from Science News
A quantum effect known as
entanglement may be part of the compass
that birds use to sense Earth's
magnetic field, researchers report in
an upcoming Physical Review
Letters.
Critters from bacteria to mole rats
use tiny variations in the Earth's
magnetic field to navigate, but exactly
how they sense the magnetism is a
mystery. One idea is that magnetic
fields disrupt pairs of entangled
electrons in a light-sensitive protein
in the retina. In quantum entanglement,
particles are linked to each other so
that one always knows instantly what
the other is doing, even if they get
separated.
In the new research, physicists at
the University of Oxford and the
National University of Singapore
calculated that quantum entanglement in
a bird's eye could last more than 100
microseconds--longer than the 80
microseconds achieved in physicists'
experiments at temperatures just above
absolute zero, says Elisabeth Rieper, a
physicist at the National University of
Singapore. That would be a surprising
feat for a bird warbling at room
temperature, which people thought was
too hot to see quantum effects.
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from Nature News
It's been a mystery for more than
half a century: why, in the short
distance from the Sun's surface to its
corona, or outer atmosphere, does the
temperature leap from a few thousand to
a few million degrees? The answer,
researchers say, might lie in hot jets
of plasma erupting from the Sun's
surface.
"It's truly a breakthrough in the
longstanding puzzle of how the corona
gets so hot," says Rob Rutten, a solar
physics expert at Utrecht University in
the Netherlands who was not involved
with the work. "The jets behave like
bullets shot upwards, causing hot
coronal temperature fronts in front of
them."
Over the years, theorists have
offered various explanations for the
hot corona. One idea is that the Sun's
violent inner motion shakes its
magnetic field lines, sending waves
through the atmosphere and into the
corona that deposit their energy as
heat. Another posits that the magnetic
field lines become so twisted that they
snap, accelerating and heating the
coronal gas. However, there has been
little observational evidence to
support either of these theories.
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from Scientific American
As the new decade opens up,
researchers are gathering data that
will redefine weather pattern averages
for the nation. The "new normals" will
update the averages for temperatures,
rainfall and snow. A climate normal
bases itself on the weather patterns of
a particular region over a 30-year
period. Every decade, in accordance
with international agreements, the
National Climate Data Center releases
new temperature and rain and snowfall
normals for 10,000 regions across the
country.
This may sound like an academic or a
laboratory exercise, but for some
businessmen, utility regulators,
wildlife agencies and others, tinkering
with the meaning of "normal" can mean
big changes. They range from future
sales and budgetary issues to
difficulties with songbirds and
trout.
The current normals rely on weather
patterns that occurred between 1971 and
2000. The new normals, which will be
released later in the year, will drop
the 1970s--a decade marked by cool
temperatures--and add the hottest
recorded decade in history, the
2000s.
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from the (Raleigh, NC) News and
Observer
NEW YORK (Associated Press) --
Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven,
people like music for the same reason
they like eating or having sex: It
makes the brain release a chemical that
gives pleasure, a new study says.
The brain substance is involved both
in anticipating a particularly
thrilling musical moment and in feeling
the rush from it, researchers
found.
Previous work had already suggested
a role for dopamine, a substance brain
cells release to communicate with each
other. But the new work, which scanned
people's brains as they listened to
music, shows it happening directly.
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from the Houston Chronicle
WASHINGTON -- The lethal well blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year resulted from a "failure of management" and could happen again without significant reform of the offshore drilling industry and the federal agency that oversees it, according to the presidential commission investigating the disaster.
The seven-member panel concluded that better decision-making and risk assessment by the three companies involved in drilling and sealing BP's Macondo well almost certainly would have prevented the accident.
In its final report--a portion of which was released Wednesday--the commission blames a series of "missteps and oversights" on BP; Halliburton, the cement contractor; and Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. The panel also singles out decisions on the rig and at BP's office in Houston that saved time and money but increased risk, making an avoidable accident nearly inevitable.
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from NPR
David Nichols studies the way psychedelic drugs act in the brains of rats. But he's haunted by how humans hijack his work to make street drugs, sometimes causing overdose deaths.
Nichols makes chemicals roughly similar to ecstasy and LSD that are supposed to help explain how parts of the brain function. Then he publishes the results for other scientists, hoping his work one day leads to treatments for depression or Parkinson's disease. But Nichols' findings have not stayed in purely scientific circles. They've also been exploited by black market labs to make cheap and marginally legal recreational drugs.
... Now the 66-year-old chairman of the Purdue University pharmacology department is speaking out in one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals to describe an ethical struggle seldom discussed by brain researchers. "You can't control what people do with what you publish, but yeah, I felt it personally," he said in a phone interview ... The journal Nature published his essay online Wednesday.
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from Science News
Low-income countries struggling to keep tuberculosis under control might get a boost from an unlikely source--giant African rats. The big rodents spotted hundreds of TB-positive sputum samples that a standard microscope test missed on first pass, researchers report in the December American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
The TB bacterium currently infects one in three people worldwide, the World Health Organization estimates, with the highest rates in Africa. Giant African rats, also called Gambian pouched rats (Cricetomys gambianus), are native to much of Africa and have been used before to sniff out land mines.
... The rats are exposed to sputum samples through holes in the floor of a cage, and if they correctly pause for five seconds to smell a TB sample, they are rewarded with a mouthful of banana. Lingering over non-TB samples gets no reward. Eventually, the rats can check a string of holes moving "about as fast as they can walk ..."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
MISSOULA, Mont. -- The flying abilities of even the most prosaic bird put airplane maneuvers to shame, and experts here at the University of Montana Flight Laboratory are cognizant of that every day.
"Birds can do some pretty spectacular things," said Kenneth P. Dial, a biologist who, in 1988, founded the lab at a field station near the University of Montana. "They can go from 40 miles an hour to zero and land on a branch that's moving, all in a couple of seconds. It's inspiring."
Dr. Dial and Bret W. Tobalske, a biologist and the director of the lab, are obsessed with trying to bridge the gap in flying abilities between humans and birds. At a laboratory filled with wind tunnels, high-speed cameras, lasers, surgical equipment and a device that generates clouds of olive oil, they and several graduate students try to divine the secrets of bird flight.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
A two-week treatment with an antibiotic can ease overall symptoms in many patients with irritable bowel syndrome for at least 10 weeks and perhaps for much longer, according to a pair of clinical trials of more than 1,200 patients reported Wednesday.
The proportion of patients who benefited--about 11%--was modest, but the fact that any at all were helped validated the idea that intestinal bacteria play a role in the onset of irritable bowel syndrome, commonly known as IBS, said Dr. Mark Pimentel of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who led the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
"This is the culmination of a 10-year journey in proving that gut bacteria are a cause of IBS," he said. "There has been a lot of skepticism, a lot of criticism." The drug used in the trials, rifaximin, "has the potential to provide a welcome addition to the limited armamentarium of agents that are available to treat IBS," Dr. Jan Tack of the University of Leuven in Belgium wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.
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from BBC News Online
UK and US scientists have found the remnants of a star that exploded more than 13 billion years ago. It would most probably have been one of the very first stars to shine in the Universe, they say. All that is left of this pioneer is the gas cloud it threw out into space when it blew itself apart.
It was identified when its contents were illuminated by the brilliant light coming from the surroundings of a distant black hole. The cloud's atoms occur in abundances that are quite unlike that found in the nearby cosmos today and are more what one would expect from stars that were originally made only of hydrogen and helium.
The research required the observations of two of the world's most powerful telescopes--the Keck facility in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile. It has been written up in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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from National Geographic News
Four bumblebee species once common across North America have suffered precipitous--and so far mysterious--declines, a new study shows. Within the past 20 years abundances of the bee species Bombus occidentalis, B. affinis, B. pensylvanicus, and B. terricola have plummeted by up to 96 percent.
The finding is based on a new analysis of more than 73,000 museum collections of bumblebees, which showed where bees had been found over the last century, as well as collections of wild bees across the United States. The study looked at 8 of the 50 known bumblebee species in North America.
"We found that yes, indeed, [these four species] are seriously declining, but there are some other species doing very well," said study co-author Sydney Cameron of the University of Illinois' department of entomology. The discovery makes it harder to pinpoint pesticides or climate change as a cause for the bug die-off, because those factors wouldn't explain why other bumblebee species in the same areas have survived.
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from New Scientist
We already have solid, liquid, gas, plasma and Bose-Einstein condensate. Now it seems we may be on the verge of discovering a whole host of new forms of matter--all based on mathematics.
Nils Baas, a mathematician at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, has unearthed a plethora of possibilities for the way the components of matter can link together. He made the discoveries while researching the field of topology--the study of the properties that objects share because of their shape.
It is particularly concerned with the various shapes that can be formed while squashing and bending an object. A ring doughnut and a teacup share the same topology, for example: it is possible to squish the doughnut into a teacup shape without doing away with the hole, as it becomes the hole in the handle.
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from Science News
Just tossing mortar and bricks together won't yield a tidy structure, but chemists must often resort to similar measures when building molecules the size of proteins, the workhorses of cells. Now researchers have developed a cleaner strategy for constructing such compounds.
By employing one kind of molecule as a template, scientists can string together small biologically important molecules into larger ringed structures with unprecedented precision and no mess, a team reports in the Jan. 6 Nature.
The new technique hits a previously inaccessible sweet spot, yielding hefty molecules that approach the size of proteins, the macromolecules that are the movers and shakers of the cellular world. The method could become a broadly used tool for building big molecular structures, including more templates to build even larger compounds.
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from Nature News
The use of dire predictions to encourage action on climate change may be backfiring and increasing doubt that greenhouse gases from human activities are causing global warming.
Although scientific evidence that anthropogenic activities are behind global warming continues to mount, belief in the phenomenon has stagnated in recent years. "When I was a pollster, I was detecting that many dire messages seemed to be counterproductive, we really needed someone to determine why," says Ted Nordhaus at the Breakthrough Institute, a Californian think-tank for energy and climate issues.
Matthew Feinberg at the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether presenting children as the main victims of climate change, a common feature of warning messages, might be viewed as unfair because children have not caused global warming. He speculated that this, along with the apocalyptic descriptions of global warming's possible consequences, might threaten people's natural tendency to believe that the world is a fundamentally fair and stable place. Undermining that belief has been shown to increase the likelihood that people will ignore reality and allow events to unfold around them without intervening.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
One of psychology's most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events. The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.
The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.
Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
More than 1 in 5 patients who receive an implantable defibrillator to prevent sudden death fall outside guidelines for the use of such devices and have about three times the risk of dying while hospitalized for the procedure as those who receive it within the guidelines, researchers said Tuesday.
Although the absolute risk of dying is still low--less than 1%--such patients also endure longer hospitalizations and other complications and add substantially to the nation's healthcare costs, researchers from the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, N.C., reported in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
"The rate of [inappropriate] use was astonishingly higher than I expected," said Dr. Sana M. Al-Khatib, the lead researcher. "There are some situations in which physicians think it is in the best interests of patients to get the devices in" even when the guidelines don't call for it, she said. "But even if you account for that, [more than 1 in 5] is surprising. We did not expect the number to be that high."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
What happens to a dark energy dream deferred? An ambitious $1.6 billion spacecraft that would investigate the mysterious force that is apparently accelerating the expansion of the universe--and search out planets around other stars, to boot--might have to be postponed for a decade, NASA says, because of cost overruns and mismanagement on a separate project, the James Webb Space Telescope.
The news has dismayed many American astronomers, who worry they will wind up playing second fiddle to their European counterparts in what they say is the deepest mystery in the universe.
"How many things can we do in our lifetime that will excite a generation of scientists?" asked Saul Perlmutter, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is one of dark energy's discoverers. There is a sense, he said, "that we're starting to give up leadership in these important areas in fundamental physics."
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from the Wall Street Journal
An influential but now-discredited study that provoked fears around the world that childhood vaccinations caused autism was based largely on falsified data, according to an article and editorial published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal.
The article, by journalist Brian Deer, found that important details of the cases of each of 12 children reported in the original study either misrepresented or altered the actual experiences of the children, the journal said. "In no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal," the editorial said. It called the study "an elaborate fraud."
The original article, by British doctor Andrew Wakefield and other researchers, was published in the highly regarded journal The Lancet in 1998. The study concluded that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine--a mainstay of public health disease prevention efforts around the world--was linked to autism and gastrointestinal disorders.
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from Nature News
Nature looks at key findings and events that could emerge from the research world in 2011.
The North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project reached bedrock in July 2010, at a depth of more than 2,500 metres. The fruits of that effort should soon be seen, now that researchers are analysing gas and particles trapped inside the ice core to reveal details of the climate of the Eemian interglacial period (130,000-115,000 years ago), when the average global temperature was about 5°C warmer than today.
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have uncovered plenty of links between diseases and particular regions of the genome, but frustratingly haven't revealed much about the biochemistry behind these associations. In 2011, expect to see real mechanistic insights explaining how genes, and non-coding regions, affect the medical conditions they have been linked with. Metabolism, obesity and diabetes are among the hottest targets.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
In the 1990s, many people knew the Internet by a different name: AOL. America Online was the lens through which millions viewed the Web. At the time, there was little reason to look anywhere else.
In 2011, Google has come perhaps the closest to once again luring people into a single vision of the Internet--from Google search and YouTube to Gmail and Android phones.
To keep people in the Google way of life, the company constantly launches new services. In fact, Google has an official "20 percent" rule that asks every employee to spend "one day a week working on projects that aren't necessarily in our job descriptions." These extracurricular experiments live at GoogleLabs.com, a self-described "playground" where anyone can try out the almost-finished projects. Recent alumni include Google Maps, Alerts, and its SMS text message directory service.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
Companies spend huge resources going to the far reaches of the Earth to search for the next blockbuster. But we need look no further than our own intestines, which are populated with thousands of bacterial species that are constantly producing and releasing small, bioactive molecules.
Small molecules--the bread and butter of pharmaceutical companies--are compounds of low molecular weight (under 3,000 daltons) and diverse chemical composition. Examples of such molecules are the steroid and small-peptide hormones of higher organisms, with a molecular weight around 300 daltons, which have many important biological functions.
The term hormone (from the Greek: excite, arouse) was coined in 1905 by British physiologist1 Ernest Starling to describe the chemical messengers produced in an organ or gland of the body that travel to distant organs to exert their physiological effects. In humans, the critical functions of small-molecule hormones include modulation of the immune system, the development of sexual characteristics, the response to stress, metabolism, and mineral balance, among others.
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from BBC News Online
The great life cycle of stars, from the moment they switch on to the point they destroy themselves, is caught in a new view of the Andromeda Galaxy. This picture, released to the BBC, combines the power of Europe's Herschel and XMM-Newton space telescopes.
Herschel is sensitive to infrared light and sees the cold clouds of gas and dust where stars are forming. XMM-Newton, on the other hand, sees X-rays, a signature of the violent cosmos and the death throes of stars.
Acquired in just the past few weeks, the joint observation from the two European Space Agency (Esa) telescopes has been featured on the BBC's Stargazing Live series. Andromeda is something of a twin to our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. It is part of the Local Group and is a mere 2.5 million light-years distant. Like the Milky Way, it is also a spiral galaxy.
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from Science Insider
A group of prominent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers has coined a new name for research that combines disciplines--"convergence," they call it--and called for policies to support these kinds of cross-cutting studies. The 12 scientists outlined their ideas today in a white paper released in Washington, D.C., at a forum held by MIT and AAAS (ScienceInsider's publisher).
According to organizer and MIT cancer biologist Phillip Sharp, the 34-page white paper grew out of an "organic movement" among the dozen faculty members to try to flesh out where biomedical research is headed. Their report defines convergence as "the merging of distinct technologies, processing disciplines, or devices into a unified whole that creates a host of new pathways and opportunities" by combining life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering.
Convergence is the "third revolution" in biomedical research, one that will be needed to make health care more affordable, the report says. (The first two revolutions were molecular biology following the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA and the genomics era and sequencing of the human genome.)
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from USA Today
Want to know how long you or your aging parents will live? One simple indicator of well-being and longevity among older people is their walking speed, new research shows.
In an analysis of nine studies involving more than 34,000 people age 65 and older, faster walking speeds were associated with living longer: Predicted years of remaining life for each age and both sexes increased as gait-speed increased, with the most significant gains after age 75.
In addition, researchers found that predicting survival based on gait speed was as accurate as predictions based on age, sex, chronic conditions, smoking history, blood pressure, body mass index and hospitalization.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
In a move that could signal a long-awaited return to business as usual in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration announced Monday that it would allow 13 companies to resume deep-water oil and gas drilling that was suspended after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion last spring.
The administration had imposed a drilling moratorium after the April 20 accident at the BP well, which killed 11 workers and spewed millions of barrels of oil into the gulf in the country's worst offshore oil disaster.
The Interior Department lifted the moratorium in mid-October, but because drilling permits have been issued at a far slower pace than before the disaster, the administration has faced criticism from the oil industry, Gulf Coast politicians and residents that a de facto moratorium persisted. After the moratorium was lifted, two companies received new permits, but for activities they could have done anyway under the suspension, an administration official said.
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from the Seattle Times
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- In an indication of coming tensions with the GOP-controlled House, President Barack Obama on Tuesday was signing into law an overhaul of the nation's food safety system as Republicans talked of withholding $1.4 billion needed to put the new requirements into place.
Congress passed the bill at the end of the year after several serious outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning in peanuts, eggs and produce in the past few years. It would increase inspections at food processing facilities and allow mandatory recalls of tainted products.
Obama made improving food safety a priority shortly after taking office in 2009. But at a cost of $1.4 billion in new funding over five years, some Republicans who are looking to cut federal spending say the new law may be unaffordable. "I think we'll look very carefully at the funding before we support $1.4 billion," said Rep. Jack Kingston, who hopes to become chairman of the agriculture subcommittee of the House panel that helps spend the government's money.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
I try not to fall into a rut, but every December I give out Sidney Awards for the best magazine essays of the year, and every year it seems I give one to Michael Lewis. It would be more impressive if I was discovering obscure geniuses, but Lewis keeps churning out the masterpieces.
This year it was a Vanity Fair piece called "Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds." His large subject is the tsunami of cheap credit that swept over the world and "offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge."
... Darin Wolfe wrote a piece in American Scientist, called "To See for One's Self," about the decline of the autopsy. Autopsies frequently reveal major diagnostic errors and undiscovered illnesses, yet the number of autopsies performed each year is plummeting. Medical training no longer relies on this hands-on exercise. Doctors are afraid of information that might lead to malpractice suits. Medicare won't pay for them. A form of practical inquiry is being lost.
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from National Geographic News
A large asteroid known for more than a century appears to actually be a comet in disguise, astronomers say. Most asteroids are chunks of metallic rock that have virtually no atmospheres. Tens of thousands of asteroids circle the sun inside what's known as the main asteroid belt, a doughnut-like ring that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
By contrast, most comets are loose clumps of dirt and ice thought to originate in the Kuiper belt, far beyond the orbit of Neptune. When a comet's oval-shaped orbit brings it close to the sun, its ices vaporize and the comet develops its signature halo of gases and dust.
On December 11 astronomer Steven Larson of the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona spotted what appeared to be a faint comet not currently in any comet databases. Larson later realized the cometlike body is traveling along the same circular, stable orbit as an asteroid named 596 Scheila. Discovered in 1906, the space rock is more than 70 miles wide.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In the good old days, it was all about speed. Computer chip makers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices tried to outdo each other by putting out ever faster chips, and then by improving battery life and making smaller, cheaper laptops.
These days, though, it's all about graphics and how well computers can process and display photos, videos and other types of media. And the competition is putting marketing departments to the test.
Gone are the crisp pitches about faster, thinner and longer-lasting products, which allowed consumers who wanted the latest and greatest computer to look for simple metrics like more gigahertz, more hours of battery life or lighter weight. Instead, now there is baffling talk about things that improve visual performance like breathtaking tessellation, zippy transcoding speeds and DirectX 11 support--all of which will be highlighted by the chip makers at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, opening in Las Vegas on Thursday.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
The dream of regenerative medicine is that it will one day be possible to replace flawed tissues--to create a new spinal cord, repair a defective heart, or regrow a limb. But as scientists make steady progress toward that tantalizing goal, some are studying a range of simple organisms, from tadpoles to salamanders to flatworms, that can already rebuild complete limbs or tails.
In his laboratory at Tufts University, biology professor Michael Levin is investigating an often-overlooked mechanism that may play a key role in triggering this regenerative capacity in such critters: electrical signals.
When people think of electricity in the body, they usually think of brain and nerve cells, or muscles. But Levin and other scientists study the bioelectrical signals that exist in all cells, and the role those play in allowing organisms to generate precise, functional replacements for body parts.
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