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Musical Diaper Alarm Can Help With Toilet Training ChildrenA new study evaluates the use of a daytime diaper that uses a musical "wetting alarm" for children in day-care centers. The findings show that wetting alarm diaper training is an effective option for toilet training in a child-friendly way.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm Estrogen Linked To Lowered Immunity In FishExposure to estrogen reduces production of immune-related proteins in fish. This suggests that certain compounds, known as endocrine disruptors, may make fish more susceptible to disease. The research may provide new clues for why intersex fish, fish kills and fish lesions often occur together in the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm Scientists Demonstrate All-fiber Quantum LogicA team of physicists and engineers have demonstrated all-fiber quantum logic, where single photons are generated and used to perform the controlled-NOT quantum logic gate in optical fibers with high fidelity.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm New Radio Chip Mimics Human EarEngineers have built a fast, ultra-broadband, low-power radio chip, modeled on the human inner ear, that could enable wireless devices capable of receiving cell phone, Internet, radio and television signals.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm Common Diabetes Drug May 'Revolutionize' Cancer Therapies: Unexpected T-cell BreakthroughResearchers have discovered that a widely used anti-diabetic drug can boost the immune system and increase the potency of vaccines and cancer treatments.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm Simple Drug Treatment May Prevent Nicotine-induced SIDSA new study has identified a specific class of pharmaceutical drugs that could be effective in treating babies vulnerable to Sudden Infant Death syndrome (SIDS), because their mothers smoked during pregnancy.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm Theorists Reveal Path To True Muonium -- Never-seen AtomTrue muonium, a long-theorized but never-seen atom, might be observed in future experiments, thanks to recent theoretical work by researchers. True muonium was first theorized more than 50 years ago, but until now no one had uncovered an unambiguous method by which it could be created and observed.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm Computer Graphics Researchers Simulate The Sounds Of Water And Other LiquidsSplash, splatter, babble, sploosh, drip, drop, bloop and ploop! Those are some of the sounds that have been missing from computer graphic simulations of water and other fluids, according to researchers in Cornell's Department of Computer Science, who have come up with new algorithms to simulate such sounds to go with the images.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm Small Molecules Mimic Natural Gene RegulatorsIn the quest for new approaches to treating and preventing disease, one appealing route involves turning genes on or off at will, directly intervening in ailments such as cancer and diabetes, which result when genes fail to turn on and off as they should.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm Alcohol And Smoking Are Key Causes For Bowel CancerA new global study has found that lifestyle risk factors such as alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking are important risk factors for bowel cancer. Researchers have shown that people who consume the largest quantities of alcohol (equivalent to more than seven drinks per week) have 60 percent greater risk of developing the cancer, compared with non-drinkers. Smoking, obesity and diabetes were also associated with a 20 percent greater risk of developing bowel cancer -- the same risk linked with consuming high intakes of red and processed meat.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm The History of Bankruptcy: Dungeons, Slavery and ExecutionsThe head of GM won't be executed, like he could have been in some parts of ancient Rome.Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:51 pm New Questions About Purpose of Big Brains (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - Group living, as opposed to a solitary life, apparently taxes the brain. In fact, sociality has made brains bigger over evolutionary time across numerous groups of animals, a lot of biologists and anthropologists have figured over the years.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:49 pm Cell Phones Allow Everyone to Be a ScientistMobile phones are starting to be used as sensors that can help people monitor their health and environmentSource: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:47 pm Circus chief to be space touristThe founder of Cirque du Soleil, the circus performance group, is set to become Canada's first space tourist in September.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:42 pm New Questions About Purpose of Big BrainsThe big-brain, big-socializers association may pertain to some groups, but overall it's false when it comes to carnivorous mammals.Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:25 pm Urine, Fingernail-Filled 'Witch Bottle' FoundA urine-filled "witch bottle" designed to ward off spells is unearthed.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:15 pm Mammoth skeleton unearthed in Serbia (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 1:05 pm Women Almost Gained Right to Vote 90 Years AgoOn June 4, 1919, Congress approved the woman's suffrage amendment. It still had to be ratified.Source: Livescience.com | 4 Jun 2009 | 12:58 pm Huge Waves Detected in AtmosphereRadar detects giant, fast-moving atmospheric waves over Alaska.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 4 Jun 2009 | 12:10 pm The Human Cost of Climate Change (Time.com)Time.com - A chilling report from Kofi Annan's new humanitarian group says climate change is already devastating the world's poorest regionsSource: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 12:10 pm Obama's Pick for NASA Chief May Win Quick Senate Approval (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - WASHINGTON — Key members of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee are clearing the way for swift confirmation of four-time space shuttle astronaut Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden, the president's pick to lead NASA. Congressional aides say a confirmation hearing for Bolden, as well as former NASA Associate Administrator Lori Garver — the White House pick for the space agency's No. 2 slot — could be scheduled as early as the week of June 8.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 11:45 am Sir David Attenborough: 'There should be a morality about living'Sir David talks about the changes in public attitudes to wasting energy and the prospects for mitigating climate change
Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Jun 2009 | 9:26 am The Nation's Weather (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 9:15 am Toyota Prius tops monthly auto sales in Japan (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 9:01 am 'Beehive fence' can deter elephants from raiding cropsA pilot study in Kenya shows that a simple fence made from wood, wire and beehives can deter elephants from raiding farmers' crops.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Jun 2009 | 8:55 am Skulls vs. DNA: Zeroing In on American Origins
Ancient Argentinian skeletons may help resolve a raging anthropological debate: whether or not early Americans came from a single original population.
“We don’t know how people got to the New World, when, or who they were,” said anthropologist Judith Habicht-Mauche at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Those questions are very much up for grabs right now and very controversial.” The controversy centers around two conflicting sets of data. Studies of skull shapes noted that people in South America 14,000 years ago looked different from the people that were there 8,000 years ago and from modern Native Americans. Some anthropologists think that means there were at least two migrations to South America. The first group, Paleoamericans, had long narrow skulls and small eye sockets and was closely related to Northeast Asians. The second, Amerindians, had short broad faces, larger eye sockets, and was related to Southeast Asians. But the molecular data disagrees. Studying modern people’s mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the mother, suggests all the Native Americans in South America split off from a single Northeast Asian group that migrated over about 15,000 years ago. Now for the first time, anthropologists have put the same bones to both tests. The verdict: The DNA is right. There was a single ancestor, at least for the part of Argentina they studied. The work, done by a group from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was published in PLoS ONE Friday.
The team studied 8,000-year-old bones from an archaeological site in east central Argentina called Arroyo Seco 2. They also used bones from three different historical periods found in other nearby sites to see how skull shape and mitochondrial DNA changed over time. They ran the skulls through standard statistical analyses to compare their shapes to each other and to modern humans. They focused mostly on facial features, which are thought to change less through the generations than other parts of the body. “Facial structure is not as influenced by new environmental things, like cold or diet,” said anthropologist David Smith of the UC Davis. “With facial data, you’re more on solid ground.” To extract the DNA, they subjected the bones to some rough treatment. To keep them from being contaminated with modern genetic material, the researchers soaked bones and teeth in hydrochloric acid, irradiated them with ultraviolet light, sand-blasted them, and powdered them in liquid nitrogen. These are mostly standard procedures for DNA extraction, but very few researchers had used them on such old bones. “It’s really hard to extract mitochondrial DNA from old skeletons like that, and we have very few of them,” Haibcht-Mauche said. “You probably couldn’t do this in the United States. People aren’t going to let you do destructive stuff on the oldest bones in North America.” They found that, even though older skulls and newer skulls still looked different, they shared the same genetic markers. This lends support to the idea that these ancient Argentinians had a single common ancestor. “What that does is, it drops out an idea. These guys who have different cranial features, these very earliest guys, they’re not coming from a separate genetic pool,” Haibcht-Mauche said. “Paleoamericans were the original guys.” The group discussed several explanations for the difference in face shapes, including evolution in response to changes in climate and diet. If the original population that entered South America was small before fanning out across the continent, the resulting groups of people could look very different while still being genetically related. “Morphology is much more responsive to environmental pressure and selective pressure,” Smith said. “With selection driving many different genes that affect the same feature, you can get very very rapid morphological change.” “It always surprised me how when anthropologists measure the physical shape of these skulls and compare them to DNA and find they’re different, they tend to ignore the possibility of evolution happening,” said Nate Dominy, an anthropologist at UC Santa Cruz. “This paper basically calls attention to this and says ‘Yeah, people are going to evolve to fit their own environmental circumstances.’” But anthropologists who study skull shapes caution against seeing DNA as a smoking gun. “A misconception people have is that DNA will give you the truth, and anything else will give you an approximation of the truth,” said Christopher Stojanowski of Arizona State University. “But different types of DNA might not give you the same answer.” For instance, mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome DNA each only carry genetic information from one parent. Studying only one of them only tells half the story. “It really is important to continue with both types of research,” Stojanowski said. “It’s important to embrace disparities that arise when you do different types of data analyses, rather than assume that this indicates necessarily that one is wrong. See Also:
Citation: Discrepancy between Cranial and DNA Data of Early Americans: Implications for American Peopling. Ivan Perez et al., PLoS One 4(5). Published May 29, 2009. Image: PLoS ONE Follow @WiredScience on Twitter
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am Pig Stem Cells Created (HealthDay)HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, June 3 (HealthDay News) -- Using cells from pig ears and bone marrow, researchers in China generated a type of stem cell capable of developing into any type of cell in the body.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 3:49 am Fire destroys 60 of Ike-damaged Galveston condos (AP)AP - A fire has destroyed at least 60 condos in a Galveston, Texas, beachfront development that was being rebuilt after being damaged by Hurricane Ike.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Jun 2009 | 2:56 am Armstrong's 'poetic' slip on MoonNeil Armstrong did not say "one small step for a man" when he set foot on the Moon in 1969, a linguistic analysis has confirmed.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Jun 2009 | 11:26 pm More premature babies survivingSurvival chances have greatly improved for premature babies, even those born extremely early, work reveals.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Jun 2009 | 11:05 pm Science writer Simon Singh to appeal against chiropractic libel judgementThe author will appeal against the ruling by Mr Justice Eady that he implied in a Guardian article that the British Chiropractic Association was being consciously dishonest A leading science writer who is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association is taking his case to the Court of Appeal after a preliminary judgement went against him. Simon Singh, who co-authored a book on alternative medicine called Trick or Treatment? with Professor Edzard Ernst of Exeter University, was sued after writing a piece for the Comment pages of the Guardian last year. In the article, Singh criticised the BCA for claiming that its members could use spinal manipulation to treat children with colic, ear infections, asthma, sleeping and feeding conditions, and prolonged crying. Singh described the treatments as "bogus" and based on insuffcient evidence, and criticised the BCA for "happily promoting" them. The BCA denies these criticisms and maintains that the efficacy of chiropractic treatments is well documented. At a preliminary hearing last month to decide the meaning of the article, Mr Justice Eady ruled that the wording used by Singh implied that the BCA was being consciously dishonest. Singh has denied that he intended any such meaning. Singh said he will appeal against the decision on Monday, though he concedes that the courts rarely overturn such rulings. "We think it might be worth it. The ruling is quite extreme and it's our only hope," he said. The courts could take two months to decide whether it will hear an appeal, Singh's lawyers said. The writer already faces a bill for legal costs in excess of £100,000. If the appeal fails, said Singh, he will take the case to the European courts. "We'll fight this until all the options are exhausted," he said. The case has led to a campaign to raise awareness of English libel laws, which critics claim can stifle legitimate and open debate about scientific and health issues. A statement, signed by more than 100 leading scientists and public figures, said libel laws had "a chilling effect, which deters scientists, journalists and science writers from engaging in important disputes about the evidential base supporting products and practices." The statement was signed by Sir David King, the government's former chief scientist, Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, Baroness Helena Kennedy, and Lord Rees, the president of the Royal Society, the most prestigious scientific organisation in the country. A cross-party statement from parliamentarians urged the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee to recommend a "rebalancing" of libel laws, which are the subject on an ongoing enquiry. The Guardian said it had removed the article from its website because it was the subject of a legal dispute. In a statement, the newspaper said: "We supported Simon and funded his legal advice when the case was brought against him. The recommended legal advice was to settle out of court and we offered to pay for the British Chiropractic Association's costs should he choose to follow this course of action." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Jun 2009 | 11:05 pm The treasures of MesselIda, the fossil of an early primate, caused a sensation when she was unveiled last month. But she is just one of thousands of beautifully preserved ancient creatures that are being unearthed from an old shale quarry in Germany. Patrick Barkham pays a visit One day, in an ancient land, a small bat began an incredible journey through time. Dusk was falling in the forest when he swooped low over a lake. Suddenly, a belch of noxious gas from a fissure caused him to fall into the water. Escaping the attentions of small crocodiles, the bat sank nearly 300m to the bottom of the lake. Gently, he settled into the sediment, as if his mother had tucked him into bed. Over 48m years, continents shifted, the lake silted up and the little bat slept on. Much later, there was the banging and crashing of new arrivals. One of these excitable primates discovered shale oil in this small patch of German forest and dug up the sediment. The remnants of mysterious prehistoric beasts crumbled into pieces like the oil shale around them. The bat had some near-misses. When the human primates fought, pilots looked down on the giant smoking crater of the open-cast mine and assumed they had already bombed it. Later, these quarrelsome humans decided to fill its 60m crater with rubbish. Others protested and frantically dug up fossilised anteaters, tapirs and miniature horses before they could be buried again. Finally, last week, the bat was gently prised from his stone covers by a palaeontologist, and bathed in water so he would not crumble into dust. Grime was gently brushed from his wings and tiny ears by the team of scientists led by Stephan Schaal from the Senckenberg, the largest natural history museum in Germany. The bat will be attached to a slab of yellow resin and given a name, and then he will be admired in a museum for the short time these humans walk the earth. When a rather different fossil, Darwinius masillae, or Ida, was unveiled in New York last month, she caused a sensation. She was hailed in this paper as "a crucial 'missing link' between our own evolutionary branch of life and the rest of the animal kingdom". While the scientific significance of this celebrity fossil primate will be debated for years, her story was certainly compelling: a broken wrist, a fatal fall, millions of years in the ground and 20 in the clutches of a possessive private collector before she finally came into public view. Equally amazing, however, are the stories of thousands of other creatures who, like Ida, lived, died and have found an afterlife at Grube Messel, or the Messel Pit, one of the richest repositories of fossilised life in the world. Unlike Ida the fossil rock star, the Messel Pit is unassuming in the extreme. Tucked behind an industrial estate 18 miles south of Frankfurt, it is badly signposted and hard to find. Local office workers shrug their shoulders; they don't know where or what it is. Down a rough lane, between a building site and lorries plundering old heaps of shale, are a couple of portable cabins for a trickle of visitors. A housekeeper doubles as a security guard. Beyond a modest fence slumps a spectacularly large crater, 60m deep and feathery around the sides with birch trees, elder, nettles and ragwort. At the bottom is a tiny pond from which rises the croak of dozens of frogs. The frogs would have been croaking 48m years ago, when Messel was a deep volcanic lake in the subtropical rainforests of the European archipelago. While lemur-like primates such as Ida clambered through the trees, tapirs, anteaters and primitive hedgehogs snuffled in the forest. A miniature horse, 50cm high and pregnant, stood by the water. Woodpeckers pursued giant ants, crocodiles snapped at perch, turtles mated and a snake that would come to be named after the German Green politician Joschka Fischer weaved along the shore. Turning up just 2m years ago, humans tend to look pretty insignificant in the history of the Messel Pit, but Fischer is one person who played a small part in ensuring its survival. Another is Schaal, who when not cleaning up newly discovered bats must wonder how Ida will affect the future of Messel. Each discovery triggers dozens of new questions. Why did species such as tapirs become extinct in Europe? Or how did a migratory eel get into the lake? "It's like a puzzle, every year a new piece," says Schaal. The unveiling of Ida, however, poses some less scientific riddles. Will Ida cause the pit, which is open to the public but with excavation restricted to scientists with permits, to be swamped with visitors? Will there be a return to the illicit plundering of its treasures? And is there another Ida, or something even more spectacular, still buried? The first crocodile was pulled from the earth at Messel by miners in 1875, around the time the extraction of oil shale, used to produce paraffin and later, industrial oils, began in earnest. Oil shale is a dark, flaky sedimentary rock. Layers of shale come apart like the pages of a book, exposing rather flattened fossils, often in two halves. These fossils were amazingly well-preserved. Because the volcanic lake was so deep, no oxygen circulated at the bottom, and animal carcasses could not be eaten by scavengers. Slowly, bacteria ate the soft tissue, creating a cast of the creature through the mineral waste they left behind. As well as bones, you can see outlines of animals, the markings on its feathers, soft skin and even stomach contents. There was one problem: these beautiful fossils were as ephemeral as a sunset. When shale is dug from the ground, it quickly dries, turning brittle and crumbly. Fossils would simply shatter. In the 1960s, however, a "transfer" technique was developed. Resin was applied to the fossil found on a slab of shale and the bones and the tracings of its soft tissue would attach themselves to the resin. "With the transfer method it was possible to get aesthetically pleasing fossils and significantly interesting fossils," says Norbert Micklich of the Hessen state museum in nearby Darmstadt (Micklich's museum and the Frankfurt-based Senckenberg are only institutions currently licensed to excavate the pit). Without this method, says the gruff Micklich, "even Ida would have looked like bullshit". Scientists and amateur collectors quickly mastered the technique that could turn Messel's fossils into collectable treasures ideal for hanging on a living room wall. The mining may have destroyed thousands of great fossils but, as Schaal points out, "on the other hand, we wouldn't have the hole. We wouldn't be in those layers, we would be 60m above and we wouldn't have a single fossil." The mining stopped in 1971 and Messel became a mini El Dorado. At times, 300 fossil-hunters would be digging at random. "It was like a gold rush. Many people who were not well equipped went into the pit," says Micklich. Exotic primitive relatives of tapirs and anteaters were dug up. So too were tiny horses (one with the bones of a foal still visible in its womb). In 1975, the first primate was discovered. It was a male: among the remains was the baculum - the penis bone that is found in most mammals. Many fossil sites serve up one, characteristic kind of fossil. Messel boasts an unusual diversity: the lake was, in effect, a deadly trap for not just mammals but birds, fish, plants and even insects - brilliant beetles in iridescent orange and metallic turquoise - from 48m years ago. "It's like you open a window and look into a time you don't know," says Schaal. Scientists are building up an amazingly detailed picture of this ancient ecosystem. In Messel's fossils, they can calculate the frequency a bat echo-located on from the shape and size of its ears. Queens and kings of a species of giant ant with a 12cm wingspan have been found but, oddly, no worker ants. Sonja Wedmann, a scientist at Senckenberg, believes the queen's wings would have dragged her under when she fell on the water: humble worker ants, unencumbered by wings, could have scampered across the water to safety. Turtles the size of dinner plates have often been picked up in pairs, a large one nestled with a smaller one, back-to-back. These perished in a moment of vulnerable ecstasy: just as they mated. In the 70s and 80s, at least some part of the febrile excitement around the pit had little to do with a spirit of scientific inquiry. Nevertheless, even the greed of private collectors had an altruistic flavour when it was the announced the pit would become a rubbish dump. Every state political party supported the landfill plan, except the Green party (and Fischer). So "emergency excavations" began. Museums were permitted to excavate fossils but illegal digging continued too: as Schaal says, people felt it was morally justifiable because it would soon be buried in garbage. The museums welcomed help from amateurs. In haste, much may have been lost. "Everyone tried to get out large mammals. Insects and smaller things were discarded," says Micklich. In the midst of this chaos, in 1983, someone found Ida. She came out in two halves. Whether they were kept together at first is a mystery but secretly, and very expertly, Ida's better half was preserved in resin. And so, another riddle at Messel was created: how could someone whisk away the pit's greatest discovery from under the noses of everyone? Relatively easily, say the scientists. The finder would have needed people to help extract Ida but assistants could have been oblivious to what they were helping with: like most discoveries, before she was cleaned up and examined, her significance may not have been apparent. Schaal began working at Messel in 1984. He joined the campaign to save the pit. Every time he found a new fossil, he raced to the local paper and urged them to write stories about it. "The first years were really hard for me. I got my grey hairs then," he sighs. In 1987, a local court threw out the landfill plan but legal battles continued until 1991 when the state of Hessen bought the site. Four years later, Unesco crowned it a World Heritage Site. In Germany, the owner of the land where a fossil is found owns half that fossil. Rumours of a spectacular discovery swirled among those who worked at Messel for years, but the first step towards the unveiling of Ida came with an amnesty: finds taken before it became a World Heritage Site were declared legal. "At this moment, private collectors began to show them to scientists, and sell them," says Schaal. "It was a very important step for the science." Schaal and his colleagues at Senckenberg cultivated relationships with private collectors; gradually he built up an idea of who had what. He refuses to judge private hunters. "You can say it was not legal but it was helpful that they worked here in the pit. If they were able to prepare them, they were able to produce good fossils," he says. His contacts led Schaal to be offered Ida before she was sold. He calls her "Part A" because "Part B", the other, less perfect half of Ida, was identified several years ago and purchased by Burkhard Pohl, a German vet turned collector who placed it in his private museum in Wyoming. (Part A was eventually bought by the palaeontologist Jørn Hurum, the man who paraded her before the press last month.) "Senckenberg knew about Part A two years ago and they asked if we wanted to buy it and it was too expensive," says Schaal. "Of course, museums like to have such a piece but we decided not to buy it, so we don't regret it now. This find is important because it's complete and because the quality is good. It is good that it is public but I cannot say more about the real significance about whether it's the missing link or not. The main point is that science has now got the work. Everybody can look at it and study it. This is what is important." The unspoken implication is that Ida is not as significant as billed, but Schaal won't be drawn. It is not sour grapes: two of what he calls, without irony, the "dream team" of scientists who wrote the academic paper on Ida are from Senckenburg. Micklich seems rather more unimpressed by the hullabaloo around Ida. He also looked at Ida around the time she was sold. "We have seen this specimen," he says of Ida. "It is a counterpart of a described specimen [Part B, the less good half of Ida, in the Wyoming museum] and we wondered how could a known species now be an unknown species? But we could not imagine this hype." His colleague, Gabriele Gruber, tactfully adds: "It's a very fine fossil. It is very well preserved." Will Ida help Messel? An exhibition of remarkable Messel finds from Micklich's museum is currently touring Germany after museums in London and America turned it down. They probably would not do so again. Micklich and Gruber agree that Messel's raised profile may help its scientists find more financial support. Then again, as scientists have a habit of saying, it may not. Overhyped palaeontology that panders to our fascination with mammal fossils creates a problem for the likes of Micklich and Gruber, who are studying fish and invertebrates. "It is dangerous because our work is evaluated by these striking records," says Micklich. "If you can't hold a striking press conference every year then people will ask, 'Why are you costing us this money?'" Are there more spectacular finds buried in Grube Messel? During the April-September excavation season, every day, on average, Schaal's team of a dozen researchers will find 10 fish, 10 plants and 10 insects. Every week they will find a bird or a bat. Schaal is confident there will be more Idas. "Every year we find more big mammals. It is possible we will find the next primate tomorrow, or in 20 years, but as we are digging every summer the chances are quite good. It's only a question of time before we find the next primate". • For more on the significance of the Ida discovery, including a video with Sir David Attenborough and an interactive guide to the fossil, go to guardian.co.uk/fossil-ida guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Jun 2009 | 11:01 pm NASA Targets June 13 Launch for Shuttle Endeavour (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - NASA's space shuttle Endeavour is officially set to blast off toward the International Space Station on June 13 to finish work on the $100 billion outpost's massive Japanese lab.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jun 2009 | 10:45 pm NASA clears space shuttle for June 13 launch (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jun 2009 | 10:26 pm Powerful Ideas: Electronics Grown by GermsAncient germs that hunt bacteria are now getting recruited to assemble the electronics of the future.Source: Livescience.com | 3 Jun 2009 | 9:48 pm Also Made in China: The First PotteryChina gave the world gunpowder, paper, the compass and porcelain. Pottery, too, it seems.Source: Livescience.com | 3 Jun 2009 | 9:44 pm How Cigarettes Cause Sudden Infant DeathSmoke messes with a baby's fight-or-flight system, a study of rats suggests.Source: Livescience.com | 3 Jun 2009 | 9:19 pm Bridging the gap to quantum world"Entanglement" is seen in a mechanical system for the first time, narrowing the gap between two branches of physics.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Jun 2009 | 9:02 pm Antarctic Mountains Found Under Miles of IceA prehistoric mountain range is discovered on Antarctica under miles of ice.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Jun 2009 | 8:10 pm Potion Put a Smile on Dead FacesA plant-based potion forced smiles on the faces of the condemned 2,800 years ago.Source: Livescience.com | 3 Jun 2009 | 8:00 pm SLIDE SHOW: Prehistoric BBQArchaeologists unearth a huge grill pit where early humans roasted some mammoth.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Jun 2009 | 6:10 pm Astronauts Debunk NASA 'UFO' VideosThey discuss a supposed coverup and what's really seen in the footage.Source: Livescience.com | 3 Jun 2009 | 6:09 pm 'Gay penguins' rear adopted chick after hatching eggA male penguin couple has hatched an egg at Bremerhaven zoo in Germany, the zoo says - and they are now rearing the chick together.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Jun 2009 | 5:50 pm Fossil Teeth Hint at Animal Adaptation to Global Warming
The tale of the teeth, collected at two sites in Florida and spanning a transition between extreme temperatures during an ice age climate cycle, runs counter to the standard narrative of animals as unable to adjust their behavioral patterns. “One of the main assumptions is that species niches are conserved. Here we’re showing that the diets vary and change,” said Larisa DeSantis, a Florida Museum of Natural History zoologist. “These niches are not the same. The animals were not doing the same thing constantly through time.” A prominent study published in Nature in 2004 predicted that about one-quarter of all species would be “committed to extinction” by 2050 if the planet’s temperature increased by about 6 degrees Fahrenheit. Such an increase falls in the middle of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s calculations of global temperature change in the next century. Some researchers call the one-quarter extinction prediction excessive. Others think it’s conservative. The IPCC says that a rise of several degrees could put a quarter of all species at risk of extinction, with a jump of a few more degrees threatening up to three-quarters of Earth’s animals. Those predictions, however, are based on models in which creatures don’t alter their habits when weather changes disrupt their traditional food chains. And though the authors of the teeth analysis warned against extrapolating their findings, which documented a gradual shift spanning hundreds of thousands of years, to the fast-warming climate of the present, the research suggests a limit to our own predictions. “I don’t think you can use this study as a model for what’s going to happen to a given species. But it does say that if we have global warming, then there will be changes to animals, and those changes will be complex,” said study co-author Robert Feranec, a vertebrate paleontologist at the New York State Museum. “It’s hard to understand what global warming is going to do.” The 115 fossil teeth in the study came from 11 large mammal species, some still found in Florida and others long departed: horses, deer, pronghorns, tapirs, two types of llama, two types of peccary, and three types of mammoth. The animals’ bones had come to rest in two ancient lakebeds. The first group dated to approximately 1.9 million years ago, when America was locked in the frigid grip of an ice age. The second group of fossils dated from about 1.3 million years ago, a period of glacial retreat. Different plants have different ratios of carbon isotopes — variations of carbon with different atomic masses. Those carbon ratios are recorded in the teeth, hair and tusks of the animals that eat them, so the researchers were able to deduce the animals’ diets by analyzing the chemical composition of their teeth. When it was cold, the animals’ diets were dominated by grass. When it warmed, they ate a mixture of grass, shrubs and trees. The tapirs — a now-endangered, pig-like animal with a prehensile snout that typically lives on land — apparently took to water. The findings “build upon what we know are inadequacies in how ecologists predict changes in species under modern climate change,” said Jessica Hellmann, a University of Notre Dame ecologist who was not involved in the study. “Most of the models that we use to project future change assume that species will continue doing in the future what they do today. As the authors point out, these models don’t account for flexibility in the tolerances of some species,” she said. How much temperatures fluctuated between 1.9 million and 1.3 million years ago isn’t known. According to Feranec, it may have resembled fluctuations known to have occurred in Florida near the end of the last ice age. At about 9 degrees Fahrenheit, those fluctuations were comparable to those predicted at the upper ranges of modern climate change. But whether modern animals will adapt as easily as their ice age forebears is an open question. The researchers cautioned that human-driven climate change is happening much faster than glacial transitions. “It may move too fast for animals to switch what they’re doing,” said Feranec. His caveat was echoed by Patrick Gonzalez, a University of California, Berkeley forest ecologist who has served as an expert reviewer for the IPCC. “Current global warming is occurring in a short period of approximately 50 to 150 years. This extremely rapid pace may not leave enough time for substantial species adaptation,” said Gonzalez. Even if animals can adapt to temperature shifts, the combination of climate change and competition with billions of resource-hungry, habitat-developing humans may prove too great, warned Feranec. The last wave of extinctions came at the end of the last ice age, when the planet warmed and humans spread out of Africa and around the world. “We lost 35 genera of large mammals in North America at that time,” said Feranec. “If we can use that as any kind of model, then whenever you have a large human footprint and rampant global warming, you seem to end up with large-scale extinction.” See Also:
Citation: “Effects of Global Warming on Ancient Mammalian Communities and Their Environments.” By Larisa R. G. DeSantis, Robert S. Feranec, Bruce J. MacFadden. Public Library of Science ONE, Vol. 4 Issue 6, June 2, 2009. Image: Larisa DeSantis Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; @WiredScience on Twitter.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Jun 2009 | 5:39 pm Measles outbreaks lead to call for compulsory vaccinationPressure is growing for childhood vaccinations such as the MMR jab to be made compulsory for all children before they can be allowed a place at school. A prominent doctor said yesterday he would lobby the British Medical Association (BMA) to change its stance in favour of compulsory immunisation, and the Welsh assembly is actively considering the move following a series of outbreaks of measles across the country. Sir Sandy Macara, a public health doctor and former chairman of the BMA, wants the doctors' body to throw its weight behind compulsory childhood vaccinations at its annual meeting this month. "Our attempts to persuade people have failed," he said yesterday. "The suggestion is that we ought to consider making a link which, in effect, would make it compulsory for children to be immunised if they are to receive the benefit of a free education from the state." The Welsh assembly is considering compulsory vaccination after recent outbreaks that affected more than 250 children and adults, with 32 people taken to hospital. In a statement to the assembly, Edwina Hart, minister for health and social services, said this week that the principle of compulsion was already accepted in the UK in certain circumstances. She cited hepatitis B vaccination for health workers. "In considering a compulsory vaccination policy for Wales, we would need to consider the legal issues and look at the potential benefit of delivering a higher coverage level against the controversy that is likely to ensue," she said. She was aware of the potential problems, she said, which could involve clashes with parents on ethical, political and religious grounds, as well as potential accusations of infringing children's rights to education. "However, I do think that we should explore further the options for making completed vaccinations or checking and recording vaccination status an entry requirement for nurseries and schools." Many of the unvaccinated children across the UK are not protected because their parents became worried about the safety of the MMR jab following a small study published in the Lancet medical journal in 1998 by Dr Andrew Wakefield which has now been discredited. The government has consistently opposed compulsory immunisation for children. But the anti-vaccination pressure groups that have grown up as a result of the Wakefield paper and other scares in the past would not easily accept immunisation as a condition of school entry. A change in the rules would lead to an outcry in the UK, where parental choice has always been paramount. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Jun 2009 | 5:38 pm Origin of Antarctic ice revealedThe East Antarctic ice sheet was formed against an "Alpine" backdrop 14 million years ago, research suggests.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Jun 2009 | 5:06 pm How Antarctica Got Its IceRadar surveys show topography of land underneath Antarctic ice sheets.Source: Livescience.com | 3 Jun 2009 | 5:03 pm BLOG: Lightning Still a MysteryA lot of open questions remain about lightning and how it may affect jets.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Jun 2009 | 3:31 pm First Pig Stem Cells CreatedThe world's first pig stem cells are created and could be used to battle human disease.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Jun 2009 | 2:47 pm Promise?Are pupils really entitled to study separate sciences?Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Jun 2009 | 2:04 pm BLOG: Lovebirds to Marry in Zero GA couple plans to tie the knot while on board the "Vomit Comet."Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Jun 2009 | 1:17 pm Some City Rats Roam Far From HomeMost city rats stay local, but a few adventurous ones stray further, foiling pest controls.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Jun 2009 | 1:05 pm
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