S. Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State University whose research teams also have discovered the world’s tiniest lizard in the Dominican Republic and the smallest frog in Cuba, said the snake was found slithering beneath a rock near a patch of Barbadian forest.

Hedges said the tiny-title-holding snake, which is so diminutive it can curl up on a U.S. quarter, is the smallest of the roughly 3,100 known snake species. It will be introduced to the scientific world in the journal “Zootaxa” on Monday.

“New and interesting species are still being discovered on Caribbean islands, despite the very small amount of natural forests remaining,” said Hedges, who christened the miniature brown snake “Leptotyphlops carlae” after his herpetologist wife, Carla Ann Hass.

The Barbadian snake apparently eats termites and insect larvae, but nothing is yet known of its ecology and behavior. Genetic tests identified the snake as a new species, according to Hedges. It is not venomous.

Zoologist Roy McDiarmid, curator of amphibians and reptiles at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, said he has seen a specimen of the diminutive creature. He saw no reason to argue with the assertion that it is the world’s smallest snake.

McDiarmid said the Barbados creature is a type of thread snake, also called worm snake, which are mostly found in the tropics. “We really know very little about these things,” he said in a Sunday telephone interview from his Virginia home.

Finding the globe’s tiniest snake demonstrates the remarkable diversity of the ecologically delicate Caribbean. It also illustrates a fundamental ecological principle: Since Darwin’s days, scientists have noticed that islands often are home to both oversized and miniaturized beasts.

Hedges said the world’s smallest bird species, the bee hummingbird, can be found in Cuba. The globe’s second-smallest snake lives in Martinique. At the other end of the scale, one of the largest swallowtail butterflies lives in Jamaica.

Scientists say islands often host odd-sized creatures because they’re usually inhabited by a less diverse set of species than continents. So island beasts and insects often grow or shrink to fill ecological roles that otherwise would be filled by entirely different species.

SOURCE: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080803/ap_on_sc/barbados_tiny_snake ]

By DAVID McFADDEN, Associated Press Writer

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

Global warming _ through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding _ is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians _ the Bushes’ Kennebunkport and John Edwards’ place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.

That’s the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea level rise is “the thing that I’m most concerned about as a scientist,” says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

“We’re going to get a meter and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. “It’s going to happen no matter what _ the question is when.”

Sea level rise “has consequences about where people live and what they care about,” said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. “We’re going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost.”

This week, beginning with a meeting at the United Nations on Monday, world leaders will convene to talk about fighting global warming. At week’s end, leaders will gather in Washington with President Bush.

Experts say that protecting America’s coastlines would run well into the billions and not all spots could be saved.

And it’s not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes an even greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms and regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher and more frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.

All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the lower 48 states would put about 25,000 square miles under water, according to Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. That’s an area the size of West Virginia.

The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s calculation projects a land loss of about 22,000 square miles. The EPA, which studied only the Eastern and Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina would lose the most land. But even inland areas like Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also have slivers of at-risk land, according to the EPA.

This past summer’s flooding of subways in New York could become far more regular, even an everyday occurrence, with the projected sea rise, other scientists said. And New Orleans’ Katrina experience and the daily loss of Louisiana wetlands _ which serve as a barrier that weakens hurricanes _ are previews of what’s to come there.

Florida faces a serious public health risk from rising salt water tainting drinking water wells, said Joel Scheraga, the EPA’s director of global change research. And the farm-rich San Joaquin Delta in California faces serious salt water flooding problems, other experts said.

“Sea level rise is going to have more general impact to the population and the infrastructure than almost anything else that I can think of,” said S. Jeffress Williams, a U.S. Geological Survey coastal geologist in Woods Hole, Mass.

Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century. But he tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.

Williams says it’s “not unreasonable at all” to expect that much in 100 years. “We’ve had a third of a meter in the last century.”

The change will be a gradual process, one that is so slow it will be easy to ignore for a while.

“It’s like sticking your finger in a pot of water on a burner and you turn the heat on, Williams said. “You kind of get used to it.”

[SOURCE: http://www.comcast.net/news/science/index.jsp?cat=SCIENCE&fn=/2007/09/24/770996.html&cookieattempt=1]

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

They also found hundreds of thousands of animal bones in a cave, possibly evidence of some prehistoric human activity.

The findings are preliminary and have not been analyzed.

The expedition is designed to learn how to spot caves on Mars by studying the thermal signatures of caves and non-cave features in hot, dry places here on Earth. Scientists think Martian caves, some of which may already have been spotted from space, could be good places to look for life.

No hot place on Earth is drier than the Atacama Desert. Many parts of the high-plateau desert have never received rain that anyone can remember. Average rainfall across the region is just 1 millimeter per year. (Parts of Antarctica are considered the driest places on Earth, however.)

So nobody was looking for water.

Total surprise

The research team was exploring Cueva Chulacao, the largest known cave in the Cordillera de la Sal. Naturally curious, they took note of things they saw while conducting their primary research. Other than a single black hair that was likely from an indigenous person, this cave was pristine, virgin territory, explained J. Judson Wynne, a cave expert with the SETI Institute and Northern Arizona University.

“There were no footprints where we were going, and I only saw the slightest evidence of human use,” Wynne told LiveScience by email Monday night as the day’s work was sinking in.

Wynne and his colleagues moved carefully through the cave to place a sensor along the wall, part of their NASA-funded research.

“Much to my surprise, as we moved about halfway through this passage, my foot completely sunk into the soil,” Wynne said. “It was mud! There was a lot of it. It was all contained within the salt stream flow that meandered through this passage.”

There is no known source of water nearby.

The finding may prove exciting for scientists searching for water on Mars. Water is considered a prerequisite for life as we know it.

“In arguably the driest desert in the world, we’ve found water in a cave far away from any known water source,” Wynne said. “Essentially, we found water in a barren area below the Earth’s surface. Why was water there? What are the mechanisms for the presence of water in these hyper-arid caves? Is this merely a phenomenon related to these caves in particular? Is there some sort of moisture sink that results in the water concentrating in certain caves and not others in the Atacama Desert?”

Bones, bones, bones

Another discovery yesterday left the researchers just shaking their heads.

In a different cave in the same region, they found animal remains. Lots of them.

“We found hundreds of thousands of bones and skulls eroding out of the cave walls,” Wynne wrote in his blog. “So, we’ve renamed this small cave Cuevita de Huesos (or Small Cave of the Bones).”

The researchers had to climb about 13 feet up to find a walkable passage.

“This is where we found all the bones mixed in with tree branches,” Wynne wrote.

It’s not clear if the animals were dumped into the cave by prehistoric people or if perhaps they were trapped by a flood. After all, the expedition is related to figuring out the thermal signatures of Mars caves, and the finding was made just this week.

“Whatever the mechanism for their deposition, this find was incredibly cool and rather exhilarating,” Wynne said. Pete [Polsgrove] and I had a blast marveling over the extent of this deposition as well as discussing what could have possibly led to the deposition of these bones. Once the sensors were deployed in this feature we moved on.”

Wynne’s colleagues on this expedition: Pete Polsgrove, a Northern Arizona University Ph.D. student in microbiology; Dan Ruby, associate director of Fleischmann Planetarium and Science Center in Reno; geographer and speleologist Knutt Peterson; self-taught astronomer John DeDecker; expedition doctor Lynn Hicks; commercial pilot and wilderness guide Christina Colpitts; and U.S. Geological Survey astrophysicist Tim Titus.

The research is funded by NASA’s exobiology program.

Caves on Mars

“Our overall goal is to define mission and instrumentation requirements for detecting caves on Mars using thermal infrared imagery,” Wynne explained.

That means figuring out what caves look like in infrared, and what time of day the heat signatures of caves and surrounding features is optimal for cave hunting from, say, a craft orbiting Mars. The air around a cave entrance can be cooler or warmer than what is being radiated off sunlit rocks.

“Martian caves have already been detected through techniques developed by this project, and are significant as a potential habitat for microorganisms and other extremophiles that might exist or have existed on Mars,” Ruby said in a statement prior to departure earlier this month. “They may also serve as future habitats for astronaut explorers to the red planet, as they offer protection from radiation and the harsh environment of the surface.”

The work will continue in various visits through 2010, and a similar program will be conducted in the Mojave Desert in California.

[SOURCE: LiveScience http://www.livescience.com/environment/080731-cave-water.html ]

Their findings will be reported Thursday in the British science journal Nature.

The 2,100-year-old Antikythera Mechanism was recovered from an ancient shipwreck in 1901 near Antikythera, a small island off Greece’s south coast.

Its insides look like a clock. About 30 bronze gears were cranked to calculate phases of the moon, eclipses and other celestial information specific to a certain date. Results were displayed on dials on the front and back of the mechanism.

Most workings of the device only came to light with recent advances in scanning technology and computer processing power.

In 2005, an X-ray tomography machine was brought from Britain to the National Archaeological museum of Athens, which houses the device’s corroded and sediment-encrusted remains. Researchers soon found the gear structure — including the number of teeth cut into the wheels — corresponded to known theories of celestial cycles.

“It’s like a medical scanner, but instead of putting people in it, we put the Antikythera Mechanism,” Yanis Bitsakis, a co-author of the Nature report, told The Associated Press of the technology used to study the device.

Bitsakis, of Athens University’s Center for History and Paleography, said finding the Olympian dial on the device was a surprise. Greece’s ancient games had important religious significance and were commonly used dates for historical reference.

“We were astonished because this is not an astronomic cycle but an Olympian cycle, one of social events … One does not need a piece of high technology to keep track of a simple four-year cycle,” he said. “It is perhaps not extravagant to see the mechanism as a microcosm illustrating the temporal harmonization of human and divine order.”

In a second new find, also reported in Nature on Thursday, Bitsakis and fellow researchers found that month names etched onto the Antikythera Mechanism were consistent with ones used in Corinthian colonies in Sicily. This provides the first possible link with the Greek mathematician Archimedes, who died there about 100 years before the device was built, Bitsakis said.

“This is an interesting — not direct link but possible link — with the town where Archimedes used to work. It is the first link of this kind,” he said.

With the powerful 3-D scanner, built by the British-based X-Tek Systems, scientists can peer into razor-thin sections of the device’s 80-odd surviving fragments to understand its mechanics and read hundreds of tiny Greek inscriptions etched onto its bronze components.

Information was also gleaned from a technique developed by U.S.-based Hewlett-Packard Co. which made composite images of high-resolution digital photographs taken of the mechanism fragments under varied lighting conditions.

Bitsakis said improved computing power, used to analyze existing scans and images, made the latest discovery possible.

“The inscriptions are in very faint layers, like one-tenth of a millimeter in depth, and the letters are 1 millimeter high, so it’s almost nothing,” he said.

“(We had better) memory processing power and more powerful graphic cards … Without this we couldn’t see the inscription because you have to increase the resolution and the result is a very big file,” he said.

The ongoing research project into the Antikythera Mechanism is being led by Mike Edmunds, professor of astrophysics, and his colleagues at Cardiff University in Britain.

[SOURCE: DEREK GATOPOULOS, Associated Press Writer http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080730/ap_on_re_eu/greece_ancient_gadget]

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs – and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen – in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking-water supplies of 24 metropolitan areas – from Southern California to northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.

Water providers rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings, unless pressed, the investigation found. For example, the head of a group representing major California suppliers said the public “doesn’t know how to interpret the information” and might be unduly alarmed.

How do the drugs get into the water?

People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at water-treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.
And while researchers do not yet understand the exact risks from decades of persistent exposure to random combinations of low levels of pharmaceuticals, recent studies – which have gone virtually unnoticed by the general public – have found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife.

“We recognize it is a growing concern, and we’re taking it very seriously,” said Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Findings widespread

The AP reviewed hundreds of scientific reports, analyzed federal drinking-water databases, visited environmental study sites and treatment plants and interviewed more than 230 officials, academics and scientists. It also surveyed the nation’s 50 largest cities and a dozen other major water providers, as well as smaller community water providers in all 50 states.

Here are some of the key test results:

Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco’s drinking water.

Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city’s watersheds.

Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking-water-treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.

The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

The federal government doesn’t require any testing and hasn’t set safety limits for drugs in water. Of the 62 major water providers contacted, the drinking water for only 28 was tested. Among the 34 that haven’t: Houston, Chicago, Miami, Baltimore, Phoenix, Boston and New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, which delivers water to 9 million people.

Some providers screen only for one or two pharmaceuticals, leaving open the possibility that others are present.

Watersheds affected

The investigation also indicates that watersheds, the natural sources of most of the nation’s water supply, also are contaminated. Tests were conducted in the watersheds of 35 of the 62 major providers surveyed, and pharmaceuticals were detected in 28.

Yet officials in six of those 28 metropolitan areas said they did not go on to test their drinking water – Fairfax, Va.; Montgomery County in Maryland; Omaha, Neb.; Oklahoma City; Santa Clara, and New York City.

The New York state health department and the USGS tested the source of the city’s water, upstate. They found trace concentrations of heart medicine, infection fighters, estrogen, anti-convulsants, a mood stabilizer and a tranquilizer.

In several cases, officials at municipal or regional water providers said pharmaceuticals had not been detected, but test results from independent researchers showed otherwise.

Of the 28 major metropolitan areas where tests were performed on drinking water supplies, only Albuquerque; Austin, Texas; and Virginia Beach, Va.; said tests were negative. The drinking water in Dallas has been tested, but officials are awaiting results. Arlington, Texas, acknowledged that traces of a pharmaceutical were detected in its drinking water but cited post-9/11 security concerns in refusing to identify the drug.

A spreading problem

Contamination is not confined to the United States. More than 100 different pharmaceuticals have been detected in lakes, rivers, reservoirs and streams throughout the world. Studies have detected pharmaceuticals in waters throughout Asia, Australia, Canada and Europe – even in Swiss lakes and the North Sea.

In the United States, the problem isn’t confined to surface waters. Pharmaceuticals also permeate aquifers deep underground, source of 40 percent of the nation’s water supply. Federal scientists who drew water in 24 states from aquifers near contaminant sources such as landfills and animal feed lots found minuscule levels of hormones, antibiotics and other drugs.

Perhaps it’s because Americans have been taking drugs – and flushing them unmetabolized or unused – in growing amounts. Over the past five years, the number of U.S. prescriptions rose 12 percent to a record 3.7 billion, while nonprescription drug purchases held steady around 3.3 billion, according to IMS Health and The Nielsen Co.

“People think that if they take a medication, their body absorbs it and it disappears, but of course that’s not the case,” said EPA scientist Christian Daughton, one of the first to draw attention to the issue of pharmaceuticals in water in the United States.

The cellular level

Some drugs, including widely used cholesterol fighters, tranquilizers and anti-epileptic medications, resist modern drinking water and wastewater treatment processes. Plus, the EPA says there are no sewage treatment systems specifically engineered to remove pharmaceuticals.

Veterinary drugs also play a role. Pets are now treated for a wide range of ailments- sometimes with the same drugs as humans. The inflation-adjusted value of veterinary drugs rose by 8 percent, to $5.2 billion, over the past five years, according to an analysis of data from the Animal Health Institute.

[Source: http://www.dailybulletin.com/ci_8514600 ]

Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard, The Associated Press

The phenomenon could be used to improve the performances of everyday devices ranging from car airbags to computer chips, say Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin from Saint Andrews University.

Casimir force — discovered in 1948 and first measured in 1997 — can be seen in a gecko’s ability to stick to a surface with just one toe.

Now the British scientists say they can reverse the Casimir force to cause an object to repel rather than attract another in a vacuum.

“The Casimir force is the ultimate cause of friction in the nano world, in particular in some micro-electromechanical systems,” said Leonhardt, writing in the August issue of New Journal of Physics.

“Micro or nano machines could run smoother and with less or no friction at all if one can manipulate the force,” he added.

And he added: “In order to reduce friction in the nanoworld, turning nature’s stickiness into repulsion could be the ultimate remedy. Instead of sticking together, parts of micromachinery would levitate.”

Leonhardt stressed that the practise is possible only for micro-objects.

But he underlined that, although in principle it may one day be possible to levitate humans, that day is a long way off.

“At the moment, in practice it is only going to be possible for micro-objects with the current technology, since this quantum force is small and acts only at short ranges,” he said.

“For now, human levitation remains the subject of cartoons, fairytales and tales of the paranormal.”

Their research was to be published in the New Journal of Physics.

[Source:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070806/sc_afp/britainsciencelevitation_070806132733 ]

A lake in southern Chile has mysteriously disappeared, prompting speculation the ground has simply opened up and swallowed it whole.

The lake was situated in the Magallanes region in Patagonia and was fed by water, mostly from melting glaciers.

It had a surface area of between 4 and 5 hectares (10-12 acres) — about the size of 10 soccer pitches.

“In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal … we went again in May and to our surprise we found the lake had completely disappeared,” said Juan Jose Romero, regional director of Chile’s National Forestry Corporation CONAF.

“The only things left were chunks of ice on the dry lake-bed and an enormous fissure,” he told Reuters.

CONAF is investigating the disappearance.

One theory is that the area was hit by an earth tremor that opened a crack in the ground which acted like a drain.

Southern Chile has been shaken by thousands of minor earth tremors this year.

SANTIAGO (Reuters)

[SOURCE: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070620/sc_nm/chile_lake_dc ]

How about congenitally deaf people? It appears that they may dream in sign language! Their dreams are also more colorful than those of people with normal hearing.

[SOURCE: Selsick, Hugh, and Baker, Fiona; "Dreamtime," New Scientist, p. 108, October 28, 2000]