The Great Beyond

Sure, Francis Collins is likely going to be the next head of the US National Institutes of Health. But is he famous? A new ad campaign called the Rock Stars of Science is trying to bring a little celebrity to the sciences by picturing famous researchers together with rock stars. (In case you can't recognize him behind those cool shades: that's Collins to the right of Joe Perry. And for those of you who have no idea who Joe Perry is: he's the guy with the striped hair to the left of Collins.)

The campaign launched with a 6-page photo portfolio in GQ magazine. “It’s like being in the middle of a genius sandwich”, the ad quotes Josh Groban, apparently a singer of some sort, who was pictured between UCLA neurologist Jeffrey Cummings and Elan Corp’s chief scientific officer, Dale Schenk.

Musical ability was not a prerequisite to participate in the campaign, at least not for the scientists. One scientific rock star – cardiologist Eric Topol of The Scripps Research Institute -- told theheart.org: “I was asked to leave the band in ninth grade and take a study hall because my clarinet playing was so pathetic.” And participants evidently weren’t given much choice about their wardrobe: “I was the only scientist that ended up in tennis shoes and barefoot, but what can you do?” lamented Schenk to The Scientist. (Personally, I think NIAID director Anthony Fauci looks quite dapper in his white “cool and dry” “cotton-rich” button-down shirt, available for $49.95 at Macy’s.)

It’s all for a good cause of course: the ad campaign aims to highlight the importance of biomedical research and the need for science funding. Medscape Medical News notes that the campaign hopes to fight the social forces behind a recent survey which found that only 4% of Americans could name a living scientist and – prepare to be shocked – that Britney Spears is more influential than Stephen Hawking. Yeah. Good luck with that.

Images: Geoffrey Beene/GQ

Posted by Heidi Ledford
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Sweden snares neutron facility
Lund will play host to European Spallation Source.

Failure is certainly an option
Conservation scientists plead for better reporting of negative results.

Getting science into policy
New Zealand's first ever chief science adviser talks about how he will make an impact on government decision-making.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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“This first observational proof of General Relativity sent shockwaves through the scientific establishment.”
Today marks the 90th anniversary of Eddington’s test of Einstein’s famous theory.

“Leaders must lead and Dr. McLeroy has proven conclusively that he is less concerned with leading the board than he is with fighting the battle.”
The Texas Senate on Thursday refused to confirm evolution-unbeliever Don McLeroy as State Board of Education chairman, senator for Austin, Kirk Watson, explains why.

"Yinghuo" means light from firefly in Chinese.
China announces that its Mars probe will be ready for launch in the second half of this year, and choose a name for it.

"We have this big ball, right? And we hold our little targets inside of there, and the light focuses on there, and that's where all the action happens."
The National Ignition Facility finally opens in San Francisco, and Ed Moses, director, explains to Fox News how it works.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Exoplaneteers have finally succeeded in using a technique called astrometry to spot a far off planet.

Astrometry measures the change in the star’s position from side to side, brought about by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. It was first used 50 years ago, and almost came up with a planet in 1963 when astronomer Peter van der Kamp claimed, in error, that he’d found two planets going round Barnard’s star.

But now, after 12 years of observation, Steven Pravdo and Stuart Shaklan from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have spotted a planet like Jupiter, but heavier, around the small star VB10 about 20 light years away.

The star is the smallest known to host a planet, and the astronomers say that such a system might be a good place to look for Earth-like planets.

“This method is optimal for finding solar-system configurations like ours that might harbor other Earths," says Pravdo (press release). "Some other exoplanets around larger M-dwarf stars are also similar to our Jupiter, making the stars fertile ground for future Earth searches," says Shaklan. "Astrometry is best suited to find cold Jupiters around all kinds of stars, and thus to find more planetary systems arranged like our home," he adds.

Pickup so far includes UPI.com and New Scientist. None of these has any comment from exoplanet scientists that favour other techniques, but perhaps one of these stories in languages other than English will have something that I have missed: Nouvel Obs, Wissenschaft aktuell, ADN.es.

Image: Artists impression of VB10 and VB10b, NASA/JPL-Caltech

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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The US Forest Service (USFS) must halt road-building in 58 million acres of national forest for one year, according to a directive issued yesterday by the US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack. The move is a reversal of a Bush-era environmental policy, which in turn undermined a rule Clinton instated late in his presidential term.

The Clinton and Bush rulings spawned numerous lawsuits, according to today's AP report. Vilsack, who oversees the USFS, said in a statement yesterday that "this interim directive will provide consistency and clarity that will help protect our national forests until a long-term roadless policy reflecting President Obama's commitment is developed."

Continue reading "End of the roads" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Forget Galaxy Zoo and SETI@Home – using Google Earth you can now choose potential sites on Mars for a space-based camera to snap and send directly to you.

The latest upgrade to Google Earth 5.0 includes a collaboration with the scientists that run the THEMIS (Thermal Emission Imaging System) infrared camera on NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter.

They have developed software that shows where THEMIS will be flying over in the coming week or so, and using Google Earth you can pick out a site that you would particularly like to see photographed. If your choice matches with the mission scientists’ choice, they send you an email and a link to the data as soon as it’s zoomed back to Earth.

To do this you need Google Earth 5.0 and a file that is updated each week giving the spacecraft’s Mars orbital groundtrack, which is available from Arizona State University.

“We wanted to give the general public a way to suggest places on Mars for THEMIS to photograph,” says Philip Christensen, THEMIS’ principal investigator.

So hop to it! And if anyone gets their own Mars image in their inbox anytime soon, do let us know. Here in the Nature News office we're about to make our own suggestions and will keep you posted.

Image: Martian dust storm, NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Genome-analysis whiz Eric Schadt is leaving his fulltime commitment to the nonprofit company he helped create only a few months ago. His new job: chief scientific officer for Pacific Biosciences, a next-next generation sequencing company based in Menlo Park, California.

Schadt has achieved an unlikely level of fame for someone who performs complex network analyses of how gene sequences and expression patterns relate to disease. (One recent profile referred to him as a 'bioinformatics rabble-rouser'.) Best known as the genomics mastermind behind Rosetta Inpharmatics, a biotechnology firm once based in Seattle, Schadt became a Merck employee when the pharma giant bought Rosetta in 2001. Earlier this year, Schadt and Rosetta founder Stephen Friend left Merck to start a nonprofit company called Sage Bionetworks that aimed to create an open-access research platform for genomics data. (See this Nature News story for more details, subscription required.)

Today, Pacific Biosciences announced that it had successfully wooed Schadt. According to Bio-IT World, Schadt intends to maintain close ties with Sage Bionetworks and remains committed to the cause, but the allure of getting his hands on PacBio’s sequencing technology was just too strong for him to maintain his full-time commitment at the nonprofit. “What we learned in generating data on a scale no-one else has generated [is] that we're only glimpsing a fraction of the biology in those systems," he told Bio-IT World. "I see the PacBio technology providing a way to go from glimpsing maybe 1% of biology in these populations to an order of magnitude beyond that."

Posted by Heidi Ledford
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Taking a fossil primate on the road
Ida's promoter defends science and showmanship.

Hot times ahead for the Wild West
American west threatened by more heatwaves than past models have predicted.

The nail in the coffin for group selection?
Benefits to an individual and its family may be enough to account for altruistic behaviour.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone’s mind
Mars Science Laboratory gets a new name.

"We want fairly urgent action by government because charities are currently weathering the storm that's been caused by the recession"
Research charities face tough times in the financial downturn.

"It went down like a rock"
The world's second largest artificial reef is created when a US warship is sunk off the coast of Florida.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Over on space.com, there's one of those stories that's just so crazy that it must be true. A team of Romanians are planning on going to the moon… in a balloon.

There are so many places I could take this. Let's stick to the facts: The Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA), a non profit organization dedicated to space flight, is shooting for the final frontier on a shoestring. They can't afford costly launch pads and first stages, so they're trying to get a boost into orbit from a high altitude balloon. The balloon carries their rocket (which looks weirdly like a Constantin Brâncuşi sculpture, see below) to 18 km. Then the rocket will fire, and woosh! Off it goes to the moon.

Left to right: modernist Romanian sculpture, moon rocket

This may sound, um, completely insane. But it's not completely insane. A quick search of Encyclopedia Astronautica reveals that NASA experimented with balloon-launched sounding rockets in the 1950s. They were especially favored by the famous planetary scientist James Van Allen, who called them "Rockoons". Rockoons were a hit for a while, but they fell out of favor for a couple of reasons. First, they were difficult to control. Second, if something in the balloon failed, or if the rocket was deployed too early, those below had to watch out for a giant falling tube of rocket fuel.

Continue reading "Romania's moon balloon" »

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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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.

The spread of swine flu continues in Asia with the first case reported in Singapore.

This brings the total number of cases, as of May 27 according to WHO, to 13,398 from 48 countries. This includes 95 deaths, although reports since that official figure was posted suggest the number is now over 100.

But, as Nature’s Declan Butler pointed out last week, the case counting isn’t necessarily helpful anymore, and the numbers are not necessarily accurate either, according to one expert in the UK (Independent).

New York’s health commissioner, Thomas Frieden, has warned that myriad “underlying conditions” could exacerbate swine flu, putting many people at risk. (New York Times).

As far as science, and science policy goes, the New England Journal of Medicine has a review article laying out some of the scientific and policy challenges of responding to a swine flu H1N1 pandemic. This article looks in particular at the problems in estimating the severity of, then defining, a pandemic. The NEJM also has more on the genetics of the virus, with an article by Paul Rabadan’s team from Columbia University in New York, which adds to more genetic analysis published last week.

A wiki updating with data about the origins and evolution of A/H1N1 has also been set up.

Image: Getty

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Posted for Declan Butler

Strong rumours abound inside the Parisian Beltway that French president Nicolas Sarkozy is considering offering the former Socialist science minister, 72-year old maverick geophysicist and climate sceptic Claude Allègre, a ministerial post in his government -- possibly a ministry of industry and innovation. (Financial Times).

Allègre has the scientific credentials. He won the 1986 Crafoord Prize, awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for outstanding basic research in disciplines not covered by the Nobel prizes. He also headed the Institut de Physique de Globe in Paris from 1976 to 1986, and was president of the French geological survey — the Bureau des Recherches Géologiques et Minières — from 1992 until 1997, as well as being a member of the European Parliament from 1989 to 1994.

But when Allègre, a former prominent Socialist, was minister for science and higher education in Lionel Jospin’s government from 1997 to 2000 he probably broke all records for unpopularity of a French science minister. He described the education system as a fat "mammoth" in need of slimming, and said that the trade unions were "chloroformed". In 1998, Nature called for Jospin to fire Allègre unless he changed his ways – which Jospin finally did in 2000. Since then Allègre has divorced himself further from many French scientists with his views that carbon dioxide is not the main cause of global warming. (see Real Climate here and here)

Continue reading "Claude Allègre back in French government? " »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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This week, transgenic monkeys that glow green, quantum states that change as soon as you look at them, and a new approach to the war on cancer.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Yesterday Nature published a paper heralding the birth of the first transgenic non-human primates - in other words a genetically modified adult gave birth to offspring that inherited the modification.

Their birth offers to researchers the chance to use more human-like models for disease than the currently-favoured mice, or rhesus macaque (another monkey disease model, but one in which transgenic offspring have never been produced). The marmosets have been born expressing the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP). The neat thing about GFP is that it’s easy to spot – the marmosets have green feet under UV light.

But also, and this might be why they received just quite so much coverage, these marmosets are unbelievably cute.

Favourite headline/standfirst of the day came from WA Today, with “The green Monkeys are coming / They’re monkeys but not as we know them”

Coverage was generally positive, although NPR ran a story about 50 years since monkeys were sent to space, with a disturbing picture.

The cuteness of the animals will undoubtedly give animal activists new ammunition, and this warning is covering in an editorial to accompany the paper.

Continue reading "Marvellous marmosets" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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The three astronauts that recently left our planet to hang around in orbit on the International Space Station will double the crew’s size. Once Belgian Frank De Winne, Russian Roman Romanenko and Canadian Robert Thirsk arrive on Friday, the crew will total six.

This move from three to six is a “milestone” according to this BBC report, saying that “A primary objective will be to assess how well such a large number of people live together in the cramped confines of the space station.”

It’s been a long time coming; as this story from 2007 reports - only now can the ISS fulfil its scientific potential since it’s on-orbit construction began in 1998.

The lofting of the three astronauts in a Soyuz TMA-15 craft from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, has picked up lots of press attention – Google news search brings up almost 1000, too many to list here, but a few for you to peruse at your pleasure listed here:

Radio Netherlands
CBC
AP
Calgary Herald
Reuters

Image: NASA TV

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Former shuttle pilot nominated as NASA head
Charles Bolden lined up to take over space agency.

Draft stem-cell guidelines criticized
Researchers complain that previously approved cell lines would not be covered.

Russia makes major shift in climate policy
Putin emphasizes the need for action on global warming.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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African countries are slow to address problems about who owns forested land, according to a report from the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) and the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).

The report, which was presented at an ITTO and RRI-organised forestry conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon, shows that “less than 2 percent of Africa’s tropical forests are owned by or designated for use by the region’s forest communities and indigenous groups compared to nearly one-third of all forests in Latin America, Asia and the Pacific.” (Press release).

By lagging behind in working out ‘tenure reform’ – ensuring land rights for local communities – Africa is not only threatening the planet but also putting local people at risk, the report says. “Inaction on land reform and the separation of forests into national parks or industrial concessions exacerbate civil strife and limit community development and conservation efforts,” so says RRI’s Andy White, who was an advisor for the study.

The news has travelled far, if not yet wide. The UN’s humanitarian news site IRIN, has it covered,
as does the BBC, and in the African press, of course, news of the report and the meeting is being reported (All Africa, Africa Science News).

The meeting runs until May 30, for a closer look at the agenda look here.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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These shadowy images are snapshots from a short film that shows a sperm whale stealing black cod from a fishing ship's long line by tugging at one end until the fish comes off at the other.

The film is part of a study from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, and is published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

In the video, the whale's clicking can be heard quite clearly, and it is this, rather than any sneaky fish-nicking, that the scientists were interested in.

"The sounds can be louder than a firecracker," said Aaron Thode, Scripps researcher. "But until this video recording was made, scientists had not been able to get a measurement of the size of the animal's head and the foraging sounds at the same time." (Press release)

Watch it for yourself, and try to work out if it's real, or just shadow puppetry.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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“The sunlight comes down and it actually goes back up – there is no greenhouse effect.”
Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy advocates painting roofs white to combat global warming, on a recent meeting in London. (Independent)

"For a vehicle that was designed to travel 1 km over its lifetime, going 16+ km is a pretty substantial accomplishment”
Steve Squyres, PI for the Mars rovers celebrates Opportunity reaching the 10 mile mark (Space.com)

“We can be confident that they held their heads upright.”
Roger Seymour explains his research that shows dinosaurs with long necks used those necks to hold their heads high. (BBC)

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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It wouldn't be Washington if the rumour mill weren't spinning out of control. Just days after Barack Obama finally nominated Charles Bolden, a Marine Corps general, to head NASA (Nature), media reports are buzzing yet again about another long-anticipated science nominee: Francis Collins, supposedly to head the National Institutes of Health.

The shortlist for NIH head reportedly included more than just Collins, but he has long been considered a frontrunner. The former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, he spearheaded the publicly funded drive to sequence the human genome. Never shy, he has been outspoken about his efforts to reconcile science and religion, such as in his 2006 book The Language of God (Nature story, subscription required). Most recently he has drawn attention through his BioLogos Foundation, funded by the Templeton Foundation and meant "to address the escalating culture war between science and faith in the United States". It drew a fair amount of ire for its apparent fluffiness, for instance from blogger PZ Myers.

Obama's personnel announcements come near the end of most days on the White House listserv, often titled 'President Announces More Key Administration Posts'. For reporters, this means opening each email with baited breath to see if it will be, finally, the NIH head announcement -- or something about the chief of protocol for the state department.

Posted by Alex Witze
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Posted for Lucas Laursen

For a petrified primate with a broken wrist, Ida seems to get around. Last night, the History Channel premiered a 2-hour documentary about the fossil, which was unveiled last week at the American Museum of Natural History. Yesterday, Ida appeared at the Natural History Museum across the pond in London, and then spent the afternoon at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in Picadilly, where a crowd of nearly 200 viewers gathered for an advance screening of the 1-hour British version of the film.

Jørn Hurum and Holly Smith, authors on the scientific study of the fossil which raised a media storm last week, were there, along with a handful of paleontologists from the Natural History Museum and University College London.

After the screening, the paleontologists chuckled about some of the technical errors in the documentary, including a claim that the common ancestor of modern-day lemurs and monkeys must have lived "hundreds of
millions of years ago" when in fact the common ancestor probably dates a mere fifty or sixty million years back. This version of the film, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, made a few other claims the scientists left out of the peer-reviewed PLOS One article, such as hinting that Ida belonged on the anthropoid branch of the family tree
because she lacks certain characteristics associated with the main alternative, the ancestors of modern-day prosimians such as lemurs.

"How lemur it is and how monkey it is is what we're trying to figure out," Philip Gingerich, another author on the study, told the cameras. That, perhaps, is the take-home message of most members of the research team, though it does not come across so clearly in the film, which made use of Matrix-like zooming shots, a relentless score, and shadowy reconstructions of the fossil's finding to suggest that much of the figuring out has already been done. "The next stage is for the experts to obsess over the details," says Christopher Dean of University College London.

Posted by Mark Peplow
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The European Union’s fishing quota system doesn’t work. Even the European Union appears to admit this, and released a green paper in April suggesting some serious reforms.

Yesterday, Europe’s fish ministers met in Brussels and had what the European Commission calls “frank and open discussion” and a “thorough and honest exchange of views”. Obviously this is normally diplomatic-speak for a stand up row.

Key to the Commission’s plans is eliminating ‘discards’, whereby caught fish that could be eaten are thrown back into the sea as they do not fit the quota of the fisherman who has hauled them in.

Danish Fisheries Minister Eva Kjer Hansen said yesterday that quotas should be based on how much fish is caught, rather than how much is landed and eventually sold.

“We should move from landing quotas to catch quotas -- meaning that everything that is caught is brought to land,” she said (Reuters).

This could even be monitored with video cameras on boats, a method piloted in Denmark. “You can clearly see what kind of fish are being caught and you can control what they are bringing back to land,” Hansen told the BBC.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Big Science Debate: A Biological Century?
Biology And Physics – The Next 50 Years

Please join us for the second of our summer debates:

7pm on Monday 8 June 2009.
Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG.
Tickets online or from the Box Office on 020 7520 1490 or tickets@kingsplace.co.uk.

Price £9.50 online

Physics, biology and chemistry have all helped define the 20th century. Many world-changing innovations from physics include electric power, the microchip and the internal combustion engine. In biology and chemistry, an agricultural revolution has helped to feed a growing population. But some of these advances have also helped to create climate change and a rate of species-loss not seen since the last mass extinction.

What will physics and biology look like 50 years from now? And what might the impacts be?

Join three distinguished speakers ¾ a physicist, a biologist and a historian ¾ as they cast their gaze into the future of science, and its possible impacts. Will we resolve the riddle of dark matter and dark energy? Will string theory remain the best candidate for unifying the forces of nature? Will stem cells have fulfilled their promise and what of the potential of GM crops in agriculture?

Join the Nature Big Science Debate at 7 pm on Monday 8 June

Speakers:

David Edgerton, Professor of the History of Science, Imperial College London
Lewis Wolpert, Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine, University College London
Alison Wright, Editor of Nature Physics
Chair: Ehsan Masood, Acting Chief Commissioning Editor, Nature
Host: Nick Campbell, Managing Editor, Nature

For more info on The Nature Debate series, please email naturedebates@nature.com

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A leading climate scientist from New Zealand is taking his claim for unfair dismissal against a government-owned environmental consultancy company to the country’s Employment Relations Authority.

Jim Salinger told Radio New Zealand that mediation with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research had failed. “Unfortunately, common sense did not prevail,” he said (NZPA).

Salinger claims he was sacked in April for unauthorised discussions with the media on issues related to climate change. “It was very shocking,” he told Nature at the time. “I was talking about my publicly funded science.”

According to Radio New Zealand, Salinger expects the authority to rule on his case in August or September.

Earlier this month NIWA claimed mediation was progressing positively, but could not comment further due to confidentiality agreements.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Rex Dalton

The royals of three Scandinavian nations are heralding the dangers of climate change.

The Royals from Denmark, Sweden and Norway will travel Wednesday 27 May to Greenland to see first hand through 1 June the impact of greenhouse gas warming on glaciers, industry and Arctic life.

Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden will be accompanied by six scientists, who will show the Royals direct evidence of climate change.

“We hope they will raise awareness about what is occurring,” says Minik Rosing, a geologist at the University of Copenhagen who helped organize the trip.

Continue reading "Scandinavian royals to visit Greenland " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Rooks can't bend spoons with their minds just yet, but they did bend wires using their beaks to hook food in a recent study (video here, large file).

Led by the appropriately named Chris Bird, this experiment adds rooks, a member of the Corvid family, to the list of animals that create and use tools. Unlike most known tool-using species, such as chimpanzees or other types of crows, rooks do not appear to use tools in the wild. Previous studies have shown that capuchin monkeys are more likely to resort to tool use in labs than in the wild.

Rooks may simply be too lazy to bother making tools in the wild, write the study authors: "Rooks exploit a number of different, readily-available food sources, such as seeds, insects, carrion, and refuse and as such may lack the motivation to use tools in the wild."

The researchers also argue that the tool-making is an example of an original insight, since the birds in the study were hand-raised and had neither seen other birds attempt the task, nor practised the task themselves before solving it.

They add that the finding adds to evidence that birds may have independently evolved a kind of problem-solving intelligence comparable to primate intelligence.

The paper should be available on this link by the end of the week:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0901008106

Headline watch
Rook with a hook proves bird brains are the equal of monkeys' - Daily Mail
Clever rooks have plenty to crow about - Irish Times
Rooks are not so bird-brained - Daily Telegraph
Caw blimey! Rooks can make tools - Cambridge News

Image: PNAS

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Posted for Declan Butler

An unpredecented aspect of the reaction of the scientific community to the current pandemic threat is the sheer speed with which researchers are making data publicly available. Within hours of the genomes of virus isolates having been analyzed, researchers from every corner of the globe have uploaded their sequences to the GISAID flu database, or Genbank, for anyone to compute.

Meanwhile, some journals have moved to warp speed, getting papers peer reviewed and published in days instead of months. Neil Ferguson's group at Imperial College London, for example, published an initial report on the epidemiology of the outbreak in Science on 11 May (see 'Swine flu spread matches previous flu pandemics') . It used some sophisticated modelling to describe the evolution of the outbreak, even if the underlying epidemiological data available at that point to feed into the models was so scant that one leading public health blogger described the paper as "computer-aided tea-leaf reading".

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) also published a somewhat meatier paper on 7 May by scientists at the US Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) providing a useful summary of the clinical symptons and age distributions of the earliest cases (see 'US swine flu cases dissected').

But another group of leading evolutionary biologists, including Oliver Pybus at the University of Oxford, and Andrew Rambaut at the University of Edinburgh, have taken a completely different tack. While preparing papers for peer-reviewed publication, they have put online on a public Wiki sophisticated analyses of the flu genome, including detailed phylogenetic trees, as soon as they got their results. They argue that it is in the interest of the public and the scientific community to make data relevant to the pandemic threat publicly available as fast as possible.

And now, Science has just published a paper by another group covering much of the same ground. The paper has some 60 authors including scientists at CDC and from the World Health Organization's lab network.

Continue reading "Genome analysis sheds light on swine flu origins - and high-speed science" »

Posted by Mark Peplow
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The storyline is familiar by now: US President Barack Obama overturns industry-friendly policy established by Bush administration, reaping praise from environmental groups. And so it was on Thursday, when the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to reinstate an obscure-but-important component of the scientific review process within an equally obscure-but-important component of the air quality program.

The gist is that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has formally restored the role of its independent science advisors in producing a staff paper detailing recommendations on air quality standards. For a bit of history, check the Union of Concerned Scientists' website here and here.

The announcement even picked up some news coverage (Reuters, Philadelphia Enquirer), which is something given the flurry of energy and climate news coming out of Washington this week.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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Meanwhile, up on Mars… while Spirit flounces around in the sand, Opportunity is playing the sensible big sister role over at Victoria Crater. Well done Opportunity! You’ve got a paper in Science!

The findings are the result of a daring move by the rover’s handlers on Earth back in September 2007 when they drove Opportunity into Victoria crater, which the rover had been nosing around the rim of for over a year.

And the news from Victoria? Well, the crater’s walls were shaped by water in a way very similar to other craters a few miles away. The implication is that the entire region was shaped by water, long ago, rather than just isolated pockets of water acting locally.

“Given that we've seen the same stuff at places that are miles apart, it is a reasonable conjecture that those processes operated over most of this region," Steve Squyres, rover PI told National Geographic.

The Voice of America goes with a slightly familiar-sounding headline. “NASA scientists find more evidence of water on Mars,” which I’m not convinced is the real story here, although is factual for sure. Squyres pops up again in that story, explaining that water and life don’t necessarily mean a nice place for a day trip with the kids: "I want to stress though that it was a nasty place. You know, we say water but this stuff was more like sulfuric acid. It was very, very salty; it was kind of a more like brine,” he says.

Online NewsHour reminds us just how long the rovers have been up there, five years.

Alongside the discovery that a large region was shaped by water, Opportunity’s travels also revealed that the crater is made from sulphate-rich sedimentary rock, and that on the crater floor are dunes. The evidence for these dunes is “gorgeous, striking” Squyres says.

Perhaps Spirit, who is “Stuck in “insidious invisible rover trap’ on Mars” will welcome a few days out of the limelight to concentrate on the task in hand – becoming unstuck.

Image: False color image of Cape St. Vincent at Victoria Crater, Mars, courtesy of Steven Squyres

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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.

Swine flu is strengthening its foothold in Asia this week. H1N1 has reached one of the world’s most populous cities, Tokyo, and the total number of official WHO-listed cases in Japan is likely to have topped 300 by the time you read this.

With media reports claiming the country is in ‘crisis mode’, health officials moved to reassure on Friday by stating the virus causes only mild cases in most instances. AFP reports that some restrictions related to the flu have been eased.

But as Mexico lifts its remaining restrictions on people in its capital, Australia is going in the opposite direction. The country raised its alert level to ‘Contain’ on Friday, giving authorities wider powers to respond to H1N1 cases.

“The raising of the alert level to CONTAIN recognises that Australia has a small number of swine flu cases and at least one human-to-human transmission,” said Nicola Roxon, the Minister for Health and Ageing (pdf). “It is important to remember that while the official alert level has been raised, there are still only a small number of confirmed cases in Australia, and the symptoms people are experiencing are relatively mild.”

I will leave you with these lines from the WHO, contained in their recent High-Level Consultation report:

It remains uncertain how fast the new influenza A virus will spread throughout the world and whether it will become widely established.

It remains uncertain whether the infectivity and virulence of the new influenza A virus will change over time.

The only thing certain about influenza viruses is that nothing is certain.

Image: Getty

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The chairman and his immediate predecessor on an influential parliamentary science committee in the UK have become enmeshed in the widening scandal over politicians’ expense claims.

Liberal Democrat Phil Willis, the current chairman of the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, reportedly claimed around £15,000 of expenses for renovating a flat in Kennington, London where his daughter, Rachel Willis, now lives. Willis says his daughter, an actress who appeared in an advertising campaign as a critically panned electronic genie for five years until 2003, was not a permanent resident in the flat (though intriguingly, a BBC report after the actress was mugged in 2002, claims she was yards away from her home… in Kennington). The MP and his daughter have received a death threat since the allegations surfaced.

Meanwhile, Ian Gibson, current member and former chairman of the IUSS committee in its former guise as the Science and Technology select committee, reportedly also claimed expenses for a flat which was the main home of his daughter, Helen Gibson. The MP has offered to resign if his constituents think he should go. Gibson was a geneticist and served as dean of the school of biological sciences at the University of East Anglia from 1991-1997.

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While British politicians engage in adult pursuits such as the acquisition of material wealth, across the pond the elected representatives of the people have been carrying on like a group of overgrown school kids.

Republicans and Democrats have been wrangling this week over proposed legislation to tackle climate change. In the course of this spat it emerged that the former were considering frustrating the latter by forcing the entire 900 page bill and its 400 amendments to be read aloud.

Faced with this perceived ‘delaying tactic’ Democrat Henry Waxman, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, did what any self respecting person in his position would do … he hired someone who can read really, really fast.

Via TPM, here is a video of what happened next:

As Reuters notes:

The words flew by, sometimes almost unintelligible and too fast for even the most competent note-takers in the hearing room filled with lawmakers, lobbyists and journalists. … After about 40 seconds, Joe Barton, the senior Republican on the committee who played along with the moment of levity, signalled he had enough of the fast-talking Wilder.

While TPM sees this as “an extraordinary measure to combat nefarious Republican stall tactics”, the Weekly Standard disagrees:

Even if the reading of the bill is a partisan "stall tactic" on the part of the Republicans, intellectually honest folks who want government to function responsibly would have to admit it's a pretty benign one—beneficial, even. The brouhaha over reading the bill is an implicit, disturbing admission that—yes!— your Congress will enact a 900-page bill heavily regulating the fundamental engine of the American economy and your life in unprecedented ways without ever having read it. Feel good about that?

If only the same speed reader had been available in Manchester recently, it would have speeded up this art event, where members of the public were invited to read the entire IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change. That was scheduled to take three days…

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The first director of the UK’s iconic Jodrell Bank Observatory has claimed that the Soviet Union tried to kill him with one of their own radio telescopes.

Bernard Lovell says he believes the USSR tried to kill him on a visit to a telescope near the Black Sea, possibly because Jodrell Bank was being used to watch for Soviet missile launches.

“They tried to remove from my memory the fact that they had taken me to their own defence nucleus on the Black Sea coast, because they did not want news of what they had brought back to this country,” he said in an interview with the BBC earlier this week. “I was very thankful to see the lights of London on one return.”

“I think they had an extremely powerful transmitter of the type we had on the telescope for planetary research. And the radiation from this telescope here was so dangerous that we would never use it at an elevation below about 15 degrees, [to avoid] endangering people’s brains.”

In the interview Lovell described to the BBC how he was called by the Ministry of Defence after the launch of Spunik and asked to use the telescope at Jodrell Bank to detect missile launches.

See also
Professor Sir Bernard Lovell ‘was target of Cold War assassins’ – Times
Sir Bernard Lovell claims Russians tried to kill him with radiation – Telegraph

Image: archive photo of Bernard Lovell / Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester

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Old seasonal flu antibodies target swine flu virus
Lab results could explain why young patients are hardest hit by current H1N1 strain.

GPS signal under threat
A few years of reduced precision might affect scientists worldwide.

Flagship drug-development initiative picks projects
European project awards pharmaceutical research funding.

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“He was a renaissance person. He had such an impact on American science and technology.”
Former University of California San Diego chancellor Robert Dynes comments on first chancellor of UCSD, Herb York, who died on Tuesday (SD Union-Tribune).

“Never before has any ape species been seen treating its own offspring as a consumable resource.”
David Dellatore, of Oxford Brookes University, comments on footage of orang-utans cannibalising the bodies of their deceased babies (BBC).

“Did you guys see my house? I’m trying to figure out if my lawn is getting mowed there.”
US President Barack Obama talks to astronauts aboard the International Space Station (AP).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Ulrike Heberlein at the University of California San Francisco and her colleagues have been studying the effects of alcohol on fruitflies for nearly 15 years. Their experiments have resulted in a slew of punchy Drosophila nomenclature stripped from the lexicon of lushes, like cheapdate, lightweight, and hangover , all for mutations and genes that control tolerance to various effects of alcohol. Their latest find is happyhour . Flies with a mutant version of this protein are less sensitive to alcohol’s sedating effects (Think Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark).

The happyhour protein is similar to a specific family of kinases (proteins that phosphorylate themselves or other proteins) which have been well described in mammals. Heberlein tells me that lead author, Ammon Corl, spent ages chasing a connection to the JNK and p38 pathways, which happyhour is predicted to target based on homology with human genes. The third suspect was the charm.

Through a series of genetic manipulations, they showed that the happyhour protein appears to work by inhibiting the activity of EGFR -- the extracellular growth factor receptor pathway -- which is conserved in flies and mammals and is a target of certain cancer drugs. One of these drugs, erlotinib, made flies and mice more sensitive to alcohol’s effects. Moreover it reduced alcohol consumption in rats that had become accustomed to a tipple. The authors suggest the results might point to therapeutic avenues for people with drinking problems.

Says Heberlein, “I’m pretty excited about this paper. It’s a complete story that goes from an unbiased screen in flies to a preclinical rat model.”

Image: detail from Happy Hour by aresauburn via Flickr under creative commons.

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A new programme to develop cures for rare or ‘orphan’ diseases has been unveiled in the US. The National Institutes of Health is putting $24 million up for work on some of the 6,600 rare diseases that impact 25 million Americans and which currently have no effective treatments.

“The federal government may be the only institution that can take the financial risks needed to jumpstart the development of treatments for these diseases, and NIH clearly has the scientific capability to do the work,” says NIH Acting Director Raynard Kington (press release).

NIH’s definition of a rare disease is “one that affects fewer than 200,000 Americans”. It also notes that it can cost $10 million to get a treatment through the pre-clinical drug trial process. Between 80 and 90% of drugs fail, leading this stage to be dubbed the ‘valley of death’.

Obviously $24 million isn’t going to go far with costs of up to $10 million per drug, but NIH’s new Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases programme will aim to improve the drug development process itself, as well as coming up with its own treatments.

”Preclinical work is hard and our resources will be limited,” Stephen Groft, director of the NHI rare diseases offices acknowledges (WSJ).

Reuters notes the TRND programme will also be reporting its failures, something not widely practised in drug development. “We are going to tell everyone what we are doing,” says Christopher Austin of the NIH Chemical Genomics Center. “That alone will be revolutionary.”

Derek Lowe, on the In the Pipeline blog, adds:

Treating rare diseases can be quite profitable in the industrialized world (ask Genzyme, among other companies), but if the conditions are localized in poorer areas no one's likely to take a crack at them. So my first reaction is ‘Good, and the best of luck to you’.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Seven months after dumping R&D tax credits, New Zealand’s government looks set to slash funding for agricultural and food research, according to media speculation ahead of the 28 May budget.

The Dominion Post reports that the National party – leading a right-of-centre coalition – will replace a ten-year NZ$700 million (£270 million) research fund with a three-year NZ$90 million scheme. And, the paper says, the funding is contingent on matching dollars from industry, so may be pared back even further in the recession.

"I'm a little bit bemused by the economic strategy ... $30m a year against $1.5b on tarmac for roads [in Auckland]?" says Derek Fairweather, chief executive at Waikato Innovation Park.

Continue reading "New Zealand 'to gut science budget'" »

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A Venezuelan scientist and thorn in the side of the country’s Chavez government is threatening to go to court over his dismissal from an institute he lead in the 1980s.

Biologist Jaime Requena says his removal from the Foundation Institute of Advanced Studies of Venezuela was politically motivated. He has previously criticised the government (including in this letter to Nature) and claimed scientific productivity in Venezuela is at its lowest in years.

He told SciDevNet, “Up to the moment no legal action has been taken because my attorneys are studying the options that we have.”

Luis Carbonell, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of the Venezuelan Association for the Advancement of Science, says Requena has not been told what alleged misconduct led to his sacking.

“Requena is a man internationally recognized for his work, but disagrees with the regime of President Hugo Chávez,” he says (El Nacional, via Google Translate). “The problem is that his removal has not complied with due process. He received the communication, but by law he is entitled to defend himself …”

The El Librepensador website noted that there have been other cases of researchers allegedly being dismissed for their political views. “But in Venezuela, the dismissal of researchers for meddling in politics is not a new matter,” it noted in April.

Requena was dismissed from the same institute before, but was reinstated after a previous court battle.

Image: Flag of Venezuela / Wikipedia

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...and it's not a director's cut of David Attenborough

According to a Nature paper that's receiving some pickup (Reuters, CSM ) the history of life on earth may just have got roughly 15% longer. That may not sound a huge difference, but a 15% extension on life's lease adds up to 600 million years -- roughly equivalent to the time taken for animals to get from creepy little things that couldn’t even crawl to your pet cat.

There were no animals on earth, though, during the 600 million years in question. The paper by Oleg Abramov and Stephen Mojzsis [link fixed] at the University of Colorado is about the earliest life, not the latest. Previous research has suggested that the heavy rain of asteroids, comets and the like that characterised the early solar system would have made the earth too hazardous a place for life to persist until after what is known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment" some 3.9 billion years ago. Impacts by large objects, it was thought, would vapourise whole oceans and wrap the earth in an atmosphere of superheated steam which would sterilise the planet.

The model developed by Abramov and Mojzis tells a different story. Pretty much everywhere on the planet gets zapped by a big rock, often more than once – but there are never any occasions where the whole planet including all the subsurface is simultaneously uninhabitable. If life had got started during this time, they argue, it could have persisted ever since.

At present the first evidence for life comes right after the Late Heavy Bombardment, about 3.8 million billion years ago. The speed with which that life developed after the bombardment has been seen by some as evidence that life is implicit in the way the universe is set up, and will arise spontaneously PDQ wherever it gets the chance. If it took 600 million years, though, then one would have to start thinking that life is relatively unlikely, which obvioulsy has implications for astrobiology.

It may still be the case that life arose as soon as it could, right at the beginning of the earth's history – but it is going to be harder to prove it. While bacteria may have been able to survive the horrible early history of the earth, rocks were not so lucky – there are no major bits of crust left over from back then.

In a related happy accident, this week Nature also has a fine feature on Mike Russell and his research on the metabolism-first approach to the origins of life.

Image: simulation of the state of the Earth at the end of Late Heavy Bombardment. Circles are crater locations; colors show temperature / Oleg Abramov

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Arnold Schwarzenegger’s headache this week could soon be felt by California’s university researchers, after the state’s voters overwhelmingly terminated their governor’s suggestions for ending an ongoing budget crisis.

While the star of such movie greats as Conan and Commando will be worrying about his political future, scientists may be more concerned about their paycheques, as the state has no solution in sight for its $20 billion deficit.

On Tuesday voters rejected Schwarzenegger’s proposals to plug the hole with tax rises, borrowing and other measures and the state could soon have problems paying its bills.

Continue reading "Should scientists sweat over Schwarzenegger’s shortfall?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Anjali Nayar

The Nigerian senate has set a new deadline for oil companies to end gas flaring; December 13, 2010, reports ThisDay, a daily Nigerian newspaper.

The deadline will be binding once a bill, called the Gas Flaring (Prohibition and Punishment) Bill 2009, is passed in the National Assembly.

It’s not the first time a date has been set for oil companies in the Niger Delta to clean up their act. Nigeria first outlawed gas flaring in 1979. Over the years, the main oil companies in the region – Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), ExxonMobil and Chevron – have all set targets for the phase-out that didn’t materialize. The last deadline, in December 2008, also went by without action.

"It's a history of shifting goal posts, missing deadline after deadline,” Vivian Bellonwu, a local activist told the BBC in January.

The cheapest way to deal with gas, a byproduct from crude oil extraction, is by burning it. According to the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, Nigeria flared around 16.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2007, about 2.5% of the natural gas consumption in the US. Burning the gas also produces small amounts of over 250 toxins.

Of course, if the natural gas was allowed to seep out without burning, it would have a much greater environmental impact. Campaigners would like to see it captured instead.

Continue reading "An end to Nigerian gas flares?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week, we investigate the link between cancer and Down's syndrome, find out how life on Earth survived multiple meteorite impacts 3.9 billion years ago, and discover why it's so hard to lose weight by dieting.

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“It’s disappointing that some have chosen to misrepresent a serious piece of work that aims to support Britain’s poultry industry and ensure that ducks are kept at the high welfare standards which consumers expect.”
A spokesman for the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is unhappy about criticism of a study being portrayed as showing that ‘ducks like water’ (The Herald).

“We are at a turning point in ESA’s human spaceflight activities. Last year, with the launch of the Columbus laboratory and the Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle, ESA became a fully-fledged member of the International Space Station partnership.”
European Space Agency Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain unveils his new astronauts, who are Italian, German, Danish, British and French.

“Antimatter atoms exist, but it is very difficult to make them. It would take us billions of years to produce the amount which is used in the film.”
Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of CERN, says the science in forthcoming movie Angels and Demons is not entirely accurate (Reuters).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The American Chemical Society (ACS)'s Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), an authoritative subscription database which holds information on over 40 million molecules, is not known for its commitment to free chemical information on the internet. Their attitude: if you want reliable data on molecules, you should pay for it.

That view appears to be ever-so-slightly softening. Last week, CAS press-released that, in collaboration with Wikipedia, it had launched a free web-based resource, “common chemistry”, holding information on around 7800 chemical substances for the general public. The service has actually been available since the ACS spring meeting (March 22-26) in Salt Lake City.

"This collaboration is CAS' gesture to provide accurate chemical information and CAS Registry Numbers to the public,” Christine McCue, CAS vice president for marketing, tells Chemical & Engineering News, the ACS-published magazine.

Continue reading "Gesture chemistry" »

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Yesterday's announcement of a 47-million-year-old primate fossil nicknamed "Ida" has provoked a large, if uneven, media response.

A press release entitled "WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING" got reporters’ attention last week, after a pair of earlier scoops (which Nature blogged) revealed that the finding was an unusually intact primate fossil dating to 47 million years ago, a time when most primates looked more like squirrels than people.

The fossil’s official announcement yesterday came one week ahead of the US premiere of a television documentary unashamedly entitled “The Link”. A book by the same title appeared on US and UK bookshelves today, after waiting Harry Potter-style in sealed boxes, wrote the New York Times. The Times labeled the furore “science for the Mediacene age”.

Scientists and others have expressed admiration for the find and contempt for its reception in many media outlets.

Continue reading "Missing link, evidence thereof - media analysis" »

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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.

The worldwide number of swine flu cases has passed the five figure mark. While having 10,243 cases as opposed to yesterday’s 9,830 is not a sign of imminent doom, it’s another important reminder that we should be taking H1N1 seriously.

It follows Monday’s warning from WHO director-general Margaret Chan, who warned, “This virus may have given us a grace period, but we do not know how long this grace period will last. No one can say whether this is just the calm before the storm.”

And yesterday the WHO met vaccine manufacturers and insisted that an H1N1 treatment must be “made available in a spirit of equity and fairness”. This follows earlier concerns that developed nations – particularly the US – would lay claim to the majority of vaccine doses.

“In the name of solidarity, I have reached out to drug and vaccine manufacturers,” said Chan. “We will look at different mechanisms to make sure poor communities and countries are not left out.”

More swine flu news

To stop swine flu before it could sneak off airplanes arriving from North America, Japan dispatched masked health inspectors with fever-sensing guns to walk among passengers. But the flu has taken hold in this island nation anyway, with rapidly increasing numbers of confirmed cases in its western region.
- Washington Post

Inmates at a Mexico City prison rioted Tuesday over restrictions on visits due to swine flu, as the country reported two more confirmed deaths, raising the toll to 74 nationwide.
- AP

As the co-discoverer of one of the key enzymes of the influenza virus and as someone who has written extensively about H5N1 avian flu, I do not count myself among the “flu experts” who believe that the World Health Organization and Dr. Margaret Chan, its director general, “performed well” during the current outbreak of H1N1 swine flu.
- Henry Miller, in a letter to the NY Times

Image Getty

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Reunion of fossil halves splits scientists
Well-preserved primate suffers identity crisis.

Q&A: Reaping the rewards of health research
The director of the University of Oxford's institute in Vietnam on studying disease in poor countries.

Exploration divides geographers
Campaigners pledge to fight on after Royal Geographical Society rejects resolution to bring back big expeditions.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The International Whaling Commission has yet again failed to reach an agreement between those nations that would hunt cetaceans and those that oppose all whaling. A key working group has failed to make a decision on Japan’s proposal that it phase out its controversial Antarctic hunts in return for being allowed to hunt minke whales in its own coastal waters.

The Small Working Group on the Future of the IWC is tasked with attempting to solve the issues related to Japanese coastal whaling, ‘special permit’ or ‘scientific whaling’ and sanctuaries. In the report of its 18 May meeting, it notes:

However, given the complexity and the sensitivity of the issues involved, it should not come as a surprise that it has thus far not been possible to secure agreement on key specifics ... . The inter-relatedness of the three issues singled out cannot be overemphasized; hence the importance of the principle that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.

It notes that two working group members expressed concern that too much attention is being given to Japanese coastal whaling versus the more general issues of commercial whaling bans and management issues.

Although the report does not identify these members, Australia’s environment minister Peter ‘Burning Beds’ Garrett said, “We don’t consider a solution to this particular issue to be a reduction in whaling in one area and an increase in whaling in another. Until such time as the commission is able to reach a strong view about the appropriate ways of determining matters such as scientific whaling and other measures, then we will just continue to remain in the tough negotiation.” (The Age.)

Other coverage
Decision postponed on minke hunt off Japan – UPI
IWC delays decision on coastal whaling – Kyodo

Other whaling news
“The Federal Opposition has accused the [Australian] Government of secretly dropping its election promise to take Japan to the international court over its whaling program.” - ABC News

Image: Gulf of Maine Cod Project, NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries; Courtesy of National Archives

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“The discovery of so many leaks in so many places over recent years suggests that there is a real problem with the safety culture across the whole nuclear navy.”
John Ainslie, coordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, comments on the latest news of nuclear leaks from British submarines (Guardian).

“Give them a few penguins and let that be an end to it.”
The original offer by Bernhard Blaskiewitz, the director of the Berlin zoo, over demands from Neumünster zoo for a share of the money generated by polar bear Knut. The zoos are now in a court fight (Guardian).

“Walker – who published his findings in Nature in 1981 – had to work with very incomplete skeletons, and his discoveries were not at the time seen as particularly significant. Today, however, they are recognised as among the most important in avian palaeontology.”
From the Daily Telegraph obituary of Cyril Walker, who died 6 May 6 aged 70.

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Mockingbirds (Mimus polyglottos) can recognize humans who have threatened them before, and will divebomb them in self-defence, according to a new study whose echoes with Alfred Hitchcock’s horror movie The Birds have garnered news coverage aplenty.

Douglas Levey and colleagues from the University of Florida, Gainesville report that the mockingbirds very quickly learn to pick individual human threats out of the crowd. Although crows and parrots are known to recognise individual humans, mockingbirds were not thought to be as clever. And they remain a wild species, though one that has happily adjusted to the presence of people (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., doi:10.1073/pnas.0811422106).

The birds in the study, nesting on the University of Florida campus, see hundreds of people walking past every hour. Most casual passers-by elicit no response, even if they touch the nest. But if a human stands close to them day after day – even wearing different clothing to vary their appearance – the mockingbirds attack, swooping down on the intruder.

"It's amazing what a bird brain can do," ornithologist John Fitzpatrick, of Cornell University, tells ScienceNOW.

"We don't believe mockingbirds evolved an ability to distinguish between humans. Mockingbirds and humans haven't been living in close association long enough for that to occur. We think instead that our experiments reveal an underlying ability to be incredibly perceptive of everything around them,” Levey tells the Guardian.

Image: A mockingbird prepares to divebomb an intruder /Louis Guillette.

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The world’s largest nesting site for the critically endangered leatherback turtle has been identified by researchers aboard light aircraft over Africa. An international team worked out that between 15,000 and 41,000 Dermochelys coriacea females are breeding in Gabon, making this the world’s largest nesting aggregation.

Their results, published last month in Biological Conservation, should help draw up plans to preserve the species.

“We knew that Gabon was an important nesting site for leatherback turtles but until now had little idea of the size of the population or its global ranking,” says paper author Matthew Witt of the University of Exeter.

“We are now focusing our efforts on working with local agencies to coordinate conservation efforts to ensure this population is protected against the threats from illegal fisheries, nest poaching, pollution and habitat disturbance, and climate change.”

On the Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin writes:

As I wrote not long ago, there are growing threats to the turtles in parts of Gabon, even in places where beachfront development or poaching aren’t an issue. Thousands of stray logs drifting down the Congo River from clearing operations are cluttering some nesting beaches, forming deadly blockades that trap leatherbacks. But over all it’s clear that leatherbacks have a strong beachhead in this country, at least for now.

The leatherback is listed as ‘critically endangered’ by the IUCN, one step below ‘extinct in the wild’.

Image top: : J.G. Collumb / Image lower: D. Agambouet

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Journalists, scientists and even a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament met in a pub last night in support of science writer Simon Singh, who is fighting a libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association, which Nature covered two weeks ago and last week.

The 7 May ruling, in which Justice David Eady spelled out how he would interpret Singh's article if the case goes forward, will make it difficult for Singh to defend himself in a full trial.

The Skeptics Club, which meets at the Penderels Oak pub in London, invited speakers including comedian Dave Gorman, journalist Nick Cohen, and Lib Dem Dr. Evan Harris. The speakers decried English libel law, which is famously plaintiff-friendly, and warned of the dampening effect it is having on scientific discourse before welcoming Singh, who made jokes and thanked the crowd for its support.

Singh has until 28 May 2009 to decide whether to settle the case (for a cool £100,000+, he says), appeal the ruling, or fight the case under the current definition of his article. Lawyers from the Guardian, which was not sued, advised Singh that he was unlikely to win in an English court, but he and his personally retained counsel are still considering whether to appeal Eady's ruling and how their appeal might fare in a European court, he said.

Asked what impact a ruling against him would have on his science writing career, Singh joked, "I'll go back to writing cosmology and Fermat's last theorem. Everyone was very nice about it."

He added that he would not accept settlement terms that limited his ability to write about chiropractic in the future.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Austria has stepped back from abandoning Europe’s most important particle physics lab.

Last week Johannes Hahn, the country’s science minister, said his country would withdraw from CERN, which runs the high profile Large Hadron Collider project. The decision was greeted with shock by Austrian physicists (see: Austria quits CERN after 50 years).

Now Chancellor Werner Faymann appears to have overruled Hahn, issuing a statement saying Austria will “remain a reliable partner in the CERN project”.

Reuters sees the u-turn as a spat between Faymann, a social democrat, and Hahn, a conservative. It notes that one national paper is running the story under the headline ‘CERN clash: government in a black hole’.

A petition against the pull out attracted over 30,000 signatures. Austria contributes around 20 million Euros to CERN.

Image: flags of member states fly at CERN’s Meyrin site / CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Public donations to lift research
Website paves way for people power.

Sunny outlook for Australian science
Research programmes win big in budget, but critics say environment is 'overlooked'.

NASA chief nearly named?
President Obama to meet with former astronaut Charles Bolden.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A senior official in the Obama administration held an anonymous background briefing with reporters Monday evening, confirming earlier reports that the administration plans to issue new regulations for automobiles tomorrow.

Given that the official largely confirmed everything that has already been written, it wasn't entirely clear why anonymity was required, but there you go. The new standard does indeed achieve the same requirement in 2016 as the California standard, although the ramp-up in the first three years is slightly slower. California has consequently agreed to drop its request for a separate standard, at least through 2016.

The proposed rule, to be filed jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department, would break vehicles into unspecified categories and require each category to increase in fuel-efficiency. This new system is designed to ensure that all vehicles improve, because companies can't simply make a few more fuel-efficient vehicles to offset their gas-guzzlers. Manufacturers would still be required to make sure that their entire fleet meets the average of 35.5 miles per gallon.

The official said the new proposal is expected to add $600 to the price of a new car on average, in addition to the $700 increase expected from the previous regulations. But once you factor in savings due to increased fuel efficiency, the official explained, 'it might end up being a wash."

Although the proposal must still negotiate the regular rule-making process, the administration seems confident that it will sail through as written, thanks to support from not only California but also the automobile manufacturers themselves.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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The White House is poised to announce new federal standards for automobile manufacturers on Tuesday. Early news reports suggest that the deal will settle a long-standing dispute with California and create the first greenhouse gas standards for vehicles (Associated Press, Washington Post).

Indeed, reports suggest that the administration is going to essentially take the California standard and apply it across the nation. Such a move would reduce cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from new automobiles by nearly 30 percent by 2016. This translates into a mileage standard of about 35 miles per gallon (nearly 15 kilometers per liter) in 2016, which is in line with the standards that California had been proposing and four years ahead of the current schedule.

California proposed its greenhouse gas standards in 2004, but it needed a Clean Air Act waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency in order to institute the regulations. Automakers immediately sued, arguing that California was using the Clean Air Act to indirectly regulate fuel economy, which is something that only the federal government can do (the issue is still tied up in court).

EPA sided with automakers in December 2007, but Barack Obama pledged to reverse that decision during the presidential campaign. Now it looks like he will be able to fulfill that pledge, even as he overhauls the entire sector in an attempt to preserve some kind of future for beleaguered US auto companies.

The issue is also tied up with the Supreme Court decision granting EPA the authority to set greenhouse gas emissions for vehicles. EPA recently proposed a finding on that account, but it's not year clear how these two issues might play out in the current decision. Stay tuned.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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“We found these bones along with a lot of carnivore teeth. So we suspect these carnivores were feeding on the hatchling dinosaurs.”
Tetsuto Miyashita, of the University of Alberta, comments on a new dino find (CanWest News).

“So, first we worked through mice and showed we could do it with mice. And now we've shown that we can actually transfer these genes into monkeys and protect these animals from SIV [simian immunodeficiency virus].”
Philip Johnson, chief scientific officer at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, comments on his new paper in Nature Medicine that is raising HIV vaccine research hopes (Forbes).

“This was never a strategy the defence discussed.”
A spokesperson for the attorney of former astronaut Lisa Nowak says she will not plead insanity if the case against her reaches court (Florida Today).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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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.

Just when people were starting to suggest that swine flu was not that big a deal, the World Health Organization has warned the world not underestimate the dangers.

“This virus may have given us a grace period, but we do not know how long this grace period will last,” said Margaret Chan, WHO director-general. “No one can say whether this is just the calm before the storm.”

The WHO also confirmed today that there are now 8,829 cases of H1N1 infection worldwide, in 40 countries.

AP says Chile is reporting its first case of the virus and the NY Times is reporting a leap in the number of cases in Japan. Rumours that Chan might raise the pandemic alert level to six, signifying a full blown pandemic, have not come true though.

“We remain in phase 5 today,” says Chan.

In other news, American universities are beginning to allow handshakes at graduations again. "In the process of taking a look at it and discussing it, the administration determined that it would probably be okay to say we would be shaking hands," Joel Kleinsasser, spokesman for Wichita State University in Kansas, told AFP.

Image top: Getty
Map: WHO

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Astronauts Drew Feustel and John Grunsfeld, of NASA’s Hubble servicing team, are currently completing their fifth and final spacewalk. If all goes well, at the end of this the space telescope will be in tip-top condition again.

A number of papers note that things have not been going smoothly so far. Yesterday astronauts Mike Massimino and Michael Good were nearly frustrated by a stripped bolt.

Massimino eventually resorted to brute force, or what NASA calls “steps developed quickly at the Goddard Spaceflight Center to carefully bend and break”.

Image: Feustel (left) and Grunsfeld (right) / NASA TV

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for David Cyranoski

Korean newspapers are reporting that Woo Suk Hwang and his research group are trying to get back in the big leagues by doing in pigs what he had once claimed to do in humans.

The once-famed cloner and now famed fraudster has been running the Sooam Biotech Research Centre, funded with private money, outside of Seoul for a couple years now.

On 15 May, Hyun Sang-hwan, identified as "Hwang's key colleague" told the Korea Times that they had succeeded in creating a cloned pig embryo, extracting stem cells from it, and establishing lines of self-reproducing cloned cells from them.

Continue reading "New Hwang cloning claim" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The credit crunch claims another victim, this time it’s the algal-fuel hope of MIT and Harvard. The company GreenFuel Technologies promised to provide green energy from algae. “GreenFuel's high yield algae farms recycle carbon dioxide from flue gases to produce biofuels and feed, reducing net carbon dioxide production as waste becomes profit. Harvesting algae for biofuels enhances domestic fuel production while mitigating CO2,” reads their website.

Greentech media now reports that the company claims to have fallen victim to the economic times: "We are closing doors. We are a victim of the economy," the report has venture capitalist Duncan McIntyre saying.

GreenFuel has had problems in the past when its algae over ran and they couldn’t control production. But the company seems to have been adept at raising money, although the last round, $13.9 million came over a year ago.

The hopes of a world fuelled by green slime are not over, though. Plenty other algae projects are still in existence. In late April, the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology opened, an academic and commercial collaboration. In New Zealand Aquaflow continues its open-air production and in Colorado, Solix does the same in tanks. Both these companies, as well as GreenFuel were highlighted in an article from last year looking specifically at 15 algae companies.

It will be interesting to watch progress of these other companies in these challenging credit crunch times.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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European Commission plans to create a new department for energy and climate change have been criticised by members of the European Parliament (MEPs), the European Voice reports.

In a letter to Jose Manuel Barosso, the president of the Commission, the MEPs say they are “astonished” that the new department may be established. They express concern that combining energy and climate change in one department presents “a risk that short term economic interest would interfere and conflict with the aim of designing effective and sustainable climate priorities”.

Currently energy and climate change are dealt with in separate directorates.

The MEPs also fear that “internal speculation” within the Commission about the new directorate and its responsibilities could be “highly damaging” to the EU’s preparations and performance in the climate change negotiations due to take in Copenhagen, Denmark in December this year.

Last year, the EU Observer reported that detailed proposals for the scope and structure for the new directorate would be expected by 1 May.

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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With the help of some carefully chosen words to the Daily Mail and a belated "Oops, I've said too much" to the Wall Street Journal, a team of researchers and public relations virtuosos have attracted extraordinary attention to a primate find.

Philip Gingerich, the Director of the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology and Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo will reportedly publish a peer-reviewed article about a new primate skeleton found in Germany with the Public Library of Science tomorrow. The timing coincides with the opening of a related exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York hosted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a BBC documentary hosted by Sir David Attenborough, according to the Wall Street Journal and Daily Mail articles.

Continue reading "Missing link, evidence thereof" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Q+A: Mapping the world's oldest submerged town
Underwater archaeologist Jon Henderson is hoping to reveal the secrets of the ancient Greek town of Pavlopetri.

Q&A: Defending basic research in Israel
The country's science minister speaks out on proposed budget cuts.

Thoughts of money soothe social rejection
Handling cash also eases physical pain.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

Is it possible to catch a sexually transmitted disease from a transplant of reproductive-tract tissue? That gross-out possibility doesn't seem too likely, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was advised this week.

A panel of expert advisers to the US regulatory agency said on 14 May that, while rigorous data are lacking, epidemiologic and anecdotal evidence suggests that the transmission of Chlamydia trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae through products like amniotic membrane transplants used in eye surgery (pictured) are exceedingly slight.

“Any potential for transmission with these products would seem to be very low-- acceptably low,” said panel member Emily Erbelding, an infectious-disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Continue reading "One way you'll probably never catch an STD" »

Posted by Alex Witze
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“We took this very seriously, but the evidence suggests that this is a naturally occurring virus, not a laboratory-derived virus.”
Keiji Fukuda, WHO deputy director general, rejects suggestions that the current H1N1 virus came from a lab (NY Times).

“This is the first evidence that monkeys, like people, have ‘would-have, could-have, should-have’ thoughts.”
Ben Hayden, of Duke University Medical Center, comments on new research published in Science (AFP).

“The long-term impact of West Antarctica is not be [sic] as serious as previously believed. But 17 million people in Bangladesh alone would be displaced by a sea level rise of 1.5 metres.”
Jonathan Bamber, of Bristol University, says melting of Antarctica’s ice sheet won’t be quite as bad as we thought, although it will still be pretty bad (Reuters).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It is all too common to hear complaints that there are not enough women in science. Yesterday, Europe’s research commissioner warned an audience in Prague that, “It’s a little like being a magician - take a look at the upper levels of the occupational ladder in science and technology: women disappear!”

Janez Potocnik, along with many before him, points out that there is a ‘leaky pipeline’. While many women pass through universities at the lower levels, relatively few make it to lofty positions.

Potocnik was not just in Prague to re-state previous wisdom though.

Continue reading "Women in science and Europe" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It’s a busy day for NASA. First up it seems the space agency may finally be getting a new boss (see Bolden tipped for NASA top job, for more on that).

Then there’s the shuttle mission to repair the Hubble telescope. The second of five spacewalks is underway today to swap out old components for new shiny ones to get the telescope back seeing clearly.

NASA has released this rather cool image of the shuttle Atlantis silhouetted against the Sun on Tuesday (photo by NASA/Thierry Legault). More importantly, the first use of Twitter in space has been reported.

Problems with the aging shuttle are also surfacing. NASA says that one of the ‘flash evaporators’ that help cool the shuttle has had to be shut down, although this does not pose “an immediate concern”. This isn’t the first time a shuttle has had this problem either. NASA also says damage one of the shuttle’s wings incurred during launch is no cause for concern (Houston Chronicle).

Once the shuttle and its repair bill is gone, NASA will have another big bill to foot though.

Russia has announced it will be charging America $51 million per return flight for each astronaut that it flies to the space station from 2012, reports Reuters. This is a pretty sharp hike from the $21.8 million that it has charged since 2006 and the $35 million it charges space tourists. No news on how much a one way ticket costs was available.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Anjali Nayar

Volcanoes in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo could erupt “any day now,” razing the city of Goma with lava and poisoning the air with methane and carbon dioxide, says Dieudonné Wafula, the head scientist at Goma’s Volcano Observatory (OVG).

In the last few weeks, the OVG has recorded a sharp increase in the activity of the Nyamuragira and Nyiragongo volcanoes (see USGS map), including increased local temperatures, tremors and larger than usual plumes of gas and volcanic dust.

The Nyamuragira and Nyiragongo volcanoes last erupted in 2002, forcing 300,000 people to flee lava flows in central Goma city, says Michel Halbwachs, a volcanologist from the University of Savoie, in an official report on the eruptions.

But the real worry is that an eruption could destabilize the deep waters of Lake Kivu, 18 km away on DRC’s border with Rwanda, releasing lethal doses of carbon dioxide and methane gas.

Continue reading "Deadly volcano threatens DRC" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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There seems to be one easy way to get a top public health spot in the new US administration: be a leading official in the New York health department. Today, President Barack Obama announced that he had appointed the current health commissioner in New York City, Thomas Frieden, to head the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The person who was the New York health commissioner between 1992 and 1997, Peggy Hamburg, is currently awaiting confirmation as the nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration.

Friedman's background includes extensive experience in various areas of public health, from fighting tuberculosis in India to working on tobacco control in New York City. He worked for the CDC between 1990 and 2002, including a stint in its Epidemiologic Intelligence Service, the crack team that investigates emerging infectious disease worldwide. A Newsday profile published in 2002 details his workaholic habits. A 2006 Nature Medicine profile also delves into his record in New York.

He takes over an agency not exactly in crisis but somewhat limping along; some had accused the previous CDC director, Julie Geberding, of politicizing the agency's scientific work. However, many experts have praised the CDC's response to the recent swine flu outbreak. More than 4,200 cases have been confirmed within US borders, including three deaths.

Richard Besser, the acting director for the CDC who has been handling most of the swine flu press briefings, will stay on at the agency in his job running its office for terrorism preparedness and emergency response.

Some AIDS activists have challenged Frieden's potential appointment before. They oppose his efforts to drop a reporting requirement -- instituted in the early days of the AIDS epidemic -- that means potentially HIV-infected patients need to provide written consent and get counseling before getting an AIDS test. Many public health experts think this step is today unnecessary paperwork, but some activists support the mandatory counseling part of it.

The position of surgeon general is still open. Any former New York health commissioners out there interested?

Posted by Alex Witze
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Former astronaut and retired Marine Charles Bolden will likely meet with US President Barack Obama on Monday to discuss taking the helm at NASA, reports NBC. The US space agency has had no clear leadership candidate since Obama's inauguration.

A pair of Air Force generals were under consideration, reports the Wall Street Journal, but one bowed out and members of Congress complained about another because he lacked NASA experience. Bolden, whose name came up in early discussions for the role, flew on 4 shuttle missions in the 1980s and 1990s, including the mission that placed the Hubble space telescope in orbit. He returned to the Marines in 1994, according to his NASA biography.

Bolden was selected in part "because of his earlier space experience and compelling personal story of an African American who rose from humble beginnings to senior military posts," writes the Journal. US Senator and fellow former astronaut Bill Nelson (Democrat, Florida) told NBC that "Charlie's credentials are top-notch." Bolden also has the support of NASA's last administrator Michael Griffin, who stepped down in January. Griffin told NBC that Bolden is "perfect" for the role.

Photo: NASA

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Pfizer has announced plans to give free drugs to people who have lost their jobs following the credit crunch.

A new programme titled Medicines Assistance for Those who Are in Need (Maintain) will give 12 month supplies of medication to Americans in financial hardship who lose their jobs and their health insurance this year. This will presumably include the hundreds of scientists Pfizer is itself laying off.

“We all know people who have been laid off recently and have lost their health insurance, making it difficult for them to pay for health care,” says Jorge Puente, the company’s regional president of Worldwide Pharmaceuticals. “We thought there must be some way we could help recently unemployed people who are taking Pfizer medicines to continue treatment during these challenging economic times.”

Over 70 drugs are on the free list, including Viagra and cholesterol medication Lipitor.

“Pharma’s obviously always trying to work on their image. It gets them to be able to say, ‘We can help out in a recession and help people afford our drugs.’” Jon LeCroy, an analyst with Natixis Bleichroeder, told the WSJ. The Journal also highlights schemes from Abbott and Merck to help the needy.

Bizarrely, earlier this week GlakoSmithKline nixed claims that it was planning to offer a 50% discount on medicines to the uninsured. Those claims were based on a press release issued in error, said the company (see: FiercePharma).

Image: detail from ‘Maintain’ application form

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“It turned out the sub-bottom is like an inky sand art. Or a Chinese brush painting of mountains.”
Melissa Clarke, a graphic artist in Brooklyn, describes making art based on scientific measurements of the Hudson River (Columbia University State of the Planet blog).

“In an era when a 5 per cent treatment effect over placebo is considered a perfectly acceptable basis to market multi-billion dollar drugs, why should poor old Mrs Putt have to demonstrate such a high threshold of effectiveness?”
Julie Robotham, of the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, playfully sides with a ‘psychic’ who failed to demonstrate her powers in a recent test.

“The medical profession has to wake up if we're going to save billions of lives. … Being a climatologist and jumping up and down pulling my hair out and saying 'we're all going to die in a horrible way' does not work.”
Climatologist Mark Maslin explains why medical journal the Lancet has got together with medics to call climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st Century” (BBC).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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1,227, or 12 percent, of all known bird species are threatened with extinction, and 192 are critically endangered, according to a 14 May update to the Red List of species at risk, which is produced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

There’s not much change on last year’s bird survey, which is performed for IUCN every year by BirdLife International. (The entire Red List is updated separately in the autumn). But in the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a Galapagos medium tree-finch (Camarhynchus pauper) has been upgraded to “critically endangered”, partly as a result of an introduced parasitic fly. Eight other species have also been uplisted to this category – two being the only novel additions to the list: the gorgeted puffleg (Eriocnemis isabellae, pictured), and the antioquia brush-finch (Atlapetes blancae), both from Colombia.

There were some conservation success stories, however.

Continue reading "Birds in trouble" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Russia is banging its Arctic war drums again this week, with the release of a report warning that it cannot rule out “problems that involve the use of military force” along its borders.

The strategy document was approved on Tuesday by President Dmitry Medvedev (Reuters, CanWest News).

Other nations, including Canada and the United States, are eyeing up potential oil resources under the Arctic. Thinning sea ice and a UN convention that allows countries to claim rights to the sea floor if they can fulfil certain criteria are also raising the frequency of sabre rattling over the cold region.

“The Russians have been talking very co-operatively, but they have been backing it up with an increasingly strong military set of actions,” Rob Huebert, a University of Calgary political scientist, told CanWest. “You mix uncertain boundaries with major powers and massive amounts of oil and gas, and you always get difficult international circumstances.”

The Times opines that “Unlike the Antarctic, there is still no international treaty governing the Arctic. There should be. What the Arctic urgently needs is a fleet of lawyers, not a fleet of gunboats.”

(From the Times, see also: Kremlin keeps up James Bond theme with talk of Arctic war.)

Previous Nature coverage of this topic
Norway’s undersea dominions just got larger – 16 April 2009
Europe crashes the Arctic party – 21 November 2008
Arctic cold war gets hotter again – 13 August 2008
Arctic mapping redraws borders – 15 February 2008
Mapping the Arctic dispute – 06 August 2008
Sea floor claims madness – 21 April 2008
Climate change ‘could lead to conflict with Russia’ – 10 March 2008
Russian pole stunt’s American origin – 19 February 2008
News Feature: The next land rush – 2 January 2008

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Australia’s new budget was announced earlier this week, bringing with it smiles for researchers. The new budget for science in 2009/10 is 8.6 billion Australian dollars (£4.3 bn).

“This is an historic budget for science, education and innovation, with a record spend in this area representing a 25% increase on last year, the highest annual increase since records began,” says Ken Baldwin, president of the Federation of Australian Science and Technological Societies (ABC News).

Continue reading "Australian scientists celebrate cash boost" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week we discover a 35,000 year-old figurine with exaggerated breasts, look back to the origins of RNA, look forward to a new light source that could replace ugly fluorescent strip lights, and we ask: is free will an illusion?

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Hubble servicing mission has been buzzed by debris left over from a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite weapon test. The debris flew within about 2.8 km of the space shuttle Atlantis, which is currently working to install new instruments and gyroscopes on the telescope.

As we noted some months ago, satellite debris is a very real risk for the Hubble servicing mission. The amount of debris in space has increased dramatically over the past few years—first because of the Chinese anti satellite test, and then due to the collision of two satellites in February. Most of that debris is well above the International Space Station, where the shuttle usually travels, but other pieces have entered similar orbits to that of Hubble, which is at a higher altitude.

Shuttle program managers had at first put the risk of a collision at 1 in 185, below the nominal 1 in 200 safety limit. After a more detailed analysis, Nasa's orbital debris revised that downward to 1 in 229, although the portion of the mission that takes place at Hubble altitudes carries a somewhat higher risk.

Nasa is watching the situation carefully with both Air Force and Nasa tracking stations around the globe. They notified the crew that the 10 cm piece of debris would pass by at around 7:30 Eastern Time yesterday.

In this particular case, no evasive action was necessary, and the mission continues apace: astronauts are already undertaking the first spacewalk to rejuvenate the aging telescope (see right).

Image: Nasa

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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The US Food and Drugs Administration is getting serious flack today from commentators (Eye on FDA, Testcountry) over a 5 May warning letter telling General Mills that the popular cereal's health claims are too drug-like.

A two-year-old marketing campaign claims that Cheerios can reduce cholesterol by 4% in 6 weeks. The FDA, which was responding to a complaint by the National Consumers League, had the option to send a less severe informal letter asking the company to change its labelling, according to the Eye on FDA posting.

Another federal body, the Federal Trade Commission told Kellogg's earlier this year to stop claims that Frosted Mini-Wheats improved children's attention spans, reports Bloomberg.

The FDA, which is reportedly trying to make its image more consumer-friendly under the new White House administration, may be suffering from internal growing pains. Officials at the agency's headquarters "did not know, they were upset and said this was a field office that was freelancing," a former FDA official told AdvertisingAge. A spokesperson for the agency who would not comment on the fracas directly told AdvertisingAge that "warning letters speak for themselves."

Image: screenshot of Cheerios website earlier today.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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The two European spacecraft set to begin their missions today have just been successfully shoved off the planet by an Ariane 5 rocket. Herschel will look at far-infrared signatures of stars as they form, and Planck will be able to claim the title of coldest thing in the galaxy while it maps the cosmic microwave background.

The launch, from Kourou, French Guiana, went off without a hitch and streamed live by the European space agency.

Read more about the missions here and here.

Congratulations ESA and Ariane Space!

Image: ESA/CNES/ARIANESPACE

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Q&A: Marie-Paule Kieny
The vaccine research director of the World Health Organization, on swine flu.

RNA world easier to make
Ingenious chemistry shows how nucleotides may have formed in the primordial soup.

Ancient Venus rewrites history books
Female figure was carved from a mammoth tusk 35,000 years ago.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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We reported earlier that Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced an agreement on climate legislation. They are now posting some of the details, sector by sector, on the committee website. The full committee plans to take up on the legislation on Monday.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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Posted for Anjali Nayar

New initiatives to save tropical forests and curb climate change could marginalize forest communities, according to a report by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

A priority of this year’s UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen is to conclude a global agreement on cutting greenhouse gasses for the period after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires.

One of the pressing issues is whether to make mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) eligible for carbon credits on the carbon market. The idea is that in addition to cutting in-country emissions, rich nations can buy credits from the market to meet their agreed targets. In turn, developing countries can earn money simply by keeping their forests standing, rather than cutting them down.

The importance of tropical forests in the global carbon cycle is well established; they store between 40–50% of carbon in terrestrial vegetation and annually process about six times more carbon through photosynthesis and respiration than human emissions from fossil fuels. According to the IPCC, current deforestation and forest degradation (mostly in the tropics) account for almost a third of all the human emissions of carbon dioxide.

But as the IIED report suggests, including REDD credits in the carbon market could feasibly cause land disputes by making forested land profitable enough that corrupt governments take it away from forest communities. The report argues that a well-established system of “rights, rules, institutions and processes regulating the access and use of [forested lands]” will affect how REDD strategies benefit or marginalize forest communities.

Continue reading "Seeing REDD over forest management" »

Posted by Mark Peplow
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The Hubble Space Telescope is in the grasp of the Space Shuttle! The picture here, from NASA TV, shows Hubble from the perspective of the shuttle, minutes before the orbits aligned and astronauts reached out with a robotic arm. A clock on the screen counted down to "The Grapple". Hubble is now safely within the bay of the shuttle. Tomorrow, astronauts will begin spacewalks in an effort to repair the aging telescope. Florida Today's Flame Trench blog has more.
Image: NASA TV

Posted by Eric Hand
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Five cancer patients and a host of activists, clinicians, and researchers are suing a biopharmaceutical company, the University of Utah Research Foundation, and the US patent office over the right to patent genes. The lawsuit has the hallmarks of a landmark case with possible implications for the practice of patenting genes, according to the New York Times.

"It is absolutely our intent that upon victory this will rend invalid patents on many other genes," Dan Ravicher a patent law professor at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law who is involved with the case, told CNN. "We just had to pick one case as our case."

The company, Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City, Utah, markets a genetic test for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The mutations are associated with an increased risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation holds patents on the genes, and plaintiffs argue the genetic tests could be done faster and cheaper if other companies were allowed to test for the mutations. One patient said she wanted a second opinion after receiving a positive test result, but then found that no one else could provide the test.

Gene patents have long been controversial, and the BRCA patents were particularly contentious. (For an example, see ‘Europe to pay royalties for cancer gene’). Although a 2006 National Academy of Sciences report found that patenting genes has done little to limit innovation, others worry that the practice will become more troublesome as the era of personalized genomics brings a flurry of new genetic tests. (For more on this, check out Nature’s recent coverage of the gene patent debate here and here.)

Posted by Heidi Ledford
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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.

This morning the World Health Organisation confirmed that over 5,000 swine flu cases have been reported. The number of countries reporting H1N1 has reached 33 and the death toll is now 61.

Confirmation of a second case in mainland China is raising fears of an Asian outbreak, reports Forbes.

The WHO is also warning countries to conserve anti-flu drugs for those patients most at risk. AP reports:

A WHO medical expert, Dr. Nikki Shindo, said the U.N. agency thinks antivirals should be targeted mainly at people already suffering from other diseases or complications — such as pregnancy — that can lower a body's defences against flu.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said pregnant women in particular should take the drugs if they are diagnosed with swine flu — even though the effects on the foetus are not completely known.

In the Netherlands, the virus isolated from one infected person has an “intriguing mutation”, reports ScienceInsider. The change in the PB2 gene could make this version of the flu better at human-to-human transmission.

It could also be a red herring, says the blog.

Image Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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House Democrats announced Tuesday that they are close to a preliminary agreement on US climate legislation, meaning the Energy and Commerce Committee could complete its work on schedule next week.

Reuters reports, via the Washington Post, that the deal would ease the requirement for reducing overall emissions from 20 to 17 percent by 2020. The language would also allow upward of 35 percent of the emissions allowances to be given away for free to utilities in the early years.

Obama, Democratic leadership and most economists think a 100 percent auction is wisest because each company must then pays for the right to pollute, but news of a compromise on these principles is hardly surprising. This is one easy place for political bargains to be struck with lawmakers who want to protect one industry or another in their state.

Meanwhile, Greenwire is reporting that Committee Democrats have also reached a deal on a renewable electricity standard, long a top priority among environmentalists. Many set their sites on 25 percent by 2025, but the House language would apparently reduce that to 20 percent and allow a quarter of the requirement to be met through improvements in energy efficiency.

Continue reading "House Democrats report progress on climate" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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Asteroid impact may have gassed Earth
Did dinosaur-killing space rock create enough carbon monoxide to trigger extreme global warming?

Erupting gas may cause lunar flashes
Eyewitness reports of flickering Moon lights stand up to scrutiny.

Q+A: The way forwards for Britain's environment policy
Bob Watson, the UK environment department's chief scientist, discusses research priorities.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which regulates animal research in the US, has found animal welfare lapses at the New Iberia Research Centre.

The Humane Society carried out an undercover investigation of the centre, which is run by the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, and filed a complaint to the USDA, according to a statement . The Humane Society investigator claimed to have recorded videos of animal handlers allowing sedated primates to fall to the ground, and video of animals with open wounds.

The USDA confirmed that a March inspection found "evidence of several issues with the facility’s compliance with Animal Welfare Act (AWA) standards" and problems with "review and approval of research protocols." This included a number of African Green Monkeys whose tails had been amputated due to trauma or frostbite, reports The Scientist, in part because their enclosure was inadequately heated.

Violators of the Animal Welfare Act can get warning letters, fines or lose their licenses. In this case, the USDA is working with the centre administrators to improve animal care standards. A follow-up visit in late April found that most of the issues identified on the USDA's March visit had been addressed.

Previous coverage on The Great Beyond: Primate mistreatment allegations at Louisiana research lab - March 05, 2009

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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For anybody under the impression that Barack Obama has overcome all opposition and instilled a general sense of agreement on climate regulation throughout the many halls of U.S. government, this White House memo will come as shocking news. (Fair warning: Those who suspected that Obama might need a little time to impose complete order might be less surprised.)

For background, regulatory proposals in the United States generally go through a round of inter-agency review coordinated by the White House Office of Management and Budget. And so it was with the Environmental Protection Agency, which proposed last month to formally declare greenhouse gases a danger to "public health and welfare," thereby opening the door to direct regulation under the Clean Air Act.

A record of that process, titled "Deliberative-Attorney Client Privilege" and filed under OMB's name, surfaced with much fanfare during a Senate hearing today. The document, which acknowledges that regulating greenhouse gases would have "serious economic consequences," has been hailed as the "smoking gun" memo by Republican senators. House Republican Leader John Boehner says the memo is evidence that EPA put "special-interests ahead of middle-class families and small businesses."

Continue reading "White House memo reveals rifts on climate regulations" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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“This innovation sounds like it could be really useful to help people learn what they are looking at. It will be interesting to see how much the camera on the phones will be able to pick up.”
Carolin Crawford, of Cambridge University’s institute of astronomy, comments on Google’s latest toy, which will identify stars and planets via users’ mobile phone cameras (Times).

“It was stunning. I don't know if I was surprised or simply blown away by what we came across.”
Kirk Olson, of the University of Massachusetts, has seen a mega-herd of Mongolian gazelles gathering (BBC).

“The blue whale, the biggest animal that has ever inhabited the planet, seems to be on the move in the Pacific Ocean in ways that could reflect the revival of old migratory patterns disrupted by decades of intensive whaling in the 20th century.”
Andrew Revkin, of the New York Times, reports on a new study published in Marine Mammal Research.

“[Carbofuran] can over-stimulate the nervous system, causing nausea, dizziness, confusion and, at very high exposures, respiratory paralysis and death.”
The EPA comments on the pesticide carbofuran, which it has just banned (AP).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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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.

The first Nordic nation to report swine flu is Finland. “There are 2 confirmed cases,” says Juhani Eskola, deputy director general at the National Institute for Health and Welfare (Reuters).

Thailand has also reported an H1N1 sufferer, although all these new cases are people recently returned from Mexico, reports PA.

In China authorities are now attempting to quarantine all passengers who were on a flight with the first case reported on the mainland. The Wall Street Journal reports:

About 120 of the 143 passengers on the flight from Tokyo have been contacted, including several dozen foreign nationals. So far, none are known to have symptoms, but the officials said they were "persuading them to take quarantine measures." It was unclear how many are already in quarantine.

If some of the more dire predictions come true, we may have cause to offer some rare praise for big pharma. Roche has announced that it is donating 5.65 million course of its antiviral Tamiflu to the WHO.

Finally, the journal Science has produced a rapid analysis of swine flu which is getting a lot of press. You can read Nature’s coverage here.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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All Nature’s swine flu coverage is collected on our news special page.

Posted for Declan Butler

French scientists this week proposed an international scheme to monitor closely how the new H1N1 swine flu associated strain behaves in the population. The proposal was presented a meeting of flu scientists in Rennes yesterday by Antoine Flahault, dean of the French School of Public Health, which is based in Rennes and Paris.

The proposal suggests creating within three months a system to track the impact of the new flu strain in a standardized way in 1,000 households in as many countries as possible, with surveillance continuing until at least the end of 2010. It suggests the World Health Organization might be one appropriate coordinator.

Under the proposal, the network would report in almost real time basic epidemiological variables such as the proportion of the cohort infected, ill, and asymptomatic, as well as clinical data on case severity and symptoms. The network would also look at such things as local antiviral availability, and precautions being taken.

Continue reading "Wanted: 1,000s of households for H1N1 study" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Spirit, the Mars rover recently troubled by memory loss, seems to have been trying its hand at wheel spins, but has become stuck in the mud.

The rover was rovering towards a pair of volcanic features named Von Braun and Goddard (Seattle Times) when it hit soft sand. As anyone who has tried to drive a car out of a muddy field will know trying to move often has the opposite effect, and it seems that Spirit’s controllers’ efforts to drive the rover out have actually embedded its five functioning wheels further. In fact the rover might have dug itself in so far that its belly is touching the rocks under the sand.

But at least it means that NASA scientists get a chance to play in a huge sandpit (press release). For the next few weeks, rover scientists are going to try and recreate the ground near Spirit and using a replica rover will try and find some way of manoeuvring the actual rover out of its sticky spot.

Until then, the rover will stay put. In fact, this could turn out to be the ultimate fate for Spirit. “If it is unable to move, Spirit could still perform some science, at least until winter arrives, when the sun is low on the horizon. It just wouldn't be a rover anymore,” the LA Times says.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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While Reporters Without Borders celebrates the release of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, Physicians for Human Rights are holding a virtual and live vigil today to draw attention to the continued imprisonment of Iranian doctors Kamiar and Arash Alaei.

The brothers’ HIV relief work landed them in an Iranian prison in June 2008. They were charged and later convicted of “communications with an enemy government” and “seeking to overthrow the Iranian government under article 508 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code” this winter according to the vigil website.

The doctors, who studied and have attended conferences in the US, had distributed condoms and clean needles in Iranian prisons to curtail HIV transmission.

Saberi's conviction ("cooperating with a hostile state" ) was overthrown on the grounds that the United States is not hostile to Iran, according to an editorial in the Boston Globe. The reversal has diplomatic overtones, writes the Globe, which should also apply to the doctors.

Previous Nature coverage of this topic
An appeal to President Ahmadinejad - Nature Editorial, 29 January 2009
Iranian AIDS doctors' trial draws condemnation - Nature, 28 January 2009
Iran puts leading HIV scientists on trial - The Great Beyond, 07 January 2009
Iran holds AIDS doctors - Nature, 17 September 2008

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Quirin Schiermeier

The World Ocean Conference in Manado, Indonesia, opened yesterday with an appeal to the world to act on climate change now. Climate change threatens ocean ecosystems, food security and economic development alike, Indonesia’s Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries said in his opening speech (Xinhuanet).

But when it got down to the political nitty-gritty agreement wasn’t easy to find.

Indonesia hopes that under a new climate agreement it might get credit (and funding) for protecting its vast ocean territory, reports the German Press Agency DPA.

The idea failed to impress scientists. "To get credit for preserving the ocean or avoiding deforestation is like getting credit for not beating your wife," Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, told DPA.

Scientists and officials from over 70 countries have come to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for the five-day meeting, touted as the first major global talks on the role of oceans in mitigating climate change and global warming.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This morning the crew of the Shuttle Atlantis woke in space to the dulcet sounds of US band 3 Doors Down performing ‘Kryptonite’. Having recovered from that, they had to get on with the day's tasks of checking the shuttle’s heat shield for damage sustained during yesterday’s launch and getting ready for tomorrow’s rendezvous with the Hubble telescope.

This photo shows the shuttle’s launch reflected in the glasses of NASA Acting Administrator Christopher Scolese (see detail).

For more on the work that this mission will be doing on the super-scope check out NASA’s interactive Hubble repair feature.

See also
Previous Great Beyond posts on this mission.

Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Synthetic biology gets ethical
UK centre hopes to blend science, policy and outreach in burgeoning field.

Swine flu spread matches previous flu pandemics
New analysis supports pandemic designation.

How thalidomide makes its mark
Drug's effects on embryonic blood-vessel growth may be the source of malformed limbs.

Making war not love
Fiercest warriors in Amazon tribe left fewer descendants.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Clinical cancer research is often conducted by scientists with conflicts of interest, such as ties to the company making a drug tested in a study. And studies conducted by conflicted researchers are more likely to report positive findings, researchers reported yesterday.

The findings come from a study led by Reshma Jagsi of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who published her results in the journal Cancer.

Jagsi and her colleagues studied 1,534 cancer research reports published in eight top journals in 2006. Twenty-nine percent of the studies appeared to have a conflict of interest. However, only 17 percent disclosed a conflict of interest. And randomized clinical trials that measured a treatment's impact on patient survival were more likely to report positive results if a conflicted researcher was involved with the study, Jagsi's team found.

Continue reading "Cancer studies sometimes conceal conflicts" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden
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Posted for Anjali Nayar

The EU signed a deal with the Republic of Congo last week to help fight illegal logging.

Starting in 2011, any timber or timber product entering the EU from Congo will need a licence showing it has been legally harvested, maintains the health of the forests and provides benefits to local forest communities. The agreement, called the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA), is the second of its kind in Africa.

Ghana signed a similar deal with the EU in September 2008 and several other countries are in VPA negotiations, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Cameroon and Gabon and recently, Liberia.

Congo exports about USD $330 million of timber and timber products every year, about half of which is purchased by EU countries. Some estimates suggest that poor regulation costs the country millions in lost revenue though.

“With a total of 4,674,320 acres of certified forests as of March 2009, Congo has reached the highest echelon of tropical wood producing countries and is becoming a laboratory for sustainable forest management,” says Henri Djombo, Congo's Minister of Forest Economy (press release).

Although the VPA is relatively new, some environmentalists are already concerned that the agreement won’t be able to prevent illegal harvest from being sold to non-EU countries, processed, and re-sold to the EU.

Image: timber in the Republic of Congo / Mr. Moussoki

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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China is under attack from a battalion of mystery worms. The plague of hungry wigglers has devastated large areas of China’s Xinjian region, in the northwest of the country.

The worms are “2-cm (1 inch) long, thorny green worm with black stripes” according to Reuters.

These beastly creepy crawlies are crammed in, up to 3000 per square meter. They chomp through grass leaving behind them nothing but churned up soil. "The way they eat grass is like rolling a carpet," Zhang Xisham, a grassland management official told Xinhua. If you can bear to witness the sinister scene, look here.

The worms have not yet been identified, but could be moth larvae. They are currently being tested at Xinjiang Agricultural University on Friday. The devastation has forced 50 families to abandon their grassland where they herd livestock.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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As the Space Shuttle Atlantis sits ready on the launch pad for its servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are remembering one instrument that will soon be no more.

The Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) onboard the telescope will soon be decommissioned. Hubble’s team has released one last ‘pretty picture’ from it: planetary nebula Kohoutek 4-55, 4,600 light-years away.

The colours show emission clouds: red = nitrogen, green = hydrogen, and blue = oxygen.

On the Democratic Underground website, 'Shireen' writes:

The last Hubble servicing mission, scheduled to be launched on Monday afternoon, will be bitter-sweet for me. I've worked in WFPC2 technical support for more than 14 years and become very fond of this camera.

WFPC2 was installed in 1993 and will be replaced later this week by the Wide Field Camera III. … But my heart will always be with WFPC2, a very remarkable and resilient camera, built by the good people at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

Image right: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Image left: NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Pharma companies Merck and GSK are squaring up for a fight, with rival products vying for a slice of the controversial cervical cancer vaccine market.

Merck’s Gardasil has already been on the market for a while, and the company last week unveiled results showing that it can protect for over eight years, extending the known protection time.

GSK meanwhile unveiled a study on its product Cervarix, which it claims shows it to be better than Gardasil. Cervarix has yet to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, although it is used in other countries.

The whole issue of vaccinating against cervical cancer has been controversial. Both Merck and GSK’s vaccines actually protect against Human papillomavirus (HPV) , which can cause the cancer. Some groups, mainly on the political right, fear that vaccinating young people against STDs may encourage promiscuity, although the US Centres for Disease Control recommends vaccination for all 11 and 12 year old girls.

According to the Wall Street Journal, $1.4 billion of Gardasil sold last year, while GSK moved about $231 million-worth of Cervarix. As Mike Huckman notes on MSNBC’s Pharma’s Market blog, which vaccine works best is only one part of the fight.

“Sales of Gardasil are going down,” he writes. “By its own admission, Merck is having a tough time getting females in their late teens and early- to mid-20s to get the set of three shots.

“It’s hoping to find a way to break through with that population and to win approval of the vaccine for older women and males to reignite sales growth. And Glaxo will be late getting into the game.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A member of the US military’s Human Terrain programme has avoided jail time after being sentenced last week for shooting a restrained Afghan man in the head.

Don Ayala, a contractor on the controversial military social sciences programme, previously pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Although this crime would normally carry up to eight years of jail time, AP reports, he instead received a $12,500 fine and five years on probation.

Nature has previously called for the programme to be reformed or scrapped, noting, “Questions have been raised about how well the programme vets its employees. Some scientists who have joined the system have complained about inadequate training. And qualified researchers have been dismissed for seemingly trivial reasons, even though much more questionable people seem to breeze onto the payroll.”

Ayala killed Abdul Salam in Afghanistan in November 2008, minutes after an incident in which Salam attacked Human Terrain researcher Paula Loyd, setting her on fire. Loyd later died of her injuries.

On Friday, the New Orleans Times Picayune reported:

There were tears and sighs of relief from friends and supporters of Don Ayala, 46, of New Orleans, when District Court Judge Claude Hilton announced a sentence of five years probation. Hilton said he is sympathetic to the horror Ayala experienced after learning social scientist Paula Loyd had been attacked.

The Human Terrain programme has been mired in controversy. In addition to the death of Loyd and Salam, two other members have been killed in action.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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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.

The WHO has confirmed the first swine flu death outside of the US and Mexico was the Canadian victim reported last week.

A death has also been confirmed in Costa Rica. In Mexico 48 people have died. In the US the number currently stands at three.

China has reported its first case of swine flu on the mainland. A previous case was reported in Hong Kong. Now state news agency Xinhua says a man in Sichuan Province has twice tested “weakly positive” to H1N1. This case has also been confirmed by the WHO.

Anne Schuchat, interim deputy director for science and public health of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the current sequence of the virus indicates it is not as bad as might have been feared.

“The good news so far is that the virulence markers for the 1918 and H5N1 influenza viruses do not appear in the H1N1 strain,” Schuchat says (Bloomberg).

However, she adds, “What we don’t know is whether there may be other virulence markers. Remember the first wave of the 1918 virus was mild and the next wave was devastating.”

Current WHO outbreak map:

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Count Lennart Bernadotte of didn’t quite make it to 100. He died in 2004 at the age of 95, but not before ensuring that his life’s great project had a future. Great grandson of King Oscar II who presented the first Nobel awards in Stockholm in 1901, Count Lennart launched, exactly sixty years ago, the Nobel Laureates Meeting in Lindau, a pretty but very provincial town on Lake Constance. The original aim of the weeklong meetings was to encourage isolated and struggling scientists and doctors in post-war Germany by bringing them into social contact with great living scientists from around the world.

Over the next 55 years or so, not a lot changed, even though Germany was no longer isolated or struggling. The meetings – morning lectures, afternoon discussions, evening dances - were popular but remained anachronistically provincial. By the turn of the millennium that had become unsustainable. Laureates were becoming less interested in a long trip to speak with locals at meetings primarily conducted in German, however charming the location.

In 2005, the meetings were internationalised and thrust into the modern world (Nature 436, 170-1). Now 600 hand-picked students from all around the world mingle, discuss and dance with 20 or more Nobel laureates during summer.

To commemorate the centenary of Count Lennart’s birth on 8 May, the Meetings organisers set up a science-history project to digitalise selected lectures from their archives and make them openly available on their webpage (www.lindau-nobel.de). The first eleven selected lectures are now live, more will follow in phases throughout the summer.

The cleaned up voice recordings, accompanied by an introduction and charming black-and-white photos taken in Lindau, bring legendary scientists to life – be it Rita Levi Montalcini (Physiology or Medicine, 1986) pushing her human-rights agenda, Rosalyn Yalow (Physiology or Medicine, 1977) appealing to women to help solve social problems or simply the extraordinary plumminess of the British tones of Lawrence Bragg (Physics 1915) and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964). A particular treasure is the lecture on the gravitational constant by Paul Dirac (1933, Physics). Dirac was renowned for being almost pathologically socially withdrawn. Despite this, he showed up to the first ten meetings in Lindau, where, they say, he remained almost silent aside from his lectures.

Coming soon – Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Lorenz, James Watson and other stellar personalities.

Image: Nobel Laureate Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964) and young researchers at
the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting 1986.

Posted by Alison Abbott
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Image courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Despite pressure from many environmentalists, the Obama administration upheld a Bush administration rule limiting the regulatory impact of last year's decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species.

The rule would essentially prevent the Endangered Species Act from becoming a venue for arguments about greenhouse gas emissions. And the logic is simple enough: Bear biologists hopefully have better things to do than analyze greenhouse gases from, say, a cement plant in Georgia, even if emissions from that plant contribute to global warming and the retreat of sea ice, which ultimately translates into hungry bears.

"We already are doing everything we can to protect the polar bear," US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters Friday. "The Endangered Species Act, however, is not in my view the proper mechanism for controlling our nation’s carbon emissions."

This does not necessarily mean that the administration doesn't care about climate. Indeed, Salazar reiterated Obama's call for a comprehensive regulatory regime for greenhouse gases (and presumably one that would be enforced not by biologists but the Environmental Protection Agency, which has more expertise regulating industrial airborne pollutants).

But some environmentalist groups refused to let him off the hook. Greenpeace, for instance, went so far as to cite the decision as evidence of an "emerging willingness by the Obama administration to ignore clear scientific imperatives on global warming in the face of industry pressure."

Many viewed the environmentalists' polar bear strategy as part of a broad effort to apply regulatory pressure wherever possible in hopes of forcing action at the federal level. Whether or not they challenge the polar bear rule, there's no reason to think that this debate is going to end here.

The polar bear might be the first species to receive federal protection due primarily to long-term threats posed by global warming, but the US Fish and Willdife Service is already analyzing whether similar protection should be granted for the pika, a hardy rodent that typically lives among rocks high in the mountains. Indeed, there's no end to the list of plants and animals that stand to lose their homes as the world heats up.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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The libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against science writer Simon Singh arrived in court yesterday.

Singh is being sued by the association over an article he wrote for the Guardian which was less than complimentary about the BCA. (See Chiropractors get litigious, again - August 19, 2008, also the ‘For Simon Singh and Free Speech’ Facebook timeline.)

Yesterday, the judge in the case ruled that Singh’s assertion that the BCA “promotes bogus treatments” was a statement of fact, and not comment (Index on Censorship).

Continue reading "Simon Singh loses first round in chiropractic fight" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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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.

The Canadian press is reporting a death in Alberta, which if confirmed would be the first H1N1 death outside of Mexico and the United States.

British researchers say they now have the full genetic code of H1N1.

“The pure sample of virus that we have isolated, together with its genetic fingerprint, will be important resources as scientific organisations join forces on the development of an effective vaccine,” says Maria Zambon, director of the Health Protection Agency’s Centre for Infections (BBC, Daily Telegraph). “The rapid assessment of this virus will ultimately help us to make future decisions regarding the health implications of swine flu.”

Continue reading "Swine flu round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A string of e-mails posted on the non-for-profit news site ProPublica has reignited a long-running debate on the role of psychologists in interrogation.

The e-mails relate to a 2005 document from the American Psychological Association (APA) on psychological ethics and national security. The document lays out guidelines for psychologists working for the Pentagon and other security services. Among other things the document says that psychologists must report acts of cruel or degrading treatment, but that they may consult on interrogations.

The e-mails show that psychologists actively involved with the military had a disproportionate influence on the way the guidelines were written. "These guys were writing a get out of jail free card for themselves," says Nathaniel Raymond, senior investigator at the Cambridge-based Physicians for Human Rights, which has called on the APA to investigate.

The APA calls those accusations "ill-founded". The guidelines were meant to help psychologists working in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, to navigate the ethical minefield surrounding military intelligence gathering. In that context it only makes sense that the panel would consult with those who needed guidance the most. "To allege that the APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct in the development of this task force’s report is wholly without merit," the organization said in a statement.

The Boston Globe has done a really good story on the subject here.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Q&A: Bill Chadwick
A volcanologist reveals how undersea eruptions can be a boon for some species.

Austria to quit CERN
Move will end 50-year participation in physics laboratory.

Obama requests US science funding
After a massive stimulus injection in February, requests for research monies level out.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Shell has pulled back its plans for drilling in the Arctic, but insists this does not mean the end of this controversial oil exploration.

In the face of huge opposition from environmentalists and native groups, the company has withdrawn its plans for drilling in Beaufort Sea in the 2007-2009 period and says it will be back with a more modest proposal for 2010.

“Over the last three years, Shell's Beaufort Sea drilling objectives have become more focused with the acquisition and analysis of additional seismic data,” says Pete Slaiby, Shell Alaska’s general manager (statement pdf, via KTVA). “As a result, the 2007-2009 plan no longer represents Shell’s current drilling approach.”

The NY Times Green Inc blog says the decision will be seen as a “costly setback” for the company, which spent $2.1 billion to obtain oil leases in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. However, the Financial Times Energy Source blog says:

The move is really only a formal acceptance of a position that was generally understood already: drilling this year was going to be too difficult. Shell insists, however, that this is a setback, not a defeat. In the Arctic, one of the last great frontiers for oil and gas exploration, it is playing the long game.

Last month a court ruled that the leases granted to oil companies in the Chukchi were invalid, as the US Minerals Management Service had failed to do proper environmental checks before issuing them. Slaiby said then that Shell still had “every intention of pursuing a drilling program in the Beaufort and the Chukchi” (Reuters).

Image: Beaufort Sea, by Kevin Raskoff / NOAA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for David Cyranoski

Question: What to do with all those spare Japanese postdocs?
Answer: Sell them to industry.

Japan's science and education ministry has an unemployment problem on its hands: postdocs. Efforts in the 1990s to cultivate postdocs to fill in gaps in the research environment worked--all too well--and now there are tens of thousands without work in a university system shrinking under pressures from government streamlining and declining population (declining student bodies).

Industry traditionally has not wanted to deal with postdocs, preferring to recruit straight out of university and train its R&D staff on location.

The education ministry wants to change this.

Continue reading "Pssst. Wanna buy a posutodoku?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Elsevier yesterday said the “fake journal” it published, which came to light in an Australian court case over the drug Vioxx, was one of a series. The publishing company admitted publishing five other “sponsored article compilation publications … that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures”.

The look-alike journals were funded by pharmaceutical clients including Merck, which is under investigation in the Australian court for improperly marketing drugs including Vioxx (see our previous coverage of the allegations and of Merck's defence.).

The CEO of Elsevier’s Health Sciences Division, Michael Hansen, said:

This was an unacceptable practice, and we regret that it took place.

We are currently conducting an internal review but believe this was an isolated practice from a past period in time. It does not reflect the way we operate today. The individuals involved in the project have long since left the company.

Elsevier published six such journals, according to The Scientist. Hansen added that Elsevier has "strict disclosure rules in place so that readers are aware of any financial interests behind a specific article or journal, or when entire compilation products are created for pharmaceutical marketing purposes".

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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The Obama Administration has nominated Tara O'Toole, director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, as the chief scientist for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

O'Toole is inheriting a deeply troubled programme. From its inception in 2002, the DHS S&T programme has been a bit of a mess. It's been slow to release grant money, failed to justify its spending to Congress, and lost its power to other organizations such as the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office. Morale has been low and staff turnover high.

In some sense she's perfect for the job. If confirmed, she will oversee programmes such as BioWatch, which is designed to detect biological attacks. But she's already drawing criticism over at Danger Room. Among others, George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, says that O'Toole is a scaremonger who will pander to the bio-defence industry.

We can probably look forward to some tough questions at her confirmation hearing.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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“They take a few liberties, but we can forgive them for that.”
James Gillies, a CERN spokesman, comments on forthcoming film ‘Angels & Demons’, which features the particle physics facility (Independent).

“The rapid appearance and sheer scale made us suspect it had accumulated offshore and been transported in.”
Dongyan Liu, a marine biologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Yantai, Shandong, knows where the giant algae bloom that nearly ruined the Olympic sailing in China came from (BBC).

“We have had to throw away almost all of the extant technologies that we've been using for decades.”
Chris German, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, explains the difficulties faced in constructing Nereus, the first autonomous vehicle to visit the Challenger Deep (BBC).

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

How do molecules, or nanoparticles, of many different shapes jostle together while nestling against a surface? Scientists from the University of Washington, St Louis Washington University in St Louis [press release], simulated such a situation using the seven tetrominoes of Tetris - an analogy that has been suggested before (F Cicoira and F Rosei, Surface Science Perspectives, doi:10.1016/j.susc.2005.10.063).

In the simulations (B C Barnes, D W Siderius and L D Gelb, Langmuir, doi:10.1021/la900196b) pieces from an infinite store were allowed to drop onto a flat board and shift around, but not to interact with each other (unlike real molecules). So the patterns generated simply reflect the system increasing its entropy (a measure of disorder). Even so, the scientists noted complicated clustering and that particular pieces fitted preferentially around each other - which they summarise by the old maxim "like attracts like".

Testing a number of combinations of shapes - from 'pure fluids' all the way up to a 7 component system - the researchers found that squares are easiest to surround (most 'soluble'), while rods are the hardest. "The results obtained to date may have some relevance to successful strategies for playing the Tetris computer game, but this has not been considered in detail," they say.

Ars Technica has more on this research. "Thermodynamically, how do they explain the spontaneous disappearance of a row once it has been completely, and continuously, assembled?" asks 'Vibedog'.

The researchers have been promised a show of Cossack dancing on completing their work.

Image: A four-component mixture of squares, rods, S shapes and Z shapes shows the pieces make little clusters rather than completely mixing together. Credit: Washington University, St Louis.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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The Google search engine offers a predictive function, where it will suggest things you might be looking for in advance of you completing your query. As these are at least partially based on what other people have been searching for, can they provide some insights into the way science is perceived on the interwebs? The Great Beyond investigates.

Initial results are not promising. There seems to be widespread skepticism of evolution for a start. This page is from the US version of Google:

Continue reading "Predictive search and science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Last year the European Court of Human Rights told the UK government it couldn’t keep the DNA of innocent people on its police database. Today the UK government announced how it would deal with the ruling, in a response that basically amounts to two fingers to the court.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who has already been beset by controversy this year, wants to keep DNA profiles of innocent people arrested but not convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes for 12 years. Innocent people arrested but not convicted of other crimes would be kept for six years.

Opposition party shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said, “The government just doesn’t get this. People in Britain should be innocent until proven guilty.” (Reuters.)

Civil liberties groups and opinion writers have also reacted with outrage to the proposals.

Continue reading "UK will retain DNA of innocent accused" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Selling ancient artifacts, fossils or meteorites on e-bay (like this really old mushroom) should be embraced instead of reviled, archaeologist and anthropologist Charles Stanish from the University of California, Los Angeles has decided. Fake and “missing” fossils and artifacts that occasionally show up in unexpected places have caused outcry on more than one occasion (see Paper sparks fossil fury).

In an article in Archaeology, Stanish explains how the advent of online auction houses struck fear into the heart of archaeologists because it was expected that the black market for antiquities would become huge, and looting would become rife. But, says Stanish, the opposite has happened. “A very curious thing has happened. It appears that electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the antiquities trade,” Stanish says.

At the low end of the market, he says, it began to make more sense to make fake artefacts than to go looting. These fakes would sell for a fraction of the price of the real thing, but a consequence of their presence on the market was that the real things went down in value too, making looting less lucrative. “The value of real antiquities is also impacted by the increased risk that the object for sale is a fake. The likelihood of reselling an authentic artifact for more money is diminished each year as more fakes are produced,” Stanish says, "the Web has forever distorted the antiquities trafficking market in a positive way."

When the article first came out this generated a bit of interest (New York Times blog) but has gathered more interest apace and has hit blogs and news desks elsewhere (Ars Technica , Information Week) As ever, the Register leads the headlines charge, with their Lara Croft attempt. The least catchy headline award might go to popsci.com’s Website Yields Unexpected Results in the Business of Artifacts.

Image: A forger's daughter in Peru with an example of a fake antiquity. Credit: UCLA/Charles Stanish

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.

H1N1 continues to spread and the World Health Organization has confirmed a case in Sweden and one in Guatemala.

For light relief, today we learned from Reuters that “Afghanistan’s only known pig has been locked in a room, away from visitors to Kabul zoo where it normally grazes beside deer and goats”.

On a more serious note, vaccine production is now on the cards. The WHO’s Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the Initiative for Vaccine Research, has also told pharma companies to get ready for mass vaccine production, in case it is needed.

Continue reading "Swine flu update" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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'Hobbit' was a dwarf with large feet
Studies suggest Flores man was a distinct species.

DNA twisted into boxes
Molecular keys can open tiny containers.

China joins world-class synchrotron club
Nation's costliest science facility is unveiled.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The world’s future largest ground-based space project has taken a crucial step. The team working on the Atacama Large Millimetre/sub-millimetre Array have successfully linked up two of the 66 dishes that will eventually work as one giant telescope.

ALMA is being built in the Chilean Andes and in 2011 it will begin observations in the millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths. On 30 April two of the antennas were synchronised with a precision of one millionth of a millionth of a second.

Without such synchronisation, ALMA will not be able to combine its 66 parts into one giant whole.

“We're very proud and excited to have made this crucial observation, as it proves that the various hardware components work smoothly together,” says Wolfgang Wild, the European ALMA Project Manager (press release). “This brings us another step closer to full operations for ALMA as an astronomical observatory.”

Previous Nature ALMA coverage
First antenna switches on in the Atacama - December 31 2008
Antenna arrives at Atacama array - December 19, 2008

Image: the two antennas / ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week on the Nature Podcast, we’ve got miniature hippos and even smaller hominids, birds with culture written into their genes, a lockable box made of DNA, and a tale of Two Cultures. Plus we announce the winner of our science haiku competition.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“With Anaconda, we have an invention that changes conventional thinking and it can help to meet government targets for cutting CO2 by providing renewable wave energy from our coastal waters.”
Paul Auston, chairman Checkmate Seaenergy Ltd, comments on his company’s new wave power machine (BBC).

“The international trade community all agree that this EU ban is illegal.”
Canadian MP Gerry Byrne says Europe’s ban on seal fur from his country is not on (CTV).

“We have recovered a wolf population. The populations are viable, they are in great shape, they have extreme genetic diversity and so the Endangered Species Act did its job to bring wolves back.”
Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the western state of Montana, comments on the animal’s removal from the list of endangered species in the United States (AFP).

“We generally admit a signal as being something which is newly emerged, like turning on a light bulb. However, if we have a light bulb which has been left turned on continuously, turning it off can be a good signal, too.”
Dong-Hwan Choe, of the University of California, Riverside, comments on his research showing ants produce an ‘I’m still alive’ chemical to stop colleagues throwing their bodies out of the nest (NY Times).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Via Wired, The Great Beyond has learned of a baffling cultural crosswire.

Car insurance fan and rock star Iggy Pop is apparently making a new jazz-influenced album called Preliminaires, based on the work of a science-obsessed agent provocateur of French literature.

Continue reading "Iggy Pop’s cloning project" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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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.

The first death of a US citizen with swine flu has been confirmed. The Texas Department of State Health Services says a woman with “chronic underlying health conditions” died earlier this week.

There has been one previous death outside of Mexico, when a Mexican child died while visiting Texas. In Mexico 29 people have died.

“She was a US citizen, a resident of Cameron County,” Doug McBride, spokesman for the DSHS told AFP. “My understanding is she had not had recent travel to Mexico.”

AP named the victim as Judy Trunnell, “a 33-year-old schoolteacher who had just given birth to a healthy baby girl”.

Continue reading "Swine flu update" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded 81 grants worth $100,000 (£65,000) each for research projects into unconventional approaches to tackle global health issues, such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases (Telegraph, AP, Baltimore Sun).

Among the grant recipients of five-year grants is Eric Lam at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who is exploring tomatoes as an antiviral drug delivery system.

Continue reading "Gates Foundation awards grants for unconventional projects " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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The World Meterological Organization yesterday retired Ike, Gustav, Paloma, and Alma as hurricane names, following the deaths and damage they caused in 2008.

Eastern North Pacific and Atlantic hurricane names are held on a six-year rotation, so these soubriquets would have emerged again in 2014, had they not been taken off the list. Instead, we'll see hurricanes Gonzalo, Isaias, Paulette and Amanda.

The complete list of hurricane names shows that we can expect hurricanes Claudette, Kevin, Olaf and Mindy in 2009, among others. While tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea have names quite unfamiliar to Western ears. "The main purpose of naming a tropical cyclone or hurricane is basically for people easily to understand and remember it in a region," the WMO explains.

The National Hurricane Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has a comprehensive list of retired hurricane names, beginning with Carol and Hazel in 1954.

Image: Hurricane Ike in 2008 / NASA / JPL

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Two of the world’s biggest players on the biotech scene look set for a vicious court fight over their GM crops.

Monsanto has filed suit against DuPont in a row over the former company’s ‘Roundup Ready’ GM products, which are resistant to the Roundup herbicide.

“As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. However, unlawfully taking technology is neither imitation nor flattery; it is unethical and wrong,” says Hugh Grant (not that one), Monsanto’s Chief Executive Officer (press release).

DuPont’s subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred is allowed to sell Roundup Ready soybeans and corn. Monsanto though is unhappy that Pioneer is planning on combining Roundup Ready genes with its own ‘Optimum GAT’ modifications.

Continue reading "Monsanto and DuPont trade harsh words, legal allegations" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The White House announced today that it will ask Congress to spend $63 billion on U.S. global health programs over six years. The money will be used to combat HIV/AIDS - largely though the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) – and on programs in malaria, tuberculosis, maternal and child health, family planning, and neglected tropical diseases.

President Obama will ask Congress for the money in his 2010 budget, which he is scheduled to release on 7 May.

In a statement announcing his plan, Obama cited the outbreak of H1N1 swine flu, and said, “The world is interconnected, and that demands an integrated approach to global health. [W]e have a responsibility to protect the health of our people, while saving lives, reducing suffering, and supporting the health and dignity of people everywhere.”

Continue reading "Obama to request $63 billion for global health" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden
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Francis Collins is a geneticist who is famous not only for being the former head of the US Human Genome Project--and a widely rumoured choice to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health--but for being a devout evangelical Christian.

He sees no contradiction between those roles. In his 2006 best-seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, he argued that science is perfectly compatible with religious faith, properly understood--and that faith, in particular, need not be synonymous with absolute-literal-truth-of-every-word-in-the-Bible fundamentalism. God operates through natural law, Collins declared. Humankind is the product of Darwinian evolution. And the scriptural accounts are best read metaphorically.

Collins' arguments earned him howls of derision from the more stridently atheistic quarters of science, but praise from many other parts of the research community (including a complementary editorial in Nature). Now, with funding from the John Templeton Foundation, he has launched BioLogos.org: a Web site that, in the words of its mission statement, "addresses the core themes of science and religion, and emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with what science has discovered about the origins of the universe and life."

At the heart of the site are essays that attempt to answer 33 of the most frequently asked questions about religion and science. Examples range from the basics--"What is evolution? "--to that freshman bull-session classic, "If God created the universe, what created God?" The BioLogos.org also provides reading lists and other resources. Future plans include curriculum materials for parents who are home-schooling their children, and looking for alternatives to the abundant materials provided by creationist and intelligent-design organizations.

No word yet on whether the founding of BioLogos.org will affect Collins' chances for the NIH directorship. But if his book hasn't knocked him out of contention already, it's hard to imagine this Web site will. And besides, the choice is up to US president Barack Obama, who invited televangelist Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration, and who seems to love bridging cultural divides.

Posted by Mitch Waldrop
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Following up on California's announcement last week, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed the nation's first greenhouse gas standards for biofuels on Tuesday (AP)

The much-anticipated analysis confirms that corn ethanol often increases greenhouse gas emissions compared to gasoline, largely due to the impact of indirect emissions. These result from foreign farmers cutting down forests and planting new crops in response to rising grain prices. That said, the analysis suggests that there is plenty of room for improvement in the production of corn ethanol (for instance, by switching to natural gas or biomass as a heat source during production). Corn ethanol also performs better over the long haul, gradually overcoming the initial spike in emissions due to deforestation.

EPA will use these standards to implement the US biofuels mandate, which requires companies to meet various greenhouse gas requirements as they ramp up production in the coming years. It came as part of a broader set of White House initiatives that seem to offer up a little something for everybody. The administration underscored its support for the industry by creating a high level biofuels working group, while announcing $786.5 million in stimulus funding to promote a range of biofuel research and development activities.

Environmentalists are pleased to see that the administration isn't ignoring the latest science regarding ethanol's unintended impacts. The Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol trade group, is pleased to see ample wiggle room in the way the numbers work out. And according to Reuters, investors are pleased to see that the administration isn't turning its back on biofuels altogether.

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

Every stage of the protracted movement of Europe’s new animal research legislation from proposals to statute book has attracted the ire of one group or another.

When the proposals were first announced last year researchers were outraged at what they saw as ridiculous and damaging barriers to their work. When Parliament’s agriculture committee recently amended the proposed legislation animal rights groups were outraged at what they saw as political kowtowing to business interests.

Now the full parliament has voted on the legislation. This time people on both sides get to be angry.

The majority of members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted with the agriculture committee, backing the use of non-human primates in basic research and science-friendly approaches to the re-use of animals.

Continue reading "European animal research vote generates more anger" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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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.

Canadian bacon is still safe, say Canadian health authorities who have quarantined a herd of pigs thought to have contracted swine flu from a human. This is the first report of the virus moving from humans back to pigs.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said last week:

It is highly probable that the pigs were exposed to the virus from a Canadian who had recently returned from Mexico and had been exhibiting flu-like symptoms. Signs of illness were subsequently observed in the pigs. The individual has recovered and all of the pigs are recovering or have recovered.

Yet China has banned imports of Canadian pork, reports the Financial Post. Alberta's agriculture minister said that the 2200-pig herd could still be used for food if they checked out after the 10-day quarantine. Flu is not transmissible through food, but the case does indicate that the virus could be prone to rapid mutations, according to the Globe and Mail.

Officials called the import ban, which is also in place in nearly two dozen other countries "disappointing and unfortunate," reports CTV.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK’s charming Royal Botanic Garden at Kew in London is 250 years old.

To celebrate this anniversary our hereditary ruler the Queen and her consort the Duke of Edinburgh are visiting, and the former will be presented with a new specially bred thornless rose called the Kew Gardens.

In an event the UK’s republican types will doubtless consider symbolic, the pair will also plant two living fossils at the gardens, according to the Daily Telegraph:

The Queen will plant a Ginkgo, an ancient tree known as a "living fossil" which is now native only to a small area of central China. Prince Philip will plant a Wollemi pine, also known from fossil records. It was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered in Australia in 1994 and it is now part of an international conservation programme.

It is to be hoped that these planting go better than the royal couple’s last additions to the gardens, as the Times notes:

The royal couple’s last official visit to Kew Gardens was 50 years ago for its 200th anniversary when they both planted trees. The swamp cypress planted by the Duke in front of Kew Palace is doing extremely well, but it is understood that the Queen will learn only today that the walnut tree she planted was a victim of the 1989 storms.

Even Google is getting in on the celebrations, with a special graphic on its UK homepage.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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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.

Is the worst behind us in the current swine flu outbreak? Mexico is preparing to end its H1N1 lockdown by allowing restaurants and cafes to reopen in Mexico City tomorrow.

According to the Independent, libraries, museums and churches will then open on Thursday. Mexican officials do appear to believe the worst is over, adds CNN.

In America Richard Besser, acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says, “So far, the severity of illness we’re seeing in this country is similar to what we’re seeing with seasonal flu. While we’re not out of the woods, we are seeing some encouraging signs.” (NY Times.)

However the World Health Organisation still thinks a pandemic is possible.

Its chief Margaret Chan says that moving to the highest level of the WHO scale – pandemic level 6 – was still on the cards although “we are not there yet” (AP).

She did add that, “Level six does not mean, in any way, that we are facing the end of the world. It is important to make this clear because [otherwise] when we announce level six it will cause unnecessary panic.” (El País, via the Guardian.)

Finally, a Mexican football player has been suspended by his club for expectorating at an opponent and then claiming he had swine flu.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Major league carbon emitter Australia has delayed the introduction of a cap-and-trade scheme to regulate its greenhouse gas emissions.

In order to ‘manage the impacts of the global recession’, prime minister Kevin Rudd announced on Monday 4 May, the system will be phased in from 1 July 2011, a year later than planned. Rudd had introduced draft legislation of the carbon pollution reduction scheme in March, but it has faced mounting criticism from opposition politicians.

What's more, until July 2012 permits to emit carbon dioxide will be sold at the fixed price of AU$10 (US$ 7.4) a tonne – and companies will be able to buy an unlimited number of them, so there will be no 'cap' involved.

Rudd said he still hopes to push the necessary legislation through parliament this year. He also revised the upper limit on Australia’s emissions reduction target to 25% below 2000 levels by 2020, up from 15%, depending on agreements reached at December’s UN summit in Copenhagen.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Merck began its legal defence yesterday in an Australian court case over Vioxx marketing tactics that allegedly included publishing marketing material in the guise of peer-reviewed literature.

"The relationship between Vioxx and cardiovascular risk was ... and remains contradictory and uncertain," said Merck's legal counsel Peter Garling, according to the Australian.

The case has drawn attention from scientists and doctors, some of whom have asked why anyone would agree to serve on the editorial board of a publication that contained only reprints and summaries of studies with positive conclusions about Merck-owned drugs. The publication, called The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, appears in at least one journal indexing service.

An Elsevier spokesperson told The Scientist that the "project in question was produced 6 years ago and disclosure protocols have evolved since 2003."

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Chemistry | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pharma companies could be facing billions of dollars in legal payouts as the fallout from a March ruling in the US Supreme Court makes itself felt, according to Bloomberg.

The Supreme Court ruled that Federal approval of a drug complete with listed side effects doesn’t stop people suing over side effects (see: FDA-approved warning labels won't protect companies). Bloomberg now reports that the decision has “affected more than 250 lawsuits involving at least 10 companies that were in limbo before”.

Mark Herrmann, attorney at Jones Day in Chicago, told the wire service that the decision could cost the industry billions. “There’s no way to quantify it, but the number has as many zeroes in it as attacked Pearl Harbor,” he said.

Full article: Wyeth Supreme Court Loss Breaks Drug Lawsuit Logjam.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Universities warned about swine flu threat
Government agencies in the US and UK issue advisories over flu on campus.

Age-defying dinosaur collagen
Hadrosaur, dead 80 million years, yields oldest protein yet sequenced.

Q+A: German virologist's race for swine flu test
Christian Drosten talks to Nature about tackling the threat of a pandemic.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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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.

In South Africa, one of two suspected swine flu suffers does not have the swine flu virus, influenza A (H1N1) virus. AFP says laboratory tests have confirmed that a woman recently returned from Mexico does not have the H1N1 virus. Test results are pending on the other possible case.

The virus may have reached the Republic of Ireland. Tony Holohan, chief medical officer at the country’s Department of Health, is expected to announce the results of tests on an adult male who recently returned from Mexico later today (Irish Times).

“This is a probable case which is likely to be positive,” says Bill Hall, chairman of the National Pandemic Influenza Expert Group (BBC).

Continue reading "Swine flu update" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Back in June last year Nature’s own Philip Ball reported on new research showing that a male sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball really can dance:

Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues say that Snowball’s ability to shake his stuff is much more than a cute curiosity. It could shed light on the biological bases of rhythm perception, and might even hold implications for the use of music in treating neurodegenerative disease.

Patel and colleagues videoed Snowball’s movement to music and slowly altered the tempo of his tunes. Statistical analysis showed that he was synching to the beat. Now Patel’s research has been published in Current Biology, and the world’s media has gone predictably crazy.

“People are not the only ones who've got rhythm – birds can also get into the groove claim scientists,” says the Daily Telegraph. “Parrots join humans on the dance floor,” says NPR. The Daily Mail says Snowball’s musical taste is “questionable” as he generally dances to the Backstreet Boys, a fact that has led the Sun to brand him “Beakstreet Boy”.

Here’s what you all want to see:

See: Birds that boogie, 25 June 2008, for more.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Large Hadron Collider is finally complete again, after the last replacement magnet was lowered into the giant ring yesterday.

Work at the particle accelerator crunched to a halt last September when a connection between magnets failed, causing extensive damage and the removal and replacement of 53 magnets.

“This is an important milestone in the repair process,” says Steve Myers, the director for accelerators and technology at CERN, which runs the collider (press release). “It gets us close to where we were before the incident, and allows us to concentrate our efforts on installing the systems that will ensure a similar incident won’t happen again.”

Now the magnets will be connected alongside systems designed to stop any more mishaps. If all goes to plan the LHC will restart in autumn and bring on the science.

Image: the 15m long magnet is lowered into the LHC / CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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