Researchers retrieve sperm from the abdomen of an ant. Credit: Boris Baer/UWA
From Cosmos:
SYDNEY: The queen of a social insect colony has one sexual encounter during her life, which involves many males, then controls which sperm will die off, researchers said.
A social insect queen only experiences a single day of sexual activity in her lifetime yet she must obtain all the sperm necessary to create an entire colony within that time frame. This means that social insect females store a large amount of sperm in their storage organ.
"A honeybee queen mates with many more males than she has to, thereby collecting much more sperm than she actually needs," said Boris Bear, from the University of Western Australia in Crawley.
The Sabreliner 65 and Her Swiss Crew Emmanuel Joffet - Sipa Press
From Popular Science:
First time the record has been set with refueling stops.
Piloting a plane older than two of the three crew on board, a Swiss team shattered Steve Fossett's around-the-world flight record by almost ten hours over the weekend, the first time the record has been set in this weight class with refueling stops. But the pilots didn't just have to negotiate the usual headwinds and bad weather -- their flight was nearly derailed by a volcanic eruption in Iceland that forced them to make an extra refueling stop and add an unexpected 12th leg to their journey.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo made its first captive carry flight early this morning at the Mojave Air and Space Port. SpaceShipTwo, which was christened the VSS Enterprise at its unveiling in December, is being carried by WhiteKnightTwo on its first test flight.
Image: Although "all-round" editors helped contribute to high-quality articles, the study's findings don't negate the importance of fact-checkers, copy editors and other contributors. Wikimedia Foundation
From Discovery News:
Wikipedians who can perform a range of roles -- rather than possess a single expertise -- are key to quality articles.
It takes a village of contributors -- adding paragraphs here, inserting references there -- to craft a quality Wikipedia article, according to a new study that identifies the types of contributors who initiate and dominate the process to separate the Wikipedia wheat from chaff.
Artist's schematic impression of the distortion of spacetime by a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy. The black hole will swallow dark matter at a rate which depends on its mass and on the amount of dark matter around it. (Credit: Felipe Esquivel Reed)
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 22, 2010) — About 23 percent of the universe is made up of mysterious 'dark matter' -- invisible material only detected through its gravitational influence on its surroundings. Now two astronomers based at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) have found a hint of the way it behaves near black holes.
One key to happiness might be whether you make more than your peers, regardless of whether that income is six figures or just a mediocre take-home, a new study finds.
This concept of "doing better than the Joneses" is well established among children: A toy gets ditched as soon as a shinier toy in the hands of another child is spotted. But some researchers have often thought that when it comes to adults and money, things works differently, in that the more money one has, regardless of how it stacks up, the more resources can be acquired to generate happiness.
Sun Spots Solar storms, like this one captured by NASA’s STEREO satellite, could knock out the power grid. NASA
From Popular Science:
It depends on the source of the pulse. Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) large enough to cause you trouble come in two varieties: those produced by the sun, and those created by a nuclear bomb or another military-grade emitter device. With the sun-related variety, specifically coronal mass ejections (CMEs), your gear will probably be fine. But a really large CME could take down the power grid, says Bill Murtagh, the program coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Power lines transmit electricity as an alternating current, but a pulse from a CME can introduce a direct current into the system, says Luke van der Zal, a technical executive at the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute. This can cause transformers to overheat and work sluggishly, or fail altogether.
Colossal: This ice formation is a portion of the wall terraces of the Mojave Crater on Mars. It has barely suffered any erosion so offers scientists a tantalising glimpse of what a very large complex crater looks like
From The Daily Mail:
It looks like a filmmaker's apocalyptic vision of Earth following a devastating natural disaster.
But this colossal ice formation is actually a portion of the wall terraces of a huge crater on Mars.
Approximately 37 miles in diameter, a section of the Mojave Crater in the planet's Xanthe Terra region has been digitally mapped by Nasa scientists.
The result is this digital terrain model that was generated from a stereo pair of images and offers a synthesized, oblique view of a 2.5-mile portion of the crater's wall terraces.
Iceland Volcano Could Have World Consequences -- MSNBC
1783 eruption changed weather patterns, sent poisoned air to British Isles
REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Blasts of lava and ash shot out of a volcano in southern Iceland on Monday and small tremors rocked the ground, a surge in activity that raised fears of a larger explosion at the nearby Katla volcano.
Scientists say history has proven that when the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupts, Katla follows — the only question is how soon. And Katla, located under the massive Myrdalsjokull icecap, threatens disastrous flooding and explosive blasts when it blows.
My Comment: It is an uncomfortable thought to realize that even with our huge military arsenals, sophisticated technology, and all the tools that a modern and sophisticated society can bring to any problem .... when it comes to mother nature and the power that it can unleash we are powerless to do anything.
As to the 1783 eruption, a long time ago I did a university paper on the impact that the American revolution had on Canada. What struck me from the literature and news reports that I was reading was the impact that the 1783 eruption had on everyday life. Spring only came to Montreal late May, and winter returned by October. Growing crops was difficult and sporadic, and sickness was prevalent throughout the cities. The American Revolution was a major event, but the aftereffects of the 1783 volcanic explosion were just as serious.
If a repeat of the 1783 eruption was to occur today .... with the population centers that we have today .... there is no question in my mind the impact would be catastrophic.
Google has made its decision on China: it's moving search to Hong Kong.
Google has shut down its Google.cn site and is redirecting users to Google.com.hk, where it will offer uncensored Chinese-language search services. The company will maintain a research and development organization in China as well as a sales office, it announced Monday.
Scientists Say to Plant Milkweed to Help Save the Butterflies.
Monarch butterflies normally find sanctuary in the mountains of Mexico, away from the cold winters of North America, but a harsh winter of torrential rain and mudslides has decimated the monarch butterfly population.
"We saw a number of things happen in Mexico this winter that shouldn't be happening but are probably due to climate change in some way," said Chip Taylor, director of Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas.
This Triassic exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science helps to illustrate the battle between crocodiles and dinosaurs. Larry O'Hanlon
From Discovery News:
A massive volcanic eruption 200 million years ago tipped the scales in the battle between dinosaurs and crocodiles for global dominance.
Some 200 million years ago, Earth was on the verge of either an age of dinosaurs or an age of crocodiles. It took the largest volcanic eruption in the solar system -- and the loss of half of Earth's plant life -- to tip the scales in the dinos' favor, say researchers.
The idea is not new, but connecting the eruption to a 200-million-year-old mass extinction event has not been easy. Now that link is confirmed in an exhaustive new study published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Facebook recently surpassed Google as the top destination on the Web. Granted, the victory only represents one week, but with traffic on par with Google, and membership exceeding 400 million users, Facebook is primed to challenge the vast Google empire for online advertising dollars.
According to a blog post from Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise, "The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185 percent last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9 percent during the same time frame."
Glossy and greedy: Bluefin tuna is one of the world's most highly prized foodstuffs.
From The BBC:
"Welcome to the strange world of globalisation."
That is Roberto Mielgo's response to the fact that it is commercially viable to catch and keep live tuna in off-shore pens - or ranches - in the Spanish Mediterranean and feed them vast amounts of expensive caught fish (around 10kg of feed fish serve to make the tuna put on 1kg of body weight).
And to cull them by hand using divers, ship them to shore, package them in a purpose-built factory and fly them whole - on the same day - to market on the other side of the world.
Roberto Mielgo calls himself an independent fisheries consultant.
Atomic bombs changed carbon content in grapes. Credit: Wikimedia
From Cosmos:
WASHINGTON: Up to 5% of fine wines are not from the year the label indicates, according to Australian researchers who have carbon dated some top dollar wines.
The team of researchers think "vintage fraud" is widespread, and have come up with a test that uses radioactive carbon isotopes left in the atmosphere by atomic bomb tests last century and a method used to date prehistoric objects to determine what year a wine comes from - its vintage.
The test works by comparing the amount of carbon-12 and carbon-14 in grapes.
This image from the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope highlights the large and bright elliptical galaxy called ESO 306-17 in the southern sky. In this image, it appears that ESO 306-17 is surrounded by other galaxies but the bright galaxies at bottom left are thought to be in the foreground, not at the same distance in the sky. In reality, ESO 306-17 lies fairly abandoned in an enormous sea of dark matter and hot gas. (Credit: NASA, ESA and Michael West (ESO))
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 21, 2010) — Located half a billion light-years from Earth, ESO 306-17, is a large, bright elliptical galaxy in the southern sky of a type known as a fossil group. Astronomers use this term to emphasize the isolated nature of these galaxies. However, are they like fossils -- the last remnants of a once active community -- or is it more sinister than that? Did ESO 306-17 gobble up its next-door neighbors?
Being around a pretty woman can make men take more risks, a new study finds.
Researchers looked at the risk-taking behaviors of 96 young adult men, with an average age of nearly 22, by asking them to do both easy and difficult tricks on skateboards.
First, the young men performed the tricks in front of another man, then in front of a young, attractive female. (The attractiveness of the woman was independently assessed by 20 male raters.)
Researchers retrieve sperm from the abdomen of an ant. Credit: Boris Baer/UWA
