Excess nitrogen favors plants that respond poorly to rising CO₂

As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, so does the pressure on the plant kingdom. The hope among policymakers, scientists and concerned citizens is that plants will absorb some of the extra CO₂ and mitigate the impacts of climate change. For a few decades now, researchers have hypothesized about one major roadblock: nitrogen.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Volcanic ash research shows how plumes end up in the jet stream

A volcanologist has shown how the jet stream -- the area in the atmosphere that pilots prefer to fly in -- also seems to be the area most likely to be impacted by plumes from volcanic ash.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

How rules of physics in quantum world change when applied to classical world

Researchers have discovered a potentially important piece of the quantum/classical puzzle -- learning how the rules of physics in the quantum world (think smaller than microscopic) change when applied to the classical world (think every day items, like cars and trees).
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Childhood malnutrition could weaken brain function in elderly

Malnutrition early in life appears to diminish brain function in older adulthood, according to a new study that has implications for many poor, developing nations.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Scientists uncover novel role for DNA repair protein linked to cancer

Researchers report that DNA polymerase theta, or PolQ, promotes an inaccurate repair process, which can ultimately cause mutations, cell death or cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

People with depression eat more chocolate, a mood food

Researchers have found that women and men eat more chocolate as depressive symptoms increase, suggesting an association between mood and chocolate.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm

Cell phone microscope poised to begin trials in Africa

Engineers have developed a functioning prototype of a cell phone microscope for telemedicine. The lensless imaging platform behind the cell phone microscope is nearing readiness for real world trials, after receiving prestigious awards in the past month from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, National Geographic and the National Science Foundation.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Cellular and molecular events that restrict HIV transmission identified

Researchers have identified two molecules that when activated by drugs, can inhibit a number of specific aspects of HIV transmission. These findings may lead to therapies that target mucosal HIV transmission.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Subtle mutations in immune gene may increase risk for asthma

A gene that encodes a protein responsible for determining whether certain immune cells live or die shows subtle differences in some people with asthma, researchers report.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Scientists find direct line from development to growth

It may seem intuitive that growth and development somehow go together so that plants and animals end up with the right number of cells in all the right places. But it is only now that scientists have gotten some of the first insights into how this critical coordination actually works in a plant.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 6:00 am

Moynihan, as Nixon aide, warned of global warming (AP)

AP - Documents released Friday by the Nixon Presidential Library show members of President Richard Nixon's inner circle discussing the possibilities of global warming more than 30 years ago.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:53 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Wet weather persisted in the southern and central Plains on Saturday, as the remnants of Hurricane Alex continued pulling moisture in from the Gulf of Mexico.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 3:39 am

When evidence is unwelcome, people try to reason it away

Research results not consistent with your world view? Then you're likely to believe science can't supply all the answers

What do people do when confronted with scientific evidence that challenges their pre-existing view? Often they will try to ignore it, intimidate it, buy it off, sue it for libel or reason it away.

The classic paper on the last of those strategies is from Lord, Ross and Lepper in 1979: they took two groups of people, one in favour of the death penalty, the other against it, and then presented each with a piece of scientific evidence that supported their pre-existing view, and a piece that challenged it; murder rates went up or down, for example, after the abolition of capital punishment in a state.

The results were as you might imagine. Each group found extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views.

Some people go even further than this when presented with unwelcome data, and decide that science itself is broken. Politicians will cheerfully explain that the scientific method simply cannot be used to determine the outcomes of a drugs policy. Alternative therapists will explain that their pill is special, among all pills, and you simply cannot find out if it works by using a trial.

How deep do these views go, and how far do they generalise? Professor Geoffrey Munro took about 100 students and told them they were participating in a study on "judging the quality of scientific information", now published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. First, their views on whether homosexuality might be associated with mental illness were assessed, and then they were divided into two groups.

The first group were given five research studies that confirmed their pre-existing view. Students who thought homosexuality was associated with mental illness, for example, were given papers explaining that there were more gay people in psychological treatment centres than the general population. The second group were given research that contradicted their pre-existing view. (After the study was finished, we should be clear, they were told that all these research papers were fake, and given the opportunity to read real research on the topic if they wanted to.)

Then they were asked about the research they had read, and were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement: "The question addressed in the studies summarised … is one that cannot be answered using scientific methods."

As you would expect, the people whose pre-existing views had been challenged were more likely to say that science simply cannot be used to measure whether homosexuality is associated with mental illness.

But then, moving on, the researchers asked a further set of questions, about whether science could be usefully deployed to understand all kinds of stuff, all entirely unrelated to stereotypes about homosexuality: "the existence of clairvoyance", "the effectiveness of spanking as a disciplinary technique for children", "the effect of viewing television violence on violent behaviour", "the accuracy of astrology in predicting personality traits" and "the mental and physical health effects of herbal medications".

Their views on each issue were added together to produce one bumper score on the extent to which they thought science could be informative on all of these questions, and the results were truly frightening. People whose pre-existing stereotypes about homosexuality had been challenged by the scientific evidence presented to them were more inclined to believe that science had nothing to offer, on any question, not just on homosexuality, when compared with people whose views on homosexuality had been reinforced.

When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate attempt to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken. This is an interesting finding. But I'm not sure it makes me very happy.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 3 Jul 2010 | 1:00 am

Diver dies while working on rig unrelated to spill (AP)

AP - A waste services company says a diver performing maintenance on a client's rig in the Gulf of Mexico, unrelated to the massive oil spill, has died after an underwater accident.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Jul 2010 | 12:14 am

Oil spill claims arriving faster than BP can pay them (AFP)

AFP - New claims against BP from the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are pouring in more than twice as fast as the British energy giant is paying them out, US officials said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2010 | 11:31 pm

Volunteers ready but left out of spill cleanup (AP)

AP - BP and the Obama administration face mounting complaints that they are ignoring foreign offers of equipment and making little use of the fishing boats and volunteers available to help clean up what may now be the biggest spill ever in the Gulf of Mexico.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2010 | 11:30 pm

Scientists Make Immune Cells in Mice That Fight Off HIV (HealthDay)

HealthDay - FRIDAY, July 2 (HealthDay News) -- Research in mice suggests that scientists may have a new lead on using gene therapy against the virus that causes AIDS.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2010 | 9:48 pm

Russian spaceship 'under control'

Russia says a spaceship which missed the International Space Station is under control and will try to dock again on Sunday.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2010 | 9:08 pm

NASA delays shuttle finale until 2011

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA on Thursday postponed the final two missions of the space shuttle program until November and February due to delays preparing the last load of spare parts for the International Space Station.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Jul 2010 | 7:03 pm

Six killed as Alex floods major Mexican city (Reuters)

Reuters - Intense rain from Hurricane Alex shut down Mexico's richest city, Monterrey, on Friday, as floods killed six people, swept away cars and swamped wealthy suburbs with mud and rocks.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2010 | 6:54 pm

Gulf oil cleanup resumes, new drilling rules awaited (Reuters)

Reuters - Washington was preparing a revised offshore oil drilling moratorium and cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico returned to normal on Friday after hurricane Alex passed through the region without doing major damage.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2010 | 6:36 pm

Family Aims High for Ultimate 4th of July Vacation: Zero Gravity Flight (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - It's about to be the Fourth of July and I am going on a family vacation to the nation's capitol.  This time around, we will not be going to the usual tourist destinations. Instead, we are taking a giant leap into the world of space tourism: All five of us will be spending our Independence Day suspended in gravity as we embark on our first family Zero-G trip.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2010 | 5:45 pm

Marcus du Sautoy on books and apps

Eager to find new ways to involve his readers in the mysteries of numbers, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy looked to new technology. A revolution is coming, he argues, and the whole idea of what a book can do is about to change

Consider two books: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Not the printed books, the apps – software for mobiles and the iPad. The Wolf Hall app is a thing of beauty. It contains the text, of course, but readers can also move slickly between the text, family trees of the Tudors and the Yorkists, extra articles by Mantel and a fascinating video discussion between the novelist and historian David Starkey. All of which gives a deeper and richer understanding of the novel's historical context and its characters.

But this is nothing compared to Alice for the iPad. You can throw tarts at the Queen of Hearts, help the Caterpillar smoke his hookah pipe, make Alice grow as big as a house and then shrink again. You can watch as "the Mad Hatter gets even madder", and throw pepper at the Duchess. Over the 52 pages of the app there are 20 animated scenes. Each illustration has been taken from the original book and has been made gravity-aware, responding to a shake, tilt or the touch of a finger. The story is never the same twice, because users are Alice's guide through Wonderland. The Caterpillar will smoke his hookah in a new way when you tilt your iPad, or you can throw more pepper the second time around.

It would have been quite simple to convert the printed files of Carroll's book and drop it straight on to the iBookstore, but what Atomic Antelope (atomicantelope.com) has done, through painstaking artistry, is to capture, for adults and children alike, the fantastical nature of the story. This is about recreating what a book is and can be. With the advent of new technology – devices such as the iPhone or iPad, the Sony Reader or the Kindle – authors and publishers are being offered a huge challenge: to reconceive their content to provide a visual and interactive experience that the printed book cannot provide. Art books with huge numbers of accessible images; architecture books with 3D plans of buildings; travel books with videos and interactive maps; children's books with games and characters who introduce themselves; and so on and on. The potential is vast. This is not a case of simply trying to cram written content on to an e-reader; this is about taking that content and completely reinventing it.

Currently readers are being offered little more than the novelty of a book on an electronic device, but the thrill of turning the page by clicking a button quickly pales. Many of the current projects are just tarted-up books for electronic media, but if it doesn't move the experience on to a new level, to enhance the material, what's the point? What authors and publishers need to do is to go back to the drawing board and, at the moment ideas are conceived, work out how – if at all – to make use of these new toys.

Before we get too cross-eyed about what the technology can do, there are a number of caveats. In 80 days Apple sold 3m iPads worldwide. It's a staggering amount, but on the tube people reading books outnumber those reading from iPads by more than 100 to one. And books are a great invention. They are durable, portable. Their batteries don't run out. They look great, and it is much easier to show off that you are reading Tolstoy in the original with a paperback than it is on an e-reader. Perhaps most important, the rules for publishing, say, Annie Proulx's short stories are not the same as those for publishing Simon's Cat on a portable Playstation. What can and should be done with one type of book will not necessarily translate to another.

Non-fiction surely provides more potential than fiction. It's difficult to see what else could be done with a novel such as Wolf Hall, however elegant the app. (And to read the novel on an iPhone would take 40,000 swipes or tilts of the screen.) The exception is children's fiction. Already game developers and publishers are working on augmented-reality books that follow on from Mobile Art Lab's PhoneBook, available from Amazon Japan, a hybrid that combines the iPhone with an ordinary book. The iPhone is placed inside the covers of a picturebook and, as you turn the page, you simultaneously turn the page on the iPhone to reveal interactive imagery.

Non-fiction is different again. What is a footnote, after all, but an attempt to break out of the linear structure of a book? How reference books could change can now begin to be imagined, but I'm particularly interested in apps for non-fiction that are not designed to break up a narrative in a radical way, but rather to augment a storyline – for me, non-fiction works best when it tries to emulate the narrative that drives a reader to the end of a novel.

To understand how to make the most of the new technology, I decided to go back to first principles and analyse what it is that I do as a mathematician and a writer. My job is, as the jargon goes, to "deliver content" in as many different forms and to as many different people as possible. I prove theorems; I present TV and radio programmes; lecture in schools, universities, prisons and to government; I collaborate with theatre companies and composers to create artistic pieces that explore mathematical themes; and I've worked with games developers to create mangahigh.com, an internet maths school that allows students to play and get better at maths. None of this will change. Now, however, technology has become so sophisticated in the way it engages its users that I can bring something of the experience of TV and lecturing to the books I write.

My new book, The Num8er My5teries, could have been written before the advent of the digital age and the arrival of smartphones and web-browsing ereaders. But these technologies offer new possibilities. The book is being launched in conjunction with a gaming app, and is an interactive experience: for the first time, I'm using technology to bring the maths alive – to demonstrate, in real time, problems that until now have been explained only in ink or in person.

As the book evolved, it became clear that it was bursting to get free of the constraints of the page. Mathematics is not a spectator sport. You want your readers to get their hands dirty, exploring, investigating, playing and achieving their own "aha" moments. The book contains mathematical experiments that explore the dynamics of population growth, experiments that are best appreciated by doing them yourself; and there are games whose mathematical strategies the reader can try out on the app.

The experience is still highly text-based; it's not a book that would work better as a website, and it's far from a videogame. It has a strong narrative line, telling the story of five of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics. The first mystery is the challenge of finding a pattern behind the enigmatic prime numbers. A curious cicada in north America turns out to have been the first species to embark on an exploration of these numbers. The book describes an experiment that helps readers to explore why primes might have been the key to the evolutionary survival of this strange insect. But it is the unpredictability of these numbers as one climbs through the universe of numbers which represents one of the biggest mathematical mysteries. A game of prime number hopscotch gives the reader a real feeling for their wild behaviour, as do the page numbers, which vary according to whether they are prime or not.

Other mysteries include the search for the elusive shape of the universe. Exploring the bagel shape that hides behind the 1970s videogame Asteroids turns out to be the best warm-up to navigating the four-dimensional contours of our real universe. The ability to predict certain developments in the future using the equations of maths is something that not only mathematicians but also climate scientists, astronomers and economists would love to develop.

One chapter has games at its heart. Mathematics is a very powerful tool for producing winning strategies in a range of games, from Monopoly to chocolate-chilli-roulette, from the lottery to the roulette wheel. But there are some games that are currently beyond the limits of mathematics. It is these unsolved mysteries which make it a living subject, constantly evolving, changing and surprising.

The Num8er My5teries draws heavily on technology from Japan, and features, among the games and puzzles, Quick Response (QR) codes. These are rather peculiar-looking barcodes that, when you take a photo of them with your smartphone, will take you out of the book to different websites to show you maths in action. My favourite is the video I've included of Roberto Carlos demonstrating chaotic and laminar turbulence in one of the most staggering free-kicks ever taken in the history of football . Watching a video of Carlos bending the ball delivers something that no explanation in words or still photos ever could. These QR codes were first used on a dating site where teenagers would wear a T-shirt with a code on the back – if you were interested, you took a photo, followed the link to the website and got in touch.

The Num8er My5teries is still intended to work as a traditional literary experience – to provide a place in which to immerse yourself for more than just a few clicks through pages on the web. It is still principally linear, with a narrative to take you from A to B. But it also aspires to be something different, something more than a book. The games and experiments are there to get the reader actively involved. As Clay Shirky's new book Cognitive Surplus argues, the internet, computer games and mobile devices are creating a new generation of active producers and sharers of content, rather than passive consumers. New technology, far from dumbing us down, is getting us involved in building a more engaged, democratic and creative world.

Ebooks and apps make it possible to reconceive books for devices that people use to email, call, play games and tweet, in a way that allows an author to reach people who have rarely bought books before. Conversations have begun between publishers and the gaming industry, who previously have had nothing to say to one another.

The future offers much more. One of the most intriguing prospects for me is to use social networking facilities to conduct mass-participation experiments to explain the science discussed in a book. You can already download for nothing an app that allows you to join the Galaxy Zoo project to help astronomers explore the universe. Twitter and Facebook offer the opportunity to create communities bound together by the experience of reading a particular book. The app that lets you read the series of Scott Pilgrim comics on your smartphone is already exploiting the power of social networking to create dialogue between readers, who use the characters from the comics as their avatars.

Authors and composers have for centuries explored ways for readers or listeners to have some involvement in the act of creation – to navigate their way through a piece to create a unique, personal composition. Obvious problems are encountered. Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel, or musical dice game, produces a different waltz according to the throw of the dice (it is available through an app). The game can produce around 46 million billion different waltzes. Played one after the other, it would take 200m years to hear every waltz. But none of the waltzes compares to any of the compositions that Mozart had total control over.

BS Johnson's notorious 1969 novel The Unfortunates was unbound and published in a box. The first and last chapters are fixed but readers can choose the order of the 25 chapters that form the body of the book. That's 15,511,210,043,330,985,984 million different books. The French writer Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the Oulipo movement, provided readers with even more options with his sequence of sonnets in which there is a choice of 10 different versions for each of the 14 lines of the sonnets. Like Mozart's dice game, this produces work that would take over 200m years to recite. For me, it is a mathematician, Henri Poincaré, who best sums up the problems with these attempts: "To create consists precisely in not making useless combinations. Invention is discernment, choice . . . The sterile combinations do not even present themselves to the mind of the inventor."

But that doesn't mean that the new technology doesn't offer readers a chance gratifyingly to navigate their own passage through a narrative. The challenge of how to use this technology without breaking the narrative experience shares something with television trying to discover what it can do creatively with the red button to enhance rather than interrupt the viewer's experience. It's a problem TV has not really been able to crack yet.

The gaming industry has probably made most progress with creating interactive narratives. The Playstation3 game Heavy Rain allows players to make choices at points during the game, resulting in a seamless film-noir experience that varies from player to player. Because you're responsible for the death of a central character in the closing sequences, you feel more emotionally involved. Fable II for Xbox sees your character morphing, becoming more or less evil, fatter or thinner, according to your actions. Bodies such as the Independent Game Developers' Association are now seeking out traditional "content providers" to collaborate on new digital projects, and some authors are being drawn to experiment with writing for the gaming industry. Graham Joyce, who has won the British Fantasy award four times, was hired in 2009 to write the storyline for the fourth instalment of the shoot-'em-up videogame Doom.

Such collaborations are beginning to break down barriers. Three years ago the government launched a scheme to provide funding to UK companies that collaborate on digital initiatives in an attempt to stimulate new ideas. Similarly, Artist's eBooks (artistsebooks.org) has been set up to explore "new platforms and formats" for authors. One book that it features, Niven Govinden's L'histoire de Bexhill Baudelaire, includes links to YouTube videos which comprise the book's soundtrack.

Marvel Comics' app gives you access to more than 500 comic books, featuring Iron Man, Captain America, Spider-Man, Hulk, Thor and more of the world's most popular superheroes. The app brings the world of Marvel to iPad owners with each comic presented at high resolution, and includes a search engine and innovative viewing options. But apps such as this also often feature a comic shop locator, allowing users to source a local retailer – an indication that the app editions are at present being seen as supplementary to the printed book, not a cannibalisation of an existing market. (I am very grateful to Robin Harvie of Fourth Estate for many of these examples.)

In January, the Diary of Samuel Pepys app was launched – iPhone and iTouch users are sent the relevant diary entries for each day. This, of course, is merely offering a new way to read wonderful things. Writing for new platforms – Japanese mobile phone novels, such as Deep Love by "Yoshi", are an obvious example – is only just beginning. (For a taste, see theliteraryplatform.com.)

Though one of the central themes of The Num8er My5teries is the power of mathematics to work out what will happen next, maths isn't much use in predicting the shape that books will take in the decades to come. The nature of literary fiction is unlikely to change, but in different areas of publishing new developments are inevitable. Reading experiences can take many forms. I am always on the lookout for new ways to convey the excitement of my subject, and have now begun to take advantage of the amazing new technology being developed to enrich a reader's experience. Things are changing fast. Like every writer, I'm already thinking about the next book. But when it arrives, it may not look the way you expect it to.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jul 2010 | 5:05 pm

The great turtle-egg evacuation

A generation of sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico is to be lifted out of the oil spill's way.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/7g2TD6yVtDE" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 2 Jul 2010 | 4:11 pm

Saber-toothed Cats Wrestled Prey with Powerful Arms (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Saber-toothed cats might be most famous for their oversized fangs, but scientists now find the feisty felines had another exceptional feature - powerful arms stronger than those of any cat alive today.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2010 | 3:10 pm

Saber-toothed Cats Wrestled Prey with Powerful Arms

An arm-wrestling contest of sorts pits saber-toothed cats against modern-day felines.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2010 | 2:59 pm

Russia pushes for domestic drug development

But building a complex industry from scratch won't be easy.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 2 Jul 2010 | 2:35 pm

Russian cargo vessel misses space station

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A faulty radio link forced an unmanned Russian cargo ship to abort its docking at the International Space Station on Friday, U.S. and Russian space officials said.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Jul 2010 | 1:54 pm

Archaeologists Find Ancient Weapon In Melting Ice Patch

Archaeologist Craig Lee unearthed a 10,000-year-old ancient hunting weapon in a melting ice patch in the Rocky Mountains.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Jul 2010 | 1:45 pm

Unwanted Babies Haunt Roman-Era Graveyard

The ancient Romans slaughtered dozens of babies at a villa in England’s Thames Valley, a new study into the tiny remains has revealed. Located in Buckinghamshire, just northwest of London, Yewden Villa, as the site is known, was excavated in ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Jul 2010 | 1:17 pm

Volcanic Hot Spots Explained

Hidden history matters most.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2010 | 12:21 pm

The Most Dangerous Things at the Beach

On this Fourth of July weekend, if you dare go in the water, oil may be the least of your worries.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2010 | 12:13 pm

Flying Outhouses: Really?

Can An Outhouse Go Airborne? Get the answer to that and more questions about the crazy things rockets can send into the great blue yonder.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Jul 2010 | 12:04 pm

Military Plans Hummingbird-Sized Spies in the Sky

Soldiers fighting future battles in crowded urban areas will be able to launch hummingbird-sized unmanned nano aerial vehicles — or NAVs – capable of carrying sophisticated sensors and flying through open windows in buildings to report back on enemy posi
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2010 | 12:01 pm

How to Clean a Dirty Keyboard and Why You Should

TechNewsDaily walks you through a proper do-it-yourself keyboard cleaning.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2010 | 11:55 am

Lizard Camouflage Confuses Males About Gender

PORTLAND, Oregon — The recent evolution of camouflage among lizards in the powdery dunes of New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument can lead to some misunderstandings when some males choose to make love, not war.

Since the dunes developed a few thousand years ago, a light-colored form of the normally dark-shaded eastern fence lizard, Sceloporus undulates, has arisen that blends in with the landscape.

The change in hue can produce confusion over sex-recognition signals, Jeanne Robertson of the University of Idaho in Moscow reported June 27 at the Evolution 2010 meeting. At least it did when she and an associate arranged encounters between pale White Sands lizards and their darker cousins from the area surrounding the dunes.

Whenever she and University of Idaho colleague Erica Bree Rosenblum put a pale male lizard and a male from dark soil together, the dark lizard gets ready to fight, positioning himself sideways and showing off his bulk and his blue belly. He does some menacing push-ups and prepares for the head-butting and tail-whipping common in aggressive lizard encounters.

Meanwhile, the pale lizard starts wooing, making rapid shuddering movements and starting little romantic chases. So what might have been a territorial fight becomes “a very confused dark-soil male trying to engage in combat despite being courted,” Robertson said.

The confusion appears to arise from the blue belly splotches that both light and dark forms use as handy clues in social situations, Robertson said. The pale males now sport bigger patches than their darker counterparts, whose more modest blue blotches are more like those of sand dune-living females. Thus male light-colored lizards probably perceive their darker brethren as female — or at least as female enough to court.

This confusion looks as if it develops as an indirect effect of dodging predators through camouflage. That roundabout origin is “the most interesting part,” says evolutionary biologist Liam Revell of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Aside from causing amusing problems with courtship, there’s a deeper message here, says Jonathan Losos of Harvard University. Sex-identification miscues can make it less likely for members of different populations to mate if they happen to meet. “As a result, adaptation to different environments may have the incidental effect of leading to reproductive isolation, and hence the origin of distinct species,” he says.

Images: 1) Gypsum sand dunes in White Sands National Monument, New Mexico./Erica Bree Rosenblum, Univerity of Idaho. 2) Pale and dark forms of male fence lizards./Erica Bree Rosenbaum, University of Idaho.

See Also:

• Giant Spider Species Discovered in Middle Eastern Sand Dunes
• Extreme Heat Triggers Lizard Sex Change
• Sublime Sand: Desert Dunes Seen From Space
• Self-Irrigating Desert Plant Discovered
• New Giant Lizard Discovered in the Philippines
• Video: Leaping Lizard’s Tail-Free Mid-Air Wipeout
• Lizards Use Third Eye to Steer by the Sun

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Jul 2010 | 11:28 am

Grandmothers link orcas to humans

Scientists discover a common trait in humans and whales that explains why both groups have grandmothers.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2010 | 11:08 am

70 Million Swine Flu Vaccine Doses Wasted

70 million doses of H1N1 swine flu vaccine prepared for an epidemic that never came will likely be destroyed.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Jul 2010 | 11:01 am

Invasive Cane Toads to Thrive In Warmer World

Toads breathe easier at higher temperatures.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2010 | 10:31 am

Fourth of July: Most Dangerous Day of the Year

Crowded roads and drunk driving make summertime travel dangerous.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Jul 2010 | 10:30 am

Gene pattern predicts who will live the longest

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers have found a pattern of genes that predicts with more accuracy than ever before who might live to be 100 or older -- even if they have other genes linked with disease.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Jul 2010 | 10:12 am

Life through a giant lens

A microscope with a giant lens known as the Mesolens is on display at the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jul 2010 | 9:49 am

What Do Astronauts Eat?

The menu is expansive, provided food items can survive microbe-killing heat treatment or complete dehydration. Oh, and there's absolutely no pizza.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Jul 2010 | 9:42 am

How to Discuss the Oil Spill With Your Kids

The oil spill is bound to make summer vacation look a lot different this year for children around the Gulf.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Jul 2010 | 8:05 am

Human Conflict Disrupts Bird Research in Amazon

Ecologist Kevin Jernigan studies how the indigenous Aguaruna of the Peruvian Amazon view ecological relationships between birds
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2010 | 7:43 am

Scientists peer inside a python

Scientists employ the latest imaging techniques to look inside a python that had just swallowed a rat whole.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2010 | 7:31 am

Dolphin 'superpod' seen off Skye

A massive pod of dolphins thrills a group of wildlife spotters on a tourist boat trip off the north coast of Skye.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2010 | 7:28 am

Mutation in key gene allows Tibetans to thrive on thin air

The gene mutation is much more common in Tibetans than Han Chinese and may represent the strongest instance of natural selection ever documented in a human population

A gene that controls red blood cell production evolved quickly to enable Tibetans to tolerate high altitudes, a study suggests. The finding could lead researchers to new genes controlling oxygen metabolism in the body.

An international team of researchers compared the DNA of 50 Tibetans with that of 40 Han Chinese and found 34 mutations that have become more common in Tibetans in the 2,750 years since the populations split. More than half of these changes are related to oxygen metabolism.

The researchers looked at specific genes responsible for high-altitude adaptation in Tibetans. "By identifying genes with mutations that are very common in Tibetans, but very rare in lowland populations we can identify genes that have been under natural selection in the Tibetan population," said Professor Nielsen. "We found a list of 20 genes showing evidence for selection in Tibet - but one stood out: EPAS1."

The gene, which codes for a protein involved in responding to falling oxygen levels and is associated with improved athletic performance in endurance athletes, seems to be the key to Tibetan adaptation to life at high altitude. A mutation in the gene that is thought to affect red blood cell production was present in only 9% of the Han population, but was found in 87% of the Tibetan population.

"It is the fastest change in the frequency of a mutation described in humans," said Professor Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California Berkeley, who took part in the study.

There is 40% less oxygen in the air on the 4,000m high Tibetan plateau than at sea level. Under these conditions, people accustomed to living below 2,000m – including most Han Chinese – cannot get enough oxygen to their tissues, and experience altitude sickness. They get headaches, tire easily, and have lower birth rates and higher child mortality than high-altitude populations.

Tibetans have none of these problems, despite having lower oxygen saturation in their tissues and a lower red blood cell count than the Han Chinese.

Around the world, populations have adapted to life at high altitude in different ways. One adaptation involves making more red blood cells, which transport oxygen to the body's tissues. Indigenous people in the Peruvian Andes have higher red blood cell counts than their countrymen living at sea level, for example.

But Tibetans have evolved a different method. "Tibetans have the highest expression levels for EPAS1 in the world," said co-author Dr Jian Wang of the Beijing Genomics Institute in Schenzhen, China, a research facility that collected the data. "For Western people, after two to three weeks at altitude, the red blood cell count starts to increase. But Tibetans and Sherpas keep the same levels," he said.

"I just summitted Everest a few weeks ago," added Dr Wang. He said the Sherpas and Tibetans were much stronger than the Westerners or lowland Chinese on the climb. "Their tissue oxygen concentration is almost the same as Westerners and Chinese but they are strong," he said "and their red blood cell count is not that high compared to people in Peru."

"The remarkable thing about Tibetans is that they can function well in high altitudes without having to produce so much haemoglobin," said Prof Nielsen. "The entire mechanism is not well-understood – but is seems that the gene responsible is EPAS1."

Nielsen said the gene is involved in regulating anaerobic and anaerobic metabolism in the body (cell respiration with and without oxygen). "It may be that the [mutated gene] helps balance anaerobic versus aerobic metabolism in a way that is more optimal for the low-oxygen environment of the Tibetan plateau," he said.

Writing in Science, where the results are published today, the authors say: "EPAS1 may therefore represent the strongest instance of natural selection documented in a human population, and variation at this gene appears to have had important consequences for human survival and/or reproduction in the Tibetan region."

Dr Wang said future research will focus on comparing the levels of EPAS1 expression in the placentas of Tibetan and Han Chinese women.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jul 2010 | 7:25 am

Space Shuttles To Stay On the Job A Bit Longer

With no clear vision of its future, NASA will cling a bit longer to its past.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Jul 2010 | 7:16 am

Gulf Oil Spill Update: Just the Facts

The Gulf oil situation seems to change daily. Here's where the leak and cleanup stand.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2010 | 7:12 am

Genes predict how likely someone is to live beyond the age of 100

Scientists in the US have developed way of predicting how likely a person is to live beyond the age of 100.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2010 | 7:02 am

Solar lamp wins award

The developers of a solar lamp that aims to replace kerosene-burning lights in developing countries wins a prestigious environmental award.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2010 | 7:02 am

Shuttle schedule slips into 2011

The final space shuttle flight will now take place in 2011, Nasa has confirmed.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2010 | 6:43 am

Whale Sharks Spotted in Gulf of Mexico Oil Slick

The good news: Researchers spotted dozens of whale sharks in the Gulf of Mexico. The bad news: Some of them have been seen swimming in the oil slick.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Jul 2010 | 6:35 am

Humans Altered Climate 10,000 Years Ago, Study Claims

Could humans have played a role in climate change 10,000 years ago?
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2010 | 6:30 am

Far-Out World Leaves Astronomers Baffled

The mysterious planet-like object is circling its star at a distance roughly 300 times farther than Earth orbits the sun.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 2 Jul 2010 | 6:30 am

Herschel spies a far-distant galaxy with its 'zoom lens'

Europe's Herschel space telescope spies a far-distant galaxy with a cosmic gravitational "zoom lens".
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2010 | 5:19 am

Premiere protest

Dolphin hunt film causes controversy in Japan
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2010 | 4:30 am

Scientist cleared of fraud charges

Four-month university investigation clears climate scientist Mann of research misconduct allegations made by climate change deniers

• Michael Mann speaks out on hacked climate science emails
• Fred Pearce: Controversy behind climate science's 'hockey stick' graph

The climate scientist Michael Mann, who has been under relentless attack from sceptics since the exposure of emails at East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, was cleared of research misconduct by a university investigation yesterday.

The four-month internal investigation by Pennsylvania State University found no evidence for charges made by climate sceptics that Mann had violated university ethics. The committee cleared Mann of the much more serious charges of falsifying and manipulating data last February.

The climate scientist is the author of the iconic "hockey stick" graph, showing a recent and rapid rise in the earth's temperature. The graphic depiction of global warming made Mann a prime target of those who deny the existence of climate change.

But the campaign against Mann escalated to new heights after emails taken from the Climatic Research Unit's server showed discussion over his use of a statistical "trick" to "hide the decline". Climate sceptics accused Mann of science fraud.

In its announcement yesterday, the university noted Mann's "outstanding" work was widely recognised in science circles – discounting accusations of misconduct. However, it chided him for circulating the unpublished work of other researchers without their consent.

Mann told Climate Science Watch that the decision was a vindication for scientists, who have been under attack since the release of thousands of emails from East Anglia last November.

"It's become clear that all of the claims that they had made originally, about the stolen CRU emails, are incorrect and do not stand up to scrutiny," he said. "There is no evidence of any impropriety on the part of the scientists. There's no indication of the fudging of data. There's no indication of any of the things they claim that these emails showed. And every investigation that's been done thus far has concluded that."

Mann added: "They have fundamentally failed in their effort to prove that climate change is a grand hoax."

His personal battle will go on however. Virginia's Republican attorney general is trying to investigate Mann for defrauding government research grants while he was at the University of Virginia.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jul 2010 | 4:29 am

'Cookies' point to complex life

Scientists report the discovery of centimetre-sized fossils that may be the earliest known examples of multicellular life.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2010 | 4:02 am

The IPCC messed up over 'Amazongate' – the threat to the Amazon is far worse

Challenging climate sceptics is good sport but we're in danger of forgetting the deadly serious matter at hand

Well this becomes more entertaining by the moment. Those who staked so much on the "Amazongate" story, only to see it turn round and bite them, are now digging a hole so deep that they will soon be able to witness a possible climate change scenario at first hand, as they emerge, shovels in hand, in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert.

Here's the story so far. In January the rightwing blogger Richard North claimed that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had "grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on the Amazon rain forest". In 2007 the Panel had claimed that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation". Reduced rainfall could rapidly destroy the forests, which would be replaced with ecosystems "such as tropical savannahs."

North asserted that this "seems to be a complete fabrication", though see this update too. His story was picked up by hundreds of other climate change deniers, some of whom went so far as to claim that it destroyed global warming theory. It was also run by the Sunday Times, which headlined its report "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim".

Two weeks ago the Sunday Times published a complete retraction. That, you might think, would be the end of the matter. How wrong you would be. Far from accepting that they had made a mistake, the promoters of this story now seem determined to compound it. On Sunday our old friend Christopher Booker asserted that "an exhaustive trawl through all the scientific literature on this subject by my colleague Dr Richard North (who was responsible for uncovering "Amazongate" in the first place), has been unable to find a single study which confirms the specific claim made by the IPCC's 2007 report … all observed evidence indicates that the forest is much more resilient to climate fluctuations than the alarmists would have us believe."

There is no doubt that the IPCC made a mistake. Sourcing its information on the Amazon to a report by the green group WWF rather than the substantial peer-reviewed literature on the subject, was a bizarre and silly thing to do. It is also an issue of such mind-numbing triviality, in view of the fact that the IPCC's 2007 reports extend to several thousand pages and contain tens of thousands of references, that I feel I should apologise for taking up more of your time in pursuing it. But the climate change deniers have made such a big deal of it that it cannot be ignored.

It is also true that nowhere in the peer-reviewed literature is there a specific statement that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation". This figure was taken from the WWF report and it shouldn't have been.

But far from "grossly exaggerating" the state of the science in 2007, as North claimed, the IPCC – because it referenced the WWF report, not the peer-reviewed literature – grossly understated it. The two foremost peer-reviewed papers on the subject at the time of the 2007 report were both published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology. The references are below. They are cited throughout the literature on Amazon dieback.

What do they tell us? That the projection in the IPCC's report falls far, far short of the predicted impacts on the Amazon.

The first paper, by Cox et al, predicts a drop in broadleaf tree cover from approximately 80% of the Amazon region in 2000 to around 28% in 2100 (Figure 6). That is bad enough, involving far more than 40% of the rainforest. But the forest, it says, will not be largely replaced by savannah: "When the forest fraction begins to drop (from about 2040 onwards) C4 grasses initially expand to occupy some of the vacant lands. However, the relentless warming and drying make conditions unfavourable even for this plant functional type, and the Amazon box ends as predominantly baresoil (area fraction >0.5) by 2100."

In other words, the lushest region on earth is projected by this paper to be mostly replaced by desert as a result of global warming (and the consequent reduction in rainfall) this century. I hope I don't have to explain the consequences for biodiversity, the people of the Amazon or climate feedbacks, as the carbon the trees and soil contain is oxidised and released to the atmosphere.

So what does the second paper say? Betts et al go even further. In their model runs: "By the end of the 21st Century, the mean broadleaf tree coverage of Amazonia has reduced from over 80% to less than 10%."

They are slightly more sanguine about the savannah/desert balance. "In approximately half of this area, the trees have been replaced by C4 grass leading to a savanna-like landscape. Elsewhere, even grasses cannot be supported and the conditions become essentially desert-like."

Isn't that reassuring? It is worth noting that both these papers are referenced elsewhere in the IPCC's 2007 report.

They are not alone. One of the runs in a 1999 paper by White, Cannell and Friend, also published in a peer-reviewed journal (see below) shows almost the entire Amazon basin as desert by the 2080s (Figure 2b(ii)).

Compare these projections to Booker's claim that "all observed evidence indicates that the forest is much more resilient to climate fluctuations than the alarmists would have us believe."

So now the promoters of the Amazongate story have three options. They can persist in claiming that the IPCC was wrong, but this time on the grounds that it underestimated the likely response of the Amazon to climate change. But that would create more problems for them than it solved. They could fall back on their age-old defence and claim that it's all irrelevant, because the scientists' projections for how the Amazon might respond to climate change are based on models. But that would oblige them to suggest a better means of predicting future events. Tealeaves? Entrails? Crystal balls? Or they could quietly slink away before this doomed crusade causes them any more embarrassment, and find something more useful to do.

Booker ends his piece by maintaining that on "the only occasion" on which I had attempted to expose the misinformation he peddles, I got it wrong and had to apologise to my readers. Yes, I did get one of my claims wrong and I said so as soon as I discovered it. This is where Christopher and I differ: I admit my mistakes, he does not.

But I'm fascinated by his assertion that this was "the only occasion" on which I pulled him up. Either he has a very short memory or a very selective one. To prompt some glimmer of recognition, here are some of the other occasions on which I have pointed out his mistakes:

In 2007 I showed that Booker and North had used cherry-picking to support their claim that speed cameras had impeded the decline of deaths on the roads. They had ignored the latest evidence (which flatly contradicted their claims), misquoted a House of Commons report and changed the date of an article of mine, which had the effect of making their narrative more convincing.

In 2008, I showed how Booker had misquoted scientific papers, engaged in cherry-picking and relied on the word of a man convicted under the Trade Descriptions Act for making false claims about his qualifications to support his contention that white asbestos cement "poses no measurable risk to health".

I also drew attention to my favourite Bookerism: his observation, in February 2008, that "Arctic ice isn't vanishing after all." The "warmists", he pointed out, had made much of the fact that in September 2007 northern hemisphere sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But now it had bounced back, proving how wrong they were. To reinforce this point, he helpfully published a graph, showing that the ice had indeed expanded between September and January. I pointed out that the Sunday Telegraph continued to employ a man who cannot tell the difference between summer and winter.

In 2009, I detailed six howling mistakes about climate change in just one of his columns. Last month I lambasted him for falsely claiming that under EU rules you'll be able to bury dead pets only after "pressure cooking them at 130 degrees centigrade for half an hour".

I don't mean to spend my life correcting Booker's mistakes, but the volume of misinformation he has published is mindblowing, and someone has to call him to account. Other journalists, perhaps wisely, don't bother.

All this is good knockabout stuff. But we're in danger of forgetting that it concerns a deadly serious matter: a change in the climatic conditions which have made human civilisation and the current human population possible, and, specifically, the degradation of the most wonderful and beautiful of the world's ecosystems into desert and scrubby grassland. It is hard to overstate the irresponsibility of those who misrepresent the science in order to persuade people that no action needs to be taken.

References:

PM Cox et al, 2004. Amazonian forest dieback under climate-carbon cycle projections for the 21st century. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 78, 137–156. DOI 10.1007/s00704-004-0049-4

RA Betts et al, 2004. The role of ecosystem-atmosphere interactions in simulated Amazonian precipitation decrease and forest dieback under global climate warming. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 78, 157–175. DOI 10.1007/s00704-004-0050-y

A White, MGR Cannell, AD Friend, 1999. Climate change impacts on ecosystems and the terrestrial carbon sink: a new assessment. Global Environmental Change, 9, S21-S30.

www.monbiot.com

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jul 2010 | 3:46 am