from IEEE Spectrum
Once a year, three officials bearing three separate keys meet at the bottom of a stairwell at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, in Sèvres, France. There they unlock a vault to check that a plum-size cylinder of platinum iridium alloy is exactly where it should be. Then they close the vault and leave the cylinder to sit alone, under three concentric bell jars, as it has for most of the past 125 years.
This lonely cylinder is the International Prototype of the Kilogram, known colloquially as Le Grand K, and it is the last remaining physical object to define a unit of measure. It's a quaint throwback to a time when people compared the ocean's depth to the span of a man's outstretched arms and the second to a tiny fraction of a year.
Now we fix our rulers to the speed of light and our clocks to a spectral property of cesium. By thus linking measurement to fundamental and unchanging phenomena, scientists have paved the way for GPS satellites, gravity-wave detectors, and many other precision technologies that simply wouldn't have been possible before.
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from BBC News Online
What may be the earliest direct example of insect pollination has been identified by scientists. The evidence is seen in 100-million-year-old amber blocks from Spain that include tiny invertebrates whose bodies are coated with pollen grains.
The role of insects in fertilising plants was one of the great steps in the evolution of life on Earth. Today, most flowering plants, including many food crops, could not reproduce without the insect transport of pollen.
The discovery is reported in the American journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Science (PNAS). Amber, the fossilised remnant of tree resin, is a wonderful preservation medium, freezing in time the exquisite detail of insects that got caught up in the once sticky mess. The translucent pieces described by the researchers in their PNAS paper come from the Basque Country.
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from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Researchers at Duke University have given a powerful new demonstration of the gene sequencing technique used successfully in Wisconsin to diagnose and treat Nic Volker, the young boy from Monona who suffered from a never-before-seen intestinal disease.
The team at Duke worked for more than two years, sequencing a dozen children with different unknown diseases. By sequencing all of their genes, researchers were able to reach a likely genetic diagnosis for half of the children, according to work detailed in the Journal of Medical Genetics.
The Duke study bolsters what Nic's doctors at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Children's Hospital of Wisconsin have been saying since his landmark case in 2009: The sequencing of our genetic script can solve the riddle of some unknown illnesses, giving hope to families who have spent thousands of dollars and sought numerous medical opinions without success.
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from Nature News
A field trial for a novel UK geoengineering experiment has been cancelled amid questions about a pre-existing patent application for some of the technology involved.
The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project is a collaboration among several UK universities and Cambridge-based Marshall Aerospace to investigate the possibility of spraying particles into the stratosphere to mitigate global warming. Such particles could mimic the cooling produced by large volcanic eruptions, by reflecting sunlight before it reaches the Earth's surface.
But the field-trial arm of SPICE--which would have seen around 150 litres of water pumped into the atmosphere via a 1-kilometre hosepipe attached to a balloon--has now been abandoned.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
BOCA SANIBENI, Peru -- Along the murky waters of the Ene River, in a remote jungle valley on the verdant eastern slopes of the Andes, the rhythmic humming of an outboard motor draws the stares of curious Ashaninka children.
With encroachment from settlers and speculators, and after a devastating war against Shining Path rebels a decade ago, the indigenous Ashaninkas' hold is precarious. And they are now facing a new peril, the proposed 2,200-megawatt Pakitzapango hydroelectric dam, which would flood much of the Ene River valley.
The project is part of a proposal for as many as five dams that under a 2010 energy agreement would generate more than 6,500 megawatts, primarily for export to neighboring Brazil. The dams would displace thousands of people in the process.
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from Discovery News
Very little is known about giant manta rays, the world's largest of the ray species reaching up to 25 feet wide. Now, in the first study using satellite tracking of the creatures, scientists have teased out a few secrets, including that the beasts travel a lot.
The new study tracked six manta rays--four females, one male and a juvenile (undetermined sex)--for 13 days off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.
"The satellite tag data revealed that some of the rays traveled more than 1,100 kilometers (621 miles) during the study period," study team member Matthew Witt, of the University of Exeter's Environment and Sustainability Institute, said in a statement. "The rays spent most of their time traversing coastal areas plentiful in zooplankton and fish eggs from spawning events."
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from NPR
Archaeologists working in one of the most impenetrable rain forests in Guatemala have stumbled on a remarkable discovery: a room full of wall paintings and numerical calculations.
The buried room apparently was a workshop used by scribes or astronomers working for a Mayan king. The paintings depict the king and members of his court. The numbers mark important periods in the Maya calendar.
The room is about the size of a walk-in closet. It's part of the buried Maya city of Xultun. There are painted murals on three walls, depicting a resplendent king wearing a feather and four other figures. Maya paintings this old--the site dates to the ninth century--are very rare; tropical weather usually destroys them.
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from Scientific American
About one-quarter of seafood sold as `sustainable' is not meeting that goal, according to an analysis taking aim at the two leading bodies that grant this valuable label to fisheries.
In an online paper in Marine Policy and at a conference this week in Edinburgh, UK, fisheries biologist Rainer Froese of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, launched a stinging attack on the schemes by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the marine-conservation organization Friend of the Sea (FOS) to certify fisheries as sustainable. Such schemes aim to help consumers and retailers to support fisheries that are sustainable and not exploited by overfishing.
Both organizations approve certain stocks of fish and seafood to carry their logo, designating these species as environmentally friendly, and both say that their certification processes are scientifically credible. The presence of the logos can result in higher prices and increased consumer demand for food products that carry them.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Thanks to a new method of modeling earthquakes, scientists may now understand why the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas Fault--a carefully studied region known for producing moderate temblors every 20 years or so--has been behaving unexpectedly since around the time Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
Taking data collected by sensors on the ground and in space and combining them with observations from laboratory physics experiments, Caltech researchers conducted a computer simulation of tectonic events at Parkfield and discovered that a series of small quakes there may have staved off a larger shaker that geologists predicted would occur in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Instead, the fault produced a magnitude 6.0 quake in 2004, more than a decade behind schedule.
Someday, exercises like this could help scientists make predictions about the worst-case scenario for different spots along a fault line, said Nadia Lapusta, coauthor of a study about the research published Thursday in the journal Science.
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from Nature News
One of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics is also among the easiest to grasp. The weak Goldbach conjecture says that you can break up any odd number into the sum of, at most, three prime numbers (numbers that cannot be evenly divided by any other number except themselves or 1).
Mathematician Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now inched toward a proof. He has shown that one can write odd numbers as sums of, at most, five primes--and he is hopeful about getting that down to three. Besides the sheer thrill of cracking a nut that has eluded some of the best minds in mathematics for nearly three centuries, Tao says, reaching that coveted goal might lead mathematicians to ideas useful in real life--for example, for encrypting sensitive data.
The weak Goldbach conjecture was proposed by 18th-century mathematician Christian Goldbach. It is the sibling of a statement concerning even numbers, named the strong Goldbach conjecture but actually made by his colleague, mathematician Leonhard Euler. The strong version says that every even number larger than 2 is the sum of two primes. As its name implies, the weak version would follow if the strong were true: to write an odd number as a sum of three primes, it would be sufficient to subtract 3 from it and apply the strong version to the resulting even number.
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from BBC News Online
The violent rise and collapse of an underwater volcano in the Pacific Ocean is captured in startling clarity for the first time.
Researchers studying the Monowai volcano, near Tonga, recorded huge changes in height in just two weeks. The images, gathered by sonar from a research ship, shed new light on the turbulent fate of submarine mountains.
Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the findings were made during a seabed survey last year. Lead author Tony Watts of Oxford University told the BBC that the revelation was "a wake-up call that the sea-floor may be more dynamic than we previously thought."
"I've spent my career studying the seabed and have generally thought it pretty stable so it's stunning to see so much change in such a short space of time."
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from the Guardian (UK)
One of the least expected successes in London's West End last week was Stella by the Take the Space theatre company. The three actors wore their own clothes, hadn't learned any lines, and there were only about 20 people in the invited audience who met in a circular room high above the Aldwych.
Moreover, the show was hardly a barrel of laughs, being about female astronomers--notably the tiny, forgotten, angry 18th century Caroline Herschel. But I have to admit, the audience choked on the bared emotions and the wonderment of people seeing deep space for the first time.
This was a performed, one-off reading of Stella, a new play by Irish actor-playwright Siobhán Nicholas, who appears to be inventing a new theatre form that we might call "revelatory early science." After their show about 18th century Royal Society chair and diarist Samuel Pepys, she and Chris Barnes--a former National Theatre actor and Barnum and Bailey circus clown--have been touring a play about "England's Leonardo": Robert Hooke.
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from Nature News
Shortly after the Second World War, the Swedish government conducted a vast social experiment to decide whether to implement educational reform. An examination of data from people who took part in the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revealed that those lucky enough to have experienced the eformed system have been more likely than their contemporaries to live a long life.
Governments across northern Europe reformed their education systems in the wake of the Second World War, searching for ways to regain economic strength. "There was an international trend inspired by the United States to go for more comprehensive schooling," says Anton Lager, a co-author of the research, who studies young people's health at the Centre for Health Equity Studies of Stockholm University. As well as starting to teach all children equally, many countries introduced longer schooling. The United Kingdom, for instance, raised the school leaving age from 14 to 15 in 1944, and to 16 in 1972.
In Sweden, the government decided to undertake a controlled study of its proposed new school system--so, from 1949 to 1962, all 1.2 million children in the Swedish state education system were set on one of two paths. In a slowly increasing proportion of the school districts across the country, it became compulsory for children to attend a comprehensive school for 9 years. The rest of Sweden provided a control group, in which children stuck to the existing system: mandatory schooling for 8 years, with the most academically gifted children remaining in school for up to 10 years.
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from ScienceInsider
Increasing collaboration between U.S. scientists and their counterparts in other countries has been a priority for Subra Suresh since he became director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in October 2010. But one thing about negotiating such bilateral agreements has frustrated him: The time it takes to reach an agreement on the scientific rules of the road. There may be haggling over how to handle intellectual property and access to data, for example, but Suresh says the biggest bugaboo is often agreeing on common standards for peer review.
"We keep repeating the same thing over and over," says Suresh about the discussions over how each side would select the most worthy proposals. "Having to start from scratch causes considerable delay, and it is a big waste of time."
So Suresh decided to do something about it. After winning the strong backing of the White House, Suresh this weekend convened a meeting of 47 leaders of research funding agencies from 44 countries. And tomorrow, at the conclusion of closed-door sessions, the group will issue the first-ever global statement on the principles of merit review. Although the actual statement is embargoed until then, it is expected to touch on the importance of using experts in conducting a confidential yet transparent process to identify the highest-quality proposals.
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from Smithsonian
Down a spiral staircase, deep inside the Millennium Seed Bank in West Sussex, an hour or so from London, you'll find the heart of the facility. Behind a massive airlock door you enter four 516-square-foot cold-room chambers, maintained at minus-20 degrees Celsius--sufficiently frigid to preserve botanical treasure, depending on the species, for 500 years.
Dozens of shipments arrive weekly from every corner of the globe--seeds air-freighted from far-flung locations: the deserts of Kyrgyzstan, the Dominican Republic's tropical valleys, the alpine meadows of China, the plains of Oklahoma. In more than 50 countries, hundreds of researchers are engaged in one of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of field science: The goal is to collect 25 percent of the planet's 400,000 plant species by 2020.
Scientists are racing against time: 100,000 species of flora--imperiled by habitat destruction, overharvesting and climate change--are threatened with extinction. "Even if we know that plants are being lost in the wild," says Paul Smith, head of seed conservation, "if we can get them into the seed bank, we can regenerate them in the future."
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U.S. drug regulators last week affirmed landmark study results showing that a popular HIV-fighting pill can also help healthy people avoid contracting the virus that causes AIDS.
In other biomedical news, researchers reported that a three-pronged strategy--to knock out renegade immune cells, replace them and revitalize other cells that make insulin--appeared to cure type 1 diabetes in seven out of 12 diabetic mice.
Doctors on a panel revising psychiatry's influential diagnostic manual have backed away from two controversial proposals that would have expanded the number of people identified as having psychotic or depressive disorders.
Elsewhere, researchers have found a set of gene mutations that seem to play a part in some cases of melanoma.
By inserting a mutated gene into cancer patients, researchers have found a way to protect them against the side effects of chemotherapy and boost their odds of surviving a particularly aggressive type of cancer, glioblastoma, a fast-growing and usually fatal brain cancer.
Finally, scientists say that psychopaths have a distinct brain structure. They reached this conclusion after scanning the brains of men convicted of murder, rape and violent assaults. The study showed that psychopaths, who are characterized by a lack of empathy, had less gray matter in the areas of the brain important for understanding other peoples' emotions.
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Three young scientists examined the fossil record over the 12 million years leading up to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous geological period and concluded that a huge asteroid is still the central villain in the dinosaurs' extinction.
In other news of the ancient past, the smallest mammoth ever known roamed the island of Crete millions of years ago, researchers say. Adults were roughly the size of a modern baby elephant.
A newfound crocodile species may have been the largest to ever roam the Earth. Some 25 feet long, it trolled East African waters between 4 million and 2 million years ago and may have snacked on human ancestors, researchers said.
For centuries, scientists trying to describe the earliest life have relied on evidence provided by biology, studying what features modern life-forms have in common to deduce the most primitive components of cells. By working backward, biologists have developed proposals describing when and where such simple forms of life could have arisen.
Putting a place and date on the domestication of horses has been a challenge for archaeologists. Now a team of geneticists studying modern breeds of the animal has assembled an evolutionary picture of its storied past. Horses, the scientists conclude, were first domesticated 6000 years ago in the western part of the Eurasian Steppe, modern-day Ukraine and West Kazakhstan.
Dinosaurs may well have been tortured by large, flealike bloodsucking insects. Scientists in China have discovered Pseudopulex jurassicus and its cousin, Pseudopulex magnus--magnus as in "great."
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from New Scientist
THE symbols we use to represent numbers are, mathematically speaking, arbitrary. Now there is a way to write numbers so that their areas equal their numerical values. The font, called FatFonts, could transform the art of data visualisation, allowing a single infographic to convey both a visual overview and exact values.
"Scientific figures might benefit from this hybrid nature because scientists want both to see and to read data," says Miguel Nacenta, a computer scientist at the University of St Andrews, UK, who developed the concept with colleagues at the University of Calgary, Canada.
Infographics are all the rage as a means to display information now that computers can gather and sort vast reams of data. However, fancy charts and images often obscure the actual data behind them. To get the best of both worlds, Nacenta's team designed a font in which a 2 has an area exactly twice that of a 1, a 3, triple, and so on.
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From Nature News
The development of retinal implants has been dogged by problems of unwieldiness since the first implantable stimulator for vision restoration was developed in 1968. Sticking a mess of electronics, with wires, cables and inductive coils, into the human visual system was always going to be a tricky business.
James Loudin and his colleagues at Stanford University in California have developed a solution that overcomes many of these problems by the use of special glasses that fire infrared signals into the eye and onto an implanted array of silicon photodiodes. The system simplifies what needs to be implanted and both transmits visual data and power directly to the implants, eliminating the need for any bulky external power source. Their work is published today in Nature Photonics.
In order to explain how the set-up would work, Loudin regularly uses the Star Trek character Geordi LaForge as an analogy. "I'm not well versed in Star Trek any more, and I don't think Geordi had implants," he says. "However, like his visor, our patients cannot see without the goggles."
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from BBC News Online
The decline of linguistic and cultural diversity is linked to the loss of biodiversity, a study has suggested. The authors said that 70% of the world's languages were found within the planet's biodiversity hotspots.
Data showed that as these important environmental areas were degraded over time, cultures and languages in the area were also being lost.
The results of the study have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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from BBC News Online
The violent rise and collapse of an underwater volcano in the Pacific Ocean is captured in startling clarity for the first time.
Researchers studying the Monowai volcano, near Tonga, recorded huge changes in height in just two weeks. The images, gathered by sonar from a research ship, shed new light on the turbulent fate of submarine mountains.
Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the findings were made during a seabed survey last year.
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from USA Today
A push to find new treatments and preventions for Alzheimer's disease begins today at the largest-ever government-sponsored summit for the disease, bringing together nearly 600 researchers from around the world.
And new treatments are long overdue, says Neil Buckholtz, chief of the Dementias of Aging Branch at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The last drug therapy designed to ease symptoms of the brain-wasting illness was developed in 2003. Buckholtz drew up the agenda for the two-day NIA meetings.
"Not much has worked so far," Buckholtz says. "This is a major public health problem that is going to get worse over time, and we have to do a better job of developing trials and treatments."
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
Massachusetts General Hospital in the next few weeks will launch a large, long-awaited test of whether a controversial cutting-edge proton beam therapy is more effective than standard radiation treatment for prostate cancer. Proton beam therapy, a targeted and controlled way to administer radiation to a tumor, has become a flashpoint in the debate over health care reform.
The expensive therapy is being used across the country and in some cases advertised directly to the general public before it has been deemed superior to standard radiation treatment, which costs about half as much. For years, doctors and federal health agencies have called for a scientific study like the one led by Mass. General, which will enroll its first patients by early June.
The five-year study will take place at a half-dozen centers across the country, including the University of Pennsylvania.
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from San Francisco Chronicle
Birds are famously good navigators. Some migrate thousands of miles, flying day and night, even when the stars are obscured. And for decades, scientists have known that one navigational skill they employ is an ability to detect variations in the Earth's magnetic field.
How this magnetic sense works, however, has been frustratingly difficult to figure out.
Now, two researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, Le-Qing Wu and David Dickman, have solved a central part of that puzzle, identifying cells in a pigeon's brain that record detailed information on the earth's magnetic field, a kind of biological compass.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
One day last summer, Anne and her husband, Miguel, took their 9-year-old son, Michael, to a Florida elementary school for the first day of what the family chose to call "summer camp." For years, Anne and Miguel have struggled to understand their eldest son, an elegant boy with high-planed cheeks, wide eyes and curly light brown hair, whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment. Michael's eight-week program was, in reality, a highly structured psychological study--less summer camp than camp of last resort.
Michael's problems started, according to his mother, around age 3, shortly after his brother Allan was born. At the time, she said, Michael was mostly just acting "like a brat," but his behavior soon escalated to throwing tantrums during which he would scream and shriek inconsolably. These weren't ordinary toddler's fits. "It wasn't, 'I'm tired' or 'I'm frustrated'--the normal things kids do," Anne remembered. "His behavior was really out there. And it would happen for hours and hours each day, no matter what we did." For several years, Michael screamed every time his parents told him to put on his shoes or perform other ordinary tasks, like retrieving one of his toys from the living room. "Going somewhere, staying somewhere--anything would set him off," Miguel said. These furies lasted well beyond toddlerhood. At 8, Michael would still fly into a rage when Anne or Miguel tried to get him ready for school, punching the wall and kicking holes in the door. Left unwatched, he would cut up his trousers with scissors or methodically pull his hair out. He would also vent his anger by slamming the toilet seat down again and again until it broke.
When Anne and Miguel first took Michael to see a therapist, he was given a diagnosis of "firstborn syndrome": acting out because he resented his new sibling. While both parents acknowledged that Michael was deeply hostile to the new baby, sibling rivalry didn't seem sufficient to explain his consistently extreme behavior.
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from San Francisco Chronicle
The search for distant planets in the Milky Way is now so sophisticated that astronomers are searching for unseen moons around the planets that the Kepler mission's scientists have discovered.
A team of astronomers hunting for those moons reports that in their quest they have unexpectedly detected a hidden planet--and probably two--by using a technique that promises to aid the search for smaller planets much like Earth.
The technique is already in use by the Kepler team at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, and was being used by astronomers at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and Harvard when they detected a curious kink in the orbit of one planet they were tracking in search of a possible "exo-moon." The orbit was curiously irregular, the astronomers noticed, and after carefully tracking it, they determined that the gravity of some unknown object too massive to be a moon must be tugging at the planet they were observing.
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from San Francisco Chronicle
New Orleans (Associated Press) -- A big increase in reports of Asian tiger shrimp along the U.S. Southeast coast and in the Gulf of Mexico has federal biologists worried the species is encroaching on native species' territory.
The black-and-white-striped shrimp can grow 13 inches long and weigh a quarter-pound, compared to 8 inches and a bit over an ounce for domestic white, brown and pink shrimp. Scientists fear the tigers will bring disease and competition for native shrimp.
Shrimp are all bottom feeders, eating detritus and small animals. Bigger shrimp would eat more and these get so big they also eat small shrimp and fish, marine ecologist James A. Morris said. Reports of tiger shrimp in U.S. waters rose from a few dozen a year - 21 in 2008, 47 in 2009 and 32 in 2010 - to 331 last year, from North Carolina to Texas.
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