from Smithsonian Magazine
At first sight, the people of Kiribati, a nation of tiny islands in the central Pacific, would not appear to be model conservationists.
Trash is abundant all along Tarawa, the capital island, a skinny atoll shaped like a backward L and crammed with 40,000 people. (It was the site of one of the costliest landings in World War II, in which 1,000 U.S. marines were killed.)
The rustic charm of the traditional thatched houses, which have raised platform floors and no walls, is offset by the smell of human waste wafting from the beaches. The groundwater is contaminated. Infant mortality is high, life expectancy low. And yet this past January impoverished Kiribati established the world's largest protected area, a marine reserve the size of California.
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from New Scientist
A neurobiologist who is profoundly hard of hearing has developed an experimental gene therapy that generates the type of cells that are damaged or missing in deaf animals. Mice embryos were injected with a key developmental gene that led to the production of ear cells that convey sounds to the brain–a scientific first.
"That is sort of the major achievement or milestone that we all had to reach," says Stanford University cell biologist Stefan Heller, who specialises in hearing research and was not involved in the study.
Milestone though it may be, the advance represents only an incremental step in the search for a treatment to human hearing loss, says lead author John Brigande of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.
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from National Geographic News
Chances are you've never heard of Hypothenemus hampei. But this tiny insect is the world's biggest threat to something many of us swear we can't live without: our morning cup of coffee.
The bug, commonly known as the coffee berry borer, strikes almost everywhere coffee grows. It can destroy up to 70 percent of a crop, posing a significant threat to this $70-billion-a-year industry.
Millions of dollars have funded research to eradicate the coffee berry borer, and for decades, coffee farmers the world over have been battling the pest using every weapon they can muster, from traps to insecticide and even other insects—all with limited success. But a simple solution may already exist in their own backyards: birds.
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from the BBC News Online
Early stone tools developed by our species Homo sapiens were no more sophisticated than those used by our extinct relatives the Neanderthals.
That is the conclusion of researchers who recreated and compared tools used by these ancient human groups. The findings cast doubt on suggestions that more advanced stone technologies gave modern humans a competitive edge over the Neanderthals.
The work by a US-British team appears in the Journal of Human Evolution. The researchers recreated wide stone tools called "flakes," which were used by both Neanderthals and early modern humans.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Ayurvedic medicines—herbal mixtures dating back thousands of years in India and increasingly popular in the West—are frequently contaminated with lead, mercury or arsenic, according to a study published [yesterday].
A fifth of the nearly 200 concoctions tested contained levels of the toxic metals that, if taken at the maximum recommended doses, would surpass California's safety guidelines.
Dr. Robert Saper, a Boston University professor of family medicine who led the study, said the findings should spur the Food and Drug Administration to start clamping down on the largely unregulated world of pills, herbs and powders classified as dietary supplements. "It shouldn't be me trying to figure this out," Saper said.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON—More ominous signs Wednesday have scientists saying that a global warming "tipping point" in the Arctic seems to be happening before their eyes: Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is at its second lowest level in about 30 years.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that sea ice in the Arctic now covers about 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point since satellite measurements began in 1979 was 1.65 million square miles set last September.
With about three weeks left in the Arctic summer, this year could wind up breaking that previous record, scientists said. Arctic ice always melts in summer and refreezes in winter. But over the years, more of the ice is lost to the sea with less of it recovered in winter. While ice reflects the sun's heat, the open ocean absorbs more heat and the melting accelerates warming in other parts of the world.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Inside a bland industrial building in Wilmington, N.C., an experiment is in the works that could vastly reduce the cost, time, and space needed to make fuel for nuclear power plants and, some nonproliferation experts say, for nuclear bombs as well.
In that building, secret uranium-enrichment technology licensed by GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy is nearing a pilot test. If successful, the new technology will enable the company to supply low-cost nuclear fuel to power reactors worldwide, officials say.
Only broad outlines of the “Separation of Isotopes by Laser EXcitation,” or SILEX technology, are public. Most details are classified under the Atomic Energy Act. But it would not take much ... to unleash a global push by companies and nations to develop similar laser-based technology, nonproliferation experts, scientists, and US government studies warn.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
NASA researchers yesterday released images collected by a new telescope studying high-energy gamma rays. A combined image from 95 hours of the telescope's initial observations showed bursts of gamma rays glowing across the plane of the Milky Way.
The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, renamed Fermi, was launched in June and is off to a promising start, NASA scientists said. "I like to call it our extreme machine," said Jon Morse, the director of astrophysics for NASA. "It will help us crack the mysteries of these enormously powerful emissions."
Gamma rays are powerful light rays invisible to the naked eye. Because Earth's atmosphere absorbs gamma rays, they can be studied only from the edges of the visible universe. Fermi is gathering data on gamma rays that originate near black holes and high-energy stars called pulsars.
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from the Scientific American
On the day Patricia Hunt’s career veered into an entirely different field, her graduate students at Case Western Reserve University were grumbling, itching to use some exciting new data in their own experiments, but were told to wait while Hunt (just one last time) checked on her subjects.
Hunt, a geneticist, was exploring why human reproduction is so rife with complications. She had a hunch the chromosomally abnormal eggs that plague human pregnancies were tied to our hormones.
A paper outlining the results of Hunt’s experiments on the hormone levels of female mice was ready for publication. All she needed was to ensure that her control population, the mice left alone in the study, was normal. Instead Hunt stumbled on a disturbing result—40 percent had egg defects.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
Angela O'Connell will not allow her 15-month-old son to be vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella because she is certain the vaccination caused autism in her older boy, Aidan.
"The little boy that would stare into your eyes and laugh when you played with him turned into a boy that wouldn't even respond when you called his name," the Minooka mother said.
Over and over, careful scientific research has found no link between vaccinations and autism. Experts note that autism tends to emerge at the same age children receive their shots, leading to a false sense of cause and effect. But stories such as O'Connell's are so powerful, and so easily spread online, that pediatricians say they are spending unprecedented time answering questions about vaccinations, from mercury fears to concerns over the increasingly intense schedule of shots.
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from National Geographic News
Wind turbines can kill bats without touching them by causing a bends-like condition due to rapidly dropping air pressure, new research suggests.
Scientists aren't sure why, but bats are attracted to the turbines, which often stand 300 feet high and sport 200-foot blades. The mammals' curiosity can result in lethal blows by the rotors, which spin at a rate of about 160 miles per hour.
But scientist Erin Baerwald and colleagues report that only about half of the bat corpses they found near Alberta, Canada, turbine bases showed any physical evidence of being hit by a blade. A surprising 90 percent showed signs of internal hemorrhaging—evidence of a drop in air pressure near the blades that causes fatal damage to the bats' lungs.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
CUDAHY, Wis.—The deep is legendary for inky darkness. William Beebe, the first person to eye the abyss, called it perpetual night.
The darkness is matched by the intense pressure. Four miles down, it amounts to nearly five tons per square inch. That is too much even for Alvin, the most famous of the world’s tiny submersibles, which can take a pilot and two scientists down to a maximum depth of 2.8 miles.
But a new submersible is being built here, and even the process of construction seems a rebuke to the darkness. The work lighted up a cavernous factory with fireworks on a recent visit. Hot reds and oranges burst into showers of spark and flame as blistering metal began to yield to the demands of the submersible’s design.
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from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)
Operations at an air traffic control center in Hampton [Georgia] were back to normal Wednesday morning, federal officials said, a day after a software glitch snarled flight plan processing and delayed hundreds of airline flights nationwide.
Kathleen Bergen, spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the computer problem was fixed Tuesday evening about 7 p.m. Tuesday.
“We held off on allowing the system to assume a full load of flight plans until after midnight, after the evening rush was over. About 1:15 this morning, we allowed the computer to assume a full load and it’s working normally.”
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
A new blood test aimed at detecting ovarian cancer at an early, still treatable stage is stirring hopes among women and their physicians. But the Food and Drug Administration and some experts say the test has not been proved to work.
The test, called OvaSure, was developed at Yale and has been offered since late June by LabCorp, one of the nation’s largest clinical laboratory companies.
The need for such a test is immense. When ovarian cancer is detected at its earliest stage, when it is still confined to the ovaries, more than 90 percent of women will live at least five years, according to the American Cancer Society. But only about 20 percent of cases are detected that early. If the cancer is detected in its latest stages, after it has spread, only about 30 percent of women survive five years.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
President Bush on Monday signaled his intention to protect some of the Pacific Ocean's most remote and unspoiled islands, atolls and coral reefs from fishing and deep-sea mining.
In a memo to three Cabinet secretaries, the president asked for a plan that would protect parts of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on the planet, as well as waters around Rose Atoll in American Samoa and various islands and reefs in the central Pacific that are under U.S. jurisdiction.
The proposal, expected to be finalized before Bush leaves office, could establish marine sanctuaries or national monuments extending as far as 200 miles from each island or emergent reef that breaks the surface of the water.
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from Science News
People who inhabited Palau in western Micronesia nearly 3,000 years ago have achieved new and disputed heights. Contrary to an earlier report that these ancient islanders had unusually small bodies, human remains recently excavated in a Palau cave come from individuals who physically measured up to people today, according to a new report published online August 27 in PLoS ONE.
This is no arcane archaeological dispute. An earlier study of human remains on Palau found them to be remarkably small and posited that if human seafarers quickly took on tiny statures after settling Palau due to isolation and a lack of varied resources, then the same could have happened on other islands.
That would cast doubt on reports that a prehistoric skeleton from the Indonesian island of Flores represents a tiny humanlike species called Homo floresiensis, or hobbits for short, rather than a person with a disorder that stunted brain growth.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
HANFORD, Wash.—A platoon of double-crested cormorants took flight from the eastern shore of the Columbia River, skimming the sun-sparkled surface as two slender white egrets stood in the nearby shallows, hunting small fish hiding in the reeds.
Twenty kayakers, mostly tourists from the Pacific Northwest, paddled along, letting the steady current do most of the work. They coasted past mule deer grazing on the shore, coyotes stalking the sandy beaches and cliff swallows buzzing the nearby white bluffs.
But the main attraction was on the western shore: several bland, industrial-gray structures and towering smokestacks, a collection of buildings that gave birth to America's Atomic Age. Welcome to the Hanford Reach, where one of the last free-flowing stretches of the Columbia River encounters America's most contaminated nuclear site.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
HOUSTON—American natural gas production is rising at a clip not seen in half a century, pushing down prices of the fuel and reversing conventional wisdom that domestic gas fields were in irreversible decline.
The new drilling boom uses advanced technology to release gas trapped in huge shale beds found throughout North America—gas long believed to be out of reach. Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, releasing less of the emissions that cause global warming than coal or oil.
Rising production of natural gas has significant long-range implications for American consumers and businesses. A sustained increase in gas supplies over the next decade could slow the rise of utility bills, obviate the need to import gas and make energy-intensive industries more competitive.
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from the BBC News Online
A UK-built solar-powered plane has set an unofficial world endurance record for a flight by an unmanned aircraft.
The Zephyr-6, as it is known, stayed aloft for more than three days, running through the night on batteries it had recharged in sunlight. The flight was a demonstration for the US military, which is looking for new types of technology to support its troops on the ground.
Craft like Zephyr might make ideal platforms for reconnaissance. They could also be used to relay battlefield communications. Chris Kelleher, from UK defence and research firm QinetiQ, said Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer advantages over traditional aircraft and even satellites.
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from National Geographic News
A labyrinth filled with stone temples and pyramids in 14 caves—some underwater—have been uncovered on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, archaeologists announced last week.
The discovery has experts wondering whether Maya legend inspired the construction of the underground complex—or vice versa. According to Maya myth, the souls of the dead had to follow a dog with night vision on a horrific and watery path and endure myriad challenges before they could rest in the afterlife.
In one of the recently found caves, researchers discovered a nearly 300-foot concrete road that ends at a column standing in front of a body of water.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
A biotech consultant had reviewed a young biotech's development plan and presented the company with several recommendations. It was clear to this consultant that the company was moving prematurely into a human proof-of-concept study and needed more data to define the appropriate dose.
Several weeks later, she was astonished to hear from the company's chief medical officer that while he had personally agreed with her, the company had decided to proceed directly to the next stage of development without further testing, because even at the "wrong" dose it would be able to raise the money needed to stay afloat.
It was with sadness, but no great surprise, that she read a year later that the trial had failed. The company was said to be "evaluating its strategic options." Welcome to the reality of financially driven drug development!
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