from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
On November 6, 2011, Bill McKibben arrived at Washington, D.C.'s, Lafayette Park to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, designed to carry oil 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. McKibben, a Vermont writer and environmentalist, had been one of 1,252 people arrested in front of the White House in August and September, protesting the same pipeline. He'd spent two nights in the district's Central Cell Block, and now was back with thousands more people and a bold new plan.
"We can't literally occupy the White House," McKibben had told his fellow protesters, "so the next best thing is to surround it." And that's what they would do, encircle the White House in a "giant hug" to remind President Obama of his campaign promise to "end the tyranny of oil." McKibben wasn't sure how many people he would need to "hug" the White House, though, and was worried that he wouldn't have enough.
It turns out he had plenty. At least 12,000, actually, making it the largest protest ever for an environmental cause outside the White House. The protesters circled the White House several times and in some places stood five deep. Speaking to the crowd, McKibben seemed pleasantly surprised that so many people had actually showed up.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Oscar Pistorius trains inside a converted garage at the home of his personal trainer, a former professional rugby player. Iron pull-up bars and a variety of ropes and pulleys are bolted to brick walls. Free weights are lined up on the floor, along with hammered-together wooden boxes that serve as platforms for step-ups and standing jumps. Some of the equipment is clamped to an exterior wall of the garage, opposite an uncovered patio; when it rains, athletes just carry on and get soaked...
I visited with Pistorius last month in Pretoria, South Africa, where he was born 25 years ago without a fibula in either of his legs. (The fibula runs between the knee and ankle, beside the tibia.) His parents yielded to doctors' recommendations that his lower legs should be amputated, and at 11 months, they were cut off just below the knee. At 13 months, he was fitted with prostheses. At 17 months, he was walking.
Now he is among the top-ranked 400-meter runners in the world and a favorite to qualify for the 2012 London Olympics this summer. If he achieves this goal, he will be the first person without intact biological legs to compete in an Olympic running event. If he runs for South Africa in the 4-by-400-meter relay--and if Usain Bolt, the world-record holder in the 100- and 200-meter dashes does the same for Jamaica, as he hopes to--the finals of that event could be the marquee moment of the Summer Games.
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from Wired Science
Deep in a pristine Borneo rainforest, researchers have found an endangered species of monkey recently feared to be extinct.
Surveys in the late 1970s spotted the monkey, called Miller's grizzled langur, in Borneo's easternmost national forest. Three decades later, all but 5 percent of the habitat had been destroyed by logging, agricultural encroachment, coal mining and fire.
As late as 2011, many researchers feared the langur was extinct. One place they hadn't searched intensively, however, was Wehea--a rainforest preserve 90 miles west of the langur's traditional territory. Armed with camera traps and some luck, a survey team accidentally captured the first images of grizzled langurs in years.
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from the Economist
One sure giveaway of quack medicine is the claim that a product can treat any ailment. There are, sadly, no panaceas. But some things come close, and exercise is one of them. As doctors never tire of reminding people, exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection.
How it does so, however, remains surprisingly mysterious. But a paper just published in Nature by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre and her colleagues sheds some light on the matter.
Dr. Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for "self-eating," is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Proposed changes in the definition of autism would sharply reduce the skyrocketing rate at which the disorder is diagnosed and might make it harder for many people who would no longer meet the criteria to get health, educational and social services, a new analysis suggests.
The definition is now being reassessed by an expert panel appointed by the American Psychiatric Association, which is completing work on the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the first major revision in 17 years. The D.S.M., as the manual is known, is the standard reference for mental disorders, driving research, treatment and insurance decisions. Most experts expect that the new manual will narrow the criteria for autism; the question is how sharply.
The results of the new analysis are preliminary, but they offer the most drastic estimate of how tightening the criteria for autism could affect the rate of diagnosis. For years, many experts have privately contended that the vagueness of the current criteria for autism and related disorders like Asperger syndrome was contributing to the increase in the rate of diagnoses--which has ballooned to one child in 100, according to some estimates.
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from Scientific American
Ripples in the fabric of space-time regularly zip across the universe from titanic cosmic events, such as the mergers of supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun. These so-called gravitational waves ought to be ubiquitous but faint, and no experiment has yet registered the disturbance caused by a passing wave.
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna was supposed to do just that. The spaceborne observatory, also known as LISA, was to be a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to detect gravitational waves and give scientists a whole new window through which to look on the universe and understand its underpinnings.
Cost overruns concerning the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope apparently helped doom the ambitious joint mission--NASA and ESA dissolved their decadelong LISA partnership in March 2011. Reports of its death may have been greatly exaggerated, however, as researchers are still fighting hard toward launch. Even scaled-back versions of the project might still have a good chance of making revolutionary discoveries, the scientists maintain.
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from ABC News
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- The world last year wasn't quite as warm as it has been for most of the past decade, government scientists said Thursday, but it continues a general trend of rising temperatures.
The average global temperature was 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit, making 2011 the 11th hottest on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. That's 0.9 degrees warmer than the 20th century average, officials said. In fact, it was hotter than every year last century except 1998.
One reason 2011 was milder than recent years was the La Niña cooling of the central Pacific Ocean. La Niñas occur every few years and generally cause global temperatures to drop, but this was the warmest La Niña year on record.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
The Obama administration denied a permit for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline from
Canada, leaving the door open for the builder to reapply this year but prolonging a bitter
political fight that has raged for months and energized each party's political base.
The State Department, responding to a 60-day deadline Congress imposed in late December, said
Wednesday that it did not "have sufficient time to obtain the information necessary to assess
whether the project, in its current state, is in the national interest."
For Republicans, the oil industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Keystone has become a
one-word campaign slogan: synonymous with the themes of regulatory overreach and environmental
activism they have tried to pin on President Obama. For environmentalists and many other
Democratic constituencies, the administration's willingness to deny the permit has become a test
of whether Obama has the resolve to stand up to big business.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Astronomers have discovered a small galaxy that is invisible to telescopes and may be
completely composed of dark matter, which reflects no light.
The newfound galaxy is incredibly distant and extremely small. It orbits as a satellite of a
larger galaxy. Though telescopes can't spot the dwarf galaxy, scientists detected its presence
through the tiny distortions its gravity causes to light that passes it by.
Scientists think dark matter, which may be made of some exotic particle that doesn't reflect
light, makes up about 98 percent of all matter in the universe. Yet it has never been detected
directly. Discovering dark objects like this tiny, distant galaxy could help researchers
understand better what dark matter is and how it affects regular matter around it.
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from Nature News
A decade ago, hot on the heels of whole-genome sequencing, the idea of three-dimensional
genome mapping was developed. Now, the highest-resolution 3-D map of the fruitfly genome has been
produced, an important step towards understanding whether, and how, the structure of the genome
affects its function.
Chromosomes and their genes are arranged in a specific way throughout the nucleus, and because
the nucleotide sequence of a genome alone cannot explain the functions of its genes, researchers
have started investigating how the spatial organization of genes might affect how they work.
"Conceptually, we're entering a new era," says study author Giacomo Cavalli, of the Institute
of Human Genetics in Montpellier, France. "Forty years ago we looked at single genes, now we know
we need to look at them in context--that's the 3-D folding of chromosomes."
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
When it comes to Earth's rotation, you might think geophysicists have pretty much everything
figured out. Not quite. In order to explain some variations in the way our planet spins, Earth's
mantle--the layer of hot, softened rock that lies between the crust and core--must conduct
electricity, an ability that the mantle as we know it shouldn't have. Now, a new study finds that
iron monoxide, which makes up 9% of the mantle, actually does conduct electricity just like a
metal, but only at temperatures and pressures found far beneath the surface.
Earth's spin isn't flawless. Geophysicists have discovered that the time it takes our planet
to complete one rotation--the length of a day--fluctuates slightly over the course of months or
years. They've also noticed extra swing in the predictable wobble of Earth's axis of rotation,
like the swaying of a spinning top. The variations are probably caused by the solid iron inner
core, liquid metal outer core, and rocky mantle rotating at slightly different rates.
Friction helps bring them into line, and the magnetic field of the outer core can pull on the
metal inner core. But to really fit the observations, the core should also exert its magnetic tug
on the mantle, says Bruce Buffett, an earth scientist at the University of California, Berkeley,
who was not involved in the new study. This means that a layer of the mantle must be able to
conduct electricity. But, he says, "the origin of the metallic layer remains an open
question."
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from Nature News
A Scottish intelligence study that began 80 years ago has borne new fruit. Researchers have
tracked down the study's surviving participants--who joined the study when they were 11 years
old--to estimate the role that our genes have in maintaining intelligence through to old age.
Researchers have long been interested in understanding how cognition changes with age, and why
these changes are more rapid in some people than in others. But, in the past, studies of
age-related intelligence changes were often performed when the subjects were already elderly.
Then, in the late 1990s, research psychologist Ian Deary of the University of Edinburgh, UK,
and his colleagues realized that Scotland had two data sets that would allow them to take such
studies a step further. In 1932 and 1947, officials had conducted a sweeping study of
intelligence among thousands of 11-year-old Scottish children. The data, Deary learned, had been
kept confidential for decades.
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from Science News
Carbon dioxide may be public enemy number one in the fight against global warming. But taking
aim at methane and soot has a better chance of keeping the planet cooler in the short run, a new
study finds.
Cutting the amounts of these two pollutants that are poured into the sky would diminish
warming by half a degree Celsius by 2050, researchers report in the Jan. 13 Science.
That could buy a little time for the world--slowing sea level rise, glacial melting and other
problems caused by rising temperatures. Targeting these agents of climate change would also
improve air quality, potentially preventing up to 4.7 million premature deaths every year, the
researchers calculate.
"These are really the low-hanging fruit both for mitigating climate change and improving air
quality," says study leader Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for
Space Studies in New York City.
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Biological systems are complicated. Though DNA may carry a simple sequence of base pairs, once
this information is transcribed into RNA and translated into proteins, this simple sequence can
give rise to numerous, often unpredictable convolutions. Contending with this unpredictability of
RNA and protein structure, synthetic biologists can struggle to design precise biological systems
with specific goals. But what if the system was constructed entirely of DNA?
In a study in Journal of Royal Society Interface published online last week, Harish
Chandran of Duke University and colleagues use DNA's simplicity and predictability to propose
possible DNA nanostructures that mimic polymerases or restriction enzymes to carry out a variety
of biological processes.
"It's a theoretically neat demonstration that some important reactions could be possible using
DNA's structure," said Chris Dwyer, a computer engineer at Duke University who designs DNA
nanostructures and was not involved with the research.
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from the Economist
Bullets and bombs are so 20th-century. The wars of the 21st will be dominated by ray guns.
That, at least, is the vision of a band of military technologists who are building weapons that
work by zapping the enemy's electronics, rather than blowing him to bits. The result could be
conflict that is less bloody, yet more effective, than what is now seen as conventional
battle.
Electromagnetic weapons, to give these ray guns their proper name, are inspired by the
cold-war idea of using the radio-frequency energy released by an atom bomb exploded high in the
atmosphere to burn out an enemy's electrical grid, telephone network and possibly even the wiring
of his motor vehicles, by inducing a sudden surge of electricity in the cables that run these
things.
That idea, fortunately, was never tried in earnest (though some tests were carried out). But,
by thinking smaller, military planners have developed weapons that use a similar principle,
without the need for a nuclear explosion. Instead, they create their electromagnetic pulses with
magnetrons, the microwave generators at the hearts of radar sets (and also of microwave ovens).
The result is kit that can take down enemy missiles and aircraft, stop tanks in their tracks and
bring speedboats to a halt. It can also scare away soldiers without actually killing them.
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from Scientific American
The Amazon rainforest is in flux, thanks to agricultural expansion and climate change. In
other words, humans have "become important agents of disturbance in the Amazon Basin," as an
international consortium of scientists wrote in a review of the state of the science on the
world's largest rainforest published in Nature on January 19. (Scientific
American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The dry season is growing longer in areas
where humans have been clearing the trees--as has water discharge from Amazon River tributaries
in those regions. Multiyear and more frequent severe droughts, like those in 2005 and 2010, are
killing trees that humans don't cut down as well as increasing the risks of more common fires
(both man-made and otherwise).
The trees are also growing fast--faster than expected for a "mature" rainforest--according to
a network of measurements.
The exact cause or causes of this accelerated growth--which means the Amazon's 5 million
square kilometers of trees are now sucking in and sequestering some 400 million metric tons of
carbon per year, or enough to offset the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Japan--"remains
unknown," the researchers wrote in the review.
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from BBC News Online
A decision on whether to abolish the leap second--the occasional, extra second added to the
world's time--has been deferred. Experts at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) were
unable to reach a consensus, so moved the matter to a meeting in 2015.
The US argued at the meeting that leap seconds were causing problems for communication and
navigation systems. But the UK said that the long-term consequences of losing it were great.
An ITU spokesman said that Canada, Japan, Italy, Mexico and France all supported the United
States' stance on losing the leap second, while Germany, like the UK, wanted the extra second to
stay.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Federal researchers say an infectious and lethal cold-loving fungus sweeping through parts of North America and Canada has killed millions more bats over the last five years than previously estimated.
The rapidly spreading fungus responsible for white-nose syndrome is now believed to have killed 5.7 million to 6.7 million bats, a count several times higher than earlier estimates, across 16 states as far west as Oklahoma.
The fungus, which scientists know as Geomyces destructans, seems to prefer the 25 species of hibernating bats. But each of the 45 species of bats in the United States and Canada may be susceptible, wildlife biologists say.
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from the Guardian (UK)
Have you heard of Futurity? How about The Conversation? In different ways, these sites and others are bypassing the traditional media model--cutting out the journalist middleman and letting researchers speak more directly to the public. In the case of Futurity, which is backed by a growing number of research-intensive universities, university press officers act as mediators with the site posting more-or-less edited "stories" (press releases) that are uncontaminated by any sordid contact with the grubby mitts of the reporting classes.
The Conversation, based in Melbourne, is a more interesting hybrid with hacks drafted in to commission and edit contributions from academics.
There's nothing wrong with these sites. As a critical friend of science, I regard anything that improves informed public debate about research to be a good thing. But if you browse them a little while you can't help but notice that they're, well, a little bit dull.
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from the Seattle Times
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- They came from Mars, not in peace, but in pieces. Scientists are confirming that 15 pounds of rock collected recently in Morocco fell to Earth from Mars during a meteorite shower last July.
This is only the fifth time in history scientists have chemically confirmed Martian meteorites that people witnessed falling. The fireball was spotted in the sky six months ago, but the rocks weren't discovered on the ground in North Africa until the end of December.
This is an important and unique opportunity for scientists trying to learn about Mars's potential for life. So far, no NASA or Russian spacecraft has returned bits of Mars, so the only samples scientists can examine are those that come here in a meteorite shower. Scientists and collectors are ecstatic, and already the rocks are fetching big bucks because they are among the rarest things on Earth--rarer even than gold. The biggest rock weighs over 2 pounds.
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from Nature News
Proteus Biomedical, a company based in Redwood City, California, announced on 13 January that it would be launching a "digital health product" in the United Kingdom in collaboration with the pharmacy chain Lloydspharmacy.
This product, called Helius, will include "sensor-enabled tablets" to monitor patients' medication use. Compliance with doctors' instructions has been identified as a problem area in medicine, especially when patients are prescribed multiple drugs that may need to be taken at different times.
"The most important and basic thing we can monitor is the actual physical use of the medicine," says Andrew Thompson, chief executive of Proteus. "We have tested the system in hundreds of patients in many different therapeutic areas. It's been tested in tuberculosis, in mental health, in heart failure, in hypertension and in diabetes."
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
After a 30-year, record-shattering rise, U.S. obesity rates appear to be stabilizing. New statistics cited in two papers report only a slight uptick since 2005--leaving public health experts tentatively optimistic that they may be gaining some ground in their efforts to slim down the nation.
Many obesity specialists say the new data, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are a sign that efforts to address the obesity problem--such as placing nutritional information on food packaging and revising school lunch menus--are beginning to have an effect in a country where two-thirds of adults and one-third of children and teens are overweight or obese.
"A good first step is to stop the increase, so I think this is very positive news," said James O. Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. "It may suggest our efforts are starting to make a difference. The bad news is we still have obesity rates that are just astronomical."
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Along with all the festivities surrounding the anniversary of explorer Robert Falcon Scott's reaching the South Pole on 17 January 1912, Antarctic researchers are at the edge of their seats waiting for news that will merit another celebration. The centennial coincides with an expected new landmark: This week, a Russian team drilling into Lake Vostok in the center of the Antarctic continent is likely to break through the ice to water. It will be the first time that a subglacial lake has been breached. These modern-day explorers hope to discover whether Vostok, which at 5000 km3 is the third largest lake on the planet, is teeming with hidden, cold-loving life that could have evolved separately from the rest of the world for hundreds of thousands of years.
Microbiologist John Priscu of Montana State University in Bozeman, who was one of the original planners of the Vostok mission, has been getting regular updates from the Russian team. As of 13 January, they had reached a depth of 3737.5 meters, about 15 meters away from liquid water. With three teams drilling around the clock and making progress at an average of 2 meters per day, Priscu says they're on track to break through within the week. "This is an epic event. I really wish them luck," he says. "I wish I was out there with them."
After drilling 3720 meters last February, time ran out for the team and the project was stymied just 29.5 meters from its destination as winter set in. Over the summer, they modified their drill bits and now the team is back at work with plenty of time to spare. They had left the large hole filled with antifreeze, so it was ready and waiting for them. It will remain open for years to come, Priscu says, potentially allowing other teams to sample the waters in the future.
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from Science News
When adults mouth off, babies learn by watching. As infants start babbling at around age 6 months in preparation for talking, they shift from focusing on adults' eyes to paying special attention to speakers' mouths, a new study finds.
As tots become able to blurt out words and simple statements at age 1, they go back to concentrating on adults' eyes, say psychologist David Lewkowicz and psychology graduate student Amy Hansen-Tift, both of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Whereas babbling babies match up what adults say with how they say it, budding talkers can afford to look for communication signals in a speakers' eyes, the scientists propose in a paper published online January 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Babies start to lip-read when they learn to babble," Lewkowicz says. "At that time, infants respond to what they see and hear as a unified stimulus."
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from National Geographic News
Shale gas has transformed the U.S. energy landscape in the past several years--but it may crowd out renewable energy and other ways of cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, a new study warns.
A team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology used economic modeling to show that new abundant natural gas is likely to have a far more complex impact on the energy scene than is generally assumed. If climate policy continues to play out in the United States with a relatively weak set of measures to control emissions, the new gas source will lead to lower gas and electricity prices, and total energy use will be higher in 2050.
Absent the shale supply, the United States could have expected to see GHG emissions 2 percent below 2005 levels by 2050 under this relatively weak policy. But the lower gas prices under the current shale gas outlook will stimulate economic growth, leading GHG emissions to increase by 13 percent over 2005. And the shale gas will retard the growth of renewable energy's share of electricity, and push off the development of carbon capture and storage technology, needed to meet more ambitious policy targets, by as long as two decades.
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from Smithsonian
Paleoanthropologists agree that modern humans evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago, yet the fossil evidence for the earliest examples of Homo sapiens is scarce.
One problem is the difficulty in recognizing true modern humans in the fossil record: At this time, many of the fossils thought to be early members of our species possess a mix of modern and primitive traits. For some paleoanthropologists, it means our species once had a greater range of physical variation than we do today.
For others, it means more than one species of Homo may have lived in Africa at this time, sharing some traits in common. Despite the challenges of identifying early humans, there are several candidates for the earliest known members of our species. Here's a look at some of the top contenders.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
Lead can be converted into pyromorphite, the most stable mineral form of the metal, by some fungi species, according to a study published online this week (January 12) in Current Biology. The findings add to work highlighting the important role of microbes in geological processes and suggest a possible avenue for bioremediation of lead polluted soils.
"This is the first example of fungi acting to mineralize lead," said Silvia Perotto, a plant biologist at the University of Torino, who did not participate in the study.
It's common knowledge that lead is extremely toxic. Implicated most famously in neurodevelopmental problems in early childhood, the metal has been phased out of products such as household paint. But there are still sources of lead contamination, such as mining operations and shooting ranges, where bullets can impregnate the soil. Once in the soil, lead can leach into the water supply and enter the food chain, Perotto explained.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.
Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey. Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide, Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labeled "C. Darwin Esq."
"It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin's signature on the slide," the paleontologist said, adding he soon realized it was a "quite important and overlooked" specimen.
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from BBC News Online
Europe's Herschel space telescope has produced a majestic new version of a classic astronomical target--the Eagle Nebula (also called M16). This dense region of gas and dust some 6,500 light-years from Earth hosts copious numbers of bright new stars.
Radiation from these objects is sculpting the clouds of gas and dust, producing in places great columns and curtains of material. The picture is being featured on the BBC's Stargazing Live series.
Brian Cox and Dara O'Briain are presenting the popular programmes this week from Jodrell Bank radio observatory in Cheshire. Look just below the centre of the image and you will see the columns that were famously dubbed the "Pillars of Creation" when they were pictured by the Hubble telescope in 1995. But Herschel and Hubble see distinctly different things in the nebula.
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