Danon and Stradee.
I like the riverkeeper concept and hope that it strengthens and spreads.
Any interesting day trips around that are wheelchair accessible? So that Patti can get out of the house and do something different.
My computer is very sluggish and slow this morning so I only clicked 5 times rather than my usual 19.
January 25, 2011
Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated
By CARL ZIMMER
Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies.
He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.
Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.
“It’s really quite a marvel,” said Naomi Pierce of Harvard, a co-author of the paper.
Nabokov inherited his passion for butterflies from his parents. When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities, the 8-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift. As a teenager, Nabokov went on butterfly-hunting expeditions and carefully described the specimens he caught, imitating the scientific journals he read in his spare time. Had it not been for the Russian Revolution, which forced his family into exile in 1919, Nabokov said that he might have become a full-time lepidopterist.
In his European exile, Nabokov visited butterfly collections in museums. He used the proceeds of his second novel, “King, Queen, Knave,” to finance an expedition to the Pyrenees, where he and his wife, Vera, netted over a hundred species. The rise of the Nazis drove Nabokov into exile once more in 1940, this time to the United States. It was there that Nabokov found his greatest fame as a novelist. It was also there that he delved deepest into the science of butterflies.
Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classify the butterflies based on differences in their genitalia. He argued that what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly related.
At the end of a 1945 paper on the group, he mused on how they had evolved. He speculated that they originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait, and moved south all the way to Chile.
Allowing himself a few literary flourishes, Nabokov invited his readers to imagine “a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine.” Going back millions of years, he would end up at a time when only Asian forms of the butterflies existed. Then, moving forward again, the taxonomist would see five waves of butterflies arriving in the New World.
Nabokov conceded that the thought of butterflies making a trip from Siberia to Alaska and then all the way down into South America might sound far-fetched. But it made more sense to him than an unknown land bridge spanning the Pacific. “I find it easier to give a friendly little push to some of the forms and hang my distributional horseshoes on the nail of Nome rather than postulate transoceanic land-bridges in other parts of the world,” he wrote.
When “Lolita” made Nabokov a star in 1958, journalists were delighted to discover his hidden life as a butterfly expert. A famous photograph of Nabokov that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post when he was 66 is from a butterfly’s perspective. The looming Russian author swings a net with rapt concentration. But despite the fact that he was the best-known butterfly expert of his day and a Harvard museum curator, other lepidopterists considered Nabokov a dutiful but undistinguished researcher. He could describe details well, they granted, but did not produce scientifically important ideas.
Only in the 1990s did a team of scientists systematically review his work and recognize the strength of his classifications. Dr. Pierce, who became a Harvard biology professor and curator of lepidoptera in 1990, began looking closely at Nabokov’s work while preparing an exhibit to celebrate his 100th birthday in 1999. She was captivated by his idea of butterflies coming from Asia. “It was an amazing, bold hypothesis,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we could test this.’ ”
To do so, she would need to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of blues, and estimate when the branches split. It would have been impossible for Nabokov to do such a study on the anatomy of butterflies alone. Dr. Pierce would need their DNA, which could provide more detail about their evolutionary history.
Working with American and European lepidopterists, Dr. Pierce organized four separate expeditions into the Andes in search of blues. Back at her lab at Harvard, she and her colleagues sequenced the genes of the butterflies and used a computer to calculate the most likely relationships between them. They also compared the number of mutations each species had acquired to determine how long ago they had diverged from one another.
There were several plausible hypotheses for how the butterflies might have evolved. They might have evolved in the Amazon, with the rising Andes fragmenting their populations. If that were true, the species would be closely related to one another.
But that is not what Dr. Pierce found. Instead, she and her colleagues found that the New World species shared a common ancestor that lived about 10 million years ago. But many New World species were more closely related to Old World butterflies than to their neighbors. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the New World — just as Nabokov had speculated.
“By God, he got every one right,” Dr. Pierce said. “I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.”
Dr. Pierce and her colleagues also investigated Nabokov’s idea that the butterflies had come over the Bering Strait. The land surrounding the strait was relatively warm 10 million years ago, and has been chilling steadily ever since. Dr. Pierce and her colleagues found that the first lineage of Polyommatus blues that made the journey could survive a temperature range that matched the Bering climate of 10 million years ago. The lineages that came later are more cold-hardy, each with a temperature range matching the falling temperatures.
Nabokov’s taxonomic horseshoes turn out to belong in Nome after all.
"What a great paper," said James Mallet, an expert on butterfly evolution at University College London. "It's a fitting tribute to the great man to see that the most modern methods that technology can deliver now largely support his systematic arrangement."
Dr. Pierce says she believes Nabokov would have been greatly pleased to be so vindicated, and points to one of his most famous poems, “On Discovering a Butterfly.” The 1943 poem begins:
I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer — and I want no other fame.
“He felt that his scientific work was standing for all time, and that he was just a player in a much bigger enterprise,” said Dr. Pierce. “He was not known as a scientist, but this certainly indicates to me that he knew what it’s all about.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 26, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated the year Vladimir Nabokov immigrated to the United States. It was 1940, not 1941.
January 26, 2011
Plants That Earn Their Keep
By KIRK JOHNSON
DENVER — Could airport security gardens be the wave of the future? (“Please have photo ID and boarding pass ready and walk past the rhododenrons.”) How about a defensive line of bomb-sniffing tulips in Central Park in New York, or at the local shopping mall’s indoor waterfall, or lining the streets of Baghdad?
Researchers at Colorado State University said Wednesday that they had created the platform for just such a plant-kingdom early warning system: plants that subtly change color when exposed to minute amounts of TNT in the air.
They are redesigned to drain off chlorophyll — the stuff that makes them green — from leaves, blanching to white when bomb materials are detected.
“It had to be simple, something your mom could recognize,” said June Medford, a professor of biology at Colorado State, referring to the idea of linking a plant’s chemical response to its color, visible to the naked eye.
The research, published in the peer-reviewed online science journal PLoS One, and financed mostly by the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, said that plants are uniquely suited by evolution to chemical analysis of their environment, in detecting pests, for example.
Plants in the lab, when modified to sense TNT, the most commonly used explosive, reacted to levels one one-hundredth of anything a bomb-sniffing dog could muster, the paper said.
The trick, still in refinement, is how to make sure the plant’s signal is clear enough and fast enough to be of use.
“Right now, response time is in the order of hours,” said Linda Chrisey, a program manager at the Office of Naval Research, which hopes to use the technology to help protect troops from improvised explosive devices.
Practical application, she said, requires a signal within minutes, and a natural reset system back to healthy green in fairly short order.
Professor Medford said she thought both goals were attainable, perhaps within three years — the goal that military backers are pushing for, she said — but more likely in five to seven years.
One scientist who read the scientific paper on Wednesday and was not involved in the project said he was concerned that the difference between all-clear green and TNT-detected white might be too subtle or subject to false inputs.
“What you want is something that is extreme on-and-off and reliable, and I don’t think they’re there yet,” said Sean R. Cutler, an associate professor of plant cell biology at the University of California, Riverside. “It’s a very interesting work-in-progress.”
@sumac,
I for some unknown reason couldn't get on the able2know site last night. oh well.
sumac, interesting stuff -- I like the butterfly one - and, the bomb sniffing flowers is unbelievable!!!!!!
Thanks, and great clicking.......
No interesting articles today, but did my clicking. While others have snow, we are expecting a small rain event next week.
@sumac,
Great sumac....... Rain on roads is much better than ICE......!
Thanks for clicking all good Rain Forest clickers!!!!!!!
Hi all ~
We've had beautiful weather for two weeks...sunshine and mild temps...and Sunday Mother Natures sending snow.
Made zuchinni bread today, chicken soup yesterday, and plan vegging on the couch the rest of the evening.
Dan, hope you all are doing better...sending Pattie good thoughts.
sue, thanks again for the articles. Interesting stuff.
Have a good evening all ~
Hi Stradee and Danon,
No interesting articles today. Sob.
Danon, your weather eventually becomes my weather. Are you expecting rain?
@Stradee,
Thanks Stradee, we saved another tree yesterday --- isn't that a good thing!!!
My Patti isn't doing well. She has told me for the past few years that she won't be in the position to be in constant pain and have someone take care of her when she isn't able to do it herself. She has expressed her opinion of that in her life and said to me and her doctor that if that time comes she will not live that kind of life. It is not easy to deal with that thought.
Well, back to the good stuff --- we have saved enough trees to possible find new medications that will benefit peoplekind........
Happy clicking all.
@sumac,
sumac, YES, we are expecting rain for the next four days.......... Today is a good sunny day - tomorrow will be 50% and Tuesday will be 80%.......... It's heading your way......... Good clicking.....!!!
Danon,
That is indeed not an easy thought to think. I hope she is "up" some of the time.
So, I will expect rain then, My garden is never going to dry out so that the leaves can be rototilled in.
@sumac,
Yeah, it's not easy to think about. She does have a "good" day about once each two or three months....... Then we go in the auto to Walmart (the social center of our town). After about an hour we have to go home - then the next three or four days are not good days. It doesn't take much to tire her out.
We did some good today,,,,, we saved some trees.........
@danon5,
Yea....... It is MONDAY!!! We have a good chance to save at least SEVEN trees asmiling this week............
Let's give it a shot.......... BANG!!!!!!!!
@danon5,
Well, now it's going to be TUESDAY !!!
That's another tree asmiling!!!!!!!!!!!
Great clicking folks.........
January 31, 2011
Gas Drilling Technique Is Labeled Violation
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Oil and gas service companies injected tens of millions of gallons of diesel fuel into onshore wells in more than a dozen states from 2005 to 2009, Congressional investigators have charged. Those injections appear to have violated the Safe Water Drinking Act, the investigators said in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday.
The diesel fuel was used by drillers as part of a contentious process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives — including diesel fuel — into rock formations deep underground. The process, which has opened up vast new deposits of natural gas to drilling, creates and props open fissures in the rock to ease the release of oil and gas.
But concerns have been growing over the potential for fracking chemicals — particularly those found in diesel fuel — to contaminate underground sources of drinking water.
“We learned that no oil and gas service companies have sought — and no state and federal regulators have issued — permits for diesel fuel use in hydraulic fracturing,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California and two other Democratic members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, in the letter. “This appears to be a violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.”
Oil and gas companies acknowledged using diesel fuel in their fracking fluids, but they rejected the House Democrats’ assertion that it was illegal. They said that the E.P.A. had never properly developed rules and procedures to regulate the use of diesel in fracking, despite a clear grant of authority from Congress over the issue.
“Everyone understands that E.P.A. is at least interested in regulating fracking,” said Matt Armstrong, a lawyer with the Washington firm Bracewell & Giuliani, which represents several oil and gas companies. “Whether the E.P.A. has the chutzpah to try to impose retroactive liability for use of diesel in fracking, well, everyone is in a wait-and-see mode. I suspect it will have a significant fight on its hands if it tried it do that.”
Regardless of the legal outcome, the Waxman findings are certain to intensify an already contentious debate among legislators, natural gas companies and environmentalists over the safety of oil and gas development in general, and fracking in particular.
Oil services companies had traditionally used diesel fuel as part of their fracturing cocktails because it helped to dissolve and disperse other chemicals suspended in the fluid. But some of the chemical components of diesel fuel, including toluene, xylene and benzene, a carcinogen, have alarmed both regulators and environmental groups. They argue that some of those chemicals could find their way out of a well bore — either because of migration through layers of rock or spills and sloppy handling — and into nearby sources of drinking water.
An E.P.A. investigation in 2004 failed to find any threat to drinking water from fracking — a conclusion that was widely dismissed by critics as politically motivated. The agency has taken up the issue again in a new investigation started last year, although the results are not expected until 2012 at the earliest.
The House committee began its own investigation in February last year, when Democrats were in the majority. In Monday’s letter, Mr. Waxman, along with Representatives Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Diana DeGette of Colorado, said that they were so far “unable to draw definitive conclusions about the potential impact of these injections on public health or the environment.”
Still, the investigators said that three of the largest oil and gas services companies — Halliburton, Schlumberger and BJ Services — signed an agreement with the E.P.A. in 2003 intended to curtail the use of diesel in fracking in certain shallow formations.
Two years later, when Congress amended the Safe Water Drinking Act to exclude regulation of hydraulic fracturing, it made an express exception that allowed regulation of diesel fuel used in fracking.
The Congressional investigators sent letters to 14 companies requesting details on the type and volume of fracking chemicals they used. Although many companies said they had eliminated or were cutting back on use of diesel, 12 companies reported having used 32.2 million gallons of diesel fuel, or fluids containing diesel fuel, in their fracking processes from 2005 to 2009.
The diesel-laced fluids were used in a total of 19 states. Approximately half the total volume was deployed in Texas, but at least a million gallons of diesel-containing fluids were also used in Oklahoma (3.3 million gallons); North Dakota (3.1 million); Louisiana (2.9 million); Wyoming (2.9 million); and Colorado (1.3 million).
Where this leaves the companies in relation to federal law is unclear.
Mr. Waxman and his colleagues say that the Safe Drinking Water Act left diesel-based hydraulic fracturing under the auspices of E.P.A.’s “underground injection control program,” which requires companies to obtain permits, either from state or federal regulators, for a variety of activities that involve putting fluids underground.
No permits for diesel-based fracking have been sought or granted since the Safe Drinking Water Act was amended in 2005.
Lee Fuller, a vice president for government relations with the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said that was because the E.P.A. had never followed up by creating rules and procedures for obtaining such permits and submitting them for public comment.
The agency did quietly update its Web site last summer with language suggesting that fracking with diesel was, indeed, covered as part of the underground injection program, which would suggest that permits should have been obtained. But Mr. Fuller’s organization, along with the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, has gone to court to challenge the Web posting, arguing that it amounted to new rule-making that circumvented administrative requirements for notice and public commentary.
The E.P.A. said Monday that it was reviewing the accusations from the three House Democrats that the companies named were in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.
“Our goal is to put in place a clear framework for permitting so that fracturing operations using diesel receive the review required by law,” Betsaida Alcantara, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. “We will provide further information about our plans as they develop.”
No word from you last night, Danon. I do hope that the storm didn't knock out your internet and that your furnace wasn't stopped by a lack of electricity. We will escape this time.
@sumac,
Hi sumac, the weather here is cold but dry. I think I slept through yesterday - can't really remember.
Wow, the ice and snow across the USA is terrible. I saw a map of the lower 48 states on a Nat'l news weather segment and it had a Zambone machine going across from the Atlantic to the Pacific.......!!!!! I thought that was really funny.......
Good article. I say the oil business's should go 'frack' themselves....... Oh well, Obama is pushing safer fuel technology - that's a good thing....
Good to see you Danon. Saw the snow in Dallas and wondered about you. Here is another interesting article:
NASA finds planets a plenty outside solar system
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
2 hrs 36 mins ago
WASHINGTON – NASA's planet-hunting telescope is finding whole new worlds of possibilities in the search for alien life. An early report from a cosmic census indicates that relatively small planets and stable multi-planet systems are far more plentiful than previous searches showed.
NASA released new data Wednesday from its Kepler telescope on more than 1,000 possible new planets outside our solar system — more than doubling the count of what astronomers call exoplanets. They haven't been confirmed as planets yet, but some astronomers estimate that 90 percent of what Kepler has found will eventually be verified.
Kepler, launched in 2009, has been orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars, conducting a planet census and searching for Earth-like planets since last year. It has found there are more planets that are much smaller than Jupiter — the biggest planet in our solar system — than there are giant planets.
Some of these even approach Earth's size. That means they are better potential candidates for life than the behemoths that are more easily spotted, astronomers say.
While Kepler hasn't yet found planets that are as small as Earth, all the results are "pointing in the right direction," said University of California Santa Cruz astronomer Jonathan Fortney, a Kepler researcher.
Yale University exoplanet expert Debra Fischer, who wasn't part of the Kepler team but serves as an outside expert for NASA, said the new information "gives us a much firmer footing" in eventual hopes for worlds that could harbor life.
"I feel different today knowing these new Kepler results than I did a week ago," Fischer said.
___ Online:
@sumac,
Good to see you also, sumac......... Good article. No snow here in NE TX - Zip!!!! It's all SOUTH of us - believe it or not........ We have freezing temps here but no snow and we have DRY weather which makes it a very nice Winter.......
Love the article about other planets. Ya know it only makes sense that we aren't the only solar system in the universe that has planets......!!!! And if we have only found LARGER planets --- then it makes great sense that life forms on a LARGER planet will be SMALLER than we are --- SO, that's great if we can only learn to live with smaller people..... OR, things ---- so to speak..... Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of aliens?????? Tha Shadow do.....!!!
Ahhhh, feels great to make a joke.......
And, to save another tree from leaving us to unknown futures of no oxygen.......
Hi Danon,
Sure looked like you got some snow and wintry mix this morning. We have rain and 35 - not expected to get out of the 30's. It is raw and nasty out.
