Recent Science Diaries and Stories
DarkSyde: This Week in Science
mataliandy: UK "Institute of Physics" Climate Embarassment
Stephen Daugherty: Science and Technology Links for Week of March 1st
Slideshows/Videos
Discovery News: Flashback: Images From the Week's News
Take a look at this week's top stories in the Discovery News Flashback Slide Show.
Discovery News: Tech: Earthquake Shake Table Rocks Buildings
Building designs are put to the test on the University of California-San Diego shake table, where engineers recreate destructive earthquakes to help make our structures safer and survivable. Jorge Ribas reports.
Discovery News: Space: Tumbleweed Rovers Could Explore Mars
New concepts for Mars-probing rovers would use Martian wind to move around the planet. James Williams gets a look at two of the designs.
Discovery News: History: DaVinci Perfected World's Largest Horse Statue
Leonardo DaVinci conceived, but never finished, the world's largest equine statue. This project failure has puzzled scholars ever since. Kasey-Dee Gardner finds out why this project came to a grinding halt.
Discovery News: Tech: What's a Virtual Colonoscopy?
Virtual colonoscopies offer a new, less invasive way to get screened for colon cancer. A Cleveland Clinic colorectal surgeon explains how it differs from a traditional procedure.
BBC: Earth's true colours in Nasa's Blue Marble images
These spectacular images of the Earth are the most true-colour images of the entire world released to date, according to Nasa scientists.
Astronomy/Space
Science Daily: Astronomically Large Lenses Measure the Age and Size of the Universe
ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2010) — Using entire galaxies as lenses to look at other galaxies, researchers have a newly precise way to measure the size and age of the universe and how rapidly it is expanding, on par with other techniques. The measurement determines a value for the Hubble constant, which indicates the size of the universe, and confirms the age of the universe as 13.75 billion years old, within 170 million years. The results also confirm the strength of dark energy, responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe.
These results, by researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, the University of Bonn, and other institutions in the United States and Germany, is published in the March 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The researchers used data collected by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and showed the improved precision they provide in combination with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
The team used a technique called gravitational lensing to measure the distances light traveled from a bright, active galaxy to the earth along different paths. By understanding the time it took to travel along each path and the effective speeds involved, researchers could infer not just how far away the galaxy lies but also the overall scale of the universe and some details of its expansion.
Science News: Lopsided stellar disks help black holes guzzle gas
By Ron Cowen
Astronomers have finally gotten a firmer grip on how supermassive black holes in the centers of most galaxies gobble up gas from their surroundings. In a new study, two astronomers neatly explain how stars drag swirling gases toward a galaxy's center, bringing them close enough that the black holes can suck them in like water down a bathtub drain.
Although supermassive black holes wield an enormous tug on their immediate surroundings, astronomers have been uncertain how these astrophysical beasts manage to pull in the large amounts of gas they absorb from their host galaxies. A key problem is that gas swirling rapidly around a black hole has enormous angular momentum, which creates a centrifugal force that can slow or halt the material from edging toward the abyss.
Generally, black holes easily swallow up gas that approaches to less than a third of a light-year from the galactic center, because the black hole's own magnetic field acts like a brake, slowing down the rotational motion of the gas and causing it to fall in. At much larger distances — about 30 to 300 light-years from the center — disturbances from collisions with other galaxies and the gravitational interactions of matter within the galaxy can drive gas toward the central black hole. But that still leaves a critical gap at intermediate distances between about one light-year and 30 light-years from the center, where nothing seems to reduce the rotational motion and centrifugal force of gas enough that the black hole can pull it in.
New Scientist: Mars rover Spirit could rise again
by David Shiga
NASA's Spirit rover should be able to wriggle free of its sandy trap on Mars after all, says a scientist for the mission. But the robotic explorer will need to survive the bitter Martian winter first.
In April 2009, Spirit's wheels broke through a thin surface crust and got mired in the loose sand below. After months of trying unsuccessfully to free the rover, NASA declared on 26 January that Spirit would henceforth be a stationary lander mission rather than a rover.
But the announcement was "a little bit premature", rover scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, told researchers at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, on Monday.
Evolution/Paleontology
Physorg.com: Dinosaurs might be older than previously thought
(PhysOrg.com) -- Until now, paleontologists have generally believed that the closest relatives of dinosaurs possibly looked a little smaller in size, walked on two legs and were carnivorous. However, a research team including Randall Irmis, curator of paleontology at the Utah Museum of Natural History and assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah has made a recent discovery to dispel this hypothesis.
The team announced the discovery of a proto-dinosaur (dinosaur-like animal) — a new species called Asilisaurus kongwe (a-SEE-lee-SOAR-us KONG-way), derived from asili (Swahili for ancestor or foundation), sauros (Greek for lizard), and kongwe (Swahili for ancient). The first bones of Asilisaurus were discovered in 2007, and it is the first proto-dinosaur recovered from the Triassic Period in Africa. Asilisaurus shares many characteristics with dinosaurs but falls just outside of the dinosaur family tree—living approximately 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinosaurs.
Physorg.com: Anthropologists say fossil was not 'missing link'
(PhysOrg.com) -- A fossil that was celebrated last year as a possible "missing link" between humans and early primates is actually a forebearer of modern-day lemurs and lorises, according to two papers by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin, Duke University and the University of Chicago.
In an article now available online in the Journal of Human Evolution, four scientists present evidence that the 47-million-year-old Darwinius masillae is not a haplorhine primate like humans, apes and monkeys, as the 2009 research claimed.
They also note that the article on Darwinius published last year in the journal PLoS ONE ignores two decades of published research showing that similar fossils are actually strepsirrhines, the primate group that includes lemurs and lorises.
Oops!
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman for these stories.
Science News: Rise of female weaponry driven by poop fights
By Susan Milius
So many moms, so little fresh excrement.
Though male animals are usually the ones to sport horns and other weapons, in one species of beetle battle armor comes in handy for the ladies, who use their oversized horns in fights over dung.
Females of the species Onthophagus sagittarius who had heftier horns won control of more available dung and thus laid more eggs, evolutionary biologists Nicola Watson and Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia in Crawley found in lab tests. Competition for quality dung is the evolutionary force selecting for feminine weaponry in this species, the researchers conclude in a paper to be published online the week of March 2 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Reuters via Yahoo! News: It's official: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs
By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent Kate Kelland, Health And Science Correspondent – Thu Mar 4, 2:07 pm ET
LONDON (Reuters) – A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only plausible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades.
A panel of 41 scientists from across the world reviewed 20 years' worth of research to try to confirm the cause of the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which created a "hellish environment" around 65 million years ago and wiped out more than half of all species on the planet.
Scientific opinion was split over whether the extinction was caused by an asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in what is now India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted around 1.5 million years.
The new study, conducted by scientists from Europe, the United States, Mexico, Canada and Japan and published in the journal Science, found that a 15-kilometre (9 miles) wide asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub in what is now Mexico was the culprit.
Science Daily: Genetic Footprint of Natural Selection
ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2010) — A further step has been taken towards our understanding of natural selection. CNRS scientists working at the Institut de Biologie of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (CNRS/ENS/INSERM) have shown that humans, and some of their primate cousins, have a common genetic footprint, i.e. a set of genes which natural selection has often tended to act upon during the past 200,000 years.
This study has also been able to isolate a group of genes that distinguish us from our cousins the great apes. Its findings are published in PLoS Genetics (26 February 2010 issue).
During evolution, living species have adapted to environmental constraints according to the mechanism of natural selection; when a mutation that aids the survival (and reproduction) of an individual appears in the genome, it then spreads throughout the rest of the species until, after several hundreds or even thousands of generations, it is carried by all individuals.But does this selection, which occurs on a specific gene in the genome of a species, also occur on the same gene in neighboring species?On which set of genes has natural selection acted specifically in each species?
N.Y. Times: Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force
By NICHOLAS WADE
As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.
The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology. The evidence of its activity is the more surprising because culture has long seemed to play just the opposite role. Biologists have seen it as a shield that protects people from the full force of other selective pressures, since clothes and shelter dull the bite of cold and farming helps build surpluses to ride out famine.
Because of this buffering action, culture was thought to have blunted the rate of human evolution, or even brought it to a halt, in the distant past. Many biologists are now seeing the role of culture in a quite different light.
Biodiversity
Science News: Losing life's variety
By Susan Milius
No silly hats or shouted countdowns. But entomologist Scott Miller is hosting a small event to mark the beginning of 2010, which the United Nations has declared the International Year of Biodiversity. Miller's occasion is low-key, on a weekday, before noon even, and there's no bubbly in sight. But there are other reasons for not quite calling this a celebration.
This is a poignant year for anyone who cares about the rich diversity of life on planet Earth. 2010 was supposed to be a milestone. The 193 nations participating in a treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity had agreed to "achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth."
Fat chance. The official document assessing the 2010 global outlook for biodiversity won't be released until May, but conservationists and trend watchers predict at best a few bright points among worsening losses. Even a preview statement from the treaty secretariat says that, as of late January, "all the indications are that the 2010 target has not been met."
ScienceDaily: Red Tide: Researchers Issue Outlook for a Significant New England Bloom of a Toxic Alga in 2010
ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2010) — Scientists from the NOAA-funded Gulf of Maine Toxicity (GOMTOX) project have issued an outlook for a significant regional bloom of a toxic alga that can cause 'red tides' in the spring and summer of this year, potentially threatening the New England shellfish industry.
An abundant seed population in bottom sediments has set the stage for a significant bloom of the toxic alga Alexandrium fundyense. This organism swims in the water, and divides again and again to form a "bloom" or red tide, but it also produces dormant cells or cysts that fall to the ocean bottom at the end of these blooms.
A cyst survey conducted in late 2009 shows the highest amount of cysts the team has ever measured, more than 60 percent higher than what was observed prior to the historic red tide of 2005. The cyst bed also appears to have expanded to the south, and thus the 2010 bloom may affect areas such as Massachusetts Bay and Georges Bank sooner than has been the case in past years.
Science News: Country ants make it big in the city
By Susan Milius
It's a tale of bright lights, big colonies: Rural ants go wild in the city.
The first systematic lifestyle survey of odorous house ants confirms how much a modest country dweller can change habits in the big city, according to urban entomologist Grzegorz Buczkowski of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
Science News: Mature females key to beluga sturgeon survival
By Rachel Ehrenberg
Saving grown females first — not fry — is crucial to preventing extinction of the beluga sturgeon, suggests a new conservation assessment of the fish that's been pushed to the brink by demand for its roe, known as black caviar.
Current harvest rates are four to five times higher than the population can handle and management practices must change if the species is to survive, scientists report in an upcoming Conservation Biology.
"In this case, it's a no-brainer," says fisheries biologist Dylan Fraser of Concordia University in Montreal, who was not involved with the study. "The data are saying if you want to save the species, stop fishing — or drastically reduce it. The evidence is overwhelming."
N.Y. Times: Cancer Kills Many Sea Lions, and Its Cause Remains a Mystery
By INGFEI CHEN
For 14 years, since they first reported that a disturbing proportion of deaths among rescued California sea lions were caused by metastatic cancer, researchers have been trying to pinpoint the source of the illness.
In 1996, Dr. Frances Gulland, the director of veterinary science at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, and colleagues at the University of California, Davis, found that a striking 18 percent of deaths in stranded adult sea lions were the result of tumors in the reproductive and urinary tracts.
"It's such an aggressive cancer, and it's so unusual to see such a high prevalence of cancer in a wild population," Dr. Gulland said. "That suggests that there's some carcinogen in the ocean that could be affecting these animals."
Biotechnology/Health
CNN: Electronic 'iShoe' aims to prevent falls
By John D. Sutter, CNN
(CNN) -- Erez Lieberman-Aiden had a nagging feeling that his grandmother's death, which occurred after a hard fall, could have been prevented.
But the 30-year-old graduate student at MIT and Harvard did more than fret. He tried to prevent something similar from happening to other older people.
Lieberman-Aiden invented a high-tech shoe insole to help older people manage their balance before a catastrophic fall occurs. His "iShoe" sneaker insoles track a person's balance patterns using digital sensors. The battery-powered footbeds transmit data to computers about a person's walking and standing stability.
Science Daily: 'Biological Clock' Could Be a Key to Better Health, Longer Life
ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2010) — If you aren't getting a good, consistent and regular night's sleep, a new study suggests it could reduce your ability to handle oxidative stress, cause impacts to your health, increase motor and neurological deterioration, speed aging and ultimately cut short your life.
That is, if your "biological clock" genes work the same way as those of a fruit fly. And they probably do.
In research published in the journal Aging, scientists from Oregon State University outline for the first time how a key gene that helps control circadian rhythms can improve the health of aging fruit flies if it is intact, but can result in significant health impacts, up to and including earlier death, if it is absent.
Science News: Researchers distinguish two different types of blood stem cells
By Laura Sanders
All stem cells are not created equal, a new study finds. Two distinct kinds of self-renewing blood cells have been spotted in mice, muddying a simplistic view of stem cell categories.
Knowing how these different types of stem cells behave may help scientists better understand and treat blood diseases.
"The definition of a stem cell, as you look closer, gets more complicated," comments stem cell researcher Timm Schroeder of the German Research Center for Environmental Health's Institute of Stem Cell Research in Neuherberg. The new study, appearing March 5 in Cell Stem Cell, adds to a growing body of evidence that "black and white characterizations might not be right," says Schroeder, who was not involved with the study.
Science News: Coffee not linked to heart arrhythmia
By Nathan Seppa
Too much coffee may bring on jitters, but this doesn't seem to translate into heart-rhythm problems, a new study shows. People knocking back cup after cup had no more hospitalizations for heart arrhythmia — and may even have had slightly fewer — than did people who dodge the java altogether, researchers at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif., report.
The finding should reassure people who have heart-rhythm problems or are at risk of them that they don't need to abstain from drinking coffee, says study coauthor Arthur Klasky, a cardiologist at Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. The study results were released March 2 and will be presented March 5 at a meeting in San Francisco of the American Heart Association.
Science News: Chip of tooth tells radiation dose
By Laura Sanders
WASHINGTON — A tiny chip of tooth enamel can tell the tale of radiation exposure, scientists report February 16 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. The technique may allow researchers to better understand the links between radiation exposure and illnesses such as cancer. Knowing normal levels of radiation exposure is important in the event of acute exposures, such as the detonation of a radioactive bomb or nuclear power plant accidents.
Climate/Environment
Science Daily: Where Will the Next Food Crisis Strike? Extended Geographical Monitoring Using Satellite Observation
ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2010) — The European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the American Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) are working to innovate and reinforce their food security monitoring systems and to develop more efficient early warning tools. These efforts come as a response to the 2007-2008 global food crisis that increased significantly the number of countries under threat of famine.
Satellite observation is the key instrument that will allow to double in 2010 the number of countries monitored in real time for detecting first indications of adverse agricultural outcomes. The new Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) system facilitates and accelerates the reaction time to food security crises by allowing a common and internationally recognised classification of their severity.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 1 billion people go to bed each night with an empty stomach. In addition, the latest global food crisis resulted in more countries being added to the list of food insecure populations. This is probably the most urgent and dramatic problem that humankind faces today. Food security is not only a crucial issue for developing countries and their more vulnerable inhabitants; it is also key to building a more stable, equal, wealthier and safer world.
National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...
Rachel Kaufman for National Geographic News
The so-called pregnant man has company: One of the most common weed killers in the United States can make male frogs lay eggs, a new study says.
Atrazine, widely used to kill pests on U.S. croplands, is an endocrine disruptor—a substance that interferes with animals' reproductive systems.
Previous research has shown that atrazine can give male amphibians female characteristics: For instance, male frogs exposed to atrazine have lower testosterone levels, produce less sperm, and even change their mating habits by choosing males over females.
Now, researchers have discovered that the chemical transforms male frogs into fully functioning females—and that the substance may be contributing to a worldwide decline in amphibians.
Science News: Fowl surprise! Methylmercury improves hatching rate
By Janet Raloff
A pinch of methylmercury is just ducky for mallard reproduction, according to a new federal study. The findings are counterintuitive, since methylmercury is ordinarily a potent neurotoxic pollutant.
Over a two-month feeding trial, treated adults produced more offspring — and young that at least initially grew faster — than did mallards dining mercuryfree.
Geology/Geophysics
Science News: Geophysicists push age of Earth's magnetic field back 250 million years
By Lisa Grossman
Evidence for the existence of Earth's magnetic field has been pushed back about 250 million years, new research suggests. The field may therefore be old enough to have shielded some of the planet's earliest life from the sun's most harmful cosmic radiation.
Earth's magnetic field was born by 3.45 billion years ago, a team including researchers from the University of Rochester in New York and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa report in the March 5 issue of Science.
That date falls during life's earliest stages of development, between the period when the Earth was pummeled by interplanetary debris and when the atmosphere filled with oxygen. Several earlier studies had suggested that a magnetic field is a necessary shield against deadly solar radiation that can strip away a planet's atmosphere, evaporate water and snuff out life on its surface.
Space.com via Yahoo! News: Chile Earthquake May Have Shortened Days on Earth
The massive 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile may have changed the entire Earth's rotation and shortened the length of days on our planet, a NASA scientist said Monday.
The quake, the seventh strongest earthquake in recorded history, hit Chile Saturday and should have shortened the length of an Earth day by 1.26 milliseconds, according to research scientist Richard Gross at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth's axis," NASA officials said in a Monday update.
The computer model used by Gross and his colleagues to determine the effects of the Chile earthquake effect also found that it should have moved Earth's figure axis by about 3 inches (8 cm or 27 milliarcseconds).
Psychology/Behavior
Physorg.com: Time is money for brainy workers who earn much more over life course
March 3, 2010 by Cathy Keen
(PhysOrg.com) -- Brains translate into big bucks in the workplace, according to a University of Florida study, which finds that bright people have earned at least half a million dollars more by middle age than those who are less intellectually inclined.
Smart people start out with modestly higher paychecks, but their income and job status greatly accelerate over time, said Ryan Klinger, a UF graduate student in management and one of the study's researchers.
"Although we expected mental ability to influence whether someone had a more prestigious job and earned more money, we were surprised by the magnitude of the difference," he said. "Over the course of the study individuals with high intelligence outgained those with low intelligence by more than $580,000."
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman for this story.
Science News: Alcohol distills aggression in large men
By Bruce Bower
As St. Patrick's Day approaches, it may pay to keep in mind that there is a kernel of truth to the stereotype that large men are especially prone to being DWI — dangerous while intoxicated.
When they were drunk, bigger men became especially aggressive when given the opportunity to administer electric shocks to a fictitious opponent in a laboratory contest, say psychologist Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky in Lexington and his colleagues. Yet larger men showed no aggression increases after downing a nonalcoholic placebo drink.
Intoxicated women showed little taste for shocking another person in the same experimental contest regardless of their weight, DeWall's team reports in a paper published online February 25 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Science News: Titanic study: It takes time to do the right thing
By Laura Sanders
Gallantry ruled on the day the Titanic went down. As the vessel's orchestra played soothing music to calm the passengers, women and children were escorted to the limited supply of lifeboats, leaving healthy young men to go down with the sinking ship.
Three years later, the sinking of the Lusitania by a German torpedo was an altogether different affair. As the civilian passenger ship keeled over in a matter of minutes, young healthy men scrambled to the lifeboats, leaving women and children to drown.
These dramatic differences in behavior aboard a sinking ship may all come down to time, a new study suggests. The Titanic took 2 hours and 40 minutes to sink beneath the waves. The Lusitania, in contrast, went down in 18 minutes. The new results, appearing in a paper to be published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that in extreme situations social norms — codified here as women and children first — require time to appear.
Archeology/Anthropology
Scientific American: Engraved Ostrich Eggshell Fragments Reveal 60,000-Year-Old Graphic Design Tradition
By Kate Wong
Archaeologists have unearthed 270 pieces of engraved ostrich eggshell dated to around 60,000 years ago from a site called Diepkloof in South Africa's Western Cape province. The fragments constitute what the researchers say is the "earliest evidence of a graphic tradition among prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations." As such, the finds help to illuminate the emergence of symbolic representation—a hallmark of modern human behavior.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Mystery queen's pink tomb found in Egypt
A French archaeological mission has unearthed a 4,000-year-old rare pink granite sarcophagus belonging to a little known ancient queen of Egypt, the culture ministry said.
The mystery queen, identified as Bahnou, was "one of the queens of the Sixth Dynasty which ruled Egypt from 2374 to 2192 BC," antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said in a statement.
But experts are confused on who was Queen Bahnou's spouse.
"We still do not know if she was the wife of Pepi I (2354-2310 BC) or of Pepi II (2300-2206 BC)," Mr Hawass said.
Earth Times: Residents make way for sphinxes in controversial Luxor plan
By dpa
Luxor, Egypt - An ancient sphinx-lined avenue that once connected two of Egypt's grandest temples will open to the public this month - but the project's implementation has drawn criticism from displaced residents. Archaeologists are working to restore a processional path between the Luxor and Karnak temples that lay buried for centuries beneath soil and urban sprawl.
But many locals, especially low-income families, claim the scheme is a form of slum-clearance in disguise, aimed at freeing land for lucrative, upmarket hotel development.
The 2.7-kilometre "Avenue of Sphinxes" was built by Pharaoh Amenhotep III nearly 3,500 years ago, and took its final form under Nectanebo I in the fourth century BC. More than 1,300 stone sphinxes lined the paved road, but it fell into disuse in the late Roman era.
Eureka Alert: Field Museum archaeologists amend the written history of China's first emperor
The exploits of China's first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, are richly documented in 2,000-year-old records of his conquests across eastern China. His reign was indeed noteworthy – he is responsible for initiating construction of the Great Wall, and the discovery of life-size terracotta soldiers that guard his tomb in central China has generated worldwide attention.
But as the saying goes, history is written by the winners. Ancient texts can contain inaccuracies favorable to a strong ruler's legacy. That's why two Field Museum scientists and their Chinese collaborator have integrated textual information with archaeological research in order to further understand the impact of Shihauangdi's reign.
The scientists are Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas – husband and wife anthropologists who, since 1996, have spent four to six weeks each year walking across fields in rural China looking for pottery sherds and other artifacts with colleagues including Fang Hui of the School of History and Culture at Shandong University. They compared ancient written records to archaeological evidence and the result of their work is a more holistic view of China's first emperor and his influence on the eastern province of Shandong.
A report of their research will be published in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of March 1, 2010.
The Independent (UK): Evidence of 'upper class' Africans living in Roman York
By Ann Wuyts
Using the latest techniques in forensic archaeology, the University of Reading has revealed a new image of multi-cultural Roman Britain. New research demonstrates that 4th century AD York had individuals of North African descent moving in the highest social circles.
The research conducted by the University of Reading's Department of Archaeology used modern forensic ancestry assessment and isotope (oxygen and strontium) analysis of Romano-British skeletal remains such as the 'Ivory Bangle Lady', in conjunction with evidence from grave goods buried with her.
USA Today: Archaeologists find crucifixion-style nail from the time of Jesus
A 4-inch crucifixion-style nail dating from the time of Jesus has been discovered in an ornate box at a fort that may have been a stronghold of knights who occupied Jerusalem during the Crusades, The Daily Mirror reports.
The Knights Templar, featured in The Da Vinci Code, conquered the Holy Lands and claimed to be guardians of the Holy Grail, the cross and other relics.
The iron nail, similar to the type used in thousands of crucifixions across the Roman Empire, was found during excavations of the fort on the tiny island of Ilheu de Pontinha, off the Portuguese island of Madeira.
Deseret News: Indian artifact informant Ted Gardiner commits suicide
By Pat Reavy and Emiley Morgan
HOLLADAY — A suicidal man who shot and killed himself during a confrontation with police Monday was the informant who helped federal officials in a case involving stolen Indian artifacts in the Four Corners region.
A lover of Native American culture, the work Ted Dan Gardiner, 52, did for the FBI was work he did voluntarily, his son Dustin Gardiner said. He wanted to protect a history that was important to him.
"He had a passion for Southwestern archaeology and Native American culture," Dustin Gardiner said. "It was something he didn't want to see destroyed or disrespected."
Last summer, federal officials wrapped up a 2 1/2-year investigation in the Four Corners area, with the indictment of 26 people, including several prominent community members from the southern Utah town of Blanding. The indictments accused them of violating the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. The government believes the defendants were selling or attempting to sell artifacts taken from federal land.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman, who sent in the above articles.
Science Daily: 'Pompeii-Like' Excavations Tell Us More About Toba Super-Eruption
ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2010) — Newly discovered archaeological sites in southern and northern India have revealed how people lived before and after the colossal Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago.
The international, multidisciplinary research team, led by Oxford University in collaboration with Indian institutions, unveiled to a conference in Oxford what it calls 'Pompeii-like excavations' beneath the Toba ash.
The seven-year project examines the environment that humans lived in, their stone tools, as well as the plants and animal bones of the time. The team has concluded that many forms of life survived the super-eruption, contrary to other research which has suggested significant animal extinctions and genetic bottlenecks.
Physics
Science News: Hogan's noise
By Ron Cowen
Oh, the noise!
Oh, the noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!
That's the one thing he hated!
The NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!
— Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas
The Grinch detested the noise created by the tiny residents of Whoville. Cosmologist Craig Hogan, in contrast, has become enamored of a noise he claims is generated by something even tinier — a minuscule graininess in the otherwise smooth structure of spacetime
Call it Hogan's noise. Many physicists are skeptical, but if his hunch about the existence of this subatomic clatter proves correct, it could have a mind-boggling implication: that the entire universe is nothing more than a giant hologram.
What's more, it would mean that the structure of spacetime on subatomic scales might soon be revealed. "What's new is that we can make a prediction and design an experiment to measure something on the tiniest of scales in the universe, and that's what hasn't been done before," says Hogan, director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Batavia, Ill., and a researcher at the University of Chicago.
Chemistry
Science News: Plasticizers kept from leaching out
By Rachel Ehrenberg
Keeping plasticizers in their place has always been a slippery task. The compounds that add flexibility to harder plastics may also migrate from these materials, raising health concerns about human exposure via medical devices or children's toys.
Now, scientists working with the widely used plasticizers known as phthalates have locked down these compounds, preventing them from migrating. The research, published in the March 9 Macromolecules, may lead to improved versions of hard plastics that don't leach their ingredients.
Science News: Aluminum superatoms may split water
By Laura Sanders
Tiny clusters of aluminum atoms may be able to quickly extract pure hydrogen from water, a new simulation suggests. The results offer an incredibly detailed view of how the molecules react and may help scientists develop new ways to produce pure hydrogen-based fuels, researchers report in an upcoming Physical Review Letters.
Many energy experts consider hydrogen an ideal fuel, because mixing it with oxygen produces nothing but energy and water. But transporting and storing pure hydrogen is a safety challenge, and current methods of producing it on an industrial scale require more energy than the resulting hydrogen fuel contains. What's more, that energy typically comes from natural gas, coal or other fuels that produce greenhouse gases. In order to reap hydrogen's benefits, researchers need to find ways to create, transport and store it in a safe and sustainable way.
Energy
N.Y. Times: The Newest Hybrid Model
By JAD MOUAWAD
INDIANTOWN, Fla. — In former swamplands teeming with otters and wild hogs, one of the nation's biggest utilities is running an experiment in the future of renewable power.
Across 500 acres north of West Palm Beach, the FPL Group utility is assembling a life-size Erector Set of 190,000 shimmering mirrors and thousands of steel pylons that stretch as far as the eye can see. When it is completed by the end of the year, this vast project will be the world's second-largest solar plant.
But that is not its real novelty. The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation's largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas. It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.
Science, Space, Environment, and Energy Policy
N.Y. Times: NASA Chief Denies Talk of Averting Obama Plan
By KENNETH CHANG
In response to reports that he was looking for a Plan B to address Congressional concerns, the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said Thursday that he was not backing away from the Obama administration's proposal to reshape the nation's human spaceflight program.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Michael L. Coats, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, had the blessing of Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, to explore "what a potential compromise might look like" with Congress over the direction of NASA.
General Bolden "agreed to let us set up a Plan B team," Mr. Coats wrote in an e-mail message sent Tuesday to Stephen J. Altemus, the chief engineer at Johnson. Mr. Coats added in a parenthetical remark that Plan B was his phrase, not General Bolden's.
N.Y. Times: Lawmakers From Coal States Seek to Delay Emission Limits
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON — Coal-country lawmakers moved Thursday to impose a two-year moratorium on potential federal regulation of carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, said the Environmental Protection Agency should refrain from issuing any new rules on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other major stationary sources for two years to allow Congress to pass comprehensive legislation on energy and climate change.
Representatives Alan B. Mollohan and Nick J. Rahall II of West Virginia and Rick Boucher of Virginia, also Democrats, introduced a similar bill in the House.
N.Y. Times: No Endangered Status for Plains Bird
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON — The Interior Department said Friday that the greater sage grouse, a dweller of the high plains of the American West, was facing extinction but would not be designated an endangered species for now.
Yet the decision in essence reverses a 2004 determination by the Bush administration that the sage grouse did not need protection, a decision that a federal court later ruled was tainted by political tampering with the Interior Department's scientific conclusions.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a conservative Democrat from a Colorado ranching family, sought to carve a middle course between conservationists who wanted ironclad protections for the ground-hugging bird and industry interests and landowners who sought the ability to locate mines, wells, windmills and power lines in areas where the grouse roam.
Science Education
N.Y. Times: Risk and Opportunity for Women in 21st-Century
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
PARIS — Daniel Louvard does not believe in affirmative action. Time and again, the scientists in his Left Bank cancer laboratory have urged him to recruit with gender diversity in mind. But Mr. Louvard, research director at the Institut Curie and one of France's top biochemists, just keeps hiring more women.
"I take the best candidates, period," Mr. Louvard said. There are 21 women and 4 men on his team.
The quiet revolution that has seen women across the developed world catch up with men in the work force and in education has also touched science, that most stubbornly male bastion.
N.Y. Times: After Harvard Controversy, Conditions Change but Reputation Lingers
By TAMAR LEWIN
NEW YORK — It has been five years since Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard University, suggested at an academic conference that innate differences might explain why fewer women than men succeed in science and math careers. His remark sparked a firestorm that brought many changes — among them, Mr. Summers's resignation and the naming of the university's first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust.
Although many top universities took action in the early 2000s to help women, especially women in science, Harvard, under Mr. Summers, had an unimpressive record. Tenure offers to women plummeted after he took office in 2001. While Harvard extended 13 of its 36 tenure offers to women the year before Mr. Summers became president, that dropped to 4 of 32 the year before his speech. And several departments did not have a single tenured female professor.
Then, at a conference in January 2005, Mr. Summers delivered his now infamous remarks.
N.Y. Times: Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation's classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.
In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss "the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories," including "evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning."
The bill, which has yet to be voted on, is patterned on even more aggressive efforts in other states to fuse such issues. In Louisiana, a law passed in 2008 says the state board of education may assist teachers in promoting "critical thinking" on all of those subjects.
N.Y. Times: Building a Better Teacher
By ELIZABETH GREEN
ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students' strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn't reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he'd seen before: "a dispiriting exercise in good people failing," as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.
But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers' instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn't have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.
Science Writing and Reporting
Science News: Book Review: The Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate Change: A Complete Visual Guide
By J.L. Fry, H.-F. Graf, R. Grotjahn, M.N. Raphael, C. Saunders and R. Whitaker
Review by Sid Perkins
There's an old saying among meteorologists: Climate is what you should expect, weather is what you'll actually get. With explanations a little more complicated than that, The Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate Change provides enough detail for weather buffs of all ages.
Besides being lavishly illustrated with more than 2,000 color photos, maps, diagrams and other images, this hefty volume — organized into six topical sections, each written or vetted by a different expert — thoroughly explores Earth's weather and climate.
Coturnix on Science Blogs: Why it is important for media articles to link to scientific papers
You may be aware that, as of recently, one of my tasks at work is to monitor media coverage of PLoS ONE articles. This is necessary for our own archives and monthly/annual reports, but also so I could highlight some of the best media coverage on the everyONE blog for everyone to see. As PLoS ONE publishes a large number of articles every week, we presume that many of you would appreciate getting your attention drawn to that subset of articles that the media found most interesting.
So, for example, as I missed last week due to my trip to AAAS, I posted a two-week summary of media coverage this Monday. And that took far more time and effort (and some silent cursing) than one would expect. Why?
Science is Cool
N.Y. Times: Bringing New Understanding to the Director's Cut
By NATALIE ANGIER
And now, just in time for Oscar junkies, comes a new statistical mincing of the movies that may someday yield an award category of its own: best fit between a movie's tempo and the natural rhythms of the brain.
Reporting in the journal Psychological Science, James E. Cutting of Cornell University and his colleagues described their discovery that Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us. This mounting synchrony between movie pace and the bouncing ball of the mind's inner eye may help explain why today's films manage to seize and shackle audience attention so ruthlessly and can seem more lifelike and immediate than films of the past, even when the scripts are lousier and you feel cheap and used afterward, not to mention vaguely sick from the three-quart tub of popcorn and pack of Twizzlers you ate without realizing it.
According to the new report, the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it. Start with a picture of Penélope Cruz, say, or a flamingo on a lawn, and decompose the picture into a collection of sine waves of various humps, dives and frequencies. However distinctive the original images, if you look at the distribution of their underlying frequencies, said Jeremy M. Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital, "they turn out to have a one over f characteristic to them."
Hat/Tip to Rimjob for alerting me to this subject.
Chicago Tribune: Ancient brews brought back to life
By Chris McNamara, Special to Tribune Newspapers
It's hard to quibble with the coolest nickname in the world — "The Indiana Jones of Beer." But a more fitting moniker for Patrick McGovern might be "The Lazarus of Libations."
See, this bimolecular archaeologist brings drinks back from the dead. There's no divine intervention or witchcraft involved; rather, McGovern has spent a career researching what ancient civilizations consumed and is using that knowledge to enable modern beer drinkers to travel back in time using their taste buds.
The scientific director with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is working with Delaware's Dogfish Head Craft Brewery to create a line of Ancient Ales — facsimiles of brews from centuries ago.
Hat/Tip to annetteboardman for this story.
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