Health & Science

A glacial meltdown in Greenland

An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan has torn free from one of Greenland’s largest glaciers, offering further evidence that warmer Arctic temperatures are taking their toll on the island’s massive ice sheet. Scientists predicted last fall that the Petermann Glacier in the north of Greenland would calve the massive iceberg, having watched an iceberg twice that size break away from the glacier in 2010. Glaciers calving icebergs is a normal process, which occurs on a smaller scale thousands of times a year in Greenland alone. But University of Delaware oceanographer Andreas Münchow tells The Washington Post that the rapid erosion of the Petermann Glacier is a “disturbing” departure from 150 years of observation, pointing to deeper changes underway on the world’s largest island. “The Greenland ice sheet is changing rapidly before our eyes,” he says. Over the past 30 years, average Arctic temperatures have increased by 4 degrees Fahrenheit, a rate of change that’s five times faster than the global average. But scientists say it’s warming seas that are really driving the change, since glacial outcroppings are submerged in the ocean. If Greenland’s glaciers continue to dump more and more of their ice into the sea, scientists warn, sea levels will rise, and coastal flooding in much of the world will get worse.

Hitting malaria in the gut

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Malaria has been difficult to treat because the parasites that cause the disease have proved fiendishly successful at developing resistance to drugs. Now researchers at Johns Hopkins University have come up with a new way to suppress the deadly disease, by killing the parasites before they mature in the guts of mosquitoes. The researchers identified a type of bacteria that resides in the insect’s digestive tract and genetically modified it so that it releases proteins that are toxic to the malaria parasites when they’re most vulnerable—before they hatch from egg sacs in the lining of the insect’s gut. They mixed the bacteria in a sugar solution and found that less than 20 percent of mosquitoes that drank it down later became infected with the malaria parasite, as opposed to 90 percent of those that didn’t drink it. That could mean that simply leaving buckets of the bacteria solution in baiting stations near malaria-prone villages would significantly reduce transmission of the disease, which kills more than 800,000 people a year, mostly in Africa. “The ultimate goal,” study author Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena tells The Daily Mail (U.K.), “is to completely prevent the mosquito from spreading the malaria parasite to people.”

Pluto’s inconvenient moon

Astronomers have discovered a tiny, fifth moon orbiting Pluto, a finding that suggests that a NASA satellite headed that way might run into unexpected obstacles. Researchers spotted the moon, which is only between 6 and 15 miles wide, while using the Hubble Space Telescope to search Pluto’s neighborhood for debris that could collide with the New Horizons space probe. The probe will give astronomers their first-ever close-up look at Pluto. It has been speeding toward the demoted ninth planet—now considered a “dwarf planet”—at 30,000 miles per hour for six years, and is scheduled to complete its 3-billion-mile journey in 2015. Even a pellet-size object “can be lethal to the spacecraft,” New Horizons team leader Alan Stern tells The New York Times. Since Pluto resides within the Kuiper belt, an orbiting band of space rocks at the outer regions of the solar system, it and its moons have likely endured a constant pummeling, creating orbital debris that may well have formed into mini moons and possibly even rings that the Hubble can’t see. If New Horizons can make it to Pluto safely, Stern says, the images it beams back are probably “going to knock our socks off.”

A boon for brittle bones

Wine may be a better beverage for maintaining strong bones than milk—at least for older women. A new study of postmenopausal women between the ages of 50 and 65 shows that a glass or two of wine a night actually helps shore up their bones. Researchers tested the bone strength of 40 moderate drinkers before, during, and after a two-week abstention from alcohol. They found that when the women stopped drinking, their bones began to shed old cells, a process called resorption, more quickly than normal. As postmenopausal women lose bone-building estrogen, resorption often outpaces the production of new bone cells, weakening bones and increasing the risk of fractures and osteoporosis. But as soon as the women resumed drinking, their resorption rates returned to normal—suggesting that alcohol may significantly slow typical bone-cell loss. “After less than 24 hours, to see such a measurable effect was really unexpected,” Oregon State University researcher Urszula Iwaniec tells The Globe and Mail (Canada). Previous research has found that moderate drinking leads to a host of health benefits, including lower risks for arthritis, stroke, and cardiovascular disease.