How species form and what keeps them distinct from each other, even though they can interbreed, is a key question in evolution. Researchers have recently identified genes in three closely related yeast species that cause sterility, increasing our understanding of how species can remain distinct. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm
From Star Trek's Romulans, who could cloak their spaceships, to Harry Potter's magical garment, the power to turn someone or something invisible has intrigued mankind. Now one researcher is doing it for real. She has found ways to use magnetic resonance to capture rays of visible light and route them around objects, rendering those objects invisible to the human eye. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm
The brain undergoes rapid growth and development in the early years of life and then degenerates as we progress into old age, yet little is known about the biological processes that distinguish brain development and aging. In a new study, researchers have identified a gene regulatory link between changes in the young and aging brain, describing "runaway" development as a potentially significant factor in age-related loss of function. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm
Government scientists are reporting that eight of the most commonly used oil dispersants used to fight oil spills, such as the massive episode in the Gulf of Mexico, appear unlikely to act as endocrine disruptors -- hormone-like substances that can interfere with reproduction, development, and other biological processes. The tested dispersants also had a relatively low potential for cytotoxicity (cell death), with JD-2000 and SAF-RON GOLD showing the least potential. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm
Surface tension isn't a very powerful force, but it matters for small things -- water bugs, paint, and, it turns out, nanowires. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm
Scientists have identified the three protein fragments that make gluten -- the main protein in wheat, rye and barley -- toxic to people with celiac disease. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm
Splashing around in a swimming pool on a hot summer day may not be as safe as you think. A recent study links the application of disinfectants in recreational pools to previously published adverse health outcomes such as asthma and bladder cancer. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am
Scientists have uncovered a novel mechanism that dramatically increases insulin sensitivity and reduces the risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am
Patients with chronic gum disease who quit smoking in addition to undergoing nonsurgical therapy not only demonstrated a lower abundance of harmful oral pathogens, but also an increase in health-associated bacteria. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am
That dry, dusty moon overhead? Seems it isn't quite as dry as it's long been thought to be. Although you won't find oceans, lakes, or even a shallow puddle on its surface, a team of geologists has found structurally bound hydroxyl groups (i.e., water) in a mineral in a lunar rock returned to Earth by the Apollo program. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 9:00 am
AFP - Chinese authorities battled Thursday to contain an oil spill on the country's northeast coast amid reports it was spreading and as warnings emerged of a heavy long-term environmental impact.
New henge, a circular ditch that aligns with world-famous monument, deemed site's most exciting find in a lifetime
Without a sod of earth being dug up, a new henge, a circular ditch which probably enclosed a ring of timber posts and may have been used for feasting, has been discovered within sight of Stonehenge.
Professor Vince Gaffney, of Birmingham university, described the discovery of the new monument, only 900 metres away and apparently contemporary to the 5,000-year-old stone circle, as the most exciting find at Stonehenge in a lifetime.
"This finding is remarkable. It will completely change the way we think about the landscape around Stonehenge."
"People have tended to think that as Stonehenge reached its peak, it was the paramount monument, existing in splendid isolation. This discovery is completely new and extremely important in how we understand Stonehenge and its landscape."
"Stonehenge is one of the most studied monuments on Earth but this demonstrates that there is still much more to be found."
Midsummer revellers coming to Stonehenge for the solstice have probably trampled unwittingly across the grass hiding the henge.
Amanda Chadburn, the archaeologist responsible for Stonehenge at English Heritage, said: "This new monument is part of a growing body of evidence which shows how important the summer and winter solstices were to the ancient peoples who built Stonehenge. The discovery is all the more remarkable given how much research there has been in the vicinity of Stonehenge, and emphasises the importance of continuing research within and around the world heritage site."
The survey suggests that the henge was on the same alignment as Stonehenge, and comprised a segmented ditch with north-east and south-west entrances, enclosing internal pits up to a metre in diameter believed to have held massive timbers.
The henge was revealed within a fortnight of an international team beginning field work on the three year Stonehenge Hidden Landscape project, which aims to survey and map 14 sq km of the sacred landscape around the world's most famous prehistoric monument, which is studded with thousands more monuments from single standing stones to ploughed out burial mounds.
For the last fortnight curious tourists have watched scientists trundling what look like large lawn mowers around the nearby field. The geophysical equipment can peer under the surface of the earth using techniques like ground-penetrating radar, revealing structures now invisible to the human eye.
The new discovery really was hidden landscape: nothing remains above ground in the farmland.
The international team includes scientists and archaeologists from Birmingham University, Bradford, St Andrews, and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Virtual Archaeology in Austria, as well as teams from Germany, Norway and Sweden.
Professor Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, adds: "This is just the beginning. We will now map this monument using an array of technologies that will allow us to view this new discovery, and the landscape around it, in three dimensions. This marks a new departure for archaeologists and how they investigate the past."
The work of other teams suggests that timber and stone monuments were separate parts of the same Stonehenge story. Professor Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist who has been excavating for many seasons at Durrington Walls, another nearby timber henge site, has already suggested that timber henges and structures were associated with feasting for the living, and stone circles with the realms of the dead.
Work continues and the team expects to uncover many more secrets of the landscape.
The discovery sharpens the disappointment of the partners working on the Stonehenge Project, an ambitious scheme which has already absorbed millions of pounds in planning work, intended to reunite the stone circle with the surrounding landscape, most of which is owned by the National Trust and leased to farmers. The plan to bury in a tunnel the traffic choked trunk road, which runs within yards of the monument, has been abandoned on cost grounds. Last month the government announced it was scrapping its promised £25m contribution towards a new visitor centre, replacing the present facilities damned by the parliamentary public accounts committee as "a national disgrace" almost 20 years ago.
AP - Crew members aboard dozens of ships in the Gulf of Mexico prepared Thursday to evacuate as a tropical rainstorm brewing in the Caribbean brought the deep-sea effort to plug BP's ruptured oil well to a near standstill.
Reuters - State-run explorer Oil and Natural Gas Corp and PetroVietnam are considering a joint bid for BP's stake in an offshore Vietnam gas field, Oil Minister Murli Deora told Reuters on Thursday.
LONDON (Reuters) - Archaeologists have discovered a wooden version of British prehistoric monument Stonehenge at the same site, the project's leader told Reuters.
Reuters - Southern China was lashed on Thursday by its second typhoon in a week, with shipping and flights disrupted by heavy rain and strong winds, state media said. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 2:24 am
AP - Hundreds of penguins that apparently starved to death are washing up on the beaches of Brazil, worrying scientists who are still investigating what's causing them to die. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 Jul 2010 | 1:08 am
The Private Life of Pigs | Tim Marlow Meets | Undercover Boss | Southland | Arena: According to Beryl | Skins
The Private Life Of Pigs 8pm, BBC2
Everything you think you know about the ordinary pig is proved wrong in the final episode of the BBC's wonderful and weird three-part series, The Private Life Of . . . Not only do some pigs have straight tails and stripy fur coats, Jimmy Doherty proves their intelligence in a series of challenges before introducing you to the wild boar, "the SAS of the pig world". Worth watching purely to see Jimmy learn how to converse in pig, this show is probably the only time you will ever see a pig and its "corkscrew todger" work its way towards "what must be the world's longest ejaculation". Hilariously gross viewing. MLY
Tim Marlow Meets 8.30pm, Sky Arts 1
Jung Chang's Wild Swans, the story of three generations of her family in China, was a publishing phenomenon. It has sold over 10m copies and been translated into 30 languages, making Chang a literary superstar. The book is still banned in her home country, though, and Chang has been very critical of communist China, which she describes as a "prison". Her biography of Mao, co-written with her husband Jon Halliday, was also a success, though controversial in some quarters. Chang meets Marlow at the V&A where she discusses her life and work through a selection of the museum's artefacts. MS
Undercover Boss 9pm, Channel 4
This Undercover Boss has the emotional impact of a three-act Hollywood drama. The big bad boss spends a few humbling days at the grassroots of his business and realises how wonderful his staff are and at the end he gives them special jobs. Not that Tower Hamlets council chief exec Kevan Collins is one of the bad guys. He's having to make £50m worth of cuts, but by spending time with the meals on wheels service and in the homeless office, he appreciates the value of his frontline staff. MS
Southland 10pm, More4
Remindful of what The Shield might have been like had it focused entirely on the straight members of the department rather than Mackey and his crew, Southland is shaping up well. Tonight's episode opens with a tableau of public indifference to murder – young boys tossing rocks at the naked corpse of a female murder victim. Lydia takes the case and becomes emotionally involved. Aggressive canines play a pivotal role in this episode, and what's the deal with wayward young Mercedes? DS
Arena: According To Beryl 11pm, BBC4
A re-showing of an Arena from 2001 to honour the novelist Dame Beryl Bainbridge who died this month. She talks about the project she was working on then, the relationship between Samuel Johnson and the wife of a prominent brewer, Hester Thrale (it became the novel, According To Queeney). Bainbridge journeys through the places associated with Johnson, as well as discussing her work. Wonderfully candid, she explains how as she writes she becomes her characters, walking up and down muttering like Johnson, though she can't do a Birmingham accent. MS
Skins 11.10pm, Channel 4
Filming on series five of Skins has recently begun, and it will be interesting to see if they replicate the kind of controversy that dogged this episode, seen by many as going too far (and not necessarily in a Skins way). Effy has returned home following her stint in a psychiatric ward, and despite Anthea and Freddie's best efforts, she's finding it difficult to adjust to life without the support of her counsellor. But what exactly is his hold over her? RN
Archaeologists rethink the extent of the Roman presence in Gwynedd as construction of a bypass reveals unexpected artefacts. Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 11:57 pm
Archaeologists discover a second henge at Stonehenge, described as the most exciting find at the site in 50 years. Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 10:46 pm
HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, July 21 (HealthDay News) -- Eight of nine male infants
born with so-called "Bubble Boy" disease were still alive and well nine
years after they underwent gene therapy, French researchers report. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:48 pm
Scuba divers encountered the remains of a 3,000-year-old extinct monkey in an underwater Dominican Republic cave. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:29 pm
Experts are considering whether a possible tropical cyclone could disrupt work at the site of the BP oil spill. Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 7:59 pm
AP - New Jersey will hold its first bear hunt in five years this December to thin a growing black bear population that wildlife biologists say is increasingly coming into contact with suburban New Yorkers.
SPACE.com - The
discovery of a giant, spinning black hole that has been knocked off its axis
twice has led astronomers to suggest that a violent galaxy collision caused the
strange cosmic behavior. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 Jul 2010 | 4:30 pm
Money is surprisingly bad at making us happy. Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries. Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history – 21st century America – is slowly getting less pleased with life. (Or as the economists behind this recent analysis concluded: “In the United States, the [psychological] well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time.”)
Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure. That’s why we work hard, fret about the stock market and save up for that expensive dinner/watch/phone/car/condo. We’ve been led to believe that dollars are delight in a fungible form.
But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn’t money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. The scientists explore the “experience-stretching hypothesis,” an idea first proposed by Daniel Gilbert. He explains “experience-stretching” with the following anecdote:
I’ve played the guitar for years, and I get very little pleasure from executing an endless repetition of three-chord blues. But when I first learned to play as a teenager, I would sit upstairs in my bedroom happily strumming those three chords until my parents banged on the ceiling…Doesn’t it seem reasonable to invoke the experience-stretching hypothesis and say that an experience that once brought me pleasure no longer does? A man who is given a drink of water after being lost in the Mojave Desert may at that moment rate his happiness as eight. A year later, the same drink might induce him to feel no better than a two.
What does experience-stretching have to do with money and happiness? The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves.
The study itself is straightforward. The psychologists gathered 351 adult employees of the University of Liège, from custodial staff to senior administrators, for an online survey. (I should note that it remains unclear whether happiness and other aspects of well-being can be meaningfully measured with a multiple choice test. So caveats apply.) The scientists primed the subjects by showing them a stack of Euro bills before asking them a bunch of questions which attempted to capture their “savoring ability.” Here’s how the savoring test worked:
Participants are asked to imagine finishing an important task (contentment), spending a romantic weekend away (joy), or discovering an amazing waterfall while hiking (awe). Each scenario is followed by eight possible reactions, including the four savoring strategies referred to in the introduction (i.e., displaying positive emotions, staying present, anticipating or reminiscing about the event, and telling other people about the experience). Participants are required to select the response or responses that best characterize what their typical behavior in each situation would be, and receive 1 point for each savoring strategy selected.
Interestingly, the scientists found that people in the wealth condition – they’d been primed with all those Euros – had significantly lower savoring scores. This suggests that simply looking at money makes us less interested in relishing the minor pleasures of life. Furthermore, subjects who made more money in real life – the scientists asked all subjects for their monthly income – scored significantly lower on the savoring test. A subsequent experiment duplicated this effect among Canadian students, who spent less time savoring a chocolate bar after being shown a picture of Canadian dollars. The psychologists end on a bleak note:
Taken together, our findings provide evidence for the provocative notion that having access to the best things in life may actually undermine one’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures. Our research demonstrates that a simple reminder of wealth produces the same deleterious effects as actual wealth on an individual’s ability to savor, suggesting that perceived access to pleasurable experiences may be sufficient to impair everyday savoring. In other words, one need not actually visit the pyramids of Egypt or spend a week at the legendary Banff spas in Canada for one’s savoring ability to be impaired—simply knowing that these peak experiences are readily available may increase one’s tendency to take the small pleasures of daily life for granted.
This makes me think of the Amish. From a certain perspective, the Amish live without a lot of the stuff most of us consider essential. They don’t use cars, reject the Internet, avoid the mall, and prefer a quiet permanence to hefty bank accounts. The end result, however, is a happiness boom. When asked to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, the Amish are as satisfied with their lives as members of the Forbes 400. There are, of course, many ways to explain the contentment of the Amish. (The community has strong ties, plenty of religious faith and stable families, all of which reliably correlate with high levels of well-being.) But I can’t help wonder if part of their happiness is related to experience-stretching. They don’t fret about getting the latest iPhone, or eating at the posh new restaurant, or buying the au courant handbag. The end result, perhaps, is that the Amish are better able to enjoy what really matters, which is all the stuff money can’t buy.
Researchers think they've determined the genetic markers for the most successful sled dog traits. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 3:44 pm
We’re happy to announce a new addition to Wired Science that will bring an added dimension to the science news our team produces. Starting today, we’ll be hosting the neuroscience blog The Frontal Cortex by Jonah Lehrer, best-selling book author and contributing editor at Wired magazine.
Jonah’s entertaining and insightful writing on neuroscience, psychology and culture has been featured in many publications including The New Yorker, Nature, The Washington Post and, of course, Wired. In his 2007 book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Jonah uncovers how Proust, Cezanne, Whitman and other artists understood the secrets of the brain long before science confirmed them. His latest book, How We Decide, explores how our minds make decisions and how we can use this understanding to make better ones.
We look forward to more great analysis and commentary, and to getting to know our brains better. If you’ve got questions about your gray matter, ask Jonah.
Welcome!
Image: A photo I made Jonah take of his bookshelf.
I always find introductions a little awkward, so I’ll make this brief. My name is Jonah Lehrer, and I write mostly about the intersection of neuroscience and culture. (I’ve been blogging for the last few years over here.) I’m interested in how the brain works – it’s a really peculiar chunk of electric meat – and how learning about the brain can improve our everyday lives. If you read Wired Magazine, you might have encountered a few of my past articles. (In the current issue, I have a piece on the dangerous feedback loop of stress, and the search for a stress “vaccine”.) I’ve also written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Nature, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and am a contributor to WNYC’s Radiolab. I’m the author of two books - How We Decide and Proust Was A Neuroscientist – and am currently at work on my next book, Imagine, which explores the science of creativity. Needless to say, I’m really excited about joining the wonderful blog network at Wired. If you have any questions for me, please put them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them!
David Cameron, Britain's new Prime Minister, is currently in the United States for talks with President Obama. The two leaders have a lot of weighty issues to discuss: the BP oil spill and the war in Afghanistan spring to mind. ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 3:07 pm
NASA and Germany have spent 15 years and billions of dollars on SOFIA, an airborne telescope that is about to produce its first results. Eric Hand asks whether the science will justify the cost. Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 21 Jul 2010 | 3:00 pm
The veteran Mars Odyssey satellite has switched itself into "safe mode" after detecting a problem with an electronic encoder responsible for controlling the orientation of the spacecraft's solar array. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 2:31 pm
A safety helmet equipped with special sensors could let you know how banged up you really are after a fall. Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jul 2010 | 2:20 pm
The dainty damselfly re-appears in the UK after an absence of more than 50 years, probably assisted by climate change. Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 1:57 pm
The site of Jesus' baptism is dangerously contaminated, according to an advisory that urges tourists to stay out of the river's waters. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 1:55 pm
The heavy turbulence that rattled a United Airlines plane headed for Los Angeles and injured 30 people Tuesday evening has drawn attention to turbulence – and what can be done to avoid it. Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jul 2010 | 1:51 pm
In a remote valley in the mountains of Colorado, the marmot population has tripled over the past decade, but this may not ultimately be good news for the fat, furry, squirrel-like creatures.
Increasingly, short winters have meant that yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory now emerge 20 days earlier from their seven- to eight-month hibernation than they did in the late ’70s. This, in turn, has meant more time to get fat over the summer, less fat loss over the winter and, over the past decade, a huge spike in their survival and reproductive success.
“We believe that gradual change in climate crosses a threshold, and causes abrupt changes in population,” said biologist Arpat Ozgul from the Imperial College of London, lead author of a study on the marmots being published July 21 in Nature.
While these marmots have been getting gradually fatter since the study began in 1976, the population didn’t explode until 2000. Between 2000 and 2008, their numbers increased by 18 percent per year, which is very rapid for a mammal.
Researchers found a strong correlation between body mass and individual survival and reproduction, but are still working out why there was such a sudden change.
What sets this study apart is that the researchers have been tracking individual marmots (by painting different symbols on their backs, such as lightning bolts or diamonds) over the entire course of their lifetimes, for more than 30 years.
“This study presumably started before the impacts of climate change was a major motivation,” said biologist Murray Humphries from McGill University. “Now, 33 years later we have really important, detailed information on how climate change ripples into population impacts.”
While getting fatter and having a population boom sounds like a marmot heyday, warmer weather might not be so great for the cold-adapted alpine creatures in the long run.
“We strongly suspect that this is only a short-term response,” said Ozgul. “Marmots are adapted to cold environments and have a small tolerance for heat. If they are trapped under the sun for more than two hours they get heat stress and can die. Warmer days will limit their foraging times to the early morning and late afternoon, which could make them more susceptible to predators.”
“In the past couple years we’ve already started to see higher rates of predation, taking into account that there are more marmots overall,” Ozgul added.
“I’d be surprised if the population keeps growing, even if the summers keep getting longer,” echoed Humphries. “What goes up must come down.”
How is it that the immune systems of some seem impervious to a virus that kills 2 million people around the globe each year? Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jul 2010 | 1:01 pm
A 40-tonne whale launched itself onto a yacht off Cape Town. Was it an act of aggression or just a badly timed leap?
Ralph Motes and Paloma Werner were out for a nice sailing trip off Cape Town in their 33ft yacht when they got more than they bargained for. While these middle-aged South African sailors were minding their own business, a 40-tonne whale leapt out of the water and on to their boat. Or was it that simple? Other reports claim that boats in the area had been harassing the animal by going closer than the 300-metre exclusion zone required by marine authorities.
Shades of Moby-Dick indeed. Nor was the story of Captain Ahab's ship being stove and sunk by a sperm whale fictional. There are plenty of documented cases of irate whales (who wouldn't be, with humans sticking harpoons in you?) turning on their tormentors.
This whale, however, was a right whale, a blubber-rich species hunted to near-extinction in the mid-20th century. It's so-called because it floats when dead and was therefore the right whale to catch. The heaviest of all cetaceans – for all that it feeds exclusively on minute zooplankton – it migrates to South African waters to breed and calve. By the looks of it, this particular whale was a juvenile – notorious for their playful and not always well judged leaps.
I've just returned from Cape Cod, where naturalists have been treated to an inordinate amount of whale breaching in the past few weeks. "There's lots of weird stuff going on this year," Dr Carole Carlsen of the Dolphin Fleet whalewatch boats told me. This last week alone, I've seen humpbacks, right whales and even fin whales – the second largest animal in existence – throwing themselves out of the water, a very rare occurrence.
Yet no one knows why they do it. It may be a means of communication. Or it may have something to do with dislodging the thousands of parasites, such as barnacles, that accrue to the animals' bellies, chins, and flippers. We have also observed that whales breach more often when the wind picks up or changes direction.
But if I were a 40-tonne animal able to launch my body entirely out of the water, I'd do it just for the hell of it. Unlike toothed whales, such as sperm whales or orca, these baleen whales do not have highly developed sonar, and their eyesight is poor. Indeed, last week a humpback calf breached so near our boat that it nearly hit the bow. Evidently we both had a lucky escape. Which is more than can be said for our hapless South African whale-watchers.
Philip Hoare's book, Leviathan or, The Whale, won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction in 2009
Divers find the fossilised bones of an ancient, tiny monkey in a cave in the Caribbean, revealing clues about the origin of primates there. Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 12:10 pm
The European Space Agency is to call upon scientists to come up with ideas for the next great space mission. Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 12:09 pm
Pioneering climate change scientist who fought for informed public engagement
The American climate scientist Stephen Schneider, who has died aged 65 following a heart attack, would have preferred readers to spend their time studying his books and scientific articles, looking at the evidence, doing their own research, making up their minds about climate change and lobbying local politicians – rather than reading his obituary.
Steve believed passionately in evidence, and was always reminding me and other colleagues at meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) not to duck the hard questions. He was the first to recognise that it is precisely because climate change is so uncertain that it is so important to do something about it.
Back in the 1970s, when only a handful of scientists were working on global climate change at all, Steve was the first to recognise the importance of the balance between greenhouse warming and cooling due to other forms of atmospheric pollution. The most extreme pollution-induced cooling was, of course, the nuclear winter – "more like a nuclear autumn", as he put it.
Although that scenario seems remote today, the magnitude of cooling by aerosols – tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere – and how fast the world might warm as China cleans up its power stations remain among the most important uncertainties in climate projections. As late as 1977, Steve wrote: "We just don't know enough to choose definitely at this stage whether we are in for warming or cooling – or when."
As the world warmed through the ensuing three decades, he readily accepted that the balance of evidence pointed towards further warming. However, he still insisted on the ability of the real world to surprise us. In a survey of expert opinion on the range of uncertainty in the warming response to a doubling of carbon dioxide levels undertaken in the mid-1990s, Steve's response stands out as by far the most uncertain. Yet he rightly saw this uncertainty not as an excuse for inaction, but a reason to be doubly concerned about this uncontrolled global experiment.
A polymath and a consummate communicator, Steve believed strongly in the public's right to make informed decisions about climate change, but also that the science itself is a meritocracy, not a democracy: "When we're talking about what to do about it, then every citizen's opinion is just as important as anybody else's, and everybody should be quoted. But not about how many degrees of warming there are – that takes a lot of knowledge, to be able to know what you're talking about."
To judge from his book The Patient from Hell (2005, with Janica Lane), in which he described his own engagement with the doctors treating him for a rare type of lymphoma, anyone can join a scientific community, at any time. By the time he had finished his treatment, Steve was just about ready to submit for a PhD in oncology. But he believed that everyone has to start out by approaching the evidence with an open mind.
Born in New York, Steve was brought up on Long Island. Having gained a degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University (1966) and PhD in mechanical engineering and plasma physics (1971), he focused on atmospheric physics and the global environment. He was optimistic about our technical abilities as a species, and his 1971 paper on the dangers of aerosol cooling suggested: "[by 2000], nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production".
He was less sanguine about our willingness to co-operate. An adviser to successive US administrations from presidents Nixon to Obama, he was a sceptical supporter of greenhouse gas legislation and international agreements, recognising that intergovernmental agreements to share out limited resources do not have a promising track record.
After postdoctoral work at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, based at Columbia, in 1972 he moved to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, where he founded the climate project. He remained involved with the centre until 1996, and in 1992 joined the faculty at Stanford University, California, where he came to hold three professorships. In 2007 the IPCC shared the Nobel peace prize with Al Gore.
Steve was an inspiring mentor of his many students, postdoctoral researchers and collaborators, negotiating to allow graduate students to accompany him to international climate negotiations – and he was always supportive when his fellow scientists came under fire. He also put his expertise on global climate into practice, playing a key role in studies that led to groundbreaking climate change legislation in California.
One of his most influential feats came when he was 30: the founding of the journal Climatic Change, which linked the various disciplines involved. He edited the journal for the rest of his life, never shying away from publishing controversial articles. For him, anyone who played by the rules of scientific peer review deserved a hearing.
Steve saw the failure of the Copenhagen meeting last year as an opportunity to open up the public debate on emission controls to alternative approaches but was frustrated, though philosophical, when the world's media decided instead to restage old debates over whether climate change is an issue at all. He was especially exasperated by those who claimed to oppose greenhouse gas legislation in the name of democracy. Were there to be uncontrolled climate change, followed by draconian emission cuts and geo-engineering, it would pose a serious threat to liberal democracy.
The focus of Steve's most recent work, much of it in collaboration with his wife, Terry Root, was on tracing the influence of greenhouse gas emissions through to the systems people really care about, the tangible impacts of climate change on vulnerable ecosystems and societies. He had recently been appointed as convening lead author on the chapter on attribution for the forthcoming IPCC assessment of the impacts of climate change.
He was flying back from a scientific meeting in Sweden when he suffered his heart attack, and is survived by Terry.
• Stephen Henry Schneider, climate scientist, born 11 February 1945; died 19 July 2010
A new window into the deep past offers a glimpse into the future of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and rise of sea level around the world. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 12:02 pm
Three fragments of the gluten protein make it toxic to patients with celiac disease, a new study says. Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jul 2010 | 12:00 pm
The astronomer royal on the significance of the newly discovered star
Scientists at the University of Sheffield have found a star 10m times brighter, and with a mass 265 times larger, than our own sun. The stellar giant – named R136a1 and located in the Tarantula Nebula adjacent to "our" Milky Way – is thought to be middle-aged at only 1m years old. By comparison, the Sun is 4.57bn years old. Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, gives his view of the discovery.
The properties of R136a1 are interesting to astronomers because the biggest stars are very unstable, and they lose their mass very quickly. There are many questions: how much has been lost? How long do they last? How much is left behind when they run out of fuel and explode as supernovae?
Stars that become supernovae start off at least eight times heavier than our sun. They're so short-lived that, even if they have planets, there is unlikely to be time for life to get started. The surface is 40,000C and, as a result, the colouring will be extremely blue.
As with all stars, R136a1 will be made mainly of hydrogen and helium, and be powered by nuclear fusion. The heavier the star is, the more rapidly it radiates, and this speeds up the rate at which the fuel is burned. This is why the lifespan of these huge stars is so short, and why so few are seen.
I don't view this discovery as a big breakthrough. It's a bit bigger than other stars of this kind that we've seen and it's nice that it involves British scientists and the world's biggest telescope. It's a step forward, but it is not more than an incremental advance in our knowledge.
The olm, a foot-long salamander nicknamed “the human fish” because of its fleshy skin and tubular shape, is certainly a strange-looking animal. But beneath the surface, they’re even weirder: Olms can live for 100 years, far longer than any other amphibian.
Scientists have no idea why.
“This species raises questions regarding aging processes,” write researchers led by biologist Yann Voituron of France’s Université Claude Bernard in a July 21 Biology Letters study.
The olms studied by Voituron’s team are part of a population established 48 years ago to help conserve the rare amphibian, which is found in caves in Croatia and Slovenia.
When the project began, the olms were about 10 years old, making them nearly 60 now. Yet they “do not show any time of senescence,” write the researchers, who estimate the olm’s average lifespan to be 69 years, with an upper limit at the century mark.
Living in a stable environment without predators has made it possible for olms to have long lives, but the mechanisms underlying their longevity are unknown. In general, long life correlates with a large body size, but the half-pound salamanders are pipsqueaks compared to the next-longest-lived amphibian, the 50-pound Japanese salamander, which clocks in with a 55-year lifespan.
Voituron’s team thought olms might have extremely slow metabolisms, but they proved metabolically similar to other amphibians, including African bullfrogs and European toads that live for about 40 years.
The researchers also wondered if olms might have special tricks for cleaning up oxygen-free radicals, the DNA-damaging molecules produced when cellular mitochondria turn nutrients into energy. Free-radical accumulation is linked to aging, but the olm’s antioxidant activity is nothing special.
“The olm presents a paradox,” wrote the researchers. “Neither its basal metabolic rate nor its antioxidant activity, the two most cited mechanisms that should be involved in enhancing lifespan, differ from species with a more reduced lifespan.”
Voituron is now testing whether the olm might have extra-efficient mitochondria that emit fewer free radicals to begin with. “If you manage to produce more energy with less free-radical production, then you can avoid aging and increase lifespan,” he said.
Citation: “Extreme lifespan of the human fish (Proteus anguinus): a challenge for ageing mechanisms.” By Yann Voituron, Michelle de Fraipont, Julien Issartel, Olivier Guillaume Jean Clobert. Biology Letters, online publication, July 21, 2010.
While many species are being walloped by climate change, rising temperatures seem to be temporarily helping out yellow-bellied marmots, who have recently become bigger and fitter, a new study found. Source: Livescience.com | 21 Jul 2010 | 11:00 am
A 33-year-long study shows that ground-dwelling squirrels are leaving hibernation earlier -- and eating more -- as the planet warms. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 11:00 am
Bloggers who left ScienceBlogs had no desire to silence Pepsi – we were letting Seed know it had violated its readers' trust
I'll give this to David Appell: the man's efficient. Few have ever packed as much error and folly into seven paragraphs as he does in his PepsiCo and the shame of the bloggerati. Appell takes a stark but complex event – the exodus of bloggers from Seed's ScienceBlogs network when Seed sold a blog spot to Pepsi – and misrepresents it despite contradictory evidence that his very article links to. He misses the point of just about everything.
Guardian commenters have already pointed out most of Appell's fallacies. They noted that his free speech issue is bogus, since Pepsi enjoys and lucratively exercises its right to free speech elsewhere, including the same blog hosted on its own site; that it was Seed that silenced Pepsi, not the bloggers; and, most important, that Appell's focus on the "bloggerati's" supposed effort to "hound out undesirable opinions" "misunderstood the whole point", which is that "advertising [was presented] as editorial content", an issue that "dead-tree journalism dealt with … decades ago".
Sharp readers. They also noticed that Appell accused departing bloggers, including me, of "shameful" and "cowardly" motives for which he offered zero evidence, and for which contradicting evidencelay within the exit posts of many of those he accused. Where in my or Rebecca Skloot's posts on the matter, for instance, does Appell find basis for saying that she and I felt that "sharing a forum with [Pepsi's] supposed morons was somehow beneath [us]"?
Most poisonous, however, and destructive to all of journalism, is that Appell ignores the central issue. He insists it's about writers' distrust of Pepsi – when it's really about readers' trust in media. I'd fret less over this if I didn't see others making the same mistake. This includes not only commenters at the ScienceBlogs site but some ordinarily sensible bloggers and journalists. Again and again, people have asked, as Appell does, why Pepsi wasn't allowed to pop its can open, for we could have learned and accomplished something flinging the fizz around. They wish, as one person put it, that we had the Pepsi blog stand or fall on its own merits.
Yet how can a blog stand on its merits if it's propped into a standing position to start with with a stack of money? Merit, of course, is how you're supposed to earn a voice at a place like ScienceBlogs, or the Guardian, or the New York Times, or the local paper. And the most essential merit for exercising this voice, as in other public or quasi-public venues, is that you speak or write for yourself, as an independent agent, and not as a mouthpiece for an organised commercial or political interest.
Whether media be old or new, this role as a quasi-public forum lies at its heart. Readers enter this space with that understanding. Credible publishers hire and fire their writers accordingly. We'll pay you to write and we'll print your stuff, the publisher says, because we think you'll do your best to gather the facts and think them through and write things up so the reader can properly understand things. The reader is your client, and the reader's needs trump all others'. We accept that you'll make mistakes. But if we find you writing for someone else, or you hold a source's agenda above that of the reader, we'll fire your ass.
Does this advertising-editorial wall ensure good journalism? Unfortunately, no; people find other ways to botch journalism. But in the murky world of media, we need a few firm lines to keep us away from slippery slopes. This pact between publisher, writer, and reader provides one of the most vital. It forms the foundation of reader trust; violating it erodes that foundation. Ads are a necessary evil. Credible publications present them unambiguously as third-party commercial messages so the reader instantly knows someone is selling something. That's why patching a couple of stickers on a blog that presents itself in every other way as editorial content, as Seed proposed before killing the Pepsi blog, doesn't work. It's like sticking a lapel button on a guy at the front of the church in a tuxedo and expecting us to think he's not part of the wedding. The guy needs different clothes.
Good publications know all that. Seed either didn't know it or set it aside. Most of the 20 bloggers who left, including those whom Appell names, did not leave because they hoped to silence a company possessing a constitutional right to same and tens of millions of dollars of ad money (apparently Appell thinks we're not just shameful and cowardly; we're also dumb.) We left because Seed betrayed its readers.
The star known to astronomers as R136a1 is among the heaviest, brightest, hottest and biggest ever discovered. So why does its name sound like an obscure insurance form?
A more impressive one seems essential. Piggy, perhaps, after the boy in Lord of the Flies, too big and bright to survive? Or a homage to other stars who burned bright but briefly: Heath Ledger? Bill Hicks? Then there's the obvious ones: the Hulk, Goliath, Brian Blessed. Well, you decide.
Nicolae Ceausescu, who ruled Romania with an iron fist for a quarter century, may not be buried at the grave bearing his name. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 21 Jul 2010 | 9:20 am
Astronomers say colossal star known as R136a1 is more than 265 times more massive than the sun
Astronomers say they have discovered the most colossal star on record, in a region of space known as the Tarantula nebula in a neighbouring galaxy to our own.
The record-breaking star has a mass 265 times greater than the sun and is millions of times brighter, they said.
The discovery has astonished scientists, who thought it was impossible for stars to exceed more than 150 times the mass of the sun.
When the star was born it could have been more than twice as massive. Because it is so far away – about 165,000 light-years – it can only be seen with the use of powerful telescopes in the southern hemisphere.
If the star, known as R136a1, took the place of the sun in our solar system, its gravitational attraction would pull our planet in so close that the length of an "Earth year" would shrink to three weeks.
"It would bathe the Earth with incredibly intense ultraviolet radiation, rendering life on our planet impossible," said Raphael Hirschi, a researcher at Keele University.
A team led by Paul Crowther, an astrophysicist at Sheffield University, used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama desert of northern Chile and archival material from the Hubble space telescope to study two young clusters of stars called NGC 3603 and RMC 136a.
The first group of stars, NGC 3603, lies about 22,000 light-years away, while stars in the RMC136a cluster are in a neighbouring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The astronomers found a clutch of monster stars, including several that are tens of times larger than the sun and several million times brighter. Some have surface temperatures of more than 40,000C – seven times hotter than our own sun.
These enormous stars churn out vast quantities of material, and, close up, would look fuzzy compared with the sun. "Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age," said Crowther. "Being a little over a million years old, the most extreme star, R136a1, is already 'middle-aged' and has undergone an intense weight-loss programme, shedding a fifth of its initial mass over that time, or more than 50 solar masses."
Such heavyweight stars are extremely rare, forming only within the densest star clusters. Distinguishing the individual stars was made possible by the use of infra-red instruments on the telescope.
"Owing to the rarity of these monsters I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon," said Crowther.
A short but intense life
Lightweight stars, such as our sun, live a long and quiet life. Massive stars, on the other hand, are very rare, and have a short but intense existence before exploding as supernovas.
Star R136a1, discovered thousands of light years away from the solar system, the most massive star found to date. It has a mass about 265 times that of our own sun and would have been over 320 solar masses when it was born a million or so years ago.
R136a1 has now overtaken the likes of Eta Carinae and the Pistol Star as the most massive and luminous known star in existence. Like these other giants it has a large radius for its mass and surface temperature, over 40,000C. Its brightness is hundreds of thousands of times greater than that of the sun.
While still a young star, R136a1's size eclipses other categories: red dwarfs, which weigh in at about 0.1 solar masses, low-mass yellow dwarfs such as the sun, and massive blue dwarf stars weighing eight times more than the sun.
BBC environment correspondent David Shukman witnesses the moment an oil-cloaked pelican was rescued. Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 8:55 am
Pollution worries and fears of a disruption to oil supplies increase after a large pipeline blast in eastern China. Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 8:33 am
Tezuka inspired a generation of manga artists and shaped the national debate about medical reform in Japan
So far in this blog series on graphic medicine I've been looking at medical comics in the west. Now I look east to the work of the "Father of manga" (Japanese comics) Osamu Tezuka. A talented writer, artist and animator, Tezuka used his medical education to inform his anatomically accurate depictions of surgery.
Tezuka was born in Toyanaka City, Osaka, in 1928. Though he attended medical school and became a licensed physician, he chose not to work as a doctor and instead devoted himself to writing and drawing manga and making animated films.
Over the course of his long career Tezuka became a defining force in shaping the genre, publishing more than 700 manga running to more than 150,000 pages. Early Tezuka characters had large eyes, inspired by their American counterparts Betty Boop and Disney's Bambi. Large eyes have since become a stylistic hallmark of the whole genre.
As well as countless other titles including the world famous Astro Boy, Tezuka produced three notable medical manga: Black Jack, Ode to Kirihito, and Tezuka's Ancestor, Dr. Ryoan.
The latter is the story of Tezuka's grandfather, doctor to a samurai warrior during Japan's Meiji period. The other two works, fiercely critical of the Japanese medical establishment, have inspired a generation of manga artists (mangaka) as well as shaping the national debate about medical reform in Japan.
Ode to Kirihito was originally published in Japan as a series in the twice-monthly manga magazine Big Comic from 1970 to 1971. The story follows Dr Kirihito Osanai as he seeks a cure for the life-threatening (and thankfully fictional) Monmow disease which transforms people into dog-like creatures. When Kirihito himself becomes infected, he travels the world reflecting on his alienation and searching for a cure. In this 832-page epic, Tezuka deals with the anguish and moral dilemmas of both doctors and patients with piercing insight.
"For Tezuka, a doctor is not just someone who heals the body, but someone who appreciates the value of life, and inspires others to value it as well," said Ada Palmer, a historian at A&M University Texas and manga scholar. "In Tezuka's Buddhist cosmology all life is sacred and nothing is more valuable than creating or continuing life." Ode to Kirihito expresses Tezuka's frustration at what he saw as an ineffectual medical establishment. It is one of a number of later social critique stories written by Tezuka that had only a limited impact in the context of his general body of work.
By contrast, Tezuka's medical manga Black Jack has been hugely successful since its original run in Weekly Shonen Champion from 1973 to 1984. In Black Jack, Tezuka depicted the physician he would like to have been had he continued with his medical career. An extremely gifted but unlicensed surgeon, Black Jack performs complicated operations on humans and animals and charges extortionate prices for his services.
"The outrageous fees he charges are a test to make sure his patients truly appreciate that life itself is more valuable than any amount of money," said Palmer. Rejected by the medical community, he mostly provides his services to criminals and outlaws on the fringes of society. The series ran for more than 230 episodes.
Tezuka used his experience as a physician to draw anatomically accurate surgical scenes in Black Jack. His highly stylised cartoon figures were set against realistic landscapes and medically accurate depictions of the tissues of the human body. This attention to detail set the book apart from what had come before, and inspired many more mangaka to follow his lead.
"Many of the operations which Black Jack performs are astounding, sometimes impossible, but Tezuka's grounding in medicine means they are almost always convincingly portrayed," said Paul Gravett, comics historian and author of Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics.
Indeed there are several points in Black Jack where Tezuka chose to reject medical plausibility. The superhuman surgeon can perform complex surgical operations from memory in complete darkness, for example. In one episode Black Jack operates on himself without anaesthetic. Despite this degree of poetic licence the manga has been enormously influential.
Black Jack remains one of the most popular manga of all time in Japan. "I have never met a Japanese person who wasn't familiar with Black Jack, even those who don't usually read manga," said Palmer. "If Astro Boy is the Japanese Superman, Black Jack is the Japanese Batman. Everyone knows him, even far outside the comics world, and when people think of him people think of his fierce critique of the medical world."
Palmer told me the character is often brought up in debates about medical reform. The Hitachi medical group used Black Jack's image in their advertisement in 2006, for example, because his image is synonymous with good medical care.
However, Tezuka's message was not always welcome. "There were a number of Black Jack episodes which drew complaints from the medical establishment in Japan and which Tezuka agreed to suppress and not allow to be reprinted in book form," said Gravett. Two of these three "sealed issues", issue 41 Vegetable and issue 58 Seat of Pleasure, which deal with the vegetative state and lobotomy respectively, were considered politically sensitive and never re-published.
Gravett said it was significant that Tezuka agreed to suppress this work. "Despite some ill-informed, scaremongering headlines here in the UK trying to panic the public about imported Japanese comics, manga does not operate with an anarchic, unregulated, 'anything-goes' licence," he said.
Palmer cited Naoki Urasawa's Monster and Chiho Saito's Say Hello to Black Jack as examples of manga inspired by the Black Jack series. The latter is a gritty, realistic portrait of corruption and incompetence in the Japanese medical school internship process.
"The subject of the manga is literally that every medical student in Japan starts medical school wanting to be Dr Black Jack, and then has to face the trauma of discovering that isn't possible in the real world," said Palmer. The comic is beautifully illustrated with a detailed medical realism in tribute to Tezuka.
In a similar vein, Team Medical Dragon by Akira Nagai and Taro Nogizaka attacks corruption and petty politics within the Japanese healthcare system. Serialised in Japan in the manga magazine Big Comic Superior since 2002, the comic combines explanatory medical diagrams with graphic depictions of surgery. The idea was so successful it was made into the television drama Iryu which enjoyed critical acclaim when it aired in Japan between 2006 and 2007.
It is not unusual in Japan for a manga on a seemingly niche topic to gain enormous readership and become serialised on television or turned into films. "Manga covers an enormous range of topics, genres and styles of story, far more diverse than one finds in western comics, or on the animated side western television," said Palmer. "There are manga about gender-switching princes, children raised by pigeons, the bombing of Hiroshima, international competitive baking and the French Revolution."
Palmer told me that because of Tezuka's Black Jack, people in Japan are much more aware of the issue of medical corruption than in most other countries.
"Imagine if Batman were about medical corruption," said Palmer. "When a new movie comes out, the whole nation talks about it. That has had a vast impact on how the Japanese nation thinks about doctors."
Would we have manga without Tezuka? According to Gravett, the question "is rather like asking if we would have French-language comics without Hergé, or American comic books without Jack Kirby. Tezuka was pivotal and a huge inspiration [for manga artists]."
Dr Osamu Tezuka died at the age of 60 in 1989. His legacy lives on in the work of mangaka who continue to tell medical stories. The Osamu Tezuka Memorial Museum in Takarazuka showcases the life work of this prolific and talented artist.
Cian O'Luanaigh is a graphic artist and science writer based in London. He has a masters in science communication from Imperial College London
Scientists in Romania are exhuming what are thought to be the remains of former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. Source: BBC News - Science & Environment | 21 Jul 2010 | 7:56 am
Images from the Very Large Telescope in Chile capture the most massive stars ever found, including one twice as large as the current accepted limit for stellar birth weights. This supermassive star, called R136a1, is 265 times the mass of the sun, and was as much as 320 times the mass of the sun when it was born.
This book-of-records-worthy star was found in the young stellar cluster RMC 136a, colloquially known as R136. It is located 165,000 light-years away inside the Tarantula Nebula, in one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The star is already a little over a million years old, and has spent most of its life shedding material through powerful stellar winds and outflows of gas. It has lost a fifth of its initial mass.
Astronomers had previously believed that the upper limit on stars’ masses at birth was 150 solar masses, but four stars in the cluster had birth weights well above that limit. Although the cluster houses more than 100,000 stars, those four giants account for nearly half the wind and radiation power of the entire group.
This trio of images shows a visible-light image of the Tarantula nebula as seen with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope (left) along with a zoomed-in visible-light image from the Very Large Telescope (middle). A new image of the R136 cluster, taken with a near-infrared instrument on the Very Large Telescope, is shown in the right-hand panel, with the cluster itself at the lower right.
Below, an artist’s conception shows the relative sizes of stars, from red dwarfs of about 0.1 solar masses, yellow dwarfs like the sun, blue dwarfs weighing eight solar masses, and the approximately 300-solar-mass R136a1.
