Weird News Files

The "milk sea" in a composite satellite image, and the region of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia where it was spotted by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program.

Mariners have long told of rare nighttime events in which the ocean glows intensely as far as the eye can see in all directions.

Fictionally, such a “milky sea” is encountered by the Nautilus in Jules Verne classic “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

Scientists don’t have a good handle what’s going on. But satellite sensors have now provided the first pictures of a milky sea and given new hope to learning more about the elusive events.

The newly released images show a vast region of the Indian Ocean, about the size of Connecticut, glowing three nights in a row. The luminescence was also spotted from a ship in the area.

“The circumstances under which milky seas form is almost entirely unknown,” says Steven Miller, a Naval Research Laboratory scientist who led the space-based discovery. “Even the source for the light emission is under debate.”

Scientists suspect bioluminescent bacteria are behind the phenomenon. Such creatures produce a continuous glow, in contrast to the brief, bright flashes of light produced by “dinoflagellate” bioluminescent organims that are seen more commonly lighting up ship wakes and breaking waves.

“The problem with the bacteria hypothesis is that an extremely high concentration of bacteria must exist before they begin to produce light,” Miller told LiveScience. “But what could possibly support the occurrence of such a large population?”

One idea, put forward by the lone research vessel to ever encounter a milky sea, is that the bacteria are not free-living, but instead are living off some local supporting “substrate.”

The mystery highlights how little scientists know about the ocean. Milky seas appear to be most prevalent in the Indian Ocean, where there are many trade routes, and near Indonesia.

“But there could be other areas we simply don’t know about yet,” Miller said. “In fact, we’re already beginning to receive feedback from additional witnesses of milky seas. Some of these accounts occurred in regions we had not thought to look before, and we’re currently working to find matches with the satellite data.”

There have been 235 documented sightings of milky seas since 1915 – mainly concentrated in the north-western Indian Ocean and near Java, Indonesia.

Source: LiveScience Link Filed under Weird Science News

HEATED car seats may keep your bottom nice and toasty, but beware: if you’re male, they could also be frying your vital equipment.

Optimal sperm production requires a temperature 1 to 2 °C below the core body temperature of 37 °C. This is one reason why the testicles hang outside the main part of the body. To test whether heated car seats might be raising scrotal temperatures above this threshold, Andreas Jung at the University of Giessen in Germany and his colleagues fitted temperature sensors to the scrotums of 30 healthy men, who then sat on a heated car seat for 90 minutes.

An hour in, and scrotal temperature had already risen to an average of 37.3 °C, with a maximum temperature in one man of 39.7 °C. Men who sat on unheated car seats reached an average scrotal temperature of just 36.7 °C (Fertility and Sterility, vol 90, p 335).

Although that’s only a slight increase due to the heated seats, Jung notes that it may nevertheless be enough to damage the sperm production process. Sitting in a car for long periods of time, even without a heated seat, is already known to raise scrotal temperatures. And previous research suggests that couples take longer to conceive if the man drives for more than 3 hours a day.

Source: New Scientist  Link Posted by Drew. Filed under Weird Science News.

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LONGYEARBYEN, Norway – It’s been dubbed a Noah’s Ark for plant life and built to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear strike.

Dug deep into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, Norway has created a “doomsday” vault to protect the world’s seeds from global catastrophe.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a backup to the world’s 1,400 other seed banks, has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, war, natural disasters and other threats.

“There are not many countries in the world they could have pulled this off,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of project partner the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Norway owns the vault in Svalbard, a frigid archipelago about 620 miles from the North Pole. The Nordic country paid US $9.1 million for construction, which took less than a year. Other countries can deposit seeds for free and reserve the right to withdraw them upon need.

The operation is funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which was founded by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International, a Rome-based research group.

Giant air conditioning units have chilled the vault to -18 Celsius (-0.4 F), a temperature at which experts say many seeds could last for 1,000 years.

Inside the concrete entrance, a roughly 400-foot tunnel lined with steel and concrete leads to three separate 32-by-88-foot chambers where the seeds will be stored.

The first 600 boxes with 11 tons (12 U.S. tons) of seed have already arrived at Svalbard from 20 seed banks around the world, Norwegian Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen said at a seminar Monday. The first 75 boxes will be carried into the vault by guests as part of the opening ceremony.

The seeds are packed in silvery foil containers – as many as 500 in each sample – and placed on blue and orange metal shelves inside the vaults. Each vault can hold 1.5 million sample packages of all types of crop seeds, from carrots to wheat.

Construction leader Magnus Bredeli-Tveiten said the vault is designed to withstand earthquakes – successfully tested by a 6.2-magnitude temblor off Svalbard last week – and even a direct nuclear strike.

Even if power systems failed, the permafrost around the vault would help keep the seeds “cold for 200 years even in the worst case climate scenario,” said Fowler.

He expected the vault’s life span to rival that of Egypt’s ancient pyramids.

“So much of the value of Svalbard is that it is so far away from the dangers” that affect many other parts of the globe, Fowler said. The archipelago is about 300 miles north of the Norwegian mainland.

Other seed banks are in less protected areas. For example, war wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006. Fowler said the Svalbard bank was a like an insurance policy.

The Svalbard vault is protected by armed guards, but their rifles aren’t only meant to discourage uninvited humans from coming too close.

“My job is to keep away people who aren’t supposed to be here, and guard against polar bears,” said seed vault worker Jimmy Olsen, who was standing outside the entrance Monday with a bear rifle slung from his shoulder. There are an estimated 3,000 polar bears on the islands.

Norway has received praise from around the world for building the seed bank.

FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf on Monday called it “one of the most innovative and impressive acts in the service of humanity.”

But the world spotlight has worried some locals who treasure the isolation of the Arctic archipelago.

“We like to be here a little bit for ourselves,” said Kai Tredal, 42, one of the roughly 2,000 residents of Svalbard’s main town of Longyearbyen.

Source: AP via CBS News. Link Posted by Drew. Filed under Weird Science News.