An inspection at first light on 26th January morning revealed that the pilot whales refloated yesterday have restranded themselves on Farewell Spit. The Dept said that thhe pod has stranded even further to the east than yesterday, making the chances of a successful refloat even more unlikely.

The whales have been ashore for five high tides and have been twice refloated and were noticeably poor condition. There was a gale warning in force for this afternoon, which meant that an assisted refloat would not be possible. Finally, the Dept took the decision to euthanize the surviving whales.

36 Pilot whales had died naturally and 17 were successfully refloated. Thirteen remain unaccounted for.

Researched by Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) at University College London and the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, the results were published yesterday in the online version of the scientific journal, Nature Geoscience.

ERS-2 and Envisat satellite data was used to measure sea-surface height over the western Arctic from 1995 to 2010. Sea ice can be

Mosaic of Envisat radar images between 9 and 11 September 2011 over the Arctic Ocean. PIC/ESA

Researchers say that a change in wind direction could cause the water to spill into the north Atlantic, cooling Europe. A change in the direction of the wind would cause the fresh water to spill into the rest of the Arctic Ocean and even reach the north Atlantic. This could slow a key ocean current, stemming from the Gulf Stream, and subsequently cool Europe.

“When we looked at our data on a year-to-year basis, we noticed that the changes in the sea surface height did not always follow what the wind was doing, so we thought about reasons why this might happen,” said Katharine Giles, CPOM research fellow and lead author of the study.

However she added, “Our next step is to look into how changes in the sea ice cover might affect the coupling between the atmosphere and the ocean in more detail to see if we can confirm this idea.”

Mount Everest is 8,848 metre high.

The solar powered camera will withstand temperatures as low as minus 30 degree celsius and operates during the daytime. The image and the data from the peak can be accessed directly through Internet.

The image taken by the camera is updated every five minutes.

Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary is the home to over 130 koalas and over 90 species of native Australia animals. Located on the Brisbane River in Fig Tree Pocket, the water flowed into the sanctuary quickly and continued to make it’s way through many animal enclosures, photography area, the gift shop and the undercover eating area.

Fortunately, enough notice was given to relocate animals to other higher enclosures and dedicated staff members have been camping out at the sanctuary to ensure the wellbeing of their furry, feathery and even scaly friends. Evacuated animals

Wisely Koala being evacuated. Image:Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary

Sea World has showed tremendous support by sending their helicopter from the Gold Coast with food supplies for the animals of Lone Pine. Barak the platypus has a very specific diet and without the help of Sea World, he would be running very low on his crayfish supplies!

“We expected the debris field to expand dramatically, like shrapnel flying from a hand grenade,” said astronomer David Jewitt of the University of California in Los Angeles, who is a leader of the Hubble observations. “But what happened was quite the opposite. We found that the object is expanding very, very slowly.”

These four Hubble Space Telescope images, taken over a five-month period, from January to May 2010 with Wide Field Camera 3, show the odd-shaped debris that likely came from a collision between two asteroids. Illustration Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI) Science Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

The Hubble images, taken from January to May 2010 with the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3, reveal a point-like object about 400 feet wide, with a long, flowing dust tail behind a never-before-seen X pattern. Particle sizes in the tail are estimated to vary from about 1/25th of an inch to an inch in diameter.

The 400-foot-wide object in the Hubble image is the remnant of a slightly larger precursor body. Astronomers think a smaller rock, perhaps 10 to 15 feet wide, slammed into the larger one. The pair probably collided at high speed, about 11,000 mph, which smashed and vaporized the small asteroid and stripped material from the larger one. Jewitt estimates that the violent encounter happened in February or March 2009 and was as powerful as the detonation of a small atomic bomb.

Sunlight radiation then swept the debris behind the remnant asteroid, forming a comet-like tail. The tail contains enough dust to make a ball 65 feet wide, most of it blown out of the bigger body by the impact-caused explosion. The science journal Nature will publish the findings in the Oct. 14 issue.

NASA found the peculiar object, dubbed P/2010 A2, cruising around the asteroid belt, a reservoir of millions of rocky bodies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It is estimated modest-sized asteroids smash into each other about once a year. When the objects collide, they inject dust into interplanetary space. But until now, astronomers have relied on models to make predictions about the frequency of these collisions and the amount of dust produced.

Catching colliding asteroids is difficult because large impacts are rare while small ones, such as the one that produced P/2010 A2, are exceedingly faint. The two asteroids that make up P/2010 A2 were unknown before the collision because they were too faint to be noticed. The collision itself was unobservable because of the asteroids’ position in relation to the sun. About 10 or 11 months later, in January 2010, the Lincoln Near-Earth Research (LINEAR) Program Sky Survey spotted the comet-like tail produced by the collision. But only Hubble discerned the X pattern, offering unequivocal evidence that something stranger than a comet outgassing had occurred. NASA does not has a good explanation for X

Although the Hubble images give compelling evidence for an asteroid collision, Jewitt says he still does not have enough information to rule out other explanations for the peculiar object. In one such scenario, a small asteroid’s rotation increases from solar radiation and loses mass, forming the comet-like tail.

Urine as a Commercial Fertilizer? The separate collection of urine provides innovative opportunities for the improvement of sanitation and the recycling of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Urine separation is an excellent sanitation solution, particularly in places where classic sewer-based sanitation is not sustainable.

The 4 year project focuses on the further development of technical solutions for urine processing for nutrient recovery. In addition, project participants, together with experts from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, will study the logistics of collection and transport of urine from toilets to processing facilities. The Swiss aquatic research scientists and their partners in South Africa will also examine ways in which sanitation can be paid for by the production and sale of urine-based fertiliser, thus enabling a cheap, efficient and widely-accepted sanitation system to be set up.

Eawag has many years of experience in the research of urine separation, also known as NoMix technology, and in 2007 completed the transdisciplinary Novaquatis project. Since then, Eawag’s project in Siddhipur near Kathmandu, Nepal, has demonstrated that urine processed to make the phosphorus-based fertiliser struvite can help to close regional nutrient cycles and promote awareness of the value of the nutrients contained in urine.

Very little is known about the vontsiras. Natural History Museum zoologist Paula Jenkins says “Durrell’s vontsira is very rare, as it is known only from 2 animals captured, photographed and briefly observed before being released, and from the type specimen carefully preserved in the Museum so that it is available for future research.”

One of only 2 Durrell's vontsira animals captured and released so far. This rare find is a new carnivore species from Madagascar. © Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust

‘More recently, the Bourlon’s genet, Genetta bourloni, was found in west Africa. It was described 7 years ago.’

The new carnivore was first seen swimming in a lake by DWCT researchers during a field trip in 2004.

Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands are known as a biodiversity hotspot because of their great richness in species. They have 7 families of plants, and 15 families of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, which live nowhere else on Earth.

Durrell’s vontsira is found in the Lac Alaotra wetlands in central eastern Madagascar where the Alaotra grebe, Tachybaptus rufolavatus, from the same area, was announced extinct just a few months ago.

The Lac Alaotra wetland habitat has suffered over the past decades from pollution from fertilizer and pesticides, silting and the introduction of invasive fish and plants that compete with those native to the area.

The Dracula is because of the fangs in the jaws in males of the new species and was inspired by Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel.

The fish was spotted in a stream of Irrawaddy drainage in northern Myanmar. It was scientifically named and identified by Museum fish

Danionella dracula males have tooth-like structures, shown here in an image of the head of a stained specimen (top) and a scanning electron micrograph of the mouth (bottom). (Image: National History Museum)

When alive, D. dracula is colourless and largely translucent, except for 5 rows of melanophores; melanophores capping the dorsal and dorsolateral surface of the gas bladder chambers and their connecting duct; and a thin yellow line running along the body at the level of the neural tube (the fish’s central nervous system). Very little is known about the biology or behaviour of any of the Danionella species.

Now, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and MIT say that the half-inch to 5-inch-long creatures are even more efficient than had been believed. The researchers have found that the ocean-dwelling salps are capable of capturing and eating extremely small organisms as well as larger ones, rendering them even hardier and perhaps more plentiful than had been thought.

Salps capture food particles, mostly phytoplankton, with an internal mucous filter net. Until now, it was thought that only particles as large as or larger than the 1.5-micron-wide holes in the mesh.

A mathematical model suggests that salps somehow might be capturing food particles smaller than that, said Kelly R. Sutherland, who wrote the paper as part of her PhD thesis at the MIT/WHOI Joint Program for graduate students. In the laboratory at WHOI, Sutherland and her colleagues offered salps food particles of three sizes: smaller, around the same size as, and larger than the mesh openings.

“When exposed to ocean-like particle concentrations, 80 percent of the particles that were captured were the smallest particles offered in the experiment,” says Sutherland.

Other than figuring out slaps behavior, the findings have role in carbon cycling in environment too. “As they eat small, as well as large, particles, “they consume the entire ‘microbial loop’ and pack it into large, dense fecal pellets,” Madin says.

The larger and denser the carbon-containing pellets, the sooner they sink to the ocean bottom. “This removes carbon from the surface waters,” says Sutherland, “and brings it to a depth where you won’t see it again for years to centuries.”

And the more carbon that sinks to the bottom, the more space there is for the upper ocean to accommodate carbon, hence limiting the amount that rises into the atmosphere as CO2, explains co-author Roman Stocker of MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering .

Since the consumption and excretion is quick, the smaller particles of carbon is rolled into larger particle by this process. Hence they sink faster.

A team of researchers from Australian, Dutch and German universities also found a range of toxins, two of which had not previously been described.

The study follows from Dr Bryan Fry’s revelation last year that all octopuses are venomous. Dr Fry is from the Bio21 Institute.

The team has managed to collect venom from 203 octopuses from Antarctic waters. They then genetically profiled each specimen to identify the species and collected venom to analyse in the lab.

An understanding of the structure and mode of action of venom found in all octopuses may help design drugs for conditions like pain management, allergies and cancer, as per Dr Fry.