Nature Newsblog
We rarely learn anything Earth-shaking from space labs, says Philip Ball - which is why inexpensive missions like Foton-M3 are the way to go.
Space experiments have rarely seemed as much fun as they did on the European Space Agency's Foton-M3 mission, which blasted off two weeks ago from Russia for a 12-day spell in low-Earth orbit.
Funding woes plague US biomedical researchers. But calls for more funding ignore the structural problems that push universities to produce too many scientists, argues Brian C. Martinson.
Federal funding for biomedical research is a substantial investment in the US science community. Earlier this year, representatives of several major research universities testified before Congress and issued a report arguing that the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, is insufficient to sustain "a strong and vibrant program of basic research"1. They pointed to stifling of innovation and damage to the career prospects of young scientists, ultimately warning that there could be a threat to US pre-eminence in biomedical research if Congress does not increase levels of funding for the NIH. Yet, what is it that poses the most potent threat to the future of biomedical research — a lack of resources, or our failure to manage the level of competition for available resources? The answer to this question is vital if society is to gain maximum benefit from the public money invested in biomedical research....
The trend for debunking science's simple narratives can be overdone, says Philip Ball.
There was once a time when the history of science was told as a succession of Eureka moments in which strokes of experimental or theoretical genius led the scales to fall from our eyes, banishing old, false ideas to the dustbin.
The Marvel Universe has social webs similar to our own, says Philip Ball. In other words, they're sexist and elitist.
In which society do powerful males form a dominant, elitist network while females are relegated to peripheral roles?
A survey of evidence for the 'memory' of liquid water casts little light on its putative role in homeopathy, says Philip Ball.
I suspect it will be news to most scientists that Elsevier publishes a peer-reviewed journal called Homeopathy. I also suspect that many, on discovering this, would doubt there is anything published there that it would profit them to read. But I propose that such prejudices be put aside for the current special issue, which collects a dozen papers devoted to the 'memory of water'. It's worth seeing what they have to say — if only because that reveals this alleged phenomenon to be as elusive as ever.
Read Phil's column here.
Fatalities are an inevitable part of human spaceflight, and space tourism companies will have to face up to it, says Philip Ball.
The tragic deaths of three workers in an explosion at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California should not be seen as the first fatalities of commercial spaceflight. The accident occurred during a test on a rocket-propulsion system for a private spacecraft, but this was an industrial accident, not a failure of aerospace engineering.
Read more here.
Real science can't compete at the movies with bad science. But perhaps that's how it is meant to be.
"I'm arresting you for breaking the laws of physics," says the policeman to the levitating man, in a cartoon that speaks volumes about the curiously legalistic terminology that science sometimes adopts.
Read more here.
Behind scare stories of building synthetic life lies the issue of who owns the biological parts.
"For the first time, God has competition", claimed the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group) two weeks ago. With this catchy headline, it aimed to raise the alarm about a patent on "the world's first-ever human-made species", a bacterium allegedly created "with synthetic DNA" in the laboratories of the Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland.
A 'vaccine court' case on autism could have disastrous consequences if people confuse its verdict with scientific consensus.
Why are there so many more cases of autism now than there were 30 years ago? It's a question the best scientific minds have been unable to answer. But I'm afraid a US court now looking at that question may settle it on the basis of emotion rather than science.
The ethical debate about a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease has been premature, says Apoorva Mandavilli; we don't even know how well it works.
Here's a good lesson: before you start pushing for a controversial vaccine to be made compulsory, best wait for the research — and I mean all the research — to come up with results.
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.
Continue reading "Could America lead the world on global warming?" »
A recent claim of water on an extrasolar planet raises broader questions about how science news is reported, says Philip Ball
'Scientists discover just what they expected' is not, for obvious reasons, a headline you see very often. But it could serve for probably a good half of the stories reported in the public media, and would certainly have been apt for the recent reports of water on a planet outside our Solar System.
The warming of other solar bodies has been seized upon by climate sceptics; but oh how wrong they are, says Oliver Morton.
If the shooting of fish in barrels offends you, look away. The publication this week of a Nature paper on global warming on Mars offers a fantastic opportunity to kill off one of the silliest climate-sceptic arguments, and I'm more than happy to be pointing the gun at the water.
John Whitfield wonders why fringe fantasies get attracted to the edges of the Earth.
After the initial flurry of interest, International Polar Year (IPY, launched this March) seems to have gone a bit quiet. I propose pepping things up with a good conspiracy theory.
Read the column here.
The caution of climate scientists is commendable even if caution is out of fashion, says Philip Ball.
Jim Hansen is no stranger to controversy. Ever since the 1980s he has been much more outspoken about the existence and perils of human-induced climate change than most of his scientific colleagues. A climate modeller at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, Hansen has flawless credentials to speak about climate change, and has fought for his right to do so.
If addiction's the problem, says Phil Ball, prohibition's not the answer.
This week the Chinese government announced that it will freeze the opening of any new Internet cafés for a year from July 2007. This restriction on computer access has inevitably been interpreted as a further attempt by the Chinese authorities to control and censor politically sensitive information. But the government claims that the move is to protect susceptible teenagers from becoming addicted to games, chatrooms and online porn.
Read the column 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.
With the shift of power in the US Congress comes an chance to re-engage in the debate over climate change. But the process will not be simple, says our new columnist David Goldston.
The 110th Congress convened in Washington DC on 4 January, with the Democrats in control of both chambers for the first time in a dozen years. The banging of the gavel by the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was in effect the starting gun for what is likely to be two years of political strife, as both Democrats and Republicans race towards the 2008 congressional and presidential elections.
Read the column here.
How far can a parent go in managing the life of their disabled child? Perhaps too far.
Shock. Even revulsion. These were the main reactions provoked by news stories about Ashley, a nine-year-old disabled girl who has been surgically and hormonally altered by her parents to forever stay the size of a small child. Is such treatment acceptable, asked the world's press. On instinct, my immediate reaction was "no".
Read the column here.
Handing out experimental drugs to desperate patients is not a good idea, says Apoorva Mandavilli.
At first glance it seems only kind and right to let people with serious illnesses take whatever medicines they want. Some have campaigned so hard for this that the US Food and Drug Administration agreed on 11 December to let patients buy experimental drugs direct from the manufacturer when there are no other options available.
Read the story here.
Richard Doll's links with industry are disconcerting but hardly scandalous. And they don't make him a villain, says Philip Ball.
Few things will polarize opinion like the dressing down of a recently deceased and revered figure. That's clear enough in the debate that has followed the recent media splash on accusations that Sir Richard Doll, the British epidemiologist credited with identifying the link between smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s, compromised the integrity of his research by receiving consultancy payments from the chemicals industry.
Read the column here.
The world has been offered a rare chance to cut the risk of HIV, if only circumcision can be offered widely and safely.
The evidence is now overwhelming: circumcision can have a huge effect on the spread of HIV, cutting risks of infection in African men by about half. Now it's up to the World Health Organisation to decide whether they should advise certain countries to offer circumcision on a massive scale.
Read the column here.
New York is cutting trans-fats from restaurant menus to cut down on heart disease — what a good idea, says Apoorva Mandavilli
I'm so lucky I live in a city that, with or without my consent, seems determined to save me from killing myself.
First, New York banned smoking in public places. And now, as of today, trans-fats have been banned from restaurant menus. That's right. By law, the city's 24,000 restaurants will soon have to switch to healthy cooking.
Read the column here.
The death of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko has highlighted how long it can take to diagnose a poison. Nicola Jones asks how hard can it be?
You'd think, in this day and age, that diagnosing the culprit in a suspected poisoning wouldn't be that tricky. Bang the symptoms into a database, plug the blood into a mass spec and spot the toxin.
Read the column here.
As scientists debate the risks of nanotech, Philip Ball warns that the major impacts of emerging technologies have rarely been spotted in advance.
In today's issue of Nature, an international team of scientists presents a five-point scheme for "the safe handling of nanotechnology". "If the global research community can rise to the challenges we have set," they say, "then we can surely look forward to the advent of safe nanotechnologies."
Read the story here.
It's about time that this country hard-hit by AIDS promised help for the afflicted, says Apoorva Mandavilli.
HIV causes AIDS. That's not news to you or me, but shockingly it has taken years for the government in South Africa — where about 1,000 people die of AIDS every day — to acknowledge that fact and pledge to provide medicines.
Read the column here.
A costing for a giant sunshade in space shows that there are probably better ways to spend the money.
The leading economist Nicholas Stern has just handed us, in advance, the bill for the impacts of climate change: close to $4 trillion by the end of this century1.
And with perfect timing, astronomer Roger Angel of the University of Arizona has delivered the equivalent of a builder's estimate for patching up the problem using a cosmic sunshade2. It will set us back by... well, let's make it a nice round figure of $4 trillion by the end of the century.
Read the column here.
Dawkins's attempt to test the existence of God is as silly as using logic to tear down Santa Claus in the eyes of a child, says Henry Gee.
In his book Unweaving The Rainbow, Richard Dawkins boasts (boasts!) that he told a six-year-old that Father Christmas doesn't exist. His logic was purely scientific - there wouldn't be time for Santa to reach the homes of all the good children in the world in one night.
Read the column here.
We need to look seriously at nanoparticle risks, not invent a nanohazard sign to stick on everything.
When a fire at the chemistry department of the University of Texas, Austin, several years ago required firefighters to enter the labs, they were horrified to discover that there were inflammable substances inside. The department briefly faced the threat of having to label every door with warnings to that effect ("Danger: this chemistry lab contains ethanol").
Read Philip Ball's column here.
By confronting ExxonMobil, the Royal Society is not being a censor of science but an advocate for it.
It isn't clear whether Bob Ward, former manager of policy communication at the Royal Society in London, knew quite what he was letting himself in for when he penned a letter taking the oil company ExxonMobil to task for funding groups that deny the human role in global warning. But with hindsight the result was predictable: once his letter was published by the British Guardian newspaper, the Royal Society was denounced from all quarters as having overstepped its role as an impartial custodian of science.
Read the column here.
The space agency's visit to China is overdue — the rest of the world went there long ago.
This could be the start of a beautiful friendship. That, at least, is how the Chinese press seems keen to portray the visit this week by NASA head Mike Griffin, who is touring Beijing and Shanghai at the invitation of President Hu Jintao. China Central Television proudly proclaims "China, US to boost space cooperation", while China Daily reports "China-US space co-op set for lift-off".
Read the column here.
Claims of 'neutralizing' radioactivity grab headlines and have even piqued the interest of Madonna. Phil Ball explains, to her and us, whether any of it will solve our problems with nuclear waste.
Read the column here.
NASA's grand ambitions aren't its own, and are at the expense of science, says our columnist Phil Ball
NASA's administrator Michael Griffin must have one of the least desirable jobs going.
Since he took the post a little over a year ago, he has been forced to announce budget cuts for basic science in the US space programme that have infuriated researchers (see 'US space scientists rage over axed projects'), has reluctantly had to accede to fulfilling commitments to the beleaguered and unpopular International Space Station (ISS), and has been accused of being a yes-man for a governmental agenda that values stagy manned space projects over real science.
Read more here
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
Did you see these headlines this week? "Secret report says UFOs DO exist", screamed one. "UFOs don't exist, says MoD", said another. Confused, intrigued and potentially a little disappointed, I tried to find out what was behind the flurry of flying-saucer excitement.
Read the column here.
muse@nature.com
It is a crime against humanity when professional communicators manage to get language so horribly muddled, says Henry Gee.
For the past few weeks I've been busy completing a book, and so haven't had much time to listen to the radio, nor watch TV. But now, having switched back on to these means of mass communication, it seems that news and current-affairs shows have been taken over by a horde of lexical barbarians whose mission seems to be to assault my ears with a barrage of grammatical and stylistic solecisms.
Read the column here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
Today I bring you some research results that should please sitcom writers everywhere: men are fat slobs who prefer to dine on chicken wings, beer and solid fat, whereas women are iron-willed sylphs who subsist mostly on carrot sticks and tofu.
Read the column here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
Did you know that there are scientists who study deaf budgies? I didn't. But this mysteriously titled paper has brought the field to my attention: "Perception of complex sounds in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) with temporary hearing loss."
Read the column here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
Have a read of this: "Scientists find brain function most important to maths ability". And I thought the most important body parts for counting were fingers. Who knew?
Read the column here.
The University of Oxford is failing to give official support to academics speaking out in favour of animal research, says Jim Giles.
Mingling with the crowd at last weekend's march in support of animal research at Oxford was Chris Patten, the university's chancellor. But you had to be quick to spot him.
Read the column here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
"Well-dressed women get better service at clothing stores," says the press-release headline.
For a stylish columnist such as myself, particularly one who is seeking the point of seemingly obvious research, this is like a red rag to a bull. Don't even start me on the way I was treated at stores on Fifth Avenue the other day when I happened to be in my sweatpants. It was worse than that scene from Pretty Woman.
Read the column here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
A British study has just found "genetic links among men who share surnames". The rarer the name, the more likely the link.
Read the column here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
My computer was so slow today that I punched its lights out, thus landing myself in hospital, where I now lie in agony, scrawling these words with my uninjured left hand.
Read the rest of the column here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
A recent press release about lightning protection systems (otherwise known as lightning rods, I assume) strikes me as odd.
Read the rest of the column here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
"Mountain bikers are cautioned to ride with care - major injuries do happen". So says the newsflash in my inbox.
Read the rest of the column here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
A trawl through the journal Addiction this week comes up with this startling find: a hangover makes you feel out of sorts, and affects your cognitive performance.
Read the rest of the column here.
Looking for the point of seemingly pointless research.
2006, I have decided, is the year that I'll make it big. I'll get a promotion. I'll be wildly popular. And in order to do this I'll meet lots of people and make them my friends.
Read the rest of the column here.
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