Gas improves blood flow and organ status during minimally invasive surgery

As good as laparoscopy is in preventing some of the stresses of open surgery on the body, it does have drawbacks, including reduced blood flow and organ dysfunction. By adding another gas to the carbon dioxide used to inflate the surgical area during laparoscopy, researchers have found they can preserve more normal blood flow during noninvasive surgery. Laparoscopy is a type of surgery in the abdomen done through small incisions.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm

Drinking coffee, decaf and tea regularly associated with a reduced risk of diabetes

Drinking more coffee (regular or decaffeinated) or tea appears to lower the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a new analysis.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm

Witnesses to bullying may face more mental health risks than bullies and victims

Students who watch as their peers endure the verbal or physical abuses of another student could become as psychologically distressed, if not more so, by the events than the victims themselves, new research suggests.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm

Going vertical: Fleeing tsunamis by moving up, not out

When the next big earthquake strikes Indonesia, a tsunami could follow close behind, killing thousands of people stuck in traffic jams while attempting to evacuate. Researchers suggest lives can be saved if those residents take refuge instead in nearby tall buildings -- but only after those buildings are strengthened to withstand big waves.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm

Parents: Be mindful of hazardous holiday ornaments

A new study has found that holiday decorations, particularly glass ornaments, are one more safety hazard parents must consider during the season.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm

'Rock-breathing' bacteria could generate electricity and clean up oil spills

A new discovery could contribute to the development of systems that use domestic or agricultural waste to generate clean electricity.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm

New kind of micro-mobility: Microscopic system for moving tiny objects inside a microfluidic chip

A new microscopic system could provide a novel method for moving tiny objects inside a microchip, and could also provide new insights into how cells and other objects are propelled around within the body.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am

Myopia appears to have become more common

Myopia (nearsightedness) may have been more common in Americans from 1999 to 2004 than it was 30 years ago, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am

Coconut-carrying octopus: Tool use in an invertebrate

Scientists once thought of tool use as a defining feature of humans. That's until examples of tool use came in from other primates, along with birds and an array of other mammals. Now adds an octopus to the growing list of tool users.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am

Minimally invasive surgery removes sinus tumor without facial disfiguration

With the advances in sinus endoscopy, many tumors can now be removed directly through the nose, avoiding the need for facial incisions or a craniotomy. Complications are decreased and recovery is faster.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 9:00 am

Cisco, NASA launch climate monitoring venture (Reuters)

Reuters - Technology firm Cisco Systems and the NASA space agency launched a $100 million plan on Tuesday to monitor the earth's resources, aiming to boost transparency of national commitments under a new climate treaty.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 3:20 am

Cisco, NASA launch climate monitoring venture

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Technology firm Cisco Systems and the NASA space agency launched a $100 million plan on Tuesday to monitor the earth's resources, aiming to boost transparency of national commitments under a new climate treaty.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 3:20 am

Ban: Finger-pointing at climate talks must stop (AP)

AP - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says rich and poor countries must "stop pointing fingers" and raise their climate targets to salvage faltering talks on a global warming pact.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 2:46 am

Shell shock! Octopus spotted using coconuts as shelter in first sign of tool use among invertebrates

Researchers 'gobsmacked' after watching species off Indonesia collecting and adapting shells for use as hiding place

Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter, unusually sophisticated behaviour that researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal.

The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them, carrying them under their bodies up to 65ft (about 20 metres), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot.

Julian Finn and Mark Norman of Museum Victoria in Melbourne observed the activity in four creatures during dives at North Sulawesi and Bali between 1998 and 2008. Their findings were publishedTuesdaytoday in the journal Current Biology.

"I was gobsmacked," said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specialises in cephalopods. "I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh."

Octopuses often use foreign objects as shelter. But the scientists found the veined octopus going a step further by preparing the shells, carrying them long distances and reassembling them as shelter, an example of tool use, which has never been recorded in invertebrates before, Finn said.

"What makes it different from a hermit crab is this octopus collects shells for later use, so when it's transporting it, it's not getting any protection from it," Finn said. "It's that collecting it to use it later that is unusual."

The researchers think the creatures probably once used shells in the same way. But once humans began cutting coconuts in half and discarding the shells into the ocean, the octopuses discovered an even better kind of shelter, Finn said.

The findings are significant, in that they reveal just how capable the creatures are of complex behaviour, said Simon Robson, associate professor of tropical biology at James Cook University in Townsville, northern Queensland, Australia.

"Octopuses have always stood out as appearing to be particularly intelligent invertebrates," he said. "They have a fairly well-developed sense of vision and they have a fairly intelligent brain. So I think it shows the behavioural capabilities that these organisms have."

There is always debate in the scientific community about how to define "tool use" in the animal kingdom, Robson said. The Australian researchers defined a tool as an object carried or maintained for future use. Other scientists could define it differently, which means it is difficult to say for certain whether this is the first evidence of such behaviour in invertebrates, Robson said.

Still, the findings are interesting, he said: "It's another example where we can think about how similar humans are to the rest of the world. We are just a continuum of the entire planet."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 15 Dec 2009 | 2:45 am

Face in the crowd

The queue to beat all queues at climate summit
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 Dec 2009 | 2:21 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Two weather systems were forecast to produce unsettling weather activity in the West and East on Tuesday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 1:57 am

China accuses developed countries on climate (AP)

AP - China accused developed countries Tuesday of backsliding on what it said were their obligations to fight climate change and warned that the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen had entered a critical stage.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 1:42 am

Aussie scientists find coconut-carrying octopus (AP)

AP - Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 1:40 am

UN climate talks 'back on track'

Talks are back on track at the UN climate summit after developing countries won significant concessions.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 Dec 2009 | 1:27 am

How the poll on global warming was conducted (AP)

AP - The Associated Press-Stanford University Environment Poll on global warming was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media from Nov. 17-29, 2009. It is based on landline telephone and cell phone interviews with a nationally representative random sample of 1,005 adults. Interviews were conducted with 705 respondents on landline telephones and 300 on cellular phones.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Dec 2009 | 1:09 am

Particles Make Beautiful Music

Buzz, buzz buzz.... The Interwebs are buzzing still about rumors that the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or CDMS, experiment is on the verge of announcing the very first detection of dark matter particles. That would be big news, indeed, but ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 14 Dec 2009 | 9:29 pm

Americans Are Info-Junkies (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Americans are known for gorging on food, but we're also gluttons of another sort: A new study finds that the average American consumes more than 34 gigabytes of video, music and words a day-and that's only on our free time.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Dec 2009 | 9:25 pm

Tweets 'can shed light on quakes'

Tweets are being used by the US Geological Survey to gather instant public reaction to earthquakes.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Dec 2009 | 8:04 pm

Built back better in Aceh five years after tsunami (Reuters)

Reuters - The ship almost looks like it belongs in the neighborhood, swept miles inland almost five years ago after a cataclysmic earthquake spawned the worst tsunami known to mankind.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Dec 2009 | 8:02 pm

Gore: Polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years (AP)

AP - New computer modeling suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in the summertime as early as 2014, Al Gore said Monday at the U.N. climate conference. This new projection, following several years of dramatic retreat by polar sea ice, suggests that the ice cap may nearly vanish in the summer much sooner than the year 2030, as was forecast by a U.S. government agency eight months ago.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Dec 2009 | 7:24 pm

New species of coral, sponges found near Hawaii (AP)

AP - New and dramatic species of coral and sponges have been found in the Pacific during deep sea dives near the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, scientists said Monday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Dec 2009 | 7:02 pm

Video: Black Carbon Travels the Globe

SAN FRANCISCO — Black carbon, the soot emitted when fuels like diesel, wood and coal are burned, may have a bigger impact on climate in some areas than greenhouse gases. New research presented here at the American Geophysical Union meeting shows that the 20 percent decrease in the extent of Himalayan glaciers since the 1960s may be partly due to an influx of black carbon from Asian cities.

Using satellite data and computer models, NASA atmospheric scientist William Lau and colleagues put together this animation of Earth’s atmospheric concentration of black carbon from August to November. The time of fastest glacial melting on the western Tibetan Plateau coincides with the highest concentration of black carbon in the area, Lau reported.

“Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally,” Lau said in a press release. “Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play.”

The dark soot particles affect the area by absorbing sunlight and heating the air around them. When black carbon gets trapped in the air flanking the Himalayas, it creates a warm layer that then rises into the mountains and accelerates glacial melting. The effect of this regional phenomenon may even be greater than that of global warming from greenhouse gases.

Video: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

See Also:

• The Other Carbon: Reducing Black Carbon’s Role in Global Warming
  
• Stunning Views of Glaciers Seen From Space

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Dec 2009 | 5:56 pm

Chronic loneliness can do real damage

Neuroscientist John Cacioppo says social pain is akin to physical pain. So what can be done to make it better?

'Tis the season to be lonely. Half a million pensioners will spend Christmas Day alone, while nearly three in five people over 55 will be wishing they could see more of their family. This isn't just a seasonal or British phenomenon. At any given time, around one in five Americans – 60 million people – feel so isolated that it makes them seriously unhappy.

That last statistic comes from a new book called Loneliness, co-written by John Cacioppo, a neuroscientist. He says social pain is akin to physical pain. That occasional pang of isolation – the odd Saturday night when none of your friends are around – is no more than a prompt to socialise, in the same way that burning skin is a spur to get your hand away from that frying pan. It's regular, chronic loneliness that does the serious damage: increased stress levels, higher blood pressure, disrupted sleep – all the way to accelerated dementia. Many pensioners who complain about not seeing enough of their loved ones might end up in this category.

Loneliness is contagious, even between people who don't have direct contact with each other. A study of nearly 5,000 Massachusetts residents conducted over 10 years found that a friend of a lonely person was 52% more likely to develop feelings of social rejection – and one of their friends had 25% more chance of feeling lonely in turn. Even a friend of a friend of a friend was at greater risk of loneliness.

This is a social disease that threatens to turn into an epidemic. And it has spread not geographically but economically. In the new boomtowns of China, community-oriented societies are beginning to be swept by serious loneliness. The Chinese are getting richer, but they also feel more alone.

What can be done? Cacioppo wants to encourage neighbours to come into contact with each other, by making cities more walkable. And for the seriously lonely, he has one overriding piece of advice: help others through charity work, or cook for acquaintances. "When you're lonely you feel you could just eat other people," he says. "But the trick is to feed them."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 14 Dec 2009 | 5:06 pm

A radical treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder

Could Gamma Knife, a non-invasive brain surgery using radiation help OCD sufferers who can't be helped by more established treatments?

^'One of our first patients, just 17 years old, was brought to us in a wheelchair," says Professor Christer Lindquist, a pioneer in the use of a brain surgery technique for people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), known as Gamma Knife. "This boy would set himself maths problems, which he had to solve before he could eat. His OCD had become so severe, and the maths problems he set himself so complex, that he couldn't solve them any more, so he couldn't eat."

At Butler hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, Lindquist and colleagues put the boy in an MRI-like machine and passed beams of gamma radiation through his brain. These beams converged on a pinpoint-accurate spot where they created a lesion that damaged a tiny area of tissue, blocking the pathway that caused the OCD symptoms.

This is modern psychosurgery, a hi-tech, experimental, descendant of the now infamous frontal lobotomy. It could offer hope to millions suffering from OCD, and other disorders such as severe depression.

Over the past 10 years, Gamma Knife has become a highly effective treatment for brain tumours and there are now several Gamma Knife centres in the UK. Nick Plowman, consultant clinical oncologist at St Bartholomew's hospital, London, says that before Gamma Knife, an acoustic neuroma– a benign brain tumour – would require a major operation. "Now you can do it in a fraction of the time, without opening the head, whilst the patient listens to music." Successful for nine out of 10 patients with this type of brain tumour, the radiation stops the tumour cells from reproducing, and in time they'll die.

The surgery is also now widely used to treat certain brain conditions, such as a rare form of epilepsy and a condition called trigeminal neuralgia, where the patient experiences shooting pains in the face. Still, it could be a while before OCD sufferers will be offered Gamma Knife surgery in the UK. For this and other psychological problems, such as depression, Gamma Knife is still considered by many to be highly controversial.

OCD affects around 2-3% of the UK population, and the usual treatments are medication or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). But these don't work for everyone. Joel Rose, director of the UK charity OCD Action, is not surprised that some are prepared to try experimental brain surgery. "People become paralysed," he says. "They're in a despairing state and they'll try anything to get out of it."

However, many surgeons believe that we don't know enough about the brain circuits to tamper with them. "When it comes to treating OCD and other psychological disorders, Gamma Knife is totally unproven," says Plowman. It is certainly in its infancy. Lindquist carried out the first Gamma Knife treatments for OCD at Butler/Rhode Island in 1992. Since then, 56 people have had the procedure.

About 60% of the patients at Rhode Island were much improved, but many were left with residual symptoms. "This might all sound lame," says Lindquist, "But you have to bear in mind that these people are suffering severely. They've been treated for years with the most advanced drugs and CBT."

It can take up to a year to see any improvement, and "even if neurosurgical intervention is successful," says Richard Marsland, a psychologist at Butler who helps screen the patients, "they have to be included in an aftercare programme. Most patients acquired their OCD at an early age, and missed at least part of their normal development . . . they have to catch up."

Gerry Radano, a former flight attendant from New York State, is one of the most vocal supporters of Gamma Knife for OCD. She was in three psychiatric hospitals and tried every medication available before having the surgery. "Gamma Knife is the best thing that ever happened to my OCD life," she writes on her website.

But there are scare stories. One Ohio hospital stopped performing the procedure after a law suit in 2002, when a patient was left partially paralysed. "This should never happen," says Lindquist. In fact, he says "the main risks for the surgery are temporary lethargy or loss of initiative if too high a dose is given, which happens in around 10% of cases".

The technique certainly could not be further from the brutal lobotomies made famous by Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. While the frontal lobotomy essentially destroys part of the brain, Gamma Knife is highly accurate and non-invasive. It is usually done as an out-patient procedure. Some might experience a mild headache afterwards, but most report no physical problems at all.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest did psychosurgery no favours," says Lindquist. "The treatment of psychiatric disorders is still surrounded by an aura of mysticism. We think about the psyche as something magical, and aren't willing to accept that a psychological disease could be a transmitter problem, just like Parkinson's disease." However, for OCD he admits, "it's still controversial. We have to be extremely careful that patients have exhausted all other avenues." As for the 17-year-old boy Lindquist operated on years ago? He is now a doctor himself.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 14 Dec 2009 | 5:06 pm

France Returns Ancient Treasures to Egypt

France has handed over to Egypt five fragments of an ancient wall painting that were kept in storage at the Louvre museum in Paris. President Nicolas Sarkozy presented today one of the slabs to his Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak, ending ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 14 Dec 2009 | 3:54 pm

Time-Lapse Photos Show Dramatic Erosion of Alaska Coast

Time-lapse photography of crumbling Alaskan coastlines is helping scientists understand a triple whammy of forces affecting the local landscape.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Dec 2009 | 3:52 pm

Tool Use Found in Octopuses

After years of surprising scientists with their cleverness and smarts, some octopuses appear to also use tools.

Veined octopuses observed off the coast of Indonesia carried coconut shell halves under their bodies, and assembled them as necessary into shelters — something that wasn’t supposed to be possible in their corner of the animal kingdom.

“To date, invertebrates have generally been regarded as lacking the cognitive abilities to engage in such sophisticated behaviors,” wrote Museum Victoria biologists who described the octopuses in a paper published Monday in Current Biology. “The discovery of this octopus tiptoeing across the sea floor with its prized coconut shells suggests that even marine invertebrates engage in behaviors that we once thought the preserve of humans.”

In captivity, some species of octopuses have solved mazes, remembered cues and passed other cognitive tests typically associated with advanced vertebrates. More anecdotally, they’re known for popping aquarium hoods, raiding other tanks and demonstrating what might be called mischief.

All this has come as a bit of a surprise to scientists. After all, octopuses are descended from mollusks. They’re more closely related to clams than to people. They’re not supposed to be smart. But it’s hard to argue with the evidence, and in recent years, researchers have grappled with the possibility that octopuses can even use tools.

That debate has focused on octopuses seen barricading their den openings with stones. In the end, that behavior wasn’t accepted as genuine tool use, because it seemed more instinctive than calculated. (Another contested invertebrate behavior is the use of shells as homes by hermit crabs. According to the conventional wisdom, tools require direct manipulation, so the shells are no more tools than are human houses.)

Such definitions are inevitably ambiguous. But there’s no ambiguity in the veined octopuses found flushing mud from buried coconut shells, stacking them for transport — an awkward process that required the octopuses to walk on tiptoe with the upturned shells clutched beneath them — and finally turning them into hard-shelled tents.

“The fact that the shell is carried for future use rather than as part of a specific task differentiates this behavior from other examples of object manipulation by octopuses,” wrote the researchers.

With their tents, the veined octopus has joined chimpanzees, monkeys, dolphins and crows in the ever-expanding menagerie of non-human tool users. But as significant as the finding may be, the moment of discovery wasn’t exactly solemn.

“I could tell that the octopus, busy manipulating coconut shells, was up to something, but I never expected it would pick up the stacked shells and run away. It was an extremely comical sight,” said Julia Finn, a Museum Victoria biologist, in a press release. “I have never laughed so hard underwater.”

Image: At top left, a veined octopus; bottom left, a veined octopus carrying its shells; at right, inside the assembled shell house/Current Biology

See Also:

• Clever Critters: 8 Best Non-Human Tool Users
• Clever Crows Prove Aesop’s Fable Is More Than Fiction
• Monkeys Are Gadget Junkies, Too
• Whales Might Be as Much Like People as Apes Are

Citation: “Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus.” By Julian K. Finn, Tom Tregenza and Mark D. Norman. Current Biology, Vol. 19 No. 23, December 15, 2009.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Dec 2009 | 3:44 pm

Hacked Wiimote Makes Super Scientific Sensor

SAN FRANCISCO — To gamers, $40 may seem like a steep price to replace a Wii remote controller, but to scientists, a hacked Wiimote is a steal compared to the pricey sensors needed for a lot of field research.

Inspired by videos of renowned hacker Johnny Chung Lee turning the Wiimote into a finger-tracking device and a touchscreen white board, physicist Rolf Hut of of Delft University of Technology built a Wiimote wind sensor.

“It was just a bendy pole with an empty bottle on top with an LED light on the bottle,” Hut said. “And it swayed in the wind.”

The Wiimote can track just about anything: All that’s needed is an LED light. Hydrologist William Luxemburg of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands demonstrated a hacked water-level sensor made from a Wiimote and a plastic boat at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union here Monday.

“Just switch it on and make sure it doesn’t get wet,” Luxemburg said.

Luxemburg’s team aimed the Wiimote at a problem that can be very tricky for hydrologists: measuring evaporation on a body of water. The easiest way to measure evaporation is to place pans of water near the lake, or whatever water is being studied, and put pressure sensors in them. The sensors record the drop in pressure as more and more water disappears. But this equipment can run $500 or more, and still the measurements aren’t accurate because the water in the pan gets warmer on land than it would in the lake. Alternatively, measuring the level of water in a pan that is floating in a lake is also tricky because the pan will inevitably be moving.

The Wiimote could overcome the evaporation-measurement problems. It has a tri-axial accelerometer and a high-resolution, high-speed infrared camera, which can sense movement with better than 1 millimeter accuracy.

Luxemburg’s team tested it in a floating evaporation pan, using a float with an LED. With a Wiimote aimed at the float, and some hacking and programming of the Wiimote’s output, they were able to get highly accurate, real-time data on water level wirelessly sent to a laptop.

The IR camera can track up to four LED lights at once, so scientists can use several floats to calculate the water’s plane. To be as accurate with pressure sensors, you’d need more and costlier units.

Luxemburg and Hut’s goal was to show other scientists at the meeting that the videogame controller can be a legitimate piece of scientific equipment that they should consider deploying in all types of field experiments. They’ve gotten interest from colleagues who study building construction at Delft University because of the controller’s accelerometer.

“If you have a structure that collapses and you have Wiimotes on the building, you could see how fast it falls,” Luxemburg said.

And judging from the crowd at their demonstration, plenty of scientists are interested.

“I’m pretty sure within the next four to six weeks, some good ideas will come along,” Hut said.

Of course, each experiment will have it’s own challenges that require specific hacking of the Wiimote. It will need longer battery life and a way to store data so it can be left to work alone at a field site. But Hut is confident all that can be done, and more.

“I still want to do something to measure temperature with it,” Hut said. “I just don’t know how yet.”

But the basics, he said, are easy. His original wind-sensor demo took him just a few hours to build and was a welcome break from the network and signal analysis he usually does.

“There are probably better ways to measure wind, but it was a day well-spent,” Hut said. “I really felt the need to solder something.”

Images: 1) Betsy Mason/Wired.com. 2) Hubert Savenijel/ Delft University of Technology. 3) Betsy Mason/Wired.com.

See Also:

• Tiny, DIY Satellites Get NASA Boost
• Teen’s DIY Energy Hacking Gives African Village New Hope
• Carnivorous Plants Are DIY Ecosystem Monitors
• GPS-Equipped iPhone Could Enable New Citizen Science

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Dec 2009 | 3:04 pm

The TV Diet: Watch Less, Burn More Calories

Simply switching off the TV may help people burn calories, a new study suggests
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Dec 2009 | 2:46 pm

Black Soot Might Be Main Culprit of Melting Himalayas

Black carbon pollution could be causing most of warming, melt of Himalayan glaciers.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Dec 2009 | 2:21 pm

Bacterial Micro Machines Turn Tiny Gears

The power of swimming bacteria can be harnessed to turn tiny gears, opening the possibility of building hybrid biological machines at the microscopic scale.

The gears, just 380 micrometers in diameter, are turned by the collective swimming motion of bacteria a million times lighter than the gears themselves, scientists announced in a paper Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The rotational velocity of the objects can be controlled by altering the levels of air and nitrogen in the liquid solution. In a sense, the Argonne National Laboratory scientists have almost created living micro machines.

“Our discovery demonstrates how microscopic swimming agents, such as bacteria or man-made nanorobots, in combination with hard materials can constitute a ’smart material,’ which can dynamically alter its microstructures, repair damage, or power microdevices,” said Argonne National Laboratory physicist Igor Aronson in a press release.

An individual bacterium’s motion appears random. However, at a concentration of about 10 billion bacterial cells per cubic centimeter, the organisms begin to swim together in what the researchers described as “self-organized, large-scale vortices.” It’s that collective motion that powers the gears’ movement. In their experiments, the motion petered out if the concentration was increased to anything beyond 40 billion bacteria per cubic centimeter, as the organisms appear to shift their behavior toward creating biofilms.

While scientific understanding of collective bacterial behavior is still limited, the new paper provides a powerful demonstration that it may be possible to control them with some precision.

“The ability to harness and control the power of bacterial motions is an important requirement for further development of hybrid biomechanical systems driven by microorganisms,” Aronson said.

By experimenting with the type of gear, the amount of bacteria and the oxygen levels in the solution, they were even able to power multiple gears. Even so, the total power the gear extracts from the motion of the bacteria is only on the order of a quadrillionth of a watt.

That’s too small to power any real-world machine, but the scientists hope that such tiny motors could be useful for microfluidic devices or fluid mixers. At a more fundamental level, they also highlight the power of collective movements in bacteria.

Video: Igor Aronson

Citation: “Swimming bacteria power microscopic gears” by Andrey Sokolov, Mario M. Apodaca, Bartosz A. Grzybowski, and Igor S. Aranson. PNAS, December 15. PNAS, December 15.

See Also:

• Farmer Ants Fertilize Their Gardens With Bacteria
• Gut Bacteria Affect Almost Everything You Do
• Early Life Hedged Its Bets to Survive
• Extraterrestrial Terraforming Starts With Bacteria
• Primordial Earth Echoed in Arsenic-Eating Bacteria
• Metal Bits Self-Assemble Into Lifelike Snakes

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Dec 2009 | 2:08 pm

Blair sold Iraq on WMD, but only regime change adds up | Hans Blix

The PM seems to have deployed arguments as they suited him. Our weapons inspections were telling another story

Before the Iraq war was launched in March 2003 the world was given the impression by the US and Britain that the goal was to eradicate weapons of mass destruction. Recent comments by Tony Blair suggest, however, that regime change was the essential aim. He would have thought it right to remove Saddam Hussein even if he had known that there were no WMD, he said, but he would obviously have had to "deploy" different arguments. Must we not conclude that the WMD arguments were "deployed" mainly as the best way of selling the war? Blair's comments do not exclude a strong – but mistaken – belief in the existence of WMD even when the invasion was launched. However, given that hundreds of inspections had found no WMD and important evidence had fallen apart, such a belief would have been based on a lack of critical thinking.

How could the issue of – non-existent – WMD mislead the world for more than 10 years? At the end of the Gulf war in 1991 the UN security council ordered Iraq to declare all WMD and destroy them under international supervision. However, Iraq chose to destroy much material without any inspection, giving rise to suspicions that weapons had been squirrelled away. These were nurtured by the frequent Iraqi refusals throughout the 90s to let UN inspectors enter sites and by evasive and erroneous responses to inspectors' inquiries.

What other reason could there have been than to prevent inspectors getting evidence of existing weapons? It is possible that Saddam wanted to create the – false – impression that he still had WMD. What seems more likely to me, however, was a sense of hurt pride, a wish to defy and the knowledge that some of the inspectors worked directly for western intelligence – perhaps even passed information about suitable military targets.

Only in September 2002, when the US had already moved troops to Kuwait, did Iraq say it was to accept the inspection that the UN demanded. By that time a new US national security strategy declared that it could take armed (pre-emptive or preventive) action without UN authorisation; many in the Bush administration saw UN involvement as a potential impediment.

Many are convinced that the American and UK military plans moved on autopilot, and the inspections were a charade. I am sure that many in the Bush team felt that way. It seems likely that British and American leaders expected that UN inspections would again be obstructed or that Iraqi violation of the draconian new resolution 1441 would persuade the security council to authorise military action to remove the regime. For my part, I tended to think of the war preparations rather as a train moving slowly to the front and helping to make Iraq co-operative. If something removed or reduced the weapons issue, the train, I thought, might stop.

For the UK to join the US on an unpredictable UN line was a gamble – and in the end it failed. Inspections did not turn up any "smoking guns" and gradually undermined some of the evidence that had been invoked. Iraq became more co-operative and showed no defiance that could prompt the authorising of armed force. Thus, while the train of war moved on, the UN path pointed less and less to an authorisation of war.

What could the UK have done to avoid this development? It could have made a condition of its participation in the enterprise that the movement of the military train be synchronised with the movement on the UN path. With inspections just starting in the autumn of 2002 the military train should have moved very slowly. We have heard that Karl Rove had said that the autumn of 2003 was the latest time for invasion. Why so fast then in 2002? As the then German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, said: what was the sense of demanding UN inspections for two and a half years and then let them work only for a few months? Of course, if regime change – and not WMD – was the main aim, the steady speed becomes logical.

The responsibility for launching the war must be judged against the knowledge that the allies had when they actually started it. The UK should have recognised that no smoking gun had been found at any time, and that in the months before the invasion evidence of WMD was beginning to unravel. As we have heard recently: out of 19 Iraqi sites suspected by the UK – and suggested to the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission for inspection (Unmovic) – 10 were actually inspected, and while "interesting", none turned up any WMD. This warning that sources were not reliable seems to have been ignored. Intelligence organisations seem to have been 100% convinced of the existence of WMD but to have had 0% knowledge where they were. Worse still: the uranium contract between Iraq and Niger that George Bush had given prominence in his 2002 state of the union message was found by the International Atomic Energy Agency to be a forgery.

The absence of convincing evidence of WMD did not stop the train to war. It arrived at the front before the weather got too hot and the soldiers got impatient waiting for action. The factual reports of the IAEA and Unmovic did, however, have the result that a majority on the security council wanted more inspections and were unconvinced about the existence of WMD.

At the end the UK tried desperately to get some kind of authorisation from the security council as a legal basis for armed action – but failed. Confirming the fears of Dick Cheney, President Bush's vice-president, the UN and inspections became an impediment – not to armed action, but to legitimacy.

Unlike the US, the UK and perhaps other members of the alliance were not ready to claim a right to preventive war against Iraq regardless of security council authorisation. In these circumstances they developed and advanced the argument that the war was authorised by the council under a series of earlier resolutions. As Condoleezza Rice put it, the alliance action "upheld the authority of the council". It was irrelevant to this argument that China, France, Germany and Russia explicitly opposed the action and that a majority on the council declined to give the requested green light for the armed action. If hypocrisy is the compliment that virtue pays to vice then strained legal arguments are the compliments that violators of UN rules pay to the UN charter.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 14 Dec 2009 | 2:00 pm

Dog Ball Launcher Solves Sensor Dilemma

What's going on in the mountains? Is there snow or what? A dog-ball launcher and some sensors could give us a better idea. Jessica Lundquist, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington, came up ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 14 Dec 2009 | 1:59 pm

NASA Launches Infrared Mapper

It's been 26 years since scientists have made a survey of infrared-radiating objects in the universe and a lot has changed since then. "The old all-sky infrared pictures were like impressionist paintings -- now, we'll have images that look like ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 14 Dec 2009 | 1:30 pm

Infrared space telescope launched from California

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - NASA's new infrared space telescope was launched into orbit on Monday on a 10-month mission expected to reveal previously unseen objects ranging from near-Earth asteroids to some of the most distant galaxies in the cosmos.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Dec 2009 | 1:03 pm

Study Reveals Why Infants Can't Walk

An animal's brain size can predict the onset of walking.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Dec 2009 | 1:00 pm

This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity

It's hard for a species used to ever-expanding frontiers, but survival depends on accepting we live within limits

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.

The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.

The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people's interests forbid us to live.

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.

So here we are, in the land of Beowulf's heroics, lost in a fog of acronyms and euphemisms, parentheses and exemptions, the deathly diplomacy required to accommodate everyone's demands. There is no space for heroism here; all passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should be, though every neurone revolts against it.

Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.

While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.

For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city are still not serious, even about climate change. There's another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption. The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can.

We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of 60% of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than two degrees. We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5C. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels. There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion.

But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it – rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth – must begin. If governments don't show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers' weakness. They will attack – using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest – the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world's ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 14 Dec 2009 | 1:00 pm

Stroke risk for women on post-menopausal pills

Users of antidepressants 45% more likely to experience strokes in 50-79 age group, study says

Post-menopausal women who take antidepressants may be increasing their chances of suffering a stroke and dying prematurely, a study suggests.

Researchers looked at rates of stroke and death in more than 136,000 women aged between 50 and 79 over a period of six years. They found that users of antidepressants were 45% more likely to experience strokes than women who did not take the pills.

Women taking antidepressants also had a 32% higher risk of death from all causes.

The study, in the Archives of Internal Medicine, could not rule out underlying depression as a contributor to stroke risk.

The absolute risk of stroke was very small - 0.43% a year versus 0.3% for women not on antidepressants. But because so many people take the pills, even that could have a significant impact at the population level, said the scientists.

No difference in stroke risk was found between the two major classes of antidepressant, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac, and tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs). However, SSRIs were more associated with bleeding in the brain.

The findings came out of the Women's Health Initiative, a major public health investigation focusing on women in the US.

Lead researcher Dr Jordan Smoller, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said: "While this study did find an association between antidepressants and cardiovascular events, additional research needs to be done to determine exactly what it signifies.

"Older women taking antidepressants, like everyone else, should also work on modifying their other risk factors for cardiovascular disease, such as maintaining a healthy weight and controlling cholesterol levels and blood pressure."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 14 Dec 2009 | 12:54 pm

Super-Earths Orbit Neighboring Stars

The discovery of up to six planets breaks new ground in the search for worlds like our own.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 14 Dec 2009 | 12:35 pm

Nasa sky survey probe blasts off

A Nasa satellite designed to uncover hidden cosmic objects has blasted off from an air force base in California.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Dec 2009 | 12:24 pm

Americans Are Info-Junkies

Average Americans spend about 12 hours consuming 34 gigabytes of information daily.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Dec 2009 | 12:07 pm

Quadriplegic Hunter Shoots Gun with Mouth

For more than two years, 46-year-old Jamie Cap, a resident of New Jersey and quadriplegic since 1979, fought a legal battle to fire his shotgun. He finally won. Now he can legally aim and fire his 12-gauge gun. Cap operates ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 14 Dec 2009 | 12:03 pm

Garage Seismic Stations Provide High-Res Earthquake Data

SAN FRANCISCO — If you have the dubious distinction of living in an earthquake zone geologists want to study, your garage could become part of a new effort to detail how tremors move through urban areas.

NetQuakes, a project launched by the U.S. Geological Survey’s James Luetgert, aims to create a denser network of seismic sensors in the Bay Area by putting a miniaturized geological station in private homes across the region.

The falling cost and size of electronics allowed Luetgert and his team to create a small $4,000 seismic station in a box that piggybacks on your Wi-Fi network to beam data back to the USGS. That’s a third to a half less expensive than a standard unit and it can be installed in just a few hours.

“Yet it’s producing research-quality data,” Luetgert said here at the American Geophysical Union meeting Monday.

That’s important for scientists who want to study the variation in ground motion between locations. Differences in soil and terrain can impact the way a quake’s energy actually moves the ground. But in urban areas, it’s hard to find space for the standard, bulky seismic station, so the sensor network is sparser than scientists might like. The traditional stations are also expensive. Given the relatively small budgets of the groups that do earthquake monitoring, Luetgert estimated that it would take “several decades” to reach “the desired level of monitoring” if the old-style seismic stations were used.

The new program could redraw the seismic map for urban areas. Sixty-eight garage stations have already been installed since the program began in March, and 90 more will be put in next year. Forty-two stations will also be installed in the Pacific Northwest. If you’re interested in signing up, you can head to the NetQuakes site and see if a station is needed in your area.

The seismic-station-in-a-box consists of three accelerometers measuring motion along the three axes that store their data on a two-gigabyte flash drive. It’s also got a 36-hour internal battery in case a nasty earthquake knocks out the grid.

Images: James Luetgert.

See Also:

• Istanbul Opens World’s Largest Earthquake-Safe Building
• Jargon Watch: Ethical Governor, Earthquake Cloak, Triggercards
• Earthquake Simulation - Video - Wired
• Massive Fake Quake Shakes 6-Story Condo
• NASA Drone Uses Radar to Map Quake Faults in 3-D

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Dec 2009 | 11:58 am

Freaked-Out Tweets After Earthquakes Help Scientists

SAN FRANCISCO — A team of U.S. Geological Survey scientists have developed a web service that combines seismic data about an earthquake with Tweets of surprise and angst from the popular microblogging service’s users.

The goal of the project is to improve emergency response by providing a crowdsourced window of the conditions on the ground immediately following a quake.

“Why would such a system work?” asked Paul Earle, a geologist at the USGS, at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting Monday. “Because people like to tweet after an earthquake.”

It turns out that the “Earthquake! Earthquake!” SOS that you tweet, aggregated with thousands of others, provides an excellent indication of the strength and severity of a quake. A little rumbler yields just a small spike, while a strong quake produces a huge spike in Twitter activity, as seen in the graph above.

Right now, the system is designed to automatically harvest tweets, so they can be e-mailed to would-be responders with traditional earthquake measures and plotted in Google maps. All the OMGs and BFDs can provide some qualitative color about what’s happened on the ground.

“We’ve developed a prototype system that integrates Twitter messages with our standard earthquake alerts,” Earle summarized.

It’s one of a variety of ways that some scientists are trying to use the crowd and the cloud to augment the professional tools they already have. It’s already been suggested that some laptops with accelerometers built-in may be useful as earthquake detectors. Researchers in other disciplines, like bird-tracking, have also had success using citizen scientists. In a separate session at the AGU fall meeting, another scientist described a garage seismic station that has begun to make its way into homes around the Bay Area.

The challenge presented by data gathered outside the traditional channels is that it’s noisy. What the scientists gain in breadth is partially canceled out by the lack of control they have over the incoming information. After all, Quake is also a popular videogame and Dairy Queen serves up a “brownie earthquake,” and both are likely to find their way into tweets.

“We’ve been developing filtering techniques that allow us to tell the difference between an actual earthquake and a group of people who just finished playing a videogame and got the munchies,” Earle said.

Eventually, Earle and his software engineer, Michelle Guy, would like to use geolocated tweets to rough out a “felt range” for earthquakes, but it’s not as easy as it looks. Only half of Twitter users even give a basic location like “San Francisco” and just a few percent of earthquake tweets come from GPS-enabled devices, which allow for precise measurements, Guy said.

It also stands to reason that USGSted, as the program is known on Twitter, won’t be of much help in any earthquake strong enough to knock out telecommunications systems.

Where Guy and Earle say their service may be most useful is in the window of time between when an earthquake happens and when the USGS data starts to pour in. That time period can be anything from two to 20 minutes, and during that time, all those tweets are much better than nothing, if far from perfect.

Image: Paul Earle

See Also:

• Citizen Science Is for the Birds
• GPS-Equipped iPhone Could Enable New Citizen Science
• Thousands of Citizen Scientists to Help Map Light Pollution
  
• How Earth’s Hum Could Help Us Map Mars
• Scientists Want Your MacBook for Earthquake Detection
• April 18, 1906: Mother Nature 1, San Francisco 0

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Physicsts Find Dark Matter, or Something Even Stranger

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Dec 2009 | 11:30 am

Investigation: Climate Data Not Faked

Climate scientists may have acted improperly (perhaps even unethically and unlawfully) but ...
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Dec 2009 | 11:27 am

On Lieberman | Michael Tomasky

As several of you have observed, he's being the skunk at the picnic again.

I'm not sure what to say about the man at this point that hasn't been said. So instead of re-heating cold leftovers of theories, I'll quote a comparatively novel one, from Jon Chait of TNR:

I think one answer here is that Lieberman isn't actually all that smart. He speaks, and seems to think, exclusively in terms of generalities and broad statements of principle. But there's little evidence that he's a sharp or clear thinker, and certainly no evidence that he knows or cares about the details of health care reform. At one point during the 2000 recount, the Gore campaign explained to Lieberman why lowering standards for military ballots would be totally unfair and illegal, and Lieberman proceeded to go on television and subvert the campaign's position. Gore loyalists interpreted this as a sellout, but perhaps the more plausible explanation was that Lieberman -- who, after all, badly wanted to be vice-President -- just didn't understand the details of the Gore position well enough to defend it. The guy was taken apart by Dick Cheney in the 2000 veep debate.

I suspect that Lieberman is the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of a cultural stereotype that Jews are smart and good with numbers. Trust me, it's not true. If Senator Smith from Idaho was angering Democrats by spewing uninformed platitudes, most liberals would deride him as an idiot. With Lieberman, we all suspect it's part of a plan.

As for all this talk about exacting revenge on him and stripping him of his committee chair...highly unlikely. And probably not even desirable. Lieberman is in fact being a good lieutenant on climate change. His standing in the Senate is such that he can probably help bring a small number of Republicans on board. And Lindsey Graham is already there, no doubt in part because of political cover provided by Lieberman's participation.

It's more important to pass climate change legislation -- which by the way I think is a very long shot, but it's worth the shot -- than to indulge in Lieber-freude. Then, the liberals of Connecticut should just find a candidate who can beat him in 2012.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 14 Dec 2009 | 11:14 am

Indian farmers adapt to shifting weather patterns

GORAKHPUR, India (Reuters) - As global leaders and top scientists in Copenhagen debate how to deal with climate change, farmers in flood-prone areas of northern India are taking it into their own hands to adapt to shifts in the weather.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Dec 2009 | 10:45 am

Sticky Science: Why Some Bats Sleep Head-Up

Scientists have figured out why some bats snooze head-up.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Dec 2009 | 10:27 am

Octopus snatches coconut and runs away

Scientists have been surprised to observe octopuses picking up coconuts and "running" away with them.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Dec 2009 | 10:19 am

European taxpayers lose €5bn in carbon trading fraud

• Europol says EU's Emission Trading System in peril
• Fraudsters could target gas and electricity markets next

The European Union has probably lost at least €5bn (£4.5bn) to VAT fraud related to carbon trading and there is a risk that the criminals will now shift their attention to Europe's electricity and gas markets, according to Europol.

The news will cause further embarrassment for European governments negotiating at the Copenhagen climate summit and trying to persuade other parts of the world to sign up to carbon trading as a way of reducing emissions.

The Guardian recently revealed that the Danish government had been forced, on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, to rush through an emergency law making it impossible for criminal gangs to reclaim huge amounts of VAT on fraudulent trades they were making on Europe's various carbon exchanges.

At the time, the Danes refused to estimate how much money the fraud cost them but now Europol, the EU's law enforcement operation, has estimated an approximate cost of the fraud on carbon trading. This was mainly carried out over the summer before Britain, France and the Netherlands – home to big exchanges – changed their VAT rules to stop criminal activity.

Europol has now set up a specific project to collect and analyse information to identify and disrupt the organised criminal structures behind these fraud schemes.

Rob Wainwright, Director of Europol, says "These criminal activities endanger the credibility of the European Union Emission Trading System and lead to the loss of significant tax revenue for governments. Europol is using its expertise and information capabilities to help target the organised crime groups involved".

"There are reasons to believe that fraudsters might soon migrate towards the gas and electricity branches of the energy sector," said Europol.

A spokesman added that the organisation had no specific evidence that Europe's huge markets for electricity and gas have yet been targeted, but said the markets were so similar to that for carbon that the link in the criminals' minds would be obvious.

The fraud involves a criminal registering to be able to trade carbon permits in the ETS. Most of these registrations have taken place in Denmark where the rules are slackest. The criminal then starts buying carbon permits in one EU country from another, free of VAT, then sells them on with the VAT added. But instead of passing the VAT on to the relevant tax authority, he disappears without trace, hence the name "missing trader" fraud.

In its more sophisticated form, groups of fraudsters in different countries will send carbon permits round a circuit between various countries, reclaiming VAT repeatedly before the ruse is discovered, by which time they are long gone.

This led to a big spike in trading volume last summer, particularly on exchanges in the UK, France and Netherlands, which subsequently moved to change their VAT laws so VAT was not payable along with the trading charge. Trading volumes have since fallen dramatically.

The French authorities last week arrested four people suspected of engaging in a €156m carbon carousel fraud on France's Bluenext exchange.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 14 Dec 2009 | 10:06 am

Clever Octopus Builds a Mobile Home

An octopus that uses coconut shells as portable armor is the latest addition to a growing list of animals that use tools.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Dec 2009 | 10:04 am

10 Animals That Use Tools

From crows that craft twigs into usable objects to elephants that morph tree branches into fly swatters, the animal kingdom is full of adept tool makers.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Dec 2009 | 10:02 am

Octopus Uses Tools

The veined octopus gathers and stacks discarded coconut shells, then transports them on the seafloor to use as shelter.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Dec 2009 | 10:01 am

Airline Passengers May Face Radiation Risk

Add lightning-produced radiation to the list of potential concerns for holiday travelers.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 14 Dec 2009 | 9:45 am

Interactive: Test our climate simulator

Play the role of a climate change negotiator at the Copenhagen summit and use this tool to see how different emission levels affect global temperature

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 14 Dec 2009 | 9:35 am

Carbon giant

China seeks green future as it burns more and more coal
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Dec 2009 | 9:01 am

LED Christmas Lights are Magical

This weekend I did a little Christmas shopping and decided to pick up some LED Christmas lights. LED lights offer several benefits over incandescent and even compact fluorescent bulbs. Long-lasting. My box of Philips blue icicle lights claims that these ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 14 Dec 2009 | 8:03 am

World's Oldest Santa Figurine Believed Found

Archaeologists working in Akron, Ohio, claim to have found the world's oldest three-dimensional representation of Santa Claus. Known as the "Blue Santa," the object was made circa 1884 by The American Marble & Toy Manufacturing Company, which burned to the ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 14 Dec 2009 | 7:15 am

Snowflakes' Shape Changed by Pollution

Every snowflake may be unique, but the shape it takes is not random.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 14 Dec 2009 | 6:33 am

How climate change sceptic Ian Plimer dodges valid criticism | James Randerson

His book Heaven and Earth has fuelled sceptics the world over, but when I talked to Professor Plimer he sidestepped vital points

A few days ago I interviewed the prominent climate change sceptic Professor Ian Plimer for a piece ahead of the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen. Very little of our half-hour conversation made it into the final story but it was a revealing interview. This blog is an attempt to put some of what we talked about on the record.

It is important to do so, because the Australian mining geologist's book Heaven and Earth – on what he calls the "missing science" of global warming – has proved extremely popular. It has been reprinted six times in the UK since its publication in March and has sold more than 30,000 copies in Australia. In July, the Spectator ran a fawning cover feature about the book under the headline "Relax: global warming is all a myth".

The new Australian opposition leader, Tony Abbott, was converted to the sceptic cause by reading the book, or so Plimer says. And the backbench Tory MP Douglas Carswell said it overturned his belief that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon.

But it has also come in for stinging criticism from scientists and others. Bob Ward, director of public relations and policy at Lord Nicholas Stern's Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics said the book is "full of inaccurate statements and misrepresentations of global temperature data".

Plimer has refused to answer a series of questions put by George Monbiot about specific claims he makes in the book, but our interview gave me the opportunity to put some of those - and others' questions - to him.

I found him to be one of the most difficult and evasive interviewees I have spoken to in my career, frequently veering off on tangents rather than answering the question I had put.

Strangely, Plimer was only vaguely aware of the criticisms that have been levelled at Heaven and Earth and appeared to have little interest in dealing with them. He gave me the impression that engaging with his critics was beneath him. That seemed to me an odd attitude for a scientist to take. He did say though that when he returned home from promoting the book he planned to write a less technical follow-up to Heaven and Earth that would address some of the criticisms.

The first figure in Heaven and Earth makes a bold claim:

This diagram shows that the hypothesis that human emissions of CO2 create global warming is invalid.

It is a graph running from 1990 to 2025 and shows five different plots of global temperature. One of these plots is the so-called HadCRUT temperature series produced by the Met Office's Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Plimer's first mistake is to refer to this plot as a "computer prediction" of temperature when this is in fact the measured global average temperature. But more significantly, the final point on his graph is a long way from where it should be. The figure for 2008 is placed much lower than the correct figure (at 0.1C above the 1961-1990 average instead of 0.437). That might not sound like much, but it wrongly gives the impression there has been a massive recent cooling – something Plimer says the climate modellers have not predicted.

His broader point appears to be that if climate models cannot predict warming over the course of a decade, what hope do they have of getting the forecast right for 2050 and beyond? Leaving aside the misplaced data point, Plimer appears to have misunderstood what climate models can and can't do. It may seem paradoxical, but predicting the year-by-year fluctuations in global temperature is actually a lot harder than predicting the general trend. No one who understands climate modelling would expect a perfect fit on such a short timescale.

"His premise that the models do not represent the [real data] is flawed," said a spokesperson for the Met Office. "The models never claim to predict the individual variability from year to year. However, they do clearly show the trend over longer periods of time."

Elsewhere in the book, Plimer appears to have conflated a US temperature record and the global average temperature. On page 99 he writes "Nasa now states that […] the warmest year was 1934." The Nasa dataset he is referring to covers the US only but he seems to be referring to the world average.

Again, Plimer does not appear to accept that the world is warming. But in fact, the hottest year on record is 1998 and eight of the 10 hottest years ever recorded have occurred this century.

When I put the mistake to him he responded: "The 1930s in North America and probably the rest of the world were a hot period of time." But what about increased global average temperature since then? "That has been disputed by many of my colleagues who I have a great regard for because they've been the people involved in putting measurements together ... I do dispute that as do many other people who are far more qualified in atmospheric sciences than I."

He appears to be taking the bizarre position that the world has not warmed since the 1930s. Even global warming critic Lord Nigel Lawson doesn't say silly things like that.

Now Plimer is not a climate scientist so you can perhaps forgive his glaring errors when writing about that field, but one thing he might hope to get right would be his own field of geology. Sadly not.

On page 413 of the book he repeats the old canard that "Volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world's cars and industries combined". It was a claim that he famously made in a recent interview by Justin Webb on the BBC's Today programme. Webb did not challenge him, but I put it to Plimer that the website of the US Geological Survey (USGS) states: "Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes."

Plimer's response was that the USGS is only talking about terrestrial volcanoes and has not incorporated CO2 produced by undersea eruptions at mid-ocean ridges. "85% of the world's volcanoes we neither see nor measure," he said. "They leak out huge amounts of carbon dioxide... That does not come into the USGS figures nor does it come into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's figures."

If he is right, that is an astonishing omission and an oversight that would force a huge reassessment of climate science.

But when I check with the USGS they are very explicit. According to volcanologist Dr Terrence Gerlach:

I can confirm to you that the "130 times" figure on the USGS website is an estimate that includes all volcanoes – submarine as well as subaerial ... Geoscientists have two methods for estimating the CO2 output of the mid-oceanic ridges. There were estimates for the CO2 output of the mid-oceanic ridges before there were estimates for the global output of subaerial volcanoes.

These are just three of the many criticisms that have been made about Heaven and Earth. Plimer dismissed them as "pathetic nit-picking" but if his book is influencing politicians and public opinion around the world then I think his arguments deserve close scrutiny.

He likes to argue that his position on global warming is dismissed by mainstream scientists because they are part of a "fundamentalist religion" and a "mafia". In fact, his arguments are rejected because they are just plain wrong.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 14 Dec 2009 | 5:09 am

In Pictures

Watching how meerkats grow old in the Kalahari
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Dec 2009 | 4:37 am

New Infared Telescope’s Awesome First Images

Thick clouds of dust usually obscure the Flame Nebula in visible light, but a brand new infrared telescope saw right through to capture this spectacular image.

Vista is the latest telescope to come online at the European Southern Observatory’s outpost in the Chilean desert. It is the largest sky-mapping survey telescope and is perched on a peak next to the Very Large Telescope. It has a 13.5-foot mirror and a three-ton, 67-megapixel camera. The result is a sensitivity 40 times greater than previous infrared surveyors, which will provide a whole new look at the southern sky, as these first VISTA images released to the public show.

The Flame Nebula, pictured above,  is a cloud of ionized gas located around 1,000 light-years away in the Orion constellation. Below, around 1 million stars are pictured in the constellation Sagittarius, also known as the Archer, deep in the dense core of the Milky Way. The view is much different than a visible-light telescope would offer. Below that is the Fornax Galaxy Cluster.

Images: ESO/Vista

See Also:

• Glorious and Ghostly New Photo of Swan Nebula Star Birth
• Spectacular Wide-Field View of Eagle Nebula in High-Res
• Star Factory Shows Off Three Kinds of Nebulae
• Zoom In on Lagoon Nebula with Super-High-Res Image
• Violent Star-Forming Nebula Caught by Spitzer Telescope
• Beautiful New Nebulae Images from the Very Large Telescope
• The Design of Extremely Large Telescopes
• Titanic 30-Meter Telescope Will See Deep Space More Clearly
• How to Truck 66 200,000-Pound Antennas to 16,000 Feet

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Dec 2009 | 4:00 am

'Baby-faced' people live longer

People blessed with youthful faces are more likely to live to an old age than those who look more than their years, work shows.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Dec 2009 | 3:01 am