Gizmorama - June 2, 2014

Good Morning,

Still wondering what was with that wild winter we had? Well, you guessed it - it was climate change. Scientists have discovered a link the rising in ocean temperatures and mild to severe weather over the winter of 2014.

Learn about this interesting story and more from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Ant colonies highly efficient at amassing and parsing new information --*
POTSDAM, Germany (UPI) - A single ant isn't all that smart. But a new study suggests an amalgamation of the diminutive insects -- or ant colonies -- can create intelligent networks that gather, spread and respond to a variety of information.

"While the single ant is certainly not smart, the collective acts in a way that I'm tempted to call intelligent," explained Jurgen Kurths, researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Reseaerch and co-author of the new ant study. "The ants collectively form a highly efficient complex network."

Of course, the intelligence of ant colonies isn't channeled toward producing reality TV shows or selling mortgage derivatives. Their information networks are primarily concerned with finding and gathering food.

Their intelligence lies not in the ants' strategy for finding food but in the colony's efficiency in honing in on a food source and leveraging its workforce toward a specific goal -- bringing the food back to home base.

When a single ant finds a piece of food, it heads back to the center of the ant colony, releasing a pheromone scent to mark the route. Because the pheromones quickly dissipate, the growing barrage of ants still look a bit chaotic as they track down the recently discovered morsel. But as more and more ants find the food, the line of ants from home to food and back becomes straighter and more efficient.

The study also found that as ants get older they get better at foraging, having acquired more information about their surroundings than younger colony members.

Kurths argues that the chaos-to-precision find and collect transition is quite similar to how Google's search engine works -- only he says ants are better at it.

"I'd go so far as to say that the learning strategy involved in that, is more accurate and complex than a Google search," Kurths told The Independent. "These insects are, without doubt, more efficient than Google in processing information about their surroundings."

Kurths' study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


*-- Scientists link wild winter to rising ocean temps, global warming --*
OXFORD, England (UPI) - The Western Hemisphere's long, strange 2014 winter was the result of rising temperatures in the Pacific Ocean -- warming exacerbated by greenhouse gases and climate change. That according to Tim Palmer, a professor of climate physics at Oxford University.

Palmer's latest study, published in the journal Science this week, attempts to explain the cause of the only recently-ended bizarre winter of 2014 -- a winter that featured record precipitation on both sides of the Atlantic, record lows across the Midwest, and strangely mild temperatures and depressed snowfall in the West.

The strange winter has previously been explained by the oft-cited "polar vortex," in which a drooping, slowed-down, snake-like jet stream pushed colder air farther south and warmer air north. This phenomenon has been blamed on the warming of the poles. But Palmer says the vortex is more likely the result of a warming Pacific.

Unusually warm waters stretching from Fiji to the Indonesia birthed an endless supply of powerful thunderstorms, Palmer says. And it's the energy of these storms, pushing up into the atmosphere, that contorted the jet stream into its s-like shape.

"The sea temperatures in that crucial region of the west Pacific, which are some of the warmest ocean temperatures anywhere in the world, have reached these all-time record warming through an additional effect, which is man-made climate change," Palmer recently explained to Bloomberg.

"The water's already warm there, and it's just taken it over the brink to create conditions last winter and into this spring that were unprecedented," he added.

Scientists are split over Palmer's conclusions.

"I think it is basically right," Kevin Trenberth -- a climate data scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado -- told National Geographic.

But scientists who originally pinned the warming Arctic as the major culprit are (not surprisingly) less impressed.

"I think it proposes a new mechanism, but there is still a long way to prove the argument," said Qiuhong Tang, climatologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Bejing. "I can hardly find any observation-based evidence in the essay which can support the argument."

Others, like Katharine Hayhoe, of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, fall somewhere in the middle: "the two ideas are not necessarily competitors. They may be complementary."

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