UK fishing industry 'will need EU market access' post Brexit

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption The House of Lords report says __that it fears the UK fishing industry might be marginalised in Brexit negotiations

The UK fishing industry will need continued access to EU markets if it is to thrive after Brexit, a House of Lords report has warned.

It also warns __that Britain may have to allow EU-registered boats to fish in UK waters as part of an overall deal.

Fishing regions around the UK voted heavily in favour of leaving the EU during the referendum campaign.

The Lords review says these communities are at risk of being marginalised in the wider Brexit negotiations.

Regain control

The EU's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), with its quotas and principle of equal access to commercial fishing grounds for boats from all member states, has often been characterised by the industry as a disaster for Britain.

This dislike helped mobilise many in the industry to campaign for a leave vote in the referendum last June.

Many in the fishing community argue that Brexit now offers the industry the chance to regain control over UK waters and become a leading fish-exporting nation, like Norway.

However, the House of Lords European Union Committee has released a report that looks at the risks and opportunities for the UK industry.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Many in the UK fishing industry strongly supported the leave vote in the referendum

Since UK fishing only produces a half of one percent of GDP and employs just 12,000 fishers, the Lords say that industry might be a low priority for the government but it "must not be marginalised in the wider Brexit negotiations".

What complicates the picture is the fact the most commercial fish stocks are in waters that are shared between the UK and other EU coastal states. The vast majority of UK fish are exported, mainly to the EU while a significant proportion of the fish that British consumers eat is imported, often from EU states.

"A successful industry," the report says, "therefore needs continued market access."

However, that access may come at a price.

"Brexit will involve many trade-offs," said Lord Teverson who chairs the Lords EU Energy and Environment sub-committee.

"It may very well be that EU member states demand more access to UK waters than some fishers would want in return for our continued rights to sell fish to the European market with zero tariffs."

The report also points to the fact that many elements of the CFP should be retained post-Brexit and the UK should ensure that total allowable catches and quotas should continue to be based on scientific advice. The UK will also continue to be under international obligations to co-operate with neighbouring states.

One area of concern, according to the report, may well be that if Britain leaves the EU, the CFP framework which treats the UK as one entity will fall away "raising the potential of four different fisheries management regimes" in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

However, many in the fishing industry still argue that Brexit will bring more opportunities than threats.

Just this week, the EU announced agreement on new quotas under the CFP - many analysts say that it marked an advance for the UK with significant increases in allowable catches for plaice, haddock and prawns.

Responding to the new quotas, representatives from the industry said they believed this augurs well for the future of British fishing outside the EU.

"With Brexit now looming, fishermen can look to the future with real optimism as we are on the cusp of an exciting new era as a coastal state with full control of our 200-mile exclusive economic zone," Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation said in a statement.

"This will give us the opportunity for fairer shares in catching opportunity and better fit-for-purpose sustainable fisheries management, which will benefit our coastal communities."

In response to the report, a government spokesperson said: "As we enter the EU negotiations, the prime minister has been clear we want to ensure British companies have the maximum freedom to trade with and operate in the single market."

"At the same time, leaving the EU is a real opportunity to review fisheries management in order to ensure fair access to quota, sustainable stocks and a healthy marine environment."

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Moonlit snow, water on Ceres, and more

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Strange giant diamonds give hints to the inner Earth's composition

The largest diamonds ever mined on earth aren’t just set apart by their large size and luster, but by a unique origin story as well. They were born of metal, growing from patches of liquid iron and gas deep inside the Earth.

That’s the conclusion formed in a study published in Science on Thursday, written by Evan Smith of the Gemological Institute of America.

“Most diamonds form somewhere between 150 and 200 km [93 and 124 miles] deep in the Earth. They form in the thickest parts of continents, the base of the rigid continental tectonic plates,” Smith says. “98 percent of diamonds we mine come from this place.”

But a few, including the famous Cullinan diamond —the largest gem-quality diamond ever found, weighing in at over 3,000 carats—are too big and too different to have formed in the same place as other brilliant stones.

“Diamonds like [the Cullinan] have characteristics __that aren't quite the same as other kinds of diamonds. For years, geologists have wondered if maybe they formed in a slightly different way or if they came from a different part of the mantle. It’s been a lingering question that’s been really hard to tackle," Smith says.

Studying these incredibly valuable gems proved nearly impossible. Asking to sample the crown jewels for a science experiment? Yeah, that’s not going to go over well.

So Smith tried to systematically find diamonds __that were of the same type and quality before they had been cut and turned into priceless heirlooms. He looked for gems that had inclusions, or bits of material trapped inside the diamond as it grows. “These give us clues about how the diamonds form, where it comes from, what else happens in that environment,” Smith says.

By looking at the inclusions in some of the larger diamonds—and chemically testing the inclusions in small remnants discarded in the jewelry making process—Smith was able to piece together a picture of how these particular diamonds formed.

“It so happens that these big diamonds—like the Cullinen—are kind of surprising. They don’t come from the rigid tectonic plate, they come from somewhere deeper, in the convecting mantle,” Smith says.

That means they come from about 360-750 kilometers (approximately 224-466 miles) inside the Earth.

Not only was Smith able to figure out where these large gems came from, he was also able to figure out how they formed—in a high temperature and high pressure environment that was speckled with bits of iron and nickel. “This is something that had been predicted based on theory and experiments. People have thought about it for at least 20 years now, but we’ve never been able to have confirmation,” Smith says.

“These diamonds are special because they tell us that the deep environment really can have metal in it,” Smith says.

The diamonds grow in association with the liquid metal, which is incredibly good at dissolving carbon. When the metal gets too saturated with carbon, some of it starts to precipitate out and crystallize, building up over time into the large diamonds that we see today.

The origins of the carbon dissolved into the liquid metal are still in question. But one possibility, Smith says, is that the carbon originally came from the Earth’s crust, was drawn deep into the mantle at the edge of a continent where one tectonic plate was colliding with the other, and eventually made its way down into the mantle where it was dissolved by carbon—and transformed at high temperature and pressure into some of the most prized diamonds in the world.

The large diamonds and hum-drum ‘normal’ diamonds all take the same route up to the surface: huge volcanic eruptions from deep within the Earth occasionally produce diamond-rich deposits called kimberlite, which is where most diamonds are found today.

Smith plans to continue to look for more inclusions and gather more clues as to the inner workings of the Earth. Unfortunately, some information has been lost forever. When some of the most famous large diamonds like the Cullinan were cut down into their current splendor, the metallic pieces that held some of the most valuable scientific information were cast aside as flaws, never to be seen again.

Smith hopes that in the future, those cuttings will be as prized as precious scientific specimens.

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Scientists watch an undersea volcano shake, rattle, and inflate

Last year the most active submarine volcano in the Northeast Pacific erupted, triggering over 200,000 earthquakes 300 miles off the coast of Oregon.

The frenzy of activity at the volcano—Axial Seamount—was recorded by a newly established underwater observatory called the Ocean Observatories Initiative Cabled Array, which came into operation just before moving magma triggered the quakes.

It was a remarkable chance to witness an eruption in real time—and researchers were actually able to predict __that the eruption was going to happen. In two papers published Thursday in Science, researchers describe observations from the eruption.

In the first paper, Scott Nooner and colleagues describe how previous observations of eruptions at __that volcano allowed researchers to predict that it would erupt in 2015. Axial Seamount has erupted three times in recent history: once in 1998, then in 2011, and again in 2015. Between each eruption, the seafloor inflates as the magma chamber just below the surface fills with magma. Then it reaches a tipping point and erupts, deflates, and starts to fill up again.

“We’ve been measuring the deformation over this volcano for a long time,” Nooner says. “We saw an eruption in 1998, during which the seafloor dropped about 3.5 meters [11.5 feet]. It was a really large drop in the surface elevation of the volcano, and then it slowly started inflating again.”

The surface of the volcano kept rising by about 6 inches a year until it erupted again in 2011. But it didn’t deflate quite as far, and the rate of inflation suddenly increased to a little under 24 inches per year. Using data from the past eruption, Nooner and colleagues were able to predict that the volcano would erupt in 2015, which it did.

The volcano is now re-inflating at a rate somewhere between the slow and steady period that scientists saw between 1998-2011 and the rapid inflation between 2011 and 2015. Nooner estimates that if the current rate—about 19 inches per year—continues, the next eruption could be in about 3 years.

But the data from under the sea didn’t just tell researchers when the eruption would happen, but also how it was happening. “By looking at the pattern of deformation on the surface, we could tell that the magma was being injected into this nearly vertical conduit beneath the volcano, and that was what was swelling,” Nooner said. That conduit also became the path for the magma to follow during the eruption itself, when the lava burst onto the seafloor.

The 2015 eruption at Axial was accompanied by a lot of shaking. In the second Science paper William Wilcock and colleagues describe what they’ve learned from the 2015 eruption itself. Their data comes from the Cabled Array, an array of scientific instruments tethered permanently to a power source that allows them to run indefinitely, making long-scale observations.

“It’s very difficult to deploy instruments to record eruptions autonomously, because it’s very difficult to predict when they’re going to occur. You need a network in place on the order of a decade in order to capture one,” Wilcock says. Previous attempts to deploy autonomous instruments to monitor an eruption were less than ideal, because their power sources need refreshing. And despite the success of Nooner, volcanic eruptions are notoriously difficult to predict. On a previous mission to study another volcano, research was stymied briefly when the sensors actually got lost in the lava.

That’s where the Cabled Array comes in. “This cable basically has given us the ability to have instruments in place for perhaps a few decades and observe multiple volcanic cycles," Wilcock says.

Because the array was turned on in 2014, Wilcock and colleagues were able to see the tail end of one of these eruptive cycles, with seismometers on the array recording 2,000 earthquakes a day as the eruption neared. Now, Wilcock and others are watching the array to see how the volcano acts during its downtime.

They’ve already seen some interesting results. In this paper, Wilcock and others found that the numbers of earthquakes increased dramatically during low tides, when the pressure of water above the volcano lessened and the faults were able to move more freely. They also were able to peek inside the volcano and add some additional data to a long-standing debate about its architecture. At the site of the volcano is a ring fault, a circular crack that goes around its interior.

“There’s been sort of a controversy about how ring faults work,” Wilcock said. Using the earthquakes as a kind of sonar to peer into the center of the earthquake, they were able to determine that during the eruption at Axial Seamount, the active ring fault was sloped outwards, almost like a traffic cone. “As the volcano inflates, it pushes the sides of the volcano outward, almost like pushing a cork into a bottle, then when the volcano erupts, it subsides down and the whole volcano collapses.”

That’s significant, because there had been debate for years as to whether the inward sloping (think: ice cream cone) or outward sloping ring faults were active during an eruption. At this volcano, at least, it looks like the outward ring faults are more active.

Axial Seamount, as complicated as it is, is considered a pretty simple volcano, without too many added factors to muddle the research. Magma at Axial only has to travel a short distance to reach the surface, while land-based volcano magma has to travel through many more miles of the Earth’s crust to break free. That makes Axial the perfect place to start digging into the basic science of what makes a volcano tick, and researchers are looking forward to using the Cabled Array to answer some of the most basic questions about the most volatile rocks on Earth.

“If you look closely at a volcano, we don’t know how they work in detail,” Nooner says. “We don’t know how magma is stored or how it moves under a volcano very well, we don't know what drives the whole system, we don’t know what controls the rate at which magma is coming from the mantle into the magma chamber, we don’t really know the physics behind what triggers the eruption.”

There's a lot to learn, but luckily it seems as if volcano research is about to explode.

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The year's best videos starring really, really small things

Wonders of the world come in all sizes, and to see the smallest, you’ll need access to a microscope—or some truly incredible videos. With Nikon's annual Small World in Motion video competition, science buffs get a chance to experience theater on a microscopic stage. Onward, for the winners.

This year’s winning video was made by William Gilpin, a PhD student at Stanford, and his colleagues. Using a time lapse technique similar to the methods used by astronomy photographers to capture stars streaking across the sky, Gilpin filmed tiny beads in the water around a single starfish larvae, watching as the starfish manipulated the water currents to bring food into its tiny body. This behavior hadn’t been seen before, and studying the manipulation of the water currents could one day allow for better water filtration systems.

Second prize went to Charles Krebs, who filmed the giraffe-like ciliate Lacrymaria olor, as it stuck its neck out to feed on other, smaller microbes. Lacrymaria olor is a natural hunter, picking out its pray with its long appendage.

Wim van Egmond took third prize in the contest, with a beautiful time lapse of flower…ing mold. The fruiting bodies of Aspergillus niger usually ‘bloom’ on fruits.

Prizes for the first, second, and third place winners was given in the form of money to be used toward the purchase of Nikon products: $3,000, $2,000, and $1,000 respectively.

Honorable mentions were awarded to 17 other videos, ranging from cheese mites on a cheddar rind to growing Paracetamol (acetaminophen) crystals and killer cells attacking a cancer cell. Get a taste of each video, below.

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World’s oldest water gets even older

Image copyright UTORONTO

Image caption The liquid is found deep down a mine in Canada

The world’s oldest water, which is locked deep within the Earth’s crust, just got even older.

The liquid was discovered deep down in a mine in Canada in 2013 and is about 1.5 billion years old.

But now, at the same site, scientists from the University of Toronto have found a deeper source of water __that is at least 500,000 years more ancient.

The research was presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar, who led the team __that made the discovery, told BBC News: “When people think about this water they assume it must be some tiny amount of water trapped within the rock.

“But in fact it’s very much bubbling right up out at you. These things are flowing at rates of litres per minute - the volume of the water is much larger than anyone anticipated.”

The first pool of ancient water was discovered 2.4km-down in a copper, zinc and silver mine.

“It really pushed back our understanding of how old flowing water could be and so it really drove us to explore further,” said Prof Sherwood Lollar.

“And we took advantage of the fact that the mine is continuing to explore deeper and deeper into the earth.”

This new investigation led by Dr Oliver Warr, from the University of Toronto, found water at a depth of nearly 3km.

And tests have revealed that it is at least two billion years old.

Image copyright UTORONTO

Image caption The mine is continuing to explore deeper and deeper into the Earth

It provides scientists with a unique insight into the history of our planet, and gives a glimpse at the life that was present at this time.

The researchers have found chemical traces left behind by tiny single celled organisms that once lived in the fluid.

“By looking at the sulphate in the water, we were able to see a fingerprint that’s indicative of the presence of life,” said Prof Sherwood Lollar.

“And we were able to indicate that the signal we are seeing in the fluids has to have been produced by microbiology - and most importantly has to have been produced over a very long time scale.

“The microbes that produced this signature couldn’t have done it overnight. This isn’t just a signature of very modern microbiology.

“This has to be an indication that organisms have been present in these fluids on a geological timescale.”

The researchers say that studying watery sites like this on Earth could give them clues about where life might reside elsewhere in the Solar System, such as the oceans on the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

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Pokemon Go probably didn't make its users more active after all

In July 2016, when Nintendo unleashed its Pokemon GO game (which uses augmented reality to let players find Pokemon in the real world), many salivated over an enticing idea: at long last, a video game—a video game—had successfully convinced people to get more exercise. After all, Pokemon GO was immediately popular, downloaded some 100 million times in less than a month, and the mechanics of the app require exploring (and, more to the point, taking steps in) the real world.

It's a nice thought, but according to a new study from Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health examining the steps taken by both players and non-players, the boost in step counts was moderate and short-lived. The study was published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal's Christmas edition, which always highlights quirky, light-hearted findings.

To determine just how much of an effect the popular app might have on fitness, researchers looked at the step counts of 1,182 iPhone 6-series users between the ages of 18 and 35, comparing the stats of Pokemon GO players and non-players over several weeks.

That first week, the activity increase was significant—a boost of 955 steps, or an estimated 11 minutes of additional walking a day, according to study author Katherine Howe. "It was a really neat finding," Howe says. "That additional walking is around half of the World Health Organization's recommendations."

Significant, maybe, but the step increase is (unsurprisingly) much smaller than __that generated by other walking "interventions," like the use of a Fitbit. The researchers note __that opting to use a fitness tracker usually increases daily steps by something like 2,500 (at first, anyway).

So these results are far from mind-blowing. What's more: after the first week, the disparity between players and non-players tapered off. After six weeks, the Pokemon GO effect had disappeared completely. Non-players were once again getting as many steps in as players.

Still, the study doesn't address the potential mental, emotional, and social benefits of being outside more, and the authors "would really love to explore" them, Howe says, adding that public health researchers and behavioral scientists can lear a lot from these sort of "unintentional public health interventions."

So, no, Pokemon GO is not going to solve the global obesity crisis.

Still fun, though.

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Spy satellites reveal Himalayan melt

Image copyright US government

Image caption The images were taken by the US Hexagon spy satellite programme

Scientists have used Cold War spy satellites to reveal the dramatic environmental changes in the Himalayas.

They compared pictures collected by a US reconnaissance programme with recent satellite data to measure the extent of glacial melt.

They believe the now-declassified images could help to show how other remote regions have changed over time.

The research was presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall meeting in San Francisco.

“This imagery will be getting used more and more,” said Josh Maurer from Columbia University in New York.

The images were taken by a United States spy satellite programme __that went by the codename of Hexagon.

During the 1970s and 1980s, it launched 20 huge reconnaissance satellites into space, which secretly snapped areas of interest below.

The images were taken on rolls of film, which were then dropped by the satellites, and collected mid-air by passing military planes.

The material collected was declassified in 2011 and is now being digitised by the US Geological Survey (USGS) for scientists to use.

Image copyright Nasa

Image caption Scientists used images taken more recently by Nasa as a comparison

Among the spy images are pictures of the Himalayas, an area for which historical data is scarce. By comparing them with more recent satellite imagery from Nasa and Jaxa (Japanese Space Agency) scientists have been able to see how the region has changed.

“What we are trying to do is to quantify by exactly how much are the glaciers retreating, how much ice are they losing and at what rate,” said Josh Maurer.

“So we’ve used the images to extract 3D models of the terrain back in the 1970s.

“We can see the height of the glacier ice in 1973, and we take those elevation models, and can take the difference between those and the modern day elevation models, and we can work out how the ice volume is changing over time.”

The researchers have found __that the extent of the ice loss has been great.

“At every point on the glacier surface across the whole of the Himalayas a quarter of a metre of water is being lost each year,” said Mr Maurer.

“I wouldn’t say it’s surprising given the climate data we have, but it is very very interesting to see how much ice is lost.

“And populations downstream where they depend on these water resources are going to be affected.

“As the glaciers shrink and retreat, the amount of run-off they provide to these streams will increase in the short term as they melt, but over the next 100 years it will decrease more and more, and that’s going to have a negative impact on water resources.”

He said that the images from the Hexagon programme are now being used by various research groups to track how other parts of the Earth have changed over time.

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How to prepare your kids for jobs that don't exist yet

When I was growing up, as far as I knew, there wasn’t data mining or user-experience design or front-end engineering—and now they’re some of the most coveted careers in the world. Today, we can’t just prepare students for certain types of careers—we have to enable them to adapt to whatever new careers emerge.

As a society, we accept __that everything around us changes quickly and responds to advances in technology. Yet education is such a different thing. Teachers are already very busy—to expect them to guess at what future careers could be is difficult. So we make lesson plans to teach these adaptive skills using a principle __that we developed called “invention-based learning.” It’s about giving the kids inventions that are relevant to them as prompts, and then they start inventing to learn the underlying principles. For example, we have students create a catapult, working with a partner and competing against another two-person team, to knock over a pyramid of cups. So you’re learning collaboration, you’re learning how to try and then learn from your trial and try again—and you’re also learning the scientific principles underneath: mechanics and robotics, and physics and trajectories. We don’t just want to make STEM exciting for students; we want to make it more accessible to people of different countries, different languages, and different genders.

We can’t just prepare students for certain types of careers—we have to enable them to adapt to whatever new careers emerge.

In the past we organized ourselves by nations and countries. I think technology is allowing us to organize by interest, by passion, by expertise. We have 300 chapters—a library, school, or stay-at-home mom can sign up to be a chapter and start running events and workshops—around the world. We see people collaborating between South Africa and Pakistan and New York and Dubai; teachers are sharing lesson plans and best practices.

Our students and kids have ideas that we’ve never thought of, so we have to empower them very early on to feel that they are change makers. We did a challenge, called “Invent for Good,” and we saw students invent things that are heart-warming but also extremely clever: a wearable echolocation device inspired by bats so blind people can move around obstacles, a device that helps you brush your teeth more thoroughly, enhancements to wheelchairs. You have them thinking about things in a different way, and creating new inventions that might help the future because they’re more exposed to technology.

Bdeir isn’t the only one creating new tools for learning. These startups also aim to disrupt STEM education.

• The MEL Science chemistry set uses virtual reality to help students visualize reactions.

• Once a month, Blue Moon Box ships the materials for a science project to subscribers.

• Makey Makey kits let kids turn everyday objects into computer controllers or musical instruments.

• Kids can program robots like mBot and Innovati Bipedinno to move around the room.

• Kits such as VEX and Engino let students build whatever type of robot they imagine, then learn programming in order to control their creations.

This article was originally published in the November/December 2016 issue of Popular Science.

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Cryogenic storage offers hope for renewable energy

Image copyright Highview

Image caption The demonstrator cold storage plant works alongside an existing landfill gas generation site

The world's largest cold energy storage plant is being commissioned at a site near Manchester.

The cryogenic energy facility stores power from renewables or off-peak generation by chilling air into liquid form.

When the liquid air warms up it expands and can drive a turbine to make electricity.

The 5MW plant near Manchester can power up to 5,000 homes for around three hours.

The company behind the scheme, Highview Power Storage, believes __that the technology has great potential to be scaled up for long-term use with green energy sources.

Peaks and troughs

Electricity demand varies, influenced by factors like time of day and season. The National Grid is prepared for surges in demand, with power stations on stand-by ready to crank up the power.

However, dealing with these peaks and troughs will become increasingly difficult as coal-fired power stations close down and more intermittent renewable energy like wind and solar comes online. In 2015 renewables provided almost a quarter of UK electricity.

The intermittent nature of green sources has seen researchers focus on trying to improve energy storage.

Pumped hydropower can provide large amounts of energy for long durations, and lithium-ion batteries can respond to demand in milliseconds making them ideal for portable electronic devices and electric vehicles.

But hydropower depends on specific geographies as water has to be pumped uphill, and batteries currently cannot be scaled in a cost effective way to store energy for a town or city.

"Our technology is a bit like a locatable version of a pumped hydro system. Anywhere __that needs large scale long-duration storage, that might be to help integrate an offshore wind farm, a system like ours can help achieve that," Gareth Brett from Highview Power explained, during a visit to the Manchester cryogenic site.

Image copyright Highview

Image caption How the cold storage plant works in three stages

"5MW is a bit small for this technology; anything from 10MW and up is the sort of scale we're talking about.

"We've already designed a plant that can do 200MW /1200MWh, that's enough to keep a city going for 6 hours."

Cryogenic storage works by using renewable or off-peak electricity to cool air down to -190 degrees C, which turns it into a liquid.

It's then stored in an insulated tank, similar to a large thermos flask. To release the stored energy, the liquid air is exposed to ambient conditions causing it to expand back into a gas. The volume increase is huge, about 700 times, which is used to drive a turbine to generate electricity.

Highview Power's demonstrator plant is next to Pilsworth landfill gas generation site. The large insulated tanks sit across the road from a collection of gas engines. These engines burn methane gas produced from decomposing rubbish to generate electricity. The waste heat from this process is captured and used to increase the efficiency of the cryogenic process.

Dr Sheridan Few, Research Associate at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, described a phenomenon unique to this technology.

"There's the storage of the energy, and the generating of the energy. You can make use of waste cold and waste heat... because you're putting both electrical and thermal energy in, the amount of electrical energy you get out, can in some cases end up being more than the electrical energy you put in."

Alongside the provision of energy storage, this technology can tackle the issues of waste heat which is a by-product of many industrial process. Waste cold, as an example, can be found at liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals.

Meeting demand

While cryogenic storage may be one of the solutions to help the future supply of electricity, there are also new approaches to controlling demand.

"One of the most current issues is understanding the demand side," Dr Jenifer Baxter, Head of Energy and Environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, told the BBC.

"We tend to just produce electricity to meet the demand. Once we understand demand, we will have more confidence in deploying technologies."

Demand side response, the concept of adjusting usage in response to the available supply of electricity, could work easily alongside other innovations like cryogenic energy storage.

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Birds in tiny goggles, exploding batteries, and more

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Our favorite science-themed ugly Christmas sweaters

OK, so technically these are sweatshirts more than sweaters, but make no mistake: your love of science will not be doubted.

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The planet is heating up faster than species can migrate

Visitors to the Santa Catalina Mountains just outside Tucson, Arizona encounter a very disturbing sight: patches of dead alligator junipers scattered across hillsides at the base of the range. Wildfires did not destroy these trees — climate change did.

The trees can’t survive where it’s hot, so many have moved to higher elevations, where it is cooler. But if the heat keeps rising, they will die there too, and eventually cease to exist entirely.

“They can’t cope with the conditions,” says John J. Wiens, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. “They simply can’t change fast enough.”

What is far worse, however, is __that this is no isolated example.

The plight of the alligator juniper is but one obvious piece of a frightening pattern of local extinction currently underway “everywhere, all over the planet,” Wiens says, “It is happening among birds, plants, animals, in the ocean and in the freshwater environment.”

Climate change could doom numerous species irreversibly, including those __that people depend on for resources and food. “If it’s happening a little now, it will happen a lot in the future,” Wiens says. “We have a moral imperative to be sure that the future does not play out.”

The trend is especially troubling in tropical and subtropical environments––lowland places like the rainforest, where climate-threatened species have nowhere else to go. “For plants and animals that can’t move, they’re dead,” Wiens says.

Wiens recently examined the fate of hundreds of plant and animal species around the world, concluding that local extinctions already have occurred in nearly half of the 976 species he studied. His research, published today in PLOS Biology, found that 450 plant and animal species have disappeared locally, a result he finds especially striking, since mean temperatures have increased less than 1 degree Celsius since the pre-industrial era. 

“Local extinctions are already widespread,” he says. “The results suggest that even modest changes in climate are enough to drive local populations in many species to extinction. They also suggest that local populations in many species cannot shift their climatic niches rapidly enough to prevent extinction. We know the climate is going to change even more, which bodes really badly for overall survival.”

Camilo Mora, assistant professor of geography at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, who has studied the impact of climate change on plant growth, describes Wiens’ work as an important new piece of evidence of “the massive destruction of nature” caused by human-induced warming. 

“The fingerprint of climate change on nature is demonstrated yet again,” says Mora, who was not involved in Wiens’ study. “This is not rocket science. Whenever you heat up a place, species are forced to deal with it. Climate change, compounded by other stressors, appears to be too much for species to take. Clearly, we are making it hard for species to endure us.”

Jeremy Kerr, a professor of biology at the University of Ottawa who has studied the effects of climate change on bumblebees, called these growing extinctions “dangerous [because] we rely on a lot of these species for ecosystem services we can’t really do without, like pollination."

“Some of the species that are disappearing serve critical functions,” he adds. “We all know about monarch butterflies, one of the most beautiful animals in the world. Climate change… is contributing to their decline. Other animals that are even more important for practical reasons are bumblebees, and we now know that climate change is part of the reason for their decline also. These losses chip away at the planet’s life support systems, which we need.”

David Inouye, a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Maryland who studies the impact of climate change on the environment, agrees.

“Scientists have predicted for a while now that we are entering the sixth major mass extinction event in the history of life on the planet,” he says. “Evidence for this is now accumulating…this study provides insights into the range shifts that can already be documented in both plants and animals in response to the changing climate, and how the dynamics of range shifts can lead to local, and eventually, global extinctions.”

In fact, Inouye says, he has seen similar trends in his own research. “In my work in the Rocky Mountains, we have observed several species of animals, from moose to mosquitoes, moving up in altitude, and plants disappearing from the lower part of their former ranges,” he says. “Bumblebees are also moving up in altitude. If plants and pollinators don’t move at the same rates, historic interactions will be disrupted, potentially leading to more examples of local extinctions.”

Even those species that try to move upward may not be able to do so, according to the new study. Human factors, such as agriculture, roads, and increasing urbanization may impede their ability to relocate by leaving them no other live-able habitats, the study says.

Moreover, “many species are already confined to islands, peninsulas and mountaintops where dispersal to higher latitudes or elevations may not be possible,” the study says, adding: “Even if dispersal is unimpeded by human or natural barriers, it may simply occur too slowly to allow species to remain within their climatic niche.”

If the heat doesn’t kill directly, it can encourage potentially dangerous interactions, Wiens says. Certain plants may become vulnerable to beetle attacks, for example, and amphibians are prone to the deadly chytrid fungus, whose growth is stimulated by heat. 

“In Arizona, we no longer have any natural Tarahumara frog populations because of the fungus,” Wiens says. “Climate is the basic cause, but the proximate cause may be something else.’’

For his study, Wiens conducted a meta-analysis of dozens of existing studies demonstrating how species have shifted their geographic ranges over time in response to global warming. Using these “range-shift” studies, he found that local extinctions have occurred in the warmest parts of the ranges for nearly half of the plant and animal species studied.

His research also found that local extinctions varied by region, and were more than twice as likely to occur among tropical species compared to those in more temperate locations. This latter is important because most plant and animal species live in the tropics. 

“If species live in a preserve in the topics, or in a place that has been deforested, it’s not really possible for them to move,” Wiens says. “They may be able to move up a mountain in Arizona, but that’s not going to work in a rainforest.”

“We are locked into a climate pattern, and things don’t seem to be able to adapt,” added Wiens. “This is only going to get worse if the climate warms further.”

Mora, of the University of Hawaii, agrees. “When places start failing to meet basic human needs for water… We will also very likely start seeing people moving as well,” he says. “Our planet is increasingly becoming unsuitable for many species, potentially even us.”

Marlene Cimons writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.

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This feathery dinosaur tail has been beautifully preserved for 99 million years

Getting trapped in sticky tree resin is a bad way to die. But if you’re a paleontologist, __that nasty death is a gold mine (or amber mine) of information.

A dinosaur tail covered in tiny, fragile feathers survived a 99-million-year stint in amber only to be hacked off by miners. It was sitting in a market in Myanmar, set to be sold and made into jewelry, when a paleontologist spotted it. Bird feathers in amber are valuable for their aesthetics, but dinosaur feathers are another matter.

As a paleontologist, Lida Xing knew __that dinosaur feathers rarely get preserved. The rare specimens can tell us what prehistoric feathers were like and how they evolved. And this particular specimen contained bones and soft tissue as well as preserved feathers, making it especially rare and useful. Xing and his colleagues examined it using CT scans and microscopes, publishing their findings this week in *Current Biology *. It’s a fairly complete tail of a baby theropod (about the size of a sparrow) that lived in the mid-Cretaceous period. Here it is munching on a bug:

Scientists already know that dinosaurs had feathers, and this isn’t the first time that they’ve been found in amber. This same team published an analysis of two ancient bird wings with feathers similar to modern flight feathers. Like the tail, those wings were a rare find––few feathers can resist decomposition.

Feathers can occasionally make impressions in a fossil, but otherwise can’t withstand the forces of nature over millennia. This is why amber is so valuable to scientists. Amber is the beautiful result of ancient tree resin becoming fossilized. As it dries, it can trap insects and small animals inside and prevent delicate body parts from decomposing.

The tail feathers on this baby dinosaur were especially delicate, because they don’t have the hard structure that we associate with flight feathers. They’re more like the short, downy feathers found on turkeys when they haven’t been fully plucked. That suggests that the tiered branching pattern on feathers evolved earlier than the stiff central shaft did.

Even though the feathers look like a bird’s, researchers know that this tail came from a baby dino because of the way the vertebrae are aligned. They’re not fused the way modern bird vertebrae are, but separated such that the tail could bend.

More complete amber specimens could tell us a lot more about prehistoric animals, so scientists are keeping a trained eye on the Burmese amber mines. Pendant necklaces mined in the area are certainly gorgeous, but to researchers they could be priceless.

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Silly Putty makes for super-sensitive sensors

It’s easy to dismiss Silly Putty as a kid’s toy. But the stretchy material actually exhibits some surprising properties: It’s one of the softest plastics around, and it can behave like both a liquid and a solid, oozing when gently stretched but bouncing off surfaces like a rubber ball when hurled. And when you mix Silly Putty with graphene—strong, conductive carbon sheets with unusual physical properties—it becomes an incredibly sensitive strain detector __that can track blood pressure, heart rate, and even a spider’s footsteps.

In Jonathan Coleman’s research group at Trinity College Dublin, the scientist and his team study two-dimensional molecules such as graphene and find applications for these flat nanomaterials. In addition, Coleman says, his lab likes to do “kitchen physics,” a tradition where they incorporate household objects into their research to make it more fun and accessible.

“In __that vein,” Coleman says, “one of my students thought, ‘Well, Silly Putty is a kids toy, but it’s really just a polymer, and a lot of people mix graphene with polymers—so why don’t we mix graphene with Silly Putty and see what happens?’”

That graduate student, Connor Boland—who has since earned his doctorate—made a batch of graphene in water and added the Silly Putty polymer. As he mixed them, the graphene sheets stuck to the polymer, creating a black goo the researchers dubbed “g-putty.”

When they ran an electrical current through the g-putty—graphene-infused polymers can conduct electricity—they discovered an extraordinary sensitivity. “If you touch it even with the slightest pressure or deformation, the electrical resistance will change significantly,” Coleman says. “Even if you stretch or compress the Silly Putty by one percent of its normal size, the electrical resistance will change by a factor of five. And that’s a huge change.”

That change makes g-putty about 500 times more sensitive than other deformation-detecting materials, which would respond to a similar compression with a mere one-percent change in electrical resistance. The results were published in the journal Science.

This type of material could be used in the electromechanical sensors that measure vibrations. Specifically, the soft putty is a perfect candidate for measuring bodily motion. A squishy, unobtrusive sensor could track a baby’s breathing, for example, without irritating or disturbing the child. Placed over a pulse point, a similar sensor could measure not only heart rate, Coleman claims, but blood pressure as well.

Changes in blood pressure often precede negative changes to a patient’s status. So, Coleman says, “If you could continuously measure blood pressure, you would have a fantastic way of measuring the wellness of someone. This sensor can do that, and it can do it cheaply.” He envisions a wristband that could hold a g-putty sensor against someone’s wrist and send an alert to a smartphone app when it sensed a significant rise or fall in blood pressure.

In addition to measuring breathing, heart rate, and pulse, g-putty can act as an impact sensor. To demonstrate its sensitivity, Boland coaxed a spider to walk across the putty and measured its miniscule footfalls. This was harder than it sounds.

“The real problem was that when a spider would put one foot onto the putty, it didn’t like the feel of it at all, so it would run the other direction,” Coleman says. “It was very difficult to get a spider to stay on it long enough to generate the train of footsteps.” The moral of the experiment? “Never work with children or animals.”

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Are jellyfish going to take over the ocean?

Jellyfish have been around for half a billion years, and they’re flourishing. While beautiful, they pose a tremendous threat to people and property, and warming waters are helping spawn enormous swarms. Lisa-ann Gershwin has studied jellyfish for two decades, discovering more than 200 new species. She recently sat down with Nexus Media to share insights from her research and discuss her new books, Jellyfish: A Natural History and Stung!: On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean.

What impacts are jellyfish having around the globe?

The thing __that grabs me the most is how something so diaphanous, so brainless — so incredibly, unbelievably simple — can cause so much devastation and so much death and so much harm.

Back in 2004, I was featured in a 60 Minutes episode and they brought a woman who’s partner, Robert King, was killed by a jellyfish. (The species was named Malo kingi after him because of the incredibly positive effect on public safety __that followed from his sting.) I handed her the specimen, and she just looked at it and looked at it. It was heart wrenching. You could see her looking at this little blob of nothing and thinking, “This thing took away my future. It took away my partner, the love of my life. How did that happen?”

Jellyfish can disable American supercarriers, disable power systems, capsize trawlers, flip ecosystems into completely different states, and it often leaves me feeling, “How did it happen?”

Jellyfish have been on this planet for more than half a billion years, and during that time the planet has changed dramatically. How do jellyfish adapt to such diverse environments?

It’s amazing. In Stung!, I talk about how jellyfish have been around for so long. When you look at other things, like arthropods, there is unbelievable diversity — literally millions of species. They go from ocean dwellers to crawling through cornfields, they burrow and they swim. Arthropods have dealt with environmental changes through time by evolving into different forms and handling different habitats and different niches. They have diversified.

Jellyfish have not. They’ve adapted by being so unbelievably “plastic,” so flexible in their lifestyle that they can handle nearly anything. Some can stand water that’s drinkably fresh to water that’s hyper-saline, or water that’s not freezing, but damned cold, all the way to warm. They can stand fully oxygenated water or where oxygen is sparse. Plentiful food to months with no food.

They’re clonal, so looking at a bloom, a fair few are actually clones of each other. They’ve dealt with environmental change over time by doing what they do. They’re so incredibly variable that they just go with the flow. Jellyfish don’t have brains or blood or bones, and yet they move, they swim, they have muscular action that appears to be reacting to something for some purpose. There’s no face and no brain, and you look at them and think, you’ve got to be kidding to me — they don’t seem real to us.

And they’re also beautiful. They’re colorful and they are flowing. And like cockroaches or dandelions, you can’t kill them. Whatever you do, it just bothers them. When you get into that pest realm, how pests survive in their world, it’s because they’re so damned tenacious, and impressively opportunistic. We think the freshwater species even get around on birds’ feet, believe it or not. They’re built for surviving. They’ve evolved that way.

You’ve discovered 200 new species of jellyfish — what does that say about diversity?

I can honestly say, with my hand to my heart, we definitely have not found all of the species. Not just jellyfish, but species in general. It’s estimated we know around 10 percent of the Earth’s flora and fauna, though with jellyfish it’s maybe a bit more unknown.

Where I live in Tasmania — on the southern end of the southern island of the southern coast of the southern continent — there hasn’t been a lot of jellyfish research. When I go out to the jetty about 50 yards from my office and throw a net in the water to see what’s around, about 9 of 10 times I find something new to science.

It’s not only the species, but everything about them — their biology, their ecology, everything that goes with that identity. Pick any animal or tree, and think of everything conceivable that we could know about it, and multiply that by the millions of species that we don’t even know.

And people discover new species every day. A colleague of mine in Australia has discovered 4,000 new species of sponges. Four thousand. People think we know everything about science and everything about the ocean, that we need to travel to Mars to discover anything. I’m intrigued with Mars just like everyone, but we’ve got amazing things to discover right here on Earth. Especially ctenophores. I look at them and just think, “Alright, evolution does have a sense of humor . . . how the heck did that happen?” You’ve got jellyfish that look like belts, others that look like Klingon attack vessels.

If people fail to cut greenhouse gas emissions and carbon pollution, acidification and warming will get even more out of hand. What will the future look like for jellyfish?

That’s not the $64,000 question but the $64 trillion dollar question.

Going back over the last couple decades, there’s been an increasing flurry of attention to reports of jellyfish behaving badly, but also a more scientific approach. There have been ecological surveys, laboratory experiments, and computer simulations of different scenarios, and we’ve come to a really good understanding about jellyfish and how they bloom into superabundances and how they tip the balance in ecosystems and essentially take over. We have a good idea of how and where, but there have also been studies that say we don’t have enough data to conclude they’re taking over the world, so slow down.

I’ve been an active player in this to-ing and fro-ing thing, vitally interested in it, it keeps me up late at night and up early in the morning. What does our future look like? I have many years ahead of me, so I’m very intrigued with this question. Are we facing a more gelatinous future, or not? And everything is pointing to yes.

I respect reports that suggest there’s a lack of evidence, and that’s true because there’s a lack of global sampling and a lack of long-term datasets. Humanity never imagined that jellyfish could be a problem. But we do understand the mechanisms for how they bloom, and we’re working on understanding what the tipping points are. And that’s pretty scary.

I tried to wrap my head around it in Stung!, but it’s so hard to believe that the things we’re doing with such gusto are screwing us so badly, and we don’t care. Certainly jellyfish aren’t the only manifestation of that, but they are a very visible indicator because they come from left field — they are a completely unexpected player in that system. We think we’ve got climate change figured out and what effects will happen, and when. We have a reasonable range of scenarios for what’s probably coming. But now you have this jellyfish factor that nobody’s been considering.

Then you’ve got climate warming, which just amps up jellyfish in unbelievable ways. Fractions of degree changes above normal water temperatures amp up their metabolism, they eat more and breed more and live longer — it’s astounding what a little bit of warming can do for jellyfish. Trawling gives them new room for their polyps to settle, and while acidification or chemical pollution doesn’t hurt jellyfish, it hurts everything else like fish and shellfish that struggle with environmental change.

Our impacts are creating tipping points, and once ecosystems have passed those tipping points, they become really stable in their new normal. Once jellyfish take over an ecosystem — or any pest for that matter — it’s hard to undo that. Pest controlled ecosystems are some of the most incredibly resilient ecosystems around: think of cockroaches in your kitchen or dandelions in your garden, pests are tenacious by their very nature. The best way to fix this is to not let it happen in the first place.

This interview was conducted by Josh Chamot, who writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.

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John Glenn, first American to orbit Earth, dies aged 95

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption At age 77 Glenn became the oldest man to travel to space

Former astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, has died at 95.

The ex-Marine and US Senator had been in hospital in Columbus, Ohio, for more than a week and died surrounded by his children and wife of 73 years.

Glenn is best known for circling the earth in 1962 aboard the Friendship 7 space capsule.

His achievement marked the moment the US caught up with the Soviet Union in manned space exploration.

Glenn is expected to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia.

Obituary: John Glenn

"Though he soared deep into space and to the heights of Capitol Hill, his heart never strayed from his steadfast Ohio roots. Godspeed, John Glenn!" Ohio Governor John Kasich said in a statement.

Media captionWatch: When a US man orbited Earth for first time

After returning to Earth, Glenn was elected in 1974 as a Democrat to the US Senate, where he served for 24 years.

He blazed another trial in 1998 - 36 years after his historic flight - when he became the oldest man to travel to space, at age 77.

The only son of a plumber and schoolteacher, Glenn was born in 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio.

His father would recall how the boy used to run around the yard with arms held wide, pretending to fly a plane.

Image copyright NASA

Image caption Glenn prepares to orbit the earth

Glenn retained a lifelong love of flight and was piloting his own aircraft as recently as five years ago.

He married his childhood sweetheart, Annie Castor, and they had two children, David and Lyn.

Glenn's wife still has the $125 diamond engagement ring he bought for her in 1942.

He became a combat pilot, serving in World War II and the Korean War before joining America's space agency.

Media captionMr Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth

Glenn earned six Distinguished Flying Crosses and flew more than 150 missions during the two conflicts.

After setting the transcontinental flight speed record as a test pilot, he joined Mercury 7, America's first class of astronauts.

On 20 February 1962, he blasted off solo from Cape Canaveral aboard a cramped capsule on an Atlas rocket to a new frontier for Americans.

Image copyright AP

Image caption John Glenn at Nasa in 1963

He spent just under five hours in space, completing three laps of the world.

"Zero G (gravity) and I feel fine," was Glenn's remark on weightlessness.

His capsule's heat shield came loose, leading Mission Control to fear he would be incinerated on re-entry, but the craft held together.

Image copyright NASA

After splashdown in the Atlantic, Glenn was treated to a New York ticker-tape parade.

During his political career he was briefly considered as a running mate for Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter.

But Glenn's star dimmed after a meandering keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention __that led Mr Carter to call him "the most boring man I ever met".

He vied himself to be the party's White House standard-bearer in 1984, but was beaten by Mr Carter's Vice-President, Walter Mondale.

Image copyright AP

Image caption John Glenn (L) President John F Kennedy (M) and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson ® inspect the Friendship 7 capsule

Glenn's business career, which included an investment in a chain of Holiday Inns, made him a multi-millionaire.

When he returned to space in 1998, despite the misgivings of his wife, he said in a news conference from orbit: "To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible."

In 2011, Glenn received the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian award.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption President Obama presents John Glenn with the Presidential Medal of Freedom

A year later, President Barack Obama presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mr Obama said in a statement on Thursday __that Glenn had "spent his life breaking barriers".

Nasa tweeted that he was "a true American hero".

"Godspeed, John Glenn. Ad astra."

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John Glenn: First US astronaut to orbit Earth dies

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