Canada has approved for limited production a genetically engineered, environmentally friendly pig.

The “Enviropig” has been genetically modified in such a manner that its urine and feces contain almost 65 percent less phosphorus than usual. That could be good news for lakes, rivers, and ocean deltas, where phosphorous from animal waste can play a role in causing algal blooms. These outbursts of algae rapidly deplete the water’s oxygen, creating vast dead zones for fish and other aquatic life [National Geographic].

All living creatures need phosphorus, as the element plays an important role in many cellular and organ functions. Domesticated pigs get their daily dose from corn or cereal grains, but not without a struggle. These foods contain a type of phosphorus that is indigestible to the pigs, so farmers also feed their pigs an enzyme called phytase to allow the animals to break down and digest the phosphorus. But ingested phytase isn’t as effective at breaking down phosphorus as phytase created inside the pig would be, so a fair amount of the element gets flushed out in pig waste. That waste, in turn, can make its way into the water supply [National Geographic].

To fix this problem, the scientists tinkered with the swine’s genes to make the pig produce its own phytase in its salivary glands. When the cereal grains are consumed, they mix with the phytase in the saliva, and throughout the pig’s digestive tract the enzyme works to break down the phosphorous in the food. With more phosphorus retained within the body, the amount excreted in waste is reduced by almost 65 percent, say researchers.

The researchers who created the Enviropig say it’s not just eco-friendly, but it also cut farmers’ feed-supplement costs. If the pigs eventually become common, they could also help U.S. farmers comply with “zero discharge” rules that forbid pork producers from releasing nitrogen or phosphorus runoff.

The Enviropigs will be raised only in controlled research settings in Canada for now, and experts say transgenic pork won’t be landing on your plate anytime soon; the new biotech pig will face years of safety trials to see if it should be approved for commercial production and consumption in the United States and Canada. No transgenic animal has been approved for consumption as of yet. But in 2008 the FDA announced approval of the first human health product made from a genetically engineered animal. The goat-derived anticoagulant, ATryn, is used for the prevention of blood clots in patients with a rare disease-causing protein deficiency [National Geographic].

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Image: Enviropig/University of Guelph

The STS-131 crew from the left: Mission Specialists Clayton Anderson, Naoko Yamazaki, Stephanie Wilson, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger and Rick Mastracchio, Pilot James P. Dutton, Jr., and Commander Alan Poindexter. Image credit: NASA/Jim Grossmann

Everything looks good for Monday’s shuttle launch.  Even the weather is looking favorable with just a 20 percent chance the weather will cause a delay.

Launch time is scheduled for 6:21 am EDT Monday morning.  I will try and record it and put it up for those not able to see it for whatever reason.  Heh, somebody will have it even if I flub it up.

This morning a Soyuz TMA-18 rocket launched NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Komienko on their way to the International Space Station.  You know of course, the Russians will pretty much be the only ticket to the ISS pretty soon.

No matter, our guys will be too busy fooling around with cars to amount to much spacewise in what some former NASA astronauts are calling “the dismantling of NASA”.  I wonder if the NASA people ever dreamed they would go from “rocket scientists” to glorified grease monkeys when they worked so hard in school to be able to have a chance at working at the prestigious agency.  I bet not.

I am not dissing automotive people either so no emails to that effect thank you.  I have many friends in the automotive industry and I have NO talent for such work myself.  But just the same, you have to admit it’s rather far afield from what these  NASA people worked so hard to be able to do.  I am also concerned with the message being sent to school-aged young adults; kind of like: meh, like science? Don’t bother.

Wondering which Hollywood movie will be this weekend’s smash hit? Head straight to Twitter, as a new study (pdf) suggests the microblogging service offers the most accurate predictions of a movie’s success.

In a new paper about Twitter’s success at gauging a film’s fortunes, Sitaram Asur and Bernando Huberman from HP devised a simple model that tracks people’s tweets about a certain movie (for their study, they collected almost 3 million tweets). The researchers found that compared to the industry’s gold standard for movie success prediction, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, tweets were far more accurate in predicting how much money a movie would make.

The researchers’ system tracks the rate and frequency of movie mentions, and also categorizes the tweet reviews as either positive or negative. The Twitter findings reflect marketing realities, the researchers note: While movie studios can push people to the theaters with hype and pre-release marketing, it’s usually positive reviews and word-of-mouth that sustains people’s interest after a movie has been released.

Mashable writes:

One movie analyzed in this study, The Blind Side, had an “enormous increase in positive sentiment after release,” reads the paper. The film’s score jumped from 5.02 to 9.65 on HP’s scale. After a “lukewarm” first weekend, with sales around $34 million, the movie “boomed in the next week ($40.1 million), owing largely to positive sentiment.”

The study suggests that the collective chatter of the crowds on Twitter can be used not just for predicting future movie hits, but could also be a valuable tool for marketers preparing to introduce new products. Perhaps even political candidates could use Twitter to check for interest in their policy positions. Hey, is #FinancialRegulations trending yet?

Follow us on Twitter.

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Image: The Blind Side

My friend and fellow science promoter Brian Cox will be on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross tonight on BBC America (it already aired last week in the UK). Brian is funny and smart, as is Wossy (as Ross is called), so this should be a great time. And speaking of Matt Smith and Doctor Who, Mr. Smith will be on Wossy’s show as well.

Speaking of speaking of Doctor Who, oh how I wish this were true.

Tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to Fizzygoo for the Obama link.

The “young sun paradox” just won’t go away. For decades, scientists like Carl Sagan have tried to resolve this mystery of the early solar system—how the newborn Earth stayed warm enough to keep liquid water—but it continues to bob and weave around an answer. In the journal Nature, a team led by Minik Rosing proposes an alternate solution to the leading theory, which relies on the greenhouse effect hypothesis. But don’t expect the debate to end here.

The problem is this: The young Earth received much less heat from the sun. Four billion years ago, a lower solar luminosity should have left Earth’s oceans frozen over, but there is ample evidence in the Earth’s geological record that there was liquid water — and life — on the planet at the time [Space.com]. So what gives? The traditional explanation going back to the 1970s has been that a powerful greenhouse effect, far stronger than the one we experience today, kept the Earth basked in enough warmth to keep water sloshing around the planet’s surface as a liquid and not packed in solid ice. In 1972, Sagan and colleague George Mullen wrote that such an effect would have required intense carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere during that period, the Archaen.

But the evidence isn’t there, Rosing argues. To research the greenhouse hypothesis, he and his team studied banded iron formations in Greenland ice dating back 3.8 billion years. They focused on two minerals, magnetite and siderite, that can provide a bellwether of the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Too much CO2, and magnetite can’t form, whereas the opposite is true for siderite [ScienceNOW]. According to Rosing’s analysis, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere could have been as high as three times what we see today, but that’s not nearly enough to account for the warmth that would’ve been needed to stave off a snowball Earth.

So, Rosing puts forth his own solution. Back then, he says, the continents were smaller and thus more of the Earth’s surface was covered by water. Since water tends to absorb more heat than land, an ultra-watery Earth could have helped conserve warmth. Secondly, he says, the early earth wasn’t a cloudy place back then, due to the fact that life had just arisen. The droplets of water that make up clouds form by glomming on to tiny particles, called cloud condensation nuclei, many of which are chemical substances produced by algae and plants, which weren’t present on the Earth at that time [Space.com]. You see the same effect today, he says, in areas of the open ocean that have neither much marine life nor much cloud cover. And if the young Earth truly had few clouds, more sunlight reached the surface.

Atmospheric scientist James Kasting says that if Rosing’s team is right, the idea could have consequences beyond our own planet’s history—it could widen the habitable zone for exoplanet hunters seeking extraterrestrial life. But regarding the young sun paradox, he says, this new answer is incomplete. “I think their mechanism fails because they just barely get up to freezing point,” Kasting said, adding that it also fails to take into account the reflectively of the planet’s ice [Discovery News].

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / Neethis

The “normal” form of the condition called synesthesia is weird enough: For people with this condition, sensory information gets mixed in the brain causing them to see sounds, taste colors, or perceive numbers as having particular hues.

But psychologist David Brang is studying a bunch of people with an even odder form of synesthesia: These people can literally “see time.”

Brang’s subjects have time-space synesthesia; because they have extra neural connections between certain regions of the brain, the patients experience time as a spatial construct.

In his research, Brang describes one patient who was able to see the year as a circular ring surrounding her body that rotated clockwise throughout the year. The current month was reportedly inside her chest with the previous month in front of her chest, reports New Scientist.

Describing the condition to New Scientist, Brang said:

“In general, these individuals perceive months of the year in circular shapes, usually just as an image inside their mind’s eye.”

So, while boring, normal folks whip out their physical or online calendars to jot down plans for the future, time-space synesthetes just look straight ahead and can tell you precisely what days work for them. It’s almost like their personal version of augmented reality.

Brang found these uncommon individuals by recruiting 183 students for a trial, in which he asked them to visualize the months of the year and reconstruct that representation on a computer screen.

New Scientist writes:

Four months later the students were shown a blank screen and asked to select a position for each of the months. They were prompted with a cue month – a randomly selected month placed as a dot in the location where the student had originally placed it. Uncannily, four of the 183 students were found to be time-space synesthetes when they placed their months in a distinct spatial array – such as a circle – that was consistent over the trials.

A second test was conducted to compare the memories of time-space synesthetes to those of regular folks. Brang asked his subjects to memorize an unfamiliar spatial calendar and reproduce it. The results showed that when it came to recalling events in time, time-space synesthetes far outperformed the others.

Earlier research has shown that people with synesthesia, on an average, remember about 123 different facts related to a certain period in their life, while a regular person could recall just 39 facts.

Psychologist Julia Simner last year told the BBC:

“So the average person might remember that they went on holiday to America when they were seven…. This person would recall the name of the guesthouse, the name of the guesthouse owner and the breed of the owner’s dog.”

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DISCOVER: Are We All Synesthetes?

Image: Julia Simner / BBC