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A long-term research has determined that a combination of changing weather patterns, overfishing, pollution, and other factors have conspired to drive penguin populations into a precipitous decline.

The findings were presented by University of Washington professor and WCS scientific fellow Dr. P. Dee Boersma at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago.

Boersma, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Penguin Project, has recently published two papers documenting some of the serious challenges faced by Magellanic penguins at a colony she has studied for more than 25 years at Punta Tombo, a wildlife reserve some 1,000 miles south of Buenos Aires.

Boersma’s data reveal that penguins at Punta Tombo are traveling farther to find food than they did just a decade ago due to changing ocean conditions and overfishing-particularly of anchovies, a favorite penguin food.

This has forced some penguins to attempt to nest outside of protected areas where they often fall prey to predators.

Meanwhile, changing weather patterns have also led to increased instances of heavy rains, which have caused high mortality of penguin chicks in five of the last 25 years.

“All told, penguin numbers at Punta Tombo have declined by more than 20 percent in the last 22 years, from 300,000 to just 200,000 breeding pairs,” Boersma said.

“Penguins are having trouble with food on their wintering grounds and if that happens they’re not going to come back to their breeding grounds,” she said.

“If we continue to fish down the food chain and take smaller and smaller fish like anchovies, there won’t be anything left for penguins and other wildlife that depend on these small fish for food,” she added.

Of the world’s 17 species of penguins, 12 are rapidly declining, Boersma further added.

A micro satellite being developed by IIT Kanpur in co-operation with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has been christened ‘Jugnu’.

The satellite, which is near completion, will be handed over to ISRO in November, who after testing will launch it.

Work on the satellite, which is aimed at gathering prior information regarding flood, drought and disaster management is in the last stage and will be handed over to ISRO in November for further test and launch, IIT Kanpur director Prof Sanjoy Govind Dhande told here today.

Last year in August, both ISRO and IIT-K had inked an MoU to develop a micro satellite dedicated for agricultural purpose.

“A team of mechanical engineering department of the institute has almost finished the work on the satellite. They will need another 6-7 months to give final touch to the project,” he said.

Scientists have used indigenous technology to develop ‘Jugnu’, whose weight and length are 3kg and 34cm respectively, he said, adding an estimated amount of Rs 2.5 crore has been spent to develop the satellite.

The hi-tech cameras fitted in the satellite will send photographs regarding agriculture, weather and soil to the base station, he said.

The satellite can also be used to link other big satellites in the space, he added.

Vacationing by the beach might not be so safe for your kids, as it exposes them to a higher risk of skin cancer, according to a new study.

For instance, it led to a five percent increase in moles among seven-year-old children. Their numbers are a major risk factor for malignant melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer.

Melanoma rates have been rising dramatically over recent decades. More than 62,000 Americans are diagnosed with melanoma each year and more than 8,000 die.

Study co-author Lori Crane, who heads the Department of Community and Behavioral Health at Colorado School of Public Health, said the findings are applicable worldwide.

‘Parents of young children need to be cautious about taking their kids on vacations that are going to be sun-intensive at waterside locations, where people are outside for whole days at a time in skin-exposing swimsuits,’ said Crane. Parents often mistakenly believe that sunscreen is a cure-all, she added.

‘We recommend that, for young children, parents keep the kids involved in indoor activities from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. to decrease risk, or if they are to be outside, that they wear shirts with sleeves,’ said Crane.

Crane and colleagues examined 681 white children born in 1998 who were lifetime residents of Colorado. Vacation histories were assessed by interview and skin exams were used to evaluate the development of moles (nevi), said a Colorado release.

These findings were published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Archaeologists have found over 50 ancient rock engravings in Tonga, which may shed some light on the pre-Polynesian Lapita peoples who voyaged across the Pacific.

The petroglyphs, including stylised images of people and animals, were found emerging from beach sand at the northern end of Foa Island, late last year, the Matangi Tonga newspaper reported.

Artist Shane Egan called in archaeologist Professor David Burley, from the Simon Fraser University in Canada, to investigate and document the site.

“The site on Foa Island is an amazing piece of artwork, with over 50 engraved images. Having an average height of 20 to 30cm, there are very nicely stylized images of men and women, turtles, dogs, a bird, a lizard, as well as footprints and some weird exotic combinations,” he said.

According to Egan, the images were close in form to some found in ancient Hawaii and dated to between 1200 and 1500AD.

If similar dating was found for the latest carvings, it would raise a question about direct long distance voyages between Tonga and Hawaii in that era.

The Foa rock engravings are on two large slabs of fixed beach-rock that were apparently exposed by erosion.

The rock engravings were first sighted by visiting friends Richard Whelan and Janelle Johnston from Melbourne.

Tonga’s previously reported rock art has been limited to simple geometric engravings, though there is also a single engraved outline of a foot on a stone at a royal tomb.

Petroglyphs have been found throughout eastern Polynesia, especially in the Marquesas, Tahiti and Hawaii.

About 100 million years ago, Triceratops likely engaged in horn-to-horn battles with its kin, according to a new analysis of the scrapes, bruises and healing fractures preserved on fossils of the dinosaurs’ bony headgear.

“Paleontologists have debated the function of the bizarre skulls of horned dinosaurs for years now,” said lead study researcher Andrew Farke, curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in California. “Some speculated that the horns were for showing off to other dinosaurs, and others thought that the horns had to have been used in combat against other horned dinosaurs. Unfortunately, we can’t just go and watch a Triceratops in the wild.”

Past research has also suggested Triceratops’ horns served as a means of communication and species recognition.

The results from Farke’s new study point to combat as one usage.

“We’re not suggesting Triceratops was using its horns only for fighting,” Farke told LiveScience. “I like to think of the horns on these animals as kind of like the Swiss Army knives of the dinosaur world. They were using their horns for a variety of functions.”

Horn patterns

Farke and his colleagues analyzed bone injuries from hundreds of fossils belonging to Triceratops and Centrosaurus.

Both dinosaurs belong to the family Ceratopsidae, but while Triceratops sported two long horns above its brows and a shorter one topping its beak-like snout, Centrosaurus had two smaller brow horns and a longer one on its nose. Both dinosaurs were equipped with a bony frill around their necks.

With such different horn patterns, the researchers assumed that if the dinosaurs were horn-butting with members of their own species the injuries of Triceratops and Centrosaurus should also be different from each other. But if they weren’t poking and butting one another with those horns, the injuries should be relatively similar, perhaps due to random nicks from clumsily running into a tree or head butts from predators, Farke said.

Triceratops combat

The team found the so-called squamosal bone on the skull that forms part of the frill was injured 10 times more frequently in Triceratops compared with Centrosaurus. “The most likely culprit for all of the wounds on Triceratops frills was the horns of other Triceratops,” Farke said. The combat would have been similar to that among modern antelopes and among deer.

Farke’s previous research showed that if Triceratops were engaging in horn-to-horn combat with other Triceratops, the squamosal bone would be an area most frequently injured.

With Centrosaurus showing so few bony injuries, the researchers are unsure if this dinosaur fought with its horns.

“Possibly Centrosaurus wasn’t using its horns for fighting, or if it was doing this, it was concentrating its energies on parts away from the skull, like maybe flank-butting or something like that,” Farke said.

The study, detailed in the Jan. 28 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE, was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

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.

Paleontologists in east China have dug up what they believe is one of the world’s largest group of dinosaur fossils including the remains of an enormous “platypus”, state press said Tuesday.

Paleontologists have discovered 15 areas near Zhucheng city in Shandong province that contain thousands of dinosaur bones, the Beijing News reported.

“This group of fossilised dinosaurs is currently the largest ever discovered in the world… in terms of area,” the paper cited paleontologist Zhao Xijin of the China Academy of Sciences as saying.

In one area measuring 300 metres (990 feet) by 10 metres, more than 3,000 bones were found, the report said. Since digging began in March scientists have discovered more than 7,600 bones.

Included in the find was the largest “platypus” — or “duck-billed dinosaur” in Chinese — ever discovered measuring nine metres high with a wingspan wider than 16 metres, the report said.

Zhao said the discovery of so many dinosaurs in such a dense area could provide clues on how the animals became extinct towards the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago, the Beijing News said.

Scientists have also identified the remains of ankylosaurus, tyrannosaurus and coelurus, according to China’s official Xinhua news agency.

Xinhua said paleontologists are expecting to find many more remains in the area, which lies in a region that has produced more than 50 tonnes of dinosaur fossils since the 1960s.

Plans are being made to set up a fossil park in the area, but local mine operations that were suspended for the dig are eager to resume mining, it said.