Penguins Rocket Through The Water Aboard Supercavitating Bubble Jets

Turns out not being eaten by a leopard seal is excellent motivation. It’s what spurred penguins to develop an ingenious method of cutting down their drag by wrapping themselves in a shawl of bubbles.

When being hunted by a leopard seal in the water, penguins will attempt to escape by hurling themselves out of the water and onto land or ice. To get the necessary speed, and put some distance between itself and the pursuing seal, the penguin will emit a cloud of bubbles, like those above. This veil of air greatly diminishes the penguin’s drag and helps it rapidly accelerate — like a shot of subsurface Nitro — towards safety. Some species can launch themselves as high as 3m above the surface and land unscathed on a rocky shore.

The fascinating aspect is that the bubbles aren’t being exhaled by the penguins as previously thought; they’re being shaken free from the bird’s feathers. John Davenport, a Professor at University College Cork, along with a grad student made the surprising discovery and recently published their findings in the Marine Ecology Progress Series journal. As the BBC explains,

They raise their feathers to fill their plumage with air, then dive underwater. As the birds descend, the water pressure increases, decreasing the volume of the trapped air. At a depth of 15-20 metres, for example, the air volume has shrunk by up to 75%. The birds now depress their feathers, locking them around the new, reduced air volume.

When the need arises, penguins will simply aim for the surface and let loose the bubbles. “Because the feathers are very complex, the pores through which the air emerges are very small so the bubbles are initially tiny. They coat the outer feather surface,” said John Davenport, a Professor at University College Cork.

Militaries have been attempting to duplicate this biological process since the Soviets designed rocket torpedoes in the 1960s. Even now, the US Navy is dabbling with bubble veils for its future submarines. However, none of those systems compare the the efficiency and elegance of millions of years of evolution. [Marine Ecology Progress Series via BBC via DVice]

Bucky Balls Could Double Your Lifespan

Bucky Balls Could Double Your Lifespan

Buckminster fullerene molecules, the naturally occurring spheres made up of 60 carbon atoms, have long been suspected to have biological benefits. Now, a study that set out to establish if they were toxic when administered orally has proven quite the opposite—they almost doubled the lifespan of the rats that they were fed to.

The experiments, which were carried out at the Université Paris Sud, France, set out to assess what adverse reactions might be caused by ingesting Bucky balls orally. To do that, they fed three groups of rats differently. Along with their normal diet, one group was held as a control; a second was fed olive oil; and a third group was fed olive oil doped with a 0.8 mg/ml concentration of Buckminster fullerene.

The results, which appear in Biomaterials, took the researchers by surprise. The control group had a median lifespan of 22 months, and the olive oil group one of 26 months. But the Bucky ball group? They stuck it out for42 months. That's almost double the control group.

The researchers have established that the effect is mediated by a reduction in oxidative stress—an imbalance in living cells that contributes to ageing. To say these results are important is an understatement: the desire to live longer runs strong in many of us, and it's a feat scientists have been hoping to achieve for centuries.

But while it's a remarkable finding, it's worth remembering that it's just a single study. It's going to take a hell of a lot more work before the scientific community is completely convinced that we should all be splashing Bucky-enriched olive oil on our salads, that's for sure. [Biomaterials viaExtreme Longevity]

Image by Leonid Andronov/Shutterstock

Orchids Are as Finicky as the Fungi That Nourish Them

Fungi that orchids need to grow are just as finicky as the exotic flowers themselves

By Carrie Madren  | April 13, 2012 | 5

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Image: Larry West/Minden Pictures

In The Orchid Thief, writer Susan Orlean describes the cultlike devotion that these exotic-looking flowers inspire among plant collectors. One reason, in addition to their beauty, that orchids are so prized is that they are fragile: although they grow in every U.S. state and on every con­tinent except Antarctica, many are endangered, and the flowers are exceed­ingly sensitive to environ­mental changes. Native orchids’ dustlike seeds will grow only if nourished by certain groups of root fungi, known as mycorrhizal fungi.

Little is known about these organisms—so little that many have not been named. They grow into the roots of orchids, which digest the fungi to obtain needed nutrients. Recently a four-year study has shed new light on where my­corrhizal fungi grow and under what conditions they stimulate orchids to germinate. The results, published online Jan­uary 24 in Molecular Ecology, will help ecol­ogists preserve rare or­chid varieties.

The team of researchers, led by ecologist Melissa McCormick of the Smithsonian Environ­mental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., planted and tracked three U.S. orchid species—all present in the East and endangered somewhere in the country—in six study sites: three in younger forests, which were 50 to 70 years old, and three in older forests, which were 120 to 150 years old. Investigators covered each plot with leaf litter, decomposing wood or nothing and provided half the plots with the specific fungi known to promote growth in each orchid.

The researchers also identified the existing fungi in each forest. Because the organisms have no fruiting structures, they can be tough to detect, so the team pio­neered the use of testing for DNA in the soil to identify where and how much fungus was present. Older forests, McCormick and her colleagues found, had about five to 12 times more orchid-friendly fungi than younger forests, and the fungi in older forests were more diverse.

Each orchid had different requirements to grow. For Goodyera pubescens (a stalk of its small white flowers is pictured), only older forests held enough fungus for it to flourish. Adding the fun­gus to younger forests alone or in combination with decom­posing wood did not make Goodyera seeds germinate. The host fungus of Tipularia dis­color, which has many small mauve-purple flowers with yellowish centers, was wide­spread in young and old forests alike but could support germi­nation only on decom­posing wood. The host fungus for Liparis lilii­folia wasn’t common in the wild, but the orchid would germinate if the fungus was added.

Orchid conservation plans gen­erally do not account for orchid fungi abundance or require-ments, simply because the techniques and knowledge to identify the fungi haven’t been in place. Says McCormick, “We’re hoping others can apply these tech­niques to figure out what environmental conditions affect the fungi.”

This article was published in print as "Picky Eaters Club."

Sensor-Laden Smart Rackets Could One Day Replace Tennis Coaches

ANDREW LISZEWSKI

TODAY 12:40 AM

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Babolat, a French company that has been making tennis gear since 1875, has recently unveiled a high-tech racket that could revolutionise training. Called the Play & Connect, the racket is packed with sensors analysing every aspect of a player’s swing and performance.

And even though it’s been electronically enhanced, the racket still weighs and feels just like other hollow string rackets, which is important since it shouldn’t affect how a player uses it in a match.

Previously, video replays of a match have been studied to help improve a tennis player’s swing. But the sensors in the Play & Connect can measure the ball speed, the force exerted during the swing, the vibrations of the strings, and even the exact location where it made contact with the ball. And all of that data can then be downloaded to a piece of software where it can not only be analysed, but also track a player’s performance over time so they know if they’re destined for Wimbledon, or a life coaching a high school tennis team. [Babolat via Reuters]

As Climate Becomes Less Certain, So Does China's Ability to Grow Enough Food

Climate-related challenges are already beginning to affect China's ability to grow enough food. Image: Wikimedia Commons/Stevie Mann

DUJIADUN, China -- Liu Changxiong has been farming in this southwestern Chinese village for more than a decade, but his years of experience aren't of much use these days.

Last year, his corn seedlings withered at a time Liu expected would be rich in rain. It took twice as many days for his green onions to grow than Liu's estimates. But the 43-year-old farmer isn't the one to be blamed. Instead, experts say, his farming routine is being messed up by climate change.

Similar phenomena are happening across the nation. In north China, where wheat fields have dominated the landscape for centuries, the crop is becoming increasingly difficult to grow as the land gets drier and warmer. In southern China, droughts in recent years have replaced rainy seasons, drying up rice paddies on a large scale.

Experts are scrambling to understand the problems and to predict how serious they might become. Although forecasts for crop output vary, most agree that the future climate won't be as favorable to agriculture. While China's hunt for adaptation measures is on, little progress has been made so far.

That raises the question of whether 1.34 billion Chinese -- accounting for almost one-fifth of the world's population -- would be able to feed themselves. Currently, China produces slightly less grains than its people consume. Crop losses caused by extreme weather events, insect attacks and other problems associated with climate change are rocking the already delicate balance.

In 2011 alone, droughts claimed grains that could have been sufficient for nearly 60 million Chinese to eat for a whole year, official statistics show.

There is also the issue of rising crop production costs being driven higher by climate change. For one, as temperatures rise, many insects that used to be killed off by the cool of winter now live longer, forcing farmers to spray more pesticides. That increases food prices, and adds pressure on the lives of the poor.

Genetic engineering becomes less helpful
Worse yet, China is losing its ability to produce more. During the past decades, farmers here have enjoyed an explosion of productivity, thanks partly to genetically manipulated crops that are higher-yielding and resistant to pests and diseases. But today, that help is starting to fade away, as it is falling victim to climate change.

"In the 1970s, when we used genetic engineering technology to breed regionally adopted crops, we could enjoy its high yield for years; now that period is much shorter," said Pan Genxing, director of Agriculture and Climate Change Center at Nanjing Agriculture University.

What is defeating the technology, according to Pan, is that the environment in which the crops grow keeps changing due to climate change, making regionally adopted crops no longer a fit for the region they were designed to.

To be sure, not all the effects of climate change are an agricultural curse. For instance, the higher temperatures allow crops to grow in areas which were previously too cold, and lengthen the growing season and, for some crops, the number of times per year they can be harvested. But whether China can take advantage of those changes is another troubling question.

Along north China's Haihe River Basin, where crops can now grow twice a year thanks to warmer climate, local farmers still plant only once, for lack of water, says Mo Xingguo. He researches climate change and agricultural water use at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Experts say that other parts of northern China, which were to enjoy greater numbers of harvests per year as the climate gets warmer, confront the same obstacle. Irrigation there largely relies on groundwater, and to grow more crops would require pumping more water out of wells, an unlikely prospect in a land whose groundwater level in recent years has already dropped dangerously.

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"The region's water resources simply can't afford more crop plantings," Mo said.

Less water and more damaging insects
And climate change is continuing to intensify that shortage. During the past half-century, the nation experienced less rainfall and declining river flows. At the same time, global warming is largely causing higher evaporation. Even in places that are relatively rich in water resources now, fears are rising that farmers would lose the essential resource to grow their crops.

That fear is acute in places like Linze County, an oasis city along the Silk Road. The rising temperature is causing glaciers, on which so much of the water supply in the oasis depends, to melt faster.

The glacier water is greening more fields now, but when the glaciers disappear, they will leave the city with a severe water deficit within five years, says a leading scientist at the Chinese Academy of Agriculture Sciences, Lin Erda, who is helping the locals offset that gap with water-saving agricultural technology.

Besides water deficit, other climate risks are coming into focus. Deep in the cornfields of northeast China's Jilin province, Ma Chunsen, an insect scientist at the Chinese Academy of Agriculture Sciences, in recent years spotted more holes on maize stems, left by an undesirable visitor -- Asian corn borer.

Such insects are a natural part of the life in cornfields, but they had never bred more than once a year until nowadays, Ma said. Chilly springs in this major corn-growing region used to hold back the hatching of Asian corn borer. Today, that hold is loosening due to the temperature rise.

In addition to lengthening the period that invasive insects can live, scientists say temperature rise has caused outbreaks of insect attacks to happen more extensively. For instance, wheat aphids -- insects that feed on the juice of wheat -- have chewed their way into a larger scope of areas in northern regions than ever recorded.

While insects are taking a ride on climate change to invade fields, crops are becoming more vulnerable to such attacks. If the air's carbon dioxide content reaches twice the current level, as scientists expect to happen by the end of this century, chemicals of major crops like rice, wheat and corn would change, making those crops less able to defend against insects, says Ge Feng, an ecologist studying interaction among insects, crops and carbon dioxide.

'Later is better than never'
It is possible that the vulnerability is less significant in real-world conditions than in lab experiments, since the rise of carbon dioxide is a slow process and crops might be able to adapt to that change, Ge said. The more troubling possibility, he added, is if crops won't adapt to it, and farmers need to use more pesticides in the future.

But there might be a way other than pesticides to kill invasive insects. "If we understand how climate change is affecting crops, insects and the natural enemies of the insects, then we should be able to control insect attacks by adjusting crop planting timing, for instance," said Ma, the insect scientist.

Some steps have already been taken in recent years, including developing models to trace and predict attacks by some major insects like wheat aphids, he continued. But studies on other insects are essentially stymied for lack of money.

"To study all major invasive insect species would require about $2 million [in] research funds each year, but little investment has spent on the subject so far," said Ma. To continue his research, Ma says he has to squeeze money from other projects.

The lack of financial support comes against the background that more studies are needed in order to understand the impact of climate change. Scientists acknowledge that their attempts to use computers to project future agriculture risks are still crude. Some of those computer forecasts, for example, were found to contradict what is happening in the fields. Besides that, all of the previous research efforts didn't answer a core question.

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"We have researches on the impact of increasing heat, declining rainfalls as well as other factors of climate change, but we still don't know how those factors altogether affect crops' production," said Pan, of Nanjing Agricultural University. "Agriculture is an ecosystem. We can't just add or deduct research results of each factor, and say that's what climate change has caused."

To draw a fuller picture, Pan has built an outdoor monitoring station where his team can follow all the changes in fields under the influence of climate change and then study their mutual impacts on crops production. Launched in 2009, it was the first study of its kind in China. Today, more programare under way, with rising government support.

The idea behind such support is that if scientists understand the role of climate change in crop production, they can suggest ways to solve it -- though translating scientific findings into practical tips that can be absorbed and put to use by the average farmer might take years.

"It is quite late already," Pan said, referring to China's fresh efforts to search for adaptation measures. "But later is better than never."

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500

Wikipedia’s Next Big Thing: Wikidata, A Machine-Readable, User-Editable Database Funded By Google, Paul Allen And Others

Wikidata, the first new project to emerge from the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, is now beginning development. The organization, known best for its user-edited encyclopedia of knowledge Wikipedia, recently announced the new project at February’s Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, describing Wikidata as new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.
There have been other attempts at creating a semantic database built from Wikipedia’s data before – for example, DBpedia, a community effort to extract structured content from Wikipedia and make it available online. The difference is that, with Wikidata, the data won’t just be made available, it will also be made editable by anyone.
The project’s goal in developing a semantic, machine-readable database doesn’t just help push the web forward, it also helps Wikipedia itself. The data will bring all the localized versions of Wikipedia on par with each other in terms of the basic facts they house. Today, the English, German, French and Dutch versions offer the most coverage, with other languages falling much further behind.
Wikidata will also enable users to ask different types of questions, like which of the world’s ten largest cities have a female mayor?, for example. Queries like this are today answered by user-created Wikipedia Lists – that is, manually created structured answers. Wikidata, on the hand, will be able to create these lists automatically.
The initial effort to create Wikidata is being led by the German chapter of Wikimedia, Wikimedia Deutschland, whose CEO Pavel Richter calls the project “ground-breaking,” and describes it as “the largest technical project ever undertaken by one of the 40 international Wikimedia chapters.” Much of the early experimentation which resulted in the Wikidata concept was done in Germany, which is why it’s serving as the base of operations for the new undertaking.
The German Chapter will perform the initial development involved in the creation of Wikidata, but will later hand over the operation and maintenance to the Wikimedia Foundation when complete. The estimation is that hand-off will occur a year from now, in March 2013.
The overall project will have three phases, the first of which involves creating one Wikidata page for each Wikipedia entry across Wikipedia’s over 280 supported languages. This will provide the online encyclopedia with one common source of structured data that can be used in all articles, no matter which language they’re in. For example, the date of someone’s birth would be recorded and maintained in one place: Wikidata. Phase one will also involve centralizing the links between the different language versions of Wikipedia. This part of the work will be finished by August 2012.
In phase two, editors will be able to add and use data in Wikidata, and this will be available by December 2012. Finally, phase three will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata, which can then populate the pages of Wikipedia.
In terms of how Wikidata will impact Wikipedia’s user interface, the plan is for the data to live in the “info boxes” that run down the right-hand side of a Wikipedia page. (For example: those on the right side of NYC’s page). The data will be inputted at data.wikipedia.org, which will then drive the info boxes wherever they appear, across languages, and in other pages that use the same info boxes. However, because the project is just now going into development, some of these details may change.
Below, an early concept for Wikidata:

All the data contained in Wikidata will be published under a free Creative Commons license, which opens it up for use by any number of external applications, including e-government, the sciences and more.
Dr. Denny Vrandečić, who joined Wikimedia from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, is leading a team of eight developers to build Wikidata, and is joined by Dr. Markus Krötzsch of the University of Oxford. Krötzsch and Vrandečić, notably, were both co-founders of the Semantic MediaWiki project, which pursued similar goals to that of Wikidata over the past few years.
The initial development of Wikidata is being funded through a donation of 1.3 million Euros, granted in half by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, an organization established by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2010. The goal of the Institute is to support long-range research activities that have the potential to accelerate progress in artificial intelligence, which includes web semantics.
“Wikidata will build on semantic technology that we have long supported, will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, and will create an extraordinary new data resource for the world,” says Dr. Mark Greaves, VP of the Allen Institute.
Another quarter of the funding comes from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, through its Science program, and another quarter comes from Google. According to Google’s Director of Open Source, Chris DiBona, Google hopes that Wikidata will make large amounts of structured data available to “all.” (All, meaning, course, to Google itself, too.)
This ties back to all those vague reports of “major changes” coming to Google’s search engine in the coming months, seemingly published far ahead of any actual news (like this), possibly in a bit of a PR push to take the focus off the growing criticism surrounding Google+…or possibly to simply tease the news by educating the public about what the “semantic web” is.
Google, which stated it would be increasing its efforts at providing direct answers to common queries – like those with a specific, factual piece of data – could obviously build greatly on top of something like Wikidata. As it moves further into semantic search, it could provide details about the people, places and things its users search for. It would actually know what things are, whether birth dates, locations, distances, sizes, temperatures, etc., and also how they’re connected to other points of data. Google previously said it expects semantic search changes to impact 10% to 20% of queries. (Google declined to provide any on the record comment regarding its future plans in this area).
Ironically, the results of Wikidata’s efforts may then actually mean fewer Google referrals to Wikipedia pages. Short answers could be provided by Google itself, positioned at the top of the search results. The need to click through to read full Wikipedia articles (or any articles, for that matter) would be reduced, leading Google users to spend more time on Google.