Come one, come all to the science gatheringof 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 method of detecting emerging sunspots deep within the sun, the man in the Moon is looking younger, sniffer dogs could detect lung cancer, human sewage identified as the source of a pathogen killing Florida corals, wildlife responds increasingly rapidly to climate change, a new fuel cell that cleans water as it generates electricity, a reason why stress causes DNA damage, and quantum optical link sets new time records. Pull up that comfy chair and bask in the sunshine. There is plenty of room for everyone. Get ready for one more session of Dr. Possum's science education and entertainment.
Featured Stories
Disruptions such as solar flares and eruptions wreak havoc with electronic communications, power grids, and air travel.
Now Stanford researchers have developed a method that allows them to peer deep into the sun's interior, using acoustic waves to catch sunspots in the early stage of development and giving as much as two days' warning.
Sunspots develop in active solar regions of strong, concentrated magnetic fields and appear dark when they reach the surface of the sun. Eruptions of the intense magnetic flux give rise to solar storms, but until now, no one has had luck in predicting them.
The key to the new method is using acoustic waves generated inside the sun by the turbulent motion of plasma and gases in constant motion. In the near-surface region, small-scale convection cells – about the size of California – generate sound waves that travel to the interior of the sun and are refracted back to the surface.
The hope is advance warning will allow those affected to take protective measures.
New research suggests Earth's Moon could be younger than once thought.
Analysis of lunar rock samples thought to have been derived from the original magma has given scientists a new estimate of the Moon’s age.
The (research) team analyzed the isotopes of the elements lead and neodymium to place the FAN (ferroan anorthosite) sample’s age at 4.36 billion years. This figure is significantly younger than earlier estimates of the Moon’s age that range as old as the age of the solar system at 4.568 billion years. The new, younger age obtained for the oldest lunar crust is similar to ages obtained for the oldest terrestrial minerals--zircons from western Australia--suggesting that the oldest crusts on both Earth and Moon formed at approximately the same time, and that this time dates from shortly after the giant impact.
One more score for the canine world comes with news of possible lung cancer sniffer dogs.
The dogs sniffed the tubes and sat down in front of those in which they detected lung cancer smells.
They were successful 71% of the time. The researchers showed the dogs were not getting confused by chemicals associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or smoking.
Human sewage has been identified as the source of the pathogen that causes white pox disease of Caribbean elkhorn coral.
Serratia marcescens is also a pathogen of humans, causing respiratory, wound and urinary tract infections, meningitis, and pneumonia. Human diseases caused by this bacterium are most often associated with hospital-acquired infections of newborn infants and immune-compromised adults. This research reveals a new disease pathway, from humans to wildlife, which is the opposite of the traditional wildlife-to-human disease transmission model. The movement of pathogens from wildlife to humans is well documented-for example, bird flu or HIV-but the movement of disease-causing microbes from humans to marine invertebrates has never been shown before. This is the first time that a human disease has been shown to cause population declines of a marine invertebrate.
Wildlife are responding ever faster to the effects of climate change.
Species have moved towards the poles (further north in the northern hemisphere, to locations where conditions are cooler) at three times the rate previously accepted in the scientific literature, and they have moved to cooler, higher altitudes at twice the rate previously realised.
Analysing data for over 2000 responses by animal and plant species, the research team estimated that, on average, species have moved to higher elevations at 12.2 metres per decade and, more dramatically, to higher latitudes at 17.6 kilometres per decade
A new device that cleans wastewater as it produces electricity has been developed by a Chinese team.
In addition to organic material, wastewater often contains other materials that need to be removed in order to reuse the water for other purposes. In their lab the team tested their fuel cell’s ability to separate clear aromatics (perfumes), azo dyes, pharmaceuticals, personal care products and endocrine-disrupting compounds (birth control pill chemicals that wind up in urine) from wastewater samples and found they were able to separate them completely from the organic material thus producing clean water.
To allow the system to use visible and regular sunlight rather than UV, the team modified the electrodes with semiconductors (such as CdS) which means of course the system, if industrialized, could be used outside as an add-on perhaps to existing wastewater treatment plants.
So far the team hasn’t listed cost estimates for building an electrical/wastewater treatment facility with their new technology, but it’s not hard to see how useful such a plant would be in areas where sewage is sometimes not treated at all, but simply dumped into rivers or streams, or worse, in the streets. In addition to helping clean up such places, the people in those areas would benefit from the electricity that would be produced in the process.
Researchers have long associated stress with DNA damage but until now the mechanism was not known.
At first, the theory was that beta-arrestin proteins turned off or desensitized the G-protein pathways, but evidence is accumulating that these proteins are also responsible for causing certain biochemical activities in their own right.
In the current study, the scientists found a molecular mechanism through which adrenaline-like compounds acted through both G-protein and the beta-arrestin pathways to trigger DNA damage.
For secure transmission of data quantum communication could be the answer but until now the link was held for only a fraction of a second.
But in new experiments at the Niels Bohr Institute researchers have succeeded in setting new records and maintaining the entanglement for up to an hour.
Entanglement is a curious phenomenon in quantum mechanics which Albert Einstein called "spukhafte Fernwirkung" (spooky action at a distance). Two separate entangled systems have a ghostlike connection even when they are placed at a large distance without being directly connected to each other. It is said that their states are correlated. This means that if you read out the one system, the other system will 'know' about it. In the experiments at the Niels Bohr Institute, the spins of two gas clouds of caesium atoms are entangled.
Other Worthy Stories of the Week
Growth of cities endangers global environment
NASA releases full map of Antarctic ice flows
America's Cup racers push the sailboat to its limits
Lessons learned from the two worst oil spills in U.S. history
How microbes travel the earth
Watching the ice sheet of the Antarctic flow
Space storm tracked from sun to Earth
Giant space blob glows from within
Greenland glacier melting faster than expected
Survey completed of amphibian killing fungus in Asia
Calcifying microalgae are witnesses of increasing ocean acidifiction
New energy storage device could recharge electric vehicles in minutes
Nitrogen in the soil cleans the air
Common cause of all forms of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) found
Earth's oldest fossils boost hope for life on Mars
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
Earth and its Moon taken in 1977, NASA, Public Domain