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Study Says Insecticide Used with GM Corn Highly Toxic to Bees

Ken Roseboro
The Organic & Non GMO Report
Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:35 UTC
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© The Organic & Non GMO Report
Sierra Club, US bee and honey groups urge EPA to ban clothianidin

An insecticide used as a seed treatment on genetically modified corn and other crops has been found to be highly toxic to honey bees, according to a study published recently in the journal PLoS ONE.

The study may be a key to solving the mystery of Colony Collapse Disorder that has decimated bee populations over the last five years, causing losses of 30% and more of honey bee colonies every year since 2006, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Comment: For a more in depth look at What is killing the bees? read the following articles carried on SOTT.NET:

Wik-Bee Leaks: EPA Document Shows It Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees

Beekeepers Suggest Pesticide is Destroying Insect Colonies

Bayer in the Dock Over Pesticide Linked to Colony Collapse Disorder

Germany Suspends Pesticide Approvals After Mass Death Of Bees

Have Bees Become Canaries In the Coal Mine? Why Massive Bee Dieoffs May Be a Warning About Our Own Health
The decline of bees has been in the headlines for several years, and theories to explain their deaths abound. But perhaps there is not just one single cause. University of California San Diego professor of biology James Nieh studies foraging, communication and health of bees. "I would say it's a combination of four factors; pesticides, disease, parasites, and human mismanagement," says Nieh. Bees might be weakened by having a very low level of exposure to insecticides or fungicides, making them more susceptible if they are attacked by viruses or parasites. "It's kind of like taking a patient who is not doing so well - very weak, poor diet, exposing them to pathogens, and then throwing more things at them. It's not surprising that honeybees are not very healthy."

One class of pesticides, neonicotinoids in particular has received a lot of attention for harming bees. In late 2010, the EPA came under fire from beekeepers and pesticide watchdog organizations. This happened when Colorado beekeeper Tom Theobald spoke out about how the EPA allowed clothianidin to be used without any proof it was safe and despite the fact that the EPA's own scientists believed it "has the potential for toxic risk to honey bees, as well as other pollinators."


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Beaker

Study Finds One Percent of Human Genes Switched Off

Kate Kelland
Reuters
Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
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© Leon Neal/AFP/Getty ImagesA researcher performs a DNA test
Scientists studying the human genome have found that each of us is carrying around 20 genes that have been completely inactivated, suggesting that not all switched-off genes are harmful to health.

A team at Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is developing a new catalogue of so-called "loss-of-function" (LoF) gene variants to help identify new disease-causing mutations, and say their work will help scientists better understand the normal function of human genes.

Working as part of larger study called the 1000 Genomes Project, the team developed a series of filters to identify common errors in the human genome, which maps the entire genetic code.

"The key questions we focused on for this study were how many of these LoF variants were real and how large a role might they play in human disease," said Daniel MacArthur of the Sanger Institute, who worked on the team.

The researchers looked at nearly 3,000 possible LoF variants in the genomes of 185 people from Europe, East Asia and West Africa. Their findings were published in the journal Science on Thursday.
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Info

Unusual Minor Planet 2011 YU75

Nick Howes, Giovanni Sostero and Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Observatory
Sun, 19 Feb 2012 11:43 UTC
This unusual minor planet was discovered by the Spacewatch sky survey on 2011, Dec. 26. It moves along a very eccentric orbit (perihelion close to Mars, aphelion nearly 3 AU away from Saturn). Currently it's about 1 AU from Earth and 2 AU from the Sun, approaching its perihelion, scheduled for the end of April 2012 (q= 1.7 AU). Since it moves along a nice comet-like track (a= 7.5 AU, e= 0.77, Incl.= 16.7 deg), we decided to insert it in our wish-list of interesting targets, in order to check if it's going to develope any perceptible sign of cometary activity (coma and/or tail) while approaching the Sun.

On 2012, Feb 17.4 we aimed the "Faulkes Telescope South" 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD at Siding Spring (Australia) to this target, and collected on it twelve R-filtered exposures, 30-seconds each. Stacking these images through "Astrometrica" along the expected proper motion of 2011 YU75, we get a nice starlike object (magnitude ~19) at its expected position. Its FWHM was the same of the nearby field stars (about 1.2-arcsec) and no traces of coma/tail was visible to us, in spite of several image processing routines we applied on it. So we can conclude that, at least through the analysis of the images we collected, at this time 2011 YU75 shows no detectable outgassing activity. Below you can see our follow-up image. Click on it so see a larger version.

2011 YU75
© Remanzacco Observatory
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Telescope

Rare Black Hole Survives Galaxy's Destruction

Clara Moskowitz
LiveScience
Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:58 UTC
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© NASA, ESA, and S. FarrellThis spectacular edge-on galaxy, called ESO 243-49, is home to an intermediate-mass black hole that may have been stripped off of a cannibalized dwarf galaxy.
Like a fossil hinting at a long-gone animal, a black hole is offering clues about a now-destroyed galaxy that may once have existed around it.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently spied a cluster of young blue stars surrounding a rare mid-weight black hole that suggests the black hole was once at the center of a dwarf galaxy. Astronomers think this galaxy was torn apart by the gravity of a larger host galaxy that it orbited.

The violent encounter would have stripped away most of the dwarf galaxy's stars, but it also could have compressed the gas around its central black hole, triggering a new wave of star formation. It is these new stars that Hubble recently saw signs of.

The observations suggest that the young stars must be less than 200 million years old, meaning the collision between the parent galaxy and its dwarf likely occurred around that time.
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Telescope

From Earth's Water to Cosmic Dawn: New Tools Unveiling Astronomical Mysteries


PhysOrg
Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
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© Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSFArtist's Conception of Dusty Disk Around Young Star TW Hydrae.
Two new and powerful research tools are helping astronomers gain key insights needed to transform our understanding of important processes across the breadth of astrophysics. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and the newly-expanded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) offer scientists vastly improved and unprecedented capabilities for frontier research.

The cutting-edge research enabled by these powerful telescope systems extends from unlocking the mysteries of star- and planet-formation processes in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, to probing the emergence of the first stars and galaxies at the Universe's "cosmic dawn," and along the way helping scientists figure out where Earth's water came from.

A trio of scientists outlined recent accomplishments of ALMA and the Jansky VLA, both of which are in the "early science" phase of their development, as construction progresses toward their completion. The astronomers spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia.

One exciting area where the two facilities are expected to unlock longstanding mysteries is the study of how new stars and planets form, in our own Milky Way Galaxy and in its nearby neighbors.
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Telescope

Astronomy Team Discovers Nearby Dwarf Galaxy


PhysOrg
Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
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© UCLANGC 4449 and companion
A team led by UCLA research astronomer Michael Rich has used a unique telescope to discover a previously unknown companion to the nearby galaxy NGC 4449, which is some 12.5 million light years from Earth. The newly discovered dwarf galaxy had escaped even the prying eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The research is published Feb. 9 in the journal Nature.

The larger, host galaxy, NGC 4449, may be "something of a living fossil," representing what most galaxies probably looked like shortly after the Big Bang, Rich said. The galaxy is forming stars "so furiously" that it has giant clusters of young stars and even appears bluish - a sign of a young galaxy - to the eye in large amateur telescopes, he said.

NGC 4449 has a nucleus that may someday host a black hole and an irregular structure, lacking the spiral arms characteristic of many galaxies, he said. It is surrounded by a huge complex of hydrogen gas that spans approximately 300,000 light years, which may be fueling its burst of star formation.
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R2-D2

DARPA Wants to Give Soldiers Robot Surrogates, Avatar Style

Evan Ackerman
IEEE Via Wired.com
Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:17 UTC
avatar
© unknown
In the movie Avatar, humans hooked themselves up to brain-machine-interface pods with which they could control giant genetically engineered human-alien hybrids. It's just a movie, but DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, doesn't care: It wants this kind of system to be real, just replace "giant genetically engineered human-alien hybrids" with "robots."

In its 2012 budget, DARPA has decided to pour US $7 million into the "Avatar Project," whose goal is the following: "develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier's surrogate." Whoa.

That word "surrogate" implies something more than just telepresence, and indeed DARPA does specify that it is looking for "key advancements in telepresence and remote operation of a ground system." But we're perfectly free to speculate on what those "key advancements" are, which again comes back to "surrogate." To me, the implication is that there's going to be some technology that effectively puts the user "inside" the remote system, whether it's through immersive VR or exoskeleton or some sort of direct brain control. Either of these things is a realistic possibility, especially if DARPA's tossing a couple million at the problem.
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Out of Africa? Data Fail to Support Language Origin in Africa


ScienceDaily
Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
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© vlorzor/FotoliaWords. In the beginning was the word - yes, but where exactly?
In the beginning was the word -- yes, but where exactly? Last year, Quentin Atkinson, a cultural anthropologist at Auckland University in New Zealand, proposed that the cradle of language could be localized in the southwest of Africa. The report, which appeared in Science, was seized upon by the media and caused something of a sensation. Now however, LMU linguist Michael Cysouw has published a commentary in Science which argues that this neat "Out-of-Africa" hypothesis for the origin of language is not adequately supported by the data presented. The search for the site of origin of language remains very much alive.

Atkinson based his claim on a comparative analysis of the numbers of phonemes found in about 500 present-day languages. Phonemes are the most basic sound units -- consonants, vowels and tones -- that form the basis of semantic differentiation in all languages. The number of phonemes used in natural languages varies widely. Atkinson, who is a biologist and psychologist by training, found that the highest levels of phoneme diversity occurred in languages spoken in southwestern Africa. Furthermore, according to his statistical analysis, the size of the phoneme inventory in a language tends to decrease with distance from this hotspot.

To interpret this finding Atkinson invoked a parallel from population genetics. Biologists have observed an analogous effect, insofar as human genetic diversity is found to decrease with distance from Africa, where our species originated. This is attributed to the so-called founder effect. As people migrated from the continent and small groups continued to disperse, each inevitably came to represent an ever-shrinking fraction of the total genetic diversity present in the African population as a whole.
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Invisibility Cloak Could Protect Buildings from Earthquakes

Nick Collins
The Telegraph, UK
Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:30 UTC
A Harry Potter-style "invisibility cloak" could be used to protect buildings from earthquakes, according to a new study.

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© Air Photo Service/AP PhotoThe Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was badly damaged in last year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan Photo.
The prospect of cloaking devices has become more realistic in recent years as scientists have developed means of making objects invisible to certain wavelengths in limited circumstances.

Now researchers from Manchester University say a similar approach could be used to defend structures against earthquakes and other natural disasters.

In the same way that cloaking devices make objects appear invisible by deflecting light around them, the team claimed that pressurised rubber could be used to "hide" structures from shock waves produced by earthquakes, sending them around the structure rather than through it.
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Einstein

Answer to Shocking 'Faster-Than-Light' Particles Expected Soon

Clara Moskowitz
Live Science
Sat, 18 Feb 2012 11:52 UTC
Speed Tunnel
© Willem Dijkstra / ShutterstockEinstein's theory of special relativity sets of the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second (300 million meters per second), as a cosmic speed limit. Some researchers think they may have broken this limit, and the implications are mind bending.

Vancouver, British Columbia - Physicists stunned the world last year by announcing they'd seen signs that particles called neutrinos were traveling faster than light - a feat thought to be proven impossible by Einstein. Ever since, other researchers have been racing to try the experiment on their own to see if the findings hold up.

Some results of these tests should be announced this spring, scientists said Friday (Feb. 17) here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"It's very hard to find an error by reading a paper," said particle physicist Rob Roser of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., who was not involved in the original experiment. "What you need is for someone else to make the measurement. We'll see what happens."

Shocking finding

The bizarre finding was first reported in September 2011, when physicists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, announced that an experiment called OPERA had measured the tiny subatomic particles apparently breaking what was thought to be the ultimate cosmic speed limit.

OPERA sends neutrinos 454 miles (730 kilometers) underground to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, and measures how fast they take to make the trip. While researchers expected the almost-massless particles to travel at near light speed, they actually appeared to arrive at their destination about 60 billionths of a second sooner than light would have.

If this really occurred, it would contradict Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, and throw much of physics into upheaval.
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