More Genetic Differences Between Mice And Humans Than Previously Thought

A new article explores exactly what distinguishes our genome from that of the lab mouse. In the first comprehensive comparison between the genes of mice and humans, scientists reveal that there are more genetic differences between the two species than had been previously thought.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

European Shipping Routes Linked To Locations With High Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution

A synoptic view of European shipping routes can be seen for the first time thanks to a new map created using seven years of radar data from ESA's Envisat satellite. Despite the fact that ships are more energy efficient than other forms of commercial transportation, many marine engines operate on extremely dirty fuel that causes large emissions of air pollutants like sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Lessons From The Vaccine-autism Wars

Researchers have investigated why the debunked vaccine-autism theory won't go away. Medical anthropologists, science historians, vaccine experts, social scientists, and pediatricians explore the factors keeping the dangerous notion alive -- and its proponents so vitriolic.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

In-depth Look At Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine Life, Ecosystems

A new report on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands provides the sharpest picture yet of the region's marine life and ecosystems. The report examines the geographic distribution of the island chain's marine life and habitats, and the conditions that determine where they are found.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Green Tea Extract Shows Promise In Leukemia Trials

Researchers are reporting positive results in early leukemia clinical trials using the chemical epigallocatechin gallate, an active ingredient in green tea.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Identification Of Genetic Variants Affecting Age At Menopause Could Help Improve Fertility Treatment

For the first time, scientists have been able to identify genetic factors that influence the age at which natural menopause occurs in women. A greater understanding of the factors influencing age at menopause might eventually help to improve the clinical treatment of infertile women.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Giant Dinosaur Posture Is All Wrong: Sauropods Held Their Heads High, Research Finds

Famous depictions of the largest of all known dinosaurs, from film and television to museum skeletons, have almost certainly got it wrong, according to new research. Now scientists are saying the low-necked pose of sauropods is a mistake: new evidence indicates that they held their necks aloft like giraffes and all other living land vertebrates, making them up to 15 meters tall.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Healing With Light? Optical Technology Controls Living Cells

Star Trek scanners that fix injuries with beams of light may not be science fiction after all. A new optical technology that lines up living cells and controls their movements has opened the door to better artificial tissues and wounds that heal faster with less scarring.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Watermelons Tapped For Ethanol

With their sweet, refreshing juices and succulent interior, watermelons are a favorite summertime treat, especially around July 4th. But now this Independence Day favorite could become even more of a patriotic commodity. The simple sugars in watermelon juice can be made into ethanol.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Heart Muscle Protein Can Replace Its Missing Skeletal Muscle Counterpart To Give Mice With Myopathy Long And Active Life

A heart muscle protein can replace its missing skeletal muscle counterpart to give mice with myopathy a long and active life.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 27 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Desert Tortoises Get Real Estate Map

Predicting where displaced animals could live may become a conservation tool.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 27 May 2009 | 1:00 pm

Russian rocket blasts off for space station (Reuters)

Reuters - A Russian Soyuz spacecraft with three astronauts on board blasted off from Kazakhstan on Wednesday in a mission that will increase the International Space Station crew to six for the first time.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 11:04 am

Russian rocket blasts off for space station

KOROLYOV, Russia (Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz spacecraft with three astronauts on board blasted off from Kazakhstan on Wednesday in a mission that will increase the International Space Station crew to six for the first time.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 11:04 am

Space station crew set to double

The International Space Station (ISS) crew is set to double after three astronauts blast off from Kazakhstan.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 27 May 2009 | 10:40 am

First European to command ISS lifts off from Baikonur

Esa astronaut Frank de Winne is on his way to rendezvous with the orbiting outpost aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. He will be the first European to command the ISS

It looked like a beautiful, textbook launch this morning, with the Soyuz rocket powering gracefully into the blue skies over Baikonur.

It will take two days for the crew to hook up with the International Space Station. The launch marks the beginning of a six-month mission for European Space Agency astronaut Frank de Winne. He's flying with a Russian, Roman Romenenko, and a Canadian, Robert Thirsk.

You can follow the mission via the OasISS twitter feed here.

The arrival of the new crew at the ISS will bring the total onboard to six, the first time the station has had a full crew. Until now, it was only able to support a crew of three.

Esa has a full briefing on the naming of the mission and the scientific research that will be carried out.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 27 May 2009 | 10:15 am

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - Rain, thunderstorms and strong winds were expected Wednesday from the mid-Mississippi Valley into the Upper Great Lakes.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 9:24 am

Shell unveils major restructuring (AFP)

AFP - Energy group Royal Dutch Shell on Wednesday unveiled a drastic overhaul of the company's structure but gave no details on potential job losses.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 9:21 am

Where's the Beef?: Ghent Goes Vegetarian (Time.com)

Time.com - In an effort to curb climate change by cutting down on meat consumption and to promote healthy eating, the Belgian town of Ghent has declared every Thursday Veggie Day
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 9:10 am

Cancer risk for child survivors

Childhood cancer survivors have a higher risk of a new tumour throughout their lives, research finds.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 27 May 2009 | 8:22 am

Pelosi Avoids Human Rights on China Visit (Time.com)

Time.com - Labeled a year ago a "disgusting figure" by China's state press for her criticism of its human rights record, Nancy Pelosi has stuck to the script -- climate change -- in her visit to China this week
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 8:00 am

Obama promotes clean energy, stimulus in Nevada (AP)

AP - In a Western trip devoted mainly to raising political money, President Barack Obama is highlighting two favorite issues: clean energy and his economic stimulus plan.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 7:13 am

Skeleton shows earliest evidence of leprosy (AP)

AP - Leprosy is one of mankind's most ancient scourges, mentioned in writing from ancient India to the Bible to the Middle Ages. Now researchers have uncovered what they say is the oldest case of the disease yet found. Analysis of a 4,000-year-old skeleton from India shows traces of leprosy, researchers report in Wednesday's edition of PLoS One, a publication of the Public Library of Science.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 4:19 am

Op-Ed: Why the Elevator Floor Is So Interesting

In horror movies, more people are probably murdered in elevators than in any other closed space, including the shower. In real life, the probability of being the victim of a deadly attack in an elevator is virtually zero. Yet, the way people act towards others when they ride together in an elevator suggests that they have serious concerns about their own safety.

If the elevator is crowded, everybody stands still and stares at the ceiling, the floor or the button panel as if they’ve never seen it before. If two strangers ride together in the elevator, they stand as far as possible from each other, don’t face each other directly, don’t make eye contact and don’t make any sudden movements or noises.

Much of people’s behavior in elevators is not the result of rational thinking. It’s an automatic, instinctive response to the situation. The threat of aggression is not real, yet our mind responds as if it is, and produces behaviors meant to protect ourselves.

Elevators are relatively recent inventions, but the social challenges they pose are nothing new. Close proximity to other people in restricted spaces is a situation that has occurred millions of times in the history of humankind.

Imagine two Paleolithic cavemen who follow the tracks of a large bear into the same small, dark cave. There is no bear in there, only the other hungry caveman ominously waving his club: clearly an awkward situation that requires an exit strategy. In those Paleolithic days, murder was an acceptable way to get out of socially awkward situations, much in the way we use an early morning doctor’s appointment as an excuse to leave a dinner party early. In the cave, one of the cavemen whacks the other over the head with his club and the party is over.

Similarly, when male chimpanzees in Uganda encounter a male from another group, they slash his throat and rip his testicles off — just in case he survives and has any future ambitions for reproduction.

Our minds evolved from the minds of the cavemen, and their minds, in turn, evolved from the minds of their primate ancestors — apes that looked a lot like chimpanzees. Some of our mental abilities appeared very recently in our evolutionary history — like our ability for abstract reasoning, language, love or spirituality. But the way primate minds respond to potentially dangerous social situations hasn’t changed in millions of years.

Evolution has been so conservative in this domain that the minds of humans, chimpanzees and even macaque monkeys — whose ancestors began diverging from ours 25 million years ago — still show traces of the original blueprint.

When two rhesus macaques are trapped together in a small cage, they try everything they can to avoid fighting. Moving with caution, acting indifferent and suppressing all the behaviors that could trigger aggression are good short-term solutions to the problem. The monkeys sit in a corner and avoid any random movements that might inadvertently cause a collision, because even a brief touch could be interpreted as the beginning of hostile action. Mutual eye contact must also be avoided because, in monkey language, staring is a threat.

The monkeys look up in the air, or at the ground, or stare at some imaginary point outside the cage. But as time passes, sitting still and feigning indifference are no longer sufficient to keep the situation under control. Tension between the prisoners builds, and sooner or later one of them will lose her temper.

To avoid immediate aggression, and also to reduce stress, an act of communication is needed to break the ice and make it clear to the other monkey that no harm is intended or expected. Macaque monkeys bare their teeth to communicate fear and friendly intentions. If this “bared-teeth display” — the evolutionary precursor of the human smile — is well received, it can be a prelude to grooming. One monkey brushes and cleans the other’s fur, gently massaging the skin and picking and eating parasites. Grooming can both relax and appease another monkey, virtually eliminating the chance of an attack. (You wouldn’t bite your masseuse, would you?)

So, if you are a rhesus macaque and find yourself trapped in a small cage with another macaque, you know what to do: Bare your teeth and start grooming. If you are a human and find yourself riding in an elevator with a stranger, I recommend you do the same: Smile and make polite conversation.

One morning when I was living on the 20th floor of a high-rise building I rode the elevator with a middle-aged man who seemed to be particularly intimidated by my presence. As I stepped in, he smiled nervously and started talking immediately. He talked nonstop and managed to give me his entire medical history, complete with symptoms, diagnoses and treatments, before we reached the ground floor. I doubt that this man expected to receive medical advice from me. Rather, he was clearly an insecure and emotionally vulnerable person who used massive verbal grooming to appease a perceived potential aggressor in a risky situation.

Not all my experiences are like this, of course. When I ride in an elevator with an attractive woman, I’m generally treated with indifference, which in this case is not a sign of fear or intimidation. When my girlfriend rides in an elevator with a man, the man often strikes up a conversation with her and ends up asking for her phone number. People’s responses to potential mating opportunities are just as predictable as their responses to potentially dangerous situations.

The beauty of human nature, however, is that although the average behavior of human beings can be scientifically predicted, there is a lot of unpredictable variation above and below the mean. Once, on the way up to my apartment, I met an old lady who got in the elevator on the second floor, pressed all the buttons from the third through the 22nd floor, and got out on the third floor with a grin on her face.

See Also:

• Wired Science’s Complete ‘From the Fields’ Series
• Op-Ed: Stop Trying to Save the Planet
• Op-Ed: What Marmots Teach Us About Terrorism
• Op-Ed: Reversing the Congressional Science Lobotomy

Image: Dario Mastripieri photographed by Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 27 May 2009 | 4:00 am

Chrysler submits $448 million electric car plan

DETROIT (Reuters) - U.S. automaker Chrysler LLC said on Tuesday it submitted proposals totaling $448 million to the U.S. Department of Energy to research and develop electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid models.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 3:28 am

Earliest Known Case of Leprosy Unearthed (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - A 4,000-year-old skeleton found in India bears the earliest archaeological evidence of leprosy, a new study reports.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 2:21 am

Earliest Known Case of Leprosy Unearthed

Skeleton represents earliest known evidence of leprosy in human history.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 2:07 am

Mouse genome laid bare to science

An international team of scientists has finished sequencing the mouse genome after a 10-year effort.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 27 May 2009 | 12:23 am

Giant dinosaurs 'held heads high'

Huge sauropod dinosaurs could have held their heads much higher than many researchers believe, according to a study.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 27 May 2009 | 12:23 am

Miniature Cows See Small Boom

Budget-conscious farmers buy up smaller and more efficient cows.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 12:16 am

Museums and TV have dinosaurs' posture all wrong, claim scientists

Research suggests the largest dinosaurs, the sauropods, did not stick their necks out in front of them but held their heads high

The staid and scholarly world of palaeontology was thrown into rare turmoil yesterday following the latest salvo in an argument that dates back to Jurassic times.

The row erupted after a team of British fossil experts published a fresh analysis of animal bones in an arcane academic journal. In their paper they challenge a view of dinosaurs that is so familiar it has almost become the accepted truth.

The controversy goes to the heart of our perception of the largest of the dinosaurs, the sauropods, which became widespread 150m years ago in the late Jurassic. According to the researchers, the beasts did not stick their necks out in front of them as so often depicted, but held their heads high on majestic, curving, swan-like necks.

The claim overturns the popular impression of the lumbering creatures given by museum exhibits and TV series like the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs. The sauropods include many of the most well known prehistoric beasts, such as diplodocus and apatosaurus, the dinosaur formerly known as brontosaurus. Some sauropods were more than 40m long and weighed over 100 tonnes.

"Unless sauropods carried their heads and necks differently from every living vertebrate, we have to assume that the base of their neck was curved strongly upwards," said Mike Taylor, a palaeontologist at Portsmouth University in the UK, who led the study. "In some sauropods this would have meant a graceful, swan-like S-curve to the neck, and a look quite different from the recreations we are used to seeing today."

In their study, Taylor and his team examined the natural neck posture of a wide range of land vertebrates, such as cats, rabbits, turtles and crocodiles. They found that almost all of them hold their necks in an upright, S-shaped curve, even though analysis of the bones alone would suggest the neck should stick out horizontally. His report appears in the journal Acta Paleontologica Polonica.

"The burden of proof is very much on people who want to argue for a different posture," he said. "They are arguing that sauropods are doing it differently to everything else that's alive today."

Dave Martill, another palaeontologist at Portsmouth, said it was easy for fossil hunters and museum staff to get the posture of dinosaurs wrong. But he added: "In this case it is shocking, because our perception of these animals is ingrained, then someone comes along 50 years later and says it doesn't look like this at all."

The comments triggered an immediate response from the Natural History Museum in London, where dinosaur experts were keen to point out that it is almost impossible to be sure how the beasts carried themselves in their natural environment.

"The criticisms that various museums have their dinosaurs in the wrong positions are just nonsense," said Paul Barrett, one of the museum's dinosaur researchers. "I suspect no museum has a sauropod mounted in a position it couldn't achieve. Their necks may have been vertical from time to time, but they were still able to come down low to drink."

There is more to the debate than academic pride. If sauropods walked with their necks upright, it would change palaeontologists' understanding of their behaviour. Their ability to spot predators and potential mates would be dramatically different. It would also change experts' view of their ecological role as the animals would be able to feed on food that was out of reach of many other dinosaurs.

The idea that sauropods held their necks upright is not new. Until the 1950s, most dinosaur experts considered this to be their natural posture. That view changed when scientists suggested that an upright neck would raise the animals' blood pressure catastrophically.

In a study published only last month, the Australian palaeontologist Roger Seymour calculated that if a saurpod held its head upright, it would use half of its energy pumping blood to its brain, requiring a two-tonne heart that would hardly fit inside its ribcage.

But Taylor said the estimates of blood pressure were based on extrapolations from smaller animals, which he doesn't believe are valid for larger creatures.

"It might be that the sauropods found a similar way around the problem as giraffes, but we have no way of knowing. We just can't tell with the sauropods, because they're all dead," said Barrett.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 26 May 2009 | 11:05 pm

Scientists Call Hubble a 'Whole New Telescope' After Repairs (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The Hubble Space Telescope appears better than new as NASA puts the 19-year-old observatory through a battery of tests after its final facelift by an astronaut repair crew.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

Obituary: Rupert Hall

Pioneering historian of science and editor of Isaac Newton's letters

Next year the Royal Society will be celebrating its 350th anniversary. We owe much of our understanding of this body and its working to the historian Rupert Hall, who has died aged 88, and his wife Marie Boas Hall.

In 1949, Herbert Butterfield, in The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, summoned historians to take seriously a development he considered at least as important as the Renaissance and Reformation. Hall took up the challenge in his book The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800 (1954). The title provided a useful label for the changes in approach to the natural world, the new institutions, and the power that new knowledge brought, that distinguish the science and technology of the modern world. The book's range and its accessibility made it a landmark, opening up the history of science for a new generation.

Alfred Rupert Hall (he never used his first name) was born near Stoke-on-Trent and educated at Alderman Newton school, Leicester. He went to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1938 to read history, but his studies there were interrupted by war service as an officer in the Royal Corps of Signals with the Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy.

Demobbed, he completed his degree in 1946 and began postgraduate research. As a boy he had delighted in the history of inventions and devices, and the army had given him hands-on experience; for his doctoral thesis, in which his supervisor was the mathematician FP White, he chose 17th-century ballistics - the close connections of science, technology and warfare are not new. Hall's thesis was published as a book in 1952. In 1949 he was elected a fellow of Christ's College.

Although the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) had been founded in 1947, and the journal Annals of Science a decade earlier - staggering on through the war years - the history of science was then a very small field, dominated by scientists and by what Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history, which judges the past in terms of the present. Hall was unusual in coming to the discipline from history, not science, and his background would yield fresh and different perspectives in the subject.

Charles Singer, the first president of BSHS, was not alone in having suspicions about someone without a scientific education teaching the history of science. Nevertheless, Hall won him round, and they were to co-operate in editing the five-volume History of Technology published by Oxford University Press in 1954-58.

In 1948 Hall was appointed as the first curator of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, in Cambridge, and in 1950 began lecturing in the subject. Soon, the discipline was formally accepted into the tripos structure of degrees, and the department of history and philosophy of science was established, now the largest university department of its kind in the UK.

Meanwhile, Marie Boas had come from the US to work on Robert Boyle's papers, and met Hall, who was working on Isaac Newton's. In 1957 she returned to the University of California, Los Angeles; and in 1959 Hall, whose first marriage had ended in divorce, joined her there and they were married. Two years later they went to Indiana University. In 1963 they were invited back to London, to Imperial College, where Hall became the first professor of the history of science and she senior lecturer. There they trained many graduate students. In 1966-68, Hall was president of BSHS, where as a junior member of council I remember him as a benevolent dictator.

Between 1962 and 1986 the Halls edited, translated and published in 13 volumes the correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society in its early days, and founding editor of its journal, Philosophical Transactions, which grew out of his extensive international letter-writing. They also edited a valuable collection of Newton's unpublished scientific papers (1962), and Rupert took over the faltering project of publishing Newton's correspondence, completing it in 1977. In 1980 he published Philosophers at War, an account of Newton's rather disreputable quarrel with Leibniz. That year the Halls retired from Imperial College to live in Tackley, near Oxford, and for four years Rupert directed the Wellcome Trust programme on the history of medicine, which funds courses in various universities and gives bursaries to individuals.

When I edited for Blackwell's a series of scientific biographies, Hall was the obvious choice to write on Newton. He consented, provided that we agreed to publish also his life of Newton's contemporary the Platonist Henry More. William Wordsworth saw Newton as a voyager in strange seas of thought, alone; and recent scholarship has indeed revealed a magus devoted to alchemy and unorthodox religion. Hall saw the scientific revolution as a triumph of rationality, and his Isaac Newton (1992) was more traditional, although judicious and well worth waiting for. Newton was sympathetic to More, but Hall was not and his biography (1990) is inimical, detailing the metaphysics and psychical research with fascinated distaste.

Rupert and Marie were inseparable and devoted; she died 18 days after him. They not only filled gaps in our knowledge of 17th-century science, but were exemplary in being genial, encouraging and helpful to younger scholars.

• Alfred Rupert Hall, historian, born 26 July 1920; died 5 February 2009

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 26 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

In praise of ... agriculture

Nostalgia is human, but it doesn't half distort our grasp of the past, particularly when it comes to food. From Friedrich Engels - who fantasised about the "primitive communism" of tribesmen - to new-age nutritionists who advocate munching only on things that can be foraged from forests, self-hating modernists have indulged in rose-tinted retrospection. Now Tom Standage - in a lively new "edible history of humanity" - goes further, insisting that the shift to agriculture was the biggest mistake humanity ever made. Hunter-gatherers, he says, worked only half the hours of early farmers; they also suffered less disease and lived more equally. Maybe so, but it is all beside the point when no amount of berry-gathering or deer-trapping could fill the 6.7 billion mouths, a billion of them undernourished, which the world must feed today. It took farming to achieve food surpluses, which freed people to think beyond filling their stomachs. In the early days only a small elite could avoid labouring on the land, but the number has grown with each agricultural innovation and now includes most people on the planet. The cost to the environment of some technologies on has undoubtedly been too high, but the right response is to get smarter, not to go back to the past. Marx wrote whimsically about a good life where one could shepherd one part of the day before becoming a "critical critic" in another. But such portfolio careers are only an option when dinner is taken care of. In an important sense, agriculture is the precondition of culture.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 26 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

Climate Helper: Paint Roofs White

Energy secretary Steven Chu suggested that painting roofs and roads a lighter color.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 May 2009 | 10:23 pm

Five-million-year old sloth fossil found in Peru

LIMA (Reuters) - The nearly intact fossil of an ancient sloth that lived 5 million years ago has been unearthed in Peru, a find about 4 million years older than similar ones discovered in the Americas, researchers said.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 26 May 2009 | 9:33 pm

Giant Blob Found Deep Beneath Nevada

Rocky material is flowing beneath the Great Basin.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 May 2009 | 9:22 pm

How Machines Could Take Over

A defense expert weighs in on whether humanity faces the rise of the machines.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 May 2009 | 8:54 pm

Should Supreme Court Justices Be Compassionate?

President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court is a compassionate choice.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 May 2009 | 8:52 pm

Great Geek-Off Is On

If you are one, go over to ScientificBlogging and show off your geekness.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 May 2009 | 7:58 pm

Implantable Telescope Helps Restore Vision

The first implantable telescope is developed for human eyes.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 26 May 2009 | 7:56 pm

Why Chimps Don't Get Alzheimer's

Plaque in the brain is different in chimps compared to humans.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 May 2009 | 7:50 pm

Global CEOs back greenhouse gas cuts, carbon caps (AP)

AP - Global business leaders added momentum to prospects for a new U.N. climate treaty by agreeing Tuesday that the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by mid-century by setting specific limits on carbon.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 26 May 2009 | 7:46 pm

WHO puts off giving advice on pandemic vaccines

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization wants to keep monitoring the spread of H1N1 flu before issuing guidance on the production of pandemic flu vaccines, a top WHO official said on Tuesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 26 May 2009 | 6:51 pm

10 Strange Species Discovered Last Year

Every year, biologists brave the world’s deserts, jungles and industrial ecosystems looking for new species.

And what wonderful things they find. It turns out that the real world is totally like the internet: If you look hard enough, you can find just about anything. This year, scientists found caffeine-less coffee plants, tiny seahorses and a 23-inch long bug that looks like a branch, not to mention a strange white slug no one had ever described that was found in a Welsh garden.

Below, you’ll find the top 10 species found and described in 2008, according to The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University.

At the top of the page you see the world’s tiniest seahorse, Satomi’s Pygmy Seahorse, aka Hippocampus satomiae. Found in Indonesian waters, it’s the reigning champ of lilliputian seahorses, floating around at half an inch tall. (In Wired Science’s informal Cutest Thing Ever rankings, it came in right behind the slow loris.)

Deep Blue Chromis aka Chromis abyssus

The deep reefs of the Pacific Ocean are home to a variety of strange creatures that are just beginning to be described. Named in honor of the BBC program that funded the trip on which it was discovered, this small blue fish was found in Palau, which is hundreds of miles from anywhere.

Ghost Slug aka Selenochlamys ysbryda

This member of the family Trigonochlamydidae was found in a “domestic garden in Canton,” a town in Wales. It’s nocturnal and creepy looking.

Phobaeticus chani

That’s not a stick, it’s the world’s longest insect, measuring in at 22.3 inches total and with a body length of 14 inches. You can find it in Borneo, although we’d rather not.

Charrier Coffee aka Coffea charrieriana

If there’s one thing we’ve been waiting for from the plant community, it’s a caffeine-less coffee plant. Oh, wait, no we haven’t! Caffeine is the coffee plant’s raison d’etre in our book. Biologists say, however, that this Cameroonian freak could be useful in coffee breeding programs to develop a naturally decaf bean. Which is good news, if you’re into that weak stuff.

Tahina spectabilis

Looking for a new metaphor for your new magical realist novel set in Madagascar? The Tahina palm is the answer to your dreams: The plant literally flowers itself to death, going out in a blaze of flowers and fruit. It lives only in one tiny corner of Madagascar and is unrelated to any of the 170 other palm varieties on the island.

Barbados Threadsnake aka Leptotyphlops carlae

The world’s tiniest, quarter-wrapping snake made the rounds of the internet last year and made the ASU’s species list this year. It’s only found in Barbados.

Mother Fish aka Materpiscis attenboroughi

The mother fish is only known from the fossil above, which shows the animal giving birth 370 million years ago. It’s the oldest-known vertebrate to have birthed offspring live.

Opisthostoma vermiculum

This strange Malaysian gastropod has a shell that defies the standard laws of shell twisting. It coils along four separate axes, not three like most of its relatives. It’s no tiny seahorse, but you can’t hold that against it.

Microbacterium hatanonis

Bacteria really can live just about anywhere on else from hot volcanic vents to Antarctic ice. But they are also adapting to the new environments that humans create. Case in point, Japanese scientists found that this bacterial species lives inside hairspray. It still doesn’t have a common name, but seeing as most bacteria live in communities, we suggest AquaNet.

See Also:

• Transitional Whale Species Hunted at Sea, Gave Birth on Land
  
• To Save Animals, Put a Price on Them
• Hobbits May Belong on New Branch of Our Family Tree
• A Species Waves Goodbye
• Remains of Prehistoric Reptile Species Found
• Entire Genome of One Species Discovered Inside Another’s

Image credits:
Seahorse: Color photo, John Sear; specimen photo, Rudie Kuiter
Slug: Ben Rowson
Chromis: Underwater photo, John Earle; specimen photo, Richard Pyle
Insect: Philip Bragg
Coffee plant: Color photos, François Anthony; Preserved specimen, Piet Stoffelen
Microsnake: S. Blair Hedges
Tahina palm: John Dransfield
Mother fish: John A. Long
Gastropod: Reuben Clements
Hairspray: flickr/goodonpaper

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and book site for The History of Our Future; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 May 2009 | 6:44 pm

Californians Flock to Mexico for Health Care

Nearly 1 million Californians cross the border each year to seek medical care in Mexico.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 May 2009 | 6:34 pm

ADHD Linked to Gas Stoves

Preschoolers raised in homes with gas stoves had slightly higher rates of ADHD.
Source: Livescience.com | 26 May 2009 | 6:15 pm

SLIDE SHOW: Hottest Solar Images

Images of the sun by spacecraft reveal its dynamic, energetic weather.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 26 May 2009 | 5:41 pm

Wine Snobs Geek Out on “Systems Oenology”

Oenophiles seeking to understand the origins of their favorite vintages may soon turn to science, which has returned the most comprehensive analysis yet of wine’s chemical characteristics.

French researchers used an ultra-high resolution mass spectrometer to analyze a set of 10-year-old wines, identical except for their maturation in oak barrels made from trees grown in nine forests. Mass spectrometers hit samples with an electron beam that ionizes their constituent molecules, which are then pulled into an electromagnetic field and identified according to changes in their mass.

The results, described Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were so precise that the researchers could determine the exact “metabologeographic signature” of each bottle’s barrel.

“Our systems oenology approach provides an unprecedented example of metabologeography translated into chemical representations of the way such noble nectar can shape on the papillas of the wine taster some of the outlines of the scene of its birth,” write the researchers, who seem to have imbibed a bit of noble nectar while drafting their manuscript.

Unlike earlier analyses of wine’s composition, which focused on subsets of molecules derived from each vintage’s grapes but generally ignored their intricate interplay with yeast and barrel compounds, the spectrometer provided an “instantaneous image of complex interacting processes, not easily or possibly resolvable into their unambiguous individual contributions.”

Of the molecules they found, fewer than 20 percent have been structurally described by chemists, “showing the importance of the structurally unresolved chemistry of wine” — a fancy way of saying that much more research is needed to determine how molecules translate into taste.

Bottoms up!

See Also:

• Genomics Could Help Wine Grapes Survive Global Warming
• Anti-Aging Drug Stories Get Tipsy

Citation: “The chemodiversity of wines can reveal a metabologeography expression of cooperage oak wood.” By Regis D. Gougeon, Marianna Lucio, Moritz Frommberger, Dominique Peyron, David Chassagne, Herve Alexandre,
Francois Feuillat, Andree Voilley, Philippe Cayot, Istvan Gebefugi, Norbert Hertkorn, and Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106 No. 21, May 25, 2009.

Images: 1. Flickr/Mr. T in DC

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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 May 2009 | 5:40 pm

Astronauts Spot Mysterious Ice Circles in World’s Deepest Lake

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station noticed two mysterious dark circles in the ice of Lake Baikal in April. Though the cause is more likely aqueous than alien, some aspects of the odd blemishes defy explanation.

The two circles are the focal points for ice break-up and may be caused by upwelling of warmer water in the lake. The dark color of the circles is due to thinning of the ice, which usually hangs around into June. Upwelling wouldn’t be strange in some relatively shallow areas of the lake where hydrothermal activity has been detected, such as where the circle near the center of the lake (pictured below) is located. Circles have been seen in that area before in 1985 and 1994, though they weren’t nearly as pronounced. But the location of the circle near the southern tip of the lake (pictured above) where water is relatively deep and cold is puzzling.

The lake itself is an oddity. It is the largest by volume and the deepest (5370 feet at its deepest point), as well as one of the oldest at around 25 million years. The photo above was taken by an astronaut from the ISS. The photo below was taken by NASA’s MODIS satellite instrument.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 26 May 2009 | 5:14 pm

Green Room

The critical role of ocean history in the ocean future
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 26 May 2009 | 4:05 pm

Hair Loss Gene Found in Mice

A genetic discovery in mice could lead to treatments for balding in humans.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 26 May 2009 | 3:31 pm

Hospital workers save orang-utan

Staff at Jersey Hospital help save the life on an orang-utan which suffered health complications after giving birth to a stillborn baby.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 26 May 2009 | 2:51 pm

Rooks Quickly Learn Tool-Use

Laboratory studies with rooks show the birds quickly pick up how to use tools to get food.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 26 May 2009 | 2:11 pm

Space rock yields carbon bounty

A meteorite that crashed to Earth in 2000 has shown an abundance of a chemical likely to have been involved in the origins of life.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 26 May 2009 | 1:25 pm

Whales, Sharks Need Major Rebound, Study Shows

The seas once supported far more animals than exist today. Could it happen again?
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 26 May 2009 | 1:11 pm

Smart Wind Turbines to Switch Shapes

Scientists are creating intelligent wind turbines that shape-shift with the wind.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 26 May 2009 | 12:51 pm

Rooks rival chimps in ability to use tools

Research reveals that rooks are intelligent enough to use tools in captivity to get food, even though they are not known as tool users in the wild

Hand-reared rooks are adept at using tools and can even make their own if they can get their claws on the right materials.

The birds, which belong to the corvid family along with crows, ravens and magpies, have been caught on video demonstrating tool skills that rival those of more sophisticated animals such as chimpanzees.

The footage is all the more extraordinary because rooks are not thought to use tools in the wild, unlike other corvid species such as New Caledonian crows, which use sticks to winkle insects from crevices in tree bark on their native islands in the South Pacific.

Researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Queen Mary, London, recorded how rooks reacted when provided with a choice of tools and a problem to solve. All had been raised in captivity, so had not been taught any tool tricks by their parents.

The birds almost always selected the right tool to use first time, allowing them to crack the puzzle and retrieve tasty morsels of food.

In one round of tests, the birds had to select a stone of the right size and drop it down a tube to open a trap door and release a little snack.

In later tests, the birds had to choose sticks and stones of the right weights and sizes to retrieve snacks, and even use one tool to get another.

In the most impressive display of avian intelligence, the rooks were faced with a juicy worm in a tiny bucket at the bottom of a glass tube. Each bird looked at the worm and then bent a length of wire left nearby into a hook and used it to haul the bucket up.

Corvids are among the most social of bird species, and it is thought their intelligence helps them to recognise each other. The birds do not appear to have evolved tool skills, but are simply intelligent enough to work out how they can help.

Nathan Emery, an expert on animal cognition at Queen Mary, said the test involving the worm at the bottom of a tube could be the "first unambiguous evidence of animal insight", since the birds set about making hooks from wire before trying any other way to retrieve the food.

"The finding is remarkable because rooks do not appear to use tools in the wild, yet they rival habitual tools users such as chimpanzees and New Caledonian crows," said Chris Bird, a Cambridge zoologist who led the study.

The study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges long-held views over the evolution and uniqueness of certain forms of intelligence.

Commenting in the journal, the authors say their findings overturn the idea that our own species' intelligence improved dramatically once early humans began working with tools. "Caledonian crows and now rooks have been shown to rival, and in some cases outperform, chimpanzees in physical tasks, leading us to question our understanding of the evolution of intelligence," they write.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 26 May 2009 | 11:56 am

Undersea frontier

Robot defines the limits of nations' watery borders
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 26 May 2009 | 10:54 am