Blogs / 80beats

The plight of honeybees got an official hearing in Congress last Thursday as farmers, scientists, and even Haagen-Dazs executives testified about the mystery of “colony collapse disorder,” which has been killing off honeybees since the fall of 2006. Beekeepers are getting desperate, but scientists still don’t know why more than one-third of U.S. hives were destroyed last winter. To make things worse, one promising avenue of research has just been debunked.

Researchers had recently zeroed in on a bee ailment called deformed wing virus as the culprit, and had hypothesized that the virus was being transmitted by a parasitic mite that’s been observed in failing hives. However, a new study published in the Journal of General Virology [subscription required] discredits that theory, finding that the virus does not grow within the mite. Instead, the infection has been found only inside the gut of the [parasite], suggesting that the mite has merely eaten it from the bodies of bees already infected [The Times].

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Under a new law, California hospitals are supposed to report all serious medical errors to the state, and the first batch includes stories that will scare anyone with a looming hospital admission date. [D]uring a 10-month period ending in May, doctors performed the wrong surgical procedure, operated on the wrong body part or on the wrong patient 41 times, records show. During the same period, hospitals reported that foreign objects were left in surgical patients 145 times [AP].

Officially called “adverse events,” those accidents are also known as “never events” because they are considered preventable, and many safety experts say they should never happen [Los Angeles Times]. The new disclosures listed 1,002 cases that caused serious medical harm; under the new law, the public health department must begin to post all these cautionary tales on the Internet by 2015.

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Researchers are about to get to know the 20,000 African penguins that live on Robben Island, South Africa in intimate detail, down to the last feather. A new computer program will use pictures of the penguins going about their daily business to identify each individual based on the distinct pattern of black spots on its belly. Each bird’s markings are as unique as a human fingerprint, researchers say.

Previously, researchers had to clip metal ID tags onto the penguins if they wanted to keep track of them, but that system was less than ideal. This new biometric solution has the advantage over tags as it can operate without the birds having to be caught, which greatly reduces stress on penguin and scientist. “These penguins are vicious, nasty things that bite and scratch. They have very sharp beaks. I do love them but, by God, they can hurt,” said Professor Peter Barham, of Bristol University…. “It’s no fun trying to get tags on them” [Telegraph].

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One hundred years ago today, a fireball streaked across the morning sky over Siberia and exploded, flattening the forest across an area of 830 square miles. The cause of the Tunguska Event, named for the nearby Tunguska River, has been a source of speculation ever since, with theories ranging from the absurd (space aliens!) to the most plausible: a disintegrating meteor exploding in the atmosphere. But a century after the event scientists still don’t have enough evidence to conclusively say what happened.

Scientists arrived at the most likely scenario, the meteor explosion, by studying the pattern of blasted trees; they concluded that an explosion hadn’t occurred at ground level, but rather four to six miles above the Earth’s surface. [T]he fragment, which is believed to have measured perhaps 100 feet across (although new research suggests it may have been even smaller), was probably traveling at around 21,000 miles per hour when it exploded…. Based on later assessments of the damage, the force of the blast was estimated to be between 10 and 15 megatons of TNT, roughly a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima [Wired News].

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At the sailing venue for this summer’s Olympic Games, a vast algae bloom has covered the coastal waters with a bright green slime. The Chinese government is scrambling to clean up the mess before the games begin in early August, and more than 1,000 fishing boats have already been mobilized. “We can only haul the blue-green algae manually and we’re doing all we can with our arms full and by the boat-load,” said Wang [Haitao], a sailing spokesman for the Beijing Games organizing committee. “All you can see is fishing boats along the coast” [Bloomberg].

Besides being a concern to the sailors who plan to compete in the Olympic regattas, the algae explosion is also another instance of bad publicity highlighting China’s polluted environment. The country’s three-decade economic boom has left its waterways and coastlines severely polluted by industrial and farm chemicals and domestic sewage [AP], which contain high levels of nitrogen that nourish the algae blooms.

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It’s clearly a historic occasion, albeit a weird one: The Spanish parliament has announced its support for granting legal rights to gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. The parliament’s environmental committee has approved resolutions committing the country to the Great Apes Project, an international campaign that aims to provide our closest genetic relatives with the right to life, the freedom of liberty and protection from torture [Great Ape Project]. The Spanish resolutions have majority support, and are expected to soon become law.

“This is a historic moment in the struggle for animal rights,” Pedro Pozas, the Spanish director of the Great Apes Project, told The Times. “It will doubtless be remembered as a key moment in the defence of our evolutionary comrades.”… Mr. Pozas said that the vote would set a precedent, establishing legal rights for animals that could be extended to other species. “We are seeking to break the species barrier — we are just the point of the spear,” he said. [The Times].

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As the world warms, plants are seeking higher ground. A new study that examined botanical surveys of European mountain ranges over the past century found that plants are slowly moving to higher elevations in order to stay within their ideal temperature zones. More than two thirds of the plants in six western European mountain ranges have climbed an average of [95 feet] in altitude each decade since 1905 [CBC].

The study, published in the journal Science [subscription required], is the first to bring the positive news that many mountain plants are able to adapt to the rapid changes brought by global warming. But there are troubling ramifications. The team also discovered that different types of plants are moving at different rates. “Long-lived plants like trees or shrubs did not show a significant shift, whereas short-lived species like herbs showed a strong upward shift in elevation,” [lead researcher Jonathan] Lenoir said. “This may imply profound changes in the composition and the structure of plant communities and on the animal species they interact with,” he added. “It may disrupt ecosystems” [National Geographic News].

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An extensive study of bird genetics has revealed so many surprises about avian evolution that researchers say textbooks and field guides will have to be rewritten. After comparing the genetic codes of 169 species researchers realized that many assumptions about bird evolution are wrong; for example, they found that falcons are not closely related to hawks and eagles, and that flamingos didn’t evolve from other waterbirds.

“With this study, we learned two major things,” said Sushma Reddy, lead author and a fellow at The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. “First, appearances can be deceiving. Birds that look or act similar are not necessarily related. Second, much of bird classification and conventional wisdom on the evolutionary relationships of birds is wrong” [AFP].

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The Mars Phoenix Lander may deserve a Nobel Prize by the time it’s through. Just a week after the robot explorer took the first pictures of water ice on the on Mars, NASA scientists have a new announcement: The Phoenix has analyzed a scoop of soil, and found that the Martian dirt has the necessary ingredients to support plant life. Researchers say the soil they tested is slightly alkaline, not harshly acidic as feared, and that it contains the mineral nutrients potassium, magnesium, and sodium.

“There’s nothing about it that would preclude life. In fact, it seems very friendly,” said mission scientist Samuel P. Kounaves of Tufts University. “We were flabbergasted.” Kounaves said that the soil was similar to what people would find in their back yards on Earth and that if organic material was added, “you could probably grow asparagus, but not strawberries” [The Washington Post].

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Just weeks after the U.S. Senate failed to pass a sweeping set of regulations to slow global warming, the state of California is pointing the way forward. California air regulators today announced a bold plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions that would alter the way utilities generate electricity, automakers build cars and developers construct buildings, and launch the nation’s broadest market in carbon-credit trading [Los Angeles Times].

The 99-page document really marks the beginning of negotiations over the finer policy details; that debate will continue until the end of 2010. One point of contention is the state’s proposal to force automakers to curb emissions of greenhouse gases from new California vehicles more quickly than required under federal mileage standards – a proposal currently blocked by the Bush administration [Sacramento Bee].

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In a few years, young women may be offered a genetic test that would gauge their probability of developing breast cancer decades later. The test, which could be a simple mouth swab, could make women who are at high risk more vigilant and could lead them to detect the disease earlier, researchers say. But some doctors warn the results could cause serious psychological stress and would not identify all women at risk [Sydney Morning Herald].

Researchers know that a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer is based on both genetics and lifestyle. Currently, women with a strong family history of breast cancer are offered genetic screenings, but those tests only look for the rare genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, which have long been known to carry a high risk of the disease. The proposed tests, which researchers say are just a few years away, would also look at seven genetic variants… which have been discovered to increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer, particularly if she has certain combinations of them [The Guardian].

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When researchers warn of the dire consequences of global warming, they often mention that disease patterns for both humans and animals will change in a warmer world. In the most obvious scenario, infectious disease carriers like mosquitoes may increase their ranges, bringing tropical disease to northern climes. But there will also be far more subtle examples of the interplay between climate and disease, and researchers say they’ve found an early case that may be a harbinger of what’s to come. It’s not a canary in a coal mine, but rather a lion in the Serengeti.

A research team from Minnesota studied data from two extreme die-offs of lions; a 1994 incident when almost one-third of lions in the Serengeti National Park died, and a similar incident in the nearby Ngorongoro Crater area in 2001. Researchers found that those lions were infected by two diseases that usually occur in isolation. In 1994 and 2001, however, a “perfect storm” of extreme drought followed by heavy seasonal rains set up the conditions for the two diseases to converge, the study said [National Geographic News].

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Around 365 million years ago, a fishy, finned creature that resembled a small alligator clambered up on a sandbank and earned its place in evolutionary history. Researchers who recently discovered fossils of the animal, named Ventastega curonica, say it’s the most primitive four-legged creature ever found. While it wasn’t the first “fishapod” to lurch out of the water (that honor goes to the Tiktaalik, which accomplished the feat about 375 million years ago), its more primitive evolutionary stage gives researchers new information about the earliest four-legged creatures, or tetrapods.

Ventastega was first described from a few bone fragments unearthed in Latvia in 1994, but it took additional years of excavation and the discovery of remains from many more individuals before scientists had a good idea of what the creature looked like. The latest portrait to emerge, from an especially well-preserved find, reveals an animal with a part-fish, part-tetrapod skull and a full-fledged tetrapod body. It would have spent the majority of its time on water and been clumsy on land [National Geographic News].

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When a “new and improved” sign catches your eye and your hand starts to move towards the product, an ancient part of the brain called the ventral striatum is at work. Researchers say a new study shows that primitive portion of the brain is activated when people try something unfamiliar, which suggests that the impulse to seek out new things has conveyed an advantage ever since the early stages of evolution.

To conduct the study, which was published in the journal Neuron, researchers took brain scans of volunteers who were playing a game. The test subjects were shown cards and had to pick the one they thought had a monetary reward attached; after a few repetitions, they knew which cards were most likely to win them some money. Then researchers started introducing new cards and watched the reaction. “What we found is that people preferentially go for the ones they’ve never seen before,” [lead researcher Bianca] Wittmann says. Rather than stick with the familiar — a picture for which they’ve already figured out the probability of getting money — they’d rather take their chance on a new picture [ABC News].

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The governor of Florida announced yesterday that the state is putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to conservation of the imperiled Everglades. The state has agreed to buy out U.S. Sugar for $1.75 billion, and will switch the company’s 187,000 acres of land from sugar cane fields to natural wetlands. U.S. Sugar’s property lies just south of Lake Okeechobee, the heart of the Everglades’ unique ecosystem.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist said the deal is “as monumental as the creation of our nation’s first national park, Yellowstone. This represents, if we’re successful, and I believe we will be, the largest conservation purchase in the history of the state of Florida” [AP]. Environmentalists are delighted by the conservation coup, and will be keeping their fingers crossed that everything goes as planned; under the proposal, U.S. Sugar will farm the land for six more years before turning it over to the state.

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