redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Despite immense pressure and a lack of sunlight, an abundance of microbes are thriving in the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean, claims new research published in Sunday´s edition of the journal Nature Geosciences.

A team of scientists led by Ronnie Glud of the University of Southern Denmark explored the 36,000-foot deep Mariana Trench “unusually high levels of microbial activity in the sediments” of the Challenger Deep region, Colin Barras of New Scientist said.

“Glud’s team dispatched autonomous sensors and sample collectors into the trench to measure microbial activity in the top 20 centimeters of sediment on the sea bed,” Barras added. “The pressure there is almost 1100 times greater than at the surface. Finding food, however, is an even greater challenge than surviving high pressures for anything calling the trench home.”

The amount of bacteria and other microbes discovered by the researchers was more than double that discovered at a site nearly half as deep, explained Reuters Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle. They fed upon dead plants and fish that fell into the deepest parts of the trench, Doyle said, supporting a theory which had suggested that those materials fall onto the trench´s steep sides, slide to the bottom and form a sort of “hot spot” for microbes.

“It’s surprising there was so much bacterial activity,” Glud, an aquatic biogeochemist at the Odense, Denmark-based university, told ABC News Australia. “Normally life gets scarcer the deeper you go — but when you go very deep, more things start happening again. We find a world dominated by microbes that are adapted to function effectively at conditions highly inhospitable to most higher organisms.”

Likewise, Hans Røy, a geomicrobiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who was not a member of the survey team, told Sabrina Richards of The Scientist that the discovery “shows that microbes are basically able to cope with any conditions on this planet.”

The study could also have implications related to climate change, Richards explained. Ocean-dwelling microbes play a key role in the carbon cycle, and if organic matter falls into the ocean without being eaten and digested, it ultimately turns into fossil fuels. However, if microbes consume those substances, they release carbon dioxide and keep the compound cycling in the ocean where they dwell. The question that remains, the researchers say, is: how effective are microbes at breaking down organic particles at such extreme depths?

Glud told Reuters that it is “likely that more carbon is deposited” in the deepest parts of the trench than previously believed. He added that he and his colleague had discovered “a small exotic piece of the puzzle which has never been studied before” when it comes to the how large bodies of water recycle or bury carbon.

April Flowers for redOrbit.com — Your Universe Online
A team of scientists, led by the University of New South Wales (UNSW), has used sophisticated cloning techniques to revive and reactivate the genome of an extinct Australian frog by implanting a “dead” cell nucleus into a fresh egg from another frog species.
Rheobatrachus silus was a bizarre gastric-brooding frog that swallowed its eggs, brooded its young in its stomach and gave birth through its mouth. The frog species became extinct in 1983.
The Lazarus Project team, however, has been able to recover cell nuclei from tissues harvested in the 1970s and kept in a conventional deep freezer since then. The results of this study have not yet been published, however UNSW Professor Mike Archer spoke about the Lazarus Project this week at the TEDx DeStinction event, as well as his desire to clone the extinct Australian thylacine — the Tasmanian Tiger. The Washington DC event was hosted by Revive and Restore and the National Geographic Society to allow researchers from around the world to discuss progress and plans to “de-extinct” other extinct species, such as the woolly mammoth, dodo, Cuban red macaw and New Zealand’s giant moa. The scientists involved also discussed some of the ethical issues surrounding such de-extinctions. Can such species be reintroduced into the wild responsibly? Should they be reintroduced or even brought back at all? The event was livestreamed to the public.
Over the last five years, the Lazarus Project research team has performed repeated experiments using a laboratory technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer. Fresh donor eggs were harvested from the distantly related Great Barred Frog, Mixophyes fasciolatus. The egg nuclei were inactivated and replaced with dead nuclei from the extinct frog. Spontaneously, some of the eggs began to divide and grow into early embryonic stages — tiny balls of many living cells. None of the embryos survived beyond a few days; however, genetic testing revealed the dividing eggs contain the genetic material from the extinct R. silus frog.
“We are watching Lazarus arise from the dead, step by exciting step,” says Archer, the leader of the Lazarus Project team. “We’ve reactivated dead cells into living ones and revived the extinct frog’s genome in the process. Now we have fresh cryo-preserved cells of the extinct frog to use in future cloning experiments.
“We’re increasingly confident that the hurdles ahead are technological and not biological and that we will succeed. Importantly, we’ve demonstrated already the great promise this technology has as a conservation tool when hundreds of the world’s amphibian species are in catastrophic decline.”
Dr. Andrew French and Dr. Jitong Guo, formerly of Monash University, performed the technical work in a University of Newcastle laboratory. They were led by frog expert Professor Michael Mahony and were joined by Mr. Simon Clulow and Dr. John Clulow. Professor Mike Tyler, University of Adelaide, preserved and provided the frozen specimens. Tyler extensively studied both species of gastric-brooding frog — R. silus and R. vitellinus – before they vanished in the wild in 1979 and 1985 respectively.

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com — Your Universe Online

Scientists writing in the journal Science say they have found the first direct evidence of life in the deeply buried oceanic crust.

Researchers on board the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s (IODP) research vessel JOIDES Resolution drilled a water depth of 1.5 miles and hundreds of feet of sediment into the oceanic crust off the west coast of North America. After examining rock samples from this depth, they were able to uncover evidence of life, suggesting this ecosystem is largely supported by chemosynthesis, which is the biological conversion of molecules using oxidation or methane as a source of energy, rather than sunlight like in photosynthesis.

Dr Mark Lever, a scientist at the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University, Denmark, said they learned that sunlight is a prerequisite for life on Earth. In the photosynthesis process, organisms use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into organic material. However, life in the rock material in the oceanic crust is fundamentally different.

“There are small veins in the basaltic oceanic crust and water runs through them. The water probably reacts with reduced iron compounds, such as olivine, in the basalt and releases hydrogen. Microorganisms use the hydrogen as a source of energy to convert carbon dioxide into organic material,” explains Dr Lever. “So far, evidence for life deep within oceanic crust was based on chemical and textural signatures in rocks, but direct proof was lacking”, adds Dr Olivier Rouxel of the French IFREMER institute.

Ocean crust covers about 60 percent of the Earth’s surface, making it the largest ecosystem on the planet. Since the 1970s, scientists found local ecosystems, like hot springs, are sustained by chemical energy.

“The hot springs are mainly found along the edges of the continental plates, where the newly formed oceanic crust meets seawater. However, the bulk of oceanic crust is deeply buried under layers of mud and hundreds to thousands of kilometers away from the geologically active areas on the edges of continental plates. Until now, we’ve had no proof that there is life down there,” says Dr Lever.

Although the ecosystem is mostly based on hydrogen, several different forms of life are found in these depths. The hydrogen-oxidizing microorganisms create organic material, forming the basis for other microorganisms in the basalt. Some of the organisms get their energy by producing methane or reducing sulphate.

“We collected rock samples [34 miles] from the nearest outcrop where seawater is entering the basalt. Here the water in the basaltic veins has a chemical composition that differs fundamentally from seawater, for instance, it is devoid of oxygen produced by photosynthesis. The microorganisms we found are native to basalt,” explains Dr Lever.

Laboratory cultures in the study have shown that the DNA belonging to these organisms is not fossil.

“It all began when I extracted DNA from the rock samples we had brought up. To my great surprise, I identified genes that are found in methane-producing microorganisms. We subsequently analyzed the chemical signatures in the rock material, and our work with carbon isotopes provided clear evidence that the organic material did not derive from dead plankton introduced by seawater, but was formed within the oceanic crust,” Lever said.

He added that sulphur isotopes showed the team that microbial cycling of sulphur had taken place in the same rocks.

“These could all have been fossil signatures of life, but we cultured microorganisms from basalt rocks in the laboratory and were able to measure microbial methane production,” says Lever.

Finding life in these harsh environments on Earth could shed light on what kinds of life lives on other planets. Researchers studying microorganisms in Antarctica are finding better examples of what life on Mars and other extreme environments may be like.

Scientists from the University of Maryland reported in the journal BMC Biotechnology recently about how they found new aspects of certain proteins that could enable life to function on Mars. They found significant differences in the core proteins of Antarctic extremeophile bacteria, or Haloarchaea, compared to similar proteins in other microorganisms. These differences allow the extremeophiles to tolerate severe living conditions.

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A new report in PLoS Genetics attempts to clarify conflicting studies on a population of Alaskan brown bears that are genetically similar to polar bears, yet look and act like typical brown bears.
“This population of brown bears stood out as being really weird genetically, and there’s been a long controversy about their relationship to polar bears,” said co-author Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). “We can now explain it, and instead of the convoluted history some have proposed, it’s a very simple story.”
Shapiro and her team believe that as the last Ice Age ended and the glaciers receded, a group of polar bears was stranded on Alaska’s Admiralty, Baranof, and Chicagof Islands, collectively known as the ABC Islands. Eventually, male brown bears would swim across to the islands from the mainland and mate with female polar bears living there, transforming the entire ABC Islands´ population into brown bears.
Previous studies on both of these bear species, which have been known to mate and known to produce fertile hybrids, suggested that all polar bears had descended from the ABC brown bears — essentially telling Shapiro´s story in reverse. However, the findings from UC Santa Cruz biologists show that the genetic exchange occurred only in isolated populations and did not affect the larger polar bear population.
Shapiro said previous research had focused primarily on the bears´ mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited directly from the mother´s DNA.
“The key to solving this mystery was to analyze DNA from the ABC Islands bears’ nuclear genomes, and in particular their X-chromosomes,” Shapiro said in a statement. “Focusing on the X gave us a surprising result.”
In the latest study, the team, which included scientists from California, Canada and Russia, analyzed DNA from seven polar bears, an ABC Islands brown bear, a mainland brown bear, and a black bear. The researchers also considered data from recently published bear studies by other researchers.
The team found that polar bears are genetically homogeneous, with no evidence of brown bear ancestry, yet the ABC Islands brown bear DNA contained clear evidence of polar bear ancestry. According to Shapiro, evidence from the bears´ X chromosome indicated that ABC brown bears have more DNA in common with polar bear females than they do with polar bear males.
To better understand the scenario behind these genetic results, the team used computer simulations of various breeding scenarios.
“Of all the models we tested, the best supported was the scenario in which male brown bears wandered onto the islands and gradually transformed the population from polar bears into brown bears,” said co-author James Cahill, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz.
The researchers warned that the isolation of the polar bear is occurring today as a result of climate change and said there could be far-reaching genetic impacts as a result.
“During a previous ice age, polar bears ranged much farther to the south than they do today, reaching the present-day ABC Islands and Alexander Archipelago,” said co-author Ian Stirling, from the University of Alberta in Canada. “As the climate warmed and ice began to retreat, it is possible that some of the animals began to spend progressively longer on land with reduced access to ice.”
“We see the same sort of thing happening today with polar bears in areas such as western Hudson Bay or the Russian coast, in response to continued climate warming and loss of ice,” he added.

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Whether they hunt for food by opening their mouths while diving deep into the ocean or skimming along its surface, many whale species rely on their baleen teeth to filter tasty morsels from the mouthfuls of seawater they take in.

According to Alexander Werth, a biology professor from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, no one has ever looked into the mechanism behind how the hairy substance actually traps food.

“The standard view was that baleen is just a static material and people had never thought of it moving or that its function would be altered by the flow of water through the mouth,” Werth explained.

Werth found that the baleen system actually works best by entangling food as water flows across it, according to his report in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

Composed primarily of the protein keratin, baleen is a system of large, continually growing plate-like structures with an internal fiber core and a smooth exterior. These plates are continually worn away by the whale´s tongue, forming bristly fringes that are capable of trapping food.

Most whale mouths contain about 300 baleen ℠plates´ and the structure of baleen systems can vary from whale to whale. For example, the hairy baleen fringes of the skim-feeding bowhead whale are twice as long as the fringes on the dive-feeding humpback whale.

According to Werth, he became fascinated with baleen while performing his postdoctoral work with the Inupiat Eskimos of Barrow, Alaska. After collecting baleen samples from ram-feeding bowheads in Alaska, Werth decided to compare them with samples of humpback baleen that he had collected as a graduate student.

He began by trying to see how well the baleen trapped small latex beads carried by flowing water. Taking a small section of each type of baleen, Werth place each sample in a flow tank and watched as he varied the flow of the water from 4 to 47 inches per second. He also changed the inclination of the baleen, allowing the water to flow from parallel to perpendicular.

While making adjustments to his experimental settings, Werth monitored the baleen and recorded how many beads were trapped for 2 seconds or more. He found that the bristles trapped most beads at the lowest speeds. As the flow speed increased, the marine biologist saw the baleen fringes act more like hair, allowing more beads to pass through. This indicated that single baleen plates are less effective filters at higher swimming speeds.

However, Werth said that the results of this set of experiments were inconclusive.

“’It doesn’t make sense to look at flow across a single plate of baleen, it’s like looking at feeding with a single tooth,” he said. “You can’t chew anything with just one tooth, you need a whole mouthful.”

To refine his experiment, Werth built a scale model rack of six baleen plate fragments and tested the larger system for its ability to trap the latex beads. This setup resulted in the baleen becoming tangled and matted at flow speed that closely mirror the average swimming speeds of these whales.

Encouraged by these results, Werth said he plans to scale up his experimental baleen systems to get a more comprehensive picture of how they enable whales to feed.

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

From time immemorial, humans have grappled to understand the slippery notion of time, often drawing on familiar metaphors of physical motion such as “time flies” or “time marches on.” When Einstein published his paper on special relativity in 1905, he forever fused the notions of space and time into a single, mind-boggling, yet mathematically elegant, concept known as spacetime. Now, new research on the human brain suggests our movements through physical space are directly connected with how our brains perceive time.

“It seemed to us that psychological scientists have neglected the important fact that, in everyday experience, people don´t evaluate the past and the future in exactly the same way,” explained lead author Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

In recent years, an array of new research in the field spatial perception has revealed humans feel closer to objects they are moving towards than objects they are moving away from — an illusion that holds true even when the distance of the objects remains exactly the same. Since our perception of time is so closely related to our experience of space, Caruso and his team predicted this same basic principle would hold true for time as well, a phenomenon his team dubbed the ℠temporal Doppler effect.´

By performing a simple survey of people at a train station, the scientists found individuals tended to perceive future times one month or one year away as closer to the present than times one month or one year in the past.

In a separate part of the experiment conducted online, the team found people who completed an Internet survey one week before Valentine´s Day perceived the holiday as being closer to the present than people who were surveyed one week after the holiday.

While these results point to a striking similarity in how we perceive space and time, the team wanted to explore whether there was a direct connection between the two. To do this, they conducted yet another experiment using virtual reality technology.

The team equipped college students with a head-mounted display that placed them in a virtual scene where a two-lane road was lined on both sides with trees, streetlamps and buildings. For half of the students, the virtual environment was made to give them the sensation they were moving forward toward a large fountain at the end of the road. The other half was given the virtual experience of moving backwards, away from the fountain.

Following the virtual reality portion of the experiment, the participants were asked how far away a specific date felt to them — one that was three weeks in the future and another three weeks in the past. The students who had just had the virtual experience of moving forward toward the fountain reported the future felt closer to the past, whereas the students who had moved away from the fountain did not feel the future was closer than the past.

For the second group of students, the mismatch between their physical movement (backward) and the chronological direction of the event (future) in question tended to eliminate the ℠temporal Doppler effect´ — a finding Caruso and his colleagues argue confirms a direct link between our perceptions of time and space. In short, we feel closer to the future because we feel like we´re moving toward it just like the students felt like they were moving physically closer to the fountain.

The researchers also suspect this perceptual alignment isn´t mere coincidence but rather that it serves an important practical function. The laws of physics (as we currently understand them) prevent us from going back in time and changing the past. However, we can directly influence our future. Thus the feeling that future events are closer may provide us with the psychological kick in the pants we need to prepare ourselves to deal with those events.

According to Caruso, “this research is important because the idea of psychological distance is central to theory and research in every subfield of psychology — social, developmental, cognitive, clinical — yet there has been an implicit assumption that distance to the past is the same as distance to the future.”

Caruso also says he and his team would like to continue their research by exploring how the temporal Doppler effect influences our day-to-day lives. For example, is a functional temporal Doppler effect associated with healthy psychological function? Can a weakened sense of the effect lead to problems with depression and an inability to escape from the past? Do people who do not experience the temporal Doppler effect have a hard time making plans and decisions about the future?

“Our work suggests instead that there is a systematic difference in people´s perceptions of distance to the past and the future,” Caruso concluded.

The team´s report was published in a recent edition of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Mobile technology is enabling people to become productive in ways they never thought possible and recently the scientific community has been looking to tap into that productivity by enlisting citizen scientists.

To see just how reliable crowd-sourced research can be, a group of international scientists decided to check data collected by citizen scientists against information collected using traditional scientific means and found that the amateur-collected data compared quite favorably.

According to the team´s report in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, they compared the results of SCUBA divers with those of professional scientists when it came to measuring the variety of fish species across three Caribbean sites.

The divers surveyed the locations using two standardized methods — the ℠belt transect´ method, used in peer reviewed aquatic studies, and the ℠roving diver technique´, used by the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF) volunteer fish survey project.

“The popularity of SCUBA diving has resulted in monitoring of the underwater environment on a scale that was previously impossible,” said lead author Ben Holt, a marine biologist from the UK´s University of East Anglia (UEA). “For example, the REEF method has been used by volunteers in more than 160,000 underwater surveys across the world. It would have cost many millions of pounds for professionals to have undertaken the same work.”

Over the course of four weeks, 24 divers performed over 140 separate underwater surveys across the three sites. While scientific methods revealed 106 different types of fish, the volunteer technique detected even greater marine diversity, uncovering a total of 137 in the same waters.

“The results of this study are important for the future of citizen science and the use of data collected by these programs,” Holt said in a statement. “Allowing volunteers to use flexible and less standardized methods has important consequences for the long term success of citizen science programs.”

“Amateur enthusiasts typically do not have the resources or training to use professional methodology,” he added. “Our study demonstrates the quality of data collected using a volunteer method can match, and in some respects exceed, protocols used by professional scientists.”

Holt also mentioned that amateur scientists could be valuable in understanding the rapidly changing ecosystems that exist in certain regions.

“For example, Lion fish is an invasive species which was not in the Caribbean until roughly 10 years ago,” he said. “They have now become a real problem in many areas and this invasion has been tracked using volunteer data. Following our study, scientists can have more confidence when using these data to consider the impact of threats, such as invasive species, on the wider natural communities.”

While the results of the study appear promising, Holt warned against placing too much emphasis on citizen-collected data.

“It is important to note that our study does not consider the abilities of the individuals performing the surveys and this is also an important consideration for any large scale biodiversity program. By addressing these issues we can make important steps towards enabling the large pool of volunteer enthusiasts to help professional researchers by collecting valuable data across many ecosystems,” concluded Holt.

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

One would not assume that cloud cover over Antactica’s Southern Ocean could cause rainfall in Zambia or the tropical island of Java. New research from the University of Washington, however, finds that a phantom band of rainfall just south of the equator that does not occur in reality is caused by poor simulation of the cloud cover thousands of miles farther to the south. This illusionary band of rainfall is one of the most persistent biases in global climate models.

Atmospheric scientists at Washington hope that their results will help explain why global climate models duplicate the inter-tropical convergence zone, a band of heavy rainfall in the northern tropics, on the other side of the equator by mistake.

The results of the study appear in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“There have been tons of efforts to get the tropical precipitation right, but they have looked in the tropics only,” said Yen-Ting Hwang, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences who found the culprit in one of the most remote areas of the planet.

“What we found, and that was surprising to us, is the models tend to be not cloudy enough in the Southern Ocean so too much sunlight reaches the ocean surface and it gets too hot there,” Hwang said. “People think of clouds locally, but we found that these changes spread into the lower latitudes.”

Prior studies examined tropical sea-surface temperatures, or better ways to represent tropical winds and clouds. None managed to correctly stimulate rainfall in the tropics, however, which is an important region for global climate models since small shifts in rainfall patterns can have huge effects on climate and agriculture.

“The rain bands are very sharp in this area,” commented Dargan Frierson, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. “You go from some of the rainiest places on Earth to some of the driest in [less than a few hundred miles].”

Recent theories have suggested that tropical rainfall might be linked to global processes. The new research looked for possible connections to ocean temperatures, air temperatures, winds and cloud cover.

“For the longest time we were expecting that it would be a combination of different factors,” Frierson said, “but this one just stood out.”

Cloud biases over the Southern Ocean are the primary contributor to the phantom double rain band problem existing in most modern climate models, the research showed.

“It almost correlates perfectly,” Hwang said in a statement. “The models that are doing better in tropical rainfall are the ones that have more cloud cover in the Southern Ocean.”

Hwang will present the findings at the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) in April. The findings have also been submitted for inclusion in the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The team found that most modern climate models do not generate enough low-level clouds over the perpetually stormy Southern Ocean, allowing heat to accumulate in the Southern Hemisphere.

“Basically hot air rises, and it rains where air rises. So it´s kind of obvious that the rain is going to be over warmer ocean temperatures,” Frierson said. “Our new thinking is that the heat spreads — it´s the warmth of the entire hemisphere that affects tropical rainfall.”

Climatologists can look for ways to improve the models to increase cloud cover over the Southern Ocean in the short term. Eventually, however, more powerful computers may permit models that are able to create accurate simulations of global cloud coverage.

“We have confidence in climate predictions outside the tropics, but tropical rainfall forecasts are much less certain,” Frierson said. “We hope this work will lead to better rainfall forecasts in regions like equatorial Africa, where it´s so important to have accurate predictions of future patterns.”

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Tropical forests may be more resistant to the effects of greenhouse gas emissions than previously believed, according to a new study published online this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.

In what Olive Heffernan of Nature refers to as “the most extensive study of its kind,” researchers from the US, the UK, Australia and Brazil created a simulation of the impact that carbon-based emissions would have on tropical forests in the Amazonia/Central America region, Asia and Africa through the year 2100.

“They compared the results from 22 different global climate models teamed with various models of land-surface processes. In all but one simulation, rainforests across the three regions retained their carbon stocks even as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increased throughout the century,” she added.

According to Reuters reporter Nina Chestney, the only region in which the team discovered forest cover loss was in the Americas (aka the Amazonia/Central America region).

The simulation that predicted a biomass loss in that area was developed by the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, a climate change research center located in Exeter, Heffernan explained.

While the study said that there was still some uncertainty in determining exactly how different ecosystems will respond to climate change, lead author Chris Huntingford of the UK´s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology told Chestney they determined that there was “evidence of forest resilience” in all three regions.

“The big surprise in our analysis is that uncertainties in ecological models of the rainforest are significantly larger than uncertainties from differences in climate projections,” Huntingford said in a statement. “Despite this we conclude that based on current knowledge of expected climate change and ecological response, there is evidence of forest resilience for the Americas (Amazonia and Central America), Africa and Asia.”

“This study highlights why we must improve our understanding of how tropical forests respond to increasing temperature and drought,” added co-author Dr. David Galbraith of the University of Leeds. “Different vegetation models currently simulate remarkable variability in forest sensitivity to climate change. And while these new results suggest that tropical forests may be quite resilient to warming, it is important also to remember that other factors not included in this study, such as fire and deforestation, will also affect the carbon stored in tropical forests.”

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
Two years after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, researchers in the US and Canada are concerned about the possible damage that could be caused by invasive species that have found their way to North America on debris resulting from the 2011 disaster.
According to UPI, experts in the northwest US and Canada are having difficulty determining whether or not marine life washing ashore on the debris will be a threat to the environment and/or living things native to the region — or for how long they could pose a threat.
“Ecologists have a terrible track record of predicting what introduced species will survive and where. But once things are here, they are a threat,” John Chapman, an invasive species expert working at the Oregon State University (OSU) Hatfield Marine Science Center, told Lori Tobias of The Oregonian on Thursday. “They could explode at any time. It’s just like roulette. Each time something lands here, we pull the trigger. We’re getting more and more every year.”
Chapman and his OSU colleagues have been tracking and studying the debris since shortly after it began arriving on nearby beaches. That includes a dock that arrived on Agate Beach in Lincoln County, Oregon last summer following roughly 450 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean. Chapman explained the debris and the organisms they have found living on it have been extremely unpredictable.
“It’s been a constant surprise,” he told The Oregonian. “There was a huge diversity of organisms. There are multiple generations. They were carrying on with life like fleas on a dog’s back. The other thing that was maybe even a bigger surprise is that lots of things settled on the debris after the tsunami. We know that because it was on top of the things that were there at the time of the tsunami.”
For now, Chapman and his colleagues have to measure the debris as it washes in, keeping careful track of the types of species they harbor. He called it a “giant“¦ terrible experiment that should have never happened,” adding, “I can’t see the dock and debris and know what happened in Japan and not feel an enormous amount of responsibility for pulling everything good out of it I possibly can.”
Experts in Canada are faced with a similar situation, according to CTV British Columbia reports published Saturday.
“Items like home cleaning supplies and kids´ toys are now littering West Coast shorelines,” they explained. However it is the “small organisms attached to the debris” that are concerning scientists. “Foreign plants and animals could devastate local ecosystems, researchers say, and as coastal communities“¦ start to see more debris there is growing concern they won´t be able to clean it up fast enough.”
Dolf DeJong, vice president of conservation and education at the Vancouver Aquarium, told reporters invasive species were “a legitimate threat” to the province´s ecosystem.
DeJong warned, depending on exactly which organisms managed to survive and how many there are on any given piece of debris, they could adversely impact the region´s biodiversity, damage the oceans, and even have a negative fiscal influence by harming populations of economically-important life forms like shellfish.
“Canadian researchers say they haven´t had the chance to study the problem as closely because they haven´t had access to such a large item with so many organisms on it,” CTV said, adding that DeJong is urging anyone who spots a foreign object that has washed ashore to contact the aquarium or another expert so they “can determine whether it harbors invasive species.”

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Vibrators are being used by researchers at the University of Alberta to help give actors a little bit more vocal power. The team of researchers found that pressing the sex toys against the throats of actors helps to give them improved projection and range — vocally, of course.

“You can actually watch on a spectrograph how vocal energy grows,” said David Ley, who worked on the project. “Even when you take the vibrator off, the frequencies are greater than when first applied.

He said he has used this method with singers, schoolteachers and actors, and so far the vibrator technique has always worked.

Another method used in speech pathology involves massaging the larynx to loosen up tension, but Ley says some people can’t handle this technique because of the feeling of fingers on their throat. He began to search for a new method to help actors and singers project their voices with increased power.

Ley headed over to a local love shop in search of some hand-held vibrators in order to test out whether they could help release various forms of muscular tension. He was looking for a vibrator with a frequency somewhere between 100 and 120 hertz, which is close to the range of the human voice. Once he applied the vibrator to an actress’ neck over the vocal cords, she was able to produce striking results.

“Not only did it free tension in the laryngeal muscles, but it seemed to stimulate vibrations in the vocal folds,” says Ley.

He found applying the vibrator to the top of the head and cheeks helped to increase specific overtones as well. After these results, he decided to take his idea to a friend in speech pathology to explore its potential for helping to relieve more serious cases of vocal stress.

“This is the great thing I´ve found about the university. I´ve gone with what I´ve considered to be pretty wacky ideas to people in other departments and they say, ℠That sounds odd, but I´m willing to go with you on this’,” Ley said.

Sara Farb, a Toronto actress, was suffering from laryngitis in a production of Next to Normal, a high-octane, vocally demanding musical. She said after she tried the vibrator-to-throat application, “it was like my voice had been polished and was completely brand new.

“It was so absent of stress, even though the show was a stressful one to do,” Farb said in a statement. “I sent David a message that night saying he may have changed my life. I don´t mean to be dramatic, but it was drastic. I will never forget that performance.”

According to Ley, it is still too early to march out definitive scientific claims on the vibrator technique working, but he plans to present his method at the Voice Foundation Symposium in Philadelphia next June.

For those actors and actresses who do not want to be seen massaging their throats with a sex toy before a big performance, one San Francisco startup company is making a solution. CRAVE announced on Valentine’s Day this year it has officially launched a discreet sex toy. With an inconspicuous vibrator tucked away in a pocket or purse, and the confidence of a new study behind their backs, intrepid actors and actresses can now walk into their next performance and blow everyone away with their powerful vocal projections.

WATCH VIDEO: [Forebrain Engraftment In Mice]

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

A group of non-neural cells found in the human central nervous system may be more essential to the complexity of our brains than previously believed, according to new research published in Thursday´s edition of the journal Cell Stem Cell.

A team led by Steven A. Goldman and Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center´s (URMC) Center for Translational Neuromedicine transplanted a special type of glial cells known as astrocytes into mice. By doing so, they learned that the cells could influence communication within the rodent´s brain, allowing the creatures to learn at a faster pace than before.

Astrocytes, which are found in the brain and spinal cord, are responsible for a variety of tasks within the body, including providing nutrients to the nervous tissue and helping to repair nervous system organs following traumatic injuries. According to Goldman and Nedergaard, they are larger and more complex in humans than they are in other creatures, leading them to believe that they may be part of the reason that has given mankind higher-level cognitive functions than other species.

“This study indicates that glia are not only essential to neural transmission, but also suggest that the development of human cognition may reflect the evolution of human-specific glial form and function,” Goldman, co-senior author of the study, said in a statement. “We believe that this is the first demonstration that human glia have unique functional advantages. This finding also provides us with a fundamentally new model to investigate a range of diseases in which these cells may play a role.”

Previous research conducted at URMC has helped scientists learn the role that astrocytes and other glia cells play in brain function. Experts at the New York-based research hospital demonstrated that astrocytes communicate with neurons and with each other, rather than just supporting the neurons.

As Nedergaard explained, while the main role of these cells is to enhance neural transmission, she and her colleagues have also determined that as astrocytes evolve and become larger, more complex, and more diverse — as they have in humans — the complexity of brain function also increases.

Since there are a greater number of astrocytes in men and women than in other species, and they are larger and more diverse, the researchers believe that they could possibly coordinate far more synapses than in mice or similar animals. The URMC researchers’ observations led them to believe that these glial cells could help regulate humanity´s higher cognitive functions, and that if they are transplanted into mice, they could have a similar affect.

“In a fundamental sense are we different from lower species,” Goldman said. “Our advanced cognitive processing capabilities exist not only because of the size and complexity of our neural networks, but also because of the increase in functional capabilities and coordination afforded by human glia.”

“I have always found the concept that the human brain is more capable because we have more complex neural networks to be a little too simple, because if you put the entire neural network and all of its activity together all you just end up with a super computer [sic],” added Nedergaard. “But human cognition is far more than just processing data, it is also comprised of the coordination of emotion with memory that informs our higher abilities to abstract and learn.”

In order to determine whether or not human glial cells did enhance the brain´s capabilities, the URMC researchers isolated some of the cell progenitors that give rise to astrocytes and transplanted them into the brains of neonatal mice. As those rodents matured, the implanted glial cells overwhelmed the host´s native cells, but did so without damaging the creature´s pre-established neural network.

“The human glia cells essentially took over to the point where virtually all of the glial progenitor cells and a large proportion of the astrocytes in the mice were of human origin, and essentially developed and behaved as they would have in a person’s brain,” Goldman said.

Closer analysis revealed that the human glia had two major impacts on the brains of the mice.

First, they increased the speed and distance at which a signal travels to and amongst adjacent astrocytes within the brains — a phenomenon known as the calcium wave.

Second, the transplanted mice developed more rapid and sustained long-term potentiation (LTP), which affects how long neurons are affected by brief electrical stimulations. That indicates that the transplanted cells improved the rodents´ learning capabilities.

“The bottom line is that these mice demonstrated an increase in plasticity and learning within their existing neural networks, essentially changing their functional capabilities,” said Goldman. “This tells us that human glia have a species-specific role in intellectual capability and cognitive processing. While we’ve suspected for a while that this might be the case, this is really the first proof of this point.”