Science and technology news blog

Recent reports have suggested that listening to Apple’s iPod in a storm is a naughty thing to do and Mother Nature punishes you by giving you the biggest shock of your life, quite literally. Here is a report that will make you shudder from head to toe:

The man had burns along his chest and neck where his earphone wires lay. The insides of his ears also were burned—and then the ear buds conducted the current into his head.

The full article can be read here. Makes you wonder what if that was me. I could not even sleep properly, I can’t even listen to my iPod now for a few days, just imagining if this were to happen to me.

With the onset of global warming, ecotourism is seeing a sharp rise all over the world and Hawaiianbeachrentals.com offers its visitors with a wide variety of wailea condominiums. The Hawaii Ecotourism Association describes ecotourism as something that involves the development of the local community, while at the same time offering tourism based on nature and culture that is environmentally friendly.

This is a major initiative by resorts in tourist-friendly regions and none better than Hawaii itself. I had been planning on going to Hawaii in the next couple of years and Hawaiianbeachrentals.com provided me plenty of information on the renting of wailea condos.

According the US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), almost 100 million dollars have been used in the last year and steps have been initiated to prevent future pollution of the environment in Hawaii. There is growing partnerships between businesses and environmentalists in conserving the natural flora and fauna in a bid to secure future tourism. This in itself is a major breakthrough as both sides have been at crossroads since time immemorial.

The environment-friendly hotels, also known as “Green Hotels”, use energy and natural sources in ways that cause the least amount of wastage and pollution, thereby providing a clean and fresh environment for the tourists to experience Hawaii like its supposed to be.

U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks issued a stern warning Wednesday to the Bush administration not to weaken the Endangered Species Act, in the wake of a leaked U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service document that suggests the agency was considering an overhaul to the rules.

Dicks, at a hearing of the Interior appropriations subcommittee he chairs, told Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall that he should get congressional approval for any far-reaching changes to regulations underpinning the law.

“If you’re going to make these kind of fundamental, sweeping changes, they ought to come up to Congress, rather than being done by regulation in a way that looks as if it is very critically undermining the intent of the act,” Dicks, D-Bremerton, told Hall.

Hall responded that endangered-species revisions, first reported this week by the online magazine Salon, were only part of a draft that has since undergone further changes. And decisions about any changes in the rules haven’t been made, he said.

He assured Dicks, “I will not support anything, even going to the secretary [of the Interior] that our field staff and I can’t support.”

The latest dustup, over what would ordinarily be a relatively obscure agency document, is just the latest in a long-running fight over the Endangered Species Act.

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Humans, mainly those in countries with a craving for shark-fin soup, have devoured so many of the oceans’ top predators that it has rattled the length of the marine food chain, according to a study to be published today in the prestigious journal Science.

While previous studies have calculated declines by half or more, this one argues that seven of the largest sharks along the Atlantic Coast have all but vanished because of overfishing—down as much as 99 percent for bull, dusky and smooth hammerheads over the last 35 years.

Researchers believe the disappearance triggered a boom-and-bust cycle for other sea life, resulting in the wipeout of a valuable scallop fishery—a ripple effect biologists have long warned about but that has not been widely documented.

‘I am not using the word `extinction’ at this point. The ecological term we would use is ‘functionally eliminated,’ ‘’ said co-author Julia Baum, a biologist at Dalhousie University in Canada. ``It means there aren’t enough of these top predators around anymore to do their role.’’

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British scientists are following science-fiction writer Jules Verne and taking a journey to the centre of the Earth to explore mysterious giant holes in the planet’s crust.

The 12-member expedition is en route from the Canary Islands with a new high-tech submarine and a robot named Toby to a spot 11,000ft underwater in the middle of the Atlantic.

They will explore a part of the seabed where the Earth’s crust is missing and the material that makes up the core – the mantle – is exposed.

The main site – there is at least one other in roughly the same area and a third is suspected – is part of a globe-spanning ridge of undersea volcanos.

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Humans might not be as pioneering as we’re cracked up to be.That’s one possible explanation for new evidence that West African chimpanzees learned to use stone tools on their own to crack nuts at least 4,300 years ago.

The research pushes back chimpanzee tool use thousands of years. It casts into doubt the long-standing theory that direct human ancestors were the only animals to independently develop tools—and that chimps learned to use stone tools by watching humans.

Instead both humans and chimps could have inherited the ability to crack nuts with rocks from a common ancestor, Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary in Canada and co-authors report in today’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Or chimps may have developed the behavior on their own. In either case, it’s no longer likely that chimps learned to use stones as tools only by imitating humans.

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The first flying dinosaurs took to the air in a similar way to a World War I bi-plane, a study shows. A fresh analysis of an early feathered fossil dinosaur suggests that it dropped its hind legs below its body, adopting a bi-plane-like form.

This contrasts with earlier reconstructions showing the dinosaur maintaining its wings in a tandem pattern, a bit like a dragonfly.

Details appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

The ancestors of modern birds are thought to have been small, feathered, dinosaurs.

Microraptor gui, which lived 125 million years ago, was one of the earliest gliders. It appears to have utilised four wings, as it had long and asymmetric flight feathers on both its hands and feet.

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President Bush has said it.

A lot of government scientists have said it.

But until yesterday, it appeared that no news release on annual climate trends out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Bush White House had said unequivocally that a buildup of greenhouse gases was helping warm the climate.

The statement came in a release that said 2006 was the warmest year for the 48 contiguous states since regular temperature records began in 1895. It surpassed the previous champion, 1998, a year heated up by a powerful episode of the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean by El Niño. Last year, another El Niño developed, but this time a long-term warming trend from human activities was said to be involved as well.

“A contributing factor to the unusually warm temperatures throughout 2006 also is the long-term warming trend, which has been linked to increases in greenhouse gases,” the release said, emphasizing that the relative contributions of El Niño and the human influence were not known.

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Zoologists have discovered a new species of bats, Myzopoda schliemanni, with large flat adhesive organs or suckers attached to its thumbs and hind feet.

According to the research team, it is a remarkable find as the new bat belongs to a “family of bats” endemic to Madagascar—and one that was previously considered to include only one rare species.

According to Steven M. Goodman, Field Museum field biologist and lead author of the study in the journal Mammalian Biology, the species occurs only in the dry western forests of Madagascar.

The previously known species, Myzopoda aurita, occurs only in the humid eastern forests of Madagascar.

Goodman says the new species is different from the known species based on pelage coloration, external measurements and cranial characteristics.

Myzopoda are often found in association with broad-leaf plants, most notably Ravenala madagascariensis or the Travelers’ Palm, because they can use their suckers to climb and adhere to the leaves’ flat, slick surface.

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A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said Thursday, citing climate change as a “major” reason for the event.

The Ayles Ice Shelf — 66 square kilometers (41 square miles) of it — broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic.

Scientists discovered the event by using satellite imagery. Within one hour of breaking free, the shelf had formed as a new ice island, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and was amazed at the sight.

“This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years,” Vincent said. “We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead.”

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The scientific community is all abuzz with the discovery of a new va-riety of dinosaur, called the Turiasaurus riodevensis, in Barrihonda-El Humero, near the village of Riodeva, in Spain. Estimated to weigh as much as six to eight elephants, it belongs to a group that comprised the largest ever land animals to be known to have habited the Earth.

For Europe too, it’s quite a talking point. There’s much excitement over the fact that it’s the first time such a huge dinosaur was discov-ered on this continent. Africa and South America had for so long basked in the glory of being the continents of the big-sized dinosaurs.

But this time, paleontologists dug up several dozens of 150 million-year-old fossils of these long-necked, leaf-eating creatures known as the sauropods. They would have weighed between 40 and 48 tonnes when fully grown, and measured between 100-120ft from head to tail. Sauropods are incidentally the largest of the dinosaurs and include the well-known herbivorous Brontosaurus. T Rex or Tyrannosaurus rex, the most dreaded of them all, was in comparison just 45 ft long and weighed about six tonnes.

Besides the humerus, the scientists discovered pieces of the sauropod’s skull, scapula, femur, tibia and fibula, as well as teeth, vertebrae, ribs and phalanges – the tips of the fingers and toes. The teeth were said to have been found with long roots intact and heart-shaped crowns.

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Auckland University scientists have revealed that eruptions of supervolcanoes powerful enough to change the climate and cause mass-extinction can be worse than previously thought.

Ordinary volcanoes spew lava, erupting magma, from cones or vents. But in the case of a supervolcano, the underground magma chamber bursts out in a titanic explosion with a force thousands of times that of a normal eruption and huge amounts of ash, dust, and poisonous sulphur dioxide are thrown into the atmosphere, leaving a giant crater or caldera.

Such large eruptions of greater than 100 cubic kilometres of magma are generally rare and random events worldwide.

But geologist Darren Gravley of Auckland University and his colleagues have shown that one of the largest supervolcano eruptions on record, at Taupo 250,000 years ago, was twice as big as previously thought.

They have published in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America evidence that the eruption in the Taupo Volcanic Zone was actually two supervolcanoes 30km apart which erupted within days or weeks of each other.

It is the first time such a close pairing of supervolcano eruptions has been documented and provides scientists with a new understanding of the potential linkage between geographically separate caldera volcanoes.

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HOLLYWOOD has turned them into the cartoon stars of the film Happy Feet, but the real life story of the rockhopper penguin is not such a happy tale, scientists have discovered.

Millions of the birds are disappearing in a “sinister and astonishing” phenomenon that is baffling biologists.

In just six years their numbers have fallen from 600,000 to 420,000 in the Falkland Islands – one of its few remaining strongholds – according to the latest survey by Falklands Conservation.

The decline equates to a drop of about 30 per cent, although the Falklands population is thought to have dipped by about 85 per cent since 1932, when there were more than 1.5 million birds.

It is thought that global warming may be behind its decline, as warmer seas are less productive and the penguins may not be able to find enough food to eat, but researchers admit they have not yet established the reasons.

Dr Geoff Hilton, an RSPB biologist who has studied the species, said: “It’s actually quite rare in conservation that we don’t know why a species is declining.

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Satellites can be used to help predict where wildfires are likely to occur, a study reports. By studying shrublands in California, US researchers found that Nasa orbiters can accurately detect factors which contribute to fires developing.

The authors said Earth observation satellites could monitor plant moisture and the ratio of dead to live material, and provide data on potential hotspots.

The findings appeared in the journal Geophysical Research (Biogeoscience).

“This represents an advance in our ability to predict wildfires using data from recently launched instruments,” said lead author Dar Roberts, from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“We have come a long way in just the past five to 10 years and continue to gather much better data on the variables critical in wildfire development and spread.”

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Like good stock brokers, red squirrels predict when the market will be flooded with seeds and then invest big by producing a second litter of young, a new study finds.

“Lots of animals time their reproduction to match predictable increases in resources like the new growth of plants every spring,” said lead researcher Stan Boutin of the University of Alberta. “But the interesting twist here is that these squirrels have figured out a way to produce this second litter of babies at a time when they have little food and before an ‘unpredictable’ boom in seed production.”

The results are detailed in the Dec. 22 issue of the journal Science.

Unlike Eurasian red squirrels, which feed on a variety of pine-tree seeds, American red squirrels dine almost exclusively on the seeds hidden in spruce-tree cones. Before the seeds are ripe, the furry mammals clip the cones from tree limbs and bury them in one spot underground.

If successful with their hoarding and gorging, the squirrels could wreak havoc on trees whose sole way of reproducing is through seed dispersal.

The trees have devised a strategy, however, to protect at least some of their seeds. From one year to the next, they unpredictably produce either an overabundance of seed-bursting cones or just a few. For instance, one year the trees are covered with more than 1,000 cones each, while the next year just tens of cones dangle from tree limbs.

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