The Athenaeum

Domestic cats kill 3.7 billion birds/year in the US

"Domestic cats in the United States kill up to 3.7 billion birds and as many as 20.7 billion mice, voles and other small mammals each year, biologists estimated on Tuesday. Puss is probably the biggest human-induced killer of these species, outstripping better-known culprits such as habitat loss, agricultural chemicals or hunting, they said in a study published in the journal Nature Communications. A team led by Scott Loss at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington looked at published research into the predation habits of cats. Cats that have outdoors access kill between 30 and 47 birds apiece in temperate parts of Europe and North America each year, and between 177 and 299 mammals, according to past investigations."  AFP

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We used to have a couple of Persian cats.  They were unintelligent, and physically clumsy but would come to me when I summoned them.  They could not catch their own tails, much less birds.  I am a dog person.  PL

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gypdcc9Gc_Kdle0rOlMUamrF36qw?docId=CNG.076e294a319ce60310b0aaa0ea75423a.781

Non-Solar Images: Astrophotography by John Minnerath, Part 3

 

(click on images to enlarge)

Aurora Near The Chukchi Sea:

Comet 17P Holmes:

Comet Hale-Bopp:

Daytime Venus-Moon Conjunction:

Full Moon Near Perigee:

ISS & Shuttle in Ursa Major:

July Thunder Moon:

Perigee Moon:

 

 

-John Minnerath

Hydrogen Alpha Images- Astrophotography by John Minnerath, Part 2

 (click on images to enlarge)

7.30.12 Four frames across solar disk:

9.29.12 Mosaic in Ha:

 

2012 Venus Solar transit:

 

Annular Eclipse on 5.20.2012:

April 13, 2012 Large Solar flare.  Moving at +750,000 MPH:

August 5, 2012 Large filament:

White Light Solar Images- Astrophotography by John Minnerath, Part 1

Here are a few images of the Solar Photosphere, the outer layer of the Sun. These are referred to as taken in WL (white light), which is the full visible spectrum. What we would see of the Sun with no special filtering but to remove harmful UV rays and to reduce brightness to a tolerable level for our eyes. Some in B&W, which I think shows better detail. And some colorized because a lot of people like them. For most of my WL images I use a 6" f8 achromatic refractor with a Baader WL filter plus usually a couple other colored filters that help cut through atmospheric turbulence. Various barlows are used to increase focal length for as much magnification as I can manage with the seeing conditions at the time. The camera is a pure monochromatic high speed video camera which captures frames at about 60 per second. Each capture is usually 1 minute for about 3600 frames which are then processed into a single image. The individual image scale is fairly small and most of these are mosaics of a number of frames combined into one larger one. Close ups with good conditions show a granular surface. These granules are ~1000 km across and have a life of about 10 to 20 minutes. Good WL photography is hard to do, but show great beauty in visible light of the active Solar surface.     Below is an image of the shadow of Venus transiting the Sun.  This is one of the rarest phenomena dealing with the Sun we get to see, occurring in pairs every 243 years. The next occurrence will be in 2117, followed by the second in 2125. I was lucky to be in a place where it would be visible. All day we were blanketed with clouds and I fretfully watched the sky as the time of transit approached and then passed. Suddenly the sky cleared and I got a few minutes to see it and capture the event. It was really an amazing thing to see.    -John Minnerath

Bigfoot is a human hybrid species?

"“Our study has sequenced 20 whole mitochondrial genomes and utilized next generation sequencing to obtain 3 whole nuclear genomes from purported Sasquatch samples. The genome sequencing shows that Sasquatch mtDNA is identical to modern Homo sapiens, but Sasquatch nuDNA is a novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species. Our data indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens. Hominins are members of the taxonomic grouping Hominini, which includes all members of the genus Homo. Genetic testing has already ruled out Homo neanderthalis and the Denisova hominin as contributors to Sasquatch mtDNA or nuDNA. “The male progenitor that contributed the unknown sequence to this hybrid is unique as its DNA is more distantly removed from humans than other recently discovered hominins like the Denisovan individual,” explains Ketchum. "  DNA Diagnostics

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Well!    pl  

http://www.dnadiagnostics.com/press.html

 

The "Curiosity" landing.

Opening a thread now on tonight's attempt to land "Curiosity" on Mars.  pl

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-me-0805-mars-rover-curiosity-landing-countdown-20120805,0,2172787.story

This picture is from NASA.  pl

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-509693/Life-Mars-Amazing-photos-Nasa-probe-reveal-mystery-figure-Red-Planet.html

 

 

Strength In Numbers: The Mighty Salp

Phytoplankton-eating, transparent, smallish gelatinous blobs though they may appear, an onslaught of salps was the cause of the Reactor #2 shutdown at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant (located on the Central California coast) this past week:

Diablo Canyon knocked offline, powerless against tiny jellyfish-like creature

A bit of info on the "mighty" salp:

Super-efficient Salps help lock up CO2

They may look like rather unexciting little bags of jelly, but salps may be the most efficient filter feeders in the ocean, according to a study just out in the journal PNAS. And this could make them important players in the draw down of carbon from surface waters into the deep sea.

Salps are a variety of tunicate, a group of animals that also includes sea squirts and are, surprisingly, evolutionarily related to vertebrates. They are filter feeders a few centimetres long that are either solitary or live in chains that can be hundreds of salps long.

Until now, scientists thought that although they were very efficient at filter feeding using a mucous ‘net’ type structure, they could only catch food that was larger than the holes of the net – a fairly sensible assumption to make if you think about things like fishing nets and sieves. But Kelly Sutherland and her colleagues used lab experiments where they offered salps specifically sized polystyrene balls of 0.5 to 3 micrometers in diameter and showed that even the smallest particles were picked up at a higher rate than expected.

So it turns out that salps can eat food in a huge range of sizes – in the words of one of the paper’s authors, ‘like being able to eat everything from the size of a mouse to a horse!’. And this is extremely beneficial as it allows salps to thrive on a wide range of different phytoplankton, zooplankton and other particles.

Another really interesting suggestion made by the authors is that the salps could be contributing more than expected to take down of carbon into the deep ocean. Because they consume tiny, tiny particles and then combine them into much larger faecal pellets, that allows carbon to be taken out of the top layer of the seawater and sink down to the ocean floor.

So, efficient and important for the environment – again proof that you shouldn’t judge an animal by its looks!

References

- Kelly Sutherland et al (2010). Filtration of submicrometer particles by pelagic tunicates. PNAS.

 

 

 

 

 

-Maureen Lang

Archaeology News- February/March 2012

ALASKA: In a pit house dating to around A.D. 1200, archaeologists uncovered a cast-bronze buckle that appears to be East Asian in origin and older than the house in which it was found. The oldest known cast bronze in Alaska, the artifact may have been part of a horse fitting, perhaps traded in from as far away as Manchuria. It was probably used as a charm or noisemaker by a local Inupiat shaman.  (Courtesy Jeremy Foin, University of California, Davis) TEXAS: The last issue of Archaeology detailed sites at risk (Top Ten Discoveries of 2011"), including those exposed by the drought in Texas. In addition to wrecks and human remains, receding waterlines revealed a mysterious 4-foot aluminum sphere. NASA officials confirmed that it was a fuel-cell tank from the space shuttle Columbia, which was destroyed during reentry in 2003. Along with other remains from the shuttle, it can teach us something about the effects of high-speed atmospheric reentry.  (Courtesy Nacogdoches, Texas, Police Department) GRENADA: People on the tiny island of Carriacou may have feasted on animals imported from South America over 1,000 years ago. Remains of South American animals, including piglike peccaries, armadillos, and guinea pigs—none of which are native to the island today—were excavated from prehistoric middens. The find suggests regular contact between natives and people on other islands and the mainland, but because the bones are scarce, archaeologists think only a select, high-status few got to eat these exotic treats.  (Wikimedia Commons) ENGLAND: Using stable isotope analysis, researchers examined remains of infants from the crypt at Christ Church in Spitalfields, London, to study breastfeeding in the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that prolonged breastfeeding was common in the 19th century among this relatively well-off population, which does not necessarily agree with the idea that more women were entering the workforce at the time as a result of industrialization. The breastfeeding mothers of these infants may have had the means to hire wet nurses—or they may have been homebound due to an economic downturn.  (Wikimedia Commons) SWITZERLAND: High-end Swiss watchmaker Hublot has created a wrist-mounted version of the Antikythera Mechanism, the mysterious 2,000-yearold astronomical machine recovered from a Greek shipwreck in 1901. It contains 495 precision elements in a 3x4-centimeter package. The manufacturers claim that it is the first watch inspired by an archaeological finding. Would a wrist-mounted sundial count?  (Courtesy Hublot)

CHINA: A cracked skull may be the oldest known evidence of interpersonal aggression among modern humans. A CT scan of the skull, which is around 130,000 years old and known as Maba Man, revealed evidence of severe blunt force trauma, possibly from a clubbing. Remodeling of the bone around the injury, however, shows that he survived the blow and possibly was well cared for after his injury—for months or even years.  (Courtesy Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Science) JAPAN: An excavation at a train yard in Dazaifu has revealed the remains of two large, prestigious buildings, as well as expensive eating utensils and pottery. The finds, including tin and copper alloy spoons, Chinese and Korean pots, and Nara tricolored ware (the finest tableware in Japan at the time), date to the 8th and 9th centuries. The assemblage appears to identify the site as a diplomatic facility, mentioned in ancient documents, that housed and fed envoys from China and Korea.  (Courtesy Nobumasa Inoue, Board of Education of Dazaifu, Japan) PAKISTAN: 4,500-year-old Indus city of Harappa is thought to have been relatively peaceful. A new analysis of human remains excavated at the site found that while the overall level of violence in the city was on the low side for a statelevel society, it was not evenly distributed. Some communities endured much higher levels of trauma, inflicted on women in particular, suggesting a potentially brutal social hierarchy.  (Images of Asia) PAPUA NEW GUINEA: The seafaring Lapita, who settled the South Pacific more than 3,000 years ago, were not thought to have lived in Papua New Guinea. Findings from a new dig there have overturned that idea. The remains of several villages, including stone tools, shell ornaments, and thousands of pottery fragments have been discovered. The site is both unusually deep—including pre- and post-Lapita sequences—and perhaps the largest Lapita landscape yet discovered. According to researchers, the site opens a whole new chapter in Pacific history.  (Courtesy Steve Mortin, Monash University) OMAN: It's often thought that modern humans emerged from Africa through the Arabian Peninsula by hugging its shores, which may have protected them from swings in climate. However, 100,000-year-old stone tools found in the Dhofar Mountains suggest that some people traveled over the now arid—though once wet—interior. The find adds another layer of complexity and understanding to the path that modern humans took on their way around the world.  (Courtesy Jeffrey Rose, University of Birmingham)

(courtesy of www.archaeology.org)

-Maureen Lang

Hubble Reveals New Class Of Extrasolar Planet

Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It's smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.

Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and colleagues made the observations of the planet GJ1214b.

"GJ1214b is like no planet we know of," Berta said. "A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water."

The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA's David Charbonneau, discovered GJ1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is about 2.7 times Earth's diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 1.3 million miles, giving it an estimated temperature of 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

In 2010, CfA scientist Jacob Bean and colleagues reported that they had measured the atmosphere of GJ1214b, finding it likely that it was composed mainly of water. However, their observations could also be explained by the presence of a planet-enshrouding haze in GJ1214b's atmosphere.

Berta and his co-authors used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to study GJ1214b when it crossed in front of its host star. During such a transit, the star's light is filtered through the planet's atmosphere, giving clues to the mix of gases.

"We're using Hubble to measure the infrared color of sunset on this world," Berta explained.

Hazes are more transparent to infrared light than to visible light, so the Hubble observations help tell the difference between a steamy and a hazy atmosphere.

They found the spectrum of GJ1214b to be featureless over a wide range of wavelengths, or colors. The atmospheric model most consistent with the Hubble data is a dense atmosphere of water vapor.

"The Hubble measurements really tip the balance in favor of a steamy atmosphere," Berta said.

Since the planet's mass and size are known, astronomers can calculate the density, of only about 2 grams per cubic centimeter. Water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, while Earth's average density is 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter. This suggests that GJ1214b has much more water than Earth does, and much less rock.

As a result, the internal structure of GJ1214b would be an extraordinarily different world than our world.

"The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like 'hot ice' or 'superfluid water,' substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience," Berta said.

Theorists expect that GJ1214b formed farther out from its star, where water ice was plentiful, and migrated inward early in the system's history. In the process, it would have passed through the star's habitable zone, where surface temperatures would be similar to Earth's. How long it lingered there is unknown.

GJ1214b is located in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus, and just 40 light-years from Earth. Therefore, it's a prime candidate for study by the planned James Webb Space Telescope.

A paper reporting these results has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available online.

CONTACT

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-4514
[email protected]

David Aguilar / Christine Pulliam
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
617-495-7462 / 617-495-7463
[email protected] / [email protected]

Zachory Berta
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
617-495-4484
[email protected]

(courtesy of http://hubblesite.org)

 

 

-Maureen Lang

 

Lake Vostok: Largest Sub-Glacial Lake Ever Discovered

Artist's conception of the "Cryobot" and "Hydrobot."  Source

In 1996, Russian scientists were drilling ice core samples at Vostok Station in Antarctica. When they reached 3,623 meters (11,886 feet), they stopped because they couldn't figure out why the ice at such an extreme depth was so clean. After a series of tests using radar and seismic waves, it turned out that this ice was actually the uppermost region of the world's largest warm-water sub-glacial lake - a lake roughly the size of Lake Ontario. The lake is composed of fresh water and has been isolated beneath the glacier for somewhere between half a million and one million years.

Naturally, the first thing that came to the scientists' minds was that this lake could possibly be the most pristine liquid environment on Earth and could be full of living creatures and organisms that, due to isolation and adaptation, live nowhere else. Researchers tested the core samples taken close to the water and indeed found microbes that have never been found elsewhere.

But when the question of how to explore the lake came up, not long after its discovery, the Vostok scientists faced a serious dilemma. The lake is under immense pressure, and to breach the ice would have devastating consequences. Secondly, anything sent into this pristine environment would have to be as sterile as possible to avoid contamination.

In 1999, NASA approved funding for the development of a torpedo-like probe dubbed "Cryobot." Equipped with a heated tip, the probe was designed to slowly melt its way down through the glacier, unwinding communication cables as it went. As Cryobot ventured down, the water would refreeze behind and above it. Then, before it breached the ceiling of the lake, the probe was to decontaminate itself with a hydrogen peroxide bath. Once inside, Cryobot would release the remote-controlled "Hydrobot," a specially designed submersible vehicle equipped with a camera and other instruments, to explore the interior of the lake.

Despite promising tests, funding for the project was cut in 2003. One hope, however, is that due to the discovery that Mars also has sub-glacial lakes and that Jupiter's moon Europa may have them as well, the Cryobot project will be re-opened soon in order to test technology for future space missions.

UPDATE: As of February, 2012 Russian scientists report that they have successfully drilled to the surface of the lake and pierced the ice sheet, however many in the scientific world are concerned about their method, which entails using kerosene to keep the borehole open. The fear is that only taking samples from the top of the lake will be insufficient for proper analysis, making the possible contamination a large risk with little benefit. The concern is that a mere surface sample will tell scientists nothing regarding the depth of the lake, or anything about the sediment, which could hold vital information, and that the kerosene could compromise the samples and skew data.

Regardless, the lake has been reached, and the unconfirmed word is that there is possibility of a “fundamental scientific development”. The Russian team is battling intense weather conditions, and communication is inconsistent and unpredictable, so the scientific community and the rest of the world can do nothing but wait until contact is reestablished to find out what, after 20 years of drilling, lies beneath the ice.

(courtesy of atlasobscura.com)

 

 

-Maureen Lang