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Reef Fish at Risk as Carbon Dioxide Levels Build

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - Jan. 21 (Special Report) - Rising carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions threaten the survival of some fish species by sending their central nervous systems haywire.' Australian Associated Press

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From blue whales to earthworms, a common mechanism gives shape to living beings

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - By Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, ScienceDaily Staff - Oct. 14 (Research) - Mice don't have tails on their backs, and their ribs don't grow from lumbar vertebrae. And for good reason. Scientists have discovered the mechanism that determines the shape that many animals take -- including humans, blue whales, and insects.

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'Dark matter' of the genome revealed through analysis of 29 mammals

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - By Broad Institute of MIT, Harvard, ScienceDaily Staff - Oct. 13 (Research) - An international team of researchers has discovered the vast majority of the so-called "dark matter" in the human genome, by means of a sweeping comparison of 29 mammalian genomes. The team has pinpointed the parts of the human genome that control when and where genes are turned on. This map is a critical step in interpreting the thousands of genetic changes that have been linked to human disease.

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Breeding crops with deeper roots could 'slash CO2 levels'

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - Aug. 03 (News) - Writing in the Annals of Botany, Professor Douglas Kell argues that developing crops that produce roots more deeply in the ground could harvest more carbon from the air, and make crops more drought resistant, while dramatically reducing carbon levels.

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Justice Department Filing Casts Doubt on Guilt of Bruce Ivins, Accused in Anthrax Case

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By by Mike Wiser, PBS FRONTLINE, Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers, Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica This story was co-published with PBS FRONTLINE, McClatchy. WA - Jul. 19 (News Report) - The Justice Department has called into question a key pillar of the FBI's case against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of mailing the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized Congress a decade ago. Shortly after Ivins committed suicide in 2008, federal investigators announced that they had identified him as the mass murderer who sent the letters to members of Congress and the media. The case was circumstantial, with federal officials arguing that the scientist had the means, motive and opportunity to make the deadly powder at a U.S. Army research facility at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. On July 15, however, Justice Department lawyers acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins' lab -- the so-called hot suite -- did not contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001. The government said it continues to believe that Ivins was “more likely than not” the killer. But the filing in a Florida court did not explain where or how Ivins could have made the powder, saying only that the lab “did not have the specialized equipment’’ in Ivins' secure lab “that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters.” The government’s statements deepen the questions about the case against Ivins, who killed himself before he was charged with a crime. Searches of his car and home in 2007 found no anthrax spores, and the FBI’s eight-year, $100 million investigation never proved he mailed the letters or identified another location where he might have secretly dried the anthrax into an easily inhaled powder. Earlier this year, a report by the National Academy of Science questioned the genetic analysis that had linked a flask of anthrax stored in Ivins’ office to the anthrax contained in the letters. The court papers were uncovered by a reporter for the PBS program FRONTLINE which is working on a forthcoming documentary on the case with McClatchy Newspapers and ProPublica, the investigative newsroom. They were filed by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Division who are defending the government against a wrongful death suit brought by the family of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun. Stevens was the first to die from a tainted letter and his family has accused federal officials of lax procedures that allowed someone to make a germ weapon using anthrax from a government laboratory. In asserting that Ivins was culprit, criminal investigators pointed to his access to the specialized equipment at the laboratory. Officials drew up elaborate charts showing that Ivins’ time in the hot suites spiked in the weeks before the letters were mailed. But Ivins’ colleagues have said in depositions for the Stevens case that the powder could not have been made in the lab without sickening lab technicians and others who had not been vaccinated against anthrax. A Justice Department spokesman Monday shed little light on the seeming shift in positions, saying that investigators still believe Ivins produced the anthrax at Fort Detrick and are unaware of evidence that he did so elsewhere. The Justice Department filed the papers in federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., last week. The lawyers were attempting to counter allegations by the Stevens family of negligence at Fort Detrick, including inadequate controls over anthrax controls, by arguing that the anthrax in the letters wasn't produced there. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said Monday that the court filing did not contradict the government’s conclusion that Ivins sent the letters. Rather, he said, the lawyers merely argued that “Ivins’ actions were not foreseeable to his supervisors’’ because he did not have equipment to dry the spores in his containment laboratory. Boyd said this meant the United States should not be held liable for his actions.” “To clarify, this statement was intended to relate to the specific containment laboratory” where Ivins kept a flask of liquid anthrax with genetic markers similar to those found in the letters, Boyd said. In excerpts from one of more than a dozen depositions made public in the case last week, the current chief of of the Bacteriology Division at the Army laboratory, Patricia Worsham, said it lacked the facilities in 2001 to make the kind of spores in the letters. Two of the five letters, those sent to Democratic U.S. Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Thomas Daschle of South Dakota, were especially deadly, because they were so buoyant as to float with the slightest wisp of air. Worsham said that the lab’s equipment for drying the spores, a machine the size of a refrigerator, was not in containment. “If someone had used that to dry down that preparation, I would have expected that area to be very, very contaminated, and we had non-immunized personnel in that area, and I would have expected some of them to become ill,” she said. In its statement of facts, the government lawyers also said that producing the volume of anthrax in the letters would have required 2.8 to 53 liters of the solution used to grow the spores or 463 to 1,250 Petri dishes. Colleagues of Ivins at the lab have asserted that he couldn’t have grown all that anthrax without their noticing it. The government’s own summary of the case against Ivins, released early last year when the Justice Department formally closed its investigation, noted that “drying anthrax is expressly forbidden by various treaties,” and “overt use of any of these methods, if noticed, would have raised considerable alarm and scrutiny.’’ Paul Kemp, Ivins’ lead defense attorney, said Monday that the department’s concession that the equipment wasn’t available “is at direct variance to the assertions of the government on July 29, 2008,” the day Ivins died, thus “invalidating one of the chief theories of their prosecution case.” Kemp said that government officials told him and a colleague, Tom DeGonia, that the FBI could “prove that Dr. Ivins manufactured the dried spores used in the anthrax attacks, and would prove this by the records of his presence in the hot suites in August and September. Anthrax is one of the deadliest biological weapons. Once inhaled, the tiny spores germinate inside the human body, producing rapidly multiplying, highly toxic bacteria that, if untreated, typically kill a person within days. The anthrax mailings came as a second shock to the nation just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. Beginning Sept. 18, 2001, the perpetrator sent at least five letters containing anthrax powder to three media outlets and to the offices of Sens. Leahy and Daschle. Two postal workers, a nurse and an elderly woman in Connecticut also died, some 32,000 congressional and postal employees took long-term antibiotic treatments and teams wearing moon suits spent months cleansing a Senate office building and large postal facility of the deadly spores.

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What's the Future of Synthetic Biology?

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

MIT Technology Review - By Katherine Bourzac - Jun. 20 (News) - Last July, scientists created the first " synthetic cell ," an organism that's controlled by a chemically synthesized genome edited on a computer and stitched together in the lab. One year later, biologists at the Fifth Annual Synthetic Biology conference at Stanford University are still struggling to take the next step in the field.

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The evolutionary tree of fungi grows a new branch

Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Nature.com - By Marian Turner - May. 11 (News Report) - .....and his colleagues have called the fungi the cryptomycota, or 'hidden fungi,' because they have remained undiscovered until now, despite being present in common environments.

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Big Win for Biotech: USDA Deregulates Monsanto Alfalfa

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

TruthOut - By Mike Ludwig - Feb. 07 (Special Report) - , the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has fully deregulated Monsanto's Roundup Ready alfalfa that is genetically modified (GM) to be resistant to Roundup herbicide. The decision squashed a proposed compromise between the biotech industry and its opponents that would have placed geographic restrictions on Roundup Ready alfalfa to prevent organic and traditional alfalfa from being contaminated by herbicide sprays and transgenes spread by cross-pollination and other factors.read more

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A cure for AIDS?

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

cosmos Magazine - By Jon Cohen - Dec. 16 (Special Report) - Researchers are pursuing radical new ways to control the infection entirely.

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Study shows wolves aren’t helping aspen as much as thought - The Bozeman Daily Chronicle: News

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Bozeman Daily Chronicle - By Daniel Person - Sep. 02 (News Report) - Wolves have not helped the aspen trees in and around Yellowstone National Park as much as previously thought, a study to be published in the journal Ecology suggests.

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Could This Be A Crime?

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

climatestorytellers.org - By Subhankar Banerjee - Aug. 26 (Special Report) - Last month the U.S. Senate finally put an end to the climate bill. Since then several opinion pieces have been published, including articles in Yale Environment 360, Grist, TomDispatch, The Nation, and The Hill. Some of these point out why the U.S. climate movement failed, while others call for a new movement. Global warming is a crisis: for all lands, for all oceans, for all rivers, for all forests, for all humans, for all birds, for all mammals, for all little creatures that we don’t see... for all life. We need stories and actions from every part of our earth. So far, global warming communications have primarily focused on scientific information. I strongly believe that to engage the public, we need all fields of the humanities. It is to this end that I founded ClimateStoryTellers. And there is much action: globally, 350.org and Climate Justice Movement; nationally, organizations such as Center for Biological Diversity; and state-based initiatives such as New Energy Economy in New Mexico. These groups give us hope that a bold – not weak – climate movement will continue to move forward with renewed energy. Our task is to make the collective global voice louder and louder until ignoring such loud cacophony will not be an option by our governments. Global warming is not something we can solve with good behavior and healthy lifestyles. It will require major government action to control pollution–and–polluters and to start a low–carbon–society.

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Just Like Lady Gaga, Paper Wasps Don’t Want No Paper Gangsters

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

discovermagazine.com - Aug. 19 (News) - What do you get if you fake your fighting skills, little wasp? A walloping, that’s what. A recent study says that Polistes dominulus, commonly known as paper wasps, punish individuals who misrepresent their combat abilities. Yes, you could call those fakers paper gangsters.

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The Limits of Empathy for Outsiders

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Miller-McCune - By Tom Jacobs - Jul. 20 (News) - Two new studies — one sociological, another using brain scans — document and help explain our lack of empathy for perceived outsiders.

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Effects of sleep loss can be masked, not erased

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

harvardmagazine.com - By Erin O'Donnell - Jul. 14 (News Report) - the days and weeks of lost sleep eventually took their toll. The investigators knew from previous research that people awake for 24 hours straight display reaction times comparable to those of people who are legally drunk. Cohen’s new study reveals that those who pull an all-nighter on top of two or three weeks of chronic sleep loss reach that level of severe impairment faster—after just 18 hours awake.

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Call for ban on whale shark trade

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

heraldsun.com.au - By Trevor Paddenburg - Jun. 07 (News) - WHALE sharks are being slaughtered and sold in a back-street Hong Kong shark fin market.

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Swarms of grasshoppers predicted to plague the West this year

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

OregonLive.com - By Richard Cockle - May. 11 (News Report) - Hungry grasshoppers are starting to hatch in Arizona and New Mexico and could make 2010 the worst grasshopper year since the mid-1980s -- consuming huge swaths of grasslands and crops, said U.S. Department of Agriculture expert Charles Brown. The anticipated glut results from natural population cycles and widespread drought conditions that grasshoppers thrive under.

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Experts astounded by 'city of gonads' jellyfish

Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - May. 05 (News Report) - Tasmanian scientists have discovered a new species of jellyfish in Hobart's River Derwent and given it a sexy name. The species is only a few millimetres wide and looks like a flying saucer with a cluster of gonads, or sex organs, on top.

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Mutant cows die in GM trial

Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

nzherald.co.nz - By Eloise Gibson - May. 01 (News Report) - Genetically modified cows were born with ovaries that grew so large they caused ruptures and killed the animals. The bungled experiment happened during a study by AgResearch scientists at Ruakura, Hamilton, to find human fertility treatments through GM cows' milk.

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New find bolsters bird-dino connection ? News in Science (ABC Science)

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Australian Broadcasting - By Jennifer Viegas - Jan. 29 (News Report) - The bird family tree just gained a new and distinctive member, according to Chinese palaeontologists. They have found a long-legged, toothy, stubby-armed, three-fingered dinosaur that was an important early member of the lineage that includes birds and their closest dinosaur relatives.

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Lack of human handouts don't keep birds from bay 01/27/10

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

homernews.com - By Michael Armstrong - Jan. 29 (News) - After Homer's beloved Eagle Lady, Jean Keene, died Jan. 13, 2009, bald eagle lovers worldwide wondered what would happen after Keene quit feeding. Under a Homer ordinance, Keene was the only person legally allowed to feed eagles within city limits. After her death, the Homer City Council allowed friends of Keene to feed until March 27, 2009. With no one legally feeding this winter, would the eagles not return? Would they come back in numbers too small to be significant?

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US teen pregnancy rate up for first time since 1990: study

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Raw Story - Jan. 28 (News Report) - The US teen pregnancy rate rose in 2006 for the first time in 16 years, an report showed Tuesday, as experts speculated that the increase was due to abstinence-only sex education in schools.

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Deaths indicative of expanding turtle population

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

beaumontenterprise.com - Jan. 26 (News Report) - Texas bays are home to more green sea turtles than anyone thought, and perhaps more than in close to a century. At least they were.

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Bugs in Your Bed

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

thestranger.com - By Brendan Kiley - Jan. 21 (Investigative Report) - Of all the disturbing things about bedbugs, their mating habits may be the worst. Cimex lectularius have evolved a breeding technique called "traumatic insemination," and it's even more horrible than it sounds. A male bedbug's penis is literally a

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Monsanto GM Corn Causing Organ Failure In Rats Study

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Katherine Goldstein - Jan. 19 (News Report) - Three types of Monsanto genetically modified corn are under scrutiny in the wake of a new study published by the International Journal Of Biological Sciences...

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A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

International Journal of Biological Sciences - By Joël Spiroux de Vendômois, et al - Jan. 13 (Research) - However, in the three GM maize varieties that formed the basis of this investigation, new side effects linked to the consumption of these cereals were revealed, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others [4]. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity

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