tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29643580548108303052024-03-13T23:50:15.946-07:00Science Paljeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.comBlogger3057125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-74842309387291781002011-08-18T23:53:00.000-07:002011-08-18T23:55:37.453-07:00Moon may be younger than thought, study says<h2>An analysis of a lunar rock raises questions about when and how the moon was formed. It may be 200 million years younger than widely believed.</h2> <img style="width: 399px; height: 265px;" src="http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2011-08/64049628.jpg" alt="Moon over L.A." border="0" /> <p class="small"> The moon rises over Los Angeles City Hall. The new analysis could leave scientists who model the moon's formation "scratching their heads," said an isotope geochemist who was not involved in the study. <span class="credit">(<span class="photographer">Scott Harrison / Los Angeles Times</span>)</span></p><p class="small"><span class="toolSet" style="width: 335px;"> </span></p><div class="byline"> <span class="byline">By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times</span> <p class="date"><span class="dateString"></span>The moon may be 200 million years younger than widely believed, according to a new analysis of a rock brought back to Earth in 1972 by Apollo 16 astronauts. Or, if not, the moon may never have had the magma ocean that scientists think covered its surface soon after it formed.
<br /></p> </div>
<br />Either way, the findings published online Wednesday by the journal Nature could send lunar scientists back to the drawing board to reconsider the moon's evolution.
<br />
<br /> The moon is thought to have formed from debris ejected into space after a Mars-sized body collided with the still-molten Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The young moon would have been hot and blanketed by magma. But without a thick atmosphere to trap its heat, the molten rock cooled relatively quickly, while minerals that were less dense than the magma floated to the top first, forming the moon's crust. These rocks give the white highlands of the moon's near side their pale hue, and have been used to determine the point at which the moon solidified into the body we know today.
<br />
<br />But an international team of scientists decided to use sophisticated techniques to better<b> </b>test a sample collected by the Apollo 16 mission — one that was considered one of the oldest moon rocks and that would, with any luck, provide an accurate age because it is relatively unscathed by meteoric impacts.
<br />
<br />Planetary scientists can determine a rock's age by calculating how many radioactive "parent" isotopes of a particular element have decayed into "daughter" isotopes. But rather than test the radioactive decay using just one method,<b> </b>the researchers used three, involving the elements lead, samarium and neodymium. Because different isotopes decay at different rates, each method provided a slightly different measuring stick.
<br />
<br />All three calculations resulted in very similar ages: an average of about 4.36 billion years, which surprised the scientists. "We all looked at one another and laughed," said lead author Lars Borg, a geochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California.
<br />
<br />If that is correct, it means the moon's magma ocean formed — and cooled — more recently than scientists have generally thought was the case based on evidence from meteorites<b> </b>containing some of the oldest minerals in the solar system. This also could mean that the great impact that separated the moon from Earth happened more recently too.
<br />
<br />The study authors propose another, more radical, explanation: The crustal rock they analyzed, called ferroan anorthosite, is not linked to magma dynamics at all. Perhaps the moon never even had a magma ocean and the rocks were formed another way, they suggested.
<br />
<br />"You're left with picking your poison," Borg said.
<br />
<br />The new dates could leave scientists who model the moon's formation "scratching their heads," said Alex Halliday, an isotope geochemist at <a class="taxInlineTagLink" id="OREDU0000186" title="University of Oxford" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/education/colleges-universities/university-of-oxford-OREDU0000186.topic">Oxford University</a> who was not involved in the study. "It's a little bit awkward, because nobody likes to say, 'They've got their data wrong.' "
<br />
<br />But there are less dramatic explanations, Halliday said, including the possibility that both these and previous dates are right, and the ferroan anorthosite examined in this study simply does not represent the oldest rocks on the lunar surface.
<br />
<br />"I hope it's going to cause a real stir," said Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame who was not involved in the study. But, he added, the researchers need much more evidence that other rocks have been inaccurately dated before they jump to radically different theories about the moon's formation.<p></p><p class="small"><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-moon-age-20110818,0,4380476.story">Original here</a>
<br /></p>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-75443257889031937412011-07-11T01:52:00.000-07:002011-07-11T01:53:34.866-07:00Potato genome sequenced by international team<div class="caption body-narrow-width"> <img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53962000/jpg/_53962061_003122205-1.jpg" alt="New potatoes" height="171" width="304" /> <span style="width: 304px;">The humble spud provides the world's fourth-largest crop<br /><br /></span><p class="introduction" id="story_continues_1">An international team has uncovered the full DNA sequence of the potato for the first time.</p> <p>The breakthrough holds out the promise of boosting harvests of one of the world's most important staple crops. </p> <p>Researchers at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, which contributed to the work, say it should soon be possible to develop improved varieties of potato much more quickly.</p> <p>The genome of an organism is a map of how all of its genes are put together.</p> <p>Each gene controls different aspects of how the organism grows and develops.</p> <p>Slight changes in these instructions give rise to different varieties.</p> <p>Each individual has a slightly different version of the DNA sequence for the species. </p> <p>Professor Iain Gordon, chief executive of the James Hutton Institute, said decoding the potato genome should enable breeders to create varieties which are more nutritious, as well as resistant to pests and diseases.</p> <span class="cross-head">Colour and flavour</span> <p>He hopes it will help meet the challenge of feeding the world's soaring population. </p> <p>The research is far from complete. Analysing the genetic sequence of the plant will take several more years.</p> <p>At the moment it can take more than 10 years to breed an improved variety. </p> <p>By locating the genes that control traits like yield, colour, starchiness and flavour, the research should make it possible to develop better spuds much more quickly. </p> <p>Potatoes provide the world's fourth-largest crop, with an annual, global yield of 330m tonnes.</p><p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14096485">Original here</a><br /></p><br /> </div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-40994719950894507812011-07-11T01:50:00.000-07:002011-07-11T01:52:15.589-07:00Ocean's carbon dioxide uptake reduced by climate change<span class="newsimg"> <img src="http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/2011022201.jpeg" alt="Earth" align="left" /> </span> <p class="clear-left"> <strong>How deep is the ocean's capacity to buffer against climate change? As one of the planet's largest single carbon absorbers, the ocean takes up roughly one-third of all human carbon emissions, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide and its associated global changes.</strong></p><p class="one-ad"><a class="ad-link" href="http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/aclk?sa=l&ai=BA7_OLbkaTpfbGsXe_AawyLHcCrXxtc4BtZ-NqRWniMnXB_DmFxABGAEg9raFAjgAUIf19I_6_____wFgpaaihtgioAGLo8P-A7IBD3d3dy5waHlzb3JnLmNvbcgBAdoBTGh0dHA6Ly93d3cucGh5c29yZy5jb20vbmV3cy8yMDExLTA3LW9jZWFuLWNhcmJvbi1kaW94aWRlLXVwdGFrZS1jbGltYXRlLmh0bWyAAgGpAhMqMJT34Lo-wAIBqAMB6AO6A-gD5wnoA7kD9QMAAABE9QMgAAAA&num=1&sig=AGiWqtx1R1pPApuualAQl7dTZPnUxdBkGQ&client=ca-pub-0536483524803400&adurl=http://www.andor.com/scientific_cameras/neo_scmos_camera/">New sCMOS Camera</a> - The first true scientific CMOS camera available now from Andor. - <a href="http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/aclk?sa=l&ai=BA7_OLbkaTpfbGsXe_AawyLHcCrXxtc4BtZ-NqRWniMnXB_DmFxABGAEg9raFAjgAUIf19I_6_____wFgpaaihtgioAGLo8P-A7IBD3d3dy5waHlzb3JnLmNvbcgBAdoBTGh0dHA6Ly93d3cucGh5c29yZy5jb20vbmV3cy8yMDExLTA3LW9jZWFuLWNhcmJvbi1kaW94aWRlLXVwdGFrZS1jbGltYXRlLmh0bWyAAgGpAhMqMJT34Lo-wAIBqAMB6AO6A-gD5wnoA7kD9QMAAABE9QMgAAAA&num=1&sig=AGiWqtx1R1pPApuualAQl7dTZPnUxdBkGQ&client=ca-pub-0536483524803400&adurl=http://www.andor.com/scientific_cameras/neo_scmos_camera/" class="url">www.andor.com/scmos</a></p> <p>But whether the ocean can continue mopping up human-produced carbon at the same rate is still up in the air. Previous studies on the topic have yielded conflicting results, says University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Galen McKinley.</p><p>In a new analysis published online July 10 in <i>Nature Geoscience,</i> McKinley and her colleagues identify a likely source of many of those inconsistencies and provide some of the first observational evidence that <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/climate+change/" rel="tag" class="textTag">climate change</a> is negatively impacting the ocean carbon sink.</p> <p>"The ocean is taking up less carbon because of the warming caused by the carbon in the atmosphere," says McKinley, an assistant professor of atmospheric and <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/oceanic+sciences/" rel="tag" class="textTag">oceanic sciences</a> and a member of the Center for Climatic Research in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.</p> <p>The analysis differs from previous studies in its scope across both time and space. One of the biggest challenges in asking how climate is affecting the ocean is simply a lack of data, McKinley says, with available information clustered along shipping lanes and other areas where scientists can take advantage of existing boat traffic. With a dearth of other sampling sites, many studies have simply extrapolated trends from limited areas to broader swaths of the ocean.</p> <p>McKinley and colleagues at UW-Madison, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, and the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris expanded their analysis by combining existing data from a range of years (1981-2009), methodologies, and locations spanning most of the North Atlantic into a single time series for each of three large regions called gyres, defined by distinct physical and biological characteristics.</p> They found a high degree of natural variability that often masked longer-term patterns of change and could explain why previous conclusions have disagreed. They discovered that apparent trends in ocean carbon uptake are highly dependent on exactly when and where you look – on the 10- to 15-year time scale, even overlapping time intervals sometimes suggested opposite effects.<br /><br /><p class="one-ad"><a class="ad-link" href="http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/aclk?sa=L&ai=BI4AmLrkaTurHC5aU_Ab75InUCseittsB9-b4mRvAjbcBgKYdEAEYASD2toUCOABQqtnI-AVgpaaihtgisgEPd3d3LnBoeXNvcmcuY29tyAEB2gFMaHR0cDovL3d3dy5waHlzb3JnLmNvbS9uZXdzLzIwMTEtMDctb2NlYW4tY2FyYm9uLWRpb3hpZGUtdXB0YWtlLWNsaW1hdGUuaHRtbKkC2i2VfS_zsT6oAwHoA-cJ6AO6A-gDuQP1AwAAAET1AyAAAAA&num=1&sig=AGiWqtzriOEOg6-cL1heHkvkTMO9y9w5xQ&client=ca-pub-0536483524803400&adurl=http://www.globalccsinstitute.com">Global CCS Institute</a> - Building and sharing expertise on carbon capture and storage - <a href="http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/aclk?sa=L&ai=BI4AmLrkaTurHC5aU_Ab75InUCseittsB9-b4mRvAjbcBgKYdEAEYASD2toUCOABQqtnI-AVgpaaihtgisgEPd3d3LnBoeXNvcmcuY29tyAEB2gFMaHR0cDovL3d3dy5waHlzb3JnLmNvbS9uZXdzLzIwMTEtMDctb2NlYW4tY2FyYm9uLWRpb3hpZGUtdXB0YWtlLWNsaW1hdGUuaHRtbKkC2i2VfS_zsT6oAwHoA-cJ6AO6A-gDuQP1AwAAAET1AyAAAAA&num=1&sig=AGiWqtzriOEOg6-cL1heHkvkTMO9y9w5xQ&client=ca-pub-0536483524803400&adurl=http://www.globalccsinstitute.com" class="url">www.globalccsinstitute.com</a></p> <p>"Because the ocean is so variable, we need at least 25 years' worth of data to really see the effect of carbon accumulation in the atmosphere," she says. "This is a big issue in many branches of climate science – what is natural variability, and what is climate change?"</p> <p>Working with nearly three decades of data, the researchers were able to cut through the variability and identify underlying trends in the surface CO2 throughout the North Atlantic.</p><p>During the past three decades, increases in <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/atmospheric+carbon+dioxide/" rel="tag" class="textTag">atmospheric carbon dioxide</a> have largely been matched by corresponding increases in dissolved <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/carbon+dioxide/" rel="tag" class="textTag">carbon dioxide</a> in the seawater. The gases equilibrate across the air-water interface, influenced by how much carbon is in the atmosphere and the ocean and how much carbon dioxide the water is able to hold as determined by its water chemistry.</p> <p>But the researchers found that rising temperatures are slowing the carbon absorption across a large portion of the subtropical North Atlantic. Warmer water cannot hold as much carbon dioxide, so the ocean's carbon capacity is decreasing as it warms.</p> <p>In watching for effects of increasing <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/atmospheric+carbon/" rel="tag" class="textTag">atmospheric carbon</a> on the ocean's uptake, many people have looked for indications that the carbon content of the ocean is rising faster than that of the atmosphere, McKinley says. However, their new results show that the ocean sink could be weakening even without that visible sign.</p> <p>"More likely what we're going to see is that the ocean will keep its equilibration but it doesn't have to take up as much carbon to do it because it's getting warmer at the same time," she says. "We are already seeing this in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, and this is some of the first evidence for climate damping the ocean's ability to take up carbon from the atmosphere."</p> She stresses the need to improve available datasets and expand this type of analysis to other oceans, which are relatively less-studied than the North Atlantic, to continue to refine carbon uptake trends in different ocean regions. This information will be critical for decision-making, since any decrease in <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/ocean/" rel="tag" class="textTag">ocean</a> uptake may require greater human efforts to control carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-ocean-carbon-dioxide-uptake-climate.html">Original here</a><br /><p class="clear-left"> </p>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-8499176318115493272011-07-11T01:45:00.000-07:002011-07-11T01:49:12.034-07:00Obama Says Last Space Shuttle Launch Ends One Era, But Opens Anotherby Tariq Malik, SPACE.com Managing Editor<br /><br /><p><span style="width: 100%; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; color: rgb(114, 127, 110);"></span></p><table style="width: 386px; height: 274px;" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 384px; height: 245px;" rel="#custom0" class="make_big" src="http://i.space.com/images/i/10773/i02/Screen_shot_2011-07-06_at_3.13.49_PM.png?1309981172" alt="Obama-space-tweet" /></td> </tr><tr> <td style="margin-top: 10px; border: 1px solid lightgray; padding: 10px;"> The President answers a tweeted question on space policy<br /> <span style="font-size: 11px;">CREDIT: whitehouse.gov</span> <span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /><div style="padding-left: 10px;"><a class="make_big" rel="#custom0">View full size image</a></div></span> </td> </tr> </tbody></table> <p></p><p> President Barack Obama lauded NASA's final space shuttle launch Friday (July 8), saying that the blastoff marks the end of one chapter of human spaceflight, but also the start of a new one.</p> <p> "Today's launch may mark the final flight of the Space Shuttle, but it propels us into the next era of our never-ending adventure to push the very frontiers of exploration and discovery in space," Obama said in a statement. </p> <p> <a href="http://www.space.com/12208-nasa-final-space-shuttle-launch-photos.html">Atlantis launched into space</a> at 11:29 a.m. EDT (1529 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking the final flight of the space shuttle program, which NASA is shutting down after 30 years of spaceflight. The shuttle is carrying four astronauts on a 12-day delivery mission to the International Space Station. </p><p> </p><p>"Behind Atlantis and her crew of brave astronauts stand thousands of dedicated workers who have poured their hearts and souls into America's <a href="http://www.space.com/topics/nasa-space-shuttles-30th-anniversary-retirement/">Space Shuttle program</a> over the past three decades," said Obama, who did not attend the launch but did tour Atlantis with his family before launch. "To them and all of NASA's incredible workforce, I want to express my sincere gratitude. You helped our country lead the space age and you continue to inspire us each day." [<a href="http://www.space.com/11545-photos-obama-president-nasa-space.html">Photos: President Obama and NASA</a>]</p> <div class="article_img_i02"><div style="float: left; width: 100%;"><a style="cursor: pointer;" rel="#custom10827" class="make_big"><img style="width: 400px; height: 545px;" src="http://i.space.com/images/i/10827/i02/atlantis-space-shuttle-launch-from-air.jpg?1310244346" alt="Shuttle Atlantis launch from airplane" /></a></div><div style="float: left; width: 100%;"><div style="display: inline-block; width: 565px; margin-top: 10px; border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 5px;">Space shuttle Atlantis is seen through the window of a Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA) as it launches from Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on the STS-135 mission, July 8, 2011 in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on the final shuttle mission.<br /><span style="font-size: 11px;">CREDIT: NASA/Dick Clark </span><div style="padding-left: 10px;"><a style="font-size: 11px;" rel="#custom10827" class="make_big">View full size image</a></div></div></div></div> <p> <strong>American icon's last voyage</strong></p> <p> NASA is retiring its space shuttle fleet to make way for a new exploration program aimed at deep space missions. Thousands of NASA and shuttle contractor workers are expected to lose their jobs once the program is no more.</p> <p> Previously, the agency planned to replace the shuttle program with a new one aimed at returning astronauts to the moon. But Obama canceled that plan and gave NASA a new directive for <a href="http://www.space.com/12215-nasa-bolden-human-spaceflight-future.html">deep space exploration</a>, including a crewed asteroid mission by 2025.</p> <p> "And I have tasked the men and women of NASA with an ambitious new mission: to break new boundaries in space exploration, ultimately <a href="http://www.space.com/12192-obama-nasa-technological-breakthrough-twitter-town-hall.html">sending Americans to Mars</a>. I know they are up to the challenge – and I plan to be around to see it," Obama said.</p> <p> Obama's comments came just days after he said NASA needs to develop new technologies in order allow faster and longer spaceflights.</p> <p> "Frankly I have been pushing NASA to revamp its vision," Obama said on July 6 in answer to question from a Twitter user during a Town Hall event. "The shuttle did some extraordinary work in low orbit: experiments, the International Space Station, moving cargo. It was an extraordinary accomplishment and we're very proud of the work that it did. But now what we need is that next technological breakthrough." [<a href="http://www.space.com/12189-obama-technological-breakthrough-space.html">Video: See Obama's Full Comments</a>]</p> <p> </p><div style="clear: both; float: left; width: 100%; text-align: center; padding: 10px 0pt;"> </div> <p> <strong>Future of U.S. spaceflight</strong></p> <p> NASA currently plans to use a new space capsule, called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, for future deep space missions. The vehicle is based on work for the agency's Orion spacecraft developed for the previous moon plan.</p> <p> The heavy-lift rocket for the new program is called the Space Launch System, but the details of the booster are not yet final. This week, NASA officials said they plan to settle on a design for the new rocket by the end of summer.</p> <p> NASA's space exploration plan will lead to new advances in science and technology, as well spur education, innovation and economic growth, the president said.</p> <p> A major hurdle to Obama's deep space exploration vision is NASA's budget, which is mired in a maze of congressional battles over cutbacks.</p> <p> On Thursday, the House Appropriations commerce, justice and science committee, which oversees NASA funding, released a $16.8 billion 2012 budget proposal for the agency that is nearly $2 billion less than what Obama proposed in his 2012 budget request.</p> <p> The House proposal includes $1.95 billion for the <a href="http://www.space.com/12130-nasa-heavy-lift-rocket-documents-senate.html">Space Launch System</a>, which is $150 million more than the heavy-lift rocket received for 2011 but nearly $700 million less the amount recommended in the NASA Authoriz<span style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Buttons"><span class="" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_CreateLink" title="Link" onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);FormatbarButton('richeditorframe', this, 8);ButtonMouseDown(this);"><img src="img/blank.gif" alt="Link" class="gl_link" border="0" /></span></span>ation Act of 2010, which Obama signed into law in October.</p> <p> In the meantime, Obama said Americans should take pride in the accomplishments of the shuttle program and he wished the shuttle's veteran astronaut crew well.</p> <p> "Congratulations to Atlantis, her astronauts, and the people of America's space program on a picture-perfect launch, and good luck on the rest of your mission to the International Space Station, and for a safe return home," Obama said in the Friday statement. "I know the American people share my pride at what we have accomplished as a nation, and my excitement about the next chapter of our preeminence in space."</p><p><a href="http://www.space.com/12229-obama-nasa-final-space-shuttle-launch.html">Original here</a><br /></p>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-26191832208336099452010-02-11T21:32:00.000-08:002010-02-11T21:33:57.238-08:00Brain surgery boosts spirituality<p class="intro">Lose a tumour, gain self-transcendence.</p> <p class="byline"> <span class="vcard"><span class="author fn"> Janelle Weaver </span></span> </p> <span class="cleardiv"><!-- --></span> <div class="inline-image right" style="width: 180px;"><img src="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100210/images/news.2010.brain_damage.jpg" alt="Wings and lights" /><span class="imagedescription">Lights and wings have been associated with spirituality in different cultures.<span class="imagecredit">Urgesi, C. et al.</span></span></div><p>Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas.</p> <p>To investigate the neural basis of spirituality, Cosimo Urgesi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Udine, and his colleagues turned to people with brain tumours to assess the feeling before and after surgery. Three to seven days after the removal of tumours from the posterior part of the brain, in the parietal cortex, patients reported feeling a greater sense of self-transcendence. This was not the case for patients with tumours removed from the frontal regions of the brain.</p> <p>"Self-transcendence used to be considered just by philosophers and crank new age people," says co-author Salvatore Aglioti, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Sapienza University of Rome. "This is the first really close-up study on spirituality. We're dealing with a complex phenomenon that's close to the essence of being human."</p> <p>The authors pinpointed two parts of the brain that, when damaged, led to increases in spirituality: the left inferior parietal lobe and the right angular gyrus. These areas at the back of the brain are involved in how we perceive our bodies in spatial relation to the external world. The authors of the study in the journal <span class="i">Neuron</span><sup><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100210/full/news.2010.66.html#B1">1</a></sup>, say that their findings support the connection between mystic experiences and feeling detached from the body. </p> <p>"The most surprising part was the rapidity of the change," says Urgesi. "This discovery shows that some complex personality traits are more malleable than previously thought." </p> <h2 class="inlineheading"> The science of spirituality</h2><p> The researchers interviewed 88 people with brain tumours of various severities. Twenty of these people had benign tumours and although they underwent surgery no brain tissue was removed. All 88 people participated in interviews about their religious habits and beliefs before surgery and afterwards answered a series of true or false questions that assessed spirituality. The questionnaire tapped into three main components of self-transcendence: losing yourself in the moment, feeling connected to other people and nature, and believing in a higher power. Examples of the items on the questionnaire include: "I often become so fascinated with what I'm doing that I get lost in the moment - like I'm detached from time and place" and "I sometimes feel so connected to nature that everything seems to be part of one living organism."</p> <p>The researchers then mapped the precise areas of the patients' brains where they had lesions as a result of surgery.</p> <div class="inline-image left" style="width: 260px;"><img src="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100210/images/news.2010.Figure3a_left_b_right_.jpg" alt="Brain regions responsible for spirituality" /><span class="imagedescription">Spirituality was tracked to the the left inferior parietal lobe (left) and the right angular gyrus (right).<span class="imagecredit">Urgesi, C. et al.</span></span></div><p>Previous studies have shown that a broad network of frontal and parietal brain regions underlies religious beliefs <sup><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100210/full/news.2010.66.html#B2">2</a></sup><sup>,</sup><sup><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100210/full/news.2010.66.html#B3">3</a></sup><sup>,</sup><sup><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100210/full/news.2010.66.html#B4">4</a></sup><sup>,</sup><sup><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100210/full/news.2010.66.html#B5">5</a></sup>. But spirituality does not seem to involve exactly the same regions of the brain as religion.</p> <p>In the past, neurologists have observed spiritual changes in patients with brain damage, but it is not something they systematically evaluate. "We usually stay away from it, not because it's not an important topic, but because it's very private and personal," says Rik Vandenberghe, a neurologist at the University Hospital Gasthuisberg in Leuven, Belgium. "This paper is very interesting, but like many pioneering studies, it leaves open many questions." Vandenberghe, who uses a similar lesion-mapping technique, says the data should be interpreted with caution. "It's very unlikely that something like self-transcendence is localizable to just two brain areas," he says. </p> <h2 class="inlineheading"> Coarse measure</h2><p> Probably the most worrisome aspect of the study is the way the authors measured self-transcendence. "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items," says cognitive neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "In the future, it will be important to understand why lesions in the parietal cortex induce changes on this scale."</p><p>"Self-transcendence is an abstract concept, and different people will attribute different meanings to the word," says Vandenberghe. Patient self reporting is not always accurate, he says, adding that tapping into spirituality with more rigorous behavioural measures and pinpointing the specific thoughts and feelings that constitute it are the obvious next steps. </p> In future studies, Urgesi would like to measure other aspects of spirituality and determine how long changes in spirituality last in patients. He'd also like to inactivate parietal regions in healthy subjects using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a non-invasive technique that temporarily changes neural activity in a specific region, to see if he can induce immediate changes in self-transcendence. He envisions a day when TMS can be used to increase the feeling of self-transcendence in people with neurological or psychological disorders.<span class="end-of-item"><br /><br /><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100210/full/news.2010.66.html">Original here</a><br /></span>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-27134221843638943822010-02-11T21:30:00.000-08:002010-02-11T21:32:35.839-08:00Dwarf Dinosaurs Lived on 'Neverland'-Like IslandBy <a href="http://news.discovery.com/contributors/jennifer-viegas/">Jennifer Viegas</a><br /><br /><div id="article-body"> <div id="media-blocks"> <div class="photo"> <img src="http://news.discovery.com/dinosaurs/2010/02/11/dwarf-dinos-278x225.jpg" title="Transylvanian Dwarf Dinosaurs Had Short Lives" alt="Transylvanian Dwarf Dinosaurs Had Short Lives" /> <p> <span class="caption">The largest group of animals ever to walk the earth included dwarf varieties.</span><br /> <em class="photo-credits">Vlad Codrea</em><br /> </p> </div> </div> <div id="body-copy"><p> <b>THE GIST:</b> </p><ul><li><b>Dwarf dinosaurs existed on a Late Cretaceous island, a new analysis of bones confirms.</b></li><li><b>Dwarf dinosaurs appear to have emerged from a process called progenesis, which shortens the developmental period.</b></li><li><b>The dwarf dinosaurs lived fast, reaching sexual maturity at earlier ages than their mainland counterparts, and they likely died young.</b></li></ul><br /><hr style="" align="left" noshade="noshade" size="2" width="328"><br /> <p>When Hungarian baron Franz Nopcsa claimed that his sister in 1895 found bones belonging to dwarf dinosaurs on his family's Transylvanian estate, many thought his claims were on par with Count <a href="http://news.discovery.com/earth/of-vampires-and-bats-and-vampire-bats.html">Dracula</a> fiction.</p> <p>A new study not only confirms the existence of dwarf dinosaurs, but also explains how dinosaurs shrank during the <a href="http://news.discovery.com/animals/new-cretaceous-turtle-was-an-ocean-invader.html">Late Cretaceous</a> at a Neverland-like place -- Hateg Island, Romania -- where dinos never really grew up.</p> <p>According to the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal <em>Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology</em>, the unusual phenomenon appears to have only affected some of the island's dinosaur residents.</p> <div style="padding: 0pt 0pt 5px 10px; float: right; width: 278px; text-align: left;"> <a style="text-decoration: none;" href="http://news.discovery.com/videos/discovery-news-dinosaurs/"><img alt="dinosaurs" src="http://news.discovery.com/videos/2010/dinosaurs.jpg" border="0" height="155" width="278" /><br /><strong>WATCH VIDEO: From a tiny, tough guy T. rex to a mummified duck-billed dino, take a look at these stories and more in these dinosaur videos.</strong></a> </div> <p> <b>Related Links:</b> </p><hr style="" align="left" noshade="noshade" size="2" width="328"><br /><ul><li><a href="http://news.discovery.com/dinosaurs/tyrannosaur-new-mexico-dinosaur.html"><b>New Tyrannosaur Had More Teeth Than T. Rex</b></a></li><li><a href="http://news.discovery.com/dinosaurs/stolen-rare-dinosaur-skeleton-found-in-montana.html"><b>Stolen Dino Fossil Found in Montana</b></a></li><li><a href="http://www.howstuffworks.com/late-cretaceous-period.htm"><b>HowStuffWorks.com: Late Cretaceous Period</b></a></li><li><a href="http://news.discovery.com/animals/worlds-first-bird-was-more-dinosaur-than-bird.html"><b>World's 'First Bird' Was More Dinosaur than Bird</b></a></li></ul><br /><hr style="" align="left" noshade="noshade" size="2" width="328"><br /> <p>"The other animals living with the dinosaurs -- <a href="http://news.discovery.com/animals/freshwater-fish-population-decline.html">fish</a>, <a href="http://news.discovery.com/animals/frog-fungus-biodiversity-loss.html">frogs</a>, albanerpetonids (salamander-like <a href="http://news.discovery.com/videos/earth-new-amphibians-emerge-in-colombia.html">amphibians</a>), <a href="http://news.discovery.com/animals/sea-turtles-global-warming.html">turtles</a>, <a href="http://news.discovery.com/animals/alligators-rarely-divorce.html">crocodilians</a>, <a href="http://news.discovery.com/dinosaurs/pterosaur-fossils-evolution.html">pterosaurs</a>, <a href="http://news.discovery.com/animals/ancient-birds-fat-lazy.html">birds</a>, <a href="http://news.discovery.com/animals/lizards-adaptation-evolution-speciation.html">lizards</a>, <a href="http://news.discovery.com/earth/report-giant-snakes-threaten-us.html">snakes</a>, and <a href="http://news.discovery.com/animals/ear-evolution-mammals.html">mammals</a> -- were generally much smaller anyway, but so far haven't shown obvious size differences from mainland relatives," lead author Michael J. Benton told Discovery News.</p> <p>Benton, who directs the Palaeobiology and Biodiversity Research Group at the University of Bristol, and his colleagues conducted one of the most extensive studies yet on the Hateg Island dinosaur remains. They analyzed the dinosaurs' limb proportions and bone growth patterns, comparing them with those of mainland dinos.</p> <p>The analysis determined that at least four of the Hateg dinosaurs were dwarves.</p> <p>The diminutive dinosaurs included the titanosaurian sauropod <em>Magyarosaurus</em>, which had a body length of about 16 to 19 feet. That's impressive by human standards, but is miniature compared to a sauropod such as <em>Argentinosaurus</em>, which grew to be at least 82 feet long.</p> <p>Another small dinosaur was the hadrosaurid <em>Telmatosaurus</em>. Its 13-foot-long body contrasted with the average size of other hadrosaurids, which were 23 to 33 feet long, according to Benton.</p> <p>Two species of <em>Zalmoxes</em> dinosaurs also appear to have been dwarves, with one -- <em>Zalmoxes robustus</em> -- measuring about 10 feet in length.</p> <p>"So these forms are all typically half the length of their close relatives on larger land masses, and this equates to a body mass of perhaps one-eighth that of the relatives," said Benton. "Body mass is what matters most in biological terms, such as physiology and food intake."</p> <p>Magnified sections of the dinosaurs' bones revealed that the animals were adults and not juveniles. The scientists believe the dinosaurs likely shrank due to a process called progenesis, which shortens the developmental period. Sexual maturity happened early, and these dinosaurs may have also died two to five years younger than their "normal"-sized counterparts.</p> <p>"This in-depth study by Benton and colleagues is both fascinating and provocative," paleontologist Scott Sampson, a research curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, told Discovery News, "demonstrating that the largest group of animals ever to walk the earth included dwarfed varieties."</p> <p>Sampson added that the study also supports "the more general 'island rule'-- the idea that, when marooned on islands, evolution tends to make large animals smaller, and small animals larger."</p> <p>Scientists continue to debate why this happens on islands. Reduced supplies of food, smaller ranges, and few larger predators have all been theorized.</p> <p>"I think most biologists accept that there is something going on, and that the island rule has validity," Benton said.</p><p><a href="http://news.discovery.com/dinosaurs/dwarf-dinosaurs-transylvania.html">Original here</a><br /></p></div> </div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-14589144092500046942010-02-11T21:28:00.000-08:002010-02-11T21:30:07.017-08:00Directed Panspermia: Moral Obligation or Bio-Pollution?<dl id="contributing-details" class="clear clearfix"><dd class="photo"><a href="http://news.discovery.com/contributors/ian-o%27neill/"><img src="http://news.discovery.com/contributors/images/ian-oneill-49x49.jpg" title="" alt="" /></a></dd><dd class="information"> By <a href="http://news.discovery.com/contributors/ian-o%27neill/">Ian O'Neill</a></dd></dl><br /><div id="article-body"> <div id="body-copy"><div style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px; float: right; width: 300px; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://blogs.discovery.com/.a/6a00d8341bf67c53ef0120a8883ee2970b-pi"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8341bf67c53ef0120a8883ee2970b" style="width: 300px;" browse="" src="http://blogs.discovery.com/.a/6a00d8341bf67c53ef0120a8883ee2970b-300wi" /></a><strong><small><br />The Huygens probe as it descended through Titan's atmosphere in 2004. Could a similar delivery method seed life on other worlds? (NASA)</small></strong></div> <p>The <a href="http://science.howstuffworks.com/cellular-microscopic-biology/extremophile4.htm">speculative mechanism of panspermia</a> could explain how life formed on Earth and how it might exist elsewhere in our solar system and beyond. Hitching rides on chunks of rock blasted into space by meteorite impacts or gliding through space on a comet, it turns out that "life as we know it" has an astonishing knack of surviving in the most extreme environments.</p> <p>But what if mankind could purposefully launch space probes packed with little biological "starter kits" toward star systems that appear to have the potential to nurture life? We have lots of life down here, isn't it our duty to spread our seed amongst the stars?</p> <p><strong><a href="http://news.discovery.com/videos/tech-nano-storage.html">WATCH: Extremophiles, micro-organisms that can live in volcanos, space and the deep oceans, are still a mystery, but one scientist has found a way to use them to study other elements</a>.</strong></p> <p>Yes, says Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, <a href="http://www.physorg.com/news184915200.html">in a paper submitted to an upcoming issue of the <em>Journal of Cosmology</em></a>. Before the rich biosphere of Earth is dead, Mautner believes that we need to ship Earth Brand™ biology to suitable adopted homes so our evolutionary line has a chance to gain a foothold elsewhere in the universe.</p> <p>"We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life," Mautner said. "Securing that future for life can give our human existence a cosmic purpose."</p> <p>These are certainly lofty plans, but he proposes that we send a variety of basic organisms to "potentially fertile" worlds throughout the universe (to worlds from a few to over 500 light years away). Using early-Earth as an example, <a href="http://science.howstuffworks.com/the-early-earth-info6.htm">organisms like cyanobacteria</a> could be sent to alien worlds to go into reproductive overdrive, feasting on toxic gases and releasing byproducts such as oxygen. </p> <p>These little biological starter kits would support a brand new biosphere, helping more complex life forms to develop and evolve. </p> <p>(Is anyone else thinking this was borrowed from the plot of <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088170/">Star Trek III: The Search for Spock</a></em>?)</p> <p>In his paper, Mautner goes into some detail about what this galactic seeding mission would look like. As current launch costs are astonishingly high (using current technology, it costs $10,000 to get a one kilogram payload off the Earth's surface and into space), the space seeding pods would need to be small. But using tiny "pods" weighing only 0.1 grams, as many as 100,000 microorganisms could be accommodated to give a reasonable chance of success.</p> <p>Perhaps surprisingly, he indicates that we'd need "hundreds of tons" of biological material. But in this case, the launch costs would be a modest $1 billion; a bargain considering we'd be ensuring the continuation of Earth Brand™ life on various new worlds.</p> <p>All these plans are completely speculative however, and to put a cost on such a mission is fanciful at best. Although Prof. Mautner does a great job of identifying how we could go about flinging our seed to the furthermost reaches of the galaxy, I'd question the fundamental point of "directed panspermia" at all. Is it <em>really</em> our "moral responsibility"?</p> <p>I understand that we -- as life forms -- see the whole life thing as sacred, but what if one of these biological pods fertilizes a world where another life form is struggling to survive? Who are we to say that our Earth Brand™ life is superior to another brand of alien microbe? </p> <p>If our life takes hold of a planet where another life had the opportunity to evolve into an interstellar civilization in a couple of billions of years time, wouldn't we be in violation of some kind of cosmic anti-monopoly regulation (or at least in violation of the <a href="http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Prime_Directive">Prime Directive</a>)?</p> <p>And there's another thing to ponder: What if "life" is the universal equivalent of some kind of infection. Is life rare because the universe has a very strong immune system? Firing our genetic code far and wide could be considered to be biological pollution. </p> <p>I'm all for spreading the human influence around the galaxy, but I think this can only be considered if we physically go to these alien worlds, to evaluate these places in person before we start setting up home. Blindly sending life from Earth to habitable worlds and planet-forming accretion disks seems a little reckless, especially as we have no clue about the consequences if we started impregnating unsuspecting planets.</p> <p>I know these points are just as speculative as Mautner's paper, but it does make you wonder whether sending it into space is really a "moral responsibility" when we have little clue about <em>who or what we are</em> in the grand (cosmic) scale of things. </p> <p>Just because we've got it doesn't mean the rest of the universe wants it.</p><p><a href="http://news.discovery.com/space/directed-panspermia-moral-obligation-or-bio-pollution.html">Original here</a><br /></p></div> </div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-41489262572716255412010-02-11T21:26:00.000-08:002010-02-11T21:28:38.675-08:00Martian Dune Mystery Solved by Bouncing Sand Grains Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/martian-dune-mystery-solved-by-bouncing-sand-By <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/author/lisa-grossman-2/" title="Posts by Lisa Grossman, Science News">Lisa Grossman, Science News</a><br /><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 400px; height: 237px;" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-18035" title="mars_barchans_cluster" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2010/02/mars_barchans_cluster-660x392.jpg" alt="mars_barchans_cluster" /></p> <p>Once Martian sand grains hop, they don’t stop.</p> <p><a href="http://bit.ly/2TwTeS" target="_blank"><img class="size-full wp-image-11123 alignright" title="sciencenews" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2009/09/sciencenews.gif" alt="sciencenews" height="40" width="200" /></a>That’s the conclusion of a new study that finds sand can move on Mars without much windy encouragement.</p> <p>Mars’ sandy surface has clearly been shaped by wind. Its characteristic dunes and ripples are the kind formed by sand particles taking short wind-borne hops, a process called saltation.</p><div id="TixyyLink" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><p>But atmospheric simulations and landers’ direct measurements of wind speed have found that the Martian wind hardly ever blows hard enough to kick sand grains off the ground in the first place.</p> <p>The new paper, to appear in an upcoming Physical Review Letters, suggests a solution to this paradox: a kind of billiard-ball effect in which one sand particle knocks the next one into motion. “It’s much easier to keep this process going than it is to start it in the first place,” says study author Jasper Kok, an atmospheric physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who did most of this research while at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “It’s like when you ride a bike: It costs a lot of exertion to get it going, but once you’re going it’s easier to keep going.”</p> <p><span id="more-18034"></span></p> <p><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-18037" title="mars_barchans_verticalcrop" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2010/02/mars_barchans_verticalcrop.jpg" alt="mars_barchans_verticalcrop" height="474" width="200" />Kok modified a numerical model, previously applied to geological processes on Earth, to include Martian gravity and atmospheric conditions. Unlike in other models, Kok simulated a process called splashing, in which a flying sand particle knocks at least one new grain into the air as it smacks into the ground.</p> <p>“That’s hard to study in a wind tunnel,” notes planetary scientist Robert Sullivan of Cornell University. The study “goes numerically where we have a hard time going with wind tunnel experiments,” he says.</p> <p>The way sand grains knock each other around turns out to make all the difference, Kok says. Because Martian gravity and air density are so much lower than Earth’s, a small kick from the wind sends sand particles on Mars flying much higher, up to a meter off the ground.</p> <p>“It’s like playing golf on the moon,” Kok says. Particles get caught in stronger winds as they rise, causing them to pick up speed and ultimately slam into the ground, where they kick up more particles and start the cycle over. “This splashing process is really efficient,” Kok says. “It can keep saltation, or sand blowing, going on Mars at relatively low wind speeds.” These jumping sand grains can create ripples over time even without high sustained winds, he says.</p> <p>The finding could help solve other puzzles in the Martian landscape. Earlier models predicted that crescent-shaped sand dunes called barchan dunes should grow to at least 500 meters long — but many are only 100 meters. And the Mars rover Opportunity has found sand ripples made up of particles only 100 micrometers in diameter, so small that scientists had expected them to stay aloft once kicked up. The new model could explain both riddles by showing that splashing can keep particles moving at low wind speeds. Slow-moving sand grains don’t travel far and therefore make short dunes, but even tiny particles can get pushed into ripples, Kok says.</p> <p>“This study is very welcome, very informative,” Sullivan says. “The results go a long way toward explaining several mysteries.”</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 399px; height: 299px;" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-18039" title="mars_7b" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2010/02/mars_7b-660x495.jpg" alt="mars_7b" /></p> <p><em>Images: Martian dunes imaged by HiRISE 1) Barchan dunes. 2) Barchan dunes. 3) Megaripples. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.</em></p><div id="TixyyLink" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/martian-dune-mystery-solved-by-bouncing-sand-grains/">Original here</a><br /></div></div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-51075052898067464462010-02-11T21:11:00.000-08:002010-02-11T21:25:20.375-08:00Winter Overcomes 1,200-year-old Oak<div class="content"> <p><span class="inline inline-left"><img style="width: 399px; height: 245px;" src="http://greenanswers.com/sites/default/files/images/Picture%207.png" alt="" title="" class="image image-_original " /></span>CHIRK, Wales, Feb. 10 (UPI) — A Welsh oak tree, already more than 300 years old when King Henry II spared it in 1165, couldn’t withstand the unusually cold winter of 2010, locals say.</p> <p>Mark Williams, a historian of the Wrexham area in North Wales, told the BBC he and Deryn Poppit visited the tree Tuesday and found its trunk had been split. He said ice apparently formed around the base of the tree, which had a circumference of 34 feet.</p> <p>“The tree is on marshy ground in a basin with a stream running down nearby,” he said. “With the stream overflowing because of melting snow, the water must have settled around the trunk and it looks as if this has caused it to split.”</p> <p>The Great Oak at the Gates of the Dead near Chirk was 1,200 years old, dating from the 9th century. According to legend, in 1165, King Henry II of England, preparing to meet Owain Gwynedd in the Battle of Crogen, commanded his men to clear Ceiriog Woods but ordered the Great Oak to be spared.</p> <p>“Although some parts of the tree were rotten, some of it was still as strong as an oak,” Williams said.</p> <p>Mike McKenna, owner of Kronospan, a wood-panel producer in Chirk, has retained a firm of tree surgeons to determine if anything can be done to keep the Great Oak going.</p></div><div id="TixyyLink" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://greenanswers.com/news/127110/winter-overcomes-1200-year-old-oak">Original here</a><br /></div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-24366717741342043822010-02-11T21:09:00.000-08:002010-02-11T21:11:37.381-08:00How to Answer the Dumb Things Climate Deniers Say<p>If you are like me you probably have encountered a few people that do not believe global warming exists, or if they do, they are not always convinced that humans are contributing to the problem. There are usually a range of issues these skeptics raise in an attempt to cast doubt on climate change evidence. Below are a few responses to some of the more frequent statements these deniers toss our way.</p> <p><em>The Skeptics: There is simply no evidence that humans are contributing to climate change, if the earth is even warming.</em></p> <p>Answer: As carbon dioxide (CO2) is pumped into the air through human activities, heat becomes trapped in the atmosphere. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as the "greenhouse effect." If the earth's global temperatures rise a mere 3 degrees, there will be catastrophic results all over the world.</p> <em>The Skeptics: CO2 can't possibly be to blame for any so-called climate change as emissions only stay in our atmosphere for up to 10 years. Our oceans and terrestrial carbon sinks absorb this CO2 anyway. In fact, the oceans are so big that they could absorb over 50 times more CO2 than humans contribute now. As such, we can't possibly be to </em><em>blame for any change in global temperatures today.</em> <p>Answer: Actually the ocean's ability to store CO2 is not very long. Only 50% of CO2 is absorbed by areas of the ocean that are not very deep. In these areas, CO2 is released back into the atmosphere. Recent studies have shown that only 30% of CO2 is stored in the deep ocean. The rest, some 20%, stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years.</p> <p><em>The Skeptics: The evidence that CO2 emissions are linked to any rise in global temperatures is casual at best. Global CO2 emissions do not match Arctic temperatures, which are often used as the best gauge for how to measure the earth's climate.</em></p> <p>Answer: While the Arctic may serve as a great resource for measuring climate change, looking at one small area of the planet is not the best way to assess the situation. During the 1930s, for example, warming occurred in the Arctic, but the cause is not exactly known and did not take place all over the planet.</p> <p><em>The Skeptics: It's actually been much hotter than it is today during recorded human history. During medieval times, for example, warm </em><em>temperatures plagued much of Europe. This happened long before humans started burning fossil fuels, which is hard proof that we aren't causing global warming today.</em> </p><p>Answer: The warming that happened during 800-1300 AD is considered to be a local warming event, which is quite different than the changes in the global climate we are experiencing today. Ice samples have shown that temperatures around the world varied during that time.</p> <p><em>The Skeptics: But ice core sampling is simply not a reliable way to measure changes to our climate because it is an imperfect science. Records come from measuring gas that is trapped in tiny air bubbles. But this air isn't saved in stone, it can seep out over time.</em></p> <p>Answer: Specific ice samples may not be completely reliable, this is true. However, in order to reduce error many samples are taken all over the world, which gives us a much better record of the earth's historic climate trends. When used in conjunction with other resources, like tree rings, these records are undeniably accurate and reliable.</p> <p><em>The Skeptics: Scientists fix the data all the time. One ice sampling in the Arctic at Siple has shown us that CO2 levels were around 328 parts per million all the way back in 1890. However, global warming believers insist that this level wasn't met until the early 1970s. In order to make their point, graphs have been altered to fix this data in order to have us believe that CO2 emissions, from humans, were to blame for the rise in global temperatures.</em></p> <p>Answer: When new evidence is found scientist alter their theories and data. No additional samplings taken anywhere in the world confirm that CO2 levels were above 290 parts per million in the last half of a million years. The Siple ice core samples in the Arctic cannot be used to counter this overwhelming consensus. Perhaps temperatures in the Siple area were elevated for a month or a year, but not consistently and not anywhere else on the planet at the same time. Since new data has come to light to address these findings, scientists have adjusted their graphs.</p> <p><em>The Skeptics: Our environment has a great ability to adjust for inflation in CO2 emissions. When an increase occurs, our carbon sinks pick up the slack over a period of decades. So all the hype about global warming is nothing more than hot air.</em></p> <p>Answer: Past warming cycles are not the result of greenhouse gas emissions. These warming trends were the result of the earth's rotation around the sun. When the earth heated up in the past, more CO2 was released from our carbon sinks, which created a greenhouse effect. So when humans release CO2 today we are not allowing the earth to go through its natural cycle. Our oceans haven't even started heating up yet. But if they do, and we do not cut CO2 in the atmosphere over the next twenty years, catastrophic effects will ensue.</p><p><a href="http://www.alternet.org/environment/145609/how_to_answer_the_dumb_things_climate_deniers_say">Original here</a><br /></p>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-59190711184363126142010-02-11T21:06:00.000-08:002010-02-11T21:09:11.884-08:00Another Blizzard: What Happened to Global Warming?By <span class="name"> <a id="emailWriter" href="http://www.time.com/time/letters/email_letter.html">Bryan Walsh</a><br /><br /></span><div class="toutAsset"> <img id="toutImg" alt="" src="http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2010/1002/nyc_blizzard_0210.jpg" height="200" width="307" /> </div> <p class="caption">A pedestrian crosses Fuller Place in Brooklyn, New York.</p><div id="TixyyLink" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><p>As the blizzard-bound residents of the mid-Atlantic region get ready to dig themselves out of the third major storm of the season, they may stop to wonder two things: Why haven't we bothered to invest in a snow blower, and what happened to climate change? After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer — and the past decade was the hottest on record — major snowstorms should become a thing of the past, like PalmPilots and majority rule in the Senate. Certainly that's what the Virginia state Republican Party thinks: the GOP aired an ad last weekend that attacked two Democratic members of Congress for supporting the 2009 carbon-cap-and-trade bill, using the recent storms to cast doubt on global warming. <span class="see"><a href="http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1960714,00.html" target="_blank">(See pictures of the massive blizzard in Washington, D.C.)</a></span></p> <p>Brace yourselves now — this may be a case of politicians twisting the facts. There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent <a href="http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html" target="_blank">blog</a> at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.</p> <p>But there have been hints that it was coming. The 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report found that large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S. over the past 50 years. While the frequency of storms in the middle latitudes has decreased as the climate has warmed, the intensity of those storms has increased. That's in part because of global warming — hotter air can hold more moisture, so when a storm gathers it can unleash massive amounts of snow. Colder air, by contrast, is drier; if we were in a truly vicious cold snap, like the one that occurred over much of the East Coast during parts of January, we would be unlikely to see heavy snowfall. <span class="see"><a href="http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1726292_1556601,00.html" target="_blank">(See pictures of the effects of global warming.)</a></span></p> <p>Climate models also suggest that while global warming may not make hurricanes more common, it could well <a href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1955838,00.html" target="_blank">intensify the storms that do occur</a> and make them more destructive. <span class="see"><a href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1962294,00.html#comments" target="_blank">(Comment on this story.)</a></span></p> <p>But as far as winter storms go, shouldn't climate change make it too warm for snow to fall? Eventually that is likely to happen — but probably not for a while. In the meantime, warmer air could be supercharged with moisture and, as long as the temperature remains below 32°F, it will result in blizzards rather than drenching winter rainstorms. And while the mid-Atlantic has borne the brunt of the snowfall so far this winter, areas near lakes may get hit even worse. As global temperatures have risen, the winter ice cover over the Great Lakes has shrunk, which has led to even more moisture in the atmosphere and more snow in the already hard-hit Great Lakes region, according to a 2003 study in the <i>Journal of Climate</i>. <span class="see"><a href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1958234,00.html" target="_blank">(Read "Climate Accord Suggests a Global Will, if Not a Way.")</a></span></p> <p>Ultimately, however, it's a mistake to use any one storm — or even a season's worth of storms — to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming). Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries. And while our ability to predict the former has become reasonably reliable, scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate. Of course, that doesn't help you much when you're trying to locate your car under a foot of powder.</p><div id="TixyyLink" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1962294,00.html">Original here</a><br /></div></div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-57729710904700781502009-12-20T00:49:00.000-08:002009-12-20T00:51:44.299-08:00New Study of Meteorite Provides More Evidence for Ancient Life on Mars<small>By Lisa Zyga</small> <!-- Main --> <!-- <div id="news-main"> --> <span class="newsimg"> <img src="http://www.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/martianmeteorite.jpg" alt="New Study of Meteorite Provides More Evidence for Ancient Life on Mars" align="left" /><p><a rel="lightbox" href="http://www.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/martianmeteorite.jpg" title="This image of the meteorite, seen through a scanning electron microscope, shows bumps that resemble a fossilized colony of microbacteria. Some of the rounded bumps are preserved at the top of the surface and resemble individual spherical and ovoid-shaped microbes. Image credit: NASA.">Enlarge</a></p> </span> <!-- google_ad_section_start --> <p class="desc">This image of the meteorite, seen through a scanning electron microscope, shows bumps that resemble a fossilized colony of microbacteria. Some of the rounded bumps are preserved at the top of the surface and resemble individual spherical and ovoid-shaped microbes. Image credit: NASA.</p><p class="desc"><br /></p><p class="desc"><strong>PhysOrg.com) -- In 1996, when scientists examined a meteorite from Mars previously uncovered in Antarctica, they were intrigued by what looked like microscopic fossils of ancient Martian life forms. Now, using new technology that wasn't available 13 years ago, NASA scientists have found further evidence that the materials and structures in the meteorite are likely signs of ancient life, rather than the results of inorganic processes.</strong></p><div class="KonaBody"> <p><b>ALH84001 History</b></p> <p>Scientists estimate that the <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/meteorite/" rel="tag" class="textTag">meteorite</a>, called Allan Hills 84001 (ALH84001), formed on <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/mars/" rel="tag" class="textTag">Mars</a> about 4.5 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest known objects in the solar system. Because the meteorite contains microscopic carbonate disks that are about 4 billion years old, scientists have previously hypothesized that the meteorite interacted with water that may have existed on Mars at this time.</p> <p>Much later, about 15 million years ago, a larger meteorite likely struck Mars and ejected ALH84001 into space. After spending most of that time traveling throughout the <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/solar+system/" rel="tag" class="textTag">solar system</a>, the meteorite landed on Earth about 13,000 years ago. Then, in 1984, a team of US scientists discovered it in Antarctica. The meteorite finally made news headlines in 1996, when NASA scientist David McKay and others peered at the rock under a <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/scanning+electron+microscope/" rel="tag" class="textTag">scanning electron microscope</a> and saw what appeared to be nanoscale fossils of bacteria-like life forms. </p> <p><b>Bacterial or Thermal Origin?</b></p> <p>Now, McKay, along with Kathie Thomas-Keprta, Everett Gibson, Simon Clemett, and Susan Wentworth, all of NASA's Johnson Space Center, have revisited the original hypothesis with new observations of the meteorite. The study is published in a recent issue of the journal <i>Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta</i>.</p> <p>In the new study, the scientists used advanced microscopy techniques to investigate the carbonate disks and, more importantly, the magnetite <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/nanocrystals/" rel="tag" class="textTag">nanocrystals</a> within the disks. These embedded magnetites are the apparent fossils that exhibit features similar to contemporary magnetotactic bacteria. </p> <p>During the past 13 years, different groups of scientists have proposed competing hypotheses to explain the origins of these magnetites. Some of the leading hypotheses are non-biological, suggesting that the magnetites were formed via thermal decomposition of the carbonates in which ALH84001 was struck by other meteorites. Such impacts may have increased the temperature of ALH84001 and caused the carbonates to decompose into magnetites via bond redistribution. In some models, ALH84001 may have experienced this shock by a random meteorite impact while still on Mars, while in other models, thermal decomposition may have occurred due to the impact event that ejected ALH84001 from its home planet. <!-- inj G3 --><br /> <!-- Google FISRT Adsense block --> <script language="JavaScript"> <!-- google_ad_client = "pub-0536483524803400"; google_ad_output = "js"; google_feedback = "on"; google_max_num_ads = 2; google_ad_type = 'text'; // ch news google_ad_channel ="0559369967+2326988306+3945203613+2481199938"; google_skip = google_adnum; --> </script> <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="http://www.physorg.com/js/adsense_news_page2.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script><script>google_protectAndRun("ads_core.google_render_ad", google_handleError, google_render_ad);</script><script language="JavaScript1.1" src="http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0536483524803400&output=js&lmt=1261295431&num_ads=2&skip=1&channel=0559369967%2B2326988306%2B3945203613%2B2481199938&ad_type=text&ea=0&feedback_link=on&flash=10.0.42&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.physorg.com%2Fnews180264793.html&dt=1261295438781&correlator=1261295435567&pv_ch=0559369967%2B3945203613%2B2481199938%2B&frm=0&ga_vid=988402062.1261295436&ga_sid=1261295436&ga_hid=1813613703&ga_fc=0&u_tz=180&u_his=22&u_java=1&u_h=1024&u_w=1280&u_ah=994&u_aw=1280&u_cd=32&u_nplug=16&u_nmime=55&biw=1263&bih=773&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fdigg.com%2Fscience&fu=0&ifi=2&dtd=23"></script><span class="box-ads"><p class="hr ads-head"><span><a href="https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=abg_afc&url=http://www.physorg.com/news180264793.html&hl=en&client=ca-pub-0536483524803400&adU=www.sens-tech.com&adT=X-Ray+Detection+Systems&gl=UA">Ads by Google</a></span></p><p class="one-ad"><a href="http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/aclk?sa=l&ai=B-1zaD-UtS7zjKY6__AaIqsmtDMOT6xOX1af6ArfPvp0HgOIJEAEYAiD2toUCOABQ59-M1vz_____AWClrqOG_CKyAQ93d3cucGh5c29yZy5jb23IAQHaASlodHRwOi8vd3d3LnBoeXNvcmcuY29tL25ld3MxODAyNjQ3OTMuaHRtbKkCFiNWNNIhuz7AAgGoAwHoA7sD6AOuAegDswPoAwzoA7gD9QMAAACE9QMgAAAA&num=2&sig=AGiWqtz4W-ztCyJff0qawRkg2r3twsR2Hw&client=ca-pub-0536483524803400&adurl=http://www.sens-tech.com/xray/linx.html">X-Ray Detection Systems</a> - Linescan and CT 10keV - 400keV Customised systems up to 10MeV - <a href="http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/aclk?sa=l&ai=B-1zaD-UtS7zjKY6__AaIqsmtDMOT6xOX1af6ArfPvp0HgOIJEAEYAiD2toUCOABQ59-M1vz_____AWClrqOG_CKyAQ93d3cucGh5c29yZy5jb23IAQHaASlodHRwOi8vd3d3LnBoeXNvcmcuY29tL25ld3MxODAyNjQ3OTMuaHRtbKkCFiNWNNIhuz7AAgGoAwHoA7sD6AOuAegDswPoAwzoA7gD9QMAAACE9QMgAAAA&num=2&sig=AGiWqtz4W-ztCyJff0qawRkg2r3twsR2Hw&client=ca-pub-0536483524803400&adurl=http://www.sens-tech.com/xray/linx.html" class="url">www.sens-tech.com</a></p><p> </p></span> </p> <p>But whatever event might have triggered a thermal decomposition process, the scientists argue in the current study that very few - if any - of the magnetites embedded in ALH84001 carbonates are a product of thermal decomposition. By analyzing details such as the percentage of magnetite volume in the carbonate disks, the trace amounts of impurities observed in some of the magnetites, and the lack of siderite which some previous models suggested may have decomposed to form magnetite, the scientists concluded that these new observations were inconsistent with the previous inorganic-based thermal decomposition hypotheses.</p> <p>By showing that it’s very unlikely that the magnetite originated from the decomposition of ALH84001’s carbonate, the scientists argue that possible biological origins of the magnetite need to be considered more seriously than before. </p> <p>“For the past 10 years, the leading (and only) viable non-biologic hypothesis for the origin of the nanophase magnetites concentrated in ALH84001 has been thermal or shock decomposition of iron-bearing carbonates, a process known to produce small magnetite crystals,” Thomas-Keprta told <i>PhysOrg.com</i>. “Our paper has falsified this non-biologic hypothesis by showing, based on thermodynamics and minor element chemistry, that this non-biologic hypothesis simply cannot produce the ultrapure magnetites actually present in ALH84001 as a significant population of all magnetites. By falsifying this non-biologic hypothesis, we are left with only the biologic hypothesis to explain the detailed properties of the magnetites in this martian meteorite.”</p> <p><b>Magnetite Biosignature</b></p> <p>Although they have not yet developed a model for the origin of the magnetite in ALH84001, the researchers’ new observations are consistent with the possibility that the magnetite has an “allochthonous origin,” in which it was exposed to aqueous solutions such as water. </p> <p>As Thomas-Keprta explained, the magnetite in ALH84001 could have been one of several ferromagnetic minerals produced by magnetotactic bacteria that live in aquatic environments. When these bacteria die and their shells degrade, a chain of magnetite is released into the environment. Without its confining shell, the magnetite chain configuration cannot be maintained, so individual magnetite crystals begin to mix with inorganic particles in the water. </p> <p>On Earth, magnetotactic bacteria are quite common in aqueous environments, and scientists often find magnetites in surface and subsurface sediments. </p> <p>“For many years, the presence of the specific kind of nanomagnetite formed by magnetotactic bacteria on Earth have been completely accepted as a biosignature when found in any Earth sediment or rock,” Thomas-Keprta said, noting that these magnetite have very specific properties. </p> <p>“When we first documented these specific properties in the ALH84001 carbonates, the only alternate non-biologic hypothesis that was commonly accepted as viable was the thermal decomposition of iron-bearing carbonate,” she said. “Now that we have completely falsified this hypothesis with this latest paper, we are still left with the specific properties of the ALH84001 magnetite that, if found on Earth, would be a robust biosignature indicating production by bacteria.</p> <p>“We also point to the many discoveries since our original paper showing supporting evidence such as an early strong magnetic field on Mars (necessary for the development of magnetotactic bacteria); the presence of near surface water at many locations on current-day Mars; the presence of possible oceans, major drainage channels, and other features associated with an early wet Mars; and the recent evidence for variable releases of methane into the Martian atmosphere. . . . We do not believe it is too incautious to restate our original hypothesis that such magnetites constitute strong evidence of early life on Mars.”<br /></p> </div> <!-- additional info --> <b> More information:</b> K.L. Thomas-Keprta, S.J. Clemett, D.S. McKay, E.K. Gibson, and S.J. Wentworth. “Origins of magnetite nanocrystals in Martian meteorite ALH84001.” <i>Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta</i>, 73 (2009) 6631-6677.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.physorg.com/news180264793.html">Original here</a>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-87974536690240834912009-12-20T00:40:00.000-08:002009-12-20T00:49:22.659-08:00Ancient Book of Mark Found Not So Ancient After All<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mOpTVrRMDjQ/Sy3kvRsZ9LI/AAAAAAAAC58/zKJ39ivScQY/s1600-h/1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 225px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_mOpTVrRMDjQ/Sy3kvRsZ9LI/AAAAAAAAC58/zKJ39ivScQY/s400/1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5417237427651212466" border="0" /></a><em>The University of Chicago has found after careful study that what was previously was thought be a very old copy of the Gospel of Mark in its library is a modern fraud. (Credit: University of Chicago)<br /><br /></em>A biblical expert at the University of Chicago, Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library's most enigmatic possessions is a forgery. The book, a copy of the Gospel of Mark, will remain in the collection as a study document for scholars studying the authenticity of ancient books.<br /><p>Scholars have argued for nearly 70 years over the provenance of what's called the Archaic Mark, a 44-page miniature book, known as a "codex," which contains the complete 16-chapter text of the Gospel of Mark in minuscule handwritten text. The manuscript, which also includes 16 colorful illustrations, has long been believed to be either an important witness to the early text of the gospel or a modern forgery, said Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature.</p> <p>"The mystery is now solved from textual, chemical, and codicological (bookmaking) angles," said Mitchell, who first became intrigued by the codex when she saw it as a graduate student in 1982. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates that it is not a genuine Byzantine manuscript, but a counterfeit, she said, "made somewhere between 1874 and the first decades of the 20th century."</p> <p>Mitchell said experts from multiple disciplines made the findings possible. "Our collective efforts have achieved what no single scholar could do -- give a comprehensive analysis of the composite artifact that is an illustrated codex. The data collected in this research process has given us an even deeper understanding of the exact process used by the forger," said Mitchell. "It will, we hope, assist ongoing scholarly investigation into and detection of manuscripts forged in the modern period."</p> <p>Since 1937, when Edgar J. Goodspeed a University of Chicago biblical scholar, acquired the Archaic Mark, the manuscript has been an enigma. As early as 1947, scholars speculated about its authenticity. Because it is the closest of any known manuscript to the venerable 4th-century Codex Vaticanus for the text of Mark's Gospel, Mitchell said, it was believed to be "either a very important textual witness (from the 14th Century) or a forgery based upon some late 19th-century critical edition of the Greek New Testament incorporating the readings of the Vatican manuscript." The modern blue pigment in the illustrations, indentified in 1989, would support the latter, but Mitchell explained this finding was not definitive because the pigment could have come from a restoration effort on an earlier manuscript.</p> <p>In 2006, the University of Chicago Library digitized the Archaic Mark, making it available to scholars worldwide (<a target="_blank" href="http://goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu/" title="http://goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu">goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu</a>) and stimulating renewed interest in it. The following year, in response to that growing interest in the mysterious manuscript, Alice Schreyer, Director of the Special Collections Research Center, convened a committee to lead a complete and definitive examination of the material components of the Archaic Mark.</p> <p>The Library commissioned materials analysis from McCrone Associates, and enlisted the aid of Abigail Quandt, a rare books expert and preservationist at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.</p> <p>Last January, Joseph G. Barabe, a senior scientist at McCrone, took 24 samples of parchment, ink and a range of paints used in illustrations. Barabe analyzed the samples using an array of techniques -- polarized light; energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry; the scanning electron microscope for elemental analysis; X-ray diffraction; Fourier Transform infrared spectroscopy; and Raman spectroscopy. Under microscopic analysis, Barabe and his colleagues found no evidence of retouching of any kind in the manuscript, disproving earlier suspicions of restoration attempts.</p> <p>Barabe determined the Archaic Mark was created after 1874 -- using materials not available until the late 19th century -- on a parchment substrate dating from about the middle of the 16th century. Carbon dating determined the animal hide was from some time between 1485-1631.</p> <p>The rest of the authentication team confirmed and helped interpret Barabe's findings.</p> <p>Quandt carefully reconstructed the steps the modern forger took to produce the manuscript, from preparing the parchment, to the painting of images and inscription of text, as well as the application of the modern coating, cellulose nitrate. Quandt also identified specific ways in which its production defies usual Byzantine procedures, and she determined that the reused parchment contains no recoverable text underneath.</p> <p>Mitchell completed the analysis with a study of the textual edition the forger had used. She confirmed and refined Stephen C. Carlson's proposal that the modern edition from which the forger copied the text was the 1860 edition of the Greek New Testament by Philipp Buttmann. Mitchell identified telltale readings in the Archaic Mark that arose from the original 1856 edition of Buttmann's critical text, reproducing errors later corrected in the flurry of collations of the famous manuscript Vaticanus between 1857 and 1867.</p> <p>Mitchell, Barabe and Quandt have detailed these findings in a paper scheduled for February publication in the journal <em>Novum Testamentum.</em></p><p><em><a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091211203717.htm">Original here</a><br /></em></p>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-49707435164945671452009-12-20T00:34:00.000-08:002009-12-20T00:38:20.370-08:00'Green' vibrators promise sustainable pleasure<!-- end: .tools --> <!-- end: .hd --> <div class="bd" role="main" labelledby="yn-story-title"> <div id="yn-story-related-media"> <div class="primary-media"> <div id="yn-story-main-media" class="ult-section yn-style1"> <div class=""> <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/COP15-UN-Climate-Change-Conference-Copenhagen/photo//091216/photos_od_afp/ffcc50efe8050b6d1d64022602efcfe3//s:/afp/20091215/od_afp/unclimatewarmingirelandretailsexoffbeat" class="media "> <img src="http://d.yimg.com/a/p/afp/20091216/capt.photo_1260924791483-2-0.jpg?x=213&y=141&xc=1&yc=1&wc=410&hc=271&q=85&sig=bmPPRHap4c3i5ALXcAtS9Q--" alt="'Green' vibrators promise sustainable pleasure" height="141" width="213" /> </a> <cite class="caption"> AFP – A man stands infront of a giant globe at the Bella center in Copenhagen on the the 9th day of the COP15 … </cite> </div> </div><!-- end #main-media --> </div><!-- end .primary-media --> </div><!-- end .related-media --> <div class="byline"> <cite class="vcard"> by Jurgen Hecker <span class="fn org"></span></cite><abbr title="2009-12-15T08:50:06-0800" class="timedate"></abbr></div><!-- end .byline --> <div class="yn-story-content"> <p>DUBLIN (AFP) – When world leaders in <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1261081606_0">Copenhagen</span> argue for days in knife-edge talks to save the planet, what more fitting way to relieve the tension than an environmentally-friendly vibrator?</p> <p> The global sex toy industry is worth an annual 15 <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1261081606_1">billion dollars</span> (22 billion euros), and uses up a mountain of batteries in the process, many of which end up as <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1261081606_2">toxic waste</span>.</p> <p> But now one Irish company reckons they've got the solution to shake up the market: a vibrator they are calling the world's first-ever "green technology sex toy".</p> <p> The <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1261081606_3">Earth Angel</span>, described as "eight inches (20 centimetres) with a sleek white finish", is a wind-up vibrator which comes with a handle built into the bottom.</p> <p> "You just flip out the handle, grab a hold of it there, and you just wind it," said Janice O'Connor, the co-founder with her husband Chris, of Caden Enterprises which makes the gadget.</p> <p> "So for four minutes of doing that, you should generate enough power to give you 30 minutes of full-on, right-to-the top vibrations," she told AFP.</p> <p> She added: "I've only used it a couple of times, and it's fantastic. It's very intense, and sometimes, at the top level, depending on the person that's using it, it can actually be too intense sometimes.</p> <p> "That's why we have four different levels on it."</p> <p> The vibrator is made of 100 percent <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1261081606_4">recyclable materials</span> and the couple hope it will encourage sex toy fans around the globe to do their bit for the environment.</p> <p> "We want to change the way that people view adult toys and the adult industry as a whole," they said.</p> <p> "We wanted to produce an environmentally-friendly sex toy that appealed to all consumers.</p> <p> "Every industry has an obligation to do as much as they can to reduce the effects of climate change and by developing this new technology we hope that others will follow suit and look for alternative ways to design and manufacture their products."</p> <p> Chris O'Connor is the brains behind the power-storing technology that he said could be applied to any small power device, such as electric toothbrushes.</p> <p> He said climate change had been his primary motivation rather than sexy fun.</p> <p> "When I was a child we'd have months of good weather," the inventor said.</p> <p> "Now that's totally changed, 100 percent changed, in this country. And that's why I decided I'd try to make a change for the better, for the planet."</p> <p> Public morality in Ireland is still traditionally Catholic, so producing the green vibrator there was out of the question - it is manufactured by a British-based company - while financing it proved an obstacle course.</p> <p> But the O'Connors, both practising Catholics, believe God is on their side. </p><p> "In all fairness, wouldn't God want something that's green and that doesn't do any damage to the environment?" asked Chris. </p><p> An Earth Angel costs 70 euros (100 dollars) plus shipping costs and around 1,000 have already been sold to people seeking its special brand of "sustainable pleasure".</p><p><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091215/od_afp/unclimatewarmingirelandretailsexoffbeat">Original here</a><br /></p> </div> </div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-2000991501208300152009-11-22T02:26:00.000-08:002009-11-22T02:29:37.679-08:00The Brain Humanity's Other Basic Instinct: Math<span class="author">by Carl Zimmer<br /><br /></span><p class="imgcapleft"><img class="inline" src="http://discovermagazine.com/2009/nov/17-the-brain-humanity.s-other-basic-instinct-math/mindkey.jpg" alt="" />Image: iStockphoto</p> <p>Numbers make modern life possible. “In a world without numbers,” University of Rochester neuroscientist <a class="external-link" href="http://caoslab.bcs.rochester.edu/">Jessica Cantlon</a> and her colleagues recently observed in the journal<em> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613%2808%2900259-3">Trends in Cognitive Sciences</a></em>, “we would be unable to build a skyscraper, hold a national election, plan a wedding, or pay for a chicken at the market.”</p> <p>The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them—and Cantlon is among the researchers trying to find out exactly how that skill works. Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt. History provides some support. The oldest evidence of people using numbers dates back about 30,000 years: bones and antlers scored with notches that are considered by archaeologists to be tallying marks. More sophisticated uses of numbers arose only much later, coincident with the rise of other simple technologies. The Mesopotamians developed basic arithmetic about 5,000 years ago. Zero made its debut in A.D. 876. Arab scholars laid the foundations of algebra in the ninth century; calculus did not emerge in full flower until the late 1600s.</p> <p>Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.</p><p>One sign that this skill truly is innate: Children enter the world with a head for numbers. <a class="external-link" href="http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/%7Elds/index.html?spelkelab.html">Veronique Izard</a>, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, demonstrated this in a <a class="external-link" href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/11/0812142106.abstract">recent study</a> of newborns. She and her colleagues played cooing sounds to babies, with varying numbers of sounds in each trial. The babies were then shown a set of shapes on a computer screen, and the scientists measured how long the babies gazed at it. (The length of time a baby spends looking at an object reflects its interest.) Newborns consistently looked longer at the screen when the number of shapes matched the number of sounds they had just heard. For example, a baby who heard “<em>tuuu, tuuu, tuuu, tuuu</em>” would look the longest at four shapes, less at eight, and still less at twelve. Izard’s study suggests that newborns already have a basic understanding of numbers. Moreover, their concept of numbers is abstract; they can transfer it across the senses from sounds to pictures.</p> <p>Mathematical intuition develops as we grow up, but probing its growth is tricky because older children draw on both their innate skills and the ones they learn. So scientists have come up with ways to force people to rely on intuition alone. Cantlon, working with <a class="external-link" href="http://www.duke.edu/web/mind/level2/faculty/liz/cdlab.htm">Elizabeth Brannon</a> of Duke University, ran an experiment in which adult subjects see a set of dots on a computer screen for about half a second, followed by a second set. After a pause, the participants see two sets of dots side by side. They then have a little more than a second to pick the set that is the sum of the previous two pictures.</p> <p>People do fairly well on these tests, which summons up a weird feeling in them: They know they are right, but they don’t know how they got the answer. Even in toddlers who cannot yet count, these studies reveal, the brain automatically processes numbers. From infancy to old age, mathematical intuition consistently follows two rules. One is that people score better when the numbers are small than when they are large. The other is that people score better when the ratio of the bigger number to the smaller one is greater. In other words, people are more likely to correctly tell 2 from 4 than they are to tell 6 from 8, even though both pairs of numbers differ by two. As we get older, our intuition becomes more precise. Other experiments have shown that a six-month-old baby can reliably distinguish between numbers that differ by as little as a factor of two (like 4 and 8). By nine months the ratio has dropped to 1.5 (8 and 12, for example). And by adulthood the ratio is just 10 to 15 percent. The fact that the same two rules always hold true suggests that we use the same mental algorithm throughout our lives.</p> <p>Brain scans using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) are shedding some light on how our brains carry out that algorithm. Neuroscientists have found that when people do mathematical intuition problems, a strip of neurons near the top of the brain, surrounding a fold called the intraparietal sulcus, consistently becomes active. And when we confront more difficult problems—when the numbers are bigger or closer together—this region becomes more active.</p> <p>Psychologists suspect that the mathematical intuition that these neurons help produce lays the foundation for all of our more sophisticated kinds of math. <a class="external-link" href="http://pbs.jhu.edu/research/halberda/facultyinfo/">Justin Halberda</a> of Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues recently carried out a telling <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18776888?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=2">study</a> of mathematical intuition in a group of 14-year-olds. Some of the children demonstrated a more accurate intuition than others. Halberda then looked at the subjects’ scores on standardized school tests. Students who had a sharper mathematical intuition scored better on math tests from kindergarten onward.</p> <p>The fact that children possess a mathematical intuition long before they even start school implies that our evolutionary ancestors had it too. Indeed, recent research indicates that our forebears possessed such an intuition long before they could walk upright. Scientists have found that many primates, including rhesus monkeys, can solve some of the same mathematical problems we can. Since monkeys and humans diverged 30 million years ago, mathematical intuition presumably is at least that old.</p><div> <p>Providing evidence of that shared heritage, Cantlon and Brannon were able to teach monkeys to do addition by intuition the same way people do. The animals’ intuition is about as good as ours, and it follows the same rules. As the ratio between numbers gets larger, the monkeys are increasingly likely to pick the right one. And when monkeys use their mathematical intuition, they rely on the same region of the brain around the intraparietal sulcus that we do.</p> </div> <p>Monkeys can even learn written numbers, a skill children develop only around age 5. In order to make the link between a <em>2</em> and a pair of objects, children use a region of the brain located underneath the temple called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This region is like a blacksmith shop for forging associations between signs and concepts. Once the association has been formed, children recognize written numbers quickly, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex becomes quiet.</p> <p>Monkeys can learn, with enough training, to pick out a <em>4 </em>if they see four dots on a screen. <a class="external-link" href="http://homepages.uni-tuebingen.de/andreas.nieder/">Andreas Nieder</a>, a physiologist at the University of Tübingen, and his colleagues have discovered that, like children, the monkeys use their <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19447604?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=1">dorsolateral prefrontal cortex</a> to make those associations. They have even found individual neurons in the region that fire strongly at both the number <em>4</em> and four dots.</p><p>But does a monkey actually understand what a written <em>4 </em>signifies? To find out, Nieder and his former student Ilka Diester trained monkeys for a <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19199420?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=1">new experiment</a>. The monkeys learned to press a lever, after which they saw one number followed by another. If the numbers matched, the monkeys could release the lever to get a squirt of juice. If the numbers didn’t match, the monkeys had to keep the lever pressed down until a new number appeared, which was always a match.</p> <p>The monkeys were able to learn to release the lever for matching numbers and to keep it down for numbers that did not match. If they had succeeded simply by matching shapes, you would expect them to sometimes confuse similar-looking numbers: They might choose <em>1</em> as a match with <em>4 </em>because both are made of straight lines, for example. But Diester and Nieder found that the monkeys got confused in a different way. The monkeys were most likely to mix up numbers that were numerically close to each other: the sticklike <em>1 </em>and the curvaceous <em>2</em>, for example. What’s more, the monkeys took more time to release the lever if larger numbers matched than if smaller ones did—another sign that the animals were responding to quantity, not shape.</p> <blockquote style="float: right;" class="pullquote">Once our ancestors linked their natural instinct for numbers with an ability to understand symbols, everything changed. Math became a language of ideas and measurements.</blockquote> <p>To neuroscientists, these studies raise a deep question. If monkeys have such solid foundations for numbers, why can’t they perform high-level mathematics? Finding an answer may help us understand what makes humans so much better with numbers than other animals. Nieder and Cantlon have both speculated that the difference lies in our ability to understand symbols, which enables us to transform our approximate intuition of numbers into a precise understanding. When we say “2,” we mean an exact quantity, not “probably 2 but maybe 1 or 3.” We can then learn rules for handling exact numbers quickly. And then we can generalize those rules from one number to the next, thus understanding general mathematical principles. Other primates, lacking our symbolic brains, take thousands of trials to learn a new rule.</p> <p>The recent studies of monkeys and infants cast a new light on the old notched bones. The earliest recorded numbers coincide with the first appearance of many other expressions of abstract thought, from bone flutes to carvings of zaftig female figures. Before then, humans may have thought about numbers the way monkeys (and babies) still do today. But once our ancestors began to link their natural instinct for numbers with a new ability to understand symbols, everything changed. Math became a language of ideas, of measurements, and of engineering possibilities. The rest—the skyscrapers and supermarkets and weddings—were just a matter of derivation.</p><p><a href="http://discovermagazine.com/2009/nov/17-the-brain-humanity.s-other-basic-instinct-math/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=">Original here</a><br /></p>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-16700626905008834642009-11-22T02:23:00.000-08:002009-11-22T02:26:03.743-08:00Malaria Gaining Resistance to Best Available TreatmentBy <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/author/nathan-seppa/" title="Posts by Nathan Seppa, Science News">Nathan Seppa, Science News</a><br /><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 399px; height: 309px;" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-14518" title="malaria" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2009/11/malaria-660x510.jpg" alt="malaria" /></p> <p>WASHINGTON — Malaria that is resistant to the best available drug is more widespread in Southeast Asia than previously reported, new research shows. The worrisome finding poses a risk that travelers could carry this strain of the malaria parasite to other parts of the globe and unwittingly spread it, scientists reported Nov. 19 at a meeting of the <a href="http://www.astmh.org/" target="_blank">American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene</a>.</p><p>The frontline drug in question is called artemisinin, the most potent medication currently in use against malaria. Signs of malarial resistance to artemisinin have surfaced over the past several years in Cambodia (<em>SN: 11/22/08, p. 9</em>). The new findings confirm that resistant malaria has now cropped up beyond a spot on the border of Thailand and Cambodia where it was initially detected. Now it has appeared in Vietnam and in two spots along the Burma border with Thailand and China. </p><p>“Things are changing. There’s no doubt the signs are concerning,” said Robert Newman, director of the <a href="http://apps.who.int/malaria/" target="_blank">Global Malaria Programme</a> at the World Health Organization in Geneva. But he added that these signals are early and need further verification.</p> <p>Patients in these areas take longer on average to overcome a malaria infection when given a standard combination of artemisinin and another antimalarial. This lag results from slower clearance of the malaria parasites from the blood, said WHO’s Pascal Ringwald, a medical officer who presented the update.</p> <p><span id="more-14500"></span></p> <p>Patients who remain ill for longer stretches despite treatment need extra medication to recover from malaria and are also more likely to have severe or fatal cases, Ringwald said.</p> <p>Malaria is caused by a single-celled parasite that infects the blood. Symptoms include fever, headache, chills, anemia and a swollen spleen. Of the more than 350 million people who come down with malaria worldwide each year, up to 1 million die. Mosquitoes spread the parasite from person to person.</p> <p>Malaria has a history of becoming resistant to drugs, and artemisinin now risks becoming the most recent addition to that list. The new reports are disheartening to doctors because artemisinin normally packs a considerable wallop. Although artemisinin is a short-acting drug that gets cleared from the body in a few hours, it makes the most of its time — driving down parasite levels dramatically.</p> <p>Using artemisinin alone invites resistance. So the standard therapy teams it with one of the longer-acting drugs, which perform mop-up duty on the remaining parasites, said Christopher King, a physician and epidemiologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.</p> <p>The new flashes of resistance may have arisen because combination treatment isn’t always available. And since artemisinin can be bought over the counter in many parts of Asia, people seeking relief don’t always follow the WHO guidelines of pairing artemisinin with another drug, King said.</p> <p>Also, taking artemisinin for a fever that isn’t caused by malaria can allow resistant strains of the parasite to take hold, Newman said.</p> <p>In the past, malaria’s resistance to other drugs has been linked to specific genetic changes in the parasite. The precise mechanism underlying resistance to artemisinin is still unsolved, King said.</p> <p>Artemisinin is derived from extracts of the sweet wormwood bush. The bush’s leaves have been used as a folk remedy against fevers for roughly 2,000 years in Asia but fell out of use in the 20th century with the introduction of modern antimalarial drugs such as chloroquine.</p> <p>During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh appealed to China for traditional remedies for soldiers who had malaria. Tea made from sweet wormwood leaves worked and ultimately became the basis for artemisinin drugs. It’s not clear whether parasites in Southeast Asia are the first to become resistant because they have had a long history with artemisinin, or if other factors are involved, Newman said.</p> <p><em>Image: Malaria from Plasmodium falciparum. Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gotjenna/191072948/" target="_blank">Got_Jenna</a></em></p><p><a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/malaria-resistance/">Original here</a><br /><em></em></p>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-39498151706842713822009-11-22T02:21:00.000-08:002009-11-22T02:23:25.724-08:00Evolution and history compulsory<div> <img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45047000/jpg/_45047017_classroom226.jpg" alt="classroom" vspace="0" width="226" border="0" height="170" hspace="0" /> <div class="cap">Evolution should be taught early, scientists advised </div> </div> <!-- E IIMA --> <!-- S SF --><p class="first"><b>Primary school children in England will have to learn about evolution and British history under a shake-up of the national curriculum.</b></p><p>Schools Minister Vernon Coaker says the subjects will be compulsory elements of a new primary school curriculum being introduced in 2011. </p><p>Scientists and humanists had lobbied ministers for the inclusion of evolution in the theme-based timetable. </p><p>History is already compulsory, but there were fears it would be sidelined. </p><!-- E SF --><p>Schools will not be told which parts of British history to teach. </p><p>Earlier this year, when the curriculum changes were announced, critics complained that children would learn more about the internet than history. </p><p>Ministers say they want to "reinforce" history by making it a statutory element of the new primary curriculum. </p><p><b>Campaign</b></p><p>The curriculum is set out in a new education Bill just introduced to Parliament. </p><p>It was drawn up after a review by Sir Jim Rose, which called for distinct subjects to be replaced by six new "areas of learning". </p><p>Mr Coaker said: "What and how our children learn lies at the heart of our policies to raise standards. </p><p>"We've seen that an inspiring and rigorous curriculum can transform failing schools, which is why these plans are based on the very best practice from this country's top-class teachers." </p><p>He added: "Teachers will have more freedom to use their professional judgement and creativity to make links between subjects that make sense to their pupils: from linking history to the arts, or science to PE." </p> <!-- S IBOX --> <table width="231" align="right" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td width="5"><img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/shared/img/o.gif" alt="" vspace="0" width="5" border="0" height="1" hspace="0" /></td> <td class="sibtbg"> <div> <div class="mva"> <img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/start_quote_rb.gif" alt="" width="24" border="0" height="13" /> <b>Evolution is arguably the most important concept underlying the life sciences</b> <img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/end_quote_rb.gif" alt="" vspace="0" width="23" align="right" border="0" height="13" /><br /> </div> </div> <div class="mva"> <div>Andrew Copson, British Humanist Association</div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody></table> <!-- E IBOX --> <p>The British Humanist Association (BHA) had led a campaign to have Darwin's theory of how life evolved through natural selection made a compulsory element of the new primary curriculum. </p><p>It organised a public letter signed by more than 500 from scientists and supporters. </p><p>Andrew Copson of the BHA said: "This is excellent news. Evolution is arguably the most important concept underlying the life sciences. </p><p>"Providing children with an understanding of it an early age will help lay the foundations for a surer scientific understanding later on." </p><p>He added: "Public authorities clearly need to do more to tackle the growing threat to the public's understanding of science from creationist-inspired beliefs and other pseudoscience". </p><p>Evolution is already taught in secondary schools and many primary schools, but under the curriculum changes, it will become compulsory for primary pupils, with the recommendation that they are taught the subject in their later years at school. </p><p>The new curriculum says schools must "investigate and explain how plants and animals are interdependent and are diverse and adapted to their environment by natural selection". </p><p>Professor Sir Martin Taylor, vice-president of the Royal Society, said: "We are delighted to see evolution explicitly included in the primary curriculum. </p><p>"One of the most remarkable achievements of science over the last two hundred years has been to show how humans and all other organisms on the earth arose through the process of evolution."<br /></p><p><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8369172.stm">Original here</a><br /></p>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-33911665611076507162009-11-22T02:19:00.000-08:002009-11-22T02:21:45.252-08:00Extinction of Giant Mammals Changed Landscape Dramatically<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mOpTVrRMDjQ/SwkQeN7FNPI/AAAAAAAAC5s/RiLMbYOrrzA/s1600/091119-mastodons-eating-01.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 163px; height: 110px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mOpTVrRMDjQ/SwkQeN7FNPI/AAAAAAAAC5s/RiLMbYOrrzA/s400/091119-mastodons-eating-01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5406870938954577138" border="0" /></a>By <a href="http://www.livescience.com/php/contactus/author.php?r=jbr">Jeanna Bryner</a>, Senior Writer<br /><br /><p> The last breaths of mammoths and mastodons some 13,000 years ago have garnered plenty of research and just as much debate. What killed these large beasts in a relative instant of geologic time? </p> <p> A question asked less often: What happened when they disappeared? </p> <p> A new study, based partly on dung fungus, provides some answers to both questions. The upshot: The <a href="http://www.livescience.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display.php?s=animals&c=news&l=on&pic=091119-mastodons-eating-02.jpg&cap=Before+ancient+megafauna+went+extinct%2C+mastodons+kept+broad-leaved+vegetation%2C+such+as+black+ash+trees%2C+in+check.+Credit%3A+Barry+Roal+Carlsen%2C+University+of+Wisconsin-Madison.&title=">landscape changed</a> dramatically. </p> <p> "As soon as herbivores drop off the landscape, we see different plant communities," said lead researcher Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, adding the result was an "ecosystem upheaval." </p> <p> Gill and her colleagues found that once emptied of a diversity of large animals equaling or surpassing that of Africa's Serengeti, the landscape completely changed. Trees once kept in check by the <a href="http://www.livescience.com/topic/mammoths">mammoth gang</a> popped up and so did wildfires sparked by the woody debris. </p> <p> The results, which are detailed in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Science, could paint a picture of what's to come if today's giant plant-eaters, such as elephants, disappear. </p> <p> "We know some of these large animals are among the most threatened that we have on the landscape today and they have a lot of large habitat requirements and they eat a lot of food," Gill told LiveScience. "If these animals go extinct we can expect the landscape will respond." </p> <p> <strong>Dung fungus</strong> </p> <p> Gill and her colleagues analyzed sediment samples collected from Appleman Lake in Indiana as well as data from sites in New York. </p> <p> They focused on a dung fungus called <em>Sporormiella</em> that must pass through a mammal's gut to complete its life cycle and reproduce via spores. More of such spores indicate more dung and more megafauna around to contribute to the fecal contents. Within that same sediment, the team looked at pollen and charcoal as proxies for vegetation and fires, respectively. </p> <p> Sediment layers accumulate over time and can indicate when the stuff embedded in it was around. By matching up the dung spores along with vegetation and fire indicators in certain layers, the researchers figured the large herbivores were already declining before the vegetation started changing or wildfires took off. </p> <p> The changes in spore abundance suggest the megafauna began to decline some time between 14,800 and 13,700 years ago. By 13,500 years ago, the decline was in full force, Gill said. </p> <p> Rather than getting vaporized in an instant, the results suggest the animals gradually dwindled for about 1,000 years. </p> <p> Here's how it may have gone down: The large herbivores started to decline. Without such leafy eaters to keep broad-leaved species in check, trees such as black ash and elm took over a landscape once dominated by conifers. Soon after, the accumulation of woody debris sparked an increase in wildfires, another key shaper of landscapes, the researchers say. </p> <p> <strong>What killed the mammoths?</strong> </p> <p> As for what drove the beasts into their graves, Gill says the findings don't put the nail in the coffin, but do rule out some ideas. To explain the extinction, scientists have put forth climate change, hunting by humans such as the <a href="http://www.livescience.com/history/070222_arrowhead_makers.html">Clovis people</a> (known for using advanced spear tips), and even <a href="http://www.livescience.com/animals/070521_comet_climate.html">impact by a comet</a>. The answer could be a combination of several factors, scientists say. </p> <p> Gill says this new study is a strong one because all of the evidence comes from one place, and so the researchers aren't making comparisons across different regions whose sediments may be off in terms of timing. </p> <p> If the timing is accurate, as Gill says it should be, the findings can rule out the idea of a meteor or comet killing off the creatures some 13,000 years ago. </p> <p> And since the plant community didn't change until after the big guys began to decline, that's a mark against climate change. (A warming climate was considered the cause of a revamping of vegetation, and thus animal habitat.) </p> <p> "At this site, we can say that habitat loss didn't cause the decline, because the major habitat shift happens after the collapse [of the megafauna]," Gill said. "And habitat change is a big line of argument in the climate camp. If climate change is causing these extinctions, you'll have to evoke another process than habitat loss." </p> <p> Hunting, at least that by the Clovis people, can also be ruled out at the site. </p> <p> "It seems as though the animals were already in decline by the time [Clovis] people adopted this tool kit," Gill said, referring to the advanced spear tips thought to be more efficient at taking down large prey than hunting instruments used by humans prior to the Clovis. </p> <p> The new study was funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and the National Science Foundation.<br /></p><p><a href="http://www.livescience.com/animals/091119-mammoth-megafauna-extinction.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Livesciencecom+%28LiveScience.com+Science+Headline+Feed%29&utm_content=Google+Reader">Original here</a><br /></p>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-81427442258230937352009-11-22T02:15:00.000-08:002009-11-22T02:19:38.569-08:00Bangladesh arsenic poisoning mystery solved<!-- END YAHOO BUZZ --> <div class="inside-copy"> <div class="inside-copy"> <p><a href="http://blogs.usatoday.com/.a/6a00d83451b46269e20120a6b77f3e970b-pi" style="float: left;"><img alt="Arsenic-bangladeshx-large" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451b46269e20120a6b77f3e970b " src="http://blogs.usatoday.com/.a/6a00d83451b46269e20120a6b77f3e970b-200wi" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px; width: 200px;" /></a> A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have solved one of the great environmental disaster riddles of the last 30 years -- where did the arsenic that has poisoned between two and 25 million people in Bangladesh come from?</p> <p>In a paper from this week’s edition of the journal <a href="http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo685.html">Nature Geoscience</a>, engineers from MIT, Harvard and the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Dhaka, Bangladesh offer a new potential source -- tens of thousands of human-dug ponds.</p> <p>The ponds were dug over the past 50 years to provide dirt so home could be sited on high ground and so <a href="http://www.bangla2000.com/Bangladesh/geography.shtm">flood barriers could be built</a>.</p> <p>Using chemical tracers, the researchers show that when organic carbon settles at the bottom of these ponds, it seeps underground where microbes consume it. This creates a chain of biochemical events that causes naturally occurring arsenic to dissolve out of the sediment and into the ground water.</p> <p>Tragically, international health agencies in the 1970s began a successful push to get villagers to dig shallow tube wells for water, to stop the spread of cholera and other water-borne bacterial diseases that came from drinking pond and river water. Upwards of 40% of those wells are now <a href="http://phys4.harvard.edu/%7Ewilson/arsenic/countries/arsenic_project_countries.html#BANGLADESH">contaminated with arsenic</a>. </p> <p>Beginning in the late 1970s the country was struck with severe, widespread arsenic poisoning. The immediate symptoms are violent stomach pains, vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions and cramps. Over the longer term, <a href="http://phys4.harvard.edu/%7Ewilson/arsenic/arsenic_project_health_effects.html">serious skin diseases can result</a>.</p> <p>Scientists at MIT and Harvard also estimate that the in the end the exposure will result in 125,000 cases of skin cancer, and 3,000 deaths from internal cancers. </p> <p>The researchers found that when rice fields are irrigated with this arsenic-laden water, the rice filtered arsenic out of the water system. So one solution is to dig wells for drinking water below the level of the ponds. Another would be to put shallow wells under rice fields which naturally filter the arsenic.</p>They estimate that by replacing 31% of the wells in the country with deeper wells the health effects of the arsenic could be reduced by 70%.<br /><p><em>By Elizabeth Weise<br />Photo: Installing a pore-water sampler into the soil of a rice field. (Sarah Jane White, Nature)</em></p><p><em><a href="http://blogs.usatoday.com/sciencefair/2009/11/bangladesh-arsenic-poisioning-mystery-solved.html">Original here</a><br /></em></p> </div> </div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-81301687493368556452009-11-22T02:12:00.000-08:002009-11-22T02:14:57.650-08:00Water mission returns first data<div class="mvb"> <span class="byl"> By Jonathan Amos </span> <br /> <span class="byd"> Science reporter, BBC News </span> </div> <img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/shared/img/999999.gif" alt="" vspace="0" width="466" border="0" height="1" hspace="0" /><br /> <!-- E IBYL --> <!-- S IIMA --> <div><div style="text-align: center;"> <img style="width: 398px; height: 239px;" src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/46770000/jpg/_46770282_map_esa_466.jpg" alt="First uncalibrated data from Smos (Esa)" vspace="0" border="0" hspace="0" /> </div><div class="cap">Smos builds up its map data in strips as it sweeps around the Earth</div> </div> <br /> <!-- E IIMA --> <!-- S SF --><p class="first"><b>Europe's latest Earth observation satellite has returned its first data.</b></p><p>Smos was launched earlier this month on a quest to help scientists understand better how water is cycled around the Earth. </p><p>The spacecraft will make the first global maps of the amount of moisture held in soils and of the quantity of salts dissolved in the oceans. </p><p>The data will have wide uses but should improve weather forecasts and warnings of extreme events, such as floods. </p><!-- E SF --><p>"Smos is performing like a dream," said Dr Yann Kerr, a lead investigator on the mission from the Centre for the Study of the Biosphere from Space (Cesbio), Toulouse, France. </p><p>"Everything went as clockwork and exactly as expected or better up to now. We did not expect to have images so soon," he told BBC News. </p><p>The European Space Agency's (Esa) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (Smos) satellite was launched on 2 November.</p> <!-- S IIMA --> <table width="226" align="right" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr><td> <div> <img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/46647000/jpg/_46647143_smos_esa_226b.jpg" alt="Smos artist's impression (Esa)" vspace="0" width="226" border="0" height="170" hspace="0" /> <div class="cap">The mission will run for three years in the first instance</div> </div> </td></tr> </tbody></table> <!-- E IIMA --> <p>After its initial check-out in orbit, its sole instrument - an interferometric radiometer called Miras - was sent live on Tuesday this week. </p><p>The first publicly released image on this page has not been properly calibrated by researchers but they say it proves the instrument is in good shape. </p><p>Miras is some eight metres across; it has the look of helicopter rotor blades. </p><p>It measures changes in the wetness of the land and in the salinity of seawater by observing variations in the natural microwave emission coming up off the surface of the planet. </p><p>It does this through 69 antennas positioned on a central structure and along the lengths of its three arms. </p><p>Generally speaking, the "colder" (blue) the "temperature brightness" of the microwave signal, the saltier the water and the wetter the soil; but a lot of processing will be needed before any real values can be attached to the measurements coming down from Smos. </p><p>"Moreover, there seem to be radio frequency interferences (RFIs) over China, western Russia and parts of Europe (the reddish stripes)," explained Dr Kerr. </p><p>"We will have to tune the reconstruction algorithm before we can reduce or address these." </p><p>Scientists were well aware before launch that RFIs might be a problem. Smos is operating in the so-called L-band (21cm) which is supposed to be protected, but pre-flight testing established known interference hotspots, such as airports. </p><p>The 315m-euro ($465m; £280m) Smos programme, although led by Esa, has with significant input from French and Spanish interests. The satellite is expected to operate for at least three years. </p> <!-- S IBOX --> <div style="text-align: center;" class="o"> <img style="width: 398px; height: 317px;" src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/46770000/gif/_46770631_soil_moist_ocean_salin_466.gif" alt="Soil moisture and ocean salinity explainer (BBC)" vspace="0" border="0" hspace="0" /> </div> <div class="mva"><div class="bull">The amount of water retained in soils varies between about 5% and 50%</div> <div class="bull">This will cover most conditions from 'bone dry' to 'mud bath'</div> <div class="bull">Smos sees the entire range with an accuracy of 4% at the 50km scale</div> <div class="bull">Natural salinity in water covers the range from near zero to 30%</div> <div class="bull">Drinking water might be one extreme; salt lakes would be the other extreme</div> <div class="bull">Smos is seeking sea waters which are typically in the 3-3.5% range</div> <div class="bull">This needs high accuracy (0.01-0.02%). Maps are at the 200km scale<br /><br /><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8371449.stm">Original here</a><br /></div> </div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-30616310599442451312009-11-22T02:08:00.000-08:002009-11-22T02:12:37.828-08:00Water found in lunar impact probably came from comets<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mOpTVrRMDjQ/SwkOCLdsIjI/AAAAAAAAC5k/1j9QZEKhXts/s1600/dn18178-1_300.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 229px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mOpTVrRMDjQ/SwkOCLdsIjI/AAAAAAAAC5k/1j9QZEKhXts/s400/dn18178-1_300.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5406868258234835506" border="0" /></a>Volatiles, including hydrocarbons known to be present in comets, have been detected in lunar material kicked up by NASA's LCROSS mission (Image: T.A.Rector/I.P.Dell'Antonio<br /><br />by <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/search?rbauthors=Dana+Mackenzie%2C+Houston"><b>Dana Mackenzie, Houston</b></a><br /><br /><p class="infuse">The mystery of where the moon's water came from may soon be solved. Evidence from NASA's LCROSS mission suggests much of it was delivered by comets rather than forming on the surface through an interaction with the solar wind.</p> <p class="infuse">In October, the mission crashed two impactors – a spent rocket stage and a few minutes later, the LCROSS spacecraft itself – into a crater near the moon's south pole. The spacecraft <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17996-elusive-lunar-plume-caught-on-camera-after-all.html">snapped images</a> and <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18155-impact-reveals-lunar-water-by-the-bucketful.html">took spectra</a> of lunar debris kicked up by the rocket's impact and found that it contained the unmistakable signs of water.</p> <p class="infuse">Previous missions have also <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/water-on-moon">found hints of lunar water</a> but its source has not been clear. One idea is that it forms when hydrogen atoms from the solar wind latch onto oxygen atoms in the lunar soil, creating hydroxyl and water.</p><p class="infuse">But now, the evidence is mounting in favour of an alternative explanation – comet impacts. The data was discussed this week at the <a href="http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/leag2009/" target="ns">Lunar Exploration Analysis Group</a> meeting, a gathering of 160 lunar scientists in Houston, Texas.</p> <h3 class="crosshead">'Dirty iceballs'</h3> <p class="infuse">The first line of evidence comes from compounds that vaporise readily, called volatiles. LCROSS found spectral signs of volatiles containing carbon and hydrogen – likely methane and ethanol – as well as others such as ammonia and carbon dioxide. "It appears that we impacted into a very volatile-rich area," LCROSS principal scientist Tony Colaprete told the conference.</p> <p class="infuse">These compounds should have been mostly lost to space billions of years ago, when the moon coalesced from the debris of an impact between the Earth and a Mars-sized object. Water formed through an interaction with the solar wind would therefore be relatively pure – and free of volatiles.</p> <p class="infuse">But comets, which are thought to have been <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17520-comets-not-asteroids-to-blame-for-moons-scarred-face.html">responsible for many of the moon's impact scars</a>, are "dirty iceballs" known to contain volatiles such as methane. "If you can nail down the source of the water [on the moon], that could tell us a lot about the cometary history of the moon for the last couple of billion years," says Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee.</p> <h3 class="crosshead">High concentrations</h3> <p class="infuse">The second line of evidence pointing to comets comes from the amount of water detected. The solar wind is expected to form water in minute amounts, amounting to concentrations of no more than 1 per cent in the lunar soil.</p> <p class="infuse">LCROSS team members are still analysing the data, but calculations suggest the concentration of water is higher than that. "The data are consistent with a total hydrogen content in the range of several per cent," says Colaprete.</p> <p class="infuse">Beyond their link to comets, volatiles generated excitement at the meeting because of their value as a resource for human spaceflight. While water is important for survival on the moon, it is the water's hydrogen that can be used as rocket propellant.</p> <p class="infuse">The possibility of finding compounds like ethanol and methane, which can be used as fuel directly, makes the economic case for returning astronauts to the moon even sweeter. "LCROSS has given us our ticket back to the moon," says Noah Petro of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.</p><p class="infuse"><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18178-water-found-in-lunar-impact-likely-came-from-comets.html">Original here</a><br /></p>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-10074406405086021922009-10-04T04:12:00.000-07:002009-10-04T04:17:36.488-07:00First ape woman suggests human ancestors may have started walking in pursuit of sex<span style="font-size:100%;">By <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=y&authornamef=Daily+Mail+Reporter" class="author" rel="nofollow">Daily Mail Reporter</a><br /><br /></span><p><span style="font-size:100%;">She lived at the dawn of a new era, when chimps and people began walking (or climbing) along their own evolutionary trails. This is Ardi - the oldest member of the human family tree we've found so far. </span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Short, hairy and with long arms, she roamed the forests of Africa 4.4million years ago.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Her discovery, reported in detail for the first time today, sheds light on a crucial period when we were just leaving the trees. Some scientists said she could provide evidence that our ancestors first started walking upright in the pursuit of sex.<br /></span></p><div class="clear"> </div><div class="artSplitter"><div style="text-align: center;"> </div><div style="text-align: center;" class="splitLeft"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><img style="width: 306px; height: 658px;" src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/02/article-1217400-06A911FF000005DC-146_306x658.jpg" alt="skeleton" class="blkBorder" /></span> </div> <div class="splitRight"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><img src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/02/article-1217400-06A911D9000005DC-150_306x658.jpg" alt="humanoid" class="blkBorder" height="658" width="306" /></span> </div> <div class="clear"> </div> <p class="imageCaption"><span style="font-size:100%;">Ardi's skeleton (left) revealed she was 4ft tall and weighed 7st 12oz<br /></span></p><div class="clear"> </div></div> <div class="clear"> </div> <div class="floatRHS"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/01/article-1217400-06A911EB000005DC-336_306x338_popup.jpg" rel="map" class="lightboxPopupLink" onclick="return false"> <span class="clickToEnlargeTop">Enlarge</span> <span class="clickToEnlarge"></span> <span class="clickToEnlargeButton"> </span> <img src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/01/article-1217400-06A911EB000005DC-336_306x338.jpg" alt="map" class="blkBorder" height="338" width="306" /> </a></span> </div><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Conventional wisdom says our earliest ancestors first stood up on two legs when they moved out of the forest and into the open savannas. But this does not explain why Ardi's species was bipedal (able to walk on two legs) while still living partly in the trees.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Owen Lovejoy from Kent State University said the answer could be as simple as food and sex.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">He pointed out that throughout evolution males have fought with other males for the right to mate with fertile females. Therefore you would expect dominant males with big fierce canines to pass their genes down the generations.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">But say a lesser male, with small stubby teeth realised he could entice a fertile female into mating by bringing her some food? Males would be far more successful food-providers if they had their hands free to carry home items like fruit and roots if they walked on two legs.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Mr Lovejoy said this could explain why males from Ardi's species had small canines and stood upright - it was all in the pursuit of sex.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">He added that it could also suggest that monogamous relationships may be far older than was first thought.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Ardi - short for Ardipithecus ramidus or 'root of the ground ape' - stood 4ft tall and weighed 110lb. </span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">She lived a million years before the famous Lucy, the previous earliest skeleton of a hominid who was dug up in 1974. </span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Experts believe Ardi is very, very close to the 'missing link' common ancestor of humans and chimps, thought to have lived five to seven million years ago. </span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">'This is not that common ancestor, but it's the closest we have ever been able to come,' said Dr Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Centre at the University of California, Berkeley, who reports the discovery today in Science. The first fossilised and crushed bones of Ardi were found in 1994 in Ethiopia's Afar Rift. </span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">But it has taken an international team of 47 scientists 17 years to piece together, analyse and describe the remains. </span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Ardi's skeleton had been trampled and scattered, while the skull was crushed to just two inches in height.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Despite this, Dr David Pilbeam, curator of palaeoanthropology at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology said: 'This is one of the most important discoveries for the study of human evolution.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">'It is relatively complete in that it preserves head, hands, feet, and some critical parts in between.' </span></p><div class="clear"> </div><div class="artSplitter"> <div class="splitLeft"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/01/article-1217400-06A905FD000005DC-883_306x441_popup.jpg" rel="A digital representation of Ardi's skull" class="lightboxPopupLink" onclick="return false"> <span class="clickToEnlargeTop">Enlarge</span> <span class="clickToEnlarge"></span> <span class="clickToEnlargeButton"> </span> <img src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/01/article-1217400-06A905FD000005DC-883_306x441.jpg" alt="A digital representation of Ardi's skull" class="blkBorder" height="441" width="306" /> </a></span> </div> <div class="splitRight"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/01/article-1217400-06A92B94000005DC-129_306x441_popup.jpg" rel="A digitally rendered composite image of Ardi's hand" class="lightboxPopupLink" onclick="return false"> <span class="clickToEnlargeTop">Enlarge</span> <span class="clickToEnlarge"></span> <span class="clickToEnlargeButton"> </span> <img src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/01/article-1217400-06A92B94000005DC-129_306x441.jpg" alt="A digitally rendered composite image of Ardi's hand" class="blkBorder" height="441" width="306" /> </a></span> </div> <div class="clear"> </div> <p class="imageCaption"><span style="font-size:100%;">Digital representations of Ardi's skull (left) and hand (right)<br /></span></p></div><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Researchers have pieced together 125 fragments of bone - including much of her skull, hands, feet, arms, legs and pelvis - which were dated using the volcanic layers of soil above and below the find.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">The results were surprising. Previously, scientists believed that our common ancestor would have been very chimp-like, and that ancient hominids such as Ardi would still have much in common with them. </span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">But she was not suited like a modern- day chimp to swinging or hanging from trees or walking on her knuckles. </span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">This suggests that chimps and gorillas developed those characteristics after the split with humans - challenging the idea that they are merely an 'unevolved' version of us.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><div class="clear"> </div><div class="artSplitter"> <div class="splitLeft"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><img src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/01/article-1217400-06A73A2B000005DC-170_306x753.jpg" alt="ape skeleton Ardi found in Ethiopia" class="blkBorder" height="753" width="306" /></span> </div> <div class="splitRight"> <span style="font-size:100%;"><img src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/01/article-1217400-06A9121C000005DC-528_306x753.jpg" alt="ardi" class="blkBorder" height="753" width="306" /></span> </div> <div class="clear"> </div> <p class="imageCaption"><span style="font-size:100%;">Analysis of the ape skeleton of Ardi, found in Ethiopia in 1994, reveals humans and chimps evolved separately from a common ancestor</span></p></div><div class="clear"> </div><div class="clear"> </div> <div style="background-color: rgb(192, 192, 192);" class="floatRHS"><p><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Ardipithecus ramidus</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;"><br />- Volcanic layers around the fossil were used to date it from 4.4million years ago</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">- Ardi's upper canine teeth are more similar to stubby human teeth than </span><span style="font-size:100%;">sharp chimpanzee teeth</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">- Tooth enamel analysis revealed they ate fruit, nuts and leaves</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">- Ardi's brain was positioned in a similar way to that of humans</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">- Pelvis and hip show the gluteal muscles were positioned so she could walk upright</span></p></div><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Ardi's feet were rigid enough to allow her to walk upright some of the time, but she still had a grasping big toe for use in climbing trees.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">And she had long arms but short palms and fingers which were flexible, allowing her to support her body weight on her palms. </span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Her upper canine teeth are more like the stubby teeth of modern people than the long, sharp ones of chimps. An analysis of her tooth enamel suggests she ate fruit, nuts and leaves. </span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Scientists believe she was a female because her skull is relatively small and lightly built. Her teeth were also smaller than other members of the same family that were found later. </span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Alan Walker, of Pennsylvania Sate University, told Science: 'These things were very odd creatures. You know what Tim (White) once said: 'If you wanted to find something that moved like these things you'd have to go to the bar in Star Wars'.' </span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Since the discovery, scientists have unearthed another 35 members of the Ardipithecus family. </span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Ardi was found in alongside crumbling fossils of 29 species of birds and 20 species of small mammals - including owls, parrots, shrews, bats and mice.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Lucy, also found in Africa, thrived a million years after Ardi and was of the more human-like genus Australopithecus.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">'In Ardipithecus we have an unspecialized form that hasn't evolved very far in the direction of Australopithecus. So when you go from head to toe, you're seeing a mosaic creature that is neither chimpanzee, nor is it human. It is Ardipithecus,' said Dr White.</span></p><div class="clear"> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><img style="width: 396px; height: 488px;" src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/02/article-1217400-06AC610D000005DC-65_634x784.jpg" alt="Last_Common_2.jpg" class="blkBorder" /></span></div> <p class="imageCaption"><span style="font-size:100%;">How Ardipithecus fits into humankind's evolutionary path<br /></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">He noted that Charles Darwin, whose research in the 19th century paved the way for the science of evolution, was cautious about the last common ancestor between humans and apes.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">'Darwin said we have to be really careful. The only way we're really going to know what this last common ancestor looked like is to go and find it. Well, at 4.4 million years ago we found something pretty close to it,' Dr White added.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">'And, just like Darwin appreciated, evolution of the ape lineages and the human lineage has been going on independently since the time those lines split, since that last common ancestor we shared.'<br />Some details about Ardi in the collection of papers:<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">- Ardi was found in Ethiopia's Afar Rift, where many fossils of ancient plants and animals have been discovered. Findings near the skeleton indicate that at the time it was a wooded environment. Fossils of 29 species of birds and 20 species of small mammals were found at the site.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">- Geologist Giday WoldeGabriel of Los Alamos National Laboratory was able to use volcanic layers above and below the fossil to date it to 4.4 million years ago.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">- Paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo reported that Ardi's face had a projecting muzzle, giving her an ape-like appearance. But it didn't thrust forward quite as much as the lower faces of modern African apes do.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Some features of her skull, such as the ridge above the eye socket, are quite different from those of chimpanzees.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">The details of the bottom of the skull, where nerves and blood vessels enter the brain, indicate that Ardi's brain was positioned in a way similar to modern humans, possibly suggesting that the hominid brain may have been already poised to expand areas involving aspects of visual and spatial perception.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">The first signs of Ardi were discovered in Middle Awash, a desert site that would have been much wetter, teeming with animal life and thickly covered with trees 4 million years ago. A graduate student from the University of California at Berkley found two finger bones. Further excavation turned up pieces of pelvis, feet, hands and skull. By the end of three years, scientists realised they'd found a paleontological treasure.</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">The search continues for the 'last common ancestor' from which both modern humans and modern chimpanzees can trace their ancestry.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Many experts think the common ancestor lived at least 7 million years ago.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Research on Ardi suggests that this ancestor didn't look nearly as much like a modern chimpanzee as had been previously suspected.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">This suggests that chimpanzees have themselves evolved significantly.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >For more information visit</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.sciencemag.org/" target="_blank"> www.sciencemag.org</a></span></p><div class="clear"> </div><div class="clear"> </div> <p> </p><div class="clear"> </div><span style="font-size:100%;"><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wjTOkV7r_-o&hl=en&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wjTOkV7r_-o&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object></span> <!-- google_ad_section_end(name=s2) --> <div class="clear"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1217400/Ardi-skeleton-Ethiopia-closest-thing-missing-link-humans-apes.html"> Original here</a></span><br /></div> <div class="print-or-mail-links cleared"> <div class="align-l float-l"> </div></div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-43521679185497576262009-10-04T04:09:00.000-07:002009-10-04T04:12:24.695-07:00Opportunity Finds Another Big MeteoriteWritten by <a href="http://www.universetoday.com/author/nancy/" title="Posts by Nancy Atkinson">Nancy Atkinson</a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span id="sharethis_0"><a st_page="home" href="javascript:void(0)" title="ShareThis via email, AIM, social bookmarking and networking sites, etc." class="stbutton stico_default"><span st_page="home" class="stbuttontext"></span></a></span> <!-- article start --> <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT new_visitor_welcome --> <script type="text/javascript"> GA_googleFillSlot("new_visitor_welcome"); </script><script src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?correlator=1254650950553&output=json_html&callback=GA_googleSetAdContentsBySlotForSync&impl=s&client=ca-pub-0569369285898441&slotname=new_visitor_welcome&page_slots=new_visitor_welcome&cust_params=Category%3D&cookie_enabled=1&ga_vid=2109023858.1254650951&ga_sid=1254650951&ga_hid=1209782595&ga_fc=true&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.universetoday.com%2F2009%2F10%2F02%2Fopportunity-finds-another-big-meteorite%2F&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fdigg.com%2Fgeneral_sciences&lmt=1254653795&dt=1254650950847&cc=100&biw=1280&bih=799&ifi=3&u_tz=240&u_his=8&u_java=true&u_h=1024&u_w=1280&u_ah=994&u_aw=1280&u_cd=32&u_nplug=20&u_nmime=61&flash=10.0.32"></script> <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT new_visitor_welcome --><a href="http://www.universetoday.com/2009/10/02/opportunity-finds-another-big-meteorite/oppy-meteorite/" rel="attachment wp-att-42027"><img style="width: 399px; height: 403px;" src="http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Oppy-meteorite.jpg" alt="Another Mars meteorite seen by Opportunity. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech " title="Another Mars meteorite seen by Opportunity. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech " class="size-full wp-image-42027" /></a> <br /></div><br />It's amazing what a rover can find laying by the side of the road. The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found a rock that apparently is another meteorite. Less than three weeks ago, Opportunity drove away from a larger meteorite called "Block Island" that the rover examined for six weeks. Now, this new meteorite, dubbed "Shelter Island," is another fairly big rock, about 47 centimeters (18.8 inches) long, that fell from the skies. Block Island is about 60 centimeters (2 feet) across and was just 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) away from this latest meteorite find. At first look, the two meteorites look to be of a similar makeup; Opportunity found that Block Island was is made of nickel and iron. <p>This image was taken during Oppy's 2,022nd Martian day, or sol, (Oct. 1, 2009). </p> <p>See below for a 3-D version of this image created by Stu Atkinson.<br /><span id="more-42026"></span><br /></p><div id="attachment_42028" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 545px;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.universetoday.com/2009/10/02/opportunity-finds-another-big-meteorite/oppy-meteorite-3d/" rel="attachment wp-att-42028"><img style="width: 400px; height: 433px;" src="http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Oppy-meteorite-3d-535x580.jpg" alt="Shelter Island in 3-D. Dimensionalized by Stu Atkinson" title="Shelter Island in 3-D. Dimensionalized by Stu Atkinson" class="size-medium wp-image-42028" /></a></div><p class="wp-caption-text"><a href="http://www.universetoday.com/2009/10/02/opportunity-finds-another-big-meteorite/">Original here</a><br /></p></div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-70862339958630874642009-10-04T04:07:00.000-07:002009-10-04T04:09:23.950-07:00Scientists Discover What Makes The Same Type Of Cells Different<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mOpTVrRMDjQ/SsiCNeY3DwI/AAAAAAAAC5c/mOvxIqneCe4/s1600-h/3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 154px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mOpTVrRMDjQ/SsiCNeY3DwI/AAAAAAAAC5c/mOvxIqneCe4/s400/3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5388700122156044034" border="0" /></a>A research team led by Lucas Pelkmans at ETH Zürich has managed to decipher a well-known phenomenon that had, until now, remained unexplained: why cells of the same type can react differently, and what the reason for this is.<br /><p>The properties of a cell population determine the different cell activities observed in cells of the same type. This is the conclusion drawn by a research team lead by Lucas Pelkmans, professor at the Institute for Molecular Systems Biology at ETH Zürich. The scientists examined the cause of the well-known phenomenon of cell heterogeneity. Until now, the reasons behind the different reactions seen in cells of the same type had not been scrutinised.</p> <p><strong>No random distribution</strong></p> <p>After three years of intensive development and research work, researchers have developed a computer-supported process, which allows them to observe the processes behind the variability of individual cells in cell cultures with millions of cells for the first time, and uncover the secret behind these processes. Until now, cell variability was simply called “noise”, implying statistical random distribution. However, the results of the study now show that the different reactions are not random, but that certain causes lead to predictable distribution patterns. The study has now been published in “Nature” and Pelkmans is glad to be reaping the first rewards for the research project, which was supported by ETH Zürich to the sum of 1.8 million Swiss Francs.</p> <p>“For the project, we created an automated setup, the RNAi image-based screening centre, which we used to carry out a high turnover of cell experiments”, Pelkmans explains. The computer-supported methods were developed in conjunction with the experiments and allow the phenotypes of the cells to be quantified and described automatically. The data is fed into models and used to show how individual cell properties develop and affect each other.</p> <p>The scientists focused their study on the cell properties predetermined by the population of the cell culture. This includes, for example, the size of the population, the local cell density, the size of an individual cell, whether the cell is on the edge of the cell culture and therefore not limited by another cell on one side, whether the cell is in the process of duplicating its nucleus (mitosis) or whether it is in the process of so-called programmed cell death.</p> <p><strong>Collecting large volumes of data</strong></p> <p>For each cell, the scientists examined the variety in endocytosis activity, by which cells invaginate parts of its biological membrane and absorbs the surrounding medium. They further looked at the variable amounts of a certain fat molecule (sphingolipid) on the surface of the cell, which plays an important role in relaying the cell’s signals and reactions. They also infected the cell culture with three different viruses and observed the differences in progression of the infection.</p> <p>“We created a multivariable analysis of individual cells and obtained a very large number of very different readings”, Pelkmans explains. With this huge volume of data, the researchers used computer models to determine which variables affect each other. This allowed them to establish many rules, coined “heterogeneity signatures” by the scientists, which describe the way in which population-dependant properties of a cell culture influence cell reactions in the models.</p> <p><strong>Properties of the cell cultures determine variability</strong></p> <p>As the next step, the scientists tested how well the models would be able to predict the reactions of the cell. It was shown that this is possible with a high degree of accuracy and that the variability is clearly determined by the properties of the cell population. The cell cultures are naturally different from one another, explaining the broad variation in reactions of individual cells in the respective cell cultures during endocytosis and viral infections. For example, endocytosis is more uniform and is easier to control when the cell culture is densely populated, and certain diarrhoea-causing viruses can infect a less densely populated cell area more easily.</p> <p>The findings are of particular significance for research using comparative cell cultures: “This is one of the most important methods, but at the same time also one that poses big problems for cell biologists”, says Pelkmans. The study has shown that reactions in two cell cultures can be better compared when the models to predict these reactions in each cell culture are used as a reference, taking into account the effect of the properties of a cell population of at least ten thousand cells. This is an important aspect, for example, for the pharmaceutical industry. As the study shows, many changes do not directly influence the cell, but the population as a whole, which then leads to changes in behaviour of individual cells.</p> <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090911204217.htm">Original here</a>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2964358054810830305.post-5059440013758857262009-10-04T04:06:00.000-07:002009-10-04T04:07:46.373-07:00The Mating Game is a Team Sport<div class="article-meta"> </div> <div class="article-content-top"> <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/laughter" title="Psychology Today looks at Laughter" class="pt-basics-link"> </a><p><img src="http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u520/22576875.jpg" alt="" height="134" width="180" />Are you looking for love but having trouble convincing the target of your infatuation to take you seriously? Or maybe hoping that certain unsavory types will stop looking for love with you? Well I'd recommend maybe updating your wardrobe and not hanging out in seedy bars by yourself anymore, but you might also be interested in new research suggesting that a important means of achieving your romantic <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/motivation" title="Psychology Today looks at Motivation" class="pt-basics-link">goals</a> involves less about what you do or where you do it, and more about who you do it with. That is, social coordination can improve your love life, whether that means finding the right person or avoiding the wrong one.</p><p>The idea that other people often factor into our search for romance is not new. Overbearing <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/parenting" title="Psychology Today looks at Parenting" class="pt-basics-link">parents</a> and desirable-but-pompous peers are two classic archetypes of history, literature and Hollywood movies (think Egeus in <em>A Midsummer Night's Dream</em> or Iceman in <em>Top Gun</em>). In scientific research, the role these other people play has by and large been restricted to <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/sport-and-competition" title="Psychology Today looks at Sport and Competition" class="pt-basics-link">competition</a>. If you're a guy, other men represent people to trump in status or best in fights. If you're a girl, being more attractive or popular than other women is the name of the game. However, this other-people-as-competition framework misses a huge chunk of how we interact socially within romantic situations. We also: talk about potential romantic partners with people, find people to date by socially <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/social-networking" title="Psychology Today looks at Social Networking" class="pt-basics-link">networking</a>, and even directly help each other perform better on the mating market. You've probably done such things with your friends and family members. You may even have actively refrained from competing over the same guy or girl. These more cooperative forms of courtship behavior emerge through successful coordination of our own romantic interests with the interests of people with whom we share close, platonic relationships.</p><p>These behaviors may be immediately familiar, but research is now examining the evolutionary basis for "cooperative courtship" and identifying its differential appeal for women and men. Evolutionarily, the mating behavior of males and females (in all species) tends to be influenced by the physical and resource-based costs of <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/pregnancy" title="Psychology Today looks at Pregnancy" class="pt-basics-link">pregnancy</a>. Pregnancy is expensive, on the body as well as the pocketbook. The biological <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/sex" title="Psychology Today looks at Sex" class="pt-basics-link">sex</a> that spends the most effort gestating and rearing kids has the most to invest, and thus tends to be the most picky about choosing romantic partners (i.e., if you have to pay the cost, make sure to get a good deal). In many animals, including people, females are relatively more choosy. When it comes to cooperative courtship, therefore, females help each other to evaluate potential mates and avoid mates who don't make the grade. Males, on the other hand, tend to help each other get chosen. We see evidence for these strategies in animals, as when male turkeys help each other attract mates and when female bonobo chimpanzees form alliances to reduce sexual coercion.</p><p>People use very similar strategies, even though birth control has lowered the actual chance of unintended pregnancy. With my colleague Douglas Kenrick, I conducted several studies looking at how people coordinate their romantic interests. In one study, we showed people drawings of flirtatious scenes (see one in the image below) and asked them to identify who was a woman and who was a man.</p><p><img src="http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u520/CCscene.jpg" alt="" height="120" width="448" /></p><p>Who would you guess? In other studies, we asked people about what kind of help people give to their friends and what kind of help they want to receive. We consistently found that everyone wants to help-competition is not the inevitable outcome. And though everyone helped in multiple ways, we found that women tended to help their friends build romantic barriers (weeding out the undesirable guys and testing the desirable ones), and men tended to help their friends break down those barriers (attempting to counter women's strategies). People used all sorts of techniques to do this, including having friends pose as counterfeit romantic partners (this worked for women AND men). Not only that, people also switched the kind of help they gave to their opposite-sex friends-now men helped women build barriers and women helped men break down barriers.</p><p>We even set up a <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/mating" title="Psychology Today looks at Mating " class="pt-basics-link">Dating</a> Game experiment in which people came to the lab expecting to be a contestant on a game show. The show wasn't all about competition though. At one point in the game, contestants had the option to act cooperatively with other contestants. Interestingly, in this "real-world" environment, women still gave more help when the potential date was an undesirable guy (suggesting barrier-building) and men still gave more help when the potential date was a desirable woman (suggesting barrier-breaking). We concluded that many of the romantic behaviors we think of as unique to our time and culture actually have their roots in universal biological principles.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 358px; height: 239px;" src="http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u520/DG1.jpg" alt="" /></p><p> </p><p>There is still a lot of research to be done. I'd love to hear from people who have observed cooperative courtship in other cultures. Not all of the behaviors I mentioned will be cross-culturally identical, but I expect that people everywhere are helping each other achieve their romantic goals (e.g., in some cultures, family might provide more help than friends). I also think these findings are interesting because of their implications for <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/teamwork" title="Psychology Today looks at Teamwork" class="pt-basics-link">cooperation</a> in other contexts. For instance, how do people cooperate in business negotiations or in non-romantic social networking, and might women and men be better at certain negotiation and networking strategies than at others? Leave some comments below and let me know your thoughts.</p><p><a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/coordination-games/200909/the-mating-game-is-team-sport">Original here</a><br /></p> </div>jeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14171094684775093233noreply@blogger.com0