Science and Technology

[~ Susan ~]

How did you guess? lol...As a matter of fact, yes, was on to the east coast on holidays :)

[DewDiligence]

Delayed reaction—were you on vacation? :- )

[~ Susan ~]

Thanks so much for the updates Dewy!!

[DewDiligence]

Update on how the EU will handle GM crops:

#msg-52340585

[DewDiligence]

(Dicamba update, 3 years later): Monsanto Submits USDA Application for Dicamba-Tolerant Soybeans:

#msg-52340806

[~ Susan ~]

Is Eli Lilly Milking Cancer by Promoting and Treating It?


Jeffrey Smith

Author and founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology
Posted: October 7, 2009 02:27 PM


Breast Cancer Action and a coalition of consumer and health organizations have launched a campaign called Milking Cancer, where you can demand from Eli Lilly that they withdraw their dangerous bovine growth hormone from the market. For more on bovine growth hormone, see the 18-minute film, Your Milk on Drugs.

Years ago, an owner of a glass company was arrested for throwing bricks through store windows in his town. What a way to increase business! Has Eli Lilly figured out the drug equivalent of breaking, then fixing our windows?

In August 2008, the huge drug company agreed to buy Monsanto's bovine growth hormone (rbST or rbGH), which is injected into cows in the US to increase milk supply. It was an odd choice at the time. A reporter asked Lilly's representative why on earth his veterinary division Elanco just paid $300 million for a drug that other companies wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. The drug's days were obviously numbered. The former head of the American Medical Association has urged hospitals to stop using dairy products from rbGH-injected cows, the American Nurses Association came out against it, even Wal-Mart has joined the ranks of numerous retailers and dairies loudly proclaiming their cows are rbGH-free. In fact, Monsanto's stock rose by almost 5% when the sale was announced, and Eli Lilly's dropped by nearly 1%.

The main reason for the unpopularity of this hormone, which is banned in most other industrialized countries, is the danger of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). Dozens of studies confirm that IGF-1, which accelerates cell division, substantially increases the risk of breast, prostate, colon, lung, and other cancers. Normal milk contains IGF-1, milk drinkers have higher levels of IGF-1, and the milk from cows injected with Eli Lilly's drug has much greater amounts of IGF-1. You can connect the dots.

Would it be too crass to point out the obvious conflict-of-the-public's-interest that Eli Lilly also markets cancer drugs? In fact their drug Evista, which might help reduce the risk of breast cancer, may lower IGF-1 (according to one small study). So on the one hand, Eli Lilly pushes a milk drug that might increase cancer, and on the other, it comes to the rescue with drugs to treat or "prevent" cancer. Call it the perfect cancer profit cycle.

It gets better.

Cows treated with rbGH have much higher incidence of mastitis, a painful infection of the udder. This results in more pus in the milk (yuck). But don't worry. It's Eli Lilly to the rescue again. They are one of the companies happy to sell antibiotics to dairy farmers to treat the infection--which can't help but increase antibiotic resistance in humans (double yuck).

History of Lawsuits and Criminal Charges

But would Eli Lilly consciously risk our health just to increase their profit? What kind of company are they and can we trust them with our food? If recent events are any indication, you better look for rbGH-free labels.

A December 17, 2006 New York Times article revealed that according to hundreds of internal documents and emails,

Eli Lilly has engaged in a decade-long effort to play down the health risks of Zyprexa. ... Lilly executives kept important information from doctors about Zyprexa's links to obesity and its tendency to raise blood sugar -- both known risk factors for diabetes. ... Lilly was concerned that Zyprexa's sales would be hurt if the company was more forthright about the fact that the drug might cause unmanageable weight gain or diabetes.

Their own surveys revealed that 70% of psychiatrists had at least one patient "develop high blood sugar or diabetes while taking Zyprexa." And 30% of patients taking the drug for a year gained at least 22 pounds--some over 100 pounds. But Lilly told their sales team, "Don't introduce the issue!!!"

One doctor even warned: "Unless we come clean on this, it could get much more serious than we might anticipate." It did indeed get serious. They paid out hundreds of millions in settlements to people who claimed they developed diabetes or other disorders.

But Lilly's Zyprexa troubles were not over. In early 2009, they were forced to pay a record-setting $1.42 billion settlement with the Justice Department, and another record-setting state consumer protection claim of $62 million, for illegally marketing the drug to children and the elderly. It emerged in June of this year that Lilly "officials wrote medical journal studies about the antipsychotic Zyprexa and then asked doctors to put their names on the articles, a practice called 'ghostwriting.'"

Eli Lilly was also the maker of the infamous Diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen. Starting in 1938, it was prescribed to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages and other problems. Although in 1953, research showed that it didn't actually prevent miscarriages, it continued to be used until 1971, when the FDA alerted the public that the daughters exposed to DES in the womb were at risk of a rare vaginal cancer. An estimated 5-10 million pregnant women received DES. The civil courts held Lilly liable because they should have foreseen (based on prior information) that DES might cause cancer and that Lilly should have done the proper testing before marketing it.

Rigging Research

In the late 1980s Eli Lilly was one of four companies (including American Cyanamid, Upjohn, and Monsanto) that tried to get their version of bovine growth hormone approved by the FDA. I sat down with Dr. Richard Burroughs, who was a lead reviewer for the agency on these applications. He didn't have kind words to say about the companies. "They didn't follow good science and they didn't follow regulations for adequate well controlled studies," he said. "They just went out and skewed the data."

He said, for example, that Eli Lilly had mysteriously lost organ samples that may have shown problems in injected cows. And their researchers came up with creative ways to hide reproductive changes in the animals. Specifically, injections appeared to suppress cows' regular menstrual cycle or reduce the visual symptoms. The company was required to report the number of cows "in heat," but was told by the FDA that they could not use bulls to identify them. If bulls were needed, then the label on their drug would have to inform farmers that they would need a bull to help identify which cows were in heat. And most farms didn't have bulls.

According to Burroughs, FDA investigators figured out that Lilly researchers secretly pumped up a heifer--a young female cow--with male hormones, so that the transgendered animal would act like a male and be attracted to the cows in heat. Lilly followed the letter of the law by not using a bull, but well, you can decide if you want to trust these guys.

Eventually, Lilly and two other companies withdrew their products, leaving Monsanto's brand of rbGH as the only one that got approved and marketed. But Lilly worked a deal where they represented Monsanto's drug outside the US. They sell it in 20 countries, including South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Kenya and Mexico. And now, they offer it in the US as well.

Human Reproductive Problems from Drugged Milk

In May 2006, an article in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine concluded that rbGH use, and the subsequent increase in IGF-1 in the US diet, is probably the reason why we have much higher levels of fraternal twins compared to the UK, where rbGH is banned.

Mothers with twin births are more likely to suffer from hypertension, gestational diabetes, hemorrhage, and miscarriage. Twin babies are more likely to be born prematurely and suffer from birth defects, mental retardation, cerebral palsy, vision and hearing disorders, and serious organ problems. How many drugs do you suppose Eli Lilly sells to treat these disorders?

Tell Eli Lilly to take rbGH off the market and out of your milk. To find non-rbGH dairy products, check out the non-GMO shopping section at www.responsibletechology.org.

International bestselling author and filmmaker Jeffrey M. Smith is the executive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology. His first book, Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You're Eating, is the world's bestselling and #1 rated book on GMOs. His second, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, documents 65 health risks of the GM foods Americans eat everyday. Both are distributed by Chelsea Green Publishing.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/is-eli-lilly-milking-canc_b_312754.html?view=print

[~ Susan ~]

Nests of dinosaur eggs found
2009-10-01 14:27



New Delhi - Indian geologists have found a trove of dinosaur eggs, estimated to be about 65 million years old, in the country's southern state of Tamil Nadu, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

The fossilised eggs were found in the Sendurai village in the central district of Ariyalur, an area rich in fossils dating back 140 million years, the Times of India said.

"We found clusters and clusters of spherical eggs of dinosaurs, and each cluster contained eight eggs," MU Ramkumar, geology lecturer at Periyar University, told the newspaper.

The eggs were discovered during a study funded by Indian and German scientific institutions, the report said.

Ramkumar said each egg was about 13 to 20 centimetres in diameter and they were lying in sandy nests about 1.2m wide.

Scientists said they believe the eggs belonged to large, predatory dinosaurs called carnosaurs and docile sauropods, long-necked herbivores that grew to enormous heights and sizes.

Earlier fossil finds have indicated dinosaurs once roamed the region, but the latest discovery was the first time that hundreds of nests with clusters of dinosaur eggs have been unearthed in the district, the report said.

The clusters were under ash from volcanic eruptions on the Deccan plateau. Scientists said the Deccan eruptions might have caused the dinosaurs to become extinct.

Samples of the eggs are to be sent to Germany for further research.

"This is a very significant finding as never before have we found so many dinosaur eggs in the country," senior scientist Jyotsana Rai was quoted as saying.

- SAPA
http://www.news24.com/Content/SciTech/News/1132/4064dfababb54d7ebdbe32e329ab3066/01-10-2009-02-27/Nests_of_dinosaur_eggs_found

[~ Susan ~]

Dutch researchers find mutation linked to greater virulence in swine flu virus
Helen Branswell, Medical Reporter, THE CANADIAN PRESS
29 September 2009 10:46

TORONTO - Dutch scientists have reported they have found what was thought to be a key mutation in some swine flu viruses from the Netherlands, a change many virologists feared would give the viruses the ability to cause more severe disease.

But so far the evidence seems to suggest this mutation does not make the new H1N1 virus more virulent, the researchers said Tuesday.

The change, at position 627 on the PB2 gene of the virus, is known to increase the ability of flu viruses to replicate; prolonged viral replication can lead to more serious illness. The mutation has been found in all known human flu viruses, including the three that caused the pandemics of the last century.

"Everybody predicted that this mutation is going to have a big impact on virus replication of the new H1N1," said Dr. Ron Fouchier, one of the authors of the report and a molecular virologist at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam.

"If you would have asked me three months ago, I would have bet my car on it. But nobody placed that bet because everybody was sure that it would increase (virulence)."

If they had, it seems they might have been able to claim the keys to Fouchier's SUV.

Three people either known or suspected of having been infected with the mutated H1N1 viruses suffered only mild disease. And ferrets infected with a laboratory synthesized H1N1 virus with this change also did not suffer more severe disease. Ferrets are the standard animal model for human flu.

"Given the information that we have at present, we have no indication for increased virulence," said Dr. Marion Koopmans, chief of virology in the infectious diseases laboratory of the National Institute of Public Health, The Netherlands.

"This is a mutation that is in the textbooks as something to look out for, but whether it really confers something to these (H1N1) viruses remains to be seen."

Koopmans, Fouchier and a number of colleagues disclosed the surprising findings through ProMed, a website and mailing list that serves as an early warning system for infectious diseases developments. It is closely scrutinized by scientists and public health officials in the infectious diseases sphere.

The Dutch scientists reported finding two viruses with this change that appear to have been transmitted between mid-July and mid-August in the West Frisian Islands in the north of The Netherlands. The area is a popular destination for Dutch and German campers.

One of the mutated viruses was recovered from a male who had been there and who started developing symptoms on Aug. 9. The second was found in a girl who hadn't been to the area, but whose sister had been camping there at the time. The sister was also sick, but there was no specimen from her to test. Koopmans said the working assumption is that the sister who went camping was also infected with this virus.

The first virus was only discovered in mid-September, when it made its way to Koopmans' lab. An investigation at that point showed the male and the sister had been part of a group of 24 who shared two tents on the island. Most of the members of the camping party reported having been ill.

Koopmans said officials have looked at specimens from the area and from the regions from whence the campers came, but haven't found more viruses with this change.

"There's no evidence yet that this virus has spread any further in Holland," Fouchier said. "Of course we're currently still looking for it. Every virus we get our hands on we check (position) 627. But we haven't found any more."

Labs have been looking for this mutation from the moment the new H1N1 virus was fully analyzed and it was seen it didn't have the same amino acid at position 627 as other human viruses have.

Some scientists even suggested the virus might not be fully adapted to spread among humans because it didn't have this change, but instead had an amino acid at position 627 that is normally seen in avian flu viruses. The pandemic virus, which is a never-before-seen hybrid of swine, avian and human genes, has an avian PB2 gene.

Dr. Richard Webby, head of the World Health Organization's influenza collaborating centre at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., said there is good evidence this mutation is associated with adaptation of avian influenza viruses to humans, but the proof that it is linked to severity of disease is less clear.

Viruses with this change show increased virulence in mice and sometimes in ferrets, but not always, he said, suggesting the ferret data probably are more reliable. "I think this is one instance where mice are probably lying a little bit," Webby said.

In some flu viruses this change is known to allow the virus to replicate at cooler temperatures, meaning they can infect the upper airways, rather than the warmer deep lung area preferred by avian flu viruses.

That might actually be a good thing with this H1N1, Webby said, noting autopsies have shown that in severe cases the pandemic virus wreaks havoc deep in the lungs.

Dr. Nancy Cox, who heads the influenza division at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, warns people should not take too much comfort from the fact this change doesn't seem to make the virus more virulent at this point.

"We just know that influenza can change in unpredictable ways through mutation and reassortment," she said, referring to the process by which flu viruses swap genes with each other.

"The unexpected can arise, and arise very quickly. So we shouldn't write this off. It is causing hospitalization. It is causing fatalities. And in every single case that you hear about, it's a tragedy."

-Follow Canadian Press Medical Writer Helen Branswell's flu updates on Twitter at CP-Branswell

http://www.metronews.ca/ottawa/live/article/324939--dutch-researchers-find-mutation-linked-to-greater-virulence-in-swine-flu-virus

[sumisu]

Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us

30 September 2009 by Bob Holmes

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427281.300-posthuman-earth-how-the-planet-will-recover-from-us.html?full=true

WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

The only way to know is to look back into our planet's past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?

Take greenhouse warming. Climatologists' biggest worry is the possibility that global warming could push the Earth past two tipping points that would make things dramatically worse. The first would be the thawing of carbon-rich peat locked in permafrost. As the Arctic warms, the peat could decompose and release trillions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere - perhaps exceeding the 3 trillion tonnes that humans could conceivably emit from fossil fuels. The second is the release of methane stored as hydrate in cold, deep ocean sediments. As the oceans warm and the methane - itself a potent greenhouse gas - enters the atmosphere, it contributes to still more warming and thus accelerates the breakdown of hydrates in a vicious circle.

"If we were to blow all the fossil fuels into the atmosphere, temperatures would go up to the point where both of these reservoirs of carbon would be released," says oceanographer David Archer of the University of Chicago. No one knows how catastrophic the resulting warming might be.

That's why climatologists are looking with increasing interest at a time 55 million years ago called the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures rose by up to 9 °C in a few thousand years - roughly equivalent to the direst forecasts for present-day warming. "It's the most recent time when there was a really rapid warming," says Peter Wilf, a palaeobotanist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "And because it was fairly recent, there are a lot of rocks still around that record the event."

By measuring ocean sediments deposited during the thermal maximum, geochemist James Zachos of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has found that the warming coincided with a huge spike in atmospheric CO2. Between 5 and 9 trillion tonnes of carbon entered the atmosphere in no more than 20,000 years (Nature, vol 432, p 495). Where could such a huge amount have come from?

Volcanic activity cannot account for the carbon spike, Zachos says. Instead, he blames peat decomposition, which would have happened not from melting permafrost - it was too warm for permafrost - but through climatic drying. The fossil record of plants from this time testifies to just such a drying episode.

Carbon spike

If Zachos and colleagues are right, then 55 million years ago Earth passed through a carbon crisis very much like the one feared today: a sudden spike in CO2, followed by a runaway release of yet more greenhouse gases. What happened next may give us a glimpse of what to expect if our current crisis hits full force.

Geochemists have long known that when a pulse of CO2 enters the air, much of it quickly dissolves in the upper layer of the ocean before gradually dispersing through deeper waters. Within a few centuries, an equilibrium is reached, with about 85 per cent of the CO2 dissolved in the oceans and 15 per cent in the atmosphere. This CO2 persists for tens or hundreds of thousands of years - what Archer believes will be the "long tail" of the Anthropocene. Until recently, though, climate modellers were a bit fuzzy on what this tail would look like.

"Until we had some case studies from the past, there was always some degree of uncertainty in the models," says Zachos. His studies are beginning to clear up these doubts. Carbonate rocks laid down on the sea floor during the carbon spike, for example, reveal that the oceans quickly became very acidic (Science, vol 308, p 1611). But this extreme acidification lasted just 10,000 or 20,000 years, barely a blink of an eye by geological standards, after which the oceans returned to near-normal conditions for the next 150,000 years. Even the stores of peat and methane hydrates must have regenerated within 2 million years, Zachos says, because at that time the planet underwent another, smaller carbon crisis, which must also have involved peat or methane hydrates. That suggests that the long tail of the Anthropocene is unlikely to last longer than 2 million years - still not long at all by geological standards.

However, today's carbon spike differs from that of the late Palaeocene in one important way: our planet is much cooler than it was back then, so warming is likely to have a more profound effect. During the late Palaeocene, the world was warm and largely ice-free. Now we have bright, shiny ice caps which reflect sunlight back into space. These will melt, giving way to dark, energy-absorbing rock and soil. And with all that meltwater, sea levels will rise and permafrost will thaw more rapidly, boosting warming still further.

This extra nudge could conceivably tip the Earth out of its present cycle of glacials and interglacials and return it to an older, warmer state. "The Earth was ice-free for many millions of years. The current ice ages started only about 35 million years ago, so we might kick ourselves out of that," says Pieter Tans, an atmospheric scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. Even so, the newly ice-free world would merely be reverting to a familiar state. On this reading of the evidence, even the most drastic climate catastrophe would have little chance of pushing the Earth's physical systems into uncharted territory.

Not so, says James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He argues that past episodes are a poor guide to what will happen in the future, for the simple reason that the sun is brighter now than it was then. Add that to the mix and the release of methane hydrates could lead to catastrophic, unstoppable global warming - a so-called "Venus syndrome" (PDF) that causes the oceans to boil away and dooms the Earth to the fate of its broiling neighbour.

So much for the Earth itself - what of life? If Hansen is right, Earth is heading for sterility. But if the lesser scenario plays out instead, it's a very different story.

Conservation biologists say we may already be in the midst of an extinction event that could potentially turn into one of the greatest mass extinctions ever - one that would alter the trajectory of evolution.

Oddly enough, the climatic turmoil of the thermal maximum led to very little loss of biodiversity. "Nobody has ever picked the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary as a major extinction interval. It's not even in the second tier," says Scott Wing, a palaeobotanist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Instead, the fossil record shows that species simply migrated, following their preferred climate across the globe.

Today, of course, that is often not possible because roads, cities and fields have fragmented so many natural habitats. Polar and alpine species may find their habitat vanishes entirely, and this is not to mention all the other ways people imperil species.

"We're a perfect storm as far as biodiversity is concerned," says David Jablonski, a palaeontologist at the University of Chicago. "We're not just overhunting and overfishing. We're not just changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans. We're not just taking the large-bodied animals. We're doing all this stuff simultaneously." Even so, Jablonski thinks humans are unlikely to be capable of causing an extinction comparable to the one at the end of the Permian, 251 million years ago, when an estimated 96 per cent of all marine species and 70 per cent of terrestrial ones bit the dust.

Whether the Anthropocene mass extinction eventually ranks with the Permian or with lesser ones, it would still reshuffle the evolutionary deck. Once again, the past gives us some idea of what we could expect.

The fossil record tells us that every mass extinction plays out differently, because each has its own unique causes. However, there is one common factor: the species at greatest risk are those with the narrowest geographic ranges. Jablonski's studies of fossil marine snails show that species with planktonic larvae - which disperse widely - fare better than species with a more restricted distribution (Science, vol 279, p 1327).

Cockroach world

Add to that massive habitat disturbances, says Jablonski, and a picture emerges of life after the Anthropocene extinction. Small body sizes, fast reproductive rates and an ability to exploit disturbed habitats will all prove advantageous. "It's a rats, weeds and cockroaches kind of world," says Jablonski.

The wave of extinctions is likely to sweep through species in a fairly predictable way. "First we would probably lose the species that are already endangered, then it would work its way down," says Barnosky. "Eventually it would hit some of the species that we don't consider at risk today - for example, many of the African herbivores that today seem to have healthy populations."

However, predictions about the fate of any particular species are almost impossible, as luck will also play a role. The survivors will probably be a more-or-less random selection of weedy plants and opportunistic animals, notes Doug Erwin, a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

If the Anthropocene does end with a mass extinction, the fossil record tells us a lot about what the recovery might look like. Whether the news is good or bad depends on your perspective. "Recoveries from mass extinctions are geologically rapid, but from a human point of view grindingly long. We're talking millions of years," says Jablonski.

Recoveries from mass extinctions are geologically rapid, but from a human point of view grindingly long. We're talking about millions of years.

Immediately after a mass extinction, the fossil evidence suggests that ecosystems go into a state of shock for several million years. For many millions of years after the Permian extinction, for example, marine environments the world over were dominated by the same 25 or 30 species. "It's pretty boring," says Erwin.

Something similar happened on land after the Cretaceous extinction. Pre-extinction plant fossils from western North America testify to flourishing ecosystems, with a variety of insects feeding on a wide assortment of plants. After the extinction, though, both plant and insect diversity drops dramatically, with some insect feeding methods vanishing almost completely.

After that, confusion reigns for 10 million years. There are fossil assemblages with only a few insects and plants, ones with many insects but few plants, others with many plants but few insects - just about everything except what ecologists would call "normal" (Science, vol 313, p 1112). "At no time did we have what I would call a healthy ecosystem, with diverse insects feeding on diverse plants," says Wilf. All the while biodiversity remains low, with few new species evolving. "You're just trying to hang on," says Erwin.

A study of marine fossil diversity bears this out. Nearly a decade ago, James Kirchner of the University of California, Berkeley, and Anne Weil of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, took a database of all known marine fossils and used it to work out how closely peaks of speciation follow peaks of extinction (Nature, vol 404, p 177). "We went into this thinking, like everybody else, that when you have an extinction, you begin repopulating almost immediately," says Kirchner, now at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Birmensdorf. Instead, they found that speciation peaks lagged about 10 million years behind extinction peaks. "We pretty much fell out of our chairs," he says.

In fact, for the first few million years after an extinction the speciation rate actually falls. "That suggests to us a sort of wounded biosphere. Extinction events don't just remove organisms from an ecosystem, leaving lots of opportunity for new species to diversify. Instead, what we think happens is that the niches themselves collapse, so you won't have new organisms emerging to occupy them. The niches themselves don't exist any more," says Kirchner.

Eventually, though, evolution wins the day, and after a few tens of millions of years biodiversity rebounds. Sometimes, as after the Ordovician mass extinction 440 million years ago, the new regime looks a lot like the old one. But more often a new world emerges. "You're not re-establishing the old chessboard, you're designing a whole new game," says Erwin.

In the Permian, the oceans were dominated by filter-feeding animals such as brachiopods and sea lilies, which lived their whole lives attached to the bottom. Predators were rare. All that changed after the extinction, leaving a more dynamic and richer ecosystem. "From my point of view, the end-Permian mass extinction was the best thing that ever happened to life," says Erwin.

In a perverse way, then, the bottom line is an encouraging one. Even if we manage to overpopulate and overconsume ourselves back to the Stone Age, the Earth will probably survive. Life will go on. By the time the long tail of the Anthropocene is over, what little was left of humanity will probably be gone. A new geological age will dawn. Shame there won't be anybody around to give it a name.

Editorial: Earth will be OK, but for us it's not so good

Bob Holmes is a consultant for New Scientist based in Edmonton, Canada

[EnergyGuy62]

Some Health Care Workers Refuse To Take Swine Flu Shots

http://news.mobile.msn.com/en-us/articles.aspx?afid=1&aid=32586706

[EnergyGuy62]

Why America Will Never Have Super Fast Passenger Trains Like Europe's Or Asia's

http://news.mobile.msn.com/en-us/articles.aspx?afid=1&aid=29900655

[EnergyGuy62]

Huge Multi Billion Dollar Bridge To Be Built To Northern Germany

Copenhagen -- Danish lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Thursday in favour of the construction of a giant bridge linking Denmark and Germany across the Fehmarn strait in the Baltic Sea.

The project, which has yet to be ratified by the German parliament, is set to be the largest ever road and railway construction project in northern Europe and one of the biggest infrastructure projects on the continent.

A total of 104 Danish members of parliament voted in favour, while just three members of the opposition far-left Unity List party objected to the plan.

The 19-kilometre (12-mile) road and rail link will stretch from Roedbyhavn (150 kilometres south of Copenhagen) to Puttgarden in northern Germany.

Denmark and Germany signed a treaty in September 2008, agreeing to build the link.

The bridge, which is scheduled to open in 2018, is expected to cost 5.6 billion euros (8.1 billion dollars), with Denmark footing 4.8 billion euros of the bill and Germany only paying for linking the bridge to its existing transport and infrastructure.

Once the project is completed, Copenhagen expects to be reimbursed for its expenses through user tolls.

Germany's parliament is expected to vote on the project in the coming months, a move seen largely as a formality.

Danish Transport Minister Lars Barfoed hailed parliament's "historic decision," noting that the link would "reduce the distance (by train) between Copenhagen and Hamburg by 150 kilometres (93 miles)."

The trip currently takes four hours by car, and would take three hours with the new link.
It would also make deliveries of goods between the two countries "shorter and cheaper."

Denmark already has two other major bridge and rail constructions: the Oeresund Bridge linking it to Sweden, and the Great Baelt Bridge between two of Denmark's main islands, Zealand and Funen.

The new link will make it possible to travel from northern Germany to eastern Denmark without having to pass through the continental part of the Scandinavian country.

There are currently ferries that link Roedbyhavn to Puttgarden.
Critics, including the Unity List party, have argued that the road traffic on the bridge will increase pollution, but Barfoed rejected the criticism.

He said the link would "lead to a fantastic upswing in Danish and European rail traffic," and predicted that around eight million tonnes of goods would be transported by train each year out of a total of 15 million.

[sumisu]

Pretty Sky Alert

02.26.2009

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/26feb_prettysky.htm?friend%20=

[MSC290]

Fossil proves sex started 350 million years ago

February 25, 2009 - Timesonline



The era when sex became a popular form of reproduction has been fixed by the discovery of a fossilised pregnant fish and her embryo.

Remains of the primitive fish, Incisoscutum ritchiei, have provided the earliest known evidence of copulation and live births in the animal kingdom.

Until the evolution of the armoured fish, sex is thought to have been limited to external fertilisation techniques in which sperm and eggs were squirted into the water to mix.

The species, with the fossil dated at 350-380 million years old, is the same age as another closely related fossilised fish, Materpiscis attenboroughi, which was found last year with a newly born offspring still attached by the umbilical cord.

Researchers said the discovery of two types of fish living at the same time shows copulation among vertebrates was a common means of reproduction some 200 million years earlier than had been thought.

“Seen in one fossil, it could have been a one-off. With our new discovery we are beginning to think sex is characteristic,” said Dr Zerina Johanson, of the Natural History Museum in London. “We now have to rethink how animals reproduced way back then.

“We would have expected before this, that this very primitive fish had an external form of fertilisation. We are having to rethink that now. It’s challenging how we think about reproduction at this early evolutionary stage.”

Analysis of fossilised males revealed that the species had developed claspers on its pelvic fins which would have enabled the male to insert a package of sperm into the female.

“This is what I understand as copulation - a transfer of the sperm inside the female, then fertilisation takes place inside the female,” Dr Johanson added. “Sex started a lot sooner than we thought.”

By evolving internal fertilisation and giving birth the fish had opted to invest a lot of energy in a few offspring which were well-developed and capable of avoiding predators by the time they were born.

The alternative was for the female to lay huge numbers of eggs and for the male to squirt sperm over them. Such external fertilisation creates large numbers of tiny larvae but few survive to adulthood.

The embryo found inside I. ritchiei was originally thought to have been the mother fish’s last meal but was reassessed after the discovery of M. attenboroughi.

Both species were found in Western Australia’s Gogo formation which is thought to be the remnants of a reef in tropical inland sea. I. ritchiei was first described in the 1980s and the new interpretation is reported in the journal Nature.

The two species of copulating animals were examples of placoderms which were a class of fish that had armoured plates on their heads and thorax and dominated the seas during the Devonian.

They are the most primitive form of jawed vertebrates yet found and most were predators. Placoderm fossils have been found in Europe, North America, North Africa, Australasia and Antarctica.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5804234.ece

[sumisu]

Cache of Ice Age fossils found in Los Angeles

By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer Alicia Chang, Ap Science Writer – 1 hr 33 mins ago AP –


Volunteer Meganne Macias works on the giant pelvis of a well preserved Colombian mammoth fossil named 'Zed' by laboratory workers at the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles on Wednesday Feb. 18, 2009. Researchers discovered 16 fossil deposits under an old parking lot next to the tar pits in 2006 and began sifting through them last summer. The mammoth remains, including 10-foot-long tusks, were in an ancient riverbed near the fossil cache. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090219/ap_on_sc/sci_la_tar_pits

LOS ANGELES – Scientists are studying a huge cache of Ice Age fossil deposits recovered near the famous La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of the nation's second-largest city.

Among the finds is a near-intact mammoth skeleton, a skull of an American lion and bones of saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, bison, horses, ground sloths and other mammals.

Researchers discovered 16 fossil deposits under an old parking lot next to the tar pits in 2006 and began sifting through them last summer. The mammoth remains, including 10-foot-long tusks, were in an ancient riverbed near the fossil cache.

Officials of the Page Museum at the tar pits plan to formally announce their findings on Wednesday. The discoveries could double the museum's Ice Age collection.

Such a rich find usually takes years to excavate. But with a deadline looming to build an underground parking garage for the next-door art museum, researchers boxed up the deposits and lifted them out of the ground using a massive crane.

"It's like a paleontological Christmas," research team member Andie Thomer wrote in a blog post in July.

The research dubbed "Project 23" — because it took 23 boxes to house the deposits — uncovered fossilized mammals as well as smaller critters including turtles, snails and insects. Separately, scientists found a well-preserved Columbian mammoth that they nicknamed Zed.

An examination reveals Zed, which is 80 percent complete, had arthritic joints and several broken and re-healed ribs — an indication that he suffered a major injury during his life.

"It's looking more and more as if Zed lived a pretty rough life," Thomer blogged in December.

Some scientists not connected with the discovery said this is the first significant fossil find since the original excavations at the tar pits more than a century ago.

"Usually these things are either lost in the mixing or not recovered in the processing of the oily sand and soil they occur in," paleontologist Jere H. Lipps of the University of California, Berkeley wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

The La Brea Tar Pits ranks among the world's famous fossil sites. Between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, mammoths, mastodons, saber-tooth cats and other Ice Age beasts became trapped by sticky asphalt that oozing upward through cracks and fissures in the ground. The newly recovered fossils were also in asphalt.

Since 1906, more than a million bones have been unearthed from the sticky ponds.

[sumisu]

Scenes from Antarctica

November 10, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/11/scenes_from_antarctica.html

[EnergyGuy62]

Will Smokers Win?

http://news.mobile.msn.com/en-us/articles.aspx?afid=1&aid=29020243

[MSC290]

Ancient fossil find: This snake could eat a cow!

By Malcolm Ritter - AP Science Writer - February 4, 2009

Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie "Anaconda." Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world. Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.

"This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus," enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.

"It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately."

"If it tried to enter my office to eat me, it would have a hard time squeezing through the door," reckoned paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto Missisauga.

Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago, he said.

Head is senior author of a report on the find in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

(The same issue carries another significant report from the distant past. Scientists said they'd found the oldest known evidence of animal life, remnants of steroids produced by sponges more than 635 million years ago in Oman.)

The discoverers of the snake named it Titanoboa cerrejonensis ("ty-TAN-o-BO-ah sare-ah-HONE-en-siss"). That means "titanic boa from Cerrejon," the region where it was found.

While related to modern boa constrictors, it behaved more like an anaconda and spent almost all its time in the water, Head said. It could slither on land as well as swim.

Conrad, who wasn't involved in the discovery, called the find "just unbelievable.... It mocks your preconceptions about how big a snake can get."

Titanoboa breaks the record for snake length by about 11 feet, surpassing a creature that lived about 40 million years ago in Egypt, Head said. Among living snake species, the record holder is an individual python measured at about 30 feet long, which is some 12 to 15 feet shorter than typical Titanoboas, said study co-author Jonathan Bloch.

The beast was revealed in early 2007 at the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Bones collected at a huge open-pit coal mine in Colombia were being unpacked, said Bloch, the museum's curator of vertebrate paleontology.

Graduate students unwrapping the fossils "realized they were looking at the bones of a snake. Not only a snake, but a really big snake."

So they quickly consulted the skeleton of a 17-foot anaconda for comparison. A backbone from that creature is about the size of a silver dollar, Bloch said, while a backbone from Titanoboa is "the size of a large Florida grapefruit."

So far the scientists have found about 180 fossils of backbone and ribs that came from about two dozen individual snakes, and now they hope to go back to Colombia to find parts of the skull, Bloch said.

Titanoboa's size gives clues about its environment. A snake's size is related to how warm its environment is. The fossils suggest equatorial temperatures in its day were significantly warmer than they are now, during a time when the world as a whole was warmer. So equatorial temperatures apparently rose along with the global levels, in contrast to the competing hypothesis that they would not go up much, Head noted.

"It's a leap" to apply the conditions of the past to modern climate change, Head said. But given that, the finding still has "some potentially scary implications for what we're doing to the climate today," he said.

The finding suggest the equatorial regions will warm up along with the planet, he said.

"We won't have giant snakes, however, because we are removing most of their habitats by development and deforestation" in equatorial regions, he said.

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2009/02/04/ancient_fossil_find_this_snake_could_eat_a_cow/

[MSC290]

Earliest Evidence For Animal Life Pushed Back To 635 million years ago

By News Staff - February 4th 2009 - Scientific Blogging

An international research team of scientists from UC Riverside, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Geoscience Australia, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom has found the oldest evidence for animals in the fossil record.

The researchers examined sedimentary rocks in south Oman, and found an anomalously high amount of distinctive steroids that date back to 635 million years ago, to around the end of the last immense ice age. The steroids are produced by sponges – one of the simplest forms of multicellular animals.

The researchers argue that the discovery of the sponges is evidence for multicellular animal life beginning 100 million years before the Cambrian explosion, a well-studied and unique episode in Earth history that began about 530 million years ago when, as indicated by the fossil record, animal life diversified rapidly.The discovery can help scientists reconstruct Earth's early ecosystems and explain how animal life may have first evolved on the planet.

"Our findings suggest that the evolution of multicellular animals began earlier than has been thought," said Gordon Love, an assistant professor of Earth sciences, who led the research group. Love began working on the project while he was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. "Moreover, sponges live on the seafloor, growing initially in shallow waters and spreading, over time, into deeper waters, implying the existence of oceanic environments which contained dissolved oxygen near the shallow seafloor around 635 million years ago."

According to Love, the climatic shock of the extensive glacial episodes of the Neoproterozoic era (1000-542 million years ago) likely caused a major reorganization of marine ecosystems, perhaps by irrevocably altering ocean chemistry.

"This paved the way for the evolution of animal feeders living on the seafloor," he said. "We believe we are converging on the correct date for the divergence of complex multicellular animal life, on the shallow ocean floor between 635 and 750 million years ago."

The steroids that Love and his colleagues observed in the Omani rocks are essential biochemicals present in the cell membranes of the sponges, and help provide the membranes with structural support. The sponges are a few millimeters in size, immobile, and were filter feeders existing on the seafloor.The sponge findings emerged from a project Love was working on at MIT (with Roger Summons, a professor of geobiology) in collaboration with Petroleum Development Oman. Using state-of–the-art techniques, he and his colleagues analyzed 64 Neoproterozoic-Cambrian sedimentary rock samples from the South Oman Salt Basin (SOSB), a region known for some of the best preserved rocks in the world. The researchers also established a robust stratigraphic and temporal framework for the SOSB rocks as part of their analysis.

Next, Love and his colleagues plan to screen other Neoproterozoic sedimentary rocks for animal steroids just before and through the Sturtian and Marinoan glaciations, the greatest ice ages known to have occurred on Earth during 850 to 635 million years ago.

"We aim to investigate the environmental context by which multicellular animal life became viable and flourished," he said.

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/earliest_evidence_animal_life_pushed_back_635_million_years_ago

[MSC290]

Ancient Whales Gave Birth on Land

03 February 2009 - By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer - LiveScience

More than 47 million years ago, a whale was about to give birth to her young ... on land. That's according to skeletal remains of a pregnant cetacean whose fetus was positioned head-down as is the case for land mammals but not aquatic whales.

The teeth of the fetus were so well-developed that researchers who analyzed the fossils think the baby would have been born within days, had its mom not died.

The fossil discovery marks the first extinct whale and fetus combination known to date, shedding light on the lifestyle of ancient whales as they made the transition from land to sea during the Eocene Epoch (between 54.8 million and 33.7 million years ago).

Philip Gingerich, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his team discovered the pregnant whale remains in Pakistan in 2000, and then in 2004, Gingerich's co-authors and others found the nearly complete skeleton of an adult male from the same species in those fossil beds. The adult whales are each about 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) long and weighed between 615 and 860 pounds (280 and 390 kg), though the male was slightly longer and heavier than the female.

(Gingerich is also director of the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology.)

Confusing find

On the dig that ultimately yielded the pregnant whale, Gingerich and his team first spotted what looked like a line of chalk on the ground surface, which later turned out to be the teeth of the whale fetus.

"Very quickly I got into the baby's teeth," Gingerich told LiveScience. "Then I kept going around it, and the ribs seemed too big for the size of the animal and they were all going the wrong way. So I have to say I spent the whole day excavating this thing confused about what in the world was going on here."

Soon after, Gingeric discovered another, larger, skull, and he realized the fetus was still inside its mother.

The new species, now called Maiacetus inuus, is a member of the Archaeoceti, a group of cetaceans (an animal group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises) that predate modern toothed and baleen whales. Archaeocetes had mouths full of several types of teeth, as well as nostrils near the nose tip. Both features are seen in land mammals but not in today's whales.

Like other archaeocetes, the newly discovered whale was equipped with four legs modified for foot-powered swimming (sort of like climbing, or scrambling, up a steep hill but instead in water). While the whales likely could support their weight on their flipper-like limbs, they probably couldn't go far on land.

"They clearly were tied to the shore," Gingerich said. "They were living at the land-sea interface and going back and forth."

Land delivery

The team suggests that Maiacetus fed at sea and came ashore to rest, mate and give birth.

The head-first position of the fetus matches what is found in many land animals, particularly the artiodactyls (pigs, deer and cows), which are thought to have given rise to ancient whales. Human babies also emerge head first, ideally.

Scientists speculate that a head-first orientation allows land mammals to breathe even if they get stuck in the birth canal.

That's not the case underwater. "If you're born in the water you don't want the head out away from the mother until it's going to pop free, because you don't want it to drown,” Gingerich said.

In addition, tail-first delivery in modern whales and dolphins would ensure the baby is facing in the same direction as its mother who is likely swimming. To keep mom and baby from getting separated, tail-first delivery would be optimal, Gingerich said.

The research, published in the Feb. 4 issue of the online journal PloS ONE, was funded by the Geological Survey of Pakistan, National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

http://www.livescience.com/animals/090203-pregnant-whale-fossil.html

[MSC290]

What Tiktaalik Roseae Means To You And Me

By Hank Campbell - February 1st 2009 - Scientific Blogging

In 2004 a University of Chicago researcher discovered something every evolutionary biologist knew had to exist - a missing link between land animals and fishes.

Transitional forms are sometimes touchy subjects to biologists because the notion is used in a bad way by detractors; opponents of evolution will speculate why there is no half-formed lung because they are using the term 'transitional' in a non-scientific way; they don't really understand the concept of gradualism in evolution and because there are arguments in the scientific community about phyletic gradualism or punctuated equilibrium, quantum evolution, punctuated gradualism, etc., evolution detractors take that to mean it must be a weak idea rather stronger because of the debate, but very little science could ever be done without retrodictions, including geology, climate science and cosmology.

390 million years ago all vertebrates were fishes but 30 million years later there were four-legged creatures walking on land and they retained fishlike qualities. It makes sense that a transitional creature, a missing link, would be right in the middle of that period. Science says such a creature absolutely did exist much the way 3 will exist between 2 and 4 but that doesn't mean a fossil survived. We see fossils every day so we take them for granted but a fossil is actually a rare thing because the process is so elaborate. Anti-science ideologues will use the honesty of science against itself by claiming the lack of a fossil in our hands right this minute invalidates what we know must be true because they don't understand that a complete fossil record is well, 'miraculous'; most life is soft-bodied and rarely survives the fossilization process.

But science is sometimes about long shots so Neil Shubin and colleagues set off to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, convinced without rational hope that freshwater sediments would yield what they sought - a needle in a haystack proposition, if the haystack were on Mars. Outside research, I'll spend two hours writing this article but Shubin spent five years trekking off to hunt around in the water in Canada.

But after five years they found it. A 'fishapod', Shubin later joked, because it had a skull like a crocodile, sturdy ribs - and a neck, the only fish to have one. He called it Tiktaalik roseae, opting for Inuktitut rather than Latin ('big, shallow-water fish') and roseae as some sort of reference to one of the expedition's financiers (presumably not the National Science Foundation or the National Geographic Society - does anyone know who the mystery donor is? I couldn't find a name).

The most fascinating thing about Tiktaalik is that it did not live on land (it had gills) but could breathe air above the surface and its bone structure was already partway between leg and fin - and instead of a 30 million year gap between fish and land creature, there is now 15 million.

Tiktaalik roseae, the intermediate between fish that lived in water and animals that evolved to walk on land. It has the fin of a fish but could 'prop' its bodyup, much like a limb. Credit: Kalliopi Monoyios, University of Chicago.

Obviously there is another transitional creature between them and somewhere in the sediment there may be a fossil that can be found - we have enough haystacks, we just need more scientists willing to search for needles.

So we know what Tiktaalik means to biologists but what does it mean to you and me? It means science works. Shubin and colleagues got lucky but it was a special sort of luck. Evolution had predicted the existence of Tiktaalik and science said not only that it must have existed but that if a fossil remained, it would exist in a specific sort of place; freshwater and in sediment of a somewhat narrow time period, all predicted quite accurately it turned out. Finds like this are a mix of biology, paleontology and geology but they all have a common foundation in the scientific method.

So as we go into February and Darwin's bicentennial we need to keep in mind that evolution is not just about a man, even one who had 'the greatest idea anyone ever had' - it's about using science to explain the world around us and about man's quest for answers.

http://www.scientificblogging.com/science_20/30_days_evolution_what_tiktaalik_roseae_means_you_and_me

[EnergyGuy62]

Biotechies use their homes to discover and invent.

http://news.mobile.msn.com/en-us/articles.aspx?afid=1&aid=28390773

[EnergyGuy62]

Congratulations Sumi! Your post about the coming Ice Age should be read by EVERYONE on this planet Earth!

[MSC290]

Billion-year revision of plant evolution timeline may stem from discovery of lignin in seaweed

Public release date: 27-Jan-2009

Land plants' ability to sprout upward through the air, unsupported except by their own woody tissues, has long been considered one of the characteristics separating them from aquatic plants, which rely on water to support them.

Now lignin, one of the chemical underpinnings vital to the self-supporting nature of land plants – and thought unique to them – has been found in marine algae by a team of researchers including scientists at UBC and Stanford University.

Lignin, a principal component of wood, is a glue-like substance that helps fortify cell walls and is instrumental in the transport of water in many plants.

In a study published in today's issue of the journal Current Biology, lead author Patrick Martone and colleagues describe using powerful chemical and microscopic anatomy techniques to identify and localize lignin within cell walls of a red alga that thrives along the wave-swept California coast. Martone conducted the work described in the paper while a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of co-author Mark Denny, Professor of Biology at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station.

"All land plants evolved from aquatic green algae and scientists have long believed that lignin evolved after plants took to land as a mechanical adaptation for stabilizing upright growth and transporting water from the root," says Martone, an assistant professor in the UBC Dept. of Botany, where he is continuing his work on lignin.

"Because red and green algae likely diverged more than a billion years ago, the discovery of lignin in red algae suggests that the basic machinery for producing lignin may have existed long before algae moved to land."

Alternatively, algae and land plants may have evolved the identical compound independently, after they diverged.

"The pathways, enzymes and genes that go into making this stuff are pretty complicated, so to come up with all those separately would be really, really amazing," says Denny. "Anything is possible, but that would be one hell of a coincidence."

The team's finding provides a new perspective on the early evolution of lignified support tissues – such as wood – on land, since the seaweed tissues that are most stressed by waves crashing on shore appear to contain the most lignin, possibly contributing to mechanical support, says Martone.

The new discovery may affect one of the ways land plants are distinguished from aquatic algae in textbooks – by the presence of lignin. It is also of interest to biofuel researchers since lignin binds cell walls and prevents the extraction of cellulose, a key component in biofuel production.

Funded primarily by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, Martone says the research team has started looking for billion-year-old lignin genes that might be shared among land plants and red algae, and has started exploring whether lignin exists in other aquatic algae and what role it plays in the evolution and function of aquatic plants.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/uobc-bro012609.php

[MSC290]

Dinosaur Fossils Fit Perfectly Into The Evolutionary Tree Of Life

ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2009) — A recent study by researchers at the University of Bath and London’s Natural History Museum has found that scientists’ knowledge of the evolution of dinosaurs is remarkably complete.

Evolutionary biologists use two ways to study the evolution of prehistoric plants and animals: firstly they use radioactive dating techniques to put fossils in chronological order according to the age of the rocks in which they are found (stratigraphy); secondly they observe and classify the characteristics of fossilised remains according to their relatedness (morphology).

Dr Matthew Wills from the University of Bath’s Department of Biology & Biochemistry worked with Dr Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum and Julia Heathcote at Birkbeck College (London) to analyse statistical data from fossils of the four major groups of dinosaur to see how closely they matched their trees of evolutionary relatedness.

The researchers found that the fossil record for the dinosaurs studied, ranging from gigantic sauropods to two-legged meat eaters such as T. rex, matched very well with the evolutionary tree, meaning that the current view of evolution of these creatures is very accurate.

Dr Matthew Wills explained: “We have two independent lines of evidence on the history of life: the chronological order of fossils in the rocks, and ‘trees’ of evolutionary relatedness.

“When the two tell the same story, the most likely explanation is that both reflect the truth. When they disagree, and the order of animals on the tree is out of whack with the order in the rocks, you either have a dodgy tree, lots of missing fossils, or both.

“What we’ve shown in this study is that the agreement for dinosaurs is remarkably good, meaning that we can have faith in both our understanding of their evolution, and the relative completeness of their fossil record.

“In other words, our knowledge of dinosaurs is very, very good.”

The researchers studied gaps in the fossil record, so-called ‘ghost ranges’, where the evolutionary tree indicates there should be fossils but where none have yet been found. They mapped these gaps onto the evolutionary tree and calculated statistical probabilities to find the closeness of the match.

Dr Wills said: “Gaps in the fossil record can occur for a number of reasons. Only a tiny minority of animals are preserved as fossils because exceptional geological conditions are needed. Other fossils may be difficult to classify because they are incomplete; others just haven’t been found yet.

“Pinning down an accurate date for some fossils can also prove difficult. For example, the oldest fossil may be so incomplete that it becomes uncertain as to which group it belongs. This is particularly true with fragments of bones. Our study made allowances for this uncertainty.

“We are excited that our data show an almost perfect agreement between the evolutionary tree and the ages of fossils in the rocks. This is because it confirms that the fossil record offers an extremely accurate account of how these amazing animals evolved over time and gives clues as to how mammals and birds evolved from them.”

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Sytematic Biology, was part of a project funded by the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) that aimed to combine different forms of evolutionary evidence to produce more accurate evolutionary trees.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090126082351.htm

[MSC290]

First Americans Arrived As Two Separate Migrations, According To New Genetic Evidence

ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2009) — The first people to arrive in America traveled as at least two separate groups to arrive in their new home at about the same time, according to new genetic evidence published online in Current Biology.

After the Last Glacial Maximum some 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, one group entered North America from Beringia following the ice-free Pacific coastline, while another traversed an open land corridor between two ice sheets to arrive directly into the region east of the Rocky Mountains. (Beringia is the landmass that connected northeast Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age.) Those first Americans later gave rise to almost all modern Native American groups of North, Central, and South America, with the important exceptions of the Na-Dene and the Eskimos-Aleuts of northern North America, the researchers said.

" Recent data based on archeological evidence and environmental records suggest that humans entered the Americas from Beringia as early as 15,000 years ago, and the dispersal occurred along the deglaciated Pacific coastline," said Antonio Torroni of Università di Pavia, Italy. "Our study now reveals a novel alternative scenario: Two almost concomitant paths of migration, both from Beringia about 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, led to the dispersal of Paleo-Indians—the first Americans."

Such a dual origin for Paleo-Indians has major implications for all disciplines involved in Native American studies, he said. For instance, it implies that there is no compelling reason to presume that a single language family was carried along with the first migrants.

When Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, Native American occupation stretched from the Bering Strait to Tierra del Fuego, Torroni explained. Those native populations encompassed extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, which has fueled extensive debate among experts over their interrelationships and origins.

Recently, molecular genetics, together with archaeology and linguistics, has begun to provide some insights. In the new study, Ugo Perego and Alessandro Achilli of Torroni's team analyzed mitochondrial DNA from two rare haplogroups, meaning mitochondrial types that share a common maternal ancestor. Mitochondria are cellular components with their own DNA that allow scientists to trace ancestry and migration because they are passed on directly from mother to child over generations.

Their results show that the haplogroup called D4h3 spread from Beringia into the Americas along the Pacific coastal route, rapidly reaching Tierra del Fuego. The other haplogroup, X2a, spread at about the same time through the ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice Sheets and remained restricted to North America.

" A dual origin for the first Americans is a striking novelty from the genetic point of view and makes plausible a scenario positing that within a rather short period of time, there may have been several entries into the Americas from a dynamically changing Beringian source," the researchers concluded.

The evidence that separate groups of people with distinctive genetic roots entered the Americas independently at the same time strongly implies linguistic and cultural differences between them. "The origin of the first Americans is very controversial to archaeologists and even more so to linguists," said study corresponding author Professor Antonio Torroni, heading the University of Pavia group. "Our genetic study reveals a scenario in which more than one language family could have arrived in the Americas with the earliest Paleo-Indians."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090108121618.htm

[MARKETEDGE]

Scientists find new creatures of Australian deep

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090118/sc_afp/scienceoceansanimalswarmingaustralia
Sat Jan 17, 11:13 pm ET AFP/HO – One of Australia's deepest residents a carnivorous sea squirt, or ascidian, standing half a meter … SYDNEY (AFP) – Scientists said Sunday they had uncovered new marine animals in their search of previously unexplored Australian waters, along with a bizarre carnivorous sea squirt and ocean-dwelling spiders.

A joint US-Australian team spent a month in deep waters off the coast of the southern island of Tasmania to "search for life deeper than any previous voyage in Australian waters," lead researcher Ron Thresher said.

What they found were not only species new to science -- including previously undescribed soft corals -- but fresh indications of global warming's threat to the country's unique marine life.

"Our sampling documented the deepest known Australian fauna, including a bizarre carnivorous sea squirt, sea spiders and giant sponges, and previously unknown marine communities dominated by gooseneck barnacles and millions of round, purple-spotted sea anemones," Thresher said.

Using a submersible car-sized robot named Jason, the team explored a rift in the earth's crust known as the Tasman Fracture Zone, a sheer two kilometre (1.24 mile) drop to 4,000 metres (13,200 feet) below the ocean's surface.

[MSC290]

Did life begin in a pool of acidic gloop?

19 January 2009 by Douglas Fox - NewScientist-Life

JETS of sulphurous steam roar out of holes in the ground and an eggy stench hangs in the air. This is Bumpass Hell, a valley of bubbling mud pools in the heart of the Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California. The valley is ringed with beautiful pine and fir trees climbing up the surrounding slopes, but life seems to have stayed away from the lower reaches. Billions of years ago, though, the opposite might have been true.

I've come to Bumpass Hell with David Deamer, a biochemist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, to watch him run an experiment recreating one of the most important episodes in the history of life: when carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus came together in the primordial soup to form amino acids, DNA and the rest of life's building blocks.

If Deamer is right, then the sort of extreme conditions found here were key to that momentous event. It may be an unattractive and rather dangerous place to work, but to Deamer this is one of the most precious places on Earth - the closest thing he can get to the cauldron of chemicals from which life might have emerged over 4 billion years ago.

Researchers have spent decades trying to recreate this magical moment in their labs, and they have made some impressive discoveries along the way. In 1953, Stanley Miller, then at the University of Chicago, was the first to synthesise amino acids by passing high voltages through a cocktail of ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water vapour. In the decades that followed, researchers found other ways to synthesise amino acids and nucleotides - the building blocks of DNA and RNA - at temperatures ranging from 80 °C to -80 °C. They also discovered many different ways in which these molecules could assemble into larger structures similar to life's first proteins and genetic molecules.
Test-tube life forms

Deamer is a veteran of such experiments himself. Along with Jack Szostak, a biochemist at Harvard University, he has created test-tube environments in which fatty acids and similar molecules self-assemble into cell-like structures - one of the key steps in the emergence of life. These artificial proto-cells are able to survive boiling (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 13351) and can absorb nucleotides from the environment as they grow chains of RNA within (Nature, vol 454, p 122).

Still, huge gaps remain in our knowledge of how life began. The first genetic material might have been RNA, but equally it might have been some other, unknown molecule. And which of early Earth's varied environments was the one that first spawned life - did it happen in a deep-sea hydrothermal vent, on frigid polar sea ice or in boiling cauldrons of clay and water like the ones at Bumpass Hell? We just don't know.

Deamer and a few other like-minded researchers have concluded that lab work alone can get them no further. They have decided to find out which of the experiments that work so well in a squeaky-clean laboratory can be reproduced in the messy real world. "The prebiotic world was much more complex than a laboratory situation," says Deamer. He thinks that doing experiments in places like Bumpass Hell will help narrow down the environments that are realistic candidates for the origin of life. Forget the theory, he says: he wants to see which candidates actually work.

It's all too easy to make a false discovery, however. Even in a thoroughly controlled environment, just a few bacteria creeping into the apparatus undetected can ruin the experiment. You could mistakenly conclude that your chemical soup was generating DNA which had in fact come from these trespassing microbes. To prevent such contamination, Miller baked his glassware near its melting point for up to 24 hours.
Swamping contaminants

Of course, Deamer can't do that in his mud pools. But unlike Miller, he has a way of distinguishing between synthesised and bacterial nucleotides and RNA. Deamer adds enough bio-material to swamp any belonging to bacteria by a factor of around 100, which means that any synthesised biomolecules will also swamp any signal of bacterial origin. There is no better way to test if a candidate environment could have led to life on early Earth, he says.

Other researchers have tried experiments in cold environments. In 1999, Hauke Trinks, then at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany, travelled to the Arctic to study the properties of sea ice as an incubator for life. He measured the ice's ability to trap and concentrate RNA molecules inside microscopic pockets of unfrozen brine (New Scientist, 12 August 2006, p 34). Deamer, on the other hand, thinks life emerged in a very different environment.

Bumpass Hell lies near a volcano that last erupted in 1915. The cauldrons that belch boiling mud are a potent reminder that the volcano is merely dormant, not extinct. Water from rain and nearby streams continually drains through fissures in the valley to a spot 4 kilometres below the surface, where it meets molten lava and flashes into steam. In the geological equivalent of an espresso machine, the steam hisses back up through cracks - carrying sulphuric acid, smelly hydrogen sulphide, iron and other substances to the surface. The pools are a mess of chemicals, including a lot of sulphuric acid, and the edges of the vents undergo regular cycles of wetting and drying, heating and cooling. Industrial chemists have long known that cycles of drying can help kick-start chemical reactions that don't work in moist conditions. Deamer thinks these cycles could also drive important biochemical reactions, like RNA synthesis, outside of a cell.

.....continued (3 pages total)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.400-did-life-begin-in-a-pool-of-acidic-gloop.html?page=1

[MSC290]

Step-by-step Evolution

Mining the Gaps: Transitional fossils are the hardest to find, but sometimes tell the best stories

By Sid Perkins -January 2009 issue; Vol.175 #3 (p. 30) - Science News

When Charles Darwin proposed the idea of evolution in On the Origin of Species, he wrote “if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed.” At the same time, he bemoaned the dearth of such transitional fossils as perhaps “the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”

Surely it was serendipity when, just two years later, quarriers unearthed fossils of Archaeopteryx. This creature, now recognized by many scientists as the first known bird, has a mosaic of features that links it with the disparate groups of species on either side of it in the fossil record: While its teeth, tail and overall body shape are distinctly reptilian, its feathers have the same complex structure as the lift-generating feathers of modern birds. In other words, it is just one of the “numberless intermediate varieties” that Darwin predicted must have existed.

“It was the right discovery at the right time,” says Richard Fortey, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London.

Darwin blamed the lack of transitional fossils in part on the poorness of the paleontological record. It’s a rare accumulation of fortuitous events when a creature is fossilized, its remains are preserved over millions of years, and then those remains are discovered.

In many cases, that critique still holds true: Researchers have yet to discover fossils of a creature that fits in the gap between bats, which seem to appear suddenly in the fossil record about 54 million years ago, and their mammalian predecessors. The gap in the fossil record between Archaeopteryx and its reptilian ancestors also remains unoccupied, although several discoveries of feathered dinosaurs in China have given researchers clues about what these still undiscovered intermediate creatures may have looked like.

Many of the gaps in the fossil record that remained unfilled in Darwin’s time now throng with creatures, such as the ones used to chronicle the 48-million–year series of evolutionary changes between whales and their predecessors . And particular biomarkers — chemical fossils, if you will — in rocks more than 240 million years old have provided clues about the evolution of flowering plants.

Paleontologists still randomly stumble across transitional fossils these days, such as a creature found in Texas that falls in a 50-million–year gap in amphibian evolution and helps pin down when the groups that include salamanders and frogs arose.

As often as not, however, transitional fossils are found when researchers head into the field with a specific target in mind: By focusing on rocks deposited during an interval where gaps in the fossil record exist, scientists can boost the chances of making a critical discovery. That’s how researchers unearthed Tiktaalik, a 2.7-meter–long beast that plopped into a 9-million–year gap in the chronicle of vertebrates’ transition from water to land.

Techniques such as CT scanning, used to reinvestigate fossils collected decades ago, have revealed new insights about the anatomy of semiaquatic creatures that preceded Tiktaalik. Even genetic analyses of living creatures can provide insight into the fossil record: The evolutionary changes observed in fossil fish deposited over a time period of 20,000 years in an ancient lake can be linked to a particular gene often studied in that species’ modern-day kin.

Amphibian enigma

Gaps in the fossil record can be large in terms of time — sometimes many millions of years — and in the extent of the evolutionary changes seen when comparing creatures before and after the gap. When Archaeopteryx was discovered, for instance, the fossil record was sparse and the disparity between known fossil reptiles and birds was vast.

Until recently, the gap in the fossil record separating frogs and salamanders from their amphibian ancestors was similarly huge. About 290 million years ago, a diverse assemblage of primitive amphibians walked the land, says Jason Anderson, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Calgary in Canada.

But in rocks documenting the 50 million years or so that followed, amphibian fossils are few and far between. Only in rocks deposited after 240 million years ago do such fossils — and specifically, those of frogs and salamanders — appear. These two groups of creatures are distinct both from each other and from their ancestors, and they apparently evolved during an interval for which few fossils have been discovered.

Recently, however, Anderson and his colleagues unearthed Gerobatrachus hottoni, a species whose genus name means “elder frog.” The single specimen unearthed so far is about 11 centimeters long, the size of most modern-day salamanders. It was found in a two-foot-thick knob of 290-million-year-old, fine-grained siltstone in north-central Texas. Even though the fossil was found in rocks deposited just before the start of the lengthy gap in the fossil record, the remains have features characteristic of the frogs and salamanders that presumably descended from it or others like it, Anderson says.

A main clue is that some of the bones in the first and second innermost toes on each of Gerobatrachus’ feet are fused together, a trait characteristic of salamanders but rarely found in other creatures. Because some of the other bones in the fossil aren’t fully developed, Anderson and his colleagues suggest that the creature was a juvenile, indicating the fusion of the toe bones occurred even before adulthood — a stronger sign that it betrays an evolutionary link to salamanders.

But like frogs, Gerobatrachus has a broad skull and a shortened tail, the researchers reported last May in Nature. The shape and configuration of bones in the creature’s skull, and particularly those in its palate, are very froglike. Therefore, “this fossil seals the gap” between primitive amphibians and the frogs and salamanders that evolved later, Anderson says.

On the amphibian family tree, Gerobatrachus and its kin are ancestors to salamanders and frogs, the researchers contend, and the evolutionary split between those two groups probably occurred between 260 million and 270 million years ago.

Gerobatrachus was “quite advanced” compared with other amphibians of its era, he adds. Another way to look at it, he notes, is to consider the amphibians appearing 290 million years ago to be evolutionary holdovers best representing species that first evolved long before.

.....Continued at link

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/39974/title/Step-by-step_Evolution

[MSC290]

New Feathered Dinosaur Adds to Bird Evolution Theory

January 16, 2009 - Kevin Holden Platt in Beijing for National Geographic News

A fossil of a primitive feathered dinosaur uncovered in China is helping scientists create a better model of how dinosaurs evolved into modern birds.

The winged dinosaur is still in the process of being dated, and might have lived toward the end of the Jurassic period, which lasted from 208 to 144 million years ago.

In many ways, it is "more basal, or primitive, than Archaeopteryx," said paleontologist Xu Xing at Beijing's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, lived 150 million years ago.

The protobird is "very close to the point of divergence" at which a new branch of winged dinosaurs first took flight, said Xu.

The new species, called Anchiornis huxleyi, was discovered in the ashes of volcanoes that were active during the Jurassic and Cretaceous (144 to 65 million years ago) periods in what is now northeastern China.

Anchiornis, which is Greek for "close to bird," measured just 13 inches (34 centimeters) from head to tail and weighed about 4 ounces (110 grams).

The dinosaur's body and forelimbs were covered with feathers, and it "might have had some aerial capability," Xu said.

"Anchiornis is one of the smallest theropod dinosaurs ever uncovered," Xu explained. Theropods were a group of carnivorous dinosaurs that walked on two legs.

Taking Wing

The fossil provides new clues about how feathers, wings, and flight progressively appeared among theropods, along with evidence that certain types of feathered dinosaurs decreased in stature even as their forelimbs became elongated.

The compact structure of Anchiornis "reinforces the deduction that small size evolved early in the history of birds," Xu explained.

"[Anchiornis] exhibits some wrist features indicative of high mobility, presaging the wing-folding mechanisms seen in more derived birds," he said.

"The wrist is a big part of the formation of wings, and pivotal to flight," Xu added. "During flight, steering and flapping greatly depend on the wrist."

Despite this protobird's relatively advanced feathers and wrist, it is unclear if Anchiornis could actually engage in powered flight.

"Behavior and biomechanics are very difficult to determine solely from the fossil record, and perhaps flight is impossible to determine," said Mark Norell, chairman and curator of the division of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

"Feathers have lots of functions, and probably evolved as thermoregulators," said Norell, who closely examined the fossil during a trip to Beijing.

"Dinosaurs might have used feathers for sexual display or to make themselves appear bigger, or as camouflage to avoid predators," he said.

Patterns of spots and bars evident on one species of feathered dinosaur from China might have functioned as a camouflage defense, Norell added.

(Related: "First Dinosaur Feathers for Show, Not Flight?" [October 22, 2008].)

Prehistoric Paradise

Xu said that the region in northeastern China where most of the world's feathered dinosaurs, including Anchiornis, have been discovered is a virtual paradise for dinosaur hunting.

"This area has three circles of volcanic activity," with eruptions that intermittently covered and preserved entire biospheres starting from the early Jurassic.

"Volcanos periodically killed the animals and plants and preserved them perfectly in volcanic ash," he said.

"Sometimes the volcanic ash even preserves soft tissues, leaving behind an exceptional 3-D fossil."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090116-feathered-dinosaur.html

[sumisu]

Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age

Front page / Science / Planet Earth

11.01.2009 Source: Pravda.Ru

http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-0/

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.


Winter sea ice terrain of the Beaufort Sea; Location: Alaska North Slope; Photo Date: Spring 1949; Photographer: Rear Admiral Harley D. Nygren, NOAA Corps (ret.)


Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.

Most of the long-term climate data collected from various sources also shows a strong correlation with the three astronomical cycles which are together known as the Milankovich cycles. The three Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000 year period; the shape of the earth’s orbit, which changes over a period of 100,000 years; and the Precession of the Equinoxes, also known as the earth’s ‘wobble’, which gradually rotates the direction of the earth’s axis over a period of 26,000 years. According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these three astronomical cycles, each of which effects the amount of solar radiation which reaches the earth, act together to produce the cycle of cold Ice Age maximums and warm interglacials.

Elements of the astronomical theory of Ice Age causation were first presented by the French mathematician Joseph Adhemar in 1842, it was developed further by the English prodigy Joseph Croll in 1875, and the theory was established in its present form by the Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovich in the 1920s and 30s. In 1976 the prestigious journal “Science” published a landmark paper by John Imbrie, James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton entitled “Variations in the Earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” which described the correlation which the trio of scientist/authors had found between the climate data obtained from ocean sediment cores and the patterns of the astronomical Milankovich cycles. Since the late 1970s, the Milankovich theory has remained the predominant theory to account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists, and hence the Milankovich theory is always described in textbooks of climatology and in encyclopaedia articles about the Ice Ages.

In their 1976 paper Imbrie, Hays, and Shackleton wrote that their own climate forecasts, which were based on sea-sediment cores and the Milankovich cycles, "… must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends - and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted... the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate."

During the 1970s the famous American astronomer Carl Sagan and other scientists began promoting the theory that ‘greenhouse gasses’ such as carbon dioxide, or CO2, produced by human industries could lead to catastrophic global warming. Since the 1970s the theory of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ (AGW) has gradually become accepted as fact by most of the academic establishment, and their acceptance of AGW has inspired a global movement to encourage governments to make pivotal changes to prevent the worsening of AGW.

The central piece of evidence that is cited in support of the AGW theory is the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph which was presented by Al Gore in his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth.” The ‘hockey stick’ graph shows an acute upward spike in global temperatures which began during the 1970s and continued through the winter of 2006/07. However, this warming trend was interrupted when the winter of 2007/8 delivered the deepest snow cover to the Northern Hemisphere since 1966 and the coldest temperatures since 2001. It now appears that the current Northern Hemisphere winter of 2008/09 will probably equal or surpass the winter of 2007/08 for both snow depth and cold temperatures.

The main flaw in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past one thousand years at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years -- evidence which is essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more credible explanation for the recent global temperature spike, based on the natural cycle of Ice Age maximums and interglacials.

In 1999 the British journal “Nature” published the results of data derived from glacial ice cores collected at the Russia’s Vostok station in Antarctica during the 1990s. The Vostok ice core data includes a record of global atmospheric temperatures, atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and airborne particulates starting from 420,000 years ago and continuing through history up to our present time.

The graph of the Vostok ice core data shows that the Ice Age maximums and the warm interglacials occur within a regular cyclic pattern, the graph-line of which is similar to the rhythm of a heartbeat on an electrocardiogram tracing. The Vostok data graph also shows that changes in global CO2 levels lag behind global temperature changes by about eight hundred years. What that indicates is that global temperatures precede or cause global CO2 changes, and not the reverse. In other words, increasing atmospheric CO2 is not causing global temperature to rise; instead the natural cyclic increase in global temperature is causing global CO2 to rise.

The reason that global CO2 levels rise and fall in response to the global temperature is because cold water is capable of retaining more CO2 than warm water. That is why carbonated beverages loose their carbonation, or CO2, when stored in a warm environment. We store our carbonated soft drinks, wine, and beer in a cool place to prevent them from loosing their ‘fizz’, which is a feature of their carbonation, or CO2 content. The earth is currently warming as a result of the natural Ice Age cycle, and as the oceans get warmer, they release increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Because the release of CO2 by the warming oceans lags behind the changes in the earth’s temperature, we should expect to see global CO2 levels continue to rise for another eight hundred years after the end of the earth’s current Interglacial warm period. We should already be eight hundred years into the coming Ice Age before global CO2 levels begin to drop in response to the increased chilling of the world’s oceans.

The Vostok ice core data graph reveals that global CO2 levels regularly rose and fell in a direct response to the natural cycle of Ice Age minimums and maximums during the past four hundred and twenty thousand years. Within that natural cycle, about every 110,000 years global temperatures, followed by global CO2 levels, have peaked at approximately the same levels which they are at today.

Today we are again at the peak, and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age. If we are lucky, we may have a few years to prepare for it. The Ice Age will return, as it always has, in its regular and natural cycle, with or without any influence from the effects of AGW.

The AGW theory is based on data that is drawn from a ridiculously narrow span of time and it demonstrates a wanton disregard for the ‘big picture’ of long-term climate change. The data from paleoclimatology, including ice cores, sea sediments, geology, paleobotany and zoology, indicate that we are on the verge of entering another Ice Age, and the data also shows that severe and lasting climate change can occur within only a few years. While concern over the dubious threat of Anthropogenic Global Warming continues to distract the attention of people throughout the world, the very real threat of the approaching and inevitable Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable, is being foolishly ignored.

Gregory F. Fegel

[MSC290]

Life As We Know It Nearly Created in Lab

11 January 2009 - By Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director - Live Science



Cells are the fundamental working units of every living system. All the instructions needed to direct their activities are contained within the chemical DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). Credit: U.S. Department of Energy Genome Programs
.....

Life As We Know It Nearly Created in Lab

One of life's greatest mysteries is how it began. Scientists have pinned it down to roughly this:

Some chemical reactions occurred about 4 billion years ago — perhaps in a primordial tidal soup or maybe with help of volcanoes or possibly at the bottom of the sea or between the mica sheets — to create biology.

Now scientists have created something in the lab that is tantalizingly close to what might have happened. It's not life, they stress, but it certainly gives the science community a whole new data set to chew on.

The researchers, at the Scripps Research Institute, created molecules that self-replicate and even evolve and compete to win or lose. If that sounds exactly like life, read on to learn the controversial and thin distinction.

Know your RNA

To understand the remarkable breakthrough, detailed Jan. 8 in the early online edition of the journal Science, you have to know a little about molecules called RNA and DNA.

DNA is the software of life, the molecules that pack all the genetic information of a cell. DNA and the genes within it are where mutations occur, enabling changes that create new species.

RNA is the close cousin to DNA. More accurately, RNA is thought to be a primitive ancestor of DNA. RNA can't run a life form on its own, but 4 billion years ago it might have been on the verge of creating life, just needing some chemical fix to make the leap. In today's world, RNA is dependent on DNA for performing its roles, which include coding for proteins.

If RNA is in fact the ancestor to DNA, then scientists have figured they could get RNA to replicate itself in a lab without the help of any proteins or other cellular machinery. Easy to say, hard to do.

But that's exactly what the Scripps researchers did. Then things went surprisingly further.

'Immortalized'

Specifically, the researchers synthesized RNA enzymes that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components, and the process proceeds indefinitely. "Immortalized" RNA, they call it, at least within the limited conditions of a laboratory.

More significantly, the scientists then mixed different RNA enzymes that had replicated, along with some of the raw material they were working with, and let them compete in what's sure to be the next big hit: "Survivor: Test Tube."

Remarkably, they bred.

And now and then, one of these survivors would screw up, binding with some other bit of raw material it hadn't been using. Hmm. That's exactly what life forms do ...

When these mutations occurred, "the resulting recombinant enzymes also were capable of sustained replication, with the most fit replicators growing in number to dominate the mixture," the scientists report.

The "creatures" — wait, we can't call them that! — evolved, with some "species" winning out.

"It kind of blew me away," said team member Tracey Lincoln of the Scripps Research Institute, who is working on her Ph.D. "What we have is non-living, but we've been able to show that it has some life-like properties, and that was extremely interesting."

Indeed.

Knocking on life's door

Lincoln's advisor, professor Gerald Joyce, reiterated that while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not life as we know it.

"What we've found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts," Joyce said in a statement.

Joyce's restraint, clear also on an NPR report of the finding, has to be appreciated. He allows that some scientists familiar with the work have argued that this is life. Another scientist said that what the researchers did is equivalent to recreating a scenario that might have led to the origin of life.

Joyce insists he and Lincoln have not created life: "We're knocking on that door," he says, "but of course we haven't achieved that."

Only when a system is developed in the lab that has the capability of evolving novel functions on its own can it be properly called life, Joyce said. In short, the molecules in Joyce's lab can't evolve any totally new tricks, he said.

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/090111-creating-life.html

[MSC290]

The blurry line between life, nonlife

January 12, 2009 - By Colin Nickerson - Boston Globe Correspondent

CAMBRIDGE - It's new science - so new that its name has barely taken hold - and it's brimming with notions that only a few years back would have been laughed off as lurid science fiction.

Geobiology, it's mostly called, although some of its leading lights stick to their old professional dogtags, such as biologist, geologist, hydrologist, biochemist. Others prefer more cosmic nomenclature: Astrobiology.

In any event, it is wild and wooly research occurring "on the frontiers of so many disciplines," said geobiologist Dianne K. Newman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Geobiology is, in part, about looking for life or life's graffito - and finding it - in unusual places: deep in ancient rock, in super-heated waters of undersea volcanic vents, and beneath the ice of Greenland.

But geobiology can also be about fashioning crude "proto-cells" from chemical goop resembling primeval ooze, work done recently in the Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital laboratory of geneticist Jack W. Szostak to study how lifelike entities might have arisen in the extreme environment 3.5 billion years ago.

The emergent field rests on the idea that the dividing line between life and nonlife is blurrier than science has long believed. And that the minerals and chemicals of the earth are constantly interacting with living things in unexpected ways.

That means the origins of life can only be understood as shaped by the larger environment, and - by the same token - the nonliving environment can be understood only in the context of the fast-multiplying organisms that shaped it right back.

"Evolution is not something that happened solely to organisms," said Robert Hazen, a research scientist with Washington's Carnegie Institution. "There has been co-evolution of the geosphere and the biosphere."

Said geobiologist Lisa M. Pratt of Indiana University: "Turns out, establishing where geochemistry ends and life begins isn't always so easy. We know surprisingly little about the origin, evolution, and limits for life on earth. But we're on the cusp of dramatic new understandings."

Twitches of life are showing up where life shouldn't exist. In southern Africa, for example, scientists burrowed 2 miles beneath the earth's surface, discovering bacteria that feed on radioactive rocks.

"That's crazier than any science fiction," said Pratt, part of the team that made the 2006 discovery. "This is life that shouldn't be there. Except it is."

In the minds of some geobiologists, including Pratt, the existence of these "extremophile" microbes hints that life is such sturdy stuff that it might seed itself on any planet possessing a bit of water.

"Stardust contains all the [chemical] building blocks of life," she said, referring to primal matter forged by the Big Bang. "And it rains down on all planets. Life may be commonplace [on other planets], not some rare event. Earth may be singular only in that life has proved highly durable, hanging on through various cataclysms to evolve into sophisticated forms."

In her office, MIT's Newman keeps a sphere of smooth stone streaked by jagged red marks, reckoned to be 2.4 billion years old. Until quite recently, most scientists would have described the markings as merely the trace of iron oxide - a mineral - and left it at that. But geobiology provides another, richer version.

Iron oxide, which occurs in various forms, is just iron that's been exposed to oxygen. But in that distant eon, only the barest whiffs of oxygen infused Earth's atmosphere. Much of the new oxygen building in the air was cast off by photosynthetic bacteria.

So the enigmatic red streaks on Newman's rock may be likened to a puff of breath left on a mirror - exhalations of early life captured for all time.

"Are we looking at a mineral trace?" said Newman. "Or are we looking at the bio-marker from some long-ago organism? Perhaps both. That's an exciting thing, life's signature within stone's substance."

Much work at Newman's lab focuses on the evolution of age-old bacteria.

In a strange twist, however, her latest research has spawned a discovery relevant to modern medicine.

Working with living bacteria to understand how their ancestors converted energy, Newman and colleague Lars E. P. Dietrich found clues in the metabolism of the microbes that could eventually help fight "cascading infections" that are the leading cause of death for cystic fibrosis patients.

For decades, researchers had thought that the classic blue-green mucous that forms in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients were natural antibiotics secreted by infecting bacteria to kill competing microbes.

Instead, the new MIT research suggests, the vile-looking stuff - known as phenazine - consists mainly of "signaling molecules" used to form a protective biofilm under which the bacteria cluster in colonies. That understanding puts researchers closer to devising ways to more effectively attack the infections.

"We have a long way to go before we can test this theory," said Newman. "But it shows how this research can take some really surprising turns."

On another front, the Carnegie Institution's Hazen and colleague Dominic Papineau recently published research in the journal American Mineralogist arguing that minerals evolve just as surely as living organisms - a conclusion that raised some scientific eyebrows.

But Hazen defended the work, arguing that roughly two-thirds of the minerals on Earth have come to their present form by interacting with living organisms or life processes.

"Of the 4,300 mineral species on Earth, perhaps two-thirds are biologically mediated," Hazen said. "Mineral evolution is obviously very different from Darwinian evolution. Minerals don't mutate, reproduce, or compete. But the variety and abundance of minerals have changed dramatically over more than 4.5 billion years of Earth's history."

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2009/01/12/the_blurry_line_between_life_nonlife/?page=1

[EnergyGuy62]

Diesel Powered VW Awarded 'Green Car Of The Year'

On Thursday, the Los Angeles auto show gave the "Green Car of the Year" award to Volkswagen AG's Jetta TDI, marking the first time a diesel-powered car has taken the industry's top environmental honor.

Ron Cogan, editor of Green Car Journal, the trade magazine that awards the prize, said the win was a clear signal that clean diesel has arrived.

Diesel fuel has been making inroads into the U.S. market as a here-and-now option to make engines run more economically and pollute less. It is a conventional combustion approach long favored by Europeans.

In the past, the U.S. has frowned upon diesel because of unacceptably high tailpipe emissions, but advanced technology has allowed so-called clean diesel vehicles to filter out more pollutants and for the first time meet smog pollution laws in all states.

Diesel engines have also had to overcome major image problems in the U.S. market due to an association with the underpowered versions sold in the 1970s.

The technology has been mostly limited to large trucks in the United States, even though it is a perennial top seller among passenger cars in Europe.

“Diesels have emerged as an alternative to hybrids such as Toyota Motor Corp's popular Prius,” said Volkswagen's U.S. chief, Stefan Jacoby.
He called diesel engine development a real breakthrough in the U.S.

"I don't want to say it's better than other technologies, but it's a real alternative to hybrids. It brings fuel consumption down, it's environmentally friendly, and -- this is a difference with a Prius -- this is really fun to drive."

Boasting a fuel efficiency of 41 miles per gallon, Volkswagen's five-passenger Jetta TDI starts at $21,990, compared with $17,340 for a traditional Jetta.

The Jetta TDI beat out finalists including BMW's 335d diesel sport sedan, Ford Motor Co's Fusion Hybrid passenger sedan, General Motors Corp's crossover Saturn Vue 2 Mode Hybrid, and the smart fortwo mini car.

Cogan said the TDI was the vehicle that stood out among all of the five finalists as the one that really exhibited the greatest environmental achievement

"You get 30 percent better fuel efficiency, on average, with a diesel, and a commensurate reduction in greenhouse gases."

However, in some parts of the United States, diesel fuel costs almost $1 more per gallon than gasoline.

Jacoby said so far the Jetta TDI, which went on sale in August, has sold out. "The Jetta TDI and Sportswagen don't see recession."

Diesels could represent up to 30 percent of sales for Volkswagen models like the Jetta, on which diesel is an option, Jacoby said. That would mean a sales target of 30,000 to 35,000 Jetta TDI per year in the United States.

Among others, the "Green Car of the Year" prize was awarded by a panel that included famed car designer Carroll Shelby, late-night talk show host Jay Leno and representatives from environmental groups the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

[EnergyGuy62]

Germany and Romania begin joint nuclear reactor project 21/11/2008

Essen -- One of Germany's two main electricity companies, RWE, signed up for a project to build two nuclear power reactors in Romania on Thursday.

RWE is legally required to shut down its nuclear plants inside Germany over the next 15 years as Germany abandons atomic power. The company, however, has been advocating a return to nuclear power.

It initiated the investment terms for two new reactors at Cernavoda Power Station in Romania on Thursday, RWE said at its main office in Essen, Germany.

The next step, if the Romanian government approves, would be to form a project consortium with Romanian majority partner Societatea Nationala Nuclearelectrica SA and five other partners. RWE would hold 9 percent.

The Cernavoda site already operates two power reactors. RWE said the new reactors would be a Canadian design and would have a capacity of 1,400 megawatts after commissioning in 2016

[EnergyGuy62]

Honda's Hybrid Walking Device

This device has a wide spectrum of applications ranging from factory production workers to older people wanting to move around and climb stairs.

http://news.mobile.msn.com/en-us/articles.aspx?aid=27592994&afid=1

[EnergyGuy62]

Video: German Girls Run with STYLE!
When you get to the page, scroll down for the video...and tell me what you think of it. :)

[~ Susan ~]

Might rock help soak up warming gas?
Peridotite turns CO2 into solid carbon mineral like limestone, marble
msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 5:38 p.m. ET, Fri., Nov. 7, 2008

NEW YORK - A common rock can be harnessed to soak up the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at a rate that could help slow global warming, scientists reported in a new study.

When carbon dioxide comes in contact with the rock, known as peridotite, the gas is converted into a solid carbonate like limestone or marble.

Geologist Peter Kelemen and geochemist Juerg Matter said the naturally occurring process can be supercharged 1 million times to grow underground minerals that can permanently store 4 billion or more of the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity every year.

Peridotite is the most common rock found in the Earth's mantle, or the layer directly below the crust. In some places it also appears on the surface — particularly in the Middle Eastern nation of Oman, which is conveniently close to a region that emits substantial amounts of carbon dioxide in the production of fossil fuels.

"To be near all that oil and gas infrastructure is not a bad thing," Matter said in an interview.

Supercharge via drilling, hot water
The scientists, who are both at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, say they could kick-start peridotite's carbon storage process by boring down and injecting it with heated water containing pressurized carbon dioxide.

"Once jump-started in this way, the reaction would naturally generate heat — and that heat would in turn hasten the reaction, fracturing large volumes of rock, exposing it to reaction with still more CO2-rich solution," the university said in a statement. "Heat generated by the Earth itself also would help, since the further down you go, the higher the temperature. The scientists say that such a chain reaction would need little energy input after it was started."

The peridotite field in Oman is already naturally absorbing 10,000 to 100,000 tons of carbon a year, the researchers found, far more than anyone had thought.

The two made the discovery during field work in Oman's desert. "Their study area, a Massachusetts-size expanse of largely bare, exposed peridotite, is crisscrossed on the surface with terraces, veins and other formations of whitish carbonate minerals, formed rapidly in recent times when minerals in the rock reacted with CO2-laden air or water," the university stated.

Peridotite also occurs in the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea and Caledonia, and along the coast of the Adriatic Sea and in smaller amounts in California.

The study by Kelemen and Matter will appear in the Nov. 11 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Not a silver bullet
Many companies are hoping to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by siphoning off large amounts of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and storing it underground.

But big greenhouse gas emitters like the United States, China and India — where abundant surface supplies of the rock are not found — would have to come up with other ways of storing or cutting emissions.

Using underground caverns could require thousands of miles of pipelines and nobody is sure whether the potentially dangerous gas would leak back out into the atmosphere in the future.

Kelemen cautioned that this discovery alone would not solve the carbon problem.

"We see this as just one of a whole suite of methods to trap carbon," Kelemen said. "It’s a big mistake to think that we should be searching for one thing that will take care of it all."

To that end, Matter has also been working on a project in Iceland where a different rock, volcanic basalt, might be able to absorb CO2. Tests are set for next spring, the university said.
Reuters contributed to this report.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27593907/

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© 2008 MSNBC.com

[~ Susan ~]

Europe's secret plan to boost GM crop production

Gordon Brown and other EU leaders in campaign to promote modified foods

By Geoffrey Lean
Sunday, 26 October 2008
GM corn growing in France, which has since suspended cultivation of modified crops



Gordon Brown and other European leaders are secretly preparing an unprecedented campaign to spread GM crops and foods in Britain and throughout the continent, confidential documents obtained by The Independent on Sunday reveal.

The documents – minutes of a series of private meetings of representatives of 27 governments – disclose plans to "speed up" the introduction of the modified crops and foods and to "deal with" public resistance to them.

And they show that the leaders want "agricultural representatives" and "industry" – presumably including giant biotech firms such as Monsanto – to be more vocal to counteract the "vested interests" of environmentalists.

News of the secret plans is bound to create a storm of protest at a time when popular concern about GM technology is increasing, even in countries that have so far accepted it.

Public opposition has prevented any modified crops from being grown in Britain. France, one of only three countries in Europe to have grown them in any amounts, has suspended their cultivation, and resistance to them is rising rapidly in the other two, Spain and Portugal.

The embattled biotech industry has been conducting a public relations campaign based round the highly contested assertion that genetic modification is needed to feed the world. It has had some success in the Government, where ministers have been increasingly speaking out in favour of the technology, and in the European Commission, with which its lobbyists have boasted of having "excellent working relations".

The secret meetings were convened by Jose Manuel Barroso, the pro-GM President of the Commission, and chaired by his head of cabinet, Joao Vale de Almeida. The prime ministers of each of the EU's 27 member states were asked to nominate a special representative.

Neither the membership of the group, nor its objectives, nor the outcomes of its meetings have been made public. But The IoS has obtained confidential documents, including an attendance list and the conclusions of the two meetings held so far – on 17 July and just two weeks ago on 10 October – written by the chairman.

The list shows that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany sent close aides. Britain was represented by Sonia Phippard, director for food and farming at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The conclusions reveal the discussions were mainly preoccupied with how to speed up the introduction of GM crops and food and how to persuade the public to accept them.

The modified products have to be approved by the EU before they can be sown or sold anywhere in Europe. But though the Commission officials are generally strongly in favour, European governments are split, causing the Council of Ministers, on which they are represented, to be deadlocked.

In that event the bureaucrats on the Commission wave them through anyway. They are legally allowed to do this, but overruled governments and environmental groups are unhappy.

The conclusions of the first meeting called for the "speeding up of the authorisation process based on robust assessments so as to reassure the public", while the second one added: "Decisions could be made faster without compromising safety."

But the documents also make clear that Mr Barroso is going beyond mere exhortation by trying to get prime ministers to overrule their own agriculture and environment ministers in favour of GM. They report that the chairman "recalled the importance for prime ministers to look at the wider picture", "invited the participants to report the discussions of the group to their heads of governments", and "stressed the importance of drawing their attention to ongoing discussions in the Council [of Ministers]".

Helen Holder of Friends of the Earth Europe said: "Barroso's aim is to get GM into Europe as quickly as possible. So he is going straight to prime ministers and presidents to tell them to step on their ministers and get them into line."

The conclusions of the meetings on public opposition are even more incendiary. The documents ponder "how best to deal with public opinion" and call for "an emotion-free, fact-based dialogue on the high standards of the EU GM policy". And they record the chairman emphasising "the role of industry, economic partners and science to actively contribute to such a dialogue". He adds that "the public feels ill-informed" and says "agricultural representatives should be more vocal". And in a veiled swipe at environmental groups he says that the debate "should not be left to certain stakeholders who have a legitimate but vested interest in it".

What they say

'We have to feed an extra 2.5 billion people. It would be extraordinary if we chose not to exploit the most important breakthrough in biological science'

Professor Allan Buckwell

'New developments will benefit the world's poorest farmers: GM rice that is drought-resistant; transgenic crops with genes to protect against disease'

Lord Dick Taverne, Sense About Science

'GM crops pose unacceptable risks to farmers and the environment and have failed to increase yields despite funding at a cost of millions to UK taxpayers'

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, FoE

'GM crops do not increase yields. Scientists have found genetically engineered insecticide in crops can leak and kill beneficial soil fungi'

Peter Melchett, Soil Association

Q & A: The trouble with modified crops

How much GM is grown in Europe?

Very little. The documents boast the area increased by 21 per cent last year, proving "growing interest". But it still only covered 0.119 per cent of Europe's agricultural land.

What are the problems?

Mainly environmental. Official trials in Britain showed that growing GM crops was worse for wildlife than cultivating conventional ones. Worse, genes escape from the modified plants to create superweeds and to contaminate normal and organic crops, denying consumers a choice to be GM-free.

Do they endanger health?

Hard to tell. Some studies show that they may do, others (including almost all those by industry) are reassuring. The trouble is that very few truly independent, peer-reviewed research has been done. Most consumers have sensibly concluded that they would sooner be safe than sorry, particularly as they get no benefit from buying GM.

Can they feed the world?

Almost certainly not. Despite all the hype, present GM varieties actually have lower yields than their conventional counterparts. The seeds are expensive to buy and grow, so wealthy developing-world farmers would tend to use them and drive poor ones out of business, increasing destitution. The biggest agricultural assessment ever conducted – chaired by Professor Robert Watson, now Defra's chief scientist – recently concluded that they would not do the job.

To have your say on this or any other issue visit www.independent.co.uk/IoSblogs


http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/europes-secret-plan-to-boost-gm-crop-production-973834.html

[~ Susan ~]

Turbocharged Nanomotors
Published: 06:11 EST, October 29, 2008

(PhysOrg.com) -- Nanorobots that are introduced into the body to eradicate tumor cells or clean out clogged arteries are not just science fiction; they are a realistic vision of the technological possibilities of the not-so-distant future. Efficient nanomotors will be needed to drive these nanomachines.

A team of scientists from University of California, San Diego (USA) and Arizona State University (Tempe, USA) has now developed nanorods that swim extremely fast. “These nanorods travel about 75 times their own length in one second,” report Joseph Wang and his co-workers in the journal Angewandte Chemie. “We are approaching the speed of the most efficient biological nanomotors, including flagellated bacteria.”

The first simple applications for nanomotors could include rapid transportation of pharmaceutical agents to specific target areas, or the passage of specimen molecules through the tiny channels of diagnostic systems on a microchip. However, forward motion through a liquid is not as trivial as one would like to think. One method for the construction of nanomotors that can achieve this is the fuel-driven catalytic nanowire. These are tiny nanoscopic rods whose ends are made of two different metals. Unlike macroscopic motors, they do not have a fuel tank; instead they move through a medium that contains the fuel they need.

The “classic” example of such a system is a gold–platinum nanotube that can travel at speeds of 10 to 20 µm per second with hydrogen peroxide as its fuel. Wang and his team have now dramatically accelerated these nanorod motors: they have achieved speeds of over 150 µm per second by replacing the gold portion with an alloy of silver and gold.

How does the nanomotor work? The platinum segment catalyzes the splitting of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) into oxygen (O2) and protons (H+). It absorbs the excess electrons. These are transferred to the silver/gold segment, where they speed up the reduction reaction of H2O2 and protons to make water. The release of oxygen and water produces a small current, which drives the nanorod through the fluid, platinum side first. “The silver/gold alloy causes the electrons to be transferred more quickly,” explains Wang. “This increases the fuel decomposition rate and the nanorod is accelerated faster.” The speed of the nanorods can be tailored by changing the proportion of silver in the alloy. “Fuel additives or variations of the platinum segment will make these rods even faster,” predicts Wang.

Citation: Joseph Wang, Ultrafast Catalytic Alloy Nanomotors, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, doi: 10.1002/anie.200803841

Provided by Wiley

http://www.physorg.com/news144479498.html

[~ Susan ~]

Waterloo welcomes first Green Bay Store
September 20, 2008 (Canada)

The ongoing success and growing affluence of Waterloo has prompted The Bay, a division of the Hudson's Bay Company (Hbc) to launch a beautiful new 120,000 square foot Bay store at Conestoga Mall. The new store, which is the first green Bay location in Canada, will open to the public on September 19th, 2008.

"Waterloo has become home to some of Canada's leading entrepreneurs and most successful companies," said Bonnie Brooks, President and CEO, The Bay.

"Our new store provides people in Waterloo with an exciting shopping experience, as well as appealing to the community's environmentally progressive nature through unique green initiatives like solar panels, wind turbines, energy efficient lighting and even recyclable carpet."

Among the store's many green innovations are:
- Special energy efficient lighting inside and out - LED exterior signage lights, which uses 10 percent of the energy required for conventional lighting; Fluorescent lighting uses energy efficient T8 and T5 ballast which save energy and reduce cooling loads while providing same lighting quality within the store.
- High efficiency roof top units use ozone friendly R410A refrigerant.
- Accent lighting uses highly efficient Metal Halide light fixtures.
- Solar panels mounted on the front of the store enabling the store to draw less power from the local grid.
- Two wind turbines, which will generate enough electricity to offset the power consumption of an average home.
- White TPO roofing to reflect heat and reduce thermal islanding; the cooler roof reduces the need for air conditioning and is recyclable at end of life.
- Waterless urinals and touchless water faucets and toilets for water conservation.
- Carpet tile is recyclable.
- Fully automated energy management system controlled by Hbc head office, which allows the Company to reduce energy consumption.

Peter Love, Ontario's Chief Energy Conservation Officer, has already recognized Hbc's commitment to creating a culture of conservation Ontario, and has awarded his prestigious Certificate of Recognition for their efforts.

"There is no doubt that energy conservation benefits us environmentally and economically", he said. "Hbc has shown that saving electricity can also go hand in hand with high style, with no compromise in comfort or design."

In addition to the many green features of the store, the new Waterloo Bay is a Company prototype with innovative design and some of the best materials available. Architecturally, it will be very distinctive with frosted glass accents and chrome finishing throughout.

Recently re-built from the ground up, this Bay store can now meet the demands of the Waterloo shoppers through a range of services and special features such as family size fitting rooms and facial rooms for cosmetic services.

Many new brands will also be launched for the first time in Waterloo including cosmetic lines MAC and Chanel. The Bay is also pleased to introduce updated clothing lines such as Esprit, Mexx and Kenzie as well as new jewelry and watches such as Puma.

The new collection in the store will be geared towards lines for her, for him, and for family as well as soft lines for home.

Hudson's Bay Company

http://www.fibre2fashion.com/news/textiles-industry-news/newsdetails.aspx?news_id=63625

[EnergyGuy62]

Elgin Illinois (USA) Hospital Uses Nifty Man-Made Lake To Reap Geothermal Energy Savings.

Issue Date: July 2008, Posted On: 7/1/2008
Running hot and cold
Sherman Hospital finds energy, environmental solutions by going geothermal
by Jonathan Gyory, AIA, LEED AP

As the largest geothermal hospital project under construction in the world today, Sherman Hospital offers a powerful example of the economic and environmental value of innovative design.

When Sherman Hospital, in Elgin, Illinois, opens the doors of its replacement campus in 2010, patients and staff will be greeted with a spectacular view across a 15-acre lake to a forest preserve beyond.

The former 154-acre farmstead will be restored to a pristine prairie state, with no-mow grasses and plantings covering a large portion of the site. This is part of an ambitious agenda to integrate the project into its natural setting and create a tranquil environment conducive to the healing and health of patients, staff, and the wider community of Elgin.

But what the visitors might not realize is that the man-made lake (figure 1), situated adjacent to the hospital's public spaces and a majority of the patient rooms, is the most visible part of a geothermal heating and cooling system that will save 30% to 40% of Sherman's space conditioning costs—and upwards of a million dollars a year.
It will make the new campus one of the most energy efficient healthcare facilities in the world. The geothermal system, which qualified Sherman for a $400,000 grant from the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation, was originally projected to have a payback period of eight years, but with rising energy prices, that period has shrunk to six years (figure 2).

The manmade lake is the most visible part of a geothermal heating and cooling system at Sherman Hospital in Elgin, Illinois

The geothermal system was originally projected to have a payback period of eight years, but with rising energy prices, that period has shrunk to six years

A replacement hospital offers a rare opportunity to think big, and Sherman President and CEO Rick Floyd set out with the goal “to become the best regional hospital in the nation.” Sherman had the foresight to purchase the large tract of land to control its own destiny and plan for expansion over time; a change for the 100-year-old institution and its land-starved campus in downtown Elgin.

The scale of the project and the expansive greenfield site presented an ideal opportunity to make a substantive contribution to the environment that was economically viable at the same time. The design team, led by architects Shepley Bulfinch of Boston, recognized the potential for a geothermal lake system and lobbied for it from the outset.

MEP and structural engineers KJWW Engineering had pioneered geothermal design for healthcare with the Great River Medical Center in Burlington, Iowa, in 2000. With energy prices rising, all the stars were aligned for a geothermal system at Sherman.

Why geothermal?

The geothermal system has many attractive selling points. It provides clean, reliable, renewable, environmentally friendly energy that replaces fossil fuel consumption. It is a relatively simple system to operate. It offers significant operational savings and eliminates the need for noisy, unsightly cooling towers. Mechanical plant size is reduced, and shaft sizes are 10% smaller compared to a conventional ducted heating and cooling system, because a portion of the energy is supplied hydronically. A geothermal system's constant, steady supply of energy is well-suited to a building type like a hospital that is occupied 24 hours a day.

In addition to its role as an efficient energy source, the lake has therapeutic value. For a leading healthcare institution, an investment in geothermal energy underscores the connection between a healthy campus and personal health. The lake provides recreational opportunities and also has the potential to irrigate the decorative planting areas close by the buildings and to save city water. Site development requirements mandated a four- to five-acre detention pond to control water runoff anyway; so the 15-acre geothermal lake could be thought of as a 10-acre premium above that requirement.

Operations and economics

But did it make sense operationally? Sherman administrators visited the installation at Great River to better understand the system, which had been operating for five years. They posed the question to their counterparts at Great River: Would you do it again? The answer was a resounding “Yes, in a heartbeat,” with a few minor design alterations.

Sherman does not possess an extraordinary endowment, and the project is confronted with the usual—even unusual— cost pressures.
The design phase began during an inflationary period (construction costs in the Chicago area escalated 10% annually during 2005 and 2006) and the Illinois CON process locked in budget numbers and square footage early in the project's schematic design phase.

The geothermal system provided a convenient target for construction managers looking to trim scope during several rounds of value engineering. But once the system's design and economic value were explained to Sherman's Board of Trustees, they stood firm—don't touch the geothermal system.

Compared to a conventional gas-fired mechanical plant with chillers, boilers, and cooling tower, the new system carried a first-cost price tag premium of $4.5 million, about 2% of the $230 million construction cost: $1 million to excavate the lake, and a $3.5 million premium for 177 miles of polyethylene pipe, 175 heat exchangers, an in-ground lakeside manifold room to house equipment, and 757 water-to-air heat pumps to circulate energy throughout the facility. The actual cost of this geothermal infrastructure was higher, but the investment was offset by fewer boilers and chillers, a smaller mechanical plant, and the elimination of cooling towers.

There is also the cost of land to consider—10 acres in this instance, purchased previously at $160,000 per acre. An argument can be made that the cost of the land should be excluded from the calculation, since it otherwise would be sitting idle pending future expansion, but its value was included for pricing analysis to assure the hospital's board that the investment was prudent.

Calculations showed that the $4.5 million first cost, plus $1.6 million land cost, would be offset by an annual savings originally estimated at $750,000, for an eight-year payback; that projection has increased to $1.1 million savings per year as energy prices continue to rise and the payback period has been reduced to six years.

The design team retained a limnologist to size the lake and arrange the heat exchangers in a layout to derive maximum heat transfer.

There is a delicate balance among acreage, water depth, and temperature gain to ensure that the lake functions geothermally while also serving as a wildlife habitat for fish and ducks, and not becoming choked with weeds or algae. The 18-foot deep lake will provide 2,450 tons of cooling, with room to expand to 3,400 tons as the campus grows.

The heat exchangers, constructed of loops of piping structured in 30 × 8 pre-assembled grids, will be floated out onto the half-full lake later this summer, connected back to the manifold room, and then filled with water to sink into place on the lake bottom. The system is large but simple, with few moving parts, and the rafts can easily be retrieved should they spring a leak.

The design team also explored the idea of a supplemental geothermal wellfield sunk below the surface parking lots to augment the lake system during the coldest months of the year.

This hybrid system would have further reduced the size of the conventional plant by one boiler, but the $1 million price tag to drill 200 wells carried a 15-20 year payback—too great to justify. “While geothermal systems have been used for years, their use has been primarily in residential, commercial, and K-12 facilities. Their usage in a hospital is new and much more difficult to design due to reliability, maintainability, and strict code compliance requirements,” says Warren Lloyd, PE, LEED AP, of KJWW Engineering.

Site intervention

The excavated lake fill remained on-site for environmental and cost reasons. Care was taken to pile and sort the soil, to reuse a seam of clay as a three-foot thick liner for the lake bottom. The remainder of the fill was placed and compacted under the building footprint to elevate the new hospital five feet above a very flat site (figure 3).

The elevation increases the building's presence from surrounding roads and provides a better sectional relationship for overlooking the lake from the ground level cafeteria and patio.
The lake is now partially filled and the hospital (right) and its geothermal system (manifold room at left), are scheduled for completion in 2010

The location of the manifold room, tucked beneath the main entry circle, also provides an educational opportunity for visitors and staff to understand the inner workings of the geothermal system. A covered pedestrian concourse from the lower parking lot overlooks the lake on one side and provides a close-up view of the piping and pumps in the manifold room on the other.

Eventually, the walkway will be enclosed with glass as a connector to a future medical office building that will flank the entry drive above. Another path circles the lake, providing recreational opportunities for bikers and walkers, and further emphasizing the connection between personal health and a healthy site (figure 4).

With the initial phase of the project (left) now underway, the site has been planned to accommodate both the geothermal lake and a 75-year expansion plan (right)

The integration of hospital and environment is also carried forward in the design of the hospital facility, with particular attention paid to its succession of public spaces. The Hospital's entry and lake levels meet in a dramatic multistory atrium framed by a unique steel structure dubbed the “Tree of Life” by the design team. Together with a pair of courtyard healing gardens, prairie restoration, and art and signage programs based on indigenous flora, these features all underscore the goal to bring the natural world into the new facility and integrate site and building into one continuous experience to create an ideal healing environment.

Conclusions

Sherman Hospital and its geothermal system offer a powerful example of how economic and environmental interests can work in concert, with measurable benefits to patients and staff and an impact that extends well beyond the hospital campus.
Jonathan Gyory, AIA, LEED AP, is a Principal at Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott and is a senior member of the firm's healthcare practice.

For more information, visit http://www.sbra.com.
Sidebar

How does a geothermal system work?
Although there are certain volcanic areas in the world that superheat rock and water into steam, most of the earth beneath us exists year round at a steady 55°F state. A geothermal system, either through wells, a lake bed, or even a horizontal grid buried under soil, employs a liquid coolant in a closed loop that is pumped from building to ground and back to building to absorb or discharge heat.

Like a huge automobile radiator, the network of thin pipe grids in the lake provides maximum surface area to exchange heat with the building. Lake water temperature at Sherman will vary from 38° to 85°F over the course of the year, but even at the extremes, there will still be enough of a temperature differential between the water and air temperature to harvest potential energy for the building.

The network of thin lake piping is gathered at the manifold room (pictured left) and channeled into a pair of 24 supply and return pipes that run to and from the building and fan out to individual heat pumps. These small, residential-sized pump units allow each patient room to be controlled individually by thermostat. The pumps are housed in small closets along the patient corridor for easy access and routine maintenance. This is an improvement over the design at Great River, where the units were located above the patient room ceiling, and filter replacement every three months proved disruptive for patients.

For critical life safety areas such as the Emergency Department, Inpatient Surgery, and the ICU, the geothermal system provides heating and cooling, but relies on conventional air handlers to deliver the high rates of ventilation and filtration required. Water-to-air heat pumps are not well suited for this sort of application.

Surprisingly, the geothermal system will operate in cooling mode 10 months of the year, even in its northern location west of Chicago. A hospital generates so much heat from occupants, medical equipment, and lighting—more than twice as much energy per square foot as commercial or residential building—that a well-engineered facility can capture and redistribute this excess load during the heating season to avoid paying twice for heat. The building will effectively heat itself when ambient temperatures rise above 20°F.

[~ Susan ~]

Interesting article...thanks for posting it, sumisu.

[sumisu]

Chronic arsenic poisoning from burning high-arsenic-containing coal in Guizhou, China

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CYP/is_2_110/ai_84303267/pg_2

[~ Susan ~]

Can Coal and Clean Air Coexist in China?

August 4, 2008

The furious growth of China fueled by burning coal takes a toll on health and the environment

By David Biello



HAZY SKIES: There is no horizon in industrial cities like Chongqing, pictured here, thanks to air pollution from burning coal.
David Biello/ © Scientific American

CHONGQING—Coal powers China. In addition to producing about 75 percent of its electricity, the dirty, black rock is burned everywhere from industrial boilers to home stoves. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging up the fossil fuel, shortages abound forcing curbs in electricity use, and the country's transportation infrastructure creaks under the weight of distributing it across the country.

But the Chinese reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, rendering them all but invisible from the sky, which in many spots is little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. And it's not just confined to China: as the pollution builds it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that takes about a week to cross the Pacific to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution.

There is no true horizon in this inland port city where the majority of China's motorcycles are produced, one of several industrial goods produced here. This "furnace" of China, as it's known, is akin to the entire Rust Belt of the U.S. crammed into a single community of 30-plus million people (twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region)—and its residents breathe air filled with so much lung-clogging soot that it would fail both U.S. and European Union (E.U.) safety standards.

The choking smoke produced by all that coal burning insinuates itself into the lungs of Chinese men, women and children and costs China an estimated $100 billion in health costs associated with respiratory ills, according to the World Bank. Further, it can literally stunt the growth of the next generation in this city in the heartland of China, according to recent research from Frederica Perera of Columbia University and her colleagues.

The Chinese have been burning coal for centuries. Venetian trader and explorer Marco Polo said that one of the most surprising sights during his travels through Asia in the 13th century was the Chinese practice of burning a strange, black rock for heat—and the mountains along the Silk Road that smoldered due to underground coal fires, like the ones burning throughout the country today. In fact, these underground blazes burn through an estimated 20 million tons of coal a year, the equivalent of the entire coal production of Germany last year.

But that pales in comparison to the amount of coal mined and deliberately burned annually by the Chinese: some 2.5 billion tons—double the amount burned by the U.S.—and doesn't even include ever growing imports. Much of it goes to the country's 541 coal-fired power plants, which pumped out 554,420 megawatts of electricity last year, according to the State Electricity Regulatory Commission.

China is a developing country undergoing an energy transformation unprecedented in human history, but fired by an engineering optimism reminiscent of the U.S. in the 1950s. China opens one large coal-fired power plant a week on average to generate enough electricity to service its 1.3 billion population and fuel industries that manufacture cheap goods for the U.S. and Europe.

China has a plan designed to reduce pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, linked to climate change and breathing problems, by as much as 10 percent over the next five years. And part of that plan is simply shuttering small, inefficient coal plants and replacing them with larger ones, meaning the abundance of new coal power plants will actually help clear the air somewhat. "To close small plants, it will be very effective to improve air quality," says Greenpeace spokeswoman Sarah Liang.

But that still leaves a load of pollution: China this year surpassed the U.S. as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind global warming.

Despite the surfeit of smut, the average Chinese citizen is responsible for a fraction of the greenhouse emissions of the average American—and the country is not bound by any international treaty to reduce its emissions. Yet, the government has launched a pilot project to address the problem by capturing and storing the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by using coal as a fuel for electricity generation at a power plant dubbed GreenGen.

The project in the port city of Tianjin will proceed in three phases. First, a consortium of power and coal companies will fork over funds to construct a so-called integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plant (in which coal is turned to gas and pollutants removed before burning) that is capable of producing 250 megawatts of electricity. Such technology could cut acid rain–causing sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 90 percent, smog-forming nitrogen oxides by 75 percent, and—ultimately—capture more than 80 percent of the CO2 normally produced by combustion, storing it in nearby depleted oil fields by 2015.

China's $1 billion GreenGen power plant became the world's leading clean coal technology project after the U.S. government in February pulled the plug on FutureGen, a similar program that lost steam as the costs for building the demonstration plant in Mattoon, Ill., skyrocketed. Yet, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and leaders of the world's eight richest nations, including President Bush, among others, have called the development of clean coal technology essential to preventing the consequences of climate change.

But completing GreenGen may yet prove a challenge as well. "There's no co-benefit to doing the carbon capture and storage," says energy technology expert Kelly Sims Gallagher of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. "There's an argument for doing GreenGen in terms of research and getting experience with it but from a commercial point of view it doesn't make sense." The reason: it requires extra energy to turn the coal to gas and then to capture the CO2 as well—in effect requiring the burning of more coal to generate the same amount of electricity.

GreenGen is a for-profit power plant, so economic gains or losses will play a pivotal role in whether to proceed with the capture and storage portion. "It may well be in this environment where oil is above $100 a barrel that it is economically viable and valuable for nations that are rich in coal, like China, to use that coal and to sequester the CO2 for purposes of producing more oil," says Vic Svec, senior vice president of investor relations and communications at U.S. coal giant Peabody, which is also a part owner of GreenGen. The Chinese also "view it as being a long-term benefit to remove CO2."

Thanks to the Olympics and ongoing efforts, the air in cities like Chongqing (and particularly Beijing) is vastly improved. Factories have been shifted to industrial parks on the outskirts of town and small, inefficient coal power plants closed in favor of larger, higher heat facilities in an effort to clear the air for visiting athletes and tourists. "When I was young, the sky was green and we [could not] see stars at night," says local government official David Lee, a lifelong Chongqing resident "This year, we see blue skies and stars. We think it's much better."

Perhaps, but the air is still not so clear—it can be tasted on the tongue, felt in the lungs and obscures the horizon. Part of the problem is a lack of enforcement of existing clean air laws—and efforts to avoid them. Factories and power plants turn on pollution control equipment when government officials visit but, when they leave, such controls are shut off to boost power production. "The government cannot check every day," Lee says.

The government "needs to enforce the environmental laws, if they want blue skies," insists Li Jungfeng, director of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.

Other Chinese cities, such as Zhengzhou in China's most populous province Henan, have little hope of such clear skies any time soon. There the stars remain invisible at night, according to former resident Li Jia, now a college student in Beijing.

The atmosphere in Beijing is still so thick with pollution (despite a ban on coal burning and spending $17 billion, or 120 billion yuan, on clean air measures in the last decade) from cars, factories and other sources that some athletes, including marathon runner Haile Gebrselassie of Kenya, voluntarily withdrew from the games and a shot at Olympic Gold because of health concerns.

"It is bitter air that you can feel," says Timothy Hui, a program manager at environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council and a Beijing resident. "People hate it. They complain."

Efforts such as GreenGen bode well for resolving those complaints, but China is also moving ahead with efforts to turn coal into liquid fuel—a costly transformation that emits twice as much CO2 as does simply burning the black rock and consumes yet more energy.

Fundamentally, however, a good portion of China's air pollution is simply outsourced smog: industry that has migrated from the U.S. and E.U. to China to help maintain low prices or clean Western skies. A full 23 percent of China's greenhouse gas emissions can be linked to Western exports, according to an analysis by researchers at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in England. And researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh put the percentage even higher: 33 percent.

That doesn't absolve China of responsibility to cut back on noxious emissions and it is clear that the fate of the world's climate will be forged in the crucible of its industrial cities. "Gradual warming of the earth's atmosphere is caused by the developing countries as well as the developed countries," says English professor Wang Xiansheng of Zhengzhou University, which is also facing rolling blackouts as a result of the current coal shortage. "The whole world should get united to deal with the problem."




http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=can-coal-and-clean-air-coexist-china

[EnergyGuy62]

COVER YOUR KEYS! THEY CAN BE DUPLICATED FROM AFAR!

Keys Can be Copied From Afar, Jacobs School Computer Scientists Show San Diego, CA, October 30, 2008--UC

San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key.

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=791

[EnergyGuy62]

GERMAN SCIENTISTS CONDEMN CHINESE POWER PLANTS

Sea levels expected to rise higher within this century 30/10/2008

German scientists warn that earlier studies showing sea level increases are highly understated.

Hamburg -- Sea levels around the world will rise one meter higher, say German scientists who warn that global warming is happening much faster than previously predicted.

Citing UN date on climate change, two senior German scientists say that previous predictions were far too cautious and optimistic.

Earlier estimates predicted a rise of 18 to 59 centimeters in sea levels this century.

However, according to Jochem Marotzke and leading meteorologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects, that estimate is woefully understated.

"We now have to expect that the sea level will rise by a meter this century," said Schellnhuber in Berlin.

He said it is "just barely possible" that world governments will be able to restrain the rise in average global temperatures to just 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, if they all strictly adhere to severe limitations on carbon dioxide emissions.  

Restrictions call for halving greenhouse emissions by 2050 and eliminating CO2 emissions entirely by the end of the century.

But the German researchers said the resulting limited increase in temperature is predicated on condition of strict adherence to those restrictions without exception, and even then there are many variables which could thwart the goals.

Schnellnhuber, who is an official adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate-change issues, said the new findings employed data unavailable to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for its most recent global warming report.

The two experts said the IPCC report was based on data that was collected up to 2005 only. Since then, the loss of ice in the Arctic has doubled or tripled.

Schnellhuber said that 20 percent of the loss of the ice sheet on Greenland could be directly linked to increased carbon dioxide emissions from new Chinese coal-fired power stations.

Schellnhuber's new prognostications of higher sea levels are based on studies of melting Himalaya glaciers and the ever shrinking Greenland ice cap.

He blames the rapidly diminishing size of the latter upon soot particles emitting from Chinese coal-fired power plants.

"That is truly a global effect," he said. Soot settles on the ice, preventing the ice from reflecting as much sunlight back into space. The result is that the ice absorbs sunlight rays, raising the temperature of the ice, which then causes it to melt.

 "Air pollution plays a massive role in the accelerating pace of climate change," he said.

[toddao]

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Marijuana Ingredients Show Promise In Battling Superbugs


Substances in marijuana show promise for fighting deadly drug-resistant bacterial infections, including so-called "superbugs," without causing the drug's mood-altering effects, scientists in Italy and the United Kingdom are reporting.


ScienceDaily (Sep. 8, 2008) — Substances in marijuana show promise for fighting deadly drug-resistant bacterial infections, including so-called "superbugs," without causing the drug's mood-altering effects, scientists in Italy and the United Kingdom are reporting.

Besides serving as infection-fighting drugs, the substances also could provide a more environmentally-friendly alternative to synthetic antibacterial substances now widely used in personal care items, including soaps and cosmetics, they say.

In the new study, Giovanni Appendino and colleagues point out that scientists have known for years that marijuana contains antibacterial substances. However, little research has been done on those ingredients, including studies on their ability to fight antibiotic resistant infections, the scientists say.

To close that gap, researchers tested five major marijuana ingredients termed cannabinoids on different strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a "superbug" increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

All five substances showed potent germ-killing activity against these drug-resistant strains, as did some synthetic non-natural cannabinoids, they say. The scientists also showed that these substances appear to kill bacteria by different mechanisms than conventional antibiotics, making them more likely to avoid bacterial resistance, the scientists note. At least two of the substances have no known mood-altering effects, suggesting that they could be developed into marijuana-based drugs without causing a "high."

Journal reference:

1. Appendino et al. Antibacterial Cannabinoids from Cannabis sativa: A Structure−Activity Study. Journal of Natural Products, 2008; 71 (8): 1427 DOI: 10.1021/np8002673

Adapted from materials provided by American Chemical Society.
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American Chemical Society (2008, September 8). Marijuana Ingredients Show Promise In Battling Superbugs. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 21, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/09/080908103045.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080908103045.htm