Nature Newsblog
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This week the Nature Podcast watches the nervous system at work, discovers how to identify single atoms, and finds malaria's weakness.
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NASA flyby makes for pretty pictures.
NASA's New Horizons mission has swung by Jupiter on its way to Pluto, and taken a slew of photos and measurements.
Read the story here
Tiny transistor uses a single electron to turn off and on at room temperature.
The latest contender to succeed silicon's throne is graphene. It has been used to make a truly tiny transistor that works at room temperature, offering hope for making faster, smaller electronics devices once silicon reaches its limits.
Read more here
Tadpoles use a proton pump to direct tissue regrowth.
Tadpoles can achieve something that humans may only dream of: pull off a tadpole's thick tail or a tiny developing leg, and it'll grow right back — spinal cord, muscles, blood vessels and all. Now researchers have discovered the key regulator of the electrical signal that convinces Xenopus pollywogs to regenerate amputated tails. The results, reported this week in Development, give some researchers hope for new approaches to stimulating tissue regeneration in humans.
Read the story here.
Why is Wikipedia as good as it is? While the debate about precisely what level of goodness that entails has been heated, the free online encyclopaedia offers a better standard of information than many would have expected from a resource that absolutely anyone can write and edit.
Read more here.
Texan takeover may signal changes in the way America generates electricity.
Controversial plans for eight new coal-fired power plants in Texas look likely to be scrapped as part of a proposed buyout of Dallas-based electricity generator TXU Corporation.
Read more here.
Public consultation could suggest killing to control population.
As part of a package of measures to control its spiralling elephant population, South Africa is expected to propose an elephant cull in a document to be released on 28 February.
Read more here
Analysis of fossilized bones suggests milk-drinking mutations emerged after dairy herding.
When did ancient populations learn that drinking milk 'does a body good'? A team of scientists in Germany has tried to answer this question by studying ancient DNA extracted from skeletons thousands of years old.
Read more here
Indonesian physicists have started deploying chains of concrete balls in an attempt to stem the flow of mud in East Java.
For nine months Indonesian officials have been reacting to the torrent of mud that started erupting from a rice paddy in the village of Porong, East Java, with embankments and evacuations. This weekend they began experimenting with a new strategy for controlling the flow.
Read more here
Europe's Rosetta mission is still years from its cometary target, but has sent home some pretty pictures of Mars en route
On 25 February the comet-chasing spacecraft Rosetta used the gravitational pull of Mars to change its trajectory, guiding it on to a future encounter with Earth.
Read more here.
International Polar Year will feature more than 220 separate projects.
With contributions from 50,000 scientists in 63 nations, the International Polar Year, launched today, will be the most far-reaching investigation into the biology and geophysics of the Arctic and Antarctic ever mounted.
Read more here
Coatings make all the difference for splashing
A ball dropped into water can make a tiny plop or a huge splash, depending on what it's coated with.
Read more here.
Ice-shelf collapse offers glimpse of life beneath the South Pole.
Read the story here.
Greener film soundtracks win Academy Award.
As the film world awaits the tearing of envelopes at Sunday's Oscar ceremony, some are already clutching their Academy Awards. Among them are the 12 technicians who, in the name of reducing pollution, have de-silvered the silver screen for good.
Read more here.
Cycling cosmos obeys thermodynamics without ripping itself apart.
It has to be the closest ever shave. Two physicists have proposed that, a fraction of a second before a cataclysm that would destroy space-time itself, the Universe may escape by abruptly collapsing to a virtually empty state that 'resets' it for a fresh cycle of cosmic expansion.
Read more here.
Not all the correspondence to a top science journal contains top science. Some of it is very odd indeed.
Some institutions attract outlandish claims. Curators at London's Science Museum are used to meeting visitors clutching perpetual-motion machines — claims often undermined by the batteries attached to the device.
Read more here.
Muslim artists were 500 years ahead of western researchers.
The complex geometrical designs used centuries ago in Islamic art and architecture were planned with a tiling system that was not discovered in the West until five centuries later, two physicists have claimed.
Read more here.
Dating study suggests it wasn't the makers of the Clovis culture.
For decades many archaeologists have believed that the first Americans belonged to what is called the Clovis culture — hunter-gatherers who lived in parts of North America roughly 13,000 calendar years ago.
Read more here.
Wooden weapons are a first in animal kingdom.
Chimpanzees can hunt with spears, say researchers who have seen wild chimps in the grasslands of Senegal. The innovative apes fashion weapons from sticks to kill bushbabies.
Read more here
Drugs that target common infection might limit spread of AIDS virus.
Drugs that fight genital herpes also significantly reduce levels of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in patients infected with both viruses, a new study finds. Most HIV-positive patients also carry the herpes simplex virus, so anti-herpes drugs might help to restrict the spread of HIV.
Read more here
This week the Nature Podcast discovers new lakes under Antarctica, meets some rather clever blue-jays, finds an extrasolar planet and exposes fake science on TV.
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Far-sighted birds plan breakfast the evening before.
They might not pay into savings accounts or keep diaries, but western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) can anticipate and plan for the future, research published in Nature this week shows.
Read more here.
Large lakes in Antarctica speed up ice flow to the ocean.
Lakes under the Antarctic ice pack lubricate the flow of ice off the continent and into the ocean, researchers have found. The discovery has implications for our understanding of how the southern ice sheet will respond to climate change, and how this will contribute to sea-level rise.
Read more here
Moving satellites may have caused falling measurements of cloud cover.
Satellite evidence that cloud levels are decreasing could just be pie in the sky. The trend might simply be a result of where the satellites are positioned.
Read more here.
Embraces calm tension between rival gangs.
When British politician David Cameron advocated affection as a solution to antisocial behaviour and petty crime, his speech was mockingly labelled ‘Hug-a-Hoodie’. But no one realized that there is a precedent in the animal kingdom — spider monkeys in Mexico have been observed embracing to avoid gang violence.
Read more here
Local governments crack down on unorthodox views.
Many climate scientists get frustrated with those who don't believe that human activity is causing global warming, but should having such views be a sackable offence? In recent months, two US state climatologists have been asked to stand down from their posts because of it, triggering debate about whether personal views should determine suitability for what many see as an academic position.
Read more here.
It’s not unusual for Noble prize winners to put in an appearance at the AAAS meeting, but this year’s meeting also featured a few Oscar winners as well. In one of the final sessions of the conference, Doug Roble of Digital Domain, filled us in on some of the secrets of designing special effects for blockbuster movies.
Roble listed some of the ways that computer animators try to make their animations look realistic. They use satellite imagery and the latest atmospheric models, he said, and they’re always culling through scientific journals in search of new information. Still, the drive for scientific accuracy has its limits. “It doesn’t have to be totally accurate,” says Roble. “If it looks good, it’s right.”
“I would never ever fly in an airplane that had been designed using my animation,” he added.
Glancing through my notebook on the last day of the meeting, I was embarrassed to see page after page with flowers and odd geometric shapes sketched in the margins. But doodlers need not feel ashamed, says Mimi Lam of University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “Everybody does these things absent mindedly to think,” she says. Right – that’s why I did it. To think.
Lam has been looking at the quixotic carvings on ancient hominid artifacts like the parallel scratchmarks on a 1.4 million year old bone fragment found in the Kozarnika Cave. Are they art? Symbolism? No, says Lam. They’re meaningless doodles, perhaps comparable to a bear leaving his mark on a tree by scratching its trunk. At best, she said, the marks could be a sign of ancient hominids honing their hand-eye coordination.
Well, if those are doodles, I have to hand it to the doodlers. It’s one thing to doodle with pen and paper. It’s entirely something else to go to the trouble of chiseling your doodles in stone.
In a session today on Biosecurity, the debate was on over "dual use" research - work that could be used for good or for evil. How should such work be regulated, and by whom? And what are the most effective ways to ensure that good wins out?
Everyone agrees that education is a big (and cheap) part of the answer: giving new scientists ethical guidance. But according to one questioner in the audience, the issue now is knowing when to start. Graduate school, he says, is about 6 years too late. In the state of Virginia, apparently, kids can take biotechnology classes in highschool. And, he adds, these classes are in the "technologies" department - more commonly known as "shop". As a result, kids with disciplinary problems who are sent off to classes with more hands-on practicals and less bookish homework are ending up doing biotech. Give it a few years, he says, and the juveniles in penitentiary will have had practice splicing fluorescent genes into e-coli and so, presumably, will be all set to become bioterrorists.
Sadly I can't confirm if any of this is true, or a fair assessment of Virginia's biotech efforts (which look admirable to me, from a quick web search). But if there are teachers out there who can let us know if they have a serious problem here, then let us know...
Perhaps more serious problems are apparent in the area of biocontrol... private companies, it seems, are not exactly under the same strict regulation as, say, National Institutes of Health labs. What they're doing with their botulism bacteria is anyone's guess. Other government departments too - including the department of defense - may be doing things with biological organisms that some might term more "offensive" than "defensive" if the details were known.
And if anyone does find out about quesitonable activities - in a colleague, shop student or company worker - it is hard to know, for the moment, who exactly to call about it. That was one question this panel couldn't answer. Though further draft guidelines, expected to be available for public comment possibly as early as this Christmas, should have phone numbers in it. They hope.
Digital imaging makes fakes easier to make, but maybe also easier to spot. News@nature.com talks to mathematician Hany Farid about tracking down falsified photos for science journals and the FBI.
Read more here.
The plenary speech today was a summary of the science in the IPCC’s fourth assessment – a somewhat more sobering counterpart to the light-hearted talk by Larry Page on Friday. It would amaze me somewhat if there was anyone in this room who didn’t already know the conclusions – that the world is committed already to a certain degree of warming, that this warming is very likely due to human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases, and that the impacts of this will include more extreme weather and sea level rise of an unknown but frightening amount. It is, I hope, a case of preaching to the converted. But it’s a message that can’t be hammered home too hard – it only gets better the more it is bashed into peoples’ heads. And it is particularly nice to hear it being done in America.
The AAAS only just this year released its first consensus statement on climate change, saying "global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society". It is amazing how long it takes for such things to happen. Perhaps the only thing slower than the planet’s response to climate forcings is mankind’s psychological response: convincing a planet full of people to do something before it’s too late seems to be about as hard as turning a giant ship at sea before it whacks into an iceberg. It will be rather unfortunate if our policy response runs on the kinds of geological time scales that will see Greenland melt and the Antarctic start to turn green.
People have been thinking of adaptation to climate for a very, very long time. As we’re told today in the plenary, Thomas Jefferson observed: “The changes between heat and cold in America, are greater and more frequent, and the extremes comprehend a greater scale on the thermometer in America than in Europe. Habit, however, prevents these from affecting us more than the smaller changes of Europe affect the European. But he is greatly affected by ours.” The lesson - that those un-used to changes in climate are ill equipped to deal with them - is one that we are still learning today, and will learn with some force in the near future.
James Sherley's protest ignited discussions about racism at MIT.
After fasting for 11 days, an MIT biologist ended his hunger strike earlier today. James Sherley gave daily speeches outside of the MIT provost's office to protest the university's decision two years ago to deny him tenure, which he said was due to racism.
Read more here.
Medicine’s long held obsession with the white male has certainly not come to an end, but it does seem to be lessening over the past few years. More and more, we’re finding that therapies originally tested on white men don’t necessarily work well for members of the opposite sex or other races, and scientists have been trying to work out why.
In today’s session called “Genetic Targeting of Drug Therapies”, Esteban Burchard of the University of California, San Francisco discussed differences in how Latino populations respond to the popular asthma medication albuterol. He found that Puerto Rican kids were less likely to benefit from the drug than Mexican children, and has been narrowing in on some of the reasons why.
It’s always striking how tough these studies are, given so many confounding non-genetic differences in environment, diet, and economic class. But when Burchard set out to determine the genetic origins of Latino ethnic groups, he found another complicating factor – how do we really know what race we belong to, anyway?
Burchard found that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans populations differed in the proportion of genetic regions that came from African, Native American, and European lineages. Mexicans, for example, had more regions that were similar to Native American genotypes. But if you looked at individual members of his studies, the variability in genetic makeup was astounding. For example, some participants who insisted that they were Puerto Rican were 100% European, while others were nearly 100% African.
Burchard says he’s developing statistical methods to incorporate that data into his analysis, but one conclusion is clear: “We don’t really know who we are,” he said.
The bioterrorism frenzy in the US tends to focus on glamorous pathogens like smallpox and anthrax. But Jacqueline Fletcher of Oklahoma State University worries about more obscure threats like “Karnal bunt” and “citrus canker”. Though they aren't as well known, unleashing those plant pathogens could cost the US millions in higher food prices and lost trade. And quickly catching a plant disease in the over 1 billion acres of crops, forest, and rangeland in the US won't be easy.
Protecting the nation’s plants against bioterrorism isn’t exactly sexy, and Fletcher’s accustomed to spending a fair amount of time justifying the need to protect plants. Today she started out with a historical approach, highlighting plant disasters from years past, like the Irish potato famine of the 1800’s that sent waves of Irish immigrants to the US. And ever wonder why so many Brits eschew coffee in favor of tea? Thank the coffee rust epidemic in the mid-1800’s that wiped out coffee supplies.
A few things to consider on the 49th running of the Daytona 500 today:
200 miles per hour: average speed of a racecar
0.7 seconds: reaction time of a race driver
144 feet: how long the car travels during that time
Courtesy of Diandra Leslie-Pelecky of the University of Nebraska, author of the upcoming 'The Physics of NASCAR'.
One of the great things about the AAAS meeting is the public events they incorporate to bring in local families. Today is ‘family science day’ here at the San Francisco Hilton, and the place is crawling with kids of all sizes happily wielding geeky science t-shirts and geeky science toys.
Most popular was a Q&A session with the stars of the Discovery Channel show ‘Mythbusters’. These guys -- the beret-wearing Jamie Hyneman and the ebullient Adam Savage – use their experience in special effects and engineering to investigate potential urban legends. They’re best known for doing crazy things like locking themselves in a car and plunging it underwater to see if you can really get out.
But all the fun is really about the scientific method, Hyneman told the rapt audience. “It’s all just general curiosity about the world at large,” he said. “We just want to see what happens.”
Adam, the crazier of the pair, made a serious point when a boy asked him if they would investigate the Bermuda Triangle. “We have to choose a myth that’s actually testable,” he said. “That’s why we don’t do things like the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot.”
A brief lesson in the scientific method right there.
Who wants a robotic companion? Everyone, said David Calkins of San Francisco State University in a robotics seminar today. But after hearing his talk, I wasn’t so sure.
Calkins listed the many uses that robots could serve in the home. Robots could take over tedious household tasks, for example, and provide a conversation partner that can promise absolute confidentiality – or, as Calkins put it, “the conversation partner who won’t tell your wife you’re cheating on her.” Calkins said when his busy schedule and rental agreement didn’t allow him to keep a live dog, he kept a robot dog instead.
And of course, they’ll be ultra popular among “geeky bachelors who can’t get a girlfriend,” he added. Yeah. You know what he means.
Somewhere in there, I started to become uncomfortable, and it wasn’t just the reference to kinky robot ‘companionship’. Calkins proposed lots of perfectly reasonable uses for robots, focusing on how they could provide 24-hour care for housebound elderly relatives. Clearly it’s a good idea – the robots could be used to manage complicated medication regimens, and could call for help should an accident occur.
But I could imagine how this would play out over time. A robot would be cheaper than hiring human help to care for the elderly, and that could eventually translate into less human companionship for our elderly loved ones. Meanwhile, would we start to use the robot as an excuse not to squeeze grandparents into our busy schedules? “No need to visit grandpa today – RoboNurse will take care of him.”
We’ll soon find out -- Calkins says the technology will be upon us before we know it. “Like the internet, home robots will happen faster than you think, and will quickly become taken for granted,” he said.
Gulp.
Hearing loss in the elderly might not be what you think: it isn’t just the loss of hair cells in the ear, as it is with young kids at rock concerts, or even as many clinicians might tell you when your hearing starts to go. It’s a battery problem. The tissue in the ear that ‘powers up’ the amplifiers of hair cells in the outer ear starts to degrade with age. Oxidants pile up and clog the system. The battery dies. And there goes hearing.
This mechanism was published some four years ago, though it still comes as a surprise to many who hear it today – including doctors. Unfortunately scientists’ understanding of the situation hasn’t yet resulted in any breakthrough treatments. The cells that make up this ‘battery’ can regenerate, so it’s possible that stem cell treatment might be able, one day, to fix the problem. Stem cells would probably also be needed to re-grow hair cells in the ear (which do also die away with age, and don’t grow back). But we’re a long way from clinical trials on any of this. We’ll just have to wait for updates.
In the meantime, a word of advice from the experts on hearing at the conference: don’t listen to your ipod on more than half the volume setting if you listen to it all day (or no more than 80% max volume if you’re just listening for 20 minutes or so). More than that and you may not get to experience age-related hearing loss; your ears may go long before then.
It seems odd at a conference where the grand scale impacts of climate change take top billing to get excited about the global warming impact of eating an 8 once salmon steak. But aquaculture is booming – salmon farming is expected to increase 240 fold by 2030 – and the environmental impacts of these activities are not just “a drop in the ocean”. To assess those impacts, speakers here have been looking at the overall environmental burden of fish production, from the pollution of waters resulting from producing fish food, to the emissions of a plane bound for San Francisco from Alaska with a hold full of fresh salmon. And some of their conclusions give food for thought.
In terms of fish food, for example, Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada told the audience that the ‘organic’ label on store-bought salmon is not a guarantee that your fish has tread lightly on the sea. Using organic plant ingredients over non-organic ones does reduce the energy intensity and environmental burden of fish food. But what makes a bigger difference is the proportion of plant components (soy, for example) compared to the animal-derived proteins (like fish oils), and the efficiency of the factory that turns fish by-products into oil and meal. These distinctions do not, at present, show up on the food labels at the supermarket.
And if you want your salmon dinner to have had as little impact on the planet as possible, you need to consider not just how it was farmed and fed, but also how it has been processed and transported. Fresh salmon, says Anna Flysjo of the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology in Goteborg, creates more than twice as much greenhouse gas as smoked salmon. That’s thanks almost entirely to the airplane trip that transports it fast from source to seller. Frozen salmon also wracks up a burden thanks to the energy needed to keep it refrigerated on its boat trip. Smoked salmon in cardboard packaging is the way forwards, she says.
Alternatively you can simply live in Alaska, catch a salmon wild and eat it fresh at source. That would be best. Barring that, I think I’ll skip having sushi for dinner tonight.
I started out the morning at a symposium on the future of internet searching, but the discussion of institutional repositories and language translation algorithms was a bit dry, and I soon headed down the hall for a guaranteed thrill: “Robots – Our future’s sustainable partner”.
Perfect timing – I got there just before University of California, Berkeley professor Robert Full started his talk. Full designs robots that mimic animals of all sorts, and can always be counted upon for cool slow motion videos of insects flying or geckos climbing walls. This time he had a fun video of a cockroach on a treadmill (“The American cockroach,” he explained. “The one that you don’t think you have in your house.”) and a robotic crab playing in the surf, to name but a few.
Full also had a live demonstration of StickyBot – a gecko-like robot with bright orange feet designed to crawl up a glass window. Unfortunately, StickyBot seemed to suffer from stage fright, and kept slipping off the glass.
But despite his push for biomimicry, Full says he isn’ t trying to achieve exact biological replicas, and he won’t be copying evolutionary processes to optimize his designs. Evolution, he said, is a tinkerer without a defined goal, but engineers have finite endgames in mind.
And, he added, robots don’t always have to be as complex as the animals they’re modeled after. The legs of his robot crab, for example, had only two joint motions as compared to the biological crab’s nine. “Crabs do a lot of other things,” he said. “They fight with one another, they mate with one another.
“Robots don’t do that… yet.”
In late December 2004, the world was riveted by the horrible news coming from the Indian Ocean tsunami. And a lot of people missed the news that - for a few days at least - there was a reasonable chance that an asteroid called Apophis was poised to devastate even more of the globe in the year 2029.
Later calculations showed that Apophis will miss Earth that year, but a slim chance remains it could hit in 2036. And even though that probability is expected to go away with further studies, politicians and governments ought to sit up and take notice, says Rusty Schweickart.
Schweickart is an Apollo astronaut and a key player in the Association of Space Explorers, which is trying to get the United Nations to take a leading role in figuring out who should lead in deflecting any potential asteroid threat, and when. At the AAAS meeting today, Schweickart showed a map of the possible places on the globe that Apophis might still hit in 2036. The potential impact area extends in a line arcing from Kazakhstan over east Asia, extending along the Aleutian islands and down the Pacific, crossing Central America on the northern border of Costa Rica and eventually petering out in the Atlantic just off Africa.
The map vividly illustrates how many countries will be panicking if an asteroid is indeed ever found that looks like it will definitely hit. Schweickart will be speaking to the UN committee on the peaceful uses of outer space next week, in an effort to get some protocols in place. It's not simple to figure out who ought to do what in the face of a planetary catastrophe, he notes. Within the US, agencies such as Homeland Security and FEMA are typically charged with public safety.
"And do you really want FEMA in charge of this??" he asked.
Today’s session on infant memory closed with some sobering news for mothers with diabetes – get your sugar under control, or your child may experience long-term memory difficulties for years to come.
When diabetic mothers experience abnormal blood sugar levels, the developing fetus feels it, too. As a result of the metabolic flux caused by rapidly changing sugar levels, the fetus may be chronically starved for oxygen and may also redirect iron away from the developing brain and other organs to the blood. This, said Tracey DeBoer of the University of California, Davis, can be particularly harmful to the hippocampus – a region of the brain that’s critical for memory
DeBoer and her colleagues tested long-term memory in infants born of diabetic mothers. One-year olds were taught to put a toy car in a container and push a car down a track. The investigators tested recall immediately after teaching infants the tasks and ten minutes later. Children who were born with iron levels in their blood – a sign that they’d experienced abnormal sugar levels in the uterus -- performed just as well as the control group when asked to immediately recall the task. But after the ten-minute delay, they struggled more to remember what they’d been taught.
DeBoer followed up with the same kids two years later, and retested them with age-appropriate tasks that were more complicated and had to be remembered for a longer time. Again, children born with low iron were less successful at retaining memories of the learned task . The greater the iron deficiency at birth, the worse their performance.
On the bright side, DeBoer said that children born to mothers who kept their blood sugar under tight control had normal levels of iron at birth and passed their tests with flying colors.
Larry Page told the conference today that his invention (PageRank, the thing that drives Google) holds a lesson for science funders…
He started his whole project by accident. He decided to map out the links of the internet, thinking it would take “about a week”, and a few years later had a pretty nice dataset. And, oh, by the way, maybe it would be useful for searching too. “It was completely random – it’s a great example of pure research and why we want to do it.”
“When you have basic technologies, you find interesting things to do with them. If you’re lucky it turns into something big.” Funding agencies take note.
It is amazing what we can do with mind-computer-body interfaces these days. I have read the stories about people moving a cursor on a computer screen using only the power of their thoughts. I have edited stories about modern prosthetic arms that move when the wearer thinks about moving, and the re-wiring of nerves so the user can regain ‘feeling’ from their lost limb. I know, intellectually, about all these things. But I’d never seen a video of someone miraculously regaining movement from a lost or deadened limb. Suddenly now it seems simultaneously more real, and more like science fiction, than it did before.
In today’s session on “smart prosthetics” (the latter part of the same session Sarah wrote about here) we were shown video clips of paraplegics opening peanut butter jars, blow drying their hair, and even walking down the aisle at their own wedding, thanks to implanted devices that, when turned on by a radio-transmitting external switch, stimulate a predetermined bunch of nerves. Simply press a button to activate the hips, knees, leg and back muscles of a woman with no control over her legs, and she can stand up. Turn the switch off and a man sitting upright crumples like a puppet with cut strings.
Electronics can be used to bypass a break in the spinal cord, helping the brain to talk to the muscles, a wheelchair, or a computer cursor. As long as the mind still functions, it seems, its connection to the body can be repaired - or simply bypassed altogether (see John Donoghue’s lab for more info on how the brain turns thought into action, and Hunter Peckham’s lab on controlling muscles externally).
There is obviously a long way yet to go, and we do not have the fine control that can turn complex thoughts, above and beyond ‘clench hand’ or ‘bend knee’ into complex actions. But we’re getting there. The researchers in this room dream of allowing a paraplegic to play Rachmaninoff on the piano, without the watcher ever knowing they were once disabled. We’re not there yet, but after seeing these films, I’m willing to join in with the dream.
Perhaps the greatest advantage of the AAAS is the way it brings together scientists – and journalists – from across all the disciplines. I know it sounds cheesy, but this really does bring a new and refreshing light to old topics. Talking to a particle physicist over a glass of wine about recent news events, for example, gave me a new perspective on climate change. In his line of work, “certainty” is a much firmer thing than it is in the Earth sciences. No one would claim to have found a particle if they were only “greater than 90%” sure that they had observed it. Yet that’s the IPCC level of certainty that climate change is being caused by mankind – an announcement that was heralded in the press as being really, really quite sure indeed, with headlines from “climate change pinned on mankind” to “It’s all your fault!” splashed across the newspapers. Particle physicists would rather be 99.99994% certain (that’s 5 sigma for those who know about such things) before making such firm statements. Of course there isn’t a precautionary principle when it comes to the existence of, say, the Higgs boson, nor is our children’s future riding on the ultimate energy of the particle that ‘gives things mass’. So perhaps the comparison isn’t really fair. But it gave me pause for thought.
Hurrah for the plastic brain! At a session this morning on neural prosthetics – smart devices that restore lost nervous system functions – Michael Merzenich of UCSF praised the brain’s remarkable plasticity. Merzenich was describing the way the brain actively cooperates in recovery following a cochlear implant to restore hearing. Despite what Merzenich calls fairly primitive technology, the brain in many cases is able to interpret speech from the limited information it receives.
Neural prosthetic technology is developing fast though. In addition to cochlear implants, researchers are working on retinal implants and new implantable stimulators for bladder control. The latter is particularly important for patients who have had spinal cord injury as loss of bladder control leads to infection and kidney problems. According to William Groat of the University of Pittsburgh, who is developing an implant to stimulate the pudendal nerve, the bladder control pathway is actually a fairly simple system. Imagine, he says, how much harder it gets if you are trying to restore hand or arm function to such patients.
This is exactly what Hunter Peckham of Case Western Reserve University is doing. His team is using multiple-channel implants to restore certain movements to spinal-cord injury patients. As Peckham explains, the act of standing requires activating 8 muscles, walking another 16 or more, while coordination of the stimulation becomes much more complex. An implant for bilateral hand control involves 12 electrodes for stimulating nerves and another two for recording, all of which are connected to a single control device. The amazing recovery of function by many of these patients – allowing one patient to sit erect or to roll over, and yet another to compete as a sailor – is heartening. But as the movements become more complex – and the patients’ expectations become higher – the sheer number of electrodes involved will rise rapidly. What sort of networked implant might be needed to move this amazing research to the next level?
Imagine you're a politician with a chunk of money to spend on improving a local park. You have a choice – you could spend the money fighting petty crime or you could spend it dealing with deer overpopulation. Your risk analyst warns you that the risk of deer overpopulation to human health, property, and the environment exceeds the threat posed by crime. Where do you allocate most of your money – deer or crime?
At this point in the story, Joseph Arvai of the Michigan State University pauses. “Believe it or not, people get attacked by deer and can end up in the hospital,” he says.
Nevertheless, you’ll probably elect to spend more money fighting crime, Arvai said in a press briefing before a symposium titled “Numbers and Nerves: Affect and Meaning in Risk Information.” Crime evokes a more emotional response than deer attacks, he said, and emotion triumphs over numbers.
When Arvai tested this experimentally, he gave study participants a quantitative estimate of the risk posed by both problems. Not until he had ratcheted up the risk from deer to nearly twice that of crime did participants take the problem as seriously. Arvai tested other scenarios as well -- avian flu or Anthrax bioterrorism vs. food poisoning, for example. The trend was always the same. To counteract that emotional first instinct, Arvai is designing programs that will crunch the numbers for politicians making difficult decisions and present the results in ways that will make more of an impact.
Think you're immune to that emotional pull? Odds are you aren't. Arvai and his colleagues tested scientists and other well-educated folk as well. "It didn't matter how smart or educated -- everyone was biased," he said. "Including scientists."
...the creationists are coming!
Of course, all of you loyal Nature readers already knew that (http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061120/full/444406a.html), but the AAAS has taken the threat seriously enough to organize a symposium about the spread of anti-evolutionism in Europe.
The trend was largely portrayed as another cultural import from the US. And despite the session's indecisive title ("Anti-Evolutionism in Europe: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid, or Not?"), the panelists at yesterday's press briefing largely settled on "be afraid".
Towards the end of the briefing, Eugenie Scott of the Oakland, California-based National Center for Science Education ran through a laundry list of proposed legislation across the US that could limit the teaching of evolution in public schools. She finished with a significant glance at her European co-panelists. "Maybe this is a preview of coming attractions for you all," she said.
There's a new unit of measurement for government spending, if seismologist Kerry Sieh of Caltech has anything to say about it.
At the AAAS meeting today, he spoke passionately about the earthquake, tsunami, hurricane and other natural hazards facing the planet's most vulnerable populations. Huge cities such as Tripoli and Tehran are built atop faults that could devastate them. Padang, Indonesia, is at risk for another mega-tsunami. And how much money is spent on research to investigate and protect such areas at risk? Just $2 million a year.
The US is spending $100 billion a year on the war in Iraq. Call that unit, says Sieh, a 'Rumsfeld', after former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. Thus natural disasters - which could kill hundreds of thousands at any point - get only 20 micro-Rumsfelds.
Which is the true measure of a life?
Leading politicians agree a new proposal to tackle climate change at US meeting.
Legislators from the world’s wealthiest industrialized nations and from major developing countries have signed a non-binding agreement to reduce carbon emissions. The announcement came at the end of a two-day summit in Washington DC.
Read more here
The always-massive program for the AAAS meeting contains an inordinate number of sessions on climate change this year. The first started bang-up this morning at 8:30 am, on 'communicating climate change'.
Sociologists have had a field day in recent years trying to figure out how the US public perceives the risk of climate change, given that the country emits one-quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions yet has not signed onto the international emissions-limiting Kyoto protocol. It turns out, new research shows, that most Americans aren't morons when it comes to climate change. They know it's a problem, they know it's serious -- but they simply feel helpless when it comes to addressing it.
Tony Leiserowitz, a risk perception expert at Yale University, talked about a number of polls, done by himself and others, that reveal some interesting trends. Even though three-quarters of Americans believe global warming is a serious issue, it's just not a priority for them. Given a list of multiple environmental problems (clean air, clean water, toxic waste and the like), climate change nearly always ends up near the bottom of list of things to act on, in the public's view.
The problem, according to Leiserowitz? Americans still see climate change as far off, both geographically and temporally. His polling shows that the first words that come to mind for most Americans when they hear 'climate change' are images such as melting ice caps or the effects on animal species. In other words, they just don't think it affects them all that much.
The solution? Those who want to instigate action on climate change shouldn't focus on trying to scare people into the paralysis of fear. They should instead focus on local and regional impacts of climate change - what people can expect in their own lives - and on small actions people can take on their own.
And don't start talking about carbon taxes - 'tax' is not a word Americans like to hear.
Join Nature's reporters at this year's annual meeting of the AAAS in San Francisco - one of the biggest science conferences of the year. We'll be blogging from Friday 16 February till Monday 19. See you there, or see you online...
Proposal calls for web community to help professionals in disaster relief.
The US government should use the power of the Internet to engage citizens directly in relief operations, say two computer scientists. Use of wikis, blogs and other 'community' tools could help to coordinate responses to natural or man-made emergencies.
Read more here
Domesticated chillies may have seasoned cuisine more than 6,000 years ago.
When it comes to cuisine, some traditions are sacred. A Thai curry, for example, should be spicy enough to make your eyes water and your nose run. The heat from Korean kim chi simply must sizzle your tastebuds and leave you gasping for relief. Now archaeologists have found that New World farmers may have established blistering traditions like these much earlier than we thought.
Read more here
The HIV virus enters a women’s body by attacking two types of cells simultaneously.
Researchers have developed a better understanding of how the HIV virus enters the female body during sex. The discovery could help to protect women and girls, who are more vulnerable than men to transmission of the virus during vaginal sex.
Read more here
Programmable computer solves sudoku and sets seating charts.
A Canadian firm has built what it claims is the first fully functional quantum computer and has used it to solve a number of simple problems.
Read more here
This week the Nature Podcast finds a chink in HIV’s armour, works out how humans avoid incest, explores the darkest galaxies in the universe, and takes a look at the soppy side of science.
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Archaeological dig reveals high-tech medieval instrument.
When the owners of a restaurant in the historic British city of Canterbury dug the foundations for an extension to their period property, they may have hoped to find an old coin or two. Instead, they unearthed a rare scientific instrument.
Read the story here.
Potential vaccine target identified.
Medical researchers have found a chink in the constantly shape-shifting armour of the HIV virus. The discovery could be a significant step forward in the ongoing quest for a vaccine.
Read more here
When two worlds collide
One half of a physics couple that met online, Jennifer Ouellette seeks some advice from married scientists on how to handle both long-distance and up-close relationships, while juggling career and family. Can love survive?
Read our feature to find out.
And share your valentine stories and love tips with us here!
Pictures from the depths reveal luminous and speedy animal.
Japanese researchers have gained an insight into the behaviour of the elusive Taningia danae, one of the world's largest squid species, thanks to the first footage of the deep-sea creature. The video reveals that the animal is a speedy swimmer — not, as was thought, a lazy drifter.
Read the story here.
There should be room for a bit of fringe science - but it's liable to suck you in.
It can't do much for your self-esteem when the media get interested in your research because it is shutting down. But Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory probably aren't too bothered by that. For the attention generated by this week's closure of the PEAR lab — or rather, by the suggestion in the New York Times that this removes a source of embarrassment to the university — can surely only enhance the profile of Jahn and Dunne's vision of exploring "consciousness-related anomalies".
Read the column here.
Purdue's investigation fails to satisfy critics.
An inquiry has exonerated nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan of misconduct with respect to allegations made internally at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, officials announced last week. But the announcement may raise more questions than it answers: researchers in the field have criticized the university for failing to say whether the inquiry considered their concerns that the work may be fraudulent.
Read the story here.
Bat blood shows that they can attack migrating birds.
When a team of researchers found hints six years ago that bats hunt migrating birds by night, some found the story hard to swallow. But a new study now confirms their suspicions.
Read the story here.
Apes could have passed down skills for thousands of years.
In the West African rainforest, archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools thousands of years older than the previous oldest finds in the same area. The discovery suggests that chimps may have passed cultural information down the generations for more than 4,000 years.
Read the story here.
Studies show CO2 has reached the bottom of the ocean.
Human-generated carbon dioxide has sunk down to a great depth in the North Atlantic Ocean, a new study has shown. The work, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, suggests that the oceans store CO2 for longer than expected — good news for reducing the risk of climate change, but bad news for marine life in the deep sea.
Read the story here.
Boosting badger movements also boosts infection risk, study finds.
Culling badgers to reduce the incidence of bovine tuberculosis (TB) among farm cattle may in fact worsen the spread of the disease, according to a study of the disease's prevalence among different badger groups.
Read more here
Could you invent the best device for absorbing greenhouse gas?
A multi-million dollar prize is on offer to anyone who can invent a device that will remove significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As one of the largest science prizes on offer, it is likely to attract huge interest globally in a bid to combat climate change.
Read the story here.
News@nature.com asks how easy it is to pick personalities that survive high stress.
The arrest of astronaut Lisa Nowak for attempted murder this week has raised questions about NASA’s policies on safeguarding the emotional welfare of its staff. Astronauts undergo rigorous psychometric evaluation on their recruitment, in an attempt to screen out those who might crack under pressure. But can psychological monitoring really ensure that staff are emotionally sound and ready to fly?
Read more here
Detectors may all grow old before their time.
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on board Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the newest and most powerful craft to arrive at the red planet, has lost its peripheral vision. And its colour vision is fading too.
Read the story here.
Bats lured by foam food bring seeds to patchy land.
Bats can be lured into large areas of destroyed rainforest with fake fruits, researchers have found. This, they say, could be the key to restoring patchy parts of the landscape.
Read the story here.
A brainscan can tell whether you're about to add or subtract two numbers.
Just by looking at the pattern of firing in your brain, neuroscientists can tell whether you are thinking about moving your hand to the left or to the right. They can tell if you have seen something you didn't even know you saw, and, now it seems, they can tell which mathematical operation you secretly have in mind.
Read the story here.
Researchers find possible cause for heart failure in new mothers.
It should be one of the happiest events in a woman's life. But for women with a rare heart disease, the first few months after giving birth can be deadly.
Read the story here.
This week the Nature Podcast explores what gut bugs can tell us about human evolution, how to transport light between atoms, discusses climate change both ancient and modern, and sees what it takes to ‘seal’ the mating deal.
To SUBSCRIBE to the Nature Podcast for FREE copy and paste this URL into iTunes or your preferred media player or RSS reader:
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Brain Gain programme goes wrong.
Hundreds of researchers who moved to Italy in the belief they had been promised permanent careers are now finding themselves without a job. And confusion has erupted as the country's research ministry has suspended one appointment made through the same scheme.
Read teh story here.
Turning off cold storage could buffer the electricity grid.
Refrigerated warehouses might soon be used to store not just food, but gigawatts of electricity. A plan dreamt up in the Netherlands could see the giant fridges acting as massive batteries. They would buffer swings in supply and demand from electricity created from renewable sources.
Read the story here.
How do you make a light wave vanish and then reappear elsewhere?
It sounds like a conjuring trick. You shine a light into a gas, and the light gets swallowed. Then you pump the gas into another container, say the magic words, and the light comes out again.
Read the story here.
Energy efficiency is one of the least flashy but most promising ways to cut carbon dioxide emissions.
Super savers: Meters to manage the future
Declan Butler explores the energy-saving possibilities of an intelligent electrical grid.
Super savers: Experimenting with efficiency
Zoë Corbyn looks at how labs can cut their energy use.
United States gives thumbs up to breast cancer prognostic.
US regulators have approved a new diagnostic tool to help target treatment for breast cancer patients.
Read the story here.
Compromise plan follows tussle between environmental and industrial lobbies.
After two weeks of wrangling, European politicians have proposed new limits for greenhouse gas emissions from cars in the European Union. Under the new plan, cars sold in the 27-nation European Union after 2012 will be allowed to emit a maximum of 130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre.
Read more here
Widely-used compound may boost production of Alzheimer's protein.
One of the most commonly used anaesthetic drugs may cause chemical changes in the brain that promote Alzheimer's disease. Researchers have discovered that isofluorane, a widely used agent for general anaesthesia, triggers production of a protein linked to the disease when applied to cultured cells.
Read more here
No one wrote about this condition until the 1800s.
The idea of repressed memory — when traumatic events are wiped from a person's conscious memory but resurface years later — has had a chequered past. Some have cited it as evidence in court, yet others dismiss it as nothing more than psychiatric folklore.
Read the story here.
Missing computer scientist prompts massive response that could aid future efforts.
Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist and head of eScience at Microsoft, is still missing at sea off San Francisco, California, nine days after contact was lost with his 40-foot yacht. The official coastguard search has stopped, but an army of volunteers from across the tech industry have refused to give up hope of finding him, and have mounted their own gigantic high-tech search and rescue operation.
Read the story here.
Japan questioned for not preventing tangles in fishing nets.
The death of another critically endangered western grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus) in Japanese fishing nets has scientists and conservationists concerned for the safety of the species — and confused as to why the deaths are happening.
Read the story here.
Sibling matrimony pays off for African fish.
For one group of African fish, incest is not only a way of life — it may also be a boon.
Read the story here.
Layered information holds back protein evolution.
Think your genes have evolved to make the perfect proteins for your body? Think again. Researchers have found that a secondary function of some pieces of DNA has held this evolution in check, slowing the associated genes' progress in becoming 'ideal' protein machines.
Read the story here.
Lunar settlements could face high-voltage sparks.
Lunar colonists could be in for a nasty shock — literally. A team of US scientists has found that the Moon's surface can become charged with up to several thousand volts of static electricity1.
Read the story here.
On Friday 2 February, in Paris, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its long-awaited report on global warming.
See our news story: Climate report released
Check back here for a comprehensive package of analysis by Tuesday 6 Feb.
Surgery opens door to prosthetics that can 'feel'.
Surgeons have managed to give an amputee not only a prosthetic arm that moves as directed by her thoughts, but also the feeling of touch — albeit in the wrong part of her body.
Read the story here.
The whiff of yeast might help determine lifespan.
Eating less can lengthen an animal's life. But now it seems that — for flies at least — they don't have to actually cut down on the calories to benefit. Fruitflies can boost their lifespan just by not smelling their food.
Read the story here.
Climate-change figures since 1990 offer test of IPCC projections.
Climate factors such as sea-level rise may be changing more rapidly than predicted, according to a new survey of global trends since 1990. The figures suggest that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which publishes a fresh assessment of climate change tomorrow, may have previously underestimated the changes that lie ahead.
Read the story here.
Multifaceted company gets into healthcare for the future.
Richard Branson, more famous for investing in planes, trains and music through Virgin Group, today announced his first foray into healthcare.
Read the story here.
This week the Nature Podcast explores how a scientific SWAT team are helping to conserve the Amazon, redraws the hydrological cycle from space, and looks at micro-organisms forming new relationships and virtual quantum computing on chips.
To SUBSCRIBE to the Nature Podcast for FREE copy and paste this URL into iTunes or your preferred media player or RSS reader:
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Early signs of CJD spotted and stopped in their tracks.
A man walks around the neighbourhood with his family, and stops to admire a particularly lovely house. He turns to his family and asks who built it. "You did," they reply.
Read the story here.
