The Great Beyond
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How did the moose cross the road?
Through a special tunnel of course. CBC reports on special subways that will make Canada’s ‘Moose Alley’ safer for motorists and moose.
Osaka mudflat formed by quake now home to rare crab
Sometimes earthquakes help wildlife, from the Yomiuri Shimbun.
University abandons homeopathy “degree”
David Colquhoun is claiming “the first major victory in the battle for the integrity of universities”.
The image of an ancient, unspoiled Amazon rainforest might have to be revised after researchers claimed that tracts of it were urbanised well before Colombus sailed the ocean blue (in 1492).
The ‘Amazon rainforest was giant garden city’, says the Telegraph while the BBC hails the discovery of ‘lost towns’ (not strictly accurate as they were first described in 2003). As Scientific American’s headline notes alliteratively: ‘Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized’.
In this week’s issue of Science researchers from the US and Brazil report their findings on the societies that already existed at the time Europeans arrived in the New World. Many areas previously considered virgin forest have actually been influenced by human activity, says author Mike Heckenberger, of the University of Florida (press release).
Caltech scientists have determined why flies are so hard to swat, to the delight of world media.
Using hi-speed photography Michael Dickinson and Gwyneth Card found that fruit flies (Drosophila) calculate the direction of a threatening swat and determine an optimal escape from your pathetically slow squashing attempt. Their research is published today in Current Biology.
“When it first notices an approaching threat, a fly's body might be in any sort of posture depending on what it was doing at the time, like grooming, feeding, walking, or courting,” says Dickinson (press release).
“Our experiments showed that the fly somehow ‘knows’ whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture. This means that the fly must integrate visual information from its eyes, which tell it where the threat is approaching from, with mechanosensory information from its legs, which tells it how to move to reach the proper preflight pose.”
A large number of penguins have fallen victim to an oil slick off the coast of Brazil.
AP quotes Marcelo Duarte of the Santa Catarina state environmental police as saying 200 birds have washed up dead since Sunday. Manuela Osorio, a vet caring for around 150 survivors, told the wire service hundreds more were being reported by citizens and some Brazilian media sources are putting the number of dead at 2,000 penguins.
Duarte says the Navy is searching for the source of the oil slick -- presumed to be a large leaky ship.
The United Nation's latest climate talks wrapped up in Ghana this week with participants citing particular progress on reducing emissions from deforestation and heavy industry (AP, Reuters).
The negotiations come in advance of the main UN climate conference in Poznan later this year. The iterative nature of the process appears to have worn out some of the major news outlets, but there was no shortage of wire coverage.
Participants in Accra focused in large part on deforestation and a pathway towards "sectoral" agreements that could be used to promote action in developing countries. Under this logic, countries that cannot immediately take on hard targets for emissions reductions - due to the scale of current growth or the need to develop basic energy services for their citizens - might be able to fully modernize their industrial sectors (cement, steel, glass, etc.).
This approach would do more than reduce emissions in the developing countries. Indeed, the adoption of some kind of international standards would help ensure that tighter pollution controls in, say, Europe, doesn't shift even more heavy manufacturing into countries like China (a double whammy that drives emissions up even faster and makes eventual reductions even harder).
All of these discussions are ultimately laying the groundwork toward an eventual agreement that many hope will be reached in Copenhagen in 2009. But don't hold your breath: The talks might well bleed into 2010, given the upcoming leadership change in the US and the plethora of issues that remain to be settled.
Hairy ears – yuck. But if you want to carry on hearing pins dropping around you, you’re going to need to hang on to those aural protrusions - or at least those right inside the ear (those unslightly sticky-out ones can go). Hairs in the inner ear are an important way of transferring sound but not everyone manages to keep them, perhaps after one poke too many with a cotton bud. With ear hairs – once they’re gone, they’re gone.
But researchers led by John Brigande Oregon Hearing Research Center reported in Nature yesterday that they’ve managed to grow working hair cells from non-hair cell cells in mice. They did this by transferring the gene responsible for the growth of ear hair cells into normal cells in mice embryo inner ears.
The news has pricked up lots of journos ears. A cure for deafness is on the way, says the Daily Telegraph, while Reuters and New Scientist, among others, play it safe by reporting simply that these hairs have been regrown rather than claiming that all deaf people will be able to hear again any time soon. The authors say that the work might lead to therapies in future. So while it’s not a bad news story by any means, it isn’t quite right to say that a cure for deafness has been found. Yet.
Image: Punchstock
Nature is taking some flak this week for an editorial published in July on the Templeton Foundation, which gives sizeable grants for research on the crossover of science and spirituality. Some of that flak is coming from our own letters page.
The take home message of the editorial was “The Templeton Foundation's exploration of science and faith merits tolerance, not outright rejection.” In a letter in this week’s Nature biologists Matthew Cobb and Jerry Coyne take issue with this. They were, they write “perplexed by your Editorial”:
You suggest that science may bring about "advances in theological thinking". In reality, the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism.
Over on RichardDawkins.net SteveN is fairly typical of those weighing in on the Cobb-Coyne letter. “Throwing money at religion/spirituality in an attempt to give it scientific credibility is, I feel, deluded at best,” he says. “I was therefore disappointed by Nature’s editorial when it first appeared and applaud Cobb and Coyne's direct and forthright letter.”
There’s a rather longer set of comments on this article on Pharyngula. Of course very few of them are about the debate and rather a lot of them are expletive ridden diatribes against previous comments, as evidenced by this Wordle picture showing almost as many people discussing commenter Max as those discussing God. Poor old ‘Nature’ barely gets a look in.
UPDATE
Brian Switek, on the Laelaps blog, has weighed in on Nature's side. Accusing Cobb and Coyne of the henious crime of quote mining, he says, "Now along comes a letter by Matthew Cobb and Jerry Coyne who use the article on the Templeton Foundation to launch into an attack on religion. The somewhat sneering tone of the correspondence suggests that Nature tacitly supported the aims of the Templeton Foundation, whereas a reading of the original article shows that this is not so. Cobb and Coyne try to support their position, however, by quote mining the original article."
Purdue University has reprimanded scientist Rusi Taleyarkhan for research misconduct, according to a statement released yesterday. Taleyarkhan will remain on the faculty but will lose his named professorship after a committee rejected an appeal against two findings of misconduct.
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008b/080827WoodsonTaleyarkhan.html
“In considering the sanctions to impose, I have been guided by the principle that the sanctions should address and be proportional to the specific findings of research misconduct,” said Purdue Provost Randy Woodson. “In my judgment as Purdue's chief academic officer, it is inappropriate for a faculty member who has been found guilty of research misconduct to hold a title of a named university professor.”
Purdue previously released a report stating that Taleyarkhan arranged for a student’s name to be added to a paper to “create the appearance that the student had witnessed the experiment reported in the paper” and he later claimed the paper as independent confirmation of his experiments on a tabletop fusion device using ‘sonofusion’, where fusion is created by sound waves collapsing bubbles.
Continue reading "Fusion scientist reprimanded for misconduct" »
What could either be an easily made mistake or a cutting insight comes to light in this year’s exam answer howlers competition, run by academic newspaper The Times Higher Education.
University of Southampton research fellow Anita Perryman submitted this statement from one of her students: “Tackling climate change will require an unpresidented response.”
It’s not known whether the student received marks for this.
A “substantial proportion” of Ayurvedic herbal “medicines” from India contain lead mercury and arsenic, according to research published this week in JAMA.
The team behind the work says the Food and Drug Administration should start putting the screws on the industry.
“Current regulations governing the quality of herbal supplements made and sold in the US and India are inadequate,” author Robert Saper told Reuters. “We recommend strictly enforced government-mandated daily dose limits for toxic metals in all dietary supplements.”
Saper’s team tested 193 Ayurvedic “medicines” purchased via the internet in 2005 and tested them for contamination. Just over 20% of products contained toxic metals.
From the latest edition of Astrobiology Magazine European Edition comes this Astrobiology Rap from Oort Kuiper aka Jonathan Chase.
“Jon is an early career researcher in science communication,” says AMEE. “Multi-talented, Jon has undergraduate degrees in both Aerospace Engineering, and Science and Science Fiction. As a post-graduate practitioner in communicating science, Jon is actively involved in a number of science communication activities.”
The Knight Science Journalism tracker calls this song “clear evidence that life on Earth is evolving - or, at least, human culture is”.
Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists
Songs about science part VI: ‘Don’t go messing with our telescope’
Songs about science VII: ‘It’s a long way from Amphioxus’
Songs about pseudo-science
Coral reefs aren’t being protected against climate change despite the protective zones set up to do just that, say researchers in a report just published in PLoS ONE. (Paper and press release)
Lead researcher Nick Graham from Newcastle University says that the No-Take Areas (NTAs) set up in the 1960s and 70s were devised when climate change wasn’t the big deal it is now. These zones have had no effect on the health of the coral, he says, and are in the wrong place.
The NTAs are often small, and are surrounded by exploited areas, the report points out. The researchers looked at different fish populations in areas that were protected, and areas that weren’t. The results were stark – “irrespective of body size and trophic categorization, NTAs provided no clear benefits for any of the fish groups in terms of their change in response to coral decline,” the report reads. The work follows a report earlier this year that fishing statistics for tropical regions were wrong, and that overfishing is a much bigger problem than thought.
Elsewhere, Australian researchers are saying that warmer oceans will mean more coral diseases. They, like Graham and colleagues, traced the fate of a reef after a major bleaching event in 1998, but in the Great Barrier Reef off Australian, rather than the Indian Ocean.
Other scientists, including the group The Nature Conservancy, have prepared a statement called the Honolulu declaration, calling for greenhouse gas reductions to prevent acid eating up coral. The future for coral reefs, it has to be said, looks bleak.
Image: Punchstock
NASA’s interactive 50th anniversary tour
Where else can you find JFK, classic pop songs, Saturn V, Snoopy, Werhner Von Braun, and the Space Shuttle?
“The move to wheat may endure”
Opium production falls in Afghanistan; from AFP.
‘Young leukemia victim’s dream comes true as he meets with fellow brainiacs’
The Mercury News reports on how the Make-A-Wish Foundation set up David Godfrey with a visit to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. [Hat tip: Good Morning Silicon Valley.]
Earlier this month, we wrote about rumours that an Italian experiment called PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) had seen an intriguing signal. The cliff-notes version: PAMELA sees more positrons (anti-electrons) than expected, which may in turn be a signal from dark matter—mysterious stuff that floats around our cosmos and has never been seen.
PAMELA's results have been shrouded in mystery. So far, the researchers involved have only flashed their data on screen at a few conferences, for fear that the press would get a hold of the results before they were published in a peer-review journal. Such precautions are taken when submitting to journals like ours, but in this particular case, it's left a lot of physicists miffed.
Well now it appears that some enterprising individuals have scooped PAMELA. As reported by Jester on his popular physics blog Resonaances, somebody has "graphically extracted" the PAMELA data from their presentation at a conference last week in Stockholm. "Graphically extracted" is open for interpretation, but I'm guessing it means that they took a picture.
In any event, the new paper is here, and the cat, it would seem, is out of the bag.
A grand jury in the US has indicted a man amid allegations he posed as a researcher to acquire a deadly toxin found in pufferfish.
In a joint statement, US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and FBI agent Robert Grant announced that Edward Bachner IV had been indicted on ten counts; five of acquiring Tetrodotoxin to use as a weapon and five of possessing Tetrodotoxin “in a quantity that was not reasonably justified by a prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose” (press release pdf, indictment pdf).
From the Chicago Tribune:
Authorities said Bachner, posing as a researcher, ordered the toxin from a California company since 2006 — enough to kill 100 people. Another order from a New Jersey company was intercepted by the FBI, which set up an undercover delivery to Bachner, authorities said.
Posted on behalf of Amber Dance
Cane toads - big, poisonous hoppers up to a kilogram in weight - have been marching steadily across Australia since they were invited over in 1935, but no-one knows quite how far they could go. Now scientists at the University of Melbourne say south Australians can heave a collective sigh of relief at a toadless life – for the time being.
The toads were inported to eat the beetles plaguing the sugar cane crops; instead they gobbled up everything else, in the process evolving longer legs to expand their territory across the eastern and northern coast of the continent at a rate of 1.8 kilometers a night, and inspired one of the most hilarious science documentaries of all time. The residents of Darwin await their inevitable approach with automobiles and cricket bats at the ready, planning to squish as many as possible.
But the cold may slow them down.
Continue reading "Frigid nights may halt Australia’s warty green menace" »
After spending three years chipping away at rocks a team of researchers has concluded that the stone tools used by our ancestors were no better than those used by Neanderthals. This, they say, means we should stop calling Neanderthals stupid.
In a paper due to be published today in the Journal of Human Evolution Metin Eren and colleagues report their comparison of wide flint ‘flakes’ used by Neanderthals and the narrower ‘blades’ used by Homo sapiens.
“Technologically speaking, there is no clear advantage of one tool over the other,” says Eren, a researcher at the University of Exeter (press release). “When we think of Neanderthals, we need to stop thinking in terms of ‘stupid’ or ‘less advanced’ and more in terms of ‘different’.”
The team compared how costly the two tools were to produce – in terms of raw materials – along with their longevity and the size of the cutting edge. Eren says the presumed superiority of blades over flakes has been considered a sign of the more advanced nature of Homo sapiens.
“It is time for archaeologists to start searching for other reasons why Neanderthals became extinct while our ancestors survived,” says Eren.
Headline watch
Why Neanderthal man may not have been as stupid as he looks – Independent
Stone me – he's smart, he's tough and he's equal to any Homo sapiens – The Scotsman
Neanderthals 'were not stupid' – PA
Image: University of Exeter
“Bolt is an outlier. He’s enormous.”
Wired reckons we are nowhere near the fastest 100m it’s possible to run, despite Usain Bolt’s amazing Olympic win.
‘Human exoskeleton suit helps paralyzed people walk’
Reuters reports on the ReWalk: “a mix between the exoskeleton of a crustacean and the suit worn by comic hero Iron Man”.
“When I was growing up, I felt the dragons were my family. But today the dragons are angry with us, and see us as enemies.”
Conservationists are being blamed as Komodo Dragons turn nasty, says the Wall Street Journal.
Who has the best solar cell?
The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency both say they do. Greentechmedia tries to decide.
A solar powered plane has set a new record over the desert of Arizona, staying aloft for 83 hours and 37 minutes. Importantly, this means it stayed up for three nights.
The Zephyr beat a previous official world record for unmanned flight of 30 hours set by the Global Hawk plane in 2001 and also beat its own previous unofficial record of 54 hours. As this Zephyr flight does not meet all the requirements of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale the record remains unofficial, notes the BBC.
Although it might eventually be used for research purposes such as earth observation, those most likely to see the Zephyr first used commercially are those unfortunate enough to be in war zones. Its manufacturer QinetQ is a mainly military engineering company that was spun out of the British military a few years ago.
“In addition to setting a new unofficial record, the trial is a step towards the delivery of Zephyr's capability for joint, real-time, battlefield persistent surveillance and communications to forces in the field at the earliest opportunity,” says Simon Bennett, managing director of QinetiQ’s Applied Technologies business (press release).
Previously on Nature
Solar power: A flight to remember
Solar powered flight at night
Ok, the headline is a little misleading. But it’s still a bit worrying that NASA has found a computer virus on the space station.
Astronauts onboard the International Space Station are now running anti-virus software on their systems, following last week’s detection of an unwanted computer-guest.
According to Space.ref a ‘W32.Gammima.AG worm’ was detected on the ISS. The website quotes a terse NASA status update thus:
Virus was never a threat to any of the computers used for cmd and cntl and no adverse effect on ISS Ops. Theory is virus either in initial software load or possibly transferred from personal compact flash card.
According to anti-virus software manufacturer Symantec this is a ‘very low’ threat virus that steals information regarding an online game. It’s still a bit worrying that computers on the ISS aren’t set up to deal with these problems though.
For some reason this puts me in mind of this cartoon.
Image: NASA
At the weekend the Great Beyond went to the seaside, where – alongside the tooth-rotting food, psychotic sea-gulls and overpriced fairground rides – a number of psychics and tarot readers can also be found. One of these modern-day Nostradamuses had a particularly interesting client list on display.
We can exclusively reveal to you the pharma industry’s latest advisor...
Cross posted from Nature Climate Feedback.
The US Climate Change Science Program will revise and reissue its latest report following widespread criticism and a mountain of comments during the official review period. The news has spurred talk of sinister motives from groups like the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, as well as some media attention (Greenwire, subscription required) suggesting undue influence from global warming skeptics.
In truth, it doesn’t sound like anything sinister is going on, although clearly the process could have been managed better.
Agencies within the climate science program have been putting out climate reports on various topics for the past year or so (10 down, 11 to go). The document in question, which is being ushered through the process by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was released last month for public comment and is a synthesis report that is supposed to tie everything together. That has some wondering: How can the summary document be completed before the documents it is supposed to be summarizing?
President George W. Bush on Monday announced plans to create two new offshore sanctuaries in the central and western Pacific Ocean (The Associated Press). The move has already earned the praise of environmentalists who, though they might deny him a green legacy, are perfectly willing to support the president's efforts to achieve a "blue legacy."
The proposal, detailed in a memo here, would represent an impressive follow-up to his 2006 announcement creating the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii. Papahānaumokuākea covers more than 139,797 square miles, an area larger than all of the United States' national parks combined.
But that monument would be dwarfed by the latest proposal. The central-Pacific designation could be nearly as large as Alaska, making it the largest protected area in the world, according to the US-based Environmental Defense Fund. Meanwhile, the proposed designation around the Northern Mariana Islands would include the deepest part of the ocean at the Marianas Trench.
It's not yet clear how the designations might play out. The president has asked various federal agencies for input on the idea (including its impact on military activities), and he has various legal options as far as implementation goes. The simplest, and therefore the most likely, is to declare a pair of national monuments, which any president can do almost anywhere at the proverbial stroke of the pen.
The president's memo raises the possibility of prohibiting fishing, mining and energy development, all of which were banned at Papahānaumokuākea. But threats can come from afar, too, as trash floats in from the around the globe. And on this point, apparently things have gotten worse at Papahānaumokuākea.
“eBay insect fossil is new species”
Amazing what you can find on the internet these days. From the BBC.
“Land yacht set to blow record away”
Wind-powered wackiness from the Guardian.
“Iran plans manned space mission in 10 years”
The crucial word being ‘plans’. From Reuters
“Capturing bears for research can cause significant harm”
Oh. To the bears. Got it. (From the Canadian Press.)
We’re going to take a break from bringing you songs about science to display this amazing song about Bill Nelson.
As reported on the Bad Science and Denialism blogs, Nelson has invented the Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface. He’s also come up with a song about his life; listen and learn. Well ... actually ... just listen.
More from Bad Science.
More from Denialism.
You might be annoyed by loud noises going off near your head (I'm looking at you Mr Fire-alarm Tester). It may be that whales aren’t so fussed.
‘Study: seismic has little effect on Gulf whales’, says AP. ‘Shipping, noise don't seem to bother endangered giants, researchers say’, exclaims the Houston Chronicle.
Researchers working the Gulf of Mexico have found that Sperm Whales don’t seem to be too disturbed by oil and gas prospects doing surveys with noisy air guns. This is handy given the recent political moves towards offshore drilling.
According to Doug Biggs of Texas A&M university:
The bottom line is that airgun noise from seismic surveys that are thousands of yards distant does not drive away sperm whales living in the Gulf. However, some individual whales feeding at depth reduced the rate at which they searched acoustically for their prey when scientists carried out controlled exposure experiments by bringing seismic surveys close by the whales. (Press release.)
Planktos, a company that wanted to dump a load of iron filings in the sea with the idea that it would help carbon-eating phytoplankton grow, thereby solving the world’s climate crisis, is in crisis itself.
This began back in February when the company dumped its iron-dumping pilot project, protesting it had been the victim of a “highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders”.
Now the company, listed by Pink Sheets, has announced it will seek out an alternative near term business opportunity , change its name, consolidate its stock and make an acquisition. No details yet on what any of those things involve, though.
No doubt environmentalists will be relieved by the news – back at the height of Plankton’s media fame, scientists were not backwards in coming forwards to offer dramatic, dangerous consequences to be expected if Planktos went ahead with its scheme – such as a glut of nitrous-oxide-producing bacteria growing to feed on the bloom, thus emitting more greenhouse gases. The company was also criticized for its disregard of what the iron fertilization would mean for the local ecosystem.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Scientists trawling through daily satellite images of Greenland’s glaciers have found break-ups at two more glaciers and a big scary crack (press release).
The Petermann glacier in northern Greenland lost 29 square kilometres of ice between July 10th and 24th. It is the longest floating glacier in the Northern Hemisphere, with a floating section 16 km wide by 80 km long. Its last major ice loss was between 2000 and 2001 when the glacier lost 86 square kilometers of floating ice.
The researchers have also reported that the massive Jakobshavn glacier, the fastest retreating glacier in the world according to AP, has lost at least 10 square kilometers since the end of the last melt season (see images here). They think it has not retreated this far for 4,000 to 6,000 years.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Australia has opened the world's largest indoor, climate-controlled bee flight-testing facility. But this is nothing to do with colony collapse disorder. The facility is part of the Queensland Brain Institute and is designed so that scientists can study the behaviour, brain function and brain development of the bees (press release).
“Studying how bees control their flight speed, avoid collisions, and orchestrate smooth landings is providing valuable insights into the design of biologically inspired vision systems for unmanned aerial vehicles,” says Mandyam Srinivasan of the QBI.
In the Sydney Morning Herald, Srinivasan was quoted saying "Our research will hopefully increase our knowledge of brain functioning, which will in turn lead us to finding new and effective ways to treat brain disorders like Parkinson’s disease, strokes, Alzheimer’s and depression".
Continue reading "The buzz: Australian all weather bee flight facility opened " »
A massive black hole sits at the centre of the giant galaxy NGC 1275, which is itself in the centre of the Perseus Cluster. Giant filaments of gas connect this beast out to surrounding galaxy cluster (ESA press release).
Until now it has been something of a mystery how these filaments survive the harsh environment of the galaxy cluster and its multi-million degree gas, without being heated up and evaporated. A paper in this week’s Nature, from galactic sleuths led by Andy Fabian of the UK’s Institute of Astronomy, claims to have solved the problem:
Here we report observations that resolve thread-like structures in the filaments. Some threads extend over 6 kpc [kiloparsec], yet are only 70 pc wide. We conclude that magnetic fields in the threads, in pressure balance with the surrounding gas, stabilize the filaments, so allowing a large mass of cold gas to accumulate and delay star formation.
Press coverage
Galactic 'spaghetti monster' powered by magnetic fields – New Scientist
Galactic "Jellyfish" Mystery Solved? – National Geographic
Image: NASA, ESA and Andy Fabian (University of Cambridge, UK)
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
A little snail found by the National Trust at Cliveden house, a stately home once occupied by British royalty, is making a big splash in the UK. So why the fuss? They think the Mediterranean snails have gone unnoticed for over a century, over which time, says the BBC, the Cliveden estate has seen political scandals, visits from luminaries and at least one footballer’s wedding (see also the press release).
The small colony of Papillifera papillaris are thought to have arrived in the UK hiding in an Italian marble balustrade brought controversially from the famous Villa Borghese in Rome in 1896, according to the Telegraph
“Despite opposition from the Italian government the balustrade was brought to Cliveden and incorporated in the beautiful terrace which surrounds the house overlooking the Thames.”
This is not the first time that this snail has gone adventuring. According to the blog Snails Tales “The species has been inadvertently introduced to many other locations by humans possibly on marble and marble objects”. They do live on marble and limestone, which is why they are so well travelled. Although Mathew Oates of the National Trust says on the BBC "What they're doing, what they're eating, we don't rightly know, although it's likely they're feeding on lichen or algae growing on the marble".
The snail has no English name so the National Trust [press] has called it "Cliveden snail", and now they are working to protect it. “Although the ‘Cliveden snail’ hitched a ride to the UK accidentally, it doesn’t appear to be a threat to our native wildlife as it has taken 100 years to get from the balustrade to the house (27 m), so we’re now working to ensure that it has a secure future at Cliveden” says Oates in the press release.
Image: National Trust / Mark Telfer
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
“Forty-two years after Dr. Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy first waved his tricorder over a patient to make a diagnosis in the original Star Trek, scientists yesterday presented the basis for a handheld electronic nose to detect the most common kind of cancer.”
How can you beat that as an opener from the Philadelphia Inquirer?
But the basis of this research comes not from science fiction but from dogs, which have apparently been known to sniff out cancer in people (for examples see the Scotsman). Now scientists claim to have identified the difference in odours between people with skin cancer and healthy people that might lead to the development of new methods for cancer screening (press release).
In this week’s issue of Nature my colleague Geoff Brumfiel reports on the slide of Bell Laboratories away from fundamental science.
Under the headline ‘Bell Labs bottoms out’ he notes:
Just four scientists are left working in Bell's fundamental physics department in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Nature has learned. Others have either left or been reassigned to other parts of the company, and a major materials-fabrication facility has been shut down.
Now, piling insult upon injury, a developer is planning to turn Bell’s iconic Holmdel lab site in New Jersey into a mall, some flats and office space, according to the Greater Media Newspapers.
Out with the science; in with the shops...
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Scientists say they've worked out how to make blood by the gallon, and maybe just in time to save their company.
The development “promises to provide an almost limitless supply suitable for transfusion into any patient” say the Times, which “would also eliminate the risk of transmitting the pathogens that cause hepatitis, HIV and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) through transfusions”. This means that “blood donations and vampire bites may one day be a thing of the past” according to one blogger.
Blood has published the paper as an advance online publication, and according to the abstract Shi-Jiang Lu, of Advanced Cell Technology, and colleagues show that it is feasible that embryonic stem cells can be used to create functional oxygen carrying red blood cells at high yields (1010 to1011 red blood cells per six-well plate of embryonic stem cells). They are not the first group to create red blood cells this way, but they are the first to do it on this scale.
Continue reading "Blood farm to satiate vampires, accountant " »
India is in uproar over the deaths of 49 babies over 30 months in clinical trials run by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences hospital in Delhi.
Over 4,000 infants were involved in the trials, putting the death rate at about 1.18% (WSJ’s Live Mint). The London Times says the average mortality rate for all cases at the hospital is 4%. Some of the babies were in control groups.
V K Paul, head of the AIIMS paediatric department, said on Monday, “After a faculty review meeting of all available data, we found that none of the deaths can be attributed to drugs” (Times of India).
However the fact that around 2,700 of the infants were under a year old is not going down well in the country and an investigation has been started by the institute.
Continue reading "Clinical trials row shakes Indian medicine" »
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Another popular press release to help us through August.
Today it is being widely reported (BBC, CBS, CTV) that fruit juices, including grapefruit, orange and apple, can reduce the effectiveness of medication, potentially wiping out the beneficial effects.
The “new evidence” is attributed to a presentation by David Bailey from the University of Western Ontario at the American Chemical Society conference in Philadelphia, although even the abstract indicates that this was a review presentation.
NASA says it has solved the shaking problem that threatened its shuttle-replacement rocket Ares, which we first wrote about in January.
The agency no longer thinks Ares is going to tear itself apart but it is worried about what the shakin’ could do to its astronauts. So it is going to sit said astronauts on 16 big springs. As AP notes, this is “a space-age version of the rusty springs under old pickup trucks”.
Florida Today explains:
A spring-and-damper ring will separate the first and second stages of Ares 1 rockets, which NASA is developing for missions to the International Space Station, the moon and later Mars. Sixteen actuators that act like shock absorbers also will be added to the bottom of the rockets, significantly reducing the gravitational forces and vibrations astronauts will be exposed to in flight.
“It’s a lot like the shock absorbers on your car,” said Steve Cook, the Ares project manager told a teleconference (Space.com). “It isolates the vibrations just travelling through the structure, all the way up to the seat.”
Image: NASA
‘Unseen Bigfoot corpse more likely a big fat lie’
Xinhua puts an uncompromising headline on the obituary of this nonsense story.
‘Is There a Pharmacist in the House?’
Inside Higher Ed explores the explosion of US pharmacy schools.
‘Take care when handling those hallucinogenic plants’
Kevin Short, Daily Yomiuri Columnist and professor at Tokyo University of Information Sciences, has a warning based on a personal (and trippy) experience.
NASA has released this rather wince-worthy picture of July’s test of the Orion crew exploration vehicle under the headline NASA Tests Launch Abort Parachute System.
Its rather dry announcement notes: “The mock-up used during the July 31, 2008, test of the parachute system for the recovery system of the Orion spacecraft was severely damaged when a test set-up chute failed to properly inflate and caused the parachute system to fail.”
NASA Watch is, unsurprisingly, unimpressed:
Nowhere does NASA mention that the vehicle slammed into the desert floor or crashed. They just say that “the result was a landing that severely damaged the test mock-up.” Nor has NASA issued a media advisory or a press release to alert people of the images it claimed that it did not have last week.
More photos below the fold.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Five European Magpies (Pica pica) have provided the “first evidence that non-mammals can recognise themselves”, says the Daily Mail.
In the paper published online at Plos Biology the level of self-recognition of Gerti, Goldie, Harvey, Lilly and Schatzi was measured in “mark tests”.
Each of the magpies was observed when it had a brightly coloured mark placed on the throat, under the beak, that could only be seen in a mirror. The observations were made in a cage with a mirror and a cage with a grey non-reflective plate instead of the mirror, and then repeated with ‘sham’ markings, black dots which were not visible against the black of the birds feathers. You can see videos of the birds in the supporting information online.
Initially, as each bird explored the mirror, all displayed aggressive behaviour towards the mirror, such as picking a fight. But for Gerti, Goldie and Schatzi this behaviour stopped quickly, and in the mark test they all showed self-directed behaviour, with Gerti and Goldie managing to remove their marks after a few minutes.
‘There should be no question, in our country, of choosing between bear and man’
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy, backs ursine ménages a trois the reintroduction of bears to the Pyrenees.
‘Confused sea turtles march into Italian restaurant’
And they weren’t eaten, according to Reuters.
‘Wild dolphins tail-walk on water’
“We can’t for the life of us work out why they do it,” Mike Bossley from the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society told the BBC.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Does language determine thought? Not according to a new study of maths skills in children who speak languages with few number words (press release).
The Australian study investigated the number skills of children from two indigenous communities that did not have words or gestures for numbers – a group of Warlpiri speakers in the Tanami Desert, north west of Alice Springs, and Anindilyakawa speakers from Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria – as well as a group of indigenous children from Melbourne who only spoke English.
The researchers used four tests: sharing pieces of play dough among three toy bears; remembering how many number of tokens, and putting out the same number of tokens; remembering how many tokens, and then another additional group of tokens, and putting out the total number of tokens; and matching the number of taps to the number of tokens.
Merck is back in the media glare for alleged shady practices this week. This time round it’s for a sneaky trick known as ‘a seeding trial’: you pay for a randomized trial to get hundreds of doctors using your new drug.
“This practice—a seeding trial—is marketing in the guise of science,” write Harold Sox and Drummond Rennie, in an editorial in Annals of Internal Medicine. “The apparent purpose is to test a hypothesis. The true purpose is to get physicians in the habit of prescribing a new drug.”
In that journal researchers - led by Kevin Hill, of McLean Hospital, Belmont - use documents obtained through litigation to analyse the ADVANTAGE trial of drug Vioxx and to show that it was "designed and executed" by Merck's marketing division. These documents have previously been the source of other damaging allegations against Merck (see this Nature story).
The researchers’ paper notes:
Although billed as a gastrointestinal safety study, ADVANTAGE was actually a sophisticated marketing tool designed to allow optimal "seeding" of positive experiences with Vioxx among customers—primary care physicians—before its approval. As a result, 5557 participants received Vioxx and 600 investigators prescribed it just before it became available on the market, which generated positive publicity and anecdotes from physicians and patients
Earlier this month we noted that the New Zealand Chiropractors’ Association was alleging defamation against the New Zealand Medical Journal and pharmacologist David Colquhoun of University College London.
Now their colleagues on the other side of the world have also called in the legal teams. The British Chiropractic Association is suing author Simon Singh over an article he wrote in the Guardian.
“It wasn’t a decision taken lightly,” Antoni Jakubowski, a member of the association’s governing council, told the Daily Telegraph. “I know that a lot of thought went into this.”
As the Telegraph points out it is quite unusual for Singh to be sued and the Guardian to be left well alone. The Quackometer blog has excerpts of the Guardian article that led to this action and links to a cache of the full piece.
Japan has stepped up its fight with anti-whaling protestors, announcing yesterday it will seek international arrest warrants for three people who attempted to stop its hunt in Antarctica.
“Whatever opinions they have over whaling, it is impermissible for them to take such violent measures which risk the lives of the people involved,” said chief cabinet secretary Nobutaka Machimura (AFP and others).
The allegations centre on three members of the controversial Sea Shepherd group – named as Jon Batchelor, Ralph Koo and Daniel Bebawi. Japanese news sources say those sought by the authorities are suspected of ramming Japanese ships and throwing ropes to jam their propellers (eg Yomiuri Shimbun).
Sea Shepherd says it was their ship that was rammed by a Japanese vessel. Captain Paul Watson said in a statement:
It’s a mystery to me why the Japanese police would target three relatively minor crewmembers. As captain, all Sea Shepherd crewmembers act in accordance with my orders. All activities opposing the illegal actions of the Japanese whaling fleet are my responsibility, yet no charges have been filed against me. This is absurd and makes no sense at all.
Previously on The Great Beyond
Shooting claim in whaling fight
Acid attack on Japanese whaling ship
Pictures spark new whale row
Whaling fight turns ugly
Japan abandons humpback hunt
Why shouldn’t we eat whales?
Remembrance of viruses past
Long-lived survivors of the 1918 flu pandemic may hold the key to defeating future outbreaks.
Trees eat pollution products
Leaves can absorb organic nitrates and turn them into amino acids.
Virus helps to build tiny battery
Simple technique could create power packs for microdevices.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Is antidepressant medication slowing down people’s reaction times, or does it actually help improve concentration in the depressed? Researchers from the University of North Dakota have found that people taking antidepressants appear to drive worse than people who aren't taking such drugs.
The psychologists used driving simulations to test the steering, concentration and scanning of 31 people who were on antidepressants, as well as 29 people not taking them. The results were presented on Sunday at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington, DC.
“Participants had to make a series of common driving decisions, such as reacting to brake lights, stop signs or traffic signals while being distracted by speed limit signs, pylons, animals, other cars, helicopters or bicyclists.” (press release).
Those taking antidepressants were further divided, according to the press release, into those who scored higher and lower on a test of depression. People taking antidepressants did worse in the driving simulation than those no on medication, but people taking antidepressants who scored high on a test of depression had even more trouble concentrating and reacting behind the wheel than those who scored low on a test of depression*.
According to the BBC, the team said it could be either the pills themselves or the condition which caused the problems.
"There is obviously more work to do on this. We need a much larger study, but there certainly seems to be some sort of link” author Holly Dannewitz told the BBC.
*According to the BBC, the group taking medication was further split into those taking a low dose course and others on a high dose. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get access to the paper to find out if these divisions are one and the same, but it is possible that the group scoring high on the test of depression were also on higher doses if they were not responding well to medication.
Image: Punchstock
“We don’t want to discourage companies from making legitimate claims but want to reinforce the fact that they have an obligation not to mislead.”
Chris Smith. chairman of the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority on upholding a complaint against a Shell advert that claimed Canada’s oil sands were a ‘sustainable’ energy source (The Guardian).
Wooden stargazing
“Northumberland's glorious new timber observatory fits beautifully into its forest surroundings,” writes Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian.
Appropriate researcher names: Christopher D. Bird has just published a paper on using video to study rooks.
‘How wildlife fared in the Yellowstone fires’
The Salt Lake tribune rounds up how creatures did in the 1998 fires.
‘Ancient Beavers Take Silver in Log-Chomping Olympics’
Researchers prove modern beavers are better log-munchers than their ancient cousins and Science prove that you can shoe-horn an Olympic reference into anything if you try hard enough.
NASA has cancelled the space suit contract it signed in June.
The contract could have been worth up to $745 million for the company Oceaneering International.
A statement issued by the space agency on Friday says, “NASA determined that a compliance issue requires the termination of the contract for the Constellation Space Suit System with Oceaneering International, Inc. of Houston for the convenience of the government.”
According to a letter NASA sent to US federal watchdog the Government Accountability Office it had failed to ask for a “cost accounting standards disclosure statement” from Oceaneering (Reuters, Wall Street Journal). The WSJ says the office was already considering a complaint from rival firm Hamilton Sundstrand over the award of the contract to Oceaneering.
Oceaneering told the Courant:
We respect the government's...procurement and selection process, and we are confident that the result will remain the same. We continue to believe our team offered an innovative and comprehensive solution to develop and produce the next spacesuit for NASA.
Both Hamilton and Oceaneering have been asked to bid again for the contract (Houston Chronicle).
Image: NASA design for new space suit / NASA
The rare Bornean cloud leopard has been snapped in the Sebangau National Park in Borneo (click the picture for a larger version).
This is the first time the leopard has been shown to live in this area, according to a press release from Oxford University; Susan Cheyne, an Oxford researcher, leads the team who placed the remote cameras responsible for this photo. And no, it is not thought that the beast has laser beam eyes, that’s light-spashback from the flash.
“These cats are extremely elusive and shy,” says Cheyne (Daily Telegraph). “If they are surviving in an area that has had extensive disturbance from mankind and logging then it is very positive. As the level of disturbance in the park decreases then we hope they will do well.”
There are thought to be about 10,000 adult Bornean cloud leopards. The BBC notes that the animal was only classified as a separate species in 2007, after genetic testing revealed it was significantly different from clouded leopards on mainland Asia.
In other clouded leopard news from the Daily Telegraph: “four rare Clouded leopard cubs have made their debut at a Wildlife Park” (video from the BBC).
Over in Philly a whole bunch of Nature people are at this year’s meeting of the American Chemical Society. They’re blogging the whole thing on both In the Field and The Sceptical Chymist.
So far Katharine Sanderson found “blue skies, hot sunshine and a summery feeling in the air” and has confirmed the heavy-drinking journalist stereotype by celebrating the fact that “following years of disappointment, members of the press have been given drinks tickets”.
Meanwhile Andrew Mitchinson has been watching movies. Chemical movies of course.
Gavin Armstrong isn’t getting into the ACS groove though. He opening his conference blogging thus: “I spent the day and night cursing chemistry”.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Ornithologists have identified a new species of bird, the olive-backed forest robin (Stiphrornis pyrrholaemus), which has been published in Zootaxa (paper / press release).
The robin was found by scientists from the Smithsonian Institution’s Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity Program during a study in the Gamba Complex in south western Gabon, part of a collaboration with Shell International to develop “a more environmentally friendly approach to resource development and extraction, while promoting the conservation of biodiversity” (paper).
They first found the robin in 2001, but mistook it for a juvenile of a recognised species. But when they had a chance to compare it with other specimens in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History they realized it might be unique.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Researchers have accidentally discovered that moisturisers can increase the rate of skin cancer in mice. While this is a perfect candidate for over hyping and fear mongering, it has received really balanced coverage in most cases. Instead, it has been rightly pointed out that hairless mice have different skin to humans (CBS, ABC, LA Times, Calgary Herald).
According to the paper, published online in Nature's sister title the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, the hairless mice were exposed to UVB twice a week for 20 weeks, then had moisturiser applied 5 times a week for 17 weeks. The study started out as a control, using a popular US moisturiser, for testing if caffeine could prevent skin cancer.
"We wanted a safe cream that we could put the caffeine into," says Dr Allan Conney of Rutgers University in New Jersey, one of the authors of the study (Reuters).
But what they found was that the moisturiser significantly increased the rate of both the formation and growth of a tumours in the mice, and this result was repeated with another three popular moisturisers.
Continue reading "Link between skin cancer and moisturisers in hairless mice" »
The number of tracts of the ocean devoid of oxygen, and therefore bereft of complex life, is growing.
In a review piece in this week’s Science Robert Diaz, a researcher at the College of William and Mary in Virginia warns that the dead zones’ number has increased by a third between 1995 and 2007 (paper, press release). Diaz has been studying the things since the 1980s,
He and his co-author Rutger Rosenberg, of the University of Gothenburg, note:
By the end of the 20th century, oxygen depletion of marine systems had become a major worldwide environmental problem, with only a small fraction (4%) of the 400-plus systems that had developed hypoxia exhibiting any signs of improvement. ... There is no other variable of such ecological importance to coastal marine ecosystems that has changed so drastically over such a short time as DO [dissolved oxygen].
Posted on behalf of Tim Sands
News rampage, that is. The world’s press has gone into something of a frenzy over a report in New Scientist of a robot guided by “rat brains” – more accurately rat neurons in a dish.
This is just a small sample from around the globe: Wired, News.com.au, India Times, Telegraph.
This experiment is somewhat different from the monkey-brain controlled robotic arm described in Nature in May and the earlier robots controlled by whole monkey and lamprey brains. In these new experiments the response of disembodied rat neurons in a dish were used to control a free-roaming robot called Gordon.
Posted on behalf of Tim Sands
A UK submarine has successfully completed its first scientific mission surveying a deep-sea canyon north of the Canary Islands. The survey found huge holes in the sea floor created by flows of sediment
The craft, Autosub6000, is the UK Natural Environment Research Council’s new deep-diving autonomous submarine. It is capable of diving to 6000m (that’s 3281 fathoms for any salty seadogs out there) and returning high-resolution sonar images and physical and chemical measurements of the ocean.
Its next destination will be off the coast of Portugal to look for evidence of the 1775 earthquake that devastated Lisbon (Times). Most coverage has been about a planned future mission to explore the world’s deepest undersea volcanoes in the 5000m deep Cayman trough in the Caribbean, which may contain new forms of marine life.
This is far from the first autonomous underwater vehicle. They have been roaming the seas since the 1970s. There is even a Student Autonomous Underwater-vehicle Challenge Europe ("SAUCE"). However Autosub6000 is one of the most capable.
The impressive specs of this nifty piece of kit can be found here. More photos below the fold.
Greenpeace has sailed into a mini-storm of annoyed marine biologists after dropping massive granite boulders into the North Sea in an attempt to disrupt fishing.
Earlier this week its ship the Beluga II began dropping the first of 150 granite rocks weighing 2 to 3 tonnes onto the seabed. “By strategically placing granite rocks, Greenpeace intends to protect this ecologically diverse area from destructive practices including bottom trawling,” says the group (press release).
Unsurprisingly, fishermen were not happy. More surprisingly some marine biologists have joined them in condemning the group...
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Following up on our bird flu blog of yesterday, Alan McNally from Nottingham Trent University contacted the Great Beyond to provide us with some more science.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Sat-Nav in a wristwatch, pretty high-tech? Apparently, not necessarily. Sat-Nav wristwatches have been around since 1920.
This nifty device, which provides scrolling directions for multiple locations*, is one of 50 weird and wonderful labour-saving devices that have gone on display at the British Library.
It is not clear if this device can also provide traffic updates.
Other gadgets, some of which the Daily Mail provides pictures for, on display include:
The two handled self-pouring teapot (1886)
Clockwork burglar alarm (1852)
Grenade to put out fires (1890)
Mechanical page-turner (1890)
The automatic nose hair cutter (1920)
And according to the Telegraph there are also "Go no further" honeymoon garters.
The collection is provided by Maurice Collins, “a retired businessman from Muswell Hill, London, who has cherry-picked 50 must-have items from his collection of 1,400 historic gadgets to show off at the British Library Business and Intellectual Property Centre”, says the Daily Mail.
For more retro-futurism check out yesterday's post: Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
*ok, you have to scroll it yourself and change the paper reel for different directions, it was the 20s!
Image: BL
It just won't end. Two years after the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto from a planet to a dwarf, the bickering goes on.
I'm here at the “Great Planet Debate”, an event put on by the John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where several hundred scientists, teachers and members of the public have shown up to watch two scientists duke it out over definitions. The organizers say a Internet video stream of the debate will be posted here soon.
On one side, they've got Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, a Pluto proponent full of good-natured bluster. And on the other is Neil deGrasse Tyson, the hyperarticulate director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, who famously pushed Pluto out of its customary box as the ninth planet in his museum's exhibits. It was supposed to be a debate about planetary definitions -- but it quickly became all about that attention-seeking Pluto. The two clearly were having fun as they milked it for all it was worth.
“The word 'planet' has lost all scientific value,” says Tyson. “We're in desperate need of a new lexicon to accommodate our new knowledge.”
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
See also: Bird flu (news) strikes again
Bird flu has hit the news again, at least it has in the UK - not thanks to a case but thanks to a press release.
Alan McNally from Nottingham Trent University and his team, say that they are developing a portable testing machine for bird flu. At the moment it takes two to three days to identify the strain, or up to a week in countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, which are most affected by the virus, says the Times. It is claimed that this new technology will detect cases of bird flu from saliva swabs in two hours (BBC).
The Daily Mail give details of what has actually been done: “Dr McNally and his team have been designing the tests which will be carried out.”
“They have now completed this research, which will be passed to a French company to design the machine itself. It is expected to be completed by December 2010.”
On the front page of wikipedia today you may have noticed a small item about WRNY, “an AM radio station ... started by Hugo Gernsbacks Experimenter Publishing Company to promote his radio and science magazines”.
These magazines started up over a hundred years ago in April 1908 with the first edition of Modern Electrics, which later became Modern Electrics and Mechanics. Gernsbacks continued with The Electrical Experimenter in 1913, which became Science and Invention in 1920.
“Not only did this fill America’s proto-geeks with dreams of wireless and electrical power machinery, it published Gernsback's hard-SF novel Ralph 124C 41 + and arguably foreshadowed the entire genre of technically oriented science fiction,” says the Magazine Art website.
Ok, we’ve missed the anniversary in April but this was too good not to bring to your attention: the Magazine Art website has a complete cover gallery of these magazines. If you have any time on your hands have a browse and see how the future looked back in the last century.
Cover gallery for Modern Electrics on MagazineArt.com
Cover gallery for Electrical Experimenter on MagazineArt.com
Image: January 1920 issue of Electrical Experimenter from MagazineArt.com
Posted for Tim Sands
I suddenly have an inexplicable urge apparently out of the blue to write about a new report on the military implications and applications of cutting-edge cognitive science. It’s almost as if someone is controlling my mind.
The report, entitled “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies” was commissioned from America’s National Research Council by the US Defence Intelligence Agency to provide a primer on what the latest advances in brain research mean for the intelligence community and to look into the possibilities of brain research for next-generation spookery.
One conclusion described in the executive summary is on the validity of brain scanning technology for use as a means of lie-detection. The report notes the lack of high-quality research in this area and questions the ability of both polygraph tests and more sophisticated functional neuroimaging methods to spot fibbing (see Nature, Nature and Nature). As for other, more speculative forms of mind-reading, it predicts that they will become increasingly important for the trench-coat-and-dark-glasses crowd but notes that there are great difficulties to overcome before such things become useful.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
And again we revisit the question: Does religion get in the way of teaching science?
For students at Calvary Baptist School, California, it certainly does, as Judge James Otero ruled that the University of California doesn’t have to accept their biology class as a suitable entry course. Calvary Chapel Christian School also had courses rejected in English (“Christianity and Morality in American Literature”), history (“Christianity's Influence on America”), government (“Special Providence: Christianity and the American Republic”) and an elective called “World Religions”.
The WSJ says there were "legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts - not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.” (WSJ)
Continue reading "Exhibit A: Religion does get in the way of teaching science." »
White blood cells fight infections, but according to a paper in this week’s Nature taking them out of circulation might actually help cure chronic viral infections.
Mary Premenko-Lanier and John Altman, of Emory University, and his colleagues found that stopping white blood cells from leaving lymph nodes helped mice fight off a strain of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus. This might lead eventually to a new strategy for fighting diseases such as hep C and AIDS.
“We think it’s crucial that we do experiments to check it out,” Altman told Reuters.
There’s gold in them there Scottish hills
The Guardian notes that commodity prices are making old mines viable again
Bogus Bigfoot body?
Scientific American rounds up the media frenzy over two hunters who claim to have shot Bigfoot. One’s a cop who may have got himself in trouble with his boss, adds the Atlantic Journal Constitution.
'Russia's actions could hurt US space program'
US Senator Bill Nelson tells Florida Today he's worried about a knock on from the war in Georgia.
Papers with good titles: How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? (Inferring personality from e-mail addresses. Hat tip: Good Morning Silicon Valley).
Animals with good names: boring giant clam. Snore! We've all seen giant clams before.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
It began with a single thud, says the Seattle Times.
After 58 years of service the John N. Cobb, the last wooden hulled ship in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fleet, has been retired. It was due to be retired in October, but the thud and subsequent thuds of increasing in volume and frequency that occurred while transiting the Warren Channel in Southeast Alaska signaled a sheared main crankshaft and the end for the ship. The Cobb is older than NOAA is.
This retirement news comes on the same day that NOAA announced the commissioning of the Okeanos Explorer, a former U.S. Navy surveillance vessel converted to perform ocean exploration.
The views of the UK’s heir to the throne on GM crops have been spread like a nasty case of fish herpes across the internet in another example of woeful prioritising by the British media.
Prince Charles – who is for some reason not known as Barmy Prince Charlie – has taken time off from his official duties and his passion for criticising modern architecture to explain to the Daily Telegraph why he thinks GM foods are a “gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong” And likely to lead to “unmentionable awfulness”:
What we should be talking about is food security not food production - that is what matters and that is what people will not understand. And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time.
Naturally, the prince found some support. And equally obviously he was criticised, with various levels of disprespect.
The pictures are coming back from Cassini’s latest fly-by of Saturn’s ice-moon Enceladus, and NASA's science team is already spotting big ice-boulders in high places, a finding that could embolden those scientists who think a liquid water ocean -- perhaps even warmer than thought -- lies beneath the surface.
Enceladus, of course, stunned all of us Earthlings with an eruptive tour-de-force during Cassini’s first fly-by in 2005. From a region near its south pole, the moon was spewing ice and water vapour -- even organic chemicals -- in a plume that stretched hundreds of kilometres into space. But there has been a percolating debate about the internal plumbing that drives the geyser, with models that range from a “Cold Faithful”, where the geyser is driven by pockets of liquid water under pressure, to “Frigid Faithful”, where the gases are locked in ice lattices until they explode into the vacuum of space. (Not to be confused with “Old Faithful”, the geyser in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.)
In some of the new pictures, such as the one shown here, Andrew Ingersoll, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is seeing big boulders everywhere – even *on top* of ridges.
“It sort of looks like 10-metre boulders came flying out of the sky. I don’t know how you get them on top of ridges,” says Ingersoll, part of the Cassini imaging science team.
Boulders can form from a naturally fracturing slope and roll downhill. But to get them on top of a mound or a ridge? They would have to land there after being thrown up by the geysers. Even though gravity on Enceladus is a fraction of the Earth’s, upchucking 10-metre boulders is no mean feat.
“It would be a big deal because it would mean the jets are at pretty high pressure. And high pressure means high temperatures -- well above the boiling point of water on Earth.” That, of course, willl get the astrobiologists excited.
Physicists spooked by faster-than-light information transfer
Quantum weirdness even stranger than previously thought.
Biodiversity body 'lacks science'
Swedish researchers criticize credentials of convention.
Physicists await dark-matter confirmation
PAMELA mission offers tantalizing hint of success.
Canada and the United States have announced a joint survey of the Arctic continental shelf, in the latest move in the ‘claim the Arctic chess game’.
Canada’s icebreaker Louis S. St.-Laurent and the US Coast Guard’s Healy will sail in August, rendezvousing around September 8 to collect information that could end up being submitted to the UN as part of a claim for rights to the sea floor (Canadian government press release). The Healy is also undertaking a separate cruise to produce a 3D map of the Arctic seafloor (US press release).
“These are places nobody's gone before, in essence, so this is a first step,” says Margaret Hays, head of oceanic affairs at the US State Department (Reuters).
Of course America will first have to ratify the treaty that allows sea floor claims (something Canada has already done).
Headline watch
Arctic rivals break ice, exchange expertise – CanWest News
Previous moves in the Arctic game from the Great Beyond
Mapping the Arctic dispute - August 06, 2008
Sea floor claims madness - April 21, 2008
Russian pole stunt’s American origin - February 19, 2008
Northwest passage in ice opens – September 17, 2007
And related from Nature
The long summer begins
Arctic mapping redraws borders
Russia at forefront of Arctic land-grab
Image: Healy stock photo / NOAA
A judge in San Francisco has approved an agreement between environmentalists and the US Navy on the use of military sonar.
Whale fans have been arguing for years that military sonars harm and even kill whales, although the evidence has been far from totally conclusive (see this recent news story).
Now the navy has agreed to limit use of low-frequency sonar to military training areas and there will also be seasonal exclusions in some areas. This wraps up a rumbling court case between the navy and groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“We don’t have to choose between national security and protecting the environment,” says Michael Jasny, an NRDC policy analyst (press release). “Today’s agreement maintains the Navy’s ability to test and train, while shielding whales and other vulnerable species from harmful underwater noise.”
A Navy spokesman at the Pentagon says, via the LA Times, “We get some areas to train and they get some areas that are off-limits.”
More coverage
Navy Agrees to Sonar System Restriction – AP
Navy agrees to sonar curbs to protect whales – SF Chronicle
Image: Los Angeles-class submarine / US Navy photo by Paul Farley
‘Lonely vulture finally finds love’
If you don’t go ‘ahhh’ at this BBC story you’ve got a heart of stone.
‘It's a strategy that has served them well for millions of years but is of little use in fending off a truck’.
Reuters looks at the problem of rattlesnake roadkill and it seems coiling up and shaking your tail just doesn’t cut it.
Animals with good names: the sarcastic fringehead (Hat tip: Ugly Overload)
‘A bunch of scientists over-analyze Bram Stoker's Dracula’
The A Good Poop blog rounds up the more bizarre medical papers of the world
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
In the words of the Express: “Experts up in arms after finding octopuses have… two legs”.
As mentioned on this blog last month, scientists from 20 centres across Europe have been studying how octopuses use their limbs. They have analysed data from 2,000 observations of octopuses playing with toys such as the Rubik’s Cube.
Their headline discovery is that octopuses have six 'arms' and two 'legs'. It had been believed that the back four tentacles were used for propulsion and the front four for manipulation. But researchers have found that they use the rearmost two tentacles, their legs, to get around over rocks and the seabed, leaving the remaining six arms for eating, according to the Daily Mail. They are reported to use their third pair of arms to help them get out of a tangle (Times).
Continue reading "Mavis and Olga, a tale of two bipedal hexapuses" »
Posted on behalf of Amber Dance
The competition over which city will host the new US National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility is getting dirty, with recent allegations of politicians playing favorites.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) disregarded the advice of carefully selected experts to put a Flora, Mississippi, site on the shortlist of candidates, the Associated Press said Monday. The implication is that powerful Mississippi politicians — Rep. Bennie Thompson (D) and Sen. Thad Cochran (R) — pushed DHS to consider their home state, despite other sites scoring higher in the expert evaluations. Both politicians deny the allegations, and DHS denies using a scoring system at all.
The lab, where scientists study diseases such as foot-and-mouth, is currently housed on Plum Island in Long Island Sound. But the lab is small and lacks Biosafety Level 4 capacity to work with the most dangerous pathogens. DHS is considering revamping the Plum Island lab, but has said a mainland facility would be cheaper to build and maintain, and scientists would be more likely to want to work at a lab that doesn’t require a commute by boat. The new lab is expected to cost $500 million (USA Today).
Continue reading "Cities play hardball to host biodefence lab" »
Disney backs research centres
New facilities in Zurich and Pittsburgh hope to develop film technologies for the next animated blockbuster.
Molecules multiplied
Synthetic chemists hope to apply the power of PCR to a range of other compounds.
Top climate-impacts programme shut
National Center for Atmospheric Research axes developing-world initiative.
Following on from Polish rejection of attempts to analyse the DNA of Chopin, a woman who says she is the daughter of Salvador Dali has started another testing debate.
A woman identified in the Daily Telegraph as Pilar A says the artist is her father but initial DNA testing on skin and hair from his iconic moustache has proven inconclusive. She has called in the lawyers and says she may even try to exhume Dali’s remains, having not been satisfied with the response of his estate to her attempts to establish paternity.
Pilar A says more DNA testing has been done by the estate, but she has not been told of the results by the estate, controlled by Dali’s friend Robert Descharnes. However Robert Descharnes’s son is quoted as saying that the doctor undertaking the paternity test told him verbally there was no Dali link to Pilar A (the Telegraph calls the son Richard; El Mundo calls him Nicolas).
And, proving beyond doubt that internet language translation cannot be trusted, ABC Spain (via Google language tools) provides us with this appropriately surrealist gem as the intro of their coverage:
Only ‘you lack the mustache’ (of the Salvador Dalí, which hedgehogs into the sky), confesses that he told Robert Descharnes-friend and collaborator of genius ampurdanés for forty years-nothing else see it.
Image: Dali, by Roger Higgins via Wikimedia and the Library of Congress
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Part of the jaw of a young polar bear has been found in the stomach of a Greenland shark off the coast of Svalbard. Could this be the final answer to the eternal pub debate: who would win in a fight between a bear and a shark?
After all a myth says the sharks can leap out of the water and seize caribou standing on ice, so couldn't they easily munch on a swimming polar bear? Actually a much more mundane scenario is thought to be the case for this little polar bear: it was dead before the shark found it floating somewhere (Reuters) .
No one has seen the Greenland shark make a kill (Independent) . They are known to feed on seals, from stomach contents, which suggests they are quite quick, but a even a young bear, “would be a ferocious opponent”, as the Telegraph points out.
After the news that five scientists had to be airlifted out of Alaska after being menaced by a polar bear, this finding pushes scientists a little further down the food chain. Kit Kovacs, a seal expert at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromso, notes "I won't be going swimming there again." (Independent).
Sadly, the polar bear(11,500,000) also looses to the shark (74,300,000) in google smackdown. Scientists score 67,500,000.
Image: get out of the water! USFWS
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Does religion get in the way of science, or more specifically, does it get in the way of teaching science to the general public? This is the hot topic debated by Richard MacKenzie and Lawrence Krauss, who have continued a debate they had at a physics meeting in Saskatoon in 2007 with two new papers on the arXiv collection of pre-prints (MacKenzie paper, Krauss paper, blog pick up).
Krauss says: Faith is not the enemy. Ignorance is the enemy.
MacKenzie's line: I disagree with this statement – to the point where I would be inclined to go so far as to interchange the words “faith” and “ignorance.”
NASA is pushing back an internal date, by a year, to send astronauts into space on a replacement to the Space Shuttle, top managers said Monday.
The Constellation program, with its Ares 1 rocket and its Orion capsule for astronauts, is in development as the replacement to the Space Shuttle, which has its last flight scheduled in May or June of 2010. NASA has kept a March 2015 date as the official goal for returning astronauts to the International Space Station, but has now pushed back an aggressive internal date from September 2013 to September 2014. Eventually the rockets are supposed to return humans to the moon.
The Constellation program is depending on the retirement of the shuttle, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars per flight, to pay for the rapidly ramping up development of Ares and Orion.
But concerns over the 2009 federal budget are forcing NASA to be more cautious in its development timeline. Most expect that the US Congress, anticipating a new administration in January, will avoid passing a budget this fall and will instead pass a continuing resolution, which freezes spending at the previous year’s levels. That means NASA could be stuck at 2008 spending levels for the for six months of fiscal year 2009, according to Aviation Week and Space Technology, which scored an interview with NASA Administrator Mike Griffin.
The Associated Press also reported that a safety panel has concerns over the inclusion (or lack thereof) of backup safety systems in Constellation designs, though managers defended the designs as works in progress. The panel's safety report can be found here.
Image credit: NASA/MSFC
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
The humpback whale has been moved from “Vulnerable” to “Least Concern” on the 2008 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List (press release).
It is estimated that there are 40,000 mature individuals (Australian), and there are good reports for the current breeding season in the Southern hemisphere (News Adelaide). But now, as a former Nature staffer reports, scientists have also found hundreds of baby whales in a bay on the north west of Australia, which is thought to be one of the world's biggest humpback whale nursery grounds.
"The large whales, the commercially important ones, have for the most part responded well under protection," Randall Reeves, chair of the cetacean specialist group of the IUCN (Reuters).
The southern right whale is also now listed as having a low risk of extinction. Several other whales, such as the blue and sei whales, are also growing in number, but are still listed as “Endangered”.
In all, nearly a quarter of the 86 cetacean species assessed, including whales, dolphins and porpoises, are considered threatened, with nine species listed as Endangered or Critically Endangered. This is most likely underestimating the situation as there is not enough data to classify 44 of the species (Telegraph).
Posted for Tim Sands
The New Zealand Medical Journal is facing legal action from chiropractors after publishing two articles addressing the issue of who can use the term ‘Doctor’.
The Journal has received a letter from a lawyer acting on behalf of the New Zealand Chiropractors’ Association claiming the articles in the journal were defamatory. It threatens further action unless the journal retracts the articles, publishes an apology and pays costs and damages.
David Colquhoun of University College London, a pharmacologist and critic of complementary medicine, was the author of one of the articles. He has posted both of the articles and the NZMJ’s response to the legal letter on his blog.
Smuggling lions into a zoo?
‘[M]onkeys and lions were drugged, tossed into cloth sacks and dragged through smuggling tunnels under the border between Egypt and the besieged Gaza Strip before ending up in a dusty Gaza zoo’, says AP.
'Mutant Games'
John Tierney of the NY Times wants an Olympics for artificially enhanced humans.
‘Easy oil is over’ in Oman
The country is having to go high tech to get more of the black stuff, says the Washington Post.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
The story of the smallest snake from last week has generated a storm in Barbados.
Blair Hedges freely admits he is not the first person to ‘discover’ the snake he has called Leptotyphlops carlae. The locals were perfectly well aware of it and he says that most newly "discovered" species are already well known to locals (AP). Hedge’s claim is that he distinguished L. carlae from a related but, he says, distinct species, L. bilineata.
Many local people are still unhappy though. The main point of anger is summed up by Margaret Knight: “How dare this man come in here and name a snake after his wife?”
Damon Corrie, president of the Caribbean Herpetological Society, says "For him to claim that he 'discovered' this is like Columbus all over again. He might be the first person to scientifically examine and describe it, but he is certainly not the first person to discover it.” (Bar.)
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Researchers have discovered the 'scaredy-cat gene', which explains “why horror films make some people scream in terror while others may simply laugh”, says the Telegraph.
The researchers attached 96 women to electrodes to determine if they blinked when they were startled (i.e. they were exposed to a short blast of loud white noise) while being shown pictures that were either pleasant (e.g. animals, babies), neutral (e.g. power outlet, hairdryer) or unpleasant (e.g. weapons, injured victims).
"We used the startle reflex because it's a very old evolutionary indication of anxiety. It's not something you can manipulate or fake," said author Dr Martin Reuter of the University of Bonn, co-author of the paper published in Behavioral Neuroscience (Independent).
China fired over a thousand rockets into the sky last week at the climax of its efforts to ensure a rain free opening ceremony for the Olympic games. No rain fell during the ceremony, although some showers disrupted other events.
“We fired a total of 1,104 rain dispersal rockets from 21 sites in the city between 4 pm and 11.39 pm on Friday, which successfully intercepted a stretch of rain belt from moving towards the stadium,” Guo Hu, head of the Beijing Municipal Meteorological Bureau, told state news service Xinhua.
The NY Times has reporter George Vecsey on the scene. As well as worrying about misuse of weather modification by US baseball teams he says:
Meanwhile, the weather forecast is for storms Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. There is muddy scum on sidewalks and streets – from the skies, not the ground – but street cleaners come by and clean it up, and workers mop the entrances to the Water Cube.On Sunday night, polite young workers stood outside the south entrance of of the main press center and smiled and told people in English, “Watch your step” before the slippery marble entrance. The young people took umbrellas from soaked guests and shook them out and put them in plastic bags. What hath the rockets wrought?
A global warming rug? Wouldn’t something to keep you cool rather than warm be more appropriate?
This does keep both sides of the debate happy though. Concerned eco-types can raise awareness among their Hummer-driving friends by putting one of these in their front room.
The Hummer-driving friends can show their contempt by walking all over it and kicking that felt polar bear. Or they can sweep those IPCC reports they’ve got lying around underneath it.
The rug was designed by the Mexican design collective NEL, who say:
Global Warming contrasts the comfort and softness of a rug with a thorny problem that is specific to our time. Following the age-old tradition of using rugs as a means for communication and a cultural record, NEL is portraying global warming in a scene that invites us to reflect on our impact on today’s world.
There’s no news on whether manufacturing was carbon offset, let’s hope if was or the designers will have to face allegations that they’re just … wait for it … carpetbaggers. I’ll get my coat…
Hat tip: Deep Sea News
Images: NEL
A number of Indian school children have disappeared on a trip to NASA, according to media reports.
Initial reports said two teenagers were missing from a trip by students from the Dayanand Model School, amid claims the students had a “well thought out plan” to disappear into the US. By Saturday the number of missing students had climbed to four. By Monday it was up to six students and a teacher.
The Times of India says the student’s visas are valid till September, meaning that apart from annoying their teachers they haven’t broken the law yet. The Times also introduces us to the term 'kabootarbaazi', for cheating immigration.
An editorial in the Times notes:
It doesn't take rocket science for Indians to disappear in the US. Or does it? In fact, such is the craze for settling abroad that they keep devising new ways to do so — from joining "bhajan mandlis" or cultural troupes to jumping into containers and even entering into fraudulent marriages.The latest in the long list of their tricks is taking the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) route.
Maybe they’re hiding in the mysterious trailer which photographer Richard Harrington discovered (trailer photo site, pick up).
Hat tip: NASA Watch
The Hubble telescope has been spinning round the Earth for a while now. To celebrate its 100,000th orbit NASA and ESA have released this rather striking image, which one of Nature’s editors claims resembles a t-shirt she was rather fond of in the 80s.
What it actually shows is a star-forming region about 170,000 light-years away. According to the press release:
The three-dimensional-looking image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head “pillars of creation”, and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars.
The red is emission from sulphur atoms, the green shows hydrogen and the blue oxygen.
Image: NASA, ESA and M. Livio (STScI)
The AIDS fight: looking ahead to 2010
Nine leaders give Nature their view.
Snails transmute to guard against danger
Changes in shell structure are induced by the presence of predators.
MUSE: Crime and punishment in the lab
Before we ask whether scientific conduct is dealt with harshly enough, says Philip Ball, we need to be clear about what punishment is meant to achieve.
US backs its biofuels
Environmental agency denies request to cut back on ethanol.
First complete Neanderthal genome sequenced
Full nuclear sequence, offering clues about our relatives' demise, expected within months.
RNA tackles HIV
Antibodies help to deliver interfering RNA sequences to immune-system cells.
The Great Beyond has headed off into the great beyond today, taking a well-earned long weekend break. Still, we couldn’t resist sharing a few news items with you.
A start-up date has been announced for the Large Hadron Collider. The big day is 10 September, when the first attempts to circulate a particle beam will start. So, we have a little over a month left before the planet is annihilated (or, more accurately, isn’t). The first tests of synchronisation between the LHC and the Super Proton Synchrotron take place this weekend.
Continue reading "Miniature black holes, flying robots, melons and bicycles. Isn't August great?" »
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration increased its Atlantic storm forecast on Thursday, predicting the formation of as many as 5 major hurricanes through November (Reuters).
In all, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center is forecasting a total of 14-18 named storms during the 2008 season, which runs from June through November. Seven to 10 of those are likely to become hurricanes, three to six of which qualify as "major." That is slightly higher than the original forecast in May and comes with a confidence level of 67 percent.
So far this season two major storms have hit the US Coast: Dolly landed on South Padre Island in Texas as a Category 2 hurricane on July 25, and Tropical Storm Edouard struck the Texas coast further north on August 5.
In all, there have been five named storms and two hurricanes, one of which was major. Just do the math to figure out the rest of the season: That leaves an additional 9-13 named storms and five to eight hurricanes; two to five of those are likely to be major.
As it happens, the new forecast aligns well with a recent update by noted hurricane forecaster William Gray, a former Colorado State University climatologist. The Associated Press reports that Gray is calling for nine hurricanes, five of which will qualify as major.
Ten diseases in a dish
Disease-specific cell lines will help the study and treatment of medical conditions.
Environmental chemists keep watchful eye on Beijing's smog
On the eve of the Olympic Games, scientists are taking the long view on the capital's air pollution.
John McCain may have picked on the wrong person when he used Paris Hilton in an advert attacking Barack Obama.
Hilton, a famous socialite and part time movie star, has responded with surprisingly coherent policy statement of her own.
Barack wants to focus on new technologies to cut foreign oil dependency and McCain wants offshore drilling. Well why don’t we do a hybrid of both candidates ideas. We can do limited offshore drilling, with strict environmental oversight, while using tax incentives to get Detroit making hybrid and electric cars. That way the offshore drilling carries us until the new technologies kick in which would then create new jobs and energy independences.Energy crisis solved. I’ll see you at the debates bitches.
Researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have launched a test of ‘air-purifying’ concrete.
Titanium dioxide in the bricks helps sunlight convert nitrogen oxides into “harmless nitrate”. When the rains come this then washes the bricks clear (press release). It’s not clear if the amount of nitrate being produced would be a pollution problem, as is the case with nitrates in agriculture.
The bricks are based on Japanese technology (possibly this tech) which has been further developed by the Twente researchers, says the university. One road in the town of Hengelo will be paved with the eco-bricks and another with normal bricks. The researchers will monitor pollution on both roads.
This isn’t the first set of air-scrubbing concrete out there. The idea has popped up in Italy, where it featured at the Venice Biennale.
Want to know more? Check out this paper from Belgian researcher Anne Beeldens: An environmental friendly solution for air purification and self-cleaning effect: the application of TIO2 as photocatalyst in concrete (PDF).
Image: U Twente
A senior British scientist has urged us all to prepare for global temperature rises of 4ºC.
Last year climate scientists warned the UN climate change conference in Bali that the emissions must be cut with a goal of limiting warming “to limit global warming to no more than 2ºC above the pre-industrial temperature” (Nature News story). A four degree rise would be seriously damaging to a whole host of things, not least people, as you can see on this National Geographic video, which is a little reminiscent of The Day After Tomorrow.
“There is no doubt that we should aim to limit changes in the global mean surface temperature to 2ºC above pre-industrial,” Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser to the UK’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told the Guardian newspaper. “But given this is an ambitious target, and we don't know in detail how to limit greenhouse gas emissions to realise a 2 degree target, we should be prepared to adapt to 4ºC.”
Posted for Tim Sands
At the risk of turning The Great Beyond into a celebrity gossip sheet, which extravagantly-masked leader is currently having paternity tests conducted on two children suspected of being his offspring?
This is the widely reported news that Egyptian scientists are conducting DNA paternity tests on two foetuses found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The stillborn foetuses were found by Howard Carter when he discovered the tomb in 1922 and have remained in storage ever since, having never been put on display or studied (AP).
It has always been assumed that the children were his, DNA testing should settle matter (and lay to rest questions over his fertility).
The testing is part of a larger program to test the relations between hundreds of Egyptian mummies. This is of immense interest to Egyptologists as the precise identity of Tutankhamun’s parentage is unclear.
An unintended consequence of electric and hybrid cars was reported earlier this year: these environmentally-friendly cars are a danger because they don’t make enough noise. But now Lotus Engineering have come up with a way to add 'vroom' to a hybrid car.
The main concern with these quiet cars has been for the vision impaired, but children and distracted pedestrians, as well as cyclists, are also at risk. According to the Daily Mail “A study at the University of California found that a petrol or diesel car could be heard 36ft away but a Prius was not heard until it was 11ft from blindfolded volunteers.”
So to increase the noise Lotus have outfitted a Toyota Prius “with a waterproof speaker near the radiator that blares simulated yet realistic engine sounds to let pedestrians” (Wired).
'Virophage' suggests viruses are alive
Evidence of illness enhances case for life.
German professor in sex discrimination battle
Row throws spotlight on dearth of top female academics in the country.
Curved electronic eye created
Flexible circuits should lead to diverse imaging applications.
Google tool identifies linchpin species
Search system predicts what prey are needed to keep an ecosystem working.
Technological advances behind the anthrax investigation
Machines can quickly compare strains and pinpoint origin.
Posted on behalf of Amber Dance
The US Department of Justice today released a set of documents describing how its investigators linked Bruce Ivins, who died last week (Los Angeles Times), to the 2001 anthrax mailings.
In an affadavit for a search warrant, a US postal inspector lays out the circumstantial evidence that led investigators to suspect Ivins, an anthrax expert and longtime employee at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Maryland.
New DNA sequencing technology was key in advancing the investigation (Nature). The anthrax used in the attacks was of the Ames strain, and further analyses identified four mutations that match a subtype called RMR-1029.
The anthrax envelopes had defects matching envelopes sold in Maryland and Virginia. Of the 16 labs that had RMR-1029, only USAMRIID was in that area.
It was only a matter of time before somebody sued the US Interior Department regarding its decision to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. And it's not exactly a surprise that the honour goes to the state of Alaska (Reuters), which will undoubtedly be joined by opponents of the law.
The state questioned the notion that receding sea ice threatens the bear and suggests that the Interior Department failed to take into account the bears' survival during previous periods of warming (the climate is already in a warm phase, of course, so the question is what follows). But to be fair, Alaska is correct in pointing out that the polar bear population, for all the worries about the future, is currently doing rather well in terms of numbers.
That has led some to argue that the ruling was purely political, although it's hard to imagine the administration of George W. Bush as a front for environmental interests. On the other hand, it is entirely plausible that the administration based its decision on what it felt it could defend in the courts, given that a decision against the listing would have provoked the equal and opposite legal reaction.
Alaska fears the listing could affect things like commercial fisheries and tourism as well as oil and gas activities, but if this headline in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner is any indication, the impacts have have been modest so far: "Oil firms get federal permission to annoy polar bears".
Posted for Tim Sands
Current pharma top-earner Pfizer may not be by 2014 according to a study released this week.
Pharmaceutical industry analysis company EvaluatePharma, released the report on Monday, updating their recently release analysis “World Preview 2012”. It doesn’t paint a rosy picture for US pharmaceutical companies. Only Johnson and Johnson are predicted to be in the top 5, with European companies Roche, Sanofi-Aventis, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis in the top four slots.
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
Want to improve your species’ chances of survival? Grow fast and large, and start breeding younger.
For the soft-bodied, duck-billed hadrosaur, Hypacrosaurus, this seems to have been the survival strategy. It was one of three common prey for Tyrannosaurus rex and its relatives, but the other two had the advantages of “horns or stout, tank-like bodies” (press release).
Researchers have now found, by looking at thin sections of the long leg bones of a specimen of Hypacrosaurus and counted and measured the growth rings, that these dinosaurs grew much more rapidly than their predators (research paper).
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
The tortoise might just have been the original instant meal (BBC, Telegraph). Hermann’s tortoise, which is the breed most commonly used today as pets, was eaten by early man some 130,000 years ago.
“Hermann’s tortoise is relatively easy to catch: it is slow moving and not aggressive. Therefore, obtaining these species does not require much effort and involves no risks” says Ruth Blasco in her paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Or as it was interpreted in the papers: “Cavemen who didn't have the energy to stalk a woolly mammoth or spear a sabre-toothed tiger often resorted to a lazy alternative.” (Daily Mail)
The tortoises are one of many species that have been found in the Bolomor Cave near the town of Tavernes on the Spanish coast. The researcher has been studying the 526 specimens to learn more about the use of small animals for food by early humans. The tortoises are thought to be from the Later Middle Pleistocene era, around 130,000 years ago (somewhat more recent than reported elsewhere).
The evidence that tortoises were eaten included cutmarks, evidence of cooking, and human toothmarks on the bones. The Telegraph says:
It indicates that the whole animal was cooked, upside down, and the shell cracked off. This would have been achieved either by hurling the roasted snack against the cave wall until it cracked or hitting it with a blunt object like a rock.There are also signs that once cracked, the limbs and bones were cut off by hand and tooth.
Image: FWS
This map of the Arctic, complete with future areas of political strife, has been drawn up by researchers at Durham University’s International Boundaries Research Unit.
It shows disputed territories that states bordering the region could potentially lay claim to under international laws on the sea and the sea floor (an issue explored more in the Nature feature from the start of the year).
“The map is the most precise depiction yet of the limits and the future dividing lines that could be drawn across the Arctic region,” says Martin Pratt, director of research at the IBRU (press release). “The results have huge implications for policy-making as the rush to carve up the polar region continues. It’s a cartographic means of showing, and an attempt to collate information and predict the way in which the Arctic region may eventually be divided up.”
The Arctic territory issue has generated huge interest since the Russians planted a flag on the North Pole sea floor last year. Recently the US Geological Survey estimated that the Arctic holds a fifth of the world’s remaining undiscovered oil.
As the IBRU explains:
While there are a number of disagreements over maritime jurisdiction in the Arctic region - and potential for more as states define the areas over which they have exclusive rights over the resources of the continental shelf more than 200 nautical miles from their coastal baselines - so far all of the Arctic states have followed the rules and procedures for establishing seabed jurisdiction set out in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. To date, only Russia and Norway have made submissions to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of Continental Shelf, but Canada, Denmark and the USA are also likely to define their continental shelf limits over the next few years.
Click the image for a full pdf version with briefing note.
News coverage
New map aims to help battle for Arctic territories – Reuters
Arctic Map shows dispute hotspots - BBC
You don’t often hear about amateur stem-cell scientists, or amateur brain surgeons. But astronomy seems to be set up perfectly for anyone to take part. Take Galaxy Zoo - a project run by scientists at Oxford University, Portsmouth University, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University and Fingerprint Digital Media, Belfast to classify over a million galaxies spotted by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
A story is doing the rounds at the moment about a mysterious, unique, astronomical object with ghostly overtones – it looks like a galaxy and is full of hot gas, but *gasp* there are NO STARS THERE…. Wooooooooooo, spooky.
Posted for Jeff Tollefson
The price of petrol in the United States has actually come down in recent weeks, and by European standards it was never that high to begin with. But you wouldn't know it looking at the news. With the November elections approaching, Democrats and Republicans have officially engaged in a (frequently rhetorical) battle over energy policy.
Democratic contender Barack Obama came out over the weekend and said he would be willing to consider expanding offshore drilling as part of a broader energy compromise proposed last week by a bipartisan group of senators. And on Monday Obama proposed a clever way to tap the petroleum reserve without really drawing it down (by releasing high-quality light crude and filling it up with cheap, heavy crude). Video here.
Republicans have charged Obama with the classic campaign "flip-flopping," but to his credit he has expressed a willingness to compromise on difficult issues, an attitude that is hard to come by in Washington. He has also laid out a broader plan to boost renewables and deploy plug-in-hybrids and other alternative fuel vehicles. On the other hand, he is toeing the Democratic line by advocating cash rebates for working families that would be paid for with a portion of the "record profits the oil companies are making right now."
The sounds of silent movies
Flickering images can trigger perception of sound.
Climate war games
Role-play negotiations test the outcomes of global warming.
Almost half of primate species face extinction
Global review shows danger is greatest in Asia.
Climate protestors in the UK are running foul of ‘the man’ in a big way this week.
Protestors have been gathering by a coal power station in Kent “for ten days of learning and sustainable living” and a bit of protest against plans to build a new coal station on the site. However the police have already arrested a number of people and removed vehicles they apparently thought were blocking access to the ‘Climate Camp’ site.
PA says the opening day of the camp “was marred by persistent stand-offs between officers in riot gear and protesters over safe access to the site”. Now a "stash of knives and weapons" has been uncovered nearby, according to the police, making more headlines.
Continue reading "Dangerous weapons and boardgames seized at ‘Climate Camp’" »
It’s time for another ride on ‘vitamin C cures cancer’ rollercoaster. Some readers may recall that chemist Linus Pauling took a long ride a while ago and was never quite the same after. Exercise caution people.
In a paper published this week in PNAS Qi Chen, of the US National Institutes of Health, and colleagues show that injected vitamin C (ascorbate) can halve the growth rate of tumours in mice. The team tested vitamin C injections in mice with rapidly spreading ovarian, pancreatic, and brain tumours. Injections reduced tumour growth by 41% and appeared to control spreading to other organs.
By injecting vitamin C you can produce far higher levels of ascorbate than you can achieve with oral tablets. High concentrations of ascorbate generate hydrogen peroxide, which is known to slow tumours in mice, they write.
“Similar pharmacologic concentrations [of vitamin C] were readily achieved in humans given ascorbate intravenously,” say the researchers. “These data suggest that ascorbate as a prodrug may have benefits in cancers with poor prognosis and limited therapeutic options.”
Posted for Katharine Sanderson
Over the weekend, SpaceX tried for a third time, and failed for a third time, to launch its Falcon 1 rocket. On board the rocket were three payloads – a US military satellite and two from NASA – all lost.
But it seems that the rocket also had another precious cargo. Reports abound that ashes of James Doohan, the actor who played Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott, chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek, were on board Falcon 1, along with the remains of 207 other people. This has prompted much attention, especially from news blogs:
Something about this sad tale rang a bell, and sure enough, it was widely reported just over a year ago that Scotty’s ashes were lost in an attempt to reach space. In April 2007 a rocket whizzed 70 miles up, carrying with it Scotty’s ashes. The rocket parachuted back to Earth as planned, but got pushed off course and was lost in New Mexico...
A mysterious disease destroying French oysters has got a lot less mysterious and lot more repulsive. The delectable delicacies are dying of herpes.
Around mid-July oyster farmers in France started to complain that their one and two year old molluscs were being wiped out, with between 40% and 100% succumbing. As the LA Times noted, the country could handle a stock market crash and the president’s wife with her risqué music, “But an oyster blight? Quelle horreur!”
Now the ‘oyster crisis team’ at French marine research institute Ifremer has discovered the horrific true cause of the mass mortality. The young oysters have been so busy growing their sex organs they neglected to develop resistance to Oyster Herpesvirus type 1.
“We had a warm winter followed by a rainy spring, which caused high levels of planktonic plant life to develop,” says Ifremer spokeswoman Johanna Martin (Reuters). “This meant that the oysters were particularly well fed and spent a lot of energy developing their sexual organs to the detriment of their natural reserves, leaving them vulnerable to OsHV-1.”
There is no cure for the virus. In Liberation Sonya Faure says “better pray that the winter and next spring will not be too soft or wet”. However Ifremer researcher Tristan Renault told AFP that those oysters not killed would be resistant to the virus and could be safely eaten. Herpes resistant oyster anyone?
Image: NOAA
'Seriously frickin' weird'
Weird whales week on the tetrapod zoology blog.
Hey hey! GSK! How many chemists have you sacked today!
“The ax is falling again at GlaxoSmithKline. This time it’s the oncology group,” says the In the Pipeline blog.
Papers with good titles: Parasite, Know Thyself (sex allocation and Darwinian adaptation)
Posted for Jeff Tollefson
The idea of creating an international fund to help tropical countries protect their rainforests has been floating around international climate negotiations for some time, but Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is apparently tired of waiting. Last week he established a fund to do exactly that with the Amazon (video here).
What he didn’t do was put any money in it. Indeed, Brazil is seeking donations to the fund to the tune of $21 billion, including $1 billion in the first year.
Brazil would retain its control over the Amazon, which is as it should be, and the funds would be used to promote various forest protection programs. It’s not clear beyond that how, exactly, it would be work, aside from the fact that it would be managed by a Brazil’s National Development Bank (BNDES).
Norway has apparently kicked in $100 million, and we’ll see where things go from here. The question is whether other nations will want to wait and see what comes of the climate negotiations at the UN, where negotiators from around the world are debating how to calculate deforestation emissions and create a system to fund conservation programs in tropical nations.
Many are pushing for a market-based system that would allow companies rich nations to offset emissions by protecting rainforests that would other wise be cut down. This kind of program would come with plenty of strings attached, although it could be merged with other programs - including the kind of direct aide sought by Brazil.
Image: Lula / Ricardo Stuckert/PR
Falcon 1 blows it again
Private space travel takes another hit, but isn't doomed.
Scientists identify algae that almost swamped the Olympics
Algal bloom may have been boosted by fertilizer run-off.
Lawsuit chips away at fish research
Court order may halt attempts to train sea bass.
The end of AIDS is nowhere in sight
Battle against HIV dogged by vaccine failures, poorly targeted prevention measures and lack of fresh research talent, conference told.
Nature’s virtual island in Second Life will tomorrow play host to Jeff Marlow, of Imperial College London. Jeff is part of the European ExoMars team that is aiming to put a life-seeking rover on the Red Planet that will put sedentary solvent-sniffer Phoenix to shame.
Tomorrow he is delivering the next Nature Second Life lecture, anyone interested in Mars should check it out.
ExoMars: Europe’s Next Step in the Search for Life on Mars, kicks off tomorrow at 6pm BST (10am PDT).
Researchers in Santa Cruz have been forced to flee their homes after suspected animal rights activists attacked them with what a local police chief described as “Molotov cocktails on steroids”.
“This is nothing less than a case of attempted homicide,” says Santa Cruz Chief of Police Howard Skerry. The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and UCSC police are all cooperating on the case.
The San Francisco Chronicle notes:
The attacks may mark an escalation in a series of protests against UC researchers that prompted a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to issue a temporary restraining order against three animal rights groups in February. In January, a Molotov cocktail exploded on a UCLA researcher's porch. A month later, six people in masks tried to force their way into the home of a UC Santa Cruz researcher and hit her husband on the head, police said.
Professor David Feldheim and his family had to use a ladder to escape their house after the attacks, which also targeted another UCSC researcher (The Mercury News). The chancellor of UCSC, George Blumenthal, said, “These are odious assaults on individuals and on the principles of free inquiry by which we live.” (Statement.)
England’s Neolithic artists had something of an abstract bent. While our continental artists were making human and animal representations 5,000-odd years ago British artists were carving convoluted lines and patterns into rocks, using other rocks as tools.
English Heritage, a government-funded body, has been cataloguing the carvings in the Northumberland region and has just released an online catalogue of them. It is also expanding this regional survey across the UK and hopes to add to the new carvings already discovered.
“There are many theories as to what rock art carvings mean,” says Kate Wilson, English Heritage’s inspector of ancient monuments (press release, Times news story). “They may have played a role in fire, feastings and offering activities, or been used as ‘signposts’, or to mark territory. They may have a spiritual significance.”
And according to Wilson, England’s rock-carvers may not be so different to their fellow artists after all. “The fact that these carved symbols developed in diverse and dispersed cultures across the world lend weight to arguments that these simple designs – and the urge to create them – are somehow hard-wired into the human psyche,” she says.
More pictures below the fold and on the England’s Rock Art website.
Continue reading "Picture post: England’s ancient rock art" »
‘Oil: Tar sands less damaging than coal, insists Shell’
Oil giant says not exploiting tar sands will cause more global warming, from The Guardian.
‘Queen's Guitarist Publishes Astrophysics Thesis’
Queen guitarist Brian May has finally published his doctoral thesis. It appears in the book ‘A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud’, says Space.com.
‘Solving New Zealand’s moose mystery’
DNA tests on hairs show Canadian moose may still be living in New Zealand. Attempts to establish a population there for hunting were thought to have failed, with the last confirmed sighting being in 1952.
‘Racket Science’
Chidanand Rajghatta writes in the Times of India about bogus "Indian kid-genius goes to NASA" stories and what they tell us about the state of India’s science.
Papers with good titles: Losing 'Nemo': bleaching and collection appear to reduce inshore populations of anemonefishes
Workers who build the giant external tanks for the Space Shuttle will begin losing their jobs in October, it was announced on Friday. Lockheed Martin says all the 50 metre tanks needed for the 10 remaining Shuttle missions are already in production, so it is scaling back its 2,445 strong tank-building team (press release).
“This was the first official notification of a reduction in force that starts with a reduction in the fall and continues through the end of the shuttle program,” says the appropriately named company spokeswoman Marion LaNasa (Houston Chronicle). The cuts will impact employees in Huntsville, AL, the Kennedy Space Center, FL, and New Orleans, LA.
Although it is no real surprise that Shuttle contractors are being laid off, it does mark a point of no return for the iconic vessel. Political attempts to extend the number of remaining shuttle missions will be pointless if the workforce needed for those extensions is no longer there.
As Lockheed has a contract for the Orion shuttle-replacement craft it is possible that some staff could be relocated to this project. “We’ve been very successful in past [with relocating staff]. We intend to do everything we can,” says LaNasa (Calgary Herald).
Image: First Space Shuttle External Tank Rollout / NASA
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
It’s perhaps not surprising that the smallest of snakes is making a big splash in the press. What is surprising is that the dark brown snake with two yellow stripes has been called Leptotyphlops carlae, dedicated to Carla, the wife of the researcher who discovered it (AP, BBC).
He says if the new species was any smaller it would not be able to eat anything (ABC). The limited evidence that is available on this snake also suggests that it only lays one very elongated egg at a time, with offspring half its size.
This ten centimetre long snake, reported to be the width of a piece of spaghetti, was found under a rock on the Caribbean island of Barbados. It is the smallest in the genus Leptotyphlops, all of which are pretty small.
In the article published today in Zootaxa, Blair Hedges, the United States biologist, reports the discovery of two snakes from this genus.
Continue reading "Is naming a snake after your wife really a compliment?" »
Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow
From the littlest to the biggest, scientists have modelled the bite force of the great white shark and its ancient ancestor, the gigantic fossil species Carcharodon megalodon (also known as Big Tooth).
The great white comes in at a bone-crunching 1.8 tonnes of bite force. And the elastic cartilage that the shark’s jaws are composed of did not greatly reduce the power of its bite compared to bony jawed fish (press release).
The great white, says Stephen Wroe of the University of New South Wales, is possibly the hardest biting creature alive.
By way of comparison, large African lions have around 560 kilograms of bite force and a human approximately 80 kilograms.
Any of you scuba divers? And any of you ever seen any insects down there? Nope, thought not. And why? Because of maths.
Insects manage to survive under water by forming a thin bubble around themselves to trap air and let them breathe. Mathematicians John Bush and Morris Flynn at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have looked closely at all the factors that control the stability of the bubble and have done the sums to work out the limits on the insects’ sub-aquabatics. (paper and press release)
There’s a maximum depth that insects can dive to before the bubble pops, around 30 metres. But there’s also a minimum depth above which the bubble becomes unstable.
Even though these insects, like the water boatman, could dive deep deep down, they typically don’t bother – it’s dark, cold and there’s not much to eat – but plenty of things to eat them.
Continue reading "Boating bugs breathe by building bubbles" »
Soy has not been getting very good press recently. Last week the potential detrimental effects of soy consumption on male fertility aroused a storm of media interest and some choice headlines.
Some outlets and the Soya Association made the obvious observation that in many countries soy makes up a significant proportion of the diet but the populace still manages to reproduce somehow. Despite this, and the authors and fertility experts stressing that there is nothing to panic about, the press clearly care deeply about their readers’ sperm and panicked regardless.
A famous 16th-century warship sank because its crew spoke a different language to its captain, says a researcher who has been looking at the crew’s skulls.
The Mary Rose was the flagship of Henry VIII’s navy before it sank, probably because water flooded in through open gun ports. The last words of its captain Admiral George Carew were of his crew: “I have the sort of knaves I cannot rule.”
Now Hugh Montgomery, a medical researcher at University College London, says he has found that many of the crew were Spanish, and may not have understood the order to close the gun ports. By looking at teeth from the shipwreck Montgomery and colleagues found their composition suggests they come from people who grew up in the Mediterranean.
“The analysis of the teeth suggests the men grew up in a warm climate, probably somewhere in southern Europe,” says Montgomery (Independent). “It’s also known that at this time Henry VIII was short of skilled soldiers and sailors and was trying to recruit mercenaries from the Continent.”
The claims will feature on a TV documentary next week.
Headline watch
Que? Spanish crew's lack of English sank the Mary Rose – The Times
Was Henry VIII's Mary Rose lost in translation? – Reuters
All at sea: Mary Rose sank because foreign sailors couldn't understand their commander's orders – Daily Mail
Image: Punchstock
Hwang Woo Suk has been knocked back in his attempt to re-start work on human embryonic stem cells. The South Korean government has rejected his request for a licence.
Hwang, whose name is now rarely mentioned without the words ‘disgraced’ and ‘scientist’ before it, was exposed for research fraud in 2005 and became a national pariah in South Korea.
A statement from the country’s health ministry announcing the rejection said: “We took into consideration the ethical problems that caused him to be fired as professor ... and the fact that he was indicted on charges of illegally trading in human eggs.” (Statement in Korean, extracts on AP.)
Hyun Sang-hwan, Hwang’s colleague at Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, told Reuters the rejection was a disappointment. “We expected our request to be accepted because the research plan we submitted has no flaw in terms of legal and administrative procedures,” he says.
More from Nature
Disgraced cloner Woo Suk Hwang attempts a comeback - 21 Dec 2007
Nature Special: Woo Suk Hwang - 11 Jan 2006
A massive simulation of the formation of the first stars, published in Science this week, shows they started out as tiny ‘protostars’ with a mass just 1% of our Sun. These grew into massive primordial stars which lasted only a million-odd years, compared to our-Sun which could make it to 5 billion.
The NY Times characterises them as “short-lived brutish monsters”.
“These stars are thought to be the first sources of light and also the first sources of heavy elements such as carbon, oxygen and iron,” says Naoki Yoshida of Nagoya University in Japan (Reuters).
The team ran simulations of primordial gas found back in the mists of time, using our the atomic and molecular knowledge of this gas to show protostars can be formed by “primeval density fluctuations left over from the Big Bang”.
Continue reading "First stars were nasty, brutish and short" »
Here’s a familiar sounding headline: “Mars water breakthrough”.
It could be one of many headlines hitting us today from the Phoenix lander, which has finally scooped a bit of ice into one of its ovens (press release) but no! The headline came from a story in the Herald, in March 1999.
The Great Beyond has decided to do a little research, and perform a search on a well-known news search facility to see how many times headlines have screamed WATER ON MARS!!! to us over the years.
Here’s a few real headlines about water on Mars. Try and guess where and when they were reported – answers below the fold
1) Mars water found
2) Scientists find Mars water
3) Probe shows underground Mars water
4) Mars water
5) PLANET ICE!; OFFICIAL: MARS HAS WATER
6) NASA digs to find Mars water
7) Mars water news excites prof
8) UA team sees no recent sign of Mars water
9) Water could be flowing on mars today
