Tomorrow in Brief
Threats to Biodiversity in Protected Forests
Karpanty in Madagascar’s
Ranomafana National Park.
Many of the world’s tropical forest preserves are experiencing declines in biodiversity, reports a team of conservation researchers in the journal Nature.
Tropical forests are rich in terms of numbers of species, but protected areas are struggling to sustain their diversity—mirroring threats to the surrounding areas, such as lack of protection and encroachment from illegal colonists, hunters, and loggers.
The study found that most preserves do help protect the surrounding forests, but about half were losing old-growth trees and wildlife, such as many primates, stream-dwelling fish, and amphibians.
“We need to be as aggressive in eliminating threats outside of park boundaries as we are in establishing new parks or maintaining existing ones,” concludes Sarah Karpanty, associate professor of wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech.
Source: Virginia Tech, www.vt.edu.
Sapphire Optics
by Clemson University materials
engineers.
Sapphire may soon supplant silica as an effective and affordable medium for fiber optics.
Silica-based optical fiber has nearly reached its physical limits for transmitting information, observes John Ballato, director of the Center for Optical Materials Science and Engineering Technologies at Clemson University. As demand for high-speed data transmission accelerates, the need for more durable materials is becoming critical.
Sapphire is widely available, low cost, and has proved valuable in high-energy lasers. Ballato and his team have developed new techniques for creating fibers that overcome the challenges associated with sapphire’s crystalline structure. This will make sapphire fibers more useful for high-energy applications than typical commercial fibers.
Source: Clemson University, www.clemson.edu.
Acoustic Tweezers
cells into patterns without touching them.
Ultrasound used in medical imaging may soon be deployed as a new, noninvasive tool for biomedical research and other applications. The “acoustic tweezers,” under development at Penn State University, can move and manipulate tiny objects like blood cells and even small organisms without touching them.
The acoustic tweezers are based on a piezoelectric material that produces mechanical motion when an electrical current is applied. Ultrasound offers a more affordable alternative to optical tweezers or lasers to produce this effect, because it requires less power density, according to Tony Jun Huang, associate professor of bioengineering. It is also far smaller and produces less heat than lasers, thus making the device less likely to damage cells.
Among the potential applications of the device are point- of-care cancer cell sorting and diagnostics, says Huang.
Source: Materials Research Institute, Penn State University, www.mri.psu.edu.
Amish Boom
become a more common
sight on U.S. rural roads, as
Amish population increases.
The fastest-growing religious group in the United States is the Amish, whose numbers will reach 1 million shortly after 2050, according to Joseph Donnermeyer, professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University.
While most other religions experience growth due to conversions, Amish communities are growing on sheer family size and numbers of baptisms. A new Amish settlement is founded every three and a half weeks, and more than 60% of Amish settlements in the United States have been founded just since 1990.
Among the impacts of this boom in a traditionally technology-averse population will be more demand for farmland and farm jobs, which may not be able to keep pace with growth. As Amish men then turn to nonfarm jobs such as woodworking, local economies could see a boost from new business startups, Donnermeyer predicts.
Source: Ohio State University, www.osu.edu.
WordBuzz: Connectome
Research is under way to create a road map of our minds—the connectome.
Just as the Human Genome Project aimed to draw our genetic map, the Human Connectome Project will map “the complete, point-to-point spatial connectivity of neural pathways in the brain,” according to Arthur W. Toga and colleagues of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. The work is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.
The human nervous system’s 100 billion neurons form functional connections that enable us to sense, think, and act. The project will help researchers to better understand normal variation in brain development and to chart genetic influences on neurological and psychiatric diseases, such as autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Sources: Neurosurgery, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Human Connectome Project Web site www.humanconnectome project.org.