A Holiday Angel Among the Stars

A composite image of S106, from the Hubble Space Telescope and Japan's Subaru Telescope (Credits: NASA/ESA/the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)/NAOJ)

About 2,000 light years away, in the direction of the constellation Cygnus (The Swan), in a rather isolated part of the Milky Way, lies a newly formed star known IRS 4. This star, about 15 times the mass of our Sun, is still so young that it hasn’t yet calmed down; it’s ejecting material at high speed, giving this image its wings. That hydrogen gas, colored blue here, is heated by the star to temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, making them glow. The cloudy, red parts in the image are tiny particles of dust illuminated by the star.

This area of the universe is known as star-forming region S106 and it’s pretty small (well, by universe standards), at only two light years from the edge of one “wing” to the other. The nebula is also home to more than 600 known brown dwarfs, “failed” stars that, because of their size, less than a tenth the mass of our Sun, cannot undergo the nuclear fusion that powers glowing stars.

Birds Have No Reason to Like Fireworks

Fireworks can startle birds so badly they become disoriented (courtesy of flickr user SJ Photography)

On January 1st of this year, we awoke to reports of thousands of birds dead in Arkansas. The cause was not immediately known, and some people started to freak out, even saying that the event was a sign of the coming apocalypse.

Of course, within days scientists had an answer–the birds were likely startled by fireworks and, unable to see in the night, they ran into houses and signs and other objects and died from the trauma.

It turns out that birds are easily startled by fireworks. A study in the November/December issue of Behavioral Ecology used weather radar to track birds disturbed by New Year’s Eve fireworks for three years in the Netherlands. They found that thousands of birds took to the skies shortly after midnight and didn’t settle down again until 45 minutes later.

The scientists estimated that hundreds of thousands of birds, including several species of migratory waterfowl, were disturbed by the fireworks each year in the Netherlands alone. “The unexpected loud noises and bright lights fireworks produce are probably a source of disturbance for many species of domestic and wild animals,” the scientists wrote.

Most of the time, birds won’t die from the fireworks displays, as they did in Arkansas, the researchers note. But they still suffer from disrupted sleep, interrupted feeding and the energetic costs of flight and resettlement.

So, if you wake up on Sunday morning to more reports of dead birds, don’t think it’s Armageddon, but have a thought for the effects of our pretty displays on the wildlife around us.

14 Fun Facts About Elephants

An elephant running in the Masai Mara, Kenya (courtesy of flickr user brittanyhock)

1) African and Asian elephant populations are sometimes thought to differ only by the location of the animals, but, evolutionarily speaking, they are species forest and savannah elephants as separate genetically as Asian elephants and woolly mammoths.

2) The elephant’s closest living relative is the rock hyrax, a small furry mammal that lives in rocky landscapes across sub-Saharan Africa and along the coast of the Arabian peninsula.
3) African elephants are the largest land mammals on the planet, and the females of this species undergo the longest pregnancy—22 months.

4) Despite their size, elephants can be turned off by the smallest of critters. One study found that they avoid eating a type of acacia tree that is home to ants. Underfoot, ants can be crushed, but an elephant wants to avoid getting the ants inside its trunk, which is full of sensitive nerve endings.

5) Elephants don’t like peanuts. They don’t eat them in the wild, and zoos don’t feed them to their captive elephants.

6) Female elephants live in groups of about 15 animals, all related and led by a matriarch, usually the oldest in the group. She’ll decide where and when they move and rest, day to day and season to season.

7) Male elephants leave the matriarch groups between age 12 and 15. But they aren’t loners—they live in all-male groups. In dry times, these males will form a linear hierarchy that helps them avoid injuries that could result from competing for water.

8) Asian elephants don’t run. Running requires lifting all four feet at once, but elephants filmed in Thailand always kept at least two on the ground at all times.

9) An African elephant can detect seismic signals with sensory cells in its feet and also “hear” these deep-pitched sounds when ground vibrations travel from the animal’s front feet, up its leg and shoulder bones, and into its middle ear. By comparing the timing of signals received by each of its front feet, the elephant can determine the sound’s direction.

10) Like human toddlers, great apes, magpies and dolphins, elephants have passed the mirror test—they recognize themselves in a mirror.

11) Elephants can get sunburned, so they take care to protect themselves. “Elephants will throw sand on their backs and on their head. They do that to keep them from getting sunburned and to keep bugs off,” Tony Barthel, curator of the Elephant House and the Cheetah Conservation Station at Smithsonian’s National Zoo, told Smithsonian.com. To protect their young, adult elephants will douse them in sand and stand over the little ones as they sleep.

12) Stories of African elephants getting drunk from the fermented fruit of the marula tree are not true, a study concluded. The animals don’t eat the fruit off the ground where it ferments, the fresh fruit doesn’t stay in the elephant’s digestive tract long enough to ferment, and even if an elephant did eat the fermented fruit, it would take 1,400 pieces to get one drunk.

13) Elephants have evolved a sixth toe, which starts off as cartilage attached to the animal’s big toe but is converted to bone as the elephant ages.

14) Some farmers in Kenya protect their fields from elephants by lining the borders with beehives. Not only are their crops saved, but the farmers also get additional income from the honey.

How Humans Cause Earthquakes

Some scientists have suggested the weight of water in the lake created by the Zipingpu Dam in China triggered the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (courtesy of flickr user TaylorMiles)

On Saturday, a magnitude 4.0 earthquake shook eastern Ohio, a week after a smaller temblor in the region worried officials so badly that they halted work on a fluid-injection well in Youngstown.
This wasn’t the first case in which the injection of fluids into the earth has been linked with earthquakes. In April, for example, the English seaside resort town of Blackpool shook from a magnitude 2.3 earthquake, one of several quakes now known to have been caused by hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking,” which involves pumping large amounts of fluid into the ground to release natural gas) in the area. The link has been known for decades—a series of quakes in the Denver, Colorado, region in 1967 was caused by fluid injection.

The phenomenon is so well known that Arthur McGarr, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, has developed a method to predict the highest magnitude of an earthquake that could be produced by hydraulic fracturing, carbon sequestration, geothermal power generation or any method that involves injecting fluid deep into the earth. Though the method doesn’t allow scientists to predict the likelihood that such a quake would occur, it will let engineers better plan for worst-case scenarios, McGarr told Nature.
Hydraulic fracturing naturally causes small tremors, but bigger quakes may occur if the liquid migrates beyond the area where it’s injected. The New York Times reports:

The larger earthquakes near Blackpool were thought to be caused the same way that quakes could be set off from disposal wells—by migration of the fluid into rock formations below the shale. Seismologists say that these deeper, older rocks, collectively referred to as the “basement,” are littered with faults that, although under stress, have reached equilibrium over hundreds of millions of years.

“There are plenty of faults,” said Leonardo Seeber, a seismologist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Conservatively, one should assume that no matter where you drill, the basement is going to have faults that could rupture.”

Earthquakes caused by fracking are of particular interest right now because the number of wells, particularly in the United States, has been skyrocketing (along with reports of nasty environmental consequences, such as flammable water). But this is only one way that humans are causing the earth to quake. Mining (taking weight from the earth), creating lakes with dams (adding weight on top of the earth) and extracting oil and gas from the earth have caused at least 200 earthquakes in the last 160 years, Columbia University earthquake scientist Christian Klose told Popular Science.

Klose’s research has demonstrated that coal mining was responsible for Australia’s most damaging earthquake in recent memory, the magnitude 5.6 Newcastle earthquake of 1989. And in 2009, he was one of several scientists who suggested that the magnitude 7.9 earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province in 2008, which left 80,000 dead, could have have been triggered by the Zipingpu Dam. (That wasn’t the first time a dam was linked to an earthquake—Hoover Dam shook frequently as Lake Mead filled.)

It can be easy to look at our planet and think we’re too small to really do much damage, but the damage we can do can have severe consequences for ourselves. ”In the past, people never thought that human activity could have such a big impact,” Klose told Wired, “but it can.”

Why Not All Chili Peppers Are Hot

If spicy fruits are helpful to a chili plant, why aren't all chili peppers hot? (courtesy of flickr user dbeck03)

When we last saw University of Washington ecologist Joshua Tewksbury, in the April 2009 issue of Smithsonian, he was bouncing along the back roads of Bolivia, accompanied by our writer Brendan Borrell, in search of chili peppers. He was hoping to answer what should have been a simple question: Why are chilies spicy?
Capsaicin, the molecule that gives chilies their heat, it turns out, helps protect chili fruits from fungal rot and munching rodents without deterring the birds that the plant needs to distribute the seeds in the fruit.

But that leads to a new question—why aren’t all chili peppers hot? Tewksbury’s lab has an answer to that, too, in a study published last month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
David Haak, then a graduate student in Tewksbury’s lab and now a post-doc at Indiana University, studied Capsicum chacoense, a species of wild chili in Bolivia that occurs either in populations of only hot chilies or in mixed populations with hot and mild fruits. Haak, Tewksbury and their colleagues found that in the wettest parts of their research area, only hot chilies grew. The driest places, though, were home to mixed populations, with only 15 to 20 percent of the plants producing spicy fruits.

The researchers collected hot and mild fruits from three sites in their study area, spanning the range of rainfall and  population types. They grew the seeds in the lab, giving the plants either plenty of water–mimicking the wettest areas in which the plants grew–or not enough water, as in the dry areas.

Both mild and spicy plants grew well when there was plenty of water, the researchers found. And there was no cost to producing lots of capsaicin–spicy plants produced just as many seeds as mild ones. But because Fusarium, the fungus that attacks chili plants in Bolivia, likes wet conditions, the mild plants would be more vulnerable and not able to survive. That’s why spicy chilies dominated the wetter areas of Bolivia, Haak and his colleagues concluded.
When the plants were subjected to drought-like conditions, though, spicy plants produced only half the number of seeds as the mild ones. GrrlScientist at Maniraptora: Tastes Like Chicken explains:

Plants lose water through microscopic pores in their leaves and stems, known as stomata. During the day, plants release oxygen to the environment in exchange for carbon dioxide through their stomata, but this vital gas exchange comes at a price: water loss. Knowing that the density of stomata on a plant’s leaves directly affect water loss, the team compared stomata density from 30 age- and height-matched pungent and non-pungent chili plants.

They found that pungent plants have a 40 percent greater stomata density on their leaves than do non-pungent plants. Even after cross-breeding pungent with non-pungent plants and then identifying whether the fruits were pungent, the team found that the pungent crossbred chilis still had a greater stomata density than non-pungent crossbreds.

Because the spicy plants lose more water, they’re not able to produce as many seeds. And with Fusarium not as big of a problem in the dry conditions and the mild plants’ greater ability to hold onto water and produce more seeds, those plants are able to thrive in the driest conditions and easily outgrow their spicy brethren there.

The Tallest Mountains in the Solar System

Mauna Loa (as seen from nearby Mauna Kea) is tall enough to have snow, at least when the volcano isn't erupting (courtesy of flickr user superfluity)

If asked to name the tallest mountain on Earth, most people would answer Mount Everest. They’d be wrong–Everest is the highest peak on the planet, but mountains are measured from their base to their peak, and Everest’s base sits far above sea level on the Tibetan Plateau. And when you start looking at the tallest (known) mountains in the solar system, Mount Everest, at only 2.3 to 2.9 miles tall (depending on where you decide the mountain’s base is located), doesn’t even make the list:

(1) Olympus Mons - 15.5 miles
The largest volcano on Mars is also the solar system’s tallest mountain. Measuring 374 miles in diameter, it covers about the same amount of land as the state of Arizona. Olympus Mons is located near three other volcanoes known as the Tharsis Montes. The volcanoes in this area are all 10 to 100 times bigger than Earth’s largest volcanoes. They can get this big because, unlike on Earth, there are no plate tectonics on Mars that can drag a volcano away from its hotspot–they just sit in one volcanically active place and grow bigger and bigger.

(2) Rheasilvea Mons – 13.2 miles
Rheasilvea, on the asteroid Vesta, sits at the center of a 300-mile wide crater. The asteroid is currently the subject of a close study by the spacecraft Dawn, which will continue to circle it through the first half of 2012 before moving on for a rendezvous with the asteroid Ceres in 2015. Rheasilvea Mons sometimes gets named the tallest peak in the solar system, but even with satellites and spacecraft monitoring faraway planets, moons and asteroids, measuring these things is rather difficult (which should explain why the numbers for heights given here may differ from what you’ve seen elsewhere–sources often disagree).

(3) Equatorial Ridge of Iapetus – 12.4 miles
Saturn’s moon of Iapetus has a couple of weird features. The first is a huge crater that gives the moon the appearance of the Death Star from Star Wars. The second is an equatorial ridge, with some peaks reaching over 12 miles high, that makes Iapetus look like a walnut. Scientists aren’t quite sure how the ridge formed, but they have hypothesized that it was either the remnant of the moon’s earlier oblate shape, icy material pushed up from beneath the moon’s surface or even the remainder of a collapsed ring.

(4) Ascreaus Mons – 11.3 miles
This volcano on Mars is the tallest of the three volcanoes known as the Tharsis Montes, which appear in a straight line near Olympus Mons. Ascreaus Mons has a central caldera that is 2.1 miles deep. It was first spotted by the Mariner 9 spacecraft in 1971 and then named the North Spot, as it appeared as a spot in a dust storm photographed by the spacecraft. Later images revealed it was a volcano and the spot was remaned.

(5) Boösaule Montes – 10.9 miles
Boösaule Montes is a collection of three mountains on Io, a moon of Jupiter, all connected by a raised plain. The mountain termed “South” is the tallest of the three. One side of the mountain has such a steep slope, 40 degrees, that scientists think that it was the site of a huge landslide.

(6) Arsia Mons – 9.9 miles
This is second tallest volcano from the Tharsis Montes on Mars. Based on the discovery of certain geological features on the volcano, scientists think that Arsia Mons may be home to glaciers.

(7) Pavonis Mons – 8.7 miles
Pavonis Mons is the shortest of the three volcanoes that make up the Tharsis Montes, and it has also been suggested to be home to glaciers.

(8) Elysium Mons - 7.8 miles
This Martian volcano is a big fish in a little pond, metaphorically speaking. It is the tallest volcano in the Elysium Planitia, a region in Mars’ Eastern Hemisphere that is the second largest volcanic system on the planet.

(9) Maxwell Montes - 6.8 miles
This mountain range on Venus stretches for 530 miles. Scientists aren’t sure how the mountains formed, but they think they are home to large amounts of fool’s gold (iron pyrite).

(10) Mauna Loa – 5.7 miles
Earth just squeaks into this top ten list with this active volcano on the island of Hawaii (remember, mountains are measured from their base to their peak, and Mauna Loa’s base is far beneath the ocean surface). Mauna Loa is one of many active and dormant volcanoes created by a hotspot beneath the Pacific Ocean plate. As the plate moves over the hotspot, which has been active for at least 30 million years, new islands begin to form and old ones, no longer being built up through volcanic activity, whither wither away.

What Is Enriched Uranium?

A sample of highly enriched uranium (via wikimedia commons)

Enriched uranium is back in the news with a report that Iran has begun creating the stuff at a heavily fortified site in the north of that country. But what is enriched uranium?
Uranium is element 92 on the periodic table–every molecule has 92 protons in its nucleus. The number of neutrons can vary, and that’s the difference between the three isotopes of uranium that we find here on Earth. Uranium-238 (92 protons plus 146 neutrons) is the most abundant form, and about 99.3 percent of all uranium is U-238. The rest is U-235 (0.7 percent), with a trace amount of U-234.

Uranium has a bad reputation (it is radioactive, after all), but U-238 has a very long half-life, meaning that it can be handled fairly safely as long as precautions are taken (as seen in the video below). More importantly here, though, U-238 isn’t fissile–it can’t start a nuclear reaction and sustain it.

U-235, however, is fissile; it can start a nuclear reaction and sustain it. But that 0.7 percent in naturally occurring uranium isn’t enough to make a bomb or even a nuclear reactor for a power plant. A power plant requires uranium with three to four percent U-235 (this is known as low-enriched or reactor-grade uranium), and a bomb needs uranium with a whopping 90 percent U-235 (highly enriched uranium).

Uranium enrichment, then, is the process by which a sample of uranium has its proportion of U-235 increased.
The first people to figure out how to do this were the scientists of the Manhattan Project during World War II. They came up with four methods to separate the U-235 from uranium ore: gaseous diffusion, electromagnetic separation, liquid thermal diffusion and centrifugation, though at the time they deemed centrifugation not practical for large-scale enrichment.

The most common methods for enriching uranium today are centrifugation (decades of development have made this method more efficient than it was during WWII) and gaseous diffusion. And other methods are being developed, including several based on laser techniques.
Highly enriched uranium, the type used in bombs, is expensive and difficult to create, which is why it remains a barrier, though not an insurmountable one, for countries wishing to develop nuclear weapons. And once a nation develops the capability for enriching uranium beyond reactor grade (Iran has reportedly begun to produce uranium enriched up to 20 percent), the path to weapons-grade uranium is significantly sped up.

Seven Reasons to Believe Electric Cars Are Getting in Gear

The Chevy Spark

Sunday was National Plug In Day. Missed it? So did just about everyone else in America.
For a few thousand people, though, it was a chance to stand up and shout, “I drive an electric car and I’m not half as crazy as you think I am.” A few cities in California held oddly quiet electric vehicle parades; other places staged tailpipe-free tailgate parties.
But you have to keep things in perspective. Through September, Nissan had sold a little more than 7,000 all-electric Leafs in the U.S., while fewer than 4,000 people have bought GM’s semi-electric Volt. And no more than 2,000 high-end Teslas have been sold around the world since 2008. By contrast, Ford sells more than 10,000 F-series pickups in a week.

Still, this is shaping up to be a sweet little watershed month for electric vehicles, aka EVs.
(1) Nissan announced that, together with researchers at Kansai University, it has developed the technology to fully charge an electric car battery in only 10 minutes. It could be years before such an efficient charging station is widely available, but the fact that it’s coming eases one of the bigger anxieties about EVs—that it takes forever to get a full charge.
(2) Last week, seven car companies—Ford, GM, Audi, BMW, Daimler-Chrysler, Porsche and Volkswagen—agreed to standardize charging stations in North America. Which means you won’t have to drive all over town looking for a place to charge your particular EV. There goes that anxiety.

(3) GM also announced last week that it will start selling a truly all-electric vehicle called the Spark in 2013. (The Volt’s back-up gas engine makes it a plug-in hybrid.)
(4) The sequel to the scathing documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? opens in theaters this Friday. The new film, Revenge of the Electric Car, is a lovefest by comparison. This time, filmmaker Chris Paine had the cooperation of the three companies selling EVs in the United States—Nissan came on board after it heard GM and Tesla were in. One of the screening parties will actually be held in a Tesla showroom and each of the three carmakers will be showing off models.
So now that everyone’s holding hands, the electric car is finally ready to silently roar into the future, right?

Reality check: GM’s commitment to start rolling out all-electric Sparks in 2013 is for only 2,000 vehicles. (Talk about putting half a toe in the water.) Some think this is more about GM wanting to qualify for zero emission credits in California than it is about getting serious about EVs.
And the Chevy Volt is touted by car dealers for its “halo effect.” People who haven’t been in a Chevy showroom in years are stopping by to look at the Volt. But they aren’t ready to go electric yet, and some end up buying gas-powered Chevys. In fact, GM now recommends that Chevy dealers always keep one Volt around.

The Sport of Camel Jumping

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Legend has it that camel jumping began many generations ago with a dare between two Zaraniq tribesmen.
Adam Reynolds

Among the members of the Zaraniq tribe on the west coast of Yemen are, apparently, the world’s only professional camel jumpers. “This is what we do,” says Bhayder Mohammed Yusef Qubaisi, a champion bounder. The presumably ancient sport was recently documented by Adam Reynolds, a 30-year-old photojournalist from Bloomington, Indiana.

Reynolds spent six months in Yemen before being deported this past May, he believes for photographing leaders of a secessionist movement. Politically, Yemen is troubled, with a repressive but weak government beleaguered by insurgents in the largely lawless northern and southern regions. U.S. authorities have expressed concern that a large number of Al Qaeda and other terrorists operate there.

The Zaraniq live in the Tihama-al-Yemen, a desert plain on the Red Sea, and they are mostly poor; Qubaisi’s home is a one-room hut. To see the daredevils in action, Reynolds traveled a dirt track to a village southeast of the coastal city of al-Hudaydah. “It was pretty amazing,” he says of the acrobatic athletics. “They did it with such ease and grace. Afterward, though, I wondered why there hasn’t been a Yemeni long jump Olympic champion yet.”

California’s Disappearing Apple Orchards

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Though apples are the nation's most popular fruit, they are relatively worthless in Sonoma County, California.
Patti McConville / Alamy

Sonoma County is among the most esteemed wine-growing areas in the world, but it used to be famous for a different crop. Located just north of San Francisco, this region of rolling hills, vast dairy spreads and conifer forests flanking the coast was once the heart of a thriving apple industry. In its heyday in the early and mid 20th century, more than 13,000 acres of apple orchards blanketed the county. These groves consisted of scores of varieties and supported hundreds of farmers.

But one by one, Sonoma County’s apple farmers are giving up. Though apples are the nation’s most popular fruit, they are relatively worthless in Sonoma County, where wine grapes draw more than ten times the price per ton and where imported apples on local market shelves are often cheaper than locally grown ones. Today, fewer than 3,000 acres of apple trees remain countywide, and just one processing and packing plant is still in business.

“The industry as a whole is almost finished,” says Dave Hale, who began growing apples three decades ago on the outskirts of Sebastopol, a hub of artists, hippies and farmers. Since then, Hale has watched the industry shrink steadily. In 2010, Hale didn’t even bother harvesting his crop of Rome Beauties. The wholesale price for flawless, tree-ripened fruit was barely 6 cents a pound—$125 per ton, two grand an acre. The sodden, spoiled fruits of last year’s fruit linger on the ground.

Hale’s neighbors have already given up. Standing at the southern edge of his 20-acre orchard, Hale peers through a wire fence at the adjacent property. Among the trees, the weeds stand knee-deep; the orchard was last harvested in 2008. New owners are planning to remove the apple trees and replace them with grapevines. This fate is a tirelessly common one in the county, where 56,000 acres of wine grapes crawl up trellises staked into the earth. On the north side of Hale’s farm, the land has already been converted; an apple orchard until seven years ago, it now bears a bucolic sign at the front gate with calligraphic letters reading, “Susanna’s Vineyard.”
Wine grapes are where the money is, and with a ton of Sonoma County grapes going for $2,000 on average, the incentive for apple farmers to switch to grapes or sell out is huge. Farmer Ted Klopt succumbed to this temptation ten years ago, when he was receiving just $120 per ton of apples. He planted his orchards in Pinot Noir grapes. He has no regrets. He says he grew many kinds of apples, which ripened at different times between July and November, keeping him and his crew working steadily throughout the autumn. By contrast, his grapes, when deemed ready for the crush, can be stripped from the vines all at once. “Grapes take less work,” Klopt says. “I can harvest in one or two days instead of over four months, and I get more money.”

The local wine industry’s rise has helped spur the apple industry’s fall, but another force is also at play: global competition and the bizarre economic dynamic that can make goods produced half the world away cheaper than those from down the road. Chile, New Zealand and Australia all export either fresh apples or juice concentrate to the United States. But no nation now plays as pivotal a role in the global apple industry as China. In its northwestern provinces on and around the Loess Plateau, a colossal expansion of apple orchards has occurred since the early 1990s, when China produced about the same amount of apples as America. Today, Chinese apples outnumber American apples seven to one and in 2010 amounted to 36 million tons–roughly half of all apples grown on earth. What’s more, they’re dirt cheap–some less than 2 cents a pound, according to a 2010 U.S. Department of Agriculture report.

China’s fresh apples are tumbling into foreign markets worldwide, undercutting prices of locally grown fruit. In Australia, the first Chinese apples since the 1920s entered the country in January 2011, raising objections from local industry leaders and farmers, who urged shoppers not to buy them. China’s apples are barred from import into the United States, but not its apple juice concentrate, which is what is crushing Sonoma County’s farmers. This product, often shipped frozen, is the basic ingredient of much of the world’s apple juice and other juice products. China is now the world’s largest exporter of apple juice concentrate, and its biggest buyer is the United States, where two-thirds of all apple juice consumed comes from China.

Lee Walker, a third-generation owner of one of the oldest apple farms in Sonoma County, remembers when the apple business first changed dramatically. “In the 1980s, China started exporting juice concentrate and selling it for half of our price,” Walker says. “We lost our floor.”
The facilities that bought and processed his apples and those of other Sonoma County farmers went under as national produce companies turned increasingly to the cheap concentrate from China, and by 2004, Manzana Products Company, a large gray aerodrome-like facility, was the last processor in town.

Elsewhere, along the roadways and bike paths that cut through the area’s woods, relics of the apple-growing glory days remain: A pair of rail cars once used by an apple shipper lie in a field; a cluster of warehouses, once home to an apple-processing company, contain steel tanks full of wine. And in a tidy suburban cul-de-sac on Gail Lane, old apple trees sprout here and there from the trimmed green lawns, reminders of the day when this was a 20-acre orchard.
Farmer Gene Calvi lives here. While he has maintained the six acres of trees behind his home, his neighbors have removed nearly all their apple trees over the past 30 years and replaced them with neat hedges, rock gardens and grassy lawns. Calvi thinks that Sonoma County’s apple industry may be doomed. “I just don’t see what can keep it together,” he says. Calvi notes that Manzana was recently offering farmers $45 per ton for bruised or otherwise damaged “vinegar apples.”

“It costs me about $40 per ton to pay my sons to clean them up,” Calvi says. “That leaves me five bucks per ton.”

Preparing for a New River

“We want them to think, ‘maybe science is something I could do,’” coastal geoscientist Rob Young said of tribal youths, who took part in a camp focusing on the area’s spiritual heritage.
Brian Smale

The turquoise, snow-fed Elwha River crashes through the cedar forests of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. In the early 1900s, the river was dammed to generate electricity for a nearby logging town, but the dams devastated the Klallam Indians who had lived along the Elwha for thousands of years. The structures blocked the river’s salmon runs and flooded a sacred place on the riverbanks considered the tribe’s creation site.

Now the two antique dams are being dismantled—the largest and most ambitious undertaking of its kind in U.S. history. Demolition began this past September and will take three years to complete. It will free up some 70 miles of salmon habitat and allow the fish to reach their upstream spawning grounds again. Scientists expect a boom in bald eagles, bear and other creatures that gorge on salmon.

The Klallam people, who have lobbied for the dams’ removal for decades, are preparing their children for the river’s renaissance. The Elwha Science Education Project, hosted by NatureBridge, an environmental education organization, has held camps and field trips for youths from the Lower Elwha Klallam and other tribes to acquaint them with the changing ecosystem—and maybe spark an interest in watershed science.
“We want them to say, ‘I could be fixing this river,’” says Rob Young, the coastal geoscientist who designed the program. “‘I could be helping it heal. I could be uncovering sacred sites. That can be me. And it should be me.’”

When I visited a camp, held in Olympic National Park, some of the middle schoolers already knew the Elwha’s saga well; others couldn’t spell the river’s name. But for a week, all of them were immersed in ecology and ancestral culture. They went on a hike to a nearby hot spring. They listened to tribal stories. They played Plenty o’ Fish, a rather cerebral game in which they weighed a fisheries biologist’s advice about salmon harvests against a greedy grocery store agent’s bribes. They studied how their ancestors pounded fern roots into flour, made snowberries into medicine and smoked salmon over alder wood fires.

The kids helped repot seedlings in a park nursery where hundreds of thousands of plants are being grown to replant the river valley after the reservoirs are drained. The nursery manager, Dave Allen, explained how important it is that invasive plants don’t elbow out the native species when the soil is exposed and vulnerable. “You guys will have lived your lives and this will still be evolving and changing into forest,” Allen told the kids. “When you are old people—older than I am, even—you’ll still be seeing differences.”

The highlight of the week was a canoe journey and campout across Lake Crescent. The kids occupied two huge fiberglass canoes. Each crew had dark designs on the other, with much splashing between the boats, and they wanted to race, but their competitive passions outstripped their paddling skills and the canoes turned in slow circles.
Dinner that night, cooked over a fire among the fragrant cedars, was native foods, supplemented by teriyaki chicken bused over from the dining hall. The steamed stinging nettles tasted something like spinach. The kids gagged over the raw oysters, but when the counselors cooked the shellfish on the campfire rocks, everybody asked for seconds.

Afterward, the children sang one of the tribe’s few surviving songs. Far from an enthusiastic paddling anthem, the haunting “Klallam Love Song” is about absence, longing and the possibility of return. Tribal members would sing it when their loved ones were away. The words are simple, repeated over and over. “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” they would cry. “You are so very far far away; my heart aches for you.”

Scandinavians’ Strange Holiday Lutefisk Tradition

Lutefisk is both a delicacy and a tradition among Scandinavian-Americans.
Courtesy of Kyle Nabilcy / Flickr

Although the doors don’t open until 11 a.m., the parking lot is already filling up on a Friday morning at Lakeview Lutheran Church in Madison, Wisconsin. Inside, volunteers busily set tables, stir boiling pots and dish out plates of food they’ve been planning and preparing for weeks. Outside, pink-cheeked diners decked in Nordic sweaters head up the steps, eager for their annual taste of lye-soaked cod drenched in melted butter.

“I like lutefisk! It tastes good to me,” says Nelson Walstead with a laugh. Walstead, a Norwegian-American, is the chief organizer of Lakeview Lutheran’s annual lutefisk dinner. “It makes me feel good to know we are keeping the tradition alive, and that we’re passing this on to the next generation,” he says.

It seems only natural that the descendants of the Vikings, perhaps history’s greatest tough guys, would celebrate a food prepared with a caustic and highly dangerous substance. Lutefisk—codfish (fisk) preserved in lye (lut)—is both a delicacy and a tradition among Scandinavian-Americans, who serve the chemical-soaked, gelatinous fish with a warm and friendly smile. Lutefisk, or lutfisk in Swedish, is a traditional dish in Norway, Sweden, and parts of Finland.
But today, Scandinavians rarely eat lutefisk. Far more lutefisk is consumed in the United States, much of it in church and lodge basements. In fact, the self-proclaimed “lutefisk capital of the world” isn’t in Norway but in Madison, Minnesota, where a fiberglass codfish named “Lou T. Fisk” welcomes visitors to this lye-fish loving town. The lutefisk dinner is an annual fall and winter tradition at scores of Lutheran churches and Nordic fraternal groups throughout the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest or anywhere with a large Scandinavian-American population. Strangely, these children of immigrants celebrate a tradition that connects them to their ancestral home, even as many Scandinavians have moved on.

“These dinners represent important traditions in both families and communities, and for some, they are a valued connection to culture and heritage,” says Carrie Roy, a Scandinavian cultural scholar and creator of the film Where the Sacred Meets the Quivering Profane: Exploring the Public and Private Spheres of Lutefisk “While the food tradition certainly originated in Scandinavia, the immigrant communities—especially their churches and cultural heritage lodges—have played a major role in developing the phenomenon of lutefisk dinners.”
Lutefisk starts as cod, traditionally caught in the cold waters off Norway. It’s then dried to the point that it attains the feel of leather and the firmness of corrugated cardboard. Water alone can’t reconstitute the fish, so it’s soaked in lye. Yes, lye, the industrial chemical used to unclog drains and dispose of murder victims, the one that explodes when it comes in contact with aluminum. Incidentally, it’s the same chemical that gives pretzels that deep, shiny brown, cures fresh olives for eating, and what makes bagels gleam; these foods just don’t advertise this fact like lutefisk does. The fish is then repeatedly rinsed before being shipped off for cooking and eating. But it’s still so close to toxic that the state of Wisconsin specifically exempts lutefisk from classification as a toxic substance in Section 101.58 (2)(j)(f) of its laws regulating workplace safety.

A strong fishy odor wafts through the stairwell at Lakeview Lutheran as diners dig into steaming platters of lutefisk served family style. Melted butter sits in ceramic pitchers for easy pouring, though other dinners feature a mustard or cream sauce. The fish itself is flaky and a slightly translucent white in color. While still firm in places, the fish tends to be slippery and a little squishy, and the whole platter quivers a bit as it makes its way down the table.

The rest of the meal is a fairly standard slate of starchy seasonal fare: mashed potatoes with gravy, creamy coleslaw, cranberries, green beans and a big bowl of mashed rutabagas that are nearly indistinguishable at quick glance from the mashed potatoes. A pile of rolled lefse, the Scandinavian potato flatbread similar in appearance to a flour tortilla, sits in the center of the table beside sticks of butter and bowls of brown sugar, lefse’s usual dressing.
Lutefisk is a polarizing dish, even among those at the dinners.

“I won’t touch the stuff. My wife was the Norwegian one,” says Ed, who has come to Lakeview’s dinner for a decade or more. “I like to come, though. And I really like the lefse!”
In the wrong hands, lutefisk can turn into slimy glop. For the haters, there’s always meatballs, a hand-rolled peace offering for mixed marriages of Scandinavians to spouses of different ethnic heritages, and for those with Scandinavian blood who object to lutefisk’s texture and intense odor.

The First Butchers?

Butchered bone? These marks may offer the first evidence of butchery and meat-eating in human evolution.
Credit: Dikika Research Project

Marks on the bones of two antelopes uncovered in Ethiopia may indicate that hominids were using sharp stones to butcher their meat 3.4 million years ago. If so, the discovery represents the earliest evidence of stone tool use by a human ancestor. "This find will definitely force us to revise our textbooks on human evolution, since it pushes the evidence for tool use and meat eating in our family back by nearly a million years," says paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

The age of the cut marks pegs them as the handiwork of Australopithecus afarensis, a species made famous by the 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton nicknamed Lucy, says Alemseged. That suggests our ancestors were already using sharp stones to cut meat when their brains and bodies were barely bigger than a chimpanzee’s. Although the earliest known stone tools don’t appear until 800,000 years later—also in Ethiopia—the marked bones may offer a glimpse of the first stage of tool use, when hominins were beginning to use sharp rocks but perhaps not yet making their own stone flakes.

In January 2009, Alemseged and other members of an international team of researchers—known as the Dikika Research Project—found the bones in the Afar Depression of Ethiopia. The researchers were using a new method to collect every scrap of bone from large mammals so they could reconstruct the ancient environment there. Archaeologist Shannon McPherron of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says he picked up an unimpressive rib from a cow-sized ungulate and saw two "obvious, V-shaped cut marks." A few moments later, he found a thighbone shaft from a goat-sized antelope, with many marks on it. "In this case, they were incredibly obvious cut marks. But they were so old, we wanted to play it cautious," says McPherron.

Back at camp, the researchers examined the bones under a microscope and felt confident that the marks were made when a hominin cut flesh from the bones and pounded the bones open for marrow. Later, the bones were given to paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean of Arizona State University, Tempe, who showed that the marks were made by stone rather than by carnivore teeth. Other members of the team used secondary electron imaging and energy-dispersive x-ray spectrometry to show that the marks were created before the bones fossilized and also found a tiny piece of rock embedded in a cut mark, perhaps left during the butchering.

Radiometric dating of the sediments at the site shows the marked bones date to almost 3.4 million years ago—a time when the only known hominin in east Africa was A. afarensis. To butcher ungulates as large as a cow, the researchers say, A. afarensis must have ventured into dangerous terrain to compete with other carnivorous scavengers, such as hyenas. The team reports its findings in the 12 August issue of Nature.

"This is really a very exciting find," says archaeologist David Braun of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who was not involved with the work. "This find emphasizes that tool use and carnivory have very deep roots in human ancestry." Others, though, say it will take stone tools—and marks on more than two bones—to prove that hominins, rather than crocodiles or other animals, made those cuts. "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence," says paleoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley.

New Dates for Egypt's Pharaohs

Date with destiny. Papyrus records (lower left) and radiocarbon analysis of plant remains (upper left) give similar dates for the reigns of Egyptian kings such as Djoser, buried in the Step Pyramid at Saqqara (main photo).
Credit: (pyramid) Anita Quiles; (papyrus and bowl insets) Ezra Marcus
Just when did Egyptian pharaohs such as King Tut and Rameses II rule? Historians have heatedly debated the exact dates. Now a radiocarbon study concludes that much of the assumed chronology was right, though it corrects some controversial dates and may overturn a few pet theories.

"This is an extremely important piece of research that shows clearly that historical dating methods and radiocarbon dates are compatible for ancient Egypt," says Kate Spence, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Egyptian records, such as the writings of the 3rd century B.C.E. historian Manetho and inscriptions found at key sites such as Saqqara and Karnak, provide what are called "floating chronologies" because they are internally consistent but not anchored to absolute dates. On the other hand, they sometimes refer to astronomical events whose dates can be calculated today. Thus, scholars are confident that they are not wildly off the mark. But it's difficult to be precise. For example, the first known pyramid, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, was built as a tomb for King Djoser, and historians usually put the beginning of his reign between 2667 and 2592 B.C.E. But one recent paper by Spence, based on astronomical calculations, put it as much as 75 years later. Radiocarbon dating has been too imprecise to resolve these contradictions because in this period it usually has error ranges of between 100 and 200 years.

A team led by Christopher Bronk Ramsey of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom adopted a two-pronged strategy to get around radiocarbon's limitations. First, researchers searched museum collections around the world for plant remains directly associated with the reigns of particular kings or periods, often using offerings from pyramids where the kings were buried. The 211 plant samples were radiocarbon dated.

Second, the team used a mathematical modeling approach called Bayesian statistics to compare the patterns in the radiocarbon and historical dates and come up with the most likely correlation between them. The researchers constructed a separate model for each of the three main Egyptian periods: Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom. This allowed them to increase the precision of radiocarbon dating of each period to 76, 53, and 24 years, respectively.

As the researchers will report in tomorrow's issue of Science, they found that the Old Kingdom, which kicked off with Djoser's reign, began between 2691 and 2625 B.C.E. The New Kingdom, which starts with the reign of Ahmose, began between about 1570 and 1544 B.C.E. New Kingdom pharoah Rameses II, considered the greatest of the Egyptian kings by historians, clocks in between 1297 and 1273 B.C.E., and King Tut between 1353 to 1331 B.C.E. The dating ranges are earlier than some historians had previously proposed. For example, in a 2000 Nature paper, Spence argued, based on the astronomical alignments of Egyptian pyramids, that Djoser's reign was somewhat later. "I am more than happy to accept" the new results, Spence says, adding that the Old Kingdom dating is "particularly important" because "this is the first time there has been anything firm to which to pin our historical relative chronologies."
Yet the new study does not resolve all of the outstanding issues. In a Perspective accompanying the paper, archaeologist Hendrik Bruins of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel points out that one major controversy remains unresolved: the timing of the massive eruption of the volcanic island of Thera in the Aegean Sea, which transformed the history of the eastern Mediterranean and has important implications for understanding the relationship between Egypt and the Minoans, another powerful culture of the time. Previous radiocarbon dating suggests that the eruption took place at least 100 years before the New Kingdom began, which the new dating puts at no earlier than 1570 B.C.E. But radiocarbon and historical dating by University of Vienna archaeologist Manfred Bietak's team at Tell el-Dab'a in Egypt has concluded that the Thera eruption took place during the New Kingdom era.

Bietak says that although the new study is a "serious and innovative approach," the team's need to use Bayesian statistics to narrow its radiocarbon date ranges "expose[s] the weakness of radiocarbon chronology." But Sturt Manning, an archaeologist at Cornell University, says that the field must now accept that "there is something wrong" with the stratigraphy and dating of the site of Tell el-Dab'a rather than the chronology as a whole.

Elephants Have an Alarm Call for Bees

Run away! Elephants run from bees while making the "bee rumble."
Credit: Lucy King/Oxford Universtiy

East Africa’s elephants face few threats in their savanna home, aside from humans and lions. But the behemoths are terrified of African bees, and with good reason. An angry swarm can sting elephants around their eyes and inside their trunks and pierce the skin of young calves. Now, a new study shows that the pachyderms utter a distinctive rumble in response to the sound of bees, the first time an alarm call has been identified in elephants.

“It’s an important finding,” says Karen McComb a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. “It not only provides the first demonstration that elephants use alarm calls but also shows that these may have very specific meanings.” Indeed, the study suggests that this alarm call isn’t just a generalized vocalization but means specifically, “Bees!” says Lucy King, a postgraduate zoologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the study’s lead author.

Several other species, including primates and birds, make calls that warn others of danger. Because elephants also have an extensive repertoire of vocalizations, researchers have long suspected that certain calls have specific meanings. But it’s not easy for researchers to link the pachyderms’ calls—many of which are beyond the range of human hearing—to particular events. A few years ago, however, King and colleagues documented the fear elephants have of bees via a series of playback experiments: When they hear buzzing bees, the pachyderms turn and run away, shaking their heads while making a call that King terms the “bee rumble."
To find out if the bee rumble is an alarm call, King's team played the vocalization to 10 elephant families. Six of the herds fled, even though they had neither seen nor heard bees. In contrast, only two families moved away when the scientists played another rumble that lacked a key acoustical feature that they had identified in the bee rumbles, the team reports today in PLoS One.

It may be that elephants can subtly alter a call, simply by changing the position of their lips and tongues, just as humans do to produce different vowels, King says. If so, then elephants may also have warning calls to alert their fellows to humans and lions—much like Diana monkeys in West Africa can call out a leopard alarm or eagle alarm, depending on which predator they spot.
It will take further experiments to show that the bee rumble means bees to other elephants and is not a more general alarm call, says Robert Seyfarth, a biological anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, he says, “the paper adds significantly to our knowledge of animal communication” because it adds elephants to a growing list of animals whose vocalizations are slowly being deciphered.

Did an Unholy Trinity Kill Jesus?

Case closed? A controversial hypothesis may explain what Jesus actually died of.
Credit: Hans Baldung,The Crucifixion of Christ (1512)
There is no death certificate for Jesus of Nazareth—and many believe that he still lives on in a spiritual sense. But that hasn't stopped physicians and medical scholars from trying to diagnose the exact physiological mechanisms that caused the crucified revolutionary to die 2 millennia ago. Now, an American doctor has offered a new hypothesis involving Christ's blood-clotting ability—but other researchers are skeptical.

"As a kid going to church, I'd heard that Jesus died of a 'broken heart,' " says Joseph Bergeron, a private physician associated with The Pain Clinic in Terre Haute, Indiana. But that idea—technically known as the "cardiac rupture" hypothesis, and first published in 1847 by British physician William Stroud—"didn't really make sense, given what we know about the crucifixion." Bergeron became even more intrigued after he was asked to speak to a group of Christian medical students and started looking for a topic that they might find interesting. He discovered that a flock of researchers have tried to explain exactly how Jesus died, and "I just couldn't stop reading," he says.

There are at least six major hypotheses about Christ's death, Bergeron notes in a paper published online this month in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine. Beatings and the stress associated with being nailed to a cross could have caused a blood clot to block a vessel in Christ's lung, for example, leading to death by pulmonary embolism. Other possibilities are that he was unable to breathe due to his awkward hanging position and suffocated, or that he went into lethal shock—ideas supported by studies of what has killed modern torture victims. And although the Bible's book of John reports that Roman soldiers found that Jesus was already dead when they removed him from the cross, it's possible he wasn't and that the final blow was a subsequent spear thrust to his chest that caused a "sudden flow of blood and water," Bergeron writes, quoting from the New Testament. "The idea ... is based on the assumption blood cannot flow from a corpse."

None of these explanations, however, seems to fully fit the harrowing story of the beatings and abuse Jesus suffered prior to and during the crucifixion, Bergeron says. Nor do they jibe with Christ's apparently rapid death just six or so hours after being nailed to the cross.

Instead, Bergeron proposes that a mechanism called "trauma-induced coagulopathy" played a key role. Over the past decade or so, emergency room physicians and others have described a combination of factors that occurs in about 25% of trauma patients and dramatically increases the risk of rapid death. The "lethal triad" includes a rapid drop in body temperature (hypothermia); a failure of the body's blood-clotting ability, leading to uncontrolled bleeding; and abnormal blood acidity, which causes a range of biochemical reactions to go haywire. "Even today's best trauma centers can't control [the lethal] cascade of events," Bergeron says.

Jesus' hypothermia could have been caused by his naked exposure to the cold temperatures of early April, when religious documents say the crucifixion occurred, Bergeron says. And trauma-induced coagulopathy would also explain why Jesus died so rapidly—and "how blood could flow from Jesus' corpse when his chest was impaled," because the condition can cause fluids to pool.

Bergeron's hypothesis isn't going over well with at least one other researcher who has studied death by crucifixion. "I am quite disappointed that this article was accepted for publication," Piers Mitchell, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, writes in an e-mail. The coagulopathy concept "is hardly a radical idea," he says, and Bergeron has failed to fully credit past studies, including a 2006 paper that Mitchell and a colleague wrote for the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, which reviewed 10 hypotheses and found most "unsubstantiated by the available data." In part, that's because Roman-era crucifixions left behind little physical evidence, often because the corpses were "left on a rubbish dump to be eaten by wild dogs and hyenas," according to the paper.

Another problem, Mitchell says, is that Bergeron's study and others rely on "English language translations of historical descriptions for crucifixion in the past, which leads to mistakes from potentially poor translations."

Informed of Mitchell's complaints, Bergeron sounded a bit taken aback. "I really liked their paper, that's why I cited it," he said. It's not yet clear, however, whether the researchers will be able to turn the other cheek.

Meat-Eating Plant Traps Victims Underground

Munch, munch. The Brazilian plant Philcoxia (right) buries its leaves under the sand (lower left) where they trap nematodes (upper left).
Credit: Adapted from C.G. Pereira et al., PNAS Early Edition (9 January 2012)

Patches of white sand dot the Campos Rupestres savanna in Brazil's central highlands. One of the strangest plants that thrives in these tracts of nutrient-poor soil is a spiny, purple-flowered genus called Philcoxia, which inexplicably grows with its leaves buried underground. Researchers have now discovered why: The leaves are a snare for tiny worms that the plant absorbs and eats.

The sand patches, each about 300 meters wide, used to occur in many more areas of Brazil's mountain savannah, says plant ecologist Rafael Oliveira of the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil. But they are very vulnerable to environmental change, and "real biological treasures might be disappearing," he says. Those treasures include Philcoxia, whose 1-millimeter-wide underground leaves are still able to photosynthesize despite being covered by soil. But Oliveira and colleagues were mystified about where Philcoxia got its raw materials. The plant has only one taproot for taking up water rather than a root network that would be useful for absorbing nutrients from the soil.

Previously, researchers had discovered that Philcoxia's leaves contained structures that resembled the sticky glands seen in many carnivorous plants. When Oliveira and colleagues looked at the leaves under an electron microscope, they noticed tiny roundworms called nematodes sitting on the leaves (inset image). To figure out what the worms were doing there, the researchers created a miniature food chain. They grew bacteria in a culture containing a variant—or isotope—of nitrogen that is heavier than the normal element. They then fed these bacteria to nematodes, who took up the heavy isotope into their own tissues. Finally, the scientists placed these nematodes near the leaves of a few Philcoxia plants and waited.

The next day, the worms had crawled onto the leaves, and the team was able to detect the heavy nitrogen isotope from the worm in the plant's tissues. Within 48 hours, 15% of the heavy nitrogen in the worms had been taken up by the leaves, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This result suggests that not only had the plant eaten the worms, but they constituted a very large part of its diet.

"When I first saw the results, I couldn't believe those underground leaves were actually eating nematodes," Oliveira says. He and his colleagues didn't find any fungi or other organisms associated with the leaves, but Oliveira says they "can't throw out the idea that [Philcoxia] could digest other really small creatures," and he plans to study this further. The researchers also want to know how the plant attracts nematodes to its sticky death trap in the first place.

Although Philcoxia is not the first worm-eating plant to be discovered—plants such as bladderworts catch worms and other critters with the trapdoor in their bubblelike traps—nematodes appear to be especially important to the plant's diet, which is novel, says Aaron Ellison, an ecologist at Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts. "It's a really good study," he says, not the least because "everybody loves carnivorous plants." Even Charles Darwin, writing in 1875, called them "the most wonderful plants in the world."

Physicists Squeeze X-Ray Laser Light Out of Atoms

Pump it up. A blast of x-ray laser light from the LCLS (green) excites neon atoms to produce their own x-ray laser light (red).
Credit: Adapted from N. Rohringer et al., Nature, Vol. 481 (26 January 2012)

Two years ago, physicists fired up the world's first laser to shine out hard x-rays—the high-energy, short-wavelength particles of light needed to probe atomic-scale structure. Shining 10 billion times brighter than any previous x-ray source, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) can determine the structure of crystals from samples a few nanometers across and probe changes in materials that take place in a millionth of a nanosecond. But the $410 million LCLS doesn't look anything like a laser pointer, as it relies on a 3-kilometer-long particle accelerator to generate x-rays. Now, physicists have made a much smaller x-ray laser that works much more like the conventional one you might carry around in your pocket.

The new atomic x-ray laser won't replace the LCLS and other accelerator-based systems. In fact, to make the atomic laser work, researchers blasted neon atoms with x-rays from the LCLS itself. Still, the results mark a conceptual triumph, fulfilling a 45-year-old prediction that such an atomic x-ray laser is possible. "Nobody had done this before, and everybody knew that somebody had to go out and do this," says Philip Bucksbaum, director of SLAC's PULSE Institute for Ultrafast Energy Science in Menlo Park, California, who was not involved in the work. "So this is great."

In a conventional laser, atoms in, say, a gas sit between two mirrors, one only partially reflective. The electrons in an atom can occupy cloudlike quantum states of only certain energies, and an electron that has been "excited" in some way from a lower-energy state to a higher-energy one can emit radiation of a definite wavelength as it returns to its original state. That light induces other excited atoms to radiate photons in the same direction as the original and in quantum lockstep with one another—the hallmark of laser light. The result of such "stimulated emission" is a tsunami of light that shines through the partially reflective mirror.

Until now, however, that scheme hasn't worked for generating x-ray laser light. It requires simultaneously exciting many atoms to very high-energy, very short-lived states. That means applying a staggering amount of power per unit area to the sample. So the LCLS relies on a different scheme. Physicists fire high-energy electrons through a train of magnets called undulators, which make the electrons wiggle back and forth and radiate x-rays. The x-rays then travel along with the electrons and push them into bunches that radiate far more efficiently than individual electrons. Thanks to that feedback, a hugely intense burst of x-ray laser light emerges.
Ironically, that powerful pulse is just the thing for generating x-ray laser light from atoms, too, report Nina Rohringer of the Max Planck Advanced Study Group in Munich, Germany, Jorge Rocca of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and colleagues. They shined pulses from the LCLS, which deliver up to 200 billion megawatts for a few millionths of a nanosecond, onto neon gas. The x-rays would rip the most tightly bound electron out of an atom, leaving hosts of atoms in highly energetic states. An atom could lose its energy when another of its electrons fell into the vacant spot and emitted an x-ray. Through stimulated emission, that would cause other atoms to emit x-rays and create the laser beam, the researchers report today in Nature.

Physicists dreamed up the basic scheme in 1967. But try as they might, experimenters (at least those in civilian labs) never had enough power to push it into the x-ray regime, says Roger Falcone, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Rohringer says she was excited to see the scheme work. "We were jumping up and down and shouting," she says. "I was excited for days."

So what's the classical atomic x-ray laser good for? Compared with the LCLS's beam, the beam from the atoms has a more precisely defined wavelength and better synchronization among the photons. So it might be used for precision spectroscopy and other applications, Rohringer says. However, researchers are working on other ways to stabilize the LCLS's beam, Falcone notes. The atomic laser allows researchers to generate two x-ray pulses of different wavelengths, which could be used to probe materials simultaneously, Rohringer says.

An atomic x-ray laser may have been realized in the 1980s under different circumstances. As part of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, researchers in the United States tried to develop ultrahigh-power x-ray lasers to shoot down nuclear missiles, using underground nuclear explosions to excite atoms. They may have succeeded, but the details are likely classified, Bucksbaum says. "I think this was done, but I don't think much is known about it," he says. "It wouldn't have made a very good scientific instrument."

ScienceShot: Where to Find Fungi to Fuel Orchids

Credit: Melissa McCormick/Smithsonian Institution

Young orchids depend entirely on symbiotic fungi to provide energy for growth, and new research shows that those fungi are finicky, preferring older forests. Scientists had previously speculated that fungal distributions influenced orchid distributions. But separating out the effects of soil condition, such as moisture and acidity, has been difficult. So researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland, planted seeds from three endangered orchid species in plots on six sites in Maryland: three in younger forests aged 50 to 70 years old and three in more mature forests aged 120 to150 years old. The scientists added the symbiotic fungi for each orchid to half of the plots. Over 4 years, they found that fungal abundance was highest in mature forests and that orchid germination and growth depended on an abundance of their partner fungi, not merely their presence. The findings could improve conservation and restoration projects for endangered orchids, the authors write.

Organic Meat Not Free of Drug-Resistant Bacteria

Down on the farm. Even organically raised pigs may harbor MRSA bacteria (inset).
Credit: iStockphoto; Janice Carr/CDC (inset)
If you're paying premium prices for pesticide- and antibiotic-free meat, you might expect that it's also free of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Not so, according to a new study. The prevalence ofone of the world's most dangerous drug-resistant microbe strains is similar in retail pork products labeled "raised without antibiotics" and in meat from conventionally raised pigs, researchers have found.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a drug-resistant form of the normally harmless S. aureus bacterium, kills 18,000 people in the United States every year and sickens 76,000 more. The majority of cases are linked to a hospital stay, where the combination of other sick people and surgical procedures puts patients at risk. But transmission also can happen in schools, jails, and locker rooms (and an estimated 1.5% of Americans carry MRSA in their noses). All of this has led to a growing concern about antibiotic use in agriculture, which may be creating a reservoir of drug-resistant organisms in billions of food animals around the world.

Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa College of Public Health in Iowa City who studies the movement of staph bacteria between animals and people, wondered whether meat products might be another mode of transmission. For the new study, published this month in PLoS ONE, she and colleagues bought a variety of pork products—395 packages in all—from 36 different stores in two big pig farming states, Iowa and Minnesota, and one of the most densely populated, New Jersey.

In the laboratory, the team mixed meat samples "vigorously" with a bacterial growth medium and allowed any microbes present to grow. MRSA, which appears as mauve-colored colonies on agar plates, was genetically typed and tested for antibiotic susceptibility.

The researchers found that 64.8% of the samples were positive for staph bacteria and 6.6% were positive for MRSA. Rates of contamination were similar for conventionally raised pigs (19 of 300 samples) and those labeled antibiotic-free (seven of 95 samples). Results of genetic typing identified several well-known strains, including the so-called livestock-associated MRSA (ST398) as well as common human strains; all were found in conventional and antibiotic-free meat.

Smith says she was surprised by the results. In a related investigation, which has not been published, her group tested pigs living on farms and found that antibiotic-free pigs were free from MRSA, whereas the resistant bug is often found on conventional pig farms.

The study reveals an important data point on the path from farm to fork, yet the source of the MRSA on meat products is unknown, Smith says. "It's difficult to figure out." Transmission of resistant bugs might occur between antibiotic-using and antibiotic-free operations, especially if they're near each other, or it could come from farm workers themselves. Another possibility is that contamination occurs at processing plants. "Processing plants are supposed to be cleaned between conventional and organic animals," she says. "But how well does that actually happen?"

In another recent study, researchers from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, found that beef products from conventionally raised and grass-fed animals were equally likely to be contaminated by antibiotic-resistant Escherichia coli. In a second study by the same group, poultry products labeled "no antibiotics added" carried antibiotic-resistant E. coli and Enterococcus (another bacteria that causes invasive disease in humans), although the microbes were less prevalent than on conventionally raised birds.

"The real question is, where is it coming from, on the farm or post-farm?" says Paul Ebner, a food safety expert who led the Purdue studies. And the biggest question of all, he says, "Is it impacting human health?"

"There's a tremendous amount of interest in this issue—feeding antibiotics to food animals," says Ellen Silbergeld, an expert on health and environmental impacts of industrial food animal production at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. "Thus, determining when amending that practice makes a difference is important."
"The definitive study would take every bacterium and follow that along until it gets in humans—from food supply to causing a certain disease," Smith says. "It would be a huge and costly study that no one's going to do, but that's what the meat producers" say is missing." Meanwhile, Smith says she will continue her investigations of MRSA, one potential transmission point at a time.

North Star May Be Wasting Away

Slimming down? The North Star looks constant, but don't be deceived.
Credit: Wang Jinglei/ Jia Hao/NASA
The North Star, a celestial beacon to navigators for centuries, may be slowly shrinking, according to a new analysis of more than 160 years of observations. The data suggest that the familiar fixture in the northern sky is shedding an Earth's mass worth of gas each year. Some researchers caution, however, that the conclusion depends on certain assumptions about exactly where the star is in its several-billion-year life cycle.

Also known as Polaris, the North Star always sits over the North Pole because it is aligned with Earth's axis. Find it in the night sky, at the end of the Little Dipper's handle, and you don't need a compass to orient yourself. To weigh Polaris, astrophysicist Hilding Neilson of the University of Bonn in Germany and colleagues essentially took its pulse. The star grows dimmer and brighter over a roughly 4-day cycle, and the team studied variation in the length of that cycle. Like all stars, Polaris is made of gas in layers around a core, where nuclear fusion occurs. As its gravity pulls the outermost gas inward, Polaris develops an opaque layer just under the surface that doesn't let light through easily, dimming its glow. Light then builds up beneath this layer and pushes on it like water vapor boiling up under the lid on a saucepan. That light heats the opaque layer, causing it to expand and making it more transparent. The star becomes bigger and brighter until those outer layers of gas fall inward again and the cycle begins anew.
Even that 4-day pulsation isn't constant: In 1844, it was about 12 minutes slower than it is now.
Previously, astronomer David Turner of St. Mary's University in Halifax, Canada, who was not involved in the new analysis, and colleagues compiled an archive including historical measurements of the pulse. Their data set ended in 2004. Neilson and collaborators, including two citizen astronomers, have now added their own observations from the past decade. This long record, from 1844 to the present, shows that the pulse of Polaris runs about 4.5 seconds slower every year.

The changing rate suggests that the structure of the star is evolving. If, as Neilson and collaborators assume, Polaris is an older star that is fusing or "burning" helium nuclei in its core, then its pulse is decreasing too quickly to match the standard model for stellar evolution. "Only if the star is losing a lot of mass can that [discrepancy] be resolved," Neilson says. This mass may leave Polaris's surface in waves, pushed outward as the pent-up light bursts through the opaque layer, and the loss would slow down the star's pulse rate. To account for the relatively lethargic pulse, Polaris must be losing nearly the equivalent of Earth's mass—or a little under a millionth of its own mass—each year, the team reports in the 1 February issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. But never fear, Neilson doesn't think our beacon is hurtling toward oblivion. "Odds are [the mass loss] is episodic," he says.

Done deal? Maybe not, Turner says. The mass-loss argument hinges on the internal behavior of the pulsing star, and Neilson's team assumes that its layers are moving out of sync—when the outer layers are falling in, the inner layers are pushing out and vice versa. Turner suspects that Polaris is pulsing in a simpler way, with both inner and outer layers moving in the same direction, a hypothesis that his team revived in 2005. In this picture, he says, the North Star's changing pulse can fit the models without hemorrhaging mass because the star is in an earlier stage of its evolution—it's not yet burning helium but is instead preparing to blow up as red giant when the core runs out of hydrogen. On the other hand, if Polaris pulses the way Neilson's team describes it, then the North Star would be past the red giant stage and now burning helium in its core.

Polaris's distance from Earth is the key to figuring out which way it pulsates—and its place in stellar evolution. The more complicated pulse would mean that Polaris shines brighter in absolute terms, so to match its observed brightness in the sky, it would have to be farther away than if the pulse was simple. The Hubble telescope should be able to determine whether the North Star is closer to 325 light-years away, supporting Turner's case, or 425 light-years away, supporting Neilson's. "There are many mysteries about Polaris that defy simple explanation," Turner says. "I think I will sit on the fence in this case and await further observational results."

Killer Whale Menu Finally Revealed

On the prowl. A pod of killer whales explores Admiralty Bay for narwhal.
Credit: Gretchen Freund; Steven Ferguson (inset)
What do killer whales dine on in Canada's remote Arctic waters? "Whatever they can catch," local Inuits say, recounting harrowing observations of pods of orcas drowning adult bowhead whales, tossing narwhals as though they were soccer balls, and ripping apart beluga whales. Normally, such stories might be considered just anecdotes. But in an unusual collaboration, marine biologists have helped confirm the tales by talking to the hunters who know the whales best.

To gather observations of killer whales (Orcinus orca), the world's top marine predator, two scientists working with an Inuktitut-speaking interpreter interviewed 105 Inuit hunters, who ranged in age from 30 to over 90 and live in 11 communities along the coastal edge of Nunavut, Canada's northernmost territory. The hunters' accounts proved to be "a gold mine," says Steven Ferguson, a marine biologist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Winnipeg who led the study. The vastness of the region, coupled with the low density of orcas, makes a traditional scientific study difficult. "It would take decades of work, with researchers identifying then following individual whales, to gain this kind of knowledge," says Ferguson, who, because the whales are so widely dispersed, has yet to see an orca in these Arctic waters.

Killer whales have been extensively studied elsewhere, particularly along Canada's west coast, where researchers have identified a resident orca population that eats only fish and a migratory population that targets only marine mammals, particularly gray whales. In the Antarctic, scientists have identified five types of killer whales, each having different habitat, prey preferences, and hunting strategies. Researchers have found a similar pattern among orcas in the Atlantic, tropical Pacific, and Indian oceans.

But "there was a complete vacuum in our knowledge of the ecology of killer whales" in northern Canada until this study, says Andrew Foote, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen who was not involved in the study. Since the Arctic sea ice is melting, orcas are moving into new regions, and scientists want to know more about their prey preferences and hunting behaviors. The hunters' information will help researchers better gauge how this apex predator is likely to affect other species, particularly those that are recovering from the effects of commercial whaling, such as bowheads, narwhals, and beluga whales.

According to the Inuit knowledge, the Arctic killer whales "are primarily mammal eaters," Ferguson says. None of the Inuit who were interviewed had seen a killer whale eating fish. Instead, 73 of the hunters had watched orcas killing ringed seals; 24 had witnessed them hunting and feasting on narwhal (medium-size whales characterized by their single, long tusk); and 17 had seen orcas ramming and drowning adult bowhead whales—animals that are more than twice their size.

The killer whales arrive in the eastern Canadian Arctic as the ice begins to recede in July, just as the other marine mammals begin giving birth to their calves and pups. When hunting, the orcas work in highly coordinated pods, "like wolves," the Inuit said, herding narwhal and beluga whales into deep water and circling them to keep them from escaping. The prey sometimes attempt to get away by fleeing into shallower water. This response is so striking—with waves of animals rushing toward shore—that the Inuit have a specific word for it: "Aalirijuk," the fear of killer whales. Frightened prey might also try to hide in the ice, and the Inuit hunters have seen narwhal skewering killer whales with their tusks, sometimes killing their tormentors.

The study, published this month in Aquatic Biosystems, comes at a time when, as the Arctic sea ice melts due to climate change, killer whales are moving into new areas in Hudson Bay, where even the Inuit have not seen them before.

Although the data are anecdotes, they are "valuable and very interesting," says Robert Pitman, a cetacean expert at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego, California. "Killer whales are normally very careful about the way that they interact with live prey, and we almost never see or hear about the risks involved with hunting large mammals," he says. "Currently, there is considerable controversy within the marine mammal community about how successful killer whales are at taking adults of large whales. ... It seems pretty clear from Ferguson et. al. that killer whales in the Eastern Canadian Arctic are adept at taking adult bowheads."
"It is an excellent example of the role that [traditional knowledge] can play in ... informing traditional science," Alan Springer, a marine ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, adds in an e-mail. Researchers should also attempt to collect similar data in "northern Alaska and Chukotka, where climate change is likely creating opportunities for killer whales to exploit new seas," he says.

"We need a better understanding of the killer whales' role in this ecosystem to help with conservation and management," Ferguson says, noting that the local Inuit rely on the same species the killer whales like to eat. And two of these—the beluga and narwhal—are considered "near threatened" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Is It Safe to Drink Ensure on an Empty Stomach?

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Ensure is a brand of nutritional shake that contains essential vitamins and minerals. Physicians recommend Ensure to patients that have nutritional deficiencies or other conditions that limit their nutritional intake. Because Ensure is considered a meal replacement, you can consume the beverage on an empty stomach or with meals. Consult your physician before you decide to make Ensure a part of your diet.

Identification

There are different types and flavors of Ensure. The basic Ensure helps to replace vitamins and minerals to help make sure that you obtain all of your necessary nutritional needs. Ensure Plus helps you gain or maintain weight. Other types of Ensure target bone health, muscle health, increase immunity or provide extra protein. If you need or want to drink Ensure, the shake comes in several different flavors, including chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, butter pecan and coffee latte.

Nutrition

The standard Ensure shake contains 24 essential vitamins and minerals. One serving size of the shake contains 50 percent of your daily recommended value of vitamin C. The shake is also high in iron and calcium. It is a good source of vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K and many of the B vitamins. One bottle of Ensure has 200 calories and 6 g of fat. The standard Ensure also has 9 g of protein and 1 g of fiber.

Recommendations

The ways you use Ensure will depend on your nutritional needs. Some people need the extra calories and nutrients offered by the shake. However, you can also use Ensure as a meal replacement. You can drink the beverage on an empty stomach. If you have difficulty eating certain meals, Ensure can help add much needed nutrition to your diet. Consume the drink first thing in the morning on an empty stomach or at other times throughout the day as a snack or meal replacement.

Precautions

Consult your doctor for specific recommendations on drinking Ensure. Ensure does contain a high amount of sugar and may be contraindicated with certain conditions, such as diabetes. If you are using Ensure as a meal replacement, you should only replace two meals. Since Ensure does have a high amount of sugar and only a small amount of fiber, you will still need to eat at least one regular meal to obtain the rest of your nutritional needs. This meal should contain grains, with a high amount of fiber.