Global warming a major health risk

LONDON: Global warming is already causing death and disease across the world through flooding, environmental destruction, heatwaves and other extreme weather events, scientists said. And it is likely to get worse.

In a review published in The Lancet medical journal, the scientists said there was now a near-unanimous scientific consensus that rising levels of greenhouse gases would cause global warming and other climate changes.

"The advent of changes in global climate signals that we are now living beyond the Earth's capacity to absorb a major waste product," said Anthony McMichael of the Australian National University in Canberra and his colleagues, referring to greenhouse gases.

The scientists' review of dozens of scientific papers over the last five years said health risks were likely to get worse over time as climate change and other environmental and social changes deepened. "The resultant risks to health ... are anticipated to compound over time as climate change along with other large scale environmental and social changes continues," they wrote.

The review said climate change would bring changes in temperature, sea levels, rainfall, humidity and winds.

This would lead to an increase in death rates from heatwaves, infectious diseases, allergies, cholera as well as starvation due to failing crops.

They said climate change may already have led to lower production of food in some regions due to changes in temperature, rainfall, soil moisture, pests and diseases.

"In food insecure populations this alteration may already be contributing to malnutrition," it said. The scientists said sea levels had risen in recent decades, and people had already started moving from some low-lying Pacific islands.

Such population movements often increased nutritional and physical problems and disease, they said.

"The number of people adversely affected by El Nino-related weather events over three decades, worldwide, appears to have increased greatly," it said, referring to the weather pattern caused by warming of the Pacific Ocean off South America.

The review called for research to identify groups vulnerable to climate change and said health concerns should be included in international policy debates about global warming.

"Recognition of widespread health risks should widen these debates beyond the already important considerations of economic disruption," they said.

(Reuters)

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LOST WORLD FOUND

Expedition: An international team of scientists says it has found a "lost world" in the Indonesian jungle that is home to dozens of new animal and plant species.

"It's as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth," said Bruce Beehler, co-leader of the group.

The team recorded new butterflies, frogs, and a series of remarkable plants that included five new palms and a giant rhododendron flower.

The survey also found a honeyeater bird that was previously unknown to science.

The research group - from the US, Indonesia and Australia - trekked through an area in the mist-shrouded Foja Mountains, located just north of the vast Mamberamo Basin of north-western (Indonesian) New Guinea.

The researchers spent nearly a month in the locality, detailing the wildlife and plant life from the lower hills to near the summit of the Foja range, which reaches more than 2,000m in elevation.

"It's beautiful, untouched, unpopulated forest; there's no evidence of human impact or presence up in these mountains," Dr Beehler told the BBC News website.We were dropped in by helicopter. There's not a trail anywhere; it was really hard to get around."

He said that even two local indigenous groups, the Kwerba and Papasena people, customary landowners of the forest who accompanied the scientists, were astonished at the area's isolation.

"The men from the local villages came with us and they made it clear that no one they knew had been anywhere near this area - not even their ancestors," Mr Beehler said.

Unafraid of humans

One of the team's most remarkable discoveries was a honeyeater bird with a bright orange patch on its face - the first new bird species to be sighted on the island of New Guinea in more than 60 years. The researchers also solved a major ornithological mystery - the location of the homeland of Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise.

First described in the late 19th Century through specimens collected by indigenous hunters from an unknown location on New Guinea, the species had been the focus of several subsequent expeditions that failed to find it.

On only the second day of the team's expedition, the amazed scientists watched as a male Berlepsch's bird of paradise performed a mating dance for an attending female in the field camp. t was the first time a live male of the species had been observed by Western scientists, and proved that the Foja Mountains was the species' true home.

"This bird had been filed away and forgotten; it had been lost. To rediscover it was, for me, in some ways, more exciting than finding the honeyeater. I spent 20 years working on birds of paradise; they're pretty darn sexy beasts," Dr Beehler enthused.

The team also recorded a golden-mantled tree kangaroo, which was previously thought to have been hunted to near-extinction.

Mr Beehler said some of the creatures the team came into contact with were remarkably unafraid of humans. Two long-beaked echidnas, primitive egg-laying mammals, even allowed scientists to pick them up and bring them back to their camp to be studied, he added.

The December 2005 expedition was organised by the US-based organisation Conservation International, together with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

The team says it did not have nearly enough time during its expedition to survey the area completely and intends to return later in the year.

The locality lies within a protected zone and Dr Beehler believes its future is secure in the short term.

"The key investment is the local communities.

Their knowledge, appreciation and oral traditions are so important. They are the forest stewards who will look after these assets," Dr Beehler told the BBC.

A summary of the team's main discoveries:

A new species of honeyeater, the first new bird species discovered on the island of New Guinea since 1939 The formerly unknown breeding grounds of a "lost" bird of paradise - the six-wired bird of paradise (Parotia berlepschi) First photographs of the golden-fronted bowerbird displaying at its bower.

A new large mammal for Indonesia, the golden-mantled tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus pulcherrimus) More than 20 new species of frogs, including a tiny microhylid frog less than 14mm long A series of previously undescribed plant species, including five new species of palms .

A remarkable white-flowered rhododendron with flower about 15cm across Four new butterfly species

(BBC)

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Dwarf galaxies open door to a great mystery

SPACE: Cambridge University researchers have creaked open the door to one of the greatest mysteries in science. For the first time they can describe some physical properties of "dark matter", the mysterious substance that outweighs all the stars and galaxies that can be seen in the universe.

Cosmologists know that the stars and planets we can see add up to only 4% of the mass required to keep the universe in its ordered state. The rest is made of a combination of unknown particles called dark matter and a source of energy, which seems to push galaxies apart, called dark energy. Other than knowing that both these things must exist, scientists have been at a loss to describe anything about them.

But by studying the motion of dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, Gerry Gilmore, the deputy director of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, calculated that dark matter moved at 5.6 miles a second and that the smallest chunks it could exist in measured 1,000 light years across and had 30m times the mass of the Sun.

"This is the first time we've determined a property of the dark matter robustly in a way that we expect will give us some real clues as to what the real physics of this stuff is," said Professor Gilmore at a briefing in London. He said the universe appeared to be built out of these invisible 1,000 light-year-wide bricks of dark matter.

"There must be some basic property of the dark matter that limits it in that way," he said. "It's the basic unit from which bigger things are made up. Some of these you put stars in and you call it a little galaxy; sometimes you put several of these together and call it a bigger galaxy. But you never get anything smaller."

The biggest surprise is that dark matter is not the cold cosmic sludge that scientists once thought. Prof Gilmore calculated its temperature to be in the tens of thousands of degrees, although this is not normal heat. "Normal hot things glow and you can feel the infrared coming off," he said. "The strange thing about dark matter is that it doesn't give off radiation." This is because dark matter is not made of electrons and protons, the fundamental particles that everything else consists of.

Whatever its mysteries, dark matter has its uses. It is essential in keeping the universe ordered and, without it, the galaxies would quickly fall apart. "The Sun is moving so fast that if it weren't for the dark matter, it would fly straight off out of the Milky Way," said Prof Gilmore. "The reason we are still here is that we're held here by the dark matter."

Different regions of space have different amounts of dark matter. The concentrations can be measured in terms of the equivalent weight of hydrogen, the lightest atom in the universe, per cubic centimetre. Around the Sun the concentration of dark matter is equivalent in weight to a third of an atom of hydrogen per cubic centimetre.

According to the new results, the maximum density that dark matter can be packed into is much greater: the weight of four hydrogen atoms per cubic centimetre. While diffuse, it permeates the entire universe and adds up to more than five times the mass of all the stars and galaxies in existence. The results, which are yet to be published, were obtained by analysing measurements made at the Very Large Telescope, an array of four 8m telescopes on the Paranal mountain in Chile, part of the European Southern Observatory.

The observations took 23 nights of work, the biggest British experiment carried out at Paranal. Prof Gilmore said he was in the final stages of drafting a paper on the results to be submitted to a scientific journal.

The research might also give clues to the relationship between dark matter and dark energy. "Something has fine-tuned the relative amounts of this stuff to make them similar in amount and exactly right to add up to perfection. That can't be chance, there's got to be some connection between the two," said Prof Gilmore.

An additional unexpected result that came out of the dark matter study was the discovery that the Milky Way was bigger than cosmologists had thought. Prof Gilmore said it was the biggest galaxy in the local group, knocking Andromeda, previously thought to be the largest, into second place.

FAQ: Missing mass

What is dark matter?

It was first proposed in 1933 by Swiss cosmologist Fritz Zwicky as a way to explain the missing mass of the universe.

Estimates suggest that normal matter - what we see in the universe, including the stars and planets - makes up only 4% of the universe.

How much of it is there?

Dark matter makes up about 23% of the mass of the universe and the remainder is dark energy, another mysterious substance that pushes matter apart.

What do we know about dark matter particles?

Not much. Whatever they are, dark matter particles are transparent to light, and unlike most components of ordinary matter, have no electric charge. Yet they are weighty enough to exert a gravitational pull that prevents the stars in galaxies from flying apart.

Are scientists trying to detect it?

Yes. Experiments are attempting to measure the presence of dark matter using huge, one-tonne crystals kept at low temperatures. The passage of a dark matter particle through the crystal will, very occasionally, lead to a gravitational drag in some of the particles in the crystal. Aside from these indirect measurements on Earth, there is no way of observing the particles yet.

Courtesy The Guardian