Science & TechnologyS


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Scientist Finding Many Negative Impacts of Roundup Ready GM Crops

Ken Roseboro
The Organic & Non-GMO Report
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:41 UTC
USDA doesn't want to publicize studies showing negative impacts

Robert Kremer is a microbiologist with the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and an adjunct professor in the Division of Plant Sciences at the University of Missouri. He is co-author of one of five papers published in the October 2009 issue of The European Journal of Agronomy that found negative impacts of Roundup herbicide, which is used extensively with Roundup Ready genetically modified crops. Kremer has been studying the impacts of glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, since 1997.

The Organic & Non-GMO Report interviewed Mr. Kremer about his research and the reluctance of the USDA to publicize the findings of the five papers.
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Australia: Aboriginal folklore leads to meteorite crater

Aaron Cook
Cosmos
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:24 UTC
Australian meteorite impact crater
© Google MapsResearchers are using Aboriginal dreaming stories and Google Maps to find new meteorite impact craters.
An Australian Aboriginal 'Dreaming' story has helped experts uncover a meteorite impact crater in the outback of the Northern Territory.

Duane Hamacher, an astrophysicist studying Aboriginal astronomy at Sydney's Macquarie University, used Google Maps to search for the signs of impact craters in areas related to Aboriginal stories of stars or stones falling from the sky.

One story, from the folklore of the Arrernte people, is about a star falling to Earth at a site called Puka. This led to a search on Google Maps of Palm Valley, about 130 km southwest of Alice Springs. Here Hamacher discovered what looked like a crater, which he confirmed with surveys in the field in September 2009.

Cosmic impact

The crater is 280 m in diameter and about 30 m deep. Magnetic and gravitational data collected from the site show the crater is bowl-shaped below the surface and was likely caused by a meteorite a few metres in diameter.

"There is no other way to explain this than as a cosmic impact," said Hamacher. "It couldn't have been erosion and there is no volcanic activity in the area."
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Brain Activity Levels Affect Self-Perception: 'Rose-Colored Glasses' Correlate With Less Frontal Lobe Use


ScienceDaily
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00 UTC
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© iStockphoto/Trista WeibellThe less you use your brain's frontal lobes, the more you see yourself through rose-colored glasses.
The less you use your brain's frontal lobes, the more you see yourself through rose-colored glasses, a University of Texas at Austin researcher says.

Those findings are being published in the February edition of the journal NeuroImage.

"In healthy people, the more you activate a portion of your frontal lobes, the more accurate your view of yourself is," says Jennifer Beer, an assistant professor of psychology, who conducted the research with graduate student Brent L. Hughes. "And the more you view yourself as desirable or better than your peers, the less you use those lobes."

The natural human tendency to see oneself in a positive light can be helpful and motivating in some situations but detrimental in others, Beer says.
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Why Won't the Supernova Explode?

Patrick Barry
SPX / Space Daily
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:56 UTC
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© Fiona Harrison/CaltechA supercomputer model of a rapidly-spinning, core-collapse supernova. NuSTAR observations of actual supernova remnants will provide vital data for such models and help explain how massive supernovas manage to explode.
A massive old star is about to die a spectacular death. As its nuclear fuel runs out, it begins to collapse under its own tremendous weight. The crushing pressure inside the star skyrockets, triggering new nuclear reactions, setting the stage for a terrifying blast. And then... nothing happens.

At least that's what supercomputers have been telling astrophysicists for decades. Many of the best computer models of supernova explosions fail to produce an explosion. Instead, according to the simulations, gravity wins the day and the star simply collapses. Clearly, physicists are missing something.

"We don't really understand how supernovas of massive stars work yet," says Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology. The death of relatively small stars is better understood, but for larger stars - those with more than about 9 times the mass of our sun - the physics just doesn't add up.
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Bering Strait influenced ice age climate patterns worldwide

David Hosansky
National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:43 UTC
Boulder -- In a vivid example of how a small geographic feature can have far-reaching impacts on climate, new research shows that water levels in the Bering Strait helped drive global climate patterns during ice age episodes dating back more than 100,000 years.

The international study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), found that the repeated opening and closing of the narrow strait due to fluctuating sea levels affected currents that transported heat and salinity in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As a result, summer temperatures in parts of North America and Greenland oscillated between warmer and colder phases, causing ice sheets to alternate between expansion and retreat and affecting sea levels worldwide.

While the findings do not directly bear on current global warming, they highlight the complexity of Earth's climate system and the fact that seemingly insignificant changes can lead to dramatic tipping points for climate patterns, especially in and around the Arctic.
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Fossil footprints give land vertebrates a much longer history

Per Ahlberg
Uppsala University
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:38 UTC
The discovery of fossil footprints from early backboned land animals in Poland leads to the sensational conclusion that our ancestors left the water at least 18 million years earlier than previously thought. The results of the Polish-Swedish collaboration are published online this week in Nature.

- These results force us to reconsider our whole picture of the transition from fish to land animals, says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, one of the two leaders of the study.
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Pharoah

Egypt tombs suggest pyramids not built by slaves

Marwa Awad
Reuters
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:32 UTC
Cairo - New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt's chief archaeologist said on Sunday.

Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts.

"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement.
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Killer Algae Wiped Dinosaurs, May Wipe Humans, Study Suggests


Russia Today
Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:15 UTC
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© Getty Images
The mass extinctions in Earth's history may have been caused by the rapid growth of toxic algae, scientists believe. The modern environment favors such a deadly event.

There have been five major die-offs, in which thousands of species were wiped out from the planet. Paleontologists still argue over the possible causes, with meteorite impacts, super volcano eruptions, changes of sea level and other catastrophic events named as possible culprits.

James Castle and John Rodgers of Clemson University put the blame on microscopic algae, which produce toxins and consume oxygen. In their work, presented at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, the scientists reported their findings of spikes in the number of algae fossils - stromatolite structures - coinciding with mass extinctions of the past.
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Ancestors' Carnivorous Habits Made Us Outlive Apes


Russia Today
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:39 UTC
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© Getty Images
A genetic adaptation to increasing the consumption of raw meat by ancient humans may have given us protection from age diseases. Puzzlingly, a variant of the same gene can be rather more harmful than beneficial.

Modern humans enjoy a much longer life expectancy than their cousins the chimpanzees, mostly due to technology. Sanitary conditions, good nutrition and medicine have cut down our infant mortality rates.

However even our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived longer then other primates. This is likely to be a result of the difference in diet, says Professor Caleb Finch of the University of Southern California-Davis.
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Micro RNAs Can Turn Genes Off


ScienceDaily
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:00 UTC
RNA molecules are the mobile messengers of genes. They carry information on the production of proteins from the DNA to the ribosomes. In addition to these messenger RNAs all living beings have micro RNAs that can hinder the messenger RNAs and thus the production of proteins. Biologists at the University of Freiburg, Germany, around Lecturer Dr. Wolfgang Frank und Professor Dr. Ralf Reski from the Chair Plant Biotechnology have discovered that such micro RNAs also come into direct contact with genes, effectively turning off the genes in the process.

Their findings have now been published in the current issue of the scientific journal Cell.

With the exception of some viruses all living beings store their hereditary information, the sum of all their genes, as DNA. Active genes are transcribed into messenger RNAs (mRNAs) that function as blueprints for the production of proteins on ribosomes. Inactive genes are not transcribed into mRNAs. The fine balance between switched-on and switched-off genes differs between organs and changes during development and under varying environmental conditions. When this balance is disturbed disfiguration and illnesses such as cancer occur.
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