Genetic moderation is needed to debate our food future

• 28 July 2014 by Susan Watts
• Magazine issue 2979. Subscribe and save
• For similar stories, visit the Food and Drink , Comment and Analysis and GM Organisms Topic Guides

GM is now a term loaded with baggage. Scientists must allow for people's objections to show the public there's nothing "spooky" about it

 

WITH food security firmly on the international agenda, there's a growing appetite to look again at the opportunities promised by agricultural biotechnology.

Scientists working in this area are excited by new techniques that enable them to edit plant DNA with unprecedented accuracy. Even epigenetic markers, which modulate the activity of genes, can now be altered. The promise is to modify crops to make them more nutritious or resistant to disease.

 

But there's a problem, notably in Europe: genetic modification.

Much of agricultural biotechnology – including conventional breeding – involves genetic modification of one kind or another. But "GM" has come to mean something quite specific, and is loaded with baggage. To many people it means risky or unnatural mixing of genes from widely disparate species, even across the plant and animal kingdoms, to create hybrids such as corn with scorpion genes. That baggage now threatens to undermine mature debate about the future of food production.

 

It is no longer a simple yes/no choice between high-tech agribusiness and conventional production driven by something ill-defined as more "natural".

The battle lines of this latest wave of agricultural advance are already being drawn. The UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, for example, is working on a position statement on the new technologies, which it expects to release later this summer.

It is clear that, over the coming years, the general public will have to decide which of these technologies we find acceptable and which we do not.

 

So where did it all go wrong to begin with? In the late 1990s, when I was reporting on early GM research for the BBC's current affairs programme Newsnight, anti-GM protestors realised that vivid images made good TV and rampaged through fields in white boiler suits destroying trial crops.

 

On the other side, industry representatives brushed aside public concerns and tried to control the media message, thumping the table in the office of at least one bemused newspaper editor (who went on to co-script a TV drama about a darker side to GM). They also lobbied hard for the relaxation of regulations governing agribusiness.

 

In the middle was the public, just coming to terms with farming's role in the BSE crisis. There was little space for calm, rational debate. Instead, GM became the cuckoo in the nest of agricultural biotechnology and its industry backers became ogres, shouting down any discussion of alternatives.

 

As a result, many people remain unaware that there are other high-tech ways to create crops. Many of these techniques involve the manipulation of genes, but they are not primarily about the transfer of genes across species.

 

But for GM to be discussed alongside such approaches as just another technology, scientists will have to work harder to dispel the public's remaining suspicions.

 

I recently chaired a debate on biotech at the UK's Cambridge Festival of Plants, where one audience member identified a public unease about what he called the slightly "spooky" aspect of GM crops. He meant those scorpion genes, or fish genes placed into tomatoes – the type of research that helped to coin the phrase "yuck factor".

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To my surprise, a leading plant scientist on the panel said she would be prepared to see cross-species manipulation of food crops put on hold if the public was overwhelmingly uncomfortable with it. Ottoline Leyser, director of the University of Cambridge's Sainsbury Laboratory, said she believed valuable GM crop development could still be done even if scientists were initially restricted to species that can swap their genes naturally, outside of the laboratory. An example of this might be adding a trait from one variety of rice to another.

 

Nevertheless, Leyser remains adamant that there is "nothing immensely fishy about a fish gene". What's more, she added, the notion of a natural separation between species is misplaced: gene-swapping between species in the wild is far more prevalent than once thought.

But Leyser insisted that scientists must respect the views of objectors – even if "yuck" is their only complaint. That concession from a scientist is unusual. I've spoken to many of her peers who think such objections are irrational.

 

Scientists cannot expect people to accept their work blindly and they must make time to listen. Above all, more of them should be prepared to halt experiments that the public is uncomfortable with. And it's beginning to happen.

 

Paul Freemont is co-director of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College London. He designs organisms from scratch but would be prepared to discontinue projects that the public is unhappy about. He says scientists need an occasional reality check.

 

"We are going to have to address some of the consequences of what we're doing, and have agreements about what's acceptable to society in terms of manipulating biology at this level," Freemont says.

 

Scientists funded with public money may already feel some obligation to adopt this approach. But those working in industry should consider its advantages too. A more open and engaged conversation with the public could surely benefit the companies trying to sell us novel crop technologies.

 

Society, for its part, will need to listen to the experts with an open mind. And as we work out how to feed an expanding population, we will need to ask questions that are bigger than "GM: yes or no?"

 

This article appeared in print under the headline "Genetic moderation"

Susan Watts is a journalist and broadcaster. She was science editor of Newsnight until the post was closed

Strange dark stuff is making the universe too bright

• 17 July 2014 by Lisa Grossman
• Magazine issue 2978. Subscribe and save
• For similar stories, visit the Cosmology Topic Guide

LIGHT is in crisis. The universe is far brighter than it should be based on the number of light-emitting objects we can find, a cosmic accounting problem that has astronomers baffled.

"Something is very wrong," says Juna Kollmeier at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, California.

 

Solving the mystery could show us novel ways to hunt for dark matter, or reveal the presence of another unknown "dark" component to the cosmos.

 

"It's such a big discrepancy that whatever we find is going to be amazing, and it will overturn something we currently think is true," says Kollmeier.

The trouble stems from the most recent census of objects that produce high-energy ultraviolet light.

Some of the biggest known sources are quasars – galaxies with actively feeding black holes at their centres. These behemoths spit out plenty of UV light as matter falling into them is heated and compressed. Young galaxies filled with hot, bright stars are also contributors.

Ultraviolet light from these objects ionises the gas that permeates intergalactic space, stripping hydrogen atoms of their electrons. Observations of the gas can tell us how much of it has been ionised, helping astronomers to estimate the amount of UV light that must be flying about.

But as our images of the cosmos became sharper, astronomers found that these measurements don't seem to tally with the number of sources found.

 

Kollmeier started worrying in 2012, when Francesco Haardt at the University of Insubria in Como, Italy, and Piero Madau at the University of California, Santa Cruz, compiled the results of several sky surveys and found far fewer UV sources than previously suggested.

 

Then in February, Charles Danforth at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues released the latest observations of intergalactic hydrogen by the Hubble Space Telescope. That work confirmed the large amount of gas being ionised. "It could have been that there was much more neutral hydrogen than we thought, and therefore there would be no light crisis," says Kollmeier. "But that loophole has been shut."

 

Now Kollmeier and her colleagues have run computer simulations of intergalactic gas and compared them with the Hubble data, just to be sure. They found that there is five times too much ionised gas for the number of known UV sources in the modern, nearby universe.

 

Strangely, their simulations also show that, for the early, more distant universe, UV sources and ionised gas match up perfectly, suggesting something has changed with time (Astrophysical Journal Letters, doi.org/tqm).

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This could be down to dark matter, the mysterious stuff thought to make up more than 80 per cent of the matter in the universe.

 

The leading theoretical candidates for dark matter are weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. There are many proposed versions of WIMPs, including some non-standard varieties that would decay and release UV photons.

 

Knowing that dark matter in the early universe worked like a scaffold to create the cosmic structure we see today, we have a good idea how much must have existed in the past. That suggests dark matter particles are stable for billions of years before they begin to decay.

 

Theorists can now consider the UV problem in their calculations and see if any of the proposed particles start to decay at the right time to account for the extra light, says Kathryn Zurek, a dark matter expert at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. If so, that could explain why the excess only shows up in the modern cosmos.

 

If WIMPS aren't the answer, the possible explanations become even more bizarre, such as mysterious "dark" objects that can emit UV light but remain shrouded from view. And if all else fails, there's even a chance something is wrong with our basic understanding of hydrogen.

 

"We don't know what it is, or we would be reporting discovery instead of crisis," says Kollmeier.

"The point is to bring this to everyone's attention so we can figure it out as a community."

 

This article appeared in print under the headline "Why is the cosmos too bright to bear?"

Psychedelic cells are fruit of Alan Turing's equations

• 29 July 2014 by Jacob Aron
• Magazine issue 2979. Subscribe and save
• For similar stories, visit the Picture of the day and Books and Art Topic Guides

(Image: Jonathan McCabe)

 

WE ALL know the world can look weird and wonderful under the microscope, but who knew cells could look this pretty? Actually, you won't find these psychedelic blobs in any living creature on Earth, because contrary to appearances this image has been created by a computer.

Generative artist Jonathan McCabe works with algorithms first developed by mathematician Alan

Turing to create pictures like this. "I don't guide the production of any particular image, the program runs from start to finish without input," McCabe says, though he does tweak the software to produce different results. "The trick is to try to make a system that generates interesting output by itself."

Turing is most famous for his pioneering work in computing, but he was also interested in how living creatures produce biological patterns such as a tiger's stripes. He came up with a system of equations that describe how two chemicals react together, resulting in surprisingly lifelike arrangements.

 

McCabe developed his algorithm based on Turing's ideas. His program treats colours as different liquids that can't mix together because of an artificial surface tension, which is what gives them a cell-like appearance. "You get structures which look like cell membranes and mitochondria because at the microscopic scale surface tension forces are strong," says McCabe.

 

This article appeared in print under the headline "Rise of the blobs"

Cagey material acts as alcohol factory

2 hours ago by Kate Greene

Enlarge

Jeff Long, Materials Sciences scientist, with student Dianne Xiao. The team’s research enabled MOFs to oxidize ethane to ethanol. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt

Some chemical conversions are harder than others. Refining natural gas into an easy-to-transport, easy-to-store liquid alcohol has so far been a logistic and economic challenge. But now, a new material, designed and patented by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), is making this process a little easier. The research, published earlier this year in Nature Chemistry, could pave the way for the adoption of cheaper, cleaner-burning fuels.

"Hydrocarbons like ethane and methane could be used as fuel, but they're hard to store and transport because they're gases," says Dianne Xiao, graduate student at the University of California Berkeley.
"But if you have a catalyst that can selectively turn them into alcohols, which are much easier to transfer and store," she says, "that would make things a lot easier."
Xiao and Jeffrey Long, scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and professor of chemistry at the UC Berkeley, focused this project on converting ethane to ethanol.
Ethanol is a potential alternative fuel that burns cleaner and has a higher energy density than other alternative fuels like methanol. One problem with ethanol, however, is that current methods for production require extreme heat, which makes it expensive.

The innovation came when Long and Xiao designed a material called Fe-MOF-74, in a class of materials called metal-organic frameworks or MOFs. Because of their cage-shaped structures, MOFs boast a high surface area, which mean they can absorb extremely large amounts of gas or liquid compared to the weight of the MOF itself.

A view inside the MOF: hexagonal channels lined with iron. Credit: Dianne Xiao, Berkeley

Since MOFs are essentially structured like a collection of tiny cages, they can capture other molecules, acting as a filter. Additionally, they can perform chemistry as molecules pass through the cages, becoming little chemical factories that convert one substance to another.
It's this chemical-conversion feature of MOFs that Long and Xiao took advantage of. Ethane is a molecule made of two carbon atoms where each atom is surrounded by atoms of hydrogen. Ethanol is also made of two carbon atoms bonded to hydrogen atoms, but one of its carbon atoms is also bonded to a hydrogen-oxygen ion called a hydroxyl.

Previous attempts to add a hydroxyl ion to ethane to make ethanol have required high pressure and high temperatures that range from 200 to 300 degrees Celsius. It's costly and inconvenient.
But by using a specially designed MOF—one in which a kind of iron was added inside the tiny molecular cages—the researchers were able to reduce the need for extreme heat, converting ethane to alcohol at just 75 degrees Celsius.


"This is getting toward a holy grail in chemistry which is to be able to cleanly take alkanes to alcohols without a lot of energy," says Long. Long and Xiao worked closely with researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the University of Minnesota, the University of Delaware, and the University of Turin to design, model, and characterize the MOF and resultant ethanol production.

Next steps involve tweaking the concentrations of iron in the MOF to produce a more efficient conversion, says Xiao. "It's a promising proof of principle," she says. "It's exciting that we can do this now at low temperature and low pressures."

Explore further: Metal-organic framework helps convert one chemical to another

More information: "Oxidation of ethane to ethanol by N2O in a metal–organic framework with coordinatively unsaturated iron(II) sites." Dianne J. Xiao, et al. Nature Chemistry 6, 590–595 (2014) DOI: 10.1038/nchem.1956. Received 17 December 2013 Accepted 14 April 2014 Published online 18 May 2014
Journal reference: Nature Chemistry

Provided by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-cagey-material-alcohol-factory.html#jCp Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-cagey-material-alcohol-factory.html#jCp

Direct reaction heavy atoms to catalyst surface demonstrated

1 hour ago

Enlarge

Ruthenium crystal covered with oxygen atoms in the experimental set-up Harpoen. Credit: Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM)

Researchers from FOM Institute DIFFER are the first to have demonstrated that heavier atoms in a material surface can react directly with a surrounding gas. The so-called Eley-Rideal reaction has never previously been demonstrated for atoms heavier than hydrogen. The Eley-Rideal process requires less energy than a reaction between two atoms that are both attached to the material. The discovery could lead to more efficient catalysts for the production of synthetic fuel, for example. The researchers published the results on 29 July online in Physical Review Letters.

Most chemical reactions on a material surface (catalyst) follow the Langmuir-Hinshelwood scheme: atoms from the surroundings adhere to the material and move randomly across the surface until they meet each other. At that spot the atoms react with each other and are subsequently released from the surface. In Eley-Rideal reactions a particle on the surface instead reacts directly with an atom from the surroundings that is rapidly moving past it. According to the theory, this type of reaction takes place most easily with light, rapidly moving atoms. In practice, the Eley-Rideal reaction has only been demonstrated with the lightest atom, hydrogen. The team from DIFFER, the Materials innovation institute M2i and the Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences in Amsterdam have now demonstrated for the first time that heavier atoms such as nitrogen and oxygen can also undergo an Eley-Rideal reaction.

Enlarge

The direct Eley-Rideal reaction between the surrounding gas and an atom that is attached to the surface had never previously been observed for heavier atoms. Credit: Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM)

Rebound

"In our set-up, Harpoen, we can directly observe the difference between the two types of reaction", explains research leader Dr Teodor Zaharia. His team covered a surface of ruthenium with a layer of oxygen atoms and fired a focused beam of nitrogen atoms at this to obtain the reaction product nitrogen oxide. "The Eley-Rideal reaction takes place within a fraction of a second: the original kinetic energy of the nitrogen is conserved and you can therefore observe the reaction product rebounding from the surface at the same angle as which the original nitrogen atom collided with it." In the Langmuir-Hinshelwood reaction, however, there is no link between the direction of movement of the original atoms and the reaction products; due to the random walk across the surface the information about the original direction of movement is lost. Using detectors that can measure the direction of the reaction product, Zaharia and his team could unequivocally observe the fingerprint of the Eley-Rideal reaction.

The higher energy of the reaction products also revealed that an Eley-Rideal reaction had taken place: just one of the reacting atoms needs to break its attachment to the surface as a result of which less energy is needed. The Eley-Rideal reaction between heavier atoms is therefore attractive for applications in catalysis. The reaction pathway offers extra control over which particles react and that could lead to new ways of producing and processing materials. The research will be continued in a collaboration between DIFFER and the Center of Interface Dynamic for Sustainability that fellow researcher and former director of DIFFER Aart Kleyn has set up in the Chinese city of Chengdu.

Explore further: Scientists discover channel used by catalyst to produce ammonia, vital for food and fuel crops
 

More information: 'Eley-Rideal reactions with N atoms at Ru(0001): Formation of NO and N₂^'  T. Zaharia, A. Kleijn, M. Gleeson, Physical Review Letters, 21 July 2014.

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters
Provided by Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM)

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-reaction-heavy-atoms-catalyst-surface.html#jCp

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7 Things to Consider Before Choosing Sides in the Middle East Conflict

Posted: 07/28/2014 2:07 pm EDT Updated: 07/28/2014 2:59 pm EDT

Are you "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine"? It isn't even noon yet as I write this, and I've already been accused of being both.

These terms intrigue me because they directly speak to the doggedly tribal nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You don't hear of too many other countries being universally spoken of this way. Why these two? Both Israelis and Palestinians are complex, with diverse histories and cultures, and two incredibly similar (if divisive) religions. To come down completely on the side of one or the other doesn't seem rational to me.

It is telling that most Muslims around the world support Palestinians, and most Jews support Israel. This, of course, is natural -- but it's also problematic. It means that this is not about who's right or wrong as much as which tribe or nation you are loyal to. It means that Palestinian supporters would be just as ardently pro-Israel if they were born in Israeli or Jewish families, and vice versa. It means that the principles that guide most people's view of this conflict are largely accidents of birth -- that however we intellectualize and analyze the components of the Middle East mess, it remains, at its core, a tribal conflict.

By definition, tribal conflicts thrive and survive when people take sides. Choosing sides in these kinds of conflicts fuels them further and deepens the polarization. And worst of all, you get blood on your hands.

So before picking a side in this latest Israeli-Palestine conflict, consider these 7 questions:

***
1. Why is everything so much worse when there are Jews involved?

Over 700 people have died in Gaza as of this writing. Muslims have woken up around the world. But is it really because of the numbers?

Bashar al-Assad has killed over 180,000 Syrians, mostly Muslim, in two years -- more than the number killed in Palestine in two decades. Thousands of Muslims in Iraq and Syria have been killed by ISIS in the last two months. Tens of thousands have been killed by the Taliban. Half a million black Muslims were killed by Arab Muslims in Sudan. The list goes on.

But Gaza makes Muslims around the world, both Sunni and Shia, speak up in a way they never do otherwise. Up-to-date death counts and horrific pictures of the mangled corpses of Gazan children flood their social media timelines every day. If it was just about the numbers, wouldn't the other conflicts take precedence? What is it about then?

If I were Assad or ISIS right now, I'd be thanking God I'm not Jewish.

Amazingly, many of the graphic images of dead children attributed to Israeli bombardment that are circulating online are from Syria, based on a BBC report. Many of the pictures you're seeing are of children killed by Assad, who is supported by Iran, which also funds Hezbollah and Hamas. What could be more exploitative of dead children than attributing the pictures of innocents killed by your own supporters to your enemy simply because you weren't paying enough attention when your own were killing your own?

This doesn't, by any means, excuse the recklessness, negligence, and sometimes outright cruelty of Israeli forces. But it clearly points to the likelihood that the Muslim world's opposition to Israel isn't just about the number of dead.

Here is a question for those who grew up in the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries like I did: if Israel withdrew from the occupied territories tomorrow, all in one go -- and went back to the 1967 borders -- and gave the Palestinians East Jerusalem -- do you honestly think Hamas wouldn't find something else to pick a fight about? Do you honestly think that this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they are Jews? Do you recall what you watched and heard on public TV growing up in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt?

Yes, there's an unfair and illegal occupation there, and yes, it's a human rights disaster. But it is also true that much of the other side is deeply driven by anti-Semitism. Anyone who has lived in the Arab/Muslim world for more than a few years knows that. It isn't always a clean, one-or-the-other blame split in these situations like your Chomskys and Greenwalds would have you believe. It's both.

***
2. Why does everyone keep saying this is not a religious conflict?

There are three pervasive myths that are widely circulated about the "roots" of the Middle East conflict:
Myth 1: Judaism has nothing to do with Zionism.
                        Myth 2: Islam has nothing to do with Jihadism or anti-Semitism.
     Myth 3: This conflict has nothing to do with religion.
  To the "I oppose Zionism, not Judaism!" crowd, is it mere coincidence that this passage from the Old Testament (emphasis added) describes so accurately what's happening today?

"I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River. I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you. Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods." - Exodus 23:31-32

Or this one?

"See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land the Lord swore he would give to your fathers -- to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- and to their descendants after them." - Deuteronomy 1:8

There's more: Genesis 15:18-21, and Numbers 34 for more detail on the borders. Zionism is not the "politicization" or "distortion" of Judaism. It is the revival of it.
And to the "This is not about Islam, it's about politics!" crowd, is this verse from the Quran (emphasis added) meaningless?

"O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you--then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people." - Quran, 5:51

What about the numerous verses and hadith quoted in Hamas' charter? And the famous hadith of the Gharqad tree explicitly commanding Muslims to kill Jews?
Please tell me -- in light of these passages written centuries and millennia before the creation of Israel or the occupation -- how can anyone conclude that religion isn't at the root of this, or at least a key driving factor? You may roll your eyes at these verses, but they are taken very seriously by many of the players in this conflict, on both sides. Shouldn't they be acknowledged and addressed? When is the last time you heard a good rational, secular argument supporting settlement expansion in the West Bank?
Denying religion's role seems to be a way to be able to criticize the politics while remaining apologetically "respectful" of people's beliefs for fear of "offending" them. But is this apologism and "respect" for inhuman ideas worth the deaths of human beings?
People have all kinds of beliefs -- from insisting the Earth is flat to denying the Holocaust. You may respect their right to hold these beliefs, but you're not obligated to respect the beliefs themselves. It's 2014, and religions don't need to be "respected" any more than any other political ideology or philosophical thought system. Human beings have rights. Ideas don't. The oft-cited politics/religion dichotomy in Abrahamic religions is false and misleading. All of the Abrahamic religions are inherently political.
*** 3. Why would Israel deliberately want to kill civilians?
This is the single most important issue that gets everyone riled up, and rightfully so.
Again, there is no justification for innocent Gazans dying. And there's no excuse for Israel's negligence in incidents like the killing of four children on a Gazan beach. But let's back up and think about this for a minute.
Why on Earth would Israel deliberately want to kill civilians?
When civilians die, Israel looks like a monster. It draws the ire of even its closest allies. Horrific images of injured and dead innocents flood the media. Ever-growing anti-Israel protests are held everywhere from Norway to New York. And the relatively low number of Israeli casualties (we'll get to that in a bit) repeatedly draws allegations of a "disproportionate" response. Most importantly, civilian deaths help Hamas immensely.
How can any of this possibly ever be in Israel's interest?
If Israel wanted to kill civilians, it is terrible at it. ISIS killed more civilians in two days (700 plus) than Israel has in two weeks. Imagine if ISIS or Hamas had Israel's weapons, army, air force, US support, and nuclear arsenal. Their enemies would've been annihilated long ago. If Israel truly wanted to destroy Gaza, it could do so within a day, right from the air. Why carry out a more painful, expensive ground incursion that risks the lives of its soldiers?
*** 4. Does Hamas really use its own civilians as human shields?
Ask Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas how he feels about Hamas' tactics.
"What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?" he asks. "I don't like trading in Palestinian blood."
It isn't just speculation anymore that Hamas puts its civilians in the line of fire.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri plainly admitted on Gazan national TV that the human shield strategy has proven "very effective."
The UN relief organization UNRWA issued a furious condemnation of Hamas after discovering hidden rockets in not one, but two children's schools in Gaza last week.
Hamas fires thousands of rockets into Israel, rarely killing any civilians or causing any serious damage. It launches them from densely populated areas, including hospitals and schools.
Why launch rockets without causing any real damage to the other side, inviting great damage to your own people, then putting your own civilians in the line of fire when the response comes? Even when the IDF warns civilians to evacuate their homes before a strike, why does Hamas tell them to stay put?
Because Hamas knows its cause is helped when Gazans die. If there is one thing that helps Hamas most -- one thing that gives it any legitimacy -- it is dead civilians. Rockets in schools. Hamas exploits the deaths of its children to gain the world's sympathy. It uses them as a weapon.
You don't have to like what Israel is doing to abhor Hamas. Arguably, Israel and Fatah are morally equivalent. Both have a lot of right on their side. Hamas, on the other hand, doesn't have a shred of it.
*** 5. Why are people asking for Israel to end the "occupation" in Gaza?
Because they have short memories.
In 2005, Israel ended the occupation in Gaza. It pulled out every last Israeli soldier. It dismantled every last settlement. Many Israeli settlers who refused to leave were forcefully evicted from their homes, kicking and screaming.
This was a unilateral move by Israel, part of a disengagement plan intended to reduce friction between Israelis and Palestinians. It wasn't perfect -- Israel was still to control Gaza's borders, coastline, and airspace -- but considering the history of the region, it was a pretty significant first step.
After the evacuation, Israel opened up border crossings to facilitate commerce. The Palestinians were also given 3,000 greenhouses which had already been producing fruit and flowers for export for many years.
But Hamas chose not to invest in schools, trade, or infrastructure. Instead, it built an extensive network of tunnels to house thousands upon thousands of rockets and weapons, including newer, sophisticated ones from Iran and Syria. All the greenhouses were destroyed.
Hamas did not build any bomb shelters for its people. It did, however, build a few for its leaders to hide out in during airstrikes. Civilians are not given access to these shelters for precisely the same reason Hamas tells them to stay home when the bombs come.
Gaza was given a great opportunity in 2005 that Hamas squandered by transforming it into an anti-Israel weapons store instead of a thriving Palestinian state that, with time, may have served as a model for the future of the West Bank as well. If Fatah needed yet another reason to abhor Hamas, here it was.
*** 6. Why are there so many more casualties in Gaza than in Israel?
The reason fewer Israeli civilians die is not because there are fewer rockets raining down on them. It's because they are better protected by their government.
When Hamas' missiles head towards Israel, sirens go off, the Iron Dome goes into effect, and civilians are rushed into bomb shelters. When Israeli missiles head towards Gaza, Hamas tells civilians to stay in their homes and face them.
While Israel's government urges its civilians to get away from rockets targeted at them, Gaza's government urges its civilians to get in front of missiles not targeted at them.
The popular explanation for this is that Hamas is poor and lacks the resources to protect its people like Israel does. The real reason, however, seems to have more to do with disordered priorities than deficient resources (see #5). This is about will, not ability. All those rockets, missiles, and tunnels aren't cheap to build or acquire. But they are priorities. And it's not like Palestinians don't have a handful of oil-rich neighbors to help them the way Israel has the US.
The problem is, if civilian casualties in Gaza drop, Hamas loses the only weapon it has in its incredibly effective PR war. It is in Israel's national interest to protect its civilians and minimize the deaths of those in Gaza. It is in Hamas' interest to do exactly the opposite on both fronts.
*** 7. If Hamas is so bad, why isn't everyone pro-Israel in this conflict?
Because Israel's flaws, while smaller in number, are massive in impact.
Many Israelis seem to have the same tribal mentality that their Palestinian counterparts do. They celebrate the bombing of Gaza the same way many Arabs celebrated 9/11. A UN report recently found that Israeli forces tortured Palestinian children and used them as human shields. They beat up teenagers. They are often reckless with their airstrikes. They have academics who explain how rape may be the only truly effective weapon against their enemy. And many of them callously and publicly revel in the deaths of innocent Palestinian children.
To be fair, these kinds of things do happen on both sides. They are an inevitable consequence of multiple generations raised to hate the other over the course of 65 plus years. To hold Israel up to a higher standard would mean approaching the Palestinians with the racism of lowered expectations.
However, if Israel holds itself to a higher standard like it claims -- it needs to do much more to show it isn't the same as the worst of its neighbors.
Israel is leading itself towards increasing international isolation and national suicide because of two things: 1. The occupation; and 2. Settlement expansion.
Settlement expansion is simply incomprehensible. No one really understands the point of it. Virtually every US administration -- from Nixon to Bush to Obama -- has unequivocally opposed it. There is no justification for it except a Biblical one (see #2), which makes it slightly more difficult to see Israel's motives as purely secular.
The occupation is more complicated. The late Christopher Hitchens was right when he said this about Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories:

"In order for Israel to become part of the alliance against whatever we want to call it, religious barbarism, theocratic, possibly thermonuclear theocratic or nuclear theocratic aggression, it can't, it'll have to dispense with the occupation. It's as simple as that.
It can be, you can think of it as a kind of European style, Western style country if you want, but it can't govern other people against their will. It can't continue to steal their land in the way that it does every day.And it's unbelievably irresponsible of Israelis, knowing the position of the United States and its allies are in around the world, to continue to behave in this unconscionable way. And I'm afraid I know too much about the history of the conflict to think of Israel as just a tiny, little island surrounded by a sea of ravening wolves and so on. I mean, I know quite a lot about how that state was founded, and the amount of violence and dispossession that involved. And I'm a prisoner of that knowledge. I can't un-know it."

As seen with Gaza in 2005, unilateral disengagement is probably easier to talk about than actually carry out. But if it Israel doesn't work harder towards a two-state (maybe three-state, thanks to Hamas) solution, it will eventually have to make that ugly choice between being a Jewish-majority state or a democracy.
It's still too early to call Israel an apartheid state, but when John Kerry said Israel could end up as one in the future, he wasn't completely off the mark. It's simple math. There are only a limited number of ways a bi-national Jewish state with a non-Jewish majority population can retain its Jewish identity. And none of them are pretty.
*** Let's face it, the land belongs to both of them now. Israel was carved out of Palestine for Jews with help from the British in the late 1940s just like my own birthplace of Pakistan was carved out of India for Muslims around the same time. The process was painful, and displaced millions in both instances. But it's been almost 70 years. There are now at least two or three generations of Israelis who were born and raised in this land, to whom it really is a home, and who are often held accountable and made to pay for for historical atrocities that are no fault of their own. They are programmed to oppose "the other" just as Palestinian children are. At its very core, this is a tribal religious conflict that will never be resolved unless people stop choosing sides.
So you really don't have to choose between being "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine." If you support secularism, democracy, and a two-state solution -- and you oppose Hamas, settlement expansion, and the occupation -- you can be both.
If they keep asking you to pick a side after all of that, tell them you're going with hummus.

Follow Ali A. Rizvi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/aliamjadrizvi

SPACE & EARTH

Shared publicly  -  Yesterday 8:09 PM

 

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Cassini Spacecraft Reveals 101 Geysers & more on Icy Saturn Moon
Enceladus' geyser-active fractures | July 28, 2014: This artist's rendering shows a cross-section of the ice shell immediately beneath one of Enceladus' geyser-active fractures, illustrating the physical and thermal structure and the processes ongoing below and at the surface.

Scientists using mission data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have identified 101 distinct geysers erupting on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Their analysis suggests it is possible for liquid water to reach from the moon’s underground sea all the way to its surface.
These findings, and clues to what powers the geyser eruptions, are presented in two articles published in the current online edition of the Astronomical Journal.

Over a period of almost seven years, Cassini’s cameras surveyed the south polar terrain of the small moon, a unique geological basin renowned for its four prominent "tiger stripe” fractures and the geysers of tiny icy particles and water vapor first sighted there nearly 10 years ago. The result of the survey is a map of 101 geysers, each erupting from one of the tiger stripe fractures, and the discovery that individual geysers are coincident with small hot spots. These relationships pointed the way to the geysers’ origin.

After the first sighting of the geysers in 2005, scientists suspected repeated flexing of Enceladus by Saturn’s tides as the moon orbits the planet had something to do with their behavior. One suggestion included the back-and-forth rubbing of opposing walls of the fractures generating frictional heat that turned ice into geyser-forming vapor and liquid.

Alternate views held that the opening and closing of the fractures allowed water vapor from below to reach the surface. Before this new study, it was not clear which process was the dominating influence. Nor was it certain whether excess heat emitted by Enceladus was everywhere correlated with geyser activity.

To determine the surface locations of the geysers, researchers employed the same process of triangulation used historically to survey geological features on Earth, such as mountains. When the researchers compared the geysers’ locations with low-resolution maps of thermal emission, it became apparent the greatest geyser activity coincided with the greatest thermal radiation. Comparisons between the geysers and tidal stresses revealed similar connections. However, these correlations alone were insufficient to answer the question, “What produces what?”

The answer to this mystery came from comparison of the survey results with high-resolution data collected in 2010 by Cassini’s heat-sensing instruments. Individual geysers were found to coincide with small-scale hot spots, only a few dozen feet (or tens of meters) across, which were too small to be produced by frictional heating, but the right size to be the result of condensation of vapor on the near-surface walls of the fractures. This immediately implicated the hot spots as the signature of the geysering process.

“Once we had these results in hand we knew right away heat was not causing the geysers, but vice versa,” said Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team from the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and lead author of the first paper. “It also told us the geysers are not a near-surface phenomenon, but have much deeper roots.”

Thanks to recent analysis of Cassini gravity data, the researchers concluded the only plausible source of the material forming the geysers is the sea now known to exist beneath the ice shell. They also found that narrow pathways through the ice shell can remain open from the sea all the way to the surface, if filled with liquid water.  

In the companion paper, the authors report the brightness of the plume formed by all the geysers, as seen with Cassini’s high resolution cameras, changes periodically as Enceladus orbits Saturn.  Armed with the conclusion the opening and closing of the fractures modulates the venting, the authors compared the observations with the expected venting schedule due to tides.

They found the simplest model of tidal flexing provides a good match for the brightness variations Cassini observes, but it does not predict the time when the plume begins to brighten. Some other important effect is present and the authors considered several in the course of their work.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the United States, England, France and Germany. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute.

Credit: NASA/JPL

+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

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Friday Focus: How Texas’ new solar institute is planning to take on the world

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  Texas A&M's Center for Solar Energy is setting out to become the world's largest solar research centre.
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  CSE is aiming to help the US become a world leader in solar.

Blogger

Lucy Woods

Following Obama’s climate action plan the US has begun flag-staking for solar, pumping investment and changing policies to put solar energy at the top: and America at the top of solar.
As the US jumps full bound into dominating solar and international solar companies look for a slice of the action, a flurry of recent announcements suggests the country is also looking to take a lead in the sphere of solar research and academia.

Earlier this month, Texas A&M University revealed grand plans for what it said would be the “world’s largest” solar research institute in the form of the US$600 million Center for Solar Energy (CSE). And hot on its heels, State University New York (SUNY) said it was planning to open a US$100 million new PV manufacturing and development research centre in New York this year.
CSE’s ambitions as the answer to the US solar industry’s problems are indeed impressive. Its promotional video unleashes a barrage of catastrophic facts: the US controlling just 7% of the world solar market when in 1995 it controlled 50%; 90% of solar products coming from outside the US; 2,000 jobs lost; the world spending 500 times more on solar than the US. Will the US be left behind, it asks, or will it regain its “rightful place through innovation and leadership?”
Urgent and inspiring quotes from prominent economists and business leaders make the message clear: America must win the international solar leadership battle, as “the country that can answer the [solar] call will be the force to be reckoned with”.The CSE video questions: “Will we rise to the occasion?” CSE “can and will answer that call,” comes the response.

In short, CSE is shooting for nothing short of being the school for solar, offering the biggest and best of everything: the largest pure solar PV research facility in the world; the only utility-scale test site in the world; the largest exclusively solar PV innovation lab globally; the most technologies deployed anywhere. Alongside all of this, CSE pledges to generate 100% of the campus’ energy from its own 50MW plant.

The US$600 million venture is being majority funded by “venture philanthropy” and government bursaries; it has already secured its first venture partner, but is far from fully funded. CSE subsequently welcomes conversations with technologies corporate groups, other institutions, and venture capitalists and of course philanthropists.

Money aside, CSE’s primary focus will be on education, then job creation with career training, engineering research specialities including cell architecture, optics, ion implantation, 3D printing and advanced manufacturing methods among others.

But with an impressive list of international solar institutes already established across the globe, will CSE ever be able to live up to its grand ambitions?
Mark Thirsk, managing partner at Linx Consulting for electric materials, believes CSE will still find it hard to overtake other established centres such as America’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute to become a global leaders.

But he commends CSE’s focus on next-generation research technologies and predicts CSE may “help tip solar installations into becoming sure-fire money makers eventually, but those gains remain a few years away”.

And what about the cost? Fraunhofer’s expenditure over four years was less than half, at approximately US$270 million, while NREL’s expenditure in 2009 was US$316 million.
“The headline number is impressive, but it sounds as if some of the money will be invested in a ground-based array rather than in research,” concludes Thirsk.

Raju Yenamandra, vice president of business development at manufacturer SolarWorld USA, reckons only 25% of the US$600 million figure will be spent on the in-house array, but admits the “devil is in the detail” as announcements so far are not detailed enough for a full insight. Yenamandra doesn’t imagine CSE will be frivolous with its budget though, as it won’t want to be “pounced” on by critics if seen to be splashing money around.

Yenamandra mainly sings CSE’s praise for bringing practical solar to academia, offering a side-by-side comparison for installation approaches. And he predicts that if the institute can make enough money from its 50MW solar plant, it will be able to fulfil its ambitions. CSE plans to sell spare electricity from the plant to the national grid to provide Texans outside the campus walls with clean, green, cheap energy.

For America as a whole Yenamandra thinks CSE will help promote and advertise solar to the general public, as the “population is more likely to embrace solar if it is from a university”. CSE plans to provide independent verifications and breakdowns of solar products to make it clear what has been proven and what is viable in solar energy.

But what seems to define Texas A&M from other universities is its sheer boldness, says Yenamandra. Where other universities he believes are shy and purely technology and theory focused, CSE will be actively applying and installing (and gaining grants and credibility on the way).
Which is good news for graduates – Yenamandra confirms Solarworld USA would value CSE graduates as having an “edge” over others for practical work experience in the solar field, and would hope training times could therefore be minimised, accelerating solar advancement as a whole.
CSE will also run a solar entrepreneurship programme lasting two years aimed at amateurs and established solar professionals. Students are promised the chance to work with cutting edge technology teams and to learn how to start and run a global solar company.

There are also ten scholarships offered per company, with participants given the chance to live in CSE, refine their technology, train in solar business, acquire additional talent and hit the ground at a full run ready for an advanced venture capital investment - leaving the inventors and entrepreneurs in charge of their company, and the technology.

As for CSE’s ambition of America becoming a world leader in solar again, Yenamandra doesn’t think CSE will help it to overtake China in terms of solar production.
But with such bold ambitions, it is hard not to be won over by CSE’s vision of becoming the biggest and best solar research institute in the world.

At least for now anyway.

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)

Shared publicly  -  6:57 AM

 

Marked Prairie Dog — The chin of an anesthetized prairie dog in Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota is marked before the animal is released back into the wild.

Over 30 organizations and agencies are testing a USGS-developed oral vaccine to prevent the spread of plague in prairie dogs. If successful, the sylvatic plague vaccine could help protect endangered black-footed ferrets in the western U.S. because the ferrets rely on prairie dogs for food.

A veterinarian tags each trapped prairie dog and takes hair, whisker, and blood samples before scientists release the animals. Chin markings help scientists determine whether certain trapped prairie dogs had been previously tested. If markings are present on a trapped animal, that animal is immediately released without further testing. Photo credit: Marisa Lubeck, USGS.

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)'s photos

 

Good Reasons for "Believing" in God - Dan Dennett, AAI 2007

Dan Dennett's talk at the AAI 2007 Conference in Washington, D.C. He is presented with the 2007 Richard Dawkins award at the introduction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvJZQwy9dvE

Study Sheds New Light on Extinction of Dinosaurs

Jul 28, 2014 by Sci-News.com

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According to a study published in the journal Biological Reviews, non-avian dinosaurs might have survived the impact of a large bolide about 66 million years ago if it had happened a few million years earlier or later.

This image shows two individuals of Qianzhousaurus sinensis and a small feathered dinosaur called Nankangia. Image credit: Chuang Zhao.

“There has long been intense scientific debate about the cause of the dinosaur extinction,” said Dr Richard Butler from the University of Birmingham, who is a co-author on the study.
“Although our research suggests that dinosaur communities were particularly vulnerable at the time the asteroid hit, there is nothing to suggest that dinosaurs were doomed to extinction. Without that asteroid, the dinosaurs would probably still be here, and we very probably would not.”
“The dinosaurs were victims of colossal bad luck,” added Dr Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, the lead author on the study.
“Not only did a giant asteroid strike, but it happened at the worst possible time, when their ecosystems were vulnerable. Our new findings help clarify one of the enduring mysteries of science.”
Dr Brusatte and his colleagues studied an updated catalogue of dinosaur fossils, mostly from North America, to create a picture of how dinosaurs changed over the few million years before the asteroid hit.
The team found that in the few million years before a large bolide (comet or asteroid) struck what is now Mexico, Earth was experiencing environmental upheaval. This included extensive volcanic activity, changing sea levels and varying temperatures.
At this time, the dinosaurs’ food chain was weakened by a lack of diversity among the large herbivorous dinosaurs on which others preyed. This was probably because of changes in the environment and climate.
This created a perfect storm of events in which non-avian dinosaurs were vulnerable and unlikely to survive the aftermath of the asteroid strike.
As food chains collapsed, this would have wiped out the dinosaur kingdom one species after another.
The only dinosaurs to survive were those who could fly, which evolved to become the birds of today.
The scientists said if the asteroid had struck a few million years earlier, when the range of dinosaur species was more diverse and food chains were more robust, or later, when new species had time to evolve, then they very likely would have survived.
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Stephen L. Brusatte et al. The extinction of the dinosaurs. Biological Reviews, published online July 28, 2014; doi: 10.1111/brv.12128

Reading Climate Change in the Leaves

An ecologist records nature's color signals to understand the feedback between plants and a changing climate.

By Josie Garthwaite|Tuesday, May 27, 2014

 

Andrew Richardson installs instruments 115 feet up in the Harvard Forest. 

Courtesy Donald Aubrecht

A silver station wagon loaded with climbing gear, computers, electrical wiring and a few scientists from Harvard University stops near a stand of pine and oak trees in the Harvard Forest, about 70 miles west of campus. Physiological ecologist Andrew Richardson, leader of this expedition, slips from the driver’s seat and grabs gear to ascend a metal tower among the trees. Its peak affords
Richardson a clear view of his living laboratory: the forest canopy.

Above the treetops, he checks a cluster of instruments that analyze the lush canopy as a collection of numbers: the amount of carbon being inhaled from the atmosphere, the concentration of water vapor in the air and the precise mix of hues the leaves exhibit.

Different pigments serve different functions: Green chlorophyll, which dominates during the growing season, absorbs light energy for photosynthesis, the conversion of carbon and water to sugar. In the shortening days of autumn, red anthocyanins and yellow carotenoids take over to help protect leaves against light damage.

To document this subtle seasonal color change, a webcam atop the tower snaps high-resolution images of the canopy every 30 minutes from dawn to dusk and uploads them to an online database.
During the past decade, Richardson has spearheaded an effort to install more than 80 such cameras at sites across North America, from the arctic tundra near northern Alaska’s Toolik Lake to the tropical grasslands surrounding Hawaii’s towering Mauna Kea. 

This PhenoCam Network amasses thousands of photos per day. Over time, Richardson hopes the resulting trove of color data will help scientists understand — and better predict — how ecosystems like the Harvard Forest respond to changes in the climate. 

Fall colors in the Harvard Forest on any given day (Oct. 9 in this case) vary from year to year, depending on temperature and rainfall.

Courtesy of Andrew Richardson/PhenoCam Network (3)

A Pulsating Palette

Over the course of millennia, white snow cover, vibrant autumn foliage and bright bursts of green have punctuated the rhythmic cycles of winter frosts, spring showers and long, warm summer days. Animals have evolved to be in sync with seasonal change: They bring young into the world just as nutritious green sprouts emerge in spring, and molt to blend in with winter whites and summer green-browns. It’s an intricate dance scientists refer to as phenology.

Richardson’s efforts to decipher this color code began in the 1990s, shortly after his return from an eight-month trek in Canada’s Yukon Territory. “It was the vegetation, the transition from forest to tundra and how the colors changed through the seasons that really captivated me,” he recalls.
Richardson had recently abandoned pursuit of a Ph.D. in economics at MIT and found himself in awe of nature’s colorful clockwork — so much so that he redirected his studies. 

Richardson enrolled in Yale University’s forestry program in 1996 and a few years later threw himself into a project lopping off balsam fir and red spruce branches in the White Mountains. He measured how much light the needles reflected in different wavelengths. This is an indicator of stress and “a very precise way of measuring color,” he explains.

Richardson showed that needles in the harsh, resource-poor high altitudes invested in stress-protection pigments to cope with wind, cold and blazing sun. 

Reading the Leaves

“Phenology is really sensitive to weather,” Richardson explains. “If it’s a cold spring, leaves will come out later. If it’s a warm spring, that will happen earlier.” 

Forests in the United States absorb and store more than 750 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, or more than 10 percent of national carbon emissions. Warmer temperatures triggering earlier green sprouts could produce a longer growing season in some places and more photosynthesis — and thus more carbon uptake. But early growth followed by frost or drought could damage fragile sprouts and reduce the amount of carbon that certain plants are able to absorb. Some species also respond to warming by fast-forwarding through their life cycles, narrowing the window for photosynthesis and carbon uptake.

Nature’s color palette already shows effects of climate change. Along the East Coast, where the “green wave” of spring leaves sprouting from maples, oaks and poplars historically has rolled from Miami to Maine in 75 days, atmospheric scientists with Princeton University predict the wave could take just 59 days by the end of the century. In parts of New England, fall colors arrive a few days later than they did 20 years ago, and the reds are more muted as autumn temperatures in the region warm.

But scientists don’t know what new rhythms will arise across different regions  — whether bursts of green will be brighter but shorter-lasting, for example, or more muted but longer-lasting. Nor do they know what such changes mean for the food web; for life-cycle events like migration, breeding and nesting; for the amount of moisture that trees will suck from the soil; or for the amount of carbon dioxide stored by plants.

That’s what Richardson hopes to tease out. “As we build up a big archive — warm years, cold years, wet years and dry years — we can use the data to develop models of how weather and phenology are related,” he says. These models can then be mapped against climate forecasts to predict how phenology could shift in the future, painting a picture of landscapes in a world of warmer temperatures, altered precipitation and humidity, and changes in cloud cover. “We want to use phenology as a biological indicator of the impacts of climate change on ecosystems,” Richardson says.

Richardson climbs a tower in New Hampshire’s White Mountains to repair a wireless network.

Courtesy Mariah Carbone

Cameras Rolling

Webcams offer a cheap way to monitor foliage at a local scale across a broad geographic range. “These pictures give you this permanent record,” Richardson says. “I can see what it was like on any day. I can go back to other years and compare, and tell you how things are different between those two years.” 

Scientists have used satellite-mounted sensors to indirectly measure vegetative growth around the globe for decades. But cloud cover and other atmospheric clutter often muddle the data. A study published in Nature in February suggests that previous models based on satellite data have overestimated greenness during dry seasons in the Amazon rainforest. Shadows, which shorten over the course of the tropical dry season, produce an optical illusion: Leaves reflect more light in the infrared spectrum, even as their actual greenness declines. 

Researchers need ground-level measurements like those of the PhenoCam Network to validate
remotely gathered information and refine the algorithms used to evaluate it. Richardson’s work complements field observations by researchers like Harvard ecologist John O’Keefe, who visited the same trees in the Harvard Forest every few days for more than 20 years, starting in the 1990s, to track the opening of buds in springtime and autumn leaf coloration. Last year Richardson’s team analyzed O’Keefe’s historic data set and found that most local tree species will likely display fall colors for longer durations and at higher intensity in coming years.

A decade and a half after Richardson’s shift to ecology, he has come to see leaf color the way an economist might view a financial statement. “It tells you a lot about the physiology of the leaf,” he says. 

Eighty-two feet up the tower, Richardson emerges above the dark understory of the Harvard Forest to feel a flush of sunlight and a flick of breeze on his face. “The views from the top are fantastic,” he says, “and this motivates a lot of what I do.” His methodical quest to decode the phenological rainbow has a way of propelling itself forward. As Aldo Leopold, who doggedly recorded seasonal signposts in Wisconsin in the 1930s and ’40s, once wrote: “Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search, and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.”

[This article originally appeared in print as "Cracking the Climate Color Code."]

Early Cretaceous Bloodsucking Bugs Found in China

July 26, 2014 | by Janet Fang

Photo credit: Flexicorpus acutirostratus / Y. Yao et al., Current Biology 2014

       

Fossilized blood-feeding bugs have been discovered in early Cretaceous sediments in China. That means at least one lineage of bloodsuckers was around 30 million years earlier than we thought. They may have even fed from dinosaurs. According to the study published in Current Biology this week, the fossils represent two new species, and they’re the earliest evidence of blood-feeding “true bugs.”

True bugs (order Hemiptera) have a mouthpart designed for sucking fluids, called the proboscis. But unlike proboscis-wielding butterflies or honeybees, true bugs can’t roll up their mouthparts. Modern true bugs include nasty bed bugs. As annoying and ubiquitous as they seem, blood-feeders (also called hematophages) are relatively uncommon among modern insects. They’re mostly found in just four orders: lice, fleas, true flies (including mosquitoes), and true bugs. The latter three have been documented prior to the Cenozoic.

It’s been hard to tell hematophages apart from their non-blood-feeding relatives in the patchy insect fossil record. Until now, only one hematophagous true bug, Quasicimex eilapinastes, has been described, from mid-Cretaceous amber in Myanmar, about 100 million years ago.
Working in the early Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Northeastern China, a team led by Yunzhi Yao and Dong Ren of Capital Normal University in Beijing studied nearly 400 insects. In seven true bug specimens, they looked specifically for geochemical signals of iron, which indicates blood meals. By combining those findings with results with morphological and taphonomic (fossilization) data, the team placed three of the bloodsuckers into two new genera within a new family, Torirostratidae.

The other fossilized true bugs belonged to phytophagous (plant eating) families or predaceous families, which include assassin bugs who would liquefy the insides of their prey, before drinking them. Their iron concentrations were much lower.

They named one of the new true bugs Flexicorpus acutirostratus. That’s Latin “flexi” for “soft” and “corpus” for “body.” The species name is taken from Latin “acuti” for “sharp” and “rostratus” for “beaked.” It's less than 10 millimeters long, and here are some cool pictures:

They’re naming the other one, which is over 12 millimeters long, Torirostratus pilosus. That’s Latin “torosus” for “bulges” and “rostratus” for “beaked” (again). The species name is comes from Latin “pilosus,” which refers to its dense setae (stiff bristles).

One of the bugs appears to have died immediately following a blood meal, which may have been taken from a mammal, bird, or dinosaur, though the researchers can’t be sure. (Insert Jurassic Park joke here, bonus points for True Blood.)

Images: Y. Yao et al., Current Biology 2014

Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/early-cretaceous-bloodsucking-bugs-found-china#mzQvUAVVY8ffihKI.99

Refreshing Our Hearts -- With Thich Nhat Hanh

Published on Mar 26, 2014

Enjoy this video stream from our friend Thich Nhat Hanh which we originally broadcast live in October of 2013, from the Paramount Theater in Oakland, CA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC8FBdWwejk