Welcome to Science Saturday, where the Overnight News Digest crew, consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors jlms qkw, maggiejean, wader, rfall, and JML9999, alumni editors palantir, Bentliberal, Oke, Interceptor7, and ScottyUrb, guest editor annetteboardman, and current editor-in-chief Neon Vincent, along with anyone else who reads and comments, informs and entertains you with this week's news about science, space, health, energy, and the environment.
This week's featured stories about the science of 4th of July come from Space.com and Discovery News.
How Fireworks Work
They're the biggest- and loudest- part of America's Independence Day celebrations: Fireworks! Anthony shows us how where they came from and what makes 'em go "BOOM!"
Rockets' Red Glare! NASA Marks Fourth of July with Double Launch
by Tariq Malik, Managing Editor
Date: 04 July 2013 Time: 11:00 AM ET
NASA launched two small rockets from Virgina's Eastern Shore today in an early Fourth of July fireworks display aimed to probe the electrical eddies of the Earth's upper atmosphere.
The two small rockets blasted off within 15 seconds of each other from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. The mission: to probe the global electrical current in the winds of Earth's ionosphere with instruments mounted to a Black Brant V booster and a Terrier-Improved Orion sounding rocket.
"We have liftoff of the Black Brant V & Terrier-Improved Orion, for an Independence Day fireworks show," NASA Wallops officials wrote in a Twitter post marking launch success.
The Science Of BBQ
It's one of the hallmarks of summer-- barbecue! Trace, along with Leisure & Summertime Correspondent Will Johnson, talk to to some of the best barbecuers in the country to find out the science behind your grill.
Earth Is Farthest From the Sun for 2013 Today
by Joe Rao, Skywatching Columnist
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 11:27 AM ET
The Earth is as far from the sun as possible for the year today (July 5), but that may come as a surprise for people baking in a heat wave affecting nine western states, with temperatures at or above 100 expected across much of Southern California, southern Nevada and southern Arizona.
Of course, scorching heat has blistered most of the Southwest in recent days where highs of 115 to120 degrees over parts of Arizona, Nevada and California occurred this past weekend; the temperature at California's Death Valley actually approached 130 degrees.
With such punishing heat as this, it may be shocking to hear that today at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), the Earth reached the point in its orbit where it is farthest from the sun in space. During aphelion, as it is called, the Earth will be 94,508,959 miles (152,097,426 kilometers) from the sun, or 3,106,399 miles (4,999,264 km) farther as compared to when the Earth was closest point to the sun (called perihelion) last New Year's Day. The difference in distance is 3.287 percent, which makes a difference in radiant heat received by Earth of nearly 7 percent.
Bon appetit and eat the heat!
More stories after the jump.
Recent Science Diaries and Stories
Green diary rescue: Kochs try to squelch solar power, litmus test on climate change for candidates?
by Meteor Blades
Eternal Life (Maggots Included)
by zen sparky
The Daily Bucket: Unbearable cuteness of being a baby ground squirrel
by matching mole
This week in science: It's time for change
by DarkSyde
The Mammals
by Yosef 52
Slideshows/Videos
CNN: See inside the cockpit of the Solar Impulse
Hear from the pilot of the Solar Impulse about his habits on board the first manned plane to fly 24 hours on sun power.
Discovery News: Cursive is Dead!
Just a few short years ago, cursive was something all kids were taught in schools. Not anymore! In many parts of the country, cursive is becoming a dead relic of the past. But Laci shows us why educators might be smart to keep teaching kids those loopy letters.
Discovery News: Why We Spend Money On Stuff We Don't Need
There's a reason you just HAD to buy that new tech gadget you didn't really need. Anthony shows us the science behind the things we love.
NASA Television on YouTube: July Spacewalks Previewed on This Week @NASA
Expedition 36 Flight Engineers Chris Cassidy of NASA and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency will venture outside the International Space Station twice in July on spacewalks to prepare for a new Russian module and perform additional installations on the station's backbone. The EVA's, scheduled for July 9 and July 16, were previewed for the media during a briefing at the Johnson Space Center. NASA TV coverage of the spacewalks will begin at 7 a.m. on both days. Also, Cosmic Fireworks, Planetary Probe Workshop, Student Spaceflight Experiments, Supersonic Airfoil, Pluto's New Moons Named and more!
NASA Television on YouTube: IRIS Mission Underway on This Week @NASA
NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph or IRIS mission is underway. IRIS was air-launched on an Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus rocket 39,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean near Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The NASA Small Explorer Mission will observe how solar material moves, gathers energy and heats up as it travels through a little-understood region in the sun's lower atmosphere. Also, Atlantis Unveiled, 10,00th Near Earth Object, SLS Vertical Weld Center, Human Spaceflight Update, Spacewalk Prepares ISS for New Module, Accelerating ISS Science, A HUNCH for STEM, Rocket Week 2013 and more!
JPL News: What's Up for July 2013
Earth will shine from beyond the rings of Saturn while Cassini takes a mosaic of the planet and its rings on July 19. That's when you can wave at Saturn and be part of the one-pixel portrait.
Astronomy/Space
Nature (UK): Mystery extra-galactic radio bursts could solve cosmic puzzle
Ultrashort radio bursts from outside the Milky Way may help locate missing baryons.
Ron Cowen
04 July 2013
Astronomers have for the first time detected a population of ultrashort radio bursts with properties that strongly suggest that they originate from outside the Milky Way Galaxy. Lasting for a few thousandths of a second and estimated to erupt roughly every 10 seconds, the mysterious bursts are likely to be caused by a previously unknown class of radio-emitting phenomenon, researchers report in Science.
“This is one of the most important radio discoveries in the last couple of decades,” says Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, who was not part of the study.
Although radio signals that vary over days to months have been recorded from distant galaxies for decades, ultrashort signals from beyond the Milky Way had never been definitively detected, notes study co-author Dan Thornton, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, UK. He and his colleagues embarked on a search for extragalactic radio bursts after a report in 2007 suggested that one such signal had been tentatively found.
Space.com: 2 Pluto Moons Get New Names (Sorry 'Star Trek' Fans)
by Miriam Kramer, Staff Writer
Date: 02 July 2013 Time: 12:00 PM ET
It's official! Two tiny moons orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto finally have new names: Styx and Kerberos.
The International Astronomical Union — the organization responsible for naming celestial objects — has approved "Kerberos" and "Styx" as the new monikers for two of Pluto's moons that were previously called P4 and P5 respectively, but fans of TV's "Star Trek" might not be too happy about the new names.
The IAU selected the names based on the results of the Pluto Rocks Internet poll sponsored by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), but the top vote-getter, Vulcan, ultimately wasn't chosen as a name for one of the tiny moons.
Space.com: Mars Rover Opportunity Hits Driving Milestone on 10th Birthday
by Clara Moskowitz, SPACE.com Assistant Managing Editor
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 03:10 PM ET
On the 10th anniversary of its launch, NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars is also celebrating reaching the halfway point in its drive from one crater-rim segment to another.
The Opportunity rover, which is still going strong on the Red Planet long after its official mission was slated to end, is journeying 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) from the spot it studied for the past 22 months, on the edge of Mars' Endeavour crater, to another area where it will begin a new phase in its research.
Sunday (July 7) marks the 10th anniversary of Opportunity's launch from Earth with its sister rover Spirit, which shut down on Mars in 2010. The rovers lifted off in 2003, and arrived at the Red Planet in January 2004. They were originally expected to operate for three months.
Space.com: Mercury's Volcanic Facelift Belies Planet's True Age
by Miriam Kramer, Staff Writer
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 01:01 PM ET
Mercury is looking good for its age.
Even the oldest parts of the surface of the planet closest to the sun are only 4 billion to 4.1 billion years old, not 4.5 billion years old — the age at which the planet formed, a new study finds.
"If the oldest surface visible on Mercury is 4 billion or 4.1 billion years old, then that would imply that the first perhaps 500 million or 400 million years of the planet have been erased," said Simone Marchi, a NASA Lunar Science Institute planetary scientist based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. and lead author of the study. "They are gone. There is no record of the oldest surface of Mercury, and we expect that Mercury pretty much formed like the Earth or the moon around 4.5 billion years ago."
Space.com: NASA to Attempt Fix for Planet-Hunting Kepler Spacecraft This Month
by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 01:27 PM ET
NASA will try to revive its ailing Kepler spacecraft this month in the hope of resurrecting a mission that has revolutionized the search for alien planets.
Launched in March 2009, NASA's Kepler space telescope has detected more than 3,000 potential alien planets. But that exoplanet hunt stalled in mid-May of this year, when the second of Kepler's four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed, hobbling the spacecraft.
Since then, the Kepler team has been working on possible fixes for the reaction wheels and plans to try them out out in the coming weeks, officials said.
Space.com: India Launches Its First Navigation Satellite
K.S. Jayaraman, Space News Staff Writer
Date: 02 July 2013 Time: 05:05 PM ET
BANGALORE, India — The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched July 1 the first of seven satellites that will constitute an independent, regional satellite navigation system.
"With this we are entering into a new era of space applications after remote sensing and communications," ISRO Chairman Koppili Radhakrishnan said in a post-launch statement. The constellation known as the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) is slated to become operational by 2015.
The televised launch of the IRNSS-1A satellite on board India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket took place at 11:41 p.m. local time from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in southeastern India. Originally scheduled for June 12, the launch was postponed due to a problem with the electro-hydraulic actuator in the rocket’s second stage.
Space.com: Russia Halts Proton Rocket Launches After Explosive Crash
by Mike Wall, Senior Writer
Date: 02 July 2013 Time: 03:37 PM ET
Russia has temporarily suspended upcoming launches of its Proton-M rocket in the wake of Monday's high-profile mishap, according to media reports.
An unmanned Proton-M crashed shortly after blasting off on Monday (July 1), destroying three navigation satellites worth a total of nearly $200 million. The incident marked the fifth major Proton launch failure since December 2010.
The Proton has been grounded while a Russian governmental commission investigates the causes of the crash and attempts to determine which officials bear responsibility for it, the Russian news agency Ria Novosti reported today (July 2).
Climate/Environment
LiveScience: Burning Question: How Will Climate Change Impact Western Wildfires?
by Becky Oskin, OurAmazingPlanet Staff Writer
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 03:52 PM ET
Climate change will dramatically alter wildfire patterns in the western United States before the century ends, studies show.
Experts are reluctant to paint a broad picture of future fire risk because fires vary so drastically among regions — a forest fire in high-elevation Colorado, for example, is vastly different than coastal, chaparral-fed flames in California. But many fire scientists agree the doomsday scenario of massive fires that wreak death and destruction can be quashed through smarter development.
"Fire is usually coupled in with climate change like there's an equal sign between them, but it's much more complicated and interesting than that," said Max Moritz, who directs a fire research and outreach lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "There's a lot we can learn about the science of fire and climate, but how and where we build on the landscape is a huge, huge part of why we have a problem in this country to begin with."
Nature (UK): China gears up to tackle tainted water
Government is set to spend 500 million renminbi to clean up groundwater polluted by industry and agriculture.
Jiao Li
03 July 2013
When rumours swirled earlier this year that factories in Weifang, China, were discharging waste water into the region’s aquifers — the principal source of drinking water for the city’s 9 million residents — citizens flocked to the Web to register their outrage on microblogging site Sina Weibo. The rumours were finally confirmed by officials in late May, further stoking public fears over an already hot issue: the sorry state of the water that so many Chinese people drink.
Now, a massive government investigation has documented the scope of the problem in northern China, and officials have formulated an ambitious plan to tackle it.
About 18% of the water that China uses comes from groundwater, and more than 400 of the country’s roughly 655 cities have no other source of drinking water. Much of the groundwater is contaminated, tainted by fertilizers, pesticide residues and dirty waste water used for irrigation in China’s vast rural regions, as well as pollutants from mining, the petrochemical industry, and domestic and industrial waste. Heavy metals are especially problematic, because “once in the groundwater, they don’t go away”, says Sun Ge, a research hydrologist at the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service Southern Research Station in Raleigh, North Carolina. “It will be very expensive to clean up, if it is even possible.”
Nature (UK): Crowdsourcing may open up ocean science
DIY ocean instrument could create 'citizen scientists' of the seas.
Daniel Cressey
05 July 2013
An open-source approach to collecting oceanographic information could democratize marine science, a team of US researchers believes. If successful, it could bring down the cost of obtaining three crucial pieces of data needed by marine scientists.
Just about the first action involved in any experiment at sea is the casting overboard of a conductivity, temperature and depth instrument, known as a CTD.
...
The team thinks that it can produce open-source blueprints for a CTD that will allow anyone with a modicum of technical nous to build their own device for a fraction of the cost of a ready-made version.
Biodiversity
Nature (UK): Hawkmoths zap bats with sonic blasts from their genitals
The tropical moths produce ultrasound in response to bat sonar, which may serve as a warning or jam bat echolocation.
Traci Watson
03 July 2013
Talk about a multi-purpose tool. Several species of tropical moth can rasp their genitals against their abdomens to beam loud ultrasound signals at approaching bats, possibly throwing the hunters off course.
Bats and moths have been engaged in a natural arms race for nearly 65 million years, each evolving strategies to outwit the other. Scientists have long known that members of the tiger moth family blast bats with ultrasound signals resembling the echolocation calls bats make as they search for, or close in on, prey. But tiger moths were assumed to be the only moth group able to imitate the bats’ signals.
LiveScience: Buzzworthy Find: 'Mythical' Corpse-Eating Flies
By Douglas Main, Staff Writer
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 05:08 PM ET
Behold the bone-skipper, high in the running for the strangest fly on Earth. For the bone-skipper, fresh carcasses just won't do. No, these flies prefer large, dead bodies in advanced stages of decay. And unlike most flies, they are active in early winter, from November to January, usually after dark.
They also disappeared from human notice and were declared extinct for more than a century. That's why they've often been considered almost mythical or legendary, said Pierfilippo Cerretti, a researcher at the Sapienza University of Rome.
In the past few years, three species of bone-skipper have been rediscovered in Europe, setting off a buzz among fly aficionados. But many bone-skippers were found by amateur scientists and recorded in photographs or video; actual specimens of the flies are few and far between. For the first time, Cerretti and colleagues have established a "type specimen" or "neotype" for one bone-skipper species, to which all of these bone-skippers will be compared in the future, in order to be identified.
LiveScience: How Guillemot Eggs Clean Themselves
By Megan Gannon, News Editor
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 10:37 AM ET
Unlike birds that incubate their young in carefully built nests, sea-loving guillemots lay their eggs in rather precarious places — on rock ledges and exposed cliffs in crowded breeding colonies throughout the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans.
The bottom-heavy shape of guillemot eggs prevents them from tumbling off cliffs: When the eggs get knocked over, they spin in a tight circle. New research shows that guillemots also have tiny structures on their eggshells that keep the eggs from falling and help them stay clean.
LiveScience: Military Sonar May Hurt Blue Whales
Megan Gannon, News Editor
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 06:09 PM ET
The oceans are increasingly cluttered with human-made noise, which can disturb even the largest animals on Earth, blue whales, new research shows.
Whales depend on vocalizations to communicate with other individuals in their species over long distances. But sonar blips that the U.S. military uses in underwater navigation, object-detection and communication are feared to mask whale calls, deter the marine mammals from their habitats and damage the animals' hearing, researchers say.
Mid-frequency sonar signals (between 1 kHz and 10 kHz) have been blamed for mass strandings of deep-diving beaked whales before. There are fewer cases of sonar-linked strandings of baleen whales, those that have plates for filtering food rather than teeth, like blue whales.
Biotechnology/Health
Nature (UK): Stem-cell transplants may purge HIV
But treatment is too risky for most people infected by the virus.
Erika Check Hayden
03 July 2013
Two men with HIV may have been cured after they received stem-cell transplants to treat the blood cancer lymphoma, their doctors announced today at the International AIDS Society Conference in Kuala Lumpur.
One of the men received stem-cell transplants to replace his blood-cell-producing bone marrow about three years ago, and the other five years ago. Their regimens were similar to one used on Timothy Ray Brown, the 'Berlin patient' who has been living HIV-free for six years and is the only adult to have been declared cured of HIV. Last July, doctors announced that the two men — the ‘Boston patients’ — appeared to be living without detectable levels of HIV in their blood, but they were still taking antiretroviral medications at that time.
Timothy Henrich, an HIV specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, who helped to treat the men, says that they have now stopped their antiretroviral treatments with no ill effects. One has been off medication for 15 weeks and the other for seven. Neither has any trace of HIV DNA or RNA in his blood, Henrich says.
Nature (UK): Miniature human liver grown in mice
Cells self-organize and grow into functional organs after transplantation.
Monya Baker
03 July 2013
Transplanting tiny 'liver buds' constructed from human stem cells restores liver function in mice, researchers have found. Although preliminary, the results offer a potential path towards developing treatments for the thousands of patients awaiting liver transplants every year.
The liver buds, approximately 4 mm across, staved off death in mice with liver failure, the researchers report this week in Nature. The transplanted structures also took on a range of liver functions — secreting liver-specific proteins and producing human-specific metabolites. But perhaps most notably, these buds quickly hooked up with nearby blood vessels and continued to grow after transplantation.
The results are preliminary but promising, says Valerie Gouon-Evans, who studies liver development and regeneration at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “This is a very novel thing,” she says. Because the liver buds are supported by the host’s blood system, transplanted cells can continue to proliferate and perform liver functions.
Psychology/Behavior
TechNewsDaily via LiveScience: Can Facebook Predict Suicide Risks?
Marshall Honorof, TechNewsDaily Staff Writer
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 06:28 PM ET
If you've been thinking about killing yourself, your social media might give you away. An initiative called the Durkheim Project will use artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to identify common words and phrases among those who might be contemplating suicide.
The program, which launched on July 2, currently targets only veterans, who have disproportionately high suicide rates. Veterans opt into the Durkheim Project, which installs an app on computers, iOS and Android devices. These apps keep track of what users post and upload it to a medical database. A medical AI monitors the data in real-time, picking out patterns that might lead to self-harm.
The Durkheim Project app monitors content from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, in addition to storing information from a user's mobile device. A database at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth University will keep track of users' locations and text messages, and will not share any information with third parties. Additionally, the system will be guarded by a firewall to ward off would-be hackers.
LiveScience: High Achievers More Prone to Jealousy on Facebook
By Rachael Rettner, Senior Writer
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 01:54 PM ET
People who are high-achieving in academics may be more prone to feelings of romantic jealousy than those who are less studious, new research suggests.
In several studies of undergraduate students, researchers found that the higher a student's grade point average (GPA), the greater their levels of "Facebook jealousy" were.
There's no one definition of Facebook jealousy, but it's sometimes referred to as a phenomenon in which misunderstandings on the social network lead to jealousy among people in romantic relationships.
BusinessNewsDaily via LiveScience: The Kinds of Facebook Posts That Unfairly Cost Workers Jobs
Chad Brooks, BusinessNewsDaily Contributor
Date: 04 July 2013 Time: 05:33 AM ET
If you are using Facebook to screen job candidates, there is a good chance you're not looking for the right things, new research shows.
A study from North Carolina State University found that companies that are using the popular social network to weed out candidates they think have undesirable traits may have a fundamental misunderstanding of online behavior and, as a result, may be eliminating desirable applicants.
Researchers tested 175 study participants to measure the personality traits companies look for in job candidates, including conscientiousness, agreeableness and extroversion. The participants were then surveyed on their Facebook behavior, allowing researchers to see which Facebook behaviors were linked to specific personality traits.
LiveScience: Exercising Your Brain into Old Age May Keep Memory Sharp
Anna Azvolinsky, Contributing Writer
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 04:00 PM ET
Keeping your brain busy from childhood into old age may help keep dementia and memory loss at bay, even for people who already have early signs of dementia, a new study says.
Mental exercises during both the grade-school years and late adulthood independently contributed to a slower mental decline in old age, according to the study.
About one-third of cognitive decline in older adults could be explained by physical abnormalities in the brain, such as damage from stroke, or plaques of amyloid beta proteins linked to Alzheimer's disease, the study showed. But the amount of cognitive activity throughout a person's lifetime could explain an additional 10 percent of their cognitive decline, the researchers said.
Archeology/Anthropology
LiveScience: Evidence of Ancient Farming in Iran Discovered
By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 09:02 AM ET
Agriculture may have arisen simultaneously in many places throughout the Fertile Crescent, new research suggests.
Ancient mortars and grinding tools unearthed in a large mound in the Zagros Mountains of Iran reveal that people were grinding wheat and barley about 11,000 years ago.
The findings, detailed Thursday (July 4) in the journal Science, are part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that agriculture arose at multiple places throughout the Fertile Crescent, the region of the Middle East believed to be the cradle of civilization.
LiveScience: Ancient Native Americans' Living Descendants Revealed
By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 05:00 PM ET
Ancient people who lived in in Northern America about 5,000 years ago have living descendants today, new research suggests.
Researchers reached that conclusion after comparing DNA from both fossil remains found on the northern coast of British Columbia, Canada, and from living people who belong to several First Nations tribes in the area.
The new results, published today (July 3) in the journal PLOS ONE, are consistent with nearby archaeological evidence suggesting a fairly continuous occupation of the region for the last 5,000 years.
LiveScience: Mysterious Toe Rings Found on Ancient Egyptian Skeletons
Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 12:26 PM ET
Archaeologists have discovered two ancient Egyptian skeletons, dating back more than 3,300 years, which were each buried with a toe ring made of copper alloy, the first time such rings have been found in ancient Egypt.
The toe rings were likely worn while the individuals were still alive, and the discovery leaves open the question of whether they were worn for fashion or magical reasons.
Supporting the magical interpretation, one of the rings was found on the right toe of a male, age 35-40, whose foot had suffered a fracture along with a broken femur above it.
LiveScience: Ancient Carving of Roman God Found in Garbage Pit
Laura Poppick, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 10:21 PM ET
An 1,800-year-old stone carving of what may be the head of a Roman god was recently found in an ancient garbage dump, British archaeologists announced today (July 3).
An undergraduate student at Durham University discovered the largely intact head during an archaeological dig at the Binchester Roman Fort, a major Roman Empire fort built around A.D. 100 in northeastern England's County Durham.
Archaeologists involved in the dig believe that somebody probably tossed the 8-inch-long (20 centimeters) statue in the garbage when the building was abandoned in the fourth century, during the fall of the Roman Empire.
Evolution/Paleontology
LiveScience: Chimp Genetic History Stranger Than Humans'
By Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 01:00 PM ET
The most comprehensive catalog of great-ape genome diversity to date offers insight into primate evolution, revealing chimpanzees have a much more complex genetic history than humans.
In a new study, researchers sequenced a total of 79 great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, eastern and western gorillas, orangutans and humans, as well as seven ape subspecies. The animals were wild- and captive-born individuals from populations in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Much attention has been focused on studying the diversity among human genomes, said study researcher Tomas Marques-Bonet, a geneticist at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva in Spain. "If we want to understand the genetic diversity of humans, we need to measure the genetic diversity of our nearest relatives," Marques-Bonet said.
Geology
LiveScience: Gathering Gondwana: New Look at an Ancient Puzzle
By Becky Oskin, Staff Writer
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 03:00 PM ET
Scientists are a step closer to solving part of a 165-million-year-old giant jigsaw puzzle: the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.
Finding the past position of Earth's continents is a finicky task. But pinning down their wanderings plays a key role in everything from understanding ancient climate to how Earth's mountains and oceans evolved. Through "plate reconstruction" models, geoscientists illustrate how Earth's continents crunch together and split apart.
Before it cracked into several landmasses, Gondwana included what are today Africa, South America, Australia, India and Antarctica. The big continents — Africa and South America — split off about 180 million to 170 million years ago. In recent years, researchers have debated what happened next, as the remaining continents rocketed apart. For example, different Gondwana reconstruction models had a 250-mile (400 kilometers) disagreement in the fit between Australia and Antarctica, an error that has a cascading effect in plate reconstructions, said Lloyd White, a geologist at Royal Holloway University in Surrey, England.
LiveScience: New Look at What Lies Beneath Hawaii
By Becky Oskin, Staff Writer
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 07:00 AM ET
The hotspot feeding Hawaii's volcanoes may look like one of two lava lamp bubbles — an oval blob or a long, stretched-out plume.
With direct access to the mantle still the stuff of science fiction, scientists have argued for decades about the shape and size of Hawaii's hotspot. Is it shallow, or does it rise from deep in the Earth? Now, a new look under the islands seems to refute the shallow mantle model.
To come up with the new picture, researchers used seismic waves from earthquakes to detect temperature differences within the mantle, similar to a CT scan. The waves travel faster through cold rock and slower through hot rock. The mantle is the thick layer of hot rock between Earth's crust and core.
Energy
Nature (UK): Management row threatens to blow Sahara solar dream
Posted by Quirin Schiermeier
03 Jul 2013 | 13:42 BST
Plans to supply Europe with electricity generated in North Africa suffered another blow this week when the DESERTEC Foundation, set up in 2009 to promote the idea, pulled out of the industrial consortium which is trying to advance the €400 billion project.
The split, agreed upon during an extraordinary DESERTEC board meeting on June 27, is the climax of growing tensions between the founders of the project and the Dii consortium – including Deutsche Bank and German energy utilities Eon and RWE – over management and strategy issues. Solar power capacities are expanding throughout North Africa and the Middle East – but Dii has recently scaled back ambitions, hinting to political and technical problems with transmitting massive amounts of electricity from North Africa to Europe.
The DESERTEC foundation – sole owner of the project’s brand name – has been increasingly unhappy with how internal discussions over the future of the project leaked to the press.
Physics
Science News: Particles defy gravity, float upstream
Inspired by tea leaves’ reverse route, physicists demonstrate that water’s surface tension allows unexpected movement
By Andrew Grant
Web edition: July 2, 2013
Rogue tea leaves have led physicists to the discovery of a counterintuitive phenomenon: Particles can float upstream in moving water.
“It’s interesting and very cool,” says Eva Kanso, a physicist at the University of Southern California. “I’m going to have my students do an experiment like this.”
Any kayaker, plumber or physicist would probably say that things always flow downstream. But that conventional wisdom started to unravel for Sebastian Bianchini one night in 2008 when he prepared some mate tea, a South American specialty, by pouring hot water over a cup of tea leaves. Bianchini, then an undergraduate at the University of Havana in Cuba, noticed that by the time he filled his cup, a handful of tea leaves had invaded the pristine water in the kettle.
Chemistry
Space.com: Weird Quantum Tunneling Enables 'Impossible' Space Chemistry
by Clara Moskowitz, SPACE.com Assistant Managing Editor
Date: 05 July 2013 Time: 07:00 AM ET
A weird quirk of quantum mechanics is allowing a chemical reaction thought to be impossible to occur in cold gas in outer space.
In the harsh environment of space, where the temperature is about minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 210 degrees Celsius), scientists had thought a certain reaction involving alcohol molecules couldn't take place, because at such low temperatures, there shouldn't be enough energy to rearrange chemical bonds. But surprisingly, research has shown that the reaction occurs at a rate 50 times greater in space than at room temperature.
Now, by simulating the conditions of space in a laboratory, scientists have found a possible explanation for how the reaction occurs: quantum tunneling.
Science Crime Scenes
LiveScience: Fluorescent Polymer Detects Crime Scene Fingerprints
Jillian Scharr
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 02:36 PM ET
The latest in high-tech crime-scene investigation is a "fluorescent tag" that can help identify fingerprints on bullets, knives and other metal surfaces by creating images that are accurate to the nanoscale.
A significant portion of crime scene investigation involves searching for what are called "latent fingerprints," or deposits of secreted sweat and natural oils transmitted by touch onto a flat surface, and usually invisible to the naked eye.
The ridges on human fingertips, also called epidermal ridges or friction ridges, make the lines, whorls and swirls in these latent fingerprints. These patterns are virtually unique to each individual person (the chances of two people having the same prints are 64 billion to one), which makes fingerprints an excellent way to identify who was present at a crime scene.
Nature (UK): German cardiologist’s stem cell papers attacked
Posted by Alison Abbott
04 Jul 2013 | 16:47 BST
The copious publications of high-profile German cardiologist Bodo-Eckehard Strauer – who has long claimed that stem cells derived from bone marrow cells can repair damage in diseased hearts – have come under new attack.
Strauer, who retired from the University of Düsseldorf in 2009, has been a controversial figure in Germany since he first claimed clinical success with the approach in 2001. Many stem-cell scientists have been openly sceptical of his claims, which have been reported enthusiastically in the media.
An article published this week in the International Journal of Cardiology dissects 48 of the papers from his group and exposes a series of problems, including arithmetic errors in the presentation of statistics and identical results in papers presenting different numbers of patients. The authors also searched systematically in all of the papers for discrepant information – pairs of statements that could not both be true.
Science, Space, Environment, and Energy Policy
Nature (UK): US Senate backs immigration plan
Proposal would lift visa caps for US-trained scientists and engineers.
Helen Shen
03 July 2013
For Gaurav Basu, a graduate scholarship in 2003 helped to fulfil a long-held ambition of pursuing scientific research in the United States. In 2009, Basu, a native of India, earned his PhD in biomedical sciences from Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk.
But Basu is struggling to keep his American dream alive after finishing a postdoctoral fellowship at Old Dominion University in Norfolk in 2011. With his temporary work visa set to expire in 2015, he is now working as a consultant in northern Virginia — and fighting tough odds to stay in the United States permanently by applying for a coveted but scarce ‘green card’.
Those green cards could soon flow more freely to scientists such as Basu. After years of debate and many failed attempts, on 27 June the US Senate approved a comprehensive immigration plan that would allow thousands more foreign scientists and engineers to remain in the United States permanently.“It’s a phenomenal improvement over the current situation,” says Russell Harrison, a senior legislative representative for IEEE-USA in Washington DC, which advocates for US members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Nature (UK): Bioengineers look beyond patents
Synthetic-biology company pushes open-source models.
Heidi Ledford
03 July 2013
When DNA2.0, a company that synthesizes made-to-order genes, needed to conduct a few routine experiments using a fluorescent protein, its lawyers dug up more than 1,000 US patents covering their use. DNA2.0 decided to avoid the legal thicket by engineering several dozen fluorescent proteins from scratch. But the company, based in Menlo Park, California, was convinced that something had to change.
Last month, DNA2.0 deposited gene sequences encoding three of its fluorescent proteins into an open-access collection of recipes for DNA ‘parts’, molecular building blocks used to engineer organisms — often bacteria — to carry out specific functions. The company vows not to pursue its patent rights against anyone using the sequences.
Such moves are unusual among larger biotechnology companies, which tend to guard patents fiercely, but for DNA2.0 the choice was strategic, says Claes Gustafsson, the firm’s chief commercial officer. Synthetic biologists aim to bring engineering principles to bear on genetic manipulation, and the field’s success hinges on the creation of standardized parts that can be combined in predictable ways. The company wants to create incentives for other synthetic-biology firms to design custom organisms for which DNA2.0 can synthesize the parts. “We have a lot of customers in small biotech companies,” Gustafsson says, “and the intellectual-property situation for them is just a nightmare.”
Nature (UK): Europe’s politicians vote to resuscitate carbon market
Posted by Richard Van Noorden
03 Jul 2013 | 16:00 BST
The world’s largest carbon-trading market may awaken from its coma: politicians in Europe’s parliament today agreed a plan to revive market prices which have collapsed in the recession.
It’s a change-of-heart from a parliament which had rejected the same idea in April. But although it would lift the market out of total irrelevancy, the plan still won’t raise carbon prices high enough to spur investment in low-carbon energy, which was one of the European trading scheme’s key goals when it was launched in 2005. So some politicians say much deeper reforms are needed. What’s more, the plan still needs to be approved by the ministers of Europe’s member states – a decision that won’t be taken until after Germany’s elections in September.
In Europe’s carbon-trading scheme, polluters from 27 member states buy and sell permits to emit carbon dioxide under an overall emissions cap. The idea is that if permits get too expensive — say, upwards of €30 (US$40) per tonne — industry will find it worthwhile to generate energy without emitting carbon dioxide. But the financial recession led to a slump in industrial activity, and the region’s emissions are now far below the cap set by politicians.
Nature (UK): EU debates U-turn on biofuels policy
Key vote could signal withdrawal of support from biodiesel.
Richard Van Noorden
01 July 2013
The European Union (EU) has spent the past 10 years nurturing a €15-billion (US$20-billion) industry that makes transport fuel from food crops such as soya beans and sugar cane in the hope of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet for more than half a decade, scientists have warned that many food-based fuels might actually be boosting emissions relative to fossil fuels.
Now the EU could change course by setting a cap on the use of food-based biofuel, but pressure from industry, farming and energy lobbies threatens to limit the reversal. Tensions are rising over how much of the emerging science on biofuel emissions will be included in EU policy ahead of a vote on 10 July by the key European Parliament committee dealing with the legislation.
Europe began mandating the development and use of biofuels in 2003. The two latest laws on the subject, passed in 2009, require a 6% drop in the carbon footprint of transport fuel by 2020, by which time renewable energy must fuel 10% of the transport sector. Biofuel counts towards that requirement if it produces a 35% emissions saving over fossil fuels, or 50% from 2017 onwards; so far, most of that fuel has come from food crops, helping to generate a thriving biofuels industry based mainly on biodiesel. Europe is even importing rapeseed and vegetable oil to meet demand.
But the original accounting for biofuel emissions was all wrong, as Tim Searchinger, who studies environmental economics at Princeton University in New Jersey, noted in an influential 2008 article (T. Searchinger et al. Science 319, 1238–1240; 2008).
Nature (UK): Anger as Spanish funder claws back science money
Research institutes' unused cash reserves wiped amid budget crisis.
Nuño Domínguez
05 July 2013
Researchers at institutes funded by Spain's National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) are outraged over a move to take back unspent money from their budgets. The council's decision is the latest development in Spain's burgeoning science crisis.
Any institute that has been frugal with its funding and has saved money will now find some of those savings absorbed back into the CSIC's centralized pot. The CSIC, based in Madrid, is Spain’s largest scientific organization, with 15,000 employees, some 6,000 of whom are scientists. Its centralized finance model handles national and European Union research money for more than 100 institutes.
But the CSIC is in the middle of its largest budget crisis in years. Since 2010, the funding body has had to deal with large budget cuts imposed by the government, with a total reduction of €500 million (US$642 million), according to CSIC president Emilio Lora-Tamayo. Last week, the government injected €25 million into the council. However, the CSIC needs €100 million to make it to the end of the year.
Nature (UK): Russian Academy gets temporary reprieve
Posted by Quirin Schiermeier
01 Jul 2013 | 17:28 BST
The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), threatened with liquidation, has been granted a temporary reprieve. The Duma — the Russian Parliament — agreed today to postpone until October its final vote on a bill that some feel will mark the end of the academy, founded in 1724 by Peter the Great.
The Russian government, at a meeting last week, launched a bill proposing fundamental changes to the academy. According to the bill, dated 28 June, the academy is to merge with two minor societies — the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences and the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The responsibility for the more than 400 research institutes now under the academy’s auspices would be transferred to a new government-run agency.
“It was a shocking surprise, says Vladimir Fortov, a physicist who in May was elected as the new president of the RAS. “I’ve learned of the existence of that bill only on the eve of the government meeting on Thursday.”
Science Education
Nature (UK): Evolution makes the grade
Kansas, Kentucky and other states will also teach climate-change science.
Lauren Morello
03 July 2013
Five US states have adopted science education standards that recommend introducing two highly charged topics — climate-change science and evolution — into classrooms well before high school.
Released in April, the Next Generation Science Standards are the first effort in 15 years to overhaul US science education nationwide. Twenty-six states, working with non-profit science and education groups, developed the guidelines on the basis of recommendations from the US National Research Council. And the measures are being adopted, even in states where climate change and evolution tend to be avoided in the classroom.
In the past two months, education officials in Rhode Island, Kentucky, Kansas, Maryland and Vermont have all approved the standards by overwhelming margins. At least five more states — California, Florida, Maine, Michigan and Washington — may take up the standards in the next few months.
Science Writing and Reporting
Space.com: Astronaut Chris Hadfield to Write 'Guide to Life on Earth'
by Robert Z. Pearlman, collectSPACE.com Editor
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 10:12 PM ET
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who in May returned from the International Space Station as a veteran commander and social media star, has landed a two-book deal to share his space experiences.
In "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth," to be published this fall worldwide by Little, Brown and Company and by Random House Canada in his home country, Hadfield will take his readers "deep into his years of training and space exploration to show how to make the impossible possible."
Hadfield's "entertaining stories filled with the adrenaline of launch, the mesmerizing wonder of spacewalks, and the measured, calm responses mandated by crises" are used to explain "how conventional wisdom can get in the way of real achievement — and happiness," his publishers said in a description of the book.
Nature (UK): NIH sees surge in open-access manuscripts
Posted by Richard Van Noorden
02 Jul 2013 | 17:37 BST
Last November, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said that "as of spring 2013" it would start cracking down on enforcing its public-access policy - and it seems the agency is now seeing positive results.
In May, authors approved more than 10,000 peer-reviewed manuscripts arising from NIH-funded research to go into the agency's online free repository, PubMed Central. That's a huge jump from the average 5,100 per month in 2011-12, and suggests the agency is nearing its goal of getting everyone it funds to make their papers publicly available....
"Things have stepped up considerably," says David Lipman, director of the NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland, but he did not give an overall figure for compliance with the NIH's policy.
Science is Cool
Space.com: Canada's Star Astronaut Chris Hadfield Goes Out With a Big Bang
by Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com Contributor
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 01:18 PM ET
OTTAWA — Pausing before thousands of fans in a downtown park, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield gave serious thought to a silly submitted question: What are the benefits and drawbacks of having a mustache?
Those attending the Canada Day festivities on Monday (July 1) — some wearing fake Hadfield-inspired mustaches themselves — laughed as Chris Hadfield explained one advantage of facial hair: A mustache is great for hanging on to extra soup, and also for impressing his wife, Helene, Hadfield said. Then, Hadfield described mustache negatives to the crowd, which was celebrating Canada's national holiday in the capital city of Ottawa.
"Your kids will mock you for the rest of your life," said Hadfield, who soared to international acclaim during his command of the International Space Station's Expedition 35 mission this spring. Then, he elucidated a Canadian cold-weather problem: "When your nose starts running, it's a very bad time to have a mustache."
Space.com: 'Star Trek' on Pluto? It Could Really Happen, Scientists Say
by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer
Date: 03 July 2013 Time: 07:00 AM ET
While the naming gods have swatted away an attempt to christen one of Pluto's newfound moons "Vulcan," the "Star Trek" universe may still leave its mark on the dwarf planet soon enough.
After NASA's New Horizons spacecraft gets the first up-close views of Pluto in 2015, craters, mountains and other features spotted on the dwarf planet's surface could bear the names of famous "Star Trek" characters, researchers said.
"We might have craters called Sulu and Spock and Kirk and McCoy and so on," Mark Showalter of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif., said during a Google+ Hangout today (July 2).
annetteboardman is enjoying her summer vacation.
