Slideshows
National Geographic: PHOTOS: Bird Odd Couples Revealed by New Gene Study
Scientific American: Fishing Poll: Taking a Census of Ocean Species [Slide Show]
Taxonomists are cleaning up and adding to the book of life on hundreds of thousands of known marine species—from plankton to sperm whales.
Astronomy/Space
N.Y. Times: For Alien Life-Seekers, New Reason to Hope
For those of us who still mourn the demise of the "Star Trek" franchise and its vision of the cosmos as a thrillingly multicultural if occasionally lethal nightclub, the announcement last week that many Sun-size stars in our galaxy are girdled with Earth-size planets was, frankly, transporting.
The newly detected worlds are far too close to their stellar parents to have much chance of harboring even microbial life, let alone anybody capable of looking boss in spandex. Nevertheless, the discovery gave astronomers and alien life-seekers heart. For one thing, the planets are encouragingly compact. In the past decade, astronomers have found some 250 extrasolar planets, but most have been forbiddingly Jovian: celestial gas bags presumed to have no solid surface and hundreds of times the mass of Earth. In the new report, Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory and his colleagues said they had found 45 planets that were only a few times as massive as our beloved blue base, which means that they, like Earth, are probably built of rock.
The tally is proportionally impressive as well: roughly one in three stars surveyed showed signs of harboring stony planets, and other researchers performing similar studies said the figure might be more like one in two. And though the 45 planets on the Geneva list are all "star-huggers," as one astronomer put it, with orbital periods of 2 to 50 days — even Mercury needs nearly three months to circumnavigate the Sun — researchers are confident that other rocky planets remain to be found at Earthier distances from their suns.
N.Y. Times: Alkaline Soil Sample From Mars Reveals Presence of Nutrients for Plants to Grow
Stick an asparagus plant in a pot full of Martian soil, and the asparagus might grow happily, scientists announced Thursday.
An experiment on the Phoenix Mars lander showed the dirt on the planet’s northern arctic plains to be alkaline, though not strongly alkaline, and full of the mineral nutrients that a plant would need.
"We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life whether past, present or future," said Samuel P. Kounaves of Tufts University, who is leading the chemical analysis, during a telephone news conference on Thursday. "The sort of soil you have there is the type of soil you’d probably have in your backyard."
N. Y. Times: Huge Meteor Strike Explains Mars’s Shape, Reports Say
The lopsided shape of Mars may well be a result of a cataclysmic impact of a Pluto-size meteor billions of years ago, three teams of scientists are reporting. That would suggest that the lowlands of Mars’s northern hemisphere are a single gigantic impact crater, the largest crater in the solar system.
"The early solar system was a pretty exciting place," said Francis Nimmo, an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the lead author of one of three scientific papers to appear in Thursday’s issue of Nature. "There were big collisions happening fairly frequently, and those collisions affected what the planets ultimately ended up looking like."
About the same time, more than four billion years ago, Earth is believed to have been hit by a Mars-size object, which created the Moon, and signs of a giant impact have also been detected on Mercury.
Evolution/Paleontology
National Geographic: Fishy Ancestors of Humans Surprisingly Diverse
The fishlike ancestors of humans and other land animals were a surprisingly diverse bunch, according to a new fossil reconstruction of the transitory species Ventastega curonica.
The aquatic creature, which lived during the late Devonian period about 365 million years ago, represented an evolutionary midpoint between Tiktaalik, one of the earliest fish to clamber onto land, and primitive four-legged land animals, or tetrapods.
Reuters: New bird family tree reveals some odd ducks
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The largest study ever of bird genetics has uncovered some surprising facts about the avian evolutionary tree, U.S. researchers said on Thursday, including many that are bound to ruffle some feathers.
Falcons, for example, are not closely related to hawks and eagles, despite many similarities, while colorful hummingbirds, which flit around in the day, evolved from a drab-looking nocturnal bird called a nightjar.
And parrots and songbirds are closer cousins than once thought.
Biodiversity
National Geographic: Legalize Whaling (a Little), Some Conservationists Say
Could a little legalized commercial whale hunting actually help save the animals? That's one idea floating around this year's meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Santiago, Chile.
The still unofficial proposal involves backing off a 22-year-old moratorium that bans all but a small amount of whaling for scientific and sustenance purposes.
Some problems with the ban as it stands include Iceland and Norway openly defying it to kill several hundred whales a year and Japan's liberal and allegedly dishonest use of "science" to justify its annual hunt of up to a thousand whales.
Biotechnology/Health
National Geographic: To Save Chocolate, Scientists to Map Cocoa Genome
U.S. government scientists aim to safeguard the world's chocolate supply by dissecting the genome of the cocoa, or cacao, bean in a five-year project that begins today.
A Miami, Florida-based U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) team with more than ten million U.S. dollars from candymaker Mars Inc. will analyze the more than 400 million parts of the cocoa genome, a process that could help battle crippling crop diseases and even lead to better tasting chocolate.
Climate/Environment
N.Y. Times: Can Weeds Help Solve the Climate Crisis?
Lewis Ziska, a lanky, sandy-haired weed ecologist with the Agriculture Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, matches a dry sense of humor with tired eyes. The humor is essential to Ziska’s exploration of what global climate change could do to mankind’s relationship with weeds; there are many days, he confesses, when his goal becomes nothing more than not ending up in a fetal position beneath his battleship gray, government-issue desk. Yet he speaks of weeds with admiration as well as apprehension, and even with hope.
It is easy to share the admiration and apprehension when you consider the site that Ziska planted with weeds in downtown Baltimore in the spring of 2002. Tucked in next to the city’s inner harbor, the site is part of a barren expanse of turf rolled out over a reclaimed industrial landscape. This unfertile scrap seems an unlikely choice for growing anything, but Ziska saw in it, ominously perhaps, a model of where the global habitat as a whole is headed.
"Ingenuity," Ziska says, "may be the mother of invention, but poverty is definitely the father." For some time, he had wanted to create in a laboratory setting the elevated temperatures and increased concentrations of atmospheric CO2 predicted for the mid-21st century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international scientific authority on the subject. Carbon dioxide has received a lot of attention as a greenhouse gas, a major cause of global warming. But it is also, along with water, light and nutrients, one of the four essential resources for plant growth. The effect that boosting this gas’s concentration in the atmosphere will have on plants is very poorly understood.
National Geographic: Plants "Climbing" Mountains Due to Global Warming
Like people vacationing in the mountains to escape summer heat, plants are "climbing" to higher elevations to cope with global warming, a new study shows.
Previous research has suggested that many plant and animal species have been shifting their ranges toward the Poles as the planet warms.
N.Y. Times Dot Earth Blog: What’s Really Up With North Pole Sea Ice?
The Drudgeosphere was all pumped up today about the "shock claim" in the (UK) Independent that the sea ice that normally persists year-round at the North Pole (I stood on it in March, 2003) will be replaced by open water later this summer.
Given the unpredictable short-term dynamics up there, which make the ice subject to vagaries of Siberian winds and a mix of currents, a lot of polar ice experts tell me it’s pretty much impossible to make such a prediction with high confidence. In fact, the Independent’s story — the opening sentences and headline at least — go way beyond what Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center tells the reporter. As early as May, ice experts were putting good odds on having open water at the North Pole. [UPDATE 11 p.m.: Gavin Schmidt of Realclimate.org muses on why the media hyperventilate over polar non-news developments.]
One way or the other, it’s clear that, by the end of the 1990s, the veneer of ice on the Arctic Ocean had shifted to a far more tenuous state, with ever less thick, years-old ice like the floes I camped on when I went with the team setting up the annual North Pole Environmental Observatory. The animation above shows that the ice was flushed out, not melted.
Geology/Geophysics
N.Y. Times: Follow the Silt
LITITZ, Pa. — Dorothy J. Merritts, a geology professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., was not looking to turn hydrology on its ear when she started scouting possible research sites for her students a few years ago.
But when she examined photographs of the steep, silty banks of the West Branch of Little Conestoga Creek, something did not look right. The silt was laminated, deposited in layers. She asked a colleague, Robert C. Walter, an expert on sediment, for his opinion.
"Those are not stream sediments," he told her. "Those are pond sediments." In short, the streamscape was not what she thought.
National Geographic: Arctic Volcanoes Found Active at Unprecedented Depths
Buried under thick ice and frigid water, volcanic explosions are shaking the Arctic Ocean floor at depths previously thought impossible, according to a new study.
Using robot-operated submarines, researchers have found deposits of glassy rock—evidence of eruptions—scattered over more than 5 square miles (15 square kilometers) of the seabed.
Psychology/Behavior
Scientific American: Our Brains on Marketing: Scans Show Why We Like New Things
We know not to judge a book by its cover—but new research shows that may be exactly what we do.
Scientists have discovered that novel objects perk up the reward system of our brains, indicating our sense of adventure—exploring or learning something new—may be just as tempting as cash and other prizes in the choices we make. Researchers say the finding may explain why marketers are able to bolster sagging sales by simply repackaging old products.
Archeology/Anthropology
(h/t to annetteboardman, who sent me these stories and links.)
Discovery Channel: The intersection of anthropology, genetics, and meteorology
June 25, 2008 -- The phrase "blame it on the weather" takes new meaning in light of research suggesting that regional climate may very well have been responsible for the evolution of lifestyle, culture and even religion in the Middle East
A new study published in the journal Antiquity marks the first time researchers have applied regional climate information to geographic variation in the Y chromosome (which only men possess).
The scientists identified a genetic branch within the chromosome's genetic tree. Called "Haplogroup J," it, in turn, was split in two, with some individuals possessing a version called J1, others J2. The researchers found that J1 individuals were more likely to come from the drier regions and J2 men from the wetter parts of present day Turkey, Iran, the coastal Levant and Northern Iraq.
Palm Beach Post: Scientists race to rescue cemetery from ocean
BARROW, ALASKA — At the edge of the Americas, where the icy Chukchi and Beaufort seas join, archaeologists race against erosion to save an ancient cemetery whose village was long ago taken by the Arctic Ocean.
Point Barrow, Alaska - a crooked finger of black gravel sand pointing out from the northernmost spot in North America - is where the village of Nuvuk once stood as many as 1,200 years ago.
The people here lived on the treeless frozen land - first in sod-covered pit houses built with driftwood, later in more modern structures - until the 1940s, when their dissolving beachfront and the nearby city of Barrow drained life from the village.
AFP via Yahoo News: Egypt archaeologists find ancient painted coffins
CAIRO (AFP) - A team of Egyptian archaeologists have discovered several painted wooden coffins, including some dating back to the 13th century BC rule of pharaoh Ramses II.
"These coffins were found in the tombs of senior officials of the 18th and 19th dynasties," near Saqqara, Zahi Hawass, the director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Thursday.
"Some coloured unopened coffins dating back to the sixth century BC were found as well as some coffins dating back to the time of Ramses II," who ruled from 1279 to 1213 BC, he said.
The Egyptian State information service has an update here.
New Zealand Herald: Insights into original explorers
"A replica 3000-year-old Pacific canoe, modelled on the world's first ocean-going vessels, has been tested in a world-leading Auckland wind tunnel.
Preliminary results show the canoes of the type sailed from New Guinea to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa about 1000BC were so well designed they could probably sail against the wind."
Discovery Channel: Odysseus' Bloody Homecoming Dated to 1178 B.C.
June 24, 2008 -- Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.
It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Experts have long debated whether the books of Homer reflect the actual history of the Trojan War and its aftermath.
The next one I found.
N.Y. Times: Microbes Eating Away at Pieces of History
At Angkor Wat, the dancers’ feet are crumbling.
The statue of Hiawatha at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has microbial deterioration on its back.
The palatial 12th-century Hindu temple, shrouded in the jungles of Cambodia, has played host to a thriving community of cyanobacteria ever since unsightly lichens were cleaned off its walls nearly 20 years ago. The microbes have not been good guests.
These bacteria (Gloeocapsa) not only stain the stone black, they also increase the water absorbed by the shale in morning monsoon rains and the heat absorbed when the sun comes out. The result, says Thomas Warscheid, a geomicrobiologist based in Germany, is a daily expansion and contraction cycle that cracks the temple’s facade and its internal structure. Dr. Warscheid, who has studied Angkor Wat for more than a decade, said in an interview that these pendulum swings had broken away parts of celestial dancer sculptures on the temple walls.
Physics
N.Y. Times: Government Seeks Dismissal of End-of-World Suit Against Collider
Calling its claims "overly speculative and not credible," and saying that it is too late anyway, lawyers for the federal government argued this week that a so-called "doomsday suit" intended to prevent the startup of a the world’s most powerful particle accelerator should be thrown out of court.
When it begins operations, the collider will smash together subatomic particles at the speed of light in search of new forms of matter and new laws of physics.
In the lawsuit, filed in March in Honolulu district court, Walter Wagner, a retired radiation safety expert who lives in Hawaii, and Luis Sancho, a Spanish science writer, contended that the Large Hadron Collider could create microscopic black holes that could wind up eating the Earth, or other dangerous particles known as strangelets — a sort of contagious dead matter — or so-called magnetic monopoles, which could catalyze the destruction of ordinary matter.
Chemistry
Scientific American: How Cells Make Use of Random Biochemical Reactions
Just as identical twins raised in the same home often grow up to be different, identical cells grown in the same environment frequently exhibit distinct characteristics. These differences are the result of random fluctuations in biochemical reactions. Biologists had always thought of such biochemical blips as liabilities, but recent studies suggest that cells and bacteria sometimes utilize this randomness to their benefit.
Science Policy
N.Y. Times Dot Earth Blog: Return to Sender: E.P.A. E-Mail on CO2 Refused by Administration. Old Pattern Back?
The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.
The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.
This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.
N.Y. Times Dot Earth Blog: Reports: Energy Thirst Still Topping Climate Risks
Two studies out Wednesday — one on energy trends, one on climate as a security issue — bode poorly for those seeking to prevent global warming from passing dangerous thresholds. Coal and oil use climb relentlessly, at a rate similar to that for growth in wind, solar, and nuclear power, but in vastly larger quantities.
The report on global warming as a source of conflict sees climate change amplifying discord in parts of Africa and Asia, but not enough to destabilize governments — and even as its impacts through 2020 in rich countries remain small. The "climate divide" we explored last year is alive and well.
N.Y. Times: Citing Need for Assessments, U.S. Freezes Solar Energy Projects
DENVER — Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.
The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.
But the decision to freeze new solar proposals temporarily, reached late last month, has caused widespread concern in the alternative-energy industry, as fledgling solar companies must wait to see if they can realize their hopes of harnessing power from swaths of sun-baked public land, just as the demand for viable alternative energy is accelerating.
Reuters: Booming China splashes out on science
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's booming economy has allowed it to increase spending on research and basic science, but it still has a way to go to catch up with the United States and other developed countries, top science officials said.
Three decades of economic reform means China can turn its attention to advanced science and expensive research, considered a luxury in the days when the country worried about simply feeding and clothing 1.3 billion people.
Science Writing
N.Y. Times: E. Coli and You
From Victorian England to contemporary America, creationists have often denied that we are related to other primates. But the hard truth of our genealogy does even greater damage to human pride. We are cousins of every living thing, including the billions of E. coli bacteria in our intestines. This kinship may not be flattering, but it is useful. By studying these tiny creatures, we learn about other organisms, including ourselves. As the French biologist Jacques Monod once said, "What is true for E. coli is true for the elephant."
Carl Zimmer effectively applies this principle in his engrossing new book, "Microcosm," relating the study of these microbes to larger developments in biology and thoughtfully discussing the social implications of science. If you must limit yourself to only one title on bacteria this year, "Microcosm" is a good pick.
As Zimmer explains, a number of landmark discoveries have involved E. coli, including experiments confirming the universality of biochemistry and revealing how genes function. Studying the many strains of E. coli (most are innocuous) suggests something further: the divergent behavior of genetically identical bacteria, Zimmer writes, is "a warning to those who would put human nature down to any sort of simple genetic determinism."
Science is Cool
Yes, it is, but I couldn't find any good stories to illustrate science as entertainment or in pop culture this week. Oh, well, the past few weeks had more than their share.
