Pesticides 'damage brains of bees'

27 March 2013 Last updated at 12:05 ET By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC World Service

Commonly used pesticides are damaging honey bee brains, studies suggest.

Scientists have found that two types of chemicals called neonicotinoids and coumaphos are interfering with the insect's ability to learn and remember.

Experiments revealed that exposure was also lowering brain activity, especially when the two pesticides were used in combination.

The research is detailed in two papers in Nature Communications and the Journal of Experimental Biology.

But a company that makes the substances said laboratory-based studies did not always apply to bees in the wild.

And another report, published by the Defra's Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera), concluded that there was no link between bee health and exposure to neonicotinoids.

The government agency carried out a study looking at bumblebees living on the edges of fields treated with the chemicals.

Falling numbers

Honey bees around the world are facing an uncertain future.

They have been hit with a host of diseases, losses of habitat, and in the US the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder has caused numbers to plummet.

Continue reading the main story

?Start Quote

It would imply that the bees are able to forage less effectively?

End Quote Dr Sally Williamson Newcastle University

Now researchers are asking whether pesticides are also playing a role in their decline.

To investigate, scientists looked at two common pesticides: neonicotinoids, which are used to control pests on oil seed rape and other crops, and a group of organophosphate chemicals called coumaphos, which are used to kill the Varroa mite, a parasite that attacks the honey bee.

Neonicotinoids are used more commonly in Europe, while coumaphos are more often employed in the United States.

Work carried out by the University of Dundee, in Scotland, revealed that if the pesticides were applied directly to the brains of the pollinators, they caused a loss of brain activity.

Dr Christopher Connolly said: "We found neonicotinoids cause an immediate hyper-activation - so an epileptic type activity - this was proceeded by neuronal inactivation, where the brain goes quiet and cannot communicate any more. The same effects occur when we used organophosphates.

"And if we used them together, the effect was additive, so they added to the toxicity: the effect was greater when both were present."

Another series of laboratory-based experiments, carried out at Newcastle University, examined the behaviour of the bees.

The researchers there found that bees exposed to both pesticides were unable to learn and then remember floral smells associated with a sweet nectar reward - a skill that is essential for bees in search of food.

Dr Sally Williamson said: "It would imply that the bees are able to forage less effectively, they are less able to find and learn and remember and then communicate to their hive mates what the good sources of pollen and nectar are."

'No threat'

She said that companies that are manufacturing the pesticides should take these findings into account when considering the safety of the chemicals.

Continue reading the main story

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Decisions on the use of neonicotinoids must be based on sound scientific evidence?

End Quote Ian Boyd Defra

She explained: "At the moment, the initial tests for bee toxicity are giving the bees an acute dose and then watching them to see if they die.

"But because bees do these complex learning tasks, they are very social animals and they have a complex behavioural repertoire, they don't need to be killed outright in order not to be affected."

The European Commission recently called for a temporary moratorium on the use of neonicotinoids after a report by the European Food Safety Authority concluded that they posed a high acute risk to pollinators.

But 14 out of the 27 EU nations - including the UK and Germany - opposed the ban, and the proposal has now been delayed.

Ian Boyd, chief scientist at Defra, said: "Decisions on the use of neonicotinoids must be based on sound scientific evidence."

He said that the results of the Fera bumblebee study suggested that the extent of the impact might not be as high as some studies had suggested - and called for "further data based on more realistic field trials is required".

Dr Julian Little, communications and government affairs manager at Bayer Crop Science Limited, which makes some of the pesticides, said the findings of laboratory-based studies should not be automatically extrapolated to the field.

"If you take an insecticide and you give it directly to an insect, I can guarantee that you will have an effect - I am not at all surprised that this is what you will see," he explained.

"What is really important is seeing what happens in real situations - in real fields, in real bee colonies, in real bee hives, with real bee keepers."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21958547#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Kate Gosselin is Now 38 Years Old

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What You Lost In The Fire | Angst in Anxiety

?I know this: fire blooms, blooms again, marking us, dismantling what we believed inviolable. At times we can do nothing but record its stunning recklessness. Later, we sift through the ashes by hand.? ~ Nancy Reisman, House Fires.

Fossil records show that wild fires took place over 420 million years ago. Wild fires are a natural disaster. They are a phenomenon of nature and of man within nature. When our geography is wounded or destroyed a part of us is wounded as well. One plays off the other. Geography affects people and people affect the geography.Pat Conroy in The Prince of Tides wrote, ?My wound is geography?it is also my anchorage, my port of call.? Fire is about destruction, loss, grief, dismantling, decomposing, fragmenting, things falling apart and then somehow putting things back together again, but not in an identical way, because that is not possible.

Fire is about losing your anchor. We feel passionate about our geography. Our sense of place in the world is tied to our geography. One of the most immediate losses for individuals who live in communities affect by fires is the loss of their geography. It changed; it is now charred, disfigured, and barely recognizable. It is no longer the place of solace, nurturance, and interdependence. It has been harmed and cannot now care for you. You have to care for it, while also attending to your other wounds.

There is a link between people and land. The people who live on the land are insiders; it is their land and they have an intimate relationship with the land. People who visit the land from elsewhere are outsiders. They do not have the same relationship with the land. This may, for some, complicate the grief process, as many of the helpers who come to assist are from elsewhere.

Natural disasters include wild fires, but also tornado?s, tsunami?s, earthquakes, flooding, lightening strikes, and just about anything else that originates at the hands of nature or combined with man and nature. Man made disasters are made by man and include things, like torture, rape, terrorism, assault, mass murder, school shootings, genocide, and any number of other human rights violations.

Wild fires, along with other natural and man-made disasters are life events. All disasters are life events. Life events include all of our combined experiences that lead us from birth through death. Life events carry a responsibility known as loss. Every event, every situation has a marker of either a significant or less significant loss attached to it.

Birth is a life event, attending kindergarten, graduation from elementary school, graduation from high school, the best friend who moved, the sibling who died, the grad mother who just had her 97th birthday, the dog who ran away, the cat who got sick, the time you had the flu for three weeks, and the terrorist attacks are all life events. All event are life events whether they are good events or extremely bad ones. All life events are characterized by loss, because unless we are suspended somehow in time, we must move from an event to the next event waiting our attention. Loss requires change. Loss involves grieving.

We are accustomed to loss and we know how to grieve the losses that move us through a lifetime. Judith Viorst talks about loss in her book, Necessary Losses. She says,

?For we lose not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. and our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusion of freedom and power, illusions of safety?and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it always would be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.?

Whether it be a wild fire, other natural disaster, or a disaster given you by another human being there are things we lose in all fires. Let?s look at what can be lost in a fire.

Physical Impact

You may have lost your health or physical well being.

Were you hurt, harmed, injured? Was someone close to you injured? There are many physical repercussions including blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory issues, and the release of adrenaline and norepinephrine. Adrenaline and norepinephrine allow us to cope with overwhelming stress. What was your physical health before the disaster, before the fires?

Psychological Impact

You may have lost your psychological balance

What pre-existing mental health issues existed before this event? Did you have depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or another mental health concern?

Intellectual Impact

You may be challenged by what the fires have brought to bear in terms of decision-making.

Did you suffer from smoke inhalation(or its counterpart in other disasters)? Have your cognitive abilities been affected? Is decision-making more difficult? Are you having trouble remembering things? How is your short-term memory?

Emotional Impact

You may have lost your emotional equilibrium.

Are you more emotional or less emotional? Have your emotions fled? Are you feeling too much or not enough? Do you feel you could explode? Are you angry?

Social Support Issues

You may have lost your social safety net.

We all need a social net to catch us if we start to fall. Who is there for you? Family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, your pastor, priest, and rabbi, your therapist? There is community loss. With everyone struggling to pull their life together, the sense of community is loss, at least temporarily.

Occupational Impact

You may have lost your job or had to leave your job or your job was destroyed in the fire (or its counterpart in other disasters).

One of the dimensions of wellness addresses our occupational wellness. When we lose our connection to how we interface with the world through our employment there is unsteadiness.

Financial Impact

You may have lost your ability to produce income or your losses are more than your finances can handle. You may have repair bills, health bills, and additional things the fire (or other disaster) brought to you that require financial expenditure.

Spiritual Impact

You may have lost your spiritual or religious bearings. You may ask why me? You may feel forsaken by God.

When life is more or less predictable people take comfort in feeling they must be doing the right things, because all is well. When things don?t go well or when disaster strikes it is not unusual for people to question themselves and wonder if they are being punished. Everyone is impacted spiritually following a disaster.

Environmental Impact

You lost your land, your physical surrounding, and your geography.

We depend on our physical surroundings to reflect back something beautiful about who we are.? If the reflection we see is disfigured and blackened we are reminded about the loss, death, destruction, and we can do nothing but grieve. The environment gives to us and we are stewards of the land. Some people may feel they failed their land.

It is important to take an inventory where loss is concerned. It is important to allow for your personal narrative of the grief process. Fires engulf and take away everything known. Much can be lost in a fire. Rebuilding following a fire is possible. It takes time and it will not be the same as before. This is OK.

Be well and take care,

Nanette Burton Mongelluzzo, PhD

Photo Credit: David McNew, Getty Images

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????Last reviewed: 27 Mar 2013

APA Reference
Burton Mongelluzzo, N. (2013). What You Lost In The Fire. Psych Central. Retrieved on March 28, 2013, from http://blogs.psychcentral.com/angst-anxiety/2013/03/what-you-lost-in-the-fire/

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Source: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/angst-anxiety/2013/03/what-you-lost-in-the-fire/

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Amazon X-Ray Goes Prime Time With TV Support

Now you can find out who played that guy Raylan Givens just shot down on Justified without frantically searching the internet while pausing the show.

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Greenfield: Liberal? Conservative? When labels distort

By Jeff Greenfield

In the flood of commentary engulfing us about the gay marriage cases before the Supreme Court, be wary--be very, very wary--about how the labels ?conservative and liberal? are thrown around.

One of the sins besetting coverage of the high court is that these labels are often not simply useless, but positively confusing. Why? Because when it comes to judicial opinions, such terms often have very different meanings than they do in political discourse.

Take the fight over DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act. President Clinton signed it into law in the fall of 1996, and now says it should be overturned. Clinton?s enthusiasm for the law back then can be measured by the fact that he signed it--literally--in the middle of the night, and argued in a ?signing statement? that it should not be seen as an excuse for discrimination.

(An honest ?signing statement? from Clinton would have said, ?I?m heading for an easy re-election against my totally flummoxed Republican opponent, Bob Dole, and I?m not going to give him any reed, no matter how thin, to grasp. I?ll make it up to my gay supporters and campaign contributors later.? But I digress.)

In political terms, upholding DOMA would be the ?conservative? position--at least, it would have been a year or two ago, when most voters said they opposed gay marriage. Even with the steady shift of public opinion toward the gay marriage position, only one Republican senator, Ohio?s Rob Portman, publicly supports the idea, and his openly gay son made the issue personal for him.

The Republican Party platform still defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman (or, in the case of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one woman followed by another woman followed by another woman).

But consider: one of the tenets of conservatism is an embrace of federalism, the idea that states retain significant powers under the Constitution. The steady expansion of federal power is an affront to that Constitution, many conservatives say.

Traditionally, marriage is one arena where states have all but plenary power; it took until 1967 for the Supreme Court to tell states they could not prohibit interracial marriage.

So if the court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act, is that a ?liberal? result enabling gay couples married in states where gay marriage is legal to enjoy the same economic advantages that federal laws now grant to straight couples? Or is it a ?conservative? ruling, limiting the federal government?s ability to override state power?

It?s just one example of how confusing political labels can be when brought into the courtroom.
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Here?s another, taken from the recent oral arguments in the court over the extension of the Voting Rights Act.

The ?liberal? position politically is that the act ought to be extended to protect the black vote, while the ?conservative? view is that the law has outlived its purpose, now that it?s almost half-century old, and a black president sits in the White House.

When it comes to the Supreme Court, however, a very different measurement applies.

One of the litmus tests for judicial conservatism is the idea of judicial restraint -- that courts should give substantial deference to the decisions of the political process. When Congress and the president enact a law, conservatives generally say, judges should avoid ?legislating from the bench.?
?
Yet in oral arguments on the Voting Rights Act, Justice Antonin Scalia--the poster child for conservatives--was openly scornful of that political process.

Scalia mocked the law?s name (?even the name of it is wonderful...who?s going to vote against that in the future??)? And rather than treating the law?s overwhelming support in Congress as an argument for its validity, Scalia called its popularity ?a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.?

Scalia?s argument was a far, far distance from ?judicial restraint.? It was, in fact, an argument that said, ?I, as an unelected justice for life, am going to substitute my judgment for the judgment of the Congress and the president.?

Your political preferences will tell you whether Justice Scalia is right or wrong. What is clear, however, is that his approach is in no sense a ?conservative? judicial approach.

No one captured this distinction better than Justice Ruth Badger Ginsburg, a pioneering litigator in the field of sex discrimination and a political liberal who has sharply criticized the reasoning behind Roe v. Wade, which constitutionalized a woman?s right to an abortion some four decades ago. The sweep of the decision, Ginsburg argues, has interfered with the steady expansion of abortion rights through the political process.
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If she were a lawmaker, Ginsburg clearly would have voted for an expansion of abortion rights. As a matter of Constitutional analysis, she is a critic.

It?s the kind of distinction that will be highly useful when the court rules on gay marriage. It may well be that a constitutionally ?conservative? ruling will warm the hearts of liberals.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/when-labels-distort-191634520.html

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Measuring the magnetism of antimatter: Antiprotons measured more accurately than ever before

Mar. 25, 2013 ? In a breakthrough that could one day yield important clues about the nature of matter itself, a team of Harvard scientists have succeeding in measuring the magnetic charge of single particles of matter and antimatter more accurately than ever before.

As described in a March 25 paper in Physical Review Letters, the ATRAP team, led by Gerald Gabrielse, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics, and including post-doctoral fellows Stephan Ettenauer and Eric Tardiff and graduate students Jack DiSciacca, Mason Marshall, Kathryn Marable and Rita Kalra was able to capture individual protons and antiprotons in a "trap" created by electric and magnetic fields. By precisely measuring the oscillations of each particle, the team was able to measure the magnetism of a proton more than 1,000 times more accurately than an antiproton had been measured before. Similar tests with antiprotons produced a 680-fold increase in accuracy in the size of the magnet in an antiproton.

"That is a spectacular jump in precision for any fundamental quality," Gabrielse said, of the antiproton measurements. "That's a leap that we don't often see in physics, at least not in a single step."

Such measurements, Gabrielse said, could one day help scientists answer a question that seems more suited for the philosophy classroom than the physics lab -- why are we here?

"One of the great mysteries in physics is why our universe is made of matter," he said. "According to our theories, the same amount of matter and antimatter was produced during the Big Bang. When matter and antimatter meet, they are annihilated. As the universe cools down, the big mystery is: Why didn't all the matter find the antimatter and annihilate all of both? There's a lot of matter and no antimatter left, and we don't know why."

Making precise measurements of protons and antiprotons, Gabrielse explained, could begin to answer those questions by potentially shedding new light on whether the CPT (Charge conjugation, Parity transformation, Time reversal) theorem is correct. An outgrowth of the standard model of particle physics, CPT states that the protons and antiprotons should be virtually identical -- with the same magnitude of charge and mass -- yet should have opposite charges.

Though earlier experiments, which measured the charge-to-mass ratio of protons and antiprotons, verified the predictions of CPT, Gabrielse said further investigation is needed because the standard model does not account for all forces, such as gravity, in the universe.

"What we wanted to do with these experiments was to say, 'Let's take a simple system -- a single proton and a single antiproton -- and let's compare their predicted relationships, and see if our predictions are correct," Gabrielse said. "Ultimately, whatever we learn might give us some insight into how to explain this mystery."

While researchers were able to capture and measure protons with relative ease, antiprotons are only produced by high-energy collisions that take place at the extensive tunnels of the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Gabrielse said, leaving researchers facing a difficult choice.

"Last year, we published a report showing that we could measure a proton much more accurately than ever before," Gabrielese said. "Once we had done that, however, we had to make a decision -- did we want to take the risk of moving our people and our entire apparatus -- crates and crates of electronics and a very delicate trap apparatus -- to CERN and try to do the same thing with antiprotons? Antiprotons would only be available till mid-December and then not again for a year and a half.

"We decided to give it a shot, and by George, we pulled it off," he continued. "Ultimately, we argued that we should attempt it, because even if we failed, that failure would teach us something." In what Gabrielse described as a "gutsy" choice, graduate student Jack DiSciacca agreed to use this attempt to conclude his thesis research, and new graduate students Marshall and Marable signed on to help.

Though their results still fit within the predictions made by the standard model, Gabrielse said being able to more accurately measure the characteristics of both matter and antimatter may yet help shed new light on how the universe works.

"What's also very exciting about this breakthrough is that it now prepares us to continue down this road," he said. "I'm confident that, given this start, we're going to be able to increase the accuracy of these measurements by another factor of 1,000, or even 10,000."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Harvard University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. J. DiSciacca, M. Marshall, K. Marable, G. Gabrielse, S. Ettenauer, E. Tardiff, R. Kalra, D. W. Fitzakerley, M. C. George, E. A. Hessels, C. H. Storry, M. Weel, D. Grzonka, W. Oelert, T. Sefzick. One-Particle Measurement of the Antiproton Magnetic Moment. Physical Review Letters, 2013; 110 (13) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.130801

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/electricity/~3/7793vig8o2c/130325094030.htm

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Home prices jump 8.1%, the most since 2006

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. home prices rose in January at the fastest pace since the summer of 2006, just before the housing bubble burst. The gain shows the housing recovery is strengthening ahead of the spring buying season.

The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index climbed 8.1 percent in the 12 months ending in January That's up from a 6.8 annual gain in December. Prices rose in all 20 cities, led by a 23 percent gain in Phoenix.

Prices rose in 11 of 20 cities on a month-over-month basis. Those numbers are not seasonally adjusted and reflect the slower winter buying period.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-home-prices-rise-8-130850000.html

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