80beats » Environment

Study: Americas + Europe + Asia Will Form Amasia, a Supercontinent in the Arctic

Sarah Zhang — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:08:15 +0000

Geological analysis suggest the current-day continents we know and love will drift together, forming a new supercontinent like ones that existed many millions of years ago. What’s not certain is where that supercontinent will be. The authors of a new Nature study suggest that the next supercontinent, dubbed Amasia, will join together up in the Arctic. Antarctica, though, would stay by its lonesome in the south.

The Yale scientists analyzed the formation of two earlier supercontinents, Rodinia and Pangaea, and found that the continents had rotated 90 degrees between one supercontinent and the next one. They calculated these rotations based on the alignment of magnetic material in ancient rocks. Before lava solidifies into rock, the tiny shards of magnetic material point to align with the Earth’s North Pole at the time—a magnetic snapshot of the past that can tell us how continents have since rotated. Rotate 90 degrees away from the last supercontinent, Pangaea, and that puts Amasia near the North Pole. However, this contradicts previous models proposing that Amasia will be either exactly where Pangaea was or directly 180 degrees across from it.

Of course, none of us will be around to ...

Solar Panels Sometimes Pit Global Warming Against Local Ecosystems

Sarah Zhang — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:22:08 +0000

Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert

Solar energy has been enjoying its day in the sun with massive federal subsidies, but the energy taken from sunlight also has a dark side. Building these plants in the American West destroys large swathes of the desert ecosystem. Cacti must be mowed down and local wildlife displaced to make room for the giant mirrors that will essentially carpet the desert. The LA Times has a great feature on the Ivanpah project in the Mojave that began construction in October 2010.

Far from an empty stretch of sand, the Mojave supports diverse wildlife. No one knows exactly how the new solar power plant will affect the tortoises, eagles, and Joshua trees that currently inhabit the area. Is it okay to sacrifice the desert in the fight against larger climate change? The situation has put environmental groups in a bind, as Times reporter Julie Cart explains:

The national office of the Sierra Club has had to quash local chapters’ opposition to some solar projects, sending out a 42-page directive making it clear that the club’s national policy goals superseded the objections of a local group. Animosity bubbled over after a local Southern California chapter was ...

How Can You Tell If You’ve Hit an Antarctic Lake?

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:47:55 +0000

The outline of Lake Vostok beneath the ice, as seen from space.

Last week, as Russian scientists neared the end of two decades of drilling to reach Lake Vostok, an ancient Antarctic lake buried beneath miles of ice that hasn’t seen light in 20 million years, people around the world waited with bated breath for news. Yesterday the Russian state-run news agency announced that on Sunday, the drill had reached water, apparently the lake surface. Today, the project leader clarified that they need to verify that the water the drill struck was actually Lake Vostok. New Scientist has a tidy explanation of why it’s not necessarily obvious if you’ve hit a massive underground lake:

[Hitting water] suggests the lake has been breached, but the team are now checking the level of water in the borehole and readings from pressure sensors to confirm that the water did come from the lake and not a pocket of water in the ice above the lake. Ice temperatures rise as you go deeper into the ice sheet, and approach melting point just above the lake, so the fact that the team hit liquid water doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve reached the ...

New Solar Cell Pulls Electricity Out of Chopped-up Plants

Sarah Zhang — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:08:39 +0000

For years, solar energy researchers have tried to imitate the success of photosynthesis by building devices like an artificial leaf and a solar cell that hijacks chemistry of photosynthetic bacteria. Now researchers at MIT have come up with an innovative technique that also happens to be very cheap: all you need is some “stabilizing powder” and plant waste. Mowed your lawn lately?

The stabilizing powder is a mix of safe, easily attainable chemicals that preserves photosystem I, a protein complex that captures light energy in plant cells. (In contrast, the newest photovoltaic cells in solar panels require metals that are rare or toxic.) The powder is mixed with plant matter such as grass clippings and crushed, and the resulting green goo is spread onto glass or metal substrate. Hook up wires to capture the electric current and that’s your solar panel.

The efficiency of these solar panels is only 0.1%, compared to the 15 to 18% efficiency of solar panels out in the market right now. Lead researcher Andrew Mershin says the technology still needs to improve 10-fold to become practical. After all, being able to power only one lightbulb with a whole house covered in solar ...

Scientists to Breach Buried Antarctic Lake, Untouched for Millions of Years

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:01:50 +0000

The outline of Lake Vostok beneath the ice, as seen from space.

After two decades of drilling through miles of Antarctic ice, Russian scientists are about to breach an underground lake that has not been exposed to the surface in more than 20 million years. Lake Vostok, as the body of water is called, is part of a chain of more than 200 lakes hidden beneath the ice, some of which were formed when Australia and Antarctica were still connected. Vostok will be the first one of all to be opened when the drill hits water next week.

Scientists believe that there may be life in the lake, as ice removed from the Vostok borehole has been found to contain bacteria. And since the subterranean lakes, kept liquid by heat from the Earth’s core, are similar to those found on moons Enceladus and Europa, scientists are excited to see what such inhabitants might be like. But the Russian team’s somewhat sloppy drilling methods have got a number of people worried about preserving the pristine lake from contamination, as Marc Kaufman reports in a great feature for the Washington Post.

The lake is known to have quite a bit ...

New Plan Proposes Protecting New Orleans By Restoring the Delta

Veronique Greenwood — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:29:40 +0000

In this graphic from the restoration authority, the land that will
be lost to erosion if the plan isn’t undertaken is shown in red.

Six years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Louisiana coast, the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has finally released a draft of a plan to try to keep it from happening again. How? By restoring the wetlands along the Mississippi River Delta, which we have more or less systematically destroyed but used to act as buffers between storm surge waves and inland cities.

Previous plans had relied on mainly on building levees and seawalls, so it’s striking that this plan, which would unroll over the course of 50 years at a cost of $50 billion, focuses on wetland restoration, writes Mark Fischetti, who has been covering this issue for Scientific American for years. Here’s how it would work:

Along the outer edge of the torn-up coast, furthest from New Orleans, former barrier islands that have been worn to thin wisps of land would be broadened with sandy sediment, mostly dredged from the ocean bottom and conveyed through pipelines. Natural ridges of land along the coast would be strengthened ...

The National Parks That No Longer Are

Valerie Ross — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:16:28 +0000

With their majestic peaks, imposing canyons, and lofty designation, America’s national parks seem inviolate, places of natural grandeur far from the vagaries of money or politics. But over the years, 26 sites have lost their national park status. In a slideshow at National Geographic, Brian Handwerk explores why.

A few parks were less-than-ideal candidates to begin with (the National Park Service running the Kennedy Center? huh?). But more often than not, the decision to jettison a park from the list came down to economics: Several parks, like Montana’s Lewis and Clark Caverns, above, were too remote to attract enough visitors; the caverns are now part of the state’s park system. Other ex-parks, however, are no longer open to the public: a Palm Beach retreat that proved too expensive for the government to maintain was bought by Donald Trump—and made into a swanky, exclusive club.

Read the rest at National Geographic.

Image courtesy of Montana State Parks

Why This Winter is So Crazily Warm

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:12:52 +0000

Spring! Not.

Across the US, this winter has been unusually balmy, with precious little snow, or even rain, and with trees taking the warmth as a cue to send out new leaves in January. Temperature data support those impressions: in the first week of the year, temperatures were 40 degrees F higher than average in some parts of the Midwest, Discovery News reports, and snow cover is at 19 percent across the country, compared to an average of 50 percent at this time of year. In notoriously chilly Fargo, North Dakota, the January 4 high temperature of 55 broke the record for the warmest January day on record, and the country has seen close to no rain or snow in this first week of 2012, writes Wunderground meteorologist Jeff Masters. “It has been remarkable to look at the radar display day after day and see virtually no echoes,” he writes, referring to the radar echoes reflected back by storms. “It is very likely that this has been the driest first week of January in U.S. recorded history.”

Why this freaky weather? The answer is, basically, an extremely unusual jet stream over the ...

Global Warming May Have Delayed the Next Ice Age

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:53:31 +0000

If you could watch a movie of the planet over the last several million years, you’d see the ice caps advance and retreat: The planet’s climate moves in cycles, with ice ages and interglacial periods alternating. But looking at previous interglacials similar to our own, geophysicists now think that the current mostly ice-less period may be longer than it would have been had a certain species not invented the combustion engine. Specifically, it looks like with amount of greenhouse gases we’ve already spewed into the atmosphere, the next ice age will be delayed. And before you decide that’s a good thing, at the rate we’re currently going, we’re not just pushing off the glaciers for a few geologically insignificant years: the team says that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would to be at most 240 parts per million (ppm) before glaciation would kick in. Right now, it’s 390 ppm, with no signs of dropping and many signs of continuing to rise. When (and how) the planet’s self-regulation system will kick in isn’t clear, but the long, increasingly hot trip probably isn’t going to be pretty.

Read more at the BBC.

Image courtesy of NASA ...

Ohio Christmas Quakes Likely Caused By Fracking Operation

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:01:27 +0000

A tower for removing gas at the Marcellus Shale Formation in Pennsylvania.

When it was revealed in November that several small earthquakes in northwestern England had been caused by fracking, the controversial process of extracting shale gas from bedrock by cracking the rock with pressurized water, the gas company responsible stated that it was an extremely unlikely occurrence. True as that may be, residents of Youngstown, Ohio, can now testify that something similar has happened again. This time, it wasn’t the removal of shale gas that triggered the earthquakes, but apparently the subsequent cracking of sandstone in order to store the wastewater produced by fracking.

These revelations come from scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), who were called in by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources after nine small quakes struck near a wastewater injection site in as many months. They set up seismographs that observed the earthquakes of 2.7 magnitude on Christmas Eve and 4.0 magnitude on New Year’s Eve (which caused no injuries and little damage). Mark Fischetti over at Scientific American explains:

By triangulating the arrival time of shock waves at the four stations, Armbruster and his colleagues [from LDEO] ...

To Keep Venice From Going Underwater, Researchers Say, Pump Water Under Venice

Valerie Ross — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:19:11 +0000

Flooding in Piazza San Marco, Venice

Venice is sinking, and the nearby Adriatic sea—like the global sea level—is rising. The city could, some estimates suggest, be underwater by the end of the century. Much of the trouble is due to Venice’s precarious, low-lying position in the middle of a lagoon, but human activity in the area has played a role in the city’s subsidence, as well. As Scott K. Johnson explains at Ars Technica:

The pumping of shallow groundwater in the mid-1900s also contributed to the problem. Water in the pores between grains of sediment provides pressure that bears some of the load. When pore pressure decreases, or water is removed completely, grains can be packed together more tightly by collapsing the pore spaces. As sediment is compacted, the land surface drops. While the effect was small (less than 15cm), Venice doesn’t have much wiggle room.

One possible solution to the problem may be, in essence, reversing what was done last century: rather than pumping groundwater out from under Venice, some scientists suggest, it’s time to pump it back in. While injecting water won’t undo all the damage, it can stop subsidence—and ...

Following in Scott’s Footsteps: Measuring the Magnetic Pole

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:41:58 +0000

The peripatetic magnetic south pole.

A hundred years after Robert Scott‘s disastrous mission to the South Pole, a pair of Kiwi scientists are traveling to his observation hut today to continue the work he began there: tracking the Earth’s magnetic field. Since 1957, New Zealand has measured the field at Scott’s base every five years, accruing data that, along with measurements from other, more comfortable sites around the world, helps maintain the model used by NATO and nations’ defense departments for navigation.

The planet’s magnetic field needs tracking because it is shifting: the magnetic south pole has been traveling northwestward at a rate of 6 to 9 miles a year for the past century. (The geographic South Pole is somewhere altogether different.) This shift occurs because the mass of molten metal that makes up the Earth’s outer core is in a constant state of turmoil, and the the poles could veer off in another direction at any time. Intriguing, the magnetic field has also been getting weaker since the 1800s. But whether that means the poles will flip at some point in the future—it’s happened before!—or whether it will ...

Where Christmas Lights Go to Die (and Be Reborn as Slippers)

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:17:51 +0000

The holidays are hard on Christmas lights. Exposed to the vagaries of small nephews and exuberant pets, most strings will experience a few casualties, and while a missing bulb no longer means the entire set stops working, Americans still throw out millions of pounds of lights a year. Adam Minter, who’s writing a book on the globalization of recycling, describes exactly what happens to your old lights when they’re shipped over to a concern in China, which, ironically, makes better use of minced-up lights than any US company could.

Workers untangle the lights and toss them into small shredders, where they are chopped into millimeter-sized fragments and mixed with water into a sticky mud-like substance. Next, they’re shoveled onto a large, downward-angled, vibrating table, covered in a thin sheen of flowing water.

As the table shakes, the heavier flecks of copper (from the wire) and brass (from the light bulb sockets) flow in one direction, and the lighter plastic and glass (from the insulation and bulbs) flows in another. It’s the same concept that miners use when panning for gold, and the results of this updated, age-old technology can be found at the far end of the water tables: baskets of ...

Why Wool is Warm and Snowflakes Aren’t Always Pretty

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:16:40 +0000

If you live in the Northeast, chances are you’ve had a disappointingly balmy December so far (the snow seems to have taken a wrong turn somewhere and wound up over Texas instead). But when the air gets that snap and you reach for the wool socks, Emily Eggleston at Scientific American has a few factoids that promise to fascinate. Here’s why wool keeps you warm:

Wool keeps out the cold because it is an excellent insulator. Crimped and crisscrossed woolen fibers create tons of little air pockets. The tiny air masses within my socks have difficulty moving in and out of the fabric. Without convective heat transfer and contact with air of other temperatures, the spaces between wool fibers maintains a steady temperature.

And why are snowflakes sometimes beautifully crystalline and sometimes clumpy as cold oatmeal?

The two main snowflake shapes are plates and columns. Plates are the typical hexagonal flakes and columns are elongated, blocky crystals. As a cloud’s temperature moves below 32º F(0º C), it will pass through various phases of crystalline potential. If enough water is present in a cloud, between 32 and 23º F (0 and -5º C), plates will form, sending small ...

Why Do Mockingbirds Accept Invaders’ Eggs?

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:35:33 +0000

In the form of brood parasites, the bird world has enough irresponsible moms to start a reality TV show: cowbirds, for instance, lay their eggs in other species’ nests, stab most of the hosts’ eggs to death, and then leave their offspring to be raised by the host parents. The standing explanation for this involves most host birds being not that sharp on the uptake (watch a tiny warbler fussing over a cuckoo chick ten times its size (above) and you’d think that too). But maybe, a new study suggests, it’s sometimes to the host’s benefit to let imposter eggs stay in their nests.

The researchers chose mockingbirds as their hosts and cowbirds as their parasites, because mockingbirds usually fight like crazy to keep cowbirds of their nests but get strangely quiescent once the invaders have laid their eggs, a behavior that piqued the researchers’ interest. Once all the birds in the sample population had laid, the researchers went around adding and removing eggs from nests to see whether having a certain number of cowbird eggs affected mockingbird survival. They found that mockingbird eggs that shared their digs with cowbird eggs and suffered repeated cowbird invasions were more likely ...

Panel Finds That Nearly All Invasive Chimp Research is Unnecessary; NIH Agrees

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:17:31 +0000

After seven months of deliberation, the US Institute of Medicine has released a report that marks a turning point in the use of chimpanzees, humanity’s closest relative, in medical research. An IOM panel found that chimpanzees were in the vast majority of cases no longer required for disease research and laid out three stringent rules against which all current and future chimp research should be judged. Within two hours, Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, announced he had accepted the group’s analysis and would set up a committee to apply the rules to proposed and ongoing research projects funded by the NIH.

The recommendation is a reflection of our growing realization that chimps may be capable of self-awareness, empathy, grief, and happiness, and may possess basic morality as well as a culture; Brandon Keim, who has covered chimp research extensively for Wired, notes that some scientists have begun to think they should qualify as nonhuman people. Subjecting them to disease, pain, and psychological trauma in the service of research thus has grown to seem ethically dubious, especially after it was revealed that the NIH ...

Wild Monkeys To Monitor Radiation Levels In Japan

Douglas Main — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:15:57 +0000

How do you do to measure radiation levels in the hard-to-reach forests near Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant? Why, fit wild monkeys with radiation sensors, of course! Researcher Takayuki Takahashi tells CNN that his team plans to fit three monkeys in early 2012 with collars that measure radiation, as well as GPS units that record location and distance from the ground. The researchers plan to leave the monitors in place for about a month, before detaching them via remote control and picking up them up to retrieve their stored data.

The information thus gathered will help scientists understand how radiation travels through the environment and the effects it may have on humans and animals. Radiation levels in the area have been monitored from the air by helicopter, but this has yielded an incomplete picture of what’s going on at ground level. By fitting sensors on the monkeys—who rove along the ground and high in the trees—the researchers may get a better understanding of how radioactive fallout varies by elevation and differs between various habitats. The project will take place in Minamisoma, a mountainous area just outside the exclusion zone about 16 ...

Twenty Years of Climate Meetings, Through the Eyes of a Veteran Journalist

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:02:27 +0000

The most important climate meeting of the year, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Convention of Parties in Durban, South Africa, has just concluded, with the US envoy “relieved” by the results, but developing countries frustrated by the failure of developed nations to take greater responsibility for emissions. At Nature News, Frank MacDonald, a veteran reporter who has attended nearly every Convention of Parties meeting since they began in 1992, recounts his experiences as a spectator on the edge of the climate poker game:

Nearly 20 years ago, as I wandered as a newspaper reporter from tent to tent at the Global Forum in Rio de Janeiro’s Flamingo Park, with young, idealistic environmental activists milling about, I couldn’t help thinking of Dale Arden’s line from the film Flash Gordon, a decade before: “Flash, Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the Earth!”

Brazil’s 1992 Earth Summit was in full swing, and when it closed it even seemed that we would manage to save the world from global warming, and species extinction too. After all, delegates at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development — as it was officially known — had ...

Japan Disaster Was Two Tsunamis Rolled into One

Valerie Ross — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:17:41 +0000

Satellite radar data showed two wave fronts combining into a doubly tall tsunami off the coast of Japan on March 11.

The tsunami that spawned by the 9.0 earthquake off Japan this March was a disaster of massive proportions, reaching heights of over 130 feet in some areas and traveling up to six miles inland in others. Scientists at NASA and Ohio State University have now found another factor, beyond the sheer strength of the quake, that made the tsunami so ferocious: It started out as two separate walls of waves that combined to form one taller, more powerful “merging tsunami.”

Three different satellites happened to fly over the tsunami on March 11. Using their onboard radar altimeters, the satellites could gauge sea level changes within inches, producing a detailed picture of how the tsunami developed—and why it was so destructive when it hit land. As NASA explains:

Data from NASA and European radar satellites captured at least two wave fronts that day. The fronts merged to form a single, double-high wave far out at sea. This wave was capable of traveling long distances without losing power. Ocean ridges and undersea mountain chains pushed the ...

After Tsunami, Japanese People Think Waves Are Less Dangerous. What?

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:10:51 +0000

The wave that washed over the eastern coast of Japan was more than 130 feet high.

You would expect that a disaster of the magnitude of the Tohoku tsunami and earthquake, which killed 15,000 people and caused about $210 billion in property damage, would have people feeling more apt to evacuate when another killer wave approaches. But, strikingly, scientists who interviewed Japanese people a year before the event and afterwards found that the size of the waves they would think dangerous enough to flee had grown. As Adam Mann writes at Wired, people had stopped recognizing the height at which a wave becomes dangerous:

After the 2010 Chilean earthquake, almost exactly one year before the Tohoku disaster, Oki asked Japanese residents a set of questions related to tsunami preparedness. At the time, roughly 70 percent correctly identified that a 10-foot tsunami is a hazard and 60 percent said they would evacuate in the event of one that tall. Even 1.5 feet of swiftly moving water can carry a person off and drown them, and waves only 6.5 feet high can wash away or destroy wooden houses.

But when the same questions were asked again one month ...

Atmospheric Remnants of Nuclear Tests Reveal Antarctica’s Tiny “Old-Growth Forests”

Douglas Main — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:47:33 +0000

Hardy Antarctic moss.

Ah, Antarctica. A vast expanse of ice, interrupted by mountains, ice… and more ice (with the occasional penguin). But in the East of the continent and on the Windmill Islands near Australia’s Casey research station, bare ground can actually be seen during summer months. Here Antarctica’s endemic plants dwell: lichens, terrestrial algae, and mosses. These smatterings of bryophytes are amongst the hardiest flora in the world, providing a home for a variety of minute life. They survive being covered in snow most of the year, only growing briefly during the summer months, watered by snowmelt. Except for in-person observations made over the last two decades, little definitive was known about these oases of diversity, like their age or how they might respond to changes in climate.

But now, some of the moss’s secrets are out. A recent study in the journal Global Change Biology found that some of these plants must be more than a century old, and a few may even be thousands of years old, said researcher and study author Sharon Robinson via email. On average these mosses grow at the glacial speed of 1 millimeter per year—and some of the turfs are meters thick. That ...

Study: Switch to Farming Shortened Jaws, Giving Us Crowded & Crooked Teeth

Douglas Main — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:15:30 +0000

What’s the News: Parents going broke to pay for their offspring’s braces and orthodontistry can finally blame somebody besides their mildly malformed children: our farmer ancestors. A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people living in subsistence farming communities around the world have shorter, wider jaws than those in hunting and gathering societies. This leaves less room for teeth, which have changed little in size or abundance over human history—and may help explain why crooked choppers and a need for orthodontia are so common, study author Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel tells the BBC. ”I have had four of my pre-molars pulled and that is the only reason that my teeth fit in my mouth,” she says.

How the Heck:
von Cramon-Taubadel, a University of Kent anthropologist, made 3-D images of 322 craniums and 295 mandibles from 11 groups of subsistence tribes around the world. Six of the groups were farmers; five were hunter-gatherers. She found no link between cranium size and the type of subsistence economy the person came from. The jawbone was a different story. After controlling for genetic, geographic, and climatic factors, she found a ...

Mongolia to Cool Capital City During the Summer with a Giant Ice Cube

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:45:12 +0000

A naled, or aufeis, in the flesh. Er, ice.

It sounds like science fiction, but, like so many science fiction-ish ideas in the age of radical adaption to climate change, it’s real: Mongolia is launching a $750,000 geoengineering project to freeze vast quantities of the Tuul River in order to cool its capital city of Ulan Bataar during the sweltering summer, and to provide drinking water as the ice melts, as well. While specifics about exactly how the cooling will work are scarce, details about the freezing process are not, as it will mimic a natural process that already occurs on rivers in the north.

Thick ice sheets called naleds form each winter on the surfaces of rivers in exceptionally cold regions of the globe. As the surface of the river freezes, water comes seeping out of holes in the ice, drawn surface-wards by the difference in pressure, and freezes into a new layer on top when temperatures drop at night. The engineering team behind the project plans to help this process along by drilling new holes throughout the winter, causing thicker naleds to form. And naleds are already quite thick in ...

When Data is Beautiful: A Collection of Colorful Volcano Maps

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:01:18 +0000

The Crater Lake caldera shows a particularly striking pattern of lava flows.

Sometimes, the results of science can be a little cryptic. But other times, data can be as beautiful as it is information rich. Betsy Mason over at Wired Science has a gallery of geological maps of volcanoes that demonstrate exactly that, with a rainbow of colors indicating different types of rock and lava flows from millennia of eruptions. Which mountain is your favorite?

Image courtesy of USGS

What Stands Between You and the World’s Most Expensive Burger

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:05:24 +0000

You can dream, but…lab-grown processed meats, let alone steak, are a very
long way off still.

Part of what stands between you and a lab-grown meat patty (a perennial source of fascination around here) is your gag reflex: the pale strips of cultured muscle cells that are currently the top contender for Petri-dish burgerdom look like scraps of mold, and they must be “exercised”—stretched between Velcro tabs—to strengthen and gain meat-ish texture. A patty made from them will be a hand-assembled stack of about 3,000 scraps, and in order to give the stuff color and iron, the lead scientist of the project opined to Reuters, they might need to soak it in lab-grown blood. Gah.

Still, factory farming ain’t pretty either, and the sheer amount of land and other resources we dedicate to meat production can be enough to make you gag as well.

This particular cultured meat project—there are many—hopes to have its first proof-of-concept burger made by August or September next year. But there is a long way to go before this stuff has even a chance of hitting the mainstream, especially since, on top of the ...

CA Birds Are Getting Bigger; PA Birds Are Getting Smaller

Douglas Main — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:01:01 +0000

California birds are getting slightly bigger, according to a study published in Global Change Biology in which researchers measured and weighed 33,000 birds over the past 40 years. The increases were small, but significant: in the last 25 years robins have grown 0.2 ounces in mass and 1/8th of an inch in wing length, for example. But the finding runs counter to the only other long-term study measuring avian size in North America, which found that birds in Pennsylvania have shrunk slightly over recent decades. And it seems to disagree with other recent suggestions that animals may shrink in a warming world: Bergmann’s rule holds that animals generally get bigger as they get farther away from the equator, because larger animals are better able to retain heat.

So what’s going on? The researchers have a number of hypotheses, all related to climate change. More severe weather on the West Coast, for example, could perhaps favor bulked-up birds that can store more energy to survive storms. Or maybe warmer temperatures cause changes in rainfall patterns that ultimately lead to more food for birds (a pattern that may be different elsewhere, like ...

As Permafrost Melts, Methane-Munching Soil Bacteria Come to Life

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:39:21 +0000

There’s a lot going on in Arctic permafrost as it melts and soil bacteria become more active. A new study explores how these bacteria may help or hinder our efforts to control the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

What’s the News: Melting permafrost in a warming world could mean lots of greenhouses gasses, especially methane, released into the atmosphere. But it also means an unusual community of soil bacteria coming out of hibernation, so to speak. A new study looks at what those permafrost microbes do, exactly, as their environment warms up.

How the Heck:
The researchers took cores of frozen soil from Alaska and started melting them in the laboratory. As the permafrost melted, they used a technique called metagenome sequencing, harvesting and sequencing DNA from the samples, to identify the permafrost denizens and to see what kinds of proteins they were manufacturing. By performing this step while the samples were frozen and at two points during the melting process, they were able to see how the bacterial makeup of the soil changed over the course of the melt, as some bacteria reproduced like crazy and others did not. They also monitored the amount of ...

Chinese Elite Breathe Cleaner Air Than Their Countrymen

Douglas Main — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:11:28 +0000

Beijing smog as seen from the China World Hotel, March 2003.

While top Chinese government officials have many advantages in terms of wealth, education, and status compared to most of their countrymen, the consolation remained that the rich had to breathe the same polluted air as the poor in smog-ridden cities like Beijing. But as a story in the New York Times points out, that may not be entirely accurate:

As it turns out, the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live. The company’s vice president, Zhang Zhong, said there were more than 200 purifiers scattered throughout Great Hall of the People, the office of China’s president, Hu Jintao, and Zhongnanhai, the walled compound for senior leaders and their families. “Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people,” boasts the company’s promotional material, which includes endorsements from [leaders like] Long Yongtu, a top economic official who insists on bringing the device along ...

Low-Tech Vikings May Have Used Mineral With Funky Optics to Reach New World

Douglas Main — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:40:59 +0000

What’s the news: Viking legend has it that sailors could hold up crystal sunstones to the sky to help them find their way. Turns out the legend could be true. In a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of researchers found that a type of crystal called an Icelandic spar commonly found in that country could accurately reveal the position of the sun in cloudy or near-dark conditions. How Vikings Got Around:
Researchers have long wondered and argued about how the Vikings were able to successfully navigate their way around the Northern Hemisphere in the late eighth to 11th centuries, hundreds of years before the magnetic compass reached Europe around 1300. Besides the direction of the wind, waves, and swell, the only way to navigate during the day away from shore is by knowing the sun’s direction. But that’s not so easy on a foggy or stormy day, or during the long twilight of Northern summers. Historians have speculated that, due to their optical properties, crystals of calcite (a common form of calcium carbonate) could have been used to ...

Vampire-like Predatory Bacteria Could Become A Living Antibiotic

Douglas Main — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:07:59 +0000

The bacterium Micavibrio aeruginosavorus (yellow), leeching
on a Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium (purple).

What’s the news: If bacteria had blood, the predatory microbe Micavibrio aeruginosavorus would essentially be a vampire: it subsists by hunting down other bugs, attaching to them, and sucking their life out. For the first time, researchers have sequenced the genome of this strange microorganism, which was first identified decades ago in sewage water. The sequence will help better understand the unique bacterium, which has potential to be used as a “living antibiotic” due to its ability to attack drug-resistant biofilms and its apparent fondness for dining on pathogens.

Anatomy of a Vampire:
The bacterium has an interesting multi-stage life history. During its migratory phase it sprouts a single flagellum and goes hunting for prey. Once it find a delectable morsel of bacterium, it attacks and irreversibly attaches to the surface, and sucks out all of the good stuff: carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, DNA, etc. Sated, the cell divides in two via binary fission, and the now-depleted host is left for dead.
Hungry for Pathogens:
M. aeruginosavorus cannot be grown by itself; it must be cultured along with another bacteria to feed upon. A 2006 study found that it ...

Toxic Pufferfish Invade Eastern Mediterranean, Killing People and Irking Fisherman

Douglas Main — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:08:33 +0000

In the Eastern Mediterranean, the pufferfish has arrived. And nobody’s too happy about it. The fish, also known as the silverstripe blaasop or Lagocephalus sceleratus, was first confirmed in Turkey in 2003 and has been spreading throughout the area. The problem with this unassuming fellow is that it contains tetrodotoxin, a neurotoxin that can be deadly to humans and for which there is no known antidote. Consumption of the fish has killed at least 7 people in Lebanon in the past few years, according to The Daily Star, and likely affected many more. A 2008 study found that 13 Israeli patients who ate the blaasop had to receive emergency medical attention at the hospital, where they didn’t recover for four days.

Besides being poisonous the pufferfish is also strong and has a sharp beak that allows it to cut through fishermen’s nets. The fish is native to the Pacific and Indian Ocean, and lives in the Red Sea, from which it likely migrated through the Suez Canal. As of 2005, there were as many as 745 exotic species in the Mediterranean, many of which likely arrived via the ...

New Study: Fukushima Released Twice as Much Radiation as Official Estimate Claimed

Valerie Ross — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:56:07 +0000

The nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant this spring may have released twice as much radiation into the atmosphere as the Japanese government estimated, a new preliminary study says. While the government estimates relied mostly on data from monitoring stations in Japan, the European research team behind the new report looked at radioactivity data from stations scattered across the globe. This wider approach factored in the large amounts of radioactivity that were carried out over the Pacific Ocean, which the official tallies didn’t.

Overall, the team says, the disaster released about 36,000 terabecquerels of cesium-137, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear fission, more than twice the 15,000 terabecquerels Japanese authorities estimated—and approximately 42% as much radioactivity as Chernobyl.

The researchers also found that the release of cesium declined sharply when workers started spraying water into the pools holding spent fuel rods at the plant—suggesting that, contrary to the official account, the spent fuel rods had been emitting radiation, and spraying them earlier might have mitigated the fallout.

Image: iStockPhoto

Study Links Fetal Bisphenol A Exposure to Behavioral Problems in Girls

Douglas Main — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:06:35 +0000

A study published this week in the journal Pediatrics found a link between levels of bisphenol-A in pregnant moms and behavioral problems such as anxiety and hyperactivity in their daughters at age 3. No such effects were seen in boys. BPA has estrogen-like activity and can lead to developmental and behavioral problems in animals—but whether or not it does the same in humans, and at what dosages, is a subject of considerable debate. This study won’t settle the debate but highlights the need to answer some basic questions about BPA that remain surprisingly unclear.

What’s the Context:
Bisphenol-A is used in many types of plastics like polycarbonate, linings of metal cans, and in receipts (even some labeled “BPA-free”). It shows up in the urine of the vast majority of Americans. Since BPA mimics estrogen in the body, it may effect mental and sexual development, especially if it is present very early in life. For this reason it has been explicitly banned from being used in baby bottles in several European countries, and BPA manufacturers say they don’t sell the chemical to makers of baby bottles. Animal studies show fetal or early-life ...

Largest Single-Celled Organism Found 6 Miles Beneath Sea

Douglas Main — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:06:18 +0000

Researchers have found new examples of the strange singled-celled creatures called xenophyophores more than six miles beneath the surface of the Pacific in the Mariana Trench. At more than four inches in length, they are perhaps the largest single-celled organism on Earth. These protists make a living by sifting through sediments and can accumulate high levels of toxic metals like uranium, lead, and mercury.

Read more at LiveScience.

Image: Lisa Levin & David Checkley, Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Watch the World Burn: Cool NASA Video Shows Fires Around Globe

Douglas Main — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:43:14 +0000

Some men just want to watch the world burn. Count me as one of them, at least when it comes to this video from NASA showing fires taking place the world over. Seventy percent of the world’s blazes take place in Africa—apparently making it the “fire continent,” according to the narrator. Perhaps surprisingly, especially given recent wildfires in the American West and Southwest, only 2 percent of the globes conflagrations take place in North America. NASA used two satellites, Terra and Aqua, to visualize patterns of vegetation, snow/ice cover, and fires worldwide from July 2002 to July 2011.

[Via NASA]

White Roofs May Actually Add to Global Warming

Douglas Main — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:53:01 +0000

A new study published in the Journal of Climate claims that painting rooftops white—a method championed by energy secretary Steven Chu and others to combat climate change—only minimally reduces local cooling, and actually causes a slight increase in overall global warming.

How the Heck:
The researchers used a global climate model called GATOR-GCMOM [PDF], which incorporates a host of data from satellites and weather stations worldwide. It models how relationships between various environmental conditions, like the presence of clouds or pollutants, will affect local and global climate. The model found that more white roofs means less surface heat in cities (which is obvious enough to anyone who’s sat in a car with a black interior in the sun). Lower local temperature means less water evaporates and rises up to eventually form clouds, says lead author and Stanford University researcher Mark Jacobson. The decrease in clouds allows more sunlight to reach the Earth’s surface, leading to higher temperatures overall. The model also predicts that much of the light reflected by rooftops will eventually be absorbed by dark carbon soot and particulates that are especially prevalent in the air ...

Scientists Who Model Ethnic Violence Find That in Switzerland, Separation is Key to Peace

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:55:22 +0000

In Bar-Yam’s model, areas where different language groups overlap have a high likelihood of ethnic violence (E). Once administrative boundaries are included, the risk of violence drops–except for a northwestern region, where ethnic violence has in fact occurred (F).

Ethnic violence is one of the bloodiest and most virulent kinds of conflict. Pinpointing areas where it’s likely to erupt and sussing out why some areas have avoided it are intensely interesting issues to geographers, and Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute made headlines four years ago with a model indicating that how messy the borders are between ethnic groups may be a good predictor of violence. Now, after using it to predict where violence was likely to occur in India and the former Yugoslavia, both areas known for their ethnic turbulence, he’s posted a paper on the ArXiv that applies his analysis to Switzerland, a enviably peaceful country that nevertheless has four national languages and large, devout populations of both Protestants and Catholics. How do the Swiss do it, he asks?

His team’s answer, basically, is geographic and administrative isolation. Switzerland is divided up into cantons—states that each run almost ...

FDA Completes Review of First Genetically Modified Animal for Consumption

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:12:25 +0000

The AquAdvantage salmon.

When most people say “genetically modified organism,” they usually mean a plant—corn, perhaps, or an eggplant. But that may soon change. The FDA has completed its analysis of the first genetically modified animal likely to hit supermarket shelves: the AquAdvantage salmon, made by Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies, Inc. Thanks to some added genes, the salmon grows 2-6 times the size of a normal Atlantic salmon in half the time, promising some respite for the planet’s heavily taxed natural fish stocks, a third of which are near extinction or exhaustion. Talking Points Memo’s IdeaLab reports that a source close to the review process says that the FDA’s environmental impact statement, which looks at what effect the salmon will have on the environment and seems to be favorable, has been passed on to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

As always with genetically modified organisms, there are questions about how the salmon’s manufacturers plan to keep its genes from getting loose in the environment. AquaBounty has developed a way to make the fish sterile, which would make spreading their genes quite tricky. At the moment, however, it only works on 98% of the ...

Study: Fish Have Been Jumping on Land for 150 Million Years and Hiding it From the Fossil Record

Douglas Main — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 18:01:27 +0000

Mosquitofish can leap with “skill and purpose.”

How did animals move from water to land? The answer may have just got a little murkier. A study published this month in the Journal of Experimental Zoology found that two distantly related fish share a similar method for jumping about on land, suggesting that a common ancestor evolved this ability long ago. But unlike amphibious fish such as the mudskipper, which has pectoral fins adapted to “walking” on land, these fish have no specialized equipment for leaping, and would therefore leave no evidence of their talent behind in the fossil record.

In the lab scientists placed fish on a moist surface and filmed their leaps using a high-speed camera (see video below). In this study researchers compared the western mosquitofish, which is known to hop onto land when pursued by predators, and the zebrafish, which doesn’t leave the water in its natural habitat. And yet in the lab both fish can jump with “skill and purpose,” and in very similar way. This led researchers to hypothesize that a common ancestor of the two fish evolved the capacity to jump on land, more than ...

Diving Expedition Finds New Life in the Dead Sea

Valerie Ross — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 12:00:19 +0000

Israeli and German scientists recently took the plunge into the murky, salty Dead Sea, making what they say is the first scientific diving expedition there. Scouring the seafloor, they saw small freshwater springs—with mats of salt-loving, never-before-seen microorganisms coating the surface of nearby craters. In these waters—too salty for large animals, too rich in magnesium for many bacteria—seeing so much life was a surprise.

While floating in the Dead Sea is a popular tourist pastime, scuba-ing into its depths is a difficult and dangerous endeavor. Since the salty water is so buoyant, the divers had to carry 90 pounds each to weigh them down. Swallowing some of the salty water—a not-implausible occurrence during a dive—would make the larynx swell up, leading the diver to suffocate. If that weren’t enough, getting the water in your eyes would be painful at best, and potentially blinding. The scientists wore full face masks during their dive, and apparently weren’t scared off; they’re headed back down for a follow-up study in October.