Earth Bytes

Base of Quaternary, Pleistocene fixed at 2.6 My

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:40:00 +0000

Published online by Nature 3 June 2009 | Nature 459, 624 (2009) | doi:10.1038/459624a

Quaternary geologists win timescale vote

by Amanda Leigh Mascarelli

The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) has elected to formally define the base of the Quaternary at 2.6 million years before present, and also to lower the base of the Pleistocene — an epoch that encompasses the most recent glaciations — from its historical position at 1.8 million years to 2.6 million years ago. The decision, finalized on 21 May, will now be passed to the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) for ratification, which is expected in the next month or two.

The vote shifts an 800,000-year slice, formerly part of the Pliocene epoch, into the Pleistocene. "It's kind of a land grab," says Philip Gibbard, a geologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who has fought for the redefinition since 2001. "But we see it as just putting straight a mistake that was made 25–30 years ago."

In 1985, the beginning of the Pleistocene was defined at 1.8 million years ago, calibrated to an outcropping of marine strata in southern Italy. But some geologists have long felt that was a localized, arbitrary boundary that did not reflect worldwide changes — and argued instead for the 2.6-million-year mark, when the entire planet cooled.

The term Quaternary was adopted in the early 1800s, when geologists divvied up fossil records of Earth's history into four periods: the Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary. The first two terms were discarded long ago, and although Tertiary is still sometimes used, in recent decades some geologists came to consider the Quaternary an outmoded relic. In 2004, a major publication left the Quaternary out of the ICS timescale altogether, making it vulnerable to extinction from scientific nomenclature. In place of the Quaternary, it extended the prior 'Neogene', which began 23 million years ago, up to the present. The Quaternary community went into open revolt.

"The geologic timescale is fundamental for expressing the history of the Earth," says Stan Finney, a geologist at California State University in Long Beach and chair of the ICS. "This is our clock — we need the units of our timescale and their boundaries to be precisely defined."

Finney inherited the debate when he took his post at the ICS in 2008, and he vowed to come up with a democratic process to resolve it. After several months of open discussions and formal proposals from the Quaternary and Neogene communities, two rounds of voting took place, in April and May. The redefinition proposal passed with approval from 16 of the 18 voting members.

Although for some the debate is settled, others are not pleased. "We don't take a metre stick in Paris and add a foot-and-a-half to it," says Lucy Edwards, a marine geologist with the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia. "You can redefine it by being more precise, but you don't increase its size by 40%." Edwards has practical concerns as well: in the 1980s, the USGS reworked all of its maps and terminology to reflect the decision to place the Pleistocene at 1.8 million years ago. Now that the international standards have changed, it will have to do so again.

Marie-Pierre Aubry of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, who lobbied against the change, says that the rules of science are being violated. Whereas other major boundaries in Earth's history are associated with faunal extinctions and turnover, she says, "you come to the Neogene–Quaternary boundary, and there is nothing there". She notes that the term Neogene, not Quaternary, is used widely in textbooks to describe the current period. The Neogene community has already responded by petitioning the IUGS to suspend the vote.

Others are moving on. "In the end, it is only a shift in nomenclature," says Martin Van Kranendonk, a geologist at the Geological Survey of Western Australia in East Perth, and one of the two voting members who voted against the Quaternary proposal. "The rocks and time itself haven't changed," he says. "It's just what we have chosen to call them."

No impact, Deccan volcanism killed the dinosaurs

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:22:00 +0000

So here we are again: back to Deccan volcanism as the culprit for dino extinctions.
Gerta Keller of Princeton University, based on fossil assemblages and the supposed age of the impact event has come to such a conclusion, in her paper with Theirry Adatte of Neuchatel Uni, Switzerland, the J Geol Soc London (April 27, 2009).

Read the TIME report by Jeffrey Kluger here

When a scientific principle is common knowledge even in grammar school, you know it has long since crossed the line from theory to established fact. That's the case with dinosaur extinction. Some 65 million years ago — as we've all come to know — an asteroid struck the earth, sending up a cloud that blocked the sun and cooled the planet. That, in turn, wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of mammals. The suddenness with which so many species vanished after that time always suggested a single cataclysmic event, and the 1978 discovery of a 112-mile, 65-million-year-old crater off the Yucatán Peninsula near the town of Chicxulub seemed to seal the deal.

Now, however, a study in the Journal of the Geological Society throws all that into question. The asteroid impact and dinosaur extinction, say the authors, may not have been simultaneous, instead occurring 300,000 years apart. That's an eyeblink in geologic time, but it's a relevant eyeblink all the same — one that occurred at just the right moment in ancient history to send the extinction theory entirely awry.

The controversial paper was written by geoscientists Gerta Keller of Princeton University and Thierry Addate of the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland. Both researchers knew that challenging the impact doctrine would not be easy. The asteroid charged with killing the dinosaurs, after all, left more than the Chicxulub crater as its calling card. At the same 65-million-year depth, the geologic record reveals that a thin layer of iridium was deposited pretty much everywhere in the world. Iridium is an element that's rare on Earth but common in asteroids, and a fine global dusting of the stuff is precisely what you'd expect to find if an asteroid struck the ground, vaporized on impact and eventually rained its remains back down. Below that iridium layer, the fossil record shows that a riot of species was thriving; above it, 65% of them went suddenly missing.

But Keller and Addate worried that we were misreading both the geologic and fossil records. They conducted surveys at numerous sites in Mexico, including a spot called El Peñón, near the impact crater. They were especially interested in a 30-ft. layer of sediment just above the iridium layer. That sediment, they calculate, was laid down at a rate of about 0.8 in. to 1.2 in. per thousand years, meaning that all 30 feet took 300,000 years to settle into place.

Analyzing the fossils at this small site, they counted 52 distinct species just below the iridium layer. Then they counted the species above it. The result: the same 52. It wasn't until they sampled 30 feet higher — and 300,000 years later — that they saw the die-offs.

"The mass extinction level can be seen above this interval," Keller says. "Not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact."

Keller's and Addate's species samplings are not, of course, conclusive, and plenty of other surveys since 1978 do tie the extinctions closely to the asteroid. But since the new digs were so close to ground zero, the immediate species loss ought to be have been — if anything — greater there than anywhere else in the world. Instead, the animals seemed to escape unharmed. Other paleontologists, however, believe that the very proximity of El Peñón to the impact site makes the results even less reliable. Earthquakes and tsunamis that resulted from the collision could have wrought havoc on the sedimentary record, causing discrete strata to swirl together and completely scrambling time lines. Keller disagrees, pointing out that the slow accretion of sediment that she and Addate recorded is completely inconsistent with a sudden event like a tsunami. (See pictures of animals in space.)

"The sandstone complex was not deposited over hours or days," she says. "Deposition occurred over a very long time period."

So if the Chicxulub asteroid didn't kill the dinosaurs, what did? Paleontologists have advanced all manner of other theories over the years, including the appearance of land bridges that allowed different species to migrate to different continents, bringing with them diseases to which native species hadn't developed immunity. Keller and Addate do not see any reason to stray so far from the prevailing model. Some kind of atmospheric haze might indeed have blocked the sun, making the planet too cold for the dinosaurs — it just didn't have to have come from an asteroid. Rather, they say, the source might have been massive volcanoes, like the ones that blew in the Deccan Traps in what is now India at just the right point in history.

For the dinosaurs that perished 65 million years ago, extinction was extinction and the precise cause was immaterial. But for the bipedal mammals who were allowed to rise once the big lizards were finally gone, it is a matter of enduring fascination.
[http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1894225,00.html]

Diamonds in Tamil Nadu!!

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:24:00 +0000

Nature journal is skeptical about the report of microdiamonds from the Tamil Nadu coast, which was reported in Current Science. Read the Nature article.

Beach diamonds not for picking yet

All that glitters may not be diamond.All that glitters may not be diamond.

A recent report by geologists at Dr. H.S. Gour University at Sagar in Madhya Pradesh has raised a controversy: are the beaches of Tamilnadu in southeastern India really strewn with nuggets of diamond as these scientists claim?

A few days ago P. K. Kathal, his doctoral student M. K. Purohit and co-worker S. H. Adil announced that they have found 'micro-and macro-diamonds' in Nagapattinam and Vedaranyam beaches of Tamilnadu coast. These diamonds are so called because they are less than a millimeter in size. "A thorough search of the entire coast might yield larger diamonds," Kathal told Nature India and recommended detailed exploration of the entire Tamilnadu coast.

Their 'discovery' was reported in one of India's leading science journals1 with a photograph of the beach diamond on the cover page. That and a spate of media reports about the treasure on the sands may have already sent eager prospectors to the beaches with sieves in their hands.

But some geologists like Gopalakrishnarao Parthasarathy of the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad are skeptical about the find. "We have to make absolutely sure that what was discovered in the beaches is indeed diamond and not something else," he told Nature India.

Parthasarathy recalled that after the December 2004 Tsunami there were reports from the Geological Survey of India (GSI) of the occurrence of micro-diamonds in Kanyakumari beach. "It eventually proved to be zircon and not diamond," he said. "Zirconium silicate (or zircon) resembles diamond, and hence usually is mistaken for diamond."

Beaches usually are repositories of all products derived from the catchments of nearby rivers, coastal belt and continental region, including grains leaching from coastal rocks that contain heavy minerals like ilmenite, rutile, zircon, garnet, sillimanite and monazite.

In their study, the Sagar researchers collected sand samples from 16 beaches along the 2500-km coast from Puri to Kanyakumari. After filtration and wet-sieving to remove all the sand and heavy minerals, they hand-picked those grains showing brilliant luster.

According to the scientists, their study yielded 16 lustrous grains from Nagapattinam sample and 13 from Vedaranyam beaches.

"Normally, 6 grains of diamond per 100 grams of sediments is (considered a good) deposit," Purohit told Nature India. "In our case it is 13 to 16 grains, some of them bigger than one millimeter in size. This finding may lead to more (as well as) bigger diamonds in sediments in the area from Vedaranyam to Nagapattinam."
Map of Nagapattinam and Vedaranniyam beaches in the east coast of India from where the 'diamonds' were obtained.Map of Nagapattinam and Vedaranniyam beaches in the east coast of India from where the 'diamonds' were obtained.

"This is indeed a first report of micro- and macro-diamonds from the region with economic implications — a reason why the journal front-paged our paper," Purohit said.

But questions have been raised over the authenticity of the claims and also over the reported source of the beach diamonds.

According to the Sagar scientists, the beach grains were identified as micro- and macro-diamonds after visual examination using different types of microscopes. Kathal says examination a petrological microscope revealed their octahedron shape, brilliant (admandine) lustre, and 'isotropic' nature that are the very characteristic of diamonds. The morphological and optical characteristics of the beach grains combined with results of X-ray diffraction analysis confirm they are diamonds, Kathal said. "There should be no doubt on their identification."

However, according to Parthasarathy, an expert in characterization of minerals, while X-ray diffraction analysis is suitable for large crystalline diamonds, "laser Raman spectroscopy is the only method for unambiguous identification of micro-diamonds and practised by experimental scientists throughout the world."

From the size and shape of the recovered 'diamond' grains the scientists guess that they are released from a nearby kimberlite source. Kimberlites — 'plutonic' rocks that occur in the Earth's crust in vertical structures known as kimberlite pipes — are the most important source of mined diamonds today. According to Kathal an earlier study by the GSI in 2007 had indicated the presence of kimberlites in Mahboobnagar district of Andhra Pradesh suggesting that this may be the source of the bounty on Tamilnadu beaches.

"Nagapattinam and Vedaranyam fall in Godavari delta. Godavari has a very large basin," Kathal observed.

Parthasarathy, however points out the Mahboobnagar kimberlite is 'non-diamondiferous' and the only diamond bearing pipe is at Wajrakarur in Anathapur district of Andhra Pradesh. In any case, he says, there is no way these diamonds from Andhra Pradesh can be transported to Nagapattinam beach, by any normal geological or weathering processes. "To my knowledge there are no kimberlites in Tamilnadu or in Cauvery river zone" that could account for the presence of diamonds in the beach sands of Tamilnadu, he adds.
The 'diamonds' obtained from the beaches.The 'diamonds' obtained from the beaches.

Kathal says he never proclaimed that Mahboobnagar Kimberlite could have released the diamonds. "Our finding should rather be taken as an evidence of possible kimberlite pipe/pipes in the basin so that larger/more diamonds could be found in future," he said. The Sagar scientists, however, do not rule out the possibility that some of the recovered diamonds might have been introduced by extra-terrestrial objects like meteorites that fell on the Earth.

But S.V.S.Murty, chairman of the Planetary Sciences Division at Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad considers their extra-terrestrial nature highly unlikely.

"I am not commenting on the authenticity of identification of the grains as diamonds," he told Nature India. "I am only telling that (if they are indeed diamonds) they are certainly terrestrial in origin." The extra-terrestrial (meteoritic) diamonds, according to Murty, will be much smaller in size (nano-diamonds) than what the Sagar scientists claim to have discovered in the Tamilnadu beaches.

Parthasarathy suggests that the Sagar team "may have to contact some Raman spectrosocpist to confirm" that they have indeed discovered diamonds and also identify a more realistic origin of in the vicinity of where they were found.

Anxious prospectors should wait till then.

References
Purohit, M. K. et al. Discovery of micro-diamonds in beach sands of the Nagapattinam and Vedaranniyam beaches, southern east coast of India. Curr. Sci. 96, 767-768 (2009)

Reunion day

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:08:00 +0000

April 20th was some sort of red-letter day and Stephen was literal sporting and spouting red! Sahji, Sreenath, Riju and me came together after a really long period, we had been on our own ways and there was never much chance to meet, but with the magnetic Riju around there was no escaping. The ocassion also was a happy one for Dr Anirudhan who now heads the dept at Kariavattom for the next 3 years. Shaji is dabbling with Metamorphism as well as Hydrogeology these days, and his MSc students have started looking into the fluid processes in cordierite formation from the KKB. With a US govt GIS analyst in the form of Riju offering collaboration the dept's GIS endeavors are bound to get a boost, as also some international exposure.

Kerala: Natural Radiation - no risk?

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:21:00 +0000

Natural radiation poses no major risk

K. S. Jayaraman

Team leader Sher Ali.Genetic risk due to high natural background radiation is "a lot less than one has imagined earlier," according to a study just reported by researchers at the National Institute of Immunology NII in New Delhi1.

While natural background radiation may be responsible for varying alterations, it leaves the DNA of the vital germ line intact, they say. "Our study shows that the germ line is protected because the human genome has some unknown but powerful mechanism of protecting it," Sher Ali, a molecular geneticist who led the team told Nature India.

The findings should put at rest fears that people living in coastal areas of the south Indian state of Kerala are at risk of becoming infertile because they are exposed to natural background radiation that is ten-fold higher than the worldwide average. The radiation is the result of thorium bearing monazite minerals in the beach sands.

In their study the NII team looked for possible structural variations in the Y chromosome in blood and semen samples of 390 males of two generations at Chavara and Thevara — two high radiation regions of Kerala. They compared the results with those obtained from similar samples from 390 healthy unexposed males of matched age groups from Kochi (Kerala) and 400 normal males from different parts of India.

"We chose the Y chromosome as it is an ideal candidate to be assessed for possible genetic alterations induced by ionizing radiation due to its haploid status (having only one member of chromosome pair)," Ali said.

Containing fewer than 50 genes or gene families coding for proteins, Y-chromosome is not essential for life but harbors several testis-specific genes necessary for sperm production, and hence continuation of the species. At least three non-overlapping regions of the Y chromosome — (Azoospermia factors a, b, and c) — are essential for sperm production. Micro-deletions in these regions affecting one or more of the candidate genes (DAZ, RBMY, DBY, and USP9Y) cause male infertility. The SRY gene in the Y chromosome plays a predominant role in male sex determination.

The scientists found that barring two per cent, all the 790 unexposed (control) males from Kerala and other parts of India were free from micro-deletions. In contrast more than 90 per cent of males exposed to background radiation showed random micro-deletions in the Azoospermia factor. And, in about 80 per cent of them tandem duplication and multiple copies of 11 different Y-linked genes were found. For instance, more than 85 per cent of exposed males showed 2-8 copies of the SRY gene.

But remarkably all these genetic alterations in the exposed population were detected only in blood samples but not in the germ line (sperm) samples suggesting that sperm cells are somehow protected from background radiation. "Absence of micro-deletions in the germline explains the normal fertility status of the exposed males," Sanjay Premi, one of the authors told Nature India.

Where do the germ cells derive the protection from? Ali says that germ cells, originating from the gonad's somatic cells, most likely activate some still unknown genes that sense the defective ones and triggers apoptosis (programmed cell death). "The defective sperms are eliminated and quickly replaced by fresh ones and thus what we see is always a clean picture in case of germ line," Ali said. However that is not true in case of blood cells meaning blood cells are not treated in the same way as germ cells in the body. "I would love to call it nature's marvel," Ali said adding that "this is the hypothesis; we are yet to prove this."

According to the NII scientists the tandem duplication and multiple copies of genes detected in blood samples of exposed population "is a possible genome strategy to absorb the mutational loads caused by the radiation."

Previous studies on the high radiation areas of Kerala were focused on the cases of Down's syndrome, congenital malformations, chromosomal aberrations in humans and phenotypic changes in the rats. Some groups also focused on the frequencies of the repeated abortions in human females. "In other parts of world, people have studied rates of minisattellite mutations, mitochondrial mutations in the populations exposed to radiations due to industrial accidents or nuclear bombings," said Premi. "On the contrary, we have analysed the single chromosome Y in a much greater detail both at somatic and germ line levels. To our information no one in the world has analysed germ line and somatic cells in the manner we have done."

Premi said that on the basis of the study it has been concluded that the study populations have adapted themselves to the high background radiation. "The (genetic) alterations we recorded were random and did not represent any major Y chromosome-related recombination losses or duplications reported in the literature which has been held responsible for the infertility."

References
Premi, S. et al. Unique signatures of natural background radiation on human Y chromosomes from Kerala, India. [journal]PLoS ONE[/journal] 4, e4541. 2009)

Granite slabs and radioactivity

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 09:16:00 +0000

What's lurking in your granite countertop?

By KATE MURPHY
THE NEW YORK TIMES

August 03, 2008

Shortly before Dr. Lynn Sugarman of Teaneck, N.J., bought her summer home in Lake George, N.Y., two years ago, a routine inspection revealed it had elevated levels of radon, a radioactive gas that can cause lung cancer. So she called a radon measurement and mitigation technician to find the source. “He went from room to room,” says Sugarman, a pediatrician. But he stopped in his tracks in the kitchen, which had richly grained cream, brown and burgundy granite countertops. His Geiger counter indicated that the granite was emitting radiation at levels 10 times higher than those he had measured elsewhere in the house.

When the technician told her to keep her daughter several feet from the countertops just to be safe, she says, “I had them ripped out that very day,” and sent to the state Department of Health for analysis. The granite, it turned out, contained high levels of uranium, which is not only radioactive but releases radon gas as it decays. “The health risk to me and my family was probably small,” Sugarman says, “but I felt it was an unnecessary risk.”

As the popularity of granite countertops has grown in the last decade — demand for them has increased tenfold, according to the Marble Institute of America, a trade group representing granite fabricators — so have the types of granite available. For example, one source, Graniteland (graniteland.com) offers more than 900 kinds of granite from 63 countries. And with increased sales volume and variety, there have been more reports of “hot” or potentially hazardous countertops, particularly among the more exotic and striated varieties from Brazil and Namibia.

“It’s not that all granite is dangerous,” says Stanley Liebert, the quality assurance director at CMT Laboratories in Clifton Park, N.Y., who took radiation measurements at Sugarman’s house.

DUELING OPINIONS

Allegations that granite countertops may emit dangerous levels of radon and radiation have been raised periodically over the past decade, mostly by makers and distributors of competing countertop materials. The Marble Institute of America has said such claims are “ludicrous” because although granite is known to contain uranium and other radioactive materials like thorium and potassium, the amounts in countertops are not enough to pose a health threat.
Indeed, health physicists and radiation experts agree that most granite countertops emit radiation and radon at extremely low levels. They say these emissions are insignificant compared with so-called background radiation that is constantly raining down from outer space or seeping up from the earth’s crust, not to mention emanating from manmade sources like X-rays, luminous watches and smoke detectors.

But with increasing regularity in recent months, the Environmental Protection Agency has been receiving calls from radon inspectors as well as from concerned homeowners about granite countertops with radiation measurements several times above background levels. “We’ve been hearing from people all over the country concerned about high readings,” says Lou Witt, a program analyst with the agency’s Indoor Environments Division.

In June, Suzanne Zick, who lives in Magnolia, Texas, a small town northwest of Houston, called the EPA and her state’s health department to find out what she should do about the salmon-colored granite she had installed in her foyer a year and a half ago. A geology instructor at a community college, she realized belatedly that it could contain radioactive material and had it tested. The technician sent her a report indicating that the granite was emitting low to moderately high levels of both radon and radiation, depending on where along the stone the measurement was taken.

TAKING ACTION

The EPA recommends taking action if radon gas levels in the home exceeds 4 picocuries per liter of air (a measure of radioactive emission); about the same risk for cancer as smoking a half a pack of cigarettes per day. In Sugarman’s kitchen, the readings were 100 picocuries per liter. In her basement, where radon readings are expected to be higher because the gas usually seeps into homes from decaying uranium underground, the readings were 6 picocuries per liter.
The average person is subjected to radiation from natural and manmade sources at an annual level of 360 millirem (a measure of energy absorbed by the body), according to government agencies like the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The limit of additional exposure set by the commission for people living near nuclear reactors is 100 millirem per year. To put this in perspective, passengers get 3 millirem of cosmic radiation on a flight from New York to Los Angeles.

A “hot” granite countertop like Sugarman’s might add a fraction of a millirem per hour and that is if you were a few inches from it or touching it the entire time. Nevertheless, Witt says, “There is no known safe level of radon or radiation.” Moreover, he says, scientists agree that “any exposure increases your health risk.” A granite countertop that emits an extremely high level of radiation, as a small number of commercially available samples have in recent tests, could conceivably expose body parts that were in close proximity to it for two hours a day to a localized dose of 100 millirem over just a few months. David J. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University in New York, says the cancer risk from granite countertops, even those emitting radiation above background levels, is “on the order of one in a million.” Being struck by lightning is more likely. Nonetheless, Brenner says, “It makes sense. If you can choose another counter that doesn’t elevate your risk, however slightly, why wouldn’t you?”

Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking and is considered especially dangerous to smokers, whose lungs are already compromised. Children and developing fetuses are vulnerable to radiation, which can cause other forms of cancer. Witt says the EPA is not studying health risks associated with granite countertops because of a “lack of resources.”
The Marble Institute of America plans to develop a testing protocol for granite. “We want to reassure the public that their granite countertops are safe,” Jim Hogan, the group’s president, said earlier this month. “We know the vast majority of granites are safe, but there are some new exotic varieties coming in now that we’ve never seen before, and we need to use sound science to evaluate them.”

Research scientists at Rice University in Houston and at the New York state Department of Health are currently conducting studies of granite widely used in kitchen counters. William J. Llope, a professor of physics at Rice, says his preliminary results show that of the 55 samples he has collected from nearby fabricators and wholesalers, all of which emit radiation at higher-than-background levels, a handful have tested at levels 100 times or more above background.
Personal injury lawyers are already advertising on the Web for clients who think they may have been injured by countertops.

As for Sugarman, the contractor of the house she bought in Lake George paid for the removal of her “hot” countertops. She replaced them with another type of granite. “But I had them tested first,” she says.

ARE GRANITES A RADIATION RISK? (by Donald Langmuir, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Geochemistry, Colorado School of Mines)

It is worth noting that the stone industry, whether advertising countertops, building materials or monuments, terms many stones 'granites' that are not true granites to a geologist. A true granite, which is often grey or pink, is chiefly comprised of a potassium aluminum silicate mineral (K-feldspar or potassium feldspar) and quartz (silica or SiO2). Rocks called granites by the industry also include magnesium silicates (e.g. peridotites and serpentines) and a host of other chemically different rock-types, most of which contain much less uranium than does true granite.
As admitted by the author of 'Granite and Radon', there have been no direct measurements of radon release from granite countertops. Model calculations suggested by Dr. Richard Wanty, using a standard, scientifically accepted approach and conservative assumptions, indicate that the radon release from a granite countertop is orders of magnitude below detection by any known analytical method.

EPA standard, which is not to be exceeded in indoor air, is 4 picoCuries per liter of air (4 pCi/L). Eisenbud 1 indicates that the average contributions of radon from various sources to indoor air are 1.5 pCi/L from the soil (under and around the house), 0.01 pCi/L from public water supplies (0.4 pCi/L) from private wells), 0.05 pCi/L from building materials, and 0.2 pCi/L from outdoor air. These values are for the average house which is ventilated such that over one hour the air is changed 0.5 to 1.5 times. The vanishingly small amount of radon in household air that might be released from a granite countertop (0.00000074 pCi/L) as computed below, has been calculated assuming no exchange of indoor and outdoor air, which would further trivialize its significance. Note also that the radon content of outside air is 270,000 times greater than that released by the countertop.

There are certain properties of rocks that can increase their radon emanation efficiency, or in other words increase the release of radon from a given weight of rock. These are rock properties that maximize the exposure of internal or external rock surfaces to water or air, allowing any radon gas to escape. It is argued that such properties, which include rock porosity, fissuring and mylonitization, will increase radon releases. This is probably true, however, a granite with such properties would be too brittle to make into a countertop, and too open to take a polish, and so would not be marketable as a countertop - unless the rock pores were first filled with a chemical sealant. Such sealing would also eliminate any possible radon release problems.

The typical granite countertop in our example will release 7.4 x 10 -7 pCi/L of air. This corresponds to 2.7 x 10 -8 atom decays per second (dps). This represents 0.85 decays per year. In other words, less than one atom of radon is produced by the countertop in one year. This is hardly worth getting excited about.

Miyashiro is dead

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:42:00 +0000

Akiho Miyashiro, author of "Metamorphism and Metamorphic Belts"dies in an accident

The body of Akiho Miyashiro was found at bottom of 300-foot cliff at Thacher State Park after 36-hour on July25, 2008

Akiho Miyashiro may have wandered off a trail near the Glen Doone Overlook before falling to his death. The cliff he fell over is not near any of the park's 12 miles of marked trails.

"He may have gotten lost and walked over the edge in the dark while trying to find his way back," Albany County Sheriff's Inspector Mark Defrancesco said. "It's a steep, steep drop with a bunch of rocks and a ravine at the bottom."

Miyashiro, retired from University of Albany as geology professor, came to the park Tuesday evening to take pictures with his wife, Fumiko. He went off by himself around 7:30 p.m. and never returned. Authorities from a number of agencies searched for him for 36 hours until the body was discovered 11:30 a.m. Thursday by rescuers who had rappelled the rock cliff.

The body could not be brought up the cliff because of hard rain Thursday morning that made rocks slippery.

"It was absolutely treacherous and dangerous," Defrancesco said. Instead, a rescue crew hiked more than 300 yards into the woods from the bottom of the cliff and carried the body out.

Miyashiro retired from UAlbany's Department of Geological Sciences in 1991 after a 22-year career there that earned him international acclaim. Geology has nothing comparable to a Nobel Prize, but in 1977 Miyashiro won one of the field's most prestigious honors, the Geological Society of America's Arthur L. Day Medal.

The Japanese scientist worked at UAlbany when its fertile geology unit was known as one of the best small departments in the country.

He arrived via Columbia University in 1969, several years after the theory of plate tectonics hit the stage. The concept holds that the Earth consists of about a dozen major plates that move around, and on their edges occur volcanoes, mountains and earthquakes. It encompasses virtually everything we think about the Earth today.

Miyashiro was a plate tectonics pioneer. He studied the behavior of rocks at very high temperatures and pressures. His field is known as metamorphic petrology. He wrote the classic textbook "Metamorphism and Metamorphic Belts."

"He made major contributions to our current understanding of how major mountain systems formed," said John Delano, a professor of environmental science at UAlbany and a former colleague of Miyashiro's.

He was not a social colleague. People who worked in his department described Miyashiro as a gentleman who maintained high standards. But he was also a private person who economized his words and did not collaborate on research like some of the other professors.

Susan Anderson was his student. The Guilderland teaching assistant remembered how Miyashiro would say that one of his former students had named a mineral after him. "He would get this little giggle and say, 'Unfortunately very rare.' "

Geologists the world over have expressed their condolences

"Jim Eckert" of Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University wrote in the GEO-METAMORPHISM@JISCMAIL.AC.UK

"That indeed is very sad news. He certainly helped greatly to advance
the field, and we all owe him a lot.
------------------------------------------------------------

Miyashiro's Geological Petrological Contributions

Miyashiro's paper in J Petrology (Miyashiro A. Evolution of metamorphic belts. J. Petrology 2:277-311, 1961) is a citation classic. He authored it while at the Geological Institute, Faculty of Science, University of Tokyo, Japan. The paper has been
cited over 300 times ever since.

In 1979 he commented on this paper “I began to work on metamorphic rocks of Japan at Tokyo University in 1947 under postwar difficulties. At that time, Alfred Harker’s book, Metamorphism,1 was very influential. It was claimed in this book that the regional metamorphism of the Barrovian sequence in Scotland is standard or ‘normal’ on a worldwide scale, and that minerals characteristic of such ‘normal regional metamorphism’ are stable only in the presence of strong shearing stress. However, such ‘normal regional metamorphism’ did not exist in Japan. Thus, my main problem was to clarify how and why the regional metamorphism of Japan differs from Harker’s ‘normal regional metamorphism.’ I expected that I would be able to show the existence of a number of different types of regional metamorphism. I discussed it, for example, in relation to the compositional variation of metamorphic garnet in 1953.2 Moreover, I doubted Harker’s view emphasizing the necessity of shearing stress in the formation of certain metamorphic minerals. This motivated my proposal in 1949 of a hypothetical phase diagram of the Al2SiO5 minerals to explain their formation in terms of temperature and hydrostatic pressure only.

“In the 1950s, a new improved system of graduate school was begun in Japan. I had many brilliant students (undergraduate and graduate) in metamorphic petrology such as F. Shido and S. Banno at Tokyo University in addition to my friend Dr. Y. Seki who was already a fullfledged metamorphic petrologist. Spontaneously we formed an active cooperative group. Banno and Seki studied few glaucophaneschist terranes, and discovered that glaucophane forms only in a limited range of temperatures in progressive metamorphic sequences. This gave strong support to the existence of the glaucophaneschist facies. “After several years of our cooperative study, I came to feel that we had already understood the main features of the two major types of regional metamorphism existing in Japan, and that these two types, together with one more type corresponding to Harker’s ‘normal regional metamorphism,’ represent the three basic categories of regional metamorphism existing on Earth. I wrote this view in my 1961 paper. At that time, petrology had little connection to tectonics. The concept of paired metamorphic belts, described in this paper, was one of the earliest attempts to connect metamorphic petrology to tectonics.

“It is gratifying to know that the paper has been so frequently cited. It is a memorial to
our metamorphic petrology group of the 1950s and the early 1960s in Tokyo.”
[http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1979/A1979HE73300001.pdf]

Facies

Miyashiro (1973) renamed Turner (1968)'s prehnite-pumpellyite metagraywacke facies

as the prehnite-pumpellyite facies

Miyashiro (1961) developed the concept of the metamorphic facies series. This is a sequence of metamorphic facies developed under a particular range of P/T. For regional metamorphism Miyashiro (1961) suggested three principal facies series and the

existence of some intermediate facies series. Later (Miyashiro, 1973a), he referred to them as

baric types of metamorphism because they broadly indicate different radial sectors in a P-T

diagram such as Figure 2.3 (e.g. Miyashiro, 1994, Fig.8.1; Spear, 1993, Fig.2-3) and are

distinguished by their range ofP/T rather than their range ofpressures or temperatures. The three

principal baric types are: 1. low-P/T type (also referred to as the andalusite-sillimanite series or Abukuma type)

characterised by andalusite at lower grades and sillimanite at higher grades and typified by the

sequence greenschist f.→amphibolite f.→granulite f.;

2. medium-P/T type (also referred to as the kyanite-sillimanite series or Barrovian type)

characterised by kyanite at lower grades and sillimanite at higher grade and typified by the

sequence greenschist f.→epidote-amphibolite f.→amphibolite f.→granulite f.;

high-P/T type (also referred to as glaucophanic metamorphism) characterised by the

presence of glaucophane and typified by the sequence subgreenschist f. (prehnite-

pumpellyite)→glaucophane-schist/blueschist f.

The three principal metamorphic facies series of Miyashiro have been generally adopted (e.g.

Yardley, 1989; Spear 1993; Kornprobst, 2002) although, it is accepted that subdivisions,

intermediates and variants exist (e.g. Harte & Hudson, 1979; Miyashiro, 1994)

Gold panning in Kerala: alluvial gold in Maruda, Kalakkan puzha

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:57:00 +0000

Extensive panning for gold in the Kalakkan puzha of Maruda, in Kerala, which drains the Maruthamalai Hills. Deccan Gold has got prospecting licenses in the area. Their website has this to say,

"Two PL applications, Puttumala and Maruda, covering a total area of 90 sq km have been recommended by the DMG to the State Govt. The State Govt. has asked us to reduce the area of the Puttumala PL from 81 sq km to 25 sq km. We have provided justification to the Govt. for recommending the entire area of 81 sq km. The Maruda PL has a greater merit as this prospect has been explored by the State Department and MECL. The State Dept. had carried out 5,200 m of drilling in 50 holes during 1981-85 and assessed a gold resource of 0.55 million tonnes grading 4.14 g/t equivalent to 2.296 tonnes of gold upto a shallow depth of 75 m. Subsequently, MECL did additional drilling and estimated a total resource of 1.174 million tonnes of an average grade of 2.61 g/t equivalent to 3 tonnes of gold. Out of this resource, MECL recognized 0.32 million tonnes at 2.3 g/t grade as available for open pit mining (0.73 tonnes of gold metal). The resource is distributed in 4 different but closely spaced lodes. The mineralized zone is known to continue upto a depth of 200 m. "

Ailing science; ageing scientists: India in the dumps

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:41:00 +0000

Research is elitist, exclusive, discriminatory, and at the highest levels of outstanding quality.
Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju

An incisive analysis of the malaise in Indian science by the veteran scientist Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju in Nature India May 1, 2008. Read it.

Mis-match in ages from different dating techniques

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Tue, 06 May 2008 06:58:00 +0000

There has been a lot of discussion in journals regarding the mismatch in the ages that are turned out by Ar-Ar dating, vis-a-vis U-Pb dating etc. The recent Letter to the Editor in Nature Geosciences (May 2008, p282, vol 1) by Heiko Pälike, University of Southampton, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, European Way, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK
and Frits Hilgen, Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, Budapestlaan 4, 3584 CD Utrecht, The Netherlands puts the matter in perspective. Here is an extract of that article entitled "Rock clock synchronization". "The need for much improved knowledge of the durations and ages of climatic and geological events, such as the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (~55 million years ago), has become urgent within the Earth science and climate modelling communities. The exact dating and timing of fluxes into and out of the marine carbon reservoir can differentiate between competing hypotheses of climatic change. Highly detailed reconstructions of the Earth’s history allow us to assess whether past climatic change can be used as an analogue for the current and future change of ocean acidification and climate.

The Earthtime project is an international effort with the goal to further this quest for a well-calibrated and stable timescale that will allow more precise dating of rock layers and minerals. Radioisotopic dating methods have small but significant errors that hinder our ability to assess geologically short-lived climate events. For instance, the most widely used method for the Cenozoic era is 40Ar/39Ar, which has an error of up to 2.5% and few tie points of known age. Yet, over the last two decades much progress has been made in exploiting the imprint of the Earth’s orbital variations in palaeoclimatic records. This has dramatically increased the potential age resolution of approaches like cycle-counting and pattern matching, to less than 40,000 years throughout much of Cenozoic time (the past ~66 million years).

Unfortunately, there have been a number of inconsistencies and discrepancies between ages and durations derived from radioisotopic and astronomical dating. What is now needed is a more systematic and coordinated approach to provide a detailed intercalibration of radioisotopic clocks (U–Pb, Ar–Ar methods), the rock standards that are used for these methods, and geological tie-points with astronomical ages. At the same time, Cenozoic palaeoclimatic compilations need to be improved by closing existing gaps, verifying data from single sites and supplementing the database of magneto- and biostratigraphy so we can improve the accuracy of existing age calibrations.

In particular, a major advance towards a fully astronomically calibrated geological timescale needs to be accomplished in the middle Eocene epoch (~40 to 50 million years). Very few suitable sections have been acquired so far for this period, presumably because the calcite compensation depth was very shallow during this time, which would have prevented the preservation of carbonate material in the deep-ocean marine sediments. The Earthtime projects are open community efforts aimed at improving intercalibration between astronomical and radioisotope dating methods by finnding ash layers that can be dated with radioisotopes within astronomically age-calibrated sections. The immediate aim is to arrive at a highly accurate and stable Cenozoic timescale."

This paper in Science also deals with the same issue

Oil and gas in Deccan Traps

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:52:00 +0000

ONGC strikes petroleum in Deccan Traps

The Times of India, on 1st May 2008, reported that the ONGC has struck oil and gas in the Deccan Traps. This is sure to be a path-breaking discovery, says the report by Rajeev Jayaswal. This comes in the wake of its discoveries of gas in Kunjaban-3 well in north Agarthala in Tripura, and oil in the Karjan-9 well in the Halisa field of Gujrat. The report goes on to say that India can become the top oil-producing nation, if the Trap oil and gas is successfully exploited. A reserve of about 30 billion tons is estimated in these Cretaceous rock formations.

The Mesozoic sediments below the Deccan Traps are highly prospective, the report cites an expert. Geophysical surveys for the oil below the traps were done by the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) Hyderabad and the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons. They found sub-trappean Mesozoic to Gondwana age sediments with a maximum thickness of three kilometers.

Radioactivity in Kerala Coast's: Health Implications

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 06:04:00 +0000

The effect of the natural radioactivity emanating from the radioactive minerals in the beach placers of Kerala have been controversial and the views are divided amongst the scientific community. Even after decades of research the issue remains unresolved. And under a mist of technical jargon and statistical posturing. Very few studies have looked into the issue holistically. Either its just a geological study giving out generalizations on the possibility of radiation risks or it is a medical study which ultimately winds up with a statistical test of significance. Here I have attempted to bring together the references on the subject of "Radioactivity in Kerala Coast's: Health Implications ".

One study reported in PNAS says that "radioactive conditions (in Kerala coasts) accelerate mutations at nucleotide positions that have been evolutionary hot spots for at least 60,000 years".

In a 1999 paper in Radiation Research, doctors at the Regional Cancer Centre, Trivandrum, Kerala, India found that in "in this preliminary analysis, there is no evidence that cancer occurrence is consistently higher because of the levels of external gamma-radiation exposure in the area...". The area was Karunagapally, in the heart of the beach placer deposits of Kerala, and where two placer-deposit-based industries exist, viz., Indian Rare Earths Ltd and the Kerala Minerals and Metals Ltd. They found that "...the environmental radiation emanates largely from the thorium deposited mostly along coastal areas. In certain locations on the coast, it is as high as 70 mGy/year and on average is 7.5 times the level seen in interior areas..."

Bhabha Atomic Research Centre has steadfastly maintained that there is no enhanced hazard either along the Kerala beaches or around the Jadaguda Uranium mines. But the fact remains that the populace especially around the mines and works at Jaduguda have been the victims of the radiative hazard.

Commercilaization of Research: Plague of Sponsorship

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:07:00 +0000

"People, not profits, must be at the centre of patent law for medicines"

Desmond Tutu

This exquisite short article in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical association) reveals the anguish of a non-conformist doctor amongst the sponsored commercial circus of pharmaceutical companies in seminars. Pharmaceutical companies are often the most unscrupulous practitioners of questionable research, and get away with the clout of money power. Plagiarism and unethical publishing are quite commonly resorted to by these corporates as also planted findings, that have no real clinical merit or have never undergone clinical trials. The WTO regime has often been used by these bodies to beat down competition from players in developing countries, who could offer medicines at a fraction of the price quoted by the multinational pharma giants like Novartis of Switzerland and Merck etc.

Rainbow to Dark Clouds

Catherine D. DeAngelis, MD, MPH

JAMA. 2005;294:1107.

This year it was my honor to have been the commencement speaker at 3 medical schools: Drexel University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Texas at Houston. On each occasion, I felt the same euphoria that I had at my own graduation and at the other commencements in which I spoke or, as Vice Dean of Academic Affairs and Faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, helped with the proceedings. It is exhilarating to experience, up close and personally, the enthusiasm and excitement of so many new physicians who clearly sense their potential to help those who will seek their care, and who want to fulfill their dreams of doing so.

One of the most touching of all moments in this year’s ceremonies occurred at UCLA. The "benediction" involved 24 graduating physicians joining the chaplain on stage to speak in the native language of their ethnic groups, no matter whether they were 1st- or 10th-generation Americans. The 24 languages spoken ranged from Afrikaans through Gujarati, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Tigrinya, and Urdu to Vietnamese. The phrase each graduate spoke was, "May we leave here to cure when possible, and to care always." What could be better wishes for healers to declare publicly? I wept along with most in the audience.

Early the next morning, I flew to San Diego to speak at an international meeting of subspecialists; which subspecialty is unfortunately irrelevant because it could have been almost any one. The geographic distance is 111 miles; the psychological distance was an eternity. As I walked off the plane, I was greeted with several ads prominently placed in the airport inviting physicians to visit one exhibit booth or another. It’s a free country, so why not? It was too early to check into the hotel, so I went to the convention center to register. On the way I passed hundreds of people (many certainly were physicians) walking from the center with identification cards in plastic cases hung around their necks on a ribbon emblazoned with the name of a pharmaceutical company. They were also carrying cloth bags adorned with large logos of several pharmaceutical companies—oh, and also the name of the subspecialty society. I politely declined both when they were offered to me, much to the chagrin of the sweet woman who worked the registration desk.

When I arrived at the room where I was to speak, a giant placard outside listed the names of the speakers and times of presentations—and the announcement by the names of several speakers that their presentations were sponsored by a particular pharmaceutical company. Of course, there were statements all over the podiums and in the rooms stating that all "sponsored" discussions involved funds from "unencumbered educational grants" that had nothing to do with the choice of speakers or topics. The spirit displayed at the conference was in such contrast to that displayed at the previous day’s commencement. What happened to the altruistic, "above all, help the patient" spirit?

After completing my presentation on conflicts of interest (the conference committee apparently had a sense of irony), I returned to the hotel to register. I was handed my room key: a plastic card with the name and logo of a pharmaceutical company on one side and an invitation to "visit us at booth #1501." Once again, I wept—this time, alone.

Merck's unethical publishing activities

Merck has misrepresented research data andmanipulated clinical research articles and clinical reviews, says the latest issue of JAMA. Merck & Co Inc manipulateddozens of publications to promote one of its products. Documents that provided evidence necessary todemonstrate the manipulation became public (and publishable)because of litigation involving one of that company's products,rofecoxib (used in the treatment of Alzheimerdisease or cognitive impairment .

Geology departments in JGSI this month

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:39:00 +0000

The March 2008 issue of JGSI is out and the following departments find a place in the issue, with contributions by their scientists.

1. IIT Roorkee -- Dept of Earth Sciences

2. AMD -- Nagpur

3. AMD -- Hyderabad

4. WIHG -- NE Unit -- Itanagar

5. WIHG -- Dehradun

6. Anna University -- Dept of Geology

7. MS University -- Baroda

8. GSI -- Palaeontology Divn -- Lucknow

9. GSI -- Landslide Hazards Studies -- Lucknow

"Micro-zonation of landslide hazard in the environs of Baira Dam Project, Chamba Dt, Himachal Pradesh"

What the author says ...

A short profile of the author

10. GSI -- Marine Wing -- Kolkata

11. GSI -- Central Reg -- Pune

12. GSI -- Bhubaneshwar

13. BSIP -- Lucknow

14. NGRI -- Hyderabad

15. IMD -- New Delhi

16. Periyar University, Salem -- Dept of Geology

17. DST -- New Delhi

String Theory Image of Universe

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:25:00 +0000

String Theory

String theory folds up the universe to make it into a manageable no of dimensions.
The extra dimensions can be folded up in 10 to the power of 500 difefrent ways!!

What you see above is Andrew J. Hanson (Indiana University)'s image of such a folded-up string-theoretical universe!

Green Water Blue Water

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:17:00 +0000

New water terminologies: Green water and blue water

New jargon is replacing old water and groundwater terms, and these new terms are now widely accepted, with all scientific journals accepting and propagating the terminology.

To my understanding the first use of the term "Green water" was in an article by Falkenmark of the Stockholm International Water Institute, Sweden in his 1995 paper at the Conference of SADC Ministers in Pretoria, South Africa (Coping with water scarcity under rapid population growth. Conference of SADC Ministers, Pretoria 23-24 November 1995). He and Rockstrom in their 2006 paper on "The New Blue and Green Water Paradigm: Breaking New Ground for Water Resources Planning and Management" in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, v 132, no. 3, pp. 129-132. May-June 2006. reiterate these ideas of water. A draft of this paper is available at the University of Texas website http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/mckinney/ce385d/Papers/Falkenmark.pdf

In that paper the authors argued that "The production of biomass for direct human use-e.g., as food and timber-is by far the largest freshwater-consuming human activity on Earth. However, water policy and development concentrate on a fraction of the water for food challenge, namely, irrigated agriculture, which uses an estimated 25% of the global water used in agriculture, and on the industrial and domestic water supply, which corresponds to less than 10% of direct human water requirements (considering only water for food, domestic use, and industry).

The reason that biomass production so strongly outclasses other water-dependent processes is that water is one key element involved in plant growth. Simultaneous with the photosynthesis process, when stomata in the foliage open to take in carbon dioxide, large amounts of water are being consumed as transpiration flow and released as vapor from the plant canopy. Furthermore, this productive flow of vapor is accompanied by nonproductive evaporative losses of water (from soil, ponded water, and intercepted water from foliage surfaces).

Together, vapor fluxes as evaporation and transpiration, here defined as green-water flow, constitute the total consumptive water use in biomass production. "

The latest Nature editorial also uses this terminology (see Nature 452, 253 (20 March 2008) | doi:10.1038/452253a; Published online 19 March 2008) while talking about "A fresh approach to water".

Excerpts from that editorial ... " blue water in rivers, lakes, reservoirs and underground aquifers. ... blue water accounts for only 40% of the world's freshwater balance, and for much less in dry regions. The key to tackling the crisis in the most food-insecure parts of the world is managing 'green water': the less spectacular, but more abundant moisture that infiltrates the soil from rainfall, and that can be taken up by the roots of plants."

So transpiration losses could be losses of greenwater plus some part of blue water. Blue water is the water that is predominantly being used by all of us as drinking water and water for almost all other purposes, drawing directly from rivers, lakes and other reservoirs like aquifers. When we talk about rain-water harvesting or about check dams, or underground dams we are talking about tapping the green water. Its all just in the terminology, but surely it helps in consolidating concepts. Green water need to be exploited effectively so that blue water resources may be conserved.

The rainbow of water also consists of brown water, yellow water, grey water, black water, and virtual water. See Prof Ottopohl's (of Hamburg University of Technology, Institute of Municipal and Industrial Wastewater Management) presentation to get an idea of these waters http://www.les2004.iwa-conferences.org/uploads/LET%202005%20Sapporo/08_3.pdf

Prof J. Anthony Allan of the SOAS, University of London coined the term virtual water in 1994. See one of his papers on the topic http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/aln02/

See also http://books.google.co.in/books?id=lRec8rs6g_IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Bekithemba+Gumbo&sig=CvijputWwSOhFlPiApCWbA91-wI

German Idiosyncrasies

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:10:00 +0000

Surely there is not another language that is soslipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp

Mark Twain in A Tramp Abroad 1880

The Germans are well known for their idiosyncrasies.

This ranges from quirks of language, quirks of behaviour, quirks of culture to extremely absurd rules that could only have been made by a practical joker.

See this new item in the Washington Post for a rollicking case of PhDs!! Doktorands!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/13/AR2008031304353_pf.html

In a nutshell if you have a PhD from any country other than Germany and you happen to be in Deutschland, beware!! You can't use the title Dr. in your name, its illegal and prosecutable, you are committing a crime by masquerading as a medical practitioner.

Some German gems:

"Let us meet us each other tomorrow"
"My friend is with his mattress"

Plagiarism. III

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 06:42:00 +0000

Sucheta Dalal of Outlook Money lists some of her findings in an internet search for Indian plagiarism (http://www.rediff.com/money/2002/oct/25dalal.htm)

A professor of the Cardiology Department of Safdarjung Hospital (New Delhi) plagiarised the thesis of his postgraduate student and published it under his name in the Journal of Associated Physicians of India.
Two professors of Poona University's microbiology and chemistry department were suspended and stripped of their headships for plagiarising a research paper in Analytical Biochemistry. It was published in the Indian Journal of Microbiology. The duo had earlier plagiarised a research paper of two foreign authors.
A professor of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research lifted a chapter from his student's thesis and published it in his name in Current Science journal.
The head of Delhi University's geology department lifted material from a thesis sent to him for evaluation, and published it verbatim in the Journal of the Geological Society of India.
An Indian Institute of Management sacked a professor for plagiarising material from a book titled Quantitative Technique for Managerial Decisions

Plagiarism: II

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:23:00 +0000

For all things related to fraud in Indian science go to the excellent blog by the IISc Professor Prof.Abinandanam.

The infamous VJ Gupta case remains fresh in the minds of scientists in India. The audacity of these frauds makes one think about the plethora of unreported or undetected cases of plagiarism. Many in academics or in the laboratories would have witnessed their colleagues, or their guides, or their students resorting to subtle plagiarism. Its almost sure that if one feeds a sentence from the Introduction of most Indian PhD thesis into Google, it will throw up an already published paper, most often from a foreign source. Its simply a cut-and-paste job from the internet onto the thesis pages. Invariably this happens, cutting across subject areas and geography. PhD theses do not get as rigorous a review as do papers submitted to journals and suprevising teachers rarely bother about such "s u n d r y" matters. This is the first step towards plagiarism.

“Even researchers from some high profile institutes like the IITs are indulging in plagiarism,” says Dr KL Chopra, who is the Ex-Director of IIT, Kharagpur and the president of the New Delhi-based Society for Scientific Values, which is dedicated to detecting scientific fraud and is the only one of its kind in India.

The following cases are being pursued by the society and I post the contents verbatim from the society's website. Its clear that even Indian Institute of Technology or even the moralizing Centre for Science and Environment are free from this malaise. More shockingly, there is hardly any move to punish the offence.

Investigations of Recent cases of Plagiarism by the Society for Scientific Values (SSV)

Professor V S Rajput, Kumaon Univ:

Prof. Kavita Pandey, Head, Physics Department, Kumaon University brought to the attention of SSV, and a number of prominent particle physicists in India and abroad that Prof Rajput, a former Head of the same department and presently serving as the Vice Chancellor of the University, in co-authorship with his research students have indulged in serious unethical practices of plagiarization of published research papers of others, as also of publishing same/similar papers in more than one journal. The SSV examined the published papers in question, and sought information/ clarification from both Prof. Pandey and Prof. Rajput. Prof. Rajput maintains that his former research student and his co-author has plagiarized the paper and has put his name on the paper without his permission. Merit of this argument apart, as the VC, Prof. Rajput has taken no disciplinary action so far against his former student and presently his faculty member of the University. Having confirmed this serious case of plagiarism and unethical practices, as has also been done by several other prominent Particle Physicists in India and abroad, the SSV has written to the President of India, the Governor of Uttaranchal ( who is the Chancellor of the University), Minister, MHRD, and the Chairman, UGC, urging them to take a strict disciplinary action against Prof. Rajput. After considerable moral pressure by a number of scientists world over, the Chancellor has now set up an enquiry committee under the Chair of a retired Judge. The SSV feels strongly that prominent scientists in the field best judge scientific unethical practices and thus their verdict should be taken seriously for taking an appropriate action. We hope that a decision to refer such a case to a retired Judge does not meet the usual fate of a long enquiry, ultimately resulting in diluting the seriousness of such a case.
Drs. Rashmi Mishra and Sapna Johnson, Centre for Science & Environment, New Delhi & Padma Vankar, FEAT, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur:

Rashmi Mishra et al have submitted a paper " Analysis of Pesticide Residues in Fruits and Vegetables from different Mandis of Delhi " to J Analytical-Science for publication. This paper has been largely plagiarized from a paper " Monitoring of Pesticide Residues in Summer Fruits and Vegetables from Kanpur" published in Bulletin Environmental Contamination and Toxicology by Dr R Sanghi and Dr V. Tewari of Facility for Ecological and Analytical Testing ( FEAT), IIT, Kanpur. The SSV has examined the two papers and have verified that Rasmi Mishra et al have not only plagiarised the paper extensively but have also made false claims. The SSV has written to Dr Sunita Narayan , Director, Centre for Science & Environment and Prof. S G Dhande, Director , IIT, Kanpur to seek their comments and to urge them to take appropriate disciplinary actions against their respective colleagues, if called for. Dr Narayan has informed that Dr. Vankar did not seek permission of her two colleagues in the Centre to be the co-authors of the paper. Nevertheless , she has taken steps to see that such a thing is not repeated . What these steps are and how Dr. Padma Vankar, who is also a Consultant to the Centre for Science and Environment, is affected, has not been clarified. On the other hand, Prof Dhande has not bothered to respond, despite reminders. We, however, understand that Prof. Dhande set up an Enquiry Committee, the report of which is with him for over two months. The SSV is very concerned that an Institute of national importance is not prepared to face the reality of a scientific fraud committed by a scientist of the institute and to take suitable action as a deterrent for such unethical practices. Having exhausted our moral power of persuasion, this case is being brought to the attention of the Chairman, BOG, IIT Kanpur, Minister, MHRD and is also being put on our Web page (www.scientificvalues.org). We hope the institutions concerned will deem it important to have researchers imbibe ethics and values in the pursuit of science and technology.

There is plenty of information available on the internet about plagiarism in Science in India, and possibly the Geocities site of 2003 that garnered support for the case against B.S.Rajput is unique. It was the first such attempt at publicly soliciting help in exposing a fraud, and it succeeded in its purpose. The wikipedia article on scientific plagiarism in India is also comprehensive, but misses the VJ Gupta case altogether.

Here is a list of online resources on the topic of plagiarism in India:

Physics

http://www.geocities.com/physics_plagiarism/
[pdf and ps versions of Rajput's papers as well as the original ones can be downloaded from the site to decide for oneself about the plagiarism involved]

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0295-5075/61/3/429/
[Institute of Physics' retraction of Rajput's paper and its apology to Renata Kallosh of Stanford University Physics Dept. It says that "the article Axion-dilation black holes with SL(2,Z) symmetry through APT-FGP model by S. C. Joshi and B. S. Rajput, published in Europhysics Letters, 57 (2002) 639, should be considered withdrawn from publication. This article contains no new results, but instead plagiarizes from the article Superpotential from black holes (Phys. Rev. D, 54 (1996) R4709) by Renata Kallosh. Apart from some well-known introductory review material (ending two sentences below eq. (4)) and the first half of the Discussion, the text of the paper has been copied literally from Professor Kallosh's article. Europhysics Letters apologises to Professor Kallosh and regrets that this has not been noticed during the refereeing process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_plagiarism_in_India [wiki article]

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/physics/publications/PDFfiles/india.pdf [Nobel laureates' letter to APJ Abdul Kalam, on the BS Rajput case]

http://www.indianexpress.com/india-news/full_story.php?content_id=17786 [news article]

http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2003/02/07/stories/2003020705470103.htm [news article]

http://www.cpim.org/pd/2002/oct20/10202002_uttaranchal.htm [news article]

http://www.hindu.com/fline/fl1925/stories/20021220008813400.htm [news article]

Electrical Engineering
http://www.geocities.com/electrical_plagiarism/ [NERIST K Kumar case, 2007-08]

Biology

http://www.scientificvalues.org/kundu_case.html
[National Centre for Cell Sciences, Pune, India's very controversial case, in which the NCCS's internal committee indicted the the authors, Gopal Kundu et al, whereas a later external committe, headed by Padmanabhan exonerated Kundu. But the Society for Scientific Values, has said that the case stands]

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/jun102007/1471.pdf
[Padmanabhan's letter-to-the-editor on the Kundu case]]

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/aug102007/281.pdf
[Rahul Siddharthan's (Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India) letter in Current Science]

http://nanopolitan.wordpress.com/about/
[Prof T. A. Abinandanan's IISc, Dept of Materials Engg blog

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/mar102008/553.pdf
Prof. S. Mahadevan's (Department of Molecular Reproduction, Development and Genetics,
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India) take on plagiarism and his experiements with the citation-matching tool eTBLAST.

Economics

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/399980.cms
[The case of Harshal Pathak, who plagiarised his father, DS Pathak's thesis to secure a Ph.D in Economics]

Hindi

http://www.taralabalu.org/Suta%20Samhita/plagiarism/
[Dr Ramakant Jha of the Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapeeth University, Banares (Varanasi) is alleged to have copied major portions of Dr Shivamurthy Swamiji's thesis of 1976 for his PhD degree.]

Geology

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12917551.600-himalayan-scandal-rocks-indian-science-.html

plagiarism gupta1
2008 04 04 QUESTIONS OF FRAUD Gilbert Klapper Chicago Literary Club April 11, 2005 Horace Freeland Judson (2004). http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #1 “A Culture of Fraud” – At the beginning of his first of several essays on the Piltdown Forgery, in which he attempted to identify the perpetrators, the paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, Stephen Jay Gould wrote: “Nothing is quite so fascinating as a well aged mystery. Many connoisseurs regard Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time as the greatest detective story ever written because its protagonist is Richard III, not the modern and insignificant murderer of Roger Ackroyd. The old chestnuts are perennial sources for impassioned and fruitless debate. Who was Jack the Ripper? Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?”1 I wish to review two examples of fraud in some detail: the first a lesser known but singularly egregious case in paleontology; the second, Piltdown, “surely the most famous and spectacular fraud of twentieth century science.”2 My claimed expertise is in micropaleontology and I have some personal familiarity with the first case. But I write as a lay person in viewing the story of the Piltdown Forgery for I do not have training as a paleoanthropologist. Nonetheless, I have followed the seemingly unstoppable writings on Piltdown, at least since one of my two mentors at Stanford in the 1950s, A. Myra Keen, wrote a short essay in Natural History magazine in 19773. I visited my longtime colleague, Willi Ziegler, at Marburg University in Germany in August, 1978, as we had a few days to combine our respective parts of a review paper on Devonian conodonts. I should explain that conodonts are the skeletal remains of an extinct group related to the most primitive fossil fish. They were a once prolific marine organism that swam in the seas of the Devonian Period (extending from about 360 to 420 Ma = million years before present), as well as other periods of the Paleozoic Era and the earliest period of the Mesozoic Era. Conodonts are commonly found preserved as microscopic teeth and are used to date and correlate Devonian limestones throughout the then tropical world of a vastly different continental configuration than today. While visiting Professor Ziegler, I met another colleague, John Pickett, who was at Marburg on sabbatical leave from the Geological Survey of New South Wales in Sydney. Pickett was studying a limestone succession he collected together with John Talent along a highway road cut at Phulchauki in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal. [Talent and Pickett are both well known Australian paleontologists – more about John Talent later in this discussion]. This was a fossil site that had previously yielded a prolific fauna of conodonts from the late part of the Devonian Period (at about 380 Ma), according to a publication in 1975 by Professor V. J. Gupta of Panjab University in northwestern India.4 However, most of Pickett and Talent’s collections (samples from about 20 different horizons along the highway 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #2 road cut) did not yield conodonts, nor for that matter other fossils, except for one sample. There were only three conodonts in the productive sample and Pickett asked if I could determine the age. One of the specimens appeared to be from the Silurian (the period before the Devonian; suggestive of the early part of the Silurian, about 435 440 Ma), although it was too poorly preserved for a confident identification. The main point is that the Australian paleontologists had not replicated the report by Professor Gupta of late Devonian conodonts from the Nepal road cut. John Pickett then showed me two papers by Gupta both published in 1975. I had not seen the paper on the Nepal road cut previously; the other described a strikingly similar Devonian conodont fauna from a site in the Kashmir Himalayas, about 600 kilometers to the west.5 Not only did the illustrations in the two papers indicate that the sites represented the same short interval of time within the late part of the Devonian, but I noticed that two of the photographs were of the same conodont specimens in each paper. Of course, this is impossible, unless it was due to an inadvertent mix up of photographs. At this point Willi Ziegler returned from giving a lecture, and Pickett and I related the curious matter of the duplication of photographs, and the identity of the two conodont faunas 600 kilometers apart. Also, the three of us were well aware that the conodonts Gupta had illustrated, said to be from the Himalayas, were exactly the same species as occur in a historically important fossil site south of Buffalo, New York. This was the earliest described conodont fauna from North America from a place called Eighteenmile Creek, discovered by George Jennings Hinde in 1879. When Professor Ziegler first began studying conodonts as a graduate student at Marburg during the early 1950s, he had been given a sample of abundant conodonts from Amsdell Creek, which is a short distance north of Eighteenmile Creek, and which contains the same thin layer of conodonts. The Amsdell Creek sample was donated to Ziegler by an amateur fossil collector, Raymond Hibbard, who lived in Buffalo and who had been “mining” the thin layer of conodonts from Amsdell Creek since the 1930s. Hibbard had found so many conodonts that during the 1950s he distributed small jars full of these microscopic teeth (normally each on the order of 1 mm in length, the size of sand grains) to all the established conodont researchers, as well as various paleontological laboratories around the world. The Amsdell Creek fauna is distinctive in three respects: 1) the special gray color of the conodonts is highly characteristic, and in addition there are associated fish fragments of an unusual orange color; 2) there is one prominent species endemic to the eastern U.S., and 3) there is an anomalous mixture of four different intervals of the Devonian timescale, based on conodonts, condensed into the one layer. Significantly, the conodonts illustrated by V. J. Gupta in 1975 include the one North American endemic species and evidence of the same mixture of time intervals – of course, the color could not be discerned from the black and white photographs in the publications. 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #3 The point of this tangent about the nature of the Amsdell Creek conodonts is that as soon as Pickett and I mentioned the duplication of photographs in the two Gupta papers illustrating conodonts supposedly from the Himalayas, Ziegler immediately recalled a highly significant meeting. When Gupta visited Marburg on a Humboldt Foundation fellowship in 1972, he approached Ziegler with the proposition that they do a joint paper describing a conodont fauna he said was from the Himalayas. He brought the conodonts into Ziegler’s lab, but immediately on viewing the specimens Willi said: “Oh, you have conodonts from Amsdell Creek.” Of course he recognized this from the two distinctive colors, visible to the naked eye and akin to a fingerprint when combined with the other evidence. But Gupta assured him that the conodonts he brought to Marburg were from the Himalayas. Ziegler declined to participate in a joint paper, as he suspected something was not quite right. In the light of this earlier experience combined with evidence manifest in Gupta’s two 1975 papers, Ziegler and I decided that a brief statement should be inserted into our almost completed review paper. On returning to the U.S. in September, 1978 and beginning a research leave at Oregon State University in Corvallis, I attempted to draft a few carefully worded sentences that would express our skepticism about the geographic origin of the conodonts said to be from Nepal and Kashmir. Nonetheless, we could not conclusively prove that the conodonts illustrated by Gupta were from Amsdell Creek in New York without seeing the actual specimens, as it was possible that they were from the Himalayas. Consequently, the brief statement had to be qualified. As I was struggling to write this late one evening in the geology department at Corvallis, a famous colleague came up from his lair in the basement of the building, knocked on my door, and asked what the hell I was doing there so late. To Arthur J. Boucot I summarized the story I have just related. Art became extremely upset I had never seem him this way before and without a word rushed downstairs to his office. He returned some minutes later with a voluminous file folder. It contained several years of correspondence with none other than V. J. Gupta. The Panjab University paleontologist had sent to Oregon State University a collection of brachiopods (two shelled marine organisms superficially similar to clam shells but belonging to their own separate phylum of invertebrates), which he indicated were from the same locality and horizon as another group of fossils (graptolites) already published by Gupta and an American co author that gave an unequivocal correlation with the late Silurian (about 420 Ma). But Boucot was sure that the brachiopods were not Silurian (he is the world’s leading expert on Silurian brachiopods) but rather were from the late Ordovician (approximately 25 million years older). This was followed by an extensive exchange of correspondence, with Gupta insisting that the brachiopods and graptolites were from the same locality and horizon and Boucot insisting this was impossible because of the radical disparity in age. They reached an impasse with Boucot refusing to engage in a joint publication on the brachiopods, quite similar to Ziegler’s unwillingness to co author a paper with Gupta on the conodonts he had brought to Germany. Ziegler’s and my brief, qualified statement expressing 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #4 skepticism about the geographic origin of the Nepal and Kashmir conodonts was published in 1979, as three admittedly buried sentences in our review paper on Devonian conodonts.6 Although intended as a warning, it proved to have virtually no effect. In actuality, Ziegler, Boucot, and I had stumbled onto something already thoroughly investigated by the Australian paleontologist, John Talent. Initially, Talent had done field work in the 1970s in the Himalayas extending from northern Pakistan through India to Nepal, and had been unable to replicate any of the numerous Gupta fossil sites visited. Subsequently, after a study of Gupta’s many papers, John Talent spent a number of years building a carefully constructed, iron clad case to expose what proved to be a mountain of fraud, developed in over 400 papers published on Himalayan paleontology over a 25 year period starting in the 1960s.7 In brief, the methodology of the fraud took several forms, the major one involving reporting fossils collected from elsewhere in the world (often purchased from commercial dealers or stolen from teaching and museum collections in geological institutions) and claiming their origin to be from remote areas of the Himalayas. Typically, the papers were illustrated with generalized location maps so that replication was impeded, but where the sites could be located they contained either unfossiliferous rocks, fossils of undiagnostic character, or no exposure of rocks at all. Another method was to re publish the same fossils claiming them to be from geographically different sites (as in the conodont example mentioned at the outset) or copying illustrations taken from much earlier publications by other authors. Gupta, while acknowledging that he was not an expert on any particular group of fossils, characteristically brought in a considerable number of unsuspecting, internationally renowned experts to identify the fossils, write the detailed descriptions, and serve as co authors. 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #5 The full details of the fraud were meticulously described in a series of papers by John Talent and associates in the late 1980s and 1990s,7 as well as at an international geological meeting in Calgary in 1987 where V. J. Gupta was confronted with the evidence gathered by Talent. The story was brought to the attention of the wider scientific public in a summary paper by Talent in the British weekly journal, Nature in 1989, followed by a report in the comparable American journal, Science, a day later.8 In a commentary by the editorship of Nature, the “Himalayan Hoax” was compared with the infamous Piltdown Forgery, oversimplifying the reference to that case.9 Before turning to the story of Piltdown, I conclude by noting that Gupta was unsuccessful in his attempt to refute the overwhelming evidence of fraud published by John Talent. Although Gupta was temporarily suspended in 1991 from his prominent academic position within Panjab University, he was inexplicably re instated a year later. In a vote of the faculty senate in 1993, only 5 of 55 senators voted for his dismissal.7a According to a recent personal communication from John Talent, Gupta continued to occupy a position in the geology department there until his retirement in 2004. There are a few similarities between the “Himalayan Hoax” and the Piltdown Forgery, yet there are especially crucial differences. The principal similarity is that fossils from elsewhere were claimed to be from a highly improbable, if not impossible, geologic and geographic location. The specimens alleged to be from a gravel pit at Piltdown in Sussex, England were not only “planted” there but represented forged orangutan and human remains. But the “Himalayan Hoax,” which was soon exposed and discounted, did not despite the voluminous number of publications have a comparable impact to that of the Piltdown Forgery. The latter deeply affected the history of research in paleoanthropology for decades. The initial Piltdown specimens were presented at a meeting of the Geological Society of London in 1912. They consisted of a number of cranial fragments and a partial right lower mandible (jawbone) with two molars preserved, but with the rest of the teeth and the front of the jaw not preserved. Significantly, the point of articulation of the lower jaw to the cranium was not preserved. The specimens had been collected by Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur anthropologist and archaeologist who lived near Piltdown and who was the steward for the manor house, Barkham Manor, on which the gravel pit was located. The cranium and jaw were described by Arthur Smith Woodward, a prominent paleontologist and Keeper of Geology at the British Museum of Natural History, who was a specialist in fossil fish and reptiles. Most of the leading paleoanthropologists in England were present at the meeting, and none raised doubts on the authenticity of the fossils. The prevailing view was that the jaw and cranial fragments belonged to the same species and individual, although there was opposition to this expressed by David Waterston, Professor of Anatomy at King’s College.10 But this issue was overshadowed by disagreement on the details of the reconstruction of the cranium. The species, named by Smith Woodward as 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #6 Eoanthropus dawsoni (the genus name meaning “Dawn Man” and the species named in honor of the collector), was viewed as representing an early hominid with a human like brain and an apelike jaw, thus taken to be a “missing link” between an ape ancestor and modern humans. Furthermore, associated mammalian fossils “found” at the same site (fossil Hippopotamus and Mastodon remains, among others; all these were “planted” as well) appeared to date the Piltdown fossils to the beginning of the Pleistocene (Ice Ages), now known to be about 2 million years before present. Despite Piltdown’s acceptance by the British anthropological establishment, there were early doubters in continental Europe and the U.S., as well as Waterston in England, who thought that the jaw could not possibly belong to the same species as the cranium, as they were so different. The skeptical view was that in effect a chimpanzee like jaw had been fortuitously found associated with a human like cranium in the Barkham Manor pit near Piltdown. The fact that the articulation of the lower jaw with the cranium was missing prevented a definitive test of the alternative hypothesis. But in 1915 a site (Piltdown II) two miles distant at Sheffield Park was “discovered” by Dawson and reported by Smith Woodward in 1917, again with some cranial fragments and an isolated molar identical with the initial finds. [The exact location of Piltdown II was not given in Smith Woodward’s publication.11 No Piltdown fossils were found after Dawson’s death in 1916]. This converted some, but by no means all of the doubters to the conclusion that a single species was involved. One of the skeptics was Gerrit S. Miller, a mammalogist at the Smithsonian Institution, who made a detailed study of casts of the Piltdown Barkham Manor specimens and published his first doubts in 1915. He concluded that the jaw was that of a new species of chimpanzee and that the cranium was that of the genus Homo. He therefore recommended that the name Eoanthropus be discarded and gave a new name for the supposed fossil chimpanzee (Pan vetus),12 based on the lower jaw alone. Nonetheless, Miller’s views were not accepted by the British anthropological establishment and in fact were severely attacked by a colleague of Smith Woodward’s at the British Museum, William Pycraft.13 In a paper in 1929, Miller wrote: “Deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition and recovery in so breaking the Piltdown fossils and losing the most essential parts of the original skull as to allow free scope to individual judgement in fitting the pieces together . . . “14 In his review of the Piltdown forgery, Roger Lewin comments that “for Miller, this was merely a rhetorical observation, not a serious conjecture. But forty years later, it proved to be uncannily accurate.”15 Miller, it should be noted, did not have the opportunity to study the actual Piltdown specimens, only artificial casts. 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #7 Besides Miller, another American skeptic was William King Gregory of the American Museum of Natural History who studied the material from the Barkham Manor site in 1913 and published his doubts the following year. Apparently giving voice to a rumor that was then circulating,16 Gregory wrote of the Piltdown specimens: “It has been suspected by some that geologically they are not old at all; that they may even represent a deliberate hoax, a Negro or Australian skull and a broken ape jaw, artificially fossilized and ‘planted’ in the gravel bed, to fool the scientists.”17 But Gregory did not question the authenticity of the specimens.17a In 1915, he was persuaded by Miller’s view that the jaw did not belong with the cranium, but when the Piltdown II site was announced Gregory reversed his opinion and supported Smith Woodward and others who held the prevailing view. Gregory’s early mention of a possible hoax seems to have been largely forgotten until relatively recently. That Eoanthropus dawsoni was based on a forgery was conclusively demonstrated in 1953 in a definitive study by Joseph Weiner, Kenneth Oakley, and W. E. Le Gros Clark.18 Fluorine dating of the cranial fragments by Oakley a few years earlier showed only slight antiquity, and the cranial fragments proved to be from a specimen of modern Homo sapiens (radiocarbon date of 620 + 100 years before present).19 The jaw was from a modern orangutan, not a fossil (estimated at 90 + 120 years before present and confirmed as an orangutan in 1982).20 Most of the remains had been chemically stained to appear old, to correspond to the color of the gravel in the Piltdown pit.20a And the molars of the lower jaw had been filed down so as not to appear apelike. The planes of the wear surfaces of the two molars, however, were set at a distinct angle to each other and the file marks were plainly visible in microscopes of the 1950s. With the benefit of hindsight, one would think that these features could have been observed with careful study of the jaw in 1912. However, most of the early focus was on differing reconstructions of the cranium. Note that in this brief summary I have had to omit mention of a number of details, which together make the reality of the forgery even more obvious to us now. Since the exposure of the forgery in 1953 there has been an unending quest for the identity of the forger (or forgers). On a website that was last updated in the late 1990s over 400 papers were listed on this question.21 The majority opinion is that Charles Dawson must have been involved but the remaining question is: was he part of a conspiracy? Nearly every prominent scientist involved with the Piltdown specimens in England at that time, has been fingered as a co conspirator of Dawson’s. Also, and most remarkably, the seemingly innocent bystander, Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived near Piltdown and was shown the gravel pit by Dawson, has been alleged to have been the sole perpetrator. But the simplest explanation is that Charles Dawson acted alone. The “whodunnit” may never be solved, however, as there remains only inconclusive circumstantial evidence. But along with others, I would argue that the identity of the culprit (or culprits) is an unimportant side issue that has diverted us 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #8 since 1953 from the important question. As Michael Hammond has written: “Since its unmasking in the early 1950s, attempts to discover ‘whodunnit’ in this mystery have somewhat obscured a far more important question in the history of anthropology, namely, what could have led so many eminent scientists to embrace such a forgery?”22 To address this question, one has to consider the prevailing knowledge as well as the preconceived theories of the leading British paleoanthropologists in the years from 1900 to 1915. Before the publication of the Piltdown specimens, very few hominid fossils were known, essentially only three species. Neanderthal was first recognized from fragmentary remains in Germany in 1856 and was known from other specimens such as those from Gibraltar and Spy, Belgium also found in the 1800s. The most complete skeleton of Neanderthal before 1912 was discovered at La Chapelle aux Saints in southwestern France in 1908, and was described by Marcelline Boule of the Museum of Natural History in Paris in a series of monographs from 1911 1913. Through his reconstruction, now known to have been “based upon an incorrect analysis of the spinal column and limb bones, Boule denied the Neanderthals a fully upright posture and fabricated the archetype of the slouching cave brute. This created an enormous morphological gulf between the Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens. Since it was thought at this time that the temporal gap between these two populations was relatively small, there simply was not enough time for the evolutionary transformation of such a morphologically primitive population as the Neanderthals . .”23 into the succeeding Cro Magnon populations, which are anatomically identical with modern Homo sapiens. “And Boule was dead set against viewing the Neanderthals as anything but an offshoot of the human lineage that had died out without issue. Anatomically, Boule claimed, the Neanderthals had possessed divergent big toes (hence grasping feet, on which, moreover, weight was borne, apelike, on the outer edges) . . .”24 But Boule ignored evidence from another site in France that demonstrated Neanderthals did not possess divergent big toes.25 Thus, Boule’s views, which strongly influenced his British colleagues, excluded Neanderthals from any close evolutionary relationship with Homo sapiens and this was the prevailing view of the chief proponents of Piltdown.26 Pithecanthropus erectus (now Homo erectus, “Java Man”) was discovered at Trinil in Java by Eugene Dubois in 1891 92, consisting of a skullcap and a femur. The femur was like that of modern humans though pathologically altered, whereas the cranial cap was smaller than that of Neanderthals but with similar heavy brow ridges above the eyes.27 In his publication of 1894 Dubois considered Pithecanthropus erectus to represent an evolutionary transition between apes and modern humans. But by 1912, this view was not accepted by most paleoanthropologists, and the species was not seriously considered again until the 1930s when far more specimens were found in Java, and following discoveries in the late 1920s – early 1930s of the Peking (Beijing) specimens now known to belong to the same species. 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #9 The third species known before the Piltdown forgery appeared on the scene, was based on the lower jaw found in 1908 in a quarry at Mauer near Heidelberg and named Homo heidelbergensis. No other hominid remains were subsequently found at the site. The age was thought to be from an interval of the Pleistocene older than Neanderthal. But although this species is now considered important in hominid evolution because of later discovered specimens from elsewhere that are now included within the species,28 Homo heidelbergensis had little or no impact on the Piltdown question. In addition to the paucity of hard evidence from the fossil record prior to 1912, as well as the perhaps understandable misinterpretations of what was available, there were the preconceived theories of hominid evolution held by the leading British paleoanthropologists.29 Two of the more prominent figures will be mentioned as examples. Arthur Keith, anatomist and anthropologist at the Royal College of Surgeons, was responsible for a reconstruction of the Piltdown cranium following the initial attempt by Smith Woodward. Keith believed in a great antiquity for the origin of modern humans. A year before the unveiling of Piltdown he was on record as believing in the existence of a morphologically modern hominid living prior to the Neanderthals,30 without fossil evidence for support. Thus, Keith was susceptible to acceptance of the authenticity of the Piltdown fragments. Whereas the earlier reconstruction underestimated the size of the cranium, that of Keith’s was much larger and “lacked the primitive features erroneously present in Smith Woodward’s.”31 Keith’s cranial reconstruction was essentially modern in morphology.32 Differences in the reconstructions were to be expected since so much of the cranium was missing.33 But it is not unreasonable to suppose that Keith’s reconstruction was partly driven by his belief in the great antiquity of a modern like hominid ancestor. The cranium of Piltdown appeared to support this hypothesis [remember that it is from a modern Homo sapiens and therefore Keith’s reconstruction was essentially correct]. But to accept the authenticity of Piltdown, Keith would have had to ignore the evidence of the lower jaw, including the isolated apelike canine found by the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in company with Dawson and Smith Woodward at the Barkham Manor site in 1913.34 The third reconstruction of the Piltdown cranium was by Grafton Elliot Smith, a prominent neuroanatomist and Professor of Anatomy at Manchester University and later University College, London. Elliot Smith’s reconstruction represented a compromise between the previous reconstructions in terms of size, but still it was that of a relatively large brain. Despite the size of the cranium, Elliot Smith thought that it showed apelike characters, but that the apelike character of the lower jaw had been exaggerated.35 Elliot Smith was deeply committed to the hypothesis that the large brain appeared first in the course of hominid evolution before the advent of the ability to 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #10 walk upright (bipedalism), and he had held this view prior to the unveiling of Piltdown in 1912. Like some other anthropologists of this period (before the discoveries in Africa of Australopithecus, which demonstrate that bipedalism and evolution of a human like lower jaw preceded the development of a large brain), Elliot Smith was engaged in a type of narrative analogous in structure to that of classic folk tales (Landau29). Suffice it to say, the paleoanthropological narratives of that period were supported only by the most limited and fragmentary evidence from fossils. It may be tempting now to disparage the Piltdown forgery as unimportant, but it had a profound effect on the acceptance or more accurately the lack of acceptance of some of the legitimate hominid fossils discovered after World War I. The commitment to Piltdown as authentic impeded the acceptance of the initial discovery of Australopithecus by Raymond Dart in 1925. The strong advocates of the authenticity of Piltdown, Smith Woodward and Keith, rejected the early finds of Australopithecus, a hominid which possessed a small brain with a human like jaw, the opposite of Piltdown. To derive a moral from the uncritical acceptance of the Piltdown Forgery by the authors of the prevailing view, one might well consider the philosophical discussion given by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in their seminal paper on punctuated evolution. “Theory does not develop as a simple and logical extension of observation; it does not arise merely from the patient accumulation of facts. Rather, we observe in order to test hypotheses and examine the consequences. Thus, Hanson (1970, p. 22 23) writes: ‘Much recent philosophy of science has been dedicated to disclosing that a ‘given’ or a ‘pure’ observation language is a myth eaten fabric of philosophical fiction . . . In any observation statement the cloven hoofprint of theory can be readily detected.’ “36 Are the “Himalayan Hoax” and the Piltdown Forgery isolated cases of aberrant behavior in the sciences? Or, are they mere instances among a multitude within “a culture of fraud,” the first chapter title in the powerful new book “The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science” by Horace Freeland Judson? Let Judson have the last word. “Day upon day, week upon week, the cases multiply, in social institutions of the most varied kinds – in finance and industry, or in the professions, or in the churches, or in sports, the media, the sciences. We can no longer suppose these are isolated instances within largely self governing, self correcting systems. We can no longer escape considering the shapes and contexts of fraud.” 37 REFERENCES CITED 1. Gould, S. J., 1980, Piltdown Revisited, in The Pandas’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History: W. W. Norton, p. 108. 2. Gould, S. J., 1983, The Piltdown Conspiracy, p. 201 226, in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History: W. W. Norton, p. 202. 3. Keen, A. M., 1977, Paleontological Hoaxes: Natural History, vol. 86, no. 5, p. 24, 26, 30. 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #11 4. Gupta, V. J., 1975, Upper Devonian Conodonts from Phulchauki, Nepal: Himalayan Geology, vol. 5, p. 153 168. 5. Gupta, V. J., 1975, Devonian Conodonts from Himalaya: Chayanica Geology, vol. 1, p. 99 121. 6. Klapper, G., and Ziegler, W., 1979, Devonian Conodont Biostratigraphy: Special Papers in Palaeontology, no. 23, p. 220. 7. Talent, J. A., Goel, R. K., Jain, A. K., and Pickett, J. W., 1988, Silurian and Devonian of India, Nepal and Butan: Biostratigraphic and Palaeobiogeographic Anomalies: Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, vol. 106, 57 p. Talent, J. A., Brock, G. A., Engelbretsen, M. J., Kato, M., Morante, R., and Talent, R. C., 1989, Himalayan Paleontologic Database Polluted by Recycling and Other Anomalies: Journal Geological Society of India, vol. 34, p. 575 586. Talent, J. A., Brock, G. A., Engelbretsen, M. J., Gaetani, M., Jell, P. A., Mawson, R., Talent, R. C., and Webster, G. D., 1990, Himalayan Palaeontologic Database Polluted: Plagiarism and Other Anomalies: Journal Geological Society of India, vol. 35, p. 569 585. Wyatt, A. R., 1990, V. J. Gupta and the Aberystwyth Fossil Collections: Journal Geological Society of India, vol. 35, p. 587 592. Webster, G. D., Rexroad, C. B., and Talent, J. A., 1993, An Evaluation of the V. J. Gupta Conodont Papers: Journal of Paleontology, vol. 67, p. 486 493. Talent, J. A., 1995, Chaos with Conodonts and other Fossil Biota: V. J. Gupta’s Career in Academic Fraud: Bibliographies and a short Biography: Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, vol. 182, p. 523 551 [Note: the first and last of these references represent the most comprehensive accounts of the fraud]. 7a: Talent, 1995, p. 528 529. 8. Talent, J. A., 1989, The Case of the Peripatetic Fossils: Nature, vol. 338, p. 613 615. Lewin, R., 1989, The Case of the “Misplaced” Fossils: Science, vol. 244, p. 277 279. 9. Nature, 1989, Himalayan Hoax: Nature, vol. 338, p. 604. 10. Weiner, J. S., 1955, The Piltdown Forgery: Oxford University Press [1980 reprint, Dover Publications], p. 7. 11. Drawhorn, G. M., 1994, Piltdown: Evidence of Smith Woodward’s complicity, p. 5 6: http://home.tiac.net/~cri_a/piltdown/drawhorn.html 12. Spencer, F., 1990, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery: Oxford University Press, p. 100. 13. As 12, p. 102 104. 14. Quoted in 12, p. 114 115. 15. Lewin, R., 1988, Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins: Simon and Schuster, p. 75. 16. Spencer, F., 1988, Prologue to a Scientific Forgery, in Stocking, G. W., Jr. (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology: University of Wisconsin Press, p. 105. 17. Gregory, W. K., 1914, The Dawn Man of Piltdown, England: The American Museum Journal, vol. 14, p. 190. Also quoted in Thomson, K. S., 1993, Piltdown Man, the Great English Mystery Story, in The Common but Less Frequent Loon and Other Essays: Yale University Press, p. 86. 17a: “None of the experts who have scrutinized the specimens and the gravel pit and its surroundings has doubted the genuineness of the discovery,” Gregory, 1914, p. 191. 18. As 10, p. 34. 19. As 12, p. 229 230, footnote 30. 20. As 12, p. 230, footnotes 30, 55. 20a: Stringer, C., 2003, Piltdown 2003: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/piltdown2003.html 21. Turrittin, T., 1997, A Piltdown Man Bibliography: http://home.tiac.net/~cri_a/piltdown/bibliog.html 22. Hammond, M., 1979, A Framework of Plausibility for an Anthropological Forgery: The Piltdown Case: Anthropology, vol. 3, p. 47. [See also Broad, W. and Wade, N., 1982, Betrayers of the Truth: Simon and Schuster, p. 121: “Indeed, the real mystery is not who did it but how a whole generation of scientists could have been taken in by so transparent a prank.”] 2008 04 04 http://www.chilit.org/Klapper 1.htm #12 23. As 22, p. 49 50. 24. Tattersall, I., 1995, The Fossil Trail: How we know what we think we know about human evolution: Oxford University Press, p. 45. 25. Jordan, P. 1999, Neanderthal: Neanderthal Man and the Story of Human Origins: Sutton Publishing, p. 31. 26. As 22, p. 50 51. 27. As 24, p. 35 36. 28. As 24, p. 47, 232, 234. 29. These have been analyzed by a number of scholars, including Michael Hammond (1979), Misia Landau, 1984, Human Evolution as Narrative: American Scientist, vol. 72, p. 262 267; 1991, Narratives of Human Evolution: Yale University Press; Bowler, P. J., 1986, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844 1944: Johns Hopkins University Press, and Roger Lewin (1988). 30. As 22, p. 51. 31. As 15, p. 74. 32. As 22, p. 52; see comparison of the two reconstructions in 12, p. 64. 33. As 24, p. 48 49. 34. As 12, p. 69; 24, p. 49. For a more thorough analysis of Keith’s preconceived views, see Bowler, P. J., 1986, p. 91 95. 35. As 15, p. 74. 36. Eldredge, N., and Gould, S. J., 1972, Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism, in Schopf, T. J. M. (ed.), Models in Paleobiology: Freeman, Cooper and Company, p. 85. 37. Judson, H. F., 2004, The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science: Harcourt, p. 9.

[Infamous VJ Gupta case]
http://www.geocities.com/w_d_west/
[W.D.West is accused of plagiarising Joseph G Medlicott, with a gap of 100 years between the
publications; the Geocities cite remains anonymous]

Plagiarsim in Kerala Science Congress

http://knowventure.blogspot.com/
[GRC Reddy, the current director (March 2008) of NIT Calicut (NITC, formerly REC-Calicut) is accused of plagiarsim in his valedictory address at the 2007 Kerala Science Congress. The anonymous blog lays it thick and fast, and Reddy can't possibly outmanouvre this]

Blogs and articles discussing plagiarism in India

http://mogadalai.wordpress.com/tag/plagiarism/

http://www.famousplagiarists.com/scienceandmedicine.htm

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/mar102008/581.pdf
An article in the March 10, 2008 issue of Current Science (India) on plagiarism by one of its long-time editors, K. R. Rao

Plagiarism: Refuge of the imbecile

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:30:00 +0000

Plagiarism in India

The plagiarism saga continues in India, unabated. Maybe its the tip of the iceberg thats being witnessed. Possibly only foolhardy folks who try to publish stolen stuff in high-profile journals get caught. I know at least one case where a professor at the university at Hisar, Haryana was implicated in a plagiarism charge brought forward by scientists working in the Centre for Earth Science Studies, Trivandrum. But it never went beyond a preliminary enquiry, with the accusers taking a soft stance and not pressing their case.

The most infamous amongst all plagiarism cases has been that of V.J.Gupta, Prof of Paleontology in the Panjab University. His bluff was called by Prof Talent of Australia. The latest in this sequence is that of the case of Sri Venkateswara University Environmental Monitoring Laboratory 's chemistry professor, Pattium Chiranjeevi (chiranjeevipattium@gmail.com). He had the audacity to simply change the names of certain elements in journal articles and submit them in his own name, to Elsevier journals like Talanta, Food Chemistry, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Analytica Chimica Acta, and Chemosphere.! Elsevier has been in the process of developing a program called Cross-check which can detect plagiarism (as of Aug 2007, whether Elsevier uses the system is unknown). Elsevier is at pains explaining its anti-plagiarism steps, and admits that its a losing game, though it says that only 0.1% of submissions maybe fraudulent.

Nature (which has had its own imbroglios with fraud) has an article on the issue in its latest edition. [5 March 2008 | Nature 452, 15 (2008) | doi:10.1038/452015d, http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080305/full/452015d.html#comments]. The article says that Chiranjeevi was found guilty of plagiarizing or falsifying more than 70 research papers published in a variety of Western scientific journals between 2004 and 2007.

Jayanta Chatterjee of Reliance Life Science aptly comments in Nature that "One more committee, some more meetings, conferences, lunches and dinners at tax payers money. Indian science hardly has any accountability these days. No wonder the quality of science education and research in India is going down despite of increasing funding in recent past (according to many published reports). The disease lies deep in the society and the level of ability and honesty among scientific community in India (just like politicians and bureaucrats)."

P.Chiranjeevi is the Secretary of the Tirupathi Chapter of the Indian Society of Analytical Scientists and many of his papers can be found in a casual search on the internet like the one on "Spectrophotometric Determination of Fenpropathrin in its Formulations and Water Samples" in the E-Journal of Chemistry (http://www.e-journals.net) Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 480-486, October 2007, in which he reports that "novel spectrophotometric methods were developed for the
determination of fenpropathrin in insecticidal formulations and water samples ... "

As with Gupta, Chiranjeevi as the name implies will live on forever as Professor!!

Deltas on Mars

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:30:00 +0000

Martian water flow

The Nature paper from Utrecht University is a fascinating mix of observationsand modelling!

Erin R. Kraal, Maurits van Dijk, George Postma & Maarten G. Kleinhans

Nature 451, 973-976(21 February 2008)

The colour-coded digital terrain model (a; colour bar shows mm below measuring surface) and fan profile (b) clearly show the transition from the crater floor (CF) into an alluvial fan (AF) with a prominent delta lobe (DL) transitioning to the feeding stream canyon (SC). High infiltration rates caused a slow rise in water level followed by an abrupt increase following local saturation (c). Initially, sediment was transported in concentrated flows (d) then, as stream power decreased, the fan transitioned to sheet flow deposition (e).

Ig Nobel Prize and Kerala

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 09:03:00 +0000

Kerala Agricultural University scientists

and the Ig nobel!

Nobels done, as we flipped through the list of awardees at the year’s Ig Nobels — that parallel, hilarious thing which happens every year after the Nobel ceremony – we couldn’t but notice a curious trend – Indians have consistently been there, year after year, getting awards for outrageous research and unfathomable findings of little consequence. Our small and seemingly insignificant research (which itself could merit an Ig Nobel) postulates a new theory to challenge a widely held western myth – the myth that Indians lack a sense of humour. (Most of those who make that comment are blissfully unaware of the phenomena called Bollywood or coalition politics!)

Former Indian PM Vajpayee (left) and his then Pakistani counterpart Sharif won the Ig Nobel for their 'aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs'

Mathematics

Two Kerala scientists won the Ig for estimating the total surface area in Indian elephants

K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, for their analytical report "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants"⁴.

Arsenic in groundwater: Remedies

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 09:00:00 +0000

New arsenal to fight arsenic: sand, garlic

Subhra Priyadarshini & Biplab Das

Two separate papers this fortnight have suggested solutions — one geological and another biochemical — to combat deadly arsenic toxicity in groundwater in the Bengal and Bangladesh regions.

The first paper¹ in Current Science contends that by tapping groundwater from a specific aquifer from the 'orange sand' layer of earth, villagers in the hundreds of affected hamlets could get arsenic-free groundwater.

In the Bengal delta, people tap groundwater from a grey, fine sand layer about 20–50 metres under ground. Community wells made in these localities by the local administration tap water from the deeper grey, fine sand aquifers 60–140 m below ground. This water is laced with high arsenic content resulting in severe health hazards for the villagers.

The researchers suggest that some boreholes that have intersected the 5–10 m thick orange sand layer at a depth of 40–50 m, sandwiched between two high-arsenic grey sand-bearing aquifers, might do the trick. In two worst affected villages of Nadia district in West Bengal, they analyzed water from four test tubewells dug in the orange sand aquifer and found arsenic-free potable water for about one year. "This may be used as a guideline for future tubewells. Geogenic arsenic pollution in the Bengal delta can be eradicated by this foolproof geological method," says Taraknath Pal, the lead researcher.

In the second study² published online in Food and Chemical Toxicology, the researchers suggest that such populations exposed to arsenic can be protected from its toxic effects with the pungent spice garlic. They have shown in animal studies that garlic overcomes the drawback of existing therapeutic agents used to combat arsenic-induced toxicity. "Garlic contains a host of sulfur-bearing organic compounds that easily penetrate through the human cell membrane and bind to arsenic," says lead researcher Keya Chaudhuri. This converts arsenic into a less toxic form that the body can easily pass out with urine.

References
1. Pal, T. et al. ‘Orange sand’ – A geological solution for arsenic pollution in Bengal delta. Curr. Sci. 94, 31-33 (2008).
2. Choudhury, R. et al. In vitro and in vivo reduction of sodium arsenite induced toxicity by aqueous garlic extract. Food Chem. Toxicol. 46, 740-751 (2008). doi:10.1016/j.fct.2007.09.108

Geoforchungszentrum's 16 critical climate change effects

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 06:08:00 +0000

Potential Anthropogenic Tipping Elements in the Earth System

tipped already in limbo still stable

1 Arctic Sea Ice Loss

As sea ice melts in a warming climate, it exposes a dark ocean surface, which absorbs more solar radiation and thus ampliﬁes the warming. Over the last 30 years the area covered by sea ice has decreased signiﬁcantly. This is also bad news for many species, like seals or polar bears, which depend on that ice for hunting and breeding. Time Frame: ~ 100 yr.

2 Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting due to the extraordinary warming of the Arctic region. Recent observations sug- gest an accelerated destabilization also due to melt-water lubrication effects. The complete collapse of the Greenland ice sheet would cause a global sea level rise of 7 m. Time Frame: Unknown due to highly non-linear processes. Current estimates: 300–1000 yr.

3 Methane Escape from Thawing Permafrost Regions and Continental Shelves

Huge amounts of methane, which is a highly potent greenhouse gas, could be released by global warming. On the one hand, terrestric methane will emanate from thawing permafrost areas in Siberia and Northern America. On the other hand, ‘methane ice’ assembled by natural processes over millions of years off many coasts might be activated by changing ocean temperatures and currents. Time Frame: ~ 1000 yr.

4 Boreal Forest Dieback

Northern boreal forests account for almost one third of the global forest inventory. They are declining in a warming climate because of enhanced disturbance stress through ﬁres, pests, and storms. At the same time, their regenerative capabilities are diminished by temperature and water stress as well as direct human interference (logging, fragmentation, etc.). The dieback would trigger massive release of carbon dioxide, which in turn enhances climate change as well as signiﬁcant losses in biodiversity. Time Frame: ~ 50–100 yr.

5 Suppression of Atlantic Deep Water Formation

The warm Atlantic surface ocean current is responsible for the benign climate in Northwestern Europe. This gre- at ‘conveyor belt’ is ultimately driven by cold and dense water sinking to the bottom of the North Atlantic off the coasts of Greenland and Labrador. A warming climate leads to an increased freshwater ﬂow into the ocean, thus decreasing the water’s density and slowing down the deep water formation. Time frame: ~ 100–500 yr.

6 Climatic Change-Induced Ozone Hole over Northern Europe

Particularly Northern Europe could face a climate change-induced ozone hole. Global warming at the bottom of atmospheric strata implies cooling in the stratospheric “roof”. This cooling induces ice cloud formation which in turn provides a catalyst for ozone destruction. Time Frame: ~ 10–1000 yr.

7 Darkening of the Tibetan Plateau

As the snow cover of the Tibetan territory melts due to global warming, the exposed dark rock surface will amplify regional warming through increased absorption of solar radiation. As a side effect, the freshwater supply for many Asian countries, which depend on glacier melt water, will be reduced. Moreover, it is possible that the darkening of the Tibetan plateau could affect the Indian monsoon system. Time Frame: ~ 50–100 yr.

8 Disruption of Indian Monsoon

Up to 90% of India’s precipitation is provided by the regular summer monsoon. Carbon dioxide as well as aerosols play a key role in this highly variable system. Air pollution, land-cover change and greenhouse gas emissions could bring about a roller-coaster succession of intensiﬁed and weakened monsoons in South Asia causing extreme droughts and ﬂoods. Time Frame: 30–100 yr.

9 Re-Greening of the Sahara and Sealing of Dust Sources

Vegetation could re-appear due to higher precipitation in the Sahel region, but this greening of the Sahara may be overridden by intensive land-use, especially grazing. If the re-greening happened, it could seal major sources of dust that is blown across the Atlantic and fertilizes South American ecosystems. Time Frame: ~ 50 yr.

10 West African Monsoon Shift

The West African monsoon is affected both by heavy deforestation in coastal areas and increasing sea-surface temperatures. The future of this monsoon system is still uncertain. Global warming may bring about a doubling of dry years in the Sahel by the end of the century or a complete monsoon collapse, both of which would have profound large-scale impacts. Time Frame: ~ 50–100 yr.

11 Dieback of Amazon Rainforest

A large fraction of precipitation in the Amazon basin is recycled evaporation water. The reduction of regional rainfall in a warming climate, intimately connected to El Niño/Southern Oscillation, as well as forest fragmentation due to human activity could bring the forest cover to a critical threshold. Amazon dieback would have profound inﬂuence on the global climate and at the same time result in a huge loss of biodiversity. Time Frame: ~ 50–100 yr.

12 Change in Southern Paciﬁc Climate Oscillation

Although uncertainties are large, some climate models predict an increased frequency and/or intensity of El Niño conditions in the Southern Paciﬁc. The impacts of such a change in the oceanic oscillation patterns would be felt around the globe, especially in the form of droughts in South-East Asia and many other regions. Time Frame: Rapid changes possible in 10-100 yr.

13 Disruption of Marine Carbon Pump

This “pump” acts as a sink for both natural and anthropogenic excess CO2. There is a risk of a decline of this sink caused by increased ocean acidiﬁcation and stratiﬁcation owing to rising atmospheric CO₂ levels. The acidiﬁcation impedes ﬂoating and ﬁxed organisms, such as plankton algae and corals, to build their skeletons, which bind carbon. Time Frame: unknown.

14 Suppression of Antarctic Deep Water Formation and Nutrients Upwelling

Similar to the North Atlantic, convection of water masses in the Southern ocean can be suppressed by freshwater inﬂow from melting ice. If there is a critical threshold, it has not been assessed so far. The resulting decline of nutrients would reduce krill, which marks the basis of the marine food chain. Time Frame: ~ 100 yr?

15 Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Although assumed to be not as vulnerable as the Green- land Ice Sheet, a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be initiated within this century. Warming oceans result in melting of offshore ice shelves, which currently impede the out-ﬂow of the continental ice masses be- hind. Furthermore, the warm water could be undercutting the ice sheet and yield further separation from the bedrock, thus accelerating the decay. The complete ice sheet collapse would raise the global sea level by 4-5 m. Time frame: ~ 300–1000 yr.

16 Antarctic Ozone Hole

Already strongly perturbed by humanity’s emissions of chloroﬂuorocarbons in the past, the protective ozone layer is believed to be regenerating after these chemicals have been banned. Yet strong interactions between stratospheric ozone depletion and global warming may widen the ozone hole over the Antarctic once again. Time Frame: ~ 10–100 yr.

by Margret Boysen — last modified Tue, 17.07.2007 15:36

February Scientists

noreply@blogger.com (A.P.Pradeepkumar) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:01:00 +0000

Birthdays in February

(http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/bio/lisa.html&nl=2)

February 8 - Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907) - a Russian chemist who created the first version of the periodic table of elements.
February 11 - Thomas Edison (1847-1931), a famous American inventor who patented over a thousand inventions, including the light bulb, phonograph and a motion picture machine.
February 12 - Charles Darwin (1809-1882), English naturalist whose book On the Origin of Species laid the basis of modern evolutionary theory.
February 15 - Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), an Italian physicist, astronomer and philosopher who was called "the father of modern science" by Albert Einstein.
February 19 - Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) - a Polish astronomer and mathematician who introduced the heliocentric model of the universe.
February 25 - Maria Kirch (1670-1720), a German astronomer who discovered the comet of 1702.
February 28 - Linus Pauling (1901-1994) - an American chemist who was awarded a Nobel price for his work in biochemistry and another one for his efforts at stopping nuclear weapons testing.