from Nature News
Astronomers are claiming a new benchmark in the quest to see the
Universe's first galaxies. By taking advantage of a rare cosmic zoom
lens--in which the gravity of a large mass magnifies light from objects
in the distant background--a team of US and European researchers has
spotted a galaxy so remote its light was emitted just 490 million years
after the Big Bang, when the Universe was a mere 3.6% of its current
age.
Astronomers had previously found evidence for a handful of galaxies
about as young and remote, but the newly discovered object is noteworthy
because of the confidence that underlies the measurement of its
redshift, a surrogate for distance. Based on images taken in several
colours, or wavelength bands, using both the Hubble and Spitzer Space
Telescopes, the measurement is "one of the most accurate estimates ever
obtained" for a candidate galaxy from the early Universe, the team
asserts in a paper posted online on 12 April.
And because the faint galaxy appears 15 times brighter than it
otherwise would, thanks to the lensing effect of a massive galaxy
cluster that lies between it and Earth, researchers say the object is
luminous enough to be examined in detail by Hubble's planned successor,
the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), now scheduled for launch in 2018.
The team used a Hubble survey called CLASH (Cluster Lensing and
Supernova Survey with Hubble) to find the lensing cluster, MACS1149.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
KAENA POINT, Hawaii -- Before Polynesian settlers arrived here
hundreds of years ago in their outrigger canoes, Hawaii had more than
120 species of birds--and no mammals to eat them. Land birds flourished
in the absence of land predators, and seabirds flew in from all over the
world to nest undisturbed on the ground.
All of that changed with the arrival of humans--and the dogs, cats,
rats and mongooses that came with them. Hawaii became the extinction
capital of the world; all but a few species of land birds disappeared or
diminished to tiny numbers, and many seabirds avoided extinction only by
flying to other islands.
But here on this wild, windswept point just 30 miles from Waikiki's
crowded beaches, the first predator-proof fence in the United States,
built last year by Xcluder, a New Zealand company, is helping to restore
the land to a pristine state and proving a boon for scientists and
bird-watchers.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Seattle Times
The collapse began rather unspectacularly. In 2005, when most of the
millions of Pacific oysters in this tree-lined estuary failed to
reproduce, Washington's shellfish growers largely shrugged it off. In a
region that provides one-sixth of the nation's oysters--the epicenter of
the West Coast's $111 million oyster industry--everyone knows nature can
be fickle.
But then the failure was repeated in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It spread
to an Oregon hatchery that supplies baby oysters to shellfish nurseries
from Puget Sound to Los Angeles. Eighty percent of that hatchery's
oyster larvae died, too.
Now, as the oyster industry heads into the fifth summer of its most
unnerving crisis in decades, scientists are pondering a disturbing
theory. They suspect water that rises from deep in the Pacific
Ocean--icy seawater that surges into Willapa Bay and gets pumped into
seaside hatcheries--may be corrosive enough to kill baby oysters.
Read more...
Save to Library
from BBC News
The chances of finding life on Mars could be improved by looking in
craters made by asteroids, according to a study. Scientists at the
University of Edinburgh said organisms had been discovered thriving deep
underneath a site in the US where an asteroid crashed 35 million years
ago.
They believe such craters provide refuge for microbes. The findings
suggest that crater sites on other planets may be "hiding life."
To find the microbes, researchers drilled almost 2km below one of the
largest asteroid impact craters on Earth, in Chesapeake, US. Samples
from below ground showed that microbes are unevenly spread throughout
the rock, suggesting that the environment is continuing to settle 35
million years after impact.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Guardian (UK)
From a farm gate outside the village of Ruthe, near Hanover, a broad
asphalt path stretches in a straight line for 600 metres. On one side,
an orchard brims with apple trees which are starting to bud in the warm
German spring. On the other, a metre-wide ditch, covered with corrugated
stainless steel, runs parallel to the path. Follow it, and you reach a
cluster of temporary cabins and tall aerials from which a second
steel-covered trench, also 600m long, emerges at right angles to the
first, marking out a giant metal L in the field.
It is an odd sight. With its steel-covered trenches, the place could
be an experimental sewage farm or a design centre for drainage ditches.
In fact, this is the site of one of Europe's most advanced astrophysical
laboratories. Scientists here are hunting the universe's most elusive
force: gravitational waves.
These cosmic emanations are thought to be hurled across space when
stars start throwing their weight around--for example when they collapse
into black holes or when pairs of super-dense neutron stars start to
spin closer and closer to each other. These processes put massive
strains on the fabric of space-time, pushing and stretching it so that
ripples of gravitational energy radiate across the universe.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Nature News
Armed with a three-dimensional (3D) printer and the type of
silicone-based sealant typically used for bathrooms, researchers have
demonstrated a novel way to control chemical reactions: by making the
reaction vessel an integral part of the experiment itself. The results,
published 15 April in Nature Chemistry, could open the door to
a new generation of custom labware made to suit individual researchers'
needs.
Led by Leroy Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in
Scotland, the researchers took advantage of 3D printing--a
computer-guided process that builds up solid objects layer by layer--to
cast a variety of reaction vessels from the quick-setting bathroom
sealant. One vessel was printed with catalyst-laced 'ink,' enabling the
container walls to drive chemical reactions. Another container included
built-in electrodes, made from skinny strips of polymer printed with a
conductive carbon-based additive. The strips carried currents that
stimulated an electrochemical reaction within the vessel.
"Chemistry, for the last 200 years, has been done in a fixed, passive
reactor," says Cronin, referring to the conventional glass flasks and
other vessels that are standard issue in most chemistry labs. "That has
just changed."
Read more...
Save to Library
from ScienceInsider
More than 100 people gathered in a ballroom in Portland, Oregon, last
week for an unusual cast party. The stars were not living actors,
however, but the casts of skulls, bones, and teeth of important members
of the human family. The fossils included the partial skeletons of Lucy
from Hadar, Ethiopia; Australopithecus sediba from Malapa,
South Africa; and the fingernail-size sliver of bone of a new type of
archaic human from Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia.
Paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, explained that he organized the 12 April share-and-tell session
of published fossils at the annual meeting of the American Association
of Physical Anthropologists because many members have never even seen
casts of important fossils, including Lucy, the 3.1-million-year-old
member of Au. afarensis.
As he lined up three skulls that showed changes in the evolution of
the members of the human family from 1.8 million to 1.6 million years
ago, Hawks said that seeing the fossils is the best way to learn about
human evolution. "There are people in this association who are
responsible for teaching evolution in the U.S. who have not even seen a
cast of Lucy," he said.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Science News
PORTLAND, Ore. -- In a cooperative venture aimed at understanding the
most uncooperative of acts, researchers studying different African
communities of wild chimpanzees have pooled their data and found that
the apes sometimes kill each other nearly everywhere they've been
studied.
Chimp homicides occurred most frequently in groups with the most
adult males, anthropologist Michael Wilson of the University of
Minnesota in Minneapolis reported April 12 at the American Association
of Physical Anthropologists' annual meeting. Wilson persuaded
researchers at 10 wild chimp sites, containing a total of 17
communities, to contribute their findings on lethal attacks collected
over the past several decades.
Chimps spend most of their time in peaceful pursuits, such as
playing, foraging and grooming each other. Yet researchers, beginning
with Jane Goodall more than 40 years ago, have described occasional
chimp homicides. Some investigators have speculated that these animals
get lethally riled up by human intrusions, such as deforestation,
hunting and feeding of chimps by ecotourists.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Scientific American
After the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence
descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the
tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds
exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a
mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a
hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives.
Nearly 20 minutes before the twister struck on the Sunday evening of
May 22, 2011, government forecasters had issued a warning. A tornado
watch had been in effect for hours and a severe weather outlook for
days. The warnings had come sooner than they typically do, but
apparently not soon enough. Although emergency officials were on high
alert, many local residents were not.
... Tools for forecasting extreme weather have advanced in recent
decades, but researchers and engineers at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration are working to enhance radars, satellites and
supercomputers to further lengthen warning times for tornadoes and
thunderstorms and to better determine hurricane intensity and forecast
floods. If the efforts succeed, a decade from now residents will get an
hour's warning about a severe tornado, for example, giving them plenty
of time to absorb the news, gather family and take shelter.
Read more...
Save to Library
from New Scientist
A massive genetics study relying on fMRI brain scans and DNA samples
from over 20,000 people has revealed what is claimed as the biggest
effect yet of a single gene on intelligence--although the effect is
small.
There is little dispute that genetics accounts for a large amount of
the variation in people's intelligence, but studies have consistently
failed to find any single genes that have a substantial impact. Instead,
researchers typically find that hundreds of genes contribute.
Following a brain study on an unprecedented scale, an international
collaboration has now managed to tease out a single gene that does have
a measurable effect on intelligence. But the effect--although
measurable--is small: The gene alters IQ by just 1.29 points. According
to some researchers, that essentially proves that intelligence relies on
the action of a multitude of genes after all.
Read more...
Save to Library
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel explored lupus, a devastating and much misunderstood illness. The hereditary autoimmune disease attacks various organs of the body.
In other biomedical news, it was 57 years ago--April 12, 1955--that the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk was found to be 90 percent effective. The vaccine was part of an historic scientific push that basically wiped out polio. In the years before the vaccine was available, up to 20,000 people contracted polio in the U.S. each year.
The New York Times reported that a new FDA rule will require farmers and ranchers to get a prescription from a veterinarian before using antibiotics in farm animals. It's hoped that more judicious use of the drugs will reduce deaths from antibiotic-resistant diseases.
Researchers say an experiment in Brazil to reduce populations of the dengue-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito, by releasing millions of genetically modified insects into the wild, is working.
A new study links autism and developmental delays in young children to obesity and diabetes in their mothers.
And, finally, last week the FDA approved a radioactive compound for evaluating people with cognitive impairment for Alzheimer's disease. The drug, called Amyvid, binds to amyloid plaques, the calling card of Alzheimer's disease in the brain. When administered before a PET scan, Amyvid allows doctors to see whether amyloid has begun to build up.
Save to Library
The Pentagon's research and development agency plans to hold a competition to design specialized robots that can work in disaster zones while operating common tools and vehicles. There's no telling what shape they will take.
In other technology news, Nature News looked at what's being done with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The imaging technique produces measurements from deep inside the brain. It is also noninvasive, which makes it safer and more comfortable than positron emission tomography (PET).
Physicists have constructed an elementary quantum network that features two all-purpose nodes that can send, receive and store quantum information. It is linked by a fiber-optic cable that carries it from one node to another on a single photon. If it can be refined and scaled up, it could form the basis of communication channels for relaying quantum information.
Special equipment is being used in Scotland to help stop the gas leak at the Elgin platform in the North Sea. The Scottish government is starting its assessment of the environmental impact of the leak.
Eadweard J. Muybridge revolutionized photography, cinematography, and possibly even zoology. His most famous work was a series of photos that captured the full gallop of a horse. Muybridge proved that, for a brief moment, all four of a horse's legs leave the ground.
Save to Library
Scientists have discovered that magnetic reconnection happens on Venus, a planet with no intrinsic magnetic field. The finding suggests that magnetic reconnection may generate auroras on Venus and could have contributed to the loss of a water-rich atmosphere that scientists believe the planet had during its early history.
In other space news, scientists think they have solved a longstanding mystery about how dying stars spew out the material of future planets. An astronomical study of extraordinary resolution found dust grains of nearly a millionth of a meter across, big enough to be pushed out by dying stars' light.
The planet-hunting Kepler space telescope mission has been extended by NASA for another four years, it was announced last week. The Kepler telescope will continue surveying 170,000 stars in the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, looking for new solar systems.
The New York Times featured work being done on installation of one of the world's largest ground-based astronomical projects in northern Chile's inhospitable Atacama Desert.
Save to Library
from BBC News
Some glaciers on Asia's Karakoram mountains are defying the global trend and getting thicker, say researchers.
A French team used satellite data to show that glaciers in part of the Karakoram range, to the west of the Himalayan region, are putting on mass. The reason is unclear, as glaciers in other parts of the Himalayas are losing mass--which also is the global trend.
The region's glaciers are poorly studied, yet provide a vital water source for more than a billion people.
Read more...
Save to Library
from SciDevNet
RIO DE JANEIRO -- Brazil's Paiter Suruí community has become the first indigenous group in the country to receive international certification to sell carbon credits in return for protecting and restoring forests in their Amazonian territory.
The Suruí community, which numbers around 1300 people, was first contacted by outsiders in 1968. Over the past decade, with assistance from environmental advocates, they have conducted a sophisticated campaign to prove to the world that they are helping to preserve their 248,000 hectare forest territory.
Four years ago, they established the Suruí Forest Carbon Project, with a view to selling carbon credits under the so-called REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) mechanism.
Read more...
Save to Library
from ScienceNOW
In 1937, after the rise of quantum mechanics, Ettore Majorana, an Italian theoretical physicist, realized that the new physics implied the existence of a novel type of particles, now called Majorana fermions. After a 75-year hunt, researchers have now spotted the first solid evidence of their existence. And their discovery could hold the key to finally creating workable quantum computers.
Prior to Majorana's work, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger came up with an equation that describes how quantum particles behave and interact. Paul Dirac, an English physicist, tweaked that equation to apply it to fermions, such as electrons, moving at near-light speed. That work tied together quantum mechanics and Einstein's special theory of relativity. It also implied the existence of antimatter, where every particle has an antimatter counterpart--such as electrons and positrons--and that the two would annihilate each other if they ever met.
Dirac's work suggested that some particles, such as photons, could serve as their own antiparticles. But fermions weren't thought to be among them. It was Majorana's manipulations of Dirac's equations that suggested the possible existence of a new type of fermion that could serve as its own antiparticle.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Nature News
Chinese herbal medicines contain ingredients derived from endangered animals, toxic plants and livestock, a genetic audit has discovered. Few of these ingredients were listed on the packaging.
"There's absolutely no honesty in the labelling of these products. What they declare is completely at odds with what's in there," says Mike Bunce, a geneticist at Murdoch University near Perth, Australia, who led the study. The results are published today [April 12] in PLoS Genetics.
Traditional Chinese medicines rack up billions of dollars in worldwide sales each year, and exports to Western countries are on the rise. However, most of the medicines have not been proved to be effective, and industry regulation is scant.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Chemical & Engineering News
Television and computer displays based on light-emitting quantum dots promise more vibrant images while using half the power of organic light-emitting diodes. However, compared to the best commercial technology, LEDs using quantum dots are power hungry and produce low-quality images. Now researchers have implemented a new design to create red, green, and blue quantum-dot devices that are brighter and more efficient.
Quantum dots are inorganic semiconducting nanoparticles that, depending on their size, emit light at specific wavelengths. Because this light falls in a narrow range of wavelengths, researchers think the particles could enable beautifully colored displays that produce light at the wavelengths to which our eyes are most sensitive. Quantum dots can also form inks for printing, which should reduce their production costs.
Unfortunately, current quantum-dot light-emitting diodes (QLEDs) have low efficiencies: The devices convert only 2 to 3% of the electrical charge used to power them into light that reaches a viewer's eye. In comparison, most commercial organic LEDs have efficiencies around 6%, with the best, and most expensive, approaching 20%.
Read more...
Save to Library
from ScienceInsider
Last month, one-third of the members of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) disagreed with the group's recommendation to publish in full two studies that describe how to make the bird flu virus transmissible in mammals.
Now one of the six dissenters, influenza epidemiologist Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has written a sharp critique of the meeting that led to the decision. In a letter sent yesterday to Amy Patterson, an official at the U.S. National Institutes of Health whose office oversees NSABB, Osterholm charged that the meeting was "designed to produce the outcome that occurred."
Osterholm and the other dissenters in particular had strong concerns about a study led by Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, which is under review at Science. Osterholm's seven-page letter, obtained by Science, recounts many arguments he has made publicly before about the need to redact details of the Fouchier group's experiments in ferrets, a model used to study how influenza viruses behave in humans. But Osterholm's letter adds new scientific detail to his concerns and also spells out why he believes the meeting set a bad precedent for future NSABB deliberations.
Read more...
Save to Library
from NPR
New research shows that first-graders and baboons have at least one thing in common: Both can tell the difference between actual written words and random sequences of letters. This finding challenges some conventional ideas about what goes on in the human brain when we read.
Scientists have assumed that reading relies on the same brain circuits involved in spoken language, but now they are considering a more complicated explanation, thanks to six baboons who took part in an unusual experiment.
The baboons live in the south of France, spending their time in an enclosure that includes nine testing booths. Jonathan Grainger, a researcher at Aix-Marseille University, says that baboons, like first-graders, can be motivated by food and video games. So he put treats and touch-screen computers in the testing booths.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Economist
If you are a suspicious type you may be disturbed by the fact that, despite reassurances of the safety of the procedure, dentists and their technicians, when administering X-rays, usually step out of the room while the deed is done. Not only that, they often drape a lead-lined apron over your body to protect your vital organs. Well, all but one: your brain.
A study by Elizabeth Claus, of Yale University, just published in Cancer, suggests your suspicions might be justified. Dr. Claus thinks she has identified, in those who have had dental X-rays often, a significant rise in the admittedly small risk of developing a brain tumour.
In rich countries, five men in every 200,000, and twice as many women, develop tumours called meningiomas that affect the membranes surrounding the brain. Meningiomas account for a third of primary brain tumours. Only about 2% of them are malignant, but non-malignant does not mean non-dangerous. Even a "benign" meningioma can kill. Around 30% do so within five years of diagnosis. Symptoms can include seizures and blindness, and treatment may involve surgery, chemotherapy or, ironically, radiotherapy.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Reuters
Three weeks ago, President Barack Obama stood in front of a sea of gleaming solar panels in Boulder City, Nevada, to celebrate his administration's efforts to promote "green energy."
Stretching row upon row into the desert, the Copper Mountain Solar Project not far from Las Vegas provided an impressive backdrop for the president. Built on public land, the facility is the largest of its kind in the United States. Its 1 million solar panels provide enough energy to power 17,000 homes.
And it employs just 10 people. Three years after Obama launched a push to build a job-creating "green" economy, the White House can say that more than 1 million drafty homes have been retrofitted to lower heating and cooling costs, while energy generation from renewable sources such as wind and solar has nearly doubled since 2008.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Wired Science
The controversy over possible links between massive bee die-offs and agricultural pesticides has overshadowed another threat: the use of those same pesticides in backyards and gardens.
Neonicotinoid pesticides are ubiquitous in everyday consumer plant treatments, and may expose bees to far higher doses than those found on farms, where neonicotinoids used in seed coatings are already considered a major problem by many scientists.
"It's amazing how much research is out there on seed treatments, and in a way that's distracted everyone from what may be a bigger problem," said Mace Vaughan, pollinator program director at the Xerces society, an invertebrate conservation group.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Tennessee enacted a law Tuesday that critics contend allows public school teachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction.
Republican Gov. Bill Haslam allowed the controversial measure to become law without his signature and, in a statement, expressed misgivings about it. Nevertheless, he ignored pleas from educators, parents and civil libertarians to veto the bill.
The law does not require the teaching of alternatives to scientific theories of evolution, climate change and "the chemical origins of life." Instead, it aims to prevent school administrators from reining in teachers who expound on alternative hypotheses to those topics.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In the event of another disaster at a nuclear power plant, the first responders may not be humans but robots. They may not even look humanoid.
The Pentagon's research and development agency is to announce a competition on Tuesday to design specialized robots that can work in disaster zones while operating common tools and vehicles. And while such tasks may well inspire humanoid designs, roboticists say they may also lead to the robotic equivalent of the Minotaur--a hybrid creature that might have multiple arms and not just legs but treads.
Rumors of the challenge have already set professional and amateur robot builders buzzing with speculation about possible designs and alliances. Aaron Edsinger, a founder of Meka Robotics in San Francisco, said he was speaking with fellow roboticists around the country and was considering a wide array of possible inspirations.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
... aging does seem to make us more vulnerable to depression, but it's not a foregone conclusion.
"Even though so many things happen as we get older--lots of losses and physical changes--most people weather those by adapting, and adapting without becoming depressed," says Susan Lehmann, director of the Geriatric Psychiatry Day Hospital at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
There's a difference, she adds, between feeling profoundly lonely or blue and true clinical depression, which is a mood state involving physical and behavioral manifestations that does not shift easily.
Read more...
Save to Library
from BBC News
Two big earthquakes that struck off the Indonesian province of Aceh on Wednesday caused the deaths of five people--three from heart attacks and two from shock, disaster officials say. They have expressed relief over the low casualty figures; 70,000 people died in the 2004 tsunami in Aceh.
However the chaos caused by the 8.6 and 8.3 magnitude quakes enabled about 49 inmates to escape from prison. Scientists meanwhile have been explaining why there was no tsunami.
They say the main difference was that in 2004, one tectonic plate slipped beneath another, displacing a huge volume of water. Wednesday's quakes in contrast resulted from the plates rubbing laterally against each other--their movements although violent were less likely to create huge waves.
Read more...
Save to Library