from Scientific American
After months of hearings and finger-pointing, a Deepwater Horizon investigative commission formed by President Obama has begun to shed light on what led to the April 20 explosion that killed 11 and initiated a deep underwater gusher that spewed more than 750 million liters of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Yet one of the biggest mysteries remains--why did the drillers use cement designed to shore up the well despite warnings that the mixture would not hold?
The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling earlier this week concluded in their report that there were clear indicators of problems with the cement mixture prior to the explosion. In particular, negative-pressure tests designed to determine whether the well casing could provide a barrier to the gas and oil failed, meaning there was a danger of hydrocarbons escaping up to the rig and catching fire, according to the seven-member, bipartisan commission, which President Obama appointed in May.
Judged through the lens of science, the commission's report is less a condemnation of well owner BP or cement contractor Halliburton than an indicator that, even though the binding agent has been in wide use since Roman times, the chemical properties of the material itself is still largely a mystery.
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from Wired Science
As an apocalyptic bat disease threatens to spread across the United States, the stage is set for a showdown between the federal government and environmentalists who feel enough isn't being done to stop it.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released the second draft version on Oct. 27 of its national response plan for White Nose Syndrome, which has killed more than a million cave-dwelling bats since emerging four years ago.
On the same day, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity issued a press release excoriating the plan, calling it a "slow-motion response" to a disease that's already destroyed a major part of the animal kingdom in the eastern U.S., and shows no sign of slowing.
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from NPR
The eruption of Mount Merapi in Indonesia has residents fleeing as ash, dust and volcanic mud pour out of the mountain. The volcano has showed signs of slowing, but destruction to the communities around it since its first eruption in late October is extensive....
In addition to the visible releases, volcanoes like Mount Merapi also give off sulfur dioxide, a gas that can have a variety of effects on people and the environment. On the ground, it's a nuisance, triggering asthma and irritating skin. But when it drifts to the upper levels of the atmosphere, it may actually do some good: In a reaction with water vapor and other chemicals, particles form that can actually affect the Earth's climate for many years.
The NASA Earth Observatory explains: "If a volcano near the equator injects a sufficient quantity of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, the resulting chemical reactions can create reflective aerosols that linger for months or even years, cooling climate by reflecting sunlight. At just 7.5 degrees south of the equator, Mount Merapi is positioned to have such an impact."
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from the Economist
Twenty years ago North America, Europe and Japan produced almost all of the world's science. They were the aristocrats of technical knowledge, presiding over a centuries-old regime. They spent the most, published the most and patented the most. And what they produced fed back into their industrial, military and medical complexes to push forward innovation, productivity, power, health and prosperity.
All good things, though, come to an end, and the reign of these scientific aristos is starting to look shaky. In 1990 they carried out more than 95% of the world's research and development. By 2007 that figure was 76%.
Such, at least, is the conclusion of the latest report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO. The picture the report paints is of a waning West and a rising East and South, mirroring the economic shifts going on in the wider world. The sans culottes of science are on the march.
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from Nature News
Halfway through a satellite meeting at the Federation of European Neurosciences conference in Amsterdam in July, researcher Ken McCarthy takes the stage to give his presentation. He sports a black shirt and jeans, and his strong cheekbones, shock of white hair and tanned skin give him the look of a film star. But he doesn't have the confidence to match. "I find this a little bit daunting," he says, as he organizes his slides.
McCarthy, a geneticist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, is about to fan the flames of a debate about whether glia, the largest contingent of non-neuronal cells in the brain, are important in transmitting electrical messages.
For many years, neurons were thought to be alone in executing this task, and glia were consigned to a supporting role regulating a neuron's environment, helping it to grow, and even providing physical scaffolding (glia is Greek for 'glue').
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
After 180 days at sea, the NOAA research vessel Okeanos Explorer has returned to the Bay Area to be refitted in an Alameda dry dock for new expeditions to Indonesia's fabled "Coral Triangle," one of the richest regions of marine biodiversity in the world.
The scientists and technicians aboard, together with Indonesian colleagues, gathered precious ocean data with their highly advanced, remote-controlled shipboard instruments and transmitted their discoveries directly to researchers ashore for the first time in ocean exploration....
The team deployed the ship's unmanned submarine, a remotely operated vehicle nicknamed "Little Hercules," to explore Indonesia's little-known ocean bottom. The vehicle discovered and transmitted images of intensely hot hydrothermal vents fuming on the flanks of a mile-high undersea volcano named Kawio Barat, where barnacles, worms, colorless shrimp and other strange creatures thrive in the heat around the smoke-filled steam. In their high-tech control room, researchers aimed the ship's multi-beam sonar to sound the bottom day and night, gathering precise images of unknown seamounts, ridges and flat plains of sediments laid down, possibly, for untold thousands of years.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose.
Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why their imbibing trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured.
The act of drinking may seem like no big deal for anyone who can fully close the mouth to create suction, as people can. But species that cannot, which includes most carnivores, must resort to some other mechanism.
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from USA Today
Food is by far the main source of human exposure to the estrogen-like chemical bisphenol A, concludes an international panel of experts.
BPA is migrating from food packaging, such as plastic containers (including baby bottles) and the linings of cans, into the food itself, said scientists Tuesday with the World Health Organization and the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization.
Less important sources, they said, are house dust, soil or toys, dental treatments and thermal papers such as cash register receipts. Studies have linked the chemical to breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes, male infertility and other health problems.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Pressing ahead with plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions despite a congressional stalemate over global warming, the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday issued guidelines that gave states considerable discretion in regulating carbon dioxide emissions from large industrial facilities.
On Jan. 2, the country's largest emitters of greenhouse gases will have to show state regulators how they plan to curb such emissions when they build new facilities or make major changes in existing facilities that result in increased discharges of the gases that most scientists link to climate change and global warming.
While requiring states to secure plans for controlling carbon emissions, the guidelines gave states latitude to determine on a case-by-case basis the "best available" pollution control technology that industrial facilities could use.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Associated Press) -- NASA discovered cracks in Discovery's fuel tank Wednesday, an added problem that will complicate trying to launch the space shuttle on its final voyage this year.
The two cracks--each 9 inches long--were found on the exterior of the aluminum tank, beneath a larger crack in the insulating foam that covers the 15-story tank. The cracks are in an area that holds instruments, not fuel.
NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said engineers believe the tank can be repaired at the launch pad, although it's never been tried before. It's unclear, though, whether the work can be done in time to meet a Nov. 30 launch attempt.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- The oil spill that damaged the Gulf of Mexico's reefs and wetlands is also threatening to stain the Obama administration's reputation for relying on science to guide policy.
Academics, environmentalists, and federal investigators have accused the administration since the April spill of downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data, and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited.
The latest complaint from scientists comes in a report by the Interior Department's inspector general, which concluded that the White House edited a drilling safety report in a way that made it falsely appear that scientists and experts supported the administration's six-month ban on new deep-water drilling.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON -- Federal drug regulators on Wednesday unveiled 36 proposed warning labels for cigarette packages, including one showing a toe tag on a corpse and another in which a mother blows smoke on her baby.
Designed to cover half the surface area of a pack or carton of cigarettes, and a fifth of any advertisements for them, the labels are intended to spur smokers to quit by providing graphic reminders of tobacco's dangers. The labels are required under a law passed last year that gave the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate, but not ban, tobacco products for the first time.
Public health officials hope that the new labels will re-energize the nation's antismoking efforts, which have stalled in recent years. About 20.6 percent of the nation's adults, or 46.6 million people, and about 19.5 percent of high school students, or 3.4 million teenagers, are smokers.
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from BBC News Online
The scale of the delay and cost overrun blighting NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has been laid bare by a panel called in to review the project.
The group believes the final budget for Hubble's successor is likely to climb to at least $6.5bn, for a launch that is possible in September 2015. But even this assessment is optimistic, say the panel members.
The head of the U.S. space agency has accepted that "cost performance and coordination have been lacking." Charles Bolden has ordered a reorganisation of the project and has changed the management at its top.
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from Nature News
Global warming may be making pesticide residues, heavy metals and household chemicals more dangerous to fish, wildlife and, ultimately, humans, scientists warn.
At the North American branch of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry's 31st annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, on 8 November, environmental chemists warned that complex interactions between chemistry and climate change might be making chemicals more toxic and the environment more susceptible to damage.
For example, Erin Mann, a PhD student studying environmental chemistry at the University of Toronto in Scarborough, Canada, said that melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean exposes more seawater to the atmosphere, which may make it easier for toxic chemicals in arctic waters to escape into the air. "So global warming could produce more air pollution in the arctic," she said.
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from BBC News Online
Oxygen levels on Earth reached a critical threshold to enable the evolution of complex life much earlier than thought, say scientists. The evidence is found in 1.2-billion-year-old rocks from Scotland.
These rocks retain signatures of bacterial activity known to occur when there is copious atmospheric oxygen. The microbes' behaviour is seen 400 million years further back in time than any previous discovery, the researchers tell the journal Nature.
The team is not saying complex life existed 1.2 billion years ago, merely that the conditions would have been right for it to start to take hold.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
TEOTIHUACAN, Mexico (Associated Press) -- The first robotic exploration of a pre-Hispanic ruin in Mexico has revealed that a 2,000-year-old tunnel under a temple at the famed Teotihuacan ruins has a perfectly carved arch roof and appears stable enough to enter, archaeologists announced Wednesday.
Archaeologists lowered the remote-controlled, camera-equipped vehicle into the 12-foot-wide corridor and sent it wheeling through it to see if it was safe for researchers to enter. The one-foot wide robot was called "Tlaloque 1" after the Aztec rain god.
The grainy footage shot by the robot was presented Wednesday by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. It shows a narrow, open space left after the tunnel was intentionally closed off between A.D. 200 and 250 and filled with debris nearly to the roof.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
A series of U.S. government agencies said Tuesday that they could not explain what created a vapor trail that lit up the sky Monday night over Southern California.
But a series of civilian experts said they could. It was not a missile, they said, as many conjectured, but an airplane.
Video posted online showed an object flying off the Pacific coast near Los Angeles, leaving a large condensation trail, or contrail, that turned pink in the setting sun. A news helicopter owned by KCBS, a CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, shot the video. At sunset, the contrail looked like one created by a missile launch.
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from Nature News
The world's leading rice research institutions are joining forces to improve rice yields and breed improved varieties. The aim is to help to secure future affordable food supplies for the world's poorest people.
The 5-year US$600-million global partnership is being led by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), based in Los Baños, the Philippines, part of a consortium of leading agricultural research centres called the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
The initiative--known as the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP)--is being launched today at the third International Rice Congress in Hanoi and will be the biggest global science partnership on rice. "We are bringing together several independent research entities that were all going in their own direction to identify major global problems and develop coherent research agendas," says Robert Zeigler, director-general of the IRRI. "This is huge added power."
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from USA Today
Heavy teen-agers are often destined for skyrocketing weight gain in their 20s, a new study shows. About half of obese teenage girls and about a third of obese teen boys become severely obese by the time they are 30--meaning they are 80 to 100 pounds over a healthy weight, the new research says.
"We see a tremendous amount of weight gain during those years," says Penny Gordon-Larsen, senior author of the study and an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Other research has found that heavy children are more likely to become heavy adults. But this is one of the first studies to show what happens to teens who are obese--that is roughly 30 or more pounds over a healthy weight--as they reach adulthood.
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from Time
Call it the deformed canary in the coalmine. Scientists have found that several species of wild birds in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska are growing deformed beaks at rates never before recorded.
The birds, whose beaks are severely elongated, curved or even crossed, have developed what's called avian keratin disorder, and though the USGS biologists who released their findings this month have not pinpointed its cause, they believe it could signal a graver environmental problem.
Beak abnormalities are rare in adult birds. The deformities, which sometimes also affect birds' feed and feathers, can have many causes, from parasitic or viral infections to environmental contaminants. But when multiple species across a region--in this case the Pacific Northwest and Alaska--are affected with deformities that are so similar in nature, it could very well be a factor in their environment causing the change.
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from Science News
Climate scientists need your help--not by sending up weather balloons or drilling ice cores in Antarctica, but by turning on your computer.
Researchers are using crowdsourcing to digitize reams of historical weather data, filling gaps in existing 20th century records and extending their coverage back in time to the period before the Industrial Revolution. Anyone with an Internet connection can help scientists read the century-old logbooks where ship hands on British naval vessels scrawled weather observations.
Currently, not much is known about weather over the ocean. "The virtue of the navy is that they sent ships all over the world," says Philip Brohan of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, England.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Washington -- For decades, California has set the pace for the country on air pollution and climate change, adopting ever-higher standards for controlling auto emissions and, more recently, greenhouse gases that scientists say have led to global warming.
Now, California's dominance is being challenged--under attack from another mega-state that wants to displace California by calling for a freeze of the status quo instead of a move toward tighter controls.
In effect, Texas is staking out a role as the anti-California. With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, powerful Texans such as Rep. Joe L. Barton of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have vowed to check the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to use its existing authority to curtail greenhouse gases.
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from New York Times Magazine
One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes N.Y.P.D. detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash. Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another, and another.
... Indeed, the young man was in the act of "cashing out," as he would later admit. He had programmed a stack of blank debit cards with stolen card numbers and was withdrawing as much cash as he could from each account. He was doing this just before 12 a.m., because that's when daily withdrawal limits end, and a "casher" can double his take with another withdrawal a few minutes later. ... The detective asked his name, and ... he politely told the truth. "Albert Gonzalez," he said.
After Gonzalez was arrested, word quickly made its way to the New Jersey U.S. attorney's office in Newark, which, along with agents from the Secret Service's Electronic Crimes Task Force, had been investigating credit- and debit-card fraud involving cashers in the area, without much luck. Gonzalez was debriefed and soon found to be a rare catch. Not only did he have data on millions of card accounts stored on the computer back in his New Jersey apartment, but he also had a knack for patiently explaining his expertise in online card fraud.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Many of us are zombies without 8 hours of sleep, while envied others seem to get by just fine on much less. Now geneticists have homed in on the first gene in the general population that seems to influence how much sleep we need.
Sleep interests biologists in part because it varies with other factors, such as weight, that make people more prone to diabetes or heart disease. (The larger a person's body mass index, the less they generally sleep.) In search of sleep genes, a group of European researchers studied populations in seven countries, from Estonia to Italy, for a total of 4,260 subjects.
Each one filled out a simple questionnaire asking about his or her sleep habits and donated a DNA sample. The researchers then scanned the participants' DNA for thousands of genetic markers, looking for ones that were more common in people who slept more than those who slept less.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Cody, Wyo. -- It's been a bad year for grizzly bears, and, if forecasts prove correct, it's only going to get worse.
The tally of grizzly deaths in the states bordering the greater Yellowstone region is fast approaching the worst on record. And that's before the numbers come in from the current hunting season, a time when accidental grizzly shootings are traditionally high. Here in Wyoming, more bears were killed this year than ever, including a bear shot by a hunter last week.
A number of complex factors are believed to be working against grizzlies, including climate change. Milder winters have allowed bark beetles to decimate the white-bark pine, whose nuts are a critical food source for grizzlies. Meanwhile, there has been a slight seasonal shift for plants that grizzlies rely on when they prepare to hibernate and when they emerge in the spring, changing the creatures' denning habits.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Startled astronomers said Tuesday they had discovered two massive bubbles of gamma-ray energy extending 25,000 light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way galaxy like a squat hourglass.
"They're big, they're sharp-edged and they contain a lot of energy," astrophysicist Douglas Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said in a news conference. Finkbeiner led a team that used data from NASA's 2-year-old orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to discover the bubbles hiding behind a fog of gamma rays. That fog occurs when particles moving at or near the speed of light interact with interstellar gas.
"My first response when I saw these figures was, 'Wow!'" astronomer David Spergel of Princeton University said at the news conference. Spergel, who was not involved in the research, added that "we think we know a lot about our own galaxy," and yet the bubbles, which are almost as big as the galaxy itself, were totally unexpected.
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from CBS News
They're back. Just when you thought you had seen the last of tainted eggs, turns out food safety regulators are worried about a whole new batch.
Cal-Maine Foods Inc., the nation's biggest egg seller, is recalling 288,000 eggs that they distributed around the country after salmonella was detected at the Ohio farm they purchased them from.
That farm, Ohio Fresh Eggs, has received financing from Jack DeCoster, the owner of Wright County Egg, which caused the massive recall earlier this year. The new eggs, according to Cal-Maine, have so far been shipped to food wholesalers and retailers in Arkansas, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.
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from the Economist
What if there were two worlds, the real one and its digital reflection? The real one is strewn with sensors, picking up everything from movement to smell. The digital one, an edifice built of software, takes in all that information and automatically acts on it. If a door opens in the real world, so does its virtual equivalent. If the temperature in the room with the open door falls below a certain level, the digital world automatically turns on the heat.
This was the vision that David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, put forward in his book "Mirror Worlds" in the early 1990s. "You will look into a computer screen and see reality," he predicted. "Some part of your world--the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital--will hang there in a sharp colour image, abstract but recognisable, moving subtly in a thousand places."
Even two decades later that sounds like science fiction. But this special report will argue that Mr. Gelernter was surprisingly prescient: mankind is indeed building more and more "mirror worlds," or "smart systems," as they are often called.
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from the Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON -- A federal panel probing the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on Tuesday put the spotlight on the safety culture at companies drilling the well, seeking to move beyond findings a day earlier that rig workers didn't consciously put costs ahead of safety.
"The problem here is that there was a culture that did not promote safety and that culture failed," said Bob Graham, co-chairman of the panel created by U.S. President Barack Obama. "Leaders did not take serious risks seriously enough; did not identify a risk that proved to be a failure."
... The comments came one day after the panel's chief investigator, Fred Bartlit, said he found no evidence that individual workers made conscious choices to put costs ahead of safety. His emphasis left an impression among people such as Ronnie Penton, a lawyer representing some workers on the rig, that the commission was not focused enough on probing the root causes of the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
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