from Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
Today's Headlines - February 8, 2010
from Time
Basic biology suggests that plants might grow faster in a world with more carbon dioxide, and field experiments bear that out: when you pump extra CO2 into a field or a forest, trees and other vegetation tend to get bigger.
There are plenty of caveats attached: without other nutrients, the size and health of CO2-enriched plants can be compromised, and in some cases noxious weeds like poison ivy do better than the greenery you might prefer. But perhaps the biggest question of all is how closely such artificial situations translate in the real world.
That question is a long way from being answered, but a study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences takes a small step in that direction. A team of researchers used 22 years' worth of carefully accumulated measurements of hardwood forests in and near the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, in Edgewater, Md., to show that their growth has accelerated significantly. On average, the stands were expanding at a rate of two extra tons of mass per acre per year, by the end of the study--the equivalent of a single two-foot-diameter tree, if you could grow a tree that big in a year.
http://snipr.com/uay51
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Until last week, paleontologists could offer no clear-cut evidence for the color of dinosaurs. Then researchers provided evidence that a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx had a white-and-ginger striped tail. And now a team of paleontologists has published a full-body portrait of another dinosaur, in striking plumage that would have delighted that great painter of birds John James Audubon.
"This is actual science, not Avatar," said Richard O. Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and co-author of the new study, published in Science.
Dr. Prum and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that feathers contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes. In 2009, they demonstrated that melanosomes survived for millions of years in fossil bird feathers. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes help produce the color of feathers, so the scientists were able to get clues about the color of fossil feathers from their melanosomes alone.
http://snipr.com/uay5c
from National Public Radio
Is the "primordial soup" theory--the idea that life emerged from a prebiotic broth--past its expiration date? Biochemist Nick Lane thinks so. The University College London writer and his colleagues argue that the 81-year-old notion just doesn't hold water.
Lane [says] there's another possible explanation for the emergence of life. But before we get to that, why toss out the soup theory? Lane says the idea of a primordial soup goes back to 1929, and great biologists like J.B.S. Haldane.
"He proposed that the Earth's early atmosphere was composed of simple gases like methane and ammonia. And they would react together under the influence of ultraviolet rays or lightning to produce a thin 'soup'--which became thicker over time--of organic molecules," Lane says.
http://snipr.com/uay6a
from Science News
Sea slugs make memories with a twist. Screwing a normal nerve cell protein into a distorted shape helps slugs, and possibly people, lock in memories, new research shows.
Notably, the shape change also brings a shift in the protein's behavior, leading it to form clumps. That kind of behavior is the sort seen in prions, the misshapen, infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease, scrapie and other disorders. But the new study, published February 5 in Cell, shows a possible normal function for the shape-shifting, suggesting that twists and clumps don't necessarily make prions monsters.
In one sense, prions are machines of "molecular memory," says Yury Chernoff, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and editor in chief of the journal Prion. The proteins remember what happened to them--changing shapes--and then transmit that change to other proteins. "But the notion of these machines being used for cellular, and therefore organismal, memory is truly amazing," he says.
http://snipr.com/uay6y
from Nature News
The burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide that alters the balance of carbon isotopes naturally found in the environment--an effect that is now being found in food, reveals a US study.
Modern methods for tracking the origins of processed foods use isotopes--atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons. Of the most common naturally occurring isotopes of carbon ... the heavier carbon-13 isotope is rarer.
... As part of an undergraduate project intended to show how isotope analysis works, geochemist William Peck at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, got his students to analyse maple syrup from different parts of the northeastern United States. "Our intent was really just to see if isotope values varied by geography or if anyone was putting in sweeteners," says Peck.
http://snipr.com/uay7i
from the Times of India
The cutting-edge technology of Bt brinjal [eggplant] has had an unintended consequence. The public outrage that followed the regulatory clearance of the first ever GM food crop has forced environment minister Jairam Ramesh to adopt an innovation in public administration.
No minister has ever before crisscrossed the country to hold a series of public consultations, that too on a policy matter already approved by a statutory regulator. Ramesh has announced that he would present his findings to the prime minister shortly following the last of the seven consultation meetings due in Bangalore on February 6.
Ramesh came up with the device of public consultations on October 15, 2009, just a day after the regulator in his ministry, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), had given its go-ahead to the commercial cultivation of Bt brinjal. The series of consultation meetings chaired by him, starting in Kolkata on January 13, have turned out to be as dramatic, given the manner in which pro and anti-GM lobbies sought to demonstrate not only the strength of their arguments but also their lung power.
http://snipr.com/uay8y
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
The basic physics of sailing seem obvious: A sail catches the wind. The energy is transferred to the hull. The boat is pushed forward.
Of course, any sailor worth his salt knows it's not that simple, and sailing the boats of this year's America's Cup, scheduled to begin today off the coast of Valencia, Spain, may be something akin to rocket science.
By all reports, both vessels in this year's 33rd staging of the America's Cup (racing began in 1851, making it the world's oldest active sports trophy) are capable of sailing two to three times faster than the wind, so fast in fact that "they make their own wind," said Bryon Anderson, a physicist at Kent State University and a longtime sailor.
http://snipr.com/uay9a
from the News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)
PORTLAND, Maine (Associated Press) -- The federal government advises throwing most unused or expired medications into the trash instead of down the drain, but they can end up in the water anyway, a study from Maine suggests.
Tiny amounts of discarded drugs have been found in water at three landfills in the state, confirming suspicions that pharmaceuticals thrown into household trash are ending up in water that drains through waste, according to a survey by the state's environmental agency that's one of only a handful to have looked at the presence of drugs in landfills.
That landfill water--known as leachate--eventually ends up in rivers. Most of Maine doesn't draw its drinking water from rivers where the leachate ends up, but in other states that do, water supplies that come from rivers could potentially be contaminated.
http://snipr.com/uay9m
from BBC News Online
Migrating insects use highways in the sky to speed their journey, according to a study published in Science magazine.
Researchers say moths and butterflies use sophisticated methods to find winds that will take them in certain directions for thousands of kilometres. The little creatures travel on winds of up to 100km (60 miles) per hour.
They use internal compasses to find these fast moving winds to carry them to their journey's end.
http://snipr.com/uay9u
from the Guardian (U.K.)
Scientists have isolated a gene sequence that appears to determine how fast our bodies age, the first time a link between DNA and human lifespan has been found.
The discovery could have a profound impact on public health and raises the best hope yet for drugs that prevent the biological wear and tear behind common age-related conditions such as heart disease and certain cancers.
The work is expected to pave the way for screening programmes to spot people who are likely to age fast and be more susceptible to heart problems and other conditions early in life. People who test positive for the gene variant in their 20s could be put on cholesterol-lowering statin drugs and encouraged to exercise, eat healthily and avoid smoking.
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