NASA: Moon may have enough water for human base

A little more than a year after slamming two spacecraft into a crater on the moon, NASA scientists are reporting that they’ve found not only some water but possibly enough to sustain human explorers.

Last October, NASA scientists decided to look for water on the moon by actually sending two probes 230,000 miles to crash into the lunar surface—not once, but twice. The mission was designed to kick up what scientists believed is water ice hiding in the bottom of a permanently dark crater.

The ice is critical to any future manned missions to the moon since it would be a lot easier to turn ice into drinkable water than haul it all the way from Earth to the moon.

And that seems to be exactly what NASA has discovered. There is enough water ice on the lunar surface to sustain a human base there.

And on top of that, scientists also have found that there’s an abundance of hydrogen gas, ammonia and methane on the lunar surface, and that could be used to produce much-needed fuel there.

Computerworld

Texas’ Peyote Hunters Struggle to Find a Vanishing, Holy Crop

Mauro Morales picks his way through mesquite trees and prickly pear cacti. The 65-year-old cautiously steps around a thicket of tasajillo, or rattail cactus, just down the road from his small ranch near Rio Grande City. Tasajillo thorns stick you like a fish hook, he says. Then there’s the cola seca—the rattlesnake—another job hazard.

“We’re far enough from a hospital that you probably wouldn’t make it if you got bit,” he says in a quiet voice, as though a snake might take his words as an invitation to strike.

Morales has been wandering through the chaparral for half an hour, staring at the ground. He combs over small rocks with a stick. Finally, he spots a greenish knob, sprouting out of the ground under the tasajillo thicket.

“There’s some medicine, right there,” he says. It’s a lone peyote button, about an inch in diameter, way too small to harvest. It’ll be another five years before this peyote is mature. As he navigates the hostile flora, he points to three more small peyote plants, all of them too young to cut.

“I used to collect as much in a week as I now do in a month,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to the medicine.”

Dallas Observer via Dose Nation

Next plague likeliest to emerge from poor tropical countries

Scores of infectious diseases have emerged to threaten humans in the past decades as viruses leap the species barrier from wild animals and bacteria mutate into antibiotic-resistant strains, scientists reported on Wednesday.

Presenting the first-ever map of “hotspots” of new infectious diseases, they predict that the next pandemic is likeliest to come out of poor tropical countries, where burgeoning human populations come into contact with wildlife.

A three-year investigation led by four major institutions tracked 335 incidents since 1940 when a new infectious disease emerged.

The category includes HIV/AIDS, which has slain or infected more than 65 million people around the world, and outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and H5N1 bird flu, which have cost tens of billions of dollars to contain.

Yahoo via Posthuman Blues

Cruising the Amazon

Life is everywhere in the upper Amazon wilderness. Life that creeps, life that crawls, life that slithers, sprouts, burrows, scurries and slinks—and dies. The dank odors of alternating rot and genesis rise from the mulching forest floor. My Deet-fortified insect spray battles swarms of blood-mad mosquitoes to a draw. The air is fat with syrupy humidity, and I am sweating like an icicle in the sun.

Nature is on fast-forward here. Trees—palms, laurels, kapoks, mahoganies, bamboos, acacias, figs, balsas, cedars—jostle each other in the search for a share of the sunlight; they grow to enormous heights and spread their foliage like a green umbrella at the top. Lianas, tropical climbing plants, wind themselves like boa constrictors around the tree trunks and arch themselves in great loops as they, too, struggle upward for a glimpse of light. The trees become parasites, and giant orchids seed themselves in branches 60 feet from the ground. The general effect is of a an impenetrable fecund, living wall.

Amid this vast assortment of life, creatures use stunts and flim-flam to befuddle or repel predators, lure prey, seduce mates and gobble food. Caterpillars masquerade as snakes, plants imitate the smell of rotting meat to attract flies as pollinators, and trees rely on fish to distribute their seeds when the rivers flood.

It’s a jungle out here.

Chicago Tribune

Great apes endangered by human viruses

A new study published in the journal Current Biology by researchers of the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) and the Centre Suisse des Recherches Scientifiques (Ivory Coast) confirms the disease threat, finding the first direct evidence of virus transmission from humans to wild apes. The study also showed however that research and tourism projects strongly suppressed the poaching of chimpanzees. This protective effect outweighed the substantial chimpanzee mortality caused by human disease introduction.

EurekAlert!

Fuel Cell That Uses Bacteria To Generate Electricity

Researchers at the Biodesign Institute are using the tiniest organisms on the planet ‘bacteria’ as a viable option to make electricity. In a new study featured in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, lead author Andrew Kato Marcus and colleagues Cesar Torres and Bruce Rittmann have gained critical insights that may lead to commercialization of a promising microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology.

“We can use any kind of waste, such as sewage or pig manure, and the microbial fuel cell will generate electrical energy,” said Marcus, a Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate student and a member of the institute’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology. Unlike conventional fuel cells that rely on hydrogen gas as a fuel source, the microbial fuel cell can handle a variety of water-based organic fuels.

Science Daily

Scientists find cultural differences among chimpanzee colonies

Socially-learned cultural behaviour thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies, scientists at the University of Liverpool have found.

Historically, scientists believed that behavioural differences between colonies of chimpanzees were due to variations in genetics. A team at Liverpool, however, has now discovered that variations in behaviour are down to chimpanzees migrating to other colonies, proving that they build their ‘cultures’ in a similar way to humans.

Physorg

Scientists Use Sunlight to Make Fuel From CO2

Sandia researcher Rich Diver checks out the solar furnace which will be the initial source of concentrated solar heat for converting carbon dioxide to fuel. Eventually parabolic dishes will provide the thermal energy.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico have found a way of using sunlight to recycle carbon dioxide and produce fuels like methanol or gasoline.

The Sunlight to Petrol, or S2P, project essentially reverses the combustion process, recovering the building blocks of hydrocarbons. They can then be used to synthesize liquid fuels like methanol or gasoline. Researchers said the technology already works and could help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, although large-scale implementation could be a decade or more away.

Wired

‘Golden Bullet’ Shows Promise For Killing Common Parasite

Researchers in Australia report development of a new type of gold nanoparticle that destroys the parasite responsible for toxoplasmosis, a potentially serious disease acquired by handling the feces of infected cats or eating undercooked meat. Their so-called “golden bullet” could provide a safer, more effective alternative for treating the disease than conventional drug therapy, they say.

Science Daily

Clever Clover Forms Communication Networks

Recent research from Vidi researcher Josef Stuefer at the Radboud University Nijmegen reveals that plants have their own chat systems that they can use to warn each other.

Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form networks. Individual plants remain connected with each other for a certain period of time by means of runners. These connections enable the plants to share information with each other via internal channels. They are therefore very similar to computer networks. But what do plants want to chat to each other about?

cloverRecently Stuefer and his colleagues were the first to demonstrate that clover plants warn each other via the network links if enemies are nearby. If one of the plants is attacked by caterpillars, the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal. Once warned, the intact plants strengthen their chemical and mechanical resistance so that they are less attractive for advancing caterpillars.

Thanks to this early warning system, the plants can stay one step ahead of their attackers. Experimental research has revealed that this significantly limits the damage to the plants.

sciencedaily

Smithsonian Helps Lead Effort to ‘Barcode’ World’s Species

barcode tattooSmithsonian researchers are among the leaders in a worldwide effort to revolutionize the way scientists identify species in the laboratory and in the field with a technique called DNA barcoding. Similar to the barcode that identifies an item at the grocery store, a DNA barcode is used to identify and distinguish biological species.

This month, scientists are gathering in Taiwan for the Second International Barcode of Life Conference (Sept. 17-21). They will discuss potential applications for using DNA barcodes, including food safety, disease prevention and better environmental monitoring. There are now more than 280,000 DNA barcode records representing about 31,000 species.

ScienceBlog

Northwest Passage Opens: Arctic Sea Ice Reaches New Low

The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has now (September 14, 2007) shrunk to its lowest level since satellite measurements began nearly 30 years ago, opening up the Northwest Passage – a long-sought short cut between Europe and Asia that has been historically impassable.

Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre said: “We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme.

“The strong reduction in just one year certainly raises flags that the ice (in summer) may disappear much sooner than expected and that we urgently need to understand better the processes involved.”

ScienceDaily

World Biggest Problem: Organized Crime

cocain cartel
Organized crime may have brought in more than $2 trillion in revenue last year, about twice all the military budgets in the world combined, according to the “2007 State of the Future” report, published by the Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, by Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon.

The report called organized crime one of the most pressing global issues that needs to be addressed in the next 10 years, along with global warming, terrorism, corruption, unemployment, and income disparities.

But the report noted success in tackling other issues, saying the world has made progress on ending poverty, improving access to education and settling conflicts. It also says the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa has begun to level off.

KurzweilAI

Virus Linked to Destruction of Bee Hives

dead beeScientists may have discovered the cause of a devastating syndrome in honeybees that has destroyed 50% to 90% of hives in the USA — posing enormous problems for crops that depend on them to reproduce.

The culprit, reported in the journal Science Thursday, may be the Israeli acute paralysis (IAP) virus.

Colony collapse disorder, or CCD, first surfaced in 2004 in U.S. hives. It kills the worker bees that go out to find pollen. Theories on the cause have ranged from exposure to pollen from genetically modified crops to the impact of electronic waves from cellphone towers. None have panned out.

But using a new genetic technique to identify the various microbes and viruses that inhabit bees, scientists found a strong correlation between bees infected with the IAP virus and those from hives hit with CCD.

CCD’s impact on the $15-billion-a-year honeybee industry has hit the nation’s farms hard because of the role that bees play in natural cycles. The nimble insects pollinate 90% to 100% of at least 19 kinds of fruits, vegetables and nuts.

USAToday

Canadian-led Team Finds Oldest Evidence Of Life On Earth

A Canadian-led team of scientists has discovered what they say is the oldest indisputable evidence of life on Earth—the fossilized trackways of slithering microbes in a 3.35-billion-year-old rock from Australia.

And the find has prompted the Canadian Space Agency to fund a project this summer among similarly ancient rocks along the Ontario-Quebec border as a possible blueprint for finding traces of life on Mars in a future mission to the Red Planet.

canada.com