Nature Newsblog
« February 2006 | Main | April 2006 »
'Terahertz' detectors could one day help police to detect contraband.
British forensic scientists have developed a new scanner that could spot concealed drugs and explosives in packages or under clothes. They hope that the device, which uses 'terahertz' rays to peer through a wide range of materials, could become a fixture in mail-sorting offices, police stations or mobile forensic labs.
Read the story here.
Will Critical Mass woo students to the field?
You are deep underground in a lab that once housed some of the finest minds in chemistry. But robots directed by a crackbrained artificial intelligence have taken it over and plan to use its equipment to destroy the world! After freezing an evil robot with your handy wrist-mounted hot-and-cold gun, you reach the Haber-Bosch room. And now you must correctly synthesize ammonia or die.
Read this story.
Experts call for focus on fertilizing exhausted earth.
African countries must boost the fertility of the soil underfoot if they want to fill empty bellies, said a group of dignitaries gathered in New York City this week.
Read the story here.
Clinical trial of prayer draws fire from critics.
Distant prayers do not help people recovering from heart surgery and could even cause them more health problems, according to the results of a large and controversial clinical trial that critics have labelled a waste of money.
Read the story here.
Better superconducting strips hold hope for a perfect national grid.
Twenty years ago this month, two researchers discovered a class of materials that sparked dreams of electricity grids that would transmit power without any losses and trains that would levitate along friction-free tracks.
Read more here.
Meeting stirs debate over rocketing rate of C-sections.
An expert panel convened to advise healthy women about the risks of caesarean sections concluded that they cannot do so, because there is so little hard evidence. But at least some specialists feel that the procedure should be discouraged.
Read the full story here.
Good news is tempered by continued global rise.
The number of people with HIV seems to be dipping in southern India, adding to the evidence that prevention efforts are biting into the epidemic in some parts of the globe.
Read the story here.
It is a beautiful morning in Atlanta. The mockingbirds are singing; the cherry trees are in bloom; small children are running around in the fountain in the park. Too bad there are so few chemists here to appreciate it.
As I checked my suitcase into rolly daycare this morning (the bag check that minds about 800 bags over the conference) I realized the atmosphere had changed. Most food outlets are closed. Those that are open are practically stockless, and superintended by bored-looking people flipping the pages of novels. The exposition is now a landscape of wooden crates. The conference center as a whole is filled with the voluminous hush of the Death Star on a government holiday. I do feel sorry for those who give their presentations today.
Just once, I would like to see an ACS conference end with a bang. Why not group the hotshot presentations together at the end and then throw a huge open-bar party with a cocktail recipe contest? I can only imagine what marvelous and strange drinks chemists could come up with.
Just to prove that I can handle a non-quirky session, here is a quick summary of a much more typical ACS presentation. The thing is, all these stories are interesting. Well, okay, nearly all of them.
In a session on natural products, I saw a talk by Craig Crews of Yale, which I admired for its clarity. He took the audience through what must have been several years of work on a compound called epoxomicin...
Click to read on.
which was found back in 1992 in a strain of actinomycete, a hairy-looking bacteria [see ref]. The molecule was said to have anti-tumor properties, but Crews couldn't get a hold of any of it, so he had to make it from scratch (scratch being itsy bitsy things available off the shelf).
Chemists call this "total synthesis," which means that in my notes, I am always writing that a group "totally synthesized" something, which doesn't sound quite right. Anyway, total synthesis is totally cool, I think. It is as near as I can think of to making something from nothing.
Crews and his lab went on to show that epoxomicin was messing with a specific sub-units of the 20S proteasome. The proteasome is a little recycling center in your cells that receives proteins deemed junk and with three enzymes—snip, snip, snip—totally un-synthesizes them, more or less. Blocking this action tends to kill the cell. Crews has started a spin-off company, Proteolix, to see what can be made of a souped-up version of the molecule. At least one cancer drug on the market works by inhibiting the proteasome, Velcade.
The new news from Crews is that his lab has also totally synthesized fellutamide B, and that it is also a potent proteosome inhibitor as well as a stimulator of nerve growth. And, lo, epoxomicin also turns out to stimulate nerve growth. So it seems that perhaps the two effects are linked.
Just one of the thousands of interesting stories at the meeting. There are plenty more to pour through on the Skeptical Chymist.
Research results reignite intelligence controversy.
Researchers say that a remarkable data set on the developing brain adds to the idea that IQ is a meaningful concept in neuroscience. The study, which is published on page 676 of this issue, suggests that performance in IQ tests is associated with changes in the brain during adolescence.
Read the story here.
Simple blood test could screen for enzyme diseases in newborns.
A simple blood check that can detect some rare but devastating disorders is being trialled in New York state as a screening test for newborns.
Read the story here.
UK government energy strategy pushes ‘microgeneration’.
British politicians are urging people to turn their homes into power plants, by embracing ‘microgeneration’. The scheme could see more homeowners installing solar panels, rooftop wind turbines and a range of other measures to cut their power bills and ultimately reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
Read more here
An exclusive interview with Dejie Johnson, concierge at the Georgia World Congress Center. Johnson has been giving ACS attendees tips on restaurants and attractions for three days now. I asked her how chemists compare to the average conference-goer.
Click to find out.
“I am amazed at how many are vegetarians,” she tells me. “I was told that that’s because they know what chemicals are shot into meats. I have found that they are a little—do I want to use this word?—needy. Usually I am out of here by six. I’ve been staying until 7:30. The chemists seem to need a little more babysitting.”
And what are the chemists doing in any free time they manage to carve out?
“The pamphlets that are flying off the shelves are for CNN tours and World of Coca-Cola. A lot of people went to the Martin Luther King Museum, and there is a lot of interest in Jimmy Carter.”
Sounds like a lot of work. Has it been a headache?
“No, I love nerd boys, so I am a happy camper.”
A roundup of the pleasant and the very un at the ACS, with an emphasis on facial hair.
Click below to get the skinny.
The Good:
-enthusiastic students (overheard at the undergraduate poster fair: "Yeah, proteins are cool.")
-the food at the Division of Chemistry & the Law reception.
-No cell phones have gone off in any of the sessions I have been in.
-No one has been unable to load their PowerPoint.
-The variety and fierceness of the beards and moustaches on display, from the ZZ Top to the Wyatt Earp to the scruffy hipster look. Go unshaven chemists!
The Bad:
-a few small crowds in very large halls. Always makes the speaker look like he or she failed to draw an expected crowd.
-The escalators in the convention center are only one person wide. Therefore, there is none of the "stand on the right, walk on the left" stuff I am used to, and I am forced to just stand there on escalators as they creep up and down at sloth speeds. Actually, the fact that I have found this so deeply irritating has made me wonder if three years of living on the East Coast is starting to get to me.
-Despite CNN being across the street, I have not casually run into Wolf Blitzer—the on-air correspondent who perhaps did more than any other media figure to bring back the beard.
-No peaches are in evidence anywhere, even in the press room fruit plate. C'mon Georgia!
Remember acrylamide, that nasty substance (neurotoxin, probably carcinogenic) that was formed in the process of frying carb-rich foods to various golden crispy lovely tasty states? They found it in Sweden in 2002, and everyone went nuts.
Well, the world's food chemists are on the case—trying to reduce acrylimides in their products without sacrificing flavor compounds.
Click to read more.
Mei Lin Low at the University of Reading has developed a kinetic model that describes what happens when a potato cooks. The comforting flavor of a fried potato relies on compounds known as " Strecker aldehydes " and "pyrazines" that form during the delicious Maillard reaction. Techniques to stop those same reactions from forming acrylimides include dumping in a little citric acid to change the pH and mixing in a bit of glycine. Alas, both options also mess up some of these key flavor compounds.
But, says Low, they do different things to the different compounds. (Even something as straightforward as nummy potato taste is a complex bouquet of the things) So if you do a little bit of each, you can theoretically get your acrylamides down without noticeably changing the flavor.
All her work is on paper. No tasters have yet brought in. But scan your bag of potato chips in a year or so and see if both citric acid and glycine are in the ingredient list.
I was having a plastic cup of red wine with Bartow Culp at a Division of Chemical Information reception (always good fun, those). Culp is the head of the chemistry library at Purdue, and a co-author on a number of chemistry reviews. Having a librarian collaborate on a review strikes me as an excellent idea. Someone who has been in the field for a long time undoubtedly knows all about their topic, but everyone has lacunae. A good librarian can fill in those gaps.
And an eloquent librarian, like Culp, can answer my question about why he finds the working with chemical information so satisfying. "Just look at the periodic table," he said. "Chemistry is very concise and very visual. Chemists will always start to draw on tablecloths." And then, after a sip: "You can't draw a picture of a black hole."
Royal Society buys historic manuscript minutes before it was to go for auction.
Britain’s Royal Society has won a last-ditch battle to regain possession of one of its most valuable treasures, a seventeenth-century manuscript handwritten by the physicist Robert Hooke, which the society claims was taken from its archives some 300 years ago.
Read more here
An old lead coin looks like it was plated with silver.
An ingenious counterfeit-coin scam has been rumbled by scientists in Italy. But no one is going to jail, because the forgers lived more than 2,000 years ago.
Read the story here.
Failed rocket's cargo lands back on Earth, but doesn't survive the trip.
When the privately funded experimental Falcon 1 rocket exploded shortly after lift-off, its designers vowed to rebuild it and fly it again (see 'Private rocket crashes and burns'). But it looks like it's curtains for the rocket's payload, an ill-fated little satellite called FalconSAT-2.
Read the story here.
At a talk about polyurethane insulation (this meeting has everything), Mike Mautino from Bayer Material Science showed a slide of a system he had designed to evaluate the insulating properties of picnic coolers. He had this to say: "This is my contribution to humanity. I am keeping my fellow man's beer colder longer. What more noble cause is there?"
Yesterday I tested my receptivity to 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP), by touching a paper with the substance with my tongue. According to researchers, about 25 percent of people can't taste PROP at all, 50 percent perceive it as somewhat bitter, and 25 percent find it horrifically bitter.
One tiny touch and I was running for Atlanta's favorite beverage, coca-cola, to quench the flavor. It tasted wretched! The taste lingered for hours, but it was worth it to know that I am in the elite club of the supertasters.
Click below to read more.
According to Linda Bartoshuk, a health psychologist at the University of Florida in Gainsville, supertasters more than usually sensitive to taste, and have more tastebuds on their tongues. This is good news for me, because supertasters have a lower risk of heart disease, roughly because they need less fat and sweet to please them. But it is also bad news—supertasters often find vegetables unpleasant because of their slight bitterness and texture, so they eat less of them and therefore have a higher risk of colon polyps.
Luckily, I can act as a living example that these kinds of generalizations, while often useful in public health, are by no means rigid sentences handed down by the almighty gene gods. I quite like vegetables.
Interestingly, Bartoshuk has found that chefs are more likely to be supertasters. And, she says, "Caucasian men win the international booby prize" for being non-tasters—those 25 percent that don't taste PROP at all.
Bartoshuk herself is a non-taster. She put the whole PROP paper in her mouth, which made me cringe. She says she has never tasted anything that was "too sweet". Meanwhile, when I am in the south I take my meals with "unsweet" iced tea, which is how you order it if you don't want them to sugar it for you. Sweet tea, to me, tastes revoltingly sweet. So, are you a supertaster or a non-taster?
Read more about Bartoshuk's work at www.nature.com/news/2001/010222/full/010222-13.html
Copper chemistry helps researcher tap into Africa's past.
Ancient copper jewellery and ingots in sub-Saharan Africa have been found to bear the unique signature of copper ore from Morocco. This strongly suggests that trans-Saharan trade began hundreds of years earlier than previously thought.
Read the story in news@nature.com here.
Hormone treatment could help people to overcome phobias.
Does the prospect of public speaking make you panic? Do you run for the hills at the mere mention of spiders? Help could be at hand: researchers have come up with a way to ease the crippling symptoms of phobia.
Read more here
Falcon launcher travels less than 100 metres on maiden flight.
The rocket revolution has been postponed. The privately funded Falcon 1 launcher, which its builders hope will make access to space relatively cheap, failed half a minute into its first flight on 24 March. Early analysis points to a fuel leak as the cause of an onboard fire that brought the rocket down less than 100 metres from its launch pad on the Pacific atoll of Kwajalein.
Read the story here.
A new standard is being rolled out at the meeting today. ThermoML – "an XML-based approach for storage and exchange of experimental thermophysical and thermochemical property data" is a system was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in conjunction with the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
Click below to read more...
Interestingly, some journal publishers are already on board. ThermoML files corresponding to papers in several journals will be available on the main site: http://trc.nist.gov/ThermoML.html
The system is designed to be readable both by people and by computers. Now that there is a standard, the hope is that computers can talk to each other better. Why not let them do the grunt work while the researchers think lofty thoughts?
Each file captures many of the same things as a regular article: citation data, chemical compounds involved and data about them (sample source, purification methods and so on), information about who did the work and why, methods, results, and even information about uncertainty and level of precision.
The most interesting technical challenge seems to have been the uncertainties, which were based on the Guide to the expression of Uncertainty in Management (GUM), which has been around since 1995 but does not seem to be used very much.
"We need an efficient, well defined way to get information from measurements to engineering applications," says Rob Chirico, from NIST.
This conference is full of great stories. Take this one, from the fabulous four-day symposium on food color quality. Surimi is a seafood product made of white fish and additives that often stands in for crab—its most familiar incarnation is the "crabstick". The fish is headed, gutted, and mashed up into a paste, which is then poured out and cooked in thin sheets and rolled into tubes. The tubes, cut just so, simulate the flaky texture of crab meat. Somewhere along the line, a bit of red is added to make it look really crabby.
In the United States and Europe, one of the most common dyes used for this is carmine, which, as you may know, comes from the crushed bodies of tiny insects that live on cacti in Peru and thereabouts. The bug is called the cochineal, and the dye is, according to Jae Park, surimi expert at Oregon State University in Astoria, "stable to light, oxidation, and heat." It does bleed a little bit, but this can be fixed with a good emulsifier, like polyglycerol polyricinoleate.
Carmine is not just used in the seafood stuff that one finds in the ubiquitous California sushi roll, but in a number of consumer products, including cosmetics. As Park says, "Crabstick and lipstick: basically same color."
US team argues for a lifelong approach to beating heart disease.
Think you're too young to worry about cholesterol? Think again. Many people could drastically reduce their future risk of heart disease by lowering their cholesterol levels from as early as their 20s. That's the bottom line of a study showing that people born with low cholesterol are protected from heart problems.
Read the story here.
Microscopic creatures may have been having secret sex for millions of years.
Imagine going more than 200 million years without sex. That's what zoologists thought had happened to a microscopic shrimp-like animal called Vestalenula. But now it seems that the crafty creatures might have been at it all along.
Read the story here.
Fluoride leaching from rocks is turning kids' teeth brown.
The maximum allowable limit of fluoride in US drinking water is too high, according to a report from the National Academies' research unit this week.
Read the story here.
Procedure could yield an ethically sound source of stem cells.
Researchers in Germany have identified a potential source of reprogrammable cells in adults that could be used for regenerative therapy. The cells would be taken directly from the testis and cultured. No cloning or destruction of embryos would be necessary.
Read the story here.
I just saw my first periodic table tie. The ACS is on!
At a talk on green nanotechnology this morning, Barbara Karn—currently on leave from the Environmental Protection Agency to work at the Woodrow Wilson Center—said that the model and inspiration for the eco-savvy nanotechnologist could be a living cell...
Green nanotechnology has the dual aims of making nano safe for health and the environment, and making nano that improves health and the environment. They want the bitsy tools to save the world, through remediation and so on, but they also want to make sure that they are made in a green way (and, presumably, that they don't turn on their masters and engulf us all in nano-chaos).
The cell does this already. Using DNA as a cookbook, it makes proteins that are just there at the nano size—useful, complex proteins. And it does it all at room (or, I guess, body) temperature with a nontoxic solvent: water.
"It's a challenge to make what we need in the same kind of environmentally benign way that nature makes what it needs," said Karn, who called cells "nanofactories".
Karn's group at the Woodrow Wilson Center launched a website earlier this month that lists products available to consumers that include nanotechnology. So if you want to check out the nano-content of your sun-block, pants, or computer screen, visit their database, a link to which is available on their website: http://www.nanotechproject.com/.
It is chilly in Atlanta on this first day of the American Chemical Society (ACS) conference, but thousands of chemists are here, name-badged, lining up for coffee, and toting poster tubes. For the next five days, I'll be blogging the weird and wonderful from the Georgia World Congress Center.
Meanwhile, many of the chemistry editors at Nature Publishing Group will be doing the same over at the The Sceptical Chymist, which is at http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/
And NPG has put together a bunch of goodies, including top session picks, at a special page for the conference: http://www.nature.com/conferences/acs/index.html
Finally, I will be hanging out at the Nature booth for an hour on Tuesday, between 2 and 3 PM, for those of you at the conference.
Stay tuned...
http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/http://www.nature.com/conferences/acs/index.html
Homely stars make perfect targets for planet-finders.
It looks like a home away from home. Astronomers trawling through a catalogue of known stars have found one that is nearly identical to our Sun, and they say it's an ideal place to start looking for small blue-green planets that could host alien life.
Read more here.
Fresh predictions about climate change prompt news@nature.com to ask what we know about the future of our oceans.
The polar ice caps may melt far faster under the pressure of global warming than experts previously thought. New predictions suggest that, without efforts to curb the rise of greenhouse gases, the world's ice sheets could retreat farther by the year 2100 than they have in the past 130,000 years, leading to a huge rise in sea level.
Read more here
Our sense of position can rely on signals from the brain rather than the body.
To sense where the various parts of our body are, we sometimes rely on signals that originate in our brain rather than in our fingers or toes, a new study shows.
Read the story here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
At the tender age of 16, I excitedly unwrapped a parcel that had come all the way from Lynchburg, Tennessee. Inside was the key to rock-and-roll rebellion: a Jack Daniel's T-shirt, just like the one worn by the lord-of-mayhem lead guitarist with Guns N' Roses.
Fortunately, my fondness for that T-shirt has long expired, and I never really got the taste for Mr Daniel's whiskey. But is it mere coincidence that my seventeenth year also saw the beginning of a long and fruitful campaign of social drinking?
Researchers from the Dartmouth Medical School in Lebanon, New Hampshire, suggest that such 'alcohol-branded merchandise' (ABM) could have triggered my slide into intemperance.
Read more here.
Autonomous technology may make mine clean-ups safer.
An underwater craft that can seek out and destroy mines has been unveiled. The sub, dubbed Talisman, relies on computer software that allows it to complete its mission without being guided by an operator.
Read more here.
Sunshine is better growth-booster than water for ancient forest.
Some trees in the Amazon rainforest grow fastest not in the wet season, but in the dry, sunny part of the year, researchers have found. The discovery underlines the importance of preserving old-growth forest that is likely to be more resistant to drought.
Read more here
Nature has a series of news features and commentaries looking at how tomorrow’s computer technology will change the face of science.
The stories are all going live on news@nature.com at midnight tonight, and will be gathered in a web focus on Wednesday. Have a look!
One of the challenges at any large conference is being in the right room at the right time - and then hoping that you can find a seat near the back in case the talk is not all it could be. It also helps if the speakers turn up - flu, problems with connecting flights and "a meeting in Washington" were three of the excuses on offer in Baltimore.
And one of the challenges for the organizers of any large conference is putting the right talk in the right room. Occasionally a speaker will find themselves speaking to a handful of people in a large hall, while, somewhere along the corridor, a 100 people might be trying to squeeze into a room with 64 chairs. A senior APS figure was overheard to speculate in Baltimore that the reason that some sessions were oversubscribed was because they were highlighted on the Nature site!
Posted on behalf of: Peter Rodgers, Nature Nanotechnology
This creature was way out in front.
Talk about sticking your neck out: palaeontologists working in Mongolia have discovered a dinosaur that was far ahead of its peers. The creature had one of the longest necks of all time, measuring a staggering eight metres.
Read more here
Chest asymmetry might reveal underlying ill health.
Women with very lopsided breasts may be more likely to develop breast cancer, according to a preliminary study.
Read the story here.
The first results from the Japanese Hayabusa mission have been presented here at the Lunar and Planetary Science conference, and have generally got a warm response. Hayabusa visited the small asteroid Itokawa late last year, and managed to survey the lumpy rock in great detail, despite coping with some major technical problems.
[read more here]
The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) mission was largely about testing new spacecraft technology, such as Hayabusa’s xenon gas-powered ion drive. The ambitious project also hoped to land on the asteroid, grab some rocks and dust, and bring them back to Earth. It could still deliver the first sample ever returned from an asteroid.
Sadly, the sampling mechanism didn’t work, so scientists estimate that at best the craft may be carrying a few hundred milligrams of Itokawa that slipped into the collection pod by accident. Since it’s control system also broke, the crippled probe is now limping home using little puffs of its remaining xenon gas to steer. After making contact for the first time in three months on 6 March, Hayabusa is now expected to be back on Earth by 2010, which is way past its bedtime.
However, the probe did manage to land – well, bounce – twice. But it was only in contact for a few seconds before flying off into space again.
More successful was the earlier part of the mission, where Hayabusa hovered about 7 kilometres above Itokawa’s surface to take its vital statistics.
The asteroid – which always reminds me of a cosmic coprolith – has a surface area of 0.393 kilometres squared, and measures 535 x 294 x 209 metres. It appears to be very porous, implying that it is little more than a pile of rubble held loosely together.
By counting the number of craters on the surface, the science team confirm previous estimates that Itokawa was born between 10 and 100 million years ago. They suspect that it was created after an impact on a much larger asteroid threw up a spray of boulders, which then aggregated to create the misshapen asteroid. Itokawa is also rich in minerals like olivine and pyroxene, making it very similar to one of the most common types of meteorite.
Although not terribly surprising, this is all good for understanding where asteroids come from, where they go, and how we might go about deflecting one that is on a collision course with our planet. Many of the US scientists here made a real point of congratulating the Hayabusa team before they asked questions about the presentations. “It’s a pretty gutsy mission,” says Don Yeomans of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who leads Hayabusa’s US science team. But can the disabled craft really make it home? “I wouldn’t bet against it,” says Yeomans.
A few days ago, someone from the European Central Bank emailed Dirk Brockmann to ask for advice on how contaminated Euro notes might influence the spread of bird flu. Brockmann, who recounted this story in his invited talk today, explained that they’d made a common mistake in misunderstanding his work.
Back in January, Nature published an article by Brockmann and his colleagues that looked at how dollar bills travel across the United States. The paper is here. The idea was to study the dollar bills' movements as a proxy for how people travel. A model based on the dollar bills’ diffusion pattern could then be used in epidemiology, to help predict how diseases spread. But he was not, he emphasised, suggesting that bank notes themselves spread disease.
There’s another interesting aspect to this story, too.
The data for the study came from Where’s George?! - a website that collects sightings of marked dollar bills from enthusiasts across the United States. If you register, you get a small rubber stamp that says “Track me at www.wheresgeorge.com”. You mark your bills, throw them back into circulation (ie, spend them) and then watch to see where they turn up. People that really get into this call themselves “Georgers” and meet up around the country.
A few turned up at today’s session, to hear Brockmann speak. Before I took my spare dollar bills back to Britain, I went to talk to them…
Karin Printz, a Georger who lives not far Baltimore, had heard about the game from her brother but only got sucked in herself after getting a marked bill in change at a restaurant. She registered her first notes last month, and got her first hits yesterday. “I was terribly excited.”
Next to her was a veteran of the game. Jim Malone, from Annapolis, had started playing in 1999. He said that he had personally registered around 7,000 bills and got “hits” (meaning new sightings) on 1,100 of them. “One got to Puerto Rico,” he said. But he said others have done more: the site’s record-holders have registered hundreds of thousands of bills and seen their cash go right round the world.
It’s not that they’re obsessive, he said. “We prefer extremely focussed.”
A special guest at the session was Hank Eskin, who had set up the Where’s George?! website. He’d had to struggle to keep the site online as news of Brockmann’s work appeared on news sites around the world last month. Right now, nearly 80 million bills are registered.
For the Georgers, having Brockmann use their data has been a blessing. A hobby that friends used to laugh at has suddenly become something useful.
Malone was looking forward to going out for dinner with Brockmann, to quiz the man about his work. He unfurled a copy of Brockmann’s Nature paper, which had been stashed in an inside coat pocket. “I’ve read the paper about five times now, and each time I pick up something different.”
Impacts on our planet could have sprayed life into space.
Earthly bacteria could have reached distant planets and moons after being flung into space by massive meteorite impacts, scientists suggest.
Read the story here.
Study reveals risks of interfering with immune system.
Researchers are trying to explain how a prototype drug that manipulates the immune system triggered devastating side effects in a British clinical trial.
Read the story here.
The queue for coffee is still about 100 people long, but the conference is nearing its end. The sessions finish at noon today, and lots of the big name scientists have already gone home. The stands in the foyer have also been packed up.
That's a shame because it means I've missed my chance to buy an APS t-shirt with a physics slogan. I would have chosen between "Don't drink and derive" or, one that I haven't seen before, "Flirt harder - I'm a physicist". Maybe, thinking about it again, it's a good thing that the stall has gone...
Physicists get their hands on the second round of WMAP data.
Researchers have released the first data in three years from a NASA satellite that is mapping the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. The much anticipated results support the idea that our Universe contains a good chunk of 'dark' material, and fits the theory that it expanded rapidly in its first moments.
Read the story here.
Storm shows extreme seas may be more common than thought.
On the dark and stormy night of 8 February 2000, you wouldn't want to have been on board the Discovery, a British oceanographic research ship.
Out in the North Atlantic, 250 km west of Scotland and close to the tiny island of Rockall, the ship was forced to sit through what researchers think are the biggest waves ever directly recorded in the open ocean.
Read the story here.
Jupiter's giant moon Europa has long been a prime target for exploration, because it looks like one of the most potentially habitable place in the Solar System - its icy crust probably conceals an ocean of liquid water. So planetary scientists desperately want to find out how thick the ice is, and what sort of minerals and carbon compounds are littered around the surface.
Since the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) project bit the dust (I can't even find a NASA weblink about it), scientists have been working on an alternative proposal to visit Europa.
Torrence Johnson, chief scientist for the Solar System Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, starts his outline for a Europa orbiter concept with a question: should we go there at all? His first slide shows a screengrab of grainy, pixellated text, saying, “All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.”
These fateful words from 2010: Odyssey 2 shouldn’t put us off, though. Apparently Lou Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, once telephoned Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka to check with him. “Arthur says it’s OK,” Johnson reassures the audience ... [click below for more details]
The proposal itself looks quite like Cassini – same sort of mass, instruments, and gravity assists past Earth and Venus to save on fuel.
But Johnson admits that it’s a ‘flagship’ project – one that would cost billions of dollars and take much more than a decade to achieve. And in a tight budget environment, the general view of planetary scientists is that those missions ought to take a back seat in favour of smaller ‘scout’ missions, says Caltech’s Bill McKinnon. They may be less ambitious, but they’re quicker, cheaper and they keep the science flowing.
The sheer difficulty of getting to Europa, which shares its space around Jupiter with three other big moons, has always been a major stumbling block. It doesn’t help that the place is bathed in powerful radiation. And now that Cassini has found geological activity, possibly involving liquid water, on both Titan and Enceladus, these moons start to become much more attractive options for a visit than Europa - simply because they’re easier to get to and have already seen some basic reconnaissance.
That’s a point that’s been made several times already this week by Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona, Tucson. But there were rumblings in the astrobiology session today about the danger of switching horses mid-race. A lot of people here seem to fear that focussing their lobbying on anything other than a Europa mission will be seen as inconsistency by the suits who control the purse strings, and that could lead to nobody getting their preferred project. Then again, with a proposed 50% cut to NASA’s astrobiology budget, things seem pretty pessimistic round this corner of the conference.
I was trying to decide which session to attend when John Wei, a physicist from the University of Toronto, shanghaied me onto a bus headed for DC.
I found myself among eminent scientists on a mission. We were going to Congress and our aim was to convince US politicians that physics deserves more financial support.
How? Well, when we arrived at the venue, people were busy setting up fun physics demonstrations, from levitating magnets to balls that look like rubber but go thud instead of bouncing. Other displays used liquid nitrogen to cool superconductors, freeze flowers or shrink balloons. (A lot of work must have gone into organising this event. You don’t just drive up to the loading bay at Congress with tanks of liquid nitrogen!)
It was my first visit to the Capitol and I was looking forward to meeting some politicians. But I had trouble finding any. I went up to two men in uniform, who turned out to be physicists from the Naval Academy. Two others in suits were astronomers from the Naval Observatory.
Later, someone pointed out some House representatives, busy playing with the exhibits at the National Institute of Standards and Technology stand. They were laughing and enjoying themselves! Then we were treated to speeches from only two PhD physicists in Congress, Vernon Ehlers and Rush Holt.
They said that more scientists should be involved in politics. They’re right. We need to stand up for science education. One trip to Congress is probably not enough, but it’s a good start.
[Posted on behalf of May Chiao, Nature Physics ]
Mega-storms are set to increase as the climate hots up.
Warmer ocean waters are indeed a key factor in creating more devastating hurricanes, atmospheric scientists have found. The finding confirms what many have suspected: that rising temperatures are directly linked to the upswing in hurricane intensity seen in the past few decades.
Read the story here.
Ornithologists dispute video evidence of elusive bird.
The ivory-billed woodpecker may have faded back into extinction. After more than a year of debate over whether a video taken in an Arkansas swamp really does show a surviving member of the species, a team of ornithologists and bird watchers have weighed in with a "devastating" critique.
Read the story here.
At the ‘Back to the Moon’ session yesterday evening, Chris McKay of NASA Ames tried to convince the 500-strong audience that it was in their best interests to get behind the effort to send humans Moon-wards, more than 30 years after the final Apollo mission. Harry ‘Jack’ Schmitt, the very last person to walk on the Moon and the only scientist to ever visit, was on hand for moral support.
McKay first gave us a breakneck run through the plans for the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will carry astronauts there in the next decade. “I was there for the last Apollo launch, and I hope I’ll be there for this one too,” he said. “There’s a sort of continuity about it … er, with a 30 year gap,” he mused, to much giggling from the audience.
But he soon got the crowd onside by reminding them that most of the science done on the Moon will be geology. Ultimately, he explained, he wanted to set up a base on the Moon as a staging post for a Mars colony, because it provided the perfect testing ground for many of the challenges of the red planet.
One key difference is that the planetary protection people, who want to ensure that no Earthly bacterium ever contaminates Mars, wouldn’t be too worried if we made a few mistakes on the Moon first. “Nobody cares about contaminating the Moon,” he explained. “It’s like New Jersey.”
Spirit and Opportunity learn to single out good images.
The rovers Spirit and Opportunity will soon be able to spot interesting features of the martian weather automatically. Their new software, due to be installed in June, will help the rovers to identify swirling dust devils and thin clouds in the sky.
Read the story in news@nature.com here.
Yesterday I mentioned that I was going to a physics sing-along. I was one of about 50 people who turned up. Some loiterers in the lobby of the hotel where it was happening tried to warn me off. “It’s like a lecture at the conference,” they said. “They’re using an overhead projector.”
I went anyway. And although I didn’t expect to be saying this, I enjoyed it. I even sang. There were two musicians; one with a guitar, the other a bongo; a singer and a laptop to provide backing music.
So, altogether now, to the tune of Loch Lomond…
“Oh, you be the B field, and I’ll be the E field,
Let’s dance through the cosmos, my lover!
With the ether set aside, you and I can freely glide,
Supported on the wings of each other.”
The next verses weren’t quite so lovely, but I thought that this opening was sublime. It begins a poetic love song, sung by an electric (E) field to a magnetic (B) field, which pays tribute to their partnership in an electromagnetic wave. The rest of the words and a recording of The Love Song of the Electric Field are here.
The lyrics are by Walter Smith, an associate professor in physics at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and the coordinator of last night’s event. He runs a website that collects physics songs. Apparently, it was common in the early 1900s for physicists at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge to sing songs, which they had penned themselves, after dinner. More here.
For more funny lyrics from last night's karaoke session, relating to fraud and Nature, keep reading...
Firstly, thanks to Laura Greene, a physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She not only wrote the lyrics shown below, she was also at the sing-along to perform the piece, and gave her permission for the text to be posted here.
Fabricate! is a moral song about the fate of a young scientist, Jan Hendrik Schön. He was considered a rising star in physics until it emerged that much of his data had been made up. Nature ran a news story in October 2002 about the investigation into his work, some of which Nature had published. The story is here (password required). Try to have the right tempo in your head as you read the piece. It's to the tune of Cabaret!...
What good is working alone in your lab
Don’t leave results to fate
Come and just Fabricate, young Schön
Come and just Fabricate
No use permitting truth dictate your doom
Or wipe all your fame way
Come and just Fabricate, young Schön
Come and just Fabricate.
I knew a Prof with honesty and stature
Worked day and night but never got in Nature
She wasn’t what you’d call a CV power
With no Science pubs, her salary soon went sour.
When she lost her grants the big-shots came to snicker
“Well, compared to Schön, the NSF won’t pick her”
But when we heard of young Schön’s evil deeds
She was the happiest Prof, you’d ever seen
Put down the flanges, the scopes and the probes
Don’t make the journals wait
Come and just Fabricate, young Schön
Come and just Fabricate
Come fudge the lines
Draw points by hand
Get Nature pubs, start celebrating
Right this way, your Nobel’s waiting
And as for me, and as for me,
I made my mind up, with Science and Nature
To publish there, does not raise stature
Start by admitting inventing the points
Isn’t worth accolades
You lose when you Fabricate, young Schön
You lose when you Fabricate, young Schön
And we all lose, when you Fabricate!
The latest news on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity is always a highlight of any planetary science meeting. Even if the science starts to sound a little samey – these minerals formed in water, those minerals are volcanic – the pictures just blow me away.
Now the Pancam team have upgraded their website, and are adding images to their open-access catalogue as soon as they are downlinked from Mars. Go look at them now, I promise you your jaw will drop ...
This morning, Jim Bell, the Cornell astronomer who leads the Pancam team, took us on a visual romp through the rovers’ greatest achievments over the last martian year (that’s almost two Earth years).
He was particualrly keen on some of the snaps of the night sky taken by Spirit when it was on top of Husband Hill. “I always dreamed of being an observatory director,” he jokes. For 32 nights, the robot gazed skywards to study Phobos and Deimos, Mars’ lumpy moons. It even snapped Jupiter on one occasion. “And not a single night was rained out,” he says to appreciative chuckles.
His talk reminds me that many scientists would argue that Spirit and Opportunity are the perfect examples of how much more robots can achieve than human explorers. It’s hard to imagine how a manned mission could have stayed on Mars for this long, or cover as much ground.
The tired old argument about whether we should send robots or humans to space is surely dead. It’s clear that robots and humans together can potentially achieve so much more than either alone. But one point that is often overlooked is whether robots would be assisting the humans, or vice versa. After all, they’re a lot more experienced at exploring the Solar System than we are.
What could be more relaxing after a day of brain-stretching physics than a bit of singing? Tonight we are to be treated to what the event’s website claims will be the first ever physics "sing-along / listen-a-long".
This evening’s entertainment has been heavily advertised around the conference. The posters read: “Come sing along to physics lyrics set to familiar tunes.” Then, rather worryingly, they reassured: “No singing ability required!”
I’m heading out to add my tuneless warble to the geek chorus. More tomorrow…
“Physicists forced to alter data?” asked the flyers handed out by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to delegates today.
There is deep concern among scientists in the US that, under the current Bush administration, political appointees have interfered with the reporting of scientific findings. The issue has made it into the news more than once over recent months – when climate scientist James Hansen said he was stifled by NASA’s press office, for example, and after Nobel laureate David Baltimore spoke out at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St Louis.
I visited the UCS stall in the exhibition hall to find out what response they’d got from the physicists here.
Michael Halpern, from the Scientific Integrity Program of the UCS, said that at some meetings people come up to the UCS table and look both ways before recounting some experience of their own. This time, he said, they’d heard fewer personal tales.
“We weren’t necessarily here to uncover tales of manipulation of science,” he says. Many of the delegates at this meeting work in fields that are unlikely to be politically sensitive.
Halpern said the goal of the UCS in being at the APS is to raise awareness. “Our view is that the scientific community needs to be engaged in a persistent and active way,” he said.
Amphibians join bats and whales in talking at high frequencies.
The concave-eared torrent frog could give opera divas a run for their money. Reaching a pitch in the ultrasonic range, these frogs perform arias to be heard over the rushing waters of their habitat, the Huangshan Hot Springs in China.
Read the story here.
Memory-blocking protein may lead to dementia.
A US team has identified what could be the earliest indication of Alzheimer's, a discovery that may help to diagnose the disease and perhaps stop it progressing.
Read the story here.
Molecular artwork could point way for nanotech applications.
Technology really is shrinking the globe. In a map of the Americas unveiled in this week's Nature, the journey from Los Angeles to New York becomes a hop of just tens of nanometres. That's a scale of 1:200,000,000,000,000.
Read more here.
Debris from Genesis shows traces of the solar wind.
The first results from a smashed spacecraft's cargo are proving that useful science can be salvaged from the wreckage.
Read the full story here
At the poster session I bumped into John Murray from the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. John and his colleagues from the Mars Express team caused quite a stir last year when they announced they had found a frozen sea on Mars. Nature papers followed soon after, but since then arguments have raged between those who support the idea, and others who claim the features they saw are in fact lava flows ...
A presentation yesterday by Susan Sakimoto, a vulcanologist at the University of Notre Dame, Illinois, seems to have brought the issue to a head. She’s doubtful about John’s interpretation, and she and two other pro-lava scientists (or at least, not-convinced-it’s-ice scientists) engaged John and his OU partner David Page in some robust debate about their new research poster, which unveils even more bits of Mars that look like ice floes. More of their work in this area has just come out in the journal Icarus.
John maintains that as a vulcanologist himself, he’s been looking at lava flows for more than twenty years – and the plates, ridges and wiggles they are finding are definitely not produced by lava.
But Susan, along with Laszlo Keszthelyi, an astrogeologist with the US Geological Survey, disagrees. “We’re saying that all the plates and surface features here, we can show you examples on Earth that come from lava,” she says, adding that some of John’s proposed flow directions for the ice actually go uphill.
So how will this (very good-natured) argument be settled? “Go drill it?” she suggests brightly. Sadly, both sides agree that remote observations are unlikely to give a definitive answer. “We’ll be waving our arms about this for years,” she smiles.
Strap the little darlings to a rocket, light blue touch paper and retire? A bit harsh – perhaps a video game would be better. A group of scientists are developing software that will put kids in the driving seat of a Moon rover, or in charge of repairing the International Space Station (some marathon games on the cards there, I reckon) ...
I learned about this at the evening’s poster session – for the uninitiated, that’s where hundreds of scientists pin their latest research to boards lined up in a large hall, and then spend a couple of hours cruising around to see what the competition are up to.
Emerson Speyerer, an undergraduate at Northwestern University involved in the project, explains to me that the game will be aimed at 12-18 year olds. If the team can get a corporate sponsor, they hope to give the game away free as part of a teaching resource pack that will help enthuse the youngsters about science. It’s early days, though - they don’t even have a website yet, and the poster is very much a pitch to raise interest from the planetary scientists here.
The team plan to build the game using the graphics engine from a first-person shooter such as Doom or Quake, but incorporate real images and data from NASA missions. As yet, it’s unclear whether the kids would get to use the BFG9000 to hunt the Clangers, but I think it’d be a nice touch.
This morning I sat in a room that was full of confusion. The small group of physicists gathered for the session on “supersolids” was thoroughly perplexed.
Two years ago, researchers from Penn State University reported the first evidence for a supersolid – a strange new form of matter which is a solid but which, through quantum effects, can flow like a liquid.
Today we learnt that other groups have now repeated the result, but their experiments have also raised new questions.
In the original experiments, a team led by Moses Chan showed that a block of solid helium chilled to within a whisker of absolute zero – around 50 milliKelvin – started to behave a bit like a superfluid. As the helium was rotated, some of the material (about 1%) appeared to decouple, flowing through the solid so that it stayed still as the rest of the structure turned. The results of these experiments were published in Nature and Science .
At this meeting, it was reported that three other teams have repeated the rotation experiments, seeing a smaller but similar effect to Chan’s group. This seems to confirm the existence of the supersolid state.
However, some other types of experiment have not been able to detect supersolidity. John Beamish of the University of Alberta in Canada had failed to persuade solid helium to show any “supersolid” properties when it was put under pressure .
What does it mean? Does it make the evidence for supersolidity less solid?
I cornered Beamish after the talk to find out. Intuitively, said Beamish, you might expect a solid that can flow to do so when you squeeze it, but he points out that rotation has a special status in quantum mechanics. Maybe the rotation is essential for supersolid behaviour.
Another set of experiments, carried out by John Reppy of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and his colleagues, suggested that the supersolid effect seen during rotation disappeared altogether if the helium crystal was annealed – meaning that it was kept at a temperature just below its melting point.
Annealing tends to eliminate any defects in the crystal, so these results suggest that defects might underpin supersolidity. But the data are brand new (presented in a talk that wasn’t on the schedule) and there are some discrepancies with Chan’s results which the two teams will have to hammer out.
Whatever is happening in the “supersolid” helium, theorists can’t yet explain it. “I don’t think people understand at all what’s going on,” the session chair told me.
Thankfully, there’s nothing like a mystery to motivate more research – let’s give them until next year’s APS meeting to work it out.
So you think quantum mechanics is hard? Try being a border patrol agent in today’s post-9/11 world. The US has some 360,000 vehicles, 5,100 trucks, 2,600 aircraft and 600 vessels entering at their legal checkpoints – every single day. The Department of Homeland Security wants to install some 2,400 radiation monitors at their border crossings to spot clandestine nuclear material, and they still have some way to go. But even now the system is overloaded with false alarms.
This biggest problem: innocuous kitty litter. Apparently the clay in cat litter gives off enough radiation to set off a gamma detector. And its emission signature is very close to that of highly-enriched uranium. The current high-purity germanium (HPG) detectors can’t tell the difference.
Barry Zink and colleagues at NIST in Boulder, Colorado, along with their Los Alamos collaborators, have developed a gamma-ray detector that has ten times better resolution than existing HPG detectors. It uses a transition-edge thermometer to record the temperature difference between a superconducting bilayer, and a tiny island of tin that absorbs incoming gamma rays. The sensitivity comes from cooling the sensor down to 100 millikelvin above absolute zero. Zink admits that 100 mK is a ‘somewhat challenging’ temperature to achieve, but says that cryogenic technology has vastly improved in the past decade.
How robust is it? In order to test their detector out on a range of nuclear materials Zink and co-workers drove their prototype 400 miles in a minivan to the National Nuclear Security Agency division at Los Alamos. The sensor survived the trip okay, and successfully detected one of the usual suspects for nuclear weapons: the plutonium-239 isotope.
Right now the biggest sensor array NIST has made has 16 sensors, but they plan to build a 100-sensor array. Although it will never be big enough for general screening of, say, entire vessels, the detector can help to analyse and verify nuclear stockpiles, and to screen suspicious material flagged by other techniques.
And it may help prevent some of those costly kitty-litter false alarms.
PS. If you want to comment on one of the posts on this page, either click on the entry's title or the red "Permalink" label at the end. This will bring up a page with a comment box.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
Have a read of this: "Scientists find brain function most important to maths ability". And I thought the most important body parts for counting were fingers. Who knew?
Read the column here.
Over the last few days, I’ve had to hop between hotels. The process has left me confused about my constantly-changing room number. But I'm not the only one struggling to keep track.
After a session here at the APS, I met a similarly bewildered scientist. He was flitting between some of the many parallel sessions in the convention centre, and couldn't remember which room he was meant to be in next. Then he cried, “ah, but of course, it was room 314. I won’t forget that, it’s Pi.”
Pi, of course, is the ratio of a circles’ circumference to its diameter (and it begins 3.14159 26535 8979). Such are the advantages of being into mathematics… Unfortunately, I haven't been able to think of any fundamental constants that start 409.
Vast simulation captures molecules in motion.
One of the world's most powerful supercomputers has conjured a fleeting moment in the life of a virus. The researchers say the simulation is the first to capture a whole biological organism in such intricate molecular detail.
Read the full story here.
Stardust mission yields white hot results.
The first results from a mission to catch dust from a comet's tail have revealed a surprise: these balls of dirty snow are born of fire as well as ice. Scientists were stunned to find a huge range of minerals in the particles captured by NASA's Stardust probe as it swooped past the comet Wild 2 on 2 January 2004. Many of the compounds could only have formed close to a star - far from the chilly outskirts of the Solar System where the comet first coalesced.
Read the news@nature.com story (you'll need a password) here.
And see all blog entries from the conference here.
Emily Lakdawalla is blogging this meeting for the Planetary Society. Anyone else doing the same and wanting a link should give us a shout. A quick search shows that presenters and attendees mentioning the meeting on their blogs or livejournals include David Bigwood, Veronica Bray and Ryan Anderson. But there's no guarantee that they'll be posting while they're in Houston.
Google Mars launched today to much fanfare. It provides a map of the entire surface of the red planet, using more than 17,000 photos taken by the thermal emission camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which takes pictures in infra red and visible light, as well as the topographic maps made by MOLA, the Laser Altimeter on Mars Global Surveyor. Some key sites are imaged in much greater detail, such as the giant volcano Olympus Mons, the landing sites for the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and the grand canyon of Mars, Valles Marineris.
“It really gives you the big picture view of Mars,” says Robert Burnham, part of the team at Arizona State University, Tempe, that created the martian map. It’s more likely to be used by space fans rather than for research purposes, but it does provide a platform for higher resolution images to be added by craft such as Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at the planet on 10 March. Have a look at the cool fly-through videos at the THEMIS website – you can even download special versions onto your iPod.
[Posted on behalf of Mark Peplow]
I ought to say that the conference is actually not in Houston, but League City, just near to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Either way, I’ve never been to Texas before. Driving around the beltway yesterday in my rather natty rental car (a red Chrysler PT Cruiser – we don’t have them in the UK, as far as I know, and it looks like something out of a Dick Tracy movie, which makes me feel terribly transatlantic), I got my first real view of the city coming over the Houston Ship Channel Bridge. As the car rose further and further up the vast arc of concrete, the whole sprawling mess was laid out beneath me. Oil refineries covered the ground in both directions as far as the eye could see, thick pipes tangling around each other like tree roots. Thousands upon thousands of towers topped by burning gas lit the scene in hot orange. I have honestly never seen anything like it in my life. Someone recently said something about an “addiction to oil” that needed to be addressed – and as I drove on in my rather more guilty pleasure, I thought: for once, he’s absolutely right.
[Posted on behalf of Mark Peplow]
The result of the day at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference here in Houston undoubtedly came from the Stardust mission to catch dust from the tail of comet Wild 2. You can read more about it on news@nature.com in a few hours when the story goes live, but I was impressed by the healthy turnout of around 600 scientists who came to watch this comet’s life history start to unfold.
But that was nothing. The end of the day saw more than a thousand of the 1,500 or so conference attendees pack into a room to hear Mary Cleave, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, defend the agency’s recent budget cuts in the sciences. And boy, did she have a tough crowd. As the Shuttle and International Space Station eat up more and more cash, scientists are seeing their projects cancelled – sorry, “deferred” – in ever greater numbers.
Cleave and her colleague Andy Dantzler, who oversees Solar System research, made a really good try at mollifying the crowd. A $1.8 billion research budget was not to be sniffed at; it was a temporary blip; don’t forget we love the science program too … all to no avail.
One by one, scientists expressed their outrage. Referring to Stardust’s recent success, one said: “When you’re sitting around your conference table at NASA headquarters, in your science vacuum, you might consider the value of a sample return mission.”
Gerhard Neukum, who is in charge of the hi res stereo camera on ESA’s Mars Express, is normally a pretty jovial guy. But not today. He railed against the decision to defer the Dawn mission to Ceres and Vesta, the two largest asteroids, saying NASA had reneged on international agreements without any consultation of its European partners. “This is not the way NASA should treat these things if you want continued international cooperation,” he said. “Things are really degrading in terms of cooperation, and I’m not the only one who feels that way.” Huge applause from the room.
Another scientist introduced themselves as an American who spends a lot of time working with Europeans. “There’s a growing feeling in Europe that NASA is becoming an unreliable partner,” he said.
Earlier, I’d spoken to planetary scientist Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona, Tucson, who told me: “As far as NASA goes we have no strategy for the outer Solar System any more – it’s in a complete shambles.” He worries that the astrobiology program, which has seen some of the most significant cuts, will really suffer.
This comes up again in the meeting, with Cleave countering that astrobiology was not being killed, “just slowed down.” An audience member disagrees, saying that it is the biggest threat to their science in a generation. Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society stood up to announce that they were launching a 'Save Our Science' campaign.
At one point, Cleave became so frustrated she said, “I don’t understand why you’re so angry.” The response was gales of bitter laughter.
The last scientist to speak seemed to sum up the community’s feelings: “We feel like we’re just not getting a dialogue with NASA.” This one may take a while to sort out, I think …
[Posted on behalf of Mark Peplow]
The session on Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Terrorism this morning could have been renamed the session on scary numbers. Invited speakers Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland, Brent Park of LANL and Mike Carter of the Department of Homeland Security, did a good job at raising the audience’s personal ‘threat levels’ to Code Red.
Here are some of those stats:
Globally there are 30,000 nuclear weapons, but the uncertainty in that number is in the thousands.
When it comes to nuclear explosive materials, the accounting is even more uncertain. There are some 490 metric tonnes of plutonium, and some 1900 metric tonnes of highly-enriched uranium (with uncertainty in the 100 tonne range).
Although there are less than a dozen states with nuclear weapons , highly enriched uranium is still used in the research reactors of 40 countries.
And this is just the legal stuff – clandestine materials are of course the hardest to account for.
Both Steve Fetter and Mike Carter want to see more physics PhDs get involved in research related to non-proliferation. According to Carter the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office is currently expanding its research portfolio in Nuclear Detection Technology both for monitoring compliance with weapons treaties and for detecting clandestine material in trucks and ships. Go check them out at www.dhs.gov/dndobids.
Brent Park, together with other physicists in the audience, are already working on technologies to distinguish between kitty litter and highly-enriched uranium at US borders…and if you don’t think that’s a problem, here’s another number for you:
Of the false alarms reported by the Canadian border patrol, one-third were caused by kitty litter shipments. Another 16% were caused by medical isotopes.
More on that new detector technology tomorrow...
Press conference number two was all about using materials to generate, or save, electricity.
Sarah Kurtz of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory gave a briefing on high-efficiency solar cells, which are now almost as efficient as conventional coal and natural gas power plants.
Mercouri Kanatzidis of Michigan State University talked about thermoelectric materials which can take waste heat, such as the heat generated by a car’s engine, and convert it directly to energy.
And Fred Schubert of Renssaler Polytechnic University said a few words on the next generation of light emitting diodes (LEDs), which will niftily reproduce the spectrum of natural sunlight using just a fraction of the power consumed by your average light bulb.
Of course, none of these technologies are quite ready for prime-time. Kurtz’s cells are a bit too expensive, Kanatzids’ thermoelectrics a bit too inefficient, and Schubert’s LEDs a little too early in development to really be useful. But taken together they offered a taste of how future materials could help the coming power crunch.
The first of two press conferences today was on graphene--the high-tech name that physicists have given to honeycomb sheets of carbon that can be found in low-tech pencil lead.
If you manage to isolate a one-atom-thick layer of graphene, you can do some pretty neat stuff with it according to Walter De Heer of Georgia Tech University. Thin graphene ribbons behave in ways similar to conventional semiconductors. At the same time, electrons in a graphene ribbon have odd quantum properties that could be used in future components, he says.
Furthermore, graphene structures can be grown on a chip in a way that’s similar to conventional electronics with “no fusing and no musing,” as De Heer puts it.
So why isn’t graphene already on your motherboard? It turns out that it’s hard to connect it to more conventional materials. De Heer is optimistic, however, that the problem can be overcome. Intel seems to buy it; they’re helping to fund his research.
Alan Aspuru-Guzick , a post-doc from Berkeley, and Mark Dewing, of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, are two people with blogs that we know are attending the APS meeting (because they have posted information about their own talks: 1 and 2). There must be more of you - let us know if you are blogging the conference.
Search for deep-sea vents nets new crab family.
A blind white crab bristling with hairs has been wrested from the deep, named, and slotted into the family tree of crustaceans.
Read the story here.
This morning’s session on superconducting devices and applications kicked off with two intriguing talks about how to use superconductors as cameras for ground-based and space-based telescopes.
The first one, by Matthew Bell of the University at Buffalo, talked about using niobium nitride nanowires to detect photons. The idea is pretty simple: when photons hit the wire, they heat it up—disrupting the superconducting material and creating a measurable resistance. The second talk by Shwetank Kumar of Caltech talked about using a slightly more complicated setup of thin-film niobium resinators that also use the heat from photons to alter superconductoring behavior.
Kumar says that these devices could lead to a new generation of very sensitive astronomical cameras, but both talks showed that the devil is in the details. In the case of the wires, the theory doesn’t agree well with the data collected by Bell and his collaborators. Kumar says that unexplained noise on his group's devices are an ongoing problem. Still, he says that they are already good enough for some ground-based telescopes.
Hello,
I’m Jenny Hogan and, like Geoff, I'll be reporting from the APS. The conference began this morning with a queue for coffee from the Starbucks stand that was longer than the line for registration. We’ll need the caffeine: there are going to be around 6,500 talks over the next five days, on physics ranging from from energy policy to optical clocks.
I’ll be roaming the corridors seeking out the latest research trends, the quirkiest results and the juiciest gossip. Some of it I’ll post here. If you’re at the meeting, why don’t you comment with your stories? Physicists are a rowdy lot. They must be up to something.
Jenny
Mark Peplow will be reporting back with diary blog entries from the LPSC in Houston, Texas, this week. Keep an eye on this space for updates...
New theory explains why our hearing machinery is coiled up.
Why is our cochlea, the key organ of hearing, curled into a spiral? It has been often thought to be a space-saving measure. But researchers in the United States have shown that the spiral could be vital for increasing our ear's sensitivity to sound, particularly at low frequencies.
Read the story here.
Hi everyone, my name is Geoff Brumfiel, and I’m one of Nature’s physics reporters based out of Washington, DC. I’m about to hop on a train to Baltimore, but I thought I’d kick off our blog by asking you a little about what makes the March meeting tick.
I must admit that I’ve always been a little flummoxed by it. Even though (or maybe because) it’s the APS’s largest annual gathering, I think myself and other science journalists have a tough time figuring out how to cover it. The April meeting has a few big toys (satellites, accelerators, etc.) that one can report on, but there’s so much at the March meeting that it’s hard to know where to focus.
So why do you come to the March meeting? What are this year’s really interesting bits? Do you wish it got more general media coverage? And if so, how would you suggest outsiders approach it?
OK, better catch that train!
Geoff
Cassini probe finds giant geyser on icy moon.
Saturn's small moon Enceladus was once thought to be too small, at just 500 kilometres across, to be geologically active. But during three flybys in 2005, NASA's Cassini probe found a series of clues that tell a very different story.
But supporters say arguments about reactor costs are old hat.
Fusion reactors are an expensive dream that will never provide economical energy.
That's the controversial position of a nuclear physicist who once worked on the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bomb. And it makes bleak reading for scientists involved with the ITER project.
Read the story here.
New mammal is living representative of a lineage presumed extinct.
A family of rodents thought to have died out some 11 million years ago has a descendent alive and well and scampering around Asia.
Read the story here.
Imitating the most toxic species around is not a frog’s best bet.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but for some it’s about survival.
Animals often avoid predators by copying the appearance of poisonous creatures. Usually the impostor tries to look like the most toxic species around, or imitates a range of toxic animals. But this is not so in the case of Ecuadorian frog Allobates zaparo. This frog chooses to mimic the less toxic of two local species.
Read the story here.
Millions may go to conservation of ivory-billed bird.
US officials are seeking $2.2 million to help conserve the 'rediscovered' ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), even though there have been no new confirmed sightings of the bird.
Read the story here.
Alternative production could boost bird flu drug stockpiles.
A University of Tokyo researcher says he has made a synthetic version of Tamiflu, thought to be the most effective drug against avian influenza.
Read the story here.
Nature will have several reporters and editors at the APS meeting from 13-17 March. Check back here from Monday to read their diary reports from the meeting, and to contribute to the chat.
Rejection leaves bubble-fusion patent high and dry.
The US patent office has been drawn into the debate over whether bubble fusion has been achieved. In a crushing rejection of a patent application on the phenomenon, patent examiner Ricardo Palabrica concludes that despite the claims for bubble fusion presented in Science1 in 2002, he doesn't believe a word of them. "There is no reputable evidence of record to support any allegations or claims that the invention is capable of operating as indicated," he writes.
Concerns gather momentum over claims for table-top energy production.
Dogged by controversy, the idea of bubble fusion needed a boost - and in January this year it seemed to get it. Nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan, who originally reported the phenomenon in 2002, published fresh results1 that he claimed answered his critics and reaffirmed that energy can be generated by nuclear fusion taking place in bubbles.
Nature reveals serious doubts over claims for fusion in collapsing bubbles.
Nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan's claims that he had achieved table-top fusion in collapsing bubbles caused a storm when they were first reported in Science in 2002. If the effect is real, and could be harnessed, it might one day provide an almost limitless source of energy.
Geneticists track evolutionary forces in three populations.
Humanity’s response to the challenges of the past few millennia, from adapting to different environments to taming crops and animals, are writ large in human society. Now geneticists have shown that they are also writ small — in our DNA.
Read more here
Caffeine boosts risk of heart attacks in the genetically susceptible.
People carrying a common variation in a certain gene could be worsening their risk of a heart attack simply by drinking several cups of coffee per day.
Read the story here.
Jogging promotes boom of neurons in mouse brain.
Pregnant mice who take daily runs boost the production of new brain cells in their babies; but investigators say it is premature to say whether the same could be true in humans.
Read the story here.
Researchers identify likely scenes of tomorrow's conservation battles.
What do the frozen expanses of northern Canada, the balmy Bahamas and the verdant islands of Indonesia all have in common? They have all been pinpointed as places where the world's mammals are most at risk of future fights against extinction.
Read the story here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
A columnist can only investigate the obvious for so long before becoming a mite depressed.
But then you stumble on something that rekindles your faith in science: a bit of research that started out being called pointless, but that has found an invaluable use.
Read the column here.
Tell us which science stories make you want to see the movie.
The world of science is packed with good old-fashioned stories of romance, back-stabbing, triumph and failure. Hollywood, and the less powerful low-budget film-makers, have tackled a good number of these already. We’ve seen Richard Feynman’s life on the silver screen, the story of DNA, and an endless stream of flicks about natural disasters, to varying degrees of plausibility. At news@nature.com, we have even heard that Charged: The Life of Nikola Tesla is now in production. But there’s so much more film fodder out there.
We’d like to see the race for space put on film. That’s the modern, independent, commercial race; not the race that put Americans on the moon, but the one that put a guy and his pack of M&Ms in a spaceship to the backdrop of an all-night rave in the Mojave desert. And has anyone documented the tale of Craig Ventor and his quest to sequence genomes (his own, that is, followed by that of his pet poodle)?
There’s even an incentive in it for you budding film-makers: there is now a Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award designed to honour makers of science-based documentary films with a cash prize of US$10,000. And you can get a grant to make your film from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. So go to it. Or just have a discussion about it...
Find a whole special about science at the movies here.
Stunt crash pad and high-tech cameras steal the show.
While movie buffs are gearing up for the star-studded extravaganza at this year’s Academy Awards, few people know that a select group of engineers and inventors have already walked home clutching gongs.
Read the story here. And find a whole special on science at the movies here.
Electric fields leave unusual ceramic cold.
A material has been made that turns cold at the push of a button, a feature that could be harnessed by novel cooling systems for computers.
Read the story here.
Gravity survey shows overall loss in ice.
First Greenland, and now Antarctica. Research shows that both of these massive ice sheets are getting smaller.
Read the story here.
Youngsters help humans pick up pens they have dropped.
Chimpanzees may be more eager to help than we thought. Research suggests that the apes can understand when a person is in need, and are unexpectedly willing to give aid.
Read more here
Mice are shown to have two thymus organs, not just one
After a century of scrutinizing the laboratory mouse, one might imagine that scientists would know the creature's body like the back of their own hands. Think again, because German researchers say they have discovered a whole new organ.
Read the full story here.
The University of Oxford is failing to give official support to academics speaking out in favour of animal research, says Jim Giles.
Mingling with the crowd at last weekend's march in support of animal research at Oxford was Chris Patten, the university's chancellor. But you had to be quick to spot him.
Read the column here.
List of drug-resistant microbes hoped to prioritize efforts to make antibiotics.
You may not be familiar with Acinetobacter, Aspergillus and enterococci. But perhaps you should be. They are part of a line-up of malicious microbes from which, infectious-disease experts say, we should be running scared.
Read the story here.
Will Europe need to quarantine its pets?
A cat found dead last weekend on the German island of Rügen was infected with a dangerous strain of bird flu, health officials have confirmed.
Read the story here.
Killer bug could breed inside microscopic water-borne organisms.
The deadly MRSA bug could be lurking in a hitherto unsuspected corner of hospital wards, by hiding away inside amoebae: single-celled organisms that flourish in settings such as hand-wash basins and vases of water.
Read more here
Ancient finding suggests Peruvians could have been making tortillas 4,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have found the oldest evidence so far of agriculture in the Andes. The discovery shows that ancient Peruvians were growing and eating maize some 4,000 years ago ― more than a millennium earlier than previous records had suggested.
Read more here
