Genetic Deletion Hurts Fertility in High Milk Yield Dairy Cows

Science Daily, via Sowing Agricultural Seeds Daily:

Scientists have found a genomic deletion that affects fertility and milk yield in dairy cattle at the same time. The discovery can help explain a dilemma in dairy cattle breeding: the negative correlation between fertility and milk production.
For the past many years milk yield in Scandinavian dairy cattle has gone in one clear direction: up. This has been due to targeted breeding programs and modern breeding methods. Despite putting large weight in the breeding goal in Nordic countries, almost no improvement is achieved for fertility. It now seems that this unfavorable correlation between milk yield and fertility is partially affected by a deletion of a simple gene sequence. The presence and effects of this mutation have recently been discovered by scientists from Aarhus University, University of Liège, MTT Agrifood Research Finland, in collaboration with the Danish Agricultural Advisory Service and the Nordic Cattle Genetic Evaluation.
Scientists, farmers and advisors have generally assumed that the reduction in fertility is primarily due to the negative energy balance of high-producing cows at the peak of their lactation but now the scientists have also found a genetic explanation.
"We have discovered a deletion encompassing four genes as the causative variant and shown that the deletion is a recessive embryonically lethal mutation," explains Goutam Sahana. "This means that the calves die while they are still embryos and are aborted or reported as insemination failure. The fact that the mutation is recessive means that both parents must carry it and pass the genes on to their calf for the calf to be affected. The bulls carrying the deletion can be routinely identified in on-going genomic selection program and by avoiding carrier-by-carrier matings a quantum jump in fertility could be achieved in Nordic red breeds," adds Goutam Sahana.
To make matters worse, this particular mutation has become rather common in Nordic Red cattle, however, the deletion is totally absent in Nordic Holstein and Danish Jersey populations. Based on the frequency of the mutation in the population, it is estimated that 2.89, 1.32 and 0.42% of embryos are dying in Finnish Ayshire, Swedish Red and Danish Red cattle respectively due to this mutation.
The reason that the deleted gene sequence causing embryo mortality has become relatively widespread is that it has such as strong positive effect on milk yield. By selecting for high milk yields, breeders have inadvertently also selected for embryo mortality -- a situation of so-called hitchhiking.

The dominance of AI, and selective breeding for milk yield has massively increased milk production in dairy breeds, but I think it has probably made the dairy cow genomes extremely  susceptible to recessive mutations.  I also expect that at least some of the BSE cases in the U.S. and Canada have been genetucally inherited cases, and not a result of tainted feed.

Hard White Wheat Gains Market Foothold

Harvest Public Media via Big Picture Agriculture's new sister site, Sowing Agricultural Seeds Daily:

A new wheat variety may have cracked the code to marry the fluffiness of white bread with whole grain nutrition.
For a long time, American bread makers have been in a bind. Many consumers like the texture and taste of white bread, but want the nutritional benefits of whole grains.
Snowmass, named for a Colorado peak, is a hard white wheat variety, a crop in high demand as bread makers increasingly seek new markets -- in this case health-conscious consumers who don’t want to give up white bread. Hard white wheats lack the dark bran color and potent flavor of their red wheat cousins, which are grown widely across the Great Plains.
Farmers and food companies have been interested in hard white wheat for a while, but economic and climatological realities have kept it from taking off. Hard red winter wheat grows well in wheat states like Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska. But it doesn’t mill into white flour, it has to be bleached. By itself, the dark, flavorful bran it can be a tougher sell to more finicky consumers who prefer white bread.
Wheat breeding programs, both public and private, have been hard at work trying to come up with a variety like Snowmass -- a type of white wheat that yields well, mills into a white flour and mixes easily into dough.
Colorado State University wheat breeder Scott Haley finally had success. He’s the father of Snowmass. When you come up with a well-performing, novel crop, there’s a whole community of people who consider you a rock star.
“Well, I’ve been told that this is the most famous wheat in the world, which is just like, oh my gosh. I don’t believe that,” Haley said.
The foundation that funds some of Haley’s research receives money from food giant ConAgra to develop wheat varieties for commercial use. The exact amount is part of a confidentiality agreement among Colorado State University, ConAgra and the Colorado Wheat Research Foundation. ConAgra has been after healthier white flour, which its customers, like Sara Lee and Azteca, can then turn into whole grain white products like breads and tortillas.

Sowing Agricultural Seeds Daily looks like it will be a must-visit site.

An Ancient Battle

Physicists and archaeologists are fighting over ancient Roman lead (yeah, really):

Archaeologists and physicists are at loggerheads over ancient Roman lead—a substance highly prized by both camps for sharply diverging reasons. Very old lead is pure, dense and much less radioactive than the newly mined metal, so it is ideal for shielding sensitive experiments that hunt for dark matter and other rare particles. But it is also has historical significance, and many archaeologists object to melting down 2,000-year-old Roman ingots that are powerful windows on ancient history.....
Ancient Roman lead has been used in the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS), an experiment in Minnesota that aims to detect the particles that make up the invisible dark matter thought to contribute much of the universe's mass. The same metal has also been used in the CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) project in Italy, which will soon begin searching for a theorized particle decay process called neutrinoless double beta decay, which, if found, could explain why matter dominates antimatter in the universe. These experiments and others require extreme shielding to block out any extraneous particles that might be mistaken for the rare signals they hunt.
The lead in question once went into the making of coins, pipes, construction materials and weapons in the ancient Roman civilization. It is most commonly found now at shipwreck sites, where private companies harvest it and melt down the Roman ingots into standard bricks before passing them on to customers—many of whom are physicists. "None of us take it casually—you don’t want historical artifacts to be destroyed unnecessarily," says physicist Blas Cabrera of Stanford University, who leads the CDMS project. Nevertheless, ancient lead is the best material available for shielding dark matter detectors, he says, because it releases so little radiation, or background particles. "The kind of background levels that you're achieving with ancient lead are roughly 1,000 times below that of commercially available lead."
All lead mined on Earth naturally contains some amount of the radioactive element uranium 235, which decays, over time, into another radioactive element, a version of lead called lead 210. When lead ore is first processed, it is purified and most of the uranium is removed. Whatever lead 210 is already present begins to break down, with half of it decaying on average every 22 years. In Roman lead almost all of the lead 210 has already decayed, whereas in lead mined today, it is just beginning to decay.

Wow, I definitely didn't know any of that.

Weirdness Around the Solstice

A little explanation of the shortest day of the year, and the earliest sunset and latest sunrise:

If you live around latitude 42N—a well-populated latitude in North America and Europe, taking in Boston, Rome, and Vladivostok—today (December 8) is the day you'll experience the earliest sunset of the year. Those who live farther north, in London or Moscow, can expect the earliest sunset on Thursday. Those farther south, in Miami or Mumbai, already had their earliest sunset a few days ago.
Wait a minute. Isn't the solstice, December 21, still more than a week away, the day of the earliest sunset? And the date of the year's latest sunrise, as well? The late sunrise and early sunset combine on the solstice to create the day with the shortest amount of daylight. Right? 
Actually, that's a fantasy. The earliest sunset really comes in the first week in December, and the latest sunrise occurs in early January. Yet December 21 really is the shortest day of the year. What sort of astronomical hijinks are responsible for this absurd state of affairs?
Blame it on Earth's non-circular orbit and its tilt in relation to the Sun.

More details if you click through the link.  This kind of stuff makes my head hurt.  It reminds me how brilliant Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were when they were figuring out the heliocentric solar system.

NASA Photo of the Day

December 1:

A Laser Strike at the Galactic Center
Image Credit: Yuri Beletsky(ESO) Explanation: Why are these people shooting a powerful laser into the center of our Galaxy? Fortunately, this is not meant to be the first step in a Galacticwar. Rather, astronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) site in Chileare trying to measure the distortions of Earth's ever changing atmosphere. Constant imaging of high-altitude atoms excited by the laser -- which appear like an artificial star -- allow astronomers to instantly measure atmospheric blurring. This information is fed back to a VLT telescope mirror which is then slightly deformed to minimize this blurring. In this case, a VLT was observing our Galaxy's center, and so Earth's atmospheric blurring in that direction was needed. As for inter-galaxy warfare, when viewed from our Galaxy's center, no casualties are expected. In fact, the light from this powerful laser would combine with light from our Sun to together appear only as bright as a faint and distant star.

Why Do You Wake Up Before Your Alarm Clock Goes Off?

Because your brain wants to wake you up on its schedule:

At the center of your brain, a clump of nerves—called the suprachiasmatic nucleus—oversees your body’s clock: the circadian rhythm. It determines when you feel sleepy and when you feel bright-eyed. It controls your blood pressure, your body temperature, and your sense of time. It turns your body into a finely tuned machine.
That machine happens to love predictability. Your body is most efficient when there’s a routine to follow. So if you hit the hay the same time each night and awake the same time each morning, your body locks that behavior in. And that’s where things get sciency.

Your sleep-wake cycle is regulated by a protein called PER. The protein level rises and falls each day, peaking in the evening and plummeting at night. When PER levels are low, your blood pressure drops, heart rate slows, and thinking becomes foggier. You get sleepy. If you follow a diligent sleep routine—waking up the same time every day—your body learns to increase your PER levels in time for your alarm. About an hour before you’re supposed to wake up, PER levels rise (along with your body temperature and blood pressure). To prepare for the stress of waking, your body releases a cocktail of stress hormones, like cortisol. Gradually, your sleep becomes lighter and lighter.
And that’s why you wake up before your alarm. Your body hates your alarm clock. It’s jarring. It’s stressful. And it ruins all that hard work. It defeats the purpose of gradually waking up. So, to avoid being interrupted, your body does something amazing: It starts increasing PER and stress hormones earlier in the night. Your body gets a head start so the waking process isn’t cut short. It’s so precise that your eyelids open minutes—maybe even seconds—before the alarm goes off.
There’s evidence you can will yourself to wake on time, too. Sleep scientists at Germany’s University of Lubeck asked 15 volunteers to sleep in their lab for three nights. One night, the group was told they’d be woken at 6 a.m., while on other nights the group was told they’d be woken at 9 a.m..
But the researchers lied—they woke the volunteers at 6 a.m anyway. And the results were startling. The days when sleepers were told they’d wake up early, their stress hormones increased at 4:30 a.m., as if they were anticipating an early morning. When the sleepers were told they’d wake up at 9 a.m., their stress hormones didn’t increase—and they woke up groggier.

I definitely believe the part aboutsometimes waking up when you know what time you need to be up. I've pretty much never slept until my alarm goes off  on a day when I'm leaving for vacation, even if I'm getting up a couple hours ahead of normal in order to catch a very early flight.  That always seemed weird to me, but I guess I understand why it happens, now.

Ohio Catfish Species Declared Extinct

Scientific American:

Hope has been exhausted for the Scioto madtom (Noturus trautmani). Unseen since 1957, the small catfish has now been listed as “extinct” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, following decades of fruitless searches. The madtom was the only extinction out of more than 430 species updates published to the Red List last week.
Even when the species was alive, sightings of the Scioto madtom were rare, possibly due to their blink-and-you’ll-miss-them size (between 35 and 61 millimeters). Sightings of the species were recorded only 18 times; each happened within a single stretch of Big Darby Creek, a tributary of the Scioto River in central Ohio. Little was ever known about the fish’s ecology or behavior.
Its rarity, however, was enough to get the madtom protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act back in 1975. Biologists then spent years looking for signs of the fish and information on how to protect it. “No other fish has been searched for more persistently by researchers in Ohio than this species,” according to the Ohio Department of Nature Resources.
In 2009 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) published a review of the Scioto madtom’s status (pdf), writing that the species—which, like the five other madtom species in Ohio, depended on shallow, fast-moving waters with a lot of gravel and silt substrate—probably disappeared “due to modification of its habitat from siltation, suspended industrial effluents and agricultural runoff,” as well as competition from another madtom species that had moved into that region of the stream. The review concluded that the long amount of time since the Scioto madtom has been seen meant it no longer met the definition of an endangered species, “and therefore delisting the species due to extinction is recommended.” The FWS has yet to take that step, but the IUCN responded to the recommendation and has now finally declared the species to be extinct.

Never heard of it, but if I come across one, readers of this blog will be the first to know. There is hope:

Another madtom species, the northern madtom (N. stigmosus) went unseen for 31 years until ichthyologist Milton Trautman, who discovered the Scioto madtom, found two of them elsewhere in Big Darby Creek.

Still, I won't hold my breath.

What is Sea Level?

Geodesy makes my head hurt.

Our Brains Screw Us Up

Here's a really nice summary of various ways our brains make us irrational.  And this story claims the smarter you are, the more likely you are to fall into these traps:

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.
And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.
What explains this result? One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves.

Good thing I'm pretty dumb.

The Threat Posed by Antibiotic Resistance

Maryn McKenna:

If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance — and trust me, we’re not far off — here’s what we would lose. Not just the ability to treat infectious disease; that’s obvious.
But also: The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. Any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. Any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. Any surgery on a part of the body that already harbors a population of bacteria: the guts, the bladder, the genitals. Implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. Cosmetic plastic surgery. Liposuction. Tattoos.
We’d lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We’d lose the safety of modern childbirth: Before the antibiotic era, 5 women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of every nine skin infections killed. Three out of every 10 people who got pneumonia died from it.
And we’d lose, as well, a good portion of our cheap modern food supply. Most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. Without the drugs that keep livestock healthy in concentrated agriculture, we’d lose the ability to raise them that way. Either animals would sicken, or farmers would have to change their raising practices, spending more money when their margins are thin. Either way, meat — and fish and seafood, also raised with abundant antibiotics in the fish farms of Asia — would become much more expensive.
And it wouldn’t be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American apple crops. There’s currently one drug left to fight it. And when major crops are lost, the local farm economy goes too.

Again, the routine feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock is a practice that needs to stop.

There Are Holes in this Airplane

Boeing adds miniscule holes to make the 777X more efficient:

Boeing’s new 777X is getting a lot of attention for its composite wing with folding tips and its super-efficient engines, but one of the airliner’s most innovative features are the tiny holes in its tail that smooth airflow and improve fuel efficiency.
The holes help smooth airflow around the tail by improving something called laminar flow, basically making the airplane more aerodynamic, which reduces fuel consumption. “Aerodynamic advances such as a hybrid laminar flow control vertical tail,” are the few words Boeing used to describe it in a press release announcing the 777X, Boeing’s impressive updating of its long-range twin-engine airliner. Boeing is working with NASA to further develop the idea to include “sweeping jet actuators” embedded in the tail of future models. Such advancements in airflow manipulation could bring significant fuel savings.
Laminar flow occurs when when air flows smoothly over a surface. Think of a water flowing smoothly around a large, smooth round rock. The water flows easily, and the water appears glassy. But if the rock is jagged or the water is flowing fast enough, turbulent eddies form. The same thing happens at the micro scale as an airplane moves through the air, and that turbulent flow increases drag. Increased drag leads to increased fuel consumption.
The challenge is that laminar flow is difficult to maintain over the entire surface of a wing or tail. As the air flows past the leading edge, it becomes more turbulent, separating from the surface and increasing drag.
Boeing has come up with an innovative solution with its hybrid laminar flow control system, but is keeping most of the details under wraps. The company is using a similar innovation on the 787-9, the stretched version of the Dreamliner, providing a few clues. Tiny holes covering the unpainted leading edge of the 787-9′s vertical tail are used to control the airflow over the surface (the leading edge of the vertical tail on the 777X in the artist rendition at top is also unpainted). Turbulent airflow is reduced through suction as air pulls the turbulent layer through the small holes. This technique has been researched for decades (.pdf), including research by NASA on the F-16XL and more recently by Boeing rival Airbus on an A320 test aircraft in the late 1990s. By ingesting the turbulent layer of air through the tiny holes, the overall drag over the tail surface is reduced.

Interesting. Talk of laminar flow puts me back in fluids lab.

Cassini or Curiosity?

NASA considers where in its robotic exploration budget to cut:

This year NASA received $16.9 billion, which may sound like a lot but, once adjusted for inflation, is roughly what the agency got back in 1986. Just $1.27 billion of that budget goes into funding all robotic exploration in the solar system. And most space policy experts don’t see that number going up anytime in the near future. In 2014, NASA will put many of its robotic missions through what’s known as a senior review. Administrators will have to decide which of its missions will yield the highest scientific return and may recommend canceling some of them.
And that’s where some sad calculus comes in.
“We have two very expensive flagship missions, Cassini and Curiosity,” said NASA’s planetary science director Jim Green, speaking to one of the agency’s advisory councils on Nov. 5. “So, this particular competition we’ll have to do very carefully.”ou wouldn’t think the Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn since 2004, was in trouble. It has lately been beaming back incredible data about the planet’s rings and moons. A recent image from the mission (above) showing Earth, Venus, and Mars from Saturn was widely shared on the internet and even landed on the front page of the New York Times last week.
But NASA seems to want to focus its dwindling energy on Mars.....Most in the planetary science community would bet that in a head-to-head competition, Cassini loses. That would be a shame. Cassini has already been an incredible mission, and scientists estimate it has at least four more years of life left in it. Cassini’s operating budget is about $60 million per year while Curiosity’s runs to roughly $50 million. That’s about what the Department of Defense has budgeted for 3-D printer research and is less than half of what it’s estimated to spend maintaining its golf courses. The Cassini mission has already cost $3.26 billion to launch and operate.

You know, to come up with that $60 million, maybe we could trim back the dividend tax cut, which costs the government over $20 billion a year.  But hey, who needs science research when super rich folks need lower tax rates on unearned income than what working stiffs pay on earned income.

How Big was Haiyan?

Huge:

Haiyan is the strongest storm to ever make landfall, according to Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground, a Web site often quoted by the best weather experts. Masters knows severe weather data better than anyone I’ve encountered, and his blog is filled with fascinating facts. The “strength” of a cyclone, typhoon or hurricane—they’re all the same storm, just different names used in different parts of the world—is determined by the top speed of sustained winds, not gusts. According to Masters, Haiyan had sustained winds of 190 to 195 mph when it struck the Philippines, making it the strongest cyclone ever at the time of landfall.
It was also the fourth strongest cyclone ever recorded, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii. Three others had higher sustained winds while out at sea, then weakened before hitting land: Typhoon Nancy in 961, with 215 mph winds; Typhoon Violet in 1961, with 205 mph winds; and Typhoon Ida, in 1958, with 200 mph winds. All three eventually hit Japan. The second strongest storm at the time of landfall was Hurricane Camille, which struck Mississippi bearing 190 mph winds.
It’s important to realize that even a modest rise in speed can cause a huge increase in damage, because the power in wind increases as the cube of speed; a wind that is twice as strong delivers eight times as much power. Camille obliterated towns and the landscape. If the same storm hit Miami or New York City today, Masters says, the damage could be half a trillion dollars. Building codes in southern Florida require the highest wind resistance in the world, Masters says, yet the rules have only been in effect for a couple of decades and many buildings are older than that.

While it has gotten a good bit of coverage here, imagine what things would be like if this thing hit the U.S.  We'd be hearing about it for months.

Fractal Vegetable

Wired features fractal patterns in nature:

Romanesco Broccoli

This variant form of cauliflower is the ultimate fractal vegetable. Its pattern is a natural representation of the Fibonacci or golden spiral, a logarithmic spiral where every quarter turn is farther from the origin by a factor of phi, the golden ratio.
Image: Flickr/Tin.G.

They've got more.

The Benefits of Polymathy

Robert Twigger looks at how knowledge in one field can lead to breakthroughs in another (h/t Ritholtz):

Polymaths such as Da Vinci, Goethe and Benjamin Franklin were such high achievers that we might feel a bit reluctant to use the word ‘polymath’ to describe our own humble attempts to become multi-talented. We can’t all be geniuses. But we do all still indulge in polymathic activity; it’s part of what makes us human.
So, say that we all have at least the potential to become polymaths. Once we have a word, we can see the world more clearly. And that’s when we notice a huge cognitive dissonance at the centre of Western culture: a huge confusion about how new ideas, new discoveries, and new art actually come about.
Science, for example, likes to project itself as clean, logical, rational and unemotional. In fact, it’s pretty haphazard, driven by funding and ego, reliant on inspired intuition by its top-flight practitioners. Above all it is polymathic. New ideas frequently come from the cross-fertilisation of two separate fields. Francis Crick, who intuited the structure of DNA, was originally a physicist; he claimed this background gave him the confidence to solve problems that biologists thought were insoluble. Richard Feynman came up with his Nobel Prize-winning ideas about quantum electrodynamics by reflecting on a peculiar hobby of his — spinning a plate on his finger (he also played the bongos and was an expert safe-cracker). Percy Spencer, a radar expert, noticed that the radiation produced by microwaves melted a chocolate bar in his pocket and developed microwave ovens. And Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the modern machine gun, was inspired by a self-cocking mousetrap he had made in his teens.....
One could tell similar stories about breakthroughs in art — cubism crossed the simplicity of African carving with a growing non-representational trend in European painting. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy took street graffiti and made it acceptable to galleries. In business, cross-fertilisation is the source of all kinds of innovations: fibres inspired by spider webs have become a source of bulletproof fabric; practically every mobile phone also seems to be a computer, a camera and a GPS tracker. To come up with such ideas, you need to know things outside your field. What’s more, the further afield your knowledge extends, the greater potential you have for innovation.
Invention fights specialisation at every turn. Human nature and human progress are polymathic at root. And life itself is various — you need many skills to be able to live it.

It is a wonderful piece.  Personally, I think lots of things can be discovered by studying how things interact in the natural world.  I mean, looking at cockle burs under a microscope gave us velcro.  An understanding of physics and fluid dynamics gives one a pretty good understanding of the dynamics of traffic flow.  An understanding of human psychology can be extremely beneficial for engineers dealing with politicians, salesmen and the public (although it will take a real salesman to convince engineers of this).  Anyway, I am a firm believer that there are very few areas of study that can't be beneficial for some one in their daily lives.  Unfortunately, many people give up on learning new things when they learn what they have to do for their job.

Asian Carp Found In Lake Erie Watershed

Here's some bad news:

Lake Erie has its own problems. There, a chain-link fence separates a flood-prone wetland between two rivers—one that flows toward the Mississippi and another that flows into Lake Erie.
Several grass carp (one of the Asian carp species) have been caught in or near Lake Erie in recent years. However, the ones that were discovered were sterile. Sterile fish are used to control plant growth, and they can't reproduce because they are triploid—having a triplicate set of chromosomes.
In October of last year, four smallish grass carp were caught in a river just a couple miles upstream from Lake Erie. The results of tests performed on the fish have now been published, and the news isn’t good. The fish weren’t sterile like the others, and they were only about a year old.
To determine where the fish had come from, researchers measured the amount of strontium in a bone inside the fish’s ears. The river in which the fish were found happens to have higher than average levels of strontium in it, and that’s what they found in the ear bones as well. In fact, the inner part of the bones, which formed early in life, contained significantly more strontium than the outer portion. That matched up with strontium in the river, which was high during a wet 2011 and low during the drought in 2012.
That means the grass carp appear to have hatched in the river, making this the first documented instance of Asian carp reproducing in the Lake Erie watershed.
The researchers write, “The implications that grass carp have spawned and recruited in the Great Lakes Basin are profound.” In habitats like Lake Erie, grass carp populations are capable of grazing lake-bottom plants basically down to nothing. If they can establish a population, it would mean trouble for the rest of the Lake Erie ecosystem, including the native fishes and birds that rely on those plants.
What’s more, it had been thought that grass carp required a longer river than this one for spawning. The apparent success in this instance means that grass carp—and the other species—might have an easier time establishing a foothold in Lake Erie than expected.

Looks like the invasion may have begun, at least in the eastern part of the Great Lakes.

Will Peak Oil Help Out With Climate Change?

Some scientists think we won't be able to pollute as much as many feared:

Conventional production of oil has been on a plateau since 2005, said James Murray, a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, who chaired the panel.
As production of conventional oil, which is far easier to get out of the ground, decreases, companies have turned to unconventional sources, such as those in deep water, tar sands or tight oil reserves, which have to be released by hydraulic fracturing.
But those techniques tend to lead to production peaks that tail off quickly, Murray said.
The panelists said these trends belie the high-end emission scenario from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That scenario, known as RCP 8.5, and often referred to as the "business as usual" scenario, has carbon dioxide emissions increasing through 2100.
"I just think it's going to be really hard to achieve some of these really high CO2 scenarios," Murray said.
David Rutledge, an engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology who studies world coal production, said the IPCC's "business as usual" scenario is unrealistic because it essentially assumes that growth of fossil fuels like coal will continue apace, which is unlikely.

Well, while it is good that climate change might not be as bad as scientists fear, we'll still have to adapt to a resource-limited world that most non-Amish can't really appreciate.  

The Greatest Scientist You've Never Heard of

Stanford Ovshinski:

Ovshinsky created a hatful of world-changing innovations. In 1968, the New York Times declared that his new electronic switch would lead to a future in which we would all have “small, general-purpose desktop computers for use in homes, schools and offices” and “a flat, tubeless television set that can be hung on the wall like a picture”.
It seemed so unlikely that no one in the US wanted to invest. What’s more, Ovshinsky’s discoveries threatened the dominance of America’s great new invention: the transistor. US corporate interests rubbished his work and he ended up licensing his technologies to a few small Japanese companies. You might know their names: Sharp, Canon, Sony, Matsushita . . .
No wonder Ovshinsky was later hailed as “Japan’s American genius”. That US overdraft might not have become quite so bad if the country’s business leaders had operated with more foresight and less fear.
By the end of his life, Ovshinsky had established a new field of science: the study of “amorphous” materials, messy solids that have no regular atomic structure. He published around 300 academic papers on the subject. His inventions gained more than 400 patents. All this from a man who taught himself physics using books borrowed from the public library in his home town of Akron, Ohio.
The technology behind rewritable CDs and DVDs was Ovshinsky’s brainchild, as was the material for “phase-change memory”, now standard in data storage technologies today.He designed the solar panels used in the Japanese calculators that flooded the world market in the 1980s. Similarly ubiquitous is his rechargeable nickel-metal hydride battery.

Wow.  That is pretty amazing.

Three Types of People in U.S.?

Marina Koren reports on a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Thanks to demography researchers and their love for maps, Americans can visualize where their home states fit in on a national scale of a variety of political, economic, social, and health characteristics. One of the latest maps forgoes these traditional methods of measuring the country and investigates something a little less observable: the personality traits of its citizens.
The map, published in a recent study in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, chops the country into three distinct psychological regions based on a range of empirical data. The researchers didn't predict what these clusters might look like (or how many of them there would be), but they expected neighboring states to be, on average, psychologically similar. Geographic proximity is often correlated with human behavior, such as personality traits and lifestyles.
The researchers used self-reported information from nearly 1.6 million people collected over 12 years for 48 states (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) and the District of Columbia. They employed a commonly used personality scale to measure participants on their levels of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience, as well as separate measures to gauge opinion on politics, social issues, leisure interests and music preferences. When a given state is said to be high in neuroticism, for example, that is to say that the mean level of that trait derived from a sample of that state's residents is high compared with the mean levels of the trait from samples of residents from other states. State-level factors like economic, social, health, and religious trends, along with census data, were also included in the analysis.

What's personality type of people in the Midwest?:

The "Friendly and Conventional" region. The first region features the states of Middle America, including South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa, known as the "red" states. People here ranked highly in levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, moderately low in neuroticism, and very low in openness. Residents of the region tend to be "sociable, considerate, dutiful, and traditional," the researchers write. They are predominantly white with low levels of education, wealth, and social tolerance, and tend to be more religious and politically conservative than people outside of the region. They are also less healthy compared with other Americans.

Yes.

The Golden Shower Rule

Scientists have found a law of urination:

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered a new golden rule: every mammal takes about 21 seconds to urinate. Patricia Yang and her co-authors dubbed it the "Law of Orientation" in a paper published this week, and they say it applies across a wide range of animal sizes.

Yang and her team discovered this commonality after observing male and female cows, dogs, elephants, goats, and rats at the Atlanta Zoo. They filmed these animals urinating, taking note of their size, bladder pressure, and urethra length, and then searched for videos of other peeing animals on YouTube. Based on mathematical models derived from these data, the scientists found that every animal took an average of 21 seconds to relieve itself, despite bladders that varied in volume from 100 milliliters to 100 liters.

That's not to say that animal size doesn't matter. According to Yang, it just doesn't have a significant impact. Prior to this study, most urination models focused on bladder pressure and relatively small mammals. As a result, they didn't take gravity into account.

As New Scientist explains, an elephant's long urethra —  one meter, with a diameter of ten centimeters — gives its urine more time to pick up speed. Because of this, the animal can empty its enormous bladder in about the same time as goats, dogs, and other medium-sized mammals. For small mammals like rats and bats, gravity doesn't exert much influence on flow rates, which are instead determined by viscosity and surface tension. That's why they urinate in small drops, Yang says, finishing the job in less than a second.

The researchers will present their findings next month at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting.

Does this figure in any way into stadium bathroom design?