Whales to gain Panama Canal traffic protection

Satellite-tagged humpbacks show just how often whales cross paths with ships

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Shipping lanes into and out of the Panama Canal are likely to be constrained in order to protect whales.

Humpback whales breed around Las Perlas archipelago 60km (40 miles) from the canal's southern entrance, and are disturbed and even killed by shipping.
Panamanian officials and scientists have developed a plan that would corral vessels into narrow lanes.
They plan to present it for discussion and maybe adoption by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) next year.
Details of the proposal were presented at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) annual meeting in Panama City.
Hector Guzman from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute drew up the plans following research comparing movements of ships with those of 15 humpback whales fitted with satellite tags.
Maps show the whales swimming throughout the Gulf of Panama, which lies outside the canal entrance on the Pacific Ocean side, repeatedly crossing the ships' tracks.
"We recorded 98 interactions between whales and ships during an 11-day period," he told BBC News.
"Just over half of the whales had encounters; one particular whale had 45 encounters in just four days."
An "interaction" was defined as approaching within a distance of 200m - though the area has seen 13 whale deaths in the last two and a half years, some of which were probably as a result of being hit by a ship.
Watching brief Humpbacks migrate northwards from their summer feeding grounds around Antarctica, arriving in the region around late June.
They breed in the fertile Las Perlas waters, where an upwelling of nutrient-rich water produces an annual plankton bloom.
Altogether, about 900 animals are thought to be involved. There are also visitors from a Northern Hemisphere humpback population.
Some 17,000 large ships pass through Panamanian waters each year, the majority international cargo vessels using the canal.
Data shows one particular vessel routinely passing right through the Las Perlas protected area in order to excavate sand from the sea bed and bring it to land for construction.

Las Perlas is becoming an important area for tourists, with whale-watching trips one of the attractions on offer.
Tomas Guardia, director-general for international organisations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Panama's commissioner to the IWC, said the changes were stimulated both by economic factors and a burgeoning environmental awareness.
"The New York Times selected Panama as their number one tourist destination for 2012; so when you add on an additional activity such as whale-watching, it all helps to promote Panama outside the country," he said.
"Also, many Panamanians were previously not aware of the resource we have close to our city, and in fact one of the reasons for hosting the IWC was to raise awareness of our marine environment."
Channel solutions The government proposes funnelling ships into parallel lanes 65 nautical miles long, one approaching the canal entrance and one leaving it, separated by distance of about 2-3 nautical miles.
Dr Guzman calculates this would reduce the total area of sea where the whales would be at risk of collision by about 95%.
During the whale breeding season, ships would also be obliged to slow down to 10 knots on their way in and out.

Similar schemes have been implemented in several US ports, and the IMO has produced an advisory booklet based on the US experiences.
Vessels travelling west along the coast would be constrained into a couple of further corridor sections.
This would push them further offshore than they currently tend to travel, reducing the chance of collision with fishing boats.
"You can imagine; you have these small artisanal fishing boats and these huge vessels - it's just chaos, the way they come in and out of the country," said Dr Guzman.
"So [under the new scheme] they'll have their vessels, they'll be apart from the heavy traffic lanes - more important still is we're increasing the buffer of protection between the mainland and the shipping lanes in a region where we have five different protected areas including World Heritage Sites."
On the northern side of the country on the Atlantic Ocean side, where there is no significant presence of whales, the government is proposing a system involving three separate corridors leading in different directions.
Panama took over ownership of the canal from the US in 1999. The lock system is currently being upgraded, which will see vessels larger than the current 300m-long limit able to pass through.

Antarctic moss lives on ancient penguin poo

Antarctica's moss viewed from above

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Moss plants that survive the freezing conditions of Antarctica have an unusual food source, scientists say.

The vibrant green plants take nutrients from the poo left behind by penguins that lived in the same area thousands of years ago.
Scientists made their discovery whilst testing the plants to find out how they manage to survive in the icy landscape.
The findings were presented at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting in Salzburg, Austria.

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Big chill

Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature

• The cold, dry desert of Antarctica holds the record for the lowest temperatures on Earth
• To cope with the cold plants dry to a crisp to protect themselves in winter, rehydrating again in the summer
• Most mammals and birds choose only to visit for the relatively warmer summer months
• Between October and February Adelie penguin pairs take turns to heat their eggs on nests constructed from stones

• Watch a criminal penguin stealing building materials

Prof Sharon Robinson, from the University of Wollongong in Australia, has been studying Antarctica's plants for 16 years.

She explained that she was interested in where the plants get their nutrients, because the Antarctic soil on which they grow is so poor.
"Plants need water, sunlight and nutrients; there's plenty of sunlight in the summer and as long as the ice melts there's water," she told BBC Nature.
"But the soil is basically sand and gravel."
To find out where the plants were getting the food they needed to grow, Prof Robinson and her team used a technique that allowed them to see all of the chemicals that made up a moss plant.
This "chemical signature" revealed nitrogen that had passed through a marine predator.
"Nitrogen that's gone through algae, krill and fish and then penguins has a characteristic 'seabird signature'," Prof Robinson told BBC Nature.
Since no penguins live on the elevated lakeside site in East Antarctica, the researchers had to work out where the mysterious seabird poo came from.
They realised that their moss beds were growing on the site of an ancient penguin colony.
"Between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago, on the site where the moss is now growing, there used to be [Adelie] penguins," said Prof Robinson.
"There's fossil evidence to support that, and the little pebbles that the penguins use to make their nests are actually still there.
"The other thing that's still there is the penguin poo.

Six different species of moss live on the islands of East Antarctica studied by the scientists

"And because Antarctica is so cold, those nutrients have just stayed frozen in the soil; they're now feeding this moss."
Prof Robinson said that the hardy plants, which grow just 2-3mm per year, create "luxuriant green beds" that are home to some of the insects and other miniature creatures that manage to live in this frozen desert.
Prof Robinson hopes to learn exactly how they adapt to this extreme environment.
The mosses are able to "freeze-dry" in order to survive the winter and produce sunscreen compounds to protect themselves from UV rays.
"It's amazing that the plants can do [these things], but it's also interesting to know which compounds they use," said Prof Robinson.
Learning the molecular mechanisms behind plants' abilities to dry out but remain viable could help researchers to develop ways to store food or even medicines for long periods.

Dark energy

About Dark energy

In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that permeates all of space and tends to accelerate the expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the most accepted hypothesis to explain observations since the 1990s that indicate that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for 73% of the total mass-energy of the universe.
Two proposed forms for dark energy are the cosmological constant, a constant energy density filling space homogeneously, and scalar fields such as quintessence or moduli, dynamic quantities whose energy density can vary in time and space. Contributions from scalar fields that are constant in space are usually also included in the cosmological constant. The cosmological constant is physically equivalent to vacuum energy. Scalar fields which do change in space can be difficult to distinguish from a cosmological constant because the change may be extremely slow.
High-precision measurements of the expansion of the universe are required to understand how the expansion rate changes over time. In general relativity, the evolution of the expansion rate is parameterized by the cosmological equation of state (the relationship between temperature, pressure, and combined matter, energy, and vacuum energy density for any region of space). Measuring the equation of state for dark energy is one of the biggest efforts in observational cosmology today.
Adding the cosmological constant to cosmology's standard FLRW metric leads to the Lambda-CDM model, which has been referred to as the "standard model" of cosmology because of its precise agreement with observations. Dark energy has been used as a crucial ingredient in a recent attempt to formulate a cyclic model for the universe.
Read more at Wikipedia

Early human ancestor chewed bark

The first Australopithecus sediba fossil was discovered in South Africa

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An early relative of humans chewed on bark and leaves, according to fossil evidence.

Analysis of food trapped in the teeth of the two-million-year-old "southern ape" suggests it existed on a unique diet of forest fruits and other woodland plants.
The study, in Nature, gives an insight into the evolution of what could have been a direct human ancestor.
Other early African contemporaries had a diet suggesting a grassland habitat.
The first fossils of Australopithecus sediba, discovered in South Africa in 2008, were hailed as a remarkable discovery.
Teeth from two individuals were analysed in the latest research, focussing on patterns of dental wear, carbon isotope data and plant fragments from dental tartar.
The evidence suggests the ape-like creature ate leaves, fruit, bark, wood and other forest vegetation.
Dr Amanda Henry of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led the research.
"We've for the first time been able to put together three quite different methods for reconstructing diet and gotten one cohesive picture of the diet of this ancient species and that picture is really quite different from what we've seen in other hominins (human ancestors)," she said.
"That's exciting, we're seeing a lot more variation among these species than we'd expected."
Human milestone Human ancestors from around this time period were probably exploring a wide variety of habitats.
Each species was finding its ecological niche a few hundred thousand years before the evolution of Homo erectus, which spread out of Africa into many different habitats around the world, heralding a milestone in human evolution.
Dr Henry said Australopithecus sediba walked on two legs but probably also spent time foraging in the trees.
"It was still quite primitive; it had a very small brain; it was quite short and it had fairly long arms but it was definitely related to us," she said.

Bark and woody tissues were found in the teeth

Dr Louise Humphrey of the palaeontology department at London's Natural History Museum said there was debate about the position of Australopithecus sediba in the human lineage.
"The question is, is this a great great granddad or grandma or is it a cousin?
"They were eating bark and woody substances, which is quite a unique dietary mechanism; it hasn't been reported for any other human relative before."
The animal may have eaten fruit and young leaves when food was plentiful, but turned to less nutritious food like bark when times were hard.
However, syrup beneath the bark may have provided a sugary treat.
Dr Henry said: "A lot of people have turned their nose at the idea of eating bark but I always think that what they're eating is probably not the coarse outer bark but potentially the softer inner bark where the sap is.
"And so if you think of maple syrup - it's the sap of maple trees - then it could have been quite a tasty substance."

Brian Greene: Exploring the unknown universe

These are the sorts of questions that Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, has spent his lifetime trying to answer.
In between, he has also found time to write several best-selling books on the subject. His latest, The Hidden Reality, explores the possibility that our universe is not the only universe.
He tells BBC Future how pushing the boundaries of scientific exploration will shape our future.
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Laser treatment for Earth-bound asteroids

In the cinematic world, our planet’s destruction by the impact of another cosmic body is one of the few science-fiction tropes to bridge the blockbuster (Meteor, Armageddon, Deep Impact) and the arthouse (Last Night, Melancholia). Whatever else that means, it seems to imply that we’re all thinking about it.
But how do you think about it? The impact of a 10-km (6-mile) asteroid would be apocalyptic, but the chances of it happening in the next few generations are all but negligible. The smaller the asteroid, though, the bigger the danger, as witnessed by the recent near miss of the 7-metre (23-feet) 2012 KT42, the sixth closest encounter of any known asteroid. But, Bruce Willis apart, can we even begin to think about averting such an event with today’s technologies?
This is one of those areas in which hard science can degenerate into idle speculation and fantasy. That’s why a paper, as yet unpublished, by two aerospace engineers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK, is worth attending to. No one would claim that the plan sketched by Massimiliano Vasile and Christie Maddock to deflect Earth-threatening asteroids with solar-driven lasers is a blueprint for the survival of mankind, or that governments should be rushing to implement the idea. Rather, it’s the sort of ballpark calculation that lets us contemplate the magnitude of the task.
Deflection tactics
But there’s another reason to take note, which the authors don’t mention. Recent announcements of plans to mine asteroids for precious elements and minerals – in particular the launch of Planetary Resources, backed by Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google and commercial spaceflight entrepreneur Peter Diamandis – has got people talking about whether some of these cosmic goldmines might be nudged closer to Earth for easier access. Any technology that could alter the course of asteroids might therefore excite more interest from private speculators than from governments wanting to prevent doomsday.
The basic idea behind this approach isn’t new. In fact it goes back to 1994, when planetary scientist Jay Melosh, a specialist on meteorite impacts, and his colleagues proposed that asteroids on a collision course with our planet might be deflected by the type of nuclear blasts favoured in Armageddon.
Another possibility makes use of a huge reflector floating near an asteroid, which could focus sunlight onto the surface and burn off a jet of icy material. According to Newton’s third law of motion, this would gradually change the asteroid’s course: the momentum of the material flung out in one direction would be compensated by a change in the asteroid’s own direction of motion. Some researchers expanded the idea by proposing the use of a whole fleet of mirror-bearing spacecraft around the asteroid. But Vasile and Maddock pointed out that if the reflectors are going to be close enough to the asteroid to achieve strong solar heating, there’s a risk that the mirrors will be covered with the debris coming off the surface.
Laser blast
That’s why the duo now envisage using laser beams instead to heat the surface: they remain tightly focused over large distances, and so can be stationed further away. Lasers too have been considered before for this purpose. But they eat up a lot of energy, and previous proposals have imagined running them from a nuclear power source on a single spacecraft. In contrast, Vasile and Maddock propose using a swarm of craft – which are easier to build – equipped with modest-sized, electrically powered lasers driven by photovoltaic cells, powered in turn by light-collecting mirrors perhaps a few metres in size.
Sounds nice in principle. But can a realistically sized fleet of spacecraft induce enough deflection to head off a potentially hazardous Earth-bound asteroid? The two engineers formulate an answer to this question by looking at an asteroid named 99942 Apophis, which is known to have a trajectory that crosses the Earth’s orbit and has a very small chance of hitting in 2036 or 2037. It’s shaped like a potato, reaching almost 200m (655 feet) along the long axis, and would wreak serious havoc if it hit us.
There are lots of asteroid-deflecting parameters one could vary: the laser power (and consequent solar-cell requirements), the size, number and position of the spacecraft, how they are powered to hold their position, and so on. The craft would have to be actively held in place, not least to counteract the slight push that they will receive from the stuff being blasted off the asteroid. One of the key aims is to find a compromise distance that achieves enough heating without too much clogging of the collector mirrors. The effort any system needs to put in also depends on how much deflection is needed to avoid catastrophe, and how much warning you have: how long you can spend nudging the asteroid, in effect.
All this means that it’s not possible, or indeed meaningful, to say exactly what would be needed in terms of design or cost to get this idea to work. But Vasile and Maddock do manage to establish that if, say, we discovered in ten years time that Apophis really was going to strike, it should be possible to implement a strategy like this based more or less on the technologies already to hand, without any fear of bankrupting the economy. That’s surely a little reassuring, even if it wouldn’t make much of a movie.
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The Case of the Missing Carbon

Alone in a sealed jar, a mouse would die from exhaled CO2. But as scientist Joseph Priestley observed in 1771, adding a mint plant allows the mouse to thrive. In this proof of photosynthesis, the mint absorbed CO2, retained carbon for growth, and released oxygen. Two centuries later humans tried—and failed—to survive in a sealed environment in Arizona's Biosphere 2.

Photograph by Peter Essick

By Tim Appenzeller

Republished from the pages of National Geographic magazine

It's there on a monitor: the forest is breathing. Late summer sunlight filters through a canopy of green as Steven Wofsy unlocks a shed in a Massachusetts woodland and enters a room stuffed with equipment and tangled with wires and hoses.
The machinery monitors the vital functions of a small section of Harvard Forest in the center of the state. Bright red numbers dance on a gauge, flickering up and down several times a second. The reading reveals the carbon dioxide concentration just above the treetops near the shed, where instruments on a hundred-foot (30-meter) tower of steel lattice sniff the air. The numbers are running surprisingly low for the beginning of the 21st century: around 360 parts per million, ten less than the global average. That's the trees' doing. Basking in the sunshine, they inhale carbon dioxide and turn it into leaves and wood.
In nourishing itself, this patch of pine, oak, and maple is also undoing a tiny bit of a great global change driven by humanity. Start the car, turn on a light, adjust the thermostat, or do just about anything, and you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If you're an average resident of the United States, your contribution adds up to more than 5.5 tons (5 metric tons) of carbon a year.
The coal, oil, and natural gas that drive the industrial world's economy all contain carbon inhaled by plants hundreds of millions of years ago—carbon that now is returning to the atmosphere through smokestacks and exhaust pipes, joining emissions from forest burned to clear land in poorer countries. Carbon dioxide is foremost in an array of gases from human activity that increase the atmosphere's ability to trap heat. (Methane from cattle, rice fields, and landfills, and the chlorofluorocarbons in some refrigerators and air conditioners are others.) Few scientists doubt that this greenhouse warming of the atmosphere is already taking hold. Melting glaciers, earlier springs, and a steady rise in global average temperature are just some of its harbingers.
By rights it should be worse. Each year humanity dumps roughly 8.8 billion tons (8 metric tons) of carbon into the atmosphere, 6.5 billion tons (5.9 metric tons) from fossil fuels and 1.5 billion (1.4 metric) from deforestation. But less than half that total, 3.2 billion tons (2.9 metric tons), remains in the atmosphere to warm the planet. Where is the missing carbon? "It's a really major mystery, if you think about it," says Wofsy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University. His research site in the Harvard Forest is apparently not the only place where nature is breathing deep and helping save us from ourselves. Forests, grasslands, and the waters of the oceans must be acting as carbon sinks. They steal back roughly half of the carbon dioxide we emit, slowing its buildup in the atmosphere and delaying the effects on climate.
Who can complain? No one, for now. But the problem is that scientists can't be sure that this blessing will last, or whether, as the globe continues to warm, it might even change to a curse if forests and other ecosystems change from carbon sinks to sources, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb. The doubts have sent researchers into forests and rangelands, out to the tundra and to sea, to track down and understand the missing carbon.