The Great Beyond

“It was explained to us how it was supposed to work and, I think, from the technical point of view, there is no doubt that this concept would work.”
Christian Bank, designer of manned space systems at EADS-Astrium, comments on rumours that Russia’s next space craft will have rocket powered landings, rather than using a parachute (BBC).

“That’s not our tortoise. We do not have a missing tortoise”
Mary Dixon, a spokeswoman for the group that runs the Bronx Zoo in New York, denies that a large tortoise found wandering the city that never sleeps was a victim of the recent round of animal redundancies at the zoo (NY Times).

“NASA is cautious about exposing the crew to any and all viruses and bacteria in the preflight phase, whether that be swine flu or the common cold. NASA does not have to alter their current posture, because their current posture is already very conservative, as even a routine [common cold] can be problematic on a space mission.”
NASA spokesman Bill Jeffs says all precautions are being taken to prevent swine flu being carried into space (Space.com).

“I felt guilty. They need somebody.”
Retired Air Force General Lester Lyles says he feels bad about pulling out of the race to be next NASA administrator (Dayton Daily News, hat tip: NASA Watch).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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South Korea has re-entered stem cell science, with the national committee on bioethics approving the first research proposal since the national scandal over Woo Suk Hwang’s fraudulent stem cell claims.

A new study will be undertaken at Cha Hospital in Seoul.

“The decision will help reactivate stem cell research in South Korea,” says Chung Hyung-Min, the hospital’s lead researcher (AFP). “Stem cell research has been done by scientists in Britain and other countries. But there has been no successful case yet, using human eggs.”

Reuters says the research will involve “producing human stem cells through cloning” while AFP confusingly says the project will be “using aborted human eggs to develop cures for grave human diseases”. The Korea Times says the approval is for “somatic stem cell cloning”.

A number of conditions have been placed on the research team. The Korea Times explains:

In lifting the ban, the committee called on the hospital to minimize the use of human eggs by having the research conducted primarily on lab animals. The use of human eggs will be limited to 800 for the research, lower than the 1,000 originally requested by the centre.

The hospital was also required to remove all references about stem cell research leading to 'cures' for certain diseases and improve the quality of its consent process for egg donors.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Shell’s profits tumbled by 62% to $3.49 billion in the first quarter of this year (from $9.08 billion from last year, AP), and meanwhile the oil company remains committed to hoiking oil out of gloopy, sticky tar sands in Canada (see this Nature story from earlier this year for a description of the stuff).

The slump is blamed on falling oil prices. According to a Market Watch report Shell “sold oil for, on average, 54% less than it did in the same quarter last year. Gas prices dropped 15%.”

The tar sands project has been roundly criticised by environmentalists, because they say getting oil out of these tar sands is a messy, carbon-intensive process. But Shell is pressing ahead with the project: “When we build projects, we take a long-term view. Oil sands is something that produces for 30-40 years and you do not get too nervous if short-term volatility drives you in a down cycle,” CEO Peter Voser is quoted by the Guardian.

Bloomberg is reporting another Oil sands company also posting huge losses – bigger than Shell’s: Canadian Oil Sands profits dropped by 86% this quarter compared to last year.

Image: US DOI

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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All Nature’s swine flu coverage is collected on our news special page. These regular updates on The Great Beyond round up the latest from other news sources around the globe.

As the World Health Organisation raises the pandemic alert level to five, reports indicate the H1N1 virus may have reached Africa.

South Africa reported the continent’s first suspected cases on Wednesday (AFP, Die Burger). SA health ministry spokesman Fidel Hadebe told AFP that two women under investigation had recently returned from Mexico.

After yesterday’s suggestion from Israel’s deputy health minister that the outbreak should be renamed “Mexican flu”, the correct label is being much debated. The NY Times says that Thailand has adopted the Mexican flu moniker and US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has said, “This is not a food-borne illness, virus – it is not correct to refer to it as swine flu because really that’s not what this is about.”

AP notes that the US Department of Homeland Security “suggested the boring scientific route” of using H1N1. Of course, in Spanish the disease is ‘la gripe porcina’. The Knight Science Journalism Tracker has been rounding up Spanish coverage.

UPDATE: The WHO has thrown its hat into the name debate ring, with the following note on its website:

More
According to a number of sources, email scammers have started trying to exploit swine/Mexican/H1N1 flu scare.
The first American victim of swine flu, reported yesterday, was a Mexican child visiting the US, according to the NY Times.

Image: WHO pandemic phases

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week’s issue of Nature looks in detail at “the coming climate crunch”.

As my colleague Quirin Schiermeier explains on the Climate Feedback blog, “What’s it all about then? Well, Gavin Schmidt and David Archer, in their news and views piece, get to the heart of it: “Dangerous climate change, even loosely defined, is going to be hard to avoid.’”

The Real Climate blog focuses on two papers which look at the chances of staying below 2°C warming. “Both find that the most directly relevant quantity is the total amount of CO2 ultimately released, rather than a target atmospheric CO2 concentration or emission rate,” the blogging team writes. “This is an extremely useful result, giving us a clear statement of how our policy goals should be framed.”

Much of the coverage focuses on the suggestion in one of these papers that once humanity has added a trillion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere 2°C is inevitable (eg: Wired).

In the Guardian, Myles Allen, author of one of the papers, writes:

Like all scientists, most of what I do is arcane and technical and of very little interest to outsiders. For once, however, I'm involved in a couple of studies (published today in Nature), that my fellow parents might just find interesting. The headline result of both papers is that the risk of dangerous climate change is primarily determined by the total amount of carbon dioxide that we, the human race, release into the atmosphere over all time, not by emissions in any particular year.

Joseph Romm, of the Climate Progress blog, is unimpressed though. He writes that our issue “fails utterly to provide its readers with the two must-haves in any comprehensive coverage of the issue:

-A clear and specific understanding of the plausible worst-case scenario impacts facing the world post-2050 on our current emissions path.
-A clear and specific understanding of the core climate solutions, policies for their rapid deployment, and an understanding of why the total cost of action is so darn low — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.”

Make up your own mind: all the content is here.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Swine flu goes global
New influenza virus tests pandemic emergency preparedness.

California in clean-fuel drive - Premium content
State rule says biofuels aren't so green.

Japan goes for the sun - Premium content
Government pushes to regain national lead in solar-energy research.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It's getting to be old-hat. Following up on an earlier promise, US President Barack Obama has formally reversed yet another of his predecessor's policies, this one focusing on the institutional role of science in protecting endangered species (AP).

The rule in question was targeted at the so-called "Section 7 consultations" under the Endangered Species Act. Current regulations require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service to review all projects involving federal government for potential impacts to endangered species. The Bush administration's rule would have allowed other federal agencies to skip that review process if their own experts determined that it wasn't necessary.

In theory, such a system might improve things on the front end. The idea is that other federal agencies would have an incentive to integrate biology into the planning process rather than simply passing the environmental review to Fish and Wildlife, which comes in on the tail end and tries to straighten things out. For those worried about whether these initial agency reviews would be sufficient, the argument goes, lawsuits remain as a critical backstop.

Continue reading "Interior revokes Bush rule on endangered species" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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This week we've a climate special: Nicholas Stern tells us how the recession could help curb global warming, Nature's climate science editor is in the studio to talk us through the latest research, and we imagine what the world would look like in the worst-case scenario of 1000ppm of CO2. Also on the show, autism genes and how to fix a broken heart.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“Public officials and civic leaders were inclined to look the other way so long as resurrectionists kept to what one anatomist in 1896 called the ‘prudent line of stealing only the bodies of the poor’.”
John Harley Warner, expert in the history of medicine at Yale University, has co-authored a book on photographs of historic dissections (Insider Higher Ed – slightly gruesome photographs at this link).

“As of now, half of Americans live in an area where they are at risk.”
Norman Edelman, chief medical officer for the American Lung Association, comments on a new report from his group detailing America’s most polluted cities (Forbes).

“My belief is that it’s an older woman or her estate, from the world war two generation which is much more comfortable being anonymous. Women of that generation had no automatic opportunity to go to college even if they came from a family with money, and the role of women in leadership positions was still new and exciting.”
Melissa Berman, of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, speculates about the identity of a mystery donor behind donations to US universities worth $75 million (Guardian).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Swine flu continues to spread. All Nature’s coverage is collected on our news special page. Here is the latest from other sources around the globe.

The first person outside of Mexico to die from the H1N1 virus has been confirmed. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, confirmed the victim was a 23-month old child (BBC, NPR).

In Germany, the Robert Koch Institute has confirmed three cases. The institute is the country’s national reference centre for influenza.

In Mexico the death rate from swine flu seems to be dropping, according to the Daily Telegraph:

[Health secretary Jose] Cordova said that the drop in deaths was due to people taking anti-viral drugs soon after they started displaying symptoms. The first victims were treated with antibiotics and other flu medicine as Mexican health workers struggled to find out what was going on.

US researchers working on a vaccine hope to have a reference strain of the disease by May, according to AP. However the virus appears to grow slowly in the chicken eggs conventionally used in vaccine manufacture. “There is a little bit of concern there,” Ruben Donis, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the newswire.

The New York Times says it will be November at the earliest before enough vaccine for all Americans could be made. A more likely date is January.

A number of papers are now carrying stories about the last swine flu outbreak at Fort Dix in 1976. The Philadelphia Enquirer focuses on David Sencer, who was forced from his job at the CDC after vaccine programme developed in response to that outbreak led to deaths.

The LA Times also has good coverage of the 76 outbreak.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Common genetic variations implicated in autism are reported in two papers published this week by Nature. The studies represent the first robust evidence of a link between such common variations and autistic spectrum disorders.

“The genes that were discovered appear to be involved in the development of the frontal lobe of the brain ... that is, involved in complex behaviour such as social behaviour and also abstract thought,” says study author Geri Dawson, chief officer of the Autism Speaks group (ABC News).

In one of the papers the research team uses a genome-wide association study with 780 families to pinpoint six single nucleotide polymorphisms linked to autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). The second paper pin-points two major gene pathways as linked to ASDs

“It is very exciting,” says Hakon Hakonarson, who led both studies (LA Times). “It opens up the opportunity someday for new interventions to fix the bad consequences this variant has on brain function and development.”

Hakonarson is director of the Center for Applied Genomics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

More coverage
Autistic Kids Have Altered Genes Controlling Brain Development – Bloomberg
Biggest autism study identifies gene variations behind condition - Times

Papers
Common genetic variants on 5p14.1 associate with autism spectrum disorders
Autism genome-wide copy number variation reveals ubiquitin and neuronal genes

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Posted for Rex Dalton

A uranium-rich peak in New Mexico that is sacred to 30 Native American tribes was named this week as an endangered historic place by the US Natural Trust for Historic Preservation.

The 3,450-meter Mount Taylor is known as Tsoodzil, or turquoise mountain, to the Navajo; it also has deep significance for tribes like the Zuni and Acoma. With uranium prices high in recent years, the historic classification is seen as an attempt to save or limit the culturally rich volcano from further mining.

The highest point in the Cibola National Forest, the mountain was named in 1949 1849 after General Zackary Taylor, president at the time. Studies show the majestic volcano that dominates horizon west of Albuquerque was active 1.5 million to 3.3 million years ago.

The trust listed 11 sites in total:

Ames Shovel Shops, Easton, Mass.
Cast-Iron Architecture of Galveston, Texas
Century Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif.
Dorchester Academy, Midway, Ga.
Human Services Center, Yankton, S.D.
Lāna‘i City, Hawai‘i
The Manhattan Project’s Enola Gay Hangar, Wendover Airfield, Utah
Memorial Bridge, Portsmouth, N.H. to Kittery, Maine
Miami Marine Stadium, Virginia Key, Fla.
Mount Taylor, near Grants, N.M.
Unity Temple, Oak Park, Ill.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Following the collapse on April 4 of a narrow ice bridge that had connected the Wilkins ice shelf with a small island off the Antarctic Peninsula, the northern ice front of the ice sheet is beginning to disintegrate.

A high-resolution radar image taken on April 20 by the German TerraSAR-X satellite shows large icebergs being released from a rift zone near Latady Island. Scientists expect up to 3,400 square kilometretres of the Wilkins Ice Sheet to break into icebergs before a new stable ice front will form.

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier
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The Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, not to be confused with the Major Economies Meeting (also known as the Major Emitters Meeting) of yesteryear, wrapped up with little fanfare at the U.S. State Department in Washington Tuesday.

A holdover from the administration of George W. Bush, the meeting serves as a venue for less formal global warming talks among 17 countries accounting for some 75 percent of global emissions. Many accused Bush of using the process to undercut the United Nations process, but even critics acknowledged that the idea - bringing key players together for parallel talks on the big issues - was sound.

No major news has come from the meeting, but then again nothing was really expected. Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, says the closest the parties ever got to actual numbers - representing emissions cuts and monetary commitments - was a presentation by Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, regarding emissions trajectories and potential scenarios for stabilzing carbon dioxide levels.

But by all accounts the administration is taking the process seriously. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton kicked things off on 27 April, and President Barack Obama himself reportedly visited with the foreign delegations.

"The fact that he took time out of his schedule to actually do that is important symbolically," Schmidt says. "He didn’t talk too much, mostly listened. He mostly wanted to kind of hear their perspective, and I think that’s an important way to reach out to these countries and build some trust."

It's still early in the year, and so far international delegates are pleased to report that trust is indeed building (for a sampling, check the Washington Post's coverage). But clearly negotiators have a long way to go if they are to sign any meaningful agreement in Copenhagen this December.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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NASA’s replacement for the space shuttle is in choppy seas at the moment and, for once, this isn’t a metaphor for budget problems.

The Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle is undergoing tests in the Atlantic, the first ocean tests of a full size US-spacecraft since the 60s according to Space.com.

Rather than landing like a plane in the fashion of the space shuttle, Orion capsules will splash down in the ocean, so NASA is sea-ing what happens when they’re afloat.

“They're looking for different types of sea conditions so they can report back how the capsule behaves,” NASA spokesperson Amber Philman told Space.com.

Image: NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“Mmm… chocolate”. Remember who said that? It was Homer Simpson. Why do you remember? Maybe it’s because that utterance inspired you to eat some lovely, unctuous, fatty chocolate, which boosted your memory.

For ‘tis written: scientists from the University of California, Irvine, have shown that the molecule oleoylethanolamide (OEA), which is released when fat gets to the gut, can help rats to retain memories after they’ve been through a training exercise. The study came out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The experiments involved giving rats OEA, then checking their ability remember during two exercises – navigating a maze and avoiding something nasty.

Having lots of OEA normally quashes the appetite, tricking the brain into thinking its stomach is full. But this compound also seems to help consolidate memories, reporter John von Radowitz in The Scotsman. (Scotland of course famous for its high-fat cuisine in the guise of deep-fried battered chocolate bars.)

The process might have evolved many years back in our history, the authors suggest.

“Remembering the location and context of a fatty meal was probably an important survival mechanism for early humans,” author Daniele Piomelli told BBC News.

The Daily Telegraph tells us that a memory pill to help “students and Alzheimer’s patients” is on the cards. Whether that is the case or not right now, the work could lead to new therapeutics for people with memory or other cognitive problems, the authors suggest.

Image: By Chotda from Flickr under Creative Commons

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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A genetically modified corn has been produced in an attempt to combat worldwide problem of vitamin deficiency.

Somewhere between 40 and 50% of the world’s population is suffering from diseases caused by a lack of minerals and vitamins, say Paul Christou, of the University of Lleida in Spain, and his colleagues. In response they have created a corn with enhanced levels of three compounds: the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene, vitamin C, and vitamin B9.

“In assessing strategies to deal with micronutrient deficiency, the provision of a varied diet with fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish would be ideal,” the researchers write in PNAS. “However, where this varied diet is impossible because of poverty and poor governance, super-enhanced, nutritionally complete cereals could provide a durable solution to improve the health and general well-being of impoverished populations.”

Previous vitamin enhanced plants have had increased levels of only one compound, meaning only one problem would be solved. The new Christou-corn potentially opens the door to magic-maize that could help improve health more generally.

“Our research is humanitarian in nature and targets impoverished people in developing countries. This specific project is targeted towards sub-Saharan Africa,” Christou told the BBC. “Our funding is exclusively from public sources so we are not encumbered by any commercial constraints.”

Gary Toenniessen, of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, warns that many countries in Africa where the crop might be useful don’t have procedures in place to approve and evaluate GM crops and several countries have outright banned them (AP).

Another expert who spoke to AP was more positive. “I could see this transforming the field. It's just really cool stuff,” said Martina Newell-McGloughlin of UC Davis.

Image: National Academy of Sciences, PNAS

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Research for development
The UK Department for International Development's research chief discusses priorities.

Obama promises spending boost for science
Ambitious target for economically tough times.

Swine flu outbreak sweeps the globe
Genetic code of new influenza strain could contribute to its rapid spread.

Briefing: Swine flu jumps continents
Influenza virus spreads around the world.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Swine flu is spreading. The World Health Organisation has raised its pandemic status to level 4 (see Nature’s Briefing: Swine flu jumps continents, and the Swine Flu special).

The H1N1 virus has already appeared in North America and Europe. Now it appears to have reached Israel, where the BBC reports that Israel's deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman “said the outbreak should be renamed "Mexican flu" in deference to Jewish and Muslim sensitivities over pork”.

Share prices have been sent haywire by the flu, with markets first dropping, then recovering, and probably dropping again by the time you read this. Oil prices are also down amid fears over the impact on the world’s already fragile economy and a likely drop in air travel.

Flights to Mexico are already being cancelled, with governments cautioning against “non-essential travel” to the country at the centre of the outbreak. Online pharmacies are already reporting a run on the flu drug Tamiflu.

Obama’s people have also been assailed with questions about his meeting with Felipe Solis, the Mexican archaeologist who died recently. The Mexican Ministry of Health has already denied initial reports that Solís had contracted swine flu (see: RIP Felipe Solís)

If this is all too depressing there is a slight silver line, not least if you make flu drugs or play the market. The Times business columnist Ian King writes:

Never mind drug stocks — there's nothing like a good health scare to give speculators a shot in the arm. Accordingly, shares of the antiviral makers GlaxoSmithKline and Roche rose on the Mexican swine flu outbreak. But the virus, which has caused more than 100 deaths, created trading opportunities everywhere.

It was a day of swine and roses for anyone short of travel and tourism stocks...

And finally, Obama had the following to say: “If there was ever a day that reminded us of our shared stake in science and research, it's today.”

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“The size of the site is huge. ... At the beginning of the excavation, I thought that we may rewrite the history of the area, and I was right.”
Archaeologist Abdul Rahman Al-Ayedi comments on a new archaeological find in Egypt (Reuters).

“I realised I’d have to search every inch of Victoria to find all my letters. So I just settled into the zen of trying to solve my puzzle.”
Rhett Dashwood has constructed an alphabet from pictures on Google Earth (Sydney Morning Herald).

“This star chart was the single most critical navigational device we used while on the moon.”
Buzz Aldrin explains the value of one of the many Moon items up for auction shortly (Guardian).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Phew. Spirit, the rover that just kept on truckin’ but then decided to take a break from truckin’ to do some snoozin’, rebootin’ and some forgettin’ has finally started truckin’ again.

The troubled rover, which stopped behaving properly on April 11, was finally deemed safe enough by its Earth-bound controllers, to take a drive on Thursday April 23. It went 1.7 metres.

But things aren’t completely fixed, and the command team is braced for more trouble: “We expect we will see more of the amnesia events, and we want to learn more about them when we do,” said JPL’s Sharon Laubach, chief of the rover sequencing team, which develops and checks each day’s set of commands. (Press release)

To help prevent memory losses infuture, Spirit's daily 'nap' will now happen before it begins to gather data to store it on its RAM drive. This way, if the snooze-resistant flash memory fails again, the team here on Earth will still get daily updates.

The press coverage continues, but there is a sense of the vultures hovering – this slightly good news story failed to gather as much coverage as the news from the past two weeks of Spirit’s failing and ailing. Is news of continued health less immediately interesting to the press? Does a rover have to die to get headlines these days? (Physics Today, MSNBC, Universe Today)

Image the ‘Von Braun’ mound, taken by Spirit on April 8 2009. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Last week Nature’s Lucas Laursen exposed a Facebook network of stem cell scientists that was not all it seemed. Over 100 scientists, policy-makers and journalists have had their identities purloined to create a fake network of people linked to stem cell science.

One of the few real people in the network was Forbes science editor Matthew Herper, who accepted a seemingly authentic friend request from a fake version of Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss. Now Herper has written a piece for Forbes entitled, ‘I Was Impersonated On Facebook’.

“My trip from Facebook to fakebook began in February when I got a friend request from Rick Weiss, the former Washington Post science writer. I'd admired Weiss' work for years and was thrilled to speak on a panel with him in Madison, Wis.; I accepted the request immediately,” he says.

Read the full article here.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Channel 4 News has a good expose up today about repeated accidents involving radioactive material at the Faslane naval base in Scotland. According to documents obtained by Channel 4, radioactive coolant spilled into Gare Loch in Argyll and Bute three times over the past six years.

The incidents appear to have involved only low-level radioactive waste. In 2004, radioactive effluent "was discharged" from the nuclear submarine, HMS Trafalgar; in 2007, somebody left the wrong valve open on the HMS Superb; and in February of last year, a barge being used to handle radioactive effluent accidentally overflowed during servicing of HMS Torbay. In the latter two cases, the leaks released trace amounts of tritium that was probably too diluted to be much of a health risk. You can try to read a very badly reproduced copy of an internal MOD review of the incidents here.

Nevertheless, the incidents have infuriated the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency and other onlookers who are calling for tighter oversight at the base.

Image: Royal Navy

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Posted for Rex Dalton

The plankton record doesn’t lie. And again it is showing that the meteor that created the Chicxulub impact crater in Mexico didn’t cause the Cretaceous/Tertiary [KT] mass extinction, says Gerta Keller – the Princeton University paleontologist whose group has been a primary questioner of the widely accepted theory that the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and most life 65 million years ago.

As researchers were wrapping up last week’s European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria, the Keller group is publishing an article April 27 online in the Journal of the Geological Society, London, [JGSL 166, 393-411 2009 doi: 10.1144/0016-76492008-116] on its latest data in support of its view that the impact occurred 300,000 years before the KT mass extinction. Keller’s work also is among research discussed last weekend at a post-EGU workshop on Austrian geological sections of the KT.

The article focuses on stratigraphy in northeastern Mexico, in particular a site called El Penon outside Monterrey in the state of Nuevo Leon that is about 1,200 kilometres from the impact location on the Yucatan Peninsula. At El Penon, Keller and colleagues located a line of the spherules reflecting blast material from the Yucatan impact. Looking above and below this spherule-laced section, Keller checked the fossil record of foraminifera that are used to chart life around mass extinctions.

Below the spherule line, they found 52 foraminifera species – and above the line after the impact the same 52 species were abundant. “We found not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” says Keller. This means the Chicxulub impact couldn’t have been the sole event causing the extinction, she says.

Continue reading "Plankton undermine dino extinction theory" »

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People in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, together with the rest of the world, are commemorating the 23th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history.

At 1:23 a.m. on 26 April 1986 reactor number four exploded at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, spreading radioactive fallout across Europe. But not until three days later, when the fallout was detected in Sweden, would the Soviet authorities admit that there had been an accident.

The series of explosions killed more than fifty people. Around 4,000 are believed to have died of cancer in the aftermath of the disaster, and millions across Europe have been exposed to harmful nuclear radiation of different degrees.

Chernobyl ruined the reputation and public acceptance of nuclear power for years to come. But with growing concern over global warming and energy security nukes seem staged for a comeback. Meanwhile, the world’s twelve leading nuclear technology nations and the European Union have joined forces to develop a new generation of nuclear reactors for safer, cheaper and cleaner power generation.

But Chernobyl is not forgotten. British no nukes campaigners protesting against plans to build new nuclear reactors, used a two-day camp-out this weekend in Sizewell to mark the 23rd anniversary of the disaster. In Minsk, meanwhile, Gay activists were told they are not wanted in the annual Chernobyl remembrance march – one of few public occasions allowed by the Belarusian authorities in which the political opposition can take part.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier
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Felipe Solís, a prominent Mexican archaeologist and director of the country's National Museum of Anthropology, has died of complications from pneumonia. The Ministry of Health has denied initial reports that Solís had contracted swine flu.

Solís was born in 1944 in Mexico City and had worked as an archaeologist for the National Institute for Anthropology and History since 1972. He helped uncover some of the most important archaeological finds in Mexico, including an Aztec aqueduct near Mexico City and the Coyolxauhqui stone, a famous sculpture of a dismembered Aztec goddess discovered at the city's Templo Mayor in 1978 (right).

More recently, he had helped curate museum exhibitions in Bonn and Chicago. He had over 200 articles published and authored or co-authored 30 books on archaeology, anthropology and history. He died on 23 April as the result of a cardiac arrest caused by "complications from pneumonia," according to the Ministry of Health.

The Ministry denied initial reports that claimed Solís was a victim of the swine flu outbreak in Mexico City. Those reports gained international attention, in part because Solís had met with US President Barack Obama a week before his death.

Image: Wikipedia

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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More than 80 people have died and more than 1,300 suspected cases exist in Mexico in the swine flu outbreak that has emergency-preparedness personnel swinging into action around the globe.

According to the World Health Organization, the swine flu strain has been confirmed in 18 people in Mexico and 20 in the United States, including cases in New York City, Ohio, Kansas, Texas and California. Suspected cases are being investigated from New Zealand to Spain.

Richard Besser, acting director for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Sunday that as doctors look for more cases of the disease, he expects those numbers to rise. In a press conference from the White House, he and Department of Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano sought to reassure the US public that officials were monitoring the outbreak. The strain appears to be resistant to two common flu drugs but is susceptible to the newer drugs Tamiflu and Relenza. US officials have ordered the release of one-quarter of the nation's emergency stockpile of 50 million doses of these drugs, to be given preferentially to states with confirmed cases of the disease.

Mexico has closed down schools in and around Mexico City, and urged people to stay home and wash their hands.

The World Health Organization's influenza pandemic alert system remains at 3. Raising it to a 4 would reflect "sustained human-to-human transmission" reflecting "community-level outbreaks".

Hong Kong, still reeling from its experience with the SARS epidemic, on Sunday ordered anyone who felt sick and had traveled through affected areas in the past seven days to go to a hospital.

The H1N1 strain contains genetic contributions from human, swine and avian influenza.

Posted by Alex Witze
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

In an earlier post, we cited third-hand information suggesting that Barack Obama will be the first sitting president since John F. Kennedy to address the National Academy of Science's annual meeting. It seemed credible enough at the time, given the sources, but it turns out that it was wrong twice over.

For a complete and detailed list, compiled (and composed) today by NAS, read on:

Continue reading "Update: Obama to address the NAS " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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There's no doubt that forest fires release enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and soot into the atmosphere. There's also no doubt that fire is every bit as natural as rain and snow, which in theory means that forest regeneration would balance things out over time. The question facing researchers is to what extent global warming might fuel this natural trend with droughts and heat waves.

A group of scientists penned a review article in this week's edition of Science calling for a more aggressive research agenda on these questions. Exhibit number one: Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted the issue and suggested that the fire cycle could become more active in a warmer climate, no attempt was made to quantify this effect. The article has gotten considerable press (see here and here), mostly focusing on the top-line assessment that fires will beget more fires.

Not surprisingly, the researchers suggest that by far the biggest impact of fire in terms of carbon dioxide emissions is from the slash-and-burn techniques for clearing forest. From this perspective, fire is a surrogate for deforestation, and they estimate this effect at 19 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions.

That is broadly in line with the notion that deforestation is responsible for a fifth of emissions, but as Thomas W. Swetnam, a University of Arizona researcher and one of the authors, suggests in this story on mongabay.com, that number is more likely to go up than down as the science comes in.

The National Science Foundation has a quick post here, linking to a teleconference with three of the scientists.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nature.com has been nominated for a Webby Award. You can find us in the Society section under Science.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Two men from Papua New Guinea have accused Jared Diamond and the New Yorker of defaming them in an article published last year about clan violence entitled "Vengenance is Ours."

Diamond, a geographer at the University of California in Los Angeles and author of prize-winning popular books, wrote that his source, Hup Daniel Wemp, provoked a long-lasting blood feud in New Guinea's highland region according to StinkyJournalism.org, a media criticism project of the Art Science Research Laboratory.

Continue reading "Will vengeance be theirs? New Guineans seek $10 million for defamation" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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The European Space Agency has unveiled the logo for astronaut Frank De Winne’s tenure in charge of the International Space Station.

The OasISS mission will see De Winne will become the station’s first European commander in October this year. ESA says:

The ISS itself can be considered an oasis in space for its astronauts and cosmonauts, whilst Earth is often referred to as the Blue Planet and represents an oasis for humankind in the Universe.
…
Our planet is shown as a drop of water, resembling Earth as seen by the astronauts on the ISS. The importance of water for life is represented by the tree that grows out of the arms of a man. He is rooted in the Station and its scientific utilisation. Water flows through the man’s arms and the branches of the tree.

However the logo’s giant, glowing, blue man astride the space station causes The Great Beyond to ask whether someone at ESA’s graphic design department has become a tad obsessed with recent movie Watchmen. Based on a 1980’s graphic novel, the movie features a character called Dr Manhattan (picture), a giant, glowing, blue man who decides to leave the Earth.

Coincidence?

Image: ESA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

An international team of researchers has successfully converted adult cells into embryonic-type stem cells without a potentially dangerous method previously used in this transformation.

In the brilliantly named journal Cell Stem Cell, the team reports that they successfully generated pluripotent stem cells from mouse cells that normally generate connective tissue. Crucially, their technique does not involve the use of genetic material or viruses.

“Scientists have been dreaming about this for years,” says paper author Sheng Ding, of the Scripps Research Institute in California (press release).

Continue reading "Induced stem cells advance" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Have you ever wondered what the most important scientific questions for biodiversity conversation are?

Well, wonder no longer. The journal, Conservation Biology, yesterday published online the top 100 questions, which were contributed by conservation experts from around the world.

The questions include: How does biodiversity shape social resilience to the effects of climate change, and how effective are different types of protected areas, such as natural parks, at conserving biodiversity?

William Sutherland, a conservation biologist at the University of Cambridge, who led the project to come up with the questions, says, “With the current crisis in the loss of habitats and species it is important that we ensure we are carrying out the most important research.”

The aim behind the project was to address a mismatch between the conservation topics that academics study and the information conservationists need to help them preserve biodiversity, says the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council, which funded the project.

A group of 761 conservationists and 12 academics contributed a long list of 2291 questions, which were eventually whittled down to the top 100 questions by a group of 44 experts at a two day meeting at the University of Cambridge.

Image: the endangered Pine Barrens Tree Frog / USFWS

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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The UK government has pressed ahead in its support for carbon capture and storage (CCS), but appears to be relying on electricity consumers to fund the technology.

Following Wednesday's budget announcement that the government would fund up to four demonstration CCS projects, energy secretary Ed Miliband added yesterday that any new coal-fired power station built in the UK must demonstrate CCS on 400MW of its output. (E.ON's proposed coal plant in Kingsnorth, which may be built by 2014, will generate about 1600MW in total).

And by 2025, if the technology is "proven" - a judgement to be made by the Environment Agency - new coal-fired power stations would have to retrofit CCS across their entire output.

Continue reading "The UK's carbon capture contretemps" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Barack Obama is scheduled to address the National Academy of Sciences' 146th annual meeting in Washington on Monday, 27 April, NAS spokesman Bill Kearney confirmed Friday.

The last president to address the academy was Bill Clinton, although Obama will be the first sitting president to speak at the annual meeting since John F. Kennedy (the latter bit of trivia courtesy of John Holdren, the president's science advisor, via Kearney).

The talk will take place Monday morning. Stay tuned for more.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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A company that reviewed proposals for clinical trials and became the target of a governmental investigation has decided to close.

Just last week the company, Coast IRB of Colorado Springs, Colorado, pledged to address federal concerns that arose after the company’s ethical review board unanimously approved a fictitious clinical trial that was designed by investigators with the US Government Accountability Office. The fabricated trial, to be led by a fictitious doctor with a faked medical license, was poorly documented and was called “the riskiest thing I’ve ever seen” by a board member at another review company. (For more details on the investigation, see this earlier blog post.)

On 14 April, the US Food and Drug Administration released a warning letter, and noted that Coast IRB would not be reviewing new trials or enrolling additional patients in ongoing trials until the agency's concerns were addressed. The move was expected to affect as many as 300 trials and 3,000 researchers. This week, the company threw in the towel altogether.

Posted by Heidi Ledford
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“It was all quite painless.”
Peter Terren discuses recreating Rodin’s The Thinker with a Tesla coil (The Age).

“It was really a surprise. We did not suspect the spiders could go into a coma.”
Julien Petillon, of the University of Rennes, discovered Wolf Spiders can survive being submerged in water for 16 hours (Discovery / MSNBC).

“The data appears to have been interpreted to support a pre-conceived hypothesis.”
Merck senior researcher Briggs Morrison discusses a paper on Vioxx in an email to colleagues now being discussed in an Australian court (Sydney Morning Herald).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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If you travel enough that gets to be an oft-heard and much dreaded refrain. But its not just a problem for frequent fliers; it looks like NASA's follow-on to the Space Shuttle, the Orion crew capsule, may also end up overbooked. Planners are now weighing whether to fly the capsule with four seats, instead of the advertised six.

It all comes down to weight: The Orion has to be able to land using just two of its three parachutes. That in turn means that the capsule can weigh no more than 9525 kg (2100 lbs). At present it's within "a couple of hundred pounds" of that weight limit, according to Jeff Hanley, who oversees the Orion's development.

All of this may add to fuel to the efforts of some in Congress to keep the shuttle running past its 2010 retirement date.

Image: NASA

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Following hot on the heels of the theft of computer data on America’s most advanced fighter plane, President Obama’s cybersecurity advisor has called for more to be done in safeguarding information.

Melissa Hathaway, acting senior director for cyberspace, is leading a review into the issue of cybersecurity which the New York Times says “is simply the opening round in what may become a bruising political battle over how much control should be exercised and over which agencies of the government will take command of computer security”.

The review will likely be made public at the end of the month but Hathaway, speaking at the RSA 2009 conference in San Francisco, said cybersecurity was “one of the most serious challenges of the 21st Century”. She called for public and private organisations to come together with individuals to secure the internet (BBC).

“A few hours south of here, there are creative Hollywood writers and actors who have imagined and produced stories that capture the essence of the problem, including: Matthew Broderick in War Games, Robert Redford in Sneakers, Sandra Bullock in The Net, and Bruce Willis in Live Free and Die Hard. These and other movies present the types of issues that we should care about and solve together,” Hathaway told the conference (remarks from The Atlantic).

Continue reading "Cybersecurity: Matthew Broderick, Robert Redford, Sandra Bullock, Bruce Willis and now … Barack Obama" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Researchers and students staged a rally on the UCLA campus yesterday in support of animal research.

The rally was organised by the new University of California, Los Angeles branch of Pro-Test, a UK group founded in Oxford which supports animal research. A group of about 40 animal rights protesters held a rally opposite the Pro-Test event, which attracted over 400 people, according to the Los Angeles Times.

UCLA neuroscientist David Jentsch, the victim of a car bombing last month, founded UCLA Pro-Test. The North American Animal Liberation Press Office posted a 'communiqué' from a group calling itself the Animal Liberation Brigade taking credit for the attack and threatening to harm Jentsch.

"I hope this rally lessens the sense of helplessness and fear that has pervaded our community," Jentsch said (UCLA newsroom). "We’re just not going to take the harassment anymore."

Nature also interviewed him last week.

A member of UCLA's Animal Law Society told a Science reporter that violence gave other animal rights activists "a bad name."

No arrests have been made in the car bombing case yet, though the FBI did report arrests in other animal rights-related cases this week and in February. The FBI is offering a reward of $75,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the Jentsch case.

Video below the fold.

Continue reading "California animal researchers protest protesters" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Afghanistan has established its first national park, known as Band-e-Amir, which will protect six deep blue lakes separated by natural dams made of travertine, a mineral deposit. The park is near the Bamyan Valley, where the 1500-year-old Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban once stood (BBC News).

Travertine systems are found in only a handful of places around the world, most of which are protected on the world heritage list drawn up by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency, which will help manage the park, hopes it will encourage tourism to the war torn country.

Continue reading "Afghanistan establishes its first national park" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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A potential ‘missing link’ in the evolution of seals has been discovered. A new fossil described in Nature shows features suggesting it was semi-aquatic, but had not yet fully accepted the sea as its home.

Named Puijila darwini, the animal has the long tail and limbs of a terrestrial carnivore but other features, such as indications of webbing on the feet, suggest an affinity for water. Previously the earliest pinniped – the group that includes seals, sea lions and the walrus – was an animal that already had flippers.

According to Natalia Rybczynski, of the Canadian Museum of Nature, interviewed on the Nature Podcast, the animal was “something like a river otter, but much more muscular” and was “almost a wolverine that could hunt on land and also in water” around 21 and 24 million years ago.

“The remarkably preserved skeleton of Puijila had heavy limbs, indicative of well developed muscles, and flattened phalanges which suggests that the feet were webbed, but not flippers,” says paper author Mary Dawson, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (press release). “This animal was likely adept at both swimming and walking on land.”

Continue reading "Flippin’ heck! Proto-seal discovered" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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On this show, a newly discovered fossil reveals clues to the origin of flippered mammals, we get stuck into the glue that holds species together, and mobile phone tracking: is it science or stalking?

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Cancer drug hits setback
Results from early-stage colon cancer trial turn spotlight on recent acquisition.

Green technologies win £1.4 billion in UK budget
Carbon reduction sees a stimulus — but blue-skies research may be at risk.

China's plants absorb a third of its carbon emissions
But another study shows vegetation will absorb less carbon dioxide as nations cut pollution.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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US Energy Secretary Steven Chu found himself on the hot seat once again Wednesday, as congressional Republicans pinned him down about past comments on the value of higher energy prices (previously it was coal). Representative Cliff Stearns (Republican, Florida) asked Chu about a remark he made last year suggesting that the United States would benefit from European gasoline prices. It's worked for Europe, but gas prices are a touchy issue on Capitol Hill.

In light of the current economic crisis, Stearns asked, would Chu still seek to raise gas prices on American families? Chu said such a policy would be "unwise."

"You can't honestly believe that," Stearns pressed. "You want Americans to pay for gasoline at European prices?"

"No."

"Doesn't that sound a little bit silly, in retrospect?"

"Yes."

The exchange came as Chu and two of President Barack Obama's other top environmental appointees, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday. At issue was the leading climate bill, spearheaded by Chairman Henry Waxman (Democrat, California), which would reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 80 percent below 2005 levels by mid-century.

Continue reading "Chu " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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“All of us at NSF join in thanking Greenlandic and Danish authorities for their good work in carrying out the search and rescue operation.”
Karl Erb, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, welcomes the rescue of a man from one of its missions who was lost for three days in Greenland (Fox News).

“The body shape is lean and mean and built for speed and they can be hideously fast and aggressive.”
Derek Gow comments on his new herd of rare ‘Nazi cows’, recently introduced into the UK (Times).

“The failure is a significant setback for Roche.”
David Kagi, an analyst at the Swiss brokerage Sarasin, comments to MarketWatch on the news that the value of Roche fell by as much as $10 billion on the back of poor trial results for key drug Avastin.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Quotes of the day | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is eco-awareness time! Yes people, it is once again Earth Day. So who is up to what? Here are some of the stories that have caught our collective eye.

CNN says one billion people will celebrate Earth Day, although it’s not clear where that figure came from.

NASA has a whole Earth Day Page, complete with images of our fair planet (including the photo used right) and features on the space agency’s green work.

American politicians are getting on the bandwagon too. President Obama is visiting a facility in Iowa that manufactures towers for wind power generation (Christian Science Monitor).

Continue reading "Earth Day roundup" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Panayiotis Zavos does not shy away from media attention. The fertility specialist has told The Independent that he has been trying to implant human embryos using material cloned from living individuals. Everybody from the Indy's local competition to outraged scientists and sober wire services have weighed in.

Zavos has attempted to implant 11 human embryos in four women since 2003 according to The Independent, and a Discovery Channel film-maker who has witnessed the process and whose television programme premieres tonight at 9pm:

The cloning was recorded by an independent documentary film-maker who has testified to The Independent that the cloning had taken place and that the women were genuinely hoping to become pregnant with the first cloned embryos specifically created for the purposes of human reproduction.

Zavos has previously attempted controversial cloning-related treatments and attracted the ire of other fertility researchers in 2004, when he announced a result ahead of academic publication. Zavos, born on Cyprus but a naturalized US citizen, reportedly carries out his cloning attempts in the Middle East to avoid anti-human cloning laws in other countries.

He also claims to have spliced tissue from a dead child with an embryo from a cow as a learning exercise, though he has not attempted to implant the hybrid embryo. The child's mother reportedly wouldn't mind if he did. While none of these attempts with living cloned material have succeeded, his group plans to try again with 10 younger couples, according to the Indy.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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An animal rights activist has been added to the FBI’s Most Wanted list, ranking him among terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

Daniel Andreas San Diego is wanted for allegedly bombing two biotechnology facilities near San Francisco, says the FBI. He is the first US ‘domestic terrorist’ to make the Most Wanted list.

Both of the buildings bombed were apparently targeted for doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company that has long been targeted by animal rights extremists.

“San Diego is a known San Francisco Bay-area animal rights extremist, involved with the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign, commonly referred to as SHAC,” says Michael Heimbach, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division (statement). “We continue to make great strides in dismantling animal rights and environmental extremists, like Daniel Andreas San Diego.”

According to Heimback, animal rights and environmental extremists have committed over 1,800 criminal acts and caused over $110 million in damages. A reward of up to $250,000 is on offer for information leading to the location and arrest of San Diego, who is considered armed and dangerous.

Coverage
Animal rights activist on FBI terror list – SF Chronicle
In defense of people – Chronicle editorial
Vegan Daniel Andreas San Diego who tried to close British animal lab is put on FBI list – (London) Times
Wanted: FBI Adds Environmental Terrorist to Most-Wanted List – WSJ Environmental Capital blog

Image: detail from FBI wanted poster

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Exoplanets lighten up
More Earth-like planets spotted outside our solar system.

Why big eruptions don't always fuel mass extinctions
Rocks near the site of a volcano could determine whether an eruption causes catastrophic climate change.

Genetic profiling used to tailor cancer therapy
Tumour screening leads to more effective treatment for some patients.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Tourists may need to stretch their arms and legs at little further to straddle Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah all at once. A report in the Deseret News claims that modern surveys put the US monument marking the geographical union of the four western states in the wrong place.

The error is due to subtle effects such as imperfect bulges on the Earth's surface which were difficult to incorporate in 1868, when the US government first surveyed the site, the chief geodetic surveyor for the National Geodetic Survey told Colorado's Channel 9 news:

"The 2.5 mile discrepancy that was originally reported is not accurate... At most, the difference between the location of the monument and where the actual four states should meet geographically is approximately 1,800 feet."

Google Map:

View Larger Map

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Rock ants refuse to live in any old hole in the ground, and researchers from the University of Bristol have been finding out how they choose between a des res and a hovel.

Temnothorax albipennis have been previously shown to pick the better of two potential nest sites even when it is nine times further away from their current abode than the less salubrious residence. If ants decide a nest site is a good place to settle down they often return to their soon-to-be former home and recruit friends.

A nest is chosen by the number of ants in a potential nest reaching a quorum, but most ants appear not to visit both sites, say Elva Robinson and her colleagues.

They fitted micro-transmitters to every worker ant in nine colonies housed in artificial nests. Each colony contained between 100 and 200 workers and larvae. The team destroyed the ants' homes and gave them a choice of a good, far-away site and a worse, closer site to move to. Chip readers on both potential nests recorded ant coming and goings.

“Each ant appears to have its own ‘threshold of acceptability’ against which to judge a nest individually,” says Robinson (press release). “Ants finding the poor nest were likely to switch and find the good nest, whereas ants finding the good nest were more likely to stay committed to that nest.”

This contrasts with previous assumptions that ants compare nests, the team write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Ant house hunting isn’t perfect though, in this study only four of the nine colonies chose the far-away, ‘good’ nest, with three putting up the 'home sweet home' signs in the poor site and two splitting in half and moving into both.

Coverage
Tracking bugs so tiny they fit an ant – Sun
Transmitters show house-hunting ants have gift for locating a des res – Times
Ants 'go further for better nest' – PA
Ants' home search habit uncovered – BBC

Photo: Elva Robinson

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“This transaction will create a new world-leading specialist dermatology business and re-energise our existing dermatology products.”
Andrew Witty, GSK chief executive, comments on the company’s $3.6bn move for Stiefel Laboratories (Financial Times).

“We still have every intention of pursuing a drilling program in the Beaufort and the Chukchi.”
Pete Slaiby, Shell's Alaskan general manager, says the oil company is determined to drill for oil and gas off Alaska despite a court ruling last week that federal leasing under which it acquired Chukchi Sea exploration rights is illegal (Reuters).

“It’s been a labour of love which presented enormous challenges. It embodies everything I love about this fascinating shark.”
Alastair Gibson, former chief mechanic at Honda's F1 team, comments on his move into art with a £25,000 two-and-a-half metre shark made from carbon fibre and parts from Jenson Button’s 2008 Formula 1 car (Daily Telegraph).

“Irrespective of any reform, a number of fishing fleets are two-three times the size needed to catch the available fish.”
Uta Bellion, director of the Pew Environment Group's EU marine programme, comments on the European Commission’s new green paper on fisheries policy (BBC).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Following our news last week that Spirit, one of the rovers roving on Mars, had rebooted itself twice, it seems the little robot is still at it.

Only this time, Spirit is also suffering from amnesia, according to NASA, losing flash memory - the capability to store data even when switched off. And still rebooting itself. It isn’t clear whether the two events are related.

NASA optimism is still shining through, though. From the press release: “"We are proceeding cautiously, but we are encouraged by knowing that Spirit is stable in terms of power and thermal conditions and has been responding to all communication sessions for more than a week now," said JPL's Sharon Laubach, chief of the rover sequencing team, which develops and checks each day's set of commands.”

We'll be sure to keep you updated...

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Q&A: Prepare to be digitized
The World Digital Library's director explains his vision.

Platinum pollution issue gets measured
Demand for catalytic converters has spread osmium around the globe.

Designer immune cells fight prostate cancer
'Living drug' shows promise in early clinical trials.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Aid charity Oxfam is warning that the number of people impacted by climate-related disasters will rise 54% in the next six years, reaching 375 million.

Using data on 6,500 droughts, floods and other disasters dating back to 1980, Oxfam predicts another 133 million people will be in peril by 2015. Dealing with this will require an increase in aid spending from 2006 levels of $14.2 billion to £25 billion a year.

“Any such projection is not an exact science, but what is clear is that substantially more people may be affected by disasters in the very near future, as climate change and environmental mismanagement create a proliferation of droughts, floods and other disasters,” says the new report. “And more people will be vulnerable to them because of their poverty or location.”

In addition to those people directly impacted by disasters, others will be put at risk by climate-related conflicts when climate change exacerbates more traditional security threats, says the ‘Right to Survive’ report. The projections are made by smoothing out the extremes of the historical disaster data and fitting a straight trend-line up to 2015 (graph below).

Continue reading "Climate disasters increasing with waistlines?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The outlook for Shell's carbon sequestration plans is not rosy in the town of Barendrecht in the Netherlands. The town's council recently said that it had "numerous reservations" about the demo project, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Shell hopes to compress 400,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and inject it into aging natural gas beds a kilometre and a half below Barendrecht. Because Dutch gas beds are running out of natural gas, there could be room for storing up to 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2020, according to the Journal. But last month, 1,300 residents protested the proposal, which was commissioned by the Dutch government.

Continue reading "Dutch protest carbon-trapping demo project" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Back in the day, Chinese scientists like Wen Ho Lee had to come to the US to be accused of stealing secrets. More recently, a US researcher is awaiting sentencing in America for sharing technology with his Chinese student. But the world is changing fast, and today's Wall Street Journal has an incredible story of how the Chinese are now being accused of stealing US technology from the comfort of home.

The Journal article details how hackers have stolen terabytes (that's TERABYTES) of data on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a US$300 billion project that is the Pentagon's costliest development programme ever. The attackers infiltrated contractor computers during 2007 and 2008 and siphoned off sensitive details about the design and electronics systems of the aircraft. The most sensitive data were kept on a secure Pentagon server and appear to be safe, but the hackers made off with mounds other stuff. It's not even clear what they managed to steal: the infiltrators encrypted the data that they siphoned off, leaving Air Force forensic teams stumped.

Like many cyber attacks, the espionage appeared to originate in China. Of course nobody knows for sure that Chinese nationals were behind the attacks, but that hasn't stopped speculation that, once again, the Chinese have gotten hold of the US's most sensitive secrets. The Chinese Embassy in Washington called those allegations "a product of the Cold War mentality" and said that they were meant to "fan up China threat sensations."

Lockheed Martin Chief Financial Officer Bruce Tanner says, via the Washington Post, "To our knowledge there's never been any classified information breach." He went on to say, "Like the government, these attacks on our systems are continuous, and we do have stringent measures in place to both detect and stop these attacks."

Image: USAF/Lockheed Martin

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Alleged members of the Animal Liberation Front have been charged with conspiracy, stalking and other crimes related to a campaign against researchers in California.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office says Linda Faith Greene, 61, and Kevin Richard Olliff, 22, were arrested on 16 April and arraigned yesterday. Both have pleaded not guilty (press release).

University of California, Los Angeles chancellor Gene Block said in a statement, “While we respect the rights of those who hold different views on the use of animals in research, the use of criminal tactics is deplorable. We’re grateful to UCLA’s police department for working with other law enforcement agencies to gather the evidence that led to these arrests, as well as to the district attorney’s office for recognizing the seriousness of the crimes against our researchers.”

Continue reading "Animal rights activists arrested in California" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Further details of what is expected in the UK’s budget on Wednesday are leaking out into the press. The Independent first reported the government’s plans for a green budget on 8 April (The Great Beyond).

Alastair Darling, the chancellor, is expected to announce a £500 million green stimulus package, including £200 million for wind turbines, hydro-electric power and other renewable energy technologies, says a report in the Times

The BBC reports that the chancellor will announce two carbon capture and storage demonstration projects. It is unclear if funding will be earmarked for these projects, though.

Continue reading "Hundreds of millions for green technology expected in UK budget " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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In two days time Rita Levi Montalcini will become the first centenarian Nobel laureate. A week of celebrations began today with the biggie; the President of the Italian republic, Giorgio Napolitano, received her in his residence, the Quirinale, a seventeenth century baroque palace in the heart of Rome.

An entourage of 80 or so guests, including myself, attended in one of the Quirinale’s most lovely rooms - frescoed, golden-and-scarlet, dripping with putti and guarded in all corners by the ceremonially dressed corazzieri, the President’s special corps.

Rita’s entrance moistened the eyes of the more sensitive in the audience, including myself. Entering regally on the President’s arm, awash in blue silks, she turned her head upwards and towards us with a long, sweet smile. Behind the pair came the guests of honour, a long and impressive roll call of the famous, from former prime minister (and former head of the European Commission) Romano Prodi to physics Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia.

Continue reading "Rita makes 100" »

Posted by Alison Abbott
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“The Great Wall of China is even greater than once thought.”
AP reports that the Great Wall is even greater than we thought, with an extra 300-odd kilometres newly detected.

“The Saturn V is a great choice to model as it will help this project connect to all Americans as a symbol of not only our national pride, but also our achievements in space engineering.”
Jeff Taylor of Loki Research and Engineering comments on a project that will soon attempt to launch a 10 metre model Saturn V rocket (Rocketry Planet, hat tip: Wired).

“Le Mans is all about pressure and stress, dangerous twists and turns, red-eyed fatigue and rivals trying to cut you up. Who would be better qualified than a politician?”
Geoff Hoon, UK transport secretary, comments on the fact that science minister Lord Drayson will be competing in this year’s 24 hour Le Mans race (Sunday Times).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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If you haven’t yet voted, there’s still time to pick your favourite NASA Image of the Day from the 50 finalists.

Will you pick Antarctic warming trends or Fall Colours in Pennsylvania? Maybe you lean more towards the giant designs carved by Nazca in the Peruvian desert? Or a view of Earth from Saturn?

My vote is going to this 2002 image. Can you guess what it is? Answer below the fold. Voting ends April 27.

Continue reading "NASA’s 50 greatest photos " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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French chef Pierre Gagnaire has created the world’s first “entirely synthetic gourmet dish” and unveiled it today in Hong Kong. In collaboration with the molecular gastronomy pioneer Hervé This, Gagnaire has created a dish made not from natural flora and fauna but from basic molecules.

The new dish’s ingredients are ascorbic acid, glucose, citric acid and 4-O-a-glucopyranosyl-D-sorbitol. The result, says the Times, is “a starter of jelly balls tasting of apple and lemon; creamy on the inside and crackling on the outside”.

“If you use pure compounds, you open up billions and billions of new possibilities,” says This. “It’s like a painter using primary colours or a musician composing note by note.”

In an email last month This noted, “Don’t be afraid: if Pierre is doing it, it will be good ...”

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Chemistry | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The author JG Ballard has died at the age of 78.

Although most famous for the autobiographical Empire of the Sun and the controversial Crash, Ballard also embraced technology, science and the environment as subjects for his writing and worked as an assistant editor on the Chemistry and Industry magazine.

Continue reading "RIP JG Ballard, psychologist of the future" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Despite being one of the great green hopes for the future, electric cars still have a long road to travel before they can hope to replace their internally-combusted brethren.

To illustrate this, AFP is today reporting that agreement has been reached on a ‘common plug’ for recharging the vehicles. In a few years drivers may find themselves pulling into filling stations and saying, “Fill her up with 400-volt three-pin premium.”

That’s right; despite multiple cars being available or in development and some governments already considering thousand pound subsidies of the vehicles it has only just been decided how drivers will actually juice them up.

Continue reading "Universal plug for electric cars?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for David Cyranoski

The Japanese press is reporting that senior ruling party parliament member and former finance minister Shoichi Nakagawa called for Japan to develop a nuclear weapons program yesterday [Sunday].

Reports of nuclear bomb ambitions aren't new in Japan, but they are always controversial.

Japan, the only country to suffer a nuclear strike, has long held a no-nuke position, and most of its populace take great pride in it. Most Japanese get nervous about nuclear energy, and power companies have been defeated often by local initiatives rejecting new nuclear plants. Observers here refer to it as a "nuclear allergy" among the populace (Referendum stalls Japanese nuclear power strategy - June 2001).

Continue reading "Japan facing nuclear future?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Space shuttle Endeavour has been rolled out to the launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA says this is likely to be the last time two shuttles are ready to go at the same time.

Endeavour is on stand by in case something goes wrong with shuttle Atlantis’s mission top repair the Hubble Space Telescope. While most shuttle crews can bail out to the International Space Station if something goes wrong, the Hubble mission’s trajectory means the ISS is out of reach (photo detail).

Image: detail photo by from NASA/Kim Shiflett

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The song that originally inspired the start of this Songs About Science Series now has a sequel.

Back in the depths of time, the Bio-Rad company decided to promote one of its products with the inspired PCR Song. Now, via chemistry-blog.com, we’ve been made aware of the follow up: the GTCA song.

If you want more head over to Bio-Rad for different versions, outtakes and more.

Below the fold: songs about metrics and charts.

Continue reading "Songs about science XIX: back to our roots" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A 3,000 year record of African climate holds warnings of devastating droughts yet to come, say US researchers.

Using lake sediments from Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana, a team led by Jonathan Overpeck and Timothy Shanahan reconstructed the variability of the African monsoon for nearly every year of the past three millennia. Dire droughts appear to be unavoidable in West Africa, and there are worrying implications related to the Sahel drought in the 60s, 70s and 80s that killed thousands.

“What’s disconcerting about this record is that it suggests that the most recent drought was relatively minor in the context of the West African drought history,” says Shanahan, of the University of Arizona, Tucson (press release 1).

And while some droughts – like the one in Sahel – lasted for decades, the sediment record shows some lasted for centuries.

Continue reading "Africa ‘must brace for mega-droughts’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Dying trees may exacerbate climate change
Forests could emit more carbon than they store if temperatures rise.

Writing about values shrinks racial grades gap
Short essays raise school scores of low-achieving African-American students for two years.

Life thrives beneath Antarctic glacier
Unique chemistry enables microbes to survive harsh conditions.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy, has changed the lay of the land, according to blended satellite imagery from the European Space Agency. Geologists used the images to identify the fault line that caused the 6 April earthquake and its aftershocks, which so far have killed 294 people according to an AP report.

Italian research groups have released three images created by blending radar satellite data taken before and after the earthquake. The images, called interferograms, show changes in the distance from the observing satellite to the ground. This means they can only detect displacement along the axis to the satellite, so the Italian team used ground-based GPS stations in the region to confirm their findings, which indicate that the ground has moved as much as 25 cm in some places.

Continue reading "ESA releases L'Aquila before and after satshots" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Posted for David Cyranoski

Advocates of nuclear power in Japan, having long struggled to convince a skeptical populace of the need for more and new forms of nuclear power, have certainly had their run of bad luck.

Or maybe it isn't luck.

On Monday 13 April Hitachi admitted that data related to the heat-treatment process used for pipe welding on moisture-separator heaters, which increase thermal efficiency by removing moisture from steam, had been falsified.

Hitachi admitted the equipment, in use at two nuclear plants in Shizuoka and Shimane prefectures, was not operating as specified but maintained there are no safety concerns (which, if that's the case, makes you wonder why someone would require collecting that data in the first place).

Continue reading "Japan’s nuclear woes" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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25 March, 2009
A job advert for “Chief Scientific Adviser - Security Service MI5” goes live on the Nature Jobs website.

01 April, 2009
Policy newspaper Research Fortnight comments on job advert. Job advert is also noted here, on The Great Beyond.

17 April, 2009
“MI5 is to appoint a chief scientific adviser, BBC News has learned.”

Image: detail from MI5 website

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Kepler space telescope has taken its first images of the region near the constellation Cygnus which it will scour for planets for at least the next 3 years.

The telescope, which was launched in early March, is designed to observe the same wide field of stars continuously for the length of its mission, providing astronomers with a record of the changes in brightness of 100,000 stars (See: Looking for worlds like this one).

The team selected those stars from the 4.5 million in the telescope's unusually large field of view because they are the likeliest planet hosts based on their size and composition. A narrower field of view might have allowed the astronomers to see more details or stars further away, but Kepler's primary mission is to survey stars for regular slight dips in their brightness, a sign that an orbiting planet is blocking the star's light. Astronomers routinely use small, wide-field telescopes on Earth to detect such dips and find Jupiter-sized planets around other stars, but to enable Kepler to find the even smaller dip from an Earth-sized planet they have launched it above the Earth's atmosphere.

Full images below the fold.

Continue reading "Kepler begins staring contest with Cygnus" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Another day, another security lapse at one of the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons labs.

The Government Accountability Office is reporting yet again that there are security lapses in the complex, this time at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, near San Francisco.

LLNL is one of three DOE national labs that designs, handles and stores nuclear weapons. It also maintains stores of plutonium and enriched uranium.

Investigators found 13 specific deficiencies in the security force employed to counteract a terrorist attack. Among other problems, the security force didn't put on chemical masks fast enough, and a tank-like vehicle with a mounted machine gun failed to "competently support" the mission. Investigators also found seven instances of lapses in physical security, i.e., issues with alarms and keys and vaults.

Yet the lab was assessed with a security performance grade of 100% by the on-site federal oversight office of the National Nuclear Security Agency, the quasi-independent, but much-maligned organization within DOE that's supposed to be responsible for the weapons labs.

Posted by Eric Hand
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“What we’ve got to get people used to is the idea that electric cars will become quite normal, quite usual.”
UK transport secretary Geoff Hoon tells the Guardian that incentives of up to £5,000 will be offered to people buying electric cars.

“When US researchers are being actively approached for ideas to use the stimulus money to think big and to hire and retain their researchers, their Canadian counterparts are now scrambling to identify budget cuts for their labs, while worrying about the future of their graduating students.”
In Canada, 2,000 researchers have signed an open letter to the Prime Minister complaining about the recent budget (Globe and Mail).

“Every drop of water requires desalination. One leaf of salad has to be flown eight hours from New Zealand. Cameron would have absorbed so many resources that he was not invited.”
Film director Werner Herzog explains why his two-person crew got to film a documentary in Antarctica and Titanic director James Cameron’s 35-person crew didn’t (Guardian).

“Biomass is a limited resource, and we must make sure it is not wasted on inefficient generators that do not take advantage of the emissions savings to be made from combined heat and power.”
Tony Grayling, head of climate change and sustainable development at the UK’s Environment Agency, comments on a new report suggesting switching to biomass fuel could release more carbon dioxide than fossil fuels (BBC).

“A news agency item, Volcano begins to erupt on Galapagos island, reported that flowing lava could affect "iguanas, wolves and other fauna" on Fernandina island. The surprising reference to wolves probably stemmed from a mistranslation of one of the South American terms for sea lion, lobo marino (sea wolf).”
The Guardian newspaper corrects its invention of a new species of wolf on the Galapagos islands (Regret the Error blog).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A controversial study of ancient corals published this week suggests that sea levels can rise rapidly under global warming-type scenarios.

Paul Blanchon, of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, and his colleagues report in Nature that fossilized coral reefs uncovered during excavations for a Mexican theme park show that a sea-level leap of 2 to 3 metres occurred in the space of about 5 decades some 121,000 years ago. This was during the last interglacial period, when temperatures were higher than they are today.

“In our warming world, the implications of a rapid, metre-scale sea-level jump late during the last interglacial are clear for both future ice-sheet stability and reef development,” the researchers write.

“Given the dramatic disintegration of ice shelves and discovery of rapid ice loss from both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the potential for sustained rapid ice loss and catastrophic sea-level rise in the near future is confirmed by our discovery of sea-level instability at the close of the last interglacial. Furthermore, the inhibition of reef development that this instability caused has negative implications for the future viability of modern reefs, which are already being impacted by anthropogenic activity on a global scale.”

However a number of other researchers seem sceptical of the claims.

Continue reading "Ancient seas ‘rose fast’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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As if the White House wasn’t enough, US President Barack Obama now has a lichen of his own. Kerry Knudsen, the lichen curator at the University of California, Riverside Herbarium, has named a newly discovered species Caloplaca obamae.

In his paper in Opuscula Philolichenum, Knudsen writes:

The species is named in honor of Barack Obama, President of the United States. The final collections of this species were made during the suspenseful final weeks of Obama’s campaign for president and this paper was written during the international jubilation over his election. The final draft was completed on the day of his inauguration. He is honored for his support of science and scientific education.

C. obamae was discovered in 2007 on Santa Rosa Island in California. Knudsen says it was nearly wiped out by cattle ranching on the island, but is now recovering (press release).

Image: J. C. Lendemer / UCR

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Norway has successfully claimed a huge swathe of seabed in the North Sea.

The United Nations has gifted the country the rights to an additional 235,000 square kilometres of seabed – potentially including lucrative oil reserves.

Under rules set down in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea countries can claim seabed beyond the standard 200 nautical mile range if this is a natural extension of their territory. The Arctic has been a controversial area for such claims, with Russia and Canada also seeking seabed rights (see Nature’s 2008 feature ‘The next land rush’ for more on this).

Now the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which is responsible for assessing such claims, has accepted Norway’s rights to an area that extends nearly to the North Pole (UN pdf).

Continue reading "Norway’s undersea dominions just got larger" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week, we unzip nanotubes to make some graphene nanoribbons, challenge the idea that closely related species have similar cognitive abilities and hear about the world's largest network of cosmic ray detectors in Argentina. All that, plus our weekly NewsChat in which we celebrate the life of John Maddox, former editor of Nature.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Patients with diabetes given a stem cell transplantation were able to go without insulin for over three years in some cases, according to a new study in JAMA.

Researchers from American and Brazil treated 23 patients with type 1 diabetes and 20 used less insulin or none at all during the follow-up period, 12 continuously and 8 transiently. The idea is to stop the patients' own immune systems attacking insulin-producing cells.

“We were trying to preserve islet beta cell mass, that is, the cells that produce insulin, by stopping the immune system attack on these cells,” says study author Richard Burt, of Northwestern University (Forbes).

“Why new onset? Because we wanted to make sure there were still some islets there. We don't believe stem cells form islet cells, but if the islet cells are still there, there might be regeneration if we stop the attack soon enough.”

Continue reading "Diabetes breakthrough ‘is not a cure’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“This significant breakthrough gives a means of preserving the valuable genetics of our elite racing and milk producing camels in the future.”
Lulu Skidmore, Scientific Director of the Camel Reproduction Centre in Dubai, says the world’s first cloned camel has arrived (Gulf News).

“We don’t typically name US space station hardware after living people and this is no exception.”
Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, explains why comedian Steven Colbert will not be getting a room on the International Space Station named after him, despite winning a poll (AP).

“In social insects, there are a number of different types of reproduction. But this species has evolved its own unusual mode.”
Anna Himler, of the University of Arizona, is part of a team that discovered the first asexual ants (BBC).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Union of Concerned Scientists has released a report attacking big farma's claims that genetically modified crops produce a higher yield per cultivated acre than traditional crops.

The report [pdf] examines academic reports of crop yields over a 20-year period, including 13 years of real-world commercial results in the US. Author Doug Gurian-Sherman attributes most yield gains in most crops to technique, not genes:

Overall, corn and soybean yields have risen substantially over the last 15 years, but largely not as result of the GE traits. Most of the gains are due to traditional breeding or improvement of other agricultural practices.

Gurian-Sherman also distinguishes between intrinsic yield, which is an idealized measure, and operational, or real-world yield. Genetic engineering only improved operational yields for corn modified with genes from Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacteria which helps the corn resist certain pests, he writes.

An industry group has responded with its own release claiming that "marker-assisted breeding has nearly doubled the rate of yield gain when compared to traditional breeding alone" and pointing out that a growing number of farmers are adopting genetically modified strains of crops.

Gurian-Sherman concedes that farmers may find certain modified crops easier to work with, but that this does not directly translate into an improved yield or a wider benefit to society.

Related in Nature News: Germany banned a breed of genetically-modified corn yesterday, joining a handful of other European countries in contradiction of EU law.

Photo: Seabamirum on Flickr

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Today’s science song is what the office’s young person tells me is a ‘rap’ that has been ‘dropped’ by Chicago- based BinoWhite, where the rapper and his ‘crew’ threaten to “kick your arse with science”.

Mr White describes his ditty as, “An educational song, with violence.”

(Warning: video contains swearing some may find offensive.)

[Hat tip: Pharyngula]

As ever – below the fold is Previously on Songs about Science.

Continue reading "Songs about science XVIII: ‘What up Einstein, you as smart as people think you are.’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Twin NASA spacecraft have observed a huge explosion of plasma on the surface of the sun, the first time such a coronal mass ejection has been monitored in 3-D.

These ejections can knock out satellites and power grids if they head towards Earth, as well as triggering the pretty Northern and Southern Lights.

NASA’s two Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (Stereo) craft are in orbit around the Sun, with one ahead and one behind our planet. Their data should help scientists predict when coronal mass ejections will hit us, and how worried we should be.

“Before this unique mission, measurements and the subsequent data of a CME observed near the sun had to wait until the ejections arrived at Earth three to seven days later,” says Angelos Vourlidas, of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington (press release). “Now we can see a CME from the time it leaves the solar surface until it reaches Earth, and we can reconstruct the event in 3D directly from the images.”

The BBC focuses on what all this might mean for Earthlings, in particular for those concerned with satellites. Chris Davis, of mission partner the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, says a forthcoming paper will describe an ejection for which a warning could have been given a full day before.

“That’s ample time to power down a satellite until the worst of the storm has passed; and if you're an astronaut on the space station, you would have had plenty of time to get into an area that has much better shielding,” he says.

Vic Pizzo, of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, told National Geographic, “We always knew if you had two views, you could do a vastly better job [predicting CME impacts]. And that's what they’re getting here.”

Image: artist's impression of one of the Stereo craft imaging a coronal mass ejection / Walt Feimer, NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Q+A: Hong Kong university chooses new president
Nature talks to Tony Chan about his vision for the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Germany bans GM maize
State defies European Union directive on genetically modified crops.

Time to sequence the 'red and the dead'
New projects could tackle the genomics of species both critically endangered and already extinct.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Climate change could force birds to migrate hundreds of extra miles, according to new research. The extra distance might even be deadly.

Modelling by Stephen Willis, of Durham University, and his colleagues shows that the breeding ranges of Sylvia warblers will shift consistently north as the Earth warms. Non-breeding ranges showed no consistent directional shift, meaning longer migrations.

“From 2071 to 2100, nine out of the 17 species we looked at are projected to face longer migrations, particularly birds that cross the Sahara desert,” says Willis (press release). “Our findings show that marathon migrations for some birds are set to become even longer journeys. ... The added distance is a considerable threat.”

According to the team’s paper in Journal of Biogeography, trans-Saharan migrants face an average extra flight of 413 km. The researchers write that the challenge facing many species is “unprecedented”:

The future for many migratory species will depend not only upon their ability to adapt, but also critically upon our success in meeting the challenge of ensuring that conservation strategies are designed to facilitate changes in breeding and non-breeding ranges, changes in stopover requirements and adaptation of migration routes, all of which are likely to form part of the response of these species to future climatic changes.

Coverage
Tiny warbler at risk from longer African migration – Independent
Birds face longer migrations due to climate change – Reuters
Warming pushes bushed birds to migrate farther – AFP

Image: Common whitethroat Sylvia communis / copyright RSPB Images

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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North Korea's April 5 rocket launch has been the cause of much speculation: Was it an attempt to put a satellite into orbit or a test of a ballistic missile? Did it work or didn't it?

The answers to these questions matter, and not just to the analysts over at Arms Control Wonk. Diplomats trying to determine what to do about the Hermit Kingdom must figure out the North's intentions. If the launch was a military test, it would violate a 2006 resolution that was put in place after North Korea tested (kinda) its first nuclear weapon.

Yesterday, the UN Security Council decided that the North's actions were provocative enough to merit condemnation. Today, in an awesomely worded statement, the North announced that it would walk away from six party talks on nuclear disarmament and "bolster its nuclear deterrent for self-defence in every way."

They also referred to the UN's statement as "brigandish". I'd like to get a gig writing for these guys…

Image: satellite image featuring the rocket launch courtesy of DigitalGlobe

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Making new eggs in old mice
A textbook-challenging finding revives debates about extending female fertility.

Bendy laser beams fired through the air - Premium content
Curved tracks could help direct lightning or steer particle beams around colliders.

Disease in a warming climate - Premium content
Fears of a global rise in infectious conditions may be unfounded.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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In January, an in-press article criticizing the statistical methodology of social scientists using fMRI to back their hypotheses caused a major stir. The no-holds-barred paper claimed that many published papers are worthless because brain imaging data have been inappropriately analysed.

Those scientists personally attacked were not only upset by the content. They were also offended by the title which referred to ‘voodoo correlations’. Many argued that they were not only well aware of the importance of good statistical practice, but also used it.

The editor of the journal in question, Perspectives in Psychological Research, has now said the final version to be published in May will appear with a more circumspect title: ‘Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality and Social Cognition’. The authors, Edward Vul from MIT and Harold Pashler from the University of California, San Diego and their colleagues also answer the specific criticisms they received in response to the widely circulated original version in an accompanying paper.

Posted by Alison Abbott
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“As academics involved in research on the uses and abuses of state power, it is becoming increasingly apparent that members of staff in universities and colleges are being drawn into a role of policing immigration.”
A group of UK academics are urging a boycott of new student immigration rules (Guardian letters, Guardian article).

“It’s staggering how much power is potentially available in space. And I say ‘potentially’ because a lot remains unknown about the cost and other details.”
Jonathan Marshall, spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric Co, discusses plans to put solar panels into orbit and ‘beam’ the power down to Earth (SF Chronicle).

“I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more.”
UK wildlife broadcaster David Attenborough offers his support to the Optimum Population Trust, which wants fewer people on Earth (BBC).

“We didn't pay 37 million zlotys ($11 million) for the largest elephant house in Europe to have a gay elephant live there.”
Michal Grzes, a councillor in Poznan, Poland, says a new zoo addition is a waste of money, as 'Ninio the gay elephant' will not help the breeding programme (Reuters, Reuters video).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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UPDATE – Current Nature editor Philip Campbell’s tribute, John Maddox 1925–2009, is now on our website:

It was with great sadness that I and my colleagues at Nature learned of the death on Sunday of Sir John Maddox — or 'JM', as his colleagues always referred to him.

There was puzzlement, too. Yes, John had been looking frail recently, but, well, this was JM — the perpetually restless, irresistible, unstoppable force. The editor who conducted some gatherings with 'shock and awe' as some recall. The 'man with a whim of iron' as others used to call him. And the man who survived countless cigarettes and glasses of red wine, many consumed late into the night as he wrote the week's Editorials at the last possible moment.

As Walter Gratzer, of King’s College, London, wrote recently, “John Maddox brought an old-fashioned Nature into the modern age from the mid-1960s.” (History of Nature feature.)

A full appreciation from Nature will follow shortly. Meanwhile, here is what the world is saying.

Without too much trouble I could probably fill blogs for a month with tales of John: of waiting at the typesetter while he finished an editorial way beyond deadline; of a plan to visit Mexico together when we wined and dined the very attractive press attache at the Mexican Consulate; of how he regularly set fire to his waste-paper basket. Of being sent to the wine bar with a fiver for a bottle of Chateau Thames. Of him disappearing on a Friday night and saying, as the door closed, that he wanted a thousand words from me by Monday for the following week’s issue – on anything I pleased. Of many cases of exasperation and irritation, and many more acts of kindness.

- Henry Gee, Nature editor

He was one of those fellows who shaped the direction of science for quite a long period of time with the power of one of the most influential science journals in the world. I suspect every scientist of my generation read his editorials in our weekly perusal of the journal.

- PZ Myers, Pharyngula

One of the toughest adversaries I’ve ever wrangled with is Sir John Maddox. He was hard-headed, scarily knowledgeable, hyper-articulate, unfailingly gracious even as he ripped you a new one.

- John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology

As Editor of Nature, he restored the journal to an unchallenged position as the place to publish interesting research quickly, and did so at a time when Britain’s influence in world science was otherwise declining. His judgments, sometimes quirky but never dull, were always backed by persuasive argument and a sense of humour.

- The Times

It was a mark of his skilled editorship that Nature could publish a paper on, say, the Loch Ness monster without sacrificing its authority.

“He took command of Nature in a big way,” the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said. “He had a tremendous grasp of science in the full range, from physics to biology to public affairs as they affected the world of science.”

Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society and Britain’s astronomer royal, called Mr. Maddox “a dominant figure,” adding that “he helped establish Nature’s status internationally and built it up by developing supplements to increase its coverage.” After retiring as editor in 1995, he assumed an influential elder statesman role, acting, Mr. Rees said, “as a general guru of science and scientific policy.”

- NY Times

"He adored science and talked about it all the time," she [his daughter, Bronwen Maddox] says. "He was enormously enthused by it. He was a physicist, and took to the biological sciences with enthusiasm, but I think his heart stayed in physics."

- Scientific American

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Financial Crisis, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Up on Mars, the rover Spirit seems to be either a) in trouble; b) making a bid for freedom or c) infiltrated by our Martian overlords. Over the weekend, NASA reports (press release) that Spirit “apparently rebooted its computer at least twice”. I’m not sure if that should read “Spirit’s computer crashed twice” or not.

The rovers do have a long history of being anthropomorphised, with NASA constantly reporting on their “health” and the things that they are seeing as they travel around Mars.

Indeed the latest news follows in the same ilk; “The rover is in a stable operations state called automode and taking care of itself,” says John Callas, project manager for the rovers. “We are aware of the reality that we have an aging rover, and there may be age-related effects here,” Callas adds.

The story of the beleaguered little rover is doing the rounds (Universe Today, AP, Tech Radar), but today’s thanks go to the Register for pointing out the timeliness of the Rover’s double resurrection. If only I’d thought of that first.

Image: Snapped by Spirit in March, courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Over 100 suspected climate change protesters have been released by the police after they were arrested over an alleged plot to shut down a coal power station near Nottingham.

“Police have gathered a large amount of evidence which they are now reviewing,” says a Nottinghamshire police statement. “From the information gathered police believe those arrested were planning a period of prolonged disruption to the safe running of Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station.”

The UK has seen a series of power station protests in the last year but this operation was unusual both for the number of arrests and the fact these arrests occurred before the protest. The arrests come after wider controversies over policing including the death of a man who became caught up in protest around the G20 meeting in London. The Guardian newspaper obtained a video showing that the man was handled roughly by police just moments before his death.

There have also been complaints about policing of past climate change protests.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty, says “In the light of the policing of the G20 protests, people up and down the country will want to be confident that there was evidence of a real conspiracy to commit criminal damage by those arrested and that this was not just an attempt by the police to disrupt perfectly legitimate protest.” (Guardian, Daily Mail.)

Police say they recovered “specialist equipment” after the raid on a school. Some papers say this included bolt cutters and locks.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The lives of four African elephants have been explored through the unusual medium of their hair, researchers report this week.

The History of Animals using Isotope Records (HAIR) project tracked four elephants from the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya and used differences in isotopes in their tail hair to gain insights into their eating and drinking.

Differences between amounts of heavier carbon 13 isotopes and lighter carbon 12 in the tail hair show whether the beasts have been dining on trees and shrubs or grasses. Certain grasses have higher C13 to C12 ratios.

Similarly, changes in hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios can show where the elephants are drinking, as dry season rivers are highly evaporated and have a different composition to rainy season rivers, says researcher Thure Cerling.

“Now, we have a long-term record so we can really see what one normal family is doing over a long period of time,” Cerling, of the University of Utah, told the BBC.

This type of data can also show when things are not going well for the elephants. “We have this one incident where they apparently missed an entire good season of grass resource; the GPS data shows that they were outside [the Samburu National Reserve] in a community area where it appears that they had to compete with cattle,” says Cerling. “They got out-competed in that situation.”

Cerling et al’s paper will be available soon when it is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

See also
University of Utah press release
Hairs Provide Clues to Shifts in Elephant Diet – NY Times
University of Utah study identifies threats to elephants - Deseret News

Image: Mahala Kephart, University of Utah

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A shortage of nickel in the oceans of ancient Earth may be the push that gave oxygen-producing bacteria a competitive edge over their methane-producing counterparts. The long-term result: an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and life as we know it.

The findings, reported yesterday in Nature, provide a new answer to the long-standing question of how ‘Great Oxidation Event’ occurred 2.4 billion years ago. Kurt Konhauser of the University of Alberta in Canada and his colleagues analyzed the nickel-to-iron ratio of banded iron formations found in sedimentary rock (pictured at right). They found that nickel levels dropped dramatically around 2.7 billion years ago, possibly because cooling of the Earth’s crust reduced the nickel-content of volcanic rocks.

Methane-producing bacterial rely heavily on three critical nickel-containing enzymes, so when the abundance of nickel declined, so did they. Methane reacts with oxygen in the atmosphere, and with less methane being produced, oxygen released by the world’s earliest photosynthesizers was free to accumulate and reshape the planet. For more, check out Chemistry World, National Geographic, or Science News.

Posted by Heidi Ledford
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News reaches us today that the European Commission is trying to put a stop to the last minute food fight that happens in the Council of Ministers each year when setting fishing quotas. This process seems deeply flawed, with each country looking for the best deal for them, which often leads to quotas that fly in the face of the scientific advice that the commission has received.

Apparently a green paper has been drafted that will be published on 22 April. This paper says that the biggest problem is that there are too many boats chasing too few fish.

The consequence is the dwindling, or at least not-recovering, fish stocks in the seas around Europe. Just a couple of weeks ago the Heads of Delegation of the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission met to discuss vulnerable marine ecosystems – with the conclusion that only “limited progress” had been made to protect these areas. That was a meeting more about habitat than fish stocks, but it’s all related. And it’s fishing that damages the sea bed.

The quota-setting procedure in future will replace the meeting of national minsters with a meeting of expert committees, or regional bodies, according to European Voice. And the focus will be long term, rather than deciding how much fish can be caught over the next coming months.

Let’s hope this works, but I’m not holding my breath. It is bound to be unpopular with some countries. Back in October 2006 Nature News wrote a story that sounded eerily familiar: the European Commission wanted to stop the last minute wrangling over fish quotas.

Image: NOAA

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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In 2007 an earthquake in Japan shut down the world’s largest nuclear power station. Now Kashiwazaki-Kariwa looks set to re-start.

Just after the quake, Nature’s Asia correspondent wrote, “No one died as a result of Japan's latest nuclear incident and environmental damage seem have been mostly avoided. But is this testimony to successful plant design or a warning of impending disaster?”

The plant’s operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) says a host of measures have been implemented at the plant since the 6.8 magnitude quake, but agreement of the leaders of Kashiwazaki and Kariwa is still required before the plant can restart.

According to the Financial Times the plant accounts for 13% of TEPCO’s electricity generating capacity.

A date for a final meeting between the three groups – TEPCO, Kashiwazaki and Kariwa – has yet to be set, but approval for a test run of one of the seven reactors at the site has been given, says AFP.

“We think the safety of the reactor has been confirmed,” says Kashiwazaki Mayor Hiroshi Aida (Japan Times). “We would like to hold a meeting of three parties toward the resumption of the operation.”

However geology professor Masaaki Tateishi told AFP, “There has not been enough discussion in terms of the evaluation of geological faults near the plant, which is essential in defining its quake-resistance strength.”

Image: Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant / TEPCO

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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New pharmaceutical company dark deeds are being alleged down under.

An Antipodean class action over the health risks of Merck’s troubled drug Vioxx started at the end of March in Australia’s Federal Court. As has often happened in these cases, the legal action is bringing a host of alleged murky deeds to light.

Most mind-bogging is the claim that Merck “produced an entire journal -- called The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine -- and passed it off as an independent peer review publication”. No more details are forthcoming from the Australian, the only paper to carry this story.

No publication of this name seems to be listed in PubMed or Google Scholar either.

Another report of the court case, in The Age, notes allegations that Merck “kept a list of ‘physicians to neutralise’ in a bid to dampen criticism” of Vioxx.

The case continues.

[Hat tip: Pharmagossip.]

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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President Obama’s new science adviser John Holdren has been talking to Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson about his new role. If that interview only left you hungry for more, the rest of the world’s press have also been grilling the man.

Here are some highlights.

Science Magazine has an interview on their ScienceInsider blog, where Holdren “discussed why he thinks the United States doesn't need new nuclear weapons. He warned of likely delays beyond 2015 in replacing the space shuttle and the possibility that China would launch U.S. astronauts during the interim.”

Holdren also warned that moves in Texas that could undermine the teaching of evolution were a “step backwards”.

AP focuses on the possibility that the Obama administration might look to geo-engineering to solve the climate change problem. “It’s got to be looked at,” Holdren told the news service. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”

The Washington Post looks at Holdren’s approach to another possible solution to climate change: cap and trade. The paper says Obama may chose to auction some carbon emission permits and give the rest away to industry, a move that might annoy environmental groups who want 100% of permits auctioned.

Holdren told the post that “whether you get to start with [a 100% auction] or get there over a period of time is something that’s being discussed”.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Q&A: John Holdren
President Obama's science adviser talks about his new job.

Analysts spar over launch image
North Korean rocket trajectory may be too shallow for satellite launch.

One drug, two targets
Antimalarial compound fights disease and fends off drug-resistant parasites in mice.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week we uncover a new twist in our understanding of the Great Oxidation Event, find out why some people are better than others at repairing radiation damage in their cells, and delve into the 'cancer genome' to discover more about how cells turn cancerous.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“This may implicate a universal structure of the first genetic codes anywhere.”
Ralph Pudritz, an astrophysicist at McMaster University in Hamilton, comments on new amino acid research that suggests, in Wired’s words, that the “building blocks of life may be more than merely common in the cosmos”.

“It's a matter of survival for us, also. So we are among the most vulnerable countries, economically.”
Mohammad Al Sabban, Saudi Arabia's lead climate negotiator, sees threats in tough action on carbon dioxide emissions (Reuters).

‘Nano song’ wins prize.
The excellent nano-song featured recently on this blog won both the ‘People’s Choice’ and ‘Critics’ Choice’ in the American Chemical Society’s What is Nano? video contest (press release).

“I was counting away like a madman, but it just wouldn’t work.”
Emelie Baedecke Yllner, comments on the accident that saw Swedish maths students at the Royal Institute of Technology set three impossible questions in a five question paper (Svd.se via The Local).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Feminists avert your gaze. News that female chimps mate more frequently with male chimps that share their meat with them has prompted a slew of at best corny, at worst downright sexist, even lewd, headlines.

The meat-for-sex hypothesis has already been suggested to explain certain human behaviours, and to explain why male chimps often share meat with females who do not participate in the hunt. Researchers have tried to test the meat-for-sex hypothesis in different groups of chimps previously, with confusing results. Cristina Gomes from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig, Germany suggests that this is because they only looked at behaviour in the short term, when the female chimps were in estrous, or ‘in heat’.

Her study covered a group of chimpanzees in the Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire over three years. “Our findings show that females copulated more frequently with those males who shared meat with them over long periods of time,” Gomes says in the paper.

So back to the newshounds, who clearly loved this story.

Continue reading "Chimp sex-for-meat saga gets reporters hot and bothered" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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A rare megamouth shark has been caught by Filipino fishermen. Despite protests from an environmentalist on the scene, the shark was butchered and eaten, according to the WWF.

“While it is sad that this rare megamouth shark was ultimately lost, the discovery highlights the incredible biodiversity found in the Donsol area and the relatively good health of the ecosystem,” says Yokelee Lee, WWF-US program officer for the Coral Triangle (National Geographic). “It is essential that we continue working with the government and local community on the sustainable management of Donsol's fisheries resources for the benefit of whale sharks, megamouth sharks, and the local community.”

Only 40 megamouths have previously been found, leading this Megachasma pelagios to be imaginatively christened Megamouth 41 by the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The Philippine Star says the shark was cooked “kinunot-style”, with coconut milk, malunggay leaves and chilli. On the blog of the Toronto-based Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts and Culture, Leonard presents a semi-sarcastic recipe for how to make Kinunot.

“Now, we’re not saying go out and catch an endangered species of shark and cook it up with your friends at a party, but if you DO happen to find yourself with a bigass shark in your possession, you’d better at least know how to prepare it right,” he writes.

For the record, megamouth sharks are awesome and The Great Beyond is distraught that this specimen was eaten, rather than being studied by scientists.

Image: WWF-Philippines & Elson Aca

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Sonar can induce deafness and behaviour changes in dolphins, but only at prolonged, high levels.

In a rare controlled experiment, researchers from the University of Hawaii, Kaneohe, used an actual mid-frequency naval sonar signal and a captive dolphin to shed some light on this contentious issue.

Many believe sonar, particularly more powerful military sonar, can damage marine mammals and lead to mass stranding (see: Sonar does affect whales, military report confirms). Due to the problems of running controlled experiments on dolphins and whales, firm evidence on this issue has been difficult to come by.

Now Aran Mooney, Paul Nachtigall and Stephanie Vlachos show sonar can induce temporary hearing loss. They also found subtle shifts in behaviour, such as respiration.

Continue reading "Sonar does deafen dolphins" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, says the UK budget to be announced on 22 April will kick start a “green” route to economic recovery.

In an interview with the Independent, Brown outlined a flurry of environmentally friendly measures, including plans to create the UK’s first green cities, and to make Britain "a world leader" in producing and exporting electric cars, hybrid petrol-electric vehicles and lighter cars using less petrol.

He said that trials for electric cars in two or three cities will begin next year, and that the government will open talks with power companies to ensure the vehicles can recharge their batteries at a national network of roadside power points.

Brown says the green initiatives are “a major part of [the UK’s] plan for recovery in the budget”.

Continue reading "Gordon Brown to announce green budget" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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Amazonian reserves have fewer fires
Satellite data reveal less deforestation in Brazil's protected parks.

Open-access policy flourishes at NIH - Premium content
Researchers, institutions and publishers have complied with the mandate, but it still has its opponents.

Volcanoes ignite monitoring efforts
Efforts intensify after eruptions in Alaska and Chile.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Way back in the depths of time there was a moderately successful children’s movie called Free Willy, which detailed a boy’s attempts to free a killer whale from an amusement park.

‘Willy’ was actually Keiko, a whale from an amusement park in Mexico. After the film, amid much publicity, Keiko was returned to the wild. The Keiko Project website states: “After a wonderful journey in freedom, Keiko passed away in Norway on December 12, 2003 at age 27.”

“The most important question is did we do the right thing? I am certain we did,” wrote Jean-Michel Cousteau in 2003 on the website of the Ocean Futures Society, which was heavily involved in returning Keiko to the wild.

Now, in 2009, a peer-reviewed paper on ‘Free Keiko’ has been published. This again raises the question: was release really the best option?

Continue reading "To free or not to free Willy?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“We wanted to see if this program can have a palpable effect. The answer is: without a doubt.”
Eran Bendavid of Stanford University comments on his research into the effectiveness of the George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Bloomberg).

“The interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics.”
The Red Cross says medical professionals monitoring interrogations in Guantanamo Bay violated medical ethics (AP).

“A lot of the impacts we’re seeing are running ahead of our expectations.”
William Hare of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research talks to Reuters, as it announces a poll of 11 global warming experts found 10 think it ‘unlikely’ that warming can be limited to 2 degrees C.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A gene variant linked to late-onset Alzheimer's may affect the brain's workings early in life, decades before forgetfulness becomes apparent.

Publishing in PNAS (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0811879106), Clare Mackay from the University of Oxford, and colleagues at Imperial College London, scanned the brains of 36 healthy adults between 20 and 35 years old. Eighteen of the volunteers carried the ApoE4 allele of the APOE (apolipoprotein E) gene, which is associated with late-onset Alzheimer's. About a quarter of the population have one copy of ApoE4, which for reasons unknown increases their risk of developing Alzheimer's fourfold, says the Alzheimer's association.

The volunteers were asked to do memory tests, and to do nothing, while hooked up to fMRI machines. Though all performed equally well on the memory tests, the APOE4 carriers showed greater activity in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in long-term memory. Other distinctive differences in hippocampal brain activity were spotted even when the volunteers did nothing. (The images show increased brain network activity for the APOE4 carriers, relative to non-carriers, while resting and performing memory tasks).

Continue reading "Alzheimer's gene linked to overworked memory" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Expert witnesses in UK trials could soon have to prove just how expert they actually are.

The government’s independent legal advisory commission has published a set of proposals to reform the current “unsatisfactory” provision of expert evidence, following a series of scandals.

The Law Commission’s consultation paper warns that there is a danger juries may simply defer to ‘experts’ when there are legitimate questions about the reliability of their evidence (paper pdf).

“Expert evidence, particularly scientific evidence, can have a very persuasive effect on juries,” says Jeremy Horder, the commissioner leading the project (Indepdendent, Telegraph).

“There have been miscarriages of justice in recent years where prosecution expert evidence of doubtful reliability has been placed before Crown Court juries. There may also have been unwarranted acquittals attributable to such evidence.”

Continue reading "Judging science in court" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Gran Sasso National Laboratory, a particle physics research centre 15 km from L’Aquila in central Italy, has survived intact the earthquake that destroyed the historic town on 6 April, and killed at least 180 people.

“Gran Sasso labs and experiments have not suffered consequences of the earthquake,” says Eugenio Coccia, the centre’s director. “But of course many staff have had their houses destroyed, like so many others who live in the region.”

Scientific experiments are being monitored, but no major experimental work will take place until after the Easter holiday, says Coccia. Normal scientific work will begin Tuesday 14 April.

The research centre investigates the properties of neutrinos and dark matter. Its large underground labs built deep inside the Gran Sasso mountain were designed to withstand powerful earthquakes. The epicentre of this one, measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale, was just 10 km west of the centre.

The main highway to the laboratories has been closed for safety reasons, as small quakes are still occurring. The centre has offered to shelter those left homeless by the quake in its surface facilities.

In the meantime, the centre has distanced itself from Giampaolo Giuliani who claims to have predicted the earthquake and says that his warning was ignored. Giuliani has developed and patented a radon detector which he says enables him to predict earthquakes by detecting the radioactive gas leaking from underground sources. However, earthquake and civil defence experts in Italy said that it is not possible to predict the time and location of an earthquake with that –or any other – method.

Giuliani is quoted in many media reports as being a Gran Sasso staff member, but Caccia says this is not the case. “He is a technician in a collaboration with Gran Sasso which is based in Turin (in northern Italy) - and his work on earthquakes is a hobby, nothing to do with the research project here.” Caccia says the research centre has been a “bit embarrassed” by the media reports.

Alison Abbott

Posted by Alison Abbott
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Arctic sea ice continues to shrink, according to the latest satellite data. And in a scenario all too familiar to people of a certain age, the ice that is left has been replaced by a younger, thinner version of itself.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, the maximum extent of Arctic sea ice last winter was the fifth lowest on record. All sixth lowest maximums have occurred in the last six years (press release).

This year’s maximum was 15.16 million square kilometres, which is smaller than the 1979-2000 average by an area roughly the size of Texas (or France). Younger, thinner ice which melts every year is now 70% of Arctic sea ice, says the NSIDC, meaning melting is easier. In the 1980s and 90s this type of ice was between 40 and 50% of the total.

“Ice extent is an important measure of the health of the Arctic, but it only gives us a two dimensional view of the ice cover,” says Walt Meier of the NSIDC, which is run by the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Thickness is important, especially in the winter, because it is the best overall indicator of the health of the ice cover.”

Thomas Wagner, chief snow and ice scientist for NASA, adds, “The thicker ice particularly is very important, because it’s the thicker ice that survives the summer to stay around and reflect that summer sunlight.” (Reuters.)

The latest NSIDC data comes just days after a study in Geophysical Research Letters warned that the Arctic could be nearly ice free in 30 years, rather than the 90 some have been predicting (AFP story, research paper).

Headline watch
Ice, Ice Maybe – WSJ

Image: Arctic sea ice extent for March, 2009 / NSIDC

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The narrow strip of ice which connected the Wilkins ice shelf with a small island off the southwestern Antarctic Peninsula has finally collapsed, threatening to speed up the disintegration of the 11,000 square kilometres-large shelf.

Read the rest of this post at Nature's Climate Feedback blog.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Testosterone boost doesn't fuel risky behaviour in women
Hormones could matter less on the trading floor than suspected.

Korean satellite misses orbit
Third time unlucky as payload plunges into the Pacific.

A tiny litmus test for cells
Nanomachine senses cellular pH in real time.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The controversial ‘Human Terrain’ program that sees social scientists integrated with US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has hit more trouble, according to Wired.

The Danger Room blog says at least a third of the programme’s employees have quit:

In February, the program's managers gave everyone in the 27 Human Terrain Teams (HTT) stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan a choice. Either they could choose to be converted from a generously-paid contractor to a less-well-compensated government employee. Or they could step down.

So far, 82 overseas Human Terrain employees have agreed to make the switch. Many others did not. As of February, there were between 135 and 243 HTT members.

Danger Room also highlights a recent Boston Globe story, which suggests Obama would like to see an expansion of the Human Terrain programme.

Controversy has followed the programme since its inception. A number of employees have died and one has pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In December a Nature editorial said, “Unless the programme can be reborn in a format less plagued by deadly mistakes, it needs to be closed down.”

Image: a Human Terrain Team take notes while speaking with locals in Afghanistan / US Army photo by Staff Sgt. Michael L. Casteel

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Penguins would see smaller groups of tourists waddling onshore from their cruise ships in Antarctica, if US delegates have their way at the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, starting today in Baltimore.

The delegates aim to require visitors to abide by a series of currently voluntary limits, such as keeping shore parties down to 100 tourists at a time, reports the Associated Press. The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO) already provides tour operators with guidelines designed to minimize their impact on Antarctica's environment and natural inhabitants.

But private Antarctic cruises had their first serious accidents recently, including a sinking in 2007 and two groundings in 2008-2009, according to the Associated Press. Partly in response, the US delegation will push for better lifeboats, reports the Baltimore Sun. Limiting the size of cruise ships in the area might also help keep the number of future shipwrecked passengers manageable, the New York Times noted last month.

The Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959 to jointly manage the continent's environment and restrict military competition over territorial claims on the continent. Today, armies of tourists appear to be the biggest threat. Since the early 1990s, annual visitor numbers have grown from the low thousands to over 45,000 this season. Penguin numbers are harder to track.

Image: NOAA

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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“We can tell within 30 seconds whether it's going to be a big or small quake. We can sense the scale and how much damage it's likely to cause.”
Wu Yih-min, of the National Taiwan University Department of Geosciences, says his group has invented a cheap device that can give crucial warnings just before earthquakes (Reuters).

“We need our top scientific minds on this. Get me India on the phone!”
Writers on the children’s movie Monsters vs Aliens have slipped a science policy joke into the mouth of their cartoon US president (movie, see also: SAJA blog).

“Although there is a long way to go, methods that can induce a pleasurable scratch sensation without damaging the skin, via mechanical stimuli or drugs that can inhibit these neurons, could be developed to treat chronic itch.”
Gil Yosipovitch, of Wake Forest University in North Carolina, discusses research that identifies neurons which appear to be blocked by scratching (BBC).

“The Canadian Press moved a story April 3 that erroneously reported The Wilkins Ice Shelf was originally part of Jamaica. In fact the Ice Shelf, located on the western side of the Antarctic was originally the size of Jamaica.”
The Regret the Error blog highlights a scientific example of that moment every journalist dreads: the mistake.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Costing 800 million rubles ($24 m) to design, a new six-seat craft to replace the three-seat Soyuz could take its first flight in 2018.

“Post-Soviet Russia has never had a massive project of this kind,” says Aleksey Krasnov, head of the Roscosmos human spaceflight programme (New Scientist).

The BBC says a number of different versions of the Prospective Piloted Transport System are envisaged, including a six-seat Earth-orbiter, a Moon-capable four-seater, and a cargo version.

“The lunar version of the ship would be capable of flying no less than 200 days in space when docked to a space station in orbit around the Moon,” says the BBC. “… The 200-day mission requirement probably provides some hint about Russian plans to eventually build a permanently occupied lunar outpost, similar to Nasa’s lunar base developed under its Constellation programme.”

Image: “Soyuz 4 Commander Vladimir Shatalov displays how Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 docked in Earth orbit on January 16, 1969.” / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Pfizer has apparently agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit over a drug trial it ran in Nigeria.

According to media reports, lawyers for the pharma giant and Nigeria’s Kano state agreed an out of court settlement over the trial of a meningitis drug, which the state alleges killed 11 children and left others seriously injured. Pfizer has denied its product caused the deaths (Pharma Times).

Reuters says sources told it last Wednesday that the settlement would come to near $75 million, with $30 million going to Kano state, $35 million to victims and $10 million going on legal fees.

The Independent presents some of the back story in its coverage:

A divorce case was all that passed for excitement at Richard P Altschuler's "kinda small" lawyer's office in West Haven, Connecticut, when the phone rang nine years ago. On the other end of the line, a world away in the heat of Nigeria, was Etigwe Uwo, a young lawyer with "an incredible story about Pfizer". The Lagos attorney was going to take on the largest pharmaceutical company in the world in an unprecedented class action pitting African parents against an American corporate giant. And he needed help.

Bloomberg says Nigeria’s federal government also sued Pfizer for $7 billion in 2007, although the BBC says this case could be dropped as a result of the new settlement.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Back in March the powers in charge of the mighty Hubble space telescope let the public vote on what it should take its next pictures of.

The public voted for an interacting pair of spiral galaxies called Arp274 about 400 million light-years away. Unlike NASA, which refused to honour a recent vote on space station names, the Hubble team respected the public vote.

According to the press site:

Arp 274, also known as NGC 5679, is a system of three galaxies that appear to be partially overlapping in the image, although they may be at somewhat different distances. The spiral shapes of two of these galaxies appear mostly intact. The third galaxy (to the far left) is more compact, but shows evidence of star formation.

Two of the three galaxies are forming new stars at a high rate. This is evident in the bright blue knots of star formation that are strung along the arms of the galaxy on the right and along the small galaxy on the left.

See also: A final trip to Hubble - April 01

Image: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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World leaders fail to kick-start green economy
G20 summit a missed opportunity, say climate campaigners. (See also: Nature's Climate Feedback blog.)

Muslim students weigh in on evolution
In Indonesia and Pakistan, questions about how science and faith can be reconciled.

Carbon dating shows humans make new heart cells
The cold war helps settle a hot debate about how hearts grow.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The NASA inspector general, Robert "Moose" Cobb, has resigned, effective 11 April, succumbing to calls for his head from the halls of Congress. “Mr. Cobb was not up to the job," said the chairman of the House science committee, Bart Gordon, Democrat from Tennessee. It's rare for an agency inspector general to draw attention at all -- they're in the business of pointing out problems, not being a problem -- but Cobb had drawn intense criticism from the GAO, and both sides of the aisle. According to the AP, an ethics council formed during the administration of George W. Bush issued a report saying Cobb abused his authority and didn't appear independent enough. Bush appointed Cobb to his office in 2002, when he had handled ethics issues for the White House.

Posted by Eric Hand
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Here is an image that has taken almost a decade to achieve. It's a map of all the galaxies near to us (we're at the centre of the image, naturally).

The image was collated with data from the Six-Degree Field Galaxy Survey (6dFGS) carried out with the 1.2-m UK Schmidt Telescope in eastern Australia, operated by the Anglo-Australian Observatory and involving scientists from the US, UK and Australia. (published here)

It shows not only the positions of the galaxies, but also their movements.

But hang on, there's a bit missing. Those two blank triangles are there because the Milky Way and all its dust gets in the way. "Sadly we can't see the whole of the sky," says John Lucey, a team member from Durham University, UK.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Two hundred and twenty-nine scientists will be barred from making grant applications to the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for a year, from 1 June.

The exclusion policy for serially unsuccessful applicants, announced by EPSRC on 12 March, aims to relieve the pressure on an overloaded system that currently peer reviews all grant applications.

An online petition protesting against the ban has attracted almost 1700 signatures as of 3 April. Some scientists thought many more than EPSRC's ballpark estimate of 250 researchers would be affected.

EPSRC has now confirmed the exact number and tells Nature News it intends to send letters to individuals next week.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Would you Adam and Eve it? Robot scientists - named Adam and Eve - could soon be after your research jobs.

According to a new paper in Science, an autonomous robot can conduct its own experiments and has now come up with its first results. Ross King, of Aberystwyth University, and his colleagues report that their robo-researcher ‘Adam’ has “generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation”.

The team set Adam to work finding genes for “orphan enzymes”. These are as-yet undiscovered genes for enzymes thought to catalyze reactions that occur in yeast. King told the Times:

Because biological organisms are so complex it is important that the details of biological experiments are recorded in great detail. This is difficult for human scientists, but easy for robot scientists. Yeast is well understood. It’s been studied for over 100 years. We knew this enzyme must be there, but we didn’t know where.

Continue reading "Rise of the machines" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Climate change could cost California tens of billions of dollars a year, according to a draft government report.

The Climate Action Team, tasked by the state to produce biennial science assessments on climate change and California, sees potential impacts on agriculture, forestry, energy, water and health, as well as problems from sea-level rise.

“The basic conclusion is that climate change will impose substantial costs to Californians in the order of tens of billions of dollars annually,” says the report (pdf). It adds that “costs will be substantially lower if global emissions of greenhouse gases are curtailed”.

Michael Hanemann, of UC Berkeley and an author of the report, told Reuters that the summary of 37 research studies painted a bleaker picture than the last report. “As you fill in the detail, the whole gets worse,” he says.

Local coverage below the fold.

Continue reading "California faces billion dollar bill from climate change " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“I think they can generalize to human eyes somehow, and interpret human eyes as eyes.”
Auguste Bayern, of the University of Oxford, discusses research showing that jackdaws can interpret the movement of human eyes (LiveScience).

“This morning I got a worrying email from Vanessa Woods, a bonobo expert who’s at a bonobo research facility in DRC.”
Science journalist Carl Zimmer is worried about the bonobo. You should be too (The Loom blog).

“It’s a clean technology. We can't do anything that kills our organisms.”
Angela Belcher, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is making viruses make batteries (Reuters).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week’s UN hosted climate change talks in Bonn, Germany, are well underway. According to New Scientist this climate summit is “more important than the G20”.

So what’s going on in Bonn?

This meeting is the first of five sessions leading up to what the UN says will be an “ambitious and effective international climate change deal” to be finalised in Copenhagen in December (pdf). The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has already started its ‘countdown to Copenhagen’ timer.

However, as Reuters pointed out on Wednesday, delegates from 175 nations even managed to argue about what they were arguing about. The question is whether they should come up with a ‘treaty’, a ‘protocol’ an ‘agreement’, a ‘deal’, or a ‘decision’ to succeed the Kyoto protocol.

Continue reading "What’s going Bonn?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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US scientists today report preliminary data on a brain imaging study they say may help lead to the identification of a ‘footprint’ of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the brain. Rajendra Morey, director of the neuroimaging lab at Durham Veterans Administrative Medical Centre, and his colleagues are presenting results of their study on 42 US soldiers who had recently served in Iraq or Afganistan at the World Psychiatric Association International Congress on Treatments in Psychiatry in Florence. Journalistically speaking, the group of probands is attractive, and so the study has been press-released in advance.

One group of 22 suffered from PTSD while a second group of 20 did not. Using an experimental paradigm designed to indicate how easily distracted the soldiers were, the neuroscientists showed that there were differences between the two groups of soldiers in activation of a brain area called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, a region they say is associated with the ability to maintain vigilance. The scientists say this concords with established understanding of the underlying psychology of PTSD. Sufferers are hypervigilant, and fail to stay focussed because they are always on the look-out for unexpected threats.

They also saw also saw differences in activation in brain areas previously shown to be associated with PTSD - the medial prefrontal cortex, a large slab of tissue onto which scientists have tentatively projected many possible functions, and the amygdala, which reproducibly indicates the emotional saliency of a signal (ie ‘is what I am seeing or hearing truly appalling, or is it not quite so bad?’)

What do the results tell us? Primarily that it is possible to see group differences in brain activation patterns between people with PTSD and those without it. It is a solid piece of information, but the hope of eventually finding a useful and reliable way of predicting an individual’s susceptibility to PTSD, or to diagnosing it – as expressed in the meeting abstract – is still just a hope. This is part of a body of work which is very much in progress. Seeing group differences is a long way from being able to predict syndromes from an individual’s brain scan. For many reasons, individual brain scans are still highly variable.

Posted by Alison Abbott
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Toxic flame retardant compounds have been detected in all US coastal waters, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Back in 1996 NOAA researchers found polybrominated diphenyl ethers only in a limited number of sites. Now an analysis of sediments and mussels shows they are detectable in all coastal waters and the Great Lakes.

“This is a wake-up call for Americans concerned about the health of our coastal waters and their personal health,” says John Dunnigan, NOAA assistant administrator of the National Ocean Service (press release). “Scientific evidence strongly documents that these contaminants impact the food web and action is needed to reduce the threats posed to aquatic resources and human health.”

The report notes that laboratory studies suggest these compounds can impair liver and thyroid development. At least a decade ago some had already dubbed them ‘the new PCB’, a reference to the controversy over the banned polychlorinated biphenyls compounds. PBDEs are already banned in Europe.

Local coverage
NOAA report: Flame retardants found in samples from Puget Sound - Seattle Times
Flame retardant chemical found in all coastal waters, report says - The Oregonian
Flame retardant, banned in Maine, found in shellfish - Kennebec Journal

Image: Image: National Distribution of PBDE tissue concentration in parts per billion lipid weight between 2004 and 2007). Categories low (green), Medium (yellow), High (red) / NOAA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Bendy displays close to market
Second-generation e-paper can be rolled up, use almost no power and even display video.

Tracing carbon dioxide's fate underground
Greenhouse gas dissolves in water rather than becoming locked into minerals.

China to spearhead anti-tuberculosis drive
Gates Foundation partners health initiative.

News Feature - The textbook of the future
Undergraduate textbooks are going digital. Declan Butler asks how this will shake up student reading habits and the multi-billion-dollar print textbook market.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The historic home of chemist Joseph Priestley may soon close to the public due to budget cuts.

Priestley is famous chiefly for his work on oxygen, and many a historian of science has considered whether he or French rival Antoine Lavoisier should be accorded the honor of being named as its discoverer*. After being hounded out of England, he ended up in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where the Joseph Priestley House is now a National Historic Landmark and National Historic Chemical Landmark.

However, a notice on the house’s website says that a new report from the PA Historic and Museum Commission is recommending “discontinuing operation of the Priestley House”.

Commission executive director Barbara Franco told C&EN, “We’re not going to walk away from it and let it deteriorate. We are asking ourselves, 'Who cares about this site? Who will help us solve this problem?’”

As a citizen of the country that burned Priestley’s previous house, in Birmignham, England, I plead with you America: save the Priestley house.

* Yes, I know about Carl Scheele too.

Image: Priestley, via Wikipedia.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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There's plenty of coverage today about the latest from the Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA) — a collaboration between Italy, Russia, Germany and Sweden, which studies high-energy electrons and anti-electrons in outer space.

As we reported in August, between 2006 and 2008 PAMELA saw an unexpected excess of positrons (anti-electrons) whizzing around space. That excess could be from a nearby astrophysical source, or it could be from the annihilation of dark matter—heavy, rarely interacting particles that make up about 85% of the matter in the universe. The news today is based on the fact that the work has appeared in this week's issue of Nature.

Incidentally, this issue also has a pretty nice Q&A about dark matter and dark energy with Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College and Marc Kamionkowski of the California Institute of Technology.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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The world’s press is getting very excited by the news that researchers have discovered thousands of a thought-to-be-rare dolphin frolicking in the Bay of Bengal. All is not what it seems however.

The story goes that the Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris) was thought to be in serious trouble. It is listed on the IUCN’s ‘Red List’ as vulnerable, with several sub-populations deemed to be critically endangered. Now a new press release from the Wildlife Conservation Society says:

WCS researchers have discovered a stronghold for one of the world’s rarest freshwater dolphins, the Irrawaddy, deep in the waterlogged jungles of Bangladesh. The scientists counted nearly 6,000 of the dolphins in the South Asian country’s Sundarbans mangrove forest and the adjacent waters of the Bay of Bengal.

“This discovery gives us great hope that there is a future for Irrawaddy dolphins,” says Brian Smith, study author and researcher at the WCS. “Bangladesh clearly serves as an important sanctuary for Irrawaddy dolphins, and conservation in this region should be a top priority.”

The finding has just been presented to a conference in Hawaii, although it was published last year in Journal of Cetacean Research and Management, says the WCS. Here’s where things get a bit more complicated. As Andrew Revkin at the New York Times notes, this population was discovered back in 2004. It is not “previously unknown”, as one report has it.

The IUCN red list itself says that there are likely to be 5,383 irrawaddy dolphins in the coastal waters of Bangladesh, based on number from Smith et al. 2005. Exactly the same number is listed in Smith’s 2008 Journal of Cetacean Research and Management report (pdf, page 76). The abstract of this research suggests they did not actually count all these dolphins, they estimated the population from those they did see.

Finding new populations of at risk animals is great. Generating new publicity by re-announcing information that has already been largely incorporated into risk assessments is less great.

Image: WCS / Alice Rocco

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Two major European Space Agency (ESA) missions have been postponed due to technical issues. Herschel, an infrared observatory, and Planck, a satellite to study the cosmic microwave background, were to launch aboard a single Ariane 5 rocket in mid-April from ESA's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

But it appears that the launch is off for now. No new date has yet been given, and further details are expected within the hour.

Update

OK maybe not within the hour, but ESA has released a statement:

"The verification of operations procedures for Herschel and Planck at ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) has now positively concluded. However, during final checks on the spacecraft, concerns have arisen and a short delay is proposed in order to allow ESA and Arianespace to carry out a final and independent check of the safety margins. Therefore, the final decision on the date of the Herschel and Planck launch will be postponed by a few days."

Credit: ESA

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Cross posted for Richard Van Noorden from Climate Feedback

If we're going to bury carbon dioxide underground to reduce greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, then we need to know it won't shoot out again in a couple of generations time.

Experience from naturally formed underground reservoirs of CO2 shows it's quite possible to keep the gas trapped in bubbles underneath impermeable 'cap' rocks. A study in Nature [subscription] has now sampled a bewildering number of isotopes in nine reservoirs to fill in some more details on exactly where CO2 goes in these sedimentary systems after millions of years.

It turns out, say researchers from Edinburgh and Manchester, in the UK, that much of the CO2 ends up dissolved in water. Only a very small amount - at most, 18 per cent in some areas - gets transformed into minerals such as calcium carbonate.

That doesn't surprise any experts in the field - the limited amount of free calcium cations in these conditions would tend to limit mineralisation. If you read the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change's 2007 report on carbon capture, however, you might have thought the potential for mineralisation was somewhat greater.

Although it appears CO2 won't get tied up in minerals much, dissolving it in water is still a good way to trap the gas (which otherwise remains as a buoyant, supercritical fluid phase). In fact, some researchers are actively investigating mixing CO2 ­with water as it's injected, in order to encourage dissolution. The solution created like this is denser than water and should sink downwards.

The slight worry is that injecting a lot of gas into water creates acidic carbonic acid, which could etch out holes in the surrounding rock. And a surge of CO2 might push otherwise stable water into an unexpected flow.

What the paper reinforces is that we really need to know where water might flow in order to decide the long-term fate of carbon dioxide trapped underground. While geologists might be fully aware of this point, will the companies preparing to dump CO2 from their powerplants into the nearest hole also be aware? Only time will tell.

See also: News: Briefing - Tracing carbon dioxide's fate underground

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week on the Nature Podcast, a history lesson for Obama and his science advisers. Plus, we look at the world through the eyes of an autistic toddler, and find out if it's safe to store CO2 underground.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“We hung the [robot] arm over the right wing, we panned it to the location and took a look and I said to myself, ‘we are going to die’. There was so much damage.”
Shuttle commander Robert Gibson discusses a very close call on a secret space mission (CBS Space Place). [Hat tip: Bad Astronomy.]

“This one fed on meat. Its name is tyrannosaurus rex.”
Petr Springer, a five-year-old boy in Czechoslovakia can distinguish 69 dinosaur species (Czech News Agency).

“Takeda is making meaningful changes in structure and governance through this reorganization.”
Yasuchika Hasegawa, president of Japan’s biggest pharma firm Takeda, announces that the company is shifting its global research and development headquarters from Osaka to Illinois (AP).

“Discretion is important, so please only discuss your application with your partner and/or immediate family.”
The UK’s ‘security intelligence agency’ MI5 is recruiting a chief scientific advisor. British citizens who fancy becoming chief science spook should start polishing their CVs (Nature Jobs). [Hat tip: Research Fortnight.]

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The space shuttle Atlantis is being set up on its launch pad in preparation for the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. (Image right shows Atlantis atop the mobile launcher platform yesterday.)

Led by Scott Altman, mission STS-125 will undertake five spacewalks to upgrade and repair the telescope's sensors, batteries and gyroscopes, hopefully equipping it for another five years of operation (NASA press release).

“I remember when I was a kid going outside and looking up at the stars and going, ‘Wow, I wonder what’s out there’ ... Hubble is a tool that can take you out there to those distant galaxies, those pictures that come back,” said Altman in an interview last year.

“… It’s amazing to me when I talk to people and I say, hey, I’m going to the Hubble, they go, “Wow, I’m so glad we’re going back.” All kinds of folks in every walk of life know about Hubble and connect with the idea that it’s a good thing for us to have and they’ve made some connection with it on their own.”

Continue reading "A final trip to Hubble" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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In early March, the National Ignition Facility fired up its lasers and emitted a 1 million joule pulse of highly concentrated light. The demonstration came ahead of schedule for the over-budget facility, which cost $3.5 billion--almost 3 times its original budget of $1.2 billion--to complete. On Tuesday, the Department of Energy gave its blessing for the facility to go ahead with regular operations, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The new facility, which is part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has three planned missions: It will provide a way to nondestructively monitor the health of existing nuclear weapons stockpiles, and will be used to simulate early conditions in the Universe. But it's real glamour comes from plans to trigger controlled nuclear fusion, in which the lasers would heat a small core of hydrogen atoms until they fuse together and released more energy than the laser put in.

Controlled nuclear fusion has been a goal for physicists since the discovery of lasers, but is also the butt of decades of science jokes, since its proponents have been declaring it 'just a decade away' for decades.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Tuesday that current Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told an audience in 2006: "I'm going to skip (discussing) fusion because it will probably skip the 21st century."

If it does emerge this century, it may happen simultaneously in Europe: a similar French laser facility, called Laser Mégajoule, is slated to begin operations in 2010, according to a recent Nature story.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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An entire colony of a rare breed of albatross, previously resident at Kuaokala in the Hawaiian Wai’anae mountains, has disappeared.

Up to 50 birds made up the Laysan albatross colony, which has taken 20 years to grow to this size (press release). In February, the last time the colony was checked by biologists, 15 chicks, 6 nests with eggs and 20 adults were in the colony, Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources says.

Not only have 50 birds gone missing, there are no remains left – which would be expected if the birds had been attacked by pigs or dogs. No mention is made of mice, which were caught red-handed eating albatross chicks alive in 2005.

The closely-guarded wording in the press releases seems to suggest that humans are to blame: “The lack of carcasses and the absence of adults on the colony, who come back even when chicks are not present, suggest that human interference cannot be ruled out as the cause of this colony’s rapid demise.”

The Honolulu Advertiser is so far the only outfit to report on the mystery with not one, but two stories. You can help, though. If you were in the vicinity between February 13th and March 23rd this year, and noticed anything suspicious, you should contact the DLNR, phone number is in the press release.

Image: US Fish and Wildlife Service

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Ocean mercury on the increase
Rise may affect neurotoxin levels in fish

Migrating nanotubes add to asbestos concern
Initial tests suggest the tiny tubes can pass through the lung lining.

China denies US ship access to Taiwan Strait
Research vessel's seismology studies compromised by politics.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Faced with a gloomy property market here on Earth, Swedish students are designing a robot to erect a one-room house on the Moon.

The class, led by robotics professor Lars Asplund at Mälardalen University, posted a video of the prototype robot, nicknamed Roony, last week. (Skip to 0:39 seconds to see the robot build a prototype.)

Their collaborator, artist Mikael Genberg, has built variations of a traditional red Swedish house with white trim in other unusual locations, including one partially submerged in a lake and another up in a tree, both of which double as hotels.

His 'Luna Resort' concept dates back a few years. Genberg told the BBC in 2006 that he was aiming for a 2011 launch date and that he had the support of the Swedish Space Corporation. The 10 square meter house could be in place on the moon by 2012, according to a statement released today, though the statement does not specify a launch vehicle.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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The rights and wrongs of ‘dwarf tossing’, where a large human attempts to hurl a smaller human as far as they can, have been debated by bodies as august as the United Nations. However, according to a paper published this week, careful consideration of the issue can also help us deal with ethical issues in science.

“While admittedly unusual, the case of dwarf tossing illuminates several themes central to the field of bioethics including the issues of human dignity, autonomy, and the protection of vulnerable people,” write Carlo Leget, Pascal Borry and Raymond De Vries in the latest edition of Bioethics.

Their paper explores the relationship between empirical approaches to ethics (assessing how things are) and normative approaches (assessing how things ought to be).

Paper author Raymond De Vries, of the University of Michigan Bioethics Program told Nature, “I assure you that we are serious about dwarf tossing, and if you can’t have fun while being serious, well then, count me out of this business.”

Continue reading "‘Nobody tosses a dwarf!’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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