Polar Ice Caps Can Recover from Warmer Climate-Induced Melting, Study Shows

n recent years scientists have closely monitored the shrinking area of the Arctic covered by sea ice in warmer summer months, a development that has created new shipping lanes but also raised concerns about humans living in the region and the survival of species such as polar bears.

In the new research, scientists used one of two computer-generated global climate models that accurately reflect the rate of sea-ice loss under current climate conditions, a model so sensitive to warming that it projects the complete loss of September Arctic sea ice by the middle of this century.

However, the model takes several more centuries of warming to completely lose winter sea ice, and doing so required carbon dioxide levels to be gradually raised to a level nearly nine times greater than today. When the model's carbon dioxide levels then were gradually reduced, temperatures slowly came down and the sea ice eventually returned.

"We expected the sea ice to be completely gone in winter at four times the current level of carbon dioxide but we had to raise it by more than eight times," said Cecilia Bitz, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences.

"All that carbon dioxide made a very, very warm planet. It was about 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it is now, which caused the Arctic to be completely free of sea ice in winter."

Bitz and members of her research group are co-authors of a paper about the research that is to be published in Geophysical Research Letters. The lead author is Kyle Armour, a UW graduate student in physics, and other co-authors are Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth and Kelly McCusker, UW graduate students in atmospheric sciences, and Ian Eisenman, a postdoctoral researcher from the California Institute of Technology and UW.

In the model, the scientists raised atmospheric carbon dioxide 1 percent each year, which resulted in doubling the levels of the greenhouse gas about every 70 years. The model began with an atmospheric carbon dioxide level of 355 parts per million (in July the actual figure stood at 392 ppm).

In that scenario, it took about 230 years to reach temperatures at which Earth was free of sea ice during winter. At that point, atmospheric carbon dioxide was greater than 3,100 parts per million.

Then the model's carbon dioxide level was reduced at a rate of 1 percent a year until, eventually, temperatures retreated to closer to today's levels. Bitz noted that the team's carbon dioxide-reduction scenario would require more than just a reduction in emissions that could be achieved by placing limits on the burning of fossil fuels. The carbon dioxide would have to be drawn out of the atmosphere, either naturally or mechanically.

"It is really hard to turn carbon dioxide down in reality like we did in the model. It's just an exercise, but it's a useful one to explore the physics of the system."

While the lack of a "tipping point" could be considered good news, she said, the increasing greenhouse gases leave plenty of room for concern.

"Climate change doesn't have to exhibit exotic phenomena to be dangerous," Bitz said, adding that while sea ice loss can have some positive effects, it is proving harmful to species such as polar bears that live on the ice and to some people who have been forced to relocate entire villages.

"The sea ice cover will continue to shrink so long as the Earth continues to warm," she said. "We don't have to hypothesize dramatic phenomena such as tipping points for this situation to become challenging."

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Davidow Discovery Fund and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Reflection:

After reading this article, the first thing that came to my mind was:"Oh yeah! In the future I can still have the chance to visit the Arctic!" Hearing the news that there is a way to save the Earth as well as hope to save the Arctic, I was quite shocked. I only heard news that Global Warming was worsening and that Global Warming would do this and do that. But after reading this, I think that the scientist are really heroes and genius. No one has ever tried to stop global warming but just make the process slower and to buy human race more time. The group of scientist are smart and think otherwise of the news that come out. They try their best to find ways to save the Earth although they know that they will fail several times. Although it is just a model, it still shows that by chance, the earth will really be saved.

Going where no Mars rover has gone before

ASA’s six-wheeled Mars rover Curiosity now has a destination on the Red Planet: Gale Crater, an ancient, 150-kilometer-wide depression with a large mountain in the middle. The car-sized robot will spend at least two years wheeling around the rocky basin, collecting information about martian history and looking for signs of habitable environments.

NASA announced the landing site for the $2.5 billion rover on July 22. Scheduled to launch later this year for an August 2012 landing, Curiosity and its payload of instruments will wheel around examining rocks, snapping photos and eating dust. There are 17 cameras on board; one on its belly will capture the probe’s dramatic descent to the surface. A laser will help Curiosity identify intriguing rocks to study; when it finds one, the rover will approach the rock and drill into it, producing a powder that it will then ingest and analyze.

Gale Crater’s central mound is a 5-kilometer-tall stack of sediments that scientists can read like chapters in a history book. The rocky pages will reveal Mars’ geologic and environmental history, including how much water may have drenched the basin once upon a time. The crater also features canyons and fissures that may once have been habitable.

“Our primary goal is to explore habitable environments,” says project scientist John Grotzinger of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “That means we have water present, that means we have a source of energy for microbes to undertake metabolism to live, and that we also have a source of carbon for life as we know it.”

Curiosity will study clay deposits near the base of the mountain, then head toward an area rich in sulfur salts. Both form in the presence of water, says geologist Dawn Sumner of the University of California, Davis.

Gale Crater has been on the short list of Mars target sites for at least a decade, having been mentioned in the early stages of planning for the rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The other finalist for Curiosity’s destination was Eberswalde Crater, potentially a former lakebed and home of an extensive, fossilized river delta. Choosing a landing site was difficult, scientists said, because 60 options initially under consideration were all so good. This time, a group of scientists including astronomer and planetary scientist Jim Bell of Arizona State University led the charge for Gale’s selection. Bell says he didn’t know Gale had been selected until the public announcement. “I thought it could go either way, between Eberswalde and Gale,” he says. “They both have great science potential, and amazing features. So I’m not surprised — but of course I’m delighted.”

According to Bell, Cornell University graduate student Ryan Anderson played a critical role in shaping current understanding of the crater. “It’s both simultaneously wonderful and terrifying that [Curiosity] is going to the landing site I have been studying for the last few years,” Anderson, who is doing fieldwork at a remote site in Canada, wrote on the American Geophysical Union’s website. “Suddenly my work is going to come under very close scrutiny, and I fully expect that [Curiosity] will discover things that completely invalidate some of my interpretations. But … that is what science is about, and I’m thrilled that we will get the answers to some of the big questions about Gale that I couldn’t answer using data from orbit.”

Reflection:

After reading this interesting article, I think that Curiosity, the mars rover will be collecting a lot of valuable information since the Gale Crater has never been explored before. As the article had said, the mars rover, Curiosity cost 2.5 billion, which is very expensive which only the government can afford. But with this new equipment that has been installed with 17 cameras on its body with many other instruments that are used to collect samples like dirt and record temperature and humidity etc. Curiosity will study clay deposits near the base of the mountain, then head toward an area rich in sulfur salts, which are both forms of water. With water on mars, it means that the planet can be able to sustain life with some technology involved. This is also the primary objective of the whole space exploration activity, to find habitable environments so that we can have a place to take refuge in when the Earth finally dies, to ensure the continuity of the human race.

Genes & Cells

New mutations in schizophrenia
New genetic errors crop up more often in people with schizophrenia than in their parents. The results may indicate that many cases of schizophrenia arise spontaneously from the new mutations and are not the result of many inherited genes working in concert. An international group of researchers decoded the genetic blueprints of 14 people with schizophrenia and of those people’s parents. The team examined only protein-producing genes, which constitute a tiny fraction of the genetic instructions, but found 15 new mutations in eight of the people with schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia develop new mutations at more than twice the rate of the average person, the researchers report online July 10 in Nature Genetics. —Tina Hesman Saey

Mice get human livers
The mouse-or-man question just got a little blurrier. Researchers led by Sangeeta Bhatia of MIT engineered artificial livers from human liver cells encased in a polymer scaffold, then implanted the liver packets under the skin or in the abdomens of mice. Mice with the implants can break down drugs and produce liver proteins just like humans do, the team reports online July 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Such “humanized” mice could be used to screen drugs and improve therapies for diseases involving the liver. —Tina Hesman Saey

Stroke-be-gone compound
Brains have natural self-healing components that may help protect against and repair damage from a blood-clot-induced stroke. A piece of a protein called perlecan protects brain cells from damage and helps stimulate growth of new blood vessels, all without harmful side effects, an international group of researchers reports online July 11 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The bit of protein, called perlecan domain V, restored movement in mice and rats to prestroke levels when administered within 24 hours of a stroke. Since it is part of the brain’s natural response to stroke, the substance could be a safe treatment. —Tina Hesman Saey

Eye of newt regenerates
Shakespeare’s witches may be happy to learn that one of their favorite ingredients is a renewable resource. Newts’ ability to regenerate the lenses of their eyes is not hampered by aging or repeated injury, an international team of researchers reports online July 12 in Nature Communications. Mammals, including humans, lose the ability to renew body parts with age, but newts don’t seem to have that problem. In the new study, newts regrew lenses 18 times in 16 years, with no loss of lens quality. Figuring out how newts regenerate body parts may help improve antiaging therapies for people. —Tina Hesman Saey

Potato genome
Po-tay-to, po-tah-to, however you pronounce it, scientists are now calling the tuber’s genome (mostly) done. Potatoes have 39,031 genes, an international group of researchers known as the Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium reports online July 10 in Nature. Of those, 3,372 genes are unique to potatoes. Analysis of the potato’s genetic blueprints reveals that the plant made duplicate copies of its genetic instructions at least twice in the ancient past. Clues to disease resistance and the evolution of tubers may also be hidden among the genes, and breeders may use the data to build better spuds. —Tina Hesman Saey

Reflection

After reading this particular article, I can come to a conclusion. That humans are creative and intelligent but at the same time cruel to animals. Humans may like to experiments to get new findings and have new creations. But in the process of accomplishing all these things, animals are harmed and sometimes may even die in the process of doing so. These kind of artificial "upgrades" may seem kind of cool at the start, but when you think of it the things sacrificed to accomplish it, you will be kind of guilty that you made the animals suffer.

Learnin' Lizard

Lizards everywhere may be scampering a little taller now that an Anolis species from tropical tree canopies has passed tests for behavioral flexibility.

“These guys are smarter than people say,” reports behavioral ecologist Manuel Leal of Duke University in Durham, N.C. Cognitive scientists have studied birds’ and mammals’ powers to solve unexpected problems and learn new rules, but research on lizard cognition has been limited.

Yet several Anolis evermanni lizards collected from Puerto Rico and brought into the lab coped with devices not seen in nature that were modeled on tests of avian brain power, Leal and Brian Powell, also of Duke, report in an upcoming issue of Biology Letters. In a series of tests, four out of six lizards figured out how to remove plastic lids firmly stuck on a food box and how to ignore lids with other colors introduced as possible distractors. Two lizards eventually were able to undo their previous training and choose the “wrong” color because researchers had reversed the rules.

Lizards indeed deserve more respect, says Walter Wilczynski of Georgia State University in Atlanta, who studies the neural basis of animal behavior. “I agree with the authors that reptiles, and amphibians for that matter, are generally dismissed as being incapable of the simplest cognitive task,” he says, “despite the fact that whenever researchers do a careful study like this one, it turns out that, in fact, they do learn, often in a sophisticated way.”

Wilczynski’s lab has demonstrated that whiptail lizards can learn and unlearn tasks, and researchers led by Gordon Burghardt of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville have described monitor lizards learning how to get food out of a lab device. Two research groups including Burghardt’s have even demonstrated that turtles can learn how to do tasks by watching turtle peers.

Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University in England, who studies cognition in New Caledonian crows, was not exactly wowed by the Anolislizards, though. The ability to discriminate among options, and reverse that learning, is also known in fish, flies and bees, among other animals, he says. “It may well be that lizards do have the same flexibility shown by other taxa,” Kacelnik says, “but the results shown here are nowhere near what we know in birds and mammals.”

Figuring out which animal lineages can manage what mental acrobatics could reveal much about how cognition has evolved. One of the charms of the Anolis study, Burghardt says, is that demonstrating behavioral flexibility in a well-known species that is easily maintained in the lab could inspire a new wave of research on reptile cognition, which might finally let a lizard get some respect.

Reflection:

After reading this article, I have the same feelings as the previous time I read the chimpanzee news. The lizards have great adaptation skills to their surroundings as these lizards are even better than chimpanzees. They knew how to uncap some simple plastic lids that were firmly stuck with other lids as distractions. Other animals from the lizard family and other animals like fish and turtles also can learn and unlearn things from their peers. So think twice before you hit a lizard in your house since they are intelligent and have the ability to act accordingly to their surroundings. Maybe one day, the other animals in the animal kingdom besides mammals can overrun the country due to their ability to adapt with the surroundings and the ability to learn things quickly.

Germy Weather

The storm brought a lot of damage to the small city. But for Montana State University scientist Alexander Michaud, it also brought an opportunity for science.

Michaud is an ecologist who usually studies life beneath Antarctic glaciers. On that stormy day in June, though, he was more interested in hail. Once it was safe, he ventured outside and collected 27 hailstones for dissection. When another storm hit in July, he collected hundreds more. He cut the hailstones into four layers and studied the water that melted from the stones.

Plenty of scientists had studied hail before, but Michaud was taking a different approach. He was searching for signs of life in the pellets of frozen rain.

“I suddenly realized no one had really ever thought about studying hailstones — in a layered sense — for biology,” he told Science News.

In May, at a meeting of microbiologists, Michaud reported that he found bacteria scattered through the hailstones. Bacteria are tiny organisms made of only one cell, and they can live almost anywhere on Earth (even inside the human body). The cores, or centers, of the stones hosted the most bacteria. The study by Michaud and his colleagues suggests that bacteria may play an important role in the formation of hail.

The giant hail that pummeled Krieger’s car and ended up in Michaud’s lab probably had a wild ride before it landed on earth. Powerful winds may have tossed it up and down through different temperature zones in the sky, and these changes formed the layers of the hail.

Precipitation like hail doesn’t just fall from the sky on its own: Hail needs a “seed.” This can be a speck of dust or pollen, for example. Water freezes on the seed, and the icy ball starts to grow. The temperature of the clouds, the air and the earth all help determine what kind of precipitation is formed. As a small ball of ice falls through warmer and then colder parts of a cloud, the ice is alternately melted and refrozen. If it then gets blown upward before falling down, it may form hail.

More work is needed to know if bacteria can cause hail, said Noah Fierer, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. So far, scientists have found that bacteria can help form ice crystals. This is very different from finding that bacteria actually cause hail, microbiologist Noah Fierer told Science News. However, he says, finding a large share of bacteria in the center of hail certainly suggests they might cause hail formation.

Scientists have long suspected that bacteria, like dust, could get blown into the upper atmosphere and become seeds for tiny particles of ice. Researchers have been studying bacteria in the sky since the 1980s, and many researchers argue that bacteria may be involved in the formation of clouds and rain.

At the same meeting where Michaud and his colleagues showed the results of their hailstone dissections, other scientists also suggested bacteria plays an important role in the climate. A team of French scientists found bacteria in clouds nearly one mile high in the sky.

The French team also identified pollutants that break down in sunlight to form carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas. Some of those pollutants break down only if bacteria are around. That suggests bacteria may help release greenhouse gases. The accumulation of those greenhouses gases is heating up Earth. So, bacteria in the sky may be players in climate change.

These new studies suggest germs help form clouds and hail, and possibly influence climate change. However, “we still don’t know on a global scale how important these processes are,” Anthony Prenni toldScience News. Prenni is an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and he did not work on the new studies.

Prenni said scientists have only recently begun to seriously study the effects of bacteria on clouds. “Within a few years, I think we’re going to have a much better handle on it,” he said.

Reflection

After reading this interesting article, I have cleared some of my doubts. In the first place, I have never seen a hail storm with my own two eyes, only hearing it on radio or watching it on the television. At first, I thought that hail were just like rain, just iced. I thought that it was because of the cold weather in other countries that caused the hail to form and fall to earth. But after reading this article, I now know the true "mastermind" behind the formation of hail. Bacteria living in the sky? I did not know that too until this article came up. To me it is very weird as I thought that the microorganism only lived in the air around us, on land and in the soil. But I wonder how does bacteria go all the way up in to the sky where the clouds and rain form. By reading storybooks, I always read that some American kids like to eat the snowflake as they fall, doesn't this mean that they are eating bacteria too? I hope that some kids will not have the idea to eat anything falling from the sky.

Chimp Has An Ear For Talk

Panzee doesn’t talk, but she knows a word when she hears one — even if it’s emitted by a computer with a synthetic speech impediment.

That’s not too shabby for a chimpanzee. Raised to recognize 128 spoken words by pointing to corresponding symbols, Panzee perceives acoustically distorted words about as well as people do, say psychology graduate student Lisa Heimbauer of Georgia State University in Atlanta and her colleagues. Panzee thus challenges the argument that only people can recognize highly distorted words, thanks to brains tuned to speech sounds and steeped in chatter, the scientists contend in a paper published online June 30 in Current Biology.

“Auditory processing abilities that already existed in a common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans may have been sufficient to perceive speech,” Heimbauer says.

Panzee’s immersion in talk began in infancy and fueled her word-detection skills, much as occurs in people, Heimbauer suggests.

Originally, the researchers thought that Panzee would need training to grasp the word task, since she had never heard artificially distorted words. But after hearing only one such word, the chimp identified the next four synthetically distorted words before making a mistake. “What were supposed to be training sessions became test sessions,” Heimbauer says.

Heimbauer’s group presented Panzee with spoken and synthetic versions of 48 words, such asapricot, that the chimp had previously learned to associate with symbols. Some synthetic words sounded fuzzy and noisy, much like what hearing-impaired persons perceive with cochlear implants. Other mock words consisted of three whistle like tones.

Panzee’s immediate recognition of distorted words “is quite impressive and novel,” remarks psychologist Lori Holt of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In experiments conducted over the past 30 years, birds, rodents and other nonhuman animals have been trained to identify acoustically altered words. In contrast, Panzee apparently generalized from past experience hearing caretakers talk to distinguish acoustically transformed words, Holt says.

Panzee identified a word by pointing to one of four symbols on a computer screen.

The researchers played the same natural and synthetic words for 32 college students, who wrote down what they heard.

Across several sessions, Panzee recognized substantially more words than would be expected if she guessed — an average of about 80 percent of spoken words, 55 percent of fuzzy words and 40 percent of tone words.

Human participants recognized all spoken words and an average of about 70 percent of fuzzy words and 40 percent of tone words.

It’s not known whether any other animals have Panzee’s word-recognition chops. Irene Pepperberg of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., predicts that parrots could decipher highly distorted speech on their own. Wild parrots recognize species-specific and individual vocal calls in noisy forests, amid cacophonous flocks of comrades, comments Pepperberg, who studies thinking and communication in African gray parrots.

Alex, a parrot trained by Pepperberg to use a vocabulary of roughly 100 words, immediately knew familiar words spoken in regional dialects and in thick foreign accents.

Reflection

After reading this news about teaching animals to learn words, I was quite shocked. From young, I watched television cartoon and knew that parrots could imitate sounds it hears and see chimpanzees obeying to human commands. Now, the scientist are using more and more innovative ways to teach animals to listen and speak human words. From the article, you can see that the scientist underestimated the animals as they thought that Panzee would need special help and training to aid her through the difficult word challenge. However, just after hearing one word, Panzee identified the next four synthetically distorted words before making a mistake. Thus, showing that Panzee did not need much training.

Across several sessions, Panzee recognized substantially more words than would be expected if she guessed — an average of about 80 percent of spoken words, 55 percent of fuzzy words and 40 percent of tone words.

Human participants recognized all spoken words and an average of about 70 percent of fuzzy words and 40 percent of tone words. This shows that chimpanzees are smart for an animal since it can identify almost the same amount of sounds and words as a human can.

This makes me think twice before looking down on the animals's intelligence and other abilities.

Rare earth elements plentiful in ocean sediments

Mud at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean contains surprising concentrations of rare earth elements, 17 chemicals with exotic names like neodymium and europium that are critical to technologies ranging from cell phones and televisions to fluorescent light bulbs and wind turbines.

Hot plumes from hydrothermal vents pulled these materials out of seawater and deposited them on the seafloor, bit by bit, over tens of millions of years. One square patch of metal-rich mud 2.3 kilometers wide might contain enough rare earths to meet most of the global demand for a year, Japanese geologists report July 3 inNature Geoscience.

“I believe that rare earth resources undersea are much more promising than on-land resources,” says Yasuhiro Kato, a geologist at the University of Tokyo who led the study.

More than 97 percent of the world’s rare earth elements come from mines in China, which has restricted exports in recent years. With prices skyrocketing, shortages are feared — especially in Japan, which lacks minable deposits of these elements.

Kato’s team analyzed seafloor cores taken from 78 sites throughout the Pacific Ocean. Near Hawaii and in the southeast Pacific, concentrations of rare earths were comparable to those found in clays mined in China. Some deposits contained twice as much heavy rare earths such as dysprosium, a component of magnets in hybrid car motors.

“The heavier rare earths tend to be ones that command greater price because of their scarcity,” says Alex King, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory in Iowa.

Deep-sea mining is an old idea, but one that has yet to prove itself in the face of high costs and environmental concerns. Discovered decades ago, chunks of manganese on the ocean floor and deposits of metals such as zinc and copper in the Red Sea have proven impractical to mine.

“I don’t understand how this can be expected to be an economic way to recover rare earth,” says Daniel Cordier, a mineral commodity specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Minerals Information Center in Reston, Va.

Reflection

I think that by discovering these rare elements in the ocean, the people of Japan and the world will definitely mine for them. By mining these rare elements, they will not only damage the Earth's coral reefs and other things, but also disturb the natural ecosystem. These elements can only be found in the ocean and not on land like other elements which can be found more easily compared to the ocean elements. Due to its greater price and scarcity, the government will definitely urge the experts to begin excavating the resources immediately and will definitely explore the sea bed for more of these expensive and precious elements.