africa science

Rapid Radiation, Borrowing and Dialect Continua in the Bantu Languages

2007-12-09T11:50:00.000-08:00

Rapid Radiation, Borrowing and Dialect Continua in the Bantu Languages

Clare J. Holden & Russell D. Gray

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http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/publications/index.php?pub=Holden_and_Gray

Rapid Radiation, Borrowing and Dialect Continua
in the Bantu Languages

1. Introduction

Despite several decades of study, several fundamental questions about Bantu linguistic relationships remain unresolved, as well as numerous questions of detail (see Chapter 4 this volume). Phylogenetic analysis has shown that Bantu languages fit a branching-tree model of evolution surprisingly well, but a tree model does not explain all the variation in the Bantu linguistic data. Moreover, several different Bantu trees appear to fit the data almost equally well. Our difficulties in resolving the Bantu tree are o􀄞en ascribed to a lack of data and research, and it is true that there are many more Bantu languages than linguists. However there are probably also more fundamental reasons why a single Bantu tree has proven elusive, arising from the historical processes under which these languages developed. In this chapter, we show how the networkbuilding method Neighbor-Net (Bryant & Moulton 2003) can be used to distinguish between different historical reasons why some linguistic relationships are not well resolved. We test three hypotheses for why some Bantu languages might not fit a tree model well: rapid radiation, linguistic borrowing and dialect chains, all thought to have been widespread within the Bantu family.
Bantu is a large family of over 450 languages that are spoken across sub-Equatorial Africa (Fig. 2.1). We define ‘Bantu’ in the sense of Ruhlen’s (1991) ‘Narrow Bantu’. Bantoid is the larger language group to which Bantu belongs. Bantoid belongs to the Niger-Kordofanian phylum, whose deepest branches are found in West Africa (Williamson & Blench 2000). Bantu languages are identified by codes originally assigned by Guthrie (1967–71), who classified Bantu languages into 15 zones (later expanded to 16), labelled A to S, based on geographical and linguistic criteria. (Many of these zones are probably not valid genetic groups.) Guthrie also divided the whole of Bantu into two large subdivisions, West Bantu and East Bantu (see Chapter 4 this volume). In this chapter, we use a modified version of Guthrie’s codes taken from Bastin et al. (1999) (for a correspondence between the codes of Bastin et al. and Guthrie see Maho 2002). Bantu is thought to have originated in Cameroon or Nigeria, where the non-Bantu Bantoid languages are spoken today. The spread of Bantu is associated with the spread of
farming; East Bantu in particular is associated with the Early Iron Age ‘Chifumbaze’ tradition in East and southeast Africa (Ehret 1998; Holden 2002; Phillipson 1993, 184–205; Vansina 1990).

Part 1: Tree approaches to Bantu language phylogeny

A number of Bantu trees have been published, constructed using different samples of languages and different tree-building methods. Distance-based lexicostatistical methods have been widely used as a heuristic device to infer Bantu relationships (Nurse 1996; see Chapter 4, this volume). Bastin et al. (1999) published the most comprehensive lexicostatistical Bantu trees, including 542 languages and dialects. Their linguistic data comprised coded information on cognates for 92 items of basic vocabulary, derived from the Swadesh 100-word list of basic vocabulary, with eight meanings (such as ‘snow’) that are not present in Bantu excluded (Bastin 1983). Subsequently, subsets of the data of Bastin et al. (1999) have been reanalyzed using phylogenetic tree-building methods, which use only innovations to define subgroups. In this respect, phylogenetic methods are comparable to the linguistic comparative method. Unlike the comparative method, however, phylogenetic methods use an explicit optimality criterion, such as maximum parsimony or likelihood, to choose among possible trees. Two further advantages of phylogenetic methods are that they let us test the fit of data on a tree using the consistency and retention indices, which measure the extent of homoplasy in the data set, and they allow us to evaluate the level of support in the data for each node, using tests such as bootstrap analysis, or, for Bayesian methods, by estimating the posterior probability of each node.
Holden (2002) reanalyzed 75 languages from Bastin et al. ’s (1999) data set using maximum parsimony tree-building methods, implemented by the computer program PAUP*4.0 (Swofford 1998; see Fig. 4.2 this volume). More recently, we have used Bayesian MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) methods to infer phylogeny for 95 Bantu languages from the same dataset, using using the computer programs MrBayes (Huelsenbeck & Ronquist 2001) and BayesPhylogenies (Pagel & Meade 2004) (Fig. 2.2; Holden et al. 2005).
Instead of searching for the best tree(s) according to an optimality criterion, Bayesian methods sample trees in proportion to their likelihood, producing a sample of trees (usually several hundred) in which both moreand less-likely trees are included. One advantage of constructing a Bayesian tree sample is that it allows us to represent phylogenetic uncertainty in the sample, so that we do not have to treat the tree as if it were known without error, when, in fact, any tree remains simply a hypothesis about phylogeny. Our ability to reconstruct the true tree is inevitably limited by our data and our models of evolution; moreover, as we have noted, linguistic borrowing cannot be represented on a single tree.
Phylogenetic analysis suggests that Bantu basic vocabulary fits a tree model at least as well as typical biological data sets (Holden 2002; Sanderson & Donoghue 1989). For the 75-language Bantu tree constructed using equally weighted parsimony, Holden (2002) reported a consistency index (CI) of 0.65 and a retention index (RI) of 0.59; using weighted parsimony the CI was 0.72 and the RI was 0.68. These results indicate that Bantu linguistic evolution was substantially tree-like, at least for the basic vocabulary (other parts of the lexicon may be more prone to borrowing).
This was at first a surprising result, since borrowing among Bantu languages is thought to be widespread, whereas gene flow and hybridization are thought to be rare among many biological taxa. However, a branching tree model does not explain all the variation among the Bantu languages; there remains considerable conflicting signal in the Bantu data, which could be due either to borrowing or parallel evolution. In comparative perspective, Indo-European is even more tree-like than Bantu (Bryant et al. 2005; Rexova et al. 2003), but Austronesian may be less so (Gray & Jordan 2000).

Agreement and uncertainty among Bantu trees

Comparing Bantu trees, it is apparent that several major questions about Bantu linguistic relationships remain unresolved. Conflicts among Bantu trees are illustrated in Figures 2.2–2.4. Figure 2.2 shows a majority rule tree summarizing a Bayesian sample of 200 Bantu trees, sampled from 2 million trees, constructed using a reversible model of evolution with the computer program MrBayes (Huelsenbeck & Ronquist 2001). The majority rule tree in Figure 2.2 shows all nodes present on at least half the trees in the sample, plus all other compatible groupings. Alternative tree topologies (not shown) were also present in the sample. Node labels indicate the proportion of trees in the sample in which each node was found, which is equivalent to the posterior probability of that node. While many nodes were well supported in this analysis (being found in more than 95 per cent of trees in the sample) several nodes towards the root of the tree received much lower levels of support. An alternative summary of this tree sample, constructed using a consensus network (Holland & Moulton 2003), is shown in Figure 2.3. A consensus network allows us to represent the alternative tree topologies that were found in the sample.
This consensus network (Fig. 2.3) shows trees present in more than 18 per cent of the sample. Examining the consensus network reveals that most alternative tree topologies involve the East Bantu languages spoken in East Africa, particularly Yao P21, which has conflicting affiliations with both East and Southeast Bantu languages (among the la􀄴er, especially with the N zone languages and Makwa P31). The 18 per cent threshold was chosen to illustrate the maximum amount of conflict among trees without becoming too visually complex; if we decrease this threshold, the main effect is to reveal even more complexity among the East African languages. Figure 2.4 illustrates a range of plausible alternative Bantu trees. Figure 2.4a summarizes the Bayesian tree sample shown in more detail in Figure 2.2. Figure 2.4b shows a number of alternative Bantu tree topologies, found in other analyses that used a variety of methods including maximum parsimony (Holden 2002; see Fig. 4.2), Bayesian methods with a nonreversible model of evolution (Holden et al. 2005) and Neighbor-Joining (Saitou & Nei 1987; unpublished work by Holden). Figures 2.2–2.4 illustrate that there is significant uncertainty regarding the shape of Bantu history that we cannot currently resolve. Summarizing across Bantu trees, we have divided Bantu into four major areas: West and East Bantu, and two groups of languages in Central and Southwest Africa that seem to be intermediate between West and East Bantu. These areas are shown on Figure 2.1. In phylogenetic analyses, languages in the intermediate zone usually cluster in two groups, labelled Central and Southwest Bantu on Figures 2.1 and 2.2 (Holden 2002; Holden et al. 2005). These categories broadly agree with much previous work in Bantu linguistics (Bastin et al. 1999; Heine 1973; Nurse 1996), although
under Guthrie’s traditional West and East Bantu division, our Southwest zone and parts of our Central zone would be grouped with West Bantu (see Chapter 4 this volume).

West Bantu

In our classification, West Bantu includes languages spoken in west-Central Africa, belonging to zones A, B, C, H and parts of D (Figs. 2.1–2.2). The most fundamental disputed question about the shape of Bantu history is whether or not West Bantu is monophyletic. In other words, do West Bantu languages share a unique common ancestor that is not also ancestral to East Bantu languages? Many published trees show the deepest splits on the Bantu tree to be within West Bantu, among the northwestern Bantu languages belonging to zones A and B (Bastin et al. 1999; Heine 1973; Holden 2002; Holden et al. 2005; Figs. 2.1 & 2.4b).
The alternative hypothesis is that the deepest split on the tree is between East and West Bantu. The Bayesian tree sample summarized in Figure 2.2 supports this alternative hypothesis. The status of West Bantu has profound consequences for reconstructing ancestral Bantu language and culture. If the earliest splits were within the northwestern Bantu languages of zones A and B, then those languages would become highly influential in reconstructing the earliest Bantu linguistic forms. Many historians, archaeologists and anthropologists also treat the Bantu language tree as a source of information about population history in this region (Ehret 1998; Holden & Mace 2003; Phillipson 1993; Schoenbrun 1998; Vansina 1984; 1990). Uncertainty in the tree has received li􀄴le a􀄴ention in such studies, although different researchers have used quite different trees. For example, in his classic study of political development in the Equatorial Bantu, Vansina (1990) assumed that there was a primary split between East and West Bantu; in contrast, Ehret (1998) subscribed to the alternative model that the deepest splits on the tree are within West Bantu languages. The topology of the tree chosen can have a significant effect on the conclusions of such studies; again, for example, in determining the influence of the northwestern Bantuspeaking societies for reconstructing of ancestral Bantu culture.

East Bantu

In our classification, East Bantu includes languages of zones E, F, G, J, N and S, plus some languages of zone M (Figs. 2.1–2.2). East Bantu is monophyletic on all published phylogenetic Bantu trees, but this clade is not well supported: it was not recovered in a bootstrap analysis (Holden 2002) and it has a very low posterior probability in Bayesian analyses (Holden et al. 2005; see also Fig. 2.2). Within East Bantu, the languages spoken in Southeast Africa, belonging to zones N and S, form a clade on previously-published phylogenetic trees. Languages in zone S o􀄞en appear to be the most divergent within East Bantu when using ultrametric distance-based methods such as UPGMA; this is seen in some of the trees published by Bastin et al. (1999). However, maximum parsimony analysis (Holden 2002; see Fig. 4.2), which can display true branch lengths, suggests that this is because there was an increased rate of evolution among these languages. The languages spoken in East Africa sometimes form a clade within East Bantu, but not always (Fig. 2.4). In the present data set, the languages spoken in East Africa comprise zones E, F, G and J (Lakes Bantu), plus the individual languages Nyakyusa M31 and Yao P21 (Fig. 2.2). Again, alternative relationships among East Bantu languages imply different historical scenarios for the spread of these languages and their speakers. Within East Bantu, was there a primary division between the languages spoken in East and Southeast Africa, as Ehret (1998) suggests? Or are the deepest splits within the East African languages, suggesting that the East Bantu originated there, perhaps in association with the Urewe archaeological tradition around Lake Victoria (Holden 2002; Phillipson 1993)?

Southwest and Central Bantu

Bantu languages that seem to be intermediate between West and East Bantu belong to zones K and R Southwest Bantu), and to zones L and parts of M (Central Bantu). Central Bantu languages usually form a clade that is a sister-group to East Bantu (Figs. 2.2 & 2.4a). However, on some trees the Central languages split into an eastern and a western group, in which case the east-Central group usually forms a sister group to East Bantu, or occasionally to the southeastern (zones N-plus-S) clade within East Bantu, while the northwest-Central group clusters with Southwest Bantu (Fig. 2.4b). The position of the two languages Lega D25 and Binja D24 varies considerably across previously-published trees. They fall somewhere within, or as immediate outliers to, the East-plus-Central clade.
The position of Southwest Bantu is also somewhat variable among the trees that have been proposed. On some maximum parsimony trees, Southwest Bantu clusters with West Bantu languages of zones C and H (Holden 2002; Fig. 4.2). However, on the widely cited tree published by Heine (1973), and in Bayesian analyses (Holden et al. 2005; Fig. 2.2) Southwest Bantu forms a sister group to Central-plus-East Bantu. But in the Bayesian tree sample summarized in Figure 2.2, there is very strong support (posterior probability =1.0) for a clade which is a sister to Southwest Bantu and which comprises the languages of the Central Bantu and East Bantu regions of Figure 2.1 including Lega D25 and Binja D24 — regardless of how these languages are subgrouped among themselves.

Why is a single Bantu tree elusive?

It is unclear whether our difficulties in resolving the Bantu tree stem from a lack of data, or from a more fundamental mismatch between the actual process of Bantu evolution, o􀄞en thought to be characterized by widespread borrowing and dialect continua, and a bifurcating tree model of language evolution. Regarding
the lack of data, the linguistic data published by Bastin et al. (1999) comprised only 92 meanings. A 200-word vocabulary list would probably be preferable. All phylogenetic analyses by Holden have also used this data set, so potentially suffer from the same problem. Counteracting this limitation, we should note that most of these 92 items have numerous distinct word forms (see Chapter 15 this volume), comprising over 1600 cognates in the 95-language sample. Regarding the tree model of linguistic evolution, trees are rather simplistic models of both biological and linguistic evolution. In biology, the importance of evolutionary processes such as hybridization, lateral gene transfer and recombination, especially in bacterial and viral evolution, is increasingly recognized
(Boucher et al. 2003; Stone 2000; Woese 1998). Linguistic borrowing and the formation of creole languages are analogous to lateral gene transfer and hybridization (see Ringe et al. 2002, for a discussion of these phenomena). Parallel evolution can also give rise to ambiguous relationships among taxa. Such complex relationships cannot be represented on a single tree. When placed on a tree, admixed languages are usually positioned near the root of the branch of the parent language that contributed most to the mixed language (Bryant et al. 2005; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). Unlike trees, which only permit branching and divergence among taxa, networks can also have reticulations among branches, making it possible to show more than one evolutionary pathway on a single graph. For this reason, networks may be preferable for describing linguistic relationships involving creoles, or among languages with extensive borrowing, as they allow us to represent more than one ‘parent’ per language.

Part 2: Network approaches to Bantu language phylogeny

In this analysis, we used a new network-building method, Neighbor-Net, to investigate the affiliations of those Bantu languages whose position varies across different trees. A primary question concerns the earliest Bantu history — can we resolve the question of whether there was a primary split between East and West Bantu, or whether the deepest splits on the tree are within West Bantu? The position of Southwest Bantu is also unclear from previous studies — is it a sister-group to East Bantu, or does it cluster with West Bantu languages? Is Central Bantu a valid group, or should it be split into two? Within East Bantu, are the Lakes (J) languages outliers to other languages, or do all East African languages form a clade?

Constructing a Bantu network also lets us distinguish between the different linguistic processes that might underlie the weak or conflicting signals for some parts of the Bantu tree. Such processes include rapid radiation and borrowing, the la􀄴er perhaps in the context of dialect continua. Rapid radiation may be inferred from a lack of phylogenetic signal, i.e. a rake- or star-shaped phylogeny, whereas reticulation would indicate possible borrowing. Reticulations can also pinpoint those languages which may have been each branch before the subsequent further spli􀄴ing of that branch. This leaves a weak phylogenetic signal that can be difficult to detect, so that the language tree appears to be star- or rake-shaped (Bellwood 1996). Borrowing is the transfer of linguistic elements from one language to another, o􀄞en between neighbouring languages. Extensive borrowing can lead to conflicting affiliations (where a language shows similarities to more than one divergent language groups) that cannot be represented on a single tree.
Unlike tree-building methods, constructing a network does not force the data into a bifurcating tree. If the data are truly tree-like, then the Neighbor-Net method will return an unrooted tree, but if there are conflicts within the data then it will construct a splits graph, in which conflicting relationships are represented by reticulations or joining among branches. From the shape of the Neighbor-Net network, we can infer whether either rapid radiation or borrowing occurred in different parts of the Bantu language family. On a network, we would expect rapid radiation to result in a star-shaped phylogeny, with poorly marked hierarchical structure but no evidence for conflict among language groupings. We would expect borrowing to result in reticulation among branches,
and we would expect dialect chains to be indicated by complex chains of reticulation involving numerous languages.

Methods

Data

The sample included 93 Bantu languages and two non-Bantu Bantoid (hence simply ‘Bantoid’) languages, Tiv and Ejagham. The la􀄴er were used as outgroups to root the tree where appropriate (e.g. Fig. 2.2). Figure 2.1 shows the approximate geographical locations of the languages in the analysis. The data set included all languages for which linguistic data were published in Bastin et al. (1999), and for which ethnographic data from the corresponding cultural group were published in the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1967). This data set was designed to let us use our knowledge of Bantu language relationships to study other aspects of cultural evolution in these populations in the future; this is possible insofar as linguistic relationships reflect population history (Barbujani 1991; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1988). The data set is similar to the 75-language data set used by Holden (2002; see Fig. 4.2), except that in the 75-language data set, languages with more than 5 per cent missing data were excluded, whereas they have been included here. For this analysis, the data were coded in a multistate form, i.e. with each column representing a meaning, and most meanings having several different cognate forms. (We have also run this analysis with the data coded in binary form, i.e. each cognate having its own column; this made very li􀄴le difference to the results.)

Analysis

Neighbor-Net (Bryant & Moulton 2003) is an agglomerative method for constructing networks that selects taxa on the basis of similarity and groups them together. The algorithms used in this method are analogous to the Neighbor-Joining method for building trees (Saitou & Nei 1987). In agglomerative tree-building methods, two taxa (or nodes) are chosen on the basis of similarity, then they are agglomerated (merged), the data matrix is reduced and we proceed to the next iteration. However, to construct a network, the Neighbor-Net method does not immediately agglomerate the selected taxa (or nodes). Instead, it waits until one of the chosen taxa (or nodes) has been grouped with a different node. Then the three nodes are reduced to two, and the process is repeated. The Neighbor-Net method represents similarities within the data set as a splits graph, constructed from a distance matrix. Splits are bipartitions of the data. An example of a splits graph for four languages, Ndebele S44, Swati S43, Ngoni S45 and Zulu S42, is shown in Figure 2.5. Sets of parallel lines indicate a single bipartition (split) in the data. The box shape at the centre of the graph is characteristic of conflicting data. Split A groups together Zulu and Ngoni on the one hand, and Ndebele and Swati on the other. Split B groups together Ndebele and Ngoni on the one hand, and Swati and Zulu on the other. Branch lengths (or edge weights) are proportional to the support for a split in the data: thus there is more evidence for split A than for split B. Distances between language pairs in the 95-language data set were calculated using PAUP v.4a (Swofford 1998), using mean character differences. Weighted splits were calculated and then represented as a splits
graph using the computer program SplitsTree v4beta.06 involved in borrowing. Complex chains of conflicting relationships involving numerous languages may indicate that borrowing occurred in the context of dialect chains. Under rapid radiation, a language diverges into several daughter languages very rapidly, so there is li􀄴le time for linguistic innovations to accumulate in (Huson 1998; Huson & Bryant 2006). The complete Bantu network resulting from this analysis is shown in Figure 2.6. Separate splits graphs for East and West Bantu are shown in Figures 2.7a and 2.7b. There is some evidence that Neighbor-Net may overfit the data, meaning that it produces some false splits (Nakhleh et al. 2005). However, such false splits have very small edge weights. To guard against the possibility of including false splits in our Bantu network, we also constructed a network from which edges weighted less than 0.002 were excluded; this cut-off point was essentially arbitrary. Eighty-seven of 331 edges or 26 per cent had weights less than 0.002. The network of weights greater than 0.002 is shown
in Figure 2.8; it may be interpreted as a simplified and conservative estimate of the Bantu network.

Results

A splits graph of the complete sample of 95 Bantu and Bantoid languages is shown in Figure 2.6. The major groups including West, East, Southwest and Central Bantu are indicated. Figures 2.7a b show splits graphs for East and West Bantu, respectively, allowing us to focus on relationships within those groups in more detail. The simplified splits graph of edge weights greater than 0.002 is shown in Figure 2.8. Unless specified, the following discussion refers to splits that are present on both the complete network (Fig. 2.6) and on the reduced network (Fig. 2.8). On Figure 2.6, West Bantu languages cluster together on the top le􀄞 of the graph, while East Bantu languages cluster to the bo􀄴om right. Southwest and Central Bantu occupy a space intermediate between West and East Bantu, with Central Bantu being closer to East Bantu, and Southwest Bantu closer to West Bantu. This is in line with our expectations from Bantu trees (cf. Figs. 2.2 & 2.4). Although the absolute positions of the languages have been rotated on Figure 2.8, the relative positions of languages remain the same.

Central Bantu

Although Central Bantu is clearly defined by splits dividing this group from other Bantu languages, there are also conflicting splits dividing Central Bantu into (a) a northwestern group comprising Kaonde L42, Luba L33 and Songe D10S, and (b) an eastern group comprising M-zone languages. The northwestern group is more similar to West and Southwest Bantu, plus a number of East Bantu languages that border the West Bantu area (see Fig.
2.1), including subzones J5, J6, E5 and E6 plus Hima J13. The east-Central group is more similar to the other East Bantu languages. This suggests that there was an area of contact, leading to borrowing or convergence, among languages on at least one side of this Figure 2.7. a) Network of 48 East Bantu languages; relationships among East Bantu languages spoken in east Africa are particularly complex and conflicting. b) Network of 29 West Bantu languages, plus Tiv and Ejagham (Bantoid languages).

divide. Linguistically, Kaonde L42 falls within the northwestern group, but is also linked by conflicting splits to the eastern group. Geographically, Kaonde is closer to the eastern group (Fig. 2.1), so it seems likely that it originated as a northwest-Central language whose speakers later migrated south, and that there was subsequently borrowing between Kaonde and the east-Central languages.

Southwest Bantu

Southwest Bantu is very clearly separated from other languages, reflecting the robustness of this group in phylogenetic analysis (Fig. 2.2; Holden 2002). Figures 2.6 and 2.8 show a conflicting split linking Umbundu R11 to West Bantu (or alternatively, linking all the other Southwest Bantu languages to East-plus-Central
Bantu). This split aside, the splits graphs (Figs. 2.6 & 2.8) are consistent with a tree in which Southwest Bantu is an outlier to East-plus-Central Bantu, rather than clustering within West Bantu.

East Bantu

The following groups are supported by splits of varying lengths:
a) zone S;
b) zone N;
c) zone J (also known as Lakes Bantu);
d) zone F (including Sukuma F21, Nyamwezi F22 and Sumbwa F23).
Some of the most complex relationships in East Bantu appear among the East African languages of zones E (excluding E5 and E6), F and G. At the centre of the graph, there are no conflict-free major groupings among these languages, suggesting that these languages developed in a condition of dialect continua with borrowing across dialects (see Ringe et al. 2002 for discussion of an analogous situation among early Indo-European ‘Satem’ languages). The early evolution of these languages appears to be the least tree-like of all the Bantu languages in this analysis. Later, some clearer groups emerge such as Kaguru G12 + Gogo G11 + Luguru G35, and zone F, but these languages also continue to be involved in extensive conflicting relationships (Figs. 2.6, 2.7a & 2.8).
Within the S-zone languages, Venda shows conflicting relationships, being grouped on the one hand with Ndau S15 plus Shona S10, and on the other hand with the S30, S40 and S50 languages (Figs. 2.6, 2.7a & 2.8). Venda is geographically adjacent to the groups it shares similarities with, suggesting that borrowing
across neighbouring groups has occurred. However, it should be noted that adjacency alone does not always lead to linguistic convergence: historically specific factors must also have played a role.

West Bantu

In previous phylogenetic analyses, it has proven difficult to resolve the relationships among West Bantu languages. The deepest splits involving West Bantu languages receive very low support on trees (Fig. 2.2; Holden 2002; Holden et al. 2005). Examining the splits graphs (Figs. 2.6, 2.7b & 2.8) suggests that there was a more or less simultaneous divergence of six groups of West Bantu languages.
These include:
a) the H languages plus Madzing B80 and Teke B73;
b) Duala A24, Puku A32, Bakoko A43, Fang A75, Kota B25 and Tsogo A43;
c) Sakata C34, Mongo C61, Nkundo Mongo C61, Kela C75, Tetela C71 and Lele C84;
d) Lingala C36, Doko C40 and Ngombe C41;
e) Kumu D37 and Bira D32;
f) Likile C57 and Mbesa C51.
There is li􀄴le evidence for conflict (borrowing) among West Bantu languages. The shape of the network suggests that our difficulties in resolving relationships among West Bantu languages may result from rapid early radiation of these languages, leaving li􀄴le phylogenetic signal or deep hierarchical structure in the data.
We also wished to address the question of whether some northwestern Bantu languages are the most divergent relative to other Bantu languages. In the tree sample shown in Figure 2.2 the most divergent West Bantu languages are Bubi A31 and a pair consisting of Likele C57 and Mbesa C51. On the 75- language maximum parsimony tree shown in Figure 4.2, Mpongwe B11 is also highly divergent. Investigating the affiliations of these languages on the complete splits graph (Fig. 2.6) yielded the following results. Bubi, a long isolated language spoken on Bioko Island, is linked by one split to the outgroups Tiv 802 and Ejagham 800. Presumably these similarities are primitive (i.e. they result from ancestral similarities, which other Bantu languages have lost). Another split links Tiv, Ejagham, Bubi, Kumu D37 and Bira D32. These similarities (among far-flung languages) are probably also primitive. Another split links Bubi to Bira, Kumu, Doko C40 and Ngombe C41; these are all geographically peripheral West Bantu languages (Fig. 2.1). One split links together all the West Bantu languages apart from Mpongwe B11. These links are consistent with the view that Bubi A31, and possibly Mpongwe B11, diverged or became isolated early among the West Bantu languages, and lack some innovations that most other West Bantu languages share. No splits linking Likile C57 and Mbesa C51 to any particular West Bantu (or other) languages were detected.
With the exception of Bubi A31, there was no evidence that languages of zones A and B are particularly divergent, either among themselves, or in relation to other Bantu languages. Zones A and B (apart from Bubi) appear to cluster with zone H (Figs. 2.2–2.3, 2.6, 2.7b & 2.8).

Discussion

The results of this analysis suggest why persistent ambiguities in the Bantu tree remain, despite several decades of study. From the shape of the network it appears that different historical processes caused the ambiguities in the East and West Bantu parts of the tree. West Bantu languages underwent a rapid early radiation — near simultaneous divergence of several major West Bantu branches — resulting in a star-shaped phylogeny with li􀄴le internal structure. With the exception of the isolated language Bubi A31 (and possibly Mpongwe B11) we found no evidence that the greatest divergence within Bantu involved languages of zones A and B. There is li􀄴le evidence for borrowing among West Bantu languages, possibly indicating that these speech communities were more isolated from one another than were early East Bantuspeaking populations. In contrast, both borrowing and dialect continua seem to have been important among East Bantu languages, especially in East Africa. There is extensive conflict at the centre of the graph, involving all East Bantu languages and also the eastern-Central Bantu languages. The fact that so many languages are involved suggests that the borrowing among these languages occurred early in their history, when their proto-languages were geographically closer together,
possibly in the context of dialect continua. There also seems to have been ongoing borrowing among the Bantu languages of zones E (excluding E5 and E6), F and G in East Africa. However, there is a fairly tree-like structure among the Southeast African languages of zones N and S, indicating that subsequent divergence among these languages was substantially tree-like. There is some evidence for more recent, localized borrowing, indicated by conflict involving fewer languages, for example that associated with Venda. Another case is the borrowing between Kaonde (a northwest-Central language) and the east-Central languages (Bemba, Lala and Lamba). Ethnographic evidence suggests that some of the languages that have experienced linguistic borrowing may have borrowed other cultural a􀄴ributes along with vocabulary. For example, Kaonde-speakers are predominantly matrilineal, like the Bemba, Lala and Lamba, but unlike modern speakers of the other northwest-Central languages, Songe and Luba. A parsimonious interpretation is that a􀄞er Kaonde speakers migrated south,
they borrowed both linguistic elements and matrilineal descent from their new neighbours.
This analysis shows how, by constructing a network, we can move beyond the question of whether, or how well, Bantu languages fit a tree model. Although previous phylogenetic analysis of Bantu languages showed that relationships among these languages are more tree-like than we might have expected, a tree model does not explain all the variation among them (Holden 2002). Moreover, several alternative trees appear to fit the Bantu linguistic data almost equally well, so that we cannot, at present, define a single best tree. A network model lets us test alternative hypotheses for why some Bantu relationships may not be tree-like, including rapid radiation, borrowing and past dialect continua, providing new insights into why parts of the Bantu language family have remained intractable to phylogenetic analysis.

Conclusion

Our results suggest that there was rapid early radiation among West Bantu languages; in contrast, there was extensive borrowing, partly within dialect continua, among East Bantu languages in East Africa. We propose that these are the underlying reasons why some parts of the Bantu language family have until now proven intractable to phylogenetic analysis.

Acknowledgements
C.J.H. was supported by a Research Fellowship from the AHRB Centre for the Evolutionary Analysis of Cultural Behaviour at University College London (UCL). This research received additional funding from the Marsden Fund, Royal Society of New Zealand and the UCL Graduate School Research Projects Fund.

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10,000 Wildebeest Drown in Migration "Pileup"

2007-10-03T16:19:00.000-07:00

Scores of wildebeest lay dead along the banks of the Mara River in Kenya, having washed downstream after a bizarre mass death that occurred early last week. An estimated 10,000 of the animals drowned while attempting to cross the river during an annual migration, wiping out one percent of the total species population. Photograph courtesy Terilyn Lemaire/Mara Conservancy/WildlifeDirect

10,000 Wildebeest Drown in Migration "Pileup"
Blake de Pastino
National Geographic News
October 1, 2007

In a bizarre mishap that conservationists describe as "heartbreaking," an estimated 10,000 wildebeest have drowned while attempting to cross Kenya's Mara River during an annual migration.
The deaths, which occurred over the course of several days last week, are said to account for about one percent of the total species population.
The drownings created a grotesque wildlife pileup, after part of the migrating herd tried to ford the Mara at "a particularly treacherous crossing point," according to Terilyn Lemaire, a conservation worker with the Mara Conservancy who witnessed the incident. (See a photo gallery of the mass drowning.)
The first animals into the river failed to cross and drowned, while others continued to stampede into the water behind them, Lemaire told National Geographic News by email.
"Once they jumped into the water, they were unable to climb up either embankment onto land and, as a result, got swept up by the current and drowned," she said.
Some 2,000 wildebeest drowned at the crossing in a single afternoon, Lemaire estimated.
"There was no unusual flooding at the time, and there seems to be no extraneous circumstances to these deaths," she said.
"The wildebeest merely chose a crossing point that was too steep."
Drowning deaths are not uncommon during the migration, Lemaire added, but her organization has never witnessed fatalities on this scale.
"It is customary every year for the wildebeest to pick a particularly treacherous crossing point and for there to be a significant die-off," she said, "but the number of deaths during these crossings almost never exceeds one thousand."
Fatal Migration
More than a million wildebeest undertake an epic migration every year in late summer, leaving their calving grounds in the Serengeti Plain of Tanzania to seek greener pastures in Kenya to the north.
The animals, also known as gnu, journey some 2,000 total miles (3,200 kilometers) each year, often joined by thousands of zebras and Thomson's gazelles.
The deaths occurred at Kenya's Maasai Mara National Reserve, as the herd was beginning its swing to the east on its way back to the Serengeti.
Since the drownings, the animals' bodies have washed downriver, beaching on the Mara's muddy banks and getting caught under a nearby bridge, Lemaire wrote on her blog for the nonprofit WildlifeDirect.
The remains formed what she described as "pungent islands of bloated carcasses."
"The crocodiles, storks, and vultures have not had to worry about where to find their next meal," she wrote.
"Those that aren't consumed will be left and will eventually decompose in the water. These thousands of carcasses will undoubtedly affect the health of the water, but to what extent, only time will tell."
Lemaire also declined to speculate, in her email to National Geographic News, on the impact the mass deaths might have on the wildebeests' overall population health.
"I would imagine that such a significant decrease in population would have an effect," she said, "but what that effect would be and to what extent, I cannot say."

Ancient Pharaoh Temple Discovered Inside Egypt Mosque

2007-10-03T16:15:00.000-07:00

Sections of columns and elaborately inscribed reliefs from an ancient Egyptian temple were recently discovered behind the walls of a mosque in Luxor. The oval relief, or cartouche, at center depicts the name of Ramses II, the pharaoh in whose name the temple was built around 1250 B.C. Photograph courtesy Zahi Hawass, Supreme Council of Antiquities

Ancient Pharaoh Temple Discovered Inside Egypt Mosque
Steven Stanek in Cairo, Egypt
for National Geographic News
September 27, 2007

Parts of a temple dating to the reign of pharaoh Ramses II have been discovered inside a mosque in Luxor, Egypt, officials report (see map).
Experts restoring the historic mosque uncovered sections of columns, capitals, and elaborately inscribed reliefs from one of the ancient temple's courtyards built around 1250 B.C.
The previously concealed architectural elements reveal well-preserved hieroglyphics and unique scenes depicting the powerful pharaoh.
The discovery is likely to touch a nerve among religious leaders, because the newly exposed reliefs contain representations of humans and animals, which are forbidden inside mosques, the experts said.
The mosque was erected as a shrine to Muslim saint Abul Haggag in the 13th century A.D. on the site of an earlier Christian church, which was itself built on top of the ancient temple, the archaeologists explained.
The discovery was made during repair work on the mosque after a fire damaged part of the structure in June.
"To do this project of restoration, [workers] had to reclean and reopen many things, and this is when the scenes were found, and they are really unique," said Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
(Hawass is also a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence. National Geographic News is a division of the National Geographic Society.)
Encryptions and Glyphs
Christians, and later Muslims, frequently built their shrines on top of ancient Egyptian holy sites, said W. Raymond Johnson, an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago who has seen the newly exposed temple sections.
Builders of both faiths usually erased or defaced ancient artwork in the temples, he said, but the newfound reliefs remain virtually untouched.
"We are very lucky that these have been so well preserved," Johnson said.
Rather than destroying the reliefs, the mosques builders carefully hid them away with a protective layer of straw-reinforced plaster, shielding them from the elements.
"We didn't know we would find the reliefs and the inscriptions in such good condition," said Mansour Boraik, general supervisor of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Luxor.
"The people who built the mosque for Haggag … actually saved the inscriptions and reliefs."
More images and inscriptions will likely be discovered as the restoration continues, he said.
The reliefs are thought to depict the temple's dedication. (Read related story: "Giant Ancient Egyptian Sun Temple Discovered in Cairo" [March 1, 2006].)
Among the most important scenes are those that feature Ramses II offering the sun god Amun Re two obelisks to be installed at the temple's front facade. One of those obelisks still stands at the temple, and the other is now at the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

Another relief shows three statues of Ramses II wearing his traditional white crown.
Experts say the carved inscriptions provide some of best examples of cryptographic or enigmatic writing, an unusual form of hieroglyphic text in which each glyph could stand for an entire word, phrase, or concept.
"Moral Quandary"
Now that the depictions have been uncovered, archaeologists will likely have to negotiate with local religious leaders who see the exposed renderings in their mosque as a violation of Islamic law.
"There is no damage to the mosque whatsoever, but its a moral quandary because you have these two places of worship, one still alive and one from the past," said Johnson, of the Oriental Institute.
"It's a living sacred space."
Boraik said that his team is in talks with mosque leaders about how to proceed.
"I think all of them understand the importance of these things," he said.
The researchers expect to reach a compromise, they said, which might include retractable coverings or screens over the inscriptions. Removing the ancient features entirely would likely cause damage to the mosque.
"One has to be very sensitive about the restoration work and make sure the people know you are doing something good," said Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University of Cairo.
She added that such issues are common in a country with such a rich religious heritage.
"In a way the mosque is part of the history of the temple—both are significant monuments of antiquity."

Kenya Plans for Huge Sugar Factory Spark Bitter Dispute

2007-10-03T16:11:00.000-07:00

Plans for a massive sugar factory in a Kenyan wetland could irreversibly ruin the ecosystem, conservationists say. The project, they warn, would wreak havoc on several indigenous groups, a vast array of bird and fish species, and two types of endangered primates—including the highly rare Tana River mangabey (above). But proponents note that the planned facility would provide up to 20,000 new jobs in an impoverished region of the country that has already seen several failed attempts at kick-starting the local economy. Photograph courtesy Julie Wieczkowski

Kenya Plans for Huge Sugar Factory Spark Bitter Dispute
Nick Wadhams in Nairobi, Kenya
for National Geographic News
September 24, 2007

Plans for a 50,000-acre (20,000-hectare) sugar production plant in Kenya's Tana River Delta have ignited a bitter dispute between conservation groups and economic-minded officials.
Supporters say studies show that sugar cane grows nearly three times as fast in the delta's rich wetlands as it does in western Kenya, where the bulk of the country's sugar is currently produced.
Such output would give Kenya's sugar industry a huge boost when it needs it most, proponents say, and would provide up to 20,000 new jobs in an impoverished region of the country.
But opponents argue that development could irreversibly ruin the delta, which is home to several indigenous groups, a vast array of bird and fish species, and two species of highly endangered primates.
On a single day in January of this year, the Mwamba Bird Observatory and Field Study Centre counted 15,000 water birds belonging to 69 species, including herons, terns, African skimmers, and stork.
Colin Jackson, who led the recent count, estimated that the census covered only 15 percent of the delta's acreage (see a map of Kenya showing the Tana River).
"I was stunned by the number of birds and the diversity, the volume—and we were only looking at a tiny percentage of the whole area," Jackson said.
He added that he was surprised at how little attention the sugar factory issue has received so far from other environmental groups.
"It appeared that there was actually very little concern being raised in the conservation world about this, even though the site is really, really important," Jackson said.
"Normally with a development of this size, which is huge and will have a major impact on the ecosystem, there's normally quite some noise being made."
Finding Balance
The situation in the Tana River Delta is a microcosm of the challenges facing Kenya and much of East Africa.
While the region boasts extraordinary biological diversity, it is also a place of deep poverty, leaving many people desperate for development.
Balancing the need to protect the ecosystem with locals' demands for jobs has not been easy.
The sugar project, to be run by Kenya's Mumias Sugar Company, is the latest in a string of proposed development ideas for the delta.
And other producers have been showing increased interest in the area in recent days.
Mat International Sugar announced this week that it has snapped up 223,000 acres (90,000 hectares) of land adjacent to Mumias's claim as part of a second, two-billion-dollar sugar project.
The firm hopes to produce 1.2 million tons of sugar each year.
"We intend to have seamless sugarcane farms where each village will have a plantation in addition to farms to take care of food security," Mat's project co-coordinator Moses Changwony told the East African Standard newspaper.
Under Pressure
One of Mumias's most important backers is the Tana and Athi Rivers Development Authority (TARDA), whose chair is a nephew of Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki.
President Kibaki has expressed his support for the project, which comes at a crucial time for the Kenyan economy.
Next February Kenya is expected to drop tariffs for sugar imported from other countries in the regional trading group known as Common Markets of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA).
Sugar from elsewhere in COMESA is about 40 percent cheaper than Kenyan sugar.
Government officials fear that without its own cheap source, Kenya's sugar industry could be wiped out—unless the country decides to extend the tariffs.
"In 2008, once COMESA starts bringing duty-free sugar [into the country] … it means we will lose out, so we have to produce sugar at low production cost so that we bridge the deficit gap," said TARDA spokesperson Damaris Kiarie.
An environmental impact study of the proposal is underway.
But even the team conducting the assessment acknowledges that it is under pressure to come up with a solution that doesn't just leave the delta in its current state.
"We have to be neutral and ensure that we come up with a solution which is all-inclusive so that the environmental crusaders will not say, Oh, they are biased on the others' side," said an environmental studies professor involved with the assessment.
The professor spoke on condition of anonymity because his contract bars him from talking publicly to the press.
"And we don't want the local people to say, Oh, we gave in to the international organizations and the local people, we leave them suffering," he added.
"In the delta, the poverty level is 73 percent—73 percent of the people live below one dollar per day. So if it is not a sugar project, we must recommend something which can be done which is viable."
Multiple Attempts
Over the years the delta has seen several failed attempts at bringing in money and development.
Among the most notorious was a World Bank project meant to protect the region's red colobus monkey and the crested mangabey—two species counted among the world's top 25 most endangered primates by the World Conservation Union.
The bank's solution was to relocate people, an idea that only fanned anger and resentment toward wildlife. Eventually the project was abandoned.
In a similar vein a reserve established in 1976 to protect the animals was abolished earlier this year.
Experts found that the reserve only increased locals' resentment toward the animals and put the primates under new threats of retaliation.
And in 2000 and 2001 deadly clashes erupted between two ethnic groups living in the delta: the Orma, who are traditionally herders, and the Pokomo, who are mostly farmers.
Many observers believe that the conflict over use of land and water was caused in part by numerous failed irrigation projects in the delta.
The newly proposed sugar projects would also require irrigation networks using water pumped in from the delta.
The Pokomo are largely in favor, while the Orma are opposed.
Tentative plans call for many farmers to be moved away from the delta, an idea that could lead to new animosity.
Critics of the sugar plans have suggested that developers focus instead on the resources that the delta already has: freshwater fisheries, mango plantations, rice, and tourism.
"The product is there already, why do they want to destroy that with sugar?" said Hadley Becha, head of the Conservation Program at the East African Wildlife Society.
Becha argues that the studies on sugar growth cited by proponents of the projects have not been submitted for peer review or public scrutiny.
"There are those who are saying that sugar is the only development," Becha said.
"But we are saying that sugar is not the only development, because it is not for and by the [local] people. It will displace them, it will make them lose their livelihoods."

Why Desalination Doesn't Work (Yet)

2007-08-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

Source: World Bank, 2007. The Most Arid Region in the World. With an average of only 1,383 cubic meters of renewable water resources per person per year in 2006, the MENA region falls far below the global average of 8,462. Environmental problems resulting from water issues cost MENA countries between 0.5 and 2.5 percent of GDP every year. People and economies also suffer from the consequences of droughts, floods and water-related public health issues. The region has responded to these water challenges with some of the best hydraulic engineers in the world, who have pioneered sophisticated irrigation and drainage systems as well as cutting edge desalinization technologies.

Why Desalination Doesn't Work (Yet)

By Michael Schirber, Special to LiveScience
livescience.com
posted: 25 June 2007 08:49 am ET

With water fast becoming a hot commodity, especially in drought-prone regions with burgeoning populations, an obvious solution is to take the salt out of seawater. Desalination technology has been around for thousands of years, after all. Even Aristotle worked on the problem.

Tantalizing as desalinated water might sound, the energy costs have made it rather unpalatable.

"Until recently, seawater desalination was a very expensive water source solution," said Gary Crisp, an engineer for the Water Corporation of Western Australia.

Drinking seawater straight is a bad idea because your body must expel the salt by urinating more water than it actually gains. Seawater contains roughly 130 grams of salt per gallon. Desalination can reduce salt levels to below 2 grams per gallon, which is the limit for safe human consumption.

Currently, between 10 and 13 billion gallons of water are desalinated worldwide per day. That's only about 0.2 percent of global water consumption, but the number is increasing.

"There is significant growth in desalination capacity throughout the world, and it is anticipated to continue for sometime," says Stephen Gray of Victoria University.

Gray has been chosen to lead a new research program in Australia—where many regions lack fresh water supplies—to improve the efficiency of desalination plants.

Aristotle's efforts

Back in the 4th century B.C., Aristotle imagined using successive filters to remove the salt from seawater.

But the first actual practice of desalination involved collecting the freshwater steam from boiling saltwater. Around 200 A.D., sailors began desalinating seawater with simple boilers on their ships.

The energy required for this distillation process today makes it prohibitively expensive on a large scale. A lot of the current market for so-called "thermal desalination" has therefore been in oil-rich, water-poor countries in the Middle East.

Since the 1950s, researchers have been developing membranes that could filter out salt, similar to what Aristotle originally envisioned. Presently, this membrane technique, sometimes called "reverse osmosis," requires one-fourth of the energy and costs half of the price of distilling saltwater.

"In the last ten years, seawater reverse-osmosis has matured into a viable alternative to thermal desalination," Crisp says.

Energy is key

But even with membranes, large amounts of energy are needed to generate the high pressure that forces the water through the filter. Current methods require about 14 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce 1,000 gallons of desalinated seawater.

A typical American uses 80 to 100 gallons of water a day, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The entire country consumes about 323 billion gallons per day of surface water and another 84.5 billion gallons of ground water.

If half of this water came from desalination, the United States would need more than 100 extra electric power plants, each with a gigawatt of capacity.

Depending on local energy prices, 1,000 gallons of desalinated seawater can cost around $3 or $4. Although that might not seem like much, it is still cheaper in many places to pump water out of the ground or import it from somewhere else.

But the price difference will undoubtedly narrow, especially in regions that could experience more intense droughts owing to climate change.

Water use has been growing twice as fast as population growth, causing more and more communities to suffer water shortages. The demand for freshwater supplies will drive prices higher, making desalination increasingly attractive.

Brainstorming on membranes

The number of desalination plants worldwide has grown to more than 15,000, and efforts continue to make them more affordable.

Last month, Australia's largest scientific research agency joined with nine major universities in a membrane research program to reduce desalination energy costs, as well as maintenance costs associated with gunk sticking to membranes and fouling them up.

"Lowering the energy required for desalination and the fouling propensity of membranes are the two biggest challenges facing desalination," Gray says.

A team of diverse researchers will try to tackle these problems by developing new types of membrane materials. The goal is to cut in half the energy required for desalination.

"We would hope to have something available within the next 10 years," Gray said.

Global Warming: How Do Scientists Know They're Not Wrong?

2007-08-20T14:42:00.000-07:00

image: undispatch.com

Global Warming: How Do Scientists Know They're Not Wrong?

By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 16 July 2007 09:34 am ET

From catastrophic sea level rise to jarring changes in local weather, humanity faces a potentially dangerous threat from the changes our own pollution has wrought on Earth’s climate. But since nothing in science can ever be proven with 100 percent certainty, how is it that scientists can be so sure that we are the cause of global warming?

For years, there has been clear scientific consensus that Earth’s climate is heating up and that humans are the culprits behind the trend, says Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at the University of California, San Diego.

A few years ago, she evaluated 928 scientific papers that dealt with global climate change and found that none disagreed about human-generated global warming. The results of her analysis were published in a 2004 essay in the journal Science.

And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the National Academy of Sciences and numerous other noted scientific organizations have issued statements that unequivocally endorse the idea of global warming and attribute it to human activities.

“We’re confident about what’s going on,” said climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Science in New York.

But even if there is a consensus, how can scientists be so confident about a trend playing out over dozens of years in the grand scheme of the Earth's existence? How do they know they didn’t miss something, or that there is not some other explanation for the world’s warming? After all, there was once a scientific consensus that the Earth was flat. How can scientists prove their position?

Best predictor wins

Contrary to popular parlance, science can never truly “prove” a theory. Science simply arrives at the best explanation of how the world works. Global warming can no more be “proven” than the theory of continental drift, the theory of evolution or the concept that germs carry diseases.

“All science is fallible,” Oreskes told LiveScience. “Climate science shouldn’t be expected to stand up to some fantasy standard that no science can live up to.”

Instead, a variety of methods and standards are used to evaluate the viability of different scientific explanations and theories. One such standard is how well a theory predicts the outcome of an event, and climate change theory has proven to be a strong predictor.

The effects of putting massive amounts of carbon dioxide in the air were predicted as long ago as the early 20th century by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius.

Noted oceanographer Roger Revelle’s 1957 predictions that carbon dioxide would build up in the atmosphere and cause noticeable changes by the year 2000 have been borne out by numerous studies, as has Princeton climatologist Suki Manabe’s 1980 prediction that the Earth’s poles would be first to see the effects of global warming.

Also in the 1980s, NASA climatologist James Hansen predicted with high accuracy what the global average temperature would be in 30 years time (now the present day).

Hansen's model predictions are “a shining example of a successful prediction in climate science,” said climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University.

Schmidt says that predictions by those who doubted global warming have failed to come true.

“Why don’t you trust a psychic? Because their predictions are wrong,” he told LiveScience. “The credibility goes to the side that gets these predictions right.”

Mounting evidence

Besides their successful predictions, climate scientists have been assembling a “body of evidence that has been growing significantly with each year,” Mann said.

Data from tree rings, ice cores and coral reefs taken with instrumental observations of air and ocean temperatures, sea ice melt and greenhouse gas concentrations have all emerged in support of climate change theory.

“There are 20 different lines of evidence that the planet is warming,” and the same goes for evidence that greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere, Schmidt said. “All of these things are very incontrovertible.”

But skeptics have often raised the question of whether these observations and effects attributed to global warming may in fact be explained by natural variation or changes in solar radiation hitting the Earth.

Hurricane expert William Gray, of Colorado State University, told Discover magazine in a 2005 interview, "I'm not disputing that there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and '40s, and then there was a slight global cooling from the middle '40s to the early '70s. And there has been warming since the middle '70s, especially in the last 10 years. But this is natural, due to ocean circulation changes and other factors. It is not human induced.”

Isaac Newton had something to say about all this: In his seminal “Principia Mathematica,” he noted that if separate data sets are best explained by one theory or idea, that explanation is most likely the true explanation.

And studies have overwhelmingly shown that climate change scenarios in which greenhouse gases emitted from human activities cause global warming best explain the observed changes in Earth’s climate, Mann said—models that use only natural variation can’t account for the significant warming that has occurred in the last few decades.

Mythic ice age

One argument commonly used to cast doubt on the idea of global warming is the supposed predictions of an impending ice age by scientists in the 1970s. One might say: First the Earth was supposed to be getting colder; now scientists say it’s getting hotter—how can we trust scientists if they’re predictions are so wishy-washy?

Because the first prediction was never actually made. Rather, it’s something of an urban climate myth.

Mann says that this myth started from a “tiny grain of truth around which so much distortion and misinformation has been placed.”

Scientists were well aware of the warming that could be caused by increasing greenhouse gases, both Mann and Schmidt explained, but in the decades preceding the 1970s, aerosols, or air pollution, had been steadily increasing. These tiny particles tended to have a cooling effect in the atmosphere, and at the time, scientists were unsure who would win the climate-changing battle, aerosols or greenhouse gases.

“It was unclear what direction the climate was going,” Mann said.

But several popular media, such as Newsweek, ran articles that exaggerated what scientists had said about the potential of aerosols to cool the Earth.

But the battle is now over, and greenhouse gases have won.

“Human society has made a clear decision as to which direction [the climate] is going to go,” Mann said.

Future predictions

One of the remaining skeptics, is MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen. While he acknowledges the trends of rising temperatures and greenhouse gases, Lindzen expressed his doubt on man’s culpability in the case and casts doubt on the dire predictions made by some climate models, in an April 2006 editorial for The Wall Street Journal.

“What the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred,” Lindzen wrote.

To be sure, there is a certain degree of uncertainty involved in modeling and predicting future changes in the climate, but “you don’t need to have a climate model to know that climate change is a problem,” Oreskes said.

Climate scientists have clearly met the burden of proof with the mounting evidence they’ve assembled and the strong predictive power of global warming theory, Oreskes said-- global warming is something to pay attention to.

Schmidt agrees. “All of these little things just reinforce the big picture,” he said. “And the big picture is very worrying.”

Water Discovered to Flow Like Molasses

2007-08-20T14:34:00.000-07:00

Water Discovered to Flow Like Molasses

By Ben Mauk, Special to LiveScience
livescience.com
posted: 11 May 2007 08:58 am ET

The Taoist poet Lao Tse famously wrote that water exemplifies the highest good, benefiting all and flowing easily without effort. While this makes for a lovely metaphor, there's more to H20 than is dreamt of in Lao Tse's philosophies.

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have found that, at the molecular level, water exhibits viscous, even solid-like properties.

When molecules of water are forced to move through a small gap between two solid surfaces, the substance's viscosity increases by a factor of 1,000 to 10,000, approaching that of molasses.

"In this small space between surfaces, the water, which is usually very fluid, organizes itself into a new state in which well-defined layers of molecules form," said Uzi Landmann, director of the Center for Computational Materials Science at Georgia Tech, in a phone interview with Live Science.

Layering refers to a structural phenomenon in which molecules form strata between which there is very little molecular exchange. Water molecules can move about fluidly within a single layer, but not between layers. This vertical structure resembles that found in solid substances.

Landmann directed the team of physicists that simulated the experiment and predicted the layering effect. Georgia Tech experimental physicist Elisa Riedo led the team that performed the actual experiments. Together they found that the simulation predictions matched the experimental results.

The experiment observed the properties visualized in the simulation by measuring the force required to push the solid walls together. Riedo found that the force oscillates predictably, becoming largest at the point when a layer of particles is squeezed out.

Riedo and Landmann's results stand at odds with long-held beliefs about water.

"The literature almost uniformly said that water doesn't layer," said Landmann. "Without direct evidence it was inferred that water would behave differently from those liquids that do."

Previously, experiments had not measured the force directly but rather had deduced it from other properties, since techniques at the time did not allow scientists to probe the one nanometer region required to observe the effect.

The layering phenomenon has been known for about 25 years. Hexadecanes (molecule chains of 16 carbon atoms) exhibit layering properties. These are featured in many common liquids, but not in water.

Applications for the findings can be found in fields ranging from pharmaceuticals to nanotechnology. The newfound viscosity of water suggests a cheap method for lubricating very narrow regions. Water was long thought too fluid to be useful for this purpose.

But it is not merely a matter of application, insists Landmann. "The question of the nature of materials on the small scale is itself fascinating."

On that point even Lao Tse agrees: "Magnify the small, increase the few."

Scientists Make Water Run Uphill

By Corey Binns, Special to LiveScience
livescience.com
posted: 29 March 2006 06:46 am ET

Toss water on a hot pan and it sizzles and evaporates. Toss water on a really hot pan, and the water beads up and starts roaming around.

Now, turn your hot pan into a hot small staircase and watch the water climb the stairs.

Researchers did just that, taking an everyday sighting in the kitchen to a new level in the lab.

How it works

If a pan's really hot, the water starts to evaporate before it even touches the surface. The evaporating water, in the airy form of a water-vapor cushion, holds the droplet above the pan. With moves as smooth as Fred Astaire, the droplet glides around on air.

When scientists heated a piece of brass with saw-tooth ridges-a thing that looks like a ratchet-water drops traveled quickly and in one direction: up.

[See the video. Credit: Heiner Linke, University of Oregon]

"The drop rides along on the vapor like a boat on a river," said physicist Heiner Linke from the University of Oregon. "The vapor is generated between the droplet and the ratchet's surface in a narrow gap, about the width of a human hair. The vapor needs a way to get out of there, and it's going to take the easiest way out. There's always going to be one direction in which it's easier to get out."

Video

Watch the Full Video
A liquid drop placed on a hot ratchet moves uphill. Credit: Heiner Linke, University of Oregon

The escaping vapor pulls the droplet along in the same direction.

The research is scheduled to be published in the April 14 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Potential use

The traveling drops could prove helpful in cases where scientists need to cool something down with water or another liquid. Tiny air conditioners are used to cook microchips in laptop computers. But the cooling system itself requires extra energy, which creates more heat.

With the newfound trick, drops could potentially pump themselves, using heat that's already there. "Pumps that don't use moving parts are simpler to make, cheaper and live longer," Linke pointed out.

If the droplet pumps prove strong enough, Linke said they could be cooling computers in about six years.

In the meantime, schoolteachers have a new trick for the classroom.

Timeline: The Frightening Future of Earth

2007-08-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

Timeline: The Frightening Future of Earth

By Andrea Thompson, and Ker Than
livescience.com
posted: 19 April 2007 08:32 am ET

Our planet's prospects for environmental stability are bleaker than ever with the approach of this year's Earth Day, April 22. Global warming is widely accepted as a reality by scientists and even by previously doubtful government and industrial leaders. And according to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is a 90 percent likelihood that humans are contributing to the change.

The international panel of scientists predicts the global average temperature could increase by 2 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 and that sea levels could rise by up to 2 feet.

Scientists have even speculated that a slight increase in Earth's rotation rate could result, along with other changes. Glaciers, already receding, will disappear. Epic floods will hit some areas while intense drought will strike others. Humans will face widespread water shortages. Famine and disease will increase. Earth's landscape will transform radically, with a quarter of plants and animals at risk of extinction.

While putting specific dates on these traumatic potential events is challenging, this timeline paints the big picture and details Earth's future based on several recent studies and the longer scientific version of the IPCC report, which was made available to LiveScience.

2007

More of the world's population now lives in cities than in rural areas, changing patterns of land use. The world population surpasses 6.6 billion. (Peter Crane, Royal Botanic Gardens, UK, Science; UN World Urbanization Prospectus: The 2003 Revision; U.S. Census Bureau)

2008

Global oil production peaks sometime between 2008 and 2018, according to a model by one Swedish physicist. Others say this turning point, known as "Hubbert's Peak," won't occur until after 2020. Once Hubbert's Peak is reached, global oil production will begin an irreversible decline, possibly triggering a global recession, food shortages and conflict between nations over dwindling oil supplies. (doctoral dissertation of Frederik Robelius, University of Uppsala, Sweden; report by Robert Hirsch of the Science Applications International Corporation)

2020

Flash floods will very likely increase across all parts of Europe. (IPCC)

Less rainfall could reduce agriculture yields by up to 50 percent in some parts of the world. (IPCC)

World population will reach 7.6 billion people. (U.S. Census Bureau)

2030

Diarrhea-related diseases will likely increase by up to 5 percent in low-income parts of the world. (IPCC)

Up to 18 percent of the world's coral reefs will likely be lost as a result of climate change and other environmental stresses. In Asian coastal waters, the coral loss could reach 30 percent. (IPCC)

World population will reach 8.3 billion people. (U.S. Census Bureau)

Warming temperatures will cause temperate glaciers on equatorial mountains in Africa to disappear. (Richard Taylor, University College London, Geophysical Research Letters:)

In developing countries, the urban population will more than double to about 4 billion people, packing more people onto a given city's land area. The urban populations of developed countries may also increase by as much as 20 percent. (World Bank: The Dynamics of Global Urban Expansion)

2040

The Arctic Sea could be ice-free in the summer, and winter ice depth may shrink drastically. Other scientists say the region will still have summer ice up to 2060 and 2105. (Marika Holland, NCAR, Geophysical Research Letters)

2050

Small alpine glaciers will very likely disappear completely, and large glaciers will shrink by 30 to 70 percent. Austrian scientist Roland Psenner of the University of Innsbruck says this is a conservative estimate, and the small alpine glaciers could be gone as soon as 2037. (IPCC)

In Australia, there will likely be an additional 3,200 to 5,200 heat-related deaths per year. The hardest hit will be people over the age of 65. An extra 500 to 1,000 people will die of heat-related deaths in New York City per year. In the United Kingdom, the opposite will occur, and cold-related deaths will outpace heat-related ones. (IPCC)

World population reaches 9.4 billion people. (U.S. Census Bureau)

Crop yields could increase by up to 20 percent in East and Southeast Asia, while decreasing by up to 30 percent in Central and South Asia. Similar shifts in crop yields could occur on other continents. (IPCC)

As biodiversity hotspots are more threatened, a quarter of the world's plant and vertebrate animal species could face extinction. (Jay Malcolm, University of Toronto, Conservation Biology)

2070

As glaciers disappear and areas affected by drought increase, electricity production for the world's existing hydropower stations will decrease. Hardest hit will be Europe, where hydropower potential is expected to decline on average by 6 percent; around the Mediterranean, the decrease could be up to 50 percent. (IPCC)

Warmer, drier conditions will lead to more frequent and longer droughts, as well as longer fire-seasons, increased fire risks, and more frequent heat waves, especially in Mediterranean regions. (IPCC)

2080

While some parts of the world dry out, others will be inundated. Scientists predict up to 20 percent of the world's populations live in river basins likely to be affected by increased flood hazards. Up to 100 million people could experience coastal flooding each year. Most at risk are densely populated and low-lying areas that are less able to adapt to rising sea levels and areas which already face other challenges such as tropical storms. (IPCC)

Coastal population could balloon to 5 billion people, up from 1.2 billion in 1990. (IPCC)

Between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will experience water shortages and up to 600 million will go hungry. (IPCC)

Sea levels could rise around New York City by more than three feet, potentially flooding the Rockaways, Coney Island, much of southern Brooklyn and Queens, portions of Long Island City, Astoria, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, lower Manhattan and eastern Staten Island from Great Kills Harbor north to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. (NASA GISS)

2085

The risk of dengue fever from climate change is estimated to increase to 3.5 billion people. (IPCC)

2100

A combination of global warming and other factors will push many ecosystems to the limit, forcing them to exceed their natural ability to adapt to climate change. (IPCC)

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will be much higher than anytime during the past 650,000 years. (IPCC)

Ocean pH levels will very likely decrease by as much as 0.5 pH units, the lowest it's been in the last 20 million years. The ability of marine organisms such as corals, crabs and oysters to form shells or exoskeletons could be impaired. (IPCC)

Thawing permafrost and other factors will make Earth's land a net source of carbon emissions, meaning it will emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it absorbs. (IPCC)

Roughly 20 to 30 percent of species assessed as of 2007 could be extinct by 2100 if global mean temperatures exceed 2 to 3 degrees of pre-industrial levels. (IPCC)

New climate zones appear on up to 39 percent of the world's land surface, radically transforming the planet. (Jack Williams, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

A quarter of all species of plants and land animals-more than a million total-could be driven to extinction. The IPCC reports warn that current "conservation practices are generally ill-prepared for climate change and effective adaptation responses are likely to be costly to implement." (IPCC)

Increased droughts could significantly reduce moisture levels in the American Southwest, northern Mexico and possibly parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, effectively recreating the "Dust Bowl" environments of the 1930s in the United States. (Richard Seager, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Science)

2200

An Earth day will be 0.12 milliseconds shorter, as rising temperatures cause oceans to expand away from the equator and toward the poles, one model predicts. One reason water will be shifted toward the poles is most of the expansion will take place in the North Atlantic Ocean, near the North Pole. The poles are closer to the Earth's axis of rotation, so having more mass there should speed up the planet's rotation. (Felix Landerer, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Geophysical Research Letters)

Fossil Hunter Condemns Lucy Tour of U.S.

2007-08-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

The framed hominid fossil "Lucy," is seen at a exhibition at the Ethiopian Natural History Museum in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2006. The 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton has left Ethiopia for a tour of the United States _ a trip that some say is simply too risky for one of the world's most famous fossils. Credit: AP Photo/Les Neuhaus

Fossil Hunter Condemns Lucy Tour of U.S.

By Khaled Kazziha, Associated Press
livescience.com
posted: 11 August 2007 01:35 pm ET

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- One of the world's leading paleontologists denounced Ethiopia's decision to send the Lucy skeleton on a six-year tour of the United States, warning Friday that the 3.2 million-year-old fossil will likely be damaged no matter how careful its handlers are.
The skeleton was quietly flown out of Ethiopia earlier this week for the U.S. tour.
Paleontologist Richard Leakey joined other experts in criticizing what some see as a gamble with one of the world's most famous fossils. The Smithsonian Institution also has objected to the tour, and the secretive manner in which the remains were sent abroad has raised eyebrows in Ethiopia, where Lucy has been displayed to the public only twice.
"It's a form of prostitution, it's gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity and it should not be permitted,'' Leakey told The Associated Press in an interview at his office in Nairobi.
Ethiopian officials could not immediately be reached for comment, but have said proceeds from the tour would be used to upgrade museums in one of the world's poorest countries.
Dirk Van Tuerenhout, the curator of anthropology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where Lucy will be on display from Aug. 31 to April 20, said his museum would treat the relic with "the greatest respect and sense of protection -- something we in the museum world do all the time.''
"On the one hand, I would say we definitely share the concern that people have to safeguard fossils like Lucy, or for that matter any other fossils,'' Van Tuerenhout said. "Where we part company, in a sense, is the decision that was made to allow her to travel.''
He emphasized the decision to allow Lucy to travel abroad was made by the Ethiopian government, and that Houston was honored by its selection.
Van Tuerenhout also noted the exhibit's story line was broader than just Lucy and offers other educational aspects.
"We are definitely going to be able, with Lucy's presence, to tell the story of Ethiopia -- not only the prehistoric part, but also the historic part,'' he said. "This is one of those exhibits that covers quite a lot of history.''
Lucy, the fossilized partial skeleton of what was once a 3 1/2-foot-tall adult of an ape-man species, was discovered in 1974 in the remote, desert-like Afar region in northeastern Ethiopia. Lucy is classified as an Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about 3 million to 4 million years ago, and is the earliest known hominid.
The State Department approved the exhibit for temporary importation into the U.S., saying that display of Lucy and the other artifacts is in the national interest because of their "cultural significance.''
Stops beyond Houston have yet to be finalized, but Ethiopian officials have said they include New York, Denver and Chicago.
Leakey said the skeleton will almost certainly get damaged.
"These specimens will get damaged no matter how careful you are and every time she is moved there is a risk,'' he said. "A specimen that is that precious and unique shouldn't be exposed to the threats of damage by travel.''
He also said keeping Lucy in Ethiopia would lure tourists to the country.
"The point is, what is the benefit of taking one of the most iconic examples of the human story from Africa to parade it around in second-level museums in the United States?'' he said.
Leakey is one of the world's most renowned paleontologists. His team unearthed the bones of Turkana Boy -- the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human ever found -- in the desolate, far northern reaches of Kenya in 1984.
He is also a conservationist credited with helping end the slaughter of elephants in Kenya during the 1980s.

Associated Press Writer John Peretto contributed to this story from Houston.

Glimpse of Time Before Big Bang Possible

2007-08-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

Glimpse of Time Before Big Bang Possible

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
livescience.com
posted: 01 July 2007 01:15 pm ET

It may be possible to glimpse before the supposed beginning of time into the universe prior to the Big Bang, researchers now say.

Unfortunately, any such picture will always be fuzzy at best due to a kind of "cosmic forgetfulness."

The Big Bang is often thought as the start of everything, including time, making any questions about what happened during it or beforehand nonsensical. Recently scientists have instead suggested the Big Bang might have just been the explosive beginning of the current era of the universe, hinting at a mysterious past.

To see how far into history one might gaze, theoretical physicist Martin Bojowald at Pennsylvania State University ran calculations based on loop quantum gravity, one of a number of competing theories seeking to explain how the underlying structure of the universe works.

Past research suggested the Big Bang was preceded by infinite energies and space-time warping where existing scientific theories break down, making it impossible to peer beforehand. The new findings suggest that although the levels of energy and space-time warping before the Big Bang were both incredibly high, they were finite.

Scientists could spot clues in the present day of what the cosmos looked like previously. If evidence of the past persisted after the Big Bang, its influence could be spotted in astronomical observations and computational models, Bojowald explained.

However, Bojowald also figures some knowledge of the past was irrevocably lost. For instance, the sheer size of the present universe would suppress precise knowledge of how the universe changed in size before the Big Bang, he said.

"It came as a big surprise that some properties of the universe before the Big Bang may have only such a weak influence on current observations that they are practically undetermined," Bojowald said of findings detailed online July 1 in the journal Nature Physics.

One implication of this "cosmic forgetfulness," as Bojowald calls it, is that history does not repeat itself-the fundamental properties of the current era of the universe are different from the last, Bojowald explained. "It's as if the universe forgot some of its properties and acquired new properties independent of what it had before," he told SPACE.com.

"The eternal recurrence of absolutely identical universes would seem to be prevented by the apparent existence of an intrinsic cosmic forgetfulness," he added.

These findings differ from a cyclic model of the cosmos from cosmologist Paul Steinhardt at Princeton and theoretical physicist Neil Turok at Cambridge, which envisions an infinite series of Big Bangs preceding our universe caused by additional membranes or "branes" of reality perpetually colliding and bouncing off each other. Steinhardt said he felt Bojowald's calculations were concrete, but needed further elaboration to include the interplay of different kinds of matter and radiation.

Cosmologist Carlo Rovelli at the Center of Theoretical Physics in Marseilles, France, found it "remarkable" that the new work could delve past the Big Bang. He added the work had to lead to predictions that could be compared to cosmological observations "in order to become credible."

Puzzle of Hot Young Stars Solved

2007-08-20T13:52:00.000-07:00

The Taurus Molecular Cloud in the infrared, revealing the vast star-forming regions nearest to Earth. The cloud contains over 400 young stars. Credits: Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory/Gopal Narayanan/Mark Heyer

Puzzle of Hot Young Stars Solved

By Dave Mosher, Staff Writer
livescience.com
posted: 14 August 2007 06:05 am ET

Most newborn stars are gluttons, feeding on afterbirth of dust and gas long after igniting.
Although this accreting activity doubles stellar surface temperatures by burning up the material, it mysteriously softens the emission of high-energy X-rays.
"Accreting stars have three times less X-ray emission than non-accreting stars, which seems unusual," said Kevin Briggs, an astrophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.
Now Briggs and several teams of researchers have discovered why some stars' X-ray profiles are so thin: The nebulous surroundings of a young star absorb the extra energy produced by falling into it.
The discovery gives astronomers a better glimpse into the early stages of stellar life.
Burning filters
Briggs explained that dust and gas surrounding young stars act like light filters on a camera, where gas absorbs X-rays and dust absorbs visible light.
Yet if both materials surrounding energetic young stars are very dense--and soak up most of the energy they create--Briggs said the team wondered why the stars weren't fainter.
The filters, it turns out, burn.
"The dust is heated so much by the radiation from the star, that it is vaporized before it can fall on the star," said Manuel Guedel, also an astrophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
As the dust and gas still waiting to be eaten by the young stars vaporizes, Briggs explained, they glow like hot plasma and mimic the appearance of a star's surface.
Shocking creation
Briggs said repetitive "shocks" of energy create young stars' X-rays, and that there are two recipes to make them.
The first type of shock is produced when gas and dust falls into a star and slams into its surface at nearly 671,000 mph (1,080,000 kph). "The impact against the star's surface can produce the high-energy shock," Briggs said.
The second type of X-ray shock in young stars is produced by gas and dust jettisoned away from a star's poles.
"It happens when fast-moving material catches up to slow-moving material and collides," Briggs said. But nature leans toward variety with its shocking young stars. "What we actually see is both types in these stars," he said.
Because stellar meals of gas and dust absorb most young stars' X-ray outputs, the teams think the few X-rays that can be detected originate from shocks emitted from the stars' jets.
"This emission must come from outside the accretion streams," Guedel said. The teams looked at 400 young stars in the constellation Taurus to uncover their findings, which are detailed in a recent issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Women Hardwired to Like Pink, Study Suggests

2007-08-20T13:45:00.000-07:00

Photographer: Jack Hollingsworth, Jupiter Images

Women Hardwired to Like Pink, Study Suggests

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
posted: 20 August 2007 12:48 pm ET

Women may be biologically hardwired to prefer pink, or at least redder colors than men do, research now reveals.

The findings are some of the first conclusive evidence to support the long-held notion that men and women differ when it comes to their favorite colors.

Scientists had student volunteers select, as rapidly as possible, their preferred color from among a series of paired, colored rectangles displayed on a computer screen. The universal favorite color for all people apparently is blue, they found.

In addition, female color preferences tended "slightly away from blue towards red, which tends to make pinks and lilacs the most preferred colors in comparison with others," said researcher Anya Hurlbert, director of the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University in England. Males tend to prefer green more than red, she added.

To see whether sex differences in color preference depend more on nature than nurture, the researchers tested 37 Chinese volunteers in addition to the other 171 white British participants. The results among Chinese volunteers were similar, Hurlbert said. She and colleague Yazhu Ling detailed their findings in the August 21 issue of the journal Current Biology.

"These are the first hints there may be some biological basis for color preferences," said Caltech cognitive neuroscientist Shinsuke Shimojo, who did not participate in this study. "I don't think this finding alone is sufficient to convince everyone, but I like their careful experimentation, and it opens up possibilities for further research."

Many differences are known to exist between the sexes when it comes to other visual abilities. For instance, females are better at visually searching for things and often use richer terminology when naming colors, while males are better at imagining what objects that get swiveled around look like.

Hurlbert told LiveScience she became interested in possible biological roots for sex differences in color preferences "partly because I was so struck by my daughter's desire for all things pink." She also recalled noticing a pink and lilac aisle at a drugstore, "a feminine hygiene and body products aisle, juxtaposed with a men’s deodorant and shaving cream aisle, which was dark browns and greens. Were marketers pandering to an innate preference? Why did they assume that girls liked pink?"

The reason women apparently prefer reddish colors might go back to humanity's ancient hunter-gatherer days on the savanna, when women—the primary gatherers—would have benefited from the ability to hone in on ripe fruits. Women might also have become focused on the reddening or blanching of faces often linked with mood as part of caregiver roles. "Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference," Hurlbert said.

Future research should collect more data across cultures to see how true these findings hold, Shimojo said. Hurlbert and her colleagues also plan to modify their test for use in young babies, whose color preferences naturally should be less influenced by culture than adults. In addition, they will test if other factors influence color preferences, including age, personality and menstrual cycle.

to why there was a universal preference for blue, "I can only speculate," Hurlbert said. "Going back to our savanna days, we would have a natural preference for a clear blue sky, because it signaled good weather. Clear blue also signals a good water source."

Water projects 'need more research'

2007-08-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

Water projects 'need more research'

Carol Campbell
20 August 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

International water development projects are suffering because not enough money is being spent on basic scientific research and monitoring, a group of water experts has said.
This accusation — made specifically about projects supported by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), an independent organisation that helps developing countries fund environmental protection projects — was made during World Water Week (13–17 August).
"A lot of water programmes funded by the GEF are not successful because they are not based on sound research and monitoring," Johann Augustyn, chief director of the South African government's Research: Antarctica and Islands project, told SciDev.Net.
"It’s a chicken and egg situation with the GEF," said Larry Hutchings, a specialist with the South African Marine and Coastal Management Programme. "Money is available for management programmes but not for research or monitoring."
Neville Sweijd, director of Namibia's Benguela Environment Fisheries Interaction and Training Programme, said the GEF's rigid boundary between research and development projects was counterproductive.
"On an issue like climate change, for instance, it is not enough to only promote development projects that are aimed at adaptation and mitigation. There has to be focus on research too," he said.
Over the last five years, the GEF has contributed much of its funding to development projects such as the Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem Programme, a project to help Angola, Namibia and South Africa jointly manage valuable fish stocks and monitor invasive species and pollution.
Although these projects have been labelled a success, "some of the resources allocated to these projects should go to research," said Augustyn.
The GEF's funds come from donor countries, which in 2006 pledged US$3.13 billion to fund operations over the next four years.
"The GEF controls a huge amount of the global resources dedicated to environmental work, they need to look at the problems scientists in developing nations are facing," said marine scientist Larry Hutchings.
In response to the scientists’ criticisms, GEF spokesman Christian Severin said that the organisation limited its role to "goal oriented research".

Related SciDev.Net articles:
Maps help manage Zambian water resources
UN hunger targets may increase water burden
Think small for water management, say scientists
South African fisheries urged to keep it simple
Science secures the fish supply in Sri Lanka

Africa needs better data to combat global warming

2007-08-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

*Data gathering in Botswana

Africa needs better data to combat global warming

1 August 2007

Effective adaptation strategies will require reliable scientific data both on the nature of climate change and on its potential impact.
It is now widely accepted that despite developing countries' lack of responsibility for human-induced global warming, they are likely to be hardest hit, and that the hardest hit of all will be African countries.
Given their relatively low level of carbon emissions, there is little African countries can do to reduce the scale of the problems they are likely to face — that must be primarily the responsibility of the developed world. But there are practices that can, and indeed must, be pursued to mitigate the impact of climate change, in areas from food production to public health.
Recent years have seen increasing attention paid to adaptation strategies. Talking about adaptation is no longer seen as a political excuse for not taking stronger action to reduce emissions; it is now generally accepted as an essential component of virtually all areas of development assistance.
Yet there remains a danger that the complexity of successful adaptation strategies will be underestimated. Success will require more than judicious application of traditional small-scale farming techniques — however flexibly they may have responded in the past to changing weather conditions — or wider distribution of conventional medicines.
Adaptation strategies will require detailed knowledge of the changes that climate change is likely to produce, both regionally and, especially, nationally.
One of the biggest challenges African countries now face, in common with the rest of the developing world, is building the capacity to generate a proper scientific understanding of these changes, particularly if countries are to take ownership of and be fully effective in their responses to these changes.
Low priority
A set of articles published this week on the SciDev.Net website highlights, among other issues, key areas in which more data is required if adaptation strategies are to succeed. For example, Suad Sulamain, a health specialist in the Sudan, describes the need for reliable data on social and environmental factors that influence malaria transmission (see How is climate change shifting Africa's malaria map?).
As Sulamain points out, collecting such data is essential both nationally and regionally if successful measures are to be taken to contain the expected spread of malaria in Africa in the next few years. International health agencies need to provide the support for data collection. At the same time, African researchers need to develop the skills required not only to collect and analyse the data, but also to interpret its significance for health policymakers.
The same is true for meteorological data. As many African governments are discovering, global climate models may be able to provide a broad-brush picture of the likely challenges. But they are of limited value in predicting the specific difficulties a particular country is likely to face — information that is essential if an appropriate response is to be developed and implemented.
Building regional models of climate change requires the maintenance of accurate weather records over long periods. Regretfully, and with a few welcome exceptions, many African countries still give low priority to the collection of such data.
There have even been allegations that in some cases where this data has been collected, government agencies have been reluctant to share it openly with scientists because of its potential commercial value.
Yet without such data the accuracy of local climate forecasts will inevitably be undermined, as will the effectiveness of subsequent adaptation strategies.
Again, if the international community is genuinely committed to enabling Africa to develop a long-term, sustainable response to climate change, enhancing the ability of the continent's researchers to collect and share relevant data should be a high priority.
Urgent challenge
Advocates of adaptation strategies are entirely correct to emphasise that strategies need to be built from the bottom upwards. New farming or public health practices will not be adopted unless communities accept and understand that it is in their own interest to do so — just as African countries cannot be expected to adopt strategies to reduce their carbon emissions unless they are convinced that the strategies will not detract from their economic growth.
But that is no reason for failing to take a more scientific approach to adaptation. It is misleading to claim, as a group of major Northern environmental organisations did in a report last year, that building on the existing ability of communities to cope with climate change is "a greater and more urgent challenge" than improved weather forecasting.
Both are needed. Similarly, there is some truth in the allegation of environmentalists that certain countries, notably the United States and Australia, have been promoting technological responses to climate change as an alternative to adopting unpopular political measures, such as imposing carbon emission caps on their industries.
Nevertheless, science-based technologies also have an important role to play in effective adaptation strategies. The challenge is simultaneously to develop these techniques and to implement ways of ensuring their wide dissemination and adoption, to blend the technical and the political, not advocate one at the expense of the other.

David Dickson
Director, SciDev.Net

MORE...
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SPOTLIGHT on Climate Change in sub-Saharan Africa

HIV 'launches two-pronged attack on brain'

2007-08-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

Cloudy Areas Around Brain's Center Represent Cells Lost to NeuroAIDS. University of Rochester Medical Center.

HIV 'launches two-pronged attack on brain'
The brain cannot regenerate in HIV-associated dementia
Jia Hepeng and Li Jiao
17 August 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

[BEIJING] Scientists have identified a way that HIV causes dementia, which could help in developing drugs to treat the disorder.
The study was published this week (16 August) in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
HIV infection can cause difficulties in memory and learning in patients with advanced disease, a condition known as HIV-associated dementia.
Anti-retroviral drugs are not entirely effective in protecting patients from developing the condition because the drugs cannot successfully reach the brain.
"The brain therefore is a protected reservoir of HIV," says Stuart Lipton from the California-based Burnham Institute for Medical Research.
Lipton and colleagues found that besides killing neural cells, the HIV virus also inhibits the ability of brain cells to regenerate.
Using mice, Lipton and colleagues found that a viral protein called HIV/gp120 prevents 'unprogrammed' brain cells — stem cells — called adult neural progenitor cells, from developing into new brain cells, thus preventing the brain from repairing itself.
The viral protein does this by activating a brain enzyme — p38 MAPK — that blocks brain stem cells from dividing.
Lipton said that a drug that blocks this enzyme could have potential for treating and preventing HIV-associated dementia.
Lu Hongzhou, deputy director of Shanghai Public Health Centre, says now that the Chinese government offers free anti-retroviral treatment to AIDS patients, they live longer and the problem of HIV-associated dementia has become more apparent.
"Previously, many doctors were not aware of the HIV-associated dementia disease, and now, with these kind of studies, doctors can better understand the mechanism of the disease," Lu told SciDev.Net.
Liu Zhe, director of the Nerve Signal Imitation Laboratory at the Beijing Institute for Psychological Medicine, adds that the study might be used by doctors to distinguish different kinds of dementia and to understand the degree of neural diseases.
"But there is a long way before it could be put into clinical practice," Liu told SciDev.Net.

Link to full paper in Cell Stem Cell
Reference: Cell Stem Cell 1, 230 (2007)

Related SciDev.Net articles:
HIV dementia a challenge to developing countries

South African scientists welcome Malawi on board

2007-08-20T13:22:00.000-07:00

Malawian farmers will benefit from South African science. Photo Credit: USAid

South African scientists welcome Malawi on board

Charles Mkoka
17 August 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

[LILONGWE] Researchers from South Africa and Malawi met in Lilongwe today (17 August) to kick-start a new cooperation agreement on science and technology.
The one-day meeting follows the signing of an agreement last Monday (13 August) by Malawi's deputy minister of higher education, science and technology, Richard Msowoya, and the South African minister of science and technology, Mosibudi Mangena.
Collaboration between the two countries should help Malawi to "understand and adapt to global technologies", thereby accelerating economic growth and reducing poverty, said Msowoya in a statement released by the government.
"We have opened a new chapter for the two countries," Septitsitane Mokoeuwe, deputy director of African cooperation at South Africa's department of science and technology, told SciDev.Net. "Researchers will develop a plan of action and highlight the possible areas of cooperation in human sciences, crop science and biosciences.''
In the week leading up to the meeting, a delegation of researchers and representatives from South Africa's National Advisory Council on Innovation toured research institutes in Malawi. These included institutions for aquaculture, agricultural and crop-science, research, and the Agricultural Research and Extension Trust, which introduces new technologies to farmers. The aim was to pave the way for future collaboration between South African and Malawian scientists.
Alic Kafasalire, a scientist at the University of Malawi, said that the agreement was timely because South Africa is a developed nation that can share its scientific experience with Malawi.
It should help technological development in Malawi, he said, for example by staff exchange between South African universities and the planned Lilongwe University of Science and Technology, where expertise and syllabuses could be shared.
The initiative will also mean that Malawi can ask South Africa's advice on how best to disseminate agricultural information to rural communities to benefit crop cultivation and animal husbandry.

Related SciDev.Net articles:
Pan-African parliament scheduled to talk science
Africa-wide facility to fund science takes shape

Africa must commit to biosecurity measures

2007-08-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

Africa needs its own agenda on biosecurity issues

Africa must commit to biosecurity measures

Chandré Gould, Thomas Egwang and Brian Rappert
16 August 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

The threat of biotechnology misuse has implications for the development of science and technology in Africa, argue Chandre Gould and colleagues.
Recent African Union summits have identified science and technology as key future drivers for development, and increased investment is being welcomed by African leaders — particularly in areas such as biotechnology.
But the growth of the biotechnology industry internationally has raised some important concerns about biological safety issues (see Agri-biotech in Africa: Safety first?).
'Biosecurity' policies are therefore being actively pursued in some countries to mitigate the deliberate destructive use of biological agents, knowledge and techniques.
Today, this sense of biosecurity extends beyond conditions in research laboratories to cover the potential dual use — for good and bad — of applications arising from the new knowledge and techniques emerging from research.
International supervision
It is crucial to assess the security implications of scientific innovations, but this is not a straightforward matter.
One reason is that Western governments, most notably the United States, are deeply concerned with the bioterror threat. Although there have been only a handful of bioterrorism attacks in recent decades, the capability to inflict them is proliferating.
This focus on bioterrorism in international discussions has arguably come at the expense of tightening constraints on the development of state programmes. There is no guarantee that states, particularly those that are isolated and existentially threatened, may not see biological weapons as a valuable item in their arsenal.
The biological defence programme in the United States has shown that the risk of accidental escape of potential biological warfare agents goes up as the number of facilities working with them increases. Indeed, it could be argued that state biodefence programmes should be subject to a great deal more international supervision.
Biosecurity has gained importance in many countries in Europe, North America and elsewhere, and networks, funders and suppliers from these areas are fundamental to the growth of the African biotechnology industry. African research partners and recipients of funds will therefore have to demonstrate their commitment to biosecurity by implementing measures for the secure handling of biological agents.
Public dialogue
But policy responses adopted elsewhere are likely to be inappropriate for many situations in Africa, not least because of the difference in the quality of public infrastructure.
In this mix of concerns, one thing is clear: engagement by scientific communities is a prerequisite for a productive response. For Africans to engage effectively in biosecurity debates at a national and international level, it is important to raise awareness about dual use research and biosecurity among African scientists, ethicists, social scientists, policy makers, the media and the public.
That way, Africa can develop its own biosecurity agenda and policies aligned with its own concerns. The cue should not come from Europe or the United States.
With this in mind, we ran seven biosecurity workshops in Kenya and Uganda in May–June 2007. The two countries are emerging biotech nations that are not yet properly engaged in international biosecurity policy deliberations.
The aim was to inform African stakeholders about the general biosecurity debate and the communication, supervision, review and funding of dual use research findings.
Many participants agreed that scientists should initiate a public dialogue about these issues and that such research should be supervised.
Stronger African voice
Although some African states, most notably South Africa, have been active contributors to the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention (BTWC), a stronger and more coherent African position on regulatory issues is needed.
Not only would this provide an African voice on biosecurity issues, but it would strengthen the negotiating position of those states wishing to place sharing of development, knowledge and technology firmly on the agenda.
A critical mass of African stakeholders who can effectively represent the continent at the BTWC and other international forums must be developed, together with policy responses.
Whether or not African states are threatened by bioterrorism (or state biological weapons programmes) is immaterial: cutting out biotech misuse is in the interests of all Africans and is a responsibility of the African scientific community.
The development of biosecurity mechanisms that neither compromise research nor pose an unbearable financial burden on those responsible for their implementation is crucial.
This strategy would reduce the risk of misuse and mitigate the damage to African scientific development that could result if products, technology or knowledge were to be used for destructive purposes.
Chandré Gould is a research associate at the South Africa-based Centre for Conflict Resolution; Thomas Egwang is chief executive officer of Uganda Media for Health and director general of Med Biotech Laboratories, in Kampala, Uganda; and Brian Rappert is associate professor of science, technology and public affairs at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom.
The authors would like to make clear that the workshops mentioned in the article were funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Infighting plagues East African cable project

2007-08-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

Kenya and South Africa face off: David Were (centre), Kenya’s deputy minister of communication, and Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri (right) at a press conference last year. M&G

Infighting plagues East African cable project
East African business will benefit from better cable access
16 August 2007
Source: Mail and Guardian Online

Political squabbles are dogging Africa's plans for undersea communications cables, reports Lloyd Gedye in the Mail and Guardian Online.
The continent needs new undersea data cables to improve bandwidth for broadband communications.
But the planned East African Submarine System (EASSy) could be split into four competing projects due to political infighting.
The South African and Kenyan governments have argued over whether EASSy should be controlled by the private sector, or an open access system — approved by the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) —where investors and non-investors are given international bandwidth access at the same price.
The result is that both have announced projects outside of the EASSy initiative: Kenya's US$110 million East African Marine System and the South Africa-led NEPAD Broadband Infrastructure Network.
EASSy could still be the first system operational. But while the two governments jostle to gain the support of African governments, another private initiative, Seacom, could beat them to it.
Meanwhile, the existing West African SAT-3 cable is rapidly running out of capacity and accused of charging exorbitant costs for bandwidth, so any delays to EASSy could be disastrous for African businesses.

No Eassy walk to cable freedom
Lloyd Gedye
23 July 2007 11:59
Africa’s east coast could go from having no undersea broadband cables to four. The planned East Africa Submarine System (Eassy), touted as the solution for the bandwidth-starved continent, has been plagued by political squabbles that have resulted in it splintering into four mooted cable projects.
The conflict between the South African and Kenyan governments has led to both announcing new cable projects outside the Eassy initiative, followed by the announcement of a private sector cable, Seacom, being rolled out by Sithe.
It is not surprising that African governments are trying to control the Eassy cable project, with the SAT-3 cable that runs down the west coast of Africa causing such a headache.
The consortium that controls the SAT-3 cable has exploited the lack of competition by charging exorbitant costs for international bandwidth, which has had a massive impact on the cost of doing business in Africa.
Complicating matters are the shortages of fibre optic cable and the ships that lay the cable, due to the large number of new fibre projects being laid in the Pacific.
The cable saga has festered for a year now and has been characterised by accusations and counter-accusations. With so many interested parties jockeying for position, the Mail & Guardian had to speak to a wide range of role-players who did not want to be named.
The Kenyan government was the first to throw a spanner in the Eassy works when it announced it was planning its own cable, The East African Marine System (Teams). The $110-million Teams cable is planned to run north from Kenya to Port Sudan. Kenya’s neighboring countries Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania have joined the Teams initiative.
The sticking point for the Kenyans is the South African government’s insistence that the Eassy project be driven through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) and that it adhere to the principles laid out in the Nepad broadband infrastructure protocol.
It appears Nepad is concerned about the structure of an open access model, insisting that investors and non-investors be given access to international bandwidth under the same conditions and at the same price.
Kenya argues that the administrative and financing structures of Eassy give too much control to governments, while it prefers a private-sector controlled model.
One analyst, who refused to be named, says the key problem is Dr Henry Chasia of Nepad’s e-Africa Commission, who crafted the Nepad protocol and is being obstinate about amending it.
“Several countries signed on the understanding that the protocol would subsequently be amended and are now heartily pissed off,” the analyst says. “One country [Zambia] signed, but the president subsequently sacked the minister. The Kenyans also see the way the protocol functions as giving the South Africans the whip hand over the whole thing.”
The analyst says that the latter is exacerbated by the fact that Chasia is married to the director general of the South African department of communications, Lyndall Shope-Mafole, and this means that he is tied so closely to the South Africans that there is little difference between the two of them.
Shope-Mafole says the fact that she might have a relationship with Chasia is not important. “I don’t see any conflict.”
The analyst says: “The e-Africa Commission is talking as if it has a separate project to Eassy. This is bollocks as it has not got the money, the expertise to commission the project or the will to complete it ahead of Seacom, Teams and Eassy.”
“Therefore, its ‘project’ will die on the vine and subsequently become one of those embarrassing things that no one can talk about,” the analyst says.
Erik Osiakwan, from the association of African internet service providers, says there is a perception that the Nepad cable is being driven by the South African government against the interests of Telkom South Africa, which is a major part of the Eassy cable.
Shope-Mafole says the Nepad cable is a partnership and is not being driven by the South Africans alone. “If you want to partner with us, you can, but don’t tell us how to do things,” Shope-Mafole says. “We are implementing Nepad’s protocol.”
Sources close to the Eassy secretariat have insinuated that the South African government is putting pressure on the South African telcos investing in the cable to withhold their funds. Shope-Mafole denies this claim.
South Africa is trying to get the majority of the original 23 countries that agreed to the Eassy project to sign the Nepad protocol. So far, only 12 have signed, with most still to get the protocol ratified by their parliaments.
Although the Eassy cable is set to go ahead, resistance to South Africa’s insistence that the process be driven through Nepad has led to an announcement of another cable project, The Nepad Broadband Infrastructure Network (NBIN).
This R300-million cable is said to be tied down by multi-government bureaucracy and, of all the mooted cables, analysts are predicting it will be the last to come online.
Presently, it looks as if the original $235-million Eassy cable could be the first to come online, with expectations that it will be ready for commercial operations in the fourth quarter of 2008.
The Eassy consortium signed a contract with French company Alcatel Lucent Submarine Networks in March 2007 and has concluded interconnection agreements with three cable systems to carry traffic to Africa, Europe and Asia.
Shope-Mafole insists that the contract signed with Alcatel Lucent is outside the policy framework set by the South African government.
“We were not happy with the South African companies that signed,” says Shope-Mafole, who has said openly that the communications department will use the South African government’s board influence at Telkom to stop it from going ahead with the contract.
Vodacom’s chief operating officer, Pieter Uys, told the M&G that the mobile giant has doubts about the business model being touted by the South African government.
Uys says the SAT-3 cable that runs down the west coast of Africa is running out of capacity and the delays to the Eassy cable could prove disastrous. “We desperately need international bandwidth in South Africa,” he says.
The private sector cable Seacom has entered the race. It is being driven by Sithe Global, a power plant constructor and operator, which is 80% owned by Blackstone, the United States private equity group.
Some analysts predict that while the squabbling continues, Seacom could come in the backdoor. Sithe’s Brian Herlihy was unavailable to elaborate on the Seacom cable project due to deadline constraints.
Numerous attempts to contact Chasia for comment were unsuccessful.

Climate change devastating wildlife in East Africa

2007-08-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

Climate change devastating wildlife in East Africa
Climate change is affecting the behaviour of wildlife
Kennedy Abwao
17 August 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) says climate change is to blame for increasing conflicts between humans and wildlife across East Africa, and is heightening the risk that animal diseases will spread.
The Biodiversity Research Unit of the KWS warns in its annual report — released last week (10 August) — that unless urgent strategies are developed to counter the effects of climate change, management of wildlife could suffer irreparably.
Researchers at the unit say climate change is to blame for rivers drying up and species migrating to new habitats, causing changes in ecosystems.
This has led to animals, such as lions, killing domestic animals like sheep and goats in villages near the animal parks. Villagers have also complained of elephants, rhinos and buffalo destroying food crops as they wander away from the parks in search of food and water.
The researchers add that these events are compromising the eradication of rinderpest — a viral infection of cattle, sheep and goats — ahead of a 2010 global elimination target.
Julius Kipngetich, director-general of the KWS, said the organisation is ill-prepared to deal with the impacts of climate change.
"This is an area where we need more scientific help," Kipngetich told SciDev.Net.
The KWS says climate change and ecological disturbances could have caused a recent increase in deaths in wildlife populations from infectious diseases. Birds and mammals have been the worst affected, with climate change blamed for the sudden mass death of flamingos around Lake Nakuru in central Kenya last year.
The KWS initially suspected bird flu, but 493 samples proved negative for H5N1 avian influenza.
According to the report, Kenya's 66 animal parks are all experiencing changes in animal disease patterns. The authors call for better disease surveillance strategies to determine the ecological factors fuelling the disease spread, as well as implementing a mass animal vaccination programme.
KWS says it is aware of the climate change risks and has spent US$42,000 in implementing decisions made at UN conferences on climate change to avert its effects and to stem biodiversity loss.

Hordes of Zebras, Elephants Moved to Restock Kenya Park

2007-08-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

A zebra charges Kenya Wildlife Service rangers at a ranch west of Nairobi on July 30, 2007. The rangers are relocating some 2,000 animals, including hundreds of zebra and impala, from this ranch and two other locations to Meru National Park, which has been devastated by poaching. Photograph by Boniface Mwangi/Reuters

Hordes of Zebras, Elephants Moved to Restock Kenya Park
Alexis Okeowo in Nairobi, Kenya
for National Geographic News
August 17, 2007

Kenya has begun a great migration of 2,000 animals to a popular game park devastated by crime and poaching, wildlife officials have announced.
In the 1970s Meru National Park, located in central Kenya, was "overrun" by bandits and poachers, leading to a drastic loss of wildlife, the officials said.
Now the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) is wrapping up a campaign begun in 2001 to repopulate the wildlife of the 1,930-square-mile (5,000-square-kilometer) park.
"We want to make Meru National Park an exclusive park for high-end tourists where they can experience total wilderness," KWS spokesperson Paul Udoto said.
A variety of animals, including zebras and elephants, are being taken from better stocked reserves, where they will be rounded up and loaded into crates.
"The animals are being moved from two ranches and a national park because we realized those areas are overstocked," Utodo said.
The six-week-long relocation is the final push in the effort to restore Meru, which may be best known as the setting for the book and 1966 film Born Free, about an orphaned lion cub.
"We want to reclaim that historical significance," Udoto said.
Great Migration
The relocation of hundreds of impalas and zebras has been underway for the past two weeks, Udoto said.
Elephants will be transported next month, he added.
The animals are being taken in several shifts for the 250-mile (400-kilometer) drive.
"We move them by road; we put them in special transportation crates," said Francis Gakuya, director of veterinary services for KWS and head of logistics for the relocation.
Each shies being moved. One crate can hold 10 zebras or 25 impalas, for example.
So far, 517 animals have been moved without incident, Gakuya said.
"We haven't come across any problems yet," he said, adding that his team takes "a lot of precautions."
At least one veterinarian rides on each truck in case the animals become restless. Gakuya said that when more than one male of a species is in a crate, particularly if they are impalas or zebras, they tend to fight, in which case, tranquilizers are used.
"You just calm them and move them," he said.
Conservation Efforts
Apart from the influx of new wildlife, Meru National Park has undergone extensive renovations, such as new roads and airstrips and a bolstered ranger force.
But the animals are necessary to restore the park's ecosystem, said Josphat Ngonyo, director of the Kenya-based nonprofit African Network for Animal Welfare.
"Moving animals from where they're many to where they're less is a solution we'd propose," he said.
The reintroduction may also help offset the ecological imbalance of the park, which currently has a disproportionate number of carnivores compared to herbivores.
The relocation is not the first in Kenya. Species such as elephants have been moved long distances for conservation purposes in the past, Ngonyo pointed out.
He acknowledged that such moves usually come with challenges. Some animals may die in the process, for example, and local communities that live near the affected areas may not be involved in decision-making.
But in order to finally restore Meru, Ngonyo said, the drive is a "wise use of resources."
Once all animals have been moved, KWS officials said that it will work to ensure that Meru National Park will not be harmed by bandits and poachers again.
"If any poachers come in, we will be ready for them. That is why we are confident of moving these animals in a single go," Udoto said.

Congo Gorilla Killings Fueled by Illegal Charcoal Trade

2007-08-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

Rangers at Congo's Virunga National Park destroy a charcoal oven operating illegally in the park. Rangers and conservationists say the burgeoning illicit charcoal trade inside the park has fueled several recent attacks on Virunga's rare mountain gorillas and the rangers who protect them. Photograph courtesy Paulin Ngobobo, WildlifeDirect

Congo Gorilla Killings Fueled by Illegal Charcoal Trade
Stefan Lovgren in Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo
for National Geographic News
August 16, 2007

In a steady trickle teenage boys push their way down a dusty road to the bustling city of Goma, their bicycles buckling under the weight of 100-pound (45-kilogram) sacks of charcoal, or makala as it's known here.
The boys are part of an illegal trade that may pose the biggest threat to one of the most pristine places on the planet, the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Virunga National Park.
The park's dense forest is rapidly being depleted of its trees to satisfy the almost insatiable demand here for charcoal, which is used for cooking and heating by the millions of people living in this troubled region.
The lucrative charcoal trade is not only wreaking havoc on the park but also on its most famous inhabitants, the rare mountain gorillas.
Conservationists believe last month's execution of four mountain gorillas inside the park was carried out by people associated with the charcoal trade who want the park unprotected.
"The gorillas have become a hindrance for the charcoal trade," said Emmanuel de Merode, director of WildlifeDirect, a conservation group based in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya that supports the park rangers working in Virunga.
"There's a very strong incentive for these people to kill the gorillas."
(Editor's note, August 17: Since this story was filed on August 16, rangers announced on their blog that one more gorilla has been found dead as a result of the July attack; her infant is still missing and presumed dead, bringing the total to six.)
Rwanda Connection
Situated on the country's eastern border, with Rwanda and Uganda to the east, Virunga is Africa's oldest national park and boasts the highest biodiversity on the continent (see Africa map).
More than half of the world's 700 remaining mountain gorillas are found in Virunga.
But the park has been torn apart over the years by a procession of armed groups—from ragtag rebel militias to foreign armies—fighting over its natural riches.
"The last 15 years of Congo's history have been defined by the illegal exploitation of natural resources," de Merode said. "The charcoal trade definitely fits into that reality."
He estimates that the charcoal trade in Goma, a city of 500,000 people, alone is worth 30 million U.S. dollars (see Congo map).
"When you talk about charcoal, people think of this mom-and-pop, small-scale business, but it's not that at all," de Merode said. "It's a massive industry."
Much of the trade is connected to neighboring Rwanda, which has maintained a strong influence in eastern Congo ever since its troops drove out militiamen hiding here after the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
In contrast, Congo's central government, based in Kinshasa more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) west, has little political say over what goes on in the eastern part of its territory.
In 2004 Rwanda passed a law banning the production of charcoal within its borders.
That has put enormous pressure on the country to find charcoal for its nine million people somewhere else, de Merode said.
"Rwanda is unsustainable in terms of natural resources within its own borders, so it has to look to the outside," he said.
"What's happened is that there's only one real source of charcoal for Rwanda, and that's Virunga National Park."
Corruption Charges
The charcoal is mostly made inside the forest by small-scale producers, Virunga rangers say.
After a tree is cut down, the large branches are used to build a makeshift dome, which is covered with mud and set on fire. The mud makes the wood burn more strongly and form charcoal, a process that takes a couple of days.
The producers are organized into local associations, which de Merode and other sources working in the area claim are controlled by Congolese military officials. The officials exact a tax on both the charcoal's production and its transportation, the sources claim.
A strong military presence is clearly visible in and around Virunga National Park, with soldiers manning frequent roadblocks and mingling with villagers.
The soldiers have reportedly not received paychecks in years, and rangers say some may turn to the charcoal trade and other illegal activities to support themselves and their families.
"The military is put in the park because of the armed bandits that operate there, but they're not paid, so they start making charcoal instead," said Virunga ranger Paulin Ngobobo, in his office in Goma.
Ngobobo has been in charge of Virunga's southern sector, where the gorillas live, for just over a year.
"We'll get a report from a military commander saying we cannot patrol the park for a certain time because of military maneuvers, but what they're actually doing is cutting down trees and poaching," he said.
A military official in Kinshasa, who did not want to be identified, admitted that military personnel in eastern Congo operate in large part independently from the government.
Other political observers say they believe the involvement in the charcoal trade by military officials stationed in eastern Congo is probably done without Kinshasa's approval.
Ranger Beaten by Poachers
Confronting the people in the trade is a dangerous business, as Ngobobo has repeatedly learned.
Earlier this year, while lecturing villagers about the threats of the charcoal industry to Virunga, Ngobobo was arrested by military officials, stripped of his shirt, and flogged in front of the crowd, he said.
In addition to such alleged reprisals, Ngobobo also faces challenges in convincing local villagers to shun the charcoal business.
"Everyone is making money off this trade," he said.
"The population is very poor. It's impossible for them to see the value of the park. They see it as another obstacle."
Ngobobo also has to battle what he says are some corrupt officials within the park service, who are allegedly involved in the charcoal trade as well.
It's a problem Ngobobo refers to as "internal poaching."
"Most of the park officials risk their lives to protect the park, [but] there are some people in the park service who are in collaboration with the military and the poachers," he said.
Shortly after Ngobobo posted an article on WildlifeDirect's blog on the illegal charcoal trade, he was arrested and placed in the custody of a military tribunal in Goma for two days on charges of negligence.
According to court documents, Ngobobo has been accused of neglect in the death of a Chinese tourist who fell into a nearby volcano. He is also charged with furnishing false information about the charcoal trade and obstructing the investigation into the gorilla killings.
Ngobobo says the charges are politically motivated, brought against him by officials involved in the charcoal trade who want to see him removed.
In a telephone interview with National Geographic News, Ngobobo's former supervisor, Honore Mashagiru, dismissed those allegations.
"People say things, but where's the proof?" he said. "It's not true. It's not true."
Mashagiru said Ngobobo has become the target of the charcoal traders because "he has not communicated well with the community about the issue."
Ngobobo is still facing court charges and must report daily to the tribunal.
Meanwhile, Norbert Mushenzi, a park service director who has been in charge of the northern sector of Virunga, has been assigned to Ngobobo's post to protect the gorillas.
In recent days, Mushenzi, who also has a history of speaking out against the charcoal traders, and his rangers have detained about 50 women whom they caught making charcoal in the park.
"Act of Sabotage"
Both Ngobobo and de Merode are convinced that the execution of the gorillas last month is linked to the charcoal trade.
"None of the gorillas was cut up, and there was a baby still on one of the mothers," de Merode said.
"In the history of gorilla conservation, there's never been incidents like these where a group is attacked not for meat or baby gorillas."
(Read related story: "Mountain Gorillas Eaten by Congolese Rebels" [January 19, 2007].)
A baby gorilla can fetch thousands of dollars on the illegal wildlife market, he added.
The mass execution was also identical to the killing of a female gorilla 8.7 miles (14 kilometers) away on June 8.
"In terms of the whole build-up over the last year, it's a very strong case for it being planned and being vindictive," de Merode said.
"We believe this was an act of sabotage by the people in the charcoal business who want to see the gorillas dead."
De Merode says the Rwandan authorities should seek to clamp down on the charcoal trade, which he believes would lead to greater protection for the mountain gorillas.
"I'm not saying the Rwandans are responsible for killing the gorillas, but they can help resolve the problem," he said.

Hyenas Encourage Sex With Strangers to Prevent Incest

2007-08-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

Hyenas Encourage Sex With Strangers to Prevent Incest
James Owen
for National Geographic News
August 15, 2007

Female hyenas avoid incestuous mating by encouraging male relatives to look elsewhere for sex, new research shows.
The females use their dominant status in hyena society to spurn males in their clan, thereby avoiding the risk of inbreeding, the study suggests.
This tactic has never been demonstrated before in mammals but may be widespread among other species that live in groups, the scientists added.
The ten-year study was based on eight groups, or clans, of spotted hyenas living in Ngorongoro Crater, the world's largest intact volcanic caldera, in Tanzania.
A team led by Oliver Höner at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany, investigated the dispersal of male hyenas using DNA samples and field observations of more than 400 individuals.
The findings, reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature, indicate that young female hyenas prefer mating with males that immigrate from other clans, or with males that were born after they were.
Older females were also found to mate with immigrants, favoring those that had courted them for several years.
As a result of these preferences, 89 percent of young males left their clans to take their sexual exploits elsewhere, the researchers found.
Höner said this pattern is the result of females following an instinctual mating rule that prevents incestuous encounters.
"This rule requires males to have entered the group after the females were born," he said.
"The older females also have an additional rule: They don't particularly like new, young males that they don't know well," Höner added.
Pseudo Penis
Inbred offspring are vulnerable to disease and other handicaps and are less likely to survive than normal young.
It's especially in the female's interests to avoid inbreeding, the team argues, because female spotted hyenas give their offspring exceptionally lengthy care, lasting 15 to 18 months.
Males, on the other hand, are largely absent fathers.
"Females invest so much more in their young," Höner said. "If males breed with a close relative, they don't lose very much because they have other females they can produce offspring with."
However, male hyenas have no choice but to go along with the mating preferences of the socially dominant females, whose bizarre genitalia make forced sex almost impossible.
"Females have a pseudo penis—an enlarged clitoris—which points forward," Höner explained.
"This makes it difficult for the male to mate. He has to balance precariously and needs the full cooperation of the female."
Female Power
Despite this peculiarity, female mate choice may help explain male dispersal patterns seen in many other mammals, the study team said.
"In the vast majority of mammals the typical pattern is that males disperse and females stay, or that males disperse over a greater distance than females," Höner said.
"We think that in many group-living mammals where females have a choice of different mates, it's very difficult for females to recognize their fathers," he added.
"The female mate choice we found here is likely to play an important role in other species," Höner said, primates included.
Laurent Lehmann of Stanford University commented that the female mate choice rule proposed by the study team "is very simple and very plausible, and so might apply to other social or nonsocial mammals as well."
But, he added, the extent to which the rule explains "the level of male sex-biased dispersal in natural populations [of other species] is not yet clear."
Spotted hyena expert Kay Holekamp from Michigan State University said the new research probably could only have been conducted in Ngorongoro Crater, "where so many clans live in close proximity to one another and where visibility for observers is excellent."
Holekamp added that the study "supports a hypothesis many of us have favored for many years—that female mate choice is all-important in this species."

Mummy Birds Recovered From Egypt Factory

2007-08-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

Mummified birds sit on display at an Egyptian textile factory. The mummies, eight in all, were recently moved to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Photograph courtesy Egypt Supreme Council of Antiquities

Mummy Birds Recovered From Egypt Factory
Dan Morrison in Cairo, Egypt
for National Geographic News
August 9, 2007

Egyptian antiquities authorities have obtained eight mummified birds that had been displayed in a textile factory for nearly a century.
Three ibises and five falcons had apparently been kept in glass display cases since 1927 at the sprawling Mahalla factory, located about 75 miles (120 kilometers) north of Cairo, said Zahi Hawass, director general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
No one is sure how the mummies got there or why they came to be on display at the site's administrative offices.
Initially, however, the factory bosses were reluctant to let go of their ancient prizes.
"It was difficult at first to retrieve them," Hawass said.
But after three months of negotiations, the company agreed to release the beasts in exchange for replicas.
The mummies are now in the custody of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and may be displayed later in the museum's animal mummy room.
"The condition of the mummies is good," Hawass said. "No conservation has been done, but they are not in a bad condition."
(Hawass is also an Explorer-in-Residence with the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)
Animal Gods
The ancient Egyptians mummified many thousands of animals, often because of their symbolic association with deities. (Related: "Egyptian Animals Were Mummified Same Way as Humans" [September 15, 2004].)
The three ibises represent Thoth, or Djehuti, the ancient Egyptian god of learning.
The falcons symbolize Horus, one of the oldest of the ancient Egyptian deities, a bird-headed god of the sky and the sun.
"It is rather charming that they acted as talismans for these factories for so long," said Salima Ikram, author of Divine Creatures, a 2005 book about animal mummies in ancient Egypt.
"Nonetheless, it's great that they will be coming back to the Egyptian Museum, where they can be studied, conserved, and reunited with their brethren," she added.
"Regardless of where they came from, it is wonderful to find another stash of ancient Egyptian animal mummies."
Hawass said the mummies date from sometime during the late ancient Egyptian period—between the sixth and third centuries B.C.
The mummies were all wrapped in well-spun ancient linen.
Not So Unusual
It's not unusual for people to stumble upon antiquities in Egypt.
The 2,500 year-old catacombs of Alexandria, for instance, were discovered in 1900 when a farmer's donkey disappeared into a sinkhole.
Hawass said he learned of the bird mummies at Mahalla—now Egypt's biggest state-owned textile company—only this year.
The mummies' origins remain a mystery, and a spokesperson for the Egyptian ministry of investment, which owns the factory, didn't return calls and emails seeking comment about how the birds arrived at the factory.
Mahalla was recently in the news for an entirely different reason—the site's 20,000 restive workers. Last December they went on giant wildcat strikes, part of a wave of labor unrest that continued for several months across Egypt.
It remains unclear what other ancient antiquities might be squirreled away among Egypt's thousands of state-owned businesses.
"There are new discoveries every day in Egypt," Hawass said.

First Europeans Came From Asia, Not Africa, Tooth Study Suggests

2007-08-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

Skull fragments from modern humans and the human ancestor Australopithecus include teeth—fossil features that can offer valuable clues to a species' genetic lineage. New analysis of more than 5,000 fossil teeth suggests that early humans from Asia, not Africa, were the first to colonize Europe. Photograph by Kenneth Garrett/NGS

First Europeans Came From Asia, Not Africa, Tooth Study Suggests
Kate Ravilious
for National Geographic News
August 6, 2007

Europe's first early human colonizers were from Asia, not Africa, a new analysis of more than 5,000 ancient teeth suggests.
Researchers had traditionally assumed that Europe was settled in waves starting around two million years ago, as our ancient ancestors—collectively known as hominids—came over from Africa.
But the shapes of teeth from a number of hominid species suggest that arrivals from Asia played a greater role in colonizing Europe than hominids direct from Africa.
These Asian hominids may have originally come from Africa, the scientists note, but had evolved independently for some time.
(Related: "Did Early Humans First Arise in Asia, Not Africa?" [December 27, 2005].)
"Asia was also an important center for hominid speciation," said Maria Martinón-Torres, a scientist at the National Research Center on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain, who led the study.
The finding suggests that the hominid family tree could be much more complex than previously thought (explore an interactive atlas of human migration).
Genetic Safe
Species from the genus Australopithecus and the genus Homo arrived in Europe between two million and 300,000 years ago.
Until recently, a lack of fossils from this time period had made it difficult to piece together hominid evolution and migration patterns.
But using the latest fossil findings, Martinón-Torres and colleagues were able to examine more than 5,000 teeth from two-million-year-old Australopithecus and Homo skeletons from Africa, Asia, and Europe.
The shape of the teeth offered clues about each species' genetic lineages.
"Teeth are like the safe-box of the genetic code," Martinón-Torres said.
That's because—compared to bones—teeth change shape very little once they are formed, and their shape is strongly influenced by genetics.
The researchers classified each of the teeth using more than 50 indicators, such as fissure patterns, overall size, and length-to-width ratio.
"We looked at the entire landscape of the teeth—the mountains, valleys, ridges—everything," Martinón-Torres said.
What they found is that European teeth were more similar to Asian teeth than they were to African teeth.
However, the results don't rule out African influence on European genes.
"This finding does not necessarily imply that there was not genetic flow between continents," Martinón-Torres and colleagues write in their paper, "but emphasizes that this interchange could have been both ways."
The work will be published in tomorrow's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Fluid Migrations
Rather than a one-way stream of people coming from Africa, Martinón-Torres and colleagues think there must have been a more fluid pattern of migrations.
"Just because people had come out of Africa didn't mean that they couldn't turn around and go back again," she said.
The researcher also believes that climate, food, and geography were major influences on hominid migration patterns.
The Sahara, for example, presented a big barrier for movement out of Africa and directly into Europe (see photos and read a related feature about athletes who ran across the Sahara earlier this year).
Rather than struggling across the Sahara, it appears that human ancestors spread in many directions before arriving in Europe.
Erika Hagelberg, a geneticist from the University of Oslo in Norway, is impressed with the study, but cautious about how it should be interpreted.
"The study shows that the genetic impact of Asia on Europe is stronger than that of Africa. But the teeth can't tell us the direction or the time when people migrated," she said.
Nonetheless, the new study does complement direct gene studies and supports the idea that hominids evolved independently in many different parts of the world.
"The fossil teeth are a way to study the traits of past peoples," Hagelberg said, "and help balance the work being done on the genes of people alive today."

Greatest Mysteries: How Many Species Exist on Earth?

2007-08-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

Greatest Mysteries: How Many Species Exist on Earth?

By Andrea Thompson, Staff Writer
posted: 03 August 2007 09:18 am ET

The prospect of discovering little green men on other planets has long captured our imaginations, but many scientists are just as excited about finding new life forms in our own backyard.
Though humans have shared the planet with millions of other creatures for thousands of years, we know surprisingly little about our neighbors—we don’t even know exactly how many flora and fauna call Earth home.
The National Science Foundation’s “Tree of Life” project estimates that there could be anywhere from 5 million to 100 million species on the planet, but science has only identified about 2 million.
“We’ve only touched the surface of understanding animal life,” said entomologist Brian Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences. “We’ve discovered just 10 percent of all living things on this planet.”
Environmental index
Taking an exact count of Earth’s creatures may not seem like the most important task, but taxonomy, the science of discovering, describing and categorizing living things, is “the foundation for understanding life on this planet,” Fisher said.
Knowing just who we share the planet with is of particular concern now because global warming, deforestation and other signs of human development are threatening many species, which may be essential to the functioning of ecosystems or may have inherent value in terms of developing medicines or other products.
As Fisher puts it, knowing what kind and how much life is out there could make society more “bio-literate”—we would better understand the impacts that human activities have on other living things.
“We could have kind of a Dow Jones index of the environment,” Fisher said.
No simple answer
Though taxonomists have been cataloguing plants and animals for more than 250 years, they still have no exact answer to the question, “How many species are on Earth?”
“It’s a very simple question, but we have no simple answer,” Fisher said.
One of the reasons we can’t get an accurate count is that the bulk of the things that have yet to be discovered and described are in the realm of the very small: insects, bacteria and other microbes.
“We’ve done a pretty good job of categorizing from the size of a fly up,” but anything below that is far less known, said Joel Cracraft of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Another part of the problem is that the tradition of taxonomy has been confined to the developed world for the bulk of its existence, leaving out the enormous diversity of much of the southern hemisphere, which is less developed on average.
“Species aren’t equally distributed across the Earth; they have these hotspots,” Fisher said.
For example, says AMNH entomologist Randall Schuh, there are about 2,000 known insect species in North America, but only 200 in Australia, while the sampling of Australia’s plant diversity that Schuh has done suggests that there could be as many as 3,000 insect species in Australia.
Complicating the matter are “cryptic” species, which look the same to the human eye, but genetically are quite different, making them that much harder for scientists to classify.
“When we go out in nature and we see individual organisms, they don’t wear little name tags, they don’t tell us what they are,” Schuh said.
New tools
But taxonomists now have new tools such as DNA sequencing that are making distinguishing one species from another, particularly “cryptic species” and smaller creatures, much easier.
“We’re going to find more and more things through these tools, there’s no doubt about it,” Schuh said.
Biologists are also combining their knowledge in projects such as the “Tree of Life,” the bug-focused Planetary Biodiversity Inventory co-headed by Schuh and the Census for Marine Life (a network of researchers in more than 70 nations engaged in a 10-year initiative to assess the diversity and abundance of marine life), all of which are intended to identify, catalogue and connect lineages of Earth’s millions of species.
“I think now we can, if we put some resources behind it, address this exciting fact that 90 percent of life is yet to be discovered on the planet,” Fisher said.

All World's Honeybees Out of Africa

2007-08-03T18:49:00.000-07:00

Honeybee (Apis mellifera). Michael Durham—ENP Images

All World's Honeybees Out of Africa

By Sara Goudarzi, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 25 October 2006 01:02 pm ET

You can be stung in Rome, Moscow or Phoenix. But the honey bee is originally from Africa, scientists reported today.
By looking at variations in genetic markers from 341 bees, researchers found that the common honey bee, Apis mellifera, originated in Africa and migrated to Europe at least twice.
"The migrations resulted in two European populations that are geographically close, but genetically quite different," said lead study author Charles Whitfield from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "In fact, the two European populations are more related to honey bees in Africa than to each other."
The researchers used simple variations in the bee DNA, called single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), to figure out where the bees came from and their relationship to one another.
The researchers compared 1,136 markers, many more than was available for previous studies. The vast number of markers allowed the scientists to decipher the bees genetic information more precisely than ever before.
In a third expansion in the Americas, the European honey bee, introduced around 1622, was replaced by the African killer bee in 1956, the researchers write in the Oct. 27 issue of the journal Science.
"By studying variation in the honey bee genome, we can not only monitor the movement of these bees, we can also identify the genes that cause the variations-and that will allow us to better understand the differences," Whitfield said.

Huge Wildlife Migration Discovered in Africa

2007-08-03T18:45:00.000-07:00

Herd of white-eared kob, Boma National Park. The darker kob are males, the lighter are females. Credit: P. Elkan, Wildlife Conservation Society/National Geographic

Huge Wildlife Migration Discovered in Africa

By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 12 June 2007 12:24 pm ET

NEW YORK -- More than a million animals, including elephants, buffaloes, ostriches, lions, giraffes and a rare type of stork, have been unexpectedly seen living and migrating across Southern Sudan, where no surveys of wildlife had been conducted for the past 25 years due to civil war in the region.
Decades of war wrought significant damage to the region, along with excessive hunting, desertification of the land and periodic droughts, so wildlife numbers were declining in the stricken country. Based on observations in other war-torn nations, conservationists thought the wildlife in Southern Sudan would be wiped out, but it wasn't.
Officials told scientists they had seen herds of animals in the region.
"Although we were telling people that wildlife was still present in southern Sudan, nobody believed us," said Maj. Gen. Alfred Akwoch, undersecretary of the Ministry of the Environment, Wildlife Conservation and Tourism for the government of Southern Sudan.
After Southern Sudan was granted autonomy by the Sudanese government in January 2005, (bringing a tentative end to the two-decade Second Sudanese Civil War), scientists were finally able to conduct aerial surveys of the savannahs for wildlife.
To their surprise, they counted more than 1.2 million white-eared kob, tiang antelope and Mongalla gazelle. They also saw at least 8,000 elephants, it was announced today at a news conference here.
"I haven't seen anything like this, even in the Serengeti [Plain, in Tanzania]," said J. Michael Fay, a conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society.
During the survey, scientists first saw a few kob, then a few hundred, then so many that "it looked like the ground was moving," Fay said.
Fay estimates that this migration is at least the third largest of terrestrial animals in the world, possibly even the largest.
"I think what we found in Sudan is nothing short of extraordinary," Fay said.
The survey, which covered a quarter of the surface area of Southern Sudan, replicated an aerial survey conducted in 1981 and found that in some areas, there were even more of certain types of animals than there were two decades ago--the numbers of Mongalla gazelle, for example, sky-rocketed.
Not all areas of Southern Sudan faired as well though; the Southern National Park saw 90 percent losses in some key species such as buffalo and elephants. Scientists suspect that the Janjaweed militias are coming down from northern Sudan and killing the buffalo for food and other uses.
Zebras were also scarce from what the scientists saw, though they plan to go back and conduct further surveys which should show that this survey actually underestimated many animal populations.
Because of the peace accord, Southern Sudan is a geographically and politically distinct region from northern Sudan, where the tumultuous Darfur region is located.

Faraway Volcanoes Shrunk the Mighty Nile

2007-08-03T18:39:00.000-07:00

This image of the northern portion of the Nile River was captured by the Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR) on January 30, 2001. The Nile is the longest river in the world, extending for about 4163 miles (6700 kilometers) from its headwaters in the highlands of eastern Africa. Credit: NASA/GSFC/JPL

Faraway Volcanoes Shrunk the Mighty Nile

By Sara Goudarzi, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 21 November 2006 01:44 pm ET

Volcanic eruptions on Iceland generated a cascade of events that led to record low levels of water in the Nile River in Africa and brought famine to the region more than two centuries ago, a new study concludes.
The findings will inform climate forecasting related to future volcanic activity.
From June 1783 through February 1784, a series of 10 eruptions from the Laki Craters on this European island in the North Atlantic changed atmospheric conditions in most of the Northern Hemisphere.
Unusual temperature and precipitation patterns peaked in the summer of 1783, causing below normal rainfall in most of the Nile drainage basin and therefore record low levels in the mighty river for up to one year following the eruptions.
When volcanic eruptions occur, large amounts of sulfur dioxide are released into the atmosphere. When this gas combines with water vapor, aerosol particles form. These particles reflect sunlight back to space and therefore cool average temperatures on Earth.
Researchers used computer models to simulate how Iceland's Laki eruptions affected temperature and rainfall levels over the stretch of land from the Atlantic ocean to the "horn of Africa," known as the Sahel.
Simulations showed that the aerosols formed by the eruptions cooled average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere by up to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Tree ring data in Alaska and Siberia also showed reduced growth during the same summer, signifying cooler than normal weather.
The abnormally cool temperatures reduced the temperature difference between the land masses of Africa and Eurasia and their respective water masses, the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Typically, a sharp contrast in temperature between land and sea drives roaring monsoon winds. Monsoons are seasonal shifts in wind direction that signify the beginning of the rainy season.
The lack of monsoons led to a reduction in cloud cover over the Sahel of Africa, southern Arabian Peninsula and India that summer. This caused temperatures to increase by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit and induced drought in the region. The resulting food shortage reduced the population of the Nile Valley by a sixth.
"Some of the driest weather occurred over the Nile and Niger River watersheds," said lead author Luke Oman, a researcher from Rutgers University, NJ. "The relative lack of cloud cover and increased temperature likely amplified evaporation, further lessening water available for run-off."
This dry weather corresponded with record low river water levels from 1783 to 1784.
"These findings may help us improve our predictions of climate response following the next strong high-latitude eruption, specifically concerning changes in temperature and precipitation," Oman said. "Many societies are very dependent on seasonal precipitation for their livelihoods, and these predictions may ultimately allow communities time to plan for consequences, including impacts on regional food and water supplies."
The study was detailed in the Sept. 30 issue of the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters.

Geologists Watch as African Continent is Torn Apart

2007-08-03T18:36:00.000-07:00

Feleke Worku, a surveyor from the Ethiopian Mapping Agency, examines a ground rupture created during the September rifting event. Credit: Tim Wright, University of Leeds.

Geologists Watch as African Continent is Torn Apart

By Sara Goudarzi, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 30 January 2007 01:04 pm ET

Seismic activity is tearing Africa apart and scientists are geared up to watch the ripping landscape in an unprecedented set of observations.

It's liable to be a long, slow investigation.

The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia and have been going through a rifting process-at a speed of less than 1 inch per year-for the past 30 million years. This rifting formed the 186-mile Afar depression [image] and the Red Sea.

Occasionally, the buildup of pressure can lead to bursts of cataclysmic activity. In September 2005, a chain of earthquakes caused hundreds of deep fractures, as reported that year [image]. In some spots the ground shifted some 26 feet [image], and magma, enough to fill a football stadium more than 2000 times, was injected into a crack between the two plates.

More recent analysis showed that the Red Sea is parting as part of the phenomenon.

"Much of the activity between the continental shelves takes place deep underwater at the mid-ocean ridges," said Tim Wright, a geophysicist with the University of Leeds, UK. "Ethiopia is the only place on the planet where we can see a continent splitting apart on dry land [image]."

Wright and his team plan to monitor the movement of these plates-one of the fundamental processes taking place on Earth-and determine the properties of rock and magma below the surface. This data will allow them to create a computer model that will simulate how magma moves through the Earth's crust to make and break continents.

"Afar is the only place on the planet where we can witness the final stages of continental breakup and the beginning of seafloor spreading," Wright said in an email interview this week. "With this project, we'll be able to understand how this happens for the first time. It will be first time anyone has collected the integrated, multi-disciplinary observations needed to understand continental breakup."

As the plates move away from each other, molten rock is seeping into the gaps. This filler cools down to form new land. A million years from now, the Red Sea could come pouring into the crevice.

"It's very exciting because we're witnessing the birth of a new ocean," Wright said. "The new ocean will connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden." The Gulf of Aden is an arm of the Arabian Sea situated between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.

Should the processes occurring today continue, the map of Africa will be forever changed, the researchers say.

"In geological terms, a million years is the blink of an eye. We don't precisely know what is going to happen, but we believe that it may turn parts of Northern Ethiopia and Eritrea into an island, before a much larger land mass-the horn of Africa-breaks off from the continent."

Earth's Protective Magnetic Field Older Than Thought

2007-08-03T18:34:00.000-07:00

Earth's Protective Magnetic Field Older Than Thought

By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor
posted: 04 April 2007 02:32 pm ET

Earth's magnetic field was at least half as strong 3.2 billion years ago as it is today, researchers report.
That means the planet was pretty well protected way back then from solar output that could otherwise have stripped away the atmosphere and doused early living organisms with lethal radiation.
"The intensity of the ancient magnetic field was very similar to today's intensity," said geophysicist John Tarduno of the University of Rochester. "It's interesting because it could mean the Earth already had a solid iron inner core 3.2 billion years ago, which is at the very limit of what theoretical models of the Earth's formation could predict."
Records of Earth that far back are difficult to find, because geologic activity has folded most rocks from that era back into the planet multiple times and spat it out as molten rock. Further, scientists don't know exactly what Earth was like early on, nor when it cooled enough to form the rocky ball with an iron core that we know today.
Why it matters
The Earth's rotating and convecting iron core gives rise to the planet's magnetic field, which billows out from the poles along invisible field lines that can be thought of as resembling the wireframe model of a giant pumpkin. The field acts as a shield against harmful solar radiation and cosmic rays.
Scientists don't know exactly how the magnetic field is created, however, and a better understanding will be needed when pondering the possibility for life on other worlds.
For instance, Mars, which has only limited magnetic activity, is considered very inhospitable to most life as we know it because of the extra radiation that reaches its surface. Scientists think Mars once had a stronger magnetic field, and its loss allowed the sun to erode the planet's atmosphere away.
The new finding, detailed in the April 5 issue of the journal Nature, adds to mounting research about continents and the presence of water that suggest Earth was a much more habitable place 3 billion years ago than scientists have long suspected.
Back in time
Tarduno had previously estimated that as far back as 2.5 billion years ago, Earth's magnetic field was just as intense as today. The new estimate was made by using a laser to heat ancient crystals of feldspar and quartz and measuring their magnetic intensity.
The tiny grains were picked out of out of 3.2 billion-year-old granite outcroppings in South Africa.
"The data suggest that the ancient magnetic field strength was at least 50 percent of the present-day field," Tarduno said. "This means that a magnetosphere was definitely present, sheltering the Earth 3.2 billion years ago."

Ancient Shells May Be Oldest Jewelry

2007-08-03T18:31:00.000-07:00

The two perforated Nassarius gibbosulus from the Mousterian layers of Skhul, Scale = 1 cm. Image courtesy of Drs. Marian Vanhaeren and Francesco d'Errico

Ancient Shells May Be Oldest Jewelry

By Randolph E. Schmid, Assocated Press
posted: 22 June 2006 02:46 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AP)-Ancient beads that may represent the oldest attempt by people at self-decoration have been identified from sites in Algeria and Israel.
The beads, made from shells with holes bored into them, date to around 100,000 years ago, some 25,000 years older than similar beads discovered two years ago in South Africa, researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
"Our paper supports the scenario that modern humans in Africa developed behaviors that are considered modern quite early in time, so that in fact these people were probably not just biologically modern but also culturally and cognitively modern, at least to some degree,'' said study co-author Francesco d'Errico of the National Center for Scientific Research in Talence, France.
In the past some researchers have argued that the ability to use symbolism did not develop until people had migrated to Europe some 35,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Alison Brooks, head of the anthropology department at George Washington University, said the new find reinforces that people developed behaviors gradually.
That this find is older than the beads uncovered in South Africa "does not surprise me,'' she said in a telephone interview. "There were no revolutions in human behavior, there was a gradual accumulation of behaviors.''
The perforated shells from Blombos in South Africa and those now coming to light are of the same genus, Nassarius, she noted.
"So, the question is, is this a single cultural tradition? Probably not,'' she concluded. "Clearly it's learned behavior.''
By the time people were populating Europe, behavior had continued to develop and beads were being made from teeth, bone, stone, "every sort of material,'' said Brooks, who was not part of the research team. "It just is improbable that that sprang from nothing, and this is a logical antecedent.''
Sally McBrearty, an anthropology professor at the University of Connecticut, also was pleased with the find extending the time range for such symbolic activity.
"It's the category of object that everybody is willing to accept as being something that signals modern behavior,'' McBrearty said. "It's not quite as wonderful as Blombos ... but it is fairly securely dated.'' McBrearty was not part of the research team.
The new find involves just three shells, two from Skhul in Israel the researchers said were about 100,000 years old and one from Oued Djebbana, Algeria, estimated to be 90,000 years old.
The researchers said the shells were found many miles from the sea, indicating they were brought to those locations deliberately, most likely for beadworking.
Brooks agreed, adding that the shells are too small to have had any food value.
"I think we're looking at symbolic value ... it's very exciting,'' she said.
D'Errico had been part of the group that found the earlier perforated shells at Blombos and he and other scientists were trying to find similar beads in other locations.
The newly identified shells were found in a study of museum collections.
The shells from Skhul were excavated in the 1930s. The researchers were able to date them by comparing sediment stuck to one of them with layers containing human skeletons that were 100,000 or more years old. The Algerian site was excavated in the 1940s and the researchers said the date of 90,000 years is based on the technology and style of the stone tools found there.
The research was funded by the European Science Foundation, the French Ministry of Research and the Fyssen Foundation.

Researcher: Early Man Was Hunted by Birds

2007-08-03T18:26:00.000-07:00

Taung child

Researcher: Early Man Was Hunted by Birds

By Alexandra Zavis, Associated Press
posted: 12 January 2006 09:29 am ET

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP)--A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds.
"These types of discoveries give us real insight into the past lives of these human ancestors, the world they lived in and the things they feared," Lee Berger, a paleo-anthropologist at Johannesburg's University of Witwatersrand, said as he presented his conclusions about a mystery that has been debated since the remains of the possible human ancestor known as the Taung child were discovered in 1924.
The Taung child's discovery led to the search for human origins in Africa, instead of in Asia or Europe as once theorized. Researchers regard the fossil of the ape-man, or australopithecus africanus, as evidence of the "missing link" in human evolution.
Researchers had speculated the Taung child was killed by a leopard or saber-toothed feline. But 10 years ago, Berger and fellow researcher Ron Clarke submitted the theory the hunter was a large predatory bird, based on the fact most of the other fossils found at the same site were small monkeys that showed signs of having been killed by a predatory bird.
Berger and Clarke had until now been unable to show damage on the child's skull that could have been done by a bird.
Five months ago, Berger read an Ohio State University study of the hunting abilities of modern eagles in West Africa believed similar to predatory birds of the Taung child's era.
The Ohio State study determined that eagles would swoop down, pierce monkey skulls with their thumb-like back talons, then hover while their prey died before returning to tear at the skull. Examination of thousands of monkey remains produced a pattern of damage done by birds, including holes and ragged cuts in the shallow bones behind the eye sockets.
Berger went back to the Taung skull, and found traces of the ragged cuts behind the eye sockets. He said none of the researchers who had for decades been debating how the child died had noticed the eye socket damage before.
Berger concluded man's ancestors had to survive not just being hunted from the ground, but from the air. Such discoveries are "key to understanding why we humans today view the world they way we do," he said.
Berger's research has been reviewed by others and is due to appear in the February edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Combo Human-Bird Antibody May Ward Off Avian Flu

2007-08-03T18:20:00.000-07:00

Combo Human-Bird Antibody May Ward Off Avian Flu

By Ed Edelson, HealthDay Reporter
posted: 13 October 2006 03:58 pm ET

(HealthDay News) -- "Humanized" bird flu antibodies could work as both vaccine and treatment during a major outbreak in people, a new study indicates.
Researchers reporting in the Oct. 12 issue of the open-access journal Respiratory Research say they've bioengineered antibodies that are active against H5N1 bird flu virus by attaching a portion of a related human antibody.
The work produced two different, so-called "humanized monoclonal" antibodies.
Mice who received the first type of antibodies via injection three days before being exposed to H5N1 were completely protected from the virus, say a team of researchers from the DSO National Laboratory in Singapore and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.
Higher doses of these antibodies were effective against the disease when given after infection, the researchers added.
The second antibody was less protective, working only when given in a high dose before infection.
"We have shown here the proof of principle that passive antibody therapy can be an effective tool for both prophylaxis against and treatment of highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus, providing the immediate immunity needed, which combined with social distancing could limit the transmission of H5N1 to others and contain a future influenza pandemic," the researchers said.
Other experts were only cautiously optimistic.
Proof of principle is fine, said Dr. John Treanor, a professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester, but lots of different things need to be done to put the findings to practical use.
"You could look at different animal models," Treanor said. "You could make additional monoclonal antibodies. You could make a mixture of antibodies. All of this would be interesting and would help to define the situation better."
But ultimately, he said, "what you really need to do is to take some product like this monoclonal antibody, find people with H5N1 influenza and see if it made them better."
Such a test might be difficult to arrange. Only a few hundred people are known to have been infected with avian flu.
The most important thing to be done now, said Richard J. Webby, an American member of the research team, is to look at different strains of the H5N1 virus.
The biggest limitation of the humanized antibody is that "it recognizes only a small portion of the virus," said Webby, who works at St. Jude. "If the virus changes only a little bit, it might not be effective. We have to look at how this antibody works against the variants that are out there in Africa and the Middle East."
The researchers will be working with different animal models other than the mouse, Webby said. They also will work on large-scale production of the humanized antibody.
The idea of humanizing animal antibodies isn't new, Treanor said. One such antibody is on the market to protect high-risk infants against respiratory syncytial virus, an infection of the lungs and breathing passages.
Treanor led a trial of a standard vaccine against bird flu, financed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. "We tested an inactivated vaccine," he said. "The finding was that the vaccine would work, but you would have to give a very high dose."
If the humanized antibody now being reported is found to work in humans, "it would be a bit cleaner and easier to deal with," Treanor said.
The World Health Organization is now testing a different approach to avian flu vaccination, a vaccine that contains part of the H5N1 virus and an adjuvant, an additive that increases effectiveness.
In related news, a team from the University of Rochester Medical Center -- led by Treanor -- said that an initial priming shot, given in advance of a "booster" shot, might help shield people against the bird flu virus.
The researchers focused on 37 people from Hong Kong. All had received two shots of vaccine as part of a 1998 study -- a response to an outbreak in poultry that had occurred there that year.
Earlier in 2006, the researchers gave these individuals a new vaccine, this time formulated to fight new strains that had emerged in 2004-2005.
Compared to people who received their very first experimental bird flu shot in 2005, those who had already gotten vaccine in 1998 were twice as likely to develop protective antibodies to the H5N1 virus, Treanor's group reported.
"If the findings hold up, then it might open up a number of options beneficial for planning," Treanor said in a prepared statement. "One might consider giving a priming shot to members of the community who would be a central part of the response if a pandemic were to occur, such as health care workers," he said.
The findings were presented Thursday at the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
More information
There's more on bird flu on at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Copyright © 2006 ScoutNews LLC. All rights reserved.

Multi-Copy DNA More Common Than Thought

2007-08-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

Each chromosome has a distinctive patterning of gains and losses of DNA. Yellow points show chromosomal segments with no copy number differences between people, whereas red and green points represent losses and gains of DNA respectively. The most structurally variable regions in the human genome are those with a high density of red and green points. [Credit: Matthew Hurles]

Multi-Copy DNA More Common Than Thought
By Steven Reinberg, HealthDay Reporter
posted: 22 November 2006 02:39 pm ET

(HealthDay News) -- It appears that many more genes than once thought have multiple copies of themselves, called "copy-number variants" -- some of which may contain disease-causing mutations, researchers report.
While scientists have long thought that genes appear in paired copies, researchers reporting in the Nov. 23 Nature say that many have three copies or as few as one. Moreover, these variations appear to occur in many more genes than was once thought.
This type of mutation has often been overlooked as a cause of genetic disease, the researchers add. What proportion of genetic disease is caused by copy-number variation isn't known but experts believe that it is significant.
To find out more, they have developed a DNA map of gene segments.
"This is the first-generation map of copy-number variation in the human genome," said co-researcher Stephen Scherer, from the Center for Applied Genomics at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada.
It has been known for about two years that a large number of copy-number variations existed, Scherer said. "Surprisingly, we found more than 1,400 copy-number variations in 270 samples. This was more than we would have expected," he said.
Scherer's group made the map by analyzing DNA from 270 individuals from four populations from Europe, Africa or Asia. The team found over 1,447 copy-number variants, covering 12 percent of the human genome. This means that copy-number variants are much more common than has been thought.
"The genes, instead of being present in the normal two copies, could be present in one or three or more copies," Scherer said. The map will make it easier for researchers to identify which genes are likely to have copy-number variations.
Copy-number variants can influence gene expression and phenotype (the way genes play out in appearance or behavior) and can cause disease. So, unless they are analyzed directly, they could be missed by the current strategies that experts use to identify DNA mutations in genetic diseases.
Based on this finding, researchers may need to go back and look again at genes involved in diseases, Scherer said. "We are going to find tens of thousands of these differences," he said.
In a related study published online in Nature Genetics, Scherer and colleagues posit that many new copy-number variants might be identified by contrasting the work of two groups -- the government-funded Human Genome Project and the private company Celera Genomics. Both groups have mapped the human genome separately, so a comparison of the two outcomes might turn up numerous copy-number discrepancies.
Such a comparison would probably be sensitive and cost-effective, according to Scherer. "You can use this comparison to build a more complete reference sequence," he said.
Another expert believes the findings will be important in understanding gene-based diseases.
"These findings should cause us to re-think how our genomes -- our 'books of life' -- differ between individuals," said Chris P. Ponting, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Oxford.
"We now know that humans' genetic texts (DNA) differ more because of the large copy or delete changes, than because of single-letter changes." Ponting said. "This should now give us hope that these textual changes can be linked to larger numbers of rare or common diseases," he said.
More information
There's much more on the human genome at the U.S. National Genome Research Institute.
Copyright © 2006 ScoutNews LLC. All rights reserved.

Madagascar Reefs May Hold Keys to Rebirth, Despite Bleaching

2007-08-03T15:44:00.000-07:00

Divers examine bleached coral reefs off the African island of Madagascar during a recent survey. Bleaching occurs when warming seas kill the algae that live inside corals and give them food and color. The survey found that up to 99 percent of some of the reefs had been bleached. Photograph courtesy Blue Ventures

Madagascar Reefs May Hold Keys to Rebirth, Despite Bleaching
James Owen
for National Geographic News
October 17, 2006

Though blighted, coral reefs discovered off Madagascar may provide the seeds of recovery for marine life devastated by rising sea temperatures, researchers say.
A survey of coral reefs along the African island nation's remote southwest coast has revealed massive damage from coral bleaching—the loss of algae that live within corals and provide them with both food and color (Madagascar map, facts, and music).
Some areas were found to have lost up to 99 percent of their coral cover. But researchers also discovered pockets of bleaching-resistant corals. The scientists say these animals could help revitalize dying reefs.
"To find these little foci of resistance is extremely rare and is of massive conservation importance," zoologist Alasdair Harris said.
Global Warming
Harris is research director for the London-based marine conservation group Blue Ventures. The organization led the survey in partnership with the Bronx, New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
He says the survey shows the importance of locating and protecting healthy coral ecosystems.
"As climate change poses an increasing threat to our marine habitats, these resilient areas could hold the key to ensuring the continued existence of coral reefs around the world and the marine species that rely on them for survival," he added.
The team found that, as in other regions of the Indian Ocean, coral reefs are dying off southwest Madagascar. (Related: "Global Warming Has Devastating Effect on Coral Reefs, Study Shows" [May 16, 2006].)
Bleaching—so called because the corals turn white—affected 75 percent of coral reefs around the world in 1998, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. The Indian Ocean was badly hit in 2000 too.
"There has been mass mortality relating to hot sea surface water," Harris said.
Madagascar, the world's fourth largest island, is renowned for its wealth of unique plants and land animals, including lemurs, fossas, and giant jumping rats. Less known is the diversity of marine life around its shores. (Related: "Coral Trove Found Off Madagascar" [May 15, 2002].)
Madagascar, the world's fourth largest island, is a nature-lover's paradise on land, but its underwater treasures are only now being explored, yielding up previously unknown species of coral and fish.
A recent one-month marine survey more than doubled the number of corals previously thought to exist in island waters and identified several new species of fish and as many as nine new corals.
"Madagascar gets a lot of attention for its biodiversity on land, but its marine habitats are equally precious and threatened," said Dr. Sheila McKenna of Conservation International, the Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization that sponsored the research.
Located 250 miles off the eastern coast of Africa, the island is slightly less than twice the size of Arizona yet has six different microclimates ranging from rain forest to desert. It hosts nine-tenths of the world's lemur population, 1,000 different orchid species and more than 10,000 varieties of plants with new ones being discovered daily. Its Eden-like diversity has made it a number one priority in international conservation efforts, but now the reefs surrounding the island like lacework are moving up on the list of marine biodiversity hot spots.
"The diversity of corals was much larger than I had expected," said Dr. John Veron, chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and a member of the international research team.
Coral are tiny spineless animals essential in building reefs, one of the planet's oldest and most complex ecosystems. Supporting 25 percent of all marine life, many reefs around the world are threatened today by both man and nature.
Donning scuba gear, the researchers surveyed 30 sites off the northwestern coast, documenting 304 coral species, some found on reefs no bigger than a few hundred yards. The number of coral described during the 20-day expedition in January comes close to the 340 species recorded for the entire western Indian Ocean and suggests that the island and the nearby Comoro Islands have the highest number of corals in the region. Dr. Veron discovered all the coral not previously identified.
"Finding nine to ten new species of corals is about the yearly quota, but for one person to fulfill this quota is quite unusual," said Stephen Cairns, a curator of coral at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Veron, who has discovered and described over one-quarter of all reef coral, was surprised himself.
"I rarely come to a place where there are undescribed species. Usually if it's new to me, it means that it is a new species, but that doesn't mean some Frenchman didn't see them in 1880," he said. He was particularly amazed to discover one spectacular coral "like a bowl of flowers, with mostly red flowers but also some blue and green."
More research will be needed before the samples are accepted as new species, because classifying coral is as much an art as a science.
"Corals are like trees, they can change their appearance depending on where they grow. They can look different in shallow and deep water and on the coasts of other countries," Dr. Veron explained.
The survey also found a richer diversity in fish than anticipated and what may be three new species of damselfish.
"Two of these three fish got me very excited because I have studied this family for more than 30 years," said Gerald Allen, Ichthyology and Science team leader for Conservation International's Marine Rapid Assessment Program. "There are 350 species worldwide and I know them all like the back of my hand. I immediately recognized two of these three as new." The third may have been masquerading as another species, he suggested.
Cataloguing new species was only one goal. The expedition also collected socio-economic and biological data to help develop reef-protection policies. The researchers interviewed local fishermen and considered reef health. They found great ecological awareness and little evidence of coral bleaching, related to increased water temperatures.
"The state of these reefs was surprisingly good," Dr. Veron said. "Within 50 years, coral reefs around the world will be decimated, but I think the Madagascar reefs will be largely protected from the effects of global warming because of cold currents from the Southern Indian Ocean. If these reefs are looked after, in 50 years they will be there."

Herpes Virus Killing Coral Reefs

2007-08-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

Herpes Virus Killing Coral Reefs

By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 20 June 2007 09:16 am ET

NEW YORK—Corals get cold sores too. Only, for corals, a herpes virus infection isn’t just annoying. It can be lethal, and it and other diseases are possibly a big factor in the deaths of coral reefs that humans are causing throughout the world’s oceans, new research shows.

Scientists have known for years that humans are killing corals indirectly and directly through global warming, overfishing and pollution. Many reefs off populous coasts have been decimated, while those near uninhabited areas are often thriving.

“For some reason, when you put people next to reefs, they die,” said microbiologist Forest Rohwer of San Diego State University at a recent symposium at the American Museum of Natural History here.

A 2004 study found that 70 percent of the world’s reefs had been destroyed or were threatened by global warming and other human activities.

But just how these problems translate into a death sentence for corals has been difficult to work out.

Millions of microbes

Corals reefs are some of the most stunningly diverse habitats on the planet. They are home to thousands of species at all levels of the food chain: invertebrates such as sponges and starfish, small fish such as angelfish and clown fish, big fish such as parrot fish, barracuda, groupers and snappers,and even sharks.

“These are basically the most beautiful thing on the planet,” Rohwer said.

But the most amazing variety, he said, is actually found in the realm we can’t see: “We know [from DNA sequencing] that the most diverse things on a coral reef are actually the microbial community.”

There are about 10 million bacteria and 1 billion archaea on every square centimeter of coral, and two neighboring corals can have completely different microbes living on their surfaces.

The reefs are also constantly interacting with the water surrounding them—in only a milliliter of ocean water (about one-fifth of a teaspoon) there are about one million bacteria and 10 million viruses.

Organic carbon, a food source for the microbes, is produced by algae around the reef, but is usually gobbled up by small fishes, which are eaten by big fishes, which in turn are eaten by sharks, so very little of the carbon is left in the water column to feed the microbes.

“This allows the coral to actually control their microbial community by providing the food source to them through their mucous,” Rohwer explained.

Normally, corals use their cilia (tiny finger-like structures) to pass the bacteria along and push them off in balls of mucous that come off the corals and burst, Rohwer said.

But when humans come into the picture, microbes get the upper hand.

A microbial explosion

When humans overfish a reef, there’s nothing left to eat the food produced by the algae, so all that carbon builds up in the water column and feeds the microbes, sort of like "MicrobeGro" fertilizer, building up their numbers and overwhelming the coral.

“The coral is actually losing control of its microbial community,” Rohwer said.

Even though these microbes normally live in a harmonious balance with the coral, they are still potential pathogens.

Rohwer and his colleagues tested their idea by putting pieces of Panamanian corals in cups with seawater, and adding different “treatments” to each cup, and essentially “just look[ing] for the coral to die,” Rohwer said.

Organic carbon was indeed the biggest coral killer.

Herpes outbreak

Rebecca Thurber, one of Rohwer’s postdoctoral researchers, also took pieces of coral and changed conditions such as nutrients, temperature and water pH, then cut up the coral and sequenced the DNA of the microbes that grew on their surface.

And what was the number one disease affecting the corals? Herpes viruses.

“They dominate almost all the viruses that are present,” Thurber told LiveScience.

Herpes viruses are naturally found in many different animals (95 percent of humans carry some kind of herpes virus).

“Everybody in this room has at least a couple herpes viruses running around,” Rohwer said at the symposium, causing some in the audience to chuckle. “And when you get stressed, or immuno-compromised, they’re going to start hopping out and giving you little cold sores or other wounds that we won’t talk about.”

“That seems to be what’s going on in the corals too,” he added.

Rohwer and Therber’s findings suggest that these disease outbreaks are just one of the many ways human activity is killing off corals.

“They’re screwed no matter what we do to them,” Rohwer said.

The Shrinking Glaciers of Kilimanjaro: Can Global Warming Be Blamed?

2007-08-03T07:31:00.000-07:00

South Cascade Glacier and Kilimanjaro
Figure 1. Glaciers around the world have been retreating in recent decades. The most-studied glacier in North America may be the South Cascade Glacier in Washington state, where photographs taken by U.S. government scientists in 1928 and 2000 provide visible evidence of the glacier’s loss of half its mass (top). Solid evidence implicates global warming in the retreat of South Cascade and other glaciers in temperate zones. There is scant evidence, however, of a direct connection between current global climate trends and the shrinking of the ice cap atop Kilimanjaro in tropical East Africa (bottom), despite its new role as a climate-change poster child. However hot the dry plains below, temperatures atop the massif remain below freezing; observations suggest the ice faces are being scoured by solar radiation rather than heated by warm air. Today a river of meltwater flows from the toe of South Cascade, whereas on Kilimanjaro observations of runoff are scant. In the lower right photograph, scattered white fields are from a recent snowfall; only the larger, closed white fields are glaciers. Photographs courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey Glacier and Snow Program (top) and Georg Kaser (bottom right). Bottom left photograph by Edward Oehler.

The Shrinking Glaciers of Kilimanjaro: Can Global Warming Be Blamed?
The Kibo ice cap, a "poster child" of global climate change, is being starved of snowfall and depleted by solar radiation
Philip W. Mote, Georg Kaser
http://www.americanscientist.org/

The shrinking glacier is an iconic image of global climate change. Rising temperatures may reshape vegetation, but such changes are visually subtle on the landscape; by contrast, a vast glacier retreated to a fraction of its former grandeur presents stunning evidence of how climate shapes the face of the planet. Viewers of the film An Inconvenient Truth are startled by paired before-and-after photos of vanishing glaciers around the world. If those were not enough, the scars left behind by the retreat of these mountain-grinding giants testify to their impotence in the face of something as insubstantial as warmer air.
But the commonly heard—and generally correct—statement that glaciers are disappearing because of warming glosses over the physical processes responsible for their disappearance. Indeed, warming fails spectacularly to explain the behavior of the glaciers and plateau ice on Africa's Kilimanjaro massif, just 3 degrees south of the equator, and to a lesser extent other tropical glaciers. The disappearing ice cap of the "shining mountain," which gets a starring role in the movie, is not an appropriate poster child for global climate change. Rather, extensive field work on tropical glaciers over the past 20 years by one of us (Kaser) reveals a more nuanced and interesting story. Kilimanjaro, a trio of volcanic cones that penetrate high into the cold upper troposphere, has gained and lost ice through processes that bear only indirect connections, if any, to recent trends in global climate.

Glacial Change

Typical midlatitude glacier

Figure 2. Most glaciers gain mass chiefly from snowfall and lose it primarily through the runoff of meltwater. A variety of factors can affect the mass balance of a glacier, and a glacier’s location plays a major role in this balancing act. A typical midlatitude glacier (shown in the summertime in this cartoon) gains mass in its higher parts and loses it at the tongue. The glacier’s equilibrium-line altitude is the point where these processes balance. Above this line, the glacier gains energy from solar radiation but loses it through infrared radiation toward the air. Below the line, sensible-heat transfer from warmer air into the glacier adds energy. With environmental warming, the equilibrium line moves up; inputs of sensible-heat flux and infrared radiation increase, with the result that melting is enhanced. Wind-driven water droplets, or rime, make small contributions to mass.
Tom Dunne
Typical midlatitude glacier

The fact that glaciers exist in the tropics at all takes some explaining. Atmospheric temperatures drop about 6.5 degrees Celsius per kilometer of altitude, so the air atop a 5,000-meter mountain can be 32.5 degrees colder than the air at sea level; thus, even in the tropics, high-mountain temperatures are generally below freezing. The climber ascending such a mountain passes first through lush tropical vegetation that gradually gives way to low shrubs, then grasses and finally a zone that is nearly devoid of vegetation because water is not available in liquid form. Tropical mountaintop temperatures vary only a little from season to season, since the sun is high in the sky at midday throughout the year. With temperatures this low, snow accumulates in ice layers and glaciers on Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya and the Rwenzori range in East Africa, on Irian Jaya in Indonesia and especially in the Andean cordillera in South America, where 99.7 percent of the ice in tropical glaciers is found.
A simple, physically accurate way to understand the processes creating and controlling these and other glaciers is to think in terms of their energy balance and mass balance.
Mass balance is merely the difference between accumulation (mass added) and ablation (mass subtracted); in this case mass refers to water in its solid, liquid or vapor form. A glacier's mass is closely related to its volume, which can be calculated by multiplying its area by its average depth. When a glacier's volume changes, a change in length is usually the most obvious and well-documented evidence. Alaska's vanishing Muir Glacier, an extreme case, shrank more than 2 kilometers in length over the past half-century.
Glaciers never quite achieve "balance" but rather wobble like a novice tightrope walker. Sometimes a change in climate throws the glacier substantially out of balance, and its mass can take decades to reach a new equilibrium.
Added mass comes largely from the atmosphere, generally as snowfall but also as rainfall that freezes; in rare cases mass is added by riming, in which wind carries water droplets that are so cold that they freeze on contact.
The most obvious subtractive process is the runoff of melted water from a glacier surface. Another process that reduces glacial mass is sublimation, that is, the conversion of ice directly to water vapor, which can take place at temperatures well below the melting point but which requires about eight times as much energy as melting. Sublimation occurs when the moisture in the air is less than the moisture delivered from the ice surface. It is the process responsible for "freezer burn," when improperly sealed food loses moisture.

Air, Ice and Equilibrium

Figure 3. Kilimanjaro’s location in a dry and cold tropical climate zone changes its mass- balance equation. In the tropics glaciers do not move between winter and summer, snowfall and melting; temperatures vary more from morning to afternoon than from season to season. The ice cap on Kilimanjaro consists of ice on the 5,700-meter-high flat summit, some with vertical edges, and several slope glaciers, mostly at altitudes where temperatures stay well below freezing and the major source of energy is solar radiation. Considerable infrared radiation is emitted from the glacier surface into the surrounding air, and the glaciers lose the most mass through sublimation—the direct conversion of ice to water vapor. Observers have seen only a trickle of meltwater.
Tom Dunne
Ice cap on Kilimanjaro

Melting, sublimation and the warming of ice require energy. Energy in the high-mountain environment comes from a variety of energy fluxes that interact in complex ways. The Sun is the primary energy source, but its direct effect is limited to daytime; other limiting factors are shading and the ability of snow to reflect visible light. Energy can nevertheless reach the glacier through sensible-heat flux—the exchange of heat between a surface and the air in contact with it, in this case heat taken directly from the air in contact with the ice—and via infrared emission from the atmosphere and land surface. Energy can also leave glacier ice in several ways: sensible-heat flux from the glacier to cold air, infrared emission from snow and ice surfaces, and the "latent heat" required for water to undergo a phase change from solid to liquid (melting) or gas (sublimation).
Mountain glaciers accumulate snow at high altitudes, slide downhill—some at speeds approaching 2 meters a day—and melt at low altitudes in summertime. Some midlatitude glaciers reach sea level in part because of copious snowfall, exceeding the liquid equivalent of 3 meters per year.
Somewhere between the top and bottom of a glacier on a mountain slope, there is an elevation above which accumulation exceeds ablation and below which ablation exceeds accumulation. This is called the equilibrium line altitude or ELA. Rising air temperatures increase the sensible-heat flux from the air to the glacier surface and the infrared radiation absorbed by the glacier, so that melting is faster and is taking place over a larger portion of the glacier.
Thus rising temperatures also raise the equilibrium-line altitude. In latitudes with pronounced seasons, this expands the portion of the glacier that melts each summer and may even, in some cases, reduce the portion of the glacier that can retain mass accumulated in the winter. Virtually all glaciers in the world have receded substantially during the past 150 years, and some small ones have disappeared. Warming appears to be the primary culprit in these changes, and indeed glacial-length records have been used as a proxy for past temperatures, agreeing well with data from tree rings and other proxies.
In many respects, however, conditions are quite different for glaciers in the tropics, where temperature varies far more from morning to afternoon than from the coldest month to the warmest month. The most pronounced seasonal pattern in the tropics is the existence of one or two wet seasons, when glacial accumulation is greater and, owing to cloud cover, solar radiation is less.
Because there is almost no seasonal fluctuation in the ELA of tropical glaciers, a much smaller portion of the glacier lies below the ELA. That is, because the processes causing depletion of the glaciers operate almost every day of the year, they are effective over a much smaller area. This smaller area also means that the terminus or bottom edge of tropical glaciers tends to respond more quickly to changes in the mass balance.
An additional important distinction among tropical glaciers divides wet and dry regimes. In wet regimes, changes in air temperature are important in mass-balance calculations, but for dry regimes like East Africa, changes in atmospheric moisture are more important. Connections between such changes and global increases in greenhouse gases are more tenuous in tropical regimes. Year-to-year variability and longer-term trends in the seasonal distribution of moisture are influenced by the surface temperatures of the tropical oceans, which, in turn, are influenced by global climate. On many tropical glaciers, both the direct impact of global warming and the indirect one—changes in atmospheric moisture concentration—are responsible for the observed mass losses. The mere fact that ice is disappearing sheds no light on which mechanism is responsible. For most glaciers, detailed observations and measurements are missing, adding to the difficulty of distinguishing between the two agents.

The Shining Mountain

Figure 4. Kilimanjaro’s ice is confined to its tallest volcanic peak, Kibo. The glaciers were explored in the late 19th century and surveyed in 1912, nearly a quarter-century before Ernest Hemingway endowed them with literary fame by titling a story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In 1912 the glaciers totaled 12.1 square kilometers in area; by 2003 that area had declined to 2.5 square kilometers (a). The most rapid shrinking may have taken place between 1912 and 1953, when the area measured about 7 square kilometers. Arrows locate the vantage points of the two photographs at right, an aerial view of Kibo from the southeast (b) and a view of the plateau ice from south-southeast with the Northern Ice Field in the background. Additional arrows locate the views in Figures 8 and 9.
Map adapted by Tom Dunne from Cullen et al. 2006. Photographs courtesy of Georg Kaser.
Kilimanjaro’s volcanic peak, Kibo

What about Kilimanjaro? Tropical glacier-climate relations are different, but among them Kilimanjaro's glacial regime is unique. Its ice consists of an ice cap (up to 40 meters thick) sitting on the relatively flat summit plateau of its tallest volcanic peak, Kibo, about 5,700 to 5,800 meters above sea level and, below this, several slope glaciers. The slope glaciers extend down to about 5,200 meters (one, in a shady gully, extends to 4,800 meters). The ice cap is too thin to be deformed, and the plateau is too flat to allow for gliding. The summit's flanks are plenty steep—with angles averaging 35 degrees—but the slope glaciers move little compared with midlatitude, temperate glaciers. The slope glaciers gain and lose mass along their inclined surfaces. The plateau ice, by contrast, has two faces that each interact quite differently with the atmosphere and therefore with climate: near-horizontal surfaces and near-vertical cliffs, the latter forming the edges of the plateau ice.
What factors may explain the decline in Kilimanjaro's ice? Global warming is an obvious suspect, as it has been clearly implicated in glacial declines elsewhere, on the basis of both detailed mass-balance studies (for the few glaciers with such studies) and correlations between glacial length and air temperature (for many other glaciers). Rising air temperatures change the surface energy balance by enhancing sensible-heat transfer from atmosphere to ice, by increasing downward infrared radiation and finally by raising the ELA and hence expanding the area over which loss can occur. The first and only paper asserting that the glacier shrinkage on Kibo was associated with rising air temperatures was published in 2000 by Lonnie G. Thompson of Ohio State University and co-authors.
Another possible culprit is a decrease in accumulation combined with an increase in sublimation, both possibly driven by a change in the frequency and quantity of cloudiness and snowfall. This argument traces its roots to 19th-century European explorers, and has been substantially improved after field work by Kaser, Douglas K. Hardy of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Tharsis Hyera and Juliana Adosi of the Tanzania Meteorological Agency and others.
In 2001 Hardy had invited Kaser to join him and some television journalists in the filming of a documentary on the ice retreat on Kibo. For about a year and a half, Hardy's instruments had been deployed on the Kibo summit, measuring weather; Kaser had been studying tropical glaciers for almost a decade and a half. The team set up tents just below one of the most impressive ice cliffs that delineates the Northern Ice Field on its southern edge. During a full five days and nights on the plateau, we observed the ice and discussed the mechanisms that drive the changes, a discussion stimulated from time to time by penetrating questions from the two journalists. Kibo's volcanic ash provided a drawing board, and a ski pole served as the pencil as a picture of the regime of the glaciers on Kibo grew clearer. Thus was formed the basic hypothesis that still drives our research and that our subsequent field measurements of mass and energy balance have largely confirmed, one in which local air temperature and its changes would play only a minor role. Here is the evidence.

Time and Temperature

Figure 5. Surface-area measurements indicate that all the major glaciers of tropical East Africa (equator, dotted line) are shrinking. The pacing of these declines is at odds with the pace of global temperature change. Worldwide, many glaciers that are now in rapid retreat came into equilibrium or even advanced around the 1970s. The Kilimanjaro ice cap, by contrast, appears to have shrunk especially rapidly during the first half of the 20th century.
Graph at left adapted by Tom Dunne from Kaser et al. 2004. Map at right by Dave Schneider and Stephanie Freese.
Surface-area measurements

Observations of Kilimanjaro's ice from about 1880 to 2003 allow us to quantify changes in area but not in mass or volume. The early European explorers Hans Meyer and Ludwig Purtscheller were the first to reach the summit in 1889. Based on their surveys and sketches, but mainly from moraines identified with aerial photographs, Henry Osmaston reconstructed (in 1989) an 1880 ice area of 20 square kilometers. In 1912, a precise 1:50,000 map based on terrestrial photogrammetry done by Edward Oehler and Fritz Klute placed the area at 12.1 square kilometers. By 2003 that area had declined to 2.5 square kilometers, a shrinkage of almost 90 percent. Much of that decline, though, had already taken place by 1953, when the area was 6.7 square kilometers (down 66 percent from 1880). Over the same period, ice movement has been almost nil on the plateau and slight on the slopes. There are indications that the slope glaciers at least are coming into equilibrium.
This pacing of change is at odds with the pace of temperature changes globally, which have been strongly upward since the 1970s after a period of stasis. Other glaciers share this pacing, with many coming into equilibrium or even advancing around the 1970s before beginning a sharp retreat.
Temperature trends are difficult to evaluate, owing to the paucity of relevant measurements, but taken together the data presented in the 2007 report from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) suggest little trend in local temperature during the past few decades. In the East African highlands far below Kilimanjaro's peaks, temperature records suggest a warming of 0.5-0.8 degree during 1901-2005, a nontrivial amount of warming but probably larger than the warming at Kibo's peak. For the free troposphere, a deep layer including Kibo's peak, the warming rate during the period 1979-2004 for the zone 20 degrees latitude north and south of the equator was less than 0.1 degree per decade—smaller than the surface trend for that time and not statistically different from zero. Averages over a deep layer of the atmosphere, however, may be a poor estimate of the warming at Kilimanjaro's peak, although it has been argued that the warming must be nearly the same at all longitudes in the tropics, given that rotational effects are small, imposing strong dynamical constraints.

Figure 6. Only sparse temperature records are available for the area around Kilimanjaro. However, there now exists a record of weather-balloon readings at the summit altitude; these have been amplified by “reanalysis,” the use of a global dynamical model capable of generating consistent fields of temperature where observations are lacking. The resulting data indicate that monthly average temperatures around the Kilimanjaro summit have fluctuated between –4 and –7 degrees Celsius since 1958; no significant warming trend is seen when a line is fitted to these points.
Graph adapted by Tom Dunne, data from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research; compiled by Doug Hardy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Record of weather-balloon readings

Focusing on measurements of air temperatures at the 500-millibar air-pressure level (roughly 5,500 meters altitude) from balloons, one paper suggests a warming trend in the tropical middle troposphere from about 1960 to 1979, followed by cooling from 1979 to 1997, although this study has not been updated.
Two of the data sets used to derive the tropical averages above are "reanalysis" data sets, in which observations are fed into a global dynamical model, thereby providing dynamically consistent fields of temperature, winds and so on, even where there are no observations. At the reanalysis point closest to Kilimanjaro's peak, there seems to be no trend since the late 1950s. But like the balloon and satel-lite data, the reanalysis data can be unsuitable for documenting trends over time .
When pieced together, these disparate lines of evidence do not suggest that any warming at Kilimanjaro's summit has been large enough to explain the disappearance of most of its ice, either during the whole 20th century or during the best-measured period, the last 25 years.

Stuck in the Freezer

Figure 7. Instruments have recorded the energy fluxes toward and from the surface of the Kibo summit glacier. Radiative energy fluxes provide the basis of heat exchange. The net infrared flux is strongly negative, because infrared radiation is controlled by temperature, and the emitting temperature of the atmosphere is much lower than that of the glacier surface. The third largest flux is the latent heat that leaves the surface with sublimation. The energy used for melting is less than half as large, and meltwater refreezes in lower ice layers. Other fluxes make very small contributions.
Adapted by Tom Dunne from Mölg and Hardy 2004.
Mean relative energy fluxes

Another important observation is that the air temperatures measured at the altitude of the glaciers and ice cap on Kilimanjaro are almost always substantially below freezing (rarely above -3 degrees). Thus the air by itself cannot warm ice to melting by sensible-heat or infrared-heat flux: On the occasions when melting takes place, it is produced by solar radiation in conditions of very light wind, which allows a warm layer of air to develop just next to the ice.
A related line of evidence concerns the shape and evolution of ice. Stunning vertical walls of astonishing height (greater than 40 meters in places) tower over the visitor to Kibo's summit. These edges cannot grow horizontally but lose mass constantly to ablation (primarily to sublimation and intermittently to melting) when they are exposed to the sun—even when the air temperature is below freezing. Once developed, the near-vertical edges will retreat until the ice is gone, since no snow can accumulate on these walls.
The careful observer notes another striking fact about these walls: They are predominantly oriented in the east-west direction. This too implicates solar radiation, whose intensity is modulated by a seasonal and daily pattern of cloudiness: The daily cycle of deep convection over central Africa means that afternoons, when the Sun is to the west, are typically cloudy. The equinox seasons when the Sun is overhead are also cloudy, whereas when the Sun is to the south or north (solstices), the summit is typically cloud-free. For the same reason, the edges of the ice are retreating more slowly on the west, southwest and northwest sides.

Figure 8. Visitors to the summit of Kilimanjaro are greeted by ice cliffs as tall as 40 meters in places (a). (For scale, note the scientist checking instruments at the base of a 30-meter wall.) The south face of the Northern Ice Field, shown here, retreats when the Sun is to the south; the north face retreats when the Sun is to the north. A daily cycle of deep convection over central Africa makes most afternoons, when the Sun is to the west, cloudy, and the west, southwest and northwest edges are retreating more slowly. This pattern supports the notion that solar radiation is the culprit. The shrinking leaves separated ice features (b) that eventually become small enough to fall over.
Photographs courtesy of Georg Kaser.

Ice cliffs
The role of solar radiation in shaping the ice edges is evident in other features as well. As the ice retreats horizontally, it can leave behind knife-thin vertical remnants that eventually become so thin that they fall over and disintegrate. Like other explorers who came before them, Kaser and Hardy also noted the sculpted features called penitentes in the Kibo ice cap on several occasions. Penitentes are seen also in many places in the Andes and the Himalaya, where they are sometimes much larger. These finger-like features arise when initial irregularities in a flat surface result in the collection of dust in pockets, which accelerates melting in those places by enhancing absorption of solar radiation. The cups between the penitentes are protected from ventilation even as wind brushing the peaks of the developing spires enhances sublimation, which cools the surface.
If infrared radiation and sensible heat transfer were the dominant factors, these sculpted features would not long survive. Solar radiation and sublimation are sculptors; infrared radiation and sensible heat transfer are diffuse, coming equally from all directions, and so they are smoothers. The prevalence of sculpted features on Kilimanjaro's peak provides strong evidence against the role of smoothers, which are energetically closely related to air temperature.
Mass in the Balance
What is known about the mass balance of Kibo's ice? Detailed studies of mass and energy fluxes have shown that the mass balance on Kibo's horizontal surfaces is driven by the occurrence or lack of frequent and abundant snowfall. On Kilimanjaro, Hardy has measured the annual layering of snow directly since 2000 using snow stakes. These measurements show that the horizontal surface of the mountain's Northern Ice Field has experienced two years of near-neutral mass balance. The largest net gain observed was in 2006 when the calendar year over East Africa ended with exceptional heavy and extended rains, associated with sea-surface temperature anomalies over the Indian Ocean, and snow blanketed much of the summit of Kilimanjaro for several months.
Obviously snowfall is the main way to increase the mass of ice, but snowfall also has a role in the energy balance, one made even more important by the prominent role of solar radiation. The loss side of the balance is very much affected by the amount and even more by the frequency of snowfall: The surface of aged or polluted snow is dark and absorbs considerably more energy from solar radiation than does a white surface of fresh snow. When there is more energy available to a glacier's surface, sublimation increases. But even in below-freezing air temperatures, the same energy can increase melting if there is no wind. Meltwater from the surface is thought to be refrozen in lower ice layers; thus such melting does not necessarily constitute a loss for the ice cap as a whole. Indeed, an observer watching a slope glacier will rarely see more than a trickle of meltwater from the toe.
Comparison of historic photographs indicates that over the past century the thinning of the plateau ice has amounted to perhaps 10 meters—a rate of loss that can be explained by snowfall insufficient to balance sublimation. The observed reduction of the ice's surface area has taken place mainly at the vertical edges, however, which is not explained by snowfall patterns.
The mass balance of the slope glaciers is somewhat different from that of the plateau ice. Retreating midlatitude glaciers typically lose most mass below the ELA and little or none above. The Kibo slope glaciers, though, show shrinkage at both top and bottom. Their history suggests that in 1900 they were already far from equilibrium, but their retreat appears to be slowing; that and their convex shape suggests that they are approaching a new smaller equilibrium between the (relatively constant) loss term and the smaller accumulation term.
Glaciers and Global Climate
The observations described above point to a combination of factors other than warming air—chiefly a drying of the surrounding air that reduced accumulation and increased ablation—as responsible for the decline of the ice on Kilimanjaro since the first observations in the 1880s. The mass balance is dominated by sublimation, which requires much more energy per unit mass than melting; this energy is supplied by solar radiation.
These processes are fairly insensitive to temperature and hence to global warming. If air temperatures were eventually to rise above freezing, sensible-heat flux and atmospheric long-wave emission would take the lead from sublimation and solar radiation. Since the summit glaciers do not experience shading, all sharp-edged features would soon disappear. But the sharp-edged features have persisted for more than a century. By the time the 19th-century explorers reached Kilimanjaro's summit, vertical walls had already developed, setting in motion the loss processes that have continued to this day.
An additional clue about the pacing of ice loss comes from the water levels in nearby Lake Victoria. Long-term records and proxy evidence of lake levels indicate a substantial decline in regional precipitation at the end of the 19th century after some considerably wetter decades. Overall, the historical records available suggest that the large ice cap described by Victorian-era explorers was more likely the product of an unusually wet period than of cooler global temperatures.
If human-induced global warming has played any role in the shrinkage of Kilimanjaro's ice, it could only have joined the game quite late, after the result was already clearly decided, acting at most as an accessory, influencing the outcome indirectly. The detection and attribution studies indicating that human influence on global climate emerged some time after 1950 reach the same conclusion about East African temperature far below the peak.
The fact that the loss of ice on Mount Kilimanjaro cannot be used as proof of global warming does not mean that the Earth is not warming. There is ample and conclusive evidence that Earth's average temperature has increased in the past 100 years, and the decline of mid- and high-latitude glaciers is a major piece of evidence. But the special conditions on Kilimanjaro make it unlike the higher-latitude mountains, whose glaciers are shrinking because of rising atmospheric temperatures. Mass- and energy-balance considerations and the shapes of features all point in the same direction, suggesting an insignificant role for atmospheric temperature in the fluctuations of Kilimanjaro's ice.
It is possible, though, that there is an indirect connection between the accumulation of greenhouse gases and Kilimanjaro's disappearing ice: There is strong evidence of an association over the past 200 years or so between Indian Ocean surface temperatures and the atmospheric circulation and precipitation patterns that either feed or starve the ice on Kilimanjaro. These patterns have been starving the ice since the late 19th century—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say simply reversing the binge of ice growth in the third quarter of the 19th century. Any contribution of rising greenhouse gases to this circulation pattern necessarily emerged only in the last few decades; hence it is responsible for at most a fraction of the recent decline in ice and a much smaller fraction of the total decline.
Is Kilimanjaro's ice cap doomed? It may be. The high vertical edges of the remaining ice make a horizontal expansion of the ice cap more difficult. Although new snowfall on the ice can accumulate over the course of months or years, new snowfall on the rocky plateau usually sublimates or melts in a matter of days (with the notable exception of the period of several months of continuous snow cover in late 2006 and into 2007), partly because thin snow above dark rock cannot long survive as the loss processes reduce the reflective snow and expose the sunlight-absorbing rock. If the cap ice were much thicker and shaped in a way that allowed ice to creep outward, gentle slopes could develop along the edges; new snow would be buffered against loss and would accumulate. But steep edges do not allow such expansion.
Imagine, though, a scenario in which the atmosphere around Kilimanjaro were to warm occasionally above 0 degrees. Sensible and infrared heating of the ice surface would gradually erode the sharp corners of the ice cap; gentler slopes would quickly develop. If, in addition, precipitation increased, snow could accumulate on the slopes and permit the ice cap to grow. Ironically, substantial global warming accompanied by an increase in precipitation might be one way to save Kilimanjaro's ice. Or substantially increased snowfall, like the 2006-07 snows, could blanket the dark ash surface so thickly that the snow would not sublimate entirely before the next wet season. Once initiated, such a change could allow the ice sheet to grow. If the Kibo ice cap is vanishing or growing, reshaping itself into something different as you read this, glaciology tells us that it's unlikely to be the first or the last time.
Bibliography

* Cullen, N. J., T. Mölg, G. Kaser, K. Hussein, K. Steffen and D. R. Hardy. 2006. Kilimanjaro Glaciers: Recent areal extent from satellite data and new interpretation of observed 20th century retreat rates. Geophysical Research Letters 33:L16502. doi:10.1029/2006GL027084
* Gaffen, D. J., B. D. Santer, J. S. Boyle, J. R. Christy, N. E. Graham and R. J. Ross. 2000. Multidecadal changes in the vertical temperature structure of the tropical troposphere. Science 287:1242-1245.
* Kaser, G. 1999: A review of modern fluctuations of tropical glaciers. Global and Planetary Change 22 (1-4):93-103.
* Kaser, G., D. R. Hardy, T. Mölg, R. S. Bradley and T. M. Hyera. 2004. Modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro as evidence of climate change: observations and facts. International Journal of Climatology 24:329-339. doi: 10.1002/joc.1008
* Mölg, T., D. R. Hardy and G. Kaser. 2003. Solar-radiation-maintained glacier recession on Kilimanjaro drawn from combined ice-radiation geometry modeling. Journal of Geophysical Research 108(D23):4731. doi:10.1029/2003JD003546
* Mölg, T., and D. R. Hardy, 2004. Ablation and associated energy balance of a horizontal glacier surface on Kilimanjaro. Journal of Geophysical Research 109:D16104.
* Oerlemans, J. 2005. Extracting a climate signal from 169 glacier records. Science 308:675-677.
* Osmaston, H. 1989. Glaciers, glaciation and equilibrium line altitudes on Kilimanjaro. In Quaternary and Environmental Research on East African Mountains, ed. W. C. Mahaney. Rotterdam: Brookfield, pp. 7-30.
* Thompson, L. G., E. Mosley-Thompson and K. A. Henderson. 2000. Ice-core paleoclimate records in tropical South America since the Last Glacial Maximum. Journal of Quaternary Science 15:377-394.
* Thompson, L. G., et al.2002. Kilimanjaro ice core records: Evidence of Holocene climate change in tropical Africa. Science 298:589-593.
* Trenberth, K. E., et al. 2007. Observations: Surface and atmospheric climate change. Chapter 3 in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group 1 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hot air cause of Kilimanjaro ‘crisis’

2007-08-03T07:25:00.000-07:00

Figure 9. Sculpted finger-like features called “penitentes” are a striking feature on the Kibo ice cap, providing further evidence that warming is not at work there. Solar radiation and sublimation tend to create such features; infrared radiation and sensible-heat transfer smooth them. Nicolas Cullen of the University of Otago in New Zealand is silhouetted in this photograph taken by Georg Kaser during a recent field season. Photograph courtesy of Georg Kaser.

Hot air cause of Kilimanjaro ‘crisis’

New findings from glacier experts signal it’s time to remove another catastrophe from the list of alarmist global-warming predictions.
Scientists report in the July/-August issue of American Scientist that “warming fails spectacularly to explain the behavior of the glaciers and plateau ice on Africa’s [Mount] Kilimanjaro.”
Scientists from the University of Washington and Austria’s University of Innsbruck studied 20 years of field work and comprehensive data regarding Mount Kilimanjaro. They made numerous findings that individually and collectively refute any notion that global warming has any meaningful connection to the recent retreat of Kilimanjaro’s alpine glacier.
As noted at the beginning of the American Scientist article, “Viewers of the film An Inconvenient Truth are startled by paired before-and-after photos” of Kilimanjaro’s glacier. The scientists document, however, that the three data sets offering the most reliable readings of Kilimanjaro’s recent temperatures “do not suggest that any warming at Kilimanjaro’s summit has been large enough to explain the disappearance of most of its ice.”
Indeed, two of the three data sets indicate either no temperature change or a net cooling at Kilimanjaro during recent decades.
Moreover, regardless of temperature trends, “temperatures measured at the altitude of the glaciers and ice cap on Kilimanjaro are almost always substantially below freezing,” the scientists report. Only on rare occasions do temperatures reach as high as 26 degrees Fahrenheit, which is still six degrees below freezing, the scientists note.
So what, then, can be causing Kilimanjaro’s glacier to shrink? The scientists point out that declining precipitation atop Kilimanjaro is the real culprit.
With the exception of the past two years, when snowfall has been relatively abundant and has replenished some of Kilimanjaro’s alpine snow pack, conditions have been relatively dry in recent years around Kilimanjaro. Sublimation — a process by which snow evaporates in sub-freezing temperatures — is occurring faster than snowfall is able to replenish it.
Indeed, as far back as 2003, scientists have been aware that declining precipitation is likely responsible for Kilimanjaro’s retreating glacier. “Although it’s tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain’s foothills is the more likely culprit,” reported the Nov. 23, 2003 issue of Nature magazine. “Without the forests’ humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry.”
Is Kilimanjaro’s ice cap therefore doomed? Not necessarily, say the scientists in American Scientist. Global warming, the alleged culprit initially framed for the receding glacier, may be the glacier’s best hope for survival.
If temperatures occasionally rise above freezing atop Kilimanjaro, the scientists explain, the vertically sharp shape of the glacier would become more of a gentle slope. A gentler slope would allow for the more efficient capture and retention of the snows that occur. Kilimanjaro’s glacier would then thicken and expand its range.
Moreover, warmer temperatures might facilitate more precipitation, which would further reinforce mountaintop snows, the scientists report.
As far as the overall global warming picture, science is showing that Kilimanjaro is more the rule than the exception.
In the past month alone, Nature magazine has published the results of two new studies that have slammed the door on claims that global warming is causing unusually strong and frequent hurricanes. The studies document that the 1970s and 1980s were periods of “anomalously low” hurricane activity compared to historical norms, and that the higher frequency and intensity of Atlantic Ocean hurricanes since then is merely “a recovery to normal hurricane activity, rather than a direct response to increasing sea surface temperature.”
Similarly, claims that global warming is causing an alarming retreat in Himalayan glaciers are also being refuted by science. As reported in the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, “Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who have recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame.”
The lesson to be learned from such frequent backpedaling on global warming claims is that we cannot accept at face value the never-ending, scare-of-the-month global warming predictions. Let’s give sound science a chance to tell us the truth about global warming.

A team of workers from the the Indian Institute of Himalayan Geology of Dehra Dun walk over the Kedarnath glacier to study the melting process. (Tomas Munita for The New York Times)

Haze over Indian Ocean contributes to the melting of Himalayan glaciers

The Associated Press
Thursday, August 2, 2007

BANGKOK: Huge haze clouds over the Indian Ocean contribute as much to atmospheric warming as greenhouse gases and play a significant role in the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, according to a study published Thursday.
Scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan and his colleagues sent unmanned measuring devices into the haze pollution, known as Atmospheric Brown Clouds, over the Indian Ocean in March 2006 near the island of Hanimadhoo.
Measuring aerosol concentrations, soot levels and solar radiation, the team concluded that the pollution — mostly caused by the burning of wood and plant matter for cooking in India and other South Asian countries — enhanced heating of the atmosphere by around 50 percent and contributed to about half of the temperature increases blamed in recent decades for the glacial retreat.
Ramanathan said his team's research shows that the brown clouds are therefore an additional factor in the melting of glaciers, along with overall global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
Until this study, which is published in the journal Nature, scientists believed the brown clouds mostly deflected sunlight, cooled the atmosphere and did not contribute much to the effects of global warming. But Ramanthan said their observations show that particles also absorbed sunlight and warmed the atmosphere much more than previously believed.
"All we are saying is that there is one other thing contributing to atmospheric warming and that is the brown cloud," said Ramanathan, a chief scientist at the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.
Prof. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a senior fellow at the Center For Policy Research in New Delhi and a glacial expert, agreed that brown clouds could be a factor in the melting of the glaciers that supply water to most Asian rivers. But he said more research was needed to understand why the Himalayan glaciers in China are also melting at a dramatic rate.
"Glaciers across Himalaya are receding but their response is dependent on many factors like size, orientation and intensity of monsoonal moisture," he said in an e-mail message from New York. "There is a great urgency on the part of the international scientific community to establish high altitude research stations across Himalaya and monitor climate accurately to develop scientifically correct models."
Scientist have expressed concerns that the Himalayan glaciers will melt entirely and the rivers will run dry for months at a time, fed only by annual rains like the monsoon that sweeps across the subcontinent every summer. Exacerbated by India and China's fast-growing, coal-fed economies, scientists have predicted that the glaciers are melting at a rate up to 15 meters (49 feet) a year and could further decline with temperatures projected to rise as much as 6.4 degrees Celsius by 2100.
While much of the melting has been blamed on global warming, Ramanathan said the new findings offer another way to tackle the problem of the melting glaciers. He said he was hopeful the findings would spur regional governments to step up efforts to replace wood-burning stoves, for example, with solar powered cookers and biogas plants that capture methane and carbon dioxide emissions and convert them to fuel.
Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which helped fund the project, said the research showed that brown clouds are "complicating and in some cases aggravating" the effects of growing greenhouse gases.
"It is likely that in curbing greenhouse gases we can tackle the twin challenges of climate change and brown clouds and, in doing so, reap wider benefits — from reduced air pollution to improved agriculture yields," Steiner said in a statement.
Ramanathan is now in India working on a pilot project with the Energy Research Institute in New Delhi that would provide fuel alternatives to 1,000 families in Kumaon region in the foothills of the Himalayas. If the project proves successful, he said he is hoping that it can be expanded in other parts of India.
"If the pollution increases, the glacier retreat will be much worse than projected," he said. "It now depends on what energy path that Indian, China and Asia will take."

Ancient "Lost" City's Remains Found Under Alexandria's Waters

2007-08-02T20:36:00.000-07:00

Alexander the Great was not the first to conquer the land where present-day Alexandria (above) now stands. Soil samples taken from beneath Alexandria's bay provide the first hard evidence of Rhakotis, a town mentioned in several histories of the region but whose existence until now had never been proven. Photograph by Ben Curtis/AP

Ancient "Lost" City's Remains Found Under Alexandria's Waters
Dan Morrison in Alexandria, Egypt
for National Geographic News
July 31, 2007

The first physical clues to a long-rumored town that existed on the site of present-day Alexandria have been uncovered—by accident.
While searching under the waves of Alexandria's East Bay for Greek and Roman ruins, archaeologists discovered signs of building construction 700 years older than Alexander the Great's invasion of Egypt.
The conquerer founded Alexandria in 332 B.C. (Related: "Alexander the Great Conquered City via Sunken Sandbar" [May 15, 2007].BELOW)
The new find is "the first hard evidence" of Rhakotis, a town mentioned in several histories of the region but whose existence had never been substantiated, said geoarchaeologist Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.
And the results, which are published in the August issue of the journal GSA Today, were "a bit of serendipity," Stanley said.
Sunken Surprise
Stanley has helped the Franck Goddio Society and Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities search for clues to what might have caused the structural failure of Greek- and Roman-era buildings, roads, and piers now sitting at the bottom of the bay.
The team sunk a half-dozen vibracores—vibrating three-inch (eight-centimeter) hollow tubes—into the muck and silt of the bay's floor.
The tubes contained layered soil samples, or cores—some as long as 20 feet (7 meters).
Stanley took his samples back to Washington, D.C., and dated them using a radiocarbon technique.
Though he was searching for cracked or damaged rocks that might suggest how Greek-era structures had failed, he was surprised to find older signs of human endeavor.
The cores turned up lead and human waste that were more than 3,000 years old—evidence of a significant settlement centuries before Alexander stormed Egypt.
Stanley assembled a team of specialists in terrestrial magnetism, anthropology, paleobiology, and geology to examine the core samples.
After a few years of study, the team confirmed the findings did indeed point to Rhakotis.
In addition to the 3,000-year-old lead, which was used for construction, the cores contained stone building materials from central and southern Egypt.
"There are signs of a flourishing settlement going back to Pharaonic times, but it's too early to say anything about it," Mohamed Abdel-Maqsud, an Alexandria expert from the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the Associated Press.
Jean-Yves Empereur, director of the Center for Alexandrian Studies, said he had not yet read the findings and could not comment.
Sailor Haven
The city's bay, anchored by the island—now a peninsula—of Pharos, has long been known as a haven for sailors. The bay is even mentioned in Book Four of Homer's Odyssey: "Therein is a harbor with good anchorage, whence men launch the shapely ships into the sea. ..."
When Alexander arrived in 332 B.C., he apparently agreed with Odysseus's reasoning. His new Egyptian capital would be close enough to the Nile for southern travel, but far enough away that seasonal flooding wouldn't be a problem.
Ptolemy I, Alexander's political heir, built the nearly 500-foot (152-meter) Lighthouse of Alexandria on Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
The lighthouse served as both a beacon and a symbol of Alexandria's greatness until a pair of earthquakes sent it tumbling into the bay 1,600 years later. Alexandria today is a breezy Mediterranean city of five million people.
The next step for researchers will be unmasking the culture and people of Rhakotis, now the bay's earliest known inhabitants.
"Were they seamen, agriculturalists, traders?" Stanley said. "We don't yet know."

Alexander the Great Conquered City via Sunken Sandbar
Kate Ravilious
for National Geographic News
May 15, 2007
Changing sea levels and shifting sands helped Alexander the Great conquer the ancient island city of Tyre in one of his most famous military victories, new research shows.
In 332 B.C. the Greek military commander invaded the island just off the coast of modern-day Lebanon, then part of ancient Phoenicia.
New geological findings and computer models show that the growth of agriculture on the island caused sediment runoff, which spurred the formation of a long, thin submerged sandbar between Tyre and the mainland.
Alexander and his men cunningly exploited this sandbar, the findings suggest, to build a 0.6-mile (1-kilometer) raised path, or causeway, out of wood and stone.
Alexander's army marched from Macedonia to Egypt around 2,350 years ago, conquering every major city in turn.
But capturing the naturally protected Tyre posed a huge military problem.
"Building a bridge out to sea was a real challenge at this time," said Nick Marriner of the University of Aix-Marseille in France, lead author of the study.
Marriner's team reports its findings in the current online issue of the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences.
No Cranes or Concrete
To understand how Alexander constructed his causeway, Marriner and his colleagues drilled out four cores from the sediment around the present-day peninsula of Tyre, now called Soûr. (See map of Lebanon.)
By studying the layering of soils inside the cores, the scientists were able to piece together the last 10,000 years of coastal activity in the region.
The researchers used a computer model to process their soil data and reconstruct tidal and current patterns.
"The computer model showed that the island of Tyre acted as a natural coastal barrier to the wind and swell [coming off the Mediterranean Sea]," Marriner explained.
Beginning in the Late Bronze Age about 3,000 years ago, an increase in deforestation and farming on the island caused more sediment to flow into the sea, he explained.
The geological cores show that along the sheltered, leeward side of the island, this sediment collected together and formed a spit.
The new layering of sediment was also enhanced by a slowdown in sea-level rise that began around 4000 B.C.
By the time Alexander arrived, the sandbar extended almost all the way to the mainland, submerged under 3.3 to 6.5 feet (1 to 2 meters) of water.
"[The formation] would probably have been known to sailors, for whom it might have hindered navigation," Marriner said.
Using the sandbar as a foundation, Alexander's engineers piled up timber, stone, and rubble to construct a causeway.
"It would have been very difficult, as they only had access from one shore and would have had to build out incrementally from the mainland," said Gordon Masterton, former president of Britain's Institution of Civil Engineers, who was not involved in the new study.
"It would have been very unusual to build something like this at this time."
Nonetheless, Alexander persevered, and after a siege lasting seven months, he marched his army into the island city.
Alexander's Sandy Legacy
By the time Alexander's army founded Alexandria in Egypt the following year, it had gotten its causeway-building skills down to a fine art, Marriner added.
"His engineers probably benefited from the savoir faire they had acquired just a few months earlier at Tyre to complete the Alexandria causeway," he said. That bridge connected Pharos island, once home of a great lighthouse—one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—to the Egyptian mainland.
After Alexander's victory at Tyre, the causeway there irreversibly changed the flow patterns in the water surrounding the former island.
"Both north and south of this causeway, two bays were formed, which have slowly silted up, because the long-shore currents were interrupted by Alexander's causeway," said Olaf Schuiling, a geo-engineer from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Around 7.5 million square feet (700,000 square meters) of new land were created, he said, forming the broad peninsula that can be seen today.

Zimbabwe's Wildlife Decimated by Economic Crisis

2007-08-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

Zimbabwe is home to many tourist draws, including the spectacular Victoria Falls and teeming herds of elephants, such as the one seen here at Hwange National Park. But the country also has the world's highest inflation rate—causing such widespread poverty that hungry villagers and poachers have nearly wiped out the country's animals in some areas. Photograph by Jason Edwards/NGS

Zimbabwe's Wildlife Decimated by Economic Crisis
Nick Wadhams in Nairobi, Kenya
for National Geographic News
August 1, 2007

Wildlife has been nearly wiped out on Zimbabwe's former private game ranches in the seven years since President Robert Mugabe began seizing and dividing the areas into small plots, a conservation group says.
Some 90 percent of animals have been lost since 2000, while the country has seen an estimated 60 percent of its total wildlife killed off to help ease massive economic woes, the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force said in a report issued in June.
"[The animals] are being killed indiscriminately," said Johnny Rodrigues, the author of the report. "There's a lot of commercial poaching, there are people on the ground snaring these animals. This is where a lot of the destruction is coming from."
Economic Meltdown
For its study, the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force gathered information and studied records about 62 game ranches. Fifty-nine reported losses, including the killings of a total of 75 rare black rhinoceroses and 39 leopards.
Most of the losses appeared among antelope, including 9,500 impalas, nearly 5,000 kudus, and 2,000 wildebeests.
The numbers help give a rough estimate of the environmental impact of Zimbabwe's recent descent into economic and political chaos.
Inflation—estimated at 5,000 percent—is now the worst in the world. On Wednesday the government introduced a 200,000 Zimbabwean dollar bill—which is worth only about $1 dollar U.S. on the black market.
The economic meltdown has had a wide-ranging and devastating impact on what is one of Africa's premier tourist draws. Zimbabwe's wildlife parks teem with herds of elephants and rhinos, as well as sights such as Victoria Falls.
Along with plummeting wildlife numbers, the country has seen massive deforestation and the neglect of some national parks.
At Hwange National Park, for example, animals have been killed off by severe drought, a problem exacerbated by scarce gasoline supplies.
There is no longer enough fuel to power the pumps that feed the watering pans where animals gather.
Policy Disaster
Until now there had only been anecdotal evidence of widespread slaughter on the private ranches that were occupied under President Mugabe's controversial land redistribution program.
That policy, implemented in 2000, is seen as a central reason for Zimbabwe's economic collapse.
Mugabe argued at the time that the reforms would reverse decades of discrimination and help Zimbabwe shed its colonial past, when wealthy white farmers snapped up some of the country's best land.
Yet once he expelled the farmers and subdivided the land, the farms that made Zimbabwe Africa's breadbasket collapsed, and some of the country's most basic foodstuffs became impossible to find.
And as a result, the subsistence farmers who moved in—often dubbed "war veterans" by the regime—began to hunt wildlife that had thrived, and in many cases, been protected on the ranches.
Government regulations meant to shield the animals have been disobeyed, and wildlife officials have been forced to focus their limited resources on Zimbabwe's national parks and reserves, where the damage is less severe.
According to the task force, Zimbabwe had 620 private game farms before the land seizures began, but now has 14. And of 14 conservancies before 2000, only one remains.
Snare Traps
Because of the proliferation of snares, many of the animals on these former ranches have been maimed, report author Rodrigues said.
"They're telling the world they want the tourists to come back, but the tourists aren't going to come back because most of the animals you see nowadays have amputated legs," he said. "It's just like a rehabilitation center."
The report acknowledges that the findings are still preliminary—many of the farmers whose land was seized have left the country, so in some cases the group had to rely on hazy reports from people still near the former ranches.
"We are not claiming to 'know' how much wildlife has been lost," the report said. "We have just tried to make the most accurate estimate possible with very limited data to work with."
Still, the trend is a disaster, because Zimbabwe once had some of the world's most progressive and successful conservation policies.
Elephant populations there have boomed, and on conservation areas that are strictly monitored and controlled, rhinoceros populations are growing. (Related: "5-Country Conservation Area Would Aid Africa's Largest Elephant Herd" [April 4, 2007].)
Matter of Survival
Part of the reason for the decline is that poachers from neighboring countries have entered Zimbabwe to hunt its animals. Another is the booming trade in bush meat.
"It's a matter of survival," said George Kampamba, coordinator of the conservation nonprofit WWF's African Rhino Program. "For people to really survive, now that poverty levels are so high, they have to do what they're doing—which is the bush meat trade."
The government too has turned on the animals. Rodrigues said the government slaughtered a hundred elephants last year so their meat could be served as part of Independence Day celebrations.
And his group has also reported that Zimbabwe recently sold ivory to China in exchange for military hardware.
Wildlife destruction has become so severe that even Zimbabwe's authoritarian government is acknowledging mistakes.
"Errors that were made were not intentional," Environment Secretary Margaret Sangarwe told the state-owned Herald newspaper.
"An area of concern is the resettling of people in some areas meant for wildlife rearing, and ensuring that our wildlife is safe."

5-Country Conservation Area Would Aid Africa's Largest Elephant Herd
Leon Marshall in Johannesburg, South Africa
for National Geographic News
April 4, 2007
Environment ministers from five southern African countries plan to turn a 110,833-square-mile (287,132-square-kilometer) chunk of land into a massive cross-border conservation zone.
The proposed parkland—spanning an area about the size of Nevada—would vastly increase roaming space for Africa's biggest elephant herd.
Estimated at 150,000 animals, the elephants presently concentrate in northern Botswana, where they heavily impact local vegetation.
Willem van Riet, chief executive of the South Africa-based Peace Parks Foundation, has been a major driving force behind transfrontier park development in southern Africa.
He said the proposed project would be a turning point for the entire region, fostering joint tourism development and nature conservation.
"It constitutes a complete refocus," he said. "It will connect [ecosystems] across national boundaries that in some instances have far more in common with each other than with most of the rest of their own countries."
Five-Country Plan
The proposed conservation area would be called the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area and would center heavily on the area's river systems.
KAZA would include the region of Victoria Falls between Zambia and Zimbabwe and Botswana's Okavango Delta and Chobe Reserve, areas said to lend the project considerable prestige.
Also included would be Namibia's ecologically diverse Caprivi Strip and a vast, sparsely populated area spanning the Angola-Zambia border.
The KAZA area would differ from a transfrontier park, which actually links parks across national boundaries to form a single reserve.
There is a possibility that many of the 36 parks in the proposed area could open to each other across borders, although the parks are in various states of repair.
But the core idea, Van Riet said, is that member countries would promote conservation of shared wildlife and socio-economic development through ecotourism and related activities such as jointly regulated safari hunting.
At a ceremony at Victoria Falls last year, ministers of environmental affairs and tourism from the five countries signed a memorandum of understanding committing their governments to work toward establishment the shared parkland.
Potential Landmine
But residual landmines pose a major obstacle to the project, particularly in Angola, which suffered nearly four decades of anti-colonial and civil war that ended in 2002.
The proposed conservation area would skirt Cuito Canavale, a town that in 1988 saw the bloody closing battle between South African troops and the Cuban-supported fighters of Angola's now-ruling MPLA party.
Van Riet said the landmines seem concentrated mainly along a 50-mile (80-kilometer) strip of the Cuando River, which in places divides Angola and Zambia. Most Angolans from the area now live on the Zambian side of the river.
"I don't know of any plans yet to lift the mines," he said. "Outside help and money is going to be needed to do it."
Lucas Gakale, secretary to Botswana's ministry of environment, wildlife, and tourism, said the scheme could still significantly ease the pressure on his country's large elephant population.
"A plan we drew up in 1990 put the maximum number of elephants Botswana could carry at 60,000. But because culling was controversial, and because we did not want to attract international condemnation, we allowed numbers to grow," he said.
"[The population] is now put at up to 150,000, and we need somewhere for the animals to go," he added.
"Zambia and in particular Angola offer a way out. We are in fact already seeing elephants move into Angola. They seem to sense where the mines are because they pass them by."
Talks Needed
Gakale chairs the five signatory countries' officials committee, which is responsible for taking the KAZA process forward. He said the next step is a full feasibility study.
But more urgently, he said, the individual governments must start talking with the local communities that stand to be affected.
The countries should start negotiations with local authorities and immigration, security, and disease-control establishments, he added.
"We are going to try to open adjoining parks across national boundaries and link others by corridors. We will need to do it in a way that will avoid large-scale resettlement," he said. "But the biggest challenge is going to be to get the cooperation of the various land users."
Werner Myburgh is the Peace Parks Foundation's project manager. He said only about 2.5 million people are estimated to live in the proposed parkland, which adds to its potential for being developed into an enormous protected area.
Angola's 76,832-square-mile (199,049-square-kilometer) Cuando Cubango province would make up a major portion of the proposed parkland.
After decades of war, the province today has only about 140,000 residents.
The conflict also took a heavy toll on the area's wildlife. Elephant ivory paid for weaponry, while other wildlife became bush meat for soldiers and famished villagers.
Myburgh said he recently flew over the area. "There were hardly any huts to be seen and no roads. I thought to myself, this is wild Africa, without game."
Cleared of minefields, he said, the area could offer a vast new home for Botswana's elephants.
Overall, Myburgh has high hopes for the ambitious project.
"The ministers involved are young, enthusiastic, and energetic," he said. "The political will exists, and there is the expertise and the funding coming in to see it through."

NASA MODIS Image of the Day: August 2, 2007 - Fires in South Eastern Africa

2007-08-02T20:13:00.000-07:00

Scores of fires were burning all around Lake Malawi on July 28, 2007.
Each red dot on the image represents an active fire detected by the MODIS on the Aqua satellite.

NASA MODIS Image of the Day: August 2, 2007 - Fires in South Eastern Africa
STATUS REPORT
Date Released: Thursday, August 2, 2007
Source: NASA MODIS Web

The fires are scattered across several countries, including (clockwise) Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. (The black lines denote country borders.) Further south, there are fires pouring out heavy smoke in South Africa. You can read more about these fires on Earth Observatory. African savanna fires are mostly caused by humans for agricultural activities such as clearing pasture or cropland or driving game. Although the fires are not necessarily immediately hazardous, the frequency and wide extent of the burning can have strong influence on weather, climate, human health, and natural resources.

Australia and South Africa are vying for international telescope

2007-08-02T20:11:00.000-07:00

Astronomy committee works to attract science delegates

Posted Mon Jul 30, 2007 12:08pm AEST

The chairman of Western Australia's Radio Astronomy Committee says he is working to attract 100 delegates from the international science world to visit the mid-west next year.
Shane Hill, who is also the Labor Party's Member for Geraldton, has returned from an international tour promoting Australia as the best site to host the $2 billion Square Kilometre Array Radio Telescope.
Australia and South Africa are vying for the international telescope.
Boolardy Station, north-east of Geraldton, is the chosen Australian site.
Mr Hill says he is confident he has been able to convince the scientists he met during his tour to come to Geraldton.
"Discussions are happening as we speak now," he said.
"Obviously UWA [University of WA] is very important with that, with Professor Peter Quinn who is going to be the host for that.
"So I'm hopeful in the next couple of weeks we can confirm that we will play host to that delegation."

Chemical Crime

2007-08-02T20:04:00.000-07:00

Chemical Crime
Written by Kotie Geldenhuys
Wednesday, 01 August 2007

Wildlife crime

CHEMICAL CRIME CALLS FOR MANAGEMENT

South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of violent crime. Official statistics indicate that figures for some of the worst crimes such as murder are increasing, and although some of the other statistics have shown a decrease, these figures remain alarmingly high.

South Africans live behind high walls, with electric fences or razor wire and large dogs such as Rottweilers or even the small noise_makers, like Jack Russells, are used to protect home owners from becoming part of the statistics in South Africa.

Article compiled by Kotie Geldenhuys
This form of protection feeds a vicious cycle as desperate criminals will go to increasingly brutal methods to commit their crime. They see the watchdog as an obstacle and therefore they want to eliminate it. This is the motive for poisoning dogs in most cases.
The poison of choice used by the majority of South African criminals is a pesticide called aldicarb (also known as "two_step"). Temik is the brand name for aldicarb which is a restricted use chemical under strict controls and management. Criminals steal small amounts of this chemical which they usually mix with maize, bread, meat or corned beef. In January this year, 14 dogs and two cats were poisoned and killed in apparent housebreaking attempts at six homes in East Lynn, Pretoria. The poison had been put into polony and fed to the animals in an attempt to gain entry to the houses. Many other attempted thefts, using this method have been reported.
But poisoning doesn't stop with the much_loved pets that are obstacles to criminals. Wild animals also fall victim to poisoning. Farmers often use pesticides to get rid of "problem animals", such as jackals. And once again the poisoning doesn't stop when the predator is killed. Many non_target animals are killed in the process and secondary poisoning then occurs when animals such as vultures, feed on the carcasses of poison victims.
Another group that also uses poison illegally, is poachers. In 2005 Carte Blanche and other media reported about poachers in the Limpopo Province who poisoned rhinos to get hold of their horns. In this case the poachers also made use of aldicarb.
The culprits stole approximately 500 g of aldicarb from a farm shed, and headed for the nature reserve where they poured the poison around the waterhole. Keeping in mind that aldicarb is extremely toxic, and that only a few grams are needed to kill a rhino, this 500 g was a lot of poison that ended up in the drinking water of innocent animals. According to the poacher who talked to the reporter, a bird drank some of the water after they had poured the aldicarb into the waterhole and died immediately.
Early the next morning the poachers returned to the waterhole and found a scene of slaughter as more than 50 animals were lying dead around the watering hole. Dozens of birds and baboons had died alongside large game such as nyalas, wildebeest and zebras. Five white rhinos had been killed by the poisoned water.
The poachers only removed the two horns of one rhino and fled with the two horns, as they were afraid of being discovered. Predators and scavengers that fed on the carcasses also died. It was a horrific scene and officials of the Department of Nature Conservation and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA) feared that it could become a trend.
Other poisons which have been implicated in animal deaths include monocrotophos carbofuran, but also dieldrin, diazinon, 1080, triazophos, strychnine, fenthion and gamma_BHC. The Endangered Wildlife Trust's Poison Working Group reports that the top four toxins implicated in wildlife poisoning events are aldicarb, carbofuran, diazinon and methamidophos. During 2006, three baboons were poisoned in the Cape Town area with Dieldrin, a pesticide that has been banned since 1981. The person nursing one of these baboons was also poisoned by exposure to the vomit of one animal.
As seen above, poisons are used illegally in South Africa for various reasons _ from controlling pests to committing a crime. Therefore, proper control of pesticides is of utmost importance.
The Poison Working Group of the Endangered Wildlife Trust
The Endangered Wildlife Trust Poison Work Group, has been working on poisoning for more than 15 years and has identified pesticides as the major poisoning problem.
The aim of the Poison Working Group (PWG) of the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) is to protect all elements of wildlife in southern Africa against deliberate or unintentional harm by stopping irresponsible and insensitive practices involving poisons. The EWT Poison Working Group is a representative forum that brings all stakeholders together in order to stop irresponsible and insensitive practices involving poison and consequently prevent negative impacts on wildlife populations, environmental contamination and ecosystem loss.
Questions about 1080
A couple of years ago there were a number of newspaper reports about a young man from Uitenhage who claimed that he became ill while working at the BKB (Boere Koöperasie Beperk) pesticide section, where amongst other chemicals, he sold unregistered 1080 poison baits to sheep farmers for poisoning jackals. He worked at the BKB since 1993 and in 2002 he started to complain about a feeling of paralysis. A year later he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). His family questioned whether his contact with 1080 could have contributed to his condition. A thorough investigation followed and although the exposure to 1080 had nothing to do with his condition, it was realised that there is a great deal of ignorance and apathy about poison and agro_chemicals, and much is used in our country without proper control.
What is aldicarb?
As aldicarb is frequently implicated in animal poisonings, we wanted to know more about it. Aldicarb is a carbamate pesticide, and is one of the most potent insecticides on the market. It has a lethal dose (LD50) in the order of 5.6 mg/kg. In South Africa aldicarb has been registered as an active ingredient in only two products, namely commercial products with the trade names Temik and Sanacarb. Sanacarb is no longer available. The Fertilizers, Farm Feeds, Agricultural Remedies and Stock Remedies Act 36 of 1947 regulates the registration, application, availability, etc of pesticides in South Africa. Certain pesticides may also be controlled by the Hazardous Substances Act 15 of 1973. Aldicarb is legally only available to registered agricultural users of the product. But there are reports of aldicarb and other pesticides that are available at street markets or at so_called muti_markets where traditional medicine is sold locally (Allen, 2001).
Aldicarb is a systemic pesticide that has a dark grey to black, granule_like appearance. It is applied to soil and taken up by plant roots, but it is illegal to use aldicarb on certain crops because it can be incorporated in the flesh of the fruit. Aldicarb is one of the most toxic pesticides known, and as already said, its toxicity can be expressed as a lethal dose (LD50) of about 6 mg/kg body mass orally.
Government Notice No 5467 (Regulation Gazette of Government 2443) dated 25 March 1977, stated that Aldicarb has been declared a Group I (Category B) hazardous substance. Therefore it is governed by the Hazardous Substances Act 15 of 1973 as administered by the Department of Health.
Symptoms of aldicarb poisoning
Symptoms of aldicarb poisoning include weakness, vomiting, diarrhoea and eventually death, if untreated. The poison attacks the nervous system and inhibits breathing. The victim goes into a nervous state of major agitation and ultimately some of the vital organs will collapse and, if the dose is sufficiently high, the animal or human will die.
Establishing a chemical crime management forum
Due to the high number of poisoning cases making headlines and the realisation that there is a lot of poison in the country that is not properly controlled, the need to establish a Chemical Crime Management Forum was realised in 2006. This makes one think that poisoning is becoming a national concern and that there are many roleplayers that can give an input to make our country "chemically safe" for animals and humans. Roleplayers such as the Endangered Wildlife Trust Poison Working Group, NSPCA, representatives from the chemical companies such as Bayer, National Intelligence, SAPS, Department of Agriculture and Department of Environment and Tourism all have a role to play to ensure a chemically safe South Africa.
Poisoning is a cruel method of killing animals and the public must report cases of animal poisoning to the police. The public should report the incident to their nearest police station and obtain a CAS number. The sample, containing stomach content that is obtained by a local vet together with the CAS number must then be sent to the Toxicology Section at the SAPS Forensics Science Laboratory. This is then recorded on the forensic lab's database, which will then be communicated to the SAPS nodal point.
Setting up a nodal point
As chemical crime is an important issue, a nodal point to report such crime was established at the SAPS Head Office in January 2007 as instructed by Div Comm Du Toit (CRC and Forensics) and Div Comm De Beer (Detective Services). The SAPS Stock Theft Unit and the Forensic Science Laboratory established a close work relationship in this regard. The SAPS country_wide has been instructed on what procedure to follow. Until June 2007, 11 cases have been reported at this nodal point, these included: two puppies that were killed at Welbekend, whereafter a bakkie was stolen; four dogs that were poisoned, but survived, also at Welbekend; four dogs that were poisoned in Vryheid; two cats poisoned in Clanwilliam and 33 head of cattle in Lichtenburg are but some of the cases that have been reported to the nodal point.
All cases of poisoning must be reported to the SAPS nodal point at tel: (012) 393 1196 or at the crime stop number. The community is urged to continue reporting all poisoning incidents even if no other crime has been committed. Members of the public must insist that a case is opened when a poisoning case is reported. In addition to being able to lay charges in terms of the Animal Protection Act, charges can be laid in terms of the Fertilisers, Farm Feeds, Agriculture Remedies and Stock Remedies Act 36 of 1947 and Possession of an Illegal Substance Hazardous Substances Act 15 of 1973 in cases of aldicarb (Temic) poisoning.
Pesticide legislation
All pesticides in South Africa are controlled by the Fertilisers, Farm Feeds, Agricultural Remedies and Stock Remedies Act 36 of 1947. These are all products that claim to control, kill or repel any vertebrate or invertebrate pest, whether such products are natural or synthetic of origin. This ensures that products are effective, that they do not pose a significant risk to human beings and the environment, and do what they are supposed to do. The Act is highly prescriptive in terms of the registration requirements, claims that are made on the labels of such products and a host of other things. One of the Act's provisions is that buyers of Group 1 pesticides must sign for the transaction in a chemical register.
Pesticide manufacturers are bound by legislation to print warnings and precautions on their labels but in many cases the public do not read or follow the advice presented on the labels. The pesticides sold in the household and garden markets are usually less toxic than those products supplied to the agricultural industry, but still home owners poison themselves, their pets and their garden wildlife by not adhering to instructions.
According to Section 16 of the Hazardous Substances Act 15 of 1973 farmers who have not been cautious in the use of legitimate aldicarb may be prosecuted if their employees are found in possession of the substance. It is also against the law to keep poison in any other packaging than its original packaging. Poison must also be stored safely behind lock and key.
Should pesticides be used or not?
"Is the gogga (bug) really a pest?" is the question one must ask before grabbing a pesticide from the shelves. Conservationists argue that people should start respecting all life forms and not just the "big and hairy". People kill spiders _ which are an environmentally_friendly and a natural pest control system. Spiders can be seen as a natural insecticide and should never be killed, irrespective of whether they are poisonous or not. We cannot regard the insects that keep our gardens alive as less important than the birds. Yes, we admit that there are pests that attack our precious plants in our gardens that must be brought under control, but it is important that pesticides/insecticides should be used with great respect and caution. There are also many natural herbs available to repel pests _ educate yourselves!
Farmers who have to make a living out of their corps may have different opinions about agro_chemicals. Although Temik has received a lot of negative publicity due to all the animal poisoning cases, it is seen as an extremely effective product sold to the agricultural market. Farmers farming certain corps could be seriously impacted if this pesticide was not available, but responsible use and safe custody are critically important!
Illegal aldicarb sales
Despite the legislation, control is not sufficient since many instances have been reported of aldicarb, and other agricultural pesticides, being available freely on street markets, where it is sold as a rat poison. Aldicarb is often illegally sold on the street in 5 g amounts of Temik and often mixed with mealie_meal for bulk. Allen (2001) used the following example and said that according to the reported lethal dose, approximately 0.5 g is enough to kill an average person weighing 70 kg.
The illegal sale of agricultural pesticides, such as aldicarb at street markets, is a huge problem and South Africa is facing a challenge to control the illegal sale to and use of pesticides by the public. Additional danger is involved as the poisons are sold in unmarked packaging, without any information about content, application, preparation and safety measures to be taken.
Chemical industries’ role in the poison business
Some pesticide companies are very concerned about the misuse of their products and offer training to retailers on product safety and responsible use. Sadly, this training stops there, as members of the public are seldom, if ever, trained in responsible use.
Chemical companies such as Bayer who imports and distributes Temik as an agricultural aid, is busy developing poisoning treatment protocol together with Onderstepoort Research Institution. This information will be distributed to vets in the form of a file and posters. Pamphlets will also be distributed to the community (via local vets) to inform them what to do when a pet is poisoned. Posters will also be distributed to the police and agricultural dealers. Poisoning in general will be covered in this documentation.
It is the pesticide users' responsibility to use all pesticides only as instructed to get the desired effect, to minimise the impact on the environment and to prevent poisoning themselves, others and innocent animals.

Sources:
Allen, J. 2001. Aldicarb: the Silent Killer, a Discussion of the Challenge Facing South Africa Regarding the Illegal Sale of Pesticides. Paper at the 2nd World Conference on Modern Criminal Investigation, Organised Crime and Human Rights in Durban.
Steyn, T. 2006. Jakkalsgif op koöperasie_rak "kon nie tot siekte lei". Die Burger. 10 Julie 2006.
www.ewt.org.za/workgroups_overview.aspx?group=poison&page=overview _ accessed on 21 June 2007.
www.health24.com/medical/Focus_centres/777 2268 2552 2590,31989.asp _ accessed on 18 June 2007.
www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=iol1149945922100P253 _ accessed on 18 June 2007.
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 01 August 2007 )

Why Africa fears Western medicine

2007-08-02T19:55:00.000-07:00

Wouter Basson

Why Africa fears Western medicine
By Harriet A. Washington
Tuesday, July 31, 2007

To Westerners, the repatriation of five nurses and a doctor to Bulgaria last week after more than eight years' imprisonment meant the end of an unsettling ordeal. The medical workers, who in May 2004 were sentenced to death on charges of intentionally infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV, have been freed, and another international incident is averted.
But to many Africans, the accusations, which have been validated by a guilty verdict and a promise to reimburse the families of the infected children with a $426 million payout, seem perfectly plausible. The medical workers' release appears to be the latest episode in a health care nightmare in which white and Western-trained doctors and nurses have harmed Africans - and have gone unpunished.
The evidence against the Bulgarian medical team, like HIV-contaminated vials discovered in their apartments, has seemed to Westerners preposterous. But to dismiss the Libyan accusations of medical malfeasance out of hand means losing an opportunity to understand why a dangerous suspicion of medicine is so widespread in Africa.
Africa has harbored a number of high-profile Western medical miscreants who have intentionally administered deadly agents under the guise of providing health care or conducting research. In March 2000, Werner Bezwoda, a cancer researcher at South Africa's Witwatersrand University, was fired after conducting medical experiments involving very high doses of chemotherapy on black breast-cancer patients, possibly without their knowledge or consent. In Zimbabwe, in 1995, Richard McGown, a Scottish anesthesiologist, was accused of five murders and convicted in the deaths of two infant patients whom he injected with lethal doses of morphine. And Dr. Michael Swango, ultimately convicted of murder after pleading guilty to killing three American patients with lethal injections of potassium, is suspected of causing the deaths of 60 other people, many of them in Zimbabwe and Zambia during the 1980s and '90s. (Swango was never tried on the African charges.)
These medical killers are well known throughout Africa, but the most notorious is Wouter Basson, a former head of Project Coast, South Africa's chemical and biological weapons unit under apartheid. Basson was charged with killing hundreds of blacks in South Africa and Namibia, from 1979 to 1987, many via injected poisons. He was never convicted in South African courts, even though his lieutenants testified in detail and with consistency about the medical crimes they conducted against blacks.
Such well-publicized events have spread a fear of medicine throughout Africa, even in countries where Western doctors have not practiced in significant numbers. It is a fear the continent can ill afford when medical care is already hard to come by. Only 1.3 percent of the world's health workers practice in sub-Saharan Africa, although the region harbors fully 25 percent of the world's disease. A minimum of 2.5 health workers is needed for every 1,000 people, according to standards set by the United Nations, but only six African countries have this many.
The distrust of Western medical workers has had direct consequences. Since 2003, for example, polio has been on the rise in Nigeria, Chad and Burkina Faso because many people avoid vaccinations, believing that the vaccines are contaminated with HIV or are actually sterilization agents in disguise. This would sound incredible were it not that scientists working for Basson's Project Coast reported that one of their chief goals was to find ways to selectively and secretly sterilize Africans.
Such tragedies highlight the challenges facing even the most idealistic medical workers, who can find themselves working under unhygienic conditions that threaten patients' welfare. Well-meaning Western caregivers must sometimes use incompletely cleaned or unsterilized needles, simply because nothing else is available. These needles can and do spread infectious agents like HIV - proving that Western medical practices need not be intentional to be deadly.
Although the World Health Organization maintains that the reuse of syringes without sterilization accounts for only 2.5 percent of new HIV infections in Africa, a 2003 study in The International Journal of STD and AIDS found that as many as 40 percent of HIV infections in Africa are caused by contaminated needles during medical treatment.
Even the conservative WHO estimate translates to tens of thousands of cases.
Several esteemed science journals, including Nature, have suggested that the Libyan children were infected in just this manner, through the reuse of incompletely cleaned medical instruments, long before the Bulgarian nurses arrived in Libya. If this is the case, then the Libyan accusations of iatrogenic, or healer-transmitted, infection are true. The acts may not have been intentional, but given the history of Western medicine in Africa, accusations that they were done consciously are far from paranoid.
Certainly, the vast majority of beneficent Western medical workers in Africa are to be thanked, not censured. But the canon of "silence equals death" applies here: We are ignoring a responsibility to defend the mass of innocent Western doctors against the belief that they are not treating disease, but intentionally spreading it. We should approach Africans' suspicions with respect, realizing that they are born of the acts of a few monsters and of the deadly constraints on medical care in difficult conditions. By continuing to dismiss their reasonable fears, we raise the risk of even more needless illness and death.

Harriet A. Washington is the author of "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present."

Toiling in the Dark: Africa’s Power Crisis

2007-07-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

Benedicte Kurzen for The New York Times. The lack of reliable power has begun to hamper development in sub-Saharan Africa, shaving more than 2 percent off the annual growth rate in some countries. Above, slag pots at the Chambishi smelter which consumes nearly 40 megawatts of power.

Toiling in the Dark: Africa’s Power Crisis
By MICHAEL WINES

LUSAKA, Zambia — It is not that Jacob Mwale minds irrigating the 11 acres of land he farms just east of Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. It is irrigating his 11 acres in the dead of night that angers him.
Two or three times a week, the Mwale farm abruptly loses power, like the homes and businesses of some of Zambia’s 300,000 other electricity users. When the power returns, sometimes late in the evening, Mr. Mwale’s farmhands work overtime, watering the fields by moonlight.
“If they shut down the whole day, I have to work nights, and pay extra,” Mr. Mwale, 39, grumbled. “It’s killing us.”
Power blackouts — “load shedding,” in utility jargon — are hardly novel in sub-Saharan Africa, where many electricity grids remain chewing-gum-and-baling-wire affairs. Even so, this year is different. Perhaps 25 of the 44 sub-Saharan nations face crippling electricity shortages, a power crisis that some experts call unprecedented.
The causes are manifold: strong economic growth in some places, economic collapse in others, war, poor planning, population booms, high oil prices and drought have combined to leave both industry and residents short of power when many need it most.
“We’ve had no significant capital injection into generation and transmission, from either the private or public sectors, for 15, maybe 20 years,” said Lawrence Musaba, the manager of the Southern African Power Pool, a 12-nation consortium of electricity utilities at the continent’s tip.
The implications go beyond candlelight suppers and extra blankets on beds. The lack of reliable power has already begun to hamper the region’s development, clipping more than 2 percent off the annual growth rates of the worst-hit African economies, according to the World Bank. Some nations, like Ghana, have tried to deal with their power crises by leasing huge teams of gas generators, producing emergency power at exorbitant rates until power plants can be built.
In Nigeria, Angola and some other nations, virtually all businesses and many residents run private generators to supplement faltering public service, saddling economies with added costs and worsening pollution.
“I’ve been on the 20th floor of an apartment building in Luanda, and there would be generators on all the verandas, with the racket, the fumes,” said Anton Eberhard, a former electricity regulator and an expert on power at the University of Cape Town. “And the lift isn’t working, because the main power supply is off.”
In normal times, South Africa’s muscular chain of power plants fills the gaps of its neighbors. But South Africa now could experience up to seven years of its own electricity shortages. Rolling blackouts blanketed parts of the country in January, and sporadic power failures have persisted since.
The gravity of this year’s shortage is all the more apparent considering how little electricity sub-Saharan Africa has to begin with. Excluding South Africa, whose economy and power consumption dwarf other nations’, the region’s remaining 700 million citizens have access to roughly as much electricity as do the 38 million citizens of Poland.
Much goes to industry: a single aluminum smelter near Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, gobbles four times as much power as the entire rest of Mozambique. On average, the World Bank says, fewer than one in four sub-Saharan Africans are hooked to national electricity grids.
Moreover, some grids are so poorly maintained that electricity suppliers get paid for as little as 60 percent of the power they generate. The rest is either stolen or lost in ill-maintained networks.
For decades, the region had enough generating capacity — and few enough customers — to tolerate such waste. No more: sub-Saharan nations are adding about a thousand megawatts of generating capacity each year, World Bank experts say, but need up to twice that to keep pace with demand.
Some governments privatized chunks of their power industry in the early 1990s when free-market solutions to public-sector problems were in vogue, leaving it unclear who is ultimately responsible for providing power.
Other governments, as in South Africa, failed to build power plants that experts warned were needed. The government monopoly Eskom, the world’s fourth-largest power utility, was advised in a 1998 report that it would run short of power in 2007, but planning and financing problems — not all within the utility’s control — stalled upgrades. The forecast was actually optimistic: Eskom began running short in 2006.
Yet South Africa’s woes pale beside those of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Only 19 of 79 power plants work, the government said in April. Daily electricity output has plunged 60 percent from its peak, and blackouts cost the economy $1 billion a year, the Council for Renewable Energy in Nigeria says.
Poor management is but one problem. War has devastated the power grid in Congo, in Africa’s heart, and stalled plans to develop its vast hydroelectric potential. In Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and parts of West Africa, drought has shrunk rivers and slashed the generating capacity of hydroelectric dams. Drought in Ghana, for example, has crippled gold and aluminum production and set off blackouts in Togo and Benin, which buy power from Ghana.
Once a major power exporter, Uganda now blacks out parts of its capital, Kampala, for as much as a day at a time and has leased two 50-megawatt generators, burning diesel at a time of record oil prices. The demand for hydropower in Uganda and its neighbors, with drought, is blamed by some for a steady reduction in the water level of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest.
Uganda’s gas stations are now short of diesel for vehicles — in part, paradoxically, because power shortages are shutting down a pipeline from Kenya. News reports say the nation has spent enough on diesel-fueled power generation to build two hydroelectric dams.
Zambia, where power to customers like Mr. Mwale is rationed almost every day, is a template for such problems. Barely 20 percent of households are wired for power — only 3 percent in rural areas — but the Zambia Electricity Supply Company, known as Zesco, is signing up 10,000 new customers a year, said Christopher Nthala, the utility’s transmission director.
Now Zambia is getting a push: a global commodities boom has jolted its moribund metals industry to life. Investors are building two smelters, and doubling the capacity of another, to handle the boom in copper, nickel and other metals, taxing the nation’s power supply.
“We’ve never seen this kind of growth before,” Mr. Nthala said.
Once the utility could make up shortfalls by buying power from other utilities in the Southern Africa Power Pool. But today, Mr. Nthala said, neighbors have little surplus to hand out. “Sometimes we get it,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t.”
None of that mollifies customers, who say blackouts are so common that service in much of Lusaka has become totally unreliable.
Many power failures seem to hit Matero, a poor township that is home to maybe a million of Lusaka’s estimated three million residents. “Every day — it’s either in the morning, when people are going to work or preparing to cook, or in the evening, the prime time when I’m tired and I need to go home and listen to the news and cook my supper,” said Bishop Peter Ndhlovu, who leads the 250,000-member Bible Gospel Church, an evangelical movement.
Nighttime prayer meetings in his corrugated-roof chapel have been canceled. Bishop Ndhlovu and others say they lave lost refrigerators, televisions and DVD players to the utility’s blackouts and surges.
Most of the township’s residents have adapted by turning away from their stoves and instead cooking outdoors, village-style, with homemade charcoal. “Charcoal is going very fast, because they’ve found out that Zesco is cutting power unpredictably,” the bishop said.
On Lusaka’s eastern outskirts, Mr. Mwale, the farmer, also has laid in a stock of charcoal — not to cook, but to warm his stock of newborn chicks, which must be kept at a constant 90 degrees for the three weeks after hatching.
He said he worried about the environment. Charcoal production is a major contributor to deforestation in Zambia and nearby nations. But the alternative is to take a loss on his poultry business.
“When they make a loss, they just raise their tariff,” he said of Zesco. “When I make a loss, I have to make it up myself. Is that fair?”
Zambia’s plan, like the plans of dozens of other nations, is to build its way out of the power crunch. Zesco plans $1.2 billion in generating upgrades and new capacity, financed mostly by China and India. South Africa plans more than $20 billion in upgrades; Congo is contemplating a hydroelectric station that by itself would increase capacity outside South Africa by 50 to 75 percent.
The World Bank says its financing of power projects in sub-Saharan Africa is ballooning, from $250 million five years ago to $660 million last year to $1 billion in 2007.
But many plans remain just that. Issues like creditworthiness, lax regulation, domestic politics and the sheer difficulty of sending power over rundown grids to the customer make outside investments in power stations tougher than they appear, said Tore Horvei, the chief operating officer of CIC Energy Corporation, which is based in South Africa.
The best answer, most experts consulted agree, would be for nations to cooperate on regional power solutions. One or two large regional plants, they say, could supply power more cheaply and efficiently than dozens of smaller ones.
But while that may be logical, Mr. Horvei said, “it’s very challenging in practice to do so.”
“National pride and everything else comes in,” he added.
There is an alternative: saving energy. Namibia plans a wind farm on its southern coast, while in South Africa, Eskom has handed out five million fluorescent bulbs and 140,000 insulating blankets for water heaters, and has paid industrial customers to switch off equipment during periods of high demand.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Investigating Africa's Mysterious Cave Crocodiles

2007-07-27T20:12:00.000-07:00

Brady Barr with a crocodile in a cave system beneath the Ankarana nature reserve in Madagascar. The crocs that inhabit this cave may perhaps be a subspecies of the Nile Crocodile. Photograph copyright Brady Barr/NGT&F

Investigating Africa's Mysterious Cave Crocodiles
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
June 20, 2003

In a vast labyrinth of caves beneath the island of Madagascar's Ankarana nature reserve off the coast of Africa, scientists are studying cave-dwelling crocodiles—perhaps the only ones in the world. Are the behemoths that inhabit these caves a new subspecies? To find out, Brady Barr led a team of researchers into the dark depths of the caves. They emerged with tantalizing clues, a scientific first, and lots of unanswered questions.
Although they dwell reclusively within the cave system, the large reptiles were certainly no secret. In fact, before they could enter the caves Barr's team had to attend a local ceremony during which a woman became possessed by the spirit of the crocodile. The spirit granted permission for them to enter—but only after a suitable offering was made of honey, tobacco, and alcohol.
"The locals had always known that crocs were living in the caves," Barr told National Geographic News, "and the scientific community had known for a long time but no scientist had put their hands on one and nothing was known about the population."
Getting his hands on one of the cave crocs is exactly what Barr set out to do, accompanied by Spanish biologist Gerardo Garcia Herrero, longtime cameraman Eric Cochran, and a local guide named Angelin. They hoped to learn if the animals represented a separate subspecies of the Nile Crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus) that inhabit the rest of Madagascar.
Those reptiles have had a tough time in the areas near Ankarana and elsewhere on the island. Humans certainly aren't their primary prey, but enough people have been killed by crocs to instill a healthy local fear for the animals, which also prey on livestock. These factors, and Madagascar's generally poor economic conditions, mean that poaching is a real problem.
"Outside the caves, the crocs were almost wiped out by poaching," Barr said. "We saw it in action."
Inside the caves, however, populations appear to be thriving. But why here, and not elsewhere in the world, have crocs ventured into caves below the Earth? The answers to that question still await future intrepid researchers—but Barr has developed some ideas.
"I don't know why they are using the caves," he said. "Maybe it's a safe haven, maybe it's a refuge from the incredibly high daytime temperatures, and maybe they use them seasonally or as a food source because of all the bizarre animals living in the caves." The caves are home to all kinds of interesting wildlife, including blindfish, eels as thick as a mans thigh, bats, spiders, and scorpions. "Why are the crocs there?" Barr asked. "That's the million-dollar question."
A further riddle concerning the reptiles' cave existence is the fact that they are ectothermic, which means that they rely on their environment to moderate their body temperatures. That's why crocs typically bask in the sun to warm up and lie in water to cool down. The cave's internal thermometer is fairly constant and not entirely accommodating. "It's way too cool for them in the cave," Barr said, "yet they are making a living in there."
It's speculation awaiting further research, but the crocs may be adapting to the caves by adjusting their metabolism. "They can't digest prey if it's too cold," Barr explained. "It was pretty cool in there, so maybe they're not feeding in there at all. Crocs can go a year without a meal if they really have to, because they may eat 20 percent of their body mass in a single meal. Their metabolism might slow down so that they don't burn energy and they can use these caves as a refuge—[they're] not cognizant, but just in a case of survival of the fittest."
"The biggest, boldest, most intimidating crocs are always the first to be killed," Barr said, "and the survivors are the shy, reclusive animals. Maybe those left in the caves are the ones who, for whatever reason, didn't use the prime habitat. The caves weren't optimal habitat, but they might have turned out to be optimal because it's helped them to survive."
Scientific First Raises More Questions than Answers
Nile crocs can grow to 16 feet (5 meters) or more, and local tales tell of 20-foot (6-meter) crocs in the caves. Barr did not encounter any of the true giants, but he did find evidence that they exist within the 60 miles (97 kilometers) of underground rivers and passageways.
"I never saw any big crocs but there were giant footprints," he said. "There are lots of crocs using these caves and it was frustrating to know that there were a lot of them around that we couldn't see. In a lake, river or swamp they dive underwater, but here they dive underwater, and then go through a secret passage to another room on the other side of a wall. It was a 3-D environment, the ultimate maze, like an ant farm for crocs."
The difficulties and dangers, which included flooding, quicksand, and disorienting directions did not stop the team from achieving their goal—capturing the first ever cave croc and taking a tissue sample for genetic study.
"We did something that had never been done before," Barr explained to National Geographic News. "Yeah, I would have loved a 16-foot [5-meter] croc but the real achievement was that we allowed a genetic analysis to take place of the tissue samples of those crocs." While it's too early to tell, the preliminary results of those tests look intriguing.
"I'm not a geneticist," Barr said, "but we are hearing that the cave population was distinctly different genetically from other populations of Nile crocodiles in Madagascar. There's ongoing research on the tissue and DNA tests, and these results are just very preliminary, but since they appear to be different that's an extra added incentive to protect the caves where they dwell."
Barr added that he's eager to return and study the cave crocs, and that others are joining the effort as well. "What I saw has been passed on to the scientific community and I know that others are eager to do research in the caves. Hopefully someone can unravel the mystery of this bizarre subterranean population of crocs."

African mapping highlights risk of drought and flood

2007-07-27T20:05:00.000-07:00

Following the conclusion of the TIGER workshop 2006, ESA and UNESCO organised training sessions. ESA’s training focused on advanced optical data from Envisat’s MERIS instrument for use in detecting and monitoring land cover, vegetation index, etc., while UNESCO offered basic remote-sensing training for wetland management. Credits: ESA

African mapping highlights risk of drought and flood

Nell Barrie
27 July 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

The European Space Agency (ESA) has produced maps of soil moisture levels in southern Africa, and says they will help predict floods and droughts.
The maps of countries in the Southern African Development Community were published online last week (16 July) and will be available to governmental and independent organisations free of charge.
Conventional methods of measuring soil moisture are expensive and inaccurate as each measurement has to be done on-site. ESA's ENVISAT satellite measures soil moisture levels by emitting radar waves and measuring the energy bounced back by the soil.
High levels of soil moisture can lead to flooding and erosion, and low levels cause crops to wilt and die.
Annett Bartsch, project coordinator at Vienna University of Technology, Austria, explained how the maps are used. "Areas of saturated upper soil can be identified with ENVISAT," she said. These areas are those at risk of flooding.
The maps can also help predict droughts by looking at past trends in soil moisture. "Provided that a long enough reference database is available, anomalies can be identified and thus… drought risk areas identified," she told SciDev.Net.
In a changing climate, predicting when and where floods are likely to happen is becoming more and more important, according to Geoff Pegram, co-researcher on the project at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. "Although we cannot prevent floods, we can anticipate them and hopefully get people out of the way."
"I think it is really a breakthrough," said Wolfgang Wagner, professor of remote sensing at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria. He said that the satellite is the first to provide enough measurements over the right timescale to give detailed maps of soil moisture.
The maps have been produced as part of the SHARE project (Soil Moisture for Hydrometeorological Applications in the Southern African Development Community).
The SHARE project is part of ESA's TIGER initiative, which aims to assist African countries in managing water-related problems by using satellite data. The next stage of the initiative involves transferring leadership of the projects to African authorities.

Related SciDev.Net articles:
Africa's weather stations need 'major effort'

Related links:
University of KwaZulu-Natal

Africa, mostly offline, struggles to get on the Internet

2007-07-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

Africa, mostly offline, struggles to get on the Internet
By Ron Nixon
IHT
Sunday, July 22, 2007

On a muggy day in Kigali in 2003, some of the highest-ranking officials in the Rwandan government, including President Paul Kagame, flanked an American businessman, Greg Wyler, as he boldly described how he could help turn their small country into a hub of Internet activity.
Wyler, an executive based in Boston who made his fortune during the technology boom, said he would lace Rwanda with fiber optic cables, connecting schools, government institutions and homes with low-cost, high-speed Internet service.
Until that point, Wyler, 37, had never set foot in Africa - he was invited by a Rwandan government official he had met at a wedding. Wyler never expected to start a business there; he simply wanted to try to help the war-torn country.
Even so, Wyler's company, Terracom, was granted a contract to connect 300 schools to the Internet. Later, the company would buy 99 percent of the shares in Rwandatel, the national telecommunications company, for $20 million.
But after nearly four years, most of the benefits hailed by him and his company have failed to materialize, Rwandan officials say. "The bottom line is that he promised many things and didn't deliver," Albert Butare, the Rwandan telecommunications minister, said.
Wyler says he sees things differently and that he and the Rwandan officials will probably never agree on why their joint venture has been so slow to get off the ground. But Terracom's tale is more than a story about a business dispute in Rwanda. It is also emblematic of what can happen when good intentions run into the technical, political and business realities of Africa.
Attempts to bring affordable high-speed Internet service to the masses have made little headway on the continent. Less than 4 percent of the African population is connected to the Web. Most subscribers are in North African countries and the republic of South Africa.
A lack of infrastructure is the biggest problem. In many countries, years of civil conflict destroyed communications networks, and continuing political instability deters governments or companies from investing in new systems.
E-mail messages and phone calls sent from some African countries have to be routed through Britain, or even the United States, increasing expenses and delivery times. About 75 percent of African Internet traffic is routed this way and costs African countries billions of extra dollars each year that they would not incur if their infrastructure was up to date.
"Most African governments haven't paid much attention to their infrastructure," said Vincent Oria, an associate professor of computer science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who is from the Ivory Coast. "In places where hunger, AIDS and poverty are rampant, they didn't see it as critical until now."
Rwandan officials were especially interested in wiring schools, seeing information technology as crucial to modernizing the rural economy.
But as of mid-July, only one-third of the 300 schools covered in Terracom's contract had high-speed Internet service. All 300 were supposed to have been connected by 2006.
Overall, less than 1 percent of the population is connected to the Internet. Rwandan officials say Terracom seems more interested in tapping the more lucrative cellphone market than in being an Internet service provider.
In November, Wyler stepped down as chief executive of Terracom, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. He still serves on the board.
Wyler said by telephone from his Boston home that he would not address the government's criticism. He said he did not want to be quoted as saying anything negative. But he said there were some things he had not anticipated, particularly the technical challenges of linking the Rwandan Internet network to the rest of the world.
"Terracom has done everything it can, " he said. "Because of the technical challenges, the Internet service is as good as it's going to get. But given what we started from, I still think we have accomplished a lot. In the beginning there were a few people with Internet service. Now there are thousands."
The Rwandan government had hoped that the number of Web surfers would be much higher by now. Rwanda has little industry, and its infrastructure is still being rebuilt after the 1994 genocide in which 800,000 to a million people were killed.
"We have almost no natural resources and no seaports in Rwanda, which leaves us only with trying to become a knowledge-based society," said Romain Murenzi, the Rwandan minister of science, technology and scientific research.
Wyler said he had not been involved in Terracom for nearly 10 months and could not comment on its current operations.
Christopher Lundh, Terracom's new chief executive and a former executive of Gateway Communications in London, has worked in several African countries. He now lives and works full time in Rwanda, and many government officials say Terracom's performance has improved under his leadership.
Lundh said there were problems with the company's operations in the past but that the Rwandan government was responsible for some of the delays.
"We would get to schools that don't even have electricity or computers," he said. "That is not our fault."
In addition, he said that many of the complaints about the company concerned things beyond its ability to control. Getting adequate bandwidth remains a constant challenge. Like most telecommunications companies in eastern Africa, Terracom depends on satellites for Internet service. Satellite service is much slower than cable because of delays in the signals. Satellites also provide less bandwidth than cable.
Adding to the problem is that most of the satellites serving Africa were launched nearly 20 years ago and are aging or going out of commission. A satellite set to go into service last year blew up on the launching pad. Power is also an issue, as intermittent power failures in Rwanda hamper efforts to provide a steady electricity source.
Despite these limitations and earlier setbacks, Lundh said Terracom was moving ahead with plans to give Rwanda the most advanced Internet infrastructure in Africa. A nationwide wireless connection should begin operating near year-end, he said.

Magnus K. Mazimpaka contributed reporting from Rwanda.

Cannabis doubles chance of psychosis

2007-07-27T19:27:00.000-07:00

Cannabis doubles chance of psychosis

Bellinda Kontominas Medical Reporter
July 28, 2007
smh.com.au

PEOPLE who smoke cannabis regularly more than double their risk of developing psychotic illness later in life, according to research that calls for increased awareness of the dangers of the drug.
Researchers found that among all cannabis users, including social and habitual users, the lifetime risk of psychotic illness increased by 41 per cent.
More than one third of Australians over 14 years of age have smoked cannabis, or marijuana, at least once in their life and one in 20 have used the drug in the past week, according to figures on drug use from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Of the 1.8 million Australians who have recently used cannabis, one in six use it every day and a further one in five use it every week.
The study found the increased risk for psychotic illness was relative to the dose. Those who smoked cannabis regularly were at an increased risk of between 50 per cent and 200 per cent of developing schizophrenia and disorders with symptoms including hallucinations or delusions.
This also suggested that stopping cannabis use would decrease the risk, said the lead author, Dr Stanley Zammit, a psychiatrist from Cardiff University and Bristol University in Britain.
Previous studies have had trouble unravelling the link between cannabis use and psychotic disorder. Smoking the drug could be a symptom of psychotic illness, rather than a cause, the research found. The researchers re-examined data from 35 international studies on psychotic illness and cannabis use involving more than 100,000 participants. Factors such as pre-existing mental illness, the use of other illicit drugs, IQ and social class were filtered out of the sample to try to isolate the effect of cannabis.
Dr Zammit said there was now sufficient evidence to warn young people that using cannabis could increase their risk of developing psychotic illness later in life, despite a lack of evidence to confirm a cause-and-effect relationship.
The risk was relatively low but significant, he said.
One in 100 people had a chance of developing severe psychotic illness. That risk increased to 1.4 in 100 if they had ever smoked cannabis.
In an accompanying comment, Merete Nordentoft and Carsten Hjorthoej, of the department of Psychiatry at the Copenhagen University Hospital, said cannabis had long been considered a harmless drug and its potential long-term effects on psychosis had been overlooked. "There is a need to warn the public of these dangers, as well as establish treatment to help young, frequent cannabis users," they wrote.
Cannabis accounted for 45 per cent of hospital admissions due to drug-induced psychosis in 2003-04, according to a study published in the Australian Medical Journal. John Saunders, Professor of Alcohol and Drug studies at the University of Queensland, said the latest research strengthened the need for increased education on the dangers of cannabis.

Why should we care about cannabis?

Approximately 4 per cent of the world's adults-some 162 million people-use cannabis every year, making it the world's most widely used illicit drug. In spite of this, many basic facts about cannabis remain obscure.

By Ted Leggett

The 2006 UNODC World Drug Report devotes special attention to cannabis, arguing that the world should take this drug more seriously. Of particular concern are the growth in the drug's potency and indications that cannabis-related mental health risks may have been underestimated.

As cannabis can be grown in virtually any country, unlike most other illicit drugs, it is difficult to establish the exact origin of the world's supply. Very few Governments can give an accurate estimate of the number of hectares grown in their own countries, and the amount of cannabis these fields produce can vary widely. Furthermore, cannabis is increasingly grown indoors in the developed nations, which means that users can, and do, grow their own.

Our understanding of cannabis consumption patterns is little better. In most markets, cannabis is relatively cheap, and unlike other drugs, it is not sold by precise weight. Surveys indicate that most users get the drug for free or buy it through friends and acquaintances. Casual users generally consume cannabis in groups, and only a small amount of the drug is necessary to produce the desired high. Most users would find it difficult to say how much cannabis they actually smoke.

Diverse global markets

Cannabis is the dominant illicit drug in every region of the world and its use is growing almost everywhere. While not every cannabis market is transnational, in the sense that production occurs in a different country from consumption, the problem is truly international.

In economic terms, North America is the largest cannabis-consuming region. Mexico alone is responsible for more than one-third of global herbal cannabis seizures. In spite of an aggressive eradication campaign, the country still supplies a large share of the massive United States market. High-potency indoor cannabis has come to dominate the Canadian market, which is another source of significant imports in the US.

USE OF CANNABIS 2003-2004 (or latest year available)
Source: World Drug Report 2006

(click on image to enlarge)

Africa comes second in the world in terms of herbal cannabis seizures, which is remarkable given the continent's limited law enforcement capacity. Africa is also home to the world's leading producer of cannabis resin, Morocco. Southern, West and East Africa all contain large cannabis-producing countries, but there is little specific data available about the scale of cultivation.

It is difficult to reconcile what is known about cannabis production in Central and South America with the available information on the extent of cannabis use in the region. Although surveys indicate a relatively small user population, large cannabis seizures take place regularly. Moreover, with the exception of Colombia, no country is known to be a major exporter beyond the region. Paraguay is reportedly the main source of the cannabis consumed in the Southern Cone and Brazil, and may be the single largest producer of herbal cannabis in the world.

The risk of becoming dependent on cannabis is higher
than most casual users suspect. Around 9 per cent
of those who try cannabis are unable to stop using it.

Oceania has the world's highest annual usage levels, including those of Papua New Guinea, where an estimated 30 per cent of the adult population consumes the drug annually. Most countries in this region appear to be self-sufficient in their cannabis supply.

While much of Europe still prefers cannabis resin to herbal cannabis, this appears to be changing in many important markets. The Netherlands, which has been in the vanguard of the indoor cannabis revolution, is named as an important supplier to at least 20 other countries. In Eastern Europe, Albania plays a similar role. Most of the cannabis resin in Europe continues to be imported from Morocco, however.

Per capita usage levels are low in Asia, but because of its large population, the continent is home to the largest absolute number of cannabis users, an estimated one-third of the global total. A national survey has shown that 2.3 million people are dependent on cannabis in India alone. Central Asia is home to the world's largest wild cannabis fields, but it remains unclear to what extent these crops are harvested.

(click on image to enlarge)

Potency growth and mental health implications

In recent years, the potency of sinsemilla cannabis, made from the unfertilized buds of the female plant, has doubled, according to studies done in key markets such as the Netherlands, the United States and Canada. This is not surprising as cannabis breeders in these countries have been hard at work creating a more potent drug since the 1970s. And while sinsemilla is currently less widespread than herbal cannabis (marijuana) and cannabis resin (hashish), the market for high-potency, indoor-produced sinsemilla appears to be growing in many key consumption countries.

Recent research indicates that cannabis consumption may have greater mental health implications than previously believed. These two trends may in fact be related: as high-potency cannabis grows in popularity, the risks of consumption may become more immediate.

While more research is required to determine the impact of the 'new,' more potent cannabis, there has been an increase in the number of people complaining of 'unexpected effects' from consuming cannabis in emergency rooms in the United States. Demand for treatment for cannabis-related problems in the US and Europe has increased as well.

TYPES OF CANNABIS

Several drug types can be produced from the cannabis plant.
They fall into three main categories:

Herbal cannabis-the leaves and flowers of the plant.
Also known as marijuana, ganja and other street names.
Cannabis resin-the pressed secretions of the plant,
commonly referred to as hashish in Western countries
and charas in India.
Cannabis oil.

Finally, the risk of becoming dependent on cannabis is higher than most casual users suspect. Around 9 per cent of those who try cannabis are unable to stop using it. Even when used only once, cannabis can produce panic attacks, paranoia, psychotic symptoms and other negative acute effects. The drug may also precipitate psychosis in vulnerable individuals and aggravate symptoms in diagnosed schizophrenics.

Cannabis is the dominant illicit drug in every region of the world,
and its use is growing almost everywhere.

Ted Leggett is an expert in the Research and Analysis Section of UNODC.

For more information, please consult the World Drug Report at www.unodc.org/world_drug_report.html

HIV Microbicide Trial Hits Snag

2007-07-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

Princess Royal presents award to CONRAD for Microbicide Research.

HIV Microbicide Trial Hits Snag

New Vision (Kampala)
NEWS
26 July 2007
Posted to the web 27 July 2007

By Carol Natukunda and Harriette Onyalla
Kampala

UGANDA'S trials of a microbicide gel designed to prevent the transmission of HIV in women have hit a deadlock after research revealed that women who used it got infected with the virus at a higher rate than those who did not utilise it.
Microbicides are substances that a woman can apply in her vagina before having sexual intercourse. They may include gels or creams. Cellulose sulphate, a microbicide gel, was tested on over 1,300 women in Uganda, Benin, India, South Africa and Burkina Faso.
During the study, the women were divided into two groups. One of them used a gel which contained cellulose sulphate, while the other group used a microbicide which did not contain the ingredient.
By the end of one year, a total of 34 women had been infected, 25 of whom were using the cellulose sulphate gel compared to 11 in the second group.
"We have decided to stop the trials, because we found that this is not actually helping our women. This is a very big blow to us and to our sponsors," said Prof. Florence Mirembe, a co-investigator.
She was yesterday releasing the findings of the study at the Microbicides Research Centre in Mulago Hospital.
"I want to clarify that the gel was not the cause of infection. Some women had more than three partners, yet many times, they did not use the gel," she asserted.
Mirembe explained that research on other Microbicides would continue in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
"It is often difficult for women to insist that men use condoms during sex, but they can apply the gel before sexual intercourse without the man knowing. While this has flopped, research will continue."
Dr. Bina Pandey of the Mulago Hospital obstetrician and gynaecology department noted that developing drugs is a difficult task.
"This is a reminder that drug development is not easy. It is a process, and there chances are that it may turn out negative. For instance, Panadol or Aspirin did not come out just like that."
The trials were sponsored by a US-based health research group, CONRAD.

Copyright © 2007 New Vision. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

Breakthrough in Study On Treating HIV Babies

2007-07-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

Breakthrough in Study On Treating HIV Babies

Business Day (Johannesburg)
NEWS
26 July 2007
Posted to the web 26 July 2007
By Tamar Kahn
Sydney

Treating babies infected with HIV as soon as they are diagnosed rather than waiting until they show signs of illness dramatically increases their chances of survival, according to a South African study presented yesterday at the 4th International AIDS Conference on HIV pathogenisis, treatment and prevention.
The research could change the way doctors around the world care for the half a million HIV-positive babies born each year.
Despite the government's free programme for preventing mother to child transmission of HIV, at least 50000 infected babies are born in SA each year.
Local treatment guidelines say doctors should wait until HIV positive infants fall sick, or their immune systems show signs of weakness before starting lifelong antiretroviral treatment.
That may well change in the wake of the Children With Early Antiretroviral Therapy (Cher) study, which found that babies who were treated before three months of age did better than infants whose treatment was delayed.
Researchers found there were 75% fewer deaths among babies who got treatment immediately compared with those whose treatment was deferred.
The continuing study, funded by the US National Institutes of Health, had enrolled 377 babies by early this year . Ten of the 252 babies who got early treatment died (4%), compared with 20 of the 125 babies who started treatment only when they fell sick (16%). The babies were given a three-drug cocktail of AZT, 3TC and Kaletra.
"This is an overwhelming difference in survival among infants treated early," said the study's co-chair Avi Violari, head of the pediatric division of the Perinatal HIV Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Scientists hoped that early treatment would slow progression of the disease, allowing babies' immature immune systems to develop, she said.
Once their immune systems were strong and could hold HIV at bay, the idea was to interrupt treatment and start again only when they showed signs of illness. This would hopefully allow children to avoid starting life-long medication at an early age, she said.
Dr Francois Venter, president of the Southern African HIV Clinicians' Society, said the study had broad implications for SA. "It may mean initiating treatment as soon as a diagnosis is made -- and that means SA has to get PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing into every clinic," he said.
Babies born to HIV-positive women cannot be diagnosed with the widely available anti-body tests usually used for adults and children .
The Cher findings came to light last month after a routine review by the trial's independent data and safety monitoring board. The results led the researchers to stop the "deferred treatment" group, and offer all the babies immediate treatment.
Study co-chair Mark Cotton said: "The prevention of mother to child transmission programme is failing. It's a national disgrace."
Copyright © 2007 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

Mugabe Duped By Mystic

2007-07-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

Robert Mugabe

Zimbabwe Duped By Mystic
washingtonpost.com
Mugabe Regime Hunts Spiritual Medium After Miracle Rock Comes Up Empty

Since taking control of Zimbabwe in 1980, President Robert Mugabe has piloted the once-prosperous south African nation into the kind of tailspin that makes "Leaving Las Vegas" appear upbeat. And yet despite a list of political and economic missteps longer than ODB's rap sheet, his latest move still seems admirably idiotic. With inflation hovering around 1.5 million percent and massive fuel shortages the de-facto dictator did what any sensible head of state would. According to a number of reports, he pinned his hopes on a witch doctor who claimed to be have a magic rock from which diesel fuel oozed.
Rotina Mavhunga the "traditional healer" in question, made headlines in April when she announced the discovery of "hundreds of years" worth of the refined fuel within a boulder on top of a hilltop shrine in the Chinhoyi district. The 35-year-old and her followers explained that it was "a gift from ancestral spirits who saw their children suffering because of the shortages of fuel," (presumably they were recently departed spirits given their familiarity with petrol-chemical technology). In May, she officially opened "the diesel plant" with a ritual ceremony, but cautioned "that the diesel would dry up and disappear if other traditional leaders did not follow her orders or if it was exported," (anti-trade spirits?).
Acting quickly, the Mugabe government dispatched a task-force including three members of the Politburo to investigate this "manna from heaven" while a palpable frenzy of anticipation took hold of Zimbabwe. However those dreams were dashed this week with the news that the rocks were in fact barren of fuel! Reports followed that 50 disciples of Mavhunga were under arrest for failing to perform what experts would call a miracle. Though not formally charged yet, Mavhunga is on the run and Secretary for Information and Publicity Cde Nathan Shamuyarira called her actions "some form of a gimmick."
Mr. Wilbert Guahavanhu, of Zimbabwe's embassy press office downplayed the story, informing me that it was "silliness" to believe a refined fuel could come out of rocks. "Anyone who has studied science knows such things are impossible," he said. Given that, I ask him on two separate occasions why his government had dispatched such a high level team of investigators to probe such crack-pot scheme. He explained at first that during the war of liberation, colonial powers may have used rocks to store diesel fuel. When we spoke again however he admitted it would be implausible to drill holes in boulders and fill them with fuel, and that the investigation was conducted because of photographs showing fuel coming out of the rocks and eye witness reports.
Clearly desperate times lead to desperation with people willing to grasp onto any shred of hope no matter how ridiculous. But given the track record it seems like the regime might have better chance of getting blood from a stone than turning around Zimbabwe's economy. Now, how long can it be before someone suggests that as solution for the nation's blood bank deficits?

By Emil Steiner | July 25, 2007

Egypt to streamline and strengthen science policy

2007-07-27T18:42:00.000-07:00

Hosni Mubarak

Egypt to streamline and strengthen science policy

afrol News / SciDev.Net, 24 July - Egypt's President, Hosni Mubarak, has authorised the creation of a higher council for science and technology and a science and technology development fund. The move is designed to restructure and strengthen Egypt's science and technology sector in the face of low productivity and criticisms that productive scientists are getting too little of an already small budget.
The new council - to be headed by the Prime Minister, and to include government ministers, scientists and representatives from the private sector - will coordinate science and technology policy and determine priority areas of research and development.
The new development fund, financially supported by the government, will finance projects approved by the council. And the Ministry of Science and Technology (formerly the Ministry of Scientific Research) will oversee the implementation of the council's decisions. Under the new plan, the Egyptian Academy for Scientific Research and Technology - formerly in charge of awarding grants - will become a think-tank.
Acting President Mohsen Mahmoud Shoukry told the science media 'SciDev.Net' the academy would now be able to focus its activities and act as an "expert house", advising on policy and science and technology development, among other areas.
The reforms will bring together the management and funding of science and technology in one place, instead of being scattered across many ministries, said Hassan Moawad Abdel Al, former president of Alexandria's Mubarak City for Scientific Research and Technology Applications.
This is aimed at strengthen and focus Egypt's efforts to develop science, he said, as well as encouraging Egypt's transformation into a knowledge-based society.
Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian scientist and director of the Centre for Remote Sensing at Boston University in the United States, said the performance of the new arrangement should be closely monitored to ensure that the objectives are being met on a long-term basis.
Mr El-Baz indicated that the new fund must be fair and transparent in awarding funding to projects, and that there also needs to be a sizable and sustained increase in the science and technology budget over the next few decades. The present budget barely covers salaries and infrastructure costs, he said.
He added that a marked increase in Egypt's science and technology ability "would have a very positive effect on the state of science and technology in the rest of the Arab region".

By Wagdy Sawahel

© afrol News / SciDev.Net

Chilled-out technology nets award for student

2007-07-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

Photo: Leeds student Emily Cummins, 19, won an award for inventing a sustainable fridge that could help people in remote African communities living without electricity.

Chilled-out technology nets award for student

Emily CumminsA sustainable fridge invented by first-year Leeds business management student Emily Cummins has helped her become the youngest winner at this year's Women of the Future Awards.
The awards celebrate the UK's next generation of female trailblazers in science and technology, arts, business and media.
Nineteen-year-old Emily won the Technology Woman of the Future category for inventing a fridge that cools its contents by using sunlight to evaporate water through sheep's wool, packed between two aluminium cylinders.
She found her inspiration during a recent gap year to Africa, where the fridge could keep life-sustaining medicines and food cool in the heat.
Emily says the fridge can already chill to as low as 7°C, but she'd like to make it even colder if possible.
"It's a really simple design that people could make themselves at home using everyday scrap materials, it wouldn't cost much at all."

Malaria: Effective Insecticide-repellent Synergy Against Mosquito Vectors

2007-07-27T18:29:00.000-07:00

Anopheles gambiae mosquito, a malaria vector, feeding. (Credit: CDC/James Gathany)

Malaria: Effective Insecticide-repellent Synergy Against Mosquito Vectors

Science Daily — The mosquitoes responsible for malaria transmission to humans belong to the Anopheles genus. One of the best known and most extensively studied is Anopheles gambiae, Africa's principal malaria vector. The protection recommended by the World Health Organization for people at risk from this devastating disease is the use of mosquito nets impregnated with pyrethroids, of low toxicity for mammals and highly active against mosquitoes.
Unfortunately, excessive and inappropriate use of this family of insecticide, particularly by spraying, has induced a disturbing rise in the number of resistant individuals in the Anopheles populations. The mosquito nets treated with pyrethroids can therefore lose their effectiveness. It is therefore essential to devise new control strategies against these malaria vectors that are resistant to these insecticides.

IRD researchers and their partners (1) obtained encouraging results by combining a non-pyrethroid insecticide, propoxur, and a repellent, N,N-diethyl toluamide (DEET). They based their investigations on previous work which had revealed a strong synergy between the two components. A combination of the two had proved to be much more effective than the straightforward addition of their respective properties. Mosquito nets soaked with this mixture had a lethal power and irritant effect that inhibited the mosquitoes from biting. Moreover, the mosquitoes are hit by a powerful paralysing action, known as the "knockdown" effect (3), on contact with the mixture. The mortality rates determined were satisfactory, in that they equalled those obtained by using deltamethrin, a commonly-used synthetic pyrethroid, highly effective against mosquitoes.

The researchers tested two mixtures composed of a non-pyrethroid insecticide of the organophosphate family, combined with either a standard repellent, DEET, or with a new-generation synthetic repellent. Both of these mixtures show a strong synergy in the resulting lethal and paralysing effects on the mosquitoes. However, only the association between the insecticide and the standard repellent produced a synergistic effect that inhibited the mosquito from taking its blood feed. A synergistic effect was also observed with regard to the treatment's residual efficacy which is several months longer than that of either agent applied alone. The advantage of the synergistic property of these combinations is enhanced by the fact that it significantly reduced the necessary effective doses against the mosquitoes (about 6 times that of the insecticide applied alone), to attain an efficacy equivalent to that of deltamethrin.

The nets treated with the two mixtures in the laboratory were subsequently tested in field trials, in the rice-growing area 40 km North of Bobo-Dioulasso, in Burkina Faso. This area has the specificity of harbouring two different forms of Anopheles gambiae. The first appears in May and June in the rice-fields. It shows no resistance to pyrethroids. The second emerges in September and October in puddles left by monsoon rains. These do show resistance to these insecticides. As expected, the usual pyrethroid-treated nets turned out to be effective only against non-resistant mosquitoes of the first population. Conversely, the nets pre-soaked with non-pyrethroid--repellent combinations proved excellent protection for the people of the local villages, whatever the population of mosquitoes present. Nevertheless, their residual efficacy (about 15 days) in real conditions did not match the researchers' expectations. The team consequently envisage working in conjunction with a company able to devise a system for encapsulating the mixture to prolong the residual life of treated mosquito nets.

The efficacy of these mixtures between organophosphates and repellents therefore opens up a new pathway towards controlling pyrethroid-resistant malaria vectors. In the long term, the researchers plan to test their method on mosquitoes resistant to two other types of insecticide utilized against malaria transmission: organophosphates and carbamates.

Notes:

(1)This research work was conducted at the IRD laboratory of Cotonou, Benin, with the participation of the Centre de Recherches Entomologiques de Cotonou (CREC), IRD's Laboratoire de Lutte contre les Insectes Nuisibles (LIN) in Montpellier, and the Institut de recherche en science de la santé, Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. (2)"Combination of a non-pyrethroid insecticide and a repellent: a new approach for controlling knockdown-resistant mosquitoes". Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg. 72(6), 2005, pp. 739-744 (3)"Knockdown" effect: action inducing paralysis of the muscles and nervous system, then death, of the insects. It is a characteristic effect of pyrethroid insecticides.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Institut de Recherche Pour le Développement.

Kenya creates 'poverty map'

2007-07-27T18:27:00.000-07:00

A poverty rate map from the Kenyan atlas

Kenya creates 'poverty map'
Zablon Odhiambo
1 June 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

[NAIROBI] A new atlas that draws attention to the relation between regional ecosystems and poverty was launched in Kenya this week (30 May).
Kenya will be able to identify regions with the greatest potential to reduce poverty and make it a priority development agenda, said Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace laureate, at the launch of the atlas.
The atlas, 'Nature's Benefits in Kenya', was developed with input from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and Department of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing, the International Livestock Research Institute and the World Resources Institute.
It provides statistical data on population density, food availability, biodiversity, weather (such as rainfall and temperatures), economic activities, household expenditure, livestock production and tourism development.
The atlas overlays these data — associated with a particular geographical location — with data on ecosystems.
"[This] yields a picture of how land, people and prosperity are related in Kenya," says Nobert Henninger, the senior associate in charge of the people and ecosystems programme at the World Resources Institute.
For example, the atlas reveals that abundance of water in a particular area does not guarantee a reduction in poverty. The same applies to tourism, with proximity to a tourist attraction providing no protection against poverty in the local population.
The atlas also includes analyses of how poverty could be linked to variables such as biodiversity, food availability, water and wood fuel. These links are useful to policy-makers worldwide, says Henninger.
"The lessons learned in Kenya can be usefully applied to other countries and regions," he told SciDev.Net.
The atlas will be used by people responsible for policy decisions to help them construct the best initiatives for tackling poverty reduction in specific locations.
"The atlas [will] improve the targeting of social expenditures and ecosystem interventions so that they reach areas of greatest need," write the authors of the atlas.
It will also inform natural-resource managers to develop strategies for sustainable utilisation of ecosystem resources — for example, in devising means to harness water in areas of abundance for use in areas where water is scarce.
The Kenyan government has already used the atlas to map the distribution of funds to alleviate poverty and to assess whether the different issues are being addressed fairly and successfully.

Related links:
Nature's Benefits in Kenya: An Atlas of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being

Modern Humans Lived in India Earlier Than Thought, Study Finds

2007-07-27T18:23:00.000-07:00

Modern Humans Lived in India Earlier Than Thought, Study Finds

By Chris Dolmetsch

July 5 (Bloomberg) -- Remains of stone tools found amid ash deposits in India from a volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago show that modern humans were living there earlier than scientists had previously thought, according to a study to be published in tomorrow's edition of the journal Science.
The Youngest Toba Tuff eruption in Indonesia, the largest volcanic event of the past 2 million years, blanketed an area from the South China Sea to the Arabian Sea with ash. Scientists had theorized that the blast produced a ``volcanic winter'' that lowered global temperatures, killing plants and animals and keeping humans from leaving Africa more than 60,000 years ago.
Study author Michael Petraglia, a University of Cambridge lecturer, and colleagues found tool fragments from soil both above and below a deposit of Toba Tuff ash, showing that humans were already in India at the time and survived the blast.
``This is some of the earliest evidence for the spread of modern humans out of Africa towards Australia,'' Petraglia said in a telephone interview from New York.
Petraglia and colleagues including Ravi Korisettar of Karnatak University in Dharwad, India, found 215 artifacts under a 2.55-meter (8.4-foot) thick ash deposit near Jwalapuram, in the Jurreru River valley of southern India, and 276 more relics above the layer.
Limestone, Quartzite Fragments
The study says the relics, made of limestone, quartzite, chert and other minerals, are likely from a variety of stone tools from the Indian Middle Paleolithic era that lasted from about 150,000 to 38,000 B.C.
Yet the characteristics of the artifacts are more typical of the African Middle Stone Age that ended about 40,000 years ago than they are of younger artifacts found elsewhere in Europe and Asia, the study says. That finding suggests that modern humans had migrated out of Africa and were already in southern India when the Toba Tuff eruption blanketed the region in ash.
``It will be very much debated,'' Petraglia said. ``There are people that are wedded to their theories and won't like it at all, and there are others who will welcome our study because this part of the world is very understudied.''
The research was funded by the Swindon, U.K.-based Natural Environment Research Council and its Arts and Humanities Research Council Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Dating Service, the Berkeley, California-based Leakey Foundation, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, the Australian Research Council and Queens College in Cambridge.

To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Dolmetsch in New York at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: July 5, 2007 14:00 EDT

A New Dawn for Science in Africa

2007-07-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

A New Dawn for Science in Africa
Mohamed H. A. Hassan*
Science 29 June 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5833, p. 1813
DOI: 10.1126/science.1146049

Editorial
When Africa's heads of state met in January for the 8th African Union summit, science, technology, and sustainable development were the main topics of discussion. This week they meet again, this time to explore the prospects for creating a "union government." A United States of Africa remains a far-off dream. But growing cross-national integration is not, and science and technology are poised to play a fundamental role in such efforts.
Several African nations have already increased their investment in science and technology. Rwanda has boosted expenditures on science to 1.6% of its gross domestic product (GDP), striving for 3% within the next 5 years. Research and development funding in South Africa is scheduled to grow to 1% of its GDP by 2009. Nigeria plans to invest $5 billion to create a national science foundation. Uganda, with a $30 million loan from the World Bank, will establish a fund for research initiatives to be selected through a nationwide merit-based competitive process. Zambia, with a $30 million loan from the African Development Bank, will offer postgraduate fellowships to train some 300 science and engineering students in its country. Increasing scientific and technological capabilities across the developing world, most notably in Brazil, China, and India, have opened unprecedented opportunities for South-South cooperation, particularly for the science-poor countries of sub-Saharan Africa. China's $5 billion Development Fund for Africa is designed to help African nations meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goals through cooperative projects with China. Brazil's Pro-Africa Program supports scientific and technological capacity building in sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Angola and Mozambique. A team of Brazilian and Indian experts is now in Senegal to help forge a biofuels industry there. And India, Brazil, and South Africa have launched a tripartite initiative to finance joint problem-solving projects in which science and technology will play a key role.
There is also increasing interest among developed countries to support scientific and technological capacity building in low-income countries, especially in Africa. The challenge lies in turning this heartfelt interest into sustainable initiatives and real progress. In 2005, G8 heads of state pledged $5 billion to rebuild Africa's universities and $3 billion to establish centers of scientific excellence in Africa. Only a small fraction of the commitment has been fulfilled. Angela Merkel, current head of the G8, has made African development a major issue of her tenure, but the focus thus far has been on climate change and missile defense systems.
This week's African Union summit offers another opportunity for progress, but only if attention is placed on one of the most critical elements for success: homegrown science. Every African nation must educate and support a new generation of problem-solving scientists. This means reforming educational systems and building world-class research universities and centers of excellence. Scientific expertise alone, however, cannot solve the challenges of poverty and development, which are as much social and political as they are scientific and technical. Broad channels of communication must be created between these two communities, enabling them to work together, exchange ideas, and learn from one another.
Lasting success will ultimately be determined not only by aid from abroad, but by strong and enduring partnerships in science and technology between Africa and the rest of the world. Joint initiatives with developing countries, based on shared experiences and challenges, could spur programs and policies leading to rapid progress in science-based development. Sub-Saharan Africa welcomes the desire of developed countries to assist. But commitments made by Africa's friends must be tailored to Africa's overall plans for economic growth and fulfilled in a reasonable time.
It's been a long time coming, but Africa could be approaching a new dawn for building effective policies for science-based development. While not likely to attract the same public notice as calls for a United States of Africa, these efforts may nevertheless help bring the continent closer together. More importantly, they could make a real difference in the lives of Africa's most impoverished citizens.
10.1126/science.1146049

Mohamed H. A. Hassan is executive director of TWAS, The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, and president of the African Academy of Sciences.

Homegrown science creates sense of community

*Testing water in a treatment facility in South Africa
29 June 2007

Mohamed H. A. Hassan, president of the African Academy of Sciences, argues in this Science editorial that collaboration in science and technology (S&T) will help foster cross-national integration.
African nations are already stepping up their own expenditure in S&T. Other developing countries such as Brazil, China and India are also opening up channels for South-South cooperation, using money and scientists to build capacity in science-poor African states.
Developed countries too are interested in supporting S&T capacity building on the continent. The challenge, Hassan says, is turning interest and pledges into sustainable initiatives and real progress, tailored to Africa's own development plans.
This week's (25 June) African Union summit is an opportunity for progress, asserts Hassan — but only if home-grown science is prioritised. Every African nation should use education reforms to support a new generation of scientists.
And science must recognise that it cannot solve the problems of poverty and development alone — broad channels of communication are needed between the S&T and social and political communities so they can learn from one another.
Such measures may not attract the same public attention as calls for a United States of Africa, but they can help bring the continent closer together, concludes Hassan.

Related SciDev.Net articles:
Regional cooperation 'key to development'
Knowledge for natural resources: a fair exchange?
Fostering technological capabilities in sub-Saharan Africa

Technology predicts African food shortages

2007-07-27T18:11:00.000-07:00

Technology predicts African food shortages

Nell Barrie
27 July 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

Satellite data could soon help predict and manage food shortages in Africa, with the help of a new model developed by NASA.
Molly Brown, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, has developed a model that combines remotely-sensed crop data with grain prices to predict changes in food prices in the future.
"We hope that the model can directly benefit small and medium sized traders and businessmen in the region once it becomes operational," Brown told SciDev.Net.
Brown tested the model on historical data from West Africa. NASA satellites sense the 'greenness' of vegetation, giving an idea of the amount of rainfall and hence the amount of grain the crops will produce.
These satellite measurements are then combined with spatial maps of millet prices, and coupled with estimates of vegetation data one to four months in the future.
The software is still being developed, but Brown hopes to produce a portable version of the model in the next few years.
Brown says she was inspired to create the new method while working in Niger, a region often affected by drought. Farmers here can grow only a few drought-resistant crops, and so when a food crisis happens they are forced to buy grain at very high prices.
"With this new study, for the first time we can leverage satellite observations of crop production to create a more accurate price model that will help humanitarian aid organisations and other decision makers predict how much food will be available and what its cost will be as a result," said Brown.
The idea is that aid agencies can then provide the right amounts of food to keep prices steady.
But Vanessa Rubin, Africa hunger advisor for CARE International UK, an aid agency working in Niger, says it is important to recognise that food production is not the only factor determining market prices.
"The closure of regional trade borders in 2005 in Niger is commonly cited as a major contributing factor to the wild market fluctuations that escalated grain prices out of the reach of millions," she told SciDev.Net.
She also says that stable markets do not necessarily guarantee food security.
"Production and market prices are just one piece of the drought puzzle; drought is just one piece of the food security puzzle; and food security is just one piece of the vulnerability puzzle."
The NASA study will be published early next year in the journal Land Economics.

Mapping can save forests, say African scientists

2007-07-27T17:58:00.000-07:00

Deforestation can be tracked by satellite images

Mapping can save forests, say African scientists

Zablon Odhiambo
27 July 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

RELATED:
African Logging Decimating Pristine Forests, Report Warns

Mapping and remote sensing technology can be used by developing countries to conserve forests and biodiversity, say experts.
Such 'geospatial' technology is helping African countries to conserve forests and identify areas in need of intervention, said scientists at a meeting organised by the Society for Conservation GIS-Kenya in Nairobi, Kenya, last week (20 July).
Geospatial technologies include global positioning systems (GPS) for capturing basic location data, remote sensing, which uses aerial photography, and geographic information systems (GIS), which analyse data to create maps.
GIS expert Peter Ndunda, is currently running a mapping program with the nongovernmental Green Belt Movement in the Mount Kenya and Aberdares forests. He told SciDev.Net that his project has mapped these regions to determine loss in forest cover over time.
"Having identified forested and non-forested areas, we have mapped out areas that need urgent intervention. With support from local communities, we have planted trees which we are monitoring using high-resolution images to determine their survival," he said.
According to Ndunda, the project has resulted in increased forest cover, improved soil quality and better management of water resources. Planting trees in higher ground, from which water flows down to rivers, helps stabilise the local climate and regulate water flows.
He added that by rehabilitating the forests, ecosystems have been preserved. And involving local communities in forest management has provided them with an income, along with education in the sustainable use of watersheds.
Ndunda says the project will soon be extended to the Cherengany, Mau and Mount Elgon forests in Kenya, as well as to the Congo Basin forest.
Forest communities themselves are also using technology to monitor their forest. In anticipation of payments under the Clean Development Mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol, communities near the Aberdares and Mount Kenya forests are assessing the number, species and width of trees, along with the amount of canopy cover, to determine the amount of carbon sequestered.
The Kenya-based Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development is involved in a project with the United Nations Environment Programme using GPS to map forested and non-forested areas in the Mount Kenya forest area.
They are mapping vegetation, forest cover, infrastructure and tourist attractions to enhance sustainable use of forest resources and for use in community education.
The National Museums of Kenya are also using geospatial technology to monitor bird biodiversity and elsewhere in Africa, national park services in Mauritania and Tanzania are using satellite imaging to examine crop-damaging locust population levels.

This map shows the location of the Virunga Conservation area within Africa, and highlights an area in the "Mikeno" sector of the park where rapid deforestation occurred in June 2004. (Credit: Nadine Laporte/ Tiffany Lin)

Date: January 19, 2005

Gorillas In The Midst Of Extinction

Science Daily — Satellites provide a bird's eye view of planet Earth, and the space-based vantage can be extremely useful to people interested in viewing out-of-the-way places. Conservationists, for example, must monitor far-flung areas in need of protection. Wars, poverty, remoteness, lack of government involvement, and uncertainty over the best places and ways to focus limited resources can all hinder conservation efforts. Now, NASA satellite imagery is giving scientists and conservationists some of the tools they need to get valuable information on land cover and land use changes in wild areas.
NASA satellite imagery helps scientists better understand land changes in the Virunga Conservation Area which covers the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Mgahinga Gorilla National Park in Uganda and the Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda. In Swahili, the word virunga means volcano. The Virunga Conservation Area offers habitat to 380 of the world's 700 remaining mountain gorillas. The other 320 gorillas reside in the nearby Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda.
In a single week in June of 2004, farmers created pasture for their cattle by clearing 15 square kilometers (5.8 square miles), or 6 percent, of the 264-square kilometers (102 square miles) of mountain gorilla habitat in the southern "Mikeno" sector of Virunga National Park. Because mountain gorilla numbers had increased by close to 56 individuals over the last 10 years, the recent loss of land was a considerable step backward.
In a race against time for the mountain gorillas and many other species indigenous to these natural areas, scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) in Woods Hole, MA, are working with NASA and conservationists in the Virunga National Park to stave off further destruction of the lands.
"Remote sensing is the only tool that we have to efficiently monitor these remote parks," says Nadine Laporte, head of the Africa Program at WHRC. "Satellite imagery allows park managers to update park property boundaries, map forest habitat, and look at encroachment of the park by comparing images from two different dates."
Laporte is working with conservation groups to create a monitoring system that combines NASA satellite imagery with aerial flight and field surveys, all of which can be relayed to and coordinated with local park rangers on the ground. Currently, park workers are building a three-foot wall along key park borders to keep out cattle and people seeking to alter the land.
NASA now provides free Landsat images, which researchers and rangers are using as base maps for field surveys. "We still have to integrate remote sensing with traditional surveys on the ground," said Laporte. "They really complement each other. The rate of change is so rapid that we need satellite imagery in a timely fashion to address the problems in the area. Aerial imagery is too expensive."
Since gorilla habitat crosses three different countries, satellite imagery provides data and perspectives that are not bound by political borders. The satellite images can create a convenient method for exchanging information among the three parks that make up the Virunga Conservation Area.
Along with mapping and monitoring changes in forest cover, a time-sensitive series of images can allow researchers to estimate rates and patterns of deforestation in and around protected areas. These patterns are also studied in relation to trends in human migration.
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The Africa Program at the Woods Hole Research Center is funded though NASA's Land Cover Land Use Change program, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Double-up measles vaccine for HIV kids, says study

2007-07-27T17:53:00.000-07:00

The measles virus of the Paramyxovirinae family. Photo Credit: Cynthia Goldsmith

Double-up measles vaccine for HIV kids, says study
Michael Malakata
25 July 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

[LUSAKA] Children infected with HIV may require repeated measles vaccination to gain adequate protection, according to new research.
The study in Zambia — published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases next week (1 August) — found that compared with healthy children, HIV-infected children were less able to maintain protective levels of antibodies against measles after an initial vaccination.
The results suggest that a second vaccination is important in regions of high HIV prevalence to protect HIV-infected children, maintain 'herd' or group immunity and to bolster measles elimination efforts.
Measles, caused by a virus of the Paramyxovirinae family, remains an important cause of child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, says William Moss, lead author of the study and an associate professor at the US-based Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University.
According to the researchers, the measles virus only needs a small number of susceptible children to cause outbreaks, so it is important that as many children as possible have immunity to the virus.
The researchers studied the immune response to the measles vaccine in 696 healthy and HIV-infected children, aged 2-8 months.
Within six months of measles vaccination at nine months of age, 88 per cent of HIV-infected children developed protective antibody levels, as did 94 per cent of children who did not have HIV.
But after a further 27 months, only half of the surviving HIV-infected children maintained antibody levels high enough to protect against measles, versus almost 90 per cent of healthy children.
The results of the study show that sufficient resources must be invested in maintaining high levels of population immunity against measles in regions of high HIV prevalence, says Moss.
The World Health Organization already recommends vaccinating children for measles a second time, either through repeated immunisation campaigns or a routine second dose delivered through the primary healthcare system.
But despite recent progress in measles control, obstacles to eliminating the disease exist, including insufficient resources and lack of political will.
"The study is important because it shows the impact HIV has on the nation and sends a message to the government to double its effort on measles vaccination," Chansa Nkonga Mwangilwa, from Zambia's University Teaching Hospital and co-author of the study told SciDev.Net.
The authors recommend that additional research be conducted to determine the duration of measles immunity in HIV-infected children who are receiving antiretroviral therapy, and their response to revaccination against measles.

LINK:
Link to full paper in the Journal of Infectious Diseases
Reference: Journal of Infectious Diseases 196, 347 (2007)

Gaps in HIV/TB research spell 'catastrophe'

2007-07-27T17:51:00.000-07:00

*A Guinean man, Conakry, who has both HIV and TB

Gaps in HIV/TB research spell 'catastrophe'
T. V. Padma
24 July 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

[SYDNEY] Experts have warned of an impending catastrophe if critical gaps in the research and management of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis are not urgently closed.
Tuberculosis (TB) kills about two million people every year, and is the leading cause of death in people with AIDS.
Today (24 July), at an international conference on HIV in Sydney, Australia, experts said poor countries are bearing the brunt of the twin epidemics.
TB cases have been rising in sub-Saharan Africa since 1990, said Stephen Lawn, a researcher from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
The areas worst hit by both infections are southern and eastern Africa, he said, where half of all people newly diagnosed with TB already have HIV.
Lawn says studies in Botswana show the current WHO-approved TB treatment strategy called DOTS (Direct Observation and Treatment – Short Course) has not reduced TB in HIV-infected people. "DOTS alone does not work," he said.
And both epidemics are being made worse by the emergence of extremely drug-resistant TB. Gerard Friedland, director of the AIDS Care Programme at Yale University, said that in areas with high rates of TB and HIV infection, drug-resistant TB threatens the success of both the World Health Organization's (WHO) Stop TB initiative, and HIV programmes rolling out antiretroviral drugs.
Speakers at the sessions highlighted areas critically in need of research, including measuring more accurately the burden and impact of TB in HIV-infected people.
A 2006 survey by the WHO found that most countries facing an HIV epidemic are not reporting the increase in TB cases, and that HIV-infected people are not benefiting from access to TB screening and subsequent treatment services.
Research into finding new diagnostic, screening and intervention tools is also needed. Doctors in most parts of the world are using a diagnostic test that is over a century old, and whose sensitivity in patients with both TB and HIV infections is just 20 per cent. This is "wholly inadequate", says Lawn.
Research is also needed to find out what anti-HIV treatment regime is most suitable for people infected with TB. Likewise, information on how best to treat TB infection in people with HIV is lacking.

Trials underway for 'essential' new TB vaccine
Contact: Craig Brierley
c.brierley@wellcome.ac.uk
44-207-611-7329
Wellcome Trust

Clinical trials are underway with the first new vaccine against TB in over 80 years. If successful, the tests will have major implications for TB control and could lead to the development of a new vaccine ready to use within eight years.
The need to control TB has become more urgent with the resurgence of the disease in many parts of the world, including a 10% rise in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the emergence of multi-drug resistant strains.
TB, which is caused by the M. tuberculosis bacterium, is thought to kill two million people every year. The UK's Health Protection Agency recorded over 8,000 cases in 2005, including almost 3,500 in London alone.
The vaccine has been developed by Dr Helen McShane, a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Research Fellow, working with Professor Adrian Hill, a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow, both at the University of Oxford. Dr McShane has been awarded a Strategic Translational Award from Technology Transfer at the Wellcome Trust to develop and test the vaccine, which currently leads the field. Additional funding has been provided by the European Commission.
Currently, the only vaccine against it is the BCG vaccine, which is administered to infants throughout the developing world and most of the developed world. However, the vaccination is only thought to be protective in preventing severe forms of the disease and is not effective in adults. In addition, antibiotics to deal with infection must be administered over many months and are becoming increasingly ineffective as the bacteria develop resistance to the drugs available.
"In children, the current vaccine provides some protection against severe forms of the disease, but there is clearly room for improvement," explains Dr McShane. "The rise in the number of cases of multi-drug resistant forms of TB plus the increasing number of cases of TB in people living with HIV means a new vaccine is essential. We can no longer rely on antibiotics to treat the disease– we need to help the body's immune system prevent disease."
The vaccine currently under development by Dr McShane, known as MVA85A, works in tandem to the BCG, acting as a booster. It uses the 85A antigen, a protein found in all strains of TB, to boost the response of T cells already primed by the BCG vaccine. T cells are produced by the body's immune system to fight infection. This vaccine uses a virus as a delivery system for the protein and the results of the clinical trials to date show the highest T cell responses ever induced with a vaccine.
"This vaccine is safe and stimulates very high levels of the type of immune response we think we need to protect against TB. It is important for us to test whether or not this vaccine does work to stop people getting TB," says Dr McShane.
Following successful safety trials in The Gambia, the drug has now entered phase II trials in The Western Cape in South Africa, where the incidence of TB disease in infants is 1 in 100 (despite BCG vaccination). It has first been tested in HIV negative adult volunteers and these trials are now being stepped down into adolescents, and also into HIV infected adults. Once Dr McShane and her team are fully confident of the safety of the vaccine, and the strength of the immune response induced by the vaccine, it will be given to infants to test its efficacy. This is important as one of the target populations for a new TB vaccine is infants.
"The aim of our award is to enable Helen to demonstrate efficacy of the vaccine in a relevant population," says Dr Ted Bianco, Director of Technology Transfer at the Wellcome Trust, which is funding the trials. "There is a clear need for a new TB vaccine and so this work will have very significant healthcare implications both for the developed and developing worlds."
Commenting on the trials, Paul Sommerfeld, Chair of TB Alert, said:
"It is immensely important that a new, and potentially much more effective, vaccine against TB is going into second stage trials. The TB bacterium has for too long managed to stay a step ahead of human efforts as shown by the appearance, especially in HIV positive populations in Southern Africa, of a strain of tuberculosis resistant to virtually all known drugs against TB. To have a new tool for preventing TB would be a great step forward."