The US is a major global supplier of tattoo inks, and yet little data exists about their impact on our health. That’s worrying regulators in Europe Americans love tattoos. Nearly a quarter of them have gotten inked, compared with 12% in Europe. The personal expression that is skin deep is particularly popular with young people: 40% of American teenagers sport tattoos. Women are also more likely than men to get one. Yet very little is known about the effects of modern day tattoo ink on the human body. The lack of research and data is worrisome because some of the key ingredients are known to make people sick or die. It also makes it difficult to regulate them. A recent report from the European Commission warns that tattoo ink often contains “hazardous chemicals” such as heavy metals and preservatives that could have serious health consequences, including bacterial infections. A separate study issued earlier this month by the Australian government reveals that 22% of the inks tested contained chemical compounds known to cause cancer. The European report notes that regulators are especially wary of imports from the US, which supplies the majority of tattoo inks to the world. The report highlights the health risks and provides European countries with scientific evidence so they can decide if better oversight of tattoo inks is necessary. “The question is, what’s in the tattoo and what can it do to the body?” said Tyler Hollmig, director of Laser and Aesthetic Dermatology at Stanford UniversityHealth Care. “The answer is, we just don’t know.
The rusty patched bumble bee has been proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be declared as an endangered species.
The rusty patched bumble bee is well known as a vital pollinator found in the upper Midwest and Northeaster United States, but their population has plunged since the late 1990s by over 90%. Scientists attribute the decline to such manmade factors as pesticides, climate change, and habitat loss. The rusty patched bumblebee would be the first bee species in the United States to be formally proposed for an official listing as a part of the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Bumble bees pollinate around one third of all U.S. crops, and hold an estimated annual economic value of $3.5 billion. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimates that over a quarter of the 47 varieties of bumble bees native to the US and Canada will soon face possible extinction. “Endangered Species Act safeguards are now the only way the bumble bee would have a fighting chance for survival,” said Sarina Jepsen of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, which was responsible for initially petitioning the government to protect the pollinators. While the rusty patched bumble bee is the first in the continental US to be proposed for federal protections, seven types of bees native to Hawaii were also proposed last year to be classified as endangered species. In a new study, published in Science, researchers from Princeton University looked at air bubbles trapped in ancient ice in Greenland and Antarctica. The team estimated the past atmospheric pressure of oxygen by measuring the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen in these prehistoric bubbles.
Oxygen is clearly key to life on Earth as we know it, but it also plays a role in many chemical processes around the globe. A change of 0.7 is nothing too dramatic, though; it's an equivalent drop of going from zero to about 100 meters (328 feet) above sea level. But the puzzling question is where did it go? The researchers have two hypotheses that could explain the decline. "The first is that global erosion rates may have increased over the past few to tens of millions of years due to, among other things, the growth of glaciers – glaciers grind rock, thereby increasing erosion rates," lead author Daniel Stolper told Live Science. "Alternatively, when the ocean cools, as it has done over the past 15 million years, before fossil fuel burning, the solubility of oxygen in the ocean increases. That is, the oceans can store more oxygen at colder temperatures for a given concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere," he added. There are many materials that are also good at removing oxygen from the atmosphere. Rust itself is formed by iron bonding with oxygen. Some materials like pyrite (also known as fools’ gold) and organic carbon are particularly efficient in capturing oxygen, and these substances could be the culprits behind the decline. There’s also another interesting finding in the research. Apart from the last 150 years, the level of carbon dioxide has been more or less constant. This was unexpected, as carbon dioxide levels tend to increase as oxygen decreases. A potential solution is the so-called "silicate weathering thermostat", a yet-to-be tested concept suggesting an increased erosion in volcanic rock when the atmosphere becomes richer in carbon dioxide. Those broken down rocks are washed in the sea and carbon dioxide is trapped there. More research is necessary, though, to work out how oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere interact with our planet over long periods of time. [H/T: Live Science] A group of Norwegian horses have learned to communicate in “horse code”, using their newly-acquired talkativeness to tell their human carers whether they are too hot or too cold. This latest breakthrough in interspecies relations is reported in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, with the study authors revealing that all 23 of the horses involved in the study were able to master the art of communication following less than two weeks of training. While the animals may not yet be able to participate in deep philosophical conversations with their human counterparts, they are now experts at indicating whether they want to be draped in a blanket or have their blanket taken off, depending on how warm they are feeling. To achieve this, the horses use their noses to select one of three different boards with specific symbols on them: a horizontal line means they want to have their blanket put on, a vertical line represents a desire to have their blanket taken off, and a blank board means they are perfectly happy as they are and don’t want a change of any sort. To train the horses, the researchers placed them in either very warm conditions with a blanket on or outside in the cold without a blanket, and rewarded them with carrots when they selected the board that made the most sense. For instance, horses that were sweating were rewarded when they indicated that they wished to have their clothing removed, while naked horses that were shivering were given a carrot when requesting to have their blanket put on. When horses made errors, such as when a nude horse asked to have his blanket removed, they received nothing. With just 10-15 minutes of training per day over the course of two weeks, the animals quickly learned to communicate using this system, with a 100 percent success rate
Amazingly, once the horses realized that they could talk to their humans, they became increasingly eager to do so, and often tried to gain their attention in order to convey their feelings even when not taking part in the training exercise. For example, hot horses regularly touched the board that indicated that they wished to have their jacket removed when they saw the researchers walking nearby. Whenever this happened, the horses were found to be sweating underneath their clothes, suggesting that they weren’t doing this just for a carrot, but genuinely understood the meaning of the symbols and the consequences of their own choices. Over the next few months, the researchers observed as the horses used their new skills to talk to their owners whenever they became too hot or too cold as weather conditions changed. Four Thieves Vinegar continues their mission to make medicine free for everyone. Crowd sourcing and the internet kind of proves that corporate, top-down power structures are busted. The human race works better as a team.
Photo by Seth Rosenblatt/The Parallax Researchers at The Ohio State University and their colleagues have discovered that the same hotspot that feeds Iceland's active volcanoes has been causing them to underestimate ice loss on Greenland. The same hotspot in Earth's mantle that feeds Iceland's active volcanoes has been playing a trick on the scientists who are trying to measure how much ice is melting on nearby Greenland. According to a new study in the journal Science Advances, the hotspot softened the mantle rock beneath Greenland in a way that ultimately distorted their calculations for ice loss in the Greenland ice sheet. This caused them to underestimate the melting by about 20 gigatons (20 billion metric tons) per year. That means Greenland did not lose about 2,500 gigatons of ice from 2003-2013 as scientists previously thought, but nearly 2,700 gigatons instead -- a 7.6 percent difference, said study co-author Michael Bevis of The Ohio State University. "It's a fairly modest correction," said Bevis, the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and leader of GNET, the Greenland GPS Network. "It doesn't change our estimates of the total mass loss all over Greenland by that much, but it brings a more significant change to our understanding of where within the ice sheet that loss has happened, and where it is happening now." The Earth's crust in that part of the world is slowly moving northwest, he explained, and 40 million years ago, parts of Greenland passed over an especially hot column of partially molten rock that now lies beneath Iceland. The hotspot softened the rock in its wake, lowering the viscosity of the mantle rocks along a path running deep below the surface of Greenland's east coast. During the last ice age, Greenland's ice sheet was much larger than now, and its enormous weight caused Greenland's crust to slowly sink into the softened mantle rock below. When large parts of the ice sheet melted at the end of the ice age, the weight of the ice sheet decreased, and the crust began to rebound. It is still rising, as mantle rock continues to flow inwards and upwards beneath Greenland. The existence of mantle flow beneath Greenland is not a surprise in itself, Bevis said. When the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites began measuring gravity signals around the world in 2002, scientists knew they would have to separate mass flow beneath the earth's crust from changes in the mass of the overlying ice sheet. "GRACE measures mass, period. It cannot tell the difference between ice mass and rock mass. So, inferring the ice mass change from the total mass change requires a model of all the mass flows within the earth. If that model is wrong, so is the ice mass change inferred from GRACE," he explained. Models of this rock flow depend on what researchers can glean about the viscosity of the mantle. The original models assumed a fairly typical mantle viscosity, but Greenland's close encounter with the Iceland hot spot greatly changed the picture. To the GNET team, the 7.6 percent discrepancy in overall ice loss is overshadowed by the fact that it concealed which parts of the ice sheet are most being affected by climate change. The new results reveal that the pattern of modern ice loss is similar to that which has prevailed since the end of the last ice age. "This result is a detail, but it is an important detail," Bevis continued. "By refining the spatial pattern of mass loss in the world's second largest -- and most unstable -- ice sheet, and learning how that pattern has evolved, we are steadily increasing our understanding of ice loss processes, which will lead to better-informed projections of sea level rise." Computer models can give a good estimate of mantle flow and crustal uplift, he said, and GNET's mission is to make those models better by providing direct observations of present-day crustal motion. That's why the GNET team includes GRACE scientists and earth modelers as well as GPS experts and glaciologists. The team used GPS to measure uplift in the crust all along Greenland's coast. That's when they discovered that two neighboring stations on the east coast were uplifting far more rapidly than standard models had predicted. "We did not expect to see the anomalous uplift rates at the two stations that sit on the 'track' of the Iceland hot spot," Bevis said. "We were shocked when we first saw them. Only afterwards did we make the connection." He added that the discovery holds big implications for measuring ice loss elsewhere in the world. For instance, GNET has a sister network, ANET, that spans West Antarctica. It employs roughly similar numbers of GPS stations, but spread out over a vastly larger area. Unless more stations are added to ANET, anomalous rates of uplift may go undetected, Bevis cautioned, and analyses of GRACE data will lead to inaccurate estimates of ice loss in Antarctica. The authors of the paper included Shfaquat A. Khan and Per Knudsen of the Technical University of Denmark; Ingo Sasgen and Veit Helm of the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research; Tonie van Dam of the University of Luxembourg; Jonathan L. Bamber of the University of Bristol; John Wahr (now deceased) of the University of Colorado; Michael Willis of Cornell University; Kurt H. Kjaer and Anders A. Bjork of the University of Copenhagen; Bert Wouters and Peter Kuipers Munneke of Utrecht University; Beata Csatho of the University at Buffalo; Kevin Fleming of the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences; and Andy Aschwanden of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. GNET is an increasingly international project led by the USA, Denmark and Luxembourg. It is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and by the governments of the partner nations. Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Ohio State University. The original item was written by Pam Frost Gorder. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the existence of a Saturn-mass exoplanet in the binary system OGLE-2007-BLG-349L, located 8,000 light-years away towards the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The newly confirmed exoplanet’s official name is OGLE-2007-BLG-349L(AB)b. The planet is somewhat less massive than Saturn. It orbits roughly 300 million miles from the pair of red dwarf stars, about the distance from the asteroid belt to our Sun. It takes about 7 years to circle its parent stars. The two stars, OGLE-2007-BLG-349LA and OGLE-2007-BLG-349LB, are a mere 7 million miles apart, or 14 times the diameter of the Moon’s orbit around Earth. “This exoplanet was observed as a microlensing event in 2007,” said Dr. David Bennett of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The event, dubbed OGLE-2007-BLG-349, was detected by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) Collaboration Early Warning System and announced on July 2, 2007. OGLE searches for and observes effects from small distortions of spacetime, caused by stars and exoplanets, which were predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of General Relativity. These small distortions are known asmicrolensing. The OGLE observations uncovered a star and a planet, but a detailed analysis also revealed a third body that astronomers could not definitively identify. “The ground-based observations suggested two possible scenarios for the three-body system: a Saturn-mass planet orbiting a close binary star pair or a Saturn-mass and an Earth-mass planet orbiting a single star,” Dr. Bennett explained. The sharpness of images from Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 allowed the astronomers to separate the background source star and the lensing star from their neighbors in the very crowded star field.
The Hubble observations revealed that the starlight from the foreground lens system was too faint to be a single star, but it had the brightness expected for two closely orbiting red dwarf stars, which are fainter and less massive than our Sun. “So, the model with two stars and one planet is the only one consistent with the Hubble data,” Dr. Bennett said. “OGLE has detected over 17,000 microlensing events, but this is the first time such an event has been caused by a circumbinary planetary system,” said Dr. Andrzej Udalski from the University of Warsaw, Poland. Now that the team has shown that microlensing can successfully detect events caused by circumbinary planets, Hubble could provide an essential role in this new realm in the continued search for exoplanets. The research paper reporting this discovery has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. There’s trouble afoot in the world of make-believe. Astrologers were left up in arms over the weekend after Cosmopolitan reported that NASA would be changing the zodiac signs, leaving countless people directionless in their lives.
“NASA has decided to update the astrological signs for the first time in 2,000 years, meaning that a whopping 86% of us now have a different sign,” the magazine claimed. “If you want to get all technical about it, the reason for this radical change is down to the fact that the sky today is extremely different to how it was thousands of years ago, which makes sense.” Well, we’ve got bad news (or good, depending on how you look at it). NASA has not changed the signs of the zodiac. Also, the scientific agency has not decided to shift its focus from factual research to studying Harry Potter. The misunderstanding seems to have come from a NASA Space Place page for kids, written back in January this year. The writer for Cosmopolitan has taken information from this page and used it to make their rather bold claim. Now, on this page NASA has delved into some actual science. They explain how the signs of the zodiac were first derived by the Babylonians 3,000 years ago by drawing an imaginary line between Earth and the Sun. Extending this line into space, the Sun seems to pass through various constellations made up of stars hundreds to thousands of light-years away. They picked 12 constellations, but there were actually 13 constellations in the zodiac, so the Babylonians left one out, Ophiuchus. What’s more, Earth’s axis has shifted in the last 3,000 years, so the sky doesn’t look the same. So, NASA explains, the signs of the zodiac don’t really fit with what we use today. Someone born into Leo, for example, would actually be Cancer nowadays. This has actually come up before, as Snopes explains. Of course, this is all just a scientific explanation for the zodiac, not a validation of horoscopes. “NASA studies astronomy not astrology,” NASA spokesperson Dwayne Brown told Gizmodo. “We didn’t change any zodiac signs, we just did the math.” So, your sign hasn’t changed. But even it did, well, horoscopes are about as real as Bigfoot. Aside from the Sun, no star is close enough to our Solar System to have a meaningful effect on our lives, let alone dictate your personality. Rest assured, if you want to be an Aquarius, you can still be an Aquarius. You can be whatever you want to be. How about a sentient collection of trillions of cells in a vast and wonderful universe? That's a lot more impressive to us. After months of suspicion, China has finally confirmed their first space station is heading for Earth and is potentially out of control. A senior official of the Chinese space program revealed at a press conference last week that the Tiangong-1 space station is likely to fall to Earth by 2017, Xinhua News Agencyreports. They added it's currently intact and orbiting at a height of around 370 kilometers (230 miles). "Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling," said Wu Ping, deputy director of China's manned space engineering office, during the press conference. The officials said that the space agency will continue to follow the movement of Tiangong-1 and will release an update on its expected time of arrival if required. The 10.3-meter-long (34-foot-long) Tiangong-1, which means “Heavenly Palace," was launched in 2011 as China’s first manned space station. It ended its mission in March this year. However, since then, numerous astronomersnoted the space station appeared to be aimlessly drifting out of control and heading for Earth. The silence by the Chinese government only heightened uncertainties. The officials did not comment on how much of the space station they still maintain. However, given the vague estimated landing time, it suggests very little. China launched a new experimental space station, Tiangong-2, last week, and are planning to launch a fully fledged space station next decade. onathan McDowell, renowned Harvard astrophysicist and space industry enthusiast, said the announcement suggested China had lost control of the station and that it would re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere “naturally.” If this is the case, it would be impossible to predict where the debris from the space station will land. “You really can’t steer these things,” he said. “Even a couple of days before it re-enters we probably won’t know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when it’s going to come down. Not knowing when it’s going to come down translates as not knowing where its going to come down.” McDowell said a slight change in atmospheric conditions could nudge the landing site “from one continent to the next”. While most of the eight tonnes of space station would melt as it passes through the atmosphere, McDowell said some parts, such as the rocket engines, were so dense that they wouldn’t burn up completely. “There will be lumps of about 100kg or so, still enough to give you a nasty wallop if it hit you,” he said. “Yes there’s a chance it will do damage, it might take out someone’s car, there will be a rain of a few pieces of metal, it might go through someone’s roof, like if a flap fell off a plane, but it is not widespread damage.” Wu Ping, the space official, told reporters the lab – which was launched into spaceamid great fanfare in September 2011 – had made “important contributions to China’s manned space cause” during its four and a half years of service.
She claimed its return to earth was “unlikely to affect aviation activities or cause damage to the ground”. “China has always highly valued the management of space debris, conducting research and tests on space debris mitigation and cleaning,” Wu said, according to Xinhua. Wu said Tiangong-1 was “currently intact” and that authorities would “continue to monitor [it] and strengthen early warning for possible collision with objects.” “If necessary, China will release a forecast of its falling and report it internationally,” she added. Space enthusiasts who have been monitoring Tiangong-1, and attempting to draw attention to its plight, fear there is a risk – albeit small – that pieces of the falling lab could cause damage back on earth. “It could be a real bad day if pieces of this came down in a populated area,” Thomas Dorman, an amateur astronomer who has been attempting to track the missing lab, was quoted as saying by the space.com website in June. China’s first space lab was most likely to land in the ocean or in an uninhabited area, Dorman admitted. “But remember – sometimes, the odds just do not work out, so this may bear watching.” Antarctic sea ice is thawing early this year, setting new daily record lows much of this week.9/20/2016 There has been a noticeable reduction in winter sea-ice coverage around Antarctica in recent weeks, with sea ice extent starting its annual retreat early and setting new daily record lows for much of the past week. The result comes two years after winter sea ice extent around Antarctica reached a new record high in September 2014, when it exceeded 20 million square kilometres for the first time since satellite measurements began in 1979. This year, Antarctic sea ice began its annual spring retreat roughly four weeks earlier than average, after peaking at 18.5 million square kilometres on 28 August 2016, which was close to the lowest winter maximum on record. Dr Jan Lieser from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre and the Australian Research Council-funded Antarctic Gateway Partnership said it was a surprising finding, given the trend in recent years. “This is a reversal of the recent trend towards record high winter sea-ice extent over the past few years,” said Dr Lieser.
“Within the space of just two years, we have gone from a record high winter sea-ice extent to record daily lows for this point in the season.” “This is a fascinating change, and a great reminder that we are dealing with an extremely variable component of the climate system.” “It’s also a reminder of why it can be unwise to leap to conclusions about the link between Antarctic sea ice and climate change on the basis of one or two years of data.” “It is the long-term trends that are most important, as well as the regional variability, which is high around Antarctica.” Sea-ice has an important effect on the global climate system and ecosystems, by covering and affecting up to 40% of the Southern Ocean surface area during winter. Its annual cycle of advance and retreat represents one of the greatest seasonal changes to the Earth’s surface, and has far-reaching impacts on atmosphere-ocean interactions and the Earth’s climate. Dr Lieser said he and his colleagues were working to understand the drivers of change and variability in sea ice coverage. “It’s likely that last year’s powerful El Nino event is playing a role in this year’s sea-ice distribution, but there is also a likely contribution by weather events at the local scale.” “Sea ice cover in the Arctic has been reducing steadily over the past several decades, and climate models also predict that over time sea ice will also reduce around Antarctica.” “It will be very interesting to see how the Antarctic sea ice extent varies over the coming years.” |
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