Blogs / 80beats

In a finding that has particular relevance right now, as the American public looks for scapegoats for the current financial crisis, a new study has found that men with higher levels of testosterone are inclined to make riskier financial decisions. Just how much riskier? Those with 33 percent more testosterone than average men invested 10 percent more of their dough. The findings are based on saliva samples from 98 male Harvard students taken before they played an investment game with $250 in real money [Scientific American].

Researchers say they didn’t outright prove that it was Wall Street men’s hormones that got us into this mess, but that the evidence is strongly suggestive. “Although our findings do not address causality, we believe that testosterone may influence how individuals make risky financial decisions,” said researcher Coren Apicella…. A recent study also showed that stock market traders made more money on days when their testosterone levels were highest [LiveScience].

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An ambitious, multibillion-dollar effort to restore Florida’s Everglades is floundering due to bureaucratic delays, and the ecosystem may be close to a tipping point, according to a new congressionally mandated report. The longer the project remains stalled, the higher its cost will rise — even as the River of Grass that it’s supposed to rescue declines, the report from the National Research Council says. “If we don’t do something soon, we’re going to lose this really precious resource,” said [report coauthor] William Graf [St. Petersburg Times].

The report criticizes progress on the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which was approved by Congress in 2000. The massive effort to restore natural water flow to about 4 million acres of wetlands was originally estimated to cost about $7.8 billion and take 30 years to complete — a price tag that has since ballooned due to rising costs…. The 2000 plan made the federal government and Florida 50-50 partners. To date, the state has committed more than $2 billion and pushed ahead alone with a few projects. Congress has only appropriated several hundred million dollars [AP].

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A single-celled phytoplankton that forms enormous blooms in the ocean and plays a vital role in regulating the carbon cycle has an unusual defense against a virus: When the virus appears, the microbe switches into a different life phase, thereby avoiding an attack from the virus. Researchers call the clever defense a “Cheshire Cat escape strategy” after the cat in Alice in Wonderland that occasionally vanished.

“In this paper, we show how a species can escape from [environmental] pressure by switching to a life-cycle phase or form that’s not recognizable by a predator,” said Miguel Frada, a marine microbiologist [The Scientist]. The microbe, named Emiliania huxleyi, is so abundant in the ocean that its massive blooms can form turquoise patches visible from space, yet these blooms are often cut off abruptly in a boom-and-bust cycle. The new study suggests that the busts are caused when a virus causes the microbes to switch forms.

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Chalk another discovery up to the Mars Phoenix Lander. Several months after finding water ice beneath the Martian soil, the NASA robot has now turned its gaze upward to the sky, and has observed a light snowfall over the polar region. Scientists said the discovery of snow on Mars was made by an instrument that shined a laser into clouds about two miles above the ground, revealing the presence of ice crystals. “Nothing like this has ever been seen on Mars,” said [scientist] Jim Whiteway [Los Angeles Times].

The ice crystals quickly vaporized as they fell through the atmosphere of Mars, but researchers say they’ll be watching during the next two months to see if the snow ever reaches the ground. Over the past few months, as the Martian winter has moved in, Phoenix has also observed frost, ground fog, and clouds of ice crystals.

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A 33-foot long, carnivorous dinosaur that lived 85 million years ago had a breathing system similar to that used by modern birds, and researchers say the finding is further evidence of the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. A fossil found in a riverbank in Argentina shows evidence of efficient air sacs that pumped air into the dinosaur’s lungs.

Lead researcher Paul Sereno named the new dinosaur Aerosteon riocoloradensis, which means “air bones from the Rio Colorado.” Instead of lungs that expand and contract, Sereno thinks this beast had air sacs that worked like a bellows, blowing air into the beast’s stiff lungs, much like modern birds…. Most paleontologists believe birds evolved from small, feathered meat-eating dinosaurs, and the earliest known birds were strikingly similar to these dinosaurs [Reuters].

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A breakdown aboard the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope will delay the final space shuttle mission to upgrade and repair the aging telescope, which was scheduled to launch on October 14. NASA said today that the malfunction of a command and data-handling system means the telescope is unable to capture and beam down the data used to produce its stunning deep space images for which the Hubble is famous [Orlando Sentinel]. NASA officials said that system can’t be fixed remotely but added that they’re currently trying to activate a backup system.

The space shuttle Atlantis is already on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in preparation for its trip to the Hubble, but NASA says the unexpected glitch may delay the shuttle’s mission until early next year. Whenever Atlantis does fly, NASA may send up a replacement part for the failed component. It would take time to test and qualify the old replacement part and train the astronauts to install it in the telescope, said NASA spokesman Michael Curie. NASA also would have to work out new mission details for the astronauts who have trained for two years to carry out five Hubble repair spacewalks [AP].

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Mathematicians at UCLA believe they have found a very long and very special prime number: It clocks in at nearly 13 million digits, and belongs to an elite group of numbers called Mersenne primes. If the math checks out, the discovery will win UCLA’s math department a $100,000 prize that was offered for the first Mersenne prime found with over 10 million digits.

Primes are numbers like three, seven and 11 that are divisible by only two whole positive numbers: themselves and one. Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2^P-1, or two to the power of “P” minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609 [AP].

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In a striking example of the evolutionary benefits of altruism, researchers have found a species of ants that sends a few workers out each evening on a suicide mission to ensure the continued survival of the colony. The tiny ant Forelius pusillus, which makes its home in sugar cane fields in Brazil, makes a nightly ritual of covering the entrance to its nest with sand. To be sure that the entrance is sealed shut tightly, a few ants remain outside each evening to finish kicking sand over the hole. Those ants, stuck outside in the cold and the wind, die during the night.

“In a colony with many thousands of workers, losing a few workers each evening to improve nest defense would be favored by natural selection,” said co-author Francis Ratnieks…. The ants stuck outside might be old or sick, [co-author Adam] Tofilski conjectured. Thus, they may have essentially sacrificed themselves for the greater good, being more expendable members of the colony [ScienceNOW Daily News].

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The private space company Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, successfully launched a rocket into orbit on Sunday, marking a major milestone in the growth of privately funded space ventures. The achievement followed three failed launches of the Falcon 1 rocket over the past two years.

“That was frickin’ awesome,” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s millionaire founder and chief executive officer, told cheering employees…. “There were a lot of people who thought we couldn’t do it … but, you know, as the saying goes, ‘The fourth time’s the charm,’” he said after the rocket soared into orbit from its launch pad on Omelek Island, 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) southwest of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean [MSNBC].

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Three Chinese astronauts returned to earth on Sunday after completing a mission that made China the third nation to send its astronauts outside their spacecraft and into the dangerous darkness of space on a spacewalk. The successful mission is being hailed as a national triumph in China, and the astronauts were bedecked with flowered garlands on their return and given a heroes’ welcome in Beijing.

State broadcaster CCTV showed the astronauts’ return Sunday after their Shenzhou 7 ship’s re-entry vehicle burst through the Earth’s atmosphere to make a landing under clear skies in the grasslands of China’s northern Inner Mongolia region. The vessel floated down gently while attached to a giant red-and-white striped parachute, marking the end of the 68-hour endeavor. “It was a glorious mission, full of challenges with a successful end,” said mission commander Zhai Zhigang, a fighter pilot. “We feel proud of the motherland” [AP].

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This week, an international group of astronauts and legal experts met to consider a dire but hypothetical threat to life on earth: another massive asteroid impact, like the one that researchers believe ended the reign of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The group, the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), concluded their meeting by asking the United Nations to prepare an international response for when a dangerous object is detected heading towards our planet. Says astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who flew into orbit with the Apollo 9 mission: “Until we have a response in place, we’re as vulnerable as the dinosaurs” [The Register].

In the report, titled Asteroid Threats: A Call for Global Response, the team reminds the public of the asteroid Apophis, which gave humanity a brief scare in 2004 when researchers calculated that it had a 1 in 37 chance of hitting the earth in the year 2029. That calamitous prediction was soon refuted by further data on Apophis’ trajectory, but the new report notes that the asteroid, also known as a “near earth object” or NEO, has a 1-in-45,000 chance of striking Earth in 2036. Currently, NASA is watching 209 NEOs, none of which is considered to be dangerous. But a threat is likely to be detected within the next 15 years, according to the ASE. “New telescopes coming online will increase these discoveries by a factor of 100,” said Ed Lu, astronaut on space shuttle Atlantis [New Scientist].

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Ever wondered what causes the spate of wild bidding in the last few minutes of an Ebay auction? Scientists say they now have answer: The irrational behavior is caused by people’s fear of losing, not their desire to win. While economists have recognized the concept of “loss aversion” for some time, a new set of experiments used brain scans and lab experiments to show how strongly the phenomenon plays out in auctions, and how it’s tied to overbidding.

In the first experiment, test subjects participated in either a lottery or an auction. During the games, scientists watched the responses of the subjects’ striata—the brain’s reward center—using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The elation of winning was the same in both games, but the agony of defeat was crushing for losers of the auction. After auction, brain activity in the loser’s reward centers decreased substantially. But it hardly blipped when the person lost a lottery [Ars Technica]. What’s more, auction losers who had the steepest declines in striata activity were more likely to have overbid during the auction.

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Researchers have found a way to create stem cells from adult liver cells without triggering DNA changes that have caused mutations and tumors in previous studies. Though demonstrated only in mice so far, the result marks another key achievement in the fledgling science of cellular reprogramming. The hope is to create human, embryonic-like stem cells — which can be turned into all the other tissue types of the body — without using eggs or destroying embryos. That freshly derived tissue could then be transplanted into patients to treat various diseases [The Wall Street Journal].

A method of using adult cells to create stem cells was debuted by Japanese researchers in 2006. By using viruses to insert key developmental genes, researchers coaxed human skin cells into an embryonic state, capable of growing into almost any other type of tissue…. But there was a catch: Viruses used to reset the cells tended to fuse with their DNA, leading to unpredictable mutations and cancer. The cells were promising in principle, but couldn’t be used medically [Wired News]. In the new breakthrough, researchers used a different kind of virus to introduce the genes, and found that it didn’t leave behind any damaging genetic code.

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A Swiss man with a jet-powered wing strapped across his back jumped from a plane at an altitude of 9,000 feet today, and blasted across the 22 miles that separate Calais, France from Dover, England. The adventurer, Yves Rossy, became the first person to complete a solo flight across the English Channel using a jet-powered wing, which he could steer only with the movements of his head and back. Rossy, whose day job is an airline pilot, traced the route of French aviation pioneer Louis Bleriot who became the first person to fly across the Channel in a plane 99 years ago [The Mirror].

Like many other aviation enthusiasts before him, Rossy wanted to find a way for people to get as close as possible to flying like birds. He started working on the project about 15 years ago, building prototypes in his garage [National Geographic News]. He took his debut flight over the Alps in May, and has been gearing up for the Channel crossing for months. The successful feat, which was postponed twice due to bad weather, was broadcast live, and observed by crowds on both the French and English coasts.

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A slab of bedrock on the shore of Canada’s Hudson Bay may be the oldest piece of the planet ever discovered: Researchers believe the rock is 4.28 billion years old, which would mean that it formed less than 300 million years after the earth itself came together. However, geologists say that considerable controversy remains over the research team’s method of dating the rocks.

Study author Richard Carlson says that if his team is right about the rock’s extraordinary old age, it will change conceptions of how the planet developed its current form, with solid tectonic plates and a stable crust. Says Carlson: “These rocks paint this picture of an early earth that looked pretty much like the modern earth.” … [T]he existence of solid rock 4.28 billion years ago would run counter to the traditional image of the young earth as a roiling cauldron of magma oceans, a view that is falling by the wayside among researchers as more geological data is unearthed [The New York Times].

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