Study: Gulf spill social effects to linger
BOULDER, Colo., April 19 (UPI) -- The BP oil spill caused social disruption and psychological stress among gulf residents similar to the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez spill, a study indicates.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder's Natural Hazards Center say that as with the Alaska incident, those social and psychological impacts will likely last for years, a university release said Tuesday.
"Just ask the residents of Cordova today whether they are over the Exxon Valdez," said study co-author Liesel Ritchie, referring to the Alaska community generally considered "ground zero" for the 1989 oil tanker spill.
Like the Exxon Valdez, the aftermath of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will almost certainly include "contested" scientific evidence concerning ecological damages, secondary traumas resulting from an extended claims process and litigation, and significant community conflicts and mental health problems, the study authors wrote.
"Given the social scientific evidence amassed over the years in Prince William Sound, Alaska, we can only conclude that social disruption and psychological stress will characterize residents of Gulf Coast communities for decades to come," they said.
Study: Right-handedness is ancient
LAWRENCE, Kan., April 19 (UPI) -- Right-handedness, a human characteristic that has right-handers outnumbering lefties 9-to-1, goes back more than 500,000 years, a U.S. researcher says.
Scientists have previously tried to determine when right-handedness became the prominent characteristic by looking at ancient tools, prehistoric art and human bones, but the results had not been definitive.
Now a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas has used markings on fossilized front teeth to show that right-handedness goes back more than 500,000 years, a KU release reported Tuesday.
David Frayer says distinctive markings on fossilized teeth correlate to the right or left-handedness of individual prehistoric humans.
"The patterns seen on the fossil teeth are directly and consistently produced by right or left hand manipulation in experimental work," Frayer said.
Frayer and his colleagues studied teeth from a 500,000-year-old chamber known as Sima de los Huesos near Burgos, Spain, containing the remains of humans believed to be ancestors of European Neanderthals.
The researchers found right-handedness in 93.1 percent of individuals sampled from the chamber and other European Neanderthal sites.
"It is difficult to interpret these fossil data in any way other than that laterality (handedness) was established early in European fossil record and continued through the Neanderthals," said Frayer. "This establishes that handedness is found in more than just recent Homo sapiens."
New count made of world's barrier islands
DURHAM, N.C., April 19 (UPI) -- Earth has more barrier islands, strips of sand parallel to a coast but separated from it by estuaries or lagoons, than previously thought, U.S. researchers say.
Scientists at Duke University and Meredith College used satellite images, topographical maps and navigational charts to identify a total of 2,149 of the offshore deposits of sand and sediment, a significant increase of the 1,492 counted in 2001 before the public availability of satellite imagery.
All told, the 2,149 barrier islands measure 12,913 miles in length, and are found along all the continents except Antarctica and in all oceans, a Duke release said Tuesday.
Taken together, barrier islands make up roughly 10 percent of the Earth's continental shorelines, the researchers said.
Barrier islands help protect low-lying mainland coasts from erosion and storm damage and can be important wildlife habitats.
Unlike stationary coastal land forms, barrier islands build up, erode, migrate and rebuild over time in response to waves, tides, currents and other physical processes in the open ocean environment, the researchers said.
The survey results have been published in the Journal of Coastal Research.
"This provides proof that barrier islands exist in every climate and in every tide-wave combination," Duke geology professor Orrin H. Pilkey said.
"We found that everywhere there is a flat piece of land next to the coast, a reasonable supply of sand, enough waves to move sand or sediment about, and a recent sea-level rise that caused a crooked shoreline, barrier islands exist."
Island study of mice yields virus clues
WASHINGTON, April 19 (UPI) -- A study of deer mice on islands off the coast of California has provided new information on the rodent-borne infectious disease Hantavirus, researchers say.
Scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied wild deer mouse populations on the Channel Islands off the southern coast of California that carry a variant of Hantavirus called Sin Nombre virus.
In humans, Sin Nombre virus causes Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome, a virulent and often fatal disease.
The study found that just three ecological factors -- rainfall, predator diversity, and island size and shape -- account for almost all the differences in infection rates among the eight islands.
"The prevalence of disease was found to be a function of ecological variables that humans can measure," university researcher John Orrock said. "What this illustrates is that if you know just a few things, you can have a reasonable shot of predicting the disease prevalence."
Learning what factors control the prevalence and spread of viruses within host populations is seen as crucial for understanding the risks of animal-borne diseases.
"These findings support an emerging consensus that ecological factors such as food web structure and species diversity play a key role in determining the prevalence of zoonotic diseases and human health risk," said Alan Tessier of the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.
