At least 52 new species of animals and plants were discovered by scientists on the island of Borneo as described in a new report by WWF which includes 30 unique fish species, two tree frog species, 16 ginger species, three tree species and one large-leafed plant species.

Stuart Chapman, WWF International Coordinator of the Heart of Borneo Program noted that these discoveries reaffirm Borneo’s position as one of the most important centers of biodiversity in the world and why conservation there is so important.

Some of the creatures new to science include: a miniature fish, the world’s second smallest vertebrate measuring less than a third of an inch in length and found in the highly acidic blackwater peat swamps of the island; six Siamese fighting fish, including one species with a beautiful iridescent blue-green marking; a catfish with protruding teeth and an adhesive belly which allows it to literally stick to rocks; and a tree frog with striking bright green eyes. The new ginger plants more than double the number of the Etlingera species found to date.

Several of these new species were found in the “Heart of Borneo,” an 84,000 square mile mountainous region about the size of Kansas that is covered with equatorial rainforest in the center of the island. Large areas of the forest are at risk from destructive logging and expanding rubber, oil palm and pulp plantations. Since 1996, deforestation across Indonesia has increased to an average of 7,700 square miles each year, an area slightly smaller than Vermont. Today only half of Borneo’s original forest cover remains.

“The remote and inaccessible forests in the Heart of Borneo are one of the world’s final frontiers for science,” said Adam Tomasek, director of WWF-US’s Borneo & Sumatra Program. “Certainly, many new species are yet to be discovered there. These forests are also vital because they are the source of most of the island’s major rivers, and provide life sustaining freshwater and other ecosystem services.”

At a meeting of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity held last March in Curitiba, Brazil, the three Bornean governments’ Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia and Malaysia declared their commitment to support an initiative to conserve and sustainably manage the Heart of Borneo.

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Discovery of the location of the spin transition zone of iron in Earth’s lower mantle has significant geophysical repercussions.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers and colleagues have for the first time tracked down exactly where this transition occurs by looking at the electronic spin state of iron in a lower-mantle mineral at high temperatures and pressures relevant to the conditions of the Earth’s lower mantle which makes up more than half of the Earth by volume, and is subject to a mineral collection made mostly of ferropericlase (an iron-magnesium oxide) and silicate perovskite (an iron-magnesium silicate).

The Earth’s mantle is a 2,900-kilometer thick rocky shell that makes up about 70 percent of the Earth’s volume. It’s mostly solid and overlies the Earth’s iron-rich core. The Earth’s lower mantle varies in pressure from 22 GPa (220,000 atmospheres) to 140 GPa (1,400,000 atmospheres) and in temperatures from approximately 1,800 K to 4,000 K. (One atmospheres equals the pressure at the Earth’s surface).

Identification of the ratios of the high-spin and low-spin states of iron that define the spin transition zone is done by the scientists through observations of the spin state so that they can understand better the Earth’s structure, composition, and dynamics, which in turn affect geological activities on the surface.

“Locating this pressure-temperature zone of the spin transition in the lower mantle will help us understand its properties, in particular, how seismic waves travel through the Earth, how the mantle moves dynamically and how geomagnetic fields generated in the core penetrate to the Earth’s surface,” said Jung-Fu Lin, a Lawrence fellow in LLNL’s Physics and Advanced Technologies Directorate. “The spin transition zone (STZ) concept differs from previously known structural transitions in the Earth’s interior (e.g., transition zone (TZ) between the upper mantle and the lower mantle), because the spin transition zone is defined by the electronic spin transition of iron in mantle minerals from the high-spin to the low-spin states.”

The research appears in the Sept. 21 issue of the journal, Science.

Lin and colleagues determined that the simultaneous pressure-temperature effect on the spin transition of the lower mantle phase is essential to locating the exact place where this occurs.

The scientists studied the electronic spin states of iron in ferropericlase and its crystal structure under applicable lower-mantle conditions (95 GPa [950,000 atmospheres] and 2,000 K) using X-ray emission spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction with a laser-heated diamond anvil cell. The diamond cell is a small palm-sized device that consists of two gem-quality diamonds with small tips pushing against each other. Because diamonds are the hardest known materials, millions of atmospheres in pressure can be generated in the small device. The sample between the tips was then heated by two infrared laser beams, and the spin states of iron in ferropericlase were probed in situ using synchrotron X-ray spectroscopes at the nation’s Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.

Ferropericlase (which is made up of magnesium, iron and oxygen) is the second most abundant mineral in the lower mantle and its physical properties are important for understanding the Earth’s structure and composition. A high-low-spin transition of iron in ferropericlase could change its density, elasticity, electrical conductivity and other transport properties. Pressure, temperature and characteristics of the spin transition of ferropericlase are therefore of great importance for the Earth sciences, Lin explained.

“The spin transition zone of iron needs to be considered in future models of the lower mantle,” said Choong-Shik Yoo, a former staff member at LLNL and now a professor at Washington State University. “In the past, geophysicists had neglected the effects of the spin transition when studying the Earth’s interior. Since we identified this zone, the next step is to study the properties of lower mantle oxides and silicates across the zone. This research also calls for future seismic and geodynamic tests in order to understand the properties of the spin transition zone.”

“The benchmark techniques developed here have profound implications for understanding the electronic transitions in lanthanoid and actinoid compounds under extreme conditions because their properties would be affected by the electronic transitions,” said Valentin Iota, a staff member in LLNL’s Physics and Advanced Technologies Directorate.

Researchers from the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Hungary, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, Northwestern University, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the University of Chicago, and Washington State University also contributed to this report.

Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a national security laboratory, with a mission to ensure national security and apply science and technology to the important issues of our time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
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Dr.Joseph Dwyer and his team uncovers a new and surprising discovery with the study of lightning research at Florida Institute of Technology’s laboratory. Lightning, a high-voltage discharge that strikes quickly and sometimes fatally, is very difficult to study.

As an associate professor of physics and space sciences and already noted for his discoveries related to x-ray emission from natural and triggered lightning, he conducted a related experiment recently and was shocked to find that laboratory-generated sparks make x-rays, too.

“We know that x-rays are made in outer space–in exotic places like the center of the sun and supernovae–but we didn’t think they could be made so easily in the air,” said Dwyer. “The results should allow for the detailed laboratory study of runaway breakdown, a mechanism that may play a role in thunderstorm electrification, lightning initiation and propagation, and terrestrial gamma-ray flashes.”

High voltage sparks are a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature. They occur in a wide range of settings, from a finger touching a doorknob to the massive lightning flashes on Jupiter. Until Dwyer’s discovery, it was believed that such electrical discharges involved only low-energy electrons, not the kind of high-energy electrons that make x-rays.

To conduct their recent experiment, Dwyer and his team; Florida Tech professor of physics and space sciences, Dr. Hamid Rassoul; Florida Tech graduate student Zaid Saleh and University of Florida graduate student Jason Jerauld, brought the instruments they had used to study lightning in Florida to Lightning Technologies Inc., in Pittsfield, Mass. They set up the equipment next to a Marx spark generator just to see what would happen. Half the team guessed they would see x-rays, half did not.

What they found was that 14 tests of 1.5- 2.0 million-volt sparks in the air produced x-ray bursts. The bursts were remarkably similar to the x-ray bursts previously observed from lightning.

“This amazed us. It opens the door to answering really big questions about lightning by generating it in the lab,” said Rassoul. “It also tells us that we have a lot to learn about how even small sparks work.”

Dwyer is excited about the opportunity to study the poorly understood phenomenon of runaway breakdown–shown to be associated with lightning–in the lab. To date, the only mechanism that can account for the creation of the high-energy electrons that make x-rays is the runaway breakdown of air. In this phenomenon, the electric force experienced by electrons exceeds the effective frictional force due to collisions with air molecules, allowing the electrons to “run away” and gain very large energies.

The new finding, published in October in Geophysical Research Letters, will also be discussed on Nature online, the first week of November.

Dwyer’s previous breakthrough findings have earned extensive media exposure, including a recent PBS NOVA ScienceNow program. His work also will be on upcoming Discovery and National Geographic Channel TV programs.

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