Cigarettes aren’t done causing damage when you put them out. Whether the tally of discarded butts worldwide is 4.5 trillion or 5.6 trillion, it represents an enormous amount of nicotine and heavy metals deposited in the environment. But what if the contents of your ashtray had a useful application? According to Chinese researchers, they might.

Seeking a use for all that junk, the scientists tested the chemicals in cigarette butts for their effects on a kind of steel used in oil and gas pipelines.

The results were pretty dramatic. In a near-boiling solution of 10 and 15 percent hydrochloric acid (HCl; same stuff as stomach acid), the cigarette-derived cocktail reduce corrosion by between 90 and 94 percent [Discovery News].

The researchers document their technique in the study in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. First, they had to soak cigarette butts they found on the side of the road in distilled water, with five butts to 100 milliliters (about 3.4 ounces) of water. That extract was then added to the HCL solution. If just five percent of the resulting solution consisted of that cigarette extract, those dramatic corrosion reductions began to appear.

If the researchers upped the strength of the acid, they needed to also increase the amount of added cigarette extract. For instance, with a 20 percent hydrochloric acid solution, the researchers needed to increase the butt leachate to 10 percent of the liquid to keep damage to the steel low: at less than 12 percent of the corrosion seen with the unamended acid solution [Science News].

Nine of the cigarette chemicals appeared to offer protective services for steel; interestingly, nicotine was the most important of the nine.

Don’t keep smoking for steel’s sake: The trillions of butts across the world represent more than enough for this use. But if you want to put your butts to good use, you can actually recycle them.

Related Content:
80beats: Study: “Third-Hand Smoke” Sticks Around & Produces New Carcinogens
80beats: Electronic Cigarettes Not a Safe Alternative to Conventional Cigs
80beats: In a Bad Economy, Recyclables Are Just Pieces of Junk
DISCOVER: Smoke Gets in Your Hair

Image: flickr / Nufkin

This is very cool: a live camera pointed at the Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajökull. I don’t think it’s embeddable, so just click that link and take a look. To add to the coolness factor, there is also a thermal camera pointed at it with the same field of view and scale, so you can compare what you’re seeing visually with what’s going on in the far infrared.

Here’s a still I grabbed last night; You can clearly see the ash plume through the cloud layers:

They provide a map of the camera location, but there’s no scale. I put it into Google maps, and it appears to be just a few kilometers from the volcano. That matches the rate the plume appears to change, too.

Take a look. It’s mesmerizing. And don’t forget that the NASA Earth Observatory is posting very high-resolution and beautiful images of the volcano quite often as well. Put that in your RSS feed reader! I check it every day; besides the volcano they frequently have incredible imagery of places I’ve never even heard of. It’s a big planet, with lots to see.

You may have heard that a major climate bill — the “American Power Act,” sponsored by John Kerry and Joe Lieberman — is trundling through Congress. Its prospects for passage are highly unclear; it’s a giant mess of a bill, which would have important consequences for any number of sectors in the economy, and the country’s attention is largely focused elsewhere at the moment. (A substantial fraction is focused on Justin Bieber, but I don’t really blame him.)

So what does the bill say? Here’s the very short version, from our sister blog 80 Beats:

The carbon emissions targets are: 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. That’s made to match the goals in the House bill that passed in 2009. In addition, the bill proposes putting a price on carbon.

Somewhat longer version from Think Progress here. Or of course you could just read the bill yourself (pdf). Only 987 pages! Most of which read like this:

23 ‘‘(B) WITHHOLDING ALLOWANCES.—
24 ‘‘(i) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding
25 subparagraph (A), subject to the condition
1 described in clause (ii), the Administrator
2 shall withhold from distribution under this
3 paragraph a quantity of emission allow-
4 ances equal to the lesser of—
5 ‘‘(I) 14.3 percent of the quantity
6 of emission allowances allocated under
7 section 781(a)(1) for the relevant vin-
8 tage year; and
9 ‘‘(II) 105 percent of the emission
10 allowances of the relevant vintage year
11 that the Administrator anticipates will
12 be distributed to merchant coal units
13 and long-term contract generators
14 under subsections (c) and (d).

There are good reasons why bills are written in turgid legal language; but it means that very few concerned citizens are going to be curling up with a good piece of legislation in the evening. That’s okay; we have multiple high-profile media outlets that are here to help us understand the complexities of these important changes to how our country does its business. I mean, right?

Sadly, no, as a wise person once said. CNN had a sit-down interview with Kerry and Lieberman last night, and here’s what we get:

Last night, John Kerry and Joe Lieberman appeared on John King’s CNN program to promote their climate bill, the American Power Act. The transcript is fairly lengthy, but at no point does King ask them to explain the provisions of their bill. Instead, he begins by asking whether they have 60 votes, tries to get them to explain why John McCain isn’t on the legislation, and then asks them to comment on the Sestak-Specter race in Pennsylvania. In fact, the clip the John King show posted online (which I embedded above) doesn’t even mention the climate bill.

Isn’t there room in the media landscape for just one TV news channel that would take seriously the responsibility of actually providing their viewers with useful information? It might be a small, niche market, but if the Golf Channel can thrive, surely it’s an experiment worth trying? I refuse to believe that providing useful information is of necessity such a tedious and boring activity that it can’t be made interesting, no matter how hard we try. We need to get Stephen Spielberg and Jay Rosen in a room together to figure out how to make a news channel that would honestly inform people in an entertaining way. Have them call me.

Yesterday Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman rolled out their new climate bill, the American Power Act. The 987-page piece of text was driven by what we’ve come to expect in climate legislation: Concrete targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions a certain percentage by a certain year. But, an international group of economists and environmental scientists are saying, that approach is doomed to failure, and this is the time to change.

The Hartwell Paper, a product of 14 different authors working since February, came out this week to coincide with the release of the climate bill. The assessment is blunt: Reaching agreements like the Kyoto Protocols to reduce carbon emissions has been the primary means of addressing climate change since the mid-1980s, and it hasn’t worked. With the high-profile flop that was the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the authors argue this is the chance to drive a new course on climate policy, one not singularly focused on CO2.

The Hartwell authors don’t downplay the importance of CO2 as a greenhouse gas; rather, they point to the silliness of being so fixated on that one compound; the Earth’s climate, after all, is a terribly complex system:

That is frustrating for politicians. So policy makers frequently respond to wicked problems by declaring ‘war’ on them, to beat them into submission and then move on. Indeed, almost any ‘declaration of war’ that is metaphorical rather than literal is a reliable sign that the subject in question is ‘wicked’. So, we have the war on cancer, the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terror and now the war on climate change.

As we noted last week at the 25th anniversary of the ozone hole’s discovery, the ozone problem was one of those with a direct solution that governments could pursue in such a prompt, bludgeoning way. Climate change, not so much. And the paper authors also criticize the closed-off nature of choosing climate strategies that led to such focus on CO2:

A distinctive characteristic of the climate change debate has been of scientists claiming with the authority of their position that their results dictated particular policies; of policy makers claiming that their preferred choices were dictated by science, and both acting as if ‘science’ and ‘policy’ were simply and rigidly linked as if it were a matter of escaping from the path of an oncoming tornado.

So, then, if rigid carbon targets are not the way to address climate change, what would the Hartwell authors recommend?

Their oblique approach is to aim instead for a world with accessible, secure low cost energy for all. The hope, intuition or strategy at play here is that since fossil fuels cannot deliver such a world, its achievement will, in itself, bring about decarbonisation on a massive scale. Following a path stressing clean energy as a development issue provides a more pleasant journey to the same objective [The Economist].

Compared to what we’ve gotten used to in international agreements, it’s a backward approach: Forget about cutting carbon emissions to an arbitrary level by subsidizing cleaner energy technology that’s on the shelf now. Instead, wholeheartedly fund research and development to reach new energy sources capable of actually competing with fossil fuel in the marketplace, and cut carbon out of the economy that way. Meanwhile, go after the low-hanging fruit like slowing deforestation and cutting black carbon.

In short, it’s an energy policy first with climate benefits on the back end, instead of a huge worldwide climate policy.

They argue that there is something wrong with a world in which carbon-dioxide levels are kept to 450 parts per million (a trajectory widely deemed compatible with a 2 degree [Celsius] cap on warming) but at the same time more than a billion of the poorest people are left without electricity, as in one much discussed scenario from the International Energy Agency [The Economist].

The Hartwell Paper’s talk of elevating human dignity is all well and good, but what about the final question: Can we really afford to wait for the world that its authors want?

Though the paper is not explicit on this, to accept that decarbonisation will require as-yet unavailable technologies to achieve deep penetration around the world is to accept that carbon-dioxide levels will get a lot higher than current policies want them to. Which might seem a good enough reason to reject the whole idea. Except that the current policies have not, as yet, made a very great deal of difference [The Economist].

Related Content:
80beats: Skip the Political Babbling: Here Is What the Kerry-Lieberman Climate Bill Says
80beats: Why the Ozone Hole Prompted Global Action—And Why Climate Change Hasn’t
DISCOVER: It’s Getting Hot in Here: The Big Battle Over Climate Science, interviews with Judith Curry & Michael Mann
DISCOVER: The State of the Climate—And of Climate Science

Image: iStockphoto

Here’s a brilliant piece of science-writing satire from the Onion. I find it particularly funny because I’ve been writing a lot recently about the evolution of human uniqueness. It’s so easy to mix up “unique” with “totally awesome.” The conflation flatters my readers, and myself. That’s the sort of self-importance that great satire can deflate so quickly.

[Hat tip, Ed Yong]

This is a guest post by Darlene Cavalier, a writer and senior adviser at Discover Magazine. Darlene holds a Masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a former Philadelphia 76ers cheerleader. She founded ScienceCheerleader.com and cofounded ScienceForCitizens.net to make it possible for lay people to contribute to science. Prizes: This old idea is making a sweeping comeback and it is changing the way government, industry and foundations help revolutionize future discovery. It’s high time we offer prizes to motivate and galvanize the public to come up with creative, real-time solutions to major disasters, such as the BP oil spill. Approximately one-and-a-half weeks ago, I received an email from Andrew Revkin (who writes the DotEarth blog at The New York Times) in which he challenged researchers and others to think creatively about substantive approaches to stanching the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "There's a lot of talk about sweeping Grand Engineering Challenges this year. But one is unfolding in real-time in the Gulf. Waiting months for a relief well seems pretty in the box,” he wrote in the email (reprinted with Revkin's permission), and reiterated in this blog post. While it’s true that BP is accepting public suggestions about ideas ...

I love illusions, and I love astronomy. So what could be better than combining the two?

If you’ve ever seen the Moon rising over the horizon, looking so fat and looming that you felt like you could fall right into it, then you’ve been a victim of the famous Moon Illusion. And it is an illusion, a pervasive and persuasive one.

So, how does this thing work? Ah, step right up.

One of my favorite brain-benders is the Ponzo Illusion. You’ve seen it: the simplest case is with two short horizontal lines, one above the other, between two slanting but near-vertical lines. The upper line looks longer than the lower line, even though they’re the same length.

The illusion works because our brains are a bit wonky. The slanted lines make us think that anything near the top is farther away; the lines force our brain to think those lines are parallel but receding in the distance (like railroad tracks). The two horizontal lines are physically the same length, but our brain thinks the upper one is farther away. If it’s farther away, then duh, our brain says to itself, it must be bigger than the lower one. So we perceive it that way.

While procrastinating on reddit, (you do look at reddit, don’t you, especially the science section?) I found this beautiful example of Ponzo:

Heehee! You’d swear up and down^* that the red vertical line on the right is much longer than the one on the left, wouldn’t you? It looks almost twice as long to me. It’s a very powerful perception.

But they’re not! I cut out the two red lines and put them side by side. They’re pretty much exactly the same length (well, they’re off by a bit due to resolution issues in the image, but not by nearly as much as your brain likes to think).

This example is a great one because it uses a real-life image. You can see the wall tiles getting smaller with distance, and the horizontal layout of them, complete with the lines between them, forces your brain to see the line on the right as farther away. Bang! Ponzo.

This illusion plays out all the time… including when the Moon is rising (you were wondering when I’d get back to that, weren’t you?). The Moon Illusion is in part due to this same effect, but weirdly, you also need to understand how we perceive the sky.

If I were to ask you what shape the sky is above your head, you’d probably answer "a hemisphere". But in fact, almost everyone perceives it as an inverted bowl, flattened at the top. Put it this way: if the sky were a hemisphere above you, you’d say the horizon was as far away as the zenith. But in fact most people perceive the horizon being farther away than the point straight over their heads; test after test has shown this. This isn’t too surprising; think of a cloudy day. The clouds over your head are maybe two or three kilometers above, but near the horizon they may be 100 kilometers away!

See where I’m going with this? When the Moon is on the horizon, your brain thinks it’s far away, much farther than when it’s overhead. So the Ponzo Illusion kicks in: your brain sees the Moon as being huge, and it looks like you could fall into it. The Illusion works for the Sun, too. In fact, years ago I saw Orion rising over a parking lot, and it looked like it was spread across half the sky. It’s an incredibly powerful illusion.

Oddly enough, when it’s on the horizon, the Moon actually is farther away than when it’s overhead. Not by much, really, just a few thousand kilometers (compared to the Moon’s overall distance of about 400,000 kilometers). Behold my Photoshop skillz:

The guy at the top of the Earth in the diagram sees the Moon on his horizon, and the guy on the side of the Earth sees it overhead. But you can tell the distances aren’t the same: the Moon is closer to the guy who sees it as overhead (by an amount roughly equal to the Earth’s radius). That’s no illusion! That’s science, baby.

So the Moon Illusion is just that. It’s not the air acting like a lens, or foreground objects making it look big by comparison. It’s just the way we see the shape of the sky together with the well-known Ponzo Illusion.

Hmmm, is there a metaphor I’m sniffing here? Science taking something we perceive as real, breaking it down, and showing it to be an interesting but decidedly unreal illusion? Well, that’s what science does! It helps us not only understand the world better, but it also makes the world cooler, too.

Moonrise image from Jorge-11’s Flickr photostream.

One of the notions implicit in most evolutionary models is that the tree of life has a common root. In other words all individuals of all species represent end points of lineages which ultimately coalesce back to the the original common ancestor. The first Earthling, so to speak. I say implicit because common ancestry isn’t necessary for evolution to be valid; after all, we presumably accept that evolutionary process is operative in an exobiological context, if such a context exists. Therefore it is possible that modern extant lineages are derived from separate independent antecedents. A “multiple garden” model. This has seemed less and less plausible as the molecular basis of biology has been elucidated; it looks like the basic toolkit is found all across the tree of life. But with a new found awareness of the power of processes such as horizontal gene transfer the open & shut case is faced with a new element of ambiguity. Or perhaps not?

Here’s a post from Wired, Life on Earth Arose Just Once:

The idea that life forms share a common ancestor is “a central pillar of evolutionary theory,” says Douglas Theobald, a biochemist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. “But recently there has been some mumbling, especially from microbiologists, that it may not be so cut-and-dried.”

Because microorganisms of different species often swap genes, some scientists have proposed that multiple primordial life forms could have tossed their genetic material into life’s mix, creating a web, rather than a tree of life.

To determine which hypothesis is more likely correct, Theobald put various evolutionary ancestry models through rigorous statistical tests. The results, published in the May 13 Nature, come down overwhelmingly on the side of a single ancestor.

A universal common ancestor is at least 10^2,860 times more probable than having multiple ancestors, Theobald calculates.

The paper is now on the Nature website, A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry. They looked specifically at 23 very conserved proteins across 12 taxa from the three domains of life (those being eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and the archaea). Here’s where the author explains the philosophy behind the statistical technique:

When choosing among several competing scientific models, two opposing factors must be taken into account: the goodness of fit and parsimony. The fit of a model to data can be improved arbitrarily by increasing the number of free parameters. On the other hand, simple hypotheses (those with as few ad hoc parameters as possible) are preferred. Model selection methods weigh these two factors statistically to find the hypothesis that is both the most accurate and the most precise.

The sorts of models compared is illustrated by figure 2. One the left you have the universal common descent model, and on the right the prokaryotes (bacteria) have an independent origin. The lines represent connections between the 23 conserved protein sequences, either through horizontal transfer or vertical transmission.

As noted in the Wired piece there’s no contest here. Universal common descent is strongly supported. I’ll let the author’s finish:

What property of the sequence data supports common ancestry so decisively? When two related taxa are separated into two trees, the strong correlations that exist between the sequences are no longer modelled, which results in a large decrease in the likelihood. Consequently, when comparing a common-ancestry model to a multiple-ancestry model, the large test scores are a direct measure of the increase in our ability to accurately predict the sequence of a genealogically related protein relative to an unrelated protein. The sequence correlations between a given clade of taxa and the rest of the tree would be eliminated if the columns in the sequence alignment for that clade were randomly shuffled. In such a case, these model-based selection tests should prefer the multiple-ancestry model. In fact, in actual tests with randomly shuffled data, the optimal estimate of the unified tree (for both maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses) contains an extremely large internal branch separating the shuffled taxa from the rest. In all cases tried, with a wide variety of evolutionary models (from the simplest to the most parameter rich), the multiple-ancestry models for shuffled data sets are preferred by a large margin over common ancestry models (LLR on the order of a thousand), even with the large internal branches. Hence, the large test scores in favour of UCA models reflect the immense power of a tree structure, coupled with a gradual Markovian mechanism of residue substitution, to accurately and precisely explain the particular patterns of sequence correlations found among genealogically related biological macromolecules.

Citation: Theobald, Douglas L., A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry, Nature, doi:10.1038/nature09014

A mathematical model of sentimental dynamics accounting for marital dissolution. "BACKGROUND: Marital dissolution is ubiquitous in western societies. It poses major scientific and sociological problems both in theoretical and therapeutic terms. Scholars and therapists agree on the existence of a sort of second law of thermodynamics for sentimental relationships. Effort is required to sustain them. Love is not enough. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Building on a simple version of the second law we use optimal control theory as a novel approach to model sentimental dynamics. Our analysis is consistent with sociological data. We show that, when both partners have similar emotional attributes, there is an optimal effort policy yielding a durable happy union. This policy is prey to structural destabilization resulting from a combination of two factors: there is an effort gap because the optimal policy always entails discomfort and there is a tendency to lower effort to non-sustaining levels due to the instability of the dynamics. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These mathematical facts implied by the model unveil an underlying mechanism that may explain couple disruption in real scenarios. Within this framework the apparent paradox that a union consistently planned to last forever will probably break up is explained as a mechanistic consequence of the ...

This Wednesday, the United States District Court in Manhattan came down in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its case against the file-sharing service LimeWire, and founder Mark Gorton, over copyright infringement.

In a fairly unusual move, Judge Wood held Gorton personally liable. “The evidence establishes that Gorton directed and benefited from many of the activities that gave rise to LW’s liability,” she wrote [Wall Street Journal].

The decision was a long time in coming. Nine years have passed (seriously, nine years) since the federal ruling against Napster back in 2001. Most file-sharing services gave up after the 2005 decision against Grokster, the Journal says, but LimeWire held out. So the record companies sued in 2006, and finally won.

This looks like the end for LimeWire.

“It is obviously a fairly fatal decision for them,” said Michael Page, the San Francisco lawyer who represented file sharing service Grokster in the landmark case, MGM Studios vs. Grokster, and also represented LimeWire’s former CTO in the company’s most recent copyright case. “If they don’t shut down, the other side will likely make a request for an injunction and there’s nothing left but to go on to calculating damages” [CNET].

The hearing regarding compensation is scheduled for June 1. The RIAA is pretty clear about what it wants: money.

“We think a high-damage award would be appropriate,” said Steven Marks, the general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that represents music companies. “I think it’s very clear from the decision that there’s a lot of evidence of willful behavior by LimeWire and its principals” [The New York Times].

But while LimeWire is doomed, that’s not reason to think that legislation will catch up to the Internet, at least according to Eric Garland of BigChampagne. While LimeWire kept operating its peer-to-peer system over the last decade, other systems, like BitTorrent, sprang up.

And if you like permissive Internet laws, just be glad you’re not in Germany. A court there this week found that people can bear some responsibility if they fail to secure their wireless connection and it winds up being used to distribute copyrighted content.

The owner had proof that the householder was on holiday at the time but the court ruled that the network should have been password-protected. The court’s verdict was that the owner could be fined up to 100 euros (about $127) [BBC News].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: A Love Song for Napster
DISCOVER: Emerging Technology: The Internet, a look back on the Web in 2006
DISCOVER: Your Digital Privacy? It Might Already Be An Illusion
Gene Expression: Nature vs. Everyone Else? (on open-access publishing)

Image: LimeWire

It’s the open ocean, and a small animal is swimming home. Listening out for the hustle and bustle of a coral reef, the creature changes direction and heads straight towards the sound. If it eventually arrives at its destination, it will settle down and add to the reef’s mighty structures. This intrepid traveller is a baby coral.

We’re used to thinking of corals as inert hunks of intricately shaped minerals but these rocky structures are merely the corals’ homes. The animals that live within are small and tentacled, looking a lot like the sea anemones that they’re related to. As larvae, corals look even stranger. Less than a millimetre in length, they swim freely in the open ocean amidst other plankton. Only later do they find a suitable place to settle down and get on with the adult business of reef construction.

These young corals have an unexpectedly amazing way of finding their way to the right site. According to Mark Vermeij from the University of Amsterdam, they ‘listen’ for the sounds of a reef.

Other oceanic babies do the same thing. Stephen Simpson, who was also involved in this new discovery, has previously showed that the larvae of both fish and crustaceans can used sound to find a home. Chemical cues can also lead them down the final leg of the journeys, but the din of a noisy reef carries further and is independent of currents. These acoustic signposts help them point in the right direction at the start of their treks.

Vermeij discovered this uncanny homing ability by collecting newly fertilised coral eggs off the Caribbean island of Curacao. The youngsters were raised in a lab and placed in six Plexiglas tubes pointing towards three underwater speakers. The speakers churned out a compilation album that may well have been called Now That’s What I Call Reef Music 2009 – a mash-up of the crackling beats of snapping shrimps laid over a background of fish calls and grunts, all sampled from local reefs.

If the speakers were silent, the baby corals were evenly spread throughout the tubes. But when the underwater mix started playing, the corals headed towards it, with over 40% of them clustering at the end of the tubes closest to the speakers. And if the tubes were placed half a metre below the speakers, the larvae clustered towards their upper surface.

Many things could affect the movement of a coral larva, including the tides, moonlight and enticing smells. But none of these mattered in the tank, which was isolated from the wider ocean. The fact that all of the tubes were angled like the spokes of a wheel also rules out the possibility that all the corals were swimming in the same direction, influenced by some external pull. It’s clear that these future reef-builders are capable of hearing underwater sounds and swimming towards them.

It seems bizarre that a simple coral larva could hear sound but we’re probably still thinking about these animals as rocky reefs rather than the living animals they encase. Previous studies have shown that coral larvae can see (detect light), touch (respond to textures) and smell (detect chemicals). Now, we know that they can also hear. Vermeij thinks that they do it with tiny hairs called cilia that coat their bodies.

As sound waves move through the sea, they cause water molecules and other particles to move up and down. These jiggling particles waggle the cilia, telling the corals where to head.

For the moment, it’s not clear if the larvae can tell the difference between reef sounds and general underwater noises. That’s an important question because the oceans are becoming noisier places, thanks to shipping, industry, drilling and military tests. This cacophony can easily drown out the sound of shrimps and fish. Underwater noise pollution already poses a problem for many animals including whales and dolphins. Do corals, many of which are already facing extinction, face the same problems?

Reference: PLoS ONE http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010660.

More on corals:

• Overfishing gives toxic seaweeds an edge in their competition with corals
• Clock gene and moonlight help corals to co-ordinate a mass annual orgy
• Worrying slowdown of coral growth in the Great Barrier Reef
• Corals survive acid oceans by switching to soft-bodied mode
• Fishing bans protect coral reefs from devastating predatory starfish
• One in three species of reef-building corals face extinction

One pest withers; another takes its place.

The Chinese government in 1997 approved Bt cotton. The crop, produced by U.S. agribusiness giant Monsanto, is genetically modified to produce a toxin that kills the bollworm, which has wreaked havoc on cotton crops. For its intended use, Bt cotton worked great: As DISCOVER covered in 2008, bollworms were in steep decline not only in cotton fields, but also in neighboring fields of corn and soybeans. But nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, and targeting just one pest opens the door for others to come in. According to a decade-long study published in Science this week, it’s happening.

The new pest plaguing the 4 million hectares of Bt cotton in China is the mirid bug, research leader Kongming Wu says.

Numbers of mirid bugs (insects of the Miridae family), previously only minor pests in northern China, have increased 12-fold since 1997, they found. “Mirids are now a main pest in the region,” says Wu. “Their rise in abundance is associated with the scale of Bt cotton cultivation” [Nature].

Operating in northern China, Wu’s team monitored how much insecticide farmers used from the early 1990s up through 2008. They also tracked the mirid population from the time Bt cotton was introduced up to 2008.

Before switching to GM cotton, farmers used more broad-spectrum insecticides to kill bollworms and other pests. But as more farmers began growing Bt cotton, their use of sprays declined, leading to a steady rise in pests, including mirid bugs [The Guardian].

Farmers have always been playing cat-and-mouse with pests and weeds, of course. The reports last week of weeds becoming increasingly resistant to the weed-killer Roundup was another reminder that nature adapts to our tricks, so while GM crops are often great at the their initial purpose, circumstances change. Cotton itself has been through many cycles of this before.

For example, the boll weevil was once the main worldwide threat to cotton. As farmers sprayed pesticides against the weevils, bollworms developed resistance and rose to become the primary pest. Similarly, stink bugs have replaced bollworms as the primary pest in southeastern United States since Bt cotton was introduced [Nature].

Related Content:
80beats: Genetically Modified Cotton Plants Protect Their Neighbors from Pests
80beats: Evolution in Action: Roundup-Ready Crops Create Roundup-Resistant Superweeds
80beats: Biotech Potato Wins European Approval; May Signal a Larger Shift on GM Crops
80beats: India Says No to Genetically Modified Eggplants

Image: flickr / J. Coelho

This is without doubt the single greatest thing on Earth, and the very reason the Internet was invented.

Sure, I came for the one about Doctor Who, but stayed for the rest of the magnificence that unfolded before me.

My hat is off to you, sir. Kudos. Kudos, indeed.

Tip o’ the brain and brain, what is brain? to BABloggee Oliver X for making my life so wonderfully better with this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Atlantis makes its final trip into space.  The launch looked to be picture perfect.  The video goes from JUST before lift off to external tank separation just over 9 minutes.

It’s a sad day for US manned spaceflight.  The term “Lucky Dog” was used by the Atlantis crew as it turned into a heads up position prior to external tank separation.

Fighting infection is one of the more important parts of medicine, but the doctors of tomorrow get to treat it like a game when they play The Healing Blade. In this card game, developed by a gaming company led by two San Francisco physicians, students take on roles of characters like the Lord of Pestilence or Apothecary Healer in a fantasy world called Soma. According to The Scientist:
"A Lord of Pestilence, for example, might play Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a highly opportunistic, gram-negative bacterium that commonly causes infections in hospitals. An appropriate counter-play by the Apothecary Healer would be to play ciprofloxacin or ticarcillan, two antibiotics that have action against P. aeruginosa.
The Lord of Pestilence can also play a multi-drug resistant card against the Healer, who might have to choose whether to use a narrow- or broad-spectrum antibiotic against the infection. Just like in other role-playing games, such as Wizards and Warriors, students have to use the information they have about their environment and the characters in play in order to win the game. Only this time, they're learning important facts and critical thinking skills they could potentially use in their jobs. If fun and games help med students learn how to most ...

Life is uncertain--eat the head first. That's the philosophy behind every meal a Zodarian spider eats, and there's a strategy behind it. Consuming certain body parts first ensures the spiders consume the maximum concentration of vital nutrients during the meal, according to research published in the journal Animal Behavior. LiveScience reports:
"When chowing down on ants, the spiders consistently began with the protein-packed front parts before getting to the fattier hind segment, called a gaster or abdomen. The picky eating seemed to pay off: Spiders reared on just front-end ant pieces grew faster and bigger, and they lived longer than those served only gasters or even whole ants."
Of course, the spiders can't sit down to dinner until they've injected their prey with a fearful venom that leaves the ants completely paralyzed in a matter of minutes. Then it's time to liquefy the ants' inside and slurp up the yummy goo. But the ants' hind parts don't go totally to waste; when given an entire ant to eat, the spiders would eat some of that, too, perhaps because certain nutrients are found chiefly in the gaster.
The findings jibe with the emerging view that for predators, achieving proper nutrition is ...

Videos of the oil leak 5,000 feet down in the Gulf of Mexico are coming out, and according to some scientists, the news is even worse than we thought.

If you remember back a few weeks to the outset of the BP oil spill, the official estimate was that 1,000 barrels of oil (42,000 gallons) was leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. While that’s nothing to sneeze at, the total wasn’t catastrophic compared to historic spills like the Exxon Valdez. Then, more than a week after the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did their own quick calculation and quintupled the estimate to 5,000 barrels per day.

BP later acknowledged to Congress that the worst case, if the leak accelerated, would be 60,000 barrels a day, a flow rate that would dump a plume the size of the Exxon Valdez spill into the gulf every four days. BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, has estimated that the reservoir tapped by the out-of-control well holds at least 50 million barrels of oil [The New York Times].

Now, according to an independent analysis done by Purdue’s Steve Werely with video footage of the leak, that worst-case figure by BP is close to what’s actually happening, and the true total might be even higher. Werely estimates the leak at 70,000 barrels per day, and with a 20% uncertainty in the numbers, that gives a range of 56,000 to 84,000.

Werely told The Guardian he based his estimate on techniques which track the speed of objects travelling in the flow stream.”You can see in the video lots of swirls and vortices pumping out of the end of the pipe, and I used a computer code to track those swirls and come up with the speed at which the oils is shooting out of the pipe,” he said. “From there it is a very simple calculation to figure out what is the volume flow” [The Guardian].

A second estimate by Eugene Chiang of UC-Berkeley provided a window of 20,000 to 100,000 barrels a day. Though the margin is wider, the estimate roughly coincides with Werely’s. But, if these guys are right, then how the heck did initial estimates miss the mark so badly?

The 5,000-barrel-a-day estimate was produced in Seattle by a NOAA unit that responds to oil spills. It was calculated with a protocol known as the Bonn convention that calls for measuring the extent of an oil spill, using its color to judge the thickness of oil atop the water, and then multiplying [The New York Times].

But according to other experts, that method isn’t especially accurate for large spills, especially one like this with large quantities of oil below the surface, unable to be seen from above.

There’s another alternative way to measure this, too. Researchers can use ultrasound to measure the flow rate; they do it under happier circumstances to measure how much oil or gas a well is providing. But two researchers who were going to take these measurements were turned away because BP was about to commence its now-failed attempt to install a containment box over the leak. They haven’t been invited back yet.

It’s one thing to be wrong, but the troubling development in measuring the spill is that neither BP nor NOAA appears terribly interested in getting the right number. When asked about the varying estimates of the leak total, BP leaders have deflected the question and said that it doesn’t really matter how big the spill is because their response would be the same. The government has responded in much the same way:

“I think the estimate at the time was, and remains, a reasonable estimate,” said Dr. Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator. “Having greater precision about the flow rate would not really help in any way. We would be doing the same things” [The New York Times].

For immediate response that may be true. But what about after the spill is finally, someday, stopped? Just as one example, it came out this week that the Deepwater Horizon, like many other rigs in the Gulf, was given the go-ahead to drill without receiving permits for assessing potential dangers to endangered species in the area. Now that responders are playing catch-up after the fact, it might be nice to know whether the leak amounts to 5,000 barrels a day or an entire order of magnitude higher than that.

In any case, the Coast Guard is beginning to treat the spill as a major disaster, according to Commandant Thad Allen.

“It has the potential to be catastrophic … I am going to act as if it is,” Allen told reporters in a briefing [Reuters].

Previous posts on the Gulf Oil Spill:
80beats: Testimony Highlights 3 Major Failures That Caused Gulf Spill
80beats: 5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom—Or Go Boom
80beats: Gulf Oil Spill: Do Chemical Dispersants Pose Their Own Environmental Risk?
80beats: Gulf Oil Spill: Fisheries Closed; Louisiana Wetlands Now in Jeopardy
80beats: Uh-Oh: Gulf Oil Spill May Be 5 Times Worse Than Previously Thought

Image: U.S. Coast Guard

[UPDATE: Atlantis launch went smooth as silk. The Orbiter is doing its thing, and will proceed to the space station.]

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled for liftoff today at 18:20 UT (14:20 Eastern US time) for its final mission to the International Space Station. After it lands 12 days laterSometime later it will be officially retired from the fleet [statement updated, see first comment below.]

I will be covering the launch from Twitter using my BANews feed. There are lots of others covering the event as well, including my friend Tim Farley. You can also watch it all live on NASA TV. As I write this, there’s a 70% chance of liftoff (high clouds may mess things up).

Atlantis is the first of the Orbiters to retire. The last scheduled flight of a Shuttle, Endeavour’s, is scheduled tentatively for mid-November. Discovery’s last mission launches on September 16.

The structure of Aleksandr Noy’s new transistor is unimpressively simple: just a carbon nanotube connecting two metal electrodes. But what makes it special is what he and his team use to control it: adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the fuel from our own cells. The project, published in a study in Nano Letters, achieves a key step in unifying man and machine.

The way it works: An insulator coats the ends of the nanotube, but not the middle—it’s left exposed.

The entire device is then coated again, this time with a lipid bi-layer similar to those that form the membranes surrounding our body’s cells [New Scientist].

Finally, the team poured a solution of ATP plus potassium and sodium across the transistor. That created an electric current, one that was stronger the more ATP they poured.

The magic is in the lipid bi-layer, which contains an ATP-sensitive protein that serves as a kind of ion pump when ATP is present. The lipid hydrolyses ATP molecules, with each occurence causing three sodium ions to move one way through the lipid and two potassium ions to move the other way, netting one charge across the bi-layer to the nanotube [Popular Science].

Noy claims to have created “the first example of a truly integrated bioelectronic system,” New Scientist says. And as simple as the transistor is, the idea behind it—harnessing the energy already in our bodies to power electronics—will be one of the keys to creating battery-free devices that monitor our cells, connect to our brains, or do things we won’t think of until we’ve (finally!) got nanodevices hooked up to our brains.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Future Tech: The Carbon Nanotube Grows Up
DISCOVER: 9 Ways Carbon Nanotubes Might Just Rock the World
80beats: Nanotubes + Waves of Heat = A Brand New Way To Make Electricity
80beats: Nanotubes Could Provide the Key to Flexible Electronics

Image: Aleksandr Noy et. al.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I saw this on NASA-TV earlier today, for me the video punctuated the finality of the shuttle program.
Have a look while you’re waiting for the launch.