Nature Newsblog
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British government committee suggests ‘league table of harm’ for drugs.
Which is the most harmful: ecstasy, alcohol or tobacco? Ecstasy features in the highest class of most countries’ drug legislation, but a report released today by British parliamentarians says that the current system for classifying drugs is based more on policy considerations than on science.
Read more here
Expert panel warns that plans for disposal should begin without delay.
Britain should take steps to join the ranks of countries planning to store nuclear waste deep underground, an advisory committee has told the government. Because any such plan will take decades to implement, the panel adds that politicians need to act on the committee’s recommendations immediately.
Read more here
Receptors in the nose pick up subliminal scents.
On that dream date, something really might be in the air. Results from a mouse study may bolster the evidence for human pheromones, the long-debated chemical signals thought to unconsciously sway our behaviour.
Read more here
Sweatshop conditions of Pakistani factories have led to unease over medical goods.
The trade in high-quality surgical instruments may be exploiting workers in the developing world, says a new report. Children as young as seven are working to make scalpels, scissors and other items, in sometimes unhealthy and dangerous conditions.
Read more here
No sequence data” have been acquired from birds for nearly a year.
Nature has learned that very few — if any — avian flu samples from Indonesian birds have been sent to official labs for sequencing over the past year.
Read more here
Miniature eruptions leak information about the mantle below.
A cluster of tiny underwater volcanoes off the northeastern coast of Japan has demonstrated that the Earth's inner mantle may not be as solid as was once thought. In a study published online this week by Science1, a team of researchers provides evidence that regions of the mantle contain molten material that can leak out on to the surface through cracks in the plate above.
Read the story here.
This week's Nature Podcast targets Hepatitis C, samples heat- and acid-loving bacteria, checks out personal carbon credits, Nigeria's good fortune, stem cell legalities, and has more on healing potential, facing faces, the weather on Titan, and median fins and limbs.
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A gene for super-fitness may let athletes go over the top.
Athletes who carry one type of a well-known 'fitness' gene might actually push themselves so hard that they tire out their hearts. That's the finding from a study of individuals who competed in one of the most gruelling races in the world.
Read the story here.
Satellite pictures suggest Pakistan is planning to increase its plutonium production. Geoff Brumfiel finds out what the images show, and why the discovery is important.
...also find a link to the construction site in Google Earth.
Read the story here.
Lines designed for safe use in humans make their debut.
Four 'safe' embryonic stem-cell lines, which have been made from scratch specifically for clinical use, make their debut this week. Singapore-based biotech company ESI will announce on 27 July the existence of these lines, plus four more in the pipeline, and have said they will make them available to researchers worldwide by the end of this year.
Read the story here.
and more about stem cells in America and Europe this week (you'll need a sub) here.
Signs of lakes, flash floods, storm clouds and drizzle seen on Saturn's moon.
What's the weather like on Titan, Saturn's largest moon? New research this week suggests it is pretty wet. Papers published in Nature show evidence of a light drizzle, and forecast the potential for occasional flash floods from storm clouds. Meanwhile, recent radar images from the Cassini spacecraft have revealed a land of lakes in Titan's northern hemisphere.
Read the story here.
Waxy layers on insects are responsible for fossil chemical make-up.
A conundrum about the chemical make-up of fossilized insects has been solved this week by scientists who baked up scorpions to find the answer.
Read the story here.
Secondary pests could undermine initial benefits of Bt cotton.
After 7 years of planting cotton genetically engineered to kill bollworms, other insects have boomed so much on Chinese farms that their owners are losing money.
Read the story here.
Researchers suggest feline 'sentinels' could identify dangerous outbreaks.
Domestic cats may be widely susceptible to infection with the avian flu H5N1 virus, according to scientists who this week reported the virus in two dead cats in northern Iraq. The latest reports, following recent cat cases in Austria, Germany, Thailand and Indonesia, reinforce the hypothesis that cats may play a role in the spread of the virus, although none of the human victims thus far is thought to have caught the virus from a cat.
Read the story here.
UK politician advocates domestic emissions allowance.
It sounds like a triumph for the doctrine that people should think globally but act locally — and like a nightmare scenario for libertarian opponents of big government. Last week, UK environment secretary David Miliband suggested issuing all British adults with an annual carbon allowance. Advocates say the system is fair and would focus people's attention on conserving energy. But could it ever succeed?
Read the story here.
Cigarettes could slash blood-alcohol levels, making smokers drink more.
A new study helps to explain why smokers tend to have boozier nights out than non-smokers. The work, done in rats, shows that a heavy dose of nicotine can cut blood-alcohol levels in half. If cigarettes similarly lower intoxication in people, it could mean that smokers need to drink more than non-smokers to get the same buzz.
Read the story here.
Researchers to check whether FreeCell can detect early signs of Alzheimer's.
If you're one of the many people who while away hours playing FreeCell, that heinously addictive and complicated version of Solitaire, you may be interested to hear that some researchers think your performance in this computerized card game might reveal early signs of dementia.
Read the story here.
Stress seems to trigger memory problems later in life.
A bout of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may do damage to the brain that kick-starts memory problems, scientists have discovered. Even patients who had recovered from a period of stress started to get age-related memory difficulties about a decade earlier than non-traumatized people, they report.
Read the story here.
Spotlight falls on lasting effects of Gleevec.
A cancer drug hailed for its ability to rescue those dying from leukaemia could end up giving them heart failure, a study suggests. Doctors say that the side effects of cancer drugs are demanding more attention now that more and more patients are saved from the initial disease.
Read the story here.
New software can sort similar tunes together.
You're listening to your MP3 player in shuffle mode and have just been lulled into a mellow mood by Miles Davis, when suddenly the mood is shattered by a blast from the Pixies. If, as Apple claims of the iPod, "random is the new order", it has its drawbacks.
Read the story here.
Michael Hopkin finds out about this week's earthquake, which spurred waves that killed more than 500 people in Java, Indonesia.
Read the story here.
Spare computing power tackles thorny questions in malaria.
Researchers want the help of your home computer for an urgent new mission: fighting malaria.
Read the story here.
This week’s Nature Podcast untangles food webs, traces our Neanderthal heritage, explores the origin of the ocean floor, and has more on military secrets, why lungfish are dammed, graphene composites, and paramutational phenomena.
Listen | About | Transcript
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Lungfish face extinction, say environmentalists.
We are about to lose a key piece of our evolutionary history, warn biologists. They are campaigning to save the Australian lungfish, which they fear could be sent extinct by an enormous dam planned for southeastern Queensland.
Read the story here.
Mercury yields best measure of a second so far.
The clock is proof that optical clocks, which count miniscule fractions of a second using visible or ultraviolet laser light, can outperform the current generation of atomic timepieces. It could also open the door to a new era of precision measurements of fundamental constants, according to Jim Bergquist, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, who headed the study published in the 14 July issue of Physical Review Letters.
Read the story here.
Police questioning and scent of scandal don't seem to tarnish the UK science minister's reputation for simply being good at his job.
The life and career of Lord Sainsbury of Turville contain all the ingredients of a juicy scandal. A major donor to the UK Social Democrat and then Labour parties, in 1998 he was handed a senior government post — minister for science and innovation — that is normally reserved for elected politicians. Links between that post and his private commercial interests were uncovered by the press. Later he admitted that he had not properly declared a multi-million loan to the Labour party. And just last week it emerged that police had questioned him as part of their "loans for peerages" inquiry, an investigation into whether some party donors have been rewarded with political appointments.
Read the story here.
Shaking isn't the only way to pack grains efficiently.
The time-honoured trick for efficiently packing grains into a container, be they sand in a jar or wheat in a silo, is to give the thing a good tap. But research published today in Nature suggests that alternate cycles of heating and cooling will do the job too. The conclusions could help explain why storage silos sometimes split apart after being exposed to extreme temperatures.
Read the story here.
President will probably veto expanded funding for embryonic research.
The US Senate has passed a bill that aims to expand the scope of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
Read the story here.
The Euroscience Open Forum is over for this year. The 1500 participants are starting to scatter out of Munich. But they´ll meet again in two years -- in Barcelona, for ESOF2008.
It´ll be interesting to see how this fledgling meeting fares in the future.
Last night Alison Abbott, Nature´s senior European correspondent, arranged to take a group of us to see Metamagicum, a show that blends magic with science.
Sound impossible? Well, just imagine a tall German man dressed as a top quark and dancing. Or deriving the equation E=mc2 with a mathematical reference to Munich´s Späten brewery. Read more about Thomas Fraps and Pit Hartling, the men behind Metamagicum, at http://www.metamagicum.com - don´t miss the link to Alison´s excellent feature about them.
After the show, Phil Campbell -- Nature´s editor-in-chief -- showed off a card trick or two of his own. Who knew...
Modelling study shows how Anglo-Saxon élite outbred native Brits.
They may not always have enjoyed the most cordial of relations, but English and German people have more in common than they might think. An analysis of the genetic make-up of today's British population suggests that almost all English people are descended from Saxon invaders who became masters of a two-tier society that battered indigenous Brits into submission.
Read more here
Thankfully, WHOI´s HROV now has a real name.
That handful of letters refers to the latest thing in deep-sea exploration -- a sort of schizophrenic deep-diving submersible that can explore the world´s oceans down to an astonishing 11,000 metres´ depth. It´s run out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and, until lately, was known by the nasty acronym HROV, for hybrid remotely-operated vehicle.
It´s a machine that can dive off the side of its mother ship tethered to a cable to send back information, or to sail freely through the ocean depths all night and return in the morning to dump its data on board. To honor this split personality, WHOI has now named the thing after mythology´s Nereus -- a god with the tail of a fish and torso of a man.
Nereus should begin exploring the oceans in early 2007. For more information, check out Oceanus magazine.
Christopher German, the WHOI expert who described Nereus at the ESOF meeting here, added a sci-fi side note about one of the institute´s other submersibles. The engineers who designed ABE or the Autonomous Benthic Explorer, its current free-flying submersible, loved Star Trek enough to try to make the machine look like the starship Enterprise.
Do you agree? Decide for yourself:
http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/instruments/abe.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Enterprise
Declan Butler talks to John Kirton, director of the G8 Research Group at the University of Toronto, Canada, about this year's 'Group of 8' meeting in Russia. Here, heads of industrialized nations have met to discuss some of the world's greatest problems.
Read the interview here.
One of today´s featured speakers, Syrian philosopher Sadik al-Azm, wasn´t able to make it out of the Middle East to give his keynote presentation. But he did get to an internet cafe and email it in. So Wim Blockmans of the Netherlands read aloud al-Azm´s lecture on "Islam and the science-religion debate in modern times". With the focus here on European science, it´s a shame a leading Middle Eastern voice was missing.
But his absence was understandable. Universities in Beirut and Haifa are closed as well. We can only hope things improve, and soon.
This week's Nature Podcast features brain-computer interfaces, science and the battle of the sexes, human transmission of H5N1, science and religion, deep sea secrets, the unshelled mollusc, tropospheric radicals, and atomic tweasers.
To subscribe for FREE to the Nature Podcast copy and paste this URL into iTunes or your preferred browser.
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Automatic detection could reveal equipment left in the body.
Medics are turning to technology to ensure that surgical equipment isn't accidentally left behind in the bodies of patients. The latest idea: tagging gauze pads so that a detector wand waved over the patient triggers an alarm if they haven't all been removed.
Read the story here.
Second test mission ends with only minor glitches.
The space shuttle Discovery glided to a gentle touchdown in Florida this morning, bringing to an end a relatively smooth, 13-day mission to the International Space Station.
Read the story here.
An alert was issued minutes before the wave struck.
A local-scale tsunami has killed at least five people in Indonesia. The recently installed warning system did issue an appropriate alert, authorities say, but it is unclear how many lives this warning saved.
Read the story here.
Landslide raises questions over impact of climate change on mountains.
The Eiger, Switzerland's most infamous mountain, is traditionally best known for the challenge of ascending its north face. But it gained fame in another way last week when a huge chunk fell from its eastern flank, triggering claims that climate change has been implicated in yet another high-profile natural event.
Read more here
Gerry Gilmore, an astrophysicst at Cambridge University, gave a lunchttime talk in the aviation hall of the Deutsches Museum today. He seemed unfazed by the breadth of his topic: the entire history and future of the universe. Then again, his job title suggests he´d be up for the challenge: He´s a professor of "experimental philosophy": http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~gil/.
For 50 minutes, Gilmore did his best to bring cosmology down to earth. Among the tidbits of his talk:
- "The top pop song in 1931 was about general relativity," he says. Check out the lyrics from "As Time Goes By," made famous in the movie Casablanca -- without the key references to Einstein in the early verses: http://www.reelclassics.com/Movies/Casablanca/astimegoesby-lyrics.htm.
- Isaac Newton predicted that the sun´s gravity could bend light, long before Einstein said the same thing.
- If you squashed the Milky Way galaxy down to be as flat as a sheet of paper, it would, remarkably, have the same density of that sheet of paper (around 80 grams per square metre). It would just be a really, really, really big shset of paper.
And the learning goes on...
Here´s something to mark on your planner for the middle of next year: The possible first sighting of a earthlike planet orbiting another star.
On 20 October, France plans to launch its Corot mission (http://smsc.cnes.fr/COROT/Fr/) to search for extrasolar planets. It´ll stare at a field of a few thousand stars for 150 days, hoping to glimpse the dimming of light caused when a planet crosses in front of the star it orbits.
Why 150 days? That´s as long as astronomers can keep it pointed in one direction, says project scientist Malcolm Friedlund. So after its October launch, expect a month to get the telescope up and running, and then 150 days for the first set of observations.
"We´re hoping in May or June of 2007 to be able to anounce the first rocky planets around other stars," Fridlund told the ESOF meeting today.
For more on Corot and other extrasolar planet missions, try this link (Nature subscribers only, sorry!): http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060703/full/442006a.html.
You can read more about Fridlund´s personal feelings about extrasolar planet studies here:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM83A1P4HD_people_0_iv.html.
Virtual reality, once a techno-toy for the curious and wealthy, is becoming an important tool for helping people cope with stressful situations. Here at the ESOF meeting in Munich, a pair of researchers presented some intriguing new work on how to treat phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder using virtual reality.
One project helps people cope better with the stress of earthquakes. Ioannis Tarnanas, a psychologist in Thessalonica, Greece (http://users.auth.gr/~ioannist/), somehow talks subjects into strapping on a pair of virtual reality glasses and experiencing a virtual earthquake. He says it´s useful for kids in particular, who can take a trip through a safe environment such as their school and then see it in ruins. They can be scared during the five-minute process, he says, but data suggest that those who have gone through the training are far less likely to suffer psychological damage if and when a real earthquake hits. Tarnanas has even used this to teach children with Downs syndrome how to cope with a quake, he says.
At a press conference Tarnanas was joined by the man behind the technology: Martijn Boosman of E-semble Corporation in Delft, the Netherlands. He´s been working with an older and far more experienced crowd, who he says can still be helped immensely by virtual reality. Firemen, police officers, medical personnel and other emergency services staff can use VR goggles to recreate a particular fire or crash scene that they found disturbing. The user can click and add cars, fire trucks, people, or whatever into a scene to represent what he or she has just been through. The details aren´t as important as the fact that the user is experiencing the moment again, says Boosman: People often start to sweat as they sit quietly in the chair, reliving the moments again.
It´s the same approach the US military has been using for years, to debrief soldiers after they return from stressful assignments. Now ordinary people may have the same shot at conquering their fears for good.
The EuroScience Open Forum (http://www.esof2006.org) isn´t like most of the science meetings I´m used to attending. Normally I´d be sitting in three hours of the latest research into paleoclimatology. Here, the focus is on celebrating European science and bringing it to the public in a most informal fashion.
Witness just a few of the wonders on display at ESOF: Mysterix, the interactive "science truck" where anyone can perform physics and biology experiments. "Pretzel with the Prof," an informal chance to get career advice from leading researchers in the sunny Science Biergarten here. And the "Bremen Profmobile," a moving science platform where, if you feel so moved, you can lecture about your research for 15 to 20 minutes to the public.
And just now, walking through the exhibit hall, I nearly bumped into a blonde woman wearing a plastic bubble around her head and long metallic strips of blue cloth over her body. She handed me a piece of chocolate emblazoned with a promotion for the southwest German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, and told me she was a fuel cell.
I can´t wait to see what else the next few days bring.
Smaller beaks in Galápagos finches make finding food easier.
Competition between two species of finch in the Galápagos has caused the beak size of one species to shrink, and scientists have watched it happen. Detailed observations of the birds, which Darwin famously studied while formulating his theory of evolution, have provided one of the best descriptions of a characteristic trait evolving in the wild.
Read the story here.
Bacteria found in Australian mines help gold grains to form.
Prospectors looking for gold nuggets have swarms of tiny helpers: bugs that take up toxic gold complexes from the soil and spit out pure gold on to the grains around them. Research published today provides strong evidence that bacteria known to produce gold in the laboratory do their trick in the wild too.
Read the story here.
Algae compound surprisingly effective at preventing cancer-causing viral infection.
Just a tiny amount of a common food additive has been found, in lab tests, to guard against the virus linked to cervical cancer.
Read the story here.
Scientists head for the beach to find out.
A seaside conundrum has been solved: what shape is a pebble?
The answer, of course, is 'pebble-shaped'; but now, thanks to research by a team in France and the United States, it's possible to define what that means.
Read the story here.
Alexandra Witze, senior news and features editor for Nature, will be in Munich from July 15-19. Check back here for her postings from the EuroScience Open Forum, a kind of pan-European festival of science.
She is particularly looking forward to filing from the Science Biergarten.
US millionaire punts roach motel into orbit.
On 12 July, a rocket took off from a Russian base carrying, among other things, one miniature inflatable space hotel filled with a few cockroaches and several Mexican jumping beans. Borne aloft by a former intercontinental ballistic missile, Genesis I carried Robert Bigelow's dream of a functioning space hotel one step closer to reality.
Read the story here.
Top geneticist asks the God question.
Is it really possible to combine dedication to science with belief in God? In a new book, prominent US scientist Francis Collins sets out his case for combining a strong religious faith with a zeal for the scientific method. But his views have already sparked debate, with critics suggesting that more talk of religion is the last thing that science needs.
Read the story here. And tell us what you think about combining science with faith.
COMMENTARY
The suggestion that women are not advancing in science because of innate inability is being taken seriously by some high-profile academics. Ben A. Barres explains what is wrong with the hypothesis.
"As a transgendered person, no one understands more deeply than I do that there are innate differences between men and women...."
Read the commentary here.
Nobel chemist lends weight to geoengineering schemes.
A soon-to-be-published paper by a Nobel laureate will seriously consider injecting sulphur into the stratosphere to combat climate change. His article is already creating a buzz, some of which is highly sceptical.
Read the full story here.
The atmosphere's cleaning agent harnesses solar power.
We may be flooding the air with pollutants, but the 'atmospheric detergent' that mops them up is still going strong, according to research in this week's Nature1. That's because the amount of cleanser in our skies seems to depend on ultraviolet radiation coming from the Sun, rather than the amount of pollution it has to clean.
Click here to read the story.
Devices to help paralysed patients work computers set to get even faster.
Five years ago, Matt Nagle was stabbed, leaving him paralysed in all four limbs. But since then, he has been able to use a modified computer to open e-mails, adjust the volume on his television, move a robotic arm and even play the computer game Pong. These powers came courtesy of a tiny square of electronic gadgetry implanted directly in his brain.
Click here for the story.
Here for videos.
And here for a web focus on the subject.
Snippets of science: Roland Strauss of the University of Wuerzburg in Germany showed his movies of mutant flies with movement disorders – and some startling six-legged robots programmed with the same movement disorders, and which he uses as a research tool. Henrick Mouritsen from the University of Oldenburg in Germany showed some really cool data on how some migratory birds use light receptors to reset their magnetic compasses to correct for the difference between magnetic north and true north. (He pointed out that molecular biology has not been tuned to the needs of those who work on birds. He would like to create a knock-out bird, but that can’t be done yet even in chickens.)
And William Fifer from Columbia University showed more sobering data on sudden infant death syndrome which is particularly high in North American Indian populations. His idea is that vulnerable babies may have defects in their autonomic nervous systems which help regulate heart rate and blood pressure to adapt to new conditions. Vulnerability is acquired in utero, he told the meeting.
We’re coming towards the end of the fifth FENS meeting inVienna. I remember the birth pains of this conference, which had the first of its now biennial meetings in Berlin in 1998. It’s nice to see that Europe can do big meetings efficiently. (It’s also rather rare.) Over 5200 scientists from 75 countries have shown up. The programme is good, of consistent high quality. And the whole thing is well-organised. The press facilities, normally a complete disaster in any European meeting, couldn’t be better. The general mood is upbeat.
You can tell you are in Europe, even in this bland out-of-town conference centre which could be almost anywhere. You notice that people go around in language groups much more often than you notice in the US. Maybe integration has a way to go. There is also a tendency for the audiences to start talking amongst themselves and moving around during question times. I don’t know why this habit is European, but it is. The Italian flag is even flying in the exhibition floor (for those who were on another planet last week, Italy won the World Cup von Sunday). And the food is edible.
For those who don’t know, FENS stands for Federation of European Neuroscience Societies. Back in the 1990s, national societies, some more willingly than others, agreed that they needed to shed their parochialism. Few European neuroscientists were visiting their neighbours’ meetings, but they all flocked over the Atlantic to the US Neuroscience meeting each November. They still do flock over to the US, quite rightly. But this meeting shows that the tide has turned.
The meeting is half the size of a typical US Neuroscience meeting, and all the better for it. Even so, you were always missing something good - that you could never be quite sure was not actually better - in the parallel session next door.
Drug-resistant bugs argue against use of antibiotics.
Bacteria clumped into tough biofilms are behind the widespread and persistent ear infections that vex kids, researchers have confirmed, supporting the idea that deploying antibiotics against these conditions is futile.
Read the story here.
Corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel are not future energy solutions.
Producing biofuels such as ethanol from food crops isn't worth the effort. That's the conclusion of a new and painstaking study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Researchers should instead concentrate either on producing ethanol from indigestible plant material such as cellulose, or on synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.
Read the story here.
Speculation abounds on Taepodong-2's wild ride.
Last week's fiery crash of North Korea's Taepodong-2 missile has left arms control experts theorizing about what went wrong.
Read the story here.
Researchers look for genetic clues to disease's gender bias.
Those who have been keeping a mental tally of the differences between males and females can now add another 25,281 items to the list. That's the number of differences that researchers have found in gene expression between male and female mice, according to a report published online in this month's Genome Research.
Read the story here.
Officials insist the country's space ambitions remain undaunted.
An Indian-made rocket carrying the country's latest telecom satellite, Insat-4C, went up in smoke on launch yesterday, raining debris into the Bay of Bengal.
Read the story here.
Wiping out one part of the brain can break the thrall of smoking.
Strokes often change a person's character, depending on where the damage hits. Some may become more impulsive, others depressed. Now researchers have shown that damage to a small but very specific brain area can wipe out an addiction to smoking.
Read the story here.
Mouse sperm has been made in a dish, but the method is too unreliable for use in humans.
For the first time, embryologists have shown that sperm created from embryonic stem cells can give rise to live offspring. The work, carried out by researchers in Germany and Britain, culminated in the production of six adult mice that owed their origins to sperm derived from these ‘multipurpose’ cells.
Read more here
Study suggests cannabis-users may be vulnerable to harder drugs.
Neuroscientists have found that rats are more likely to get hooked on heroin if they have previously been given cannabis. The studies suggest a biological mechanism — at least in rats — for the much-publicized effect of cannabis as a 'gateway' to harder drugs.
Read more here
Macchiavellians can be detected not only by their selfish and ingratiating behaviour, but also by their neurobiology, according to a new study presented today at the Federation of Neuroscience Societies in Vienna.
To separate the people who are generally fair from those who are more selfish, economics professor Ernst Fehr from the University of Zurich gave 100 ‘coins’ to 24 people who were told that they had to share their cash with an anonymous partner. In one experiment, the test subjects faced no punishment if they shared it unjustly. On average, they kept 90% of the money for themselves.
But in a second experiment they could be financially punished by partners who felt they had been treated unfairly. Faced with this prospect, the test subjects smartened up their act, giving nearly half of the money to their partners.
Some subjects started out much more firmly in the selfish camp, and responded more strongly to the threat of punishment than others. “These are what we call the ‘macchiavellian personalities’ – with a strong tendency towards both egoism and opportunism,” says Fehr, who reported the studies at the Federation of Neuroscience Societies in Vienna today. In the absence of threat of punishment, they got the best deal for themselves, and they also succeeded in avoiding economic punishment in the second experiment.
Contrary to popular belief, everyone responds to the threat of punishment to some degree, says Fehr. “Even psychopaths have a small response to the threat of punishment, though the individual differences are very big,” he says. (He didn’t, to his knowledge, have any psychopaths in this study, but adds that this fact falls out of previous research).
In order to identify the brain areas used in making these sharing decisions, Fehr and his colleague Manfred Spitzer from the University of Ulm scanned the brains of the test subjects using magnetic resonance tomography while they were deciding how to split their bounty.
The team found increased brain activity in two areas of the forebrain - the lateral orbital frontal cortex and the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex – which are involved in processing punishing stimuli and in powerful impulses, such as the desire to take the last slice of cake without concern for others.
This brain activity was most pronounced in the Macchiavellian subjects.
“We speculate that these areas must also represent decisions related to ‘norm obedience’, because the greater the punishment threat, the greater the change in behaviour towards the ‘norm’ of sharing the pie equally.”
Fehr is now doing additional experiments to try to modify the behaviour of test subjects by using TMS to suppress firing in the two areas activated by the punishing stimuli. Theoretically, this should mean that selfish people would stay selfish, even under threat of punishment.
“This is going to be really thrilling,” he says. “We will see if we can actually change behaviour by suppressing the brain’s decision-making in this way.”
Alison Abbott will be at the FENS meeting this week, and sending back reports of all the latest research on the brain. Stay tuned for her diary entries from 10-12 July.
And find the meeting page here.
This week's Nature Podcast features face recognition, koala retroviruses, a sneaky sociologist, the top science blogs, big cat business, new nukes, the search for Earth-like planets, and silent earthquakes.
Join the discussion on this week's podcast now!
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But do social scientists understand science?
After more than 30 years of studying the physicists who work on gravity waves, spending countless hours talking to physicists and writing a book on the history and sociology of the field, social scientist Harry Collins had a question. Could he pass as a physicist?
Find out here.
Could a flying trash bag help to spot new worlds?
It has long been thought that spotting Earth-like planets around distant stars will require space-based telescopes with exquisite optics. But now, one astronomer thinks he can do it with an already-planned telescope and what he modestly describes as "a big fuel tank with a hefty bag attached".
Read the story here, and find a more analytical piece (you'll need to pay for this one) here.
Study suggests cannabis-users may be vulnerable to harder drugs.
Neuroscientists have found that rats are more likely to get hooked on heroin if they have previously been given cannabis. The studies suggest a biological mechanism — at least in rats — for the much-publicized effect of cannabis as a 'gateway' to harder drugs.
Read the story here.
Bruno the bear: released to the Italian Alps, meets grizzly end in Germany.
The corpse of Bruno the bear is in high demand, but will probably end up as a teaching tool.
Read the story here.
In an exclusive news story today, Nature trawls the blogosphere to find some of the most popular, most highly-linked-to blogs written about science by scientists. Come read our lists of top blogs, along with some lessons for science bloggers hoping to get noticed.
Top 5 science blogs
Extended list: 50 popular science blogs
Science blogs by writers
How our lists were made
Blogshots: some facts about science blogs
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Despite foam concerns, shuttle launch goes smoothly.
NASA celebrated Independence Day with the successful launch of the space shuttle Discovery.
Read about this, the second of NASA's 'return to flight' launches, on news@nature.com.
Also see our all-singing, all-dancing special about the return to flight missions.
Excommunication threat may extend to all working with embryonic cells.
As the Catholic church holds its World Meeting of Families in Valencia, Spain, this week, some will be watching to see if Pope Benedict XVI supports the excommunication of those working with embryonic stem cells.
Read the story here.
Launch attempt still on despite clouds and falling foam.
NASA officials have decided to press ahead with a scheduled 4 July launch for the space shuttle Discovery, despite the fact that a small piece of insulating foam fell from the shuttle's external fuel tank yesterday, 3 July.
Read the story here.
Man who ‘awoke’ after 19 years shows how nerve cells can regrow.
The amazing recovery of a man who had spent almost two decades in a barely conscious state has revealed the brain’s previously unrecognized powers of recovery.
Read more here
Mouse trials show small gain from implanted human cells.
A company set to begin clinical trials of a stem-cell treatment for a fatal brain disease has announced that the treatment boosts survival in a mouse model.
Read the story here.
Camera fixed after two-week hiatus.
Engineers have repaired one of the Hubble Space Telescope's main cameras, after electronics problems had put it out of action.
Read the story here.
