The Great Beyond

Well, it's finally happened: a year and a half after denying California's petition to set its own greenhouse-gas emissions standards for vehicles, the US Environmental Protection Agency has reversed itself and granted the waiver request. That's what a change of administration will get you in Washington.

Lisa Jackson, the EPA's new administrator under President Barack Obama, said she had "decided this is the appropriate course under the law". The prior administrator, Stephen Johnson, rejected California's request and said that a national standard was needed, not a patchwork of state regulations. In April, the EPA declared carbon dioxide emissions a danger to human health.

California requested the waiver in 2005; it regularly asks for national standards to be waived so that it can set more stringent environmental standards.

Interest groups were split along predictable lines in their reaction. Reuters points out that the American Petroleum Institute argues that the waiver will "impose costly requirements" on businesses. David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council called the waiver granting "a win for everyone".

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

Q&A: Observing the scars of the Arctic thaw
Ecologist Breck Bowdon talks about the consequences of thawing permafrost in Alaska.

Chief scientist quits California stem-cell agency
Departure raises questions over leadership at flagship centre.

Lawsuit puts flu-vaccine contract in doubt
Biotech company sued by creditors.

Vital marine habitat under threat
Destruction of seagrass on a par with loss of rainforests and coral reefs.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Duck-billed dinosaurs, the hadrosaurs, have puzzled palaeontologists for years. The puzzle? How did these, the dominant herbivores of their time, manage to chew their food with their funny-looking bills?

Mark Purnell of the University of Leicester Department of Geology, UK, has worked it out, and published it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Press release).

Purnell and his colleagues looked at tiny microscopic scratches on the hadrosaur Edmontasurus’s teeth. They decided that rather than moving the bottom jaw like most living creatures today, it was their upper jaw that was hinged and moved up and down, and side to side.

The news has been chewed over (sorry) by a number of outlets, including MSNBC, Zee News and the AP, who get the prize for best headline with “Hadrosaur chowdown_grind, grind, grind”

The research also tells us that the hadrosaurs probably ate mainly leaves, because the scratches weren’t consistent with chomping on twigs or other tough treats.

Image: Vince Williams, University of Leicester

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

The UK government announced £150 million of investment for small technology firms by way of a venture capital initiative on 29 June, to general approval from venture capitalists, and particularly the biotech industry, who had been lobbying for support.

The newly-created UK Innovation Investment Fund will invest in a collection of other venture capital funds thereby ultimately boosting investment in start-ups and spin-outs - in life sciences, clean technology, digital sciences and advanced manufacturing, according to prime minister Gordon Brown. A private-sector fund manager will choose where the money goes, and first funds are due by the end of the year.

"We need the Google or Genentech of the future and they will only be created if there is the capital to back them," said science minister Paul Drayson (Wall Street Journal).

Continue reading "£150 million ventured, shot-in-the-arm for UK biotech gained?" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sea Launch, the imaginatively named company that launches rockets from the sea, says it will continue its “normal business operations” despite filing for bankruptcy last week.

The company told Satellite Today it will be almost-business-as-usual while it goes through Chapter 11 restructuring in the US.

Continue reading "Sea Launch is sinking" »

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

NASA and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry yesterday released what they say is the “most complete” topographic map of Earth.

Until now the most complete set of data available publicly to researchers covered 80% of the Earth’s landmass. Now new Aster (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) satellite data takes that up to 99%, says the American space agency (press release).

“Aster’s accurate topographic data will be used for engineering, energy exploration, conserving natural resources, environmental management, public works design, firefighting, recreation, geology and city planning, to name just a few areas,” says Mike Abrams, leader of the science team leader behind the new map.

Image: view of the Bhutan Himalayas generated by draping simulated natural colour image over data from the new ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model / NASA

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

Roche has decided it is tired of having its name prefixed with the words ‘pharma giant’. In response, the company is bailing out of the pharmaceutical industry associations in both the UK and the US.

Instead, it will be signing up with the US Biotechnology Industry Association (BIO). The move follows the company’s merger with biotech firm Genentech earlier this year for around $46 billion.

“As part of the world's largest biotechnology company, Genentech and Roche believe that BIO’s purpose is closely aligned with the direction of the new company and, therefore, can represent the company’s interests in Washington, among policymakers, legislators and the general public,” said the company (AP).

Farewell big pharma, hello big biotech.

Continue reading "Roche: we’re not pharma anymore" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

deCODE Genetics, a biotechnology company based in Reykjavik, Iceland, has been relisted on the NASDAQ Global Market stock exchange, the company announced last Friday.

deCODE is famous for its aggressive pursuit of DNA sequence variations linked to human disease, and aims to use this information to develop diagnostic tools and uncover new drug targets. Last October, its steadily declining stock price combined with a crashing market to drive the company's market capitalization (a measure of a company's worth, based on share price) below the $50 million minimum required to be listed on the NASDAQ Global Market stock exchange. (See 'Icelandic biotech feels the pinch', subscription required.) At that time, CEO Kari Stefansson said management was restructuring the company. The stakes were high -- in November, one analyst told Nature (subscription required) that if deCODE didn't find a way to boost their financial position, the company had little chance of surviving to see 2009.

But the company has lived on (and continued to crank out high profile genome-wide association studies). The decision to relist deCODE reverses a February decision to bump the company to the NASDAQ Capital Market, which generally lists companies with smaller market capitalization. deCODE hasn't released information about what might have spurred the change of heart -- the company's market capitalization still hovers around $37 million, and that's including the ~33% bump in stock price following last week's announcement.

Posted by Heidi Ledford
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“I was so willing to go to jail for catching water on my roof and watering my garden, but now I’m not a criminal.”
Tom Bartels, a video producer in Colorado, comment on changes that make it legal to catch a raindrop in his state (NY Times).

“We can either heat our homes and have hot baths, or fly but not both.”
Lord Redesdale, vice-chairman of the UK’s all-party parliamentary climate change group, comments on a report on the country’s energy infrastructure from the Royal Society (BBC).

“I know you would love to make a story out of all this, but it’s quite hard work.”
Vivienne Cox, managing director of BP Alternative Energy, denies that her standing down means the company is moving away from alternative energy. She says she wants to spend more time with her family (Guardian).

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

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is once again being accused of politicizing science, only this time conservatives are the ones crying foul.

At issue is a 98-page "comment" on the EPA's recent finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are endangering human health. The comment was authored by an EPA economist Alan Carlin, and claimed, among other things, that the EPA was relying on outdated data because it used the last assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to help shape its finding. Carlin also echoes the old arguments of climate sceptics, which say that solar cycles, not human activity, are responsible for the recent increase in global temperatures.

Continue reading "Hot air and politics at the EPA" »

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Biologic drugs should face the same generic competition as standard pharmaceuticals after seven years, aides of US president Barack Obama have stated.

Be they called bio-similars, bio-generics, follow-on biologics or something else, products derived from biotechnology have been a hot topic in the US recently. Obama has come down somewhere between the extremes currently proposed for these drugs.

Democratic House rep Henry Waxman proposed legislation that would give biotech drugs just five years of exclusivity before other companies could muscle in. Another rep, Republican Anna Eshoo, put forward a proposal offering 12 years.

Now Bloomberg has obtained a letter from Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, and Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, pushing for a “generous compromise” on seven years.

“Lengthy periods of exclusivity will harm patients by diminishing innovation and unnecessarily delaying access to affordable drugs,” they wrote.

Continue reading "Biosimilars: Obama’s seven year pitch" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After several cases where reports of its death were much exaggerated, the Ulysses space probe is to finally cease operations.

Exactly when is not entirely clear, as NASA says it will tell the probe to turn off its transmitter on “Monday, June 30”. Whenever Ulysses is actually put down, it deserves a round of applause, having spent over 18 years in space.

The old voyager has been on a strange orbit, speeding past the Sun’s poles three times to help researchers puzzle out the mysteries of the solar wind. As the European Space Agency, a partner with NASA on the mission, says, it has defied “several earlier expectations of its demise”, including a couple from Nature (see: Closer than ever to the Sun).

“We expected the spacecraft to cease functioning much earlier,” says Paolo Ferri, of ESA’s European Space Operations Centre. “Its longevity is a tribute to Ulysses’s builders and the people involved in operations over the years.”

Sadly though the scientific return on investment no longer justifies keeping Ulysses running. On the bright side, Richard Marsden, ESA’s Ulysses mission manager, notes that the probe will in effect become a man-made comet.

“Whenever any of us look up in the years to come, Ulysses will be there, silently orbiting our star, which it studied so successfully during its long and active life,” he tells MSNBC.

Headline watch
Ulysses Hears the Siren's Song – NASA press release
Light goes out on solar mission – BBC
After 19 years, Ulysses solar probe to go dark – AP
Tales of brave Ulysses – Christian Science Monitor

Image: NASA

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

This sweet little piece of gossip seems well suited to an old-style longform RT: The nonprofit Project on Government Oversight group points readers to an article in the June 29, 2009 issue of the Nuclear Weapons & Materials Monitor (article not available online), which describes how journalists were asked to leave the room when Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman spoke to 'a group of lobbyists and private interests'.

"While no explanation was given at the time, according to those present, the move was apparently intended to ensure that journalists not only didn't cover, but couldn't even hear, a routine address on DOE's priorities under the Obama Administration and efforts to address climate change. In what one can only hope was meant with a sense of irony, Poneman reportedly also stressed the need for improved transparency at DOE in a speech closed to the news media," according to the article.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dark allegations are being muttered about the ongoing International Renewable Energy Agency meeting in Egypt.

The agency, known as IRENA, is not even up and running yet and already sources are reporting tiffs over where it should be sited and how much power (no pun intended) the nuclear industry should have.

Even before the meeting in Sharm El Sheik began today some were warning that the French government was backing a push by the United Arab Emirates to host IRENA in Abu Dhabi in order to ensure it was friendly to nuclear power.

“An IRENA located in Abu Dhabi under such circumstances would be ‘nuclear tainted’ because the negotiating process used to select a host country would be based on support for nuclear power,” Eric Martinot, of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, told the Huffington Post. “Are the original goals of IRENA being co-opted so that renewables become a mere appendage to a nuclear agenda – ‘sprinkling some renewables on top of our nuclear power?’”

Continue reading "UAE and Germany fight for IRENA" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Energy, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The legislative process wasn't pretty, but the US House of Representatives voted 219-212 on 26 June to approve the most sweeping piece of energy and environmental legislation in history. (New York Times)

The predictable result is a bill that almost nobody likes. Greenpeace's opposition illustrates a general sentiment on the left side of the political spectrum that the bill's Democratic sponsors, Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts, compromised too much. The US Chamber of Commerce says they compromised too little. And even the American Farm Bureau, whose members sought and won massive concessions in a deal that secured enough votes for passage, maintained its opposition (for a rather scathing take on this issue, see Steven Pearlstein's column in the Washington Post).

What holds the current coalition together is a core group of seasoned legislators backed by pragmatic environmentalists and businesses who understand and are willing to play by the rules on Capitol Hill. And of course a president who supports the idea. In this respect, it's hard to imagine a more concrete example of the political transformation wrought by the past two elections (whether this momentum will carry through a third election in 2010 is an open question - and one that increases pressure on Democrats to get the job done this year).

At its core, the bill would create a cap-and-trade system that would reduce covered greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. But the legislation contains a host of initiatives meant to boost things like energy efficiency and renewable power while controlling costs on industry and consumers. Nearly every one has its critics.

Continue reading "Climate bill clears US House, faces long road ahead" »

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

State budget cuts in Florida have apparently claimed another victim: the geology and oceanography departments at Florida State University will merge, according to several emails making the rounds. Munir Humayun, an associate professor in the geology department, reports that FSU has terminated five tenured faculty and kept on seven in the geology department. They will move with the meteorology department, and the remnants of oceanography, into a new department of earth and atmospheric studies.

The faculty cut include three assistant professors who were hired within the past year, Humayun reports. Who gets laid off and who stays can be dictated more by union rules than by other factors, as Florida-based writer Mark Schrope reported recently in Nature on the budget troubles facing universities in the state.

Posted by Alex Witze
Categories: Financial Crisis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

EU environment ministers have agreed that more urgently needs to be done to stop European biodiversity from declining further.

Meeting in Luxembourg yesterday, the ministers stated they are "alarmed" by the threats to biodiversity posed by invasive alien species and "deeply concerned" by the European Commission's assessment that the EU is unlikely to meet its target of halting biodiversity loss by 2010.

Ministers called for the Commission to prepare by 2010 a new strategy to tackle invasive species, which the Commission estimates costs the EU over 12 billion euros per year. As well as setting out methods of detection, monitoring and containment, the strategy should include steps to establish a comprehensive inventory of invasive alien species, the ministers said.

Continue reading "EU environment ministers 'alarmed' by biodiversity threat" »

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

“A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said Wednesday.”
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on an unfortunate end to a scientific disagreement (hat tip: Bad Astronomy).

“The aeroplane could do it theoretically non-stop - but not the pilot. We should fly at roughly 25 knots and that would make it between 20 and 25 days to go around the world, which is too much for a pilot who has to steer the plane.”
Bertrand Piccard comments on his solar plane, which he hopes to fly around the world (BBC).

“What I am saying is based on what I expect. It is not just in my dreams.”
Andreas Carlgren, Sweden’s environment minister, pledges to push for tough carbon targets as his country prepares to assume the EU presidency (European Voice).

“A system for allowing a shoe wearer to lean forwardly beyond his center of gravity by virtue of wearing a specially designed pair of shoes which will engage with a hitch member movably projectable through a stage surface.”
Michael Jackson’s patent for the ‘method and means for creating anti-gravity illusion’ (European Patent Office).

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

It’s been an up-and-down week for supporters of carbon capture and storage (CCS) – the technology that aims to capture carbon dioxide emitted from power plants and bury it underground.

The European Commission announced yesterday that it would put €50 million towards an investment scheme to co-finance a CCS demonstration plant in China (costing around €300-500 million), fulfilling an agreement made by the EU and China in 2005.

Earlier in the week, the New York Times noted a sea change in China’s attitude towards carbon capture. Noting China’s swift progress on its GreenGen project, Julio Friedmann, head of the carbon storage programme at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told the paper: "Five years ago, you'd have a discussion [with China] on CCS and you'd meet the 'C' team. Now, you meet the 'A' team. They take this stuff seriously."

But in Germany, politicians dropped a pending national CCS legal framework, postponing agreement until after general elections in September. "It's really frustrating," Reuters quoted Staffan Goertz, Vattenfall's chief media officer for CCS. "It is the result of the local public having questions and hesitations about this."

And in the US, two companies said on Thursday they would withdraw from participating in the government-backed FutureGen CCS project in Mattoon, Illinois. American Electric Power and Southern said they’d rather spend the money on their own CCS projects instead (Reuters).

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jim Hansen has released a statement about his arrest earlier this week at a protest against coal mining by the company Massey Energy in West Virginia.

The NASA scientist and doyen of climate change protestors was arrested after those protesting against Massey’s mountaintop mining faced off against the company’s supporters. While Hansen describes local police as “courteous and professional”, he backs allegations made by some protestors that a supporter of the mining company assaulted one of their number. He also says that local man Larry Gibson, who has refused to sell his property for mining, has been the target of drive-by shootings.

However, he adds, “If Gandhi had the sequence right (first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win), we are already three-quarters of the way there. I noticed that it was only a handful of Massey people who were really vocal.”(PDF.)

Image: Hansen arrested at the protest / by Antrim Caskey for the Rainforest Action Network

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

The news that New York’s stem cell research initiative will be allowed to pay $10,000 to women who donate their eggs is enjoying another round of media coverage today.

As we noted last week:

[The New York Empire State Stem Cell Board] reached the decision on 11 June. Board members noted that taxpayer funds are already used to compensate some egg donors in state-subsidized in vitro fertilization programs. They also emphasized that researchers in other states that do not allow payment for eggs – including Massachusetts and California -- have largely failed to recruit donors.

The Washington Post published a sizeable piece on the decision today, noting that it makes NY state the first to allow taxpayer-funded researchers to pay women for eggs for stem cell research.

Researchers quoted in the Post story are divided over the move.

“In a field that’s already the object of a great deal of controversy, the question is, are we at the point where we really need to go that route in order to do the science?” says Jonathan Moreno, professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’m not convinced.”

The NY Times notes that National Academy of Science guidelines prohibit paying women for eggs used in stem cell research.

Headline watch
$10,000 is an egg-cellent price, says stem cell panel – NY Daily News

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

NASA has announced a ‘Tanking Test’ for next week Wednesday to see if it has managed to repair a hydrogen leak that scuppered its two most recent attempts to launch the space shuttle Endeavour.

Crew at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida are still working on a plate attached to the shuttle’s external fuel tank, pinpointed as the source of the leak in a line that vents hydrogen from the tank. Seals on the ‘Ground Umbilical Carrier Plate’ were due to be inspected yesterday.

“They think they have a pretty good handle on what they think caused the leak,” says NASA spokesperson Candrea Thomas (SPACE.com). “The tanking test will tell, but they’re confident they’ve got this thing figured out.”

The next launch attempt is scheduled for 11 July.

Meanwhile, CNET News reports a different problem with another shuttle. A loose knob on shuttle Atlantis has become wedged against a window and engineers are struggling to remove it:

While the knurled knob is pressing against the pane in two locations, it's not yet clear whether the glass has suffered any measurable damage. But access is tight and engineers considering removal options must make sure they don't inadvertently damage the glass. Replacing a pressure pane, one official said, could take months because part of the cockpit instrumentation would have to be moved or disconnected to provide clearance.

Image: NASA staff work on the Ground Umbilical Carrier Plate / NASA, Jack Pfaller

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A helping hand for addicts
A neuropsychologist talks about the challenges of studying the addicted brain.

Climate refugee fears questioned
Few figures to back up prophecies of mass migration to rich countries.

Female promiscuity may not benefit offspring
'Higher quality' male seed beetles lose post-copulatory battle.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ISIS, Britain’s world-class neutron and muon source, might as well be called IS – as budget cuts announced today by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) will shut down its operations for half the year.

The STFC has had to make some £12 million in research cuts for its 2009-10 budget – a deficit it had revealed in May. ISIS lost £2.3 million, and will only run for 120 days in 2009-10. It’s a familiar tale for the facility, which last year lost a similar amount, dropping its operating time from an average 180 to 150 days. (Fully funded, it should run around 220 days, according to a National Audit Office report).

The cuts will affect a number of research programmes; ISIS is used by over 1000 scientists and has just installed a £145 million second neutron target station.

Exact budget numbers were not available from STFC’s press officers on the day it announced the cuts, but the agency said it would also reduce its allocation to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron, and dial down operations at the Central Laser Facility (along with ISIS, all at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire).

It is also cutting funding for astronomy units in Cambridge and Edinburgh, deferring spending on MoonLITE (a lunar orbiting satellite that would shoot scientific instruments below the Moon’s surface), and delaying funding for other particle physics and nuclear physics projects.

Robert Kirby-Harris, chief executive at the Institute of Physics, called the cuts an “ill omen”. He added: “The over-riding message [to young scientists] appears to still be ‘Forget science, go and make shed-loads of money in banking’. Nothing has changed.”

Other coverage:

Flagship ISIS facility to go 'part-time' in wake of funding cuts (The Times)

UK physics hit by new cuts (Physics World)

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”
Lara Giddings, the attorney general for Tasmania, reveals an unexpected side-effect of growing poppies for medicine (BBC).

“We don’t have any plans to change colours at this time.”
John Huston, of the company that owns Chicago’s iconic Sears Tower, says wind turbines, roof gardens and solar panels are all coming in, but the building will not be painted silver to save energy (AP).

“The large majority of subsidies are spent on vessels fishing stock that are already overfished.”
Marcus Knigge, of Pew Environment Group, says EU fishing subsides have been making fish stocks worse (Guardian).

“Sharks are very vulnerable to over-fishing because they tend to grow and mature slowly and have a small number of young. Demand for shark fins is a driving force in over- fishing of sharks worldwide.”
Sonja Fordham is co-author of a new study painting another depressingly bleak picture of the state of our sharks (Bloomberg).

“I’m hopeful that half or more of the patients that undergo stem cell transplantation may either be cured or have a long-term remission. We think it’s likely that about 50% of people [in the trial] will be cured.”
Chris Hawkey, a gastroenterologist at Nottingham University, reports good news from his clinical trial of a Crohn’s disease treatment (Guardian).

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

Posted for Erika Check Hayden

Some baboons are born with an in-built resistance to a malaria-like disease, scientists have found. It is the first known example of a genetic variant in a non-human primate species that is correlated with a complex trait — in this case, resistance to a parasitic disease.

Like ancestral humans, baboons are large-bodied primates that roam the grasslands of East Africa. The research reveals that both groups have evolved similar solutions to fighting off malaria parasites that are common in that region.

"Our study suggests that looking at genetic differences between non-human primates may help us learn more about the possible solutions that evolution has come up with for us to cope with these sorts of things," says Jenny Tung, a graduate student at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who conducted the research with Gregory Wray, also of Duke, and Susan Alberts of Duke and the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi.

Continue reading "Baboon genes help fight parasites" »

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

The most hotly awaited science song of they year, nay, the decade, has arrived. Buzz Aldrin has released his rap!

Recently the New York Times reported that Aldrin had been in a rap session with Snoop Dogg. It transpires that Aldrin and Mr Dogg do not actually rap together, rather the latter has produced the former’s song.

You can see the full video on the Funny or Die website.

While this is unlikely to go down as a classic, the making of video that accompanies it has some choice moments. “I have only two passions, space exploration and hip hop,” declares Buzz ‘Doc Rendezvous’ Aldrin.

Perhaps the best part though is where Aldrin discusses Gill Scott-Heron’s seminal ‘Whitey On the Moon’, a tirade against spending money on spaceflight when there is so much poverty on Earth.

“Me and Gill are cool now,” says Doc Rendezvous. “I explained to him we came in peace for all mankind and he backed off.”

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science

Continue reading "Songs about science XXII: Aldrin raps his Rocket Experience " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scotland has set itself the world’s toughest climate change targets, in legislation passed yesterday. The country is looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 and by 42% by 2020 (press release, bill pdf).

“Scotland can be proud of this Bill, the most ambitious and comprehensive piece of climate change legislation anywhere in the world,” says climate change minister Stewart Stevenson (press release).

Ministers in the ruling Scottish National Party have admitted this will make little difference to global emissions overall, but they hope it will set an example to other nations (BBC).

And here lies the catch. As passed, the bill gives the country the option to move rapidly backwards from its ‘Tartan Targets’ if the rest of the world doesn’t come up with similarly tough targets at the forthcoming global summit in Copenhagen (Reuters). Targets can also be downgraded if the UK government’s advisors say they are unrealistic (Guardian).

“We will be looking for any weakening of the position being slipped out during a summer or Christmas recess,” warned Duncan McLaren of Friends of the Earth (The Herald). “A key will be the international reaction to this. If it is well-received and there is praise for Scotland’s leadership in adopting the world’s best targets, it will be harder for Ministers to back down.”

McLaren take heart from one thing: Arnold Schwarzenegger is on his side.

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

Is there any week that doesn't pass without bad news for universities? Take just US higher education as an example. The 10-campus University of California system, facing a $800 million slash from its $3.2 billion budget, is beginning to circulate emails about how such cuts might be implemented.

Jonathan Eisen this week blogged about emails reportedly circulating at UC Santa Cruz in which biomedical faculty are protesting a proposed 4-8% salary cut for all staff. They have a seemingly valid point in that their salaries come out of federal grant money, not from the UC system; they argue that it makes little sense to cut their salaries when it won't help the state.

Continue reading "US universities flounder further" »

Posted by Alex Witze
Categories: Financial Crisis | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

NASA has released this awesome picture of the Sarychev Volcano, northeast of Japan in the Russian Kuril Islands. Shot from the International Space Station, it captures an early stage of the recent eruption, on 12 June this year.

“This detailed astronaut photograph is exciting to volcanologists because it captures several phenomena that occur during the earliest stages of an explosive volcanic eruption,” says the space agency.

“The eruption cleared a circle in the cloud deck. The clearing may result from the shockwave from the eruption or from sinking air around the eruption plume: as the plume rises, air flows down around the sides like water flowing off the back of a surfacing dolphin.”

Previous Great Beyond coverage of Sarychev
Volcano ash flies high – 15 June, 2009
Volcano update – 17 June, 2009

Image: NASA

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

Bloomsberg news agency reports this morning that 70 academics were taken into custody last night after a meeting with Mir Hossein Mousavi. Their location is unknown. Mousavi, a candidate in the 12 June presidential election, contests the results, and has since become the most prominent figure in the popular protest movement that has coalesced following the announce of the election results.

Because of restrictions on reporting imposed by the Iranian regime, media there are often unable to verify or investigate emerging news from Iran. The Bloomsberg report is based on one by the Kalemeh website which is linked to the Mousavi campaign. The website is in Persian, but Google introduced on 18 June a Persian translation facility in response to current events which you can use to read this and other Persian language sites.

I published a news article last night about efforts by the Iran scientific and academic diaspora to help their colleagues in Iran.

Posted by Declan Butler
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week's Nature Podcast is a science journalism special. Listen in as we ask whether science journalists are cheerleaders or watchdogs for science, hear how technology is changing reporting from conferences, and get the inside scoop on how science gets turned into front page news. Plus, the produce of the Nature News team in our weekly science news chat.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

A million dollar contract for flu vaccines in the US has been awarded to a company facing demands from its creditors that it be declared bankrupt. Meanwhile, reports of H1N1 spread continue.

America’s Department for Health and Human Services announced on Tuesday that a $35 million contract for influenza vaccine had been awarded to Protein Sciences Corporation, of Meriden, Connecticut.

However, creditors of the company have filed an involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition against it, alleging they are owed $11.7 million (Bloomberg). Robin Robinson, a director at Health and Human Services, says the US government has done “two very thorough financial audits” of Protein Sciences (NY Times).

Continue reading "Swine flu round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sodium traces hint at subsurface ocean on Enceladus
Measurements rule out geysers on Saturn's moon.

US human spacefaring questioned
Review panel takes a hard look at NASA's goal of returning astronauts to the Moon.

New protein structures replace the old
Dutch software to weed out errors in Protein Data Bank.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The new Top 500 supercomputer list is out, and it looks remarkably like the previous one, in that it charts a continuing exponential growth in the aggregate power of the worlds top computers. Awesome technological achievement – but no great surprise. As The Register puts it in a headline “World Yawns at Petaflops”.

The yawning is helped by the fact that the number one and number two computers this time round are the same as they were last time round: the US Department of Energy’s Roadrunner, at Los Alamos, and its Jaguar, at Oak Ridge.

But if you want to get geeky on the topic there are some possibly interesting details and trends to see in the data that the Top 500 lists creators make available in a variety of helpful formats.

Continue reading "Getting geeky with supercomputers" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

What price reputation? Somebody at Elsevier thought $25 gift cards would do, at least for positive reviews of its textbooks on online bookstores.

Inside Higher Education reported yesterday that an Elsevier marketing representative offered free books and $25 Amazon gift cards to authors of a recent Elsevier title--or anyone else--willing to write 5-star reviews of the book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble's websites.

According to the writer of the email, forwarded by whistleblower--and Elsevier textbook author--George Tremblay of Antioch University, in Keene, New Hampshire, "the tactics defined above have proven to dramatically increase exposure and boost sales."

Tremblay told Elsevier he would be forwarding their email to a list of professonal psychologists--the book's target audience--along with a note suggesting the psychologists "reconsider any weight you accord to those Amazon reviews."

Two Elsevier higher-ups have weighed in, telling Inside Higher Ed that compensation for book reviewers' time is normal, but that there should be "no incentives for a positive review, and that's where this particular e-mail went too far."

In unrelated events Elsevier admitted last month that it accepted payment from drugmaker Merck to pick and choose Vioxx-friendly medical articles for inclusion in a custom journal look-alike distributed to doctors in Australia. (The Great Beyond, 8 May 2009). It's not all bad news at the academic publishing giant, however. Last week the Special Library Association named Elsevier "The Most Influential Publisher of the Last 100 Years in BioMedicine and the Life Sciences."

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Climate guru and NASA scientist James Hansen has been arrested after taking part in a protest against mountaintop coal mining.

Hansen, along with actress Daryl Hannah and other protesters, apparently planned to deliberately trespass on the property of mining company Massey Energy in the appropriately named Coal River Valley, West Virginia (press release).

However, a counter protest by miners and coal industry supporters forced them to change their plans. Instead, according to the Charleston Gazette, they sat down in the road outside Massey Energy's Goals Coal preparation plant in Raleigh County and were arrested for obstructing the police and impeding traffic.

Some reports say Hansen and other actually did trespass. Another account alleges a coal supporter assaulted members of the Hansen protest group.

Hansen, of course, has a long history of opposing coal power. He even appeared with Hannah before at a climate change protest, where Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson noted “Hansen says he is willing to get arrested”.

Willing and able, it seems.

More
Photos of the protest and arrests – RAN
A Plea To President Obama: End Mountaintop Coal Mining - Hansen on the Enivronment 360 blog

Image: Hansen at a previous protest / Jeff Tollefson

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

Female Italian researchers are urging the first ladies of the G8 nations to abandon plans to attend the forthcoming meeting in L’Aquila in protest at Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s treatment of women.

Berlusconi, who owns much of the Italian media, has faced a series of lurid allegations since his wife announced earlier this year she was leaving him. These have included questions over his relationship with a young model, his selections for political office including a high proportion of young, attractive women with little experience, and allegations about escorts.

“As Italian women active in Academia and Culture we are profoundly indignant about the way the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, treats women in the public sphere as well as in private,” the researchers write in a letter entitled ‘Appeal to the First Ladies’.

“These behaviours, appalling from a moral, civil, and cultural perspective, threaten the dignity of women and exert a negative impact on the self-determination and achievement of women.”

The Times calls the letter the “first sign of a public reaction” to stories about young models attending parties thrown by Berlusconi.

The prime minister has denied many of the claims about him and called the coverage of them a smear campaign (Times, Daily Telegraph).

Full list of signatories below the fold.

Continue reading "‘Boycott Berlusconi’ researchers urge" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year Nature’s Phil Ball wrote about the amazing parrot Snowball, the first animal to be scientifically proven to dance. Earlier this year the research was published, to great media interest.

Now a video has surfaced of Snowball dancing with some of the world’s leading bird biologists at the recent World Science Festival (55 seconds in to the clip below).

The struttin’ scientists (as ID by The Scientist) are: Duke University's Erich Jarvis, University of Cambridge's Nicola Clayton, Brandeis University's Irene Pepperberg, and City College New York's Ofer Tchernichovski.

Personally, I think Snowball has the best moves.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“You, the Iraqi brains, are an important part of driving the path we are on. We are happy to see ... these brains come back again, and I hope their return will not be just for a short time.”
Sadeq al-Rikabi, political advisor to Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, addresses a conference hosted by the Ministry of Science and Technology (Reuters).

“The deadest spot in the ocean.”
Steven D’Hondt describes the South Pacific Gyre, subject of his latest research paper (University of Rhode Island press release).

“So much forest gone, and all in two years, my God. If nothing is done, there'll be no forest left in one to two years.”
Riswan Zen, an analyst for Indonesian conservation group Yayasan Ekosistem Lestari, comments on the destruction of forest in the Tripa region (Independent).

“Extraordinarily well engineered.”
Former head of the Food and Drug Administration, David Kessler, gives his verdict on the Snickers bar (and other elements of modern food) via the New York Times.

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

Australia’s carbon emissions trading scheme has run into political squalls. Delaying tactics in the country’s upper house, the Senate, mean that a vote on the cap-and-trade legislation looks likely to be put off until August – when the bill in its current form will probably fail anyway.

Though the legislation passed through the Labor-controlled House of Representatives earlier this month, Conservative opposition in the Senate this week has proved less tractable. "They have been filibustering, wasting time, using every tactic they can to delay debate on this bill,'' climate change minister Penny Wong told reporters (Reuters, The Australian).

Now, in the last week of Parliament before the winter break, senators have voted to bring debate on nine unrelated bills, and it would be “very difficult” to find the time to debate the climate bill, Wong said (Bloomberg).

Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and its per-capita carbon emissions are among the highest in the world, and rising. Mindful of the effect of the scheme on the cost of coal and other energy-intensive exports, the Conservative opposition want the vote on legislation delayed until after the US passes its own bill, and until after a climate treaty is debated in Copenhagen in December (New York Times, Bloomberg).

Yet, as Wong told reporters on 30 March, "The best chance of an agreement at Copenhagen is for as many countries as possible to act – Australia is one of those." (Nature, 458, 554-555; 2009, subscription required.)

Continue reading "Australian carbon trading hits political wall" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has reached the Moon.

“I am now 450km above the moon....” said the probe’s Twitter feed at 11.00 UK time today.

Minutes later it noted, “The moon has capture me! I am there! :-) … I am now in orbit about the moon!! :-)”.

LRO is orbiting; now let's have some recon! Perhaps someone should also update the feed’s location information so it no longer says ‘Greenbelt, MD’. (For more on LRO see Nature: Moon mission tackles water question.)

“The engines have been burning now for 15, 20 minutes,” Mike Wargo, NASA’s chief lunar scientist, told NASA TV just moments ago. “We’ve been captured stably by the moon. We’re there.”

Later today you can watch live video of the lunar swingby of sister mission LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite), live from 2:10 pm GMT. Till then, here’s a video of the takeoff of both LCROSS and LRO (hat tip: Bad Astronomy).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems that everybody has a set of numbers to explain how climate legislation moving through the US House of Representatives could impact the economy, but it's the official Congressional Budget Office score that really counts. That document came out Friday, estimating net costs of the program at $22 billion annually, which translates to an average impact of $175 dollars per household.

It's a remarkably low number, ringing in around 48 cents per day (supporters of the legislation say it would cost households little more than a daily postage stamp). And it turns out even that is misleading: If you divide households up by income into five groups, the lowest quintile would actually save $40 annually while the second-lowest quintile would spend only $40 extra each year; for everybody else (those who can afford it most), the cost comes in between $235 and $340.

CBO director Douglas Elmendorf kindly provides a quick summary of how his organization arrived at these figures in his blog. Notably, although CBO's model is able to capture some savings (gross costs are higher than $22 billion), Elmendorf admits that the model doesn't pick up all of them.

Continue reading "Climate costs: What's in a number?" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Late Friday afternoon, NASA announced the winners to its most recent competition in the "small explorer" or SMEX programme, which is a chance for principal investigators, often from universities, to offer up their bold new ideas and have NASA pay for their chance to be in charge.
After a year-long competition among six finalists -- which had themselves been winnowed down from 32 -- NASA picked two. The first, called Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), will use an ultraviolet solar telescope to study the chromosphere, a thin and poorly understood layer of the Sun's atmosphere just above its surface. It is led by Alan Title, of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California.
The second, called Gravity and Extreme Magnetism SMEX (GEMS), will measure the polarization of X-rays emanating from black holes and neutron stars and use this to build a picture of the way these objects distort matter and space with their intense gravitational and magnetic fields. It is led by Jean Swank, of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The missions each will receive $105 million, plus the use of a launch vehicle. IRIS could launch by the end of 2012, while both are supposed to launch by 2015.
I'm sure they are stellar proposals, no pun intended, with rock-solid science potential. But I think it's fair to say that finding another Earth outside our solar system is a far cry more sexy than most heliophysics missions. And among the missing in the final cut was the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a favorite among certain blogs and even our editor here at Nature. It would have found extrasolar Earths that CoRoT and Kepler will miss, and ones close enough to home to be meaningfully followed up by the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope. As Centauri Dreams blog said, "From the PR perspective, TESS was a gold-plated winner."

Posted by Eric Hand
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The British Chiropractic Association, which sued science writer Simon Singh over a column in which he wrote about the organisation's stance on certain childhood medical conditions, has now released a list of studies which it says "support the claims which Dr. Singh stated were bogus."

Singh and others had challenged the BCA to support their claims with scientific evidence instead of taking the case to the libel court.

Skeptics, such as Martin Robbins on Lay Scientist, have already begun to deconstruct the list, pointing out that few of the 29 listed studies dealt directly with the medical efficacy of chiropractic and that those which did failed to conform to the statistically powerful, randomised, placebo-controlled, double-blind standard to which many medical studies are subject. Robbins also identifies a case of what he calls "dishonest quote-mining." [The comment is here.]

Robbins provides a list of other examinations of the BCA evidence, included below.

Continue reading "Chiropractors reveal "plethora of medical evidence"" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A husband-and-wife team of British evolutionary biologists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, were on 19 June awarded the Kyoto prize in basic science for their studies, over more than three decades, documenting evolution by natural selection in finches on the Galapagos Islands.

"I can't think of any other scientists who deserve it more," Kenneth Petren, of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, tells The Scientist.

In one typical paper, (Grant P. R., et al. Science, 313. 224 - 226; 2006), the Grants – both Professors Emeritus at Princeton University – described the struggle between the medium ground finch (Geospiza fortis) and the large ground finch (Geospiza magnirostris), in the harsh environment of the tiny Galapagos Island Daphne Major (see Nature, doi: 10.1038/news060710-11, subscription required).

Environmental changes, including a drought, caused the beak size of generations of medium finches to shrink through natural selection. Smaller-beaked medium finches were able to gobble up smaller seeds that the greater-beaked ground finches missed, and so survived longer to pass their traits to their offspring. The Grants starred in Jonathan Weiner’s book, The Beak of the Finch.

Isamu Akasaki won the Advanced Technology award, for his work on gallium nitride p-n junctions and related contributions to the development of blue light emitting devices. French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez won the Arts and Philosophy category. Each award is worth 50 million yen (US$520,000).

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“They both have the same objective, which is to find a target or prey or victim. They have to lurk. They want to be efficient in their search.”
D. Kim Rossmo, of Texas State University-San Marcos, has co-authored a paper on shark hunting habits and thinks they have some similarities to serial killers (AP).

“They were still huge animals, I don’t think anyone would dispute that. They might be half as big, but half of something that's really huge is still really huge.”
Geoffrey Birchard, of George Mason University in Virginia, says that while his new paper has revised the sizes of dinosaurs downwards, they’re still not small (LiveScience).

“The negative impacts of overdevelopment of hydropower would destroy the river's diverse aquatic life.”
Conservationists in China protest the proposal of a new dam on the Yangtze River (Wall Street Journal).

“Several dams on branches of the Yellow River in Gansu province are near collapse only one or two years after their construction.”
The China Daily newspaper reports that poor construction procedures, and embezzlement of construction funds are among the factors being blamed.

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

The 2009 meeting of the International Whaling Commission has begun in Madeira, Portugal. Once again, participants are looking to construct a compromise between those who wish to hunt whales and those who think want to stop that sort of thing.

Earlier this year a key sub-committee of the IWC failed to agree a compromise between pro-whaling nations such as Japan and their opponents, chiefly Australia. This would have seen Japan resuming coastal whaling of its coasts but giving up its annual Antarctic hunt.

Now Japan has again indicated that it might be willing to put similar offers on the table (see meeting agenda, page 9).

UK environment minister Huw Irranca-Davies told the BBC this was not going to be uncontroversial.

Continue reading "Whaling meeting faces deadlock, again" »

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

UPDATE: Some are now questioning the maths behind this analysis. See: John Graham-Cumming, Times.

It is widely acknowledged that humans are very bad at making up random numbers. If we weren’t we wouldn’t have invested so much time in developing random number generators.

Now some work by political scientists Bernd Berber and Alexandra Scacco, of Columbia University, suggests that fact hasn’t reached certain key individuals in Iran. As the country struggles with the violent aftermath of its recent hotly contested election, Berber and Scacco say the results of that election seem highly suspicious.

They used the results published by the Ministry of the Interior and examined the last two digits of the votes reported for the four main candidates.

“The numbers look suspicious,” they report in the Washington Post.

Continue reading "‘Iran’s election was fixed,’ say number crunchers" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

UK climate effects revealed in finest detail yet
Detailed projections met with caution by climate scientists.

BRIEFING: NASA's Moon goals under review
But work on the first of the agency's new rockets continues.

The virus spy
Yan Li talks about spotting the novel swine flu virus at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory.

Special: Apollo 40 years on
Exploring the legacy of the first manned lunar missions.

Drug quells anxiety in early trials
Angst-fighting compound lacks side effects of current treatments.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"What better way than to have real-time information on a huge sign in the middle of Manhattan?"
Kevin Parker, CEO of Deutsche Bank's asset management, explains the awareness-promoting benefits of a 70-foot digital billboard displaying the world's carbon emissions in New York's Madison Square Garden (New York Daily News).

"We won't put our long-term success on the line with short-term budget cuts. That's why our R&D budget is one of the largest in the automotive industry, and we intend to keep it that way." Science|Business reports that German car makers pledge to maintain R&D spending - here quoting Dieter Zetsche, the head of Daimler AG. GM officials agree (Nature).

"This work would face possible plagiarism sanctions in almost any academic environment." Law professor Michael Geist, a "one-man IP wrecking ball" (Ars Technica) finds that a report on the digital economy produced by the (part state-funded) Conference Board of Canada plagiarized a US lobby group report.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: Quotes of the day | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Global spending on health in developing nations has increased massively in recent years, but research published today in the Lancet questions how well spent it really is.

So called ‘development assistance for health’ went up from $5.6 billion in 1990 to $21.8 billion in 2007, according to a study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But, while poor countries did generally receive a bigger share of this pot than richer nations, some are missing out.

Angola, Ukraine and Thailand are among the 30 poorer countries with the most illness and premature death. They are also among the twelve countries missing from the list of those nations receiving most health aid, says Christopher Murray, study author and researcher at the University of Washington.

“With no one tracking this massive growth in spending, it’s no wonder that some countries receive far more than their neighbours for no immediately apparent reason,” he says (press release). “We’re hoping that this attempt to count money that has never been counted before in a careful and consistent way will lead to greater transparency and better use of health resources.”

Continue reading "$20 billion, and for what?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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 2009 pandemic flu continues to spread in many parts of the United States and elsewhere in the Northern hemisphere. Some had figured it might go away, as the normal flu season has ended, and not return until the autumn when seasonal flu activity typically picks up. In hard hit places such as New York almost a tenth of the population are showing influenza like symptoms.

In the Southern Hemisphere, where the flu season is getting underway, South Africa yesterday reported its first case, following recent cases in Egypt and Morocco. Africa has not reported anything like the same extent of spread asother parts of the South (such as Australia and countries in South America) - but that is likely down to lack of surveillance.

Clinical researchers have been slow to respond to the 2009 flu pandemic, lament researchers writing in today's Lancet. "Public health officials, virologists, epidemiologists, and policy makers have done well in responding to a rapidly emerging and complex problem. By contrast, the clinical research community's response has been delayed and modest, " writes Jeremy Farrar, a researcher in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and colleagues from Vietnam, the US and Mexico.

They deplore the "lack of information" on the pathogenesis and clinical aspects of those with severe illness, and argue that trials and other clinical research are urgently needed to better understand the disease, and learn of necessary tweaks to treatment regimes. What research is being done isn't being published fast enough, add Farrar et al., contrasting this with the speedy publication by researchers in other disciplines who have published in fast-tracked journal articles, or shared on public wikis – eg here – in advance of formal publication. Clinical researchers need to "catch up," they conclude, "To do otherwise would be unethical."

Continue reading "Swine flu roundup" »

Posted by Declan Butler
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Peru's Congress has overturned two laws that would have allowed foreign companies to exploit mineral resources and gain mining rights in the Amazon forest, according to BBC News. The volte-face came after weeks of protests from Indigenous groups, who say they were not consulted about the laws which would threaten their way of life.

The laws were passed 2007 and 2008 under powers Congress had granted Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, to implement a free trade agreement with the US, the BBC News report says.

Continue reading "Peru overturns laws allowing exploitation of Amazon forest " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times reported this week that the current US President's Council on Bioethics has been disbanded. Its charter had been due to expire on 30 September.

The advisory council has had a somewhat turbulent past. President George W. Bush set it up in late 2001, following his decision to permit federally funded research on human embryonic stem cells, but only on cell lines that were in existence at the time of the announcement. Its first chair, Leon Kass, drew fire for what some regarded as ideological decisions. In 2004, council member Elizabeth Blackburn was removed after speaking out against Bush's stem-cell regulations; at the time, Kass said that she was not removed because of her political views (Nature; Nature Biotechnology). The following year, Kass left and was replaced as chair by Edmund Pellegrino of Georgetown University.

This March, 10 members of the 18-member council took the unusual step of putting out a personal consensus statement criticising President Obama's lifting of Bush's restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research.

A White House spokesman told the Times that President Obama will appoint a new council with a new mandate that “offers practical policy options". Reports from the current council include such topics as ethical caregiving and the determination of death.

It remains to be seen whether Obama will fall prey to the same trap in selecting council members. One can, however, reasonably expect Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, to be involved in the process. Moreno is also a leading bioethicist at the Center for American Progress, the Washington-based think tank that has served as a farm system for appointees in the new administration.

Posted by Alex Witze
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

NASA's return to the Moon is off and running. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite both rode into the sky over Cape Canaveral, Florida,aboard an Atlas V rocket on 18 June. The threat of thunderstorms had the launch in question right up until the very end, but conditions were declared 'green' with less than 30 minutes remaining.

LRO is now heading directly to the moon, and expected to reach it on Tuesday. LCROSS is in a looping orbit around Earth that will send it plunging into a crater near the moon's south pole on 9 October, to look for water ice. If you can't wait until then for your lunar south pole action, check out a gorgeous new composite map of the south pole craters available here.

The Twitter feed of Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, is always good for moon gossip -- including the Russian vodka on tap at the post-launch party.

Image: NASA

Posted by Alex Witze
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Medical device maker Medtronic Inc. says it paid nearly $800,000 over the past three years to a former Army surgeon accused of fabricating a study that reported positive results for one of the company's key spine products.”
The Wall Street Journal reports on the latest development in the case of Timothy R. Kuklo.

“Today you find cell phone towers in almost every part of Africa. We have never been able to establish weather monitoring on that scale, until now.”
Former UN chief Kofi Annan, now at the Global Humanitarian Forum, announces a plan to put automatic weather stations on phone masts in Africa (BBC).

“We see these subsidies as worthwhile for society, because biogas is a secure supply, and it’s utilizing resources that would have a negative impact on water quality and the climate.”
Jens Bo Holm-Nielsen, of Aalborg University in Denmark, comments on subsidies that are driving up numbers of biogas plants in Europe (Wall Street Journal).

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

This is a drill, actual inventory procedures may vary.

It's a fact of lab life that stuff gets lost in the shuffle. Digging up that old data spreadsheet or lab notebook is probably not too much more than an inconvenience for most researchers. But if you happen to work at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Fredrick, Maryland then it's a lot more serious than that.

At a press conference yesterday Col. Mark Kortepeter, USAMRIID's deputy commander told reporters that a recent inventory had turned up some 9,300 vials of previously uncatalogued pathogens, including serum samples from patients who had contracted hemorrhagic fever during the Korean War. The inventory also turned up Ebola, plague, anthrax, and botulism. Most of the samples were left by researchers who had since retired from the laboratory.

The report was bound to get tonnes of press, in part because USAMRIID is the former employer of Bruce Ivins, a researcher who the FBI named a "person of interest" in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Ivans died of a Tylenol overdose in July of 2008. This February, it emerged that Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus at the lab had gone unaccounted for, and all work was suspended until this inventory was completed.

Officials told reporters that numerous new security measures have been installed at the lab since 2001, and they've instituted an "aggressive" inventory system to ensure that future samples don't go unnoticed. It's clear that USAMRIID hopes to use this event to draw a line under its recently troubled past.

Image: US Army/ArraySarah

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tremble in fear Big Pharma! Reese Witherspoon is coming for you!

We have previously encountered fictionalised pharma stories (‘phiction’ as they shall henceforth be known), notably in ‘The Constant Gardener’ where an evil drug company murders Rachel Weisz.

Now Reese Witherspoon is going to find the humour hiding behind the fake journals, the controversial drug trials, the federal investigations, the ghost writing, and all the other scandals.

Reuters reports that Universal Pictures is developing a comedy called ‘Pharm Girl’ (see what they did there) in which Witherspoon plays “a woman who gets a job at a pharmaceutical powerhouse and begins to see the underbelly of the industry as she rises through the company’s ranks”.

Film mag Empire opines:

The pharmaceutical industry is shaping up to be Hollywood's bad guy of the month, stepping into the breach usually filled with Nazis and dastardly English types with twiddly moustaches. The Ed Zwick-helmed Love And Other Drugs will also put the boot into big pharma, albeit in a similarly comically-toned way.

Hat tip: Pharma Gossip.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Chemistry | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist behind the first widely-used taxonomy of plants and animals, faced a problem modern biologists confront all the time: too much data. His solution was simple, says science historian Staffan Mueller-Wille: Linnaeus invented index cards.

“Although a seemingly mundane and simple innovation, Linnaeus’ use of index cards marks a major shift in how eighteenth-century naturalists thought about the order of nature,” says Mueller-Wille (press release).

He says Linnaeus first sorted his ideas onto individual sheets of paper so they could be shuffled, and years later shrank the size of his notepaper to make them easier to handle.

Mueller-Wille, of the University of Exeter, will be chatting about his ongoing research into how Linnaeus invented his famous taxonomy on 4 July at an outreach event organized by the British Society for the History of Science in Leicester, UK.

More
Mueller-Wille and colleague Sara Scharf published a working paper [pdf]on the topic with the London School of Economics in 2007.

Image: wikipedia

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

Woolly mammoths roamed the UK far later than is normally believed, according to a paper published today in the Geological Journal.

Adrian Lister, of the London Natural History Museum, says new carbon dating of bones first excavated in 1986 also shows climate change, rather than humans hungry for mammoth steak, may have been behind their eventual extinction.

“Mammoths are conventionally believed to have become extinct in North Western Europe about 21,000 years ago during the main ice advance, known as the 'Last Glacial Maximum',” says Lister (press release). “Our new radiocarbon dating of the Condover mammoths changes that, by showing that mammoths returned to Britain and survived until around 14,000 years ago.”

This new date ties in with the takeover of grassy plains by forests. Mammoths preferred plains and were not very good in forests, as their tusks would get tangled in the branches (possibly).

Continue reading "Mammoths around longer than thought" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Italy cancels G8 research meeting
Scrapped ministerial summit may jeopardize pressing climate change decisions.

Dinosaur's digits show how birds got wings
A new dinosaur species looks set to solve an old evolutionary puzzle.

Beijing's clean air claims questioned
Environment ministry now plans to monitor ozone and small particles.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Things are very quiet on the surface of the Sun just now… a little too quiet. Normally, the surface of the sun is covered "sun spots," areas of magnetic activity that are usually accompanied by flares and "coronal mass ejections," giant streams of material that can seriously disrupt life on earth.

Lately there's not much happening over on good old Sol. For the past few years we've been in a "solar minimum"—a period of reduced activity. Most people expected that the minimum would end last year, but it seems to be stretching on longer than expected.

Now a group of scientists at the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona think that they've finally figured out why. Using long-term observations from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) facility, the team was able to watch an east-to-west jet stream some 1,000-7,000 km below the sun's surface. They presented their results at the Solar Physics Division meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The jet stream has moved sluggishly from the polar regions of the sun to the equator, and that's delayed the onset of the latest solar cycle. Soon however that may all change—the scientists believe that the jet stream has reached a critical point where it can rekindle sunspots and start the cycle anew. So keep an eye on our nearest star, but please remember not to stare at the Sun directly.

Image: SOHO/Nasa

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Eli Lilly, the Indiana-based pharmaceutical company perhaps best known for developing Prozac, has offered to conduct preliminary drug screening of compounds developed in academic labs. The company will screen the compounds using in vitro assays against Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, cancer, and osteoporosis -- all for the low, low price of getting the first shot at subsequent licensing deals or collaborations.

Lilly’s latest move is another sign of big pharma’s increasing creativity as it prowls academic labs for new early drug leads. Although broad agreements between universities and industry make some uneasy, pharma’s hunger for pipeline-replenishing drug candidates comes as funding agencies pressure academics to translate their results into therapies that will provide a clinical benefit. (See, for example, ‘Chemical screening centers get funding boost’ and 'Flagship drug-development initiative picks projects'; subscription required). The result: more collaboration between the two sectors.

For Lilly’s latest endeavor, called the Phenotypic Drug Discovery programme (PD2), the company hammered out a universal material transfer agreement that would be signed by institutions, sparing researchers the hassle of negotiating individual agreements. The company also claims that the identity of submitted compounds will be kept secret, even from Lilly’s own researchers, by a special computer algorithm. According to The Scientist, about 65 institutions have already signed up.

Posted by Heidi Ledford
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Since erupting on June 12 the Sarychev volcano continues to wreak havoc for air travellers.

According to CBC Canada, Air Canada, Air China, Asiana Airlines and Korean Airlines all cancelled or delayed flights in and out of Vancouver International Airport on Tuesday. These are all routes that would pass near to the volcano.

The dust plume has now spread as far as 1500 miles from the site.

The NASA Earth Observatory has a nice series of pictures that for the moment is updated daily.

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

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 the wake of the first death from swine flu outside of the Americas, news from Brazil indicates that a new strain of the virus may have emerged there.

Institute Adolfo Lutz, in São Paulo, says it has isolated a new strain, “now known as A / Paulo/1454/H1N1”.

It is not yet clear whether the new strain is more or less virulent, but Medical News Today writes:

News of the new strain, together with the newly reported deaths of two people in Argentina to the swine flu virus, have added to fears that South America is heading for a tough winter dominated by the flu pandemic.

More flu news

From air traffic controllers packed together in control towers to prisoners denied hand sanitizer for fear they might drink it, many U.S. government agencies would fall short if a dangerous pandemic struck, according to a report released to Congress on Tuesday.
- Reuters

It will be difficult to boost surveillance of hogs for the new pandemic strain of H1N1 flu unless farmers are confident they won't be penalized if the disease is found in their barns, an official with the World Organization for Animal Health said on Tuesday.
- Reuters

War-funding legislation survived a fierce partisan battle in the House on Tuesday …t he $106 billion measure, in addition to about $80 billion for military operations, provides for an array of other spending priorities, including $7.7 billion to respond to the flu pandemic.
- USA Today

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-post from In The Field:

Nature News twitters the Apollo 11 moon mission as it happened -- 40 years on. Followers can read about technical milestones, political challenges, and related events in the space race starting today, just over a month before the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing.

The Tweets, located at http://twitter.com/ApolloPlus40, will follow Apollo 11’s crew to the moon and back, and taper off during the weeks following the mission to give followers the context surrounding the moon mission and its fallout for science and the wider world. Accompanying information will also be available on our In The Field blog.

Photo: NASA

Reformatted after original posting.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Biologists need to take a more nuanced view of ‘same-sex behaviour’ in animals, say the authors of a new review article on the topic.

Male-male and female-female interactions have been “extensively documented in non-human animals”, write University of California, Riverside researchers Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk. However they want to see scientists looking more towards the evolutionary consequences of same-sex behaviour, not just on why it occurs.

“It’s clear that same-sex sexual behaviour extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies,” says Bailey (press release).

He adds that researchers may be looking at widely different behaviours under the same ‘same-sex behaviours’ banner. “For example, male fruit flies may court other males because they are lacking a gene that enables them to discriminate between the sexes. But that is very different from male bottlenose dolphins, who engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding, or female Laysan Albatross that can remain pair-bonded for life and cooperatively rear young.”

Continue reading "Birds do it, bees do it…" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier

A gargantuan plan of supplying European consumers with electricity generated in the Saharan desert could see the light of day earlier than even the most optimistic solar energy aficionados had expected.

According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a group of 20 large German companies, led by the reinsurance giant Munich Re, and also including Siemens, Deutsche Bank and RWE, is determined to go ahead with an €400 billion project known as Desertec. If fully realized, the envisaged network of huge solar thermal power plants across North Africa could provide up to 15 % of Europe’s overall electricity needs by mid-century.

Next month already, the group plans to create a consortium that is to look in more detail into the technical and financial feasibility of the envisaged project. Developing concrete plans could take two to three years, Torsten Jeworek, a Munich Re board member, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Continue reading "German firms look to draw power from the Sahara" »

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier
Categories: Energy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

NASA has abandoned its attempt to launch the shuttle Endeavour today after another hydrogen leak.

A 13 June launch attempt was called off for the same reason.

“We’re going to step back and figure out what the problem is and go fix it,” says Space Shuttle Program Manager LeRoy Cain. “Once we get it fixed and we’re confident that we have a solution that’s going to work and allow us to go fly safely, then we'll proceed forward.”

At the moment the next launch attempt is scheduled for 11 July. All eyes are now on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which is being wheeled out today for a launch tomorrow atop an Atlas V rocket.

On his twitter feed, Endeavour mission commander Mark Polansky says, “I’m sure you all know that we postponed again. It’s a reminder that spaceflight is NOT routine. We will fly home to Houston this morning.”

Image: the Ground Umbilical Carrier Panel area on space shuttle Endeavour's external fuel tank, site of the hydrogen leaks / NASA TV

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

The New York Empire State Stem Cell Board (ESSCB) has approved the use of state funds to compensate women who donate eggs for embryonic stem cell research.

The board, which implements New York’s $600 million stem cell research initiative, reached the decision on 11 June. Board members noted that taxpayer funds are already used to compensate some egg donors in state-subsidized in vitro fertilization programs. They also emphasized that researchers in other states that do not allow payment for eggs – including Massachusetts and California -- have largely failed to recruit donors.

Nevertheless, the decision sparked a predictable outcry from activists. The New York State Catholic Conference called it “a grossly unethical, dangerous and exploitative move that treats women’s body parts as commodities,” (Catholic Courier) and Thomas Berg, a Catholic priest and a member of the ESSCB’s ethics committee, criticized the board for not allowing public comment on the issue (Christian News Wire).

Posted by Heidi Ledford
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The White House opened its gates to a gaggle of science reporters Tuesday as administration officials and scientists released a much-anticipated assessment of global warming's impacts on the United States. The message - global warming is upon us - was delivered clearly and forcefully, several times over.

Hardly a novel finding, but, in a sign of the times, the audience proved receptive. The report echoed over the wires (see the Washington Post, New York Times) and filled up email in-boxes as environmental groups and politicians put their seal on the document.

President Barack Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren, called the report "the most up-to-date, comprehensive and authoritative assessment" of global warming in the United States. The document focuses on regional impacts, he added, "talking about climate where people actually experience it: in their back yards."

Continue reading "US releases assessment of climate impacts" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Patchy pig monitoring may hide flu threat
Experts call for increased surveillance of animals.

Climate talks snarled up
Two-pronged negotiations fail to bridge divide between nations.

Feather growth limits size of flying birds
Time required for moulting may be a more important factor than weight.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is hard to avoid using the phrase “scientists have discovered ….” But here we go again: Scientists have discovered a way to make concrete last for 16,000 years.

This is not, as on first inspection it might seem, the environmental nightmare it sounds like. What Matthieu Vandamme from the Université Paris-Est and Franz-Josef Ulm from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done is work out why concrete creeps, or gradually deforms over time.

The answer is published in PNAS this week and appears to be the way that calcium-silicate-hydrate crystals rearrange themselves at the nanoscale.

This process can’t be stopped, the researchers say, but can be slowed. Slowed so that concrete will last 16,000 years, says GreentechMedia.

So what is creep? Well, according to Ulm, it’s like chewing gum. Gum will stretch and compress if a constant force is applied, Science News tells us, and this, says Ulm is what concrete does, but at a much larger scale.

The hope for creep-free concrete in future is now in the hands of nanoengineers who with the help of this latest research might be able to come up with an additive that slows the creep right down.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I really hope the New York Times fact checkers did their job on this one*. This has to be true: Buzz Aldrin is to appear in a rap video with Snoop Dogg.

Astronaut and Moon-walker Aldrin told the Times, “I just did a rap session with Snoop Dogg and a rap composition called 'Rocket Experience'. It’s going to be an online video.

“… I relate. It’s not singing, it’s rapping.”

Hopefully this rap, when released, will prove good enough to add to our Moon Songs Hall of Fame. As one commenter on the BoingBoing website so eloquently puts it: “Snoop D-O-double-G up in the hizzle with Bizzle Adrizzle, fo' shizzle.”

Another highlight from the brilliant interview:

NYT: Was your mother’s maiden name really Marion Moon?
BA: Yes. I didn’t feel NASA needed to know that. Somebody would think I was trying to get favoured treatment because my ancestors had the name Moon. And that’s a joke.

* And I’m suspicious, as the piece states “A version of this article appeared in print on June 21, 2009.”

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

Britain’s science minister, Paul Drayson, has backed calls for science to have its own parliamentary committee to scrutinise the government’s funding and use of science (BBC News, THE)

After a cabinet reshuffle on 5 June, responsibility for science was absorbed into a newly created department for business from the former Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. In the reorganisation, Drayson’s brief has also expanded to include responsibility for defence equipment at the Ministry of Defence.

Continue reading "Drayson backs committee for science scrutiny " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The research that allowed an endangered butterfly to be successfully reintroduced to the UK has finally been published this week.

The large blue butterfly (Maculinea arion) became extinct in the country in 1979. However, before this happened, Jeremy Thomas of the University of Oxford camped out with the last surviving colony to collect information that would be vital to their successful reintroduction.

Now he has published his research in Science (online Thursday).

“I was living with the last UK colony, measuring everything, including their behaviour, how many eggs they laid, the survival of individual eggs, how many caterpillars were in the plants. It was a bit like a detective story,” he says (press release).

“I’ve been saving this paper up, as it were, for 25 years.”

Continue reading "Saving the large blue butterfly" »

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

“I still think that anyone who is not a little scared by the changes that WolframAlpha brings hasn’t thought about it enough yet.”
Maria Andersen, a maths teacher at Muskegon Community College, comments on the potential of new search engine WolframAlpha to ‘assist’ pupils with their maths problems (Chronicle of Higher Ed).

“This gives Glaxo instant gratification. It generates sales immediately and allows GSK to expand in emerging markets with a ready made mix of products.”
Navid Malik, analyst at Matrix Corp, comments on GSK’s link up with of Indian generic drug maker Dr Reddy’s (Financial Times).

“I’m absolutely confident we will see the elements of the Humboldt payload eventually deployed on Mars, but probably in a more dedicated circumstance.”
David Southwood, science director of the European Space Agency, comments on the fact that the science instrument package called Humboldt will not go up on the ExoMars mission (BBC).

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

Posted for Quirin Schiermeier

The American astronomer Jack Eddy, famed for his studies on the connections between solar activity and terrestrial climate, died last Wednesday in Tucson, Arizona.

Born John Allen Eddy in 1931 in Pawnee City, Nebraska, Eddy was in 1949 appointed to the US Naval Academy where he crawled out on the roof one night to look at the stars. After graduation, he served for four years in the Korean War. In 1957 he became the first student in the astro-geophysics graduate school at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After a period of teaching he joined the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). When laid off from NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory in 1973 he was hired by NASA.

In a famous study published in 1976 in Science, Eddy demonstrated a link between unusually low solar activity and the coldest period of the so-called little ice age.

Continue reading "Sunspot veteran dies at 78" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarychev Peak on Matua Island in the Russian Kuril Islands is blowing its top and the ash cloud is threatening aircraft flying over the area.

The volcano began spewing on June 12, and since then, according to US Air Force Weather Agency, that ash has now spread 700 nautical miles (1,300 kilometers) east-southeast and 400 nautical miles (740 kilometers) west-northwest of the volcano. The image was taken by the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

The plume reaches up 5 miles (8 kilometers) into the air, which is why air traffic controllers and ships in the locality have been warned, “The ash cloud presents a threat to aeroplane engines and may lead to communications systems failures,” Olga Shestakova, a spokeswoman for the Marine Geology and Geophysics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences told the Telegraph.

The particles that can cause havoc are often too tiny to be picked up by weather monitoring systems (see "Volcanoes ignite monitoring efforts")

Volcano fans can keep up to date over at the blog Eruptions, where they will also find more details about this, and other volcanoes.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

At least two bloggers have taken credit for independently making hundreds of formal complaints against British chiropractors for false advertising. British chiropractors have drawn extra attention in the wake of a libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against science writer Simon Singh (The Great Beyond, 10 June 2009), and a related campaign to keep libel laws out of science.

The head of the Leicester branch of Skeptics in the Pub explained on his blog Adventures in Nonsense on Saturday how he automated a search for false claims on chiropractic websites, and filed complaints with local Trading Standards offices and with the General Chiropractic Council (GCC). The activist has forced numerous companies to change the public claims they made about health remedies through similar steps in the past.

He told Nature that Saturday's post came in response to a blog post on Zeno's Blog, a blog about false medical claims, which announced an independent letter-writing campaign last week.

A self-identified ex-member of the GCC questions whether the council will take action on so many complaints at once, since members under investigation are exempt from paying the membership dues which fund the GCC's activities, and because a committee member is targeted by the complaint.

The author of Zeno's Blog told Nature: "I don't necessarily expect it to be a smooth process, but, as a statutory body, I fully expect the GCC to follow through on all valid complaints."

The author of Adventures in Nonsense said that he had already written the to GCC to ask how they would handle this and other potential conflicts and was awaiting a response. He added that while he has long had an interest in false claims made by many different businesses, the Simon Singh case had "focused [skeptics'] energy on chiropractic."

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Alaska’s Rat Island needs a new name this week.

The US Fish and Wildlife service reports that a massive poisoning campaign appears to have rid the island, which is in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, of the rodents brought there by a shipwreck in 1780. Native bird populations were heavily damaged by the rampaging rats.

“After more than two weeks of intensive field monitoring … biologists have found no sign of the invasive rats that have decimated native bird populations for more than 200 years,” says the FWS.

However the poisoning may have had some sad side effects.

Continue reading "Rat Island now rat free" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

NASA abandoned its plan to launch the space shuttle Endeavour on Saturday after a hydrogen leak.

“Managers met Sunday afternoon to evaluate how repairs are going and assess when Endeavour’s next launch attempt will be,” the agency said in a statement. “The earliest the shuttle could be ready for liftoff is June 17, however there is a conflict on that date with the scheduled launch of NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter/Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.”

The Houston Chronicle thinks the smart money is on a launch attempt on the 17th, as this would then allow the lunar mission to launch on the 19th or 20th. “If the opportunities were reversed, and the lunar orbiter launched Wednesday, the time requirements to reconfigure the launch range for the shuttle are longer, and Endeavour would have only one day, June 20, to attempt a launch,” the paper points out.

USA Today adds that all the launch pad gridlock is starting to cost NASA serious money, as the agency has to keep workers on contract for longer than originally planned.

Image: Endeavour ready for launch on 12 June / NASA/Jim Grossmann

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Rex Dalton

The accidental death earlier this year of a researcher in a chemistry laboratory fire continues to reverberate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

UCLA officials have recently switched to a defensive mode, after last month agreeing to pay nearly $32,000 in fines and accepting health and safety citations for violations following the 16 January death of Sheri Sangji.

A statement posted on 8 June says the university will engage in a partial appeal of the state sanctions to prevent their use in any future civil or criminal proceeding against UCLA. Sangji's family and friends are pushing for more scrutiny of the 29 December accident. Sangji, age 23, was critically burned when a syringe malfunctioned when she was removing volatile t-butyl lithium from a container.

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health cited UCLA in May for inadequate training, not providing protective clothing, and failing to correct previously identified lab safety deficiencies. At the time, UCLA noted it had taken all required corrective actions.

But now a UCLA attorney’s statement says the university had corrected the noted deficiencies prior to the incident – only failed to document those remedies. The university says the appeal doesn’t mean it isn’t serious about maintaining safe laboratories.

The appeal will be heard during an administrative hearing process in the coming months.

Posted by Alex Witze
Categories: Chemistry | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

“We just looked at each other and said, ‘Hey, we’re actually observing again!’”
Peter Backus, manager of observing programmes at the alien hunting SETI Institute, comments on the first results from the Allen Telescope Array (MSNBC).

“There was significant risk that operators and even members of the public could have been harmed if there had not been fortunate and appropriate intervention of a contractor who just happened to be in the right plant area when things went wrong.”
The UK’s Nuclear Installation Inspectorate admits that a nuclear accident was on the cards at the Sizewell A power station in 2007 until a contractor decided to wash some clothes at a launderette serendipitously near a leak (Daily Mail).

“The funny thing is that it is the second smallest known mushroom in this genus and it grows sideways, almost limp.”
Bob Drewes, curator of herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences, is remarkably sanguine about a new species of mushroom being named after his [censored] (SiliconValley.com).

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

One can never have too many songs about science, nor can one ever have too many songs about science in the style of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice baby”.

Thanks to the creator of yesterday’s isotope rap, Kate McAlpine the Great Beyond has been alerted to two of the aforementioned specimens.

Welcome to ISS Baby, with the line “NASA’s hot, working things like Cassini/ Projects here are anything but teeny.” Genius, although I’m not sure it is better than the line in Cruise Cruise Baby, by a group of marine biologists, who clearly suffer for their art: “Ocean sickness problems? Yo we’ll solve them/throw up our snacks so the ocean dissolve ‘em.” Nice.

Here goes…

Continue reading "Songs about science XXI: imitation is flattery, right?" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Vaccines seem to be the H1N1 topic of the moment after the World Health Organisation raised the Panic Level, sorry, the PanDEMic Level to 6, signalling we are now officially in a pandemic.

“One immediate effect of the declaration of an H1N1 flu pandemic will be to speed the production of a vaccine against the new virus”, says the LA Times. The Times doesn’t really explain why this might be the case.

As Nature noted earlier this week, “Whether the WHO decision will change much in practice remains to be seen, as the world has clearly been in a pandemic for weeks.” AP doesn’t buy it either. The wire service has a story out headlined ‘CDC: Swine flu pandemic level won't change efforts’.

Either way, vaccine production is stepping up. GSK has announced it has started development on a potential H1N1 vaccine and offered to convert its donation of 50 million doses of bird flu vaccines to swine flu.

Sanofi Pasteur has also pledged to get behind the WHO and Novartis says it has successfully produced a first batch of H1N1 vaccine, “weeks ahead of expectations”.

Continue reading "Swine flu round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Who can resist a study that shows stress really does make your hair turn grey? Sadly the latest paper from Emi Nishimura has not found a link between, say, your office environment and the number of your colleagues sporting salt and pepper hairstyles.

Rather, in the latest issue of Cell, Nishimura and colleagues report that ‘genotoxic stress’ from ionising radiation damages DNA in the melanocyte stem cells that give mouse hairs their colour.

“It is estimated that a single cell in mammals can encounter approximately 100,000 DNA damaging events per day,” says Nishimura, of Tokyo Medical and Dental University (press release). “Once stem cells are damaged irreversibly, the damaged stem cells need to be eliminated to maintain the quality of the stem cell pools.”

Rather than causing the death of these stem cells, the damage makes them differentiate to form mature melanocytes instead of more stem cells, meaning nothing is left to dye the next growth of hair. So, mice exposed to radiation in their study turned permanently grey.

This may even be a mechanism to prevent damaged stem cells becoming cancerous.

“Greying may actually be a safety mechanism, that’s a cool twist,” David Fisher, of the Massachusetts General Hospital told Bloomberg. “They’ve shown that this mechanism is actually removing damaged stem cells. The good news is if you do find yourself greying, you’re probably better off not having those cells persist.”

Stress watch
“When an aging mouse's lovely brown fur turns grey, she can now officially blame stress — at least, the kind of stress that damages DNA” – CBC
“If you’ve ever blamed your gray hair on stress, you weren’t far from the truth” – Science
“We've all heard that stress causes gray hairs. Now, new research suggests it’s true” – LiveScience

Image: Ken Inomata

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

GlaxoSmithKline is to expand its pilot programme offering cheaper drugs in poorer countries, according to its chief executive.

Andrew Witty says the Philippines pilot had boosted sales by between 15 and 40% with price cuts of 30 to 50% (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal).

“Making sure the price-volume equation is right is a key piece of the strategy,” says Witty (FT). “We’re willing to flex our business model to show that we are as competitive in the Philippines as in Philadelphia.”

Earlier this year he promised that drug prices in so-called Least Developed Countries would be cut to 25% of prices in richer nations.

However, it is not all going GSK’s way in the pricing stakes. In another article, the WSJ notes:

GlaxoSmithKline PLC and the Russian government are at odds over the price of HIV drugs, underscoring the difficulties drug companies face in the emerging markets on which they have staked their hopes for future growth.

Image: Witty / GSK

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

A new chemical element has been officially recognised by the world’s ruling chemists. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has asked discoverer Sigurd Hofmann to pick a name for ‘Element 112’.

Hofmann’s team smashed zinc atoms into a lead target with the help of a particle accelerator to create their new element, which has an atomic number of 112, meaning each atom has 112 protons in its nucleus.

At the moment the element has been given the temporary name ‘ununbium’, derived from the Latin for one-one-two (BBC, Daily Mail).

“During the next few weeks, the scientists of the discovering team will deliberate on a name for the new element,” says Hofmann, of the GSI Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany (press release).

Previous GSI experiments have given us Bohrium, Hassium, Meitnerium, Darmstadtium, and Roentgenium. All rather serious names those; maybe it’s time to lighten things up by calling this one MegaHugeElementium or GreatBigium.

Image: the element team / A. Zschau, GSI

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Chemistry | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“The weakest target any country has pledged so far”
Kristian Tangen of Point Carbon describes Japan’s new greenhouse gas emissions targets.

"This lawsuit is a fictionalized, inaccurate account of Tesla's early years -- it's twisted and wrong, and we welcome the opportunity to set the record straight.”
Electric car manufacturer Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk’s team hit back over lawsuit filed against him by Tesla founder Martin Eberhard.

"The whole Caribbean has been flattened in the past decade, mainly as a result of climate change."
Nicholas Dulvy from Simon Fraser University, Canada tells us the bad news about the extent of coral reef damage in the Caribbean.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Quotes of the day | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week, typhoons that trigger earthquakes, worms that refuse to die, and the search for extra terrestrial life starts on Earth.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today in Songs about science, we're learning how to make rare isotopes. And why we might want to. In rap.

This little ditty comes from the same team who brought us the Large Hadron Rap in the days before the LHC was broken. (below the fold)

Also below the fold, don't forget to take a trip down memory lane for Previously on Songs about science

Continue reading "Songs about science XX: isotopes, isotopes, baby" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Glimpse of Earth as seen from afar
Lunar eclipse paints portrait of Earth that could aid hunt for distant habitable planets.

Typhoons trigger gentler tremors
Small quakes may act as a release valve that prevents catastrophic convulsions.

Avian influenza aided readiness for swine flu
Despite gains from threat of bird flu, pandemic preparedness is patchy.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pack your bags and head for the hills. The end is near. That's what you might be led to believe if you read one of the many reports out today about a paper in Nature. A duo of French researchers has modeled the future of the solar system. They've shown that chaotic gravitational perturbations could lead Mercury to swing out of its normal orbit, and that in turn could cause Venus or Mars to smash into the Earth.

"Could" is the operative word here: the chances of it actually happening stand at well under 1%. There's no way to improve the odds because of the chaotic nature of the model, but whatever the outcome, don't panic. Any collision that might occur will happen over three billion years from now.

You can listen to an interview with one of the authors, Jacques Laskar, on this week's Nature Podcast.

Image: IMCCE-CNRS

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kaguya, Japan's lunar orbiter, has concluded its mission with a concussion. The mission, which created a new set of gravity maps and also mapped the surface in HDTV, was scheduled to crash at 3:25 am local time in Japan, or 2:25 pm Eastern Daylight Time today in the US. Telescopes across Asia and Australia peered into night-time skies for a glimpse of the impact. The expected site, at 80 degrees east longitude and 66 degrees south in latitude, is shown here, as mapped by the European Space Agency's SMART-1 satellite, which itself fell to its end in 2006.
But Kaguya's crash heralds a much bigger one yet to come -- one that may turn up water along with dust. On Thursday, NASA is set to launch Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter along with its sister mission, LCROSS. In the autumn, that mission will send a 2,300 impactor -- an empty rocket stage -- into the shadowed parts of craters near the south pole where some scientists suspect ice may persist.
Image: ESA/SMART-1/Space-X

Posted by Eric Hand
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A fine example of the pitfalls of the “author-pays” scheme for the open access publishing of academic papers is revealed by The Scholarly Kitchen - the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s blog.

Philip Davis, a graduate student at Cornell University in the US, decided to investigate how rigorously academic articles submitted to journals owned by the Bentham Science Publishers, which uses the author-pays model, are peer reviewed.

Continue reading "Pay to publish" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes Avandia, previously plagued by problems associated with heart attacks, is in the news again. Late last week, GSK announced results of a large-scale clinical trial claiming that in the long term Avandia did not increase cardiovascular risk “compared to other commonly used diabetes medicines”.

The news means that GSK will hope that sales get a boost, but also that doctors will prescribe the drug more. “We believe that Avandia remains an important diabetes medicine for the appropriate patients,” said Ellen Strahlman, GSK’s Chief Medical Officer.

But there is still resistance. In the same issue of the Lancet (summary here) where the results of the trial, called Record, were published, Ravi Retnakaran and Bernard Zinman from Mount Sinai Hopsital, Toronto, Canada, offer caution. “definitive conclusions about the relation between rosiglitazone and cardiovascular disease remain elusive,” they say, and look at not just Avandia, or rosiglitazone but also a drug in the same thiazolidinedione family, pioglitazone.

“We believe that the evidence regarding the risk–benefit ratio for thiazolidinediones needs a prudent approach to the use of these medications in the management of type 2 diabetes.”

The whole thing is rounded up nicely over at FiercePharma, including links to other coverage and explanation of some of the controversies that have plagued the drug's history. The debate will rage for some time it seems.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Peter Mandelson, the government's new Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills offered some reassurance this morning about the role of science within the newly formed Department for Business Innovations and Skills (DBIS or just BIS). Mandelson spoke at the centenary celebration of London's Science Museum.

For those in need of a catch-up, BIS was formed last Friday after a number of resignations from Gordon Brown's cabinet rocked the government. BIS took over the science brief from the short-lived Department of Innovation Universities and Skills, which is now defunct after just 20 months.

Some folks fret that moving science into BIS means that it will come second to business, but that's not going to happen according to Mandelson. "We will be operating on a budget which is ring-fenced safe and sound," he told reporters at a press conference after the event. He added that the Haldane principle, which says that government should not interfere with the research councils, should be respected.

That's not to say there won't changes. At one point Mandelson said that applied research "obviously will receive greater emphasis." But when pressed about it, he backed down: "Applied research does not operate at the expense of fundamental science. You need both," he told me.

There have also been some worries about Paul Drayson, currently the minister of state for science. Under the cabinet reshuffle, it looks like he'll also be working for the Ministry of Defence. The BBC reports that he'll be managing the Defence R&D portfolio along with some procurement (although the MoD couldn't confirm it). Will that mean less time to devote to science?

No, says Mandelson. "Lord Drayson will give the overwhelming bulk of his time to science, innovation, and technology," he says. "I think you will find that he is a spokesman for the MoD in the Lords, rather than a minister who is going to be developing the bulk of his time to that title."

Indeed, several people are feeling pretty good about the Mandelson/Drayson tag team. Jessica Bland over at Just a Theory has a nice analysis of why it might be good for science.

But many others are still adopting a wait-and-see approach, including Universities UK, the UK's largest higher education group. They're hoping to set up some face time with Mandelson later this month to find out what this will mean for higher ed.

Bill Hartnett of the Royal Society summed up the press conference rather well: "The words are reassuring," he says

Reassurance is one thing, but it's the policy that will matter in the end.

UPDATE: Drayson's duties have now been outlined by the MoD. Among other things he will be "championing new technologies" in defence.

Image: J. Sutcliffe/Science Museum

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Betelgeuse is shrinking! Could it be about to go supernova? Reports from the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, California this week suggest that over the past 15 years the bright red star has shrunk by 15%. (Press release)

Wowsers.

These long-term observations were made by nearly-94-year old Nobel laureate Charles Townes and his colleagues, at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory.

The star is no dimmer than it has been over the time they’ve been looking at it, and the reasons for the shrinkage have so far eluded the team. "We do not know why the star is shrinking," says team member Edward Wishnow. "Considering all that we know about galaxies and the distant universe, there are still lots of things we don't know about stars, including what happens as red giants near the ends of their lives."

So far, so confusing. Few reports offer much explanation. The Register says the shrinking, seen by some including Townes as possible first signs of the star collapsing into a supernova, will be of most concern to fans of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the red star was home to Zaphod Beeblebrox. “Fans will be hoping that the recent shrinkage of Zaphod's sun doesn't mean that, in fact, his homeworld was destroyed hundreds of years before Earth's abrupt demolition to allow construction of a hyperspace bypass,” says the Register’s Lewis Page.

Over at New Scientist, we can find more in way of clarification. Townes tells them: “Maybe there's some instability in the star and it's going to collapse or at least go way down in size or blow off some material, but who knows.” Other astronomers polled for their opinions offer pulsations as a cause of the diminishment, or perhaps that the wonky star was just being looked at from a funny angle. "Often if you look at the simulations, the star is not spherical. It looks like a bad potato," Graham Harper from the University of Colorado in Boulder told New Scientist.

Image: NASA

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (30) | TrackBacks (0)

The libel case between the British Chiropractic Association and science writer Simon Singh appears to be drawing unwelcome attention to chiropractic in the UK.

The BCA sued Singh last year over a column he wrote attacking the organisation's medical claims. Nature has covered the case and a related campaign to 'Keep Libel Laws Out Of Science' coordinated by the non-profit lobby group Sense About Science most recently in a blog post and in a pair of news stories here and here.

Yesterday, the chair of the McTimoney Chiropractic Association (MCA), a professional organisation of practitioners of a form of chiropractic, reportedly emailed the group's members advising that they remove their websites to avoid being targeted by a coordinated campaign of complaints to the General Chiropractic Council (GCC), the UK's chiropractic regulating body. A copy of the email is posted on Chiropracticlive.com.

The message notes that "complaints against more than 500 individual chiropractors have been sent to the GCC in the last 24 hours." A representative from Sense About Science told Nature that the organisation is not involved in the complaints to the GCC.

Numerous chiropractors have removed their websites, but bloggers have already pointed to publicly available archived copies of the old sites, which made claims that the MCA suggested its members should not be making.

The MCA did not answer the telephone or respond to an email from Nature today.

The letter from the MCA is reposted in full below:

Continue reading "Chiropractic group advises members to 'withdraw from the battleground'" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted for Monya Baker from The Niche

Transplants of a fetal neural stem cell product seem safe, according to a 12-month study on six children with a horrible neurodegenerative disease called neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis or Batten disease. Furthermore, the company reported results from an autopsy of a treated patient who died from the disease. (See Girl dies in stem cell trial for Batten disease ). These indicate that the injected cells engraft and survive in the brain for close to a year.

Whether cells can survive after transplant is considered a crucial requirement for whether many cell therapies can work at all, and StemCells Inc, the company sponsoring the trial, explicitly thanked the child’s parents for allowing the autopsy to be performed.

Batten disease is a progressive neural degenerative disease in which brain cells poison themselves because they lack a crucial enzyme that clears away unnecessary fats and proteins. The hope is that transplanted cells can make enough of the enzyme to stall toxic build-up in the host cells as well.

As is typical in clinical trials, the small study, which lacked a control group, was not designed to assess whether the experimental procedure could help patients, only whether or not it would harm them. A summary of data and results can be found in this press release. Each patient received injections to 8 spots in the brain totaling approximately 500 million or a billion cells. Adverse events were reported, but none could be attributed to the stem cell injections.

Continue reading "StemCells clinical trial results: Cells survive, seem safe" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Richard Van Noorden

Lisa Jackson, new administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), won beams of approval at a Senate hearing today as she explained how the agency had changed its processes to increase scientific integrity and transparency. But more could still be done to throw off a dark eight-year blanket of political interference in environmental scientists’ work, senators heard.

“In all my years I’ve never encountered an administrator who hit the ground running the way you did,” chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) praised Jackson.

Continue reading "It's a Senate lovefest for the EPA" »

Posted by Alex Witze
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski

On Monday 8 June, the Jang Yeong-sil Memorial Foundation wanted to give cloning expert Woo Suk Hwang an award for scientific excellence. But according to The Korea Herald, Hwang had another appointment - with the Seoul district court that is still, after more than 3 years, trying to figure out if his scientific fraud is legally actionable.

An official from the foundation said, "Even though he is on trial, we have made our decision by considering his achievements in the embryonic stem-cell development and his success in cloning dogs." One might contest both those points. Investigation into Hwang’s embryonic stem-cell research left little to believe in after picking away the layers of fabrication.

And the successful dog cloning is largely credited to another scientist, Byeong Chun Lee, who was also at the hearing and, like Hwang, is under investigation for fraud related to their previous experiments.

Lee and Hwang have since ended up on opposite sides of another court case - over the patents related to dog cloning.

Posted by Mark Peplow
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Declan Butler:

Two main news items today from the World Health Organization's weekly media briefing on the H1N1 swine flu. First, the agency is receiving reports that infections in Inuit communities in Canada are showing "disproportionate numbers of serious cases occurring,” said Keiji Fukuda, WHO's interim assistant director-general for health security and environment. The agency is seeing “a larger number than expected of young Inuit people developing serious illnesses requiring hospitalization.”

There are few other details available at the moment, and Fukuda says it's too soon to start speculating on causes, such as genetic, environmental or due to underlying diseases. But the Inuit were among one of the groups that suffered the highest mortality levels in the 1918 pandemic. “This is why these reports raise such concern for us,” he said. It's also the sort of country- and community-specific impacts that WHO will be keeping its eye on worldwide in the months to come, as the severity of the virus could vary widely from place to place.

Continue reading "Inuit hit harder by swine flu?" »

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

NASA’s human spaceflight budget request was recently cut from $4 billion to $3.3 billion
by the House Appropriations Committee, and Florida congressmen are not pleased.

President Obama’s budget request was down-sized by the committee’s commerce, justice, science subcommittee in what the subcommittee chair Alan Mollohan described as a “time-out” until the Augustine panel reaches its conclusions.

Florida congresspersons Suzanne Kosmas and Bill Posey have written a letter to the committee expressing their concern, in particular for the workforce that is gearing up to provide us with space rockets. “I appreciate the desire to wait for recommendations from the Augustine Panel, but cutting funds in the meantime sends the wrong message and increases the risk of losing a professional workforce that may not be easily reassembled for future programs,” says Kosmas. (Press release). The letter says that tens of thousands of jobs are at risk.

eWeek.com runs the news of the move by the committee under the headline “Lawmakers slash NASA’s manned space flight budget”. We will have to wait and see how much more back and forth there is until the Augustine panel report, and the budget is finally set.

Image: NASA

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Termites and other pests are challenged by microbial invaders like bacteria and fungi. So, why can’t our enemies’ enemies be our friends?

Ram Sasisekharan and his colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked to some termite immune molecules, particularly a gram negative bacteria binding protein tGNBP-2 that is used by the wood chewers to fend off infections, for a way to create new pesticides.

tGNBP-2 recognizes carbohydrates associated with infectious microbes, and also cleaves the structure, alerting the immune system to the pathogen. Termites have the protein in their cells, but also secrete it and infuse their nests with it. The researchers found a modified glucose molecule that can bind to an active pocket of tGNBP-2 and deactivated it. This molecule, D-δ-gluconolactone (GDL) made termites more susceptible to subsequent infection with the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae in lab tests. The insects were also more susceptible to opportunistic infections.

See all the gory coverage at The Scientist, The Telegraph and in National Geographic News.

Kudos to The Scientist (full disclosure: they are my former employers), for getting some needed words of caution from a pathologist/entomologist who has experience in pest control.

Image: Turning Termite from Anauxite under creative commons.

Posted by Brendan Maher
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lord Paul Drayson, the UK's science minister, is on Twitter. This afternoon, he hosted an impromptu question and answer session with researchers and policy-watchers. Among other things, he reassured the research community that he will be able to continue to advocate for science, even as he takes on a new job as the Ministry of Defence's defence equipment minister. As he put it in 136 characters:

"lorddrayson: @PD_Smith But, many ministers have dual roles.. it really helps departments work together better. Silos in whitehall are not helpful. "

He also said that the ring-fence around science funding was "safe and sound," following the recent reshuffling of the government.

You can read some more excerpts here.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Anjali Nayar
The international airline industry has pledged to curb growth in their carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 and reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, the head of the global aviation association IATA said on Monday.

“No other industry is as ambitious,” said Giovanni Bisignani at the International Air Transport Association’s annual meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “Demand will continue to increase but any expansion of our carbon footprint will be compensated.”

Bisignani pointed out that international aviation emissions dropped by 7% this year. But only 2% of the drop is because of investments in technology and fuel efficiency; the other 5% drop is because of reduced capacity linked to the global recession.

Global aviation accounts for about 2% of all human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and this could rise to 3% by 2050, according to the International Panel on Climate Change. A system to keep the industry’s emissions in check was never included in the Kyoto Protocol climate deal because of the “special” international nature of the business: who is responsible for emissions reductions, for example, on an Air France flight from London to Madrid, using an American-made jet, with passengers and freight from around the world?

Continue reading "Airline industry to cut growth in carbon emissions by 2020" »

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

Posted for Anjali Nayar
Last week Reuters and The Economist reported on corruption within a yet-to-start programme to save tropical forests and curb climate change. Allegedly, the government of Papua New Guinea has illegally sold the rights to at least 40 projects aimed at averting deforestation, each worth about 1 million tonnes of carbon.

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

Continue reading "Don’t count your carbon before it’s credited" »

Posted by Mark Peplow
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Richard Van Noorden

A month after British scientists successfully protested against one of their research council’s policies, they’re at it again – this time, with a wider beef.

In May, researchers overturned a controversial banning policy [subscription required] from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. An electronic petition to Downing Street kicked off that campaign, and attracted over 2,000 signatures.

Last Tuesday another scientist-backed e-petition went live – it’s garnered over 1,100 signatures so far. The petition, organized by John Allen, a biochemist at Queen Mary University of London, requests to reverse a policy applied by UK research councils that “directs funds to projects whose outcomes are specified in advance.”

Continue reading "British scientists petition research councils: round two" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Shell has settled out of court in the case brought against them by a group including Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr., son of Ken Saro-Wiwa, an environmental activist executed in Nigeria in 1995. (see previous post here

Shell was accused of complicity in human-rights abuses, including Saro-Wiwa's execution. The settlement sees Shell pay $15.5 million, although the company says this is part of a process of reconciliation, rather than an admission of guilt.

Image: Friends of the Earth International

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Energy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The human pandemic swine flu virus H1NI is, for most of us, a disease that other people get. But now, a leading epidemiologist and flu blogger, who goes under the pseudonym Revere at the public health blog Effect Measure, reports first-hand that three generations of his family, including himself, have likely come down with the virus.

In a post last night, Swine flu comes home, he describes how his daughter has come down with lab-confirmed flu, while most of the rest of the family has influenza-like symptoms. In May, Anna Moscona, another flu expert at Weill Cornell Medical College, also diagnosed her 8-year old son as having swine flu, without testing.

Both their diagnoses are more likely correct than not, even without specific testing for swine flu.

Continue reading "Swine flu roundup – flu scientist's family catches swine flu" »

Posted by Declan Butler
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Too few women in clinical trials?
Cancer-drug studies fail to reflect true incidence of disease in the population.

Mars missions get in line
NASA planetary competitions to no longer favour Mars.

UK science pulled back to business
Government reshuffle abolishes short-lived research and education department.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Libel scorekeepers take note: campaigners have collected over 4000 signatures from the public, joining a core of 150 prominent figures in science, government and the media who signed a statement Wednesday to “Keep Libel Laws Out of Science.”

The spark for the campaign was the libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against science writer Simon Singh. Last month, a British judge decided that Singh’s words, published in The Guardian in 2008, made a factual allegation that the BCA dishonestly promoted medical treatments its members knew did not work. Singh maintains otherwise, and he announced last Wednesday that he is appealing the ruling.

The BCA released a statement Friday in response to the campaign, declaring that “The BCA sued Simon Singh only as an act of last resort.” The brief statement notes that “to stifle scientific debate would clearly be wrong,” but that “scientists must realise that they cannot simply publish with impunity what they know to be untrue and libellous.”

Fear of libel suits also means that web publishers must closely monitor--and sometimes remove--potentially libellous public comments from their sites, as happened with a statement by Stephen Curry last week on Nature Network. He has since commented on the removal, writing that, "This development seems to introduce a level of self-censorship that I had not been fully aware of before. If I can find a positive note, it will make us rely even more heavily that we already do on solid evidence."

The UK judge presiding over the case—who with a single previous ruling prompted legislation denying the jurisdiction of UK libel law in several US states—is unlikely to be overruled by the appeals court, Singh says. For now, then, the present ruling on meaning stands, and the score is BCA: one ruling; Simon Singh: thousands of supporters.

Previous coverage on Nature:
Science writer will appeal libel case ruling (Nature News, 3 June 2009)
Science writer waits on legal advice in libel case (The Great Beyond, 19 May 2009)
Court setback for science writer (Nature News, 13 May 2009)
Simon Singh loses first round in chiropractic fight (The Great Beyond, 8 May 2009)

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The World Health Organization has recommended that health authorities in all nations being routinely vaccinating young children against rotavirus, which causes 500 000 diarrheal deaths and 2 million hospitalizations every year.

Continue reading "WHO recommends expanded use of diarrhea vaccine" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Do they wind up in a standoff, beating their chests as the other primates stand by angry and embarrassed? Or might they initiate an inspiring public display of mutual respect and cooperation, if not affection?

The United States' lead climate negotiator, Todd Stern, is hoping for the latter and will depart for China on Saturday in search of ways to make it happen. "We're the two gorillas in the room," Stern told a crowd gathered at the Center for American Progress in Washington this week. "If we can join hands, it will truly change the world."

Among those accompanying Stern will be White House Science Adviser John Holdren and David Sandalow, assistant secretary for policy and international affairs at the Energy Department. It is only the latest in a string of delegations shuttling back and forth between the two countries, and it comes at a potentially revealing time.

The rest of the international climate community will be focusing on Bonn, where the United Nations is currently holding the latest round of global warming talks. With 184 days before Copenhagen, where the talks are scheduled to come to a close, the two countries appear to be seeking a little quiet time together.

The US-China relationship has sparked a fair bit of speculation as of late, spurred in part by an article about "secret" bilateral talks in the Guardian last month. In truth, the talks weren't all that secret, and in any case it would have been surprising if such talks weren't under way. But the sense of optimism raised plenty of eyebrows.

Continue reading "Two gorillas walk into a UN climate meeting... " »

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

Q&A: Zipping around on the ocean floor
Ocean scientists hunt for Canadian deep-sea corals.

Historic deal for german science
Eleventh-hour deal secures billions of euros for research.

War and migration may have shaped human behaviour
Demographic factors could be behind diverse aspects of social evolution.

Human-ape links heard in laughter
Similarities between laughter of tickled apes and humans mirrors genetic ties between species.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

NASA employees’ scored a victory this week in their struggle against background checks they regard as hugely intrusive.

Lawyers for those complaining about the Homeland Security Presidential Directive #12 checks (better known as HSPD 12) welcomed a ruling by the court of appeal in favour of employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the ongoing arcane legal wrangling.

Back in 2007 JPL employees took NASA to court over the checks, which could include information health, mental state and sexual histories. An injunction was granted blocking new HSPD-12 checks.

Yesterday’s ruling denied an attempt by the Department of Justice to have the case considered en banc. En banc hearings involve a larger panel of judges.

One of the judges who did back an en banc hearing said it would “clear the brush” that has built up as different bits of the American legal system kick the case back and forth.

Continue reading "NASA background checks court fight continues" »

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

The UK government department that houses science looks likely to be broken up amidst the flailings of under-fire prime minister Gordon Brown's cabinet reshuffle.

The Department for Universities, Innovation and Skills (DIUS) was set up by Brown when he came to power in 2007, bringing together the science and higher education agendas. Its head, John Denham - who has a chemistry degree - has been promoted in today's reshuffle, with no replacement announced.

Rumours abound that the department will be taken wholesale under the wing of business secretary Peter Mandelson (in the Department for business, enterprise and regulatory reform, or BERR). Alternatively, responsibility for science may move to BERR, and another department will take on universities.

Either way, science would be back under the control of business interests, as it was before DIUS was created. The move would reinforce the government’s push to fund research that boosts the national economy - a desire which science minister Lord Drayson has expressed on a number of occasions.

The best of the blow-by-blow speculation can be found on Twitter, but in blog action, The Times points out that the opposition Conservatives wanted to abolish the DIUS experiment anyway. "We'll get no more penguin poo research with Mandelson running the show," thinks The Ethical Palaeontologist.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The ‘White Nose Syndrome’ that has been devastating America’s bat populations since at least 2007 is “unprecedented” and could have economic and human health ramifications, a US House of Representatives hearing heard yesterday.

At a joint meeting of two subcommittees, experts lined up to warn of potential consequences not just for bats but also for human health and the economy.

Marvin Moriarty, Northeast Regional Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said it is estimated that somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million bats have died so far as a result of the fungus-related syndrome, which is named for the white fungus build up on bat noses. “The rapid onset and high mortality associated with this disease is unprecedented, making WNS the greatest challenge to bat conservation we have ever faced,” he says.

He points out that bats eat vast numbers of insects, thus protecting both crops and reducing human disease transmission by these bugs. Less bats = more insects = potentially more disease.

Continue reading "Bat disease ‘threatens humans’" »

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

Think bankruptcy is just for folks with too many credit cards? Think again.

Major health costs (see table) contributed to over 60% of US bankruptcies in 2007, according to a study of over 2,000 individuals, although this is obviously before the credit crunch really started to bite. The study [pdf], published in The American Journal of Medicine (AJM) this week, is a follow-up to a study in 2001 which found that major health costs accounted for 46.2% of US bankruptcies in that year.

The surprise is that over three quarters of those bankrupted had medical insurance and middle-class incomes.

Continue reading "Health costs drive US bankruptcies even for the insured" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Financial Crisis, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for David Cyranoski

Researchers in the Netherlands, Egypt and the United States are reporting a worrisomely high secondary transmission rate of the H1N1 virus in Japan.

The researchers also point to a high transmission rates among minors and suggest that "the population of minors could play a key role as a 'reservoir' for sustained chains of secondary transmission".

It might however be difficult to generalize from the Japanese case about how this virus moves. The explosive growth in western Japanese province of Hyogo ken, which along with neighbouring Osaka account for 98% of Japan's cases, followed a volleyball tournament in which some of the players and fans had the disease (Japan Times).

So the Japanese case might tell us less about race or age-specific transmission patterns than it does about how the disease transmits in an enclosed space when sweating, heavily breathing, people are colliding with and high-fiving each other. And the other unique factor to the Japanese case: fans at the volleyball tournament were blowing up balloons and releasing them, the way fans for the local baseball team, Hanshin Tigers, do. "Jet balloons" have since been banned by the Tigers (Japan Times).

Health ministry authorities say the extent to which the volleyball matches were responsible for the spread of the virus is under investigation. The slow release of information could have to do with complaints from the school that the kids were being scapegoated.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“This cancer drug approval for dogs is an important step forward for veterinary medicine.”
Bernadette Dunham, director of FDA’s center for veterinary medicine, comments on the approval of the first drug specifically made for treating canine cancer (AP).

“You cannot blame fat people for global warming - that is just victimisation - but there is a problem with food policy that has encouraged over-consumption and is spoiling the environment.”
Tim Lobstein, director of policy at the International Association for the Study of Obesity, responds to claims by UK government advisor Jonathan Porritt that “fat is a climate change issue” (Daily Telegraph).

“We would really prefer to do it in space or on Mars but living in the time that we do, this was the closest we could get to zero gravity.”
Noah Fulmore comments on his forthcoming zero gravity wedding on a 'Vomit Comet' (New York Daily News).

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

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 has reached Africa, with the World Health Organization confirming a case in Egypt. AFP says the Egyptian case involves a 12-year-old girl with joint US and Egyptian nationality.

Bloomberg says the WHO will raise the pandemic level to 6 soon. This would mean swine flu had “caused sustained community level outbreaks” in two different regions.

Earlier this week, Keiji Fukuda, WHO assistant director general, warned, “Globally, we believe that we are at Phase 5 but are getting closer to Phase 6 and this is based on the following assessment: it is clear that the virus continues to spread internationally, we know that there are a number of countries who appear to be in transition moving from travel-related cases to more established community types of spread.”

The White House has asked for more swine flu money to be made available, should it be needed. According to the Wall Street Journal, president Barack Obama wants $2 billion to prepare for a possible comeback of H1N1 in the autumn and also for the authority to take 1% of the $311 billion allocated for economic stimulus if it was needed in a “worst case scenario”.

More swine flu news

AstraZeneca's MedImmune biotechnology unit has won an initial $90 million order from the U.S. government to make a live attenuated vaccine against the new H1N1 flu strain, it said on Monday.
- Reuters

A further 23 cases of swine flu related to the Eton College outbreak have been confirmed by health officials over the past two days.
- BBC

As Australia's swine flu outbreak topped 620 -- making it the biggest outside of the Americas -- NSW, Queensland and South Australia yesterday ordered children who had travelled to greater metropolitan Melbourne to stay away from schools for a week on their return.
- The Australian

Image top: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Administration of a common diabetes medication to mice appears to “considerably improve” the performance of an experimental anti-cancer vaccine, according to newly published research.

Yongwon Choi, one of the team behind the new study and a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, says the discovery is “potentially extremely important and could revolutionize current strategies for both therapeutic and protective vaccines” (press release).

In their paper in this week’s Nature the researchers take a slightly more measured line, saying this “surprising finding” could “have important implications for therapeutic and prophylactic vaccine development”.

Continue reading "Does diabetes drug boost vaccines?" »

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

The United States has accidentally published a top-secret, highly-classified, I'd-show-you-but -then-I'd-have-to-kill-you list of nuclear installations on the Internets.

OK, it's not quite that bad. What they've gone and done is published a "highly confidential" disclosure document that was meant for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This document is part of the US obligation under the IAEA "additional protocol"—a set of rules that requires America to provide the agency with a list of the location and type of civilian nuclear facilities currently on its territory. You can find the whole document on Secrecy News, the excellent blog of the Federation of American Scientists website.

The key word there is civilian. This list doesn't disclose anything about the facilities in which the US handles or dismantles its nuclear weapons. But it does have the addresses, details and sometimes schematics, of every other nuclear facility in the country (click the image for an example). Not exactly the sort of thing the government may have wanted to go public with in the post-9/11 world. The government is particularly sweating the publication of detailed information about the Y-12 site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. "That's of great concern," energy secretary Stephen Chu told a congressional committee.

Of course there's a silver lining, the document does show that the US is taking seriously its obligations to the IAEA.

UPDATE: Secrecy News has taken down the file, but nothing dies on the Internet. You can find it on WikiLeaks.

Image: Super-secret US archives/GPO

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
Categories: Energy, Physics & Mathematics, Policy | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

NASA has announced that the next shuttle mission has been scheduled to launch at 7.17 AM eastern time on 13 June.

Mission STS-127 will install a ‘porch-in-space’ on the International Space Station, part of the Japanese Kibo science experiment module. This will allow astronauts to expose experiments to the harsh conditions outside the space station. The mission will also install a robotic arm to help move experiments around.

“Folks have done a tremendous job getting ready to go fly again,” says Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for Space Operations. “It will be a very challenging mission.”

Image: STS-127 mission patch: "Bathed in sunlight, the blue Earth is represented without boundaries to remind us that we all share this world. In the center, the golden flight path of the space shuttle turns into the three distinctive rays of the astronaut symbol culminating in the star-like emblem characteristic of the Japanese Space Agency, yet soaring further into space as it paves the way for future voyages and discoveries for all humankind." / NASA

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

The US National Research Council put a pretty positive spin on its latest report on women in science, released earlier this week. Women in science and engineering jobs are “faring well” in hiring and tenure processes, according to the report, which was demanded by lawmakers in Congress.

Two surveys carried out by the NRC show that women who apply for tenure-track positions have a better chance of being interviewed and receiving job offers than male applicants.

“Overall the newly released data indicate important progress, and signal to both young men and especially to young women that what had been the status quo at research-intensive universities is changing,” says Sally Shaywitz, of Yale University School of Medicine (press release). “There is a movement toward more gender equity than noted in previous reports or often publicly appreciated.”

But then comes the caveat: “At the same time, the findings show that we are not there yet.”

Continue reading "Women still struggling in US science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s that time of year again – the annual battle for control of Biogen Idec, one of the grande dames of biotech. And today’s installment did not disappoint.

For those of you who haven’t been glued to the Biogen soap opera, here’s a quick catch-up: Biogen is one of the oldest biotechnology companies and arguably the founder of the Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech cluster. The company chugged along for nearly thirty years until 2007, when billionaire ‘corporate raider’/’shareholder activist’ (depending on whose side you’re on) Carl Icahn became one of Biogen’s largest shareholders. With an eye on the multi-billion dollar prices pharmaceutical companies were paying for biotech firms, Icahn immediately tried to force Biogen executives to sell the company. The execs put the company on the market for a few months, then shrugged and said they couldn’t find any takers. Icahn didn't buy that: he accused Biogen of lying to investors and interfering with the search for a suitor, and then sued the company for access to records pertaining to the failed sales attempt. (More details available here, subscription required.) After that, Icahn riled Biogen executives again when he lobbied for the company to be split into two. “Once again, Icahn and his associates have demonstrated that they fundamentally do not understand our business,” board chairman Bruce Ross and CEO James Mullen wrote in a letter to shareholders.

Which brings us to today. In what promises to become a yearly tradition, Icahn tried to forcefully take hold of Biogen’s board of directors by nominating four of his associates to the board. (He tried this approach last year as well, and failed.) Biogen was to tally voting results today at the annual shareholder’s meeting, which started at 9am, but then Ross unexpectedly announced a recess until 2pm. The delay prompted an outcry from Icahn’s posse, with one of his nominees reportedly protesting, “This isn’t North Korea.” When the meeting rejoined in the afternoon, Ross said votes were still being tallied and winners would not be announced until later this month. Before the afternoon was over, Icahn had called Biogen's behavior "sort of despicable" (Boston Globe), declared victory for two of his nominees (although no official vote tallies have been released) and, of course, filed another lawsuit against the company.

What did the shareholders decide? What will Icahn try next? How long will Biogen survive as an independent company? All of this and more, to be continued…

Posted by Heidi Ledford
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A staunch advocate for science in the Labour government has become one of the latest casualties in a scandal over the misuse of expenses by MPs.

Backbench MP, Ian Gibson, who is a member and former chairman, of the House of Commons committee that scrutinises the use and funding of science in government, has been barred from standing for Labour at the next general elections. The penalty was handed down by a disciplinary panel, following questions over his expenses, reports BBC News.

Gibson reportedly claimed for mortgage interest and bills totally nearly £80,000 for a flat that he said was his second home, but in which his daughter lived rent free ((BBC, Guardian, Telegraph). The expenses are paid for out of public funds.

BBC News reports that Gibson is said to be “very upset” at the decision.

Martin Booth, the chairman of the local Labour Party in Norwich North – Gibson’s constituency - has defended the beleaguered MP. Booth told BBC News he was “horrified” that Gibson has been barred, and accused the panel of being a “kangaroo court”.

Continue reading "Labour science advocate barred from next elections " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
Categories: Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Warning for diplomats over misuse of science
Use science to build partnerships, urge government science advisers.

Open access publishing gains another convert
University College London joins rapidly growing throng.

African ministers lay out climate-change policy
Common vision still lacks specifics.

Role reversal undermines speed-dating theories
Women become less choosy when they, rather than men, move from table to table.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

US energy secretary Steven Chu hasn’t ruled out the use of tar sands as an energy source, which has delighted Canadian oil producers.

Chu’s comments came at a Reuters energy summit . His message was that the tar sands issue (see here for some background, subscription required) is complicated, but hinted that he thinks technological advances might help to bring down the energy costs for extracting oil from the tar sands.

“It's a complicated issue, because certainly Canada is a close and trusted neighbor and the oil from Canada has all sorts of good things. But there is this environmental concern, so I think we're going to have to work our way through that," Chu said. "But I'm a big believer in technology."

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Good news for the great bustard, the heaviest flying bird in the world: Great bustards have nested and chicks hatched in the UK for the first time since 1832.

The secret location of the chicks, somewhere on the Salisbury Plain, is home to two nests, and three chicks, which are apparently about the same size as a blackbird. Occasionally great bustards have wandered over to the UK from the European continent since the last native birds died in 1840, but these chicks are the first home-grown great bustards.

The Great Bustard Group, which arranged the importing of great bustards from Russia, and their subsequent reintroduction to the UK, is delighted. “It has been a hard struggle to get this far. I am exhausted and nearly broke, but to see Great Bustards breeding after an absence of 177 years is brilliant,” says GBG’s founder and director David Waters.

The GBG started the reintroduction in 2004, with birds from Saratov Oblast in southern Russia. The birds, which lived on prairie land, were at risk from agricultural developments.

The Brit press has heralded the birth (The Register, Independent, BBC), which comes only days after beavers were reintroduced into the wilds of Scotland.

Welcome back to the great bustard!

Image: the Great Bustard Group

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for David Cyranoski

Researchers in China have made pluripotent stem cells from a pig. The cells could be useful for making humanized pig organs for transplant to humans, pig models of human disease useful testing drugs, and for improving pig farming productivity and nutritional value.

Lei Xiao, head of the research group at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences where the research was done, admits that none of these will happen for the next several years. But his creation in pigs of induced pluripotent stem (iPS)-cells which share with embryonic stem cells the ability to differentiate into any cell type in the body-is still a huge accomplishment. (Paper).

The isolation and culture of embryonic stem (ES) cells from mice in 1981 revolutionized the use of mice as a developmental and biomedical research model. But it is a difficult process. It took 17 years to culture human iPS
cells. Even now there are ES cells for only four mammals: mice, humans, monkeys, and rats. Pig ES cells, despite many attempts, still do not exist.

Continue reading "Forget swine flu-bring on the humanized pigs!" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The fate of NASA is in their hands. Well, maybe it's not that drastic -- but it's true that everyone is wondering what will come of the review of NASA's human spaceflight programme, ordered by President Barack Obama. NASA announced the members of the 10-person panel on Monday. Part of the allure -- if a report-making committee ever really sparkles -- is that it is being chaired by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine who, of course, has built a sort of cottage industry around his report-making committees, such as the National Academies' "Rising Above the Gathering Storm".
The panel balances aerospace experts and astronauts alongside two scientists. One is Princeton University's Chris Chyba, who, in addition to his work on exobiology, has also gotten involved in test ban treaty work, and is a member of Obama's council of science advisers. Another is Charles Kennel, who used to run NASA's Earth science programme, and at one point was a name mentioned for administrator.
Some have said this review isn't all that big of a deal -- just a way for the Obama administration to lay claim to the space programme, to give it its imprimatur. Others think that the committee could end up tinkering with the mantra of the Bush-era Vision -- Moon, then Mars -- to include things like near-Earth asteroids. More drastic would be a re-think of the Constellation architecture, the new moon ships. If they decide to question the approach taken with the Ares 1 rockets, then the billions spent by former Administrator Mike Griffin -- who was determined to retire the Shuttle and move on to something -- may have been for naught.
Oh -- if you want to submit your own comments, panel member and former astronaut Leroy Chiao has already tweeted that he wants to hear from you.

Posted by Eric Hand
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Jane Qiu

It was strange bedfellows indeed at a meeting on regenerative medicine in Beijing last month. At the opening ceremony Hu Xiang, chief executive officer of Beike Biotechnology in Shenzhen, gave a speech as a key sponsor, sharing the podium with government officials and influential public figures including China’s health minister Chen Zhu.

With multi-lingual websites and promoting agencies in the US, Europe, Thailand and India, Beike has earned international notoriety by recruiting patients around the world to receive untested stem-cell therapies in China. It supplies stem cells to a network of over two dozen hospitals in China and one in Thailand for treating a myriad of diseases. Hu told Nature that Beike has treated over 5,000 patients since 2005. The company claims to be conducting clinical research, but is yet to publish any data in major international peer-reviewed journals. (See related Nature story here.)

Ellis Rubinstein, president of the New York Academy of Sciences which cohosted the meeting, says that he did not know Beike’s track record, but was grateful that someone had put down “some serious money to support the event”; several major pharmaceutical companies had pulled out as sponsors. “We are having a financial crisis in a good part of the world. That’s the reality in which we are operating,” he says.

Some researchers, like Zhao Chunhua of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, were deeply concerned. “Having Beike sharing the podium with such a distinguished list of speakers has simply sent out a very wrong signal,” he says.

Posted by Alex Witze
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For the first time in more than a decade, scientists have penetrated the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench.

Nobody's been to the Challenger Deep since 1998, when Japan's Kaiko submersible last visited the bottommost part of the ocean. On Sunday, a remotely operated vehicle called Nereus made it, clocking in at a dive depth of 10,902 meters, or nearly seven miles.

Nereus is an odd sort of beast called a 'hybrid remotely operated vehicle', or HROV (see earlier Nature feature on its development, subscription required). That means it can either be attached to shipboard scientists by a thin tether, or disconnect and 'fly' itself autonomously through the depths before returning to the surface.

At the Challenger Deep this weekend, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which built Nereus, dropped it with a tether from the research vessel Kilo Moana. It spent 10 hours on the bottom, gathering samples and sending back video. What's it look like down there? Flat and mud-colored, apparently (see image).

Nereus is likely to be the only explorer of the briny deep anytime soon. Kaiko was lost at sea in 2003, and no nations are planning a repeat of the record-setting manned dive of the bathyscape Trieste, which took Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh to the bottom in 1960.

WHOI has more images and background here.

Image: WHOI

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

Posted on behalf of Declan Butler

The World Health Organization (WHO) is getting ready to move its assessment of the pandemic threat of swine flu from phase 5 to 6, the top level on its six-point scale, denoting official global pandemic status. Keiji Fukuda, WHO's interim assistant director-general for health security and environment, said today that the world was “getting closer to phase 6.” Speaking from Geneva at the WHO's weekly media teleconference briefing on the influenza A (H1N1) strain, Fukuda said that outbreaks in many countries in Europe, Asia and South America – including Australia, Japan, the UK, Spain and Chile – were “in transition, moving from travel-related cases to more established community types of spread.”

That puts them on the trajectory already followed by North American countries, where there is now substantial sustained community spread, making a pandemic inevitable. “You can't get in the way of the spread of this virus,” said Fukuda, noting that the virus is now in 64 countries, with lab confirmed cases – the tip of the iceberg – at 18,965, and some 117 known deaths caused by the virus.

The WHO had recently come under pressure from several member states to hold off from declaring a phase 6 pandemic, by redefining this status to include an assessment of the severity of the disease, and not only its geographical spread. There are also concerns about the potential economic impacts of moving to phase 6, such as trade embargoes, culling of swine, and worries about eating pork.

But after WHO consulted some 30 experts from 23 countries at a meeting yesterday, the agency has decided to hold on to its geographical definition of phase 6, requiring evidence of rapid spread in more than one WHO region. At the same time, if it does move to phase 6, three subcategories would be used to give a rough indication of the clinical severity as the pandemic moves forward in the months to come. Trying to put estimates of severity at a global level is “a rather difficult job,” said Fukuda. Severity will vary, he pointed out, both nationally and sub-nationally, and so WHO will focus more on tailoring its guidance as to what steps individual countries need to take. (See When is a pandemic not a pandemic?).

But Fukuda added that he would “hesitate to call the virus mild”, describing it rather as “moderate” - the virus has been severe in some healthy young people, for example. He also pointed out that estimates of mortality are uncertain – see How severe will the flu outbreak be? - and that the virus is likely to reassort and mutate unpredictably over time. “The future impact of this infection has yet to unfold,” he said.

Posted by Mark Peplow
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Drug giants unite to develop cancer therapy
Merck and AstraZeneca collaboration could launch a new trend — if their work yields results.

Earliest evidence for pottery making found
Fragments from a Chinese cave push back the dawn of the craft by more than 1,000 years.

Crunch time for German science programmes
Billions of euros in university funding could be delayed or lost.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"There's a really good contrast between the dark poo stains and the ice."
British Antarctic Survey scientist Phil Trathan explains how spotting penguins from space is best done by following what they leave behind.

"If we were a business you wouldn't worry about nationality, you would just take the best students from wherever they came from the in the world."
Roy Anderson, rector of Imperial College London wants to set up a UK-version of the US's Ivy League of privately funded universities.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Quotes of the day | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Deuterium drugs have hit the big time. Concert Pharmaceuticals, a start-up company based in Lexington, Massachusetts, US, which specialises in swapping hydrogen atoms on known drugs for deuterium atoms, (Nature, subscription required) has signed a deal worth potentially $1 billion with pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline.

The company, which was founded in 2006, will develop 3 drugs with GSK: a protease inhibitor to treat HIV, a drug for chronic renal disease and a third mystery product. The company will also do their deuterium magic with 3 of GSKs pipeline products. They get $35 million upfront, with future payments being made for milestones reached and more upfront payments. (Press release).

The news has gone big, with pick up in major news outlets, (AP, Wall Street Journal, FierceBiotech) and GSK’s shares fell slightly after the deal was announced (Reuters).

In future the patent field around deuterating known drugs is likely to get murky, as Derek Lowe points out in The Atlantic but for now it looks like Concert is sitting pretty in its deuterium world.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone’s favourite chemical registry legislation, REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances) has passed another milestone. The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has produced its first recommendation for seven substances of very high concern.

The opinion of the member states committee is that seven out of a candidate list of 15 substances will be prioritised. In future, these substances can only be used within the EU when specifically authorised to do so.

Continue reading "REACH reaches milestone" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Chemistry | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the Apollo moon landings chalk up their 40th anniversary, astronauts have been given a glamour shot. Louis Vuitton, he of the handbags, has in his latest ad campaign shots of Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, Jim Lovell who guided a faulty Apollo 13 back to Earth and Sally Ride who was the first American woman in space, on the Challenger shuttle in 1983.

LV’s head of communications, Antoine Arnault, says "With this latest impressive execution of the award-winning Core Values campaign, Louis Vuitton and its advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather have proved their ability to push the boundaries once again.”

Yes indeed, and Antoine goes on: “Space represents the final frontier, and the Moon is the destination beyond which no man has yet travelled."

The photos are snapped by photographer Annie Leibovitz and will be accompanied by a website and filmed interviews with the three astronauts, to “discuss how the experience of space changed their lives, offering a fascinating insight into Annie Leibovitz's print visual.” (press release). I’m still searching for the luxury luggage link, anyone else who can read through the press release and find one, please let me know.

Also, apparently ol’ Louis is donating “a significant portion” of the astronauts’ fees to Al Gore’s The Climate Project on behalf of the three astronauts. I wonder whether they got paid as much as supermodels do? Would Buzz Aldrin even wake up for less than $10,000?

Again, I’m not sure what this has to do with handbags. Maybe in future as astronauts enter the shuttle, or whatever vessel hoiks them up to space next, we’ll see them carry onboard their toothbrushes in little goodie bags emblazoned with the famous LV logo.

Image: Louis Vuitton

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Boost for conservation of plant gene assets
Financial worries accompany award of first grants under international treaty.

Dark energy particle spotted?
Reported 'chameleon' particle would change its mass to match its environs.

Electrodes spark neuron growth
Deep brain stimulation could help make memories.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Global Humanitarian Forum certainly attracted some publicity last week when it published a report suggesting that global warming kills 315,000 people each year and seriously harms another 300,000. Total price tag: $125 billion annually.

Such numbers are as appealing to journalists as they are to those who put them out, precisely because they are easy to understand and explain. They should also raise alarms, and for the very same reasons. It's not that anybody really doubts that global warming is impacting ecosystems and communities and thus affecting lives, but these are complex issues that resist quick attempts at quantification.

The New York Times published a quick story about the report while raising some basic questions about the estimations. The story quotes Roger Pielke Jr., who has been researching these issues for years, calling the report a "methodological embarrassment" that simply glosses over socioeconomic factors (like people moving into hurricane-prone coasts). For an in-depth discussion, check Pielke's blog.

Although the GHF didn't shy away from using the eye-catching estimates, the authors do explain their calculations in the report. Among other things, they cite data from Munich Re estimating that 40 percent of the increase in weather-related disasters from 1980 to present is due to climate change. As it happens, Pielke says Munich Re itself has come to the opposite conclusion when it comes to assessing the data and assigning blame.

Pielke's message appears to be getting out there. Reuters followed up its initial story with a second, more thematic piece raising various questions about this kind of research.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

News of 'the world's first scientific experiment on Twitter' has received some media pickup today. The trial starts tomorrow, conducted by psychologist Richard Wiseman together with New Scientist.

Wiseman, who works at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, says the study will examine the psychic ability of 'remote viewing' - the idea that one can see an object without being shown or told what it is. He'll tweet from a location, then offer five photo options; tweeters have to guess which of the five he is actually in. The trial will be repeated four times using different locations (3pm, Tuesday to Friday this week).

Although rigorous scientific experiments have been conducted into remote viewing before (with no evidence found for the ability), this isn't one of them. The choice of Twitter pretty much guarantees that, as Wiseman readily concedes in conversation, though not in his quoted press comments.

Continue reading "Twitter science" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"As you walk through this desert you encounter an oasis, which is the inside of your nose"
Researcher Julia Segre, of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland explains her research showing that the human skin hosts a much more diverse set of bacteria than previously thought.

"Canada must develop and implement regulations urgently if we are to have a chance of influencing US decisions."
Enviro-group the Pembina Institute lets its feelings known about Canada's delay in implementing greenhouse gas emissions rules.

“Clients have asked for more flexibility into 2010 and 2011, especially the large clients, who have delayed 30 percent.”
The economic downturn hits windpower company Gamesa.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Quotes of the day | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An as yet unpublished study reporting the emergence of artemisinin-resistant malaria in Cambodia is getting a fair share of attention. The study was first alluded to by a 20 May Bloomberg story, now unavailable on the Bloomberg site but still available here.

Roll forward 8 days and to a BBC reporter on the ground in Cambodia, reporting directly from the site of two clinical trials, where the news seems to be coming from. The BBC then ran another story that says: “International scientists say they have found the first evidence of resistance to the world's most effective drug for treating malaria. They say the trend in western Cambodia has to be urgently contained because full-blown resistance would be a global health catastrophe.”

In the UK, science reporters were then bombarded with offers of comments from expert malaria scientists, courtesy of the Science Media Centre, and the story took off. The Daily Mail has the considered "Killer new malaria bug discovered" headline for one, although other reports are somewhat more measured.

The studies are not yet complete, nor published or peer-reviewed. The WHO has no updates on its website about this work.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t important, but with stories mysteriously disappearing, and no signs of any reports, it is hard to form a firm opinion about the dangers. Of course, artemisinin should not be used on its own, but in combination with another anti-malarials, and in 2006 WHO recommendations were taken on board by 13 pharma companies to stop selling single-drug malaria medications.

The news from Cambodia doesn’t sound good, but the real extent of the situation will not be made clearer by a rash of media reports. We need to await the clinical trial data, and the peer-reviewed results of those trials.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here’s a story to bring music to your ears. Computer scientists in the UK have allowed instrument makers to build a horn specified by Bach to be played in a particular ditty of his, but an instrument that has since never been heard of.

The work, supported by the UK’s engineering and physical sciences research council (EPSRC) has allowed the lituus to be made. This is a long, thin horn that Bach specified for one particular cantata, ‘O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht’ (BWV 118)’ written in 1736-37. Swiss conservatoire, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, contacted Murray Campbell from the acoustics & fluids group, in the University of Edinburgh’s school of physics and astronomy with the hope that he could remodel the lost instrument

“It’s called ‘Bach’s forgotten horn’ because Bach specified this in this particular cantata but nobody knows what he meant. There were no instruments known to have been around in Leipzig in Bach’s time which were called lituuses, no lituus player appear on any rolls of musicians, no one knows what exactly he meant,” says Campbell.

Campbell’s PhD student Alistair Braden did the modelling based on fragments of information from the Swiss musicians about what the lituus might have sounded like, or looked like. Braden used optimisation software that he developed to get to the final design, a blueprint to give to the instrument makers.

The result was a long, wooden horn that is apparently difficult to play.

The BBC has a story with an audio clip of the whole piece, lituus and all.

Image: EPSRC

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)