November 28, 2006, 4:54 AM CT

Biocontrol of wavyleaf thistle being studied in Texas

Wavy leaf thistle was difficult to find along Panhandle highways five years ago. But now the noxious weed can be found moving into pastures, said a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station researcher.

Dr. Jerry Michels, Experiment Station entomologist at Bushland, along with Nagendra Earle, a West Texas A&M University graduate student, began looking at controlling the intruding noxious weed with natural controls about two years ago.

Michels' entomology team travels the highways to Colorado frequently each year to monitor biocontrol work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. At first, they noticed wavyleaf thistle growing in small clumps along roadsides, Michels said, but in the past few years it seemed to be spreading.

Deciding they wanted to look at possible control measures, he submitted a proposal for a grant to the Joe Skeen Institute for Rangeland Restoration. His team received funding for two years.

In spring 2005, Earle began mapping the infestations across the Panhandle. The highest concentrations were found in the northern Panhandle down to U.S. Interstate 40, he said. Wavyleaf thistle has been found along I-40 from New Mexico to Colorado, but not much to the south.

"Our idea was that it was coming in through vehicle traffic, because it is common in Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming," Michels said. "Also, thistles love disturbed areas, so any road work could have increased the infestation".........

Posted by: Jessica      Permalink         Source

November 27, 2006, 4:35 AM CT

MSI M677 - Laptop with Crystals

If the Gold USB Hub got your attention, this laptop with crystals should probably have the same effect.

On the outside the MSI Crystal M677 has 120 pieces of Austrian crystal located on the laptop lid, while on the inside there is an AMD Turion 64 x2 processor that can handle 2GB of RAM memory. The whole package includes a built-in 1.3megapixel camera, a 15.4-inch screen, a DVD burner, a GeForce Go 7600 video card, and bluetooth + Wi-Fi on the connectivity sections.

It seems like the creators aren't only worried about the outside aspect and beauty, the performance is important too. On a serious note, I find it very silly how people waste money on gadgets that have jewelry, it is not suppose to be that way but since money falls of the trees to the rich personas, they are free to do whatever they want. At least this product combines top notch specifications with luxury instead of low quality specs.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:42 AM CT

Controlling Poaching Of Buffalo, Elephants, Rhinos

A technique used since the 1930s to estimate the abundance of fish has shown for the first time that enforcement patrols are effective at reducing poaching of elephants, African buffaloes and black rhinos in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.

"Wildlife within protected areas is under increasing threat from the bushmeat and illegal trophy trades, and many argue that enforcement within protected areas is not sufficient to protect wildlife. Some say the $2 million spent annually in the Serengeti on patrols would be better spent on other preventive activities," says Ray Hilborn, University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and lead author of a paper in the Nov. 24 issue of Science.

The 5,700-square-mile Serengeti is one of Africa's most pristine preserves.

"The animals are 'telling' us poaching is down now that there are 10 to 20 patrols a day compared to the mid-1980s when there might be 60 or fewer patrols a year," Hilborn says. They tell us, he says, by increasing in abundance, something that can measured using aerial surveys.

It's been impossible to actually count the number of animals that are poached because poaching is illegal and most animals apart from elephants and rhinos which are traditionally not eaten are caught in snares set by local villagers for their own use or sale. A recent article in National Geographic, for example, said estimates of the poaching toll range as high as 200,000 in the Serengeti. Hilborn says that poaching cannot be nearly that great or the populations still would be declining.........

Posted by: Ashley      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:35 AM CT

New Meaning To Term 'Older Than Dirt'

A especially resilient type of carbon from the first plants to regrow after the last ice age and that same type of carbon from all the plants since appears to have been accumulating for 11,000 years in the forests of British Columbia, Canada.

It's as if the carbon, which comes from the waxy material plants generate to protect their foliage from sun and weather, has been going into a bank account where only deposits are being made and virtually no withdrawals.

Modelers of the Earth's carbon cycle, who've worked on the assumption that this type of carbon remains in the soils only 1,000 to 10,000 years before microorganisms return it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, will need to revise their thinking if findings published in the Nov. 24 issue of Science are typical of other northern forests.

"Our results about the resilience of this particular kind of carbon suggest that the turnover time of this carbon pool may be 10,000 to 100,000 years," says Rienk Smittenberg, a research associate with the University of Washington School of Oceanography and lead author of the paper. He did the work while at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research.

Soils harbor the third-largest pool of carbon in the world behind the carbon locked deep in the Earth as fossil fuel oils and coal and the carbon that is dissolved in the world's oceans.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:28 AM CT

First Look At Seafloor Formation

Ordinarily, losing almost all of one's instruments would be considered a severe setback to any scientist. But when Maya Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a member of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, recently learned that two-thirds of the seismometers she placed on the floor of the Pacific Ocean were trapped more than 8,000 feet (2500 meters) underwater, it turned out to be an extremely good sign.

Tolstoy and Lamont-Doherty colleague Felix Waldhauser set an array of ocean bottom seismometers along a section of the East Pacific Rise off the coast of Mexico in 2003 to study the little-understood process of seafloor spreading--a process that is responsible for the formation of nearly three-quarters of the Earth's crust. When a team went back in April 2006 to retrieve the instruments, however, only four out of 12 responded to the coded release signal and bobbed to the surface; three more responded to the signal, but did not come up. The rest remained silent.

Tests of the water temperature and light-scattering near the sea floor revealed signs of a recent volcanic eruption. A second expedition led by James Cowen of the University of Hawaii on the research vessel R/V New Horizon in early May lowered a camera that confirmed what the researchers suspected: Their instruments had been directly on top of a section of the East Pacific Rise that erupted and were trapped in fresh lava flows.........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:22 AM CT

Insights Into Heat Flow Deep In Earth

Earth's interior is not a non-malignant world that only stores the geologic history of our planet. Geologists now see the normally assumed placid inner Earth as a dynamic environment filled with exotic materials and substances roiling under intense heat and pressures. It is an environment that continues to evolve in interesting ways and one that has an impact on what happens at its surface.

The latest evidence of this dynamic inner Earth is revealed in a recent series of measurements that peered deep within Earth, halfway to its center. The new experiments have yielded important results that help determine temperature halfway to the center of Earth. It also has implications for the age of Earth's solid inner core and how its magnetic field may be generated.

"We have found unexpected rock layering in Earth's deepest mantle," said Edward Garnero of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and one of the scientists on the team. "The implications of the layering are far reaching, with intimate connections to the rock chemistry, temperature and convective flow, all of which have been previously inaccessible".

"Understanding of Earth's core-mantle boundary environment puts us in the position of answering a host of important questions, such as how much heat from the molten outer core cooks the overlying mantle," Garnero explained. "While this might seem distant and esoteric, it actually relates to the vigor of convective mantle flow that ultimately jostles Earth's surface with volcanic and earthquake processes".........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:02 AM CT

Unique View Of Underwater Eruption

A combination of luck and being in the right place at the right time allowed a University of Florida geologist and other researchers to capture and record an undersea volcanic eruption for the first time ever.

The eruption, which took place early this spring thousands of feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, is described in a paper set for release Thursday in Science Express, the journal Sciences online magazine.

Never before have we had instruments in place like this that recorded an eruptive event on the seafloor, said Mike Perfit, a UF professor of geology.

Perfit was among the researchers who visited the eruption shortly after it took place aboard the deep-sea submersible Alvin. The project was headed by Maya Tolstoy, a seismologist with Columbia Universitys Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and the lead author of the Science paper.

Perfit said the eruption occurred about 400 miles west of Mexico along a massive volcanic mountain range called the East Pacific Rise. Fortuitously, it was one of three active undersea volcanic areas that were selected for high-intensity research in the late 1990s as part of the National Science Foundations RIDGE research program. As a result, geologists, biologists, geophysicists and other specialists had gathered a storehouse of samples, data and photos from the site.........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 6:55 AM CT

Impact of climate change in Africa

Africa is the continent that will suffer most under global warming. Past history gives us lessons on the likely effects of future climate change. Of greatest concern are the 'large infrequent disturbances' to the climate as these will have the most devastating effects. In a remarkable study from the Kenyan Tsavo National Park published recently in the African Journal of Ecology, Dr Lindsey Gillson uncovers evidence for a drought that coincided with the harrowing period of Maasai history at the end of the 19th century termed "Emutai" meaning to wipe out.

"Severe disturbance events and rapid environmental change tend to occur infrequently, but can have a lasting effect on both environment and society" says Dr Gillson. This was no-where more evident than in the case of the Maasai "Emutai". The period 1883-1902 was marked by epidemics of bovine pleuropneumonia, rinderpest and small pox. The rains failed completely in 1897 and 1898. The Austrian explorer Dr Oscar Baumann, who travelled in Maasailand in 1891, wrote chilling eye-witness accounts of the horror experienced during a large ecological disturbance:

"There were women wasted to skeletons from whose eyes the madness of starvation glared. warriors scarcely able to crawl on all fours, and apathetic, languishing elders. Swarms of vultures followed them from high, awaiting their certain victims." (Baumann 1894, Masailand).........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

November 23, 2006, 5:30 AM CT

On the cutting edge: Carbon nanotube cutlery

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) have designed a carbon nanotube knife that, in theory, would work like a tight-wire cheese slicer. In a paper presented this month at the 2006 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition*, the research team announced a prototype nanoknife that could, in the future, become a tabletop tool of biology, allowing researchers to cut and study cells more precisely than they can today.

For years, biologists have wrestled with conventional diamond or glass knives, which cut frozen cell samples at a large angle, forcing the samples to bend and sometimes later crack. Because carbon nanotubes are extremely strong and slender in diameter, they make ideal materials for thinly cutting precise slivers of cells. In particular, researchers might use the nanoknife to make 3D images of cells and tissues for electron tomography, which requires samples less than 300 nanometers thick.

By manipulating carbon nanotubes inside scanning electron microscopes, 21st-century nanosmiths have begun crafting a suite of research tools, including nanotweezers, nanobearings and nano-oscillators. To design the nanoknife, the NIST and CU researchers welded a carbon nanotube between two electrochemically sharpened tungsten needles. In the resulting prototype, the nanotube stretches between two ends of a tungsten wire loop. The knife resembles a steel wire that cuts a block of cheese.........

Posted by: Kevin      Permalink         Source

November 23, 2006, 5:26 AM CT

The 'Freakonomics of food'

Do you hate Brussels sprouts because your mother did" Does the size of your plate determine how hungry you feel" Why do you actually overeat at healthy restaurants".

"You can ask your smartest friend why he or she just ate what they ate, and you wont get an answer any deeper than, 'It sounded good,'" says Brian Wansink, Ph.D.), author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think," and Professor and Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.

Dubbed the "Freakonomics of food" by the Canadian Broadcasting Commission, Mindless Eating, uses hidden cameras, two-way mirrors, and hundreds of studies to show why we eat what and how much we eat. "The unique thing about his work is that it cleverly answers everyday questions about food and shows translates them into Good News how we can improve it," said Seth Roberts, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Take how much we eat. Wansink claims we typically dont overeat because we are hungry or because the food tastes good. Instead we overeat because of the cues around us family and friends, packages and plates, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers.

Consider your holiday ice cream bowl. If you spoon 3 ounces of ice cream onto a small bowl, it will look like a lot more than if you had spooned it into a large bowl. Even if you intended to carefully follow your diet, the larger bowl would likely influence you to serve more. This tricks even the pros.........

Posted by: Sean      Permalink         Source