Daily Briefing: Mon.

OFF THE DEEP END: Despite warming up the Earth to a life-friendly temperature and bathing it with much-needed energy, the sun may still be a bit overrated. In their latest update to a 10-year census of ocean life, an armada of 2,000 scientists from 80 countries released a report Sunday detailing 17,650 species that live below 656 feet underwater, the point past which sunlight can't reach. These frigid, pitch-black depths were considered barren not long ago, and the researchers are rapidly discovering new species and entire ecosystems that employ clever strategies for living without sunlight. "It was a surprise to me to find such rich communities in the middle of the ocean," says Odd Aksel Bergstad, a Norwegian oceanographer who was apparently destined to make such odd discoveries. "There were not even good maps for the area. Our understanding of the biodiversity there was very weak." Many of the bottom-dwellers survive on a "snowfall" of organic debris from richer waters above, a class that includes everything from large squid to see-through sea cucumbers (pictured above). While those animals' food energy still indirectly comes from the sun, however, the researchers also discovered 170 new species that survive entirely on chemicals and heat from deep-sea vents and seeps, including a family of hairy-legged "yeti crabs." The census is currently in its second-to-last year, and will wrap up next fall. (Sources: Associated Press, e! Science News, London Independent)

 

DIRTY WORK: Children may not be drawn to dirt just to aggravate their parents, researchers report in the online edition of Nature Medicine, arguing that letting kids get their hands dirty is actually good for them. That's because soil restocks kids' skin with bacteria that help keep overactive immune responses under control, preventing minor cuts and scratches from swelling up and becoming inflamed. The findings also may provide an explanation for the "hygiene hypothesis," a theory that suggests childhood exposure to germs prepares the body against allergies later in life — and that a societal obsession with cleanliness is to blame for the rise in allergies and inflammatory diseases in the developed world. The soil bacteria make lipoteichoic acid, a molecule that acts on skin cells called keratinocytes to dampen how aggresively they respond to skin damage. "The exciting implication of the work is that it provides a molecular basis to understand the hygiene hypothesis and has uncovered elements of the wound-repair response that were previously unknown," the lead researcher tells the BBC. "This may help us devise new therapeutic approaches for inflammatory skin diseases." (Source: BBC News)

 

HACKERS RAISE HACKLES: A decade's worth of e-mails written by prominent American and British climate scientists have been hacked and anonymously released online, causing a ruckus among skeptics that some scientists believe was intentionally timed just before next month's U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. Hackers stole hundreds of e-mails from the U.K.'s University of East Anglia, many of which seem to implicate the scientists in overstating the evidence that humans are causing climate change. While the e-mails' authors don't dispute their authenticity, they do argue that their words were published selectively and out of context to make it seem as though they were conspiring. "I personally feel violated," says the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research's Kevin Trenberth. "I'm appalled at the very selective use of the e-mails, and the fact they've been taken out of context." Trenberth is quoted in one of the e-mails as saying "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't," a quote he points out was actually part of a paper he wrote about the need for improved climate monitoring to explain the anomalies that skeptics often seize upon. (Sources: New York Times, AP) 

 

A SEWER RUNS THROUGH IT: Even a mild drizzle can be enough to overwhelm many U.S. sewer systems, the NY Times reports today as part of its ongoing "Toxic Waters" series, resulting in putrid floods of feces and other wastewater that frequently wash into waterways. More than 9,400 of the country's 25,000 sewage systems have reported dumping untreated dumps, as well as chemicals and other dangerous waste, into rivers and lakes during the last three years alone. That's illegal, yet fewer than 20 percent of the violators have paid fines or faced any other punishment from regulators, the Times' Charles Duhigg finds, even those in New York and other large cities. Some academic studies suggest that up to 20 million people each year become ill from drinking or swimming in waterways contaminated from sewage bacteria, and overflows sometimes even wash into people's homes and other buildings. The 1972 Clean Water Act was intended to repair the country's aging sewage systems, and the EPA tells Duhigg that it's cracking down on offenders — settlements with sewer operators in Hampton Roads, Va., and San Francisco recently led to $200 million in upgrades. But the problem persists in cities around the country, and experts say it's a combination of rapidly growing populations using outdated pipes, along with an increase in pavement that helps sewage spread farther when it does overflow. "When you get five inches of rain in 30 minutes," says the deputy commissioner of New York's Department of Environmental Protection, "it's like Thanksgiving Day traffic on a two-lane bridge in the sewer pipes." (Source: NY Times)

 

CROAKING FROGS: Amphibians have been plummeting around the world for years, and more than a third of all 6,000 known species are now seriously threatened with extinction. Much of the blame falls to the parasitic "chytrid" fungus, a disease scientists believe originated in southern Africa and was spread around the world in the 1950s via global trade of the African clawed frog, which was widely used for pregnancy testing in humans at the time. But the fungus continues to obliterate frogs and other amphibian species — especially in mountainous parts of Central America, South America and Australia — and researchers from the Smithsonian Institution believe they've found at least one culprit: frog legs. Most of the world's countries participate in the $40 million-a-year industry, and in many frog-leg-exporting nations such as Indonesia, the majority of frogs are wild-caught, while screening for chytrid and other diseases is often inadequate or nonexistent. "Any trade in live frogs or fresh, unskinned frog legs presents a substantial risk of the spread of amphibian chytrid," says the study's lead author. "The implementation and enforcement of some key amphibian trade policies could be a cost-effective conservation tool to mitigate disease risks associated with the trade." (Source: ScienceDaily)

 

— Russell McLendon