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Intoxicating fragrance: Jasmine as valium substituteInstead of a sleeping pill or a mood enhancer, a nose full of jasmine from Gardenia jasminoides could also help, according to researchers in Germany. They have discovered that the two fragrances Vertacetal-coeur (VC) and the chemical variation (PI24513) have the same molecular mechanism of action and are as strong as the commonly prescribed barbiturates or propofol.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm Prospects for finding new Earths boosted by brand new planet-finding techniqueAstronomers from Germany, Bulgaria and Poland have used a completely new technique to find an exotic extrasolar planet. The same approach is sensitive enough to find planets as small as the Earth in orbit around other stars. The group used Transit Timing Variation to detect a planet with 15 times the mass of the Earth in the system WASP-3, 700 light years from the Sun in the constellation of Lyra.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm Who is likely to become a bully, victim or both? New research shows poor problem-solving increases risk for allChildren and adolescents who lack social problem-solving skills are more at risk of becoming bullies, victims or both than those who don't have these difficulties, according to new research. But those who are also having academic troubles are even likelier to become bullies.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm Redwood forest ecosystem of northern California depends on fog to stay hydrated during rainless summersAs the mercury rises outdoors, it's a fitting time to consider the effects of summertime droughts and global warming on ecosystems. Complex interactions among temperature, water cycling, and plant communities create a tangled web of questions that need to be answered as we face a rapidly changing climate. Researchers recently tackled one aspect of the challenging question of how climate change can impact plant communities that obtain water from fog.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm Adding nutrients to oceans could enhance transfer of carbon dioxide from atmosphere to deep oceanAdding nutrients to the sea could decrease viral infection rates among phytoplankton and enhance the efficiency of the biological pump, a means by which carbon is transferred from the atmosphere to the deep ocean, according to a new mathematical modeling study. The findings have implications for ocean geoengineering schemes proposed for tackling global warming.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm Biologists find a way to lower tumor risk in stem cell therapiesBiologists have discovered a way to limit the formation of teratomas. They have identified a new signaling pathway critical for unlimited self propagation of embryonic stem cells. Using small molecule compounds that inhibit this pathway, the scientists were able to dramatically reduce the potential of embryonic stem cells to form teratomas.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm HPV infection linked to increased risk of skin cancerHPV infection heightens the risk of developing certain skin cancers and is worsened if people are taking immunosuppression drugs, according to a new study.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am New way diseases can develop: Previously unknown mechanism directs gene expression in cellsResearchers have identified a previously unknown mechanism by which cells direct gene expression, the process by which information from a gene is used to direct the physical and behavioral development of individuals. The research may help scientists gain insight into how muscle and heart diseases develop.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am Alternative evolution: Why change your own genes when you can borrow someone else's?It has been a basic principle of evolution for more than a century that plants and animals can adapt genetically in ways that help them better survive and reproduce. Biologists now document a clear example of a new mechanism for evolution.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am Don't let your termites grow up to be mommies: Researchers find 'key ingredient' that regulates termite caste systemAn entomologist has for the first time shown which specific chemicals are used by some termite queens to prevent other termites in the colony from becoming mommies like themselves.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am Russian sub 'could stop oil leak'Russian Mir submersibles would be able to cap the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the captain of one of the vessels has said.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Jul 2010 | 4:13 am Ask AP: McChrystal's fate, disposing of Gulf oil (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 4:12 am Weekend total solar eclipse visible to lucky few (AP)AP - A total eclipse of the sun occurs Sunday, but don't be so quick to take out your special viewing glasses.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 4:05 am Peugeot-Citroen in $1.2B joint venture in China (AP)AP - France's PSA Peugeot Citroen SA signed a deal Friday to set up a euro935 million ($1.2 billion) joint venture to make small, low-emission cars in China with China Changan Automobile Group.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 3:58 am Tree flowers after 90-year waitAn ancient Chinese proverb tells us that with patience a mulberry leaf eventually becomes a silk gown.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Jul 2010 | 3:47 am Obama loses drilling moratorium appeal (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 3:23 am The nation's weather (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 2:52 am Paul: Obama jabs at BP could harm spill cleanup (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Jul 2010 | 1:00 am So You Want To Be A Time Traveler?While time dilation and quantum tunneling might help, relativity will always get in the way of your time-traveling dreams.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 9 Jul 2010 | 12:44 am Teenager drowns in Oklahoma floodwaters (AP)AP - Officials say a teenager was swept to her death in Oklahoma when heavy rain fueled by persistent tropical moisture pounded parts of the state.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 Jul 2010 | 9:41 pm There's Gold in Them Thar...Oceans!The Chinese government has announced its intent to start mining the ocean floor for valuable minerals. A new era in mineral exploitation on Earth is beginning.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 Jul 2010 | 9:29 pm Gray whale swims free from Wash. beach (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 Jul 2010 | 8:55 pm Willetts: 'Science aids economy'The UK's science minister David Willetts is to say that there is a rational economic case for Britain to have a strong research base.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jul 2010 | 8:35 pm Firefly Flash Mobs Blink In SyncA long standing mystery: why groups of "lightning bugs" synchronize their illuminations has been solved. And the answer is, well: sex.Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jul 2010 | 5:15 pm How Much Plastic is in the Ocean?The first estimate of how much plastic is in the global ocean has yielded some staggering numbers.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 Jul 2010 | 5:01 pm The Rules Of Swapping SpiesThe Justice Department announced today the United States will exchange the 10 Russians agents captured last month in a spy ring.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 Jul 2010 | 4:52 pm Giant Propellers Discovered In Saturn's Rings (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - Giant propeller-shaped structures have been discovered in the rings of Saturn and appear to be created by a new class of hidden moons, NASA announced Thursday.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 Jul 2010 | 4:31 pm Newly Discovered Dinosaur Dubbed 'Mojoceratops' (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - A newly-discovered dinosaur with a heart-shaped frill around its head got its name from a combination of its flamboyant noggin and a round of beers.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 Jul 2010 | 4:10 pm Soccer Refs Subconsciously Call More Fouls on Plays to the Left
Until we invent reliable robot soccer referees, fans have one more reason to suspect the refs of bias. Referees are more likely to make foul calls when they see the action moving from right to left, or leftward, according to a new study by brain researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Twelve varsity soccer players were shown identical images of plays, with the only difference being that some viewed the images flipped horizontally, so there were right-to-left and left-to-right versions. The participants that saw the action as moving from right-to-left were statistically more likely to call a foul. Other studies have shown that the direction in which people read and write leads to a bias toward rightward or leftward action. One study found that Italians were more likely to view a soccer goal as “stronger, faster and more beautiful” when it was presented with a left-to-right trajectory rather than the other way around, and that Arabic speakers showed the opposite bias. Before we throw the human refs out in favor of robots, the bias that they found would need to be repeated with more participants, preferably with video, and with speakers of Arabic or other languages written right to left to confirm any correlation with reading and writing habits. The study appeared online July 7 in PLoS One. Image: Flikr/seriouslysilly See Also:
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 8 Jul 2010 | 4:02 pm Souped-up antibody fends off HIVTargeted search yields proteins that neutralize nearly all HIV strains.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/K32XGFYKKWI" height="1" width="1"/>Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 8 Jul 2010 | 4:00 pm Newly Discovered Dinosaur Dubbed 'Mojoceratops'Heart-shaped frill around head and a round of beers led to name.Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jul 2010 | 3:39 pm Controversy over South Korea's sunken shipPhysicists' research casts doubt on idea that North Korean torpedo downed vessel.Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 8 Jul 2010 | 2:21 pm Antibodies Kill Most Known HIV StrainsThis breakthrough could advance HIV vaccine design as well as therapy for other diseases.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 Jul 2010 | 2:15 pm Wild Cat Mimics Monkey Sounds to Capture PreyMargay wild cats emit sounds like tamarin monkey babiesSource: Livescience.com | 8 Jul 2010 | 2:13 pm Flowers Could Become Extinct Before They're Even DiscoveredThousands of rare flowering plants still undiscovered.Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jul 2010 | 1:56 pm Interesting environment wards off cancerMaking home more complicated increases stress in mice but keeps them healthier.Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 8 Jul 2010 | 1:56 pm FDA Approves Implantable Telescope for EyesThe visual prosthetic magnifies light and shines it onto healthy tissue in the back of the eye, promoting improved vision.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 Jul 2010 | 1:55 pm Researchers Predict Oil Spill's Long Term Travel PlansScientists created a computer model that predicts how the BP oil spill could spread out over the course of the year.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 Jul 2010 | 1:55 pm Aircraft completes first solar-powered night flightPAYERNE, Switzerland (Reuters) - A giant glider-like aircraft has completed the first night flight propelled only by solar energy, organizers said on Thursday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 8 Jul 2010 | 12:22 pm Sun’s Dust Ring Could Help Find Exo-Earths
Earth-like exoplanets could announce their presence through trailing clumps of dust — and new observations of the Earth’s own dust cloud could provide a way to find them. Over the course of five years, the Spitzer Space Telescope drifted through a diffuse but extensive ring of dust particles that orbit the sun in lockstep with the Earth, showing astronomers for the first time what the dusty signature of an exo-Earth might look like. “For the first time we can measure the structure of that cloud along the Earth’s orbit, using this moving space probe that travels through the cloud,” said astronomer William T. Reach of the Universities Space Research Association, the author of a paper to appear in the journal Icarus. “We can use that as a key, as a template, to understand the dust around other stars.” The observations showed that a ring of dust from comet tails and broken asteroids follows the Earth in its orbit, something astronomers had already suspected. The dust particles are about 0.02 millimeters in diameter or larger. An extra-thick cloud of these particles about 7 million miles wide trails behind the Earth at about 80 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. Spitzer, which follows the Earth in orbit around the sun, sent images from directly inside this cloud from its launch in 2003 until its coolant ran out in 2009.
Astronomers’ first whiff of this trailing dust clump came in 1984, when the IRAS spacecraft showed that the sky is brighter in infrared wavelengths when looking backward along the Earth’s orbit than when looking forward. Because dust glows in the infrared, the lightened sky was a clear sign that more dust follows the planet than leads it. “We couldn’t figure out for the life of us what the hell was going on,” said astronomer Mark Sykes, now the director of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, who worked on the IRAS project. No good explanations emerged until the early ’90s, when astronomer Sumita Jayaraman, also now at the Planetary Science Institute, realized that individual dust particles could get temporarily trapped in a special gravitational relationship called a resonant orbit with Earth. Most of the dust in the plane of the solar system, called the zodiacal cloud, will eventually spiral into the sun. But particles of the right size, tens of micrometers across, can feel a little gravitational push as they float by the Earth. That push counteracts the sun’s pull just enough to hold the dust particles in a loose halo around the sun. The subtle interactions of the Earth and the dust grains’ movements lead to the backward-facing clump. Mathematical models of the dust ring gave astronomers an idea of the clump’s extent, but the Spitzer observations were the first chance to test them. “This work is great because it provides us a novel way of probing the structure of this cloud, which could then feed back into these detailed dynamical models of the dust,” Sykes said. The observations can feed models of what dust rings associated with extrasolar planets might look like. Of the few extrasolar planets to have their pictures taken by direct imaging, at least two hinted at their presence by warping the disk of dust and gas around their star. Earth-like planets that are too small or dim to find through usual methods may have a subtle but detectable influence on their dust disks. “It’s a way that we can recognize planets around other stars that we can’t necessarily see,” said NASA exoplanet scientist Marc Kuchner. “This result make it much easier to compare solar system dust clouds with ones we see in the disks.” But the dust can be misleading too, Kuchner warns. “They can be bad news if you’re trying to directly image a planet, because they can masquerade as planets themselves,” he said. “It’s both the signal and the noise.” Image: 1) NASA. The S-shaped blue band in this infrared image from the COBE satellite is the zodiacal cloud of dust in the solar system. 2) William T. Reach. A simulation of the Earth’s dust ring, with the Spitzer spacecraft’s path traced in red. See Also:
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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 8 Jul 2010 | 12:21 pm Fireflies' Synchronous Flashes Are Booty Calls, Study ShowsThe beautiful, but seemingly random, blinking patterns of fireflies have been decoded. Turns all, it's all about love.Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jul 2010 | 12:13 pm Why Sumatra Quake Unleashed Giant Tsunami, Others Don'tWhy was the first quake deadlier than the second?Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jul 2010 | 12:09 pm Survival Tactic Evolves in Flies Using Bacteria, Not GenesA certain fly species has adopted an alternative form of evolution – passing along beneficial bacteria to its offspring.Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jul 2010 | 12:05 pm Parasite-Busting Bugs Throw Fruit Fly Evolution Into Overdrive
Fruit flies across North America are evolving at breakneck pace — and it has nothing to do with their genes. Instead they’ve acquired a bacterial infection that protects against the sterilizing ravages of a common parasite. The infection’s spread is much like the spread of a genetic mutation, only much faster. “They’re using endosymbionts” — organisms that live inside other organisms — “to adapt, rather than relying on mutations in their genes,” said biologist John Jaenike of the University of Rochester. Jaenike’s findings, published July 8 in Science, originate in work he started decades ago on nightmarish infections of the Drosophila neotestacea fly species by Howardula aoronymphium, a roundworm parasite. A mother Howardula worm would swell to massive size inside a host fly, laying thousands of eggs. After they hatched, larvae coursed through the host’s body. The flies didn’t die, but they no longer had the strength to reproduce. In the eastern United States, the worms infested nearly one in four D. neotestacea flies, and sterilization seemed absolute.
But, Jaenike found, in some flies, Howardula didn’t lead to sterilization. Instead it was the worms who were sickly, and their offspring few. And the only difference between fertile and infertile Howardula-infected flies was the presence of a bacteria called Spiroplasma. How Spiroplasma weakens isn’t known, but it clearly does. And in their new findings, Jaenike’s team shows that Spiroplasma is racing through fruit flies across North America. In the early 1980s, it was present in just 10 percent of eastern fruit flies. Now it’s in 80 percent, and moving rapidly west. The pattern fits with what’s predicted by traditional evolutionary theory: A beneficial mutation arises, confers a reproductive advantage, and over time spreads through a population — except that the adaptation isn’t genetic, but bacterial. Microbes can be passed from mother flies to offspring, but also carried by mites between flies, and even between species. This kind of evolution “allows an adaptation in one species to be moved to another species,” said Yale University evolutionary biologist Nancy Moran, who was not involved in the study. According to Moran, the spread of beneficial bugs gives animals a version of the horizontal gene transfer present in ultra-adaptable bacteria, which can pick up new genetic material over the course of their lives. “This is a way that animals can steal adaptations from each other and from other branches of the tree of life,” she said. The resulting “instantaneous acquisition” of traits between unrelated hosts is quite different than “normal” Darwinian evolution, which occurs through the accumulation of small changes, said University of Georgia entomologist Kerry Oliver. An important question is whether the findings are a rare example of a beneficial infection, or a snapshot of a common phenomenon. If the latter, “we will have to revise our view of insect defense mechanisms,” said University of Liverpool parasite ecologist Greg Hurst. Oliver noted that invertebrates are especially likely to benefit from protective bacteria, as they lack the sophisticated immune systems found in more complex creatures. “It’s essentially an alternative immune system,” he said. “This phenomenon is likely widespread in insects and other arthropods. Other examples of insect endosymbioses include Moran’s specialty, a microbe that protects aphids from parasitic wasps. Another bacteria called Wolbachia causes some male insects to turn female — a relationship that doesn’t make obvious evolutionary sense. In one species of fruit fly, Wolbachia can also kill all male offspring, but only if their mother alone is infected. If both parents are infected, the offspring are fine. “It’s really bizarre,” said Jaenike. “I have a graduate student trying to figure out what’s up with that.” In the near future, Jaenike’s attention will turn to what Spiroplasma might do in people. He received a Gates Foundation grant to explore whether the bug could control roundworm-borne diseases like river blindness and elephantiasis, which afflict millions of people in the developing world. That research is preliminary, but “there’s a possibility for using Spiroplasma as a novel mechanism for controlling control human diseases,” said Jaenike. Image: A dissected fruit fly infected by the Howardula parasite, but not by protective Spiroplasma. The mother parasite is at bottom right, and larvae around the fly./John Jaenike. See Also:
Citation: “Adaptation via Symbiosis: Recent Spread of a Drosophila Defensive Symbiont,” by J. Jaenike, R. Unckless, L.M. Boelio, S.N. Cockburn, S.J. Perlman. Science, Vol. 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 | 8 Jul 2010 | 12:01 pm Fireflies Blink in SyncGroups of male fireflies will synchronize their flashes to attract the attention of females.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 Jul 2010 | 12:01 pm La Nina to form in July as storm, drought fears flareNEW YORK (Reuters) - A La Nina weather anomaly, the opposite number of its more infamous cousin El Nino, will ramp up in the equatorial Pacific in July and August, the Climate Prediction Center forecast on Thursday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 8 Jul 2010 | 11:55 am Bacteria are a fruit fly's best friendAn improbable relationship is evolving between a bacterium and a fruit fly in the US. The microbe is protecting the female fly from a deadly parasite You would think a bacterial infection might ruin your sex life, but not if you're a fly – in fact quite the opposite. There's a war being fought inside American fruit flies. Parasitic nematode worms Howardula aoronymphium infect female larvae of the fruit fly Drosophila neotestacea, where they prevent the eggs from developing. The worms also reduce mating success and survival in male flies. "The mother worm gives birth to literally thousands of live young in the abdominal cavity of the fly," said John Jaenike of the University of Rochester in New York, who led the research. "From there they work their way into the ovaries. The female fly thinks she's laying eggs, but she's actually laying nematodes," he said. But the flies have a trick up their sleeve. For years researchers have suspected that Spiroplasma, a bacterium that is passed directly from mother to larva through the egg, is protecting the flies. To confirm this, Jaenike and his team infected flies carrying nematode parasites with either Spiroplasma or Wolbachia bacteria, or both. A control group of parasitised flies were not infected with bacteria. They found that parasitised females became more fertile after exposure to Spiroplasma, but not Wolbachia. The nematode-carrying flies that had not been infected with bacteria became sterile. Spiroplasma seems to protect the flies from the ill effects of worm infection in a textbook example of symbiosis. Both the fly and the bacterium benefit from the situation: the fly gets protection from worms, and the bacterium gets somewhere to live. When they conducted an RNA analysis of their tissues, the researchers found no other symbiotic bacteria in the flies and concluded that the protection was due to Spiroplasma alone. The research is published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science. The symbiotic relationship between fly and bacterium seems to have been spreading across the US over the past three decades. "The effect in the wild is absolutely whopping," said Jaenike. "Back in the 1980s every nematode-infected fly was completely sterile ... The situation is different today. They were getting clobbered in the 1980s but now they have quasi-normal nematode infection levels." In the 1980s, only 10% of wild flies were infected with Spiroplasma in the eastern US. That figure had jumped to 80% when a survey was conducted in 2008. Wild females infected with the bacterium had more than 10 times as many eggs in their ovaries as uninfected females. The bacterium appears to be spreading from east to west across the country, so Jaenike wants to repeat the survey this year to find out if Spiroplasma has reached the west coast. "The speed of the spread is interesting, but what I personally find astounding is that we can see it," said Jaenike. "Something happening in 20 years is a split second on an evolutionary timescale." He compared the way the bacterium is passed from generation to generation of flies to how mitochondria are passed from parent to child in humans. "What we are seeing are the early stages of a beneficial relationship. Who knows where it will lead?" guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 Jul 2010 | 11:54 am Saber-Toothed Cat UnearthedThe discovery marks the first time the carnivore, with fangs half the length of its skull, had been seen in Australia.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 Jul 2010 | 11:50 am Submarine Robots Learn TeamworkNew technology networks autonomous underwater vehicles so that they can travel farther and survey more ocean than ever before.Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 8 Jul 2010 | 11:46 am Solar plane's night test successAn experimental plane powered by solar cells successfully completes a 26-hour flight and lands safely in Switzerland.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jul 2010 | 11:44 am Harry Whittington obituaryPalaeontologist who advanced knowledge of the origins of animal diversity Few scientists can claim to have rewritten the history of life, but in his patient description of the fossils of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, in Canada, Harry Whittington changed the way we understand the origin of animal diversity. His death at the age of 94 marks the end of a heroic era for palaeontology, when a single individual working patiently with a pin under the microscope could make discoveries as far-reaching in their way as those revealed by atom smashers. Harry came to work on the Burgess Shale only in later life. He had earlier distinguished himself as a student of fossil trilobites, a hugely diverse, extinct group of animals very distantly related to crustaceans and horseshoe crabs. Trilobites had thrived in the seas since the Cambrian period, beginning 542m years ago, until they died out nearly 300m years later. They evolved into thousands of different species, many of which Harry discovered during fieldwork in Wales and the US. Trilobites had hard carapaces made of the mineral calcite, which meant that extraction of the fossil from the rocky matrix could take many hours. But in the late 1940s, Harry and his colleague Bill Evitt discovered a locality in Virginia (in rocks 460m years old) where the "shells" of the trilobite had been replaced by insoluble silica. By throwing samples into acid, they could recover perfect trilobites by the thousand, without hours of digging. They were perfect replicas, effectively made of glass. These fossils revolutionised what could be learned about trilobites. They could be examined in detail as if they had just washed up on the beach. The adults were even accompanied by their babies, larvae as small as a pinhead. It was now possible to study how ancient animals grew to maturity, moult by moult. Harry set about writing a series of monographs through the 1950s and 60s that were to add more to our understanding of how trilobites were put together than had been learned in the previous century. He became an icon for "trilobite men" like myself. Harry was a Brummie. He attended Handsworth grammar school and Birmingham University, where he was awarded his PhD in 1937. Years of living as an expatriate eventually left little trace of his origins, although when he described the work of a less careful colleague as "daft", the flat vowels were still detectable. The 30s was not a good time for employment for a young palaeontologist, but in 1938 Harry secured a Commonwealth fellowship to Yale University and established contacts with north American palaeontologists that would serve him well. In 1940 he went as a lecturer to Rangoon (now Myanmar, Burma) and later as a professor to Chengdu, China. Harry proudly displayed the artefacts he brought back from the far east for the rest of his life. After a spell back in England as a lecturer in Birmingham, he took off for Harvard University in 1949, where he stayed for the next 17 years. His room in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology was lined with cabinets stuffed with specimens, exactly what a professor's study should look like. His successor in the room was Stephen Jay Gould. The move to the Burgess Shale was logical. The trilobites Harry had made his own lacked details of the legs and soft parts – only their "shells" were present. The Burgess Shale included trilobites exceptionally preserved with all these details, and many different soft-bodied animals besides. Burgess fossils had been discovered by CD Walcott many years earlier, but they were imperfectly understood. From 1966, Harry set up expeditions to an inaccessible quarry on Mount Field, British Columbia, camping out and collecting hundreds of specimens. A team of young scientists, many of them his students, now well-known in their own right, began the long process of reconstructing the first snapshot of an entire Cambrian seafloor, 505m years old. The results proved an astonishing array of life which seemed to have exploded suddenly into an unsuspected profusion. Alongside the familiar trilobites were animals that seemed odd and inexplicable. They became known as "weird wonders". In 1966 Harry took up the post of Woodwardian professor at Cambridge University, and drawers full of Burgess Shale animals crossed the Atlantic with him. The process of describing them took decades. Indeed, his successors continue it. Harry recognised ways of using flattened specimens accurately to reconstruct the living animal – but each specimen took days of microscope time. The professor was never to be disturbed in the afternoon. The project achieved worldwide fame in 1989 when Gould published Wonderful Life, a bestseller almost everywhere. Although there were some who felt that Gould had cashed in on decades of hard labour by Harry and his colleagues, Gould was whole-hearted in his admiration for the patient palaeontologist. The phrase "Cambrian evolutionary explosion" became commonplace among the scientifically literate. In fact, Harry had already been retired for five years when the brouhaha erupted, and took it all with self-deprecating good humour. It made not a jot of difference to his routine: up at the crack of dawn and a brisk walk to the department of earth sciences in Cambridge, followed by a steady morning's work. This routine continued almost until his death. He published his last scientific work after his 90th birthday. Harry was married in 1940 to an American, Dorothy Arnold, to whom he remained devoted. She died in 1997. They had no children, but Harry was much appreciated by a loyal band of former students, for whom he became something of a father figure. His intellectual offspring are scattered around the world. His award of the Japan prize in 2001 capped public recognition for this modest, meticulous scientist. • Harry Blackmore Whittington, palaeontologist, born 24 March 1916; died 20 June 2010 guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 Jul 2010 | 11:06 am John ClarkeOur father, John Clarke, who has died aged 85, was a reproductive physiologist and lecturer in the departments of agricultural science and zoology at Oxford University. He was a dedicated teacher with an enormous interest in people, and many of his students became lifelong friends. John was born in Perth, Western Australia. He had a happy childhood with his brothers, Stuart and Miles. Their father was professor of geology at the University of Western Australia, and John would accompany him on geological expeditions into the bush. In 1947, after Hale school, Perth, and a degree in zoology at the University of Western Australia, he won a Rhodes scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, where he completed a DPhil on the ecology of the field vole. He also sang in the Oxford Bach Choir. At a dance in 1950, John met Marianne Fillenz, who had come from New Zealand to do a DPhil in physiology. They were married within six months. John was unfailingly supportive of Marianne's academic career, and he ignored the prevailing assumption in Oxford at the time that a male academic should not be hanging nappies to dry in the back garden. We were born in the 1950s. Throughout our childhood, he would cycle home from the laboratory to have tea with us, then cycle back again to work for another couple of hours before returning for supper. His relationships with his children, and later his grandchildren, were a central feature of his life. He was appointed to a lectureship in the department of agriculture at Linacre College, Oxford, becoming a fellow in 1964 and later vice-principal. His research centred on mammalian reproduction and he was secretary of the Society for the Study of Fertility from 1975 to 1980. He was awarded the Marshall medal in 2004 for his outstanding contribution to the study of fertility and reproduction. In the 1990s he acted as an inspector for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. He formally retired from his lectureship in zoology and his Linacre fellowship in 1992, but remained active professionally. He combined the rigour and rationality of a scientist with personal warmth and emotional openness, and had an infectious appreciation of everything that life has to offer. A person of great political commitment, he was a peace campaigner and participated in demonstrations right up to the 2003 march against the war in Iraq. He was also a Labour party stalwart, despite his reservations about its recent direction. He is survived by Marianne, us and five grandchildren: Olly, Frances, Rosa, Daniel and Anna. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 Jul 2010 | 10:36 am Cascade of Star Formation Captured in Omega Nebula
A wave of star formation is crashing through the Omega Nebula, captured in infrared by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The bright nebula in the middle, formally known as M17, has long been recognized as a bustling star factory. But only recently have telescopes picked up on the bursts of activity that flank it. The dark wisps of dust to the right of the starburst make up a feature called M17 SWex, which the new image reveals as a young hotbed of star formation. “We believe we’ve managed to observe this dark cloud in a very early phase of star formation before its most massive stars have ignited,” said astronomer Matthew Povich of Penn State University in a press release. Spitzer detected 488 newly forming stars in the serpentine cloud, 200 of which will become blue-white class B stars larger and hotter than the sun. Povich expects that as many as 10,000 stars are brewing below the telescope’s detection limits. But the cloud is missing the largest, hottest, bluest stars, called class O stars, which light up the neighboring nebula. A luminous bubble of gas and dust to the nebula’s left also shows signs of O star activity. The bubble was blown off by much older stars that spewed radiation in their windy, wild youths.
So where are the dark cloud’s O stars? A solution could come from the nebula’s place in the galaxy. M17 is in the process of crossing one of the Milky Way’s massive spiral arms. The higher concentration of gas and dust in the spiral arm could be compressing material in M17, triggering a cascade of star formation from the bubble to the cloud. The stars’ ages support this theory: The stars in the bubble are 2 million to 5 million years old, the bright stars in the middle are about a million years old, and the stars in the dust cloud are younger than a million years. M17 SWex’s big blue stars may just need an extra nudge to come to life. This region of the sky could give astronomers new insight into what conditions massive stars need to ignite. “We hope people will use M17 SWex as a new laboratory for studying this exact problem of how massive star formation happens,” Povich said. “Most very young clouds being studied don’t have as much going on as this one does.”
High-resolution images with and without labels. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Matthew Povich (Penn State). Blue represents 3.6-micrometer light and green shows 8-micrometer light, both captured by Spitzer’s infrared array camera. Red is 24-micrometer light detected by Spitzer’s multiband imaging photometer. See Also:
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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 8 Jul 2010 | 10:34 am New batfish species found under Gulf oil spillWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers have discovered two previously unknown species of bottom-dwelling fish in the Gulf of Mexico, living right in the area affected by the BP oil spill.Source: Reuters: Science News | 8 Jul 2010 | 10:18 am Is the Earthquake Activity in Southern California Unusual?Earthquakes don't necessarily come on a neat schedule that follows the annual calendar.Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jul 2010 | 9:58 am Badger cull order may be changedA controversial order for a badger cull in Wales is expected to be amended following an appeal hearing last week.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jul 2010 | 9:49 am Planck reveals 'spectacular sky'Europe's Planck space telescope produces its first full-sky image, a key step in its quest to decode the "oldest light" in the Universe.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am Tropical storm could hit Texas-Mexico border ThursdayNEW YORK (Reuters) - A tropical storm might hit the Texas-Mexico border Thursday afternoon, the U.S. National Hurricane Center forecast.Source: Reuters: Science News | 8 Jul 2010 | 8:59 am Vibrating Car Seats Provide Early Accident WarningA new vibrating car seat could prevent accidents.Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jul 2010 | 8:56 am Huge hoard of Roman coins found on Somerset farmA total of 52,500 bronze and silver coins dating from the 3rd century AD found by hobby metal detectorist Dave Crisp The largest single hoard of Roman coins ever found in Britain has been unearthed on a farm near Frome in Somerset. A total of 52,500 bronze and silver coins dating from the 3rd century AD – including the largest ever found set of coins minted by the self proclaimed emperor Carausius, who lasted seven years before he was murdered by his finance minister – were found by Dave Crisp, a hobby metal detectorist from Devizes, Wiltshire. Crisp first dug up a fingernail-sized bronze coin only 30cm below the surface. Even though he had never found a hoard before, when he had turned up a dozen coins he stopped digging and called in the experts, who uncovered a pot bellied pottery jar stuffed with the extraordinary collection, all dating from 253 to 293 AD – the year of Carausius's death. Just giving them a preliminary wash, to prevent them from sticking together in a corroded mass as the soil dried out, took conservation staff at the British Museum a month, and compiling the first rough catalogue took a further three months. How they got into the field remains a mystery, but archaeologists believe they must represent the life savings of an entire community – possibly a votive offering to the gods. A Roman road runs nearby, but no trace of a villa, settlement or cemetery has been found. Roger Bland, a coins expert at the British Museum, said: "The whole hoard weighs 160 kilos, more than two overweight people, and it wouldn't have been at all easy to recover the coins from the ground. The only way would have been the way the archaeologists had to get them out, by smashing the pot that held them and scooping them out. "No one individual could possibly have carried them to the field in the pot, it must have been buried first and then filled up." Bland, who heads the Portable Antiquities service which encourages metal detectorists to report all finds, said the hoard had already absorbed more than 1,000 hours of work. He admitted his first stunned reaction when he saw the coins in the ground in April, was "oh my god, how the hell are we going to deal with this? Now I think it will see me out, the research will keep me going until my retirement." "This find is going to make us rethink the nature of such hoards," he said. "The traditional thinking was that they represent wealth hidden in times of trouble and invasion – the Saxons were coming, the Irish were invading as always – but that doesn't match these dates." The archaeologists praised Crisp for calling them in immediately, allowing the context of the find to be recorded meticulously. When a coroner's inquest is held later this month in Somerset, the coins are likely to be declared treasure, which must by law be reported. Somerset county museum hopes to acquire the hoard, which could be worth up to £1m, with the blessing of the British Museum. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 Jul 2010 | 8:50 am Puffin on foodGPS trackers trace puffins to food 'hotspots'Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jul 2010 | 8:33 am EU Parliament bans illegal timberThe European Parliament votes to ban illegal timber, echoing recent legislation in the US and delighting campaigners.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jul 2010 | 8:18 am Surprisingly smartTo brave a climate similar to that of southern Scandinavia today, the first Britons living at Happisburgh some 950,000 years ago must have been surprisingly clever I remember standing in the Boxgrove quarries 15 years ago, marvelling not just at the astonishing preservation of an ancient landscape with scenes of hunting and butchery, but that it was all 500,000 years old – 200 millennia before we had thought early humans had first reached Britain. Five years ago the story moved round the coast from Sussex to Suffolk, where the discovery of tiny flint tools at Pakefield told us humans were here a further 200 millennia ago. Now that history has taken a third stride back for possibly yet another 200,000 years. Yet at Happisburgh, it's not just the age that makes these finds so exciting. In fact, we're getting used to this rapid ageing, and there's every reason to think that before long we will be talking about early humans in Britain a million years ago. What has really surprised researchers – and was partly responsible for delayed publication of these new finds as earth scientists debated whether or not they'd got it right – is the context in which the pieces of flint were found. The world in which these hominins lived was not one in which large game herds were on tap and in which the weather was always toasty – conditions archaeologists had come to accept as the basic requirements for early humans, the ones which limited expansion around the world once they had left Africa. Happisburgh has exceptional preservation of organic remains – not just bones, but insects' and plants' remains, including pieces of wood and pollen grains. All these describe a landscape and climate that was more like southern Scandinavia today than the Mediterranean. The northern latitude contrasts with other Early Pleistocene archaeological sites, which all lie at least 8 degrees further south. As if to emphasise the significance of this, at Happisburgh the artefacts are not found at a time of deciduous woodland. They were made when conifer forest and grassland had replaced oaks as the climate cooled before an era when glaciers covered the land. This undermines the traditional view that early hominins moved back and forth with herds of large mammals on which they depended for food, sticking to a warm climate. The new evidence suggests they were capable of adapting behaviour as the world changed around them. We have no evidence how they did this, but strategies must have included changes in how they gathered food. The northern forests would have challenged a genus that hitherto had spent most of its time in regions less marked by seasonal change. At Happisburgh the hominins are likely to have eaten more plants in summer and more meat in winter – and then hunting or scavenging in shorter days, and sometimes extreme cold. The key to survival may have been the mix of habitats around a river. We might imagine them not braving mammoth and bison, but collecting roots, shellfish and seaweed, and tracking grazing animals such as deer coming down to the water to drink. And in the winter it got cold – several degrees colder than a modern winter in Norfolk. Surely they must have worn some clothing, and made artificial shelters. Perhaps, even, they had mastered the use of fire (charcoal was found at the dig, though we do not know what caused the wood to be burnt – it could come from natural fires). The actual flint artefacts are rare, simple and small. But the story they tell is profound. Even this long ago, early humans were substantially cleverer than modern chimpanzees. And with a track record of underestimating early human capabilities, archaeologists are likely to turn up more finds to reinforce that view. Mike Pitts is the editor of British Archaeology guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 Jul 2010 | 8:01 am SpacemanThe private spaceships taking shape in TorinoSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jul 2010 | 7:57 am Inflatable Toads Thwart SexFemale cane toads inflate their bodies to thwart sex. These inflatable toads can decide the father in this strange animal sex act.Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jul 2010 | 7:45 am Vast Roman coin haul for metal detector hobbyistOne of the largest ever finds of Roman coins in Britain has been made by a man using a metal detector.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jul 2010 | 7:44 am A menagerie of large preyThe first human hunters to arrive in Britain would have been spoilt for choice, a study in Nature suggests A beautiful Norfolk estuary with ample hunting, but watch out for those sabre-toothed cats. Norfolk just ain't what it used to be. Some 850,000 years ago, coniferous forests covered East Anglia, and on the floodplains of the Thames estuary roamed herds of giant elk, horses and mammoths. Early human hunters of the species Homo antecessor would have been spoilt for choice, according to a study published in Nature yesterday. "Happisburgh is really an exceptional site," said Simon Parfitt of University College London, who led the research. "Here we have a tremendous range of fossils of plants and animals ... There's no other place where you would have this range of fossils from land and sea." Pine cones and pollen from spruce trees showed that the estuary was dominated by a coniferous forest at the time. Six seasons of archaeological digs at the site have sifted through hundreds of cubic metres of river gravels and estuarine silts. "The majority of what we found is wood," said Parfitt, "thousands of flakes of wood." Among all those wood flakes was a rich assemblage of herbivore remains. Key finds included teeth from the southern mammoth, Mammuthus meridionalis, toe bones from the extinct horse Equus suessenbornensis, and the bones of red deer, Cervus elaphus, which indicated nearby grasslands. "Southern mammoths were hairless and would have looked a lot like elephants today," said Parfitt. He said they were adapted to warm climates and arrived in Britain by crossing the land bridge which then linked it to the rest of Europe. "They've been found as far south as Italy," he added. The Happisburgh mammoth's teeth suggest it was a browser, feeding on leaves from trees and shrubs. As the climate cooled, mammoth teeth changed as they adapted to more abrasive food types like grass. The woolly mammoth Mammuthus primigenius of the Ice Age films evolved later, as glaciation advanced across Europe. Scientists were able to reconstruct the past climate of Happisburgh using the fossil remains of temperature-sensitive plants and animals. The presence of fossil beetles suggested that summers at the site were probably warmer than today, and winters were at least 3C cooler. Humans would have had more to worry about than the cold, however. "Sabre-toothed cats were probably the dominant carnivore and were almost certainly a threat to these humans," said Parfitt. The team also unearthed coprolites (fossilised droppings) of an extinct hyena the size of a lion. "It would have been a very formidable animal." "We've got a base here where [the early humans] were coming to process their food," said Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London. "As a human palaeontologist my dream is we will one day recover human fossil material from Happisburgh ... I think if we keep looking there's every chance." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 Jul 2010 | 2:33 am
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