Nature Newsblog
« October 2006 | Main | December 2006 »
Male deer with better sperm invest in male offspring.
The fertility of male red deer helps to determine the sex of their offspring, say biologists in Spain. The best-quality sperm tends to father sons, while the less healthy sperm tends to lead to daughters.
Read the story here.
Rainfall events and floods are getting more intense.
India is having to cope with more frequent extreme weather events, and the densely populated subcontinent may see even more in future.
Read the story here.
Established forests may continue to increase soil carbon stores.
Old-growth forests can keep on squirreling away carbon from the atmosphere long after they have reached maturity, a study suggests. The discovery runs counter to the theory that established forests, although valuable stores of carbon, will not help to alleviate the greenhouse effect because they are already 'full' of carbon.
Read the story here.
States and the Environmental Protection Agency argue over regulation of emissions.
The Supreme Court of the United States yesterday heard a potentially pivotal case on climate change.
Read the story here.
Surprise El Niño soothed this year's hurricane season.
2006 was supposed to be a rough year for Atlantic hurricanes. Coming on the back of the devastating 2005 season — which saw Hurricane Katrina ravage the US Gulf Coast and forecasters run out of alphabetized names for storms — both researchers and the public were braced for an above-average season.
Read the story here.
Freezing medieval weather linked to diminished ocean current.
The Gulf Stream — the ocean current that helps to bring warm weather to much of the North Atlantic region — was significantly weakened during the period known to historians as the Little Ice Age, new research reveals.
Read more here
I wandered into a session today and was confronted by a video of an orangutan chomping on a nut.
This wasn't what i expected at a materials science conference. How foolish of me, this meeting has it all - I should have realised that. Analysis into the toughness of nuts and why orangutans can't crack certain types (i missed the start of the talk so actually what kind of nut it was will remain a mystery), someone trying to recreate an elephant's trunk using robotics, as well as some hard core chemistry (which pleased me - lots of pictures of molecules) for photovoltaic solar cells.
There's a notice board here acting as a matchmaker for lonely research groups. It's the Research Collobaration Center.
The idea is to get like-minded collaborators together, and to provide a forum for that to happen. But so far i don't think anyone knows it's there because there was only one message pinned on the board. From Cisco Systems. Seems an ideal opportunity for a researcher who's maybe having difficulties getting funding to grasp to me. Come on materials scientists, let's get matchmaking!
It's obvious - nanoscale devices need nano amounts of power. I'd just never thought of it before.
Zhong Wang pointed out this blindingly obvious point today. He's also got a way of making little pockets of power by prodding an upstanding nanowire with an AFM tip and bending it back and forth. This does alsorts of things to the potential between the metal tip and the piezoelectric semiconductor zinc oxide nanotube, which ultimately causes a disharge of power. Piezoelectric materials, if you didn't know, can generate a voltage in response to mechanical stress. Nanorobots inside the body could then use muscle power to create their own power, which is a cool concept.
Wang also coined a new phrase, only yesterday, he claimed. Nano-piezotronics. Wow. What does that mean? It means harnessing piezoelectric principles to make electronic devices - diodes, transitors etc.
And to go back to the tiny power generation, Wang reckons that developing his system could lead to shoes that power soldiers. Or at least that's what the picture looked like. I think i misunderstood and what he means is the movement of a soldiers' foot in a specially designed shoe could be used to generate power on the nanoscale.
Antique violins may have been chemically tuned.
Simple pest control techniques may have given rise to the greatest violins ever made. Biochemists say the key to the instrument's sweet sounds come not only from their construction but also from chemicals used to treat wood.
Read the story here.
Insects and fish emerge intact from uplifting experience.
In northern China there are flying fish and flying ants like you've never seen before. Scientists at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian have used sound waves to levitate these and other small creatures while they are still alive, without causing them any apparent harm.
Read the story here.
Women beat men at the task of being attuned to a familiar face.
Women are more attuned to the subtle non-verbal communication made by the direction of a colleague's gaze, according to new research.
Read the story here.
People really do seem to have a unique odour that marks them out.
There are many good reasons to believe that we all have our own unique smell. Dogs, for example — as pets or police sniffers — seem to be able to distinguish individuals by their smell. And the mother-baby bond is cemented by their own distinctive odours.
Read the story here.
The mysteriously titled symposium X happens each lunchtime, and gets a huge crowd because it serves pizza.
Today’s talks included one by Gregg Zank, vice president of Dow Corning – the silicone company. He was talking about innovation being fuelled by advanced materials. Zank spots trends and then suggests needs that emerge from that trend that require innovative thinking to solve. So taking data storage for example, Zank saw a trend for mass archival storage – calling it WORN – write once, read never. The materials innovation needed to get away from this, he said, was a holographic data storage material that can be easily read,-re-read and added to. It’s light-sensitive, and contains a dispersion of monomers and polymers, randomly distributed in the dark, but in light the polymers and monomers separate and set up a refractive index differential, and this, somehow, can be used to store data.
Even more cool was a material for an active protection system – a body armour for old people to stop them breaking bones when they fall, or for pesky kids who fall off their skate boards.
An acrylate backbone polymer of silicone was the innovative material Dow developed to help improve L’Oreal’s Stay Beautiful lipstick. It can last for 16 hours and withstand all those lip-based activities one might indulge in. Like eating free pizza.
A giant carbon nanotube made out of black balloons is being built here. And i helped make it! It's been the highlight of my day.
Wendy Crone from the University of Wisconsin Madison made the original giant tube that was 40 feet high, and a shorter version (restricted by the ceiling height) is being built by a local balloon artist Todd Neufeld.
The model is usually taken round museums. Crone told me that trying to explain nanotechnology to people was made tricky by the fact that you can't see things on the nanoscale. So she decided to go big. Huge, in fact. And balloon-y. Genius. Neufeld, originally an engineer, has just started studying for a materials science course, although i'm not sure how much that has to do with the balloon tube.
AIDS set to become world's biggest problem disease.
AIDS will become the world's most burdensome disease by 2030, according to predictions released today. Its predicted rise, which will overtake today's top problem of poor perinatal health (such as low birth weight), is being blamed on many countries' failure to impose proper prevention measures since the pandemic was first revealed.
Read the story here.
There was the second annual hydrogen fuel cell car challenge today. Kids from local high school kids built and raced their own hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars. Wow, I thought. Teenagers are developing materials to make a new generation of fuel cells. Are we on the edge of the hydrogen revolution after all?
I was even more impressed when I saw the bits of kit they were using – balloons, string, a few drinking straws and a bit of blue-tack.
It seems I was a little naiive, and maybe slightly over-estimating the state of technologies in US schools. The fuel cell and a motors were provided to the entrants in advance. This means that the real challenge is one of engineering a lightweight and speedy car. Still, that’s no mean feat, especially when each team only received the cell and motor the day before. These cars were whizzing along their race track, which must be about 10 metres long, in a matter of a few seconds. And the teams still had to work out how to harness the power from the fuel cell.
One of the early favourites during the heats showed me his car and explained how the cell hydrolyses water to hydrogen and oxygen, which was stored in two syringes and these were used to charge a motor. Others were storing the gas in balloons and some had wheels made of old CDs, like huge dragsters, others were tiny little things the size of your hand.
The final was a tense affair, one of the teams disappeared to charge their car again, then the finish line judges disappeared as well. But the background sound of a Harley revving it’s engine kept us all entertained while we waited. And they’re off! The winning car came in at a track-record beating 4.32 seconds. Well done Norwell high school.
It’s a bit disappointing to see how male-dominated the teams were. But at least the winning team had a couple of girls in it. I was impressed by the grasp of the science that must be needed to understand and build these little machines and it’s a shame that the kids didn’t get more support from the rest of the meeting attendees. But with umpteen parallel scientific sessions going on at once, dipping out to re-live your meccano-esque childhood is a bit of a luxury I suppose.
New technique could reduce the need for painful breast biopsies.
A new ultrasound technique could help to tell a benign lump in the breast from a malignant tumour, reducing the number of painful and expensive biopsies carried out.
Read the story here.
The death of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko has highlighted how long it can take to diagnose a poison. Nicola Jones asks how hard can it be?
You'd think, in this day and age, that diagnosing the culprit in a suspected poisoning wouldn't be that tricky. Bang the symptoms into a database, plug the blood into a mass spec and spot the toxin.
Read the column here.
The Queen of pop was right when she told us we're living in a material world. Madonna herself isn't here at the Materials Research Society's fall meeting in sunny Boston, but it's obvious that materials science (which seems to mainly mean nanotech) is absoulutely everywhere.
Want better memory storage from your CDs? Then use materials science to build clever patterened surfaces for the discs.
Want to build a brain? You could do worse than going along to the session about interfacing silicon with neurons. And how about this one: mapping nanoscale displacements during loading of human teeth. What can it mean?
I have even had an invitation to go and hear how nanotechnology can save the National Grid. I am intrigued...
Join Katharine Sanderson at the Materials Research Society fall meeting in Boston. She'll be blogging here from 27 November to 1 December.
Thunderstorms on the giant planet may cause puzzling streaks in its rings.
The mysterious spokes in Saturn's rings may be created by massive thunderstorms in the planet's atmosphere.
Read the story here.
Genetic analysis turns up three new species.
The number of known species of the mouse lemur, the world's smallest primate, has increased by 25% with the description of three new species, bringing the total to 15.
Read the story here.
Breeding can repair a poor mutation in cultivated crops.
When ancient farmers first domesticated wheat some 10,000 years ago, they were trying to breed a crop perfectly suited to making food. But it seems that somewhere along the line, farmers unwittingly took out a gene that packs the plant full of goodness. Now researchers have found a way to fix that old mistake and put the nutrients back.
Read more here
Soils lacking sulphur may increase carcinogens in crops.
Not enough sulphur in the wheat can spell 'probable carcinogen' in the bun, according to new research.
Read the story here.
Lights, camera, pipette... online journal aims to put science in pictures.
Cemile Guldal pays attention to details. Her tattoo of a DNA double-helix, for example, doesn't wrap quite all the way around her right arm because doing so would have distorted the major and minor grooves of the helix. And that simply wouldn't do.
Read the story here
Stem-cell research uncovers the heart's foundations.
Researchers have uncovered a 'master' stem cell responsible for producing all the major tissues of the heart.
Click here to read the story
NASA scientists may give up hope on old craft, but welcome new one.
NASA scientists say they may have to bid farewell to a dear old friend — Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). NASA lost contact with the craft on 2 November as it was coming out from behind Mars, just five days before the tenth anniversary of its launch. The last they heard from it was a possible faint signal on 5 November.
Read the story here.
Surprisingly large segments of DNA found to differ from person to person.
Nearly six years after the sequence of the human genome was sketched out, one might assume that researchers had worked out what all that DNA means. But a new investigation has left them wondering just how similar one person's genome is to another's.
Read the story here.
Cosmonaut space stunt will put balls into orbit.
What would you do if you were taking a stroll in space? Take some souvenir snaps? Do some somersaults in zero gravity? Or perhaps you would practice your golf swing.
Read the story here.
On this week's Nature Podcast we develop a taste for synaesthesia, discover colon cancer stem cells and human genome variation, hear how your genes could help you conquer mountains, find out what tsunamis can do to coral reefs, and take a look at some real-time molecular movies.
THIS WEEK'S TOPIC FOR DISCUSSION: Creationism vs. Evolution correspondence - is Nature the right place for the debate?
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
Triumph and despair alter fishes' future behaviour.
You might be forgiven for thinking that fish have no personality. But according to biologists in Britain, not only do different trout have different characters, but these change as the fish experience life's highs and lows.
Read the story here.
International participants confirm their commitment to the ITER project.
What is ITER?
ITER is a giant, 5 billion (US$6 billion) machine designed to prove that fusion power can work. It will use magnetic fields to confine hydrogen isotopes and heat them to hundreds of millions of degrees Celcius. If all goes well, the isotopes will fuse together — producing some 500 megawatts of power in the process.
Read the briefing here.
UK museum's decision rattles researchers.
The origins of the small collection of bones that will soon travel from London's Natural History Museum (NHM) to Tasmania say much about why the journey has taken so long to come about — and is still so controversial. One skull comes from an unnamed Tasmanian aboriginal woman, shot by a white settler and later decapitated. The curatorial description for another set of remains notes coolly that: "There has been white settlement of Tasmania since 1802. The remnants of the blacks being removed from the island in 1831."
Read the story here.
It took nearly two weeks, but the results of one of the tightest Congressional races are finally out. Incumbent Rep. Heather Wilson, a Republican, has fought off Patricia Madrid, her Democratic challenger, to represent New Mexico's 1st congressional district in the House of Representatives. County election officials certified yesterday that Wilson beat Madrid by 875 votes -- in an election where roughly 211,000 votes were cast.
Nature profiled this race in its midterm election special because of two science issues: Wilson was one of many Republicans who split with President Bush over the issue of embryonic stem-cell research, and Madrid made climate change a major portion of her platform.
Looks like stem cells beat climate change for now.
The Fountain explores the roles of science and spirituality in understanding life.
A movie out this week in the United States seeks to explore mankind's persistent struggle against death, through a triple-stranded plot in three different eras. In The Fountain, Hugh Jackman plays a sixteenth-century conquistador searching for the fountain of youth; a twenty-first-century neurologist who's researching brain tumors because his wife has one; and a beatific astronaut in the future, who flies through nebulas in a more spiritual pursuit of the meaning of life.
Read the story here.
Engineered cottonseed has protein without poisons.
Researchers have genetically engineered cotton plants that produce toxin-free seeds, potentially unlocking enough nutritional content to feed half a billion people worldwide each year.
Read the story here.
But Nairobi conference leaves open the question of what happens after Kyoto.
A roadmap for the expansion of the Kyoto protocol, including ways to assist developing countries adapt to the effects of climate change, was reached at the United Nations climate-change conference that concluded in Nairobi, Kenya, this weekend.
But there was little movement on deciding what to do after the Kyoto agreement expires in 2012. Despite general agreement that global emissions need to fall drastically, all that the parties specifically decided upon in this regard was a comprehensive review in 2008 to focus on future commitments.
Read the story here.
Damaging wave hit after warnings were called off, despite accurate predictions.
When the tsunami hit California's Crescent City, harbour-master Richard Young was sitting in his office, gazing out the window at the 200-boat harbour. He wasn't surprised when the first surge arrived at around 11:30 PST on Wednesday morning — he'd been warned that it would come at about 11:38.
Read the story here.
New vaccine programme could rid the world of polio soon.
Polio has been making a comeback in India, but researchers say that a new vaccination campaign has a very good chance of finally eradicating the disease, by the end of the decade.
Read the story here.
Ancient supernovae show that mysterious force existed early in Universe.
Astronomers have determined that dark energy, a force that counters gravity, existed at least 9 billion years ago. And the mysterious force seems to have been much the same then, in the infancy of our 13.7-billion-year-old Universe, as it is today.
Read the story here.
American scientist reports setbacks at plutonium plant.
North Korea's plutonium production facilities are facing problems, says a prominent US weapons scientist who visited the country earlier this month.
Read the story here.
Must...keep...going...complete...mission.
Josh Bongard's robots walk, but they do not stride. They flop, wiggle, and scrape their way along on four, starfish-like legs. But what these robots lack in grace, they make up for in ingenuity.
Read the story here.
Gas guzzlers highlight need for new technologies.
An economic assessment predicts that the number of private cars on the world's roads will skyrocket from today's figure of just over 600 million to between 1.4 and 2.7 billion by 2050, doubling or quadrupling their carbon dioxide emissions.
Read the story here.
On this week's Nature Podcast we discover ways to treat muscular dystrophy and healing a broken heart, take a special look at secrets of synaesthesia, and have more on H5N1 mutations, Palaeolithic infant burials, and the quest for Neanderthal DNA.
This week's topic for discussion: Did humans and Neanderthals interbreed?
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
Dogs with muscular dystrophy walk better after injections.
An infusion of stem cells scraped from blood vessels has helped dogs with a form of muscular dystrophy to walk more normally, perhaps heralding a treatment for the human disease.
Read the story here.
Carbon nanotech may have given swords of Damascus their edge
Think carbon nanotubes are new-fangled? Think again. The Crusaders felt the might of the tube when they fought against the Muslims and their distinctive, patterned Damascus blades.
Read the story here
Policy experts call for measures to go even further.
Climate policy experts have cautiously welcomed the British government's newly announced plan to make drastic cuts to the country's greenhouse-gas emissions over the next half-century.
Read more here
As scientists debate the risks of nanotech, Philip Ball warns that the major impacts of emerging technologies have rarely been spotted in advance.
In today's issue of Nature, an international team of scientists presents a five-point scheme for "the safe handling of nanotechnology". "If the global research community can rise to the challenges we have set," they say, "then we can surely look forward to the advent of safe nanotechnologies."
Read the story here.
Giant quake generates alert but only small waves.
A gigantic magnitude-8.1 earthquake in Japan today triggered warnings of a tsunami and a call for limited evacuation, although the waves that hit land only measured tens of centimetres at their highest.
Read the story here.
Life may be the ultimate in planetary stress relief, a new theory claims.
The appearance of life on Earth seems to face so many obstacles — sourcing the right ingredients, for example, and arranging them into living things (while being bombarded by meteorites) — that scientists often feel forced to regard it as almost miraculous. Now two US researchers suggest that, on the contrary, it may have been inevitable.
Read more here
Erratic rains and water mismanagement cause death and destruction.
Monsoon rains in Asia are behaving ever more strangely, often with catastrophic effects, an Indian official has told climate experts at the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) meeting in Beijing.
Read more here
Reports claim up to 150 staff and visitors have been abducted.
As Nature went to press, agencies were struggling to confirm details of what may be one of the worst mass kidnappings since the Iraq conflict began in March 2003. At around 9:30 a.m. local time on 14 November, gunmen are reported to have abducted up to 150 academics, staff and visitors from an office of the higher-education ministry in the Karrada area of Baghdad.
Read more here
On Saturday, we were warned of a power outage that might occur in our hotel
between 9pm and 3am. How annoying, I thought. And how do they know in
advance about a power outage? When it came, it lasted but a few moments –
and blacked out just in time for a CNN report on the shooting of several
protestors in the Chinese province of…. (I don’t know. The power went out).
Coincidence?
There are a number of reporters here from the Chinese media, and I was keen
to find out how free they feel to write what they like, when they like. They
seem confused when I ask about this, which I am not sure is a result of a
cultural or language barrier or legitimate confusion about the notion that
they might be restricted. Then again almost all of the Chinese press here
are very young, for some reason – perhaps not old enough yet to have
developed a hard-nosed sense of cynicism.
PS – I pushed an ominous-looking button on my hotel bedside table today that
simply says ‘do not’ (I have been wondering all week what this would do, but
have been too afraid to try till the last day...). Sadly the answer is
rather mundane - but quite clever. It turns on a little red 'do not disturb'
light outside my front door. Ohhh...
That's it from me. See you at the next meeting.
One of my main goals here was to meet Chinese researchers: a rare
opportunity. But there has been a significant language barrier to this task,
which I confess I wasn’t expecting. I naively thought that the younger
generation of scientists would be chirping away in English over their
posters, but this hasn’t quite proven to be the case. For most, their
command of English is admirable – and infinitely better than their foreign
colleagues’ command of Chinese. But it is obvious at this conference, which
is almost entirely about forging communication links between different
research fields and countries, that language is still a barrier to those
goals.
Things are looking good for a Chinese project to attempt to find the oldest
ice in the Antarctic, according to presentations here.
The team aims to drill deep into the ice of Dome Argus (Dome A), smack in
the centre of the continent. This inaccessible site stands some 4,000 metres
above sea level and more than 200 kilometres from shore, and holds the
record as the coldest part of the continent, with average temperatures of
-58C.
A preliminary expedition there in early 2005 (see news in brief
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7026/full/433564a.html), which
entailed a dangerous 2-month round-trip tractor journey over crevassed ice,
extracted a trial 110 metre core from the top of the dome. This core has now
been partially analysed and helps to confirm a slow rate of snow
accumulation in the area: 1.5 cm/year on average over the last 10,000 years,
says expedition participant Xiao Cunde of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in
Lanzhsu. That compares to 2.1 cm/year at Vostok, for example, another famous
drilling site.
The result bodes well for the existence of very old ice at the bottom of the
more-than-3-km-deep cap of ice: it supports their previous estimate that the
ice could be more than 1 million years old, or possibly even 1.5 million
years old, Cunde told the meeting. The previous oldest samples have come
from the EPICA project, which has retrieved ice of some 900,000 years, and a
Japanese team may have million-year-old ice from Dome Fuji (see
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060123/full/060123-3.html).
Everyone in the 'polar' session seems excited by this prospect - both for
the science and because China is in the lead. Big Chinese Antarctic projects
are rare to say the least. But right now China may be the only country in
the world willing and able to mount such a massive logistical operation.
They're planning to return to Dome A to drill a 500 metre core in October
2007, and aim to build first a series of summer stations and finally an
over-wintering station at the site. I only wish I could go with them.
Tell-tale pattern of RNA expression could lead hunt for better treatments.
The pain of a love affair gone bad can cause a broken heart. And so can a type of molecule called a micro RNA, researchers report today.
Read more here
Compound in saliva could be more powerful than morphine.
A new painkilling substance has been discovered that is up to six times more potent than morphine when tested in rats — and it’s produced naturally by the human body. Natural painkillers are very rare, and researchers hope that this recent find might be harnessed as a clinical treatment.
Read more here
Democratic-led Congress could shake up funding for science agencies.
When the Democrats take control of Congress in January, they will also gain control over the nation’s purse strings. Scientists should take note.
Read more here
Toilet excavation could link site to Dead Sea Scrolls.
An ancient Jewish sect showed such devotion to their definition of purity that they pursued bizarre toilet habits that left them riddled with parasites, say researchers who have discovered and dug up their toilet.
Read more here
Kenyan talks stall over how to manage aid for coping with change.
Delegates at the United Nations climate talks in Nairobi are arguing over how to manage a fund meant to help developing countries cope with climate change.
Read more here
The upcoming IPCC working group 1 report highlights something interesting about global climate trends – the eastern United States is an anomaly. For a blob centered roughly on Alabama (and encompassing DC and the white house), things haven’t got significantly warmer between 1901 and 2005. It looks like the only other place in the world for which that’s true is over the water just south of Greenland.
In more recent years, the eastern US hasn’t fallen victim to warmer days (though it has seen warmer nights). The most significant change is that it’s wetter. More cloudy days over the capital might not be hammering home the message that climate change is real and the world is getting warmer…
Scientists here are concerned about data. In Africa, we heard yesterday, the amount of data from river gauges being sent to international databases has decreased by some 90% since 1990 – not a promising statistic given the vast importance of water flow to that continent. And today Kevin Trenberth of NCAR hammered home the potential upcoming problems with earth-observing satellite data.
Many such satellites, including ones monitoring solar radiation for example, aren’t accurate enough to produce absolute numbers. Instead scientists can really only trust the trend in the data. But that confidence dissolves as we switch from one satellite to another. Unless the satellites overlap, in which case you can reasonably compare one to another and carry the data set forwards, it’s difficult or impossible to compare the new data with the old.
Observations typically do overlap. But it isn’t guaranteed. Recent cuts may mean a gap in satellite records sometime around 2013 or so, he says. But they’re petitioning hard to fill that, and will hopefully succeed.
A designed DNA molecule lights up when it spots a pathogen.
Tiny machines that patrol the body for invaders are one of nanotechnology's favourite dreams. But a device made from a single molecule by a team of researchers in Israel sounds remarkably similar.
Read the story here.
Cancer vaccine harnesses similarities between embryos and tumours.
Embryonic stem cells, the controversial and versatile cells that seem able to do just about anything, have now expanded their repertoire into cancer prevention. A vaccine made from these cells shields mice against developing lung cancer under conditions thought to mimic the effects of smoking.
Read the story here.
Close ally of Tony Blair unexpectedly leaves post.
Britain's science minister since 1998, Lord Sainsbury, has unexpectedly quit his job. He has cited personal rather than political reasons, stating that he intends to pursue his other charitable and business interests.
Read the story here.
World summary of emissions reveals continuing gains.
Global carbon emissions are now growing by 3.2% a year, according to results presented at an Earth science conference in Beijing on 9 November. That's four times higher than the average annual growth of 0.8% from 1990-99.
Read the story here.
A digital atlas is being planned to map out the world’s water usage. There are already a handful of such projects, but this one plans to do it all (there’s a theme at this conference, of doing things bigger – I guess that comes of all that interdisciplinary research). It will – in an all-singing and dancing online format - show global maps of water in terms of how much is in the ground, how much rains down, runs off, gets drunk or sucked up for industry, how many dams and reservoirs there are, etc. etc. etc. (see a document about it here).
The issue is important, the presenter told meeting participants, because water use is skyrocketing. In the 1970s we ‘consumed’ 1,300 cubic kilometres a year. Now that’s up to 2,000. So that’s water, water, everywhere and some of it we drink.
Mike Raupach, of the ESSP’s global carbon project, confessed today that while he bought carbon ‘credit’ to offset his trip here for the conference, and he’s sure that the group he bought it from is legitimate, he doesn’t really, actually know how the carbon is counted up or if his trip is truly offset. I must admit that having recently bought my brother carbon credits for his birthday I faced the same problem. I’m pretty sure my money is going to the greater good of the planet, but exactly how I don’t know.
But if I don’t know, and he doesn’t know, then who does know? “Good question,” says Mike. Perhaps we all need some guidance on this.
The ESSP welcomes today a brand new project… in addition to ones on carbon, water and food security, they now have a tops-it-all programme on human health.
There are a handful of centres around the world that already look at the interactions between climate change and health. The difference here will be an even broader remit. No longer just concerned with how rising temperatures will shift pests from one place to the next, or how monsoon patterns affect mosquito booms and malaria outbreaks, researchers will also be looking at how biodiversity loss affects health. That’s a mind bender. If fish die out then I suppose the answer is clear – that means less protein and vitamins for someone somewhere. But what if we lose all our dung beetles? Or one variety of grass in Africa? Can the elimination of polar bears make us ill? We perhaps will soon know.
Experimental cystic-fibrosis treatment could be used in many diseases.
A drug that corrects the effects of a genetic mutation has produced encouraging results in tests on patients. The drug, PTC124, is designed to fool a patient's cells into producing a functional protein, even though that protein's gene is mutated.
Read the story here.
Committees likely to focus more on climate change.
After storming the US House of Representatives in the 7 November elections, the Democrats look likely to also take power in the Senate. They currently hold a 50-49 lead over the Republicans, with a tight race in Virginia the key.
Read the story here.
Sea urchin genes reveal surprising similarities with humans.
Researchers have determined the genetic sequence of the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus. Spines and sushi aside, Helen Pearson investigates what researchers find to like about these creatures.
Read the story here.
from the Earth System Science Partnership conference - see blog page here.
Vice Premier Hui Liangyu has just joined the conference attendees for dinner, to congratulate the scientists on their endeavour and to re-affirm China’s belief that “the planet Earth is the shared responsibility of all countries”. What a good thing to hear.
from the Earth System Science Partnership meeting - see blog page here.
To clear things up: the partnership was started in 2001 as a way to spur scientists across fields (from ecology to economy, geography to geophysics) to look not at humanity’s effect on planet Earth, but at planet Earth with humans as part of the overall equation. This shift is/was meant to bring clarity to understanding things such as the carbon and water cycles of the planet.
It sounds very Gaia-esque, and James Lovelock apparently once pointed to an ESSP document and said ‘looks like you’ve proved my theory’, says Will Steffen, one of the plenary speakers here and pro vice chancellor for research at the Australian National University in Canberra. But, he adds, ESSP research has shown many feedback systems that accentuate change, leading to tipping points past which the planet is a very different place, as well as Gaia-like feedbacks that serve to restore balance.
The partnership was born at the first Global Change Open Science conference in Amsterdam in 2001, at which they declared a need for more collaboration across fields, programmes, and countries. Five years on and they’re having their first meeting. Has it been a success?
Opinions here, from people high up in the organisation, range from “absolutely” (particularly in the area of carbon cycling, which many feel we have a far firmer grip on now), to “you can’t really tell – we didn’t do a controlled experiment in which we didn’t form a partnership”, to “well, we could have done better. It needs a kick-start again, really.” What everyone does agree is that it is good (even with the emissions from so many planes heading to Beijing) to meet up every now and then, especially for the younger scientists (ESSP has given grants to a number of bright young researchers who won a competition to be here and at a preceding conference). For some, it is their first time out of their native countries.
Having just had dinner at a table with researchers from Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa and the Netherlands, it is easy to see that this partnership is, at least, forging new international connections (even if the participants themselves don’t actually know what the ESSP is).
Eruptions confound the idea that our nearest neighbour is a geological dead zone.
Some think the Moon has been geologically dead for billions of years. But Peter Schultz of Brown University, Rhode Island, is not one of them. His results show that some lunar craters were formed as recently as 10 million years ago by gas eruptions, suggesting that there's still something bubbling away beneath the Moon's surface.
Read the story here.
from the Earth System Science Partnership conference - see blog page here.
The news on television at the conference hotel this morning went like this: CNN – all election, all the time. CCTV (China Central Television) – drought in Heibei, and a police crack-down on illegal oil smuggling, complete with the discovery of sand-bag-hidden pipes on the beach leading from ship to shore.
The environmental problems in China, well known internationally and of obvious interest to the local press too, were summarised nicely this morning by co-chair and director of the China Meteorological Administration Qin Dahe (who is, apparently, somewhat famous in China for his adventurous meteorological adventures in the Antarctic and on the Tibetan glaciers).
According to Dahe’s figures, cribbed from two Chinese volumes summarising climate change in China, temperature changes in this country mirror global patterns but have been more pronounced (particularly a rise in temperatures from 1920-1960 that sticks up prominently in China but is a statistical blip on the world map). Ditto sea level rise, which clocks in at 1-2.5 mm /year over the last 50 years, higher than the IPCC global assessment which is, I believe, about 1-2 mm/year.
Temperature increases of 3.9-6 C are expected by 2100. The good news – if you can call rainfall changes that bring floods and droughts good news – is a decrease in dust storms over the past 50 years, from 6 events a year in the 50s down to 3 events per year today.
Meteorological disasters, he told the press, take about 3-6% off China's GDP every year.
In response to such statistics, the Chinese government has announced a goal of reducing energy ‘intensity’ – the energy it takes to produce a unit of GDP – by 20% by 2010. That doesn’t necessarily mean an absolute reduction in CO2 emissions, as Dahe’s co-chair Gordon McBean pointed out to me later. But, he adds, it at least addresses part of the problem. (McBean, a science policy expert at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, had some things to say about Canada’s governmental response to climate change too – more on that later).
From the Earth System Science Partnership conference - see blog page here.
When my plane touched down in Beijing at 6:30am there was the most impressively depressing sunrise that I’ve ever seen: blood red pooling over a dark city, with dark high-rises poking up like tombstones in the gloom.
I’d expected Beijing to be dirty, this being one of the most polluted cities in the world. But surprisingly, come 10am a swift wind blew away the smog and the clouds and things were surprisingly clear.
Everyone here talks about the weather, and the pollution. And you get two sides of a story.
Most of the guests in the hotel are rubbing their eyes in complaint saying: “I was here two years ago and you really notice the difference. It’s much more polluted now.” But those who live here maintain that, this week at least, things are surprisingly and unseasonably clear and sunny.
Perhaps, they add, that’s just because Beijing last week played host to an African summit (this was a big deal – there are literally thousands of signs of welcome plastered around the airport and throughout the city for the delegates, including giant helium balloons, billboards and road-side banners). There were certainly traffic bans in place for the duration, and maybe some factories shut down too, some suppose, in order to leave the VIP guests favourably impressed by the weather. Or then again maybe it’s just the wind.
The Chinese Meteorological Association is playing host to this event, so hopefully I’ll get to find out…
PS – things can be odd here. There is a button on my bedside table, next to the ones saying ‘light’ and ‘tv’, that simply says ‘do not’ – I will wait for the last day until I push it.
The first ever conference of the international Earth System Science Partnership meets in Beijing this week to discuss global environmental change and how we can prevent and cope with it. Get behind the scenes with diary reports here from 9-12 November.
Find all the entries here.
Intelligent Design has been muscled out of the Ohio school board. The news came early this afternoon from Help Ohio Public Education (HOPE), an organization devoted to getting pro-evolution candidates onto the board.
Four out of five HOPE-endorsed candidates won their races. Particularly thrashed was Deborah Owens-Fink, the board's strongest intelligent design proponent. Owens-Fink’s opponent, former Akron mayor and Congressman Tom Sawyer, won by a whopping 42-point margin.
Also defeated was Michigan’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos, who endorsed intelligent design late in his campaign (see Nature 443, 615; 2006). DeVos lost to Jennifer Granholm, the incumbent Democrat, by a margin of 14 points.
This week's Nature Podcast eyes-up retinal repair and matters of perception, takes a light-hearted look at what The Sun newspaper has to say about the history science, and has more on spicy spider bites, Himalayan earthquakes, and sleep and memory.
Listeners are invited to open this week's topic for discussion.
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
Antarctic ice-drilling reveals linked cycle of warming and cooling.
Researchers trying to understand sudden, seesawing changes in the Arctic's prehistoric climate have found some answers in an unusual place: buried in the Antarctic ice, half a world away. Their work could help to predict the future consequences of sudden polar warming.
Read the story here.
Embryo results prompt editorial note in Science.
Nature, which publishes a Corrigendum on research from 1993 in this week's issue (see 'Data handling causes image problem for top lab'), isn't the only leading journal to put out an editorial note in recent weeks. On 27 October, Science printed an 'expression of concern' about a developmental-biology paper published in the journal in February. The short statement said that "there is an ongoing investigation of this study by the University of Missouri", home of the research team, and that "the results reported therein may not be reliable".
Read the story here.
Study suggests newborn cells best for transfer.
Using a technique that may one day help blind people to see, researchers have shown in mice that retinal cells from newborns transplanted into the eyes of blind adults wire up correctly and help them to detect light.
Read the story here.
All change at the head of Washington's science committees.
While the balance of power in the Senate remains undecided, pending a probable recount in Virginia, the 7 November US elections swept the Democrats back into the majority of seats in the House of Representatives. What do the changes really mean, and what will the Democrats do next? Nature takes a look at the politicians old and new who, starting in January, will be running the key House committees on science issues.
Read the story here.
America has voted, and the science-policy landscape for the next two years looks rather different. Here's a look at the results of some of the most important science-related elections Nature featured in our elections special report.
Read the story here.
A little light reading for election night: scientific papers on the very unscientific business of electing leaders:
This paper asks the question: would you vote for yourself if you didn't know it was you? "Transformed Facial Similarity as a Political Cue: A Preliminary Investigation"
This paper does an experiment to show how enthusiasm and fear in political ads might prove contagious: "Striking a Responsive Chord: How Political Ads Motivate and Persuade Voters by Appealing to Emotions"
Here's a technical treatise on predicting two-stage elections. "Modeling voter choice to predict the final outcome of two-stage elections"
This comment explores the idea that if it is harder to vote, you end up with a different kind of voter pool. "Barriers to Participation, Voter Sophistication and Candidate Spending Choices in US Senate Elections"
And here's a model of why midterm elections tend to boost party that doesn't hold the Whitehouse. "Loss aversion, presidential responsibility, and midterm congressional elections"
Happy election night!
Program learns languages by comparing documents.
Google has built an English translation tool for Chinese and Arabic texts — using a team that speaks neither of the two languages.
Read the story here.
Project aims for 7 million years of climate records.
Perched atop a thick ice shelf, scientists in Antarctica have begun drilling down into the frozen continent's deep history.
Read the story here.
Researchers' putsch plunges Zurich university into turmoil.
One of Europe's star universities nose-dived into crisis last week when its faculty members forced the president to resign.
Read the story here.
Mercury's crossing of the Sun leaves most pros unmoved.
Captain Cook left England's Plymouth harbour in 1768, bound for Tahiti so he could watch Venus pass in front of the Sun. He navigated across uncharted seas, arriving in 1769 to fulfil his mandate — to time the transit and so provide crucial data for calculating the size of the Universe.
Read the story here.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting 'what-if' story today (subscription required). If Democrats won every single election up for grabs today, would there be enough pro-stem-cell members of Congress to overturn President Bush's veto on federal financing for research on new lines of embryonic stem cells?
The short answer: no. A two-thirds majority of both chambers of Congress - the 435 total seats in the House of Representatives, and the 100 in the Senate -- are needed to override a presidential veto. Democrats led the faction voting against Bush's veto this summer, but plenty of Republicans also crossed party lines. But even given the bipartisan support for stem-cell research, the Chronicle analysis concludes that the voting records of candidates show that there simply aren't enough pro-stem-cell bodies to make the two-thirds overriding majority.
Looks like it'll be 2008 before there could be any major changes in stem-cell funding in the US.
Antibodies tagged with radioactive elements might provide a new treatment.
For decades researchers have wondered what it would take to eliminate the immunodeficiency virus HIV from a patient’s body. Now they think that radioactive antibodies might do the trick. Scientists from the United States and Germany have combined antibodies that seek out cells infected with HIV with radioactive payloads that can destroy them, as they report in the 6 November issue of PLoS Medicine.
Read more here
The fate of six health workers accused of injecting more than 400 children with HIV should be known before Christmas.
The verdict in the case of the six foreign health workers facing the death penalty in Libya will be announced on 19 December. The court in Tripoli set the date when the trial proper closed on Saturday 4 November.
Read more here
Potentially offensive names to be scrubbed from human genetics.
"How would you feel if you were telling a patient they had lunatic fringe mutation?" asks Sue Povey, who chairs the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) Gene Nomenclature Committee. It’s a rhetorical question: the answer is that no one should have to make such an announcement. And Povey’s committee is renaming a number of genes that have potentially offensive or embarrassing names so that in the future no one will.
Read more here
Report calls for cutbacks at key observatories.
With the release of a long-awaited report, US astronomers now have a hit list of observatories that may have to shut down to save the National Science Foundation (NSF) money in coming years.
Read more here
California politics always get an extra sprinkling of interest from all the earnest movie stars who feel that a career embodying unattainable glamour well equips them for thoughtful endorsement of people and propositions. This year, they have embraced the more or less scientific issues of the environment, stem cells, and alternative energy.
In the 11th congressional race between Richard Pombo, despised by greens everywhere, and Jerry McNerney, Mr. Turbine:
Campaigning for Jerry McNerney: Jennifer Garner, All-American TV actress and wife of All-American Box-Office-Poison Ben Affleck.
Carefully not campaigning for Pombo: Arnold Schwarzenegger, the lovable gap-toothed movie-star governor of California.
Endorsing McNerney: The quite shaky but still charming Parkinson's-afflicted actor Michael J. Fox, who dislikes Pombo's conservative stance on embryonic stem cells.
And…
Supporting Proposition 87, to collect $4 billion by taxing oil to spend on alternative energy: impressively-mouthed America's Sweetheart Julia Roberts, mob-movie regular James Caan and world's tallest fictional female president Geena Davis.
UPDATE: A call to the Yes on 87 office reveals that the following additional celebrities are behind the proposition: Robert Redford (the Sundance Kid), Leonardo DiCaprio (apparently soon to play Teddy Roosevelt), Alyssa Milano (TV crush of millions), Maria Bello (of Thank You for Smoking), Eva Longoria (of TV's "Desperate Housewives"), Jamie Lee Curtis (scream queen) and Ben Affleck.
Frankly, if I was trying to sell something, I wouldn't involve Mr. Affleck, gleaming as his teeth may be. He has been seen praising the initiative with Barack "So-hot-right-now" Obama, who I think needs to explain to us how he can be on so many campaign stages at once. Quantum teleportation? Cloning? Anyway, I have one cautionary phrase for the junior senator from Illinois about managing hype: Snakes on a Plane.
Flood of counterfeit chemicals is harming people and industry.
An industry body has issued a warning to European farmers buying cut-price pesticides for their fields: some cheap products, it says, could be a fake.
Read the story here.
A stimulating night's sleep improves recall.
Zapping people's brains with an electric current while they sleep might not sound such a good idea. But by boosting natural brain waves it can improve memory, as new work shows. This approach might one day help us learn better or provide new treatments for sleep disorders.
Read the story here
Things are really looking tight in Missouri, where state auditor Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, is running against incumbent senator Jim Talent for a seat in the US Senate. Many pollsters are tipping the race as the tightest of all Senate races for this election. That, in turn, makes it key for control of the Senate as a whole; if the Democrats pick up six seats in the Senate, they will have a majority and control the chamber. Pretty much everyone expects the Democrats to win back a majority in the other chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives, but the Senate still appears to be up for grabs.
Like a college student, McCaskill has pulled an all-nighter of campaigning. Early this morning she was stumping for votes in 24-hour diners across Missouri. Her opponent, meanwhile, is getting only slightly more sleep, and yesterday hosted President Bush in a campaign stop.
While the Senate race itself is neck-and-neck, Missouri's ballot initiative to protect embryonic stem cell research is looking in better shape. Polls suggest that the initiative is likely to pass, which would make any embryonic stem-cell research that is legal under federal laws also legal in Missouri. It sounds like a no-brainer, but it's meant to stave off recent challenges by conservatives in the state legislature who want to impose stricter limits on such research.
Looks like it will be a long night in Missouri next Tuesday.
With the House of Representatives looking like more and more of a lock for Democrats, what is a Republican staffer to do on a Friday night before the election? Joe Pouliot, communications director for Sherry Boehlert, head of the Science Committee, is at Tortilla Coast, a Capitol Hill "GOP staff hangout" according to the Washington Post. He says that since Boehlert had already announced his intention to retire, things have been quiet for a while. "Some people are helping out with other campaigns; other folks are sprucing up their resumes, or catching up on work." Pouliot says that from his ringside seat the one hot science issue in this midterm election has clearly been stem cells. "It has actually been a key issue in some races." I let the man go with no further shop talk. With the kind of midterm his party can expect, he deserves a margarita.
It's about time that this country hard-hit by AIDS promised help for the afflicted, says Apoorva Mandavilli.
HIV causes AIDS. That's not news to you or me, but shockingly it has taken years for the government in South Africa — where about 1,000 people die of AIDS every day — to acknowledge that fact and pledge to provide medicines.
Read the column here.
Seasonal illnesses could be down to lack of vitamin D.
The winter flu season could be the result of our reduced exposure to sunlight, according to a review scheduled to be published in print in Epidemiology and Infection1 this December.
Read the story here.
Time could be running out for seafood.
What's your favourite seafood dish? Seared scallops? Salmon sashimi? Grilled shrimp?
Read the story here.
36.5 °C may be the best body temperature for fighting ageing.
It has long been held that the ideal human body temperature is a snug 37 degrees Celsius. Our bodies stick rigidly to it when healthy, and high fevers can be deadly. But a new study suggests that 36.5 °C might be even better.
Read the story here.
Stem cells are a hot campaign topic in several key races in these elections, but one has to wonder sometimes just how much of a grasp the candidates have on the topic. On the highly regarded 'Meet the Press' television news program last weekend, the leading candidates for US senator from Maryland faced off on stem cells among other issues.
Republican Michael Steele and Democrat Benjamin Cardin both claim that they support stem cell research, but got into squabbling over whose support is the most morally upstanding. Steele has been running a campaign ad featuring his younger sister (and ex-wife of boxer Mike Tyson). She has multiple sclerosis, and says to the camera that her brother supports stem cell research.
But as Cardin pointed out, Steele has supported only research into adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. The conversation quickly devolved into bickering over who is the greater fan of stem cells, and why:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15473528/page/12/
It almost makes voters wish for the earlier days of the Steele vs. Cardin campaign - in which they argued over which of them loved puppies more.
Where the US government fears to tread, the town of Boulder, Colorado, will dive right in.
On Tuesday, city residents will vote whether to adopt a 'carbon tax' to offset emissions from residences and businesses in Boulder. The cost? A mere $22 extra for the average resident per year. By 2012, Boulder wants its emissions to be 7 percent below its 1990 levels -- itself following the Kyoto protocol the federal government has not yet signed.
Boulder is home to the University of Colorado, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and with its highly-educated and affluent residents is a liberal haven. And if previous elections are any indication, Boulderites are ready to adopt almost anything: Several years ago, the city passed a law making people who own dogs not dog owners ... but dog guardians.
Another thing the McNerney campaign has going for it is its heroic shot of the candidate in front of the turbines that he used to work on and that he hopes to make central to an alt-energy paradise in the district. See it here.
Windmills seem to be the requisite pose for politicos this year. See also Washington senator Maria Cantwell (in a tight race), Senator Menedez from New Jersey (ditto), Senator Ken Salazar from Colorado (presumably he's pointing to the future in this picture. He's not running this year.), Rep Tom Udall of New Mexico (last photo in slow-loading series. He's also pointing authoritatively and wearing a cowboy hat), and a rather artsy one from Texas Rep. Randy Neugebauer. I could go on and on, I really could.
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson mixes it up with solar panels (Richardson, by the way, is as safe as houses and might even run for president in 2008).
Rep. Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota has a slightly surreal series of alt-energy shovel shots, wherein he and some backup bureaucrats break ground on green projects in jaunty formation, including a windfarm, an ethanol plant, and two biodiesel plants (Scroll through his series to find them) He's the state's only representative, so I guess all the shoveling falls to him.
My favorite race this mid-term is between Richard Pombo, the Republican head of the House Committee on Resources, and Jerry McNerney, a novice Democrat. Pombo is the arch enemy of the greens, with his stances on revamping the Endangered Species Act and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge giving them the cold horrors. Come-from-behind McNerney is a wind energy consultant and math PhD.
They are fighting to represent California's inland 11th district. But as one of the tightest and most polarized elections of this blockbuster midterm, all eyes are on them—including the benevolent peepers of Bill Clinton, who was down to campaign with McNerney yesterday. But look out! The Republican's last lovable figure, first lady Laura Bush, is on her way in to campaign for Pombo.
On this week's Nature Podcast we cover rejuvenating resveratrol, retinoblastoma mutations, enforcing insect altruism, conservation strategies, E. coli's coat, cool quantum states, loose marsupials, and have a special on science and Islam.
For this week's topic for discussion see our Islam and Science special and check the Nature Newsblog
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
Classified data shows up in drug dealer's den.
Classified data from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first US nuclear-weapons lab, turned up last week at the home of a drug dealer in New Mexico.
Read the story here.
In many countries with large Muslim populations the pendulum of power is swinging away from secular (but mostly undemocratic) government back to where it was for many centuries: to Islamist regimes, and Islamic law. What does this mean for Muslim scientists and science? For a very long time, Muslim states have scored badly on measures of science and technology. Will things be any better or worse under the new Islamist governments?
Visit Nature's special on Islam and science.
Are you a native Muslim scientist, or part of the Muslim diaspora? What do you think needs to be done to improve the situation for scientists in the Islamic world? Let us know...
