Update: January 10, 2008

THE WALRUS SAID

By Pam Eastlick for THE DEEP on line

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

We’ve got a wide variety of topics this week, so here goes.  We’ll start with yet more news about global warming.  I’m hearing less and less these days from so-called experts who say that global warming is a crock.  Hmmmm, I wonder why?

“THE TIME HAS COME”, THE WALRUS SAID, “TO TALK OF MANY THINGS”
Some 40,000 walruses have appeared on the Russian Arctic coast, a phenomenon that scientists believe is a result of global warming melting Arctic sea ice.  According to the World Wildlife Foundation, this is the largest walrus haul out (areas where walruses rest when they are out of the water) ever seen in the Russian Arctic.

Walruses need thick sea ice to support their weight and the shallow waters of the coastal zone to feed.  Unlike seals, they cannot swim indefinitely and must periodically ‘haul out’.  And unfortunately, as the Arctic ice melts, it reduces the walrus’ habitat.  It also reduces the amount of ice available to the walruses, thus concentrating them in smaller areas.

Evidence points to a clear trend towards an overall warming in the Arctic.  As a result, the sea ice thickness has been reduced by 40 percent in the last 30 years.  Some models suggest that by 2080, or possibly earlier, sea ice in the Arctic will completely disappear during the summer months.  And then, what will happen to the walruses?

I talked last week about the Voyager spacecraft and there’s news this week that Voyager 2 has made some astounding discoveries.

THE LITTLE ROBOT THAT COULD, DOES!
Voyager 2 has just traversed the termination shockwave and made two astounding discoveries.  The first surprise is that there is an unexpectedly strong magnetic field in the interstellar wind; the incredibly tenuous wind that fills the space that surrounds the solar system.  This field is squashing the bubble of gas that flows out from the Sun and distorting it from the spherical shape the astronomers had expected to find.

The second discovery is that it’s colder out there than we expected.  Just outside the termination shockwave, the temperature was hotter than inside the shockwave, just as the scientists predicted, but it was ten times cooler than they thought it would be. 

Now here’s an interesting twist.  A new theory that’s emerging about this discrepancy says that the reason it’s cooler than they thought is that it’s much hotter than they thought.  Eh?  What?
They think that some of the particles that should have been sampled were in fact, so hot that they were outside the measuring range of Voyager 2’s plasma instrument. 

Voyager 1 has already crossed the termination shockwave, but its plasma instrument had stopped working.  (Think about it, how much of your 30-year old electronics equipment still works?  “What 30-year old electronics equipment?” you say!). 

The plasma instrument not only worked, making detailed measurements of the solar wind’s temperature, speed and density, it actually encountered the shockwave several times, because the boundary’s distance from the Sun is constantly changing.

Voyager 2 is now 8 billion miles from Earth and traveling at 35,000 mph.  Marvelous machine!
And now for some more space news.

ETERNAL LIGHT, ETERNAL NIGHT
A European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft called SMART-1, has given us our first good look at the North Pole.  “Wait a minute”, you say, “that’s where the walruses are.  We’ve been looking at the North Pole for years!”

That’s true if you’re talking about Earth, but SMART-1 is in orbit around Luna, our Moon.  And the lunar poles are very interesting for future science and exploration of the Moon mainly because of their exposure to sunlight.  They display areas of eternal light, have a stable thermal environment and are close to dark areas that could host water ice – potential future lunar base sites.

The SMART-1 North Pole map, covers an area of about 300 by 500 miles and shows some interesting craters.  The one closest to the pole is Peary, a large impact crater.  At this latitude the crater interior receives little sunlight, but SMART-1 took pictures during phases when the crater floor received enough sunlight to see it. Scientist are hoping that there’s residual ice from impacting comets buried in some of these craters that never see sunlight at their bottoms.  There are also mountain peaks near the pole, and these peaks are tall enough that they are bathed in perpetual sunlight.  Perpetual sunlight to provide solar energy coupled with water make the polar regions some of the most likely sites for lunar colonization.  Take a look at the accompanying picture.  You may be looking at the site of your grandchildren’s summer (or winter) home!

This mosaic of the lunar north pole was obtained with images taken by the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board ESA's SMART-1. The mosaic, composed of about 30 images, covers an area of about 800 by 600 km. (Credit: ESA/Space-X (Space Exploration Institute))

And now, we’ll make a giant leap from lunar colonization to a couple of stories about today’s babies.

QUELLING THE COUGH
Several cough medicines for children were removed from the market recently because they were ineffective and some of them even downright dangerous.  Now, a new study by a Penn State College of Medicine research team found that honey may offer parents an effective and safe alternative to over-the-counter children's cough medicines.

The study found that a small dose of honey given before bedtime provided better relief of nighttime cough and sleep difficulty in children than no treatment or dextromethorphan (DM), a cough suppressant found in many over-the-counter cold medications.  Honey also showed a positive effect on the sleep quality of both the coughing child and the child's parents.

Honey has well-established antioxidant and antimicrobial effects and also soothes on contact, which may help explain its effect on coughing.

Across the board, parents rated honey as significantly better than DM or no treatment for symptomatic relief of their child's nighttime cough and sleep difficulty.  In a few cases, parents did report mild side effects with the honey treatment, such as hyperactivity.

Well, you give them pure sugar, and what do you expect?  But it might be worth remembering the next time your child has a worrisome cough.

LIKE MOMMA, LIKE BABY
Mom, is your child a picky eater?  Does she whine when you try to get her to eat her vegetables?  Does your little boy turn his nose up at fruit?  It just may be your fault.

According to new research, babies like fruits and vegetables better if Mom ate them while she was breastfeeding.  Researchers from the Monell Center studied 45 infants, 20 of whom were breastfed.  The infants, who were between the ages of four and eight months and unaccustomed to eating solids other than cereal, were randomly assigned to one of two groups.

One group was fed green beans for eight consecutive days; the other was given green beans and then peaches over the same period.  Acceptance of both foods was assessed before and after the repeated exposure period.  The researchers found that breast-feeding confers an advantage for baby's acceptance of foods during weaning -- but only if the mother regularly eats those foods.

During their first exposure to peaches, breast-fed infants ate more and for a longer period of time, compared to formula-fed infants.  Questionnaires revealed that mothers of breast-fed infants ate more fruits than did formula-feeding mothers, suggesting that the enhanced peach acceptance of their infants might be attributed to increased exposure to fruit flavors through breast milk.

One of the researchers said “Flavors from the mother's diet are transmitted through amniotic fluid and mother's milk.  So, a baby learns to like a food's taste when the mother eats that food on a regular basis.”

So, you are what you eat, and for breast-feeding mothers your baby is what you eat too.  Reminds me of that three-week period in spring when you couldn’t drink the milk in my hometown because that was when the wild onions grew and cows LOVE wild onions!

And for all you readers out there!

ONLINE LIBRARY GIVES READERS ACCESS TO 1.5 MILLION BOOKS
The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online. 
For the first time since the project was initiated in 2002, all of the books, which range from Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" to "The Analects of Confucius, are available through a single Web portal http://www.ulib.org of the Universal Library. 

"Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library," said Raj Reddy, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon.  "This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language.  The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling," said Reddy, who has spearheaded the Million Book Project. 

Though Google, Microsoft and the Internet Archive all have launched major book digitization projects, the Million Book Project represents the world's largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books.  At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are or eventually will be available free. 

The collection includes a large number of rare and orphan books.  More than 20 languages are represented among the 1.5 million books, a little more than 1 percent of all of the world's books. 
The vast majority of the scanning, digitization and cataloguing has been performed at centers in China and India, where more than 1.1 million and 360,000 books have been scanned, respectively.  The U.S., China and India provided $10 million each in cash and in-kind contributions to the project.  More recently, the Library at Alexandria, Egypt, has joined the effort.  Now, more than 1,000 workers worldwide scan about 7,000 books daily. 

Though the long-term goal of the Universal Library is to make books, artwork and other published works available online for free, about half of the current collection remains under copyright.  Until the permission of the copyright holders can be documented, or copyright laws are amended, only 10 percent or less of those books can be accessed at no cost. 

A million books.  There’s just not enough hours in the day!