Wed, Oct 10 2007
ASPARAGUS TO TIGERLILY... COME IN, TIGERLILLY... OVER...
Plants Communicate to Warn Against Danger
LiveScience.com - Plants chatter amongst themselves to spread information, a lot like humans and other animals, new research suggests.
A unique internal network apparently allows greens to warn each other against predators and potential enemies.
Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form a set of connections to share information with each other through channels known as runners—horizontal stems that physically bond the plants like tubes or cables along the soil surface and underground. Though connected to vertical stems, runners eventually form new buds at the tips and ultimately form a network of plants.
“Network-like plants do not usually produce vertical stems but their stems lie flat on the ground and can hence be used as network infrastructure,” said researcher Josef Stuefer from the Radboud University in the Netherlands.
Stuefer and his team let loose caterpillars on white clover plants and watched them eat a single leaf on the network. Then a second set of caterpillars was allowed to choose between the damaged leaf—one that has been alerted to up its defense status—and leaves from an undamaged network.
Over the course of 20 trials, most or all of the approximately 15 caterpillars in each trial preferred the undamaged leaf to the leaf from a damaged network.
“The feeding caterpillars will be deterred and walk off to feed on other non-induced plants,” Stuefer told LiveScience. “[They] understand plant defense language very well as it is directed exactly to them.”
Here is how it works: If one of the network plants is attacked by caterpillars, the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal to upgrade their chemical and mechanical resistance—making their leaves hard to chew on and less desirable. This system works to spread the information amongst the plants and to ward off caterpillars.
“This is an early warning system, very much like in military defense, but then more effective: each member of the network can receive the external signal of impending herbivore danger and transmit it to the other members of the network,” Stuefer said. The attacked leaf is lost. However, the remaining leaves are protected against predators.
The study is detailed in this month’s issue of the journal Oecologia.
According to the researchers, the principle of network transfer of substances is known for very many species, including numerous invasive plants such as bracken and reed and commercial crop species such as bamboo.
The downside to these connections is that viruses often use the runner infrastructure to quickly spread. They enter the plant via the leaves, find their way into the stems and are then passively transported to all the network members where they cause new infections.
“Many pathogens are host specific, meaning that they can infect only very specific plant species,” Stuefer said. “Their main challenge for survival is to find a new host after one has been infected. Such specialists have an especially big advantage from network infections as the physical connection between plants enables them to find genetically identical copies of the original host.”
This, Stuefer explains, is comparable to a computer virus specialized to infect computers with a certain version of the Windows operating system. “Such a virus spreads very fast if all terminals on a network have the correct Windows version while its spread is slowed down if there is variability in the systems,” he said.Wed, Oct 10 2007
NU-HUH - DID NOT
You must do this because we want it... you big mean liberal activist judge you...
Bush administration to appeal Patriot Act ruling in Oregon case
PORTLAND, Ore. (Associated Press) -- The Bush administration has appealed a ruling by a federal judge in Oregon striking down key portions of the USA Patriot Act as unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled last month the act cannot be used to authorize secret searches and wiretapping to gather criminal evidence -- instead of intelligence gathering -- without violating the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.
The ruling came in a challenge to the act by Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer whose home and office were secretly searched and bugged after the FBI misidentified a fingerprint in the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people in 2004.
[Citizen terrorist Brandon Mayfield (drawing by mack mcfarland)]
Background: Judge rules for Mayfield in Patriot Act challenge
The FBI apologized to Mayfield for the mistake and the federal government settled his lawsuit for $2 million.
But Mayfield challenged the Patriot Act over the searches and surveillance, winning a sharply worded ruling by Aiken that criticized the government for "asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights ... "
Mayfield's attorney, Elden Rosenthal, was not immediately available for comment Wednesday.
The Justice Department, in a statement released after the ruling, said "we are concerned that if its reasoning were adopted and extended by other courts, it could have a significant impact on our ability to effectively share information in terrorism and other national security investigations."
The notice of appeal was filed Tuesday with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Wed, Oct 10 2007
FUEL FOR WATER WARS
Ethanol crops could threaten water supply
WASHINGTON Associated Press - When it comes to solving the fossil fuel crisis, it seems like every silver lining comes accompanied by a dark cloud.
As attention turns more and more toward using corn and other products to produce ethanol for fuel, experts warn that increased production of these crops could pose a threat to the nation's water supplies.
Both water quality and the availability of water could be threatened by sharply increasing crops such as corn, said Jerald L. Schnoor, professor of environmental engineering and co-director of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa.
Schnoor is chairman of a National Research Council panel that studied the potential impact of increased use of biofuels on water supplies. The committee report was released Wednesday.
A stated goal is to increase biofuel production about six times, to 35 billion gallons by 2017, Schnoor said.
"That would mean a lot more fertilizers and pesticides" running into rivers and flowing into the oceans, he said in a telephone interview.
Water available depends on where the crops are grown, he added. If it is an area needing irrigation, it takes 2,000 gallons of water for every bushel of corn: "That's a high amount of water."
And that's in addition to the secondary issue of how much water is needed by the factories that produce the ethanol, he said.
What is needed is a breakthrough in technology so that ethanol can be produced from cellulose such as grass, wood and sawdust, Schnoor said. "If we could do that it would be much better environmentally."
While Brazil is having success producing fuels from sugarcane, "we don't have much tropical land in the United States," Schnoor observed.
Also, he noted, Brazil uses waste from the cane to fuel its ethanol factories, while the U.S. uses natural gas or other fuels.
The report notes that water "is an increasingly precious resource used for many purposes including drinking and other municipal uses, hydropower, cooling thermoelectric plants, manufacturing, recreation, habitat for fish and wildlife and agriculture."
Supplies are already stressed in some areas of the country, including a large region where water is drawn from the underground Ogallala aquifer, which extends from west Texas up into South Dakota and Wyoming.
Growing biofuel crops requiring additional irrigation in areas with limited water supplies is a major concern, the report says.
The report suggests the possibility of irrigating crops for biofuel with wastewater that would not be suitable for food crops.
Other suggestions include developing more water-efficient crops and adopting agriculture practices that reduce the amount of chemical runoff.
The study was sponsored by the McKnight Foundation, Energy Foundation, National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and National Research Council Day Fund.
The National Research Council is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, an independent organization chartered by Congress to provide science, technology and health policy advice.
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On the Net:
National Research Council: http://www.nationalacademies.org/nrcWed, Oct 10 2007
HUMIDITY WAS WHY I LEFT THE SWAMP
... that, and the hurricanes were getting worse. In fact, Hurricane Wilma did a hard smack on the Fort Lauderdale house I sold, on the very morning after escrow on it closed (no, I didn't give the money back. Tuff shit.). FYI the bottom dropped out of that real estate bubble right after that winter. Tuff again.
Global warming may make humidity worse
WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The world isn't just getting hotter from man-made global warming, it's getting stickier. It really is the humidity. The amount of moisture in the air near the surface — the stuff that makes hot weather unbearable — increased 2.2 percent in just under three decades. And computer models show that the only explanation is man-made global warming, according to a study published in Thursday's journal Nature.
"This humidity change is an important contribution to heat stress in humans as a result of global warming," said Nathan Gillett of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, a co-author of the study.
Gillett studied changes in specific humidity, which is a measurement of total moisture in the air, between 1973-2002. Increases in humidity can be dangerous to people because it makes the body less efficient at cooling itself, said University of Miami health and climate researcher Laurence Kalkstein. He was not connected with the research.
Humidity increased over most of the globe, including the eastern United States, said study co-author Katharine Willett, a climate researcher at Yale University. However, a few regions, including the U.S. West, South Africa and parts of Australia were drier.
The finding isn't surprising to climate scientists. Physics dictates that warmer air can hold more moisture. But Gillett's study shows that the increase in humidity already is significant and can be attributed to gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
To show that this is man-made, Gillett ran computer models to simulate past climate conditions and studied what would happen to humidity if there were no man-made greenhouse gases. It didn't match reality.
He looked at what would happen from just man-made greenhouse gases. That didn't match either. Then he looked at the combination of natural conditions and greenhouse gases. The results were nearly identical to the year-by-year increases in humidity.
Gillett's study followed another last month that used the same technique to show that moisture above the world's oceans increased and that it bore the "fingerprint" of being caused by man-made global warming.
Climate scientists have now seen the man-made fingerprint of global warming on 10 different aspects of Earth's environment: surface temperatures, humidity, water vapor over the oceans, barometric pressure, total precipitation, wildfires, change in species of plants in animals, water run-off, temperatures in the upper atmosphere, and heat content in the world's oceans.
"This story does now fit together; there are now no loose ends," said Ben Santer, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and author of the September study on moisture above the oceans. "The message is pretty compelling that natural causes alone just can't cut it."
The studies make sense, said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who was not part of either team's research.
It will only feel worse in the future, Gillett said. Moisture in the air increases by about 6 percent with every degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), he said. Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's projections for temperature increases, that would mean a 12 to 24 percent increase in humidity by the year 2100.
"Although it might not be a lethal kind of thing, it's going to increase human discomfort," Willett said.
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On the Net:
Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature
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