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.
Save to Library
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.
Save to Library
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.
Read more...
Save to Library
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.
Read more...
Save to Library
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.
Read more...
Save to Library
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.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Scientist
Excelling in industry is not easy, especially if you're a woman. According to a 2010 study of New England biotech firms, females comprised only about 12 percent of biotech founders, despite earning about half of the biological science PhDs. And women are equally underrepresented at the senior management level, holding just 12 percent of senior executive positions in the world's top drug companies and 22 percent of the senior management jobs in biotech, according to a 2007 report in Pharmaceutical Executive.
"[Women] are just going to hit more hurdles," says Joanne Kamens, executive director at Addgene, a nonprofit plasmid repository in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "They can even hit outright discrimination. It still happens, and it can be career-debilitating."
But just because the odds are stacked against women doesn't mean there isn't room for success. The Scientist spoke with three women who are thriving in biotech and polled them for advice on excelling in an entrepreneurial environment.
Read more...
Save to Library
from NPR
Roll call for bloodsuckers. Vampires, step back. For four years, researchers combed through hundreds of state parks and bushy areas looking for the culprit responsible for Lyme disease. The black-legged tick, also known as a deer tick, transmits the disease through a bite.
About 20 percent of the 5,332 ticks collected in the Eastern half of the country were infected with the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.
Lead author Maria Diuk-Wasser says her suspicion about where her team would find infected ticks--and the subsequent risk for the disease--was confirmed when she mapped the data. "We suspected strongly that we wouldn't find [infected ticks] in the South," the Yale epidemiologist tells Shots. "The tick is found in the South, but it's not infected and it doesn't feed on humans, but on lizards." Researchers found the highest risk of infection for humans in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Economist
Sometimes it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr. Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics's equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.
It did. More than 2,700 researchers from around the world have so far signed an online pledge set up by Tyler Neylon, a fellow-mathematician who was inspired by Dr. Gowers's post, promising not to submit their work to Elsevier's journals, or to referee or edit papers appearing in them. That number seems, to borrow a mathematical term, to be growing exponentially. If it really takes off, established academic publishers might find they have a revolution on their hands.
Dr. Gowers's immediate gripes are threefold. First, that Elsevier charges too much for its products. Second, that its practice of "bundling" journals forces libraries which wish to subscribe to a particular publication to buy it as part of a set that includes several others they may not want. And third, that it supports legislation such as the Research Works Act, a bill now before America's Congress that would forbid the government requiring that free access be given to taxpayer-funded research.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Nature News
Researchers are questioning results from a high-profile paper suggesting that malaria may kill twice as many people worldwide as previously estimated.
The statistical analysis, published yesterday in the Lancet by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, nearly doubles the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate of global malaria deaths in 2010, revising the figure upwards from 655,000 to 1.24 million.
But Bob Snow, of the Malaria Public Health & Epidemiology Group at the Centre for Geographic Medicine in Nairobi, Kenya, who was one of the paper's peer reviewers, says that there are considerable weaknesses in the researchers' methodology.
Read more...
Save to Library
from ScienceNOW Daily News
Petroleum geologists have long used air guns in their search for oil and gas deposits. Sudden blasts from the devices generate seismic waves that they use to map underground rock formations. Could the same technique be used to study earthquakes? A team of Chinese scientists thinks so. The researchers have designed an air gun that could be useful in monitoring changes in stress buildup along fault zones.
Although geologists typically use dynamite or some other method of creating seismic waves in their land-based explorations, for exploration over water they often use air guns. When these devices--which are often towed behind boats--are set off, sharp blasts of pressurized air send shock waves through the water and into underlying sediments, where they trigger seismic vibrations. As doctors take CT scans of the human body, geologists gather such data with a network of seismometer-like receivers and use it to map the structure of rock deposits or other features, such as geological faults, in the region's crust.
Similar networks can be used to monitor subtle, long-term changes in the velocity of seismic waves. These are just the sort of variations that can signify changes in stress buildup along a fault zone, says Baoshan Wang, a geophysicist at the China Earthquake Administration in Beijing. Although studies have noted many such changes in fault zones and volcanic areas, they have relied on natural sources of seismic waves. But those sources vary in strength and occur infrequently, at irregular intervals, and in unpredictable places. As a result, the resolution of images is relatively low, Wang says.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Science News
Inching ever closer toward the goal of finding another Earth, scientists have announced the most promising extraterrestrial incubator so far: a planet of at least 4.5 Earth masses, orbiting its star in the region where liquid water can stably exist.
The super-Earth is called GJ 667Cc, and it circles one member of a triple-star system shining 22 light-years from Earth near the curving tail of the constellation Scorpius.
Unlike other recent tantalizing discoveries, the planet is both well within its star's life-friendly zone, and it's just about the right size to host life as we know it. But that doesn't mean GJ 667Cc is habitable, scientists caution, as crucial pieces of information are missing.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Telegraph (UK)
One whole face of the Moon can never be seen from Earth because it constantly faces away from our planet. But now 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 scans the barren, dusty face--the oldest part of the moon--all the way from north to south poles, revealing a landscape scarred by countless collisions with comets and asteroids.
Among the geographical features it picks up are the 93 mile (149km) wide Drygalski crater, which features a star-shaped formation in its centre and can be seen to the left of centre near the bottom of the screen as the video reaches the south pole.
Read more...
Save to Library
from CBS News
Alzheimer's disease spreads through the brain like an infection, jumping from one cell to another, according to a new study.
The study found that tau protein--which is indicative of the fibrous tangles found in brains of people with Alzheimer's--spreads along the brain's neurons from one region to the other, resulting in severe dementia. The new clues on the neurodegenerative brain disorder might help scientists find a way to stop the disease from getting worse.
For the study--published in the Feb. 1 issue of PLoS One--researchers genetically modified mice to have a human gene for the abnormal tau protein in the entorhinal cortex--an area of the brain's temporal lobe where tau buildup is thought to begin to accumulate in people. The researchers analyzed the mice's brains over a 22-month period to map the protein's spread and found that as mice aged, the tau spread to different regions of their brains across synapses--the junctions neurons use to communicate with each other.
Read more...
Save to Library
from BBC News Online
Meadows of seagrass found in the Mediterranean Sea are likely to be thousands of years old, a study shows.
Researchers found genetically identical samples of Posidonia oceanica up to 15km apart, which suggested that the species was extremely long-lived.
The team added that the organism--which provides food and shelter for many species--is under threat from climate change. They report their findings in the open access journal Plos One.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Nature News
A scramble to buy African land is threatening the continent's sustainable development, according to reports launched today at the Royal Society in London.
Of the 203 million hectares of land deals reported worldwide between 2000 and 2010, two-thirds were in Africa. The acquisitions are dispossessing millions of Africans of their land, to make way for expansive forestry and mineral projects and plantations, say a series of briefs2 and a report3 published by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), an international coalition of groups working to increase community ownership of forests, based in Washington DC.
"The global report shows the scale of the issue as never before: three-quarters of Africa's population and two-thirds of the landscape are at risk," says Andy White, who coordinates the RRI.
Read more...
Save to Library
from ScienceNOW Daily News
As the father-to-son exchange in the old Cat Stevens song advised, "take your time, think a lot, ... think of everything you've got." Turns out the mellow '70s folkie had stumbled upon what may explain a key feature of our brains that sets us apart from our closest relatives: We unhurriedly make synaptic connections through much of our early childhoods, and this plasticity enables us to slowly wire our brains based on our experiences.
Given that humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of the same genes, researchers have long wondered what drives our unique cognitive and social skills. Yes, chimpanzees are smart and cooperative to a degree, but we clearly outshine them when it comes to abstract thinking, self-regulation, assimilation of cultural knowledge, and reasoning abilities.
Now a study that looks at postmortem brain samples from humans, chimpanzees, and macaques collected from before birth to up to the end of the life span for each of these species has found a key difference in the expression of genes that control the development and function of synapses, the connections among neurons through which information flows.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Science News
After surviving a bout of virulent bird flu, mice's brains show short-term reductions of a key brain chemical and long-lasting signs of infection, a new study finds. The research suggests this type of flu might leave people more vulnerable to brain disorders such as Parkinson's disease.
While most people think of influenza as a disorder of the body, certain kinds of flu also infect the brain. Recent studies have found that the bird flu virus known as H5N1, which kills about half the people it infects, can set up shop in the brain. But exactly what happens next has been a mystery.
In the new study, scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., examined the brains of mice that had survived an initial H5N1 infection. As in people, the virus kills about half of mice affected.
Read more...
Save to Library
from BBC News Online
A huge crustacean has been found lurking 7km down in the waters off the coast of New Zealand. The creature--called a supergiant--is a type of amphipod, which are normally around 2-3cm long.
But these beasts, discovered in the Kermadec Trench, were more than 10 times bigger: the largest found measured in at 34cm.
Alan Jamieson, from the University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab, said: "It's a bit like finding a foot-long cockroach. I stopped and thought: 'What on Earth was that?' This amphipod was far bigger than I ever thought possible."
Read more...
Save to Library
from National Geographic News
A new prehistoric croc sporting an odd head "shield" has been found in Morocco, according to a study published Tuesday. Dubbed ShieldCroc, the animal's head appendage was surrounded by blood vessels and covered with a sheath like those seen in frilled dinosaurs, including Triceratops.
At 30 to 35 feet long, the river-dwelling monster would have preyed on other giant animals of the late Cretaceous, such as 13-foot-long (4-meter-long) coelacanths. But ShieldCroc--formally Aegisuchus witmeri--likely boasted relatively weak jaws, at least compared with those of today's crocodiles.
"It's fairly certain that it belonged to a group of crocodyliforms--including the flat-headed crocs--that had really thin, weak jaws and weak chin joints," said researcher Casey Holliday, a paleontologist at the University of Missouri. Crocodyliforms are part of a group known as the crocodilians, which includes modern-day alligators, caimans, and more.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Scientist (Registration Required)
Cells live longer than their internal components. To keep their cytoplasm clear of excess or damaged organelles, as well as invading pathogens, or to feed themselves in time of nutrient deprivation, cells degrade these unwanted or potentially harmful structures, and produce needed food and fuel, using a process they have honed over millions of years.
Known as autophagy, this catabolic process involves the selection and the sequestration of the targeted structures into unique transport vesicles called autophagosomes, which then deliver the contents to lysosomes where they are degraded by lytic enzymes. This conserved eukaryotic pathway plays a central role in a multitude of physiological processes, including programmed cell death, development, and differentiation.
In addition, it plays a protective role against aging, tumorigenesis, neurodegeneration, and infection. Given all this, it is not surprising that an impairment of autophagy is correlated with various severe pathologies, including cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, neuro- and myodegenerative disorders, and malignancies.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Smithsonian Magazine
A telomere is like an aglet. Aglets are those plastic or metal tubular thingies at the end of your shoe laces that keep the end of the shoelace from becoming frayed and facilitate inserting the lace into the eyelet. A telomere is a sequence of base pairs at the end of a chromosome.
A chromosome zips apart during cell division so that it can be replicated, and a small number of base pairs typically get lost during replication. This is because the molecular machinery that duplicates the chromosome can't read through to the end of the strand, so it just skips the last bit.
Any meaningful genetic information at the end of the chromosome would be lost or garbled. A nice long telomere at the end of the chromosome allows for multiple duplications without the loss of meaningful information, but over time even the telomere may be lost through attrition, and further replication of that chromosome would be a problem.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Columbia Journalism Review
Just how scarce was climate-change coverage in 2011? It's hard to get a fix on the details,
but the broad conclusion that it was even scarcer than in the year before seems to hold up.
Last week, I wrote a post about an analysis by The Daily Climate--a website that produces and
tracks news about climate change--which found that the number of articles, blog posts,
editorials, and op-eds "declined roughly 20 percent from 2010's levels and nearly 42 percent from
2009's peak," based on a review of its own archives of aggregated climate stories.
The conclusion about the downward trend "felt right" to journalists that sent me e-mails
responding to the piece. But they were miffed at my decision to report The Daily Climate's
rankings of specific outlets' year-to-year productivity. I did point out--by way of update that
should've been included from the outset--that The Daily Climate's analysis was based on a review
of its archives, which are "meant to provide broad sampling of the day's coverage, not a
comprehensive list," according to its editor, Douglas Fischer. Therefore, the rankings did not
reflect the various outlets' actual productivity.
Read more...
Save to Library
from Discovery News
A NASA robotic probe sampling particles flowing into our solar system from the galactic
neighborhood shows we're living in a cloud--and likely to stay that way for hundreds or even
thousands of years.
The measurements from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft include the
first direct samplings of hydrogen, oxygen and neon that didn't come from the sun or anywhere
else in the solar system.
Instead, the gases, along with helium, which was previously detected by NASA's Ulysses
spacecraft, streamed into our solar system from the galactic neighborhood, which right now
includes a tenuous wispy cloud.
Read more...
Save to Library
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
"Men in Black" was flickering on the screen, and Laura Cossolotto and her husband were
enjoying a rare night at the movies in their home town of Centerville, Iowa, when her
brother-in-law rushed into the darkened theater.
The couple's third child, 6-month-old Michaela, had just suffered a serious seizure and was at
a nearby hospital. As Cossolotto raced to be with the baby, she immediately remembered that
Michaela had been running a fever after receiving a vaccine against diphtheria, pertussis and
tetanus (DPT) three days earlier.
"I thought the shot must have something to do with it," Cossolotto recalled. "I had three
kids, and nothing like this had ever happened, so what else could it have been?"
Read more...
Save to Library
from BBC News Online
Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves
of patients thinking of those words. The technique reported in PLoS Biology relies on
gathering electrical signals directly from patients' brains.
Based on signals from listening patients, a computer model was used to reconstruct the sounds
of words that patients were thinking of. The method may in future help comatose and locked-in
patients communicate.
Several approaches have in recent years suggested that scientists are closing in on methods to
tap into our very thoughts; the current study achieved its result by implanting electrodes
directly into a part of participants' brains.
Read more...
Save to Library