Welcome, welcome. Monday is here one more time right on schedule. The time has come to gather around and take a well deserved hiatus from all the politics of the day. Science talk is here. New discoveries, new takes on old knowledge, and other bits of news are all available for the perusing in today's information world. Over the fold are selections from the past week from a few of the many excellent science news sites around the world. Today's tidbits include a new trove of fossils in amber, astronomers discover the most massive neutron star yet, making bone in the laboratory, the blurring of the definition of 'native species' as a result of climate change, miniature human livers created in the laboratory, world's seagrass species faring somewhat better than vertebrates, and tagged narwhals track warming near Greenland. Come in, sit down, and relax. There is plenty of room for everyone. Settle in for one more session of Dr. Possum's science education and entertainment.
Featured Stories
The fossil record continues to expand with the discovery of a new trove in amber found in India.
Amber from broadleaf trees is rare in the fossil record until the Tertiary, or after the dinosaurs went extinct. It was during this era that flowering plants rather than conifers began to dominate forests and developed the ecosystem that still straddles the equator today. The new amber, and amber from Colombia that is 10 million years older, indicates that tropical forests are older than previously thought.
A newly discovered neutron star with two times the mass of our sun is forcing reconsideration of some theories about the formatino of such stars.
Neutron stars are the superdense "corpses" of massive stars that have exploded as supernovae. With all their mass packed into a sphere the size of a small city, their protons and electrons are crushed together into neutrons. A neutron star can be several times more dense than an atomic nucleus, and a thimbleful of neutron-star material would weigh more than 500 million tons. This tremendous density makes neutron stars an ideal natural "laboratory" for studying the most dense and exotic states of matter known to physics.
In another large step in materials science researchers have found a way to make bone in the laboratory and to study the process with an electron microscope.
For a long time it was thought that collagen was only a template for the deposition of calcium phosphate, and that bone formation was controlled by specialized biomolecules. However, the images taken by the Eindhoven researchers show that the collagen fibers themselves control the mineral formation process and thereby direct bone formation. The biomolecules have proved to have a different role in the mineralization process: they keep the calcium phosphate in solution until mineral growth starts.
The team visualized this process using a unique electron microscope, the cryoTitan. This microscope allowed the researchers to investigate samples that were very rapidly frozen, so that the process could be arrested and viewed in steps. The cryoTitan has an extremely high resolution, and can even distinguish single atoms.
The underlying principles open new avenues of approach in developing nanomaterials in the future.
As climate change continues species that are able to move are doing so leading to a blurring of the definition of 'native species.'
As climate changes, some environments are becoming hostile to the flora and fauna that long nurtured them. Species that can migrate have begun to move into regions where temperatures and humidity are more hospitable.
Given the chronic shortage of human livers for transplantation the creation of a functional liver (at least in the laboratory) is an exciting early step.
The engineered livers, which are about an inch in diameter and weigh about .20 ounces, would have to weigh about one pound to meet the minimum needs of the human body, said the scientists. Even at this larger size, the organs wouldn’t be as large as human livers, but would likely provide enough function. Research has shown that human livers functioning at 30 percent of capacity are able to sustain the human body.
To engineer the organs, the scientists used animal livers that were treated with a mild detergent to remove all cells (a process called decellularization), leaving only the collagen "skeleton" or support structure. They then replaced the original cells with two types of human cells: immature liver cells known as progenitors, and endothelial cells that line blood vessels.
With the continuing climate change the world's seagrass species are faring somewhat better than many vertebrates.
The survey focused primarily on vertebrate species, finding that 20 percent of the vertebrates reviewed are classified as "threatened" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and an average of 52 species of mammals, birds and amphibians move one category closer to extinction each year. In addition, the article included three plant groups.
...14 percent of seagrass species are in threatened categories based on the Red List.
Monitoring ocean warming is both complex and expensive but using tagged narwhals is providing information in a cost effective and efficient manner near Greenland.
The published study reported that highest winter ocean temperature measurements in 2006 and 2007 from both narwhals and additional sensors deployed using helicopters ranged between 4 and 4.6 degrees Celsius (39.2 and 40.3 degrees Fahrenheit). The study also found that temperatures were on average nearly a degree Celsius warmer than climatology data. Whale-collected temperatures also demonstrated the thickness of the winter surface isothermal layer, a layer of constant temperature, to be 50 to 80 meters less than that reported in the climatology data.
Greenland’s coast is a gateway for fresh water from melting polar ice flowing south to the Labrador Shelf, ultimately reaching the North Atlantic Current. The Arctic flow’s effect on the current is critical for understanding the impacts of a changing Arctic on the transference of heat globally from the equator to higher latitudes.
Other Worthy Stories of the Week
Signs of destroyed dark matter found in Milky Way's core
Evidence of an 'active' Venus found
Newly discovered snub-nosed monkey sneezes in the rain
Risk of cancer due to radiation exposure in middle age may be higher than previously estimated
Storing thermal energy in chemical could lead to advances in storage and portability
Spiral galaxies stripped bare. Pictures, beautiful pictures.
Large scale fish farm production offsets environmental gains
Fossils suggest earliest anthropoids colonized Africa rather than arising there
The tale of the headless dragonfly preserved in amber for 100 million years
New cotton fabric stays waterproof through 250 washes
Found: First complete remains of early Sauropod dinosaur
Tool sharpening origin pushed back 50,000 years
Dracula orchids
Insights into concerns of the ancient world from papyrus research
For even more science news:
General Science Collectors:
Alpha-Galileo
BBC News Science and Environment
Eureka Science News
LiveScience
New Scientist
PhysOrg.com
SciDev.net
Science/AAAS
Science Alert
Science Centric
Science Daily
Scientific American
Space Daily
Blogs:
A Few Things Ill Considered Techie and Science News
Cantauri Dreams space exploration
Coctail Party Physics Physics with a twist.
Deep Sea News marine biology
Laelaps more vertebrate paleontology
List of Geoscience Blogs
ScienceBlogs
Space Review
Techonology Review
Tetrapod Zoologyvertebrate paleontology
Science Insider
Scientific Blogging.
Wired News
Science RSS Feed: Medworm
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe--a combination of hard science and debunking crap
Daily Kos regular series:
Daily Kos University, a regular series by plf515
This Week in Science by DarkSyde
This Week in Space by nellaselim
Overnight News Digest:Science Saturday by Neon Vincent. OND tech Thursday by rfall.
Weekend Science by AKMask
All diaries with the DK GreenRoots Tag.
All diaries with the eKos Tag
NASA picture of the day. For more see the NASA image gallery or the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive.
M31, NASA, Public Domain