White Orca adult whale spotted for first time in wild off Russian coast

Scientists have made what they believe to be the first sighting of an adult white orca, or killer whale.

The adult male, which they have nicknamed Iceberg, was spotted off the coast of Kamchatka in eastern Russia.

It appears to be healthy and leading a normal life in its pod.

White whales of various species are occasionally seen; but the only known white orcas have been young, including one with a rare genetic condition that died in a Canadian aquarium in 1972.

The sightings were made during a research cruise off Kamchatka by a group of Russian scientists and students, co-led by Erich Hoyt, the long-time orca scientist, conservationist and author who is now a senior research fellow with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS).

"We've seen another two white orcas in Russia but they've been young, whereas this is the first time we've seen a mature adult," he reported.

"It has the full two-metre-high dorsal fin of a mature male, which means it's at least 16 years old - in fact the fin is somewhat ragged, so it might be a bit older."

Orcas mature around the age of 15, and males can live to 50 or 60 years old, though 30 is more commonplace.

"Iceberg seems to be fully socialised; we know that these fish-eating orcas stay with their mothers for life, and as far as we can see he's right behind his mother with presumably his brothers next to him," said Dr Hoyt.

The cause of his unusual pigmentation is not known. The captive white orca, Chima, suffered from Chediak-Higashi syndrome, a genetic condition that causes partial albinism as well as a number of medical complications.

It is possible that an attempt may be made to take a biopsy from Iceberg; but with researchers reluctant to do so unless there is a compelling conservation reason, they are hoping instead for closer observations including a detection of eye colour.

The project Dr Hoyt co-leads, the Far East Russia Orca Project, has pioneered visual and acoustic monitoring in the inhospitable Kamchatka seas, and has produced a number of papers on the communication of killer whales.

This may lead to improved understanding of the animals' complex social structure, which includes matrilineal family clans, pods consisting of several families, and much larger "super-pods".

A related project aims to study and conserve habitat for all whales and dolphins around the Russian coast.

In recent years a white humpback whale nick-named Migaloo has drawn intense interest in Australia, while the Arctic beluga is naturally white.

The most famous white whale, though, is the fictional sperm whale that drove Captain Ahab to his eventually fatal fury in Moby Dick.

White blood cell chasing a bacteria

NASA Hubble Image: Ancient White Dwarf Stars

Pushing the limits of its powerful vision, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope uncovered the oldest burned-out stars in our Milky Way Galaxy in this image from 2002.

These extremely old, dim "clockwork stars" provide a completely independent reading on the age of the universe without relying on measurements of the expansion of the universe.

The ancient white dwarf stars, as seen by Hubble, turn out to be 12 to 13 billion years old.

Because earlier Hubble observations show that the first stars formed less than 1 billion years after the universe's birth in the big bang, finding the oldest stars puts astronomers well within arm's reach of calculating the absolute age of the universe.

Though previous Hubble research sets the age of the universe at 13 to 14 billion years based on the rate of expansion of space, the universe's birthday is such a fundamental and profound value that astronomers have long sought other age-dating techniques to cross-check their conclusions.

The new age-dating observations were done using Hubble to hunt for elusive ancient stars hidden inside a globular star cluster located 5,600 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.

Image Credit: NASA and H. Richer (University of British Columbia)

Experiment simulates exotic white holes

Expensive particle colliders are not the only way to explore extreme physics. It seems that water gushing from a tap and hitting a sink behaves like a white hole;  the theoretical opposite of a black hole.

A black hole is a dense concentration of mass surrounded by an extremely powerful gravitational field. Nothing that falls within a certain radius surrounding it, known as the event horizon, escapes.

A white hole is the opposite: its event horizon allows things to escape but prevents anything from entering. However, so far white holes only exist in theory, so cannot be studied observationally.

When water hits the bottom of a sink, it flows outwards in all directions. At a certain distance from the point where the water hits the sink, the outgoing liquid rapidly decelerates and piles up before continuing its outward flow, creating a ring-like ridge.

Physicists have previously suspected that any ripples that might arise beyond the ridge and travel towards it should not be able to get past the ridge.

This is because at the ridge the water flows outwards at the maximum speed that ripples could travel inwards, so the ripples would make no forward progress, like a runner on a treadmill. This makes the ridge behave like a white hole event horizon.

Now this has been experimentally confirmed by Germain Rousseaux of the University of Nice in France and colleagues.

Opening Angle
Instead of looking at water hitting a sink, the team examined what happens when a stream of viscous oil hits an empty aquarium. When they placed the tip of a needle in the path of the oil as it spread out from the collision point, it generated a v-shaped disturbance (see image).

The angle of the v depended on the relative speeds of the fluid and any ripples on its surface. When the team measured it, they found that the two speeds are indeed equal, preventing ripples flowing in and creating something akin to a white hole event horizon.

They also found that between the collision point and the ridge, the oil flowed faster than the ripple speed, causing any ripples arising there to be swiftly carried outwards – just as things inside a white hole should get spat out.

Summary

"The experiment is based on a simple idea everyone can understand and try at home," says Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews, UK.

Daniele Faccio of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, who recently used lasers to simulate an event horizon, says studying black and white hole analogues could provide insights into the physics of these exotic objects. For example, in 1974, Stephen Hawking showed mathematically that event horizons should radiate light.

Our telescopes are not sensitive enough to confirm this, but analogue experiments like Rousseaux's could help reveal the physical mechanism for the radiation, which remains unclear.

Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1010.1701

Video Games: White Males Dominate

You might not be surprised to hear that the demographics of video-game characters don't quite match up with those of real populations.

But the first "virtual census" of the human characters that inhabit US video games exposes just how much they diverge from reality.

The survey reveals that males, adults and white people are over-represented in games. Females, black people, children and the elderly are correspondingly under-represented.

Dmitri Williams at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, carried out the study with colleagues at Indiana University, Ohio University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He told New Scientist that the mismatch between real-world and videogame populations could be excluding some groups of potential players from games.

Identity feelings

Williams and colleagues say that this is the first research on the types of people represented by characters in video games – whose actions are claimed by some to act as role models for people's behaviour in the real world.

They ran a census on the top 150 games sold on nine popular video-gaming platforms, including the Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation, PS2, Nintendo GameCube, PSP, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and the PC. The research took place in February 2006 but has only just been published.