Monthly Archive for September, 2011

Photo by Annie Tritt for The New York Times

By Gina Kolata from The New York Times

It was Tuesday evening, June 7. A frightening outbreak of food-borne bacteria was killing dozens of people in Germany and sickening hundreds. And the five doctors having dinner at Da Marco Cucina e Vino, a restaurant in Houston, could not stop talking about it.

What would they do if something like that happened in Houston? Suppose a patient came in, dying of a rapidly progressing infection of unknown origin? How could they figure out the cause and prevent an epidemic? They talked for hours, finally agreeing on a strategy.

That night one of the doctors, James M. Musser, chairman of pathology and genomic medicine at the Methodist Hospital System, heard from a worried resident. A patient had just died from what looked like inhalation anthrax. What should she do?

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By Camilo Mora, Derek P. Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair, G.B Simpson and Boris Worm from PLOS Biology

The diversity of life is one of the most striking aspects of our planet; hence knowing how many species inhabit Earth is among the most fundamental questions in science. Yet the answer to this question remains enigmatic, as efforts to sample the world’s biodiversity to date have been limited and thus have precluded direct quantification of global species richness, and because indirect estimates rely on assumptions that have proven highly controversial. Here we show that the higher taxonomic classification of species (i.e., the assignment of species to phylum, class, order, family, and genus) follows a consistent and predictable pattern from which the total number of species in a taxonomic group can be estimated. This approach was validated against well-known taxa, and when applied to all domains of life, it predicts ~8.7 million (±1.3 million SE) eukaryotic species globally, of which ~2.2 million (±0.18 million SE) are marine. In spite of 250 years of taxonomic classification and over 1.2 million species already catalogued in a central database, our results suggest that some 86% of existing species on Earth and 91% of species in the ocean still await description. Renewed interest in further exploration and taxonomy is required if this significant gap in our knowledge of life on Earth is to be closed.

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By Stephen Cave the Financial Times

Oh victorious cow! In its bid for world domination this cunning ungulate has succeeded in training a great army of apes to do its bidding. These slavish primates, so reliant on the gifts of the udder, first killed off the cows’ predators, such as wolves and bears, and even exterminated those other large herbivores, mastodons and mammoths, that once offered competition for the best grasslands. Now the apes are clearing the world’s ancient forests and turning them over to pasture where their bovine masters might graze. They act as if mesmerised by those big wet eyes.In return for these services a certain sacrifice is made: some cows must be willing to die for the good of their kin. This is the price of power over the primates, who have become addicted to the meat and milk the cows provide. Thanks to this blood pact, the world cattle population has risen to well over a billion, and their dominion is rapidly spreading. But for those pesky vegetarians, their victory would be secure.

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Photo by fotographic1980

By Andrew H. Knoll from The Sunday Times

When Earth was thought to lie at the centre of the universe, the planets were seen as wandering stars – Gods perhaps, or their distant abodes. Once Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler redrew the solar system, however, Earth became the paradigm for planetary interpretation. Now it became possible to ask whether Mars and other wanderers might have mountains and oceans, and whether they might support life, even civilizations. Indeed, as Earth was the model, intelligence was more or less the expectation for alien life. A verse in Milton’s Paradise Lost captures this new perspective well, “Witness this new-made World . . . with stars numerous, and every star perhaps a world of destined habitation”.

Scientific mapping of Mars began around 1840. By 1877, Nathaniel Green, a British astronomer, had produced a lovely set of maps compiled from the observations of many colleagues. Green’s painterly embrace of diffuse lines and pastel shades – darker in the northern hemisphere and lighter in the south, with white caps at the poles – communicates clearly the limits of nineteenth-century observation. Within a year, however, Green’s masterpiece had been eclipsed by a new map from the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. Where Green had artfully conveyed uncertainty, Schiaparelli drew a sharply detailed landscape dissected by broad “canali”, or channels.

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