Has The Mystery Of The Antarctic Ice Sheet Been Solved?

A team of scientists from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales travelled to Africa to find new evidence of climate change which helps explain some of the mystery surrounding the appearance of the Antarctic ice sheet.

Ice sheet formation in the Antarctic is one of the most important climatic shifts in Earth’s history. However, previous temperature records show no evidence of the oceans cooling at this time, but instead suggest they actually warmed, presenting a confusing picture of the climate system which has long been a mystery in palaeoclimatology.

Now Dr Carrie Lear, Lecturer in Palaeoceanography, and her team at Cardiff have presented new temperature records using ancient sea floor mud recovered from Tanzania, East Africa. The shell chemistry of pin-head sized animals called foraminifera (“forams”) reveal that ocean temperatures did in fact cool by about 2.5 degrees Celsius.

Dr Lear said: “Forams are great tools for studying climates of the past, which helps us learn about the uncertainties of our future greenhouse climate. These new records help resolve a long-standing puzzle regarding the extent of ice-sheet growth versus global cooling, and bring climate proxy records into line with climate model simulations.

“We have been able to use the chemistry of the Tanzanian microfossils to construct records of temperature and ice volume over the interval of the big climate switch. These new records show that the world’s oceans did cool during the growth of an ice sheet, and that the volume of ice would have fitted onto Antarctica; so now the computer models of climate and the past climate data match up.” – scidaily

Key To Life Before Its Origin On Earth May Have Been Discovered

An important discovery has been made with respect to the mystery of “handedness” in biomolecules. Researchers led by Sandra Pizzarello, a research professor at Arizona State University, found that some of the possible abiotic precursors to the origin of life on Earth have been shown to carry “handedness” in a larger number than previously thought.

Pizzarello, in ASU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, worked with Yongsong Huang and Marcelo Alexandre, of Brown University,  in studying the organic materials of a special group of meteorites that contain among a variety of compounds, amino acids that have identical counterparts in terrestrial biomolecules. These meteorites are fragments of asteroids that are about the same age as the solar system (roughly 4.5 billion years.)

Scientists have long known that most compounds in living things exist in mirror-image forms. The two forms are like hands; one is a mirror reflection of the other. They are different, cannot be superimposed, yet identical in their parts.

When scientists synthesize these molecules in the laboratory, half of a sample turns out to be “left-handed” and the other half “right-handed.” But amino acids, which are the building blocks of terrestrial proteins, are all “left-handed,” while the sugars of DNA and RNA are “right-handed.” The mystery as to why this is the case, “parallels in many of its queries those that surround the origin of life,” said Pizzarello.

Years ago Pizzarello and ASU professor emeritus John Cronin analyzed amino acids from the Murchison meteorite (which landed in Australia in 1969) that were unknown on Earth, hence solving the problem of any contamination. They discovered a preponderance of “left-handed” amino acids over their “right-handed” form.

“The findings of Cronin and Pizzarello are probably the first demonstration that there may be natural processes in the cosmos that generate a preferred amino acid handedness,” Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif., said at the time.

The new PNAS work* was made possible by the finding in Antarctica of an exceptionally pristine meteorite. Antarctic ices are good “curators” of meteorites. After a meteorite falls — and meteorites have been falling throughout the history of Earth — it is quickly covered by snow and buried in the ice. Because these ices are in constant motion, when they come to a mountain, they will flow over the hill and bring meteorites to the surface.

“Thanks to the pristine nature of this meteorite, we were able to demonstrate that other extraterrestrial amino acids carry the left-handed excesses in meteorites and, above all, that these excesses appear to signify that their precursor molecules, the aldehydes, also carried such excesses,” Pizzarello said. “In other words, a molecular trait that defines life seems to have broader distribution as well as a long cosmic lineage.”" – sciencedaily

UA findings dispute Martian ‘water’ discovery

Steep Martian gullies thought to have carried liquid water in the past decade were more likely the site of an avalanche of sand and gravel, according to a UA analysis of new images taken from Mars’ orbit.

The findings dispute a 2006 study that argued liquid water flowing on Mars created bright streaks visible in pictures taken in 2006 that were not visible in pictures from 1999. The 2006 study, led by Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, used images from the Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbital Camera.

With their own higher-resolution camera in orbit around Mars, UA scientists re-imaged the same area in an effort to gather more evidence in support of Malin’s conclusions. “We started off expecting this would have a liquid water flow and we were looking to make a stronger case,” said Jon D. Pelletier, a University of Arizona associate professor of geosciences and lead author of the study.

“The original imagery looked pretty convincing. It was certainly something that was very fluidized, but if you get sand and gravel down a steep slope, it can have fluid- like behavior,” Pelletier said.

The findings are somewhat disappointing for Pelletier because they contradict what he considers the most exciting discovery about Mars in 10 years. Evidence of recent water on Mars would have profound implications for the question of whether life could currently exist on Mars.

“The conclusion of our paper led us to a simpler explanation, that we really do understand water on Mars, and under the current climate conditions, liquid water is probably not present and flowing on Mars today,” Pelletier said. “It is a bit disappointing that this really cool news didn’t turn out.”

… The UA team used HiRISE pictures taken at two angles to construct three-dimensional images of the Martian slope in much greater detail than were used in the 2006 study. The HiRISE camera, in orbit aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter since March 2006, has a resolution five times greater than the MOC. Pelletier plugged the data from those three-dimensional images — called digital elevation models, or DEMs — directly into computer models of different fluid patterns. The simplest model, liquid water with no sediment, was ruled out quickly.

The modeling continued with different levels of sediment added to the water — basically mudflows — and, at a certain consistency, the liquid-sediment mix would match the observed flow patterns on Mars. “Either we have this really sediment-rich flow mixed in with some water, or maybe it’s just dry,” Pelletier said. A dry, granular flow model fit the Martian images best, but the study did not rule out the possibility that the flows were created by a thick mud, with the consistency of hot lava.  – azstarnet

Man saves father and son – 20 years apart

A Chinese man has rescued a seven-year-old boy from a pond – 20 years after rescuing the boy’s father from the same place.

A Chinese man has rescued a seven-year-old boy from a pond – 20 years after rescuing the boy’s father from the same place.

Wang Weiqing, 58, of Beicheng village, Danyang city, is being hailed as a hero, reports the Yangtse Evening News.

“I was walking along the pool with my own grandson, then spotted a boy struggling in the water,” he said.

When the grandfather of the rescued boy arrived, he was amazed to see the rescuer was the same man who saved his son, the boy’s father, from the same pool 20 years ago.

“I can hardly believe it, and don’t know how to express my gratitude,” said the grandfather, Wang Huajian.

The grandfather later made a silk banner to thank Wang for saving two generations of his family. – ananova

Largest Clam Known to Man

The geoduck or gooyduck is the largest species of clams on the face of the earth. The clam itself is 15 to 20 cm long, which is pretty big but the really impressive part is its long siphon that often reaches one meter in length. it weighs between 0.5 and 1.5 kilograms, but there have been stories about 7.5 kg heavy gooyducks.

Source: OddityCentral via A Welsh View

Electronic tattoo display runs on blood

Jim Mielke’s wireless blood-fueled display is a true merging of technology and body art. At the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition, the engineer demonstrated a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen that operates as a cell phone display, with the potential for 3G video calls that are visible just underneath the skin.

The basis of the 2×4-inch “Digital Tattoo Interface” is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein. 

On both the top and bottom surfaces of the display is a matching matrix of field-producing pixels. The top surface also enables touch-screen control through the skin. Instead of ink, the display uses tiny microscopic spheres, somewhat similar to tattoo ink. A field-sensitive material in the spheres changes their color from clear to black, aligned with the matrix fields.

The tattoo display communicates wirelessly to other Bluetooth devices – both in the outside world and within the same body. Although the device is always on (as long as your blood´s flowing), the display can be turned off and on by pushing a small dot on the skin. When the phone rings, for example, an individual turns the display on, and “the tattoo comes to life as a digital video of the caller,” Mielke explains. When the call ends, the tattoo disappears.

Could such an invasive device have harmful biological effects? Actually, the device could offer health benefits. That´s because it also continually monitors for many blood disorders, alerting the person of a health problem.

The tattoo display is still just a concept, with no word on plans for commercialization. 

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?

 Cool. Let’s try it here.

High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don’t start school until age 7. Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world’s C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they’re way ahead in math, science and reading — on track to keeping Finns among the world’s most productive workers.

from online.wsj.com posted with vodpod

Sprint Reports Huge Loss; Warns Of More Difficulties

The depth of the challenge facing new Sprint Nextel chief executive Dan Hesse was laid bare today when the wireless carrier announced a $29.5 billion loss for the fourth quarter of 2007 and warned of ongoing troubles.

Sprint eliminated its dividend and wrote down the full value of Nextel Communications on its balance sheet. Sprint merged with Nextel in 2005 in a $70 billion deal, but the marriage has been a difficult one. Sprint also announced it had borrowed $2.5 billion to sustain business operations.

Sprint said 1.2 million wireless subscribers are expected to drop their service by the end of March. In the whole of 2007, that many subscribers abandoned Sprint. Meanwhile, chief rivals Verizon Wireless and AT&T gained subscribers.

The loss of $29.5 billion ($10.36 per share) compared to a profit of $261 million (9 cents per share) in the fourth quarter 2006. The loss for all of 2007 was $29.6 billion ($10.31) compared to $995 million (34 cents) in 2006. Overall revenues for 2007 decline slightly from 2006.

In early trading, Sprint shares sank 20 percent, according to Bloomberg. The stock had already lost a third of its value this year. The loss was the fifth-largest among S&P 500 companies since 1990, according to Bloomberg. – washblog

Today is Alexander Graham Bell’s birthday. Did he steal plans that made his telephone work?

When science journalist Seth Shulman began a year of study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Dibner Institute, his goal was to compare the lives of inventors Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born scientist and inventor. Today, Bell is still widely considered to be the foremost inventor of the telephone, although this matter has become controversial, with a number of people claiming that Antonio Meucci was the ‘real’ inventor (in June 2002, the United States House of Representatives passed a symbolic bill officially recognizing Meucci for his contributions to the invention of the telephone). Others advance Elisha Gray, the founder of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. (It is reasonably clear that each of these men independently invented a telephone.) In addition to Bell’s work in telecommunications technology, he was responsible for important advances in aviation and hydrofoil technology.

That was before he got a look at the original laboratory notebook that Bell kept at the time of his work on the telephone in 1876. In it, Shulman saw a cartoonish drawing of a head bent toward a rudimentary telephone receiver. What struck him about the drawing was that it almost duplicated one in a patent application by a rival inventor, Elisha Gray.

This book is the story of how Shulman followed up on that first clue to reach the conclusion that Bell had stolen the key technological breakthrough needed to acquire his famous telephone patent from Gray.

The novella-length book cannot absolutely prove that Bell and his backers robbed Gray of his rights to the first commercial telephone, but it lays out a strong case of circumstantial evidence.

At times, Shulman’s insistence on taking the reader along with him as he pursues his quest bogs down the book, but that’s a minor complaint about an otherwise fascinating tale of what could be the greatest intellectual property theft in history.

In their lifetimes, Gray, an Ohio native who helped establish Western Union, was a much more famous inventor than Bell, a transplanted Scotsman better known for his work with the deaf and his mastery of the art of elocution.

The vital addition to Bell’s experiments was a device that suspended a needle in liquid so that sound waves from the person talking into a transmitter would vary the resistance in the electrical circuit running to the receiver. That apparatus is what enabled his assistant, Thomas Watson, to hear Bell on March 10, 1876, when he supposedly spilled battery acid on his pants and yelled, “Watson, come here!”

This “variable resistance” device was described in Gray’s preliminary patent application, which was filed before Bell’s, and it never appeared in Bell’s experiments until after he made a mysterious visit to the patent offices around that time.

Other tantalizing tidbits: Shulman discovered that Bell’s description of the liquid transmitter was written into the margin of his original patent application, and he found an affidavit filed 10 years later by patent examiner Zenas Wilber in which he admitted that he let Bell see Gray’s paperwork, in part because Wilber owed money to one of the lawyers representing Bell. – postgaz

U.S. study shows why winter is “flu season”

 

Influenza viruses coat themselves in fatty material that hardens and protects them in colder temperatures — a finding that could explain why winter is the flu season, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.

This butter-like coating melts in the respiratory tract, allowing the virus to infect cells, the team at the National Institutes of Health found.

“Like an M&M in your mouth, the protective covering melts when it enters the respiratory tract,” said Joshua Zimmerberg of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), who led the study.

The NICHD is one of the National Institutes of Health.

“It’s only in this liquid phase that the virus is capable of entering a cell to infect it.”

Experts have long pondered why flu and other respiratory viruses spread more in winter. No one explanation, such as people staying indoors more, or the destructive effect of the sun’s radiation in summer, has fully explained it.

The new report, published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, could lead to new ways to prevent and treat flu, said NICHD Director Duane Alexander.

“The study results open new avenues of research for thwarting winter flu outbreaks,” Alexander said in a statement. – reuters