Cull of Yellowstone buffalo gets go-ahead

transcript

4 | NewScientist | 19 February 2011

NEW ZEALAND has a novel solution for dealing with a crap situation: import dung beetles. The country has approved the release of 11 Australian species to manage its massive heap of livestock dung.

Adult dung beetles lay their eggs in manure, which the brood feed on after hatching and break down into sawdust. An inhabited mound of dung can disappear in 48 hours, compared to a month for one that is left out in a field.

That may seem unimportant, but for a nation with a large cattle population, it’s not.

As the mounds rot, they release greenhouse gases and their nutrients and bacteria leach into waterways. Manure accounts

for around 14 per cent of New Zealand’s emissions of nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. Beetles can make short work of these problems.

Cow dung away Neither Australia nor New Zealand have native beetles that can handle livestock dung pats. But in the late 1960s, Australia introduced some from Europe and Africa. “They’ve been hugely successful,” says Shaun Forgie of Landcare Research in Auckland, New Zealand.

And it’s not just the environment that can benefit. Forgie points out that removing the pats should also get rid of flies and parasitic worms that breed in dung: in Hawaii, they cut pest flies breeding in dung by 95 per cent.

Tainted genomesTIME to run a tighter ship? Up to 18 per cent of the genomes sequenced so far seem to be contaminated with human DNA, likely because of lax lab practices.

Rachel O’Neill and colleagues at the University of Connecticut in Storrs went through 2749 genomes, including bacteria, viruses, plants and animals. They found that 492 were similar in one respect: they contained a snippet of human DNA called AluY.

Only the influenza genomes were completely clean, probably

because there are stringent protocols in place for handling infectious diseases (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0016410).

O’Neill did not look at the human genome, but she says it may also have been contaminated with DNA from lab workers. She thinks lab practices will have to become tighter, particularly for projects designed to scan people’s genomes for sequences that affect disease. “You wouldn’t want to be told that you had a sequence that gives a high risk of cancer when in fact you didn’t,” O’Neill says.

Buffalo to be culledTHE slaughter of hundreds of buffalo straying from Yellowstone National Park has been given the legal green light in Montana.

The wild buffalo, which are classed as “near-threatened”, can wander beyond park boundaries during the winter in search of food. Ranchers worry that they will pass the disease brucellosis to cattle in Montana, which is currently designated “brucellosis-free”. The infection does not usually cause

–Facing battle on science funding–

–Roaming into danger–

For richer or poorerIF IT were up to the White House, 2012 would be a bumper year for some areas of government-funded science in the US. The reality may well be rather different, if the Republican-controlled House of Representatives gets its way.

On Monday, President Barack Obama presented his 2012 budget request to Congress. It would boost funding to a number of science agencies above 2010 levels, including a 13 per cent increase for the National Science Foundation, to $7.8 billion, and a 10.7 per cent increase for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, to $5.4 billion.

The request now goes for approval or amendment to Congress, where it faces stiff opposition. On 11 February, the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee proposed

that the remainder of the budget for 2011 be subjected to the biggest round of spending cuts in US history.

Under these proposals, the Environmental Protection Agency would have its budget slashed by 29 per cent relative to 2010. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would suffer a 22 per cent cut, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science would face an 18 per cent cut.

Such cuts “would cripple our ability to advance education and research that most people agree are essential investments in our future”, says John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The funding proposal is being discussed in the House this week, so stay tuned.

“Within 48 hours, beetles can break down a patch of cow dung into sawdust that fertilises the soil”

uPfront

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symptoms in buffalo, but can trigger abortions in cows.

Over the past few weeks, around 525 straying buffalo have been corralled along the park’s borders. Almost half have tested positive for brucellosis and are the first up for slaughter.

The Buffalo Field Campaign maintains that the risk of disease transmission is low. The group says “relatively few” susceptible cows graze in the spillover area outside the park. The campaigners were overruled on Monday, when US district judge Charles C. Lovell gave the slaughter the go-ahead. They will be launching an appeal.

Drunk on nothingTHE US government’s health department has a drink problem. The blood and urine tests used to identify drinkers can falsely finger teetotallers too.

Typically the body destroys alcohol within hours, so the tests pick up substances that are formed in the process. But recent research shows that non-alcoholic wine or even bananas can push concentrations of the substances to levels associated with drinking.

The health department’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is aware of the problem and since 2006 has declared as “scientifically unsupportable” any legal or disciplinary action based solely on the test. But lawyers are now asking the agency to go further.

“Can SAMHSA set a cut-off level which will reliably exclude accidental exposure [to alcohol]?” asks William Meyer of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals.

Greg Skipper of the Alabama Physician Health Program thinks not. But he says that new research suggests a different breakdown product called phosphatidyl ethanol can more reliably distinguish accidental exposure from deliberate drinking.

Return of the kingFIRST the good news: North America’s monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) has bounced back after its worst year ever. Now the bad: it is still the fourth worst year since records began in 1993.

WWF Mexico’s latest survey of the butterfly’s Mexican heartland shows that the insects wintering there since November colonised 4 hectares of forest, over double the area occupied last year. The area occupied is used as an indirect measure of butterfly numbers.

In 2009, the butterflies faced storms as they migrated from

Canada and the US, which devastated their numbers. “These figures are encouraging, because they show a trend toward recovery after a record low,” says Omar Vidal, director of WWF Mexico.

Vidal says that the illegal logging

which threatened the monarch’s habitat is now under control, but climate change and farming in the US could deplete the food the butterflies rely on en route.

“Monarch butterfly numbers were devastated by storms during their migration in 2009”

IT’S enough to drive an Impressionist mad. A yellow pigment developed in the 19th century was a gift to Vincent van Gogh: it helped him create his vibrant sunflower paintings. But since then some chrome yellow paint has darkened considerably – and no one knew why.

A team led by Koen Janssens at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, used a powerful X-ray beam generator at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, to analyse samples of the key pigment in chrome yellow – lead chromate – from three 100-year-old tubes of the paint (Analytical Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/ac102424h). They then artificially aged it using UV light to simulate exposure to daylight.

Paint from one tube turned brown, and in this sample the chromium in the lead chromate at the surface had been reduced from a VI oxidation state to the darker III state.

Paint flecks from two restored van Gogh paintings – Banks of the Seine and View of Arles with Irises – had barium sulphate in the darkened areas. This white substance, which was used to make expensive paint go further or make the yellow paler, may have helped reduce the chromium and caused the darkening under light.

“The mixture of sulphate and chromate is very sensitive to darkening under UV light. Galleries should keep paintings containing chrome yellow out of any strong light or UV light,” says Janssens.

Van Gogh’s darkening yellows

–The colours were better then–

60 SeconDS

Fake Mars ship landsMars500 has landed. On 14 February, three crew members from the simulated mission to Mars stepped out of the windowless mock spaceship where they have spent the past eight months, and into a small room with a sandy floor and twinkling lights. After two more “Mars walks”, they will be reunited with the other three crew members and start the eight-month “journey” back to Earth.

Portraits of a cometEarly on 15 February, NASA’s Stardust spacecraft flew past comet Tempel 1, taking 72 pictures of the potato-shaped object. When New Scientist went to press, the close-ups had not been released. NASA hopes to compare them with snaps taken by the Deep Impact mission to Tempel 1 in 2005.

Cold cureTo banish an impending cold, take a zinc supplement at the first sniffle. A review of 15 trials showed zinc administered in syrup, lozenges or tablets within 24 hours of symptoms appearing significantly reduced the severity and length of illness, possibly through zinc’s antiviral properties (The Cochrane Library, DOI: 10.1002/ 14651858.CD001364.pub3).

Stolen DNAAround 1 in 10 gonorrhoea bacteria include a small chunk of human DNA in their genetic make-up – the first time DNA has been found to have jumped from a mammalian genome to a bacterial one. What role, if any, the human DNA performs in the bacterium remains a mystery (mBio, DOI: 10.1128/mbio.00005-11).

The power of one brainIn 2007, all the general computers in the world could together perform 6.4 × 1018 instructions per second. That roughly equals the number of nerve impulses produced by one human brain each second (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1200970).

For daily news stories, visit www.newScientist.com/news

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Cull of Yellowstone buffalo gets go-ahead

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