Nature Newsblog
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Having more words for a colour changes how it’s seen.
The language you speak may influence how you perceive colours, according to new research. Russian speakers, who have separate words for light and dark blue, are better at discriminating between the two, suggesting that they do indeed perceive them as different colours.
Read more here
Conservation icon thought to be last of his species may yet find a mate.
Lonesome George, conservation icon and apparent sole survivor of a species of giant Galápagos tortoise, may not be so lonely after all. Biologists have identified a living relative on Isabela Island, some 70 kilometres away from George's birthplace — an animal whose father (who may or may not be alive) is from the same population as George.
Desks and walls could one day light up electronics without need for cables.
Annoyed by the tangle of power cords under your desk? A sheet of plastic invented by researchers in Japan could one day make for tables and walls that power devices placed on them — without any need for wires or plugs. Computers could be powered through the desks on which they sit, for example, or flat-screen televisions through the walls where they hang.
Autonomous device should help protect animals from ships
An underwater robot that can hear the calls of whales, and so help ships to avoid them, has just been successfully trialled in the Bahamas.
read the story here
Simulation proves it's possible to eavesdrop on super-secure encrypted messages.
A team of researchers has, for the first time, hacked into a network protected by quantum encryption.
A shift in population, money and political influence to America's 'sunbelt states' is helping to reshape its research universities.
You will need a password to access this content:
The first of two features in Nature looks at the far-reaching ambitions of Arizona State University.
US education: the Arizona experiment
The second asks whether a rush to create extra medical schools could spread the region's resources too thinly.
US higher education: Medicinal properties
Court turns down request in case aiming for 'ape rights'.
An Austrian judge turned down a request this week to appoint a woman as legal guardian of a chimpanzee.
This week the Nature Podcast looks at how lowering inhibition in the brain can lead to addiction, hears how a wind tunnel full of wings might help build more efficient aircraft, and explores how invasive species thrive on hard times.
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Natural input of nutrients works ten times better than manmade injections.
Blooms of algae created by pumping nutrients into the ocean can suck up at least ten times more carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere than was previously thought. But the findings lend no support to controversial schemes to encourage such blooms in order to reduce global warming, the authors warn.
Study of swifts could improve airplane designs.
The average swift (Apus apus) travels 4.5 million kilometres in its lifetime — roughly the same as six round trips to the Moon. Now researchers have demonstrated how these adept aviators change the shape of their wings to improve performance, providing hints as to how aircraft engineers can improve their designs.
Extrasolar planet grabs attention of astronomers and alien-hunters
Astronomers have found an Earth-like planet circling a dim red star not far, in galactic terms, from our Solar System. The planet, just five times the mass of our own, might be the best hope yet of a world that can support life.
Read the story here
Unseen particles may confuse climate models.
Clouds are bigger than they look, according to new measurements by atmospheric scientists in Israel and the United States. They say that clouds are surrounded by a ‘twilight zone’ of diffuse particles, invisible to the naked eye, extending for tens of kilometres around the cloud’s visible portion.
Read more here
Gunman carried revolver onto research campus.
Workers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, were back on the job Monday after a disgruntled contractor shot himself and one bystander.
Read more here
Tests show that it isn’t just the vitamin that protects the body.
If you’re in the market for an antioxidant to keep your body young and healthy, new research suggests you’d be much better off with oranges than vitamin C tablets.
Read more here
Sufferers show less cognitive decline as they age.
A migraine is not just a headache, it is an über-headache — a pounding, queasy, searing pain that can incapacitate its victims for hours on end. And as if the pain weren’t bad enough, sufferers were also thought to show diminished memory and verbal skills.
Read more here
Mission will investigate clouds’ connection to climate change.
NASA is about to launch a spacecraft to study mysterious invaders lurking above Earth’s poles — not UFOs, but the shimmering, high-altitude apparitions known as noctilucent clouds.
Read more here
Treasure trove of extinct species discovered in old coal mine.
Geologists have found the remains of a huge underground rainforest hidden in a coal mine in Illinois. The fossil forest, buried by an earthquake 300 million years ago, contains giant versions of several plant types alive today.
Read the story here
Leaders from three steadfastly right-wing arenas - church, military and industry - are now calling for limits on US emissions. Jim Giles surveys America's green stampede.
When politicians start to run out of analogies, you know a subject must be hot. And in Washington right now, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Al Gore has for months been using the 'sick child' story to explain the scientific consensus on global warming: if nine out of ten doctors say your kid needs antibiotics, you don't choose to go with the single dissenter. Which means: listen to the consensus report on the causes and effects of climate change, ignore the skeptics.
Cash injection will safegaurd 21 critical food crops.
Funds have been announced to save 165,000 varieties of 21 food crops, from wheat to potatoes, some of which form the staple diet of people living in developing countries.
It's all over. There’s probably a scientific explanation for this – and it’s something I’d suggest the organizers consider before hosting another conference in Australia. WHY is the Australian accent so infectious? I’ve found myself speaking like an extra from “Neighbours” without even realizing I’m doing it. I fear I may be offending our gracious hosts here in Melbourne with my constant “G’day mate’s” and incessant upwards inflection. I think I’m being funny. Maybe I should be at the other convention…
Sorry Australia.
Ruth Francis
Neither journalists nor scientists are renown for sartorial sophistication but the crowd looked particularly dapper at the farewell reception held at the Governor’s house last night.
We arrived in an armada of tour buses, each of us holding fancy little personal invitations as the buses wound their way up the long drive to the impressive estate. The fleet parked in the courtyard but, before we were allowed to disembark, each bus was boarded by a security guard who examined our invitations.
I think we were all impressed with the residence. I certainly wasn’t expecting anything quite so spectacular. As we walked into the grand hall, a room in which you could fit at least a dozen family homes stacked upon each other, one of my colleagues, looking up and taking in the dramatic heights of the ceiling, turned to me and said: “Man, this place is like Versailles.”
The governor, Professor David de Kretser, who is affable and well-spoken (and a scientist himself) congratulated us on a successful conference and Wilson da Silva handed over the reigns to Pallab Ghosh of the BBC, who takes over as the new president of the World Federation of Science Journalists.
Then the crowd dispersed and milled about, exploring the premises. Each room seemed grander than the next but journalists don’t necessarily always meet grandeur with reverence. One of my colleagues was debating trying to take a seat upon the governor’s throne, a rather inviting chair with comfy-looking blue upholstery and lots of gold gilding. In the dining room, there was a very long table that could serve as an aircraft carrier if pressed into service. Along its length was a row of highly-polished candelabras, about a dozen of them. One delegate asked me how far down the table I thought he could slide, if he took a good running start. I sized him up. “About the fourth candelabra,” I told him. "But then, I've never been very good at physics. You might go a lot further than that."
I think we were all a little giddy after such an intense week. There was plenty of laughter and warm camaraderie. Eventually we were called back to the buses and, as we were leaving, there were plenty of last-moment business card exchanges, handshakes and hugs. I’m leaving Melbourne with many new contacts, a lot of ambitious project ideas and a sense of belonging to a crew of committed, hard-working and wonderfully irreverent professionals.
Ultra-hard material made in the lab without high pressures
There's hard, and then there's superhard. Researchers have designed and made a material capable of scratching diamond — and done it without resorting to harsh, high-pressure methods.
read the story here
A protein in the blood could make for a new class of AIDS drug.
A natural component of human blood has been found to block the HIV virus from infecting cells. And fortunately, tweaking just a few of the amino acids that form the molecule somehow makes its effects 100 times more potent.
The EGU goes on until Friday, but my time here is over. It has so far been another solid European geosciences meeting, although certainly not all talks were as good as you might hope.
One thing is language. The organizers ask that all lecturers must be able to give their talks in ‘more or less’ fluent English. Well, I certainly attended a few talks which suffered more than just a little from, err, let’s say ‘handicapped’ English.
Questions from the audience were encouraged, and usually they do add interesting aspects to a given topic. But discussion doesn’t make much sense if a lecturer seems not to understand what he or she is being asked. There is an issue of politeness and consideration: Do you really need to query someone in a strong Australian accent if it’s plain to see that the poor guy up there – Malaysian, Ukrainian, French, whatever - is in deep linguistic trouble?
Another thing is the use of formula in presentations. Of course, mathematics is part of the game, whether in remote sensing or in modelling fluid dynamics. But if your slides contain little else than rows and rows of equations you can’t hope to reach out to anyone except to the die-hard experts.
But these are minor points. By and large the meeting had, and has still, plenty of enlightening talks to offer. Indeed, some North American attendees told me they prefer the more human proportions of the EGU to its oversized American counterpart, the annual AGU meeting. Vienna’s ‘old-Europe’ charm, I would say, adds quite a lot to the appeal of the EGU.
And, after all, the meetings serve not least as a marketplace for new ideas, jobs and collaborations in the geosciences. I don’t know how many participants have teamed up with new scientific partners, and it’s hard to guess how many fruitful ideas have been conceived during these days. But from the many happy faces I saw during sessions I guess it must be plenty.
The session about spreading science by reaching women and children was an emotional journey. First up was Jacqueline Ashby of the Rural Innovation Institute in Columbia, who presented via video link. Her presentation was pretty positive and discussed improvements made in food security and nutrition by working with women’s groups.
The next talk was far more depressing. A series of statistics on HIV and AIDS outlined the horrific situation worldwide was given by Annmaree O’Keefe – Australia’s Special Representative for HIV/AIDS. She says there is no silver bullet to kill this disease and no hope on the horizon. But, in Australia we know that targeting the at risk communities with prevention and behavioural change messages has resulted in a low infection rate so this approach should be used elsewhere. Elsewhere in the world we know which groups are most at risk, sex workers in China, in East Asia high levels of sexual violence and the low status of women and in Eastern Europe shared needles for drug use according to O’Keefe. Different groups should be focused upon in different regions but there is hope if these messages can get spread through the right networks, a lot of which involve women.
More positively, Subbiah Arunachalam of WS Swaminathan Research Foundation in India gave examples of successful projects in his region. Women are reached via local knowledge centres and a blend of old and new technologies is used depending on what is most appropriate for that group. Indeed some of the most successful programs are those based around the coasts where 98% of families rely on fishing. Traditionally men go to sea and women sell their catch. Now satellite technology is used to provide weather forecasts 36 hours in advance and these forecasts are printed and broadcast for the community. So the women will know the men aren’t going to sea and will get them to help with chores rather than running off to hang out with their friends. Any other places where this kind of technology could play a useful role? Answers on a postcard….
Ruth Francis
I’ve been looking towards today’s sessions because they focus largely on science in developing countries. I’m particularly interested in these sessions because I’ll be in India this summer, where I’ll be focusing on renewable energy development in rural villages.
So, one of my goals at the conference has been to meet science journalists from developing countries in order to prepare myself for life and work in India.
This morning’s panel was particularly encouraging. It was a plenary session comprised of six journalists from developing countries (including India) discussing some of the challenges of reporting on science. Some of the challenges include a lack of infrastructure, low literacy levels, lack of government support and reticent scientists. There’s no doubt about it - science reporters in Africa, South America and Asia often have to do some slogging in order to get their job done. One journalist, a reporter from Zambia, mentioned that the Zambian government regularly keeps track of science journalists who travel outside the country in order to cover stories.
But does this hinder these journalists, or discourage them? Not a chance. In fact, my favourite remark was by Christina Scott, a South African journalist with SciDev.Net: “Science journalists in developing countries are like extremophile bacteria,” she quipped. “We’ve evolved to thrive in extreme environments.”
Extremophile Journalism. I like that. In fact, I’m thinking of having it printed on my business card.
Melbourne this week hosts not only the science journalism conference; there is a comedy convention just down the road. On leaving the hotel last night to go to a networking event I was stopped in the hallway by another guest who asked if I was part of the comedy conference.
I explained that I was actually part of the science one and thanked her for the assumption, based on the way I look, that I’m a comic and not a scientist. Now I come to think of it I'm not sure which is more flattering!
Ruth Francis
The best part of conferences is, of course, the socializing. Not just for the free drinks and finger sandwiches (though I certainly appreciate them both), but because you get a chance to have great conversations with fascinating people.
On Tuesday, I attended a networking breakfast for science journalists from developing countries. I sat next to William a journalist in Kampala, Uganda who I caught up with again last night.
William covers environmental issues but, as he put it, environmental issues in Uganda are usually a manifestation of poor governance. So writing about science is a politically charged and, therefore, potentially dangerous endevour.
He pointed to the riots that broke out a few days ago in Kampala when the Ugandan government seemed prepared to allocate vast tracts of the environmentally-sensitive Mabira Forest to the sugar company Scoul. Protestors were concerned that the sugar company would raze the forest in order to plant sugarcane crops. Unfortunately, what started as peaceful protests turned into riots in which several people were killed.
William said the government was probably lining its pockets by handing over a protected forest reserve to a profitable company.
And, as a journalist, he occasionally finds this frustrating because he can’t readily write about such things without putting himself at risk. In fact, William says he tends to self-censor when it comes to writing environmental stories in which the government is implicated because he feels publishing them may very well cause the paper trouble. But that’s not to say he’s resigned himself to silence. Instead, he’s decided to start up a website where he’ll publishing what he wants.
Apparently the web is still off the government’s radar; they don’t really see it as an important form of public dialogue and so William has a window of opportunity to cover stories where politics and the environment intersect. “For a journalist, it’s about speaking the truth,” he told me.
“Sure,” I said, “but what happens when the government eventually realizes you’ve been writing stories that make it look bad?”
William laughed and shrugged. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
Daemon Fairless
EDITORIAL
France's presidential elections are taking place at a time of deep debate over the French research community's standing and prospects. To further the debate, Nature's Declan Butler submitted a list of questions on research issues to the three leading candidates. Plus Nature surveys opinions from across the community, and takes a look at the research scene in France.
(You will need a password for much of this content)
EDITORIAL: Plus ça change?
NEWS FEATURES
The candidates respond
Let science speak for itself
Is French science in decline?
PLUS: Nature Jobs
Search for science jobs in the Francophone region
(please make your comments in English to aid discussion)
Claire Fraser-Liggett's move dooms The Institute for Genomic Research.
The personal divorce was final two years ago. The professional one dragged on until April, when Claire Fraser-Liggett left the organization headed by her ex-husband, genome scientist J. Craig Venter, to hoist her own flag over a new institute at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.
Google Earth is now being used to advocate for human rights and highlight the tragedy in Darfur, says Declan Butler.
When anyone now downloads Google Earth and browses over Africa, their eye cannot escape the ongoing genocide in Darfur. The country appears to be literally on fire, with flame symbols marking the locations of more than 1,600 destroyed villages and towns in this nation the size of France.
Discovery provides the first view of early forests.
Palaeontologists have uncovered a whole sample of the oldest known trees, providing a glimpse of what the Earth's earliest forests might have looked like.
This week the Nature Podcast rethinks realism in the quantum world, discovers how melting mantle formed the Earth’s crust, and uncovers the earliest forests.
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
Quantum mechanics just got even stranger.
There's only one way to describe the experiment performed by physicist Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues: it's unreal, dude.
So, remember how fat is one of the few factors consistently linked to cancer? Researchers are hard at work trying to figure out why, and here’s what they’re learning, according to a symposium on the obesity-cancer link:
1. Fat cells are evil. Texas scientist Stephen Hursting showed a Power Point slide of a fat cell, depicted as a globular circle with arrows sprouting out of it in all directions. Each arrow corresponded to a molecule that that the fat cell makes and dumps out into the body. Every one of these molecules is a bad actor that triggers deadly downstream effects, like inflammation, that lead to cancer.
The take home message? A fat cell, Hursting said, is “a veritable endocrine factory.” Translation: fat cells are like toxic chemical plants, churning out noxious substances that make us sick.
2. You can exercise to shed your excess fat cells. But this may not undo the damage you suffered by gaining too many fat cells in the first place.
Scientists like Hursting study the way our cells respond to the noxious substances that fat cells generate. It appears that exercise can counteract some of the damage wreaked by these chemicals on our cells. But the exercise effect isn’t the same as the effect of calorie restriction diets, which seem to boost health in powerful ways. Translation: as one of the speakers said, “A calorie in is not a calorie out.”
3. Drug companies like Novartis are hard at work designing drugs to save us from our own fat cells. A researcher from Novartis described a drug the company is taking through clinical trials right now, in fact, that could counteract some of the toxic effects of obesity. But here’s the kicker – drugs like these could improve our health, but they won’t make us skinnier. So here’s a question that fascinates me: When fat is healthy again, will it come back into style?
That’s a question that can’t be answered by anyone within these convention center walls. So it’s quite appropriate that the meeting is in Los Angeles this year, home of the thin-obsessed entertainment industry, which will probably determine whether or not Fat 'N' Healthy becomes the next big thing (so to speak). After all, Hollywood seems to have more influence on most ordinary people’s lives than the business that goes on at meetings like this.
And so, with that, I’m signing off from this year’s AACR meeting … and heading for the gym!
Well that's all from me from this year's April meeting as I pack my bags to leave Jacksonville. You can read more physics stories reported from the meeting, however, such as this online story by David Harris about the results from the Xenon10 dark matter experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy.
More stories will appear in Nature on Thursday, be sure to check back then.
Some pop artists, including Madonna, have been accused of hypocrisy because their life styles are not exactly compatible with the climate-awareness they are going to raise at the Live Earth concert at Wembley Stadium in London on July 7. Can the same be said about scientists who fly around the world to attend the EGU?
A session yesterday evening about whether the meeting’s ‘carbon footprint’ is justified was not overwhelmingly well attended. In the end, 100 or so people showed up. Well, it was a perfectly fine spring day in Vienna, so no wonder that the meeting had partly shifted outdoors. Hundreds of scientists were busy ‘networking’ in the sunshine all day. Today it’s raining.
Some 8,000 scientists from almost 100 countries are said to be here. Someone has calculated that together they have travelled 15 million kilometres – this is 400 times around the world – to come to Vienna. The planes, trains and cars (only one participant is said to have taken the bicycle) which brought them here have emitted 5,000 tonnes of CO2, roughly the annual emissions of 2,500 EU citizens. Too much?
Yes, say some. Why go to a meeting at the other side of the world when you don’t really interact much with other parts of your university. Ok, you’ll hear a few talks and do a little networking. But then, aren’t we all swamped with information every day anyways?
Video conferences and email interactions could do the whole networking thing just as efficiently as physically going to meetings, argue the very physically present critics.
That’s well-meant. But do we really want to create a world of scientific homies?
No, says John Ludden, the president of the EGU. We should rather increase the carbon footprint, and the outreach, of the EGU, he counters. To really start tackling the problem of climate change we must bring more, and other, people - energy experts, economists, power plant engineers, scientists from India and China – to the EGU. The benefits easily outweigh the meeting’s carbon footprint. After all, he says, the coming together of earth scientists spins off ideas how to mitigate environmental issues and perhaps save the planet.
And why not plant a few trees or invest in carbon ‘offsetting’ projects?
“Rather than giving money to some Mickey Mouse offset company we should invite more people,” says Ludden.
You heard it here first folks. The World Federation of Science Journalists just announced the venue for the next World Conference of Science Journalists will be…… London.
On Monday two cities, London and Trieste, bid for the chance to host the 6th World Conference in 2009. Both presentations were very detailed and very well received.
After further grilling the teams the Federation announced just now in their General Assembly that the London bid won. Nature is a media partner so we are all very excited.
Ruth Francis
A wonderful reception at the Melbourne Aquarium last night gave delegates opportunities to network while enjoying rays, turtles, sharks and a beautiful array of jellyfish. Champagne and canapés, were accompanied by a brass trio clothed in wetsuits, fins, masks and snorkels.
Although there was disappointment that the shark feeding turned out to be just shark viewing there were some exciting spectacles to view including a huge humphead maori wrasse. Also a somewhat famous fat shark! She has been in the news recently because of her size - she has been put on a diet by the aquarium although some people think weight loss is somewhat slow. Some think she has been eating the fish in the exhibit.
A fantastic evening was had by all. Continue reading for a couple of images by Erika Harrison
Ruth Francis
If any science story has legs it is that of the discovery of a new species of dwarf human on a remote Indonesian island of Flores, published in 2004 by Nature (Vol: 7012 pp: 1055 & 1087). A session on Tuesday looked at how this remained in the media eye so long and the resulting public confusion. The panel were Bert Roberts and Chris Turney of the original research team and Deborah Smith an award winning journalist for her coverage of the story.
The researchers detailed a new species of around 1 meter tall which they named Homo floresiensis after the island she was discovered on and nicknamed the Hobbit in relation to her height and oversized feet! (The name was apparently changed from Homo floresianes en route to publication as one of the peer reviewers pointed out she would forever be remembered by students as flowery anus…)
Initial publicity was phenomenal – countless papers reported the find as front page news and broadcasters clambered to get images and interviews. Two days later critics also began to engage with media. They claim the now nicknamed ‘Hobbit’ was a modern human who was micro cephalic – a genetic condition resulting in, amongst other things, a reduced skull size.
It is not the first time that a new fossil or human or subhuman has been claimed not to be real. The first Neanderthal was claimed by some to be a bear, others believed it was a lost Mongolian Cossack, and one critic said it was a child with rickets who had been bashed on the head!
How do the public deal with ongoing debate and discussions? Do they believe that the fossil is a genuine new species, a hoax or are they genuinely confused? Comparisons with the climate change debate in the media were made. Journalists wanting to present opposing views have focused on the vocal minority of critics and the team who found the fossil. In reality, the researchers who found the Hobbit estimate, the field is probably divided 95% to 5%.
What are the answers? What lessons have been learned by the team and reporters? Given the history of these issues researchers could have preempted the critics informed media that they were aware of the potential for criticism and tackled it head on. Media could have waited until the critics had been peer reviewed before giving them the same space as the believers who had been through this process.
On the positive side, Deb Smith pointed out this is a fantastic example of scientists engaging in media and continuing to do so. It is the ‘story of her career’ and she continues to enjoy it playing out. Only more fossils will end the confusion and a new dig begins this June. We shall watch and see if lessons have been learned and how the public perceives what ensues.
Ruth Francis
(I should probably say here that I'm the press officer for Nature, where this fossil was first published)
Leaving just 2% of transgenic crop rows unsprayed could boost diversity.
British crop researchers are claiming that they have developed a method to stop transgenic crops from damaging the biodiversity of weeds and seeds. By leaving two rows in every 100 unsprayed with pesticides, enough diversity can be preserved to prevent knock-on effects on birds and other animals, they calculate.
Read more here
Swaying from tree to tree is done with the greatest of ease.
Red apes have an easy life: their preferred method of getting from one tree to the next in the jungle not only keeps them safe from harm, but also saves them a lot of hard work. A detailed investigation into how orangutans use the sway of branches to propel themselves from tree to tree shows that it is way more efficient than climbing down one tree and up the next.
Well, hopefully not. But today, I learned that some researchers question the wisdom of adding a nutrient called folic acid to flour, as we do in the United States. Folic acid is a form of vitamin B that is essential for preventing very serious birth defects. It's also suspected to prevent colon cancer. But confusingly, some researchers also seem to be concerned that too much folate given throughout life creates its own cancer risk, and that giving it to pregnant women (as is currently recommended) creates cancer hazards for the fetus.
Why? Because of something called epigenetics - a field that is very hot right now. Epigenetics is the study of modifications that can silence or activate our genes. It's increasingly clear that when epigenetic processes go awry, cancer can result. In fact, last October, the FDA approved the first-ever drug intended to treat cancer by resetting faulty epigenetic processes.
So what does this have to do with folate? It turns out the nutrient provides an abundant supply of chemicals that the body uses to make epigenetic modifications. So there is a concern that too much folate could accelerate the epigenetic processes that lead to cancer, said Jean-Pierre Issa, an epigenetics researcher at Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center. "People in epigenetics are particularly worried about the massive doses of folate pregnant women take," he said, because those doses are presumably passed on to the fetus.
Researchers have tried to study this issue by looking at colon biopsies taken from adults, some of whom had taken three years of folate supplements. The study didn't find that the supplements accelerated epigenetic marking on the genes examined in the study. But, Issa cautioned, "We don't know what decades of folate would do, and we don't know what it will do to a fetus."
So far, the idea that folate might actually harm you is pure speculation. So nobody should avoid flour, and pregnant women should definitely continue taking their folate supplements. But it's definitely a space to watch for the future. And it's yet another case where the science behind single nutrients is irritatingly complex.
These drugs usually do more good than harm; but more monitoring is needed.
A re-evaluation of clinical data suggests that although antidepressants do promote suicidal tendencies in a small percentage of children and adolescents — as widely reported a few years ago — the benefits of the drugs for the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders almost always outweigh the risks.
Being in Australia, I’ve been keeping my eye out for quintessential Aussie research – and researchers. Today I met Marilyn Renfree, the Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics. She studies developmental biology and uses wallabies as an animal model. This makes a lot of sense since newborn wallabies, being marsupials, are essentially in an embryonic state when they’re born. Unlike humans, they don’t becoming male or female until well after they’ve been born. So, for Marilyn, the wallaby is a perfect model for studying the endocrine pathways controlling sexual differentiation. Interesting, certainly. But what I really appreciated was that, instead of calling herself something unwieldy like a Developmental Endocrinologist, a Mammalian Endocrinologist or a Marsupial Physiologist she simply called herself a Wallaby-ologist. Crickey!