The Great Beyond

Posted for Asher Mullard

A European agency has rejected an appeal for a patent on developing human embryonic stem cells.

The proposed patent, submitted by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, sought to protect a method used to culture embryonic stem cells, developed by stem cell pioneer James Thomson.

“Decisive in the [appeal board] ruling was the application's claim regarding human stem cell cultures,” says a statement from the European Patent Office. “The [board] decided that under the European Patent Convention it is not possible to grant a patent for an invention which necessarily involves the use and destruction of human embryos.”

Continue reading "European stem cell patent fails, again" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“This is the best wind in North America, we think.”
Ronald Lehr, of the American Wind Energy Association, comments on a wind-driven land-rush in Wyoming (NY Times).

“OMG! Its FILLED with Stars!!”
A day in the life of starfish researcher Chris M (hat tip: Deep Sea News).

Top 20 optical illusions
It’s Friday, so why not mess with your own mind (Daily Telegraph).

“By forming this national park, Cameroon sends a powerful message about the importance of conservation.”
Steven Sanderson, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, commends the creation of the Takamanda National Park to preserve the 115 Cross River gorillas.

“It sounded simple. Fly around in a small airplane and count moose in Game Management Unit 20A south of Fairbanks.”
Tim Mowry goes out with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s aerial moose counters (Daily News-Miner).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It was with a heavy heart that this correspondent read yesterday (BBC report by Sarah Mukherjee) that numbers of fungi experts (mycologists) in the UK are dwindling. Within ten years, according to scientists from the Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International, in Oxfordshire, all our fungi experts will be gone, never to be replaced.

The news has also reached the ears of Steve Connor at the Independent and was deemed so important to Sarah Mukherjee at the BBC that she wrote two stories about it.

Mushroomers have an amazing job. I honestly have no idea why young people wouldn’t be inspired to research fungi. New species are still being discovered, and you can make very funny jokes. Like calling yourself a “fungi to be with”.

For a rather bizarre round up of why fungi are important check out this article from the BBC.

Nature News reported on an historical line of fungi experts, beginning with Edward Gange, the fungal recorder for the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, whose son is also a fungus expert – see this news story from last year, and John Whitfield’s take on his own story. Let’s hope that the UK’s expertise in fungi is not reliant only on the Gange family in future.

Image of the fly agaric fungus: Wellcome library, London

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Showing once again just how much we have left to learn about environmental processes, a team of researchers in the US have worked out the factors that determine when icebergs will calve off ice sheets.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest factor is how fast the ice sheets are spreading out over the oceans. The width and thickness of the sheet are also important, says a paper in Science (press release, paper).

“Fracture-mechanics problems are invariably difficult,” says paper author Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University (Physics World). “Earthquake prediction comes to mind, or guessing whether a tea cup pushed off the table will break or bounce upon hitting the floor. With the tea cup, a drop from 1 mm high won’t break it, and a drop from 100 m almost surely will — one term, the height of the drop, explains a whole lot of the behaviour. Our hope was to find such a dominant term in calving of bergs from ice shelves.”

He adds, “Our first hypothesis was that spreading is required to open a crack that isolates a new iceberg, so the spreading tendency in the direction of ice and berg motion should play the role of the height of your tea cup. “Almost surprisingly, this simple hypothesis explains most of the variance in a data set we assembled to test [it].”

Alley and colleagues gathered data on a representative selection of ice shelves and worked out what factors were important for calving. “Although we have not learned the complete calving law, we suggest that the relations derived here from intercomparison of ice shelves may be more encouraging than any obtained previously for this vexing problem and so merit additional testing and cautious implementation in ice-flow models,” they write in their paper.

Scientists crack iceberg mystery – Reuters
Clue to break-up of ice shelves – BBC

Image: iceberg off Greenland / Richard Alley

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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There are still a couple of weeks left to get your applications in to be the next Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.

The post is currently held by Stephen Hawking, who is set to retire next year. But he won’t be leaving the world of theoretical physics behind him. No, the rumours (that The Great Beyond admits it took part in perpetuating) are true; Hawking has been tempted by ex-Cambridge colleague Neil Turok to head off to the land of moose and maples and join the happy Perimeter Institute folk.

Hawking will be a Distinguished Research Chair at the institute, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. But there also seems to be some cake here that is being both had and eaten, for Hawking will only visit the Perimeter Institute (press release) a few times – he’s going to hang on to the Lucasian professorship in an emeritus fashion.

What do the Canuck’s think of this? A brief survey of headlines reveals that The Canadian Press heralds the visiting prof as a coup for Canadian science whereas the Vancouver Sun goes all out for that special brand of Canadian humour with their “Hawking meets his Waterloo” pun. And the Globe and Mail have the brilliant “Waterloo institute’s big bang”.

Stay with The Great Beyond for regular updates on Hawking news:
Stephen Hawking to retire
Hawking 'mulls move to Canada'
A brief history of body art
Hawking to be cast in bronze
When theoretical physicists attack
Get us off this planet says Hawking

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Representatives of the world’s major religions are meeting in Sweden to start a crusade against climate change.

“It is easy to lose hope when we hear about climate change and ecological collapse,” says Anders Wejryd, archbishop of the Church of Sweden, which is organising the conference (speech). “It is easy to lose hope when we think of the climate issue's complexity. ... We need hope and hope is something that characterizes most of faith traditions.”

The conference aims to encourage the United Nations into tough action on climate change and also to get believers to take personal action. Around 30 religious representatives will sign a declaration to this effect in Uppsala, Sweden.

“The Climate Interfaith Manifesto will be signed this afternoon and hopefully this Manifesto can serve as a tool for the climate change discussions inside faith traditions as well as a message to the political processes under the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] agenda,” says Henrik Grape, a Swedish pastor and author of the Faith and Climate blog.

Continue reading "Get right with God: fight climate change" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Genetics of cancer relapse revealed
Biologists have tracked the origins and evolution of a type of childhood leukaemia that is deadliest when it recurs.

Enceladus shoots supersonic jets of water
Saturn's icy moon spouts water vapour from its cracks.

How the turtle got its shell
Chinese fossil forces palaeontologists to rethink turtle origins.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Dark matter is a mysterious substance that makes up about 85% of the matter in the Universe. It doesn't interact with regular matter, at least not very often, and so physicists are having a devil of a time figuring out what it is.

Lately there's been a lot of talk about dark matter. Some say they've seen it, other say no. One particularly controversial experiment is known as DAMA/LIBRA. It's located beneath the Italian mountain of Gran Sasso, and it's claiming to see an annual fluctuation of dark matter as the earth flies through a galactic halo of the stuff.

But an American experiment says that whatever it is DAMA has seen can't be dark matter, at least not any kind of dark matter predicted by current theories. The experiment, which was placed underground in a City of Chicago pumping station, should have seen a signal if DAMA was right, but it came up empty-handed (their results have just been accepted to the journal Physical Review Letters).

The DAMA group is tenacious, and I personally doubt this will be the last word on the matter

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Mathematician Kiyoshi Ito died this month in Kyoto, Japan.

The New York Times notes that his work on random motion and probability was used in fields from finance to biology. His maths for describing random processes is now called ‘the Ito Calculus’, it adds. “People all over realized that what Ito had done explained things that were unexplainable before,” Daniel Stroock, a mathematician at MIT told the paper.

The citation for his 1998 Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences says his theory “marked a new epoch in scientific research regarding random motion and stochastic phenomena in nature and society”.

Continue reading "RIP Kiyoshi Ito" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Great Beyond has sniffed out some great science news for dog lovers.

First up: New Scientist reports from an American Physical Society meeting in Texas that canines’ amazing sense of smell is all down to the slime on their noses. Apparently the mucus layer on wet dog noses absorbs some molecules faster than others. Now Brent Craven of Pennsylvania State University has used MRI images and computer models to show some molecules are detected at different points in the doggy airways.

“We’ve shown that the sorting out of the different odorants before they even get to the receptors is ... important,” says Craven.

All that super-smell-sense comes in handy when you’re a dog like Tucker, who works for researchers from the University of Washington. Tucker has the glamorous job of standing in the bows of a research boat and sniffing out whale excrement, it was reported last week.

The Seattle Times says:

When Tucker finds what researchers are looking for, he gets to play with his ball. So he is a highly motivated tracker — and in the summers of 2006 and 2008, he helped track down some of 130 samples of scat from orca whales in Puget Sound's J, K and L pods.

Hormone levels in the excrement show that Puget Sound’s resident orcas are nutritionally deprived, says Sam Wasser, director of the UW’s Center for Conservation Biology.

Finally, spare a thought for Matthew Marcum, whose dog blasted him with a shotgun. “He’s a good dog. It’s just one of those things. It’s an accident,” Marcum told The Oregonian.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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UPDATE - We've now obtained the missing statistics, full details at the bottom of the post.

Ever since the current financial crisis hit people have been suggesting that belt-tightening could spell the end of green spending.

Now a new survey conducted in 12 countries has found “Forty three per cent of those surveyed chose climate change ahead of global economic stability when asked about their top three concerns, despite the survey taking place in the midst of the financial market turmoil in September-October 2008.”

Unfortunately the survey, run for the HSBC bank, provides no further details on that figure, either in the press release or the glossy, eight-page report pdf. No information on what the other 57% of people think, or indeed what the top three concerns actually were.

Worryingly this fact – or lack of it – is glossed over in most of the positive press coverage that is being given to this poll...

Continue reading "Credit crunch chills climate change choices" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Update: James Gillies, CERN's spokesperson, is refuting the rumor. The slide in question was "one guy's speculation," he says. In fact, CERN is still aiming for collisions in mid-2009, although not at the full design energy of 7 TeV. A full report on the incident is expected soon.

The world's biggest, newest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, may be out of service for the entirety of 2009.

The LHC was knocked out of commission earlier this fall, after an electrical fault caused extensive damage to one of its eight sectors. A substantial part of the damage was caused by the liquid helium used to cool the machine, which escaped its cryostat and vaporized--causing an enormous pressure build up.

A couple of blogs have taken note of a presentation given by Jörg Wenninger of the lab's beam department, in which he apparently claimed the machine may not restart until 2010. That would allow CERN's accelerator team to install pressure relief valves on the entirety of the LHC machine. 2009 might still be an option, but it would be later in the summer and at lower energies than originally planned.

For my money I'm guessing that most physicists would like to see some collisions next year. Even if they don't yield new discoveries, they can still be used to calibrate the detectors (and write a few theses).

It should be said that the actual plan is a little unclear. The slide shown here comes from the Resonaances blog, it does not appear in the current online version of Wenninger's presentation, although there's a blank page near the bottom where some say it should be.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Nature Podcast – This week we bring you news from the year’s biggest neuro jamboree, stick our heads into the oldest turtle fossil ever found, talk to the author of a new book on photosynthesis, and discover the source of water vapour jets on Saturn’s sixth moon.

Minerals yield signs of early plate tectonics
Evidence of 4-billion-year-old subduction points to an early start for modern-Earth geology.

Cosmic-ray hot spots puzzle researchers
Proton discovery may cast doubt on dark-matter theories.

Greenland gambles on warmer, richer climate
As melting ice uncovers natural resources, Greenlanders vote to step closer to independence.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Ah, one of my favourite stories of summer, involving Brian May, a school teacher and a mysterious astronomical object is now warming my heart again in these cold and gloomy winter months.

Yes, Hanny’s Voorwerp is back! And this time science can explain it.

Remember if you will the Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel, drawn to astronomy by the plucky plectrum antics of Brian May, Queen guitarist. Remember, too, van Arkel’s discovery of her very own astronomical “object”, (or voorwerp in Dutch) which she found as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. Hanny’s Voorwerp was something that looked like a galaxy, was full of hot gas but contained no stars, and was a complete mystery.

Well since then, astronomers, both professional and amateur, including van Arkel, have trained the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, in the Netherlands, on the Voorwerp. And what did they find? A massive black hole at the centre of the galaxy known as IC2497 is spewing out lots of very energetic particles. (press release) This jet stream clears a channel through the foggy interstellar dust. "This cleared channel permits the beam of intense optical and ultraviolet emission associated with the black hole, to illuminate a small part of a large gas cloud that partially surrounds the galaxy. The optical and ultraviolet emission heats and ionises the gas cloud, thus creating the phenomena known as Hanny's voorwerp,” says Mike Garrett from Leiden University, who led the charge.

The team still aren’t entirely sure about where the stream of gas comes from in the first place, but they claim to be making progress.

The news has been picked up in places, but I want to direct you to my favourite headline, in Space Daily: Bizarre giant green cloud. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Picture: Dan Smith, Peter Herbert, Matt Jarvis & the ING

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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“Observing his behaviours, we got suspicious as to whether Tsuyoshi was really a male.”
Zoo keepers in Japan have discovered why two polar bears they have been attempting to mate, Tsuyoshi and Kurumi, have failed to become intimate (AP).

“I’m actually more interested in seeing the animals than Escobar's old stuff.”
A tourist comments on the fact that drug baron Pablo Escobar’s former mansion, complete with full-size fake dinosaurs, has become a zoo (Guardian).

“We will intensify our actions and punish those responsible. We won't be intimidated.”
Brazilian environment minister Carlos Minc vows not to back down after a mob attacks environment agency offices and vehicles after a clampdown on illegal logging (Reuters).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Asher Mullard

Ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1st the papers are abuzz with AIDS news.

A paper in the Lancet says universal testing could reduce the number of people developing AIDS by 95%. An Indonesian state is pushing for micro-chipping of HIV positive people. Infections are up in the UK. And researchers have estimated that over 300,000 lives could have been saved if South Africa had started distributing antiretroviral drugs sooner.

Full details below the fold.

Continue reading "Countdown to AIDS day" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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UPDATE – Politco has (kind of) apologised for the article, although it notes, “The reaction by that broad community [of scientists who don’t doubt global warming] to this relatively minor nod to their last opponents seems, itself, a bit overheated. But we chose this path and we’re willing to take the heat. In fact, we invited it.”

There’s nothing like a good climate change-denial article to get the internet all riled up, and boy has Erika Lovley done some riling.

She’s penned not one but two articles for the right-leaning Politico newspaper, which are being torn to shreds as we speak.

The one generating most ire is the frankly spectacular ‘Scientists urge caution on global warming’. This claims there is “a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation”.

David Roberts on the Gristmill blog calls Lovley’s pieces, “two of the most jaw-droppingly moronic stories I've ever seen”. The version of his story on the Huffington Post website comes with the headline, “Politico Reporter Erika Lovley Embarrasses Politico, Self, Profession of Journalism, Humanity”.

You know this isn't going to end well for her don't you?

Continue reading "Lovley’s day for a climate bunfight" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The theory that the huge ancient cave bear died off around 15,000 years ago has been challenged by a new paper.

Martina Pacher and Anthony Stuart claim that Ursus spelaeus likely went extinct around 27,8000 years ago, and its problem was an ice-age triggered food shortage, not nasty men with pointy sticks.

“Its highly specialised mode of life, especially a diet of high-quality plants, and its restricted distribution left it vulnerable to extinction as the climate cooled and its food source diminished,” says Pacher, of the University of Vienna (press release).

Continue reading "Humanity off the hook for cave bear extinction" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A Chinese official has confirmed that pollution has now rendered a third of the Yellow River unfit for any use.

According to state news agency Xinhua, the Yellow River Conservancy Committee has reported that 4,557.6 km of the river and its tributaries’ total 13,492.7 km length is classified as ‘type-five negative’ polluted. Only 2,174 km was type one or two, and therefore suitable for drinking.

AP explains that registering below level five means “it’s unfit for drinking, aquaculture, industrial use and even agriculture, according to criteria used by the United Nations Environmental Program”.

During the last assessment in 2006, 31% of the 12,510.8 km analysed was type-five negative.

Earlier this year National Geographic rang a long feature on China’s ‘mother river’:

Few waterways capture the soul of a nation more deeply than the Yellow, or the Huang, as it's known in China. It is to China what the Nile is to Egypt: the cradle of civilization, a symbol of enduring glory, a force of nature both feared and revered.
...
But today, what the Chinese call the Mother River is dying. Stained with pollution, tainted with sewage, crowded with ill-conceived dams, it dwindles at its mouth to a lifeless trickle.
...
The demise of the legendary river is a tragedy whose consequences extend far beyond the more than 150 million people it sustains. The Yellow's plight also illuminates the dark side of China's economic miracle, an environmental crisis that has led to a shortage of the one resource no nation can live without: water.

See also
China dam threatens ‘catastrophe’
Where has the Yangtze gone?
Nature's China Special

Image: Yellow River Mouth, China, 1996 / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Physics gets sexy
LHC physicist Brian Cox is one of the ‘Sexiest Men Alive’ according to People magazine (via Bad Astronomy).

“This is a grey area but, looked at correctly, we say this is a classic case of personal injury.”
James Townsend is representing six cancer victims seeking damages from a hospital in England after a freezer malfunction destroyed their preserved sperm, and their chances of fathering children (The Times).

“After a male and female encounter, and we can't see what they are doing, the female lets out a high-pitched scream and immediately after the male emits a loud bellow.”
Bill Ellis is using mobile phones to evesdrop on koala calls in Australia in an attempt to work out what they’re saying to each other (Reuters).

“Who knows, if you come back after 10 years maybe there is no more glacier.”
Percussionist Terje Isungset talks about making music with ice from a 2,500 year old glacier (The Guardian).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The African University Leader’s Forum meeting finishes today, in Accra, Uganda. Reporting from the meeting, the Chronicle of Higher Education paints a gloomy picture for the future of university teaching in Africa, with faculty there either approaching retirement age or else young, inexperienced and in many cases woefully under qualified.

This leaves a large gap that doesn’t look like being filled any time soon.

"Ghana alone requires over 1,000 new lecturers," Clifford N.B. Tagoe, vice chancellor of the University of Ghana and a co-chair of the University Leaders' Forum, told the paper. "We're able to recruit 20 or 30 in a particular year, but that same number retires in that year."

Continue reading "African universities' staff problems" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Via the Ocean Engineering blog, comes an amazing video.

The dangers of swimming too fast and not looking where you’re going are ably illustrated by this swordfish (or possibly marlin), found wedged into a blow out preventer on the Atwood Eagle oil rig. Not to worry though fish fans, a friendly underwater robot comes along to rescue it.

“This is an example of the things that make the offshore oil industry fun,” says the Peripatetic Engineer blog.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Astronomers unveil wish list
Roadmap sets out Europe's space priorities.

South Africa suspends water scientist
Anthony Turton may be dismissed after speaking to journalists about a canned presentation.

A new twist for horse racing
The hair on a horse's head could predict whether it is left- or right-hoofed.

Climate researchers 'should cut their carbon footprint'
Jet-setting scientists responsible for substantial greenhouse gas emissions.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Asher Mullard

The fisheries body responsible for conserving Atlantic tuna has set limits for the 2009 catch 50% higher than its own scientists deem allowable at a meeting in Morocco.

The new International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas quota for Atlantic Bluefin is 22,000 tonnes, despite calls from scientists to reduce quotas below 15,000 tonnes to avoid a crash in the tuna stocks. A plea to ban fishing during the spawning months of May and June was also ignored.

“The decision is a mockery of science and a mockery of the world,” says Sergi Tudela, head of the fisheries programme at the World Wide Fund for Nature (BBC). “Iccat has shown that it doesn’t deserve the mandate to manage this iconic fishery”.

The BBC also reports allegations that the EU threatened developing nations at the meeting with trade penalties unless they backed the EU’s push for an above-15,000 tonne catch.

Atlantic bluefin tuna levels are falling so fast that these fish may soon be listed as a threatened species. As such, authority over catch quotas would fall to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITIES).

Amidst cries of dismay and disgust from many conservationists about the decision, the Daily Telegraph focuses on the possibility of a “sushi shortage”, with Toshinori Itageki, spokesman for a chain of Sushi restaurants, saying “I expect that the price of tuna will increase by about 20 per cent”.

I wonder what he expects that price to be once all the wild tuna are gone?

More coverage
Tuna campaigners blame EU for unsustainable quota – EUobserver
Tuna commission comes up with "a disgrace, not a decision" – WWF news center
Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Quota to Be Cut by 20 Percent, Kyodo Says – Bloomberg

Image: fisherman in Sicily land a tuna / Danilo Cedrone - United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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If I had a penny for every time I’ve read a paper that says climate change is worse than we thought, I’d have ... well ... over a pound by now. A colleague on Nature Reports Climate Change says she’d have “at least five pounds … maybe a hundred”.

Today’s example: the oceans are turning acidic faster than we thought.

“The increase in acidity we saw during our study was about the same magnitude as we expect over the course of the next century,” says Timothy Wootton, of the University of Chicago (National Geographic).

His study period was the last eight years.

More carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere puts more carbon in the oceans in the form of carbonic acid and drives down the pH of the water, notes Wootton, lead author of a new paper in PNAS. After looking at over 24,000 measurements of coastal ocean acidity, recorded over the last eight years off the coast of Washington state, he brings bad news:

This rate of decline is more than an order of magnitude higher than predicted by simulation models, suggesting that ocean acidification may be a more urgent issue than previously predicted, at least in some areas of the ocean.

Continue reading "File under: ‘it’s worse than we thought’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor, broke from the tradition of his predecessor and made no mention of science in his speech delivering the pre-budget report yesterday.

But in supplementary documents published along side the report, the Government was keen to emphasise its continued commitment to investing in British science and acknowledged the key role science plays in strengthening the economy. But no new funds for science were announced and the focus on science that can deliver economic impact was stronger than on basic science.

Science campaigners viewed the tone as positive for science as “at least budgets were not cut”, says Nick Dusic, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK.

Continue reading "Science survives Chancellor's pre-budget report" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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Last week Google put the photo archives of Life magazine online, and in the process put up some of the best science photos I’ve seen for some time.

As Life has retained the copyright we can’t put them up here, but have a look at some of the Nature team favourites and feel free to add any of your own favourites below.

Paracutin Volcano in San Juan, Mexico, 1945

Roald Amundsen on his South Pole expedition, 1911

Weather ballon experiment, Antarctica, 1951

Astronomers use the McDonald Observatory telescope, 1948

Einstein & Oppenheimer in Princeton, 1947

Julian Huxley looking confused in Canada, 1955

Soviet space animals in 1961

An American chemist at an unknown research lab in 1946

Warning: browsing the Life photo archive may become addictive.

UPDATE - More science Life photo favourites:
Gorgeous physics photos from the LIFE archives – Symmetry Breaking
Kicking it Old School - Cosmic Variance

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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S. Alan Stern used to be a big cheese at NASA. From the looks of things, he’d like to be so again.

Stern, former associate administrator at the space agency, has been getting his name out there in a big way.

He certainly thinks it’s time for change.

“A cancer is overtaking our space agency: the routine acquiescence to immense cost increases in projects,” Stern writes in a New York Times op-ed piece.

Continue reading "Alan’s stern warning" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Asher Mullard

Epilepsy may develop as a result of the body’s own defensive cells getting stuck to blood vessels, researchers report in Nature Medicine.

Leaks in the blood brain barrier, which normally prevents harmful molecules from passing from blood into the brain, have been implicated in inducing seizures and epilepsy. However, it is unclear what mechanisms might lead to rupture of the blood brain barrier.

Paolo Fabene, of the University of Verona in Italy, and his colleagues now show that leukocytes, cells of the immune system that defend the body from bacteria and virus, might be responsible.

Continue reading "Epilepsy – a sticky situation" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This huge plume of fire is NASA testing the abort motor for its Space Shuttle replacement, the Orion launch system.

“It looked perfect. Very impressive. It was beautiful,” says Charlie Precourt, former NASA astronaut and VP at Alliant Techsystems, which built the motor (Florida Today).

Click through for a full photo sequence...

Continue reading "Picture post: abort, abort, abort!" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Athletes might soon be banned from taking Viagra, the erectile-dysfunction drug that launched a billion spam emails.

“It’s amazing the interest that particular drug does attract,” says John Fahey, the president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, at a press conference last week (AP). “I can simply say this, there have been statements to suggest that it is performance-enhancing — that is being evaluated.”

Viagra (sildenafil citrate) works to increase blood flow by causing blood vessels to become wider. This could, in theory, boost sporting performance.

“It’s not being ignored, but there has been no decision on it and nor would I suggest that you should interpret what I’ve just said as a likelihood that there will be either a positive or a negative decision when the examination is ultimately concluded,” said Fahey, in a statement that was immediately interpreted as there being a likelihood that there will be either a positive or a negative decision when the examination is ultimately concluded.

Continue reading "If you take the blue pill..." »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Brain implant allows mute man to speak
Patient with paralysis controls speech synthesizer with his mind.

Australia's big hop into genomics
Map milestone for kangaroo genome project.

Carbon dioxide discovered on distant planet
Gassy signature of habitability spied in the atmosphere of a 'hot Jupiter'.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A skull from Frombork cathedral in Poland has been identified as that of revolutionary astronomer Copernicus.

Marie Allen, of Uppsala University, says DNA from the skull is a match for DNA from hairs found in books owned by Copernicus, whose book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium started the movement to viewing the sun – rather than the Earth – as the centre of the solar system.

“The two strands of hair found in the book have the same genome sequence as the tooth from the skull and a bone from Frombork,” she says (AFP).

Polish police have used the skull to create a reconstruction of how its owner might have looked. This, says AFP, “bore a striking resemblance to portraits of the young Copernicus”.

More coverage
Polish tests 'confirm Copernicus' – BBC
16th-century skeleton identified as Copernicus – Guardian

See also
No choppin' Chopin, says Poland

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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What’s more embarrassing than having a non-disclosing psychiatrist like Charles Nemeroff (you can read about him in this Nature editorial) on your university’s staff, regularly raking in six-figure sums from pharmaceutical companies and failing to disclose the fact? Possibly, having such a psychiatrist as the star host of your highly popular radio programme.

National Public Radio, the darling of the US intellectual elite, may be discovering that today, after the New York Times reported that Frederick K. Goodwin, the host of NPR’s award-winning weekly programme, “The Infinite Mind,” didn’t tell the station – or, needless to say, his radio audience – about at least $1.3 million he earned between 2000 and 2007 giving marketing lectures for drug companies.

Just in case you might think there’s no connection, consider this from the Times:

In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, Dr. Goodwin warned that children with biploar disorder who are left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view. “But as we’ll be hearing today,” Dr. Goodwin reassured his audience, “modern treatments — mood stabilizers in particular — have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children.”

That very day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. Indeed, Glaxo paid Dr. Goodwin more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given Congressional investigators show.

Continue reading "This programme was brought to you in association with..." »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A major new player has stepped up in what we are going, with huge hyperbole, to call the Arctic Wars!

Following up on Russia, Canada and America’s declarations that at least a piece of the Arctic is theirs, Europe is getting on the scene.

The European Commission has released the “first step toward an EU Arctic Policy”. As AP notes, “the move is likely to irk Russia, Canada, the United States and Norway, which are issuing new territorial claims in the polar region”.

“We cannot remain impassive in the face of the alarming developments affecting the Arctic climate and, in consequence, the rest of our planet,” says Joe Borg, European Commissioner in charge of the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (press release).

Continue reading "Europe crashes the Arctic party" »

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A strange follow up to Wednesday’s story of a groundbreaking windpipe transplant: it nearly didn’t happen after an airline allegedly refused to fly stem cells used to make the new windpipe for Claudia Castillo from England to Spain.

The cells, which were used to coat a donor windpipe, were grown in Bristol and then flown to Barcelona. But airline EasyJet refused to carry the stem cells, saying that they were stored in more than 100ml of fluid and therefore breached regulations and were a “security risk”, says Bristol’s Martin Birchall.

“I almost got arrested by armed police. I was so furious, trying to explain months of work,” he says (Sun / Daily Telegraph).

“The clock was ticking. We'd taken the cells out of their culture media an hour before. We thought about driving to Barcelona, but that would have taken too long.”

Eventually Birchall paid for a surgeon friend of one of the research team to fly the stem cells in his private jet (BBC). The university later refunded the money.

EasyJet says “we do not have any record of the request” but it has refunded the cost of the flight (Sky News).

The cells apparently had to arrive in Barcelona within 16 hours of leaving the Bristol lab. Maybe Birchall can count himself lucky. When I last flew EasyJet from Barcelona to London I arrived nearly 12 hours late. And in Bristol.

UPDATE - Just to clarify, in light of the comments this post has attracted: airlines can carry items with more than 100 ml of liquid such as transplant organs. The BBC notes, “The airline had said it would carry the cells, but on the day check-in staff refused”.

Image: Claudia Castillo / University of Bristol

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Briny mix could stop carbon dioxide leaks
Engineers hope salt-water technique could make coal-fired power plants a cleaner energy option.

Nuclear masses calculated from scratch
An exhaustive calculation of proton and neutron masses vindicates the Standard Model.

Human genomes in minutes?
Not yet, but biotechnology company is on track for 2013.

Seabed tracks suggest new origin of animal life
First evidence that earliest fossils could be attributed to protozoans.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Television might be about to get geekier.

The US National Academy of Sciences has created an initiative that will link TV and movie directors with scientists and engineers to incorporate more accurate science content into entertainment: the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

"By building strong connections between the entertainment and science communities, we're hoping to provide an important service to both Hollywood and the viewing public,” says NAS president Ralph Cicerone (press release). Cicerone says he thinks initiative should allow the public to get involved in the latest advances in science, technology and medicine through television and film.

More and more shows are incorporating science into their content, especially forensic investigation and medical shows like CSI and ER. Films like A Beautiful Mind and Mission Impossible are also heavy on science and technology while Star Trek and the like use the fundamental principles of science to push the frontiers into science fiction.

Continue reading "Getting better science on screen" »

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Amphibian experts gathered today at the Zoological Society of London to hear about the sorry state of the world’s frogs, toads, newts, salamanders and caecilians.

“I can hardly think of a more important subject for us to be covering today,” ZSL’s director general Lesley Dickie Ralph Armond* told the gathered scientists. “Human intervention is essential for the survival of a vast range of amphibian species.”

While much has been made of the nasty infectious disease chytridiomycosis, Angus Carpenter of the University of East Anglia told the symposium of another problem: the global amphibian trade.

Data on species imported into countries and declared under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species between 1985 and 2008 show that over 100 million frogs were traded for meat, making over 26,000,000 kg of meat in total.

In the same timeframe 617,000 individual frogs were traded, mostly for the pet trade.

Continue reading "The international amphibian trade blues" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Biotech firm Amgen and Japanese pharma company Takeda have pulled their lung cancer drug candidate motesanib from phase III trials, after reports of higher than usual death rates among patients (press release, covered by Reuters, Bloomberg, Fierce Biotech)

The drug was being tested for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer, and the trial was halted on the advice of an independent data monitoring committee. The news comes only days after news reports about another Amgen drug in phase I trials that works by starving tumour cells of blood in a similar way to motesanib. It isn’t yet clear whether the latest news will affect Amgen’s other pipeline drugs, although Roger Perlmutter, executive vice president of R&D at Amgen, said that this kind of outcome has been seen in similar drugs before.

"While we are disappointed in this outcome, it is consistent with data seen with some other anti-VEGF therapies and appears to constitute a class effect of these types of agents," Perlmutter said in the Amgen release

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Just when it seemed that the liberal winds blowing through Washington have knocked down pretty much everything in their path, another gust sweeps in and takes out a pillar of the Democratic establishment.

Michigan Representative John D. Dingell is the second-longest House member in history and has served as the chief Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee for the past 28 years. At 82, the dean of the House has an unparalleled history of ushering through complex legislation on everything from health care to energy, environment and telecommunications. Global warming was supposed to be next on his list.

But it was not to be. A newly revitalized House caucus voted 137-122 to strip him of his chairmanship and turn over the reigns to a political fireball from California, Henry Waxman. Waxman currently chairs the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, where he has been probing alleged malfeasance by the Bush administration for the past two years.

The news came a day after the longest-serving US Senator finally conceded his loss in an extraordinarily tight election. Alaska Republican Ted Stevens' sin was a conviction on seven felony counts of failing to report gifts from industry friends. Dingell was neither accused nor convicted of anything unseemly, but the same ties to powerful industries, most notably the automakers in his hometown of Detroit, ultimately cost him his post.

“Well, this was clearly a change year, and I congratulate my colleague Henry Waxman on his success today," Dingell said in a release minutes after the vote.

So what does this mean?

Continue reading "In a year of change, Democrats take down one of their own" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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This week’s copy of Nature contains a paper that may far in the future help with the return of a woolly face from the past.

“Here we describe 4.17 billion bases (Gb) of sequence from several mammoth specimens, 3.3 billion (80%) of which are from the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) genome and thus comprise an extensive set of genome-wide sequence from an extinct species,” write Webb Miller of Penn State University, and his colleagues.

It’s only the genome of a woolly mammoth!

So does this mean the lumbering beasts could soon be roaming a zoo near you? In another part of this issue of Nature, as part of our Darwin 200 coverage, Henry Nicholls says ‘Let's make a mammoth’:

It would be a huge undertaking ... . Perhaps the whole idea will remain too strange, too expensive, too impractical, even too unappealing for anyone to take seriously.

But the fact that just 15 years ago cloning mammals was confidently ruled out by many as being impractical should give people pause before saying any such thing is impossible. On Darwin's 200th birthday in 2009, reoriginating extinct animal species will still be a fantasy. By 2059, who knows what may have returned, rebooted, to walk the Earth?

More tusk-tastic coverage below the fold

Continue reading "Researchers complete mammoth task" »

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Nature Podcast - This week's show is evolution-tastic; we've got group selection, a 'proto-eye' of the kind predicted by Darwin and we delve into the genome of the now extinct woolly mammoth. Plus, a tantalizing trace of dark matter detected by a balloon experiment above Antarctica.

Obesity linked to grandparental diet
Mice eating high-fat foods confer changes on at least two subsequent generations.

Rhesus protein stops blood becoming acidic
Blood-group-factor family has a role in pH control.

Nuclear renaissance plans hit by financial crisis - Premium content
Role of fission in fighting climate change looks likely to wane.

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Posted for Quirin Schiermeier

A paper this week in Nature (subscription) sheds new light on the causes of pronounced greenhouse-gas and climate fluctuations during glacial times.

The last ice-age, which covered the period from around 110,000 to 10,000 years before now, is famed for a series of climate swings known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

Scientists have found evidence in Greenland ice cores for abrupt warming episodes of up to 15 degrees Celsius within few decades, followed by a more gradual cooling. These glacial warm and cold periods swung back and forth between the poles in a kind of thermal seesaw effect, whereby Antarctic temperatures rose when Greenland temperatures dropped, and vice versa.

It has long been assumed that Dansgaard-Oeschger events were triggered by changes in Atlantic ocean-circulation. The new modelling study by Andreas Schmittner and Eric Galbraith now adds new evidence to the idea.

Read the full version of this post on Nature’s Climate Feedback blog...

Image: Eric Galbraith

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Blistering barnacles! The US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been busy with the fishies. NOAA has announced which states will be eligible for aid money to help recover from various natural disasters that befell the country recently.

These include: $47 million for fisheries in Louisiana and Texas damaged by hurricanes Ike and Gustav; $20 million for watermen in Maryland and Virginia who have suffered from a decline in soft shell blue crabs in Chesapeake Bay; $5 million for Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire to look more closely at what happened when a red tide of algae hit their coastline, killing off loads of shellfish; and finally, $2 million for fishermen in the Puget Sound, including severel northwest Indian tribes, who have been hit by declining sockeye salmon stocks.

Out of all these, the $5 million to help victims of the red tide algal blooms in Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire is the only one picked up so far (Boston Herald, Boston Globe)

As well as all that fishy help, NOAA also just offered its first Biological Opinion to the Environmental Protection Agency about how pesticides affect fish. This is the first in a series that will be released between now and February 2012. NOAA looked at diazonin, malathion, and chlorpyrifos and said that they were likely to affect 27 salmon populations on the West coast of the US, and that buffer zones should be introduced to protect them. Some papers are reporting this as a new EPA ruling, but nothing is likely to happen for a while. (Guardian, AP , which has a quote from NOAA employee Jim Lecky uttering the word “gazillion”). The EPA was told to ask for this information from NOAA as a result of a lawsuit brought against the agency by environmental groups.

Image: Sockeye Salmon, by NOAA/USFWS

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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“I’m the only person in the world to ever be bitten by a pygmy tarsier.”
Sharon Gursky-Doyen, Texas A&M University professor of anthropology, was one of a team that found the first living pygmy tarsiers seen in 80 years (Reuters).

“The epidemic is starting to generalize.”
Li Dongliang, a district director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, warns that AIDS in China is spreading into the mainstream of society (WSJ).

“There are some scars that women do seem to find appealing.”
Robert Burriss, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool, found men with facial scars were 5.7 percentage points higher in ‘appeal ratings’ than their smooth-skinned equivalents (Guardian).

“Debby was a great bear. She acted like a grumpy old bear a lot of times. It was great. She had a lot of life in her, a lot of feistiness.”
Jos Gatien, senior bear keeper at Winnipeg's Assiniboine Park Zoo, remembers the world’s oldest polar bear, who died this week (The Canadian Press).

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The United Kingdom held the first European auction for carbon allowances today, initiating the transition toward a "polluter pays" system for greenhouse gases.

Companies covered under the European Trading scheme must have one allowance for every tonne of carbon dioxide they emit. Until now governments have freely distributed allowances in order to soften the impact on industry during the early years. But given that each of the allowances has monetary value on the European carbon market, this is akin to giving away money.

The UK is the first country to avail itself of an EU rule allowing governments to auction up to 10 percent of the allowances between now and 2012. Selling four million allowances at a rate of 16.15 euros per tonne, the UK hauled in nearly 65 million euros (US $81 million). Next year the country plans to sell upward of 25 million allowances, according to Reuters.

Beginning in 2013, the goal is to auction all of the allowances; rules for doing so are currently under debate within the European Union. Under such a system, companies must pay for the right to pollute, which raises revenue that can be used to address global warming.

At least that's the theory. Governments can also just raise revenue - which isn't easy to come by at present - and do what they please with it. As noted by several critics in the Guardian, the UK government has so far refused to dedicate these revenues to climate solutions.

The UK had initially planned to sell 23 million allowances this year, but that plan was delayed by logistical problems, according to Point Carbon, a consultancy based in Oslo, Norway. Point Carbon says other EU countries were planning to hold auctions this year but have not implemented legislation and institutions to do so.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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Spanish doctors have successfully given a woman a new windpipe built with her own stem cells.

After stripping the donor windpipe down to just the collagen they seeded it with cells from the 30-year old woman, who was suffering with the after-effects of TB. This was then used to replace the woman’s left main bronchus.

“The graft immediately provided the recipient with a functional airway, improved her quality of life, and had a normal appearance and mechanical properties at 4 months,” Paolo Macchiarini, of the Hospital Clinico de Barcelona, and his research team write in The Lancet. “The patient had no anti-donor antibodies and was not on immunosuppressive drugs.”

The patient, Claudia Castillo, told the BBC, “I was a sick woman, now I will be able to live a normal life. I am very, very hopeful. I have been the first one but I encourage them to do more in the future.”

They very likely will, as the BBC notes that a 44-year-old woman is waiting for a suitable donor.

This next step may not be the only thing keeping the medical team awake at night. The Guardian says:

Claudia Castillo rang her surgeon at 5am one morning with surprising news. The 30-year-old, whose airway had been so damaged by TB she was gasping for breath on the stairs, told Professor Paolo Macchiarini she had been dancing all night in a club in Ibiza.

More coverage
Pioneering Stem Cell Surgery Announced – NY Times
Woman given windpipe created in laboratory – CNN
British doctors help perform world's first transplant of a whole organ grown in lab – Daily Telegraph

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A spacewalking astronaut has lost her toolbag, one of the largest ever objects lost by a spacewalker.

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper was leading a space walk to lubricate a sticky joint on a solar panel when the accident happened.

NASA’s mission log notes:

About halfway into the spacewalk, one of the grease guns that Piper was preparing to use on the SARJ [Solar Alpha Rotary Joints] released some Braycote grease into her crew lock bag, which is the tool bag the spacewalkers use during their activities. As she was cleaning the inside of the bag, it drifted away from her and toward the aft and starboard portion of the International Space Station. Inside the bag were two grease guns, scrapers, several wipes and tethers and some tool caddies.

According to AP the grease gun “exploded” covering her helmet camera and gloves. It was as Stefanyshyn-Piper was wiping her gloves that the bag drifted away (see Space.com for pictures).

In a follow up story, AP notes that the lost tool kit may mean future spacewalks have to be re-planned to reflect the reduced number of tools available. “What it boils down to is all it takes is one small mistake for a tether not to be hooked up quite correctly or to slip off, and that's what happened here,” says spacewalk officer John Ray.

To her credit, Stefanyshyn-Piper’s response to losing the bag was “Oh, great.” Which is rather less expletive-ridden than mine would have been.

Headline watch
Where did I put my tools? OOPS! – Detroit Free Press

Image: Heidemarie M. Stefanyshyn-Piper, mission specialist / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A paper published this week in the Royal Society’s Proc B* journal details a new species of primitive turtle, Eileanchelys waldmani, and helps narrow down when the shelly beasts took to the waves. From a block of rock from the Isle of Skye, off the Scottish coast, researchers extracted four well preserved turtle skeletons.

“Although the majority of modern turtles are aquatic forms, it has been convincingly demonstrated that the most primitive turtles from the Triassic, around 210 million years ago, were exclusively terrestrial,” says paper author Jérémy Anquetin, of the Natural History Museum, London and UCL (press release).

“Until the discovery of Eileanchelys, we thought that adaptation to aquatic habitat might have appeared among primitive turtles but we had no fossil evidence of that. Now, we know for sure that there were aquatic turtles around 164 million years ago.”

As if this wasn’t enough, the researchers have provided an awesome – if slightly over the top – illustration of what life might have been like on Skye all those years ago (full image below the fold).

Continue reading "When turtles took to the seas" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Forestry carbon dioxide projects to close down
Move releases funds for new experiments.

Nanotube 'shortcut ' boosts brain signals
But a second study finds that solutions of the tiny tubes may block neuronal activity.

Beat the itch
Scratch it by knowing first which type you have.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The dot earth domain just got a little less exclusive, now that NASA wants to surf the web from outer space.

The agency has completed their first successful test of a deep space network modelled after the Internet, according to a NASA press release.

They are calling it Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, and the idea, sometimes called Interplanetary Internet, has been around for a while. Vint Cerf, a Google vice-president and co-author of the packet protocols that power the Internet, partnered with NASA a decade ago to work on it, and Wired had one of the first nice discussions of its potential.

It finally appears to be on the road to reality. Since October, engineers at Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California have been testing the software with a simulated 10-node network. Nine were at JPL. Only one was actually in space: Epoxi, the probe that is on its way to Comet Hartley 2.

Continue reading "Deep Space Internet" »

Posted by Eric Hand
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Barack Obama has 62 days before he assumes the presidency of the United States, but he’s already moving into the Oval Office mentally, if not physically.

For the time being, Obama has hunkered down in his hometown of Chicago, noting that only one person can be president at a time. But his transition team is hugely busy here in Washington, filling up rented office space across the street from one of the buildings belonging to the National Academy of Sciences. All eyes are focused on who Obama might name to head the Office of Science and Technology Policy – otherwise known as the president’s science adviser. The money is on someone with a sterling scientific pedigree (possibly including a Nobel prize) and someone already well known to Obama. Who’s your best guess? Leave your thoughts in the comment thread below.

Over the past few days the team has announced who’ll be in charge of assessing potential nominees to positions important to science (Politico, also earlier Nature story). In overall charge for the science, technology and space agencies is Tom Wheeler, a telecommunications expert and managing director for the venture capital firm Core Capital Partners.

Continue reading "Who's in charge of science under Obama?" »

Posted by Alex Witze
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“We needed to save the young one’s life. If the hemoglobin was low, there was only one remedy: blood transfusion.”
Pandurang Munde, director of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, explains why vets have been undertaking blood transfusions on a tiger (AP).

“There is absolutely no reasonable scientific dispute on the subject of whether children who are raised by gay parents are disadvantaged in any way.”
Leslie Cooper, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, comments on a case in Miami that has social scientists going head to head over whether a gay man should be allowed to adopt his two foster children (Miami Herald).

“We always do tend to have music on but we certainly wouldn't stick to classical music and I think our elephants are a bit partial to Terry Wogan and Chiltern FM.”
David Field, zoological director of London and Whipsnade zoos, comments on research showing that classical music can reduce pachyderm abnormal behaviours (Guardian).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A 4600-year-old mass grave in Germany contains the oldest proven ‘nuclear family’, say genetic researchers.

Discovered in 2005, the graves near Eulau contained a number of adults and children who appeared to have met a violent end. Wolfgang Haak, who now works at the The Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, and colleagues analysed the genetic make-up of these individuals.

“A direct child-parent relationship was detected in one burial, providing the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family,” they write in PNAS (link live soon). “...Their unity in death suggests a unity in life.”

The New York Times notes that the fact all the individuals appeared to have died at the same time was a hint that they met a sudden end. There’s also the fractured skulls and an arrowhead in one of their spines. The Times says Haak suggests that:

Adolescents and young adults were either not present — perhaps they were working in fields — or were able to escape, while younger children and older adults were killed. But then the survivors returned and, with intimate knowledge of the relationships among the dead, properly buried them.

He told the BBC, “You feel some kind of sympathy for them, it’s a human thing, somebody must have really cared for them. Normally you should be careful in archaeological research not to allow feelings in that make us base judgements on modern ideas, we don’t know how hard daily life was back there and if there was any space for love.”

More from this week’s PNAS
“A hydrologic and economic analysis of the Upper Rio Grande basin in the Southwest, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that subsidies and other policies that encourage conservation methods like drip irrigation can actually increase water consumption,” says the NY Times.

“Two popular leukemia drugs, Gleevec and Sutent, kept lab mice from developing type 1 diabetes and put 80 percent of diabetic mice in remission, an international team said on Monday,” says Reuters.

Photo courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS (2008).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Back in October, Nature’s Rex Dalton reported that the biosafety level 4 pathogen research lab in Galveston, Texas had survived Hurricane Ike.

In that story, he noted:

Ike, which hit on 13 September, caused at least $700 million worth of damage — including $275 million in lost hospital revenues — to University of Texas facilities. That includes more than $400 million for clinical facilities at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), and at least $18 million for UTMB research labs. Lower-floor laboratories were flooded, and hundreds of animals had to be destroyed after auxiliary power systems failed.

Now the UT Medical Branch has started laying off its workers as a result of the Ike damage. The Houston Chronicle says 3,000 of UTMB’s 12,000 employees will be let go.

“It’s terrible,” Deborah Warren, a surgical technician in the neonatal unit at the branch’s Sealey Hospital, told the New York Times. “It’s a hard time for the hospital, our city and our state. I’m just curious to know if they can bail out Wall Street, why they cannot bail out UMTB.”

The Galveston County Daily News says:

If there’s a bright spot in the grim week ahead, it’s that the medical branch, the county’s most powerful economic engine, will dismiss only 2,800 to 3,000 people. University of Texas System regents last week authorized cutting up to 3,800 full-time equivalent positions.

Images: before and after Ike photos from the Bolivar Peninsula, near Galveston Island / USGS (click to enlarge)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Physicist Shu Quan-Sheng has pleaded guilty to charges of passing American space secrets to China.

Shu was arrested in September by the FBI and it was alleged he was “providing technical expertise and foreign technology acquisition” to the Chinese space programme (see FBI swoop on ‘China space spy guy’).

A statement released yesterday by the Department of Justice says Shu pleaded guilty to “a three-count criminal information”.

Continue reading "Physicist cops to sending space-secrets to China" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Sniffing out a rumbling volcano
A radio-controlled helicopter could help predict when a volcano will blow its top.

The search for genome 'dark matter' moves closer
The multi-million dollar 1000 Genomes project is set to be finished in a year.

Scientists self-censor after political attack
Researchers avoid contentious language and issues in grants and papers.

Why fruit are groovy
Pumpkins, melons and gourds are ribbed and ridged by the buckling of their skin.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

Imatinib (trade name Gleevec), the drug that rose to fame as a potent and lasting treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia and some other cancers has recently shown a tantalizing aptitude for targeting autoimmune diseases as well.

Both in mice with auto-immune hepatitis and arthritis and in case reports from patients with rheumatoid arthritis ,
psoriasis and Crohn’s disease, the thinking is that the drug, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, is working by dampening the immune response.

Now Cedric Louvet, a postdoc in Jeffrey Bluestone’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco and colleagues have asked what Gleevec will do in what is possibly the most infamous autoimmune disease of them all: juvenile diabetes, also known as type I diabetes, in which the body’s immune system attacks and eventually destroys the insulin-producing β cells of the pancreas. The answer they found is exciting, if highly preliminary.

Louvet and his team report this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that Gleevec cured 80% of mice afflicted with new cases of type I diabetes. Treating the mice for ten weeks led to long-lasting remission. (The diabetes reappeared in the mice when they were only treated for three weeks.) What’s more, seven weeks of treatment with the drug prevented the onset of diabetes in 80% of mice that weren’t yet diabetic but were engineered to get the disease. The protective effect was still working in a majority of them nearly one year later. Another tyrosine kinase-inhibiting drug, sunitinib (trade name Sutent), had similar effects.

The authors suggest that the drug may be throwing a wrench in the inflammatory works by targeting a tyrosine kinase that’s intimately involved in the immune response.

Posted by Alex Witze
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More bad news from the Large Hadron Collider.

Repairing the damage from the electrical failure earlier this year will run to $21 million, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (AP). The original cost estimate for the repair was around $80,000, not including labour and the spares.

In addition, the particle collider will not be up and running before June. Previously it was suggested the particles could be whizzing round the ring by April (AFP).

“There is still a lot of work to do and we want to be sure that everything is in order before starting up,” says spokesman James Gillies (AFP / AP). “If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez, has just vetoed a bill to protect the country’s glaciers, reports Reuters. The bill was passed only a month ago by Argentina’s congress.

The bill would have hampered Canadian mining company Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama project. The widely-derided $2.4 billion mine sits on the border of Chile and Argentina, in the Andes and near a number of glaciers, and the plan is to get gold, silver and a wealth of other metals and minerals from the open-cast site. The glacier bill would have hampered the project, according to the Reuters story.

Environmentalists are rather cross about this latest move (Latin American Herald Tribune), because they say the mine will cause the glaciers perched in the mountains around the mine, to slip and be destroyed, with the knock-on effect of threatening many people’s water supply. Raul Montenegro, president of the group Environmental Defense Foundation, (Funam), said in a statement that Fernandez: “doesn't care about the people whose water supply comes from (glacier-fed) water basins."

Fernandez announced her veto in a decree, saying that she did this to protect economic development in Andean regions, after concerns were raised by governors of those regions: "Banning mining and oil exploration and extraction ... would give environmental considerations pre-eminence over activities that could be undertaken in a way that protects the environment,” the decree read.

The mine still hasn’t got the final all clear, apparently, because Chile and Argentina are still wrangling about who gets what in terms of tax.

Image: Cristina Fernandez / official website

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Organ donation is a hot topic in the UK at the moment, with the prime minister hinting he could ignore the recommendations of advisors and bring in an ‘opt out’ system.

A new report from the Organ Donation Taskforce did not back a system of presumed consent to organ donations, but PM Gordon Brown said:

While they are not recommending the introduction of a presumed consent system, as I have done, I am not ruling out a further change in the law. If we can't [double the current number of donors to 50%] quickly, then we will return to the proposal I have put forward, which is a presumed consent system.
(Daily Telegraph.)

The taskforce report stated that presumed contend would likely not increase donation rates and could also undermine trust in the health care system (PA).

Continue reading "UK debates ‘presumed consent’ for organ donation" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“Why must the great die young?”
The ‘death’ of the Phoenix Mars mission is hitting some people hard (Arizona Daily Star).

“Survival is kind of the bottom line when it comes to cancer.”
Research by Barbara Andersen, of Ohio State University, seems to suggest that group therapy can help fight cancer (Reuters).

“One way to work out what is going in one end is to look at what is coming out of the other.”
Mark Meekan, a researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, is rather excited about the first video footage of a whale shark’s ‘ocean motion’ (BBC).

“Who doesn't love a good animal video?”
A top ten animal videos from Wired that shows even a hamster eating broccoli can be enthralling.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A hearty welcome to the European space party for the Czech Republic please.

Last week the republic became the 18th member state of the European Space Agency and its flag was flown alongside other members’ flags at ESA sites across the continent.

“Full membership of ESA is of tremendous importance for Czech science,” says Czech Education Minister Ondrej Liska (press release). “This is an opportunity for Czech scientific, research and industrial organisations to contribute to international cooperation in the exploration of space, the Earth, satellite telecommunication and navigation and space technologies.”

Image: the Czech flag flies at the ESA Centre for Earth Observation in Italy / ESA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The country has long been opposed to Japan’s controversial ‘scientific whaling’, which involves catching whales and eating them once the science has been done. Now the Great Beyond’s favourite rock-star-turned-environment-minister Peter ‘Burning Beds’ Garrett has announced an AU$6.15 million non-lethal whale research programme (coverage from ABC, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age).

“Australia does not believe that we need to kill whales to understand them,” says Garrett (press release). “Modern day research uses genetic and molecular techniques, as well as satellite tags, acoustic methods and aerial surveys, rather than grenade-tipped harpoons.”

The plan is for Australia to lead a ‘Southern Ocean Research Partnership’ to coordinate non-lethal research.

Garrett was interviewed about the plan by Simon Lauder of ABC’s AM programme (transcript):

SIMON LAUDER: Do you have any reservations at all about engaging the Japanese whales on their own territory rather than maintaining the argument that science has nothing to do with whaling?

PETER GARRETT: Well I think it is really important for us to bring this discussion into the fore. Australia doesn't believe that we need to kill whales to understand them. And by actually leading a Southern Ocean research partnership, we will be developing new model for coordinating regional, non-lethal whale research.

Image: Garrett / Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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English music collective Chumbawamba have stopped singing truly awful songs about the UK’s drinking culture long enough to pen this ditty about Charles Darwin.

“It’s probably one of very few songs about Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution,” says one of the band. “Quite good really at a time when they’re talking about teaching creationism in schools. ... Rather imaginatively this song is also called ‘Charlie’.”

Full lyrics for ‘Charlie’ can be found on the Pharyngula blog, which drew it to our attention. It’s not a patch on Darwin in Dub though.

More musical Darwin
DJ Darwin – “a world of musical creatures which are living in a system of death driven evolution - with a slightly sexist division of Male and Female creatures, respectively functioning with beats and melodies genes.”
Evolution (Use Your Brain) by My Poor Kevin

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists
Songs about science part VI: ‘Don’t go messing with our telescope’
Songs about science VII: ‘It’s a long way from Amphioxus’
Songs about pseudo-science
Songs about science part VIII: the astrobiology rap
Songs about science IX: Rollin’ to the Future
Songs about science X: drilling’s killer songs

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Politicians from the UK’s major opposition party will be forced to take science lessons, according to The Times.

The paper says Adam Afriyie, the Conservative party’s science spokesman, has drawn up plans for “compulsory lessons in scientific literacy” to address concerns that members of parliament are sadly lacking in scientific nous:

Classes explaining scientific method and basic concepts will be included in the induction programme for all Tory MPs after the next election, and sitting members and peers will also be offered the opportunity to attend, The Times has learnt.

“The evidence-based scientific approach extends well beyond subjects like embryology or GM crops,” Afriyie told the Times. “It is also critical to social policy and criminal sentencing, and it cuts across all areas of government.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Space Shuttle Endeavour is up! With a launch just before 8 pm in Florida, the shuttle rose cleanly into the nighttime sky, carrying 15 tonnes of equipment to the International Space Station, with which it will dock within 24 hours.
Most interesting among the cargo is a $250 million water purification system, designed to recycle 90% of the water used aboard the station -- including sweat and urine. (see New York Times and Bloomberg coverage). The system will save on seven tonnes of water that must be lifted up to orbit each year, according to Bloomberg.
The system will be necessary technology to test if long trips to Mars are ever undertaken, or if a moon base is established. In the meantime, it will allow living capacity to at the station to double from three to six. In order to do this, the shuttle also had to bring up another toilet.

Image: NASA/KSC

Posted by Eric Hand
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Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Scientists and sky-gazers got a fresh view of the Moon yesterday. NASA released a newly processed 42-year-old image, taken in 1966 by the Lunar Orbiter 1 (LO1), of Earth rising above the lunar surface.

The film tape that holds the image had been sitting in a California barn for the last four decades. A team recovered the roll, along with dozens of others, and estimates there are nearly 2,000 images from LO1 and four other related spacecraft from the 1960s. Since the film tape is now being processed with digital technology, the resulting images could become some of the highest resolution ones ever taken of the lunar surface.

The level of detail seen in these pictures is “just incredible”, says Robert Richards, CEO of Odyssey Moon, a commercial company working to build private transportation to the Moon. Should all the images be restored, he says, the data “will surely help us and other agencies as we prepare to take instruments and humans back to the Moon."

Most of the data has never been processed because decoding it all would have been too time-consuming back then, says Keith Cowing, president of SpaceRef Interactive. A former agency employee stored them, hoping that one day someone would process them. The images developed with 1960s state-of-the-art technology are good but not very detailed, Richards says. The reprocessed ones have a resolution of one meter per pixel.

The rest of the films tape is being processed as part of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. In 2009, the agency plans to launch the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to map the moon's surface. By studying the images from the 1960s compared with those taken next year, scientists will have a “great” opportunity to look at whether and how the lunar surface has changed over last 40 years, Cowing says.

The latest images are posted on Moon Views.

Image: NASA/LOIRP

Posted by Alex Witze
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Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

The tricolour of India became only the fourth flag to reach the moon when Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Impact Probe crashed into the lunar surface today.

Joining the flags of the US, the former Soviet Union and the European Union, India’s own was painted in miniature on each side of the 35-kilogram probe that impacted the Moon 25 minutes after being launched from Chandrayaan 1.

The Indian Space Research Organization described the event a “perfect operation,” according to the Times of India. The Indian-built probe now resides in a crater at the Moon's south pole, and its three instruments will be used to test the technologies necessary for future landing missions.

Remaining aboard Chandrayaan-1 are ten other instruments that mission scientists will begin to bring online as India's first unmanned spacecraft mission to the Moon continues. The spacecraft launched on October 22 and is on a two-year orbital mission to provide a detailed map of the topographical, mineral, and chemical features of the Moon's surface.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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The UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was given Royal Assent today. That means it is now law.

The Act has been a long time in the making, and has involved a lot of argument. But now it is legal for UK scientists to pursue research using hybrid embryos, among other things.

You can read all about it (if you haven't done already umpteen times over the past couple of years) here and here.

Image: Alamy

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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This week has seen a flurry of European Environmental action, whether you noticed it or not.

On Wednesday, the European Environment Agency published a report titled “Maximising the environmental benefits of Europe’s bioenergy potential”. It is a lengthy tome, some of which has been read by reporters at the European Voice. Their story tells of a warning the report makes about using biofuels for transport fuel. Maybe they read it in a lot greater depth than me, but the report doesn’t appear to be more than mildly cautious, saying that in general: biofuels = good news.

Thursday was the day the European Commission offered up its second Strategic Energy Review package (Press release). This set of proposals will feed into the Strategic Energy Technology Plan to “promote clean energy technology, new measures to improve the energy consumption of consumer goods and proposals for new compulsory targets on renewable energy and greenhouse gas emissions.” This is due in 2009.

Amusingly, press reports about the package all say that different things are “key” to the future of energy in Europe. Greenbang says it’s offshore wind farms; World Nuclear News is sure it’s nuclear, but over at EurActiv, we’re told that fossil fuel imports will be central to the strategy. Confused? You will be.

Image: SEAWIFS views the global carbon cycle, NASA

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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The estimable Chronicle of Higher Education in the US held a shindig earlier this week with Moody’s Investors Service, a well-respected financial analyst company, to discuss the economic future of higher education establishments in the US. (Story here, login required)

The financial health of academic institutions in the US is somewhat bolstered by their private funding structure (see Nature’s in-depth coverage of how the financial crisis is affecting academics worldwide here).

This feeling is shared by Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi, who said that because the higher education sector is one with still increasing numbers of jobs, it might be able to weather the recession.

But all is not good. The problem with the mess we’re in at the moment, said a Moody’s report, is that it isn’t going to go away anytime soon. And the longer the recession continues, the harder US colleges will be bitten. “The potential impacts of the combined credit freeze and recession on some colleges and universities will be significant if current trends persist,” the report says.

According to the Chronicle, “those effects could include less availability of private student loans, a shrinking pool of people who can afford to go to college, and more difficulty in borrowing funds for the colleges' operations and growth.”

But perhaps good times are ahead – the Obama administration could be good news for higher education institutes, suggested Moody’s director for higher education ratings John Nelson. “I don’t think that he’s going to lead an administration that’s hostile to universities… If anything, the opposite.”

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Astronomers claim first snaps of planets beyond the Solar System
Images of potential planets orbiting distant stars after decade-long search.

The pitfalls of tracing your ancestry
Charmaine Royal of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy explains the limitations of genetic testing.

How does bleach bleach?
The ubiquitous disinfectant may kill bacteria by unfolding their proteins.

Illegal drug shows promise in treating trauma symptoms
MDMA may boost the benefits of psychotherapy, trial suggests.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Cross-posted for Monya Baker, from Nature's stem cell blog, The Niche

A bone marrow transplant seems to have suppressed HIV virus levels in blood. These results have been observed in a single patient and have not yet been reported in the peer-reviewed literature. According to news reports, a man infected with the AIDS virus received a bone marrow transplant as part of leukemia treatment. The donor of the bone marrow was naturally resistant to HIV infection because of a mutation in the CCR5 protein that the virus uses to gain entry into the cells it infects. Afterwards, the patient stopped taking his AIDS drugs. Twenty months later, though they cannot conclude that the virus has been vanquished, doctors cannot find evidence of leukemia or HIV in the 42-year-old patient.

See the reports in Reuters (shorter) and the Wall Street Journal online (more detailed.)

But the doctors say that bone marrow transplants won't be used to treat HIV. In a bone marrow transplants, a patient’s own blood-forming stem cells are largely obliterated and then replaced. The painful procedure renders patients exhausted and extremely vulnerable to infection until the new stem cells take up residence in the bone marrow and restore the destroyed immune system.

The concept of supplying HIV patients with virus-resistant blood has been proposed before, mainly in the context of genetically engineering blood progenitors to resist the virus. Rather than genetically manipulating T-cells to prevent the virus from entering, the gene therapy trials I know about manipulate a patient's own cells to attack the virus once it begins replicating inside cells. (A search for "gene therapy" and "AIDS" on clinicatrials.gov pulls up over a dozen trials, including a Phase II trial from pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson.)

One challenge for pursuing the strategy of gene therapy is that cells that like to grow in the blood and bone marrow don't adjust well to a culture dish. It can be hard to get hold of enough cells to manipulate. Nonetheless, talk of using blood-forming stem cells beyond curing leukemia is certainly proliferating. Besides this recent report on HIV, there is talk of co-transplanting blood-forming stem cells alongside cell therapies as a way to prevent a patients’ body from rejecting transplants. As far as I know, these are regulated to so-called natural experiments such as this one and there are no plans for human trials.
(See Protecting Cells from Immune Attack )

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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The distinguishing feature of a male fiddler crab is the giant claw that he waves in a suggestive fashion at females or in a threatening fashion at other males. But it turns out that some males’ claws may be rather less distinguished than they appear. Some of them are faking it!

If a male loses his massive pinching device in a fight or to a predator he can grow a new one. Some species, though, grow new claws that look impressive but are basically useless.

“Males size each other up before fights, and displaying the big claw is a very important part of this process,” says Simon Lailvaux of the University of New South Wales (press release). “What’s really interesting about these 'cheap' claws is that other males can’t tell them apart from the regular claws.”

Lailvaux and colleagues have just published a study in Functional Ecology showing that regenerated claws of Uca mjoebergi fiddler crabs are “dishonest signals” as they have less closing force and less pull-resisting force. Both are crucial in fights.

Continue reading "Your cheatin’ claw" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Air pollution costs California $28 billion a year, according to researchers from California State University, Fullerton.

A new report produced by academics at Cal State warns that air in the South Coast and San Joaquin Valley air basins contributes to over 3,800 premature deaths each year.

“It may be tempting to think California can’t afford to clean up, but, in fact, dirty air is like a $28 billion lead balloon on our economy,” says Jane Hall, lead author of the report (press release). “Given the state of California’s economy, imagine what could be done if that $28 billion was being spent productively.”

Hall and colleagues looked at ozone and fine particulate pollution levels in the South Coast and the San Joaquin Valley areas and modelled the impact of these on human health. The economic impact was then worked out by seeing how many episodes of ill health would have been avoided if federal standards had been met.

Continue reading "California counts cost of choking" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Relations between scientists and policy makers must improve, a report commissioned by the British government has warned.

The report is one of a series on the future of the nation’s higher education system, including making research careers more attractive and the use of science in policy making. These reports were commissioned by the government from university and research leaders and will feed into a framework document setting out how the UK plans to develop its HE system over the next 10-15 years, which the government plans to launch next year.

The report on evidence based policymaking by Janet Finch, co-chair of the government’s top level advisory body the Council for Science and Technology, says, “A less than professional working relationship” exists between scientists and policymakers. She says “a degree of mistrust” exists which is inhibiting greater engagement.

Continue reading "The future of British university research " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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The Paris-based International Energy Agency came out with its annual World Energy Outlook report yesterday. And it makes for gloomy, and expensive, reading (Press release, Calgary Herald, Greentech Media).

The agency bases its findings on a reference scenario that assumes no new government policies are introduced. In this scenario, the IEA says that between now and 2030 world energy demand will grow by 1.6% a year, requiring energy-supply investments of $26.3 trillion (yep TRILLION dollars). “Yet the credit squeeze could delay spending, potentially setting up a supply-crunch that could choke economic recovery,” says the press release.

A week ago, Reuters pre-empted the report, with a story focusing on the slim chance we have to limit warming of the planet to 2 degrees Celsius. “The scale of the challenge ... is immense,” IEA has warned.

The IEA has been busy. Today it also released its prediction for how much oil will be needed globally next year. It lowered its estimate for 2009 by 0.8% to 86.5 million barrels a day (Bloomberg).

The agency also lowered its oil price assumption for 2009 to $80 a barrel from the $110 forecast it held during the past three months (AFP).

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Something “special and unforeseen” is causing a huge aurora across Saturn’s polar cap, NASA scientists report this week in Nature.

“We’ve never seen an aurora like this elsewhere,” says Tom Stallard, lead author of the paper and a researcher at the University of Leicester (press release). “It’s not just a ring of auroras like those we’ve seen at Jupiter or Earth. This aurora covers an enormous area across the pole.”

MSNBC’s Cosmic Log notes:

On Earth and Jupiter, for instance, astronomers are used to seeing auroral arcs or rings of light - which glow when energetic particles stream along a planet's magnetic field and interact with the atmosphere. The auroras on Earth, also known as the northern or southern lights, are sparked by the solar wind. Jupiter's main auroral ring is powered by the planet's own magnetic processes.

Saturn's main auroral ring, like Earth's, is caused by the solar wind. But the newly observed infrared displays go all over the place.

“This aurora appears to be unique to Saturn and cannot be explained using our current understanding of Saturn's magnetosphere,” the authors write in their paper.

Working out how it is triggered by “something special and unforeseen” in interactions between the solar wind and the planet’s magnetosphere and atmosphere will “lead us to physics which uniquely operates in the environment of Saturn,” says fellow author Nick Achilleos, of University College London.

Image: aurora and underlying atmosphere at two wavelengths of infrared / NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Nature Podcast: Learning who to trust, how cooling bird brains slows down song, controlling quantum dots for computing, how entrepreneurs think, and a round-up of science news.

Top US court allows Navy sonar use
Environmentalists concerned over potential effects on whales.

Modified genes spread to local maize
Findings reignite debate over genetically modified crops.

Counting the human costs of conflict
Calculating the death toll from the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Shar Pei dog is famous for its wrinkles. But hidden within the folds is the story of a genetic mutation enhanced by inbreeding, and a skin disorder.

Researchers in Barcelona have now discovered how this disorder, mucinosis, originated in the dogs, and they hope that their results will, they say, help in understanding nasty disorders like Familial Mediterranean Fever, as well as aging processes (press release).

Lluis Ferrer and Anna Bassols from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona discovered that mucinosis in Shar Peis is caused by a build up of hyaluronic acid in skin cells. This acid is found in the spaces between tissue cells.

In the dogs, hyaluronic acid is produced in abnormally high amounts because of the overexpression of the HAS2 enzyme. This is one of three enzymes responsible for the acid's production in mammals. The ultimate consequence is that too much mucin builds up under the skin, leading to the big, furry folds on the skin of the Shar Pei.

The inbreeding that Shar Peis have been subject to could actually help to work out how mucinosis is inherited, the researchers say.

This seems to make it clear that a bit of botox isn’t going to be any use to the Shar Pei at all.

Image by M.Peinado courtesy of Flickr

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Lonesome George may miss out on fatherhood
Eggs laid by two females in the giant tortoise's enclosure are unlikely to hatch.

Gene-testing company fights to retain listing
Frozen assets compound deCODE's financial woes.

Company sues researcher over unfavourable review
Biopure says meta-analysis harmed its product.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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We have a new rival for the shrimp running on a treadmill in our ‘strangest way to test the health of animals’ competition.

Today’s entry: flying toy helicopters over whales to collect the mucus they spray through their blow-holes.

“Scientists have always found it difficult to study diseases in whales because of their size and obligate ocean life. Most of the studies on whale pathogens have focused on dead, stranded or captive animals, which are hardly representative of the normal population,” say Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, of the Zoological Society of London (press release).

“I was determined to find a way to crack this problem and eventually hit upon the idea of using a vehicle that could be flown above the animals, thus finding out more about them whilst still using a non-invasive sampling technique.”

Mark Simmonds, director of science at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, told Bloomberg: “The blow from a blue whale is a mixture of water, mucus, bacteria and anything else that's in its lung. It’s a good approach, and it'll be nice to see it written up.”

New Scientist notes:

She first tried tying herself to a research boat and leaning overboard to catch a bit of whale "snot" in Petri dishes. "It worked," she says, "but it wasn't very safe."

Her technique is now somewhat more sophisticated. For species like grey and sperm whales that do not mind being close to a boat, the researchers attach their Petri dishes to a long pole and hold them out over the blows.

With the shyer blue whale, they have had to resort to toy-sized helicopters.

There is a downside to this research: whales can smell real bad. “It varies quite a lot,” says Acevedo-Whitehouse (Times). “... sometimes it’s pretty rotten. We’ve been pretty worried when the wind changes and you get completely drenched in it – they didn’t smell well.”

Or, as someone else might put it: “It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment, it is an argument for the pit.”

Headline watch
Thar she blows. Model aircraft sniff out ailments in whales – The Times
Thar she blows: Snot offers clues to whale health – New Scientist

Image: ZSL

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“I bent over backward to make it difficult for my work to be misused, and to no avail. When people are motivated to twist something for political purposes, they'll find a way to do it.”
University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond is not happy that her research is being allegedly distorted by up a group advocating “treatment” of homosexuality, from the Salt Lake Tribune (hat tip: Wonkette).

“I always say you never know what the sands of Egypt might hide.”
Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, comments on the discovery of a 4,300-year old pyramid to National Geographic.

“My fear is that the [monkeys] will end up in a birdcage in someone’s lounge.”
Jamie Craig, of the Cotswold Wildlife Park in England, has had his squirrel monkeys stolen, from the Guardian.

“This consumer demand is increasingly placing the natural environment - both in China and abroad - at risk through unsustainable and illegal wildlife trade.”
Reuters looks at a new report on consumption of wild animals in China.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A major report has been released demanding that the UK government keeps closer tabs on makers of nanomaterials, and products containing nanomaterials.

No, you don’t have a weird sense of deja vu. This is yet another report saying that we don’t know enough about nanomaterials, and this needs to be addressed now, before anything bad happens.

But this latest report is one of the UK’s strongest yet. It is from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Like the report produced in 2004 by the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, the latest report lays out the problems we face from the teeny tiny particles that are making it into sunscreen, cosmetics, tennis racquets, even antibacterial dressings.

Continue reading "Be scared. A little bit." »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Posted for Heidi Ledford

The publishers of the British Medical Journal have announced their first business foray into the murky world of complementary medicine: the publication of a quarterly journal dedicated to acupuncture.

BMJ Group said yesterday that it has acquired the quarterly journal Acupuncture in Medicine, which was previously published by the British Medical Acupuncture Society.

The BMJ itself is no stranger to the technique. Judging from papers it has published over the years, acupuncture might be useful for treating all sorts of things: chronic headaches, chronic neck pain, back pain, and osteoarthritis of the knee (well, except when it doesn’t work). And who could forget the most curious and controversial acupuncture finding of them all: the meta-analysis which suggested that acupuncture improves the rate of pregnancy and live births following in vitro fertilization.

To be fair, the journal has also taken a critical look at the placebo effect, and even the safety of the technique.

But to those acupuncture skeptics out there, acquiring the journal was an embarrassing excursion into the land of woo. One blogger spared no mercy: “BMJ Group promotes acupuncture: pure greed”.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Oxford University’s new £18 million biomedical science lab has officially opened with the transfer of the first mice into the building.

The lab’s dawn has been fraught with difficulties and delays since work began on its construction in 2003, after it became the target of animal rights protesters.

The building will re-house all the university’s research animals, which will be transferred in phases over the next few months, with the centre expected to become fully operational in mid-2009. It will mainly contain rodents, but will also house fish, frogs, ferrets and primates.

Continue reading "Oxford animal lab opens" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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Climate first for Obama transition team
Appointments to key energy positions should reveal the new president's priorities.

Should healthy people take statins too?
Rosuvastatin appears to lower the risk of heart disease in healthy people.

Time to test time
The essential fuzziness of time may be the limiting factor for a gravitational-wave detector in Germany.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The president of Harvard says that the financial crisis could severely damage the university’s endowment.

Drew Faust warned that Harvard “is not invulnerable to the seismic financial shocks in the larger world” in a letter to faculty, students and staff, published yesterday.

“While we can hope that markets will improve, we need to be prepared to absorb unprecedented endowment losses and plan for a period of greater financial constraint,” says Faust.

At present the endowment funds around a third of the universities operating budget, but this figure varies widely from school to school. Bloomberg notes that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences gets 52% of its income from the endowment whereas the School of Public Health depends on it for just 13%.

Harvard is just one of the universities feeling the pinch.

Continue reading "Harvard gets credit crunched" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The northeast Atlantic is the most dangerous ocean to inhabit if you are a shark, ray or chimaera species. According to an assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 26% of these species are threatened, compared with 18% globally, primarily due to overfishing.

Those at greatest risk of extinction include large sharks and rays, such as the porbeagle shark and common skate.

“From angel sharks to devil rays, northeast Atlantic populations of these vulnerable species are in serious trouble, more so than in many other parts of the world,” says Claudine Gibson, former officer for the IUCN’s shark programme, and lead author of the report. “Most sharks and rays are exceptionally vulnerable to overfishing because of their tendency to grow slowly, mature late, and produce few young.”

Continue reading "Northeast Atlantic Sharks most endangered in the world" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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Here at The Great Beyond we’ve been quite enthused by Chandrayaan-1, the Indian mission to the Moon. But our paltry blogging pales into insignificance compared to the frenzy of excitement that the probe has generated in India.

The Times of India reports that the Indian Space Research Organisation is already preparing an equally headline-grabbing mission, called Aditya, to study the Sun.

“In fact, the design is just getting completed,” says ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair. “During solar maxim we would like to see the type of emissions which are taking place in the Sun and how it interacts with the ionosphere and atmosphere and so on.”

Meanwhile, back near the Moon...

Continue reading "India’s great space adventure" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Phoenix is dead, and it’s highly unlikely that the Mars lander will rise from the ashes ever again.

After operating for more than five months, the lander stopped communicating with the Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on 2 November (see earlier Nature story, here). The dust storms that have been swirling around it for the last two weeks obscure the already-waning sunlight that could power Phoenix — and that’s what killed the lander, mission project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said today in a press conference.

The team has been flying Odyssey and MRO over the lander every two hours during the Martian daytime to check for any signs of life — all to no avail, Goldstein said. It will continue to check for vital signs for the next three weeks, he said.

Phoenix’s death came earlier than expected; the team had estimated it could maintain communications with lander until late November or early December. Still, “we shouldn’t be having a funeral, but rather an Irish wake to celebrate its success,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters in Washington.

And, the mission isn’t technically quite over, adds the mission’s principal investigator, Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Phoenix might not be able to collect more data, but that doesn’t change the fact that the team now has mounds of it to analyse, he said.

Smith remains optimistic that future data analysis will reveal the coveted signal of organic compounds and indirect detection of liquid water. Early results of the mission are currently under review and should appear in Science in a few weeks, he said.

To remember those glory days back in May when the mission had first landed, check out Eric Hand's time capsule of the Phoenix landing.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Posted by Alex Witze
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The US military's 'human terrain' programme sounds like a good idea on the surface: Send social scientists into contested area alongside troops, then gather and use cultural information to better inform the relationship between the military and local residents. It sounds like it ought to be win-win, with relationships improving on all sides.

But the Human Terrain System has come under a lot of fire in the past year, not least from anthropologists who worry about social scientists being used to further military aims. Sharon Weinberger, a freelance writer on defense issues, delved into these issues in a feature she wrote for Nature last month (available here, subscription required).

Now there's more dire news about the safety of researchers involved. Paula Lloyd was interviewing a man in Afghanistan about the price of gas when he apparently threw the liquid on her and set her afire. Teammates threw her into some water and took her immediately to a burn facility; she is now being treated in San Antonio, Texas, for her burns.

Noah Shachtman, on Wired's Danger Room defense blog, has the details as usual. The Kansas City Star reports that Lloyd was "awake and responsive" on Sunday in the hospital. Reuters says that the Taliban took credit for the attack.

Two other researchers have died in the field doing human-terrain work; Michael Bhatia (pictured, on the left), in Afghanistan in May, and Nicole Suveges, in Iraq in July.

Image: from the memorial page for Michael Bhatia at marshallscholarship.org

Posted by Alex Witze
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In September, we alliteratively pointed out to you that our Sun had been pretty quiet for a long time – no sunspot activity was seen for 200 days as of September 27th. This news carries with it some history, particularly for those that like to attribute global warming to the Sun.

Well, don't panic. I can now inform you that as things stand today, November 10th, the Sun has been the very image of activity, with five sunspots seen in a month. Maybe it was just holding its breath to see who won the US election.

"I think solar minimum is behind us," says NASA's David Hathaway (Space.com).

Image: NASA

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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A paper that could explain the mysterious "ghost particles" inside one of the world's leading high-energy physics experiments has ignited a blog debate on who knew what and when.

Last week, we reported on the discovery of mysterious "ghost muons" by an experiment known as the Collision Detector at Fermilab (CDF). CDF is looking at proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. In a nutshell, it's seen higher numbers of muons than expected—a possible sign of some sort of new physics that nobody's seen before.

There's been plenty of blogging speculating on what this signal might mean. But there's also been a bit of a spat over whether some theorists had advanced knowledge of the findings. Specifically, the above paper by Neil Weiner and Nima Arkani-Hamed was posted on 6 October, about a month before the CDF announcement, and appeared to provide a theoretical framework that could explain the muon anomaly. That led physicist-blogger Tommaso Dorigo to accuse the theorists of trading insider information.

The exchange escalated until string theorist and co-author Arkani-Hamed weighed in with a thoughtful but firm refutation of what he described as "completely baseless and deeply offensive accusations". Arkani-Hamed pointed out that the work was not particularly compatible with the CDF results, and had instead been designed to support data from previous experiments, including a claim of excess anti-electrons (aka positrons) by an Italian space experiment called PAMELA. Many other bloggers have voiced their opinions on Dorigo's blog, and Seth Zenz at the US LHC blog even wrote his own post on what I'm going to start calling "muongate".

It's worth pointing out that PAMELA was itself the centre of a controversy in September, after two theorists published papers based on the experiment's unreleased data, which they photographed at a conference. Such is the brave new world of research in the digital age.

Image: CDF/Fermilab

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Listening to the so-called music that young people have on their MP3 players these days might be enough to give some readers a heart attack. Now researchers are warning that the player itself could trigger problems.

Researchers at Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston placed the headphones of MP3 players on the chests of patients who had implanted defibrillators or pacemakers. The headphones interfered with device operation in 14 of 60 patients, they told the American Heart Association conference in New Orleans.

“Exposure of a defibrillator to the headphones can temporarily deactivate the defibrillator,” says study leader William Maisel (AFP / Reuters). “The main message here is: it’s fine for patients to use their headphones normally, meaning they can listen to music and keep the headphones in their ears. But what they should not do is put the headphones near their device.”

The problem is the magnets in headphones, but keeping them 3 cm away from the heart devices seemed to eliminate any problems.

Continue reading "Headphones and pacemakers: not good together" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“If left unchecked, rabies is likely to kill over two-thirds of all wolves in Bale's Web Valley, and spread further, with wolves dying horrible deaths and numbers dwindling to perilously low levels.”
Claudio Sillero of Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Unit warns the BBC that rabies could wipe out the Ethiopian wolf.

“China will send a moon-lander and moon-buggy around 2012.”
A state news network announces ambitious plans for the Moon from China, via Reuters.

“Not all biofuels are created equal. There are enormous differences in what’s used to make them, how they perform in the engine, what they cost to produce and, of course, how much CO2 is emitted in their production processes.”
Rob Routs, executive director at Shell, answers questions from Times readers about biofuels.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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There’s huge excitement in the press about newly engineered immune cells that can damage HIV, despite the virus’s disguises. Writing in Nature Medicine, scientists from the US and UK report making T cells that bind to the HIV-1 strain of the virus 450 times more strongly than natural T cells.

“The T-cell receptor is nature’s way of scanning and removing infected cells – it is uniquely designed for the job but probably fails in HIV because of the tremendous capability of the virus to mutate,” says Bent Jakobsen, paper author and chief scientific officer at the company which owns the technology, Adaptimmune (press release 1).

“Now we have managed to engineer a receptor that is able to detect HIV’s key fingerprints and is able to clear HIV infection in the laboratory. If we can translate those results in the clinic, we could at last have a very powerful therapy on our hands.”

Continue reading "‘Souped-up, pimped up, bionic assassin cells search-and-destroy HIV’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Emma Marris

Regular readers of this blog will remember a post about a cool palaeontology finding: more than 1,000 dinosaur footprints preserved on a three-quarter acre site in the US Southwest. We also mentioned that there was a whiff of doubt about the so-called "dinosaur dance floor". One scientist thought that the features could be geologically-formed potholes rather than the lasting impressions of a sauropod samba.

A week after the find was publicized, on October 30th, four curious palaeontologists hiked to the site and, well, they weren't impressed. “There simply are no tracks or real track-like features at this site,” said Brent Breithaupt, director and curator of the University of Wyoming’s Geological Museum. So maybe they were potholes after all.

The original team has graciously offered to team up with the doubters to further examine the site.

University of Utah press release.

Image: footprint or pothole? Winston Seiler / University of Utah

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Food research 'lost in translation'
Funders call for public and private partners to collaborate in getting new crops to farmers.

Marine census discovers more than 200 new species
Octopus origins, shark migrations and giant bacteria to be unveiled

Foreign scientists face security-check delays in Britain
After its first year, UK vetting scheme claims anti-terrorist success despite backlog.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Enigma, now there's a great film. It is all about efforts to break the code of the German Enigma machine; a complex device used by the military in the Second World War to send encrypted messages. As it happens, on News Year’s day 2008 this correspondent swam in the very loch in Scotland that appears at the end of that there film.

But I digress... Bletchley Park, in the heart of the English countryside, was the home of the British war time code-cracking efforts. It hit hard times lately and was at risk of becoming a dusty pile of rubble. So it is with a happy heart that the Great Beyond can update this tale with good news: Bletchley Park has been saved! (Press release.)

English Heritage has stumped up £300,000 to pay for urgent repairs to the buildings, and talks are underway to get another £600,000 to pay for the rest of the repairs that will be needed over the next three years. This news has hit the PC press, focussing on the fact that Bletchley was home to Britain’s first programmable computer. It's nice to see that computer geeks also have a sense of history.

Hooray! Nice news as we go into a bleak and dreary weekend here in London.

Photo of Bletchley Park by Draco2008 via Flickr

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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The UK’s top TV channel for teachers, Teachers TV, has caused a stir by publishing the results of a survey saying that a third of teachers in the UK think creationism should be taught as part of the science curriculum, and half of teachers think that creationism and intelligent design should be discussed in the classroom (press release).

And it’s headlines agogo here in the UK about this (Times, Telegraph, Guardian).

Nature’s own Adam Rutherford offers a (non-Nature-endorsed) voice of reason about the significance of these results. He delves into the details of who answered the survey, a hard copy of which he has actually seen, with the important point that the questionnaire was sent out to a range of teachers – not an exclusive sample of science teachers, and that the responding group is essentially self-selecting and therefore skewed.

Before the survey came out, Rutherford made a film for Teachers TV discussing the teaching of creationism in schools, and interviews Michael Reiss who at the time was still in post at the Royal Society as director of education. Reiss subsequently lost his job for saying that creationism should be discussed in the classroom, if children raise questions. And Reiss’s name has popped up in the news coverage of this survey as well

So it seems that this shocking survey probably reveals no more that the views of a minority of individuals who happen to be teachers. Government guidelines state that “creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science national curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science". Hopefully that will remain the case.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Recently, Dwayne Rooke, the chef at the Davis Station science base in Antarctica, was seriously injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident and had to be evacuated to Tasmania. This was no mean feat.

A ski-eqipped LC-130 Hercules transport plane was dispatched from McMurdo station, which is across the continent and now experiencing nasty spring weather. A temporary sea ice runway was prepared at Davis station for the rescue and penguins were kept off of it. The day after the plane arrived at Davis, it left again for Tasmania (NSF press release, Australian Antarctic Division press release, article from The Age).

When Werner Herzog went to Antarctica to make Encounters at the End of the World he was a bit disappointed at how mundane life at the bottom of the world seemed. Stations are often dirty and scruffy. But science at the end of the world has not yet become a tame affair.

Continue reading "Antarctic mishaps" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Nature Podcast: Individual genomes and personal genomics, lemmings threatened by climate change, how to find dark matter, and a news round-up with news editor Mark Peplow.

HIV vaccine failure explained?
Failed vaccine makes immune cells easier to infect in culture.

Growing up under the guidance of bacteria
Scientists discover how microbes help the mouse gut to mature.

Blink and you'll miss it
The invention of an ultrafast oscilloscope could yield advances in fields from telecoms to nuclear fusion.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Heidi Ledford

Famed novelist Michael Crichton died Tuesday of cancer at the age of 66. Crichton is perhaps best known for authoring Jurassic Park and for creating the television show ER (a show that, astoundingly, is still on the air fourteen years later).

He was a creative and prolific writer who influenced public discussions (and perceptions) of science, and today’s round of obituaries are glowing, if at times a touch hyperbolic.

Continue reading "Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park and State of Fear, dies of cancer" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

On 14 November, NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour will rocket toward the heavens carrying almost fifteen thousand kilograms of equipment and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Included in the payload will be an extra toilet, sleeping quarters and exercise equipment for the crew, as well as materials to service the station’s solar panels.

Currently, the ISS can comfortably house three astronauts. But, by adding the additional toilet and other supplies, NASA and other space agencies hope to expand the space station and by spring 2009, it could accommodate six crew members for long-duration missions.

“We’re taking a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house and turning it into a five-bedroom, two-bathroom house with a gym,” STS-126 mission commander Chris Ferguson said in a NASA press release.

During the 15-day mission, the astronauts will also perform four space walks, which will focus mainly on cleaning and servicing the station's machinery and solar arrays. The upgrade will ensure the station can generate the power to support the three additional crew members. The shuttle and ISS crewmembers not taking a walk on the outside will unpack the new sleeping quarters and toilet as well as a new kitchen, refrigerator and science experiments.

“We’re going to use up a lot of the new space that we’ve brought up on the past few missions,” lead shuttle flight director Mike Sarafin said. “The six-person crew is an important step toward utilizing the space station to its full capability.”

Using the extra space will also make the space station more self-sufficient and less dependent on the space shuttle for supplies. The crew members will install a new regenerative environmental control and life support system, which will give the station the ability to recycle urine and the water vapour that the crew breathes into the air into purified liquid water. It will later be used for drinking or to cool the station’s other systems.

The major upgrades to the space station come as it marks its tenth birthday—Russia launched the first ISS module on 20 November 1998.

Image: Endeavour rolling out for a previous mission / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The election is over, but the post-election analysis has hardly even begun.

Nature is one of many tackling the question of ‘What Obama’s win means for science’ and looking at some of the state-wide ballot initiatives that will impact US research. Our columnist David Goldston urges researchers to “keep a cool head about science under Obama”:

So the air of anticipation in the nation's laboratories and faculty clubs is not unfounded; the danger is that it will become excessive. Like all presidents, Obama will have to govern as a mere mortal, making trade-offs among legitimate claims on the public purse and crafting political deals among constituencies.

More below the fold.

Continue reading "Science and the president-elect" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Let us get one thing clear right at the start: lemmings do not commit mass suicide by leaping off cliffs into the sea. However, their populations do undergo massive size fluctuations, leading to mass migrations where the cute critters may go swimming to find new food sources.

At least, they used to undergo massive population explosions. In a paper published this week in Nature a group of researchers analyse the absence of such events since 1994. The culprit, you guessed it, is climate change.

Nils Stenseth and colleagues show that changes in winter weather and snow go hand-in-hand with changes in Lemmus lemmus populations. They further show that when the regular explosion of lemming numbers doesn’t occur predators such as foxes switch their attention to other species, leading to knock-on effects throughout the eco-system.

“A relatively small effect on one particular species is having a broad effect on the system,” Stenseth, a researcher at the University of Oslo, told Reuters.

Continue reading "Climate change hits loveable lemmings" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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What Obama's win means for science
Nature takes a look at some of the races — from Congressional competitions to state-wide ballot initiatives — that will affect the nation's research.

Bush may introduce environmental regulations
Policy watchdogs expect industry-friendly changes in coming months.

Industry shifts focus to immunology and cancer
Cardiology and anaemia lose out in the hunt for the next pharmaceutical blockbusters.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Solar panels seem like an obvious way to generate electricity on the cheap, but they are flawed in a number of ways. They’re pretty inefficient, and they need to be pointed right at the sun to take advantage of its rays.

So it is good to learn of a new coating made from nanometre sized rods that helps solar panels soak up almost 100% of the sun rays that hit them. This is a big improvement on losing a third of the rays such as happens in conventional solar panels. The news comes out of Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy New York, and a team led by Shawn-Yu Lin. (Press release)

The coating is actually seven layers of carpets made from tiny silicon dioxide and titanium dioxide rods. The rods sit at different angles so can capture sunlight from anywhere. Each layer transmits a different wavelength of light, so that the whole spectrum is covered.

Clever, eh? Clever enough to hit the headlines. The typical blue tinge of solar panels is a direct indication that not all the light is being used, Lin explains to Reuters. What we want is dark, black panels. It doesn't say what colour panels that have a few layers of nanorods slapped on them are, but I'm guessing it's very close to blackest black. The DailyTech calls the design ‘nearly perfect’.

The rods are not unique, though. Other groups are working on similar systems. Nate Lewis and Harry Atwater at Caltech have been working on nanocarpets for a while, as part of a bigger project to help split water using sunlight (see this feature)

Image: Rensselaer/Shawn Lin

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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No matter how hard we'd like to forget about them, nuclear weapons just don't seem to go away.

Britain's Ministry of Defence is coming under fire for plans to refurbish its aging fleet of ballistic missile submarines. A report from the National Audit Office, an independent parliamentary watchdog, says that the MoD's current timetable has "little scope for contingency" and fails to account for possible cost increases due to currency fluctuations between UK shipyards and US parts suppliers.

Across the pond, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated his belief that the US needs to develop a new generation of "more reliable" nuclear weapons. The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) would supposedly be built without testing, maintaining nuclear expertise in the nation's weapons labs and, ultimately, leading to a new generation of bombs that can last longer without being used.

The UK is also quietly mulling its own version of the RRW, which they call the High Surety Warhead, but in a hearing in the House of Commons, Defence Secretary John Hutton denied that any active design work was underway at Aldermaston, the UK's nuclear weapon's laboratory in Berkshire.

Image: Lockheed Martin

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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While no-one believed human hands to be autoclave-level sterile, a study from the University of Colorado at Boulder makes surprising reading.

Researcher Noah Fierer found an average hand has around 150 species of bacteria living on it, with women having more than men, as reported in PNAS (link should go live soon). In addition, Fierer’s research team found over 4,700 species over 51 people and only five species were shared by all those in their study.

“The sheer number of bacteria species detected on the hands of the study participants was a big surprise, and so was the greater diversity of bacteria we found on the hands of women,” says Fierer (press release, LA Times). “The findings don’t necessarily mean that women have more germs than men, just more variety.”

Before you start scrubbing your hands till they bleed, this is not a unhealthy thing. In fact, says Fierer, knowing what normal levels of bacteria are helps establish a baseline, which might help detect differences in bacterial makeup in unhealthy people.

Washing doesn’t do much, the team notes in their paper:

Either the bacterial colonies rapidly re-establish after hand washing, or washing (as practiced by the students included in this study) does not remove the majority of bacteria taxa found on the skin surface.

This obviously leaves open the possibility that undergraduates at CU have poor personal hygiene.

AP adds:

Asked if guys should worry about holding hands with girls, [co-author Rob] Knight said: “I guess it depends on which girl.”

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Canada has a woeful environmental record, according to a scorecard produced by a not-for-profit group.

The Conference Board of Canada rates its home country 15th out of 17 developed countries*, with only the United States and Australia performing worse over a range of indicators.

“We are among the world leaders in managing our forests, our air quality is good overall, and we have made progress on using energy efficiently,” say the board’s Len Coad (press release, Reuters story). “But we generate far too much waste, we still use water as though we have an unlimited supply, and our past record on greenhouse gas emissions is terrible.”

Canada generates more waste per capita than all other developed countries and using more water than anywhere apart from the United States, says the board’s report, which awards an overall C grade to the country.

Other Canadian news
“Canada’s biggest companies are making climate change a higher priority, partly through more widespread disclosure of greenhouse-gas emissions, according to a new report,” says The Canadian Press.

“For the fourth year in a row, Quebec has lowered its total greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the amount of polluting gases that contribute to climate change even as the province's economy and population have grown,” says the Montreal Gazette.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Greenpeace will not be continuing its cat-and-mouse battles with the Japanese whaling fleet in the Antarctic this year.

“Greenpeace believes the decisive battle to end whaling in the Southern Ocean is in Japan, and that's where we want to focus our efforts,” says Steve Shallhorn, Greenpeace Australia-Pacific’s chief executive (Sydney Morning Herald).

Greenpeace also has to defend two of its activists, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, over charges they stole whale meat, which may also be influencing the decision to avoid a high profile conflict on the high seas. “This is a politically motivated prosecution and so anything we do to campaign against whaling could be used against Junichi and Toru,” Takumi Kobayashi, a Greenpeace Japan official, told AFP.

The news has not been well received by the more militant Sea Shepherd group.

“As a Greenpeace co-founder, I am deeply offended that Greenpeace has been raising millions of dollars in the name of defending whales all year and now two weeks before the Japanese whaling fleet is scheduled to depart, they announce they will not be going,” say Captain Paul Watson, head of Sea Shepherd.

“In my opinion they collected funds under false pretences and now they have abandoned the whales. Shame on them.”

Greenpeace sees things differently.

“We have not won yet, but whaling in Japan is now clearly moving toward the endgame - and we are moving our campaign to the place where we believe that endgame will be played out - in Tokyo,” says a statement from the environmental group. “We can stop future whaling fleets before they even leave the port and we can end whaling in the Southern Ocean forever.”

Image: NOAA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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An appeal court in the US has resurrected a case brought by victims of the Bhopal accident against Dow Chemical.

The court ruled that an earlier decision to throw out the case was wrong as the plaintiffs did not have “sufficient notice to allow them adequately to respond” to that decision.

In the 1980s Dow bought the Union Carbide company that was running a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India when a leak killed thousands and injured thousands more. In 1999 pollution detected on the site led to the current court case.

“We’re seeking cleanup, monitoring, and damages for personal injury to at least 20,000 individuals, and property damage,” says H. Rajan Sharma, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, in an interview with Bloomberg.

“The Second Circuit did not discuss the merits of the case or the merits of the trial judge’s ruling of dismissal, and its decision should not be interpreted as a ruling on the merits,” a Union Carbide spokesman told Reuters.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Q&A: Innovating out of the financial crisis
General Electric research chief optimistic that industrial R&D will thrive.

Court tackles whether drug labels shield manufacturers
Case pits amputee against Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.

Spectral particles spook physicsts
Ghostly visitors appear inside Tevatron accelerator.

Getting tough on makers of tiny tubes
Carbon-nanotube manufacturers need to notify the EPA before they start production.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Heidi Ledford

A 16-year-old frozen mouse carcass made headlines yesterday when scientists announced the rodent was the first frozen animal to be cloned. In a paper published online by PNAS, Teruhiko Wakayama of RIKEN in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues report that they were able to produce healthy clones from the rodent’s frozen brain cells.

Frozen cells have been cloned before but those cells were specially treated with chemicals that helped protect them from the damaging effects of freezing. Wakayama’s paper is the first to successfully clone a frozen animal that was, from what I can tell, pretty much just placed in a paper box and plunked straight into a –20ºC freezer in the early 1990’s.

The authors are excited about the possibility of using the technology to resurrect the woolly mammoth from carcasses frozen in Arctic tundra, but acknowledge the possible technological leap between using a 16-year-old and a 40,000-year-old frozen body. (I won’t pretend to understand the obsession with the woolly mammoth, but have acknowledged that the obsession is very real ever since I learned there is a black market for woolly mammoth parts run, at least in part, by the Russian mafia.)

Continue reading "Clones of the dead: A mouse now, Ted Williams later?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“The same ballots, run through the same machines, yielded different results each time.”
Oakland County Clerk Ruth Johnson reports problems with electronic voting machines. Lucky there isn’t an election happening (Wired).

Bones definitely Steve Fossett’s
DNA shows remains found in October were those of missing adventurer (LA Times).

“We were surprised to find this link.”
Researcher Anita Chandra comments on finding that watching Sex in the City, Friends, and similar high-quality entertainment is linked to teenage pregnancy (Times).

“What debris may have been still together after re-entry, it fell into the ocean between Australia and New Zealand.”
Space station manager Mike Suffredini says a giant ammonia tank jettisoned from the ISS has not hit anything major (Space.com).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A scientist has seen his research become an internet hit after a video of his work was set to the Benny Hill theme music.

David Scholnick, who works at Pacific University in America, was using a treadmill to assess the health of shrimps. Healthy shrimps should run fast, unhealthy shrimps should run slower.

“The healthy shrimp ran and swam at treadmill speeds of up to 20 metres per minute for hours with little indication of fatigue,” he says (Daily Mail). “[A] shrimp dealing with an infection is less active and limited in its ability to migrate, find food, and avoid being eaten. As far as I know this is the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill and it was amazing to see how well they performed.”

Then someone leaked a video of the running shrimp onto the internet. This was way back in 2006 so it’s not quite clear why a number of newspapers are covering this story now. Still, the video is amusing enough to be its own justification.

The video of the running shrimp has become a smash hit, with many versions being set to music. Embedded above is one of the most popular, with over half a million people watching it since November 2006.

“'So many people have logged on to see it which I suppose is kind of funny - I guess people are fascinated,” Scholnick told the Mail. “I guess people find the prospect of watching a shrimp exercise on a treadmill amazing.”

More shrimp videos
Shrimp vs The Final Countdown
Shrimp vs Curtis Mayfield
Dub shrimp
Shrimp vs Justin Timberlake
Shrimp vs Dragonforce
Animals on treadmills round up

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Could the weather forecast predict rates of autism? According to a paper from Michael Waldman of Cornell University, children living in areas with higher levels of precipitation have higher rates of autism than those living in low rainfall areas.

“There seems to be a strong association between precipitation and autism diagnosis rates,” says Waldman (Washington Post). “Our finding strongly suggests that there is some factor which is positively correlated with precipitation, which is serving as a trigger for autism.”

Waldman and colleagues looked at precipitation rates in counties in California, Oregon and Washington between 1987 and 2001. They compared this with the autism prevalence rates for school children in those states and found a positive correlation, they report in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Continue reading "Autism linked to rain" »

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Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know, but reports out today suggest that diesel does.

This unlikely notion comes from a paper in the journal Microbiology by Gary Strobel at Montana State University. Strobel found a new type of fungus growing on a tree in the Patagonian rainforest, and it turns out that this fungus was farting out a load of gas - similar to the hydrocarbon molecules that make up diesel(press release).

Voila, diesel directly from trees, and a load of eye-grabbing headlines (Guardian, AFP, New Scientist, Wired).

The fungus uses cellulose, and chomps it up to release the smaller hydrocarbon molecules. If this fungus can be grown, or its active parts engineered artificially, maybe biofuel from the unwanted, woody bits of plants could become easier to make. At the moment getting any useful fuel out of these tough plant parts is hard work, and not really worth the effort.

While the trees in Patagonia aren’t going to solve our energy crisis just yet, methinks, the results are striking and could shepherd biofuel investigators in a more fruitful direction as they search for the organisms that will make our fuel in the future.

Image: Montana State University

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VIDEO: Nanotubes turn on the tunes
Stretchy carbon sheets act as loudspeakers.

Human genes are multitaskers
Up to 94% of human genes can generate different products.

Primate researchers ask the big questions
Scientists chart course for studies of humans' closest relatives.

Phoenix faces final curtain
Mars lander struggles to communicate in its last days.

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Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

Indian Moon mission Chandrayaan-1’s Terrain Mapping camera is up and running. On 29 October, the instrument – one of 11 aboard the spacecraft – took this image of the southern Australian coast from a distance of 70,000 kilometres (press release).

Now “the important date for us is November 3”, Chandrayaan-1 project director M. Annadurai told The Economic Times.

On that date, the Indian Space Research Organization will take the spacecraft to 384,000 kilometres and then fire the Chandrayaan-1’s motors to take it to the Moon. The probe is expected to enter into lunar orbit on 8 November.

Previous Chandrayaan news
India heads for the Moon
India to the moon
Songs about the Moon

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A strange reptile, the last survivor of an ancient lineage, has been nesting on the New Zealand mainland for the first time in 200 years.

Tuatara live free on a number of islands off the coast, where there are no rats to eat their eggs, but this is the first sign that those in a fenced sanctuary in the capital Wellington are breeding (coverage from AP, NZ Herald).

“This time last year we found a gravid [egg-carrying] female” says sanctuary manager Raewyn Empson (press release, mirror site).

“We knew of two suspected nests but didn’t want to disturb them to confirm whether or not they contained eggs. The nest in this photo was uncovered by accident, and is the first concrete proof we have that our tuatara are breeding. It suggests that there may be other nests in the Sanctuary we don’t know of.”

The New Zealand Department of Conservation says:

They are the only extant members of the Order Sphenodontia, which was well represented by many species during the age of the dinosaurs, some 200 million years ago. All species apart from the tuatara declined and eventually became extinct about 60 million years ago.

In other tuatara news, a raid last month on Hamilton Zoo in New Zealand saw thieves smash their way into the reptile enclosure. Although the criminals failed to get into the tuatara cage they did make off with Madagascar day geckos and bearded dragons (Waikato Times).

Image: Karori Sanctuary

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“Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God.”
Pope Benedict has been telling a meeting of scientists there is “no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences” (Reuters).

“It obviously wasn’t my intent that it would be copied word for word.”
John Miller, a physics professor at the University of Houston, comments in the Houston Chronicle on allegations that one of his grant proposals was plagiarised by a researcher at Texas Southern University.

“All credit to them for not sitting on their hands.”
Geologist John Underhill commends researchers who voted on the likely causes of a controversial mud volcano in Indonesia. Of 74 scientists, 42 blamed drilling for oil, 16 thought evidence was inconclusive, 13 blamed a combination of drilling and an earthquake, and three blamed the earthquake alone (BBC).

“I’ve gone on record as saying that I am personally standing behind delivering the cars.”
Paypal billionaire Elon Musk moves to quash rumours of problems at his electric car company Tesla (Reuters).

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Deep sea exploration pioneer Jacques Piccard died on Sunday, aged 86.

“One of the last great explorers of the 20th century, a true Captain Nemo who went deeper than any other man, Jacques Piccard passed away on Saturday, 1st November at his home on the edge of his beloved Lake Geneva,” says a statement issued by his son, the balloonist Bertrand Piccard (pdf).

In 1960 Piccard travelled to the bottom of the Challenger Deep with Don Walsh, claiming a still unsurpassed record for the deepest ever dive: 11 kilometres down.

“By far the most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole,” he said. “We were astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all.”

The discovery of life at such depths became a key point in deciding against storing nuclear waste in the deep ocean (Daily Telegraph, BBC, AFP).

The Independent adds:

After his record-breaking dive, Jacques went to work for Nasa and built four mid-depth submarines including the first for tourists – demonstrated at the 1964 Swiss National Exhibition when it carried 33,000 passengers to the bottom of Lake Geneva.

“A very sad day,” says Kevin Zelnio on the Deep Sea News blog. “We are closing in on the end of an era of deep sea exploration. Their discoveries gave birth to our science.”

Image: Don Walsh, bottom, and Jacques Piccard, top, in the Marianas Trench / NOAA

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There is still some science sneaking into the coverage of the election in the United States. At lot of it paints Obama in a better light than McCain.

Wired notes that in an “unusual move” Obama released a new ad on Sunday specifically focusing on his science and tech policies. It includes mentions of doubling basic research funding and making the R&D tax credit permanent.

“If America recommits itself to science and innovation then we can lead the world to a new future of productivity and prosperity,” says Obama in the ad. (Watch it here on YouTube.)

In an opinion piece in the MIT paper The Tech Catherine Havasi, leader of MIT for Obama, writes:

Obama plans to “increase funding for basic research in physical and life sciences, mathematics, and engineering at a rate that would double basic research budgets over the next decade.” He also stresses that he wants it to become easier for young researchers to become involved and successful in science by “increasing research grants for early-career researchers.” In addition, he plans to increase the number of NSF graduate fellowships, so his victory could directly affect you. Add this to the ways that Obama’s policies would positively impact every American.

Joseph Maurer, Class of 2012, is having none of that, saying: “I support McCain because like any good MIT student, I understand the value of incentives.”

Keith Yost, an MIT grad student, also backs McCain. He writes: “Vote on the strength of a candidate’s policies, not the strength of their marketing. Vote rationality in 2008.”

Other election news from last week
Lawrence M. Krauss, of Arizona State University, attacks McCain over his science record and his statement that grizzly bear DNA research is “a waste of money”:

The DNA study allowed researchers to pinpoint bear numbers and locations and to document how their population is changing, all essential data if the bears are to be protected from extinction. That may not be the highest item on a presidential agenda, but to claim that it is a waste of money is outrageous.
(LA Times.)

Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago's Department of Ecology and Evolution, attacks Palin over her fruit fly research comments:

As a geneticist, I've worked on fruit flies in the laboratory for three decades. I know the fruit fly. The fruit fly is a friend of mine. And believe me, Sarah Palin doesn't know anything about fruit flies.
(The Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Christopher Hitchens, in a hugely vitriolic piece, attacks Palin and McCain’s “appalling contempt for knowledge and learning”:

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there were an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now.
(Slate.)

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