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Native Australians, 1939. Photo: National Archives of Australia

When Dutch explorers first arrived in Australia in 1606, they found they’d been beaten to it. But where did these indigenous Australians come from themselves? LiveScience:

Even the indigenous, or aboriginal, population in 1788 is a bit of a mystery, with estimates of the population ranging from 250,000 to 1.2 million. Further back, the story of Australia’s human population is shrouded, though gene studies suggest a relatively large founder population would have been necessary to result in the genetic diversity seen today.

Now, new research indicates that between 1,000 to 3,000 people originally made the trek some 50,000 years ago. And rather some chance encounter with the continent down under, researchers think that the original migrants set out to deliberately colonize Australia.

To arrive at the new discovery, researchers used nearly 5,000 radiocarbon isotopes from 1,750 ancient cooking, burial and settlement sites around the contient to reconstruct the past migration events. ScienceNOW explains what they found:

Relying on the radiocarbon-date database, Williams worked out the rates at which the population changed over time. Then he back-calculated from the aboriginal population at the time of the first European settlement in 1788. He found that for the aboriginal population to reach the estimated 770,000 to 1.2 million at the time of settlement (it’s roughly 460,000 today), the founding population that arrived in Australia roughly 45,000 years ago must have been between 1000 and 3000 people.

In other words, the researcher told ScienceNOW, Australia’s original migrants weren’t just a family or two who got shipwrecked on the continent.

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Indians Made it to Australia More than 4,000 Years Before the British 
Contemporary Aboriginal Art 

Photo: Alexis Gambis, Imagine Science Films

Torn between spending the weekend at the Lincoln Center or at the Museum of Natural History? Artist Mara G. Haseltine is offering a compromise in her latest show, “La Boheme: A Portrait of our Oceans in Peril,” held at the agnes b. gallery space in New York City. The show combines opera with art to inform viewers about ocean pollution.

The show borrows from Puccini’s La Boheme, The Scientist reports, opening with the poet Rodolfo serenading giant stalks of human-sized plankton wrapped in plastic pollution to “Che gelida manina,” or “What a cold little hand.” In this case, instead of tuberculosis, it’s garbage that is robbing Rodolfo of his true love.

Here, you can see Haseltine’s introduction to her new work, with clips from the performance starting at about 2:30:

Haseltine further explained her inspiration behind the piece to The Scientist, which she first thought up while collecting water samples with the citizen science group Genspace:

Haseltine noticed that all her samples were contaminated with fine particles of sunlight-degraded plastic. “I have collected plankton from really remote places such as an oasis in the Sahara,” says Haseltine. When she found plastic even there, she was dismayed. “It was a horrifying realization.” That’s when she arrived at the concept of falling in love with something that you know is dying, “which is the ocean, but our planet too,” she says.

Scientists from the research vessel Tara Oceans, which Haseltine collected some plankton samples on, have found degraded plastic in the Antarctic Ocean, formerly believed to be pristine.  Haseltine hopes her work brings attention to the problem. Her past exhibitions and projects have featured protein synthesis, oyster restoration and estrogen.

Photo: Alexis Gambis, Imagine Science Films

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Ploughshare tortoise. Image: Hans Hillewaert

At the Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Thailand, authorities stopped a man with some turtles. Fifty-four ploughshare tortoises and twenty-one radiated tortoises, to be exact. That’s a lot of tortoises. But it’s a lot more if you consider that there are only about 400 ploughshare tortoises left in the world. In other words, this man was trying to smuggle 10 percent of the entire population of ploughshare tortoises.

The parties involved in the smuggling have all been arrested, but these sorts of arrests don’t seem to do much to stop people from trying again according to Mongbay.com:

The Thai man attempting to collect the bags, O. Visarnkol, was arrested on site. Prior to his arrest he was already on bail for smuggling protected species. The bag was registered to a Malagasy woman, Clara Rahantamalala, 25, who was traveling from Madagascar to Bangkok; she was also arrested.

“We encourage the authorities to throw the book at these two. Making an example of them will hopefully serve as a deterrent for other smugglers,” Shepherd told mongabay.com. “Releasing people on bail does not seem to be part of an effective strategy to reduce the smuggling and illegal trade.”

According to the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust the ploughshare tortoise is being threatened on all sides:

The ploughshare tortoise or angonoka has been hit by a series of disasters – not only has it suffered from burning of its habitat and hunting for food, but more recently the illegal pet trade has further reduced its numbers to fewer than 500 animals in the wild, and it is now the rarest tortoise in the world.

That pet trade is booming still, according to TRAFFIC, a network that monitors wildlife trade. They say that that same day in the same airport, officers found 300 Indian Star Tortoises and 10 Black Pond Turtles. TRAFFIC hopes that these sorts of confiscations and arrests happen more often, in a region where most smugglers are never caught.

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Photo: thewebhamster

For long distance heavy haul truck drivers, a cup of coffee can be more than just a pick-me-up. According to new research, drinking a caffeinated beverage significantly lowered a driver’s likelihood of getting into a wreck. During a long, monotonous and sleep-deprived drive, caffeine can make the difference between swerving off the road and holding the wheel steady.

In the new study, researchers compared 530 drivers in Australia who had crashed their vehicle during a long trip in the past five years, and 517 who had managed to reach their destinations without incident for the past 12 months. All of the drivers’ vehicles weighed at least 12 tons. The drivers who did not crash their vehicles tended to be older and drive longer distances, but also reported fewer hours of sleep per night on average. Just over 40 percent of all the drivers said they drank caffeinated beverages—including coffee, tea, energy drinks or dissolved caffeine tablets—to stay awake. And, after statistically adjusting for other factors such as age and sleep and break patterns, the authors found that the caffeinated drivers were 63 percent less likely to crash than those who did not—even if they reported being more sleep-deprived.

While caffeine does seem to help keep drivers safe, the researchers note that at some point caffeine’s magical chemical properties do wear off, and drivers need some old-fashioned, quality sleep.

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An artist’s rendering of methane hydrate’s small-scale structure, with a methane molecule in green and gold trapped within a blue and silver cage of water. Photo: Masakazu Matsumoto

Found deep underwater in coastal oceans worldwide, a slushy mix of natural gas and water ice is on path to becoming an energy source of future, reports the BBC. Japanese researchers announced that, for the first time, they have managed to successfully extract useful natural gas from the mix, known as a methane clathrate.

Previous work on methane clathrates found on land have been used to produce natural gas, but this is the first time that ocean floor deposits have been tapped. The stores of offshore methane clathrates around Japan, says the BBC, are estimated at around 1.1 trillion cubic metres of the mix, enough to supply “more than a decade of Japan’s gas consumption.” The United States Geological Survey, says The Washington Post, estimates that gas hydrates worldwide “could contain between 10,000 trillion cubic feet to more than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.”

Some of that gas will never be accessible at reasonable prices. But if even a fraction of that total can be commercially extracted, that’s an enormous amount. To put this in context, U.S. shale reserves are estimated to contain 827 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Japan says that the technology to usefully produce natural gas from methane clathrates is still around five years off.

Burning natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than burning coal, and replacing coal or other fossil fuels with natural gas is often looked at as a a way to limit global warming. However, fossil fuels are still fossil fuels, and burning this new source of energy could do a wondrous amount of damage. The Washington Post:

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there’s more carbon trapped inside gas hydrates than is contained in all known reserves of fossil fuels.

…Bottom line: It could prove impossible to keep global warming below the goal of 2°C if a significant fraction of this natural gas gets burned.

The New York Times:

“Gas hydrates have always been seen as a potentially vast energy source, but the question was, how do we extract gas from under the ocean?” said Ryo Matsumoto, a professor in geology at Meiji University in Tokyo who has led research into Japan’s hydrate deposits. “Now we’ve cleared one big hurdle.”

The other big hurdle is deciding whether this is a path worth following.

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