Day: January 10, 2010

Old hay and alpine ibex horns = grasslands response to climate change

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How do plant ecosystems react to rising concentrations of the greenhouse gas CO2 in the atmosphere over the long term? This fundamental question is becoming increasingly pressing in light of global climate change. Researchers from the Chair of Grassland Science at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) have now — for the first time worldwide — taken up this issue for grasslands. The scientists found their answers in two unlikely places: in horns of Alpine ibex from Switzerland and in 150-year-old hay from England.

Researchers studying the reactions of trees to rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere have it easy. Since trees store the carbon they absorb in wood, all they need to do is take core samples from tree trunks. A centenarian oak will reveal how it coped with the incipient climate change over a period of a hundred years in its annual rings. “However, the grassland vegetation we work with is grazed or dies off in a matter of months and decomposes,” explains Prof. Hans Schnyder, who is doing research in the field of grasslands…at the TUM. The Swiss scientist nonetheless wanted to establish out how economically grasslands deal with water when temperatures rise and the carbon dioxide concentration in the air increases….

This is where the team turned their sights to the Alpine ibex horn collection at the Museum of Natural History in Bern. Ibex store isotopic information in their horns that reflects the water use of the vegetation they consume…Since ibex horns also have annual rings, the grassland researchers were able to use…samples to draw conclusions about temporal changes in the grassland vegetation of the Bernese Alps where the ibex had grazed.

A unique specimen archive at the research station Rothamsted in England eventually enabled a comparison with a second grassland region. The “Park Grass Experiment” — the longest running ecological grassland experiment worldwide — was initiated in Rothamsted over 150 years ago…

In both locations the intrinsic water-use efficiency of the grassland vegetation rose over the years. This implies that the plants improved their water storage potential as temperatures rose and the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increased. Based on these results the TUM scientists have now, for the first time ever, managed to demonstrate the long-term effects of anthropogenic climate change on the water-use efficiency of grasslands…

This insight will help to further improve climate simulations. In the past, complex simulation models that included vegetation had to rely on estimates where grassland was concerned. The scientists at the TU Muenchen have now succeeded in prying open this climate research black box.

Another beginning. Another face of the polygon of scientific research. Unseen by the blindness of ideology.

Officials – at every level – hid truth of immigrant deaths in jail

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Committed suicide after he was denied painkillers for a broken leg

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security…

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

RTFA. Please. A long, detailed narrative of medieval management – punctuated by American-style bureaucrats working hardest and longest at covering their tracks.

Woman waves knife at Peeping Toms – gets warning from coppers!

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Come and meet Myleene Klass – but not in her kitchen at night!
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The TV presenter and Marks & Spencer model Myleene Klass has been warned by police for waving a knife at teenagers who were peering into a window of her house late at night.

Klass was in the kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the youths in her garden just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a knife and banged the windows before they ran away.

Hertfordshire police warned her she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon”, even in her own home, was illegal.

Klass’s spokesman, Jonathan Shalit, said the former Hear’Say singer was “utterly terrified” by the intruders and “aghast” at the police warning. “All she did was scream loudly and wave the knife to try and frighten them off,” he told the Sunday Telegraph. “She is not looking to be a vigilante, and has the utmost respect for the law, but when the police explained to her that even if you’re at home alone and you have an intruder, you are not allowed to protect yourself, she was bemused…”

A spokeswoman for Hertfordshire police said no reference was made in the Klass incident report about a weapon. She said the incident was being treated as trespass and “words of advice were given in relation to ensuring suspicious behaviour is reported immediately”.

My style – when so bemused – would be to haul out my shotgun and communicate with the intruders that self-preservation should take command of their tiny little minds.

Sheikh acquitted of torture – Stoner defense!

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Anything here that Dick Cheney wouldn’t approve?

Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, the brother of UAE president and Abu Dhabi emir Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, has been acquitted of charges of torture.

An Emirati court on Sunday acquitted Shiekh Issa despite a video tape of the 2004 incident showing him torturing an Afghan man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.

“The court acquitted Sheikh Issa after establishing he was not responsible,” for the torture, lawyer Habib al-Mulla said.

“The court accepted our defence that the Sheikh was under the influence of drugs [medicine] that left him unaware of his actions,” al-Mulla said.

Bassam and Ghassan Nabulsi, former business partners of Sheikh Issa, who filmed and kept the video tape, were sentenced in absentia to five years each in prison…

The tape shows Sheikh Issa viciously beating a worker in an empty stretch of the desert.

A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim’s arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man’s wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV…

The government statement said its review found “all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the police department”.

Anyone surprised?

The week’s leading attack by the Morality Police

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Or – how to chase votes by preaching puritanism.

Harm reduction in New York City came under attack last weekend when the tabloid New York Post ran an article titled Heroin for Dummies, excoriating the city for spending $32,000 for a 2007 harm reduction pamphlet that, among other things, gave injection drug users advice on how to reduce the harm of injecting.

But while the assault on evidence-based harm reduction practices is worrisome, it also sparked a vigorous defense of the pamphlet from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city health officials and has provided an opportunity to broaden public awareness of harm reduction. By Thursday, despite demands that they be pulled, Health Commissioner Thomas Farley had decided that the pamphlets will continue to be distributed.

The pamphlet, Take Charge, Take Care, was distributed by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and was aimed at injection drug users in the city. The harm reduction purpose behind it was to save lives and prevent overdoses and the spread of blood-borne disease. It counsels things like quitting, not sharing needles, and seeking treatment.

But also included in its advice were things like “Find the vein before you try to inject,” “If you don’t register [hit the vein], pull out and try again,” and “Warm your body (jump up and down) to show your veins.” Such common-sense harm reduction advice was like waving a red flag for Post and the drug warriors it interviewed…

RTFA if you need to see the predictable. It’s a easy parallel to the religious dimwits who sold Bush’s foolishness about how abstinence programs will make teenage pregnancy diminish.

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How do you feel about ants that have given up on sex?

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Working on their fungus farms

The complete asexuality of a widespread fungus-gardening ant, the only ant species in the world known to have dispensed with males entirely, has been confirmed by a team of Texas and Brazilian researchers.

Most social insects—the wasps, ants and bees—are relatively used to daily life without males. Their colonies are well run by swarms of sterile sisters lorded over by an egg-laying queen. But, eventually, all social insect species have the ability to produce a crop of males who go forth in the world to fertilize new queens and propagate.

Queens of the ant Mycocepurus smithii reproduce without fertilization and males appear to be completely absent, report Christian Rabeling, Ulrich Mueller and their Brazilian colleagues in PLoS ONE this week.

“Animals that are completely asexual are relatively rare, which makes this is a very interesting ant,” says Rabeling… “Asexual species don’t mix their genes through recombination, so you expect harmful mutations to accumulate over time and for the species to go extinct more quickly than others. They don’t generally persist for very long over evolutionary time…”

Taken together with the previous studies of the ants, Rabeling and his colleagues have concluded that the species is very likely to be totally asexual across its entire range, from Northern Mexico through Central America to Brazil, including some Caribbean islands.

I’ve lived in a few communities where the male humans also felt this was the direction in which their lives were progressing.