Bees with an impaired insulin partner gene prefer proteins over carbs

A new study of food-choice behavior in honey bees has identified a gene involved in bees' decisions to bring protein or nectar back to the colony. By taking control of the insulin receptor substrate gene, an insulin partner gene in the bees' fat cells, researchers made the insects forego carbohydrates (sugar-containing nectar) and favor protein (pollen).
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Bile sends mixed signals to E. coli

Bile secretions in the small intestine send signals to disease-causing gut bacteria allowing them to change their behavior to maximize their chances of surviving, according to new research. The findings could allow us to better protect food from contamination by these harmful bacteria, as well as understand how they manage to cause disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Novel interventional radiology treatment with microspheres shows promise for liver cancer patients

An interventional radiology treatment -- the use of intra-arterial yttrium-90 microspheres for liver cancer (also known as hepatocellular carcinoma) -- shows promise in prolonging life for many patients with this devastating condition, according to researchers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

World’s smallest microlaser could revolutionize chip technology

Physicists have developed a new kind of laser that shatters the boundaries of possibility: it is by far the smallest electrically pumped laser in the world and one day could revolutionize chip technology.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Endocrine disruptors: Babies absorb the most bisphenol A

The hormonally active substance bisphenol A is contained in many synthetic and packaging materials. As a result, the substance can find its way into the food chain and the human organism. Just who is exposed and to what extent is shown in a new study: babies who are fed with polycarbonate bottles are especially at risk.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

This is your brain on Cryptococcus: Pathogenic fungus loves your brain sugar

Highly dangerous Cryptococcus fungi love sugar and will consume it anywhere because it helps them reproduce. To borrow inositol from a person's brain, the fungi have an expanded set of genes that encode for sugar transporter molecules. While a typical fungus has just two such genes, Cryptococcus have almost a dozen, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Flu jab for bacteria

Viruses can wreak havoc on bacteria as well as humans and, just like us, bacteria have their own defense system in place. Uncovering the workings of the bacterial "immune system" could be used to keep industrial microbes at peak performance.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Form or function? Evolution takes different paths, genetic study shows

Biologists long have known that both the appearance of organisms and their inner workings are shaped by evolution. But do the same genetic mechanisms underlie changes in form and function? A new study suggests not.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Clue to cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis revealed in new genetic study

Researchers have discovered a fifth genetic mutation associated with typical motor neuron disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), that has a similar pathological effect to certain genetic mutations revealed in earlier studies. Ultimately, the researchers hope that understanding what is causing motor neuron disease (MND), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, will lead to new avenues for treatment.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Potential new use for cancer treatment

New research suggests anti-angiogenic drugs may help in the treatment of a range of diseases including visceral leishmaniasis.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Charities warm to climate

Philanthropic support for climate-change issues tripled in 2008.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/xvakLBuhhzY" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 6 Apr 2010 | 7:15 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Severe weather was anticipated in New England, while most of the Midwest would see rainy conditions Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 3:03 am

Australian bush fire survivor victim of rare wombat attack

A survivor of Australia's 2009 bush fires falls victim to a rare wombat attack, before killing the animal with an axe.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Apr 2010 | 2:11 am

The Black Hole That Ate My Earth

Just for fun -- and for all you 2012 Mayan calendar and Nostradamus doomsday soothsayers -- what would happen if the LHC went haywire and a permanent black hole were really made?
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 6 Apr 2010 | 1:42 am

Antenna failure hampers crew's shuttle inspection (AP)

AP - Discovery's astronauts surveyed their ship Tuesday for signs of launch damage, but the job was complicated by the failure of the space shuttle's big dish antenna.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 1:15 am

Velociraptor 'caught' eating dino

Fossil fragments reveal a predatory Velociraptor caught in the act of eating another larger plant-eating dinosaur.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Apr 2010 | 1:09 am

Our narrow, antiquated school system is at the root of the climate email fiasco | George Monbiot

Learning forced into silos of humanities and science has created closed worlds of specialists who just don't understand each other

The MPs were kind to Professor Phil Jones. During its hearings, the Commons science and technology committee didn't even ask the man at the centre of the hacked climate emails crisis about the central charge he faces: that he urged other scientists to delete material subject to a freedom of information request. Last week the committee published its report, and blamed his university for the "culture of non-disclosure" over which Jones presided.

Perhaps the MPs were swayed by the disastrous performance of his boss at the hearings. Edward Acton, the vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia, came across as flamboyant, slippery and insincere. Jones, on the other hand, seemed both deathly dull and painfully honest. How could this decent, nerdy man have messed up so badly?

None of it made sense: the intolerant dismissal of requests for information, the utter failure to engage when the hacked emails were made public, the refusal by other scientists to accept that anything was wrong. Then I read an article by the computer scientist Steve Easterbrook, and for the first time the light began to dawn.

Easterbrook, seeking to defend Jones and his colleagues, describes a closed culture in which the rest of the world is a tedious and incomprehensible distraction. "Scientists normally only interact with other scientists. We live rather sheltered lives … to a scientist, anyone stupid enough to try to get scientific data through repeated FoI requests quite clearly deserves our utter contempt. Jones was merely expressing (in private) a sentiment that most scientists would share – and extreme frustration with people who clearly don't get it."

When I read that, I was struck by the gulf between our worlds. To those of us who clamoured for freedom of information laws in Britain, FoI requests are almost sacred. The passing of these laws was a rare democratic victory; they're among the few means we possess of ensuring that politicians and public servants are answerable to the public. What scientists might regard as trivial and annoying, journalists and democracy campaigners see as central and irreducible. We speak in different tongues and inhabit different worlds.

I know how it happens. Like most people with a science degree, I left university with a store of recondite knowledge that I could share with almost no one. Ill-equipped to understand any subject but my own, I felt cut off from the rest of the planet. The temptation to retreat into a safe place was almost irresistible. Only the extreme specialisation demanded by a PhD, which would have walled me in like an anchorite, dissuaded me.

I hated this isolation. I had a passionate interest in literature, history, foreign languages and the arts, but at the age of 15 I'd been forced, like all students, to decide whether to study science or humanities. From that point we divided into two cultures, and the process made idiots of us all. Perhaps eventually we'll split into two species. Reproducing only with each other, scientists will soon become so genetically isolated that they'll no longer be able to breed with other humans.

We all detest closed worlds: the Vatican and its dismissal of the paedophilia scandals as "idle chatter"; the Palace of Westminster, whose members couldn't understand the public outrage about their expenses; the police forces that refuse to discipline errant officers. Most of us would endorse George Bernard Shaw's opinion that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. Much of the public hostility to science arises from the perception that it's owned by a race to which we don't belong.

But science happens to be the closed world with one of the most effective forms of self-regulation: the peer review process. It is also intensely competitive, and the competition consists of seeking to knock each other down. The greatest scientific triumph is to falsify a dominant theory. It happens very rarely, as only those theories which have withstood constant battery still stand. If anyone succeeded in overturning the canon of climate science, they would soon become as celebrated as Newton or Einstein. There are no rewards for agreeing with your colleagues, tremendous incentives to prove them wrong. These are the last circumstances in which a genuine conspiracy could be hatched.

But it is no longer sufficient for scientists to speak only to each other. Painful and disorienting as it is, they must engage with that irritating distraction called the rest of the world. Everyone owes something to the laity, and science would die if it were not for the billions we spend on it. Scientists need make no intellectual concessions, but they have a duty to understand the context in which they operate. It is no longer acceptable for climate researchers to wall themselves off and leave the defence of their profession to other people.

There are signs that this is changing. The prominent climate change scientist Simon Lewis has just sent a long submission to the Press Complaints Commission about misrepresentation in the Sunday Times. The paper claimed that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's contention that global warming could destroy up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest "was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise". It quoted Lewis to suggest he supported the story. The article and its claims were reproduced all over the world.

But the claims were wrong: there is solid scientific research showing damage on this scale is plausible in the Amazon. Lewis claims that the Sunday Times falsely represented his views. He left a comment on the website but it was deleted. He sent a letter to the paper but it wasn't published. Only after he submitted his complaint to the PCC did the Sunday Times respond to him. The paper left a message on his answerphone, which he has made public: "It's been recognised that the story was flawed." After seven weeks of stonewalling him, the Sunday Times offered to run his letter. But it has neither taken down the flawed article nor published a correction.

Good luck to Lewis, but as the PCC's treatment of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal suggests, he's likely to find himself shut out of another closed world – journalism – in which self-regulation manifestly doesn't work. Here's a profession that looks like a conspiracy against the laity even from the inside.

The incomprehension with which science and humanities students regard each other is a tragedy of lost opportunities. Early specialisation might allow us to compete in the ever more specialised labour market, but it equips us for nothing else. As Professor Don Nutbeam, the vice-chancellor of Southampton University, complains: "Young people learn more and more about less and less."

We are deprived by our stupid schooling system of most of the wonders of the world, of the skills and knowledge required to navigate it, above all of the ability to understand each other. Our narrow, antiquated education is forcing us apart like the characters in a Francis Bacon painting, each locked in our boxes, unable to communicate.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 6 Apr 2010 | 1:00 am

Toyota Prius tops Japan's March auto sales (AP)

AP - Toyota's Prius hybrid was Japan's top-selling car in March for an 11th straight month despite global recall woes, an industry group said Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:56 am

Hitachi president says green focus key to recovery (AP)

AP - Money-losing Hitachi will focus on ecological businesses including hybrid railways and batteries for green cars in its latest effort to return to profitability, its new president said Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:55 am

Farming fame

How one man went to hoe, laughing all the way
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:48 am

Barrier Reef route 'outrageous'

Australia's PM Kevin Rudd says it is "outrageous" that a Chinese ship leaking oil near the Great Barrier Reef was off course.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:27 am

Just how similar are humans to rats?

Overcrowded rat colonies lead to social breakdown and degeneracy. But are humans the same?

Individuals can be heroic, even God-like, but crowds are animals. Put us in the plural and we become a herd, a rat race, a swarm of worker bees. Groups apparently behave worse, too: at the end of last year, the London Assembly published a report describing how commuters on the packed (sardine-like, if you will) underground adopted a "dog-eat-dog" attitude. One passenger told researchers, "I'm a different animal on the tube to normal life. I'm not me."

The history of how crowds got such a bad name is a long one. We could point to the coming of urbanisation and mass democracy, or the damning theories of groupthink laid out by Freud, and Mussolini's favourite psychologist Gustave Le Bon. The most intriguing contribution of all, however, comes from John Calhoun and his experiments on rats.

As a scientist for the US government from the 1950s to the 1980s, Calhoun was obsessed with testing the psychological effects of crowding. Out in the Maryland countryside, he created a "rodent universe": room-sized pens amply stocked with food, water and bedding. The only restriction Calhoun put on his rats and mice was space – and as they rapidly bred, the "rat utopias" turned into lab versions of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Young male rats formed gangs that preyed on females. Mothers abandoned their babies, then attacked them. Some rats mounted any animal they could. Cleaning the pens, Calhoun's assistants would find discarded rodent skins turned inside out – the creature within had been eaten whole.

All those who saw urban overcrowding as leading to degeneracy could now claim science was on their side. Calhoun would himself begin papers by quoting Malthus's view that "vice and misery impose the ultimate natural limit on the growth of populations". Plenty had been written about how too many people led to the misery of food shortages and disease – but the psychologist had found proof of how it also created a "behavioural sink" of vice.

As a result, he'd also found international renown. In a recent paper titled Escaping the Laboratory: the Rodent Experiments of John B Calhoun and their Cultural Influence, the historians Ed Ramsden and Jon Adams chart how their subject's reputation took off, with his arguments reported in newspapers and quoted frequently by politicians, architects and urban planners.

Those rat cities and rodent tower blocks also entered the popular culture with almost viral ease. JG Ballard set a novel, High Rise, in a 40-storey development in London's Docklands where the residents descend into barbarism. The creators of the Judge Dredd comic strip acknowledge Calhoun's influence in the depiction of their lawless "megalopolis", Mega City One.

Yet the argument that simply putting lots of humans in close proximity to each other leads to social breakdown has never stacked up. The well-heeled inhabitants of Park Avenue's apartment blocks don't live in the scientist's dystopia; in South Central LA, on the other hand, lack of space isn't a problem, but lack of money is.

Still, the rat experiments have a symbolic power that far outstrips their usefulness. Ramsden and Adams were approached recently by TV producers about a programme on Calhoun. At one point, the proposal was for a human re-enactment of the rat experiments, to pack lots of them in a mini-city. But what, asked the academics, if the subjects began killing each other?

The idea swiftly died, but the producers were on to something; Calhoun's experiments are about as close as mainstream science comes to reality television.

Do B&B owners tend to be homophobic?

The right-thinking, liberal response to Chris Grayling's comments that bed and breakfast owners should, unlike hotel managers, have the right to turn away gay prospective guests, is to point out that this is discriminatory and illegal. As a right-thinking liberal, I'm just as predictable.

But what do B&B owners themselves think about sex under their own roofs? MariaLaura Di Domenico and her colleagues have asked that very question – and their findings suggest that, long after the blimpish Grayling has left the Tory front bench, he'll get his share of full English breakfasts.

In a series of more than 30 interviews, B&B owners acknowledged they were uneasy with being relegated to the role of service-provider to passing guests. They wanted to act as hosts in their own homes, rather than run a commercial enterprise. Some did that by turning away guests ("Men with turbans don't get in," as one owner cheerily admitted), or making the decor very personal (with signs asking those using the bathroom to cover up: "Please don't reveal a twinkling bum/For that would really upset mum!").

Policing guests' sexual behaviour was, some claimed, an excellent way for a B&B owner to show they were in charge. Putting a gay couple into two single rooms, as one admitted doing, was part of that. Homophobic? Certainly – but even the less Fawlty-esque owners wanted to feel like the people sleeping in their beds were guests in their own home – who just happened to pay £70 a night.

"I had a couple once who stayed up in their room all day . . . don't you tell me they were sleeping," one owner complained to the researchers. "I think that's a bit much, to be honest. Not that I want to tell people what to do with their time."

Well, quite.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 6 Apr 2010 | 12:00 am

Pharma seeks genetic clues to healthy aging

LONDON (Reuters) - They may be a little wrinkly, and there may not be many of them, but centenarians are the fastest growing demographic in the developed world.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 11:53 pm

Flocking together - why do birds mimic other species?

Scientists believe they are a step closer to discovering why some species of bird mimic the sounds made by other birds.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Apr 2010 | 11:50 pm

Millions of Sea Turtles Captured, Killed by Fisheries

Six out of seven of the world's marine turtle species are at risk of extinction. Fisheries aren't helping.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 5 Apr 2010 | 10:05 pm

In social dealings, being older is being wiser (AP)

AP - It turns out grandma was right: Listen to your elders. New research indicates they are indeed wise — in knowing how to deal with conflicts and accepting life's uncertainties and change.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 7:33 pm

Words Really Can Hurt (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words ... well, the old adage might need a revision. New research shows that the brain's pain matrix gets activated by pain-related words.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 7:25 pm

Australia questions crew of ship that ran aground (AP)

AP - The crew of a coal-carrying ship that ran aground on Australia's Great Barrier Reef and is leaking oil will be questioned Tuesday about why their vessel was in a restricted area, an official said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 7:19 pm

Predators in Peril -- What's Next for Sharks?

The CITES conservation meeting last month failed to protect shark species in danger of overfishing and habitat loss. What's next for the vulnerable predators?
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 5 Apr 2010 | 7:00 pm

What Are the Most Dangerous Jobs?

Fishing, logging and flying are the three most dangerous occupations.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Apr 2010 | 5:35 pm

Letters: Indian Ocean marine reserve and the Chagossians' right of return

The foreign secretary's announcement (UK sets up marine reserve in controversial area, 2 April) of the establishment of a marine protected area (MPA) around the Chagos archipelago (British Indian Ocean Territory) following the recently completed consultation is welcome news in principle. The area's conservation value is undisputed. However, as John Vidal's article (Good news for the warty sea slug is devastating for Chagos islanders, 30 March) indicates, there are important associated controversies regarding the displaced Chagossians' right of return and Mauritian sovereignty claims. The FCO's unilateral action over the MPA is exacerbating these tensions and unnecessarily undermining what should have been near universal support.

The Mauritian foreign minister is reportedly furious, having repeatedly requested a bilateral approach to the MPA process. Many Chagossians are similarly angered that the "no-take" commercial fishing zone may damage their future livelihood prospects. Their right of return – at least to the outer islands – could easily also have been granted magnanimously as part of the deal, thereby resolving what even the British government admits to have been a shameful historical injustice.

Thursday's announcement repeats earlier assertions that the MPA should not prejudice resolution of either of these issues. Significantly, it also implicitly leaves open the possibility of subsistence fishing and implies that Diego Garcia, site of the massive US military base, will be included within the MPA. However, it ignores the key fact that once established under international conservation instruments, MPA status is hard to change or rescind. Why does the FCO never fail to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity over the Chagos/BIOT?

David Simon

Royal Holloway, Universityof London

• While some Chagossians are undoubtedly concerned by the marine reserve, there are many others who support its establishment. The Pew Environment Group and others supporting protection of the Chagos Islands have been working closely with the Diego Garcian Society, the largest Chagossian group in the UK.

Designation of Chagos as a protected area means the islands and their resources will be protected for the future, whatever it holds. If the Chagossians are one day granted the right to return, conservation arrangements could be modified to accommodate their needs.

Without protection, the Chagos' resources will continue to be damaged and diminished by commercial fishing.

It is difficult to think of anyone other than a few distant water fishing fleets that would be disadvantaged by the protection of the Chagos' resources, whereas millions would be advantaged, including those benefiting from the replenishment of the Western Indian Ocean's marine resources and those benefiting from better climate and marine science.

Alistair Gammell

Pew Environment Group

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 5 Apr 2010 | 5:05 pm

Are 'smart drugs' safe for students?

Students are increasingly taking neuroenhancing drugs to fight fatigue and help them concentrate. But how safe are they – and is it cheating?

It is an all too common story: a diligent student works hard and finally achieves a coveted place at Cambridge University. Once there, the pressure becomes too great and they turn to drugs. These days, however, the old narrative has changed. Instead of the spliffs that apparently so delighted generations of our politicians, the latest fad is for educational, not recreational, drugs.

"It was the summer term of my second year," explains Raj Perera, in his final year of a natural sciences degree at Cambridge University. "I'm an international student, which means my parents are paying £20,000 for every year I am here. That sort of money puts a huge pressure on you. But last summer, I had two weeks to go before my exams, and I had done pretty much no revision. It was a make-or-break moment. So I bought modafinil."

Modafinil is one of the new neuroenhancing "smart drugs" now being taken by growing numbers of students. It was originally developed for the treatment of narcolepsy, but is now used by students to combat fatigue. Another popular choice is Ritalin, originally designed as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Both increase levels of dopamine levels in the brain – and the alertness and wakefulness of those taking them.

So popular have these drugs become that last month Barbara Sahakian, professor of clinical neuropsychology at Cambridge University's psychiatry department, warned that their use has "enormous implications" and that universities must act on them – even mentioning dope testing as one possibility. But this is not happening. "What universities are doing about [them] is nothing," she says.

Last year, Sahakian was co-opted on to a committee, set up by the Medical Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, to look at the use of cognitive enhancing drugs by healthy people. One American study, cited in the journal Nature, estimated that up to 25% of students at some campuses had taken neuroenhancing drugs in the past year.

Many hear of these drugs through friends, others independently. "I read an article in the student press on them," says Lawrence Price, a third-year arts student at Sheffield Hallam University. "It was criticising them, but I thought they sounded great." Perera, similarly, found out about smart drugs through the media. "I read an article in Nature on them," he says. "They seemed a pretty good idea."

Students believe the drugs enable them to do more work. "I take them when I need to get through lectures and I have a terrible hangover," says Price.

At the other extreme, Lucy Makepeace, a postgraduate student at Cambridge, uses them less from a lack of diligence than an excess of it. Extremely hard working, she takes modafinil once or twice a week. "With study, work and sport I have a very full timetable," she says. "I want to do everything, but I don't want to do any of it at a mediocre level. Taking modafinil helps me to do it all."

Perera similarly turned to modafinil from time pressures – which were, in his case, extreme. "Due to difficulty getting my visa last year, I couldn't return at the start of the summer term," he says. "When I eventually got my visa, I arrived back with just a fortnight before my exams, and no revision behind me."

All the students are clear on the drug's effects. "Modafinil increases my enthusiasm for studying," says Perera. "It makes me feel that lazing around is the last thing I want to do." Price agrees: "Modafinil gives me the motivation I would otherwise lack." Makepeace, who clearly doesn't lack motivation, instead takes modafinil to stay alert. "Once I've taken a pill I can stay up all night without stopping. It just works so well," she says. "I need it."

The way the students obtain the drugs varies. Some get them from friends, but many purchase them from online chemists. "I just Googled them," says Perera. "The cost, including shipping, came to about £2 each." "I bought them from an online pharmacy," says Price. "You just sign a disclaimer saying you won't sue them for selling you prescription drugs without a prescription, then they send you them."

Such a convenient process might please the consumer, but it is not one that impresses Sahakian. "When you get a drug off the internet, you don't know what it is, or whether you have some pre-existing condition that means you shouldn't be taking it," she says. "If you get a drug from your GP, they would check that."

Even if the drugs are what they purport to be, they are not risk-free. Such smart drugs have only been developed relatively recently, and, says Sahakian (who has herself researched the effects of modafinil on healthy volunteers), it is therefore too early to feel confident that they are safe. "It's a real worry that students are taking these drugs, as we just don't know whether they are safe in the long term. They're so new. How could we know?"

In addition to concerns about the drugs' physical effects, there are also moral issues. "Do we want to solve all our problems in this way?" Sahakian asks. "There are other ways of coping – like exercise, or sleep." Such methods would not only be physiologically better, but also psychologically. "It's nice to feel that what you have achieved is your achievement. Take a pill and you might not feel that," she says.

For some, chemically enhanced achievement is reprehensible. "Students who are not taking them, feel [to do so] is cheating," says Sahakian. "They feel that [taking these] could just make the difference between a 2.1 and a first. At that point, students who don't want to take them start to feel coerced into doing so because everyone else is." But the accusation of bending the rules is denied unanimously. "I'm not cheating," says Makepeace. "Taking a pill is no different to having a cup of coffee. It's just more effective." Perera agrees: "I don't think this is cheating. I read a nice analogy, which said that people with a bad memory are no different to people who have bad eyesight. You let people with bad eyesight have glasses; why not let people with a bad memory have these pills?"

At present, the actual status of such drug-taking remains undefined by universities, something that Sahakian hopes they will soon address. "Universities need to think about whether they want their students to be on drugs or not when they come into their exams. There needs to be some debate within the universities. Do we care about this? Is this cheating? Is it the way we want our society to be going?"

Professor John Rallison, pro vice-chancellor for education at Cambridge University, said the university "does not approve of any non-medicinal drug-taking", and welfare officers at the university's union said that they were concerned about such usage.

The view is echoed by Universities UK, the body representing the heads of British universities, which says it has "grave concerns about students taking drugs not prescribed to them", because it "poses health risks to those students". Instead, it advises pressurised students to seek help from university counselling services or the GP.

A spokesman for Sheffield Hallam University said: "We are not aware of any student taking this drug and if any students do have difficulties with their studies we encourage them to make use of our support services."

Given the habits of academics themselves, the topic is a sensitive one: according to a recent survey by Nature, whose readership tends to be academics and researchers, one in five respondents said that they had used smart drugs.

Something of which Sahakian herself has personal experience. "I was at a conference in America recently," she says. "I'd just flown in that day from the UK. I saw I was timetabled to give a lecture that afternoon. I wanted to do a good job of it, but I was just feeling so jetlagged. I mentioned to a colleague how I felt and he immediately said to me, 'Oh, do you want to take some of my modafinil?'"

She didn't, for the record, accept.

• All student names have been changed

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 5 Apr 2010 | 5:05 pm

Cellulosic Ethanol Dealt a Blow

Not being one to put all my eggs in one alternative fuel basket, I've long been tracking progress in cellulosic ethanol development--the kind of biofuel made from tough, inedible plant parts including agricultural waste. But a new study out of ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 5 Apr 2010 | 4:37 pm

Study: Northeast seeing more, fiercer rainstorms (AP)

AP - The Northeast is seeing more frequent "extreme precipitation events" in line with global warming predictions, a study shows, including storms like the recent fierce rains whose floodwaters swallowed neighborhoods and businesses across New England.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 4:34 pm

Obama the Muslim Antichrist? Survey says...

A recent poll by Harris interactivefound that 14 percent of Americans suspect that President Barack Obama may be the Antichrist. Nearly a quarter of Republicans, and 16 percent of Democrats, responded this way. Forty percent said they think Obama is ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 5 Apr 2010 | 4:14 pm

Friday News Feedbag Poll for 4/2/2010

If 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 | 5 Apr 2010 | 3:50 pm

Double Play: Spacecraft to Image Two Saturn Moons This Week (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A lucky cosmic alignment will allow NASA's Cassini spacecraft to swing up close to two of Saturn's moons back-to-back this week.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 3:45 pm

What Is the Great Barrier Reef?

Australia's Great Barrier Reef is the largest living organism on the planet.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Apr 2010 | 3:38 pm

Psychic Sorcerer Condemned to Death

Ali Sabat is accused of being a sorcerer. He's sentenced to beheading.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Apr 2010 | 3:29 pm

Tortoise's Beauty Contributing to Its Downfall

One of the world's most beautiful tortoises, Madagascar's radiated tortoise, is on the brink of extinction because illegal pet traders covet the eye-catching reptile, which is also hunted for its meat, according to a report today issued by the Turtle ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 5 Apr 2010 | 3:19 pm

Rare Sight: Asteroid to Hide Easily Spotted Star Tuesday (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The sight of a relatively bright star suddenly vanishing as a faint asteroid crosses in front of it, and then just as suddenly reappearing several seconds later is an exceedingly rare and startling celestial occurrence. But it's happening in the predawn hours on Tuesday and lucky skywatchers across parts of Canada and the western United States may have a chance to see it.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 3:15 pm

Star-Patterned Tortoise Could Die Out in 20 Years

A tortoise that lives on Madagascar could go extinct within 20 years unless drastic conservation measures are taken, biologists report.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Apr 2010 | 2:46 pm

Sonic Scalpel Aimed at Surgeries of Tomorrow

A sonic scalpel could become the newest tool in the operating room.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Apr 2010 | 2:09 pm

Chain of Offshore Wind Turbines Could Power Atlantic Seaboard

A 1,550-mile-long network of offshore wind stations could provide power from Massachusetts to North Carolina with minimal threat of outages, according to a new study.

By connecting stations together, the system could eliminate the biggest downside of wind power: intermittency.

The concept is simple: If you spread out wind stations far enough, each one will experience a different weather pattern. So it’s very unlikely that a slackening of the wind would affect all stations at once. The result is steadier power.

“We’re designing transmission in a different way, according to meteorological principles,” said marine-policy expert Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware in Newark, co-author of the research, published April 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Kempton and a team of scientists analyzed five years of wind data from 11 meteorological stations — buoys and towers — off the Atlantic coast, from Florida to Maine. They found that combining power from all stations with a transmission cable could prevent massive power fluctuations.

The scientists simulated an underwater transmission cable, which they called the Atlantic Transmission Grid, that stretched more than 1,550 miles and connected all 11 stations. Although individual sites showed erratic patterns, the aggregate power output changed only very slowly.

For example, the power output of individual stations would regularly drop to zero and fluctuate by more than 50 percent in an hour, but the output of the entire grid did not change more than 10 percent in any given hour. And the north-south orientation of the grid meant that a northward cyclone, which can cause wind power to drop quickly after it passes through, would affect only a few stations at a time. Grid power never dropped to zero during the entire five-year period.

“We took an intermittent resource and made it not intermittent anymore,” Kempton said.

Scientists had considered offshore wind as a potentially limitless source of power. Compared to land, the ocean has stronger and more constant winds, though still not constant enough to be a primary energy supply. This study indicates that offshore wind deserves more serious consideration as an energy alternative.

“The technology’s there, the materials are there, we have the willpower to reduce carbon emissions, we have a reliable power supply that doesn’t lead to fuel shortage,” said Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Stanford University. “The next step is really to start implementing this on a large scale.”

There are currently no commercial offshore wind stations, though companies have started developing six wind farms along the east coast. Together, the developments could produce as much energy as a large coal or nuclear power plant.

Next, Kempton would like to optimize the selection of stations to get the most stable and robust wind power. The current electric grid cannot handle another large source of variability, so it will be important to design the transmission to ensure that wind power is more reliable, he says.

And he recommends the development of a new regulatory body to oversee offshore wind power. But first developers and investors have to be willing to pony up the large capital costs for building wind farms along the coast.

Images: 1) Data from the QuikScat satellite shows wind-power density over global oceans for winter (top panel) and summer (lower panel). Red and white colors indicate high energy is available, while blue color reflects lower energy./NASA/JPL.
2) A buoy used to collect wind data for the study./Willett Kempton.

See Also:

• Laser Guidance Adds Power to Wind Turbines
• America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate
• Bottled Wind Could Be as Constant as Coal
• High-Altitude Wind Machines Could Power New York City
• Global Energy Network Depends on a Few Vulnerable Nodes
• DOE Report: Wind Could Power 20 Percent of US Grid by 2030

Follow us on Twitter @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Apr 2010 | 1:30 pm

How scientists can monitor radon gas emissions

Radon can give a clue to earthquake activity – but how does Italian scientist Giampaolo Giuliani measure the radioactive gas?

Radon is a radioactive gas, with no colour or smell. It is slightly heavier than air, chemically inert, and is made – after stages of decay and mutation – from uranium. Radon diffuses out of the earth in small, variable quantities all the time, but these can increase when reductions in pressure allow radon (or fluids carrying it in solution) to escape to the surface. Such pressure drops can accompany – or precede – the shearing of rocks in an earthquake.

At the surface radon disperses very quickly, particularly due to wind and rain. It also decays quickly, with a half-life of 3.8 days (in contrast to uranium's half-life of 700,000 years). Only in rare circumstances can the gas pose a health hazard: where it is abundant and able to pool in a sheltered space. The basement, for example, of a well-sealed house built on Cornish granite.

A crude measurement of radon may be taken from a simple probe stuck in the ground for a few months, then analysed to see how much its special plastic has been etched by the gas. Measuring radon precisely and continuously, however, requires an expensive piece of kit called a radometer. These differ, and the Italian scientist Giampaolo Giuliani has designed and built his own.

The heart of a GG radometer is a sealed cubic box made of sheet lead, 7cm thick. Air is drawn out of the box, and two instruments – a scintillator and a photo-multiplier – are inserted in the walls opposite one another.

A lead box will keep out a lot of things, including some forms of radiation, but it doesn't keep out radon. This inert gas is able to diffuse into the box and indeed out again, but some of it decays while it is inside. The instruments cannot see radon's own decay, because the energy is too low, so they are tuned to spot and count the photons released when the "children" of radon, lead 214 and bismuth 214, in turn decay within the box. The variable flux of radon is measured very precisely in this indirect way.

Each of Giuliani's radometer stations has the lead box placed in a three-metre deep shaft in the ground, weather-protected and sometimes in the basement of a building. The instruments are linked to a seismograph, and then to a phone line. Giuliani can thus monitor both radon and earthquake activity in the small network of his four stations from a single computer.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 5 Apr 2010 | 1:30 pm

The man who predicted an earthquake

On 6 April 2009 an earthquake devastated the Italian city of L'Aquila. A year on, it's reported that toads predicted the disaster. But there was a more vocal warning from a scientific technician – whose forecast was, fatefully, ignored

Two horrifying earthquakes in quick succession, in Haiti and Chile, had begun to obscure memories of another such disaster that happened exactly a year ago today: the devastation of the medieval city of L'Aquila, and 50 nearby villages, in Italy's mountainous Abruzzo province. Until, that is, news of some toads that "predicted" the disaster emerged via the pages of the Journal of Zoology.

Last week, reports reached the British press that a colony of common toads in a lake 70km away had somehow foreseen the L'Aquila quake. On a routine toad study, Dr Rachel Grant of the Open University noticed that 96% of this large and actively breeding colony had suddenly disappeared. Five days later the earthquake struck, after which the toads did not reappear for a further five days. According to Grant: "Our findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues, such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of early warning system."

As the events of the past year have shown, no factor should go uninvestigated in the quest to find a reliable predictor of earthquake activity. And while the toads attracted much coverage, the L'Aquila quake had already brought to prominence another more articulate, if also contentious, predictor: Giampaolo Giuliani, a scientific technician working near L'Aquila who for years had fought to be taken seriously. Then, at 3.32am on 6 April 2009, disaster struck the city in which he and his family lived.

Amid a sudden roaring noise, the ground bucked with violent tremors for 22 devastating seconds. In the dust-choked darkness, stunned survivors groped through the rubble as aftershocks added to their confusion. The emergency services – though not on red alert – arrived very quickly, bringing expertise, special equipment and 5,000 body bags. Within days it was established that 307 people were dead, 1,500 injured, and 80,000 homeless.

Giuliani was as shocked as any other survivor. Not by the fact of the earthquake, because he had seen that coming, but by its power and the extent of the damage. He had expected something measuring around 4 on the Richter scale, but the quake had measured 6.3, which is 1,000 times more powerful. (In comparison, Haiti measured 7.0 and Chile 8.8.)

For several days, Giuliani had been watching with mounting anxiety as his four radometer stations, placed in and around L'Aquila, showed very high and rising levels of radon gas emissions from the ground. By Sunday 5 April, he was convinced that within 24 hours there would be a quake – but he could not raise a public alarm. He was under an injunction, served a week earlier, that forbade him to do so on the grounds that his predictions would spread unfounded panic.

Privately, that fateful evening, Giuliani phoned urgent warnings to relatives, friends and colleagues. Finally, he lay down fully clothed with his wife and two daughters, leaving the windows and doors wide open for a quick exit. A couple of hours later, they fled outside as the quake hit.

The family's modest concrete villa survived intact, but for the next seven months they would sleep in a camper van to allay their youngest daughter's fears. Their other house, in a nearby village, was reduced to rubble but fortunately, Giuliani's eldest son, who lived there, was away in Rome.

The quake had also put three of Giuliani's precious radometers out of action. As he set about fixing them, he raged against the authorities who had denied him funding, sneered at the scientific quality of his research, and invoked the law to gag his predictions. Finally, in a flash of temper, he publicly demanded an apology – but didn't get one.

Italy is the most geologically volatile area in Europe, with four active volcanoes, growing mountains, and lots of earthquakes. (L'Aquila had previously been devastated in 1349, 1461, 1703 and 1915, when the death toll was 30,000.) The centre of Italy's earthquake expertise is the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, headed by Dr Enzo Bosci, with its headquarters in Rome. The institute also has a major laboratory offshoot just outside L'Aquila, on the flank of Gran Sasso mountain, which is connected with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, located deep inside it. This is where Giuliani was employed throughout the 1990s as a lab technician, working on instruments for astrophysical studies of (for example) cosmic rays.

In 1999, Giuliani first heard about radon gas anomalies that had been observed by Russian scientists just before an earthquake in eastern Turkey. This fired his interest so much that he transferred out of the mountain to the geophysics lab, hoping to research the subject. In status, however, he remained a technician rather than a fully fledged research scientist.

By this time, the Italian government had begun pouring a lot of money into how to protect against earthquakes, and how to predict them. Anti-seismic building regulations were tightened; the number of seismographs (which measure and record earthquake tremors) was quadrupled; and the interior ministry sprouted two new organs: the Protezione Civile, a nationwide disaster response organisation, and a committee designed to make quick decisions called the High Risk Commission, which included Dr Bosci on its panel of 12 experts.

In 2003, Giuliani submitted a request to the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology for project funding, to study radon gas emissions as a possible predictor for earthquakes, using one or more radometers of his own design. He met both Bosci and Guido Bertolaso, the head of the government's interior ministry, but his proposal was rejected on the grounds it was not sufficiently scientific.

This judgment must have taken into account previous radon studies, carried out amid widespread attempts to find a reliable earthquake predictor. The Japanese, Americans, Russians and Chinese, as well as the Italians, had all tried different kinds of radometers and procedures, but failed to get definitive or consistent results. And, according to a later statement by Dr Bosci's deputy, Dr Walter Mazzochi: "The things Giuliani has presented are at a very low level, from a scientific point of view. I didn't see any evidence that the method could work."

Undaunted, by 2006 Giuliani had built his first two radometers – at his own expense – and, encouraged by the test results, he re-submitted his request for funds and support. Again, it was turned down. So he continued his research in private, with only his eldest son and a couple of colleagues to back him up, as he built more radometers and linked them up into a small network.

Then, on 14 December 2008, the rise in earthquake activity around L'Aquila began with a "seismic swarm" of small tremors. These continued, off and on, into January and the subsequent months of 2009. None of the quakes did any real damage; most people going about their daily lives there did not even notice them.

But Giuliani noticed. On 27 March, he sent a message to his friend, the mayor of L'Aquila, who had helped set up one of his radometer stations in the basement of a school in the old town. Giuliani warned him there could be a quake within 24 hours. Next day there were indeed tremors – but still almost imperceptibly small, at 2.3 on the scale.

By then, however, Giuliani was detecting a greater threat to the south-east, towards the city of Sulmona, 50km from L'Aquila. Its mayor was contacted, he took the alert seriously, and sent loudspeaker vans around to warn the populace (an event wrongly associated with L'Aquila in British press reports), which duly provoked a panic. This is what worried Bosci, Bertolaso and the authorities, leading them to issue the gagging injunction which was served on Giuliani on 30 March.

The next day, L'Aquila suffered small damage from a quake of 4.2. Exactly a week later, the place lay in ruins. If the big one had struck in working hours, at 9am rather than 3.32am, experts predict that as many as 30,000 people could have died, because the worst affected structures – aside from old churches and old houses – were government buildings, schools and hospitals, which had not been built to the modern anti-seismic standards.

The mood of shock persisted for many months, as a clean-up operation of admirable energy and organisation tended to the disaster zone. The once beautiful centre of old L'Aquila was now a silent, empty, rubble-strewn wreck which only firefighters, co-ordinated by the Protezione Civile, were allowed enter. Their teams also erected the vast camps of blue tents, christened "tentopoli", for thousands of refugees who could not bear to leave for Pescara on the coast – where Silvio Berlusconi had cheerfully and tactlessly suggested they take a holiday at the state's expense.

Most impressive of all was the speed with which state-of-the-art, anti-seismic blocks of flats, known as "Berlusconi houses", were built from scratch. After only seven months, 5,000 people were housed in them, with new blocks being completed every week and the tents coming down, in a race against the changing seasons.

The long summer finally broke in mid-October, and it grew cold. Heavy rain fell in L'Aquila, along with the first snow on the Apennine peaks up above. At his house, Giuliani was looking tired. He had been checking his radometer network on the computer and trying to write a report of his work in English for a learned journal. Outside, next to their bedtime camper van, his wife was plying her craft as a beautician and hairdresser with a single cheery client. The salon in which she used to work lay ruined in the town, where all commerce had ceased.

At the start of his career, Giuliani had spent some months working in Britain. He remembers going on holiday with his then girlfriend, opening the curtains in the morning to a seaview of Folkestone. His English wasn't bad at the time, but it had been lost through disuse. Now, however, he needed it back. The American Geophysical Union had invited him to present his work to its members in San Francisco.

As it turned out, Giuliani's presentation last December went very well. The Americans may not hold a candle to the Italians in matters of disaster management (compare New Orleans to L'Aquila), but they appreciate a free and independent spirit of scientific enquiry. The evidence Giuliani presented aroused intense interest and debate, and the AGU subsequently invited him to take part, with Chapman University and Nasa, in developing a worldwide seismic early warning system.

Furthermore, when Giuliani returned home, the Italian authorities lifted the gagging injunction against his predictions, which again proved accurate in the early months of 2010 – though this time the tremors were all mercifully small.

Where does that leave us, one year after the L'Aquila quake? It is too early to say whether Giuliani has discovered a technique of earthquake prediction that works throughout the quake-active zones of the world (and could thus be a potential lifesaver for many millions of people). Or, indeed, whether the technique can be refined to foretell the power, as well as the fact, of the tremors before they come.

Certainly, though, through his dogged determination, Giuliani has broken new scientific ground. Out of the tragedy of L'Aquila, and those disappearing toads, grows fresh hope.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 5 Apr 2010 | 1:30 pm

Arctic thaw frees overlooked greenhouse gas: study

OSLO (Reuters) - Thawing permafrost can release nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, a contributor to climate change that has been largely overlooked in the Arctic, a study showed on Sunday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 1:22 pm

U.S.-Russian crew dock at space station

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A U.S.-Russian crew in a Russian Soyuz space ship docked at the International Space Station on Sunday, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 1:17 pm

'Sound Bullets' Could Blast Subs, Cancer

An old toy has inspired some new tricks.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 5 Apr 2010 | 1:01 pm

95-Million-Year-Old Bugs Found in African Amber Surprise Scientists

Newly discovered pieces of amber have given scientists a peek into the Africa of 95 million years ago, when flowering plants blossomed across Earth and the animal world scrambled to adapt.

Suspended in the stream of time were ancestors of modern spiders, wasps and ferns, but the prize is a wingless ant (above) that challenges current notions about the origins of that globe-spanning insect family.

“Most specimens represent a unique fossil record of their group from Africa, and some are among the oldest records in the world,” wrote researchers in a paper April 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The amber, which is formed when plant resin fossilizes, preserving flora and fauna trapped within, was found in what is now northwest Ethiopia. Ninety-five million years ago, it was part of a disintegrating Gondwana, one of two vast land masses that spawned the seven modern continents.

Most amber deposits have been found in former parts of Laurasia, the other supercontinent of the time. The Gondwana record is relatively sparse.

The amber in the latest study dates to the middle of the Cretaceous era, which followed the dinosaur-dominated Jurassic and witnessed the rise of mammals, birds and flowering plants. Mammals get most of the attention, but changes to flora were just as profound.

Before the Cretaceous, flowering plants — which are now the most diverse type of terrestrial plant — didn’t exist. By the mid-Cretaceous, they dominated the land. Existing plants and animals had to adapt, filling the flowery new niches. The new study is a snapshot of that process.

While it will take years to interpret the ecological tales trapped in the new amber, one important story is already suggested. Inside the Ethiopian amber is an ant that looks nothing like ants found in Cretaceous amber from France and Burma. Those deposits had placed the origin of ants in Laurasia. That’s no longer certain.

“The Ethiopian amber is of great importance for improving our knowledge of the evolutionary history of terrestrial arthropods, plants and Fungi,” wrote the researchers.

Images: Photos From Alexander Schmidt/PNAS: 1) Wingless ant; 2) False fairy wasp; 3) Tree fern; 4) Springtail. Diagram: Breakup of Pangea./USGS.

See Also:

• Oldest Preserved Spider Web Dates Back to Dinosaurs
• Bizarre Ancient Fly With Three-Eyed Horn Discovered
• 3D Imaging Technique Brings 50 Million-Year-Old Spider to Glorious, Gory Life
  
• ‘Living Fossil’ Ant Species Dates to Late Cretaceous

Citation: “Cretaceous African life captured in amber,” by Alexander Schmidt, Vincent Perrichot, Matthias Svojtka, Ken Anderson, Kebede Belete, Robert Bussert, Heinrich Dörfelt, Saskia Jancke, BarbaraMohr, Eva Mohrmann, Paul C. Nascimbene, André Nel, Patricia Nel, Eugenio Ragazzi, Guido Roghi, Erin E. Saupe, Kerstin Schmidt, Harald Schneider, Paul A. Selden, and Norbert Vávra. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 14, April 5, 2010.

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Apr 2010 | 1:00 pm

The great spring gamble: nature's winners and losers

Spring is very late this year and the daffs are only just in bloom. But the long, cold winter hasn't necessarily been bad news for all our flora and fauna

After the harshest winter for more than 30 years, spring 2010 is proving to be an equally unusual season. On the one hand, lambs are being born, daffodils are blooming, and the first swallows are starting to arrive. But on the other, snow is falling in Scotland, butterflies are nowhere to be seen, and our woodlands are looking more like February than April. The producers of BBC's Springwatch are certainly having an anxious time, with presenters and crews on standby up and down the country, waiting for the season to really get going.

The Woodland Trust's ongoing survey, Nature's Calendar, confirms that this is one of the most unusual springs in recent years. Observations by their 30,000 participants suggest that some natural phenomena have been delayed by as much as four weeks compared with recent years. For example, wood anemones, whose carpet of white appeared last year in the second week of March, have so far yet to bloom across most of Britain.

Overall, despite the recent trend towards earlier springs, spring 2010 is about a fortnight late, even when compared with winters 40 years ago. But the very late spring isn't bad news for all our native plants and animals.

Insects such as bumblebees, butterflies and moths are used to cold winters, as Martin Warren of the charity Butterfly Conservation explains: "Contrary to what many people think, hard winters are not necessarily a problem for butterflies. They have evolved to cope with typical British seasons, so this year has been a return to business as usual, shutting up shop for the winter and emerging as soon as it is warm enough to feed on nectar."

During the very mild winter of 2008, in a Dorset churchyard, Warren came across a truly bizarre seasonal juxtaposition: a red admiral butterfly perched on a snowdrop. This was probably because red admirals had begun to alter their lifecycle in response to milder winters, staying put instead of migrating back southwards. But this year, any insect taking this gamble will almost certainly have perished.

Butterflies overwintering in garden sheds, such as small tortoiseshells and peacocks, have yet to emerge, as temperatures are still too low for them to fly and feed. As with other hibernating creatures, this could increase their chances of survival.

Hedgehogs could also benefit from the hard winter, as they will not have been tempted to emerge too early from their winter sleep, only to get into trouble if the weather takes a turn for the worse. And frogs, which in the last few years have often laid their spawn in January, only to have it killed off by a hard frost, have delayed their spawning until now. Given a good spring, all these creatures have every chance of enjoying a successful breeding season.

Fine weather is equally crucial for the long-distance travellers of the bird world: species such as the swallow, willow warbler and cuckoo. These birds migrate here from Africa to breed each spring. But each year they face a tough decision: do they get here early, and hope for fine weather, giving them the best territories and first choice of mate? Or do they play it safe, arriving once the season is well under way?

According to Paul Stancliffe, of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), this year the early birds have made the wrong call. "We saw wheatears and sand martins arriving in Scotland by the end of March. But with the lack of insect food, these birds have almost certainly perished, leaving the door open for those arriving now to take their place."

As the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch survey recently reported, many of our resident songbirds have already suffered major falls in numbers as a result of the prolonged cold weather in January. The main loser was the tiny goldcrest, which at 9cm (3½in) long, and weighing just five grams, is Britain's smallest bird. Numbers were down by 75%, as many failed to survive because of the shortage of insect food.

Other small birds, such as wrens, robins and long-tailed tits, also did badly during the cold spell. But even though numbers are down, their high reproductive rate means population levels should return to normal within two or three years at most.

Looking ahead, the BTO suggests that one potential winner might be the cuckoo. In recent years cuckoos have arrived from mid-April onwards, just as they always have. But in the last few springs the caterpillars on which they feed have been hatching and pupating early, and as a result young cuckoos have had nothing to eat. This year, though, the returning cuckoos may have got their timing just right and, given a fine May and June, could start to reverse their recent serious decline.

In the longer term, it is predicted that the trend towards milder winters and earlier springs will continue – bad news for the two out of three of our migrant bird species currently in decline. The BTO's Out of Africa campaign has just been launched to draw attention to their plight, reminding us that however bad the weather may seem, the real issue facing our wildlife is climate change.

In the meantime, we and the natural world have been offered a glimmer of hope from the weather forecasters, with temperatures predicted to return to normal during the coming week. The Woodland Trust's Paul Hetherington is confident that we are in for a treat. "As long as the forecast is correct," he says, "we should all enjoy a short but very vibrant floral display."

Stephen Moss is a naturalist, author and broadcaster, based at the BBC Natural History Unit.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 5 Apr 2010 | 1:00 pm

Power of the Wind: Thinking Bigger

Wind power is unreliable at small scales. But zoom out -- say, to the entire east coast of the U.S. -- and good breezes are always blowing. The finding could be a revelation for green energy.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 5 Apr 2010 | 1:00 pm

Earthquakes Cross Political Boundaries

The earthquake that struck south of the Mexico-U.S. border could mean better social and scientific ties, says one earthquake scientist.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Apr 2010 | 12:02 pm

Apollo 13 Mission Manual: For the Armchair Astronaut Who Has Everything

On April 13 in New York City, Bonhams will auction off pages from the Apollo 13 mission manual, with handwritten notes by flight commander Jim Lovell.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 5 Apr 2010 | 11:56 am

Shuttle launches on one of last missions

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Space shuttle Discovery and seven astronauts blasted off Monday on one of NASA's final servicing missions to the International Space Station.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 5 Apr 2010 | 10:57 am

Words Really Can Hurt

The brain’s pain matrix is activated by pain-related words, a new study shows.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Apr 2010 | 10:48 am

Massive Earthquakes Barely Disturb Earth's Natural Rhythms

The earthquakes in Mexico and Chile are insignificant compared to the Earth's major forces.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Apr 2010 | 9:05 am

U.S. Government Creating Low-Fat Cake and Frosting

The U.S. government is experimenting with recipes for low fat cake mixes and frosting.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Apr 2010 | 8:46 am

Economists need their own uncertainty principle

Bad risk management contributed to the current financial crisis. Two economists believe the situation could be improved by gaining a deeper understanding of what is not known, as Philip Ball explains.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 5 Apr 2010 | 7:15 am

Discovery blasts off from Florida

The space shuttle Discovery launches from Florida in one of the last shuttle missions before the programme is shut down.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Apr 2010 | 6:54 am

China rejects Mekong dam claims

China rejects claims that its dams on the Mekong River are to blame for record low water levels in downstream nations.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Apr 2010 | 6:11 am

Crane show draws Swedish crowds

For thousands of Swedes the Easter weekend meant a trip to Lake Hornborga to witness the annual return of flocks of migrating cranes.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Apr 2010 | 5:39 am

Sequencing the Video Genome

Think organisms are the only ones with genomes? Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology are sequencing the “video genome” to put an end to video piracy on the internet.

The technique works by detecting features that remain basically unchanged by typical color and resolution manipulations. Current methods rely on action recognition algorithms, which match video sequences by the movement they contain.

Think of three sample clips: the original lightsaber fight scene from Star Wars, a low-quality video of the scene playing on TV and a home video of you and your brother reenacting it with plastic lightsabers. Action recognition algorithms would see all three clips as similar, but video-genome analysis would only match the first and the second.

Brothers Alexander and Michael Bronstein and their advisor Ron Kimmel are able to make this distinction using gene-sequence matching and alignment algorithms borrowed from the field of bioinformatics. Their research was posted on ArXiv.org on March 27.

“We realized that many problems that exist in the analysis of video match nicely to applications and problems that exist in the analysis of sequences,” Michael said.

The technique rests on the idea that changes like clipping and cropping of video are analogous to mutations in DNA. The “DNA” of video clips can be aligned the same way that biological DNA sequences can, using bioinformatics, even with the addition of commercials, deletion of scenes or changes to color or resolution.

“Looking at a very short piece of video, we are able to tell where it comes from, independently of the transformations it may undergo,” Alexander said.

For example, when a camcorder captures the video from a movie screen, the camera may be shaking, the colors might be different, the resolution may vary, but the video DNA sequence would still be similar.

The video’s features are translated into a string of information, just as a genome is read as a DNA nucleotide sequence. This video genome is made up of a group of features including boundaries and shapes, in the same way that search algorithms use a group of words to find similarities in text. These features don’t change during normal video manipulations.

“You can think of modifications a video can undergo as analogous to mutations,” Michael said. For example, an advertisement would be like an insertion mutation, and removal of content for rating would be a deletion.

The frequency of features in each frame is graphed and translated into a 64-bit binary word. When this information is played over time, the clip’s video genome can be compared to a database using bioinformatic analyses. The video genome takes up about 1 millionth the bandwidth of DVD-quality video, and can be translated in real time.

The technology could potentially be used to detect pirated content on YouTube, or to match metadata (like subtitles, user-generated notes or comments) to any version of a video. Theoretically, thousands of hours of video sequence could be processed in a matter of days, and matched with greater than 99 percent accuracy.

Though the idea is promising, the technology has some drawbacks. While the video genome can be created in real time from video, matching the genome to entries in the database cannot. The team is currently working to simplify and speed up the database search process, so matches can be made in a fraction of a second.

Via the physics arXiv blog, MIT Technology Review

Image: Bronstein

See Also:

• The Internet Is Changing the Scientific Method
• Your Computer Really Is a Part of You
• Organism Sets Mutation Speed Record, May Explain Life’s Origins
• Gene Editing Could Make Anyone Immune to AIDS

Follow us on Twitter @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Apr 2010 | 3:30 am