Annual bird counts give scientists climate clues

Armed with flashlights, recordings of bird calls, a small notebook and a stash of candy bars, scientist Rich Kostecke embarked on an annual 24-hour Christmastime count of birds along the Texas Gulf Coast. Yellow rail. Barn owl. Bittern. Crested Cara-Cara. Kostecke rattled off the names and scribbled them in his notebook. His data, along with that from more than 50 other volunteers spread out into six groups across the 7,000-acre Mad Island preserve, will be analyzed regionally and then added to a database with the results of more than 2,200 other bird counts going on from mid-December to Jan. 5 across the Western Hemisphere. The count began in 1900 as a National Audubon Society protest of holiday hunts that left piles of bird and animal carcasses littered across the country. It now helps scientists understand how birds react to short-term weather events and may provide clues as to how they will adapt as temperatures rise and climate changes. "Learning the changes of habit in drought could help us know what will happen as it gets warmer and drier," said Kostecke, a bird expert and associate director of conservation, research and planning at the Nature Conservancy in Texas. Scientists saw birds change their habits during last year's historic drought that parched most of Texas. Some birds that normally winter on the coast — such as endangered whooping cranes — arrived and immediately turned back when they couldn't find enough food. Other birds didn't even bother flying to the coast. Snowy owls, who sometimes migrate from the Arctic to Montana, suddenly showed up as far south as Texas. There has been some rain this year, but Texas still hasn't fully recovered from the drought and many areas remain unusually dry. Wetlands, a crucial bird habitat, have been damaged. Trees and brush are dead or brown. There are fewer flooded rice fields, prime foraging grounds for birds. And sandhill cranes, for the second winter in a row, are staying in Nebraska. An initial report on the 24-hour count that began midnight Monday and ended midnight Tuesday included 233 different species — a drop of 11 from last year when 244 were counted on Mad Island. While the area likely still has one of the United States' most diverse bird populations, the species that were missing raise questions. Where are the wild turkeys? Why were no black rails found? What about fox sparrows and the 13 other species that are commonly counted on the preserve? Where have they gone? "There are several possibilities," Kostecke surmised. "Conditions may be better in the east, like Louisiana. Some may still be north, because it's been mild, and they tend to follow the freeze line." With weather in the north still relatively warm, some birds might choose to stay put and conserve energy for the nesting season, Kostecke added. Similar changes in bird behavior could be seen this year in the Midwest and parts of the South, areas that have been gripped by a massive drought that covered two-thirds of the nation at its height. The drought's severity is unusual, but scientists warn that such weather could become more common with global warming. Birds — as well as other animals — will have to adapt, and the data collected in the Christmas count gives crucial insight on how they might do that. The dataset is notable for its size and the decades that it covers. Along with showing how birds adapt to climate change, it reveals the impact of environmental changes, such as habitat loss, which has contributed to a 40 percent decline in bird numbers during the past 40 years, said Gary Langham, vice president and chief scientist for the National Audubon Society. "We've converted the landscape dramatically, and then you add climate change to the mix ... and the results are more alarming," Langham said. Scientists have used the data to predict bird populations and behavior in 2020, 2050 and 2080. They also could use it to advance conservation work or calls for emergency action, he said. Birds, though, are only one part of an ecosystem. As they move from place to place, they encounter new predators and species that may be competing for the same food. Vegetation also is changing as the Earth warms and some areas become more drought-prone. What happens as all these changes take place? "It's the million dollar question. When you have that kind of ecological disruption, no one knows what happens," Langham said. "There are going to be winners and losers. There will be some that become more common, and some that will go extinct." The survivors are the big unknown.

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Most Extreme Space Discoveries of 2012

Astronomical discoveries in 2012 have reshaped what we know about the universe and pushed some instruments to the very limits of their observing power. Scientists discovered a galaxy that harbors an enormous central black hole 17 billion times more massive than the sun. Another research group spotted a scorching-hot rocky planet in the closest star system to our own. Meanwhile, the records for most massive galaxy cluster and most distant galaxy were shattered. Here's a brief rundown of some of the year's most extreme and exciting cosmic finds. Most monstrous black hole Observers probably don't want to get too close to NGC 1277 or its supermassive black hole, which takes up a large portion of the galaxy itself. The central black hole is 17 billion times more massive than the sun and makes up 14 percent of its host galaxy's mass, compared to the usual 0.1 percent. Researchers were so flummoxed by the black hole's size that they took an extra year to double-check their calculations before publishing their results. Closest exoplanet to Earth In a surprise discovery, astronomers found a planet that is about the same size as Earthin the star system next door. The rocky planet was found in Alpha Centauri, a three-star system just 4.3 light years from us. [Alpha Centauri Planet and Stars Explained (Infographic)] Life is very unlikely on this world. Its rocky surface may be molten, since the planet orbits just 3.6 million miles (6 million kilometers) from its sun-like star. (Earth, for comparison, circles 93 million miles, or 150 million km, from the sun). Alpha Centauri Bb, as the planet is known, was discovered through tracking gravitational wobbles around its planet star. The wobbles in this case are very subtle, making the star move back and forth at no more than 1.1 mph (1.8 kph). The research team stated it "pushed our technique to the limit," and some astronomers are skeptical that the planet even exists. And just this month, a different research team detected five potential planets orbiting the star Tau Ceti, which lies only 11.9 light-years from Earth. One of the newly spotted candidate worlds may be capable of supporting life as we know it, scientists say. Smallest alien worlds Astronomers using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope discovered three tiny planets 120 light-years away from Earth. Circling the star KOI-961, the smallest of the three planets is about the size of Mars, and all are smaller than Earth. Even the star itself is tiny — just 70 percent larger than Jupiter. "This is the most compact system of planets," said John Johnson, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "It's like you have a shrink raygun and set it to seven times smaller and zapped a planetary system." Smallest solar system KOI-500 has five planets so crowded together that their gravity jostles each other profoundly during their orbits. Their "years" are only 1, 3, 4.6, 7.1 and 9.5 days long. Furthermore, the planets are tiny: just 1.3 to 2.6 times the size of Earth. All of this action takes place in an area 150 times smaller than Earth's orbit, astronomers said. "At this rate, you could easily pack in 10 more planets, and they would still all fit comfortably inside the Earth's orbit," Darin Ragozzine, a planetary scientist at the University of Florida at Gainesville, said in a statement. Most distant galaxy Much like the 100-meter dash world record, the record for farthest known galaxy often changes. The newest potential record-holderis UDFj-39546284, which had taken shape when the universe was only 380 million years old. Its extreme age was discovered in 2012 using new observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy is part of a group of seven that astronomers examined, forming perhaps the first reliable observations of galaxies that formed 400 million and 600 million years after the Big Bang created the universe 13.7 billion years ago. [Gallery: Spectacular Hubble Photos] Oldest, most distant supernovas In 2012, astronomers described what they think led to the oldest, most distant supernovas in the universe. Scientists believe some of these "super-luminous" supernovas come from massive stars — 100 to 250 times the mass of the sun — that explode and blast their matter into space. Astronomers stated that inside these massive stars, gamma-ray light changes into electron pairs as well as antimatter positrons. The gamma rays usually stop the star from collapsing due to gravity, but the grip weakens as gamma rays convert to matter. It is at this point that the star implodes, sparking the explosion. Most massive galaxy cluster At 2,000 times more massive than the Milky Way, a large cluster of galaxies some 7 billion light-years away dwarfs just about any other collection of matter known. Astronomers say the cluster — properly known as SPT-CLJ2344-4243and dubbed the Phoenix cluster — appears to contain thousands of galaxies of many different sizes. Astronomers first spotted the Phoenix cluster in 2010, but didn't realize its extent until they did follow-up observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. High-energy light pouring out of the cluster make it the most X-ray luminous one ever found, at 35 percent brighter than the last record-holder found. Biggest map of the universe Courtesy of a mega map, astronomers are a step closer to understanding how the universe came to be. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III released a map that charts more than 1 million galaxies in a total volume of 70 billion cubic light-years. The map could help astronomers better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that appears to make up most of the universe, researchers said. Deepest view of the universe The Hubble Space Telescope is peering back further and further in time. The famous orbiting observatory captured light that emanated 13.2 billion years ago, when the universe was just 500 million years old or so. Hubble's picture, which is called the eXtreme Deep Field, shows galaxies and starlight accumulated over 10 years in a small bit of sky; this is the best method we have to see objects so far away. The photo is a successor to Hubble's "Ultra Deep Field", which the telescope took in 2003 and 2004. [Video: Hubble's eXtreme Deep Field] Most magnetic star There's a star 20,000 light-years from Earth with a real magnetic personality. NGC 1624-2, which is about 35 times as massive as our sun, was spotted in the constellation Perseus. With a magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than the sun's— and 10 times more powerful than that of any known star — NGC 1624-2 drags a blanket of trapped charged particles around it. "Magnetic fields of this strength are extremely rare; they are only known to exist in a few other stars of much lower mass," study lead author Gregg Wade, an astronomer at the Royal Military College of Canada, told SPACE.com in a September interview. "To find such a strong field is very lucky." X-ray blast in the universe's youth A jet of X-rays emanating from quasar GB 1428 — a galaxy that has a huge black hole in its center — was found about 12.4 billion light-years from Earth. The radiation band is estimated at about twice the diameter of the Milky Way. With the previous record-holder at 12.2 billion light-years away, astronomers said they are getting more information on how black holes behaved in the universe's early days. Biggest core found in a ginormous galaxy Lurking in a galaxy about 10 times the width of the Milky Way lies a large, diverse galactic core that doesn't seem to have a black hole associated with it. The wispy core of A2261-BCG, which is about 10,000 light-years across, puzzles astronomers because supermassive black holes are expected to be at the heart of most galaxies. Hubble Space Telescope observations suggest the core might have been constructed when two galaxies merged. Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

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Jupiter, Moon Align in Christmas Skywatching Treat

As darkness falls on Christmas night, check out the east-southeast sky. Shining brilliantly to the upper left of the bright, nearly full moon will be a silvery "star" with a steady glow. But that's not a star, or Santa returning to the North Pole. Rather, it's the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter, serving as a sort of holiday ornament with Earth's nearest neighbor to cap off a year of interesting skwyatching events. As viewed from the eastern and central United States, the moon and Jupiter will appear closest together during the late afternoon or early evening hours on Tuesday (Dec. 25). From New York, they’ll be closest together at 6:25 p.m. EST (2325 GMT); from Chicago, it’ll be 5:18 p.m. local time (2318 GMT). Jupiter will appear just a bit over one-half degree from the limb of the moon. (One-half degree is roughly equal to the moon’s apparent width). In the western United States, the closest approach will come before sunset, but moon and planet will still appear to be quite close together as darkness falls. [Video: Jupiter and the Moon Converge on Christmas] The pair will be slowly separating as Tuesday night shifts to Wednesday morning; the moon moves across the sky at roughly its own diameter each hour. Jupiter will remain a bold light high in the east-southeast at nightfall. This week, it doesn't set in the west until around 5 a.m. local time. Appearing brighter than any nighttime star, Jupiter is now levitating in front of the constellation Taurus (the Bull), not far from the famous V-shaped Hyades star cluster and despite the nearby presence of the orange 1st-magnitude star, Aldebaran, which fills this region of the sky with overbearing brightness. What kind of telescopic observation can be made of the gas giant now? Almost every kind. From mid-northern latitudes you can even watch a full rotation of Jupiter, with the cloud features of every longitude displayed, during a single nightlong vigil. And as always, a fascinating dance of Jupiter's four large Galilean satellites will await viewers on any night who watch with a small telescope or even steadily held binoculars. As darkness falls over the eastern U.S. on Tuesday, you'll see two Jupiter moons — Ganymede and Callisto — on one side of the giant planet, while a third, Europa, hovers by itself on the other side. As the evening progresses, Ganymede and Europa will gradually pull away from Jupiter. Then, at 7:15 p.m. EST (0015 GMT Wednesday), the fourth Galilean satellite, Io, will emerge from Jupiter's shadow and appear on the side of the planet occupied by Europa. Slowly, as Tuesday night wears on, Io will become easier to see as it moves away from Jupiter and toward Europa. At 11:40 p.m. EST (0440 GMT Wednesday), you’ll see Io passing Europa. And Jupiter itself will continue to be a great target throughout the entire winter season for those who got binoculars or a telescope as a holiday gift. Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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Revealed: Rudolph Really Did Have a Red Nose

Most people know Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose — but why? Medical researchers say they've now found the answer. The secret to Rudolph's rosy schnozzle is the dense network of blood vessels in his nose. Reindeer, it seems, have 25 percent more capillaries carrying red, oxygen-rich blood in their nasal architecture than humans, say the scientists from the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the University of Rochester in New York. "In colder climates and also when they are higher up in the atmosphere pulling Santa's sleigh, the increase in blood flow in the nose will help keep the [nose's] surface warm," Dr. John Cullen of the University of Rochester told MedPage Today. The dense network of blood vessels in reindeer noses is also essential for regulating the animal's internal body temperature — like many mammals, reindeer don't sweat. The researchers took advantage of high-tech instruments like hand-held intravital video microscopes to compare the blood vessels of two reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) with those of human volunteers (five healthy humans and one with nasal polyps). One of the human volunteers was examined after inhaling 0.0035 ounces (100 milligrams) of cocaine, "a drug routinely used in ear, nose, and throat medicine as a local anaesthetic and vasoconstrictor," the researchers write in the British Medical Journal this week. "We're kind of glad they didn't do the same thing with the reindeer, because the last thing we would want is reindeer on cocaine, pulling Santa around the sky," said Cullen. Their results showed reindeer noses do turn a rosy red; after a treadmill test, the reindeer's nose showed up as red (warm) in a thermographic image. In addition, they found glandlike structures in the nasal mucous membrane of reindeer and humans; the structures were surrounded by capillaries, and the researchers suspect, at least in humans, they secrete mucus. "These results highlight the intrinsic physiological properties of Rudolph's legendary luminous red nose, which help to protect it from freezing during sleigh rides and to regulate the temperature of the reindeer's brain, factors essential for flying reindeer pulling Santa Claus' sleigh under extreme temperatures," they write.

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The Hottest Climate Change Stories of 2012

Perhaps the most unavoidable climate story of 2012 was the warmth that gripped much of the United States, and to a lesser degree, the planet, throughout the entire year. Heat waves brought "spring in March" to parts of the country, and broke all-time high-temperature records in a number of places. This, inevitably, led to a discussion of global warming and the degree to which it contributes to some types of extreme weather, in this case heat waves. In fact, prominent climate scientist James Hansen, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and colleagues published research saying recent heat waves "were a consequence of global warming, because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small." Some other climate scientists, however, disagreed about the degree to which heat waves can be attributed to climate change. Meanwhile, many of the top climate stories this year have become something like annual rites recently, as people around the world grapple with human-caused climate change, and attempt to address it and its effects. [7 Hottest Climate Change Stories of 2012] Natural disasters, such as Hurricane Sandy (actually a hybrid storm) this year like others last year, have sparked discussion of the connection between climate change and increased risk for some extreme weather events. A majority of Americans also seem to be making the connection between extreme weather and climate change, according to surveys by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. In reality, attributing any single weather event to global warming is tricky, though some scientists said the planet's increasing temperatures may have worsened Sandy. "The climate influences on this are what we might call the 'new normal,' the changed environment this storm is operating in," Kevin Trenberth, who heads the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told LiveScience at the end of October. For instance, the warmer ocean surfaces — which fuel hurricanes — may increase the risk that a storm will become more intense, Trenberth said. In addition, rising sea levels worsen the risk of flooding, the cause of much of the devastation Sandy wrought. Likewise, global climate talks moved forward slowly, as they have in the last few years, against warnings that nations must curb the planet's rising greenhouse gas emissions or face dramatic consequences. This year also brought some milestones. Arctic sea-ice cover retreated to a record low in September. As with unusually warming temperatures, the record sea-ice retreat did not come out of the blue. In recent years, the sea-ice cover has fallen below the average extent for 1979 to 2000, and, likewise, the first decade of this century was the warmest decade ever recorded in all continents of the globe, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Scientists who study sea ice have blamed a combination of natural fluctuations and human-caused warming for the increased loss of ice, although some differ as to how much humans have contributed, Claire Parkinson, a senior scientist who studies climate at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in September. Early in the year, the United States, once the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, saw its carbon-dioxide emissions from energy use drop to the lowest level since 1992, a decline the Department of Energy attributed to a mild winter, a shift from coal to natural gas and a slow economy. In 2011, the United States contributed 16 percent to the world's emissions from fossil fuel use, behind the 28 percent contribution from the top emitter, now China, according to a report by the Global Carbon Project.

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Have Humans Caused a New Geological Era?

SAN FRANCISCO — Humans drive trillions of miles in cars, clear-cut forests for agriculture and create vast landfills teeming with tin cans, soda bottles and other detritus of industrialization. There's no doubt that humans have radically reshaped the planet, and those changes leave traces in the Earth's geological record. At the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union this week, geologists are grappling with how to define the boundaries of that human-centered geologic era, referred to as the Anthropocene. Despite our dramatic impact on the planet, defining our era has proven a difficult task. "If it's to be a geological period, it has to be visible in the geological record," said Anthony Brown, a researcher at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, who is trying to define the boundary. Because geology looks at the deep past, such questions would normally be examined in 100,000, even 1 million years' time, he said. "In the absence of time travel, we have to work out whether we really do have enough around to define a new geological period." Shifting boundary In one possible way of demarcating the boundary between natural geologic eras and the human-shaped period, scientists would look at how agriculture changes sediments, Brown told LiveScience. For instance, when farmers clear-cut forests and plant crops, they change how sediments and runoff wash into the local rivers, often creating a thick layer of silty, sandy clay on the flood plain, Brown said. [Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth] But using such geologic clues to date the Anthropocene era runs into a problem: agriculture began at different times around the globe. Some areas, such as certain pockets in Africa, may not have had intensive agriculture until recently. Alternatively chemical deposits could date the boundary between human and natural geologic eras. For instance, widespread use of leaded gasoline and paint has left high levels of lead in soils throughout the world, said Michael Kruge, a researcher at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) could also serve as markers. These are formed from combustion in natural wildfires, but also come largely from the burning of fossil fuels. "In the middle of the 20th century, you see a big spike in these compounds in sediment," Kruge said in a press conference. Using those measures, the Anthropocene era would begin around industrialization, thousands of years after humans began reshaping the planet with agriculture. Yet another proposal would peg the time of the Anthropocene's birth to the mass movement of soil, or the accumulation of minerals from coal burning, cement production for construction, or the massive use of nitrogen fertilizers. That would date the Anthropocene to the sharp uptick in the production of these chemicals after World War II. Other scientists hope to date the Anthropocene's onset using modern-day fossils, for instance, layers and layers of plastic soda bottles and tin cans piling up in landfills. All of these approaches face a challenge, however: combining human-caused changes with natural, global variations that normally demarcate different geologic time periods. For instance, our current geologic time period, the Holocene Epoch, governs our climate and the extent of our glaciers, and is dictated by eccentricities in the Earth's orbit (something humans' haven't yet managed to alter). Since the Earth's orbit isn't going to change any time soon, the Anthropocene would somehow need to overlap with the Holocene. "Nobody believes that the astronomical cycle, the 100,000-year cycle that we're in, is suddenly coming to an end," Brown said. "We have to combine the anthropogenic with the natural variability in the climate system. It is a question that geologists never had to face before."

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Disgust Makes Dirt More Visible

The feeling of disgust isn't particularly enjoyable, but new research suggests the "ewww" has its role: People who are disgusted are better at detecting impurities. In other words, disgust makes it easier to see dirt and other nastiness that might make us sick, researchers reported online Nov. 5 in the journal Psychological Science. The findings aren't the first example of emotions influencing perceptions. Spiders, for example, look bigger to people who fear them, according to research published in February in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders. Similarly people who are afraid of heights think drops look bigger than they are. Ewww, disgusting! University of Virginia researchers were interested in finding out whether disgust skews our perceptions, too. Disgust motivates cleanliness, they reasoned, and cleanliness is symbolized across many cultures as whiteness — think of a bathroom cleaner commercial that emphasizes shots of gleaming white porcelain to sell its product. In that case, the researchers hypothesized, feeling disgust might make people more sensitive to impurities in the color white, which would indicate dinginess or dirt. They conducted a series of three experiments to test the idea. In the first, 122 undergraduate students were shown four gray rectangles on a computer screen, one slightly darker or lighter than the others. They were asked to pick the one that was a different shade. After the fact, the students filled out questionnaires about their personal sensitivity to disgust, answering, for example, how grossed-out they'd be at seeing something like maggots in a garbage can. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You] A second study, this one with 51 undergraduate participants, mimicked the first, but asked students to detect a faint numeral on either a white or gray background. In both studies, the researchers found the more disgust-sensitive the student, the more likely they were to detect differences in shade on the white and lighter gray side of the spectrum. They did not, however, get any better at detecting differences in dark grays, suggesting their perceptual shift was focused on the brightness of whites only. Noticing impurities In the final experiment, the researchers asked 44 different undergrads to complete a similar task detecting a faint numeral against a black or white background. This time, though, the students saw either gross images (such as roaches or garbage) or scary images (such as guns or angry faces) before the task. Previous studies have found that scientists can subtly influence people's behavior with these so-called "primes." That turned out to be the case with disgust, too. People who were generally sensitive to disgust became better at distinguishing whites and light grays after seeing gross images. People not sensitive to disgust showed no change, perhaps because they simply weren't grossed out enough by the images. The results held for sexual disgust (an aversion to hearing strangers having sex, for example) and pathogen-based disgust (a strong desire to avoid potential communicable disease), but not for moral disgust such as a negative reaction to forging a signature. People who are sensitive to disgust may be more in-tune with the differences between a bright white and a dingy white because they're motivated by their concerns with cleanliness to pay attention to those shades, the researchers wrote. Or they may have sharper perceptions in the first place, which lead them to notice dirt where others overlook it, contributing to their disgust. The anterior insula, a small nugget of nervous tissue buried deep in the brain, may be the region that influences these perceptions, the researchers suggest.

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