from BBC News Online
One of Europe's great astronomical ventures is coming to a close. The Planck telescope, put in space to map the oldest light in the Universe, has run out of the helium coolant that keeps it in full working order.
Engineers expect the observatory's systems to start to warm from their ultra-frigid state in the coming days, blinding one of its two instruments.
Nonetheless, Planck has gathered more than enough data since its launch in 2009 to complete its mission goals.
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from New Scientist
Carbon dioxide in the ocean acts like alcohol on fish, leaving them less able to judge risks and prone to losing their senses. The intoxication adds to the threats that global warming and ocean acidification pose to marine ecosystems.
Around 2.3 billion tonnes of human-caused CO2 emissions dissolve into the world's oceans every year, turning the water more acidic.
Philip Munday and colleagues at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, have previously found that if you put reef fish into water with more CO2 than normal in it--similar to the levels expected in oceans by the end of the century--they become bolder and attracted to odours they would normally avoid, including those of predators and unfavourable habitats.
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from Nature News
Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease. Although reports call this latest form a "new entity," researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem.
The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 2007 and Iran in 2009.
However, data on the disease, dubbed totally drug-resistant tuberculosis (TDR-TB), are sparse, and official accounts may not provide an adequate indication of its prevalence. Giovanni Migliori, director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases in Tradate, Italy, suggests that TDR-TB is a deadlier iteration of the highly resistant forms of TB that have been increasingly reported over the past decade. "Totally resistant TB is not new at all," he says.
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from Miller-McCune
If you're a scientist who wants to study animals in their natural habitats, the process is simple enough: get a pair of binoculars, find a shady spot to sit, and watch the critters.
But what if your quarry lives deep in the ocean--and is so tiny it's barely visible?
Jules Jaffe, a research oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thinks he's got a solution. With the help of a few million dollars in National Science Foundation funding, Jaffe is developing an army of small, networked, underwater robots that will drift passively along with the ocean's currents and unobtrusively keep tabs on other things doing likewise, from algae to fish larvae to globules of spilled oil. The 'bots will relay data on what's happening around them to human beings on the surface, providing unprecedented insight into how tiny organisms and objects travel in the complex welter of sub-surface ocean currents.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Gale-force winds were whipping whitecaps and spray across Mono Lake when Robert Hanna spotted a distant hiker. It was a crummy day to chat up a stranger in a state park, but Hanna was upbeat, as usual. He stepped hurriedly along a trail to introduce himself. "Hello there!" Hanna said, flashing a toothy smile. "Do you know that California wants to shut this place down? Would you like to sign our petition to keep it open?"
"Yeah, I guess so," the man said. "Wow! That's great," Hanna said, reaching to shake his hand. "Every signature counts."
The hiker signed and traipsed off, not realizing he'd just shaken hands with the great-great-grandson of John Muir. Less than a year ago, Hanna was leading a fairly ordinary life as a corporate manager with a wife and two children. Not even his closest friends knew of his relationship with the man who founded the Sierra Club and helped establish Yosemite and Sequoia national parks.
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from the Wall Street Journal
Astronomers said Wednesday that each of the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way probably has at least one companion planet, on average, adding credence to the notion that planets are as common in the cosmos as grains of sand on the beach.
The finding underscores a fundamental shift in scientific understanding of planetary systems in the cosmos. Our own solar system, considered unique not so long ago, turns out to be just one among billions. Until April 1994, there was no other known solar system, but the discoveries have slowly mounted since then: The Kepler space telescope, designed for planet-hunting, now finds them routinely.
"Planets are the rule rather than the exception," said lead astronomer Arnaud Cassan at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris. He led an international team of 42 scientists who spent six years surveying millions of stars at the heart of the Milky Way, in the most comprehensive effort yet to gauge the prevalence of planets in the galaxy.
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from BBC News Online
A frog species that appears to be the world's smallest has been discovered in Papua New Guinea by a U.S.-based team. At 7mm (0.27 inches) long, Paedophryne amauensis may be the world's smallest vertebrate--the group that includes mammals, fish, birds and amphibians. The researchers also found a slightly larger relative, Paedophryne swiftorum.
Presenting the new species in PLoS One journal, they suggest the frogs' tiny scale is linked to their habitat, in leaf litter on the forest floor. Finding the frogs was not an easy assignment.
They are well camouflaged among leaves on the forest floor, and have evolved calls resembling those of insects, making them hard to spot.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
The first wild gray wolf to enter California in almost a century has moved out of the farmlands of Siskiyou County and is now roaming the forests of eastern Shasta County looking for a mate that he may never find.
The lone male wolf, known as OR7, has traveled more than 100 miles into California through sagebrush and juniper, past ranching and irrigated agriculture into a forested area with better habitat, cover and more wild prey, state wildlife officials said.
The 2-year-old wolf, which is wearing a GPS collar that transmits his location to researchers every six hours, undoubtedly wants to start his own pack, but the nearest female is about 300 miles away in Oregon. The 90- to 100-pound predator has nevertheless created a furor throughout the state, with environmentalists packing binoculars and ranchers cocking hunting rifles.
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from the Guardian (UK)
He may have been On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but James Bond and the power-hungry villains he saved the world from did no service to the image of nuclear power, a leading scientist has claimed.
The film version of Dr. No, first screened 50 years ago and still a TV favourite, and other Bond movies have helped frame public perceptions of the hazards of nuclear power along with accidents such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, according to David Phillips, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
He feared the portrait of the evil megalomaniac and his nuclear reactor hidden away on a Caribbean island contributed to the "entirely negative" and "remorselessly grim" perception of the industry as a force for evil. Phillips told the BBC that when nuclear power was discussed "it is not at all surprising that the public at home and abroad are sceptical."
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
State coastal regulators Wednesday criticized and fined a property owner for unearthing artifacts at a 9,000-year-old Native American village site near the Bolsa Chica wetlands in Huntington Beach.
In a settlement with the California Coastal Commission, the Goodell Family Trust agreed to pay a $430,000 penalty, rebury artifacts and restore areas disturbed when archaeologists dug a series of pits on the family-owned land on the Bolsa Chica Mesa in 2010.
The work was conducted without the state's authorization and without a Native American monitor present, a requirement under state law. State officials said the excavation damaged prehistoric shells, animal bones, scorched rocks and other cultural artifacts that might help determine the boundaries of the 9,000-year-old village and burial site on the mesa, above one of the state's most treasured coastal wetlands.
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from the Seattle Times
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- The most detailed data yet on emissions of heat-trapping gases show that U.S. power plants are responsible for the bulk of the pollution blamed for global warming.
Power plants released 72 percent of the greenhouse gases reported to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for 2010, according to information released Wednesday that was the first catalog of global-warming pollution by facility. The data include more than 6,700 of the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gases, or about 80 percent of U.S. emissions.
According to an Associated Press analysis, 20 mostly coal-fired power plants in 15 states account for the top-releasing facilities. The largest greenhouse-gas polluter in the nation in 2010, according to the EPA's data, was the Scherer power plant in Juliette, Ga., owned by Southern Co. That coal-fired power plant reported releasing nearly 23 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, in 2010.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
It's been said that if you truly want to learn about nature, you must speak the language. That language is physics, as University of California San Diego researchers learned while making a discovery about the essence of rainbows.
Computer scientist Henrik Wann Jensen, whose work in graphics earned him an Academy Award, teamed with student Iman Sadeghi to create simulations of the full spectrum of rainbows. They're trying to better depict rainbows in animated movies and video games. Things were going fine until they realized that not all types of rainbows arise from circular drops of water, as commonly believed. They were unable to correctly replicate "twinned" systems, or rainbows that have an arm that splits off from the main bow.
It's well known that rainbows are caused by the way that sunlight is bent and redirected inside of a raindrop. The assumption was that pretty much all raindrops handled sunlight in the same way. But that's not true.
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from the Baltimore Sun
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) -- About one third of breast cancer survivors experience fatigue that can affect their quality of life, but a small new study finds that doing yoga might help restore some lost vitality.
After three months of twice-weekly yoga classes, a group of breast cancer survivors in California reported significantly diminished fatigue and increased "vigor." A control group of women who took classes in post-cancer health issues, but didn't do yoga, had no changes in their fatigue or depression levels.
Dr. Maira Campos, a research scholar at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, said the findings echo similar results from past studies that looked at yoga and cancer patients. Persistent fatigue lasting years after cancer treatment is a common problem whose origin is unknown, and for which there are no validated treatments.
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from Nature News
Yang Wei has an easy smile and a carefree, even distracted, air--but he takes such a solemn approach to life that his wife sometimes tells him to relax. "I take everything seriously," he says.
The former materials scientist certainly took it seriously when, two years after he became president of Zhejiang University (ZJU) in Hangzhou, China, he faced a case of scientific misconduct that became a turning point for his presidency. In early October 2008, the editor of the International Journal of Cardiology discovered that figures in a manuscript by He Haibo, a scientist researching traditional Chinese medicine who had been hired by the ZJU only months before, were suspiciously similar to those in an article that He had published elsewhere. Confronted, He quickly owned up, submitting a 12-page confession to Yang on 26 October.
But the case, which eventually led to the retraction of eight papers, spiralled into an international media catastrophe for the ZJU, one of China's oldest and largest universities, as well as one of the most successful in publishing science. Articles attacked the laxity of a system that gave leadership roles to the likes of Li Lianda, dean of the department of pharmaceutical sciences and He's supervisor, who was largely absent from the lab and unfamiliar with the work, but was last author on some of He's papers. "There was plagiarism, fabrication and falsification. It was a showcase of every kind of problem," says Yang.
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from BBC News Online
The largest distant galaxy cluster has been spotted by astronomers using a telescope in Chile. Galaxy clusters are the largest stable structures in our Universe.
Seven billion light years away and with two million billion times the mass of our Sun, the cluster was nicknamed "El Gordo"--"the Fat One" in Spanish.
Astronomers reporting at the 219th American Astronomical Society meeting said El Gordo was currently undergoing a merger and growing even larger.
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from USA Today
NEW YORK -- A biotechnology company announced it has developed a machine to decode a person's DNA in a day for $1,000, a long-sought price goal for making a person's genome useful for medical care.
Life Technologies Corp. said Tuesday it was taking orders for the technology, which it expects to deliver in about a year. The Carlsbad, Calif., company said three major research institutions had already signed up for the $149,000 machine: the Baylor College of Medicine, the Yale School of Medicine and the Broad Institute of Cambridge, Mass.
The machine is a sequencer, meaning that it lets scientists identify the sequence of the 3 billion chemical building blocks that make up a person's DNA. Since the first sequencing of the basic human genome was announced at the White House in 2000, the costs of sequencing DNA have steadily tumbled.
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from BBC News Online
Scientists at Glasgow University say they have found a key genetic indicator of how long an individual will live. They say the lengths of tiny pieces of DNA called telomeres indicate whether a young creature is likely to live long into old age.
But before you rush out to get your telomeres stretched--were such a process possible--it is worth pointing out that the creatures they have been working with are not humans but altogether shorter-lived zebra finches.
Everything that is made up of living cells contains chromosomes: the genetic code that makes us what we are. At the ends of each chromosome lie the telomeres. They have been likened to the caps on the ends of shoelaces--they stop things from unravelling.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
In 1669, Nicolas Steno rewrote the way people thought about the earth. And today, more than 300 years later, Google excavated his name from the history books for a special Google doodle tribute to the late (and perhaps first) geologist.
Steno was a true Renaissance man. He lived back when scientists didn't stick to a single discipline. He dabbled in medicine, shark dentistry, ancient beasts, and ultimately kick-started the study of geology. Steno simply followed his curiosity, no matter where it led.
Our story starts in Florence, Italy, where Steno, then a budding physician, settled down after years of studying throughout western Europe. He had already challenged several long-held scientific assumptions, researched the changing shapes of muscles, and discovered an unknown body part in the heads of mammals. (He named it after himself, the "ductus stenonianus.")
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from Science News
Heart attacks and strokes wreak havoc throughout Europe but often travel incognito. A majority of people in nine European countries recognize few or no warning signs of these potentially deadly conditions, a new study finds.
About half of Europeans don't realize that it's best to call an ambulance when someone displays stroke symptoms, say psychologist Jutta Mata of the University of Basel in Switzerland and her colleagues. People with high blood pressure or who are obese--two key risk factors for heart attack and stroke--knew no more about warning signs or how to respond to strokes than anyone else, the researchers will report in Health Expectations.
"Across all nine countries, people knew surprisingly little about heart attack and stroke symptoms and how to react to them," Mata says.
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from NPR
Anyone who lives with a cat knows that fruits and vegetables do not top the feline food chart. So it's a surprise to hear that some cats do crave mushrooms.
This tale starts with Ellen Jacobson, an amateur mushroom hunter in Colorado. As she was cooking up a bolete mushroom, her cat Cashew started brushing against her legs. She put some of the mushrooms in a bowl, and Cashew gobbled them up. "He didn't like them raw," she told The Salt. "He only liked them cooked."
She was puzzled as to why a meat-loving cat would love fungi. But she soon found that other peoples' cats wanted mushrooms, too. That oddity is a clue to how the taste preferences of humans and animals evolved, based on the foods we need to survive.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
None of us would be here today if, billions of years ago, a tiny, single-celled organism hadn't started using oxygen to make a living. Researchers don't know exactly when this happened, or why, but a team of scientists has come closer than ever before to finding out. They've identified the earliest known example of aerobic metabolism, the process of using oxygen as fuel. The discovery may even provide clues as to where the oxygen came from in the first place.
To travel so far back in time, evolutionary bioinformaticist Gustavo Caetano-Anollés of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, along with colleagues in China and South Korea, did a bit of molecular sleuthing.
They scoured published genomes from all groups of organisms--although they didn't include viruses in this study--focusing on pieces of proteins known as domains. These pieces have their own distinguishing shapes that provide clues to the protein's function and can be categorized based on various characteristics. Just like a Victorian house has certain features that set it apart from a Tudor mansion, researchers can tell the difference between different domains based on their shape.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Opponents malign it as "toilet to tap." But a new National Research Council report says that reclaimed water can contribute a growing portion of the nation's drinking water supplies and be as safe as conventional sources.
The assessment is especially relevant to Southern California, which has been a pioneer in recharging local aquifers with treated wastewater but still sends most of its runoff and treated water to the Pacific Ocean. A decade ago, public outcry and electoral politics thwarted a Los Angeles plan to partially replenish San Fernando Valley groundwater with recycled supplies.
Not to worry, concluded the scientific panel that wrote the report: "We can really say that there is no difference from the risk standpoint," said Jorg Drewes, a water reuse expert who was on the panel. "You can have a supply that is as safe as the current drinking water supplies."
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from Science News
People who smoke marijuana for recreational or medical purposes might now breathe easier. Scientists report in the Jan. 11 Journal of the American Medical Association that occasional cannabis users don't experience any loss of lung function.
In a 20-year study that included lung tests and a specific accounting of marijuana use, scientists also found that people who smoke more than 20 times a month and accumulate many years of use might have a slight drop in lung capacity over time. But the researchers are unsure of that finding since it was based on scant data.
The study is the longest ever conducted that measures cannabis smoking and lung function, uses standard lung measurements and includes thousands of volunteers, says Donald Tashkin, a pulmonologist at UCLA who wasn't involved in the study. "That makes it important," he says.
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from New Scientist
The long campaign to eradicate polio faces a crucial turning point this month. On 16 January, the 34 countries represented on the World Health Organization's executive board will be asked to ditch the vaccine that has cut polio cases by 99 per cent since 1988. The aim: to prevent the vaccine itself defeating the whole effort.
Scientists have been warning since 2000 that the endgame in tackling polio--now endemic only in south Asia and Nigeria--would be tricky. We have been fighting the disease with trivalent oral polio vaccine (tOPV), containing weakened viruses from each of the three polio strains. The idea has been to stop the wild virus circulating worldwide, at which point everyone in the world stops using the vaccine at the same time.
But vaccine viruses persist in the environment and in a few people who are chronically infected. These viruses can regain the ability to cause polio, as an outbreak in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 2000 showed. As vaccination is withheld from more and more newborn children, those viruses could return.
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from Wired Science
Instant messages are ubiquitous and convenient, but something primal may be lost in translation.
When girls stressed by a test talked with their moms, stress hormones dropped and comfort hormones rose. When they used IM, nothing happened. By the study's neurophysiological measures, IM was barely different than not communicating at all.
"IM isn't really a substitute for in-person or over-the-phone interaction in terms of the hormones released," said anthropologist Leslie Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin, lead author of the new study. "People still need to interact the way we evolved to interact."
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from ScienceInsider
A report from the National Research Council (NRC) released today (January 5) points out that a draft federal plan to coordinate research into how to respond to climate change is unlikely to succeed without added resources and new ways to manage the program.
The NRC committee--chaired by climate modeler Warren Washington of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado--commends the 21-year-old U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) for proposing to broaden its scope beyond coordinating basic climate research. Its new draft strategic plan includes research that would support society's efforts to reduce the magnitude of greenhouse warming and other climate change--and to adapt to any unavoidable change....
The rub comes in how to support and manage such ambitions. "The USGCRP and its [13] member agencies and programs are lacking in capacity to achieve the proposed broadening of the Program," says the report. "Member agencies and programs have insufficient expertise" to integrate the social and ecological sciences into the program or to develop the capacity to support decision makers.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Companies that collect used cooking grease from restaurants across the country have turned to all forms of sleuthing in recent years. Private investigators. Surveillance cameras. Rigged alarms. And still, containers full of used fryer oil are slipping through their fingers.
For years, restaurants had to pay companies to haul away the old grease, which was used mostly in animal feed. Some gave it away to local gearheads, who used it to make biodiesel for their converted car engines.
But with a demand for biofuel rising, fryer oil now trades on a booming commodities market, commanding around 40 cents per pound, about four times what it sold for 10 years ago. That makes it a tempting target for thieves, especially in hard times.
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from the Guardian (UK)
Whether we want to remember our last birthday party, our first love, a shopping list or where in the world we put those reading glasses, memory is indispensable. That each and every one of us regularly depends on it is what makes memory the captivating research area it is.
There are many aspects of memory that we and other researchers study in the laboratory, but as valuable and important as lab research is, nothing beats taking it into the real world and sharing it with real people--which is why we are delighted to be part of this memory project with the Guardian. Your engagement with our research is a great opportunity not just to peek into the world of science but to enter and actively shape the course of our research. For us, it is a chance to share our interest in a topic that concerns everyone.
This memory study provides an insight into the kinds of experiments we run in our lab. It will give you the chance to participate in and learn about a typical laboratory memory experiment and its impact on advancing our knowledge about the topic. The results will contribute a large amount of useful data to our research.
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from Miller-McCune
Headaches. Insomnia. Anxiety. American medicine cabinets are packed with remedies for these common maladies. And up to 40 percent of them are manufactured overseas (along with 80 percent of active ingredients for pharmaceuticals). But a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that in fiscal year 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration visited just 11 percent of the 3,765 foreign factories it is responsible for inspecting--compared to 40 percent of domestic factories. In 2008, the GAO found that the FDA took two to five years to follow up with foreign plants it cited for safety issues--if it followed up at all.
In 2008, 30 products made by a single Indian company were banned by the FDA, and a tainted batch of the blood thinner heparin from one of many hundreds of Chinese pharmaceutical plants was linked to 81 U.S. deaths.
The good news is, the low rate of inspection should soon change: Under an agreement reached in August between the generic drug industry and the FDA (expected to win congressional approval in 2012) the generic drug companies would pay $299 million in annual fees to help the FDA inspect their overseas operations. Inspections would happen once every two years, the same rate as at U.S. facilities.
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from ABC News
Scientists have found new evidence that grief might actually break your heart. A new study shows that people grieving the death of a close loved one could have a heart attack risk that is 20 times higher than normal.
When researchers interviewed nearly 2,000 people in the early 1990s who were hospitalized after a heart attack, 270 reported that they had experienced the death of a parent, sibling, spouse, friend or other loved one in the six months before their heart attack; almost 20 people had experienced a loss within the past day.
The authors calculated the risk of a heart attack as 21 times higher in the first day after the loss of a loved one, and six times higher during the week after such a loss. The study was published yesterday in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.
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