Tiny Penguins Saved by Little Sweaters

A good yarn: Knitters make sweaters for penguins after oil spill

A little blue penguin from Papamoa Beach
was covered in oil after a Liberian cargo ship hit a reef on Oct. 7 in Tauranga, New Zealand.

It's a sad story with a happy twist. Blue penguins in New Zealand have been soaked with oil after a container ship ran aground near the east coast of the country's North Island earlier this month. New Zealand’s Environment Minister Nick Smith has described the oil spill as the nation’s “most significant maritime environmental disaster.”

In their oil-soaked state, the birds shouldn’t preen themselves because their feathers are contaminated. They also need help staying warm before and after rescue workers do what they can to clean them up.

So Skeinz, a knitting shop in Napier, New Zealand, put out a call for knitters to make little sweaters for penguins in need. And boy, have knitters around the world responded. One blog post from the folks at Skeinz.com ran under the headline “It’s raining jumpers.”  Another ran with the headline “We have Critical Mass” — but Skeinz is still encouraging determined knitters to send their handiwork along to “keep stocks available for the Wildlife Rescue Team to draw from if required.”

This isn't the first time that penguins have been outfitted with sweet little sweaters. Let's take a waddle down penguin lane to see some other penguins in sweaters — because you can never have enough photos of that!

Back in 2005 in Australia, tiny fairy penguins Toby and Percina modeled sweaters
that were being sent for the rehabilitation of penguins involved in oil spills.

In 2000, a group of penguins were rescued off the coast of South Africa
after getting caught in an oil spill from a sunken carrier ship.
Sweaters helped them stay warm while they recovered.

Want to make an adorable sweater for a penguin in a pinch? You can find specifications — (for instance, they must be made of 100 percent wool yarn, and they must be just the right size) — as well as an address to send your creations, here.

After a spill near Tasmania in 2000, a penguin was clad in a knitted sweater in an attempt to prevent it from ingesting oil.

Quoted from AnimalTracks

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Turkey sends 10,000 elite forces after Kurdish militants

Offensive on border of Iraq follows insurgents' deadliest one-day attacks against Turkish military since mid-1990s

Students protest against recent attacks
on Turkish military in Istanbul

ANKARA, Turkey — About 10,000 elite Turkish soldiers were taking part in a ground offensive against Kurdish rebels in southeastern Turkey and across the border in Iraq on Thursday, making it the nation's largest attack on the insurgents in more than three years, the military said.

The offensive began Wednesday after Kurdish rebels carried out raids near the Turkey-Iraq border that killed 24 Turkish soldiers and wounded 18, the insurgents' deadliest one-day attacks against the military since the mid-1990s.

The military said in a statement Thursday that 22 battalions, or about 10,000 soldiers, were taking part in the offensive in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, but it did not say how many were in each country.

NTV television said most of the troops were believed to be in Iraq.

It was Turkey's largest such offensive since February 2008, when thousands of ground forces staged a weeklong offensive into Iraq on snow-covered mountains.

Story: Turkey in 'hot pursuit' after deadly attacks

The military said the soldiers in the current operation are commandos, special forces and paramilitary special forces — making it an elite force trained in guerrilla warfare. They are being reinforced by F-16 and F-4 warplanes, Super Cobra helicopter gunships and surveillance drones.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to share details of the military's offensive. The military only said the offensive was concentrated in five separate areas it did not identify.

"Our goal is to achieve results with this operation," Erdogan told a nationally televised news conference. "The military is determinedly carrying out this (operation), both from the air and the ground."

The military said the offensive was launched because the rebels had staged Wednesday's deadly simultaneous attacks on eight separate targets, including military and police outposts.

Iraq expresses support 

In its first comment since those attacks and the start of Turkey's offensive, Iraq's government on Thursday condemned the rebel attacks and promised to stop them from using Iraqi territory for future attacks against Turkey.

"The Iraqi government stresses again that Iraq will not be a haven or a shelter to any foreign armed and terrorist group," the Iraqi Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website, adding that both Baghdad and the regional Kurdish government in northern Iraq "are committed to secure the borders" to prevent the repetition of such attacks.

Story: Turkish warplanes hit Kurdish rebels in Iraq

A senior Iraqi Kurdish official, Nechirvan Barzani, was in Ankara and expected to be received by Erdogan shortly.

The Kurdish rebel attack outraged many Turks and fueled nationalist sentiment. Thousands of high school students, carrying Turkish flags, marched in the streets of the Turkish capital on Thursday.

"Tooth for tooth, blood for blood, vengeance!" students chanted in support of the military as they marched through the affluent Tunali Hilmi district. At one point, the students stopped traffic to sing the national anthem as some shopkeepers joined them and passers-by stood still in respect.

The Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq are mostly stable and prosperous. But to Turkey, which has a large Kurdish minority, they also are an inspiration and a support base for the Kurdish rebels.

Turkey's Kurdish rebel conflict has killed tens of thousands of people since the insurgents took up arms for autonomy in the country's Kurdish-dominated southeast in 1984.

Quoted from MSN

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Can you inherit a long life?

Parents may be passing more to their offspring than only DNA, study finds

Happy mother & son

Parents may be passing more to their offspring than their DNA. A new study shows some worms pass along non-genetic changes that extend the lives of their babies up to 30 percent.

Rather than changes to the actual genetic code, epigenetic changes are molecular markers that control how and when genes are expressed, or "turned on." These controls seem to be how the environment impacts a persons' genetic nature. For instance, a recent study on diet showed that what a mouse's parents ate affected the offspring's likelihood of getting cancer. Studies in humans have suggested that if your paternal grandfather went hungry, you are at a greater risk for heart disease and obesity.

The new study's results "could potentially suggest that whatever one does during their own life span in terms of environment could have an impact on the lives of their descendents," study researcher Anne Brunet, of Stanford University, told LiveScience. "This could impact how long the organism lives, even though it doesn't affect the genes themselves."

The study was conducted in the model organism C. elegans, a small, wormlike nematode often used in experiments as a stand-in for humans because of their genetic similarities. Even so, the researchers aren't sure how their results would apply to human life span. They are currently studying fish and mice to see if their findings hold true in different species.

Mutations that affect longevity in nematode parents
can impact the lifespan of descendants even if the initial mutation
is no longer present. This image represents a longevity
mark in the normal offspring of mutant nematodes.

Genes or epigenes?

Our DNA holds the code for life, but this code can be adapted based on how DNA is twisted together with proteins. Changes to these proteins are called "epigenetic," a word that literally means "on top of the genome." [ Epigenetics: A Revolutionary Look at How Humans Work ]

Modifications to proteins called histones that hold DNA together can turn genes off by adding a molecule called a methyl group (a carbon-hydrogen molecule), and can turn genes on by removing the methyl. These modifications can be caused by a variety of things in the environment, including diet or exposure to toxins.

The new study shows that, contrary to popular belief, some of these changes survive fertilization. Which ones survive, and how, are questions researchers are still trying to answer.

"What this finding suggests is that it's [the epigenome] not completely reset and there is epigenetic inheritance that isn't encoded by the genome that is sill transmissible between generations," Brunet said.

Inherited longevity 

The researchers found that when they mutated the protein complex that adds a methyl group to a specific histone protein, the nematodes lived up to 30 percent longer than the non-mutants. When the mutant nematodes reproduced with normal nematodes, their offspring (even those without the mutation) lived up to 30 percent longer. The methyl addition that caused the extended lifespan seemed to be passed down, even if the actual mutation wasn't.

For a nematode, which lives 15 to 20 days in the lab, an extra five or six days is a big boost. This would be like a human, instead of living to 80, living past 100.

The complex seems to turn off pro-aging genes, though what those genes are and how they work, the researchers aren't sure. "We really don't know yet what the mechanisms are, even in the parents, in which this complex manipulates life span," Brunet told LiveScience. "We do see genes that are involved in aging that are regulated by this complex."

Human implications 

While the researchers aren't sure about the protein's effect on human longevity yet, the finding is also important in studies of adult stem cells. Adult stem cells are normal cells that are 'reprogrammed' and supposedly wiped free of their epigenetic modifications. If this wiping process isn't thorough, leftover modifications could compromise therapies using these cells.

"The finding is fascinating," David Sweatt, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told LiveScience in an email. "The observations are also consistent with the emerging concept of 'soft inheritance,' whereby epigenetic mechanism may drive a molecular memory of ancestral experience over several generations."

Silvia Gravina, a researcher from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, suggested that epigenetic inheritance like that in the study could augment traditional "longevity" genes in human centenarians and their offspring.

"This finding supports the captivating and novel concept that health and general physiology can be affected not only by the interplay of our own genes and conditions of life, but also by the inherited effects of the interplay of our own genes and the environment of our ancestors," Gravina said, also by email.

Neither Sweatt nor Gravina was involved in the study, which was published Oct. 19 in the journal Nature.

Quoted from MSN

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Dark matter mystery deepens

Dark matter should be densely packed in the centers of galaxies. Instead, new measurements of two dwarf galaxies show that they contain a smooth distribution of dark matter.

Like all galaxies, our Milky Way is home to a strange substance called dark matter. Dark matter is invisible, betraying its presence only through its gravitational pull. Without dark matter holding them together, our galaxy’s speedy stars would fly off in all directions.

This artist's conception shows a dwarf galaxy
seen from the surface of a hypothetical exoplanet.
A new study finds that the dark matter in dwarf galaxies
 is distributed smoothly rather than being clumped
at their centers. This contradicts simulations
using the standard cosmological model known as lambda-CDM.
Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)

The nature of dark matter is a mystery — a mystery that a new study has only deepened.

“After completing this study, we know less about dark matter than we did before,” said Matt Walker from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The standard cosmological model describes a universe dominated by dark energy and dark matter. Most astronomers assume that dark matter consists of “cold” (i.e. slow-moving) exotic particles that clump together gravitationally. Over time, these dark matter clumps grow and attract normal matter, forming the galaxies we see today.

Cosmologists use powerful computers to simulate this process. Their simulations show that dark matter should be densely packed in the centers of galaxies. Instead, new measurements of two dwarf galaxies show that they contain a smooth distribution of dark matter. This suggests that the standard cosmological model may be wrong.

“Our measurements contradict a basic prediction about the structure of cold dark matter in dwarf galaxies. Unless or until theorists can modify that prediction, cold dark matter is inconsistent with our observational data,” Walker said.

Dwarf galaxies are composed of up to 99 percent dark matter and only 1 percent normal matter like stars. This disparity makes dwarf galaxies ideal targets for astronomers seeking to understand dark matter.

Walker and Jorge Penarrubia from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, analyzed the dark matter distribution in two Milky Way neighbors — the Fornax and Sculptor dwarf galaxies. These galaxies hold one million to 10 million stars, compared to about 400 billion in our galaxy. The team measured the locations, speeds, and basic chemical compositions of 1,500 to 2,500 stars.

“Stars in a dwarf galaxy swarm like bees in a beehive instead of moving in nice, circular orbits like a spiral galaxy,” said Penarrubia. “That makes it much more challenging to determine the distribution of dark matter.”

Their data showed that in both cases, the dark matter is distributed uniformly over a relatively large region, several hundred light-years across. This contradicts the prediction that the density of dark matter should increase sharply toward the centers of these galaxies.

“If a dwarf galaxy were a peach, the standard cosmological model says we should find a dark matter “pit” at the center. Instead, the first two dwarf galaxies we studied are like pitless peaches,” said Penarrubia.

Some have suggested that interactions between normal and dark matter could spread out the dark matter, but current simulations don’t indicate that this happens in dwarf galaxies. The new measurements imply that either normal matter affects dark matter more than expected, or dark matter isn’t “cold.” The team hopes to determine which is true by studying more dwarf galaxies, particularly galaxies with an even higher percentage of dark matter.

Quoted from Astronomy Magazine

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