Total buzz kill: Metals in flowers may play role in bumblebee decline

Apr. 2, 2013 ? Beekeepers and researchers nationally are reporting growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides may be killing off bumblebees. Now, research at the University of Pittsburgh points toward another potential cause: metal pollution from aluminum and nickel.

Published in the journal Environmental Pollution, the Pitt study finds that bumblebees are at risk of ingesting toxic amounts of metals like aluminum and nickel found in flowers growing in soil that has been contaminated by exhaust from vehicles, industrial machinery, and farming equipment. The Pitt study finds that bumblebees have the ability to taste -- and later ignore -- certain metals such as nickel, but can do so only after they visit a contaminated flower. Therefore, the insects are exposed to toxins before they even sense the presence of metals.

"Although many metals are required by living organisms in small amounts, they can be toxic to both plants and animals when found in moderate to high concentrations," said Tia-Lynn Ashman, principal investigator of the study and professor and associate chair in Pitt's Department of Biological Sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. "Beyond leading to mortality, these metals can interfere with insect taste perception, agility, and working memory -- all necessary attributes for busy bumblebee workers."

Ashman and George Meindl, coauthor of the study and a PhD candidate in Ashman's lab, studied bumblebee behavior using the Impatiens capensis, a North American flower that blooms in summer. Its flowers are large, producing a high volume of sugar-rich nectar each day -- an ideal place for bumblebees to forage. The blooms were collected from the field each morning of the two-week study and were of a similar age, color, and size.

To determine whether nickel and aluminum in the flowers' nectar influenced bumblebee behavior, Ashman and Meindl used two groups of uncontaminated flowers, one group of flowers contaminated by nickel, and another contaminated by aluminum. When a bumblebee visited a flower in an array, the entire visitation was recorded as well as the time spent (in seconds) foraging on each individual flower. This included monitoring whether the bee moved from a contaminated to a noncontaminated flower, whether the bee moved to the same group it had just sampled, or whether the bee left the flower group without visiting other individual blooms. Following each observed visit, all flowers in the array were replaced with new flowers, to ensure accurate results.

"We found that the bees still visited those flowers contaminated by metal, indicating that they can't detect metal from afar," said Ashman. "However, once bumblebees arrive at flowers and sample the nectar, they are able to discriminate against certain metals."

In the study, the bees were able to taste, discriminate against, and leave flowers containing nickel. However, this was not the case for the aluminum-treated flowers, as the bees foraged on the contaminated flowers for time periods equal to those of the noncontaminated flowers.

"It's unclear why the bees didn't sense the aluminum," said Meindl. "However, past studies show that the concentrations of aluminum found throughout blooms tend to be higher than concentrations of nickel. This suggests that the bees may be more tolerant or immune to its presence."

These results also have implications for environmentally friendly efforts to decontaminate soil, in particular a method called phytoremediation -- a promising approach that involves growing metal-accumulating plants on polluted soil to remove such contaminates. Ashman says this approach should be considered with caution because the bees observed in the study foraged on metal-rich flowers. She states that further research is needed to identify plants that are ecologically safe and won't pose threats to local animals that pollinate.

The paper, "The effects of aluminum and nickel in nectar on the foraging behavior of bumblebees" first appeared online March 6 in Environmental Pollution. Funding was provided by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's Powdermill Nature Reserve in Rector, Pa., a Botany-In-Action Fellowship from the Phipps Botanical Garden and Conservatory in Pittsburgh, an Ivey McManus Predoctoral Fellowship to Meindl, and a National Science Foundation grant (DEB 1020523) to Ashman. The bees were observed at a nature reserve in Western Pennsylvania during August and September 2012.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Pittsburgh.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. George A. Meindl, Tia-Lynn Ashman. The effects of aluminum and nickel in nectar on the foraging behavior of bumblebees. Environmental Pollution, 2013; 177: 78 DOI: 10.1016/j.envpol.2013.02.017

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/AegmMOcRNhc/130402152432.htm

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Geckos keep firm grip in wet natural habitat

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Geckos' ability to stick to trees and leaves during rainforest downpours has fascinated scientists for decades, leading a group of University of Akron researchers to solve the mystery.

They discovered that wet, hydrophobic (water-repellent) surfaces like those of leaves and tree trunks secure a gecko's grip similar to the way dry surfaces do. The finding brings UA integrated bioscience doctoral candidate Alyssa Stark and her research colleagues closer to developing a synthetic adhesive that sticks when wet.

Principal investigator Stark and her fellow UA researchers Ila Badge, Nicholas Wucinich, Timothy Sullivan, Peter Niewiarowski and Ali Dhinojwala study the adhesive qualities of gecko pads, which have tiny, clingy hairs that stick like Velcro to dry surfaces. In a 2012 study, the team discovered that geckos lose their grip on wet glass. This finding led the scientists to explore how the lizards function in their natural environments.

The scientists studied the clinging power of six geckos, which they outfitted with harnesses and tugged upon gently as the lizards clung to surfaces in wet and dry conditions. The researchers found that the effect of water on adhesive strength correlates with wettability, or the ability of a liquid to maintain contact with a solid surface. On glass, which has high wettability, a film of water forms between the surface and the gecko's foot, decreasing adhesion. Conversely, on surfaces with low wettability, such as waxy leaves on tropical plants, the areas in contact with the gecko's toes remain dry and adhesion, firm.

"The geckos stuck just as well under water as they did on a dry surface, as long as the surface was hydrophobic," Stark explains. "We believe this is how geckos stick to wet leaves and tree trunks in their natural environment."

The discovery, "Surface Wettability Plays a Significant Role in Gecko Adhesion Underwater," was published April 1, 2013 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study has implications for the design of a synthetic gecko-inspired adhesive.

###

University of Akron: http://www.uakron.edu/

Thanks to University of Akron for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127550/Geckos_keep_firm_grip_in_wet_natural_habitat

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Panetta says US must be 'very firm' with N. Korea as it issues more threats

As the U.S. deploys a Navy missile destroyer in case of a launch by North Korea, the country's leader Kim Jong Un has abolished an armistice with South Korea and is now saying he will re-open a nuclear bomb facility that was closed in 2007. NBC's Richard Engel reports.

By Ian Johnston and Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned that the United States should be ?very concerned? by the level of ?provocation and bellicosity? emanating from North Korea, as the rogue communist state announced it was going to restart all its nuclear facilities.

Panetta told CNBC in an interview that the U.S., Japan and South Korea had to be ?very firm in sending them a message that we are going to do everything necessary to defend our security and defend our troops.? He said there was a danger of a "miscalculation" that escalated.

The North continued to make threats Tuesday, and said it would rebuild and restart nuclear facilities, including a reactor that can make one bomb's worth of plutonium a year.

Panetta said the amount of hostility emanating from Pyongyang was alarming.

?I think we've got to be very concerned about ... the level of provocation that North Korea is engaged in. They are in the process of testing ICBMs [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles]. They've also been testing nuclear weapons,? he said.

NBC's Jim Maceda reports on U.S. Navy movements of destroyers into the Pacific amid threats from North Korea.

?The kind of provocation and bellicosity they're showing now with their rhetoric raises a lot of concern,? he added. ?It just means the United States and our allies Japan and South Korea have to be very firm in sending them a message that we are going to do everything necessary to defend our security and defend our troops.?

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon took time out of an official visit to Andorra on Tuesday to say that the North Korean crisis had "already gone too far" and that he was "deeply troubled" by it.

"Nuclear threats are not a game," Ban said, adding that "things must begin to calm down" or they "could lead down a path that nobody should want to follow."

He closed his remarks by offering to facilitate peace talks, but how the North would react was not immediately clear. Ban was South Korea's foreign affairs minister before election to his UN post.

'Be very prepared'
Panetta noted that over the last 50 or 60 years the North had gone through cycles of ?provocation? and ?accommodation.?

?A lot of this is aimed more probably on the internal situation in North Korea, aimed at improving the new leader's credibility, his credentials as a leader,? he said.

?But at the same time since they have capabilities and [are] developing those capabilities, I don't think we can take anything for granted. The U.S., South Korea and our other partners in that region have to be very prepared in the event that something could happen here. I think the greater likelihood is miscalculation and if they do something that escalates quickly that's the greater danger,? he added.

A spokesman for the North's General Department of Atomic Energy said restarting its nuclear facilities was part of efforts to resolve the country's acute electricity shortage, but also for "bolstering up the nuclear armed force both in quality and quantity," the official Korean Central News Agency said, according to Reuters.

Pyongyang conducted its third nuclear test in February, prompting a new round of U.N. sanctions that have infuriated its leaders and led to a torrent of threatening rhetoric. The United States has sent nuclear-capable bombers and stealth jets to participate in annual South Korean-U.S. military drills that the allies call routine but that Pyongyang claims are invasion preparations.

As North Korean state TV shows constant images of the army bombarding South Korea, North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un is saying his missiles are at the ready and has cut off emergency communications. NBC's Richard Engel reports.

KCNA kept up the rhetoric on its English-language site Tuesday, with an article headlined ?Intensified Anti-U.S. Action Called For.?

It quoted the ?North Side Committee for Implementing the June 15 Joint Declaration? as saying in a statement that the joint U.S. and South Korean military exercise ?clearly proves that the U.S. imperialists' scenario to launch a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula at any cost has reached an extremely reckless phase of its implementation.?

?As already clarified by the DPRK [North Korea], gone are the days when it could have verbal exchange with them,? the statement said.

?To wage a merciless, just, retaliatory war is the only way of rooting out the source of the danger of a nuclear war on this land and build a peaceful and prosperous reunified thriving nation where all Koreans live together,? it added.

Reuters and NBC News' Andrea Mitchell and John Newland contributed to this report.

Related:

US Navy shifts destroyer in wake of North Korea missile threats

US official warns North Korea is no 'paper tiger'

Analyst: Threats are predictable, Kim Jong Un is not

This story was originally published on Tue Apr 2, 2013 4:39 AM EDT

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Dot Earth Blog: Fresh Thoughts from Authors of a Paper on 11,300 Years of Global Climate Changes

April 1, 12:17 a.m. | Update below |
There?s been vigorous discussion here and elsewhere (e.g., Climate Audit and Skeptical Science) of the methods and findings in ?A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years,? a recent Science paper by Shaun A. Marcott, Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark and Alan C. Mix.

One author, Jeremy Shakun (currently at Harvard) weighed in via Skype for Dot Earth. When more questions came in, the group of authors wrote that they would respond more completely to questions about the work and now they have done so, on the RealClimate blog. Here?s a short excerpt and link to the rest:

Q.

What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?

A.

Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called ?uptick? in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Our primary conclusions are based on a comparison of the longer term paleotemperature changes from our reconstruction with the well-documented temperature changes that have occurred over the last century, as documented by the instrumental record. Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval (Anderson, D.M. et al., 2013, Geophysical Research Letters, v. 40, p. 189-193).

Q.

Is the rate of global temperature rise over the last 100 years faster than at any time during the past 11,300 years?

A.

Our study did not directly address this question because the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of ~120 years on average, which precludes us from examining variations in rates of change occurring within a century. Other factors also contribute to smoothing the proxy temperature signals contained in many of the records we used, such as organisms burrowing through deep-sea mud, and chronological uncertainties in the proxy records that tend to smooth the signals when compositing them into a globally averaged reconstruction. We showed that no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is preserved at 1000-year time scales, and nearly all is preserved at 2000-year periods and longer. Our Monte-Carlo analysis accounts for these sources of uncertainty to yield a robust (albeit smoothed) global record. Any small ?upticks? or ?downticks? in temperature that last less than several hundred years in our compilation of paleoclimate data are probably not robust, as stated in the paper.

There?s much more at RealClimate, although there?s also room for more questions ? one being how the authors square the caveats they express here with some of the more definitive statements they made about their findings in news accounts.

[April 1, 12:17 a.m. | Insert | Roger A. Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado has compared the new output from the authors with the paper and related news releases and coverage (including mine) and finds some very big differences.]

The managers of RealClimate offered their own reaction to the paper and the authors amplification on their methods and conclusions:

Our view is that the results of the paper will stand the test of time, particularly regarding the small global temperature variations in the Holocene. If anything, early Holocene warmth might be overestimated in this study.

For convenience, here?s Shakun?s discussion of the paper when it was published in Science:

Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/fresh-thoughts-from-authors-of-a-paper-on-11300-years-of-global-temperature-changes/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Drug maker Novartis loses India patent battle

NEW DELHI (AP) ? India's Supreme Court on Monday rejected drug maker Novartis AG's attempt to patent an updated version of a cancer drug in a landmark decision that health activists say ensures poor patients around the world will get continued access to cheap versions of lifesaving medicines.

Novartis had argued that it needed a patent to protect its investment in the cancer drug Glivec, while activists said the drug did not merit intellectual property protection in India because it was not a new medicine. In response to the ruling, Novartis said it would not invest in drug research in India.

The court's decision has global significance since India's $26 billion generic drug industry, which supplies much of the cheap medicine used in the developing world, could be stunted if Indian law allowed global drug companies to extend the lifespan of patents by making minor changes to medicines.

Once a drug's patent expires, generic manufacturers can legally produce it. They are able to make drugs at a fraction of the original manufacturer's cost because they don't carry out the expensive research and development.

Pratibha Singh, a lawyer for the Indian generic drug manufacturer Cipla, which makes a version of Glivec for less than a tenth of the original drug's selling price, said the court ruled that a patent could only be given to a new drug, and not to those which are only slightly different from the original.

"Patents will be given only for genuine inventions, and repetitive patents will not be given for minor tweaks to an existing drug," Singh told reporters outside the court.

Novartis called the ruling a "setback for patients," and said patent protection is crucial to fostering investment in research to develop new and better drugs.

Ranjit Shahani, the vice chairman and managing director of Novartis India, said the ruling "will hinder medical progress for diseases without effective treatment options."

He said the court's decision made India an even less attractive country for major investments by international pharmaceutical companies.

"Novartis will not invest in drug research in India. Not only Novartis, I don't think any global company is planning to research in India," he said.

The Swiss pharmaceutical giant has fought a legal battle in India since 2006 to patent a new version of Glivec, which is mainly used to treat leukemia and is known as Gleevec outside India and Europe. The earlier version of Glivec did not have an Indian patent because its development far predated the country's 2005 patent law. Novartis said Glivec is patented in nearly 40 other countries.

India's patent office rejected the company's patent application, arguing the drug was not a new medicine but an amended version of its earlier product. The patent authority cited a provision in the 2005 patent law aimed at preventing companies from getting fresh patents for making only minor changes to existing medicines ? a practice known as "evergreening."

Novartis appealed, arguing the drug was a more easily absorbed version of Glivec and that it qualified for a patent because it was "a revolutionary treatment," not an incremental improvement.

Anand Grover, a lawyer for the Cancer Patients Aid Association, which led the legal fight against Novartis, said the ruling Monday prevented the watering down of India's patent laws.

"This is a very good day for cancer patients. It's the news we have been waiting for for seven long years," he said.

Aid groups, including Medicins Sans Frontieres, have opposed Novartis' case, fearing that a victory for the Swiss drugmaker would limit access to important medicines for millions of poor people around the world.

Glivec, used in treating chronic myeloid leukemia and some other cancers, costs about $2,600 a month. Its generic version was available in India for around $175 per month.

"The difference in price was huge. The generic version makes it affordable to so many more poor people, not just in India, but across the world," said Y.K. Sapru, of the Mumbai-based cancer patients association.

"For cancer sufferers, this ruling will mean the difference between life and death. Because the price at which it was available, and considering it's the only lifesaving drug for chronic myeloid cancer patients, this decision will make a huge difference," Sapru said.

Leena Menghaney of Medicins Sans Frontieres said India would continue to grant patents on new medicines.

"This doesn't mean that no patents will be granted. Patents will continue to be granted by India, but definitely the abusive practice of getting many patents on one drug will be stopped," Menghaney said.

The judgment would ensure that the prices of lifesaving drugs would come down as many more companies would produce generic versions.

"We've seen this happening with HIV medicines, where the cost of HIV treatment has come down from $10,000 to $150 per year. Cancer treatment costs have come down by 97 percent in the case of many cancer drugs," she said.

"This decision is incredibly important. The Supreme Court decision will save a lot of lives in the coming decades," Menghaney said.

___

AP writer Kay Johnson contributed to this story from Mumbai, India.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/drug-maker-novartis-loses-india-patent-battle-092200333--finance.html

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Famo.us, The Framework For Fast And Beautiful HTML5 Apps, Will Be Free Thanks To ?Huge Hardware Vendor Interest?

Famo.us, the Javascript framework that's designed for building crazy rich (yet still fast) interfaces in pure HTML5, is making two announcements out of the HTML5 Developer Conference in San Francisco this morning: the framework will be free to developers thanks to a few "huge hardware vendors" taking interest, and it's getting a physics engine.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/BXeWM_SOxyA/

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U.S. Steps Up Show of Force in Korea (WSJ)

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