Ethnicity key to accurate obesity measurements, researchers find

The current National Institutes of Health body mass index cutoff values for obesity are too high for many reproductive-age women in the US and should be adjusted to account for ethnic differences in body composition to produce proper diagnosis of obesity, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

House with an edible wall: Runs on sun, wind, rain and wastes

Students and researchers are constructing a house to run on solar power, as well as harness wind, rain and the building's wastes. Its also features include an edible wall.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Does the weather cause northerners to get more prostate cancer?

Cold, dry weather has been linked to an increased incidence of prostate cancer. Researchers suggest that meteorological effects on persistent organic pollutants, such as some pesticides and industrial by-products, may be to blame.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Researchers create 'sound bullets': Highly focused acoustic pulses could be used as sonic scalpels and more

Taking inspiration from a popular executive toy ("Newton's cradle"), researchers have built a device -- called a nonlinear acoustic lens -- that produces highly focused, high-amplitude acoustic signals dubbed "sound bullets." The acoustic lens and its sound bullets (which can exist in fluids--like air and water--as well as in solids) have the potential to revolutionize applications from medical imaging and therapy to the nondestructive evaluation of materials and engineering systems.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

Key molecular step to fighting off viruses identified

Researchers have determined how a protein that normally latches onto molecules inside cells and marks them for destruction also gives life to the body's immune response against viruses.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

How do ads depicting mixed emotions persuade abstract thinkers?

People who think more abstractly respond better to ads that portray mixed emotions, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:00 pm

New genetic framework could help explain drug side effects

In a major step toward predicting adverse drug reactions, systems biologists have integrated genetic, cellular and clinical information to find out why certain medicines can trigger fatal heart arrhythmias. The new framework could be used to study other cardiac disorders and certain neurological diseases, including epilepsy and autism, and could aid the advance of personalized medicine.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Smell your way to a longer life? Odors that represent food or indicate danger can alter an animal's lifespan

What does the smell of a good meal mean to you? It may mean more than you think. Specific odors that represent food or indicate danger are capable of altering an animal's lifespan and physiological profile by activating a small number of highly specialized sensory neurons, researchers have shown.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Higher amounts of added sugars increase heart disease risk factors, study finds

Consuming a higher amount of added sugars in processed or prepared foods is associated with lower levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C, the "good cholesterol") and higher levels of triglycerides, which are important risk factors for cardiovascular disease, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

Does a man's estrogen level impact his risk of prostate cancer?

A high level of one type of estrogen in a man's body might increase his risk of developing prostate cancer. That is one surprising conclusion from a new study which also offers another novel finding -- that high levels of the estrogen considered fuel for breast cancer might offer a protective benefit against prostate cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 9:00 am

How Marmite spread its way through journalism | Mind your language

Love them or hate them, Marmite comparisons have increased massively since 2006 – why?

After two fairly meaty blogs on electionspeak and swearing (never has there been such well-considered bad language), time for a light, vitamin B-rich snack.

As editors of the style guide, we used to complain about the amount of elephants in the room, a language trope that reached its peak in 2006: "Elephants in the room – and sometimes, more precisely, in the living room – have included trade figures, policy, lack of policy, climate change, Iraq, the US, Europe, anti-Americanism, men, women, single women, a new French football league, race, religion, Islam, Catholicism, Tessa Jowell, Andrew Neil, Jimmy Greaves, fatness, thinness, Stalinism, Hitler and Tony Blair's departure from office."

Vince Cable is still at it, as are we, but there are far fewer elephants than there used to be – the expression now spreading its way stickily through articles in the Guardian, Observer and on guardian.co.uk is Marmite.

Love it or hate it – and I am rather bored by it – the habit of comparing people or things to Marmite is unavoidable. Based on the company's advertising slogan, this simile has existed in spoken language longer than in newspapers. The first example in the Guardian archive dates from 7 April 1995, in an article by Andrew Clements about a Wagner season on TV. "The Wagner cult invites that kind of extreme reaction, positive or negative; as someone observes in one of Channel 4's documentaries, 'Wagner is like Marmite, you either love it or you hate it.'"

What turned the comparison into a linguistic phenomenon was a marketing campaign by Marmite that began in March 2006. It brought out a squeezy bottle, pushed the love/hate angle and received much press attention that year, including a leader in the Guardian. There were nine Marmite comparisons that year (George Galloway, Headingley Test matches, Chris Moyles, Keith Allen (on himself), Broadcasting House, Russell Brand, Trinny & Susannah, horseracing, The Archers, winklepinkers, and Lily Allen (had she been listening to her father?).

The following year brought 31 uses – highlights were Lily Allen (again), Thought for the Day, Samim's tech-house hit Heater, shoes and panto. Hazel Blears and the singer Mika both applied the expression to themselves pre-emptively. There were 29 uses in 2008 (highlights: the Times New Roman font, bagpipes, Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone, and faith schools, according to a leading article in the Guardian). Applications of Marmite rose again to 38 in 2009 (mostly sporting figures but also Twitter, Shirley Bassey, the essential oil ylang ylang and Chris Moyles). There have been 12 so far in 2010, with an emphasis on Marmite design (Central St Giles church, London; the Razor tower block in Elephant and Castle, London, and the designer Ron Arad).

Marmite has previously been used as a comparison, though mostly in reference to its need to be spread thinly (or thickly, if that is what you really like): "It was quite a night for medicine and a little medicine, like Marmite, goes quite a long way," Nancy Banks-Smith, TV review, 22 February 1991. The first mention of "marmite" in the paper was in 1821, the year of the Guardian's foundation and refers to the pot that gave the spread its name: "The following is related as a fact: – There is a very large cauldron in a house at Paris, which is called 'La Marmite Perpetuelle,' from its having been on the fire eighty-seven years; during which time it has boiled more than 800,000 capons, and it boils nothing else."

This easy simile is a good contender for the category of snowclone, defined by the professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum as "a multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants", and has been nominated for inclusion on Language Log's list.

Advertising phrases often find their way quickly into speech and writing – recently a certain car insurance firm's "simples", as noted by David Mitchell – but which others have proved themselves as adaptable as Marmite's? And should they be used sparingly?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:05 am

DNA boost in tree killer battle

Researchers sequence the genome of a bacterium that causes a virulent disease in horse chestnut trees.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:03 am

Treating Climate Change as a Curable Disease

Nearly 200 scientists from 14 countries met last month at the famed Asilomar retreat center outside Monterey, California in a very deliberate bid to make history. Their five-day meeting focused on setting up voluntary ground rules for research into cloud-brightening, giant algae blooms and other massive-scale interventions to cool the planet. It’s unclear how significant the meeting will turn out to be, but the intent of its organizers was unmistakable: By choosing Asilomar, they hoped to summon the spirit of a groundbreaking meeting of biologists that took place on the same site in 1975. Back then, scientists with bushy sideburns and split collars — the forefathers of the molecular revolution, it turned out — established principles for the safe and ethical study of deadly pathogens.

The planners of Asilomar II, as they called it, hoped to accomplish much the same for potentially dangerous experiments in geoengineering. Instead of devising new medical treatments for people, the scientists involved in planet-hacking research are after novel ways to treat the Earth. The analogy of global warming to a curable disease was central to the discussions at the meeting. Climate scientist Steve Schneider of Stanford talked about administering “planetary methadone to get over our carbon addiction.” Others debated what “doses” of geoengineering would be necessary. Most crucially, the thinkers at Asilomar focused on the idea that medical ethics might provide a framework for balancing the risks and benefits of all this new research.

What would it mean to apply the established principles of biomedical research to the nascent field of geoenginering? The ethicists at Asilomar — particularly David Winickoff from Berkeley and David Morrow from the University of Chicago — began with three pillars laid out in the landmark 1979 Belmont Report. The first, respect for persons, says that biomedical scientists should obtain “informed consent” from their test subjects. The second, beneficence, requires that scientists assess the risks and benefits of a given test before they start. The third, justice, invokes the rights of research subjects to whatever medical advances result from the testing. (The people who are placed at risk should be the same ones who might benefit from a successful result.)

Then Winickoff and Morrow proposed applying the Belmont principles to the study of the most aggressive forms of geoengineering — the ones that would block out the sun like a volcanic eruption, with a spray of sulfur or other particles into the stratosphere. Before we could embark on a radical intervention like that, we’d need to run smaller-scale tests that might themselves pose a risk to the environment. In much the way that a clinical drug trial might produce adverse reactions, so might a real-world trial of, say, the Pinatubo Option. Instead of causing organ failure or death in its subjects, a botched course of geoengineering might damage the ozone layer or reduce rainfall.

The problem, admitted the ethicists, is how to go about applying the Belmont rules outside of medicine. In clinical drug trials, researchers obtain consent from discrete individuals, and they can precisely define the worse-case outcome (like death). But a trial run of hazing up the stratosphere wouldn’t affect specific, identifiable people in any one town, city, or state. The climate is interconnected in many ways, some still mysterious to scientists, and so the risks of even a small-scale test in a particular location might apply across the globe. If everyone on Earth could be affected, how do you figure out whom to ask for informed consent?

One possibility would be to require that all nations of the world agree ahead of time on any tests of consequence. To many gathered at Asilomar, however, this seemed naive; speakers repeatedly invoked the failure of all-inclusive talks to cut global carbon emissions, and it would presumably be much tougher to secure an agreement on work that might damage crop yields or open a hole in the ozone. A more pragmatic approach would be to set up something like a U.N. Planet Hacking Security Council, comprising 15 or so powerful nations whose oversight of research tests would take into account the concerns of a broad swath of countries. But that undemocratic approach would surely face howls of protest.

The principle of beneficence may be just as difficult to follow. Under the Belmont guidelines, doctors must balance the particular risks of a clinical trial with the potential benefit to any individual who might participate. Since it would be impossible to make such a calculation for every person on Earth, planet-hackers could at best choose the experiments that minimize harm to the most vulnerable communities — like people living on the coasts of Southeast Asia. But we may not know enough about the risks of geoengineering to make any such credible calculation when the time comes. Consider the Pinatubo Option, by which scientists would mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes. Putting particles in the stratosphere could reduce the total amount of energy that strikes the earth. Some climate modelers say this would disrupt rainfall by reducing moisture in the atmosphere obtained by evaporation. Others say that geoengineering droughts and famines would be less harmful than those caused by unchecked warming. Right now, no one can agree on the nature of the risks, let alone the degree to which they would apply to particular communities.

And what about justice? Among the disruptions that could result from testing the Pinatubo Option is a weakening of the Asian monsoon, a source of water for hundreds of millions of people in India. Those in developing countries will “eat the risk” of geoengineering trials, shouted one of the climate scientists at Asilomar during his presentation. If representatives from just a small set of countries were appointed as doctors to the planet, then the less powerful nations might end up as the world’s guinea pigs. Of course, the citizens of those nations also would seem to have the most to lose from uninterrupted global warming. These two dangers would have to be measured one against the other — and compensation as part of the experimental program could be one way of making tests more fair.

If medical ethics aren’t quite up to the task of guiding our forays into geoengineering, what other sort of principles should we keep in mind? One important danger to be aware of is the moral hazard that might come with successful trials. That’s the idea that protective circumstances or actions can encourage people to take undue risks — government insurance of banks led to risky investments that caused the savings and loans crisis in the 1980’s, for example. Moral hazard looms particularly large for geoengineering studies since medium-scale field tests could prematurely give us the sense that we have a low-cost technical fix for global warming, no emissions cuts needed. (Moral hazard isn’t quite as potent in medical research. The availability of cholesterol-lowering drugs may well discourage people from maintaining healthy diets, but it’s unlikely that mere clinical trials would have the same effect.)

Another ethical principle that might apply to geoengineering is minimization — the idea that, a priori, it’s better to tinker at the smallest-possible scale necessary to answer vital scientific questions. This notion comes from the ethics of animal experimentation; now we might apply it to planetary systems and the environment more broadly. Up until now, the medical ethics frame for geoengineering has guided discussions of how geoengineering might affect people in various countries. Perhaps we should be talking about how it affects the planet itself.

By that token, we might gain something by thinking of the Earth as a patient on its own terms. The rules and regulations we come up with for tests of geoengineering should take into account the way those experiments might affect ecosystems and non-human animals, both under threat from warming. And so maybe the most famous piece of medical ethics ought to apply: the Hippocratic oath. “First, do no harm,” is the crux of the original, but an updated version exhorts doctors to avoid “the twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.” The climate crisis may force us to act despite myriad ethical challenges, for our benefit and for the planet’s.

This story was produced by Slate for the Climate Desk collaboration.

Image: zpeckler/flickr

See Also:

• License to Green: Clean Energy vs. Patents
• Betting on Climate Change: Corporations Stand to Make or Lose Billions
• Attractive Nuisance: Should Judges Help Tackle Climate Change?
• The Coming Tide of Global Climate Lawsuits

Eli Kintisch is a reporter at Science, and author of a new book on geoengineering, Hack the Planet.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 22 Apr 2010 | 4:00 am

Earth Day 2010 grows a Google Doodle forest for its 30th birthday | Adam Vaughan

Google marks Earth Day with 'doodle', but has the green movement outgrown this worldwide celebration started in 1970

Fire up Google today and you'll be greeted by the Google logo as a lush forest - the web giant's nod to and celebration of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. This so-called Google Doodle appears to depict a collection of six parrots, which I'm taking - Google doesn't provide explanatory gallery notes - to be a reference to the fact that 2010 is also the International Year of Biodiversity, to be marked on 22 May.

This isn't the first time Google has given over its logo for Earth Day. Last year, it ran an illustration of a waterfall and a rainbow of marine life (quite cool), in 2008 it plumped for the logo as a pile of rocks with vegetation growing on it (slightly random), and in 2007 depicted the Google logo as melting polar ice (very apt seeing as the loss of Arctic ice that summer left experts "stunned").

Beyond the natural world, it has also previously celebrated Earth Day by taking a look at the solutions to some of our environmental problems: 2006 featured solar panels atop the famous logo with a wind turbine in the background.

Earth Day, of course, is a bit older than Google, with the first taking in the US in 1970, thanks to Gaylord Nelson, a US senator and Democrat, who died in 2005. In the words of its organisers, it is designed to "[activate] individuals and organizations to strengthen the collective fight against man's exploitive relationship with the planet." No mean feat then. It's very much a product of the burgeoning environment movement of its time, and a clear forerunner to modern green coalitions, such as TckTckTck for the ongoing international climate talks, Ask The Climate Question for the election, along with countless other groups and invididuals.

Robert Stone, a film-maker who recently released a documentary called Earth Days on the genesis of the environment movement and the founding of Earth Day, seems to think the "day" has done its job. He told the New York Time's Andy Revkin this week:

"The environmental movement in the late 60s and early 70s was driven by a strong sense of urgency that I think you see conveyed in the footage of those times. The movement now is sort of a victim of its own success in that our environment as a whole seems pretty good."

I'm not sure which environment Stone is looking at? Perhaps the one extinction has overtaken evolution or the one where the talks to reign in habitat-threatening global warming are in disarray? If you think there's still a need for an Earth Day, there are hundreds of events going on globally — including a rally this Sunday (25 April) on the mall in Washington — alongside the "people's climate summit" taking place this week in Bolivia.

And Google, with its investments in renewable energy, talk of need for a strong carbon price and other green philanthropic efforts – is well-placed to help awareness of such green days. This is unlikely to be the last eco Google Doodle either for 2010 – any guesses for what a Google logo might look for the UN's World Environment Day on 5 June?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 3:48 am

Mexico City offers bikes in its clean air campaign (AP)

AP - Pedaling placidly, black-suited businessmen and women in dresses and high heels wheel shiny red bikes between growling green buses, serenaded by shrill police whistles and coughing diesel trucks, the morning sunlight filtering through yellow smog.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 3:40 am

Eyewitness:

Photographs from the Guardian Eyewitness series

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 3:31 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Wet weather was forecast to persist over the Western U.S. on Thursday, with snow expected in the Central Rockies.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 2:43 am

Earth Day: No more burning rivers, but new threats (AP)

AP - Pollution before the first Earth Day was not only visible, it was in your face: Cleveland's Cuyahoga River caught fire. An oil spill fouled 30 miles of Southern California beaches. And thick smog choked many cities' skies.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 2:14 am

Hong Kong pollution expert departs city (AFP)

AFP - Hong Kong's leading authority on air quality said Thursday he is leaving the city to avoid its polluted air and keep his respiratory problems under control.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 1:39 am

Challenge to IPCC's Bangladesh climate predictions (AFP)

AFP - Scientists in Bangladesh posed a fresh challenge to the UN's top climate change panel Thursday, saying its doomsday forecasts for the country in the body's landmark 2007 report were overblown.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 1:16 am

Lungless frog and 'ninja slug' among new species

Conservationists hail success of three-year plan that has resulted in the discovery of 123 new species in the biodiverse rainforest of the 'Heart of Borneo'

In pictures: Weird and wonderful species in the Heart of Borneo

An enormous stick insect more than half a metre long and a bizarre lungless frog are among a staggering collection of new species highlighted today to celebrate an agreement to conserve wildlife on the island of Borneo.

Conservationists say the weird and wonderful creatures were discovered thanks to a pioneering deal between three governments to protect and conserve 220,000 square kilometres of lush rainforest on the island.

Some 123 new species have been recorded in the protected region, known as the "Heart of Borneo", since the 2007 agreement.

They include a vivid flame-coloured bronzeback snake that can flare the back of its neck to reveal bright orange colours when threatened, a new bird named the spectacled flowerpecker, and a green and yellow slug with a tail three times the length of its head.

Adam Tomasek, leader of conservation group WWF's Heart of Borneo initiative, said: "As the past three years of independent scientific discovery have proven, new forms of life are constantly being discovered in the Heart of Borneo. If this stretch of irreplaceable rainforest can be conserved for our children, the promise of more discoveries must be a tantalising one for the next generation of researchers to contemplate."

Explorers have visited Borneo for centuries, he said, yet vast tracts of its interior are yet to be biologically explored.

The new species identified on Borneo are highlighted today by a WWF report on the conservation project, which began in 2007 with an agreement between Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia and Malaysia.

The reserve is an "island within an island" the report says, home to 10 species of primate, more than 350 birds, 150 reptiles and amphibians and 10,000 plants that are found nowhere else in the world. The discovery of three new species a month since the agreement offers "ample justification" of the decision to protect the region, it adds.

New species include a giant stick insect, known as Chan's megastick, that measures 57cm long. Discovered in 2008, only three specimens have been found. It is believed to inhabit the high rainforest canopy, which makes it elusive and difficult to study. Borneo has long been known for its monster insects, including giant cockroaches some 10cm long.

A long-tailed slug, dubbed "ninja slug", was discovered on leaves in high-altitude forests, where the creature likes to wrap its long tail around its body while it rests. The slug is part of an unusual invertebrate family that uses chalky "love darts" in courtship. The tiny harpoons pierce and inject hormone into mates, and may increase the chances of reproduction.

Under the 2007 plan, the three governments have committed to enhance management of the protected area, develop eco-tourism and support sustainable resource management.

"Three years on, the Heart of Borneo declaration is proving to be an irreplaceable foundation for conservation and sustainable development by establishing a framework for action to protect Borneo's globally outstanding biodiversity, ecosystem services and livelihoods," Tomasek said. "The discovery of these new species in the Heart of Borneo underlines the incredible diversity of this remarkable area."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:40 am

In pictures: Weird and wonderful species discovered in the Heart of Borneo

A lungless frog, a stick insect more than half a metre long and a 'ninja' slug are among the bizarre new species found on the island of Borneo during a three-year conservation plan

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:30 am

The Moon's Great, Straight Wall Gets Solar Spotlight (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - On Thursday night, April 22, the sun will rise over the one of the most spectacular topographic features on the moon – the Straight Wall – giving skywatchers a good chance to spot the lunar marvel.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:15 am

US to overhaul restrictions on sensitive material

Export reform effort could help scientists who collaborate with foreign researchers<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/zq6NGxbc-wo" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 22 Apr 2010 | 12:09 am

Amorous slug, orange snake among finds on Borneo (AP)

AP - A lungless frog, a frog that flies and a slug that shoots love darts are among 123 new species found in Borneo since 2007 in a project to conserve one of the oldest rain forests in the world.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Apr 2010 | 11:20 pm

'Love-dart' slug, lungless frog among new species on Borneo (AFP)

AFP - Wildlife researchers said Thursday they have discovered around 120 new species on Borneo island, including a lungless frog, the world's longest insect and a slug that fires "love darts" at its mate.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Apr 2010 | 10:56 pm

Starry eyed

Top astronomer on Hubble Telescope's hunt for aliens
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Apr 2010 | 10:51 pm

Flowering Plants Bloom Earlier With Warming

Got a window and some time on your hands? On this Earth Day, find out how you can help researchers document climate change in action.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Apr 2010 | 10:00 pm

Supermassive Black Holes: Galactic Killers?

Black holes get a bad rap, and often its deserved, especially when the supermassive behemoth at the center of your galaxy is blowing away all the star-forming fuel.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Apr 2010 | 9:49 pm

Recycle Your Old Cell Phone This Earth Day (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Instead of planting a tree for Earth Day this year, consider recycling that old cell phone taking up space in your desk drawer.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Apr 2010 | 9:21 pm

IM Interview: Waves of Plastic

Last summer, Miriam Goldstein led a research cruise to the North Pacific Gyre to see how much plastic there was and whether it was making its way into the food chain. What she found astounded her.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Apr 2010 | 9:15 pm

Borneo's Quirky Species

An eccentric bunch of species have recently been discovered in the rainforests of Borneo, including the world's longest known stick insect, and a slug that shoots "love darts."
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Apr 2010 | 7:19 pm

World's Longest Bug And 'Ninja' Slug Discovered in Borneo

A neon slug that shoots love darts and a color-changing frog are just a couple of the 123 species discovered in the Borneo rainforests.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Apr 2010 | 6:58 pm

Citizen Scientists Trawl for Ocean Plastic

Imagine dumping a week's worth of trash into a bathtub full of water and then stirring it with a paddle. That's basically what's happening in parts of the ocean, only worse. To figure out exactly what we're facing, a program ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Apr 2010 | 6:27 pm

Parties clash over environment policies

Ed Miliband accuses Lib Dems of 'ducking' difficult issues at special debate organised by Guardian

• See what the speakers said on our live blog

Important differences between the major parties on the environment emerged last night, as they clashed over nuclear power, windfarms, expanding flying, and the number of climate change sceptics in their ranks.

Despite similar-sounding manifestos, Labour's climate and energy secretary, Ed Miliband, and his Conservative and Liberal Democrat shadow spokesmen attacked each other's policies at a special debate organised by the Guardian.

On the Labour government's planned expansion of Heathrow airport – which is opposed by the other two parties – Tory spokesman, Greg Clark, was forced to deny his party wants to expand another airport in the south-east. It is an idea supported by at least one shadow cabinet colleague and the Tory London mayor, Boris Johnson.

Speaking at the Guardian's special green hustings, Clark said: "We have no plans to build another runway in the south-east." Aviation critics, however, pointed out that this did not rule out increasing the use of a smaller airport such as Luton.

While Labour and the Conservatives agreed on new nuclear power stations, Miliband accused the Lib Dems of "ducking" difficult issues, and asked their spokesman, Simon Hughes, to explain how his party would meet their pledge to cut electricity emissions without it.

Hughes did not answer directly, but said instead that a key reason they could meet their energy targets was because they would do more to make homes and businesses energy efficient.

Clark was also challenged to explain how the Conservatives could insist there would be no taxpayer subsidies for nuclear power, despite reports that new nuclear reactors could not be built and operated without pubic support. "We're very clear, we're not going to subsidise it," Clark said in response.

Miliband and Hughes attacked the record of Conservative councils in opposing windfarms, but Clark said this was because "we have more councils, and they are more likely to be in rural areas where wind is built".

Labour and the Conservatives disagreed on how the problem could be solved. It was a debate that went to the heart of a wider clash between the party manifestos, over whether the government needed to intervene more to deliver environmental improvements.

Clark said there needed to be more incentives for local people to want wind power, such as the party's policy to let communities share in profits. Miliband challenged him to take on local councils, over wind power and other issues, such as insulation, adding: "It does require leadership. Of course we are in favour of [profit-sharing], but the question is: are you going to say to local authorities 'you have to be part of our plan', or not?"

The most heated debate, was over claims many Conservatives are sceptical that climate change is caused mostly by humans and that the government needs to urgently tackle it. In the most high-profile case, Miliband claimed Tory culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, had responded to a question by saying "there are climate sceptics in all parties", implying that the shadow business secretary was one.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Apr 2010 | 6:09 pm

Ash cloud's silver lining: bluer skies (AP)

AP - As volcanic ash cast a shadow over millions of lives, Londoners and other city dwellers across Europe were treated to a rare spectacle of nature: Pristine, blue skies brighter than any in recent memory.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Apr 2010 | 5:42 pm

Eyjafjallajokull Volcano's Ash Cloud Explained

Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano created an ash cloud that disrupted flights, created beautiful sunsets and lightning.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Apr 2010 | 4:57 pm

Recycle Your Old Cell Phone This Earth Day

There are 1 billion unused phones that can be recycled.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Apr 2010 | 4:33 pm

Will Leaked iPhone 4G Bruise Apple?

Product leaks usually only serve to benefit the consumer, not the business.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Apr 2010 | 4:28 pm

Comparing the iPhone 4G and Droid Incredible

How does the upcoming next generation iPhone measure up against Droid Incredible?
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Apr 2010 | 4:22 pm

What Country Is the Best at Protecting the Environment?

After dropping 24 spots in one ranking, the United States is taking steps to improve its environmental impact.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Apr 2010 | 4:20 pm

The view from a broad: And what do you call your Mooncup?

It may be an environmentally friendly sanitary device, but calling it by a pet name would be toe-curling

Thank you to all who have been in touch about those adorable loveyourvagina.com ads. For those too timid to visit the website, it is not promoting a lady garden topiary product or a range of Ann Summers electrical equipment, but is, in fact, a campaign for that old Guardian women's page favourite, the Mooncup.

Mooncup is not the domesticated cousin of Moonpig, but an environmentally friendly sanitary "device" for ladies. As image overhauls go, it's pretty impressive; if only they hadn't undone all their hard work by littering the website with such toe-curling enquiries as "Do you love yours?" and "Tell us what you call yours". Oh, Mooncup, there's interactive, and there's intrusive, and you just crossed the goddamn line, my friend.

✤Science watch: This week we learned two fascinating scientific facts: (i) courtesy of the Royal Society journal – sperm production is not so much affected by a man's lifestyle choices as by his mother's; (ii) from a City University presentation at the British Psychological Society's annual conference – baby boys prefer cars, while baby girls favour dolls. Combining the results of these two studies, may we conclude that dolls are to blame for a low sperm count?

✤Our favourite discovery of the week is surelythe Propose to Girl! video posted by johnwat12 on Youtube: exceedingly confident young man inexplicably wearing two shirts explains that despite being a flirt, and despite the fact that he can happily live without the object of his affection, he'd like to marry her all the same.

Gentlemen, if you're considering proposing to a girl, first think: it is unlawful to marry a minor; why not try proposing to a woman instead? Second, there are more winning lines than: "I know there are barriers between us . . . like, I know your favourite car is BMW, and I can't in my wildest dreams imagine going to a BMW showroom just to look at that car." Anyway, aren't you aware that girls prefer dolls?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Apr 2010 | 4:00 pm

Of Plastics and Whales. And Other Marine Life.

The stomach of a gray whale found near Seattle last week was chock full of garbage, including lots of plastic. Plastic is the most abundant form of trash in the region's waters, research has found, and it can be lethal ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Apr 2010 | 3:52 pm

Good Bacteria Eat Bad Greenhouse Gas

Northwestern University are studying bacteria that might be able to tackle two environmental issues at once: leeching heavy metals from the soil while at the same time consuming the greenhouse gas methane.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Apr 2010 | 3:40 pm

How airlines won battle for the skies

Heathrow airport opened to inbound flights with minutes to spare after 96 hours of test flights resulted in deal

Thousands of miles from Britain's ash-shrouded Heathrow airport, passengers on flight BA84 on Tuesday morning were delighted to be taking off from Vancouver at last. Five days after the volcano crisis began, those on board, like many thousands of other travellers across the world, had been unsure how – or when – they would get back to the UK.

The problem was, neither British Airways nor the government could guarantee the flight's destination. Mindful of the safety fears that had grounded an entire continent, the pilot announced that the delays had nothing to do with the shipshape aircraft – it just wasn't clear whether Heathrow would be available at the end of the nine-hour flight.

The other 27 BA long-haul services heading towards the UK on Tuesday had the same problem, as airports at Shannon, Amsterdam, Paris and Brussels warned that their runways might be called upon if the meetings in London failed to lift a ban on flights in and out of the capital.

As BA84 took off from Canada, BA's chief executive, Willie Walsh, was being taunted by the sight of aircraft contrails 35,000ft above the Department for Transport headquarters in London. UK airline bosses had assembled at Marsham Street to seek a lifting of the flight embargo from the transport secretary, Lord Adonis.

Britain, it had been judged, was safe for overflying at more than 20,000 feet, above the cloud of volcanic ash, but not for takeoffs and landings. BA was losing up to £20m a day as a result.

One person at the meeting said: "It was frustrating to see someone else flying while we couldn't." Adonis told the most powerful figures in UK aviation that, without the approval of the Civil Aviation Authority, the air safety watchdog, the crippling ban would remain in place.

There was, a government source said today, an element of opportunism in Walsh's decision to approve the flights on Monday evening. BA gave the go-ahead shortly after Nats, the national air traffic controller, said it hoped to allow flights into southern England the next day.

"It was a wily move by BA, but we knew that they might have to divert those flights somewhere else," said the source.

Hours after the Monday announcement, Nats appeared to dash BA's hopes by admitting that a new plume of ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano would keep London closed to flights. With 28 planes now heading to a newly shuttered UK, Walsh was rooting for a resolution from the Tuesday meeting.

Adonis was adamant that any decision to lift the ban would be the CAA's call. On Saturday, the independent aviation regulator had called a round of teleconferences with the Met Office, aircraft engine manufacturers and specialists on volcanic hazards from the US Geological Survey. The discussion centred on finding a way of getting planes safely back into the skies.

In Exeter, Met Office staff were tracking the plume arriving from Iceland with infrared satellites and 30 ground-based lasers that had been reassigned to monitor volcanic ash instead of the cloud base.

Separately, forecasters were modelling how the plume might spread. The weather had conspired to impose a "blocking high" over Britain, meaning light winds and little chance of the plume blowing over fast.

The forecasters used the "numerical atmospheric dispersion modelling environment", a powerful programme that takes weather data and plots how clouds of particles are likely to spread. In its last emergency, the model had been used to forecast the spread of another toxic plume, from the Buncefield oil depot in Hertfordshire that exploded in 2005.

The first runs of the model said nothing about the amount of ash in the skies over Britain, but it did show how the cloud would move and spread out with time.

No-go areas of ash-filled air were defined as those with more than ten billionths of a billionth of a gram's worth of ash per cubic metre, which meant that under the old guidelines, a light scattering of ash was enough to ground a plane.

Over the weekend, forecasters fed the dispersion model with data on the amount of ash being churned out by the volcano. With these figures in place, the model could give its first realistic estimates of how much ash the cloud contained. On computer screens, the plume showed up as a patch of sky where levels of ash were above 200 micrograms per cubic metre.

The CAA asked the Met Office to generate two maps of the plume. The first showed where ash levels were above 200 micrograms per cubic metre and covered most of Britain. The second showed the plume only where it was 10 times more dense, with 2,000 micrograms of ash per cubic metre. "We thought we could start working with those figures," said Jim McKenna, CAA's head of airworthiness, strategy and policy. "We were trying to develop the concept and give the manufacturers a chance to look at the data."

Within 24 hours of the eruption last Thursday, it became clear to Adonis that the situation could turn into a logistical and financial catastrophe.

The government source said: "It became clear that, because the situation was so unpredictable a sit-back-and-hope approach would not work. So we had to interrogate the no-ash-no-fly rule. It quickly became apparent that it was not a benchmark that had been developed in response to detailed scenarios, including how planes respond to them."

By Sunday the CAA had garnered initially reluctant engine and aircraft manufacturers into working groups that were analysing whether the guidelines were too stringent.

The aircraft engine manufacturers, including Rolls Royce and the US group, Engine Alliance, dug out old cases where airliners had flown through volcanic ash clouds inadvertently and studied reports on the incidents.

There are plenty: in the three months up to February 1989, five commercial jets were damaged by ash clouds from Redoubt volcano in Alaska, while of 60 aircraft that were damaged in ash clouds in the 12 years to 1993, seven airliners, carrying more than 2,000 people, suffered dramatic engine failure.

The incident reports were crucial for the manufacturers. Forensic inspections of aircraft that survived near-misses with volcanic ash clouds gave them a clue as to how much dust can cause an engine to fail. Engineers know how much air an airline engine sucks in every minute, so they could work back to how dense a cloud of ash might be dangerous. That same day, Sunday, a Dornier twin propeller research plane operated by the National Environment Research Council took off from Cranfield, Bedfordshire, and flew a route that was followed later by a BA 747 jumbo jet with Walsh on board. While the research plane took readings of ash levels, engineers waited at Cardiff airport to examine the BA flight when it landed. Conditions were perfect and the ground crew found no sign of engine damage.

Amid mounting evidence from airline test flights that it was safe to fly through the ash, EU transport ministers agreed on Monday evening that "safe flight zones" could be established in the ash if national air safety watchdogs sanctioned it.

At the same time, the aerospace giant Airbus ordered test flights of its own from Toulouse. An A380 took off into the French no-fly zone on a route that lasted three hours and 50 minutes. A second test aircraft, an A340-400, flew for five hours, crossing over into German airspace.

Both planes were checked on landing and the inspection reports sent to the CAA and manufacturers that evening.After poring over the historical data and results from test flights, manufacturers one by one said their engines could safely fly in volcanic plumes with up to 2,000 micrograms of ash per cubic metre.

"They agreed that it's acceptable for that level of ash to be tolerated without any real restriction," said McKenna. A new safety code was roughed out: anything more than 2,000 micrograms per cubic metre is a no-fly zone. Between 2,000 and 200 micrograms requires planes to take extra precautions. Below 200 micrograms is considered no threat at all.

But by Tuesday morning, those doubts had yet to crystallise into a sweeping rule change. Walsh was arguing that the BA test flight proved that flying through low-density ash clouds was safe – a finding backed by dozens of tests around Europe. The CAA still had to run its findings by a board meeting on Tuesday, however, with the airline executives reconvening at Marsham Street at 7pm.

With the clock ticking as BA84 approached UK airspace, the CAA told Walsh and his peers that the board approved new guidelines that would allow flights through the ash – overturning years-old regulations in 96 hours.

The BA boss had one question, according to the government source. "Willie then said: 'What does it mean for my flights?'" CAA officials conferred with colleagues in Ireland and came back with the answer: you can land at 10pm. In fact, BA84 landed at 21.49pm, minutes after Adonis announced the changes on the steps of Marsham Street, becoming the first flight to grace Heathrow in nearly six days.

A BA spokeswoman said: "Our priority is to bring stranded customers home as soon as possible. When our long-haul aircraft took off , we were optimistic that London airspace would reopen after 1900 in the evening. We had contingency plans for the aircraft if the air space restrictions changed. Safety is our top priority."

Andrew Haines, the CAA's chief executive, defended its conduct amid claims that airspace should not have been closed for so long. "We achieved what often takes years in 96 hours. When you are dealing with people's lives it is not enough to say, this guidance looks a bit restrictive, let's just make up a less restrictive one, you have to agree new safety guidelines that are evidence based," he said.

Asked if passengers should have any concerns about safety, Haines added: "I would happily fly myself. We have only taken this view after very detailed work by aircraft and engine manufacturers, in-flight testing and intensive investigations. All that data is saying that in low contamination areas it is very safe to fly."

The disruptive influence of Eyjafjallajokull may not be at an end. Chris Yates, an aviation consultant, said: "Concentration levels of volcanic ash have been shown to be low … hence planes allowed to fly, but it's important to note [that] if concentration levels rise then airspace will be closed again and flights grounded. The airline industry has won the battle on this one, but it hasn't won the war."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Apr 2010 | 3:37 pm

Mercury in Tuna Sushi Higher at Restaurants than Groceries

Tuna sushi from your local supermarket might have lower mercury levels and so be safer to eat than sushi from a high-end restaurant, a new study using fish DNA suggests.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Apr 2010 | 3:27 pm

Songbirds Hold Secrets of Attracting Mates

How pheromones influence songbird mating could shed light on how humans find the perfect mate.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 Apr 2010 | 3:10 pm

We were lucky we weren't wiped out

The volcanic ash cloud from Eyjafjallajokull has caused travel chaos and misery. But we were lucky. An eruption in the future could wipe out the human race

The map is almost uncannily similar to today's: a spray of black dots showing the recorded sightings of a foul grey haze spreading across Europe, from Helsinki to Naples, from Heligoland to Mallorca, and reaching eventually to Aleppo and Damascus – and all of it caused by clouds of ash from an immense volcano erupting far across the sea in Iceland.

But this was a map made from data collected in 1783. The volcano was called Laki, it erupted for eight dismal months without cease, ruined crops, lowered temperatures and drastically altered the weather. It killed 9,000 people, drenched the European forests in acid rain, caused skin lesions in children and the deaths of millions of cattle. And, by one account, it was a contributing factor (because of the hunger-inducing famines) to the outbreak six years later of the French revolution.

Great volcanoes have a habit of prompting profound changes to the world – very much greater in extent than the most savage of earthquakes and tsunamis, even though the immediate lethality of the latter is invariably much more cruel. Though ground-shaking events are generally fairly local in extent, their potential for killing can be terrific: 250,000 died after the Tangshan earthquake in China in 1975; and a similar number died in the Indian ocean tsunami of 2004. Volcanoes seem by contrast relatively benign: the accumulated total number of deaths in all of the great volcanoes of the last 300 years has probably not exceeded a quarter of a million: the total number of casualties from a hundred of the biggest recent eruptions has been no more than those from a single giant earthquake.

But there is a signal difference. Earthquakes and their aftershocks, once done, are done. Volcanoes, however, often trigger long-term and long-distance ill-effects, which history indicates generally far outweigh their immediate rain of death and destruction. Emanations of particles from the tiniest pinprick in the earth's crust, once lifted high into the skies by an explosive eruption, can wind themselves sinuously and menacingly around the entire planet, and leave all kinds of devastation in their train. They can disrupt and pollute and poison; they can darken skies and cause devastating changes in the weather; they can and do bring about the abrupt end to the existence of entire populations of animals and people.

Earthquakes and tsunamis have never been known to cause extinctions; but volcanoes and asteroid collisions have done so repeatedly – and since the earth is today still peppered with scores of thousands of volcanoes ever yearning to erupt, they and the dramatic long-term effects of their eruptions are in fact far more frequent, far more decisive, and far greater than those that are triggered by any other natural phenomenon on the planet.

It is worth remembering that ours is a world essentially made from and by volcanoes. They are creatures that will continue to do their business over the aeons, quite careless of the fate of the myriad varieties of life that teems beneath them and on their flanks. Including, of course, ours.

There is perhaps no better recent example of the havoc that a big eruption can cause than that which followed the explosive destruction of Mt Toba, in northern Sumatra, some 72,000 years ago (which, in geological time, is very recent indeed). The relics of this mountain today are no more than a very large and beautiful lake, 60 miles long and half a mile deep – the caldera that was left behind by what is by most reckonings the largest volcanic explosion known to have occurred on the planet in the last 25 million years.

On the widely used volcanic explosivity index (VEI), Toba is thought to have been an eight – meaning that in the unusually flamboyant official language of vulcanology it was a super-plinian type eruption with mega-colossal characteristics (Eyjafjallajökull is by contrast listed as a strombolian type, with its characteristic regarded as merely gentle, and having a probable VEI rating of just two).

About 680 cubic miles of rock were instantly vaporised by the super-eruptive blast of Toba, all of which was hurled scores of thousands of feet into the air. This this is what did the lasting damage, just as Iceland's high-altitude rock-dust is doing today. But while we today are merely suffering a large number of inconvenienced people and a weakening of the balance sheets of some airlines, the effect on the post-Toban world was catastrophic: as a result of the thick ash clouds the world's ambient temperature plummeted, perhaps by as much as 5C – and the cooling and the howling wave of deforestation and deaths of billions of animals and plants caused a sudden culling of the human population of the time, reducing it to maybe as few as 5,000 people, perhaps 1,000 breeding pairs. Many anthropologists believe that the event caused a sudden evolutionary bottleneck, with genetic implications that linger to this day. Put more crudely, humanity was nearly wiped out by Toba, and only by the merest hair's-breadth did our ancestors of 72,000 years ago manage to cling on and bequeath to us our current existence.

Mercifully, from humanity's point of view, there have been very few Tobas known in planetary history. They are probably so large that they reach the upper limit of the kind of eruptions that can physically occur on earth – one VEI-8 event occurs only every 100,000 years or so. Yet of those known to have occurred, two have taken place in Britain (mainly because Britain has such a vast variety of geology, with almost every age of rock known in the world found somewhere between Cape Wrath and the Port of Dover). They are comfortingly ancient: both – the volcano that created Scafell in the Lake District, and the other that gave us Glen Coe in the Western Highlands – took place more than 400 million years ago.

But others of the 47 known VEI-8 volcanoes are more alarmingly recent. Taupo in New Zealand erupted with mega-colossal force some 22,500 years ago. The newer of the great eruptions that helped form the mountains of today's Yellowstone national park in Wyoming took place just 640,000 years ago, and all the current signs – from such phenomena as the rhythmic slow rising and falling of the bed of the Yellowstone river, as if some giant creature is breathing far below – suggest another eruption is coming soon. When it does, it will be an American Armageddon: all of the north and west of the continent, from Vancouver to Oklahoma City, will be rendered uninhabitable, buried under scores of feet of ash. (I mentioned this once in a talk to a group of lunching ladies in Kansas City, soothing their apparent disquiet by adding that by "soon" I was speaking in geologic time, and that meant about 250,000 years, by which time all humankind would be extinct. A woman in the front row exploded with a choleric and incredulous rage: "What?" she said. "Even Americans will be extinct?")

Ratcheting down the scale a couple of notches, to the only slightly less gigantic eruptions that are classified as VEI-7 and VEI-6, and a host of more familiar eruptions come into view. These include Santorini, the Aegean volcano whose destruction around 4,000 years ago may have triggered the collapse of the Minoan civilisation; Laki, the 1783 Icelandic volcano mentioned above, and which most obviously parallels today's events at Eyjafjallajökull; the Javan volcano of Krakatoa, which erupted so infamously in August 1883; and the rather more profoundly world-affecting eruption of 1815, also in the Dutch East Indies, of the huge stratovolcano on Sumbawa Island, known as Tambora. Each of these had massive after-effects, and all of the effects were global in their extent.

Tambora is the most notorious, not least because it was so immense: almost 40 cubic miles of pulverised Sumbawan rock were hurled into the sky, which darkened, cooled and polluted a world that, unlike in Toba's day, was already well populated and widely civilised. The consequences ranged from the dire – a lowering of temperature that caused frosts in Italy in June and snows in Virginia in July, and the failure of crops in immense swathes across Europe and the Americas – to the frankly ludicrous – Irish migrants, promised better weather in New England, found it on landing to be every bit as grim as the Connemara and Cork they had left, and so either went home, or pressed on in hope to California.

And Tambora's eruption had its effects on art also: a gloomy Byron wrote the gloomiest of poems, Darkness ("Morn came and went, and came, and brought no day/ And men forgot their passions in the dread/ Of this their desolation . . ."); Mary Shelley, it is said, became so fed up with the rain while visiting Byron in Geneva that she followed suit and wrote her exceptionally gloomy novel Frankenstein. Only JMW Turner rose more cheerfully to the occasion: the lurid colours of many of his paintings, it is said, owe much to the flaming Tambora sunsets that had half the world astonished, and Turner evidently inspired.

Krakatoa's immediate aftermath was dominated initially by dramatic physical effects – a series of tsunamis that were measured as far away as Portland Bill and Biarritz, a bang of detonation that was clearly heard (like naval gunfire, said the local police officer) 3,000 miles away on Rodriguez Island, and a year's worth of awe-inspiring evening beauty – astonishing sunsets of purple and passionfruit and salmon that had artists all around the world trying desperately to capture what they managed to see in the fleeting moments before dark. A Londoner named William Ascroft left behind almost 500 watercolours that he painted, one every 10 minutes like a human film camera, from his Thames-side flat in Chelsea; Frederic Church, of America's so-called Hudson River School, captured the crepuscular skies over Lake Ontario in their full post-Krakatoan glory; and many now agree that Edvard Munch had the purple and orange skies over Oslo in mind when 10 years afterwards he painted, most hauntingly, The Scream.

Yet there was an important legacy to Krakatoa's eruption that was not shared by the other giant volcanoes of the time. Close mapping of the spread of the 1883 sunsets showed them girdling the earth in a curious set of spirals, the stratospheric aerosols evidently being borne around the world on high-altitude winds that no one at the time knew even existed. An atmospheric scientist in Hawaii mapped them and decided to call the air current the equatorial smoke stream; it later became, more elegantly and economically, the jet stream. There has to be some irony that the jet stream that drives today's Icelandic dust so dangerously over Britain and mainland Europe is a phenomenon that was first discovered as a direct consequence of the study of Krakatoa.

And yet, of all the consequences of the truly great volcanoes of the past, the phenomenon of mass extinctions of life must surely be the most profound and world-changing of all. Between two and five major extinction events occur in the world every million years or so. We humans have not thus far been privileged to observe one of them – hardly surprisingly, since they would probably occur so slowly as to be barely noticeable. However, with painstaking care, palaeontological evidence is currently being amassed to link sudden and catastrophic changes in world climate, changes that promote such extinction crises, with the known major eruptions of the past, and with what are known as flood basalt events (such as those that have been triggered specifically in the past by eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and her neighbouring volcano in Iceland, Katla, which is herself currently well overdue for an eruption). It is a study that opens up a fascinating speculative possibility.

For what if the kind of event that we have seen this month, and which caused us all in Europe such commercial inconvenience, is in fact not just a minor volcanic hiccup, but the beginning of an event that causes in time a mass extinction of some form of earthbound life? And further, since we know from the history books that the massive eruption of Santorini once had the power to destroy one proud part of human society, what if the extinction we might be beginning to see turns out to be what will one day surely occur, and that is the extinction of us?

Simon Winchester is a journalist and author; one of his books is Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Apr 2010 | 2:00 pm

How the Internet Fuels Cell Phone Scares

There's little scientific evidence supporting a link between cell phones and cancer, yet hoaxes and media scares raise alarm with the public.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Apr 2010 | 1:48 pm

Upward Physical Movement Brings Back Happy Memories

Physical movement and memory are so closely intertwined that even a seemingly meaningless motion, like moving marbles from one box to another, alters the speed and tenor of recall.

The marble-moving study was performed by Daniel Casasanto and Katinka Dijkstra, psychologists at the Max Planck Institute and Erasmus University, and published in March in the journal Cognition.

In earlier studies, the group showed how right-handed people associate positive emotions with the rightward direction, and negative with left. Left-handed people experience the opposite. They’ve also shown that people are better at recalling activities when their bodies are engaged in relevant postures. Other researchers have documented how smiling and frowning alters emotion, and how sitting upright or slumping affects cognitive performance.

Researchers have proposed two explanations for these results. Casasanto and Dijkstra think that motion is metaphorical. We’ve come to associate spatial characteristics with emotional values in our minds, and physical motions activate the same pathways: Jumping sends spirits soaring. Other researchers suspect the link is more direct. They think that we associate memories with physical movements involved in their formation. A nasty fall once caused pain, so falling has negative connotations forever.

To investigate the mechanisms tying motion to memory, Casasanto and Dijkstra instructed 24 college students to move marbles with both hands between two stacked boxes. As they moved the marbles, they were asked about times they had “felt really cool,” “ate something delicious” and other emotion-specific experiences.

When moving the marbles upward, the students were quicker to recall positive experiences and slower to remember the negative. When moving marbles down, happy memories came slowly and sad memories fast.

In the second part of the study, students were asked more general questions, such as “tell me about something that happened last summer.” When moving marbles up, they were more likely to recall a happy time. Moving marbles down brought back unhappy memories.

Because moving marbles is a motion not likely linked to a specific memory, the findings suggest a metaphorical link between motion and memory, say the researchers. Of course, there could still be a direct link in other circumstances. But whatever the explanations, the results add further weight to the idea that bodies are not simply vehicles for our brains, but an important part of our minds.

Via Neurophilosophy.

Image: Evire.R./Flickr.

See Also:

• The Messy Future of Memory-Editing Drugs
• Think You’d Remember the Face of Your Torturer? Think Again
• Humans Hard-Wired to Remember Phone Numbers
• Seeing Red: Tweak Your Brain With Colors
• Babies See Pure Color, but Adults Peer Through Prism of Language

Citation: “Motor action and emotional memory.” By Daniel Casasanto and Katinka Dijkstra. Cognition, published online March 4, 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 | 21 Apr 2010 | 1:47 pm

New Space Telescope Delivers First Mind-Blowing Video of the Sun

NASA’s latest space telescope, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, is delivering unprecedented images of our local star.

The telescope was launched Feb. 11. NASA released the first tremendously exciting data from the mission today.

“These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA, in a release. “SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society. This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics.”

The sun’s internal dynamics were the subject of intense interest over the last few years as the normal waxing and waning of solar activity did not follow past cycles as closely as anticipated. The solar minimum of 2008 stretched deep into 2009, raising questions about how well we understand the complex internal dynamics that drive sun spots, solar flares and coronal-mass ejections.

Because solar storms can disrupt human technologies, it’s important to know when we might expect a serious event that could shut down the electrical grid, for example.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory is now NASA’s best eye on the sun, with a resolution far-exceeding any previous telescope. It will send 1.5 terabytes of data to Earth every day. With the more precise data and the SDO’s ability to see the whole sun at once, scientists anticipate that they’ll be able to solve some longstanding questions about how the sun’s magnetic field works.

NASA has posted some high-resolution images and video to flickr. In the video embedded above, we see a solar prominence that erupted March 30. Below, we can see the whole star at the time of the prominence, in the extreme ultraviolet part of the spectrum. Reds map to relatively cool temperatures of around 100,000 degrees Fahrenheit (60,000 kelvins), while blues and greens represent hotter regions of more than 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1,000,000 kelvins).

See Also:

• Cute Little Spacecraft Will Take Amazing Pictures of the Sun
• Psychedelic Sunspot Video Useful for Science, Too
• Photo: The Sun Gets Its Spots (Back)
• Solar Slumber May Have Been Caused by Magnetic Flows

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and forthcoming book on the history of green technology; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Apr 2010 | 1:21 pm

'Paltry' carbon curbs point to 3C

Pledges made at the Copenhagen summit are very unlikely to keep global warming below 2C, researchers find.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Apr 2010 | 1:17 pm

Sun 'microscope' returns images

Stunning new images are released of huge explosions and looping gases on the Sun, captured by Nasa's new solar mission.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Apr 2010 | 12:27 pm

License to Green: Clean Energy vs. Patents

Developing new green technologies — like cheaper solar panels or methods of extracting energy from ocean tides — is a top priority for combating climate change, because global carbon emissions cannot be stabilized with existing technologies. In rich countries, where most tech development takes place, patents create incentives for innovation. But these new technologies will do little good if they are unaffordable in most of the world.

The tension between promoting new inventions and enabling access to them has created a global deadlock over patent law that’s a stumbling block for an international climate treaty. In the run-up to last year’s Copenhagen summit, countries like China and India demanded special patent exemptions for green technologies, so they might use these technologies without paying high licensing fees.

For example, Chinese car manufacturers are unable to produce low-cost hybrid cars because a small number of companies have patented key components. American companies, however, worry that patent law changes will cut into their profits, and last June, the House unanimously voted to prevent any weakening of international patent rights.

There’s a way out of this impasse: The United States could appease its global critics without changing international patent laws — while simultaneously making green technologies cheaper for Americans. Our government can do this simply by changing the way in which federally funded inventions are patented.

Taxpayer dollars fund 60 percent (.pdf) of this country’s basic research, most of which occurs at universities. And that pool of money is only growing. Last year’s stimulus package added $5 billion to the basic research budgets of the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy in what President Obama called the biggest increase in basic research funding in American history. Game-changing green technologies—such as a method to store solar energy as fuel — will probably emerge in the coming years from government-funded university labs or research centers.

But a 1980 federal law designed to get inventions out of university labs and to consumers will end up limiting worldwide access to these technologies. The Bayh-Dole Act allows universities to grant exclusive rights to private companies. MIT, for example, has more than 30 patented green technologies available for licensing, and Cleveland State University has granted one company a worldwide exclusive license for a new wind-turbine design.

These patents do provide companies with an added incentive to commercialize new technologies, but they stifle competition, too. In the end, the public pays twice for new inventions: once for the initial research and again for the high prices of the patented products. Universities do not benefit from this system very much, either — very few earn significant revenue from their licenses, and most fail even to recoup their legal fees.

The theory behind the Bayh-Dole Act is that companies need the incentive of exclusive patent rights (and the high prices they can then charge) to turn basic research into new consumer products. This may well be true for pharmaceuticals, given the high cost of running clinical trials and getting the necessary FDA approval.

For most technologies, however, companies don’t need this added incentive to bring a good idea to market. On the contrary, a thicket of patents on basic research findings can make it harder to synthesize the latest knowledge and create a useful, new product. These patent thickets have arisen for fuel cells, wind energy, and carbon sequestration.

So what’s the fix? Patents on federally funded inventions should be the exception, not the rule. Fewer patents would mean cheaper green products, both abroad and here in the United States, which would help reduce global carbon emissions. And it wouldn’t be too much of a burden to U.S. business interests, since companies that perform their own research, rather than just commercializing federally funded inventions, would still be able to patent their technologies.

Under Bayh-Dole, the agencies that distribute research grants (like the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy) can only limit patent rights under “exceptional circumstances,” as determined through procedures so elaborate that they have only been satisfied once. What if this burden were reversed, so that it took exceptional circumstances for an exclusive patent license to be allowed in the first place?

New drug development, for example, might meet the requirement, since it takes a huge investment of resources to bring a pharmaceutical product to market. But other technologies — like a new battery design or better solar cell materials — wouldn’t get the special patent rights.

The people who run the university technology transfer offices — that is to say, the people who actually do the patenting — are strongly in favor of keeping the law the way it is. They argue that Bayh-Dole helps get university inventions out of the lab so that people can actually use them.

But a huge number of technologies have been commercialized out of federally funded research without the need of patents. Think of the computer — or search engines. Furthermore, the licensing deals negotiated by university staff are focused on raising revenue, not increasing public access: A recent study by professor Jay Kesan found that “university technology transfer activities continue to be predominantly patent-centric and revenue-driven with a single-minded focus on generating licensing income and obtaining reimbursement for legal expenses.”

While each university hopes to be among the lucky few who hit the jackpot with a blockbuster patent, few actually succeed in generating more income than they pay out in legal fees, so current Bayh-Dole practices seem to benefit neither universities nor the public.

Amending Bayh-Dole would be the best way to show developing countries that the United States is serious about helping them go green. But agencies like the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy don’t have to wait for Congress. They can begin to make a partial fix on their own. Although they do not have authority to declare certain technologies off-limits to patenting, agencies can nudge universities toward change by making patent practices one of the factors considered when they distribute grant money.

For example, researchers who want National Science Foundation grants must already show how their work will benefit society. The list of examples (.pdf) of how to satisfy this requirement includes sharing data publicly or presenting research results to nonscientists. It would be easy to add examples of access-oriented licensing to this list.

Agencies could also ask universities to set up “responsible patenting policies” in addition to the conflict-of-interest policies that are already required. Forcing universities to put their policies on paper — and giving students, alums, and the public the opportunity to evaluate them — could go far toward aligning university practices with the goals of the Bayh-Dole Act.

The researchers who are developing groundbreaking green technologies spend much of their time writing grant applications. If their success in winning a grant depends in part on their willingness to forgo a patent, they would care a lot more about what their technology transfer offices actually do.

Researchers would have an incentive not only to invent fabulous new things, but also to serve the public interest by opening up access to developing countries. And wouldn’t that make China and India happy?

This story was produced by Slate for the Climate Desk collaboration.

Image: adulau/flickr.

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette has a Ph.D. in physics and is a student fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. This piece is adapted from her comment in the May issue of The Yale Law Journal, “Addressing the Green Patent Global Deadlock Through Bayh-Dole Reform.” 119 Yale L.J. 1727 (forthcoming 2010).

See Also:

• The Coming Tide of Global Climate Lawsuits
• Attractive Nuisance: Should Judges Help Tackle Climate Change?
• Betting on Climate Change: Corporations Stand to Make or Lose Billions

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Apr 2010 | 11:55 am

Skywatchers set for meteor show

Stargazers are preparing for a sky show as the annual Lyrids meteor shower gets underway on Wednesday.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Apr 2010 | 11:51 am

Male Spiders Have Safer Sex With Siblings

Inbreeding isn’t worth dying for, even in a spider species where males routinely pay for sex with their lives.

Sex is never safe for males of the species Argiope bruennichi, one of Europe’s common orb-web spiders. In lab tests conducted by behavioral ecologists at the Zoological Institute and Museum of the University of Hamburg, males ended up as their mates’ lunch in about three trysts out of four.

But when researchers matched up siblings the cannibalism rate fell to about half, mostly because the males beat a hasty retreat, Klaas Welke and Hamburg colleague Jutta Schneider report online the week of April 19 in Biology Letters.

Males who found themselves paired with their sisters suspended relations after an average of six seconds, fast enough to improve their odds of escaping the female afterward. With an unrelated female, the average was about nine seconds.

The study suggests that males balance their chance of reproductive success against their risk of being eaten by adjusting how much time they spend mating.

Biologists have long recognized that mating with close relatives can lead to trouble, such as fewer or weaker offspring down the line. In species where females make greater investments in young or mate fewer times, biologists have predicted that females would be especially fussy about the risk of inbreeding.

But in Argiope bruennichi, males have more restrictions on mating. Each male has two sperm-delivery organs, or pedipalps, and they’re not reusable. During mating a bit breaks off, usually the tip, and acts as a partial plug in the female reproductive tract that makes insertion difficult for later males. Despite this barrier, females can still mate again, but males get only two shots.

“The males should be choosy,” Welke says.

And that’s how the experiment turned out. The researchers knew the family origin of each spider because they reared the arachnids from egg sacs collected in the wild. When the spiders grew up, researchers paired 45 females with sibling males and 46 with nonsiblings, and then compared reactions.

Just how males recognize their kin isn’t clear yet. But Welke notes that if spiderlings have the brain capacity to learn their siblings, they have months to do so. Mom lays the egg sac in summer, but youngsters hatch inside and stay cooped up until the next spring.

This finding of inbreeding avoidance in males intrigues Trine Bilde of Aarhus University in Denmark, who has studied the female side of inbreeding in spiders. It’s another twist in the tale of cannibals, which have proved quite informative to biologists. “It is interesting to study sexually cannibalistic species to understand how evolution can possibly favor self-sacrificing males,” she says.

Image: Female Argiope bruennichi./Coussier/flickr.
See Also:

• 1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth
• The Spider Awards: Wired.com’s Arachnid Hall of Fame
• Even-More-Gigantic Giant Orb Spider Discovered
• Giant Spider Species Discovered in Middle Eastern Sand Dunes

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Apr 2010 | 11:46 am

High-Tech $100 Bill Unveiled

Benjamin Franklin's portrait is set to undergo a modern makeover in an attempt to keep counterfeiters at bay.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Apr 2010 | 11:10 am

The Plan to Map Every Tree in San Francisco

Every tree in San Francisco will soon be accounted for online, thanks to a new, Wikified project that aims to plot them all.

The Urban Forest Map will officially launch Wednesday, drawing on tree information collected by the city of San Francisco and Friends of the Urban Forest, a non-profit group. Though the project is getting its start in the Bay Area, the site will head to other major cities in the coming months.

“We’re going to publish the most up-to-date data from our data sources. Then, from that point on, we’re going to allow the community to add and edit and update that information,” said Amber Bieg, the project manager of the Urban Forest Map project. “It’ll become a tree census from the community and function like a Wiki.”

The new website combines two trends: citizen science and local data projects. In the past several years, sites like EveryBlock and Yelp have had tremendous success collecting and presenting information about cities from the people, businesses, and governments there. Meanwhile, all kinds of citizen science projects have had success tracking birds and sorting through pictures from space.

While questions about the usefulness of citizen-acquired data dog some of the efforts, photographing and tagging the trees in your neighborhood may be a perfect application for citizen science. Conducting tree surveys is expensive for local governments, costing $3 per tree, Bieg estimates.

“If you are LA and you have 10 million trees, you’re spending 30 million dollars,” Bieg said. “That’s bigger than the entire urban forestry budget.”

Bieg got the idea for the project five years ago while she was planting trees in the famed North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco.

“I had this epiphany,” Bieg said. “It was really inefficient for one individual or even a group to go out with GPS units and survey trees.” Instead, the people of the community could survey their own trees.

So, she teamed up with ecologist Kelaine Vargas and had the online tools built that would allow everyday people to participate in a tree survey. “It’s projected that San Francisco has hundreds of thousands of trees, and we only have 90,000 in the database,” she said. “We’re counting on people to help us improve that data.”

Built with open-data principles in mind, all of the tree information collected will be available for city officials and developers to play with.

The better the data about trees, the easier it is to design good policies, said Kathy Wolf, a research social scientist at the National Forest Service and the University of Washington.

“Local government can introduce policy to promote urban forestry but government just does not have the resources to follow through and do the work, and that’s where these citizen mapping projects are extremely helpful,” Wolf said.

For example, in Seattle where Wolf works, “There are thousands of people, hundreds of organizations.” But at the aggregate level, city planners and ecologists don’t know if the organizations are working together or in alignment “with any ecosystem policy.” New York’s urban stewardship program is leading the way toward figuring out how to incorporate community data into government plans.

Bieg and Vargas said New York City could be the next place they launch the Urban Forest Map.

Image: Jon Snyder/Wired.com.

See Also:

• Citizen Science Is for the Birds
• GPS-Equipped iPhone Could Enable New Citizen Science
• Thousands of Citizen Scientists to Help Map Light Pollution …

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 Apr 2010 | 10:28 am

Oil Rig Explosion Rocks Offshore Platform

At least 11 workers are reported missing after the explosion sent a column of fire into the night sky.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Apr 2010 | 9:45 am

Brain Games Won't Boost I.Q.

Although they may be entertaining, brain games probably won't make you smarter.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Apr 2010 | 8:55 am

Story in Photos: Male Monkeys Hold Infants to Make Friends

Please check out this week's Discovery News story on how male monkeys hold infants in order to make friends with other males. The basic finding is that male Barbary macaques purposefully hold infants in order to bond with other males. ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Apr 2010 | 8:41 am

Iceland volcano spews less ash, eruption goes on

REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - The Icelandic volcano which grounded air traffic over Europe is still erupting, but it is spewing less ash, the meteorological office and experts said on Wednesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 21 Apr 2010 | 8:24 am

Earth Watch

Ozone's joined-up climate: Carbon cuts in a spray can
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Apr 2010 | 7:44 am

US set to launch unmanned shuttle

The US air force quietly prepares to launch the X-37B, an unmanned spacecraft, into space just days after the return of the Discovery shuttle

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 21 Apr 2010 | 4:23 am

Tracks left by two-metre prehistoric 'sea scorpion' found

A cast is to be made of tracks left by a two-metre long prehistoric "sea scorpion" in north east Fife.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Apr 2010 | 4:06 am

Light shed on bee-tricking orchid

The secrets of orchids that trick male insects into pollinating them by mimicking females are revealed by scientists.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 Apr 2010 | 3:16 am