from Wired
The best thermal images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot yet captured have revealed surprising weather and temperature variation within the solar system's most famous storm.
The darkest red part of the spot turns out to be a warm patch inside the otherwise cold storm. The temperature variation is slight: "Warm" in this case translates to -250 degrees Fahrenheit while cold is an even frostier -256 degrees F. But even that difference is enough to create intriguing internal dynamics.
"This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system," said Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer Glenn Orton, who led the new study to be published in Icarus. "We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated."
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
Neuroscientist Lori Marino and a team of researchers explored the brain of a dead killer whale with an MRI and found an astounding potential for intelligence.
Killer whales, or orcas, have the second-biggest brains among ocean mammals, weighing as much as 15 pounds. It's not clear whether orcas are as well-endowed with memory cells as humans, but scientists have found they are amazingly well-wired for sensing and analyzing their watery environment.
Scientists are trying to better understand how killer whales learn local dialects, teach one another specialized methods of hunting and pass on behaviors that can persist for generations--longer, possibly, than in any other species except humans.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Keeping the public looped in on what scientists are discovering has never been easy. For one thing, the traditional explainers--journalists--can distort, hype, or oversimplify the latest breakthroughs. But the need to communicate science broadly and clearly has never been more urgent.
Understanding science helps people know "where the truth speakers are on an issue" such as climate change, says Robert Semper, the executive associate director of the Exploratorium, a hands-on science center in San Francisco.
"The more educated and knowledgeable the public is about science ... the more responsible they can be when it comes time for voting or expressing opinions about public policy," adds Leslie Fink, a public affairs specialist at the National Science Foundation in Washington. The importance of getting the word out has science organizations scrambling to explore new channels, from souped up websites to asking Hollywood for help.
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from Science News
BALTIMORE -- Microbes living under ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland could be churning out large quantities of the greenhouse gas methane, a new study suggests.
In recent years scientists have learned that liquid water lurks under much of Antarctica's massive ice sheet, and so, they say, the potential microbial habitat in this watery world is huge. If the methane produced by the bacteria gets trapped beneath the ice and builds up over long periods of time--a possibility that is far from certain--it could mean that as ice sheets melt under warmer temperatures, they would release large amounts of heat-trapping methane gas.
Jemma Wadham, a geochemist at the University of Bristol in England, described the little-known role of methane-making microbes, called methanogens, below ice sheets on March 15 at an American Geophysical Union conference on Antarctic lakes.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
One year after President Obama announced he was lifting his predecessor's controversial restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research, some scientists are complaining that so far the new policy is--ironically--more of a burden than a boon to their work.
"The situation at the moment is worse than it was under the Bush administration," said Charles Murry, a professor of pathology and bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. "Because of this, we are going to waste a lot of time." At issue is the fate of the 21 "lines of cells" that President George W. Bush said could receive federal funding.
Bush limited federal funding to the lines that were already in existence in 2001. He wanted to prevent taxpayer dollars from encouraging the destruction of more embryos to create more lines. Critics of the research praised Bush's move, arguing that destroying embryos to obtain the cell lines is immoral. But the restrictions were condemned by many scientists, who argued they were hindering research that could lead to cures for Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, paralysis and other ailments.
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from Science News
For better or for worse, science has long been married to mathematics. Generally it has been for the better. Especially since the days of Galileo and Newton, math has nurtured science. Rigorous mathematical methods have secured science's fidelity to fact and conferred a timeless reliability to its findings.
During the past century, though, a mutant form of math has deflected science's heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos. Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.
It's science's dirtiest secret: The "scientific method" of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Three aggressive treatment strategies doctors had expected would prevent heart attacks among people with Type 2 diabetes and some who are on the verge of developing it have proved to be ineffective or even harmful, new studies show.
The results are surprising and disappointing, heart and diabetes experts say. An estimated 21 million Americans have Type 2 diabetes, the kind once known as adult-onset, and they are at enormous risk for heart disease.
The only measures proved to reduce their chances--avoiding cigarettes and taking medication to lower bad cholesterol and blood pressure--still leave diabetics with a heart attack risk equivalent to that of a nondiabetic who has already had a heart attack. So doctors began trying other strategies they hoped would help: getting blood pressure to a normal range; raising levels of good cholesterol and lowering levels of dangerous triglycerides; or modulating sharp upswings in blood sugar after a meal.
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from BBC News Online
The bacteria on our hands could be used in forensic identification, in the same way as DNA, say scientists. Researchers in the US discovered that the "communities" of bacteria living on a person's skin are different for each individual.
The team took swabs from keyboards and were able to match the bacteria they found to the computer owners. They describe their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Even on the hands of the most scrupulously clean people, about 150 different species of bacteria can be found. And these numbers are not significantly affected by regular hand-washing.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
ABE, a nomadic adventurer that plumbed the world's oceans on its own, forever changing the way scientists explored the seafloor, was lost at sea March 5 off southern Chile. The autonomous underwater vehicle was about 16 years old and in the off-seasons was stored in Woods Hole, Mass.
ABE had been enlisted after a period of semi-retirement to help researchers look for hydrothermal vents at the Chile Triple Junction, the meeting point of three tectonic plates. It was most likely destroyed by the implosion of a pressure housing or buoyancy sphere under enormous water pressure at a depth of about 10,000 feet, said Dana Yoerger, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and one of the engineers who built ABE in the early 1990s with a $1.1 million development grant.
Dr. Yoerger, speaking from the research vessel Melville, which was using ABE to survey the seafloor, said two acoustic transponders aboard the craft had failed simultaneously. "For both to die at exactly the same time means probably something very bad and very violent happened," he said. The implosion of one pressure structure would have generated a shock wave that would have destroyed others, rendering the craft inoperable and consigning it to the seabed forever.
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from the Guardian (UK)
Human regeneration has to date been the preserve of science fiction. But mammals may have a dormant ability to regrow healthy tissue, research suggests, possibly paving the way for scar-free healing at some point in the future. Biologists believe that a gene called p21 may hold the key to spontaneous healing, which could allow limited regeneration of the human body, as witnessed in newts, flatworms and the hydra.
It is thought that in mammals this healing potential has been lost through evolution, but may lie dormant in cells and could be reactivated by switching off the p21 gene. Mice engineered in the laboratory to lack the p21 gene, were able to renew surgically removed tissue so that no trace of an injury remained.
Removing p21 causes adult cells to behave like stem cells--those cells in embryos with a "pluripotent" power to become any kind of tissue. In experiments, mice which were missing the gene had holes punched into their ears (as commonly done to identify lab animals), but after a few weeks all traces of the ear holes had disappeared.
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from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Registration Required)
ARANSAS NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Texas (Associated Press) -- After the poisonous snake slithered into the whooping crane family's marshy grounds and sank its fangs into the chick's neck, death seemed certain. The bird's head quickly turned red and swelled to the size of a basketball. He refused to eat for days and was too weak to even stand. Somehow, though, he survived.
And now the bird--dubbed Scarbaby--is a healthy adult whose resilience offers a speck of hope for the endangered species. Just a year after a record number of cranes died in their south Texas wintering grounds, wildlife managers embrace even the smallest successes. "To me, it symbolizes the fight to survive," said Tom Stehn, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who's studied them for nearly 30 years. "They're pretty tough."
There are about 400 wild whooping cranes in the world, and biologists had feared that number would drop further this winter after last year's record 23 Texas deaths. Even though the birds fared better than expected--only one died this winter--the cranes face many obstacles to survive as a species.
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from National Geographic News
A new species of ancient amphibian with bone-ripping tusks has been found near a major airport in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a new study says.
Scientists named the 300-million-year-old Fedexia strieglei as a gesture of thanks to the FedEx shipping company, which owns the land where the fossils were found, said study co-author Dave Berman of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
The 2-foot-long creature is also named for University of Pittsburgh geology student Adam Streigel, who mistook fossils of Fedexia's teeth for ancient fern leaves when he picked them up on a 2004 field trip. A later excavation found two vertebrae and a well-preserved skull that clearly shows Fedexia's taste for meat: The animal had two large canine-like teeth at the front of its mouth as well as tusks anchored to the roof of its mouth, which helped the amphibian dismember prey.
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from the Economist
Some time in 2014 natural gas will be condensed into liquid and loaded onto a tanker docked in Kitimat, on Canada's Pacific coast, about 400 miles northwest of Vancouver. The ship will probably take its cargo to Asia. This proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, to be built by Apache Corporation, an American energy company, will not be North America's first. Gas has been shipped from Alaska to Japan since 1969. But if it makes it past the planning stages, Kitimat LNG will be one of the continent's most significant energy developments in decades.
Five years ago Kitimat was intended to be a point of import, not export, one of many terminals that would dot the coast of North America. There was good economic sense behind the rush. Local production of natural gas was waning, prices were surging and an energy-hungry America was worried about the lights going out.
Now North America has an unforeseen surfeit of natural gas. The United States' purchases of LNG have dwindled. It has enough gas under its soil to inspire dreams of self-sufficiency. Other parts of the world may also be sitting on lots of gas. Those in the vanguard of this global gas revolution say it will transform the battle against carbon, threaten coal's domination of electricity generation and, by dramatically reducing the power of exporters of oil and conventional gas, turn the geopolitics of energy on its head.
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from Scientific American
In 2009, Miley Cyrus reportedly made an astonishing 25 million dollars. Most of that money came from album sales, which were reported to be slightly over 4 million during that year. ... According to the findings of a study recently published in Neuroimage, selling four million albums does not translate to having four million people like your music.
The study reports that there is good reason to believe that a lot of those purchases were made out of fear--a fear well known to adolescents all over America: terror of social rejection. The fear of social rejection is so strong in adolescents because their relationships are essential for passing on the lessons that will enable them to join adult society....
Gregory S. Berns, the chair of Neuroeconomics at Emory University, and his colleagues set out to understand more about the neural and behavioral mechanics of social influence on decisions about purchasing music. The researchers' basic question was: When people change their behavior based on social influence, is it their actual preferences that change, or simply their behavior? In order to investigate this question they designed a clever behavioral study that was amenable to being performed while participants had their brains scanned.
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from USA Today
Marc Baskett is not exactly the same guy he was before suffering serious injuries in a traffic accident in 2004. ... But he can walk. And talk. "My brain is back all the way," says Baskett, 25. His speech gives no clue that he had lingered in a coma as deep as you can get and still live to tell about it.
Today, the Commerce, Ga., resident works for his parents' cleaning business and aspires to be a model. He and his parents credit his vastly shortened hospital stay--he spent seven weeks in the hospital, nearly a year less than his doctors had predicted--and recovery to progesterone, best known as a female hormone that plays a key role in maintaining pregnancy.
A small study of progesterone in the treatment of traumatic brain-injured patients, including Baskett, was so promising the National Institutes of Health has financed a larger, nationwide study that is to start enrolling patients this week. Scientists are still trying to unravel how progesterone protects the brain, but laboratory and animal studies suggest that it is critical for normal development of brain cells and reduces swelling from trauma.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.
The cemetery lies in what is now China's northwest province of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world's largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god's mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation.
The long-vanished people have no name, because their origin and identity are still unknown. But many clues are now emerging about their ancestry, their way of life and even the language they spoke.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
They're not as menacing as Burmese pythons proliferating in the Everglades, but giant African snails are targets of the government too.
The invasive mollusks are considered a major plant pest and a potential public health threat because they can spread diseases, including meningitis. Now federal and state authorities are seeking to prevent the large, slimy, shell-toting snails from reestablishing themselves in Florida. Once established, agricultural officials said, the mollusks "can create a giant swath of destruction."
"The idea is that these are prolific breeders," said Mark Fagan, spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. "Our primary concern is the potential harm it can do to agricultural crops, as well as [public] health concerns." The Florida department, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are leading the mollusk-prevention effort.
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from the Seattle Times
NEW YORK (Associated Press) -- Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be "like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons," a new consumer survey suggests.
That was one of several bleak headlines in the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual assessment of the state of the news industry, released Sunday. The project's report contained an extensive look at habits of the estimated six in 10 Americans who say they get at least some news online during a typical day. On average, each person spends three minutes and four seconds per visit to a news site.
About 35 percent of online news consumers said they have a favorite site that they check each day. The others are essentially free agents, the project said. Even among those who have their favorites, only 19 percent said they would be willing to pay for news online--including those who already do.
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from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)
BOSTON (Associated Press) -- The federal government on Wednesday recommended an endangered-species listing for the loggerhead turtles in U.S. waters, a decision that could lead to tighter restrictions on fishing and other maritime trades.
The massive, nomadic sea turtles have been listed since 1978 as threatened, a step below endangered, but federal scientists proposed ratcheting up the designation after reviewing the state of the species.
Researchers said primary threats to the loggerheads include injury and death from fishing gear and damage to their nesting areas. The joint proposal by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fisheries division and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is not a final decision. If approved, it puts loggerheads on track for an endangered listing by the summer of 2011. The proposal now enters a public comment period.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
In the ongoing battle between pathogens and humans, bacteria have an unusual survival tactic: playing dead.
Scientists in Boston and elsewhere are increasingly interested in mysterious "persisters"--a small number of cells in a bacterial population that are not growing, but are also not dead. They exist in an inactive state that allows them to survive antibiotic treatment, only to awaken later and grow again.
"Persisters are thought to go into deep dormancy. They become zombies of a sort... resistant to killing by everything, because they don't have active targets [for drugs] to attack," said Kim Lewis, director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University. "It's a safety valve for the population."
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from BBC News Online
New pictures have been released of the Martian moon Phobos, acquired by the European Mars Express (Mex) probe during its recent flybys. The images reveal details down to a resolution of just 4.4m per pixel.
Mex began a series of 12 close passes in mid-February. The observation schedule continues until 26 March. One flyby skimmed past the surface at just 67km, the nearest any manmade object has ever gotten to the little Martian moon.
The new images of Phobos come from 7 March approach when the spacecraft achieved an altitude just above 100km. The pictures will help the Russians as they prepare to launch their Phobos-Grunt mission next year. The spacecraft will attempt to land on the moon, collect a soil sample and return it to Earth for analysis.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
In the hope of expanding a controversial form of organ donation into emergency rooms around the United States, a federally funded project has begun trying to obtain kidneys, livers and possibly other body parts from car-accident victims, heart-attack fatalities and other urgent-care patients.
Using a $321,000 grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, the emergency departments at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-Presbyterian Hospital and Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh have started rapidly identifying donors among patients whom doctors are unable to save and taking steps to preserve their organs so a transplant team can rush to try to retrieve them.
Obtaining organs from emergency room patients has long been considered off-limits in the United States because of ethical and logistical concerns. This pilot project aims to investigate whether it is feasible and, if so, to encourage other hospitals nationwide to follow. So far, neither hospital has yet gotten any usable organs.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- In a surprising discovery about where higher life can thrive, scientists for the first time found a shrimp-like creature and a jellyfish frolicking beneath a massive Antarctic ice sheet. Six hundred feet below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist.
That's why a NASA team was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera's cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.
"We were operating on the presumption that nothing's there," said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. "It was a shrimp you'd enjoy having on your plate."
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from Science News
Opiates for the masses may not be far off. Scientists have figured out two of the final steps in the chain of chemical reactions that synthesize morphine in the opium poppy.
Pinpointing the cellular workhorses and the genes involved in making morphine may lead to new production methods for the drug and its chemical cousins such as codeine, oxycodone and buprenorphine, scientists report in a paper published online March 14 in Nature Chemical Biology.
Morphine and its relatives, widely used as painkillers in developed countries, are fairly expensive and are often taken for extended periods of time. The new research may lead to better ways of engineering yeast or other microbes to make these painkillers--perhaps skirting the social and political morass of agricultural poppy production, the source of heroin.
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Data from the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory suggest that magnetic flows on the sun may explain the recent lack of sunspots, flares and other storms—and could also suggest a better way to forecast the intensity and duration of future solar cycles.
In other space news, scientists say that interstellar dust was included in material collected by the Stardust spacecraft during its seven-year interplanetary voyage. A capsule containing the material returned to Earth in 2006.
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Last week the United Nations announced that an international team of leading scientists will conduct an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in an attempt to restore its credibility.
Those errors have been seized on by global warming skeptics, and in recent weeks, Texas, Virginia and Alabama officials have filed challenges to the EPA's finding that manmade greenhouse gases threaten public health.
In other environmental news, Wired magazine looked at compressed-air energy storage plants, which used abandoned mines to "bottle the wind." Combining cheap wind energy and compressed-air storage could create "a potent new force in the electricity markets."
A Boston Globe story pointed out that how Massachusetts, the nation's eighth-most-forested state, resolves a conflict between logging interests and conservationists could serve as an example for other states.
Scientists say that the rediscovery in rural Australia of the yellow-spotted bell frog, thought to have been extinct for 30 years, is a reminder of the need to protect natural habitats so "future generations can enjoy the noise and color of our native animals."
And the Obama administration cited the need to address higher-priority species first in announcing that it will not place the imperiled sage grouse on the Endangered Species list. Also mentioned several times was the need for energy development on public and private lands in the West, where the sage grouse makes its home.
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