Batfish Key to Keeping Reefs Clean

Batfish may come to Great Barrier Reef’s rescue by Catherine Brahic:

Neither species was able to make a dent in the damaging algae. Nor did any of the remaining 41 herbivorous fish found in the area make much of a difference. Instead, the researchers found that a rare batfish, Platax pinnatus, moved in. The team was surprised to see the batfish act this way, as they usually feed on plankton and invertebrates on the sea bed. “In five days the batfish had halved the amount of weed. In eight weeks it was completely gone and the coral was free to grow unhindered,”
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Batfish are vulnerable because of their large size, which makes them attractive to spear fishers, and because their young depend on coastal mangroves which are in decline in many areas. For now, they are one of the last populations apparently capable of reversing the fate of coral reefs that have been damaged by overfishing. Already, the reef has all but lost two major weed-mowers: dugongs and green turtles.

Which relates to a story this morning on NPR (I can’t find the link on the site?). It had to do with village officials paying fisherman… to maintain the mangrove swamps since the swamps were shown to greatly decrease the impact of tidal waves (and large storms) on land. Previously government officials had supported (and I would imagine many still do…) large developers raising the mangrove swamps and building big beachfront hotels.

Photos of Mason Neck State Park

Mason Neck State Park butterfly - Mason Neck SP

Photos of Mason Neck State Park, Virginia

I have posted photos from quite a few of my travels. For example, see some national park photos: Shenandoah National Park, United States Botanical Garden, Olympic National Park, Egypt…

UK Science and Research Funding

UK Science and Innovation Awards from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council:

University of Oxford – over Â£3.3 million has been awarded to establish a forward looking world class research centre in the Analysis of Non-linear Partial Differential Equations (PDEs).
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Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and Imperial College London – almost Â£6 million to create a new collaboration of complementary expertise between the Physics Departments at Cambridge, Imperial & Oxford in the area of quantum coherence…

Universities get Â£31m research awards:

The money is going to leading research-intensive universities. Four out of the seven awards are for joint projects, indicating how even players like Cambridge and Imperial are having to collaborate to keep up with the international competition.

Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds

Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds, Study Finds by Shankar Vedantam:

the brief training sessions seemed to confer enormous benefits as many as five years later. That would be as if someone went to the gym Monday through Friday for the first two weeks of the new year, did no exercise for five years, and still saw significant physical benefits in 2012.
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The researchers also showed that the benefits of the brain exercises extended well beyond the specific skills the volunteers learned. Older adults who did the basic exercises followed by later sessions were three times as fast as those who got only the initial sessions when it came to activities of daily living, such as reacting to a road sign, looking up a number in a telephone book or checking the ingredients on a medicine bottle — abilities that can spell the difference between living independently and needing help.

Related: Feed your Newborn Neurons – Another Paper Questions Scientific Paper Accuracy (just a reminder that the conclusions of many studies are not confirmed in future studies) – Virus may be eating your brain

$25 Million for Marquette College of Engineering

$25 million gift for the Marquette College of Engineering:

The Marquette University College of Engineering has received a gift commitment of more than $25 million as the first part of a legacy grant that could provide the university with an additional future $1 million a year in perpetuity, Marquette President Robert A. Wild announced Monday. The gift is from an engineering alumnus and his wife who have asked to remain anonymously.
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The $25 million gift is part of a broader fund-raising initiative to “transform the College of Engineering through endowed scholarships and faculty positions, an enhanced curriculum, extensive research opportunities and completion of a Discovery Learning Complex with state-of-the-art facilities and equipment,” Wild said. The benefactors, he noted, hope the gift “inspires others to help fund the bold initiatives that will position the College of Engineering as the premiere Catholic institution in the nation for engineering education.”

Mind controls body in extreme experiments

Mind controls body in extreme experiments by William J. Cromie, Harvard University Gazette:

During visits to remote monasteries in the 1980s, Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to generate such heat.

The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. “It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result,” Benson exclaims.

To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation.

In my opinion, much more evidence is needed to take these claims seriously but still it is interesting.

Nanotechnology Education

Teaching the Notion of Nanotechnology

Scientist Robert P.H. Chang of Northwestern University had no trouble persuading education officials in Mexico to introduce the burgeoning field of nanotechnology to schools there, but it’s been a far tougher sell in the United States. In Mexico, Chang said he had only to speak about the subject to top government officials, who then simply ordered school officials to teach it.
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Nanotechnology presents an especially difficult challenge in education. It is not a traditional discipline but rather a combination involving physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, engineering and technology.
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That’s what Chang has been developing as he directs Northwestern’s new national center for the university’s Materials World Modules program, charged with creating materials on nanotechnology for students in grades seven through 12.

Bed Bugs, Science and the Media

Media Criticism – the bed bug story

Since I discovered that I have bed bugs I have been touring around the internet doing research right from day one and what I have discovered is that the media is doing a terrible job of covering the bed bug story, and as a result many of the bed bug blogs I have read are full of misinformation which echoes this bad reporting in the media. One of the most common themes in the media stories you will read if you do a search for news articles on bed bugs is that we have bed bugs because DDT was banned, thus forcing us to use ‘weak chemicals’ against bed bugs. This is false. Bed bugs developed resistance to DDT in the 1940s
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I recommend tenting your bed, because you see a bed bug is not a super bug, the bug of steel, it is just a bug, and it is a bug that is used to being foiled by humans who do all the thinking in that symbiotic relationship, which is why bed bugs have evolved to be so damned sneaky in the hopes of getting away with all that biting.

I like the idea of avoiding pesticides, but I am not sure this is sufficient. Still I like the idea of presenting alternative ideas to pesticides as the first option. Extension services at many universities have great information, on a wide variety of topics, and in general are not overly biased toward commercial solutions (like business may be). They often have applied scientific thinking, run experiments and examined existing research on the topics for which they provide information.

How Do Wii Game Controllers Work?

How Do Motion-Sensing Video Game Controllers Work?:

The new Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 3 gaming systems, just released for the holidays, both include motion-sensing controllers.
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But how are the controllers able to precisely and accurately measure physical movement? At the heart of the controller technology are tiny accelerometers. Inside these chips, silicon springs anchor a silicon wafer to the rigid controller. As you wave the controller through the air at an attacking enemy, the wafer presses onto the springs, just as you are pressed against the seat of a car when you stomp on the gas pedal. The faster the controller accelerates, the more the wafer moves relative to the rest of the chip.
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But accelerometers alone cannot provide complete control, because small positional errors add up over time, like when you need to re-center your mouse on a mousepad. Nintendo addressed this problem by including a sensor bar that can be placed above or below the television. Each end of the bar emits a beam of infrared light like a television remote, which is monitored by a sensor on the controller that works like a digital camera: by seeing where the two spots of light fall on its grid of more than 750,000 pixels, the sensor can determine where the controller is pointing and translate it to a position on the television screen.

Arteriovenous Malformation Explanation

What Happened to the Senator’s Brain?

What is arteriovenous malformation (AVM)?

An AVM is a cluster of abnormally formed blood vessels. In medical images, it looks like a tangle of arteries and veins. About 300,000 people in the U.S. have these malformations, but most AVMs never cause any symptoms. The malformations can occur in various places around the body, however, those in the brain or spinal cord can cause the most widespread damage, because they affect the central nervous system.

AVMs disrupt the normal system used to provide oxygen to the brain. Ordinarily, arteries deliver oxygenated blood to the brain and veins return it to the heart and lungs. But in an AVM, blood that should be in an artery can flow through a vein. When that happens, part of the brain may not get enough oxygen. Also, veins are not meant to handle the high pressures and fast blood flow of arteries. So they may expand or even rupture, causing bleeding in the brain.