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Magic Wand

Revealed, the secret life of gay birds who are 'attached and faithful' for life


The Daily Mail
Tue, 16 Aug 2011 07:39 UTC
Birds can have gay relationships that last for life, say researchers.

They found that if isolated from the opposite sex, same sex birds will pair off with each other.

The scientists studied young zebra finches, which are known for forming lifelong relationships.

Image
© Press Association
Comfortable together: A study showed zebra finches sang to and preened each other just like heterosexual pairs.
When raised in same-sex groups, more than half the birds paired up together. When females were then brought into the male group, five out of eight pairs of males ignored them and stuck with their male partner.
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Magic Wand

Sweden: Mysterious soil fungi identified


Bio Scholar
Fri, 12 Aug 2011 05:30 UTC
Image
© Anna Rosling & Karelyn Cruz Martine
Fungus hyphae and swellings (chlamydospores). The fungus was fixated and then photographed using a scanning electron microscope.
Researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden, have cultivated and classified fungi that had previously been known only through DNA sequences. The fungi, which have lived hidden underground for millions of years, represent a class of fungi that is new to scientists, Archaeorhizomycetes. The findings are being published in the scientific journal Science on August 12.

The fungi now classified are considerably more prevalent in the ground than was previously thought, and they probably occur all over the world, scientists believe. DNA has been identified from about a hundred different species of Archaeorhizomycetes. The findings are based on more than 50 studies from different ecosystems such as pine forests in Sweden, grasslands in California, and tropical rainforests in Costa Rica and Australia.
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Nuke

Iran Nuclear Plant 'to Link to Grid this Month'


physorg.com
Sun, 14 Aug 2011 16:16 UTC
Bushehr nuclear plant Iran

A security guard outside the reactor building at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran.
Iran's first nuclear power plant, built by Russia, will be connected to the national grid in late August, atomic chief Fereydoon Abbasi Davani told the Arabic-language network Al-Alam on Sunday.

"The test to reach 40 percent of the plant's power capacity has been done successfully... God willing, we will be able to commission the plant by the end of Ramadan with an initial production" of the same amount, Abbasi Davani said.

He estimated that the plant would reach its "full capacity of 1,000 megawatts" in late November or early December.
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Magic Wand

Scientists in China detect neutrino hoping to solve antimatter mystery


Xinhua
Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:40 UTC
Scientists in a lab with Daya Bay Nuclear Power Station in southern Guangdong Province have found neutrino through two detecting instruments, which is likely to provide clues to solving the mystery of why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.

The Institute of High Energy Physics with the Chinese Academy of Sciences on Monday announced the breakthrough that was achieved by more than 250 researchers from six countries and regions.

The two neutrino detectors are installed underground 360 meters away from the nuclear plant at a depth of 100 meters.

Scientists believe that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang, but the disappearance of antimatter remains a mystery.
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Info

Rocks Suggest Antarctica, North America Were Once Attached

Charles Q. Choi
OurAmazingPlanet
Mon, 15 Aug 2011 08:54 UTC
SuperContinent
© OurAmazingPlanet
The Franklin Mountains in West Texas were once part of Coats Land in Antarctica,
Remote Antarctic rocks hold strong new evidence that parts of Antarctica and North America were connected more than a billion years ago, researchers say.

The suspected link between the two widely separated continents helps paint a picture of what the planet was like when complex multicellular life was emerging.

An international team of scientists found that the combination of lead isotopes in rocks peeking out of the Antarctic ice is the same as in rocks from a rift that cuts across the United States.

Staci Loewy, a geochemist at California State University, Bakersfield, who has studied the rift, said: "I can go to the Franklin Mountains in West Texas and stand next to what was once part of Coats Land in Antarctica. That's so amazing."
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Chalkboard

In Future Math Whizzes, Signs of 'Number Sense'

Sindyan N. Bhanoo
The New York Time
Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:48 UTC
number sense mathematics
© Will Kirk/JHU
Children as young as 3 have a “number sense” that may be correlated with mathematical aptitude, according to a new study. Melissa Libertus, a post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University.
Melissa Libertus, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, and colleagues looked at something called "number sense," an intuition - not involving counting - about the concepts of more and less. It exists in all people, Dr. Libertus said, including infants and indigenous peoples who have had no formal education.

The researchers measured this intuition in preschoolers by displaying flashing groups of blue and yellow dots on a computer screen. The children had to estimate which group of dots was larger in number. Since the display was fleeting, they had to use their number sense rather than count the dots.

Children with a better number sense were also better at simple math problems the researchers posed. The children were asked to count the number of images on a page out loud, read Arabic numbers and make other simple calculations.

Previous studies have shown that there is a connection between number sense and mathematical ability in adolescents. But this is the first study to explore the connection in children with little formal education.
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Info

Ancient Texas Reef Holds Clues to Sea Changes


OurAmazing{Planet
Sun, 14 Aug 2011 14:15 UTC
Guadalupe Mountains
© NPS
Guadalupe Mountains.

Clues about changes in sea level rise have been found in an unlikely place: the mountains of Texas.

Rocks from the fossil Permian Reef in the Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas reveal secrets about changes in sea level and marine life 265 million years ago, according to a new study.

Improved understanding of this ancient reef could shed light on the effects of environmental change on living systems, a concern for coral reefs in today's warming world.

Much like Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which stretches across more than 1,600 miles (2,754 kilometers) and is so large it can be seen from space, the Permian Reef was a massive reef that grew in shallow tropical waters 265 million years ago.

"The ancient reef grew in water just below sea level and it overlooked the Permian Basin, which was more than 1,000 feet [305 meters] deep," said study author Thomas Olszewski of Texas A&M in College Station. "The rocks at the foot of the mountains preserve sediments that record natural environmental changes caused by changing sea level and climate."
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Satellite

NASA Rover Nears Rim of Giant Crater on Mars

Tariq Malik
Space.com
Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:00 UTC
Mars Endeavour crater
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its panoramic camera (Pancam) to capture this view of a portion of Endeavour crater's rim after a drive during the rover's 2,676th Martian day, or sol, of working on Mars (Aug. 4, 2011). The drive covered 396 feet (120.7 meters) and put the rover with about that much distance to go before reaching the chosen arrival site at the rim, called "Spirit Point."
NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is just days away from arriving at the edge of a huge crater after a years-long trek on the Red Planet.

Opportunity has been driving for nearly three years toward the crater Endeavour, an immense scar in the Martian surface about 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide. Now the rover is less than 164 feet (50 meters) from the rim and is due to pull up to it later this week, mission scientists said Monday (Aug. 8).
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Telescope

Strange Planet is Blacker than Coal


Agence France-Presse
Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:49 UTC
TrES-2b
© AFP/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
An artist's rendition of TrES-2b, the darkest known exoplanet
A planet orbiting a distant star is darker than coal, reflecting less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, according to a paper published on Thursday.

The strange world, TrES-2b, is a gas giant the size of Jupiter, rather than a solid, rocky body like Earth or Mars, astronomers said.

It closely orbits the star GSC 03549-02811, located about 750 light years away in the direction of the constellation of Draco the Dragon.
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Stop

'Cycle of violence' in nature: Abused baby boobies grow up to abuse other chicks

Matt Walker
BBC Nature
Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:46 UTC
Image
© Jacquelyn Grace
An adult Nazca booby attacks an unrelated chick, which adopts a submissive bill-hiding posture
Chicks abused by older birds are more likely to grow up to become abusers themselves, scientists have found.

Researchers studying a colony of Nazca boobies, a colonial seabird, found the birds perpetuate a "cycle of violence".

Juvenile birds that are maltreated by older, non-relatives grow up to become more violent towards other chicks.

It is the first evidence from a wild animal that, as in humans, "child abuse" can be socially transmitted down the generations.

Details of the discovery are published in the journal The Auk by Martina Müller, David Anderson and colleagues from Wake Forest University, North Carolina, US.
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