the evidence was left behind."
The latest state-of-the-art analytical chemical techniques are required to reveal and identify the invisible ancient molecules ? ‘biomarkers’ ? which are then matched to modern reference materials. These molecular and isotopic ‘fingerprints’ can be used to trace human activities, adding important new pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of past life on Earth.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above article.
Energy
Deutsche Welle: Renewable energy agency to call United Arab Emirates home
The capital of the United Arab Emirates beat Bonn and Vienna when representatives from 129 countries met in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday to decide where the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) would be based.
Despite hoping the agency would have its headquarters in the former German capital, Germany's Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel welcomed what he called a "fair and appropriate compromise."
Members of the agency decided to place an innovation and technology center in Bonn, the Austrian city of Vienna will be home to an office dedicated to liaising with the United Nations and other international institutions.
Science, Space, Environment, and Energy Policy
Salt Lake Tribune: Current laws are inadequate to protect antiquities
By Gray Warriner
Artifacts give us a priceless window into the past, but the laws protecting our past are no more than a Band-Aid on a hemorrhaging patient. Somehow, our personal property rights have come to include prehistoric structures that none of us built, and artifacts that can be willfully destroyed if we happen to hold title to the land. We are about the only civilized nation in the world that allows this unrestricted, unrepentant erasure of history.
Inadequate laws have created a thriving business in backhoe archeology and looting on both public and private lands. It again came to the forefront June 10 when a federal sting operation netted 24 people charged with pothunting and trading in stolen antiquities in the Four Corners area.
I consider this whole episode tragic, and I blame all of us, especially politicians without the courage to pass laws removing the money incentive from the picture. There really should be a public outcry, but the 24 indicted are no more than scapegoats in what is a much broader issue.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above article.
Wired: Water Should Be a Human Right
By Brandon Keim
Water, water everywhere, and you’re entitled to a drop.
As scientists warn that the world’s fresh water supplies will soon run critically short, and companies scramble to privatize them, some researchers and activists say water should be considered a basic human right.
"Access to clean water, which is essential for health, is under threat," write the editors of Public Library of Science Medicine in an essay published Monday.
Deutsche Welle: EU ministers approve sale of food from cloned animals' offspring
Milk and meat from the progeny of cloned animals could soon be hitting the shelves of European supermarkets. Some groups have been critical of such products, which are already on sale in the United States.
European agriculture ministers approved the sale of milk and meat from the direct offspring of cloned animals on Monday. Germany had long opposed the move, but finally changed its position.
According to Monday's decision, food products originating from the progeny of cloned animals will still have to receive approval by the European Food Safety Authority before they can be sold in the EU. The sale of meat and milk from cloned animals themselves, however, is not permitted.
Wired: Will Obama Save America’s Giant, Smelly Earthworm?
By Brandon Keim
Environmentalists have asked the Obama administration to declare the three-foot-long, highly aromatic Palouse earthworm an endangered species, reversing the Bush administration’s mystifying refusal to protect them.
Scientifically known as Driloleirus americanus, or "lily-smelling American worm," the Palouse earthworm was once abundant in the prairies of eastern Washington and northern Idaho. But sightings became less common as accidentally-imported European earthworms tunneled under their grassland habitat, which now covers just two percent of its historic range.
Science News: Become a guinea pig
By Janet Raloff
Because society at large benefits from biomedical research, we should all accept it as our "moral duty to participate" in research trials, argues a commentary in yesterday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
The authors, who work at the National Institutes of Health’s clinical center, acknowledge at the outset that theirs is not the prevailing view. Although most people believe that participating in a research trial constitutes a "public good," they also see nothing inherently wrong in turning down an opportunity to help advance medicine, write Alan Wertheimer and his colleagues. Currently, the majority of Americans step up to the plate only when it feels right or when we see some likelihood of obtaining direct gain from participation.
"According to the standard view, participation in research is akin to giving blood or donating to charity," the scientists say. But Wertheimer and his coauthors are stumping to reshape our charitableness on the basis of two issues that are sort of joined at the hip: morality and civic duty.
Science Education
Tiger Weekly (Louisiana State University): LSEA spoils future of an educated Louisiana
By Anna Heumann
Nearly a year ago, the signature of our own Bobby Jindal enacted the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) inviting "supplemental" teaching materials to enter public school classrooms that specifically attack the scientific theory of evolution by questioning the origins of life and attempting to disprove Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Since the LSEA, new legislation pushed the charade further by allowing science teachers to challenge other economic-religious issues like global warming and cloning that are disagreeable in conservative religious and republican circles.
If scientists across the globe agree that evolution theory is fundamental to science, students deserve to know how individuals from non-scientific backgrounds, such as politicians and school board officials, are qualified to challenge the veracity and transmission of the scientific theory of evolution.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above article.
Science is Cool
USA Today via Asbury Park Press: New 'Ice Age' goes the dinosaur route
By SUSAN WLOSZCZYNA
The makers of "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" had to fully embrace that idea for their franchise — especially Part 3, which opened Wednesday.
They know, of course, that by the time woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers roamed the Earth, the Tyrannosaurus rex existed only as a very extinct memory. But for the second sequel, they needed a fresh way to appeal to the franchise's primary audience.
Mingling factual prehistoric creatures with computer-animated fantasy paid off for them before: The original "Ice Age" in 2002 and its 2006 sequel grossed a combined $371.7 million. And as much as youngsters enjoy Ray Romano's Manny the mammoth and that nutty Scrat, they really, really love dinosaurs — maybe even more in 3-D.