The Great Beyond
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With the holiday season upon us, we want to thank you all for following The Great Beyond over the past year.
We will be taking a short winter hiatus—unless any breaking news shakes the scientific community—but will be back blogging on January 5th, 2009.
Until then, we wish you a merry Christmas, a happy Hannukah, a jubilant Kwanza and a happy New Year.
See you all in 2009!
Best wishes,
From everyone at The Great Beyond and Nature News
Rat embryonic stem cells created
Genetically engineered rats should follow soon, providing new models of human disease.
Synthetic opals show their colours
Tunable material could be used to make electronic books or advertising displays.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
NASA announced yesterday that two private companies, Orbital Sciences Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), will service the International Space Station (ISS) starting in 2010.
Crewmembers aboard the ISS depend on regular deliveries of fuel, food, air and water to survive. Service vehicles, like NASA’s space shuttle, also drop off experimental equipment and spare parts that enable the crew to continually upgrade the space station.
But the US space agency plans to retire its shuttle program in 2010, and told legislators last April that it will stop asking for Congressional permission to buy cargo space on Russian Progress resupply vehicles after 2011. The ISS will depend on Europe's Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle, Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle and the carriers that the two private companies will provide, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, announced in a 23 December media briefing.
“The public should be aware that money donated in good faith to Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) was in fact being used to finance this criminal conduct.”
Detective Chief Inspector Andy Robbins speaks about animal rights extremists who have been convicted for establishing a “climate of fear” and for running a blackmail campaign to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences in Oxford, UK.
“The progress is not enough to approve building measures”
Three insurers announce that they are halting plans to build a £1.1 billion Turkish dam.
“It's not just humans who expect to be given something in return when they are co-operative. Orangutans do that too."
Valerie Dufour, of the University of St Andrews, finds that orangutans trade food for favours.
Downturn hits Chicago's natural history museum
Staff and science cut as museum's endowments crash.
VIDEO: Optical fibres feel light's recoil
Experiment claims to resolve an old debate about how light behaves.
'Proto-spiders' made silk, but not webs
An arachnid with no talent for weaving may have excreted the first known spider silk 386 million years ago.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
In just a matter of days, the first Falcon 9 (F-9) rocket will be assembled on Florida’s famous launch site, Cape Canaveral.
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), the private California-based company responsible for designing the F-9, successfully launched its Falcon 1 rocket into low-earth orbit in September. Falcon 1 can carry a 1-tonne payload, and its successful blast-off marked what SpaceX hoped would be the dawn of a new, substantially cheaper, era of space flight, Nature news reported.
The delivery of the first of F-9’s three booster stage flight tanks to the Cape on 22 December puts SpaceX well on its way to having “a fully integrated launch vehicle by year's end,” Elon Musk, chief executive officer and chief technical officer of the company, wrote on the Falcon 9 progress update site.
All of the hardware for the rocket has either already arrived or is on its way to the launch site, and the company is now preparing for F-9’s first flight, scheduled for 2009.
Buzzing bees protect plants from pesky caterpillars, providing yet another example of the intricate and often unexpected linkages that make up food webs.
Leaf-eating caterpillars are the bane of gardeners and farmers. However, while these pesty predators search for tasty plants, they are hunted by carnivorous wasps. Consequently, caterpillars keep bristling sensory hairs alert for attacks from above and drop to the ground when they sense danger.
Biologist Jurgen Tautz of Biozentrum University in Bavaria, Germany, realized that the caterpillars' defence mechanism was not “fine-tuned" and suspected that “caterpillars cannot distinguish between hunting wasps and harmless bees." Thus, Tautz wondered whether bees might affect pest foraging behaviour (press release).
As reported in Current Biology, Tautz and his colleague Michael Rostas set up small tents that contained pepper and soya plants and voracious beet armyworm caterpillars. Unsurprisingly, the insects climbed the plants and devoured the foliage. When bees were introduced into the tents, however, the caterpillars stayed grounded, and hungry.
Obama's picks underline climate focus
Strong roles for biologists as the president-elect chooses his science and technology team.
Blind man walking
Man navigates obstacles he can't consciously see.
Reprogrammed skin cells provide testing ground for new drugs
Induced pluripotent stem cells pass key milestone.
WhiteKnightTwo, the mothership that will be used to launch Virgin Galactic’s commercial spaceship, made its maiden flight on Sunday morning at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
The flight, which was caught on video, lasted for just under one hour. Two pilots guided the 24-metre-long plane to 4,900 metres. Ultimately, the carrier aircraft will need to fly to 14,600 metres to launch SpaceShipTwo.
"The maiden flight went perfectly," Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, told Wired.com. "With these aircraft, nothing is ever a foregone conclusion. It's not like pulling another AirBus off the line and putting it into the air. This was a big moment. I think it was a big milestone for the whole industry."
Cedric the Tasmanian devil has developed cancer, leaving researchers scrambling to find new strategies to save the endangered species.
Tasmanian devils are being decimated by a fatal and infectious cancer that spreads when one animal bites another. Wild population sizes have plummeted by 60% in the past 10 years, and experts predict that these feisty marsupials may be extinct within 20 years if no solution is found.
Researchers suspected earlier this year that one lucky devil, Cedric, was immune to the cancer, spurring hope that the “devil’s could be their own saviours”. A breeding programme, which would have seen Cedric’s cancer-resistant progeny repopulating the wild, was initiated.
Cedric has now developed two cancerous tumours on his face, however.
“It was very deflating, very, very disappointing,” cancer researcher Greg Woods from the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, told ABC news.
The tumours have been surgically removed and Cedric is expected to make a full recovery. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the breeding programme, which has been put on hold.
Top image: a Tasmanian devil (not Cedric)/ Getty.
In an annual meeting on European Union fisheries last week, ministers talked about the ones that got away.
Besides setting fishing quotas for 2009, rules agreed on December 19th are intended to bring down the number of fish that crews pull out of the sea and then throw back, dead or alive. Fishermen discard many catches because they are the wrong size or species — or, ironically, because a quota has already been reached. In the case of threatened cod stocks, for example, environmentalists have complained that a fish is tossed overboard for each one taken into port.
New mandates to prevent this waste include wide-mesh nets that let some fish escape (press release).
The ministers also raised North Sea cod quotas by 30%, citing a large intake of young cod in 2005 as a hopeful sign for the long-declining stock. Ministers said this compromise will allow fishermen to market more fish while catching fewer.
Carbonate deposits found on Mars
Long-lost mineral could help explain planet's thin atmosphere.
US Environmental Protection Agency faces eleventh-hour shake-up
Scientists voice concerns as small-scale projects fall from favour.
Spanish solar firms accused of fraud
Hundreds of companies falsely registered to receive higher subsidies.
Cell biologists share their snaps
Journal of Cell Biology launches an image bank for microscopy images.
Dinosaur dads used to guard the nest and look after the kids, researchers have concluded, after comparing the sizes of dinosaur clutches with those of modern-day reptiles and birds.
While studying Troodon formosus, Oviraptor philoceratops and Citipati osmolskae — three species of bird-like dinosaurs — David Varricchio, a paleontologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, and his colleagues made a curious observation. "By volume, these dinosaurs were laying clutches that were two to three times larger than what would be expected for their adult body size," Varricchio told National Geographic.
They examined the sizes of clutches from 400 species of reptiles and birds. Clutches that were cared for by dads were the largest, followed by clutches that were cared for by mothers. Clutches that were cared for by mother–father pairs were the smallest. These findings, they report in Science, suggest that because Oviraptor, Citipati and Troodon clutches were so large, males may have been the primary care providers.
While journalists delight in the “softer side” of dinosaur culture (Reuters, Globe and Mail), these findings have implications for today’s bird watchers — they suggest that the primary paternal care system of some modern-day birds might be an evolutionary relic from ancestral dinosaurs.
Top image: Bill Parsons.
Posted on behalf of Declan Butler
Google has at the last-minute pulled the plug on a plan to host large scientific datasets for free. The idea was to have been that Google would send three-terabyte or bigger hard drives by snail-mail to scientists interested in having their data hosted by the company. Once returned to Google, these were to have been uploaded onto its servers. As a condition of using the service, scientists would have to agree that all data was public domain, free for all to access and reuse.
Google's stated mission “is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”, but for the moment extending that mission to include scientific information seems off the table.
Over the past few months, Google had been quietly testing the service, mostly using data from NASA, including massive Hubble datasets, but also data from the Archimedes Palimpsest project.
Continue reading "Google pulls out of science data project" »
Posted on behalf of Anna Petherick
Cambridge University opened a big black Physics of Medicine centre this week, inviting Nobel Prize winner Sir Aaron Klug along for the plaque-revealing ceremony.
The swish new centre is in the rapidly developing West Cambridge site, which also houses the William Gates Building computing laboratory. The Physics of Medicine building makes the next door Cavendish laboratory—where most of the university’s physics research happens—look rather short and 1970s-shabby.
Athene Donald, deputy head of physics, will run the new center. She was recently profiled in The Observer and on BBC Radio 4 after being made a laureate of the UNESCO/L’Oreal-sponsored Women in Science awards.
The centre aims to become the place to go if you want to research anything biophysical, from tissue scaffolds to the properties of the eye’s optical fibres.
Top image: The new centre, with Sir Aaron Klug in the far left. University of Cambridge/Philip Mynott.
The first antenna for ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, high in the desert in Chile, was handed over to the ALMA team yesterday. (Press release from the European Southern Observatory)
This, say those in charge, is a massive milestone for the project, which will end up being one of the world’s most advanced telescopes. It will sit at 5,000 metres above sea level, on the Chajnantor plateau. It's a global project, and will cost over a billion US dollars.
The antenna was delivered by manufacturers Mitsubishi Electric Corporation for the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, one of the global partners of ALMA. Next up will be European and North America antennae. Initially the array will have 66 antennae spread out across the plateau. These things weigh 100 tonnes, and will span a distance of 16 kilometres.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Got an extra $42 million, why not buy an authentic NASA space shuttle? The US space agency has put out feelers to museums, educational institutions and other “appropriate” organizations to see if they are interested in purchasing the soon-to-be retired Atlantis, Discovery or Endeavour spaceships.
NASA anticipates that to clean toxic, volatile chemicals from each craft will cost $28.2 million. Another $8 million is needed to prepare each shuttle for display, and shipping and handling from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) adds $5.8 million to the price tag.
The space agency feels that taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill to put the spaceships on public display, NASA spokesman Mike Curie told FloridaToday.com. Bringing in the outside cash would also help fund the NASA’s new manned spaceflight programme — Constellation.
US science adviser pick rumoured near
Harvard climate scientist John Holdren is the leading candidate.
Canada's scientists face an uncertain future
Political turmoil leaves key positions in doubt.
Similar genes shape diverse leaves
Distantly related plants use the same set of genes to establish the outline of their leaves.
Neurons on border patrol
The limits imposed by walls and trenches are recognized by special brain cells.
The UK is being warned that a second wave of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease deaths could be on the way, after the nasty condition was found in a man with genes thought to make people less susceptible.
Until now all cases of variant CJD in the UK have been in people with an ‘MM’ genetic makeup. But the new case is in an ‘MV’ person. MVs make up 47% of the population (Daily Telegraph).
“Given that 160-170 MM individuals were infected we would estimate that the number of MV victims would be a maximum of 300 to 350, probably between 50 and 350,” says Chris Higgins, chair of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (BBC).
This follows a paper published in Lancet Neurology on genetic risk factors in CJD, generally contracted from eating infected beef. An op-ed piece published with that paper noted that “To put it prudently, a second wave of CJD with a longer incubation time might hit these shores, but we do not know whether this will be a tidal wave or just an imperceptible ripple.”
Hugh Pennington, of Aberdeen University, told the BBC that the MV-gene cases “have a longer incubation period, because they’re more resistant... a longer period goes by between [the patient] being infected... and falling ill.”
Image: Punchstock
While my colleagues were sitting down to the office canteen’s Christmas lunch yesterday, I was down at London’s Geological Society looking at powerpoint slides of decaying corpses. Christmas may come once a year, but it’s only every other year that the Forensic Geoscience Group holds a conference.
Every year the BMJ - the new hip and trendy title of the venerable British Medical Journal – gets into the Christmas spirit with some slightly frivolous research.
This year has some truly choice picks.
Continue reading "Head banging, frankincense and papal rugby" »
Results of the UK’s massive assessment of university research have been released today.
Analysing the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, my colleague Natasha Gilbert writes on Nature News:
Of the 52,400 academics from 159 higher education institutions that entered the RAE, 54% were found to be of an international standard, with 17% of these regarded as the best of the world's best, and 37% judged as internationally excellent. Only 2% of the work submitted was judged to fall short of the nationally recognized standards.
This is perhaps unsurprising given that universities can – and do – just leave out of the assessment departments they suspect will score low.
Still, what the RAE should provide is a handy league table to give one group of students and academics an opportunity to look down on everyone else. Sadly it has failed to even do this.
“It provides the missing link because it explains how the Wari people allowed for the continuation of culture after the Moche.”
Archaeologist Cesar Soriano tells Reuters why a ruined city discovered in Peru is so important.
“When I found the frog, I had a thrilling suspicion that we were looking at an entirely new species of amphibian.”
Naturalist and photographer Jeremy Holden talks about the new frog he found. It’s got green blood and turquoise-coloured bones (Fauna and Flora International).
“It is generally believed that LUCA was a heat-loving or ‘hyperthermophilic’ organism - a bit like one of those weird organisms living in the hot vents along the continental ridges deep in the oceans today. However, our data suggests that LUCA was actually sensitive to warmer temperatures and lived in a climate below 50 degrees.”
Nicolas Lartillot, of the Universite de Montreal, has been working on the ‘last universal common ancestor’ (LUCA), from which we all came (Canwest News).
Pharma company Bristol-Myers Squibb has announced it is shedding another 10% of its staff.
This time last year the company announced 4,300 positions – 10% of its workforce –would go. Now it says that an additional 10% will get the chop, bringing the total to 8,000 losses by 2010 (WSJ).
Commenting on what now looks like a worrying new pre-Christmas tradition for the company, David Moskowitz, an analyst with Caris & Co, told Reuters, “Overall it’s just getting tougher in the new environment for pharmaceutical companies with increasing generic competition and insurance companies clamping down on what drug companies can charge. As a result, this is the natural consequence.”
As the FiercePharma blog notes, it’s time to round up the usual suspects: the layoffs are “likely due to weak pipelines, increasing regulatory burdens, looming generic competition and (do we even need to say it?) the economy”.
Nature Podcast - In this special holiday show, we bring you sleepy songbirds, sun damage, mega-masers, Nature's Newsmaker of the Year, and our seasonal gift suggestions: what to get the scientist who has everything.
Briefing: Sucking carbon out of the air
Are plans to take carbon dioxide out of the air just a pipe dream, or a cure for global warming?
More prizewinners of 2008
Some other recipients of major science prizes this year tell Nature how they did it — and what they will do next.
How genes are silenced
Molecular snapshot reveals the mechanics of RNA interference.
Posted for Quirin Schiermeier
The year 2008 was likely the coolest year of the current decade, but it was still the tenth warmest year on record since instrumental climate records began in 1850.
The average global sea-surface and land-surface air temperature from December 2007 to November 2008 was 14.3 °C, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has announced. This is slightly lower than for all previous years of the ‘naughties’, but still some 0.3 °C above the 1961-1990 annual average. The warmest year on record is 1998, with an average global temperature just above 14.5 °C.
Image: Global map of surface temperature anomalies in degrees Celsius for the 2008 meteorological year. Right: Annual-mean global-mean anomalies, except 2008, which is the 11-month (Jan-Nov) mean anomaly / NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
When calculating global average temperatures, climatologists prefer the meteorological year, from December through November, as it is easier to split it into actual seasons than is the calendar year.
The WMO temperature analysis is based on land-based weather stations in 188 countries, complemented by measurements from ships, buoys and satellites. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the UK Met Office, which both contributed their own datasets to the WMO analysis, independently arrive at very similar values.
Continue reading "2008 cooling, but the heat is on" on Climate Feedback
It's not everyday you see an intelligence-agency-backed study on the feasibility of using gravity waves for spying. But that's exactly what you'll find here: On the Federation of American Scientist's blog.
The report is by the JASONs, a semisupersecret group of academic scientists who consult for the Pentagon on technical issues. Apparently the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which coordinates US spying, has been approached by a company called GravWave LLC, which claims that gravity waves can be used for secret communication and sneaking a peak at stuff.
The concept is at first glance intriguing: Gravity waves are waves in the fabric of space and time, and they certainly can pass through objects like the earth with very little effort. Moreover, the company's plan of converting gravitons, hitherto unseen gravity particles, into photons, light particles that you're seeing right now, is apparently not completely far-fetched.
Continue reading "JASONs shoot down research into gravity surveillance" »
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
The same unexplained force—dark energy—that causes the universe to fly apart at an accelerating pace is also stifling the growth of galaxy clusters, new research shows. These clusters, cloudlike swarms that are the largest accumulations of matter in the universe, grew rapidly during the first 10 billion years of cosmic time but, due to the dark energy, they can no longer continue to grow.
“These are the largest clusters ever to be seen,” Alexey Vikhlinin of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, in Cambridge, Mass., said in a NASA press briefing yesterday. “It is a good thing we are observing them now because future cosmologists won’t even be able to see them because of the accelerating universe.”
Vikhlinin and his colleagues studied the clusters, the most massive collapsed objects in the universe, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. By comparing the X-ray observations of distant and nearby swarms of galaxies, the team reported that they have found new, independent evidence for the existence of dark energy and that it has maintained the same density over time. The new research, to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, also suggests that dark energy closely resembles Einstein’s cosmological constant.
Two new dinosaur species have been discovered by intrepid British scientists, in Morocco, in the Sahara (press release). The new species are a pterosaur flying dino and a plant eating sauropod. Let’s call it a Saharasaurus! I haven’t run this name by the researchers yet – led in part by Nizar Ibrahim from University College Dublin – but I’m sure they can’t fail to like it.
The Times describes in great detail the romp that the scientists made through the desert to bring home their bony bounty, consisting of a metre-long Saharasaurus leg bone and a pterosaur beak.
The leg bone caused the researchers no small amount of trouble in its retrieval from the rock. Then, once safe in the back of a Land Rover, it made the vehicle so heavy it nearly sank into a dune. And that wasn’t all, tales of flooded rivers, night time journeys and snowstorms make this quite the thing of adventure stories. Was that Indiana Jones I heard someone mention?
The proportion of videos on YouTube concerned with performing animals and feats of dance has declined very slightly this month. The reason for this is that Nature has launched its very own channel, bringing you all that is best in science.
Where else can you watch items on genome analysis of the duck-billed platypus and new interpretations of the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism alongside whale evolution and mega-impacts on Mars? Nowhere, that’s where.
Barack Obama is filling out the final members of his Cabinet, with plans to announce today the appointment of Ken Salazar, a Democratic senator from Colorado, as secretary of the interior. Salazar joins the rest of Obama's energy and environmental team (see Nature story here), which includes Steve Chu as secretary of energy, Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Carol Browner in a new White House position coordinating climate and energy issues.
Salazar, whose family has lived in Colorado for five generations, is known as a dealmaker. He fought Bush administration plans to open new areas to oil-shale exploration, but has supported offshore oil drilling (Washington Post). Environmentalists are less happy with his appointment than they would have been if one widely circulated name, Raul Grijalva -- a Democratic congressman from Arizona who chairs a House subcommittee that oversees public lands -- had been tapped instead. Salazar will be taking over an agency with vast responsibility that includes managing national parks and forests and overseeing the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has been hammered in recent years (New York Times) over its management of endangered-species listings. "He's better than what's come before, but it looks like it's going to limp along as a semi-broken agency," Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity, told the Washington Post.
Elsewhere in Washington, the game of musical chairs continues. Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, will run the US Department of Agriculture (Washington Post). Vilsack, like Obama, supports biofuels such as ethanol - although he has proposed cutting down on the massive ethanol subsidies that exist in America.
And some top health-related posts will definitely be vacant soon, confirming the usual trend of leaders exiting with the administration. Yesterday Andrew von Eschenbach, head of the Food and Drug Administration, said he would resign on 20 January, the day Obama is sworn in as president. Leading candidates to replace him, as reported elsewhere, include Joshua Sharfstein, the health commissioner of Baltimore, and Steve Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and frequent FDA critic. In an overview story, the New York Times notes that National Institutes of Health head Elias Zerhouni is already gone (check out Nature's interview with the departed head here), that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Julie Geberding expects to leave shortly, and that John Niederhuber will likely step aside as head of the National Cancer Institute.
Image: Salazar
Yale has joined the growing list of institutions being hammered by the current financial crisis. The Ivy League university has seen a loss of at least 13.4% - and probably more like 25% - in its endowment portfolio.
President Richard Levin has revealed that the value of Yale’s marketable securities has fallen by the former number between 1 July and 31 October, while once other investments and drops since then were taken into account it was probably down by the latter number, putting it at $17 billion.
“It is important to recognize that $17 billion is still a very large endowment,” he says. “This was where the endowment stood as recently as January 2006.”
Cross posted from Climate Feedback for Quirin Schiermeier
After eleven months of legislative work, the European Parliament gave its backing today to the European Union’s (EU) climate change package which aims to ensure that the EU will achieve its self-set climate targets by 2020: a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions relative to 1990 levels, a 20% improvement in energy efficiency, and a 20% share for renewables in the EU energy mix.
EU heads of states, who had hammered out the agreement last week, called the legislation "historic". But critics say the reduction targets are less ambitious than they appear, basically a bluff. What bothers environmentalist most are the many far-reaching concessions to power plants and other emission-intensive industries participating in the EU’s mandatory emissions trading system.
More about this is in my story over on Nature News.
Researchers have released a map showing where in the US you are most likely to die in a natural disaster. Such acts of God do not, of course, smite the country evenly.
The survey, published in the International Journal of Health Geographics yesterday, puts the worst mortality statistics in the South, thanks to tornadoes and other deadly weather. Heat waves and droughts made the northern Great Plains another danger zone.
Heat and drought were, in fact, the country's biggest killers, accounting for 19.6% of all hazard deaths in 1970-2004. Close behind were other forms of severe weather - thunderstorms, blizzards, and such like.
“If you look at molecular biology as breaking Humpty Dumpty into as many pieces as possible, then systems biology is about trying to put him back together again.”
Physiologist Denis Noble talks to the Guardian.
“The tusks help females identify males within their species, which could otherwise be difficult as these species are quite similar to each other in shape and coloration.”
Scott Baker, of Oregon State University, comments on the strange tusks of beaked whales (BBC).
“The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider reinstating a lawsuit against The New York Times by a former government scientist who contended that he was defamed by a series of columns about the anthrax mailings of 2001.”
So says ... The New York Times.
After a protracted battle, US chemicals companies Huntsman and Hexion have reached an agreement over the proposed buyout by Hexion of Huntsman.
This ‘agreement’ means that Hexion, owned by Apollo Management, has to stump up $1 billion to pay off Huntsman and the deal, which was meant to see Hexion pay $6.5 billion for Huntsman, is off.
Huntsman is glad of the cash, according to CEO Peter R. Huntsman (press release) and so they should be, because their shares dropped by either 40% (Times) or 51% (Forbes) depending which story you read. This means that the cash they’re getting from Hexion is more than the company’s current value. Nice work Huntsman!
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
The virologist and anthropologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on infectious brain agents now known as prion diseases, died last week in Norway.
He was found in his Tromso hotel room on Friday morning. Currently the cause of death is unknown, but his biographer, Robert Klitzman, told the New York Times that the Nobel laureate’s death was likely due to congestive heart failure. Gajdusek was 85.
The former NIH researcher and NINDS director is most noted, and won the Nobel, for his work in the fifties and sixties on kuru, a disease that led patients into trembling and madness before death. After an autopsy, the victims were found to have spongy holes in their brains. Gajdusek also worked in isolated communities around the world to investigate the genetics of pseudo-hermaphroditism, Huntington's disease and other conditions.
Most recently, Gajdusek was charged with molesting several of the young boys that he adopted while on expeditions to the Pacific. He pleaded guilty to one charge, served one year in prison and then spent the remainder of his life living in Europe.
Imaging advances provide immune-cell breakthroughs
Microscopy tracks living cells as they move through the body.
Climate talks defer major challenges
Minor progress in Poland on adaptation and deforestation sets the stage for Copenhagen in 2009.
Europe agrees emissions deal
Heavy industry wins key concessions in last-minute negotiations.
Via the Panda’s Thumb blog, here comes another science song for your delectation.
Tiktaalik (Your Inner Fish), by the Indoorfins, concerns the strange ‘fishapod’ fossil that is halfway between the gutter and the stars fish and land-dwellers. It was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania’s reading project on Neil Shubin’s book Your Inner Fish.
Shubin discovered the Tiktaalik fossil, and is commemorated in this song:
From the water to the land I;
Learn to swim and learn to stand I'm;
Found here by the hands of Neil Shubin.
Carry me home;
To find the Inner fish unknown
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
Songs about science XI: Charlie Darwin
After years of being lambasted as “the lowest form of wit”, sarcasm has fallen into the good graces of doctors as a tool for diagnosing dementia.
John Hodges, a neurologist at Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute in Australia, and his colleagues designed two sets of short plays that were identical except for the tone of voice: words were said either seriously, or sarcastically.
Sad news from the squid world. The awesome, though slightly terrifying, Humboldt squid is not going to do well as the oceans acidify.
Driven by increased emissions of carbon dioxide, the world’s oceans are likely to be increasingly acidic in the next 100 years. When researchers Brad Seibel and Rui Rosa exposed Humboldt (Dosidicus gigas) to these levels the animals got lazy, with metabolic rates down 31% and activity levels down 45%, they report in PNAS.
The squid spend their days in the deep ocean where there isn’t much oxygen, but they recover in well-oxygenated near-surface waters at night, explains University of Rhode Island researcher Seibel (press release). But low oxygen levels in deep waters could expand to shallower depths and increased temperatures and carbon dioxide levels of surface waters could mean trouble
“In the future, the habitable window between low oxygen at depth and acidified and warmer waters at the surface will grow narrower,” says Rosa (BBC). “The net result will be that the squid may become more susceptible to predators, less able to capture prey, or may be forced to migrate elsewhere, altering the oceanic food web.”
More squid news below
Vaccine failure explained
Immunologists show how deaths in 1966 could have been avoided.
Nobel physicist to run energy agency
Obama appointments likely to focus on renewable energy and implementing cap and trade.
Vatican toughens stance on embryo research
Proclamation on biomedical science and reproductive medicine revised.
Seven genes have been newly linked to obesity in humans, thanks to two big sequence-sifting studies published in Nature Genetics this week (Times, Financial Times). The Icelandic company deCODE Genetics has the list of seven genetic variants in their paper, and six - including one the deCODE team says was already known - were found by an academic consortium with the happy acronym of GIANT.
The results sound as though 'mind over matter' applies even in the biologically big-boned: five of these genes are expressed in the brain.
"Until 2007, no genetic associations had been found for 'common obesity', but today almost all those we have uncovered are likely to influence brain function,” says Ines Barroso of GIANT (press release on Science Daily). Her colleague Joel Hirschhorn concludes, “Inherited variation in appetite regulation may have something to do with predisposition to obesity.”
Just three months after the stores put up their decorations, the Great Beyond’s first Christmas blog post has arrived. Brady Haran, the University of Nottingham’s film-maker in residence, has been asking people at the School of Chemistry what element they want for Christmas.
“I think the elements have a special mystique because they're nature's building blocks at the purest form,” he says. “But there are still 118 of them, and each is totally unique. So we thought it would be fun to ask ‘which one would you like under the Christmas tree?’”
Haran says, “I think I'd choose francium. It’s extremely rare, very dangerous and totally radioactive, which means we've not been able to film it for the Periodic Table of Videos. Being able to make that video would be my ideal Christmas present!”
Nature’s chemistry correspondent Katharine Sanderson wants molybdenum. “I like the name, you can abbreviate it to Molly,” she says
Personally, I’d go with something from group one that you could throw into a lake, but remember kids: an element is for life, not just for Christmas. Unless you’ve got something like Seaborgium of course...
An ancient amphibian that roamed the earth and its lakes 210 million years ago may have had the world's most bizarre bite — rather than opening its mouths by lowering its bottom jaw, like other vertebrates, Gerrothorax pulcherrimus would raise its upper jaw.
Or, according to Reuters, “it lifted the top of its head in a way that looked a lot like lifting the lid of a toilet seat”.
Palaeontologist Farish Jenkins, of Harvard University, and his colleagues published their finding on this abnormal amphibian's upside-down bite in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
“It’s the ugliest animal in the world,” Jenkins told Reuters.
The scourge of the pharmaceutical industry has struck again in the United States.
Senator Charles ‘Chuck’ Grassley has been hounding big-pharma over perceived bad-behaviour in an ongoing and wide-ranging investigation. Now he is demanding Wyeth cough up details of its ‘ghost-writing’ activities.
“I have been informed that this practice involves marketing and/or medical education companies that draft outlines and/or manuscripts of review articles, editorials, and/or research papers,” writes Grassley in a letter released Friday.
“This information is then presented to prominent doctors and scientists, particularly those affiliated with academic institutions, to review, edit and sign on as authors, whether or not they are intimately familiar with the underlying data and relevant documentation.”
Continue reading "Wyeth ghost-writing: Grassley rides again" »
Posted for Emma Marris
Researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno working on earthquake-resistant building materials (nickel-titanium bars, elastomeric materials, and polyvinyl fibre concrete, to be precise, three different designs in three different pairs of support columns) shook a 33.5 metre, 190 tonne concrete bridge with three "shake tables" that simulated a 8.0 earthquake on December 11th.
The test was the second of three at this unprecedented scale—the first one back in February 2007 shook a conventional bridge, representing the current bridge-building practice. The third test will use fibre composites as the primary resisting force in the column and the beam as a kind of shell around the concrete.
Surveys of flora and fauna may be flawed
Bat study raises doubts over our understanding of Earth's ecosystems.
Elias Zerhouni looks back
Former chief of the National Institutes of Health reflects on his years there.
Kickstarting puberty
Genes discovered for brain pathway that triggers onset of adulthood.
Oil demand is expected to drop this year for the first time in decades, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a Paris-based inter-governmental organization that monitors this sort of thing. Global oil demand in 2008 was just 85.8 million barrels per day, according to the IEA eggheads. That's 200,000 bpd less than last year.
The globe's thirst for crude has been rising steadily over the years, and demand hasn't dropped since Michael Jackson's music video for "Thriller" first debuted (1983, if you're not a fan of the King of Pop).
The drop in demand is undoubtedly bad news for alternative fuels, such as biofuels, which rely on high oil prices to remain competitive. But the dip could be very short-lived, the IEA thinks that oil demand will rise again in 2009.
Rolling Stone headlines it “Bush’s Final FU”: the US Department of the Interior yesterday released last-minute regulations weakening protections for endangered species.
They’ve nixed a 35-year-old requirement that independent biologists review the wildlife impacts of new projects at such non-ecologist-dominated entities as the Federal Highway Administration and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Interior is also desperately trying to pre-empt groups who would use the protected status of polar bears to fight greenhouse gas emissions. “The Endangered Species Act was never intended to be a back door opportunity for climate change policy,” said Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne (New York Times).
“It suggests that ancient and modern criminal justice systems may otherwise be built on a much more primitive, pre-existing machinery for recognizing unfairness to you.”
Owen Jones, of Vanderbilt University, comments on his study of how the brain deals with crime and punishment (New Scientist).
“This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the UK and one of the earliest worldwide.”
Sonia O'Connor, of the University of Bradford, comments on a 2,000 year old brain dug up in England (PA).
“Potential for extreme violence and even death.”
US District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. comments on the ‘eco-terror’ crimes of Lauren Weiner as he passes sentence (Sac Bee).
“According to my files, there are at least 13 different types of elves.”
National Geographic investigates the belief of elves in Iceland. Your guess as to why is as good as mine.
The zoo world is in uproar over claims that captive elephants have far shorter lives than their free-roaming cousins.
Researchers writing in Science blame stress and obesity for the problem, which is most apparent in Asian elephants. Using data on 4,500 of the lumbering beasts, Georgia Mason, of the University of Guelph in Canada, and colleagues estimate that animals in European zoos have half the lifespan of protected populations in the wild.
“These kinds of questions often generate more heat than light, and our research shows what can be found out by analysing objective data,” says Mason (press release). “We hope it provides a model for tackling similar issues with other species.”
There’s certainly some heat coming her way this morning. Paul Boyle, of the US Association of Zoos and Aquariums, told the NY Times the paper was “terribly flawed” and contained “flagrant” errors.
Continue reading "Perhaps penned pachyderms perish precipitously?" »
Because weather forced the Shuttle to land on the west coast, rather than the east, the $1.8 million operation of moving it home is now underway. This shot shows it lifting off from Edwards Air Force Base atop a 747.
Endeavour will be overnighting in Fort Worth, Texas, before heading on to Florida tomorrow.
Image: NASA / Tom Tschida
The Clean Coal Carolers
If you weren’t a fan of ‘clean’ coal before, you certainly won’t be after listening to this.
“The moment you hear its voice, you can’t help [but] think of a large cat.”
Greg Budney, a biologist from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, discusses the bare-throated tiger heron with NPR.
“Your real impact factor”
PhD comics’ unique take on an academic issue.
“Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2008”
At least according to Time magazine.
The entire Liberian delegation showed up late to the UN climate change conference in Poznan, Poland. The reported reason: slothlike Polish bureacrats. They had to wait out the talks’ first week in Nigeria, where other African attendees were also held up, before the Polish embassy there granted them visas.
Head Liberian delegate Ben Donnie says, “Surely, this will affect our representation. We want to be there ourselves for all the sessions. Although, as head of the delegation, I have been receiving e-mails about what is happening in Poznan from the summit secretariat, this is not enough. We should have been there from the beginning to make our input and meet with colleagues.“
African journalists are also having trouble making it to Poznan.
“Just getting to the [conference] has been one of the greatest challenges of my career as an environmental journalist,” writes Harold Williams, a reporter from Sierra Leone who, along with other developing-country journalists, has a fellowship from the Climate Change Media Partnership to go to the talks.
Continue reading "Visa problems delay reps to Poznan conference" »
Consumer groups are warning the Europe could be in line for American-style direct to consumer drug adverts after the European Commission released proposals to increase “information provision”.
Although Europe insists that an advertising ban will remain in force it wants companies to be able to provide information on drug characteristics, prices and research studies to the general public.
“EU citizens have unequal access to information across the EU,” says the commission. “Although advertising of prescription-only medicines to the general public is forbidden, a lack of detail on information provision has led to a situation in which Member States interpret EU legislation in very different ways.”
UK consumer group Which? says the changes – which have to be approved by Europe’s parliament and council – are a bad move (AP). “Without a clear distinction between ‘information’ and advertising, allowing direct to consumer information is like letting advertising in through the backdoor,” says public affairs manager Peter Moorey (PA).
European consumer group BECU says the plans could open a ‘Pandora’s box’. Monique Goyens, BEUC Director General, says, “The proposal on information to patients is just a disguised way of giving pharmaceutical companies greater flexibility to provide the information they want on prescription medicines directly to the public, namely direct-to-consumer communication strategies - the goal of which in our view is to boost sales.”
Meanwhile, across the pond, Dow Jones Newswires reports things are going the other way:
Drug makers have agreed to new voluntary restrictions on how they conduct direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs in the U.S. - a response to recent government scrutiny of the ads and feedback from doctors.
Image: Getty
Nature Podcast - This week we bring you the weather from an extrasolar planet, discover ocean cleaning bacteria off the coast of Namibia, worry that the food crisis isn't over yet and consider how society should respond to the growing demand for cognitive enhancing drugs like Ritalin.
Forecasting the future of hurricanes
A meteorologist's new model zooms in on how climate change affects Atlantic storms.
Exoplanet may harbour stormy skies
Signs of water and, perhaps, weather on a distant 'hot Jupiter'.
Antibody fights AIDS-like disease in monkeys
Approach being considered for HIV prevention in humans.
NASA is already proving problematic for president-elect Barack Obama, according to the Orlando Sentinel’s Write Stuff blog.
The paper says Obama’s transition team have not gone down well with administrator Mike Griffin, who would like to hang onto his job.
When one member of the team, who are meant to smooth the transition from Bush-rule to Obama-rule, told Griffin they were “just trying to look under the hood” Griffin replied:
If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar. Because it means you don’t trust what I say is under the hood.
A key sticking point appears to be the Constellation program, a replacement for the Space Shuttle. Griffin seems to regard Constellation as his baby and is outraged that Obama would even countenance cutting it.
Over on the NASA Watch blog the ever-acerbic Keith Cowing says, “Mike: everyone seems to have gotten the message - except you. It is time to go.”
One of the comments on Cowing’s blog notes that a betting pool has been started on when Griffin will step down.
Image: Griffin stock photo / NASA
Rumors have been flying thick and fast about who might serve on president-elect Barack Obama's team, and today they seem to be coalescing around some semi-probable future announcements. 
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Steve Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, will be named secretary of energy. Chu shared the 1997 Nobel prize in physics for his work done at Bell Labs on cooling and trapping atoms. In recent years he has led a number of energy-related initiatives at the lab, including the solar energy initiative Helios. He's also brought together a number of groups to form new organizations like the Energy Biosciences Institute, a research partnership whose links with BP had some academics uneasy at the start (see earlier Nature story, subscription required).
Other possible appointments include Carol Browner, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Bill Clinton, in the new position of what's being styled as an "energy/climate czar". This job would likely coordinate among the many agencies that all have a piece of energy policy in the bureaucratic jungle that is the US government. One key question that remains unclear: what sort of power this position would have in terms of directing the other agencies' efforts.
Lisa Jackson, former head of the New Jersey environmental protection agency, will head the full federal EPA.
Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles who has served on various California environmental-related positions, is likely to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The current occupant of that position, Jim Connaughton, is in Poznan, Poland, for the international climate negotiation talks that Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson is covering here.
Image: LBNL
Brits and Kiwis got curious about the Large Hadron Collider this year, according to newly released search stats from Google. But nobody else did.
After a press-sweeping September debut - and an almost immediate breakdown from which rumours are still rippling - "large hadron collider" was the 6th-fastest-rising search term of 2008 in the UK, and came in 10th in New Zealand (fastest rising = largest increase in searches since 2007). It didn't make the top 10 list in any other country.
The LHC-equivalent 6th fastest riser for the US was "fox news"; for Canada it was "free movies".
No other science term made it onto the lists - unless you count "earth day", which was 4th for Hong Kong googlers (followed, for reasons opaque to me, by "alexander graham bell", "marc chagall", and "diego velasquez"). In Australia "underbelly" was 10th, but disappointingly, it's a popular TV show, not an epidemic of seedy corruption.
“To our sincere regret ... it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker.”
The Max Planck Institute has apologised after Chinese “poetry” it used to illustrate an article on the front of its journal turned out to be an advert for a brothel (Independent).
“Totally without merit.”
Mrs Justice Dobbs throws out Christian groups’ attempt to block scientists in the UK from creating human-animal hybrid embryos for research (BBC).
“Dolphin spongers are workaholic loners.”
That’s what ABC makes of a new study showing “female dolphins that use marine sponges to help them forage for prey spend less time socialising with others”.
A European court has fined France 10 million Euros ($12.9 million) for failing to amend its laws on genetically modified crops and foods.
European Union passed a directive in 2001 that regulates the use of GM crops, including how GM crops are grown for crop and seed production and how GM crops are imported. Individual European governments were supposed to integrate the law into their own national legislation by 2002, but France has repeatedly dragged its feet.
The European Court of Justice has now issued a statement saying that the "unlawful conduct repeatedly engaged in by France in the GMOs sector is of such a nature as to require the adoption of a dissuasive measure, such as a lump sum payment".
Researchers in the US have released the latest figures comparing the maths and science abilities of 4th- and 8th-grade students in countries across the globe.
Far Eastern countries dominate the top tens, with Singapore top for science in both 4th and 8th grade. In maths, Hong Kong tops the 4th grade scores, with ‘Chinese Taipei’ leading the 8th. (Image right shows the percentage of fourth-grade students who reached the TIMSS advanced international benchmark in science in the top ten countries. See full graph.)
As the New York Times points out, this should worry the US as these subjects “are crucial to economic competitiveness and research”.
“It was good to see that the United States has made some progress in math, but I was surprised by the magnitude of the gap between us and the highest performing Asian countries, and that should cause us some concern,” Ina Mullis, of the International Study Center at Boston College that directs the study, told the paper.
Of course this is perfect chance for the world’s media to either gloat or wail...
Oliver Postgate, who co-created the TV series the Clangers, has died aged 83.
American readers may not be familiar with Postgate’s groundbreaking work in children’s TV. However, after the death of Phoenix and as we move towards the Mars Sample Return mission that could bring back rocks from the Red Planet, it seems worth noting that nearly 40 years ago the Clangers opened with this piece of narration:
Of all the planets in the solar system, of all the stars in the Milky Way, perhaps the most troublesome is this one. This cloud covered planet called Earth, our planet, the home of the human race.People have stood on the Earth and looked away into the sky and tried to imagine what life would be like on other planets, other stars.
And they have done more than imagine. They have invented things: complex rockets so powerful that they will blast away from the Earth and carry space probes to invade these distant planets. Robot devices that will land, explore, take photographs, and even dig up pieces of the unfortunate planet and make off with them.
The World Health Organisation has announced that the death of a two-year old in Indonesia is linked to bird flu. In another case in the country a nine-year old also contracted the virus, although she survived. Both had the nasty H5N1 strain.
To date 139 cases of bird flu have been confirmed in Indonesia since 2003, with 113 of them being fatal (press release, news coverage).
Meanwhile, Hong Kong's Health secretary warned of a “new alert” and said the government will consider using a new vaccine on chickens after an outbreak on a poultry farm (AP).
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
For 16 years, astronomers have meticulously tracked the motions of 28 stars orbiting the Milky Way's most central region. Two individual teams now say they have discovered indisputable evidence that a supermassive black hole sits at the heart of the galaxy.
"The centre of the galaxy is a unique laboratory where we can study the fundamental processes of strong gravity, stellar dynamics and star formation that are of great relevance to all other galactic nuclei, with a level of detail that will never be possible beyond our galaxy," says Reinhard Genzel, leader of the team from the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany (European Southern Observatory press release).
He explained the long-term study provides the best empirical evidence that supermassive black holes do exist and allowed the two teams to peg the mass of the central black hole at four million solar masses. At that size, the central object “must be a black hole, beyond any reasonable doubt", says Genzel.
The results give astronomers a clearer picture of what is happening at the galactic centre than guesses of the past, Andrea Ghez, leader of the UCLA Galactic Center Group, told the Los Angeles Times.
"We had the luxury of ignorance. It's like we went from a teenager to an adult," she says.
The two studies focused on a set of stars that orbit near the black hole because direct observation of a black hole is impossible, but the data also allowed the US and European groups to recalculate the distance to the centre of the galaxy to be 27,000 light-years. The research of both groups will appear in upcoming issues of the Astrophysical Journal.
Image: central parts of the Milky Way / ESO/S. Gillessen et al.
President-in-waiting Barack Obama met with failed presidential candidate and climate guru Al Gore yesterday, and declared “the time for denial is over”.
Obama said both men believed “what the scientists have been telling us for years now” about the need to deal with climate change (AFP). The New York Times says the meeting was at Gore’s request but that Al is not pencilled in for a job by once Obama moves into the White House.
Obama does seem to be taking things seriously though. “[Climate change] is a matter of urgency and of national security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way,” he says (Reuters). “That’s what I intend my administration to do.”
Another man who failed to become president has also been making climate change noises. John Kerry said this week that the change of US governments and the economic meltdown must not derail attempts to forge a new global warming treaty. “We need to keep it on track, we need to make sure that the slow pace of the [Bush] administration doesn't downgrade people's sense of possibility,” he told the Boston Globe.
Posted for Emma Marris
Heather Wylie, the US Army Corps of Engineers scientist who paddled her way down the Los Angeles river in this post won't pay for her “off-duty kayaking”.
Wylie was trying to prove, with a group of others, that the river was navigable, and thus subject to the Clean Water Act. Her employers at the Corps had previously declared it not navigable, and were displeased when she so publicly disagreed.
Now the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, who took up her case, is announcing that Wylie's case has been settled; she will not face a 30-day suspension and has decided to leave the Corps and go to law school to become an environmental lawyer.
OPINION: Fearing the fear of nanotechnology
Hard data could help dispel scientists' preconceptions about the public, argues Richard Jones.
UN suspends leading carbon-offset firm
Emissions trading rocked as Norwegian company is left in limbo.
Rule change for human grants sparks spat at NIH
Bid to extend length of certain applications draws fire.
Q&A: UK DNA database needs overhaul
Inventor of DNA fingerprinting welcomes a ruling that will keep the innocent out of genetic databases.
Dogs get jealous when given unequal rewards for their faithful obedience, according to a new PNAS paper being mediafied with gusto.
In solo dog-on-human tests, pooches trained to ‘shake hands’ will offer a paw gratis, say researchers at the University of Vienna’s Clever Dog Lab. But if a nearby dog gets a treat for each shake while they go unrewarded, they’ll act upset and refuse to comply.
"Animals react to inequity; to avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently," said study leader Friederike Range (AP).
The Independent, which clearly spares no expense for doggie mind-reading, concludes: “Canines are capable of withdrawing their co-operation and friendship if they see another dog get tasty sausage morsels that they feel they deserve.” New Scientist goes for the clever-but-inaccurate headline “Jealous dogs don’t play ball”.
The study seems less important for sociobiology than for dinner conversation fodder (watch out for biased distribution of under-table scraps). But the doggy envy is being compared to that of capuchin monkeys, the only other non-humans found to have a sense of equity – Scientific American summarizes this nicely.
The researchers are now rearing wolf pups for further research, to see if domestication causes jealousy. But could there be other influences? “[T]he green-eyed monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on” sounds like more of a cat thing to me.
Image: Punchstock
“I couldn't believe it. I was shocked at first, these were school boys in their school uniforms.”
Documentary-maker Tooli Nhlapo tells the BBC how some South Africans are recreationally smoking drugs meant to help treat AIDS.
“We are starting to get to the point that when an adverse weather event occurs we can quantify how much more likely it was made by human activity. And people adversely affected by climate change today are in a position to document and quantify their losses.”
Myles Allen, a physicist at Oxford University, tells the Guardian people could soon be suing oil companies over climate change (see also his Nature commentary from 2003 on this topic).
“Like so much of nature, it must hint at the menace that lurks in all beauty.”
Kathleen McFarlane comments on her work. The artist, who the Daily Telegraph explains “subverted the domestic arts of weaving, tapestry and crochet work to create fantastical and often disturbing images and forms reminiscent of sea monsters, huge fungal growths — and worse” has died at the age of 86.
“Someone saw we were doing well and decided to put their hand in the honeypot.”
Joseph Costard, head of the Normandy shellfish farmers committee, comments on an outbreak of oyster rustling in France (Guardian).
Chemical company Dow has announced “a series of aggressive actions to accelerate its transformational strategy in light of current economic realities”. For those baffled by this new low in corporate speak: it is laying off thousands of employees after being credit crunched.
Dow is closing 20 facilities in what it calls “high-cost locations” and will shed 5,000 employees, around 11% of its total workforce, as part of a $700 million annual cost saving (press release).
Andrew Liveris, the company’s chairman and CEO, told a conference call Dow was also “temporarily idling” around 180 production plants, 30% of its total. This will mean a reduction in contractor numbers of around 6,000.
Just in case he hadn’t used enough jargon, Liveris added “Today’s restructuring is designed to support the Dow of Tomorrow. However, we are accelerating the implementation of these measures as the current world economy has deteriorated sharply, and we must adjust ourselves to the severity of this downturn.”
Reaction below the fold.
Researchers gathered in Duluth, Minnesota, yesterday to discuss the declining local moose populations. Their conclusion: climate change is largely to blame.
There are currently fewer than 8,000 moose in Minnesota, down from 14,000 in the mid-1980s. Some regions of the state are particularly hard hit, such as the northwest, where there are now fewer than 100 moose, down from 4,000 in the mid-1980s.
At the meeting, moose expert Rolf Peterson, of Michigan Technological University said that heat stress — from rising temperatures — was killing the moose.
“Moose are very heat-sensitive,” Peterson said. “They’re a 1,000-pound animal, and they’re almost black. They have no terribly effective way of getting rid of heat except by breathing faster.” (Star Tribune)
Today’s space picture shows rivers of gas and stellar wind smashing together in the Swan nebula. It provides, says NASA, some of the best examples ever seen of the ‘bow shocks’ that form in the turbulence found in star-forming regions.
“The stars are like rocks in a rushing river,” says Matt Povich of the University of Wisconsin, Madison (press release). “Powerful winds from the most massive stars at the centre of the cloud produce a large flow of expanding gas. This gas then piles up with dust in front of winds from other massive stars that are pushing back against the flow.”
The discovery of these particular bow shocks was described in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal. Click here for a picture showing them in more detail.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Wisc.
Clock-gene variants linked to diabetes
Receptor for body-clock hormone connected to disease risk.
LHC further delayed
Giant accelerator won't smash protons before July 2009.
Setback for key UK animal lab
Rising costs will delay the planned facility at Pirbright unless the government intervenes.
A surprising decline in the number of people taking the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) has sparked stories in both the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) and Inside Higher Ed (free).
For those who don't know, the GRE is the basic admissions test required of nearly everyone who applies for graduate school in the states. According to Educational Testing Services, which administers the test, the number of people expected to take the exam is expected to drop from 633,000 in 2007 to between 621,000 and 625,000 by the end of 2008.
Now such a small decline might not seem all that alarming, but educators are taking note. Graduate applications have risen during previous recessions, presumably because unemployed workers returned to school to further their education. The fact that they're not this time around is the subject of some speculation. David Payne, a vice president at ETS, suggests that personal wealth is down and individuals are feeling the pain. Debra Stewart, who heads the Council of Graduate Schools, thinks that the credit crunch is making it more difficult for people to borrow to fund their studies.
Regardless, it's another sign that the current recession is different from the others. And Stewart for one says that she is "very worried" about the financial stability of higher education in the US.
See also
US colleges likely to feel the pinch - November 14
Harvard gets credit crunched - November 11
A waterproof rice that can survive more than 2 weeks of total submersion has aced field tests and is nearly ready for official release, it was announced recently.
Researchers discovered 13 years ago that the gene sub1A makes rice plants flood resistant — rather than extending stems and leaves to try to escape a flood, plants with sub1a become dormant and conserve energy during flooding and then thrive when the floodwaters recede.
Annual flooding currently results in losses of US$1 billion worth of rice in South and South-East Asia. In Bangladesh and India, up to 4 million tonnes of rice, enough to feed 30 million people, is lost each year to flooding.
If you believed some of the more sensationalist headlines, you might think that a commentary paper published in Nature yesterday was urging everyone to go out and source illegal drugs to boost their brain function.
Sample headlines include ‘Let all pop pills for brain, experts urge’ and ‘Uppers for everyone, scientists say’. Admittedly, that is catchier than the title of the article in question: ‘Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy’.
“The article, while libertarian in spirit, is absolutely not saying: ‘use these drugs, everybody’,” says Philip Campbell, one of the paper’s authors and editor of Nature.
“My advice is to avoid taking such drugs unless you have been prescribed them. It is a serious felony to sell such drugs off-prescription in the US; in the UK, Ritalin, for example, is a class B drug, so that un-prescribed possession is punishable by prison and a fine. Furthermore, these drugs have undergone no clinical trials for use by healthy people. And they do have side-effects.”
It sounds like the plot of a preposterous B-movie: former US president Jimmy Carter is going to single-handedly slay a dragon that has been terrorising the world since biblical times.
For accuracy’s sake we may have to replace ‘single-handedly’ with ‘backed by a huge amount of money from Bill Gates and the British government’. And we’ll have to change ‘dragon’ to ‘affliction with little dragons’.
What we’re actually talking about here is the nasty parasitic Guinea worm (dracunculiasis: "affliction with little dragons") that is found in Sudan, Ghana, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria. This, says the New England Journal of Medicine, is “a plague so ancient that it has been found in Egyptian mummies and has been proposed by some to have been the ‘fiery serpent’ described in the Old Testament as torturing the Israelites in the desert”.
Carter announced last week that there were fewer than 5,000 cases remaining worldwide, and he unveiled a collaboration between his Carter Center, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department for International Development to finally slay the dragon.
“Guinea worm is poised to be the second disease eradicated from Earth, ending needless suffering for millions of people from one of the world's oldest and most horrific afflictions,” says Carter (press release). “The reduction of Guinea worm cases by more than 99 percent proves that when people work together, great positive change is possible.”
“I feel confident that the (carbon storage) time of stable biochar is from high hundreds to a few thousand years.”
Johannes Lehmann, of Cornell University, explains why ploughing burned plants into fields is a good idea (Reuters).
“We are happy to engage in serious debates on airport expansion, and we respect people’s right to protest within the bounds of the law.”
The owners of Stansted airport in the UK comment on a climate change protest that shut down their runways (Bloomberg).
“Next week I will move on: but know that nobody else has.”
Ben ‘Bad Science’ Goldacre is angry about media coverage of the MMR vaccine. Again.
“It’s really important for neuroscientists to start to think about the effects of people's experiences on their brain function, and specifically about the effect of people's socioeconomic status.”
Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, comments on research showing that some brain functions may be reduced in poor children compared with rich children (USA Today).
Simultaneously hopeful and harrowing evidence suggests that wild tiger populations are making a comeback in Nepal — tiger attacks are on the rise.
There are currently fewer than 5,000 wild tigers, down from 100,000 a century ago, largely because of hunting and habitat destruction. In 1996, a buffer zone was established to keep people and livestock out of Royal Chitwan National Park, along Nepal’s southern border with India, to protect tigers. Ecologist Bhim Gurung of University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and colleagues analyzed the 88 tiger attacks that occurred between 1979 and 2006. The number of people killed by tigers soared from 1.2 people per year to 7.2 people per year once the forest bounced back in the buffer zone, they report in Biological Conservation.
As locals are likely to retaliate for this rise in killings by hunting and poisoning the recovering tigers, Gurung and colleagues say that more education is needed so that locals don’t enter the rejuvenated forest. Also, radio collars could be used to monitor potential problem animals, which could reduce killings.
Continue reading "Wild tigers bite the hands that save them" »
“It was apparent that the monkeys associated humans with danger -- perhaps due to ongoing threats from hunters.”
Researchers have found a new population of endangered Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys in Vietnam (CNN).
“It’s something that they need to assist them in daily living.”
Matthew Carmel, president of American company Constitution Arms, explains the rationale behind his easy-firing pistol for the infirm (New Scientist).
“It was on the third night that we found out that the octopus Otto was responsible for the chaos.”
A spokesman for the Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, explains how an octopus has been shooting out the electrics with a jet of water (Daily Telegraph).
“The chemicals Das was using in his 'factory' could have been extremely dangerous.”
A former Astra-Zeneca employee has been jailed for producing £10 million of bootleg vodka and whisky (Daily Mail).
Science bloggers and media pundits have been collectively sounding off and scratching their heads about CNN’s decision to cut its entire science reporting staff.
Although the network insists that science coverage can successfully integrate into its general news teams, this has not been widely accepted. The Columbia Journalism Review blog notes, “the decision to eliminate the positions seems particularly misguided at a time when world events would seem to warrant expanding science and environmental staff”.
The TVNewser site originally announced on Wednesday that “16-year veteran CNN correspondent and anchor Miles O'Brien will soon be leaving CNN. O'Brien's departure comes as the network dismantles its science, space, environment and technology unit in Atlanta. That includes O'Brien as well as six producers.”
Following this announcement annoyed bloggers have been vociferously criticising the network. Excerpts below the fold.
Unsurprising science news strikes again — your happiness depends on the happiness of the people who surround you, especially your friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. But is that the whole story?
Political scientist James Fowler and sociology professor Nicholas Christakis, of UCSD and Harvard, analyzed a social network of 4,739 people whose happiness, along with other factors, had been tracked for 20 years. The report their findings in the British Medical Journal:
While there are many determinants of happiness, whether an individual is happy also depends on whether others in the individual’s social network are happy. Happy people tend to be located in the centre of their local social networks and in large clusters of other happy people. The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network.
So even the happiness of a friend of a friend's friend can make you happier, they say.
Although Fowler and Christakis are getting a lot of media attention with this story (over 490 online news stories at last check), a related BMJ article is getting less coverage. Reporting in the same issue, economist Ethan Cohen-Cole and assistant professor of public health Jason Fletcher, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Yale University, assessed the value of a different social network and concluded that “Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends to social network effects, especially when environmental confounders are not adequately controlled for in the analysis.”
Props go to Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times and TopNews for at least mentioning both stories.
Also, no need to despair if you are unhappy — happy people shouldn’t ditch their unhappy friends just yet, writes population health scientist Peter Sainsbury in an associated commentary in the BMJ. “…Happiness is not everything; unhappy acquaintances may contribute something other than happiness to our lives,” he writes.
Image: Punchstock
Only last week, according to the BBC, the Zimbabwean government said that the cholera epidemic rampaging through the country since August and making news since late October was not an emergency. Now a national emergency has officially been declared, reports the local state-controlled Herald. Economic ruin under Mugabe’s regime has closed hospitals and apparently left the country helpless in the face of a treatable disease.
Continue reading "Zimbabwe admits cholera epidemic is an emergency" »
Researchers laid off from the University of Texas Medical Branch in the wake of Hurricane Ike are not taking things lying down. Some of them are now suing to get the job cuts revoked.
The Texas Faculty Association has filed a lawsuit arguing the cutting of over 3,000 jobs was authorised at a closed-doors meeting, when under the Texas Open Meetings Act “deliberations concerning a class or group of employees ... must be held in open session” (AP).
UT has denied the charge. “Our lawyers believe we acted within the law of the Open Meetings Act,” says Anthony de Bruyn, a spokesman for the University of Texas System (Houston Chronicle).
In an editorial the Chronicle says:
The board's decision to cut 3,800 jobs at UTMB is viewed by most Galvestonians — rightly, we would conclude — as a body blow to a healthy, stable future. It is only adding insult to Galveston's injury that the regents' process leading to the job cuts was conducted in secret — and may well have been in violation of the state's Open Meetings Act.
...
At the very least, regents violated the spirit of openness in government required by state law. Decisions about job cuts involving thousands of public employees and millions of public dollars at an institution of historic importance should be made in plain view.
UK to train 2,000 new PhDs
Multidisciplinary centres with business ties to produce physicists and engineers.
Mars rover's debut delayed
NASA will team with Europe for future big missions.
Companies spurn low-tech HIV tests
Cheap, effective tests for patients in Africa too unprofitable.
With UN climate change bigwig Yvo De Boer waving from the passenger seat, the first solar-powered car to travel around the world completed its journey yesterday by smashing through a wall of polystyrene bricks at the climate conference in Poznan, Poland ('Solar Taxi' website).
Louis Palmer, a Swiss teacher, has driven the car through 38 countries - reportedly being turned away only by Japan, which does not allow cars with Swiss license plates. "I think it's great; he's driven around the world in this thing so that's a world record," said De Boer (Reuters).
The small blue three-wheeler tows a trailer full of solar panels and batteries, which Palmer sometimes charged from local electricity sources when sun was scarce - in the Polish winter, for instance.
Next year, Palmer plans to take six more low-carbon cars around the world in 80 days.
See also
Nature's Poznan coverage
Car industry: Charging up the future - Nature
Solar car completes 1st ever round-the-world trip - AP
'Solar taxi' goes round the world - BBC).
“Copper Thefts Threaten US Critical Infrastructure”
That’s what the FBI says in a new report (Wired).
“Therefore his minimum age is 176-years-old. He is the oldest inhabitant on St Helena and is claimed to be the oldest living tortoise in the world.”
Meet Jonathan the Tortoise, who has been dated thanks to Boer War-era photos (Daily Telegraph, if you prefer your science salacious check the Sun’s Old-age mutant swinger tortoise).
“I really enjoyed launching the teddy-bear into space.”
Science outreach seems to have worked on Kane Robbins, age 12 (University of Cambridge).
“There has been so much man-made damage to the river that I sometimes can't see how the Chinese sturgeon can recover.”
Wei Qiwei, biologist at the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute, comments on the plight of ‘a living dinosaur’ (Austin-American Statesman).
“From time to time, in our experience, fruit has been encountered at crime scenes.”
Researchers Matej Trapecar and Mojca Kern Vinkovic of the forensic science laboratory in Slovenia explain their new paper ‘Techniques for fingerprint recovery on vegetable and fruit surfaces used in Slovenia — A preliminary study’ in the Science and Justice journal (subscription required).
Posted for Ashley Yeager
The earthquakes aren’t over for the Indonesian island of Sumatra. In 2004, a devastating 9.2 magnitude earthquake and tsunami killed 225,000 people when it struck the Indonesian area. Now new research suggests that the area, part of a belt of intense seismic activity known as the "Pacific Ring of Fire", could take another hit in the future.
Geologists have been monitoring the area using satellites to measure ground movements. They’ve also studied geological evidence of what has happened there in the past. Surprisingly, despite a series of quakes in 2005 and 2007, measurements of the quake zone around the Mentawai islands off Sumatra's west coast show there is still a large amount of stress built up in the region. The findings are published in the 4 December issue of Nature.
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Aside from feeling the love, the Indian Space Research Organization’s first unmanned lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, is now feeling the heat. Some of the probe’s systems have been shut off as temperatures aboard the spacecraft reached 49 degrees Celsius.
The increase was not unexpected, Mylswamy Annadurai, the project director for the lunar mission, told CNN.
Spacecraft typically heat up because as the craft, the moon and the sun line, the probes receive infrared radiation from the Moon as well as energy directly from the Sun. The spacecraft is currently orbiting the moon’s sunlit side and facing external temperatures of 100 degrees Celsius, Annadurai said.
He explained that temperatures aboard Chandrayaan-1 should not surpass 50 degrees Celsius, but noted that the orbiter is designed to withstand up to 60 degrees Celsius. To maintain a safe temperature, however, Chandrayaan-1 has cooling systems that aim to keep the spacecraft's interior at 40 degrees Celsius.
The craft has since cooled to that temperature. But as a preventative measure and to rule out the possibility of damage to spacecraft, mission scientists have switched off onboard systems that do not necessarily need to be on. Also, because of the heat, scientists will use only one instrument aboard Chandrayaan at a time until temperatures stabilise in late December.
Nine of the 11 onboard instruments have been switched on for checks on their health and calibration. Annadurai told The Economic Times that perhaps by mid-January scientists will be able to operate all instruments simultaneously.
Image: detail from moon photo acquired Chandrayaan-1 on 16 Nov. 2008 / ISRO
French scientists today announced plans to clone black truffles and grow them in a lab (Financial Times).
Marking the start of truffle season, the French region of Corrèze launched a three-year plan that it hopes will revive supplies of the precious fungus - which fetches €1,000 ($1,265) per kilo at market but is harvested less and less. FT reports:
Their goal is to unlock the secrets of black truffle production - the soil, climate or the trees - and hopefully revive an endangered industry by producing a more consistent crop.The project will involve culturing cloned truffles together with tree saplings in rows of sterile test tubes until they form their crucial symbiotic relationship, a process that can take up to a year. Once the pair is established they will be planted out to mature naturally.
The Times and the Telegraph pick up the story (the latter in a close paraphrase of the FT).
Says Jacques Pebeyre, an octogenarian author and truffier known as France's 'truffle king', "I am not against helping nature." But, he adds, "we need to know how good these [cloned] truffles will be. In the end it all depends on that" (FT).
The University of Bath has unveiled the latest iteration of what may be the first robot that can both jump and roll.
PhD student Rhodri Armour’s ‘Jollbot’ could be useful for space exploration, says the university, as it is simpler than a legged design and can overcome larger obstacles than a similar sized wheeled vehicle could achieve (press release, 2005 meeting presentation).
“Others in the past have made robots that jump and robots that roll; but we’ve made the first robot that can do both,” says Armour. “Before jumping, the robot squashes its spherical shape. When it is ready, it releases the stored energy all at once to jump to heights of up to half a metre.”
Jollbot was previous announced in a 2007 paper, when Armour told PhysOrg, “For earth-bound uses, there are a variety of other possible applications that involve locomotion over random or rough terrain. Typically these would involve exploration and could occur in places such as volcanoes, caverns, mountainous regions, or more structured rough environments such as urban areas with stairs and other obstacles. Other applications could be for entertainment, such as tourist guides.”
Of course, if Jollbot does go into space it may meet some very similar things already out there...
A new statement by wildlife groups yesterday on the longstanding problem of ocean noise is getting plenty of press. Buried in the AP coverage of this story is the possibility that governments might be ready to tackle it with regulations.
Escalating noise from ships, seismic surveys for oil and gas, and military sonar is drowning out the sounds whales and dolphins use to communicate, said groups led by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, who were attending a UN conference on the Convention on Migratory Species. The volume could get pumped up, they added, by surprise effects of ocean acidification, plus an oil and gas rush in the thawing Arctic.
"Noisy activities are producing an acoustic fog that prevents whales from maintaining social groups, finding each other for breeding purposes, and so forth," says the WDCS's Mark Simmonds (AFP), referring to evidence rounded up in a June report from the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
Continue reading "Ocean noise is no cocktail party for marine mammals" »
Genetic information from innocent people cannot be kept on a police criminal database, a European court ruled today. The UK government has been told that its policy of refusing to remove DNA information from a massive centralised database when a suspect has been exonerated breaches human rights.
The European Court of Human Rights said the right to respect and a private life would be “unacceptably weakened if the use of modern scientific techniques in the criminal justice system were allowed at any cost and without carefully balancing the potential benefits of the extensive use of such techniques against important private-life interests” (Guardian).
Before the ruling, the Daily Telegraph noted that if the UK government lost the case more than 850,000 people on the database could have their records wiped. All of these hundreds of thousands of people do not have criminal records. The number includes 40,000 children.
Nature Podcast - This week, we discover what proportion of cancer cells actually form tumours, try to predict the size of future tsunamis, find out what's in store for farming, and talk to stargazers who have spied a blast from the past.
Indonesia to reject tagging of HIV carriers
A controversial bill to track patients with HIV using implanted microchips is unlikely to pass.
Methane bursts from frozen tundra
Ice build-up may squeeze greenhouse gas from cold soil.
Astronomers revisit a blast from the past
Light 'echoes' from 436-year-old supernova explosion first seen by Tycho Brahe.
“They would be expected to sleep better because their internal clock is on the right time.”
Elizabeth Klerman comments on her research that shows jet lag might be treatable with a drug that mimics melatonin (LA Times).
“I texted him and he texted back step-by-step instructions.”
Surgeon David Nott explains how a colleague talked him through a risky amputation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Guardian).
“The citadel [overlooks] an abyss that, we think, ancient inhabitants used as viewing-point and where they could see possible enemies.”
Benedicto Perez Goicochea reports discovering a pre-Inca citadel in Peru (Andina, mirror in English).
A clever camera setup in a Swedish neuroscience lab produces the sensation of swapping bodies with a mannequin or, perhaps even more uncannily, with a cognitive neuroscientist, according to a paper in PLOS One(press release).
This is not a major new finding, but rather – as Reuters notes - a high-tech extension of an old trick in which subjects are made to perceive a rubber hand is their own. The paper describes the technique:
Two CCTV cameras were positioned on a male mannequin such that each recorded events from the position corresponding to one of the mannequin’s eyes. A set of head mounted displays ... connected to the cameras was worn by the participants, and connected in such a way that the images from the left and right video cameras were presented on the left and right eye displays, respectively, providing a true stereoscopic image. Participants were asked to tilt their heads downwards as if looking down at their bodies. Thus, the participants saw the mannequin’s body where they expected to see their own.We used a short rod to repetitively stroke the participant’s abdomen, which was out of view, in synchrony with identical strokes being applied to the mannequin’s abdomen in full view of the participant.
One of America’s most important medical research centres has begun disclosing all employees’ industry links on its website.
The Cleveland Clinic is making public “payments to its physicians and scientists for speaking and consulting of $5,000 or more per year, and any equity, royalties, and fiduciary relationships in companies with which they collaborate”. Anyone searching the staff directory on the centre’s website can now find out this information just by scrolling to the bottom of an individual doctor’s page.
This move follows conflict of interest allegations concerning clinic employees, see the Cleveland Plain Dealer for more on this.
David Rothman, president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession, told the New York Times that the clinic was “breaking a new path here”.
Praise has also come from senator Charles Grassley, who has been running a high profile campaign against conflicts of interest in the medical research sphere (see links below). “Patients deserve easy access to information about their doctors’ relationships with drug companies and the Cleveland Clinic is making that possible,” says Grassley in the Times.
See also
This programme was brought to you in association with... - November 21
Department of beams in the eye - October 23
Conflict of interest inquiry claims psychiatrist scalp - October 06
Today from 3:00 to 7:00 p.m. GMT, Nature's Elucian Islands in the virtual world of Second Life are the site of a free conference on "Climate Change and CO2 Capture and Storage".
The conference is co-hosted by Nature and Imperial College London and features speakers from the US and UK - but, look ma, no air travel.
Full details (including instructions for first-time Second Lifers) here.
SL vets can teleport to Elucian Islands via this link.
Invasive ants are rampaging their way through Europe and will soon start wreaking havoc in parks and gardens near you, if you live in Northern Europe. A paper in PLoS One has now traced how these ants got spread and how they achieved pest status.
The study shows that Lasius neglectus ants have spread out from the Black Sea region and thrive by creating large networks of cooperating nests, rather than smaller mutually hostile nests. The ants are also highly competitive because their networks contain many queens that mate underground and don’t fly, this makes it easier to find reproductive partners.
Headlines run from the Reading Evening Post’s urgent “Killer ants on the way” to the Telegraphs more measured “Invasive foreign ant could be heading to Britain”. The Metro goes with “Invasion of the (very, very ugly) ‘super-ants’”.
Ralph Lewin, marine biologist and contributor to Nature, died last week.
Lewin’s scientific career focused on the physiology and biochemistry of marine microbes, which he studied at Yale in the 1950s and at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California from the 1960s until his retirement a few years ago. But his outside interests were wide-ranging and notably eclectic.
"He has been a longstanding regular contributor to many sections of Nature, as well as frequently pulling us up on matters of accuracy in the details," says Maxine Clarke, executive editor. His pieces sometimes posed imaginative questions like “Why are cows not green?” (subscription). Other notes flagged up corrections as gentle and droll as they were fastidious. Those that made it into print (and at least one that made it into blog) give a nice glimpse of the man. One sample:
SIR –
When you wrote about the report … on locating radium-labelled click beetles (Agriotes sp.) with a Geiger-Müller counter (Nature 17 October 1996, ix), you might have mentioned a method described many years earlier by J. M. Barrie, whereby the sound of ticking served to localize a crocodile that had ingested an 8-day alarm clock.
Posted for Declan Butler
How would nature do it? That's the premise of the field of biomimetics or biomimicry, which draws on designs and materials that lifeforms have evolved over the course of millions of years.
Now Autodesk, the industry leader in Computer Aided Design software and the maker of Autocad, has got together with Janine Benyus naturalist and founder of the Biomimicry Institute in Missoula Montana. Together they’ve created a free online database called Ask Nature, where they hope to compile nature's solutions to design and engineering challenges, for creators of all stripes to draw on for inspiration.
“This free database is the only public-domain online library of its kind in the world, where architects, designers and engineers can search for and study nature’s solutions to design challenges – learning, for example, how organisms filter air and water, gather solar energy, and create non-toxic dyes and glues,“ they say.
Recent rumours that the Large Hadron Collider wouldn’t be doing any colliding before 2010 were quickly quashed, although the presentation slides that triggered the rumour are still missing from the internet. Now a similar disappearing act has been pulled on the first photos of the damage that downed the particle accelerator.
Blogger and post-doc particle physicist Stephanie Majewski posted on Monday to say, “Finally, some photos of the damage to the LHC”, linking to an original post by fellow LHC blogger Seth Zenz. By yesterday morning the photos had been removed from the online version of a talk given at the LHC’s home in CERN, although you can still see them here.
As a comment on Majewski’s blog notes, “You’d think the organization that spawned the Web would do more to harness its power rather than engage in cover-up activity, especially in a time when openness would be better respected.”
In the meantime, here is a nice picture of them fixing the damage to the LHC, which are available for all to see. This is the first replacement magnet for sector 3-4.
Image: Maximilien Brice / CERN
Spain in the dock over research visas
Failure to cut red tape for foreign scientists prompts legal action by the European Union.
Europe to pay royalties for cancer gene
BRCA1 patent decision may be ignored in clinics.
Can triniobium tin shrink accelerators?
Exotic superconductors promise savings.
“It’s simply too much money. It’s time for him to go - the sooner he gets a new home the better.”
Heiner Kloes, senior bear keeper at Berlin Zoo, explains that the zoo is trying to sell celebrity polar bear Knut as it cannot afford a new compound that would be large enough for him to mate in (The Times).
“We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name. But it didn't.”
Doug Engelbart, of the Stanford Research Institute in California, invented the computer mouse 40 years ago (Daily Telegraph).
“We drilled and drilled all winter when it was dark and the windchill was 80 below. Everyone thought I was crazy.”
Chuck Fipke explains how, in Wired’s words, ‘a Rogue Geologist Discovered a Diamond Trove in the Canadian Arctic’.
Because science is always evolving and changing, conventional school textbooks are often outdated, leaving students behind the times. The Virginia Board of Educators, fed up with their high-school physics books having misinformation (or no information) on string theory, nanotechnology and particle physics, is now working on a solution — a 'flexbook'.
Dozens of physics teachers were invited to fill in the gaps of outdated textbooks with chapters that will be posted online as free supplements to conventional textbooks. Chapter topics will include biophysics, quantum mechanics, relativity and new TV technology.
Continue reading "Virginia to get open-source online textbooks" »
According to rather breathless coverage in the UK media, a new survey has shown that the Antarctic is “more diverse than the Galapagos”.
This stems from a paper published in the Journal of Biogeography which reports the first estimate of animal biodiversity at a polar locality, in this case the South Orkney Islands.
“This is the first time anybody has done an inventory like this in the polar regions,” says study author David Barnes of the British Antarctic Survey (press release).
Barnes adds, via the Guardian, “There has been a long-held belief that the tropics are rich and the polar regions are poor and mid-latitudes are somewhere in between. This is the first time we've been able to actually look at the fauna of a polar archipelago - it is not actually that poor at all.”
Last month the University of Texas Medical Branch announced that 3,000 of its 12,000 employees would lose their jobs after Hurricane Ike devastated its facilities.
Now the Galveston Daily News is reporting that 127 faculty members will be among the casualties.
The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that the Texas Faculty Association is not happy. A post on the association’s blog says, “Of the 127 names listed, a mere 44 were non-tenure track. That means, gentle readers, that UTMB used Ike to further weaken tenure by running off tenured and tenure track faculty at a rate of almost twice that of non-tenure track faculty.”
Continue reading "Faculty cut at hurricane-hit Texas university" »
The US Food and Drug Administration is seeking legislative changes so it can better protect the American food supply chain.
“Rising food imports, increasing consumption of convenience foods, and new foodborne pathogens are among the challenges we face. To address these challenges, we must move toward a food safety and defense system that is more proactive and strategic” FDA wrote one year ago in its Food Protection Plan.
Now, in their 2008 progress report, the FDA is restating its requests for legislative changes, which include the power to hire private-sector inspectors, issue mandatory recalls and force food facilities to register biennially. "These authorities are critical to future food protection implementation efforts" the report's authors write.
Posted for Heidi Ledford
Nervous Genentech employees can stop eyeing the door -- for a little while at least. Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, which announced its intention to acquire the California biotech in July, may not be able to get that $45 billion loan it has asked for to complete the offer, according to Reuters.
While the financial crisis has left tiny biotechs gasping for air, big pharma with its big reservoirs of cash is predicted to fare relatively well. But even the mighty Roche doesn’t have $43.7 billion* lying around, and according to a few anonymous but seemingly well-placed sources talking to Reuters, no bank is likely to lend it to them in the current economic morass.
That doesn’t mean that Roche’s bid is over – they’ll just have to work a little harder to raise the funds, possibly by selling corporate bonds. Roche, meanwhile, has pledged as recently as last week that its pursuit of Genentech is on track. But just a day earlier, Pharmalot entertained a little speculation that Roche may have scrapped plans for a swanky new helix-shaped, $450 million R&D center in Basel amid concerns over how the company would finance the Genentech takeover. And remember, at the end of it all, Genentech wanted more than $43.7 billion anyway.
* How big a loan Roche wants is unclear. The offer for Genentech is $43.7 billion but a loan of $45 billion is often mentioned.
Image: Punchstock
The United Nations global warming negotiations got of to a predictable start today in Poznan, Poland, with global leaders calling for urgent action to stem the rise in greenhouse gas emissions.
Day one also offered a taste of the antagonism that has become a hallmark of US relations with most of the world during the George W. Bush administration. This might make for good press, but everybody is already looking forward to President-Elect Obama, who has pledged aggressive regulatory action to curb emissions.
Polish Prime Minister and conference host Minister Donald Tusk himself in an awkward position as well. He called for action on global warming - and then had to answer questions about his opposition to a European Union proposal to begin a new round of emissions reductions in 2013. Tusk later cited his country's reliance on coal and said Poland is looking to "create and adapt the package, not to reject it," according to The Associated Press.
The United Kingdom also received a bit of a jolt Monday with the release of a new report documenting the early implications of its commitment to slash greenhouse gases by 80 percent by 2050 (see the Guardian's story here). Although the Committee on Climate Change led by Adair Turner was optimistic in saying that the proposed reductions are doable "without harming the UK's economy," Reuters reported that there will be consequences, namely increased energy costs that could push some 1.7 million homes into "fuel poverty."
Given the ongoing economic crisis, there are plenty of questions about how all of this will play out, both at the national and international levels. But one thing is clear: Poznan is unlikely to provide any concrete answers. The two-week conference is more of a preparatory forum for the nitty-gritty negotiations that will take place next year.
For all the news from the Poznan conference, check out our main conference blog here.
“There wasn't a scrap of bone left.”
Fossil thieves have left Michael Ryan, head of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, disgruntled (Cleveland Plain Dealer).
‘Alien-like Squid With "Elbows" Filmed at Drilling Site’
After the amazing ‘stuck fish’ video, more great footage from the oil industry (National Geographic).
“A feasible approach to produce hypoallergenic peanut”
Peggy Ozias-Akins, of the University of Georgia, wants to make peanuts safer for everyone (Wired, research paper).
“It was so busy ripping up the thing, it didn't even care about us approaching.”
Scott Gremel, a wildlife biologist at Olympic National Park in Washington state, thinks an aggressive relation might be driving out the spotted owl (LA Times).
It’s World AIDS day. Amidst government pledges and calls for more HIV testing, there’s 15 minutes of silence, an HIV+ marathon, a new Queen concert movie and much, much more.
Posted for Anna Barnett
They sent in police. They seized illegally grazing cattle. In an environmentally friendly credit crunch, they cut bank loans to farmers who don’t comply with environmental regulations.
But despite Brazil’s war on deforestation, the media is reporting that losses of Amazon rainforest are slightly up this year compared with 2006-2007. There is a caveat to this: AP notes that the apparent rise falls within the satellite survey’s margin of error.
This is a reversal after three years of steady rainforest recovery – the BBC headline a year ago was ‘Brazil deforestation slows again’ – but it is no surprise. In that BBC story, Greenpeace was already warning that clearcuts had spiked since the end of the last report period, July 2007. Official numbers confirmed the trend in January, and the police inspections and policy crackdowns were rolled out.
Posted for Asher Mullard
The world’s third largest chemical company is the latest victim of the credit crisis.
Ineos, founded only 10 years ago, is the biggest privately owned company in Britain, producing over 50 billion tonnes of chemicals a year for an annual profit revenue of £30bn. Until now, Ineos has thrived by borrowing money from bankers — and therefore not depending on public shareholders — to buy up floundering companies.
Given the current financial crisis, however, it looks like Ineos may need a new strategy. Ineos announced today that their plans to build a £65 million biodiesel plant in Grangemouth, Scotland, will be put on hold indefinitely. According to the BBC, “the current economic slowdown had rendered the project unviable”.
Continue reading "Chemical company feeling the financial heat" »
Over 150 pilot whales are thought to have died after beaching themselves on a remote and rocky section of the Tasmanian coast. Photos from the scene show the sea turned red as the animals struggled on the shore.
This is the second pilot whale stranding off Tasmania in a month.
Although an early announcement put the number of dead at 80, the toll has since risen. Warwick Brennan of the Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries and Water, told AFP, “155 are dead.”
North Atlantic cold-water sink returns to life
Convective mixing resumes after a decade due to massive loss of Arctic ice.
Space agency funding defies downturn
European ministers commit €10 billion to space missions, Earth monitoring and new facilities.
Terrestrial origin mooted for more microbes
More than two-thirds of bacteria may have descended from a land-dwelling ancestor.
Saving the Majorcan midwife toad
Researchers start gearing up to mitigate the deadly amphibian chytrid fungus in the wild.
Space shuttle Endeavour landed smoothly at Edwards Air Force Base in California on Sunday (press release).
“It’s great to be back on the ground, and it's great to be in California,” said shuttle commander Christopher Ferguson (AP).
Florida Today says:
Endeavour's flight -- the 124th by a shuttle and the 52nd to land at Edwards --travelled more than 6.6 million miles during 251 orbits of Earth. It was the 20th time a shuttle that intended to land at KSC was diverted to Edwards, all but one of those cases because of weather. NASA prefers to land in Florida because flying the shuttle home from California on a modified 747 costs about $1.8 million and slows processing for the next mission.
Image: NASA/Tony Landis
