The Great Beyond

What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

Monday November 26
Dinosaur of the day: Buffalo-head-smash-o-saurs / Elephants hate hunters, don’t mind farmers / Antarctic ship sinking fears / Indonesia: WHO can whistle for bird flu samples / Give us $3 billion, say marine researchers

Tuesday November 27
Gorillas use “weapons” / Fossils will/may/won’t delay Australian water plant

Wednesday November 28
NASA’s new map of the big white / Climate change ‘will undermine poverty progress’ / Flying foxes can’t handle the heat

Thursday November 29
Turkey may roast Dawkins’ atheism book / Are 25% of all US bird species at risk?

Friday November 30
To boldly go ... to the voting booth / A Christmas card from Hubble / Female antelope won’t take no for an answer / Don’t mess with Texas education

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
Climate Feedback: the climate podcast, episode 1
The Niche: Shenanigans at California’s stem-cell institute
In the Field: Brendan Maher blogging live from American Society for Cell Biology 2007

Ones that got away
The science of cheese, in the NY Times
The scientists inside Pakistan’s nuclear program, in the WSJ
Was Proust a neuroscientist? No, says Slate

Video of the week
Wasp voodoo rituals and cockroach zombies in the French Polynesian Islands, from Nature

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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UPDATE - The actual email has now surfaced (pdf, via Dallas Morning Herald).

Attitudes to education differ round the world, but things are looking pretty odd in Texas right now. The director of the state’s science curriculum is claiming she was forced out for forwarding an email. Its content was not a risqué joke or a sleazy photo: it was a note about a forthcoming lecture by a philosopher who has been heavily involved in debates over creationism.

The Statesman reports that the Texas Education Agency had recommended firing Chris Comer for repeated misconduct and insubordination (the details of which are unclear) before she resigned. But Comer and others are saying she was forced out for seeming to endorse criticism of intelligent design. An agency memo, according to the Statesman, said: “Ms Comer’s e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker's position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.”

In other news, a new international ranking of the science ability of 15 year olds has been conducted by the OECD. The US is below average, a little under Latvia. Finland tops the chart. Those with spare time might find it interesting to compare this chart of the new OECD ranking, with this chart of belief in evolution.

More on Comer below the fold...

Continue reading "Don’t mess with Texas education" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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You might think that being pursued by amorous females would please a male antelope no end. Not so, according to a paper published this week. Some males even resort to physical violence to repulse the advances of their would-be-mates.

“A general tenet of sexual conflict theory is that males have higher optimum mating rates than do females and therefore should be more persistent when it comes to mating,” writes Jakob Bro-Jørgensen, of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, in Current Biology (abstract). “However, in promiscuous species, females might benefit from high mating rates as a result of increased conception probability with favoured males, whereas favoured males benefit from mating selectively because of sperm depletion.”

He found that in-demand males tried to balance their ‘mating investment’ equally between females. If they were pursued aggressively by females they thought they had mated enough with in the past they would counterattack to avoid having to mate. “I was interested to see that in cases where the male antelope was free to choose between females, he deliberately went for the most novel mate, rather than the most high-ranking,” notes Bro-Jørgensen (press release).

Sex and wildlife in one story? The world’s press was always going to respond...

Continue reading "Female antelope won’t take no for an answer" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Today’s pretty space picture is a new snap from the Hubble Space Telescope. This is spiral galaxy Messier 74, a feature that amateur astronomers find so hard to detect in the night sky that it has been nicknamed ‘The Phantom Galaxy’.

Located about 32 million light-years away, there are around 100 billion stars in the galaxy (press release).

Image: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Potential future president Barack Obama may have lost some votes among space enthusiasts this week. The democrat wants to take a fairly hefty amount of money away from the Constellation programme for manned moon missions and spend it on education.

“That would be very destructive. There’s so much more we could do for education by having a visionary space program than by just throwing it away into the educational bureaucracy,” Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society (and a former school teacher), told MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.

Last month Hilary Clinton released her space policy, which seems on the face of it less like bad news for Moon-and-Mars enthusiasts. However in a recent piece at The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman takes a close look and concludes she too is going to cut science and exploration budgets at NASA (via Space Politics).

Meanwhile Republican Mike Huckabee, the choice of Chuck Norris, has been making more positive noises.

Whether we ought to go to Mars is not a decision that I would want to make, but I would certainly want to make sure that we expand the space program, because every one of us who are sitting here tonight have our lives dramatically improved because there was a space program ... [W]e need to put more money into science and technology and exploration.

Now, whether we need to send somebody to Mars, I don't know. But I'll tell you what: If we do, I've got a few suggestions, and maybe Hillary could be on the first rocket to Mars.

Given that this is the man who recently remarked that “Science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn’t. So I'll stick with God if the two are in conflict,” it’s intriguing to wonder what if anything evidence of the evolution past life on Mars would do to his belief structure once he’d paid the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to send people to examine it.

Not so positive is Republican Thomas Tancredo: “That’s why we have such incredible problems with our debt, because everybody's trying to be everything to all people. We can't afford some things, and by the way, going to Mars is one of them.” Easier to say when you have no hope of winning.

Image: Barack Obama

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A quarter of all US bird species are at risk, according to a new analysis by conservation groups. The 2007 ‘WatchList’ from the National Audubon Society and the America Bird Conservancy say 178 species in the continental US and 39 in Hawaii need “immediate conservation help”. We had a look at the numbers...

“We call this a ‘WatchList’ but it is really a call to action, because the alternative is to watch these species slip ever closer to oblivion,” says Greg Butcher, co-author of the new list (press release, report home page, report PDF).

The list was last produced in 2002. Since then it has grown 10%, as noted in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Reuters quotes Butcher thus: “Unfortunately we've been seven years in an administration that really doesn't believe in the Endangered Species Act, so they've sort of been looking for excuses not to list species that should be added to the act.”

This does lead to us asking the question of how endangered these species actually are. On the one hand the Bush administration may not have been as rigorous as it could have been over endangered species*. But the report’s other author, David Pashley, says “Adoption of this list as the ‘industry standard’ will help to ensure that conservation resources are allocated to the most important conservation needs.”

This could be problematic as there is a gold standard conservation list already – the IUCN Red List. Helpfully the Audubon report includes a comparison to the IUCN, saving me the trouble. So how do they match up? In a word – badly...

Continue reading "Are 25% of all US bird species at risk?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Prominent atheist scientist Richard Dawkins is again making headlines. The Turkish publisher of his book ‘The God Delusion’ this week announced he was to be questioned by a prosecutor to determine whether the book is “an attack on religious values” (AP has the story, massively syndicated).

Turkey has troubled relationships with science, religion, and censorship. On the one hand it is a secular state, where the religion of a politician’s wife is a huge issue. At the same time much of the country is avowedly religious, Turkish creationist Harun Yahya being a prime (if perhaps extreme) example. Censorship is also a reoccurring theme – earlier this year Yahya succeeded in blocking access to a swathe of the blogosphere and the trials and tribulations of author Orhan Pamuk have also been high profile. See the FP Passport blog for a quick round up.

If you haven’t read the book, the first chapter is free on Dawkins’s website. A CNN poll on the question “Do you believe Richard Dawkins’ book ‘The God Delusion’ insults religious values?” currently stands at Yes 32%, No 68%, with 3,359 votes.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It’s not a good time to be a flying fox. Justin Welbergen, from the University of Cambridge, has just published some new research on them and he thinks climate change means they are all going to die.

The issue for the animals, which are not foxes at all but fruit bats, is that they’re just not that good with heat. This is a bit of a problem if you live in an Australia that is getting slowly hotter. Welbergen and his colleagues found that temperature extremes caused mass die-offs, with females and the young being especially vulnerable. When temperatures reached 42.9°C, thousands of the bats keeled over and flapped no more (paper should appear here today).

Climate change may also be benefiting some types of the bat, by allowing them to expand their range by reducing the number of cold nights, which they can’t tolerate. “If so, this provides an example of how climate change may act like a double-edged sword,” write Welbergen and co, “it can cause a species to expand its distribution in response to a reduction in the number of cold nights, while putting the same species at an increased risk from extreme warm events.

It has been acknowledged before that climate change is causing changes in species distributions. Nature Reports Climate Change had an article on this recently, noting that in Australia some possums have been getting so hot they fell out of their trees.

Continue reading "Flying foxes can’t handle the heat" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This year’s edition of the UN Human Development Report makes bleak reading. Unless we deal with climate change, it says, efforts to reduce poverty will stall then reverse, the poorest countries will suffer first and not even the richest countries will escape global warming. Efforts to improve health and education are also threatened (summary PDF, full report PDF).

“Ultimately, climate change is a threat to humanity as a whole. But it is the poor, a constituency with no responsibility for the ecological debt we are running up, who face the immediate and most severe human costs,” said Kemal Derviş, administrator of the UN Development Programme (press release PDF).

More droughts, floods and storms are already reinforcing existing inequalities in standards of living, says the report. Climate change must be tackled now. “The world lacks neither the financial resources nor the technological capabilities to act. What is missing is a sense of urgency, human solidarity and collective interest,” says the UN (report home page).

The annual report also ranks the UN’s members in terms of their development, using life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income. Top of the pile this year is Iceland, bottom is Sierra Leone. As Reuters notes, per capita GDP is 45 times higher in the former than in the latter. Without fail this ranking brings a rash of stories where countries celebrate or mourn their position – details and full ranking below the fold.

Continue reading "Climate change ‘will undermine poverty progress’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Those bored of playing with Google Earth may be interested in NASA’s new toy – a stunningly detailed map of Antarctica. Claiming to be ten times more detailed than previously available equivalents, the map was painstakingly constructed by the stitching together of 1,100 hand-selected photos from Landsat satellites (NASA press release).

The map was produced in collaboration with the National Science Foundation and the British Antarctic Survey. It’s already attracting media attention (BBC, Bloomberg, ABC, Herald Sun, Wired).

“This innovation, compared to what we had available most recently, is like watching the most spectacular high-definition TV in living colour versus watching the picture on a small black-and-white television,” says Robert Bindschadler, chief scientist of the Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at Goddard (NSF press release).

Continue reading "NASA’s new map of the big white" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A rare fossil site near the planned location of a billion dollar desalination plant has thrown Australia into a tizzy.

The media is in some disagreement about whether the fossils will actually have an impact on the construction:
Dinosaur bones won’t stop desal plant - The Age
Dinosaur bones may delay desal plant - Herald Sun
Dinosaur find dries Australia water project - Reuters

According to the Herald Sun the bones were first documented back in 1994 but had been a secret till last week. It was only then that it was realised that the department in charge of the desalination plant probably didn’t know the fossils lay in the path of the in- and out-flow pipes.

Local MP, and member of the recently defeated Liberal Party, Ken Smith wants a full assessment of the environmental impact of the proposed plant. “It’s like boring through the tombs of the ancient emperors in Egypt or drilling holes through the Terracotta Warriors in China after they had been discovered,” he told Reuters.

Continue reading "Fossils will/may/won’t delay Australian water plant" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Researchers in Cameroon have seen gorillas use tools aggressively, and they’re targeting humans, according to the Daily Telegraph. The apes were observed throwing clumps of grass, earth, and in one case a stick, at humans.

“The area is largely isolated from other gorilla groups, but there are herdsmen on the mountain”, Jacqueline Sunderland Groves of the University of Sussex told the paper. “In one encounter a group of gorillas threw clumps of grass and soil at the researchers while acting aggressively. Another gorilla threw a branch. A third encounter saw the gorillas throwing soil at a local man who was throwing stones at the apes.”

Throwing earth at someone throwing stones doesn’t sound likely a hugely clever military tactic. It is a bit depressing that they might have learned this behaviour from people throwing stones at them - not to mention a little strange to think that there are people out there who think throwing stones at gorillas is a good idea. I’d think twice before enraging a gorilla, and the risk of it throwing earth at me would not be what I was afraid of.

Tool use in gorillas is actually a fairly new discovery. It was first seen in the wild in 2005 when some gorillas in northern Congo were seen testing water depth with a stick and using a shrub’s trunk as a stabilizer and then a bridge (research paper).

It’s not immediately clear where the Telegraph story comes from, but it’s got some bloggers intrigued. Wired, where I first noticed this, thinks it heralds a Planet of the Apes-esque takeover. This point and innumerable other references to the films have also been raised in the comments section of this Digg entry (don’t click the links though – there seems to be some nasty malware lurking there).

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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An international group of marine scientists met at the weekend to ask for $3 billion. This money, says the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans, could establish an ocean monitoring network featuring data-gathering buoys, research vessels, animal tracking and robots (press release pdf). It would also, they didn’t say, keep them in research grants for years.

Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and chair of the POGO Executive Committee, thinks the money is a good investment: “A continuous, integrated ocean observing system will return the investment many times over in safer maritime operations, storm damage mitigation, and conservation of living marine resources, as well as collecting the vital signs of the ocean that are needed to monitor climate change.”

The BBC picks up on Haymet’s claims that such a system could help prevent catastrophes like the recent tsunami that hit South East Asia. Although the international community has said it will construct a monitoring system, Pogo doesn’t think it’s happening fast enough. The group is going to make the case for more investment at a meeting of the international Group on Earth Observations in Cape Town, South Africa.

Spending more money on oceanography strikes me as a great idea. The seas are, as the Reuters’ coverage of this funding request notes, “as little understood as the Moon”. And they produce brilliant pictures like the one illustrating this article. However the key question here is the opportunity cost – what else could we spend this money on? Discussion of this sort is often missing when requests of this sort are made.

Image: a tiny octopus courtesy of Matt Wilson/Jay Clark, NOAA NMFS AFSC

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Indonesia has told the WHO it won’t be getting any more bird flu samples unless there are guarantees in place that ensure developing countries get access to affordable vaccines. The country wants a “material transfer agreement” to prevent samples it provides being used for commercial gain (Reuters). This demand appears to have stalled talks being held in Geneva.

“Talks hit a deadlock because the health minister was relentless in pushing for a material transfer agreement for each virus sample, but not everyone agreed to that," a spokeswoman for the country’s health ministry told Reuters. “We hope that negotiations will continue. But for her [the Indonesian health minister] one thing remains unnegotiable. We will not send samples overseas without an MTA.”

The WHO is not happy. “A pandemic will reach every corner of the earth and it will do so within a matter of months. The sharing of currently circulating viruses is the only way to monitor the emergence of drug-resistant strains,” said its director general Margaret Chan (AFP).

Indonesia is also angry about another set of samples that have already been taken out of the country...

Continue reading "Indonesia: WHO can whistle for bird flu samples" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Last week the tourist ship MS Explorer sank in the Antarctic. According to shipping newspaper Lloyds List, a number of problems with the vessel were uncovered in a recent inspection. The paper says five deficiencies were discovered, including lifeboat maintenance problems, and apparently “watertight doors were described as ‘not as required’, and the fire safety measures also attracted criticism”. In Canada’s The Star, Sander Calisal, University of British Columbia professor emeritus, also questions why the ship went down.

All the passengers and crew got off safely and apparently in high sprits, declaring it all to be an adventure and even taking time out to get engaged. But there are some pretty serious questions to be answered here, not just about the Explorer but about tourism in Antarctic in general.

Continue reading "Antarctic ship sinking fears" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Elephants can recognize differences between human ethic groups, according to a paper published last week. Lucy Bates, of Scotland’s University of St Andrews, found that Kenyan elephants distinguish between Maasai and Kamba men using colour and smell clues.

“In the Amboseli ecosystem, Kenya, young Maasai men demonstrate virility by spearing elephants, but Kamba agriculturalists pose little threat,” she notes in her paper in Current Biology. “Elephants showed greater fear when they detected the scent of garments previously worn by Maasai than by Kamba men, and they reacted aggressively to the color associated with Maasai.”

To determine this, the researchers presented different elephant families with clean, unworn, red cloths and red cloths worn by either adult Kamba men or adult Maasai men for five days. When presented with the Maasai cloths the elephants took off away faster, moved further away, and took longer to relax after stopping.

Blooger Greg Laden has had similar experiences:

I've traveled literally hundreds of kilometers by foot together with Efe (Pygmy) hunters in the Ituri Forest. We see very few animals. The few we do see are attacked, killed, and eaten. Well, a lot of them actually get away, but that is the idea.

But I've also traveled many kilometers (not as many) alone. I would see many animals, and yes, they would run (or climb or whatever) away, but not as desperately. They knew I was not really one of the hunters, although I tried my best to look tough and hungry.

Left unexplained is what he was doing walking hundreds of kilometres with pygmy hunters. PZ Myers has also posted about this research, although his post is limited to the view that “Elephants are racists! They discriminate against people with sharp pointy spears!” Commenters on this post describe similar experiences to Laden, albeit with rabbits and crows, and an absence of hardy pygmies.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Today’s dinosaur holds the auspicious title of “largest horned dinosaur ever discovered in Alberta”. Eotriceratops xerinsularis was discovered near the famed Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump – where Native Americans would kill buffalo by chasing them over a cliff.

Actually, in this case, re-discovered is more appropriate. According to one report, US fossil hunter Barnum Brown first noticed the partial skeleton of the 68-million year old monster, but decided it wasn’t worth his while to stop and examine it (Globe and Mail).

Eotriceratops xerinsularis is the earliest known member the Triceratops group, and shares their distinctive horns and solid frill (abstract of research paper). “Until we found Eotriceratops, there was a significant gap in our knowledge about the dinosaurs that lived in Alberta and North America from 69 to 67 million years ago. The discovery of Eotriceratops is an important step in helping us understand the history of latest Cretaceous dinosaur evolution on this continent,” says Don Brinkman, head curator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum and one of the discovery team (press release).

The thing was not in great condition when found. Dave Eberth, another researcher from the Tyrrell told the Edmonton Journal, “Basically, it’s a road kill. It looks like somebody ran over it in a Cretaceous Hummer.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

Monday November 19
Cyclone and early warning in Bangladesh / Noah’s flood brought farming to Europe / Cloning pioneer abandons human embryo work / It's all about me

Tuesday November 20
Son of a what? / This is your brain on a migraine

Wednessday November 21
Conflict-of-interest claims in California / The presidential space race

Thursday November 22
Termite guts spilled / Star with a carbon atmosphere / A vague sort of climate pact for Asia / The new urban scourge: turkeys

Friday November 23
Attack of the killer jellyfish! / The trillion tonne mudslide (almost) / Mirrors help phantom limb pain

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
Action Potential: Infants inherently interpret intentions?
Nautilus: Changing the way scientists are trained

One that got away special
London’s Science Museum has a new game. No really – it’s fun...

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Phantom limbs are always good value for a news story. The whole concept of people missing limbs still feeling them, and feeling pain in them, is baffling.

A study published this week in the prestigious NEJM examines the even stranger concept of ‘mirror therapy’, where the amputee is shown a mirror image of their existing limb in the position their missing limb once was. This appears to be the amputated limb and some previous studies have suggested this can help with pain relief (Ramachandran 1996 and MacLachlan 2004, for example).

The new study took 22 amputees and assigned them to either mirror therapy, therapy with a covered mirror or mental visualization (ie, no mirror). After four weeks everyone in the first group reported decreased pain, in the other two groups results were mixed. After four weeks everyone was switched to mirror therapy and all groups reported positive results after another four weeks.

“The majority of people got some relief. The range went from some relief to completely gone. We were surprised that the effect was so strongly positive,” Navy neurologist Jack Tsao told Reuters. “It’s certainly my hope that more rehab centers will try this.”

Now someone just needs to work out why it happens. There are some theories. The paper notes it could be to do with mirror neurons being activated in the hemisphere of the brain contralateral to the missing limb. It could also be due to visual input of a supposedly moving limb. However the paper concludes: “the underlying mechanism accounting for the success of this therapy remains to be elucidated”. This is medical speak for “we really don’t know”.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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There’s big and there’s big. “It was one of the largest movements of material ever to occur on our planet,” says Peter Talling of the University of Bristol (press release), putting the underwater landslide he and his colleagues have been studying off the coast of Africa firmly in the second category. “This mass was ten times that transported to the ocean every year by all of the Earth’s rivers. The flow was sometimes over 150 km wide, spread across the open sea floor.”

An analysis by Talling and his colleagues in this week’s Nature shows that the flow, which occurred thousands of years ago, extended 1,500 kilometres and carried 225 billion tonnes of sediment.

Bizarrely, the flow travelled hundreds of kilometres before it started to deposit any sediment. Only when it encountered a minute change in gradient on the ocean floor did it start ditching billions of tonnes of material. Although the change of gradient was abrupt its miniscule size is startling - from 0.05˚ to 0.01˚.

Coverage
The “mother of all mudslides”, in the Daily Telegraph
“The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period of 10 years”, from the BBC

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Aquaculture off the Northern Irish coast has been devastated by a swarm of jellyfish that left 100,000 salmon dead. Stock worth £1million were suffocated in their cages by the swarm, which is estimated to have covered 25 square kilometres of sea and been up to 10 metres thick (Reuters, BBC, Guardian, AP). Some reports say there may have been billions of the mauve stinger jellyfish.

“In 30 years, I’ve never seen anything like it. It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jelly fish and there was nothing we could do about, it, absolutely nothing.” says Northern Salmon Company managing director, John Russell (Telegraph).

The sea was so thick with jellyfish that workers could not even reach the cages. This type of jellyfish is not normally found in UK waters so the swarm could be evidence of global warming, according to some of the news reports. However Reuters quotes Russell as saying that such jellyfish blooms do occur every 10 or so years, and that last week’s could have been down to higher-than-normal water temperatures.

Continue reading "Attack of the killer jellyfish!" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“There was a case where I live [on Boston's North Shore] where some turkeys marched up onto a front porch and essentially kept a number of elderly women confined. They were afraid to go out.” So says bird expert Chris Leahy of the Massachusetts Audubon Society in National Geographic’s piece on the comeback of wild turkeys, now thriving in urban America. This wins our ‘thanksgiving story of the year’ competition.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Leaders of 16 Asian countries, including top polluters China and Japan, committed to “stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the long run”, says Reuters. The ‘pact’, struck at the East Asia Summit (EAS) in Singapore, does not set caps on emissions or otherwise quantify what efforts might be made to reduce the impacts of climate change (though it does promise they will “work to achieve an EAS-wide aspirational goal of increasing cumulative forest cover in the region by at least 15 million hectares of all types of forests by 2020”); and leaders emphasized that economic growth remains a priority for them.

"Climate change has to be addressed -- but they cannot leave people in absolute poverty," Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told Reuters. "This is a declaration of intent, not a negotiated treaty of what we are going to do to restrict ourselves.”

The declaration is posted on the ASEAN website.

At the same meeting, Japan pledged to provide US$2 billion over the next five years in aid of fighting environmental problems in East Asia (Japan Times).

Behind-the-scene details can be found in the AFX report on Forbes’ website, which adds that the countries are in favour of nuclear power, and has some interesting notes on how a goal for reducing energy intensity by a set value was dropped after apparent objections from India.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Star light, star bright, first star… with a pure carbon atmosphere was reported in Nature last night.

Actually the researchers report finding 8 weird stars in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, whose characteristics can be explained by a model of a star with a pure carbon atmosphere.

As stars’ helium burns off, leaving behind ashes of carbon and oxygen, they usually turn to white dwarfs: a core of carbon and oxygen surrounded by an atmosphere of hydrogen or helium. But these big boys seem to be bare dwarf cores, with no helium or hydrogen in the atmosphere – just carbon (press release). No one knows why. One theory is that the stars have evolved from those not quite massive enough to explode as supernovae.

The discovery was made by researchers who were frantically trying to explain the weird data coming from some particularly hot white dwarfs. "Out of pure desperation, I decided to try modeling a pure-carbon atmosphere. It worked," says Patrick Dufour of the University of Arizona, Tucson (press release).

"It will be a challenge to try to explain how they form and what does this tell us about stellar evolution," Dufour told Reuters.

There are plenty of weird star types out there, including ‘runaway’ stars that have abnormally high speeds relative to the stuff around them, really big stars that are rapidly blowing apart, and ‘carbon stars’, which have more carbon than oxygen and so take have a sooty atmosphere and a red appearance.

Such a discovery happens about ‘once a decade’ according to an expert quoted in Science’s coverage of the story.

Artists' concept of the surface of a carbon-atmosphere white dwarf star. Credit: M.S. Sliwinski and L. I. Slivinska of Lunarismaar

Posted by Nicola Jones
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The future of biofuels may lie in fast-growing woody plants, which theoretically could provide a more environmentally friendly and efficient source of fuel than things like corn. But breaking the cellulose in such plants into compounds usable for fuels is tricky. Scientists have long sought to learn a lesson from termites on how best to digest these woody bits. Now scientists in Nature report a metagenomic analysis of the bugs that live in the guts of 150 termites guts from a Costa Rican rainforest, producing a catalogue of about 1,000 bacterial enzymes that could be useful for future biofuel efforts.

There’s big potential here: a termite's intestines can theoretically turn one sheet of paper into two litres of hydrogen, Andreas Brune of the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, told the press (eg Reuters). But it’s a way off yet. Cataloguing the enzymes of interest is just the first step.

Nature has written about this specific Costa Rican project before, in a feature about biodiversity mining. And we have a good collection of news features on the future of biofuels.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Not many of the leading US presidential candidates have spent much time campaigning on space policy. If you’re going to talk about research on the campaign trail, it’s much hipper (and plays better in Iowa) to talk about things like cellulosic ethanol.

But yesterday Barack Obama actually brought up NASA – because he wants to delay its moon/Mars exploration program to pay for his new $18 billion education initiative. That would be news to NASA, which is moving full steam ahead on its plans to develop a new manned spaceship to replace the space shuttle.

Obama is edging ahead of his main rival, Hillary Clinton, in the polls in Iowa. For her part, Clinton last month made space exploration a vague-sounding cornerstone of her platform on how she would promote scientific research if elected.

You have to think, though, that space policy is not going to make or break either of these campaigns.

Posted by Alex Witze
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The California Stem Cell Report, a one-man operation run by writer from his sailboat off the coast of Mexico, has a good scoop today, about a member of the committee who oversees the state’s $3 billion stem-cell initiative, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).

Turns out that John Reed, who is also president of the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, wrote a letter back in August that protested the agency’s decision not to award a $638,000 grant to the Burnham. The decision apparently came down partly to the eligibility of the PI on the grant application, such as whether he was a fulltime faculty member at Burnham and worked in his own lab on the Burnham campus. CIRM’s response is here.

Still, rough days at CIRM don’t seem to be slowing interest any; Nature Reports Stem Cells’s Monya Baker had a piece recently (subscription required) on how industry is trying to get a piece of some of the grant money.

Posted by Alex Witze
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People who suffer from migraines have thicker brains in certain regions than non-sufferers, according to a new study. It is not clear whether variations in the thickness of the somatosensory cortex – which processes pain – are a cause or a result of migraines.

“Most of these people had been suffering from migraines since childhood, so the long-term over-stimulation of the sensory fields in the cortex could explain these changes,” says study author Nouchine Hadjikhani of Massachusetts General Hospital (Telegraph, BBC, press release).

“It’s also possible that people who develop migraines are naturally more sensitive to stimulation. This may explain why people with migraines often also have other pain disorders such as back pain, jaw pain, and other sensory problems such as allodynia, where the skin becomes so sensitive that even a gentle breeze can be painful.”

The study itself looked at only 24 patients with migraine. However it did find that ‘migraineurs’ had on average a thicker somatosensory cortex than matched controls.

“The more we understand about the pathophysiology of migraine, the better we will be able to design drugs that work. At the moment, there is no drug for prevention that works well,” Hadjikhani said (Reuters).

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The people who picked the name LUPA for a European dog genome study probably didn’t see this one coming. A letter* in this week’s Science says the researchers involved are labouring not under the name of a she-wolf but of a rather less salubrious ‘lady of the night’.

According to Science’s original article* the project was named “after the legendary wolf who nourished the founders of Rome” (see here for the legend). But according to Renato Baserga, cancer biologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, this history is a little off:

The she-wolf legend was dismissed even by the Roman historian Titus Livius, who explained that the mother of Romulus and Remus was a certain Acca Laurentia, a very prosperous sex worker (to use a Dutch expression)--so prosperous that she left a lot of money to the city founded by her sons. In popular Latin, lupa meant she-wolf, but it also meant whore.

According to the original article LUPA will obtain DNA samples and medical histories from 8,000 dogs. It aims to find genes for diseases including cancers and heart problems, then see what these genes do in humans. Maybe a name change is in order first though.

“...I suggest JASPER, the name of my German shepherd, who is, of course, the best specimen of the best of all possible breeds,” says Baserga.

* subscription required

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Brendan Maher:

News media have been trying to keep up with the dizzying pace of releases from companies going public about personal genomics. Navigenics and deCODE have been touting their plans to launch health based genetic testing services to anyone who wants them. Today, 23andMe made good on its promise to launch, going live with a service designed to genotype you for $999, store your data on its servers and allow you to query your genes for disease risks, ancestry, and inheritance. You can even, they say, opt into research studies and surveys and at some point connect socially with individuals who share your genetic proclivities or interests. This brave new world in do it yourself genomics is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (subscription required).

One early adopter of 23and Me, Amy Harmon of the New York Times, writes of her experiences in a light essay on determinism (free, but login required) in which she talks about how she “breezed through the warning screens,” so eager to see the stories her genes might tell her. Her colleague Nicolas Wade was a bit more measured, allowing some experts to urge a few words of caution.

When asked at a webcast this afternoon how they responded to criticisms that simple family history would provide a better predictor for most diseases, founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki said they agree, but that the community can’t learn more about genetic predisposition without more studies like the ones they hope to participate in. When asked whether they would be selling data to drug companies or other research entities that might want to capitalize on a strong genotype database, they reemphasized that they protect individual genotypes, but also that they knew the value of the aggregate data they’d be collecting. They would be looking into partnerships in which aggregate data could be accessed. That’s a long way of saying ‘we hope so.’ Nevertheless, they don’t collect any phenotype data up front – unless you consider credit card information a phenotype.

Coverage in the blogosphere has been attentive. Blaine Bettinger at the Genetic Genealogist has been covering the runup to the launch extensively. Over at All Things Digital, Kara provides more than most do about the personal relations between 23andMe founders and the top brass at Google. (Today, Avey and Wojcicki were asked if speculations about them partnering with Google Health were true (see our report here, subscription required) - there are no plans as of yet, but as Genentech and Google are major investors, there’s definitely an open door.)

Meanwhile, Matt Mealiffe calls out the current crop of personalized genomics efforts for not addressing structural genomic variation such as copy number, on which a number of papers have recently harped.

Image: Getty

Posted by Alex Witze
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There was much excitement last week over the news that cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut is to abandon human embryo work. Wilmut thinks a new technique using skin cells is the future.

“We’ve not made this decision because it's ethically better” Wilmut told the BBC. “To me it’s always been ethically acceptable to think that if you could use cells from a human embryo to develop a treatment for a disease like motor neurone disease, for which there is no treatment at present, then that is an acceptable thing to do.”

Wilmut, who famously cloned Dolly the sheep, told the Telegraph he plans to abandon nuclear transfer in favour of the new method pioneered by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University. The Telegraph did a massive story on this, along with a profile of Wilmut, and it was subsequently followed up by the BBC and a number of other sources, many claiming this is the end of ‘therapeutic cloning’, which inserts DNA into unfertilised eggs.

Yamanaka’s work transforms mouse skin cells into cells virtually identical to embryonic stem cells (see Nature Reports Stem Cells article and interview with him). Skin cells were also in the news last week due to a breakthrough that saw them used to create cloned primate embryos and, from these, embryonic stem-cell lines (Nature).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A massive flood that gave rise to the myth of Noah and his ark may also have brought farming to Europe. Reconstructions of a mega-flood some 8,000 years ago show that the loss of arable land to the water could have pushed farmers into areas previously occupied by hunter-gatherers, a theory seemingly backed up by archaeological evidence (study abstract).

“Entire coastal communities must have been displaced, forcing people to migrate in their thousands,” says study author Chris Turney, of the University of Exeter (press release). “As these agricultural communities moved west, they would have taken farming with them across Europe. It was a revolutionary time.”

If you’re seeking Biblical parallels this ties up nicely with the story of Noah. After he came off the Ark the first thing he reportedly did was start farming.

Continue reading "Noah’s flood brought farming to Europe" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The death toll from Bangladesh's worst cyclone in a decade is rising and rising. Soon after the cyclone hit last Thursday the death toll was listed as hundreds (see for example BBC). By this weekend the Guardian’s South Asia correspondent had the ministry of food and disaster management confirming 2,408 dead, and one expert estimating a final toll of 10,000 to 15,000. News from Bangladesh (online only) is following reports as they come out.

The story is tragic, but most press reports note that the government’s early warning programme saved a vast number of lives. About 1.5 million people on the coast were able to flee to shelters, reports the Guardian. The toll does indeed seem lower than it might have been; in 1991, more than 130,000 people died in a storm of similar size and strength.

It isn’t clear how much warning was given in this case, or how the warnings were issued; there are some specifics on the warning system generally on the Asian Disaster Reduction Center (ADRC) website. The Bangladesh Meteorological Department doesn’t say much about their Storm Warning Center (SWC), though they seem to be in charge. It is clear that some preparations were being made well in advance: this UN press release mentions that some 2,000 shelters had been built specifically for those fleeing this cyclone. But CNN says the storm made landfall earlier than meteorologists had predicted, which may have caused additional casualties.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

Monday November 12
Arizona biologist dies of plague / An inquisition for Galileo / UN: don’t clone people

Tuesday November 13
‘Chocolate beer’ is older than we thought / Invasive fish are Emperor’s fault / Getting hydrogen from microbes / Japan’s singing road

Wednesday November 14
Japan, India, China: We like the Moon too / No space walks after smoky suit / New great ape fossil

Thursday November 15
Why Zack is a failure and Andy succeeds / Far East kicks US in education fight

Friday November 16
Dinosaur of the Day: a ‘Flintstones lawnmower’ / Climate change round up / Why shouldn’t we eat whales?

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
Climate Feedback: the BBC’s approach to climate sceptics
Nautilus: Tribulations of women in academic research
The Niche: when international collaborations depend on differences in local attitudes

Ones that got away
A baffling nuclear facility break-in, from the NY Times
The curious case of George Gipp’s DNA testing, from AP
Intelligent design’s “insidious new assaults on science”, in Salon

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Japan said today that it plans to go ahead with its annual whale hunt of about 1,000 whales (AFP). For the first time this will include humpbacks, currently listed as a vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List.

A group of legal experts gathered by the International Fund for Animal Welfare think the humpback take could well be illegal. Japan insists that its whaling is for research purposes, although meat from the animals caught does end up being eaten. The IFAW group says this selling of meat could mean Japan is in breach of its obligations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (press release, coverage in The Age).

“Japan’s repeated assertion that its whaling activities are legal is incorrect and misleading. ‘Scientific whaling’ as conducted by Japan violates international law and should not be allowed to continue,” said Alberto Szekely, professor of international law and coordinator of the panel (press release).

Australia’s opposition Labor party, which may think voters in the forthcoming elections will look well on kindness to whales, has said it would consider deploying the military to monitor the Japanese whaling fleet (The Age, The Australian).

Continue reading "Why shouldn’t we eat whales?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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World experts have gathered in Valencia to produce a synthesis of all the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports released to date (Nature – subscription required). Thus, there is a rash of climate change news.

The Valencia meeting’s report will, according to AFP, “serve as a guide for policymakers for years to come”. Now traditional arguments between Europe, the US and other participants over the exact wordings are already underway (AP).

Even OPEC is getting in on the action. The group of oil producing nations said this week it would assist in cutting or capturing carbon emissions (Reuters). Some reports even say it is mulling over the creation of a $3 billion fund invest in emission capture technology (Times).

In Australia the former head of the country’s Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization’s atmospheric research unit warned before the meeting that current policy is based on science that is already out of date (ABC). “If you think climate change is on the agenda, just wait another couple of years,” he told the Sidney Morning Herald.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Even measured against all the strange species the dinosaur world has thrown up, Nigersaurus taqueti is a bit of a freak. A paper published this week reveals the bizarrely shaped beast had equally bizarre feeding behaviour.

Its totally straight jaw kept 50 columns of teeth almost constantly near the ground where Nigersaurus acted as a prehistoric lawnmower. Scans of a fossil jaw bone also reveal nine replacement teeth stacked up to quickly step in if the front row are damaged. Other scans of balancing organs in the skull show that the head was habitually held angled straight towards the ground (press release, paper).

“We have seen nothing like this dinosaur. It’s a puzzle that says, ‘Figure this out,’ and we think it’s an extreme version of Diplodocus with the minimum amount of body structure it needed,” says Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago (NY Times).

“In modern mammals, when you see broad muzzles, you know that they are grazers, animals that eat grass, like cattle. When they have narrow, pointy snouts, you know they are browsers, animals that feed on leaves and bark they pull from trees and bushes, like giraffes. This thing was a Mesozoic cow.” (Chicago Tribune).

Continue reading "Dinosaur of the Day: a ‘Flintstones lawnmower’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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While US students are doing OK in science and maths they lag behind counterparts in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, according to a new report (pdf). The report claims to be the first t compare 8th-grade students (13–14 years old) with their future competitors around the world.

“More than a century ago Louis Pasteur revealed the secret to invention and innovation when he said ‘chance favours the prepared mind’. The take away message from this report is that the United States is loosing the race to prepare the minds of the future generation,” said report author Gary Phillips, a chief scientist at the wonderfully named American Institutes for Research, a social science non-profit (press release).

Here’s the top ten for national mean achievement level on the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study data that the report uses.

Continue reading "Far East kicks US in education fight" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A strange study out this week suggests that students whose names begin with the letter A are more likely to get A grades than those whose names start with D. We’re more likely to get Ds apparently. This is of course generating “what’s in a name?” news coverage from USA Today, UPI, Vancouver Sun, plus a good piece on Newsweek.

Leif Nelson at the University of California, San Diego and colleague Joseph Simmons from Yale University, reviewed grade point averages for MBA students at an unspecified private American university. They found students named Carl or Daniel, for instance, had lower averages than those such as Adrian or Boris, “presumably because of an unconscious fondness for these letters”, says the press release. Nelson and Simmons also looked at baseball players and found a higher strikeout rate from players whose names began with a ‘K’, the letter which is used to record a strikeout.

So far so hokey – finding random correlations in data is always possible. My office has a Geoff Brumfiel who recently moved to Great Britain. If I go on holiday to Washington DC next year maybe we’ll have a trend. But Nelson and Simmons also did a laboratory test...

Continue reading "Why Zack is a failure and Andy succeeds" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A new species of great ape may have been discovered in Kenya. A 10 million year old jawbone and 11 teeth have been recovered from Nakalipithecus nakayamai, which seems to be a new species very close to the last common ancestor of gorillas and humans.

“Based on this particular discovery, we can comfortably say we are approaching the point at which we can pin down the so-called missing link,” said Frederick Manthi, of the National Museums of Kenya (Reuters, Kenya Broadcasting Corp.). He’s right to put the “so-called” there of course; “missing link” is a term best avoided when it comes to the complex branches of human ancestry.

This discovery also undermines one theory of human evolution...

Continue reading "New great ape fossil" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA has stopped all space walks until the source of a smoky smell inside a space suit being tested on Earth is found. There’s a massively comprehensive report on MSNBC starting from an obscure paragraph in an International Space Station status report (follow up from AP, Houston Chronicle, Orlando Sentinel).

As yet no signs of burning have been found in the suit. But if the suits remain out of service some crucial space walks and assembly of the ISS will be delayed.

Here is the relevant part of the NASA report:

EMU Spacesuit Troubleshooting: During a SSATA (Space Station Airlock Test Article) chamber run on the ground this past Friday, a crew member reported the smell of smoke inside the EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit). The run was terminated, and the crew member extracted without incident. A mishap investigation board was formed and has recommended that all life support system operations (power, O2 ops, etc.) for the on-orbit EMUs be terminated until a root cause can be determined. Thus, the on-orbit EMUs are No Go. All other ops, such as suit resizing, can be performed.

Image: Space suit training / NASA

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The Moon is very much the astronomical body of the moment, with X-prizes up for grabs and a new NASA moon base on the cards. China is also looking to visit, and thinks it might need some additional private funding (Reuters). India has also said it will consider a manned programme and is cooperating with Russia to build an unmanned laboratory there by 2011 (Times of India, Hindu).

Japan’s space agency is getting in on the fun with the first ever high-definition images of an ‘Earth-rise’ – where the Earth appears to be rising over the Moon. Unlike sun-rise on Earth you wouldn’t actually see this from the moon. “[T]he Earth-rise is a phenomenon seen only from satellites that travel around the Moon, such as the KAGUYA and the Apollo space ship,” says the Japan Aerospace Exploration (press release). “The Earth-rise cannot be observed by a person who is on the Moon as they can always see the Earth at the same position.”

They are pretty impressive images, shot from the recently launched Kaguya (or Selene) mission (Nature – subscription required). This mission is proving to be a boon for moon enthusiasts, last week it provided high-definition tv recordings.

Images: JAXA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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According to some extremely bizarre reports coming out of Japan, scientists have developed a ‘melody road’ to keep drivers focused. Apparently grooves cut into the road produce a melody when cars drive over at the right speed (from the Deputy Dog blog).

Unfortunately this ‘right speed’ is a rather pathetic 45 kilometres per hour. Driving faster sounds like fast forwarding while crawling along at 20 kilometres per hour may make you feel nauseous (Guardian, Sidney Morning Herald). News.com.au says a report on the work, by the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute, has been published in the Japanese Gijutsu Iten Foramu journal

I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t an elaborate spoof but there is a news item video of the road at work on Gizmodo. This features comedy giant notes painted on the asphalt, outbreaks of laughter from the presenter, and what can only marginally be described as a melody.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The hydrogen economy is still years away, if it exists at all, but that isn’t stopping researchers finding ways to make the gas on the cheap, and from any range of materials.

The most recent development is in the bacterial arena, with the latest microbial fuel cells able to convert everyday waste into electricity with unprecedented efficiency, according to a paper by Bruce Logan in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academies of America. The process has bacteria chewing up sugars, cellulose or some common acids. During this oxidative process, the electrons released scoot over to an anode, and the protons, that balance this particular equation, go into solution. Normally, oxygen would be added, and would react with the protons and electrons to make water. But leave out the oxygen, and add a bit of oomph in the guise of applied voltage, and hey presto - hydrogen is made.

Logan’s system is an updated version of his previous work, tweaked so that it can work from a range of biomass-derived stuff, even the contents of a salad bar according to the press release.

While most coverage played it straight, and trumpeted the 288% efficiency boasted by Logan, others took greater care in explaining how near, or far, the hydrogen economy is.

Logan’s achievement is certainly impressive. When the system was run with acetic acid, he managed to get 99% of the theoretical efficiency, in terms of hydrogen production. The challenge now, according to one commentator I asked, is to improve the rate of hydrogen production, which for now remains rather sluggish.

By Katharine Sanderson

Image: Microbial electrolysis cell with power supply used to boost the voltage produced by the bacteria / Photograph by Shaoan Cheng, Penn State University

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Emperor of Japan has admitted that he is the source of an aggressive American fish which may have driven at least one native species to extinction. “I brought the fish back from the United States almost 50 years ago. I feel very pained now that it has had this result,” said Emperor Akihito (Mainichi Daily News).

According to the Yomiuri Shimbun the Emperor, who was then Crown Prince, received a gift of bluegills from the mayor of Chicago during a visit to the US. A trial release of the fish took place in Lake Biwa in the hope that they might be used for food or fishing. The Emperor’s remarks came in a speech at the annual National Convention for the Development of an Abundantly Productive Sea

The UK’s Times says the introduced bluegills have already driven the Japanese rosy bitterling to extinction. The IUCN Red List however says the fish is only Critically Endangered. It has long been known the fish were probably introduced by Akihito, who is a trained marine biologist, and this fact has even appeared in journal articles and press reports. This though is the first time he has issued an explicit mea culpa.

Image: Bluegill / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The history of chocolate will have to be revised following a new discovery, along with the history of humanity’s troubled relationship with alcohol. Archaeologists working in Honduras detected residues from cacao plants in liquid holding vessels from 500 years earlier than beverages of the chocolate precursor have previously been found. John Henderson and colleagues think the beverages in question were more like beer than a hot chocolate-type drink and could have been as potent at 5% alcohol by volume (BBC, LA Times, Telegraph, NY Times, Times).

In this week’s PNAS, they report detecting theobromine in vessels dating from about 1150 BC, half a century earlier than previous finds. Theobromine occurs only in cacao. Beverages drunk at the Puerto Escondido site in Honduras were probably produced by fermenting the sweet pulp that surrounds cacao seeds. “Fermentation is also an early step in the process used to produce the better-known nonalcoholic chocolate beverage in Mesoamerica. We argue that this is a secondary use of a by-product, fermented cacao seeds, and that an alcoholic beverage made from the pulp was originally the primary consumable,” the paper states.

Co-author Patrick McGovern, of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, was amazed by how many of the samples he tested were positive for theobromine. “The results were astounding. Every vessel that he [Henderson] had chosen and was tested gave a positive signal for theobromine," he said (LA Times).

UPDATE – 14/11/07

I may have slightly misled you. This is a new comment by Patrick McGovern:

It should be noted that the use of “beer” in many of the media articles is confusing. The confusion has arisen because “chichi” has two usages:

Continue reading "‘Chocolate beer’ is older than we thought" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Rogue scientists are going to clone a human unless the UN stops them by putting out guidelines, according to a new report from a UN think tank. Clearly concerned after recent advances in cloning technology, and perhaps also watching too many re-runs of The Island of Dr Moreau, the report’s authors want a global ban on the production of cloned babies, according to many news reports.

“Failure to outlaw reproductive cloning means it is just a matter of time until cloned individuals share the planet,” said report author Brendan Tobin of the Irish Center for Human Rights in Galway, Ireland (AFP, AP). Tobin thinks a previous, non-binding UN declaration in 2005 is not enough to ensure someone doesn’t clone a human (Reuters)

Frankly though I’m a bit confused as to which report some of these news items are looking at. Reuters says the report states: “A legally-binding global ban on work to create a human clone, coupled with freedom for nations to permit strictly controlled therapeutic research, has the greatest political viability of options available.” I can’t find that statement in the report anywhere.

The report I’m looking at is titled, Is Human Reproductive Cloning Inevitable: Future Options for UN Governance, which could probably have done with a question-mark somewhere. This concludes, “...there is a strong case and urgency to prohibit reproductive cloning since a ban on the procedure is emerging as a customary international norm.”

It seems most people are agreed that we shouldn’t clone people. But given the speed at which the UN moves on topics like this, what odds can you get on an international ban appearing before a cloned human?

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Europe’s attempts to build a rival to America’s GPS network have been attacked by the British politicians behind a recent inquiry. The Galileo project could turn into a £10 billion white elephant, according to Gwyneth Dunwoody, chairwoman of the Transport Select Committee. Actually Dunwoody used rather more colourful language, telling BBC Radio 4, “This is not one pig flying in orbit, this is a herd of pigs with gold trotters, platinum tails and diamond eyes.”

The committee’s new report on Galileo says there is not enough information available to determine whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Any decision must be delayed until this becomes clear, they say (report PDF). Earlier this year the European Union doubled the subsidy needed from member states for the project to 4.5 billion euros (Bloomberg).

Initially a strong reason for Galileo was that the US military could turn off or degrade the GPS signal. However earlier this year the US said newer GPS satellites would not be down-gradable. The programme is already behind schedule and the European Commission is now proposing to divert funds from its agriculture budget to fund Galileo (AFP). Dunwoody would prefer money be spent on better roads and railways.

Whether or not the project goes forward remains to be seen; for now, though, it still moves...

More coverage
MPs urge action on Galileo costs, BBC
MPs censure EU satellite project, Reuters
MPs demand satellite cost review, Guardian
Galileo an ‘orbiting Railtrack’, say mps, Independent
Galileo slammed by UK politicians, Register
BBC Q&A on Galileo
Galileo gets into position, Nature from 2005

Image: Artists impression of Galileo satellite / ESA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A biologist in Arizona has died of the plague after conducting an autopsy on a mountain lion. According to media reports, the Grand Canyon National Park has confirmed that Eric York likely contracted the disease in the course of his work on a lion tagging programme (USA Today).

“Eric did not play it safe. ... He put his love for this earth and its creatures ahead of his own safety,” Margaret Payne, a family friend and bishop of the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, told mourners at his funeral (Massachusetts paper The Republican).

Human cases of plague are relatively rare in the US, with about 13 cases a year (AP). “His job brought him in very close proximity with wildlife. The general public would not be exposed in the same way that he would be, although we have been trying to emphasize that this is an area in northern Arizona that we know has plague,” said Matt Walburger, a consultant for the US Public Health Service (Arizona Republic).

Those who came into contact with York have been given antibiotics, although the last recorded case of human-to-human plague transmission was in 1924. The national park has announced new precautions visitors should take (LA Times).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

Continue reading "Weekly round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It’s the interview they all wanted. Earlier this week climate change sceptics were receiving an email from one Dr Mark Cox. In this email Dr Cox implored them to write about a tale of “treatment of some academic colleagues by what seems like a kind of ‘climate change mafia’”. Cox’s colleagues had discovered evidence that overthrew the idea of man-made global warming, the email said.

Those who took this email at face value are now looking rather foolish (see our earlier post for details). But why did “Dr Mark Cox” create a fictional journal, write a bogus paper, invent authors, reviewers and implore sceptics to write about the paper? Read on...

Continue reading "INTERVIEW: author of spoof paper speaks" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The surface of the Yellowstone caldera is now rising at 7 cm a year, according to a paper in this week’s Science. Wu-Lung Chang and colleagues used satellite measurements to measure uplift between 2004 and 2006 and found a rate three times faster than that measured in the 1920s. Chang thinks the results imply magma chambers below the surface are recharging.

So should we be worried about the volcano popping its top? Probably not. “There is no evidence of an imminent volcanic eruption or hydrothermal explosion. That’s the bottom line,” according to study author Robert Smith of the University of Utah (press release). “A lot of calderas worldwide go up and down over decades without erupting.”

The Salt Lake Tribune thinks the results “in no way should be construed as a harbinger of a natural disaster”. Not so, says the Daily Utah Chronicle, they could indicate earthquakes a-comin’. Kenneth Pierce of the US Geological Survey has a nice take on the importance of the results. “We have information of the longer term, millennial scale inflation/deflation cycles of the caldera, which might be called ‘heavy breathing’.”

“For now, it appears that Yellowstone is just reminding us that it's worth paying attention to,” says ARS Technica.

This is not the first ‘unprecidented uplift’ in Yellowstone history, the USGS says “In the 1970s, a resurvey of benchmarks discovered the unprecedented uplift of the Yellowstone Caldera of more than 28 inches (72 cm) over five decades.” Conventional surveying of Yellowstone began in 1923. Nature last year published an article on the pattern of uplift and magma intrusion.

Top image: Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park / Photo by Henry Holdsworth, courtesy of Robert B. Smith

Lower image: The orange in this image represents the magma chamber. Rusty circles within the caldera represent the resurgent volcanic domes above the chamber. Credit: Wu-Lung Chang, University of Utah

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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SEE ALSO - INTERVIEW: author of spoof paper speaks

Arguments over global warming have taken a strange turn. There’s a big hubbub in the blogosphere over a fake paper purporting to refute “manmade global warming theory”.

The paper itself appears to have been removed from the web, but google’s cache of it is still there [*Not anymore, but see below - Ed.]. There’s a cache of the “editorial” that goes with it as well. The paper concluded “We have no choice but to conclude that the recent increase in global temperatures, which has caused so much disquiet among policy makers, bears no relation to industrial emissions, but is in fact a natural phenomenom.”

However the listed authors and their departments don’t seem to exist. The listed editorial board is similarly suspect. These facts are causing some amusement at the Register, as well as on various blogs. One theory is that this spoof is the work of UK author David Thorpe (Desmog blog, Prometheus). However Thorpe has denied this:

Let's be clear. I did not write the content of the site. Someone else did. I designed the site because I was asked to by someone who knew I would be sympathetic to the joke. I appreciate it looks as though I wrote it. I even wish I had written it, because it's very funny. But I didn't.

This does seem to have been a just a joke, played on some of the more outspoken (or less careful) critics of climate change argument. However they are already repurposing it to show themselves in a good light. “I, along with a ton of other bloggers, and even Rush Limbaugh fell for what has turned out to be a complete hoax,” says Peer Review Florida. “Despite the the fact that the paper I used as the lead in to a discussion was false, it remains true that global warming advocates have a religious zeal about defending their beliefs on the subject and those who dare disagree are scorned.”

We await with interest the other papers listed to appear in the journal...

[*Google’s caches have disappeared but you can now get a PDF of the paper. See also this post from one of those who assisted the spoof.]

Image: NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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After seeing the scale of the recent California wildfires from space, it seems amazing that any kind of ground based monitoring equipment could have survived. But pictures have been recovered from a US Geological Survey wildlife monitoring camera.

The motion sensitive camera snapped a coyote seemingly fleeing the fire and another shot from just over a day later shows what could be the same coyote trotting back after the blaze subsided. In the interim this spectacular shot of the flames was captured.

       
Oct. 22, 2007, 04:50 PST. Coyote fleeing from the fires
Oct. 23, 2007, 23:12 PST. Coyote heading back

There’s even some science to come out of all this. “We hope that we are able to do follow-up research to help discern where the displaced carnivores go, as the options are slim between urban areas or unburned areas that already have bobcats and coyotes present who will not welcome newcomers to their territories. If so, we will have the opportunity to understand how fires interact with patterns of carnivore behavior and ecology and what the implications are for conservation of these species, especially in habitat surrounded by urban areas,” says researcher Erin Boydston.

See also this recent Nature story.

Images: all images courtesy of USGS.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A study at the American Heart Association meeting in Orlado this week revealed a rise in arterial plaques in women who took the pill: plaques were 20-30% more prevalent for each decade of pill use. They were small plaques, but any are thought to raise the risk of heart disease (AP).

Potentially frightening stuff, though there’s no data as yet on actual heart disease risk. And ABC news points out that previous studies have come to different conclusions.

Very, very few stories, surprisingly, take the time to compare this new result to the previously touted health benefits of the pill. “Some experts believe the cancer-protective benefits are so strong that every young woman should take the pill for one year just to get this protection,” writes Deborah Kotz in US News, who argues that we need bigger, better, more controlled studies of the long-term effects of hormone exposure. And / or a male pill.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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What does it mean to be British? This question obsesses many of the politicians in this country but today it is applied in a rather different context. For today a proposed list of invasive species has been released, containing 74 new additions (reported in the Daily Telegraph, Independent and Daily Mail).

We have always had a somewhat troubled relationship with our wildlife in Britain, eliminating wolves, beavers and several other interesting species years ago. Debate over the reintroduction of these rages periodically and what “British Wildlife” actually is is a difficult question.

Take one example on the list – the wild boar. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which drew up the list, says:

Once native to Britain, this species became extinct in the wild in the 17th Century, but has become re-established in small feral populations in some areas. It can cause damage to seminatural habitats and crops, and may be a vector of livestock disease, as well as potentially posing a danger to the public. Listing is proposed to prevent its increase in the wild where problems are most likely to occur.

How about the Chinese Water Deer? These are a threatened species in their natural habitat but are doing ok in England. Not that we want them here, apparently. “Invasive non-native species pose a very serious threat to our native plants, animals and the local environments they live in, costing the British economy around £2 billion per year. The threat is greater than ever with climate change,” says Joan Ruddock, minister for climate change and biodiversity.

Climate change, in the broadest sense, make it rather tricky for those attempting to draw a line in the sand. As the planet warms species will make their way north to our fair isle. There is a balance to be struck between keeping out genuinely invasive species and the impossible task of freezing an eco-system at one point in time. Let’s have the wild boar back please, but you can keep your Chinese Water Deer.

Image: Britain from space / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Japanese Selene spacecraft is now in orbit around the Moon and has sent back some high definition tv recordings. You can watch a bit of that video – it really is like being on board and looking out the window.

Wow.

The video consists of 8 minutes of footage, shot from 100 kilometres up (on Halloween, incidentally), and squashed into 1 minute for your viewing pleasure, says Asia’s tech news source Tech-On. The Japanese Space Agency notes it has no audio, a bit apologetically – but what audio would there be in a vacuum exactly? The whooshing of air past the microphones?

Funny, isn’t it, that Japan’s craft takes ace high-tech video footage, and Europe’s recent lunar mission just took stills? Well, we all know where to go when buying a video camera…

And oh, how things have changed: here’s the television footage that people got to see when the Apollo missions landed back in the 70s. Not nearly so whizzy, that.

PS: Not to be left out of the new lunar rush, German politicians are making noises again about their own Moon project… if they can find the money (Reuters). They’ve been talking about that a while; Der Spiegel has a piece on those plans from earlier this year. “Sheesh... it seems EVERYONE wants to get to the moon nowadays” says aviation website Aero-news.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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There's a rush of coverage today of the announcement of a fifth planet orbiting the star 55 Cancri, 41 light-years from Earth. Four other planets around this star had been previously known.

Now, extrasolar planets are cool. It's sort of amazing to think how far astronomers have come over the past decade or so. The first planet orbiting a sunlike star (some had been found before, but around pulsars) was announced in 1995; since then, 263 other extrasolar planets have been reported, according to the definitive Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia.

But it's not like any of these discoveries are unexpected. We know there are planets around other stars. We know we will continue to keep finding planets of smaller and smaller mass, in more and more Earthlike habitability zones, as astronomers keep raking in the data. So please, can the journalists keep the excitement in context?

The Guardian calls the new 55 Cancri planet "a hugely significant step towards finding a second Earth-like planet capable of harbouring extraterrestrial life." The Houston Chronicle quotes planet-hunter Geoff Marcy as saying he's "jumping out of his socks...The significance is marvelous, as we now know our sun and its family of planets are not unique."

As Marcy knows better than almost anybody, we've known that for 12 years.

Posted by Alex Witze
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There's an odd and rather sad story making the rounds from the Associated Press. It's about Mario Capecchi, who shared this year's Nobel prize in medicine for his work on knock-out mice.

By any measure, Capecchi had a tough childhood. In multiple interviews he has described how the Gestapo came to his home in Italy and sent his mother off to the Dachau concentration camp when he was three -- leaving him scramble the streets on his own for several years. Reporters from the Associated Press, though, have uncovered inconsistencies in his story - notably the lack of any evidence that his mother actually was at Dachau, plus records that suggest he was taken in by his father when his mother vanished.

According to the AP, Capecchi - now at the University of Utah - has not become defensive about the inconsistencies in his story, but took 'an almost scholarly interest' in their findings. An Italian historian has suggested that young children often were not told the full story of their early years, in order to avoid any further trauma.

The hardscrabble details of Capecchi's early life are, of course, irrelevant when it comes to the breakthrough work he did later in developing ways to disable specific genes in mouse strains. The Salt Lake Tribune reports how the university president and co-workers are standing by him. "It's totally irrelevant to Mario as a person and as a scientist," said a colleague.

The Chicago Sun-Times puts a rather unfair headline, in my view, on the story: 'Is a Nobel winner's mind playing tricks on him?'

Perhaps now other researchers can spend more time looking into the little-understood phenomenon of childhood memories and trauma.

Posted by Alex Witze
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The US government is still fretting about what to do when the next influenza pandemic hits - especially how state and local governments might divvy out limited vaccine stocks. Just to help, officials have now released a color-coded priority list as to who gets it and who doesn't. As with any limited resource, there will be winners and losers – at least until vaccine production ramps up and everyone gets a dose.

The highest priority – code red – will go to an estimated 23 million doctors, cops, politicians and others. Pregnant women and babies would also get first dibs on a vaccine, too. Soldier, spies, utility workers and sick children round out code orange, while yellow and green include farmers, postmen, healthy children, and the elderly. The lowest rung – code blue – will be occupied by the remaining 122 million other Americans.

The plan is open for public comment until Dec. 31. So let them know now if you've got a problem with your color.

Posted by Alex Witze
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“Children treat nursery robot as human”, according to the Telegraph today.

It sounds a bit over the top, but the sentiment does come directly from a study of a Sony robot (called QRIO) placed in a nursery environment, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. The paper tells us: “Initially, the children treated the robot very differently than the way they treated each other. By the last session, 5 months later, they treated the robot as a peer rather than a toy.”

The robot – which stands at half-toddler height and was assisted in its actions (dancing, giggling, walking) by a human operator that sent it instructions every few minutes (which sounds like cheating to me, but the researchers say this mainly stopped it from hitting walls) – spent a total of 5 months in a classroom of toddlers. After bouts of “full behavioural repetoire” the kids really bonded with QRIO, say the researchers: they touched it in the way that they touch other kids, with an emphasis on hands and arms, hugged it, put a blanket over it when it ‘went to sleep’ on low batteries, and cried if it fell over.

Well… I have seen toddlers treat inanimate dolls like ‘peers’, and cry when their tamagotchi ‘dies’, despite the fact that these virtual pets consist of an unmoving chunk of plastic whose “full repetoire” of behaviour consists of bleeping.

But, as New Scientist and others point out, these kids did behave differently to QRIO than to an inanimate robot named Robby or other toys, like teddy bears.

It’s hardly surprising for kids to respond more to things that seem to respond to them. But whether they’ll really treat a robot exactly as they do another child, and whether a robot will really ever become an invaluable teaching assistant in the classroom, are debatable.

Apparently other robots have only been able to hold a child’s attention span for less than 10 hours, by telling stories (though I wonder how this compares to the ultimate story-teller, television, which seems to have an endless fascination for kids). By contrast this robot inspired "long-term bonding and socialization" (paper).

"The authors are drawing general conclusions ... beyond what the data alone suggest," technologist and social scientist Nathan Freier told Science – who also host the videos, from which you can draw your own conclusions.

Picture: UCSD / PNAS

Posted by Nicola Jones
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...but not as we know it. In fact it's a giant peccary, (Guardian, Independent, ScienceDaily) from the Amazon brought into the scientific fold by Dutch zoologist Marc van Roosmalen. The details are apparently reported in the Bonner Zoologische Beiträge, a journal which as far as I can see has no website. But van Roosmalen has them on his website -- along with an account of a dwarf mannatee, "the smallest of all sirenians".

The Register points out that the peccary is hardly, despite some of the headlines, a discovery, in that the local Tupi people have known about the beasts in question for quite some time, and indeed hunt them on a regular basis. Fears that others will also join in, and destroy the peccary's habitat, have allowed the new peccary to jump straight from the unknown on to the Red List of endangered species.

It's also not as much of a discovery as all it might have been even for those of us who are not members of the Tipu: Loren Coleman of Crptomundo had the goods last year.

Earlier this year van Roosmalen was in the news for other reasons; amid an outcry of support by fellow scientists, he was given a long prison sentence for allegedly taking four monkeys out of the Amazon without proper permits (Nature story). The Telegraph reports that he has now been released on appeal.

I'm slightly bemused that the Guardian insists this new pig is "huge". It's bigger than Babe, sure, and also than other peccaries. That presumably is why it is being called the giant peccary. But for all that it's only a bit over a metre long, and that's not really a huge pig. This is a huge pig.

Posted by Oliver Morton
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The Smithsonian Institution, America's premier collection of museums, has not had a good year. First there was the unfolding scandal of director Larry Small, who turned out to be spending umpteen dollars of Smithsonian money to upkeep his house and office for official functions. Small resigned in disgrace earlier this year, but now there's fresh controversy on the front pages of the Washington Post.

Seems there's a little problem with the issue of a $5 million donation from the American Petroleum Institute for a new oceans hall that's slated to open at the Smithsonian's natural history museum next year. The money would primarily sponsor a website on marine issues over which the Smithsonian would retain editorial control. But businessman Gus Sant -- who made his fortune through a power company that is itself a member of the petroleum institute -- raised red flags about the deal. Citing oil spills like the Exxon Valdez, he told the Post: "I think it is in everyone's mind that oceans and oil are not consistent."

The Smithsonian regents are a powerful crowd, including several US senators and chaired by John Roberts, who leads the US Supreme Court. They are scheduled to consider the API donation at their next meeting, slated for Nov. 19. The controversy is a minor blow for Cristian Samper, a biologist who took over at the Smithsonian after Small departed, who approved the deal, and whom many had hoped might restore the institution's scientific glory. But it's not unexpected given controversies like whether the European Geosciences Union might approach the oil company ExxonMobil about sponsoring its conferences (see previous Nature story here).

Sant says he'll recuse himself from any upcoming vote, as he's the largest donor to the oceans project overall.

(And yes, the headline on this item is shamefully cribbed from whatever brilliant copy editor was working on the Post Friday night.)

Posted by Alex Witze
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US President Bush has vetoed a bill – the Water Resources Development Act (pdf) – that is overflowing with water projects, from ecological restoration in the everglades to flood protection in Louisiana.

But the US$23 million bill is very likely to be resurrected (according to everyone, from AP, to the New York Times and Baltimore Sun), by an overturn of Bush’s veto – a fun little manoeuvre in which 2/3 of the House and Senate agree to disagree with the President. The overturn is reckoned to be a done deal, and will be the first in the Bush presidency (not least because almost never vetoes things; at least not until the last election, when Democrats took congress). A staffer in the Senate Environment and Public Works committee tells me that the House is likely to do its overturning tomorrow, and that the Senate will likely do their bit later this week.

Some see the WRDA as a package of essential water projects rejected by the president under the cover of "fiscal responsibility" (Detroit Free Press). Others see it as waterborne ‘pork’ — the American term for allocations of money tied to specific projects, usually shepherded into law by politicians from the district where they will be enacted (see the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Bluey)

But what science is there to be found in the swollen-to-bursting legislation?

There are tonnes of small engineering projects for flood-control (The Dallas Morning News bemoans the loss of a project aiming to save Dallas from floods), environmental restoration (Newsday still has hope for Long Island oysters; Florida’s WFTV wonders why the federal government isn’t footing its part of the bill for the Everglades), and navigation. And there are also large numbers of conservation projects to control invasive plants and restore watery environments. There is also a call for research in the bill, with a few small monitoring projects set up. Several of the projects specify that the National Academy of Sciences should peer review them.

Basically, if you are an applied scientist and own a pair of waders, this bill is a good thing for you.

Image: Red Mangroves in the Everglades / USFWS

UPDATE: As predicted, the US Congress has overturned Bush's veto of this bill on Thursday (see for example Los Angeles Times). Local press were predictably jubilant about the incoming tide of money (Minnesota West Central Tribune, WVLT Knoxville).

Posted by Nicola Jones
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After a daring fix of a solar panel, construction of the international space station is, for now, back on track (NYTimes; BBC)

Faced with two power problems – a ripped solar panel array and a potentially gummed-up joint that would prevent a different solar panel from tracking the Sun – NASA officials decided to fix the more pressing problem of the rips (picture from NASA). This had happened when the solar panel array caught up on a guide wire as it was being unfurled last week. While the panels still drew power, the tears undermined the structural integrity of the array.

On Saturday, astronaut Scott Parazynski, clinging to the end of a robotic arm, ‘fixed’ the panels during a seven-hour spacewalk (picture from NASA). Parazynski snipped the snarled wires and patched up the tears with impromptu ‘cuff links’ – contraptions that snapped over the tears to hold the panel together.

Continue reading "Space station solar panels: one fixed, one to go" »

Posted by Nicola Jones
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Just a few years after the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s first ever robot car race ended in a major flop (with all the cars in the 2004 event breaking down), 6 of the 11 finalists in this year’s robotic car challenge successfully navigated city streets complete with intersections, traffic circles and human-driven traffic.

The Carnegie Mellon University-based team earned $2 million (€1.4 million) when their car ‘Boss’ won the Pentagon-sponsored race, which took place over the weekend in the Southern California desert.

AP quotes the Urban Challenge programme manager Norman Whitaker: "They [Carnegie Mellon] did everything right: followed all the speed laws, stopped at the intersections… It was really a phenomenal performance."

But the NY Times highlights the “crashes and traffic jams” that took place; “computer-controlled vehicles, at least to date, have failings that are all too human” they say.

There are pictures on the DARPA website, and video on Silicon.com. Check out our last post on this subject for sites with blow-by-blow coverage.

Posted by Nicola Jones
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What’s been on The Great Beyond this week and a few extras...

Monday October 29
Power problems for space station / A clam named Ming / Arthur Kornberg

Tuesday October 30
FEMA fake press conference scandal / 52m year old spider X-ray / Organic food ‘better for you’

Wednesday October 31
Leslie Orgel / Spooky science for Halloween / Tiger tales triple bill / More space station woes

Thursday November 01
Washoe the chimp dies / New planets’ hidden mystery

Friday November 02
Appetite for fish means reef destruction / Robot race shifts gear / The Lance Armstrong Mighty Mouse

Other Nature blog posts you may have missed
Peer to Peer - Blogging about peer-reviewed research
The Sceptical Chymist - The qualifying exam: Good luck, sucker!
Climate Feedback - White House advisor edits climate report
In the Field – The Nature editor goes to Spain

Ones that got away
In the hunt for shipwrecks “buccaneering ways of yesteryear” are back, says the Independent
Schools in the US are producing more science graduates than the market can support, says Business Week
‘The Most Beautiful Planetary Maps Ever’, on Wired

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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An appetite for parrotfish is putting the future of the world’s coral reefs in jeopardy, according to a paper published this week in Nature. Lead author Peter Mumby from the University of Exeter warns in this paper that mass die off of the seaweed munching sea urchin urchin Diadema antillarum in 1983 has left parrotfish doing the majority of grazing on reefs. But the parrotfish are under threat. This means reefs that are taken over by seaweed are unlikely to be able to recover, according to his computer modelling of reef ecosystems (coverage in Reuters, BBC, and Conservation Magazine – with the headline Parrots of the Caribbean) .

“The good news is that we can take practical steps to protect parrotfish and help reef regeneration,” he says (press release 1). “We recommend a change in policy to establish controls over the use of fish traps, which parrotfish are particularly vulnerable to. We also call on anyone who visits the Caribbean and sees parrotfish on a restaurant menu to voice their concern to the management.”

Parrotfish are something of a delicacy in the region, which complicates conservation. I can heartily agree with Mumby’s stance and add another reason not to eat them – they really don’t taste very good at all.

Fellow researcher Alan Hastings, a UC Davis theoretical ecologist, explains that the paper examines the process of hysteresis, where an effect lags behind its cause (press release 2). “In this case, the loss of sea urchins sent the reef off the road, and now the only guardrail is the parrotfish. Our model showed that if we overfish parrotfish, and the reef goes off the cliff, we would need four times the fish we have now to bring the reef back.”

There’s a mass of parrot fish video on the BBC.

Image: Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Completing a 97 kilometre course in six hours of driving doesn’t really seem too onerous does it? Especially when the prizes on offer total $3.5 million. However this race is not open to humans – all the contestants in the DARPA Urban Challenge must be robot cars.

DARPA, which is in charge of hi-tech research for the US military, has now selected 11 finalists for this year’s race. Other robo-racers wannabies were eliminated in a gruelling set of qualifier events that saw cars crash, smash and generally run amok. “Cars” is also pushing it for some of the contenders – one finalist is a 15 ton truck. EE Times thinks the number of finalists is disappointing: around 20 were expected.

To win, cars will have to maintain the same standard of driving needed pass the California DMV road test while completing the course, which will feature 50 non-robot driven cars to avoid. “Vehicles competing in the Urban Challenge will have to think like human drivers and continually make split-second decisions to avoid moving vehicles, including robotic vehicles without drivers, and operate safely on the course. The urban setting adds considerable complexity to the challenge faced by the robotic vehicles, and replicates the environments where many of today’s military missions are conducted,” said Norman Whitaker, Urban Challenge Program Manager.

Wired is doing blow-by-blow coverage, as is TG Daily. The Economist has a nice piece on the race with a bit more context.

The far less intricate task of driving through empty desert was won by the robotic car ‘Stanley’ in the 2005 version of the DARPA Grand Challenge (Nature).

Image: DARPA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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See how they run! Watch the mouse leave its normal partner in the dust in this video.

Scientists’ latest improvement on nature is a ‘mighty mouse’ that can run at 20 meters a minute for up to six hours before stopping. This genetically engineered mouse eats 60% more than normal mice but is still fitter and lives and breeds for longer.

“They are metabolically similar to Lance Armstrong biking up the Pyrenees*. They utilize mainly fatty acids for energy and produce very little lactic acid,” says Richard Hanson, biochemist at Case Western Reserve University and the man behind the new mice (press release). In the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Hanson details how over-expression of the gene for the enzyme phosphoenolypyruvate carboxykinases produces these effects, although it isn’t clear yet exactly what this enzyme does. This paper was originally released back in August.

A rather excitable article in the UK’s Independent says the new mouse is “raising the prospect that the discovery may one day be used to transform people's capacities”. Personally I hope not, as the researchers also found the new mice were “markedly more aggressive” than controls. The paper quotes Hanson as saying:

We humans have exactly the same gene. But this is not something that you'd do to a human. It's completely wrong. We do not think that this mouse model is an appropriate model for human gene therapy. It is currently not possible to introduce genes into the skeletal muscles of humans and it would not be ethical to even try.

The Telegraph also spoke to Hansen. He reiterated that “the possibility of using this procedure to enhance human performance is highly unlikely”.

Better, faster, stronger? Previous mighty mice
Se-Jin Lee made the original mighty mice, then he made them mightier!
World’s fattest mouse (and it doesn’t get diabetes) – New Scientist
Mice with increased muscle mass “forever fat free” - Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (subscription required)

*for more on Armstrong see Improved muscular efficiency displayed as Tour de France champion matures (pdf) and The Tour de France: a physiological review (abstract)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The first animal to learn a human language has died. Washoe the chimp, who learned around 250 words in sign language, died at the age of 42 at Central Washington University. “Washoe was a treasured member of our family,” said Roger and Deborah Fouts, co-founders of the university’s Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (official statement).

AP, the Seattle Times and New York Times all note that some researchers have expressed scepticism over the degree of language chimps can acquire. “Language has to involve conversation. It can’t be as one-sided as it was with the chimps,” says Herbert Terrace, of Columbia University, in the Seattle Times. He apparently thinks signing chimps have just learned a more complicated way of begging for food.

Washoe’s adopted son Loulis was the first animal to acquire a human language from another animal. For more about Washoe, named for Washoe County, Nevada where she lived until age five, see Friends of Washoe. A memorial will be held on November 12.

Related Nature stories
Apeing our language - Chimp genome may shed light on surprising command of vocabulary.
What the chimp means to me - Interacting with our closest living relative can be a profound experience. To mark the publication of the chimpanzee genome, Nature asked four individuals for their different perspectives.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The list of known planets outside our solar system has grown a little, with the announcement of Wasp 3, Wasp 4 and Wasp 5. These three planets orbit so close to their stars that their years are all less than two days and they have surface temperatures of over 2,000^oC, as reported by the UK’s BBC, Times, Guardian. All three planets will be officially unveiled at a conference in China this week (Telegraph).

Just to make sure we weren’t getting the wrong end of the stick I put in a very quick call to one of the researchers to check these years were two Earth days, and not two days on the planets themselves. And this is where it gets a little more complicated and a lot more interesting...

Continue reading "New planets’ hidden mystery" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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