Scientists discover the secret of whales and dolphins’ astonishing diving power

While the strongest human swimmers on Earth cannot hold their breath underwater for more than a few minutes, marine mammals such as dolphins and whales can somehow stay comfortably submerged for up to an hour. Marine biologists have long been stumped over how these mammals do it. But a new study may have found the answer: It’s in their blood.

According to the study, which was published in Science and involved six researchers from the universities of Liverpool, Winnipeg, and Alaska, marine mammal species’ blood has a protein called hemoglobin that is a highly effective at storing oxygen.
Human blood has myoglobin, too, but only in trace amounts most of the time. Levels of it spike when an injury, seizure, or heart attack occurs. All mammals have it, in fact. It’s what gives meat its red hue. The marine mammals not only have more of it—so much so that their muscle tissue appears almost black—but theirs has special “non-stick” properties that enable it to convey massive amounts of oxygen into their blood without clogging any blood vessels. The researchers found this distinctively non-stick myoglobin in the blood of whales, seals, dolphins, and some semi-aquatic mammals, too, such as beavers, muskrats, and water shrews.
Proteins in any mammal’s blood stream tend to start clumping together when there are enough of them running through the same network of blood vessels. The unique non-stickiness of the marine mammals’ hemoglobin comes from a positive charge that runs throughout its molecules, according to the study.
One of the researchers, University of Liverpool biologist Michael Berenbrink, likens it to positively charged magnets—their identical forces repel each other. This is a critically important adaptation, because it makes it possible for the marine mammals’ hemoglobin needed to work at high enough concentrations to keep them oxygenated underwater for long periods, and to do so without causing deadly blockages in their blood flow.
The Evolution Story 
These new findings on hemoglobin help researchers make much more sense of the path of evolution that land-based mammals had to have begun to undertake many millions of years ago to transition back into the water, according to Berenbrink. He and his colleagues have retraced the physiological developments as they appear in the fossils of whales’ earliest prehistoric ancestors through to the present.
In series of tests led by researcher Scott Mirceta, also of the University of Liverpool, the team scanned fossils covering a full 200 million years of evolutionary history. They topped off their evolutionary assessment with extractions of myoglobin from present-day living mammals, including not only seafaring mammals like the sperm whale, but also the semi-aquatic otter and the purely land-faring cow.
According to Berenbrink, the researchers now have enough data to estimate the diving times of the earliest fossilized proto-whale species. They have also compiled the first evidence of a common ancestor of modern-day sea cows, hyraxes, and elephants. This hypothetical creature would have lived in the waters off the coast of present-day Africa about 65 million years ago. No definitive fossil has been found for this hypothetical ancestor, though, so the researchers will have some more digging to do. But they credit the placing of myglobin development on the evolutionary map as being a critical step, to this and maybe more discoveries about sea mammals evolutionary past.
Marine mammals underwent other key adaptations besides the changes in their myoglobin. Michael Fedak, a sea-mammal researcher at the University of St. Andrews—and who was not involved in the study—told BBC that myglobin was just a piece of the story, but it is “an important” one all the same.
Human Uses 
The researchers foresee some potential innovations in human medicine arising from these hemoglobin findings, too. Human clinicians who learn to replicate some of the chemistry could develop oxygen-carrying fluids that they could inject into critically injured patients and keep their tissues alive when blood transfusions are not possible.
Although ER patients often need blood transfusions, many doctors would be glad to have alternatives. Not only is the donor blood potentially costly and sometimes in short supply, but it also carries potential risks of adverse reactions, in the form of fevers or unpleasant allergic symptoms resulting from the patient’s body attacking the transfused blood. Sometimes the adverse reactions are deadly: Studies suggest that as many as 25% of transfusion patients suffer heart attacks within a month of their transfusions.
Many hospitals have been encouraging their physicians in recent years to limit blood transfusions only to cases in which they are absolutely necessary and to substitute lower-impact measures whenever possible.
Could whale blood proteins contribute to one new lower-impact solution? This is an areas for researchers to explore in years to come.
NEWS SOURCE:http://www.sciencerecorder.com

Climate talk shifts from curbing emissions to adapting

WASHINGTON — Efforts to curb global warming have quietly shifted as greenhouse gases inexorably rise.

The conversation is no longer solely about how to save the planet by cutting carbon emissions. It’s becoming more about how to save ourselves from the warming planet’s wild weather.

It was Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement last week of an ambitious plan to stave off New York City’s rising seas with flood gates, levees and more that brought this transition into full focus.

After years of losing the fight against rising global emissions of heat-trapping gases, governments around the world are emphasizing what a U.N. Foundation scientific report calls “managing the unavoidable.” 

It’s called adaptation and it’s about as sexy but as necessary as insurance, the experts say.

It’s also a message that once was taboo among climate activists such as former Vice President Al Gore. 

In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” Gore compared talk of adapting to climate change to laziness that would distract from necessary efforts.

But in his 2013 book “The Future,” Gore writes bluntly: “I was wrong.” He talks about how coping with rising seas and temperatures is just as important as trying to prevent global warming by cutting emissions.

Like Gore, governmental officials across the globe aren’t saying everyone should just give up on efforts to reduce pollution. They’re saying that as they work on curbing carbon, they also have to deal with a reality that’s already here.

In March, President Barack Obama’s science advisers sent him a list of recommendations on climate change. No. 1 on the list: “Focus on national preparedness for climate change.”

“Whether you believe climate change is real or not is beside the point,” New York’s Bloomberg said in announcing his $20 billion adaptation plans. “The bottom line is: We can’t run the risk.”

On Monday, more than three dozen other municipal officials from across the country will go public with a nationwide effort to make their cities more resilient to natural disasters and the effects of man-made global warming.

“It’s an insurance policy, which is investing in the future,” Mayor Kevin Johnson of Sacramento, Calif., who is chairing the mayors’ efforts, said in an interview Friday. “This is public safety. It’s the long-term hazards that could impact a community.”

Discussions about global warming are happening more often in mayors’ offices than in Congress. The Obama administration and local governments are coming up with thousands of eye-glazing pages of climate change adaptation plans and talking about zoning, elevation, water system infrastructure, and most of all, risk.

“They can sit up there and not make any policies or changes, but we know we have to,” Broward County, Fla., Mayor Kristin Jacobs said. “We know that we’re going to be that first line of defense.”

University of Michigan professor Rosina Bierbaum is a presidential science adviser who headed the adaptation section of the administration’s new National Climate Assessment. “It’s quite striking how much is going on at the municipal level,” Bierbaum said. “Communities have to operate in real time. Everybody is struggling with a climate that is no longer the climate of the past.”

Still, Bierbaum added, “Many of the other developed countries have gone way ahead of us in preparing for climate change. In many ways, the U.S. may be playing catch-up.”

Hurricanes, smaller storms and floods have been a harsh teacher for South Florida, Jacobs said.

“Each time you get walloped, you stop and scratch your head ... and learn from it and make change,” she said. “It helps if you’ve been walloped once or twice. I think it’s easier to take action when everybody sees” the effect of climate change and are willing to talk about being prepared.

What Bloomberg announced for New York is reasonable for a wealthy city with lots of people and lots of expensive property and infrastructure to protect, said S. Jeffress Williams, a University of Hawaii geophysicist who used to be the expert on sea level rise for the U.S. Geological Survey. But for other coasts in the United States and especially elsewhere in the poorer world, he said, “it’s not so easy to adapt.”

Rich nations have pledged, but not yet provided, $100 billion a year to help poor nations adapt to global warming and cut their emissions. But the $20 billion cost for New York City’s efforts shows the money won’t go far in helping poorer cities adapt, said Brandon Wu of the nonprofit ActionAid.

At U.N. climate talks in Germany this past week, Ronald Jumeau, a delegate from the Seychelles, said developing countries have noted the more than $50 billion in relief that U.S. states in the Northeast got for Superstorm Sandy.

That’s a large amount “for one storm in three states. At the same time, the Philippines was hit by its 15th storm in the same year,” Jumeau said. “It puts things in context.”

For poorer cities in the U.S., what makes sense is to buy out property owners, relocate homes and businesses and convert vulnerable sea shores to parks so that when storms hit “it’s not a big deal,” Williams said. “I think we’ll see more and more communities make that decision largely because of the cost involved in trying to adapt to what’s coming.”

Jacobs, the mayor from South Florida, says that either people will move “or they will rehab their homes so that they can have a higher elevation. Already, in the Keys, you see houses that are up on stilts. So is that where we’re going? At some point, we’re going to have to start looking at real changes.”

It’s not just rising seas. 

Sacramento has to deal with devastating droughts as well as the threat of flooding. It has a levee system so delicate that only New Orleans has it worse, said Johnson, the California capital’s mayor.

The temperature in Sacramento was 110 this past week. After previous heat waves, cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., have come up with cooling centers and green roofs that reduce the urban heat island affect.

Jacobs said cities from Miami to Virginia Beach, Va., are coping with mundane efforts: changes in zoning and building codes, raising the elevation of roads and runways, moving and hardening infrastructure. None of it grabs headlines, but “the sexiness is ... in the results,” she said.

For decades, scientists referenced average temperatures when they talked about global warming. Only recently have they focused intensely on extreme and costly weather, encouraged by the insurance industry which has suffered high losses, Bierbaum said.

In 2012, weather disasters — not necessarily all tied to climate change — caused $110 billion in damage to the United States, which was the second highest total since 1980, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last week.

Now officials are merging efforts by emergency managers to prepare for natural disasters with those of officials focused on climate change. That greatly lessens the political debate about human-caused global warming, said University of Colorado science and disaster policy professor Roger Pielke Jr. 

It also makes the issue more local than national or international.

“If you keep the discussion focused on impacts ... I think it’s pretty easy to get people from all political persuasions,” said Pielke, who often has clashed with environmentalists over global warming. “It’s insurance. The good news is that we know insurance is going to pay off again.”

Describing these measures as resiliency and changing the way people talk about it make it more palatable than calling it climate change, said Hadi Dowlatabadi, a University of British Columbia climate scientist.

“It’s called a no-regrets strategy,” Dowlatabadi said. “It’s all branding.”

All that, experts say, is essentially taking some of the heat out of the global warming debate.
NEWS SOURCE:http://www.timesargus.com

Cheetah's acceleration power key to their success

WASHINGTON (AP) — Everyone knows cheetahs are blazingly fast. Now new research illustrates how their acceleration and nimble zigzagging leave other animals in the dust and scientists in awe.Researchers first determined that cheetahs can run twice as fast as Olympian Usain Bolt on a straightaway. Then they measured the energy a cheetah muscle produces compared to body size and calculated the same for Bolt, the sprinter. They found the cheetah had four times the crucial kick power of the Olympian.

That power to rapidly accelerate — not just speed alone — is the key to the cheetah's hunting success, said study lead author, Alan Wilson. He's professor of locomotive biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London.

"Capturing prey seems to come down to maneuvering," he said. "It's all the zigzagging, ducking and diving."

Wilson and colleagues put specialized GPS tracking collars on five of these animals in Botswana, Africa.

They clocked cheetahs topping out at 58 mph — slightly less than the 65 mph measured for a cheetah once in 1965. Wilson said most hunts were done at more moderate speeds of 30 mph, but with amazing starts, stops and turns.

The way cheetahs pivoted and turned while sprinting was amazing, he said. A cheetah can bank at a 50-degree angle in a high-speed turn, while a motorcycle can do maybe 45 degrees, Wilson said.

"If you are trying to catch something, the faster you go, the harder it is to turn," he said.

David Carrier, a University of Utah biology professor who wasn't part of the study, said one of the amazing things about the research is that it focuses on an ability of cheetahs that many people overlook. They are too fixated on the sheer speed of this fastest animal on the planet, he said.

Almost as important, Carrier said, was the new tracking method — using existing technology in new ways.

"Technically this is a big step forward," he said. "These guys have completely changed the standard for how we monitor locomotive performance in the field."

NEWS SOURCE:http://www.idahopress.com

Evolution: Study Shows How Marine Mammals Hold Their Breath

Scientists have discovered the secret to how mammals store oxygen to ensure that they can access it in extreme conditions—like the sperm whale that holds its breath for up to 90 minutes.

The team of researchers studied myoglobin, an oxygen-storing protein found in mammals' muscles, and found that in certain species, the myoglobin feature 'non-stick' properties that allow the animal to store large amounts of oxygen into their muscles.

The process has long puzzled scientists, who pondered exactly why the sperm whale can survive for 90 minutes without surfacing for oxygen while dophins and some whales can only withstand 20 minutes without coming up for air.

"At high enough concentrations, [proteins] tend to stick together, so we tried to understand how seals and whales evolved higher and higher concentrations of this protein in their muscles without a loss of function," study co-author Dr Michael Berenbrink told BBC News. 

Extracting myoglobin from various different species on the spectrum, including a cow, otter, and sperm whale, the group examined the changes in myoglobin in deep-diving mammals through 200 million years of evolutionary history. What they discovered was that the greatest deep-sea divers had myoglobin that were positively charged.

"Our study suggests that the increased electrical charge of myoglobin in mammals that have high concentrations of this protein causes electro-repulsion, like similar poles of two magnets," study lead author Dr Scott Mircet said.

"This should prevent the proteins from sticking together and allow much higher concentrations of the oxygen-storing myoglobin in the muscles of these divers."

Berenbrink added that the discovery is particularly intriguing because it showed that the physiological change accompanied the transition mammals made from land to water.

"It also allows us to estimate the dive times of the ancient ancestors of whales," he explained.

"We can look the fossils and predict the dive times they had."

The team's findings were published in the journal Science.

NEWS SOURCE:http://www.designntrend.com

Black hole bonanza in 'next door' Andromeda galaxy

Twenty-six new black hole candidates have been discovered in the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy. According to the astronomers involved, these could be just the tip of the iceberg. Details of the find will be published in the 20 June issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The discoveries are the culmination of 13 years of observation. Researchers used Nasa's Chandra and the European Space Agency'sXMM-Newton satellites. Both record the X-ray light emitted by celestial objects.

Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe. They are regions of space in which the density of matter has become so great that the gravitational field is overwhelming. They will devour anything that strays too close. Once inside, nothing can escape back into space, not even light.

So, strictly speaking you can't see black holes. You have to infer their presence from X-rays given out as they rip nearby stars to pieces. Hence the reason astronomers refer to these as black hole candidates. Even so, it's big news.

Black holes were first discovered not in space but on the pages of a notepad in the German trenches of the first world war. Physicist Karl Schwarzschild was serving as an artillery officer on the Russian front in 1915. In his spare time, he was investigating Albert Einstein's controversial new theory of gravity: general relativity.

He found an equation that suggested regions of space and time could become like lobster pots, trapping anything that fell into them. The point of no return around these "black holes" was dubbed the event horizon.

Schwarzschild completed the work shortly before facing his own event horizon. He contracted a painful skin disease called pemphigus and was returned to Germany, where he died in May 1916.

It took astronomers decades to convince themselves that black holes existed in nature. Convincing proof came in the 1970s when Nasa launched the Uhuru X-ray satellite and discovered Cygnus X-1, the first black hole candidate.

It made such headlines at the time that prog-rockers Rush (naturally) wrote a two-part epic song spanning two albums (again naturally) about it.

Black holes are no mere curiosities; they are the keys to a deeper understanding of the universe. No theory of physics can yet say what is happening inside a black hole.

General relativity suggests that Schwarzschild's event horizon is an invisible boundary that can be crossed without consequence but never returned from. Recently, however, quantum mechanics make it look as though the event horizon could be a real boundary and that crossing it will result in destruction. This has been dubbed the firewall.

Both cannot be right. One must be wrong. Whichever one is right points us towards a greater understanding of gravity and how it behaves on small scales.

While these new black holes may not immediately help in the quest for a new theory of gravity, they are nevertheless extraordinary. The more black holes astronomers identify, the more they will be able to study them and learn their secrets.

NEWS SOURCE:http://www.guardian.co.uk

Shenzhou-10: Chinese capsule docks with space laboratory

A capsule carrying three Chinese astronauts has docked with the Tiangong-1 space laboratory.

The procedure came two days after the crew blasted off from Inner Mongolia on a Long March 2F rocket.

The team plans to spend just under two weeks at the orbiting module, in what will be China's longest manned space mission yet.

The Xinhua news agency reported that the automated docking occurred at 13:11 Beijing time (05:11 GMT).

A good seal was confirmed seven minutes later.

After pressure checks, Xinhua said, the astronauts - Nie Haisheng, Zhang Xiaoguang and Wang Yaping - opened the hatch and entered Tiangong at 16:17 Beijing time.

This is China's fifth manned space mission, designated Shenzhou-10, and is scheduled to last 15 days in total.

Twelve days will be spent aboard Tiangong. One of the highlights will see Wang - China's second woman in space - present a video lecture to students on the ground in Chinese schools.

She will conduct at least one of these classes, demonstrating how objects move in the microgravity environment of space.

The published plan is for the crew to attempt a manual docking during their stay.

This will involve getting back inside their Shenzhou capsule, unhooking from Tiangong and then flying around the lab to re-attach with Nie at the controls.

This manoeuvre should occur on 20 June. The crew is expected to leave for good on 25/26 June. They will land in Inner Mongolia the same day.

Tiangong-1 has been in orbit for more than 600 days and has been visited by Shenzhou-8, Shenzhou-9 and now Shenzhou-10. But the lab does not have the resources aboard to support any more astronaut stays.

On completion of the Shenzhou-10 mission, Tiangong will be ditched in the atmosphere to burn up over the Pacific Ocean, although Chinese officials have not said yet precisely when this will happen.

A replacement lab, Tiangong-2, is likely to go up in the next couple of years. It will be a more ambitious module, paving the way for the big space station China hopes to launch at the end of the decade.

NEWS SOURCE:http://www.bbc.co.uk

Study shows correlation between language and altitude

Spread throughout the animal kingdom, squawks, roars, chirps and many other unusual sounds fill the planet with life. In some way or another, all social animals communicate with each other instinctively. On the other hand, humans are the only species that communicate by organizational sounds, meanings and gestures on a rational basis.

There are a little less than 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world, and just recently, an anthropologist at the University of Miami may have found a correlation between altitude and how a language is spoken. Published in in the June 12 edition of PLOS ONE, associate professor of anthropology Caleb Everett found that while studying about 600 languages throughout the world, languages that include ejective consonants are mainly spoken at higher altitudes.
“Ejectives are produced by creating a pocket of air in the pharynx then compressing it.” Everett said. “Since air pressure decreases with altitude and it takes less effort to compress less dense air, I speculate that it’s easier to produce these sounds at high altitude.”
This specific type of language structure is a non-English phoneme, and is only found in about 20 percent of the regions around the world. With help from the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (a large database of structural language properties), Everett was able to coordinate the different language structures with geographical locations. According to the research, about 87 percent of the 600 languages studied that were found to contain ejective constants in their language were located within 500 km of high elevation points throughout the world. An area can be classified as a high elevation region if it exceeds 1500m above sea level.
“I was really surprised when I looked at the data and saw that it correlated so well,” Everett says. “It really does not rely very much on my interpretation, the evidence of a relationship between altitude and language is there.”
While Everett concluded that the lower air pressure made it easier to produce the burst of air effect that relates to ejective consonants, he did not find this to be the case in all regions. In fact, the only high-altitude region where he found ejective constants missing from the native language was in the Tibetan Plateau. He speculates that due to the extremely high elevation, the people of the region have developed distinct adaptation characteristics that do not include ejective consonants in their communication. The study also suggests that by reducing the amount of air that is exhaled from the lungs, this helps to decrease dehydration in higher altitudes.
As interesting as the language pattern is, Everett plans on extending his research—looking for other possible connections between language and geographic locations around the world.

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