Nature Newsblog
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Report highlights native vegetables needing extra attention.
Ever snacked on bambara beans or lablab? If not, it may be because these vegetables are among the "lost crops of Africa" identified in a new report by the US National Academies.
Read the story here.
A costing for a giant sunshade in space shows that there are probably better ways to spend the money.
The leading economist Nicholas Stern has just handed us, in advance, the bill for the impacts of climate change: close to $4 trillion by the end of this century1.
And with perfect timing, astronomer Roger Angel of the University of Arizona has delivered the equivalent of a builder's estimate for patching up the problem using a cosmic sunshade2. It will set us back by... well, let's make it a nice round figure of $4 trillion by the end of the century.
Read the column here.
The Stern Review won't be the last word on the cost of global warming. But it has upped the stakes in the debate. Jim Giles reports.
He's a highly respected researcher and a former chief economist at the World Bank. He had a year and the help of more than 20 of Britain's brightest civil servants and academics. His work was commissioned by Gordon Brown, who controls Britain's budget and is likely to be the country's next prime minister. So could Nicholas Stern settle the debate about the economic impact of climate change?
Read the story here.
Servicing mission will keep telescope aloft until 2013.
NASA administrator Michael Griffin announced today that the agency will mount a manned mission to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Read the story here.
Virus from distant past may throw light on role of retroviruses in cancer.
Researchers in France have recreated a 5-million-year-old virus whose remains are now found littered across the human genome. The ancient virus could help us to understand how these genetic remnants contribute to cancer.
Read the story here.
Hybrid fossils in Romania add to story of ancient human pairings.
The idea that Neanderthals and early humans living in Europe may have interbred has been strengthened by a re-analysis of bones unearthed in a Romanian cave more than 50 years ago.
Read the story here.
New addition to the animal elite that can recognize themselves.
Elephants possess the highly cerebral ability to recognize their own jumbo reflections in mirrors, scientists have found.
Read the story here.
The United Kingdom's Stern report calls for investment into technologies and adaptation.
Today the UK government releases a report by chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern, on the financial costs of climate change, and the counter-costs of efforts to mitigate or adapt to the changing world. Here news@nature.com unpicks how this report differs from those that have come before, and why it is important.
Read the briefing here.
Physicists help a US basketball team get to grips with its new ball.
This year, the US National Basketball Association (NBA) is switching from using a leather to a synthetic, microfibre ball. The animal-welfare group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is thrilled, but basketball players complain that the new ball is slippery and doesn't handle as well as the old one.
Read the story here.
Microsoft co-founder withholds funding from radio telescope.
An ambitious radio array project that will join the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is running into money problems.
Read the story here.
Electricity from microbes could shield ships and rigs.
Ships, buoys, oil rigs and other ocean-bound steel objects can be protected from rust by plugging them into the seabed, says a team of Argentinian researchers.
Read the story here.
Mars rover unperturbed by potential software disaster.
Mars rover Spirit has quietly survived its own version of the millennium bug during its winter break.
Read the story here.
Commission’s proposals aim to avoid last-minute quota decisions.
Last-minute wrangling over European fishing quotas could be curbed by a science-based procedure proposed by the European Commission.
Read the story here.
The twin STEREO satellites, intended to take three-dimensional images of the Sun, launched successfully from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, just before 9 p.m. local time. The two spacecraft will now go into orbit about the moon, and gradually separate to take up their observing positions. They should be sending back images by December. Read news@nature's pre-launch story here.
Sometimes there is a sweet moment when staying to the bitter end of a meeting proves worthwhile.
And sometimes there is not.
That’s OK though, because I did learn about feng shui in fertility clinics based on a survey of patients. A board of baby photos, they found, is good. (It provides encouragement of babies to come, rather than a reminder of those that might not.) ‘Explicit visual aids’ in the ‘semen production room’ also get the thumbs up for providing encouragement.
I almost didn’t make it to the meeting’s end -- but for a free sugar-boosting sample of prenatal vitamins cleverly transformed into chocolate and caramel chews. Yum. Wish I’d known about those when I was growing my own embryo.
That’s it from reproductive medicine. I have to go back to dealing with the consequences of reproduction instead: an 18 month old toddler.
IVF has many flaws, but a new one to me is that it skews the sex ratio. A lot. Normally in the US, just over 51% of babies born are boys and 49% are girls – and apparently there has been a worldwide trend in recent years towards fewer boys. (Is a global boy shortage approaching? Panic.)
Could IVF be contributing? The team at Montefiore Medical Center in Hartsdale, New York, found that only 41% of babies born after IVF were boys and 59% were girls, in their clinic at least.
The team suggests that stress during the procedure of IVF (which is intrinsically stressful) could prevent male embryos from implanting or surviving.
There have been various studies before showing that stressful situations tend to favour the birth of girls, such as war, earthquake, starvation. For some reason, male embryos are less likely to survive stress in the mother’s body. No doubt there is some evolutionary advantage to this that I am too ignorant to know about.
An aside. I’ve just realized that virtually everything I’ve written about has been from clinics in New York. Clearly it is some kind of reproductive biology research mecca.
On this week's Nature Podcast hear about giant terror birds, the honeybee genome, the Neuroscience 2006 conference, monitoring North Korea's nuclear materials, connecting brains, and how biodiversity affects ecosystems.
This week's topic for discussion: will the genetic sequence of the honeybee offer insights into human sociality?
You can find out more about the honeybee genome in our special video web focus
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Dawkins's attempt to test the existence of God is as silly as using logic to tear down Santa Claus in the eyes of a child, says Henry Gee.
In his book Unweaving The Rainbow, Richard Dawkins boasts (boasts!) that he told a six-year-old that Father Christmas doesn't exist. His logic was purely scientific - there wouldn't be time for Santa to reach the homes of all the good children in the world in one night.
Read the column here.
The pong from handling iron or copper comes from your own skin.
Why does metal smell? Chemists have found a surprising answer: it doesn't.
Read the story here.
Around the world, researchers are being harassed, imprisoned and murdered.
Six medical workers are on trial in Libya, facing the death penalty for deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV, despite the fact that international experts say there is no evidence of their guilt (see 'A shocking lack of evidence').
Read the story here.
Fossil find reveals 'terror bird' was fast on its feet.
An ancient meat-eating 'terror bird' discovered in northern Patagonia has a record-breakingly large head — but the big beast could still sprint for its prey.
Read the story here.
Mouse study suggests stem-cell work could be made more efficient.
US researchers say they have improved the technique by which stem cells can be coaxed from an embryo without harming it.
Read the story here.
“You can’t just do things with people’s tissues without talking to them about it,” said UK stem cell expert Peter Braude this morning. This, to a participant who asked whether it was OK to take embryos which women had given their permission to discard, and use them to extract stem cells. Ethicists must be squirming.
Many of these people spend their time trying to get their hands on eggs and create embryos. So it was refreshing to hear Braude talk about how to do this ethically, even if he did it at a galloping pace.
Braude said he was troubled by one proposed way to get embryos for stem cell research. The idea is to identify IVF embryos that are defective in some way (because genetic tests have shown that their chromosomes are abnormal). These embryos are not considered fit to replace into a woman, but maybe they could be used for research.
Braude points out that many of the cells in this embryo may actually be genetically normal and that the embryo might continue to develop normally – so it is difficult to argue that they are good enough for stem cell research but not good enough to form a baby. “I’m unhappy about the idea that we can declare embryos unfit for therapy but suitable for research,” he said.
This whole topic “is not uncontroversial,” he said, with typical British understatement
What are the limits of an embryo’s powers? Scientists seem to marvel at how cells from early embryos can do remarkable things – and indeed, it is astonishing that they can grow an entire new person from a single cell.
I chatted to one researcher who has tested whether the first two cells in an embryo are the same -- or whether, after this very first division in the dawn of the embryo’s life, one cell is already headed towards one fate and the other has a different cellular career in mind. There’s actually quite a debate about this amongst developmental biologists.
Jiying Hao separated the two cells of mouse embryos and tested whether both cells could grow into a line of embryonic stem cells, or just one of them could. She found only two cases, amongst many attempts, in which both cells produced stem cells – compared with numerous cases in which one cell could and the other could not. So even at this stage, the two cells seem to have different aptitudes.
For more weirdness, you can count on fertility doctor Panos Zavos, who regularly courts controversy. He had a poster up (and a recent paper) in which he stretched embryos even further, although I couldn’t find anyone to talk to about it. The team took two cell mouse embryos, split them in half and let each half grow into a new two-cell embryo. Then they split them again and repeated. And again. At each stage, they tested whether some of the embryos were able to develop further.
After the first split, 74% of cells grew into new embryos. But after each subsequent split, less of the cells were able to grow into a fresh embryo – as if their regenerative superpowers were slowly being sapped.
Hao struggled to tell me how her study could be used. Perhaps it means you can’t chop a human embryo in half (or in half again and again) and create artificial twins without consequences. Or something.
But I promised weird stuff with embryos and here it is.
Some numbers this morning made me think.
First, the cost of an egg. Sigal Klipstein wanted to know whether the $5000-$10,000 paid to women who donate their eggs in the US is too much. So she asked them how they spent it.
40% used the cash to pay back loans or debt; 20% saved it; 20% paid college expenses; 20% used it as a down-payment on a house. Klipstein concluded that these women were not being coerced into donating their eggs, because they weren’t using the money to pay for rent, food or to escape poverty.
Hmm. It seems rather convenient to find that the amount being paid is just the perfect amount to recruit enough egg donors without pressurising them into donating. I doubt this will resolve the debate about the appropriate price for an egg. (And anyway, some places pay extra for a more ideal egg – from tall, blue-eyed women with good exam scores.)
Second, the cost of embryos. One of the biggest problems in assisted reproduction is that of multiple births: there is pressure to place multiple IVF embryos into women (to boost the chances of a pregnancy); but this increases the risk of having twins, triplets or more, with well-documented health hazards for mother and baby. Some European countries have laws limiting the number of embryos transferred. There are no such laws in the US.
But maybe, as is so often in this country, economics will force the issue in the end. Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College estimated that health insurers would save around $7,000 per couple if they paid for IVF treatment (something hardly any do) and mandated that only a single embryo be transferred per cycle.
That’s because the costs of IVF would be far outweighed by the money saved on intensive care needed for sick newborns from multiple births. And it would save all those people from mortgaging their houses to have a baby.
STEREO to create 3D images of solar explosions.
A pair of solar satellites are due to lift off Wednesday in an effort to provide researchers with their first three-dimensional images of the Sun's surface.
Read the story here.
Unpicking the problems of infertility may help guide treatment.
A battery of genetic tests might soon foretell which women are more likely to become pregnant by in vitro fertilization (IVF) — and which are more likely to face problems and disappointment.
READ THE STORY HERE.
You know you’re at a meeting attended by lots of doctors (the medical kind, rather than research scientists) when (a) most people wear suits and (b) the cookie supply is constantly replenished during break. Oh, and the water fountains are sponsored.
More from the fringes of reproductive medicine. (I know I haven’t delivered yet on the weird things that doctors do with embryos, but that will come I’m sure.)
Women who are born as heavy babies are more likely to go gray early (in their 20s). Author Lubna Pal of Albert Einstein College of Medicine said she is a bit embarrassed to even present the study. She originally wondered if women who hit the menopause early also tend to show other signs of aging, such as gray hair, and whether this premature aging was somehow established in the womb.
But what actually fell out of her analysis was the larger baby, grayer hair connection. One rather unsubstantiated idea behind this link is that heavier babies have higher insulin levels -- and that over the years this causes more oxidative damage to many cells including those that manufacture our hair dye. (There are previous links between early graying, heart disease and bone health.)
If gray hair is really an indicator of past and future health, it might help explain our obsession with covering it up.
This evening I met someone who teaches medical clowning. My eyebrows shot up too. But Shevach Friedler and his friend (the clown) teach other clowns how to cheer up ill people.
And this is relevant to reproduction because…? Because he presented a study showing that 15 minutes spent with a medical clown after an IVF cycle bumps the pregnancy rate from 20% to 36%. Which must be about the same as knocking a few years off a woman’s age.
Obviously I asked what the clown does. (I was hoping for a video presentation and a quick fertility boost, but no luck.) Friedler said it took three months to find the best routine. Red-nose clowning didn’t do the job for young, infertile women. So the clown dresses like a chef, does magic tricks and makes jokes, presumably the kind that young, infertile women find funny. I’m still struggling to think of examples.
Supposedly the clown reduces the stress that afflicts women undergoing IVF, or somehow tickles those embryos into staying put.
Statins used to lower cholesterol may also ease inflammation caused by smoke.
Cholesterol drugs called statins could protect smokers from some of the lung damage inflicted by their habit, a team of researchers report today.
Read the story here.
Fat could send the wrong signals to sick cells.
Too much fat on your frame can be a recipe for health problems, including an increased risk of cancer. Now researchers say they might know why: fat cells, they say, seem to send out signals that stop tumour cells from dying.
Read the story here.
“It’s like three jumbo jets packed with pregnant women going down every day.” Now that’s the way to get attention.
Herbert Peterson, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, was talking about the half a million women who still die every year from pregnancy and childbirth in the developing world. Another 8-9 million become sick.
So much of this meeting seems to focus on ways to help women who want to get pregnant and cannot – and yes this is important. But when you consider reproduction on a global level, infertility is only a small part of the equation. In many places, poor women are still having too many babies, in bad conditions and they don’t have much choice about it.
The world’s population is expected to rocket to over 9 billion by 2050 and all of this will happen in the poorest countries in the world. Women and children die or fall ill because they don’t have access to contraception or clinics.
People like Peterson advocate that all women should have a right to choose when and how many children they want to have, and that this would go a long way towards solving the planet’s ills. But the solutions involve strategies and capacity and infrastructure, all those words that always seem rather vague and impossible to achieve.
NASA keeps its cash as X-Prize Cup fails to find a winner
It was a showcase of high-tech space technology, but this weekend's X-Prize Cup was cursed by mis-directed post, mis-measured competition equipment and entrants that nearly blew away in the wind.
Read the story here
Last week, Icelandic authorities announced that they would resume commerical hunting of minke and fin whales; over the weekend they made their first kill. News@nature.com takes a look at the issue.
Iceland has had an on-again off-again relationship with the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which instigated a moratorium against commercial whaling from 1986.
Read the briefing here.
I’ll be blogging from the meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine – in a nutshell, strange stuff that doctors do with embryos.
For a society largely devoted to helping people have babies, the opening ceremony didn’t bode well. The only toddler member of the audience (who is, after all, what many of these people spend their lives trying to produce) drew disapproving glances when he became bored and whiny. I thought it was understandable: 30 minutes in, the suits of the society were still slapping each other on the back and giving each other awards. Perhaps like me, the toddler was wondering where the science is?
The science didn’t appear – and the kid was lucky enough to be carried out on the verge of a full blown tantrum. I stuck out the rest and was at least rewarded with some New Orleans gospel and the sight of doctors uncomfortably forced to join in.
Almost total relief of symptoms tempered by hints of cancerous side effects.
The symptoms of Parkinson's disease have been relieved in rats using a stem-cell treatment. But a potentially cancerous side effect might put the brakes on such therapies for humans.
Read the story here.
A wet weekend may be enough to set off an earthquake.
A spate of rain is all it takes to set off some earthquakes. That's what a team of German geologists has discovered after monitoring swarms of tiny tremors in the mountains of Bavaria.
Read the story here.
Helen Pearson finds out the latest from scientists devoted to making embryos. Read her diary reports from New Orleans, Louisiana, from 22-25 October, here in our newsblog.
Results show increased health risk for computer factory workers.
A paper suggesting that IBM factory workers are at higher risk of contracting cancer has been published after more than two years of controversy and a court battle.
Read the story here.
Space elevator games kick off on Friday.
An airfield in New Mexico will this weekend host a celebration of space technology: the second annual X Prize Cup games.
Read the story here
Radar images dash hopes for Moonbase water supply.
If hopes of colonizing the Moon are ever to become reality, water needs to be found there. Sizeable amounts of ice could provide Moon-dwellers with drinking water and, if they split it into its atomic components, hydrogen for fuel and oxygen to breathe. If lunar water is scarce, colonizers would have to carry water and fuel with them from Earth, or perhaps extract hydrogen from the rocks, either of which could be hugely expensive.
Read the story here.
This week I've learnt about Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS and Huntington's. Then there was autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. I've blogged on suicide and child abuse. So it's some relief to end the conference blog with a poster that has the excellent title of "No disease in the brain of a 115-year-old woman".
Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper pledged to donate to her body to medical research in 1972. Almost 30 years later, at the age of 111, she wondered whether medical research still had any interest in her body. So she called the University of Groningen, near where she lived in the Netherlands.
Gert Holstege, a neurosurgeon at the university, released that van Andel-Schipper presented a rare opportunity. He popped round and they chatted about politics and van Andel-Schipper's favourite soccer team, Ajax. She appeared totally alert. Cognitive tests later placed her in the range of performance associated with a 50-70 year-old. So when she died of cancer at 115, Holstege was able to study her brain to answer an intriguing but hard to answer question: do humans inevitably develop some form of brain disease as they age?
Van Andel-Schipper's brain tells us that the answer is no, at least up to age 115. Her brain was almost totally undamaged. In fact she was in remarkably good shape overall, says Holstege, and could have lived for several moer years if she hadn't developed cancer.
In this week’s Nature Podcast discover galactic rings of fire, methane worms and mud volcanoes, the origin of the ground beneath our feet, Darwin online, and hear the latest analysis on the US mid-term elections and Iraq war death toll calculations from our news team.
THIS WEEK'S TOPIC FOR DISCUSSION: In the US has science been manipulated to meet political agendas?
This week discuss this issue on Nature's Newsblog. See our US mid-term election 2006 special for more.
To SUBSCRIBE to the Nature Podcast for FREE copy and paste this URL into iTunes or your preferred media player or RSS reader: http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/rss/nature.xml
The 7 November 2006 US mid-term elections will decide who holds all seats in the House of Representatives, a third of the Senate seats, and 36 governorships. As Democrats and Republicans war for the hearts and minds of their voters, is science playing a role? And what are the science-based arguments taking a front seat in the debates?
Find out in our special.
Are you a working scientist, and would you vote for someone based on their science policies alone? What if a candidate puts the environment ahead of the economy? Would a positive attitude towards stem cell research outweigh, say, questionable policies on education? Tell us!
Targeting of larger fish makes populations prone to collapse.
Fishing makes fish populations more variable from year to year, and so more vulnerable to complete collapse, says a study in Nature this week.
Read the story here.
Learning the language of antibiotics could help fight superbugs.
By shuffling protein segments like words in a sentence, researchers have created what they hope is a language for finding potent new antibiotics.
Read the story here.
Multimillion-dollar facilities escape mostly unscathed.
On a quiet Sunday morning in Hawaii, astronomer Tom Geballe had just wrapped up his graveyard shift at the giant, 8-metre Gemini telescope. He had retired to the off-site dormitory and was settling in to watch some American football when he felt the ground begin to move. Quickly, he leapt into a doorframe and waited until the earthquake passed. "It was a good shake," Geballe says. "We realized immediately that we had to go back up the mountain."
Read the story here.
Can verbal abuse to a child can be as damaging in later life as some forms of sexual abuse? Apparently so. The signs of serious criticism and shouting can even show up as long-term changes in the brain, according to a study presented here.
Martin Teicher of Harvard Medical School says he was motivated to study verbal abuse after treating a patient with severe trauma symptoms. The patient said felt that she should not have been so scarred by her childhood, since she had “only been shouted at”.
The patient stuck in Teicher’s mind. When he saw four more people with similarly severe symptoms with a history of only severe verbal abuse he decided to look carefully at the problem.
He published an initial study this June, confirming that people who had been verbally abused as children show the same levels of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder as those who suffered other forms of abuse, such as witnessing domestic violence or being sexually abused by someone from outside their family (M. H. Teicher et al. Am. J. Psychiatry 163, 993-1000; 2006). That’s a problem, says Teicher, since people don’t normally take this sort of abuse so seriously. “We don’t look at what people say to their kids,” he notes.
By comparing the severity of the trauma patients’ symptoms with their childhood memories, Tiecher’s team also learnt that the frequency of the abuse was much less important than the degree to which parents criticized their child.
In a follow up study, presented on 17 October at the annual meeting of Society for Neuroscience, held in Atlanta, Georgia, the Harvard team show that verbal abuse appears to influence the development of areas of the brain that process sounds and language.
They looked 17 young people who reported having being verbally abused as children, and used magnetic resonance imaging to compare their brains to those of controls. Two auditory areas of the brain – the superior temporal and frontal gyri – were around 10% smaller in subjects who had been abused. Behavioural studies on the same patients revealed corresponding verbal memory problems.
Teicher says the results mirror those seen in people who have been sexually abused, where victims suffer defects to visual areas. That work has revealed that the abuse generates more severe problems if it takes place before puberty, and Teicher now wants to see if a similar sensitive period exists for verbal abuse.
But the major question, he adds, is whether the damage can be reversed. Teicher doubts whether the anatomical deficits can be turned round. But he wants to assess whether different types of therapy, such as that used to treat PTSD patients, can alleviate some of the trauma symptoms associated with verbal abuse.
Posted on behalf of Jim Giles