Chilling Lessons from Ice Ages Past

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
19 February 2008

Researchers studying the effects of ancient climate patterns on Antarctic waters have reached an alarming conclusion: The inhabitants of those seas were able to cling to life by the thinnest of margins during past ice ages, but they might not be able to weather the temperature increases predicted for the next century. In particular danger are the birds and mammals occupying the top of the food chain, such as emperor penguins and sea lions.

Earth's climate may be warming at the moment, but 20 times over the past 2 million years, massive glaciers marching from both poles plunged the planet into a deep freeze. Despite the extreme conditions, the organisms and ecosystems of the poles survived and then sprang forth again during the interglacial periods. But how?

That's what evolutionary ecologist Sven Thatje of the University of Southampton, U.K., and colleagues wanted to find out. They studied detailed fossil evidence in sediment cores from the Southern Ocean floor and data published elsewhere about the physiological characteristics of Antarctic birds and mammals. Based on their findings, the researchers report in the March issue of Ecology, even the coldest periods in the past could not wipe out Antarctica's ecosystems. Mostly the polar creatures migrated to deeper and slightly warmer waters--or, in the case of penguins, traveled along with the expanding sea ice--and then returned to their ancestral habitats when conditions improved.

That's the good news. The bad news is that those ecosystems could be vulnerable to warming. Thatje describes Antarctic organisms as "the champions of cold adaptation." In the past, they endured more severe conditions than anything existing today, he says, but their adaptation came at a price: They cannot tolerate higher temperatures. Even a few degrees of temperature increase in the planet's polar zones could kill off some of the creatures that depend on the cold environment, Thatje says. "Antarctic life has nowhere to go if the warming continues," he says.

It's an important study because it reveals that certain predators, such as sharks and large crabs, are now moving into waters that formerly were too cold to support them, says deep-sea biologist Paul Tyler, who is also at the University of Southampton but was not involved in the research. Over long periods of time, local prey populations could adapt to the predators? presence and acquire defenses, he says, but the change might be too rapid for adaptation. So "the predators may reduce the prey populations significantly," he says, and further diminish the polar continent's biodiversity.

Related sites

More on Antarctic ecosystems

History of climate change

Spammers Go Old School as Gimmicks Fail

The battle against spam continues, with many of the trends that started in 2007 dying out in favor of older techniques that worked, according to a new report from Symantec Messaging and Web Security. One new trend, though, has been Europe surpassing the U.S. as the primary source of spam. For the longest time, it had been botnet-infected (define) computers in the U.S. that pumped out the bulk of offers for mortgages and herbal Viagra, which comprised a staggering 78.5 percent of all e-mail floating around on the Internet according to Symantec. During the last half of 2007 that changed, however. In August, the U.S. accounted for 46.5 percent of all spam, compared to 30.6 percent for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). By January, EMEA produced 44 percent while the U.S. was down to 35.1 percent. Doug Bowers, Executive Editor in Symantec's Antispam Engineering group and editor of the report, attributes the change to a two-part condition in Europe: the growth in broadband and a lack of installed security software. "The more prevalent broadband connections become, then the more potential targets you have to become botnets," he told InternetNews.com. "We've seen the adoption of security software lagging as broadband has exploded in Europe." The nature of spam has also changed, particularly when it comes to the use of attachments. Image-based spam started appearing in 2006 but has tapered off, as it have other attachments, like PDF and MP3s, which never really took off en masse. Bowers has theories on this trend as well. "I think they gave up %26#91;on image-based spam%26#93; as filters got better," he said. "Spammers are smart, they measure their results, they move around to find other holes they can exploit." Symantec found that only 8 percent of spam letters now use images, down from 52 percent a year ago. This decline in the use of graphics has resulted in the average spam letter getting smaller. Now the majority of letters (64 percent) are 2KB to 5KB in size, generally the size of a normal e-mail. In part, images have become pass%26#233; because many spammers are going back to the tried-and-true method of sending a link and counting on the recipient to click. A growing trend has been to embed Google links that trigger a search. When the user clicks on it, they are taken directly to a spammer's site. Another growth area in spam has been in scam-based letters. These are different from phishing attacks in that they aren't looking for banking information; instead, they attempt to get people involved in shady investment, real estate or loan deals. Perhaps not surprisingly, the news comes the same week as Symantec debuts its Mail Security 8300 Series Virtual Edition, a virtual appliance version of its e-mail filtering appliance for VMware Server and ESX environments. The Virtual Edition, introduced on Monday, runs on virtualized servers, so administrators can reprovision the resources as needed to add capacity to their infrastructure. So if a company expands, merges, grows suddenly or is subject to seasonal changes in business, the server can be expanded to provide greater filtering. "Going virtual means they can spin up virtual machines to meet their needs at a particular frame of time," Bowers said.

Outlook 2007 Goes it Alone

Up until now, if you wanted Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client (not the scaled down Express version), you had to buy the company's Office suite. However, the most recent release %26#150; Outlook 2007 with the Business Contact Manager contact management application, which comes as a component of Office 2007 %26#150; has been so popular with small businesses that Microsoft is now offering it as a standalone package. Demand for a standalone release grew out of small business needs for consolidating contact information from more than one application in a single place. The standalone version enables customers to track sales and marketing activities such as organizing contacts, and customer information, according to a Microsoft statement. %26#147;Currently, many small and home-based businesses keep their contacts in several different places %26#133; We understand the importance of good customer management and are providing simple and affordable solutions to help small businesses centralize their customer information so that keeping track of customers is more effective and less time-consuming,%26#148; Takeshi Numoto, general manager of Office 2007, said in the statement. Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager also provides synergies when combined with Microsoft Office Accounting 2008, which shipped in November. The combination of programs enables users to view customer financial history as well as billing for time and generating invoices directly from Outlook. The two products share the same database -- so any changes made to customer information in one application are automatically reflected in the other, according to Microsoft. The standalone version of Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager lists for $149.95. Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 costs $449.95. Meantime, the Express edition of Office Accounting 2007 is free, while Office Accounting Professional 2007 lists for $199.95.

Be Prepared to Pay More For Tech Expertise

IT organizations will pony up decent size pay raises this year, despite the past few shaky economic months, thanks to continuing business investment in networking initiatives and internal application development work. The move to boost IT compensation, while at the same time meeting company mandates to improve efficiency and cut costs, will remain a big challenge for IT leaders, say industry watchers. The 2008 IT Salary Report , released this week by Computer Economics, anticipates that US-based IT employees, as a whole, will be getting a median pay hike of about 3.7 percent in 2008. Tech professionals at larger-sized companies may even see a 4 to 4.5 percent salary increase. Higher pay increases will be doled out to those working on Web projects, database application builds and those working on voice-data network efforts. The reason is two fold, say experts, as those areas reflect where tech spending has already been expended and skills in those specialties are getting harder to find. "Salary compensation increases are still fairly healthy though the economy, overall, slowed a bit. What it shows is that IT jobs are holding up fairly well in the marketplace as is the IT segment of business," John Longwell, Computer Economics' research director, told InternetNews.com. "It's a reflection of the investment companies are making in technology and that they're seeing those investments are enabling them to increase productivity." The median 3.7 percent raise is a healthy figure given that the average salary increase was about 1 percent just three years ago, though it's not as high as last year's median 3.8 compensation increase. Networking gurus (and this includes administrators, Web masters and designers, telecom analysts, test engineers, security analysts and systems admins) are expected to get 3.9 percent while those in operations and management are expected to get closer to 3.5 percent raises. . One salary driver is the expansion of network management staff's responsibilities, say recruitment experts. The job now includes dealing with security, compliance and telecom issues "It's added complexity; it's added staff; it's a perfect storm," John Estes, VP of Robert Half Technology, an IT recruitment firm, stated in the report's release. While middle IT managers may not be getting bold salary spikes, leaders in certain leadership roles will. Those spearheading system development teams, for example, could see a 4.5 percent raise, according to the salary report. Job location also factors into compensation increases. The study says those working in the Pacific and South Atlantic areas will get more money than those anywhere else in the country.

How to Give a Gator Heartburn

By Elsa Youngsteadt
ScienceNOW Daily News
6 February 2008

The way to an alligator's stomach is through its heart--via the left aorta, to be precise. That's the upshot of a new study that may have finally explained the enigmatic crocodilian circulatory system. Crocs are able to send deoxygenated blood directly to their stomach, and researchers show that strategy comes in handy when the reptiles need to quickly digest enormous helpings of meat and bone.

Like birds and mammals, crocodilians--the group that includes alligators, caimans, and crocodiles--have a four-chambered heart. They can completely divide their blood flow in the same way we do: Deoxygenated blood returns to the heart from the body, heads straight to the lungs to pick up oxygen, returns to the heart, and then gets pumped to the rest of the body. Although the four-chambered system is considered more efficient, crocs still sometimes engage an alternative primitive flow pattern characteristic of other reptiles. They can bypass the pulmonary artery that carries blood to the lungs, sending spent blood straight back to the digestive system through the left aorta. Since the early 1800s, scientists have envisioned many functional explanations for this shunting architecture--from keeping CO₂ out of the lungs during dives to speeding digestion--but experimental data have remained scarce.

To test the digestion hypothesis, zoologist C. G. Farmer of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and colleagues performed a series of experiments on young American alligators. First, they implanted probes around the left aortas of five gators and found that the animals shunted more deoxygenated blood to their stomachs after eating. Then, the researchers operated on a group of nine gators, closing off the left aorta. The surgery prevented shunting and forced the animals' circulation to run in the fully divided mammalian pattern. (The gators appeared healthy despite the change.) A control group underwent only sham surgeries.

After they recovered, the 2-kilogram alligators feasted on chopped steak, and the researchers measured their gastric acid secretion. As the team reports in the March/April issue of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, the animals with intact shunting abilities produced more stomach acid than did the altered reptiles, especially when it was warm. In fact, they produced 10 times more than the greatest amount recorded in any animal, apparently using the CO₂-rich blood to supply stomach glands that use CO₂ to make gastric acid. The "acid secretion seemed ludicrous it was so high," Farmer says. All that stomach acid should be good for digesting large, bony meals. Indeed, x-rays showed that shunting gators with more acidic tummies finished digesting a bony ox tail days ahead of their nonshunting counterparts. Because alligators rely on external heat to warm their bodies, they can't always maintain the ideal temperature for digestion--so processing huge meals as quickly as possible is "like making hay while the sun shines," Farmer says.

Gordon Grigg, a zoologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, calls the study "fantastic" and says he is "in awe" of the technical challenges the researchers overcame. But he won't be completely convinced, he says, until researchers can show that blocking the left aorta doesn't decrease overall blood supply to the stomach, which might also slow digestion.

Related sites

The study

More on crocodilians from the University of Florida

Yahoo May be Considering Help From Google

Yahoo would consider a business alliance with Google as one way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft, a source familiar with Yahoo's strategy said on Sunday. Yahoo management is considering revisiting talks it held with Google several months ago on an alliance as an alternative to Microsoft's bid, that source said. At $31 a share, Yahoo believes the bid undervalues the company, two sources said. A second source close to Yahoo said it had received a procession of preliminary contacts by media, technology, telephone and financial companies. But the source said they were unaware whether any alternative bid was in the offing. In a memo to Yahoo employees on Friday, which was obtained by Reuters on Sunday, Yahoo leaders wrote: "We want to emphasize that absolutely no decisions have been made -- and, despite what some people have tried to suggest, there's certainly no integration process underway." Few natural bidders exist besides Google that could engage in a bidding war, and Google would be unlikely to win approval from antitrust regulators, some Wall Street analysts said on Friday. The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Sunday that Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo's chief executive Jerry Yang to offer his company's help in any effort to thwart Microsoft's bid. Spokesmen for Yahoo and Google declined comment. Google was not immediately available for comment on the WSJ story. Yahoo's efforts to find an alternative bidder could simply be a measure to pressure Microsoft to boost its bid, which valued Yahoo at $44.6 billion when first announced on Friday. Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay wrote in a research note that "the Microsoft bid of $31 is very astute" because it puts pressure on Yahoo management to take actions that could unlock the underlying value of Yahoo assets, which he estimates are worth upward of $39-$45 a share. The bid gave a boost to markets in Asia when they opened on Monday. Shares in Softbank Corp soared as much as 16 percent and Yahoo Japan was untraded due to a flood of buy orders on Monday, on hopes a potential deal between Microsoft and Yahoo would boost the Japanese firms' competitiveness. Softbank holds a 3.9 percent stake in Yahoo Inc in terms of voting rights. Competition concerns Separately, Google fired back on Sunday at Microsoft's bid to acquire Yahoo, accusing Microsoft of seeking to extend its computer software monopoly deeper into the Internet realm.

Amazon Profit Doubles in Q4

UPDATED: Oh, it was a very merry Christmas for Amazon, yet somehow investors still found coal in their stockings. Propelled by strong holiday sales, Amazon posted net income for the fourth quarter of $207 million, or 48 cents a share. That's a 112 percent increase from the same period last year, when the Web's largest retailer posted earnings of $98 million, or 23 cents a share. Amazon's earnings per share matched analysts' consensus, according to polling from Thomson Financial. "This quarter showed accelerated sales growth and record operating profits," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO, in a statement. "In our view, these unusual financial results are driven by one thing: continuously improving the customer experience." Amazon reported total Q4 revenue of $5.67 billion, a 42 percent increase over last year's haul during the same period. Quarterly revenue also shot past analysts' consensus projection of $5.38 billion, as well as the high end of Amazon's own guidance of $5.45 billion. Looking ahead, Amazon is expecting first-quarter sales of between $3.95 billion and $4.15 billion, an increase of between 31 percent and 38 percent over the same period last year. Investors' consensus for Q1 gross revenue was $3.92 billion, well under the low end of Amazon's guidance range. Amazon finished the day up a fraction of a point to close at $74.21, but after the bell, shares fell more than 12 percent, despite reporting earnings that exceeded analyst expectations. The after-hours sell-off may have been the result of a constricting margin. Despite more than doubling last year's net earnings, Amazon's fourth-quarter gross margin dropped to 20.6 percent from 21.3 percent in 2006. Bezos deflected analysts' questions about slipping margins by emphasizing that the company viewed its free cash flow as a better yardstick of the company's health. In Q4, Amazon reported free cash flow of $1.18 billion, up 143 percent from the end of 2006. Still, Bezos did say that he expects Amazon to be able to improve its margins. Buoyed by the strong sales, Amazon will have a favorable bargaining position with its vendors to allow it to reduce overhead. Amazon experienced other mixed fortunes as well. Looking back on the quarter, the company hailed the success of its Kindle e-book reader, though Bezos acknowledged that demand outstripped supply, creating inventory shortages. "On the manufacturing side, it's causing us to scramble. We're working very hard to address that," Bezos said. "Our goal is to get to a situation where when you order a Kindle, we ship it immediately."