from BBC News Online
It is not yet clear whether Russian scientists have succeeded in their quest to drill into Lake Vostok. National media on Monday reported a breakthrough
into the lake, the largest of more than 300 bodies of liquid water buried under Antarctica's ice.
But Valery Lukin, the Russian Antarctic programme director, has told Nature journal that the claim is premature. He said data from a number of
sensors monitoring the drilling had yet to be analysed.
"Only when I will have this I can say we penetrated [the lake]," Nature quoted him as saying. "We want to be sure we have really reached the
surface of Lake Vostok." Russian, British and US researchers are in a race to see who will be first to reach down into the waters of an Antarctic subglacial
lake.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
Los Angeles -- No one expects to stumble across a cache of Picasso's works in the middle of a desert. So who would think that just off bustling Wilshire
Boulevard, tucked between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the national headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild, lie buried some of the most
exquisitely preserved fossils in the world?
The fossils of the La Brea Tar Pits are just that. They were first discovered in Maj. Henry Hancock's asphalt mine in the 1870s, when Los Angeles was but
a village. Since the early 20th century, more than 1 million bones have been excavated from the pits; when reassembled, they provide an extraordinary time
capsule of the creatures that roamed Southern California 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Interest in these animals today, however, is more than a matter of prehistoric curiosity. Many of the species found at the tar pits disappeared altogether
as the planet warmed at the end of the last ice age. The reasons for their demise are not yet fully understood but may be especially pertinent to
understanding the effects of climate change on animal populations today.
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from BBC News Online
Night-time in the Jurassic forest was punctuated by the unmistakable sound of chirping bush crickets. This is according to scientists who have
reconstructed the song of a cricket that chirped 165 million years ago.
A remarkably complete fossil of the prehistoric insect enabled the team to see the structures in its wings that rubbed together to make the sound. The
international team report their findings in the journal PNAS.
Scientists from the US and China discovered the tiny fossil and named their newly discovered species Archaboilus musicus, because the
music-making structures in its body were so clearly visible.
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from the Guardian (UK)
In a few weeks, a group of British researchers will enter the labyrinthine store of London's Natural History Museum and remove several dark-coloured
pieces of primate skull and jawbone from a small metal cabinet. After a brief inspection, the team will wrap the items in protective foam and transport them
to a number of laboratories across England. There the bones and teeth, which have rested in the museum for most of the last century, will be put through a
sequence of highly sensitive tests using infra-red scanners, lasers and powerful spectroscopes to reveal each relic's precise chemical make-up.
The aim of the study, which will take weeks to complete, is simple. It has been set up to solve a mystery that has baffled researchers for 100 years: the
identities of the perpetrators of the world's greatest scientific fraud, the Piltdown Hoax.
Unearthed in a gravel pit at Piltdown in East Sussex and revealed to the outside world exactly a century ago, those shards of skull were part of a
scientific scam that completely fooled leading palaeontologists. For decades they believed they were the remains of a million-year-old apeman, an individual
who possessed a large brain but primitive jawbone and teeth.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
Ivanpah Valley, Calif.-- Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in
scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket.
Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public
land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors--each the size of a garage door--are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square
miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.
BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar power project will soon be a humming city with 24-hour lighting, a wastewater processing facility and a gas-fired
power plant. To make room, BrightSource has mowed down a swath of desert plants, displaced dozens of animal species and relocated scores of imperiled desert
tortoises, a move that some experts say could kill up to a third of them.
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from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By filtering through 25 gallons of seawater from Puget Sound, a computer scientist in Washington State has managed to tease out and sequence the DNA of a
tiny microbe that has eluded scientists for years.
The creature is Euryarchaeota, one of the archaea, a class of micro-organisms that were once thought to be bacteria but are actually quite distinct.
"Nobody's been able to grow it in a laboratory despite trying," said Vaughn Iverson, the computer scientist and doctoral student in oceanography at the
University of Washington whose software sequenced the genome. Mr. Iverson and his colleagues gathered seawater from the sound near Seattle and filtered it so
it contained only organisms smaller than 0.8 microns. That is really, really tiny: The width of a human hair is about 100 microns.
"What we had to do was take this mixture of DNA from multiple organisms and tease out the genome," said E. Virginia Armbrust, a biological oceanographer
at the University of Washington.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
The San Diego Zoo made conservation history 30 years ago by adopting a California condor chick and raising it at what is now the Safari Park. The known
free-ranging population at the time was 22 birds--a number that fell to zero in 1987 when the last wild condor was taken captive in hopes of preventing
extinction.
It was the first time since the Pleistocene era that no condor soared over North America. Today, pioneering work has boosted the wild condor population to
210 across the Southwest and Baja California, and decades of research have advanced techniques for boosting avian recovery initiatives more broadly.
But human-caused threats pose the major obstacle for wild condors to survive without costly intervention by wildlife agencies and nonprofit groups,
according to a new journal paper by scientists at the zoo's Institute for Conservation Research and elsewhere. It shows that lead poisoning and eating
garbage such as bottle caps are the biggest dangers to the iconic, baldheaded birds.
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from Nature News
In a blinded clinical trial, neither the patient nor the clinician should know who is receiving placebo and who the active drug. But during a trial of
Kalydeco (ivacaftor), a cystic-fibrosis treatment approved by the US Food and Drug Administration on 31 January, Drucy Borowitz says it was sometimes easy to
tell the difference.
"We had two brothers in the trial," says Borowitz, a paediatric pulmonologist at the State University of New York in Buffalo. After two weeks, she says,
the pair stepped out of the lift together and it was clear who was taking the drug. "The younger brother looked sturdier," she says. "It reminded me of the
change in appearance that we see in patients with cystic fibrosis after they have lung transplants."
Kalydeco, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the first drug to target a cause of cystic fibrosis rather than the condition's
symptoms. In doing so, it fulfils a promise made more than 20 years ago when a mutated gene, called cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator
(CFTR), was first discovered and researchers spoke optimistically about developing drugs to correct it
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from Science News
Plants of different species can swap chloroplasts, the little cellular factories that capture energy from sunlight, when stems graft together. The
surprising discovery may explain why evolutionary histories based on chloroplasts sometimes disagree with those based on other sources of DNA.
"If you had asked me before I did this work, I would have said, 'This isn't happening,'" says plant geneticist Pal Maliga of Rutgers University in
Piscataway, N.J.
Chloroplasts contain their own genetic material, which is typically passed to offspring as mother plants form seed. Now it appears that two plants of
different species can exchange chloroplast DNA nonreproductively, by swapping the whole cellular organs through a graft, Maliga's team and an independent
group in Germany report online January 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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from National Geographic News
Some mammals need roughly 24 million generations to go from mouse-size to elephant-size, a new study says.
Using both fossil and living specimens, scientists calculated growth rates for 28 different mammalian groups during the past 65 million years--and found
that, for mammals, getting big takes longer than shrinking.
It takes a minimum of 1.6 million generations for mammals to achieve a hundredfold increase in body size, about 5 million generations for a thousandfold
increase, and about 10 million generations for a 5,000-fold increase, the team discovered.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Archaeologist Deanna Jones couldn't believe her eyes as she hunched over a shallow pit dug next to railroad tracks in front of the San Gabriel
Mission.
She was inside the recently excavated foundation of a long-gone adobe building that once stood in the mission's 40-acre Bishop's Garden, first cultivated
in the early 1780s. As Jones scooped a trowel full of dirt from what had been the adobe floor, a silvery glint caught her attention.
"It looked like a piece of scrap metal at first," said Jones, a 29-year-old Van Nuys resident who has worked four years as a professional archaeologist.
"I rubbed it on my jeans and noticed the detail." With the crust of dirt wiped away, it was clear this was an old coin.
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from BBC News Online
A 3-D printer-created lower jaw has been fitted to an 83-year-old woman's face in what doctors say is the first operation of its kind.
The transplant was carried out in June in the Netherlands, but is only now being publicised.
The implant was made out of titanium powder--heated and fused together by a laser, one layer at a time. Technicians say the operation's success paves the
way for the use of more 3-D-printed patient-specific parts.
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from National Geographic News
With a gargantuan crack slowly splitting it apart, Antarctica's fastest-melting glacier is about to lose a chunk of ice larger than all of New York City,
scientists say.
The crevasse stretches 19 miles long and up to 260 feet wide, as shown in a picture taken by NASA's Terra satellite in October and featured this week as a
NASA Image of the Day.
Snaking across the floating tongue of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, the crack is expected to create an iceberg 350 square miles--versus 303
square miles for Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx combined, according to NASA.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
An uncanny twin of our own Milky Way galaxy takes center stage in a new cosmic portrait by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The amazing photo shows the galaxy NGC 1073, a barred spiral like our own Milky Way. The galaxy is located 55 million light-years away in the
constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster).
By looking at cosmic wonders thought to be similar to our own galactic home, astronomers hope to learn more about the Milky Way, which we can only see
from the inside.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Families hand down many things from one generation to the next--and addiction can be one of them. A child of drug-addicted parents is eight times more
likely to become an addict than a child growing up in a drug-free home. But genes aren't everything. Even in families whose very brains seem primed for
addiction, some children still go on to lead productive lives free of drugs, according to new research.
Behavioral neuroscientist Karen Ersche of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and colleagues had set out to examine whether drug abusers
begin life with miswired brain circuitry or merely end up that way. Imaging studies of addicts show dramatic differences in brain areas involved in
motivation, reward, and self-control, to name just a few.
But it's less clear whether these differences are the cause or the effect of drug abuse. Because both addiction and brain structure are likely to be
inherited traits, many researchers suspect that drug abusers have faulty brain circuitry based in their genes.
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from Science News
Humankind's sharpest minds have figured out some of nature's deepest secrets. Why the sun shines. How humans evolved from single-celled life. Why an apple
falls to the ground. Humans have conceived and built giant telescopes that glimpse galaxies billions of light-years away and microscopes that illuminate the
contours of a single atom. Yet the peculiar quality that enabled such flashes of scientific insight and grand achievements remains a mystery:
consciousness.
Though in some ways deeply familiar, consciousness is at the same time foreign to those in its possession. Deciphering the cryptic machinations of the
brain--and how they create a mind--poses one of the last great challenges facing the scientific world.
For a long time, the very question was considered to be in poor taste, acceptable for philosophical musing but outside the bounds of real science.
Whispers of the C-word were met with scorn in polite scientific society.
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from National Geographic News
Native Americans originated from a small mountainous region in southern Siberia, new genetic research shows. The work is the most targeted study yet to
suggest a genetic "homeland" for North America's indigenous peoples, according to the authors.
New DNA analysis of ethnic groups living in the Altay Mountains revealed a unique genetic mutation that also occurs in modern-day northern Native
Americans.
A possible link between Siberians and Native Americans is an "age-old question" that was first raised by European explorers in the New World, said study
leader Theodore Schurr, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. That's because some of those early explorers had also been to
Asia, and they noticed physical similarities between the two populations.
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from Scientific American
PHILADELPHIA -- When the Allies needed a weapon terrible enough to end World War II, scientists devised the atomic bomb. When the Soviet Union hurled
Sputnik into space, American scientists rallied to build the world's top space program.
When Jim Freihaut goes to work each day, he doesn't have to win a war or outfox a Communist foe. All he has to do is crack a market, a market that has
stubbornly resisted the notion of energy-efficient buildings for decades. That might be tough enough.
Freihaut and his team have a five-year charter--one year already down--and $122 million from the federal government to meet this challenge: Convince the
Philadelphia construction industry to do deep energy retrofits on some 7,000 commercial buildings, by proving it makes good business sense.
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from the (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer
Six months before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the
weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle's huge rocket boosters could fail.
"The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life," he wrote.
The memo was meant to jolt Morton Thiokol, the company that made the boosters and which employed Boisjoly. About six months earlier a task force had been
formed, partly on Boisjoly's recommendation, to examine the effect of cold on the boosters.
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from NPR
Pieter Abbeel runs a lab at Berkeley that builds what he calls "Apprentice Robots." They are not built the usual way, with lines of code telling them
exactly what to do. No, instead, they are given "perception mechanisms" to analyze what they've seen, then "planning and simulation" mechanisms, to copy
tasks. And, through trial and error, it seems they can learn.
In this case, the robot in the video has to grasp the correct (open) end of each sock, even though they are pointed in different directions, and then put
them on the post. Apparently Abbeel's robots can study a person or even a series of photographs and figure out how to do this, sometimes after only ten or so
demonstrations.
Technology Review magazine says "Abbeel taught one robot how to fold laundry by giving it some general rules about how fabric behaves, and then
showed it around 100 images of clothing so it could analyze how that particular clothing was likely to move as it was handled." No live human instruction.
Just pictures.
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Scientists say that meadows of seagrass found in the Mediterranean are likely to be thousands of years old. They found genetically identical samples of the seagrass up to 15km apart, which suggested that the species was extremely long-lived.
In other news of the ancient past, a new prehistoric crocodile sporting an odd head "shield" has been found in Morocco. Christened ShieldCroc, the animal had a head appendage that was covered with a sheath like those seen in some dinosaurs, including Triceratops.
Genetic analysis of a 40,000-year-old finger found in Siberia indicates that modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: Neanderthals and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia.
A large Stone Age ritual complex found on an island off the coast of Britain may be older than Stonehenge. In fact, researchers say the site may have been the original model for Stonehenge and other later, better-known British complexes to the south.
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NASA's Kepler mission has added 26 new planets in 11 star systems to the list of confirmed exoplanets. The find tripled the number of known planet systems with multiple worlds that transit--or pass in front of--their stars. A new study concludes that such multiplanet hauls will become more common, because multiple-planet systems are much less likely than single candidates to turn out to be false positives.
In other space news, a cluster of European satellites has detected clouds of "cold plasma" that reach from the top of Earth's atmosphere to at least a quarter the distance to the moon.
Sometime in early 2014 NASA intends to take its first major step toward rebuilding its human spaceflight program. The milestone is the maiden test flight of its Orion spacecraft.
One of the twin GRAIL spacecraft launched by NASA last September has returned its first video of the Moon's hidden side after being pulled into orbit at New Year. The video reveals a landscape scarred by countless collisions with comets and asteroids.
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from Wired Science
A controversial proposal would regulate sugar as a toxic substance, and not simply because it's a calorie-rich enabler of obesity. Some researchers say it's intrinsically dangerous, not unlike alcohol or tobacco, with unique properties that set off a hormonal cascade ending in higher risks of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes.
It's not a scientifically certain proposition, though a growing body of research suggests it may very well be true, and the implications are thorny. Even people sympathetic to public health-based regulations may balk at treating pastries as cigarettes, as University of California, San Francisco nutritionists suggested in a Feb. 2 Nature paper.
But to anyone looking to artificial sweeteners as an alternative, as pastel-packaged reassurances that regulators won't ever need to pry donuts from their cold, dead and pudgy hands, science offers only more uncertainty. Some studies even suggest that fake sugar may cause the same problems as real sugar.
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from Nature News
North Korea may have conducted two covert nuclear weapons tests in 2010, according to a fresh analysis of radioisotope data.
The claim has drawn scepticism from some nuclear-weapons experts. But if confirmed, the analysis would double the number of tests the country is known to have conducted and suggest that North Korea is trying to develop powerful warheads for its fledgling nuclear arsenal.
It might also explain a bizarre statement issued by North Korea's state news agency in May 2010, which said that the country had achieved nuclear fusion. The news was largely ridiculed in the South Korean and Western media--but it was not so quickly dismissed by the small circle of experts who devote their careers to identifying covert nuclear tests. South Korean scientists had detected a whiff of radioactive xenon at around that time, hinting at nuclear activity in its northern neighbour, which had already tested nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009.
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from Miller-McCune
Picture an illustrated children's book--one that has won a prestigious award--and your mind conjures up images of furry animals, puffy clouds, and eager boys and girls enjoying adventures in the wild.
In fact, our kids are entering a much different world in their earliest literary experiences--one in which nature plays an increasingly minor role. That's the conclusion of a newly published study, which suggests these books reflect our growing estrangement from the natural environment.
A group of researchers led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist J. Allen Williams Jr. studied the winners of the American Library Association's prestigious Caldecott Medal between 1938 (the year the prize was first awarded) through 2008. They looked at more than 8,000 images in the 296 volumes.
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from Live Science
From the dark-matter web of the universe to the rainbow of a mouse's retina, a new trove of award-winning science images reveals little-seen worlds.
The winners of the 2011 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, announced today (Feb. 2) turn dry data into vivid imagery. The informational poster "The Cosmic Web," for example, used simulations and algorithms to create a fiery, beautiful representation of matter in the universe through time. The image, by Johns Hopkins University cosmologist Miguel Angel Aragon-Calvo, won a spot on the cover of the Feb. 3 issue of the journal Science, which co-sponsors the contest with the National Science Foundation.
The contest also includes interactive games. One honoree this year created one called "Build-a-Body," in which players can drag and drop organs into a virtual human body, learning anatomy and playing surgeon. Another game allows players to "zoom in" to the human body and look at individual cells.
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