Gulf oil spill. Source: BBC

US coastguard says 5,000 barrels a day of oil are spewing from a well beneath site of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion.

Five times more oil a day than previously believed is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the blown-out well of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the US coastguard has said. Coastguard Rear Admiral Mary Landry said National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) experts now estimate that 5,000 barrels a day of oil are spilling into the gulf – far more than the previous estimate of 1,000 barrels a day. Robot submarines have so far failed to shut off the flow, 1,500m (5,000ft) below the surface, but the coastguard said a test burn on an isolated area of the spill was successful.

Watch the video on Guardian
10 animals at risk from the spill

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• Action Against Hunger
• American Red Cross
• American Jewish World Service
• AmeriCares
• Beyond Borders
• CARE
• Catholic Relief Services
• Childcare Worldwide
• Direct Relief International
• Doctors Without Borders
• Feed My Starving Children
• Friends of WFP
• Haitian Health Foundation
• Hope for Haiti
• International Medical Corps
• International Relief Teams
• Medical Teams International
• Meds and Food for Kids
• Mercy Corps
• Operation USA
• Oxfam
• Partners in Health
• Samaritan’s Purse
• Save the Children
• UNICEF
• World Concern
• World Vision
• Yele Haiti
  Wyclef Jean’s grassroots org
  Text Yele to 501 501 to donate $5 via your cellphone

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Lena river delta (NASA)

Most of the world’s major river deltas are sinking, increasing the flood risk faced by hundreds of millions of people, scientists report.

Damming and diverting rivers means that much less sediment now reaches many delta areas, while extraction of gas and groundwater also lowers the land.

Rivers affected include the Colorado, Nile, Pearl, Rhone and Yangtze.

About half a billion people live in these regions, the researchers note in the journal Nature Geoscience.

They calculate that 85% of major deltas have seen severe flooding in recent years, and that the area of land vulnerable to flooding will increase by about 50% in the next 40 years as land sinks and climate change causes sea levels to rise.

Read the rest on BBC News

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2. UN warns of the economic impact of nature loss

Image of a single molecule

The detailed chemical structure of a single molecule has been imaged for the first time, say researchers.

The physical shape of single carbon nanotubes has been outlined before, using similar techniques – but the new method even shows up chemical bonds.

Read the rest on BBC News

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2. Cat’s purr manipulates owners
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Arctic Northeast Passage

Two German ships set off on Friday on the first commercial journey from Asia to western Europe via the Arctic through the fabled Northeast Passage – a trip made possible by climate change. Niels Stolberg, president and CEO of Bremen-based Beluga Shipping, said the Northern Sea Route will cut thousands of nautical miles off the ships’ journey from South Korea to the Netherlands, reducing fuel consumption and emissions of greenhouse gas.

Read the rest on Reuters

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Jellyfish stir up the ocean as they move

www.youtube.com/watch?v=poAQljx_sfU

Jellyfish help to stir up the ocean as they move, researchers have found.

Using a green dye, scientists showed how the animals’ umbrella-shaped bodies were a key factor in this mixing.

The distribution of heat, nutrients and chemicals helps maintain the marine environment and has an important influence on global climate. Reporting in the journal Nature, the researchers said that marine animals of many shapes and sizes contributed to ocean turbulence.

Read the rest on BBC News

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1. “City of Gonads” Jellyfish Discovered
2. First animals evolved in lakes, not oceans, claims study
3. Sinking deltas threaten millions of lives

Neoproterozoic Doushantuo Formation

Evidence for life on Earth stretches back billions of years, with simple single-celled organisms like bacteria dominating the record. When multi-celled animal life appeared on the planet after 3 billion years of single cell organisms, animals diversified rapidly.Conventional wisdom has it that animal evolution began in the ocean, with animal life adapting much later in Earth history to terrestrial environments.

Now a UC Riverside-led team of researchers studying ancient rock samples in South China has found that the first animal fossils in the paleontological record are preserved in ancient lake deposits, not marine sediments as commonly assumed.

…

“We know that life in the oceans is very different from life in lakes, and, at least in the modern world, the oceans are far more stable and consistent environments compared to lakes which tend to be short-lived features relative to, say, rates of evolution,” said Martin Kennedy, a professor of geology in the Department of Earth Sciences who participated in the research. “Thus it is surprising that the first evidence of animals we find is associated with lakes, a far more variable environment than the ocean.”

Read the rest on Science Daily

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Why is it that once you learn something incorrectly (say, 7 X 9 = 65), it seems you never can correct your recall?
—J. Kruger, Cherry Hill, N.J.

Cognitive psychologist Gordon H. Bower of Stanford University answers:

Identifying, correcting and averting our memory errors are part of a cognitive process called memory monitoring. Incorrect associations can be tough to change, but we can use techniques to retrain our brain.

When strong habits impede our ability to acquire a desired new habit or association, we experience a common phenomenon known as proactive interference. Wrong associations appear in common spelling errors such as “wierd” for “weird” and “neice” for “niece.” Persistent mistaken connections also can cause embarrassing errors, such as calling a man’s second wife by the name of his first. Interference is stronger the more previous wives you’ve had to deal with, and it is more difficult to overcome the stronger the habits are.

Read the rest on Scientific American

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Karen McComb, a researcher from the University of Sussex, was inspired by her own cat, Pepo, who continually woke her up in the mornings with an “insistent and rather annoying” purr that reliably motivated her to get up and feed him.

Unlike regular, low frequency purring, further study revealed that this “solicitation purr” contained an embedded sound with a similar frequency to a baby’s cry; a sound that humans have an inherent bias to respond to.

She and her colleagues played recordings of these purrs to human volunteers, who found them to be “more urgent and harder to ignore” than regular purring. Cats have a vocal way of manipulating their owners into doing their bidding, according to a study.

Cat's purr manipulates owners

Source: How your cat’s purr manipulates you, BBC News, July 13 2009

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