Magical Monday is here and science talk returns to brighten your day one more time. 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 Neanderthals in northern Spain had knowledge of plants' healing properties, Cassini spots daytime lightning on Saturn, the largest dam built by Maya in Central America, researchers produce the first complete computer model of an organism, highly transparent solar cells to help windows generate electricity, and how ocean chemistry affects climate change.
Pull up that comfy chair and grab a spot on the porch. There is always plenty of room for everyone. Another session of Dr. Possum's science education, entertainment, and potluck discussion is set to begin.
Featured Stories
With advances in science comes the ability to analyze molecular components of diet from ancient times.
Until recently Neanderthals, who disappeared between 30,000 and 24,000 years ago, were thought to be predominantly meat-eaters. However, evidence of dietary breadth is growing as more sophisticated analyses are undertaken.
Researchers from Spain, the UK and Australia combined pyrolysis gas-chromatography-mass spectrometry with morphological analysis of plant microfossils to identify material trapped in dental calculus (calcified dental plaque) from five Neanderthals from the north Spanish site of El Sidrón.
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The researchers say the starch granules and carbohydrate markers in the samples, plus evidence for plant compounds such as azulenes and coumarins, as well as possible evidence for nuts, grasses and even green vegetables, argue for a broader use of ingested plants than is often suggested by stable isotope analysis.
A storm last year on Saturn was viewed close-up for the first time allowing new and interesting observations including
daytime lightning.
The storm occurred last year. The lightning flashes appear brightest in the blue filter of Cassini's imaging camera on March 6, 2011. Scientists aggressively heightened the blue tint of the image to determine its size and location. Scientists are still analyzing why the blue filter catches the lightning. It might be that the lightning really is blue, or it might be that the short exposure of the camera in the blue filter makes the short-lived lightning easier to see.
What scientists do know is that the intensity of the flash is comparable to the strongest flashes on Earth. The visible energy alone is estimated to be about 3 billion watts lasting for one second. The flash is approximately 100 miles (200 kilometers) in diameter when it exits the tops of the clouds. From this, scientists deduce that the lightning bolts originate in the clouds deeper down in Saturn's atmosphere where water droplets freeze. This is analogous to where lightning is created in Earth's atmosphere.
The largest ancient
dam built by Maya is revealed in excavations and core samples.
Water collection and storage were critical in the environment where rainfall is seasonal and extended droughts not uncommon. And so, the Maya carefully integrated the built environment – expansive plazas, roadways, buildings and canals – into a water-collection and management system. At Tikal, they collected literally all the water that fell onto these paved and/or plastered surfaces and sluiced it into man-made reservoirs. For instance, the city’s plastered plaza and courtyard surfaces and canals were canted in order to direct and retain rainwater runoff into these tanks.
In fact, by the Classic Period (AD 250-800), the dam (called the Palace Dam) identified by the UC-led (University of Cincinnati) team was constructed to contain the waters that were now directed from the many sealed plaster surfaces in the central precinct. It was this dam on which the team focused its latest work, completed in 2010. This gravity dam presents the largest hydraulic architectural feature known in the Maya area. In terms of greater Mesoamerica, it is second in size only to the huge Purron Dam built in Mexico’s Tehuacan Valley sometime between AD 250-400.
Computational biology took a large step forward with the details of the
first complete computer model of an organism.
Mycoplasma genitalium is a humble parasitic bacterium known mainly for showing up uninvited in human urogenital and respiratory tracts. But the pathogen also has the distinction of containing the smallest genome of any free-living organism – only 525 genes, as opposed to the 4,288 of E. coli, a more traditional laboratory bacterium.
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Even at this small scale, the quantity of data that the Stanford researchers incorporated into the virtual cell's code was enormous. The final model made use of more than 1,900 experimentally determined parameters.
To integrate these disparate data points into a unified machine, the researchers modeled individual biological processes as 28 separate "modules," each governed by its own algorithm. These modules then communicated to each other after every time step, making for a unified whole that closely matched M. genitalium's real-world behavior.
Highly transparent solar cells may one day allow windows to generate electricity in the march to more renewable energy sources.
Polymer solar cells have attracted great attention due to their advantages over competing solar cell technologies. Scientists have also been intensely investigating PSCs for their potential in making unique advances for broader applications. Several such applications would be enabled by high-performance visibly transparent photovoltaic (PV) devices, including building-integrated photovoltaics and integrated PV chargers for portable electronics.
Previously, many attempts have been made toward demonstrating visibly transparent or semitransparent PSCs. However, these demonstrations often result in low visible light transparency and/or low device efficiency because suitable polymeric PV materials and efficient transparent conductors were not well deployed in device design and fabrication.
The latest combination offers a 4% conversion rate which may improve in the future but even a small step is a good one.
While human surely play a part in climate change a new 'paradigm shift' in understanding may be on the way as ocean chemistry is said to play a part, too.
The cooling trend of the past 45 million years may have been caused by an event 50 million years ago that altered the world’s seawater, says U of T’s Professor Ulrich Wortmann in the Department of Earth Sciences.
“Seawater chemistry is characterized by long phases of stability, which are interrupted by short intervals of rapid change,” says Wortmann, lead author of a study to be published in Science this week.
“We’ve established a new framework that helps us better interpret evolutionary trends and climate change over long periods of time. The study focuses on the past 130 million years, but similar interactions have likely occurred through the past 500 million years.”
Wortmann and co-author Adina Paytan of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz point to the collision between India and Eurasia approximately 50 million years ago as one example of an interval of rapid change.
This collision enhanced dissolution of the most extensive belt of water-soluble gypsum on Earth, stretching from Oman to Pakistan, and well into Western India – remnants of which are well exposed in the Zagros mountains.
The authors suggest that the dissolution or creation of such massive gypsum deposits changes the sulfate content of the ocean. This in turn affects the amount of sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere and thus climate.
Knucklehead's Photo of the Week
Cleaner Wrasse
©Knucklehead, all rights reserved. (Click on the image to see more in the same series.)
Other Worthy Stories of the Week
Algal blooms could have caused last Ice Age
Morbidly beautiful insect photos
Astronomers report the earliest spiral galaxy ever seen
Lower ozone standard would reduce both morbidity and mortality
What we do and don't know about Earth's missing diversity
Asteroid strikes cause the Moon's surface to smooth
Videos of Northern and Southern Lights viewed from space
9 unusual high tech gadgets of rural America
Why is Earth so dry?
Fukoshima a 'wake-up' call seen for sleeping U.S. nuclear regulators
Green plants reduce city street pollution up to eight times more than thought
U.S. experiences warm and dry June as drought extends to 56% of lower 48
Success of pink bacteria in oceans of the world
A wrinkle in space-time
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.
Space.com
Wired News
Science RSS Feed: Medworm
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe--a combination of hard science and debunking crap
At Daily Kos:
This Week in Science by DarkSyde
Overnight News Digest:Science Saturday by Neon Vincent. OND tech Thursday by rfall.
Pique the Geek by Translator Sunday evenings about 9 Eastern time
All diaries with the DK GreenRoots Tag.
All diaries with the eKos Tag
A More Ancient World by matching mole
Astro Kos
SciTech at Dkos.
Sunday Science Videos by palantir
NASA picture of the day. For more see the NASA image gallery or the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive
Peterman Glacier calving again, NASA, Public Domain
