from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Nutcracker Man didn't eat nuts after all. After a half-century of referring to an ancient pre-human as "Nutcracker Man" because of his large teeth and powerful jaw, scientists now conclude that he actually chewed grasses instead.
The study "reminds us that in paleontology, things are not always as they seem," commented Peter S. Ungar, chairman of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. The new report, by Thure E. Cerling of the University of Utah and colleagues, is published in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Cerling's team analyzed the carbon in the enamel of 24 teeth from 22 individuals who lived in East Africa between 1.4 million and 1.9 million years ago. One type of carbon is produced from tree leaves, nuts and fruit, another from grasses and grasslike plants called sedges.
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the appointment of 44-year-old Japanese venture capitalist Joichi Ito as director of the MIT Media Lab, one of the world's top computer science labs.
In other technology news, the New York Times looked at how supercomputers are altering science, and the FDA announced that it will regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products.
A review published in Environmental Science & Technology notes that there is no evidence that plastic bags made of "degradable polyethylenes" are all they're cracked up to be.
And the rumor mill was churning overtime last week when a leaked internal memo from physicists at the Large Hadron Collider reported possible detection of the Higgs boson, the long-sought theoretical particle that could make or break the standard model of particle physics.
Energy giant EnBW has almost completed the first commercial offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea, which is to be inaugurated in early May. Twenty-one giant wind turbines--each 130 meters (425 feet) tall--will jut out of the water over an area of seven square kilometers. When the wind is strong, they will feed about 185 gigawatt hours of electricity into Germany's power grid each year, or enough to supply about 50,000 households.
Meanwhile, some New Jersey residents aren't happy about the solar panels being installed in their neighborhoods. Many consider them eyesores.
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A new report says that Los Angeles has the highest levels of ozone nationwide, violating federal health standards an average of 137 days a year. The city ranks second in the country, behind Bakersfield, Calif., for the highest year-round levels of toxic particles or soot, and fourth in the nation for the number of short-term spikes in soot pollution.
In other environmental news, the New York Times featured the work of Jesse H. Ausubel, a Rockefeller University environmental researcher who is also vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In his academic role, Ausubel writes and thinks about the environment. Through the Sloan Foundation, he has started four major international programs to survey the planet and catalog its biological diversity.
Engineers and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggested last week that "the entire [nuclear power] spent-fuel management system--on-site storage, consolidated long-term storage, geological disposal--is likely to be re-evaluated in a new light because of the Fukushima storage-pool experience" in Japan.
And genetically modified (GM) Atlantic salmon patented by U.S. biotech firm AquaBounty could be approved by U.S. regulators as early as this summer, taking the global GM food fight to the fish counter.
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from Miller-McCune
After slogging through knee-deep water, past palmetto thickets and trumpet vines dangling from the treetops, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Mike Lange stops short. He signals toward a gnarled live oak, straight out of the magical charm of The Shire, its trunk the width of a car. Crumpled resurrection ferns line its branches, waiting to sprout in green abandon with the next rains. Nearby, the trunks of an elm and a water hickory wrap around each other like a sculpture of intertwined lovers.
Lange is rightly proud of these woods. Over the past 20 years, he has been largely responsible for orchestrating the conservation of what is known as the Columbia bottomlands, low-lying hardwood forests lining the southern portions of the Brazos, Colorado and San Bernard Rivers before they cross the Texas coast and spill into the Gulf of Mexico.... The Columbia bottomlands are also an amazing hotspot for migratory birds, with an estimated 40 million to 80 million individual birds of 240 species using the area. Many of them are spring migrants stopping to rest and eat after crossing the Gulf of Mexico before heading farther north.
But no one understood the significance of this thicketed haven for birds until a good-natured Cajun named Sidney Gauthreaux came to visit in the early 1990s. It was just after the National Weather Service installed the first Doppler radar on the Gulf Coast south of Houston, and meteorologist Bill Read--now director of the National Hurricane Center--invited Gauthreaux to check it out. What they discovered catalyzed the conservation effort Lange and the Fish and Wildlife Service have led since then.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Governments in the Dallas-Fort Worth region are nearing a deal that would make it the first urban area to test a new approach to weather forecasting.
Like Twitter's many ground-level dispatches, the system is based on a series of small radar devices that can be scattered around cities and their suburbs, rather than a large beacon that takes a sweeping but imprecise view.
The widespread death and damage inflicted [last] week by tornadoes throughout the South demonstrated that warnings using current weather technology are limited. Meteorologists and public safety officials said they hoped that the new system could prevent deaths from tornadoes and flash floods.
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from Wired Science
Getting along with your fellow astronauts can be dangerous. Too much consensus--what some psychologists call "groupthink"--can keep crews from being creative in a crisis. But a new study found that six "cosmonauts" on a simulated Mars mission emerged from 105 days in a replica spacecraft with their quirks intact.
The study was the first to directly tackle the possible downside of harmony, rather than antagonism, in a space mission.
"Earlier, we had been focusing on how tension increases over time," said social psychologist Gro Sandal of the University of Bergen in Norway, lead author of a paper to be published in Acta Astronautica. "This paper has more or less the opposite focus: whether people start to think more and more similar while they are isolated."
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from Science News
For all its glorious views, the Colorado plateau remains an ugly mystery to geologists. They can't figure out why and how it rose thousands of feet over the millions of years it took to carve spectacular natural wonders like the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley.
The answer may lie deep beneath the plateau's chiseled landscape, a study in the April 28 Nature suggests. Hot rock welling up from below invades the plateau, causing blobs to drip off the bottom.
"It looks kind of like a lava lamp," says team leader Alan Levander of Rice University in Houston.
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from the Economist
Ever since their discovery in the 1970s, deep-sea vents--chimney-like structures on the ocean floor that belch hot water and dissolved minerals into the surrounding ocean--have been one of the hottest topics in marine biology. The vents support populations of bacteria, giant worms, clams, shrimp and other creatures in the inky darkness, often several kilometres below the surface. Unlike virtually every other ecosystem on the planet, these deep-sea communities do not rely on the sun for their food. Instead of using photosynthesis, the bacteria at the bottom of the food chain harvest energy from chemicals supplied by the vents themselves.
The vents are both widely spaced and transient, which means their denizens live a precarious existence. Yet travel between vent systems is apparently possible, even across miles of desolate ocean floor. Creatures confined to islands rapidly head in a different genetic direction to mainland relatives; but researchers have found surprisingly little genetic variation between the populations of even quite widely spaced ocean-bottom vents. Last year one paper described how a vent system that had been wiped clean by a volcanic eruption was quickly recolonised by a variety of larval creatures, some of which seemed to have travelled from another vent more than 300km (190 miles) away. Exactly how has remained a mystery.
Now a group of scientists led by Lauren Mullineaux at America's Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has described in Science how such transfers could happen--and, in the process, discovered something surprising about how surface weather influences the deep ocean, traditionally thought of as an isolated, closed world.
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from the Philadelphia Inquirer
While opinion leaders in Britain debate whether Prince William's impending marriage to a commoner will diminish the royal family's public image, geneticists see only an upside to the pairing.
"From a genetic perspective, mixture is good," said Francisco Ceballos, a biologist at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Ceballos is involved with an ongoing study of the Habsburg family, a once-powerful royal dynasty that appears to have inbred itself into extinction.
Inbreeding, which can increase the likelihood of genetic defects, is still one of the most complex areas of evolution and population genetics, he said. Some groups of plants and animals can withstand more than others before harmful effects surface. In the badly depleted Florida panther population, geneticists determined that inbreeding had led to various birth defects, including malformed testicles and heart deformities--and that without intervention, the big cats were nearly certain to go the way of the Habsburgs.
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from BBC News Online
The final mission of NASA's Endeavour shuttle has been delayed further by a technical problem. U.S. space agency managers said the ship would not now lift off before 8 May.
It should have left Earth on Friday but has been held on the ground because of an electrical failure in a switchbox connected to a hydraulics power unit.
The youngest of America's reusable spaceplanes is set to deliver a $2bn (£1.2bn) particle physics experiment to the International Space Station (ISS). On Sunday, NASA announced the repairs would be lengthy but could not state precisely how long it would take to get the orbiter in a position to make another launch attempt.
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from ScienceInsider
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and biomedical research groups are jubilant that a federal appeals court today overturned a preliminary injunction that briefly halted research on human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) last year. The 2-1 ruling allays months of fears that research could be shut down again, at least temporarily. But the legal battle isn't over, and the final outcome is anyone's guess.
The case was filed in 2009 by James Sherley and Theresa Deisher, scientists who study adult stem cells. They claimed that NIH's new guidelines expanding research on hESCs violated the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, a 1996 law barring the use of federal funds for research that destroys embryos. In August 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth agreed and issued a preliminary injunction that halted hESC funding. The ban held for 2.5 weeks, until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit blocked the injunction while a three-judge panel deliberated.
That long-awaited ruling strongly favors NIH. Writing for himself and Judge Thomas Griffith, Judge Douglas Ginsburg disagrees with Lamberth on one condition for allowing the preliminary injunction to stand: that it wouldn't seriously harm hESC scientists. The effects on hESC researchers "would be certain and substantial.... Their investments in project planning would be a loss, their expenditures for equipment a waste, and their staffs out of a job," the decision says.
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One Saturday in January 2010, Devendra Deshpande left his home in the Delhi suburbs and drove into the city to get a vasectomy. He was 36 years old, married with two young kids, and he thought it was time.
He arrived at the hospital around midday and met Hem Das, then the hospital's chief vasectomy surgeon. Das had an interesting question for Deshpande. Rather than receive a traditional vasectomy, would Deshpande like to be part of a clinical trial for a new contraceptive procedure?
Das explained that the new method did not have some of the drawbacks associated with a regular vasectomy. First, sperm would still be able to escape Deshpande's body normally, which meant he would be free of the pressure and granulomas that sometimes accompany a vasectomy. More important, it could be reversed easily, with a simple follow-up injection.
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from National Geographic News
If you think you can function on minimal sleep, here's a wake-up call: Parts of your brain may doze off even if you're totally awake, according to a new study in rats. Scientists observed the electrical activity of brains in rats forced to stay up longer than usual. Problem-solving brain regions fell into a kind of "local sleep"--a condition likely in sleep-deprived humans too, the study authors say.
Surprisingly, when sections of the rats' brains entered these sleeplike states, "you couldn't tell that [the rats] are in any way in a different state of wakefulness," said study co-author Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Despite these periods of local sleep, overall brain activity--and the rats' behaviors--suggested the animals were fully awake. This phenomenon of local sleep is "not just an interesting observation of unknown significance," Tononi said. It "actually affects behavior--you make a mistake."
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from Science News
Inspired by a caterpillar that makes like a wheel and rolls away from predators, researchers have created a robot that curls itself into a loop and peels out at speeds faster than a half meter per second.
Called GoQBot, the 10-centimeter-long robot has a hammer-shaped head and a silicone body embedded with metal coils. The coils contract, musclelike, when pulsed with current, and within 200 milliseconds the crawling bot becomes a wheel and rolls off at impressively high speeds.
Crawling robots typically have many coordinated joints that slow them down, says Satyandra Gupta, director of the Maryland Robotics Center at the University of Maryland in College Park. While good at wriggling through tight spaces, these crawlers plod along in open terrain.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
If you should ever have a heart attack, Hippo, Warts, Merlin, Yorkie, Scalloped, Shaggy, Frizzled, Dishevelled and Mob-as-tumor-suppressor may have a lot to do with why you don't get better in a hurry.
These are not characters from a Damon Runyon story but a crew of genes that work together to switch other genes on and off. A team of biologists led by James F. Martin and Todd Heallen of the Texas A&M System Health Science Center has now found that these genes block the heart from growing new heart muscle cells, at least in mice.
Knock out Hippo, for example, and the mouse's heart grows two and a half times bigger than usual, they report in Science. This and other advances, including the discovery this year that infant mice can regenerate their hearts for the first seven days after birth, is evoking considerable interest among researchers trying to develop new treatments for heart attacks.
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from Nature News
It's an eye test with a quantum twist: physicists have used humans to detect the results of a quantum phenomenon for the first time.
Nicolas Gisin, a physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, devised a new test to see if the human eye could pick out signs of 'entanglement.' This weird quantum effect inextricably links two or more objects in such a way that measurements carried out on one immediately change the properties of its partners, no matter how far apart they are. Quantum effects, such as entanglement, are usually confined to the invisible microscopic world and are detected only indirectly using precision instruments.
Gisin and his colleagues were inspired by an experiment carried out in 2008 by Fabio Sciarrino and his team at La Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. Usually, physicists working with entangled photons only deal with a small number at a time. In the Rome experiment, the physicists entangled a pair of photons and then 'amplified' one of them to create a shower of thousands of photons with the same quantum state. In this way, one 'microscopic' photon seemingly became entangled with thousands of others in a 'macroscopic' light field. "I immediately realized that the human eye could see that many photons," says Gisin.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
They're cute. They're often roadkill. Some gourmands say they're tasty, whether baked or barbecued. Now Louisiana researchers have learned something else about nine-banded armadillos.
"A preponderance of evidence shows that people get leprosy from these animals," said Richard W. Truman, director of microbiology at the National Hansen's Disease Program in Baton Rouge and lead author of a paper detailing the discovery in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Until now, scientists believed that leprosy was passed only from human to human. Every year, about 100 to 150 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with the malady, which is also known as Hansen's disease. Though many have traveled to countries where the disease is relatively common, as many as a third don't know where they picked it up. Most of those cases are in Texas and Louisiana, where leprosy-infected armadillos live too. Now, Truman said, "we're able to provide a link."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
LOS ANGELES (Associated Press) -- The first stars that dotted the universe were not only immense, but probably also fast-spinning, according to a new study that sheds light on the nature of stellar evolution. These early stars died out long ago, but astronomers can get a glimpse of what they were like by looking at later generations of stars.
A team of scientists led by Cristina Chiappini of the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam in Germany reanalyzed data from the Very Large Telescope of a 12-billion-year-old star cluster. They found high levels of metal in the stars--a chemical signature that suggests earlier generations, perhaps even the first stars, were massive and rotated much faster than their present-day counterparts.
This is important because a star that spins more rapidly can live longer and suffer different fates than slow-spinning ones. Findings appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. Current theory holds that the universe was born out of an explosion, called the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago. During the next 200 million years, the universe cooled, leaving it dark and starless.
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from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
After a decade of wrestling with depression and anxiety, Melanie was at the end of her therapeutic rope. In her wake were a dozen medications, six counselors and several shrinks, all for naught. "You have anything new in your tool kit?" she asked at our first session. "Probably not, but I'll bet you do," I replied.
An impressive body of research shows that something called "therapeutic lifestyle change," or TLC (cute), is effective in treating many mental maladies, not to mention certain physical ones. And to use it, you don't need a shrink or a prescription, although a professional coach can help with getting started and staying on track.
The methods in TLC will come as no surprise to many of you, but their power to positively influence emotional states might. Over the years, I've directly observed its helpful impact on many clients, but not until recently have the behavioral sciences recognized it as a legitimate therapy in its own right. Psychotherapist Philip Chard presents the five basic elements of TLC.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
ORADELL, N.J. -- Nancy and Eric Olsen could not pinpoint exactly when it happened or how. All they knew was one moment they had a pastoral view of a soccer field and the woods from their 1920s colonial-style house; the next all they could see were three solar panels.
"I hate them," Mr. Olsen, 40, said of the row of panels attached to electrical poles across the street. "It's just an eyesore." Around the corner lives Tom Trobiano, 61, a liquor salesman, now adapting to the lone solar panel hanging over his driveway. "When it's up close," he said, "the panel takes on a life of its own."
Like a massive Christo project but without the advance publicity, installations have been popping up across New Jersey for about a year now, courtesy of New Jersey's largest utility, the Public Service Electric and Gas Company. Unlike other solar projects tucked away on roofs or in industrial areas, the utility is mounting 200,000 individual panels in neighborhoods throughout its service area, covering nearly three-quarters of the state.
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from the Seattle Times
Pediatricians could help diagnose children with autism earlier by asking parents to fill out a simple checklist when they take their babies in for first-year checkups, according to research released Thursday.
The federally funded study, involving more than 10,000 infants, found that the questionnaire appeared to identify about half of children who later would be diagnosed with the disorder. Early diagnosis would allow doctors to treat children with autism sooner, when therapy appears to be much more effective.
"This study is enormously important from the practical standpoint of helping families out," said Karen Pierce of the University of California, San Diego, who led the research published in the Journal of Pediatrics.
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from USA Today
(Associated Press) -- Every other week, 7-year-old twins Addison and Cassidy Hempel have an experimental medicine injected into their spines in hopes of battling a rare, fatal disease. And it's their mom who made that possible.
From her home in Reno, Chris Hempel persuaded scientists to share their research and managed to get the government to sign off on her daughters' unusual experiment. Hempel says getting help to fight a rare disease shouldn't be so hard.
But it's a huge challenge to generate drug company interest in the expensive testing of medicines for diseases so rare--like her girls' Niemann-Pick Type C--that the market is only a few hundred or few thousand people a year. There are treatments for just 200 of the roughly 7,000 rare diseases, illnesses that affect fewer than 200,000 people, often far, far fewer. Yet add those diseases together, and more than 20 million Americans have one.
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from the Guardian (UK)
It is the scientific institute made famous in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, the organisation for which the main character, Ellie Arroway--played by Jodie Foster in the 1997 film version--worked day and night looking for signs of intelligent life in outer space.
In real life, the Seti Institute has spent five decades hunting the skies for radio signals from deep space, possible communications which may indicate we are not alone in the universe. Now it has fallen prey to a very earthly problem: it has run out of cash. The institute's chief executive, Tom Pierson, has announced that there are "serious challenges" in finding operating funds and that from this week the organisation's brand new $50m (£30m) telescope array will be placed into hibernation. "This means that the equipment is unavailable for normal observations and is being maintained in a safe state by a significantly reduced staff," he said in a letter to private donors to the institute.
The problems revolve around the operation of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a set of radio dishes dedicated to looking for alien signals. Though it was paid for by the Seti Institute, the array, at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 300 miles north-east of San Francisco, is managed and operated by the radio astronomy lab of the University of California, Berkeley.
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from National Geographic News
Proving that you don't have to be big to be tough, some microbes can survive gravity more than 400,000 times that felt on Earth, a new study says. Most humans, by contrast, can tolerate forces equal to about three to five times Earth's surface gravity (g) before losing consciousness.
The extreme "hypergravity" of 400,000 g is usually found only in cosmic environments, such as on very massive stars or in the shock waves of supernovas, said study leader Shigeru Deguchi, a biologist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.
Deguchi and his team were able to replicate hypergravity on Earth using a machine called an ultracentrifuge. The scientists rapidly spun four species of bacteria--including the common human gut microbe Escherichia coli--to create increasingly intense gravity conditions. The bacteria clumped together into pellets as the gravity increased, but their forced closeness didn't seem to deter growth: All four species multiplied normally under thousands to tens of thousands of times Earth's gravity.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed the biggest statue of Tutankhamun's grandfather Amenhotep III and another of the goddess Sekhmet, the country's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Tuesday.
Both statues were discovered at the pharaoh's temple on the western bank of the Nile at Luxor in southern Egypt. The statue of Amenhotep III, who reigned around 3,350 years ago, is 13.65 meters (yards) high and carved out of quartzite. The statue, found in seven chunks and missing a head, is one of twin statues erected in front of the temple's northern entrance, said to have been destroyed in an earthquake in 27 B.C.
Some of ancient Egypt's biggest monuments were constructed during Amenhotep III's reign in the 18th Dynasty. The expedition headed by Hawass also found a 185 cm granite statue of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet. Amenhotep built large effigies of the healing deity after he contracted a disease in his final years. They also found a part of a statue of the ancient Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth, who is usually depicted with a baboon's head.
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