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RALEIGH, N.C., Aug. 31 (UPI) — Human impact on a shellfish consumed in the Pacific for thousands of years may have caused the species to actually increase in size, U.S. researchers say.

Scientists at North Carolina State University, in a counterintuitive finding, say the average size of the humped conch, a food source in the Pacific islands for 3,000 years, has increased in spite of — or even possibly because of — increased human activity in the area, a university release said Tuesday.

“What we’ve found indicates that human activity does not necessarily mean that there is going to be a negative impact on a species — even a species that people relied on as a major food source,” Scott Fitzpatrick, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at NC State, said. “The trends we see in the archaeological record in regard to animal remains are not always what one would expect.”

Researchers expected the size of the conchs to decrease over time, based on the conventional wisdom that an expanding human population would result in the conchs being harvested before they could achieve their maximum size.

Instead, they say, the average size of the conchs actually increased in conjunction with a growing human population.

Fitzpatrick believes the size increase is likely related to an increase in nutrients in the conch’s waters, a result of increased agriculture and other human activities.

“In the big picture,” Fitzpatrick says, “this study tells us to focus on the physical evidence and beware of conventional wisdom.”

Copyright 2010 United Press International, Inc. (UPI). Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI’s prior written consent.

DALLAS, Aug. 31 (UPI) — The average U.S. adult eats about 1.5 teaspoons of salt a day, more than twice the recommended amount, a U.S. professor of clinical nutrition says.

Dr. Jo Ann Carson of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas says federal regulators have begun urging food manufacturers to cut back on the amount of sodium they add to everything from breakfast cereals to soups.

The aim is for manufacturers to reduce the amount so gradually consumers would barely notice the lower sodium levels, but the final limits have not yet been determined.

“Lowering our salt intake is important to control blood pressure,” Carson says in a statement. African-Americans, the elderly and those with diabetes are recommended to lower their salt intake because they are most often salt sensitive.

For the some 50 million Americans with high blood pressure, research finds the lower the sodium, the lower the blood pressure.

To lower salt intake: Eat fewer processed foods such as frozen dinners, packaged mixes and canned soups; replace salt with herbs, spices, lemon, lime, garlic and vinegar; replace salty snacks with unsalted pretzels or nuts mixed with raisins, graham crackers, low-fat or fat-free yogurt, plain popcorn and raw vegetables; and buy unsalted or low-salt varieties of foods and condiments.

Copyright 2010 United Press International, Inc. (UPI). Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI’s prior written consent.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 (UPI) — NASA has posted almost 200 pictures covering 50 years of the agency’s history on the photo-sharing Flickr Web site for public feedback, officials say.

The images in three compilations are available for viewing and download in “The Commons” area of the site and are the first of many batches of pictures the agency plans to share, LiveScience.com reported Tuesday.

The Commons was launched by Flickr and the Library of Congress to increase access to publicly-held photography collections and provide a way for the public to contribute information and knowledge.

“NASA on The Commons is bringing literally out-of-these-world images to Flickr,” Douglas Alexander, general manager of Flickr, said. “We are thrilled to be working with NASA to offer such a rich archive and provide amazing insight into this country’s space program and its early beginnings.”

Visitors to NASA on The Commons can add tags, or keywords, to the images to identify objects and people.

Viewers can also communicate with each other visitors by sharing comments.

The first three sets of photos share a common theme of NASA’s beginnings. The “Launch and Takeoff” set captures iconic spacecraft and aircraft taking flight; “Building NASA” spotlights groundbreaking events and the construction of some of NASA’s one-of-a-kind facilities; and a “Center Namesakes” set features photos of the founders and figureheads of NASA’s 10 field centers.

Copyright 2010 United Press International, Inc. (UPI). Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI’s prior written consent.

AURORA, Colo., Aug. 31 (UPI) — Silicone oil applied inside the eye can block up to 55 percent of harmful radiation to prevent blindness in patients with eye cancer, a U.S. researcher says.

Dr. Scott Oliver, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, says eye cancer, a rare but devastating disease, can strike anyone — although fair skin and sun exposure can increase risk — at any time, and treatment often requires radiation that leaves half of all patients partially blind.

Oliver focused on choroidal melanoma of the eye, or uveal cancer, the most common and dangerous form of eye disease, which affects some 2,000 people annually. It can spread quickly to the liver and lungs and often can be fatal.

For treatment, physicians often use plaque brachytherapy in which surgeons attach a gold cap containing radioactive seeds to the white part of the eye.

“Radiation injures blood vessels and nerves in the back of the eye,” Oliver says in a statement. “Half of all patients are legally blind in 3 years in the treated eye.”

Oliver tried several substances to block radiation from striking critical structures while allowing it to hit the tumor.

The study, published in the Archives of Ophthalmology, finds silicone oil — already used to treat retinal detachment — could screen out a majority of harmful radiation.

Copyright 2010 United Press International, Inc. (UPI). Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI’s prior written consent.

TORONTO, Aug. 31 (UPI) — A Canadian doctoral student has identified 19 new species of bees, including one in downtown Toronto close to his research lab, researchers say.

Jason Gibbs of York University completed a study of 84 species of sweat bees — so called for their attraction to human perspiration — and found 19 varieties never identified or described before, a university release said Tuesday.

Gibbs’ extensive study will help scientists track bee diversity, understand pollination biology and study the evolution of social behavior in insects, scientists say.

Bees are responsible for pollinating a large proportion of agricultural crops. Researchers estimate as much as one of every three bites of food that humans eat, including some meat products, depends on the pollination services of bees.

Sweat bees, common visitors to a wide range of plants including fruits and vegetables, make up a third to a half of bees collected in biodiversity surveys in North America.

Gibbs’ task was a difficult one as sweat bees are morphologically monotonous — that is, their physical characteristics are very similar among species.

“No one has been able to identify these bees until now even though they make up so many of the bees we collect,” Gibbs says. “It’s important to identify these species, because if we don’t know what bees we have, we can’t know what bees we’re losing.”

Copyright 2010 United Press International, Inc. (UPI). Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI’s prior written consent.

LONDON, Aug. 31 (UPI) — U.K. scientists have developed a method to monitor rare and endangered species over large landscapes — and it’s as easy as clicking a camera shutter, they say.

Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Zoological Society of London collect images from remote “camera traps” that automatically photograph anything that walks, crawls or flies by for a “Wildlife Picture Index” containing thousands of images of dozens of species, a Society release said Tuesday.

These virtual photo albums are then run through a statistical analysis to produce data for diversity and distribution of a broad range of wildlife.

“The Wildlife Picture Index is an effective tool in monitoring trends in wildlife diversity that previously could only be roughly estimated,” Tim O’Brien of the WCS said. “This new methodology will help conservationists determine where to focus their efforts to help stem the tide of biodiversity loss over broad landscapes.”

WPI was used to track changes in wildlife diversity over a 10-year period in Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park in southwest Sumatra, Indonesia.

The 1,377-square-mile park contains the last remaining tracts of habitat for large mammals including Sumatran tigers, rhinoceroses and Asian elephants.

After running an analysis of some 5,450 images of 25 mammals and one terrestrial bird species photographed throughout the park, the Wildlife Picture Index showed a net decline of 36 percent of the park’s biodiversity.

“The Wildlife Picture Index will allow conservationists to accurately measure biodiversity in areas that previously have been either too expensive, or logistically prohibitive,” John Robinson, WCS executive vice president for conservation and science, said.

Copyright 2010 United Press International, Inc. (UPI). Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI’s prior written consent.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 (UPI) — U.S. seniors in Medicare Part D get their $250 “doughnut hole” checks in the mail, and people who say they can help get the checks are scammers, AARP warns.

Cheryl Matheis, AARP senior vice president, says those in Medicare Part D who reach the coverage gap, or doughnut hole — out-of-pocket expenses costs from $750 to $3,600 — have to pay the full price of their prescriptions, in addition to their monthly premiums.

However, this year because of Affordable Care Act, or healthcare reform, those who fall into the coverage gap will receive a $250 check. In 2011, seniors who reach the doughnut hole will receive a 50 percent discount on brand-name drugs, and in 2020, the doughnut hole will be eliminated entirely, Matheis says.

A senior’s prescription drug plan tracks drug costs, and once the senior reaches the coverage limit, checks are mailed automatically, Matheis says.

“If someone says they can help you get your check more quickly if you pay them a fee, immediately report this scam or any similar fraud to the police or to your state’s attorney general,” Matheis says in a statement. “The attorney general’s phone number is in the blue pages of the telephone book or online at www.naag.org. You should also report any suspected scam to Medicare by calling 1-800-MEDICARE, or 1-800-633-4227.”

Copyright 2010 United Press International, Inc. (UPI). Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI’s prior written consent.

BOULDER, Colo., Aug. 31 (UPI) — Colorado students took part in an unusual decommissioning of a satellite, bringing the craft into Earth re-entry to burn up in the atmosphere, scientists say.

University of Colorado at Boulder undergraduates, who have been helping to control five NASA satellites from campus, guided the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, out of orbit into Earth’s atmosphere Monday, a university release said.

After seven years of gathering valuable data on the polar regions and helping scientists develop a better understanding of ice sheets and sea ice dynamics, the science package on the satellite failed, leading to the decommissioning.

The control team at the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics — made up mostly of undergraduates working alongside LASP professionals — uploaded commands for the satellite to burn its remaining fuel and switched off the transmitter.

“CU-Boulder undergraduates have controlled ICESat for the past seven years from our Mission Operations Center here,” LASP Director Bill Possel said. “Although we are sad to see such a successful science mission come to an end, we are proud of our students’ role in bringing the spacecraft safely out of orbit.”

“They ran calculations to determine where the spacecraft was located and made predictions for NASA ground stations that tracked it,” LASP flight director Darrin Osborne said. “The students did this seven days a week until the decommission was complete.”

“It’s amazing for an undergraduate like me to get hands-on experience controlling multimillion-dollar NASA satellites,” said aerospace engineering sciences student Katelynn Finn, who has been a LASP satellite mission controller for more than a year.

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COLLEGE PARK, Md., Aug. 31 (UPI) — After two decades of planning and construction, the world’s largest neutrino observatory, beneath arctic ice, will open in December, scientists say.

Dubbed IceCube, it holds 5,160 optical sensors in a cube whose sides measure more than 1,000 yards, making it an order of magnitude larger than other neutrino detectors, an American Institute of Physics release said Tuesday.

The Superkamiokande detector in the Japanese Alps, for example, is only 44 yards on a side.

The goal of the world’s neutrino observatories is simple: find the source of cosmic rays.

“Almost a century after their discovery, we do not know from where the most energetic particles to hit the Earth originate and how they acquire their incredible energies,” Francis Halzen, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, says.

High-energy neutrinos are formed in the universe’s most violent events, like exploding stars and Gamma ray bursts.

With no electric charge and essentially no mass, trillions of neutrinos pass through the Earth and everything on it without effect.

On extremely rare occasions, a neutrino will strike the nucleus of an atom, creating a particle, called a muon, and a blue light that can be detected with optical sensors.

The trick is spying those rare collisions of high-energy neutrinos.

IceCube hopes to do it by sheer virtue of its size.

“IceCube has been totally optimized for size in order to be sensitive to the very small neutrino fluxes that may reveal the sources of cosmic rays and the particle nature of dark matter,” Halzen says.

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COLUMBIA, Mo., Aug. 31 (UPI) — “Free as a bird” may not be as free as it sounds, researchers say, as a study suggest what’s on the ground greatly affects where birds fly.

Scientists at the University of Missouri says the findings could be useful to foresters and urban planners alike to improve bird habitats that would perpetuate strong, diverse bird populations, a university release said Tuesday.

Dylan Kesler, assistant professor in fisheries and wildlife at the university’s School of Natural Resources, found that non-migrating resident birds tend to travel over forest “corridors,” areas protected by trees and used by wildlife to travel.

Birds choose to travel over woodlands because they can make an easier escape from predators as well as find food, he says.

“Movement of individuals influences nearly every aspect of biology, from the existence of a single population to interactions within and among species,” Kesler said.

“Movement determines where individual birds procreate. How they spread across the landscape affects who meets whom, which in turn dictates how genes are spread.”

Man-made features such as roads, as well as gaps in forests from agriculture or rivers, can restrict birds to certain areas, he says.

When forests are removed, bird populations become isolated and disconnected, which can lead to inbreeding and weaker, more disease-prone birds, Kesler says.

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