Small Trout Devours Nearly 20 Shrews

If fish had competitive eating championships, a small rainbow trout in Alaska might hold a record in the "shrew" category.

Researchers recently opened up a rainbow trout in Alaska's Togiak National Wildlife Refuge, and were surprised to find the fish had eaten nearly 20 shrews, a mouse-size mammal.

To make matters stranger, the fish was relatively small, measuring only 19 inches (48 centimeters) long, said Mark Lisac, a fish biologist at Togiak National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.  

That's " an awful lot for one fish to put down," Lisac told LiveScience. That said, rainbows and related fish species have been known to eat shrews and other small mammals, including rodents, and many species of freshwater fish are opportunistic feeders that will chow down on a wide variety of prey, he said.

This rainbow trout report trumps the previous record of seven shrews eaten (at least that Lisac is aware of), which was held by a grayling, another species of fish that "keys in on shrews even more" than rainbows, Lisac said.But how did the rainbow end up with such a large shrew meal?

Shrews aren't very good swimmers and sometimes drown if they end up in water, Lisac said. "My best guess is that the shrews were on an island [or river bank] that flooded, and the rainbow happened to be in the right spot at the right time," he said.

The fish feed heavily in the summer to prepare themselves for the winter, when they remain sedentary and don't eat much at all. Related species have been shown to enlarge their digestive tracts during the summer, and to digest the excess intestines in the winter, Lisac said. Rainbows may be able to do the same, he added.

Trent Sutton, a fisheries biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who wasn't involved in the research, said he hadn't heard of rainbow trout eating shrews but that it doesn't surprise him since they are opportunistic predators. "Top predators, like trout, have large distensible stomachs that allow them to consume large prey items or a lot of smaller items," Sutton told LiveScience. "I do not know why there would be a lot of shrews where a trout could access them though."

More typical foods for rainbows include salmon eggs, insects and smaller fish, though they have been known to eat voles and other rodents, besides shrews (which aren't rodents).

But the fact that a rainbow would eat shrews isn't that surprising. Fly fishermen in the area are well aware of the tendency, and use special flies that mimic swimming rodents or drowning shrews, Lisac said.

If you "use a mouse fly and drag it along the surface, it seems pretty irresistible" to a variety of fish, Lisac said. Doing so can lead fish to hit the fly, but not necessarily to sink their teeth in. "They hit it and you may not catch them, but they seem to want to drown it," he said.

Species known to eat shrews and rodents also include lake trout and pike, he said.  

The study that turned up the shrew-eating marvel took place on the Kanektok River in August 2009 and was primarily geared toward placing radio transmitters on 200 of the bigger fish to understand their migrations and movements. The study determined that the river consists of several different populations, meaning the various groups may need to be managed separately, as opposed to being treated as one entity, Lisac said.

West Antarctic Ice Sheet's Age Gains 20 Million Years

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet could have formed 20 million years earlier than previously thought, researchers propose, after updating a detail in global climate models, placing more confidence in those models' ability to predict future changes in global climate.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet accounts for only about 10 percent of the ice on the continent today. It sits below sea level and is subject to melting from warm air and seawater infiltration, more so than the larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which sits at a higher elevation.

Researchers have long assumed that West Antarctica has always sat at this low elevation and has thus always been less amenable to holding ice sheets as large as those in East Antarctica.

Higher ground

More recently, however, researchers have suggested that West Antarctica may have had a much higher elevation in the past, and has since been ground down to sea level by the ice sheet's glaciers, or erosive rivers of ice.

Based on the thickness of marine sediment layers off the coast of Antarctica — the presumed remnants of past mountain ranges that had been ground away by glaciers — researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently estimated that West Antarctica could have been hundreds of meters higher in the past than it is today. With these new topographic estimates, the researchers have updated ice sheet models and have shown that with that difference in elevation, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could have grown to a substantial size around 34 million years ago, 20 million years earlier than thought. The team reported its findings this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Model confidence

"I think this gives us a little more confidence in the models that are being used to predict how ice is changing with [modern] changes in carbon dioxide levels," said study co-author and geophysicist Doug Wilson.

Models that reconstruct global climate have suggested that large volumes of ice formed across the planet around 34 million years ago, during a cool period. However, these models have never been able to reconcile where on the planet this ice could have formed: About one-third of the predicated volume has been unaccounted for, Wilson said.

Now, by raising the elevation of West Antarctica, the researchers have identified a plausible location and have been able to account for the remainder of the ice volume predicted by these models.

"The main thing wrong was the topography, and that gives us more confidence that the predicting behavior of ice from these climate models is not that bad," Wilson said.

The team next plans to focus on other periods in West Antarctica's history by reassessing how topography may have changed through other periods of time. 

Climate Change Influenced 2012's Extreme Weather, Report Finds

Man-made climate change contributed to some of 2012's most extreme weather, including the spring and summer heat waves that baked parts of the United States and Hurricane Sandy, which devastated coastal communities along the eastern coast of the country, according to a new report.

The study, which includes research from 18 different teams from around the world, examined 12 extreme weather events from last year and found that human-causedglobal warming  increased the likelihood of half of the incidents, while the others were dictated by natural weather variability.

"We've got some new evidence here that human influence has changed the risk, and has changed it enough that we can detect it," Peter Stott, a climatologist at the United Kingdom Met Office, the U.K.'s national weather service, told reporters in a news briefing on Thursday (Sept. 5). "There's a great deal of variability, [but] nevertheless, we've seen evidence for that increase in risk."The report, published in the September 2013 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, attempts to pinpoint the impact of man-made climate change on extreme weather events. But, making these connections is extremely challenging, said Thomas Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climactic Data Center (NCDC), and chair of the Subcommittee on Global Change Research (part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, made of up several federal departments and agencies).

"It would be very convenient if we were able to say, 'this event — whatever it happens to be — had no effect from human contributions,' but the reality, however, is a little messier," Karl said.

The researchers used computer simulations to examine the effects of specific conditions, such as surface heating due to greenhouse gas emissions or atmospheric dynamics.

One study focused on the devastating flooding from Hurricane Sandy. The researchers drew links between sea level rise, caused by global warming and melting glaciers, and storm surge-related flooding, which soaked towns and downed trees and power lines.

"If sea levels were not rising in those areas, that's not to say the effects of Sandy would not have been significant — it would still be an extreme event," Karl said. "But, what the analysis is saying is with the added increase of sea level, that makes the event incrementally worse."

The effect can be understood with an analogy about the risks involved with driving, said NCDC principal scientist Thomas Peterson. The chance of getting into an accident is higher if other variables, such as speeding or texting while driving, are added. Similarly, some extreme weather events, such as the 2012 U.S. heat wave, were amped up due to anthropogenic or man-made global warming.

"The haet wave was more likely given the human contributions to changes in atmospheric composition," Peterson said.

But for other extreme weather events where clear-cut evidence of human contribution was not found, including droughts in the central United States, and unusually high summer rainfall in the U.K., it is possible that signs of global warming's influence are simply "buried in the statistical noise," said John Nielsen-Gammon, a climatologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, Tex. Nielsen-Gammon did not contribute to the report, but was one of the peer reviewers of the original submission.

"Lack of evidence of a role is not evidence of a lack of role," Nielsen-Gammon told LiveScience.

And while much is still unknown about the extent of natural variability, overall changes to the global climate should be considered, Nielsen-Gammon said.

"The atmosphere is different than it was 130 years ago, in terms of composition, so our climate is different," he explained. "We really have no way of saying what would have happened to the weather on a day-to-day basis without climate change."

The new report is the second one jointly produced by NOAA and the United Kingdom Met Office to examine extreme weather events from the previous year. Stott said the researchers are aiming to develop their research techniques and intend to continue providing yearly updates.

Doomsday?? Universe's Fate Depends on True Mass of Tiny Particle

The universe may end in another 10 billion years or sooner if the heaviest of all the known elementary particles, the top quark, is even heavier than previously thought, researchers say.

If the top quark is not heavier than experiments currently suggest, then an even stranger fate may await the cosmos: disembodied brains and virtually anything else could one day randomly materialize into existence.

The protons and neutrons that make up the nuclei of atoms are made of elementary particles known as quarks. Protons and neutrons are made up of the lightest and most stable flavors of quark: the up quark and down quark. The heaviest and most unstable flavor of quark is the top quark, which current experiments.

 Microscopic bubbles

Now, theoretical physicists find that if the top quark is heavier than currently thought, the energy suffusing the vacuum of empty space may one day destabilize.

"If the vacuum destabilizes, we would all die," said researcher Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicistat the California Institute of Technology.

First, microscopic bubbles would appear and affect the Higgs field, which pervades space and is thought to be responsible for the masses of particles such as electrons and quarks. Those tiny bubbles in space, however, would cause the Higgs field to have lower energy than its current value.

"These bubbles appear only rarely, but when they do, they expand at close to the speed of light," Carroll told LiveScience.

If such a bubble were to hit Earth, the masses of all the particles that depend on the Higgs field would suddenly change.

"Physics and chemistry as we know them would become very different, and certainly no living creature would survive," Carroll said. 

These bubbles may appear every 20 billion years or so. In comparison, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, meaning the universe may have 10 billion years or so left to live. These bubbles could possibly materialize even faster — tomorrow or in the next few years — although the chances are quite slim, Carroll and his colleague Kimberly Boddy at the California Institute of Technology said.

Disembodied brains

If the universe is not doomed by the top quark, it could face an even more bizarre fate — one dominated by so-called Boltzmann Brains.

In principle, a room full of monkeys randomly hitting keys on typewriters could eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Indeed, any random event, no matter how unlikely, could happen, given enough time.

One extraordinarily unlikely possibility is that anyone or everyone might have randomly come into existence with a complete set of memories no more than a moment ago from a cluster of atoms — an idea suggested by Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. One might even propose all intelligent minds in the universe are disembodied brains with complete sets of memories that randomly fluctuated out of chaos rather than evolving conventionally from a relatively orderly past. If everyone's minds are suspect, one might never be able to tell whether one's model of the universe is viable or not.

The universe is not only expanding, but its growth is apparently accelerating, perhaps driven by energy suffusing the vacuum of empty space. In principle, such a version of the cosmos may last forever, remaining warm enough to drive random fluctuations creating Boltzmann Brains.

However, if the top quark is massive enough to potentiallydoom all life, then the energy of the vacuum would be low enough to avoid the unsettling concept of Boltzmann Brains.

"We're not arguing that Boltzmann Brains exist — we're trying to avoid them," Carroll said.

In order "to bring on rapid cosmic doomsday and avoid the Boltzmann Brain menace," the top quark's mass needs to be about 178 billion electron volts, corresponding to 188 times the mass of the proton, Carroll said. This is about 3 percent heavier than the top quark's current measured mass of 173 billion electron volts, "but there are uncertainties on that measurement, and the top quark could easily be a few billion electron volts heavier than we think," he added.

As the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider — gathers more data, researchers will get a better idea of the top quark's mass and, potentially, the universe's destiny.

"It's interesting and fun to connect something measurable in experiments to speculations about the future of the universe," Carroll said.suggest is about 184 times heavier than the proton. 

Blobfish Named World's Ugliest Animal

The grotesque, perpetually grumpy-looking blobfish has been crowned the world's ugliest animal.

With its new title, the deep-sea creature will serve as the hideous public face of the U.K.-based Ugly Animal Preservation Society, an environmental group that champions "Mother Nature’s more aesthetically challenged children."

In its quest for the anti-panda, the campaign, which started as a comedy night, collected thousands of votes to choose a mascot from 11 nominees lacking in traditional charisma. As it turns out, the public decided the blobfish was even more repellant than the "scrotum frog," pubic lice and the big-nosed proboscis monkey.Biologist Simon Watt, "President for Life" of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, announced the winner Thursday (Sept. 12) at the British Science Festival in Newcastle.

"We've needed an ugly face for endangered animals for a long time and I've been amazed by the public's reaction," Watt said in a statement. "For too long the cute and fluffy animals have taken the limelight but now the blobfish will be a voice for the mingers who always get forgotten." (Minger is British slang for an unattractive person.)

Though the group's mission is somewhat cheeky, it does genuinely hope to raise the profile of animals that face serious threats in the wild.

Blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus), for example, get caught in fishing trawlers as they feed off crabs and lobsters living 1,900 to 3,900 feet (600 to 1,200 meters) below the surface, off the coasts of Australia and Tasmania. Some researchers fear that the 12-inch (30-centimeter) gelatinous-looking fish could be endangered because of overfishing, according to The Telegraph.

Physicist Brian Cox threw his support behind the campaign, saying there are "too many people trying to save cute animals."

"They get all the press, and all the attention," Cox said in a statement. "Ugly animals are more deserving than cute animals. So I think it is a superb campaign."

Froggy photobomb

An unsuspecting frog went for a bit of a wild ride last Friday (Sept. 6) when the launch of NASA's moon-bound LADEE spacecraft sent it skyward amidst a plume of smoke. Look closely: The frog can be seen to the left of the rocket, against a background of reddish-orange smoke released from the Minotaur V rocket

A sound-triggered still camera set up near the launch pad captured this incredible photo of the airborne frog during the launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The agency's photo team confirmed the image is real, and was captured in a single frame by one of the remote cameras. But as for the poor frog? "The condition of the frog, however, is uncertain," NASA officials said in a statement. 

Beam Me Up: Bits of Information Teleported Across Computer Chip

Quantum mechanics allows for some very strange things, like the teleportation of information and computers that can break even the toughest codes.

Recently, scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich made a step toward building a workingquantum computer byteleporting bits of informationacross a computer chip. The results of the study were detailed Aug. 15 in the journal Nature.

Creating such a circuit is an important milestone, said Benjamin Schumacher, a professor of physics at Kenyon College in Ohio. "Everybody really knows if you are ever going to make a real quantum computer, it must be solid state," said Schumacher, who was not involved in the new research. "Solid state" refers to computers built with single-piece transistors — with no moving parts and with components that are self-contained. Almost every electronic device is built with solid-state electronics.Bill Munro, a research scientist at Japanese phone giant NTT, who has done extensive research into quantum computing, said the ETH team's work is a "very nice experiment," adding, "it really shows prototyping the technology" involved in making a quantum computer.

Previous teleportation experiments have used lasers to transport quantum information between photons. But that isn't as practical for building real computers. Solid-state circuits, on the other hand, are a well-known field and computer chip manufacturers have decades of experience in miniaturizing them, Schumacher said.

In new experiment, the scientists took advantage of a property ofquantum physics called entanglement to teleport the quantum bits, called qubits. When two particles interact, they form a connection — they are entangled — so that an action performed on one affects the other, even when they're separated by great distances. In addition, no matter how far apart they are, if you know the state of one particle, you instantly know the state of the other.

Teleporting qubits

To set up the teleportation, the scientists put 3 micron-size electronic circuits (where 1 micron is one-millionth of a meter) on a tiny computer chip measuring 0.3 by 0.3 inches (7 by 7 millimeters). Two of the circuits were the senders, while the other served as the receiver. The scientists cooled the chip to near absolute zero and turned on a current in the circuits.

At that temperature, the electrons in the circuits, which are the qubits, started behaving according to quantum mechanical rules (in this case, becoming entangled.

The ETH team encoded information in the form of spin states, into the sending circuits' qubits, and measured them. At the same time, the researchers measured the state of the qubits in the receiver. The sending and receiving qubits' states were correlated — the information had been teleported.

The teleportation wasn't the only achievement. Usually, in teleportation experiments, the information transmission isn't reliable, meaning the experiment can't be reliably repeated. "Especially for large objects, the success rate is often small," said study co-author Arkady Fedorov from the University of Queensland in Australia. "You run the experiment millions of times and it works." In this experiment, the teleportation worked almost every time.

The ETH group also managed to make a qubit out of billions of electrons, nearly a quarter of a millimeter across, which is large by teleportation standards. "It's not anymore like a photon that you cannot see or some atom in a trap," Fedorov said.

Since the qubit doesn't go through the intervening space, some might ask if this is a way to communicate faster than light. It isn't, Schumacher noted. That's because even though two entangled particles share correlated states, it's impossible to know the states beforehand. There's a 50-50 chance a particle will be in state A or B. 

Quantum computers?

For quantum computers, though, instantaneous transmission isn't critical. Rather, the ability of quantum bits to be in two states at once is key to the reality of these computers.

In an ordinary, or classical, computer, the bits — the 1s and 0s that make up the language of computer code — have a definite state. They are either 1 or 0. But qubits can be in both states at the same time. They are in a state called superposition. In quantum mechanics, a physical system has no definite state until it is observed — that is, until it leaves some trace in the surrounding environment.

This phenomenon is very different from the way people ordinarily experience things, but it is outlined in the famous Schrodinger's cat thought experiment. Picture a cat in a box with a vial of poison gas that opens when a tiny piece of radioactive metal emits an alpha particle as it decays. Emitting an alpha particle is a quantum-mechanical process, which means that whether it happens in any given stretch of time is basically random. In that sense, when you open the box, the cat has a 50-50 probability of being alive or dead.

In classical mechanics, the physics would dictate that the cat was alive or dead before we open the box; we just can't see it. But in quantum mechanics, the cat is in both states — just as the qubits in the teleportation experiment are in both states before they are observed.

That's another aspect of the work that makes it unique, Schumacher said. For the qubits to remain in their dual state, they can't interact with the environment in any way. A computer's components, though, have to interact with each other to be useful. "You have two contradictory requirements," he said. "The qubits must interact with each other and the parts have to be isolated from the outside world."

Raymond LaFlamme, executive director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, said the experiment is a big step because it implies not just teleporting qubits, but the logical operations, such as addition or subtraction. "You can change the transformation that you do," he said, "You can transform the bit ... and then flip the bit from 0 to 1."

Fedorov said that future experiments would likely involve getting the teleportation to work in more than one chip, using more qubits.