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Mussel-inspired 'glue' for fetal membrane repairA sealant inspired by mussels' ability to stick to surfaces under wet conditions has shown promise in the repair of defects in human fetal membranes, according to a new study. During a pregnancy, such defects -- ruptures or holes -- can lead to the leakage of amniotic fluid, resulting in premature labor or termination of the pregnancy. In tests, the new sealant was found to be biocompatible and effective at sealing the tiny holes.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm Ice is 'rotten' in the Beaufort SeaRecent observations show that Beaufort Sea ice was not as it appeared in the summer of 2009. Sea ice cover serves as an indication of climate and has implications for marine and terrestrial ecosystems. In early September 2009, satellite measurements implied that most of the ice in the Beaufort Sea either was thick ice that had been there for multiple years or was thick, first-year ice. However, in situ observations made in September 2009 show that much of the ice was in fact "rotten" ice -- ice that is thinner, heavily decayed, and structurally weak due to a uniform temperature throughout.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm Neuron connections seen in 3-DScientists have managed to obtain 3-D images of the vesicles and filaments involved in communication between neurons. The method is based on a novel technique in electron microscopy, which cools cells so quickly that their biological structures can be frozen while fully active.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm HIV infection prematurely ages the brainHIV infection or the treatments used to control it are prematurely aging the brain, researchers have found. Blood flow in the brains of HIV patients is reduced to levels normally seen in uninfected patients 15 to 20 years older.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm Cervical cancer: Combined drug and radiotherapy improves survivalCombining drugs and radiotherapy improves the survival chances of women receiving treatment for cervical cancer. These are the conclusions of researchers who carried out the most comprehensive study of the effects of combined drug and radiotherapy in cervical cancer treatment to date.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm Malnutrition higher in children born to child bridesInfants born to child brides in India (married before the age of 18) have a higher risk of malnutrition than children born to older mothers, according to new research.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 3:00 pm Soccer injuries: Cleat-natural grass combination may be less likely to result in anterior cruciate ligament injuryAthletes put less strain on their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) while making a cut on a natural grass surface while wearing a cleat. This is the conclusion from a study that tested the strain placed on the ACL of four different shoe-surface interactions: Astroturf/turf shoe, modern playing turf/turf shoe, modern turf/cleat, and natural grass/cleat.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am Simple steps prevent life-threatening bloodstream infections in childrenPediatric hospitals can significantly decrease the number of bloodstream infections from central venous catheters by following some low-tech rules: insert the catheter correctly and, above all, keep everything squeaky clean after that.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am Spectacular X-ray tails surprise astronomersAstronomer were surprised to find two distinct "tails" found on a long tail of gas that is believed to be forming stars where few stars have been formed before. What is also unusual is the gas tail, which is more than 200,000 light years in length, extends well outside any galaxy.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am Stress peptide and receptor may have role in diabetesThe neuropeptide corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) makes cameo appearances throughout the body, but its leading role is as the opening act in the stress response, jump-starting the process along the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. Researchers have found that CRF also plays a part in the pancreas, where it increases insulin secretion and promotes the division of the insulin-producing beta cells.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 9:00 am The nation's weather (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 23 Jan 2010 | 3:12 am Rare warbler found in AfghanistanScientists say they have discovered a breeding site for the world's least-known bird species in a remote part of Afghanistan.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Jan 2010 | 7:44 pm This column will change your life: Short cuts for taking everyday decisionsEveryday decisions are often the ones that we find most problematical. So why not have a few short cuts to help you reach the right ones? I feel slightly sorry for Suzy Welch, the self-help guru behind the book 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea. Welch's "10-10-10" method for taking decisions (not to be confused with the 10:10 climate campaign or, for that matter, 1010, the year Beowulf was probably written) is genuinely wise. When faced with any dilemma, she advises, ask yourself: what will the consequences be in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years? This process "surfaces our unconscious agendas", Welch claims, though what it most obviously does is properly balance short- and long-term perspectives, avoiding both hedonistic impulsiveness and a grim-faced fixation with the future. "Sound simple? Not quite," warns the book's publicity material. Actually, though, it is simple. That's its strength – but it also means that, unsportingly, I've now told you everything important in the book. That I can do this so briefly is surely, sales-wise, a problem. Yet decision-making tricks such as 10-10-10 ought to be ridiculously simple, because we need them most when it comes to addressing the countless minor dilemmas that crowd our days. Momentous life-choices, by contrast, can be dwelt on and discussed with friends. But it's a curious fact that many people seem to find the insignificant choices at least as paralysing as the big ones – a truth I've had many opportunities to ponder while waiting for my father, not an indecisive man on the macro level, to agonise over toppings at PizzaExpress. Here are three more short cuts for taking everyday decisions: 1) 5-3-1: A dependable tactic for two people choosing a restaurant or movie: one person picks five options, the other narrows the field to three, then the first person selects one. This "has saved me and my girlfriend from starving to death on more than one occasion", writes one commenter at ask.metafilter.com. Hint: couples should agree in advance to use this rule, so that "whether or not to use 5-3-1" doesn't become a dilemma itself. 2) Be a satisficer, not a maximiser: "Satisficing", coined by the economist Herbert Simon, means not letting the best be the enemy of the good. But it's more rigorous than that. Rather than trying to pick the best bed-and-breakfast, for example, decide first on the criteria that matter most – "near woodland", "serves a great breakfast" and "in Wales", perhaps – then select the first one you encounter that ticks all the boxes. This is far less exhausting, and may actually bring you closer to the "best", by focusing your mind on what matters, rather than alluring advertising or other distractions. 3) The 37% Rule. This is for sequential choices, where each option must be accepted or rejected in turn – as in flat-hunting, where an option may vanish if you hesitate, or, say, choosing where to picnic while hiking (assuming you don't want to retrace your steps). Provided you can estimate the total number of options – the number of flats you're prepared to look at, the number of potential picnic spots – it's a weird mathematical truth that your best bet is to reject the first 37% of them, then pick the first one that's better than any of those first 37%. (If none is, pick the final one instead.) According to an article in Lecture Notes In Economics And Mathematical Systems, this can be applied to choosing a mate, too. But maybe that journal's not the greatest place to look for dating tips. oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Jan 2010 | 5:10 pm Animal research study shows many tests are full of flawsWhether you support or detest such experiments, it's important to know if they are well conducted Like many people, you're possibly afraid to share your views on animal experiments, because you don't want anyone digging up your grandmother's grave, or setting fire to your house, or stuff like that. Animal experiments are necessary, they need to be properly regulated, and we have some of the tightest regulation in the world. But it's easy to assess whether animals are treated well, or to assess whether an experiment was necessary. In the nerd corner there is another issue: is the research well conducted, and are the results properly communicated? If it's not, then animals have suffered – whatever you believe that might mean for an animal – partly in vain. The National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research was set up by the government in 2004. It has published, in the academic journal PLoS One, a systematic survey of the quality of reporting, experimental design and statistical analysis of recently published biomedical research using laboratory animals. It's so not good. But the study is pretty solid. The papers they found covered a huge range of publicly funded research, behavioural and diet studies, drug and chemical testing, immunological experiments, and more. Some of the flaws they found were bizarre. Four per cent of papers didn't mention how many animals were used in the experiment, anywhere. The researchers looked in detail at 48 studies that did say how many they used: not one explained why they had chosen their particular number of animals. Thirty-five per cent of the papers gave one figure for the number of animals used in the methods, and then a different number of animals appeared in the results. That's pretty disorganised. They looked at how many studies used basic strategies to reduce bias in their results, like randomisation and blinding. If you're comparing one intervention against another, for example, and you don't randomly assign animals to each group, then it's possible you might unconsciously put the stronger animals in the group getting a potentially beneficial experimental intervention, or vice versa, thus distorting your results. If you don't "blind", then you know, as the experimenter, which animals had which intervention. So you might allow that knowledge, even unconsciously, to affect close calls on measurements you take. Or maybe you'll accept a high blood pressure reading when you expected it to be high, knowing what you do about your own experiment, but then double check a high blood pressure measurement in an animal where you expected it to be low. Only 12% of the animal studies used randomisation. Only 14% used blinding. And the reporting was often poor. Only 8% gave the raw data, allowing you to go back and do your own analysis. About half the studies left the numbers of animals in each group out of their tables. I grew up friends with the daughters of Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist in Oxford who spoke out to defend animal research at great personal risk. My first kiss – not one of these sisters, I should say – was outside a teenage party in a church hall, in front of two special branch officers sitting in a car with their lights off. People who threaten the lives of 15-year-old girls, to shut their father up, are beneath contempt. People who fail to damn these threats are similarly contemptible. That's why it sticks in the throat to say that the reporting and conduct of animal research is often poor; but we have to be more grown up. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Jan 2010 | 5:07 pm Family under the microscopeNature v nurture – what are the latest genetic findings? The nature-nurture debate remains a hardy perennial for parents: why are siblings so different to each other? The latest evidence makes it look increasingly likely that genes play little or no part. Many naturally incline to the cosy answer that "it's a bit of both" but the evidence I presented eight years ago in my book They F*** You Up already showed that, even if you accepted the validity of studies of identical twins (which I do not) on which nearly all claims about the role of genes were based, they did not support this idea. For the vast majority of common traits, such as sociability, memory or creativity, heritability was closer to a quarter. Then came the findings of the Human Genome Project in 2001. To the horror of geneticists, Craig Venter, one of the main researchers, pointed out that the fact that we only have about 25,000 genes meant psychological differences between individuals could not be much determined by them – "our environments are critical," he concluded. Initially, geneticists disputed this, but the last decade has seen an increasingly rapid retreat. After many millions of pounds and thousands of studies, attempts to identify genes that have much effect on our psychology have failed. The most distinguished researchers now admit that it is extremely unlikely that there are single genes for major mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. After decades of hearing from such people that there would be a gene for almost everything, I admit to having felt a twinge of smugness. Their fallback position is that it's lots of different genes interacting together that matters, but that much remains to be seen. And now comes the first sign that the geneticists may eventually have to admit defeat. This month's editorial of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry is entitled "It's the environment, stupid!". The author, Edmund Sonuga-Barke, confesses that "serious science is now more than ever focused on the power of the environment … all but the most dogged of genetic determinists have revised their view of the primacy of genetic factors." In Sonuga-Barke's own field, ADHD, he states that "even the most comprehensive genome-wide scans available, with thousands of patients using hundreds of thousand of genetic markers … appear to account for a relatively small proportion of disorder expression." In plain English, genes hardly explain at all why some children have ADHD and not others. Another fallback is to claim that genes create vulnerabilities that environments may or may not cause to be expressed. This position took a massive blow at the end of last year. Some studies had shown that people with a particular gene variant were more likely to become depressed if they were maltreated as children: the variant created a vulnerability. This was all but disproved. An analysis of the 14,250 people whose DNA had been mapped in 14 studies showed that those with the variant were not at greater risk of depression than those without it. Nor were they more likely to be depressed when the variant was combined with childhood maltreatment. In Darwinian terms, it has always made much more sense that we should be born plastic. Obviously, genes confer fundamentals, such as the capacity for humour or anger, but how much and how we express these is in response to our particular family situation, for which we need flexibility, not predetermination. If genes play little part in how our children turn out, that is incredibly good news. Unlike our DNA, we can do something about them. Sonuga-Barke: 2010, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51, 113-5 Depression vulnerability: Risch, B et al, JAMA, 301, 2,462-2,471. More Oliver James at selfishcapitalist.com guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Jan 2010 | 5:05 pm Symmetry in the Subatomic World?For all its flaws, The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, has done more than any other book to publicize the so-called "divine proportion," "golden ratio," or in mathematical terminology, simply phi. It pops up all over the place, in ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Jan 2010 | 4:55 pm Bigger, Better Telescopes Needed to Find Near-Earth Asteroids
If we’re going to protect the Earth from an asteroid, we need to find the dangerous ones whizzing about in the emptiness of space. Unfortunately, the United States will not complete the survey of large near-Earth objects by 2020 as mandated, but not funded, by Congress in 2005. That’s the conclusion of a new National Resource Council Report, Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies, released Friday. The current budget and astronomical tools are just not sufficient to find all near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters (460 feet) across. Better telescopes than we currently have will be needed. While this has been known within the NEO science community, the final report could bring the realization to the policymakers and politicians who control the purse strings. “There’s no longer time to meet the goal by 2020,” said Michael A’Hearn, a University of Maryland astronomer and co-author of the report. “There’s no way to do the survey in that length of time because the equipment isn’t even built yet. We say it is not unreasonable to set a new deadline of 2030 and start funding now. We probably can do the job by then.” Despite the large number of NEO discoveries over the past several years, our current detection instruments like the Catalina Sky Survey, are not up to the task of completing the Congressional mandate, known as the Gordon Brown Survey. “The current instruments, no matter how you operate them are not capable of doing the George Brown survey,” A’Hearn noted. And that’s to say nothing of the smaller asteroids, those in the 30- and 50-meter (90 to 165 foot) range, which hit Earth far more often than larger objects. Finding and tracking those little guys will require new telescopes like the Large Synoptic Sky Survey and Panstarrs, neither of which currently has the funding to complete construction.
Scientists have increasingly come to understand that the risk of asteroids and comets hitting Earth is real, but quantifying the risk that humans face from such events is much trickier. “Our estimates of the risk could easily be wrong by a factor of two or three,” A’Hearn said. “I don’t think they are wrong by a factor of 10, but the boundaries, again, haven’t been explored.” Even the Tunguska asteroid, which exploded over Siberia in 1908, remains something of a mystery. It’s unclear even how large the object was, A’Hearn said, which makes it difficult to know how common such an impact is. The rareness of the event makes it very tough to compare the risk from an asteroid strike with that from automobile collisions or other prosaic problems. Right now, National Research Council scientists estimate the risk of being killed by an NEO impact is comparable to the risk of being one of the 50 or so people who die on an amusement park ride each year. The difference is that a major asteroid would kill many people all at once. Another area of high uncertainty is the physics of asteroid impacts. Near-Earth objects of different types may require different mitigation strategies. “The first thing we need to do is understand what the hazard is,” A’Hearn said. “That’s partly finding them and partly understanding what their effect is. We have to understand in more detail how we’d mitigate against them.” Former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, a tireless campaigner for asteroid risk awareness, said the latest report was the best of its kind, surpassing an earlier NASA report to Congress on near-Earth object risk. “I can certainly say that Irwin Shapiro, who I know very well personally, did a terrific job in putting this review together,” Schweickart said. Lindley Johnson, program executive at NASA’s Near Earth Object Program, which wrote the NASA report agreed. “It looks to be a very good report,” Johnson said. “It had a very strong team of top scientists in the area on the committee. They had the right people and it looks like they looked at all the right things.” Differences begin to emerge between people who study near-Earth objects when mitigation options come up. The new report looks at two main ways of deflecting asteroids, following previous reports. First, the asteroid could be hit with some kind of impactor, either conventional or nuclear. Second, a longer-term, more precise technique like a gravity tractor could be employed. Schweickart argued, however, that a gravity tractor, which would slowly push an asteroid off a collision path with Earth, should be considered a necessary but not independent part of any Earth defense. “It’s the icing on the cake of stronger deflection needs,” Schweickart said. “It’s not comparable to and should never be considered the primary means of deflection.” Image: U.S. Geological Survey/Composite: Tim Warchocki See Also:
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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Jan 2010 | 4:51 pm Sale of helium poses supply risk, panel findsWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The sell-off of the federal strategic helium reserve has driven up demand for the vital element and poses a threat to the supply that researchers need, a panel of U.S. experts reported on Friday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 22 Jan 2010 | 4:38 pm Wild Black Bear Cubs to be Born Live on the InternetRemember the puppy cam craze of 2008? Well, the internet and folks at the North American Bear Center in Minnesota have upped the ante. They are filming Lily, the three year-old black bear and expectant mother in an around-the-clock investigation ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Jan 2010 | 4:36 pm LA's flood-control system holding up in storms (AP)AP - Despite a week of heavy rain on mountains stripped dangerously bare by wildfires, thousands of homes have so far been spared from deluges of mud and rocks by a network of sprawling basins that act as huge bathtubs to safely catch debris.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jan 2010 | 4:22 pm Driving Impairs Talking (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - It's well known that talking on a cell phone distracts a driver and increases the risk of a crash. Turns out driving distracts us from listening and talking, too.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jan 2010 | 4:16 pm Driving Impairs TalkingDriving distracts us from listening and talking.Source: Livescience.com | 22 Jan 2010 | 4:01 pm Earth Not Properly Protected from Asteroids (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - The United States must do more to safeguard the Earth against destruction by an asteroid than merely prepping nuclear missiles, a new report has found.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jan 2010 | 4:00 pm Removing Part of Skull Makes for Better Brain Scans
Removing a chunk of the skull can make way for stronger, clearer signals from a common method of monitoring brainwaves. The skull-free electroencephalography could make neural prostheses like bionic arms or eyes less invasive. “It’s notoriously hard to have a long-term electrode implanted in the brain,” said University of California at Berkeley neuroscientist Bradley Voytek, lead author of the study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. So if you can get around that by just having a small hole drilled into the skull, that would be very helpful.” Doctors sometimes treat patients who have suffered severe head trauma, such as gunshot or knife wounds, with what is known as a hemicraniectomy. A surgeon cuts out a chunk of skull that’s the diameter of an orange or grapefruit, to give the brain room to swell. Surgeons usually reattach the piece of bone four to six months later, once the swelling has subsided and the skin has healed. In the meantime, the patient’s scalp and a helmet protect the exposed area. And doctors stitch the skull fragment into the abdomen, “bathed in the body’s own fluids,” to prevent it from deteriorating, Voytek said.
Voytek’s team took advantage of this brief window of time to compare EEG signals from people with and without the skull as a barrier. Patients performed simple tasks like squeezing a person’s hand or listening to an “oddball stimulus” of three low-pitched sounds followed by a higher one, he said. During these tasks the team measured a patient’s brain waves on both sides of his head. On one side, just a thin flap of skin separated the brain from the EEG electrode, while on the other side the skull was intact. Signals from the skull-free side were, unsurprisingly, much stronger, less noisy and easier to pinpoint to a specific task and region of the brain. UC Berkeley psychologist Robert Knight, a co-author of the study, first noticed 28 years ago that EEG signals from patients with holes drilled in their heads “looked really weird because they were freakishly strong,” Voytek said. But he only thought to quantify the difference after he saw the unusually strong EEG signals from a recent hemicraniectomy patient, one who was brought in clinically dead but revived with the surgery. “It provides insight into the signal properties [and] how hybrid implants might capture very local activity in the brain which is inaccessible from the surface of the head,” neuroscientist Kai Miller of the University of Washington wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “These might be captured by placing devices beneath the skull, but without invading the subdural space.” Implanting electrodes requires cutting through the dura, the outermost protective layer of the brain, which can cause scar tissue and damage nearby neurons, Voytek said. “If someone’s had a stroke or they’re paralyzed, in the future, the goal of the surgeon is to be able to implant the electrodes into the person’s brain.” Placing an implant between the skull and the dura may make neural implants less dangerous. Via Mind Hacks Image: CT reconstruction of the skull, with fMRI of the brain. EEG signals in color. Citation: “Hemicraniectomy: A New Model for Human Electrophysiology with High Spatio-temporal Resolution,” by Bradley Voytek, Lavi Secundo, Aurelie Bidet-Caulet, Donatella Scabini, Shirley I. Stiver, Alisa D. Gean, Geoffrey T. Manley and Robert T. Knight, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. See Also:
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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Jan 2010 | 3:57 pm Black bear on Internet gives birth to cub in Minn. (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jan 2010 | 3:41 pm Friday News Feedbag for January 22, 2010If this is your first exposure to the Friday News Feedbag...we're glad to have you in the club. Welcome to Feedbag Nation, which stems from our weekly science news podcast that you can subscribe to here on iTunes and chat ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Jan 2010 | 3:21 pm Obama vows to fight for jobs in retooled message (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jan 2010 | 3:02 pm NASA to Boost Speed of Deep Space Communications (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - Rovers and deep space probes can forget about quickly posting cool high-definition videos to YouTube, given the painfully slow data transfer rates for most of today's space missions.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jan 2010 | 2:30 pm Cars without DriversMeet Boss - the car that can drive itself! It has 18 sensors, including a three dimensional laser and onboard computers that connect to GPS and mapping software. When it comes to knowing the rules of the road, Boss rarely makes a mistake.Source: Livescience.com | 22 Jan 2010 | 2:20 pm Internet Freedom and Human Rights 2.0Is unfettered Internet access a fundamental human right? Given their recent -- and widely covered -- spat with China over censorship laws, Google appears to assert that Internet censorship is an important enough issue to pull out of the People's ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Jan 2010 | 2:01 pm Let Slime Mold Pick the RouteJapanese scientists have made a curious discovery with a fungus-like form of slime mold. Transportation planners, take note, because the mold could save us some money. Postdoc Atsushi Tero of Hokkaido University and a team of Japanese and British researchers ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Jan 2010 | 1:52 pm New Hi-Res Flyover of Haiti Will Aid Recovery and Research
New three-dimensional radar and hi-resolution aerial images of Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas to be released starting Friday could boost both recovery and research efforts in Haiti in the wake of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck on Jan. 12. Satellite images and aerial photos have been important resources, but the flatness of those images makes it hard for viewers to identify what they’re looking at. “We have dozens of points located along [a satellite image of] the fault with annotations after these points saying things like, ‘I don’t know. This may be a footpath or maybe it is a fracture,’” said U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist Ken Hudnut, who’s been trying to map the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault that caused the earthquake. “With the resolution of the [old] imagery … it’s hard to be conclusive.”
The preliminary 6-inch resolution data shows enormous refugee areas dotted with brightly colored red and blue tents. “You can’t miss them,” said Stefi Baum, director of RIT’s imaging-science center. It also shows rubble piled precariously along hillsides, which could amplify the threat of mudslides. “Everything is OK until the rainy season,” Baum said. “But then all of that rubble will just flow down those structures.” The data they gather will also help identify access roads that have been cut off by debris, broken bridges and unstable buildings that remain standing, as well as provide much clearer images of the fault, said RIT remote-sensing specialist Jan van Aardt, one of the project’s coordinators.
Scientists studying Haiti are most excited about the LiDAR instrument, which emits a pulse of light and then measures how fast that light takes to return to the aircraft. Because data from taller points will arrive faster than data from lower points, the points stitch together to form a 3-dimensional snapshot of the scene. “You can almost hold up your fist in the middle of the air and assign it an ‘X’ a ‘Y’ and a ‘Z’ [coordinate],” van Aardt said. “You can think of LiDAR data as millions of such positions … each with an X a Y and a Z coordinate.” Those points will also be tied to geographic coordinates to help people pinpoint specific locations on the ground. Sorting out the logistics of the $200,000 World Bank-funded project has been challenging, van Aardt said. Because of limited air space in Haiti, the team will be based in Puerto Rico and refuel every four hours in the Dominican Republic. Every night, researchers at the University of Puerto Rico will help the RIT team transfer the aerial images to Rochester and the huge LiDAR data files to Kucera International aerial imaging company in Ohio, where they will be processed. Then the images will be made public. Companies, such as GoogleEarth, Microsoft and Yahoo, have all expressed interest in uploading this data, said Ron Eguchi, CEO of ImageCat, a California-based company that specializes in disaster management, and an RIT partner. Because RIT’s team plans to assess damage in Port-au-Prince first, Hudnut will likely have to wait a day or two to receive images of the Enriquillo fault, which lies just outside the city. The new data could reveal major ruptures along the fault. With no such ruptures currently visible, Hudnut and his colleagues are worried that the ground beneath Port-au-Prince remains under a great deal of stress that could potentially trigger another, even larger earthquake. “Our dour view of the situation is that it looks like where the fault broke is pretty far to the west and we’re now concerned that it didn’t rupture in the eastern part,” Hudnut said. Because the possibility of another major earthquake of equal or greater magnitude remains low — around 3 percent over the next 30 days — even if no major ruptures are found, researchers hope to use these images primarily to create computer models that show how the fault has behaved in the past and how it might behave in the future. For instance, about five years ago, researchers used LiDAR data to map the San Andreas fault in California. Scientists had previously concluded that an earthquake in 1857 caused the ground to shift 30 feet. But the LiDAR data made clear that the shift was caused not by one, but two, earthquakes. “Past earthquakes … leave their imprint on the Earth,” said Eric Calais, a geophysicist at Purdue University. LiDAR data records those imprints, such as distinctive fracture patterns in rock and furrows in the topography of the land. Scientists should be able to use the Enriquillo images to predict the strength of future earthquakes and calculate how often the fault has ruptured in the past. “Then this information can be used to prepare a city, prepare a country,” Calais says. We will update with 3-D LiDAR images as they become available.
Images: Rochester Institute of Technology Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science. See Also:
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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Jan 2010 | 1:44 pm Is Another Haiti Quake Coming? USGS Releases Risk EstimateAs if Haiti hasn't been through enough already, it looks like there is still more to come. The United States Geological Survey said yesterday that while the probability of another magnitude 7.0 earthquake in the next month is low -- ...Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 22 Jan 2010 | 1:02 pm Why Human Blood Drives Mosquitoes WildHuman blood contains sent-producing compounds that lure mosquitoes, scientists findSource: Livescience.com | 22 Jan 2010 | 12:58 pm Slime Mold Grows Network Just Like Tokyo Rail System
Talented and dedicated engineers spent countless hours designing Japan’s rail system to be one of the world’s most efficient. Could have just asked a slime mold.
Every day, the rail network around Tokyo has to meet the demands of mass transport, ferrying millions of people between distant points quickly and reliably, notes study coauthor Mark Fricker of the University of Oxford. “In contrast, the slime mold has no central brain or indeed any awareness of the overall problem it is trying to solve, but manages to produce a structure with similar properties to the real rail network.”
The yellow slime mold Physarum polycephalum grows as a single cell that is big enough to be seen with the naked eye. When it encounters numerous food sources separated in space, the slime mold cell surrounds the food and creates tunnels to distribute the nutrients. In the experiment, researchers led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki, of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, placed oat flakes (a slime mold delicacy) in a pattern that mimicked the way cities are scattered around Tokyo, then set the slime mold loose.
The researchers then borrowed simple properties from the slime mold’s behavior to create a biology-inspired mathematical description of the network formation. Like the slime mold, the model first creates a fine mesh network that goes everywhere, and then continuously refines the network so that the tubes carrying the most cargo grow more robust and redundant tubes are pruned. The behavior of the plasmodium “is really difficult to capture by words,” comments biochemist Wolfgang Marwan of Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany. “You see they optimize themselves somehow, but how do you describe that?” The new research “provides a simple mathematical model for a complex biological phenomenon,” Marwan wrote in an article in the same issue of Science. Fricker points out that such a malleable system may be useful for creating networks that need to change over time, such as short-range wireless systems of sensors that would provide early warnings of fire or flood. Because these sensors are destroyed when disaster strikes, the network needs to efficiently re-route information quickly. Decentralized, adaptable networks would also be important for soldiers in battlefields or swarms of robots exploring hazardous environments, Fricker says. The new model may also help researchers answer biological questions, such as how blood vessels grow to support tumors, Fricker says. A tumor’s network of vessels start out as a dense, unstructured tangle, and then refine their connections to be more efficient. Images: Science/AAAS See Also:
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Examples of non-native species causing problems in the UK include grey squirrels, whose spread has led to widespread declines in red squirrels, the rampant plant Japanese knotweed, American signal crayfish and water primroses. The study said that, globally, the increase and spread of invasive species is the result of a substantial rise in international trade in the past 25 years. In some places invasive species are driving native wildlife towards extinction, for example in New Zealand where the yellowhead bird is now endangered because of a surge in the number of rats, while the chytrid fungus is spreading around the world causing massive declines in amphibians. There are examples of success stories, in which threatened wildlife has bounced back after control measures were taken against the invasive species. 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"This shows that although we are winning some battles in the fight against invasive species, current evidence suggests that we are losing the war." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Jan 2010 | 4:14 am Nature crisis 'must be tackled'This year's UN biodiversity agreement is likely to hone in on the underlying causes of nature degradation.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Jan 2010 | 2:17 am
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On Thursday, 
Initially, the slime mold dispersed evenly around the oat flakes, exploring its new territory. But within hours, the slime mold began to refine its pattern, strengthening the tunnels between oat flakes while the other links gradually disappeared. After about a day, the slime mold had constructed a network of interconnected nutrient-ferrying tubes. Its design looked almost identical to that of the rail system surrounding Tokyo, with a larger number of strong, resilient tunnels connecting centrally located oats. “There is a remarkable degree of overlap between the two systems,” Fricker says.
