Nature Newsblog
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Boosting killer T cells shows promise with skin tumours.
An experimental gene-therapy technique has sent two patients with skin cancer into partial remission. It is the first successful use of gene therapy to treat a cancer.
Read the story here.
From mice to monkeys to chimps to people, a brain-protein gene pumps up.
A newly discovered mystery gene may have helped build the modern human brain, researchers report today.
Read the story here.
The lunar orbiter SMART-1 is due to crash-land on the Moon on 2 or 3 September: dates chosen to help ground telescopes spy on the impact.
Find out how to watch it happen here.
If you saw it, let us know, and send us your pictures...
PLUS
Find background features and interactive graphics of the past and future of Moon research in our special.
As the conference winds down, I think it was, all in all, a good thing. It will be interesting to see how it develops. Will it become a mega-meeting, like the ACS meetings, or will it find some sort of niche, disciplinary or otherwise?
It was quite windy for most of the week, with the main plenary tent creaking and popping like a schooner in full sail. I thought about making some corny pun about these being the winds of change sweeping over European chemists, as they find their collective identity and become a force to reckon with. This would have been just too pat though, and in any case, we will have to wait and see.
And so, Viszontlátásra from Budapest!
A big conference just isn't a big conference without a lot of handing out of medals. So here's congrats to Jonathan Nitschke of the University of Geneva, for winning the European Young Chemist's award. He got an IOU from the Italian Chemical Society for 1,800 €, and a nice gold medal. Lee Cronin promised me that if he didn't win, he would get up and shout 'It's rigged! It's rigged!', but unfortunately, he got one of the silver medals, and so we didn't get to see a temper tantrum in the tent.
Analytical chemists won't run out of work any time soon. The world is reassuringly full of unknowns. Perhaps less reassuring is the nature of some of these unknowns. Koni Grob at the Kantonales Laboratory in Zurich, which he calls 'a nano FDA', has been looking at the compounds that food packages shed into the food we eat. His most recent focus has been on the plastic gaskets found inside jar lids. He finds that when oil–like that in tomato sauce, for example-touches these gaskets, all sorts of known and unknown things leach out into the food.
'Many people want to have bio or organic food, but I think that they are not aware that by far the highest source of contamination is food packaging.' Many compounds, like epoxidized soybean oil and Bisphenol-A diglycidyl ether are present in oily jarred foods in levels far exceeding the maximums for contamination at the plant. And there are hundreds or thousands of other things in there that he has found with gas chromatography but not yet identified.
However, there is no need to ditch all your tasty oily foods in a panic. Grob is clear that this is a challenge for analysts, not a worry for consumers. In fact, he's ambivalent about getting media coverage of his project. 'Our philosophy is to inform those really involved and not the consumers, he says. 'It is the authorities that have to do a lot more about this.'
Imaging study shows that godly experiences trigger a network within the brain.
Neuroscientists have identified a network of brain regions activated when nuns feel that they are at one with God. Artificially stimulating the brain in this way, they say, might allow people to have mystical experiences without believing in God themselves.
Read the story here.
Unapproved food additive could make baked goods safer.
Acrylamide, when it was found in food in 2002, seemed to be the ultimate confirmation that everything tasty is bad for you. Here was a compound that was a probable carcinogen and possible neurotoxin, lurking in practically every fried or baked good.
Read the story here.
Astronomers petition against new definition of a planet.
The future of the Solar System — or at least that of some of its nomenclature — may be thrown into turmoil by scientists who are calling for a boycott of a new definition of a planet.
Read the story here.
This week's Nature Podcast investigates male infertility, examines how the brain categorises visual information, heralds SMART-1's last hurrah, and has more on RNAi and indefinite inheritance, size and the death of a star, and gamma-ray bursts.
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- Kosuke Yoshida of Tokai University in Shizuoka, Japan has found a marine microalga, with the handsome name Nannochloropsis oculata, that can be trained to chop the noxious chemical formaldehyde into relatively benign ethyl formate. Yoshida is interested in using the trained strain to mitigate formaldehyde used to control parasites that live on fish gills in aquaculture.
- Hungarian Chemistry celeb George Olah was here yesterday, promoting his new book, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy. He chatted with invitees just a few yards from where he is immortalized on a plaque listing Hungarian Nobel prize winners.
- A chat in the hotel bar with a fellow attendee reveals to ignorant old me that there is such a thing as Philosophy of Chemistry, and that it’s main journal is elegantly named Hyle, after the ancient Greek for “matter”. Further investigation reveals that Nature regular Phil Ball has a paper in the latest edition examining attitudes towards chemists in recent American fiction. The rest of the issue, all about the public image of chemistry is also very interesting. Awesome.
- Mobile phones might be bad for you, especially if your head is a vat of solution of lactoperoxidase, according to Roberta de Carolis of the University of Rome.
- Broccoli sprouts have more glucosinolates—a precursor to cancer-preventing Isothiocyanates—than full grown broccoli.
- The Seine is filled with caffeine and pain relievers.
Mission managers announced today that they're moving the vehicle back to the pad ahead of Ernesto, which has been downgraded to a tropical storm. But it's unclear when the vehicle will be able to lift off.
That means the shuttle could still miss its rendezvous date with the International Space Station. The launch window is set to close on 14 September, and, complicating the situation are plans to launch a Russian Soyuz capsule to the station later in the month. The Russians have requested that the shuttle not launch after 7 September in order to prevent a scheduling conflict. NASA officials are now pleading with the Russians for more time, but it’s unclear whether they’ll get it.
If the September launch window is missed then Shuttle planners will have a small, two day window in late October, and a day in December when the launch pad and station will line up correctly. The next siginificant launch window will not open until February. Waiting that long would be a setback, though not a devastating one, according to John Logsdon, Director of the Space Policy Institute at Geroge Washington University. “I wouldn’t call it minor, but I wouldn’t call it major either,” he says. While it will put pressure on plans to finish the station and retire the shuttle by 2010, the construction “remains doable.”
When it does eventually fly, the Atlantis will deploy a massive solar array that will provide additional power for an upcoming space station expansion. It will be the first mission to continue construction of the International Space Station since the break up of the shuttle Columbia upon reentry in 2003.
Disaster-plagued Indonesian island faces new threat.
For 3 months a sea of hot mud has been gushing from the ground in Sidoarjo, East Java, 35 kilometres south of Indonesia's second largest city, Surabaya. The steaming mud pool is growing at an estimated 50,000 cubic metres a day, accompanied by hydrogen sulphide gas, and now reportedly covers more than 25 square kilometres. The flow has not yet been stopped; thousands of people have lost their homes.
Read about it here.
Su Doku, the number game that is sweeping the world, has been adapted by the Royal Society of Chemistry into a puzzle where each square must have only one of nine elements listed at the bottom of the page. The play is exactly the same as the digit version, except that one contemplates the likes of lanthanum and cerium while one plays. Check it out at www.rsc.org/puzzle.
The big tent where we saw the folk dancers was packed this morning for Jean Marie Lehn's plenary on self-organizing systems. I heard lots of ebullient murmuring on the way out, so I think it went well, though some of it may have been the celebrity-induced glow of those who have just heard a Nobel laureate speak.
The general idea is that if one works hard, one can find molecules that when introduced, get along and immediately start building complex structures on their own. Lehn showed us grids and other cunning structures that had been got up by molecules that recognized each other and then bound predictably.
Much of his work was on those superstructures bound together with metal ions, so that one way to look at his grids was a field of regularly spaced metal ions, potentially useful as a computer chip. So these "supramolecules" are, he said, "a powerful alternative to nanofabrication. Don't make components, design them to make themselves."
He also showed how mixed soups of molecules will segregate themselves into structural units—so you'll have a bunch of double helixes forming alongside a bunch of triple helixes. This relies on recognition, and then selection of the appropriate molecule to fraternize with. In a challenging finale, Lehn wondered if this effect might not represent a kind of "chemical Darwinism."
His other quoteable moment: "Chemistry is the science of informed matter".
To comment, click on headline
I heart food chemistry, and for more than one reason. First of all, it is easy to get into the science when you can immediately relate it to cheese or grapes or Parma ham or something nummy like that. And secondly, it demonstrates how seriously we take the pleasure of eating. Much of food chemistry is concerned with ensuring that when we decide to spend an evening eating bon bons and drinking champagne in the bath our chocolate is not adulterated with inferior cocoa butter fat equivalents and our champagne is actually from Champagne.
Elke Anklam, of the European Community Joint Research Centre in Belgium, gave a nice overview of food authentication this morning, which revealed that despite being armed with electronic noses, chromatography of various kinds, spectroscopy ditto., natural isotope fractioning, and PCR, they still can't easily tell if olive oil is being cut with hazelnut oil…"even if you can taste it."
Ha ha! So the best and least scientific means of authentication is still the human tongue. That being said, I was recently informed that most people cannot tell red wine from white with their eyes shut. Incredulous, I put it to the test. I shut my eyes and had my companions at dinner hand me glasses. I called the first red, the second white, and, taking a cue from the snickering I heard, the third a mixture of the two. Turns out it was the same glass of red wine all three times. Oh!
To comment, click on the headline of this post.
Ernesto has taken a turn for the worse and is heading straight towards Florida. The mission management team announced this morning that they will be moving the shuttle as soon as possible, likely early tomorrow morning.
If they do, it will be over a week before a launch will be possible. I’m headed home ahead of the weather.
Today's programme is chock full of environmental chemistry, including a few sessions on pharmaceuticals in the environment. In the last few decades chemistry has given us more and better drugs, and we have not been shy about taking them. One graph of pharmaceutical consumption in France from 1970 to the present was hair-raisingly steep. All those drugs that aren't broken down by our bodies are, well, let's be scientific here, excreted and enter the waste-treatment stream. Some end up in rivers and lakes.
So it is good that chemists are busy inventing new tools to understand the scope of the problem and what it's implications might be—beyond trout blissed out on Prozac or crustaceans with the caffeine shakes.
Outside the environmental session room, a poster by Mei-Fang Chou and colleagues from Tri Service General Hospital in Taipei, Taiwan, gives me pause. They've managed to tweak the non-speedy alertness enhancer and mood brightener modafinil (sold as Provigil) so that it also is an anti-inflamatory pain reliever. Holey moley—what a blockbuster that could be. A cure for pain, sleepiness and unhappiness in one drug. Look out fish.
Mark Peplow, former Nature staffer, and current editor of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemistry World is here in Buda, and he's recording his impressions on a brand new soft-launched blog, which is available here: http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw.
Well, the reception was delightful. The food was excellent and the wine got good reviews. But before the eating and drinking came the speeches by chemistry worthies from across the continent. Generally, they were short and expressed pleasure in European chemistry coming together in this conference, and in the umbrella organization, EuCheMS. The MS on the end stands for "molecular science," and is part of a decided emphasis on the molecule which seems to me to be a bit of an attempt to grab more territory for the field.
More inside...
Peter Elvending, the head of the European Chemical Industry Council gave a short presentation on the stiff competition facing its members, especially from the East. The solution, he says, is innovation. "This old continent currently does not stand up to competition," he said. "It is very important that we get our act together in the European Union."
The same sentiment was expressed at a press conference for SusChem, the group of chemical companies, chemists and governments trying to shape the research agenda for Europe. "Commodities will be made elsewhere," said Alfred Oberholz, head of the scheme, "we must have innovation and sustainability."
The research the group thinks is worth doing will cost 1,400 million euros a year, half to be supplied by governments and half by industry. I am not sure yet how that compares to the current figures. Their goal is to get the plan linked into the EU's Seventh Framework Programme, which is no doubt being hammered out in smoke-filled rooms even as we speak.
If you want to see if your pet project is one of the SusChem fave raves, check out their draft at http://www.suschem.org/.
Oh, one last thing about the reception: it's one thing to present musicians in Hungarian costume and young men in tight crimson trousers pirouetting with gals decked out like the St. Pauly girl, but give your guests a drink before rather than after.
The mission management team announced tonight that they are holding off on the decision to roll the shuttle back into the Vertical Assembly Building until 7:00am tomorrow. But LeRoy Cain, the highest ranking member of the shuttle team, sounded downbeat about the threat posed by Ernesto: “It would take a relatively significant change from the current forecasts that we’re seeing to prevent us from going into rollback preparation.”
The good news is that the shuttle and its booster rockets appear undamaged from the lightning strike, so it would be capable of launching Tuesday if the weather holds.
Today was supposed to be launch day, but instead, journalists walked out of the afternoon press briefing wondering if there would be any launch at all. Weather seems to be conspiring against the lift off.
First, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, announced that Friday’s lightning strike required further evaluation of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters. Mission engineers are fearful that the booster’s pyrotechnic bolts and other systems may have been damaged by the strike. The launch has been pushed back until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest.
Second, hurricane Ernesto, the year’s first, has taken an unexpected turn. NASA officials are now concerned that the hurricane could strike Cape Canaveral. “We’d like to have the vehicle back in the vertical assembly building before high winds hit the Cape,” says Gerstenmaier. “That forces us to start taking some action fairly soon.”
The team is in a quandary, Gerstenmaier continued. On the one hand, they want to get the shuttle ready to fly. On the other, they need to prepare to move it into the relative safety of the vehicle assembly building. At some point, they will have to choose which they will do. “That point in time hasn’t occurred yet,” he said. “But it’s coming this evening.”
Jó napot kívánok from Budapest, where the European chemistry community has decided to get together in the first ever European Chemistry Congress. The scale of the thing is impressive for it being a first: 2,500 registrants from 65 countries and an abstracts book the size of a phone book (do they still make those?).
Before the official start, I sat down with organizer Gábor Náray-Szabó, and asked him the obvious question: is this conference a challenge to the American Chemical Society meeting, that twice-annual mass migration of chemists?
Click below to read on...
"They do it very well," says Náray-Szabó. "We don't have to fight. But we can show that we can do something like that."
Náray-Szabó says that the time seemed ripe for European chemists to come together. The meeting has been taking shape for the last several years, but a turning point, he says, is when Jean-Marie Lehn signed on to give a plenary talk and help develop the programme. More Nobel laureates followed. Right now, Náray-Szabó is confident of the congresses success, and it looks like others chare his confidence. The Societá Chimica Italiana will host the next one in Torino in 2008. I withhold my vote until after the opening reception. Will there be adequate nibbly things and drinks? Will the chatter be lively?
Right now, the exhibitors are setting up, and everywhere knots of people are huddled, pouring over the dense program. Young people in pale blue polo shirts are registering people at a furious pace, and the Eötvös Loránd University chemistry building, on the bank of the Danube, smells strongly of newly printed programs. If only one could absorb all the presentations just by breathing in that inky smell!
At the afternoon press conference, we learned that launch pad 39B was hit yesterday by the largest lightning strike the shuttle programme has ever seen. One hundred thousand amps coursed through the tower’s lightning rod. The arc may have affected an arm on the ground structure that’s meant to swing away at launch, as well as one of the shuttle’s primary electrical systems, according to LeRoy Cain, the senior shuttle programme manager at the site. “At this point we don’t really have enough data yet to really know whether or not we have any problems.”
Cain says that the team has decided to delay the launch by at least 24 hours to assess the strike.Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that engineers will be able to go out and inspect the shuttle or the launch pad anytime soon. A second round of thunderstorms has rolled in this afternoon, and the pad will probably have to be kept clear until the late evening or early morning hours.
They've scrapped launch for at least 24 hours. I'll know more when I get back from our afternoon press conference.
Another reporter (for an unnamed rival British publication) and I spotted NASA administrator Michael Griffin in the cafeteria this afternoon. He was sporting a bright blue NASA polo and seemed busy rallying the troops.
I hope he likes thunderstorms, those clouds are gathering.
But there are clouds on the horizon. NASA forecasters have upgraded the chances of rain tomorrow to 60%, making a launch seem unlikely. Complicating things, this afternoon’s anticipated thunderstorms will likely further complicate preparations.
The weather folks are more sanguine about Monday, when rain has only a 20% chance of spoiling the show.
Nature’s conference blogs usually finish when the meeting about which they are written winds up. But the wrangling over what defines a planet, the source of the buzz at this year’s general assembly of the International Astronomical Union, is gathering new pace. The meeting is done and I am home, but here’s one more update.
To recap, astronomers in Prague on 24 August voted to define a planet by its roundness, also requiring that a planet proper had swept up the small fry from its orbit. You can read the news story here. Round objects that failed on the second count, including Pluto, became ‘dwarf’ planets (emphatically not planets).
I caught up with Richard Binzel, a member of the planet definition committee, immediately after the vote on Thursday. He said with relief, “it’s over, it’s done.”
Oh no, it’s not.
The embattled Binzel had spoken too soon. Many members of the IAU were not present in Prague to vote, and some are furious at the outcome.
“I am just disgusted by the way the IAU, which is supposed to represent the best in science, handled this matter. The definition they have is patently absurd,” says Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. He thinks that requiring a planet to have cleared its orbit rules out some of the eight planets the IAU says we are left with, including Neptune, whose orbit is crossed by Pluto, and Jupiter, which circles the sun among the Trojan asteroids.
Now, Stern has been a long-time supporter of the idea that a planet should be defined as something big enough to be round – the definition originally put forward by Binzel and his colleagues on 16 August, which was revised after much argument.
Stern is also principle investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission, until this week on its way to the ninth planet of our solar system, now on its way to the ‘dwarf’ planet Pluto. So, it’s perhaps not suprising that he should feel strongly that the IAU have messed things up.
But Stern is not alone. He’s one of 12 scientists, including some rather recognisable names, who have sponsored a petition. That petition is now circulating by email among astronomers and planetary scientists. The email arrives with the subject line “Petition Protesting the IAU Planet Definition” and invites the recipient to register their displeasure at a website.
The statement on the website reads: “We, as planetary scientists and astronomers, do not agree with the IAU's definition of a planet, nor will we use it. A better definition is needed.”
I’m not going to post the web link, since those involved have said they want the petition to represent the views of the scientific community, rather than the public at large. But I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a public petition somewhere else on the web aiming to save Pluto. Anyone know of one?
I've put the full text of the scientists’ email, minus the web link, in a separate post here. On Friday evening (GMT) I was told that the petition had already hit the 100-signature mark. And that was only a few hours after the first email was sent out.
To be honest, I’ve no idea what might happen from here. Altogether, the IAU has nearly 9000 members. The number of people voting on the resolution that's now being contested was not counted, but judging by the hands shown in favour and against another bit of the planet definition (described in an earlier post here), it would have been a few more than 400.
It’s therefore possible, in principle, that more IAU members could add their name to the petition statement against the planet definition than were in Prague to vote for it. But changes to the IAU’s resolutions are usually made only at their General Assemblies, which are triennial. I wouldn’t mind (in fact, I might rather enjoy) being in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil for the next one in 2009. But I suspect that the IAU will want this debate to be ended before then.
The next update will be online and in Nature’s news section later this week.
Oh dear, look what’s circulating on the web. Here we have a petition against the new definition of a planet, seeking scientists’ support for a boycott of the IAU resolution. I will provide some context in my next post, here.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Sent: Fri 8/25/2006
Subject: Petition Protesting the IAU Planet Definition
Dear Colleagues -
Less than 5% of the astronomical community voted at the Prague IAU for a definition of 'planet' that uses dynamics (location) rather than intrinsic properties to decide if an object is or is not a planet. This result is counter to other classification schemes in astronomy (e.g., stars, galaxies, nebulae, even asteroids) in which dynamical context does not play a controlling role.
Furthermore, it produces results that are incongruous and cannot be extended within our own solar system or to extra-solar planetary systems without producing immediate results that are patently absurd: e.g., a Neptune-sized object discovered beyond 150 AU could not be a planet, the presence of an Earth orbiting its star between a Jupiter and a Saturn would mean the Earth could not be considered a planet since it could not clear its "neighborhood".
This definition also excludes Pluto from planethood in our solar system, something that is both scientifically questionable and publicly problematic. Both Pluto and a distant Neptune would be classified as a "dwarf planet", which is not to be considered a subcategory of "planet".
If you agree that this process and its consequences are flawed, you are invited to sign a web-petition protesting this action at
**********************
The petition will be transmitted to the IAU.
Please redistribute this message to planetary and astronomical colleagues only. It is not meant to be a public petition. Thank you.
Mark Sykes (Planetary Science Institute)
S. Alan Stern (Southwest Research Institute)
Faith Vilas (MMT Observatory)
Christopher T. Russell (University of California, Los Angeles)
Larry Lebofsky (University of Arizona)
Ted Bowell (Lowell Observatory)
Carolyn Shoemaker (US Geological Survey)
David Levy (Jarnac Observatory)
David Grinspoon (Denver Museum of Nature & Science)
Harold Weaver (Applied Physics Laboratory)
David Weintraub (Vanderbilt University)
Amy Lovell (Agnes Scott College)
*Weblink removed to respect the organisers’ wish that the petition represent the views of the scientific community.
I showed up at the press centre at around noon, and almost as soon as I pulled up it started pouring. At its heaviest, the rain was so thick that you could just barely make out the fifty-story tall vehicle assembly building across the street. We found out at an evening press conference that Pad 39-B, where Atlantis is fueling up, was actually struck by lightning around that time. They’ve got ways (i.e. ¾” steel lighting rods) of deflecting the strike, and it looks like none of the shuttle’s systems were damaged.
So fortunately, launch is still scheduled for just under forty-eight hours away. At least tentatively: first Lieutenant Kaleb Nordgren of the Air Force’s 45th Weather Squadron tells us that there’s a 40% rain will spoil the show on Sunday.
And there are bigger rain clouds hanging over the launch plans. A tropical storm is forming in the Gulf of Mexico, and it appears to be headed towards Houston, where mission control is based. If the storm were to turn into a full-blown hurricane, and Houston had to be evacuated, planers say that they would have to abandon the entire mission.
That’s a pretty big if, with the storm still so far out to sea (and pretty weak), but it didn’t stop us reporters from speculating wildly about it.
So here I am at my very first shuttle launch. The space shuttle Atlantis will be carrying a roughly 16,000 kg truss, complete with solar arrays, into orbit. It’s an essential part of the International Space Station (ISS), which will need the extra juice to keep growing. It’s also an important test in the return to normal shuttle flights, because it’s the first flight to resume construction of the ISS, something that ended after the break-up of the Columbia upon re-entry in 2003.
Mission planners are telling us that this is one of the most logistically complex shuttle flights ever attempted. For starters, that truss is heavier than any payload ever carried into orbit. Furthermore, assembling it will require three separate space walks.
Astronomers tear up textbooks over stellar nurseries.
In a complex Universe, astronomers thought they had at least one simple system to tell them how stars are born. Turns out they were wrong.
Read the story here.
Debate over tiny human’s evolutionary status is set to rage on.
For the past two years, researchers have been hotly debating (and coming dangerously close to fighting over) whether the fossils of a diminutive hominin found in Indonesia are those of a previously unknown species. The publication this week of some long-standing doubts over the ‘hobbit’ fossils show the debate is far from over.
Read more here
Emma Marris heads to Budapest this weekend to attend the first European Chemistry Congress - a meeting whose goal is to promote cutting edge science, foster collaboration, and "enhance the image of chemistry". Join us here for daily diary reports from the meeting, from 27-31 August.
NASA’s shuttle Atlantis is due to launch at 4:30 p.m. EDT on Sunday 27 August – only the third launch since Columbia broke up in re-entry in 2003.
Geoff Brumfiel will be on the site and blogging here with live updates. So stay tuned this weekend for behind-the-scenes reports.
You can also catch up on the shuttle programme with our interactive special.
Tense debate ends with a definition of 'planet'.
Pluto has been kicked out of our Sun's planetary family by astronomers who voted today to define a planet by three criteria. It failed on one of them.
Read the story here.
Scientists and philosophers gathered in Helsinki last week for TransVision, a conference about 'enhancing' humans. Kerri Smith talks to Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, UK, about what's on the table.
Read the interview, complete with memory-enhancing drugs, implants, and 'virtue engineering' here.
Agreement reached, in principle, to release avian influenza data.
Researchers studying avian influenza say they have agreed to share data that were previously being kept behind closed doors — a move they hope will speed insights into the virus that threatens to spark a human pandemic.
Read the story here.
The final part of the planet definition resolution offered astronomers the chance to save Pluto fans from despair. If accepted, resolution 6A would make the planet (oops, of course I mean 'dwarf' planet, since Pluto is no longer a planet proper) the first of a new category of objects orbiting at our solar system's edge.
The vote was close: they had to count."If you’ve voting in favour of 6a, please stand with your little yellow card in front your heart," prompted the count's coordinator.
A little chaos later, the results were in. Verdict: 237 votes in favour, 157 [*] against and 17 abstentions. Pluto is, officially, "the prototype of a new category of tran-Neptunian objects".
But the resolution to name Pluto and the other 'dwarf' planets that will occupy this category "plutonian objects" was voted down. It was close. Very close. First we had 183 votes in favour. "Mr President, you’re going to love this," said the coordinator. "We have 186 votes against."
There was almost a vote to revote, after the incoming IAU president Catherine Cesarsky urged her colleagues not to leave the category nameless. "We will look a little stupid if we define a new category but have not given it a name," she warned.
It didn't happen. For now the new Pluto-like objects are to be known by nothing. But Ron Ekers, current president of the IAU, got the last laugh anyway. He pointed out that IAU rules allow the organisation to set up a body to decide a name for the category, without going having to go through the kerfuffle of a vote at a General Assembly. Maybe, just maybe, plutonian objects will be back.
That's it for now. Thanks for reading this blog. A proper news story will appear on the news@nature site shortly.
*An earlier version of this post said the number of votes against was 257. Thanks to the commenters who queried how this could mean the vote had passed. This was a typo -- the number of votes against 6a was 157. Jenny
At last, the vote. Astronomers waived little yellow cards in the air to indicate their support for resolution 5A - that's the one that defines planets, 'dwarf' planets and other solar system bodies. A few people waived their cards to vote the resolution down, a few obstained.
A moment's hesitation from the chair: "I believe the resolution is clearly carried."
Amazing! A decision! I wouldn't have predicted that at the week's beginning.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell dived under the table on stage to demonstrate where this left us. Out came a blue balloon - to represent the eight planets. A box of cereal and a stuffed Disney Pluto stood in for the 'dwarf' planets, then something lumpy for everything else, the small solar-system bodies.
Next, a vote on resolution 5B. Do we have classical planets, and 'dwarf' planets, giving us two classes of planets, with a total of 12 or more. This would make "planet" an umbrella term: out came an umbrella labelled "planets". What a photo opportunity.
Controversy courts this part of the definition because some astronomers don't like the idea that debris rings like the asteroid belt, and as found at the edge of our solar system, could harbour planets. They're counting the votes.
"We looked into the cost of electronic voting but dec the money was better spent on scientific meetings," quipped the chair.
They counted 91 in favour. The number against was overwhelming -- no need to count again.
"It’s clear that Res 5b is not passed," the chair reported. So, we have eight planets only. Pluto is out.
Will Pluto at least be allowed to give its name to a crowd of "plutonian" objects? That's what gets decided next. (Excuse my brevity, I'm trying to listen.)
Attendees were asked to amend the planet definition resolution, as printed in the newspaper. "You will need a pen or a pencil," said Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who is chairing the session. The audience duly rummaged in their bags. The changes were the addition of a few inverted commas for the category of ‘dwarf’ planets and a clarification on the situation of satellites.
Comments were taken, but no further changes were made to the first and main part of the resolution – that which defines planets, ‘dwarf’ planets and the rest. That was despite one man’s suggestion that “nearly round” and “has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit” required so much interpretation that the resolution had no meaning. “There is so much common sense in the resolution that I would propose to drop all the resolutions and keep footnote 1,” he said.
Oh yes, they laughed. Footnote 1 of resolution 5A, to remind you, stated that “The eight classical planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.”
A television crew, just before the ceremony started, was looking for a miserable American.
Pluto may be about to lose its planet status. Surely protecting this body's planethood would be a matter of pride for citizens of the United States? Pluto, after all, was discovered at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, by the American Clyde Tombaugh.
The astronomer the reporter asked in front of me said "no, not really". We've had lots of 'no's, the reporter replied. She then raised her voice to ask if there were any upset Americans in the area. Now, I did see someone waving a picture of Pluto the Disney dog somewhere near the front...
The final opportunity for astronomers to comment on the resolution to define a planet passed quietly. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a member of the IAU’s resolution committee who chaired one of the earlier meetings (blogged here), fielded a series of gentle questions. I eavesdropped.
One rather shy astronomer pointed out to Bell Burnell that moons now fell through the cracks of the resolution (version 4). Were they meant to count as ‘small solar system bodies’?
“He’s quite right. There’s a loophole in the drafting,” she told me afterwards. Satellites will be their own class of objects.
Otherwise, the debate has degenerated to the level of hyphens and commas. When the Resolution committee removed the hyphen from the “dwarf-planet” category of version 3, settling on “dwarf planets”, they created some ambiguity about whether this second category, which includes Pluto, were really planets or not.
One solution put forward this morning (see post IAU:invasion!) was to say “planetinos” instead of dwarf anything. But Bell Burnell said at lunchtime that that was out of the question. “We don’t introduce any new names at this stage, that’s out of the question”. The option tabled instead was the introduction of inverted commas around the dwarf, to give ‘dwarf’ planets. Personally, I can’t see how this is supposed to help*.
Despite the calm at her stand, Bell Burnell was uncertain whether the resolution, after final tweaks, would pass muster. "It's very hard to predict how it will go this afternoon," she said.
We're about to find out. The closing ceremony is beginning now, with some beautiful a cappella singing. The vote should be done by 4pm. (First we have to sit through votes on a few other uncontroversial resolutions.) I’ll post news as it happens.
*Update: the quotes, I have since learnt, are intended to go around both dwarf and planet to give 'dwarf planet', which makes slightly more sense.
What a madhouse. I was skipping down the stairs of the conference centre on my way to a 10.30am interview (not about planets) when I encountered a charge of scientists led by the esteemed Brian Marsden. “You’re the press,” one of his cohort noticed. “Show us to the press room.”
I retraced my steps. Marsden had, for many years, been responsible for cataloguing asteroids and other lumps of rock in his role as the head of the Minor Planet Center. He retired recently *, but made the invasion of the press room with youthful vigour. The battalion had an announcement to make.
Marsden held up an A4 sheet of paper, on it was written in very large letters the word planetino. “Planetino is what they say in the resolution is a dwarf planet,” Marsden proclaimed. The category of objects that is to include Pluto, he said, should be renamed.
Pointing to the ten or so astronomers straggling in behind him, Marsden said the proposal had support from representatives of Uruguay, Brazil, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Norway, Serbia and the UK – at least. The press room descended into a hubbub as reporters grabbed their notepads or leapt to their laptops. The press officers trying to run the show looked on, bemused.
“This is the ad-hoc international committee,” Brian Marsden told me. He wanted to replace “dwarf planet” with “planetino” to avoid the confusion about how many planets the solar system has, he said. I mentioned that murkiness earlier here.
The group were on their way to a meeting of IAU Division III, the official coordinators of planetary nomenclature, to put their proposal. And I ended up rather late for my interview.
* Correction: he is to retire today.