Rare earths: Neither rare, nor earths-bbc

Rare earths: Neither rare, nor earths-bbc

By Justin RowlattBBC World Service

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You have probably never heard of most of the rare-earth elements yet they have insinuated themselves deep into the fabric of modern life - in ways of which most of us are completely oblivious.

There are between 15 and 17 of them (depending how you classify them), including such exotic sounding substances as holmium, praseodymium, cerium, lutetium, ytterbium, gadolinium or - my own personal favourite - promethium.

They may be obscure but they have been transforming all sorts of industries. Wind turbine manufacture is a good example.

Henrik Stiesdal is celebrated as one of the fathers of the modern wind industry. He built his first turbine on his family's farm in Denmark as a teenager, and has been perfecting his designs ever since.

Now he's chief technology officer for one of the biggest wind turbine manufacturers in the world, the German engineering giant Siemens.

When you enter his generous office overlooking the company's huge turbine factory on the windswept Jutland peninsula of Denmark, the first thing you notice is the intriguing antique clock opposite his desk.


Its loud ticking is impossible to ignore. He is delighted when I ask about it. It is, he says, an original example of a synchronome clock.

"I bought it to inspire, and because sometimes I feel the need to rub my colleagues' noses in the fact that there are simple solutions to engineering problems people have struggled with for centuries."
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Rare earths - key facts

First rare-earth element discovered by Finnish chemist Johan Gadolin in 1792 after receiving a heavy mineral from Swedish village of Ytterby
Subsequent rare-earth elements identified and isolated over a period of about 150 years
The core group of 15 rare earths are known as lanthanides
These have an atomic number from 57 to 71 and are grouped together in the periodic table
Scandium and yttrium - making the total number 17 - are also considered rare earths as they exhibit similar chemical properties to lanthanides
Final one to be discovered, in 1945, was the radioactive promethium, which is the rarest
Wide range of uses such as in camera and telescope lenses, catalytic converters, refining crude oil, magnets and X-ray scanning systems

Clearly, Stiesdal can be a demanding boss.

The synchronome, designed more than a century ago in Britain, is the most accurate pendulum clock ever built - correct, according to recent studies, to one second every 12 years.

It represents, he explains, an exceptionally elegant answer to the challenge for horologists down the centuries - by reducing the mechanism down to a single gear wheel.

Until very recently Stiesdal and his colleagues faced a similar challenge. They wanted to strip out the gear systems in their turbines.

Wind turbines need gears because the blades turn at about 10 revolutions a minute but the generators that convert that rotation into electricity operate at more like 1,500 revs.

The problem is that - just as with clocks - the more complex a mechanism becomes, the more things can go wrong. And, in the world of wind turbines - particularly offshore turbines - mechanical failure is very expensive. You need specialist crane ships, engineers and good weather. The bill very rapidly runs to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So how could Stiesdal and his team get rid of all those gears? The industry's solution - as you will have guessed - involves the rare earths.

In his laboratory in University College London, Prof Andrea Sella's face lights up when I ask him about them. Clearly this family of elements is particularly close to the chemist's heart.

"The first thing you need to know is they are neither rare nor earths," he tells me.

They are known as "rare" because it is very unusual to find them in a pure form, but it turns out there are deposits of some of them all over the world - cerium, for example, is the 25th most common element on the planet. The term "earth" is simply an archaic term for something you can dissolve in acid.

They are grouped together as a family because of their incredible chemical similarities - the reason it took a century of chemical investigation to finally isolate them all.

But the rare earths' chemical similarity belies all sorts of fascinating and often very useful electro-magnetic and optical differences.

To demonstrate, Andrea produces a rack of test tubes containing a selection of the rare-earth elements, each one a different pastel shade - there are gentle pinks, purples, blues and greens.
Nitrate salts of 15 of the rare earth elements, known collectively as lanthanides

The radioactive element promethium, is missing from his collection. Andrea calls it the "cuckoo in the nest".

Promethium isn't found naturally on earth, but is formed in nuclear reactors. You may be carrying a tiny trace of promethium now because it has been used in the luminous paint on some watches.
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Andrea Sella


"They tarnish easily in air, they react quite violently, they burn like crazy... But the flipside of that is that once they've burnt and you've made an oxide, that oxide is incredibly robust and stable."

Watch Sella's 2013 Royal Institution lecture

Andrea waves an ultraviolet light over his collection. Some suddenly light up in vivid fluorescent colours.

"One of the incredible properties of the rare-earth elements is that they produce different wavelengths of light - specific colours - exactly on demand," he explains.

It turns out this property forms part of the anti-counterfeiting system used in euro notes.

Andrea takes a 50-euro note from his wallet and places this under the UV light. Bright green and blue stripes and shapes appear together with a constellation of beautiful blue and pinky-purple stars.

"Those stars contain europium," he says, grinning broadly. "This tells me that there is someone with a sense of humour at the beating heart of the European Union."

But the optical properties of the rare earths do more than just deter forgers. The distinctive green light in a television or computer screen is generated using terbium, while the red colour is produced by a combination of europium and yttrium (which is often treated as an honorary member of the rare earths).

But the most useful rare earth - in optical terms - is probably erbium.
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The light produced by erbium is out in the near-infrared spectrum and is invisible to the human eye.

But it can send signals down optical fibres for many kilometres, which is why most of the optical fibre applications around the world use signal amplifiers made with erbium.

Rare earths are also essential for the catalytic converters that scrub the exhaust gases of cars clean and in glass polishing.

But it is the incredible magnetic properties of some of the rare earths that most of us - unwittingly - exploit most often.

Andrea passes me a rectangular lump of dark grey metal a few centimetres long.

"Hold this," he orders. I clutch it in my fist.

He produces a two pence coin and places it on the back of my hand.

Even through the thickness of my hand I can feel the magnet tugging at the disk of metal.

"That is a magnet made with neodymium," he explains. "It is 10 times as powerful as a normal iron magnet and can hold 1,000 times its own weight."
Pacemakers sometimes use nuclear batteries containing promethium

It is no exaggeration to say that the miniaturisation of technology would not be possible without these incredible magnets.

They are a surprisingly recent breakthrough. The first magnets using the rare earths neodymium and scandium were developed only in 1982, but their discovery has revolutionised all sorts of technologies.

The tiny motors that power computer hard drives and the miniature speakers on mobile phones and laptops depend on rare-earth magnets.

Neodymium magnets are used in electric guitar pickups, MRI scanners and microwave ovens. You can even buy cufflinks that link up with neodymium magnets.

And they also hold the key to Mr Stiesdal's challenge - getting rid of the huge gear mechanism in wind turbines.

The stronger the magnets, the easier it is to generate power at lower speeds.

An electric current is generated by induction - the electrons are driven as a magnet moves past a coil of wire. The stronger the magnet, the more the electrons move.

Down in one of Siemens' huge engineering sheds below Stiesdal's office, I was shown one of the company's new gearless turbines.


It is much more compact than its forebears. The core is a ring about five metres in diameter, like a giant doughnut, which encloses the axle.

This ring is packed with 648 22cm-long neodymium magnets laced with another rare-earth element, dysprosium, which makes them much less liable to become demagnetised.

It means, Henrik Stiesdal tells me with evident pride, that the same power can be generated without any gear system at all.

The problem is getting hold of the rare earths that make this possible. More than 85% of the world's supply of rare-earth metals comes from China.

And practically 100% of the "heavy" rare earths - at the farther end of the periodic table - come from China, including Stiesdal's dysprosium.

China has some very rich deposits of rare earths in Inner Mongolia. And, until recently, China has not been very squeamish about the consequences of rare-earth extraction.
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Find out more

In Elementary Business, BBC World Service's Business Daily goes back to basics and examines key chemical elements - and asks what they mean for businesses and the global economy.
Listen to past Elements programmes
Listen to the latest from Business Daily
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More from BBC World Service

It is a very dirty business. Rare earths are often found with radioactive elements like thorium and uranium, and separating them out requires a lot of toxic chemicals.

Jack Lifton, founder of Technology Metals Research and an expert on rare earths, describes how, in China, the process of extraction involves leaching out the elements. They flood the high ground with chemicals, he says, and then precipitate out the metals, leaving behind a lake of carcinogenic waste fluids.

In recent years China has been trying to clean the industry up. But it can't actually stop production, because many of the hi-tech industries at the heart of the Chinese economy rely on rare-earth supplies.

Just how dependent the entire world is on Chinese rare earths became very clear at the end of 2010 when China threatened to restrict supplies. The spike in rare-earth prices was very dramatic - up to 3,000% for some of them.


Prices have since fallen back, but the shock was enough to prompt companies to begin to explore producing and refining rare earths elsewhere in the world.

And how did Stiesdal respond to this shock?

"The neodymium exists in large abundance outside China. There are a couple of companies outside China that could keep us running for thousands of years."

And the dysprosium?

"It turns out you can tweak the way you deal with your alloy so you need less. In today's magnets we have 0.7% dysprosium, and in a few years it will be all gone."
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Can you picture yourself with a Nokia?

Can you picture yourself with a Nokia?
Will a phone with a world-beating camera arrest Nokia’s decline, asks Matt Warman

The Nokia Lumia 1020 with Nokia Camera Grip 2: will it turn around Nokia's fortunes?



By Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Editor

When you go to buy your next mobile phone, what will be the most important factor? The price, the operating system? Or will it be the camera? Troubled Finnish giant Nokia is betting on photography.


It’s a significant gamble – research suggests that once a camera is 'good enough’, few consumers bother much about its precise specifications. But Nokia reckons that while its rivals offer photographs at 12 or 13-megapixels at most, its 41 megapixel version will prove so eye-catching that consumers won’t be able to resist.
The tactic is the latest in a long line of genuine engineering innovations from the company that has signed up with Microsoft to make the best Windows Phones on the market. But it’s an operating system lacking in apps that, like BlackBerry, has struggled to make any serious inroads against the overwhelming might of Google and Apple, despite high praise from some reviewers.

Among analysts, the consensus quickly emerged that the new Nokia Lumia 1020 has achieved a remarkable piece of engineering, cramming a genuinely good camera into a package that is almost the size of a normal phone. But the product, many said, “can’t save Nokia alone”. This is, according to Daniel Gleeson of IHS, a “halo product” which the company hopes will establish it as powerhouse for the very latest innovations. Consumers may yet think they want to buy into the brand. But bearing in mind people talk increasingly of saving Nokia, it’s a tough sell.


“The Lumia 1020 will act as a halo product to boost Nokia’s appeal,” said Gleeson. “But IHS forecasts that this smartphone will not ship sufficient volume’s to turn around the company’s fortunes on its own. Nokia’s share of the smartphone market will fall to 3 per cent in 2013, down from 5 per cent in 2012 unless Nokia follows this launch with a strong new smartphone portfolio across all price points in the autumn. Additionally, Nokia must continue to invest in content and services to bolster the range of Windows Phone app choice and quality.”

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An example of the quality photograph achiveable

Tony Cripps, of analysts Ovum, agreed: “The combination sets a new benchmark for high-end smartphone engineering – and a timely reminder of Nokia’s R&D capabilities – but the company must still overcome incumbent rivals, slow adoption of Windows Phone and a modest marketing budget if it is to finally help the company turn a financial corner after its recent time in the doldrums.” Those who got their hands on the new device, too, were impressed with it on its own terms.

Launched in New York, Nokia’s aim is in part also to crack the challenging American market, even though it is not yet even really considered a top-tier brand in a country where top-of-the-range smartphone sales continue to be dominated by Apple. Arriving in the US first, the Lumia 1020 will start at a steep $299 up front on two-year contract.

In that context, it’s little wonder Nokia makes grand claims for the new Lumia: “Unlike any smartphone in the market today the Nokia Lumia 1020 reinvents zoom, enabling people to discover more detail than the eye can see. With Nokia’s innovative PureView technology, including optical image stabilization, the device is able to produce some of the sharpest images possible by any digital camera.” It’s worth noting they don’t say any cameraphone – it’s better than any digital camera.



The phone's 41-MP camera has been the source of much interest

People are increasingly using either proper, DSLR cameras or smartphones. Small, cheap digital cameras are being replaced by the phones in everyone’s pockets. Nokia tries, in a sense, to cover both options, by using the camera to take one very high resolution picture at 38 megapixels for editing, and another, 5MP one that is smaller and easier to share online.

Stephen Elop, Nokia’s chief executive, claimed “We want to take people on a journey from capturing pictures to recording and sharing their lives”. Except, of course, many millions are doing that already – just not many of them on Windows Phones.

And it’s emblematic that, while Nokia emphasises its camera prowess, it showed off software from photo app Hipstamatic. Cool and functional, it has however long since been surpassed in popularity by Instagram, bought by Facebook for $1billion.
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How the turtle got its unique hard shell

How the turtle got its unique hard shell

By Melissa HogenboomScience reporter, BBC News
The sea turtle's unique shell evolved many millions of years ago
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How the turtle shell evolved has puzzled scientists for years, but new research sheds light on how their hard shells were formed.

Scientists say the ancient fossil skeleton of an extinct South African reptile has helped bridge a 30 to 55-million-year gap.

This ancestor of the modern turtle, Eunotosaurus, is thought to be around 260 million years old.

It had significant differences to a recently found fossil relative.

Eunotosaurus was discovered over a century ago but newresearch in the journal Current Biology has only now analysed its differences to other turtle fossils.
An extinct reptile fossil has helped scientists discover how turtles hard shells are formed

A turtle's shell is unique in that it is made up of around 50 bones, with ribs, shoulder bones and vertebrae fused together to form a hard external shell.

How it forms today can be observed in a developing turtle embryo. Ribs broaden first followed by the broadening of vertebrae. The final state is the development of an outer layer of skin on the perimeter of the shell.

"The turtle shell is a complex structure whose initial transformations started over 260 million years ago in the Permian period," said lead author of the study, Dr Tyler Lyson from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University.

"The shell evolved over millions of years and was gradually modified into its present-day shape."

A turtle fossil 210 million years old had a fully developed shell similar to those today, but 10 million years earlier, a fossil discovered in China, named Odontochelys semitestac, had an incomplete top shell, called a carapace.

This fossil has now helped Dr Lyson and colleagues compare the modern turtle with its ancestor Eunotosaurus.

Like turtles today, Eunotosaurus had nine pairs of T-shaped ribs. This ancient creature however did not have broad spines on its vertebrae, which both Odontochelysand modern-day turtles do have.

It also lacked intercostal muscles, which are the group of muscles that run between the ribs, and did not have osteoderms - bony scales.
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A turtle's shell
The shell's main function is protection but it can also help a turtle live underwater for longer than any other vertebrate
This is because it stores potassium and magnesium which can help protect it from a build up of lactic acid
Other animals such as armadillos or various lizards, all form a shell via the acquisition of more and more osteoderms (ossified scales)
Explore more reptiles on BBC Nature

"Eunotosaurus is a good transitional fossil which bridges the morphological gap between turtles and other reptiles," said Dr Lyson.

The evidence between fossil and developmental data shows that first the ribs broadened, then the neural spines of the vertebrae broadened, and finally osteoderms on the outer side of the shell formed. These all sutured together to form the modern-day turtle shell, he added.

"One of the direct consequences of forming a protective shell by broadening and locking their ribs is that turtles cannot use their ribs to breathe.

"Instead turtles have developed a unique abdominal muscular sling that wraps around their lungs and organs to help them breathe."
A living South African sideneck turtle next to its 260-million-year-old relative, Eunotosaurus africanus

Judith Cebra-Thomas, assistant professor from the department of biology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the study, said the research was very important in terms of understanding the turtle shell's evolution.

"The turtle shell is considered an evolutionary novelty, which means that there are no closely analogous structures in related animals.

"That leads to the notion that such things cannot occur through normal evolutionary processes. But, when you examine it in detail, you can see the series of steps, each of them explainable through small changes that gradually add up to the novel structure."




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Ape-like feet 'found in study of museum visitors'

Ape-like feet 'found in study of museum visitors'

By Melissa HogenboomScience reporter, BBC News
Bonobos have bendy feet to help them grip branches
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Scientists have discovered that about one in thirteen people have flexible ape-like feet.

A team studied the feet of 398 visitors to the Boston Museum of Science.

The results show differences in foot bone structure similar to those seen in fossils of a member of the human lineage from two million years ago.

It is hoped the research, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, will establish how that creature moved.

Apes like the chimpanzee spend a lot of their time in trees, so their flexible feet are essential to grip branches and allow them to move around quickly - but how most of us ended up with more rigid feet remains unclear.

Jeremy DeSilva from Boston University and a colleague asked the museum visitors to walk barefoot and observed how they walked by using a mechanised carpet that was able to analyse several components of the foot.

Floppy foot

Most of us have very rigid feet, helpful for stability, with stiff ligaments holding the bones in the foot together.

When primates lift their heels off the ground, however, they have a floppy foot with nothing holding their bones together.

This is known as a midtarsal break and is similar to what the Boston team identified in some of their participants.

This makes the middle part of the foot bend more easily as the subject pushes off to propel themselves on to their next step.

Dr DeSilva told BBC News how we might be able to observe whether we have this flexibility: "The best way to see this is if you're walking on the beach and leaving footprints, the middle portion of your footprint would have a big ridge that might show your foot is actually folding in that area."
Here A. sediba is compared with a modern human (L) and a chimp (R)

Another way, he added, was to set up a video camera and record yourself walking, to observe the bones responsible for this folding motion.

Most with this flexibility did not realise they had it and there was no observable difference in the speed of their stride.

In addition, Dr DeSilva found that people with a flexible fold in their feet also roll to the inside of their foot as they walk.

The bone structure of a two-million-year old fossil human relative, Australopithecus sediba, suggests it also had this mobility.

"We are using variation in humans today as a model for understanding what this human creature two million years ago was doing," added Prof De Silva.

Tracy Kivell, a palaeoanthropologist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said: "The research has implications for how we interpret the fossil record and the evolution of these features.

"It's good to understand the normal variation among humans before we go figure out what it means in the fossil record," Dr Kivell told BBC News.




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Apple's iPad mini seen as 'winning template' for launching low-cost iPhone

Apple's iPad mini seen as 'winning template' for launching low-cost iPhone

By Neil Hughes

Apple surprised many last year when it priced the iPad mini at $329 — more than $100 higher than the Amazon Kindle Fire and Google Nexus 7. But the same premium approach will probably be used to successfully introduce a more affordable iPhone, a new analysis concludes.

This week, Mark Moskowitz and Gokul Hariharan of J.P. Morgan took a stab at the prospect of a low-cost iPhone. They expect that Apple would sell such a device in the second half of 2013 priced between $350 and $400 — a cost that may prove higher than some market watchers expect.

But rather than be disappointed by those price points, investors should look to the iPad mini as a "winning template" for Apple's strategy, Moskowitz and Hariharan argue. Instead, they believe a contract-free iPhone priced under $400 would be a "very attractive" product for many consumers.

An iPhone priced between $350 and $450 could also affect market trends and lower what J.P. Morgan calls the "smartphone price pyramid." Moskowitz and Hariharan said that while currently mid-level smartphones don't see much volume, Apple could change the market trends with a reasonably priced iPhone — just like the company has done in the past with the iPad and iPod.

"Apple usually creates new demand when it steps into a price band — for example, the $300-$400 price range for tablets did not have much demand (most of the growth had been at the $499+ or $199 range) before the launch of the iPad mini," they wrote. "However, after the launch of Pad mini, this segment has become one of the largest parts of the market, even convincing many suers to upgrade from cheaper tablets to the iPad mini."

Apple's current crossroads in the smartphone market is similar to where the company was 30 years ago in the PC space, Moskowitz and Hariharan believe. At one point, Apple had more than a quarter of the PC market, but it faced competition from IBM PC clones and Microsoft's Windows platform.

"If Apple doesn't move into the mainstream, then its ecosystem advantage (already has more than 300 million iCloud users) is likely to be eroded by Android, which is growing very quickly," they said. "The move to lower price points may come at the expense of margins in the short term, but we believe that the opportunity to expand the iOS ecosystem could pay off in the long term through non-product revenue streams."

Multiple rumors have pegged the launch of a low-cost iPhone for later this year. Market watchers believe Apple will be compelled to launch such a product, particularly to gain market share in emerging markets like China and Brazil, where customers do not typically purchase phones with a contract subsidy.

One projection from last month suggested a low-cost iPhone could net Apple 11 percent share of that market segment by 2014. But many others outside of Moskowitz and Hariharan have called for Apple to launch an iPhone in the $300 price range, slightly below what J.P. Morgan expects.

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Planet with four suns discovered by volunteers

Planet with four suns discovered by volunteers

By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website
The new planet - a gas giant - is about six times the size of Earth
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Astronomers have found a planet whose skies are illuminated by four different suns - the first known of its type.

The distant world orbits one pair of stars and has a second stellar pair revolving around it.

The discovery was made by volunteers using thePlanethunters.org website along with a team from UK and US institutes; follow-up observations were made with the Keck Observatory.
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“Start Quote


Computerised attempts to find things [in the data] missed this system entirely. That tells you there are probably more of these that are slipping through our fingers”Dr Chris LintottOxford University

A scientific paper has been posted on the Arxiv pre-print server.

The planet, located just under 5,000 light-years away, has been named PH1 after the Planet Hunters site.

It is thought to be a "gas giant" slightly larger than Neptune but more than six times the size of the Earth.

"You don't have to go back too far before you would have got really good odds against one of these systems existing," Dr Chris Lintott, from the University of Oxford, told BBC News.

"All four stars pulling on it creates a very complicated environment. Yet there it sits in an apparently stable orbit.

"That's really confusing, which is one of the things which makes this discovery so fun. It's absolutely not what we would have expected."

Binary stars - systems with pairs of stars - are not uncommon. But only a handful of known exoplanets (planets that circle other stars) have been found to orbit such binaries. And none of these are known to have another pair of stars circling them.
Follow-up observations were made with the Keck facility on Mauna Kea

Asked how this planet remained in a stable orbit whilst being pulled on by the gravity of four stars, Dr Lintott said: "There are six other well-established planets around double stars, and they're all pretty close to those stars.

"So I think what this is telling us is planets can form in the inner parts of protoplanetary discs (the torus of dense gas that gives rise to planetary systems).

"The planets are forming close in and are able to cling to a stable orbit there. That probably has implications for how planets form elsewhere."
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Kepler Space Telescope

Stares fixedly at a patch corresponding to 1/400th of the sky
Looks at more than 155,000 stars
Has so far found 2,321 candidate planets
Among them are 207 Earth-sized planets, 10 of which are in the "habitable zone" where liquid water can exist
Kepler candidate list
William Borucki talks about Kepler

PH1 was discovered by two US volunteers using the Planethunters.org website: Kian Jek of San Francisco and Robert Gagliano from Cottonwood, Arizona.

They spotted faint dips in light caused by the planet passing in front of its parent stars. The team of professional astronomers then confirmed the discovery using the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Founded in 2010, Planethunters.org aims to harness human pattern recognition to identify transits in publicly available data gathered by Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope.

Kepler was launched in March 2009 to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

Visitors to the Planet Hunters website have access to randomly selected data from one of Kepler's target stars.

Volunteers are asked to draw boxes to mark the locations of visible transits - when a planet passes in front of its parent star.

Dr Lintott points out: "Computerised attempts to find things [in the data] missed this system entirely. That tells you there are probably more of these that are slipping through our fingers. We've just stuck a load of new data up on Planethunters.org to help people find the next one."

Searching for such systems, he said, was "a complicated test to hand a computer", adding: "We're using human pattern recognition, which can disentangle that reasonably well to see the important stuff."

Since December 2010, more than 170,000 members of the public have participated in the project.

Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk


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How animals predict earthquakesBy Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC Nature

How animals predict earthquakesBy Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC Nature
Can pond-dwelling animals pick up pre-earthquake signals?

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Animals may sense chemical changes in groundwater that occur when an earthquake is about to strike.

This, scientists say, could be the cause of bizarre earthquake-associated animal behaviour.

Researchers began to investigate these chemical effects after seeing a colony of toads abandon its pond in L'Aquila, Italy, in 2009 - days before a quake.

They suggest that animal behaviour could be incorporated into earthquake forecasting.

“When you think of all of the many things that are happening to these rocks, it would be weird if the animals weren't affected in some way”Rachel GrantThe Open University

The team's findings are published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. In this paper, they describe a mechanism whereby stressed rocks in the Earth's crust release charged particles that react with the groundwater.

Animals that live in or near groundwater are highly sensitive to any changes in its chemistry, so they might sense this days before the rocks finally "slip" and cause a quake.

The team, led by Friedemann Freund from Nasa and Rachel Grant from the UK's Open University hope their hypothesis will inspire biologists and geologists to work together, to find out exactly how animals might help us recognise some of the elusive signs of an imminent earthquake.Strange behaviour

The L'Aquila toads are not the first example of strange animal behaviour before a major seismic event. There have been reports throughout history of reptiles, amphibians and fish behaving in unusual ways just before an earthquake struck.

STRANGE OR NOT
In July 2009, just hours after a large earthquake in San Diego, local residents discovered dozens of Humboldt squid washed up on beaches. These deep sea squid are usually found at depths of between 200 and 600m
At 5.58am on 28 June 1992 the ground began to shake in the Mojave Desert, California, right in the middle of a scientific study on desert harvester ants. Measurements revealed the ants did not change their behaviour at all during the earthquake, the largest to strike the US in four decades.

In 1975, in Haicheng, China, for example, many people spotted snakes emerging from their burrows a month before the city was hit by a large earthquake.

This was particularly odd, because it occurred during the winter. The snakes were in the middle of their annual hibernation, and with temperatures well below freezing, venturing outside was suicide for the cold-blooded reptiles.

But each of these cases - of waking reptiles, fleeing amphibians or deep-sea fish rising to the surface - has been an individual anecdote. And major earthquakes are so rare that the events surrounding them are almost impossible to study in detail.

This is where the case of the L'Aquila toads was different.Toad exodus

Ms Grant, a biologist from the Open University, was monitoring the toad colony as part of her PhD project.

"It was very dramatic," she recalled. "It went from 96 toads to almost zero over three days."


Ms Grant published her observations in the Journal of Zoology.

"After that, I was contacted by Nasa," she told BBC Nature.

Scientists at the US space agency had been studying the chemical changes that occur when rocks are under extreme stress. They wondered if these changes were linked to the mass exodus of the toads.

Their laboratory-based tests have now revealed, not only that these changes could be connected, but that the Earth's crust could directly affect the chemistry of the pond that the toads were living and breeding in at the time.
All of the toads left the breeding colony days before the 2009 earthquake

Nasa geophysicist Friedemann Freund showed that, when rocks were under very high levels of stress - for example by the "gargantuan tectonic forces" just before an earthquake, they release charged particles.

These charged particles can flow out into the surrounding rocks, explained Dr Freund. And when they arrive at the Earth's surface they react with the air - converting air molecules into charged particles known as ions.

"Positive airborne ions are known in the medical community to cause headaches and nausea in humans and to increase the level of serotonin, a stress hormone, in the blood of animals," said Dr Freund. They can also react with water, turning it into hydrogen peroxide.

This chemical chain of events could affect the organic material dissolved in the pond water - turning harmless organic material into substances that are toxic to aquatic animals.

It's a complicated mechanism and the scientists stress that it needs to be tested thoroughly.

But, Dr Grant says this is the first convincing possible mechanism for a "pre-earthquake cue" that aquatic, semi-aquatic and burrowing animals might be able to sense and respond to.

"When you think of all of the many things that are happening to these rocks, it would be weird if the animals weren't affected in some way," she said.

Dr Freund said that the behaviour of animals could be one of a number of connected events that might forecast an earthquake.

"Once we understand how all of these signals are connected," he told BBC Nature, "if we see four of five signals all pointing in [the same] direction, we can say, 'ok, something is about to happen'."

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Google Maps Mystery Actually Spy Satellite Targets, Expert Says | Fox News

Google Maps Mystery Actually Spy Satellite Targets, Expert Says | Fox News: "Newfound Google Maps images have revealed an array of mysterious structures and patterns etched into the surface of China's Gobi Desert. The media — from mainstream to fringe — has wildly speculated that they might be Chinese weapons-testing sites, satellite calibration targets, street maps of Washington, D.C., and New York City, or even messages to (or from) aliens.

It turns out that they are almost definitely used to calibrate China's spy satellites."

'via Blog this'

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Baby tale not black and white

Baby tale not black and white

By Clare MurphyHealth reporter, BBC News
Albinism is relatively common in parts of Africa

A white baby girl with a mop of blonde hair and blue eyes has been born to black parents living in London. How is this possible?

While there have been several cases of different coloured twins born to parents with mixed-race ancestry in recent years, Ben and Angela Ihegboro, who are originally from Nigeria, say they have no such origins which could explain the phenomenon that is their new daughter Nmachi.

In the case of Nmachi, there are three possible explanations of why she looks so very different from her older brother and sister, who are both black: dormant white genes which entered both of her parents' families long ago, a genetic mutation unique to her, or albinism.

Contrary to reports, doctors at the London hospital where Nmachi was born say they have not ruled out this recessive disorder which affects skin pigmentation.

Like many human traits, a person's colour is influenced by about 12 different genes, which together control the amount of pigment - or melanin - produced in the skin.

It is in principle at least possible that both parents carried light skin gene variants, inherited from unknown white ancestors on either side, which in their cases were masked by dark skin gene variants.

We are all of us genetic mixtures to some extent and occasionally you'll have a convergence of the pale versions of these genes in African Americans and African Carribbeans who have a mixed black and white ancestry”Professor Bryan SykesUniversity of Oxford

In this way, white parents can also produce a black child, as in the recently filmed biopic of Sandra Laing, the black baby born to Afrikaner parents at the height of apartheid in the mid-1950s.

In Europeans, it is possible - if highly unusual - that African DNA from those who were brought to the continent as Roman slaves joins in two fair parents to produce a dark-skinned child.

Under this theory, when Nmachi was conceived, she inherited both light skin genes which together give her this very fair appearance.

"We are all of us genetic mixtures to some extent and occasionally you'll have a convergence of the pale versions of these genes in African Americans and African Carribbeans who have a mixed black and white ancestry," says Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford.

"But that doesn't seem to be the case here. The parents are Nigerians with little known white ancestry at all."

What is more likely, he says, is a genetic mutation within the little girl herself which she will then pass on to her children if she has any in the future.Sunburn

But other experts point the finger firmly at albinism, a genetic disorder which in its most extreme form results in a complete lack of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes.


It ranges in severity from Type 1 to 4, with overall about one in 20,000 people born worldwide with some form of the condition.

Both parents could be carrying a copy of the albino gene without it having surfaced in any known family member for many years.

"This is perhaps one of the most common recessive disorders in Nigeria, and we have to remember that it comes in different forms," says Professor Ian Jackson of Human Genetics Unit at the Medical Research Council.

"In Type 2 we would see creamy skin and yellow hair or light brown, which in some cases would darken with age."

The principal health risks of albinism are problems with vision - ranging from the mild to the severe - and sun damage to the skin due to the lack of melanin, which protects against ultraviolet rays.

This is the key problem for those with the disorder in the scorching heat of Africa, potentially less so for a baby born in London - but care will still need to be taken with sunblock and hats.


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