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.
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.
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.
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?
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 salmon. Additionally, the company is only seeking approval for growing the fish in large, land-locked tanks with double-thick walls. While giant nets teeming with fish in the middle of the ocean are a sight more commonly associated with aquaculture, inland tanks make the risk of modified fish escaping much smaller.
One hopes that if the fish is approved, though, the companies building the tanks make sure to avoid floodplains. Read more at IdeaLab.
Image courtesy of AquaBounty
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.
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.
Sequencing the DNA in a scoop of dirt can tell scientists what creatures are living nearby, a new study using soil from safari parks shows, and the amount of DNA present can even tell how many individuals of each species there are, which could allow field biologists to get preliminary surveys of species. But though the team managed to identify nearly all the species they had expected in the parks, from wildebeest to elephants, they are still addressing how to take samples that accurately represent the area’s biodiversity—one would have to avoid elephant latrines or wildebeest sleeping areas, for instance—and there is the additional problem that rare or small creatures, like insects, might easily be missed. That said, it’s still an unusual and interesting way to take a look at an area’s inhabitants without actually tracking them down.
On the left, in the 1999 edition; on the right, in 2011. Click to embiggenate.
[Originally published 9/16] Greenland glaciers have had a hard time of it lately, what with all the warming and disintegrating, and in their latest edition, the folks at the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World have decided to illustrate the island’s new look: as you can see above, lots and lots less white. The warming has even created a new island off the east coast: look closely just under the “Gr” in “Greenland Sea,” and you can see the words “Uunartoq Qeqertoq (Warming I.)”
If we are looking at a radically reshaped world in the next hundred years or more, maybe atlases will have to be more like dictionaries from here on out, recording the dynamic nature of their subject matter.
[Update 9/19: Scientists at the UK's Scott Polar Institute have written a letter to the Times saying that the image above is inaccurate; less ice has melted in the last 15 years than the atlas's image shows. The atlas's publishers, HarperCollins, respond that they created the image using data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, and that it represents not only changes due to warming but also "much more accurate data and in-depth research" than had previously been available. Regardless of the causes, however, the image doesn't resemble current satellite images, the Scott Polar group says. Check out a comparison of the images here. What do you think?]
A botanist has discovered a new species of plant in eastern Brazil whose branches bend down upon bearing fruit and deposit seeds on the ground, often burying them in a covering of soft soil or moss. This trick is an example of geocarpy, a rare adaptation to survival in harsh or short-lived environments with small favorable patches. The adaptation ensures seedlings germinate near their parents, helping them stay within the choice spots or microclimates in which they thrive. One well-known practitioner of geocarpy is the peanut, which also buries its fruit in the soil [PDF].
The Laki fissure’s eruption in Iceland was behind tens of thousands of deaths in the 1780s.
What’s the News: Iceland’s busy volcanoes have caused their share of air traffic snafus in Europe lately, but they have the potential to be deadly, not just inconvenient. A new model examining how air quality would change should the volcanoes erupt as spectacularly as they occasionally have in the past suggests that increased particulates in the air could kill more than 140,000 people in Europe in the year following the eruption.
Enormous stone statues, called moai, on Easter Island
What’s the News: Easter Island is often held up as an example of what can happen when human profligacy and population outpace ecology: Wanton deforestation led to soil erosion and famine, the story goes, and the islanders’ society declined into chaos and cannibalism. But through their research on Easter Island, paleoecologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo have unearthed evidence that contradicts this version of events. The Polynesian settlers of Easter Island prospered through careful use of the scant available resources, they argue in their new book The Statues That Walked; the island’s forests were done in not by greedy humans, but by hungry rats.
Crystals of smashed cement, the perfect size for lodging in lungs,
made up most of the dust rising from the World Trade Center.
When ten million of tons of building, mixed with 91,000 liters of jet fuel, collapse into a smoking heap, an incredible variety of pulverized materials rise into the air. Though no one took samples of the plume that rose up from the World Trade Center on 9/11, samples of the dust that filtered down in the following days and gas emanating from the pile have given a glimpse of what rescue workers and others breathed in: heavy metals from computers, cellulose from paper, shards of metal and stone from the buildings’ walls, calcium carbonate from the tons of smashed cement, fibers from rugs, fragments of glass and burned hair.
With only seven northern white rhinos left in the world, creating eggs and sperm from stem cells offers the possibility of salvaging some of the species.
What’s the News: In an effort to help preserve endangered rhinos and primates, biologists have converted skin cells taken from the animals into pluripotent stem cells, which can grow into nearly anything, given the right conditions. They might even grow into egg and sperm cells, eventually, the researchers think, suggesting a cell biological route to conservation.
The Eastern Seaboard is warily watching the progress of Hurricane Irene, wondering what course the storm will take and just how ferocious it will be. Predicting the path of a hurricane still involves some guesswork—but thanks to rapidly improving computer models and data-gathering abilities, Tekla Perry reports in IEEE Spectrum, scientists are able to make more accurate forecasts farther in advance than they were even five or ten years ago. In fact, the predicted track of a hurricane over the next 48 hours today is as accurate as a prediction for the next 24 hours was 10 years ago—a day that can make a big difference for people deciding whether to evacuate and how to prepare before the storm. Boosts in computing power mean scientists can run more, faster, and more detailed simulations of the storm, and technologies like Dopper radar provide detailed data on wind speed, air pressure, and temperature as storms progress.
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
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.
Mosquitofish can leap with “skill and purpose.”
A botanist has 
The Eastern Seaboard is warily watching the progress of Hurricane Irene, wondering what course the storm will take and just how ferocious it will be. Predicting the path of a hurricane still involves some guesswork—but thanks to rapidly improving computer models and data-gathering abilities, 
