July 20th, 2010
The Earth’s crust is a restless body. The massive plates covering the planet’s mantel move a few very measurable inches per year. Why some plates are more slothful than others remains a mystery, but one group of geophysicists has come up with a compelling explanation—the wider the plate, the faster the movement.
Wide plates tend to slip under the adjoining plate more easily than narrower ones, the researchers discovered from their computer simulations. At the boundaries, plates either sink down toward the core or slide into the mantle more or less diagonally. Plates with a wide edge slip sideways more quickly than they sink because the subducted portion of the plate pulls it along. Narrower plates, on the other hand, sink more readily than they slide because friction at the margins of the plate’s edge slow horizontal motion.
Though still a theory, many geophysicists think the new idea holds promise. In an interview with ScienceNOW, Donald Forsyth, a Brown University geophysicist unaffiliated with the study, said, “It’s a nice, really simple concept.”
Image courtesy of NOAA.
Posted in Geology, News | No Comments »
June 17th, 2010
Conservation areas like national parks are often praised for protecting wildlife but also decried for taking lands and resources away from local peoples, especially those in developing nations. But now another study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,shows that protected areas can be a boon for local residents.
The authors investigated the economic conditions of people living near parks in Thailand and Costa Rica and found significantly less poverty in those areas. Though the data are averaged across the communities—some individuals or families may not benefit from the parks—they are a heartening result for conservation biologists.
This is not the first study to find some human benefit in protecting wilderness. An extensive earlier study found that protected areas attract capital for development, which in turn fosters population growth at the park edges and places greater pressure on the parks themselves.
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April 27th, 2010
The giant Palouse earthworm is the stuff of legends. Reportedly growing up to three feet in length, the worm is also notoriously difficult to track down—so difficult that scientists in the 1990s believed it was extinct. And it supposedly smells like lillies.
But the recent discovery of two specimens of Driloleirus americanus by pedologist Karl Umiker and graduate student Shan Xu has undermined the veracity of the worm’s fairy tale-like qualities. Rather than unearthing two yard-long monsters, the pair found a small juvenile and an adult that “when we stretched it out and relaxed it,” Jodi Johnson-Maynard, Umiker’s supervisor and an associate professor of soil science, told the New York Times, “got bigger…between nine and ten inches.”
And the smell? Nothing like lillies, they report.
The adult worm had to be sacrificed in the name of science (the only sure way to identify the species is through dissection), but its DNA should enable less invasive IDs. The researchers coaxed (if that’s the word) the worms out of the dirt with electric current, placing eight electrodes in a foot-wide circle before giving them the juice. Umiker and Xu were likely surprised when the translucent worms emerged topside—giant Palouse earthworms can burrow 15 feet below the surface.
Photo courtesy of the University of Idaho.
Posted in Biology, Ecology | No Comments »
May 7th, 2009
Bioelectricity may help plant-powered transportation boost its efficiency.
Biofuels have gone from transportation panacea to pariah in the space of a few years, but plant-derived motive power may be poised for a comeback. New life cycle assessments confirm the inefficiencies of using liquid biofuels for our cars and trucks, but so-called “bioelectricity”—electric power generated from biomass—seems to be a more efficient and climate friendly solution, according to new research published in Science. Battery electric vehicles that recharge using bioelectricity would travel an average of 80% farther per acre of cropland than traditional or hybrid biofuel cars and trucks.
Biofuel vehicles require few modifications to existing internal combustion systems, changes that cost manufacturers only a few hundred dollars at most. The liquid fuels also easily flow through the existing gasoline distribution infrastructure, so most oil companies’ decided to throw their weight behind them. Yet despite these advantages, biofuels production could expand cropland by millions of acres while providing dubious climate benefits. Turning those same crops into power for battery electric vehicles, the studies’ authors say, would help address both of those issues. Biofuels—regardless of source—lose out in part due to the inefficiencies of the internal combustion engine. While electric motors convert electricity to motive force with around 90 percent efficiency, internal combustion engines convert under 40 percent of the liquid fuel’s power to motion.
Posted in Biology, Chemistry, Ecology, News | No Comments »
March 15th, 2009
No, this isn’t a handily Photoshopped photo of a bath toy. Or even a Photoshop of a standard dolphin. Rather, it’s a bona fide pink bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) swimming about the waters of Calcasieu Lake in western Louisiana. Albinism is responsible for Pinky’s rouge hue and slightly less adorable red eyes. While a different species of pink dolphin (Inia geoffrensis) plies the Amazon River, Pinky is in a class by itself.
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March 10th, 2009
Moo.
Prions are the pariahs of the protein world. They lurk behind bovine spongiform encephalopathy, chronic wasting disease, and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, causing horrific symptoms and almost always leading to the death of the infected. Proteins gone bad, you might say.
Scientists always suspected prion proteins—the precursors to prions themselves—have a useful role to play. That function, though, eluded discovery until yesterday. Researchers injected zebra fish embryos with morpholinos, molecules that stem the production of prion proteins, and lo and behold, the embryos soon petered out. Prion proteins, they think, are the tie that binds embryonic cells together. Without close contact, the cells cannot communicate properly, and the cells fail to differentiate.
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February 18th, 2009
Smilodon parking ONLY
Ever seen those cheesy “Parking for Smilodons ONLY” signs? The ones elementary school kids can hang up in their bedrooms? Well, if you haven’t, it may only be a matter of time. Construction workers toiling on a new parking structure for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art unearthed a mother lode of ice age fossils. Paleontologists and archaeologists moved swiftly to secure the prized find—expected to rival the already expansive discoveries from the neighboring La Brea tar pits—by hoisting out fossil-rich blocks of earth like shipping containers from a freighter. The hunks were transported to another museum parking lot where experts are painstakingly chipping away the detritus from the bones.
And yes, this is the third fossil story in two weeks. We can’t help our sixth-grade selves.
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February 17th, 2009
CHICAGO, IL—Three and a half days and one two and a half our flight delay, I’ve returned from the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago. For my coverage of the event, see my first post on programming in synthetic life over at Ars Technica. More to follow!
Update: Get caught up to speed on next-gen battery technology for hybrid and electric vehicles.
Posted in Biology, News | No Comments »
February 4th, 2009
Maiacetus inuus. Illustration: John Klausmeyer
A pregnant cetacean ancestor laid down her bones 47.5 million years ago, and scientists in Pakistan picked them up earlier this decade. The pair’s bones were initially mistaken for an adult whale with a smaller companion, but paleontologists later realized they were handling a mother and her fetus of an extinct group of whale ancestors, the Anchaeoceti. The real kicker, though, was that the fetus was ready to greet the wide world head first––ala land mammals and distinctly unlike modern whales. And while they gave birth and likely rested on shore, Maiacetus inuus probably did everything else in the water, similar to modern crocodiles. The new find, detailed in a Public Library of Science paper, is yet another step in the fossilized path between ancient ancestors and their modern brethren.
(By the way, Maiacetus is Latin for “mother whale.” Clever scientists.)
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February 4th, 2009
Titanoboa cerrejonensis.
Illustration: Jason Bourque
If you thought the horror film Anaconda was a terrible premise, I’m afraid to say that you’ve now been proven wrong. It was just released 60 million years to late to be relevant. For the uninitiated, the movie centers around a National Geographic documentary gone horribly wrong thanks to a fantastically huge anaconda. While unlikely these days, geologists recently unearthed a 43 foot (13 m) snake in Columbia that they estimate would have weighed 2,500 pounds (1,140 kg). The warmer climate at the time helped cold-blooded creatures like Titanoboa cerrejonensis attain record dimensions. So with climate change on the horizon, I think we can expect… wait, I think I just had an idea for a movie.
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