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Greenland loses ice in fits and starts
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Historic ice loss
acknowledges that it failed to act on information that the ebony may have violated the Lacey Act. This forbids imports of wood that are in violation of the laws of the exporting country. Gibson, of Nashville, Tennessee, is now required to pay a penalty of $300,000 as well as $50,000 to the US National Fish and Wildlife Service to promote conservation of protected trees. It will also forfeit some wood seized in the investigation, worth $261,844. Gibson says it was “inappropriately targeted” but reached agreement in order to avoid an expensive court case.
60 Seconds
that the ice sheet melted as rapidly between 1985 and 1993 as between 2005 and 2010 (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1220614). Kjær has already done a preliminary analysis of even earlier aerial photos, and thinks
EVEN in the Arctic circle, history repeats itself. The dramatic ice loss from Greenland between 2005 and 2010 drove up sea levels around the world – but it was not unprecedented. A similar retreat “Records show that the ice happened in the late 1980s. sheet melted as rapidly Greenland’s ice sheet has been monitored by satellites for just 20 between 1985 and 1993 as between 2005 and 2010” years, so researchers didn’t know whether the recent acceleration in ice loss was a new phenomenon that Greenland also lost a lot of ice in the 1930s. He says surges of ice or not. Using aerial photographs loss may be a regular occurrence, from the 1980s, Kurt Kjær of the although they may become more University of Copenhagen in common as the world warms. Denmark, and colleagues, found
Missing gorillas spotted
Higgs signal boost
BRUCE DAVIDSON/naturepl.com
THE Higgs boson is now even SOME of the gorillas caught in the midst of fighting within the more of a sure thing. Democratic Republic of the Congo ATLAS, one of two experiments have been located. Dozens more behind last month’s discovery of remain missing. the elusive particle, has carried Virunga National Park is home out a more complete analysis to around 200 of the estimated of its original result. This boosts 790 mountain gorillas (Gorilla the statistical significance of beringei beringei) remaining in ATLAS’s observed Higgs signal the wild. The primates are tracked from 5 sigma to nearly 6 sigma, daily under normal circumstances, meaning the chance of it being but the park’s rangers have been due to background processes has unable to monitor them for almost sunk to 2 in a billion. three months due to heavy fighting The experiments at the Large between a rebel militia called the Hadron Collider didn’t see the Higgs directly; it decays so quickly M23 and government forces. At the end of July, park authorities that they can detect only the were given permission to search for resulting sets of particles, known as decay channels. While the other the missing animals by the M23, now in control of Africa’s oldest national experiment, CMS, presented results for all five possible sets, ATLAS was initially only confident enough to present evidence in two channels: the photons and the Z bosons. But a paper posted online by the ATLAS team on 31 July now includes the rates for the W boson channel too, and this improves the team’s overall confidence level (arxiv.org/abs/1207.7214v1). With strong Higgs results in hand, an international team is proposing a new collider called LEP3 to study the particle in detail. The machine could be built within the next 10 years in the tunnel that –Found at last– houses the LHC, say its backers.
park. A census has located several missing families. “It was truly amazing to see the gorillas again after so long and so much fighting,” says Innocent Mburanumwe, warden of the park’s gorilla sector. “They had not seen us for a very long time and seemed calm and curious.” There is no evidence that the gorillas have been targeted in the fighting, although they have been in the past, but they are still under threat. Gorillas and humans are genetically close, which makes them vulnerable to many of the same diseases. That ups the chances that the gorillas could pick up an infection from the militia in the area – or vice versa.
Astronaut defects Syria’s first man in space, Mohammad Ahmad Faris, is among the latest in a string of high-profile defectors from President Bashar Assad’s regime. According to Turkish state media, the astronaut declared his support for the opposition and crossed into Turkey over the weekend. Faris, 61, visited the Soviet space station Mir in 1987.
Name that bat All major European bat species can now be identified from their echolocation calls. An online tool called iBatsID finds the best match for a call from a library of 34 species (Journal of Applied Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/j.13652664.2012.02182.x).
More early humans Three new human fossils from northern Kenya provide the best evidence yet that at least two species of Homo shared the African plains 2 million years ago. The face and two lower jaws may bolster previous claims that Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis are distinct species (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature11322).
Huntingdon’s hope Methylene blue, a drug approved to treat malaria, might slow the progression of Huntington’s disease. The drug reduced the accumulation of misfolded proteins in brain cells, which underlie the disease, and improved behaviour in mice engineered to have the condition (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0895-12.2012).
Shuttle showdown NASA has charged three firms with creating replacements for its space shuttle, which retired last year. SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, Boeing of Chicago, Illinois, and Sierra Nevada Corporation of Louisville, Colorado, all won contracts, but Blue Origin of Kent, Washington, run by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, did not.
11 August 2012 | NewScientist | 5
Historic ice loss
acknowledges that it failed to act on information that the ebony may have violated the Lacey Act. This forbids imports of wood that are in violation of the laws of the exporting country. Gibson, of Nashville, Tennessee, is now required to pay a penalty of $300,000 as well as $50,000 to the US National Fish and Wildlife Service to promote conservation of protected trees. It will also forfeit some wood seized in the investigation, worth $261,844. Gibson says it was “inappropriately targeted” but reached agreement in order to avoid an expensive court case.
60 Seconds
that the ice sheet melted as rapidly between 1985 and 1993 as between 2005 and 2010 (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1220614). Kjær has already done a preliminary analysis of even earlier aerial photos, and thinks
EVEN in the Arctic circle, history repeats itself. The dramatic ice loss from Greenland between 2005 and 2010 drove up sea levels around the world – but it was not unprecedented. A similar retreat “Records show that the ice happened in the late 1980s. sheet melted as rapidly Greenland’s ice sheet has been monitored by satellites for just 20 between 1985 and 1993 as between 2005 and 2010” years, so researchers didn’t know whether the recent acceleration in ice loss was a new phenomenon that Greenland also lost a lot of ice in the 1930s. He says surges of ice or not. Using aerial photographs loss may be a regular occurrence, from the 1980s, Kurt Kjær of the although they may become more University of Copenhagen in common as the world warms. Denmark, and colleagues, found
Missing gorillas spotted
Higgs signal boost
BRUCE DAVIDSON/naturepl.com
THE Higgs boson is now even SOME of the gorillas caught in the midst of fighting within the more of a sure thing. Democratic Republic of the Congo ATLAS, one of two experiments have been located. Dozens more behind last month’s discovery of remain missing. the elusive particle, has carried Virunga National Park is home out a more complete analysis to around 200 of the estimated of its original result. This boosts 790 mountain gorillas (Gorilla the statistical significance of beringei beringei) remaining in ATLAS’s observed Higgs signal the wild. The primates are tracked from 5 sigma to nearly 6 sigma, daily under normal circumstances, meaning the chance of it being but the park’s rangers have been due to background processes has unable to monitor them for almost sunk to 2 in a billion. three months due to heavy fighting The experiments at the Large between a rebel militia called the Hadron Collider didn’t see the Higgs directly; it decays so quickly M23 and government forces. At the end of July, park authorities that they can detect only the were given permission to search for resulting sets of particles, known as decay channels. While the other the missing animals by the M23, now in control of Africa’s oldest national experiment, CMS, presented results for all five possible sets, ATLAS was initially only confident enough to present evidence in two channels: the photons and the Z bosons. But a paper posted online by the ATLAS team on 31 July now includes the rates for the W boson channel too, and this improves the team’s overall confidence level (arxiv.org/abs/1207.7214v1). With strong Higgs results in hand, an international team is proposing a new collider called LEP3 to study the particle in detail. The machine could be built within the next 10 years in the tunnel that –Found at last– houses the LHC, say its backers.
park. A census has located several missing families. “It was truly amazing to see the gorillas again after so long and so much fighting,” says Innocent Mburanumwe, warden of the park’s gorilla sector. “They had not seen us for a very long time and seemed calm and curious.” There is no evidence that the gorillas have been targeted in the fighting, although they have been in the past, but they are still under threat. Gorillas and humans are genetically close, which makes them vulnerable to many of the same diseases. That ups the chances that the gorillas could pick up an infection from the militia in the area – or vice versa.
Astronaut defects Syria’s first man in space, Mohammad Ahmad Faris, is among the latest in a string of high-profile defectors from President Bashar Assad’s regime. According to Turkish state media, the astronaut declared his support for the opposition and crossed into Turkey over the weekend. Faris, 61, visited the Soviet space station Mir in 1987.
Name that bat All major European bat species can now be identified from their echolocation calls. An online tool called iBatsID finds the best match for a call from a library of 34 species (Journal of Applied Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/j.13652664.2012.02182.x).
More early humans Three new human fossils from northern Kenya provide the best evidence yet that at least two species of Homo shared the African plains 2 million years ago. The face and two lower jaws may bolster previous claims that Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis are distinct species (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature11322).
Huntingdon’s hope Methylene blue, a drug approved to treat malaria, might slow the progression of Huntington’s disease. The drug reduced the accumulation of misfolded proteins in brain cells, which underlie the disease, and improved behaviour in mice engineered to have the condition (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0895-12.2012).
Shuttle showdown NASA has charged three firms with creating replacements for its space shuttle, which retired last year. SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, Boeing of Chicago, Illinois, and Sierra Nevada Corporation of Louisville, Colorado, all won contracts, but Blue Origin of Kent, Washington, run by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, did not.
11 August 2012 | NewScientist | 5