Pricless Information about Environment, Family And Relationships And More

Iceland raised it quota on whale hunting Tuesday to 250 a year, a dramatic increase over past levels.

Outgoing fisheries and Agriculture Minister Einar Gudfinnsson announced the change in a news release, which didn’t provide any reasons for the increase.

“Total allowable takes of fin and minke whales for the next five years will be according to scientific recommendations of the (Icelandic) Marine Research Institute,” the ministry said.

Last year, whalers were authorized to catch nine fin whales and 40 minke whales. The International Conservation Union lists both fin whales and sei whales — but not minke whales — as endangered species.

Icelanders have been hunting whales since the days of the Vikings but halted commercial whaling in 1985 only to resume the practice in 2006.

Gufinnsson’s announcement follows suggestions by International Whaling Commission officials that Japan could be authorized to resume commercial whaling off its coast, in return for killing fewer whales for scientific research in the Antarctic.

Iceland and Norway are the only countries to authorize fishermen to hunt whales to sell for their meat. Both countries choose not to recognize IWC rules which stipulate that whales may be killed for research but not for commercial purposes.

Japan insists its whaling is solely for scientific research, though opponents claim the research expeditions are a cover for commercial whaling, because the whale meat is sold on the market.

Gufinnsson is a lawmaker with Iceland’s Independent Party, which said on Monday it had disbanded the coalition government which it had led since elections in 2007.

Ministers are due to be replaced by members of a new coalition between Iceland’s Social Democratic Alliance Party and the Left-Green movement. The coalition opposes commercial whaling, but it was not immediately clear whether it would attempt to reverse the ministry’s decision to raise whaling quotas.

Astronomers have observed the intense heating of a distant planet as it swung close to its parent star, providing important clues to the atmospheric properties of the planet.

The observations, by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), enabled them to generate realistic images of the planet by feeding the data into computer simulations of the planet’s atmosphere.

According to Gregory Laughlin, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC, “We can’t get a direct image of the planet, but we can deduce what it would look like if you were there.”

“The ability to go beyond an artist’s interpretation and do realistic simulations of what you would actually see is very exciting,” he said.

The researchers used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to obtain infrared measurements of the heat emanating from the planet as it whipped behind and close to its star.

In just six hours, the planet’s temperature rose from 800 to 1,500 Kelvin (980 to 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit).

Known as HD 80606b, the planet circles a star 200 light years from Earth, is four times the mass of Jupiter, and has the most eccentric orbit of any known planet.

It spends most of its 111.4-day orbit at distances that would place it between Venus and Earth in our own solar system, while the closest part of its orbit brings it within 0.03 astronomical units of its star.

The planet zips through this dramatic close encounter with its star in less than a day.

At the closest point, the sunlight beating down on the planet is 825 times stronger than the irradiation it receives at its farthest point from the star.

“If you could float above the clouds of this planet, you’d see its sun growing larger and larger at faster and faster rates, increasing in brightness by almost a factor of 1,000,” Laughlin said.

Spitzer observed the planet for 30 hours before, during, and just after its closest approach to the star.

The planet passed behind the star (an event called a secondary eclipse) just before the moment of its closest approach.

This was a lucky break for Laughlin and his colleagues, who had not known that would happen when they planned the observation.

The secondary eclipse allowed them to get accurate measurements from just the star and thereby determine exact temperatures for the planet.

According to Laughlin, the extreme temperature swing observed by Spitzer indicates that the intense irradiation from the star is absorbed in a layer of the planet’s upper atmosphere that absorbs and loses heat rapidly.

People under stress have a much harder time juggling attention between various tasks than those who are relaxed but when the tension eases, the mind is able to recuperate quickly, says a new study.

Previous experiments had found that stressed rats foraging for food had similar impairments and that those problems resulted from stress-induced changes in their brain anatomy.

The new study by scientists at the Weill Cornell Medical College and the Rockfeller University in New York, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of medical students, is a good example of how basic research in an animal model can lead to high-tech investigations of the human brain.

‘It’s a great translational story. The research in the rats led to the imaging work on people, and the results matched up remarkably well,’ said Bruce S. McEwen, head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at Rockfeller University.

The work holds good news for both rats and humans - their brains recuperate quickly. Less than a month after the stress goes away, they are back to normal.

‘The message is that healthy brains are remarkably resilient and plastic,’ McEwen said.

Researchers scanned the brains of volunteers, some stressed and others relatively relaxed, performing two subtly different kinds of mental tasks, either an attention-shift or a response-reversal.

Lying inside the scanner, the subjects looked at two discs: one red and one green, with one moving up and the other down. In a series of trials, they were prompted to choose a disc according to motion or colour, said a Rockefeller release.

By ordering when the subjects did which tasks, they challenged their volunteers’ brains to either switch focus from colour to motion, or to suddenly reverse their choice of a disc in the same category.

The study was published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists have blamed the presence of millions of two-headed fish larvae, found in the Noosa River in Australia, on chemical contamination from farm runoff.

According to a report in news.com.au, the disfigured larvae are thought to have been affected by one of two popular farm chemicals, either the insecticide endosulphan or the fungicide carbendazim.

Former NSW (New South Wales) fisheries scientist and aquaculture veterinarian Matt Landos yesterday called on the Federal Government to ban the chemicals and urgently find replacements.

Dr Landos said that about 90 per cent of larvae spawned at the Sunland Fish Hatchery from bass taken from the river were deformed and all died within 48 hours.

“It certainly looks like the fish have been exposed to something in the river,” he said.

“I wouldn’t like to be having kids and living next to a place that uses these chemicals and I wouldn’t like to be drinking tank water where they are in use,” he added.

Hatchery owner Gwen Gilson blames chemicals used by macadamia farmers near her Boreen Point business for the deformities.

“Some embryos split into two heads, some had two equal heads and a small tail and some had one big long head and a small tail coming out of the head,” she said.

According to Dr Landos, the chemicals were potentially human carcinogens and could have entered the river through any number of sources such as spraying or run-off even though there was no evidence of improper use.

Carbendazim had a history of causing embryonic defects and had been banned in the US, while endosulphan was banned in New Zealand.

“These chemicals mess up cell development,” said Dr Landos. “There’s no other plausible explanation for what’s going on,” he added.

Dr Landos and Dr Glanville said there was no danger for people either swimming or eating fish from the Noosa River because if chemicals were in the water, levels would likely be exceedingly low.