Scientists study ancient global warming
BALBOA, Panama, Nov. 11 (UPI) -- An abrupt global warming episode 56 million years ago led to an explosion of plant diversity in northern South America, Panamanian researchers say.
A 9-degree Fahrenheit spike in temperatures during 10,000 years -- a blink of an eye on a geological scale -- had researchers expecting to find evidence of a mass die-off of many tropical plant species, ScienceNews.org reported.
"We were expecting to find rapid extinction, a total change in the forest," says study leader Carlos Jaramillo, a biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama. "What we found was just the opposite -- a very fast addition of many new species, and a huge spike in the diversity of tropical plants."
The study has resonance for today in raising new questions about how tropical rain forests might respond to global warming as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise because of fossil fuel burning and other industrial activities, researchers say.
Researchers say the warming, which took place at the boundary between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs of geologic time, is the closest analog they have to the global warming they expect in the future.
But unlike that warming's 5-degree increase over 10,000 years, researchers say they expect a 2-degree increase over just the next century, with more to come after that.
In the ancient warming event, the South American plants apparently dealt with the heat by diversifying in a great evolutionary burst.
"This shows that plants have the genetic variability already built in to cope with high temperatures and high CO2," Jaramillo says.
But that doesn't mean tropical forests will necessarily thrive under future climate change, he warns.
"It's not just a matter of applying what we learned at that time, because today the forest is very fragmented," Jaramillo says. "For the forests, I don't think global warming is going to be good."
Indonesia building satellite launcher
JAKARTA, Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Indonesia has announced it is building a rocket with a range of 125 miles as the first step toward a rocket capable of putting a satellite in orbit.
The country's National Aeronautics and Space Agency, or LAPAN, said Thursday the RX-550 rocket would undergo a static test in December and a flight test in 2012, Indonesia's official news agency ANTARA reported.
"This one, which will consist of four stages, will be part of an RPS-01 rocket to put a satellite in orbit," LAPAN spokesman Soewarto Hardhienata said.
LAPAN has successfully tested the RX-320 and RX-420 rockets whose components would be used to build the multistage RPS-01 rocket, he said.
"Besides developing home-made rockets, we are also doing a satellite making project. The aim is to have home-made rockets and satellites," Soewarto said.
LAPAN completed a project to make an earth surface monitoring satellite as part of its efforts to master satellite technology, he said.
"The result was our Polar LAPAN-TUBSAT satellite created in cooperation with Germany," he said, adding that the satellite was successfully placed in orbit.
Bomb-sniffing device better than dogs
TEL AVIV, Israel, Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Israeli researchers say they've developed a portable but powerful electronic bomb sensor that can detect multiple kinds of explosives better than any dog.
The new device is attracting considerable attention from security companies worldwide, ScienceDaily.com reported Thursday.
Developed by Tel Aviv University chemist Fernando Patolsky, the sensor improves on existing detection technologies that have the drawbacks of high cost, lengthy decoding times, size and a need for expert analyses.
"There is a need for a small, inexpensive, handheld instrument capable of detecting explosives quickly, reliably and efficiently," Patolsky says.
The device consists an array of silicon nanowires coated with a compound that binds to molecules of explosives to form an electronic device -- a nanotransistor.
A major advantage of the new sensor is portability, allowing it to be carried from place to place by hand, the report said.
It is also capable of detecting explosives at a distance and can be mounted on a wall, with no need to bring it into contact with the item being checked.
To date, the device has not had a single detection error, its developers say.
Prof. Patolsky, who recently returned to Israel from Harvard University, heads a team considered to be one of the world's leaders in developing nano-based sensors that can detect chemical and biological molecules, ScienceDaily.com reported.
Scientists call for new Mars life search
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Finding life on Mars should be the top priority for any future robotic probes or rovers sent to the planet, some U.S. scientists argue.
The first and only attempts to search for life on Mars were the Viking missions launched in 1975, and when they failed to find evidence it was generally assumed that cold, radiation, the lack of water and other environmental factors ruled out the chances for microbial activity on or near the surface of Mars, SPACE.com reported.
The Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled for launch in 2011, will search for evidence that the Martian environment was once capable of supporting life, but some scientists are arguing for a more important search -- for "extant" life that is active or perhaps dormant but still alive.
"There is no human task more significant and profound than testing if we are alone or not in the universe, and Mars must be the first place to look, as it is just facing our front yard," astrobiologist Alberto Fairen at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center says.
"Finding life on Mars would be the most important scientific achievement of this century," he says.
Fairen and his colleagues want a new goal for the next round of robotic investigations on Mars.
"We call for a long-term architecture of the Mars Exploration Program that is organized around three main goals in the following order of priority -- the search for extant life, the search for past life and sample return," Fairen said.
