Antarctic Ice Breakups Reveal New Species

A potentially new species of shrimplike crustacean in the genus Epimeria was found near Elephant Island in Antarctica, scientists announced on Sunday.

The 1-inch-long (2.5-centimeter-long) creature was among nearly a thousand species collected during the first biological survey of a 3,860-square-mile (10,000-square-kilometer) section of the sea that was once covered by thick polar ice.

A 500-billion-ton ice shelf known as Larsen B disintegrated into the Weddell Sea in 2002—seven years after the nearby Larsen A ice shelf broke apart.Experts believe global warming triggered both events.

"The breakup of these ice shelves opened up huge, near pristine portions of the ocean floor, sealed off from above for at least 5,000 years—and possibly up to 12,000 years in the case of Larsen B," Julian Gutt, a marine ecologist at Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and chief expedition scientist, said in a media release.

"The results of our efforts," Gutt added, "will advance our ability to predict the future of our biosphere in a changing environment."

Terrorist Use of Google Earth Raises Security Fears

Detailed Google Earth images of British military bases were found in the homes of Iraqi insurgents, a London newspaper reported in January.

A British army official told the Daily Telegraph that the confiscated images showed Land Rovers, buildings, tents, and bathroom facilities inside the military compound in Basra, Iraq.

British officials reportedly complained to California-based Google, and the software firm replaced the images with pre-war data on its downloadable globe.

While the extent of insurgents' use of Google Earth is unknown, the news underscored what some experts see as a growing conflict between national security needs and the software's high-resolution, satellite view of the planet.

Ram Jakhu, a law professor at McGill University in Canada, called the move a "justified reaction, given that the issue of national security is of paramount importance."

Governments should have laws supporting freedom of information, including the right to snap and disseminate photos, he said. But there are limits.

"Google shouldn't spy for terrorists," Jakhu said.

Neither Google nor British military officials responded to interview requests.

Fine Resolution

Google Earth is made up of declassified satellite and aerial images that are stitched together to give users a 3-D view of the planet.

For many locations the images have a resolution as fine as 49 feet (15 meters) per pixel—enough to see individual streets, distinguish buildings, and even make out the color of automobiles.

hough sensitive locations such as the U.S. White House are intentionally blurred, the desktop software has spawned complaints from security experts.

Critics say it will facilitate terrorists wanting detailed looks at potential targets, such as nuclear power plants and government installations.

The software might also put expensive homes or jails at risk of being targeted by criminals, critics say.

"In practical terms, I think anything above 5-meter [16-foot] resolution should be freely shared—as long as it is two or three years old, as long as it's not real-time data," Jakhu said.

"Google [Earth] doesn't use real-time data, and it shouldn't."

Other security experts say that worries about Google images are overblown.

"The fact that the enemy is fascinated by such imagery does not demonstrate that they have gained some advantage from it," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

For example, Pike said, even without Google technology at their disposal, insurgents "do not seem to have displayed any difficulty in finding our troops in Iraq."

Pike also noted that Google Earth imagery lacks a date stamp, which puts an image's accuracy in doubt, and that military encampments are in a constant state of flux.

Perhaps even more telling is the fact that U.S. defense officials have found no reason to raise alarms over Google Earth images.

"The U.S. Defense Department evidently decided this imagery was not a significant security risk, since they have the legal authority to prevent its release," he said.

"This is not an administration that is a font of openness," he added, "but rather tends to err strongly in the direction of not releasing information."

International Laws

Still, several other governments and companies have made moves to require Google to limit the level of detail their images display.

When Google Earth was launched in 2005, officials at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization called on the company to pull images that showed its facility.

The officials later backtracked, saying that the images were dated and of sufficiently poor quality that they would not count as a safety risk.

Last year two Dutch lawmakers pushed for their government to address the virtual globe's potential threat to its nuclear reactors.

At the time Google spokesperson Catherine Betts told the Associated Press that the system's benefits "far outweigh any negatives from potential abuse."

"Google Earth is built from information that is already available from both commercial and public sources," Betts said. "The same information is available to anyone who flies over or drives by a piece of property."

The governments of France and India have also appealed to Google to limit access to some images because of security concerns.

Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz, who directs the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi, said there is "little if any directly applicable international law" governing the Google Earth controversy.

The portal pulls from several types of imagery, she said, which kicks in different legal standards.

"Air and space are two different legal regimes," she said. For example, the United Nations Remote Sensing Principles apply to international use of satellite imagery among UN members.

The principles state that sensing activities "shall not be conducted in a manner detrimental to the legitimate rights and interests of the sensed State," such as the use of imagery for economic espionage.

Aerial photography, however, is a matter of national and local law, she said.

"What we are seeing is not so much the application of specific laws as it is negotiations between the Web portals and the interested nations involved," Gabrynowicz said. "There has to be discussion about the potential threats and whether they are credible or not.

"I believe you should start with a presumption of openness," she continued. "That is, all things being equal, you presume data and images should be available. Then you go from there on a case by case basis."

Most Endangered Animals of '07 Announced

'Lunar Ark' Proposed in Case of Deadly Impact on Earth

The moon should be developed as a sanctuary for civilization in case of a cataclysmic cosmic impact, according to an international team of experts.

NASA already has blueprints to create a permanent lunar outpost by the 2020s.

But that plan should be expanded to include a way to preserve humanity's learning, culture, and technology if Earth is hit by a doomsday asteroid or comet, said Jim Burke of International Space University (ISU) in France.

Burke, once a project manager on some of the earliest American lunar landings, now heads an ISU study on surviving a collision with a near-Earth object.

An impact of the size that wiped out the dinosaurs hasn't happened since long before the rise of humans, he pointed out.

Yet scientists' expanding knowledge of asteroids and craters left throughout the solar system has created a consensus that Earth remains vulnerable to a civilization-crushing collision.

This calls for the creation of a space age Noah's ark, Burke said.

Lunar Ark

Humans are just beginning to send trinkets of technology and culture into space. NASA's recently launched Phoenix Mars Lander, for example, carries a mini-disc inscribed with stories, art, and music about Mars.

The Phoenix lander is a "precursor mission" in a decades-long project to transplant the essentials of humanity onto the moon and eventually Mars.

The International Space University team is now on a more ambitious mission: to start building a "lunar biological and historical archive," initially through robotic landings on the moon.

Laying the foundation for "rebuilding the terrestrial Internet, plus an Earth-moon extension of it, should be a priority," Burke said.

The founders of the group Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) agreed that extending the Internet from the Earth to the moon could help avert a technological dark age following "nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague, or asteroid collisions."

But the group also advocates creating a moon-based repository of Earth's life, complete with human-staffed facilities to "preserve backups of scientific and cultural achievements and of the species important to our civilization," said ARC's Robert Shapiro, a biochemist at New York University.

"In the event of a global catastrophe, the ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock, and, if necessary, even human beings to the Earth," Shapiro said.

ARC hopes to finance the planned moon outpost into a lunar ark of recovery in part through donations from billionaire philanthropists.

"The establishment of an ARC sanctuary would for the first time provide a compelling purpose for the colonization of space."

If the international lunar outpost of the 2020s expands into a colony and then a city, "it is possible that a whole new phase in civilization may develop—the branching of history into one stream on Earth and another on the moon," ISU's Burke added.

This "dual-world expansion" could be within reach by the end of this century, he said.

"Look at the last century, when we went from the Wright brothers to the Apollo missions—along with man's great expansion of his understanding of the cosmos."

Plan B?

Kilian Engel, an instructor at the International Space University who is involved in post-doomsday research, said the lunar archive is actually Plan B.

"Plan A involves creating an international network of astronomers to scan space for asteroids and comets that might threaten Earth, a global task force to formulate a strategy to prevent impacts with the planet, and a new generation of spacecraft to carry out these missions," Engel said.

More awareness of the danger posed by asteroids and comets is now spreading across the United States and the world.

In 2005 Congress directed NASA to figure out how to survey space for threatening near-Earth objects, as well as how to develop spacecraft to deflect or shoot them out of space.

Yet NASA receives less than five million U.S. dollars per year to conduct this "Spaceguard Survey," which is aimed at finding near-Earth objects greater than 0.62 mile (a kilometer) in diameter.

NASA has reviewed options that range from building titanic space tugboats to nudge asteroids off a collision course with Earth to crashing "kinectic impactors" into an oncoming comet.

Nuke Option

In March 2007 researchers at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program released a report that said nuclear explosions are ten to a hundred times more effective in diverting killer asteroids than non-nuclear alternatives.

Even so, "30 to 80 percent of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects are in orbits that are beyond the capability of current or planned launch systems," the report said.

And even if NASA eventually develops a nuclear-tipped, anti-asteroid launch vehicle, rocketing hydrogen bombs into space "is prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967," ISU's Burke said.

That UN-brokered treaty prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons in Earth orbit, in outer space, or on any other celestial body.

Yet as astronomers across the globe piece together predictions on potential asteroids of mass destruction, UN members could vote to amend the space treaty to prepare a nuclear response to such threats.

NASA "Clean Rooms" Brimming With Bacteria

The seemingly spic-and-span rooms where NASA assembles its spacecraft aren't quite as clean as experts had thought, a new study suggests.

A surprising diversity of bacteria thrive in at least three of the space agency's so-called clean rooms, genetic testing has revealed.

NASA experts go to great lengths to keep these rooms immaculate by sealing them from the outside environment, continually filtering the air, and cleaning the insides.

The aim is to protect the spacecraft's surface from dust and bacteria, while protecting other planets from Earthly microbes.

Bacteria Bonanza

In the past, the most common method of finding bacteria was to capture samples, take them back to a lab, and try to grow a culture.

However, of all the bacteria out there, "the fraction that you can grow in a lab is about one percent," said study leader Kasthuri Venkateswaran of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

The rest we have not yet found a way to grow outside of their native environments.

So Venkateswaran and colleagues applied a sensitive technique that can find traces of genetic material from bacteria—even from those species that won't grow in the petri dish.

"To get a more global picture, we need[ed] to use DNA fingerprinting," he said.

The researchers took samples from clean rooms at three NASA sites: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California; the Kennedy Space Flight Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida; and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

The team spotted nearly a hundred different kinds of bacteria in the clean rooms, and about half of them were new to science. Some of the bacteria were common culprits, such as the Staphylococcus, bugs that thrive on human skin.

There were also many types of bacteria that form hardy spores and are resistant to ultraviolet radiation and cleaning agents, Venkateswaran said.

Elimination Mission

Knowing which organisms lurk in the supposedly sterile environments is crucial to figuring out how to eliminate them, the experts said.

"This allows us to take inventory in these environments so that NASA can come up with different ways of cleaning and sterilizing" the spacecraft, Venkateswaran said.

Left unchecked, a bacteria buildup could jeopardize space missions.

For instance, spacecraft searching for signs of life on Mars or other planets could get confusing measurements if Earthly microbes get in the way.

And if bacteria from our planet hitch a ride to other worlds, they might survive the trip and spread on those planets.

Dead or Alive?

However, it's possible the scientists didn't find evidence of live bacteria—just genetic material left over from dead organisms.

"We do not know whether these bacteria are dead or alive at this point," Venkateswaran said. "There's no way you can tell this from the DNA fingerprinting alone."

The bacteria may have gotten into the rooms, died during sterilization, and left traces of their genetic material.

But in earlier studies, Venkateswaran and colleagues were able to get several kinds of bacteria growing—evidence that at least some of the bacteria in the clean rooms are still alive.

Mitchell Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, said that genetic testing is a good way of spotting bacteria that don't show up in traditional lab tests.

Some of the microbes that grew included types that were once thought to be exclusive to extreme environments such as the deep sea, hot springs, and permafrost.

"For now, we want to minimize contamination" on Mars or other planets, Sogin said.

But in the long run, it may be inevitable that bacteria from Earth are spread around Mars.

"People will one day go to Mars," Sogin said, "and then it won't be possible to protect the planet."

"Super Suckers" Slurp Invasive Algae Off Reefs

In the battle against an exotic seaweed, biologists are employing a rather unusual solution: underwater vacuum cleaners.

The cleaners—called Super Suckers—suck up tons of gorilla ogo, invasive algae that are killing coral reefs, smothering sea grass beds, and fouling beaches in Hawaii.

Since 2006 the original Super Sucker, a barge-mounted device, has been operating in Kaneohe Bay, on the island of Oahu, where the seaweed invasion is particularly severe.

At a recent scientific conference in Japan, biologists announced the arrival of "Super Sucker Junior," a smaller and more versatile unit that can operate in shallower waters and be easily transported between islands.

Alien Competitors

On land, non-native plant species sometimes outcompete native vegetation and take over habitat. The same phenomenon can happen in the sea.

In Hawaii and elsewhere, scientists have noticed high-diversity coral communities shift to algae-dominated reefs with greatly reduced species diversity.

The problem posed by gorilla ogo and other invasive algae in Hawaii has been growing in magnitude for a number of years, experts say, and now has become dire.

"The algae invasion poses the largest current threat to the health of reefs in Hawaii," said Cynthia Hunter, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii.

Thick coatings of algae can kill corals by blocking them from sunlight and flows of fresh seawater.

Some species have been particularly affected, Hunter said, including a species of rice coral that is now rapidly disappearing.

Algae also fill in the cracks and crevices that make coral reefs a safe haven for fish and other forms of marine life. Even larger animals such as sea turtles may be excluded from their normal resting areas.

"Removing the algae recreates the three-dimensional nature of the coral reef, and recreates homes used by all types of fish and invertebrates," said Brian Hauk, a director of the Super Sucker project with Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources.

Gorilla ogo is just one of five exotic algae that now threaten Hawaii's reefs. Only one of the invaders arrived by accident—probably on the hull of a ship.

The others were all brought to Hawaii deliberately for aquaculture research in the 1970s, Hunter of the University of Hawaii said. At that time, scientists were evaluating the suitability of different algae for commercial production.

Substances derived from marine algae are used for a variety of purposes in manufacturing and biological research, she said. When the research ended, the algae remained.

For two decades nobody really noticed: The algae were held in check by other marine life just as in their native environment.

But by the mid-1990s populations of algae-eating fish and sea urchins had declined, Hunter said, and the algae underwent an ecological shift.

"There was a tipping point about 10 to 15 years ago, and then the algae just took off," Hunter said.

"They invented a way of life that no one could have predicted: growing into dense mats 1- to 2-feet [0.3- to 0.6-meters] thick."

Sucking It Up

Each Super Sucker consists of a powerful pump and a tube for suctioning algae from beneath the ocean surface to the deck of a barge.

Divers in the water operate the 100-foot-long (30-meter-long) suction hose, feeding in gobs of algae by hand after first shaking loose any marine organisms that may be attached.

"They literally suck the algae off the reef," Hauk said.

Workers on the barge further screen the collected algae for any accidentally collected marine life. The nutrient-rich algae are then packed into bags for use as fertilizer. The Super Suckers can remove up to 800 pounds of algae per hour and restore hundreds of square feet of reef in a day, Hauk said.

"When you pull the algae off, there is often live coral underneath that is fighting to survive," Hauk said.

"You feel like you are saving the reef one [coral] colony at a time."

The Super Sucker project is a joint effort by The Nature Conservancy, the University of Hawaii, and the state's Department of Land and Natural Resources.

People Power

Using Super Suckers isn't the only way to clean up invasive algae. On the islands of Oahu and Maui, community volunteers have removed more than a hundred tons of algae from beaches and shallow waters.

But such efforts have not been able to keep pace with the invasion and are impractical in reef areas far from shore, experts say.

The Super Suckers provide a much faster and more efficient clean-up method, Hunter said, but they are only part of the long-term solution.

The ultimate goal is to turn the job of reef management back over the reefs' natural algal residents.

"Native algal consumers can keep [the invasive algae] from coming back," Hunter said. "The areas we are targeting will need to have those native communities restored."

Biologists are now starting to propagate native sea urchins—spiny, hard-shelled creatures with a strong appetite for algae. They hope to raise the urchins in captivity and then introduce them in reef areas where algae have been removed.

In addition, Hunter noted, new fishing restrictions should help allow populations of native reef fish to recover.

Studies have shown that in areas treated with the Super Sucker, native species can effectively prevent re-invasion, and new coral larvae begin to settle and grow.

Glow Sticks May Lure Sea Turtles to Death

The same glow sticks that lighten up raves and Halloween may be tempting thousands of sea turtles to their deaths, a new study says.

Used to attract fish to hooks on miles-long lines, the lights are apparently also irresistible to the reptiles.

Commercial longline fishing operations are known to contribute to the decline of sea turtle populations.

Now researchers say that simply changing the type of light sticks could perhaps reduce the number of accidentally caught turtles.

The study is the first to demonstrate that sea turtles are attracted to the lights used by commercial longliners to lure swordfish and tuna. The paper appears in this month's issue of the journal Animal Conservation.

"Once the turtles are in the vicinity of the longlines, there's a high chance they will bite on the bait and become snagged," said study co-author John Wang of the University of Hawaii. "They can also get entangled in the fishing lines."

In 2000 alone, an estimated 200,000 loggerhead turtles and 50,000 leatherbacks were killed on longlines, according to the report. The World Conservation Union lists both species as endangered.

Swimming Tests

To investigate whether visual stimuli attract sea turtles to longlines, Wang and colleagues used electronic tracking devices to monitor the movements of loggerhead turtles as they swam in a large laboratory tank.

"We put various commercial light sticks at the edge of the laboratory pool to see if the turtles would swim toward them," Wang said, "which they did."

The turtles swam toward yellow, blue, and green chemical glow sticks as well as orange LEDs.

An LED is a small type of light bulb usually used in groups. The bulbs are increasingly found in consumer applications such as car brake lights and flashlights—and in a more expensive, longer-lasting type of glow stick.

"Turtles might mistake the light sticks for glowing jellyfish," said co-author Ken Lohmann, from the University of North Carolina.

"But it's equally plausible this is just an instinctive reaction to the unnatural continuous light," Lohmann said.

Searching for Solutions

"Light sticks are integral parts of some longline fisheries," study co-author Wang explained, "so limiting their use will not be a viable management solution."

Instead, researchers are working closely with industry leaders to develop modified glow sticks that would still lure swordfish and tuna but be less attractive to turtles.

One possible strategy, Wang said, "is shading the light sticks to direct the light downward. Sea turtles use the top portion of the water column, while most target fish are caught as they move upward from deeper water."

Pulsing lights are also being tested to see if they are less attractive to sea turtles.

"Fisheries in general are the biggest concern for sea turtles," said Roderic Mast, vice-president of Conservation International and co-chair of the World Conservation Union's Marine Turtle Specialist Group.

"Research like this that focuses on ways to limit the impact of particular fisheries is going to help us do a better job of solving these problems."

New Planet Weighs as Much as 2,500 Earths

With temperatures ranging from 1000 to 2000°C, gravity 15 times stronger than Earth's, and a year that lasts just 5.6 of our days, HAT-P-2b is not a planet you'd want to visit for vacation.

The unusual gas giant—located 440 light-years away in the constellation Hercules—turns out to be the most massive planet found outside our solar system so far.

Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spotted the superdense planet using the HATNet global network of automated telescopes, which scans a large fraction of the Northern Hemisphere sky every night to search for planets.

HAT-P-2b, the second planet the project has discovered, stunned scientists with far-out features unprecedented for an alien world.

Weird World

"This planet is so unusual that at first we thought it was a false alarm—something that appeared to be a planet but wasn't," said Center for Astrophysics astronomer Gáspár Bakos in a statement. Bakos is lead author of a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal that describes the discovery.

"But we eliminated every other possibility, so we knew we had a really weird planet," he said.

The research team was able to determine some of the planet's properties by watching as it passed across the face of its star—known as HD 147506—causing a slight dimming of the star's light.

"We estimate that it has a high surface gravity, around 15 times greater than the Earth," Bakos said. That means a person who weighs 150 pounds (68 kilograms) on Earth would weigh around 2,100 pounds (950 kilograms) on HAT-P-2b.

The scientists also calculated that the planet is incredibly dense: Though HAT-P-2b is only slightly larger than Jupiter, it weighs around eight times as much—equivalent to the mass of 2,500 Earths.

Partner Planet?

Perhaps most unusual of all is the newly discovered world's boomerang orbit. HAT-P-2b closes to within 3.1 million miles (5 million kilometers) of its star before swinging out to around 9.6 million miles (15 million kilometers) away, all in just 5.6 days.

"If Earth had such an elliptical orbit, it would be really strange, like going from Mercury to Mars," Bakos said.

One theory to explain the extremely oval orbit is that another planet may be hiding out nearby.

"It is possible that [HAT-P-2b] is interacting with another planet further out that we haven't seen," Bakos said.

Calculations had suggested that such bizarre, superdense planets could exist, the researchers say. But the bizarre new find finally provides concrete confirmation.

Animals From Antarctica's Deep Seas

Hundreds of new species of deep-sea animals, such as the baby isopod Ceratoserolis above, have been discovered during expeditions in the waters off Antarctica.

Ceratoserolis is just one of 585 new species of isopod—a type of marine crustacean related to wood lice—found during the Antarctic Benthic Deep-Sea Biodiversity Project, or ANDEEP, trips between 2002 and 2005.

Researchers aboard the German research vessel Polarstern in the Weddell Sea also brought up heart-shaped sea urchins, carnivorous sponges, and giant sea spiders the size of dinner plates.

"We were astonished by the enormous biodiversity we found in many groups of species," said Angelika Brandt, a marine biologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany.

The project has made a major contribution to the Census of Marine Life (CoML) program, a global collaboration among thousands of researchers who aim to make a detailed record of all ocean life by 2010.