Coozer-Bits.

Yipes: Jellyfish invade FL beach, sting 1600 people!

WTF: 12 arrested for feeding the homeless in Orlando.

Lame: Woman-hating Santorum says abortion exception to protect mother's health is "phony."

PSA: Citibank confirms hacking attack.

Science: Periodic table adds two new superheavy elements.

NIH science projects in jeopardy from government shutdown.

From ScienceMag:

With a possible government shutdown only a few days away, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) appears to be ready to send in a skeleton staff to care for patients and maintain animals and experiments at the agency's Bethesda, Maryland, campus. But accompanying the plans is a strange sense of secrecy.

As lawmakers and the Obama Administration continue to clash over the depth of budget cuts, leaders are now acknowledging that the federal government could shut down Monday barring another stopgap measure to fund government operations for a fiscal year that began last October. University-based scientists may not notice at first, as temporarily closing the offices that distribute most of NIH's $31 billion budget to outside investigators won't immediately affect these extramural grants. But about 10% of the agency's budget goes to its intramural program, which has over 1000 principal investigators (PIs), 4000 postdocs, hundreds of labs, animal facilities, and many clinical studies. Much of this can't just shut down and be left unattended.

NIH Deputy Director for Intramural Research Michael Gottesman e-mailed ScienceInsider yesterday that each of NIH's 27 institutes and centers is identifying people who would be "excepted" from the shutdown. That includes clinical staff; fire, security, and animal care personnel; and a few employees "who are protecting research investments."

But the details are sketchy. Any public discussion of the contingency plans is forbidden "for political reasons," says one high-level official, explaining that the government can't look like it's preparing for a shutdown. Even internal e-mails are now verboten, this source said; instead, planning has been done the old-fashioned way, by word of mouth.

That said, "there seems to be a coherent plan," a lab chief said. A few months ago, PIs submitted lists of essential personnel, including most physicians, animal caretakers, and others who will maintain experiments or cell lines that can't be shut down. The numbers ScienceInsider heard ranged from 50% of a group that does nonprimate work and clinical trials to just 10% of one institute's entire intramural program. But there's no word whether those lists have been approved.

The uncertainty is stressful, says one PI, who was allowed to designate only himself and one other lab member to maintain lab animals and cell cultures for a pause of indefinite length. "A great deal of treasure will be lost if this shutdown happens" because experiments may be damaged, he predicted.

Although government shutdowns are not uncommon, most recently in late 1995 and early 1996, the culture seems different this time around. While in the past many people, especially postdocs, came into work and were eventually paid, this time, "the impression I have is that you will have to show you're on some list" to enter a building, one lab chief said. Another investigator was told there will be fines for violators. This time, NIH staff members aren't even supposed to log into e-mail from home, a source said.

6th mass extinction is happening now.

From Discover:

It’s no secret that an alarming number of species around the world, especially vertebrates, are in trouble. But is the notion that the Earth is on the brink of a sixth major extinction event—the first since the dinosaur die-off—true, or alarmist? In Nature this week, a team of scientists sought to answer the question directly by counting as many species (and extinctions) as they could in the fossil record and the recent historical record. The result is gloomy news: There’s still a chance to avert much of the crisis, but if nothing changes, such a mass extinction event really could happen in the span of just a few centuries.

Mass extinctions include events in which 75 percent of the species on Earth disappear within a geologically short time period, usually on the order of a few hundred thousand to a couple million years. It’s happened only five times before in the past 540 million years of multicellular life on Earth. (The last great extinction occurred 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were wiped out.) At current rates of extinction, the study found, Earth will enter its sixth mass extinction within the next 300 to 2,000 years. [MSNBC]

That range of time the researchers give is so large because of the great diversity of life—it makes it hard to track exactly how many species are disappearing, and how quickly. (Indeed, DISCOVER has covered how biologists are discovering many new species these days just as those species face extinction). So Anthony Barnosky and his team made conservative estimates based on the available evidence. For instance, they pegged the rate of mammal extinction at 80 species out of a total of 5,000-plus in the last five centuries. That may not sound like much, but when you consider the speed at which things typically happen on a geologic scale, it is a faster rate of species loss than the previous five mass extinctions saw, scientists believe.

The picture gets even grimmer when all mammals currently endangered or threatened are added to the count. If those all disappear within a century, then by 334 years from now, 75% of all mammal species will be gone, says Barnosky. “Look outside of your window. Imagine taking away three-quarters of the living things you see and ask yourself if you want to live in that world.”

Plankton key to origin of Earth's atmosphere.

From EurekAlert:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers studying the origin of Earth's first breathable atmosphere have zeroed in on the major role played by some very unassuming creatures: plankton.

In a paper to appear in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Ohio State University researcher Matthew Saltzman and his colleagues show how plankton provided a critical link between the atmosphere and chemical isotopes stored in rocks 500 million years ago.

This work builds on the team's earlier discovery that upheavals in the earth's crust initiated a kind of reverse-greenhouse effect 500 million years ago that cooled the world's oceans, spawned giant plankton blooms, and sent a burst of oxygen into the atmosphere.

The new study has revealed details as to how oxygen came to vanish from Earth's ancient atmosphere during the Cambrian Period, only to return at higher levels than ever before.

It also hints at how, after mass extinctions, the returning oxygen allowed enormous amounts of new life to flourish.

Saltzman and his team were able to quantify how much oxygen was released into the atmosphere at the time, and directly link the amount of sulfur in the ancient oceans with atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide.

The result is a clearer picture of life on Earth in a time of extreme turmoil.

"We know that oxygen levels in the ocean dropped dramatically [a condition called anoxia] during the Cambrian, and that coincides with the time of a global extinction," said Saltzman, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State.

Coozer-Bits.

Creepy: Snakes used to have legs.

Duh: The more you lie, the easier it gets.

Neat: Anthropologists discover earliest cemetery in Jordan. Also: red foxes may have been Man's best friend before dogs.

Yipes: Pirates seize Italian oil tanker.

Neat: New bear habitat lets children swim with polar bears.

Coozer-Bits.

Aww: Cute story & video of a baby otter.

WWIII Watch: North Korea, South Korea exchange gunfire.

Eats: World's largest gummy worm on sale.

Science: 1 in 4 Sun-sized stars have Earth-like planets.

Coozer-Bits.

ZombieWatch: 10 uses for your body after you die.

ZombieWatch: Spirit of the dead alive and well in Haiti.

Science: Hints of lightweight dark matter particle found in space.

Misc: Stewart/Colbert rally schedule revealed.

Awesome: Time traveler talking on cell phone caught in 1920s Charlie Chaplin film.

Coozer-Bits.

Awesome: Panda Pambassador is best job in the world.

Science: How the leopard got its spots.

D'oh: Campaign ad even gets opponent wrong.

Creepy: UK to record and store every email, phone call, and website visit.

Census of Marine Life reveals extent of ocean mystery.

From New Scientist:

The first global picture of life in the oceans is released today, with the completion of the decade-long Census of Marine Life.

But despite its 2700 scientists spending over 9000 days at sea, the Census has only scratched the surface of the ocean's biodiversity. In all, some 250,000 marine plant and animal species have now been formally described, out of the 1 million thought to exist. "There are three to four unknown species for every known," says Paul Snelgrove of Memorial University of Newfoundland in St John's, Canada.

The Census has so far added 1200 new species to the tally, though that is likely to rise as over 5000 more organisms that were collected have yet to be studied or named. The new species include several that were thought to have disappeared, such as the "Jurassic shrimp", which was believed to have died out 50 million years ago.

The Census was also able to identify those regions that are richest in diversity, which include the Gulf of Mexico and the Australian coastline. The Galapagos Islands, meanwhile, turned out to have less biodiversity than the chilly South Orkney Islands, in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.

However, plant and animal diversity looks insignificant compared to the sea's micro-organisms, which may number 1 billion. Their diversity is "spectacular", Snelgrove says.

The Census also assessed threats to marine life. "Fishing and exploitation is the single biggest problem," says Ron O'Dor, one of the Census's senior scientists based at The Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington DC. Despite its incompleteness, O'Dor says the Census will be essential for conservation efforts because it provides a baseline standard for diversity in the oceans.

Star discovered made up of 10 billion trillion trillion carat diamond.

Space diamonds! From BBC:

Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered.

The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk.

Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

"You would need a jeweller's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond," says astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it.

The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 546-carat Golden Jubilee which was cut from a stone brought out of the Premier mine in South Africa.

The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallised white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon.

Scientists discover which dance moves drive the ladies wild.

From Popular Science:

For Fred Astaire, it was best done cheek to cheek. Madonna made it all about getting into the groove. And Outkast advocated shaking it like a Polaroid picture. Dancing can take many different forms. But which is proven to attract more members of the opposite sex? Science has been silent on the subject until now.

Psychologists at Northumbria University in Newcastle, the U.K., say they have used avatars shimmying to computer-generated dance sequences to pinpoint the moves most likely to win over women, reports LiveScience.

They recruited 19 men between the ages of 18 and 35 to bob to a German dance track while reflectors attached to the men’s clothing recorded their moves. The psychologists then used the motions logged by the reflectors to craft avatars – the same method the makers of Lord of the Rings employed to create the character Gollum, if you’re wondering – and then asked several dozen heterosexual women to rate the avatars. By having women watch 15-second snippets of faceless white creatures rather than actual men, the reasoning goes, the psychologists weeded out possible prejudices that might creep in because of physical attractiveness. (Because women are never prejudiced by looks in real life.)

The results, which appear in the online edition of the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, aren’t what you’d guess. The pelvis gets surprisingly short shrift. Instead, the researchers say, the difference between a bad dancer and good dancer comes down to the neck, torso, and right knee. Women tend to be drawn to men who move their upper bodies, use a lot of space, and vary their movements.

While the choice of German dance music is questionable, the researchers say the study is an important breakthrough. “Men all over the world will be interested to know what moves they can throw to attract women,” psychologist Nick Neave said. “If a man knows what the key moves are, he can get some training and improve his chances of attracting a female through his dance style.” Sense of rhythm not included.

Coozer-Bits.

Creepy: Japanese girl stabs 81-year-old to death on subway.

ZombieWatch: Scientists explore cannibal bacteria.

Lame: Race, insurance status cited in uneven death rates among pedestrians hit by cars.

Science: New bee species discovered in downtown Toronto.

Yipes: 70s superstar dies in freak hay bale accident.

Awesome: Scientists discovery why fish oils work well against inflammation and diabetes.

Boozalicious: Ancient civilization drank beer as antibiotics.

Universe not created by God, says Stephen Hawking.

Not to argue with the world's smartest living person, but I'm pretty sure an old man on a cloud made everything. From The Guardian:

God did not create the universe, the man who is arguably Britain's most famous living scientist says in a forthcoming book.

In the new work, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity.

In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking had seemed to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. But in the new text, co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, he said new theories showed a creator is "not necessary".

The Grand Design, an extract of which appears in the Times today, sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have been created out of chaos.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

In the forthcoming book, published on 9 September, Hawking says that M-theory, a form of string theory, will achieve this goal: "M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find," he theorises.

"The fact that we human beings – who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature – have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph."

Hawking says the first blow to Newton's belief that the universe could not have arisen from chaos was the observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.

Menstrual cramps may alter brain structure.

From ScienceDaily:

Primary dysmenorrhea (PDM), or menstrual cramps, is the most common gynecological disorder in women of childbearing age. Lower abdominal pain starts with the onset of menstrual flow and this ongoing pain stimulus can cause alterations throughout the nervous system.

In a study scheduled for publication in the September issue of the journal Pain, researchers report abnormal changes in the structure of the brain in PDM patients, whether or not they are in fact experiencing pain.

Lead investigator, Professor Jen-Chuen Hsieh, MD, PhD, Institute of Brain Science, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan, commented, "Our results demonstrated that abnormal GM [gray matter] changes were present in PDM patients even in absence of pain. This shows that not only sustained pain but also cyclic occurring menstrual pain can result in longer-lasting central changes. Although the functional consequences remain to be established, these results indicate that the adolescent brain is vulnerable to menstrual pain. Longitudinal studies are needed to probe hormonal interaction, fast-changing adaptation (intra-menstrual cycle) and whether such changes are reversible or not."

Coozer-Bits.

Funny: Celebs and their animal look-a-likes.

D'oh: 5 things to do before losing your wallet.

Cthulhu Watch: Scientists tap into Antarctic octopus venom.

Science: We might be inside a black hole.

Sad: New York to kill 170,000 geese.

Dorky: Pics from Comic-Con.

British scientists create bulletproof custard.

Isn't all British cuisine bulletproof? From PopSci:

Liquid armor has been shown to stop bullets more effectively than plain Kevlar, according to British firm BAE Systems. The material could be used to make thinner, lighter armor for military personnel and police officers, the BBC reports.

Materials scientists combined a shear-thickening liquid with traditional Kevlar to make a bulletproof material that absorbs the force of a bullet strike by becoming thicker and stickier.

Its molecules lock together more tightly when it is struck, the scientists explained -- they described it as "bulletproof custard," the BBC reports.

Shear-thickening liquids are composed of hard nanoparticles suspended in a liquid, which turns rigid after being struck with a bullet or shrapnel. BAE says their tests provide the first clear evidence that it can actually protect people.

In the tests, BAE scientists used a gas gun to fire ball-bearing bullets at nearly 1,000 feet per second at two test materials -- 31 layers of regular Kevlar and 10 layers of Kevlar combined with the shear-thickening liquid.

The shear-thickening liquid stopped the bullets more quickly and prevented them from penetrating as deeply, the BBC says. British media got a preview of the materials at a BAE facility in Bristol, England.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory has studied using liquid armor to replace traditional Kevlar armor, which is heavy and bulky.

Scientists find two proteins that can neutralize 90% of HIV strains.

From AOL News:

American scientists are touting a major stride toward a vaccine that can ward off HIV, after finding two key proteins that neutralize 91 percent of the virus' 190 strains.

The team of researchers with the National Institutes of Health's Vaccine Research Center hopes the antibody discovery can spur successful work toward a method of preventing HIV, which already afflicts an estimated 33 million people worldwide.

The discovery, published in this week's Science, is courtesy of Donor 45, an unidentified African-American man whose body produced the antibodies, called VRC01 and VRC02.

Scientists have already identified the 12 cells in his body that produced the proteins. If they can harness the mechanisms by which the antibodies were made, they might be able to create a vaccine that would spur anybody's body to make the HIV destroyers.

PSA: Ancient monster whale MIGHT KILL YOU!

From New Scientist:

The fossilised skull of a colossal whale with a killer bite has been uncovered by a team who reckon the monster shared the Miocene oceans with a giant shark.

The bones, dated to 12 to 13 million years ago, were spotted by Klaas Post of the Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in Peru's Ica desert. In homage to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the beast has been named Leviathan melvillei.

The skull is a huge 3 metres long, says team member Olivier Lambert at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. The team estimates the whale would have been between 13 and 18 metres long, like a modern sperm whale.

What really surprised the researchers was the size of the whale's teeth. "Some of the biggest ones are 36 centimetres long and 12 centimetres wide, and are probably the biggest predatory teeth ever discovered," Lambert says.

Study shows direct link between circadian clock in pancreas and diabetes.

Interesting stuff. Item!

The pancreas has its own molecular clock. Now, for the first time, a Northwestern University study has shown this ancient circadian clock regulates the production of insulin. If the clock is faulty, the result is diabetes.

The researchers show that insulin-secreting islet cells in the pancreas, called beta-cells, have their own dedicated clock. The clock governs the rhythmic behavior of proteins and genes involved in insulin secretion, with oscillations over a 24-hour cycle.

The findings, which will be published June 18 by the journal Nature, shine a light on a system that hasn't been recognized as having a strong effect on the process of glucose homeostasis.

"This is the first evidence of how the circadian clock may affect the development of diabetes," said Joe Bass, M.D., associate professor of medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine and of neurobiology and physiology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "The biological programs in animals for harvesting energy -- much like the photosynthesis of plants -- are under control of the clock. Our findings will help us figure out the causes of glucose abnormalities, but we still have a lot to learn."

The research, led by Bass and Biliana Marcheva, a doctoral candidate in Bass' lab and first author of the paper, represents many years of work and involved key collaborators Louis H. Philipson of the University of Chicago, Joseph S. Takahashi of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Seth D. Crosby of the Washington University School of Medicine.

In their study, the researchers knocked out the clock genes in islet beta-cells in mice and found the animals developed impaired glucose tolerance and abnormally low levels of insulin and went on to develop diabetes. The clock of the beta-cell coordinates glucose management, and the loss of the clock inhibited the cells from secreting insulin.

Ocean changes to have dire impact on humans.

Hey everyone, have a great weekend! PS - We're all going to die. From ScienceDaily:

The first comprehensive synthesis on the effects of climate change on the world's oceans has found they are now changing at a rate not seen for several million years.

In an article published June 18 in Science magazine, scientists reveal the growing atmospheric concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet.

The findings of the report emerged from a synthesis of recent research on the world's oceans, carried out by two of the world's leading marine scientists, one from The University of Queensland in Australia, and one from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the USA.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, lead author of the report and Director of The University of Queensland's Global Change Institute, says the findings have enormous implications for mankind, particularly if the trend continues.

He said that the Earth's ocean, which produces half of the oxygen we breathe and absorbs 30% of human-generated CO2, is equivalent to its heart and lungs. "Quite plainly, the Earth cannot do without its ocean. This study, however, shows worrying signs of ill health.

"It's as if the Earth has been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day!"

He went on to say, "We are entering a period in which the very ocean services upon which humanity depends are undergoing massive change and in some cases beginning to fail," says Prof. Hoegh-Guldberg. "Further degradation will continue to create enormous challenges and costs for societies worldwide."

He warned that we may soon see "sudden, unexpected changes that have serious ramifications for the overall well-being of humans," including the capacity of the planet to support people. "This is further evidence that we are well on the way to the next great extinction event."

The "fundamental and comprehensive" changes to marine life identified in the report include rapidly warming and acidifying oceans, changes in water circulation and expansion of dead zones within the ocean depths.

These are driving major changes in marine ecosystems: less abundant coral reefs, sea grasses and mangroves (important fish nurseries); fewer, smaller fish; a breakdown in food chains; changes in the distribution of marine life; and more frequent diseases and pests among marine organisms.