Scientific American Online

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.

"My heart starts to race, I can't breathe, I get all sweaty, and I feel very scared - like I am about to die."   [More]

Editor's Note: William Gilly , a professor of cell and developmental biology and marine and organismal biology at Stanford University, is traveling with a group of students on board the Don José in the Sea of Cortez. They will monitor and track Humboldt squid and sperm whales in their watery habitats. This is the group's sixth blog post. [More]

Despite weighty concerns such as aging, planning for retirement or caring for older friends and family, people in the U.S. seem to get happier with age. A new study reports that these changes are consistent regardless of whether individuals were employed, had young children at home or lived with a partner. [More]

The advent of the artificial heart has spurred scientists to pursue synthetic kidneys and pancreases as well. Still, one key obstacle to realizing such devices is powering them after they have been implanted. Instead of having to constantly recharge them by hooking them up to some external system--or, worse, periodically removing them and replacing their batteries--researchers would prefer that these machines somehow harvest energy from their hosts. [More]

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Scientists exploring a remote Indonesian forest say they have uncovered a collection of new species, including a Pinocchio-nosed frog, the world's smallest known wallaby and a yellow-eyed gecko.

An international group of scientists found the species in the remote Foja Mountains on the island of New Guinea in late 2008 and released the details, including pictures, on Monday ahead of the International Day for Biological Diversity on May 22.

How do baby coral find a new home in the open ocean? They listen--very closely--for reef sounds.

Scientists at the University of Bristol in England had already discovered in the last few years that baby fish who live among coral use sound to find the reefs. So they decided to check out the coral larvae themselves. These are tiny creatures, the size of a flea.

By Alister Doyle and Gerard Wynn

OSLO/LONDON (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has chosen Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres as the new U.N. climate chief to head stalled, international talks, sources close to the matter said on Monday.

By Stefano Ambrogi

Seasonal flu epidemics account for as many as half a million deaths worldwide each year. And the rapid spread of new strains can cause many more (the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic alone killed more than 16,000 people, according to the World Health Organization ). Quickly detecting a regional rise in flu-like symptoms such as coughs, sore throats or high fevers can help public health officials take steps to dampen the impact. However, it can take days--even weeks--for trends spotted in clinics to be reported more broadly.

By Chris Baltimore and Steve Gorman

HOUSTON/GALLIANO, Louisiana (Reuters) - Energy giant BP reported a limited success at containing the oil that is gushing unabated into the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday but a skeptical U.S. government said it was "not a solution."

The sharp edges of the blue spiny lizard will not protect it against climate change. New research shows that it has gone extinct at 24 out of 200 sites in Mexico since 1975. The cause was not loss of habitat to spreading agriculture or sprawling cities. Rather, it was hotter springs, according to research published in the May 14 issue of Science .  

And that means climate change could end up driving nearly 20 percent of existing lizard species extinct by 2080.  

Researchers have devised a way to fabricate tiny electrodes from glass, harnessing a phenomenon by which nanoscale glass walls can be transformed from insulators to conductors and back again. At larger scales, that phenomenon, known as " dielectric breakdown ," leads to excess heating and structural damage, but at the nanoscale the process appears to be harmless and reversible. [More]