Science & TechnologyS


Comet

Did a comet kill off the woolly mammoth? Huge impact 13,000 years ago triggered an extreme cold snap, claims study

Ellie Zolfagharifard
Daily Mail, UK
Mon, 03 Feb 2014 12:22 UTC
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North America's woolly mammoth, giant ground sloths and sabre-tooth tigers are thought to have been wiped out by a devastating comet 12,900 years ago
  • Researchers looked for presence of nanodiamonds in Oklahoma
  • Nanodiamond is one type of material that could result from a collision
  • 49 sediment samples representing different time periods were studied
  • Team found nanodiamonds below and just above Younger Dryas deposits
  • Younger Dryas, or the 'Big Freeze', saw a return to glacial conditions in higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere 12,900 - 11,500 years ago
North America's woolly mammoth, giant ground sloths and sabre-tooth tigers were wiped out by a devastating comet 12,900 years ago.

This is according to a controversial study by Californian Professor James Kennet which suggests that an ancient cosmic impact triggered a vicious cold snap.

Now a research team from University of California, Santa Barbara, claims to have further evidence to back up Professor Kennett's 2007 'Younger Dryas impact theory'.
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Book

Scientists reading fewer papers for first time in 35 years

Richard Van Noorden
Nature News
Mon, 03 Feb 2014 09:58 UTC
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© ShutterstockA survey of the reading habits of US university researchers saw a drop in the traditional, paper-based consumption of information.
A 35-year trend of researchers reading ever more scholarly papers seems to have halted. In 2012, US scientists and social scientists estimated that they read, on average, 22 scholarly articles per month (or 264 per year), fewer than the 27 that they reported in an identical survey last conducted in 2005. It is the first time since the reading-habit questionnaire began in 1977 that manuscript consumption has dropped.

"People have probably hit the limit of the time they have available to read articles," says information scientist Carol Tenopir, who led the study.

Tenopir, who heads the Center for Information and Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, speculates that a wealth of other information sources is cutting away from the time scholars have to read articles in detail. The survey defines 'reading' as going beyond titles or abstracts to the main body of an article, and so it does not reveal whether researchers are quickly skimming over more articles than they did before.

Tenopir's colleague Donald King began mailing out a reading-habits questionnaire to scholars in 1977. It asked them to recall details of their last scholarly reading, and to estimate the number of scholarly articles they had read in the past month. Researchers said that they got through 12 - 13 articles per month, and spent an average of 48 minutes on each article. Through the 1980s and 90s, they progressively reported reading more and more articles, but spending less and less time on each.
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Bulb

Brain responds to tiniest speech details

Jessica Morrison
Nature News
Thu, 30 Jan 2014 09:49 UTC
The sounds that make up speech, built from slight variations in vowels and consonants, trigger specific responses in the part of the brain responsible for speech processing, researchers report today in Science1.

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Phonemes with similar features seemed to elicit characteristic electric responses in neurons located within each patient's superior temporal gyrus.
Phonemes - such as the 'buh' sound in 'bad' or the 'duh' in 'dad' - are thought to be the smallest linguistic elements that change a word's meaning. But the study suggests that the brain's superior temporal gyrus can recognize even smaller bits of speech, called features, that may be common across languages.

"We've known for a pretty long time now what area of the brain is really important for processing speech sounds," says lead author Edward Chang, a neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco. "What we haven't known is the details about how individual sounds are processed."

Chang's team made the discovery by working with six patients who were preparing to undergo brain surgery to treat epilepsy. An array of electrodes was implanted in the brain of each person as part of pre-surgical testing. Each volunteer then listened to speech samples comprising 500 sentences spoken by 400 people that covered the entire inventory of phonetic American English sounds.
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Info

Black Death left a mark on human genome

Elizabeth Pennisi
ScienceNow
Mon, 03 Feb 2014 16:15 UTC
Black Death
© (Top) Corbis; (Bottom) M. Netea et al./Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesCelebrating differences. The migration of gypsies from India 1000 years ago (see map) set the stage for a telling study about how diseases can influence the genome.
The Black Death didn't just wipe out millions of Europeans during the 14th century. It left a mark on the human genome, favoring those who carried certain immune system genes, according to a new study. Those changes may help explain why Europeans respond differently from other people to some diseases and have different susceptibilities to autoimmune disorders.

Geneticists know that human populations evolve in the face of disease. Certain versions of our genes help us fight infections better than others, and people who carry those genes tend to have more children than those who don't. So the beneficial genetic versions persist, while other versions tend to disappear as those carrying them die. This weeding-out of all but the best genes is called positive selection. But researchers have trouble pinpointing positively selected genes in humans, as many genes vary from one individual to the next.

Enter Mihai Netea, an immunologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands. He realized that in his home country, Romania, the existence of two very distinct ethnic groups provided an opportunity to see the hand of natural selection in the human genome. A thousand years ago, the Rroma people - commonly known as gypsies - migrated into Europe from north India. But they intermarried little with European Romanians and thus have very distinct genetic backgrounds. Yet, by living in the same place, both of these groups experienced the same conditions, including the Black Plague, which did not reach northern India. So the researchers sought genes favored by natural selection by seeking similarities in the Rroma and European Romanians that are not found in North Indians.
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Che Guevara

Dr. Tyrone Hayes: The scientist who took on a leading herbicide manufacturer

Rachel Aviv
The New Yorker
Mon, 03 Feb 2014 17:29 UTC
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© Dan WintersHayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. The company’s notes reveal that it struggled to make sense of him, and plotted ways to discredit him.
In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn't trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. "The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia," he liked to say, "is to keep careful track of your persecutors."

Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a professor in Hayes's department, said that Hayes "may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field." But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.

Comment: In February of 2012 an excellent article about Dr. Tyron Hayes and his ongoing battle with Syngenta over the growing concerns about the controversial herbicide atrazine, was published in Mother Jones Magazine and carried on SOTT.net: The Frog of War.

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Fireball

First meeting of international group tasked with reacting to asteroids

Eric Mack
CNet
Fri, 31 Jan 2014 15:39 UTC
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© ESAA new international group meets for the first time in February to coordinate efforts to predict and prevent major asteroid impacts.
Next week in Germany, representatives of all mankind's space-faring nations will get together in a room to begin coordinating efforts to prevent the end of the world...or at least to figure out how to identify and prevent really big space rocks from smacking us around like that meteor that hit Russia last year.

We've all watched those scenes in science fiction movies where the leaders of the planet (or planets) all sit around a large table and come to a consensus about the best way to confront the latest existential threat. I'm always left wondering where the heck they get such a huge table, and how they managed to come up with a unanimous plan of action in less than 5 minutes. It's a little different from the endless gabfest of political posturing translating to minimal real-world action that is a meeting of today's United Nations.

Or is it? The first ever meeting of the Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG, pronounced "same page" -- see what they did there?) set to be hosted by the European Space Agency on February 6 and 7 sounds a little more like the Hollywood version of consensus-making, just with less melodrama and fewer ridiculously beautiful people everywhere.
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Meteor

'U.S. and Russia plan to jointly fight asteroid threat', but will they walk the talk?


Ria Novosti
Mon, 27 Jan 2014 21:25 UTC
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© Cfa.harvard.eduRussia, US Plan to Jointly Fight Space Threats.
Russian and US experts are planning to join efforts in protecting our planet against thousands of potentially hazardous near-Earth space bodies, Russia's emergencies minister said.

"The collision with the Chelyabinsk meteorite last year showed that space threats could be real and as destructive as huge fires or natural disasters on Earth," Vladimir Puchkov said in an interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta to be published on Tuesday.

The minister said a joint working group would be set up in the near future to develop solutions to counter space threats.

A meteorite entered the Earth's atmosphere undetected by existing space-monitoring systems and slammed into Russia's Ural Mountain region last February, accompanied by a massive sonic boom that blew out windows and damaged thousands of buildings around the city of Chelyabinsk, injuring over 1,500.

NASA estimated the meteorite was roughly 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter when it entered the atmosphere, traveling many times faster than the speed of sound, and exploded into a fireball brighter than the sun.

Comment: Well, well. In three years it's gone from 'once a millenium', to 'once a century' to 'once a decade'... how long before we hear it's always been 'once a year'?!

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Fireball

New Comet: C/2014 B1 (Schwartz)

Seiichi Yoshida
Aerith Net
Sun, 02 Feb 2014 11:48 UTC
Discovery Date: January 28, 2014

Magnitude: 19.9 mag

Discoverer: Michael Schwartz (Tenagra Observatory near Nogales, AZ, U.S.A.)

C/2014 B1
© Aerith Net
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2014-C03.
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Fireball 3

New Comet: 2014 AA52

Seiichi Yoshida
Aerith Net
Sun, 02 Feb 2014 11:45 UTC
Discovery Date: January 11, 2014

Magnitude: 19.8 mag

Discoverer: Catalina Sky Survey

2014 AA52
© Aerith Net
The orbital elements are published at the MPC Ephemerides and Orbital Elements.
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Fireball 5

New Comet: C/2014 A5 (PanSTARRS)

Seiichi Yoshida
Aerith Net
Sun, 02 Feb 2014 11:41 UTC
Discovery Date: January 4, 2014

Magnitude: 21.4 mag

Discoverer: Pan-STARRS 1 telescope (Haleakala)
C/2014 A5
© Aerith Net
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2014-B54.
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