Wendy Science

Parrotfish munching on algae ingest coral and then eliminate the rocky substrate, creating island-building grade sediment in places like the Maldives. Julia Rosen reports. By | | The form a constellation of almost 1,200 coral reef islands in the Indian Ocean. They have stunning white sand beaches surrounded by emerald blue water. And according to a new study, they may owe their existence to . More specifically: to parrotfish poop. C.T. Perry et al, , in ] If you’ve ever snorkeled near a coral reef, you’ve probably seen neon-colored parrotfish. Their name refers to their sharp, beak-like teeth. You may have heard them too. [Scraping sound] That’s a parrotfish literally eating the reef’s coral skeleton. It bites off tiny pieces of hard coral as it forages for algae. “That gets taken into the fish. It’s then milled. And it passes through their intestines and it’s then excreted out the back end as clouds of sediment.” Chris Perry, a marine geoscientist at the University of Exeter in...

(Raises death toll to 24) By Lisa Maria Garza and Jim Forsyth DALLAS/SAN ANTONIO, May 30 (Reuters) - Rain caused flooding on roads in parts of Texas on Saturday, an official said, after severe weather killed at least 24 people during the week and prompted U.S. May 31, 2015 | (Raises death toll to 24) By Lisa Maria Garza and Jim Forsyth DALLAS/SAN ANTONIO, May 30 (Reuters) - Rain caused flooding on roads in parts of Texas on Saturday, an official said, after severe weather killed at least 24 people during the week and prompted U.S. President Barack Obama to declare a disaster in the state. Texas has endured record rainfall in May. This week, flooding turned streets into rivers, ripped homes off foundations, swept over thousands of vehicles and trapped people in cars and houses. Obama signed a disaster declaration late on Friday to free up federal funds to help rebuild areas of Texas slammed by the storms. No estimate has been given for the damage in Texas. The bodies of two wom...

The soccer world is abuzz with the allegations that officials at FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) engaged in racketeering, money laundering and other criminal activities. Officials at FIFA engaged in a "24-year scheme to enrich themselves through the corruption of international soccer," according to a statement released by the United States Department of Justice on May 27. But while it's tempting to blame such activities on weak morals, research shows that corruption—or abuse of power for private gain—is far more complicated, said Marina Zaloznaya, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Iowa. Corruption can span large groups—such as organizations or even the populations of entire nations—if the majority of the people within them find bribery and other forms of corruption to be commonplace, Zaloznaya said. [ ] Organizations with widespread corruption typically develop cultures that justify and encourage corruption, often so muc...

Modern-day alligators may illustrate how dinosaurs went from two-legged to four By | | Alligators hyperextend their digits when they walk with their body raised from the ground. All dinosaurs once pranced, strolled or lumbered about on two legs. But some took to occasionally resting or running on all fours for greater stability and over time evolved into quadrupeds. During the transition, the forelimbs were shorter than the hind limbs, raising the question of how the intermediate animals leveled out the tilted stance from those stubby appendages: Did they walk on their “fingertips” or their palms? New research suggests the latter—some early dinosaurs and their close relatives may have stepped straight down on the front of their palms. Dinosaurs are closely related to alligators' ancestors and consequently share many structural features with gators. So biologist Joel Hutson and geologist Kelda Hutson compared the forelimb mechanics of alligators with fossils from Postosuchus—a r...

Two volcanic islands that were recently born in the Red Sea are providing scientists with new information about a rift in Earth's crust By and | | Two volcanic islands recently born in the Red Sea have yielded stunning images, providing scientists with new insights about a little-known rift in Earth's crust. Both islands emerged in the , a small chain of volcanic islands, owned by Yemen, that rise from the Red Sea between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The first of the new islands, now called Sholan Island, appeared in December 2011. The second island, called Jadid, surfaced in September 2013. The Red Sea is an enormous crack in the Earth's crust called a rift, where the African and Arabian tectonic plates are tearing apart at about 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) per year. At a rift, the crust stretches apart slowly over centuries, like a piece of taffy candy, but it also sometimes suddenly splits when the strain becomes too great. For instance, in 2005, in nearby Afar,...

How much do you trust the weather forecast? Is it enough to attempt to fly an and five nights across the Pacific Ocean, when even a single stray storm could be enough to destroy the craft? There is no alternative airport, so any mishap means ditching the electric airplane in the sea. Andre Borschberg and Betrand Piccard, the two pilots of the , think forecasts are good enough for Borschberg to take off from Nanjing in China to Honolulu on May 31. Borschberg will take this first leg to Hawaii and then, assuming all goes well, Piccard will take over for the final Pacific crossing from Honolulu to Phoenix in coming weeks.   "Once in the air, you're stuck," Piccard explains. "I had this vision 16 years ago of an . Now it's the moment of truth to see if this vision is realistic or completely impossible." . is an adventure you do with the forces of nature — Bertrand PICCARD (@bertrandpiccard) The primary challenge will be energy. The airplane has to to ...

Explosive geysers of material that shoot away from black holes at nearly the speed of light seem to form more often in galaxies that are the product of two galaxies merging together By and | | This artist's impression illustrates how high-speed jets from a supermassive black hole would look. More on this Topic Powerful jets of material spewing from the edge of monster black holes may be more likely to arise where two galaxies have merged together, a new study suggests. Like a cosmic version of Old Faithful (the famous Yellowstone geyser), some black holes at the center of galaxies will spew jets of material into space that stretch for thousands of light-years. You can see an illustration of what these gushing pillars look like in a . Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, new research suggests these jets are more likely to be found in galaxies that are the product of galaxy mergers. However, the authors of the research say merging two galaxies isn't always a recipe...

Astronomers worldwide are focusing on Pluto, in anticipation of a July 14 flyby of the dwarf planet by NASA's New Horizons probe  By and | | With naked eye and binoculars, locate Pluto in relation to the well-known "teapot" asterism of Sagittarius. It is close to the stars Chi2 and Omicron Sagittarii, just north of the "handle" of the teapot. More on this Topic With NASA's New Horizons probe zeroing in on Pluto, due to pass it on July 14, attention of astronomers all over the world is focusing in on Pluto. Let's leave aside the question of whether is the smallest planet in the solar system or the largest of the Kuiper Belt Objects, and agree that whatever we call it, the distant world is an interesting and mysterious member of our planetary family. Many amateur astronomers are interested in with their own telescopes, and this is what we will discuss here. Pluto is at present around 14th magnitude, requiring a telescope with at least 8 inches (20...

The link between cardiovascular problems and depression starts young By | | Heart disease and depression often go hand in hand. Long-term studies have found that people with depression have a significantly higher risk of subsequent heart disease, and vice versa. Recent research has revealed that the link begins at an early age and is probably caused by chronic inflammation. A new study in the November 2014 issue of by researchers in the U.S., Australia and China examined data from an ongoing study of health among Australians. The researchers looked at the scores of 865 young adults on a questionnaire that assesses depression symptoms and other measures of mental health. They also examined measurements of the internal diameter of the blood vessels of the retina, a possible marker of early cardiovascular disease. After controlling for sex, age, smoking status and body mass index, the investigators found that participants with more symptoms of depression and anxiety had wider retinal ...

Martin Rees, astrophysicist and founding member of the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, talks differentiating sci-fi from real doomsday possibilities By | | This year the Doomsday Clock moved forward for the first time since 2012. The theoretical countdown to catastrophe was devised 67 years ago by the , a watchdog group created in 1945 by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. Its contemporary caretakers have inched the clock three minutes closer to midnight based on the threats of climate change and a slowdown in disarmament. But global warming and nuclear malaise are not the only threats facing humanity. One organization is looking at the potential threats posed by emerging technologies—dangers no one has even considered yet. The Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge, founded in 2012, develops scientific methodologies for evaluating new global risks—to determine, for example, if a scenario in which robots take over the ea...

A heritage committee of the UNESCO cultural agency raised long-term concerns about the reef's future May 29, 2015 | PARIS, May 30 (Reuters) - A heritage committee of the UNESCO cultural agency stopped short of placing Australia's Great Barrier Reef on an "in danger" list, but the ruling on Friday raised long-term concerns about its future. The long-awaited ruling by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee welcomed Australian efforts to maintain the environmentally sensitive region but noted its outlook was "poor" and called on the government to stick rigidly to commitments to protect it. "Climate change, poor water quality and impacts from coastal development are major threats to the property's health...," the statement said after delegates held discussions in the German city in Bonn. Busy shipping lanes pass through the area and commercial ships are required to hire a special "reef pilot" to navigate through it. Australia this ...

A new study suggests the long-held industry assumption that bisphenol-A breaks down safely in the human body is incorrect. Instead, researchers say, the body transforms the ubiquitous chemical additive into a compound that might spur obesity. The study is the first to find that people’s bodies metabolize bisphenol-A (BPA) — a chemical found in most people and used in polycarbonate plastic, food cans and paper receipts — into something that impacts our cells and may make us fat. “This shows we can’t just say things like ‘because it’s a metabolite, it means it’s not active’,” said Laura Vandenberg, an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was not involved in the study. “You have to do a study.” People are exposed to BPA throughout the day, mostly through diet, as it can leach from canned goods and plastic storage containers into food, but also through dust and water. Within about 6 hours of exposure, our liver metabolizes about hal...

Apr 9, 2015 | iStockphoto Hani Freeman , a research fellow in animal behavior at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida, answers: Evidence indicates that some nonhuman primates can be introverts or extraverts. In humans, introverts tend to spend more time alone focusing on their thoughts and less time engaging in group activities, whereas extraverts are often gregarious and enjoy interacting with their peers. Nonhuman primates also exhibit such qualities. Recent studies have identified extraversion/introversion in great apes, including chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Chimps exhibiting greater solitary and reserved behaviors are considered more introverted, whereas those that are more playful and interactive fall on the extraverted side of the spectrum. Extraversion/introversion behaviors, such as sociability, have also been identified in species of monkeys. It is important to note that we are limited in our ability to interpret the behavior of nonhuman primates. Apes can le...

If you are looking for some quiet zones in America, then this map is for you. National Park Service researchers recorded and mapped ambient sound from all over the country.   Click here for a... -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Books and recommendations from By | | How to Bake π: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics Basic Books, 2015 (($27.50)) “The world of math is more weird and wonderful than some people want to tell you,” writes Cheng, a mathematician at the University of Sheffield in England. Invoking plenty of examples from cooking and baking, as well as other everyday-life situations such as calculating a taxi fare, searching for love through online dating services and training for a marathon, she explains abstract mathematical ideas—including topology and logic—in understandable ways. Cheng's specialty is category theory, which she describes as “the mathematics of mathematics”—a way to organize and understand the many rules and processes that govern math. Her lively, accessible book demonstrates how important and intriguing such a pursuit can be. see also:

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — In an industrial section of a San Francisco Bay Area suburb, the sleek new office building of Genentech, a biotechnology firm, opened last week. The company knows it will be energy efficient because it is the first project to take advantage of a cutting-edge efficiency testing facility that was developed last year in nearby Berkeley. "Building 35" was developed on a rotating test bed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to model real-life conditions as closely as possible. Lighting, ventilation and shading in the 255,000-square-foot building have all been adjusted based on months of experiments in a mocked-up office with sensors to measure temperature, glare and energy use. First impressions of the building, however, come from a coffee bar in the airy atrium with kombucha on draft, massage chairs off the lobby and Herman Miller desks that raise and lower at the touch of a button. More subtle are the green couch cushions and the metal fins o...

A DNA-based vaccine gave rats six months of protection against high blood pressure, as well as healthier hearts. Christopher Intagliata reports. By | | Some have . Three quarters of them to keep the condition in check. But you've got to remember to actually the daily dose. Now researchers have devised a longer-lasting alternative: a to lower blood pressure…for rats, at least. Scientists jabbed hypertensive rats with three doses of the formulation. It's a DNA vaccine—containing DNA fragments from angiotensin II—a hormone that boosts blood pressure, as well as fragments from hepatitis B, to guarantee the immune system’s attention. Cells suck up the vaccine's DNA, and start pumping out the proteins the DNA codes for. When the host’s defenses gets a whiff of the proteins, it reacts. It really revs up against the hepatitis B fragments. And while it’s at it, it starts taking out some angiotensin II as well.   The result is a reduction in angiotensin II's usual blood pr...

Computer scientists have endowed a six-legged robot with the ability to rapidly modify its motion to cope with damage, such as the loss of a foot. They say the algorithm that enables this recovery, which they liken to an instinct, could add resilience to other machines, from   such as the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant to  . Although robots can be pre-programmed with contingency plans, there will always be problems that engineers had not foreseen or that they cannot diagnose from a distance. “We want to have robots that can be useful for a long period of time, without humans to perform maintenance,” says Jean-Baptiste Mouret, an artificial-intelligence researcher at France's national computer science agency INRIA in Villers-lès-Nancy, who led the work, which is published in  today. In pioneering work in 2006, evolutionary roboticist Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont in Burlington and his team built a six-legged robot that   and calcul...

Books and recommendations from By | | Choosing between colleges or job offers is challenging: one job may offer more prestige—seemingly the logical choice—but our gut seems to be pulling us in another direction. So which do we trust? In Feeling Smart: Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think (PublicAffairs, 2014), economics professor Eyal Winter proposes that the best choices often come when we combine logic and emotion. Combining research on decision making, human behavior and evolution, Winter explores how our emotions interact with rational thinking. He finds that we can often trust our gut instincts to lead us to good choices and that our emotional reactions can work in our favor. In one study conducted by Winter, he found that our inclination to become angry actually increases when we can benefit from the emotion. “In other words,” he writes, “there is logic in emotion and often emotion in logic.” Often, however, we are faced with group, not individual, decisions that ...

Defendants whose convictions on drug charges were based on evidence potentially tainted by can pursue retrials without having to face more charges or tougher sentences, the  . Dookhan, who has acknowledged that she mixed evidence samples and falsified results while working at the Hinton drug laboratory in Massachusetts, was   in November 2013. The court’s opinion stated that any withdrawal of a guilty plea should be seen as a direct result of Dookhan’s misconduct. As a result, anyone convicted using potentially tainted evidence cannot be tried as if the original plea agreement never existed, so their sentence cannot be increased. Jake Wark, a spokesperson for the Suffolk County, Massachusetts District Attorney’s office, claims that the new ruling could lead to a wave of new trials for defendants who unequivocally admitted their guilt based on reliable evidence. ‘In a great many cases, defendants who have every option to request new testing of the substances identified a...

There are four basic properties of sets that beginning analysis and topology students see: , compact, and connected. Of those properties, it seems like connectedness should be the easiest. has a pretty clear meaning in English. But it's surprisingly difficult to get the mathematical definition just right. The topologist's sine curve is one of the that helps illuminate exactly what it means to be connected. As a regular English word, we usually think of connectedness as a property of two things: A and B are connected if they overlap in some way or if you can get from A to B. In mathematics, connectedness is a property of one set. How do we make the English idea mathematical and apply it to one object? One tempting definition is that a set is connected if you can get from one point in the set to any other point in the set. But what about duplexes? You can walk between rooms in the same unit of a duplex, but you can’t get from one unit to the other one without leaving the duplex...

U.S. personnel working at an Army facility in Utah appeared to follow correctly all the outlined procedures to inactivate anthrax before they mistakenly shipped off live samples of the deadly bacteria May 28, 2015 | By Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. personnel working at an Army facility in Utah appeared to follow correctly all the outlined procedures to inactivate anthrax before they mistakenly shipped off live samples of the deadly bacteria, the Army's top general said on Thursday. Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno said investigators were now reviewing the procedures themselves to determine why the bacteria was not rendered inactive. "The best I can tell there was not human error," Odierno told reporters, cautioning that his information was based solely on preliminary reports. U.S. officials disclosed on Wednesday that U.S. Army facilities mistakenly shipped live anthrax bacteria to laboratories in nine states and an air base in South Korea. ...

The El Niño event underway in the Pacific Ocean is impacting temperature and weather patterns around the world. But its effects aren’t confined to the atmosphere: A new study has found that the cyclical climate phenomenon can ratchet up sea levels off the West Coast by almost 8 inches over just a few seasons. The findings have important implications in terms of planning for sea level rise, as ever-growing coastal communities might have to plan for even higher ocean levels in a warmer future. In California alone, some $40 billion of property and nearly 500,000 people could be affected by the sea level rise expected through mid-century, not including any additional boost from El Niño events. “This paper is an important reminder that we cannot neglect interannual sea level variability and we need a quantitative understanding of its impact,”  , an oceanographer with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) said in an email. Sea surface temper...

Black balls that litter the planet may prove the best marker for a new geologic epoch recognizing humanity's outsized impacts By | | Fire ranks among humanity's . Now the residue from all the oil and coal burned to power modern civilization may provide the best marker for the start of a new geologic epoch that highlights s world-changing impact, known as the , or "new age of humans." "We're actually changing and continuing to change how the Earth system functions and leaving time," says Earth scientist Karen Bacon of the University of Leeds in England. "That's quite incredible to think about." The proposed marker is billions of microscopic black balls found from the high arctic to the bottoms of lakes in Chile. When a flame eats into the hydrocarbons known as coal or oil, not all the carbon atoms pair up with the oxygen that makes fire and carbon dioxide emissions possible. Some of that carbon remains bonded tightly to its fellow carb...

A collaboration with Matter State Route 87, the thin band of pavement that approaches the mostly shuttered town of Coolidge, Ariz., cuts through some of the least hospitable land in the country. The valley of red and brown sand is interrupted occasionally by rock and saguaro cactus. It’s not unusual for summer temperatures to top 116 degrees. And there is almost no water; this part of Arizona receives less than nine inches of rainfall each year. Then Route 87 tacks left and the dead landscape springs to life. Barren roadside is replaced by thousands of acres of cotton fields, their bright, leafy green stalks and white, puffy bolls in neat rows that unravel for miles. It’s a vision of bounty where it would be least expected. Step into the hip-high cotton shrubs, with the soft, water-soaked dirt giving way beneath your boot soles, the bees buzzing in your ears, the pungent odor of the plants in your nostrils, and you might as well be in Georgia. Getting plants to grow in the Sonoran D...