Protect our health, Stop Monsanto. 120,014 have signed. Let's get to 1,000,000 Top scientists warn the most commonly used herbicide in the world probably causes cancer! Monsanto is demanding the World Health Organisation retract their ground-breaking report. And experts say the only way to ensure the science is not silenced is if the public demands action, now. The regulatory system is renowned for being secretive and captured by the agro-chemical industry. The threat is clear -- this poison is used on our food, our fields, our playgrounds, and our streets. Join the urgent call on the right and tell everyone. Sources. 5 Epic Drone Flying Failures—and What the FAA Is Doing to Prevent Future Mishaps. Scientific American sur Twitter : "Sugar beets are the latest veggie found able to produce the protein hemoglobin. #science.
Sugar Beets Make Hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is best known as red blood cells' superstar protein—carrying oxygen and other gases on the erythrocytes as they zip throughout the bodies of nearly all vertebrates. Less well known is its presence in vegetables, including the sugar beet, in which Nélida Leiva-Eriksson recently discovered the protein while working on her doctoral thesis at Lund University in Sweden.
In fact, many land plants—from barley to tomatoes—contain the protein, says Raúl Arredondo-Peter, an expert on the evolution of plant hemoglobins, or leghemoglobins, at the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos in Mexico. “Hemoglobins are very ancient proteins,” he notes. Scientists first discovered them in the bright-red nodules of soybean roots in 1939 but have yet to determine the proteins' role in plants in most cases. Researchers are now investigating ways to leverage leghemoglobins. The Neandertal Mystique. For the cover story of the February Scientific American I return to one of my favorite subjects: our mysterious cousins the Neandertals.
This time I take stock of recent findings that bear on the question of how the cognitive abilities of Neandertals compare with anatomically modern humans. It’s an intriguing area of research, not least because in addition to illuminating the Neandertal mind, such investigations can help reveal what factors allowed anatomically modern humans—our kind—to succeed where other members of the human family failed.
Just as fascinating is the long history of Neandertal studies, which date back to the 19th century. Indeed the Neandertals are the best known of our extinct relatives. Yet they remain the most hotly debated. “Was the Cave Man a House-Builder? “Neanderthal Man Not Our Ancestor,” by G. “Neanderthal Man,” by J. “The Multiregional Evolution of Humans [Preview],” by Alan G. “The Emergence of Modern Humans [Preview],” by Christopher B. Birds Roost On New Evolutionary Tree. In a massive data crunching analysis, researchers have created a new evolutionary tree for birds.
The effort required enormous computing power and new algorithms because it involved the whole genomes, rather than just a few genes, of 48 species of birds to establish their relatedness. The study is the first of its kind for vertebrates. “It contradicts morphology-based trees. It contradicts mitochondrial trees. It supports more trees based upon nuclear genes, although those trees weren’t highly resolved and this one is.”
Erich Jarvis of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University Medical Center, one of the leaders of the whole genome sequence analysis effort. Multiple papers related to this work are in the December 12th special issue of the journal Science. Jarvis previewed the studies in a talk he gave October 19th at the ScienceWriters2014 meeting in Columbus, Ohio: Some of the major findings of the new bird tree: —Steve Mirsky (The above text is a transcript of this podcast) Scientific American sur Twitter : "How high can the world population grow? #science... World Population Will Soar Higher Than Predicted. United Nations leaders have worried for decades about the pace of population growth.
A few years ago leading calculations had global population peaking at nine billion by 2070 and then easing to 8.4 billion by 2100. Currently it stands at 7.2 billion. Recently the U.N. revised these numbers steeply upward: the population is now expected to rise to 9.6 billion by 2050 and continue to 10.9 billion by 2100 (black line, below). What caused this drastic revision? Almost all the increase comes from Africa (pink line). Earlier models “had anticipated that fertility rates in Africa would drop quickly, but they haven’t,” says Adrian Raftery, a statistician at the University of Washington, who assessed the revised estimates. How the world will feed a few billion more people is the question of the day. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE For data on ratios of workers to retirees, see ScientificAmerican.com/dec2014/graphic-science.
Select Few Can Truly Drink to Their Health. If you like to wind down with a drink, you've perhaps also rationalized the act with this often repeated claim: <<News Anchor: "You don't have to feel guilty about imbibing a little red or white: in small amounts it is good for your heart. ">> But a new study finds that alcohol's supposed benefit may in fact only be available to certain people—who happen to have the right genes.
Researchers studied 600 Swedish men and women with heart disease, and compared them to some 3,000 healthy volunteers. They asked the subjects about their drinking, measured their blood cholesterol, and sequenced each subject's version of a gene that governs the transport of cholesterol to the liver. Unfortunately, only about 15 percent of us have this variant. So any message here for drinkers? —Christopher Intagliata [The above text is a transcript of this podcast.] 'Green News Report' - April 30, 2013.
Environment. Global Climate Change. Opinions. Conferences. News. Zoology. Scientists invent lightest material on Earth. What now? Scientists have invented a new material that is so lightweight it can sit atop a fluffy dandelion without crushing the little fuzzy seeds. It's so lightweight, styrofoam is 100 times heavier. It is so lightweight, in fact, that the research team consisting of scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Caltech say in the peer-reviewed Nov. 18 issue of Science that it is the lightest material on Earth, and no one has asked them to run a correction yet.
That's light! The material has been dubbed "ultralight metallic microlattice," and according to a news release sent out by UC Irvine, it consists of 99.99% air thanks to its "microlattice" cellular architecture. "The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," lead author Tobias Shandler of HRL said in the release. As for the uses of such a material? "It’s sort of like a feather -- it floats down, and its terminal velocity depends on the density," he said.
Newest Canary Island pictured rising from the deep. Chelsea Whyte, contributor The recent earthquakes in the Canary Islands of late aren't due to Poseidon the earth-shaker, but a submarine volcano to the south of the island of El Hierro. Hot magma spewing from beneath the surface of the ocean has injected volcanic chemicals into the water, staining the sea green. Ocean waters have been churning with heat and seafloor sediment spewed from the volcano's plume, which stretches tens of kilometres under water.
The eruption of magma is venting 50 to 100 meters below the surface, but catapulting volcanic rocks as high as 19 meters in the air. The volcanic activity is warming the waters by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, reports Red Orbit. The island of El Hierro sits on a tectonic hot spot in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Morocco, and the volcano off its shores has been erupting since mid-October. The EPA's Stalin era - Environment. This may sound like just another Erin Brockovich-style tear-jerker. Enter stage right: Poor people exposed to toxic chemicals who worry that the government is ignoring their plight. But the story of the hundreds of sick people who live near the former Kelly Air Force Base illuminates an entirely new manner in which the Bush administration has diluted science and put public health at risk.
This year, largely in obeisance to the Pentagon, the nation’s biggest polluter, the White House diminished a little-known but critical process at the Environmental Protection Agency for assessing toxic chemicals that impacts thousands of Americans. As a coalition of more than 40 national and local environmental organizations put it in a letter to EPA administrators this past April: “EPA, under pressure from the Bush White House, has given the foxes the keys to the environmental protection henhouse.” So meet lifelong San Antonio residents Robert and Lupe Alvarado. The chemical is incredibly widespread. Biology. Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access. 26 October 2011 Around 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available. The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific publisher, with the first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appearing in 1665.
Henry Oldenburg – Secretary of the Royal Society and first Editor of the publication – ensured that it was “licensed by the council of the society, being first reviewed by some of the members of the same”, thus making it the first ever peer-reviewed journal. Philosophical Transactions had to overcome early setbacks including plague, the Great Fire of London and even the imprisonment of Oldenburg, but against the odds the publication survived to the present day.
Its foundation would eventually be recognised as one of the most pivotal moments of the scientific revolution. Search the journal archive here. The Latest on the Great Magnetic Cow Smackdown | Discoblog. Academic Earth | Online Courses | Academic Video Lectures.