“Seals do something biologically amazing — they sleep with half their brain at a time,” Toronto researcher John Peever said in a university release Tuesday. “The left side of their brain can sleep while the right side stays awake.
“Seals sleep this way while they’re in water, but they sleep like humans while on land. Our research may explain how this unique biological phenomenon happens,” he said.
Thew neurotransmitter acetylcholine was found to be high on the awake side and low on the sleep side.
Locked and Loaded, How Second Amendment mythologies—and the market—have taken over the gun-violence debate. It seems to a large extent we cannot have a public debate about guns because as soon as someone mentioned gun safety regulation, the very first rejoinder will be the accusation that the person proposing some mild regulation actually wants to ban all guns. That is what is called hysteria. Assault weapons like the Bushmaster .223 semiautomatic rifle were banned for new sales for over a decade and the nation managed not to descend into tyranny.
Hundreds of hunters spent a month combing Florida’s Everglades for Burmese pythons, in the end capturing and killing 68 of the slithery, invasive reptiles, organizers said Saturday.
The longest was 14 feet and three inches, netting the hunter who brought it in a $1,000 prize.
68 may not be a lot in total, but that is hundreds, maybe thousands of snake offspring that will not be decimating small mammals and birds in south Florida.
Predators can influence the exchange of carbon dioxide between ecosystems and the atmosphere by altering ecosystem processes such as decomposition and primary production, according to food web theory1, 2. Empirical knowledge of such an effect in freshwater systems is limited, but it has been suggested that predators in odd-numbered food chains suppress freshwater carbon dioxide emissions, and predators in even-numbered food chains enhance emissions2, 3. Here, we report experiments in three-tier food chains in experimental ponds, streams and bromeliads in Canada and Costa Rica in the presence or absence of fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) and invertebrate (Hesperoperla pacifica and Mecistogaster modesta) predators. We monitored carbon dioxide fluxes along with prey and primary producer biomass. We found substantially reduced carbon dioxide emissions in the presence of predators in all systems, despite differences in predator type, hydrology, climatic region, ecological zone and level of in situ primary production.
This is in keeping with the general concept of the intricacies of the food web. When key components are taken out of the web, it starts to malfunction. In this case one of the consequences is a little more of a contribution to climate change.
I study the effects of neurological disorders on language, and I’m simultaneously fascinated and frightened by the syndromes and disorders I see in the patients who participate in my lab’s studies. Without question, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most terrifying. It progressively destroys your memory and ability to communicate, before eventually killing you. While there are some treatments that can slow the progression of symptoms in some people, there still isn’t anything resembling an effective cure. While we’ve identified some genetic markers and protein abnormalities in the brains of people with AD, we still don’t really know what causes it. But, we do know that the number of people with Alzheimer’s in America is going to increase rapidly over the next 40 years, according to a new study published in Neurology.
Researchers at the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging in Chicago collected interview data from more than 10,000 adults over the age of 65, and screened a sample of them for AD. From these data, they figured that there are 5 million Americans with AD today, but that will swell to almost 15 million by 2050, nearly a threefold increase.
One of the reason for the projected increase in Alzheimers is the aging baby Boomer segment of the population. It is simply a case of such a large part of the population being in their senior years.
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.
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.
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.
Researchers from computer firm IBM say they have invented a new non-toxic gel that can kill deadly drug-resistant bacteria by cutting through the sludge that shelters them and attacking the germ’s cell membrane.
If verified, the finding could herald a breakthrough in the fight against the superbugs that infect hospitals everywhere and add billions annually to public health bills worldwide.
In a press release issued overnight, the computer firm said researchers from IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore had developed “an antimicrobial hydrogel that can break through diseased biofilms and completely eradicate drug-resistant bacteria upon contact.”
“The synthetic hydrogel, which forms spontaneously when heated to body temperature, is the first-ever to be biodegradable, biocompatible and non-toxic, making it an ideal tool to combat serious health hazards facing hospital workers, visitors and patients,” the statement said.
IBM and IBN create antimicrobial hydrogels
Biofilms are the toxic sludge that harbour germs and often form around medical devices implanted in the body, such as catheters, heart valves and hip implants.
Biofilms are notoriously difficult to penetrate with common antibiotics but the researchers said their new water-based gel would break through biofilms and attack the bacteria’s cell membrane.
Professor Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases and microbiology expert at the Australian National University said the finding was potentially very interesting.
“They don’t give any evidence it works — this is a press release for a company on the stock exchange — but having said that, it’s good a large company is into this,” said Professor Collignon, who was not involved in the research.
“It could have its uses and also abuses. We are using too much disinfectant in kitchens and homes and that goes into the waterways and has the potential to induce resistance,” he said.
“Their claim they can penetrate a biofilm is good, if it turns out to be verified independently by others. If they can inject [the gel] that’s a major step.”
Professor Collignon said that if the new hydrogel could damage the germ’s cell membranes, it may damage cell membranes in the body as well.
Dr Marc Pellegrini, an infectious diseases researcher at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute said the discovery “has a lot of potential.”
“A lot of the bugs in hospitals at the moment are resistant to the drugs that we have. In places like intensive care units, patients have a lot of devices implanted in them like catheters or tubes to deliver drugs and these tubes often get contaminated with microbes. This is hard to treat,” said Dr Pellegrini, who was not involved in the research by IBM.
“This new discovery looks like it may well have application in preventing these surfaces becoming contaminated but it’s quite a few steps away from being put into practice in a hospital.”
Some antimicrobials that worked well in the lab presented unforeseen problems when used in humans, he said.
Including all the caveats about what this new gel could do was particularly good reporting. It seems to have potential, but as noted announcements like this to the press also tend to make company stock tick up a notch. It would be great to have a nontoxic and biodegradable superbug killer. The video is produced by IBM so is understandably very optimistic.
Urban farming has become one of the major international urban trends — a good reason for us to make a Top 5 of the greatest rooftop farms we’ve come across over the last years.
All over the world, people feel the need to start producing their food locally again. In cities, however, this is pretty difficult due to the lack of open spaces. The urban farming movement started in cities like Detroit that face a lot of vacancy. These shrinking cities have plenty of open space to produce locally grown vegetables. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of people in dense cities like New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong feel the urgent need to grow produce in their own city. The only spaces left in these cities are rooftops.
Spend a day at Hawaii’s beaches and you can’t miss the many small blue and white pieces of plastic scattered in the sand, along with bigger pieces of trash. Method, an ecoconscious cleaning-products company based in San Francisco, is putting that trash to use.
Its new liquid hand and dish soap is sold in a container made from plastic collected by hand from Hawaii’s beaches. “The most viable solution to our plastic pollution problem is using the plastic that’s already on the planet,” says Adam Lowry, Method’s co-founder and chief “greenskeeper.”
I find it remarkable that they are both cleaning plastics from beaches and suing what they collect for reuse. Now that is seriously closing the waste loop.
Researchers have discovered a new tick-borne illness, similar to Lyme disease and carried by the same deer tick that transmits Lyme.
One of the confirmed cases of this new disease – one that doesn’t even have a name yet – was on Nantucket, and infectious-disease experts are sure that it’s present in other parts of the state.
“One to 4 percent of the (deer) ticks in Massachusetts carry it,” said Dr. Philip Molloy, a rheumatologist at Jordan Hospital in Plymouth.
The identification of the new disease by researchers at Yale Schools of Public Health and Medicine could help explain why many patients tested for Lyme disease received negative results.
Borrelia miyamotoi is the name of the bacterium causing the new strain of tick born disease, though it appears to respond well to the same antibiotics used against Lymes. Unlike Lymes sufferers have relapsing fevers. At the current rate at which the disease is spreading they expect 5,000 new cases in the coming year.
Thus far that Florida hunt for invasive snakes has resulted in 21 pythons being killed, and thank goodness, zero people. The hunters are having a more difficult time than they imagined finding the snakes since their natural camouflage helps them blend in so well with the vegetation.
It’s hard to pin down exactly how many Burmese pythons slither through Florida’s Everglades, but officials say their effect is glaringly obvious. According to a study released last year, sightings of raccoons, opossums, bobcats, rabbits and other mammals in the Everglades are down as much as 99 percent in areas where pythons are known to live.
Four Spoon-billed Sandpipers were found at Fucheng, near Leizhou, south-west Guangdong Province in December 2012. Together with several other recent sightings this record indicates that Spoon-billed Sandpiper is a more widespread wintering species on the coast of southern China than was previously known. However, evidence was found of large-scale trapping of shorebirds and action is needed to address this threat.
…One of the three Spoon-billed Sandpipers recorded at Zhanjiang in 2003 was caught in a bird trapper’s net. Since then the problem of trapping appears to have become even worse and illegal bird-netting now poses a major threat to Spoon-billed Sandpiper and other shorebirds. The team counted a total of 460 mistnets during the survey – these were typically 25 m long and 3 m high, meaning that the nets counted equated to a length of 11.5 km. The nets were placed, often in parallel lines or V-shapes, beside shorebird roost-sites on fishponds, saltpans and sandbars on the coast, as well as in nearby paddyfields and marshes.
Spoon-billed Sandpiper
There was no indication in that report of reasons why locals would be netting shore birds. It would take quite a few to provide a decent meal, but this would not be the first time locals have taken to killing dozens to hundreds of birds for dinner.
That’s right, some of the bowhead whales in the icy waters today are over 200 years old. Alaska Dispatch writes:
Bowheads seem to be recovering from the harvest of Yankee commercial whaling from 1848 to 1915, which wiped out all but 1,000 or so animals. Because the creatures can live longer than 200 years — a fact [Craig] George discovered when he found an old stone harpoon point in a whale — some of the bowheads alive today may have themselves dodged the barbed steel points of the Yankee whalers.
Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick in 1851, after a brief stint on a whaling ship.
….Thirty four years ago, scientists counted 1,200 whales. Today there are about 14,000 of the mammals out there.
An artist’s rendering of a bowhead whale diving. (Richard Ellis)
Bowheads are named for their thick skulls or the blubber that covers them anyway. They have evolved that trait to break through Arctic ice.
tangledwing 
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