A Million-Year Hard Disk
DUBLIN—It seems these days that no data storage medium lasts long before becoming obsolete—does anyone remember Sony's Memory Stick? So have pity for the builders of nuclear waste repositories, who are trying to preserve records of what they've buried and where, not for a few years but for tens of thousands of years.
Today, Patrick Charton of the French nuclear waste management agency ANDRA presented one possible solution to the problem: a sapphire disk inside which information is engraved using platinum. |  |
Geneticists Evolve Fruit Flies With the Ability to Count
A team of geneticists has announced that they have successfully bred fruit flies with the capacity to count.
After repeatedly subjecting fruit flies to a stimulus designed to teach numerical skills, the evolutionary geneticists finally hit on a generation of flies that could count — it took 40 tries before the species’ evolution occurred. The findings, announced at the First Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Canada, could lead to a better understanding of how we process numbers and the genetics behind dyscalculia — a learning disability that affects a person’s ability to count and do basic arithmetic. |  |
New Federal Ban on Synthetic Drugs Already Obsolete
A federal ban on synthetic drugs, signed into law by President Obama on July 9, was obsolete before the ink of his signature dried.
Drug formulations not covered by the law’s language, and almost certainly synthesized in direct response to legal pressure, are already on sale. If synthetics are supposed to be part of the War on Drugs, then this battle may already be lost. “There are several compounds out there now, in mixtures that I’ve tested myself, that would not fall under this ban,” said Kevin Shanks, a forensic toxicologist at AIT Laboratories, an Indiana-based chemical testing company. “The law just can’t seem to keep up. |  |
Asteroid Crashes Likely Gave Earth Its Water
Asteroids from the inner solar system are the most likely source of the majority of Earth's water, a new study suggests.
The results contradict prevailing theories, which hold that most of our planet's water originated in the outer solar system and was delivered by comets or asteroids that coalesced beyond Jupiter's orbit, then migrated inward. |  |
Sun Fires X-ray Shot at Earth, CME on the Way
Continuing its increasingly active trend, the sun erupted with another X-class solar flare on Thursday. Only last week, another active region (AR1515) delivered an impressive parting shot -- an X1.1 flare -- as it rotated toward the solar limb. Today's more energetic X1.4 flare, however, was directed right at us.
Today's fireworks were courtesy of another magnetically dominated active region called AR1520 that has been ominously crackling with flare activity. The active region has produced an impressive and beautiful grouping of sunspots (right). |  |
Controlling Your Computer With Your Eyes
Millions of people suffering from multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries or amputees could soon interact with their computers and surroundings using just their eyes, thanks to a new device that costs less than £40.
Composed from off-the-shelf materials, the new device can work out exactly where a person is looking by tracking their eye movements, allowing them to control a cursor on a screen just like a normal computer mouse. |  |
Antarctica Surrounded by Threats
Antarctica and its surrounding waters are under pressure from a variety of forces that are already transforming the area, scientists warn.
The most immediate threats are regional warming, ocean acidification and loss of sea ice, all linked to global levels of carbon dioxide. Sea ice cover, crucial to the survival of virtually every animal that lives on and near the continent, already has been reduced by warming, according to a new study published in the July 13 issue of the journal Science. Visits by tourists, researchers and other people also threaten to change Antarctica, as does the harvesting of animals like krill that are key to the Antarctic food chain. |  |
Talking Apes Project Faces Cash Crisis
A group of endangered apes uses special keyboards to talk with humans at a scientific facility in Iowa. Their unusual skill is raising broad questions about language and learning, but a funding crisis threatens to shut down the unique experiment.
One bonobo chimpanzee named Kanzi rose to stardom when he began spontaneously "talking" as a baby — he had watched a researcher try (unsuccessfully) to teach his mother the lexigram symbols representing certain words. The talking skills of Kanzi and his half-sister Panbanisha have since drawn the attention of Oprah Winfrey and Anderson Cooper and earned worldwide fame for the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines. |  |
Most complete skeleton of ancient relative of man found
The remains of a juvenile hominid skeleton, of the newly identified Australopithecus (southern ape) sediba species, are the "most complete early human ancestor skeleton ever discovered," according to Lee Berger, a paleontologist from the University of Witwatersrand.
"We have discovered parts of a jaw and critical aspects of the body including what appear to be a complete femur (thigh bone), ribs, vertebrae and other important limb elements, some never before seen in such completeness in the human fossil record," said Prof Berger. |  |
Oregon cave discovery suggests lost ancient American culture (+video)
Ancient stone projectile points discovered in a Central Oregon cave complex have cast new light on the identity of the first Americans.
While scientists agree they crossed the Bering Strait during an ice age, no one knows the identity of the first people to spread across the North American continent. For some time, these first Americans were believed to have belong to a single group, called the Clovis culture, named for the New Mexican site where their distinctive, 13,000-year-old projectile points were first found. |  |
The Clovis First Theory is put to rest at Paisley Caves
Who were the first humans to enter the North American continent? Were they humans who founded what is known as the Clovis culture over 13,000 years ago? Or did other, totally unrelated peoples precede the Clovis immigrants?
This issue has been intensely, if not bitterly debated for decades. The Clovis culture has been seen as the cradle of North American indigenous culture. Now new international research shows that people of another culture and technology were present concurrently or even previous to those of Clovis. |  |
Amazon's doomed species set to pay deforestation's 'extinction debt'
The destruction of great swaths of the Brazilian Amazon has turned scores of rare species into the walking dead, doomed to disappear even if deforestation were halted in the region overnight, according to a new study.
Forest clearing in Brazil has already claimed casualties, but the animals lost to date in the rainforest region are just one-fifth of those that will slowly die out as the full impact of the loss of habitat takes its toll. In parts of the eastern and southern Amazon, 30 years of concerted deforestation have shrunk viable living and breeding territories enough to condemn 38 species to regional extinction in coming years, including 10 mammal, 20 bird and eight amphibian species, scientists found. |  |
Very round ancient turtle warmed readily in sun
Why be really, really round? It turns out that the precisely circular carapace of a newly discovered species of fossil turtle may have made the ancient creature too wide to be swallowed by predators - and helped it warm up in the sun.
Edwin Cadena at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and colleagues, uncovered the 1.5 metre long fossil buried at the Cerrejón Coal Mine in north-western Colombia. |  |
"Easter Island Drug," Bee Nursing Hold Antiaging Secrets?
Two recent animal discoveries may someday help humans lead longer, better lives.
One study shows that aging honeybees can regain the brainpower of youth. In the other, a so-called Easter Island drug enhanced the memories of laboratory mice.
The bee study, published in May by the journal Experimental Gerontology, looked at the different capabilities of young and old members in a colony.
Researchers removed the young, "nurser" bees from the hive. Older bees—which exhibit "age-associated learning deficits" toward the end of their six-week life expectancy—took on the nursing responsibilities they had fulfilled earlier in life, for example secreting "royal jelly" for larvae.
One study shows that aging honeybees can regain the brainpower of youth. In the other, a so-called Easter Island drug enhanced the memories of laboratory mice.
The bee study, published in May by the journal Experimental Gerontology, looked at the different capabilities of young and old members in a colony.
Researchers removed the young, "nurser" bees from the hive. Older bees—which exhibit "age-associated learning deficits" toward the end of their six-week life expectancy—took on the nursing responsibilities they had fulfilled earlier in life, for example secreting "royal jelly" for larvae.
Sky Hive Gives Bees an Urban Dwelling
Urban beekeepers often keep their operations on the downlow for fear of violating local ordinances, but a new adjustable-height hive prototype being tested in Europe could mean sweet success all-around. Meet the "Sky Hive."
The Dutch city Maastricht, population around 120,000, is currently testing out a new system that places beehives on an adjustable stand that beekeepers crank up to the top of a pole nearly 20 feet tall. The bees get to do their thing while staying far above the potentially allergic and freaked-out public. |  |
Badger cull ruled legal in England
The Badger Trust lost its judicial review of the government's controversial plan to allow the killing of thousands of badgers on Thursday. The result means culls, aimed at reducing tuberculosis (TB) in cattle, could begin as early as September in Somerset and Gloucestershire.
Pat Hayden, vice-chair of the trust, expressed deep disappointment but said: "How we feel is much less important than the impact on the species we exist to protect. We owe it to our members to do our utmost to protect badgers." The trust is now considering an appeal. |  |
Bush tucker feeds an ancient mystery
As sabre tooth tigers and woolly mammoths were wandering around Europe, unique, giant prehistoric animals were living in Australia – three metre tall kangaroos and wombat-like creatures, the size of a four-wheel drive, were just some of the curious creatures Down Under. Yet mysteriously, sometime during the last 100,000 years, they disappeared forever.
The extinction of these giant animals, known as megafauna, has generated great debate. One group advocates “human blitzkrieg” – those asserting the first Australians hunted these beasts to extinction. Others, myself included, find there is too little evidence to confidently attribute responsibility to any particular factor. Nonetheless, climatic instability during the last ice age cannot be discounted. |  |
Earth's past warmth is no get-out clause
CLIMATE scientists have long held that the past 2000 years were almost uniformly cool. Now it seems they were wrong. The 1st century AD looks to have been as warm as today, and the world gradually cooled from then on, right up until the industrial era (see "Tree rings suggest Roman world was warmer than thought").
Climate change denialists, who have never accepted that we are in unusually warm times, will say "told you so". They may also claim that scientists are trying to have it both ways - whatever past temperatures were, they are still evidence of global warming today.
Climate change denialists, who have never accepted that we are in unusually warm times, will say "told you so". They may also claim that scientists are trying to have it both ways - whatever past temperatures were, they are still evidence of global warming today.