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Gene Predicts How Brain Responds To Fatigue, Human Study ShowsNew imaging research helps explain why sleep deprivation affects some people more than others. After staying awake all night, those who are genetically vulnerable to sleep loss showed reduced brain activity, while those who are genetically resilient showed expanded brain activity, the study found. The findings help explain individual differences in the ability to compensate for lack of sleep.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm U.S. Seniors 'Smarter' Than English SeniorsThe first international comparison of cognitive function in nationally representative samples of older adults in the US and England has revealed that US seniors performed significantly better that their English counterparts.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm DNA Sudoku: Logic Of 'Sudoku' Math Puzzle Used To Vastly Enhance Genome-sequencing CapabilityCombining a 2,000-year-old Chinese math theorem with concepts from cryptology, scientists have devised "DNA Sudoku" -- a pooling strategy that allows tens of thousands of DNA samples to be combined and sequenced all at once. The new strategy promises to reduce costs dramatically, with sequencing projects that cost $10 million in the past now estimated to cost less than $80,000.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm Space Shuttle Science Shows How 1908 Tunguska Explosion Was Caused By A CometThe mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, according to new research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm Being Overweight, Obese During Early Adulthood Associated With Greater Risk Of Pancreatic CancerIn reviewing the weight history of pancreatic cancer patients across their life spans, researchers have determined that a high body mass index in early adulthood may play a significant role in an individual developing the disease at an earlier age.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm Imaging The Hypnotized Brain: Neural Mechanisms Of Suggested ParalysisAlthough there is no doubt that hypnosis can impact the mind and behavior, the underlying brain mechanisms are not well understood. Now, new research provides fascinating insight into the specific neural effect of the power of suggestion. A new study uncovers the influence of hypnotic paralysis on brain networks involved in internal representations and self imagery.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 6:00 pm USAID giving $1 million to Africa climate project (AP)AP - The U.S. development agency said Thursday it has committed $1 million to a project that aims to help people living along southern Africa's Zambezi River cope with worsening natural disasters because of climate change.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 3:03 pm Dutch study: slowdown, oil prices slow CO2 growth (AP)AP - Dutch researchers say the global recession, high oil prices and more use of wind and other renewable energy sources cut the growth of carbon emissions by half last year.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm New Approach For Treating Recurrent Prostate Cancer On The HorizonA new study shows that an alpha-particle emitting radiopeptide -- radioactive material bound to a synthetic peptide, a component of protein -- is effective for treating prostate cancer in mice, according to researchers.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm New Approach To Treating Heart Attacks Reduces Risk Of Life-threatening ComplicationsTransferring heart attack patients to specialized hospitals to undergo angioplasty within six hours after receiving clot-busting drugs reduces the risk of life-threatening complications including repeat heart attacks, according to a new study.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm A Breath Mint Made From ... Coffee?We all know why Starbucks puts boxes of breath mints close to the cash register. Your morning latte can create a startling aroma in your mouth, strong enough to startle your co-workers too. But, surprisingly breath specialist have found that a coffee extract can inhibit the bacteria that lead to bad breath. New laboratory tests have shown that the extract prevents malodorous bacteria from making their presence felt -- or smelt.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm Paleolithic Bone Flute Discovered: Earliest Musical Tradition Documented In Southwestern GermanyNew evidence for Paleolithic music in the form of the remains of one nearly complete bone flute and isolated small fragments of three ivory flutes has been discovered.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm Green Racing: Fast Cars, Small Eco FootprintsGreen racing awards a prize to the fastest car that produces the smallest environmental footprint in a race.Source: Livescience.com | 25 Jun 2009 | 2:57 pm Why Politicians Cheat On Their Wives (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - Politicians' personal lives used to be fairly private, but nowadays, nothing is, and the public is left trying to make sense of all the marital infidelity revealed in recent years, the latest being the case of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 2:35 pm Buzz for answersSuggest a question for astronaut Buzz Aldrin interviewSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Jun 2009 | 2:34 pm Deadlock on whaling hurting oversight body (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 2:31 pm Nigerian rebels say major Shell pipeline blown up (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 2:28 pm Why Politicians Cheat On Their WivesThe short answer, researchers say: Power and corruption go together.Source: Livescience.com | 25 Jun 2009 | 2:23 pm EU to help China test carbon capture (AP)AP - The European Union said Thursday it will give China up to euro50 million ($70 million) to build a carbon capture and storage plant that will test a technology aimed at limiting climate change.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 2:12 pm On the Brink: A Gallery of Wild SharksSome of the most amazing sharks on the planet.Source: Livescience.com | 25 Jun 2009 | 2:03 pm Modest New Moon Images Leave NASA Elated (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - They may look grainy or overexposed to the untrained eye, but the new images of the moon sent by an unmanned NASA probe early Tuesday left scientists on Earth rejoicing.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 1:45 pm Canadian farmers opposed to GM wheat: survey (Reuters)Reuters - Canadian farmers oppose the introduction of genetically modified wheat until market conditions change, a Canadian Wheat Board survey has found.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 1:43 pm Canadian farmers opposed to GM wheat: surveySASKATOON, Saskatchewan (Reuters) - Canadian farmers oppose the introduction of genetically modified wheat until market conditions change, a Canadian Wheat Board survey has found.Source: Reuters: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 1:43 pm One-Third of Sharks Could Go ExtinctNearly a third of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction in a new analysis of 64 species.Source: Livescience.com | 25 Jun 2009 | 1:12 pm Royal Society announces shortlist for science book prizeThe shortlist is a smorgasbord of popular science writing offering a taste of evolutionary biology, statistics, archaeology, olfaction, good science and bad science Today the Royal Society announced the shortlist for its science book prize. It's a strong field of contenders for the £10,000 prize money. Regular readers of the Guardian and fans of our Science Weekly podcast will already be familiar with the finalists. One of the shortlisted books was recently picked over by our Science Book Club, one of the authors writes a popular weekly column for the Guardian, and two have been guests on the podcast. Sir Tim Hunt, who chairs the panel of judges, said: "There's clearly a large audience for books that explain science clearly and gracefully, and no shortage of authors. Choosing a final list of six books from the big boxes of books that arrived on our doorsteps – over 120 books were submitted – was a challenging pleasure." Here's the shortlist: What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life by Avery Gilbert (Crown Publishers) Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (Harper Perennial) The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (HarperPress) Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer by Jo Marchant (William Heinemann) The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow (Penguin) Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery of Our 375-million-year-old Ancestor by Neil Shubin (Penguin) The winner won't be announced until 15 September, but in the coming months we'll be chatting to some of the judges and authors on the podcast, Tim Radford will rate the rival merits of the books, and we'll offer the chance to win them all in a competition. Keep watching this space. 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 | 25 Jun 2009 | 1:06 pm Coffee Extract Fights Bad BreathAn extract from coffee can inhibit the bacteria that lead to bad breath.Source: Livescience.com | 25 Jun 2009 | 12:49 pm Climate science is by nature uncertainFor climate sceptics, the mere presence of uncertainty is reason enough to doubt. But doubt is not an enemy – it is the stimulus that drives science forward It seems the one thing climate change sceptics are certain of is uncertainty, in particular how uncertainty in the predictions of climate models fatally undermines their legitimacy. So the recent revelation of the UK government's projections of global warming through to 2080 was met, predictably, with some cynicism by the deniers. While some commentators used the detailed projections about possible future UK climate scenarios to underscore why we must take strong action on climate change, the response of climate sceptics was to say that the error bars in the projections made them worthless. Never mind that the level of uncertainty about mean temperature increase, sea level rise and seasonal rainfall was dealt with in painstaking and meticulous detail in the report. For some, the mere presence of uncertainty was reason enough to doubt. But uncertainty is not an enemy of science that must be conquered – it is the stimulus that drives science forward. As in economic forecasts, medical diagnoses, and policy making, uncertainty runs through climate science like the lettering in sticks of rock. The good news is that scientists are particularly adept at acknowledging, identifying and modelling it. The Met Office team responsible for the climate projections managed to systematically indicate what they did know, what they didn't know and how confident they were about these judgments. If there's one group of people who have thought long and hard about uncertainty, its climate scientists. But Irene Lorenzoni and her colleagues at the University of East Anglia have shown that people frequently view uncertainty as a reason for inaction on climate change. Such is the level of scepticism in some quarters that climate scientists are constantly required to apologise for what they don't know, rather than encouraged to communicate what they do. But uncertainty is not the same as ignorance – which is why the labelling of GM food became mandatory in 2004. The Food Standards Agency did not demand certainty before taking action, although the uncertainty surrounding the risks of genetic modification is far greater than the considered consensus of climate science. One reason that so much attention is given to the uncertainty associated with climate models is that they form the basis of important and costly policy decisions. But the "precautionary principle" is a well-established method of policy making when uncertainty prevails, on the basis that it is better to be safe than sorry. Could it be that climate sceptics' obsession with uncertainty is simply an unwillingness to accept the consequences of the climate changing – that their lifestyles will have to change as well? The UK climate projections are not a weather forecast for 3 July 2078. They are a set of scientifically rigorous probabilistic assessments of what the UK climate might be like in, say, 50 years time. But the writers of the report seemed to feel compelled to get their counter-arguments in early. Of course, it is absolutely essential that all uncertainties in climate models are made clear. But it's odd reading a scientific report where the caveats come before the take-home message. There is one crucial uncertainty, however, that cannot be captured in any climate model: the extent to which action is taken to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases. The irony of the debate surrounding what we can and can't infer from climate models is that they sketch out possible, not inevitable futures. By giving us some idea of what lies ahead, they furnish us with a critical opportunity to change course. Rather than procrastinating about uncertainty – an inescapable fact of life – we should be taking the opportunity to get serious about climate change, and prove the climate models wrong. • Dr Adam Corner is in the understanding risk research group at Cardiff University 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 | 25 Jun 2009 | 12:47 pm Scientists Float Hurricane Barriers Idea for New York CityA movable 5-mile barrier between New Jersey and Queens might save the city.Source: Livescience.com | 25 Jun 2009 | 12:38 pm In muscle stem cells, age matters: studyCHICAGO (Reuters) - A new understanding of the genes that make muscle cells may change the way researchers think about stem cell transplants for muscular dystrophy and muscle injuries, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 12:30 pm In muscle stem cells, age matters: study (Reuters)Reuters - A new understanding of the genes that make muscle cells may change the way researchers think about stem cell transplants for muscular dystrophy and muscle injuries, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 12:30 pm Claims of Life on Saturn Moon OverstatedA headline that reads: "Alien life may be thriving on Saturn's frozen moon."Source: Livescience.com | 25 Jun 2009 | 12:26 pm Spotted Owls Face Genetic BottleneckFaced with declining populations, spotted owls have lost genetic diversity.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 25 Jun 2009 | 12:00 pm Wallabies damaging crops in Tasmania poppy fields after getting highState official talks of problem for suppliers of legally grown opium Wallabies eating in Tasmania's legally grown opium poppy fields are getting "high as a kite" and hopping around in circles, trampling the crops, a state official said. Tasmania's attorney-general, Lara Giddings, told a budget hearing yesterday that she had recently read about the marsupials' antics in a brief on the state's large poppy industry. Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legally grown opium for the pharmaceutical market. "We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," the Mercury newspaper quoted Giddings as telling the hearing. "Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high." Calls to Giddings's office were not immediately returned today, and the Associated Press was unable to obtain a copy of the brief she cited. A manager for one of two Tasmanian companies licensed to take medicinal products from poppy straw told the newspaper that wildlife and livestock including deer and sheep that eat the poppies are known to "act weird". 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 | 25 Jun 2009 | 11:45 am Politicians must champion the 'age of sensible', says science museum bossPeople more likely to act on climate change if offered positive vision of low-carbon future, says Chris Rapley Politicians and scientists must adopt a more positive and aspirational message on climate change and "re-think" the current "hair shirt" approach if they are to persuade more people of the importance of action, according to the head of the Science Museum in London. On the eve of the museum's centenary, Professor Chris Rapley, said that people needed to be shown a positive picture of low-carbon future rather than focus on how difficult the global warming problem is. "We have to believe that that's possible otherwise we might as well all give up," he said. In a reference to the title of the hit climate change film The Age of Stupid - which he called "very thought-provoking and very valuable" - he said the museum's climate change exhibit planned for 2011 will incorporate a section entitled Age of Sensible which provides a positive image of the future. In the film, Pete Postlethwaite plays a 2050 archivist who looks back from a dystopic future on documentary footage shot at the beginning of the century and asks why humanity did not save itself from climate change while it had the chance. Rapley wants to subvert that device and offer a positive future. "One of the key facets of that will be a vision of the future where we've got it right," he said. "My role at the Science Museum tells me that human ingenuity knows almost no bounds so that gives me hope." He said that negative messages risked turning the public off. "If you offer a cold, grey hair shirt, miserable vision of the future nobody's going to be motivated to pursue that," he said. But Rapley, a leading climate scientist who was previously head of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, confessed that current progress on climate change is slow. "What worries me is that the evidence up to now is that the nose of the oil tanker is continuing to go in the wrong direction," he said. "We've got to reach our peak of annual emissions very soon. Because if we don't, the latest calculations suggest that the rate at which we would have to reduce our emissions becomes impractical by anybody's optimistic standards." Rapley's call for a more positive message echoes that by the former government chief economist Nicholas Stern and the New Labour thinker Anthony Giddens. 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 | 25 Jun 2009 | 11:45 am Japan approves first generic biotech drugZURICH (Reuters) - Japanese regulators approved a human growth hormone from Novartis AG, the first green light in Japan for a biosimilar or generic version of a biotech drug, the Swiss drugmaker said on Thursday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 9:56 am Solved: the curious case of the missing frogs' legsScientists resolve one of the most controversial environmental issues of the past decade: the curious case of the missing frogs' legs.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Jun 2009 | 9:48 am Radiation not needed in common childhood cancerBOSTON (Reuters) - Children can be treated for a common form of childhood leukemia without bombarding the brain with radiation, reducing the risk that they will suffer additional tumors and thinking problems, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 9:45 am Stone Age wells found in CyprusArchaeologists find a group of water wells in western Cyprus believed to be among the oldest in the world.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Jun 2009 | 9:25 am Telescope finds space blobs are pubescent galaxies (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jun 2009 | 8:11 am 'Oldest musical instrument' foundFlutes dating back to the time modern humans began colonising Europe suggest music may have been influential in our evolution.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Jun 2009 | 8:05 am Chuffed over choughs' egg successBird enthusiasts are celebrating in Cornwall after two pairs of choughs successfully raised eight fledglings.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Jun 2009 | 6:58 am For the Gullible Man: A New Baldness CalculatorIt preys, of course, on the nearly universal fear among men that they'll go bald.Source: Livescience.com | 25 Jun 2009 | 12:29 am Many sharks 'facing extinction'Almost a third of species of open ocean sharks are under threat of being wiped out by overfishing, say scientists.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 25 Jun 2009 | 12:15 am Canada still unsure on isotope reactor repair planVANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Repair crews are still trying to determine how to fix an aging Canadian nuclear reactor that produces a third of the world's medical isotope supply, officials said on Wednesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 24 Jun 2009 | 11:46 pm Fishing puts a third of all oceanic shark species at risk of extinctionThe first World Conservation Union (IUCN) red list of oceanic sharks names 64 species as endangered. Sharks are vulnerable because they take decades to mature and produce few young Overfishing threatens to drive a third of the world's open-ocean shark species to extinction, say conservationists. Hammerheads, giant devil rays and porbeagle sharks are among 64 species on the first ever red list for oceanic sharks produced by the World Conservation Union (IUCN). Sharks are vulnerable because they can take decades to mature and they produce few young. The scalloped hammerhead shark, which has declined by 99% over the past 30 years in some parts of the world, is particularly vulnerable and has been given globally endangered status on the red list, which means it is nearing extinction. In the Gulf of Mexico, the oceanic whitetip shark has declined by a similar amount. Scientists estimate that shark populations in the north-west Atlantic Ocean have declined by an average of 50% since the early 1970s. Announcing the red list of open-ocean or "pelagic" sharks and rays today, scientists called on governments to set limits for catching the animals on the high seas and to enforce strict bans on "finning" – the practice of catching sharks, cutting off their fins and throwing the bodies back in the water. "Despite mounting threats, sharks remain virtually unprotected on the high seas," said Sonja Fordham, deputy chair of the shark specialist group at the IUCN and policy director for the Shark Alliance. "The vulnerability and lengthy migrations of most open-ocean sharks call for coordinated, international conservation plans. Our report documents serious overfishing of these species in national and international waters, and demonstrates a clear need for immediate action on a global scale." Pelagic sharks are usually caught on the high seas in tuna or swordfish fisheries. In 2007, 21 shark-fishing nations reported catching more than 10,000 tonnes of shark. The top five – Indonesia, India, Taiwan, Spain and Mexico – accounted for 42%. At one time, sharks were considered worthless bycatch, but they are increasingly being fished on purpose to serve emerging markets for their meat and fins, which are used in soups and can fetch more than £100 per kilogram. In places such as China, shark-fin soup could once only be afforded by the elite, but the growing numbers of middle-class people in the country has driven up demand. To satisfy the growing market, some fishermen have taken to finning sharks. There are bans on this practice in operation around the world, but Fordham said the coverage is patchy and, in any case, enforcing the bans is difficult due to a lack of policing on the high seas. "The overarching problem for sharks is that, for a variety of reasons, they've been considered low priority and they're traditionally low value compared with something like the tuna," said Fordham. "Also public image feeds into that – I don't know if there are people clamouring for their conservation." Most species of pelagic shark take many years to mature and have relatively few young when they do reproduce. The IUCN's report highlights a study by scientists in Canada which showed that the population of porbeagle sharks, classified as vulnerable in the red list, has been so affected by fishing that it will take at least 100 years to recover. Yet the government still allows the animal to be fished in its waters. The global dusky shark popualtion, also classed as vulnerable by the IUCN, could take up to 400 years to recover because the animals are not sexually mature until around 20 years of age and usually raise only one offspring at a time. Fordham said that because many of the sharks on the red list are at the top of the food chain, their extinction could also cause major local ecological problems. "We know that most of these species are top predators and we know that removing the top predators usually has negative consequences to the system as a whole." In 2007, Julia Baum of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, who is also a member of IUCN shark specialist group, published a study showing how a major decline in the numbers of predatory sharks in the north Atlantic after 2000 had allowed populations of cownose rays, which are their prey, to explode. The rays in turn decimated the populations of bay scallop off North Carolina. "There was a fishery for bay scallops in North Carolina that lasted over a century uninterrupted and it was closed down in 2004 because of cownose rays," she said last year. Conserving threatened shark species might not be difficult. Last year, Peter Klimley of the University of California, Davis, found that scalloped hammerhead sharks migrate along fixed "superhighways" in the oceans, speeding between a series of "stepping stone" sites near coastal islands ranging from Mexico to Ecuador. Focusing marine reserves around these hotspots might be a cost-effective way to conserve the species. The IUCN sharks red list is published a few days before Spain is due to host an international meeting of the managers of tuna fisheries, where many of the sharks are caught. Scientists are also meeting in Denmark this week to produce advice for authorities on how to manage populations of Atlantic porbeagle sharks. "The completion of this global assessment of pelagic sharks and rays will provide an important baseline for monitoring the status of these keystone species in our oceans," said Roger McManus, vice-president for marine programmes at Conservation International. 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 | 24 Jun 2009 | 11:00 pm Mysterious Space Blobs 'Tween' GalaxiesScientists find that these space blobs are adolescent galaxies.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 24 Jun 2009 | 9:30 pm Does Mom's Drinking Harm Breastfed Babies?A glass of wine every now and then won't harm a nursing infant.Source: Livescience.com | 24 Jun 2009 | 8:54 pm Prehistoric Bird-Bone Flute UnearthedThe 35,000 year-old flute is thought to be the oldest musical instrument ever found.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 24 Jun 2009 | 8:31 pm New Theory of Earth's Magnetism Might be 'Nonsense'A wild new debate about how Earth's magnetic field works goes to the very core of our planet.Source: Livescience.com | 24 Jun 2009 | 8:24 pm Playing the flute... 35,000 years agoLONDON (Reuters) - People have been making music for more than 35,000 years, judging by prehistoric bird-bone flutes excavated in southwest Germany.Source: Reuters: Science News | 24 Jun 2009 | 8:10 pm Saturn's moon may hide watery caverns - and life?LONDON (Reuters) - Saturn's icy moon Enceladus could contain watery underground caverns, forming a potential home for alien life, scientists said on Wednesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 24 Jun 2009 | 8:03 pm Saturn's Moon Has Liquid WaterScientists claim they have found water under the surface of one of Saturn's moons.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 24 Jun 2009 | 8:00 pm Swine flu puts porpoise on brinkMexico's twin crises, swine flu and the economy, may derail plans to save the world's most endangered cetacean.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Jun 2009 | 7:28 pm Hunt for Life on Saturnian Moon Heats Up
The plumes of gas and ice shooting from the south pole of the Saturnian moon Enceladus contain sodium salts, which is the best evidence so far that the satellite harbors a liquid water ocean.
NASA’s Cassini probe observed the salts in Saturn’s outermost ring, which is believed to be composed of material ejected from Enceladus. That news, published Wednesday in Nature, is sure to excite life-hunters hoping to find extraterrestrial microbes within our solar system. “Those salty grains provide our current best smoking (or steaming) gun pointing to present-day liquid water near the surface of Enceladus,” space scientist John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute, who was not involved with the research, wrote in an essay accompanying the findings. Since 2005, when Cassini spotted plumes jetting out from Enceladus, the moon has become one of the hottest topics in solar-system science. In 2008, water vapor was discovered in the plumes, and Enceladus joined Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa as the likeliest places to find liquid water — and therefore life as we know it — outside Earth. Though the planet is covered with ice and too far from the sun to derive much warmth, the gravitational field in the Saturnian system is believed to warm the moon by a frictional process called tidal heating, possibly allowing it to maintain a deep liquid water reservoir. But the presence of the hypothesized subsurface ocean isn’t as simple to confirm as it sounds. A second study in Nature Wednesday that looked at the same plumes from ground based telescopes found no evidence of sodium vapor. That rules out the possibility that the plumes are just near-surface ocean water blasted out into space, complicating our understanding of the moon’s internal dynamics. “I’m still a little skeptical,” said astronomer Nick Schneider of the University of Colorado, Boulder, lead author of the second study. “There are other ways to explain the results.”
Taking both papers together, we now know that an intermediate step is necessary to explain the plume, if liquid water is indeed present under the tiny planet’s icy glaze. Scientists had hoped that water from a deep ocean was simply making its way up through cracks in the ice towards the surface, where it was erupted into space. “That scenario is out according to both of our results,” Schneider said. Explaining both results requires some sort of distillation process that would give you pure vapor and then some salt pieces that are carried along during eruptions. “Our picture of its subsurface must now be expanded to include the possibility of misty ice caverns floored with pools and channels of salty water,” Spencer wrote. “What else may lurk in those salty pools, if they exist, remains to be seen.” There are other explanations of Enceladus’ behavior. For example, Susan Kieffer of the University of Illinois said the simplest explanation of the planet’s internal structure doesn’t require water at all. The presence of clathrates, ice-like lattice structures that can trap gases, could just as easily explain what we see on the moon. “We proposed that the crust of Enceladus was composed of two layers: One, a surface layer of ice with carbon dioxide, and two, starting at no more than 3 kilometers, a mixture of icy clathrates that overlaid the core,” Kieffer said. “Gas is released from the clathrates by the earthquakes associated with the tectonic activity at the south pole. In that way, we were able to account quantitiatvely for the gases observed in the plume. ” Support among scientists for the ocean hypothesis has gathered a lot of steam from the range of Cassini observations. Fortunately, we might be able to settle the disputes with further observations. Cassini will be flying by the moon at least four more times by mid-2010, and could make as many as 12 fly-bys before 2015, if NASA extends its mission. Unfortunately, NASA has no current plans to send a probe crashing through the ice anytime soon. Enceladus lost out in the most recent round of mission planning to the Jovian moon, Europa, to be NASA’s marquee outer planet mission. See Also:
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 | 24 Jun 2009 | 7:05 pm Grains of Sand Reveal Possible Fifth State of MatterIn the formation of droplets in a stream of falling sand, scientists have witnessed a dynamic that points beyond the boundaries of traditional physics, and may represent one aspect of a fifth state of matter. “Here we have a material right underneath our noses, that everybody grows up playing with in a sandbox, yet it’s full of surprises for scientists,” physicist said Heinrich Jaeger of the University of Chicago. The droplets formed because of instabilities in the subtle atomic forces that attract sand grains to each other. Something similar happens to water falling from a faucet, but the forces acting on those molecules are 100,000 times stronger. Measurements of this phenomena, published Wednesday in Nature, overturn the previous explanation for sand droplets — that grains stick to each other after colliding — and quantify what’s called an “ultralow-surface-tension regime.” It’s entirely new territory for researchers, and just one of many dynamics governing the behavior of granular materials, which for reasons unknown to science act sometimes as solids, or liquids, or gases — or something in-between. “You walk on the beach, and the sand supports your weight. Pick up a handful, and it runs through your fingers, like a liquid. But you can’t walk on water,” said Jaeger. “In the top of an hourglass, sand is this strange solid. It’s at the verge of being a solid; it flows through the middle as something like a liquid, and then it’s a solid again,” he said. Since the early 1990s, Jaeger has treated granularity as both a form of matter unto itself and a model for investigating the dynamics of types of matter, as though molecules could be seen by a naked eye. Jaeger also sees in granularity a potentially universal dynamic, reflected in everything from highway traffic to crowd patterns to ecosystem function. “You have many interacting particles. Energy is put in, sometimes they get stuck, and sometimes it flows,” said Jaeger. “If it flows, what properties does it have? With many interacting players, that behavior is typically very complex and crosses between solid- and liquid-like behavior.” On a less-speculative level, research into granularity could be a boon for manufacturers. Most finished products and foods pass at some point through a granular stage — pellets of plastic, gravel in concrete, corn in a silo, powders in a pill, on and on. A report published by the Rand Corporation in 1986 found that granular industrial processes generally function at about 60% of capacity. “Semingly modest changes in conditions, such as temperature, humidity, and surface conditions routinely cause earth bound devices to fail,” concluded the authors of a 2005 NASA technical report on the importance of understanding granularity to exploring Mars and the Moon. The authors are scathing in their critique of industry, which in the absence of granular theory relies on “millennia-long trial-and-error practices that lead to today’s massive over-design, high failure rate, and extensive incremental scaling up of industrial processes because of the inadequate predictive tools for design.” “Physicists have a rich toolbox for dealing with solids, liquids and gases. But we don’t have a manual for when the old categories don’t apply,” said Jaeger. See Also: Citation: “High-Speed Tracking of Rupture and Clustering in Freely Falling Granular Streams.” By John R. Royer, Daniel J. Evans, Loreto O. Gálvez, Quiti Guo, Eliot Kapit, Matthias E. Möbius, Scott R. Waitukaitis and Heinrich M. Jaeger. Nature, Vol. 459 No. 7250, June 25, 2009. Video 1: John Royer. Because the formation of sand droplets happens so rapidly, and the sand must fall several feet, he arrived at the ingenious solution of filming it with a high-speed video camera that fell at the same speed as the sand. Video 2: DropDropG/YouTube Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 24 Jun 2009 | 6:55 pm UK expands wind power potentialThe UK government moves to clear the path for a quarter of the nation's electricity to be powered by wind by 2020.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Jun 2009 | 6:50 pm Hidden Whale Culture Could Be Critical to Species Survival
Though it sounds at first like a marine biologist’s take on political correctness, respecting the cultural diversity of whales may be essential to saving them. Scientists are accustomed to thinking of whale populations in terms of genetic diversity. But even when they share the same genes, groups of whales can live in very different ways, raising the possibility that species might be saved even while individual cultures vanish. The tragedy of cultural extinction aside, cultural diversity may sustain the long-term health of Earth’s cetaceans. “We have no idea what’s going on. As we mess up the world, it goes off in all kinds of weird directions,” said biologist Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. ”The more diversity that’s out there, both genetic and cultural, the more whales can deal with it.” That whales could even have culture is a relatively new scientific proposition. It was not unil the late 1960s that recordings of humpback whale songs provided a glimpse of the unexpectedly complicated and beautiful world of cetacean communication. The songs don’t appear — for now — to reach the level of language, but they’re clearly a form of learned communicative behavior common across the cetacean realm. And as researchers spend more time with whales, they’re realizing just how much their learned behaviors differ.
One of the best-known example of marine culture comes from killer whales (which, technically, are dolphins, but they’re mentioned in the same breath as whales by biologists). Pods of killer whales have highly varied dialects and ways of life, even while sharing the same habitat — the aquatic equivalent of a neighborhood populated by two different ethnic groups. Over the last decade, two pods found off North America’s west coast and known to researchers as the Northern and Southern residents became the focus of an international conservation battle. Scientists showed that the pods had different dialects and feeding habits. The Southern Residents, their numbers at a fraction of historical levels, often ranged south through Puget Sound and into waters off the California coast. They’re more threatened than their Northern counterparts by shipping collisions and depleted salmon populations. In 2004, Canada’s environmental officials declared the Southern Residents both distinct and endangered, but U.S. officials insisted on treating the two pods as a single, genetically similar and unendangered group. The next year, following outrage among scientists and environmentalists, the United States acknowledged the Southern Residents as unique and endangered. Their decision was promising, but cultural considerations are otherwise absent from U.S. government conservation plans and the agenda of the International Whaling Commission. To some extent, the absence reflects the state of cetacean science. Most species have not been extensively studied at the cultural level. But with pollution, noise, global warming, overfishing and intermittent hunting threatening the recovery of creatures nearly hunted to extinction by the early 20th century, it might be time to expand the focus. “If I take all the sperm whales in the North Atlantic, can I consider them as one population? If I can, I can apply all kinds of theoretical results to it. But if there are factors that might break the population apart, that’s going to impact the way I can use the models to manage the populations,” said Luke Rendell, a postdoc biologist at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. “Once you realize that these sorts of things are going on, that has to be taken into account.” Rendell is a specialist in sperm-whale vocalization and learning patterns of sperm whales. Over the last decade, he and Whitehead and other researchers have painstakingly analyzed acoustic recordings of the whales, linking them to observations and biological samples, ultimately cobbling together an unexpectedly complex picture. Sperm whales live in small social units linked by maternal lineage, and form larger groups only with other units from the same clan. In the Pacific, these groups are large and tightly linked. In the Atlantic, they’re small and loosely distributed. Vocalizations vary widely between groups, as do their habits, from hunting patterns to babysitting. Yet their genes are extremely similar. In the Pacific, warming waters produced by El Niño fluctuations appear to affect clans differently, said Whitehead. “In normal temperatures, one of the clans does better,” he said. “And when El Niño strikes, the clan that was doing worse does better than the other clan. The clan that was doing well is in trouble. That has implications for global warming, because it’s going to make conditions more like El Niño. You can see how maintaining the diversity of clans in sperm whales makes it more likely that they’ll survive.” Whether other cetacean species possess equally rich cultures is largely unknown, but mostly because so little research has been conducted. “It’s notoriously difficult to collect hard evidence about what’s going on,” said Rendell. “It’s not like a bird or a bat or a chimpanzee that you can bring into the lab and investigate how they behave.” But given the abilities seen in the cetaceans that have been studied, and the socialization patterns obvious in other species even when they haven’t been rigorously studied, researchers say cultural diversity is likely common. “My guess is that there are all kinds of complicated social conventions. We know some from the killer whales, but I bet they’re in lots of other whale species as well,” said Whitehead. New research is “giving us a window into really complicated societies,” said Rendell. “You get a much better appreciation of the complexity. Ten or 20 years ago, it was just, ‘There’s a bunch of whales over here.’” Image: NOAA See Also:
Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 24 Jun 2009 | 6:15 pm 'Misty caverns' on Enceladus moonThe Cassini probe obtains compelling evidence that Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus has liquid water beneath its surface.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Jun 2009 | 5:21 pm NASA Has Plan B to Launch U.S. to MoonThe side-mount shuttle is NASA's backup plan to get the U.S. to the moon.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 24 Jun 2009 | 5:05 pm Andres weakens to tropical depression off MexicoMEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Andres, the first hurricane of the eastern Pacific season, has weakened to a tropical depression, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said on Wednesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 24 Jun 2009 | 3:51 pm Women Avoid Abnormal BabiesWomen avoid looking at babies with facial birth defects more than men.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 24 Jun 2009 | 2:39 pm Marble Head of Emperor Titus FoundThe marble head is among many treasures unearthed near Naples.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 24 Jun 2009 | 2:19 pm Greyhounds hold back to stop themselves "popping a wheelie"The acceleration of four-legged animals seems to be limited by their avoidance of raising their bodies and thus losing traction.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Jun 2009 | 2:10 pm
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