The Missouri Department of Conservation and the Nature Conservancy together put on trips to see a stable population of prairie chickens lek during the Spring on land owned by the Conservancy near Eagleville, Missouri. I met up with the volunteer guide, Bill, and about six other chicken fans at 5am, a full hour before dawn. We hiked up a hill a short distance to a small wooden blind, which looked like a children's clubhouse with all the windows on one side.

From these windows we watched the sun rise over the rolling hills of the area, most of which are covered in crops like maize and soy. Meadowlarks sang out sweetly. Presently eight male prairie chickens, each about two pounds but looking larger thanks to their fluffy feathers, descended and began displaying. Each chicken would stretch his white-ringed neck out tall, then flip its tails up in a fan and raise two whiskery-looking feathers up along its head until they looked like horns. At the same time it inflated two tennis-ball-sized shiny orange sacs on each side of its necks and made a noise that Bill described as “a long low lonesome moan”.

The chickens paired into twos and preformed this amazing display, and occasionally went after one another by brief running charges and by hopping into the air with the aid of their wings and kicking one another. Their feet are not barbed like roosters, so these brawls are mostly for show.

Only on this day there was no audience for all these antics which went on for well over an hour. It is late in the season and the few hens have apparently all already mated and crept into the tall grass to make their nests on the ground. These males just can't give up the dancing.

Because this population of birds is so small, conservationists worry about inbreeding, and are considering moving in some chickens from Kansas, where they are more numerous, to boost numbers diversify the gene pool. (“They are few enough,” says Bill, “that a severe hailstorm or a harsh winter where they couldn't get anything to eat could wipe out the whole mess.”) They have put radio collars on many of them, and long antennas were visible on a few of the birds.

The sheer obliviousness of the birds was somehow moving to me. They are totally unaware that humans are planning their fate, tracking and numbering them and watching them from blinds. They are totally unaware that they just cling to survival as a species. They are even unaware, or at least undeterred, by the lack of hens. No, they just keep it up, the puffing and strutting and moaning and charging with their expressions fierce under orange eyebrows.

That’s it from me on this prairie chicken expedition. Perhaps, for the real action, I’ll try to catch them earlier next year.

- Posted on behalf of Emma Marris

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The prairie was once one of the iconic ecosystems of North America. An undulating expanse of grasses, grazing bison and periodic cleansing fire stretching across hundreds of miles, it was called by “the inland sea” by James Fenimore Cooper. The prairie was also an obvious place to farm by removing a bouquet of native grasses and replacing them with rows of grasses dear to human stomachs—our domesticated grains. “Habitat loss” is too puny a term for what happened to the prairie. Only 4% of the original tallgrass prairie - the ecosystem most closely associated with the prairie chicken - remains.

Along to the brink with the prairie went its fauna, including the prairie chicken. There are four species of prairie chicken: the greater, the lesser, the Attwater, which lives in coastal Texas in tiny numbers, and the Heath Hen, which is extinct.

I am off to see the Greater Prairie Chicken (Tympanuchus cupido) ‘lek’. The lek is kind of like a nightclub, public promenade, or grocery store—a place where males strut their stuff for the benefit of the females, which generally give them a great number of unimpressed looks and pretend to ignore them until they finally give in and pick one. It is a great convenience to prairie chicken researchers and enthusiasts that they are a lekking species, for it means that they reliably show up at the same spot day after day to preform their competitive mating displays.

I am eager to see these birds in action, and not just because their display is said to be fantastic. It is something to see a species so rare and short of its former population and range. I'll report back on what I see.

- posted on behalf of Emma Marris

Nature Conservancy Prairie Chicken information
interview with director of conservation science for The Nature Conservancy in Missouri:
USGS information about the bird:
Audobon information

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:01 PM | Permalink

New website gives smaller African projects a bigger profile.

by Michael Hopkin

[This story was published here because the Nature News website was experiencing technical problems. You can now also find this story on our news site, which has resumed normal service.]

...(continued)...

The Internet is great for sharing links with your friends, getting information from distant lands, and, of course, spending money. Now a website is aiming to take advantage of all of these in a bid to raise the profile of African scientists working at the grassroots of the fight against malaria.

The website, MalariaEngage.org, showcases the efforts of a range of small research projects that may otherwise be overlooked by the global philanthropic efforts now under way to beat the disease, which claims more than a million lives every year. It has been launched in time to be up and running for World Malaria Day on 25 April.

Visitors to the website can view details of a range of projects based in Tanzania, and decide which to donate money to. The organizers are asking for pledges of US$10 or more, which will go towards the seven projects currently sponsored, and which have budgets of between £10,000 and $50,000.

It’s a world away from the estimated $3.6 billion total pledged to malaria research by big philanthropic organizations such as the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But the new website is trying to reach African researchers who are not currently getting funding; “Young scientists with bright ideas that at the moment are going into the dustbin,” says Peter Singer, a medical ethicist at the University of Toronto and one of the team behind the new site. “It’s not just about money,” he adds, but about “fostering direct engagement” between donators and specific local projects.

“It’s great to have a place where you can donate to R&D [research and development] rather than just bednets,” says Anna Wang, public affairs officer with the Medicines for Malaria Venture in Geneva. “R&D isn’t the sexiest area for donations, usually.” But, she adds, it is hard for a layperson using the site to assess the importance of the research being proposed: “There isn’t much detail about the projects and it’s hard to know their scientific merit,” she says.

Singer says they chose a well-respected institution for the pilot phase of the site – Tanzania’s National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) – and relied on them to use their own peer-review process to select projects. “We respect African scientific leadership,” he says. Jo Lines, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says he’d like to see broader peer review and ethical review by an independent committee to help ensure that none of the donated money goes to waste.

Fantastic four

Well-funded malaria efforts, such as the Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa (MACEPA), focus on four key strategies: providing insecticide-treated bednets; improving access to the best available artemisinin-based drug therapies; spraying of urban areas with pesticide; and routine treatment of pregnant women to protect children.

But the focus on these strategies, although approved by the World Health Organization as the most effective way to combat rates of malaria, can leave researchers without funding to pursue other ideas. “At the moment there’s a lot of wasted talent and wasted ideas in malaria,” Singer says. And those other ideas are necessary to keep the field moving forward, argues Singer’s colleague Abdallah Daar: “If you think only of bednets, then in 20 years’ time you’ll only be thinking of bednets.”

Among the seven projects featured on the website are those to improve the performance of bednets and malaria drugs. But the site also features projects to study how traditional African medics can engage with modern malaria treatments, and how to develop plants that repel mosquitoes from local communities. “The research questions asked by the projects described on the website are very important, and are not being asked by the big global players, such as Gates and the Global Fund,” says Lines.

Hamisi Malebo, a researcher with the NIMR who is leading the project to investigate these mosquito-repelling plants, explains that residents of a refugee camp in Tanzania’s Ngara district suffered less malaria if they grew plants such as American basil near to their homes. With enough funding, he hopes to set up a plant nursery in north-eastern Tanzania to test eight different plants.

“More to life than soccer”

The project’s organizers chose Tanzania because of the experience of Tom Hadfield, a British Internet entrepreneur better known for developing a website called Soccernet, which he sold to the US sports giant ESPN for $40 million at the age of just 17.

After his dotcom success, he travelled to Tanzania and saw the suffering caused by malaria. “At some point I realised there was more to life than putting up football scores on the Internet,” he says. “When I came back from Tanzania, a lot of my friends were asking me what they could do to help.”

The new site is an attempt to use the social networking power of the Internet to allow people to share details of the research projects and encourage their friends to get involved. Donors, for example, can link to the website via their Facebook profile. “I believe in the power of friends talking to friends — it’s a very viral approach,” Hadfield says.

The organizers are hoping to expand beyond Tanzania and sponsor research projects in other African countries. Singer says they will be guided by the recommendations of national-health institutions and the scientists who work for them.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In cancer, it’s typically not the primary tumour that kills – it’s the metastases. Little wonder, then, that a major topic at the meeting was developing drugs not to shrink the primary tumour, but to stop it from spreading.

Danny Welch from the University of Alabama at Birmingham presented data on an interesting protein called KISS1. (Welch claims the protein is so named because he lived near Hershey, Pennsylvania at the time of its discovery. For you international readers, Hershey, Pennsylvania is the home of Hershey’s, the chocolate company that makes ‘Hershey’s kisses”.)

Anyway, KISS1 inhibits metastasis, but the fascinating thing is that it does so without preventing the spread of tumour cells. Instead, it keeps the metastasized cells from flourishing in their new environment. In other words, if you inject KISS1-expressing tumour cells into mice, they’ll form a primary tumour and cells from the primary tumour will migrate to the lungs. And then they’ll just sit there, lost and lonely.

How does KISS1 do that? The answer isn’t clear, but Welch does have data suggesting that he protein is cleaved into pieces called peptides that are then secreted from the cell. An important question to answer now is: does KISS1 inhibit growth of metastasized tumour cells after they’ve already spread and started forming new tumours? If so, it could address a major concern among those who want to develop drugs to prevent cancer's spread: what happens if you get there with your new wonder drug too late, after the cells have already begun their invasion?

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 08:27 PM | Permalink

In 1889 Stephen Paget came up with the ‘seed to soil’ theory to explain why some cancers seem to spread to specific organs, rather than just invading the body at random. He said that perhaps there were features of the soil (the organ) that determined whether the seed (the cancer) took root there. Some soils simply aren’t hospitable to some seeds (having gardened in the heavy red clay of North Carolina, I can attest to that…)

Quite a few speakers evoked the seed to soil theory in talks about metastasis. One such speaker, Sara Sukumar of Johns Hopkins University, mentioned it while talking about her rapid autopsy program. The program is meant to test the assumption that the characteristics of the original ‘primary’ tumour will be shared by its metastatic offspring. There is some evidence to support this: gene expression patterns in some breast cancer tumours have been shown to resemble gene expression in their distant metastases, for example. But Sukumar says our understanding of this relationship is hindered by a lack of tissue to study because researchers often have only a single biopsy from each patient.

So Sukumar has a rapid autopsy program to collect tumour samples. The autopsy starts within four hours of when the patient died. She and her colleagues can then study features of the tumours to see if they express the same hormone receptors or other molecular markers. They create cell cultures of the tumours and inject tumour tissue into mice to study their growth. So far they’ve only done the autopsies on 18 patients, but Sukumar says she’s found a lot of variation between secondary tumours and the original biopsy. One questioner pointed out that there can be a long time (decades even) between the original biopsy and death of the patient, giving the tumours plenty of time to change. But overall, the system sounds like a promising way to look at the relationship between seed and soil.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 07:32 PM | Permalink

Economists? Are cold-hearted, says the dictionary of accepted ideas. Now, Richard Tol, an environmental and energy economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin is also a bit of an enfant terrible in his guild. So I, for one, was not surprised that his whistle stop at the EGU sent some palpable shockwaves through the large and well-filled lecture hall D here.

Tol talked about the economic impact of ocean acidification on the tourism industry. People ‘purchase’ the service of coral reefs (which are beginning to severely suffer from rising ocean acidity - a result of increased CO2 uptake by the seas) by going scuba diving in, say, the Caribbean, he explained. Coral reef tourism is however only a small part of the global tourism industry. The economic damage caused by less people coming to places like Belize or Martinique, although painful for these island communities, will amount to no more than 10 to 70 million dollars per year, he argued. A mere trifle.

But his reasoning drove some people mad. After the session Tol was heavily attacked by angry listeners for his (allegedly) deliberately playing down the environmental problems associated with ocean acidification. He had a hard time trying to explain that he didn’t mean to say that other impacts, such as on biodiversity, fisheries or coastal protection, did not matter from an economic standpoint. The sole reason why he focused exclusively on recreation was that impacts on tourism are the only ones that economists can currently hope to determine with reasonable reliability. But his point didn’t really get through.

The current rate of ocean acidification is something the world hasn’t seen in 20 million years, said one biologist. Neither has it ever seen democracy arriving in China, Tol replied.

So, are economists – or is Tol – outfitted with a cynical, die-hard materialist view of the world? No, they aren’t. What this little argy-bargy really goes to show is that the (much-needed) inclusion of economists to the climate debate is sometimes hampered by fear of contact between the two academic communities. That’s bad. So mind, rumours of economists lacking heart and soul are greatly exaggerated.

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier at 06:38 PM | Permalink

With all the excitement about the imminent turning on of the LHC, people are forgetting that the Tevatron at Fermilab will be nipping at the LHC's heels for a while. Brian Winer, of Ohio State University, gave an update on the Tevatron and explained how the scientists there are using every trick they can think of to wring more sensitivity out of the machine, such as using artificial neural networks to combine information from two different detection experiments. Also, the Tevatron has been running long enough now, at high enough luminosities, that they are getting enough collisions to make interesting statistics.

As early as this summer, Winer expects that Fermilab will be able to to statistically rule out the existence of a 160 GeV Higgs boson, one of the theoretically likely masses for the so-called “God particle.” (Barring a positive detection, of course.) It will be a lot harder for them to detect a lower-mass Higgs boson before the LHC starts pumping out data. But who knows?

As a tantalizing treat, Winer put up a picture, a couple years old, of a detection of a particle that had the perfect characteristics of the Higgs. Only problem was, the particle was four times as likely to be noise.
Now, if they could only get four or five more detections in the same spot, then they'd be in business.
Winer repeated the exhortation of a colleague: “We're one good idea away from finding this thing.”

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I came across an interesting little poster the other day. John Stewart, a physics professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, decided to look at lexical trends in physics textbooks. He used a method developed by the late, great Don Hayes, a sociologist at Cornell University, who looked at trends in all sorts of texts -- from school books to SATs -- to explain both the dumbing down of America and the jargoning up of science and technology.

Stewart examined trends between two physics texts, Halliday and Resnick 3rd edition, published in 1988, and Halliday, Resnick and Walker, 7th edition, from 2004. The lexical difficulty -- a measure of the book's readability -- increased by almost a grade level. The newer edition was prettier -- the amount of blank space in the book doubled -- but the addition of another author may have made the textbook worse, something along the lines of too many cooks in the kitchen. Stewart's conclusion? "The old Halliday and Resnick was a better object to read," he says. "It's very noticeable."

Now I haven't seen the 7th edition, but I do remember Halliday and Resnick 3rd edition -- it was the physics textbook I used in college. And it was plenty tough to read. I didn't realize I had it so good.

Posted by Eric Hand at 03:37 PM | Permalink

NCI director John Niederhuber was around today to answer questions from conference attendees. First, though, he gave everyone the hard truth about the budget.

The data:
Number of years that funding for NCI has remained flat: 4
Rate of biomedical research inflation (apparently slightly higher than the overall rate of inflation in the United States): 3.8% per year
Percent decrease in purchasing power at the NCI since 2004: 15%

Niederhuber said that for the first few years of flat funding, NCI tried to cope with its shrinking budget by trimming the size of their grants rather than decreasing the number of awards. Those days are over, he said today, and this year NCI will offer fewer of their competing research project grants. Niederhuber also said that he was not optimistic about the possibility of any future budget increases, "no matter which party takes over the White House".

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 10:09 AM | Permalink

Global sea levels could rise by up to 1.5 metres by the end of the century, Svetlana Jevrejeva of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool told the EGU this morning.

Jevrejeva and her team reconstructed seal levels for the past 2,000 years, and then used a non- linear equation relating sea levels to temperature change to predict future sea level rise. Unlike the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), whose most recent prediction of sea level rise is three times smaller, the team incorporated into their prediction the rapid response to global warming of large ice sheet’s, such as Greenland’s.

Interestingly, Jevrejeva arrives at an even higher range (0.8 to 1.5 metres) than had Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, just prior to the release of the 2007 IPCC report . Using a similar semi-empirical approach, but assuming a linear relationship between temperature and sea level change, Rahmstorf projected sea level rise in 2100 of 0.5 to 1.4 meters above the 1990 level. In a technical comment published in Science, Jevrejeva and others criticized his approach for “not meaningfully” contributing to quantifying uncertainties in the prediction of future sea-level rise.

The global sea level currently rises by 3.5 millimetres per year, as the combined result of thermal expansion of ocean water, glacier melting, and changes in the global hydrological cycle. Sea level rise by 1.5 meters would result in the loss of most of Bangladesh, and threaten low-lying regions around the world. In China alone, some 100 million people would need to be displaced if sea level were to rise by one meter or more.

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier at 10:07 AM | Permalink

Today's plenary session on 'late-breaking clinical trials' offered up a few new promising phase III trial results for the prevention of colorectal cancer.

The first was an update on a kind of cox-2 inhibitor called celecoxib (marketed as Celebrex). You may remember the cox-2 inhibitors -- they're a class of anti-inflammatory drugs that were the center of a scandal a few years ago when it turned out they carried increased risk of cardiovascular side effects, such as heart attacks or stroke. Most of the scandal (and accusations of suppressed negative data) revolved around rofecoxib, better known as "Vioxx", which was subsequently pulled from the market. Celecoxib is still available but carries the dreaded black-boxwarning. (The black box is the FDA's strongest warning, and is the last stop before yanking a drug off the market entirely.)

But celecoxib had shown promise for preventing colorectal cancer in those at high risk for the disease, and I've heard it said on several occasions that the negative press about the drugs' possible cardiovascular harm unfairly restricted use of what could have been a valuable cancer preventative. Today, Monica Bertagnolli of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston reported that the protective effects of celecoxib have persisted in patients that stopped taking the drug 1.5 years ago, when the study was halted due to the realization that celecoxib posed a cardiovascular risk.

Bertagnolli's data, summarized below, allay two fears about the use of celecoxib as a cancer preventative. First, some had hypothesized that the anti-inflammatory drug was not preventing the formation of abnormal growths, called adenomas, but was simply delaying their detection. These critics hypothesized that once patients stopped taking the drugs, the cancer would appear in full force, no different from placebo. But the data argue against that --adenomas were still reduced well after patients abandoned the drugs. A few stats:

Number of patients in the study:
Average length of celecoxib treatment: 3.5 years
Date that the treatment was halted due to increased cardiovascular toxicity: December 2004
Percent reduction in the occurrence of adenomas in who took 200mg celecoxib, twice a day: 14%
Reduction in 'advanced' adenomas at three years: 57% reduction
Reduction in advanced adenomas at five years (1.5 years after treatment stopped): 41%

Bertagnolli's data also address the risk of cardiovascular side effects. When her data was stratified according to pre-existing cardiovascular risk factors (things like diabetes, smoking, high blood pressure, etc), she found those who did not carry these risk factors were much less likely to experience the cardiovascular side-effects of celecoxib. The data here are a little weak on this point, she acknowledged, because 84% of her patients had at least one risk factor, leaving her with relatively small numbers in the "no risk" category. But overall, the results suggested that celecoxib may be beneficial in those with a risk of colorectal cancer but with no preexisting cardiovascular risk factors.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 10:05 AM | Permalink

It’s this time of year again – the European Geosciences Union’s (EGU) General Assembly is on.

Some 8,000 earth scientists have made it this year to the charming Austrian capital of Vienna. All sessions I went to today were well-attended. The discussions, in the lecture rooms and on the floors, were lively as ever.

The sessions this morning about mountain hydology, glaciology and the cryosphere – ice and snow, that is – were quite a treat. I listened to a pretty provocative exchange of views on arctic sea ice retreat. Are estimations about the rate of the retreat still to conservative, or is the demise of ice exagerrated? Some scientists believe that arctic ice is merely in a high flow state, and that the massive export through narrow passages of arctic ice into warmer waters will be more or less back to normal at some point. Optimistic!

The retreat of mountain glaciers, which provide a reliable water resource for many lowland regions, is one of the most striking signs of global warming. But glaciologist warned today that the behaviour of many large glaciers is worryingly understudied. Well, not in the European Alps or the Rocky Mountains. But Indian or Chinese earth scientists are often not the outdoor fanatics which most of their European or North American colleagues doubtlessly are (the uninformed passer-by could easily mistake the EGU for an assembly of mountaineers

Georg Kaser, an Innsbruck-based glaciologist, told me that fieled measurements in the Himalayas, for example, are nororiously scarce. Only for a few smaller glaciers in the region there exist reliable mass balance data. Simply extrapolating the few existing measurements is highly problematic, as larger glaciers may behave quite differently. The assumption that the exceptionally large shrink rate observed in few small glaciers is typical for the whole Himalayas is premature, he says.

Lack of field measurements is an even bigger constraint in the Hindu Kush mountains in Afgahnistan. Glaciological studies in this Taliban-controlled region can only be done by remote sensing. No western funding agency would currently support any field research there.

Meltwater from the the Hindu Kush's 3,500 or so glaciers is crucial for recharging lowland aquifers, and until 30 years ago supplied Kabul and other large cities with sufficient water. But as the glaciers are getting smaller and smaller, and because snow comes later in the years and starts to melt earlier, people are now forced to take water from often polluted wells and reservoirs.

Bruce Molnia of the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Virginia showed some impressive satllite images of glacier retreat in the Hindukush. The USGS has also begun training Afghanistan geologists with a view of them taking up field research in the Hindukush as soon as the security situation allows, he says.

Not everything worked today, though. The ‘Great Debate’ on ‘Mining versus Nature’ proved to be a rather weary and uninspired exchange of remarkably unsurprising standpoints. I do hope that tomorrow’ debates on energy options and geo-engineering will be more enlightening.

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier at 07:40 PM | Permalink

Number of attendees: ~17,000
(Population of the town that I grew up in: ~20,000)

Pages in the program book: 590

Number of sessions I attended today in which a cell phone rang during a presentation: 5

Number of sessions I attended today in which a cell phone rang, and the owner answered it and started talking during a presentation: 2

Number of sessions I attended today in which someone in the audience pulled out his cell phone, dialed, and started talking during a presentation: 1

Number of photos or recordings attendees are allowed to take of a presentation without explicit permission: 0

Number of people discreetly recording videos of Jeremy Rich's (Duke University) talk this afternoon, after he had explicitly asked the audience not to: at least 2

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 09:08 AM | Permalink

A few semi-random stats culled from my notes.

Approximate age of the 'cancer stem cell' hypothesis: 150 years

Amount of money spent in the United States for cancer treatment in 2004: $72 billion

Number of candidate cancer biomarkers reported in the literature: at least 1261

Number of biomarkers approved each year by the US FDA since 1998: less than 1 per year

Percent increase in the risk of one kind of breast cancer in postmenopausal women who drink 3 or more glasses of alcohol each day: 51%
(that's estrogen- and progesterone-receptor positive breast cancer, for those of you keeping score)

Number of women in the alcohol-and-breast-cancer study: 184,418

Percent decrease in the risk of colorectal cancer in mouse pups whose mothers were fed a diet rich in folic acid during pregnancy and lactation: 300%

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 09:02 AM | Permalink

It's happened to me several times while reporting on a story about the current state of drug approvals in the United States: a source stops talking, sighs, and tells me: "You know, if aspirin were up for approval today, the FDA would reject it."

The hypothetical is meant to imply that regulators have become overcautious, and that consumers have come to expect side-effect free drugs. The first time I heard the aspirin example, I thought it was clever. By now I think I've probably heard it from about six different people and somewhere along the way it lost its shock value. Someday I'd like to trace its origins: who was the first to say this?

Today, in a session on the regulatory challenges of developing drugs that prevent cancer, Ellen Sigal of Friends of Cancer Research in Arlington, Virginia took up the torch: "I'd like to see Aspirin approved in the regulatory environment today," she scoffed.

I should probably point out: others have told me that today's regulators are approving drugs that are more toxic than ever. But the difference is that the more toxic drugs include, for example, cancer drugs for patients who otherwise wouldn't have a fighting chance. The standards are different for drugs that would be taken by otherwise healthy people to ease a few aches and pains, or to prevent a disease they might never get anyway.

Sigal cited "hysteria in the media" as a reason for overcautious regulation, which she says is holding back drug development -- particularly of cancer-preventing drugs. True, there has been some hysteria. But in some cases, industry surely must shoulder at least a little of the blame: nothing whips the media into an emotional frenzy like the scandal of suppressed clinical trial data.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 08:47 AM | Permalink

I have just seen some of the world's greatest minds dancing to "Play that funky music, white boy".

What's that? You want pictures and videos? The thought definitely crossed my mind, but they looked so happy out there on the dance floor at the AACR reception -- I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Plus, I'm not sure what the legal ramifications of that would be. Could we be sued for posting an unflattering video of cancer researchers getting funky? Best not to take any chances.

In any case, I had some trouble accessing the internet from the conference today, so I'll try to catch up on a little blogging before calling it a night.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 08:42 AM | Permalink

At APS, there are the invited talks, and then there are the talks that might affectionately be known as the “crackpot” talks. Any member of APS, regardless of their background or affiliation, can submit an abstract and give a 10 minute talk. Nothing is rejected.
So about once a day, there's a session with a coded title like “Unconventional ideas in XXXX.” That's where the weird ones go. Sunday morning, Sunil Thakur, with an affiliation of “Individual Research”, was scheduled to give a talk on the “Nature of Reality.” In the abstract, Thakur promised to explain that “how the reality is revealed does not depend only on the properties of the reality itself but also depends on the properties of the medium through which the object is manifested.”
It looks like last year, Thakur submitted an abstract on black holes, where he claimed that temperature affects the speed of light. But today he didn't show up, and the session ended early. Everyone filed out of the room, maybe a touch disappointed.
“I wanted to learn the nature of reality,” muttered one young physicist, not without sarcasm. “Now I have to find something else to do.”

Posted by Eric Hand at 12:54 AM | Permalink

Many physicists are still smarting from the blows they took after Congress slashed various high-energy physics programs in the fiscal year 2008 budget. In the main conference area on Saturday morning, five computers sat beckoning. They weren't for quick email checks, but for physicists to sign and send form letters to their representatives in Congress. The form letter calls for a total of $510 million in emergency supplemental appropriations: $180 million for the NSF, $30 million for the NIST Core program, and $300 million for the DOE Office of Science.

Many Washington insiders think chances of this happening are quite slim, but APS officials are still pushing hard.
They collected 1,753 signatures at the March meeting in New Orleans, and in the first morning in St. Louis, they had garnered 142. Don Engel, a science policy fellow at APS in Washington, DC, was giving out stickers that read "I support science funding" to everyone that signed the form letter. "You want a sticker?" Engel asked his latest petitioner. "Then we know not to bother you again."

Posted by Eric Hand at 01:49 AM | Permalink

Greetings from San Diego -- or, as I've come to think of it, 'the surface of the sun'. Normally I’d spend this introductory, ‘scene-setting’ blog entry whining about how I’d rather be out playing in the Pacific. Not today. It was absurdly, oppressively, unjustly sunny outside. The sun streamed into the windows of the convention center, and attendees squinted and winced down the hallway. Some sat out on the patio, stretched out with their feet up on chairs sunbathing, but I don’t know how they did it. One trip out of the convention center for lunch left me sunburned and sapped. A darkened conference room offered sanctuary, but the doorway opened into one of those sun-drenched hallways. From inside the room, the hallway was nothing more than a blaze of white light.

Overall, today was a slow day, filled with educational sessions that were informative but not so newsy. Tomorrow the meeting kicks off in earnest at 7am…

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 01:27 AM | Permalink

This is a bit of a homecoming for me; it has been almost exactly a year since I left the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And so I was feeling fairly nostalgic as I walked the streets of downtown on this blustery Friday evening. My mood wasn't brightened at all by the utter desolation of downtown. With the Cardinals out of town, the streets were deserted, save for an empty beer can rattling in the wind. Attention physicists! Get out of downtown! The charm of St. Louis is hidden within its neighborhoods and side streets. Hop in a cab and say "Lafayette Square" or "Central West End" -- the cabbie will drop in the right place, and you won't be disappointed. I also hear that Schlafly, the local brewmeister (in addition to the local brewmeister, Anheuser-Busch), has a "Repeal of Prohibition" festival going on Saturday afternoon, if anyone is already looking to play hooky. I'm willing to trade more St. Louis tips for story tips -- email me at e.hand@nature.com. Looking forward to the conference!

Posted by Eric Hand at 01:30 AM | Permalink

Here's one more story for you out of Justin Gallivan's laboratory at Emory University. Gallivan has been using bits of RNA called riboswitches to turn gene expression on and off. At the conference, he reported he could turn on E. coli's propeller in the presence of a pesticide, giving the bugs chemical-following properties that look a lot like what bacteria naturally do with external receptors on their front grille.

Gallivan says motility is a good way to find the best riboswitches, which could then be modified to turn on the gene of your choice. You can read more about it here.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 03:16 PM | Permalink

Microscopic cogs and miniature turbines are fairly easy to make out of silicon, but getting them to move is another matter. Ordinary oil won't work at that scale, and solid coatings rub off in minutes. But now there might be a solution. Check out the story in Nature News.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 03:16 PM | Permalink

There's no rule that says scientists can't be a bit superstitious, especially when it comes to sensitive laboratory equipment. Take, for example, students at Zhan Chen's laboratory at the University of Michigan, who have created a shrine to one of the lab’s two sum frequency generation (SFG) spectroscopy lasers. Chen presented a picture of the shrine, replete with labels, at the introduction to his talk Sunday. I think my favorite part of the shrine is one student’s ponytail, although the inclusion of the thesis defense poster for a student who defied expectations and succeeded in graduating is a runner-up. Click on the image to enlarge.

Chen writes: “Even though our systems are commercial products, for my chemistry students, it takes some time for them to learn how to run experiments. Furthermore, it is not easy for my students to fix problems the SFG systems sometimes have. Therefore, they developed this ‘shrine to the lasers’ in hope that the SFG systems, including a pico-second laser, some nonlinear optical components, and a detection system, would be ‘happy’ to behave ‘normally’ all the time.”

Chen’s group uses SFG to study complicated surfaces and interfaces, including polymers and biological materials. They’re eyeing questions like biocompatibility, polymer adhesion, and anti-microbial peptide activities. The shrine continues to grow.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 01:59 PM | Permalink

In the spirit of our swampy environs, the first press conference Sunday morning was on the special anti-microbial/fungal/viral properties of alligator blood. Biochemist and alligator rassler Mark Merchant of McNeese State University in southwestern Louisiana wasn't on hand to field questions, but two of his colleagues filled in, describing some progress on testing the blood's ability to kill microscopic invaders

Alligators aren’t the friendliest creatures around. They like to fight and sometimes sustain serious injuries; they also live in marches and swamps full of opportunistic microbes. But, the researchers say, alligators seldom get infected.

In 2006, the Sun-Sentinel in south Florida covered Merchant's work. By then, he had found alligator serum killed off all 16 strains of bacteria tested. Now, the number of bacterial fatalities has since gone up to 23, and includes the dreaded MRSA. Human serum is only effective in killing eight of those 23 strains.

No one is quite sure what it is about the serum that works so well, although there was some speculation that lysine and arginine-rich peptides may be responsible. Merchant's colleagues are in the process of looking into this.

Still, I’m left wondering whether alligator blood will ever yield useful clinical treatments. At higher concentrations the serum is very effective at killing cells -- including healthy human ones. I wasn’t able to get a clear answer from the presenters as to what the toxicity is like for human cells. It could very well be that alligator blood is an indiscriminate killer.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 08:35 PM | Permalink

Greetings from New Orleans, where an anticipated 15,000+ chemists have descended on the ever-resilient Morial Convention Center. Last month's American Physical Society meeting passed under the city's radar, but this meeting is so large, the welcome mat extended all the way to the airport, which boasted a "Welcome ACS" sign at the baggage claim area. I'll be covering the conference's first three days, from Sunday to Tuesday. Stay tuned for more dispatches as well as links to online news coverage.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 06:46 PM | Permalink