Port-of-Spain: A man whose dog rescued him from a house fire in Trinidad said the animal died after running back into the burning building.
Trinidad & Tobago Express newspaper quoted Anderson Marcano as saying that he woke up because the dog kept barking and tugging at his pants.
Elephants send text messages to rangers
Marcano said he smelled the smoke and was shocked to find his house on fire.
The story published Friday did not say why the dog ran back in. Marcano said no one else was inside the house at the time.
Marcano did not immediately return a call for comment.
He said firefighters on Wednesday found the body of his dog, "Rebel," as well as the remains of the family's pet parrot.
| Dog dies after saving man from fire |
| Sunday, 12 October , 2008, 17:40 |
| Port-of-Spain: A man whose dog rescued him from a house fire in Trinidad said the animal died after running back into the burning building. Trinidad & Tobago Express newspaper quoted Anderson Marcano as saying that he woke up because the dog kept barking and tugging at his pants. Elephants send text messages to rangers Marcano said he smelled the smoke and was shocked to find his house on fire. The story published Friday did not say why the dog ran back in. Marcano said no one else was inside the house at the time. Marcano did not immediately return a call for comment. He said firefighters on Wednesday found the body of his dog, "Rebel," as well as the remains of the family's pet parrot. |
PTI | October 13, 2008 | 18:43 IST
Non governmental organisations seeking curbs on circulation of the Nanavati Commission report giving clean chit to Gujarat Chief Minister Narender Modi in the Godhra train carnage and subsequent riots got a setback as the Supreme Court on Monday disagreed that there was illegality in submitting an interim report.
"Prima facie there is no legal bar under the Commission of Inquiry Act to give interim report," a Bench headed by Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan said when senior advocate Rajender Sachar, appearing for petitioner NGOs -- Citizen for Justice and Peace�and People's Union of Civil Liberty, questioned the submission of the report in parts.
The first part of the Nanavati Commission report, which was placed before the Gujarat Assembly on September 25, said the fire in the Sabarmati Express coach in Godhra was a conspiracy and not an accident.
Repeatedly making it clear to the NGOs that the law did not prohibit the submission of interim report or a report in part, the bench, also comprising Justices P Sathasivam and Aftab Alam, said, "In given circumstance giving interim report may have become imperative."
The bench also allayed the apprehension of the NGOs that it was not entertaining their contention by saying that it was not passing any order and would consider the plea on receiving the response of the Gujarat government after three weeks.
However, the apex court which on September 26 had rejected the plea of the NGOs to stay the printing and circulation of the report once again posed the same question to Sachar as to what was his apprehension if recommendations of the commission were implemented.
The senior advocate said millions of copies of the report will be circulated and it would lead to communal disharmony in the country.
He said that the report could influence the trial of the case.
Senior advocate Soli J Sorabji, appearing for the Gujarat government said there was no recommendation in the report for implementation.
He said he can even record a statement that the trial will not be influenced by the findings of the report.
The NGOs have contended that the publication of the report by the commission headed by Justice Nanavati, a retired
apex court judge, would provide a ground to the state government to take a liberal stand against the accused in the post-Godhra riots of 2002 that claimed over 1,000 lives.
While seeking a stay on the circulation of the report, the CJP, run by social activist Teesta Setalvad, had referred to another report on the incident prepared by a committee headed by Justice U C Banerjee, a retired Supreme Court judge.
The Justice Banerjee Committee set up by the Lalu Prasad-headed railway ministry had concluded that the burning of S-6 coach of Sabarmati Express at Godhra was purely an accident.
However, after the report was leaked the Gujarat high court had stayed the Banerjee Committee report.
Sachar said since the Banerjee Committee report has been stayed, the apex court should maintain parity and pass an
order to restrain the circulation and printing of the Justice Nanavati Committee report also.
This submission was opposed by the Gujarat government, which said that the high court has later quashed the Constitution of the committee to probe the incident and as such it has no legal sanctity.
The first part of the Nanavati Commission report, which was placed before the Gujarat Assembly on September 25 said the fire in the Sabarmati Express coach in Godhra was a conspiracy and not an accident, contradicting the findings of the Justice Banerjee Committee report.
The 168-page report of the commission said the burning of S-6 coach of Sabarmati Express on February 27, 2002, killing 58 'kar sevaks' was a pre-planned conspiracy hatched at Aman Guest house in Godhra.
"There is absolutely no evidence to show that either the chief minister or any of the ministers in his council or police officers had played any role in the Godhra incident," the report said.
"On the basis of the facts and circumstances proved by the evidence, the commission comes to the conclusion that burning of S-6 coach of the Sabarmati Express in which 'kar sevaks' coming from Ayodhya were killed was a pre-planned act," the report said.
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My friend John Weiss sent me this great graphic:
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I agree with it.. except to add that if it’s backed by indisputable scientific evidence, it’s not outrageous by definition.
March 3, 2009
The late-winter snowstorm that blanketed much of the eastern U.S. on Sunday and Monday packed some serious sound and fury—emphasis on sound.
Along with the snow clouds, a rare and little-known phenomenon known as thundersnow rumbled over parts of Georgia and South Carolina.
Thundersnow—when thunder and lighting occur during a snowstorm—most often appears in late winter or early spring, experts say.
That's because the ingredients for thundersnow—a mass of cold air on top of warm, plus moist air closer to the ground—often come together during that time.
What Causes Thundersnow
Thundersnow starts out like a summer thunderstorm, Market said. The sun heats the ground and pushes masses of warm, moist air upward, creating unstable air columns.
As it rises, the moisture condenses to form clouds, which are jostled by internal turbulence.
The "tricky part" for making thundersnow, Market said, is creating that atmospheric instability in the wintertime.
For thundersnow to occur, the air layer closer to the ground has to be warmer than the layers above, but still cold enough to create snow—a very precise circumstance.
In the recent southern U.S. thundersnow storms, for instance, the atmosphere became unstable enough that thunderstorms with rain developed. Those storms then moved north where the air was below freezing, said Howard Silverman, a National Weather Service senior forecaster in Sterling, Virginia.
The thundersnow events were also coupled with "pretty decent snowfall rates," at the rapid clip of more than two inches (five centimeters) an hour, Silverman said.
Heavier snowfall is usually linked to thundersnow, both experts agreed.
They might not win many presidential elections, but mavericks are often leaders among flocks of birds, herds of beasts, and other creatures, a new swarm theory says. (See locust swarm pictures.)
A new computer model suggests animals don't need to be fast or strong to lead their swarms, only willing—or desperate enough—to break from their neighbors and go their own way.
Swarm "leaders are not necessarily the weakest and most vulnerable, but they can be," said study team member Larissa Conradt of University of Sussex in the United Kingdom.
The model suggests that a few very hungry birds in a well-fed flock of thousands can alter the flight path of their entire group simply by veering off to search for food.
Creatures that fly, swim, and run together are hardwired to stay together, Conradt explained.
Swarm living provides protection against predators and a convenient supply of potential mates, so members rarely perform actions that could tear the group apart.
"If some group members are desperate to reach their optimal destination, while others care relatively less whether they reach theirs or not, the desperate ones will lead," said Conradt, whose new research will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal American Naturalist.
Biologist David Sumpter studies collective animal behavior at Uppsala University in Sweden and did not participate in the research.
The new study is interesting, Sumpter said, because it shows how "a small number of highly motivated leaders can manipulate the group dynamics significantly for their own purposes but without destroying the cohesive motion of the flock."
Relative similarities. Gombe chimps infected by SIVcpz have a remarkably high death rate and evidence of AIDS-like immune damage.
Credit: Michael Wilson
MONTREAL, CANADA--Researchers have long assumed that SIVcpz, the chimpanzee virus that infected humans and triggered the AIDS epidemic, caused no harm to the apes. But new data presented here today at the 16th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections reveal that wild chimps infected with SIVcpz are more likely to die than uninfected chimps. The animals also show AIDS-like damage to their immune systems. The finding raises the possibility that chimps, too, are suffering from an AIDS epidemic.
More than 40 simian immunodeficiency viruses, or SIVs, infect African primates, yet they rarely cause disease. SIVcpz was discovered in 1989, and it soon became clear that it was closely related to HIV-1 and predated it. Several researchers soon proposed that chimps had long lived with the virus and that their immune systems had evolved to coexist with SIVcpz. But fewer than a dozen SIVcpz-infected chimps were identified until more than a decade later, when researchers led by Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, developed a way to routinely test fecal samples from wild chimps for evidence of the virus. At the conference, Rebecca Rudicell, a graduate student in Hahn's lab, explained that the researchers have now amassed enough data to assess the impact of SIVcpz on wild chimps.
Rudicell, Hahn, and colleagues analyzed more than 1099 fecal samples collected between 2000 and 2008 from chimpanzees living in Gombe Stream National Park, the Tanzanian site that Jane Goodall made famous. From these samples, they found evidence of SIVcpz infection in 18 chimps. The prevalence of SIVcpz has fluctuated in the Gombe communities from a low of 9% to a high of 18%, which mirrors the devastating levels of infections seen in human populations in the hardest hit countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Rudicell said that seven of the 18 infected chimps died during their study, compared with 10 of 76 uninfected animals. When they corrected for age and other variables, the scientists found that the SIVcpz-infected chimps had a 15-fold higher risk of death than did virus-free apes. Studies of lymph nodes from two of the infected chimps that died showed the type of immunologic destruction seen in HIV-infected humans. And these chimps also had low levels of CD4 cells, the lymphocytes that are the main targets of SIVcpz and HIV-1.
Although the researchers do not know that the chimpanzees died of AIDS, the data made a convincing case to primatologists at the meeting. "I think there's AIDS in that group," says virologist Preston Marx of the Tulane National Primate Research Center in Covington, Louisiana. The finding raises provocative questions about the relationship between HIV-1 and SIVcpz. For instance, why SIVcpz harms chimp immune systems but HIV-1 doesn't is a mystery, especially given the close similarities between humans and chimps. The work might offer clues to vaccine makers, too, about which immune responses to target. Also unknown is whether SIVcpz has contributed to the alarming chimp decline seen in Gombe and elsewhere. "It's interesting and new information," says Marx. "The rate of disease here is surprisingly high."
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Speaking to the media on Wednesday at the Mumbai Press Club, Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Mumbai, Rakesh Maria asserted that, over the past twenty years, the two foremost problems facing the Mumbai police have remained the same: terrorism and organised crime. Case in point, the Indian Mujahideen responsible for 2008's Ahmedabad blasts. |
 | Where did Valentine's Day come from? (Think naked Romans, paganism, and whips.) What does it cost? And why do we fall for it, year after year? With video. |
 | A new computer model suggests animals don't need to be fast or strong to lead their flocks, herds, or swarms, but only willing—or desperate—to break from their neighbors and go their own way. |
 | Female seed beetles, which endure rough treatment from their paramours, may be seeking sex for hydration, not breeding, a new study shows. |
 | For the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, National Geographic News asked leading scientists for their picks of the most important fossil evidence for evolution. |
 | During Australia's recent deadly fires, firefighters came upon a burned and dazed female koala—now nicknamed Sam—which eagerly gulped the water they offered. |
 | Most medicines to up amore or ease heartbreak are still in the realm of science fiction—but here are a handful that may someday stock pharmacy shelves. |
 | A satellite collision between a working U.S. orbiter and a defunct Russian satellite has created more than 500 pieces of debris, threatening other orbiting objects, officials say. |
Astronomers are fed up. One fifth of the world's population cannot see the Milky Way because street lamps and building lights are too bright. So scientists are mounting a new campaign, called Dark Skies Awareness, aiming to reduce light pollution as part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy.
"Reducing the number of lights on at night could help conserve energy, protect wildlife and benefit human health," astronomer Malcolm Smith of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile wrote in a commentary Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Smith points out that billions of dollars of light is needlessly shined into the sky each year. Beyond the waste of money and energy, this light is blocking people's view of the heavens.
"Without a direct view of the stars, mankind is cut off from most of the universe, deprived of any direct sense of its huge scale and our tiny place within it," Smith wrote.
Plus, lights confuse and harm wildlife. For example, millions of birds in North America die every year because their migration patterns are disrupted by errant light. And baby sea turtles hatched in the sand often mistakenly head toward cities, instead of the sea, because they are lured by artificial lights.
Preliminary research even suggests that light at night is harmful to human health, potentially reducing the normal production of melatonin in our bodies, which suppresses cell division in cancerous tissue.
There is cause for hope, though. Some cities have made improvements in laws and regulations governing light. For example, new lighting codes in New York require dimmers and lights that are activated by motion sensors in many buildings. And Toronto's Fatal Light Awareness program encourages buildings to turn lights off during bird migration season. The 2009 Dark Skies Awareness project plans a range of programs and events to raise public awareness of the issue and argue to lawmakers about the impacts of light pollution.
See Also:
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to Light Pollution
- Thousands of Citizen Scientists to Help Map Light Pollution ...
- The Race to Build the Biggest, Baddest Telescope Continues
Image: Chicago at night. Flickr/myelectricsheep
In preparation for Charles Darwin's upcoming 200th birthday, the editors of Nature compiled a selection of especially elegant and enlightening examples of evolution.
They describe it as a resource "for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection." Given the continuing battles over evolution in America's public schools — and, for that matter, the Islamic world — such a resource is most welcome.
However, I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the findings below, which range from the moray eel's remarkable second jaw to the unexpected plumage of dinosaurs. They are, quite simply, wondrous — glimpses through an evolutionary frame of life's incredible narrative, expanding to fill every possible nook and cranny of Earth's biosphere.
After all, it's hard to stir passion about the scientific validity of evolution without first captivating minds and imaginations. And this is a fine place to start.
Almost, But Not Quite, a Whale. The fossil record suggests that whales evolved on land, and intermediate species have been identified. But what of their last terrestrial ancestor? In 2007, researchers showed that Indohyus — a 50 million-year-old, dog-sized member of the extinct raoellidae ungulate family — had ears, teeth and bones that resembled whales, not other raoellids.
Image: Hans Thewissen / Nature
Out of the Soup. Whales represented a mammalian return to the water, but an even more extraordinary transition was made by the first creature to venture onto land — and that was made possible by Tiktaalik, discovered in 2004 on Ellesmere Island. Tiktaalik had a flexible neck and limb-like fins suitable for shallow waters, and, before long, land.
Image: Ted Daeschler / Nature
Dinosaurs of a Feather. Archaeopteryx, found in 1861, was long thought to be the first bird. Then it was recognized as something closer to a dinosaur with feathers — but still unique for that. In the 1980's, however, paleontologists digging in deposits more than 65 million years old in northern China found feathered dinosaurs which very definitely did not fly. Some dinosaurs, it appeared, may have looked far different from our traditional conception — and feathers may first have served an insulating or aesthetic, rather than aerodynamic, purpose.
Image: Zhao Chuang & Xing Lida / Nature
A Toothy Finding. In 2007, University of Helsinki evolutionary biologist Kathryn Kavanagh showed that molars emerge from front to back, with each tooth smaller than its precedent. Fodder for geeked-out dentists? Far from it: Her model predicted tooth development of rodents with different diets — a perfect confluence of a small mechanical observation and observed evolutionary trajectories.
Image: Kathryn Kavanagh / Nature
The Beginnings of Bones. Neural crest cells originate in the spinal cord before diffusing through our developing bodies, forming face and neck bones as well as sense organs and skin. The fossil record, nearly bereft of embryos, provides little direct insight into these critically important stages. But technologies that let researchers track cells during embryo development finally allowed them to watch the neural crest's development, culminating in the attachment of head to the body at its front, while the back attachment springs from the mesoderm tissue layer. With that established, scientists can decipher shared evolutionary histories from muscle attachments: the cleithrum, for example, a bony girdle found in fishes, lives on in humans as the shoulder blade.
Image: Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research / Nature
Natural Selection in Speciation. That differing selection pressures will cleave one species into two is a simple principle expressed in complex ways. One of these is reproductive isolation — when, for example, one species of stickleback fish live in freshwater streams, and the other goes to sea. Scientists found that stream-bound sticklebacks prefer larger mates, and genetic analysis confirmed that their populations are indeed diverging.
Image: Ellen Edmondson and Hugh Chrisp / New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
Lizard Games. Take an island in the Bahamas, add a predatory lizard called Leiocephalus carinatus, and the results are immediate. Males among the lizard's favorite prey, Anolis sagrei, soon became longer-legged, so as to better flee after drawing predatory attention during mating displays. In contrast, more sedentary females became larger, making them harder to ingest — a neat display of sex-specific selection pressures.
Image: WikiMedia Commons
An Evolutionary Arms Race, Frozen in Time. Predator and prey evolve together; the adaptations of one driving adaptations in the other. But how can one study this over time, in detail? Biologists from Belgium's Catholic University of Leuven used water fleas and parasitic mites that had been preserved in the mud of a lake's bottom. The sediments were precisely dated and their inhabitants revived, allowing researchers to mix species from different eras and directly measure their developing capacity for infection and escape.
Image: University of Indiana / Daphnia Genomics Consortium
Gene Flow, With Purpose. If dispersed by random animal migration, genes flowing across a region ought to dilute local pockets of genetic adaptation. But migration isn't as random as it seems: As seen in a population of great tits (the bird!) tracked in Oxfordshire, England since 1970, genes flow along channels of opportunity. Individual birds picking nesting spots best-suited to their particular traits, producing local adaptations in tiny parts of the same small forest. (These birds, incidentally, belonged to the same population that have shifted breeding times to match a changing climate.)
Image: University of Oxford / Science
Selection Finds Its Own Level. Since natural selection favors traits that increase fitness, it seems that populations should eventually become genetically homogeneous. But evolution isn't so one-dimensional: When researchers adjusted the color frequencies of wild guppy populations in Trinidad, they found that unusual variants — regardless of color — had higher survival rates. This is called frequency-dependent survival: selection favoring the rare and disfavoring the common, preventing a long-term homogeneity that — no matter how beneficial in the short term — might someday prove disastrous.
Image: Kimberly Hughes / Nature
Making Do. Though so often elegant, evolution can also be jury-rigged and provisional. Witness the Moray eel, whose body is so long and narrow that — unlike other fish — the suction created when it opens its mouth is too weak to catch prey. The solution: a second set of jaws and teeth that sprout from the skeleton around its gills. It's not pretty, but it works.
Video: Rita Mehta / sciencetranslator/YouTube
The Genes of the Finches. The Galapagos finches whose beak adaptations were described by Darwin — and later tracked, over decades, by Peter and Rosemary Grant — are poster animals for evolution. In 2006, researchers found a genetic unit underlying their oft-described progress: calmodulin, whose expression during embryonic development changes beak shape.
Image: Peter Grant and Arkhat Abzhanov
See Also:
- A Theory of Evolution for Evolution
- Researchers Synthesize Evolution of Language
- Study Pokes Hole in Theory of Anal Evolution
- When Intelligent and Natural Design Collide
- Complexity Theory Takes Evolution to Another Level
- Superorganism as Window Into Complexity and Evolution
- The Complexity of Evolution
- Biologists Take Evolution Beyond Darwin — Way Beyond
WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.
By adding life-shortening bacteria to disease-carrying mosquitoes, Australian researchers might have found a clever way to control Dengue fever, a developing world scourge now becoming common in the southern United States.
Thus infected, mosquitoes live long enough to reproduce, ensuring contagion within their own population — but their lives are too short for the Dengue-causing virus inside them to become fully mature and deadly to humans.
"We're not trying to eliminate the population, but to let a bacterial symbiont in, and then shift the population," said University of Queensland bacterial geneticist Scott O'Neill. "There will still be mosquitoes around, but only young ones. It's a biological control."
Dengue fever infects between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, causing severe flu-like symptoms and — in especially severe cases — a hemorrhagic fever that kills more than 20,000 people each year. Though treatable, the disease cannot be prevented — but not for lack of trying.
Many Dengue control plans, from pesticides to sterilized mosquitoes, have worked in a laboratory but fallen short in reality. Nevertheless, O'Neill's bacterial hack has drawn praise from grizzled Dengue control experts, and its promise comes at an opportune time.
Disease burden is greatest in the developing world, but climate change has driven Dengue's tropical mosquito vectors into previously-inhospitable regions, and incidence is rising in the southern United States and Puerto Rico.
"This isn't just a problem in Central America and Africa and Southeast Asia. It's a growing problem as well in the United States," said Joe Cummins, a University of Western Ontario geneticist who called O'Neill's technique "simple and elegant."
Years ago, O'Neill and his colleagues noticed that Wolbachia, a common bacterial parasite in insects, shortened the lives of fruit flies. If it did the same in Dengue-carrying mosquitoes, they reasoned, it would kill them before virus reached maturity. Dengue only affects humans during the last stages of its life cycle.
But repeated efforts to infect mosquitoes with Wolbachia failed until, as described in a paper published Thursday in Science, his team cultured the bacteria in dishes of mosquito cells for three years. The microbes adapted to their new host species' cellular environment.
O'Neill's Wolbachia strain now has a taste for mosquitoes. Once infected, the insects live for about a month — just half their normal lifespan, but long enough to reproduce.
Through a quirk of mosquito physiology, if an uninfected female mates with a Wolbachia-carrying male, she goes sterile. Meanwhile, infected females produce infected offspring, regardless of the male's disease status.
The mathematical inexorability of this phenomenon will make it difficult for mosquitoes to develop resistance, hopes O'Neill, and will guarantee Wolbachia's Dengue-crippling spread through entire mosquito populations. All he has to do is inject Wolbachia into a few starter bugs, breed them, and send them into the world.
"It'll spread the trait out there 100 percent, despite the fitness cost," he said. "We're in the sweet spot. All individuals will get the parasite. That's the key to this whole strategy."
The Dengue virus itself could also evolve into a more rapidly-maturing form, but O'Neill thinks this unlikely. Only a few mosquitoes now live long enough for Dengue to reach full virulence: selection already favors accelerated development.
"I think we're being close to up against some genetic constraint, where Dengue virus is going through mosquitoes as fast as it possibly can," said O'Neill.
Duane Gubler, director of the Asia-Pacific Institute of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases, said the early results "look very promising." However, he cautioned that many earlier Dengue control approaches "worked beautifully in the laboratory, but failed miserably when taken to the field. The real test is if they can show that this works in field populations."
O'Neill, his research funded by the Gates Foundation, next plans on testing the method in large, enclosed cages. That puts his developmental timeline behind another Gates Foundation-supported Dengue control plan, developed by biotechnology company Oxitec.
The company, which is scheduled to begin wild-release trials in Malaysia over the next three years, has developed genetically-engineered male mosquitoes whose offspring die shortly after hatching. However, unless sustained by steady releases of engineered mosquitoes, the technique may only clear a path for fresh waves of disease carriers. Modified mosquitoes could also face activist opposition, especially in the developed world.
As an alternative to such techniques, said Cummins, "I'm unabashedly positive" about using Wolbachia to hobble Dengue. "The thing that's so attractive is that it's a green proposal, using organic techniques. Hopefully it'll work."
"I don't see any down side to using this approach. Wolbachia is ubiquitous in other species," said Gubler. Its use, he said, "should have no deleterious effects on the ecology."
Gubler called the potential Dengue benefits "immeasurable" — and that, said O'Neill, could be just the beginning.
"The underlying principle applies to a range of other pathogens, including elephantiasis and malaria," he said. "We'd like to see if this could be used for a range of other diseases as well."
Citation: "Stable Introduction of a Life-Shortening Wolbachia Infection into the Mosquito Aedes aegypti." By Conor J. McMeniman, Roxanna V. Lane, Bodil N. Cass, Amy W.C. Fong, Manpreet Sidhu, Yu-Feng Wang,Scott L. O’Neill. Science Vol. 323, Jan. 2, 2009
Image: Fundacion Proteger
See Also:
- GM Mosquitoes Nearing Widespread Release in Malaysia
- Third World Biotech: A Quick Test for Dengue Fever
- Feverish Computing Leads Biologists Toward a Vaccine
- Complex Medical Test Made From Paper and Tape for Three Cents
WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.
Space is getting crowded. The last 12 months have seen everything from a high profile space tourist, a powerful new space telescope, and everyone's favorite cuddly-looking microbes launched into space. Here are this year's tops.
10. IBEX Spacecraft to Study Solar System's Edge
NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) lifted off in October on a mission to study the farthest fringes of the solar system. Its two bucket-sized sensors are designed to capture particles bouncing back toward Earth from the distant boundary between the hot wind from the sun and the cold wall of interstellar space. (Image: NASA/GSFC Conceptual Image Lab)
9. Navy Missile to Shoot Down Broken Spy Satellite
In a giant kaboom, the U.S. Navy destroyed a broken American spy satellite by launching a heat seeking missile to collide with it on orbit. The bus-sized spy sat, USA-193, proved to be a dud shortly after it was launched, and was deemed by the military too great a risk to be left alone, since if it did eventually fall back to Earth it could spew out toxic hydrazine fuel. (Image: U.S. Navy)
8. Space Tourist Richard Garriott
For just $30 million you too can visit outer space. Texan computer game developer Richard Garriott paid that lofty fee to Russia's Federal Space Agency for a chance to blast off aboard a Soyuz rocket in October. The son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, the younger Garriott became the first American second-generation space traveler when he took a 10-day vacation to the International Space Station. (Image courtesy NCsoft)
7. Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle
The biggest European spacecraft ever built, the double-decker bus-sized Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle, launched in March to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. The unmanned cargo ship was the first new spacecraft in nine years to join the ranks of station-bound ships. After it completed its job, however, the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere as planned during a fiery death dive back to Earth. (Image: NASA)
6. The Space Station's Biggest Room
May saw the launch of the largest addition yet to the International Space Station, the Japanese Kibo laboratory. Meaning "Hope" in Japanese, the 36.7 foot (11.2 meter)-long Kibo will be used for science experiments, including some testing the effects of the space environment in an exposed outdoor porch area. The so-called "Lexus of space labs" was delivered by the shuttle Discovery and installed by an international crew. (Image: NASA)
5. Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope
Aiming to help answer some of the most befuddling mysteries of the universe, such as the nature of dark matter, black holes and lighthouse-like spinning pulsars, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope will probe the universe in high-energy gamma ray light. Formerly known as the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), the NASA observatory was rechristened after Italian scientist Enrico Fermi following its successful launch in June. (Image: NASA/GSFC)
4. SpaceX Falcon 1 Rocket
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX)'s Falcon 1 became the first privately-developed rocket ever to launch into space after its successful September liftoff. In the wake of three failed launch attempts, the $100 million booster finally made it to orbit, proving that someone other than government-funded agencies can play the space game. The liquid-fueled rocket was designed to haul payloads of up to about 1,256 pounds (570 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit. (Image: Thom Rogers/SpaceX)
3. India's Chandrayaan-1
India made its first space mission beyond Earth orbit in October when it launched the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft on a planned two-year mission to the moon. The lunar orbiter included a small Moon Impact Probe that landed in November and planted the Indian flag on the lunar surface. (Image: ISRO)
2. China's Shenzhou-7 Mission
Chinese astronauts completed their nation's first ever spacewalk in September during the Shenzhou 7 mission. The flight, China's third manned space mission, established the country's growing prowess as major space player. China is the third nation, after Russia and the United States, to successfully carry out a spacewalk. (Image: CCTV/Xinhua)
1. Tardigrades!
Tardigrades, or "water bears," are microscopic eight-legged critters known to survive extreme temperatures, tons of radiation, and nearly a decade without water on Earth. In September scientists declared they had proven their mettle in one more extreme environment: outer space. The adorable invertebrates technically launched at the end of last year, but only reached fame recently when they were found to have survived in perfect health upon their return to Earth. We thought they deserved to make this year's list cause they're so damn cute.
Image at top: Brett's Blog
Image at left: Goldstein Lab
See Also:
- Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2008
- Top 10 Incredible Animal Videos: Readers' Choice
- Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos
- Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos
- Top 10 Amazing Biology Videos
Scientists had plenty of reasons to celebrate in 2008.
The Large Hadron Collider fired up for the first time, a temple of science opened its doors, several companies promised cheap genome sequencing and President-elect Obama hired a fantastic team of science advisers.
After decades of work, researchers made rat stem cells, built the first memristor and watched a language evolve like an organism. But none of those accomplishments impressed us as much as the breakthroughs on this list.
10. Troubleshooting stem cell therapy
In 2007, scientists learned how to reprogram skin cells into stem cells, without cloning or destroying embryos. It seemed too good to be true, and it was. The tissues grown from those cells had a nasty tendency to become cancerous, which made them useless for regenerative medicine — the science of building and fixing body parts. In 2008, several research groups figured out what was going wrong and solved the problem.
Researchers had used an an adenovirus to slip four genes into each cell, but the microbe was causing lots of collateral damage. By switching to a different kind of virus, scientists at The Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital were able to make the procedure safe.
9. Turning water into fuel
Companies like Nanosolar and Solyndra slashed the cost of solar energy, but scientists are still looking for a clean way to store all that juice. Daniel Nocera of MIT has an elegant solution: Use electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, store it in separate tanks, then recombine the gases in a fuel cell when you need power.
Anyone can do this. Just hook a 9-volt battery to electrodes and dunk them into a jar of water. The problem is that it takes a lot of energy to do this. If you want to fill tanks with those gases, and use them to run a fuel cell, you'll need to do it very efficiently. Nocera, and his team at MIT, found a catalyst that makes the task of splitting H2O remarkably easy. It could store the energy harvested by solar cells and wind farms.
Top image: Tom White, MIT
8. Marking greenhouse gas levels — 800,000-year high
The numbers on Wall Street were dismal in 2008, but even more frightening figures came from Antarctica. When scientists traveled to the frozen continent and analyzed ancient pockets of air trapped deep in the ice, they learned that our atmosphere has 28 percent more carbon dioxide now than at any other time in the past 800,000 years. Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern provided some of the most compelling evidence to date that we are irreversibly warming our planet. He showed that the rise and fall of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere matched the melting and thawing of the polar ice caps, and identified a period in which the greenhouse gas was at an all time low. Another team, led by Jerome Chappellaz of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, drew the same conclusions by measuring methane levels in ice core. They remarked that another greenhouse gas, CH4, has not risen above 800 parts per billion in the past 650 millenia, and currently it is at over twice that level.
7. Building loudspeakers from carbon nanotubes
Scientists have been tinkering with carbon nanotubes for decades, and this year the work has paid off. Chinese scientists have used the nanotubes to make transparent audio speakers and sheets of paper stronger than steel. The speakers work by a thermoacoustic effect: They vibrate and make noise when heated by an electrical current. The scientists demonstrated in YouTube videos that their prototype could blast a scratchy but understandable version of the Moldovan pop song "Dragostea din tei" while it was taped to the side of a waving flag.
Another team at Florida State University made paper that is far lighter and stronger than steel by pressing sheets of carbon nanotubes together. Those composite materials, developed by Ben Wang and his team, could make aircraft parts and body armor.
In a perfect sheet of the material, all of the carbon nanotubes should be pointing in the same direction. Wang figured out how to align the tiny cylinders with magnetic fields. Thanks to that discovery, and other advances, buckypaper could be on the market within a year.
6. Sequencing entire genome of a cancer patient, including tumor
For the first time, doctors sequenced the entire genome of a cancer patient, and also read the genetic code of her diseased cells. That allowed them to pinpoint the exact mutations responsible for the illness.
In the short run, that data will give cancer researchers a much better understanding of the disease, but their real triumph is bringing the medical community a step closer to offering personalized health care.
Cancer is hard to fight because nearly every case is different, and yet doctors use a somewhat one-size-fits-all approach to treating patients. As new medications like gene therapy and RNA interference become widespread, oncologists will be able to tailor treatments for patients because of what's wrong with their genetic code. In the meantime, some physicians are using simple genetic tests to predict which medications will work well on their patients.
5. Breaking the petaflop barrier
The latest generation of supercomputers can perform more than a quadrillion operations per second, and that remarkable capability will revolutionize the way scientists do research. It will allow them to identify meaningful patterns in unfathomably large mounds of data, and perform simulations with unprecedented accuracy. Meteorologists could know exactly where a hurricane will strike days before it makes landfall. Neuroscientists may be able to emulate a simple brain. So far, two machines have broken the petaflop barrier, and as more follow we'll see monumental advances in every field of science.
Photo: Cray XT5 Jaguar courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory
4. Curing HIV in Germany
Some people are remarkably resistant to HIV, and scientists have found two ways to give that immunity to others. In the first case, Berlin doctor Gero Huetter transplanted bone marrow from a virus-resistant donor to a man who had both HIV and leukemia. By doing that, he cured both diseases with one treatment. It sounds great, but Huetter had to kill off his patient's immune system with drugs and radiation before replacing it with a better one.
Because that tactic is tremendously harsh and risky, it is unlikely that the miraculous procedure will catch on. Instead, his victory provided solid evidence that gene editing might offer a viable solution. Every virus-resistant person has two mutant copies of a gene called CCR5, and a new biotech tool called zinc finger nucleases can give anyone that mutation. Instead of transferring bone marrow from another person, doctors could take a few cells from a patient, modify them to be HIV-resistant and then put them back in.
3. Finding another building block of life in our galaxy
This has been a very big year for astrobiology. Several teams of researchers have found the building blocks of life outside our solar system and others have spotted dozens of planets that aren't much bigger than earth.
When astronomers in France pointed the IRAM radio telescope at a region of the Milky Way filled with newborn stars, they found signs of a sugar molecule called glycolaldehyde. It is an ingredient of RNA, the substance that may have played a key role in the dawn of life. Until then, the organic chemical had only been spotted at the chaotic core of our galaxy. Using the Hubble telescope, another group of researchers found the first evidence of water and carbon dioxide on a planet outside our solar system.
2. Growing a new organ from a patient's own stem cells
Thanks to stem cell research, people with failing organs may not need to wait for a donor or take harsh medications that prevent their immune systems from rejecting transplanted tissue. One of the greatest examples of regenerative medicine — the science of building or fixing body parts — took place this year, when doctors removed some cells from a 30-year-old woman with tuberculosis and used them to grow a new trachea, replacing a segment that was destroyed by the bacterium.
They took stem cells from her bone marrow, layered them onto a decellularized trachea from a deceased donor, and surgically implanted it in the woman. Four months later, Claudia Castillo could breathe well and showed no signs of the side-effects that patients have when they receive an organ from someone else.
1. Finding ice on Mars
After a seven-month journey through space, the Phoenix lander touched down on Martian soil, and soon after discovered ice.
On May 31, two days after the lander's robotic arm went to work, its camera caught a glimpse of something shiny under the craft. Lead researcher Peter Smith speculated that the landing rockets had blown a thin layer of soil away, exposing buried ice.
The big announcement came on Jun. 19, after scientists compared two photos of a ditch called Dodo-Goldilocks. In the first image, several bright nuggets were visible, and four days later the chunks had disappeared. Taking the temperature and atmospheric pressure into account, the specks had to be ice that sublimated after being uncovered by the mechanical claw.
The red planet may have an inhospitable climate, but at least it has water, and that will be tremendously useful when the first group of explorers lands there.
Image: Frost in the Dodo-Goldilocks trench / University of Arizona, NASA
Lurking deep inside the center of almost all galaxies is a ravenous, super-massive black hole, and new research suggests the black hole may have given birth to its galaxy. This could be the answer to a long-standing astronomical chicken-and-egg problem.
By observing a series of galaxies and measuring the motions of swirling gas inside them, astronomers were able to weigh the galaxies and their resident black holes. They found that in general, there is a direct relationship between the size of a black hole and the size of the central bulge of stars and gas in the galaxy around it: Black holes usually weigh about one one-thousandth of the mass of the galactic bulge.
But when the researchers looked at galaxies that were farther away, and thus effectively dating from earlier periods in the universe’s history (because the more distant we look, the longer an object’s light has taken to reach us, so the older it is), they found a surprising pattern.
The usual mass ratio between black hole and galaxy didn’t hold up. Instead, the black holes in the farthest away galaxies — the ones we are seeing in the youngest stage of development — were much larger than expected.
"The simplest conclusion is that the black holes come first and they somehow grow the galaxy around them," said astronomer Chris Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory during a briefing Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Long Beach, California.
If this is true, it raises many significant questions about why the black holes and galaxies are so linked, and how black holes help galaxies grow.
"We don't know what mechanism is at work here, and why, at some point in the process, the 'standard' ratio between the masses is established," said Caltech astronomer Dominik Riechers in a press release. Riechers also worked on the study.
Some theorize that the strong winds and jets surrounding black holes could help feed star formation and induce galaxies to grow. But the violent environments of black holes have also been thought too chaotic to harbor stable star formation.
The researchers hope to better understand the seemingly symbiotic relationship between galaxies and their gobbling black hole inhabitants when new observation tools come online soon. The Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) being built in New Mexico, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, expected to be completed by 2012, should dramatically increase the sensitivity and resolution available for studies of distant galaxies.
"We really do need to confirm this with further observations," Carilli said. "In fact the future looks extremely bright for these kinds of studies."
See Also:
- Rogue Black Holes Could Careen Across Milky Way
- Black Holes Shoot Stars, Set Them On Fire
- Quasars Kick the Living Daylights Into Galaxies
Top Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Inset Image: NRAO/AUI/NSF, SDSS
Mysterious shrunken heads collected by a lost Peruvian tribe have confounded anthropologists for decades. Theories about what they were used for range from fertility rituals to communicating with the dead to trophies of war.
Nobody knows for sure, but now we know that the Nazca, famed for their desert-spanning geoglyphs, shrunk the heads of their own people.
Head shrinking is done by removing the skull, cooking the skin until it is about a third smaller, and then filling it with rocks and sand. When researchers analyzed severed, shrunken heads found on the southern Peruvian coast, they saw the same location-specific dietary chemical signatures identified in corpses (whose heads were not shrunk) buried in the region.
This makes the trophy-of-war hypothesis a bit less likely, though the Nazca may simply have gone to war against themselves. (War was certainly a recurrent theme in their artwork, as seen in the pottery detail above.)
Next on the research continuum is more shrunken head analysis: Were they always taken from locals? Or did patterns change over time? This could illuminate political developments among the Nazca, who vanished 1200 years ago.
"This small scale agrarian society was succeeded by an empire with regional authority," said Ryan Willams, curator of Chicago's Field Museum, in a press release. "For the first time people were governed by others who lived hundreds of miles distant. Understanding how this came about may help us better understand how these forms of government first emerged."
Citation: "The geographic origins of Nasca trophy heads using strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotope data." By Kelly J. Knudson, Sloan R. Williams, Rebecca Osborn, Kathleen Forgey and Patrick Ryan Williams. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Vol. 28, No. 1, Jan. 5 2009.
Images: The Field Museum
See Also:
- Neanderthals Not Dumb, but Made Dull Gadgets
- The First Aid: Iceman May Have Dressed His Own Wounds
- Yucatan Jungles Are Feral Maya Gardens
- Scientists Find Contents of Prehistoric Messenger Bag
WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.
Would you like power with those fries?
A new garage-engineered generator burns the waste oil from restaurants' deep fryers to generate electricity and hot water. Put 80 gallons of grease into the Vegawatt each week, and its creators promise it will generate about 5 kilowatts of power.
That's about 10 percent of the total energy needs of Finz, a seafood restaurant in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the first Vegawatt is being tested. At New England electricity rates, the system offsets about $2.50 worth of electricity with each gallon of waste oil poured into it.
Vegawatt's founder and inventor, James Peret, estimates that restaurants purchasing the $22,000 machine will save about $1,000 per month in electricity costs, for a payback time of two years.
"You take this waste resource and make it a profit center," said Peret, who spent four long years cooking up the project in his garage. "When I started telling people, they said, 'Someone's gotta have done this.' I'd run into more people. They'd say, 'Why hasn't anyone done this?' My only response was, 'I don't know; it seems like a good idea.'"
While Vegawatt is a small solution, Peret's invention is a very clever embodiment of several long-cherished alternative-energy ideas: capturing both the heat and power from fuel combustion, making energy where it's used, and recycling used resources. Big industrial plants that make paper, for example, have long taken advantage of these concepts to save on their utility bills, but the Vegawatt will be the first product that could turn thousands of fast food restaurants into mini power plants.
"Now the restaurant owners are going to be motivated to put every single drop of waste oil into this thing, because it will pay for itself," Peret said.
And importantly, it provides convenience for restaurateurs or Burger King managers, instead of subtracting it, like so many green solutions seem to.
Restaurants that fry delicious things like chicken and french fries generate dozens of gallons of waste oil that have to be stored in barrels out back. Because used cooking oil is considered a low-grade hazardous material, they haven't been allowed to just throw it away; they generally had to pay rendering-plant operators to come. But it is now a sellers' market for grease.
Higher crude prices have made other types of oil more expensive. Biodiesel makers and renderers have become increasingly willing to pay up to 40 cents a gallon for the stuff. There have even been reports of "biodiesel pirates" stealing fryer grease.
In fact, Vegawatt is derived from the home-brew fuel movement that many trace back to Dr. Thomas Reed, who popularized a recipe to convert waste cooking oil into biodiesel more than 20 years ago. Peret converted his truck to run on straight vegetable oil, or SVO to home brewers. But he was troubled by the inefficiency of the process.
"If you want to run waste vegetable oil in your car, it's not as simple as going behind a restaurant and filling up," Peret said. "People that do this spend the majority of their free time collecting fuel from restaurants."
Peret realized he could use the same engine technology to power an on-site generator and defray a restaurant's electricity costs.
"It's not difficult to go from spinning tires to spinning magnets," he said
So he created a test unit — which you can see at the back of his garage in the top photo — that's basically a diesel generator hacked to run waste cooking oil. It feeds power directly into the restaurant's electrical system through a 30 amp hook-in.
Vegawatt is more efficient than a typical coal or natural gas plant. Peret said it can capture 70 percent of the fuel's caloric value. That's because the generator captures and uses the waste heat it generates.
"All the water [the restaurant] would send to its boiler, instead of sending it straight there from the city, we run it through our heat exchanger first," Peret said. "Depending on the flow, [the water] can go into the hot water heater at 120 degrees." (This non-electrical energy savings is included in the 5-kilowatt rating cited above.)
The big power plants, though technically very efficient, waste most of the fuel they burn. After accounting for all the sources of energy waste "what you are left with ... is just 27.6 units of usable energy out of every 100 units you started with," energy researcher Benjamin Sovacool explained in his recent book, The Dirty Energy Dilemma. "In terms of making toast, it would have been nearly four times more efficient just to burn a lump of coal and place your bread over the flame."
Biomass energy sources — like waste wood, switchgrass or cooking oil — are best when used right near the source of their creation. Dragging the stuff creates more emissions and raises the cost of the fuel. Vegawatt doesn't have that problem. By company estimates, the Vegawatt generates 50 percent less carbon dioxide than a comparable amount of electricity from a coal power plant.
"In terms of the amount of energy that it takes to transport this waste, it's a french fry," Peret said. "You just feed the guy who is picking up the bucket and pouring it into the system."
Forest Gregg, an alternative-fuels expert and author of last year's SVO: Powering Your Vehicle with Straight Vegetble Oil, called it a "nifty application and a great business idea."
Gregg also drew attention to a strong part of Vegawatt's pitch: that it won't require "intervention or maintenance by restaurant staff." That's because when users buy a system — or lease it for $450 a month — they get a service contract with the company for cleaning and maintenance.
The owner of the very first Vegawatt, George Carey (pictured above), seems pleased with the unit, too. He heartily endorses the company on its website, saying, "The Vegawatt system enables me to significantly reduce my energy costs, generate clean energy on-site, and very importantly, reduce the heavy energy footprint of my restaurant."
See Also:
- Tapping the Vortex for Green Energy
- Global Energy Network Depends on a Few Vulnerable Nodes
- How A Google Engineer Hacks His Energy Usage
- Biofuel Startup Strives to Meet Obama's Green Ambitions
- Obama Voices Biofuel Doubts
- Biofuel Solution at Sea, not on Land
- DOE Invests $125 Million in Synthetic Life to Develop Biofuels ...
- Food vs. Fuel: Saltwater Crops May Be Key to Solving Earth's Land ...
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook.
