Last week my friend and I went to the mall to buy some things. I had to buy my dreamed stereo and I saved some money to be able to acquire that. My friend got a little problem; he always wanted to buy a couch. The one that we saw last time was already sold out, but there is something more beautiful. Of course that one will cost fifty percent higher than the other. He told me that he will going to borrow some money from me because of his low budget. Bad thing is, I also ran out of budget. I told him to go on and buy that couch because there is a solution to his problem.
I told him that there are available solutions for times like this, a payday advance. A way that is very convenient of reducing your worries about your budget. I told him that he can pay that on his next salary.
If we are lucky, an international climate agreement will be forged in Copenhagen later this year and emissions targets set in a bid to limit global warming to 2 °c above preindustrial levels. Agreement in Denmark or not, I find the breezy way so many politicians and commentators talk as if such an increase were no big deal truly amazing. The truth is we have no idea what will happen at those places where you and I live if we raise the global thermostat 2 °C or more. Worse, there is another factor that could crank that thermostat still higher, making life quite as intolerable as the well understood threat from rising sea levels: fire. The fossil record shows that fires started to occur soon after vegetation was established on Earth during the Silurian, about 420 million years ago. Ancient terrestrial life’s exposure to fire gives us good reason to think fire is an important evolutionary factor and, more controversially, that life co-evolved with fire. Fire can be seen as a physicochemical process, a “fire triangle” of oxygen, fuel and heat for ignition. Combustion can occur if the concentration of oxygen is higher than 13 per cent, and variation in oxygen levels correlates with fire activity in Earth’s history. Fluctuations in atmospheric oxygen through geological time significantly affected fire risk. For example, in the Permian, oxygen levels were substantially higher than now, and even moist giant moss forests sometimes burned. Those Permian coal fossils flag up another key detail: the burial of decay-resistant charcoal and organic matter may have led to long-term reductions in the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere and increased relative oxygen levels, because the carbon is geologically sequestered as coal and the oxygen left in the atmosphere (until chemical weathering draws it down). So fire in the biosphere should be considered both as a physicochemical process and as a fundamental biogeochemical process, feeding back between biosphere, geosphere and hydrosphere.
Seeing fire as biology seems odd, but landscape fires only occur because life creates fuel: so some ecologists now say fires should be seen as “biologically constructed”, drawing parallels with decomposition and herbivory. For me, then, the Greeks had it right with their classification of fire, air, earth and water. But we have much to learn about how life and fire affect each other. Take tropical savannahs, the most flammable vegetation on Earth. Researchers think that falling atmospheric CO2 concentrations about 8 million years ago stimulated the global development of tropical savannah dominated by grasses which use the C4 photosynthetic pathway. These tropical grasses are highly productive in hot, wet climates, and under low CO2 concentrations they have a physiological advantage over woody vegetation, which uses the C3 pathway. Savannah was stimulated because those grasses produce large quantities of fine and well-aerated fuels, greatly increasing the frequency of fire, further disadvantaging woody plants because frequent fires create a population bottleneck by killing “fire-tender” juveniles. Savannah trees had to develop rapid growth to escape the fire trap. Expanding savannahs may also have caused a climate feedback that created hotter, drier conditions, favoring yet more savannah : one of the great examples of fire-vegetation-climate feedback proposed by some ecologists.
A strange state of matter that dominated the early universe could be used to create ultra-fast flashes of radiation, brief enough to capture what’s going on inside atomic nuclei. To take snapshots of rapid processes you need brief flashes of light. Until now, the shortest pulses have been created by lasers – a quick blast can prompt atoms to release a burst of X-rays lasting only attoseconds (10-18 seconds, or a b billionth of a billionth of a second). That is quick enough to capture the vibration of individual molecules, but far too slow for nuclear processes. Now it may be possible to create pulses of radiation that last for only one millionth of a nattosecond, say Andreas Ipp, now at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. Instead of lasers, the light would be emitted by an exotic, dense state of matter called aquark-gluon plasma – the same stuff the universe contained for a fraction of a second after the big bang. This soup of ultra-hot, subatomic building blocks of protons and neutrons may still be hiding inside neutron stars. On Earth, a quark-gluon plasma could be created in the lab by smash ing heavy nuclei such as gold together at h I g h speeds.
This short-lived plasma would emit bursts of gamma rays lasting for just a few yocto seconds (10-24 seconds), the smallest u n it of time that has its own prefix. When Ipp and colleagues modelled the plasma, they are covered that the gamma rays can sometimes be emitted in two closely spaced yocto second pulses. Two flashes would enable the measurement of very rapid changes. “You could use it to make movies of really fast processes;’ says Michael Strickland of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Aimed at a target of ordinary matter, the gamma-ray pulses could reveal more about the vibrations and energies inside nuclei, which govern phenomena like radioactivity.
Already the prized as engines of repair, stem cells have now been engineered to contain a gene that enhances their healing properties by summoning extra blood of vessels to newly formed of tissue. Using the same technique, it should be possible to add other genes to stem cells to make them more efficient at different tasks.
Stem cells have the potential to repair the most tissues in the body. However, new tissue needs new blood vessels to feed it, and stem cells don’t always produce enough of the proteins that encourage blood vessels to grow. So Daniel Anderson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exposed human bone marrow stem cells to biodegradable nanoparticies carrying the human gene for vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which attracts blood vessels to injury sites.
When the modified cells were injected into mice whose hind limbs had been injured, the tissue that regrew to repair the damage had three times the blood vessel density of similar tissue in mice given unmodified cells. Four weeks later, only 20 per cent of the mice given modified cells had lost limbs, compared with 60 per cent in mice that received unmodified cells.
Anderson says the nanoparticies could be used to ferry other genes into stem cells to make them more efficient at repair. “It represents a proof of principle for gene enhancement strategies,” agrees Duncan Stewart of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Canada.
The wandering albatross, long a sign of good luck and source of superstition for sailors, could become a latter-day boon to them as the inspiration for a low-energy scouting aircraft. The albatross’s ability to fly for thousands of kilometers over oceans with barely a flap of its wings has inspired the concept of a diminutive, ship launched spotter plane that flies great distances by employing some of the bird’s lift-generating techniques.
The idea is that a drone could help trawler crews spot shoals of fish, or help border patrols spot drug-runners, but with next-to zero energy cost, says Tony Pipe, who leads the project at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) in the UK. The idea is the brainchild of Pipe’s colleague, Markus Deittert, who flies gliders in his spare time. The wandering albatross uses many tricks to gain lift and stay airborne for long periods. “They exploit the updrafts over waves and the shear-layers downwind of wave-crests,” says Adrian Thomas, a zoologist specializing in animal flight at the University of Oxford. But another ruse the bird uses is to harness “dynamic soaring”. Unlike thermal soaring over land – flying on rising columns of warm air – dynamic soaring exploits the big differences in wind speed that exist up to about 30 meters above the sea. It is this dynamic soaring capability that the Bristol team wants to harness in a 3 meter-wingspan unscrewed aerial vehicle (UAV).
The layer of air at the ocean’s surface is slowed by friction against the water, while the layers above move progressively faster. For instance, the air at an altitude of 2 meters may be moving at 7 meters per second, but layers above it move ever faster until, at an altitude of about 30 meters, it will be zipping along at 11 meters per second.
Rooks appear to have a better understanding of how gravity works than do chimps and babies under 6 months old.
A common way of finding out whether animals and babies understand a complex concept is to show them images of impossible events. The rationale is that viewers spend longer looking at those which defy their expectations, presumably as they try to work out what’s going on.
Chris Bird of the University of Cambridge and Nathan Emery of Queen Mary, University of London, showed rooks computer generated images, half of which were impossible according to the laws of gravity, such as an egg floating in mid-air above a table. Almost without exception, the rooks spent more time looking at the “impossible” images than the possible ones. They also took more second glances.
The responses were the same when the “familiar” egg shape was replaced by a cork, proving the birds’ insight applied equally to any object, familiar or not.
The researchers say the result is consistent with rooks being able to solve complex problems from knowledge of cause and effect, rather than by trial and error.
Give tropical forests back to the people who live in them – and the trees will soak up your carbon for you. Above all, keep the forests out of the hands of government. So concludes a study that has tracked the fate of 80 forests worldwide over 15 years. Most tropical forests – from Himalayan hill forests to the Madagascan jungle – are controlled by local and national governments. Forest communities own and manage little more than a tenth. They have a reputation for trashing their trees – cutting them for timber or burning them to clear land for farming. In reality the opposite is true, according to Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the first study of its kind, Chhatre and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor compared forest ownership with data on carbon sequestration, which is estimated from the size and number of trees in a forest. Hectare-for-hectare, they found that tropical forest under local management stored more carbon than government -owned forests. There are exceptions, says Chhatre, “but our findings show that we can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities”.
One reason may be that locals protect forests best if they own them, because they have a longterm interest in ensuring the forests’ survival. While governments, whatever their intentions, usually license destructive logging, or preside over a free-for-all in which everyone grabs what they can because nobody believes the forest will last (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).