All posts by LL

Narwhals transmit climate data from Arctic seas

The cold water beneath the winter pack ice in Baffin Bay is getting warmer, according to measurements taken by thermometer-wearing narwhals. The data collected from the diving mammals fill in a geographical and seasonal gap in the region’s climate records, as no winter temperatures were previously available from the area. The data also confirm that a warming trend measured during earlier summer-only studies of the West Greenland Current continued in the three years to 2007.

“We basically knew nothing about winters up in Baffin Bay,” says physical oceanographer Mike Steele at the University of Washington in Seattle, who co-authored the study, which appeared last week in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “But there is a lot of interest in the flow of seawater around Greenland.”

Read the rest of this news story on Nature News [html] or here [pdf].

Sugar beets still in the game

Seed producers will be allowed to plant biotech sugar beets again following a September decision from the United States Department of Agriculture’s crop approval arm to allow planting under interim guidelines. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) will issue limited permits to seed developers authorizing genetically modified (GM) beet planting this fall as long as the harvested beets are not allowed to flower. The permits are a legal way around a federal judge’s 13 August decision to ban all commercial farming of Monsanto’s Genuity Roundup Ready sugar beets beyond that date. Continue reading Sugar beets still in the game

Start-ups Try to Capture Road Traffic’s Excess Energy

Visitors to aerospace engineer Haim Abramovich’s office at the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, once asked if they could run a freight train over his latest invention. Abramovich didn’t blink: The visitors were from Israel’s National Road Company, and they wanted to know whether his piezoelectric material—which he developed to warp aerodynamic surfaces at the command of an electric current—would instead generate power if embedded beneath rumbling roads and rails.

Abramovich, who had just launched start-up Innowattech to develop wearable microgenerators for powering mobile devices, was convinced the road and track were better homes for his technology. So the company “turned around 180 degrees,” he recalls, and figured out how to embed piezoelectric material beneath a road. Now, along with several other inventive start-ups, Innowattech is poised to harvest some of the spare kinetic energy of the world’s moving vehicles—call it the kinetic surplus.

Read the rest of this news story on IEEE Spectrum’s website: [html] or here [pdf].

Emperor penguin’s old clothes are unveiled

A 36-million-year-old fossilized penguin skeleton found on a cliff-face in Peru has given scientists insight into how penguin feathers, originally used for flight, adapted to swimming. The fossil, found by palaeontology student Ali Altamirano of the Museum of Natural History in Lima, contained intact pigments which researchers say mean that, instead of the black and white plumage of modern-day penguins, the ancient bird sported grey and reddish-brown feathers.

Read the rest of this news story on Nature News [html] or here [pdf].