A Look Back at Science in 2011

The news, as most of us know it, can seem to be a study in redundancy, a repetitive procession of murders, wars, bombings, deaths, thefts, floods and fires, with a few tornadoes and earthquakes thrown in. But when you review what’s new in the world of science, invariably something jumps right out at you.  This is news that really is new.  This past year some researchers thought they’d found tiny particles that seemed to exceed the speed of light, which would violate Einstein’s theory of relativity. Stay tuned. Following are a few other examples pulled from a handful of sources re/ science news for 2011.

This past summer for the very first time, a fish was photographed using a “tool.” When I was in college, humans were considered the only critters to use tools. It’s gradually become obvious that we aren’t as unique as we thought. There are a lot of animals that use “tools,” anything from sticks to stones, to obtain food. There was even a crow that used a tool to make a tool. We are only now becoming aware of the richness of the animal kingdom, the diversity of behaviors, and amazing abilities of a wide variety of animals.  Perhaps this will bestow upon us the gift of humility.

There may finally be a partial answer to one of life’s most persistent questions, which dates all the way back to the time of Noah. How many species are there in the world? Recent research at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia now provides a reasonably accurate estimate… 8.7 million species.  6.5 million of these live on land, 2.2 million live in the oceans.  This number excludes the vast world of bacteria.

We may not all be mathematicians, but we continue to multiply… On Halloween of 2011, the Earth’s human population hit 7 billion. How many people is this? If we all joined hands, we could form a line that could encircle the Earth 175 times… or reach to the moon and back nine times. Each year the planet gains about 80 million people.  This is equivalent to adding the entire population of Germany… each year! You don’t have to be a population expert to realize this is unsustainable and threatens all life (ours included).

Joplin, Missouri was hit by a monstrous EF 5 tornado this past May, which killed dozens of people and left much of the city looking like a war zone. Unfortunately it was only one of many natural disasters that occurred in 2011. There were ten major weather disasters just in the United States. Brazil was beset with landslides, Pakistan and Australia dealt with horrific floods, East Africa suffered through drought, as did China.  Greater frequency and intensity of storms as well as a lack or precipitation are attributable to global warming.

Speaking of global warming… Climatologist, Dr. Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, stated, “The year 2011 is another exclamation point on the overall downward trend that we see in sea-ice extent.” According to Dr. Georg Heygster, physicist at the University of Bremen, Germany, we are witnessing the lowest coverage of sea ice since records began. This alarming rate of loss is outpacing computer projections. It’s possible the Arctic summer could be ice free by 2030. Back in the mid 70’s, satellites began recording the extent of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. At one point there were 3 million square miles of it. Last summer that number had shrunk to 1.67 million square miles… the second lowest extent on record. This trend is catastrophic to animals adapted to the Arctic environment.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Lab were able to look back as far as 550,000 years at climate in great detail (thanks to a 260 foot long sediment core).  It was discovered that the southwest undergoes periodic megadroughts lasting centuries.  The most recent one included the so-called “dust bowl.” People in the southwest could be in for a period of cooler wetter weather, unless greenhouse gasses interrupt the cycle.

Dr. Joachim Hallmayer admits there is much we don’t understand about autism. But his research suggests that environmental factors are responsible for more than half of the risk for developing the condition. A study of nature versus nurture… that’s what Stanford University School of Medicine conducted in deciphering whether autism is triggered by genetic or by environmental factors. Genetics accounts for about 40 percent. Now the challenge will be to unravel exactly what these factors are.

Mosquito transmitted disease is responsible for vast amounts of human suffering. Examples include malaria, yellow fever, encephalitis, West Nile, and dengue. An Australian team has come up with a novel approach to combat dengue fever (a deadly disease that sickens up to a hundred million people each year). Using ultra thin needles, they injected vector mosquitoes with Wolbachia, a harmless bacterium found in most insects. Scientists are uncertain why this prevents the mosquitoes from spreading dengue, but it does.

Chinese researchers discovered that genetic material known as microRNA from plants, can not only survive digestion, but can show up in the blood stream where it sometimes combines with human RNA. This can impact the body’s ability to deal with such things as cholesterol or flu viruses. Effects could be beneficial or harmful. This opens the door to a whole new area of dietary and therapeutic research.

The Yellowstone River was tainted with 40,000 gallons of crude oil in July, thanks to an Exxon Mobile pipeline that burst beneath the river in Montana. 140 residents were evacuated due to fumes, and the spill travelled some 240 miles downstream. Two factors may have contributed to the spill: debris stirred up by flood waters, or thick abrasive and acidic Canadian crude, which likely corroded the pipe from the inside. We continue to pay a heavy price for our continuing dependency on oil.

For more info, do a Google search for:  top science news 2011.



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