Close-up Lotus wallpaper, Large Invasive goldfish found in Lake Tahoe

Close-up Lotus wallpaper

Monster Goldfish Found in Lake Tahoe

A new kind of lake monster has been found, in the depths of Lake Tahoe: gigantic goldfish. Researchers trawling the lake for invasive fish species scooped up a goldfish that was nearly 1.5 feet long and 4.2 pounds.

“During these surveys, we’ve found a nice corner where there’s about 15 other goldfish,” environmental scientist Sudeep Chandra of the University of Nevada, Reno, told LiveScience.

Goldfish are a kind of carp so given plenty of food and room to grow, 1.5 ft. is not monstrous. The sad and surprising take-away from this article is that so many invasive aquatic species get in our lakes and rivers by way of people dumping their aquariums into them. Between 20 percent and 69 percent of fish keepers surveyed in Texas admitted to dumping. And that is just one state.

2013 Ford C-Max Energi review

The EPA estimates the C-Max Energi at 44 mpg city, 41 mpg highway, and 100 mpg equivalent, the last number based on it being driven under electric power. After a week of testing, my fuel economy in the C-Max Energi came to 58.2 mpg.

As that reviewer notes real world conditions and driving style can have a huge impact on your actual mileage. It can go both ways, you might get only the average or you could get 58mpg or even 100 mpg, depending on how many miles you run on just electric. It does get 21 miles on a full charge. So if your round trip commute is 18 miles, you might goes weeks on a few gallons of gas.

Bumblebees sense flowers’ electric fields

“We looked at [existing] literature and realised that the bees were being positively charged when they fly around, and that flowers have a negative potential.

“There’s always this electrical bias around. As a sensory biologist, suddenly I thought: can the bees sense that?” Prof Robert said.

Dominic Clarke, one of the lead authors, designed “fake” electric flowers in a laboratory “flying arena” to prove that electric fields are important floral cues.

When the researchers turned off the electric charge the bees just choose flowers at random. So the electric field is not an absolute essential, it just helps give them clues about which flowers have nectar ready.

Papilio Butterfly wallpaper

Papilio Butterfly wallpaper. Their common name is “Scarlet Mormon”

 

Study: Seals sleep with half their brain

“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.

What do TV screens, bullet-proof vests and soap all have common? They all work because of liquid crystallinity, a structure in which molecules are aligned without being packed regularly.

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.

Waxwing and Spring Blossoms wallpaper

Waxwing and Spring Blossoms wallpaper

 

 Python hunt in Everglades nets just 68: organizers

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.

UBC researchers have found that when the animals at the top of the food chain are removed, freshwater ecosystems emit a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

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.

Alzheimer’s Disease Cases in America Predicted to Triple By 2050

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.

Little Forest Bridge wallpaper

Little Forest Bridge wallpaper

Artificial legs boost limbless loggerhead turtle

A sea turtle that lost her front legs to a shark attack was bidding to match “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius on Tuesday, as she donned the latest in artificial flipper technology in Japan.

Yu, an approximately 25-year-old female loggerhead turtle, was test-driving her 27th pair of artificial front legs around her home aquarium near Kobe in western Japan, where she proves a draw for the crowds.

There have been other attempts to fit sea turtles with artificial limbs, but they have reportedly not gone so well. Yu’s limb are part of a kind of little sweater that they put down over her head and what remains of her real limbs fit inside the sleeves. This special design seems to do the trick.

Future Space Landscape wallpaper

Futuristic Space Landscape wallpaper

 

For those that would like some more background on the video, see this article, The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Viruses

Few non-scientists would be able to distinguish the E. coli virus from HIV under a microscope. Both viruses are as different in their design as they are in their outwardly effects. Artist Luke Jerram, however, can describe in intricate detail the shapes of a slew of deadly viruses. He is intrigued by viruses, as a subject matter, because of their inherent irony. That is, something as virulent as SARS can actually, in its physical form, be quite delicate.

This news was everywhere from the BBC to the science journal Nature to the NYT by yesterday afternoon, but just in case someone missed it, Meet the Ancestor of Every Human, Bat, Cat, Whale and Mouse

A team of US scientists have now reconstructed what this ancestral placental was like, to an extraordinary level of detail. They have predicted how much it would have weighed, the number of molars in its jaws, the shape of its sperm, and the path that its carotid artery took up its neck. None of this comes from a fossil of the creature itself. Instead, the predictions are based on 80 of its descendants, including some that are still alive and others that joined it in extinction. To find out more details about the results (and what they mean about when placentals evolved) have a look at my coverage for Nature News.

Meanwhile, I wanted to publish the explanation that one of my sources—Olaf Bininda-Emonds from Oldenburg University—sent me, which explains just how much work went into this.

To do their analysis, the team had to score the skeleton of 86 different species according to more than 4,500 anatomical traits. Think of an enormous table that they had to fill in. Here’s Bininda-Emonds on what that took:

I find the study to be absolutely stunning. The data matrix of characters that they’ve assembled is jaw-dropping and, when combined with DNA sequence data, undoubtedly provides one of the best estimates of evolutionary relationships within placental mammals to date.

And they have a artist’s illustration of what the little critter looked like. Not that different from some past reconstructions based on smaller samplings of DNA and paleontological data.

New process speeds conversion of biomass to fuels

The Ring of Simplicity

For more than a century, chemists focused on a “more is better” approach, adding functionality to molecules, not removing it. For this breakthrough, however, researchers applied the opposite strategy and aimed for simplicity, opening up a component of the molecule to make it easier to transform. They perfected a method for “direct-ring opening” of the furan rings, which are made of four carbons and one oxygen atom, and that are ubiquitous in biomass-derived fuel precursors.

Opening these rings into linear chains is a necessary step in the production of energy-dense fuels, said Gordon, because these linear chains can then be reduced and deoxygenated into alkanes used in gasoline and diesel fuel. The reaction requires relatively mild conditions using the common reagent hydrochloric acid as a catalyst.

The researchers tested the process on several biomass-derived molecules, and they performed calculations to study the selectivity and mechanism of reaction. This information is key to designing better catalysts and processes for biomass conversion.

As they note first off in the article current technologies for the conversion of non-food biomass require a lot of energy in terms of heat and pressure input to work. So it is either not cost effective or barely cost effective for the conversion.