Environment Day: India's green mission caught in funds' crunch

New Delhi: India's ambitious plans to fight climate change by enhancing the forest cover at a cost of Rs. 46,000 crore by 2020 have been stuck with no funds available since it was cleared by the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change in 2011.

The Green India Mission, one of eight such under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), had aimed to increase the forest cover by five million hectares and improve the quality of forests on another five million hectares.

"The Green India Mission has stopped as there are no funds coming. At the time of the mission's announcement, it was decided that funds will come from a number of ministries and the Planning Commission," V. Rajagopalan, secretary, environment ministry, told IANS.

"About Rs.2, 000 crore was to come under NREGS (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) from the rural development ministry while the Planning Commission was also to give funds. Some money was to come under the National Environment Fund but we have got nothing in the last two years," he added.

With the mission being stuck and affecting the afforestation drive, the environment ministry has now decided to approach the union cabinet.

"We are going to the cabinet to come out with a formal funding structure for the mission so that money starts flowing," Rajagopalan said.

The mission aims to reach an annual carbon dioxide sequestration - the amount of CO2 the forest cover can absorb - of 50 to 60 million tonnes by 2020.

The mission also focusses on improving ecosystem services, including biodiversity, hydrological services and carbon sequestration, and aims to increase forest-based livelihood income for three million forest-dependent families.

India currently has 23 percent of its land mass (70 million hectares) under forest cover. The aim is to eventually raise this to 33 percent (100 million hectares) but no timeline has been set for this.

R.K. Pachauri, chief of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), called for better coordination among various ministries and states for better implementation of the mission.

"It is sad that the mission has stopped. I hope there is better coordination among all stakeholders for better implementation," Pachauri told IANS.

"In India, politics is bigger than anything," he said.

The mission also aims at monitoring additional parameters like ground cover, soil condition, erosion and infiltration and groundwater levels.

It was to be implemented through an autonomous organisational structure to reduce red-tape and rigidity while ensuring accountability. However, nothing has progressed so far.

Heavy Einstein spaceship will leave a glamorous legacy

• 16:49 06 June 2013 by Celeste Biever
• For similar stories, visit the Picture of the day and Space flight Topic Guides

(Image:ESA/S. Corvaja)

Albert Einstein the man was a heavyweight of science, and so is the spaceship that bears his name. The juggernaut is the heaviest yet of a fleet of Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) built and operated by the European Space Agency.

The picture above shows Einstein lifting off yesterday from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, propelled by an Ariane 5 rocket. Now the uncrewed spaceship is parked in orbit 260 kilometres above Earth's surface, preparing to dock with the International Space Station in nine days' time.

The ATV fleet first took to the skies in 2008 with the launch of Jules Verne. The roll call of famous science-related Europeans continued with Johannes Kepler in 2011 and Edoardo Amaldi last year. The fifth and final ATV, Georges Lemaître, is scheduled for launch next year.

At 20,190 kilograms, Albert Einstein is the heaviest ATV yet, outweighing its immediate predecessor by 150 kg. Its cargo includes 2580 kg of propellants for reboosting the station's orbit and 860 kg more destined for the tanks of its Russian Zvezda module. It will also carry 570 kg of drinking water and 100 kg of oxygen and air to sustain the ISS's crew. After delivering its supplies, the craft will, like its predecessors, be filled with space-station garbage and sent down to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Despite their evocative names and pioneering docking technology, the ATVs have played a mundane, though essential, role so far. But their contribution to future space flight could be more glamorous. If ESA and NASA plans come good, they will live on in the form of the Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle, designed to take astronauts to deep space. It is a NASA project, but last year the US space agency announced that Europe would provide crucial technology derived from the ATV.

Social Networks Could Help Prevent Disease Outbreaks in Endangered Chimpanzees

Many think of social networks in terms of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, but for recent University of Georgia doctoral graduate Julie Rushmore, social networks are tools in the fight against infectious diseases.

Rushmore, who completed her doctorate in the Odum School of Ecology in May, analyzed the social networks of wild chimpanzees to determine which individuals were most likely to contract and spread pathogens. Her findings, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology on June 5, could help wildlife managers target their efforts to prevent outbreaks and potentially help public health officials prevent disease in human populations as well.
Effective disease intervention for this species is important for a number of reasons. Wild chimpanzees are highly endangered, and diseases -- including some that also infect humans -- are among the most serious threats to their survival. And due to habitat loss, chimpanzees increasingly overlap with human populations, so disease outbreaks could spread to people and livestock, and vice versa.
Disease prevention in wildlife is logistically challenging, and resources are scarce, Rushmore explained. Even when vaccines are available, it is impractical to vaccinate every individual in a wildlife population. She and her colleagues decided to use social network analysis to pinpoint individuals most important in disease transmission.
"Modeling studies in humans have shown that targeting central individuals for vaccination is significantly more effective than randomly vaccinating," Rushmore said. "There have been a few social network studies in wildlife systems -- bees, lions, meerkats, lizards and giraffes -- but this is the first paper to map out social networks in the context of disease transmission and conservation for wild primates."
Rushmore observed a community of wild chimpanzees in Kibale National Park in Uganda, recording the interactions of individuals and family groups over a nine-month period to determine which individuals -- and which types of individuals -- were most central.
"Chimpanzees are ideal for this study because to collect this observational behavioral data, you don't need to collar them or use any invasive methods. You can essentially just observe chimpanzees in their natural environment and identify them individually based on their facial features," she said.
Rushmore collected information about the traits of individual chimpanzees including age, sex, rank and family size. Rank for adult males was based on dominance, while for adult females and juveniles it was based on location: Those that lived and foraged in the interior of the community's territory were considered of higher rank than those that roamed its edges.
From December 2009 to August 2010, Rushmore recorded the interactions of chimpanzees in the community at 15-minute intervals between 6 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., four to six days per week. She mapped her observations onto a diagram showing how often each individual associated with the others.
This analysis revealed that the most central figures in the network turned out to be high-ranking mothers and juveniles with large families. "They form nursing parties -- essentially like day care -- where several families will hang out together," she said. "In that way they become quite central because they have contact with a large portion of the community."
Second in centrality were the high-ranking males.
"There are many studies in humans, and at least one in chimpanzees, showing that from an immunological perspective, juveniles and children are really important for maintaining diseases in populations through play and things like that," she said.
"In addition, high-ranking male chimpanzees are often immunosuppressed because they have high levels of testosterone and have been shown to have higher rates of parasitism. So it seems that in addition to being central to the network, the juveniles and the high-ranking males in particular could also have lower immunity than other individuals, which might help facilitate them acquiring and transmitting pathogens."
Rushmore's findings have implications for disease prevention beyond chimpanzees.
"This work can easily be applied to other systems," she said. "You could use similar methods to identify which traits are predictive of centrality. The theme that would carry over from our findings is that these central individuals are likely important to target for vaccination or treatment."
Rushmore and her colleagues are continuing their research into social networks and disease. They currently are using infectious disease models to simulate outbreaks on these networks and to develop targeted pathogen interventions.
"Ultimately, we want to develop vaccination strategies that could both prevent large outbreaks and lower the number of animals requiring vaccination," Rushmore said.
The study's co-authors were Damien Caillaud of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and the University of Texas at Austin, Leopold Matamba of the UGA department of mathematics, Rebecca M. Stumpf of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stephen P. Borgatti of the University of Kentucky and Sonia Altizer of the UGA Odum School of Ecology.

Two adult males in the Kanyawara chimpanzee community rest in Kibale National Park, Uganda

Scientists Discover How HIV Kills Immune Cells; Findings Have Implications for HIV Treatment

Untreated HIV infection destroys a person's immune system by killing infection-fighting cells, but precisely when and how HIV wreaks this destruction has been a mystery until now. New research by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, reveals how HIV triggers a signal telling an infected immune cell to die. This finding has implications for preserving the immune systems of HIV-infected individuals..
                                               

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV particles infecting a human T cell.

HIV replicates inside infection-fighting human immune cells called CD4+ T cells through complex processes that include inserting its genes into cellular DNA. The scientists discovered that during this integration step, a cellular enzyme called DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK) becomes activated. DNA-PK normally coordinates the repair of simultaneous breaks in both strands of molecules that comprise DNA. As HIV integrates its genes into cellular DNA, single-stranded breaks occur where viral and cellular DNA meet. Nevertheless, the scientists discovered, the DNA breaks during HIV integration surprisingly activate DNA-PK, which then performs an unusually destructive role: eliciting a signal that causes the CD4+ T cell to die. The cells that succumb to this death signal are the very ones mobilized to fight the infection.
According to the scientists, these new findings suggest that treating HIV-infected individuals with drugs that block early steps of viral replication -- up to and including activation of DNA-PK and integration -- not only can prevent viral replication, but also may improve CD4+ T cell survival and immune function. The findings also may shed light on how reservoirs of resting HIV-infected cells develop and may aid efforts to eliminate these sites of persistent infection

Irish Chronicles Reveal Links Between Cold Weather and Volcanic Eruptions

Medieval chronicles have given an international group of researchers a glimpse into the past to assess how historical volcanic eruptions affected the weather in Ireland up to 1500 years ago.
        

By critically assessing over 40,000 written entries in the Irish Annals and comparing them with measurements taken from ice cores, the researchers successfully linked the climatic aftermath of volcanic eruptions to extreme cold weather events in Ireland over a 1200-year period from 431 to 1649.
Their study, which has been published today, 6 June, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, showed that over this timescale up to 48 explosive volcanic eruptions could be identified in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2) ice-core, which records the deposition of volcanic sulfate in annual layers of ice.
Of these 48 volcanic events, 38 were associated, closely in time, with 37 extreme cold events, which were identified by systematically examining written entries in the Irish Annals and picking out directly observed meteorological phenomena and conditions, such as heavy snowfall and frost, prolonged ice covering lakes and rivers, and contemporary descriptions of abnormally cold weather.

New research shows that explosive volcanic eruptions are strongly, and persistently, implicated in the occurrence of cold weather events over this long timescale in Ireland. In their severity, these events are quite rare for the country's mild maritime climate

Lead author of the study, Dr Francis Ludlow, from the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Department of History, said: "It's clear that the scribes of the Irish Annals were diligent reporters of severe cold weather, most probably because of the negative impacts this had on society and the biosphere.
"Our major result is that explosive volcanic eruptions are strongly, and persistently, implicated in the occurrence of cold weather events over this long timescale in Ireland. In their severity, these events are quite rare for the country's mild maritime climate."
Through the injection of sulphur dioxide gas into the stratosphere, volcanic eruptions can play a significant role in the regulation of the Earth's climate. Sulphur dioxide gas is converted into sulphate aerosol particles after eruptions which reflect incoming sunlight and result in an overall temporary cooling of the Earth's surface.
Whilst the global effects of recent eruptions are quite well-known, such as the Mount Pinatubo eruption almost 22 years ago (15 June 1991), less is known about their effects on climate before the beginning of instrumental weather recording, or their effects on regional scales; the Irish Annals provided an opportunity to explore both of these issues.
The Irish Annals contain over one million written words and around 40,000 distinct written entries, detailing major historical events on an annual basis, and providing both systematic and sustained reporting of meteorological extremes.
The dating and reliability of the Annals can be gauged by comparing reported events to those which are independently known, such as solar and lunar eclipses.
"With a few honourable exceptions, the Irish record of extreme events has only been used anecdotally, rather than systematically surveyed and exploited for the study of the climate history of Ireland and the North Atlantic, and so the richness of the record has been largely unrecognized," continued Dr Ludlow.
Although the effect of big eruptions on the climate in summer is largely to cause cooling, during the winter, low-latitude eruptions in the tropics have instead been known to warm large parts of the northern hemisphere as they cause a strengthening of the westerly winds that brings, for example, warmer oceanic air to Europe; however, this study identified several instances when low-latitude eruptions appeared to correspond to extreme cold winters in Ireland.
One example is the 1600 eruption in Peru of Huaynaputina, which the researchers found, against expectations, to be associated with extreme cold winter weather in Ireland in the following years.
"The possibility that tropical eruptions may result in severe winter cooling for Ireland highlights the considerable complexity of the volcano-climate system in terms of the regional expression of the response of climate to volcanic disturbances.
"It is on the regional scale that we need to refine our understanding of this relationship as ultimately, it is on this scale that individuals and societies plan for extreme weather," continued Dr Ludlow.

Living Fossils? Actually, Sturgeon Fish Are Evolutionary Speedsters

 Efforts to restore sturgeon in the Great Lakes region have received a lot of attention in recent years, and many of the news stories note that the prehistoric-looking fish are "living fossils" virtually unchanged for millions of years.
             

                                But a new study by University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues reveals that in at least one measure of evolutionary change -- changes in body size over time -- sturgeon have been one of the fastest-evolving fish on the planet.

A lake sturgeon from the Great Lakes....

"Sturgeon are thought of as a living fossil group that has undergone relatively slow rates of anatomical change over time. But that's simply not true," said Daniel Rabosky, assistant professor in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a curator of herpetology at the Museum of Zoology.
"Our study shows that sturgeon are evolving very quickly in some ways. They have evolved a huge range of body sizes. There are dwarf sturgeon the size of a bass and several other species that are nearly as big as a Volkswagen."
The sturgeon finding is just one result in a wide-ranging study of the rates of species formation and anatomical change in fish. The work involved assembling one of the largest evolutionary trees ever created for any group of animals. The evolutionary relationships between nearly 8,000 species of fish are delineated in the branches of the tree, allowing the researchers to make inferences about all 30,000 or so species of ray-finned fish.
The study's findings are scheduled for online publication in Nature Communications on June 6. Rabosky and Michael Alfaro of the University of California, Los Angeles, are the lead authors. U-M computational evolutionary biologist Stephen Smith is a co-author.
The main goal of the project was to test a longstanding idea in evolutionary biology that has anecdotal support but which had never been rigorously evaluated, Rabosky said. It was Charles Darwin who coined the term "living fossil" to describe extant creatures, such as the gar (another Great Lakes resident) and the lungfish, which have been present for many millions of years in the fossil record yet appear to have undergone very little anatomical change.
Paleontologists have long suspected that these observations reflect a fundamental coupling between the rates of species formation and anatomical change: groups of organisms that contain lots of species also seem to have greater amounts of anatomical variation, while groups with only a few species, such as the gar, lack much morphological variety.
Rabosky and his colleagues assembled a time-calibrated evolutionary tree for 7,864 living fish species using DNA sequence data and body-size information from publicly available databases. Their data set was so large that they had to develop new computer programs from scratch to analyze it.
The new computer models and the vast amount of data enabled the team to study the correlation between how quickly new species form and how rapidly they evolve new body sizes on a scale that had not previously been possible.
They found a strong correlation between the rates of species diversification and body size evolution across the more than 30,000 living species of ray-finned fish, which comprise the majority of vertebrate biological diversity.
"We're basically validating a lot of ideas that have been out there since Darwin, but which had never been tested at this scale due to lack of data and the limits of existing technologies," Rabosky said.
Most of the fish groups fall into one of two categories. Fish like the gar form species very slowly and show little range in body size. Others, like the salmon family -- which includes salmon, trout, whitefish and char -- do both: they form species quickly and have a wide range of body sizes.
Sturgeon have been around more than 100 million years and today consist of 29 species worldwide, including the lake sturgeon found in the Great Lakes. They don't fit the general pattern found by Rabosky's team; there are few sturgeon species but a great variety in body size.
"In that sense, they're kind of an outlier," Rabosky said.
In addition to Rabosky, Alfaro and Smith, authors of the Nature Communications paper are Francesco Santini of the Universita di Torino in Italy, Jonathan Eastman of the University of Idaho, Brian Sidlauskas of Oregon State University and Jonathan Chang of UCLA.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Miller Institute for Basic Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sex is the key to changing the vole Makes them monogamous and loyal

Over the years there has been a sea change in the hearts and minds of people about the vole.

Some put this down to the fact that really there are much worse things out there - things with a fruity flavour and those organisations which claim to do no evil but pay no taxes.

Now scientists have worked out why people are feeling a lot more positive about the vole and it is all down to brain chemistry and sex.

Researchers have confirmed that sex induces permanent chemical modifications in the chromosomes, affecting the expression of genes that regulate sexual and monogamous behaviour.

According to a study published in Nature Neuroscience, prairie voles mate for life. The voles' pair bonding, sharing of parental roles and egalitarian nest building in couples makes them a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans.

Neuroscientist Mohamed Kabbaj and his team at Florida State University in Tallahassee took voles which had been housed together for six hours but had not mated. The researchers injected drugs into the voles' brains near a region called the nucleus accumbens, which is closely associated with the reinforcement of reward and pleasure.

Animals that had been permitted to mate also had high levels of vasopressin and oxytocin receptors, confirming that sex activates this brain area which leads to partner preference.

It is not just the drug though. It takes a drug plus about six hours of living together for the Voles to think they have found their dream partner. This might explain why Steve Ballmer has stayed as Microsoft's CEO for so long.