convergence

At Kyoto University in Japan, students and chimps saw an array of five of the numerals 1 through 9 flash onto a computer screen for just 650 milliseconds.  http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com  When the numerals simultaneously turned into white squares, the subjects had to touch the squares in numerical order. The students managed to choose the squares in the correct order around 80 percent of the time, as did Ayumu, a young chimp, says Kyoto’s Tetsuro Matsuzawa.  http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com

The researchers then shortened the viewing time to 430 ms and finally to just 210 ms, which isn’t even enough time for a person’s eye to scan across a screen. For the briefest exposures, the students got the sequence right only 40 percent of the time, but Ayumu still managed nearly 80 percent accuracy.  http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com

“The memory aspect is really surprising,” says Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Matsuzawa suggests that Ayumu’s prowess comes from something akin to photographic memory in humans. The power to retain extreme detail from a quick glimpse shows up occasionally in young children but fades with age. Youth seems to be an advantage for chimps too, Matsuzawa and Sana Inoue say in the Dec. 4 Current Biology.

The researchers worked with three pairs of mother-child chimps. Ayumu’s mother, Ai, had starred in earlier research papers when she learned to associate sets of objects with the appropriate numerals.

Researchers trained all the chimps to tap numerals from 1 to 9 in order, then switched to tests in which numerals popped up briefly on the screen and then turned into white squares. Because the exposure times are so brief, the test challenges perception as well as memory, says comparative psychologist Herbert Roitblat of Ventura, Calif.

On average, the three young chimps outperformed their mothers, the researchers say. Even Ai, despite her skill in using numbers as symbols, proved less accurate than her son. Brannon says she’ll be interested to see whether Ayumu loses his edge as he ages.

“The test says absolutely zero about chimpanzees and numerosity,” comments Brannon, who studies number skills in non-human primates. She predicts that the test could have substituted other shapes for the numerals in the test. “It’s really about memory,” she says.

“It is a terrific animal-human comparison of the cognitive ability to remember the locations of an ordered sequence,” says Anthony A. Wright of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

“Chimpanzees may have a perceptual advantage that is slowed down in humans, whose knowledge of counting may interfere,” says Sally Boysen of the Ohio State University in Columbus.

However, Matsuzawa’s results don’t mean that people will always lose to chimps, Brannon says. Ayumu might be an exceptional chimp, and some exceptional people, including children, might be able to keep up with him.

Overall, the scores for people and chimps greatly overlapped. To Brannon, this convergence suggests a basic likeness in the two species’ memory mechanisms. “I would argue that this is showing a major qualitative similarity rather than a major difference,” she says.

As to why researchers pit humans against other species, Roitblat says comparisons with close and distant relatives offer a way to infer the evolutionary path of human capacities. “Are we intelligent because we have language or do we have language because we are intelligent?” Roitblat asks.

tuberculosis

Check your tile countertop for fossils. A consumptive Homo erectus—or at least a piece of him—might be trapped there.

While cutting coveted travertine into tiles, a saw operator in Turkey sliced through a fossilized skull and gave the pieces to his supervisor. The fragments from the 500,000-year-old rock sat on a shelf behind the supervisor’s desk until a local geologist visiting the fossil-rich site claimed them.

“The workers didn’t know what it was,” says John Kappelman of the University of Texas at Austin, who studied the fossil. “The first saw cut took off a bit of the top of the [skull] and the second saw cut went through the middle of the eye orbit.”

The partial skull is the first H. erectus fossil found in Turkey, Kappelman and colleagues report online and in an upcoming American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

A wildly successful species that predated modern humans, H. erectus walked out of Africa all the way to China, Indonesia, and the Republic of Georgia starting about 2 million years ago, other fossils show. Whether the tall tool users ever arrived in Europe remains controversial, but the new find suggests they at least got close.

Kappelman says the skull’s heavy brow ridge and sharply sloped forehead mark it as H. erectus.

Moreover, he says the inside of the skull displays telltale signs of tuberculosis, which in rare cases infects the lining of the brain. If confirmed, the find would push back the origin of the disease in hominins—the anthropological term describing human and near-human predecessors—back hundreds of thousands of years.

Until now, the oldest direct evidence of tuberculosis came from a 5,400-year-old Egyptian mummy. In 2005, genetic analysis of several strains suggested the disease originated about 3 million years ago in East Africa, the cradle of early human evolution.

The Turkish travertine traveler physically buttresses the claims of an early origin of the disease, Kappelman says.

When Kappelman initially examined the fossil, he missed the signs of tuberculosis—a stippling of tiny pits around the eye orbit. But when he showed the fossil to paleopathologist Michael Schultz of the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany, Schultz recognized the pattern.  http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.blogspot.com

It matched what Schultz had seen in the skull of a 19th-century Austrian man who died from tuberculosis of the meninges, the membranes sheathing the brain. When the disease invades this covering, its characteristic tubercles, or grains, press tiny pits into the front of the skull, near the eyes.  http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.blogspot.com

“The imagery of that [Austrian] case is an exact match for what we have,” says Kappelman.

The diagnosis arrives millennia too late for the adult male H. erectus, but it’s just in time to set off a scientific controversy.

Two other paleopathologists, Pia Bennike of the University of Copenhagen and George Armelagos of Emory University in Atlanta, are skeptical of the claim. They want to see more of the ancient individual—such as his spine—to confirm that he indeed carried tuberculosis.

Kappelman hopes to find more of the early man in the quarry’s scrap heap. He might make a few trips to Home Depot too. “Back in the tile section, they have travertine from Turkey,” he says. “Honestly, it’s a case where the rest of this thing might be in somebody’s kitchen.”

substance

Science News for Kids: Three scientists travel to Antarctica to explore a secret world hidden beneath the ice.  http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com

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The snowmobile bucks like a mechanical bull as it bounces over a mound of ice. I squeeze the throttle and zoom forward, trying to catch the two snowmobiles in front of me. My fingers are numb with cold, despite the puffy black Darth Vader-style gloves I’m wearing.

It’s –12º Celsius — a beautiful summer afternoon in Antarctica, just 380 miles from the South Pole. We’re in the middle of a huge blanket of ice, called the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. This ice sheet is half a mile thick and covers an area four times the size of Texas.  http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com  The sun glares off the ice, and through my goggles the ice takes on a silvery-gray sheen.

Several days ago a tiny airplane landed on skis and dropped us off with a pile of boxes and bags. We’re camping in tents on the ice for three weeks. “It’s exciting to be here, 250 miles away from the nearest people,” said Slawek Tulaczyk, the guy who brought us here. “Where else on planet Earth can you do that anymore?”

Tulaczyk’s name looks like scrambled alphabet soup, but it’s easy to say: Slovick Too-LA-chick. He’s a scientist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he has come here to study a lake.

Maybe that sounds strange, looking for a lake in Antarctica. Scientists often call this place a polar desert, because despite its thick layer of ice, Antarctica is the driest of the continents, with very little new snow (or water in any form) falling each year. So dry is Antarctica that many of its glaciers actually evaporate rather than melt. But scientists are starting to realize that another world lies hidden beneath Antarctica’s ice: rivers, lakes, mountains and even volcanoes that human eyes have never seen.

Tulaczyk, two other people and I are far from camp, zooming on snowmobiles toward one of those hidden lakes. It’s called Lake Whillans, and was discovered only a few months before our trip last summer. It was found by remote measurements taken from a satellite orbiting the Earth. We are the first humans ever to visit it.

Guided by satellites

Scientists think that lakes under the ice might act like giant slippery banana peels — helping the ice slide more quickly over Antarctica’s bumpy bedrock toward the ocean, where it breaks into icebergs. It’s a lovely theory, but no one knows if it’s true. In fact, there are many basic things that we don’t understand about how glaciers work. But it’s important to find out because only if we understand the basic rules that Antarctica’s ice sheets live by can we predict what will happen to them as the climate warms.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains 700,000 cubic miles of ice — enough to fill hundreds upon hundreds of Grand Canyons. And if that ice melted, it could raise sea levels by 15 feet.  http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com  That’s high enough to put much of Florida and the Netherlands under water. Understanding glaciers is a high-stakes game, and that’s why Tulaczyk has brought us all the way to the bottom of the world to test whether lakes really do act like banana peels under the ice.

We’ve been riding toward Lake Whillans for six hours now. The scenery hasn’t changed a bit: It’s still big, flat and white in every direction as far as you can see.

Without any landmarks to steer your snowmobile by, you could easily get lost forever in a place like this. The only thing that keeps us on track is a walkie-talkie–sized gadget, called a GPS, mounted on the dashboard of each snowmobile. GPS is short for Global Positioning System. It communicates by radio with satellites orbiting Earth. It tells us exactly where on the map we are, give or take 30 feet. An arrow on the screen points the way to Lake Whillans. I just follow that arrow and hope the batteries don’t run out.

Uphill squirts

Suddenly, Tulaczyk raises his hand for us to stop and announces, “Here we are!”

“You mean we’re on the lake?” I ask, glancing around at the flat snow.

Tulaczyk (left) and Pettersson (right) with the ice-penetrating radar.Douglas Fox

“We’ve been on the lake for the last eight kilometers,” he says.

Of course. The lake is buried under ice, two Empire State Buildings below our feet. But I’m still a tiny bit disappointed not to see any sign of it.

“The surface of the ice is boring,” says Tulaczyk. “That’s why I like to think about what’s below.”

The world half a mile below our feet is pretty weird. We all know that water runs downhill. It always does — right? But under Antarctica’s ice, water can sometimes run uphill.

Under the right conditions, a whole river can spurt from one lake uphill to another lake. That’s because the ice weighs so much that it presses down on the water with thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch. That pressure is sometimes strong enough to force the water to squirt uphill.

I help Tulaczyk and his graduate student, a 28-year-old named Nadine Quintana-Krupinsky, loosen the ropes on a sled that we towed here. We unload boxes and tools. Quintana-Krupinsky pounds a pole into the ice. Tulaczyk opens a plastic case and fiddles with some wires inside.

The thing in that plastic case will help Tulaczyk spy on this lake, through the half mile of ice covering it, for the next two years.

Tulaczyk installs “Cookie” — our first GPS station — to track movement of the ice on top of Lake Whillans for the next two years.Douglas Fox

The case contains a GPS that’s way more accurate than the ones on our snowmobiles. It can feel the ice move by as little as half an inch. The GPS will track the ice as it slips toward the ocean. Previous satellite measurements have revealed that the ice here moves about four feet per day. But those satellite measurements are scattered: They were only taken a few days per year, and only on some years.

What’s special about Tulaczyk’s project is that his GPS boxes will take continuous measurements for two years. And unlike satellites, the GPS boxes won’t just measure forward movement. They will simultaneously track the ice rising and falling, which it does because it’s floating on top of Lake Whillans, like an ice cube floats in a glass of water. If more water flows into the lake, the ice is pushed up. And if water spills out of the lake, the ice drops.

Cookie and chatterbox

Satellites have watched from space as the ice floating on Lake Whillans rises and drops by 10 or 15 feet. In fact, this is how Lake Whillans was first discovered a few months before our trip.

A satellite called ICESat that uses a laser to measure the height of the ice found that one section of ice (maybe 10 miles across) was constantly rising and falling. Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, thought there was a lake hidden beneath the ice there. She and Benjamin Smith, of the University of Washington in Seattle, have used this way to find other lakes, too. “We’ve found about 120 lakes so far,” said Fricker on the phone, back in California.

Unfortunately, ICESat only measures the lakes 66 days per year. So now that the lakes have been spotted from afar, the next step is to spy on them more closely — which is why we’re braving the cold.

Over the next two years, Tulaczyk’s GPS will measure forward movement and up and down movement of the ice at the same time — something satellites can’t do. This will show whether movement of water into or out of Lake Whillans causes the ice to slide more quickly. It’s an important step toward understanding how water gushing through those rivers and lakes controls the movement of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

At a remote air base on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the tiny Twin Otter plane refuels before ferrying the team back to McMurdo Station for the trip home.Douglas Fox

Tulaczyk and Quintana-Krupinsky take two hours to set up the GPS station. We’ve named it Cookie, after one of Tulaczyk’s young daughters. (Another GPS station that we’ll install in a few days is nicknamed Chatterbox, after Tulaczyk’s other daughter.) Once we leave Cookie behind, it must survive two winters on the ice. The sun will not shine for four months each winter, and the temperature will drop to –60 ºC. That kind of cold causes batteries to die and electronic gadgets to go on the fritz. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com  To deal with it, Cookie the GPS has four 70-pound batteries, plus a solar power collector and wind generator.

As Tulaczyk and Quintana-Krupinsky tighten the last screws, a cold breeze spins the propeller on Cookie’s wind generator.

By the time we rumble back into camp on our snowmobiles, our jackets and face masks are covered in frost. It is 1:30 a.m. as we unload our snowmobiles. The sun is shining bright. In Antarctica during summer, the sun shines 24 hours per day.

Peering through the ice

We ride snowmobiles up to 10 hours per day as we visit Lake Whillans and several other lakes in the area.

On some days I work with the fourth person in our group, Rickard Pettersson, a glaciologist from Uppsala University in Sweden. He tows me behind the snowmobile on a sled that also holds a rugged black box — an ice-penetrating radar. “It will transmit a 1,000-volt pulse, 1,000 times per second, transmitting radio waves down into the ice,” he says as we get ready to go. The box will listen as those radio waves echo off the bed of the ice.

For two hours, Pettersson expertly guides the sled over every single ice bump in our path. A couple of them nearly send me tumbling. I hold on, and stare into a small computer screen as it bounces up and down.

A jagged line meanders across the screen. That line shows the ups and downs of the landscape half a mile below, traced by radar.

Some of these radar traces reveal low spots in the ground under the ice. They might be rivers connecting one lake to another, Tulaczyk says one night at dinner. He and Quintana-Krupinsky install GPS stations above some of these spots, in hopes of catching the ice rising and falling as water spurts through the rivers.

Within two years, the GPS stations that Tulaczyk leaves behind will hopefully collect enough information for him to start to understand how water controls the ice’s slide toward the ocean.

But the lakes hold other mysteries, too: Some people believe that unknown forms of life lurk in the dark waters beneath Antarctica’s ice. Scientists hope that studying whatever dwells in the lakes — whether single-cell bacteria or something more complex — will help them understand what kinds of life might survive in other worlds. On the top of that list of other worlds is Jupiter’s moon Europa, where an ocean of liquid water may slosh beneath a crust of ice many miles thick.

Tulaczyk hopes to drill through Antarctica’s ice to Lake Whillans in a few years and sample the water to find out for sure what kind of life dwells there. “It’s fascinating,” he says, “to think that there’s a whole continent underneath, imprisoned by a layer of ice.”

Power words

Radar A system that is used to locate distant objects and find their position, speed, and direction. Devices that use radar send out radio waves in all directions and receive the waves back after they bounce off an object.

Glacier A large mass of ice flowing very slowly through a valley or spreading outward from a central point.

Glaciologist A person who studies glaciers.

Crevasse A fracture in a glacier.

Subglacial lake A lake under a glacier, typically an ice cap or ice sheet.  http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com

GPS (global positioning system) A system that shows the exact position of objects on Earth by displaying their latitude and longitude on a computer screen. The instruments in the GPS get their information by exchanging signals with satellites in orbit around the Earth.

Satellite An object that moves around a larger object in outer space or an object that is made by people and sent into outer space to move around the Earth or another planet or the sun.

Evaporate When a liquid changes into a vapor because the liquid is below its boiling point.

Bacteria Living things that are made up of single cells, each without a cell nucleus. Bacteria are found in all of the Earth’s environments and usually live off other organisms.

Cell The most basic part of a living thing, made up of a jelly-like substance called cytoplasm that is enclosed by a thin membrane.

Jupiter The planet that is fifth in distance from the sun.

Europa The sixth moon of the planet Jupiter.

clock

Timing is everything, especially when it comes to basic biological functions such as eating, sleeping and detoxifying. Scientists have known for ages that metabolism is tied to the body’s daily rhythms, but have not known how.  http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Now, two groups of researchers report in the July 25 Cell the discovery of a molecule that links metabolism to the circadian clock.  http://louis-j-sheehan.biz The missing link turns out to be a protein called sirtuin 1 or SIRT1, which is also a key regulator of aging.

Uncovering the mechanism that links metabolism and circadian rhythms could lead to drugs to combat obesity, aging and jetlag and help shift workers reset their body clocks.

Already, SIRT1 is the target of resveratrol, a molecule found in red wine and other foods and that mimics the health benefits of a nutritious, calorie-restricted diet.

“It’s an interesting connection,” says Herman Wijnen, a circadian geneticist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who was not involved in the new studies. “It helps us understand one important aspect of how clocks and metabolism relate to each other.”

Body rhythms are governed by molecular clocks that take about a day to complete a full cycle, hence the name circadian clock. The clocks are composed of proteins whose concentrations or levels of activity rise and fall like the tide.

Most animals have a main pacemaker centered in the brain. Triggered by light, this clock can reset within a couple days.

But almost every cell in the body contains a clock, and these clocks are reset by the introduction of food, by a change in body temperature or through other metabolic signals.

All the cellular clocks need to synchronize with the main clock in the head, says Ueli Schibler of the University of Geneva in Switzerland. But the cellular clocks take longer to reset, a week or more. This mismatch between the cellular clocks and the brain clock is one reason for jetlag.

That’s probably as it should be, Schibler says. “Imagine if you stand up in the middle of the night and eat a sandwich. You don’t want your clock reset just because of one sandwich.”

In 2006, researchers led by Paolo Sassone-Corsi, a molecular biologist at the University of California Irvine, reported that a protein named CLOCK is a component in cellular clocks. It drums out the beat of circadian rhythm by chemically modifying a histone protein, which packages DNA. CLOCK transfers an organic molecule called acetyl to a histone protein.  http://louis-j-sheehan.biz  That action causes DNA to open up, helping to turn on the genes contained within the DNA.

Such chemical alterations of DNA and its associated proteins are called epigenetic modifications. They help control development, behavior and metabolic processes in the body.

In order for epigenetic modifications to be most effective they should be reversible, so cells can switch genes off and back on again when needed, such as when a person eats a sandwich and needs to make hormones to tell the brain that the stomach is full or to deal with the sudden influx of energy.

No one knew what CLOCK’s counterpoint — a protein that would remove the acetyl and turn genes off — might be. But Sassone-Corsi and his colleagues suspected that sirtuins might be involved because the proteins respond to a cell’s energy state by plucking acetyl groups from histones and other proteins. The team hypothesized that sirtuins might also interact with cellular clocks.

In one of the new studies, Sassone-Corsi’s group shows that SIRT1 acts as tick to CLOCK’s tock, removing an acetyl group from histones and also from CLOCK’s partner BMAL1.  http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Schibler and colleagues report similar results in the same issue of Cell, demonstrating that SIRT1 levels rise and fall throughout the day, and that SIRT1, CLOCK and BMAL1 interact in a circadian manner. Schibler’s group also found that SIRT1 is involved in removing acetyl groups from another clock component, a protein called PER2. That action leads to degradation of PER2, driving the clock.

Both groups found that SIRT1 is active in liver clocks. The liver performs many of its functions, such as detoxifying harmful substances and processing fat and cholesterol, on a schedule.

Tying the liver’s clock to metabolic activity makes sense, says Wijnen, and SIRT1’s connection to the clock may be important for timing the organ’s functions. Breakdowns in the body’s clocks could put them out of sync with the brain’s timer, possibly leading to disease.

Metabolic links to gene activity and circadian rhythms may help explain some mysteries of obesity and aging, but the researchers say they still don’t know exactly how SIRT1 keeps clocks ticking.

“The clock really dominates all of our physiology, so it’s not surprising to find these molecules involved in metabolism, aging and obesity” linked to the circadian rhythms, says Sassone-Corsi. “But it is important to find the molecular basis of this mechanism.”

korshunova

The daughter that Valentina Korshunova knew would never have taken her own life.

“She was so full of life; she loved life,” Mrs. Korshunova, 48, said tearfully, speaking through a translator on Thursday at a funeral home in Greenwich Village where her daughter’s wake was held. “She was very strong, even though she looked so fragile. She had stamina, inner strength, and always acted so rationally, so reasonably.”

It had been five days since the body of her daughter, Ruslana Korshunova, a 20-year-old model, had been found in Lower Manhattan, nine stories beneath her apartment. The police said she had jumped. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Upon hearing the news, Mrs. Korshunova flew immediately from her native city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, traveling alone because her son, Ruslan, 28, could not get a visa in time.

By the time Mrs. Korshunova’s plane touched down, speculation was raging about what might have caused her daughter to jump. The Daily News reported accounts of Ms. Korshunova’s lovelorn online musings, which hinted at desperation and a sense of being lost.

But Mrs. Korshunova, wearing black and shrouded in a mourning veil, insisted that her daughter was too excited about her future and too full of life to ever have considered ending it. Instead she believed, after speaking to the police, that the facts in the case did not add up and that her daughter, always adventurous, might have been making her way through construction netting to a neighboring balcony and accidentally slipped. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

The pair had always been close. Mrs. Korshunova washed her daughter’s Rapunzel-like hair, which brushed her upper thighs, until Ms. Korshunova was 16. They kept in nearly constant touch after Ms. Korshunova left Kazakhstan, at 16, to model in Moscow, then Paris and finally New York, a city she adored. They spoke often.

Before Ms. Korshunova began modeling, she was enrolled in a school for gifted children, her mother said, earning top marks and mastering Kazakh and German. She was known for her kindness, and for being a perfectionist: even after landing a major fashion campaign, she would set her sights on the next big job.

Mrs. Korshunova, who raised both of her children alone after their father died in 1992, last saw her daughter in May, when she was home to renew her passport. Ms. Korshunova was deliberating about whether to go to college, possibly in Moscow or New York, her mother said, and talked about one day becoming a mother.

Mrs. Korshunova said she planned to bury her daughter in Moscow, also a city she loved. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

“She was the closest person in the world to me, the most trusted; she would never let me down,” Mrs. Korshunova said. “I was always proud of her. And I’m proud of her today.”

mongolia

Armed soldiers enforced martial law on the streets of Mongolia’s capital on Wednesday, a day after five people were killed as hundreds angered by election results rioted, Mongolian state news media reported.

President Nambaryn Enkhbayar responded to the unrest by declaring a national state of emergency late Tuesday. http://www.bebo.com/LouisS20

Mongolia’s national news agency, Montsame, said 710 people had been detained after groups of protesters, alleging fraud in last weekend’s parliamentary elections, clashed with the police in the capital, Ulan Bator. Preliminary results of the elections gave a parliamentary majority to the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, the successor to the country’s Communist Party, which dominated the nation when it was a puppet of the Soviet Union.

The opposition Democratic Party rejected the election results but disavowed the violence, Reuters reported.

Both political parties held closed meetings on Tuesday, and Parliament was planning to hold a special session to address the crisis, the national news agency reported. “At this moment, the situation in the capital city is relatively normal,” the Ulan Bator police chief, Amarbold, said on state television, according to Reuters. “It is very peaceful compared to yesterday, but the troops need to stay on the street.”

Landlocked between Russia and China, Mongolia is a remote and hauntingly beautiful country embraced by the Bush administration both for its strategic value and its emergence as a new democracy since the fall of the Soviet Union. The country is also rich in mineral resources and has seen its gross national product soar as foreign investment in mining has hit record highs. At the same time, Mongolia is a country where many people herd animals in the grasslands and enjoy little better than a subsistence livelihood.

The UB Post, an English-language newspaper in Ulan Bator, reported that 74 percent of the country’s 1.6 million eligible voters cast ballots in Sunday’s races. It also reported that the People’s Revolutionary Party had won at least half of the 76 legislative seats even as votes were still being counted. “Based on information we got through our primary units, we have won all mandates in nine provinces,” Yo Otgonbayar, secretary general of the party, said at a news conference in Ulan Bator. http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205

A 16-member team of international election observers confirmed the results of the race. Leaders of the Democratic Party disagreed with the preliminary results but also wanted to meet with the People’s Revolutionary Party to defuse the crisis.

“From the Sea of Japan to the eastern border of Europe, we are the only functioning democracy, and we have a duty to save it,” the Democratic Party leader, Tsakhiagyn Elbegdorj, told Reuters.

gypsy

In a major step toward controlling the spread of tree-destroying gypsy moths, China has agreed to allow scientists to inspect forests near shipping ports to gauge the risk of the pests there hitching rides on ships to the U.S.http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com

View Gypsy Moth Slide Show

In exchange, the U.S. agreed to share its expertise on exterminating other invasive bugs, such as fire ants. Officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) say the move could help prevent the international transport of a faster-spreading and particularly destructive Asian gypsy moth variety.http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com

The deal with China is the fourth the U.S. has cut in an attempt to get a handle on the problem; it has more extensive agreements with Russia, Japan, and South Korea. Mike Simon, an offshore pest mitigation expert with the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), says scientists in China are set to begin trapping and studying gypsy moths this month.

The North American gypsy moth is blamed for defoliating trees in national forests and residential areas in at least 20 states as well as across southeastern Canada. U.S. Forest Service officials say that aerial pesticide spraying of hundreds of thousands of acres each summer has slowed but not stopped the moths. They add that they are trying to keep a lid on the native population as well as prevent the more virulent Asian variety from reaching U.S. soil.

The Asian moth made two minor incursions into U.S. ports during the 1990s, but both times were quickly eradicated. Over the past year, inspectors have again found Asian egg masses on foreign ships arriving in U.S. ports. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents are authorized by law to bar entry to foreign vessels carrying invasive bugs or their eggs and to order them offshore to be scrubbed of the pests before unloading cargo. But Simon says it would be more effective to verify that no eggs, caterpillars or adult moths are aboard ships before they set sail from overseas ports.

The main concern: that the virulent strain of Asian gypsy moth, if introduced to the U.S., could exacerbate damage to North American forests.

“The west coast states are basically terrified; it would be devastating to their timber resources, both for industry and recreation,” Simon says. That’s because, other than a few isolated and quickly squashed outbreaks, the U.S. west coast is generally free of gypsy moths. Without competition from local populations, any Asians that arrived there could thrive.

At least 10,000 cargo containers and 100 ships arrive daily in the Port of Los Angeles, most of them from Asia, which poses a real risk, he adds.

The North American strain, Lymantria dispar, now stretches from Canada into North Carolina, Minnesota and Wisconsin, with pockets of infestation beyond its contiguous range. It is currently expanding its  reach by about five miles (eight kilometers) a year, according to ecologist Patrick Tobin, head of the U.S. Forest Service’s Slow the Spread, a program to manage the gypsy moth.

As its name suggests, the program, which was first funded by Congress in 2000, is trying to decelerate the expansion of the gypsy moth’s range. It monitors 10 states along the region’s leading edge for outbreaks and decides which ones to combat with insecticides. It also educates truckers, plant nurseries, the timber industry, motorists and recreational forest users about ways to avoid transporting the pest. Human movement helps the gypsy moth move faster than it does on its own.

At the peak of its migration, in the 1980s the gypsy moth was spreading southward and westward across the U.S. by about 13 miles (20 kilometers) per year. But dead trees aren’t the sole concern: Gypsy moths’ hair and scales contain histamines, which can cause allergic reactions in humans sensitive to them.

As it turns out, L. dispar females cannot fly (because they lack the muscle strength and wing length of their Asian cousins); they advance when larvae suspended on strands of silk are carried by the wind—or even farther and faster by cars, trains and trucks. The adult males, meantime, are long-distance flyers that establish new colonies by sniffing out the pheromones of adult females that grew from transported larvae.

The adult female’s inability to fly has helped limit the spread of gypsy moths across North America. An L. dispar egg also requires a long winter chill and the hatched caterpillars generally eat the foliage of oak, poplar, and birch trees. Their Asian cousins can hatch more quickly and have a more eclectic diet that also includes Douglas fir, red maple, pine and cottonwood, says entomologist Melody Keena, a Forest Service supervisory researcher. The introduction of the Asian variety, should it mate with the local population and pass along those traits, could accelerate the spread and endanger additional tree species, she adds.

In experiments that began more than a decade ago (after minor incursions of flying strains were quickly eradicated in the southern and western U.S.), Keena and her group demonstrated for the first time that, when Asian and North American gypsy moths mate, the offspring female develop the ability to fly. That could help them advance into forests that are currently free of infestation.

Gypsy moths are believed to have been introduced into North America in 1869 after an amateur entomologist brought larvae back with him from Europe, most likely from France. He accidentally allowed some larvae, presumed to have been L. dispar, to escape from his backyard outside Boston, where he was keeping and studying his new colony. From there, it began inching across the continent.

Now, it appears Asian strains are gradually moving across Europe and interbreeding with L. dispar there. Resulting hybrid females in Croatia, Portugal, France and Greece still cannot fly, but major populations in Lithuania, Poland and Germany can, according to Keena.

Although Keena and other scientists say that suggests a scenario in which L. dispar interbreeding with Asians might produce flying offspring that could accelerate the spread, Tobin notes that their dispersal could be limited by still larger populations of native L. dispar.

If there were to be an influx of Asians, the areas most affected would likely be those where the L. dispar population is scarce—west and south of the Virginia–North Carolina border, eastern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota—and especially in the west where it’s nonexistent, Tobin says. In those places, where the Asian traits are less likely to be diluted by mixing with L. dispar, the Asians could dominate.

Vic Mastro, director of the APHIS research lab in Otis, Mass., says agriculture officials have set around 350,000 traps in the western part of the country. But there’s a hitch: Baited with pheromone, they only attract males and leave scientists guessing whether any flying females are in the area. So the traps alone are not enough, and it’s more crucial to keep the Asian variety out altogether by inspecting ships in ports before they enter the U.S., Mastro says.

“Right now, if we find egg mass on a ship, we assume the worst,” he says.

The current agreement calls for scientists to set similar traps in forests around Chinese ports. The traps could confirm large populations, providing the evidence U.S. officials need to back up arguments for cargo inspections.

Past studies have shown that gypsy moths are attracted to light; they swarm from infested forests to the bright lights of nearby port cities and docked ships. Once an infested ship docks in the U.S., its infested containers can also disperse quickly.

This summer, the U.S. is seeing massive gypsy moth outbreaks in Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey. But nowhere is the gypsy moth’s attraction to light more apparent than in far eastern Russia, which is in the second year of its worst outbreak since the early 1990s, says Steven Munson, the U.S. Forest Service’s team leader for the overseas monitoring program. He notes that larval caterpillars have been chewing through the vast forests around two major shipping ports—Vostochnyy and Nakhodka—near the Chinese and North Korean borders. U.S. scientists headed there last week to help check traps and search for egg masses, he says.

A naturally occurring virus helps structure gypsy moth infestations into cycles: An outbreak may last three years before the virus sends a population into dormancy for more than 10 years, Munson says. By mid-August, when the female Russian moths typically emerge from pupae and start laying eggs, researchers should know whether to step up ship inspections there or whether the virus is causing a new die-off.

blogging

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Flaherty, who studies conditions such as hypergraphia (an uncontrollable urge to write) and writer’s block, also looks to disease models to explain the drive behind this mode of communication. For example, people with mania often talk too much. “We believe something in the brain’s limbic system is boosting their desire to communicate,” Flaherty explains. Located mainly in the midbrain, the limbic system controls our drives, whether they are related to food, sex, appetite, or problem solving. “You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively,” Flaherty notes. Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.

The frontal and temporal lobes, which govern speech—no dedicated writing center is hardwired in the brain—may also figure in. For example, lesions in Wernicke’s area, located in the left temporal lobe, result in excessive speech and loss of language comprehension. People with Wernicke’s aphasia speak in gibberish and often write constantly. In light of these traits, Flaherty speculates that some activity in this area could foster the urge to blog.

Scientists’ understanding about the neurobiology underlying therapeutic writing must remain speculative for now. Attempts to image the brain before and after writing have yielded minimal information because the active regions are located so deep inside. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown that the brain lights up differently before, during and after writing, notes James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. But Pennebaker and others remain skeptical about the value of such images because they are hard to duplicate and quantify.

Most likely, writing activates a cluster of neurological pathways, and several researchers are committed to uncovering them. http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205At the University of Arizona, psychologist and neuroscientist Richard Lane hopes to make brain-imaging techniques more relevant by using those techniques to study the neuroanatomy of emotions and their expressions. Nancy Morgan, lead author of the Oncologist study, is looking to conduct larger community-based and clinical trials of expressive writing. And Pennebaker is continuing to investigate the link between expressive writing and biological changes, such as improved sleep, that are integral to health. “I think the sleep angle is one of the more promising ones,” he says.

Whatever the underlying causes may be, people coping with cancer diagnoses and other serious conditions are increasingly seeking—and finding—solace in the blogosphere. “Blogging undoubtedly affords similar benefits” to expressive writing, says Morgan, who wants to incorporate writing programs into supportive care for cancer patients.http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205

Some hospitals have started hosting patient-authored blogs on their Web sites as clinicians begin to recognize the therapeutic value. Unlike a bedside journal, blogging offers the added benefit of receptive readers in similar situations, Morgan explains: “Individuals are connecting to one another and witnessing each other’s expressions—the basis for forming a community.”