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Scientific American - News (10 unread)

Putting the Sting on Mealy Marauders: Thailand Unleashes South American Wasps to Save Its Cassava Crop [Slide Show]

Posted: July 21st, 2010, 12:31pm EDT

The cassava mealybug ( Phenacoccus manihoti ) thrives on the plant's starchy root --a staple of many diets worldwide. That's because the pest and the crop evolved together in South America , before Europeans transplanted the woody shrub across the world in Africa and Asia. In the absence of these pest insects the crop has thrived in countries ranging from Nigeria to Thailand. [More]

Africa - Cassava - South America - Agriculture - Asia
2 Genes Linked to Embryonic Brain Impairment in Down's Syndrome

Posted: July 20th, 2010, 7:30pm EDT

Down's syndrome (DS) is an incurable, heritable disorder affecting an estimated 400,000 people in the U.S. It is characterized by impaired cognitive ability and abnormal physical growth. Whereas scientists have long known that DS is caused by inheriting an extra copy of all or part of chromosome 21 , the underlying cause of the brain defects common in Down's patients has not been fully gleaned.
Now, a collaborative team of scientists working with a mouse model of DS has discovered that just two genes are responsible for the majority of the brain abnormalities present in their animals. The scientists hope that their findings will help scientists understand brain defects in humans with the disorder as well as aid in the development of drugs to treat the cognitive impairment in Down's patients.
[More]

Gene - Genetic disorder - Health - Conditions and Diseases - Down syndrome
Can Climate Change Cause Conservation?

Posted: July 19th, 2010, 1:00pm EDT

YELLOWKNIFE, Northwest Territories – The scale of the conservation effort is staggering: 470,000 square miles – half the size of the Louisiana Purchase, five times the size of the U.S. national park system – forever shielded from logging, mining and damming.
It is part of an ongoing and unprecedented drive to protect Canada's northern boreal forests, peat bogs , wetlands and tundra – a drive that is also changing how land managers view their stewardship, civic leaders approach economic growth and companies view their bottom line. And for the first time, some of the protections have a climate component.
[More]

Northwest Territories - Canada - Climate change - Yellowknife - Louisiana Purchase
A Magnetic Remote Control That Can Rewind a Worm's Wriggle

Posted: July 19th, 2010, 11:00am EDT

The power to control living things and objects from a distance is a popular supernatural talent in science fiction and fantasy: Witches fling spells at foes and X-Men send chairs and tables flying with telekinesis, for example. But when it comes to remotely controlling biological organisms, science has a few tricks up its sleeve, too--although there's nothing metaphysical about them. Manipulating biological processes with minimal interference, from the cellular level to the behavior of whole organisms, is a burgeoning scientific effort to better understand how living things work and to develop more effective treatments for a range of medical disorders. [More]

Science fiction - Organism - Fantasy - Arts - Fiction
Heat of the Moment: How Much Global Warming Are We Willing to Take?

Posted: July 16th, 2010, 10:00pm EDT

The average temperature of the planet for the next several thousand years will be determined this century--by those of us living today, according to a new National Research Council report which lays out the impact of every degree of warming on outcomes ranging from sea-level rise to reduced crop yields. [More]

Global warming - Environment - Climate change - Opposing Views - Current sea level rise
Scourge of the Jellies: Small Fish Shows How Ecosystems Adjust to Potentially Catastrophic Changes [Video]

Posted: July 15th, 2010, 7:45pm EDT

Jellyfish are returning to prominence in the world's oceans, thanks to a combination of overfishing, climate change and even " dead zones ". A case in point is in the Benguela Current , an upwelling in the South Atlantic off the coast of Namibia and South Africa. Sardines thrived here, feeding on the rich blooms of plankton fertilized by nutrients carried along by rising deep ocean waters. The sardines, in turn, were consumed by everything from seabirds and sea lions to predatory fish like the mackerel. [More]

South Africa - Namibia - Climate change - Benguela Current - Plankton
Warming Waters Exacerbate Dwindling New England Fisheries

Posted: July 13th, 2010, 6:00pm EDT

GLOUCESTER, Mass.-- Pete Libra is frustrated. The 40-year-old cod fisherman sees lots of fish in the ocean, and he wants to catch more. Fishing authorities see fewer, and want him to catch less. [More]

New England - Fish - United States - Massachusetts - Fisheries
Perturbing Discovery: Does an Exoplanet's Orbital Oddity Reveal a Neighboring World?

Posted: July 13th, 2010, 11:00am EDT

Astronomers are uncovering newfound planets in orbit around other stars at a meteoric rate these days. The tally of known planets outside the solar system now stands at more than 450, of which about 50 have been discovered just this year. That pace promises to increase as NASA's Kepler mission carries out its multiyear survey of a large patch of stars; the campaign has already located several hundred planetary candidates for follow-up study and confirmation. [More]

Solar System - NASA - Extrasolar planet - Kepler Mission - Astronomy
Scientists Quantify Global Warming's Threat to Public Health

Posted: July 12th, 2010, 8:00pm EDT

Extreme weather induced by climate change has dire public health consequences, as heat waves threaten the vulnerable, storm runoff overwhelms city sewage systems and hotter summer days bake more pollution into asthma-inducing smog, scientists say.
The United States – to say nothing of the developed world – is unprepared for such conditions predicted by myriad climate models and already being seen today, warn climate researchers and public health officials.
[More]

Climate change - United States - Heat wave - Environment - Extreme weather
Skin Fight: Could Bacteria Carried by Amphibians Save Them from Extinction?

Posted: July 12th, 2010, 1:00pm EDT

As many as one third of the world's 6,260 known amphibian species are in danger of going extinct. The main killer--outside of ongoing destruction of habitat--is a fungal disease known as chytrid ( Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis ). Now researchers in California and Virginia have identified symbiotic bacteria living on amphibians' skins that protects them from the deadly fungal disease, and later this summer the scientists will collect some of the microbial samples, culture them in the lab, and use the product to inoculate some frogs in California's Sierra Nevada to see if the approach stops chytrid in the wild. If a management plan can be developed, "creating a self-disseminating system [to fight chytrid] will be revolutionary," says Reid Harris, a biologist at James Madison University (J.M.U.) in Harrisonburg, Va., and one of the scientists whose research led to isolating and identifying this bacteria group in a telephone interview. [More]

California - Sierra Nevada - James Madison University - Virginia - Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis