Mount McKinley's Gotten Shorter Again

Mount McKinley. There's a bit less of it than we thought.

Could Alaska's Mount McKinley be in danger of developing a Napoleon complex?

Well, it's still said to be the tallest peak in North America, so perhaps it won't need to worry about its height just yet. But for the second time in recent decades, the mountain's been shortened.

This week's announcement by Alaska's lieutenant governor, Mead Treadwell, that the U.S. Geological Survey now thinks McKinley is 20,237 feet tall rather than 20,320 is getting plenty of attention:

— "Say it ain't so!" writes Alaska Dispatch.

— "McKinley's perch as the tallest mountain in North America just got a little less comfortable," says the Anchorage Daily News.

McKinley is also known as Denali. According to Treadwell's office:

"Denali's elevation was originally measured to stand 20,320 feet in 1952, based on photogrammetry. A 1989 field survey recorded an elevation of 20,306 feet — 14 feet shorter than the 1952 recording.

"The 2012 revision of 20,327 feet was recorded with radar technology deployed as a result of Alaska's Statewide Digital Mapping Initiative (SDMI), which also revealed that an entire ridgeline of Mt. Dickey in Denali National Park was missing from previous maps — one of many discrepancies corrected by recent map updates.

"The State of Alaska invested $9.59 million in SDMI since 2010, and the federal government has invested $14 million toward the overall cost of creating a digital elevation model for Alaska. The initiative, nearly 50% complete, is on schedule for statewide completion by 2016."

Which mountain is still North America's No. 2? It's thought to be Canada's Mount Logan, which comes in around 19,550 feet.

Why Szechuan Peppers Make Your Lips Go Numb

New research shows that a molecule in Szechuan peppers activates your cells’ touch receptors, making them feel like they’ve been vibrated rapidly. Photo by Flickr user diwineanddine

If, in the midst of a Szechuan pepper-heavy meal, you have the presence of mind to ignore the searing hot pain that fills your mouth, you might notice a more subtle effect of eating the hot peppers: a tingling, numbing sensation that envelops your lips and tongue.

What’s behind this strange phenomenon, scientifically known as paresthesia? Scientists believe that it has something to do with a molecule called hydroxy-alpha-sanshool, naturally present in the peppers.

Research has shown that the molecule interacts with our cell’s receptors differently than capsaicin, the active ingredient in the world’s hottest chili peppers. Capsaicin produces a pure burning sensation by binding to the same sorts of receptors present in our cells that are activated when we’re burned by excessive heat, but the Szechuan peppers’ active chemical appears to act on separate receptors as well, perhaps accounting for the distinctive tingling that can persist for minutes after the burn has gone away.

Now, in a study that required some uncommonly compliant volunteers—they let their lips get brushed with ground Szechuan pepper—researchers found that the peppers produce the tingle by exciting tactile sensors in our lips and mouth. In other words, it seems that apart from tasting the peppers’ spiciness, we feel it too, as though our lips are being physically touched by the chemicals present in the Szechuans.

Hydroxy-alpha-sanshool, the molecule responsible for Szechuan peppers’ tingle-inducing ability. Image viaWikimedia Commons

As part of the study, published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a group of neuroscientists from University College London gathered 28 people and subjected them to ground Szechuans and small metal vibrating tools. Initially, they ground up the peppers, mixed them with ethanol and water, and brushed them onto the lips of the participants, who reported the level of tingling they felt.

Then, to try figuring the exact frequency of the tingling—a concept that becomes a bit more intuitive if you think of the tingling, or numbness, as the lips being vibrated quickly—they held a small vibrating tool up to the volunteers’ fingers. They could control how fast or slow the tool vibrated, and were asked to set it so that it matched the same feeling as the tingling on their lips. After the Szechuan tingling had time to die down, the vibrating tools were placed on their lips in the same spot, and again the participants could control the vibrating to make it resemble the pepper numbness as closely as possible.

When they looked at the records of the tool’s frequency, they found that the participants consistently set it to vibrate at 50 hertz (another way of saying 50 cycles per second). This consistency across people was telling—specific classes of tactile receptors in our cells are each activated by different frequencies (when touched, they pass along an electric current through nerve fibers, ultimately signaling to the brain that physical contact has occurred), so it supported the idea that touch receptors were involved.  Which class of receptor, though, is activated by Szechuan peppers?

The scientists say that frequency of the Szechuan’s numbing sensation fell within the range of vibration typically conveyed by a highly-sensitive type of tactile receptor called Meissner receptors, which cover around 10-80 hertz. Previous work has shown that in human nerve cells cultured in petri dishes, the sanshool molecule caused fibers associated with Meissner receptors to fire, passing along a burst of electricity.

This experiment showed that in the real world, the Szechuans’ active ingredient seems to do the same thing, triggering activity in this set of receptors and causing them to pass along tactile stimuli towards the brain, thereby making our lips feel numb, as though they’ve been vibrated quickly. It’s a strange idea, but not unlike the feeling of spiciness: When you eat the pepper, you’re not actually being burned, but your heat-sensitive receptors are being activated, making it seem that way. In the same way, if you’re daring enough to bite into a Szechuan, the touch receptors in your lips and mouth will be stimulated, and as a result, they’ll go numb in a few minutes.

Remote Antarctic Trek Reveals A Glacier Melting From Below

The surface tower at a drill site, under construction during blistering Antarctic winds. Data from instruments, deployed through 450 meters of ice, is transmitted from the tower by satellite back to the Naval Postgraduate School.

Scientists watching Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier from space have noticed with some alarm that it has been surging toward the sea.

If it were to melt entirely, global sea levels would rise by several feet.

The glacier is really, really remote. It's 1,800 miles from McMurdo, the U.S. base station in Antarctica, so just getting there is a challenge. Scientists have rarely been able to get out to the glacier to make direct measurements.

"This was a granddaddy of a problem," says Tim Stanton, oceanography research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

Stanton not only wanted to get to it, he wanted to get to it with 20,000 pounds of gear, so they could drill into it.

The Naval Postgraduate School team deploys ocean monitoring instruments through a bore hole into the ocean cavity below.

Stanton and about a dozen colleagues spent several years planning this mission, which involved multiple aircraft and remote support camps. In fact, they took four trips to Antarctica before they finally succeeded.

It wasn't just getting there that was hard. Bill Shaw, a colleague of Stanton's, says Antarctica has its own way of serving up trouble.

"You're in your tent sleeping, and you start to hear things flapping and then you wake up to find that all your neatly piled batches of gear are now covered in several feet of snow," Shaw says. "You're going to spend the next several days digging it out and getting going again."

That happened more than once during their seven weeks out on this remote piece of ice. They chose this spot because the glacier here is actually being undercut by ocean water, which flows below it.

The team's challenge was to drill down through the ice sheet, which is twice as thick as the Golden Gate Bridge is tall. Melting those holes involved heating up a metal rod and circulating hot fluid through hoses to the rod, as it gradually ate its way down through the ice.

"Everybody was shlepping hose," Stanton says. "They needed lots of support, so that's what we did during the drilling phase. As soon as the hole was through, we immediately started deploying instruments."

In particular, Stanton wanted to measure the currents flowing right under the ice sheet. He wanted to test how salty the water was, and to find out how quickly the ice was being eaten away by the comparatively warm seawater. They also grabbed a sample of the mud from the seafloor below.

"To see what's down there is quite remarkable, because I can assure you, nobody else on this planet's ever touched the mud before us, underneath an ice shelf like that," he says.

Their instruments showed that meltwater from the glacier was flowing rapidly toward the open ocean, and cutting into the ice above as it went.

"I was surprised by how much like a river this was. It's a river, but instead of eroding a channel, it's melting a channel," Shaw says.

And it turns out that channel is melting very fast. As they report in Science magazine, the ice in that channel was disappearing at the rate of 2 inches a day. Stanton said their measurement is consistent with what scientists had inferred from satellite measurements.

"Don't forget, this happens day in and day out," he says. "We saw no changes over the 35 days that we were reporting on in this paper. It's a phenomenally high melt rate compared to what we observe in the Arctic, for example."

At the moment, it's contributing a tiny amount to rising sea levels. But the melting has been accelerating in recent years, and if it keeps accelerating, in the very long run, the Pine Island Glacier could add several feet to global sea levels.

The results are sobering, but Stanton says when the drilling system finally punched through the ice and he was able to position his instruments, he felt he'd conquered this grandaddy of a problem.

"That was remarkably satisfying," he says. "It really had been a long, long road."

With luck, those instruments will continue to run for another two or three years — and send their data back via satellite to Stanton and his colleagues, in the cozy confines of their labs.

Voyager 1 Officially in Interstellar Space!

NASA Quotes 'Star Trek' As Voyager 1 Enters the Interstellar Frontier 

This still from a NASA video shows the Voyager 1 probe nearly 12 billion miles from the sun as it goes …

When NASA announced Thursday that its far-flung Voyager 1 spacecraft is now officially the first interstellar spacecraft in human history, it was a time for celebration, congratulations and … "Star Trek"?

During a news conference Thursday (Sept. 12), John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator of science missions, walked out to address the public and press about the unprecedented Voyager 1 milestone to the tune of TV's "Star Trek" theme song, effectively melding science with science fiction. 

"Space: The final frontier," Grunsfeld said kicking off the event by borrowing "Star Trek's" iconic opening words. "These are the voyages of the starship Voyager. Its 36-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out anomalous cosmic rays and new plasmas, to boldly go where no probe has gone before. Those words from 'Star Trek' have inspired so many of us and I think are characteristic of the excitement and the discoveries we're going to talk about today."

Those findings do deserve some fanfare. NASA officials announced that Voyager 1 entered interstellar space 35 years after its launch in August 2012. By measuring the vibrations of electrons surrounding Voyager 1, NASA scientists were able to determine the point in time where the probe crossed over into interstellar space.

Voyager 1 is now about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from the sun.

"Someday humans will leave our cocoon in the solar system to explore beyond our home system," Grunsfeld said during the event. "Voyager will have led the way."

NASA's Voyager 1 probe launched to space on Sept. 5, 1977, about two weeks after Voyager 2, its twin. The spacecraft trekked through the solar system on a "grand tour" that got them up-close and personal with Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune plus many of the moons orbiting those distant planets.

Why We Don't Need Pandas

Now I know what you are thinking. Don’t need Pandas!? How dare he! On some days I might even be inclined to agree with you. Even now as I write this I feel I am getting some pretty judgmental looks from the stuffed panda toy at the other side of the room. Well calm down; I love pandas, perhaps even more than most. Pandas are among the most interesting, charismatic and culturally significant animals in the world and ones that need our protection if they are to survive. So why would I write such a thing? Well as much as I like pandas, I like conservation even more.

The fact is that conservation biology suffers from a phenomenon known as taxonomic bias. It has been long acknowledged that popular species such as lions, eagles and pandas receive disproportionate amounts of funding and public attention over others. This shouldn't be surprising; you don’t have to look much further than the city zoo to see how the famous animals draw in crowds of people, eager to catch a glimpse of an orangutan defelting himself. They are the faces of conservation charities around the world and they appear all the time on the covers of magazines. They are on our clothes, they have their own movies, heck, they even show up in breakfast cereal.

However, many in the conservation community have taken off their panda cap long enough to realize that while focusing our attention on popular mammals may attract public support and funds for these particular animals; it results in a significant lack of interest in less ‘glamorous’, yet often more endangered species. Less ‘exciting’ groups like invertebrates, amphibians and fungi are particularly unacknowledged by the public at large, often finding themselves relegated to the bin of creepy-crawly-sticky-slimy crap. There’s no cereal for them, and as far as I know nobody has ever wanted this guy on a T-shirt (a shame in my opinion).

Despite increasing recognition of the importance and conservation status of these species, it simply doesn't seem to be translating into actual interest in less well known plants and animals. What’s worse is that the bias of interest runs right down to the academic literature, where species like amphibians are particularly underrepresented. For example a 2002 study in Science found that invertebrates are perhaps one of the most understudied groups of organisms in terms of papers relative to their number. Despite making up 79% of all species on earth, research into invertebrates makes up just 11% of the conservation literature. A stark contrast to mammals that have a 68% share of the research yet make up just 3% of the total number of species. Many of these species are not only more endangered than our favorite mammals but they are arguably more important in terms of ecological interactions within the biosphere, having key roles in things such as pollination and soil management.

What’s worse is that when papers do research these ‘less exciting’ groups, they are more likely to be underfunded, unfinished or unpublished, and when they aren't, they are published to much less eager eyes. The bias even seems to affect choice of research projects, among scientists and editors actually working in the field (albeit subconsciously). There is again a heavy preference for flagship mammals and birds and a further preference for studying species primarily in the developing world. As much as we might not like to admit, it seems being a frog in the Amazon means you are nobody’s friend.

What about the flagship species themselves? It is true that pandas and charismatic animals charm a lot of money for conservation in general, but consistently spending large amounts of money on particularly endangered species is potentially harmful for two reasons. First, because many of the high-profile conservation campaigns focus funds on animals that actually only have a very small chance of conservation success. There is a good argument to be made that the money can be spent on less critically endangered species that often have a much higher chance of actually being saved. The second problem is that campaigns like these perpetuate the spending of large amounts of funding on our favorite species like pandas, bringing their media profile even higher, in turn receiving more money for (but usually only for), you guessed it… pandas. Again the less popular species are left out in the cold.

This clearly has profound consequences for our understanding of conservation and throws up a lot of pertinent questions about which species we should be protecting and why. While I doubt anyone’s intentions are insidious, there is a good amount of evidence to say that at the moment our conservation attention is simply focused on how charismatic and popular a species is, rather than how endangered or important it is for the biosphere. Despite a growing acknowledgement of this bias in journals, there is not much sign that things are getting any better.

I think the time has come to say that as much as we all love pandas, something needs to change. It is one thing using popular species to sell magazines, but this imbalance in research needs to be rectified if we are actually to take real steps in conserving the biosphere. We need a conscious effort on the part of the public, editors and scientists to recognize the implications such a bias has on conservation and make real steps towards changing it, both in the research we do and where we put our (usually limited) funds. It would be a sad state of affairs to find ourselves creating an entirely human based selection pressure on animals; with the ones most likely to survive being the ones we most like to cuddle.

So perhaps my title for this article was a little misleading, I do like pandas, even though I think they are a bit overblown. I guess it could be changed to the more accurate: “Why we don’t need (more) pandas in conservation research”. Who knows, perhaps I just chose something inflammatory to get people to read my article… but oh look you already finished reading it… Oh well, maybe next time.

Trout Eats 20 shrews!!!

Small Trout Devours Nearly 20 Shrews

A 19-inch rainbow trout caught in Alaska's Kanektok River, within the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge, was found to contain nearly 20 shrews in August 2009.  Credit: Alaska Department of Fish and Game

If fish had competitive eating championships, a small rainbow trout in Alaska might hold a record in the "shrew" category.

Researchers recently opened up a rainbow trout in Alaska's Togiak National Wildlife Refuge, and were surprised to find the fish had eaten nearly 20 shrews, a mouse-size mammal.
To make matters stranger, the fish was relatively small, measuring only 19 inches (48 centimeters) long, said Mark Lisac, a fish biologist at Togiak National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
That's " an awful lot for one fish to put down," Lisac told LiveScience. That said, rainbows and related fish species have been known to eat shrews and other small mammals, including rodents, and many species of freshwater fish are opportunistic feeders that will chow down on a wide variety of prey, he said.
This rainbow trout report trumps the previous record of seven shrews eaten (at least that Lisac is aware of), which was held by a grayling, another species of fish that "keys in on shrews even more" than rainbows, Lisac said. 

The 19-inch rainbow trout next to a ballpoint pen for a size comparison. 
Credit: Alaska Department of Fish and Game

But how did the rainbow end up with such a large shrew meal?
Shrews aren't very good swimmers and sometimes drown if they end up in water, Lisac said. "My best guess is that the shrews were on an island [or river bank] that flooded, and the rainbow happened to be in the right spot at the right time," he said.
The fish feed heavily in the summer to prepare themselves for the winter, when they remain sedentary and don't eat much at all. Related species have been shown to enlarge their digestive tracts during the summer, and to digest the excess intestines in the winter, Lisac said. Rainbows may be able to do the same, he added.
Trent Sutton, a fisheries biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who wasn't involved in the research, said he hadn't heard of rainbow trout eating shrews but that it doesn't surprise him since they are opportunistic predators. "Top predators, like trout, have large distensible stomachs that allow them to consume large prey items or a lot of smaller items," Sutton told LiveScience. "I do not know why there would be a lot of shrews where a trout could access them though."
More typical foods for rainbows include salmon eggs, insects and smaller fish, though they have been known to eat voles and other rodents, besides shrews (which aren't rodents).
But the fact that a rainbow would eat shrews isn't that surprising. Fly fishermen in the area are well aware of the tendency, and use special flies that mimic swimming rodents or drowning shrews, Lisac said.
If you "use a mouse fly and drag it along the surface, it seems pretty irresistible" to a variety of fish, Lisac said. Doing so can lead fish to hit the fly, but not necessarily to sink their teeth in. "They hit it and you may not catch them, but they seem to want to drown it," he said.
Species known to eat shrews and rodents also include lake trout and pike, he said.
The study that turned up the shrew-eating marvel took place on the Kanektok River in August 2009 and was primarily geared toward placing radio transmitters on 200 of the bigger fish to understand their migrations and movements. The study determined that the river consists of several different populations, meaning the various groups may need to be managed separately, as opposed to being treated as one entity, Lisac said.

Dolphin Die Off in the Atlantic Ocean

Mid-Atlantic Dolphin Die-Off Leaves Scientists PuzzledWilfredo Lee/Associated Press

An Atlantic bottlenose dolphin at the Dolphin Research Center on Grassy Key in Marathon, Fla., in July.

Dead dolphins have been washing up in alarming numbers on mid-Atlantic beaches since July as scientists struggle to find a cause for the largest such die-off in a quarter-century.

More than 160 Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have turned up dead from New York to Virginia, says Charley Potter, a marine mammal collection manager at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, tells NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday.

Potter, who is working with a rescue team from the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center , tells host Scott Simon that the die-off involves "all age classes, both males and females" and that it "seems to have two centers of concentration – one in New Jersey and the other in Virginia."

While no definitive cause for the dolphin deaths has been determined, Potter says one possibility is the morbillivirus, a member of the same family of virus that causes measles and canine distemper.

Morbillivirus was pinpointed as a cause in a 1987 dolphin die-off that killed some 2,500 animals. Potter says it "has been found in some of the animals to date."

Scientists must now determine "whether or not the [morbillivirus] infection is something that's always been there and that we're picking it up because of increased surveillance, or in fact it's the smoking gun," he says.

Delmarvanow.com quotes Teri Rowles, National Marine Mammal Stranding coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as saying the suspect virus is "at the top of our list to rule out."

Rowles tells the news website that the virus requires close contact to pass between dolphins, but that some of the marine mammals have antibodies that protect them.

According to Delmarvanow.com:

"There are four near-shore populations of dolphins from New York to North Carolina, said Lance Garrison, research biologist with NOAA Fisheries.

There is an estuarine North Carolina population that also moves north into Virginia, a southern migratory group off the coast of Virginia and a northern migratory group from Delaware to New York. In addition, there is a genetically distinct, offshore population, he said.

The northern group likely will likely begin migrating to the coast of North Carolina coast in October.

The southern group, which will also [begin] migrating in October, moves as far south as northern Florida, he said."