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Whale beaching puzzles scientists
Scientists and wildlife officials in Sydney continued to search for what may have caused a series of mass strandings which left 168 whales and dolphins dead on Australian and New Zealand beaches last week.
Authorities and volunteers worked through the night to save dozens of whales and dolphins after three separate beachings in Australia and New Zealand since Sunday.
By Tuesday, 96 long-finned pilot whales and bottle-nosed dolphins had died after the first beaching Sunday at King Island, midway between the Australian mainland and the southern island state of Tasmania.
Tasmanian wildlife officer Shane Hunniford said another 19 long-finned pilot whales had died in a separate beaching on Maria Island, 60 km (37 miles) east of the Tasmanian capital Hobart.
He said 43 whales had beached themselves on Maria Island but officials had managed to save 24 that had been found alive.
Across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand, a mass grave was dug on a beach at Opoutere, 100 km (62 miles) east of Auckland on the North Island, for 53 dead pilot whales. Officials said 73 whales had become stranded but 20 were saved.
Of those 20, more were expected to die because many were too weak to follow the others out to sea.
“Some of them had suffered pretty significantly on the beach,” New Zealand conservation department manager John Gaukrodger told reporters.
Hunniford said it was unlikely there was any connection between the Australian and New Zealand beachings, with the mass strandings no more than just unfortunate coincidences.
“If you look at spaceship Earth, Tasmania and New Zealand both stick out into the Southern Ocean and that’s a playground for whales and dolphins,” Hunniford told reporters.
Warwick Brennen of Tasmania’s environment department said there was no obvious explanation for the strandings but his department would examine factors such as local weather patterns.
Stress may promote cell aging
A new finding may explain how stress could ultimately lead to premature aging.
Chronic psychological stress is associated with accelerated shortening of the caps, called telomeres, on the ends of chromosomes in white blood cells — and thus hasten their demise —according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Telomeres promote chromosome stability, Dr Elissa S. Epel at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues explain. Telomeres shorten with each replication of the cell, and cells cease dividing when telomeres shorten sufficiently.
The team investigated the theory that psychological stress affects telomere shortening and thereby contributes to accelerated aging.
Their study included 39 healthy, premenopausal women who were primary caregivers for a child with a chronic illness, and 19 age-matched mothers of healthy children who served as a comparison “control” group.”
Stress was measured with a standardized questionnaire, and telomere length was measured in participants’ blood samples.
These findings may have implications for human health, co-author Dr Elizabeth H. Blackburn, also at UCSF, told reporters, since telomere shortening is associated with premature death from cardiovascular disease and infections.
Device to probe physics
The Atlas experiment will explore the fundamental properties of matter and look for “new physics” beyond the limits of our current understanding.
It will be housed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, due to begin operating in 2007. The LHC could create mini-black holes as particles collide at high energies.
Researchers are confident they will be able to detect the most sought after particle in physics: the Higgs boson, which explains why all other particles have mass.
The finished element is the first of the four barrels that will form the central part of the SemiConductor Tracker (SCT).
When complete, Atlas will be 25m high (as tall as a five-storey building), 46m long and will weigh about 7,000 tonnes.
The SCT will track the movement of particles as they pass through the thousands of silicon wafers with which the barrels are populated.
Project for hydrogen power
A government laboratory and a private company announced a $2.6 million project to develop hydrogen in a nuclear reactor using a process with the potential to one day trim USA’s reliance on fossil fuels.
High temperature electrolysis could become economically feasible by using the next generation of nuclear reactors to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, said officials with Ceramatec and Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.
“We have been able to show that we can produce hydrogen at commercially attractive rates in a very small unit and at conditions that are typical of a high temperature, helium-cooled reactor,” said laboratory researcher Steve Herring.
The sample, about the size of a paperback book, had its successful test in a pottery kiln used to simulate the high temperatures created by the next generation of nuclear reactors — about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Researchers said the process of obtaining hydrogen by splitting water using electric energy has been known for about 150 years.
The energy department is hoping for a demonstration of commercial-scale hydrogen production using the process by 2017. — Sci-tech World Report
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