Science News

Dear EarthTalk: Oceans are in big trouble and I understand President Obama is creating a high-level ocean council to address them. What are the major issues? --Steve Sullivan, Bothell, Wash.

Jan Dubuisson heads up the least-tern sanctuary for an Audubon Society chapter in Gulfport, Miss. She's been working with the migratory birds for the past 30 years--her chapter formed to help imperiled springtime breeding colonies there in 1976. [More]

Could the eradication of smallpox have been a factor in the spread of HIV? That’s the question posed by researchers in the journal BMC Immunology , who think that the vaccine might have offered partial protection against HIV. As smallpox was wiped out, fewer people received the vaccine. The HIV explosion followed. [More]

By Steve Gorman

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - At least 150 sea turtles have washed up dead or dying along the U.S. Gulf Coast since the giant oil spill off Louisiana, a higher number than normal for this time of year, a leading wildlife expert said on Monday.

When the Nobel Foundation awarded Ray Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics, it could have chosen to emphasize any of their many accomplishments. Davis made his name detecting neutrinos from the sun--the first of these notoriously elusive particles ever seen from beyond our planet--and Koshiba discovered them coming from the great supernova explosion of 1987. Their work was an experimental tour de force and helped to establish that neutrinos, which theorists had assumed were massless, in fact have a small mass. Yet the Nobel Foundation recognized Davis and Koshiba, above all, for establishing a new branch of science: neutrino astronomy.

With their work, neutrinos graduated from a theoretical novelty to a practical way to probe the universe. In addition to studying neutrinos to glean the particles’ properties, scientists can now use them to lift the veil on some of the hidden mysteries of the universe. In an undertaking akin to the construction of giant optical telescopes a century ago, astronomers have been designing and building vast neutrino telescopes in anticipation of seeing new wonders. These observatories have already caught tens of thousands of neutrinos and made pictures of the sun in neutrinos. Neutrinos from other cosmic sources are hard to tell apart from those produced in Earth’s upper atmosphere, but instruments should be able to do so by this time next year.