Bugs! The critters eating America’s forests

America’s 4 July bonfires served a dual purpose yesterday. They burned the wood of trees destroyed by a trio of bugs that are devastating parts of the nation’s forests.

With 750 million acres of forests in the United States, the scale of the problem is massive. Since 1999, the country has lost, on average, 1 per cent of its tree cover per year. This means these small insects have killed about 10 per cent of all US forests in 10 years.

Two of the bugs, says the government, have the potential to destroy $700bn (£429bn) worth of forests.

Already, one beetle – the emerald ash borer – has invaded 13 US states and two Canadian provinces. In those places, all movements of firewood are illegal and contractors who have moved logs have been fined by the courts and banned from working in the quarantined areas.

Last month, the emerald ash borer (or EAB) was identified in New York State, home to 700 million ash trees which sustain a profitable furniture industry and even provide the raw material for baseball bats. Ironically, the trees were replacements for elms killed off by Dutch elm disease. America’s chestnut trees have also suffered catastrophic damage from blight.

The borer, which comes from China, first entered America in the wood of crates shipped to Detroit in the early 1990s, but it was 2002 before it was formally identified. The tiny, creamy-white larvae bore through the bark and adults start emerging in mid-June. The larvae damage causes general yellowing and thinning of the foliage, followed by crown dieback and the eventual death of the tree. The borer has killed around 50 million trees in Michigan and tens of millions in 12 surrounding states and in Canada’s Ontario and Quebec.

Therese Poland, of the US Forest Service, said that in a bid to attract, trap, identify and monitor the insect, the service has researched the odours, or kairomones, produced by the ash; these allow the insects to identify the trees. Ms Poland said the service is hoping to find the “ultimate attractant”, and it is hoped this will prove more successful than the sticky traps hoisted in tens of thousands of ash trees across the Midwest. Another theory – not Ms Poland’s – is that purple attracts the male insect because it replicates the colour of a female’s backside.

via Bugs! The critters eating America’s forests – Americas, World – The Independent.

Link between cancer and human evolution revealed

A new study conducted by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) suggests a link between cancer and human evolution.

Writing about their work in the journal Genome Research, the researchers say that gene mutations that once helped humans survive may increase the possibility for diseases, including cancer.

They came to this conclusion after studying mutations in the genome of the mitochondria, a part of every cell responsible for energy production that is passed exclusively from mothers to their children.

The mitochondria are essential to every cell’s survival and our ability to perform the functions of living.

“Our ancestors responded to environmental changes, such as climate shift, with mutations that increased their chances of survival. But today, these same mutations predispose us toward complex diseases such as cancer,” says Dr. Dan Mishmar, a molecular biologist from the Department of Life Sciences at BGU.

“Although mitochondria’s role in the emergence of new species has been investigated recently, the idea that they are responsible for our susceptibility to illness startles many,” Dr. Mishmar adds.

During the study, the research team analysed the genome mitochondria mutations from 98 unrelated individuals.

According to them, combinations of mutations tended to occur in tumours in precisely the same DNA building blocks that changed during evolution.

The researchers also observed that the mitochondrial genome of humans, who had migrated out of Africa to Europe 100,000 years ago, carried seven mutations found in almost all of today’s Europeans.

“The concept that the same principles that drive evolution toward the emergence of new species govern the emergence of diseases is new. A clinician looks at the genome of a tumor, or other disease, and compares it to the normal population, looking for new mutations that do not occur there. I assume the mutations are already part of the population and have had a survival function. When these same mutations reoccur in the correct environment, they can cause disease,” Dr. Mishmar says.

The team say in the research article: “We show, strikingly, that evolution repeated itself in cancer. If we better understand how evolution moved, we can understand the genetic basis of many complex disorders.

via Link between cancer and human evolution revealed | Newspost Online.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if… those you don’t accept evolution, are not be allowed to receive the cancer cure. You don’t believe in evolution, so why should you want a cancer cure based on it?

Russian spacecraft landed on moon hours before Americans

A previously unheard recording of a Russian spacecraft attempting to beat NASA’s Apollo 11 in 1969’s race to the moon has been released. In July 1969, the telescopes at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, in Cheshire, were tracking the Americans’ Eagle Lander carrying astronauts towards the moon’s surface.Sir Bernard Lovell, the astronomer, was among the team listening to transmissions coming from the area of space and began tracking the unmanned Soviet spacecraft Luna 15, which was trying to collect samples of lunar soil and rock and then return to Earth before the US mission.

The recordings from Jodrell’s Lovell radio telescope, which were hidden in archives until researchers found them, show the Russian craft orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on July 21 – just a few hours before the Americans lifted off.

In the newly released recordings, which were made over three days, Sir Bernard, the founder of Jodrell Bank, can be heard narrating events with conversation from the Apollo 11 astronauts in the background.

Sir Bernard notes a change in the orbit of Luna 15 to take it closer to the US landing site and later reports a rumour from a “well-informed source in Moscow” that the craft is about to land.

People in Jodrell’s control room can then be heard shouting “it’s landing” and “it’s going down much too fast” as they track Luna 15’s final moments before it crashes.

A voice is later heard saying: “I say, this has really been drama of the highest order.”

The recordings have been released by The University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Moon landings.

via Russian spacecraft landed on moon hours before Americans – Telegraph.

Mayan underworld filled with gifts, sacrifices to gods

Xibalba was a Maya name for the underworld, home of the gods of death and disease. Caves, not the lofty pyramids left behind by the ancient Maya, were the entrances to Xibalba. And here, in caves like this one, they left sacrifices — plates, bowls and captive’s remains — as offerings to the gods.

“One of the things that Maya would do, particularly when they made offerings in caves, was smash things, because to the Maya, things that we consider inanimate, they consider animate. And if you use them in a ritual it was important to smash the vessel to release the spirit,” says archaeologist Jaime Awe, director of Belize’s Institute of Archaeology. He was standing in the cave before an array of bowls, broken or incised with holes, just as they had been left a thousand years before.

AUDIO: Sounds of the cave

For more than four millennia, Maya conducted rituals in caves like Actun Tunichil Muknal, where Awe led teams to explore starting in 1993. The descendants of the ancient Maya, who abandoned their pyramid-adorned ceremonial centers by 1050 A.D., still perform rituals today in caves in Mexico’s Yucatan. In a recent paper in the Latin American Antiquity journal, Awe and colleagues presented evidence from caves like this one that drought played a role in the famed collapse of the ancient Maya. “We’ve had to map everything in these caves,” Awe says.

via Mayan underworld filled with gifts, sacrifices to gods – USATODAY.com.

Who is Neil Armstrong?

A hero to millions, Neil Armstrong has consistently shunned the limelight. To mark the 40th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing, author Andrew Smith travelled across America to discover why the man who first set foot upon the Moon remains such an enigma.

His words on being the first person ever to set foot on the Moon have been written into soundbite history – but in the four decades since Neil Armstrong became a household name, he has also increasingly become an enigma.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Armstrong has refused to cash in on his fame and seemingly done everything in his power to diminish it.

So what has made Neil Armstrong such a reluctant hero, unsusceptible to the normal trappings of celebrity? And why won’t he speak about his historic journey?

In his quest to uncover the man behind the spacesuit, Andrew Smith, author of Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, decided to travel across America to meet people who have had an impact on Armstrong’s life.

His conclusion is that Armstrong, now 78, believes simply that he did not deserve the attention.

“There were 400,000 people that worked on that [Moon landing] programme in various different ways and he thinks he didn’t deserve all the credit just because he did the flying part,” says Smith.

But Armstrong became a celebrity overnight. The Apollo 11 Moon landing marked a seismic shift in space exploration during a time when the world was captivated by space. It was watched by the largest television audience of its time, and President Nixon put in a congratulatory phone call just after the US flag was planted.

On the astronauts’ return, Nasa sent them on a world tour.

Although Neil Armstrong initially went along with the celebrations, he always remained aloof; an elusive presence who preferred to talk about facts rather than feelings.

He started to decline speeches and interviews, eventually refusing to sign autographs and shying away from being photographed in public.

“To my knowledge he has done two television interviews in the last 40 years – and he says nothing about what he felt about anything. He will talk about matters of fact and that’s it,” says Smith. The author has been repeatedly refused an interview with Armstrong despite many requests, although the pair have had e-mail correspondence.

“And he didn’t want to profit from it financially – even though a lot of the other Moon walkers have done – and amazingly he’s stood by that. An auction house told me that if Armstrong spent just one afternoon signing autographs he could make a million dollars, but he’s always refused.”

Two years after his historic journey, in August 1971, Armstrong left Nasa and decided to become a teacher.

“Ostensibly, it was a very strange decision. He could have done anything,” says Smith.

But if Armstrong thought a small aerospace engineering department at the University of Cincinnati would provide a refuge, he was to be disappointed.

“His old boss told me when he first arrived, he spent two hours every single day signing autographs for members of staff and students. Apparently there was a window right at the top of the wall and people used to go and make human pyramids just to look into his office.

“He dealt with it but he didn’t like it, he couldn’t walk across the campus without being constantly approached. He ended up going and spending a lot of his time flying, on his own, to get away from it.”

Neil Armstrong’s decision to keep a low profile contrasts with the man he shared the limelight with on that historic lunar landing.

Buzz Aldrin has become the face of space, courting media attention with a series of high-publicity manoeuvres including a Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space computer game and making a guest appearance in The Simpsons.

…

And what about the poetic prose “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” that slips off most people’s tongues almost as easily as Shakespeare’s famous lines “to be or not to be”?

Whether Armstrong was fed the line by a press officer or it was his own musing is the subject of much speculation, but one of his oldest friends has his own theory about its origin.

“‘Kotcho’ Solacoff says they used to play the game Mother May I? (also commonly known as Grandmother’s Footsteps) – where you take small steps or giant steps – in the playground. He thinks it came from that. …

via BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Who is Neil Armstrong?.

Spider builds life-sized decoys

image: An adult C. mulmeinensis alongside decoy prey pellets (L) and decoy egg sacs (R)

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There is a species of spider that builds models of itself, which it uses as decoys to distract predators. The spider may be the first example of an animal building a life-size replica of its own body.

So believe the scientists who made the discovery, which is published in the journal Animal Behaviour.  The arachnid’s behaviour also offers one explanation for why many spiders like to decorate their webs with strange-looking ornaments.

Many animals try to divert the attentions of predators by becoming masters of disguise. Some try to avoid being seen altogether by using camouflage to blend in against a background, such as the peppered moth evolving motley wings that blend into tree bark, or stick insects that look like sticks.

Others evolve more conspicuous ornaments designed to distract a predator, such as butterflies that grow large eyespots or lizards that quickly move colourful tails, which they detach from their bodies if grabbed. This latter strategy has puzzled biologists, because attracting predators in the first place is usually a bad idea.

One hypothesis is that animals which grow conspicuous ornaments benefit overall, because directing a predator to attack an expendable part of the body, such as the lizard’s tail, outweighs the costs of attracting the attention of the predator in the first place. …

But animals do not tend to actually build life-like replica models of themselves to act as decoys. However, that is exactly what a species of orb spider called Cyclosa mulmeinensis does, biologists Ling Tseng and I-Min Tso of Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan, have discovered.

via BBC – Earth News – Spider builds life-sized decoys.

‘Normal’ cells far from cancer give nanosignals of trouble

A new Northwestern University-led study of human colon, pancreatic and lung cells is the first to report that cancer cells and their non-cancerous cell neighbors, although quite different under the microscope, share very similar structural abnormalities on the nanoscale level.

The findings, obtained using an optical technique that can detect features as small as 20 nanometers, validate the “field effect,” a biological phenomenon in which cells located some distance from a malignant or premalignant tumor undergo molecular and other kinds of abnormal changes.

The most striking findings were that these nanoscale alterations occurred at some distance from the tumor and, importantly, could be identified by assessing more easily accessible tissue, such as the cheek for lung cancer detection.

The partial wave spectroscopy (PWS) technique, once optimized, could be used to detect cell abnormalities early and help physicians assess who might be at risk for developing cancer. Like a pap smear of the cervix, a simple brushing of cells is all that is needed to get the specimen required for testing.

Using PWS, the researchers made another important discovery: the abnormalities found in the nanoarchitecture of the colon cells are the same abnormalities as those found in the pancreas and lung, illustrating commonality across three very different organs.

The results are published online by the journal Cancer Research.

via ‘Normal’ cells far from cancer give nanosignals of trouble.

New monkey discovered in Brazil

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced today the discovery of a new monkey in a remote region of the Amazon in Brazil.

The monkey is related to saddleback tamarins, which include several species of monkeys known for their distinctively marked backs. The newly described distinct subspecies was first seen by scientists on a 2007 expedition into the state of Amazonas in northwestern Brazil.

The discovery was published in the June online edition of the International Journal of Primatology. Authors of the study include Fabio Röhe of the Wildlife Conservation Society, José de Sousa e Silva Jr. of Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Ricardo Sampaio of the Instituto Nacional de Parquisas de Amaozônia, and Anthony B. Rylands of Conservation International.

Researchers have dubbed the monkey Mura’s saddleback tamarin (saguinus fuscicollis mura) named after the Mura Indians, the ethnic group of Amerindians of the Purus and Madeira river basins where the monkey occurs. Historically this tribe was spread through the largest territory of any of the Amazonian Indigenous peoples, extending from the Peruvian frontier today (Rio Yavari) east to the Rio Trombetas.

The monkey is mostly gray and dark brown in color, with a distinctly mottled “saddle.” It weighs 213 grams (less than ¾ of a pound) and is 240 millimeters (9 inches tall) with a 320 millimeter (12.6 inch) tail.

via New monkey discovered in Brazil.

Not bigfoot, but an undiscovered monkey is still interesting. I haven’t found a picture of this new one yet. The monkey in the photo is Saguinus oedipus.

Psychic Blogging: Jackson Video Found

Experiment in “Psychic Blogging”

4:43 AM. While sleeping I dreamed this headline “Jackson Video Found” very clearly and woke with the certainty that I should post this right away because it will be evidence that the brain is capable of seeing the future. I’ve had flashes like this before about the news which have turned out to be true. These are not supernatural psychic predictions. The simple fact is, our brains are quantum computers and as such they are doing calculations with energy that has been in touch with events that have not yet happened. This is a real connection to the becoming universe.

While in this state I also dreamed that an image associated with “21″41″ will be relevant, although I’m less certain of this, this would be important extra proof. – Xeno

Julie, the Beat Boxing Girl

I don’t get some of the stuff she is doing but this is the first time I’ve heard/seen someone imitate a known song being slowed down and sped up as if it were embedded on a record that is being turned by hand.