Eideard

A young grizzly bear hitches a ride on his mum’s back in a bid to prevent his paws getting cold as his mum hunts for food in the freezing snow. Steve Hinch photographed the pair from a safe distance in the Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

After finding gaseous clouds of buckyballs in space last year, astronomers have now discovered the carbon balls in a solid form, around a pair of stars some 6,500 light-years from Earth.

Buckyballs are microscopic spheres, where 60 carbon atoms are arranged — with alternating patterns of hexagons and pentagons — into a football-like pattern. The unusual structure makes them incredibly strong, and ideal candidates for things like superconducting materials, medicines, water purification and armor. They got their name because of their resemblance to the geodesic domes of the architect Buckminster Fuller.

So far, they’ve only been found in gas form in space. In 2010, astronomers using the Spitzer space telescope found the balls in a planetary nebula called Tc 1.

But with this latest discovery, again using data from NASA’s Spitzer space telescope, astronomers found particles consisting of stacked buckyballs. They had stacked together like oranges in a crate to form a solid shape.

“The particles we detected are minuscule, far smaller than the width of a hair, but each one would contain stacks of millions of buckyballs,” said the paper’s lead author Nye Evans of Keele University in England.

The research team was able to identify the solid form of buckyballs in the Spitzer data because they emit light in a unique way that differs from the gaseous form. In all, the team detected enough solid buckyballs to fill the equivalent in volume to 10,000 Mount Everests.

Buckyballs may be more widely distributed in space than anyone thought. They may be common enough to be an essential form of carbon as building blocks for organic substances, organic life.

Photographs of variously mutated brown trout were relegated to an appendix of a scientific study commissioned by the J. R. Simplot Company, whose mining operations have polluted nearby creeks in southern Idaho. The trout were the offspring of local fish caught in the wild that had been spawned in the laboratory. Some had two heads; others had facial, fin and egg deformities.

Yet the company’s report concluded that it would be safe to allow selenium — a metal byproduct of mining that is toxic to fish and birds — to remain in area creeks at higher levels than are now permitted under regulatory guidelines. The company is seeking a judgment to that effect from the Environmental Protection Agency. After receiving a draft report that ran hundreds of pages, an E.P.A. review described the research as “comprehensive” and seemed open to its findings, which supported the selenium variance for Simplot’s Smoky Canyon mine.

But when other federal scientists and some environmentalists learned of the two-headed brown trout, they raised a ruckus, which resulted in further scientific review that found the company’s research wanting.

Now, several federal agencies, an array of environmental groups and one of the nation’s largest private companies are at odds over selenium contamination from the Idaho phosphate mine, the integrity of the company’s research, and what its effect will be on future regulatory policy.

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More than 50 million years ago, the Earth was a hotter place than it is today and horses the size of pet cats roamed the forests of North America, US scientists said on Thursday. These earliest known horses, known as Sifrhippus, actually grew smaller over tens of thousands of years in order to adapt to the higher temperatures of a period when methane emissions spiked, possibly due to major volcanic eruptions.

The research could have implications for how the planet’s modern animals may adapt to a warming planet due to climate change and higher carbon emissions, scientists said.

Researchers made the discovery after analyzing horse tooth fossils uncovered in the western US state of Wyoming that showed the older ones were larger, and that the species had shrunk over time. Many animals became extinct during this 175,000-year period, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 56 million years ago. Others got smaller in order to survive with limited resources.

“Because it’s over a long enough time, you can argue very strongly that what you’re looking at is natural selection and evolution — that it’s actually corresponding to the shift in temperature and driving the evolution of these horses,” said co-author Jonathan Bloch of the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Average global temperatures rose by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit during that span due to massive increase in carbon that was unleashed into the air and oceans. Surface sea temperature in the Arctic was about 23 Celsius (73 Fahrenheit), much like the temperatures of contemporary subtropical waters today.

The research showed that Sifrhippus shrank by almost one third, reaching the size of a small house cat (about 8.5 pounds, four kilograms) in the first 130,000 years of the period. Then, the horses grew larger again, to about 15 pounds (seven kilograms) in the final 45,000 years of the period.

About a third of known mammals also minimized themselves during this time, some by as much as one half.

“This has implications, potentially, for what we might expect to see over the next century or two, at least with some of the climate models that are predicting that we will see warming of as much as four degrees Centigrade (seven degrees Fahrenheit) over the next 100 years,” said co-author Ross Secord of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Some predictable changes along this line of thought have already been observed, It is much too early to sort out all the potential changes, of course. I have the most fun wandering through regional climatology over questions of rainfall – but, that’s only natural living in high desert country.

Fortunately, scientists are not only open-minded by definition, their natural conservatism keeps wild swings in check – regardless of perceptions from the Chicken Little variety of climate-carbon coward. Legitimate analysis generally stays within range of my generalist comprehension.

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A village emerges through the mist like a mystical island in the Asiago plateau in the Alps of northern Italy. The picture was taken by an amateur photographer.

Photograph: Vittorio Poli/National News and Pictures

This truck was shipped to Kuwait. The local sign writer was asked to paint on the side of the truck:

“ 36,000 Lts. Diesel Fuel in Arabic No Smoking in Arabic..”

Thanks, Ursarodinia

Facebook’s data center in Prineville, OR

Last December, people familiar with the matter indicated that Apple was “nearing a decision” to build a server farm in Oregon. After a filing with the Crook County clerk’s office emerged last week with Apple’s name on it, the Cupertino, Calif., company has publicly confirmed the development, which is known as “Project Maverick…”

“We purchased the land and it’s for a data center,” said Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet, adding that the facility will be “green.” Earlier this week, the company revealed in a Facilities Environmental Report that its massive server farm in North Carolina will utilize the largest end-user-owned onsite solar array and the largest non utility fuel cell installation in the U.S., making it the only facility in its class to earn LEED Platinum certification.

According to the report, county commissioners signed the deed for the purchase on Feb. 15, the same day that the state senate voted in legislation that removed an earlier threat of property taxes for data centers in the area.

Officials said they were bound by non-disclosure agreements and offered few details on the project, though one judge did say that he’s confident it will be “good for Prineville and Crook County.”

“These folks have been wonderful to work with,” said Judge Mike McCabe. “We will look forward to a long-term relationship with them.”

Apple’s facility will be just minutes from a Facebook server farm that opened last year. McCabe revealed that the social networking site “kind of helped recruit” Apple to come to Prineville. Facebook reportedly allowed Apple representatives to tour its facility last summer.

Keep on rocking in the Geek World. Oregon is one of those places where anyone who is hip should consider living – unless you prefer being as dry as I am in New Mexico.

On the frozen edge of the Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia, in an ancient pantry harboring seeds and other stores, an Arctic ground squirrel burrowed into the dirt and buried a small, dark fruit from a flowering plant. The squirrel’s prize quickly froze in the cold ground and was preserved in permafrost, waiting to grow into a fully fledged flowering plant until it was unearthed again. After 30,000 years, it finally was. Scientists in Russia have now regenerated this Pleistocene plant, transplanting it into a pot in the lab. A year later, it grew forth and bore fruit.

The specimen is distinctly different from the modern-day version of Silene stenophylla, or narrow-leafed Campion. It suggests that the permafrost is a potential new source of ancient gene pools long believed to be extinct, scientists said.

The fruits were buried about 125 feet in undisturbed, never thawed permafrost sediments, nestled at roughly 19.4 degrees F (-7 C). Radiocarbon dating showed the fruits were 31,800 years old, give or take about 300 years. Seeds are incredible things, storing the embryo of a new plant and encasing it in protective material until conditions are right for it to germinate.

Scientists led by David Gilichinsky at the Russian Academy of Sciences worked with three of these fruits and took placental tissue samples. They fed the tissue cultures a cocktail of nutrients to induce root growth, and once the plants were rooted, they were transplanted into pots in a greenhouse. Just as they were supposed to, plants grew, developed flowers and fruits, and went to seed…

All of this is interesting not just because it’s amazing to regenerate a Pleistocene plant, which of course it is, but because the permafrost may be an important new gene pool. Other ancient squirrel burrows have been found in the Yukon territory and in Alaska. That’s interesting for pure research, but also because of what may happen as the planet warms and more permafrost regions thaw. Organisms will be released from their long, cold sleep, and these ancient life forms could become part of modern ecosystems, affecting modern phenotypes and changing the landscape.

Permafrost has long served as a functional deep freeze for animal and vegetable matter reaching back into the last Ice Age. There have been dinners of thawed mammoth for nutball gourmands – and, yes, that brings up the suggestion again of cloning the wooly mammoth in a modern elephant.

Frankly, I’m as interested in the vegetable side of the spectrum of life. It’s more likely to aid in adaptability to climate change – especially since our corporate masters and their flunkies in politics and society seem to have little inclination to respond any useful view of science.

He cracked the Nazi Enigma code, helped end the Second World War and is recognised as the father of computer science.

But for his final challenge, Alan Turing turned his mathematical mind to one of the natural world’s most enduring riddles: how the leopard got its spots. Now, 60 years on, scientists have discovered that Turing’s theory for why repeated patterns occur in nature was absolutely correct.

In his 1952 paper The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, the code breaker proposed that animals’ stripes and spots are caused by the interaction of a pair of chemicals, dubbed ‘morphogens’.

One of the chemicals, he suggested, triggered cell activity, while the other hindered it. The way in which they interact would dictate where cells grow, creating familiar patterns on the fur of animals.

While scientists have been able to simulate Turing’s theory using computer models, for the first time scientists have identified the exact chemicals in action.

Researchers at King’s College London found the interaction between two morphogens named Fibroblast Growth Factor and Sonic Hedgehog dictated the ridge patterns in the mouths of mice, as predicted by Turing’s models.

The same theory applies to the stripes and spots of big cats, the number of bristles on a fruit fly, or the whorls on a leaf.

Dr Jeremy Green, a reader in Developmental Cell Biology, said the discovery could help progress the next generation of stem cell therapy by indicating how to build complex structures such as organs in a laboratory…“Our study provides the first experimental identification of an activator-inhibitor system at work in the generation of stripes – in this case in the ridges of the mouth palate.”

While biological processes at work are highly complicated, the mathematics behind Turing’s theory was “ingeniously simple”, he said.

“He was a great British genius. He had the confidence to take a completely new field, biology, and ask, ‘What can I add to it?’”

The mathematician, who would have been 100 years old this June, was convicted of being a homosexual the month the paper was completed. He committed suicide two years later…

The reward of a bigoted nation for his efforts at stopping Hitler and winning WW2.

Do you lie awake at night expecting aliens to invade our planet? Perhaps you have nightmares after watching “Mars attacks!” or think Jell-O is now yuck after seeing “The green slime.”

Chances are, regardless of whether you are anxious about aliens or not, that it’s not something you think about when you buy a new computer or gadget. For example, have you ever thought about whether the warranty of your brand new computer is valid if (when?) the aliens arrive?

If that’s you, you should definitely not expect Taiwanese computer, component, and gadget manufacturer Asus to help.

Under the heading “Exclusions from your ASUS Warranty Extension Program including the WEP On-Site NBD Limited Hardware Warranty Service” we can read some of the usual things you would expect to find in this text…

But as we continue down the list of exclusions something more unusual appears: “There is damage caused by natural disaster, intentional or unintentional misuse, acts of war, space invasions, abuse, neglect, improper maintenance, or use under abnormal conditions.”

Uh, OK.

Thanks, Ursarodinia