Invasion of the Lace Corals

By Erik Stokstad
ScienceNOW Daily News
16 February 2008

BOSTON?In the evolutionary battleground of the sea, most of the action is thought to take place in shallower waters. There, the constant struggle between predator and prey has sparked new ways of killing and better means of defense. Those species less equipped for the fight have often taken refuge in deeper water. Yesterday, here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher), a biologist presented the first strong evidence that some corals have taken the opposite path, rising from the deep to invade shallow water several times.

The corals are called Stylasteridae, also known as lace or hydrocorals. They first appeared 65 million years ago and live as deep as 2800 meters--and perhaps farther down, too. Just 10%26#37; of stylasterid species inhabit shallow water. Alberto Lindner of the Universidade de S?o Paulo, Brazil, collected samples of Stylasteridae from around the world, mainly from fishing trawlers that had snagged the corals and from scientific dredging.

Lindner sequenced and compared their DNA. By constructing a family tree, he and colleagues determined that the shallow-water Stylasteridae evolved from relatives in deeper water. They have invaded the tropics three times and the temperate waters once. Two lineages gained enough of a foothold to thrive and diversify. A paper on the findings is in review.

The team doesn't yet know exactly when or how the invasions took place. One idea is that Stylasteridae managed to sneak into a shallow-water microhabitat that was similar to their deep-water environment, such as a cave or a dark overhang. Marine ecologist Richard Aronson of the University of South Alabama's Dauphin Island Sea Lab says it's not surprising that some species would move up from deep water but that this is the first solid example.

Related site

More on stylasteridae

Repairs Start on Cut Undersea Cable

Repair work has started on one of three broken undersea cables providing data services to parts of the Middle East and Asia, a cable operator said, and a repair ship was expected to reach a second cable on Tuesday. Undersea cable connections were disrupted off Egypt's north coast last week when segments of two international cables were cut, affecting Internet access in the Persian Gulf region and south Asia and forcing service providers to reroute traffic. A third undersea cable, FALCON, was reported broken off the coast of the United Arab Emirates on Friday. Indian-owned cable network operator FLAG Telecom said on Tuesday a ship had reached the location and repair work had started. "FLAG repair team is operating in extreme weather conditions to ensure timely repairs," the operator, a unit of India's No. 2 mobile operator Reliance Communications, reported on its Web site. FLAG said another repair ship was likely to reach the location of the FLAG Europe-Asia cable, one of the two that were reported cut off the coast of Egypt. Egypt lost more than half its Internet capacity because of the breaks last week, and the telecommunications ministry said this past weekend it did not expect services to be back to normal for at least 10 days. UAE telecom firm Du said on Monday its Internet and telephone services were largely back to normal after it used a terrestrial cable across Saudi Arabia to circumvent the problem. In India, Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association, said it would take at least eight to 10 days from the start of the repair work for Internet access to be restored completely. India's $11 billion back-office outsourcing industry, which provides a range of services such as insurance-claims processing and customer support to overseas clients over the Internet, says it has not been hurt by the cable disruption due to backup plans. Chharia said the impact of patchy access on other Indian businesses had been largely mitigated as most services providers had found new routes to restore communication. The International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to safeguarding submarine cables, said more than 95 percent of transoceanic telecoms and data traffic are carried by submarine cables.

Taking the Heat Off Coral

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 February 2008

Researchers have found a control mechanism in the western Pacific Ocean that seems to be protecting coral reefs from global warming. The discovery is a welcome bit of good news, the scientists say, because it suggests that some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world might not be in as much jeopardy as previously thought.

Over the last 30 years, average ocean temperatures have jumped 0.5 to 0.7 degrees Celsius. One of the adverse consequences of this rise has been a noticeable worsening in the health of ocean coral populations. As the water warms, the colonies of tiny reef-building animals become more vulnerable to coral bleaching. The disease turns the normally colorful coral a ghostly white and has been killing colonies around the globe at an alarming rate (ScienceNOW, 7 May 2007).

But now a U.S. and Australian team has discovered that, in at least one part of the ocean, there are physical forces that act as a kind of thermostat that appears to be curtailing the heating and might protect some fragile reef systems from further damage. In tomorrow's Geophysical Research Letters, the team, led by marine ecologist Joan Kleypas of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, reports what they found in the Western Pacific Warm Pool--a well-studied region off the northeastern coast of Australia. Temperature readings taken here between 1950 and 2006 show that the water has warmed by less than 0.1%26deg;C, considerably less than other ocean areas studied. Not coincidentally, the team has found much less evidence of coral bleaching in the area, with only four outbreaks in the last 25 years.

One reason why the Western Pacific Warm Pool coral seems healthier, the researchers say, is that the waters there are warmer to begin with--about 29%26deg;C--compared to temperatures in the rest of the ocean. So it's possible that the mitigating effects of the thermostat have created a natural protection against bleaching. Although no one fully understands what powers the thermostat, or whether it will be effective against further warming, Kleypas says it's critical to unravel its mechanism "if we are to understand whether this area will continue to warm less in the future."

Perhaps a bigger question is whether anything learned about the thermostat could help protect coral colonies in more volatile waters, Kleypas says. Failing that, she adds, "since we don't have the resources to protect every coral reef, we might want to ramp up our efforts to conserve reefs that are less vulnerable to bleaching."

The findings should cause neither "despair nor unbridled optimism about the future of coral reefs," says Richard Aronson, senior marine scientist at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. The corals in warmer waters do seem to be insulated from the effects of climate change, he says, but only somewhat. Still, the research should at least "compel us to stop wringing our hands about the impending demise of reefs and get the data to be more accurate in our projections," Aronson says.

Related sites

Background on coral bleaching

More on coral bleaching

More on the Western Pacific Warm Pool

Google Streamlines Security Apps

Google today reduced pricing significantly for its line of on-demand security software as it continues to fine-tune the software applications it acquired last year when it bought Postini. "What was once a convoluted and complex product line is now three nice chunks of applications at an aggressive price," Scott Petry, founder of Postini and product management director at Google, told InternetNews.com. "Before we would try and get more dollars for every feature," he explained, "but now that we're part of Google there's a great democratization of the product line that lets us reach a huge market." The three areas Google offers are in security and compliance services: Google Message Filtering, Message Security and Message Discovery. Filtering, which covers incoming spam, malware and other e-mail threats, is available for $3 per user per year. According to Petry, the volume of spam doubled last year. "If you're an administrator, do you want to double what you spend on security appliances?" Alternatively, Google's approach of offering software as a service (SaaS) (define) and storage online lets IT better maintain its infrastructure costs, he said. Messaging Security includes filtering and adds "enhanced virus detection," outbound processing and content policy management at $12 per user, per year. Administrators can use the service to enforce policy rules -- for example, prevent Social Security numbers and credit card information from being transmitted via e-mail. Message Discovery includes Security and adds one year of message data archiving, retention and discovery. The service is designed for companies looking to improve their readiness for legal discovery and compliance issues. Cost is $25 per user for one year of archived data. "This shows Google is making a more coordinated effort to go beyond the Google Apps Premier brand and get into other areas like archiving and compliance," Michael Osterman, principal at Osterman Research, told InternetNews.com. "The pricing is very significant. When you start at $3 per user annually, compared with what some other companies charge, that's almost nothing. Also, the fact you can mix and match only what you need gives companies a lot of flexibility," he said. According to Osterman, Google faces a near-term challenge of letting potential customers know they don't need to be running Google Apps to use the security and compliance software. "The market of Apps is growing, but Microsoft Office is what most people use, and I don't think companies realize Google's messaging and security services are completely independent services that can be purchased separately to use with the software they already use," Osterman said. Petry said his group is working on tighter integration to Google Apps but will continue to offer the security products as an add-on that can be used with competitors' software. "When we were independent as Postini, we sold a service layer that works with any customer's infrastructure and we will continue to do that with security and archiving that works with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, SunMail and others."

Microsoft Demos New Visio Features

Microsoft this week is giving users and partners a sneak peak at the next version of its Visio business diagramming package. The company is showing off the upcoming features, as well as four new add-ins, at its Microsoft Office Visio Conference 2008 this week to a conclave of 250 customers and partners gathered on the company's sprawling Redmond, Wash. campus. It's no surprise that one of the key upcoming new features will be support for Office 2007's trademark "ribbon" %26#150; context sensitive %26#150; user interface, which has recently been renamed "fluent." "The ribbon is key because it allows us to expose more of the functionality of the product," Richard Wolf, general manager of the Office Graphics Division, said in a statement. "The other key benefit that customers will get from the ribbon is a similar way of working to their other Office tools that will make it easier for new users to get up to speed with Visio," he added. The company claims to have 15 million Visio users worldwide. Among other new capabilities coming in the next release will be the addition of process management logic to diagrams, Will Golding, director of product management for Visio, told InternetNews.com. "The next version of Visio %26#91;provides%26#93; the ability for customers and partners to put in their own logic %26#91;into process diagrams%26#93;," Golding said. Microsoft also showed off new add-ins for the existing version, Visio 2007. "The new add-ins will dramatically ease the challenges organizations currently face in monitoring their IT environments, pinpointing and troubleshooting problems in the network, performing diagnostics on different nodes, testing out configuration upgrade scenarios and allowing IT and development staff to work in closer alignment," Wolf's statement continued. The add-ins tie into Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager 2007, SQL Assessment and Datacenter Storage Management. The latter pulls data from Microsoft Excel to aid in managing storage infrastructure. Microsoft is also emphasizing new capabilities introduced last year with Visio 2007, such as data connectivity, which provides the ability to connect multiple data sources to diagrams. "With data connectivity, users can take this additional data and superimpose it on top of their Visio diagram, so it%26#146;s immediately at hand where they%26#146;re already working," Wolf said. Golding did not give a date for the availability of the next version of Visio. "We tend to release new versions between two to three years from the last release," he said. Since Visio 2007 shipped a year ago, that would put the next version's release sometime in the next one to two years, he added.

PostgreSQL 8.3 Gets HOT

Speed is important in all aspects of computing, especially with databases. The latest 8.3 release of the open source PostgreSQL database has speed and a kind of heat of its own in mind. It's HOT, literally. HOT is an acronym for Heap Organized Tuples (HOT),but according to PostgreSQL Core Team member Josh Berkus HOT in a word means performance. HOT is a key feature that PostgreSQL had on its to do list for 8.3 since the 8.2 release was finalized a year ago. "It improves greatly throughput for database applications with frequently updated data, as well as improves response time consistency for most database applications," Berkus told Internenews.com. "For specific types of applications with a very high degree of data contention, performance improvements are up to 300 percent. For most applications, it's more like 20-30 percent." Beyond HOT there are a few other key highlights of the PostgreSQL 8.3 release including XML, full text search, and enumerated data type support improvements. There are also improvements to support data warehouses and the new release also has improved self-tuning features. PostgreSQL has also changed the way it puts together its Windows version. PostgreSQL has been steadily improving its Windows versions since at least 2005 with the release of PostgreSQL 8.1. "We've also moved to MS Visual C++ for Windows builds," Berkus commented. "While this was done primarily to improve performance and stability on Windows, I also hope that it inspires a few Windows developers to become code contributors." PostgreSQL's new release comes as one its main benefactors, Sun Microsystems is in the process of acquiring the open source MySQL database for $1 billion. Berkus is also a Sun Microsystems employee where he holds the role of PostgreSQL Lead. Sun has been backing PostgreSQL strongly since at least 2006. For the 8.3 release Berkus noted that his team at sun was working mostly on the Solaris build and compatibility issues. "My team at Sun is working on stuff for 8.4, such as more SMP scaling (to 64 cores) and upgrade-in-place, but their wasn't ready in time for the May 2007 code cutoff for 8.3," Berkus commented. "So the largest chunk of code going into 8.3 was from EnterpriseDB." Bruce Momjian, senior database architect, EnterpriseDB, and PostgreSQL Community Leader told InternetNews.com that for PostgreSQL 8.3 EnterpriseDB dedicated a team of developers on three continents to work on the project.. The plan is to do the same for 8.4. With Sun's purchase of open source database rival MySQL now in motion, neither Berkus nor Momjian see much impact, yet. "It's early days yet," Berkus said. "So far, the only thing we've done is to pick a common demo database to use with PostgreSQL, MySQL and Derby." From Momjian's point of view he noted that EnterpriseDB has not seen much market demand for more compatibility or migration efforts with MySQL. "In fact, the market demand for PostgreSQL seems to grow every month," Momjian commented. With the 8.3 release out the door developers are now looking toward the 8.4 release. According to Berkus, one of the items that might end up being included is PL/PSM which is a procedural language directly compatible with IBM DB2 and MySQL. Additionally Berkus noted that hot standby databases as well as greater SMP scalability up to 64 cores might end up in the 8.4 release as well. All told though, Momjian noted that the PostgreSQL TODO list is still the same size as it was following the 8.3 release. "We plan to keep looking for things that will further cement PostgreSQL as a world-class, enterprise-ready database," Momjian said. "There is no question 8.3 has taken us farther in that direction."

Google Planning Online Music Move in China?

Web search leader Google is planning to boost its presence in China by tying up with a Chinese online music company to provide free music downloads, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The report, quoting people close to the situation, said Google was in the late planning stages of a venture and will likely offer access to tunes from three global music companies as well as dozens of smaller brands. The service could start in the next several weeks barring any last-minute problems, it said. The move would come as Google struggles to wrestle market share from Baidu.com Inc, which dominates the Chinese search market and offers music search. Google representatives were not immediately available for comment. China's search engine market reached 946.6 million yuan ($131 million) in the fourth quarter -- almost double from a year earlier, according to a research firm. Baidu.com led the market in the fourth quarter with a 60.1 percent share, said Analysys International, while Google came second with a 25.9 percent share, followed by Yahoo China with 9.6 percent.