Daily Briefing: Tues.

EARTH-CARE REFORM: The Obama administration will send three Cabinet secretaries and its EPA administrator to address Congress today, part of a reinvigorated effort to put climate change back on the national agenda. While almost no one still expects the Senate to pass its climate bill this year, world leaders are putting pressure on U.S. senators to at least show some kind of commitment to reducing the country's greenhouse gas emissions ahead of December's climactic U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. If the United States can't bring a tangible domestic game plan to Copenhagen, many observers doubt the conference — which is supposed to replace the Kyoto Protocol — will be very productive overall. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Monday to tell him it's urgent for the United States to demonstrate "some movement in the Senate," such as at least advancing the climate bill out of committee. To that end, Sen. Barbara Boxer has scheduled a series of hearings, beginning today, in which members of the Environment and Public Works Committee will listen to testimony on the escalating dangers of doing nothing about climate change. (Sources: Bloomberg News, Associated Press)

 

AN ILL WIND: Americans are becoming more vulnerable to diseases and natural disasters as the planet heats up, and governments should not only try to stem the tide of greenhouse gas emissions, a new study warns, but should start preparing for the inevitable health crises that will emerge in a warmer world. The report by the Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit group that advocates for disease prevention, says the public-health consequences of climate change can be softened by cutting back emissions, but adds that it's too late to focus entirely on battling the causes of global warming — it's time to start battling the effects. Heat waves, smog, insect-borne diseases and extreme weather events will not only harm people directly,  according to the report, but will also cause crop failures that could lead to malnutrition and starvation. (Source: Washington Post)

 

TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL: The phrase "global cooling" has been percolating around the Internet and Fox News in recent years, and even features prominently on the cover of a new book by the authors of Freakonomics. The chatter was enough to get AP science writer Seth Borenstein wondering if there was a grain of truth in it, so he asked several independent statisticians to study long-term temperature data, from both satellite and ground-based instruments, to determine with finality whether the planet is heating up or cooling down. The answer? Still heating up, it turns out. The proponents of global cooling tend to "cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend," says one statistics professor, especially focusing on the blistering hot year of 1998. The swirling variability of Earth's climate means there will almost never be a clean, linear trend in any direction, yet skeptics often argue the planet isn't warming because only one year (2005) has been hotter than 1998. But if you start that same comparison in 1996 or 1999, Borenstein points out, the supposed cooling trend disappears. (Source: AP)

 

TRUE BLOOD: Jumping spiders use their victims' blood as a sort of perfume to help them attract mates, according to a new study by researchers in New Zealand. By feeding Africa's Evarcha culicivora jumping spiders a variety of mosquitoes that were raised on either blood, sugar or nectar, the researchers noticed that the blood-fed spiders were more attractive to members of the opposite sex. In an additional twist that could have widespread public-health implications, they also discovered that the spiders apparently prefer to eat mosquitoes carrying malaria, an insect-borne parasite that affects up to 500 million people worldwide each year, killing roughly 1 million of them. (Sources: LiveScience, CDC)

 

MOLE RATS VS. CANCER: Naked mole rats are one of nature's more bizarre mammals — they're hairless, hideous and live virtually their entire, 30-year-long lives in underground tunnel networks like ant colonies, complete with breeding queens and infertile worker drones. Their subterranean lairs protect them from the various predators that make most rodents' aboveground existence so brief, but they also have another secret weapon that protects them against one of humans' top predators: cancer. Biologists from the University of Rochester have discovered that naked mole rats almost never get cancer — despite living decades longer than many other rodents — because of a specialized anti-cancer cell called p16 that stops cell growth when too many cells start crowding together. Humans have a similar type of cell, called p27, but tumors often find a way to grow around that defense; naked mole rats, on the other hand, come equipped with both p16 and p27, making them almost cancer-proof. The researchers say it's too early to know the possible implications of this finding, but if there's some way to simulate the effect of p16 in people, "we might have a way to halt cancer before it starts." (Sources: New York Times, e! Science News)

 

UNICORN FLY: A zoologist from the University of Oregon has discovered a bizarre, long-extinct species of insect that lived 100 million years ago, and is called by "a monster" by one reviewer of his report. The "unicorn fly" was preserved in amber, a la the Jurassic Park mosquito, and featured a small horn protruding from his head, topped with a trio of eyes that gave it a heads up when predators were approaching. Even with that little evolutionary gimmick, however, this monster eventually went the way of the dinosaurs. "None of the specialized body characters of [the unicorn fly] occurs on previously reported Cretaceous [relatives]," the report concludes. "This 'unicorn' fly was one of the oddities of the Cretaceous world and was obviously an evolutionary dead end." (Source: ScienceDaily)

 

— Russell McLendon