Oops!

Last winter we attended the AAAS Meeting in Vancouver, BC and listened to the University of Texas’ Charles Groat downplay the effects of fracking. We posted a bit of that news in an article about increased fracking regulations in April.

This week, Science Insider reports that Groat neglected to mention that he serves on the board of (and receives quite a bit of funding from) an oil and gas company that conducts fracking. Sounds like a bit of a conflict of interest, doesn’t it?

Really Old Polar Bears

In April we also ran a story about polar bear evolution. Researchers, studying nuclear DNA, put polar bears’ origin to 600,000 years ago.

But a new study, published earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that polar bears evolved into a distinct species as many as 4-5 million years ago and did not recently descend from brown bears, despite shared genetic material.

The authors conclude that brown bears and polar bears interbred intermittently over the years. The New York Times compares this to humans in a funny, relatable way:

The progress of species formation, at least in this case, is a bit like a long, ambivalent divorce in which the two parties separate but occasionally fall back into bed even after the official decree.

Drought

Last week, we wrote about the devastating drought engulfing our country. This week Brandon Keim, writing in Wired, describes how this tragedy could reach beyond our borders and create global unrest.

Reporting on a recent study by the New England Complex Systems Institute, Keim says that commodity speculation (that food prices will rise due to the drought) may drive conflict in developing countries. The study reports that recent history demonstrates this trend:

During the last six years, high and fluctuating food prices have lead to widespread hunger and social unrest.

An article in Nature also explores this global impact.

Rain, rain…

Finally, earlier this summer, before drought was a harsh reality, we described mosquitoes amazing ability to fly through the rain. Now, a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, demonstrates that hummingbirds are equally as adept in heavy downpours.

According to the abstract, UC Berkeley’s Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez and Robert Dudley found that:

…birds hovering in heavy rain adopted more horizontal body and tail positions, and also increased wingbeat frequency substantially, while reducing stroke amplitude when compared with control conditions.

These dynamics can be applied to robots, say the authors. No surprise, given both scientists are part of Berkeley’s Integrative Biology department—where many bio-inspired robotic ideas come from.

Image: User:Mdf/Wikipedia

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

And it seems we’re not alone. In the prestigious journal Nature last week, reporter Janet Fang argues that if mosquitoes were removed from the global ecosystem, they wouldn’t be missed. But what about biodiversity, you say?

Well, first of all, Fang says, mosquitoes cause a lot of problems:

Malaria infects some 247 million people worldwide each year, and kills nearly one million. Mosquitoes cause a huge further medical and financial burden by spreading yellow fever, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, Chikungunya virus and West Nile virus. Then there’s the pest factor: they form swarms thick enough to asphyxiate caribou in Alaska and now, as their numbers reach a seasonal peak, their proboscises are plunged into human flesh across the Northern Hemisphere.

3,500 species of mosquitoes occupy almost every continent.  And interestingly, all the bloodsuckers from the several hundred species that feed on humans are female. Writer Sonia Shah, explained why on Fresh Air last week:

The itchy bites that we get are from the female mosquito trying to suck our blood, and the reason they are taking blood is, not for food for themselves, but to nourish their eggs.

Fish, reptiles, birds and bats feed on mosquitoes, but after speaking with scientists, Fang discovered that other insects could probably replace the mosquitoes in these creatures’ diets:

“If you’re expending energy,” says medical entomologist Janet McAllister of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Collins, Colorado, “are you going to eat the 22-ounce filet-mignon moth or the 6-ounce hamburger mosquito?”

With many options on the menu, it seems that most insect-eaters would not go hungry in a mosquito-free world.

Pollinating and decomposing plant matter are vital occupations of mosquitoes, and some plant species could be affected. But overall, Fang states that:

The romantic notion of every creature having a vital place in nature may not be enough to plead the mosquito’s case. It is the limitations of mosquito-killing methods, not the limitations of intent, that make a world without mosquitoes unlikely.

And so, while humans inadvertently drive beneficial species, from tuna to corals, to the edge of extinction, their best efforts can’t seriously threaten an insect with few redeeming features. “They don’t occupy an unassailable niche in the environment,” says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. “If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over.”

In the meantime, according to the New York Times, we’ll continue to hear the background music of “Whine-slap. Whine-slap.”