http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/ http://www.redorbit.com/media/themes/redorbit/images/logo_160x80.gif http://www.redorbit.com/ 160 80 http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471869/sharks-denticles-help-it-achieve-higher-speeds/ 2012-02-09 13:47:34 Image 2: Professor George Lauder has found that the rough surface of shark skin helps reduce drag and increase thrust as the animal swims. Interestingly, the research also tested the high-tech swimsuits and found that their surface (supposedly designed to mimic shark skin) has no effect on swimming speed. "I’m convinced they work, but it’s not because of the surface,” he said of the swimsuits. Credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer --- On the Net:

• Harvard University
• Journal of Experimental Biology

]]> 0 Image 2: Professor George Lauder has found that the rough surface of shark skin helps reduce drag and increase thrust as the animal swims. Interestingly, the research also tested the high-tech swimsuits and found that their surface (supposedly designed to mimic shark skin) has no effect on swimming speed. "I’m convinced they work, but it’s not because of the surface,” he said of the swimsuits. Credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer --- On the Net:

• Harvard University
• Journal of Experimental Biology

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471647/researchers-taking-stock-of-earths-melting-ice/ 2012-02-09 10:36:22 [ Watch the Video ] In a new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, scientists using NASA data have found that Earth’s glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are losing nearly 150 billion tons of ice annually. Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), researchers were able to measure ice loss in all of Earth’s land ice between 2003 and 2010. What they found is dramatic: the melt-off from the world’s ice sheets, ice caps and glaciers over the past eight years have been enough to cover the entire United States in about 18 inches of water. The data indicates that melting ice has raised sea levels by an average of 0.06 inches per year. Besides those found in Greenland and Antarctica, glaciers and ice caps around the world are shedding 148 million tons -- or 39 cubic miles -- of ice annually, the researchers said. Physics professor John Wahr of CU-Boulder, one of the study leaders, said these measurements are important because the melting of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, along with Greenland and Antarctica, pose the greatest threat to sea level increases in the future. Despite the new evidence, research does show that in some regions, particularly in the snow-capped chain of mountains from Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, no ice has been lost over the past decade. The discovery shocked scientists, who believed that nearly 55 tons of melt water were being shed each year and not being replenished with new snowfall. The Himalayan glacier melt-off caused controversy in 2009 when a report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mistakenly stated that they would disappear by 2035, instead of 2350. However, Wahr said while greater uncertainty has been discovered in Asia’s highest mountains, the melting of ice caps around the world still remains a serious concern. “Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year,” he told Damian Carrington of The Guardian newspaper. “People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before.” While the team of scientists did point out that lower altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges were definitely melting, as satellite images and reports confirmed, during the 8-year study, enough ice was added back to the peaks to compensate for the loss. Wahr warned that eight years of data is a relatively short time period and that variable monsoons mean year-to-year changes in ice mass of hundreds of billions of tons. “It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century,” he told Carrington. Wahr said the reasoning behind the radical reappraisal of ice melting in Asia comes from different ways in which the current study and previous studies were conducted. Before the new research, estimates of melt water loss for all the world’s 200,000 glaciers were based on analytical data from a few hundred. Lower altitude glaciers were much easier for scientists to study, and so were more frequently included, but were also more prone to melting. The new study, using GRACE, measured tiny changes in the Earth’s gravitational pull. When ice is lost, the gravitational pull weakens and is detected by the orbiting satellites. “They fly at 500km (310 miles), so they see everything,” Wahr said. “Even though we don’t have the resolution to look at individual glaciers, GRACE has proven to be an exceptional tool.” “I believe this data is the most reliable estimate of global glacier mass balance that has been produced to date,” said professor Jonathan Bamber of England’s Bristol University. Bamber, who was not involved in the new research, wrote an accompanying commentary, published along with the study, in the journal Nature. Bamber noted that 1.4 billion people depend on the rivers that flow from the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau. “That is a compelling reason to try to understand what is happening there better.” “The new data does not mean that concerns about climate change are overblown in any way. It means there is a much larger uncertainty in high mountain Asia than we thought. Taken globally all the observations of the Earth’s ice – permafrost, Arctic sea ice, snow cover and glaciers – are going in the same direction,” he added. Bamber, in his commentary, noted that the study period was too brief to capture large fluctuations in melting from some areas, such as the Gulf of Alaska and the Himalayas. “Nonetheless, [the study authors] have dramatically altered our understanding of recent global (glacier and ice cap) volume changes, and their contribution to sea-level rise,” Bamber wrote. “Now we need to work out what this means for estimating their future response.” The study’s first lead author, Thomas Jacob, completed his research at CU-Boulder and is now at the Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières, in Orléans, France. Other co-authors include Professor Tad Pfeffer of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and Sean Swenson, a former CU-Boulder physics doctoral student who is now a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. The twin satellite system GRACE launched in 2002 and continues to monitor the planet, but has passed its expected mission span and its batteries are beginning to weaken. A replacement program has been approved by US and German space officials and could launch by 2016. The GRACE satellites were developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based in Pasadena, California. The two satellites are in the same orbit, roughly 137 miles apart. The California Institute of Technology manages JPL for NASA. --- On the Net:

• University of Colorado at Boulder
• NASA
• GRACE Mission
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Bristol University
• Nature
• Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières
• Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research
• National Center for Atmospheric Research

]]> 0 [ Watch the Video ] In a new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, scientists using NASA data have found that Earth’s glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are losing nearly 150 billion tons of ice annually. Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), researchers were able to measure ice loss in all of Earth’s land ice between 2003 and 2010. What they found is dramatic: the melt-off from the world’s ice sheets, ice caps and glaciers over the past eight years have been enough to cover the entire United States in about 18 inches of water. The data indicates that melting ice has raised sea levels by an average of 0.06 inches per year. Besides those found in Greenland and Antarctica, glaciers and ice caps around the world are shedding 148 million tons -- or 39 cubic miles -- of ice annually, the researchers said. Physics professor John Wahr of CU-Boulder, one of the study leaders, said these measurements are important because the melting of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, along with Greenland and Antarctica, pose the greatest threat to sea level increases in the future. Despite the new evidence, research does show that in some regions, particularly in the snow-capped chain of mountains from Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, no ice has been lost over the past decade. The discovery shocked scientists, who believed that nearly 55 tons of melt water were being shed each year and not being replenished with new snowfall. The Himalayan glacier melt-off caused controversy in 2009 when a report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mistakenly stated that they would disappear by 2035, instead of 2350. However, Wahr said while greater uncertainty has been discovered in Asia’s highest mountains, the melting of ice caps around the world still remains a serious concern. “Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year,” he told Damian Carrington of The Guardian newspaper. “People should be just as worried about the melting of the world’s ice as they were before.” While the team of scientists did point out that lower altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges were definitely melting, as satellite images and reports confirmed, during the 8-year study, enough ice was added back to the peaks to compensate for the loss. Wahr warned that eight years of data is a relatively short time period and that variable monsoons mean year-to-year changes in ice mass of hundreds of billions of tons. “It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century,” he told Carrington. Wahr said the reasoning behind the radical reappraisal of ice melting in Asia comes from different ways in which the current study and previous studies were conducted. Before the new research, estimates of melt water loss for all the world’s 200,000 glaciers were based on analytical data from a few hundred. Lower altitude glaciers were much easier for scientists to study, and so were more frequently included, but were also more prone to melting. The new study, using GRACE, measured tiny changes in the Earth’s gravitational pull. When ice is lost, the gravitational pull weakens and is detected by the orbiting satellites. “They fly at 500km (310 miles), so they see everything,” Wahr said. “Even though we don’t have the resolution to look at individual glaciers, GRACE has proven to be an exceptional tool.” “I believe this data is the most reliable estimate of global glacier mass balance that has been produced to date,” said professor Jonathan Bamber of England’s Bristol University. Bamber, who was not involved in the new research, wrote an accompanying commentary, published along with the study, in the journal Nature. Bamber noted that 1.4 billion people depend on the rivers that flow from the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau. “That is a compelling reason to try to understand what is happening there better.” “The new data does not mean that concerns about climate change are overblown in any way. It means there is a much larger uncertainty in high mountain Asia than we thought. Taken globally all the observations of the Earth’s ice – permafrost, Arctic sea ice, snow cover and glaciers – are going in the same direction,” he added. Bamber, in his commentary, noted that the study period was too brief to capture large fluctuations in melting from some areas, such as the Gulf of Alaska and the Himalayas. “Nonetheless, [the study authors] have dramatically altered our understanding of recent global (glacier and ice cap) volume changes, and their contribution to sea-level rise,” Bamber wrote. “Now we need to work out what this means for estimating their future response.” The study’s first lead author, Thomas Jacob, completed his research at CU-Boulder and is now at the Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières, in Orléans, France. Other co-authors include Professor Tad Pfeffer of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and Sean Swenson, a former CU-Boulder physics doctoral student who is now a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. The twin satellite system GRACE launched in 2002 and continues to monitor the planet, but has passed its expected mission span and its batteries are beginning to weaken. A replacement program has been approved by US and German space officials and could launch by 2016. The GRACE satellites were developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based in Pasadena, California. The two satellites are in the same orbit, roughly 137 miles apart. The California Institute of Technology manages JPL for NASA. --- On the Net:

• University of Colorado at Boulder
• NASA
• GRACE Mission
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Bristol University
• Nature
• Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières
• Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research
• National Center for Atmospheric Research

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471403/next-supercontinent-could-be-formed-near-north-pole/ 2012-02-09 06:13:38 MSNBC Science Editor Alan Boyle, the Yale researchers, including geologist Ross Mitchell, used a computer model to determine the estimated location of the new supercontinent, which they have dubbed Amasia due to the formation beginning when Europe and Asia merge with North and South America. Boyle notes that many scientists have predicted that "either the Atlantic Ocean will close up, reversing the trend that broke apart the last supercontinent ... or that the current spreading zone in the Atlantic will push the continents 180 degrees around the world to close up the Pacific instead." However, Mitchell and his colleagues believe that the new continental conglomeration will instead form in the far north, with the Arctic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea being among the first casualties. "After those water bodies close, we’re on our way to the next supercontinent,” Mitchell, who is the first author of a paper describing the research which has been published in the journal Nature, said in a statement Wednesday. “You’d have the Americas meeting Eurasia practically at the North Pole.” Though Pangaea is believed that have been the most recent supercontinent, geologists believe there have been others throughout the years, according to BBC News Science and Health Reporter Neil Bowdler. Before Pangaea, experts have hypothesized that there was a supercontinent known as Rodinia some one billion years ago, and before that (1.8 billion years ago) was another worldwide landmass known as Nuna. Based on their analysis of all previous supercontinents, Mitchell, senior author and Yale Professor David A.D. Evans, and second author and doctoral student Taylor M. Kilian discovered that from one landmass to the next, the geographic centers were offset from one another by approximately 90 degrees. They call this new model the "orthoversion model" of supercontinent formation, the university reported. According to this model, Boyle says, North America and South America will come closer together to eliminate the Caribbean. After that, "North America would be drawn along the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' to crash into Eurasia and close the Arctic Ocean. The Mediterranean Sea would disappear when Africa smashes into Europe. Australia would continue its current northward drift, becoming part of Asia somewhere between India and Japan. Antarctica, meanwhile, would be left out of the supercontinent, at least at first." "Under the orthoversion model, either Asia or North America would become the center of Amasia, in a spot currently occupied by the Arctic Ocean," the Yale press release added. "A newly formed mountain range will stitch them together." --- Image Caption: Yale scientists theorize that the present-day Arctic Ocean and Caribbean Sea will vanish as North and South America fuse during a mutual northward migration that leads to a collision with Europe and Asia. --- On the Net:

• Yale University
• Nature

]]> 0 MSNBC Science Editor Alan Boyle, the Yale researchers, including geologist Ross Mitchell, used a computer model to determine the estimated location of the new supercontinent, which they have dubbed Amasia due to the formation beginning when Europe and Asia merge with North and South America. Boyle notes that many scientists have predicted that "either the Atlantic Ocean will close up, reversing the trend that broke apart the last supercontinent ... or that the current spreading zone in the Atlantic will push the continents 180 degrees around the world to close up the Pacific instead." However, Mitchell and his colleagues believe that the new continental conglomeration will instead form in the far north, with the Arctic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea being among the first casualties. "After those water bodies close, we’re on our way to the next supercontinent,” Mitchell, who is the first author of a paper describing the research which has been published in the journal Nature, said in a statement Wednesday. “You’d have the Americas meeting Eurasia practically at the North Pole.” Though Pangaea is believed that have been the most recent supercontinent, geologists believe there have been others throughout the years, according to BBC News Science and Health Reporter Neil Bowdler. Before Pangaea, experts have hypothesized that there was a supercontinent known as Rodinia some one billion years ago, and before that (1.8 billion years ago) was another worldwide landmass known as Nuna. Based on their analysis of all previous supercontinents, Mitchell, senior author and Yale Professor David A.D. Evans, and second author and doctoral student Taylor M. Kilian discovered that from one landmass to the next, the geographic centers were offset from one another by approximately 90 degrees. They call this new model the "orthoversion model" of supercontinent formation, the university reported. According to this model, Boyle says, North America and South America will come closer together to eliminate the Caribbean. After that, "North America would be drawn along the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' to crash into Eurasia and close the Arctic Ocean. The Mediterranean Sea would disappear when Africa smashes into Europe. Australia would continue its current northward drift, becoming part of Asia somewhere between India and Japan. Antarctica, meanwhile, would be left out of the supercontinent, at least at first." "Under the orthoversion model, either Asia or North America would become the center of Amasia, in a spot currently occupied by the Arctic Ocean," the Yale press release added. "A newly formed mountain range will stitch them together." --- Image Caption: Yale scientists theorize that the present-day Arctic Ocean and Caribbean Sea will vanish as North and South America fuse during a mutual northward migration that leads to a collision with Europe and Asia. --- On the Net:

• Yale University
• Nature

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471400/russian-team-becomes-first-to-reach-subglacial-lake/ 2012-02-09 06:05:58 BBC News Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos is one of more than 300 glacial lakes known to exist on that continent. Lake Vostok had been untouched for at least 14 million years, added Alissa de Carbonnel of Reuters, and the scientists behind the feat hope that they will be able to learn more about Antarctica's history, discover new life forms, and sneak a peek at what Earth might have been like in the days prior to the ice age. "The 57th Russian Antarctic expedition has penetrated the waters of the subglacial Lake Vostok," expedition head Valery Lukin said in a statement, according to de Carbonnel. "The discovery of this lake is comparable to the first space flight in its technological complexity, its importance and its uniqueness," he added in comments made to the Interfax news agency, also quoted by Reuters. Christine Dell'Amore of National Geographic News reported that the drillers discovered lake water at depths of 12,355 feet, which Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) claims makes them the first team to ever successfully probe a subglacial lake. Dell'Amore says that they accomplished the feat at 8:25pm Moscow time on Sunday. Lukin's team did not take a water sample in order to avoid contaminating it with kerosene and Freon, the expedition head told AFP. Rather, they are opting to wait until the continent's summer months, when they anticipate a "column of water to rise up through the borehole and freeze." The samples should be collected in December 2012 and January 2013, and will be transported back to Russian onboard a research vessel next May. "It is an important milestone that has been completed and a major achievement for the Russians because they've been working on this for years," Professor Martin Siegert, principal investigator for a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) team that plans to drill into Lake Ellsworth on the Western part of the continent later this year, told Amos. Likewise, Texas A&M University Oceanography Professor Mahlon C. Kennicutt II told National Geographic that the discovery "should be celebrated… Fifteen years ago we couldn't imagine the day there would be penetration of one of these lakes." "Penetrating Lake Vostok culminates more than a decade of planning," added Montana State University ecologist John Priscu. "The success of my Russian colleagues proves, from an engineering standpoint, that we can sample an environment beneath 4,000 meters [13,000 feet] of ice. It also opens the doors for ensuing subglacial science." As previously reported on RedOrbit.com, Lake Vostok is the largest of Antarctica’s hidden lakes, as well as one of the largest lakes in the world. Scientists also believe that it could provide a glimpse of what conditions exist for life in similar extreme conditions on Mars and Jupiter’s moon, Europa. --- Image Caption: The surface above Lake Vostok, hidden under more than a kilometer of ice, looks like most of Antarctica’s landscape—flat, barren, and icy. The best way to detect a subglacial lake is through remote sensing. Credit: M. Studinger, LDEO --- On the Net:

• Vostok Station
• Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI)
• British Antarctic Survey (BAS)
• Texas A&M University
• Montana State University

]]> 0 BBC News Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos is one of more than 300 glacial lakes known to exist on that continent. Lake Vostok had been untouched for at least 14 million years, added Alissa de Carbonnel of Reuters, and the scientists behind the feat hope that they will be able to learn more about Antarctica's history, discover new life forms, and sneak a peek at what Earth might have been like in the days prior to the ice age. "The 57th Russian Antarctic expedition has penetrated the waters of the subglacial Lake Vostok," expedition head Valery Lukin said in a statement, according to de Carbonnel. "The discovery of this lake is comparable to the first space flight in its technological complexity, its importance and its uniqueness," he added in comments made to the Interfax news agency, also quoted by Reuters. Christine Dell'Amore of National Geographic News reported that the drillers discovered lake water at depths of 12,355 feet, which Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) claims makes them the first team to ever successfully probe a subglacial lake. Dell'Amore says that they accomplished the feat at 8:25pm Moscow time on Sunday. Lukin's team did not take a water sample in order to avoid contaminating it with kerosene and Freon, the expedition head told AFP. Rather, they are opting to wait until the continent's summer months, when they anticipate a "column of water to rise up through the borehole and freeze." The samples should be collected in December 2012 and January 2013, and will be transported back to Russian onboard a research vessel next May. "It is an important milestone that has been completed and a major achievement for the Russians because they've been working on this for years," Professor Martin Siegert, principal investigator for a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) team that plans to drill into Lake Ellsworth on the Western part of the continent later this year, told Amos. Likewise, Texas A&M University Oceanography Professor Mahlon C. Kennicutt II told National Geographic that the discovery "should be celebrated… Fifteen years ago we couldn't imagine the day there would be penetration of one of these lakes." "Penetrating Lake Vostok culminates more than a decade of planning," added Montana State University ecologist John Priscu. "The success of my Russian colleagues proves, from an engineering standpoint, that we can sample an environment beneath 4,000 meters [13,000 feet] of ice. It also opens the doors for ensuing subglacial science." As previously reported on RedOrbit.com, Lake Vostok is the largest of Antarctica’s hidden lakes, as well as one of the largest lakes in the world. Scientists also believe that it could provide a glimpse of what conditions exist for life in similar extreme conditions on Mars and Jupiter’s moon, Europa. --- Image Caption: The surface above Lake Vostok, hidden under more than a kilometer of ice, looks like most of Antarctica’s landscape—flat, barren, and icy. The best way to detect a subglacial lake is through remote sensing. Credit: M. Studinger, LDEO --- On the Net:

• Vostok Station
• Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI)
• British Antarctic Survey (BAS)
• Texas A&M University
• Montana State University

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471397/you-be-the-judge-icelands-loch-ness-monster-caught-on-video/ 2012-02-09 05:56:14 caught on video.  Belief in the creature dates back to 1345 and sighting it is considered a bad omen. The Daily Mail Online reports that in the legend, a girl placed a heather worm inside a ring of gold in order to make the ring grow. But, when she returned the worm had grown into a serpent but the gold ring stayed the same size. In fear she flung the ring into Lake Lagarfljót where the serpent then grew into a dragon terrorizing the local people. The video, shot by a resident named Hjortur Kjerulf, shows something that looks like a snake meandering through the water. Skeptics, however, think it is only an old net, thawing out after being frozen and moving its way through the water. The creature is believed by some to be 300 feet long with many humps. Some have spotted in on land coiled up or moving into the trees. Others say the monster is 19 miles long, as long as the lake itself.]]> 0 caught on video.  Belief in the creature dates back to 1345 and sighting it is considered a bad omen. The Daily Mail Online reports that in the legend, a girl placed a heather worm inside a ring of gold in order to make the ring grow. But, when she returned the worm had grown into a serpent but the gold ring stayed the same size. In fear she flung the ring into Lake Lagarfljót where the serpent then grew into a dragon terrorizing the local people. The video, shot by a resident named Hjortur Kjerulf, shows something that looks like a snake meandering through the water. Skeptics, however, think it is only an old net, thawing out after being frozen and moving its way through the water. The creature is believed by some to be 300 feet long with many humps. Some have spotted in on land coiled up or moving into the trees. Others say the monster is 19 miles long, as long as the lake itself.]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471379/transformational-fruit-fly-genome-catalog-completed/ 2012-02-09 05:08:03

North Carolina State University

Nature

]]> 0

North Carolina State University

Nature

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471373/pacific-carbon-pump-speeds-up-in-summer/ 2012-02-09 04:44:07 Measuring the biological carbon pump Using 13 years of Hawaiʻi Ocean Time-series (HOT) data from Station ALOHA (A Long-term Oligotrophic Habitat Assessment) about 100 miles north of Oʻahu, the scientists identified a rapid, predictable summer jump in the amount of total carbon, organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and biogenic silica transferred from sunlit surface waters to the ocean depths through what is called the biological carbon pump. This summer export pulse is approximately threefold greater than mean wintertime particle fluxes and fuels more efficient carbon sequestration, according to an article published in the February 7 PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors are Matthew Church from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, John Dore from Montana State University, Ricardo M. Letelier from Oregon State University and Claire Mahaffey from the University of Liverpool. Half of the photosynthesis on Earth is attributable to microscopic, single-celled phytoplankton that inhabit the sea. The vast majority of photosynthetic carbon fixation takes place in low-biomass, low-nutrient open ocean gyres, with about 15 percent of particulate organic matter settling into deep-sea reservoirs to await eventual resurfacing. The researchers suspect that the unanticipated summer jump in deep-sea sequestration of carbon is due to seasonal increases in the biomass and productivity of symbiotic nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in association with diatoms. This increase in microbial presence and activity is distinct from surface blooms, which don’t necessarily result in transfer of particulate matter, but does have ecological implications, said Karl. Besides identifying the probable mechanism and documenting seasonal variability and efficiency in carbon sequestration, the findings confirm the importance of nitrogen fixation and diatom-cyanobacteria symbiosis in the efficient transfer of carbon and energy to the deep sea. In the absence of any obvious predictable stimulus or habitat condition, the scientists hypothesize that changes in day length may be an important environmental cue to initiate aggregation and subsequent export of organic matter to the deep sea. Nearly all cyanobacteria and eukaryotic algae studied to date, including marine diatoms, have light-activated molecular switches, they note. Their conceptual model provides a testable hypothesis for future laboratory and field experimentation. Becoming a microbial oceanography pioneer It’s not the first time that Karl has been out front with unexpected findings that spur new science. A three-page profile that accompanies the PNAS article describes the origin and high points of a remarkable oceanographic career. A baseball-playing, motorcycle-riding youth who served as high school class president and aspired to become a commercial fisherman, Karl was captivated by the sea from his first glimpse of the ocean, viewed from atop a Maine mountain when he was 17. As a master’s student at Florida State University, he helped improve the assay used to quantify ocean microbes and applied it to marine sediments—the first of many tools and processes he had a hand in developing. A newly minted PhD just hired by the University of Hawaiʻi, he set off on his first National Science Foundation–funded grant to study newly discovered life forms at hydrothermal vents on the Galapagos Rift. In 1999, he published the first account of microorganisms in another extreme environment, the accreted ice of Antarctica’s Lake Vostok. Karl conceived of the Hawaiʻi Ocean Time-series program, launched by the National Science Foundation with a $1 million grant in 1988 and is still collecting crucial microbial and biogeochemical data such as that providing the basis for the current paper. (UH Mānoa colleague Roger Lukas leads the companion physical oceanography portion of HOT.) Along the way, Karl has garnered numerous professional awards and been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He has published hundreds of papers and helped secure more than $62 million in extramural funds. His proposal of “Southern Ocean” as the name for waters south of the 60° south latitude was formally designated by the U.S. Geographical Board of Names, and he is credited with helping create the discipline of microbial oceanography. As director of the new Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education, a National Science Foundation–sponsored Science and Technology Center with five partner institutions, he continues to advance the understanding of the life of the sea “from genome to biome.” Reflecting on his first Galapagos Rift dives, Karl says the mesmerizing deep-sea hydrothermal vents “revealed how little we actually knew about our planet.” With unflagging enthusiasm, he continues to do his best to change that. About the research The research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. --- Image Caption: Deployment of sediment traps from the R/V Kilo Moana on a 2007 Hawaiʻi Ocean Time-series cruise (photo by Adriana Harlan and Susan Curless) --- On the Net:

• University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
• Read the PNAS article

]]> 0 Measuring the biological carbon pump Using 13 years of Hawaiʻi Ocean Time-series (HOT) data from Station ALOHA (A Long-term Oligotrophic Habitat Assessment) about 100 miles north of Oʻahu, the scientists identified a rapid, predictable summer jump in the amount of total carbon, organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and biogenic silica transferred from sunlit surface waters to the ocean depths through what is called the biological carbon pump. This summer export pulse is approximately threefold greater than mean wintertime particle fluxes and fuels more efficient carbon sequestration, according to an article published in the February 7 PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors are Matthew Church from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, John Dore from Montana State University, Ricardo M. Letelier from Oregon State University and Claire Mahaffey from the University of Liverpool. Half of the photosynthesis on Earth is attributable to microscopic, single-celled phytoplankton that inhabit the sea. The vast majority of photosynthetic carbon fixation takes place in low-biomass, low-nutrient open ocean gyres, with about 15 percent of particulate organic matter settling into deep-sea reservoirs to await eventual resurfacing. The researchers suspect that the unanticipated summer jump in deep-sea sequestration of carbon is due to seasonal increases in the biomass and productivity of symbiotic nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in association with diatoms. This increase in microbial presence and activity is distinct from surface blooms, which don’t necessarily result in transfer of particulate matter, but does have ecological implications, said Karl. Besides identifying the probable mechanism and documenting seasonal variability and efficiency in carbon sequestration, the findings confirm the importance of nitrogen fixation and diatom-cyanobacteria symbiosis in the efficient transfer of carbon and energy to the deep sea. In the absence of any obvious predictable stimulus or habitat condition, the scientists hypothesize that changes in day length may be an important environmental cue to initiate aggregation and subsequent export of organic matter to the deep sea. Nearly all cyanobacteria and eukaryotic algae studied to date, including marine diatoms, have light-activated molecular switches, they note. Their conceptual model provides a testable hypothesis for future laboratory and field experimentation. Becoming a microbial oceanography pioneer It’s not the first time that Karl has been out front with unexpected findings that spur new science. A three-page profile that accompanies the PNAS article describes the origin and high points of a remarkable oceanographic career. A baseball-playing, motorcycle-riding youth who served as high school class president and aspired to become a commercial fisherman, Karl was captivated by the sea from his first glimpse of the ocean, viewed from atop a Maine mountain when he was 17. As a master’s student at Florida State University, he helped improve the assay used to quantify ocean microbes and applied it to marine sediments—the first of many tools and processes he had a hand in developing. A newly minted PhD just hired by the University of Hawaiʻi, he set off on his first National Science Foundation–funded grant to study newly discovered life forms at hydrothermal vents on the Galapagos Rift. In 1999, he published the first account of microorganisms in another extreme environment, the accreted ice of Antarctica’s Lake Vostok. Karl conceived of the Hawaiʻi Ocean Time-series program, launched by the National Science Foundation with a $1 million grant in 1988 and is still collecting crucial microbial and biogeochemical data such as that providing the basis for the current paper. (UH Mānoa colleague Roger Lukas leads the companion physical oceanography portion of HOT.) Along the way, Karl has garnered numerous professional awards and been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He has published hundreds of papers and helped secure more than $62 million in extramural funds. His proposal of “Southern Ocean” as the name for waters south of the 60° south latitude was formally designated by the U.S. Geographical Board of Names, and he is credited with helping create the discipline of microbial oceanography. As director of the new Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education, a National Science Foundation–sponsored Science and Technology Center with five partner institutions, he continues to advance the understanding of the life of the sea “from genome to biome.” Reflecting on his first Galapagos Rift dives, Karl says the mesmerizing deep-sea hydrothermal vents “revealed how little we actually knew about our planet.” With unflagging enthusiasm, he continues to do his best to change that. About the research The research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. --- Image Caption: Deployment of sediment traps from the R/V Kilo Moana on a 2007 Hawaiʻi Ocean Time-series cruise (photo by Adriana Harlan and Susan Curless) --- On the Net:

• University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
• Read the PNAS article

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471339/carbonized-coffee-grounds-remove-foul-smells/ 2012-02-09 04:18:45 Scientists at The City College of New York Report Nitrogen Contained in Caffeine Enhances Odor-Adsorbing Properties of Carbons For coffee lovers, the first cup of the morning is one of life’s best aromas. But did you know that the leftover grounds could eliminate one of the worst smells around – sewer gas? In research to develop a novel, eco-friendly filter to remove toxic gases from the air, scientists at The City College of New York (CCNY) found that a material made from used coffee grounds can sop up hydrogen sulfide gas, the chemical that makes raw sewage stinky. Dr. Teresa Bandosz, CCNY professor of chemistry and chemical engineering develops and tests materials that scrub toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide from air in industrial facilities and pollution control plants. Much like the grains of charcoal packed into the filter of a tabletop water pitcher, her filters use a form of charcoal called “activated carbon.” Carbon producers already use materials like coal, wood, peat, fruit pits, and coconut shells to make filters. Professor Bandosz realized that our modern coffee culture could supply an abundant source of eco-friendly organic waste. But coffee grounds also come equipped with a special ingredient that boosts their smell-fighting power. Caffeine, the stimulant that gives coffee its energy jolt, contains nitrogen. This element cranks up carbon’s ability to clean sulfur from the air, a process called adsorption. “We should not neglect the natural biomass that is rich in this element,” she and colleagues assert in the January 30 issue of the Journal of Hazardous Materials. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Army Research Office funded the research. Usually, making carbon adsorbents more reactive to toxins requires treating the original with a nitrogen-rich chemical such as ammonia, melamine, or urea, the main nitrogen-containing substance in mammal urine.  “All of these,” the researchers note, “significantly increase the cost of adsorbents.” To make their new filter, Professor Bandosz and her colleagues carbonized old coffee grounds, essentially turning them into charcoal. To do so, they prepared a slurry of coffee grounds, water and zinc chloride, a chemical “activator.”  The team then dried and baked the mixture at temperatures of up to 800 degrees Celsius. The process of activation fills the carbon with scores of minute holes about 10-30 angstroms in diameter, roughly equivalent to 10-30 hydrogen atom-widths across. These densely packed pores are blanketed with nitrogen, perfect to capture hydrogen sulfide molecules passing through. Hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S) isn’t just a smelly nuisance for sewage plant neighbors; it can be deadly. Human noses are so sensitive to the rotten-egg scent of this toxin that it can overwhelm the sense of smell, Professor Bandosz explained. “When someone is exposed to high concentrations of H2S, the nose will stop detecting it,” she said. “There have been cases in which workers died of H2S exposure in sewer systems.” Professor Bandosz suspects that the coffee-based carbon could also separate out other pollutants from the air and water. With the ubiquitous motto to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” and coffee-ground carbon’s special affinity for a toxic gas, Professor Bandosz hopes coffee grounds can be commercially developed into the next green waste filter. For now, however, she recycles them on her own: “I put them outside under the plants in my garden, especially those that like acidic soil,” she said. They are a great fertilizer, of course, packed as they are with nitrogen-rich caffeine. Reference: K. Kante, C. Nieto-Delgado, J. R. Rangel-Mendez, T. J. Bandosz. Spent coffee-based activated carbon: Specific surface features and their importance for H2S separation process. Journal of Hazardous Materials, Volumes 201–202, 30 January 2012, Pages 141–147 --- On the Net:

• The City College of New York
• Teresa Bandosz
• Journal of Hazardous Materials

]]> 0 Scientists at The City College of New York Report Nitrogen Contained in Caffeine Enhances Odor-Adsorbing Properties of Carbons For coffee lovers, the first cup of the morning is one of life’s best aromas. But did you know that the leftover grounds could eliminate one of the worst smells around – sewer gas? In research to develop a novel, eco-friendly filter to remove toxic gases from the air, scientists at The City College of New York (CCNY) found that a material made from used coffee grounds can sop up hydrogen sulfide gas, the chemical that makes raw sewage stinky. Dr. Teresa Bandosz, CCNY professor of chemistry and chemical engineering develops and tests materials that scrub toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide from air in industrial facilities and pollution control plants. Much like the grains of charcoal packed into the filter of a tabletop water pitcher, her filters use a form of charcoal called “activated carbon.” Carbon producers already use materials like coal, wood, peat, fruit pits, and coconut shells to make filters. Professor Bandosz realized that our modern coffee culture could supply an abundant source of eco-friendly organic waste. But coffee grounds also come equipped with a special ingredient that boosts their smell-fighting power. Caffeine, the stimulant that gives coffee its energy jolt, contains nitrogen. This element cranks up carbon’s ability to clean sulfur from the air, a process called adsorption. “We should not neglect the natural biomass that is rich in this element,” she and colleagues assert in the January 30 issue of the Journal of Hazardous Materials. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Army Research Office funded the research. Usually, making carbon adsorbents more reactive to toxins requires treating the original with a nitrogen-rich chemical such as ammonia, melamine, or urea, the main nitrogen-containing substance in mammal urine.  “All of these,” the researchers note, “significantly increase the cost of adsorbents.” To make their new filter, Professor Bandosz and her colleagues carbonized old coffee grounds, essentially turning them into charcoal. To do so, they prepared a slurry of coffee grounds, water and zinc chloride, a chemical “activator.”  The team then dried and baked the mixture at temperatures of up to 800 degrees Celsius. The process of activation fills the carbon with scores of minute holes about 10-30 angstroms in diameter, roughly equivalent to 10-30 hydrogen atom-widths across. These densely packed pores are blanketed with nitrogen, perfect to capture hydrogen sulfide molecules passing through. Hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S) isn’t just a smelly nuisance for sewage plant neighbors; it can be deadly. Human noses are so sensitive to the rotten-egg scent of this toxin that it can overwhelm the sense of smell, Professor Bandosz explained. “When someone is exposed to high concentrations of H2S, the nose will stop detecting it,” she said. “There have been cases in which workers died of H2S exposure in sewer systems.” Professor Bandosz suspects that the coffee-based carbon could also separate out other pollutants from the air and water. With the ubiquitous motto to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” and coffee-ground carbon’s special affinity for a toxic gas, Professor Bandosz hopes coffee grounds can be commercially developed into the next green waste filter. For now, however, she recycles them on her own: “I put them outside under the plants in my garden, especially those that like acidic soil,” she said. They are a great fertilizer, of course, packed as they are with nitrogen-rich caffeine. Reference: K. Kante, C. Nieto-Delgado, J. R. Rangel-Mendez, T. J. Bandosz. Spent coffee-based activated carbon: Specific surface features and their importance for H2S separation process. Journal of Hazardous Materials, Volumes 201–202, 30 January 2012, Pages 141–147 --- On the Net:

• The City College of New York
• Teresa Bandosz
• Journal of Hazardous Materials

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471332/younger-birds-get-no-respect/ 2012-02-09 04:01:34 Image Caption: This is a white-crowned sparrow. Credit: Photo courtesy of Douglas Nelson, Ohio State University --- On the Net:

• Ohio State University
• Biology Letters

]]> 0 Image Caption: This is a white-crowned sparrow. Credit: Photo courtesy of Douglas Nelson, Ohio State University --- On the Net:

• Ohio State University
• Biology Letters

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471329/researchers-study-genetic-history-of-sheep/ 2012-02-09 03:56:02

Public Library of Science

PLoS Biology

CSIRO

]]> 0

Public Library of Science

PLoS Biology

CSIRO

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112471060/whales-briefly-benefited-from-decrease-in-shipping-traffic-after-911/ 2012-02-08 13:53:38 new study, baleen whales suffered less stress from ship noise after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. A study conducted in Canada's Bay of Fundy has revealed that a lull in ship noise after the attacks eased stress on right whales, a type of baleen whale. They analyzed underwater noise levels during a period of reduced ship traffic in the bay after the attacks, and compared the data with levels of stress-related hormone metabolites in the fecal samples of right whales before and after the attacks. Douglas P. Nowacek, Repass-Rodgers University Associate Professor of Marine Conservation Technology and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Duke University, said there was a six-decibel decrease in underwater noise in the bay following September 11. "This correlated to reduced baseline levels of stress-related hormone metabolites in samples collected from whales later that fall," Nowacek said in a statement. "In subsequent years, ship traffic – and noise – were higher, along with the whale's stress-hormone levels." Scientists have become concerned about the effect that increased underwater noise pollution might be having on whales and other marine mammals over the past 50 years. These animals rely on sound to help communicate with each other, locate prey, and navigate through the waters. Nowacek said the sounds made by large ships are particularly concerning because their propellers and engines generate low-frequency noise that overlaps with the frequency band used by baleen whales for communication. Until this study, there was little evidence about whether exposure to the noise resulted in physiological responses that could be harmful to the whales. "Essentially, the animals' stress levels dropped when the underwater ship noises did," Nowacek said. BBC reported that the researchers used trained dogs to help locate bobbing fecal matter in the waters. This feces gathered showed a lower level of metabolites of glucocorticoid hormones, which are associated with stress, than in subsequent summers when marine traffic returned to normal levels. "Past studies have shown they alter their vocalization pattern in a noisy environment just like we would in a cocktail party, but this is the first time the stress has been documented physiologically," Dr Rosalind Rolland of the New England Aquarium in Boston told BBC. Despite the positive effects of the drop in noise levels for the whales, global shipping has risen substantially in recent decades, with noise levels reaching 10 to 12 decibels louder than in the 1960s. The researchers would like to extend their study to other locations, such as moving to study the Southern right whales in the southern hemisphere. The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. --- On the Net:

• Duke University
• Proceedings of the Royal Society B

]]> 0 new study, baleen whales suffered less stress from ship noise after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. A study conducted in Canada's Bay of Fundy has revealed that a lull in ship noise after the attacks eased stress on right whales, a type of baleen whale. They analyzed underwater noise levels during a period of reduced ship traffic in the bay after the attacks, and compared the data with levels of stress-related hormone metabolites in the fecal samples of right whales before and after the attacks. Douglas P. Nowacek, Repass-Rodgers University Associate Professor of Marine Conservation Technology and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Duke University, said there was a six-decibel decrease in underwater noise in the bay following September 11. "This correlated to reduced baseline levels of stress-related hormone metabolites in samples collected from whales later that fall," Nowacek said in a statement. "In subsequent years, ship traffic – and noise – were higher, along with the whale's stress-hormone levels." Scientists have become concerned about the effect that increased underwater noise pollution might be having on whales and other marine mammals over the past 50 years. These animals rely on sound to help communicate with each other, locate prey, and navigate through the waters. Nowacek said the sounds made by large ships are particularly concerning because their propellers and engines generate low-frequency noise that overlaps with the frequency band used by baleen whales for communication. Until this study, there was little evidence about whether exposure to the noise resulted in physiological responses that could be harmful to the whales. "Essentially, the animals' stress levels dropped when the underwater ship noises did," Nowacek said. BBC reported that the researchers used trained dogs to help locate bobbing fecal matter in the waters. This feces gathered showed a lower level of metabolites of glucocorticoid hormones, which are associated with stress, than in subsequent summers when marine traffic returned to normal levels. "Past studies have shown they alter their vocalization pattern in a noisy environment just like we would in a cocktail party, but this is the first time the stress has been documented physiologically," Dr Rosalind Rolland of the New England Aquarium in Boston told BBC. Despite the positive effects of the drop in noise levels for the whales, global shipping has risen substantially in recent decades, with noise levels reaching 10 to 12 decibels louder than in the 1960s. The researchers would like to extend their study to other locations, such as moving to study the Southern right whales in the southern hemisphere. The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. --- On the Net:

• Duke University
• Proceedings of the Royal Society B

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470822/philippine-tarsier-has-bat-like-pitch/ 2012-02-08 10:19:09 Jennifer Viegas of Discovery News. The study is published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters. Ramsier, an evolutionary biologist for the Biological Anthropology Research Lab at Humboldt State University in California, noted the ironic discovery in an animal that has always been considered a silent nocturnal creature. “It turns out that it’s not silent. It’s actually screaming and we had no idea,” she told Stephanie Pappas of LiveScience. The highest pitch a human ear can detect has a frequency of around 20 kilohertz. The Philippine Tarsier can emit calls up to 70 kHz and can hear up to 90 kHz. This hearing ability puts the creature’s hearing abilities in the same range as bats, and far beyond those of any other primate ever known. Even dogs, who tend to respond to higher pitches than humans can tune in to, only hear in the 22 to 23 kHz range. These tiny, but shrilly creatures of the night are found only on islands of the Philippines. They are strictly nocturnal. They lack a tapetum lucidum, the layer of tissue in the eyes of animals such as cats that allows for strong night vision. Instead, the tarsier has giant, lemur-like eyes to navigate its nighttime surroundings. “They’re most closely related to the group that includes monkeys, apes and humans, but in many ways they resemble lemurs and lorises,” Ramsier told Pappas. Ramsier said these small animals made tempting subjects to investigate hearing capacity in the primate world. “People had pretty much thought that monkeys and other primates hear the way we do, but that was based on limited data,” Ramsier told Pappas. But because the Philippine Tarsier is endangered and does not respond well to captivity, Ramsier and her colleagues had their work cut out for them. They were able to capture six tarsiers on the island of Mindanao and placed each one in a sound-muffling chamber, where they were exposed to noises of varying frequencies from a speaker inside the chamber. The team placed non-invasive electrodes on the primates to measure brain response to the sounds. The test is more or less the same found in hospitals used to determine whether newborn babies have the full range of hearing, she noted. Each test took about an hour, after which the tarsiers were released back into the wild, Ramsier said. The team found that the tarsiers responded to pitches as high as 91 kHz -- far higher than the 65 kHz range of the Galago, previously believed to be the highest range for a primate. But the team wanted to know if the primate only listened in high-pitched frequencies, or if it actually called out in ultrasonic noises as well. Ramsier said another researcher, Texas A&M anthropologist Sharon Gursky-Doyen had been researching on the islands of Bohol and Leyte and “happened to notice that these animals were opening their mouths and she was hearing nothing coming out.” She happened to have a bat detector on hand and “she was able to get that vocalization on a recording,” Ramsier noted. In all, researchers were able to capture the calls of 35 wild tarsiers using an ultrasonic microphone. They discovered eight of the animals cried out in pure ultrasound, ranging from 67 to 79 kHz, with most ranging right around 70 kHz. “This is the first time that a primate has been shown to use vocalization that is only in the ultrasound, so this call doesn’t use anything in the lower frequencies that we can hear,” Ramsier said. The Philippine Tarsiers join a select group of mammals that have the ability to use ultrasonic frequency calling. This group includes bats, rodents, cetaceans, and domestic cats. “Kittens produce a pure ultrasonic call from about 2-6 weeks of life when they are first exploring their environment, and a mother cat produces its own purely ultrasonic call in response to the kitten,” explained Ramsier to Discovery's Viegas. Cats at these times of life can therefore communicate in ways not detected by their owners, “unless they follow them around with a bat detector,” she said. Using ultrasonic frequencies to communicate could be a useful tool preventing detection from predators, prey and competitors. It could also enhance energetic efficiency and improve detection against low-frequency background noise, Ramsier said. Other primates have ultrasonic elements to their calls, but the dominant frequencies are well within human hearing range, according to the authors. Chris Kirk, an associate professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, told Discovery News that this “study is important because it expands the number of primate species that concentrate a large part of the acoustic energy in their vocal communications within the ultrasonic range.” The documented tarsier calls seem to conceal it from being detected by others within its auditory range, given the call seems to have “ventriloquial” properties, he said. “In fact, it looks an awful lot like the ‘seet’ alarm calls or (those of) passerine birds, but scaled up to a higher frequency range.” Philippine tarsiers are odd primates, Ramsier said, so they may be unique in their ultrasonic abilities. But it’s also possible that other primates are talking on channels humans have yet to notice. “There could be a whole world of signals out there just waiting for us to hear them … We just have to listen,” she concluded. --- On the Net:

• Biology Letters Paper
• Humboldt State University
• Biological Anthropology Research Lab
• Texas A&M University
• University of Texas, Austin
• Image Courtesy Kok Leng Yeo/Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0)

]]> 0 Jennifer Viegas of Discovery News. The study is published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters. Ramsier, an evolutionary biologist for the Biological Anthropology Research Lab at Humboldt State University in California, noted the ironic discovery in an animal that has always been considered a silent nocturnal creature. “It turns out that it’s not silent. It’s actually screaming and we had no idea,” she told Stephanie Pappas of LiveScience. The highest pitch a human ear can detect has a frequency of around 20 kilohertz. The Philippine Tarsier can emit calls up to 70 kHz and can hear up to 90 kHz. This hearing ability puts the creature’s hearing abilities in the same range as bats, and far beyond those of any other primate ever known. Even dogs, who tend to respond to higher pitches than humans can tune in to, only hear in the 22 to 23 kHz range. These tiny, but shrilly creatures of the night are found only on islands of the Philippines. They are strictly nocturnal. They lack a tapetum lucidum, the layer of tissue in the eyes of animals such as cats that allows for strong night vision. Instead, the tarsier has giant, lemur-like eyes to navigate its nighttime surroundings. “They’re most closely related to the group that includes monkeys, apes and humans, but in many ways they resemble lemurs and lorises,” Ramsier told Pappas. Ramsier said these small animals made tempting subjects to investigate hearing capacity in the primate world. “People had pretty much thought that monkeys and other primates hear the way we do, but that was based on limited data,” Ramsier told Pappas. But because the Philippine Tarsier is endangered and does not respond well to captivity, Ramsier and her colleagues had their work cut out for them. They were able to capture six tarsiers on the island of Mindanao and placed each one in a sound-muffling chamber, where they were exposed to noises of varying frequencies from a speaker inside the chamber. The team placed non-invasive electrodes on the primates to measure brain response to the sounds. The test is more or less the same found in hospitals used to determine whether newborn babies have the full range of hearing, she noted. Each test took about an hour, after which the tarsiers were released back into the wild, Ramsier said. The team found that the tarsiers responded to pitches as high as 91 kHz -- far higher than the 65 kHz range of the Galago, previously believed to be the highest range for a primate. But the team wanted to know if the primate only listened in high-pitched frequencies, or if it actually called out in ultrasonic noises as well. Ramsier said another researcher, Texas A&M anthropologist Sharon Gursky-Doyen had been researching on the islands of Bohol and Leyte and “happened to notice that these animals were opening their mouths and she was hearing nothing coming out.” She happened to have a bat detector on hand and “she was able to get that vocalization on a recording,” Ramsier noted. In all, researchers were able to capture the calls of 35 wild tarsiers using an ultrasonic microphone. They discovered eight of the animals cried out in pure ultrasound, ranging from 67 to 79 kHz, with most ranging right around 70 kHz. “This is the first time that a primate has been shown to use vocalization that is only in the ultrasound, so this call doesn’t use anything in the lower frequencies that we can hear,” Ramsier said. The Philippine Tarsiers join a select group of mammals that have the ability to use ultrasonic frequency calling. This group includes bats, rodents, cetaceans, and domestic cats. “Kittens produce a pure ultrasonic call from about 2-6 weeks of life when they are first exploring their environment, and a mother cat produces its own purely ultrasonic call in response to the kitten,” explained Ramsier to Discovery's Viegas. Cats at these times of life can therefore communicate in ways not detected by their owners, “unless they follow them around with a bat detector,” she said. Using ultrasonic frequencies to communicate could be a useful tool preventing detection from predators, prey and competitors. It could also enhance energetic efficiency and improve detection against low-frequency background noise, Ramsier said. Other primates have ultrasonic elements to their calls, but the dominant frequencies are well within human hearing range, according to the authors. Chris Kirk, an associate professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, told Discovery News that this “study is important because it expands the number of primate species that concentrate a large part of the acoustic energy in their vocal communications within the ultrasonic range.” The documented tarsier calls seem to conceal it from being detected by others within its auditory range, given the call seems to have “ventriloquial” properties, he said. “In fact, it looks an awful lot like the ‘seet’ alarm calls or (those of) passerine birds, but scaled up to a higher frequency range.” Philippine tarsiers are odd primates, Ramsier said, so they may be unique in their ultrasonic abilities. But it’s also possible that other primates are talking on channels humans have yet to notice. “There could be a whole world of signals out there just waiting for us to hear them … We just have to listen,” she concluded. --- On the Net:

• Biology Letters Paper
• Humboldt State University
• Biological Anthropology Research Lab
• Texas A&M University
• University of Texas, Austin
• Image Courtesy Kok Leng Yeo/Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0)

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470541/genetic-mixing-not-extinction-led-to-neanderthals-demise/ 2012-02-08 06:07:35

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS)

Arizona State University (ASU)

University of Colorado Denver

]]> 0

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS)

Arizona State University (ASU)

University of Colorado Denver

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470518/2011-shark-attacks-remain-steady-deaths-highest-since-1993/ 2012-02-08 05:13:22 [ Watch the Video ] Shark attacks in the U.S. declined in 2011, but worldwide fatalities reached a two-decade high, according to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File report released Tuesday. While the U.S. and Florida saw a five-year downturn in the number of reported unprovoked attacks, the 12 fatalities — which all occurred outside the U.S. — may show tourists are venturing to more remote places, said ichthyologist George Burgess, director of the file housed at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “We had a number of fatalities in essentially out-of the way places, where there’s not the same quantity and quality of medical attention readily available,” Burgess said. “They also don’t have histories of shark attacks in these regions, so there are not contingency plans in effect like there are in places such as Florida.” Seventy-five attacks occurred worldwide, close to the decade average, but the number of fatalities doubled compared with 2010. Fatalities occurred in Australia (3), Reunion (2), the Seychelles (2) and South Africa (2), with one each in Costa Rica, Kenya and New Caledonia. The average global fatality rate for the last decade was just under 7 percent, and it rose to 16 percent last year. Excluding the U.S., which had 29 shark attacks but no deaths, the international fatality rate averaged 25 percent in 2011, Burgess said. “We’ve had a decade-long decline in the number of attacks and a continued decline in the fatality rate in the U.S.,” Burgess said. “But last year’s slight increase in non-U.S. attacks resulted in a higher death rate. One in four people who were attacked outside the U.S. died.” Florida led the U.S. with 11 of its 29 attacks. Other countries with multiple attacks include Australia (11), South Africa (5), Reunion (4), Indonesia (3) Mexico (3), Russia (3), Seychelles (2) and Brazil (2). While the higher number of fatalities worldwide came as a surprise, the drop in the number of U.S. attacks follows a 10-year decline, Burgess said. “It’s more than coincidence that we’ve had this drop over this last decade,” Burgess said. “The fact is, that’s a downward trend, and there has to be a cause for that. People might argue there’s less sharks, but since the late 1990s, populations have begun a slow recovery. By contrast, the number of attacks in the United States and Florida suggests there’s been a reduced use of these waters.” Florida’s attacks historically lead the U.S., and as a high aquatic recreation area, especially for surfers, Volusia County leads the state. In 2011, Volusia County again led the state with six attacks, but it was the lowest since 2004 (3). “It’s a good news/bad news situation,” Burgess said. “From the U.S. perspective, things have never been better, our attack and fatality rates continue to decline. But if it’s a reflection of the downturn in the economy, it might suggest that other areas have made a real push to get into the tourism market.” The next step to reducing the number of fatalities is creating emergency plans for these alternative areas in the future, said Burgess, who has been invited to work on developing a response plan in Reunion Island this spring. “Ironically, in this very foreign environment that has animals and plants that can do us harm, we often don’t seem to exhibit any concern at all, we just jump in,” Burgess said. Surfers were the most affected group, accounting for about 60 percent of unprovoked attacks, largely due to the provocative nature of the activity. Swimmers experienced 35 percent of attacks, followed by divers, with about 5 percent. “When you’re inside the water, there’s much less chance of sharks making a mistake because both parties can see each other,” Burgess said. “Surfing involves a lot of swimming, kicking and splashing.” Despite the number of deaths being higher than other years, people should remember how much of a threat humans are to sharks, Burgess said. With worldwide over-fishing, especially to meet demands for flesh and fins used in shark fin soup, an expensive Asian delicacy, humans pose a greater threat to elasmobranchs (sharks, skates and rays) than sharks do to humans. “We’re killing 30 to 70 million sharks per year in fisheries — who’s killing who?” Burgess said. “The reality is that the sea is actually a pretty benign environment, or else we’d be measuring injuries in the thousands or millions per year.” --- On the Net:

• University of Florida
• 2011 Worldwide Shark Attack Summary
• Florida Museum of Natural History

]]> 0 [ Watch the Video ] Shark attacks in the U.S. declined in 2011, but worldwide fatalities reached a two-decade high, according to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File report released Tuesday. While the U.S. and Florida saw a five-year downturn in the number of reported unprovoked attacks, the 12 fatalities — which all occurred outside the U.S. — may show tourists are venturing to more remote places, said ichthyologist George Burgess, director of the file housed at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “We had a number of fatalities in essentially out-of the way places, where there’s not the same quantity and quality of medical attention readily available,” Burgess said. “They also don’t have histories of shark attacks in these regions, so there are not contingency plans in effect like there are in places such as Florida.” Seventy-five attacks occurred worldwide, close to the decade average, but the number of fatalities doubled compared with 2010. Fatalities occurred in Australia (3), Reunion (2), the Seychelles (2) and South Africa (2), with one each in Costa Rica, Kenya and New Caledonia. The average global fatality rate for the last decade was just under 7 percent, and it rose to 16 percent last year. Excluding the U.S., which had 29 shark attacks but no deaths, the international fatality rate averaged 25 percent in 2011, Burgess said. “We’ve had a decade-long decline in the number of attacks and a continued decline in the fatality rate in the U.S.,” Burgess said. “But last year’s slight increase in non-U.S. attacks resulted in a higher death rate. One in four people who were attacked outside the U.S. died.” Florida led the U.S. with 11 of its 29 attacks. Other countries with multiple attacks include Australia (11), South Africa (5), Reunion (4), Indonesia (3) Mexico (3), Russia (3), Seychelles (2) and Brazil (2). While the higher number of fatalities worldwide came as a surprise, the drop in the number of U.S. attacks follows a 10-year decline, Burgess said. “It’s more than coincidence that we’ve had this drop over this last decade,” Burgess said. “The fact is, that’s a downward trend, and there has to be a cause for that. People might argue there’s less sharks, but since the late 1990s, populations have begun a slow recovery. By contrast, the number of attacks in the United States and Florida suggests there’s been a reduced use of these waters.” Florida’s attacks historically lead the U.S., and as a high aquatic recreation area, especially for surfers, Volusia County leads the state. In 2011, Volusia County again led the state with six attacks, but it was the lowest since 2004 (3). “It’s a good news/bad news situation,” Burgess said. “From the U.S. perspective, things have never been better, our attack and fatality rates continue to decline. But if it’s a reflection of the downturn in the economy, it might suggest that other areas have made a real push to get into the tourism market.” The next step to reducing the number of fatalities is creating emergency plans for these alternative areas in the future, said Burgess, who has been invited to work on developing a response plan in Reunion Island this spring. “Ironically, in this very foreign environment that has animals and plants that can do us harm, we often don’t seem to exhibit any concern at all, we just jump in,” Burgess said. Surfers were the most affected group, accounting for about 60 percent of unprovoked attacks, largely due to the provocative nature of the activity. Swimmers experienced 35 percent of attacks, followed by divers, with about 5 percent. “When you’re inside the water, there’s much less chance of sharks making a mistake because both parties can see each other,” Burgess said. “Surfing involves a lot of swimming, kicking and splashing.” Despite the number of deaths being higher than other years, people should remember how much of a threat humans are to sharks, Burgess said. With worldwide over-fishing, especially to meet demands for flesh and fins used in shark fin soup, an expensive Asian delicacy, humans pose a greater threat to elasmobranchs (sharks, skates and rays) than sharks do to humans. “We’re killing 30 to 70 million sharks per year in fisheries — who’s killing who?” Burgess said. “The reality is that the sea is actually a pretty benign environment, or else we’d be measuring injuries in the thousands or millions per year.” --- On the Net:

• University of Florida
• 2011 Worldwide Shark Attack Summary
• Florida Museum of Natural History

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470515/explaining-dune-field-patterns/ 2012-02-08 05:04:26

University of Pennsylvania

Douglas Jerolmack

University of Alabama

Temple University

Nature Geoscience

]]> 0

University of Pennsylvania

Douglas Jerolmack

University of Alabama

Temple University

Nature Geoscience

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470512/utah-botanist-finds-smaller-amorphophallus-species/ 2012-02-08 04:57:01 New plant species from Madagascar smells like roadkill The famed "corpse flower" plant – known for its giant size, rotten-meat odor and phallic shape – has a new, smaller relative: A University of Utah botanist discovered a new species of Amorphophallus that is one-fourth as tall but just as stinky. The new species, collected on two small islands off Madagascar, brings to about 170 the number of species in the genus Amorphophallus, which is Greek for "misshapen penis" because of the shape of the plants' flower-covered shaft, called the inflorescence or the spadix, says Greg Wahlert, a postdoctoral researcher in biology. The 4.5-foot-tall plant, Amorphophallus perrieri, began reeking Friday, Feb. 3 as it approached the peak of its bloom in a campus greenhouse. A day later, Wahlert began cutting down the plant in stages so the spadix, the surrounding leafy spathe and other parts could be pressed, mounted and submitted to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris as part of the process of designating the plant a new species. That won't be official until about a year from now after Wahlert publishes a scientific paper formally describing the species, which can grow to 5 feet high, and how it differs from relatives in the genus, including Amorphophallus titanum – also known as the "corpse plant," "corpse flower" and "titan arum" – which grows to 20 feet high. After Wahlert first collected specimens of the new plant in 2006 and 2007 and discovered it was a new species, he found the Paris museum's herbarium held a dried specimen collected from one of the same islands by French botanist-geologist Joseph Marie Henri Perrier de la Bâthie (1873-1958), who didn't realize it was a new species. So Wahlert is naming it for Perrier. "Perrier collected it in 1932, and it sat in the museum until we dug it up and compared it to the other specimens and the plants that I had collected," Wahlert says. "Perrier spent years working on scores of other plant groups [and describing hundreds of other new species] and just never got around to it." The corpse flower smells like rotting meat to attract the flies and beetles that pollinate it. Wahlert had expected the new species would smell like cheese, which it did briefly when it began blooming Feb. 3. But the odor soon grew worse – much worse – and more like its giant relative. "I smelled rotting roadkill out in the sun reeking," says University of Utah biology Professor Lynn Bohs, in whose lab Wahlert works. "There's also a note of public restroom – a Porta Potty smell." Wahlert added: "I would say carrion and feces. When you get right up to it, it's really foul and disgusting." Another Utah researcher collected volatile gases emitted by the plant "and will identify the components of the smell," Wahlert says. Only a small group of Amorphophallus species have been tested for odors, but the known aromas range from rotting meat to anise, cheese, dung, fish, urine, spice and chocolate, he adds. Two weeks before the plant began to bloom, "it was just a little bud sticking out of the dirt," he says. When it bloomed, the stalk was almost 4 feet tall and the inflorescence or spadix was about 10 inches long. It was yellow, with pollen on the top part. The lower part, hidden by the reddish, leafy spathe, was covered by hundreds of tiny flowers, each a fraction of an inch wide. (Sometimes the entire spadix is referred to informally as the flower.) "They are just so rude – their appearance and smell," Bohs says. "Everybody I've talked to says they almost started puking when they smelled it. It's horrid." In the Same Family as Philodendrons and Skunk Cabbage Some thought the plants' suggestive genus name was horrid. In 2008, Sir David Attenborough said he invented the name "titan arum" for the corpse flower for his BBC series "The Private Life of Plants" because he thought it would be inappropriate to repeatedly refer to Amorphophallus. Bohs says the genus belongs to the family Araceae, commonly known as the arum or aroid family. The family includes philodendrons, taro root (from which Hawaiians make poi), skunk cabbage and anthurium, a plant common in floral arrangements, with a yellow spadix surrounded by a leafy, red, heart-shaped spathe. Wahlert says plants in the genus Amorphophallus are found in southern Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and Africa, including Madagascar. Of the 170 or so species in the genus, which first was discovered in 1834, "a lot have been known for 150 years, but one, two or three new species are described every year," he adds. A. titanum grows naturally only in Sumatra in Indonesia, although it is found around the world in greenhouses that compete for the largest corpse flower plant. The Guinness Book of Records title currently is held by a New Hampshire specimen that had a spadix measuring 10-feet-2.25-inches tall in 2010. Counting the stem and spadix, A. titanum can reach 20 feet tall, compared with a 5-foot maximum for A. perrieri, which has a longer stem and shorter spadix – about 10 inches long in the case of the one that bloomed on campus. New Species Collected from a Burial Island Wahlert collected the new species from Nosy Mitsio and Nosy Ankarea – two islands northwest of Madagascar, which is off the east coast of Africa. "Nosy" means island in the Malagasy language. The plant since has been found on Madagascar. He had to obtain permission from a local village to visit Nosy Ankarea, an uninhabited, half-mile-wide island where the Sakalava people buried their rulers. Unlike Ankarea, which is still vegetated, Mitsio is heavily deforested. A. perrieri was found there in low scrub behind beach dunes. "I went there in 2006 to collect tree violets, and when I got there I discovered these Amorphophallus in full bloom on the first day in the field," cutting and collecting four or five specimens, Wahlert says. "That night I got malaria. I stayed there a week but was so sick I couldn't do much collecting." After the trip, Wahlert showed the specimens to Dutch botanist Wilbert Hetterscheid of Wageningen University. Hetterscheid, an expert on Amorphophallus, said they were a new species, and is co-authoring the descriptive paper with Wahlert. In October 2007, Wahlert went back to the islands at the end of the dry season, and once again the new species were in full bloom. He collected 15 tubers – the roots – so he could grow the plants. Wahlert kept the live plants at various institutions where he worked and gave others away, ending up with one left when he moved to Utah last fall. Why should anyone care about a stinking plant with a suggestive shape? "It's not high-tech, but it's still important to describe new species, to document biodiversity, particularly in a place like Madagascar, which is one of the world's great biodiversity hotspots," Wahlert says. "It's been severely deforested and is continuing to be deforested. So it's important to document new species before they go extinct." --- Image Caption: University of Utah botanist Greg Wahlert, a postdoctoral researcher in biology, and the upper part of a new plant species he discovered, Amorphophallus perrieri. The plant is in the same family as philodendrons, taro root, skunk cabbage and anthurium, which is common in floral arrangements. Photo Credit: Lee Siegel, University of Utah --- On the Net:

• University of Utah

]]> 0 New plant species from Madagascar smells like roadkill The famed "corpse flower" plant – known for its giant size, rotten-meat odor and phallic shape – has a new, smaller relative: A University of Utah botanist discovered a new species of Amorphophallus that is one-fourth as tall but just as stinky. The new species, collected on two small islands off Madagascar, brings to about 170 the number of species in the genus Amorphophallus, which is Greek for "misshapen penis" because of the shape of the plants' flower-covered shaft, called the inflorescence or the spadix, says Greg Wahlert, a postdoctoral researcher in biology. The 4.5-foot-tall plant, Amorphophallus perrieri, began reeking Friday, Feb. 3 as it approached the peak of its bloom in a campus greenhouse. A day later, Wahlert began cutting down the plant in stages so the spadix, the surrounding leafy spathe and other parts could be pressed, mounted and submitted to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris as part of the process of designating the plant a new species. That won't be official until about a year from now after Wahlert publishes a scientific paper formally describing the species, which can grow to 5 feet high, and how it differs from relatives in the genus, including Amorphophallus titanum – also known as the "corpse plant," "corpse flower" and "titan arum" – which grows to 20 feet high. After Wahlert first collected specimens of the new plant in 2006 and 2007 and discovered it was a new species, he found the Paris museum's herbarium held a dried specimen collected from one of the same islands by French botanist-geologist Joseph Marie Henri Perrier de la Bâthie (1873-1958), who didn't realize it was a new species. So Wahlert is naming it for Perrier. "Perrier collected it in 1932, and it sat in the museum until we dug it up and compared it to the other specimens and the plants that I had collected," Wahlert says. "Perrier spent years working on scores of other plant groups [and describing hundreds of other new species] and just never got around to it." The corpse flower smells like rotting meat to attract the flies and beetles that pollinate it. Wahlert had expected the new species would smell like cheese, which it did briefly when it began blooming Feb. 3. But the odor soon grew worse – much worse – and more like its giant relative. "I smelled rotting roadkill out in the sun reeking," says University of Utah biology Professor Lynn Bohs, in whose lab Wahlert works. "There's also a note of public restroom – a Porta Potty smell." Wahlert added: "I would say carrion and feces. When you get right up to it, it's really foul and disgusting." Another Utah researcher collected volatile gases emitted by the plant "and will identify the components of the smell," Wahlert says. Only a small group of Amorphophallus species have been tested for odors, but the known aromas range from rotting meat to anise, cheese, dung, fish, urine, spice and chocolate, he adds. Two weeks before the plant began to bloom, "it was just a little bud sticking out of the dirt," he says. When it bloomed, the stalk was almost 4 feet tall and the inflorescence or spadix was about 10 inches long. It was yellow, with pollen on the top part. The lower part, hidden by the reddish, leafy spathe, was covered by hundreds of tiny flowers, each a fraction of an inch wide. (Sometimes the entire spadix is referred to informally as the flower.) "They are just so rude – their appearance and smell," Bohs says. "Everybody I've talked to says they almost started puking when they smelled it. It's horrid." In the Same Family as Philodendrons and Skunk Cabbage Some thought the plants' suggestive genus name was horrid. In 2008, Sir David Attenborough said he invented the name "titan arum" for the corpse flower for his BBC series "The Private Life of Plants" because he thought it would be inappropriate to repeatedly refer to Amorphophallus. Bohs says the genus belongs to the family Araceae, commonly known as the arum or aroid family. The family includes philodendrons, taro root (from which Hawaiians make poi), skunk cabbage and anthurium, a plant common in floral arrangements, with a yellow spadix surrounded by a leafy, red, heart-shaped spathe. Wahlert says plants in the genus Amorphophallus are found in southern Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and Africa, including Madagascar. Of the 170 or so species in the genus, which first was discovered in 1834, "a lot have been known for 150 years, but one, two or three new species are described every year," he adds. A. titanum grows naturally only in Sumatra in Indonesia, although it is found around the world in greenhouses that compete for the largest corpse flower plant. The Guinness Book of Records title currently is held by a New Hampshire specimen that had a spadix measuring 10-feet-2.25-inches tall in 2010. Counting the stem and spadix, A. titanum can reach 20 feet tall, compared with a 5-foot maximum for A. perrieri, which has a longer stem and shorter spadix – about 10 inches long in the case of the one that bloomed on campus. New Species Collected from a Burial Island Wahlert collected the new species from Nosy Mitsio and Nosy Ankarea – two islands northwest of Madagascar, which is off the east coast of Africa. "Nosy" means island in the Malagasy language. The plant since has been found on Madagascar. He had to obtain permission from a local village to visit Nosy Ankarea, an uninhabited, half-mile-wide island where the Sakalava people buried their rulers. Unlike Ankarea, which is still vegetated, Mitsio is heavily deforested. A. perrieri was found there in low scrub behind beach dunes. "I went there in 2006 to collect tree violets, and when I got there I discovered these Amorphophallus in full bloom on the first day in the field," cutting and collecting four or five specimens, Wahlert says. "That night I got malaria. I stayed there a week but was so sick I couldn't do much collecting." After the trip, Wahlert showed the specimens to Dutch botanist Wilbert Hetterscheid of Wageningen University. Hetterscheid, an expert on Amorphophallus, said they were a new species, and is co-authoring the descriptive paper with Wahlert. In October 2007, Wahlert went back to the islands at the end of the dry season, and once again the new species were in full bloom. He collected 15 tubers – the roots – so he could grow the plants. Wahlert kept the live plants at various institutions where he worked and gave others away, ending up with one left when he moved to Utah last fall. Why should anyone care about a stinking plant with a suggestive shape? "It's not high-tech, but it's still important to describe new species, to document biodiversity, particularly in a place like Madagascar, which is one of the world's great biodiversity hotspots," Wahlert says. "It's been severely deforested and is continuing to be deforested. So it's important to document new species before they go extinct." --- Image Caption: University of Utah botanist Greg Wahlert, a postdoctoral researcher in biology, and the upper part of a new plant species he discovered, Amorphophallus perrieri. The plant is in the same family as philodendrons, taro root, skunk cabbage and anthurium, which is common in floral arrangements. Photo Credit: Lee Siegel, University of Utah --- On the Net:

• University of Utah

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470509/redder-ladybirds-are-more-deadly/ 2012-02-08 04:51:39 Image Caption: This image shows a ladybird eating an aphid. New research suggests that the redness of a ladybird's wings directly links to its toxicity and its diet in early life. Credit: Jan Stipala --- On the Net:

• University of Exeter
• Functional Ecology

]]> 0 Image Caption: This image shows a ladybird eating an aphid. New research suggests that the redness of a ladybird's wings directly links to its toxicity and its diet in early life. Credit: Jan Stipala --- On the Net:

• University of Exeter
• Functional Ecology

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470503/studying-natures-rhythms-soundscape-ecologists-spawn-new-field/ 2012-02-08 04:46:59 Listen to biophony, geophony, anthrophony: the 'music' of Planet Earth Geophony. Biophony. Anthrophony. Unfamiliar words. But they shouldn't be. We're surrounded by them morning, noon and night, say ecologist Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University and colleagues. The evening "singing" of frogs. Burbling brooks, breaking waves and the whistling wind. Planes, trains and automobiles. Biophony is the music created by organisms like frogs and birds; geophony, the composition of non-biological sounds like wind, rain and thunder; and anthrophony, the conglomeration of noise from humans. What they add up to is a cacophony--a mix of sounds made by the environment, and by people; a background to which most have become tone-deaf. "Another word for it is 'soundscape,'" says Pijanowski. He and colleagues are leading an effort to spawn a new field called soundscape ecology. It uses "nature's music" to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape. It also reconnects people with Earth-sounds. "Natural sound could be the 'canary in the coal mine,'" says Pijanowski. "Sound might be the critical first indicator of changes in climate and weather patterns, or the presence of pollution." The dawn and dusk choruses of birds, for example, are characteristic of a certain location. If the intensity or frequency of these melodies change, "there's likely something causing it," says Pijanowski. "Ecologists have largely ignored the ways in which sound can help determine what's happening to an ecosystem." Pijanowski and colleagues have received a grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program to study soundscapes. NSF CNH awardees work to provide a better understanding of natural processes and cycles, and of human behavior and decisions--as well as understanding how and where they intersect. NSF's Directorates for Biological Sciences (BIO), Geosciences (GEO) and Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) support the CNH program. CNH is part of NSF's Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative. "CNH highlights the need for scientists from different fields to work together and benefit from each other's perspectives to gain an understanding of the complex ways people interact with Earth's natural systems," says Tom Baerwald, CNH program director in SBE. "Findings from these projects will help individuals and groups address environmental problems more effectively." "By bringing together researchers from a wide variety of academic fields," adds Sarah Ruth, CNH program director in GEO, "the projects are providing valuable new insights into the ways in which we, our environment, and the natural resources we rely on act as one interconnected system." "CNH addresses societal challenges in the management of 'ecosystem services' and in adaptation to climate change," says Alan Tessier, CNH program director in BIO. "The soundscapes project is one such effort." Since Rachel Carson's far-reaching 1962 book Silent Spring, the sounds of nature have been linked with environmental quality. "Over increasingly large areas of the United States," wrote Carson in Silent Spring, "spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds. The early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song." Carson's observations turned out to be right.  What began as her observation of sound--or its absence--ultimately led to the ban of DDT, the insecticide responsible for precipitous drops in numbers of bald eagles and their avian relatives. The study of soundscapes can yield valuable information about very different landscapes, say Pijanowski and colleagues like Bernie Krause of Wild Sanctuary, Inc., in Glen Ellen, California, and Almo Farina of Urbino University in Italy. Pijanowski has mapped soundscapes in wetlands and agricultural fields in Tippecanoe County, Indiana; near burbling streams and in high-wind chaparral in Sequoia National Park, California; and in the bird-song-filled forests of Italy and Costa Rica. The ecosystem that surrounds the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, for example, is home to more than 5,000 species of plants, 500 species of birds, three dozen frogs and kin and hundreds of species of insects. All these animals--including poison dart frogs, cicadas, great green macaws and howler monkeys--contribute to the La Selva biophony. "Geophony is a hallmark of this landscape, too, with strong winds moving through trees, raging rivers audible from far away, and intense tropical rain showers that fill the 'acoustic spaces,'" says Pijanowski. Acoustic spaces are equally "noisy" in the beech forests of Italy's Apennine National Park. There Pijanowski and other scientists collected three-hour recordings from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. each day. Data from the acoustic recorders were used to construct "soundtopes"--three-dimensional maps of acoustics plotted across the landscape. The daily maps show that large seasonal changes happen in this beech forest. "We anticipated that the maps would be similar," says Pijanowski. "But that wasn't the case." Recordings like those made in Apennine National Park will become tomorrow's "acoustic fossils," says Pijanowski, "possibly preserving the only evidence we have of ecosystems that may vanish in the future." Soundscapes, he believes, represent the heritage of our planet's acoustic biodiversity and reflect Earth's assemblages of organisms. "Natural sounds are an auditory link with our environment, one we need. Society's growing 'nature deficit disorder' is likely to increase as we replace these sounds with the din made by humans." Almost 50 years ago, Rachel Carson highlighted the dangers of pesticides and their potential threats to wildlife, and to us. A half-century later, "the unintended silencing of organisms by human activities is an indication of our continued effect on the planet's ecosystems," says Pijanowski. Through soundscape ecology, he hopes to record and study Earth-music--while there's still time. While frogs yet sing, waves break, and the wind whistles through the forest. --- Image 1: Soundscape: the landscape of 'nature's music' when a wolf howls in the forest. Credit: U.S. National Park Service Image 2: Sound surrounds us, in the sky, the land, the water. Credit: U.S. National Park Service --- On the Net:

• NSF
• NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) Investment
• Purdue University

]]> 0 Listen to biophony, geophony, anthrophony: the 'music' of Planet Earth Geophony. Biophony. Anthrophony. Unfamiliar words. But they shouldn't be. We're surrounded by them morning, noon and night, say ecologist Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University and colleagues. The evening "singing" of frogs. Burbling brooks, breaking waves and the whistling wind. Planes, trains and automobiles. Biophony is the music created by organisms like frogs and birds; geophony, the composition of non-biological sounds like wind, rain and thunder; and anthrophony, the conglomeration of noise from humans. What they add up to is a cacophony--a mix of sounds made by the environment, and by people; a background to which most have become tone-deaf. "Another word for it is 'soundscape,'" says Pijanowski. He and colleagues are leading an effort to spawn a new field called soundscape ecology. It uses "nature's music" to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape. It also reconnects people with Earth-sounds. "Natural sound could be the 'canary in the coal mine,'" says Pijanowski. "Sound might be the critical first indicator of changes in climate and weather patterns, or the presence of pollution." The dawn and dusk choruses of birds, for example, are characteristic of a certain location. If the intensity or frequency of these melodies change, "there's likely something causing it," says Pijanowski. "Ecologists have largely ignored the ways in which sound can help determine what's happening to an ecosystem." Pijanowski and colleagues have received a grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program to study soundscapes. NSF CNH awardees work to provide a better understanding of natural processes and cycles, and of human behavior and decisions--as well as understanding how and where they intersect. NSF's Directorates for Biological Sciences (BIO), Geosciences (GEO) and Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) support the CNH program. CNH is part of NSF's Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative. "CNH highlights the need for scientists from different fields to work together and benefit from each other's perspectives to gain an understanding of the complex ways people interact with Earth's natural systems," says Tom Baerwald, CNH program director in SBE. "Findings from these projects will help individuals and groups address environmental problems more effectively." "By bringing together researchers from a wide variety of academic fields," adds Sarah Ruth, CNH program director in GEO, "the projects are providing valuable new insights into the ways in which we, our environment, and the natural resources we rely on act as one interconnected system." "CNH addresses societal challenges in the management of 'ecosystem services' and in adaptation to climate change," says Alan Tessier, CNH program director in BIO. "The soundscapes project is one such effort." Since Rachel Carson's far-reaching 1962 book Silent Spring, the sounds of nature have been linked with environmental quality. "Over increasingly large areas of the United States," wrote Carson in Silent Spring, "spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds. The early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song." Carson's observations turned out to be right.  What began as her observation of sound--or its absence--ultimately led to the ban of DDT, the insecticide responsible for precipitous drops in numbers of bald eagles and their avian relatives. The study of soundscapes can yield valuable information about very different landscapes, say Pijanowski and colleagues like Bernie Krause of Wild Sanctuary, Inc., in Glen Ellen, California, and Almo Farina of Urbino University in Italy. Pijanowski has mapped soundscapes in wetlands and agricultural fields in Tippecanoe County, Indiana; near burbling streams and in high-wind chaparral in Sequoia National Park, California; and in the bird-song-filled forests of Italy and Costa Rica. The ecosystem that surrounds the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, for example, is home to more than 5,000 species of plants, 500 species of birds, three dozen frogs and kin and hundreds of species of insects. All these animals--including poison dart frogs, cicadas, great green macaws and howler monkeys--contribute to the La Selva biophony. "Geophony is a hallmark of this landscape, too, with strong winds moving through trees, raging rivers audible from far away, and intense tropical rain showers that fill the 'acoustic spaces,'" says Pijanowski. Acoustic spaces are equally "noisy" in the beech forests of Italy's Apennine National Park. There Pijanowski and other scientists collected three-hour recordings from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. each day. Data from the acoustic recorders were used to construct "soundtopes"--three-dimensional maps of acoustics plotted across the landscape. The daily maps show that large seasonal changes happen in this beech forest. "We anticipated that the maps would be similar," says Pijanowski. "But that wasn't the case." Recordings like those made in Apennine National Park will become tomorrow's "acoustic fossils," says Pijanowski, "possibly preserving the only evidence we have of ecosystems that may vanish in the future." Soundscapes, he believes, represent the heritage of our planet's acoustic biodiversity and reflect Earth's assemblages of organisms. "Natural sounds are an auditory link with our environment, one we need. Society's growing 'nature deficit disorder' is likely to increase as we replace these sounds with the din made by humans." Almost 50 years ago, Rachel Carson highlighted the dangers of pesticides and their potential threats to wildlife, and to us. A half-century later, "the unintended silencing of organisms by human activities is an indication of our continued effect on the planet's ecosystems," says Pijanowski. Through soundscape ecology, he hopes to record and study Earth-music--while there's still time. While frogs yet sing, waves break, and the wind whistles through the forest. --- Image 1: Soundscape: the landscape of 'nature's music' when a wolf howls in the forest. Credit: U.S. National Park Service Image 2: Sound surrounds us, in the sky, the land, the water. Credit: U.S. National Park Service --- On the Net:

• NSF
• NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) Investment
• Purdue University

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470080/experts-say-advances-in-neuroscience-may-affect-future-of-warfare/ 2012-02-07 14:43:33

Queen Mary University

Report: Brain Waves Module 3: Neuroscience, conflict and security

]]> 0

Queen Mary University

Report: Brain Waves Module 3: Neuroscience, conflict and security

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470071/entire-genome-of-extinct-human-decoded/ 2012-02-07 14:31:14 [ Watch the Video ] Researchers have decoded the entire genome of a fossil from an extinct species of human related to Neanderthals. The team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology sequenced every position in the Denisovan genome about 30 times over. They used DNA extracted from less than 10 milligrams of the finger bone discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. Svante Pääbo and his colleagues presented a draft version of the genome in 2010 that showed this individual came from a previously unknown group of extinct humans. Denisovans, along with their sister group the Neanderthals, are the closest extinct relatives of modern humans. During the 2010 research, each position of the genome was determined only twice on average.  This level of resolution was only sufficient enough to establish the relationship between Denisovans to Neanderthals and modern humans. However, they were unable to study the evolution of specific parts of the genome due to the low resolution. Now, the team is even able to distinguish the small differences between the copies of genes it received from its mother and father. “The genome is of very high quality”, Matthias Meyer, who developed the techniques that made this technical feat possible, said in a press release. “We cover all non-repetitive DNA sequences in the Denisovan genome so many times that it has fewer errors than most genomes from present-day humans that have been determined to date”. This is the first complete genome sequence of an archaic human group, which could lead scientists to a better understanding of the evolutionary steps from this group to modern humans. “We hope that biologists will be able to use this genome to discover genetic changes that were important for the development of modern human culture and technology, and enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world, starting around 100,000 years ago” Pääbo said in a press release. The group said they plan to present a paper describing the findings later on this year. --- Image 2: Researchers have now been able to sequence the entire Denisova genome using 10 milligram of a finger bone fragment that was found in the Denisova-Cave in Southern Sibiria. © MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology --- On the Net:

• Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
• The genome is available at http://www.eva.mpg.de/denisova and as a Public Data Set via Amazon Web Services (AWS): http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/2357.

]]> 0 [ Watch the Video ] Researchers have decoded the entire genome of a fossil from an extinct species of human related to Neanderthals. The team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology sequenced every position in the Denisovan genome about 30 times over. They used DNA extracted from less than 10 milligrams of the finger bone discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. Svante Pääbo and his colleagues presented a draft version of the genome in 2010 that showed this individual came from a previously unknown group of extinct humans. Denisovans, along with their sister group the Neanderthals, are the closest extinct relatives of modern humans. During the 2010 research, each position of the genome was determined only twice on average.  This level of resolution was only sufficient enough to establish the relationship between Denisovans to Neanderthals and modern humans. However, they were unable to study the evolution of specific parts of the genome due to the low resolution. Now, the team is even able to distinguish the small differences between the copies of genes it received from its mother and father. “The genome is of very high quality”, Matthias Meyer, who developed the techniques that made this technical feat possible, said in a press release. “We cover all non-repetitive DNA sequences in the Denisovan genome so many times that it has fewer errors than most genomes from present-day humans that have been determined to date”. This is the first complete genome sequence of an archaic human group, which could lead scientists to a better understanding of the evolutionary steps from this group to modern humans. “We hope that biologists will be able to use this genome to discover genetic changes that were important for the development of modern human culture and technology, and enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world, starting around 100,000 years ago” Pääbo said in a press release. The group said they plan to present a paper describing the findings later on this year. --- Image 2: Researchers have now been able to sequence the entire Denisova genome using 10 milligram of a finger bone fragment that was found in the Denisova-Cave in Southern Sibiria. © MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology --- On the Net:

• Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
• The genome is available at http://www.eva.mpg.de/denisova and as a Public Data Set via Amazon Web Services (AWS): http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/2357.

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470031/alien-ladybug-in-europe-dropping-native-species-population/ 2012-02-07 12:24:40

Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

Diversity and Distributions

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Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

Diversity and Distributions

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112469795/researchers-recreate-fossil-cricket-love-song/ 2012-02-07 10:11:18 [ Listen to the Recreation ] An international team of scientists took it upon themselves to recreate the love song of an extinct cricket that lived more than 160 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. The song was reconstructed using microscopic wing features on a fossilized bush cricket (Archaboilus musicus) found in northeast China. The call of the Jurassic cricket was simple, pure and capable of traveling long distances in the night, scientists noted. The reproduced sounds are actually the mating call of the “primitive” insect, whose modern descendants are also known as katydids. The “exceptionally” well-preserved fossilized remains were discovered by Chinese scientists from Capital Normal University in Beijing. Jun-Jie Gu and Professor Dong Ren, yearning to know how their fossil would have sounded when alive, contacted Dr. Fernando Montealegre-Zapata and Professor Daniel Robert of Bristol University in the UK, both experts in the biomechanics of singing and hearing in insects. The group also teamed up with Dr. Michael Engel of the University of Kansas, USA, a leading expert on insect evolution. The Chinese team provided an exceptionally detailed bush cricket fossil with well-preserved wings, measuring three-quarters of an inch long, allowing scientists to recreate for the first time the features that would have produced sound when rubbed together. The researchers said the resulting sounds are “possibly the most ancient known musical song documented to date.” They said the call should be imagined against a busy backdrop of waterfalls, wind, the sound of water coursing through streams and other amphibious creatures and insects serenading their mates. The researchers, publishing their study in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the anatomical construction of the fossil’s song apparatus, and compared it to 59 living species of katydids. They concluded that the 165-million-year-old cricket must have produced musical songs, broadcasting pure, single frequencies. Montealegre-Zapata, using biomechanical principles he discovered years ago, established that this extinct cricket sang a tone pitched at 6.4kHz and each tone lasted roughly 16 milliseconds. This information gave the scientists enough data to acoustically reconstruct the song itself. “This discovery indicates that pure tone communication was already exploited by animals in the middle Jurassic, some 165 million years ago. For Archaboilus, as for living bush cricket species, singing constitutes a key component of mate attraction,” said Robert. “Singing loud and clear advertises the presence, location and quality of the singer, a message that females choose to respond to – or not. Using a single tone, the male’s call carries further and better, and therefore is likely to serenade more females. However, it also makes the male more conspicuous to predators if they have also evolved ears to eavesdrop on these mating calls.” “Using a low-pitched song, A. musicus was acoustically adapted to long-distance communication in a lightly cluttered environment, such as a Jurassic forest,” added Montealegre-Zapata.  “Today, all species of katydids that use musical calls are nocturnal so musical calls in the Jurassic were also most likely an adaptation to nocturnal life.” “Being nocturnal, Archaboilus musicus probably escaped from diurnal predators like Archaeopteryx, but it cannot be ruled out that Jurassic insectivorous mammals like Morganucodon and Dryolestes also listened to the calls of Archaboilus and preyed on them,” he said. “This Jurassic bush cricket thus sheds light on the potential auditory capacity of other animals, and helps us learn a little more about the ambiance of a world long gone. It also suggests the evolutionary mechanisms that drove modern bush crickets to develop ultrasonic signals for sexual pairing and for avoiding an increasingly relevant echolocating predator, but that only happened 100 million years later, possibly with the appearance of bats,” said the researchers. --- On the Net:

• Bristol University
• Capital Normal University
• University of Kansas
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

]]> 0 [ Listen to the Recreation ] An international team of scientists took it upon themselves to recreate the love song of an extinct cricket that lived more than 160 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. The song was reconstructed using microscopic wing features on a fossilized bush cricket (Archaboilus musicus) found in northeast China. The call of the Jurassic cricket was simple, pure and capable of traveling long distances in the night, scientists noted. The reproduced sounds are actually the mating call of the “primitive” insect, whose modern descendants are also known as katydids. The “exceptionally” well-preserved fossilized remains were discovered by Chinese scientists from Capital Normal University in Beijing. Jun-Jie Gu and Professor Dong Ren, yearning to know how their fossil would have sounded when alive, contacted Dr. Fernando Montealegre-Zapata and Professor Daniel Robert of Bristol University in the UK, both experts in the biomechanics of singing and hearing in insects. The group also teamed up with Dr. Michael Engel of the University of Kansas, USA, a leading expert on insect evolution. The Chinese team provided an exceptionally detailed bush cricket fossil with well-preserved wings, measuring three-quarters of an inch long, allowing scientists to recreate for the first time the features that would have produced sound when rubbed together. The researchers said the resulting sounds are “possibly the most ancient known musical song documented to date.” They said the call should be imagined against a busy backdrop of waterfalls, wind, the sound of water coursing through streams and other amphibious creatures and insects serenading their mates. The researchers, publishing their study in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the anatomical construction of the fossil’s song apparatus, and compared it to 59 living species of katydids. They concluded that the 165-million-year-old cricket must have produced musical songs, broadcasting pure, single frequencies. Montealegre-Zapata, using biomechanical principles he discovered years ago, established that this extinct cricket sang a tone pitched at 6.4kHz and each tone lasted roughly 16 milliseconds. This information gave the scientists enough data to acoustically reconstruct the song itself. “This discovery indicates that pure tone communication was already exploited by animals in the middle Jurassic, some 165 million years ago. For Archaboilus, as for living bush cricket species, singing constitutes a key component of mate attraction,” said Robert. “Singing loud and clear advertises the presence, location and quality of the singer, a message that females choose to respond to – or not. Using a single tone, the male’s call carries further and better, and therefore is likely to serenade more females. However, it also makes the male more conspicuous to predators if they have also evolved ears to eavesdrop on these mating calls.” “Using a low-pitched song, A. musicus was acoustically adapted to long-distance communication in a lightly cluttered environment, such as a Jurassic forest,” added Montealegre-Zapata.  “Today, all species of katydids that use musical calls are nocturnal so musical calls in the Jurassic were also most likely an adaptation to nocturnal life.” “Being nocturnal, Archaboilus musicus probably escaped from diurnal predators like Archaeopteryx, but it cannot be ruled out that Jurassic insectivorous mammals like Morganucodon and Dryolestes also listened to the calls of Archaboilus and preyed on them,” he said. “This Jurassic bush cricket thus sheds light on the potential auditory capacity of other animals, and helps us learn a little more about the ambiance of a world long gone. It also suggests the evolutionary mechanisms that drove modern bush crickets to develop ultrasonic signals for sexual pairing and for avoiding an increasingly relevant echolocating predator, but that only happened 100 million years later, possibly with the appearance of bats,” said the researchers. --- On the Net:

• Bristol University
• Capital Normal University
• University of Kansas
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112470056/scientists-shed-new-light-on-mariana-trench/ 2012-02-07 07:00:28 Image 1: Map view of bathymetry of southern Mariana Trench Challenger Deep area. Arrow points to circle that identifies the location of the deepest sounding in the trench (10,994 meters). White contours are 10,000-meter isobath. Credit: University of New Hampshire Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center Image 2: Perspective view of bathymetry looking at the guyots and ridge approaching the Mariana Trench. Vertical exaggeration 5x. Credit: University of New Hampshire Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center --- On the Net:

• University of New Hampshire
• Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center
• American Geophysical Union

]]> 0 Image 1: Map view of bathymetry of southern Mariana Trench Challenger Deep area. Arrow points to circle that identifies the location of the deepest sounding in the trench (10,994 meters). White contours are 10,000-meter isobath. Credit: University of New Hampshire Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center Image 2: Perspective view of bathymetry looking at the guyots and ridge approaching the Mariana Trench. Vertical exaggeration 5x. Credit: University of New Hampshire Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center --- On the Net:

• University of New Hampshire
• Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center
• American Geophysical Union

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112469467/cape-cod-dolphin-strandings-at-record-high-for-january/ 2012-02-07 06:04:54

International Fund for Animal Welfare

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International Fund for Animal Welfare

]]> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112469459/man-arrested-for-stealing-bits-of-glacier-for-designers-ice-cubes/ 2012-02-07 05:52:23 0