Discover Environment

Why More Parasite Diversity is Good News for Frogs | 80beats

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:44:10 +0000

Flukes that parasitize amphibians

The enemy of my enemy is my friend—especially if I’m a frog and my enemies are competing parasites. A recent study in PNAS found that frogs populations exposed to a more diverse set of flukes actually had lower rates of infection, with fewer frogs in the group afflicted with tiny hitchhikers.

Researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder bred Pacific chorus frogs in a lab and put their tadpoles in different tanks with anywhere from one to six different types of flukes. On average, 40% of the frogs that came into contact with only a single fluke species developed infections, while 34% of frogs exposed to four flukes and 23% of frogs exposed to six flukes were infected (the numbers for two, three flukes followed a roughly similar trend). Additionally, some of the fluke species make frogs sicker than others, and oddly enough, the frogs exposed to a greater variety of flukes had a lower proportion of infections from these dangerous species.

Most research on host-parasite interactions has focused one host–one parasite, but as this study shows, it’s a lot more complicated in the natural world. Preserving biodiversity—even biodiversity of creatures, whether flukes or ...

We Pump Water From Underground. It Flows to the Ocean. The Oceans Are Getting Deeper. | 80beats

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:30:14 +0000

It’s easy to see how overwatering our crops would deplete the groundwater supply and cause land nearby to sink, but could it cause sea level to rise on a global scale? Yes, according to a model published in Nature Geosciences, that attributes 42% of the sea-level rise over the past half century to groundwater use.

Ninety percent of readily available freshwater is underground, and water used for drinking or crop irrigation must, of course, be brought above ground. That water then evaporates or flows into rivers, entering the water cycle and eventually the oceans, making them deeper.

Sea levels rose by 1.8 millimeters per year in the last half of the century, but calculations of the contribution from melting ice and rising sea temperatures (which causes water to expand) accounted for only 1.1 millimeters of that. This new model found that the remaining sea-level rise could be explained by groundwater depletion. Some more data is needed to prove the link conclusively, but it suggests that the global consequences of groundwater deserve a more serious look.

[via Nature News]

Image via NOAA

And THIS Tiny Sphere is All the World’s Water That We Can Use | 80beats

Fri, 18 May 2012 18:46:02 +0000

A few days ago, we wrote about a remarkable graphic released by the USGS, showing all the water on Earth—freshwater, saltwater, water vapor, water in plants and animals; all of it—rolled into a sphere.

That sphere was only 860 miles in diameter, fitting comfortably between Salt Lake City and Topeka, Kansas, on a map. It was striking, especially considering that the water available for humans use in our daily lives is only a very small fraction of that; the vast majority of the Earth’s water is saltwater, and most of the freshwater is tied up in glaciers.

How big would a sphere of just the freshwater available to humans be? Reader Jay Kimball of 8020Vision, his interest piqued, went ahead and made such a graphic:

That sphere—the sphere representing the freshwater available to humans—has a diameter of just 170 miles. Head to his blog to see the math.

North American Fish Populations Slowly Crawling Back From Disaster, NOAA Report Shows | 80beats

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:15:54 +0000

A snow crab

If you’ve ever read up on the environmental impact of your eating habits, you know that eating fish can be a dicey prospect. Having been overfished for decades, many wild fish populations are on the brink of disappearing.

A new report from NOAA shows that one attempt to deal with this problem of severely depleted fisheries, the Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization Act of 2006, seems to be helping, at least a little bit. The act states that each year, NOAA must give status updates on all fish populations within 200 miles of the US Coast. If the fisheries are hurting, fishermen must stop catching those fish until their numbers recover. Over the last 11 years, 27 previously precarious fish populations have been announced recovered; this year, the six lucky winners were the haddock in the Gulf of Maine, the Chinook salmon along the coast of Northern California, the snow crab of the Bering Sea, the summer flounder on the mid-Atlantic coast, the coho salmon on the coast of Washington, and the widow rockfish in the Pacific.

Overall, NOAA takes these recoveries as a sign that the law is doing its job; according to a metric ...

This Tiny Sphere is All the World’s Water | 80beats

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:34:11 +0000

When you’re trudging through the pouring rain to the office, it seems like the Earth possesses an infinite amount of water, a not-insignificant amount of which is dripping down your collar. But when you see an image like this one, produced by the USGS, it hammers home the reality of the situation: the water’s all spread out in a very thin layer, like a millimeter of frosting on a cake. If you gathered all the world’s water—from oceans, lakes, groundwater, water vapor, everything—into a sphere, it would have a diameter of 860 miles. That’s the distance between Salt Lake City and Topeka, Kansas.

That’s still a fairly big sphere, when you think about it: that same water spread out in an even layer across the United States would leave us under a 90-mile-deep lake. But it isn’t nearly as big as you might expect, looking at our blue marble in photos from space or dipping your toes in the Atlantic. To boot, very little of that water—less than 4%—is freshwater, and the vast majority of that is locked up in glaciers and ice caps. We’ve got just a tiny fraction of that sphere at our disposal; ...

Insects that skate on the ocean benefit from plastic junk | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Tue, 08 May 2012 23:00:45 +0000

Imagine a world of two dimensions, a world with no up or down… just across. No climbing, falling, jumping, or ducking… just shimmying and sidling. Welcome to the world of the sea skater.

Sea skaters, or ocean striders, are small bugs. They’re relatives of the pond skaters or water striders that zip spread-eagled across the surface of ponds and lakes. Except they skate over the open ocean, eating plankton at the surface. “They skate through storms and wind and waves,” says Miriam Goldstein from the University of California San Diego and the Deep Sea News blog. “They even have a little ‘life jacket’ – the hairs on their body trap air so if they get sunk by a wave, they pop back up. They’re amazing!”

There are only five species of sea skaters, all belonging to the Halobates group. Of all the millions of insect species, these five are the only ones to live out at sea. Now, Goldstein has discovered that one sea skater Halobates sericeus actually benefits from what most people would regard as an ecological disaster – the circling mass of plastic and debris known as the ...

How I Contained the Mississippi | DISCOVER

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A year ago, an unusually rainy spring caused the Mississippi River’s most serious flooding since 1927. Record-setting water levels threatened Memphis, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. It was up to Major General Michael Walsh, then commander of the  Mississippi Valley division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to open floodgates and blow up levees, flooding some areas but averting catastrophe in major cities downstream. In his own words, here’s how he decided where to send the swelling waters.

We knew it was going to be a challenging flood year. I was working in an operations center aboard the Mississippi, the largest motor vessel on the river: 241 feet long, with five decks.

We have a comprehensive flood plan that dictates what to do when water reaches certain levels—where we need to allow controlled flooding to save cities downstream. By April 9 the flood gauges at Cairo, Illinois, which straddles the Missouri and Kentucky borders, exceeded allowable limits. We were supposed to open the nearby Birds Point–New Madrid Floodway when the water reached 61 feet, and on the night of May 1, the forecast level climbed to 63 feet. The decision was clear. If I didn’t open that floodway and relieve the pressure, levees would have broken somewhere else—but the angst level was very high. We planned to submerge 130,000 acres of farmland, and Missouri’s attorney general asked the Supreme Court to stop the operation, but the court refused the request. I gave the order and we blew up the floodway on May 2.

Our first move removed about a fifth of the water flowing through that area, but we hadn’t gone far enough—we still had to open up the next floodway, the Bonnet Carré, just upstream of New Orleans. We opened it on May 9, in bright sunshine, with a few hundred people out to watch.

Even then the river was flowing at record rates...

Impatient Futurist: Your Personal, Automated Mass Transit Vehicle Is on Its Way | DISCOVER

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Despite my mania for all manner of irresponsible personal vehicles, I’m actually a public-transportation nut. A few of the reasons:
• I can read, check email, send text messages, or catch a few winks while I’m zipping to my destination
• I have built-in motivation for walking, given that I have to get to and from the bus or train stop
• I feel good that my ride isn’t fueled by the conversion of fossilized sea life into impending climate catastrophe
• I get to trade small talk and occasional newspaper sections with fellow transit riders.

But I know you have your very good reasons for being among the 98 percent of the population that shuns public transportation:
• You can read, check email, send text messages, or catch a few winks while you’re swerving into oncoming traffic and pedestrians
• You have built-in motivation for stopping at Wendy’s for celebration takeout, given that you haven’t had to walk more than nine consecutive steps the entire day
• You feel good about the copious burning of hydrocarbons, which is creating valuable new beachfront property
• You get to trade hand gestures and occasional gunfire with fellow traffic jammers.

Ok, go ahead and sneer at my bus through the windshield of your Range Rollover. Thanks to some snazzy high-tech upgrades coming to public transit over the next several years, I’ll have the last laugh. Surely you’d envy me, for example, were my bus to suddenly lower four large metal wheels next to its tires and jump onto nearby rail tracks to go roaring off past your Toyota Highballer and all the other traffic. Or were my bus to pass over the roof of your Porsche Careen, supported on giant stilts with wheels that ran on either side of the road. Or, perhaps most impressive, were my commuter train to fly by you—really, actually fly by, lifted a few feet in the air by side-mounted wings.

Well, get ready to gawk. The next time you’re in Asia, that is, because the track-riding bus and the flying train are Japanese projects in prototypes (at Toyota and Tohoku University, respectively), and a stilted bus has been developed in China...

Ancient Microbes (“Bacteriasicles”) From Melting Glaciers Are Spilling Into Oceans | 80beats

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:47:24 +0000

Melting polar ice has a worrisome list of consequences—methane gas release, rising sea levels, and the liberation of long frozen 750,000-year-old microbes. While melting glaciers probably aren’t going to turn into Jurassic Park, scientists are understandably concerned how they might affect the environment. Scientific American has a new feature on the impact of these liberated microbes on ocean life:

More likely is [the] prospect that thawing ice sheets will allow ancient microbial genes to mix with modern ones, flooding the oceans with never-before-seen types of organisms. Rogers [an evolutionary biology] believes this is already taking place. “What we think is happening is that things are melting out all the time and you’re getting mixing of these old and new genotypes,” he said.

The biggest effect of these newly liberated – and potentially newly remade –microbes will likely be seen in the oceans, Christner [a microbiologist] said. Earth’s glaciers and sub-glacial sediments contain more microbial cells and carbon than all the lakes and rivers on the surface of the planet – a huge load of organic matter that, if thawed, would end up in the sea, he said.

Microorganisms have a remarkable ability to survive ...

Gallery | Our Wonderful Age of Abundance, in 9 Striking Infographics | DISCOVER

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:40:00 +0000

Click through to view gallery

Does Rain Come From Life in the Clouds? | DISCOVER

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 22:05:00 +0000

The plane pitches violently as it plows through the milky innards of a cloud bank. A commercial pilot would fly high above these clouds over California’s Sierra Nevada Range, but this 63-foot Gulfstream-1 seems to invite the turbulence. Updrafts grab hold of the aircraft and shove it up even as the pilot noses it down. In the back of the plane, atmospheric chemist Kimberly Prather wears headphones to muffle the roar of the propellers. She steadies herself with a hand on an instrument rack and focuses on the bobbing screen of her laptop. Readings from the clouds spool across it.

Those numbers tell Prather that these winter clouds are cold and heavy, –30 degrees Fahrenheit and just over 100 percent relative humidity. Yet despite being 62 degrees below the freezing point of water, the cloud droplets remain stubbornly liquid. As long as they don’t form ice crystals, these clouds won’t shed more than a few flakes of snow over the Sierras’ 13,000-foot peaks. They are typical clouds, teasers that won’t drop much of anything.

After two hours of flying, though, something changes. The voice of another researcher crackles over Prather’s headset: “Ice!” The plane has entered a cloud layer where suddenly every droplet is frozen. Prather’s instrument—a tangle of metal tubes, wires, and airtight chambers nicknamed Shirley—tick-tick-ticks as its laser blasts apart hundreds of microscopic cloud particles, one by one, that are drawn in from the air outside. The size and composition of each particle flash across Prather’s monitor. The specks at the heart of those ice crystals are high in aluminum, iron, silicon, and titanium, the chemical signatures of dust not from California but from faraway deserts in Asia or even Africa. There’s something else in the crystals too: carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, telltale signs of biological cells...

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Image: A high-altitude balloon is readied for a 2011 launch at a NASA facility in New Mexico. It carried microbe collectors up to 120,000 feet.

Eyeless Shrimp, Clawless Crabs, & Other Nightmarish Effects of the Gulf Oil Spill | 80beats

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:40:47 +0000

Mutated shrimp from Al Jazeera’s video report

Al Jazeera‘s report on seafood in the Gulf Coast reads like a horror story: eyeless shrimp, fish with oozing sores, clawless crabs. Unfortunately these deformities are very real and disturbingly common two years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. Chemical dispersants used by BP to “clean up” the oil spill are the likely cause.

Deformities happen even in ordinary circumstances, but scientists and fishers are seeing them in unprecedented scales in Gulf marine life. For example, half the shrimp caught in a Louisiana bay lacked eye sockets, according to fishers interviewed by journalist Dahr Jamail.

“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” [commercial fisher Tracy Kuhn] added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.

Perhaps the most troubling line in the whole article is this: “Questions raised by Al Jazeera’s investigation remain largely unanswered.” When Jamail ...

Let’s Take a Walk Through the Science of Walking | 80beats

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:56:33 +0000

Walk through a crowded city and you’re making dozens of instinctive choices: swerve to avoid the guy staring at his Blackberry, walk around those subway grates, speed up so you don’t walk side by side with a stranger, and on and on. While pedestrians aren’t usually thinking too hard about these decisions, scientists are. Over at Slate, Tom Vanderbilt has a four-part series on the history, the science, and the future of walking in American. In part two, about the science of walking, Vanderbilt profiles a company that models how people walk with mathematics:

The Legion model seeks to understand, with each step the pedestrian takes, what their next step will be, based on a mathematically weighted combination of three factors (the tolerance for, and wish to avoid, inconvenience, frustration, and discomfort). More minor things are often observed—people pausing briefly in London before exiting a transit station to see if it’s raining—but not fully modeled yet. (Plottner [Legion's VP] notes the company already has some 9 million pedestrian measurements.)

Getting large crowds of people to move smoothly often involves negating people’s own natural inclinations. In London, or in Chinese cities, he notes, it is common to see a long ...

Climbing Everest is So Much Like Aging That the Mayo Clinic is Headed There To Do Research | 80beats

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:37:51 +0000

Mount Everest is often the site of impressive physical feats, as climbers brave brutal conditions to scale the tallest peak in the world. But the extreme altitude takes quite a toll on the body, causing hypoxia, muscle loss, sleep apnea, and other ill effects. Many of the same symptoms are more commonly found in elderly patients suffering from heart conditions or other chronic ailments—meaning Everest provides a natural laboratory for researchers to gain a better understanding of these diseases.

Scientists from the Mayo Clinic are making their way from Minnesota to Everest base camp, where they’ll set up an ersatz lab to monitor the vital signs of nine climbers making the ascent (the scientists’ 1,300 pounds of equipment will be carried to camp by yaks). The team will gather data on the mountaineers’ heart rate, oxygen levels, and sleep quality, as well as taking samples of their blood and urine. Among the questions the scientists will investigate are whether muscle loss, common in heart disease patients and the elderly, is related to lack of oxygen, especially during sleep, and why fluid gathers in the lungs of both ...

Scientists crawl into tower of poo to understand reasons for swift decline | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 23:00:56 +0000

For some scientists, an academic career can feel like crawling into a tower of crap. For other scientists, an academic career actually involves crawling into a tower of crap.

Since 1928, thousands of chimney swifts have roosted at Fleming Hall, a university building in Kingston, Ontario. For decades, they fed on local insects, and excreted the remains down one of the building’s chimneys. Around 2 centimetres of droppings, or ‘guano’, built up every year until the chimney was finally capped in 1992. To this date, Fleming Hall contains a hardened guano tower, two metres tall and 64 years in the making, which preserves a layered record of the swifts’ meals.

Now, a team of scientists, led by Joseph Nocera, have used this archive of historical poo to explain why the swift populations have fallen by 90 per cent since their heyday.

The guano tower was discovered by Chris Grooms from the Kingston Field Naturalists, who brought it to the team’s attention. They reached it via a 2-foot-wide square door at the bottom of the chimney, and found a two-metre-tall column. “One has to be somewhat of a contortionist to get in,” says ...

Attack of the Flying, Invasive Carp | DISCOVER

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:20:00 +0000

Ending through corn and  soybean fields southwest of Chicago, the Illinois River eventually comes to the sleepy little town of Havana, Illinois. On the east bank of the river, the populated side, there is a field station run by the Illinois Natural History Survey. For decades now, INHS biologists in aluminum skiffs have scooted up and down the thinly wooded banks, monitoring local fish—these days, catching, recording and releasing approximately 150,000 of them a year. The local species are small and nondescript for the most part; their behavior is unremarkable. Probably the most colorful thing about these fish is their names: gizzard shad, bigmouth buffalo, largemouth bass, bluntnose minnow—hand-hewn names from America’s heartland.

In the mid-‘90s, though, the lazy stretch of river around Havana was roiled by the invasion of two species of Asian carp, the bighead carp and its flamboyant cousin, the silver carp. Imported from China during the 1970s, the carp escaped their ponds in the South, migrated up the Mississippi River, and spread into tributaries like the Illinois. “They puttered along for a few generations,” says Duane C. Chapman, the top Asian carp expert for the U.S. Geological Service, “and then they reached an exponential growth phase.” A quirk of silver carp behavior—an exaggerated startle response, causing them to leap from the water when boats approached—revealed their enormous, unexpected populations in the rivers of the Midwest. Along La Grange Reach, as this section of the Illinois is called, routine monitoring tasks took a dangerous turn. Today, the biologists have to measure the local species amid a glut of flying aliens.

You’re sitting in the kill zone,” Thad Cook remarked to me, as the skiff pulled away from the launch site. Cook, director of the INHS station, was driving. He sat behind a low shield in the stern, but the visitor’s chair beside him was exposed. I stood up nervously, holding onto a strut. I recalled reading about a woman who nearly died while riding a jet-ski near Peoria, upstream from Havana, in 2004. She was knocked unconscious by a silver carp and tumbled into the river. “We’re at ground zero,” Cook warned, smiling. “The carp don’t wax and wane here.” In a video I’d watched on the Internet, a water-skier wearing a football helmet laughs hysterically as he is towed through a fusillade of carp...

The full text of this article is available only to DISCOVER subscribers. Click through to the article to subscribe, log in, or buy a digital version of this issue.

Is Natural Gas Cleaner Than Coal? It Depends on Leaks—and There’s a Huge One in the North Sea | 80beats

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:52:08 +0000

A news report from the first week of the leak.

Since March 25, the Elgin gas platform off the coast of Scotland has been leaking 7 million cubic feet of gas a day. The natural gas, mostly methane, doesn’t have the dark stain of oil and it hasn’t inspired the news coverage of Deepwater Horizon. But that doesn’t mean it can be ignored.

Like carbon dioxide, methane is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. But methane is much worse: the same amount of methane will have 25 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. In the six months that it will take to stop the leak, enough methane would have escaped into the atmosphere to equal the annual global warning impact as 300,000 new cars, according to a recent TIME article.

The Elgin gas leakage is an extreme example of how natural gas exploration and processing is always beset by leaks. After all, the stuff is gas that wants to float away. The TIME piece dissects a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences evaluating whether natural gas really is more environmentally friendly than coal. Their answer? It depends, and ...

With Plenty of Cheap Electricity to Spare, Iceland Courts Server Farms | 80beats

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:29:38 +0000

A geothermal plant in Iceland

Iceland’s gigantic energy reserves, generated from renewable sources like geothermal vents, are all dressed up with nowhere to go—it’s too expensive to get power from the chilly island to anywhere else. But transporting data to and from the island is a different story. Iceland is starting to attract companies that build giant server farms, lured by the cheap electricity and the possibility of being able to market “green” power.

As we’ve noted before, data centers, which store information people put in the cloud and handle processing tasks that keep the Internet chugging along, are huge energy users. Their demand for electricity is growing by leaps and bounds, with some estimates holding that by 2020, they will use quadruple the energy they did in 2007.

Proposals that data centers move to places where renewable energy is cheap are not new. But a short article over at Technology Review notes some signs that this proposed shift is actually happening. Iceland, seeking to turn its electricity surplus to a profitable use that’s more environmentally friendly than aluminum smelting, which is the current major user of electricity on the island, is courting data centers, ...

Local Fishermen Help Scientists Understand the Secrets of a Lake | 80beats

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:40:59 +0000

Lake Como, in Northern Italy

Sometimes, the collective knowledge of generations of locals is just as valuable as a network of high-tech sensors. That’s what scientists studying the fluid dynamics of Lake Como in the Italian Alps found, when they began to interview fishermen.

The team from the University of Western Australia had been studying the complex currents and temperature gradations in the Y-shaped lake for some time, using a system of floating sensors. Alongside them were the approximately 30 local fisherman who go out each night to string out their giant gill nets, as much as 2,300 feet long and 27 feet high. In the morning, the fishermen retrieve the nets and any fish—mostly shad and whitefish—that have swum into them overnight.

The lake, as described by the fishermen

The team was surprised at first to learn that the fishermen were aware of some the complex phenomena the team had observed. But it made sense: When you are laying out nets that long, it behooves you to know where the currents will have taken them by morning, as well as whether they will be blown into your neighbor’s nets by the breeze. The ...

A Storm-Chaser Who's Looked Straight Into a Tornado's Heart | DISCOVER

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:50:00 +0000

By early June of 2009, Joshua Wurman was exhausted and discouraged. For weeks, the nomadic teams of VORTEX2 (the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment) had crisscrossed the Midwest in pursuit of the violent thunderstorms that can generate tornadoes. Yet all that he and the other meteorologists had encountered so far were a few rain showers. With more than 100 participants, 11 radar trucks, 13 instrument-laden vehicles, an unmanned plane, and millions of dollars from the National Science Foundation in play, the most ambitious tornado field study ever was at risk of failing. The weather was just too nice.

But when the scientists finally intercepted their first  tornado of the season in Goshen County, Wyoming, it offered an amazing coup. For the first time, they were able to capture detailed data on the entire life cycle of a  tornado, from gestation to birth to demise. Analysis of information from this storm and dozens of lesser intercepts in 2009 and 2010, combined with new insights from computer simulations, may finally answer the researchers’  biggest question: What triggers a tornado? Zeroing in on how tornadoes get going could lengthen warning times from the current, dangerously short average of 13 minutes and also lower the rate of false alarms. DISCOVER recently  spoke with Wurman, who has probably collected data on more tornadoes than any other scientist, about his theory of how tornadoes form, the twisters that claimed 548 lives in 2011, and a recent storm that flat-out awed him.

What makes tornadoes so unpredictable? 
We know the fundamentals of how supercell thunderstorms—the ones that produce tornadoes—form. We know that there need to be certain conditions of temperature, relative humidity, and wind speeds at different altitudes. What we don’t really understand very well is why only 25 percent of the supercells make tornadoes and when in their life cycle they do it: Why did that particular supercell make a tornado now, not 15  minutes ago, or 15 minutes from now? The reason we drive 15,000 miles a year to catch 10 tornadoes is because we don’t know which supercells are going to make them or when...

Image: Wurman in Battle Pass, Wyoming, in November. Behind him is the Doppler on Wheels, the mobile radar truck he invented. Photograph by Beth Wald

Is Wind Spreading a Mysterious Disease Across the Pacific? | 80beats

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:13:47 +0000

Strawberry tongue, a symptom of Kawasaki disease.

Scientists don’t know much about the cause of Kawasaki disease—a disease of blood vessel inflammation most commonly found in Japan—but they do know one thing: Japanese outbreaks are highly correlated with winds from central Asia. When those same winds blow thousands of miles across the Pacific to Hawaii and California, Kawasaki disease ends up there too.

The disease affects generally children under the age of five. Blood vessels through the body become inflamed, leading to rashes, a characteristic “strawberry tongue,” and death in some untreated cases. Japanese pediatrician Tomisaku Kawasaki described the first case in 1960, and incidence of the mysterious disease have been rising ever since.

In the latest issue of Nature, Jennifer Fraser profiles scientists who are looking to the wind for answers about Kawasaki disease. There are a couple examples of windspread fungal spores, just as Aspergillus sydowii that follows dust storms from Africa to the Caribbean, but conditions up high are so extreme that wind had not been seriously considered capable of spreading disease across the Pacific:

Microbiologists have generally assumed that ultraviolet radiation and the near-cryogenic temperatures at high altitude will annihilate any infectious microbes ...

How Do You Prove a Bear Guilty of Murder? | 80beats

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:00:18 +0000

A grizzly bear crossing the street in Yellowstone.

You can’t get inside the head of a grizzly bear, yet that’s exactly what bear managers try to do every time a wild animal attacks a hiker. A bear acting out of self-defense is allowed to live, but a bear is attacking and eating humans must be killed. That’s the rules of our grizzly bear justice system.

Last summer, a female bear called the Wapiti sow was euthanized after bear managers ruled her responsible for the only two grizzly bear-related deaths in Yellowstone of the past 25 years. The first mauling was probably out of self-defense but the second, well, the only evidence pointing toward her was circumstantial. In the tradition of true crime, Jessica Grose at Slate has written a riveting piece about the Wapiti sow case. At the heart of the issue is what happens when humans and bears are forced to confront each other:

It occurs to me later that this moment perfectly illustrates what [bear manager] Chris Servheen calls “the Park Service paradox.” City slickers like me go to Yellowstone to feel humbled by nature, by its sheer beauty and its uncontrollability—that’s part ...

Climate  Engineers Get  a PR Lesson | DISCOVER

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:00:00 +0000

It sounded like an odd but harmless experiment.  Last October British scientists planned to send a balloon more than half a mile high to spray water into the air. Yet a few days before the test, it was delayed amid major backlash from environmental groups.

Though the trial itself would surely have been safe, it was a step toward something far more controversial: geoengineering, the use of large-scale human intervention to reverse the effects of climate change. Instead of water, the researchers envision that their balloon may one day release tons of particulates that would reflect sunlight and cool the planet.

But judging by the reaction to the pilot experiment, geoengineers will need to employ a delicate public relations strategy as they pursue their research. The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering, or SPICE, project entered the public eye last summer when scientists trumpeted the $200,000 balloon experiment at the British Science Festival. The announcement generated interest but also pushback. A Canadian environmental group sent a letter warning of drought resulting from the future release of sun-blocking particles and claiming that the test would cause a distraction from international efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions...

Destination Science: 17 Best Places for a Geek to Go This Summer | DISCOVER

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:45:00 +0000

A man was working on a plot of private land in Arkansas last fall when he uncovered a set of huge, fossilized dinosaur tracks. Also last year, interested amateurs photographed tides on low-lying stretches of the California coast to help predict the effects of climate change; they also checked up on local patches of milkweed, prime real estate for monarch butterflies, to keep tabs on the insects’ migration patterns.

Scientific wonders are accessible to anyone with the curiosity to seek them out, and summer is the perfect time to get exploring. In that spirit, we’ve brainstormed a whole season’s worth of places to go, sights to see, and things to do. There are destinations across the country, so whether you’re in Albany or Albuquerque, you should be able to find something nearby.

The adventurous among you may find yourselves strapping on an undersea helmet and strolling through a submarine kelp forest or wielding a Geiger counter in a field strewn with remnants of the atomic era, while those traveling with the family can swing by the bayou for a relaxed but rewarding swamp-by-boat tour. And plan to watch the sunset on June 5—there won’t be another like it for 105 years...

Skip to the quick reference guide of summer getaways or see the descriptions below.

GET DOWN TO EARTH  The most exotic geological hot spots in the country

Grand Prismatic Spring Yellowstone  National Park, Wyoming
The plume of molten rock that rises from more than 400 miles inside Earth beneath Yellowstone National Park powers the 10,000 springs, geysers, and other thermal features located where magma-heated water and steam come simmering to the surface. Yellowstone’s biggest hot spring, Grand Prismatic, also hosts some of the planet’s strangest, hardiest life.

“Yellowstone’s known for its bison and bald eagles,” says John Spear, an environmental microbiologist at the Colorado School of Mines, in Golden, “but it’s really a microbial wonderland”...

Yes, Insecticides Kill Bees. Studies ID Chemical That May Contribute to Colony Collapse | 80beats

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:54:03 +0000

Honey bees tagged with RFID chips

The mysterious drop in honey bee populations—often called colony collapse disorder for lack of a more specific name—has generated a long list of suspects that includes mites, viruses, malnutrition, and even cell phone radiation. Two new studies published in Science suggest that neonicotinoids, a class of widely used insecticides, may belong at the top of the list.

That an insecticide kills insects like bees is not particularly surprising. Neonicotoinoids have already been partially banned in Italy, Germany, and France for their possible role in colony collapse disorder. Still, it remains one of the most common pesticides: one neonicotoinid alone, imidacloprid, is authorized for use on over 140 crops in 120 countries. Results from the two new studies suggest that even doses that do not kill the bee immediately can have enough ill effect to eventually cause colony collapse.

The first study in the UK compared 75 bumble bee colonies that researchers had exposed to varying levels of neonicotoinoids over 14 days. (Colony collapse disorder refers specifically to honey bees, but bumble bee numbers have been dropping off too.) After six weeks of foraging in the field, the colonies exposed to ...

Watch This: Earth’s Oceans Wriggling With Durable, Beautiful Currents | 80beats

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:10:22 +0000

For a strangely hypnotic minute and a half, check out this visualization of the Earth’s ocean currents. It flies you across the globe–past small blue swirls and over the bright lines of the Gulf Stream. More ocean current photos and videos, all based on data from NASA’s ECCO2 project, are available to watch and download at the Scientific Visualization Studio.

[via PopSci]

Tools of the Trade: Fierce Old Warplane Has a New Mission: Flying Into the Hearts of Thunderstorms | DISCOVER

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:40:00 +0000

The National Science Foundation provided $10.9 million to convert an old military A-10 Thunderbolt into the world’s most formidable storm-chasing research vessel, outfitted to withstand the lightning, turbulence, and hail that big clouds unleash. “The A-10 was designed to be shot at,” says Paul Smith, an atmospheric scientist at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, who helped acquire the aircraft.

The A-10 will replace the T-28 Trojan, which retired from chasing storms in 2005...

Illustration: Steve Karp

The Continent Where Climate Went Haywire | DISCOVER

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 18:00:00 +0000

“The river came up to right where we’re sitting, and the waters were more than two feet deep,” Peter Goodwin tells me in the driveway of his ranch-style house perched on the banks of the Balonne River in St. George, a village of 3,500 in eastern Australia. It is a drizzly Sunday afternoon in April, three months after a devastating flood that drenched a landmass the size of France and Germany combined and isolated the town after the rain-swollen river rose to a record 45 feet.

Agricultural areas like St. George were hardest hit by the relentless rains and overflowing rivers that swamped roads, cut off power lines, washed away vineyards and fruit orchards, drowned thousands of head of cattle and other livestock, and covered homes and everything inside them in thick layers of sediment and mud. Shell-shocked residents are still digging out from under the debris.

“That’s the hard part of the flood—the aftermath,” says Goodwin, 60, a crusty, compactly built man with piercing blue eyes and calloused hands who works as an operations manager for the local municipality and has been staying with his grown daughter while he makes his home habitable again. “You get a lot of help during the flood, but then everyone settles back into their routine. There are a lot of houses down there that are still empty,” he adds, gesturing toward the riverbank. “And they will be for a long time to come”...

Dung fungus reveal that humans, not climate change, killed Australia’s giant beasts | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 18:00:14 +0000

In Australia, an ancient murder mystery is coming to a riveting conclusion, thanks to an unusual clue – not a fingerprint, or a bloody weapon, but fungal spores preserved in fossilised dung. The spores belong to Sporormiella, a fungus that only grows in mammal and bird droppings. Large plant-eaters provide it with vast banquets. In turn, the fungus reveals how many big vegetarians were living in the neighbourhood.

Scientists have used these spores to study the deaths of the giant animals that once grazed North America – “megafauna” such as mammoths, woolly rhinos, and more. Now, it’s Australia’s turn. By using Sporormiella records, along with other buried clues, Susan Rule from the Australian National University has found strong evidence that acquits a changing climate in the death of Australia’s giants. Instead, her study points the finger squarely at humans.

Australia was once home to giant versions of its current animals, as well as strange forms with no modern counterpart. These included Megalibgwilia, an echidna the size of a sheep; Procoptodon, a huge kangaroo more than twice the size of today’s reds; Thylacoleo, a lion-like hunter with a bone-crushing ...

Meet the man who is scanning the Amazon by plane | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:00:43 +0000

Last September, I travelled to Peru to meet a fascinating scientist who is mapping the Amazon by plane. The piece was published in Wired UK earlier this year, and I’m reprinting it here now. This was one of the most enjoyably things I got to write last year. I hope you enjoy it too

**********

A small, twin-propeller plane flies over the Amazon rainforest in eastern Peru. The scale of the vegetation is extraordinary. The tree canopy stretches as far as the eye can see — an endless array of broccoli florets bounded only by haze and horizon. Greg Asner, 43, has seen the rainforest from this vantage point many times before, but he still stares out of the window in rapt fascination.

This patch of forest in the Tambopata National Reserve is rich with life, even by the Amazon’s standards. A 50-hectare patch of forest — the size of as many rugby pitches — contains more plant species than the whole of North America. “We might as well be exploring Mars,” says Asner. “These are areas where no human has ever been. There’s no access.”

Access isn’t a problem for ...

Vulture blind spots lead to collisions with wind turbines | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:16:42 +0000

Here are two facts that make no sense together:

Vultures have among the sharpest eyes of any animal.

Vultures are among the birds most likely to crash into wind turbines and power lines.

If their eyes can spot a tiny carcass from high up in the air, why can’t they see a massive metallic structure looming in front of them? Because they can’t. Vultures, it turns out, have large blind spots above and below their heads. And because they hold their heads at a downwards angle when they fly, they are blind to everything directly in front of them.

I covered this story for Nature News. Head over there to find out why these blind spots exist, and what we can do to prevent vultures crashing into wind farms (featuring “vulture restaurants”).

Photo by M. Mirinha/STRIX

The Giant, Underestimated Earthquake Threat to North America | DISCOVER

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 17:35:00 +0000

Just over one year ago, a magnitude-9 earthquake hit the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan, triggering one of the most destructive tsunamis in a thousand years. The Japanese—the most earthquake-prepared, seismically savvy people on the planet—were caught off-guard by the Tohoku quake’s savage power. Over 15,000 people died.

Now scientists are calling attention to a dangerous area on the opposite side of the Ring of Fire, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault that runs parallel to the Pacific coast of North America, from northern California to Vancouver Island. This tectonic time bomb is alarmingly similar to Tohoku, capable of generating a megathrust earthquake at or above magnitude 9, and about as close to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver as the Tohoku fault is to Japan’s coast. Decades of geological sleuthing recently established that although it appears quiet, this fault has ripped open again and again, sending vast earthquakes throughout the Pacific Northwest and tsunamis that reach across the Pacific.

What happened in Japan will probably happen in North America. The big question is when.

On a foggy spring morning just before sunrise, 27 miles northwest of Cape Mendocino, California, a pimple of rock roughly a dozen miles below the ocean floor finally reaches its breaking point. Two slabs of the Earth’s crust begin to slip and shudder and snap apart.

The first jolt of stress coming out of the rocks sends a shock wave hurtling into Northern California and southern Oregon like a thunderbolt. For a few stunned drivers on the back roads in the predawn gloom, the pulse of energy that tears through the ground looks dimly like a 20-mile wrinkle moving through a carpet of pastures and into thick stands of redwoods.

Telephone poles whip back and forth as if caught in a hurricane. Power lines rip loose in a shower of blue and yellow sparks, falling to the ground where they writhe like snakes, snapping and biting. Lights go out and the telephone system goes down.

Cornices fall, brick walls crack, plate glass shatters. Pavement buckles, cars and trucks veer into ditches and into each other. A bridge across the Eel River is jerked off its foundations, taking a busload of farm workers with it. With computers crashing and cell towers dropping offline, all of Humboldt and Del Norte Counties in California are instantly cut off from the outside world, so nobody beyond the immediate area knows how bad it is here or how widespread the damage.

At the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) lab in Menlo Park, seismometers peg the quake at magnitude 8.1, and the tsunami detection centers in Alaska and Hawaii begin waking up the alarm system with standby alerts all around the Pacific Rim. Early morning commuters emerging from a BART station in San Francisco feel the ground sway beneath their feet and immediately hit the sidewalk in a variety of awkward crouches, a familiar fear chilling their guts...

Image: The "ghost forest" of dead cedar trees at the Copalis River on the Washington coast is evidence of a major quake three centuries ago.

Water Wranglers | DISCOVER

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:50:00 +0000

Climate change and population growth are both stressing the planet’s freshwater supply.  Our experts debate the tough choices scientists, politicians, and the general public will have to  make to adapt to a world where water could outstrip fuel as the most prized commodity.

This year, Texas suffered through the worst one-year drought in its history, while states along the Mississippi River endured record flooding. Shifting climate patterns mean these radical disruptions could be a harbinger of things to come.

DISCOVER recently partnered with NBC Learn, the National Science Foundation, and Arizona State University to convene a town hall discussion that explored the impact of climate change on our freshwater resources. Anne Thompson, NBC’s chief environmental affairs correspondent, moderated the expert panel, which included (from left): Heidi Cullen, a correspondent for Climate Central, a nonprofit that reports on climate science; Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico and a board member of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank; Grady Gammage Jr., a practicing attorney and a senior scholar at the ASU Global Institute of Sustainability; and Pat Mulroy, general manager  of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Anne Thompson: Water covers more than 70 percent of the Earth, but only 2.5 percent of it is freshwater. And two-thirds of that is locked up in ice caps and glaciers. Freshwater accessible in lakes, rivers, and streams is just six-thousandths of one percent of the world’s total water. With that in mind, what is the status of freshwater around the world today?

Heidi Cullen: Freshwater around the world is definitely stressed, and climate change is the great exacerbation. With water, the rich get richer globally, and the poor get poorer.  Places that tend toward drought are going to see it more. The subtropical drought regions will expand. And in places like Asia, the monsoon system is expected to intensify. It’s a problem of greater uncertainty, greater variability, and more stress overall.

Thompson: Governor Richardson, do you see water scarcity as a source of global crisis?...

Destination Science: The Natural World Outside Disney World | DISCOVER

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:40:00 +0000

Unpaved Orlando
Where: Central Florida
 What: Pristine wilderness in the shadow of America’s theme park capital

Orlando is famous as the family-fun city that Disney built, but it has quietly developed a secret second identity as a jumping-off spot to some of the most pristine wilderness in Florida. Sadly, the bulk of the 50 million-plus visitors who converge on this tourist megalopolis every year, spending hours creeping along congested highways from hotels to theme parks, probably never realize that the other, wilder Florida lurks just an exit away. When I passed through recently with my daughters en route to a family reunion, we were able to explore this hidden Orlando, where tropical ecology is the prime attraction. It was a relaxing antidote to the hyperstimulating theme park experience: no crowds, no merchandise booths, no imitation castles, and the only mouse ears in sight belong to Podomys floridanus, the Florida mouse.

Photo: Look Die Bildagentur der Fotografen GMBH/ALAMY

PetriDish: Fund the Science You Want to See Happen | 80beats

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:00:20 +0000

Two years ago, a pair of scientists put out a shingle on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter: They needed, by hook or by crook, to get to Mexico to study a rare species of quail. 55 people signed up to fund their project to the tune of almost $5,000 dollars, in return for quail T-shirts, books, and the profound thanks of the researchers. The New York Times wrote about it, and ever since, there has been talk of a place on the web just for crowdfunding science.

The newly launched PetriDish.org is an answer to these prayers. The site is visually appealing—cartoon test-tubes fill up with bubbling orange fluid as the projects get funded, and the introductory videos from researchers convey their excitement both about their work and about engaging the community. The nine handpicked projects now on the site are fascinating: funding the search for new species of ants in one of the last standing pristine Malagasy forests, helping get DNA sequences for one of the longest-studied wolf populations in the world, and pitching in to find the first moon orbiting a planet beyond our solar system, among others. And there ...

What Do You Do With a Sunken Cruise Ship? | 80beats

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:58:09 +0000

A schematic of where the Costa Concordia sits on the sea floor.

Nearly two months since the Costa Concordia capsized off the coast of Italy, clean-up crews are still puzzling over what to do with the gigantic wreck. And gigantic it is—with a gross tonnage of 112,000, the Costa Concordia is twice the size of the Titantic.

The immediate concern was oil, 500,000 toxic gallons of it, that could gush into the Mediterranean. Since February 12, the Dutch film Smit has been vacuuming out fuel using a system of pumps and valves. Their work is especially tricky because the wrecked ship sits on the edge of a 200-foot underwater drop-off, and any disturbances can easily push it over. So to minimize the risk of destabilizing the ship while moving 500,000 gallons of oil out of it, Smit is pumping in seawater as it pumps out oil.

Once the fuel is all extracted, crews salvaging the actual ship will have to contend with the precipitous problem too. The cruise’s parent company recently invited 10 firms to bid on the clean-up operation. Charles Choi at Scientific American talked to some experts about possible solutions.

The two most practical solutions seem ...

In 300 Million Years, Never Has the Ocean Acidified So Fast | 80beats

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:00:34 +0000

In addition to rising temperatures, wildly fluctuating weather, and higher sea levels, global climate change is triggering a spike in the acidity of the oceans, as the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reacts with seawater. In an attempt to see whether anything like the projected climb in acidity has happened before and what we can expect the results to be, scientists have been looking into the geological record and recently published their findings in Science. Poring over the carbon isotopes in ancient rock, the fossilized bodies of long-extinct creatures, and the chemical compositions of those bodies, they looked as far back—300 million years—as we have fairly reliable geological records. They found that for the track we’re on, there really is no good analog in the past: even the extreme extinction events of the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction, which killed 96% of marine species, and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which likewise caused huge extinctions in the oceans, happened after slower rises in acidity than we will see. It’s hard to say how much of those massive extinctions was due to acidification and how much was due to related factors, like warming. But we already ...

Scientists and tourists bring thousands of alien seeds into Antarctica | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:00:25 +0000

Aliens are invading Antarctica. Thanks largely to scientists, they have already established a foothold on the frozen continent, and their numbers are set to increase. This might sound like the plot of John Carpenter’s classic film The Thing, but it is very real.

The aliens in question are not body-snatching monsters, but plants from other parts of the world. Steven Chown from Stellenbosch University found that in just one summer, visitors unwittingly imported around 70,000 seeds to Antarctica. And even though the continent has a reputation for being harsh and desolate, many of these immigrants have already founded populations in their new homes.

This is a new chapter in an old story. Wherever humans go, seeds hitch a lift on our clothes and belongings. If these foreigners germinate where they don’t belong, they can often out-compete native plants and uproot local ecosystems. From Japanese knotweed to kudzu vines, these invasive species cause problems throughout the world. Inhospitable though Antarctica is, it’s not immune to such invasions. It does, however, present a valuable opportunity to study them.

In most cases, we can only see the results of plant invasions when it’s ...

A Voyage into the Deep: Inside the Plans to Dive the Mariana Trench | 80beats

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 20:19:51 +0000

Even in the age of satellite imagery, commercial flight, modern medicine, and plenty of other perks unavailable to the explorers of earlier ages, there are still some crannies on Earth left unexplored. But that’s because exploring them is an extreme endeavor. The race to get to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the deepest place on Earth, now includes billionaires Richard Branson and James Cameron, each working on specialized submersibles. Eliza Strickland of IEEE Spectrum traveled to the epicenter of the activity near the Mariana Islands and reports back in a fascinating feature.

It’s a great Friday afternoon adventure story, so we’ll get you started with this excerpt:

As the battered little boat slides down a 3-meter ocean swell into the next trough, Chris Welsh grits his teeth and peers out into the storm. Sheets of rain pummel the dark windows of the bridge, and a Micronesian sailor wrestles with the wheel. It’s past midnight on a July night and we’re bobbing over the almost 11 kilometers of water that fill the deepest abyss on Earth, the Mariana Trench. Welsh is leading a small party of engineers, scientists, and adventurers under ...

Beetle pest destroys coffee plants with a gene stolen from bacteria | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:00:27 +0000

For fans of a velvety latte or a jolting espresso, meet your greatest enemy: the coffee berry borer beetle. This tiny pest, just a few millimetres long, can ruin entire coffee harvests. It affects more than 20 million farming families, and causes losses to the tune of half a billion US dollars every year- losses that are set to increase as the world warms.

But the beetle isn’t acting alone. It has a secret weapon, stolen from an unwitting accomplice.

Ricardo Acuña has found that the beetle’s ancestors pilfered a gene from bacteria, most likely the ones that live in its gut. This gene, now on permanent loan, allows the insect to digest the complex carbohydrates found in coffee berries. It may well have been the key to the beetle’s global success.

Bacteria regularly trade genes in a global markeplace, and they do so to their advantage. They exchange genes that allow them to thrive in new environments, fend off assaults from antibiotics, or wage deadlier infections.

Among more complex creatures like animals or plants, such ‘horizontal gene transfers’ are much rarer. Many examples have only recently come to ...

Study: Raindrops Take Energy Out of Air | 80beats

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:21:16 +0000

Thank god for air friction. Without it, falling rain would smack into our heads at hundreds of miles per hour. But friction works both ways—falling raindrops also slow down the movement of air molecules in the atmosphere. A new paper in Science calculated that raindrops dissipate as much kinetic energy from the atmosphere as air turbulence. Granted, at 1.8 watts per square meter and 0.75% of the atmosphere’s total kinetic energy, that’s not very much. What’s surprising is that rain drops are pulling more than their weight, as they make up only 0.01% of the atmosphere’s mass.

Researchers calculated the kinetic energy dissipated by a single raindrop and put it together with precipitation rates around the world. Since satellite precipitation data also show the height from which rain started falling, the researchers could plug how far raindrops fell into their energy calculations. It all adds up across the whole globe: the researchers estimate the total rate of energy dissipation from rainfall to be 1015 Watts. That’s a lot of energy, but still unlikely to affect major weather phenomena like hurricanes or tornados.

[via Nature News]

Image via Shutterstock

A Big Blue Swirl in the Ocean is a Sign of Microscopic Life | 80beats

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:13:31 +0000

Along the top of this satellite image lies the coast of South Africa, but follow the sheets of clouds south about 500 miles, and a beautiful, incongruous-looking blue swirl appears. That plankton-laced eddy, which is 90 miles wide, is the oceanic version of a storm, spun off from a larger current and caused by roiling of water instead of air. Eddies in this region bring warm water from the Indian Ocean to the South Atlantic, and they can even pull nutrients up from the deep sea, fertilizing surface waters and causing blooms of plankton in areas that are otherwise rather devoid of life. It is just such a bloom that lends this eddy its cerulean hue.

Image courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory

How to Make Acres of Fake Snow | 80beats

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:13:51 +0000

When winter doesn’t hold up its end of the snow bargain (we’re looking at you, this winter), ski areas often make their own, using devices like the one above and plenty of water. A short piece on the New York Times site describes the moment in 1950 when modern snowmaking was invented, when Wayne Pierce, an employee at Mohawk Mountain in Connecticut, improved upon the owner’s plan of trucking in tons of shredded ice:

He figured that a drop of water, propelled through below-freezing air, would turn into a snowflake, [colleague Arthur] Hunt recalled. Along with Dave Richey, their partner in a ski factory, they slapped together a spray-gun nozzle, a 10-horsepower compressor and a garden hose into something of a D.I.Y. snow gun. They experimented with it all night. “By morning,” Hunt wrote, “we had a 20-inch pile of snow over a diameter of 20 feet.” The contraption was later used at Mohawk Mountain.

Snowmaking has since developed quite a bit. While early attempts at snowmaking used just water, these days a special mixture of dirt and water is used to get natural freezing: as we’ve written before, ice crystals usually need a particle to ...

Money vs. Science | Cosmic Variance

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:35:53 +0000

Everyone who has been paying attention knows that there is a strong anti-science movement in this country — driven partly by populist anti-intellectualism, but increasingly by corporate interests that just don’t like what science has to say. It’s an old problem — tobacco companies succeeded for years in sowing doubt about the health effects of smoking — but it’s become significantly worse in recent years.

Nina Fedoroff is the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which is holding its annual meeting right now. She is not holding back about the problem, but tackling it directly. From a weekend article in the Guardian (h/t Dan Gillmor):

“We are sliding back into a dark era,” she said. “And there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.”

Tim F. at Balloon Juice points to this flowchart at Climate Progress that illustrates how the money and message gets sent around to sow doubt about scientific findings. (Okay, it’s not really a flow chart, but you get the point.) I was also struck by a link to an older article by Ian Sample, which put the problem in its starkest terms: the American Enterprise Institute was offering $10,000 to scientists and economists who were willing to write op-eds or essays critiquing the IPCC climate report — before it was published. Money goes a long way.

Relatedly, here’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg trying to push the Supreme Court away from its ruling in Citizens United, the notorious case that led to the creation of SuperPACs by deciding that corporations were persons, and not letting them advertise anonymously would be a grievous violation of their free-speech rights. We’ll see how well she does. Scientists, meanwhile, need to keep speaking out about the integrity of our field. When researchers are attacked and their jobs threatened by politicians who disagree with their results, it’s time to stand up for what science really means.

What To Do With Invasive Asian Carp: Electrocute, Poison, or Bow and Arrow? | 80beats

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 14:24:15 +0000

At 50 pounds, the Asian carp can pack up a punch–especially if you get caught in a cloud of jumping fish. “The air is so thick with fish that some bash together mid-flight, showering everyone with a snot-like splatter,” writes Ben Paynter in a Bloomberg Businessweek feature on the invasive Asian carp.

Damaged boats and injured boaters—broken noses and concussions are among the alleged crimes of the Asian carp—aren’t even the biggest problems with the fish. The bottom-dwellers eat voraciously, starving the native fish and quickly outgrowing any natural predators. They’re now in 23 states, and fears are that they will soon invade the Great Lakes.

Drastic policies to protect the Great Lakes, such as completely rerouting the trade through Chicago’s waterways, have made it as far as the Supreme Court even though tracking the fish’s actual location is rather imprecise. (The Supreme Court rejected the request.) eDNA—e for “environmental”—detects the presence of DNA from Asian carp but it can’t tell the difference between 1 and 100 fish or even between a live fish or a few scales. Instead, writes Paynter, researchers have resorted to brute force methods for counting fish in a river: electrocution and poison.

[N]ear a railroad track ...

4 Bold Ideas to Make America’s Energy Supply  Safer, Cleaner &  Virtually Inexhaustible | DISCOVER

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:50:00 +0000

Greenhouse-gas emissions produced by each economic sector in the United States. Source: EPA; numbers rounded.

Perhaps it is time to retire the term “energy crisis.” People have been talking about one crisis or another since at least the early 1970s, for so long that the term has nearly lost its meaning. At any rate, we are not about to run out of energy: We have enough fossil fuels on the planet to power civilization for another half century or more. It is more honest to say that we are in the midst of an energy transition, a wrenching change in the kinds of energy we use and the ways we produce them. If we continue to rely on coal to keep the lights burning and gasoline to keep our cars running, we are bound to pay a heavy price. Imported oil accounts for 42 percent of our trade imbalance. Fossil fuels collectively produce 95 percent of the carbon emissions that are heating the planet. And the need for reliable sources of energy becomes more evident with every geopolitical tremor.

To explore a future in which the United States powers itself both independently and cleanly, DISCOVER teamed up with the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to organize a series of briefings on Capitol Hill. The presentations brought lawmakers together with eight leading energy scientists and policy experts to map out the road to a new energy economy. This is the way forward...

The Would-Be Nuclear Power Plant That Became a Tourist Attraction | 80beats

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:49:28 +0000

In a dank, humid room 45 miles west of Manila is a direct line to the office of the Philippine president. The Bataan Nuclear Power Plant was to be the first nuclear plant in Southeast Asia. That never happened, and the power plant hasn’t generated a single kilowatt-hour since its completion in 1984. Owners sold off the uranium in 1997. In 2011, it was a reborn as a tourist attraction. The phone to the direct line sits on display, never used.

The Bataan plant has proved popular as a tourist destination, getting booked up months in advance. Especially common are Japanese tourists, who are wary about the safety of nuclear power since the Fukushima disaster. In fact, the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters both pushed Bataan out of favor just when prospects for the nuclear power plant were just looking up. ”We don’t need to hire nuclear experts but feng shui masters to get rid of the bad luck,” says Mauro Marcelo, a nuclear engineer who works there.

But politics, rather than feng shui, is holding sway, according to a New York Times feature on the Bataan plant:

The fate of the Bataan plant ...

Graphic: The Meter-by-Meter Account of How Russian Scientists Got to Lake Vostok | 80beats

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:29:25 +0000

Antarctic lake, ho! Nearly twenty years ago Russian scientists began drilling through the over two miles of ice above Lake Vostok, a gigantic underground lake in Antarctica that hasn’t seen the surface in 20 million years. The pristine lake was reached last week, prompting a flurry of discussion among scientists and members of the media about how the Russian team could keep from contaminating it and whether unusual microbial life would be found there. Kept warm and liquid by heat from the center of the Earth, Lake Vostok, the largest in a chain of about 200 underground (or under-ice) lakes, is similar to the oceans supposed to exist below the surface on moons Enceladus and Europa, which makes this an exciting time to be an astrobiologist. Or, really, anyone interested in the origins of life.

It can be hard to reconstruct in your head the long, drawn-out process of reaching the lake when poring over the recent news stories on this topic. But a nice graphic put together by Nature News gives a blow-by-blow: In 1990, scientists began drilling at Vostok Station, the Russians’ Antarctic base, returning every summer to continue the task. ...

Theoretical Metamaterial Could Protect Buildings From Earthquakes By Dissipating Energy | 80beats

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:45:01 +0000

Metamaterials—materials engineered to have optical, thermal, or other specific properties naturally occurring substances don’t—can block, bend, and otherwise manipulate all sorts of waves: they can, at least in theory, twist light to render objects invisible, contort ultrasound waves to hide things from sonar, and disguise the telltale wake of a submarine. Now, in an arXiv paper, Australian and Korean researchers have suggested another wave-altering use for metamaterials: protecting buildings from earthquakes’ powerful seismic waves.

Rather than bending or deflecting the waves, as most metamaterial cloaks do, the proposed earthquake barrier would dissipate the energy from the waves, causing them to taper off—and protecting the building it surrounds. The barrier would be composed of large concrete tubes with holes in the sides, sunk in the ground around a building; the paper looks specifically at circular tubes (see above), but cubic or hexagonal tubes, the researchers write, would work too. A full barrier, enveloping a structure’s foundations with many tubes, might measure 200 feet across, they suggest.

Since this method of seismic protection would require some space around the building, as ...

The Mystery of the Exploding Manure Pits | 80beats

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:26:15 +0000

The only thing worse than a huge stinking pit of manure may be a huge stinking and foaming pit of manure that blows up the barn. Over the past few years, explosions have destroyed several Midwestern pig farms, killing thousands of hogs and causing millions of dollars of damage. Pig farmers and scientists have been at a loss to explain these explosions. Could the culprit be a small microbe?

Methane gas is a natural byproduct of bacteria living in manure pits. It’s odorless (blame hydrogen sulfide for the unpleasant smell), colorless, and just so happens to be very flammable. There has been a recent uptick in reports of foam in these manure pits, rising as high as four feet. What’s trapped in the little bubbles of foam? Methane, of course. With such a high concentration of flammable gas, all it takes is a little spark.

The mystery is why these deep manure pits, standard practice for years, are suddenly foaming over the top. Researchers have noticed a correlation (pdf) between foaming and hogs fed a diet heavy in DDGS, or distiller’s dried grains with solubles. DDGS is the dried leftover mash from ...