April 23, 2007, 9:53 PM CT

First European Voyage Up the Delaware

A University of Pennsylvania scholar has pinpointed 1616 as the year of the first European voyage up the Delaware River.

Jaap Jacobs, a senior fellow at Penn's McNeil Center for Early American Studies, detailed his findings in a paper, "Truffle Hunting with an Iron Hog: The First Dutch Voyage up the Delaware River," presented to the McNeil Center Seminar Series on April 20.

Scholarly discoveries tend to be the outcome of a deliberate process, but serendipity played an important role in Jacobs' discovery of the significance of a centuries-old deposition pinpointing the year of the first Dutch voyage up the Delaware.

Sometime between 1993 and 1994 while doing research for his dissertation, Jacobs copied a summary of a document he found at the Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, the Amsterdam notarial archives. He said that the summary didn't indicate that the document was important, so he didn't look at the original until July 2000. At that point it became clear to him that the document referred to the Delaware River rather than the Hudson River, as he had originally thought. Years later, in 2007, while preparing his paper on early Dutch exploration of the Delaware and Hudson rivers, he revisited the historiography and realized that the document pertained to the first voyage up the Delaware by Europeans......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

April 23, 2007, 9:49 PM CT

Overcrowded hospitals may increase risk

Hospitals that operate at or over their capacity may be at increased risk of adverse events that injure patients, according to a study led by scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Woman's Hospital (BWH). The report in the recent issue of the journal Medical Care suggests that efforts to meet two primary challenges facing hospitals today reducing costs and improving patient safety may work against each other.

"While financial and political pressures to make health care more efficient are leading to increased hospital occupancy and greater patient turnover, patients and policymakers are quite rightly demanding that health delivery systems be made safer," says Joel Weissman, PhD, of the MGH Institute of Health Policy, the report's lead author. "Our study suggests that pushing efficiency efforts to their limits could be a double-edged sword that may jeopardize patient safety".

In order to examine their hypothesis that increased workload could raise the likelihood of adverse events, the scientists examined data from four hospitals in two states two large urban teaching hospitals and two suburban teaching hospitals over the 12 months from October 2000 through September 2001. To compile patient care information they reviewed patient charts and billing records on almost 25,000 patients, selecting 6,841 for comprehensive review, and analyzed that data against information on hospital workloads and staffing patterns, with a focus on variations within each hospital......... Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source

April 23, 2007, 9:43 PM CT

The emerging fate of the Neandertals

For nearly a century, anthropologists have been debating the relationship of Neandertals to modern humans. Central to the debate is whether Neandertals contributed directly or indirectly to the ancestry of the early modern humans that succeeded them.

As this discussion has intensified in the past decades, it has become the central research focus of Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.

Trinkaus has examined the earliest modern humans in Europe, including specimens in Romania, Czech Republic and France. Those specimens, in Trinkaus' opinion, have shown obvious Neandertal ancestry.

In an article appearing the week of April 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Trinkaus has brought together the available data, which shows that early modern humans did exhibit evidence of Neandertal traits.

"When you look at all of the well dated and diagnostic early modern European fossils, there is a persistent presence of anatomical features that were present among the Neandertals but absent from the earlier African modern humans," Trinkaus said. "Early modern Europeans reflect both their predominant African early modern human ancestry and a substantial degree of admixture between those early modern humans and the indigenous Neandertals"......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

April 23, 2007, 5:36 PM CT

First Seafloor Vents On Ultraslow-spreading Ridge

Researchers have found one of the largest fields of seafloor vents gushing super-hot, mineral-rich fluids on a mid-ocean ridge that, until now, remained elusive to the ten-year hunt to find them.

"The discovery of the first active vents ever found on an ultraslow-spreading ridge is a significant milestone event," said Jian Lin, leader of a team of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers who participated in a Chinese expedition to the remote Southwest Indian Ridge in the Indian Ocean in February and March.

Since deep-sea hydrothermal vents were first discovered 30 years ago in the Pacific Ocean, researchers have studied them all along the Mid-Ocean Ridge, a 40,000-mile-long mountain range that zigzags through the middle of the world's ocean basins like a giant zipper. The ridge marks the area where the Earth's giant tectonic plates spreads apart and new ocean crust forms from hot lava rising from deep within Earth's mantle.

Most studies of the chimney-like vent structures have taken place along ridges in the "fast-spreading" East Pacific Rise (100 to 200 millimeters per year) and the "slow-spreading" Mid-Atlantic Ridge (20 to 40 millimeters per year). Only in recent years have researchers explored "ultraslow-spreading ridges" (less than 20 millimeters per year) in the Arctic and Indian Oceans-remote areas tough to get to, and therefore the least studied......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

April 21, 2007, 7:32 AM CT

Pamper Your Planet!

Enjoy mud baths and sea-salt scrubs? This Earth Day, help us give the planet a little spa therapy of its own. Whether you want to nurture the birds and bugs that share your backyard or help heal rain forests and oceans across the globe, you can protect wildlife and wild places with your everyday actions. Join the Wildlife Conservation Society in our commitment to making the world a greener place by practicing these Earth-friendly suggestions.

Support green legislation.

By voicing your support for the Bigger Better Bottle Bill-a win-win solution for New York and its environment that would save tax dollars, reduce greenhouse emissions, and help keep our communities clean-you'll become part of the WCS community of planet Earth activists.

Cell phones don't grow on trees. But recycling them helps trees grow!

Deposit your old cell phones in the EcoCell bins located at the Bronx Zoo, Central Park Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo, Queens Zoo, and New York Aquarium. The coltan contained in the batteries will be recycled, reducing the demand to mine this element in the forests of Congo, where a number of endangered wildlife species live.

Transform your trash!

Help reduce our waste stream by finding creative ways to recycle your trash. Grow a plant in an empty milk carton, use old magazine pages for gift wrapping, or turn a coffee can into a canister for crayons and brushes. Get inspired by participating in recycled crafts activities at the zoos' and aquarium's Earth Day parties......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

April 21, 2007, 7:21 AM CT

Herring In Our Midst

Where car tires and factory refuse once rooted to its banks and flowed down its channel, new life has delicately reclaimed the Bronx River. The New York waterway is now home to alewife herring, night herons and egrets, and even a lone beaver. The return of native wildlife is proof of the river's improving health, and a testimony to community restoration efforts by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Bronx River Alliance, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation's Natural Resource Group, and Lehman College.

In order to find their way back to their historic home, some of these wildlife residents needed a little encouragement- and in the case of the herring, transit assistance. Last year, 200 of the silvery fish were ferried overland by truck from their birthplace in Connecticut to the riverfront of the Bronx Zoo. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection Inland Fisheries Division donated the truck, labor, and the aquatic pioneers themselves. The herring were released into their native home with great fanfare, the first net lowered to the water by Congressman Jose E. Serrano. Serrano's support of the restoration project has been integral to its success, and resulted in a federal partnership grant to WCS from NOAA, the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The 2006 release turned out to be highly successful, with the fish taking immediately to their new home. The herring spawned, producing the first official generation of Bronx alewives in more than 300 years, since the river was dammed for local industry. The flourmills that sprouted along the riverbanks in the 1600s blocked access to the fish's spawning grounds, and they vanished from the river. Last fall, the reintroduced herring's offspring were observed swimming downstream, presumably on their way to sea. (Like salmon, river herring hatch in freshwater and swim out to sea, returning as adults to their birthplace to spawn.) They are expected to return to the Bronx River in 2009, following a three to five year maturation period in the Long Island Sound and other coastal waters......... Posted by: Ashley      Read more         Source

April 21, 2007, 7:18 AM CT

When Nature Calls

The Bronx Zoo's newest exhibit requests a small contribution from its visitors upon entering. Your donation will support water conservation, help flowers grow, and provide healthy meals for red worms, fungi, and bacteria. And it doesn't take much.....just a little of your "liquid assets"!

Surrounded by sun, water, and soil, the Bronx Zoo eco-restrooms, located near the Bronxdale gate, are no typical New York City public facility. Cartoon animals that praise the "power of poop" adorn the stalls and walls of the skylit lavatory. But the graphics, from the children's book The Truth about Poop by Susan Goodman and illustrated by Elwood Smith, are more than silly scatological humor. They're also practical, offering advice on conserving resources at home and even providing a recipe for a homemade drain cleaner that won't harm wildlife.

The restrooms were created both as a conservation measure, as well as a reminder of our intimate connection with the Earth. Just as what goes into the body must come back out, what is taken from the environment must be put back in. At the new restrooms, zoo-goers' waste is not wasted; instead of entering the sewer system, your contributions-together with those of 500,000 yearly visitors-are flushed into a composting tank below the building. Microorganisms and other critters at the bottom of the food chain eat through the compost tank habitat, transforming its contents into fertilizer. Meanwhile, excess water from the sinks irrigates the gray water garden just outside, where the plants will naturally filter it......... Posted by: Ashley      Read more         Source

April 19, 2007, 7:46 PM CT

Global Earth Day broadcast to feature South Pole

Air quality research and ozone monitoring at the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole will be showcased as part of a global Earth Day telecast scheduled for April 20, 2007, on various ABC-television's news programs.

Stephen Padin, the South Pole station science leader, will be featured on the network's broadcast "Planet Earth 2007: Seven Ways to Help Save the World." Padin is spending the southern winter at the world's most remote scientific observatory.

Padin is expected to discuss what it is like to spend eight months of darkness at the Pole and what researchers are doing there. He will also talk about long-range scientific research to track levels of carbon-dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere since men first wintered at the Pole 50 years ago. The condition of the Earth's protective ozone layer also is monitored at the Pole.

The various reports in the daylong broadcast will air on "Good Morning America," "World News with Charles Gibson," an hour-long "20/20" anchored by Diane Sawyer and "Nightline".

The South Pole has the most pristine air on the Earth and the record of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere derived from measurements at the Pole, which has shown steady growth for 50 years, is one of the oldest and most comprehensive in existence......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

April 17, 2007, 10:52 PM CT

Rethinking Zinc

Try as they might, ancient alchemists could never turn lead into gold. Neither can the members of the Novel Materials group at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. But these physicists do have a way with materials, and they can get them to do some pretty amazing things.

Drs. Paul Canfield and Sergey Bud'ko and their Iowa State University Department of Physics and Astronomy graduate student, Shuang Jia, have discovered a new family of zinc compounds that can be tuned, or manipulated, to take on some of the physical properties and behavior of other materials, ranging from plain old copper to more exotic elements like palladium, to even more complex electronic and magnetic compounds that are on, as Canfield said, "the hairy edge" of becoming magnetic (or even superconducting).

Their versatility makes the new zinc compounds ideal for basic research efforts to observe and learn more about the origins of phenomena such as magnetism. Basic research is the building block. Once researchers understand how these materials work, products and/or processes can follow.

In addition, zinc is very cheap. In 1982, the U.S.Mint switched the composition of the penny to 97.5 percent zinc and only 2.5 percent copper. In a similar manner, this class of compounds is over 85 percent zinc. If technological applications can be found, these compounds will literally only cost pennies to make......... Posted by: Sarah      Read more         Source

April 17, 2007, 4:50 AM CT

Climate change could lead to extinction

Climate change could trigger "boom and bust" population cycles that make animal species more vulnerable to extinction. , as per Christopher C. Wilmers, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Favorable environmental conditions that produce abundant supplies of food and stimulate population booms appear to set the stage for population crashes that occur when several "good years" in a row are followed by a bad year. "It's almost paradoxical, because you'd think a large population would be better off, but it turns out they're more vulnerable to a drop in resources," says Wilmers.

Understanding how environmental changes influence fluctuations in animal populations is crucial to predicting and mitigating the influence of global climate change. In a paper that appears in the recent issue of The American Naturalist, Wilmers describes a powerful new mathematical model that evaluates how climate and resources interact with populations, including a fine-grained analysis of impacts on juveniles, reproducing adults, and adults.

In areas where climate change leads to more "good years," with the occasional poor year still occurring, populations will fluctuate dramatically and be more prone to extinction as a result, said Wilmers. Highly prolific species will be especially vulnerable to such fluctuations because their populations will build up most rapidly, noted Wilmers, a vertebrate conservation ecologist. Dramatic population fluctuations make species more vulnerable to extinction due to disease, inbreeding, and other causes; in addition, each crash reduces the genetic diversity of a species, lowering its ability to adapt and making it more prone to extinction......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source