A sleek new urban bicyle, Rare pygmy elephants ‘poisoned’ in Borneo, Researchers harness nature to produce hydrogen fuel of the future

Not electric, just an imaginative and modern bicycle called the 77|011 made by Rizoma

Designed by Italian manufacturer Rizoma in collaboration with Belgian fashion designer Dirk Bikkembergs, the 77|011 is a sleek bicycle for urbanites which changes the rules with its unique design. It features a distinctive monobloc carbon frame, and its saddle, pulley as well as handlebar are made of billet aluminum. Price tag: 3,700€.

Rare pygmy elephants ‘poisoned’ in Borneo

Ten endangered pygmy elephants have been found dead in a reserve in Malaysia, with officials saying they may have been poisoned.

The animals, which had all suffered internal bleeding, were found near each other over the space of three weeks.

In one instance, a three-month-old calf was found alongside the body of its mother, apparently trying to wake her.

The picture of the baby elephant trying to wake its mother is especially sad. It all seems so senseless. The animals are endangered and we’re not talking about people who were starving and having no other choice, used them for food.

 

Much of the east, south and even the upper mid-west was having some amazingly spring-like weather. That looks like it is about to end, Satellite Image Shows Eastern U.S. Severe Weather System

A powerful cold front moving from the central United States to the East Coast is wiping out spring-like temperatures and replacing them with winter-time temperatures with powerful storms in between. An image released from NASA using data from NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite provides a stunning look at the powerful system that brings a return to winter weather in its wake.

Credit: NOAA/NASA/GOES Project

Maybe not for everyone, but for some, our new science term of the day: research conducted in sil­ico, done with computer modeling. Since scientists know a lot about how molecules and compound act – the kinds of bonds formed given a a certain electron shell formation, it is possible to put a lot of the possibilities into a software program. Researchers harness nature to produce hydrogen fuel of the future

The team, led by Prince­ton chem­istry pro­fes­sor Annabella Sel­l­oni, takes inspi­ra­tion from bac­te­ria that make hydro­gen from water using enzymes called di-iron hydro­ge­nases. Selloni’s team uses com­puter mod­els to fig­ure out how to incor­po­rate the magic of these enzymes into the design of prac­ti­cal syn­thetic cat­a­lysts that humans can use to pro­duce hydro­gen from water.

In this lat­est paper, Sel­l­oni and co-authors present a solu­tion to an issue that has dogged the field: the cat­a­lysts designed so far are sus­cep­ti­ble to poi­son­ing by the oxy­gen present dur­ing the reac­tion. By mak­ing changes to the cat­a­lyst to improve the sta­bil­ity of the struc­ture in water, the researchers found that they had also cre­ated a cat­a­lyst that is tol­er­ant to oxy­gen with­out sac­ri­fic­ing effi­ciency. What is more, their arti­fi­cial cat­a­lyst could be made from abun­dant and cheap com­po­nents, such as iron, indi­cat­ing that the cat­a­lyst could be a cost-effective way of pro­duc­ing hydrogen.

 

And just something I was playing around with in a graphics program,

Winter Lake painting

 

Blue Honeycomb Swirl wallpaper

Blue Honeycomb Swirl wallpaper

 

Forests as rainmakers: Scientist gains support for a controversial hypothesis

A new study boosts support for the physics behind a controversial theory that forests play a significant role in determining rainfall, creating atmospheric winds that pump moisture across continents.

The model could revolutionise the way we understand local climates, and their vulnerability, with many major implications. It suggests, for instance, that by strategically replanting forests we could attract rainfall into desert and arid regions like the African Sahel, where drought has for years ravaged crops and induced famine.

Likewise, significant forest loss could transform lush tropical regions into arid landscapes.

“This theory provides us with yet another reason to protect and conserve forest cover,” said Douglas Sheil, co-author of the paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and a Senior Associate with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

You can read that paper here, Where do winds come from? A new theory on how water vapor condensation influences atmospheric pressure and dynamics.

British environmentalist Tony Juniper: What has nature ever done for us?

Through dozens of accessible stories I describe how nature is among other things the world’s largest water utility, a vital ally in the control of pests and diseases, the main means to capture solar energy, a massive recycling system, an endless innovator, the provider of all our food, a vast carbon capture and storage system and the only means we have to replenish oxygen. How can all that be an alternative to ‘growth’, especially when added together its annual contribution to our wellbeing is estimated as worth about double global GDP?

Cats kill more than one billion birds each year

America’s cats, including housecats that adventure outdoors and feral cats, kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds in a year, says Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., who led the team that performed the analysis. Previous estimates of bird kills have varied, he says, but “500 million is a number that has been thrown around a lot.”

For wild mammals, the annual toll lies between 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion, Marra and his colleagues report along with the bird numbers January 29 in Nature Communications. The majority of these doomed mammals and birds fall into the jaws of cats that live outdoors full-time with or without food supplements from people.

New Lake Erie park protects valuable wildlife habitat

Project name: Lake Erie Bluffs Park.

Location: Lake County in northeast Ohio, about 30 miles east of Cleveland.

Description: Lake Erie Bluffs is a county park on the shores of Lake Erie in northeast Ohio. The 139-acre parcel provides public access to a gorgeous stretch of natural beach. The site is also ecologically significant: It provides habitat for 20 rare species, including the bald eagle, least flycatcher, purple sand grass and the inland sea rocket. The site was targeted for development but the project never materialized. Lake County officials then worked with other government agencies and private land trusts to acquire the site. The park meets one of the goals of the Great Lakes Restoration Collaborative. The collaborative, a presidential task force established in 2004, identified nine priorities for restoring the Great Lakes, including “a need for significantly more habitat conservation and species management

Bull moose resting, How ‘Exascale’ Computing will Power Climate Research

Bull Moose resting

 

Video: How ‘Exascale’ Computing will Power Climate Research

In this video, Climate modelers James J. Hack of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Mark Taylor of Los Alamos National Laboratory discuss how Exascale computing capabilities will improve climate predictions. In the meantime, scientists must figure out how to refine their models to make full use of all that power.

With exascale computing, climate-change models can start to resolve physical properties like ocean eddies – and potentially resolve hurricanes,” said Ben Kirtman, professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami. He and colleagues are studying eddies and how they transport heat from the tropics to the United States. These eddies maintain the Gulf Stream. “Until we get exascale,” he says, “we need lots of years of simulations” to model how these eddies affect heat transfer.

Scientific modeling does involve some, what might be refered to as the art of science. Modeling may not apways predict something down to the last molecule or micrometer, but generally as an investigative method into our world it works pretty well. There is a good introductory paper here from the University of Texas on modeling, Chapter 4. Models are the Building Blocks of Science

Glial cells supply nerve fibres with energy-rich metabolic products

Interestingly, the function of the oligodendrocytes goes far beyond the mere provision of myelin. Klaus-Armin Nave and his team at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen already succeeded in demonstrating years ago that healthy glial cells are also essential for the long-term function and survival of the axons themselves, irrespective of myelination. “The way in which the oligodendrocytes functionally support their associated axons was not clear to us up to now,” says Nave. In a new study, the researchers were able to show that the glial cells are involved in, among other things, the replenishment of energy in the nerve fibres. “They could be described as the petrol stations on the data highway of the axons,” says Nave, explaining the results.

It was previously known that oligodendrocytes(specialized glial cells) help with the formation of the fat-rich myelin sheath that surrounds the nerve fibers. It was suspected that they did more than just as as insulators, they increase the transmission speed of the axons and also reduces ongoing energy consumption. The extreme importance of myelin for a functioning nervous system is shown by the diseases like multiple sclerosis that result from a defective myelin layer.

Joanne Young Illustration – The Alphabet of Caught Fish. Artful and clever illustration of fish.

Market for Bear Bile Threatens Asian Population

Winter Bryce Canyon wallpaper

Winter Bryce Canyon wallpaper

Beautiful Butterfly Crater wallpaper. Via NASA/JPL/University of Arizona and the HighResolution Imaging Science Experiment on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Hypersonic ‘SpaceLiner’ to fly passengers by 2050

The German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Space Systems (DLR) is developing a “SpaceLiner” that will fly passengers from Europe to Australia in 90 minutes, or Europe to California in 60 minutes at a speed of 24 Mach, 12 times the speed of Concorde.

The SpaceLiner is a hypersonic suborbital spaceplane concept under development with the support of the EU’s European Space Agency’s (ESA) FAST 20XX program.

This may all be a little premature as they have to solve some basic issues like finding a material for the space-plane that can withstand the intense heat generated when the plane glides at hypersonic speeds through the upper atmosphere. So they are hoping that there are advances in materials scince which will happens in the next thirty years. They currenly estimate that flight from Europe to Austrilia will cost several thousand dollars. That might be so expensive bad in 2050 costs. When the supersonic Conciode was flying New York to London regualr faire was around $6,000.

Fralin Life Science Institute graduate student invents new cancer drug delivery vehicle

Collaborating with a local biotech company, Techulon, Hemp is developing a phosphonium-based polymer for the delivery of nucleic acid. Phosphonium groups are positively charged and the nucleic acids are negatively charged, so the two electrostatically bind to produce a nanoparticle. This process creates a capsule in which the nucleic acid is protected by the polymer. After this binding occurs, the nanoparticle remains positively charged, making it more likely for cellular uptake since the cellular wall is negative.

However, a major challenge in drug delivery is avoiding damage to healthy cells.

“Most cancer therapeutics are pretty indiscriminate. They harm all cells, not just cancer cells. That’s why someone undergoing chemotherapy can lose their hair,” said Hemp. “The addition of targeting groups to the nanoparticles enables the selective treatment of cancer cells over healthy cells.”

The cancer’s rapid growth makes its vulnerable. The rapidly growing cells need nutrients and the inclusion of these nutrients as part of the weaponized nanoparticle allows researchers like Hemp to target only cancerous cells.

In trial studies, Hemp’s team has been able to show the phosphonium polymer successfully delivers nucleic acid in a test tube. Working with Techulon, he translates this knowledge into application by preparing that polymer for in-vivo use.

Once the new polymer delivery system is created they should be able to to manipulate the the nucleic acid and tailor it to the particular cancer.

Food waste a world tragedy, Dragonfly resting on spider web

The Conundrum of Food Waste

Each year, 1.3 billion tons of food — about one third of all the food produced globally –- ends up wasted even as hundreds of millions of people go hungry. This week, two United Nations agencies opened a global campaign to address that conundrum, calling for changes in the way that food is harvested, transported, processed, sold and consumed.

The Think, Eat, Save initiative, organized by the United Nations Environment Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization with partners, underlines the disparities between food production and consumption patterns in developed and developing countries.

Robert van Otterdijk, the team leader for the F.A.O.’s Save Food program, said that a 2011 study by his group found that just a quarter of the food lost annually would suffice to feed the world’s hungry.

“The biggest major finding was the striking difference between food waste and food losses in different parts of the word,” he said. Developing regions tend to suffer food losses in the production process through poor harvesting techniques, spoilage or improper storage, for example — what Mr. van Otterdijk calls “unintentional” loss.

Industrialized nations in the Americas, Europe and prosperous parts of Asia waste food at the retail and consumer end, embracing policies that favor glossy round apples and discard knobbly ones, for example, and set needlessly short limits on the shelf life of many products.

“And then you have, of course, the consumers that don’t plan their shopping well,” overestimating how much they may need and tossing much of it out later — largely because they can afford to do so and suffer no consequences, Mr. van Otterdijk said.

That expectation of perfect looking food – just the right color, perfectly shaped and so forth is a behavior or expectation that we have learned from advertising. I can understand not buying a badly bruised piece of fruit or vegetable, but if it becomes like that at home it can still be prepared in away that doesn’t make any difference what it looked like. Some people don’t like bananas once they start to turn brown, but they can still be used cut up in cereal or put in a blender with some bruised peaches, a little ice and milk to make a smoothie. People probably aren’t going to get the estimated usage for the week perfect, but they could get better. Some people use t leftovers as compost, which is a nice way to fertilize the vegetable garden and flower beds without using synthetic fertilizer, but not everyone has or can have a garden.

Dragonfly resting on spider web

CNN’s Erick Erickson: Climate Change Seems Like “A Problem We Probably Have To Get Used To” Rather Than One “We Can Cure”. The first polio vaccine was developed in the 1950s after years of research. Taking Mr. Erickson’s attitude, why not just get used to polio with its paralysis and death rates, and just deal with it. How about cancer. Some cancers are genetic, so why bother spending billions of research, just get used to it. Climate change is already costing the world economy billions of dollars ( and there are – The Human Cost of Climate Change), one assumes he would rather continue to pay that cost rather than the transition costs to a cleaner economy. Mr, Erickson has no scientific training yet is paid a nice six figure salary to pontificate on science and science related economic issues. No wonder the public is frequently so ill informed.

Right whales saved from entanglement have babies

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Four years after wildlife experts carefully cut away fishing line wrapped tight around its midsection, an endangered right whale that still bears a scar from the encounter returned to waters off the Georgia coast this month along with something to celebrate — a newborn calf by its side.

The new mom, known to its rescuers as Equator for the scar circling her belly, is one of three right whales spotted with babies this month off the Atlantic coast — years after the adults had been freed from entanglement by humans. Experts said they rarely saw rescued whales move on to motherhood until a few years ago. They called the January sightings a success story for a critically endangered species believed to number 400 or fewer.

According to that same report, the NOAA said that 40 whales of various species — including four endangered right whales — were reported entangled in fishing gear last year off the Atlantic coast of North America. Rescue crews were dispatched in 18 of those cases, including two for the right whales. Maybe it would help if commercial fishing fleets were a little more ethical about the impact of their nets.