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The annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition has opened at the Natural History Museum in London. As a special treat one of the winning entries includes the best thing in the sea: the mighty sailfish.
This shot – Sailfish Strike - is by Amos Nachoum. More below the fold. A full gallery of photos is available on the museum’s website. The competition is run by the museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine.
AstraZeneca announced a rather rosy set of third-quarter results yesterday. The company also said it will stop buying up its own shares in order to have more free cash for snapping up smaller firms.
At the moment Simon Lowth, its chief financial officer, says, “we don’t have any specific targets in mind” (Financial Times).
As the credit crunch hits smaller companies this could be an ideal time to buy them and AstraZeneca is not the only one hoping to profit from the world’s financial woes.
Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that, “small drug companies squeezed by the credit crunch are turning to GlaxoSmithKline PLC to discuss being acquired, Glaxo Chief Executive Andrew Witty said, adding that Glaxo may step up its acquisition activity in the coming months”.
Bloomberg says AstraZeneca’s results put it as “the best performing stock among European drugmakers this year”. It adds:
AstraZeneca joins GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Novo Nordisk A/S in seeking bargains as the financial crisis forces cash-strapped companies to seek buyouts. Glaxo last week said it plans to scrap its stock repurchasing program in 2009 to free up funds for more purchases. Novo CFO Jesper Brandgaard said today that the Danish drugmaker is earmarking as much as $2 billion for takeovers. AstraZeneca will not seek a 'large scale' purchase and will reconsider share buybacks in January, Lowth said.
A new fungus is in the frame for ‘White Nose Syndrome’, a nasty condition ravaging America’s bat populations.
Over 100,000 hibernating bats in the north-eastern United States have succumbed to the syndrome, which is characterised by white fungus growing on the nose, ears and wings (see - ‘White Nose Syndrome’ threatens America’s bats - January 31). A new paper from Science characterises this fungus and identifies it as a previously unknown member of the Geomyces group (paper abstract, press release).
While some coverage claims this solves the mystery of the bat deaths it is actually still unclear if this fungus is directly causing the mortality, or if it is merely exploiting animals that have been weakened by some other cause.
Briefing: Antarctica hit by climate change
Study shows human fingerprints on the polar thermostats.
Technological innovation may have driven first human migration
Ancient tools give up their makers' secrets.
Shell study sheds light on biomineralization
The presence of certain molecules influences calcite growth.
Eating red meat opens the door for a particularly nasty bacteria, according to a paper published in Nature.
Researchers found a toxin produced by some forms of E. Coli specifically targets cells with a sugar molecule called Neu5Gc stuck to them. Humans absorb this sugar from red meat.
“The toxin sticks to the sugar to get inside cells,” says study author Travis Beddoe from Monash University in Melbourne (ABC). “This uncovered the first example of bacterium causing disease in humans by targeting a molecule which is incorporated into our bodies through what we eat.”
It is something of a double whammy, explains study author Ajit Varki:
Ironically, humans may set themselves up for an increased risk of illness from this kind of E. coli bacteria present in contaminated red meat or dairy, because these very same products have high-levels of Neu5Gc. The Neu5Gc molecule is absorbed into the body, making it a target for the toxin produced by E. coli. (Press release.)
AFP notes that there are around 75,000 E. coli-related food poisonings in the US each year. On average 60 people die as a result.
Varki told the San Diego Union Tribune it is unknown how long the Neu5Gc sugar stays in the body after meat eating. “I would suspect months,” he says.
Image: Getty
On the 27 and 28 of October, the Hubble telescope’s prime working camera finally caught sight of this pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147.
It was the first photographic target after glitches aboard Hubble put all the instruments to sleep. These galaxies lie more than 400 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus.
UPDATE - 31/10
NASA managers announced yesterday that they will not meet a February 2009 launch date for the fifth and final shuttle mission to service the telescope. The earliest a spare computer system to replace one that faulted in September might be ready is April of 2009, they said. A firm servicing mission start date cannot be set without more testing of this system although a launch is possible in May.
Environmental activists launched a seaborne invasion of a controversial coal power station site in the UK yesterday. The Greenpeace activists eventually left the Kingsnorth site this morning after a legal injunction from the plant's owner E.ON.
The company plans to build a new coal power station on the site, something environmental activists strongly oppose.
“A new Kingsnorth would emit the same amount of carbon dioxide as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined, and destroy any chance we have of persuading China and India to stop building coal plants,” said Ben Stewart, one of the activists (BBC).
Stewart and five others were recently acquitted of causing criminal damage to Kingsnorth, on the grounds that climate change was a ‘lawful excuse’ for their actions.
An E.ON press officer told Kent News, “We absolutely support the campaigners’ right to protest but clearly tying up boats to a working power station is just ridiculous.”
More
The vigil ends - Greenpeace
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
It’s Messenger to Mercury – take 2.
The spacecraft buzzed past the planet on 6 October for the second of three flybys. Messenger skimmed just 200 kilometres above Mercury’s cratered surface and created the highest-resolution colour images ever obtained of the planet. The new images offer firm evidence that magnesium atoms are floating in the planet’s thin atmosphere and that ancient volcanic processes were important in shaping the its surface.
In 1975 Mariner 10 visited Mercury and produced the first black and white close-up of just less than half of the planet. Messenger, equipped with modern cameras and instruments has now sent back over 1,200 photos that, when compiled, give the first complete view of nearly 95 percent of the planet.
Planetary scientists have analyzed the data and discovered that they now have solid evidence to answer several long-standing scientific questions about what is currently in the planet’s extremely thin atmosphere and about processes that took place on the planet’s surface billions of years ago.
Posted for Heidi Ledford
And now the latest in the seemingly endless saga of bisphenol A (BPA): a report on a report in which the new report finds the earlier report lacking. The new report also suggests that the earlier report be revised using some of the recommendations from yet another report put together by a different governmental agency.
Welcome to the bewildering world of BPA, a chemical found in some plastic bottles and the lining of cans, the safety of which has been a matter of intense debate for years.
The US Food and Drug Administration recently released a draft safety assessment that deemed the BPA levels found in food safe. But congressmen, scientists, and activists have criticized that assessment, in part for excluding data from many academic studies.
Today, a scientific advisory committee commissioned by the FDA released a report that in part agrees with these criticisms.
Continue reading "FDA panel criticizes FDA report on Bisphenol A" »
The Nature Podcast: Ancient tsunamis, infected frogs, what economics can learn from physics, and a new book about the enigmatic Antikythera mechanism.
How to repair the biggest science experiment in the world
Physicists get CSI on the LHC.
Ancient tsunami uncovered
Indian Ocean disaster of 2004 was biggest in more than 600 years.
Stem-cell law goes to the polls
The 4 November election will settle more than who sits in the White House.
What you don't learn at school about the economy - Premium content
Ignoring decades of sophisticated economic theory spells trouble for us all, argues Philip Ball.
Uh-oh, more trouble at t’mill for pharma. Wyeth, a company that comes under the “drugs giant” moniker, has announced it will stop pursuing R&D in eight of its 14 therapeutic areas, and will ‘focus’ on oncology, inflammation, neuroscience, vaccines, metabolic disorders and musculoskeletal disorders.
The story hasn’t been posted on Wyeth’s website yet but has hit a number of serious news outfits (Bloomberg, WSJ, Reuters).
“This is not a cost-reduction effort at all; the dollars spent and number of personnel won't change," said Wyeth spokesman Michael Lampe in the Reuters report. All the areas that Wyeth is dropping are early stage developments. This announcement, dubbed ‘Project impact’ will see the number of diseases Wyeth is targeting specifically drop from 55 to 27.
The news is also being discussed in the blogosphere (Pharmalot, In the pipeline). According to the comments on one of these blogs 60 job losses are predicted. Which is better than the news from Pfizer and Merck lately – Merck slashed 7.200 jobs last week and Pfizer recently announced it was stopping its cardio research. We watch the pharma industry with interest to see how many other companies continue this trend.
The World Wide Fund for Nature has released the latest of its Living Planet reports, where it rounds up just how badly we’re messing up the Earth. To give it a bit of edge, this year’s report is being compared to the financial crisis.
“The recent downturn in the global economy is a stark reminder of the consequences of living beyond our means. But the possibility of financial recession pales in comparison to the looming ecological credit crunch,” says James Leape, director general of WWF International (report pdf / press release).
The populations of 1,313 vertebrate species are tracked by the WWF’s Living Planet Index. Over the past 35 years these species have declined by a third. At the same time the report warns that our “global footprint” is now 30% bigger than the Earth’s capacity to regenerate.
“If our demands on the planet continue at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles,” says Leape.
Below the fold: reaction from around the world.
NASA is slowly switching off parts of the Phoenix Mars lander in an attempt to extend its life.
As the amount of sunlight hitting the lander’s solar panels deceases at the end of the Martian summer, engineers are turning off heaters and instruments to save power.
“If we did nothing, it wouldn’t be long before the power needed to operate the spacecraft would exceed the amount of power it generates on a daily basis,” says Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager (press release). “By turning off some heaters and instruments, we can extend the life of the lander by several weeks and still conduct some science.”
As winter draws ever closer, Phoenix prepares for the end. On its Twitter feed it is trying to stay positive though, saying, “I hope to hang on several more weeks so you will be hearing more from me :-)”.
More coverage
Mars robot's heaters to be turned off, one by one – Reuters
Image: Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University
Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy is to fill Richard Dawkins’s professorial chair at the University of Oxford.
The university confirmed yesterday that du Sautoy will become the new Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science on December 1st. Dawkins, the first person to hold the position, resigned earlier this year.
“For me, science is about discovery but it is also about communication,” says du Sautoy (press release). “A scientific discovery barely exists until it is communicated and brought to life in the minds of others.”
Du Sautoy’s work concentrates on using zeta functions to understand symmetry and he also has a high profile media role, presenting television programmes and penning a ‘Sexy Maths’ column for the Times. He has a very musical website.
Continue reading "‘Sexy Mathematician’ is the new Richard Dawkins" »
How does your dinosaur smell?
Quite well, on the whole.
First ozone measurements from Everest's peak
Expedition records stratospheric distortion and hints of pollution.
Older scientists publish more papers
Age is no barrier to productivity.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Astronomers have discovered two asteroid belts in the closest known planetary system to Earth. This could therefore be the ideal place to search for an Earth-like planet and could also offer hints about the early life of our solar system, they say.
Epsilon Eridani, the star at the center of this neighboring system, is slightly cooler and smaller than the sun and is located about 10.5 light-years from Earth. The star is also younger than the sun, with an approximate age of 850 million years.
Astronomers knew a planet of about 60% the mass of Jupiter orbited Epsilon Eridani once every 7 years and that a far-out ring of icy material, much like the Kuiper belt of our solar system, was also present. Now astronomers have detected two other rocky asteroid belts.
NASA’s next rocket: “on the chopping block”
Former Republican congressman Robert Walker tells the Orlando Sentinel that Ares I is under threat. [Hat tip: NASA Watch.]
“After 15 years of work, we are handing over to industry to produce an artificial heart usable by man.”
Researcher Alain Carpentier tells AFP an artificial heart for transplant will be ready for clinical trials by 2011.
Pssst. Wanna buy some ivory?
The BBC reports that the first sanctioned sale of ivory in southern Africa in nearly a decade started today.
“We’re exercising our Constitutional right and privilege in casting our ballot this Election Day.”
So says E. Michael Fincke, who will be voting from space in the US elections (Scientific American).
It’s a literary double header in this week’s edition of the journal PNAS, with scientists following in the footsteps of both a giant of Victorian literature and one of America’s most cherished authors.
Thomas Levy and his colleagues may have uncovered ‘King Solomon’s copper mines’, a real world version of the diamond mines from Rider Haggard’s famous novel. Slightly more highbrow literature creeps into Charles Davis’s paper, which analyses the impact of climate change on the pond immortalised by Henry Thoreau in ‘Walden’.
“Some plants around Walden Pond have been quite resilient in the face of climate change, while others have fared far worse,” says Davis, of Harvard University (press release one). “It had been thought that climate change would result in uniform shifts across plant species, but our work shows that plant species do not respond to climate change uniformly or randomly.”
Davis and colleagues looked at data on flowering times of 473 species of plants around Walden pond in Massachusetts, first recorded by Thoreau over 150 years ago (press release two). Species that do not change their flowering times in response to temperature are declining rapidly, they say.
Apologies to those readers bored by stories about ice. While there has been a continual stream of stories about the extent of sea ice in the Arctic, there has been rather less about the overall volume of frozen water up there in the cold north.
A recent paper from Geophysical Research Letters addresses ice-geek cravings in this area. In this paper Katharine Giles and colleagues from the UK’s National Centre for Earth Observation use satellite radar data to assess average sea ice thickness. The researchers say that during the 2007/08 winter average ice thickness was 26 cm below the average thickness of the past six years.
“The ice thickness was fairly constant for the five winters before this, but it plummeted in the winter after the 2007 minimum,” Giles told the BBC.
Continue reading "Arctic ice is back, but only in the news" »
Salmon study sparks row over dams
Results dismissing link to fish mortality are called into question.
Urea pollution turns tides toxic
Kamikaze gulls that inspired Hitchcock's The Birds may have been doomed by leaky septic tanks.
German authority halts primate work
Licence for macaque experiments will not be renewed.
“Up a bit, up a bit, left a bit, left a bit. Down a bit. OK. There.” No, not the sound of piano removal men, but what I imagine the controllers of team Armadillo’s lunar lander said as they competed victoriously in the weekend’s Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
The competition is a two-tier affair, and the prize purse is a whopping £2 million, although Armadillo Aerospace only took home $350,000. To get this, they had to build a rocket-powered vehicle that would take off, fly 50 metres high, travel to the side for 100 metres, taking at least 90 seconds, then touch down safely. And then go back again.
Level two of the competition is to do this on a rocky, Moon-like surface. Last year Armadillo came a tantalising 7 seconds away from completing the challenge and this year they also failed.
These space prizes pick up a lot of attention in the traditional geek-press (Wired, Space.com, Discover) and elsewhere (MSNBC) despite the historically low levels of success the competition is used to. The prize money has remained safe in the hands of NASA since the competition began in 2006. This year nine teams took part, but Armadillo were the only successful entrant, in either category.
Speaking of geek press, Gizmodo has another Armadillo-related story, with an artist's impression of their next project – a goldfish bowl space ship. Wow!
Image: courtesy of Armadillo Aerospace
“This is a disaster. The population drop is worse than the stock market.”
Whale researcher Ken Balcomb is concerned that seven Puget Sound killer whales are missing, presumed dead (AP).
No rest for the wolf lobby
The Bush administration is trying to get the northern Rockies gray wolf off the Endangered Species List in the latest skirmish in this fight (Washington Post).
“Humans made fire 790,000 years ago”
So says Reuters, detailing findings from researchers at Israel’s Hebrew University.
David Attenborough = frog Viagra
After three years without mating, Mission Golden-eyed Tree frogs at London Zoo “did the deed” during a visit by famous naturalist Sir David Attenborough. The Daily Telegraph adds, “the frogs' keepers admitted it was more likely that the amphibians finally mated because of a humidifier placed in their new tank”.
You might be worried that this blog is developing a Stephen Hawking obsession. Following on from the Stephen Hawking statue and the Stephen Hawking tattoo* comes the news of the Stephen Hawking retirement.
The BBC says:
The physicist, who has motor neurone disease, will give up his position as Cambridge University's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics next year.The university said it was policy for holders of the title to retire at 67 and Prof Hawking will be 67 in January.
However it’s not bad news for Hawking fans, as a spokeswoman for the university told the Daily Telegraph he would continue to work, just as Emeritus Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. “The post is retiring but Hawking isn’t,” she said. “Nothing will change. It is merely a formality.”
If you fancy applying to be the next Lucasian Professor, the advert is now online. “Applications are invited from persons working on mathematics applied to the physical world, with strong preference for the broad area of theoretical physics,” it says.
* He was the subject, not the canvas
After McCain’s attack on earmarks for planetariums, the Republican ticket has alienated another section of the scientific community. Sarah Palin, the potential vice president, made the following statement in a recent speech:
Where does a lot of that earmark money end up? ... Sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Think like: fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.
[Video here]
The Washington City Paper notes (their emphasis):
Last night, on Countdown, a Newsweek reporter who usually can be counted on to spout dull Conventional Wisdom declared that Sarah Palin’s quip that fruit fly research is a joke may in fact be the Dumbest Thing Sarah Palin Has Ever Said.
Think Progress says: “Palin did not specify what fruit fly research earmark she was referring to (presumably a grant for olive fruit fly research), but she is apparently unaware that scientific research with fruit flies has led to valuable discoveries that have boosted autism research.”
Researchers from the University of North Carolina have shot back with a video detailing the ‘Importance of fruit fly research’ (UNC Health Care weblog).
Other blogs are also taking up the Palin-bashing on this point:
A Blog Around the Clock
Pharyngula
It’s hard enough to convince children to eat their greens. How hard is it going to be when those greens are a horrific shade of purple? Well, you could tell them it might keep them healthy. (That always works with children doesn’t it?)
By putting genes from the snapdragon into tomatoes, scientists have managed to increase the amount of pigment anthocyanins in the fruit. Eating anthocyanins may protect against diseases and, as the researchers behind this ‘super tomato’ report in Nature Biotechnology, cancer-susceptible mice fed the purple fruit showed “a significant extension of life span”.
Cathie Martin, lead author on the new paper, says (press release):
This is one of the first examples of metabolic engineering that offers the potential to promote health through diet by reducing the impact of chronic disease. And certainly the first example of a GMO with a trait that really offers a potential benefit for all consumers. The next step will be to take the preclinical data forward to human studies with volunteers to see if we can promote health through dietary preventive medicine strategies.
In comments distributed by the Science Media Centre a number of people caution about extrapolating the results to humans. Paul Kroon, of the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, notes, “Although this is promising, it would be naive to assume that the same would necessarily occur in humans, but certainly there should be more research to investigate how these foods may be of benefit.”
News coverage
Scientists develop cancer fighting purple tomato – Reuters
Purple tomato 'may boost health' – BBC
Purple 'super tomato' could fight cancer – Marie Claire
Headline watch
Purple pizzas -- just what the doctor ordered – AFP
Image top: whole and cross-section of ripe wild-type and Del/Ros1N tomato fruit.
Image lower: tomatoes harvested at green (left), breaker (middle) and red (right) ripening stages. Upper row are wild; middle row is Del/Ros1C type; lower row is Del/Ros1N type.
Why reduce your greenhouse gas emissions when you can just engineer the whole planet to prevent global warming? The idea of ‘geo-engineering’ is hugely attractive.
“The world has not been able to get carbon emissions under control. We should look at other options,” Margaret Leinin, chief science officer of geo-engineering company Climos says in a sizeable Reuters story on the topic.
But there are a number of different suggestions for schemes, ranging from pouring iron into the seas (to lock carbon up in plankton) to spraying water droplets up into clouds. In a new paper in Nature Geoscience, Philip Boyd of the University of Otago in New Zealand calls for geo-engineering schemes to be ranked according to their efficacy, cost, risk and impact on climate.
“The ideas for how to change our climate keep getting pumped out. They get lots of column inches,” says Boyd (New Scientist). “My concern is that we will reach a tipping point, people will ask what are we doing about it, and none of the schemes will have been tested.”
While he doesn’t back one technology over another, Boyd does come up with this comparison chart (more colour means a higher ranking). I’m not sure it’s going to please information design people, but it gets the point across.
“In the near future, we must decide the relative importance of time, cost, risk and efficacy in tackling climate change if it is decided to press ahead with a geo-engineering approach,” Boyd writes in his paper. “Of course, it could transpire after such an analysis that climate mitigation strategies with a very low risk but apparently higher costs, such as direct carbon capture and storage, are the best approach.”
Early bird gets the better song
Mothers transfer the gift of music to the first eggs of their brood.
Potent greenhouse gas overlooked
Rising levels of nitrogen trifluoride, used to make plasma TVs, have been found in the atmosphere.
A paper came out online in Science yesterday with new images from Japan’s SELENE (also known as KAGUYA) spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the moon.
The authors report that they see no ice down there in the crater. Uh-oh. Does this mean that when we colonise the Moon, we'll only have cans of fizzy pop to drink?
The question about ice on the Moon is a long standing debate. There are two camps in the world of moon science; one claiming that there is ice and the other, yes, you guessed it, saying “oh no there isn’t”.
So this latest paper seems to be a victory for the non-ice camp, according to the coverage the news has received (MSNBC New York Times, Thaindian News) and a slightly more measured story from the Economist.
But hang on a minute, according to Ben Bussey, from Johns Hopkins University, no-one ever expected surface ice on the Moon anyway. “The absence of the presence of ice is not surprising given all previous data predicts that the ice is buried,” he told me. Bussey claims to be in neither of the aforementioned camps, but does say that he’d like to think ice is there. “The data is tantalisingly supportive”. But be clear – we’re talking about sub-surface ice here.
Forget the ice question, Bussey suggests, what this particular piece of work shows is some stunning images that for the first time allow us to look into the crater. Groovy.
And soon, thanks to the launch the other day of India's Chandraayan-1 (see the post from earlier today whooping it up for the launch), we might really see whether there’s ice buried in the crater or nor. The Indian space craft took with it an instrument that Bussey is co-investigator on – a radar specifically designed to look for ice called mini-RF. Come January, we might know for sure.
Image: Science
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
A 190 million-year-old skull could explain when carnivorous dinosaurs moved toward loving their greens. The skull shows that a tiny veggie-dining beast must have eaten some meat too.
“It’s likely that all dinosaurs evolved from carnivorous ancestors,” says Laura Porro, a post-doctoral student at the University of Chicago (press release). “Since heterodontosaurs are among the earliest dinosaurs adapted to eating plants, they may represent a transition phase between meat-eating ancestors and more sophisticated, fully-herbivorous descendents.”
The 4.5 centimetre-long skull belonged to a young Heterodontosaurus and is the world’s second smallest known dinosaur skull. “The skull of a baby dinosaur called Mussasaurus, or mouse lizard, from Argentina is smaller, at only 3 centimetres, [and is] probably the world’s smallest complete dinosaur skull,” Porro told Discovery News.
But even though this new toothy little thing doesn’t take the cake for being the smallest, it could give palaeontologists clues as to how and when dinosaurs, including Heterodontosauri, made the switch from dining on flesh to devouring plants. The creature’s tooth structure –worn, molar-like grinding teeth in the back and fang-like canines at the front – hints that the juvenile and his cousins were “in the midst of that transition”, says Porro, who helped described the new skull in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
To celebrate India’s successful launch of the Chandrayaan-1 space probe, which set off this week for the Moon, The Great Beyond has decided to compile a special Friday blog post for our readers. We present: the best songs related to Earth’s only natural satellite and our obsession with it. Plus, what message do these songs hold for India?
Feel free to suggest your own favourites.
Fly Me To The Moon - Various
A pop classic since its debut in the 50s, this song could have been America’s theme song during the Kennedy years. Sinatra’s version, embedded above, has become the standard.
Message for India: Go to the Moon (quickly, before the Russians get it).
More below the fold...
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Meet Mr Green Genes, the latest addition to the glowing animal menagerie.
Mr Green Genes is the first fluorescent cat created in the United States. Under normal circumstances the feline appears orange, but under UV light, his eyes, gums and tongue glow lime green—the outcome of a genetic experiment done at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species.
Researchers made Mr Green Genes glow green so they could learn whether they could make a transgenic cat, Betsy Dresser, the center’s director, told Newhouse News Service. The gene, inserted into to the cloned kitty’s DNA earlier this year, has no consequence for the feline’s health.
In fact, this green gene and its discovery grabbed the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for three lucky scientists earlier this month. (Listen to an interview with one of the winners, Martin Chalfie here).
“We wanted to know for sure that we could insert this gene into a cell and have it multiply,” Dresser told the MSNBC TODAY show’s Amy Robach. No glow, means a no go for the genes. But, because Mr Green Genes glows, the scientists know they nailed the insertion technique, a success that brings them one step closer to being able to insert healthy genes into humans and take the diseased ones out, Dresser noted.
And while the cat’s legacy may transform the medical world in a few years, Mr Green Genes could also leave his mark among his fellow felines in the coming months. “We’ll breed him and we’ll see if his kids glow, too,” Dresser said.
For more amazing green glowing critters, including glowing green mice, take a look here.
Image: by Anahid Pahhlawanian
“This is one of the most exciting things you can do on God’s Earth.”
Richard Noble is enthused about his ‘Bloodhound’ project: a car capable of 1,000 miles an hour (BBC).
‘Japan develops cheaper catalyst to make plastic’
Reuters says Keiichi Tomishige’s catalyst turns natural gas into plastic and alternative fuels more cheaply than existing compounds.
‘Appalachian Coal to Power India?’
The NY Times Dot Earth blog ponders India’s moves to buy American coal for its planned ‘Ultra-mega’ power plants.
“It may be one of the quickest recoveries in the history of the Endangered Species Act.”
Deputy Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett tells the LA Times she’s mighty pleased with efforts to rescue Southern California's island foxes.
'Bad egg' gas controls blood flow
Without a little hydrogen sulphide to relax the muscles, blood pressure starts to rise.
Europe's isotope shortage will continue into 2009
Hospitals forced to use substitute procedures for medical scans.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Hubble’s eyes are still closed. The good news is that its brains are back on. 
Today, telescope operators rebooted the computer that controls the nearly all of the science instruments aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. This system, and one other one that controls data formatting, went into safe mode on 16 October after an electrical short or open circuit jolted the systems, says Art Whipple, a telescope manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. There is a chance that similar shorts could happen in the future, he told reporters during a 23 October teleconference.
As for plans for rebooting Hubble’s eyes, telescope operators hope to release a new image by early Saturday morning. Whipple wasn’t sure what the image would be of, but the team plans to snap and release it to celebrate if the telescope successfully reboots one of its three cameras. Getting that image rests, of course, on whether the telescope suffers any more hiccups before then.
Image: Two aligned spiral galaxies, snapped before Hubble lost its vision
Posted for Meredith Wadman
It has emerged that the National Institutes of Health reprimanded a long-time staff scientist in 2005 for the heinous crime of claiming his NIH affiliation in a letter to Nature entitled “Public disclosure could deter conflicts of interest” .
In that letter Ned Feder, a cell biologist then working as a grants administrator at NIH’s diabetes institute, suggested that NIH require extramural grantees “to make public disclosures of their paid arrangements with pharmaceutical, investment and other companies, as well as their ownership of stock and stock options,” as a condition of receiving funds from the agency’s $24 billion extramural research portfolio.
At the time, on the heels of controversy, NIH had tightened conflict requirements for researchers on its Bethesda campus. But Feder was talking about university scientists on NIH grants – the very same folks that Senator Charles Grassley is now methodically exposing for underreporting such income, as we reported this week along with other publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The British government is facing a fight from MPs over a climate change bill due to go to a vote in the house of commons next week, according to reports.
The BBC says 56 labour MPs are demanding that the bill include emissions from the aviation and shipping under UK’s greenhouse gas targets. The rebellion would be big enough to defeat prime minister Gordon Brown and scupper the bill.
Last week the government announced a commitment to an 80% cut in carbon emissions by 2050. But it excluded the aviation and shipping industries from the target because it says there is no system for sharing responsibility for international emissions.
The rebel MPs are calling for an amendment to the bill to state that if emissions from these industries grow, the government must compensate with extra carbon dioxide cuts elsewhere.
You know something is strange when even a peer reviewed journal calls it ‘bizarre’. Nature presents: Epidexipteryx hui. The strangest fossil seen on the Great Beyond in a while is detailed in a paper in this week’s issue.
Its most obvious intriguing feature is the two prominent pairs of tail feathers, which could have been used in mating displays.
“It shows that feathers were likely being used for ornamentation for many millions of years before they were modified for flight,” says Angela Milner, an expert at London’s Natural History Museum who was not involved in the research (BBC). “It provides fascinating evidence of evolutionary experiments with feathers that were going on before small dinosaurs finally took to the air and became birds.”
Discovered in China by researchers led by Fucheng Zhang, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the animal is probably between 152 and 168 million years old. This would make it slightly older than the earliest known bird Archaeopteryx.
“This is very exciting indeed, since it gives us a window into a stage of avialan history just preceding the appearance of the classic ‘first bird’,” says Zhang (National Geographic). Fellow paper author Zhonghe Zhou, adds, “Therefore, it could provide a lot of information about the transition process from dinos to birds” (Fox News).
The name comes from the Greek for ‘display’ and ‘feather’ (‘Epidexi’ and ‘pteryx’) and the late palaeontologist Yaoming Hu. Hu was an expert in Mesozoic mammals who died in April, says AFP.
Headline watch
Shake a tail-feather: Scientists reveal the pigeon-sized dinosaur that is birds' earliest ancestor – Daily Mail
Shake Your Jurassic Tail Feather – The Loom
On today’s election science round up:Obama on India’s space mission
Palin on stem cells
McCain talks ethanol
Pharma giant Merck is cutting 7,200 jobs after its profits this year dropped 28% in the third quarter.
The job cuts, which amount to around 12% of the total workforce, will hit all areas of the company. Merck does say it will be “enhancing its research operations” but this will be via expanding what it calls “access to worldwide external science” (statement).
More external science is not necessarily good for researchers inside Merck, and the company says three basic research sites will close by the end of 2009: Tsukuba in Japan, Pomezia in Italy and Seattle in the United States.
Nature Podcast - meet a feathered dinosaur with a carnival-style plume, watch in astonishment as researchers make X-rays from sticky tape and find out that oxygen-producing bacteria aren't quite as ancient as we thought. Plus, highlights from last week's autism conference in Pittsburgh.
Row brews over when photosynthesis emerged
Research contradicts key evidence that Sun-fuelled life arose 2.7 billion years ago.
Biosafety lab passes disaster test - Premium content
Texas facility cleared to analyse lethal pathogens.
Cash row threatens Earth-monitoring system
Europe's flagship Kopernikus mission faces potential delays.
Iranian paper sparks sense of deja vu
Allegations of plagiarism prompt journal to retract report.
VIDEO: Sticky tape generates X-rays
How weird is that?
“One could assume that a US medical school would, no matter what the amount, refuse to accept money to rename its medical school the Benito Mussolini School of Medicine.”
Jay Loeffler and Edward Halperin ponder the growing trend of naming medical schools after funding donors. (JAMA)
“We were pedalling pretty hard.”
The University of Maine’s Department of Computer Science powered one of its super-computers by rigging it up to ten cyclists. (The Maine Campus)
“The number of occasions they have been used and the circumstances I can not go into in this forum.”
Brig Chapman, director of counter-terrorism at the UK’s ministry of defence, says scientists from the nuclear and biological warfare labs at Porton Down have been deployed in the UK. He could tell you why; but then he’d have to kill you... (BBC)
“Small robots that are able to work together could explore the planet.”
Robotics researcher Marc Szymanski is part of Europe’s I-Swarm project to create miniature autonomous robots that can co-operate with each other. (PhysOrg)
Lisa Nowak, the allegedly vengeful former astronaut, is back in court, as prosecutors argue before appellate judges that detectives should be allowed to use evidence found in her car. Nowak faces charges of attempted kidnapping after she undertook what police say was a trip from Texas to Florida to confront and pepper spray the girlfriend of another astronaut, former space shuttle pilot Bill Oefelein [see AP story].
A lower court judge had agreed with Nowak’s lawyers that evidence found in her car should be inadmissible during trial, because detectives were directed to her car after a long, sleepless interview Nowak had with police during questioning after her arrest in February 2007 in Orlando. Among the things found in her car were a wig, duct tape, and a trench coat. What about the infamous NASA-issued diapers? Police say Nowak told them she used diapers so that she could make the 1,000 mile trip without breaks. Nowak's lawyers have denied that narrative, saying the media got the story wrong after toddler-sized diapers were found in the trunk. But that didn't stop people from putting diapers up on eBay after the incident.
Image: NASA
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
India has rocketed itself into the Asian space race.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched its first unmanned lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, from the Sriharikota space centre in southern India at 6:20 am India time (8:50 pm ET).
It’s a proud day for the country, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said after. "When completed, this mission will put India in the very small group of six countries which have thus far sent space missions to the moon,” he told Australia’s ABC News.
To date, only the US, Russia, countries within the European Space Agency, Japan and China have sent missions to the moon.
Posted for Declan Butler
The pair of 800 pound gorillas that are Microsoft and Google are shaking the cages of convention in traditional disease research. This week, the charity arms of both - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its Sergey and Larry counterpart Google.org - announced millions of dollars for blue skies research, along the lines of the US military's DARPA whose motto has been to support “revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and their military use.” Likewise, Google and Microsoft are trying to attract new blood and ideas, for medical payoffs in the fields of detecting, preventing, treating, and controlling killer diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and pandemic flu.
Today, Microsoft announced the 104 winners, from 22 countries and six continents (see graphic below), of a competition in novel ideas for global health (list of winners). “Projects cover a wide range of innovation, including a “mosquito flashlight” to prevent malaria transmission by disrupting wavelengths, self-destructing TB cells, and studying anti-infective properties of the eye to help prevent HIV/AIDS and other infectious disease,” the company says in a press release.
The Large Hadron Collider has already been fired up and it has already broken. Yesterday the giant particle physics experiment was also formally inaugurated as Swiss president Pascal Couchepin, French prime minister François Fillon and science ministers from across the world met at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva.
In an obligatory nod to the world’s financial woes, Fillion said, “The financial crisis that is currently raging shows us the most destabilising face of globalisation. But the LHC is an example of its most promising aspect.” (AFP.)
Of course the machine is not working at the moment, after a massive amount of liquid helium leaked from its cooling system. This fact could hardly be glossed over and Raymond Orbach, US undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy, told AP, “Frankly it was a surprise that it worked the first time without a glitch.”
However Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, added, “I have no doubts they'll get back into operation within three to four months.”
The Daily Telegraph is among papers to note that those attending the reception were treated to a banquet of ‘molecular cuisine’: “molecular egg curdle and ice-cream mixed with liquid nitrogen, created by two of the world’s best chefs Ettore Bocchia of Italy and Ferran Adria, who runs El Bulli restaurant in Spain”.
Liquid nitrogen? Let’s hope that none of that leaked...
Image: CERN control room / CERN
Amid widespread concerns that the global financial meltdown could hinder efforts to tackle climate change, European Commission plans to cut greenhouse gases face difficulties after EU environment ministers led by Italy called for significant changes at a meeting in Luxembourg on Monday.
Under the plans, the EU would cut greenhouse gases by 20% compared to 2005 levels by the end of the next decade. The major sticking point is proposed reforms to the existing carbon emission trading scheme, which when first implemented in 2005 gave carbon credits to industry for free.
Now the European Commission wants industry to buy emissions allowances at auction from 2013. According to press reports, some EU member states, including Italy and highly coal-reliant Poland, are concerned that the reforms would put them at a competitive disadvantage. They have threatened to block the plans unless amendments are made that would allow energy intensive industries such as cement and steel and the power sector to keep their free allowances until 2020.
The latest in our occasional series rounding up how the credit crisis is impacting on the world of science.
Reuters said last week that financial woes could halt Italian nuclear power plans. “The financial market turmoil has made investors less willing to put up the billions of euros needed to build just a single plant”, it warned.
Things are looking better in China, where Chemistry World informs us that the credit crunch may lead to more spending on science. Experts told the magazine that the government might increase its spending in response to a drop in exports, with science high on the priority list for such spending.
Over in the UK, the combination of the credit crunch and rising tuition fees is pushing students into science disciplines at university, says the Daily Mail. The number of students starting maths degrees is 8% up on last year, with engineering up 6.4%, physics up 4.4% and chemistry up 3.3%.
“Students are turning back to courses which lead to better paying jobs after graduating,” explains the Mail.
Readers with good memories may recall that Robert Gill of the US Geological Survey is something of an expert on the bar-tailed godwit.
In 2005 he was in the news for finding that this bird held the record for the longest non-stop flight. New Scientist noted at the time that the godwit flew at least 8,000 kilometres non-stop when migrating from Alaska to Australia, but Gill believed that they might make their entire 11,000 km return trip in one go.
In 2007 he confirmed this using satellite tags. “It’s official - the godwit makes the longest non-stop migratory flight in the world,” said the BBC.
Now this research has been published, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“These extraordinary non-stop flights establish new extremes for avian flight performance, have profound implications for understanding the physiological capabilities of vertebrates and how birds navigate, and challenge current physiological paradigms on topics such as sleep, dehydration and phenotypic flexibility,” Gill and colleagues write.
“... We propose that this transoceanic route may function as an ecological corridor rather than a barrier, providing a windassisted passage relatively free of pathogens and predators.”
More coverage
Birds Fly More Than 7,000 Miles Nonstop, Study Shows - Washington Post
Wading bird travels 7,000 miles nonstop to break flying record – Guardian
Headline watch
Good godwit! Wading bird flys nonstop for eight days to set new record – Daily Mail
Image: Robert Gill
India heads for the Moon
Chandrayaan-1 mission launches India into the space race.
Plumes of methane identified on Mars
Finding could influence choice of landing site for Mars Science Laboratory.
Give me my genome
Personal genome sequences could herald a shift in research participation.
The internet auction site eBay is getting some good press for its decision to ban most ivory sales on its sites around the world. The company announced its decision - a toughening of an earlier policy, which merely banned all cross-border ivory sales - on 20 October, just before the International Fund for Animal Welfare released a damning report on the booming Internet trade in endangered species.
Continue reading "A win for the elephants - but what about the birds?" »
Posted for Emma Marris
More than 1,000 dinosaur tracks have been found on a ¾ acre site on the Arizona-Utah border (University of Utah press release, AP story, BBC story).
The spot has been dubbed a "dinosaur dance floor" by media-savvy geologists, conjuring up visions of prehistoric partying sure to appeal to the 6-year-old in all of us. In the Palaios article on the find, Marjorie Chan and Winston Seiler of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City are a little more subdued, calling the area "A Wet Interdune Dinosaur Trampled Surface".
The exact species that left the tracks 190 million years ago are not identified, but there were at least four. Also preserved are rare tail-drag marks.
At least, they may be tail-drag marks and tracks. The press release notes that "One anonymous reviewer of the Palaios study still believes the holes are erosion features." Naturally, the researchers disagree, noting among other things that the tracks overlap and that they come in four different shapes.
The area is remote and arid, and was very dry even in the days of the dinos. The researchers say it is likely that it was a watering hole in the desert. So perhaps a better title for this post would have been "Midnight at the Oasis". But with Halloween just around the corner, who can resist Bobby 'Boris' Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers?
More images here.
Image: geologist Winston Seiler on the ‘trample surface’ / Roger Seiler
“Alaskan pollock are becoming Russian pollock”
The LA Times sees an international problem as an important catch for fishermen moves north due to temperature changes.
“Indonesia's tin islands: blessed or cursed?”
Reuters takes an in-depth look at tin mining on the Bangka-Belitung islands.
Climate change and tigers
Reuters again, with a story that blames climate change for increasing numbers of tiger attacks in India's Sundarban islands.
“The small fry of the aquatic world are being sacrificed in large numbers each year to the cooling systems of power plants.”
AP looks at an unfortunate consequence of using river and sea water in power stations.
Resurrecting our occasional series of pictures of space is this snap from Spain’s Calar Alto observatory.
The spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is 50 million light-years away and was discovered by Wilhelm Herschel in 1784 and this image is “one of the best snapshots ever obtained”, says the observatory’s press release.
Coverage in Spanish
Galaxias en la punta de los dedos – Levante-EMV
La foto de una galaxia similar a la Vía Láctea, captada por un observatorio español, será imagen del día de la NASA – Europa Press
As we move closer to the finish line the candidates are still finding the time to talk science. Today:
Obama’s NASA attack
The candidates on climate change
Science stances
A Vote for Science part II
Ancient microbes made giant magnets
Magnetic fossils show how climate change creates new extremes.
Is physics better than biology?
Citation statistics now comparable across disciplines.
Posted on Behalf of Ashley Yeager
Sarah Palin 0 : Endangered species 2
That’s the score after a small, whitish whale got the best of the Alaskan governor last week. The federal government has added belugas that live in Cook Inlet in Alaska to the endangered species list despite cries from Palin that the listing is premature. She said the same about polar bears earlier in the year — but to no avail.
As for the whales, in spite of protections already in place, the Cook Inlet population is not recovering, says James Balsiger, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries service (press release).
Canada declares bisphenol A toxic
Environment minister John Baird announces it will be banned in baby bottles, AP.
“It is extremely difficult on the seas ... to figure out the distance [between boats].”
Canadian judge Jean-Paul Décoste acquits five animal-rights activists of coming too close to a seal hunt in 2006, in The Canadian Press.
More seal news...
There has been a “dramatic decline” in the number of common seals around the UK, says the Guardian (headline: Not so common).
“Taiwan, Province of China.”
NASA has been forced to backtrack after listing Taiwan as part of China on one of its databases, says Taiwan News. [Hat tip: NASA Watch.]
Cyclones appear to be responsible for a large amount of organic carbon tied up in ocean sediments.
In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, Robert Hilton and colleagues report on the impact of cyclone-induced floods on carbon in the LiWu River in Taiwan. They found that between 77 and 92% of non-fossil carbon eroded from the LiWu catchment area was moved during floods linked to cyclones.
As increased sea surface temperatures from global warming could increase the intensity of cyclones, this could create negative feedback, with bigger cyclones locking up more organic carbon in sediments. Sadly this is not going to stop global warming.
“In terms of the manmade carbon cycle this is not going to save us. But it illustrates that the earth has natural ways of dealing with carbon dioxide,” says Hilton, a researcher at Cambridge University (Reuters).
He adds, “although we found that these tropical cyclones act as nature’s way of trying to re-balance the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, they can only do so much” (Daily Telegraph).
Reuters also notes the rather terrifying fact that paper author Meng-Chiang Chen of the Taroko National Park Headquarters was sent out during cyclones, tied up in a harness, in order to gather water from the river. Rather him than me...
Image: Cyclone Mindulle approximately 480 miles southeast of Tapei / NASA
NASA’s IBEX mission successfully launched on Sunday, sending the Interstellar Boundary Explorer safely on its way to the edge of our solar system.
Sadly this image seems to be the best NASA could produce of the launch. It allegedly shows the moment the Pegasus rocket carrying IBEX was dropped from the ‘Stargazer’ aircraft responsible for the initial lifting. After this the Pegasus carried the mission to 60 miles up where IBEX’s own rocket motor took over.
Nature’s Ashley Yeager previewed the mission last Friday and her story can be read here.
Image: NASA
Ingredients
Malaria parasite (or other organism of your choice)
Butter
Flour
Sugar
Eggs
Method
Sequence your chosen organism’s genetic code.
Submit your genome sequence to Nature.
Ensure your paper is given pride of place on the cover of that journal.
Make your cake.
Put said cover of Nature onto your cake.
Et voila. Your Nature cake should now look something like this...
Thanks to the authors behind the recent Plasmodium vivax paper for sending us these photos of their brilliant cake. Below the fold: the team with their tasty, tasty cover.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Hubble will remain blind and comatose until late next week — at the earliest.
Trouble with the space telescope began on 27 September when a glitch occurred in the computer system that processes and transmits data to Earth. NASA engineers began trying to resurrect a back-up system to restore operations on 15 October, but the mission went awry in its second day.
Everything was going well until engineers began firing up the scientific instruments. That’s when the one of the cameras shut itself down due to a problem with a power source, said Art Whipple, manager of Hubble operations at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
While diagnosing that malfunction, engineers received transmissions indicating that an unknown problem with one of the computer systems caused a cascade of events that sent the entire telescope into safe mode, Whipple explained during a press conference on Friday.
Fortunately, he said, Hubble can still transmit data to the ground and did perform a “data dump” so telescope operators can assess the anomalies and hopefully solve the problem. Prior to firing up the backup computer system, the scientists could not get data from many of the instruments.
Shifting through all the data will, of course, take time, but Whipple said he and the Hubble team are optimistic that they can bring the telescope back online possibly late next week. As for the last Hubble servicing mission, the new problems do not currently appear to affect it, Whipple said.
For more information and updates, check out the Hubble Internet site.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Hubble is blind and in a coma. It may be revived at some point but at the moment the telescope is in ‘safe mode’ after engineers detected two anomalies in its systems.
Nearly all scientific observations performed with the famous telescope were cut off on 27 September when a glitch occurred in Hubble’s main computer system, which processes and transmits data from its science instruments to Earth.
NASA engineers have been working this week to override the faulty computer and resurrect an 18-year-old spare from orbital hibernation to use instead. The backup system (Side B) was fired up for the first time on the night of 15 October.
"All that went exactly as we hoped,” NASA spokesman Ed Campion told MSNBC.com’s Alan Boyle.
So engineers then tested that this backup could talk to the telescope’s cameras and actually send information back to Earth. This is where things started to go wrong.
Hubble engineers detected what NASA describes as “two anomalies”. Now all of the telescope's computer systems and instruments are back in safe mode. Troubleshooting to determine the problems is currently underway and NASA is promising an updated status report shortly.
Revisiting the Miller-Urey experiment
PZ Myers looks at a paper in Science that says Stanley Miller’s historic experiment revealed more about the origins of life than previously believed.
“What we found is an inconsistent and too often controlling situation in many agencies.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists has been looking at US agencies’ policies on releasing scientific information. Slapped wrists for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Fish and Wildlife Service (Washington Post story, UCS report).
“Iran makes huge ostrich sandwich”
The BBC headline says it all really...
“The process was a sham and an insult to the people who took part.”
Greenpeace is raging after the UK’s Market Research Standards Board slammed a consultation run for the government into nuclear power as containing information that was “inaccurately or misleadingly presented, or was imbalanced” (reported by Civil Service Network).
Please welcome the world’s longest insect. Measuring a horrifying 56.7cm (including legs) this stick insect has just been unveiled by the Natural History Museum in London and was described in the scientific literature for the first time this week.
In a paper in the journal Zootaxa, researchers Frank Hennemann and Oskar Conle propose a revision of the classification of oriental stick insects and along the way get around to describing seven new species (paper abstract pdf).
The star of this show is the record-breaking Chan’s megastick (Phobaeticus chani). It was given to Malaysian entomologist Datuk Chan Chew Lun by a local man and then shown to UK scientist Philip Bragg, who recognized it as a new species. Chan then donated one of the three known specimens to the museum.
“We’ve known about both of the previous record holders for over a hundred years, so it is extraordinary that an even bigger species has only just been discovered,” says George Beccaloni, stick-insect expert at the NHM (press release).
More photos and links to other media reports below the fold.
Continue reading "Picture post: longest insect is the stuff of nightmares" »
It is code red in the arctic, as America’s annual Arctic Report Card is released.
“These are dynamic and dramatic times in the Arctic,” says Jackie Richter-Menge, editor of report card (McClatchy Newspapers). “The outlook isn't good.”
Produced by the government National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the report card classifies three of its six areas as code red, meaning changes are occurring that are strongly attributed to warming.
These areas are atmosphere, sea ice and Greenland. The remaining three report card areas of biology, ocean and land are code yellow, meaning signals are mixed. On last year’s card only atmosphere and sea ice were code red, with the remaining four areas code yellow.
Huge recent losses of sea ice have led to record air temperatures, with this autumn 5 degrees C above normal, warns NOAA. One bad thing leads to another, explains Richter-Menge (ABC News): “The loss of sea ice allows more solar heating of the ocean, and the more the ocean heats up, the harder it is to grow sea ice.”
For more on this see Nature’s article ‘Arctic sea ice reaches annual low’ from September.
Report card highlights from NOAA:
Atmosphere
5° C temperature increases were recorded in autumn
Sea Ice
Near-record minimum summer sea ice extent
Biology
Fisheries and marine mammals impacted by loss of sea ice
Ocean
Observed increase in temperature of surface and deep ocean layers
Greenland
Records set in both the duration and extent of summer surface melt
Land
Permafrost temperatures tend to increase, while snow extent tends to decrease
Image: Arctic sunset / NOAA Climate Program Office, NABOS 2006 Expedition
The US Environmental Protection Agency has finalized regulations reducing the legal limit on airborne lead by 90 percent (AP, New York Times).
The EPA has come under fire repeatedly in recent years from environmentalists (see coverage here and here), but they appear to be fairly pleased with this week's announcement. The new lead regulations replace previous standards dating back to 1978 and come in at .15 microgrammes per cubic metre, compared to .25 microgrammes per cubic metre in the UK.
Not everybody is entirely happy, of course. The new standard is within the range recommended by a science advisory panel charged with evaluating air quality issues, but a separate advisory panel focused on children's health recommended a substantially lower level: .02 microgrammes per cubic metre.
"Although this is a move in a more positive direction, many children will still face the risk of unnecessarily high levels of lead in their blood," Frank O'Donnell, who heads the advocacy group Clean Air Watch in Washington, wrote Thursday. "That is the judgment of EPA's children's health advisory panel. And children are the ones mainly at risk here."
CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, has released its report on what went wrong on 19 September, just as the Large Hadron Collider was firing up. Blame a bad electrical connection that led to the vacuum enclosure rupturing. The full report is a rather grim litany of engineering gone awry: "soot-like dust", it turns out, contaminated the beam pipes "over some distance".
The LHC (Nature special here) won't start working now until spring 2009 -- not a happy delay for the particle physicists who have waited for it for years.
Agriculture unaffected by pollinator declines
Global crop yields have not suffered even though key insect populations have shrunk.
Scientists clash over wolves' endangered status
Legal and academic wrangling sees biologists accused of "crying wolf".
Yeast reveals sexual selection in action
Microbe provides way to track evolution gene by gene.
A fossil of the strange Tiktaalik fish has been giving up more of its secrets this week.
In a paper in Nature Jason Downs of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and his colleagues report on the head structure of Tiktaalik roseae, dubbed the ‘fishapod’ due to its position between fish and land-dwelling creatures. They show that it had developed features to allow it to breathe air and move on land, features such as a neck to allow head movements when the body is not as free to move as it would be in open water.
National Geographic notes that the features associated with the ‘neck’ suggest the animal wasn’t very good a pumping water into its body. This doesn’t mean it couldn’t breathe through its gills, but it suggests it maybe wasn’t spending lots of time underwater.
“It’s not to say that Tiktaalik itself is a terrestrial animal,” Downs told Reuters. “It spent most of its time in water, for sure. So what it’s really demonstrating is that many of these changes that are occurring and things that we once associated with terrestrial life are turning out, in fact, to be adaptations for life in shallow water settings that Tiktaalik might had found himself in.”
“We used to think of this transition of the neck and skull as a rapid event. largely because we lacked information about the intermediate animals. Tiktaalik neatly fills this morphological gap. It lets us see many of the individual steps and resolve the relative timing of this complex transition,” says paper author Neil Shubin, of the University of Chicago and Field Museum (press release).
Image: A model of Tiktaalik roseae / Model by Tyler Keillor, Photo by Beth Rooney
A “fighting chance” for red squirrels
In the UK the threatened red squirrel appears to be developing resistance to a virus being spread by invasive grey squirrels, says the Independent.
Did Australia de-rail a whale of a deal?
Environmental groups blame Australia for scuppering an important agreement between pro- and anti-whaling countries, according to ABC News.
“Useful idiots”
Energy analyst William Yeatman blames German environmentalists for the fact Russia has that country over a barrel.
Nothing is immune from the current financial crisis / credit crunch / liquidity meltdown / world doom. Even Nature News is not immune, as we’ve just launched our ‘Finance in crisis’ specials page.
If that’s not enough, below the fold you can find what the rest of the world’s media is saying about science during the squeeze regarding:Forest finance
Food finance
University finance
McCain is gunning for planetariums again! In last night’s debate he once again wheeled out the “$3 million for an overhead projector in a planetarium in his hometown” line against Obama.
This has already taken up enough of all of our time. Read the previous posts it you want to know why it’s not an overhead projector and why planetarium’s should be supported.
McCain: planetariums suck - September 16
McCain: I still hate planetariums - October 08
When a planetarium becomes a tank helmet - October 09
Apart on the planetarium punch, some more substantial science points also emerged in last night’s debate.
This strange contraption is the result of a collaboration between Australian artist David Rogers and US Geological Survey scientist Andy Michael. The ‘seismic art installation’ displays Californian earth quakes in real time by shaking its three-metre high steel rods.
The Parkfield Interventional EarthQuake Fieldwork (PIEQF) exhibit receives data on all earthquakes above magnitude 0.1, of which there are around 40 in the Golden State every day.
Michael and Rogers say they hope the work will help people accept and understand the risks posed by earthquakes.
“The Parkfield installation embodies the extra dimension that art brings to science, helping to visualize what's going on below the surface in a way science can't on its own,” says Michael (press release). “David’s art brings earthquakes that happen under California every day to the surface and makes them real and visible for all to see. His work gives everyone a deeper appreciation for how the earth works, and why they need to prepare for the inevitable large and damaging earthquakes.”
If you can’t make it out to Parkfield you can watch on the webcam (note that PIEQF ‘sleeps’ from 9.30 in the evening to 6.30 in the morning).
More pictures below the fold.
Continue reading "Shake it! Earthquake art comes to California" »
Nature Podcast
This week, we restore movement to paralysed arms, get inside the head of a not-so-fishy fossil, and some organic molecules assemble themselves into a computer! Plus, world changing science meetings; we find out how the Human Genome Project got going.
Monkeys move paralysed muscles with their minds
Sending brain signals through electrodes to a paralysed wrist muscle restores movement.
New law threatens Italian research jobs - Premium content
Scientists protest over government's cost cutting.
Computer circuit builds itself
Organic molecules organize themselves to form a bridge between electrodes.
Canadians seemingly turned their backs on the environment in favour of protecting their pocketbooks in their federal election this week. Incumbent Conservative Steven Harper, who was campaigning mainly on the question of “who can lead in these troubling economic times” (he has training as an economist), won himself a strong minority government. Liberal opposition leader Stephane Dion, who’s main policy push had been for a “green shift” (increasing taxes against pollution and decreasing taxes against income), lost some ground as his party wound up with fewer seats than before. (See our story and editorial previewing the election ; and find full details on the vote results on CBC)
This was despite a big push for strategic voting in Canada to elect “anyone but conservatives” (otherwise known as the ‘ABC’ campaign).
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Cows can no longer take the blame for being the first to spread TB to humans.
Scientists long thought humans contracted the disease roughly six thousand years ago when drinking infected cattle’s milk. But the discovery of two much older human TB victims—a mother and a child who died 9,000 years ago – disproves this notion.
Bones from the mother and child were discovered off the coast of Haifa, Israel in a Neolithic village now submerged by the sea. Looking at the fossils hinted that the mother and child once carried active TB infections. But to verify this, Helen Donoghue of the University College London and her team extracted DNA from the bones and tested them for any telltale signs of the disease.
Surprisingly, “the only strains that turned up boasted the tell-tale signature of human tuberculosis, not a cow or other animal strain,” Donoghue told New Scientist. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14941-oldest-cases-of-human-tb-found-beneath-the-sea.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news4_head_dn14941
That means “it was not animals that infected humans, it was humans infecting humans,” which suggests that humans settling in packs, rather than humans domesticating animals, led to the spread of the disease, she told the Telegraph.
Donoghue and her UK and Israeli colleagues reported their findings in PLoS One online on 15 October. They hope that further DNA analysis from this and other ancient TB cases will continue to give scientists clues about how the bacterium that causes the disease has evolved over thousands of years and about how it may change in the future.
“This then helps us improve our understanding of modern TB and how we might develop more effective treatments,” Mark Spigelman, also a coauthor of the study from University College London, said in a press release.
Image: National Tuberculosis Association 'What You should know about Tuberculosis' pamphlet cover, via NIH.
After recent allegations about psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff’s undeclared payments from pharmaceutical companies the National Institutes of Health has suspended a $9.3 million grant to his university.
According to media reports, the grant was for a depression study led by Nemeroff.
Emory University has also revealed that the NIH has imposed what it calls “special award conditions” on all grants made to its researchers (pdf of letter to staff). Emory says says it is implementing “a new University-wide central office to oversee administration and enforcement of conflict of interest (COI) policies”.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution says Emory has been awarded over $251 million in NIH grants this year, which makes up 61% of its external funds for research.
Read more: Nature’s leader on Nemeroff: More than one bad apple.
Warwick University expects more than 200 human body parts to arrive next week. You might think that wasn’t out of the ordinary, but this time there’s a twist.
The institution’s medical school has purchased “plastinated” teaching aids costing £400 000 from the controversial Gunther von Hagens. Von Hagens, who works out of Guben, Germany, is famous for carting exhibitions of preserved and carefully chopped up dead folks around the world, occasionally displaying them riding dissected horses or playing chess (press release).
Warwick’s anatomy students will be under strict orders on how to handle the expensive flesh, which should stay in one piece (or however many pieces are intended) for about a decade, according to the university press office. Head of department Peter Abrahams, apparently trotted around the workshops of various suppliers, testing their embalmed bits before agreeing to the deal with Dr Death (as von Hagens is weirdly proud to be known).
The Telegraph just published a profile of von Hagens and his German factory, with its blood-red floors and 150-odd workers, who boast jobs as peculiar as preparing Santa Claus’s lungs.
Intriguingly, the obsessive anatomist was once sold by East Germany to West Germany (West Germany purchased the release of about 30,000 political prisoners from East Germany - Times), and 8,000 people have volunteered to have their corpses dunked in a bath of acetone, injected with silicone rubber and then cured by him or his craftsmen.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4613780.ece
More coverage
University buys £400k body parts – BBC
University buys body parts – PA
Image: Von Hagens with students and parts
Channel 4 News and the non-profit Nuclear Information Service have found new evidence of how last summer's intense flooding halted operations for a full 9 months at one of Britain's two nuclear weapons sites.
On 20 July 2007, the county of Berkshire was inundated by torrential rainfall. The Atomic Weapons Establishment's Burghfield site, where warheads are serviced and disassembled, had some 84 buildings affected by the flooding—including some areas used for assembling nuclear components. Water and highly-enriched plutonium don't mix—good ol' H2O can make a pretty good neutron moderator, and could even lead to a nuclear chain reaction within a warhead. It wouldn't be a full-scale blast in a properly maintained modern warhead, but it could still release radiation.
Fortunately, there was no chance of that happening. The flooding occurred on a weekend, while the Burghfield site was locked up tight, and emergency crews followed the correct protocol. Still, the damage was so extensive that nuclear work at Burghfield couldn't begin again until the spring of 2009.
The UK's other main nuclear site at Aldermaston, where atomic research is done, was unaffected by the flooding.
The full report on the incident is here, and a nice summary by the NIS is here.
Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman.
There’s nothing like a roundtable in Washington three weeks before Election Day to get a reporter confused about just where the candidates stand on matters like the future of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. Or stem cell research.
With a sparkling US Capitol in the background, policy emissaries from the McCain and Obama campaigns today (14 October) spent an hour jousting about health care reform and scientific research in the swishy, glass-walled digs of the Knight Conference Center on the seventh floor at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The event was put together by science advocacy group Research!America. Representing the red corner was Ike Brannon, a senior policy adviser for McCain with a background at the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget (Douglas Holtz-Eakin of McCain’s innermost circle apparently gave organizers the slip to hit the campaign trail with his boss). Tim Westmoreland, a professor of law and public policy who used to direct the federal Medicaid programme, was dispatched from Georgetown University to hold up the side for Obama. The moderator was David Leonhardt, the New York Times economics columnist.
After pushing Westmoreland and Brannon for a guided tour of the McCain and Obama health plans, Leonhardt, who did his level best to get them to actually answer questions, came around to NIH funding.
Continue reading "Candidates speak out on NIH funding, stem cells (sort of)" »
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
If all goes well, Hubble could be back to its old tricks by the end of the week.
The Hubble Space Telescope’s science mission has been largely suspended since 27 September, when the earth-orbiting observatory suffered a hardware failure with its science-data computer. But NASA officials announced Tuesday that a team of engineers is ready to begin reconfiguring the damaged equipment.
By Friday morning engineers and astronomers alike will know whether Hubble will be able to continue operating as the agency prepares a servicing mission now scheduled for 2009, said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Space Telescope Systems Management Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Reconfiguring the telescope’s computer processing system is complex and requires that certain elements of the telescope hardware be rebooted after more than 18 years of dormancy. There’s a possibility that some of the equipment won’t boot up, Whipple said, but the record for bringing dormant components on line is nearly perfect. That gives the team “very good confidence that this will work,” he said.
If it fails, Hubble will likely remain in a safe mode until the servicing crew can replace the damaged hardware, which processes information from the telescope’s scientific instruments and passes it on to Earth. Astronauts had planned to perform the last servicing mission on the telescope in October, but the hardware failure caused NASA to push the mission back.
Once the reboot of the current system is complete later this week, Hubble engineers will begin to test the spare system and bring it “up to speed”. By November, the engineers should know if the spare can endure a shaky ride into space and then be successfully integrated into Hubble's circuitry, Whipple said.
Of course, the additional testing of the system and the shifting of the launch come at a price. NASA officials peg the cost at $10 million per month.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Saturn’s all spun up. New views of the planet from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft reveal the full glory of the enormous cyclones spinning at the gas giant’s poles.
"These are truly massive cyclones, hundreds of times stronger than the most giant hurricanes on Earth," Cassini scientist Kevin Baines of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, said in a JPL media release.
He added that Cassini revealed dozens of puffy, cumulus clouds swirling around both of Saturn’s poles, “betraying the presence of giant thunderstorms lurking beneath,” and that thunderstorms are thought to be the engine for these giant weather systems.
Icelandic biotech feels the pinch
deCode Genetics runs risk of losing stock-market listing.
Mars missions face cost crunch
In Europe and America, future missions are in doubt.
‘Banjo used in brain surgery.’
The strangest video to cross our screens so far this week. (BBC.)
“One thing we’ve learned is that we’ve got to have something resilient enough to take at least some impact from a vessel.”
A fishing boat has taught Rick Luettich, a University of North Carolina marine scientist, a lesson. At the cost of a $100,000 instrument platform. (WRAL.)
Dennis the manatee dies.
Rescued from cold Cape Cod, Dennis died after a 27-hour trip to a Florida rehabilitation centre. (Boston Globe.)
“A Faustian pact with dark forces” or “We have to go there”.
Architects debate designing nuclear power stations. (The Guardian.)
The myth that bonobos are a peace-loving, gentle species can finally be killed this week. Killed like the monkeys that new research proves bonobos are hunting and eating in the forests of the Congo.
Female-dominated bonobo societies have often been considered ‘loving’, ‘hippie’ or ‘peacenik’. But in today’s issue of Current Biology Martin Surbeck and Gottfried Hohmann report direct evidence that they hunt monkeys, adding to their previous evidence (a grisly mangabey finger in a bonobo turd). The new paper shows they actively hunt monkey-meat, ruling out the possibility they took that mangabey away from another predator.
“The lack of male dominance and physical violence is often used to explain the relative absence of hunting and meat eating in bonobos,” says Hohmann (press release). “Our observations suggest that, in contrast to previous assumptions, these behaviours may persist in societies with different social relations.”
Primatologist primatologist Elizabeth Lonsdorf, told National Geographic: “The second I read this, I thought: Oh good, finally!”
Lonsdorf, of Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, adds, “Bonobos being so peaceful never sat well with me. We see all species of captive apes, including bonobos, hunting animals, like squirrels, that wander into their enclosures. I was just waiting for something like this to come up.”
More on violent bonobo society can be found in this Nature feature, Peaceful primates, violent acts.
Headline watch
Hippie apes make war as well as love, study finds – Reuters
Image: it looks cute now .... (bonobo photo by Maryrose_photos via Flickr).
Last week we noted that Stephen Hawking is getting a 3 metre high bronze statue of himself. Now Jack Newton, a resident of Brighton, England, has bestowed a rather more singular honour on the professor.
Newton, an apprentice tattoo artist, has had an image of a smiling Hawking needled into his leg. Below the picture is a line from Monty Python’s Life of Brian: “He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”.
The Brighton Argus says the ink has already won two trophies at tattoo conventions (picture here).
“I read A Brief History of Time, but to be honest I didn't understand a word, but I respect the man and that's why I got his face tattooed on my leg,” says Newton (Daily Telegraph).
Someone tell Carl Zimmer!
Today’s election watch features “A Vote For Science”, a campaign to get scientists to video themselves explaining who they will be voting for.
So far only one video is available on their YouTube site, but it’s a big fish: new Nobel Laureate Martin Chalfie (as featured in a Nature interview published yesterday).
Chalfie has previously announced that he will be backing Barack Obama. In his new video he says:
I’m a scientist and I am voting for Barack Obama.
Hear why in the video.
Q&A: Glowing with pride
Nature catches up with freshly-minted Nobel laureate Martin Chalfie.
Dark energy: the quest for galaxies
South Pole Telescope offers fresh view of Universe's expansion.
How to sex a dolphin
Fin-scanning could speed up an essential conservation task — discerning male from female.
“You could sprinkle chemicals on cells and make stem cells.”
A paper in Nature Biotechnology is getting some stem cell researchers excited.
“If everyone accepted it right off the bat, I'd be shocked.”
Loren Babcock expects scepticism for his claim to have discovered the oldest fossil footprints in the world. On cue one expert tells National Geographic he is “deeply sceptical”.
“The nymphs are literally sucking the life out of the plant.”
The BBC reports on an insect that could be introduced to the UK to help control virulent Japanese knotweed. After all it worked for those cane beetles in Australia...
Like father like son
Video game deverloper Richard Garriott has followed in his NASA-astronaut father’s footsteps by going into space.
Here at the Great Beyond we like nothing more than parasites, big money, corruption, stand-up rows and flagrant misrepresentation. But sometimes we have to leave the world of pure science behind and get into politics.
Here’s the latest from the US elections.
“The McCain campaign points to her record as governor as proof that she’s serious about addressing the effects of global warming. But her critics maintain she’s done little beyond establishing a government panel to look at ways to mitigate the effects of climate change, while ignoring the causes,” says the Alaskan paper.
Their differences lie essentially in emphasis, with Obama trying to convince voters that renewable, cleaner energy deserves as much if not more attention as conventional carbon-based choices.
...
McCain, too, vows to push alternative energy, though his record is less clear.
Last week Kenyan scientist Richard Leakey warned that the global credit crunch would be “devastating” to scientific research with “a very dramatic reduction in available funds for research” (AP).
Here in the UK however science minister Lord Drayson is looking for the silver lining:
Like many chief executives of science-based companies, I suffered from scientists going into the City* because they were paid more. My message to them is: You have been a rocket scientist in the City, now become a real scientist again. (Financial Times)Yes banking types, if you make a mess of the entire world’s financial markets science will always take you back with open arms. On a more positive (and sane) note, Drayson has also pledged to defend science spending in the downturn, as reported by Nature last week.
* An American colleague points out that ‘the City’ may not translate for some foreign readers. It refers to the City of London, shorthand for the Big Smoke’s financial district and institutions.
Image: Drayson.
Posted on behalf of Laura Starr
Scientists have identified a pair of genes that together cause a seven-fold increase in the risk of male pattern baldness, a condition that affects roughly one in three men.
Two studies, both published in the current issue of Nature Genetics, examined the hereditary basis of hair loss. The teams identified the two gene variants on chromosome 20, which can be inherited from both the mother and the father. That’s a long way from a ‘cure’ for baldness, but at least it helps you to know who to blame.
In a third Nature Genetics paper, scientists report finding a group of stem cells that effectively regrow all the important cells of a hair follicle – trumpeted by The Sun as a ‘New hope for baldies’
It’s all a long way from the clinic, but as Bloomberg points out, the market for baldness therapies is huge. Last year, Americans spent more than $115 million on hair transplant therapy, while Merck’s hair-loss drug Propecia earned more than $405 million.
Image: Punchstock
Paul Krugman of Princeton University (and the New York Times) has been awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on trade and geography (pdf of the basis for the decision). Among other interesting things, I think this is the first time that a Nobel (or as near as dammit) has been awarded to an active blogger. His first post today reads, in full:
A funny thing happened to me this morning …
I pretend to no great insight into economics, but friends and one-time colleagues so blessed have long said that Krugman's work is worthy of such honour. Quite a few, though, have also expressed the idea that his journalism, which has grown ever more trenchant -- some would say shrill -- as the Bush presidency has gone on, might effectively disqualify him. Apparently not. The tally of nobellists on the Democratic side of the election just rose by one. From a recent column: "Barack Obama seems well informed and sensible about matters economic and financial. John McCain, on the other hand, scares me."
The prize is awarded for Krugman's comparatively early work on trade and location, which can be seen as a fundamental analysis of some of the merits of globalization: "His work had a profound effect on what we know about international economics. Trade economics needed an analytical breakthrough as people were relying on old-fashioned models until he took them on," Krugman collaborator Tony Venables told Bloomberg. But it's one of his later titles that currently has a timely feel about it: "The return of depression economics" (1999). Here's the summary of the argument as it appeared in Foreign Affairs
To celebrate its tenth birthday, Google is offering the opportunity to search its earliest archived index (which is from 2001, not 1998), together with links to pages on the Internet Archive. Obvious but worth-noting points; Wikipedia wasn't in the topslot for pretty much every search, and the ratio of academic to media and corporate sites was a lot higher. So for example searching "climate" back then gave a first page on which the US government and academia was very highly represented, and the word change wasn't. Today "change" is everywhere, and so are media organisations and ngos. Though not necessarily part of a trend, also interesting to note that back then Michael Phelps was a distinguished scientist.
Sites in academia weren't just topping the listings in science: searching "living in the past" used to send you to a site on a server at Rutgers university, apparently in the computer labs, which, like most of the first page of results, took the phrase as a reference to Jethro Tull (a popular beat combo). Now it sends you to Wikipedia and Amazon and a place you can buy a ringtone (though the Rutgers site is still there) and to a number of sites that have nothing at all to do with Jethro Tull at all, which may represent the net de-geeking of the medium. But today you do get YouTube...
Also: then only 4.5 million results for porn; 200 million today. Such is progress.
More discussion at Crooked Timber.
Meanwhile, Beloit College has produced its latest mindset list -- a rundown for professors of the world as it is seen by this year's eighteen year olds, and another mildly thought-provoking insight into recent change. Excerpts below the fold:
None, because the International Space Station don't have any spares on board. But they sure could use some. The Mainichi Daily News reports that almost half the fluorescent lamps on Kibo, the Japanese module on the station, have burned out.
As of Friday last week, only one of the four lamps in the storage room and 11 of the 17 in the main experimentation room were working.The fluorescent lamps used on the ISS were produced by a U.S. company in 1997. As many of the lamps in other modules have also burned out, all the spares aboard the space station have been used.
Tetsuro Yokoyama, sub-manager of the Kibo operation team, said he suspects that the quality of vacuum in the lamps has decreased while aboard the ISS.
Six new lamps will be sent up on a shuttle mission in November: LED systems are being developed as a long term replacement, but won't be ready til 2010
Hat tip: NasaWatch
Added value: Wikipedia entry on lightbulb jokes
Posted for Emma Marris
A US Army Corps of Engineers scientist has gotten into deep trouble with her employer over some shallow water.
Biologist Heather Wylie was cited by the Corps for “off-duty kayaking” and “circulating a news article via e-mail documenting Clean Water Act enforcement problems” (according to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility). The citation came down in early August, but the proposed 30-day suspension hasn't yet happened, and PEER is filing a whistleblower complaint to try to stop it.
Why should “off-duty kayaking” be such a contentious issue? The purpose of the Wylie’s July trip down 51-miles of the Los Angeles River was to demonstrate to the Corps that the river is a navigable body of water.
If it is, then it should be covered by US's Clean Water Act...
Continue reading "Navigable Shavigable: Wait, there is a river in Los Angeles?" »
The British government is to put Paul Drayson, the science minister, in charge of coordinating biosecurity issues, in a move aimed at improving the security of high containment labs in the UK.
The move was announced yesterday in the government’s response to a report from MPs which said they were “disturbed” that ministers have not met to discuss biosecurity issues, and that no government department has responsibility or oversight in the area.
The report from the MPs on the Innovation, Universities and Skills committee, published in June, says “we do not accept the view… that it is satisfactory for no minister to have overall responsibility for biosecurity.”
The MPs investigated the biosecurity of UK laboratories after a breach at the Institute of Animal Health in Pirbright was blamed on the 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.
Continue reading "British government tightens up lab biosecurity " »
As the planet warms up it’s been taken as a given that species will either move northwards or upwards to find temperatures they’re accustomed to (see Nature Reports Climate Change’s ‘The escalator effect’ feature).
The problem of this is after a while no one is left to get on at the bottom. In this week’s issue of Science Robert Colwell and colleagues analyse the hitherto poorly investigated area of tropical species shifts. Using new data from Costa Rica Colwell says that problems for tropical species may face “attrition without parallel at higher latitudes”.
He adds in his paper, “The lowland tropics lack a source pool of species adapted to higher temperatures to replace those driven upslope by warming, raising the possibility of substantial attrition in species richness in the tropical lowlands.”
This remarkable fossil shows an extremely rare example of fossilised collective behaviour, with shrimp-like beasties joined in a chain.
Although there are no modern analogues for this behaviour Derek Siveter of the University of Oxford thinks it might be some kind of migration.
“The spiny lobster is one example of this sort of migratory behaviour amongst modern arthropods,” he says (press release). “These lobsters join together in a kind of ‘train’ with the antennae of one animal sometimes touching the tail of the animal in front. However, the animals represented by the Chinese fossils are much more closely interlocked – they formed ‘chains’ rather than ‘trains’.”
The chains could also feasibly be some phase in the reproductive process or a peculiar life cycle stage. Or maybe they’re just having a conga line party.
“It’s still a bit of a mystery and there doesn’t seem to be a direct comparison with any living animal,” says Siveter (The Times).
The fossil was found in China and a paper detailing the results are published this week in Science by researchers from Oxford, Leicester and Yunnan.
While his running mate’s statements have been ambiguous, John McCain has set his position on climate change firmly on the record.
“I believe that climate change is real,” he said at a Wisconsin rally (Chicago Sun Times), “I believe that greenhouse gasses are a threat to our planet.”
However, according to the Sun Times “some in the very partisan crowd” booed him for this statement.
[Hat tip: Wonkette]
Stephen Hawking is getting a 3 metre high statue of himself cast in bronze. The $250,000 statue will be placed near his his Centre for Theoretical Cosmology office, reports say.
“The giant monument in Cambridge will depict the physics genius in his wheelchair upon a vortex and rising out of a mist of water, surrounded by a ‘black hole’,” says Cambridge News. A scale model has already been constructed by sculptor Eve Shepherd (model picture here and here).
Shepherd says the work will show the “power of Professor Hawking’s mind and the fragility of his body”.
“There’s so much personality and energy inside Stephen's mind but it is difficult to show that in a sculpture because his body doesn't reflect it,” she says (Cambridge News). “However I didn't want to ignore his disability, and Stephen agreed with that.”
Of course this is not the first statue of Hawking to grace Cambridge. A bust of him was unveiled last year. Can any other living scientist boast two statues of himself?
Q+A: The future of pharma
GSK's research leaders answer Nature's questions about where their company — and their industry — is headed.
One is the loneliest number for mine-dwelling bacterium
Sole member of world's first single-species ecosystem depends on rocks and radioactivity for life.
Zebrafish development tracked cell by cell
Microscopic imaging reconstructs embryo's first day.
Presidential candidate John McCain probably thought he was on safe ground when attacking rival Barack Obama’s earmarking of funds for a Chicago planetarium.
As we reported yesterday, he repeated his previous attack on this front, noting:
He [Obama] voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?
While this may not prove to have been as significant a misstep as Dean’s scream or Dukakis’s tank episode McCain is taking some flack.
For starters the planetarium has issued a statement saying, “Senator McCain’s statements about the Adler Planetarium’s request for federal support do not accurately reflect the museum's legislative history or relationship with Senator Obama.”
Continue reading "When a planetarium becomes a tank helmet" »
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
If US Navy submariners and shipman can’t be trained to use sonar, there’s “the potential that a North Korean diesel electric submarine will get within range of Pearl Harbor undetected,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said on 8 October at a US Supreme Court argument.
The justices were hearing oral defenses in the Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The case, which pits environmental against military interests, questions whether the Navy’s use of sonar during training exercises off the coast of Southern California should stopped or modified because of potential harm to marine mammals like beaked whales and dolphins.
The case arose because the Navy failed to file an environmental impact statement (EIS) for anti-submarine exercises conducted from February 2007 through January 2009. The Navy did file an environmental assessment, which the US solicitor general argued was sufficient under the terms of the National Environmental Policy Act. The NRDC disagrees. A California district court judge first ruled that the sonar use should be halted. She then allowed its use with restrictions that the Navy opposes.
Welcome to the Pterodrone
Livescience reports on a proposed spy drone based on the pterodactyl.
“These images do not lie”
Satellite photos show ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia were torched after Russian’s invasion, says Amnesty International (Reuters).
Lungworm threaten the haggis!
Parasites are jeopardising the delicious delicacy, says The Press and Journal.
Sean Connery, Al Gore and Louis Vuitton.
What do they have in common? The Daily Telegraph knows.
The genomes of two malaria parasites are published today, in what malariologists say is a great step forward for their research.
Plasmodium vivax is not the nastiest type of malaria. That’s Plasmodium falciparum, which had its genome published in 2002. But while it might not get as much attention as its more deadly cousin, malaria parasite Plasmodium vivax is an increasing problem, say the researchers who have just published its genome in Nature.
Depending on which press release you read P. vivax is responsible for 125 million, 206 million, or 300 million cases of malaria world wide. The Nature paper that details the genome puts it at between 25% and 40% of the roughly 515 million annual cases.
“Although seldom fatal, the parasite elicits severe and incapacitating clinical symptoms and often causes relapses months after a primary infection has cleared,” write the authors. “Despite its importance as a major human pathogen, P. vivax is little studied because it cannot be propagated continuously in the laboratory except in non-human primates.”
Continue reading "Malaria genomes: and then there were three" »
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Mercury’s finally getting its close-up. On 6 October, NASA's Messenger probe flew within 200 kilometres of the planet's surface. After this second of three flybys, the probe beamed data nuggets back to Earth. From them, astronomers are now processing some of the sharpest images ever taken of Mercury.
Getting the pictures is “a little bit like Christmas-time,” Messenger scientist Ralph McNutt of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland told New Scientist. And, mission scientists are now “in the process of opening a lot of the presents,” he said.
But, when the new data and images have been “digested and compared,” astronomers will for the first time have a global perspective of Mercury,” Messenger’s chief scientist, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told BBC News. The images show regions of the planet that have only been seen in blurry Earth-based images, until now.
Mission scientists said that the most stunning new discovery from this flyby is the large pattern of stripes, called rays, appearing to extend from a young crater in the north to regions south of a crater called Kuiper, National Geographic reports.
During its encounter, Messenger also got the necessary gravitation tug to position the probe to swing past Mercury in September 2009 and zoom into the planet’s orbit in 2011.
Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Hot on the heals of a clean Nobel sweep for Japanese-born particle physicists, Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura says that Japan is ready to host the next generation of particle collider. The International Linear Collider, which would collide electrons rather than protons, is the big hope for high-energy physicists after CERN's Large Hadron Collider wraps up its work sometime in the next decade.
It's nice to see someone taking an interest. As myself and my Washington-based colleague Eric Hand jointly reported, the US and UK have withdrawn from the linear collider in recent months.
Image: artist's rendition of ILC particle event / Sandbox Studio
Great glowing jellyfish! It's the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Green fluorescent protein bags the biggest gong in science.
Great balls of fire
Astronomers discover and track incoming asteroid for the first time.
Q+A: Oxford school expands to tackle global challenges
Ian Goldin, director of the James Martin 21st Century School, tells Nature about his vision for interdisciplinarity.
Posted for Quirin Schiermeier and cross-posted from Climate Feedback
The European Parliament’s environment committee yesterday voted largely in favour of the ambitious European climate action plan (subscription) proposed in January.
The decision, although preliminary, allows the European Union (EU) to go into the upcoming next round of international climate negotiations with a common goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions across Europe by at least 20 % by 2020. The European commission, Council and Parliament must yet formally agree on details of the plan, but substantial changes are now considered unlikely.
Most hotly contested were the amendments to the EU’s emission trading system (ETS) which the European commission had proposed in January to strengthen the effectiveness of the scheme.
Introduced in 2005, the ETS is as yet the only mandatory emissions trading system in the world. Until now, power stations and other large European industries have benefitted from generous supply of free permits to release carbon dioxide. Much of the commission’s proposed reform was aimed to end the over-allocation of emission allowances.
The men who would be President went head to head last night in Nashville, Tennessee. Here’s the long-distance information from their debate (transcript extracts from CNN).
First up, as noted by blog commenter Theropod, John McCain is still bashing planetariums. Having previously called Barack Obama’s support for one such venue “foolishness” he was at it again last night, saying:
He [Obama] voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?
Below the fold: more highlights from the debate include both candidates making noises about green energy and feedback.
Continue reading "McCain: I still hate planetariums (and other debate points)" »
Big-pharma is in the dock again today as Pfizer stands accused of manipulating publication of data on its drug Neurontin. This is according to experts who have combed through company documents for plantiffs who are suing the company. Pfizer has denied the plantiffs charges, says the Boston Globe.
Kay Dickersin, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says the documents show “a publication strategy meant to convince physicians of Neurontin’s effectiveness and misrepresent or suppress negative findings” (NY Times).
Reuters says:
The documents suggest that Pfizer's marketers influenced Neurontin's scientific record to boost sales at least until 2003 by delaying the publication or altering the conclusions of studies that had found no evidence the drug worked for various conditions besides epilepsy.
As news breaks of another potential pharma scandal, The Great Beyond is resurrecting our interactive political interference story. We present to you: The Interactive Pharma Scandal Story.
NOTE: ALL DATA IN THIS IS DRAWN FROM ACTUAL CASES. HOWEVER IT IS NOT TRUE IN ALL COMBINATIONS AND SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN TO REPRESENT ACTUAL PAST OR FUTURE SCANDALS.
The Interactive Pharma Scandal StoryIt was revealed today by
that
had
in relation to its drug
Commentators expressed their
The company has
Let us know if you'd like more options added...
UPDATE: see also Great glowing jellyfish! It's the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
In a storming comeback for the United States three of its researchers have snagged the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien take the prize for the Queen of the Sciences “for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP”. Without this work we’d never have got the ‘Brainbow’ that Nature published last year.
Nature News’s chemistry guru Katharine Sanderson will have the full story for you soon. If you can’t wait, below the fold is the outline of a blog drafted on this victory by Nature editor Oli ‘Nostradamus’ Morton last year, who scores 2 out of 3 for prediction (albeit out by a year).
America 4 : Europe 3 : Japan 2
More Nobel news
Nobel Prize week: and we’re off!
Virus discoveries secure Nobel prize in medicine
And the physics prize goes to...
Nobel Prize in Physics for symmetry breakdown
Continue reading "US takes 2008 chemistry prize, Nobel league lead" »
Who knew that tortoises got bladder stones? Well someone at Bristol Zoo did because they’ve just extracted one the size of an egg from a rare African pancake tortoise (Malacochersus tornieri).
“We x-rayed the tortoise as part of a standard health check, and were amazed when we saw the size of the bladder stone,” says Sharon Redrobe, the zoo’s head vet (press release).
“I’ve performed bladder stone operations on tortoises before, but never on a pancake tortoise and never with a bladder stone this big. Despite initial concerns that we might not be able to get the bladder stone out of the hole we made in the shell, the operation went very well and there were no complications.”
More
Polly's Lifesaving 'Keyhole' Op – Sky news
Endangered tortoise operated on – BBC*
Rare African pancake tortoise saved by surgery – Western Daily Press
*naughty BBC. It is classified as ‘vulnerable’ not ‘endangered’.
Image: Bristol Zoo
Nanotech comes alive
Viruses and bacteria act as factories for nanostructures.
Nobel Prize in Physics for symmetry breakdown
Japanese-born theorists rewarded for work on fundamental symmetries in particle physics.
A powerful US congressman today released draft climate legislation that could serve as a foundation for the global warming debate in the US House of Representatives next year. (The Hill, Wall Street Journal, subscription required)
Michigan Democrat John Dingell and his committee have been working on the legislation since the Democrats took charge in 2007. Dingell is known as a long-time friend of the automobile industry and has drawn plenty of suspicion from environmental groups as a consequence. He is also the longest-serving member of the House and has a history of ushering major legislation, including the last major amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990, through Congress.
Dingell's bill would create a cap-and-trade system to reduce covered US greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 80 percent by mid-century (representing an overall reduction of more than 70 percent). The overall model is similar to legislation taken up in the Senate but would require less action in the early years. The bill would reduce covered emissions 6 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, compared to a 19 percent reduction in the Senate legislation.
Advocates of climate regulation were cautiously optimistic (Environmental Defense Fund, Pew Center on Global Climate Change). They credited the committee with deploying a strong long-term strategy, but criticized the short-term reductions as well as proposals to preempt state regulations and curtail EPA regulatory authority.
Industry groups have been slower to respond, although Duke Energy - one of the electric utilities that has been most active on the issue - offered its qualified support for the effort, if not the bill itself.
Film of some the deepest living fish in the world has been captured by scientists aboard the Japanese research vessel Haskuho-Maru.
This shot shows snailfish (Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis) 7,700 metres below the surface of the Pacific.
“We thought the deepest fishes would be motionless, solitary, fragile individuals eking out an existence in a food-sparse environment. But these fish aren’t loners,” says Monty Priede, of the University of Aberdeen (press release).
“The images show groups that are sociable and active – possibly even families – feeding on little shrimp, yet living in one of the most extreme environments on Earth.”
Priede told the BBC the fishes were “cute”, which some might disagree with. The images were taken as part of the HADEEP project, run with the University of Tokyo. This investigates life in the ocean below 6,000 metres and ended yesterday.
More
HADEEP blog.
Photo and video gallery.
Image: Natural Environment Research Council and University of Aberdeen.
Animal rights activists used bomb hoaxes, threats against children and criminal damage in a six year terror campaign, a court in England has been told this week.
Prosecutors allege five member of the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty group used “blackmail and unwarranted demands with menaces” in an attempt to stop companies trading with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a contract lab that conducts experiments on animal (Daily Telegraph).
SHAC members Trevor Holmes, 51, Gerrah Selby, 20, Daniel Wadham, 21, Gavin Medd-Hall, 45, and Heather Nicholson, 41, deny conspiracy to blackmail while Gregg Avery, 40, Natasha Avery, 39, and Daniel Amos, 21, have pleaded guilty (various, eg Times).
One of those targeted was told “We will attack your property or your family or you whenever we see fit. Anything goes.” Another was subjected to false rumours he was a paedophile and hoax bombs (Guardian.)
“It’s possible that an equipment malfunction may have been a factor in the moose’s death.”
Nova Scotia’s natural resources minister David Morse comments on the fact that a rare moose died after being dropped by conservation officers. Dropped from a helicopter. (Story also covered by CBC News.)
Mr. Knitted Lab Rat
‘This is What Happens When A Biologist Learns to Knit’, says the Why Would You Knit That? blog.
Biofuels: still a bad idea
Reuters says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization wants a re-think on biofuels.
Half of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics".
The other half will be split between Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".
Nature News’s physics guru Geoff Brumfiel will have the full story for you soon...
Europe 3 : Japan 2 : America 1
More Nobel news
Nobel Prize week: and we’re off!
Virus discoveries secure Nobel prize in medicine
Something strange is happening with Google News. Those of you who are avid checkers of the science and technology home page may notice that an unexpected item has made its way into the listings.
Alongside the masses of IT news and the occasional science story the mysterious and top-secret Google algorithms seem to think horoscopes now count as science.
Yesterday UPI’s ‘Your Daily Horoscope’ was the second science story at a little after nine (image). Today the LA Times’ horoscope nestled neatly between news of Microsoft R&D spending and cheap DNA sequencing (image).
Is someone at Google having a laugh?
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
To be or not to be; that always seems to be astronomical question—especially when it comes to being a planet.
Sadly, Pluto and its brethren are too small. Failed stars are too big. Now, some candidates might just be too dense. So it could up to Goldilocks to decide what’s “just right.” Or, at the very least, she might know whether COROT-exo-3b can be a part of the planet club.
Earlier this year, astronomers discovered the anomalous object with the French-Space-Agency-led COROT (COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits) satellite. Turns out the potential planet swings around its parent star—which is slightly larger and more massive than the sun—in a mere four days and six hours. Now, that’s by no mean an exoplanet record. But, add to that speed the fact that COROT-exo-3b is about the size of Jupiter yet is 21.6 times more massive, and then there’s a problem. The object is more than twice as dense as lead—a characteristic never seen before in planets, ESA reports in a press release.
A science advisor for US Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, said Monday that one of the most important engineering challenges in the 21st century will be cyber security. And an advisor for Senator John McCain, the Republican contender, said the most important challenge is improving urban infrastructure. Say what?
They were unlikely priorities to be mentioned, given that Republicans tend to own security issues, while Democrats have been more vocal on infrastructure issues, especially those that affect their core constituencies in crumbling urban centers.
The two advisors were Paul Kaminski, a former undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, who supports Obama, and Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who supports McCain. They were at a panel discussion Monday at the National Academies in Washington DC. In between them in the picture was Lord Alec Broers, a member of the UK House of Lords and former vice chancellor of Cambridge University. He grimaced a lot and kept his lips pursed while Kaminski and Fiorina went back and forth. It was a fairly civil discussion, considering the tone this campaign has otherwise taken.
Continue reading "Presidential advisers spar over engineering challenges" »
‘The only artist to have walked on the Moon’
AP reports on an exhibition of paintings from Alan Bean, one of the Apollo 12 crew.
“This will play the part of a herdsman.”
The BBC says ‘goat condoms’ are ensuring that Kenyan herds do not breed during a drought.
Wild boars on the rampage
A 320% growth in Germany’s boar population is leading to attacks on pets and people and massive damage to crops, says Reuters
Posted for Laura Starr
Europe’s potential billion pound laser fusion project HiPER was officially launched today, with a host of luminaries meeting at London’s Science Museum.
This new phase of the High Power laser Energy Research project is still a preparatory one, which will see 26 institutes from 10 nations develop a design for a laser that could produce the intense conditions needed to fuse deuterium and tritium and provide the ultimate environmentally friendly energy supply. (Project leader Mike Dunne calls it “The Holy Grail of energy sources”.)
The idea is to focus super-powerful lasers onto fuel pellet containing deuterium and tritium, forcing the isotopes together and resulting in a huge release of energy. At the moment though there are a host of hurdles to overcome. Not least the need for significantly more powerful lasers and the problem of actually capturing and extracting the energy generated. An initial ‘proof of principle’ demonstration isn’t on the cards until 2010 at the earliest.
Dunne told the Daily Telegraph:
HiPER is aiming to bridge the step between proving nuclear fusion is possible and a commercial power station. It should prove that a big enough laser can be built, with a high enough repetition rate and efficiency, which are the critical building blocks on the route towards fusion energy.
The Telegraph also notes the differences between HiPER and the more famous fusion project ITER. Where HiPER plans to use lasers to compress its fuel and achieve fusion ITER is hoping to do the compression with magnetic fields.
Ground-level ozone on the rise
Increasing pollutant levels could cause major food crisis, says Royal Society.
A quarter of mammals face extinction
Latest Red List finds 80% of southeast Asian primates are at risk.
The ‘mystery buyer’ waiting to pounce on biotech firm ImClone has been revealed as Eli Lilly.
Lilly has trumped rival firm Bristol-Myers Squibb with an offer of $70 per share, or $6.5 billion all told. The offer has been approved by the directors of both companies. In the month before Bristol-Myers made its move with an initial $60 a share offer (later raised to $62) ImClone stock was trading at around $40-45.
“We think very highly of ImClone’s ground-breaking work in oncology, particularly its success with ERBITUX, a blockbuster targeted cancer therapy, and its ability to advance promising biotech molecules in its pipeline,” says John Lechleiter, Lilly’s president and CEO (press release).
Writing in Nature last week about the struggle for the company, Derek Lowe said:
Erbitux and its potential progeny lie at the intersection of two areas of great interest to the drug industry: oncology and biological products. Both are potentially very profitable. Oncology is an area of huge unmet medical need (as the phrase has it, accurately), and the few therapies that actually show a benefit command a high price.
But David Moskowitz, an analyst for Caris & Co. in Washington, told Bloomberg, “This is an act of desperation on the part of Eli Lilly. Lilly will drain substantially all of its cash on the deal. Lilly is already bidding outside the range of what you think would be rational, but these companies are losing big products early next decade.”
However Bristol-Myers already owns 17% of ImClone’s stock and may come back with a new offer. “Bristol is very keen on acquiring this company,” Cowen & Co analyst Eric Schmidt told Reuters. “I think the Lilly thing probably came to them out of left field and I'm not sure that they are going to take it lying down.”
Senator Charles Grassley’s conflict of interest inquiry in the United States has scored its biggest victory to date, with the media full of revelations about psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff of Emory University.
“After questioning about 20 doctors and research institutions, it looks like problems with transparency are everywhere,” says Grassley (NY Times). “The current system for tracking financial relationships isn’t working.”
Grassley alleges that Nemeroff he received half a million dollars from GlaxoSmithKline while leading a federal research study on GSK drugs (WSJ). Overall Nemeroff failed to declare more than a million dollars of income from pharmaceutical companies, he alleges (Inside Higher Ed).
Continue reading "Conflict of interest inquiry claims psychiatrist scalp" »
Australians could be throwing fish of a different kind on the barbie thanks to climate change.
A new assessment of the impact global warming will have on the country’s fisheries says many species will not do well. “But the report finds there may be new opportunities for some wild fisheries where tropical species shift southward,” says minister for climate change Penny Wong (press release).
Always look on the bright side.
Long-spined sea urchins may spread south, devastating the Tasmanian rock lobster and abalone fisheries, northern prawn fisheries may collapse, coral reef species will be reduced and rainfall changes will not be good for catches of barramundi, prawns and mud crabs, warns the report. But tropical fish may come further south, so hungry Antipodeans can eat those instead.
However Wong isn’t totally upbeat:
This report is yet another reminder that climate change imposes costs on this nation - costs not only in terms of our way of life, but in terms of the economic costs to our industries and to our communities. We need to implement a carbon pollution reduction scheme. We do need to prepare for the climate change that we are unable to avoid, and this report is a contribution to that... We have to adapt and we have to plan. (AAP.)
More coverage
Fisheries at serious risk from warming – Canberra Times
Climate change threatens Australian fisheries – Reuters
Image: Getty
The first of this week’s Nobel Prizes has been announced. Once again the prize committee have shown themselves incapable of picking one winner. Instead the 2008 prize for medicine has gone to three people.
Half the prize goes to Harald zur Hausen “for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer”. (Nicely topical given the current rowing over the HPV vaccine.)
The other half is split equally between Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier “for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus”.
Europe 3 : 0 America.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
It’s almost Nobel Prize time again. And, like with any event — Wimbledon, the World Cup or the Oscars — winners are a crapshoot to predict. But that doesn’t keep people from trying.
Take Thomson Reuters. Each year, it releases its Nobel Prize predictions. David Pendlebury, of the information corporation’s Research Services, counts whose discoveries are most cited in the research literature.
Citations give “a very strong signal of what the scientific community itself feels is an important work," Pendlebury told Scientific American. After the count, though, he said he always checks whether the scientists with the highest reported citations really did do pioneering work.
And the 2008 nominees are:
Piggy-backing on a historic financial bailout for Wall Street bankers in the midst of a potentially global financial crisis certainly wasn't what clean energy advocates had in mind earlier this year, when they began their push for an extension of the renewable tax credits. But that's exactly what happened, and no one is complaining. (Reuters, Bloomberg)
The legislation was all but dead due to a dispute between the House and the Senate over how to pay for the subsidies, but Senate leaders crafted a last-minute rescue when they included their version in the bailout bill on Wednesday. Having spiked the first version of the bailout - sending already troubled stock markets plummeting around the world - House lawmakers decided it was time to give in on Friday.
The House easily cleared the legislation in a lopsided 263-171 vote, and within hours President George W. Bush had signed the bill into law.
All told, the incentives for clean energy, conservation and efficiency programs are worth an estimated $17 billion, but perhaps the biggest winners are the wind and solar industries. Both were facing a lapse in their tax incentives - 2 cents per kilowatt hour for wind and a 30 percent credit for solar investments - at the end of the year.
Wind received a one-year extension, which means producers will be back for more next year, but the solar industry made out with an eight-year extension of its credit. That is exactly the kind of predictability the renewable energy industry has been seeking from Washington for years.
But as with many pieces of legislation that come out of Congress, this one had its fair share of nonsense as well, including a pair of tax credits for rum producers in Puerto Rico and producers of wooden arrows used in children's toys. That's according to Politico, which reports that John McCain is once again fuming about wasteful spending.
Wow, here’s an invention I never realised we needed: The world’s fastest barcode reader.
But I'm just showing my ignorance – today I have learned that barcodes are used much more widely than just at the supermarket checkout.
Yes, barcodes are one of the underpinning infrastructure technologies of our society. Sorting things out everywhere from shops to post rooms to blood banks. Current readers use either a mechanically scanned laser – the reflected light bounces back and gives the reading – or an optical scanner that takes a picture of the barcode. The scan rates of these lasers is about 100 – 1000 scans per second, and require the use of mechanical scanners and lots of optical-to-electrical converters.
But if that’s not fast enough for you, check out this paper in Applied Physics Letters (paper, press release)by Keisuke Goda and colleagues at UCLA. They use a fancy laser technique, where a laser pulse has the barcode’s image mapped onto it, and this in turn is mapped onto another waveform that is read with great speed by a single, stationary, optical-to-electrical converter. The limiting step is the speed of the laser pulse.
They reckon they can get a bar code reader that scans at a rate of 25 MHz – 10,000 times faster than the old methods Goda says, and in future this speed could be even faster. They say that faster and faster readers are needed by industry. PI Bahram Jalali explains: " "Eliminating the CCD camera and the mechanically steered mirrors from bar code scanners can prove valuable in applications that demand high-throughput bar code reading, such as industrial monitoring and retail supply line management."
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Astroparticle physicists in Europe say they have their own 'magnificent seven' -- though the 200 physicists and science funding reps who met in Brussels this week surely didn't style themselves as Yul Brynner, leader of the gunslingers in the 1960s film. 
On the physicists' agenda: discussing which future large-scale experiments could answer the greatest of the universe’s unsolved mysteries, including dark matter and gravitational waves. AStroParticle ERAnet (ASPERA), a network of government agencies responsible for coordinating and funding European national research efforts in astroparticle physics, organized the meeting.
Topping the physicists’ list of seven is the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). It’s a collection of up to 100 different-sized Cherenkov telescopes (which detect high-energy particles from the ground by making the atmosphere part of the telescope) to study high-energy cosmic ray air showers and their gamma ray sources.
Next is KM3NeT, a neutrino telescope that will be built beneath one cubic kilometer of the Mediterranean Sea. Made of a network of thousands of optical sensors, the telescope will search for neutrinos ejected from distant supernovae or colliding stars.
Posted for Laura Starr
You might have read a passing reference to the aural aspirations of the Phoenix Mars Lander’s Earth bound controllers earlier this week. They wanted to activate a microphone on the Red Planet. Phoenix Principal investigator, Peter Smith, was excited at the prospect, saying that in the realm of cosmic exploration “This is definitely a first.”
Well, after a couple of glitches the switch-on has very nearly been given the go ahead, tickling the taste buds of the enthusiastic media.
NASA mission leaders have announced that the device, which is embedded within the landing apparatus of the Phoenix spacecraft, should be ready in a couple of weeks once a few checks and software updates have been made.
Continue reading "Testing, testing, one, two, one, two: Mars is wired for sound" »
Posted for Laura Starr
Last week The Great Beyond reported on the achievements of China’s spacewalk mission and http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/09/post_11.html. Basking in the glory of this triumph, the China National Space Administration (CNSA), at the 59th International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow has officially declared plans to launch an orbiting space lab by 2011.
And the ambitious developments don’t stop there. If the setup of the space-lab is a success, China will continue with developments on creating a human-tended space station, which will be composed of several of these labs. The target date for its assembly is in 2020, two years after NASA allegedly plans to send an astronaut back to the moon.
An administrator of CNSA, Sun Laiyan, believes that his country has to make “step-by-step progress” in order to lay solid foundations for progress and minimise the risks. If a space race is underway, China is tortoise, not hare.
A few weeks ago, the Guardian ran a story implying that a building at Manchester University, where Ernest Rutherford once worked with radon and polonium, was contaminated and had caused the cancers that killed two staff members.
At the time, The Great Beyond contacted the Health and Safety Executive, which was mentioned in the story as having identified 10 contaminated rooms in the building. An HSE spokesperson said the agency was not planning to investigate the matter. But the story has not gone away. Since the Guardian’s September 9 report, other UK press outfits have followed suit, and the number of deaths attributed to effects from the building rose first to three then to four. (Telegraph, BBC) The reports from September 24 say that Manchester coroner Nigel Meadows has called an inquest into the deaths.
Continue reading "Radiation scare in Rutherford's old lab" »
Physorg carries a NASA story pointing to an abnormal dearth of sunspots.
As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go back to 1954, three years before the launch of Sputnik, when the sun was blank 241 times.
People with a keen interest in possible links between the sun and the climate (which is not entirely a subset of people-who-want-you-not-to-worry-about-fossil-fuels -- but it's close) will be getting excited: the most striking evidence for a sun-climate link is that a long period of sunspotless years called the "Maunder minimum" coincided with the Little Ice Age. The estimable Clive Cookson goes over the whole story at the FT
Here, for those who need it, is a pretty good account of current controversies on sun-climate links, and why they are not really that controversial anymore. The sun is not a governing factor in the current climate. The point is actually nicely made by one of Clive's sources:
Although some people who are sceptical about the human influence on global warming like to emphasise the link between solar variability and climate, Prof Mayewski turns their argument on its head: “The fact that we are not in conditions like the little ice age today shows that the atmosphere is being perturbed by human activities,” he says.
Here are the other posts on the issue from Real Climate for those who want a bit more.
And people who want a great deal more, including some lovely history, might check out Stu Clarke's "The Sun Kings"
The fact that there are a lot of blank days, by the way, does not mean there are no sunspots at all. The Times of India reports one was spotted last week.
Image: NASA
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Conrad Lautenbacher, who has led the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for almost seven years, will step down on 31 October.
“I am leaving essentially at the time of the election when all the work of this congress is over,” Lautenbacher says. “It’s the end of the administration. NOAA is a politically appointed position, and, as much as I don’t like the concept that I am a political appointee, it is time to go.”
The administrator has “been here for almost seven years, which is a lifetime for political appointees,” Anson Franklin, a NOAA spokesman, told Scientific American. He’d “made it clear for a year or so that he'd probably depart before the end of the administration and ended up staying on,” Franklin says.
“I am in love with this job. One thing leads to another, and at NOAA, compared to my Navy experience, you can see projects through from the start and see them finished. You can them as a gleam in people’s eyes and can see them come to conclusion. That is what made it worth staying, to see that follow through,” Lautenbacher says.
Continue reading "Head of US climate agency announces resignation" »
Texas scientists are doing their best to push yet another camel's nose back out of the tent. More than 800 of them have signed a statement opposing the Texas State Board of Education's long-standing requirement that students be taught both the 'strengths and weaknesses' of scientific theories--one of those deceptively innocuous and reasonable-sounding phrases that could easily force teachers to present creationism as the intellectual equal of evolution. (AP)
Both the statement and the brand-new organization formed to draft it -- the 21st Century Science Coalition -- were triggered by the board's ongoing deliberations over Texas's new science curriculum standards. Because the Texas textbook market is so huge, the board's vote, expected next spring, will affect science curricula nationwide. The board is evenly split on whether or not to keep the 'weaknesses' language. But its chair, dentist Don McLeroy, is definitely in the keeper camp: "I look at evolution as still a hypothesis with weaknesses," he has declared on several occasions. (For background, see this New York Times story from June.)
The 840 scientist-signatories beg to differ, arguing that 21st-century Texas students deserve, well, a 21st-century education. They want the 'strength and weaknesses' language expunged. "[E]volution is an easily observable phenomenon that has been documented beyond any reasonable doubt," their statement declares.
Board of Education -- over to you.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
What’s in a name and naming names? A lot — at least according to a review of the news media’s coverage of prescription drugs in the 1 October issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Basically, US news stories rarely report funding sources, and the media almost always refers to drugs by their brand name rather than their generic names (think Viagra versus sildenafil citrate), say Michael Hochman, of Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues. And, since news articles are a major source of medical information for many patients and even some physicians, that adds biases to the perception of pharmaceuticals, the team wrote.
“All of us, doctors, patients, journalists, have gotten into a bad habit of referring to medications by their proprietary brand names. At a philosophical level, I think we need to be referring to them by the generic name,” Hochman told Health Day News. And, he said, funding sources should always been named as company-funded research can't be trusted the same way as research from an independent source. “We want to keep commercial interests as much out of the doctor-patient relationship as possible,” he explained.
Continue reading "Stop the presses: media report badly on pharma" »
Posted on behalf of Laura Starr
The world’s largest drug maker, Pfizer, has abandoned its efforts in the development of medicines for heart disease in favour of more profitable conditions. This news is getting a load of media attention within the US
(Boston Globe, Reuters). This step is only one of many in a re-shuffle of the company’s research and development activities.
Cuts are also being made in other research disciplines, such as obesity and bone health. The head of research and development at Pfizer, Martin Mackay, told the Wall Street Journal that these are “just not as valuable as other programs, like Alzheimer’s or oncology.” Other future research interests lie in the fields of pain, inflammation, diabetes and schizophrenia.
Posted on behalf of Emma Marris
The US economy is not the only complex system suffering from lack of liquidity. The Florida Everglades, the watery mosaic of landscapes that varies along with minute changes in elevation—sawgrass marsh, slightly higher hammocks of hardwood trees, and an edging of mangrove swamps, among other miniature worlds—needs cash and water. It’s an ecosystem with romantic resonance, inhabited by alligators, pelicans, roseate spoonbills and a few scrappy panthers, a beloved place that almost disappeared forever when development diverted much of the water flow that keeps it running.
The National Academies has just released a report assessing the progress of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, the eight-year-old state-federal project to keep the Everglades from drying up. The news is depressingly bad. The project is “bogged down in budgeting, planning, and procedural matters while the ecosystem that it was created to save is in peril”. Without a smooth flow of money, the project managers can’t manage the smooth flow of water. None of the plan's component projects have been completed, and the key water-engineering piece, called the “Modified Water Deliveries to Everglades National Park”, which predates the plan and was first put forth in 1989, is still not done. The report brief says it has been “plagued for nearly 20 years by changes in direction and scope, parochial interests, litigation, cost escalation, engineering constraints, and a lack of coordinated leadership.” The report puts more blame on the feds than the state.
Posted for Laura Starr
New research has highlighted the population patterns of our fishy friends at the Great Barrier Reef, which may hold the key to saving this pristine area from climate change (Herald Sun).
Marine scientists, from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies, used a genetic approach to study the relationship between fish populations along the reef. They’re convinced that protecting ‘pioneer’ fish, such as damselfish, is crucial for conserving the marine environment, because these fish can re-colonise areas of the reef that might be devastated by global warming.
Is Charles Simonyi going to get frequent flyer points? That’s what the Seattle Times blog wants to know, and I’m inclined to agree.
The billionaire ex-Microsoft executive became a space tourist in April 2007, and enjoyed himself so much he wants to go again. And what Charles wants, Charles gets. He is about to start training with the crew of the Russian Soyuz TMA-14, which is due to go to the International Space Station in spring 2009. (press release)
Most professional astronauts have to wait longer between trips than this, says Canada Now,. but at least they don’t have to shell out upwards of $25 million for each trip. This is what Simonyi paid the first time, AP reports, although just how much his return to flight is going to cost him isn’t known.
MSNBC is running a more general piece about the company and the man behind space tourism. Eric Anderson is aiming to get his company, Space Adventures – now onto its sixth space tourist flight – its own Soyuz spacecraft that can hold two passengers. Uh-oh, watch out for the first real wedding in space soon.
Posted on behalf of Anna Petherick
And now for something you may not see again for a long time: some cheery financial news.
Cash is flowing into spritely clean technology companies like never before, according to a new report by Greentech Media, which has been reported on the outlet’s website and circulated on Businesswire. It claims that venture capitalists backed green firms with $2.8 billion during the third quarter, clobbering the record they set last quarter ($1.3 billion). Three quarters of the way through 2008 the year’s total investment in the sector is 49.7% more than the end of year total for 2007.
That’s a lot of wonga, and most of it has been ploughed into firms inventing and producing new solar kit. But surely the sun will pass behind a cloud soon?
Another third-quarter report, this time by Dow Jones VentureSource, says that money in Palo Alto and its Californian environs is drying up as markets around the world plummet.
Technology firms of all stripes generated two-thirds less for their venture capitalist funders during the third quarter than during the same period last year. 2008 is likely to be the worst year on record for the venture capital industry in the United States, says VentureSource’s head of global research, Jessica Canning, in a press release reported by the Silicon Valley/ San Jose Business Journal, as taking companies public on nose-diving markets gets tougher and tougher.
Posted for Laura Starr
What do tough Viking warriors and small furry mice have in common? Not much, I can sense you thinking. Not so. A study from the University of York has shown that where the Vikings travelled, their house mice followed. These little creatures' descendants might hold the key to revealing the Viking's movements around the world, a discovery which has attracted eager attention in the British press (Scotsman, Telegraph, York Press)
The study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, revealed that mice on the British mainland shared a common British heritage. Conversely, mice on the Orkney Isles, off the coast of Scotland, had a different genetic make-up. Those mice could be traced back to mice in Norway of the Viking lineage, suggesting that these mice crossed the North Sea hand-in-hand (foot-in-hand?) with the Viking explorers (BBC).
