ontd_science - we'll soothe your inner geek

Mysterious poop foam causing explosions on hog farms

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:22:11 GMT

Starting in about 2009, in the pits that capture manure under factory-scale hog farms, a gray, bubbly substance began appearing at the surface of the fecal soup. The problem is menacing: As manure breaks down, it emits toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide and flammable ones like methane, and trapping these noxious fumes under a layer of foam can lead to sudden, disastrous releases and even explosions. According to a 2012 report from the University of Minnesota, by September 2011, the foam had "caused about a half-dozen explosions in the upper Midwest…one explosion destroyed a barn on a farm in northern Iowa, killing 1,500 pigs and severely burning the worker involved."

And the foam grows to a thickness of up to four feet—check out these imagesa 2009 explosion that lifted a hog barn a "couple of feet off the ground" and blew the farm operator himself 20 feet from the building. (Thankfully, he wasn't injured, and there were no animals in it.) And check out the footage, starting about 3:19 in, of the foam itself, which must be seen to be believed. At one point , a shovel dips into the mire and scoops up as sample—which jiggles and pulsates, alive, apparently, with microbial activity. Schmidt also does a great job of explaining just how manure foam can cause explosions.

I wrote about the phenomenon about a year ago. But these days, there's not much in the agriculture trade press about it. Which led me to wonder: Has the mysterious foam subsided—or congealed into yet another fact of factory farming that isn't even notable anymore, like, you know, raising hundreds of pigs over pits that concentrate their waste, or dosing them them daily with low levels of antibiotics, leading to rampant antibiotic-resistant bacteria?

I decided to do a bit of digging for an update. Via email, Angela Kent, an associate professor in the department of natural resources and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois, informed me that "manure foaming" is "still a very serious problem among pork producers in the Midwest." Scientists have still not been able to finger the cause of it, but "we are in the midst of a large multi-institution investigation focused on finding the cause of this very serious problem."

So: still happening, and still no explanation.

I then got Larry Jacobson, a professor and extension engineer at the University of Minnesota who has been working on the issue, on the phone. He confirmed that the problem persists—just about a month ago, he said, workers were welding metal fixtures in an empty hog facility and a fire broke out, likely because a spark managed to penetrate foam enough to free trapped methane and ignite it. (No one was injured.)

Jacobson said that surveys show that around 25 percent of operations in the hog-intensive regions of Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa are experiencing foam—and "the number may be higher, because some operators might not know that they have it."

He added that the practice of feeding hogs distillers grains, the mush leftover from the corn ethanol process, might be one of the triggers. Distillers grains entered hog rations in a major way around the same time that the foam started emerging, and manure from hogs fed distillers grains contains heightened levels of undigested fiber and volatile fatty acids—both of which are emerging as preconditions of foam formation, he said. But he added that distillers grains aren't likely the sole cause, because on some operations, the foam will emerge in some buildings but not others, even when all the hogs are getting the same feed mix.

But if the causes of manure foam remain a mystery, a solution seems to be emerging, Jacobson told me: Dump a bit of monensin, an antibiotic widely used to make cows grow faster, directly into the foam-ridden pit. At rather low levels—Jacobson told me that about 25 pounds of the stuff will treat a typical 500,000 gallon pit—the stuff effectively breaks up the foam, likely by altering the mix of microbes present. No other treatment has been shown to work consistently, he said.

Thankfully, monensin isn't used in human medicine. Still, it's striking to consider that the meat industry's ravenous appetite for antibiotics has now extended to having to treat hog shit with them.

source: Mother Jones

Russia in Color, A Century Ago

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:43:52 GMT

Unknown Author, Russia in Color, A Century Ago, Boston.com, 20 August 2010 (Photos at Source)
--

With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912.

In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images.

When these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun.

Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948.

More Photos @ Source (34)
-
Prokudin-Gorskii Collection at the LOC

Wu Tang Clan member GZA raps about the Big Bang- make response video, win stuff!

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 02:39:50 GMT

Teachers in New York are using rap to teach complex science. PBS NewsHour senior correspondent Ray Suarez reports on the effectiveness of this strategy and interviews hip-hop legend GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan.

In his upcoming solo album, "Dark Matter," Wu-Tang Clan's GZA raps about the Big Bang -- the moment that the sun, moon, stars, planets and all matter contained within sprung from chaos, from nothing.

The legendary rapper performed the new material at Bronx Compass High School, where he hopes to pique students' interest in science by introducing hip-hop to the lesson plan. GZA has teamed up with Columbia University professor Christopher Emdin and ten New York City public schools to use hip-hop to teach everything from biology to physics. Students write verse about scientific concepts and compete against one another for the best lyrics. Now you can, too.

Enter your own science rap or hip-hop verse for a chance to win a PBS NewsHour mug signed by GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan along with a personal video shout-out from the rap legend himself. Our contest is modeled after the Science Genius competition, a partnership between GZA, Emdin and Rap Genius. Entries will be judged by Emdin and two of his Columbia University Teachers College graduate students.

How to submit a video:

Create your science rap video according to the guidelines below and upload it to YouTube.
Click here to submit your entry in the contest. (You must log in to your YouTube account.)
Now, choose the video from your channel and submit it as a response to GZA's YouTube video.
Videos will be reviewed and approved before they become visible on the PBS NewsHour channel.
Competition guidelines:

Entries must incorporate at least one scientific topic/concept into 16 bars of verse. (16 bars is the length of a traditional verse, and a bar is made up of beats of four.)

The main topic/concept of the rap must be referenced in different ways at least three times in the verse.

Be creative in your expression of the science (E.g.: envision yourself either as somebody involved in the scientific process or an object undergoing the scientific process. Draw connections between your real world experiences and the concepts themselves.)

Information must be scientifically accurate and verifiable.

Lyrics must rhyme, and incorporate metaphor/analogy

Entries are due by Friday, May 3.

source has a video!

3 new snail species discovered in Thailand

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:03:53 GMT

Researchers Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and the Natural History Museum, London have discovered new snails in limestone hills in Thailand. The snails are from the brightly coloured carnivorous terrestrial snails family Streptaxidae. THe bright orange-colored Perrottetia dermapyrrhosa is pictured above and Perrottetia aquilonaria is pictured below.

The snails are described as a "One Hill One Species" - each of the snails inhabits one mountain range. The snails live in rock crevices and eat tinier snails, insect larvae and earthworms.

Dr. Somsak Panha, one of the authors of the study, said in a statement, "The three new Perrottetia species exhibit distinct morphological characteristics, which make for a great example for evolutionary studies in unstable environments. More than 50% of limestone ecosystems in this region have been or still are being destroyed. This astonishing case of biodiversity persistence gives a valuable reason to put effort in the conservation of this important world ecosystem."

The report was published here in ZooKeys.

source
scientific hournal article in ZooKeys

Saturn's rings produce rain

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 01:37:38 GMT

The rain may fall mainly from the rings of Saturn.

While it does not have the same ring to the phrase repeated by Eliza in My Fair Lady as she learned the importance of pronunciation, scientists have discovered that water is raining onto Saturn from its own distinctive rings.

The finding may help to explain where water seen in Saturn's upper atmosphere is coming from.

Observations taken by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii have shown that electrically charged droplets of rain are showering onto the planet from the rings 120,000 miles overhead.

James O'Donoghue, the lead author of the study at Leicester University, said: "“Saturn is the first planet to show significant interaction between its atmosphere and ring system.

"The main effect of ring rain is that it acts to ‘quench’ the ionosphere of Saturn, severely reducing the electron densities in regions in which it falls."

The findings are published in the journal Nature and reveal that the water falls across a large portion of the planet, influencing the composition and temperature in the upper parts of Saturn's atmosphere.

Scientists first predicted that water could be showing down from the rings after NASA's Voyager spacecraft showed images of two to three dark bands on Saturn.

Infrared images taken in 1997 also revealed the presence of trace amounts of water in the atmosphere, but left astronomers baffled as to how it got there.

A team at the Keck Observatory then captured a near infrared images that showed bright patterns in Saturn's ionosphere.

They believe that the charged water particles from the rings are drawn towards the planet by Saturn's magnetic field producing the patterns they detected.

source: The Telegraph

New bat genus discovered in South Sudan

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:38:38 GMT

Researchers have identified a new genus of bat after discovering a rare specimen in South Sudan. With wildlife personnel under the South Sudanese Ministry of Wildlife Conservation and Tourism, Bucknell Associate Professor of Biology DeeAnn Reeder and Fauna & Flora International (FFI) Programme Officer Adrian Garside were leading a team conducting field research and pursuing conservation efforts when Reeder spotted the animal in Bangangai Game Reserve.

"My attention was immediately drawn to the bat's strikingly beautiful and distinct pattern of spots and stripes. It was clearly a very extraordinary animal, one that I had never seen before," recalled Reeder. "I knew the second I saw it that it was the find of a lifetime."

After returning to the United States, Reeder determined the bat was the same as one originally captured in nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1939 and named Glauconycteris superba, but she and colleagues did not believe that it fit with other bats in the genus Glauconycteris.

"After careful analysis, it is clear that it doesn't belong in the genus that it's in right now," Reeder said. "Its cranial characters, its wing characters, its size, the ears — literally everything you look at doesn't fit. It's so unique that we need to create a new genus."

In the paper, "A new genus for a rare African vespertilionid bat: insights from South Sudan" just published by the journal ZooKeys, Reeder, along with co-authors from the Smithsonian Institution and the Islamic University in Uganda, placed this bat into a new genus - Niumbaha. The word means "rare" or "unusual" in Zande, the language of the Azande people in Western Equatoria State, where the bat was captured. The bat is just the fifth specimen of its kind ever collected, and the first in South Sudan, which gained its independence in 2011.

"To me, this discovery is significant because it highlights the biological importance of South Sudan and hints that this new nation has many natural wonders yet to be discovered. South Sudan is a country with much to offer and much to protect," said Matt Rice, FFI's South Sudan country director. FFI is using its extensive experience of working in conflict and post-conflict countries to assist the South Sudanese government as it re-establishes the country's wildlife conservation sector and is also helping to rehabilitate selected protected areas through training and development of park staff and wildlife service personnel, road and infrastructure development, equipment provision, and supporting research work. || Read more about FFI's conservation efforts in South Sudan here.

The team's research in South Sudan was made possible by a $100,000 grant that Reeder received from the Woodtiger Fund. The private research foundation recently awarded Reeder another $100,000 dollar grant to continue her research this May and to support FFI's conservation programs.

"Our discovery of this new genus of bat is an indicator of how diverse the area is and how much work remains," Reeder added. "Understanding and conserving biodiversity is critical in many ways. Knowing what species are present in an area allows for better management. When species are lost, ecosystem-level changes ensue. I'm convinced this area is one in which we need to continue to work."

source has some more pictures

New giant tarantula species discovered in Sri Lanka

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:30:50 GMT

A new type of tarantula about the size of your face has been found in northern Sri Lanka. Scientists found the spiders — with a leg span up to 8 inches across — living in trees and the old doctor’s quarters of a hospital in Mankulam.

Covered in beautiful, ornate markings, the spiders belong to the genus Poecilotheria, known as “Pokies” for short. These are the tiger spiders, an arboreal group indigenous to India and Sri Lanka that are known for being colorful, fast, and venomous. As a group, the spiders are related to a class of South American tarantula that includes the Goliath bird-eater, the world’s largest.

The new spider, named Poecilotheria rajaei after a local police inspector who helped the team navigate post-civil war northern Sri Lanka, differs from similar species primarily in the markings on its legs and underside, which bears a pink abdominal band.

“This species has enough significant differences to separate it from the other species,” said Peter Kirk, editor of the British Tarantula Society‘s journal, which published a study describing the spider in December. But, Kirk notes, taxonomic determinations based on physical descriptions can provoke disagreement. “I absolutely would love to see DNA sampling done — on all the species of Poecilotheria,” he said.

The spider’s unique leg markings include geometric patterns with daffodil-yellow and grey inlays on the first and fourth legs. It was first seen during a Sri Lankan arachnid survey led by Ranil Nanayakkara, co-founder of Sri Lanka’s Biodiversity Education and Research. In October 2009, a local villager presented Nanayakkara and his team with a dead male specimen that didn’t resemble known Poecilotheria in the area. Before the team could begin describing the presumptive new species, they needed more individuals. Scouring the semi-evergreen, forested area for females and juveniles required the help of police inspector Michael Rajakumar Purajah, who accompanied the team through areas just beginning to recover from a civil war. Eventually, the team found enough spiders — including the ones hiding in a hospital — to assemble a detailed description of the new arachnids.

“They are quite rare,” Nanayakkara said. “They prefer well-established old trees, but due to deforestation the number have dwindled and due to lack of suitable habitat they enter old buildings.”

Arachnologist Robert Raven, curator at the Queensland Museum in Australia, says the team has done a thorough job describing the spider, but isn’t entirely convinced the team has found a new species — yet.

“The description and figures are excellent and will provide a good basis for establishing whether it is a good species,” he said, noting the possibility that the spiders are a local variant of a related species. Raven says not enough is known about the Poecilotheria genus in general, and that more detailed studies of each known species are needed before new ones can be reliably added. “The genus Poecilotheria has not been taxonomically revised,” he said. “Popping new species out in that situation is always going to be fraught with doubt and difficulty.”

So far, about 15 species have been described within Poecilotheria. Several are endangered, due mostly to loss of habitat. P. metallica, a bright blue beauty, is considered critically endangered. So is P. hanumavilasumica – named after a temple on Rameshwaram Island — which lives among the trees in the island’s disappearing plantations. The spider which most closely resembles P. rajaei is called P. regalis, and so far has only been found on the Indian mainland. Nanayakkara hints that he’s got several more potential new tarantulas up his sleeve, awaiting review.

“When it comes down to taxonomy, it’s not a hard and fast science,” Kirk said. “Until we get to things like DNA sampling.”

source has pictures of GIANT TARANTULA

Punch in the eye leaves man with star shaped cataract

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:38:11 GMT

A man in Austria developed a cataract shaped like a star in his eye after he was punched, according to a report of his case.

The 55-year-old went to his doctor because his vision in that eye had progressively worsened over the previous six months, according to doctors who treated the man.

The patient said he'd been punched nine months earlier, the doctors wrote in their report.

"Nature has made a beautiful cataract," said Dr. Mark Fromer, an ophthalmologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, and eye surgeon for the New York Rangers hockey team, after he saw the image. "Most aren't so pretty," he said.

It's very common for cataracts to form after the eye takes a hit, Fromer said. Punches and the balls used in sports are most often the cause, but bumps from air bags and steering wheels have also created cataracts, Fromer said.

When the eyeball is struck, the energy of the blow sends shock waves through the eye that can disrupt the nature of the eye's lens, causing it to become opaque in regions, he explained. In most cases, cataracts look more like a vaguely shaped cloud, and can be white or yellowish.

The man in Austria was treated with a procedure called "phacoemulsification," which involves using sound waves to break up the opaque part of the lens, and then removing it with a vacuum. The lens is then replaced with an artificial lens, Fromer said. In fact, such cataract surgery is the most widely performed surgery in the world, with 2 million procedures done in the U.S. yearly.

Trauma to the eye is one reason why doctors emphasize the importance of wearing protective eyewear during sports, Fromer said.

The case is reported Thursday (April 4) New England Journal of Medicine.
source: Discovery News
New England Journal of Medicine has a super high res version you can zoom in on for extra detail

Mr. President, talk NERDY to me!

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:51:32 GMT

This week, the White House will continue a series of conversations with Administration officials on Google+. On Thursday, March 28th at 3:00 pm ET, White House innovation advisor Tom Kalil will join a Google+ Hangout to discuss the Maker Movement with leading innovators and Makers from around the country.

More and more Americans are becoming Makers, a growing community of young people and adults who are designing and building things on their own time. For example, 120,000 people participated in the May 2012 Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, sharing projects such as a flame-powered pipe organ, a fully automated ragtime band, and a 12-foot-tall aluminum robotic face controlled by 12 joysticks.

President Obama believes we need to give more young people the ability to become Makers. As the President said at the launch of his Educate To Innovate campaign to improve science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, "I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it's science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent—to be makers of things, not just consumers of things." The Maker Movement can also promote innovation in manufacturing, one of President Obama’s top priorities.

During the Hangout, Tom Kalil will discuss the elements of an "all hands on deck" effort to promote Making, with participants including:

Dale Dougherty, Founder and Publisher of MAKE
Tara Tiger Brown, Los Angeles Makerspace
Super Awesome Sylvia, Super Awesome Maker Show
Saul Griffith, Co-Founder, Otherlab
Venkatesh Prasad, Ford
Watch the hangout with Tom Kalil live on WhiteHouse.gov, or tune in to the White House's Google+ page or YouTube channel. You can also join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #WHHangout.

source: White House

Hangout starts at 3PM EST (I will edit this later after event is over, to link to archive instead)

Main population of Asiatic cheetahs threatened by road construction

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 16:56:17 GMT

Cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) are unique among large cats. They have a highly specialized body, a mild temperament, and are the fastest living animals on land. Acinonyx jubatus venaticus, the Asiatic subspecies, is unique among cheetahs and the only member of five currently living subspecies to occur outside of Africa. Listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List—with a population of between 70 and 100 individuals—the Asiatic cheetah is one of the rarest felines on the planet. But new proposed road through one of its last habitat strongholds may threaten the cat even further.

The Asiatic cheetah's historic range encompassed much of central-southern Asia; the current remaining population has been relegated to the desert region of central Iran. Instead of roaming savannahs and prairies, Asiatic cheetahs inhabit steppe and semi-desert areas. This change in habitat brought about changes in life history traits as well, most notably in diet. Unlike the typical smorgasbord of grassland ungulates on the plains of Africa, Asiatic cheetahs have an altered menu consisting of wild sheep, wild goats, ibex, hares, and Jebeer gazelles.

Though its African cousin has been studied in-depth, little is known about the ecology of the Asiatic cheetah. The current population of less than 100 animals is a drastic decrease from the estimated 200-300 animals in the late 1970s. The remaining animals are mostly confined to protected habitats in wildlife refuges and sanctuaries. Some skeptics claim that they are as good as extinct, while optimists believe that these unique animals have a fair chance of survival.

In Iran, threats to the cheetah population include desertification, human-induced modification of their habitat, agricultural pressure, poaching, and, most critically, a declining prey base. With less available prey and less suitable habitat, Asiatic cheetahs are in serious trouble; construction of a new road will further compound the problem.

The Bafq Protected area, a 250,000 hectare preserve in the eastern Yazd province, is an important habitat sanctuary for Asiatic cheetahs. Unfortunately for cheetahs, this habitat gem is under threat. Government officials have proclaimed that since few cheetahs reside in Bafq, they do not warrant special protection and the area is not an area of high environmental priority. Estimates on the number of individuals inhabiting the preserve vary, but it is generally accepted that Bafq boasts the highest density of cheetahs anywhere in the country.

The aim of the road is to shorten the distance between two villages and the main city, which lies on the other side of the mountains. The proposed road cuts through an expanse of the preserve where cheetahs are known to frequent as well as breeding populations of endangered Persian leopards (Panthera pardus ciscaucasica), caracals (Caracal caracal), and the Near Threatened Pallas's cat (Otocolobus manul). Opponents of the road argue that its construction is not a significant benefit as it would pass through a steep, rugged area; fuel costs to traverse it would be great, and, all in all, the route is not much shorter than the current one.

Cheetahs roam expansive distances in search of prey, so encountering a road is inevitable, even in a protected area. Between 2005 and 2011, 40% of known, human-induced cheetah deaths in Iran were caused by vehicle collisions.

Local conservation groups including the Iranian Cheetah Society (ICS) and the Conservation of Asiatic Cheetah Project are in arrears with developers (CACP). The proposed project has attracted a plethora of media attention and local communities and authorities are in the crux of negotiations. Local conservationists are attempting to work with proponents of the road to come up with alternative solutions. Mohammed Farhadinia of the ICS tells Mongabay that an additional challenge for conservation organizations is to procure the resources and local support to enact these alternatives.

In 2001, in partnership with international conservation groups, Iran’s government initiated a new program to protect Asiatic cheetahs from extinction. The number of game guards in the park was doubled with an emphasis on providing increased protection to the areas of greatest cheetah activity. Educational programs were implemented in surrounding communities, and as a result, human-caused cheetah mortality decreased from 2 individuals per year to less than 1 per year in some areas.

The construction of a road through Bafq not only introduces a direct risk to cheetahs by increasing the probability of cheetah-vehicle collisions, but also increases accessibility to poachers, and reduces habitat connectivity and could isolate breeding individuals. This is of particular concern since the Bafq Preserve houses both the greatest density of cheetahs in the region and is a critical source of dispersing individuals.

Farhadinia tells mongabay.com that the proposed road is set to be constructed through an area of high habitat quality, so, "less suitable habitats will be available for cheetahs to roam." This could alter spatial occurrence of cheetahs and may reduce numbers as well as occupancy.

African cheetahs suffer from low genetic diversity as a result of a population bottleneck after the last Ice Age. With too few animals breeding and contributing to the gene pool, the species is no longer genetically robust. Evolutionarily, Asiatic cheetahs separated from their African cousins around 30-60,000 years ago. While Asiatic cheetahs did not experience the population bottleneck that African cheetahs did, their population is small, which means that there is relatively low genetic mixing and animals are closely related to one another, so limited genetic diversity remains a pressing concern. With fewer than 100 individuals in the population, conservation is critical to ensure the survival of this subspecies.

Cheetah conservation in Asia has strong supporters. Conservationists are working not only to protect the current population but also to re-introduce animals to their native range throughout the region.

There has been contention as to how genetically similar African and Asiatic cheetahs truly are and whether African cheetahs can be used in re-introduction programs in Asia. Dr. Pamela Burger, a researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, has conducted studies to delve into the DNA and recent analysis has confirmed that the subspecies are quite different from each other.

"The implications of our discovery are that the confirmation of the subspecies is a basis for future conservation management," she says. Protecting Iranian cheetahs will conserve the gene pool and preserve the biodiversity for future re-introduction programs. Local conservationists are hopeful that this new-found information will garner additional support for conserving Asiatic cheetahs.

Alireza Jourabchain, the Director of the CACAP, is optimistic about Asiatic cheetah conservation in the region thus far, but admits that much is to be done.

"We have been successful in stabilizing numbers in Iran but we still have a long way to go before we can consider this unique subspecies secure."
source: MonbaBay
Iranian Cheetah Society posts pictures from their camera traps on Facebook

Hundreds of starving baby sea lions beaching off California, cause unknown

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 02:50:56 GMT

It began in January. At first, there were only a few. But as the weeks went on, more sea lion pups washed ashore. The dehydrated, emaciated pups showed up on Southern California’s beaches, tucked under trucks and lifeguard towers. One was found huddled in a flower pot.

In late January, scientists surveying Channel Island sea lion rookiers reported something worrying: Pups out there were in bad shape. By early February, regional marine mammal rescue centers were concerned.

The strandings hadn’t stopped. Instead, the pace was picking up.

Now, hundreds of these little animals have been admitted to rescue centers between Santa Barbara and San Diego. For a non-El Niño year, the numbers are much too high, too early. Something is going badly wrong offshore, and no one knows what it is yet.

“We’re in the process of trying to understand what is actually causing this,” said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist with the National Fisheries Service. “The stranding centers in Southern California are being inundated with animals. It hasn’t hit the northern centers yet.”

As of Mar. 13, 517 pups had been admitted to five Southern California rescue centers. That total is higher than the total for some entire years, said Sarah Wilkin, regional strandings coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “And we’re only two months and a week in.”

Rescue and Rehab

The stranded animals are about nine months old – most were born around June 2012. At this age, sea lion pups normally weigh between 25 and 30 kilograms (55-66 pounds). The animals coming ashore weigh about half that, Melin said. She’s visited the island colonies several times recently, first in September and again in February, and noticed that the pups hadn’t gained much weight between visits. “Normally, they would have doubled their weight by February,” Melin said.

She and others suspect the pups have weaned themselves early and left their colonies. Not yet strong enough to find food on their own, they strand themselves on the mainland in a last-ditch effort to save energy and survive. Why they’re leaving home early is an open question.

By the time the pups are rescued, many are too far gone to be saved, Wilkin said. Dehydrated, emaciated, and malnourished, those who can will spend several months in a rehabilitation facility, gaining weight and nourishment before being returned to the sea.

Rescue and rehab groups in the area are struggling to keep up with the onslaught. The pace of admissions is still accelerating, Wilkin said, noting that both Los Angeles County and Orange County admissions doubled last week.

So far, Marine Animal Rescue, based in El Segundo, has rescued 170 sea lion pups, said director Peter Wallerstein. “The pups are hypothermic, dehydrated and skinny,” he said. Marine Animal Rescue brings those pups to the Marine Mammal Care Center in nearby San Pedro for treatment.

“We have admitted over 250 [pups] since January 1,” said MMCC’s director David Bard. “We normally have numbers in the teens for those animals.”

Once admitted, pups are examined, tested for disease, and started on a treatment program. Nutritional supplementation begins with clear fluids, then moves on to “gruel” – a mix of electrolytes, protein, sugar, and ground up fish – until, eventually, the pups are fed solid, fishy food. The process can take several months. “Overall, they’ve been responding very well,” Bard said, on Mar. 13. “We actually released four of them this morning.”

Right now, the San Pedro facility is caring for more than 100 pups. Down the coast, the Pacific Marine Mammal Center has more than 90. On Mar. 12, that facility declared a state of emergency after 18 rescues over two days threatened to overwhelm existing resources. Farther south in San Diego, SeaWorld reports more than 140 marine mammal rescues this year, the majority of which are California sea lions. In all of 2012, SeaWorld rescued 131 marine mammals.

“The good aspect to this is that emaciation and dehydration are something the rehab facilities are very experienced with, and doing a good job,” Wilkin said, reporting that mortality rates in the centers are relatively low, between 20 and 30 percent.

But the bad news is, the onslaught isn’t over. Peak stranding season hasn’t happened yet. Historically, most sea lion strandings occur during April and May, when pups are weaned and have to find their way on their own. “We anticipate it will only get worse in the coming months,” Melin said.

Such large numbers of strandings so early in the year are unusual, and suggest the situation offshore must be pretty grim. “When we see a big uptick like this, we know it’s bad,” Melin said. “There’s something not right. We go out to the islands.”

Melin’s September visit to San Nicolas Island revealed that pup mortality rates were around 34 percent — about what one would expect for an El Niño year. By February, the rate had risen to somewhere near 50 percent. “By the time we get around to their first birthday, mortality might be as high as 60 percent, maybe even 70 percent,” Melin said.

It’s not just last year’s pup population that’s being affected. After giving birth in June, females spend the next months nursing, foraging, and reproducing. By this point in the year, many are probably pregnant again. But when food is scarce, females will sometimes abort a pregnancy and funnel all their resources toward the already growing juvenile. “We are seeing premature pups being born, up and down the coast. A lot of pregnancies are not coming to term,” Melin said.

This means the sea lion population will take a double punch: reduced numbers of surviving pups from 2012, and fewer pups born in 2013. “It’s two years of impact from something that we don’t yet know,” Melin said. “Thankfully, it’s a healthy population. It weathers these kinds of things fairly well.”

It’s Not El Niño

But the cause of the mass stranding is still a mystery. Disease or an environmental perturbation affecting the food supply are the best guesses, though scientists are still in the early stages of the investigation. Next week, a team will return to San Nicolas Island and reassess the colonies there. Wilkin is working on applying to have the strandings declared “an unusual mortality event” by the National Marine Fisheries Service. That classification would free up funding and investigators, allowing scientists to move more quickly.

One possibility is that the population is dealing with an infectious disease. Morbillivirus, which causes distemper, and influenza have both sickened sea lion populations in the past, but scientists don’t think this is likely because it’s not clear why only pups would be affected. Likewise, domoic acid, a toxin produced during algal blooms that can cause seizures and memory loss, seems an improbable culprit.

“If this was a disease process, you might expect it to be a little more across the board,” Wilkin said. “It does seem to be pretty targeted to that age class.”

Another possibility is that hookworms – which can infect pups until they’re about six months old – have weakened the pup population and left it susceptible to a second disease agent that is just now sweeping through. But while some pups are showing signs of having been infected with hookworms, it’s not being seen at abnormally high levels, Melin said. “It does seem more likely to be food-related,” she said.

Warmer ocean temperatures, such as what happens during an El Niño year, can affect the food supply.

Those warmer waters dampen nutrient-rich seafloor upwellings. Without cold waters and added nutrients, prey species — phytoplankton, krill, and small fish — are scarce. Animals that eat those critters, such as larger fish, sea lions and sea birds, either move with the food toward colder water, or struggle. Scarcer food means sea lion mothers have a tougher time finding a meal for their pups. They may have to swim farther, dive deeper, and stay away longer, prompting pups to wean themselves and strike out on their own in search of fish.

“It’s not that mom isn’t coming back, she’s just taking too long,” Melin said. “It takes a lot for a sea lion to leave its pups.”

After a strong El Niño event in 1997-1998, rescue centers around the state saw elevated intake numbers, similar to what’s occurring now except more broadly distributed. In spring 2009, an unpredicted halt in normal upwellings caused the food supply between Point Conception, north of Santa Barbara, and the Monterey Bay to collapse. “We had huge mortality of pups weaned that year,” Melin said. “Close to 80 percent.”

So far, this event doesn’t fit into a pattern. The strandings are localized to southern California, and this isn’t an El Niño year. At least, not really: In summer 2012, a short-lived patch of abnormally warm surface water did settle off the Southern California coast. But that’s cooled off now — and the sea lions stuck around.

“Sea lions are usually pretty good at adapting,” Melin said, noting that biologists often monitor female sea lions and use them as a gauge of ecosystem health. “If the system starts changing or becomes out of whack, they’re the one that are going to show the signs.”

There are other hints that something more systemic is amiss in the Islands, namely the nesting numbers and success of brown pelicans in the Channel Islands National Park. Pelicans, like sea lions, are top predators. Both species tend to forage for the same fish, and their numbers tend to fluctuate in tandem. In 2004 and 2005, pelicans in the islands made roughly 6,500 nest attempts, said seabird biologist Laurie Harvey of the California Institute of Environmental Studies. Last year, out of several hundred nest attempts, only five pelican chicks fledged on Anacapa Island. “That ended up being the poorest reproduction year for pelicans on the Channel Islands since 1970,” she said.

This year, though it’s still early in nesting season, pelican numbers are fairly low, with fewer than a hundred nests on Anacapa. “We think that yes, it definitely looks like it’s linked to the sea lion strandings,” Harvey said. “Sea lions and pelicans feed primarily on coastal pelagic species like anchovies and sardines. What it’s looking like is that the local availability of prey is insufficient.”

source: Wired

Last common ancestor for Y-chromosome twice as old as previously thought

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:29:05 GMT

Albert Perry carried a secret in his DNA: a Y chromosome so distinctive that it reveals new information about the origin of our species. It shows that the last common male ancestor down the paternal line of our species is over twice as old as we thought.

One possible explanation is that hundreds of thousands of years ago, modern and archaic humans in central Africa interbred, adding to known examples of interbreeding – with Neanderthals in the Middle East, and with the enigmatic Denisovans somewhere in southeast Asia.

Perry, recently deceased, was an African-American who lived in South Carolina. A few years ago, one of his female relatives submitted a sample of his DNA to a company called Family Tree DNA for genealogical analysis.

Geneticists can use such samples to work out how we are related to one another. Hundreds of thousands of people have now had their DNA tested. The data from these tests had shown that all men gained their Y chromosome from a common male ancestor. This genetic "Adam" lived between 60,000 and 140,000 years ago.

All men except Perry, that is. When Family Tree DNA's technicians tried to place Perry on the Y-chromosome family tree, they just couldn't. His Y chromosome was like no other so far analysed.

Deeper roots

Michael Hammer, a geneticist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, heard about Perry's unusual Y chromosome and did some further testing. His team's research revealed something extraordinary: Perry did not descend from the genetic Adam. In fact, his Y chromosome was so distinct that his male lineage probably separated from all others about 338,000 years ago.

"The Y-chromosome tree is much older than we thought," says Chris Tyler-Smith at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, who was not involved in the study. He says further work will be needed to confirm exactly how much older.

"It's a cool discovery," says Jon Wilkins of the Ronin Institute in Montclair, New Jersey. "We geneticists have been looking at Y chromosomes about as long as we've been looking at anything. Changing where the root of the Y-chromosome tree is at this point is extremely surprising."

Digging deeper, Hammer's team examined an African database of nearly 6000 Y chromosomes and found similarities between Perry's and those in samples taken from 11 men, all living in one village in Cameroon. This may indicate where in Africa Perry's ancestors hailed from.

Older than humanity

The first anatomically modern human fossils date back only 195,000 years, so Perry's Y chromosome lineage split from the rest of humanity long before our species appeared.

What are the implications? One possibility is that Perry's Y chromosome may have been inherited from an archaic human population that has since gone extinct. If that's the case, then some time within the last 195,000 years, anatomically modern humans interbred with an ancient African human.

There is some supporting evidence for this scenario. In 2011, researchers examined human fossils from a Nigerian site called Iwo Eleru. The fossils showed a strange mix of ancient and modern features, which also suggested interbreeding between modern and archaic humans. "The Cameroon village with an unusual genetic signature is right on the border with Nigeria, and Iwo Eleru is not too far away," says Hammer.

Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum, London, was involved in the Iwo Eleru analysis, and says the new Y chromosome result highlights the need for more genetic data from modern-day sub-Saharan Africans. "The oldest known fossil humans in both West Africa at Iwo Eleru and Central Africa at Ishango [in Democratic Republic of the Congo] show unexpectedly archaic features, so it certainly looks like we have a more complex scenario for the evolution of modern humans in Africa."

source: New Scientist

Chasing the Higgs boson

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:37:01 GMT

This morning's NYT ran a fantastic six-part feature on the long road to the Higgs discovery. Dennis Overbye did a wonderful job of capturing the excitement of the past few years!

See the link below for the full feature, plus additional accompanying multimedia and reference articles.

CHASING THE HIGGS BOSON
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published March 5, 2013

Introduction

MEYRIN, Switzerland — Vivek Sharma missed his daughter.

A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva. But on April 15, 2011, Meera Sharma’s 7th birthday, he flew to California for some much-needed family time. “We had a fine birthday, a beautiful day,” he recalled.

Then Dr. Sharma was alerted to a blog post. There it was reported that a rival team of physicists had beaten his team to the discovery of the Higgs boson — the long-sought “God particle.”

If his rivals were right, it would mean a cascade of Nobel Prizes flowing in the wrong direction and, even more vexingly, that Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had missed one of nature’s clues and thus one of its greatest prizes; that the dream of any physicist — to know something that nobody else has ever known — was happening to someone else.

He flew back to Geneva the next day. “My wife was stunned,” he recalled.

He would not see them again for months.

Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had every reason to believe that they were closing in on the Great White Whale of modern science: the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would explain all the others then known and how they fit together into the jigsaw puzzle of reality.

For almost half a century, physicists had chased its quantum ghost through labyrinths of mathematics and logic, and through tons of electronics at powerful particle colliders, all to no avail.

Now it had come down to the Large Hadron Collider, where two armies of physicists, each 3,000 strong, struggled against each other and against nature, in a friendly but deadly serious competition.

In physics tradition, they were there to check and complement each other in a $10 billion experiment too valuable to trust to only one group, no matter how brilliant and highly motivated.

The stakes were more than just Nobel Prizes, bragging rights or just another quirkily named addition to the zoo of elementary particles that make up nature at its core. The Higgs boson would be the only visible manifestation of the Harry Potterish notion put forward back in 1964 (most notably by Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh) that there is a secret, invisible force field running the universe. (The other theorists were François Englert and Robert Brout, both of Université Libre de Bruxelles; and Tom Kibble of Imperial College, London, Carl R. Hagen of the University of Rochester and Gerald Guralnik of Brown University.)

Elementary particles — the electrons and other subatomic riffraff running around in our DNA and our iPhones — would get their masses from interacting with this field, the way politicians draw succor from cheers and handshakes at the rope line.

Without this mystery field, everything in the universe would be pretty much the same, a bland fizz of particles running around at the speed of light. With it, there could be atoms and stars, and us.

Leon Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Illinois, where the boson was being sought, once called it “the God particle,” scandalizing his colleagues but delighting journalists, who kept using the name. Dr. Lederman later said that he wanted to call it the “goddamn particle.”

The “Easter Bump Hunt” of April 2011, as it came to be called, was only one episode in a roller coaster of sleepless nights, bright promises, missed clues, false alarms, euphoria, depression, gritty calculation, cooperation and envy, all the tedium and vertiginous notions of modern science.

On the way to fulfill what they thought was their generation’s rendezvous with scientific destiny, the physicists dangled from harnesses in hard hats to construct detectors bigger than apartment buildings in underground caverns. They strung wires and cranked bolts to coax thousand-ton magnets to less than a thousandth of an inch of where they needed to be. They wrote millions of lines of code to calibrate and run devices that would make NASA engineers stand by the track with their hats in their hands in admiration.

In their down time, they proposed marriage and made rap videos in the tunnels where subatomic particles collided. They ate, slept and partied, threw snowballs and worried that an unguarded smile in the cafeteria or a glance at a friend’s laptop could bias a half-billion-dollar experiment or give away cosmic secrets.

Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, put it this way in an e-mail, “The experiments are very large collaborations and they have the good, the bad, the crooks, the Sopranos, the opportunists — a prototype of the world as we know it.”

August 2010: Promised Fireballs

Everybody agreed that the Large Hadron Collider was the last stand in the hunt for the Higgs boson. Circling for 17 miles underneath the complex of aging postwar buildings outside Geneva (and out into France) that constitute the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the collider was designed to accelerate the subatomic particles known as protons to more than 99 percent of the speed of light — an energy of seven trillion electron volts — and crash them together.

The resulting tiny fireballs would recreate temperatures and densities that prevailed when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old. This was unexplored territory, and anything could happen, including — about once in every four billion collisions, according to theoretical calculations — a Higgs boson. To record it all, the two teams erected detectors, mountains of wire and computers, on opposite sides of the underground ring to capture the collisions.

“Either we find the Higgs boson, or some stranger phenomenon must happen,” said Fabiola Gianotti, a CERN scientist who led one of the groups, named Atlas. Their rival was called CMS. Both were named after their gigantic detectors. (Two other detectors, named Alice and LHCb, were built to investigate more specialized physics at the collider.)

The collider, 15 years and $10 billion in the making, was first turned on in September 2008. Then, just a week later, a section of it blew up when some electrical circuits proved unable to handle the currents needed for the giant superconducting magnets that steered the protons. Repairs took a year and a half; in March 2010, the collider started up again at half power to avoid stressing the circuits.

When I visited in August 2010, Dr. Gianotti’s desk on the fourth floor of a new building a stone’s throw from the main CERN cafeteria was as sleek and uncluttered as an aircraft’s wing, the few papers on it arranged with geometrical precision. A slender woman with dancing eyes, Dr. Gianotti gave the impression of being as graceful and strong as piano wire. She needed all of that.

As the spokeswoman for the Atlas collaboration, Dr. Gianotti, then 46, was the nominal herder of 3,000 putative Einsteins, the orchestrator of a hive mind of brilliance — responsible for getting all the trains to run on time; for all the calibrations and simulations to match; for all the physicists, from the computer analysts who massaged the final data to anyone who ever wielded a screwdriver in the detector cavern, to sign off on the results from those fireball collisions.

That made Dr. Gianotti the most visible woman in high-energy physics, a field notoriously laden with testosterone. Journalists always asked about that, but it was no big deal, she said, adding that a quarter of the Atlas collaborators are women — so many that on occasion she had gone out and recruited men to attend management meetings.

Growing up in Milan, Dr. Gianotti had been fascinated by philosophy. Seduced into physics by reading some of Einstein’s early work, she had taken two years off to study piano at the Milan Conservatory before getting a Ph.D. at the University of Milan in subnuclear physics in 1989 and joining CERN.

“Music is always in my mind,” she reflected one night, in lightly accented English, as we were driving home from dinner. Asked what kind, she punched a button on the CD player, and the car suddenly filled with Schubert — “the most romantic of the classicists and the most classic of the romantics,” she said.

At her desk, Dr. Gianotti was all business. She had made her mark working on liquid argon calorimeters, devices that could measure the energies and tracks of particles. Now she said she sometimes missed the chance to get her own hands dirty.

But then she gestured to the papers awaiting review on her desk.

“There is no typical day,” she said, ticking off a list of meetings. “My days are very full, this is for sure. I think they are wonderful.”

Asked what made her a good spokeswoman, Dr. Gianotti replied that it was her cheerfulness. Alluding to the explosion and shutdown, she said, “People in a difficult time want to see you are confident and optimistic.” Now, she added, “You can see the excitement in their eyes.”

Just down the hall was Dr. Gianotti’s opposite number and rival of sorts, Guido Tonelli, 63, an ebullient professor from the University of Pisa, newly installed as the spokesman of the CMS collaboration. The Atlas and CMS teams shared the same building, facing each other over an atrium covered with posters of their devices and a coffee bar, using the same printers — and sometimes, the joke went, sleeping with one another.

Dr. Tonelli was the third physicist to head the CMS team and perhaps the one who had traveled the longest road. The son of a farmer and a railroad worker, he had grown up in Pisa and was the first of his family to attend college — a result of effort and sacrifice “that I have tried to reward doing my best in the studies first and in my work later.”

He confessed that he had helped his own cause back then by allowing his professors to believe (incorrectly) that he was related to Leonida Tonelli, a distinguished mathematician whose statue stands near the university’s entrance. Guido Tonelli’s CERN office was dominated by a large poster of his daughter, a ballerina.

Dr. Tonelli had his heart set on discovering the Higgs boson, which he said was crucial to understanding the future as well as the past: measuring it could help determine whether the universe was stable or whether the Higgs field could twitch and dissolve us all back into that bland soup of massless particles.

December 2010: Game of Bumps

Dr. Tonelli described his job as the search for anomalies.

For all their equipment and brainy multitudes, physicists would never be able to hold the Higgs boson in their hands. As soon as it was created, it would disintegrate in a shower of lesser particles — sometimes, for example, in a flash of gamma rays, or into a spray of lightweight particles.

So the signature of a Higgs boson or any other paradigm-shattering new particle would be an unexpected excess of gamma rays or some other particles — an anomalous bump on a graph. Dr. Tonelli said this happened about once a month now that the collider was running, but random flukes would also produce bumps.

If they were flukes, more data would make them fade into the statistical background, just as a flipped coin will eventually revert to an equal number of heads and tails. If not, the bumps would grow in slow motion into a bona fide discovery.

To physicists, the gold standard for a discovery is “5-sigma,” a term meaning that the odds it occurred by chance are less than 1 in 3.5 million.

So “we crosscheck everything” and “try to kill” any anomaly that might be merely random, Dr. Tonelli said. Ninety-nine percent of the time, that is just what happens.

“But you never know when one of them will change everything,” he said, adding, “Those have been the most exciting, intense days of my life.”

In a perfect world, the same 5-sigma answer would emerge from each group independently and simultaneously. But each wanted to be first, if only by a hair: neither wanted to be the team that failed to flag a bump that eventually grew to a major discovery, or the one that jumped too soon on a fluke and wound up looking foolish. On each side, there were hundreds of physicists monitoring the different ways in which the Higgs or something else could show up.

In December 2010, Dr. Tonelli heard a rumor that his team’s rivals in Atlas were chasing an auspicious bump that would be an even bigger deal than the Higgs: an unexpected massive new particle.

“This would be totally new physics,” Dr. Tonelli said.

Dr. Tonelli put together a “quick reaction team” to check out its own data. “After a few days of frantic crosschecks we concluded there was nothing there,” he said.

He said he was later told by an Atlas member whose name he cannot recall that the Atlas investigators had been encouraged by a plot from his own CMS team. It was shown during a workshop in Germany, and there was a small bump on it. Had Dr. Tonelli and his colleagues been chasing their own tail?

An Atlas physicist, Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia University, said that he vaguely remembered seeing a CMS plot, but that Atlas had undertaken the study in question of its own accord.

On another occasion the following year, another bump — implying the existence of a massive new force particle — had Dr. Tonelli and his colleagues convinced for a couple of months that they had discovered evidence of extra dimensions of space time. They notified the director general of CERN and drafted a paper — never published — describing the discovery. And then the signal faded like an old tied balloon.

“We’ve made many discoveries,” Dr. Tonelli said, “most of them false.”

Spring 2011: The Easter Egg Hunt

The biggest false alarm, one that went around the world, came from Atlas.

For Sau Lan Wu, of the University of Wisconsin by way of Hong Kong and Vassar, the Higgs boson was unfinished business. She was one of a handful of scientists who thought they were seeing the evidence of the Higgs back in 2000 in data from an earlier CERN collider called LEP. Unconvinced, CERN shut that collider down so the Large Hadron Collider could be built in its place. In the spring of 2011, Dr. Wu thought she had found the Higgs again.

A cheerful and controlling presence, partial to wearing red, Dr. Wu thinks of herself as a mother to the 47 former students and postdoctoral fellows whose portraits line the hallway outside her CERN office. As a young postdoc at M.I.T. in 1974, she had helped Samuel Ting win a Nobel Prize for discovering the J/psi, a particle that was the last big surprise in physics, and later was co-discoverer of the gluon, the particle that holds quarks together in protons.

Dr. Wu’s team in Wisconsin was the first American group to join the Atlas collaboration, back in 1993. When the collider was restarted, they had hit the ground running. By Easter 2011, they had detected a telltale excess of gamma rays, pointing to the same Higgs she and others had thought they were discovering 10 years earlier.

Even more provocatively, Dr. Wu’s gamma-ray signal was much stronger than theory predicted, suggesting that on its way to oblivion the Higgs had temporarily changed into other massive particles yet unknown to science, a discovery that could dwarf that of the boson and shake not just physics but cosmology.

Her group wrote a short paper, an “internal note” to alert their Atlas colleagues, suggesting “that the present result is the first definitive observation of physics beyond the standard model.”

Their note was supposed to be confidential — results are not supposed to be released to the outside world until the entire collaboration has checked and approved them — but within hours the note’s abstract was posted in the comments section of a physics blog, Not Even Wrong, run by Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia.

Bedlam ensued in the physics world. Dr. Sharma and hundreds of other physicists abandoned their families and canceled vacations to go back to CERN.

The aftermath, when the signal turned out to be another fluke, was brutal. It was suggested that whoever was responsible for leaking the report should leave the Atlas collaboration.

Many physicists, Dr. Wu admits, thought that she herself had leaked the report. A year and a half later, she still found it hard to talk about the Easter event.

“I was so excited I couldn’t control my emotions,” Dr. Wu recalled. She wrote the note as a way of alerting the Atlas community, she said. “I thought CMS would go on vacation and we could get ahead. I’m sorry I did that.”

For Dr. Gianotti, the incident was a lesson in the need for keeping your mouth shut, helping to cement her distrust of bloggers. “Things should be properly understood inside the collaboration before being blogged outside.” Still, “things happen in life,” she added. “My attitude is always positive.”

For CMS, the incident served as what Dr. Sharma called “a good drill.”

Dr. Tonelli said: “In retrospect, this fear of being scooped by Atlas was useful. Once you are under attack, you start to focus.”

July 2011: Still Missing

Thus tested, both collaborations began drinking from a fire hose of data as the collider kept racking up collisions by the hundreds of trillions. In the early summer of 2011, both Atlas and CMS began recording a surplus of W bosons, particles that carry the so-called weak nuclear force that drives radioactive decay. That was another telltale sign of the Higgs. On the eve of a big conference in Grenoble, France, Dr. Sharma, of CMS, and Bill Murray, of Atlas, held a summit meeting in the CERN cafeteria and opened their laptops.

“I showed mine, and he showed his,” Dr. Sharma said. “We had many coffees.”

Dr. Murray recalled: “Bang! It’s all looking good.”

The results were reported at the Grenoble conference with great hoopla.

But by the next big conference a month later, in Mumbai, India, the bump was gone.

Dr. Murray said, “It was bizarre: twice as much data and there was nothing.”

This was beginning to be the story of the Higgs.

Physicists already knew by the time the CERN collider started up that if the Higgs existed, it would be found in a narrow window of possible masses — equivalent to 115 billion to 200 billion electron volts of energy. Their task was to sort through that window, looking for the telltale excess, or bump, like a sports fan scanning the radio dial in his car looking for the Yankees broadcast.

By the fall of 2011, most of that window had been ruled out, and physicists worried that the whole window might be closed by the end of the year, meaning that the Higgs, or at least the simplest version predicted by the theorists, did not exist — and sending theorists back to their blackboards in search of a better understanding of our origins.

Paradoxically, many physicists, including Dr. Sharma, who admitted to an “anarchic tendency,” found that prospect thrilling.

The Higgs boson fit like a key into a lock into the Standard Model, a suite of equations that was a battle-tested explanation of most of the forces of nature. But physics, Dr. Sharma explained, advances on surprises.

“Every measurement I’ve made in my career has been in confirmation of the Standard Model,” he grumbled.

For Dr. Tonelli, however, it was a dark time. He recalled being at a conference in November where a theorist had summarized the situation by showing a “terrible slide” of a grave with the name Higgs on it. “Since Peter was 83,” he said of the physicist from whom the boson takes its name, “that was not a good idea.”

October 2011: Too Big to Ignore

In the fall, there was a changing of the guard in Atlas. Eilam Gross, a former rock musician complete with earring and a Lou Reed haircut, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, joined Dr. Murray as co-convenor of the Higgs search, filling in for a colleague who was going on maternity leave.

Dr. Gross had followed an unlikely route to this mission. After serving in the Israeli military as an intelligence officer, he was studying sound engineering in New York when he happened to read “The Tao of Physics,” by Fritjof Capra, a popular book melding physics and Eastern thought.

He dropped everything and went back to Israel, studied string theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then moved on to experimental work, all the while trying to keep up his music career.

He became what he called a “Higgs soldier” while working on the LEP accelerator. “There are 6,000 Higgs soldiers,” he said of the Large Hadron Collider, “and they all deserve the Nobel Prize.”

He had been applying for the Higgs job in Atlas for years, and had given up until he got a call one day.

When it finally happened for him, Dr. Gross recalled expressing some trepidation about his new role. “What will I do?” he asked.

Dr. Murray told him not to worry, he was going to have the time of his life.

It didn’t take long.

While physicists fretted about the death of the Higgs, something was happening out in the wilds of uncertainty. One bump on physicists’ charts, from the W bosons, was disappearing. But another was blooming like the shy girl at a dance.

In retrospect, nobody could remember exactly when she had come in. But she was the one who would marry the prince.

The bump may have appeared as early as May. It was then, Dr. Murray said, that the Atlas group had discovered an “excess” in gamma rays corresponding to a mass of about 128 billion electron volts. (By comparison, a proton, the building block of the atomic nucleus, is about a billion electron volts.) The bump corresponded to a single particle, a flake of hypothetical energy, that weighed as much as an atom of iodine.

Nobody paid any attention. “End of story,” Dr. Murray said.

The bump persisted, rising and falling as data from more collisions and more channels were added, and kept being dismissed. It continued to grow over the fall until it had reached the 3-sigma level — the chances of being a fluke were less than 1 in 740, enough for physicists to admit it to the realm of “evidence” of something, but not yet a discovery.

Dr. Gianotti recalled being shown the bump during a meeting. Her reaction was characteristically guarded: “Hmm, hmm. That was nice, but let’s hope.”

Dr. Gross had a markedly different reaction. One evening late in November, he was in Paris at a workshop, staying at a colleague’s house. After a wine-soaked meal and some grappa, he fell asleep on the couch.

While he slept, a new data analysis came in from CERN. At 3 a.m. his colleagues Marumi Kado and Alex Read decided to wake up their gently snoring boss. They asked him if he wanted to see the Higgs boson.

Dr. Gross jumped up. “What? Where?” he asked. As he described it later in a blog post, they were all in a state of shock. The bump was too big to ignore anymore.

“We couldn’t believe our eyes. We looked at the screen for ages before we started to digest what we were seeing,” he said. “I think this was the first time Marumi, me and Alex realized it could be the real thing.”

November 2011: Oozing Into View

On the other side of the wall of (mostly) silence between the teams, a signal was also oozing into view.

Dr. Tonelli, of CMS, saw it first on Nov. 8. He was making his rounds, talking to his young recruits. In the morning, one group showed him a pair of events that had resulted in a spray of four light particles, a rare “four-lepton” signal. That was one of the signature ways that a Higgs boson would dissolve.

That afternoon he met with a second group in the cafeteria. One of them opened a laptop and showed him a bump in the gamma-gamma channel, the other big Higgs decay channel. It was almost 3-sigma and was at the same energy as the morning bump, about 125 billion electron volts.

“At the end of the meeting, there was some light in their eyes,” he said. “It was my birthday. I considered it a sort of gift.”

The following week, at a meeting in Paris, some people were still talking about the death of the Higgs. Dr. Tonelli was one of the few people in the world who knew differently.

“I was laughing internally,” he said.

Dr. Sharma, of CMS, went home for Thanksgiving and a long-awaited reunion with his family.

In his pocket as he ate was a new plot combining the results from both channels, a new bump indicating a Higgs boson at 125 billion electron volts. A neighbor pestered him with questions about the search, but Dr. Sharma wouldn’t talk.

A year earlier, many of his colleagues had been ready to write off the Higgs boson, and with it the Standard Model. But “on Thanksgiving Day,” he said, “we knew the jig in some sense was up.”

“I would have preferred it the other way,” he said with a sigh, then added: “I knew before the rest of the world. That is all I need.”

Afterward he marveled at how attitudes toward physics had changed from a few years earlier, when some people feared the new collider would destroy Earth. That and the “God particle” talk had gotten the public’s attention, he had to admit: “Once neighbors find out that Sharma is involved in that black hole thing, the dog doesn’t pee in my yard anymore.”

Dec. 13, 2011: The Long Hello

Neither Atlas nor CMS knew what the other had until Nov. 28, when the two team leaders, Dr. Gianotti and Dr. Tonelli, met with CERN’s director general, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, in his office.

It was apparent from the outset that nature had dealt Atlas the stronger hand, at least for the first round. Dr. Murray, of Atlas, felt both reassured and relieved.

“If there really is a Higgs, Atlas got lucky and CMS got unlucky,” he said.

According to Atlas, the new particle had a mass of 126 billion electron volts; according to CMS, it was 124 billion.

Neither experiment was even close to having the statistical goods — a 5-sigma level of significance — to declare a discovery. But the fact that two separate experiments were hinting at roughly the same answer was encouraging, and worth telling the world about. CERN scheduled a special seminar on Dec. 13. Dr. Gianotti, speaking through the pain of a toothache and dental surgery to an overflow crowd at CERN and physics fans everywhere clustered around Webcasts, went first.

“If we are just being lucky, it will take a lot of data to kill it,” she said.

It would also take a lot more data to confirm what was still at best a promising hint, with a 1-in-100 chance of being a fluke.

The results put the focus on the next big meeting, the International Conference on High Energy Physics, scheduled for July 4 in Melbourne, Australia, by which time the amount of data from the collider would have doubled. At the very least it would be an interesting progress report to see if the bumps were still there.

Dr. Tonelli made no bones about his belief that this was the Higgs at long last. He told Dr. Heuer, the director general, to “prepare the troops,” and his old friend Dr. Englert, a founder of the Higgs theory, not to book vacation for the beginning of July.

But the experimentalists had all seen promising bumps (and promising reputations staked on them) come and go. “I don’t see the smoking guns,” said Dr. Spiropulu, the Caltech professor. And Dr. Sharma cautioned: “The game is still on. People have to be prepared for there to be no Higgs.”

January 2012: The Mother of Everything

Characteristically, Dr. Gianotti was playing her cards close to the vest. She was less excited about the nearly overlapping bumps, she said, than about the fact that they had now managed to exclude almost the whole mass range that had existed for the Higgs only a year before. Now there was nowhere left for it to be.

“This was really important,” she said. “For me, it was clear now where we were going to focus in the next months. So no additional distractions in other mass regions.”

From now on, the rules would be different.

To avoid bias, both teams proceeded to “blind” themselves and not look at the relevant data until the Melbourne meeting. Somewhere along that time, Dr. Gianotti admitted, she had stopped playing the piano, unable to give it the focus it deserved.

In January 2012, Dr. Tonelli handed the reins of CMS to Joe Incandela of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Asked if this was a bittersweet moment to step down, Dr. Tonelli said he had been living a dream. He compared himself to the third runner in a four-man relay race, “a runner that did a fantastic time in his fraction.” He said, “I could not have asked more of my life.”

Dr. Incandela, a man with a warm casual demeanor, was not so sure at all that the Higgs had been discovered on the previous watch.

“Every other day I think we’ve found it, and every other day I think we haven’t,” he said over lunch shortly after taking over. He described collaborations like CMS as “the last bastion of communism,” and his new job as “a crisis a day.” The group had only a month after recording the last data to analyze the results from 2011, he complained. “So much stress,” he said. “We’ll have to do it again this year.”

He firmly rejected one idea that was buzzing around the blogosphere — that by combining their results the two collaborations could take a shortcut to the 5-sigma goal. “There’s no race — this is a 20-year program,” he snapped. “This is a serious business.”

Dr. Incandela had wandered into science from the art world. Growing up in Chicago, he studied at its Art Institute, intending to be a sculptor. He got interested in science while studying the chemistry of ceramics, went on to get a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and then worked at CERN and Fermilab, where in 1995 he helped discover the top quark, the last missing matter particle in the Standard Model.

He brought with him a deeply philosophical and historical viewpoint on the quest to understand nature. The Higgs boson reminded him of the ancient Stoic notion of “pneuma,” a sort of force or tension that permeated space and gave substance to things. It was the first example in history of people wondering about the origin of mass.

“The Higgs is sort of like the mother of everything,” he said. “It tells you something very fundamental about the entire universe. So measuring its mass, for instance, could tell us whether the universe is stable or not. This is really unbelievable if you think about it.”

“So that tells you how deeply we’ve touched into this fabric,” he went on, “and this fabric is everywhere. Throughout the universe. So for me that is a really profound thing about the Higgs. It’s not like other particles.”

In March, adding to the sense of momentum that the Higgs was finally being run to earth, physicists from Fermilab said they had measured their own bump in data from the lab’s Tevatron collider, which had been the world’s biggest for 20 years but had shut down for good the previous fall because the government couldn’t afford to run it anymore. As at CERN, there had been two groups and two detectors who were now combining their data for what would amount to a last hurrah and a what-might-have-been for the Tevatron. The Fermilab physicists had found a broad hump in their data, between 115 billion and 135 billion electron volts — the same general area as the CERN results.

Dmitri Denisov, a leader of the Fermilab effort, wrote in an e-mail at the time, “It is clearly not the answer to crossword, but an important piece of the puzzle!”

The data were of scant statistical significance, however, having a chance of about 1 in 100 of being a fluke. Over the following weeks, Fermilab would improve those statistics to a chance of 1 in 550, heartbreakingly short of the 3-sigma criteria required to claim “evidence” of the Higgs. If there really had been a race, one of the contestants was now out.

Back in Switzerland that same month, during a break when the Large Hadron Collider was not running, Dr. Gross took his girlfriend, Talia Levy Tytiun, down into the Atlas cavern. “I decided that I want to propose to Talia in the place which was the symbol of my life at this Higgs hunting period,” he explained.

“But believe me, I checked a thousand times with her before to make sure she will say yes.”

June 2012: Opening the Box

On June 18, the two experiments stopped recording data in order to get ready for Melbourne. By then they had already collected as many collisions — some 400 trillion — as they had the entire previous year.

The Atlas teams had already begun analyzing the first batch of this data a week before. Dr. Gianotti was at a conference at Fermilab when her colleague Dr. Kado sent her a plot of the new data.

The gamma rays were still there, and had grown in significance, putting the boson on the verge of reality. Dr. Gianotti scrawled a note back: “Oh, my God.”

A week later, her team looked at another important decay channel, and her enthusiasm deflated. There was nothing. She spent a few days and nights with her “neurons spinning,” she recalled, wondering how they could have been fooled.

In the next two batches of data, however, nine candidates showed up in the “zed” channel, as they called it. “It was just beautiful to see those,” Dr. Gianotti said.

At 10 p.m. on June 14, small teams of CMS physicists began “opening the box” on their data. Later that night, Dr. Incandela received a plot from the so-called 4-lepton channel, showing a spike at 124 billion electron volts.

He later told the writer Ian Sample that his life changed at that moment.

That afternoon, almost 300 physicists crowded into the room to hear talks on the first results of the unblinding, and the entire collaboration learned that the Higgs was nigh. People were sitting on the floor and standing, Dr. Tonelli said. Another 307 people had linked in by videoconference.

The room was too hot, all the doors had been opened. Dr. Tonelli said, “Everybody was really feeling we were doing something important.”

On June 22, Dr. Heuer announced that there would be a special symposium at CERN on the morning of July 4, the day the Melbourne meeting was to start. Scientists who had already bought tickets to Australia rushed to rebook.

At the time, it seemed like a gamble: neither experiment had yet reached the all-important 5-sigma level. But as various scientists were pointing out, CERN couldn’t go on almost discovering the Higgs boson forever. Some said CERN should just shut up until the discovery was official.

“If you only have 4.9 you are not allowed to call it a discovery,” Dr. Heuer said later. “But it was sure that even if being short of 5-sigma, if I see both experiments I can still call it a discovery because we are beyond 5 if we combine the two.”

The members of each of the collaborations had to approve anything that was to be presented at Melbourne, which meant that their leaders had a week to mobilize an army and read a thousand pages of papers and reports.

Dr. Incandela, of CMS, said he felt “like a hunted animal.”

“I felt tremendous stress, obviously, because things were very tight,” he recalled. “Several times per day, I would just say, ‘O.K., don’t panic, we’re going to make this.’ But my goal was to make sure we did everything right, and that the collaboration would not regret it, and that the collaboration would all feel part of it, because everyone worked on this in one way or another.”

In a conference room near his office, he set up a SWAT team of a dozen of his brightest young analysts, his “kids,” as he called them. “Keep your smiles to yourself,” he warned them, if they happened to find themselves in the company of their rivals.

On the night of June 24, the graduate students and postdocs in Atlas were tiptoeing toward the 5-sigma finish line. Among them was Sven Kreiss, a New York University graduate student who got a preliminary glimpse of the answer alone in his office late that night when, as part of a crosscheck, he combined the data from two signatures of the Higgs decay and found the result breached 5-sigma. The next day he sent a plot to his adviser Kyle Cranmer, whose birthday it was, saying he had a present for him.

Dr. Cranmer shot back a joyful expletive worthy of the discovery of a sacred particle.

The job of ultimately confirming the boson’s discovery had been entrusted to another pair of graduate students, Haoshuang Ji, a Wisconsin student, and Aaron Armbruster of the University of Michigan — who had sent the plot that Dr. Gross had woken up to in November. They were each working to combine all the Higgs data from all the myriad ways it could fall apart and leave a trace in the detectors. This calculation would make or break the Higgs, because the boson had to behave properly in all its guises.

On the afternoon of June 25, Mr. Ji announced he had gotten a result of 5.08 sigma, causing cheers to go ringing down the corridor outside Dr. Wu’s office; everybody ran to sign the printout. The next day, Mr. Armbruster arrived at the same result.

Atlas was at 5-sigma.

The scorecard, as later enumerated by Dr. Wu:

1,000 trillion proton-proton collisions

240,000 Higgs bosons

350 pairs of gamma rays

8 sets of lightweight particles from the lepton channel.

From this trickle of a trickle of atomic pitter-pat, 6,000 physicists had finally started to put a face on the ghost of the vacuum, the secret controller of cosmic destiny.

Filling in that face could take years. Not knowing yet how closely the new particle matched the predictions of the Standard Model, the physicists took to calling it a “Higgs-like boson.” Or as Dr. Cranmer put it, “Not a God particle but a God-like particle.”

“We don’t know what nature has prepared for us,” Dr. Gianotti said.

She added, “Clearly if we had not discovered the Higgs boson it would have been much more intriguing from a physics point of view. But it is so nice to find a new particle.”

On the eve of the scheduled announcement, Dr. Incandela rehearsed his talk and found that his team was still nervous. Were they ready to go public? It was too late, he told them. They were at 5-sigma. The train had left the station. “We have to stand by our data,” he said.

Later, he said it was what they needed to hear.

July 4, 2012: Champagne and Pandemonium

CERN officials locked their auditorium three days before the special symposium to prevent people from camping out in it. Still, the night before, students and scientists began sleeping on the steps. Dr. Higgs and the other founders of the Higgs theory, Dr. Englert, Dr. Hagen and Dr. Guralnikwalked into the auditorium on the morning of July 4 to a standing ovation.

Dr. Incandela finished writing his talk at 8:42 that morning. The seminar started at 9. When he walked in, he recalled, “I was just so happy that everything came together — I really enjoyed giving the talk.”

At one point, he noticed that the hand holding a laser pointer was shaking. “It was just the adrenaline,” he said. “My heart was pounding.”

At the end, he flashed a plot of CMS’s final data analysis, showing the big new bump. The room exploded in applause.

He thanked CERN and the world. “These results are global,” he said, “and now shared with all of mankind.”

Dr. Gianotti, of Atlas, now had to follow Dr. Incandela, having gone first in December. After the news from CMS, she wondered if anyone would even be interested in what she had to say. “I’m saying to myself, ‘Well, even if our results were essential, in some sense they will be nothing new compared to what they’ve seen already.’”

If nothing else, she thought, her talk would be a valentine to the passion and competence of the 3,000 Atlas scientists.

“Every slide was a reward to the work of many, many people,” she said. “So I was feeling so proud.”

“And I think I got the energy from the eyes of some of my Atlas colleagues who were sitting here in the auditorium,” she added. “The fact that they were looking at me with such intensity and attention was giving me really the strength to go on.”

When she showed the Atlas 5-sigma result, the audience exploded again. The applause seemed to go on forever. It had been left to Dr. Heuer to declare officially that a new particle had been discovered.

“I think we have it,” he said. The cheers began again. Dr. Higgs was seen wiping away tears.

The morning dissolved into pandemonium and Champagne, in the CERN auditorium and in labs, classrooms, conference rooms and living rooms in every time zone in which humans wondered about their universe. Dr. Wu waded through the crowd. She hugged Dr. Higgs.

“I’ve been looking for you my whole life,” she said.

“Well,” he replied, “now you have found me.”

Link to the full feature, plus accompanying articles

Baby giant armadillo photographed for the first time

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 02:10:50 GMT

The notoriously camera-shy giant armadillo (Priodontes maximus) has finally stepped into the spotlight—Brazilian researchers recently captured the first-ever pictures of a baby giant armadillo.

One of the world's most elusive animals, almost nothing is known about giant armadillos, which are found throughout South America.

They're "very rare," Arnaud Desbiez, coordinator of the Pantanal Giant Armadillo Project, said in an email.

For instance, Desbiez has trekked over 1,242 miles (2,000 kilometers) of Brazil's Pantanal region, one of the world's largest tropical wetlands, and has never spotted a single armadillo—until now.

Camera traps first spotted a male armadillo visiting burrows left behind by a female in early 2012. Romance soon bloomed and that male and female armadillo were photographed sharing a burrow. Five months later, pictures showed the distinctive nose of a baby emerging from the burrow.

"Documenting the birth of a giant armadillo is an exciting step forward [in] helping us better understand the biology and reproduction of this cryptic species," Desbiez said.

source has more pictures!

Lift with your legs! BigDog robot learns to throw cinder blocks using whole body, not just the arm

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 22:07:40 GMT

Boston Dynamics' BigDog rough-terrain robot just got even more terrifying, with the addition of a front-mounted arm that lets it toss around cinderblocks like soda cans. To get the job done, the 240-pound quadruped uses the same approach as human athletes, recruiting the strength in its legs and torso to power the throw.

The new addition is just the latest in a long list of superpowers, including the ability to run at four miles per hour, climb slopes up to 35 degrees, and maintain balance on terrain ranging from slick ice to mud, snow, and rubble — even when subjected to punishing kicks, as shown in the bottom video. Now, armed with this newfound throwing capability, there’s little separating BigDog from its cousin, Dog from Half-Life 2.

source: The VErge

What causes beef rainbows?

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 17:50:18 GMT

People are like moths to the flames that are rainbows. The next time there's a rainbow outside, notice how many people drop everything, even important things, to Instagram it. It would be a perfect time for aliens to take over Earth. Rainbows where rainbows shouldn't be, however, cause alarm. Take beef, for example.

How many times have you (if you eat beef) foregone a package of sliced roast beef for a different package because said beef was slightly iridescent? If you don't eat beef, perhaps you've seen a package of said rainbow meat and it reminded you why you no longer eat it. The Internets are clogged with threads like, "Why does deli roast beef look like a rainbow?," and the ever gravid concern, "Subway shiny roast beef?" And while everyone should be spared urbandictionary.com's definition of what a "Beef Rainbow" is, the truth of the matter is, there's nothing inherently wrong with rainbow meat.

Beef rainbows aren't a sign of spoiled, tainted, or (sorry) magical beef. There's enough speculation over the integrity of rainbow beef that the USDA's website has a section on "Iridescent Color of Roast Beef" near similar topics like "What does 'natural?' mean" and "what is beef?" According to the USDA, "When light hits a slice of meat, it splits into colors like a rainbow." This is something called a "diffraction grating," essentially what happens when light waves bend or spread around a surface and create a pattern. It's the same thing that happens to make rainbows on the surface of a DVD. It's understandable that folks mistake diffracted light as a sign of spoilage, especially since the main color created by meat diffraction gratings is green. There is a reason why in Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham, the central conflict of the protagonist is his strong apprehension against eating green meat.

Speaking of ham, beef is not the only meat known to have rainbows. However, when cooked beef is sharply sliced against the grain of the muscle fiber, this, coupled with the moisture in the beef, creates an excellent surface for producing rainbows. "In my opinion," Dr. Thomas Powell, Executive Director of the American Meat Science Association, told me, "The reason it shows up in roast beef is because the cuts of meat that are used in most roast beef are more prone to iridescence, particularly in the round," hence the reason why the USDA singles out roast beef as being especially colorful.

In a way, it's sad that meat rainbows are given a bad rap, especially since diffraction gratings in nature are relatively rare -- and I say this as someone who doesn't eat red meat. Sure, one can see the the vibrant iridescence of peacock feathers or the milky rainbows of an abalone shell and marvel at the rich tapestry that is nature. But it is under the flourescent light of our grocer's deli section where we can look at a rainbow on a slice of beef and know the natural diffraction grating responsible for it is shared with very few things, including the antennae of seed shrimp, and the shells of animals that haven't lived for hundreds of millions of years. A rainbow worth Instagramming as much as any other, for sure.

source: Th Atlantic

Peruvian billboards harvest water from the desert air

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:44:54 GMT

We all know the adage of turning lemons into lemonade. But have you heard the one about the billboard that turned polluted desert air into drinkable water?

Lima, Peru, is the second biggest capital in the world located in a desert. Raindrops are few and far between. The city gets less than an inch a year, forcing many residents to get their water from less than desirable places, such as dirty wells.

However, Lima’s humidity is around 98 percent, so the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) teamed up with ad agency Mayo Publicidad to create a billboard that harvests moisture in the air and converts it into purified water that locals can tap at the base of the billboard.

The air goes through a series of five machines inside the billboard, including an air filter, a condenser and a carbon filter, and finally collects in a pipe leading to the foot of the structure. The billboard is expected to generate upwards of 25 gallons (96 liters) of water per day for the neighboring community.

Check out UTEC’s video about the project here.
source has a photo

A sensational breakthrough: the first bionic hand that can feel

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:16:49 GMT

The first bionic hand that allows an amputee to feel what they are touching will be transplanted later this year in a pioneering operation that could introduce a new generation of artificial limbs with sensory perception.

The patient is an unnamed man in his 20s living in Rome who lost the lower part of his arm following an accident, said Silvestro Micera of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

The wiring of his new bionic hand will be connected to the patient’s nervous system with the hope that the man will be able to control the movements of the hand as well as receiving touch signals from the hand’s skin sensors.

Dr Micera said that the hand will be attached directly to the patient’s nervous system via electrodes clipped onto two of the arm’s main nerves, the median and the ulnar nerves.

This should allow the man to control the hand by his thoughts, as well as receiving sensory signals to his brain from the hand’s sensors. It will effectively provide a fast, bidirectional flow of information between the man’s nervous system and the prosthetic hand.

“This is real progress, real hope for amputees. It will be the first prosthetic that will provide real-time sensory feedback for grasping,” Dr Micera said.

“It is clear that the more sensory feeling an amputee has, the more likely you will get full acceptance of that limb,” he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.

“We could be on the cusp of providing new and more effective clinical solutions to amputees in the next year,” he said.

An earlier, portable model of the hand was temporarily attached to Pierpaolo Petruzziello in 2009, who lost half his arm in a car accident. He was able to move the bionic hand’s fingers, clench them into a fist and hold objects. He said that he could feel the sensation of needles pricked into the hand’s palm.

However, this earlier version of the hand had only two sensory zones whereas the latest prototype will send sensory signals back from all the fingertips, as well as the palm and the wrists to give a near life-like feeling in the limb, Dr Micera said.

“The idea would be that it could deliver two or more sensations. You could have a pinch and receive information from three fingers, or feel movement in the hand and wrist,” Dr Micera said.

“We have refined the interface [connecting the hand to the patient], so we hope to see much more detailed movement and control of the hand,” he told the meeting.

The plan is for the patient to wear the bionic hand for a month to see how he adapts to the artificial limb. If all goes well, a full working model will be ready for testing within two years, Dr Micera said.

One of the unresolved issues is whether patients will be able to tolerate having such a limb attached to them all the time, or whether they would need to remove it periodically to give them a rest.

Another problem is how to conceal the wiring under the patient’s skin to make them less obtrusive. The electrodes of the prototype hand to be fitted later this year will be inserted through the skin rather than underneath it but there are plans under development to place the wiring subcutaneously, Dr Micera said.

Source

Thawing Permafrost May Be “Huge Factor” in Global Warming

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:26:36 GMT

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/02/thawing-permafrost-may-be-huge-factor-in-global-warming/

Thawing permafrost is emitting more climate-heating carbon faster than previously realised. Scientists have now learned that when the ancient carbon locked in the ice thaws and is exposed to sunlight, it turns into carbon dioxide 40 percent faster.

“This really changes the trajectory of the debate” over when and how much carbon will be released as permafrost thaws due to ever warmer temperatures in the Arctic, says researcher Rose Cory of the University of North Carolina.

There are 13 million square kilometres of permafrost in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe. As previously reported by IPS, a 2011 study estimated that global warming could release enough permafrost carbon to raise global temperatures three degrees C on top of what will result from human emissions from oil, gas and coal.

Human emissions are headed for four degrees C of global heating, warned the International Energy Agency (IEA) this week. A rapid “decarbonization of electricity supply” is needed to avoid that future, the IEA said as it released a new book titled “Electricity in a Climate-Constrained World”.

“The solutions are well-known: increased energy efficiency, greater research and development of low-carbon energy production, and putting a realistic price on carbon,” the book says.

Carbon emissions from permafrost are not included in IEA projections. Climate models haven’t included them either, Cory told IPS. Nor has anyone factored in the latest discovery that sunlight accelerates the conversion of ancient carbon into carbon dioxide gas.

“We’re trying right now to scale up this finding to get an estimate of how much more carbon might be released,” she said.

Cory and her colleagues studied places in Arctic Alaska where permafrost is melting and is causing the overlying land surface to collapse, forming erosional holes and landslides and exposing long-buried soils to sunlight.

They found that sunlight increases bacterial conversion of exposed soil carbon into carbon dioxide gas by at least 40 percent compared to carbon that remains in the dark. The team reported its findings in an article published online Feb. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This means permafrost carbon is potentially a huge factor that will help determine how fast the Earth warms,” said co-author George Kling, a University of Michigan ecologist.

“We can’t say how fast this Arctic carbon will feed back into the global carbon cycle and accelerate climate warming on Earth, (but) the fact that it will be exposed to light means that it will happen faster than we previously thought,” said Kling in a statement.

Once the Arctic gets warm enough, the carbon and methane emissions from thawing permafrost will kick-start a feedback that will amplify the current warming rate, Kevin Schaefer, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, previously told IPS.

There is no accurate estimate of methane emissions, which are 40 times as potent in terms of warming as carbon. Methane could have a big impact on temperatures in the short term, Schaefer said.

In 2011, Schaefer’s research showed that the permafrost “tipping point” was just 15 to 20 years away. In light of Cory’s discovery, that will now have to be revised. The only question is how much sooner.

Prepare for a three to five degree C warmer world, said Sir Robert Watson the former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Speaking at a symposium in London Tuesday, Watson, the science director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the world has missed its chance to stay below two degrees C.

“All the evidence, in my opinion, suggests we’re on our way to a three to five degree C world,” Watson told participants at the symposium.

When Watson was chair of the IPCC from 1997 to 2002, optimism was high there’d be a global agreement to limit emissions. “We were hopeful that emissions would not go up at the tremendous rate they are rising now,” he told the Climate News Network, a UK journalism news service.

“(Now) all the promises in the world, which we’re not likely to realise anyway, will not give us a world with only a two degree C rise.”

Military looks at device to heal the brain through the tongue

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 21:26:21 GMT

Thousands of nerve fibers in it help us eat, drink and swallow. Without them, we would not taste. The tongue helps us speak. Quietly, its surface defends our bodies from germs.

Yet for everything the tongue can do, perhaps one of its most exciting roles is to serve as a direct "gateway" to the brain through thousands of nerve endings.

Now researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NeuroHabilitation Corporation are leveraging the power of those tiny nerves. They are aiming to restore lost physical and mental function for service members and civilians who suffered traumatic brain injury or stroke, or who have Parkinson's or multiple sclerosis.

The treatment involves sending specially-patterned nerve impulses to a patient's brain through an electrode-covered oral device called a "PoNS," a battery-operated appliance placed on the tongue. The 20-30 minute stimulation therapy, called cranial nerve non-invasive neuromodulation, or CN-NiNM, is accompanied with a custom set of physical, occupational, and cognitive exercises, based on the patient's deficits. The idea is to improve the brain's organizational ability and allow the patient to regain neural control.

NeuroHabilitation Corporation is funding the commercial development of the device, and has more than just financial investments in PoNS. The company was created with support by Montel Williams, a celebrity and military veteran who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999.

Williams was originally introduced to the research through an American Way magazine an attendant gave to him while he was on an American Airlines flight. The magazine included an article about work being done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Shortly after reading the article, Williams joined a study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Tactile Communication & Neurorehabilitation Lab, which is in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

"The third day there I said we need this in the mouths of our Soldiers," recalled Williams, stating that he has always kept his ties with the military after serving in the Marine Corps and graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy.

The PoNS prototype and associated therapeutic use were developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists Yuri Danilov, Ph.D., Mitchell Tyler, M.S., P.E., and Kurt Kaczmarek, Ph.D. Their research is driven by the principle that brain function is not hardwired or fixed, but can be reorganized in response to new experiences, sensory input and functional demands. This area of research is called neuroplasticity and is a promising and rapidly growing area of brain research.

Preliminary data from University of Wisconsin showed CN-NiNM to have great potential for a wide variety of neurological issues. Remarkably, the therapy doesn't only slow functional loss, but also has the potential to restore lost function. That's why researchers are saying that it "breaks the rules."

"When we talk about a brain changing itself, this is what we mean," said Danilov.

Because of its possible application for service members, especially those returning from combat with blast-related traumatic brain injuries, the USAMRMC signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NeuroHabilitation Corporation (founded by Williams and his colleagues, including the University of Wisconsin scientists), Feb. 8, that allows the Army to further evaluate the device.

"This exciting agreement leverages a unique private-public partnership," said Col. Dallas Hack, director of the USAMRMC Combat Casualty Care Research Program. "By collaborating with University of Wisconsin-Madison and NeuroHabilitation Corporation, we maximize our resources to explore a potential real-world treatment for injured service members and civilians with a variety of health conditions."

Testing will include a collaborative study with researchers and clinicians at the Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Ky., due to start this month as the result of a year-long coordination effort led by Capt. Ian Dews, deputy director of CCCRP. The hospital is home to the Warrior Resiliency and Recovery Center, which is dedicated to the treatment of Soldiers with physical and neuropsychological problems due to service-related trauma.

Additional patient testing will be conducted at other Veteran facilities and civilian medical institutions. Concurrently, the USAMRMC, in collaboration with its subcommands the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Agency and the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Development Activity, will conduct environmental testing, such as temperature and humidity limitations for the device, to better understand potential constraints. At the conclusion, the USAMRMC hopes to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance for PoNS.

source: US ARMY

Robo-Eye to Enter US Market

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 23:54:14 GMT

A retinal prosthesis, already available in Europe, can restore partial sight to people with a genetic disorder that causes blindness.

Americans will soon be able to purchase restored vision, with the US Food and Drug Administration set to approve a prosthetic device that compensates for failing photoreceptors. The Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, developed and made by Second Sight Medical Products, is already approved for use in many European countries, and the FDA will soon give its stamp of approval, according to DiscoveryNews.

“It’s the first bionic eye to go on the market in the world, the first in Europe and the first one in the U.S.,” Brian Mech, the Second Sight's vice president of business development, told DiscoveryNews.

The device, which includes a retinal implant paired with special glasses with an integrated mini camera, successfully restored at least partial sight in patients with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disorder that involves abnormalities in photoreceptors or retinal tissue that leads to progressive vision loss. The Argus II was tested in a bevy of clinical trials, mostly restoring black and white vision to participants, but also restoring color vision in some people.

Source

X-ray nanoprobes reveal Picasso used ordinary housepaint

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 18:20:28 GMT

Nanoscale studies of chips of paint have bolstered the notion that Pablo Picasso created some of his masterworks with ordinary house paint. Chemical analysis of the chips may lead to better art conservation techniques.

Historians had suspected that Picasso was one of the first master painters to switch from traditional oil paints to the fast-drying enamel paint normally reserved for household work. Previous analyses were inconclusive because it was not possible to identify individual elements with enough resolution.

In search of a new approach, Volker Rose of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois teamed up with Francesca Casadio, a conservationist at the Art Institute of Chicago. Using an X-ray nano-probe, a tool for measuring the type and location of chemical elements in a sample, they examined paint from five works.

Rose found that levels of zinc oxide and iron in the paint closely matched samples of 1930s Ripolin (Applied Physics A, doi.org/kf2), a household brand. Picasso's use of house paint marks the birth of a new artistic style.

"We have opened the nanoworld to culture heritage," says Rose, adding that the probe could also inform studies of ageing and deterioration of artworks.

source: New Scientist

Generating 20kW of power with a KITE

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:55:26 GMT

Kite power systems in automatic operation from XS4GREEN on Vimeo.

more info
about six months old, but fascinating

SciGirls encourages tween and teen girls to use science in their everyday lives

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:30:13 GMT

SciGirls is a new show for kids ages 8-12 that showcases bright, curious real tween girls putting science and engineering to work in their everyday lives. Each half-hour episode follows a different group of middle school girls, whose eagerness to find answers to their questions will inspire your children to explore the world around them and discover that science and technology are everywhere!

In the first season of SciGirls, the girls, with the help of scientist mentors, design their own inquiry-based investigations on a huge variety of topics, from the environment to technology and from engineering to nutrition. Shot reality style, SciGirls around the country study dolphins, engineer a giant mechanical puppet, unearth the archaeological secrets of extinct Native American cultures and create high-tech fashions. Videos of these investigations are archived in a project section of the show’s companion Web site.

While we meet new girls in each episode, the series is unified by a pair of recurring animated characters Izzie and her best friend Jake. Together, they embark on their own adventures and call on the SciGirls for help.

SciGirls integrates the companion Web site into the TV series like never before. Each episode begins with Izzie facing a challenge. Viewers follow her as she goes onto the Web site where she selects one of the archived projects that will help her conquer her challenge. She launches the project video and follows the SciGirls live-action story, learning as she watches. Viewers are invited to upload their own science projects, making the SciGirls Web site a destination for any girl who is interested in science.

The goal of SciGirls is nothing less than changing how millions of girls think about science, technology, engineering and math! Every girl can be a SciGirl!

source: PBS
you can either watch episodes online, or download them from iTunes. Plus lots of resources for adults looking to get kids interested in the STEM fields

Barnacles use their giant penises in spermcasting

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Canadian scientists have upended more than a century of assumptions about the reproductive powers of barnacles after discovering that the Pacific gooseneck species — which inhabits wave-pounded sites along the British Columbia coast — can send its sperm through seawater to impregnate a mate.

The finding would have surprised the most famous 19th-century scientist, Charles Darwin, who specialized in the study of barnacles before publishing his bombshell theory of evolution in 1859 — On The Origin of Species — and was fascinated by the shelled, shrimp-like critters’ stunningly long penises, which can extend up to eight times the length of their bodies.

Since barnacles are typically attached to rocks or other objects, it was always assumed the animals’ super-sized penises were crucial to reaching mates to engage in reproductive activity.

But what a team of University of Alberta researchers learned from a series of experiments with barnacles gathered from the western shore of Vancouver Island was that the Pacific goosenecks can even fertilize another member of the species that’s well beyond the reach of their already impressive reproductive organs (which are modest in barnacle terms — slightly smaller than their bodies).

This “spermcasting” ability — as it’s called in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B and cheekily titled “Something Darwin didn’t know about barnacles: spermcast mating in a common stalked species” — appears to constitute a third method of producing offspring for these B.C. barnacles.

The species, Pollicipes polymerus, can copulate in the traditional manner that adult humans would readily understand, but it’s also thought to be able to self-fertilize because of hermaphroditic features that allow individual barnacles to produce both sperm and eggs.

However, the U of A team’s discovery that the barnacles are successfully spermcasting to reproduce means conventional copulation may be much less prevalent than previously believed and that self-fertilization may not be occurring after all.

“In fairness, these barnacles do copulate — and it’s quite dramatic, and that’s one of the most famous things about these organisms: they have these very large penises that can reach long distances to mate,” University of Alberta scientist Richard Palmer told Postmedia News. “They clearly have them for some reason, so the assumption always was that, well, if they have large penises, the reason they still have them is because they must have them in order to mate.”

The alternative possibility — that free-floating sperm could impregnate another barnacle “outside of penis range,” as the study puts it — first occurred to Palmer and co-author Christopher Neufeld, a former U of A researcher who now teaches at Quest University in Squamish, B.C., when they saw a gooey substance floating amidst a Pacific barnacle colony on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

Barnacle experts — including the most renowned of all, Darwin — had never tested for such a phenomenon.

“The problem is that a certain set of beliefs become entrenched because people think they’re true, so nobody bothers to look,” said Palmer, who is also affiliated with the B.C.’s Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre.

To investigate their hunch, Palmer and Neufeld — along with fellow U of A researchers Marjan Barazandeh, Corey Davis and David Coltman — created a laboratory colony with barnacles from the B.C. coast, carefully regulating interactions between individuals and then conducting DNA tests on offspring to determine their parentage.

The results made clear that individuals that never came into contact were producing baby barnacles together.

“These observations,” the five scientist state in the published paper, “overturn over a century of beliefs about what barnacles can (or cannot) do in terms of sperm transfer, raise doubts about prior claims of self-fertilization in barnacles, raise interesting questions about the capacity for sperm capture in other species (particularly those with short penises), and show, we believe for the first time, that spermcast mating can occur in an aquatic arthropod.”

sexy source