58249433
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Earth's changing climate is already having an impact on ecosystems, agriculture, coastal infrastructure and a host of other human and natural systems. And a host of serious risks await as global warming intensifies, although nascent efforts are underway to adapt and prepare for a hotter, more uncompromising planet. Those are the take away messages of a major new report released today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international group of scientists convened by United Nations to report on the science and policy implications of a changing climate every seven years or so.
Weighing in at more than 2000 pages, the tome encompasses the work of 309 authors and reviewers, aided by more than 400 so-called contributing authors. The scientists needed all the help they could get: the number of scientific publications assessing climate impacts, vulnerability, or adaptation "more than doubled" between 2005 and 2010. More than 1700 reviewers from the government, academic, or nonprofit sector offered comments on draft report, which assessed literature published up until last summer.
58201381
submission
sciencehabit writes:
For centuries, scientists have debated whether Australia’s native canine, the dingo, is its own species or merely a type of wolf or dog. Now, based on physical and genetic evidence, a team of scientists is making the case that the dingo is a unique species that deserves protection under Australia’s federal conservation laws. If they can’t convince governments and landholders, the dingo may be doomed.
58133345
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Astronomers have detected a small world more than twice as remote as Pluto, lying 12 billion kilometers, or 83 AU, from the sun. The new object is the first ever found whose orbit resembles that of Sedna, a far-off body that never gets close to Neptune's path. The new world is roughly 450 kilometers across, just one-fifth Pluto's diameter. Both Sedna and its small sidekick probably belong to the inner part of the Oort cloud, the frigid reservoir of long-period comets that can dazzle us when they dash toward the sun, and suggest that many other far-flung objects await discovery.
58133289
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Even before astronomers pointed their telescopes at a dim star over Chile last June, they knew it would darken for a few seconds as an asteroid passed in front of it. What they didn’t expect were two brief flickers a few seconds beforehand and afterward, suggesting that the asteroid was encircled by Saturn-like rings. The find is the first evidence for such rings around anything in our solar system other than a giant planet.
58086627
submission
sciencehabit writes:
The scorching colors of a large volcanic blast can stain sunsets around the world for years after the initial eruption cools down. Now researchers have shown that artist's inspired by these scenes may have left clues to past climate in their paintings. Scientists compared the proportion of red and green hues in the skies of hundreds of sunset paintings produced between 1500 and 2000. Regardless of artistic style, paintings created soon after volcanic eruptions had redder skies than those painted during periods of low volcanic activity. The researchers say their results agree with other indicators of historic atmospheric pollutant levels, such as ice cores. Because these existing indicators provide limited evidence for short-term trends due to their scarcity, the scientists hope their work provides climate scientists a colorful new spectrum of data to fill in the gaps.
58086499
submission
sciencehabit writes:
When we think about the mammoth, we picture the 3-meter-high, 6-ton beast roaming northern Europe in imposing herds, fending off human hunters with their dangerous tusks. We don’t imagine genetically deformed creatures stumbling through a doomed landscape, going to desperate lengths to stay alive in a rapidly changing world. But now, an unusual feature on some mammoth fossils dredged from the North Sea suggests that inbreeding may have hastened the mammoth’s extinction 10,000 years ago.
58069275
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Gonorrhea passes from person to person thanks to some clever hitchhiking. Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes the sexually transmitted disease, shoots cables—called pili—onto proteins in the semen to tow themselves through coital liquid. The pili are normally wrapped in bundles, but when exposed to seminal fluid, they unwind into individual strands. This exposes more grappling hooks for transport, boosting the bacteria’s ability to invade by as much as 24-fold. Drugs that unhook gonorrhea’s pili may yield new antibacterials that stymie the transmission of this STD, which infects 100 million people per year.
58063745
submission
sciencehabit writes:
In the latest twist in the story of STAP cells, a new kind of stem cell described in two Nature papers in January, a scientist is live-blogging his latest attempt to generate the cells. The papers described how subjecting cells from newborn mice to a mildly acidic solution turned them into pluripotent stem cells, the sought-after cells that can become all the body’s cell types. Kenneth Ka-Ho Lee, a stem cell researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has already tried once to make the cells, following the methods published in Nature in January. That attempt failed, which Lee documented publicly on the website ResearchGate. The lack of success mirrors other reports from scientists around the world in the weeks since the papers were published, despite a more detailed set of methods posted by some of the authors on 5 March. Today, Lee posted in the comment section of his ResearchGate review that he had set up a team of four lab members to do the experiments. They will live blog the research, and promise frequent updates.
57956363
submission
sciencehabit writes:
After a massive, years-long search, researchers have recovered seven interstellar dust particles returned to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft. The whole sample weighs just a few trillionths of a gram, but it’s the first time scientists have laid their hands on primordial material unaltered by the violent birth of the solar system.
Once the sample panel was back on Earth, the problem quickly became finding any collected particles embedded in the aerogel. Out of desperation, Stardust team members called on 30,714 members of the general public. The “dusters” of the Stardust@home project volunteered to examine microscopic images taken down through the aerogel. They used the world’s best pattern-recognition system—the human eye and brain—to pick out the telltale tracks left by speeding particles.
57917537
submission
sciencehabit writes:
In June 2012, three men removing slag from a derelict copper mine in southwestern China fell ill with severe pneumonia and died. Six months later, researchers went spelunking in the mine—an artificial cave hewn from a hillside—in search of pathogens. After taking anal swabs from bats, rats, and musk shrews living in the cave, the team has discovered what it says is a new virus that may have felled the workers.
57915977
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Scientists have found that iron-rich dust floating on the wind fell into the sea at multiple times during Earth's history, sparking various ice ages. The iron nourished marine organisms that suck carbon dioxide from the air. Over time, so much of this greenhouse gas disappeared from the atmosphere that the planet began to cool--in some cases, causing an ice age.
57915933
submission
sciencehabit writes:
A rose, a fresh cup of coffee, a wood fire. These are only three of the roughly 1 trillion scents that the human nose and brain are capable of distinguishing from each other, according to a new study. Researchers had previously estimated that humans could sense only about 10,000 odors but the number had never been explicitly tested before.
57909163
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Using a single pollinated pine seed, researchers have sequenced the entire genome of the loblolly pine tree--and it's a doozy. The tree's genome is largest ver sequenced: 22.18 billion base pairs, more than seven times longer than the human genome. The team found that 82% of the genome was made up of duplicated segments, compared with just 25% in humans. The researchers also identified genes responsible for important traits such as disease resistance, wood formation, and stress response.
57889573
submission
sciencehabit writes:
A newly described dinosaur might look like a chicken, but don’t be fooled: It was nearly 4 meters long, weighed about 250 kilograms, and lived 66 million years ago in what is today the Hell Creek rock formation in North and South Dakota. That’s why its discoverers are calling it the “chicken from hell,” and indeed it was related to early birds and to feathered, birdlike dinos that brooded over their nests, such as Oviraptor. The creature had a toothless beak, sharp claws, and a tall crest on top of its head. It is the largest Oviraptor-like dinosaur found in North America.
57848861
submission
sciencehabit writes:
After decades of searching, NASA scientists have detected the veil of dust kicked up by tiny meteoroid impacts on the moon. The Apollo astronauts and many spacecraft had tried to detect sunlight reflected from the dust and failed. So, instead, the scientists of the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft used an onboard instrument that detects micrometer-size dust particles when they hit the instrument at several thousand kilometers per hour and vaporize. Orbiting the moon as low as a few tens of kilometers above the surface, LADEE detected a dust impact every minute or two on average except when a meteoroid shower hitting the moon kicked up many more times the debris. Researchers should be able to use these LADEE observations to see whether the impact debris blown off the moons of Pluto will present a hazard to the New Horizons spacecraft when it flies by the ice dwarf planet in July of next year.
