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Do we need population control?

DevastatorJr — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:36:59 GMT

Do we need population control?
http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2008/09/17/population_control/

Notorious doomsayer Paul Ehrlich and other population experts debate the consequences of a crowded world, and how a McCain administration could set back decades of progress.
By Katharine Mieszkowski

Sep. 17, 2008 | Some 6.7 billion people live on planet Earth today and close to 3 billion more may be in the mix by 2050. Given those staggering numbers, it's easy to assume surging human population is the real root of the world's evils, from global warming to poverty, starvation to habitat loss. Not so fast. Three recent books by renowned experts on the subject paint a far more complex portrait of the world's population and what it portends. It's by turns dire and hopeful.

To separate the facts from fables about overpopulation, Salon convened a round-table discussion of the authors. They include the world's most famous Cassandra of overpopulation, Paul Ehrlich, who, in his 1968 bestseller "The Population Bomb," predicted that hundreds of millions of people would imminently die of starvation. Forty years later, Ehrlich is a professor of population studies at Stanford University and the president of the university's Center for Conservation Biology. In his latest book, "The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment," which he co-authored with his wife, Anne Ehrlich, he explores how humanity threatens to overwhelm the planet's life-sustaining systems.

Challenging Ehrlich's alarms about population is Matthew Connelly, a professor of history at Columbia University, and the author of "Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population." Through primary sources, Connelly documents human rights abuses that have taken place in the name of population control, from mass sterilization camps in India to China's one-child policy.

Completing the lively and often contentious conversation is Robert Engelman, vice president for programs at the Worldwatch Institute, and the author of "More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want," which convincingly champions women's reproductive rights the world over.

Just today, an 83-year-old wrote to "Dear Abby," declaring "overpopulation" the "greatest crisis facing the world today." What do you think of that statement?

Paul Ehrlich: I think it gives the wrong impression. Overpopulation is a huge problem. But most people think of it as just being too many people. It's when you add up the numbers of people, how much they consume, and what kind of technologies they use, that it's an accurate statement.

Robert Engelman: "Overpopulation" is not a term I like using very much because it implies that somebody who is here shouldn't be here. The idea that population itself is a great crisis is something of a misinterpretation of history when you realize that population has been growing for much of the history of the species, and certainly for most of the last 10,000 years.

The ongoing increase of human presence on the planet does have effects, but it didn't just start having them last week or last year. So it's not a crisis the way that energy prices might be a crisis. But there's something real to the idea that suddenly population is an issue in a way that it wasn't a generation or a century ago. And that's related to the consumption problems that Paul is talking about.

If the human population had stabilized around 1 billion, which it was a couple of centuries ago, we would not be in a lot of situations that we're in now. We wouldn't be so concerned about whether we're driving SUVs or living in houses that are too large, or what the price of gas is.

Matthew Connelly: Reducing the size of a population can mean that you increase the number of households because people are living by ones and twos and threes. When people live in smaller households they tend to consume more of everything. That's why it's terribly deceptive to think that we can address the environmental problems of overconsumption just by getting people to have fewer kids. It's more complicated than that.

Ehrlich: Yes, if we cut the population in half over the next 50 years by any means, and we double each person's consumption, we're exactly where we are now.

Engelman: It sounds like what you're suggesting, Matthew, is that we'll be better off environmentally if we continue growing our population indefinitely.

Connelly: Far from calling for larger populations, what I am calling for is that we trust parents to make sensible choices. We have to trust that women, when they're given the means to control their own fertility, are going to make smart choices for themselves, and for their children. The idea of population control is a dangerous illusion.

Ehrlich: We have lots of evidence that when women are given job opportunities, education and the means to control their reproduction, they make what boil down to proper choices. You can see that happening all over Europe. What we need is an average family size of something like 1.6 children over the entire planet. The point-sixes aren't so we can have more George Bushes! But everybody should have slightly fewer than two children.

Isn't it true that right now the average woman has about 2.6 children?

Ehrlich: That's right. And that's got to come down. But women's literacy is lower than men's literacy around the world. Women are treated miserably in many societies, and not given job opportunities. There are whole huge outfits trying to keep women from having the means of controlling their own reproduction.

Population control doesn't mean somebody saying: "You personally have to do this." What population control consists of is having policies that encourage proper birth rates and proper death rates -- trying to keep children alive once they're born. The World Bank just came out and said the poor of the world are much poorer than they thought. I think it's 1.4 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. We're losing lots of kids to malnutrition.

Engelman: Governments need to be involved in providing the services that allow women to have healthy pregnancies and healthy births. That's not population control. That's a provision of universal access to reproductive healthcare. We're not even very good about it in this country, as recent news events demonstrate. Governments need to work a lot harder on making sure that women have access to contraceptive options, and sexuality education is available to everybody who wants it, including governors' daughters.

Connelly: When Paul says that population control doesn't mean telling you what you personally can and can't do, and punishing you if you disagree, that's not, unfortunately, what he said in "The Population Bomb," the book that made him famous.

"The Population Bomb" wasn't wrong just because of its predictions that hundreds of millions of people were going to die, and that there was nothing to do to stop it. It was wrong in its prescriptions. It called for paying people if they agreed to sterilization and penalizing them if they refused. Unfortunately, in many countries, that meant planning other people's families, with governments telling parents how many children they could have and punishing them if they resisted.

Ehrlich: Well, "The Population Bomb" was written 40 years ago. There are some things that I wouldn't say anymore, and when I discovered, much to my horror, that many of the people who were interested in population control were interested in controlling other people's populations, I worked very hard to show that's not the way to go. In fact, when I founded the Population Connection, the main lobby for population limitation in the United States, I made it very clear that we only dealt with population in the United States. Until the U.S. had a population policy, we didn't have any reason to preach to others.

What do you mean by that? What is the U.S.'s role in contributing to world population?

Ehrlich: We have over 300 million people, which makes us the third largest population. But when you factor in our consumption and the technologies we use, like SUVs, our impact on life-support systems is much higher than even China's, and certainly higher than India's, which are countries with 1.3 billion and 1.1 billion people each.

I believe it is immoral and should be illegal for people to have very large numbers of children because they are then co-opting for themselves and their children resources that should be spread elsewhere in the world. You only get a chance to get your fair share.

How many is "very large"?

Ehrlich:The issue is: What is the political position to take? In a country like the United States, we should stop at two. But if you had an ideal situation, you might have a lot of people who have no children at all, and some people who have as many as three or four because they happen to be particularly good parents, and are going to raise their children very well.

But how could you accomplish that goal without a coercive policy?

Ehrlich: It depends on what your definition of coercion is. You could simply raise the taxes very high on people who have beyond two children.

Engelman: Can I just suggest that what Paul is getting at is unnecessary? When you look at countries that have widespread access to contraceptive services, family planning and access to safe abortion, women make it very clear that they don't want to have more than two children. And often fewer.

There is no question that the international family-planning program brought incredible benefits to women, children, families and the world. We have a much smaller world population than we would have had absent the international family-planning movement, which, I might say, Paul's book made a great contribution in spurring. I've met many people in the family-planning field who got into it after reading "The Population Bomb."

So what's the result? Today, most women the world over are using contraception and family size has shrunk from five children to a little more than two and a half. That has been an incredible success story for the world. We'd have a much larger population, be much further along in global warming, lack of water supplies, the loss of nature and biodiversity, if this movement had not gotten going when it did.

But should the family-planning movement really get credit for that, or is it the increasing education of women, and improvement of their status, that leads to the drop in the average number of children?

Connelly:The education of women is far and away the most important factor in explaining how it is that fertility rates have fallen worldwide, even in countries where there were no organized family-planning services. The reason is simply that women, when they become educated, when they realize that they have choices in life, when there are other ways to gain status, to improve their welfare, they typically choose to have fewer children, and they avail themselves of whatever means available.

Engelman: I would argue that it's disingenuous to say that the spread of family planning wasn't important to the fall of fertility. Some countries didn't need active government programs because they had private-sector medical care and NGOs, who, without much government assistance, were making sure that a variety of family-planning programs were available to people.

If you don't have contraceptives, you're going to have a large family, or you'll have to be abstinent, and I think that the record shows that most people don't tend to be abstinent. You can't avoid pregnancy by wishing. You can't avoid pregnancy by reading books. You have to have contraceptives in order not to become pregnant when you're sexually active. And someone, whether it's the government, or the private sector or non-governmental organizations, needs to make sure that those contraceptives are there and there is information provided to women about their availability.

That's a problem we have in this country. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are not the result of a woman intending to become a mother. That's a shocking statistic and it betrays the fact that we ourselves have very ambivalent feelings about sexuality and reproduction, and are not very good about allowing women to achieve all that they would like to in life by planning when they want to be a mother and when they don't.

Can you imagine an ethical policy to try to stabilize the world's population?

Engelman: Absolutely.

Ehrlich: I cannot imagine it being anything but an ethical policy. The truth is, if we do not get our numbers and consumption down, there is a very real chance that the global civilization that we have will collapse. And anyone who does things that oppose that is, in my view, extremely unethical.

What would an ethical policy look like?

Ehrlich: First of all, we have to do something about the equity situation in the world. We need to see that all the people have enough to eat and have decent shelter, water and medical care. A much tougher problem is what to do about everybody wanting to consume like Americans, and have an SUV. The answer to the population situation is crystal clear: You improve the condition of women, you give women job opportunities, and you give everybody who is reproductively active the opportunity to control their reproduction with backup abortion, which you hope will be rare, because you're going to distribute good contraception.

Engelman: Every society that has made reproductive healthcare, including safe abortion, available to everyone who wants it has a replacement-fertility rate, or even lower. That's a real clear picture of success over the past 40 years, and it can be a much bigger success by simply making sure that we don't miss half the world. When we get these services available to everyone in the world who wants them, we will see population growth end. It will take a little while because of population momentum.

Will that solve all our environmental problems? No, but you'll no longer be able to talk about population as being a contributor to those environmental problems. So population does not need to be dealt with unethically in order for the world to end population growth.

Ehrlich: We also don't have to invent a lot of new technology either. We basically know how to do it. It just means treating half of humanity -- the women -- decently, and educating men about how they should treat women decently. The problem is when you get insane people saying things like, "We'll only teach kids about abstinence." That's like telling them to solve the global warming problem by not breathing because they won't be putting out CO2.

Connelly: I'm a little more pessimistic than Bob and Paul on this. It's true that fertility rates are declining all over the world. They've been declining, even in poor countries, since the mid- to late 1960s, and in many cases even before governments began to make family planning services available. From seeing an average of almost six children per woman 50 years ago, we're now down below three. The biggest reason is that women have choices now that they didn't have before, like access to paid work and access to education.

Beyond that correlation, we don't know why women who have access to education tend to have smaller families. It's a strong correlation, but even population experts really don't know where babies come from. We don't have a good theory to explain, much less predict, why fertility rates vary. Because we don't understand why people have children in a way that's predictable, we don't have the ability to design population policies that will manipulate fertility rates without coercion.

It's important that we make our stand on reproductive rights when we're arguing for family planning services, and for safe and legal access to abortion. If you continue to argue that the reason we need family planning and safe and legal abortion is because there are too many people and we have to control population growth, then on what basis are you going to oppose those many countries that have negative rates of population growth when they think they need to withdraw access to family planning and abortion to increase fertility rates?

Ehrlich: The solution is getting the leadership of those countries to understand that if the population continues to go up, the problem will not be solved by family planning, it will be solved by gigantic rises in the death rates.

Let me ask you a question: Let's suppose that every woman on the planet wanted to have four children. Would you encourage them to do that if you knew that it would lead to a collapse of civilization and the death of 7 billion people? Would it still be ethical to encourage people and supply them with whatever is necessary to have four children per woman? Where do you draw the line?

Connelly: Whatever I say to them is not going to make a damn bit of difference because parents make their own choices. And when you try to manipulate them, it inevitably leads to pernicious consequences. Look at China, where the government tried to limit people to one child. What happened? People decided that they needed at least one son. So now, in some parts of China, there are 30 to 40 percent more boys than girls.

Ehrlich: That's right, and the Chinese are working hard to change that now. Anne [his co-author and wife] and I went to China, and met in secret with a group of highly educated women. We wanted to see what their attitudes were on the one-child family situation, and every last one of them, within two minutes of our meeting, said it was absolutely the right thing to do. The Chinese government, by the way, is the only government that has connected population numbers to global warming, and pointed out how much they have saved in the way of CO2 emissions by their family-planning policy.

China is a country where people care about social responsibility. If the Chinese were still growing at the rate that they were previously, then many Chinese would have worse lives, and all of us would be in much worse shape.

Connelly: Here's the thing: You're putting it all on China, as if the problem of sex determination is just something that happened in China. In "The Population Bomb," you specifically called for more research on human sex-determination, because you said that if people could chose the sex of their offspring, they would have fewer of them.

Ehrlich: What's wrong with that?

Connelly: What's wrong with that? In a patriarchal society, when international aid agencies began to send in ultrasound machines, as they did in the 1980s, what do you think is going to happen?

Ehrlich: There are unintended consequences. What you're going to get is a mob of males, and there will be a correction.

You are not really informed on how close we are to the whole mess collapsing, on how bad our life-support systems are. With the melting of the Himalayan water tower [ice masses], the food and water for 1.3 billion people is now seriously threatened. That is just in one area in South Asia and parts of China. We are arming to fight the Chinese over the fossil fuels of the Caspian Basin. Every scientist I know is scared witless of the current situation.

Connelly: Paul, any social scientist will tell you that you can't use the future for evidence, and that's what you've been doing for 40 years.

Ehrlich: The social scientists I know use the future for evidence, and also are scared of what's happening in the world today. It's very fine to say you can't tell what's going to happen in the future. Unfortunately, to a considerable degree, you can.

Engleman: I don't think that you need to debate all these things. Population is extremely straightforward. You're not going to be able to fine-tune it. You're not going to be able to avoid a disaster, which we still might have, even if we do stabilize our population. In fact, we may have already overshot the earth's capacity to have a balanced climate, even if we didn't have a single more baby being born as of the end of this conversation.

But we do know that we can bring population into a favorable position relative to the environment, simply by making choices available to women. The world needs to prioritize good sexuality education. The kind of education that Gov. Palin says she opposes, and which Sen. McCain has opposed, is exactly what this country, with its nearly 50 percent unintended pregnancy rates, desperately needs. And what other countries around the world need.

Now, I can't make other countries do that. It wouldn't be proper for me to say here is what you ought to do in other countries. But it does affect my support for a presidential candidate in this country, knowing that one group would favor women of all ages' right to have access to these rights, and the other party and the other set of candidates doesn't favor them having access to that information and those rights.

Ehrlich: You might also point out that the Bush administration, the Reagan administration and, God help us if we get one, a McCain administration will probably continue the Mexico City policy, which has the effect of killing women around the world because it withdraws support for safe abortion and ends up withdrawing support for contraception in many places.

So, in fact, it is important what we do in the United States because we're the most powerful country in the world. We muck around with our international aid in ways that are harmful to women around the world, and to men too, because they suffer from many of these things, including STDs, that get transmitted because there is not access to condoms.

How does concern about world population color contemporary debates in the United States about immigration?

Connelly: If you look back at history, the very first world population control programs were those programs that were meant to contain Asians to their own continent. This was beginning in the 19th century but continuing through the first half of the 20th century. It wasn't just the United States. Australia, South Africa, Canada and several states in Latin America decided that they had to contain Asians to Asia because their own people could not reproduce at the same rate and live on so little. They feared this "yellow peril" would take over the world. So that's the kind of tainted legacy that we're talking about when environmentalists say that the only way that we can deal with our environmental problems is to keep the Mexicans in Mexico.

Ehrlich:One has to remember that as long as the resources of the world are flowing disproportionately toward the United States, people are going to flow in the same direction. If we put a 40-foot fence on the southern border, the coyotes will get 42-foot ladders. I think that this country has been enormously enriched by immigration.

On the other hand, immigration amounts to us increasing the consumption in the world because immigrants have tended to be very hardworking, very successful and get to be prosperous. We're not changing the size of the world population, but we are changing the amount of consumption, and the U.S. is already consuming, in some sense, more than its fair share.

Connelly: Then, Paul, why not export the most overconsuming Americans?

Ehrlich: That would be a great idea. I think that's what we ought to do, just throw them the hell out.

Connelly: If we want to use migration to try to deal with environmental problems, then wouldn't it be just as obvious that we should take the wealthiest lawyers and bankers and send them to subsistence societies?

Ehrlich: I'm absolutely with you on that. But I've never suggested using immigration policy as a population policy.

If you could give the next president of the United States one piece of advice about population, what would you tell him to do?

Connelly: I think that it's time for a peace process in the abortion wars. There are a whole range of issues where pro-life and pro-choice people could work together, including providing infertility treatments for everybody who wants and needs them, and reforming international adoption, which is now anarchic and inequitable. Even a lot of pro-life people, many of them in Congress, now agree that the best way to reduce rates of abortion is by making contraception available to everybody who wants it. It's time to get beyond the rhetoric.

Ehrlich: We have to have politicians who know something about where we came from, and where we're going, as far as science can tell them. The Bush administration has tried to suppress the scientific community, but our citizens deserve to have the consultation and opinions of scientists on areas ranging from reproductive health to how our life-support systems run and what's happening to them.

Engelman: The next president must be willing to talk about population and be willing to discuss it with Americans. We used to have presidents who did that. Lately, it's been an absolutely taboo word for presidents of both parties. But we need to make it part of the conversation, make it part of the public issues that we discuss as a nation. And at home and abroad, we need to have policies that guarantee that women have the capacity to decide for themselves whether, when and how often to have children.

-- By Katharine Mieszkowski

posted in New Scientist - 6 replies

Do we all have some synaesthetic ability?

DevastatorJr — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:15:12 GMT

Do we all have some synaesthetic ability?
12:52 30 September 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Alison Motluk

So, you think you're not synaesthetic. You might have to think again. New research shows that many people have traces of the condition without realising it.

Synaesthesia is a condition in which people make unusual associations across the senses.

Some people perceive letters, numbers, words and smells to have innate colours, while others can taste music or imagine time to have a fixed special form.

Ferrinne Spector and Daphne Maurer at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, were interested in exploring the coloured and textured smell that some synaesthetes experience.

Smells green
They asked 78 people who considered themselves non-synaesthetes to smell 22 separate odours in glass jars and assign each a colour and a texture.

The experiment included odours that were both pleasant and unpleasant and familiar and unfamiliar, and that fitted broadly into four categories: food, floral, chemical and environmental. Volunteers were asked to look beyond the obvious, say, orange for an orange scent.

When the researchers analysed the results, along with some obvious associations – lemon with yellow and peppermint with smooth, hard and sticky – they found some odd ones.

Significantly more people than chance, for instance, associated the smell of mushrooms with the colours blue or yellow. Lavender elicited the colour green and the texture of sticky liquid, while ginger was perceived as black and sharp.

"The influence of learning is there," Spector told a meeting of the American Synesthesia Association in Hamilton on 27 September, "but it cannot explain all associations."

Curved time
In a separate experiment, Ursina Teuscher, at the University of California at San Diego, and her colleagues asked 191 people whether they saw the months in a spatial arrangement. Eighty-nine said they did not.

But when the researchers asked volunteers to click on a computer screen to plot where they perceived months to be, non-synaesthetes produced similar arrangements to synaesthetes – including straight lines, curvy lines, ovals, circles and rectangles.

Some were so consistent with synaesthete representations that the researchers decided to divide them not by whether they declared themselves a synaesthete or not, but rather by their accuracy in replicating their own mental representation. "More consistency predicts a less conventional calendar," Teuscher told the meeting.

Teuscher called for researchers of synaesthesia to be more rigorous. She pointed out that they are all very careful to make sure professed synaesthetes meet the criteria before considering them bona fide synaesthetes, but less so the other way round.

"If people say they don't have synaesthesia, we feel we don't have to validate that," she says, "and maybe that's a big mistake."

The Human Brain - With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.

posted in New Scientist - 0 replies

Bad boys can blame behaviour on their hormones

DevastatorJr — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:13:51 GMT

Bad boys can blame behaviour on their hormones
15:37 30 September 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Andy Coghlan

Out-of-control boys facing spells in detention or anti-social behaviour orders can now blame it all on their hormones.

The "stress hormone" cortisol – or low levels of it – may be responsible for male aggressive antisocial behaviour, according to new research. The work suggests that the hormone may restrain aggression in stressful situations.

Researchers found that levels of cortisol fell when delinquent boys played a stressful video game, the opposite of what was seen in control volunteers playing the same game.

The results suggest that biology rather than peer pressure might play a larger role than previously thought in delinquent behaviour, and raise new possibilities for diagnosing and treating such disorders.

Virtual rival
The study pitted each volunteer against a pugnacious, virtually generated rival boy in a computer game that had them competing for a monetary reward. The game was deliberately rigged to subject volunteers to stress, frustration, provocation, and taunting from their adversary.

Saliva samples from the 95 control volunteers showed that their cortisol levels rose by an average of 48%, as expected in stressful situations. But in the 70 participants with conduct disorder, levels of cortisol dropped by an average of 30%.

The researchers, based at the University of Cambridge, suggest that the delinquent youths may be so used to provocative and stressful encounters that they no longer respond by producing the "restraining" hormone cortisol.

What stress?
"They are behaving as though there's no stress at all," says lead researcher Graeme Fairchild, who led the study.

"It could be that they're used to provocative situations and habituated to stress," he says.

The disparities only arose during the game situation. Otherwise, the daily patterns of cortisol production were similar in delinquent and control volunteers.

One other surprise was that the cortisol drops were about the same across all the delinquents, whether they originally became disruptive during childhood or during adolescence.

Although it's already accepted that there is a strong biological component to "early-onset" conduct disorder, which develops around the age of five, the current thinking is that when delinquency develops in teenagers, it's mainly a result of malevolent peer pressure, perhaps combined with lack of supervision at home.

The new research challenges this picture by showing that in both groups, cortisol levels fell – a biological rather than peer-led response.

Treatment hope
"It could be that the same latent trait exists in both groups," says Fairchild, who has initiated new brain imaging studies to see if there are differences in the way delinquent brains function.

The results also raise the possibility of finding biological markers in the blood of infants that identify those most likely to develop conduct disorders.

Families and children could then be given help to manage and refocus their behaviour before it degenerates into the usual habits of lying, stealing, violence, malevolence and lack of concern for other people.

Alternatively, the research might lead to new drugs that have the same effect.

It's too soon to say whether extra cortisol would help. But Fairchild cites earlier experiments showing extreme violence in rats unable to make corticosterone, the rat equivalent of human cortisol. When the rats received extra corticosterone to compensate, it calmed them down.

Journal reference: Biological Psychiatry (DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.05.022)

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posted in New Scientist - 0 replies

Martian fossils may be hiding inside white rocks

DevastatorJr — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:11:54 GMT

Martian fossils may be hiding inside white rocks
18:45 30 September 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Devin Powell

Where should scientists hunt for evidence of Martian life? On Earth, at least, they should scout for white-coloured meteorites made of sedimentary rock, a new study suggests.

Two rocks dropped from orbit by the European Space Agency have shown that such meteorites can carry and protect traces of life from the heat of atmospheric re-entry and the shock of impact with the surface.

Sedimentary rocks and clays have long been thought to be the most promising place to look for life on Mars. They often form in water, from layers of slowly deposited material that can entrap and preserve microorganisms.

But no meteorite made of this relatively fragile material has ever been found on Earth. Every Martian meteorite discovered contains tough volcanic rocks, such as basalt, that solidified from cooling lava.

Frances Westall of the Centre of Molecular Biophysics in Orleans, France, and colleagues set out to see if sedimentary meteorites blasted off the Martian surface in an impact could survive the fall through Earth's atmosphere.

Hardy bacteria
They attached two sedimentary rocks from our planet, each about 4 centimetres in diameter, to the outside of an unmanned Russian spacecraft called Foton M3.

"These rocks are very similar to what you would expect to find on Mars," Westall told New Scientist. After 12 days in orbit, the Foton M3 capsule plummeted through the atmosphere and crashed in Kazakhstan.

The rocks contained tiny fossils and chemical traces of organisms that once lived in Australia and Scotland, where the rocks originated. The team had also coated the back of each rock with a living organism: Chroococcidiopsis, a hardy type of cyanobacteria found on Earth in hot springs and other extreme environments thought to be one of the few creatures that might be capable of living in the harsh environment on Mars.

Melted away
During atmospheric re-entry, temperatures upwards of 1700 °Celsius melted away more than half of each rock and fused the surface to a cream-coloured, glassy shine.

Previous experiments to test the strength of sedimentary meteorites – STONE 1 and STONE 5 – used samples of fragile dolomite and sandstone that crumbled to the touch after impact. But the rocks of STONE 6, which were laced with silicon, remained solid.

After impact, each was analysed at the atomic level to see if the signatures of life they transported had also survived the trip, and the results were presented at last week's European Planetary Science Congress.

Microfossils from organisms 3.5 billion years old survived the ride in a piece of Australian rock formed from layers of sand. And in a chunk of mudstone from Scotland's Orkney Islands, chemical traces of life were still detectable, despite the fact that heat had changed the composition of the rock.

Charred remains
The Chroococcidiopsis bacteria had been placed on the side of the rocks facing the spacecraft and were therefore protected during re-entry by 2 centimetres of rock.

Even so, they did not survive, though their charred remains did. "We think the flames got around behind the rocks and scorched them," Westall told New Scientist.

One explanation for how the traces of life survived comes from anecdotal reports of meteorite hunters that meteorites quickly cool to touch after they fall, says David McKay at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

This suggests that only a thin layer on the outside of the rocks heats up during re-entry. "This experiment strengthens the case that the interiors of meteorites are basically not affected by the process of re-entry," says McKay.

Meteorite hunters generally look for dark objects that stand out against icy landscapes, such as Antarctica.

But the quartz crust of the sedimentary rocks in this experiment fused into a creamy white colour. "We should start looking for light-coloured meteorites as well," says Westall.

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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726494.300
31 March 2008
Top landing sites chosen in hunt for Mars life
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14787
23 September 2008
Weblinks

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Scientific Truth

DevastatorJr — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:20:43 GMT

What is scientific truth anyway? Where do you get your information and how do you know it's trustworthy? Does the fact that an opinion is held by the majority necessarily make it the TRUTH? What criteria do YOU use to determine whether something's the real deal or complete bullshit?

Enquiring minds want to know!

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10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life

DevastatorJr — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:37:03 GMT

10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life
http://www.livescience.com/technology/top10-transform-tech-1.html

10. Digital Libraries

Having total connectivity is pointless if all you get is the latest gossip about Paris Hilton. But the digitization of mankind's accumulated works proceeds apace. All of MIT's courses are now online, for instance, and, if you haven't done so, check out Google Book Search. The time will come when any straightforward factual question can be answered immediately, online. But, alas, those are always the easy questions.

9. Gene Therapy and/or Stem Cells

A lot of maladies actually involve inherited conditions-they're in your genes, in other words. But scientists are working to change those genes and trick defective cells into growing correctly. Perhaps, someday, birth defects will be as treatable as pneumonia.

8. Pervasive Wireless Internet

WiMAX, 3G, 4G, etc., all point to a pervasive wireless Internet, where being on-line everywhere, all the time, will be routine. That implies the possibility of full connectivity between any two random devices. Want to check your burglar alarm from your cell phone? It'll be easy. Unjacking to get away and relax, however, may not be so easy.

7. Mobile Robots

The recent DARPA challenge (where robot cars navigated through suburban traffic) hints at what might come. Why drive to the deli to pick up your order when you can just send your car? We may see convoys of robot trucks on the highways. Admittedly, they'll probably have more initial acceptance in warehouses, handling pick-and-pull chores.

6. Better, Cheaper Solar Cells

The cost of photovoltaic cells (that turn sunlight into electricity) are coming down. In less than ten years the cost of solar energy could be at parity with the cost of electricity from the grid, and solar cells could be standard features in new residential construction. Your house could power itself about a third of the time. (Science can't do much about night and bad weather.)

5. Location-Based Computing

Instead of clicking an icon on a browser screen, you can walk outside, point your cell phone at an actual three-dimensional thing (presumably, a building that houses a business), click the phone, and get information about (or jump to the Web site of) whatever you were pointing at. As well as servers with Internet address, there will be servers with geographic coordinates.

4. Desktop 3-D Printing

Instead of going to the store for your next gadget, you might download a design of your choosing and generate it in your desktop 3-D printer. The next step will be to design your own gadgets, post the designs, and sell them, etc. Toys, kitchenware, and decorative household items should be fair game, at least. Cottage industry, here we come!

3. Moore's Law Upheld

The law, stated by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, implies that available computer power can be expected to double every other year. For at least two decades pundits have been pointing out barriers to the law's fulfillment, and the chip industry has been smashing those barriers. Currently they can't agree if the law has a couple of more decades of life left, or 600 years. Either way, in terms of available computing power, it's clear that we ain't seen nothing yet.

2. Therapeutic Cloning

Forget the stories about generating identical copies of a particular sheep or person. The whole idea behind cloning all along has been to grow replacement organs or tissue in a vat, which the body would see no reason to reject. Cancerous or damaged organs could be replaced by new, disease-free clones of themselves.

1. The Hydrogen Economy

Instead of guzzling imported oil (and being at the mercy of oil suppliers) we could turn water into hydrogen and burn that (or use to charge fuel cells.) Meanwhile, the only byproduct of the combustion of hydrogen is ... more water! However, hydrogen storage remains a thorny issue, due to its low density, and hydrogen may end up being only one of many interlocking components that replace the current oil economy.

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Climate change gave dinosaurs a lucky break

DevastatorJr — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:36:19 GMT

Climate change gave dinosaurs a lucky break
19:00 11 September 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Jeff Hecht

The dinosaurs got lucky. Before they finally came to dominate Earth life in the Jurassic period, they were perpetual also-rans to their crocodilian cousins. But then the climate gave them a helping hand.

Near the start of the Triassic period, 250 million years ago, the archosaurs, or "ruling reptiles", split into two major groups: the dinosaurs and a group called crurotarsans, whose only living descendants are the crocodiles.

Palaeontologists had long thought that the more successful dinosaurs dominated the last 30 million years of the Triassic, but in recent years they have found that many of the fossils originally thought to be dinosaurs were actually similar-looking crurotarsans.

Now new research challenges the idea that dinosaurs had some evolutionary advantage over their croc rivals.

Climate catastrophe
Analysing data for the 30 million years of the Triassic that the two groups lived side by side, Steve Brusatte and Mike Benton at the University of Bristol, UK, found they evolved at essentially the same rate. Moreover they also found that the crurotarsans also developed a much broader range of body types than the dinosaurs.

An observer comparing the two groups in the late Triassic would have expected the crurotarsans to eventually dominate, says Brusatte, now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Yet all the crurotarsans bar the crocodiles were wiped out 200 million years ago, when rapid climate change caused a mass extinction. Dinosaurs "pretty much got lucky" and sailed through to dominate ecosystems for another 135 million years, he says.

It's an example, Brusatte adds, of how evolution doesn't really record "progress" – the winners may just have luck on their side.

Journal reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1161833)

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Ancient genetic imprint unites the tribes of India

DevastatorJr — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:24:52 GMT

Ancient genetic imprint unites the tribes of India

11:19 11 September 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Anil Ananthaswamy

The first humans to arrive on the Indian subcontinent from Africa about 65,000 years ago left a genetic imprint that can still be found in the tribes of India.

Anthropologists have long argued over the genetic makeup of the country's population, because of its complex history of migrations and movement.

The first humans to people the sub-continent came from Africa, following the so-called southern route, along the tropical coast of the Indian Ocean.

"Whether the original inhabitants of India were replaced by more modern immigrants or contributed to the contemporary gene pool has been debated," says Michael Bamshad of the University of Washington in Seattle, who has studied the genetic diversity of India.

One way researchers have used to figure this out is to use linguistic groups.

The tribes speaking Indo-European languages, for instance, are known to be descendants of the people who migrated into India relatively recently from Central Asia and the Caucasus. It was also thought that the Austro-Asiatic speakers were direct descendants of the original settlers.

Mothers of India
To determine which groups can trace their ancestry to the founding population of India, Vadlamudi Raghavendra Rao of the Anthropological Survey of India in Kolkata and his colleagues analysed 2768 samples of mitochondrial DNA taken from 24 tribes all over India.

Mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother, so can be used to trace the maternal lineage of a population.

The researchers looked for a particular set of mutations in the mitochondrial genome called the M2 haplogroup. This set of genetic markers is unique to India and is a sub-lineage of the M haplogroup that identifies the first humans who arrived in India from Africa 65,000 years ago.

The analysis showed that the M2 lineage began in India about 50,000 years ago, about 15,000 years after modern humans arrived.

The team also found that the M2 lineage and its branches made up nearly 10% of the mitochondrial DNA of the studied tribes.

"We found these 'footprints' in all the tribal populations," says Rao. "We analysed the most primitive tribes, spread over the south, central and east India and found the signatures of earliest antiquity."

Unifying genes
Significantly, the M2 lineage cuts across major linguistic barriers. The new study shows that both the Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic language groups share these same genetic markers.

According to team member Satish Kumar, the M2 haplogroup can also be found, albeit with reduced frequency, among members of the so-called higher castes of India, such as the Brahmins (priests) and the Kshatriyas (warriors).

Upper castes are thought to be the outcome of the arrival over time of a more technologically advanced people that marginalised the indigenous population, starting about 10,000 years ago.

Even these new migrants assimilated into India and to some extent mixed with the population, as the presence of M2 genes in the group attests.

"The early settler component is not restricted to one particular language family, or one particular population," says Kumar.

Rao agrees. "Biologically, there are no castes and tribes, there are only communities," he says.

Journal reference: BMC Evolutionary Biology (DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-8-230)

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Why the world is a happier place

DevastatorJr — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:36:27 GMT

Why the world is a happier place

27 August 2008
From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
Nora Schultz

THE economy is plummeting, the planet could burn to a crisp, and war has just broken out - again. Believe it or not though, people around the globe are happier today on average than they were 25 years ago. The secret seems to be a combination of rising economic prosperity, democracy and social liberalisation.

Every few years the World Values Survey (WVS), headed by Ron Inglehart, quizzes about 1400 people in each of 52 countries on how happy they are. Last month it pooled 25 years of data and found that since 1981, happiness has risen in 45 countries.

The results challenge earlier studies that happiness levels do not rise along with the economy - something that had led many to conclude that money can't buy happiness. However, these studies often looked at countries that were rich already. The WVS team's analysis shows that economic growth only boosts happiness noticeably in countries with per-capita GDP less than $12,000.

Since the last survey (see New Scientist, 4 October 2003), the top 10 happiest countries, which include Colombia, Denmark, Nigeria and Puerto Rico, have not changed much. Skipping up the happiness charts, however, are former Soviet states such as Ukraine and Slovenia, and emerging economies Brazil and India. Unsurprisingly, politically volatile nations like Zimbabwe or Georgia rank in the bottom 10 (Perspectives on Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00078.x).

What democratic progress and burgeoning economies have in common is the personal freedom they bestow, says the WVS team. This explains why many eastern Europeans are much happier even though their economic situation worsened in the transition from communism, says co-author Roberto Foa at Harvard University. Belarus is a notable exception, he says, as it is the eastern European country that had the least political reform. China too seems to be getting unhappier, despite its economic growth spurt, though Foa says this might be because the team only has data for China since the 1990s, which may not reflect the longer term.

What makes for overall well-being is more complicated than it seems at first glance, however. India's "subjective well-being score", which collates happiness and life satisfaction, has fallen since the 1980s. It turns out that even though more people report being very happy, far fewer are satisfied with their life. Is this the first sign of "affluenza" - the consumer-driven ennui that some say is plaguing the west?

Latin American countries often come top in happiness league tables. Though they are not the richest, researchers believe this is partly due to their strong sense of family values and national pride. In the WVS survey, Mexico had the biggest leap in numbers of "very happy" people. Foa says this is due to profound sociopolitical transformation: "There has been widespread democratisation, so that people have greater opportunities to work, travel, and express themselves," he says, plus better protection of women's rights.

Latin America also illustrates how cultures vary in how readily their satisfaction can be perturbed. Peter Kuppens at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL), Belgium, and his team asked 10,000 college students from 46 countries how often they felt positive emotions such as pride and love, or negative ones such as sadness and anger, and how it affected life satisfaction.

In general, positive emotions affected satisfaction much more than negative emotions (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.95.1.66). Individualistic nations, especially in the west, were particularly susceptible to negative emotions. Asian or Latin American countries were less troubled by negative emotions "because they consider their individual feelings less important than the collective good", explains Kuppens.

He cautions that living in a nation at the top of the happiness league is no guarantee of personal joy: "Your next-door neighbour in a happy country like Denmark may well be unhappier than the average guy in Zimbabwe."

From issue 2671 of New Scientist magazine, 27 August 2008, page 12

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Milestone reached in search for deafness cure

DevastatorJr — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:35:22 GMT

Milestone reached in search for deafness cure

18:01 27 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway

A neurobiologist who is profoundly hard of hearing has developed an experimental gene therapy that generates the type of cells that are damaged or missing in deaf animals. Mice embryos were injected with a key developmental gene that led to the production of ear cells that convey sounds to the brain – a scientific first.

"That is sort of the major achievement or milestone that we all had to reach," says Stanford University cell biologist Stefan Heller, who specialises in hearing research and was not involved in the study.

Milestone though it may be, the advance represents only an incremental step in the search for a treatment to human hearing loss, says lead author John Brigande of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

"We're really far away from a cure for deafness," says Brigande, who began losing his own hearing aged 10 and now hears nothing out of his left ear and only poorly out of his right. He spoke to New Scientist with the help of a closed captioning program.

"I'd like to hear, and I would love to be a member of the research team or community that does define an efficacious therapy, but I think it needs to be approached with enormous caution," he says.

Dangerous sounds
According to the World Health Organization, some 278 million people suffer from moderate to profound hearing loss, which is generally caused by damage to the cochlea's "hair" cells. Loud sounds, antibiotic drugs and gene mutations can all deaden these cells, which convert the air vibrations of sound into the electric currents used by the brain.

Other research teams have regenerated hair cells in mice and guinea pigs that had been deafened by drugs, but that means their regained hearing could have been down to cells spared by the drug, Brigande says.

To check this explanation, his team worked with mice that could hear and focused on birthing new hair cells, not restoring hearing. They achieved this feat by injecting mice embryos with a gene called Atoh1, as well as a gene that produced a fluorescent protein.

Atoh1 seems to be a hair cell master switch that activates myriad genes that turn developing cells into hair cells, Brigande explains. Newborn mice that received the gene therapy grew fluorescent green hair cells in precisely the right location in their cochleae, and the cells made connections to nerve fibres that travel to the brain.

More importantly, he and colleague Anthony Ricci proved that the cells worked, converting movements into electrical nerve pulses.

Temporary fix?
Yet Brigande cautions against over-interpreting such results. His team tested the cells just a few days after birth, and they could have stopped working not long after, he says. They also hope to test the same approach in mice born without working hair cells.

Moreover, Brigande views his team's research as a useful lab technique, not a potential cure for deafness. "No human subject committee would allow this kind of experiment to be done," agrees Heller, given the process would involve injecting a foetus with a foreign gene.

The new technique will however allow scientists to tweak other genes potentially involved in hair cell generation, and test the effect in an animal.

"I definitely want to be able to do this in my lab, and a number of other labs will try to set this up as well," says Matthew Kelley, a developmental neuroscientist at the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland.

The work could well speed the development of a genuine treatment for hearing loss, says Heller, who has investigated the potential for stem cells to treat deafness.

The understanding gained from the ability to tweak the developing mouse cochleae might eventually allow researchers to figure out how to treat deafness with drugs, not untested and controversial therapies such as genes and stem cells. "I think it's potentially achievable one day," Brigande says.

Journal reference: Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature07265)

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Dark matter and normal matter 'divorce' in cosmic clash

DevastatorJr — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:29:35 GMT

Dark matter and normal matter 'divorce' in cosmic clash

23:07 27 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Rachel Courtland

Dark matter seems to have separated from normal matter in a mammoth collision between two galaxy clusters.

The results bolster observations of a similar separation in the Bullet Cluster and put rough upper limits on how strongly dark matter interacts with other matter and itself. But so far they cannot rule out any of the leading dark matter candidates.

Dark matter, mysterious stuff that exerts a gravitational force on other matter, was originally proposed to explain what holds spinning galaxies, like the Milky Way, together. Observations suggest it outweighs ordinary matter by a factor of about 6 to 1.

But no one knows what it is made of, and normally dark matter and ordinary matter are too well mixed to observe the dark matter independently.

Now, isolated clouds of dark matter have been observed in a collision between two massive clusters of galaxies lying 5.7 billion light years away.

Collectively known as MACS J0025, the clusters crashed head-on while moving at millions of kilometres per hour. Hot gas within the clusters slowed down in the collision.

But observations with the Hubble Space Telescope showed that MACS J0025 acts as a gravitational lens, distorting the light from galaxies behind it. This allowed researchers to pinpoint the location of the clusters' unseen dark matter, which had passed through the wreck unimpeded and separated from the clusters' gas.

The separation is thought to have occurred because dark matter does not experience the same drag as the clusters' gas. Drag is caused by electromagnetic forces between atoms, and dark matter seems to interact with other matter and itself only through the force of gravity.

Special case?
A similar phenomenon was seen in 2006 in a collision resulting in the Bullet Cluster. There, dark matter also seemed to have separated from ordinary matter as the clusters entangled, suggesting dark matter interacts only weakly with other matter, and potentially only through gravity.

But some were not sure that the Bullet Cluster collision clinched the case. "When the first paper came out, a lot of people were saying maybe this was a special case, maybe this is a little weird," says Marusa Bradac of the University of California, Santa Barbara, an astronomer who worked on both the Bullet Cluster and this second find.

Finding this second cluster, Bradac says, provides an 'unambiguous' confirmation of the weak interaction.

MACS J0025 was originally imaged in a survey of massive clusters made by the ROSAT satellite, which finished observing in 1999.

But it was not clear that the object was the result of a merger. Bradac and colleagues realised it was when they studied the shape of its hot gas, which glows brightly in X-rays, with NASA's Chandra space telescope.

While the team can use the clusters to get a rough upper limit on how strongly dark matter interacts, they cannot eliminate any of the dark matter candidates currently being considered by particle physicists, such as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS).

The Large Hadron Collider, a powerful particle smasher set to start up on 10 September, could help measure the properties of WIMPS and help determine if any of them are viable dark matter candidates.

Journal reference: The Astrophysical Journal (forthcoming)

Cosmology – Keep up with the latest ideas in our special report.

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The road to Wikipedia

DevastatorJr — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:26:47 GMT

The road to Wikipedia

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/08/28/knowledge/print.html

How do we know what we know? A new book takes a long view of knowledge, from ancient oral traditions to the rise of universities and the Internet.
By Laura Miller

Aug. 28, 2008 | We live in the information age, when networked computers give millions of users unprecedented access to communications and data. But so what? That is, in effect, what Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton have to say at the conclusion of "Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet." The authors are indeed hard to impress. Their small book takes a long view -- an exceedingly long view, beginning with the birth of Western civilization in the philosophical academies of ancient Greece and wending its way, century by century, to the present. McNeely and Wolverton remain unpersuaded that the Internet is as revolutionary as it's cracked up to be.

"Reinventing Knowledge" partakes of a contemporary academic trend that views institutions as the major shapers of people and societies (rather than, say, vast economic forces or the genius and influence of "great men"). Its subject is "knowledge," and the "production, preservation and transmission" of it, although unfortunately the authors never quite manage to define what knowledge means to them. True, the term is elusive; one generation's knowledge is the next's rank superstition. In the Middle Ages, thanks to Aristotle, everyone knew that maggots generated spontaneously out of rotting flesh, and this fact was considered to be top-grade knowledge, though we now know it to be incorrect. On the other hand, some people today are convinced that the 1969 moon landing never really happened, and despite the so-called evidence they've marshaled in defense of this belief, hardly anyone would call it knowledge.

Whatever, exactly, knowledge is, McNeely and Wolverton see it as having been "fundamentally reinvented fully six times in the history of the West." The six institutions that achieved these reinventions are the library, the monastery, the university, the "Republic of Letters," the disciplines and the laboratory. Each characterized and embodied its own age's conception of knowledge. Each, the authors insist, gave way to the next age's institution as knowledge was once again reinvented, losing its central role in the process.

At least part of what these institutions did was decide what constituted knowledge in the first place. They also organized it so that scholars and thinkers could get at it more easily, and they preserved it for future generations. Above all, they transmitted it through various methods of teaching. Given the amount of ground they've decided to cover, McNeely and Wolverton must necessarily be fairly sweeping in describing all this. Occasionally, "Reinventing Knowledge" is so general as to be vague and a bit colorless. This is a shame, since its perspective is fresh enough that when it succeeds it has the power to wrench familiar aspects of history into new and surprising shapes. The book works best when the authors remember to use concrete examples, as when they look at the difference between how ancient China and the Hellenistic empire chose to maintain their own cultures' knowledge.

The Library of Alexandria, founded and maintained by the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, contained (at its peak) as many as 500,000 texts, mostly works in the Greek tradition, but also writings from the various Mediterranean peoples of the empire (such as the Hebrew Bible, a translation of which the Ptolemies commissioned). Classical Greek culture was, in essence, oral; public speaking was the most important skill in a small democratic city-state, and being good at it became the goal of every educated man. Philosophers proved themselves in dialogue with other philosophers, and Socrates himself denigrated writing as untrustworthy; you couldn't quiz a written text about what it meant and you couldn't see and evaluate the man who wrote it. But the oral culture of ancient Greece wasn't very portable, which meant it wasn't well suited to being spread over a far-flung empire or passed on to succeeding generations in all its outposts. Written texts could supply those needs and give the elites of the Hellenistic empire a shared high culture to knit it together.

By contrast, the Qin dynasty that united China in the third century B.C. decided that much of the country's written tradition (especially Confucian works) subtracted from the glory of the Qin and ordered those materials burned. The Han dynasty that followed the Qin struggled to restore that tradition, with great difficulty, since the texts were often printed on strips of bamboo tied together with string, and even if they survived the burning campaign, they often got hopelessly out of sequence when the strings broke. (Greek texts, on the other hand, were written on long scrolls.) Han scholars carefully reconstructed their culture's classic texts; then the emperors had them carved onto hefty, unburnable stone tablets placed outside the National Academy of Louyang. Scholars from all over the empire could travel there and make rubbings from the stones to obtain their own copies of the texts.

The Chinese goal -- to rescue and protect the hallowed texts of the nation's past -- determined the technology they used to record their knowledge, just as the Hellenistic desire to compile and disseminate Greek culture made a more portable, flexible medium the better pick. The rubbings method ensured that Chinese scholars could possess identical, definitive copies of the Confucian classics. The Hellenistic practice of hand-copying texts introduced the possibility of amendments, marginalia and commentary as well as errors, which is one reason why there are so many different versions of old Western texts. In one technology, the values of perpetuity, authority and the emulation of the past were tantamount; in the other, it was expansion and change.

Despite their libraries, Greek and Roman societies continued to privilege public speech over writing. (As McNeely and Wolverton point out, classical authors didn't actually write their own works; they dictated them to scribes who were regarded as only slightly better than manual laborers.) When Rome fell and the West became largely rural, illiterate and plagued by the constant skirmishes of small-time warlords, Christian monasteries became the last redoubt of knowledge. Reading and writing were sacred there, talking often forbidden as a form of "idleness." The Christian attention to the inner self (evidenced in the religion's focus on faith and prayer) produced the West's first memoir, the "Confessions" of St. Augustine. For the first time people began to read silently. Not only were the monasteries established as a sanctuary from a corrupt world, they were also the place where the West began to conceive of study as a retreat where the soul could be tended, instead of the means by which a man acquired the skills to attain social and political power. Where the library had been a jewel in the heart of a great city, the monastery was an oasis in the wilderness.

Eventually, however, Europe's economy and cities recovered, and students began to congregate in towns where cathedral schools offered the training they needed to become doctors, lawyers and (especially) clergymen. The first universities began as guilds for students and their masters, like the guilds formed by artisans and tradesmen, rather than as physical institutions. ("Colleges" were residences, often established by charitable foundations, where students and teachers lived.) Religion was still the basis for this particular incarnation of knowledge and all the students were clerics, but they began to apply their learning to more practical matters that, not coincidentally, were of keen interest to the burgeoning middle classes. For example, canon law specialists worked out a rationale by which Christian moneylenders could charge a fee for their services (the birth of interest) without violating the biblical prohibition against usury.

The rise of the university saw the return of the idea of learning through debate and verbal contests in the theater of the classroom. Scholars journeyed from one center of learning to another, seeking the best teachers and jobs, forming a pan-European culture of learning founded on the lingua franca of Latin and the Roman Catholic faith.

Medieval universities were identified with specific churches and nations, however, and during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, as well as during clashes between secular states, travel became difficult and jealously protected orthodoxies stifled the free exchange of ideas. The fourth reinvention that McNeely and Wolverton chronicle is perhaps the most fascinating. Called the Republic of Letters, it literally refers to letters, that is, private correspondence. The blossoming of thought we associate with the Renaissance and the scientific revolution was mostly fostered by informal networks of correspondents and eventually by the formation of academies and societies dedicated to the pursuit of learning. It was an age of gentlemen scholars who sent one another data they collected on, say, astronomical observations, or who met to compile dictionaries or to perform the first formal scientific experiments.

This "republic" was, as McNeely and Wolverton observe, a kind of alternative society, international and intergenerational. Its letters were meant to be shared among like-minded friends, but they weren't officially published, so they evaded the censorship regulations of both church and state. The Republic of Letters, McNeely and Wolverton note, "recognized no distinctions of birth, social status, gender, or academic degree," as many of its members never actually met face to face. Because letters are a kind of intimate communication, they also prized "civility, friendship, politeness, generosity, benevolence, and especially tolerance." Where the medieval universities had been competitive, the Republic of Letters was collaborative, relying on everyone's goodwill and (relatively) disinterested commitment to advancing knowledge. As René Descartes wrote, "with the later persons beginning where the earlier ones left off, and thereby linking the lives and work of many people, they can all go forward together much further than each person individually would be able to do."

The disciplines (a term for academic specialties like physiology or anthropology) arose in 18th century Germany, where an ambitious campaign of mass education eventually led scholars to specialize in particular fields. The disciplines formed their own groups and regulated the curricula and standards used to decide what constituted valid knowledge in, say, psychology or economics. (The modern university is seen by McNeely and Wolverton as the local form these disciplines take. For example, the real authority in medicine lies with medical journals and associations, not particular medical schools.) Yet until the 19th century, much of their knowledge still resided in texts. With the emergence of the laboratory, and the idea of data gathered via experimentation as the firmest basis for understanding the world, "Reinventing Knowledge" reaches the present day.

McNeely and Wolverton are skeptical about the Internet because they see it not as a way of generating new knowledge (like the laboratory) but as simply a new method of presenting information. The Internet does, however, reorganize the knowledge we already have, and since they've previously defined this as feature of institutions that reinvent knowledge, it's not always clear why it doesn't qualify as well as, say, the monastery. What the Internet doesn't have, and the laboratory definitely does, is authority. "I read it on the Internet" has become a joke about the unreliability of the Web, whereas "Studies show ..." is an imprimatur of legitimacy.

When applied up close, to recent events, McNeely and Wolverton's theory begins to get pretty cloudy, and there may not be much point in arguing whether today's technology is imposing significant changes on how we think about what we know according to their particular formula. Still, contemplating the way people in the past thought about knowledge does illuminate many of our contemporary frustrations with the Internet.

Take, for example, the ancient division between writing and speech. Spoken debate, as perfected by Socrates and his disciples, thrives on conflict and polarities. It is, to use a term beloved of medieval academic Peter Abelard, a dialectic, an inquiry. Aristotle, one of the first philosophers to ground his scholarship in writing, aimed to, in McNeely and Wolverton's words, "synthesize positions represented by contending schools." Correspondingly, there's a long Western tradition that regards writing as more careful, more considered and more authoritative than speech. Writing is supposed to be the end of a long process of thought, not the process itself.

Conversations between strangers on the Internet and postings on blogs -- are they speech or writing? They take the form of text, but they are often as provisional and subjective as speech. And while it would be nice to view the various manifestations of Web 2.0 as a modern-day version of the Republic of Letters, as some idealists are wont to, at the moment all the attention is going to the ways that its users fail to respect "civility, friendship, politeness, generosity, benevolence, and especially tolerance." Nevertheless, collaborative projects in which people all over the world gather and contribute data about the weather or astronomy are going on across the Web at this very moment, and carry on the best of the Republic of Letters tradition. Wikipedia, for all its faults, aims to arrive at a consensus view on every subject people care enough to post about.

The missing piece is the mechanism by which we'll decide the difference between information and knowledge in the future. The closest McNeely and Wolverton come to offering a definition of knowledge is "everything deemed worth knowing," which at first seems a bit tautological. But that, really, is the crux of the matter. Is every minute detail of every permutation of Japanese pop culture worth knowing? To judge by some Wikipedia entries it is. The page for, say, the solemn but essentially silly manga "Death Note" is 10 times longer than, say, the entry for Anthony Trollope's novel "Framley Parsonage." I enjoy both, but have no doubts which is the superior work of art. Even if some "Death Note" fans think my opinion represents the last gasp of a dying paradigm, they probably aren't prepared to allow that Wikipedia entry length is any real arbiter of worth. At any rate, I could devote this afternoon to posting an exhaustive synopsis of the Trollope novel's plot along with summaries of a century's worth of academic papers on it and in the course of a single day "Framley Parsonage" would trounce "Death Note" by that measure.

McNeely and Wolverton state that the Internet's various outlets for self-expression, "if anything, make the pursuit of reliable, authentic knowledge more, not less, difficult online, by drowning out traditionally credentialed cultural gatekeepers. Relatively few networked forums provide a truly democratic alternative to the focused, substantiated, reasoned -- and elitist -- debate that still governs the disciplines." Them's fightin' words to many proponents of Web 2.0, but the truth is that more of us would agree with that statement than not. Most of the people who distrust scientists or the "MSM" on a pet topic or two, like the safety of aspartame or what really happened on Sept. 11, believe them on a host of other things, like the benefits of exercise or the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Without a doubt, we've entered an era when the official truth is easier to challenge than ever before, but do we really want to live in a world without any established truths at all, or where every fact must be democratically elected by a horde of individuals whose judgment may not be informed or trustworthy? Do we want to let the cranks who care enough to make the biggest stink on a subject be the ones to have the final word on it? On the other hand, can we afford to write off all of them as cranks, knowing that every so often a crank turns out to be a prophet? Somehow, we'll have to sort all this out. And when we do, McNeely and Wolverton will have their revolution.

-- By Laura Miller

posted in New Scientist - 0 replies

Anime Eyes!

DevastatorJr — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:36:46 GMT

Anime Eyes

Posted August 9th, 2008 by Steve Levenstein

Great news, ladies! It is now possible to conquer the summit of unrealistic beauty standards: Japanese anime. Plastic surgery can offer a childlike nose and button-popping breasts -- but, for too long, anime aspirants have been unable to claim the genre's big, blinking doll eyes for themselves.

Now, thanks to extra-wide, iris-enlarging contact lenses, watery and reflective anime eyes are available to real women. The contacts, a hit with some of Japan's hottest starlets, come in a rainbow of colors; some even incorporate hearts, stars and butterflies. Shopping Times, a blog that sells the contacts for $35, commands us: "Crave and Envy No More!"

Immediately after learning about this trend on Missbehave, my expression perfectly illustrated why wearing these contacts isn't required for that wide-eyed look: One need only read about them.

posted in New Scientist - 2 replies

Are Dolphins Smart

Micky Duff — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:39:05 GMT

I have heard it said that Dolphins have not been on the planet for long. I have also heard it suggested that they are not that smart, because if they were they would be able to figure out that all they needed to do was to jump over the tuna nets to survive.

posted in New Scientist - 6 replies

Disproof of Global Warming Hype Published

Micky Duff — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 08:46:57 GMT

This article:
http://www.infowars.com/?p=4124

Lord Monckton’s Paper:
http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm

---------------------
R. F. Gay and F. William Engdahl
The Peoples Voice
August 22, 2008

A mathematical proof that there is no “climate crisis” has been published in debate on global warming in Physics and Society, a scientific publication of the 46,000-strong American Physical Society.

Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.

The article, entitled Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered demonstrates that later this century a doubling of the concentration of CO2 compared with pre-industrial levels will increase global mean surface temperature not by the 6 °F predicted by the IPCC but, harmlessly, by little more than 1 °F. Lord Monckton concludes –

“… Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no ‘climate crisis’ at all. … The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chair (2004) of the New England Section of the American Physical Society (APS), has been studying climate-change science for four years. He said:

“I was impressed by an hour-long academic lecture which criticized claims about ‘global warming’ and explained the implications of the physics of radiative transfer for climate change. I was pleased that the audience responded to the informative presentation with a prolonged, standing ovation. That is what happened when, at the invitation of the President of our University, Christopher Monckton lectured here in Hartford this spring. I am delighted that Physics and Society, an APS journal, has published his detailed paper refining and reporting his important and revealing results.

“To me the value of this paper lies in its dispassionate but ruthlessly clear exposition – or, rather, exposé – of the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity. The detailed arguments in this paper, and, indeed, in a large number of other scientific papers, point up extensive errors, including numerous projection errors of climate models, as well as misleading statements by the IPCC. Consequently, there are no rational grounds for believing either the IPCC or any other claims of dangerous anthropogenic ‘global warming’.”

Lord Monckton’s paper reveals that –

* The IPCC’s 2007 climate summary overstated CO2’s impact on temperature by 500-2000%;
* CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;
* Not one of the three key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured directly;
* The IPCC’s values for these key variables are taken from only four published papers, not 2,500;
* The IPCC’s values for each of the three variables, and hence for climate sensitivity, are overstated;
* “Global warming” halted ten years ago, and surface temperature has been falling for seven years;
* Not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted so long and rapid a cooling;
* The IPCC inserted a table into the scientists’ draft, overstating the effect of ice-melt by 1000%;
* It was proved 50 years ago that predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible;
* Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed;
* In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.

-----------------------------
Global Warming gets the Cold Freeze
Global warming hoax exposed by record global cold
by F. William Engdahl

The media and governmental hype over a danger from global warming that already is allegedly causing the polar icecaps to melt and threaten a global climate catastrophe, looks more and more like the political hype it is. This year to date, snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

According to the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) many American cities and towns have suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was - 0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in one hundred years. Temperatures in the normally mild south were low for so long that some middle-sized cities went weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has been hurt as home buyers have stayed home. In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, breaking the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in 1950.

Arctic Ice Melt has Reversed

One of the most dramatic results of the record cold over much of the planet is the reversal of the much-reported melt of the icebergs in the Arctic Ocean. Last autumn the world was alarmed to hear from certain climatologists that the ice in the Arctic had melted to its "lowest levels on record.” What was carefully omitted from those scare stories was the fact that those records only date back as far as 1972, and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

Now, as a result of the recent record cold weather, the ice is back. According to Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

What few people know and what the Global Warming lobby seems at pains to keep known is the fact that there is considerable seasonal variation in how much pack ice of the Arctic ice pack covers the Arctic Ocean. Much of the ocean is also covered in snow for about 10 months of the year. The maximum snow cover is in March or April — about 20 to 50 centimeters over the frozen ocean. The thickness is not one of the universal constants, never was.

Admit flawed Climate Model

There is also admission by several intellectually honest climatologists that their predictive models are flawed. Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona, two very prominent climate modellers, recently admitted that the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (as in the fictional movie The Day After Tomorrow) are wrong. In a recent interview Russell said, “It’s not ice melt, but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of man-made warming on polar ice melt.” Now that’s very interesting.

When professors Toggweiler and Russell reprogrammed their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator, then back towards it again, the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the recent Arctic warming.

Russian climatologists believe recent weather changes around the globe are results of solar activity and not man-made emissions. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, calls the argument for man-made climate change "a drop in the bucket." His research shows that now the recent very active solar activity has entered an inactive phase. He advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

Kenneth Tapping of Canada’s National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon. The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

The Global Warming Geopolitics

The recent Global Warming hysteria is in reality a geopolitical push by leading global elite circles to find a way to get the broader populations to willingly accept drastic cuts in their living standards, something that were it demanded without clear reason by politicians, would spark strikes and protest. The UN’s latest IPCC report on Global Warming calls for diverting a huge 12% of global GDP to “prevent the harmful effects of climate change.” The UN report, for example, estimated that its recommendations to reduce certain manmade emissions would cost about $2,750 per family per year in the price of energy.

Today there are two principal policy options of the Anglo-American power establishment to impose their further control over a world that is rapidly slipping out from under them. We might call them Plan A and Plan B for short.

The first, Plan A, was the option represented by Bush-Cheney and the big oil and military industrial complex behind them. Cheney and his close Houston friend, Matt Simmons, propagated the myth of Peak Oil to lull populations into accepting the inevitability of $100 a barrel or even higher oil prices. In the meantime, the relative strength of the Big Oil and the related US military establishment grew with higher oil prices.

Their global War on Terror provided a cover or pretext to justify military control over the major oil reserves and oil transit passages of the world. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Kosovo, the US and NATO agenda was aimed at future control of the extraordinary economic powers emerging from Russia to China to India to Brazil and Venezuela and beyond. Through China’s effective diplomacy in Africa, many African countries are on the brink of slipping out from under the US or British control into Chinese or more independent status.

If John McCain becomes the next choice of the US power elites to be President, that will signal that that military and oil agenda will escalate, especially as the USA sinks into a severe economic depression in coming months.

The second broad faction of maintaining their control over the greater part of the world economy, Plan B, sees Global Warming and “soft power” as embodied in the organs of the United Nations and IMF and World Bank as the more suitable vehicle to convince people to willingly accept drastic reduction in living standards.

Barack Obama, the apparent choice of the same elites as a “breath of change” to allow them to regroup after the debacle of the Bush-Cheney years, would likely opt for the second faction of the global elite—the Global Warming option to lowering general living standards, ‘Plan B’ of the Anglo-American establishment. In a recent campaign speech in Wallingford Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama replied to a question about Al Gore, the hero of Global Warming. As President, Obama said he would consider putting Al Gore in a Cabinet-level position—or higher. He stated, “I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem. He’s somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I’m already consulting with him in terms of these issues but climate change is real."

The two major global factions

Today there are two major factions within the Western political power establishment internationally. They cooperate and share broad elitist goals, but differ fundamentally on how to reach these goals. Foremost is their goal of sharply controlling global economic growth and population growth. The first faction is best described as the Rockefeller Faction. It has a global power base and is today best represented by the Bush family faction which got their start, as I document in my book, as hired hands for the powerful Rockefeller machine. The Rockefeller faction has for more than a century based its power and influence on control of oil and on use of the military to secure that control. It is personified in the man who is since 2001 de facto President in terms of decision-making—Dick Cheney. Cheney was former CEO of Halliburton Corp., which is both the world’s largest oilfield services company (now based in Dubai for tax reasons), and the world’s largest military base constructor.

The second faction might be called the Soft Power Faction. Their philosophy might be summed up that they think its “possible to kill more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Their preferred path to global population control and lowering of the growth rates in China and elsewhere is through promoting the fraud of global warming and imminent climate catastrophe. Al Gore is linked to this faction. So is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. They see globalist institutions, especially the United Nations, as the best vehicle to advance their agenda of global austerity.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created by the United Nations Environment Programme. Its reports have been demonstrated to be fundamentally flawed in scientific methodology, yet they are aggressively being promoted as revealed truth by the powerful media behind this faction. Others in the circle include billionaire speculator George Soros, parts of the British Royal family and representatives of European “old money.”

With the meteorological evidence of their claims for global warming dissolving as the ice forms anew, it is not surprising that news of the Arctic refreeze and other contrary evidence to their doomsday thesis are kept from mainline international media.

posted in New Scientist - 3 replies

Fred's Footprint: The best solution to climate change

DevastatorJr — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:39:01 GMT

Fred's Footprint: The best solution to climate change

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2008/08/best-solution-to-climate-change.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt11_head_Climate%20change%20fix

What's the best way to fix climate change, to stamp out the emissions that are warming our planet? I don't mean what technology. That's actually coming along quite nicely. I mean what are the international legal and financial levers that can pulled to get the technology, on the scale needed, from the test rigs to the national grids?

Later this month, in Accra, Ghana, the UN's lumbering Kyoto negotiations will have another stab at what to do after 2012. They will come up against the familiar stand-off. On the one hand, is the rich world's reluctance to accept emissions limits that will add to the cost of doing business unless developing countries subscribe to emissions controls. On the other, developing countries utter their familiar (and not unreasonable) cry: "You caused the problem; you fix it."

The answer has been staring us in the face for a while now. And more and more people - from business to politics to the greens - are catching on. It has an inelegant name: contraction and convergence (C&C).

It works like this. The world needs to contract emissions by more than half by the middle of the century. It's do-able and it won't wreck the world economy. (Bankers on a spree are far better at doing that.)

But there will be some pain. The only way of sharing out that pain fairly is for everyone to take on emissions targets, but targets that are fair because they are based on a basic parameter of need. That is: population size.

So every country should head towards annual emissions proportionate to its population. Most would have to reduce their emissions; but some of the poorest countries could raise them. That's the convergence part of the formula.

Of course, to ease the pain and make investment more efficiently, there would be massive carbon trading in the same way as is already allowed for under the Kyoto Protocol.

It's simple and it's obvious. Tony Blair's shuttling climate diplomats get it. Nicholas Stern, author of the groundbreaking report on the economic perils of climate change back in 2006, gets it. In Washington and Paris and New Delhi, some influential figures get it. "It's where we will need to end up, of course, even if we can't quite work out how to get there," one UN leading negotiator told me recently.

Why doesn't the world admit it and get on with it? Surprisingly, one reason is the long-term opposition of most environmental groups to the plan. I find this baffling and dispiriting.

Why the hostility? One reason seems to be that it is the brainchild of a maverick and sometimes truculent campaigner living in London called Aubrey Meyer.

So the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth can't claim ownership. And even the more radical climate campaigners - like the Guardian syndicated op-ed writer and blogger George Monbiot - have got cold feet.

Monbiot, a former supporter of C&C, has recently started publicly backing a proposal from his old mate Oliver Tickell, called Kyoto2, which would set up an international agency to control not emissions of greenhouse gases but the production of fossil fuels themselves.

Well, I can see why politically he wants to take on the fossil-fuel leviathans. But the beauty of contraction and convergence is that it doesn't require a global fossil-fuel autocracy; it is transparent, self-evidently fair and tackles the problem, not a surrogate.

If climate change is the central challenge for the world in the 21st century, then C&C is the most, perhaps the only, viable long-term solution on which there can ever be international agreement.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

posted in New Scientist - 93 replies

Smart plankton to 'see' underwater

DevastatorJr — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:51:17 GMT

Smart plankton to 'see' underwater

16:00 21 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
David Robson

Plankton may be thought of as lowly creatures. But gadgets that copy their drifter lifestyle could improve our understanding of the world's oceans.

Italian researchers are working on "smart plankton", which will carry sensors and communicate using flashing lights. Released in groups, they could drift through the ocean collecting data.
This is a watery take on an idea dubbed "smart dust", already used to monitor environmental conditions on land and tipped to transform extra-planetary exploration.

The smart dust model uses many small, cheap sensors that communicate wirelessly to track environmental conditions over wide areas.
Davide Brizzolara says that using a similar approach in the oceans will provide greater coverage than static underwater sensors do, and would be cheaper than using autonomous underwater vehicles. He is developing the smart plankton with colleagues at SmartLab at the University of Genoa, Italy.

Underwater eyesThe team hope that smart plankton swarms containing thousands of individuals will help environmental monitoring, underwater archaeological surveys and mine detection.

Each sensor will collect data such as water temperature or salinity as it moves with the ocean currents. Information will be relayed from plankton to plankton back to a fixed hub on a floating buoy that collates the data.

Smart dust on land communicates using radio waves. But underwater, such a signal cannot penetrate more than a metre or so. Instead, inspired by photo-luminescent plankton, Brizzolara's current design uses flashing LEDs to send messages.
Colour changingThe researchers found that visible wavelengths of light are scattered less by underwater particles, such as real plankton and sediment than radio waves are. The best wavelength to use varies depending on the size of the particles, so our plankton will be adaptable, says Brizzolara.

"If the communication bit rate falls below a certain rate it can switch to another colour, to see if the communication improves." This should allow nodes up to 10 metres apart to communicate at bit rates around 1 gigabit per second - similar to a home broadband connection.
Measuring the delay will also allow an estimate of the distance between nodes and the fixed buoy. The team is currently working on a large proof-of-principle prototype roughly 20 cm in diameter, but plan to reduce the size to smaller than 2 cm per unit.
The plankton will draw power from small piezoelectric flags that flutter in the surrounding water and produce voltage as they move.
Super-size planktonBut the model plankton may not need to be shrunk, says John Barker from the University of Glasgow, UK, who is developing smart dust for exploring other planets such as Mars.

"The advantage of the plankton model is that the swarm could drift on real currents and retrieve information on temperature and salinity in physically important regions. There is no need to make it small."

However, he points out the smart plankton still needs considerable development and testing before they are ready for their first dip.
A paper on smart plankton was presented at Alife Conference in Winchester, UK earlier this month.

posted in New Scientist - 0 replies

Elephants master basic mathematics

DevastatorJr — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:50:03 GMT

Elephants master basic mathematics

12:10 20 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway

Add elephants to the growing menagerie of animals that can count.

An Asian elephant named Ashya beat this reporter at a devilishly simple addition problem. When a trainer dropped three apples into one bucket and one apple into a second, then four more apples in the first and five more in the second, the pachyderm recognised that three plus four is greater than one plus five, and snacked on the seven apples. (In my defence, I watched the video in a noisy and crowded auditorium.)

"I even get confused when I'm dropping the bait," says Naoko Irie, a researcher at the University of Tokyo, Japan, who uncovered the elephant's inner genius. She presented her findings last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology's annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.

Moreover, Irie found that as well as summing small numbers with almost 90% accuracy, elephants can discriminate between small numbers.

That's not so surprising, considering that animals from salamanders to pigeons to chimpanzees can discern numerical values. But all animals, including humans when forced to make split-second decisions, are best at telling apart two quantities when the ratio between the large and small number is greatest.

Spot the difference
Not so for elephants, Irie says. The four that she tested distinguished between five and six apples as well as they did between five and one. They picked the bucket with the most fruit 74% of the time, on average, far above 50-50.

"It really is tough to figure out why [elephants] would need to count," says Mya Thompson, an ecologist at Cornell University who studies elephants and attended Irie's talk. Asian elephants live in close-knit groups of six to eight, and they may count one another to make sure the herd sticks to together. "You really don't want to lose your group members," she says.

Alternatively, the mathematical prowess of elephants may be a side effect of their bulging brains and an evolutionary kinship to other "smart" animals, Irie says.

Evolution - Learn more about the struggle to survive in our comprehensive special report.

posted in New Scientist - 0 replies

Gluttony - not laziness - to blame for obesity

DevastatorJr — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:52:46 GMT

Gluttony - not laziness - to blame for obesity

11:15 19 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Tamsin Osborne

Greed - not sloth - might be responsible for the obesity epidemic, according to research showing that we're doing just as much physical activity as we were in the early 1980s.

An increasingly inactive lifestyle is often blamed for the soaring obesity rates in the developed world, but few studies have measured whether lifestyle changes have decreased the amount of energy we burn.

To address this, John Speakman of the University of Aberdeen, UK, and Klaas Westerterp of Maastricht University in the Netherlands looked at the amount of energy used through physical activity over the past 25 years in 393 people from across the US and 366 from Maastricht.

In these subjects, energy expenditure has been measured since 1982 using a technique called the "doubly labelled water method", which measures the throughput of water labelled with isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen. By comparing the daily energy expenditure in the early 1980s with current data, the researchers showed that there has been no significant decline in the energy the people studied burned through physical activity.

The obesity epidemic had already started by 1982, but Speakman argues that people have always been fairly inactive during the evenings, and that although activities such as watching TV and playing computer games might be relatively new, they have not affected overall energy expenditure.

"Prior to widespread TV ownership we probably spent this time listening to the radio, before that reading, and before electrical lights were discovered we would have been asleep," he says.

If we are not less active, then we must be eating more food, suggesting that trying to increase our energy expenditure through physical activity may not be the best way of tackling obesity.

"If we want to reverse the obesity epidemic it would be much better to focus on trying to decrease caloric intake," says Speakman.

But Paul Zimmet of Monash University in Victoria, Australia, warns that a complex problem like obesity requires a complex solution. "Addressing the current obesity epidemic requires an integrated approach over and above modifying energy intake," he says.

Journal reference: International Journal of Obesity (DOI:10.1038/ijo.2008.74)

posted in New Scientist - 1 reply

Herbivores eat away at climate-change predictions

DevastatorJr — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:50:26 GMT

Herbivores eat away at climate-change predictions
22:00 18 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
David Robson

Large herbivores are likely to have a bigger influence on the fate of our planet than we thought.

Current climate simulations predict an increase in shrub-like vegetation in northern regions as the world heats up, and these plants should absorb some of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help buffer further temperature increase. Now it seems that grazers are set to eat this potential carbon sponge.

These climate models assume that in a warmer climate, shrubs, which capture and store carbon in their woody stems, will replace grasses as the most common type of vegetation. Wood stores carbon for longer than grasses, which have leafy stems that tend to decompose more quickly.

"Woody plants suck carbon out of the atmosphere as they grow," says Eric Post from Penn State University in Pennsylvania. "But they get beaten back pretty severely by large animals."

To investigate, Post placed 25 squat, glass cones in West Greenland. These had open tops that allow caribou and muskoxen to graze over the sides and glass to prevent a breeze from blowing across the ground, trapping warm air to mimic the effects of global warming. Of the 25 cones, 12 were fenced off from grazing animals.

Overestimate
Post measured the amount of shrub-like vegetation, such as dwarf birch and willow trees, in the area over 5 years. As expected, shrub biomass increased by 85% in the warmed areas compared with control areas. But the caribou and muskoxen reduced this increase by 19% in unfenced areas.

Post hasn't yet plugged his data into a climate simulation, and he suggests the true impact may be hard to predict, since he has only studied one area with just two species of grazers. In addition, it's currently not clear how the populations of grazing animals will change with global warming. But as a conservative guess he suggests previous models may have overestimated the global "carbon sponge" effect of vegetation by 10%.

Peter Convey, a climatologist from the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, agrees that it's difficult to estimate exactly what effect this could have on future climate simulations.

"As soon as you kick an ecosystem, it's difficult to know exactly how it will respond. But biological systems are poorly represented in climate models - anything that improves the accuracy is positive," he says.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0802421105)

posted in New Scientist - 0 replies