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Dolphins call each other by name

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:05 UTC
Dolphins
© Getty Images
Bottlenose dolphins call out the specific names of loved ones when they become separated, a study finds.

Other than humans, the dolphins are the only animals known to do this, according to the study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The big difference with bottlenose dolphins is that these communications consist of whistles, not words.

Earlier research found that bottlenose dolphins name themselves, with dolphins having a "signature whistle" that encodes other information. It would be somewhat like a human shouting, "Hey everybody! I'm an adult healthy male named George, and I mean you no harm!"

The new finding is that bottlenose dolphins also say the names of certain other dolphins.

"Animals produced copies when they were separated from a close associate and this supports our belief that dolphins copy another animal's signature whistle when they want to reunite with that specific individual," lead author Stephanie King of the University of St. Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit told Discovery News.
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Cassiopaea

Bright new supernova shines in Southern skies

Bob Kin
Universe Today
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:15 UTC
2013aa
© Joseph BrimacombeNew supernova 2013aa, discovered by Stu Parker on February 13, 2013, is southwest of the spiral galaxy NGC 5643 in the southern constellation Lupus. This photo was taken three days later.
I live in the frozen north by choice, but occasionally I yearn for warmer places like Tucson and Key West. These feelings usually start in late February, when after nearly four months of winter, the season feels endless. Today I wish I could head down south for another reason - to see a very bright supernova in a galaxy in Lupus.

SN 2013aa popped off in the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5643 in the constellation Lupus the Wolf 34 million years ago, but no one knew its light was wiggling its way across the cosmos to Earth until New Zealand amateur astronomer Stu Parker nailed it during one of his regular supernovae hunts. Parker recorded it on Feb. 13, 2013. Since it was so far from the galaxy, he thought at first it was a hot pixel (electronic artifact) or an asteroid. Another look at the galaxy 5 minutes later confirmed it was really there.

Good thing. It turned out upon confirmation to be the brightest supernova he and his band of supernova hunters had ever discovered.
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Radar

Hmm...NASA loses contact with space station


Associated Press / New Haven Register
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:05 UTC
Image
© NASANASA said something went wrong during a computer software update on the station.
NASA says the International Space Station has lost contact with NASA controllers in Houston. Officials say the six crew members and station are fine and they expect to fix the problem soon.

NASA spokesman Josh Byerly said something went wrong around 9:45 a.m. EST Tuesday during a computer software update on the station. The outpost abruptly lost all communication, voice and command from Houston.

About an hour later, while flying over Russia, station commander Kevin Ford was able to briefly radio Moscow that all was well and they were working on the problem.

Byerly said the problem should be fixed today. Until then, astronauts can talk with Moscow control for a few minutes every 90 minutes.
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Cloud Precipitation

Can cloud seeding preventing further flooding in Indonesia?

Dyna Rochmyaningsih
The Guardian
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:59 UTC
flood Jakarta Indonesia
© Enny Nuraheni/ReutersA boy plays in a flooded road in Jakarta. Indonesia has turned to cloud seeding to prevent further flooding.
Scientists claim rainfall has reduced since the project began, but experts call for more evidence

Indonesia is banking on an unusual strategy to prevent further flooding in its inundated capital Jakarta, and officials claim that they are already seeing positive results.

They are using 'cloud seeding' - a weather modification technology often resorted to during drought. The method involves injecting clouds with substances that encourage the formation of ice crystals heavy enough to fall, thereby speeding up the production of rain.

Rain is the last thing that Indonesia needs now, as it has been experiencing heavy rainfall since mid-January.

But Indonesian scientists believe that inducing rains to fall over the ocean before the rainclouds reach the city will help prevent further flooding in Jakarta.
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Comet 2

Shoemaker-Levy 9: Comet's impact left its mark on Jupiter

Elizabeth Howell
SPACE.com
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:00 UTC
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 experienced one of the most spectacular ends that humans ever witnessed. Several months after its discovery, pieces of the comet smashed into the planet Jupiter. The collision produced scars that were visible from Earth in small telescopes.

"This is the first collision of two solar system bodies ever to be observed, and the effects of the comet impacts on Jupiter's atmosphere have been simply spectacular and beyond expectations," NASA wrote on a website describing the comet.
Image
© JPL/NASA/STScIJupiter vacuumed up the pieces of the disrupted comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in 1994, but the impacts were a reminder of the danger faced by Earth.
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Arrow Down

Designing life: Should babies be genetically engineered?

Wynne Parry
LiveScience
Mon, 18 Feb 2013 11:22 UTC
Twins
© LiveScience
New York - The increasing power and accessibility of genetic technology may one day give parents the option of modifying their unborn children, in order to spare offspring from disease or, conceivably, make them tall, well muscled, intelligent or otherwise blessed with desirable traits.

Would this change mean empowering parents to give their children the best start possible? Or would it mean designer babies who could face unforeseen genetic problems? Experts debated on Wednesday evening (Feb. 13) whether prenatal engineering should be banned in the United States.

Humans have already genetically modified animals and crops, said Sheldon Krimsky, a philosopher at Tufts University, who argued in favor of a ban on the same for human babies. "But in the hundreds of thousands of trails that failed, we simply discarded the results of the unwanted crop or animal."
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People

Influential few predict behaviour of the many

Julie Rehmeyer
Nature
Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:25 UTC
Image
© Mauro MartinoThe complex behaviour of a network can be fully captured by tracking a few crucial nodes, here pictured in red.
To completely understand how a living organism works one would have to take it apart, the great physicist Niels Bohr once observed - but then the organism would certainly be dead1. In general, systems of high complexity, including living things but ranging from the Internet to social networks, are often impossible to track in all their details.

But what if you didn't have to? Network-theory researchers now have come up with some clever mathematics that reveals complex systems by tracking a selected few of their components.

Say, for example, that you wanted to find a biological marker that identifies people with a certain disease. You can track down all the genes that are expressed differently in people with the disease and assemble a network that shows their interactions, but how do you then pick out those that are specific to the illness?

The new work may help researchers to identify the key nodes in a network that determine the state of every other node, greatly simplifying the search.

To demonstrate their technique, Yang-Yu Liu of Northeastern University in Boston and his colleagues looked at the entire human metabolic network and found that concentrations of about 10% of the body's 2,763 metabolites could be used to determine the levels of all the rest.
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Info

New study shows how seals sleep with only half their brain at a time


University of Toronto
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:36 UTC
Sleeping Seals
© Shutterstock/ rebvt
Toronto, Ontario - A new study led by an international team of biologists has identified some of the brain chemicals that allow seals to sleep with half of their brain at a time.

The study was published this month in the Journal of Neuroscience and was headed by scientists at UCLA and the University of Toronto. It identified the chemical cues that allow the seal brain to remain half awake and asleep.

Findings from this study may explain the biological mechanisms that enable the brain to remain alert during waking hours and go off-line during sleep.

"Seals do something biologically amazing - they sleep with half their brain at a time. The left side of their brain can sleep while the right side stays awake. Seals sleep this way while they're in water, but they sleep like humans while on land.

Our research may explain how this unique biological phenomenon happens" said Professor John Peever of the University of Toronto.
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Galaxy

Subatomic calculations indicate finite lifespan for universe

Irene Klotz
Yahoo News / Reuters
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:16 UTC
Scientists are still sorting out the details of last year's discovery of the Higgs boson particle, but add up the numbers and it's not looking good for the future of the universe, scientists said Monday. "If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, told reporters.

Lykeen spoke before presenting his research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," said Lykken, who is also on the science team at Europe's Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.

Physicists last year announced they had discovered what appears to be a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, which is believed to give matter its mass. Work to study the Higgs' related particles, necessary for confirmation, is ongoing.

If confirmed, the discovery would help resolve a key puzzle about how the universe came into existence some 13.7 billion years ago - and perhaps how it will end. "This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there'll be a catastrophe," Lykken said.
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Fireball 5

The year of the comets: Three reasons why 2013 could be the best ever

Bob King
Universe Today
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:47 UTC
L4 Panstarrs
© Joseph BrimacombeComet L4 Panstarrs photographed from Australia at dawn on Feb. 17, 2013 with a telephoto lens. A bright head and short tail are visible.
2013 could turn out to be a comet bonanza. No fewer than three of these long-tailed beauties are expected to brighten to naked eye visibility. Already Comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS has cracked that barrier. Sky watchers in Australia have watched it grow from a telescopic smudge to a beautiful binocular sight low above the horizon at both dusk and dawn. A few have even spotted it without optical aid in the past week. Excited reports of a bright, fan-shaped dust tail two full moon diameters long whet our appetite for what's to come.

Recent brightness estimates indicate that the comet could be experiencing a surge or "second wind" after plateauing in brightness the past few weeks. If the current trend continues, PanSTARRS might reach 1st or 2nd magnitude or a little brighter than the stars of the Big Dipper when it first becomes visible to northern hemisphere sky watchers around March 7. That's little more than two weeks away!
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