The Great Beyond

The US National Academies has launched its long-awaited review of the scientific evidence used to track down the alleged creator of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001. A 15-member expert panel met in Washington DC on 30-31 July to determine whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) relied on appropriate scientific techniques when it implicated government biodefence researcher Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide last July as prosecutors prepared to indict him as the person responsible for mailing the Bacillus anthracis spores that killed five people and sickened 17 others.

"It is important that we understand what happened," Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) told the committee on Friday. "The illogic of the investigation that I witnessed leads me to question whether the scientific and technical steps were well undertaken."

Continue reading "Anthrax investigation probe underway" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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With a combination of luck and fancy imaging techniques, geographers have snapped the first shots of an ancient Roman city.

The coastal city of Altinum was bustling in the early CE and possibly late BCE (Wikipedia). In the 5th to 7th centuries CE, historians believe the Barbarians raged through the city and the inhabitants fled to Venice, so Altinum is thus seen as a grandfather of sorts to Venice. But besides historical records and a handful of artifacts, little is known about the town’s structure, as it was dismantled to build Venice, repeatedly flooded, and is now blanketed by fields of soy and maize. (Despite the headlines on some reports (Spiegel, Times Online), the city was never actually “lost” — people knew it was there, they just didn’t know what it looked like.)

But in 2007, researchers at Padua University caught a break: a severe drought that stressed the overlying crops. That’s a blessing for them because it exaggerates differences in the crops’ health — vegetation doesn’t grow well over soil with stones, bricks or compacted soil, but does slightly better over depressed features like pits and canals. By photographing the area at both visible and near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to pick out these differences and compile a map of the city’s urban structure.

They discovered that Altinum was pretty much your standard ancient Roman city, with a basilica, theater, emporia, forum, encircling walls, and a decent network of streets and canals. The authors end their half-page (including references) Science article by concluding that Romans had "successfully exploited the amphibious environment several centuries before the city of Venice started to emerge.”

Other coverage:
Venice "Ancestor" City Mapped for First Time: National Geographic
Ancient Roman City Rises Again: ScienceNOW

Image: Realvista 2007, Telespazio S.p.A.

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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“Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie,’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.”
An excerpt from a Creationist textbook for the International Certificate of Christian Education, which the UK has just granted equivalence to the national standard ‘A-Level’ (TES).

“We are in the midst of a recession and it is vital that people keep their spirits high. This study will help identify the most effective way of putting a smile on someone's face.”
Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire, launches an experiment to cheer up the world (Times).

“Have you ever meant to stop by the grocery store on the way home after a bad day at work, and instead just forgot and went straight home? You do the automatic thing instead of doing what you had planned.”
Rui Costa, of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, comments on his research showing rats revert to habit rather than thinking when they’re stressed (ABC).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Amid concerns about the rising cost of healthcare, a new study suggests the American public spent $33.9 billion of their health-dollars on unproven treatments in 2007.

Research by the US National Center for Health Statistics shows this was the cost of out-of-pocket spending on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in that year. Nearly 40% of adults in the 29,266 households surveyed used some form of CAM (report pdf).

Although a relatively trifling amount when set against the $2.2 trillion spent overall on healthcare, $33.9 billion represents 11.2% of 'out-of-pocket expenditures', ie money not claimable from health insurers. The $11.9bn spent on visits to CAM practitioners represents 25% of out-of-pocket spending on physician visits.

Continue reading "US alternative medicine spend reaches $33.9 billion" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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All Nature’s pandemic 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 an effort to encourage tourists to visit in the wake of swine flu, Mexico City is offering free health insurance to visitors. Under the Tourist Assistance Card programme anyone staying at a hotel in the city can claim for medical assistance in the event the catch H1N1 or indeed any other disease.

Prescription drugs, emergency dental care, hospital accommodation and transport home are also covered.

“Of all the world’s largest cities, Mexico City is the first to try this,” says Mayor Marcelo Ebrard (press release statement, LA Times).

Given the parlous state of the US health system might it be worthwhile for Americans to fly to Mexico City if they feel a little under the weather? Maybe not. The NY Times cautions “fine print of the proposal says that the treatment will be offered at ‘authorized establishments’ and that in some cases an unspecified deductible will be charged”.

Meanwhile, the Swiss government has come up with perhaps the best H1N1 public awareness campaign so far. Even if your French is ne pas tres bien you should be able to get the point from this. See here and here for the encores.

It makes the UK Department of Health’s ‘Catch It, Bin It, Kill It’ swine flu advert look positively dull. Clearly they need to raise their game by hiring someone else to do the next one, perhaps the guys behind Nature favourite, the Swine Flu Skank.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The space shuttle Endeavour is due to land in Florida today, touching down at 10:48 am, local time.

Yesterday one of the thrusters that will help control the craft's speed during descent failed during testing. NASA says, “This will not be an issue for landing.”

Endeavour put new batteries into the International Space Station and continued the installation of the Kibo science lab. It leaves behind it an improved space station and one of the oddest mix tapes you’re ever likely to hear.

As their mission ends, here’s a round up of what songs have woken the crew during their time in space.

Image: NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Battling scientists reach consensus on health of global fish stocks
Many depleted fisheries are making good progress to recovery.

Editor retracts sperm-creation paper
Plagiarism accusation hits stem-cell research.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Proposals for compensating developing countries for curbing deforestation via the international carbon market risk neglecting biodiversity hotspots, two leading scientific organizations jointly declared today.

The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) and the Society for Tropical Ecology (GTÖ), which met this week in Marburg, Germany, issued “The Marburg Declaration”, highlighting “the urgent need to maximize biodiversity conservation in forest carbon-trading”.

Deforestation gives a serious one-two punch to the climate: not only does it negate the carbon dioxide trees take in from the atmosphere, but it also releases stored carbon when trees are burned or chopped down and left to rot.

In recent years, the idea of rewarding nations for reducing deforestation by letting them “sell” the carbon value of their living forests on the international carbon market has been gaining momentum. Not only does it mitigate climate change by preventing land use changes, but it also has the potential to conserve the forests' diverse plants and critters and to direct money to the poorer regions in the tropics.

Continue reading "A fly in the forest-saving ointment" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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“I am driving back from High Wycombe with the cheese now. I may try a bit to see if it has matured at high altitude and then it will probably go into a glass case at our production offices.”
Dom Lane, of Shepton Mallet’s West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers, tells the BBC about the fate of a cheddar that his group attempted to launch into space.

“The scheme appears a victim of ‘numbyism’ – not under my backyard.”
The Guardian coins a new term for those who object to carbon capture and storage in their neighbourhoods.

“The sky is not falling.”
Sergeant at Arms Terrance Gainer downplays the possible emergence of swine flu at the US Senate (Washington Post).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Two malaria papers out this week in the New England Journal of Medicine have seen some press coverage. Undoubtedly the more concerning discusses the parasite’s increasing resistance to artemisinin-based drugs in Cambodia – see Nature’s news story.

The other, as Carlos Campbell of the PATH malaria vaccine initiative writes in an accompanying editorial, “reminds us that the whole malaria parasite is the most potent immunizing antigen identified to date”. In what AP describe as a “daring experiment” with “astounding” results, researchers found that ten people subjected to mosquito bites three times over three months whilst taking the drug chloroquine gained apparent immunity against malarial mosquito bites a month later.

It’s hard to see, however, that this finding adds much new to the vaccine-hunter’s arsenal.

Continue reading "Mosquitoes against malaria?" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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A new species of song bird has been found in Asia, and from the pictures of it it’s quite clear why it’s been shy for so long – it’s not a very pretty polly.

The bird is bald, and sports what the National Geographic calls a wispy Mohawk. Its name? The bare-faced bulbul. The baldy is the first new bulbul to be found in Asia in 100 years.

The bird lives in Laos, and was reported by scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society and University of Melbourne.

“It’s always exciting to discover a new species, but this one is especially unique because it is the only bald songbird in Asia,” said Colin Poole, director of Asia programs for the Wildlife Conservation Society (press release).

The bird lives in a particularly remote and rugged part of Laos, in limestone karst, which could explain why its unique looks and song have gone unnoticed until now.

Msnbc news has tried to describe the call of the bird: “Like an opera singer milking a final aria, the bird produces at least one song that rises distinctly and ends "abruptly in a higher, separate note." Yet another call was translated to human-speak as "ch-ch chi chi-chi-chi-chi," with the individual notes again rising in pitch.” So now you know what to listen out for.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Professional swimmers have been getting themselves in a right tizzy recently over what to wear.

A second generation of high-tech body suits has sent swimming times tumbling less than a year after records were smashed at the Olympics by those wearing similar garments. Some think science has created a monster in these new polyurethane suits and the world’s governing body has just banned them.

British Olympic-medal winning swimmer Rebecca Adlington called the new suits “technological doping”. “Why would I wear a suit just to improve my performance,” said Adlington, who wears previous generation suit the Speedo LZR, which claims to be “4% faster in starts, sprints and turns”.

So what is the science of the suit?

Continue reading "Swimsuit science shenanigans" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The European Southern Observatory has released what it claims are “the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse”.

One team of scientists detected a plume of gas erupting into space from the surface of Betelgeuse on their image, which was created by combining several exposures into one super-sharp-shot (right).

However, this picture was still not sharp enough, as there is “a clear indication that the whole outer shell of the star is not shedding matter evenly in all directions,” according to study author Pierre Kervella (press release).

To determine why a sharper image was needed. So a second team combined the light from three 1.8-metre telescopes. This created an image with four times as much detail as the previous one. Based on this researchers decided that convection of gas in the star is likely to be behind the plume.

Continue reading "Betelgeuse: super sharp shots" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Mico Tatalovic

It seems counterintuitive, but a paper published in Nature raises the possibility of losing weight by injecting fat cells.

In the paper American researchers describe using a molecular switch – two proteins PRDM16-C/EBP-beta – to turn mouse and human skin cells into brown fat cells (paper, press release).

White fat cells store fat, while brown fat cells use those stores to produce heat. Heavier people seem to have more white fat but less brown fat than slim people, so one idea for treating obese people is to increase stores of the energy-burning fat. Until now this could not be done since making brown fat was a mystery.

“Brown fat is one of the body’s natural defenses against obesity,” said cell biologist Bruce Spiegelman of Harvard Medical School, who co-authored the paper. “We’re trying to tap into a natural pathway involved in this kind of biology.” (Wired.)

Continue reading "Fighting fat with fat " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Malaria becoming more drug resistant
Artemisinin-based medicines fail a growing number of patients in Cambodia.

Deforestation emissions on the rise
Amazon study suggests denser forest yields will mean more carbon release.

Israel's space industry facing staff cuts
Decline in government funding precipitates cash crisis.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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In this episode, we bring you mice made from induced stem cells, the early Earth's disordered insides, jellyfish stirring up the oceans, and Saturn's spinning speed.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A former SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory researcher who allegedly destroyed $500,000 worth of protein crystals earlier this month was arrested and charged on Monday for willfully ruining government property.

The 4,000 to 5,000 now-useless protein crystals represented a “whole variety of different samples” involved in the Protein Structure Initiative, a federally-funded project to expedite the discovery of atomic-level protein structures, says Ian Wilson, director of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG), which oversees the initiative. Some crystals were aimed at matching three-dimensional protein structures with their corresponding DNA sequences; others were part of targeted research projects including the Human Microbiome Project and efforts to map every protein made by the bacterium Thermotoga maritima.

Continue reading "Vandal destroys protein crystals in California" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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All Nature’s pandemic 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.

Pregnant women who get swine flu are at an increased risk of serious illness and death. Researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have analysed the first 34 cases of pandemic H1N1 infections in pregnant women in the US, including 6 deaths, and found that expecting mothers were four times more likely to be hospitalized than other people with the virus.

Given the increased risks, lead author Denise Jamieson, who reported the findings today in the Lancet, urged health officials to leapfrog ill moms-to-be to the front of the queue to receive anti-flu medications such as Tamiflu. “Some clinicians hesitate treating pregnant women with antiviral medications because of concerns for the developing fetus, but this is the wrong approach,” she said. (Wall Street Journal) The right approach, the authors write, is to administer the drugs within 48 hours of illness onset.

Although pregnant women had more complications once struck with the pandemic virus, there was no indication that they were more prone to infection. “There is no reason to delay pregnancy or to be overly concerned,” said Jamieson. “We do not have evidence that pregnant women have increased susceptibility or are more likely to acquire influenza.” (Reuters)

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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Posted for Mico Tatalovic

Australia’s government is being taken to task over its environmental record as a new paper reveals the extinction risk facing the south pacific region.

In the lead-up to the Pacific Island Forum in Cairns, Australia, next week a recently published review of more than 24,000 conservation papers regarding the region warns that “Oceania will require the implementation of effective policies for conservation if the region’s poor record on extinctions is not to continue.”

"Earth is experiencing its sixth great extinction event and the new report reveals that this threat is advancing on six major fronts," says the paper’s lead author, ecologist Richard Kingsford of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia (press release).

The paper, published in Conservation Biology, focuses on habitat loss and species extinctions in Australia, New Zealand, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. It notes that the region contains six of the world’s 39 hotspots of diversity but that these six could become much colder as mass extinction of species is taking place at all of them.

Continue reading "Oceania and the ‘worst extinction record on earth’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“The government’s official experts on illegal drugs have been asked to look at whether intelligence-enhancing drugs, such as those used by students to boost performance in exams, should be banned.”
The Guardian reports on the latest in the cognitive enhancers debate in the UK.

“There is no evidence of a difference in nutrient quality between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs.”
Researchers report on a major meta-analysis of food in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (related news article from the Times).

“The blood is pale green and rather acrid smelling. I couldn't bring myself to actually taste it fresh but it leaves an acidy, tobacco-like taste on your fingers if you do not wash it off.”
Bill Bateman, of the University of Pretoria in South Africa, has been researching the armoured ground cricket, which defends itself by squirting out toxic blood (BBC).

“It’s an irritant that causes them to try to come up to escape it. It works on other worms, so probably it’ll work on the Palouse.”
Jodi Johnson-Maynard, of the University of Idaho, tells Wired why mustard may help her catch specimens of the giant Palouse earthworm.

“Manufacturing is one of our biggest exports and it is growing, but it will only grow if we keep ahead, using our science based research.”
UK business secretary Lord Mandelson unveils £150m of support for high-tech manufacturing (Daily Mail).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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How do orangutans swing through the trees? Carefully.

That awful joke takes us smoothly into the first of two studies today on the science of swinging.

First up: in a paper published in PNAS three researchers describe their work on how Sumatran orangutans move on spindly branches that appear incapable of holding their hefty weight. It seems that the animals carefully avoid setting up resonance effects of the kind that causes bridges to wobble when people march in step across them.

“We found that certain locomotor behaviours clearly are associated with the most compliant supports; these behaviours appear to lack regular limb sequences, which serves to avoid the risk of resonance in branch sway caused by high-frequency, patterned gait,” write the authors.

“Balance and increased stability are achieved through long contact times between multiple limbs and supports and a combination of pronograde (horizontal) and orthograde (vertical) body postures, used both above branches and in suspension underneath them.”

While the fact that orangs move through trees by gripping multiple branches and not using regular movements may seem obvious, the animals do differ from other primates, which often suspend themselves below branches rather than carefully balancing their way through, say the authors. Smaller animals also have to worry less about those resonance effects.

Continue reading "Man vs Orang in swinging science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Pfizer is again reportedly close to agreeing a $75 million settlement over a drug trial in Nigeria that allegedly left 11 children dead and others injured.

Earlier this year in April it was reported that this settlement related to the trial of Trovan had been agreed (see: Pfizer settles Nigerian drug case out of court - April 06, 2009). Pfizer denied any wrongdoing in the trial, which Kano State prosecutors alleged was illegal. Pfizer, in contrast, says the trial was carried out with the consent of the Nigerian government, and conformed to standard ethical practices.

Now the agreement has been officially announced. AFP says:

The agreement, which is due to be inked on Thursday in Nigeria, was formally announced in court on Monday, lawyers from both sides said, without giving details of the amounts involved.
…
"Yes, we have agreed on the out-of-court settlement and we will sign the agreement on Thursday," confirmed Pfizer lawyer Anthony Idigbe.

AFP reports that Pfizer will cough up $35m for the victims and their families, $10m for state costs and $5m to do up Kano’s infectious disease hospitals; $50m in total. However Reuters agrees with the first two numbers but says that $30m is being set aside for “healthcare initiatives chosen by the Kano State government”; $75m in total.

Reuters’ numbers would agree with reports earlier this year from the BBC.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Biologist George Church of Harvard University has developed a way to speed up genetic engineering with a technology his group calls "multiplex automated genetic engineering," or MAGE.

“Automated sequencing really advanced the way we can read genetic information. We hope automated genome engineering will advance the way we write genetic information,” Harvard biophysicist Harris Wang told Wired.com, explaining the team's motivation for developing MAGE.

Continue reading "Fast-track genetic engineering" »

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Here’s one way in which candy might be good for you. A chemical dye similar to the compound that gives a blue hue to some types of Jell-O and M&Ms could protect injured spinal cords from further damage. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in upstate New York found that rats injected with a dye called Brilliant Blue G (BBG) recovered from spinal injury and regained the ability to walk, albeit with a limp, whereas control rats remained paralyzed. The only side effect: the rats turned blue.

The finding came five years after the research team first reported in Nature Medicine that adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a vital energy metabolite, surges at the site of spinal injury to overstimulate and stress nerve cells. The Rochester researchers targeted an ATP receptor, which mitigated the spinal damage, but the ATP blocker was too large to cross the blood-brain barrier and had to be injected directly into the site of the wound — a less-than-desirable treatment for spinal cord patients. So the researchers went on the hunt for compounds with a similar structure, and they happened upon BBG. Publishing online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Maiken Nedergaard and her colleagues show that the blue dye can be given intravenously to reduce the size of spinal lesions and to improve motor skills.

This could be a boon for a new field of culinary neuroscience, hinted Nedergaard. “One of the reasons no one had done this before is that food science is very separate from neuroscience. Those two fields don’t interact at all.” (Wired) Nedergaard noted that the average American ingests about a teaspoon of blue dye each year, so the compound is likely safe for consumption. Even so, while humans might eat enough dye to turn their tongues blue, “the levels ingested in food stuffs don't make us go blue,” said Mark Bacon, head of research at the British charity Spinal Research. (BBC) “What is safe at one dose may not be safe at higher doses,” he cautioned. No need to run to the sweetshop quite yet, it seems.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A poll by Gallup has put NASA and the Centers for Disease Control as the federal agencies deemed to be doing their jobs best by the US public. For the space agency, 58% of the public thought it was doing a good or excellent job, with appreciation of the CDC running at 61%.

It’s not all good for science bodies though. The Food and Drug Administration put in a rather poor show, with only 38% rating it good or excellent.

Gallup notes:

The new poll, conducted just prior to the 40th anniversary of the July 20, 1969, moon landing by Apollo 11 -- perhaps the most celebrated of all NASA achievements -- finds NASA's rating about where it has been in recent years. While not nearly as high as it was in late 1998 (a month after John Glenn's successful return to space), NASA's current excellent/good score falls within the upper half of ratings it has received over the past two decades.

Graph data: Gallup

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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New reports, but same old message from the carbon capture and storage (CCS) crowd: high costs and regulatory uncertainty still hamper the technology reaching commercial scale.

A study by the Alberta Carbon Capture and Storage Development Council says that between $1 billion and $3 billion of local and national government support for the technology will be required every year after 2015, when full-scale projects are supposed to take over from the first wave of demonstration plants. The province is among the world’s keenest: it has already announced a $2 billion investment towards three CCS pilot projects to be built by 2015.

Last week, researchers from Harvard’s Belfer Center released a paper on the ‘realistic’ costs of carbon capture, which reckons that first (most expensive) plants will add 10 cents per kWh to electricity prices, and that each ton of captured CO2 will cost between $120 and $180. That figure is higher than widely-cited estimates[pdf] from consultancy McKinsey, which put initial costs at €60-90/tCO2 avoided. And both of these are way higher than the cost of a ton of carbon dioxide on the European Trading Scheme, currently around €14.

Meanwhile in the UK, the winners of a 400MW demonstration plant competition were supposed to be announced in the summer this year, but the timetable has slipped back. The UK’s carbon capture and storage association, an industrial lobby group, has repeated its message that the country is slipping behind others. [Bloomberg]

At least one more small demonstration project opened this week, as Doosan Babcock started up a pilot oxyfuel combustion burner in Renfrewshire, Scotland. It burns coal in pure oxygen, rather than air, producing a waste stream of almost pure carbon dioxide gas and water, from which it's easier to trap carbon dioxide.

But the Financial Times points out that Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe 30 MW pilot plant, which began operation last September, has yet to bury underground any of the 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide its plant has captured. That is because in June Germany put off a legal framework to govern CCS storage “due to concerns from local officials,” the FT says. As its reporter Joshua Chaffin sums up: “Even if CCS backers can solve the technical and financial puzzles, they may still face a more daunting challenge: winning public acceptance.”

Image: Vattenfall

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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A multi-million refurb on the site at the epicentre of the UK’s 2007 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak has done a Lazurus and come back to life.

Earlier this year plans to do up the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright to the tune of £120 million appeared to have been scuppered when the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs backed off (see: Britain hits a hurdle in replacing key animal-pathogen facility).

But yesterday the Government announced it would be funding a £100 million overhaul, with investment from a different sector, the newly formed Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. The money will allow the institute to implement the recommendations of reviews produced in the wake of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, including new labs (press release).

“What I hope is that it will give confidence to all our stakeholders that here at Pirbright we have the world’s leading experts. That it will be state-of-the-art and it will be as safe as it can possibly be,” says institute director, Martin Shirley (BBC).

The funding, says Shirley, is also a recognition of the “increasing threats” posed by animal diseases such as … err … foot and mouth.

Previous Pirbright
Britain hits a hurdle in replacing key animal-pathogen facility – Nature News, 10 February 2009
Setback for key UK animal lab – Nature News, 5 December 2008
British government tightens up lab biosecurity – The Great Beyond, 10 October 2008
Anybody know a good plumber? – The Great Beyond, 07 September 2007

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It’s not everyday you’ll find Richard Dawkins agreeing with a priest who was hounded out of his job for daring to suggest creationists shouldn’t be totally ostracised. However, Dawkins and Reverend Professor Michael Reiss have both put their names to a demand that evolution should not be excluded from primary schools in the UK.

A new science curriculum for under-11s is being developed by the government, which is currently considering responses to a consultation that closed last week (consultation pdf). The British Humanist Association, which has gathered Dawkins, Reiss and 24 others to sign its letter to education minister Ed Balls, says:

We find it extraordinary that evolution and natural selection find no place in the section ‘Science – life and living things’. The theory of evolution is one of the most important ideas underlying biological science. It is a key concept that children should be introduced to at an early stage so as to ensure a firmer scientific understanding when they study it in more detail later on.

On the BBC’s Today Programme this morning Reiss said, “Evolution is really at the core of biology … we’re suggesting that we must make sure that this core aspect of science and biology is included even in primary schools.”

Many of those involved in science education where aghast when Reiss was forced from his job at the Royal Society after a media storm over comments he made at conference last year. At best, the media reports of his comments were misinterpreted (see: Creationism stir fries Reiss).

Since then he has popped up a couple of times to comment on these issues. Welcome back professor/reverend.

More
BHA press release
BHA letter to Balls (pdf)

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DNA barcodes for plants a step closer
Biologists agree on genetic sequences to uniquely identify plant species.

UK universities urged to build more industry links
Business secretary calls for wider commercial interest in British science.

African disease labs to get health check
Rating system for labs could improve diagnosis and lift standards.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Pharmaceutical giant Wyeth just can’t catch a break. Before being swallowed by larger-giant Pfizer, the company will need to brace for a major PR thumping: A federal judge has ordered the company to release documents relating to its alleged practice of ghostwriting medical articles.

In December 2008, the New York Times reported that Wyeth played a suspiciously large role in preparing articles that cast its hormone replacement therapy PremPro in a favourable light. The articles, published in medical journals, contrast with the findings from major studies conducted by the National Institutes of Health, which found that (pdf) women who have taken PremPro have an increased risk of breast cancer, stroke, heart attack and blood clots in the legs and lungs.

Continue reading "Judge orders Wyeth to open up" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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Here’s a brilliant example of scientists at a chemistry blog providing instant high-quality peer review of an odd paper – complete with live-blogged experimenting.

Spotting a surprising claim in a paper published by the respected Journal of the American Chemical Society (X. Wang et al, J. Am. Chem. Soc., DOI: 10.1021/ja904224y), an organic chemist flagged it with a terse “WTF is going on here?” in the comments thread of an unrelated post at widely-visited chemistry blog, Totally Synthetic.

WTF indeed. The paper claimed that sodium hydride, a strong reducing agent, was acting as an oxidant – converting an alcohol to a ketone.

Less than 24 hours after that alert had appeared online, blog-savvy chemists had repeated the paper’s experiment, and shown that the authors had their reaction right but their mechanism mistaken: some other oxidant (probably trace amounts of oxygen in air) was doing the work. Totally Synthetic’s author, medicinal chemist Paul Docherty, live-blogged his own experiment to kick off the fun.

“This is perhaps the first time that such a 'web2.0' approach to chemistry has occurred, and I'm indebted to my readers for their effort!” Docherty tells Chemistry World.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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A row appears to have broken out between the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) over the EpiFlu virus sequence sharing database – one that has been widely praised by researchers for its contribution to rapid sharing of sequences during the current H1N1 pandemic.

Visitors to the Epiflu database homepage part of the GISAID web site this afternoon were met with this cryptic message, signed by "The EpiFlu Database team of the SIB":

"Due to contractual and legal issues the EpiFlu Database, developed by the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, is currently unavailable via GISAID. However registered users can continue to work as usual under the strict respect of the conditions set in the GISAID access agreement which the SIB supports. Moreover, the SIB remains totally committed to this very important initiative.
To continue to use the database please click on this link, where you will be prompted with a new password and you will be able to directly reach the EpiFlu Database. If you have any problems with this please contact epifludb@isb-sib.ch"

In December 2006, GISAID entered into an agreement with the SIB: "In order to contribute to the worldwide efforts against the spread of avian flu the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) has entered into an agreement with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) to lead a consortium that will develop a database on influenza viruses."

GISAID itself was launched in August 2006 to improve sharing of sequences of human cases of bird flu which previously had often been restricted to a closed network of WHO laboratories. Many researchers say it has proved its mettle in the current H1N1 pandemic with sequences being rapidly shared, and scientists taking to its suite of user-friendly tools. The launch was via a letter to Nature signed by some 70 flu scientists, including several Nobel laureates, which outlined the terms of the agreement – a sort of open source licence requiring users of the database to agree to various rules on attributing credit etc.

Continue reading "Exclusive: "Contractual and legal issues" affecting leading pandemic flu sequence database on GISAID" »

Posted by Declan Butler
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A monster of a Moon-book could shortly be gracing your coffee-table, provided you have a hefty amount of money in your bank account.

Billing itself as “a unique tribute to the defining scientific mission of our time” – that being the 1969 Apollo Moon mission – the book combines text by Norman Mailer with glossy reproductions of NASA photographs and, for a select few, even a piece of the Moon.

The cost of Moonfire? A mere $1,000. That’s without the Moon piece.

If you want a bit of Moon rock with your book you will have to cough up a lot more. Creed Poulson, of publishers Taschen America, told the Times, “It will be thousands, hundreds of thousands, of dollars. Kind of like a diamond.”

In total 1969 copies of Moonfire will be published in two editions. The first 1957 will be costly and lavish but sans rock. For the remaining 12, Taschen says:

Each copy comes with a unique specimen of lunar rock, ranging in weight from a slice of the moon at 0.4 grams to 30.34 grams, one of the largest lunar meteorites ever found on Earth.

On the basis that you can’t afford this, here’s how to make your own.

First, pick yourself up a copy of Mailer’s original book, ‘Of A Fire On The Moon’ (cost: about $20). Download yourself a selection of Apollo 11 photos from NASA and have them nicely printed out (cost: free). Glue these together in a nice big box (cost: dependent on box). Add some Moon rock (cost: about $1,000 or $2,000 if you’re lucky).

Image: NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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An experiment with GM crops has been “secretly restarted” in the UK a year after protestors destroyed it.

GM trials in the country have proven hugely controversial, with many plants being destroyed by environmentalists. Last year potatoes at a trial in Yorkshire run by Leeds University were destroyed and it is these that have apparently been replanted.

Researchers aim to establish if the GM potatoes are effective at resisting nematodes, says the Yorkshire Post. The Daily Telegraph claims the trial has been “secretly” restarted as the research started up without informing the public.

Michael Jack, chairman of the UK Parliament’s Environment and Rural Affairs Select Committee select committee, defended the trial. He told the Western Morning News, “We agree that there are risks and uncertainties involved in GM technology, but this seems like an argument for further research, rather than an argument for dismissing GM technology out of hand. We believe that the potential of GM technology in the context of sustainable food production should be explored further.”

However a spokeswoman for the Friends of the Earth group accused the UK’s Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs of “trying to slip it [the Leeds trial] under the radar”.

In Europe, a GM trial has recently started in Belgium, the first GM field trial since 2002 according to European Biotechnology News.

Image: a non-GM potato, yesterday / Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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More pictures have emerged of the collision that gave Jupiter a new scar earlier this month.

The new scar is believed to have resulted from a comet slamming into the planet. After being spotted by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley (first picture) it was imaged by two telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii (second pictures).

Now a third telescope on Mauna Kea and, most excitingly, the Hubble Space Telescope have focused in on the impact site. Here are the shots from them both (Gemini Observatory right, Hubble left):

For more on the impact see our previous blog posts:

Jupiter smash: more pictures - July 21, 2009
Jupiter Spotted - July 20, 2009

Image left: NASA, ESA, H. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.), and the Jupiter Impact Team
Image right: Imke de Pater, UC Berkeley; Heidi B. Hammel, Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO; Travis Rector, UA Anchorage; Gemini Observatory

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The University of Wyoming's geology museum in Laramie, with one of the best paleontology and geology collections in a small university town in the American West, closed last month -- a casualty of the budget cuts rippling through many academic institutions. The resulting outcry has yielded enough private donations to open the museum on a parttime basis starting in August -- but without its director.

Museum officials blame the $18 million reduction in state funding for the university. The private funds will pay only for security to keep the museum open for visitors, the university announced last week.

“I’m kind of skeptical that a security guard would be able to answer all of the questions about paleontology and geology that the museum handles constantly — or at least the staff used to handle constantly," former volunteer Beth Southwell told the Laramie Boomerang. Exhibits include the bones of Big Al the Allosaur (pictured).

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology wrote an open letter yesterday to the university trustees calling the closure "financially short-sighted". It pointed out that the museum is extremely active in leading local paleontological excavations and getting local students involved in the science and history of their state.

(Full disclosure: Brent Breithaupt, who had run the museum, is a friend of a friend of mine. And I'm pretty sure I dropped some cash in a donations box when I visited a few years ago.)

Image: via Fossil Freak, on Flickr

Posted by Alex Witze
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The UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has given China a kick-up-the-bum on climate change by urging them to set a leading example to developing nations by promoting green living and environmentally-friendly economic growth.

Ban was launching a project to promote energy-saving lighting (Press release). "China has long been the world's fastest-growing major economy," Ban said. "It is also a leading emitter of greenhouse gases, and it is one of the countries most vulnerable to the impact of climate change."

"Without China there can be no success this year on a new global climate framework deal," said Ban, (AFP).

Meanwhile Nobel-prize winning chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri has “slammed” the US for its plans to introduce carbon tariffs (Wall Street Journal). These tariffs will be charged to countries importing to the US, when those countries don’t take their own steps to cut their emissions. “Please don’t use this weapon. I’m afraid that those that have been pushing these provisions probably don’t realize that all of this can cause a major negative reaction,” Pachauri said.

Pachauri has also been defending India’s use of coal (The Hindu).

Image: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Today’s space picture comes from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Galaxy NGC 1097 is about 50 million light-years away. The spiral galaxy has at its core a black hole (press release).

It is, says NASA, “a wild creature of the dark”:

The black hole is huge, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, and is feeding off gas and dust along with the occasional unlucky star. Our Milky Way's central black hole is tame by comparison, with a mass of a few million suns.

The odd blue intruder in the top right is a companion galaxy that “could have plunged through, poking a hole” says George Helou, deputy director of the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “But we don’t know this for sure. It could also just happen to be aligned with a gap in the arms.”

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Now observations of the largest member of the toucan family reveal it may in fact be a form of radiator, allowing the animals to shed excess heat given birds cannot sweat.

Glenn Tattersall, of Brock University in Ontario, Canada, and his colleagues Denis Andrade and Augusto Abe watched toco toucans (Ramphastos toco) in infrared while they flapped about. They also manipulated the temperatures that these comedy-big-nosed-birds experienced.

In Science this week they report that adult tocos were able to use their bills to compensate for their lack of sweating ability. They were able to adjust heat loss from their bills to account for between 5 and 100% of total body heat loss.

“Our results indicate that the toucan's bill is, relative to its size, one of the largest thermal windows in the animal kingdom, rivalling elephants’ ears in its ability to radiate body heat,” the researchers write.

Continue reading "Toucans’ massive heating bill" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“The premium is not out of whack when you look at the scarcity value of this technology and the appetite for biotech companies right now. It’s a small deal in size but a large deal in terms of the potential scope they gain with this science.”
Reuters talks to journalistic favourite “a source familiar with the deal” about the potential $2.4 billion purchase of Medarex by Bristol-Myers Squibb.

“Procter & Gamble Co. is getting closer to a possible sale of its prescription-drug business, and several parties … are engaged in later-stage discussions, according to people familiar with the matter. The unit could fetch about $3 billion, these people say.”
The Wall Street Journal looks at another possible buy out.

“It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years.”
Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, addresses the TED Global conference in Oxford (BBC).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Mission controllers aborted yesterday's spacewalk from the International Space Station after one astronaut's suit malfunctioned.

Carbon dioxide levels in Chris Cassidy's spacesuit began to rise during the maintenance mission he was undertaking with Dave Wolf. NASA suspects the problem may trace to a lithium hydroxide canister which is supposed to remove the gas to maintain breathability inside the suit.

“It seems like the canister itself is experiencing some problems,” Aki Hoshide told the team from Houston (Reuters, CNET). “It’s not an imminent failure. We just wanted to make sure that you guys are back in the airlock.”

The problem meant Wolf and Cassidy were unable to finish their planned replacement of several huge batteries on the outside of the space station.

Image: Cassidy in an early shot from the same mission, with the checklist for extravehicular activity floating in front of him / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Mice made from induced stem cells
Technical feat shows that the different route to stem cells can indeed make a full mammal body.

Heart, heal thyself
A mouse study finds that, surprisingly, heart muscle can be made to proliferate.

Big claims for tiny lenses
Physicists balk at Nature paper saying lenses can see beyond the theoretical limit.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Lonesome George, the famous and last-surviving giant Geochelone abigdoni tortoise from the island of Pinta in the Galapagos, has achieved that fame in part for his coy attitude to the ladies. Having failed to produce any offspring despite being wooed by many female tortoises, the worst was feared for George’s species.

But now, news arrives from the Galapagos that one of the two female tortoises sharing George’s compound at the Charles Darwin Research Station on the central island of Santa Cruz, has laid five eggs. And the world’s media is rejoicing (BBC, msnbc, AP, Reuters).

We won’t know for a while, though, whether the eggs will bring us little bundles of tortoisey joy. November is the guess for when they might hatch. We had this same excitement last year when eggs were found, thought to have been fertilized by George, but they were duds (see here and here). Still, George has waited around 100 years so far, I’m sure the last 5 months of waiting won’t add to his burden too much.

Well done George!

Image: From Flickr by putneymark under Creative Commons

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Last week’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake near New Zealand moved the country some 30 cm towards Australia, it was reported today

“The country is deforming all the time because of being on the plate boundary, but this has done it in a few seconds, rather than waiting hundreds of years,” says Ken Gledhill of government-owned research organisation GNS Science (The Press). “Basically, it’s taken us closer to Australia.”

However, while the southwest side of the country’s South Island moved 30 cm closer to Australia, its east coast moved just 1 cm in the same direction.

“New Zealand just got a little bit bigger is another way to think about it,” Ken Gledhill of government-owned research organisation GNS Science told AFP.

Will this herald increasing affection between the Kiwis and the Aussies? “The transtasman bond has become a wee bit tighter,” thinks Newstalk ZB. However, despite the hopes of some, cheaper air fares between the two countries are unlikely to be forthcoming.

The quake caused only minor damage, but it did allow a Russian tsunami modeller to do some impressive real time forecasting (see Nature’s news story on this from last week).

Image: New Zealand / Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Europe’s biggest single emitter of carbon dioxide is set to get even bigger next year, likely cementing its place in the ‘dirty 30’ polluters list.

According to the Guardian, Poland’s Elektrownia Belchatow coal power station will grow by 20% between 2008 and 2010.

Figures released earlier this year by the European Commission put Belchatow at the top of the list of carbon emissions from a single source, putting out the equivalent of 30.9 million tons of carbon dioxide a year in 2008. Those preliminary figures have now been confirmed. Reuters has a table of the data on the top 30 emitters, showing German facilities once again dominate the so-called ‘Dirty Thirty’, a term coined by the WWF.

Earlier this year Krzysztof Domagala, the Belchatow plant’s chief executive officer, told Bloomberg, “We will need to buy permits for 10 million tons of carbon dioxide within the next five years.”

One small ray of light: the European Commission has a carbon capture and storage project at Belchatow on its list of projects eligible for energy investments.

Image: by placidcasual/Ian under creative commons via Flickr.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Science has been reduced to a “political bargaining chip” in government, according to MPs (Telegraph, BBC News).

In a report by the House of Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills (IUSS) committee, MPs say science should be at the heart of government, with a permanent home in the Cabinet Office, where it would be able to influence policymaking in all government departments. Instead science is “shuffled” between different departments, reports the Telegraph.

Continue reading "Science sidelined in government, say MPs" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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If you’ve ever wondered whether the gaps between valley ridges were eerily even in their spacing, you’d have been right. Geologists have struggled to explain the phenomenon, or produce a predictive model to say how far apart those ridges will be over time.

Armed with some spectacular images like this one, (more below the fold) Taylor Perron at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, has worked out what makes those ridges space themselves out so evenly. (press release). His research is published in Nature. It’s a combination of soil creep – which is the really slow downhill movement of soil that happens as gravity pulls soil and rocks into a more comfortable position – and the channels that streams cut into the sides of the valleys. These two processes do opposite things, the first smooths things out and the second chops them up.

The timescales that these processes work on are the key to the formula. When these two competing processes happen on the same timescale, there is a characteristic length scale for the valley ridge spacing.

Continue reading "Working out the lie of the land" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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“I thought, being Americans, they might say: ‘Holy chicken s**t look at all that f***ing dust’. I felt that would not be a suitable thing to be quoted in history books until eternity.”
Gary Peach, former employee at Australia’s Tidbinbilla satellite tracking facility, explains what he thought might happen when America landed on the Moon. Peach claims he came up with Armstrong’s “One small step…” lines and passed them on instead (The Age).

“There is good cost control, despite an impact on gross margin from U.S. patent expiries, and a windfall lining up on pandemic antiviral and flu sales which will give Glaxo a strong offset against multiple generic hits in 2009.”
Navid Malik, analyst at Matrix Corporate Capital, looks at GSK’s second-quarter profit, which is up 12 percent (Bloomberg).

“The same regions of the world that lack access to adequate health facilities are, paradoxically, well-served by mobile phone networks. We can take advantage of these mobile networks to bring low-cost, easy-to-use lab equipment out to more remote settings.”
Dan Fletcher, of University of California, Berkeley, explains why he is developing a microscope that attaches to a cellphone for developing world health workers (Canadian Press).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week, wild chimps show signs of an AIDS-like disease, super-tiny lenses go beyond the limits of light, and we reassess the patterns in the Northern and Southern lights. Plus, the regular news round-up.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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With the emergence of web-based lab notebooks, digital image “enhancement”, and the quick and easy (and possibly dirty) generation and dissemination of colossal amounts of data, it’s becoming increasingly clear that technology provides new challenges to maintaining scientific integrity. In an attempt to tame the beast while it still has its baby teeth, the US National Academy of Sciences released a report today that provided a framework for dealing with these challenges: “Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age”.

The NAS commissioned the report back in May 2006, when the editors of Nature, Cell, Science, and Nature Cell Biology wrote a letter to NAS president Ralph Cicerone regarding the recent rise in cases of data manipulation.

Continue reading "Data integrity in the digital age" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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More research to prove that global warming is shrinking tasty animals has appeared this week.

First up: extra on the Soay Sheep in Scotland. Earlier this month a paper in Science suggested that these animals were shrinking in size due, at least in part, to climate change (see: Scotland’s shrinking sheep shocker - July 03, 2009).

Now a new paper in Biology Letters comments on the fact that the larger sheep also tend to have darker coats than the smaller sheep. There is, say Shane Maloney, of the University of Western Australia, and colleagues, apparently a genetic link between coat colour and body size.

This may be another reason for the decline of the larger, black sheep: “While in the past a dark coat has offset the metabolic costs of thermoregulation by absorbing solar radiation, the selective advantage of a dark coat may be waning as the climate warms in the North Atlantic,” the researchers write.

Continue reading "Global warming is shrinking your dinner" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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US lobby groups filed their second-quarter 2009 records (April, May and June) to the Senate Office of Public Records on Monday night.

The figures are trickling through (AP, or search the database yourself), and it’s no surprise that with landmark healthcare reform legislation working its way through Congress, drug-makers and healthcare trade associations have upped their lobbying efforts.

Continue reading "Roll up, roll up for the lobbying frenzy – now with added health reform dollars" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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All Nature’s pandemic 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.

Human tests of two swine flu vaccines have begun in Australia.

The companies CSL and Vaxine have both begun tests on their products today, according to a number of news sources. CSL is running tests on 240 healthy adult volunteers while Vaxine has 300.

One group in the CSL trial will get one dose, while a second group will get two doses, on the basis that if just one does protects then there will be more vaccine to go round.

“The fundamental data that we and others around the world are interested in are the immune response to the first and second dose,” says Andrew Cuthbertson, CSL’s chief scientific officer (Bloomberg).

CSL expects the trial to take about seven months but says it will have enough data by September to allow the Australian government to start planning how to use the vaccine, allowing distribution in October (ABC News, AP).

The results will be carefully scrutinised by all players in the H1N1 vaccine business.

“The world will be watching to see the immunogenicity results of this first clinical trial,” says Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the WHO’s initiative for vaccine research (various, eg: Sydney Morning Herald). “It is likely to be indicative of how the other vaccine candidates will perform.”

Novartis, Sanofi and GSK also plan to start trials in the next few weeks or months. David Low, a health-care analyst at Deutsche Bank AG in Sydney, told Bloomberg most companies already had orders to supply vaccines so being first to trial is “probably more of a PR coup” than anything else.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Thirty-Meter Telescope, a leader in the new generation of mammoth telescopes, finally has a home: Mauna Kea, Hawaii (press release). To host the billion dollar project and what would be the largest telescope in the world, the Aloha State beat out its competitor, the remote peak of Cerro Armazones in Chile, based largely on Mauna Kea’s “atmospheric conditions, low average temperatures, and low humidity,” chair of the TMT board of directors Henry Yang announced 21 July.

On the northern slope of Mauna Kea, the TMT will join an impressive gathering of other sky-peepers, including the soon-to-be-dwarfed Keck telescopes which, with primary mirrors some 10-m in diameter, had been amongst the world’s largest optical and infrared telescopes. While the Keck mirrors are assemblages of 36 six-sided mirrors measuring 1.8 m across, the TMT’s will be comprised of 492 1.44-m mirrors — giving it nine times the light-gathering capacity.

The TMT will also be the first telescope ever with “adaptive optics” built in from the beginning, a technique that senses corrects for atmospheric turbulence, giving the telescope “spatial resolution more than 12 times sharper than what is achieved by the Hubble Space Telescope”. The TMT will use all of this hardware to “detect and study light from the earliest stars and galaxies, analyze the formation of planets around nearby stars, and test many of the fundamental laws of physics", says the press release.

Continue reading "Hawaii’s telescope collection gets a massive new addition — Chile spurned" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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“Copy, the WHC is go for nominal ops.”
Astronaut Robert Thirsk confirms the ‘WHC’ [NASA-speak for ‘toilet’] has been fixed on the International Space Station (Fox News).

“We should be able to design a ‘tailor-made insect’ for ideal biological control using this method.”
Researchers from Nagoya University in Japan report on their work to produce a ‘wingless ladybird’ (Insect Molecular Biology, hat tip: Kyodo News).

“During the past week vacuum leaks have been found in two ‘cold’ sectors of the LHC. … It is now foreseen that the LHC will be closed and ready for beam injection by mid-November.”
Another problem hits the Large Hadron Collider (CERN Bulletin).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Britain is considering upgrading its national space centre to a full blown space agency to take the UK to-infinity-and-beyond / where-no-man-has-gone-before / etc.

Currently the country’s British National Space Centre oversees the space science sector, but it operates as a partnership of six government departments, two research councils and two other government bodies. As the Daily Telegraph notes, “critics say the inability of this club sometimes to adopt coherent positions on complex programmes means that UK delegations often find themselves marginalised when they go into international negotiations”.

A new consultation – which launches properly today – will ask whether a single agency would be a better way to go.

Continue reading "UK government wants a space agency" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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New pictures have emerged of the new spot on Jupiter, probably caused by an impacting comet.

NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea in Hawaii came up with this image after amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley of Australia alerted the world to the spot (see: Jupiter Spotted - July 20, 2009).

“We were extremely lucky to be seeing Jupiter at exactly the right time, the right hour, the right side of Jupiter to witness the event. We couldn’t have planned it better,” says Glenn Orton, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California (press release).

Meanwhile, the W.M. Keck Observatory, also on Mauna Kea, came up with this image.

Paul Kalas, a UC Berkeley astronomer, thinks the smash will prove a valuable follow up to ideas coming from work done on the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994. “Now we have a chance to test these ideas on a brand new impact event,” he says (press release).

Image top: NASA/JPL/Infrared Telescope Facility
Image lower: Paul Kalas (UCB), Michael Fitzgerald (LLNL/UCBUCLA), Franck Marchis (SETI Institute/UCB), James Graham (UCB)

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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India has yet again publicly stated its opposition to targets that limit carbon dioxide emissions – even as it continues to push a domestic clean energy agenda.

"It is not true that India is running away from mitigation," said Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, on Sunday, during US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s three-day tour of the country. "India's position, let me be clear, is that we are simply not in the position to take legally binding emissions targets." (Washington Post).

Later, in a closed-door meeting with Clinton, Ramesh repeated his position: “There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions.” (AP) India’s per-capita carbon dioxide emissions are some 17 times lower than that of the US (pictured, extracted from EIA’s May 2009 International Energy Outlook).

Ramesh added that India also faced the threat of carbon tariffs imposed on its exports to countries such as the US – under a provision inserted into the Waxman-Markey energy bill being debated in the Senate.

Although it seemingly objects to the politics of climate talks, India has developed an ambitious climate agenda domestically (see Developing nations tackle climate, Nature 460 158-159; 2009).

Continue reading "India objects to US climate targeting" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Elsevier are busily touting their ‘article of the future’ – an improved format for online academic papers that includes tabbed browsing, embedded audio and more.

This week they unveiled their first prototypes, based on two Cell papers, which look pretty impressive. One key difference from the conventional academic paper is that you can quickly drill down into any section that you want via tabs at the top of the page.

As well as a graphical abstract, you can also listen to a five-minute interview between a Cell editor and an author on the paper. And of course everything is linked up to the nines.

It certainly looks very attractive, but I do wonder how many people will still just head for the pdf and print it out so they can scribble all over it as they read it on the train / plane / in the bath …

Posted by Mark Peplow
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Setback for Huntington's disease therapy
Brain-tissue transplants don't last very long in patients.

How raindrops fall
Exploding drops produce miniature showers.

Mystery of HIV vaccine failure deepens
Heightened immune response to cold virus may not be to blame.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Rajendra Pachauri turned up the heat on global policymakers in a series of interviews following last week's meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Venice.

Speaking to reporters in New York on Monday, the IPCC chairman credited global leaders with endorsing a goal of holding global warming to 2 degrees Celsius but said countries must now follow up with real action. "The reality is that we have very little time," Pachauri said. Despite an alarmingly wide gap between developed and developing nations, Pachauri said he remains "cautiously optimistic" that a climate deal will be reached in Copenhagen this December.

Following the IPCC's fourth assessment in 2007, some experts suggested that the panel should switch gears and begin performing more rapid assessments, but in the end the panel decided to stay the course. Pachauri said the IPCC will begin rolling out its next major assessment as scheduled in 2013.

Reuters summarized some of the major issues that the panel will be digging into. At the top are sea level change, one of the more contentious issues in the fourth assessment, and the role clouds, which are the source of the largest uncertainties in current climate models.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley has spotted a new spot on Jupiter (right). It's not much to look at, but for astronomers, it's reminiscent of the impact of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which slammed into the gas giant in 1994.

A second comet impact would be very exciting, but it's perhaps a little early to say whether it's a collision or just some weather. On Bad Astronomy, astronomer Alan Fitzsimmons, who was involved in the Shoemaker-Levy observations, points to a past example of a weather system being mistaken for an impact.

The situation is developing fast. Glenn Orton, a planetary scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has been watching Jupiter with NASA Infrared Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and he confirms via e-mail to the Great Beyond that it does look like an impact.

Wesley appears to be keeping up with things on this webpage.

Image: A. Wesley

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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“With this project, Portugal and Spain will chart a new atlas of innovation and will make new discoveries.”
Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates announces the opening of a joint Spanish-Portuguese nanotechnology research centre, the first such centre with the status of an international organization, according to Reuters.

“It’s really no different than the pioneering spirit of many in past history, who took the one-way trip across the ocean, or the trip out west across the United States with no intention of ever returning.”
John Olson, NASA’s director of exploration systems integration, tells the Guardian that one-way tickets to space might appear in future.

“When you get a second, if you could put an out-of-service note on the WHC [NASA-speak for ‘toilet’] and advise the crew members that station crew members will have to use the Russian toilet and shuttle crew members on the shuttle until further notice.”
Hal Getzelman tells the international space station that some of their facilities are not working (ABC).

“If there’s one out there, it’s too many for the environment.”
Shawn Heflick, Florida reptile hunter, comments on the state’s great python hunt (Miami Herald).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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All Nature’s pandemic 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 UK has got itself in a right tizzy over swine flu this morning. Andy Burnham, the country’s health secretary, has been forced onto the defensive after a rash of stories accusing the government of giving conflicting advice to pregnant women.

“There isn’t conflicting advice. The advice has been clear all along that women who are pregnant should take extra precautions as they would anyway – they should really follow the advice about hand hygiene, they should consider avoiding crowded places,” he says (GMTV, via the Guardian).

He told the BBC’s Today programme that the government couldn’t tell people how to live their lives. “Everyone has to make their own judgements. People have to live their lives,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ernst & Young warned that the UK economy could be brutalised by H1N1 as a result of people staying away from work.

“Perhaps the most worrying aspect of an H1N1 epidemic is that it would reinforce the downward effect of the recession on inflation,” says a report from the company’s Item Club experts (Sky News). “With the western world still teetering on the brink of deflation it is not an exaggeration to say that a pandemic on this scale could tip it over the edge.”

In addition, two major airlines are about to start turning people away if airline staff suspect they may have swine flu. British Airways and Virgin Atlantic have announced that they will require doctors notes from people who appear to be ill.

Peter Holden, the British Medical Association’s lead representative on pandemic flu, told The Times this was “a total and utter waste of time”.

He says:

A fit-note is only going to be valid at the moment of issue. You could easily become ill between leaving the GP’s surgery and reaching the airport. It flies in the face of government efforts to relieve pressure on doctors, and we have much more important work to do than this.

Image: CDC

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The vicious friendly rivalry between scientific journals has been starkly presented in (nearly) black and white by PHD comics.

Here at Nature, and no doubt at Science too, editors are hopefully waiting to see if they will appear in any third part of the series Nature vs Science. This series started harmlessly enough with a comparison of adverts and impact factors (see here).

Then the comics moved on to one way of looking at the scientific publishing business model, based on a meeting with Nature’s online publishing director, Timo Hannay.

Also, we learn that Science keeps a “gallery of embarrassing Nature gaffes”. They’re probably just bitter about losing every sporting event to us. Let’s keep it friendly people…

Image: detail from PHD Comics

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA today released some stunning pictures of several Apollo landing sites, as imaged from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the space agency's latest return to the Moon.

They are stunning less in their pixelated detail than in what they actually represent: the remnants of spacecraft built and piloted by humans to the surface of another world. The picture of the Apollo 14 site (right) shows the path scuffed by astronauts between their lunar module lander and the site where they set up a raft of scientific instruments. In its eloquent evocation of the loneliness of space travel it brings to mind the descent image of the Mars Phoenix spacecraft above the backdrop of the Heimdall crater.

If you can't get enough of Apollo reminiscing, check out Nature's special on the Apollo 11 landing here.

Posted by Alex Witze
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Neanderthal census reveals diversity
Sequencing method uses mitochondrial DNA to build up a picture of the species.

Q+A: Weighing up the G8's promises to poor countries
Nature News talks to Namanga Ngongi about the billions of dollars pledged for food security.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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NASA has released its report of what cause the US$273 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) to end up at the bottom of the ocean.

The report essentially confirms what was known shortly after the launch: OCO failed to reach orbit because the protective fairing that surrounded the satellite didn't separate from the rest of the Taurus XL rocket. With the fairing in place, the upper stage of the rocket was simply too heavy to reach orbit, and it instead ended up crashing into the icy waters surrounding Antarctica.

The exact cause behind the fairing failure will probably never be known, but the aptly named "mishap investigation board" has narrowed it down to one of four causes:

*First, is the possible failure of an explosive joint used to literally blow the fairing off the rocket.

*Second, a failure in the electrical subsystem controlling that joint.

*The third possibility would be a failure of the hydraulics that provide pressure to thrusters used to separate the fairing.

*Last but not least, the board postulates that a stray cord snagged in a joint or side rail might have been to blame.

The closing of the mishap investigation will be little comfort to OCO scientists, who are still waiting to see whether NASA will build them a replacement. But the successful conclusion is good news for Glory, an aerosol-observing satellite that is set to launch in January on the same Taurus XL model of rocket.

Image: NASA

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Sixth time lucky the space shuttle Endeavour launched on Wednesday. But an old problem has returned to haunt NASA: Space foam.

The shuttle Columbia’s tragic ending was caused by a large piece of foam that came off the fuel tank during launch and punched a hole in the shuttle’s wing. On re-entry this hole allowed heat to reach deep into the wing and destroy the spacecraft and its crew of seven.

As Endeavour launched on Wednesday, a camera on the outside of the shuttle showed a number of insulation foam chunks falling off the external fuel tank.

Over at Cnet, William Harwood has a great explanation about what actually happened.

Harwood spoke to shuttle Program Manager John Shannon, who says that the foam seems to have peeled off in strips, instead of bubbling up into little pieces.

"It's not thick foam at all. The foam is about a half an inch thick, so it kind of came off in little sheets in about seven or eight different areas. We don't understand why that happened. It looks like the base primer just was not holding onto the foam well,” Shannon says.

The foam came from the intertank area – which separates the hydrogen and oxygen sections of the fuel tank. This isn’t usually the place where foam comes from if it falls off. An Aviation Week story speculates that this was because of the five scrubbed launches meant that the fuel tanks had to be drained and re-filled five extra times, although the piece doesn’t expand upon why that might cause the insulation to strip off in flight.

Some reports are suggesting – perhaps prematurely – that the foam problem could ground the fleet, and damage NASA’s chances of completing its task to build the International Space Station before the shuttle fleet is retired some time in 2010 (Reuters, Discovery, ABC).

The shuttle has docked with the ISS, and its astronauts have been taking a close look at the shuttle with their external camera to check for damage. They are set to return after 16 days.

The foamy lumps aren’t expected to cause any troubles. "There is nothing that we have seen on the orbiter that causes us any concern," says Shannon.

Image: NASA via cnet

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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As researchers at the University of California system cope with unpaid leave, it looks like the troubles for higher education will soon stretch to this side of the pond. The University and College Union (UCU), the UK's largest postgraduate Union, has made a grim prediction of massive layoffs at London universities.

The UCU predicts that over 2,000 jobs are "at risk" at 18 institutions across London. Of particular concern to scientists are a possible 130 jobs at Imperial College's faculty of medicine, and a possible 530 job cuts at University College London (right). The UCU is highly critical of the possible cuts: "Most of these universities and colleges are not in financial crisis", they've written in their statement. "Nobody is saying that the sector in the capital is awash with money but the fact is that universities and colleges in the capital are in relatively good financial health."

That may be true at the moment, but universities in Britain are heavily dependant on government funding—funding which is expected to be cut back dramatically in coming years as the recession deepens. "Public spending is already tight and all the signs are that it is likely to get tighter yet," says Dominique Fourniol, a spokesperson at University College London. "It is likely that we will see a decrease in our income in the next few years, requiring us to reduce our spending."

Fourniol confirmed that UCL is looking to reduce spending by 6%, but he says it's "not a simple question" of lopping 6% off the current staffing level. A spokesperson at Imperial similarly said that the college "is making every effort to avoid compulsory redundancies" at the faculty of medicine.

Unlike the situation at the University of California, which is very immediate, it seems that researchers at London's universities have to wait and see just how bad the pain from the current financial crisis will be.

Image: Wikipedia

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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"We completely understand the public's concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission."
Harry Schoell, CEO of Cyclone Engine, responds[pdf] to a Fox News article (original removed) that suggested a DARPA-sponsored biomass-digesting robot could feed on dead bodies.

"We should have had a historian running around saying 'I don't care if you are ever going to use them - we are going to keep them"
As digitally remastered but still-fuzzy video of the Moon landings is released, Richard Nafzger, a NASA engineer, says that the original tape recordings were not merely lost - they were erased (Reuters).

“Normally, you do a recommendation and then nothing happens for months. This is quite unusual.”
Thorsten Markus, a member of a National Academy of Sciences committee that yesterday recommended spy satellite high-resolution images of Arctic sea ice be released to the public, is pleased that the US Geological Service did just that a few hours later. (Wired).

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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India’s first Moon-orbiting satellite suffered a key instrument failure almost three months ago – but scientists kept news of the problem under wraps while they rushed to find a work-around.

Madhavan Nair, chair of the Bangalore-headquartered Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), has now ‘fessed up to the world’s media: all is salvaged, he says, and in any case the mission is pretty much successfully concluded, science-wise.

The unmanned Chandrayaan-1, which launched last October, developed a fault on 26 April in its onboard orienteering “star sensor”, which keeps the probe’s instruments pointing Moon-wards. On 19 May, the satellite was raised from a 100km orbit to a higher, more stable 200-km orbit above the Moon’s surface. ISRO scientists enlisted the aid of onboard gyroscopes and an antenna mechanism to keep the satellite pointed the right way. Science reports that Nair says there was no need to go public, since there was “no degradation or deterioration in the mission”.

Other media reports quote ISRO officials saying the quality of pictures beamed from the satellite have been compromised, and the mission may have to be cut short (BBC).

Nair told reporters that in any case, 90 percent of the two-year mission's objectives has already been achieved. (AP). Chandrayaan-1 has taken high-resolution images, hurled an impact probe near the Moon’s south pole in November, and has also found hints of ice at the lunar north pole. “The scientific community is extremely happy with the already obtained data and the results of analysis could be expected in about 6 months to 1 year,” an ISRO press release states.

Image: the bright rim of the Moretus crater at the Moon's south pole/ISRO

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Thirty-four Nobel Laureates have penned a letter urging President Barack Obama to push for a $150 billion clean energy fund in the climate legislation currently moving through Congress. Not that Obama needs any prodding - this message was clearly targeted at Congress.

The president kicked things off earlier this spring by assumed the existence of roughly $600 billion in cap-and-trade revenues in his first 10-year budget. Some $150 billion of that money was dedicated to a Clean Energy Technology Fund, but the Senate eventually stripped all of this out of its budget bill, illustrating precisely why advocates are pushing for a dedicated and untouchable stream of revenue in the climate legislation itself.

Those efforts fell apart when House Democrats began striking deals to secure votes, eventually paving the way for passage on June 26. The last Congressional Budget Office analysis forecasts that the bill would effectively raise $873 billion over 10 years, but most of that sum would be doled out to various causes in an effort hold consumer and business costs down.

Burt Richter, the Nobel-prize winning physicist and former director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, offered up a few numbers in a conference call with journalists: Energy makes up about 10 percent of the nation's gross national product, or about $1.5 trillion per year; $15 billion would represent just 1 percent of the nation's energy expenditures. Small potatoes in the grand scheme, but Richter says it would get the nation started on the kind of energy innovation that will be needed to meet the climate challenge - and stay ahead in an increasingly competitive world.

"The United States is getting to the point where it doesn’t make anything that anybody wants to buy," he said, pointing to nuclear and wind power as two energy technologies that the United States pioneered and then shipped overseas. "We would be well advised to invest at an appropriate scale ... if we want to preserve our position of technological leadership."

Continue reading "Nobelists call for energy R&D in climate bill" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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Tsunami forecast in real time
Russian tsunami modeller seizes unexpected opportunity after New Zealand earthquake.

California academics face prospect of unpaid leave
University of California makes furlough plans as state budget cuts continue to bite.

The moonwalker
Harrison Schmitt was the first and last scientist to touch the lunar surface.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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viXra.org is a new site that wants your papers. All of them. Regardless of quality, quantity or sanity, the organizers promise they will post your paper to their site.

For those not up on the debate, viXra is an answer to arXiv.org, the popular physics pre-print server. For those of you who aren't physicists, arXiv is a place where many researchers post their work in advance of publication. There is no peer review, and the idea is that physicists can discuss their and improve their work in an open setting.

But there is a form of screening at the arXiv. Researchers must prove an academic affiliation in order to post their papers, and a moderator reviews each paper to see that it is of "refereeable" quality. This policy has created problems on at least one occasion: in 2002 a creationist sued the server over his right to post his series of ten papers on the origin of the Universe. More recently, others have alleged bias. Among other things, they accuses arXiv administrators of putting some of the more (how shall we say it) "out there" papers into the less popular "general-physics" category.

viXra is an alternative for researchers who feel that they've been "blacklisted" from the arXiv. According to PhysicsWorld.com, it was set up by Philip Gibbs, an independent physicist, who was ticked off with the arXiv system. On viXra's mission page, it says that the website is something of a parody as well as "an experiment to see what kind of scientific work is being excluded by the arXiv."

So far, here's what a sampling of what's gone up on viXra:

*Is Ratio 3:1 a comprehensive principle of the Universe?

*This Time - What a Strange Turn of Events!

*A Review of Anomalous Redshift Data

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Officials have admitted that a tiger reserve in India no longer has any tigers.

Panna National Park, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, had 24 tigers three years ago, but now officially joins the Sariska reserve in Rajasthan on zero. Panna's tiger demise is particularly embarrassing because "warning bells were sounded regularly for the last eight years," according to a report prepared by the central forest ministry (BBC).

Big cats are reportedly also in decline in the smaller Sanjay National Park, also in Madhya Pradesh, where tigers have not been seen for a year.

A century ago, 40,000 tigers roamed India. Now there are only 1,400 left (according to a February 2008 government census). Most observers blame this loss on rampant poaching - despite the attempts of the conservation programme, Project Tiger, which controls the country's tiger reserves. A 2006 Nature news feature, "The tiger's retreat" (subscription required) has more on the reasons behind India's rapidly dwindling tiger population.

Seemingly downplaying the poaching angle, a wildlife intelligence report submitted to Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has played up the influence of "excessive use of tranquilisers" and subsequent radio-collaring used to track tigers in the park. (Zeenews.com, Daily News Analysis).

Image: Panthera tigris tigris, Bengal Tiger/Wikimedia commons

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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After six aborted attempts, space shuttle Endeavour finally launched, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission.

For full immersive coverage of Apollo's historic lift-off, see the real-time ApolloPlus40 Twitter project by Nature News; and an interactive recreation at We Choose the Moon.

Back to the present-day merely-Space Station-orbiting Endeavour: appropriately for a launch delayed by fuelling glitches and thunderstorms, all was not perfect. Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's space operations chief, says eight or nine pieces of foam insulation came off the external fuel tank during launch, and that the shuttle was hit two or three times about two minutes into the flight (AP). The impacts came where the right wing joins the shuttle fuselage.

Whether the damage will prevent Endeavour making the return flight to Earth in 16 days is not yet clear. Space station residents will take more detailed pictures on Friday. Still, if needs be, the astronauts could move into the space station for a few weeks and await another shuttle back, Gerstenmaier said.

Endeavour's seven crew members, now in orbit around the International Space Station, are expecting a 16-day mission, including five spacewalks.

Image credit: NASA/Jeffrey Marino

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Shrug-worthy, disappointing, too slow, reactionary, lacking ambition, could-do-better: the scientist’s attitude to most UK politicians’ policy statements on reducing carbon emissions.

Today’s “low-carbon transition plan” looks different – although we could have done with it a lot earlier.

In a collection of four strategy documents which together proclaim themselves “the most systematic response to climate change of any major developed country”, the UK government plots out exactly how it plans to meet its legally binding targets for cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

Energy secretary Ed Miliband says that by 2020 he wants 40% of electricity to come from low-carbon sources: over 30% from renewables – overwhelmingly wind power, but also biomass, and tidal energy – and the rest from nuclear and carbon capture and storage. Heat and transport will also see vastly-boosted renewables contributions. By 2020, there will be 3,000 offshore wind turbines across the country and every home will have a smart meter. Every government department has been given its own carbon budget to follow. Thousands of ‘green jobs’ (undefined) will be created.

The ambition on paper is praiseworthy. It leaves only sizeable doubts about whether the government can match deeds to fine-sounding words – and whether they can persuade households and firms that they must pay increased costs on energy bills.

“Eventually the Government must move from analysis paralysis to doing and building," says Stuart Haszeldine, a geologist at the University of Edinburgh. “All the right plans are there, but it’s hard to believe that this is actually going to happen.”

Continue reading "UK low carbon drive: at last the right sounds; now let’s see it happen" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Asteroid belt's icy fringe explained
'Primordial objects' may have been captured during planetary realignment.

Sequencing unlocks secrets of blood parasites
Possible drug targets revealed in flatworms that cause schistosomiasis.

NIH nominee draws scrutiny
Francis Collins is likely to face funding challenges — and criticism of his Christian evangelism.

Medical isotope shortage reaches crisis level
Robust solutions sought urgently to shore up fragile supply chain.

How brain training makes multitasking easier
Practice speeds up the part of the brain that lets us tackle many jobs at once.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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"It came as a joke, but something significant came out of it."
Scott Barley, a DJ for California-based Highway Radio, who has paid off a $400 fine imposed on NASA thirty years ago when parts of its Skylab space station broke up around Esperance, Western Australia. He was guest-of-honour at anniversary celebrations on 13 July. (Discover)

"After considerable study, we have determined that the potential advantages and benefits of biofuel from algae could be significant."
Emil Jacobs, vice-president of R&D at ExxonMobil, explains why the oil giant has formed an alliance worth up to $600 million with Craig Venter's biotech company, Synthetic Genomics.

"This is an opportunity to transition solid-state laser technology to the warfighter."
Dan Wildt, at Northrop Grumman, which has won a US Navy $98-million contract to install and test a prototype high-power laser on board a ship (Aviation Week).

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Posted for Fiona Tomkinson, British Science Association Media Fellow

The verdict is out on two researchers, Judith Thomas and Juan Contreras, who falsified results in journals and progress reports for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) - spanning an incredible eight years and amounting to more than $23 million in NIH grants (The Scientist).

Thomas and Contreras were performing kidney transplants on rhesus monkeys, to see if immunosuppressant drugs would help the operation. The researchers claimed they removed both native kidneys from their patients, leaving the transplanted kidney, plus immunosuppressant drugs, to fend for itself. But in at least 32 animals, only one native kidney was ever removed.

Peter Abbrecht, of the US Office of Research Integrity, told The Scientist that the accepted studies "could lead to wasted research effort by other researchers and possibly place patients at harm if they were enrolled in clinical trials designed on the basis of the falsified results.”

Thomas has voluntarily agreed to a ten year exclusion from working with any United States Government agency; while Contreras has been given only three years. These bans will ensure both researchers are black-listed in the US, and possibly crush their career aspirations elsewhere. The knock-on effect so far has resulted in losing their jobs at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

“Such behavior is absolutely unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” Richard Marchase, UAB vice president for research and economic development, said in a written statement (Birmingham News). “We take our commitment to ethics very seriously, and our first priority is to maintain the integrity of scientific data.”

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Element 112 has a name! Taken from Nicolaus Copernicus, the man who said that the universe didn’t revolve around the Earth, and that we were actually spinning round our star, the Sun.

Element 112, first discovered in 1996 by the group of Sigurd Hofmann at the centre for heavy ion research in Darmstadt, Germany has been in want of a name since it was officially recognised by the International Union of Pure an Applied Chemistry last month.

Hofmann wanted to buck the recent trend of element naming to come out of his lab – which gave us a rush of elements named after fairly modern-era scientists: Bohr, Meitner, Roentgen, as well as a couple named after places nearby: Hess and Darmstadt.

Continue reading "Welcome to the periodic table Copernicium!" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Jerzy Buzek became the first eastern European president of the European Parliament in a vote yesterday. He also becomes the first president to have a strong and still-active scientific background. A PhD chemical engineer, he worked for many years at the Chemical Engineering Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Gliwice, southern Poland. He generated a strong bibliography and has three patents, in the area of energy. He spent a year at the University of Cambridge, UK, in 1972, but declined the offer of a grant to stay longer, preferring to return to Poland.

After the fall of communism he has concerned himself with environmental energy issues, serving on different national and international commissions.

He became prime minister of Poland from 1997 until 2001, then returned to academia before becoming an Member of the European Parliament in 2004. There he became an active member of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) and was rapporteur for the multi-billion-euro Framework 7 Research Programme legislation.
The presidency of the European Parliament is more ceremonial than powerful, but Buzek will at least throw a positive light on the deliberations of the Framework 8 Research Programme which must be approved during this legisalture.

Buzek’s wife is a chemist and his daughter a famous actress – she costarred with Roman Polanski in Andrzej Wajdas’ 2002 film Revenge.

Conservative MEP Herbert Reul of Germany is expected to be elected chair of the new ITRE parliamentary committee tomorrow.

Posted by Alison Abbott
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Employees of the University of California San Francisco protested proposed salary cuts and furloughs on 14 July at the institution's campus on Parnassus Avenue.

[Watch a video of the protests here.]

The protests came on the eve of a 15 July meeting at which the University of California Board of Regents was planned to discuss the cuts.

About 100 nurses, janitors, researchers and administrative assistants marched outside the UCSF Medical Center and chanted slogans such as, "They say furlough, We say hell no!" and "They say layoff, We say Yudof!" during the protest.

Continue reading "University of California employees protest proposed cuts" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden
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Malaria drug makers ignore WHO ban
Health agency calls for clampdown on artemisinin monotherapy.

Flu furore hits Argentina
Refusal to declare national emergency restricts pandemic measures.

Pandemic flu viruses brew for years before going global
Monitoring more viral genes could provide early warning of dangerous outbreaks.

Swine flu shares some features with 1918 pandemic
Exposure to one pandemic may protect against the other.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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The UNESCO world conference on higher education has produced some interesting progress, especially in tackling African higher education.

There was a general offer of support to Africa from world education leaders, and a couple of major projects on the table.

These include a pan-African institution of university governance, to be based in Yaoundé, Cameroon, (press release) and an Afro-Brazilian university with eight campuses; five in Portuguese-speaking Africa, two in Asia and one in Brazil.

Continue reading "African universities get international promises of support" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Posted for Fiona Tomkinson, British Science Association Media Fellow

It finally has been confirmed that we are controlled by our cats. Well, at least to the extent that they get their dinner.

Researchers from the University of Sussex have found that cats give out a mixed signal of urgent cries or meowing subtly embedded within a characteristic purr. This manipulative mewing is just too annoyingly difficult to ignore.

"The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response," says Karen McComb of the University of Sussex (press release). "Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom."

The research was inspired by Karen’s own want to understand how her cat Pepo (BBC) was just as reliable as a daily wake up call. Her own detective work led her to believe she was not alone: "After a little bit of investigation, I discovered that there are other cat owners who are similarly bombarded early in the morning," says McComb.

Playing recordings of cats to human volunteers even revealed that non-cat owners reacted similarly to cat-lovers, finding the mixed signal more urgent and less pleasing compared with a genuine low-frequency purr of content.

“The voiced peak that we measured in our study in fact occurs at comparable frequencies to the fundamental frequency of a human infant’s cry,” the researchers note in their Current Biology report.

Solicitation purrs unusually peaked in the 220 to 520 hertz frequency range. Babies' cries have a similar frequency range, 300 to 600 hertz, McComb says (New Scientist).

So cats seem capable of bringing out the nurturing instinct in us all.

Image: By fofurasfelinas from Flickr under Creative Commons

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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How about this for a mixed bag of space rocket news: The space shuttle Endeavour’s launch was delayed again yesterday – more bad weather. But the company hoping to replace the shuttle when it retires, SpaceX, did manage to successfully hoik a satellite into orbit on their Falcon-1 vehicle.

The space shuttle will try again tomorrow, with NASA predicting that the weather in Florida will be kinder to them by then: “The outlook is better on Wednesday, with only a 40 percent chance of weather conditions prohibiting liftoff” (press release).

SpaceX, meanwhile, successfully launched their Falcon 1 rocket from the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on the island of Omelek. You can watch it for yourself here. The rocket was carrying with it a Malaysian imaging satellite, which is now in orbit. This, the second successful and fifth overall launch attempt for the company will be seen as significant step: Two successful launches in a row and a paying customer’s satellite in orbit to boot.

So, why then should we hear that another communications satellite company, Avanti, wanted to raise money so it can avoid using the next-generation SpaceX rocket Falcon-9? According to this report the reason Avanti raised the $68 million was to switch from an as-yet unbuilt Falcon-9 launcher to the more commonly used Ariane-5. Why would they do that? Well, the report suggests that it’s to soothe the worries of nervous investors, seeing as Falcon-9’s inaugural launch didn’t happen in 2007 as first planned, but is now slated for later this year.

Image: NASA

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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“Caveat Emptor,” warns the slogan of a new journal, Rejecta Mathematica, released today. In the spirit of recent pushes to publish more negative data and failed experiments, Rejecta Mathematica aims to publish articles rejected by traditional journals open access and without peer review. The brainchild of Michael Wakin, an assistant Professor at Colorado School of Mines in Golden Colorado and his three co-editors in chief Christopher Rozell, Mark Davenport and Jason Laska, Rejecta shuns conventions by publishing papers that have been shunned elsewhere -- whether the reason be flawed logic, prior demonstrations, outlandish underpinnings, or just the standard human error of peer review that has on occasion deemed even Nobel Prize worthy work unfit to publish.

Reviewers make mistakes and so do scientists. Wakin says he hopes Rejecta will help turn those mistakes into teaching moments through its open letters, author commentaries that accompany each paper and explain the reasons, real or guessed at as to why the papers received such harsh treatment. I received an advanced copy of the journal’s inaugural issue, featuring six articles deemed too derivative (in the case of “Automatic CounTilings” by Doron Zeilberger), too long (as in Ezra Miller’s “Alexander duality for monomial ideals and their resolutions”) or too controversial (as in Marni Sheppeard’s “Mass matrix transforms in qubit field theory”). I spoke with Wakin as they prepared to launch.

Tell me about the reaction you get when you tell people you’re starting a journal called Rejecta Mathematica

So far it has been surprisingly difficult to convince some people that this is a real idea and not just a joke. It is something certainly that we had a lot of fun preparing, but it is something that is going to exist. It is a real idea and one that we hope can play a unique role in the academic and the mathematical and the scientific process.

Continue reading "Bring us your tired, your poor, your rejected papers" »

Posted by Brendan Maher
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Twelve companies, including Siemens, Munich Re and Deutsche Bank, yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Munich to develop business plans and financing concepts for building networked solar thermal plants in North Africa and the Middle East.

The companies agree to establish by the end of October a company, called Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII), of which they will all become shareholders. DII will then analyse the technical, economic, political, social and ecological framework of generating solar (and wind) power in the Saharan desert, and piping electricity to consumers in Europe. By 2050, the companies involved hope to produce sufficient power in the region to meet 15% of Europe’s electricity demand as well as a substantial portion of the power needs of the Maghreb region.

"We are pursuing a visionary plan,” Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek said in a statement. “If it is successful, we will make a major contribution to combating climate change. The ecological and economic potential is huge."

The DII consortium includes the Swiss ABB, the world’s largest builder of electricity grids. Besides legal and political issues, the transmission of power from the Sahara across the Mediterranean Sea to European population centres is considered a main hurdle to the project.

The Desertec project, a brainchild of the so-named foundation and the Club of Rome, made news last month when plans had leaked that German companies intended to invest up to €400 billion in a 100 gigawatt solar utility in Northern Africa.

Signatories of yesterday’s MoU did not confirm these figures.

Finance experts are not convinced that the project will attract sufficient private and public investment. “So far, this is nothing more than political lobbying in my view,” Reuters quotes an equity analyst as saying.

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier

Image: Torsten Jeworrek (Munich Re Group)

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier
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All Nature’s pandemic flu coverage is collected on our news special page.

Efforts to produce vaccine against the pandemic H1N1 2009 virus have run into problems. Vaccine makers have told the WHO that the 'seed strains' grown to produce vaccine against the pandemic virus are giving poor yields of antigen. The yield is a quarter to a half of that vaccine makers typically get for seasonal flu vaccine production. WHO has now started to try to make a new set of seed strains using new viral isolates – a process which will take around a month – in the hope that some perform better. But if improved yields aren't forthcoming, the amount of pandemic vaccine available from existing production plant capacity could be cut by half or more, whereas there already isn't enough to go round.http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090512/full/459144a.html

Continue reading "Pandemic flu vaccine yields worse than expected." »

Posted by Declan Butler
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Hello from Albert Hofmann. I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers and your personal spiritual quest. I'm interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you.
Steve Jobs gets a letter from Albert Hofmann in 2007, revealed to us now (Huffington Post).

"The cloning of a calf due to its physiology characteristics is very complex and delicate, and the successful cloning of Bonyana is a display of the country’s biotechnology"
Iran claims it has cloned a calf – a first for the Middle East (Tehran Times).

“Currently, the illness can only be reliably diagnosed when symptoms such as memory loss, language breakdown and impaired movement are advanced and only a post-mortem brain tissue examination can bring absolute certainty.”
Bayer’s Alzheimer’s marker florbetaben shows promise in Phase II trials for help with diagnosing the disease.
(Reuters).

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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As predicted, science and Africa featured only marginally in the G8 discussions in Italy held on 8-10 July. But at least in two key research areas, agriculture and health, world leaders agreed to make some progress.

Continue reading "G8 pledges support for research in African agriculture and health" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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Approvals on trial
Researchers demand more harmonization of European rules for approving clinical studies.

Mars rover devours budgets
Ever-growing cost of the planned Mars Science Laboratory threatens other space missions.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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All Nature’s pandemic 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 sweeping analysis of pandemic H1N1 (swine) flu suggests that –- at least as far as our immune systems are concerned -- the virus bears some similarity to the dreaded 1918 pandemic virus that claimed upwards of 50 million lives.

The study, published online by Nature today, evaluates the virus in mice, ferrets, macaques, pigs, and human cell cultures. Many of the results are by now familiar: the virus is susceptible to oseltamivir (better known as Tamiflu) and zanamivir (marketed as Relenza), and causes a nasty disease in ferrets (see ‘Swine flu reaches into the lungs and gut’). The virus does not cause much disease in pigs, although it does replicate well there (see ‘Patchy pig monitoring may hide flu threat’ for more on this).

But one interesting new finding addresses the long-standing question of why some people aged 60 years and older appear to be better able to fend off the virus than younger patients. Previous work from the Centers for Disease Control suggested that exposure to previous flu strains may have conferred some residual immunity (see 'Old seasonal flu antibodies target swine flu virus'). Now, Yoshihiro Kawaoka of Kobe University at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his colleagues have narrowed the time frame during which this exposure may have taken place. Specifically, patients born before 1920 are more likely to produce antibodies capable of neutralizing the new H1N1 swine flu, suggesting that exposure to the 1918 flu or a close relative may be the reason.

“Collectively, our findings are a reminder that [swine-origin H1N1 influenza viruses] have not yet garnered a place in history, but may still do so, as the pandemic caused by these viruses has the potential to produce a significant impact on human health and the global economy,” the authors conclude.

Posted by Heidi Ledford
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The space shuttle, Endeavour, was postponed again this weekend. The shuttle has been blighted with problems, first technical problems with the fuel tank had to be fixed, and then twice at the weekend bad weather prompted the postponement.

There will be another try later today. This launch will see the delivery of a porch to the International Space Station to give the chance to expose experiments to the vacuum of space.

For an explanation of the havoc that weather can cause on launches, take a look here.

Other coverage:
ITN has a video of lightning hitting the launch pad
Reuters
The Canadian Press
CNN

Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Up at the second Lagrangian point, where last week Planck became the coldest object in space, its travelling companion, Herschel, has released the first images from one of the instruments on board, SPIRE.

The pics are test images, and when compared to images of the same galaxies, by the Spitzer space telescope, look pretty good (press release).

In fact, they look loads better than the Spitzer versions of the same galaxies – namely Messier 66 and Messier 74.

These images are taken with as-yet-uncalibrated instruments, so the future for Herschel looks like it could be pretty exciting.

Images: Herschel image: ESA and the SPIRE Consortium, Spitzer image: NASA / Spitzer SINGS

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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The Obama administration this week unveiled a programme to funnel billions of dollars directly into renewable energy projects, thus helping alleviate the capital crunch that has arisen as a result of the financial crisis.

The programme, announced jointly by the US Energy and Treasury departments, basically monetizes existing tax credits that subsidize development of wind, solar and other renewable resources. The way these deals worked in the past is that banks would finance individual projects and then take advantage of the tax credits themselves. But because these credits reduce taxes that would normally be paid on profits, they are completely useless if banks aren't making any money, as is currently the case.

Nature covered this problem back in October, when the impacts of the financial meltdown on Wall Street were just beginning to emerge, and again in January. The renewable energy industry seized on the issue and pushed to make the tax credits available as cash when Congress was working on a stimulus bill; their efforts paid off, and this week's announcement kicks off the new programme.

The Energy Department hopes to begin accepting applications on Aug. 1; checks would be cut within 60 days of submission. Agency officials estimate demand at roughly $3 billion (enough to get $10 to $14 billion in projects off the ground) but said there is no ceiling on the subsidy. "The real question is just how many projects come in," says Matt Rogers, who is working on the stimulus program at the Energy Department. "Three billion is the initial estimate, but we would be quite excited to see a number larger than that."

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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Science and scientists are pretty well respected by the American public, even as they disagree on specific issues like evolution, global warming, and use of animals in research.

So finds a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, together with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

84% of the 2,001 members of the public who were surveyed thought science had a mostly positive effect on society, while scientists came third behind members of the military and teachers in a chart of professions contributing “a lot” to society’s well-being.

Despite this general approval for science, just 32% of the public thought that humans had evolved due to natural processes (as opposed to 87% of the 2,500 AAAS members surveyed); just under half thought that earth was getting warmer because of human activity (84% of scientists) and 52% favoured the use of animals in scientific research (93% of scientists).

Continue reading "US public likes science; doesn’t agree with scientists" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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After yesterday’s discovery of the elixir of life, another way to live (nearly) forever appears in the scientific literature today.

In a paper in Science, Richard Weindruch, of the university of Wisconsin, Madison, reports that restricting calorie intake appears to extend life in rhesus monkeys.

So-called Caloric Restriction, which does not involve malnutrition, has previous been shown to extend life in a number of species. Crucially though, evidence in primates has been lacking.

In their new paper, Weindruch et al report that after 20 years, 80% of animals on calorie restricted diets survived, versus 50% of control animals permitted to eat freely.

“We have been able to show that caloric restriction can slow the aging process in a primate species,” says Weindruch (press release). “We observed that caloric restriction reduced the risk of developing an age-related disease by a factor of three and increased survival.”

Continue reading "‘Dieting monkeys live longer’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Galileo Galilei – there’s no stopping him. Not content with chucking things off the top of the leaning tower of Pisa, or making nifty telescopes to stare at the stars with, it is now being mooted that ol’ GG discovered Neptune, some 200 years or so before it was officially discovered.

Its widely accepted that in 1612 and again in 1613 Galileo must have observed Neptune, although at the time he thought it was a star, spotted during his observation of Jupiter’s moons. But physicist David Jamieson from the University of Melbourne, Australia, says that history has judged Galileo incorrectly – and that his notebooks reveal that he knew he was looking at a planet after all.

Jamieson noticed that on January 28 1613 Galileo makes note of a “star” that seemed to have moved in relation to its nearest starry neighbour – behaviour only seen by planets when observed from Earth. An earlier entry, from January 6 1613 also has an unlabelled black dot in the position now recognised to be where Neptune sits.

Jamieson thinks this dot was added later, possibly on January 28th. “I believe this dot could reveal he went back in his notes to record where he saw Neptune earlier when it was even closer to Jupiter but had not previously attracted his attention because of its unremarkable star-like appearance," he says (press release).

How will we ever know for sure? There’s a chance that trace element analysis could tell the difference between when different inks were used. Or maybe, Jamieson suggests, somewhere in one of Galileo’s letters or notes he wrote one of his famous coded messages or anagrams claiming he’d discovered the planet, and this note is just waiting to be discovered.

Even better as a conspiracy theory (my own special theory) – maybe this note, if such a thing exists, was actually discovered by the astronomers who claimed Neptune for themselves in 1846; Johann Gottfried Galle, working at the Berlin observatory on predictions made by Urbain Le Verrier. Then, while revelling in their own glory, maybe they destroyed Galileo’s encrypted message.

The plot thickens…

Image: NASA

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Posted for Lizzie Buchen

Researchers in the newly emerging field of synthetic biology need to explain their science to the public to avoid unwarranted fears over its potential, an international group of researchers warned this week.

Public education and engagement are two of most important challenges facing the field, which aims to build biological components with potentially useful functions, they told a symposium held at the US National Academy of Sciences. But the relatively new discipline also presents a unique opportunity for public outreach, according to keynote speaker Arden Bement, Jr, director of the National Science Foundation: “we have the chance to get it right at the outset”.

Continue reading "‘Shiny happy biology’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Built in 1954, the Bevatron was “once the crown jewel of the lab, of the National Lab system and of the particle physics world” writes Wired. The discovery of the anti-proton at the accelerator worn a Nobel Prize for Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain in 1959.

Physics Today says that at least three other Nobel prizes came out of Bevatron research. In true American fashion, it even inspired its own – albeit minor – superhero.

Now, thanks to some money from the US stimulus package, the Bevatron is finally being dismantled.

Continue reading "Bye bye Bevatron" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Q&A: Taiwan's hopes for a biotech revolution
The president of the country's top research institute on growing the knowledge economy.

G8 leaders fail to agree on carbon cuts before 2050
Summit declaration says 2 °C warming must be avoided.

Q&A: Helping Europe's molecular biologists
The new EMBO director speaks to Nature News about her plans.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Mars programmes for NASA and the European Space Agency are going to merge, following a bilateral meeting between the agencies in Plymouth, England last week. [BBC]
The agencies' two science chiefs, NASA's Ed Weiler and ESA's David Southwood, have been talking about the need for this for months. Now they apparently have nailed something down, though the agencies are being deliberately vague on exactly what was agreed to -- they don't want to spoil the agreement while Southwood rounds up approvals from ESA's member states. "When we started out, David and I were the only ones that thought this could happen," Weiler told a group of planetary scientists at NASA headquarters today. "David called it the most successful ESA and NASA bilateral he has ever seen."
Joint missions happen all the time. What's novel here would be a joint programme. That, says Weiler, offers the flexibility to trade commitments over the course of multiple years. In particular, the agencies are trying to hash out Mars mission planning for launch opportunities in 2016, 2018 and 2020. ESA has ExoMars; NASA wants to send a trace-gas detecting orbiter. One likely scenario is just a big joint mission in 2018. The 2016 launch date for ExoMars was a poor one for orbital mechanics and martian weather, and by sharing the same launch rocket in 2018, money would be saved.
Image: ESA

Posted by Eric Hand
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With the international climate community focused on Italy, a key US senator casually announced plans to delay the first round of votes on a climate bill until September. The news from Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, came just two days after her committee kicked off the legislative process.

To what extent this counts as a setback remains unclear. For her part, Boxer downplayed the announcement by saying the committee would get its work done quickly after the August recess, leaving plenty of time to push the bill through the Senate during the fall session. In doing so, she issued her first warning to colleagues who might think they have better things to do in December: "We'll be in until Christmas, so I'm not worried about it."

There are two easy explanations for the delay. The first is that energy is competing for attention with another big-ticket issue: health care reform. The second is that Democrats are worried about cobbling together votes. Undoubtedly both are true to some extent, but it might also be that her staff needs time to organize hearings and write legislation, likely modelled after that passed by the House on June 26. After all, Boxer shouldn't have a problem getting a bill out of her committee, which consists of 12 Democrats and seven Republicans.

The difficulty will come when the bill hits the Senate floor, where it will surely need 60 out of 100 votes to pass. Boxer's committee is the most important of several that will take up the issue and then report legislative language to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Congressional Quarterly reports that Reid has pushed back his deadline for committee work by 10 days, to 28 September. That's certainly not enough to derail the whole process, but every day counts.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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The threat of nanoparticles in the environment takes a new twist. A report from researchers at the admirable Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, assesses the use of free nanomaterials as clean-up agents for contaminated land (pdf of the report here).

The science makes sense – to clean up contaminated land, reactive nanoparticles can be injected underground and because of their tiny size should be able to penetrate places where other particles can’t reach. Nanoparticles can have their outer shells tagged with reactive chemical groups to start reactions that break down toxic waste.

According to PEN’s press release, “Most of the materials discussed are a form of nano-scale zero-valent iron that are injected into the ground in a slurry which provide a reducing environment that enables the breakdown of contaminants.”

But the message we’ve been getting from those concerned about regulation for many years is that until the long terms potential risks of these teeny particles are known it is irresponsible to allow them to be released into the environment.

This latest report doesn’t offer the answer, merely highlights the pros and cons of such a system. But nanoremediation, as it is called, is already being used across parts of the world, particularly in the United States. To accompany the review article, Nanotechnology and in situ remediation: a review of the benefits and potential risks by Barbara Karn, Todd Kuiken and Martha Otto from PEN and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), PEN has produced a map showing the 45 known sites where nanoremediation is already being used.

Apparently, a 2004 EPA report but the price tag at $250 billion to clear up the US’s hazardous waste sites, and operation they estimate will take 30 – 35 years. “Nanoremediation has the potential not only to reduce the overall costs of cleaning up large scale contaminated sites, but it also can reduce cleanup time, eliminate the need for treatment and disposal of contaminated dredged soil, reduce some contaminant concentrations to near zero, and can be done in situ,” says the PEN website.

The bottom line remains, though that until the impact of using these nanoparticles is assessed and understood they shouldn’t be used on a large scale. And proper large-scale testing of the technology is what the report recommends should be the next step. Report author Todd Kuiken: “Despite the potentially high performance and low cost of nanoremediation, more research is needed to understand and prevent any potential adverse environmental impacts, particularly studies on full-scale ecosystem-wide impacts. To date, little research has been done.”

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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When really big stars die, they explode in a big blast called a supernova. Supernovae are super bright, and that makes them easy to see from far away. Very far away. 11 Billion lightyears to be exact.

That's the distance record that a group of authors is reporting in this week's Nature. The authors combed through archival data from a digital survey conducted by the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope atop beautiful Mauna Kea, and they found three of the most distant supernovae ever.

Distance records are always popular, and so this story's been getting a lot of pickup.

These supernovae came from an era when the universe was around 2.5 billion years old, but as Jeff Cooke at the University of California, Irvine, explained to on this week's Nature podcast—they're still older than the very first generation of stars, which existed when there was nothing but hydrogen and helium in the universe. Cooke hopes the fireworks from those first stars will be spotted soon using the same technique.

Image: Artist's rendition of supernova / M. Weiss/NASA/CXC

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Europe’s pharmaceutical industry breathed a sigh of relief yesterday as the European Commission unveiled the results of its inquiry into anti-competitive activities of major companies.

These activities might include deals between companies or complex patenting strategies designed to delay the arrival of generic drugs on the market. This could mean consumers end up paying for the more expensive branded drugs rather than cheaper generics.

Despite the fact that antitrust proceedings have been initiated against several pharma players, the perception seems to be that the industry had dodged a bullet. The European Commission announced a formal antitrust investigation into French pharma company Servier and a number of generics companies over “agreements” which may have been designed for “hindering entry on to the market of generic perindopril, a cardio-vascular medicine” (press release).

That announcement came as the Commission released its final report on antitrust and generics, claiming that “shortcomings in pharmaceutical sector require further action”. It says that the appearance of generic drugs on the market is being delayed and that “company practices are among the causes”.

Continue reading "Europe takes gentle aim at pharma deals" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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John Holdren, science advisor to President Barack Obama, swung by Blighty today for some tea and crumpets with the Brits. But before embarking on a who's who tour of UK science policymakers, he joined the press in the basement of the US embassy for some all-American cookies and black coffee.

Most of his hour-long round table was spent discussing climate change. He expressed some disappointment with the climate change legislation winding its way through the US Congress, but sees it as a make-or-break step for getting an effective international accord out of the UN's Copenhagen conference, which will take place in December. Some of the reporters expressed scepticism that a bill could be passed in time, but Holdren was optimistic, noting that the administration only needed around 12-15 additional votes in the Senate to pass the legislation. "I would still bet that it will happen, but I have to admit that it's going to be a challenge," he said.

Holdren believes a big part of the solution to climate change will come from nuclear energy. He reiterated his longstanding support of that technology, but poo-pooed commercial reprocessing of old nuclear fuel, an approach advocated by previous president George W. Bush (but not by Nature). He also dismissed the US's deeply-troubled nuclear waste disposal site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, advocating instead for a number of regional interim storage facilities. Such facilities, he notes, would get the current waste off the sites of commercial power plants, while minimizing the distance it will have to travel. There's a good political reason for regional sites as well—it won't force the US to choose a single location for waste disposal, something that's difficult in the highly decentralized federal system.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Holdren reiterated his belief in a coordinated international approach for supplying nuclear fuel. "I would personally like to see uranium enrichment around the world put under international management," he said. Putting enrichment under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example, would discourage nations from developing dual-use enrichment capabilities that could be used for nuclear weapons. Holdren pointed out that the Obama administration has yet to take any firm stand on the issue.

None of these positions are really new, but it was good to hear them from the horse's mouth.

By the way, I've decided that the US and UK are in some sort of twisted competition to see who can have the ugliest embassy in the other nation's capital. I've now visited both buildings, and they're absolutely hideous.

Image: Harvard University

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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The world's biggest greenhouse gas polluters are poised to adjourn a series of meetings in Italy without any significant breakthroughs between developed and developing nations. Though hardly surprising, the news certainly reaffirms fears that it could be a long slog to Copenhagen.

In this week's issue of Nature, we take a look at some of the positions and ideas being put on the table by developing nations. The upshot is that many developing countries, recognizing the threats posed by climate change, are doing quite a bit to clean up their economies. Nonetheless, they remain understandably wary of binding requirements that might restrict their ability to lift themselves out of poverty.

Countries like India, China, Brazil and others are focusing on per-capita emissions within a historical context. From this perspective, industrialized nations have pumped far more than their fair share of pollution into the atmosphere, which provides a limited cushion for development powered by fossil fuels. The way China runs the numbers, industrialized nations would have had to stop emitting all together two years ago. Recognizing that it will be virtually impossible to achieve parity under such terms, Bolivia has proposed the concept of a "climate debt," illustrated in this graph, which is basically the difference between what industrialized nations should be allowed to emit on a cumulative, per-capita basis and what they actually emit.

In other words, industrialized nations can use up more than their fair share of the allowable emissions, but they must pay for it. This transfer of wealth is likely to be the crux of any deal that might be struck this year; developed countries know they are going to have to write checks, but they want assurances that those checks will be put to good use. One solution is to start out with sectoral approaches that guarantee certain types of policy and technology changes, which can reliably be counted on to reduce emissions.

As it happens, a PNAS paper out this week takes a different approach to climate equity by targeting wealthy individuals rather than wealthy nations. Although the end result is similar, their proposal does not cover historic emissions, which are at the heart of the proposals outlined above.

One thing is sure: No agreement can be struck unless the gulf between developed and developing nations is bridged. Barack Obama's ascension to the White House makes political progress possible in the United States, but politicians in the US and Europe know that slashing emissions in developed countries alone simply cannot solve the problem. Indeed, this is one of the principle arguments being raised against climate legislation that is poised to be taken up in the US Senate. And from this perspective, it's possible that progress on the international front is just as critical for striking a deal within the US as US participation is at the international level.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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A drug already used in humans was reported yesterday in Nature to extend the lives of mice by up to 14%.

The drug, rapamycin, is a bacterial product developed from a compound found in soil on Easter Island. Although the research is only on mice and the drug suppresses the immune system (hence its use in transplant patients) many papers have jumped on this as an ‘elixir of life’ story.

In a News and Views article accompanying the research paper, Matt Kaeberlein and Brian Kennedy, of the University of Washington, Seattle, write:

Is this the first step towards an anti-ageing drug for people? Certainly, healthy individuals should not consider taking rapamycin to slow ageing — the potential immunosuppressive effects of this compound alone are sufficient to caution against this. On the basis of animal models, however, it is interesting to consider that rapamycin … might prove useful in combating many age-associated disorders.

So how well did news sources fare in presenting this study of mice to their readers? The Great Beyond investigates…

Continue reading "Of mice, men and rapamycin" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week we're a step closer to an anti-ageing drug for people, we discover how and when our planet turned green, spot the most distant supernovae yet, and it's 20 years since the discovery of the cystic fibrosis gene.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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India hikes science budget despite slowdown
Boosts for human space flight and atomic energy.

A pill for longer life?
A drug slows the march of time in middle-aged mice.

Special Report: Developing nations tackle climate - Premium content
Emissions targets, clean-energy projects and calls for justice are multiplying, reports Jeff Tollefson.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

US President Barack Obama today announced that geneticist Francis Collins will be his nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH.) The announcement caps months of waiting, watching and speculating by NIH groupies who, like the authors of this Nature editorial, were getting restive about the White House delay in naming a permanent chief for the $31 billion agency.

The president’s announcement that he intends to nominate Collins, who from 1993 to 2008 directed NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute (called the National Center for Human Genome Research until 1997), came during what has already a big week for the NIH; two days ago, the agency issued its final guidelines on human embryonic stem cell research. Collins, an MD-PhD who turned 59 in April, will find their implementation in his inbox, along with the shepherding of a crush of stimulus-incited grant applications through an overburdened peer review system.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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An international crew of academics this week boldly declared that the world is headed down the wrong track in trying to put a lid on global greenhouse gas emissions. But with global leaders pressing the issue in Italy this week, it's not clear that anybody is listening.

The team includes Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and Steve Rayner of Oxford University, who made a splash with their 2007 indictment of the Kyoto Protocol, dubbed The Wrong Trousers (Nature also published a summary of the article). Their latest paper, which includes additional authors, including Roger Pielke, Jr. at the University of Colorado in Boulder, maintains a hard line and advocates policies that directly promote energy efficiency and decarbonization in place of a messy global carbon market that might or might not do the work it is intended to do. The researchers see a model in Japan, long a leader on energy efficiency thanks in part to a dearth of domestic resources.

Although the BBC posted a story and the New York Times' Andrew Revkin included a blurb in his blog, the paper hasn't garnered much traction. To be sure, Japan has lessons to teach the world, and carbon markets are unlikely to solve all of the world's problems. But like it or not, given the amount of time and political capital that has been invested in the current negotiations, there's little appetite for radical new ideas.

This perspective was nicely summed up in the BBC's coverage by Tom Burke of Imperial College. He acknowledged that many of the authors' criticisms are valid but suggested that "nothing could be more harmful" than the solution they propose, which is to reverse course.

So far, however, that doesn't appear to be a danger. On Wednesday, G8 leaders backed the establishment of a global carbon market as part of a commitment to curb their emissions by some 80 percent by 2050. They also signed on to a goal, long held by the European Union, to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. The question facing the Major Economies Forum, to be convened Thursday by US president Barack Obama, is whether major developing countries such as China and India will agree to the 2-degree goal and commit themselves to halving global emissions by 2050 in order to make it happen.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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Charles Bolden, President Barack Obama's appointment to be NASA's administrator, had plenty of support at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. He thanked an entire busload of friends and family, filling an overflow room, who had come to Washington DC from his home state, South Carolina. He had three Republican Senators -- two from South Carolina, and one from Texas, where Bolden now lives -- vying to claim him as a prodigal son. And he had the chief architect of his eventual appointment, Florida Senator Bill Nelson, extolling his virtues as an "overcomer" who rose through the ranks of the Marine Corps (he's a retired general) and astronaut corps (he flew on four shuttle missions) despite growing up in the segregated south.

But Bolden didn't need much help. On a busy day for Congress, little time was left for actual questioning. Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the chairman of the Senate committee that handled the confirmation, was the only politician to put NASA's dilemma in blunt terms. He described NASA as "not what it was", an agency "adrift". He reminded Bolden that NASA's budget had to be "earned every year." What was he going to do about it?

Several themes emerged in the responses from Bolden and Lori Garver, appointed to be Bolden's deputy after handling Obama's campaign space policies. First, they would emphasize the Earth-exploring aspects of NASA -- a shift towards Earth science that's already being seen in NASA budgets. "We have to look at Earth, our planet, and NASA has to lead in providing remote sensors, space-borne sensors, to understand not just what's out there, but what's in here," said Bolden.

Second, they mentioned the importance of NASA R&D -- and of using the International Space Station for this. Somewhat weirdly, they focused on potential life science research on the ISS, even though many scientists take a dim view of this. The billions of dollars that NASA spends on planetary science throughout the solar system and astrophysics through the universe didn't get a mention.

Third, Bolden said that NASA had to make space exploration more entrepreneurial. He cited the example of a friend who was using venture capital to pursue a rocket engine that could take people to Mars in "39 days instead of 8 to 11 months." "The government cannot fund everything we need to do," he said.

And finally, Bolden says NASA needs to inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers who will help replace an aging workforce and develop the technologies for a human mission to Mars, which he wants, but which he says is two decades away. He acknowledged noticing a different attitude towards space among schoolchildren. "If I go to a classroom today, it's different than when I went when I was an astronaut in 1980," he said. "I could ask, 'How many of you want to be an astronaut?' -- and every hand went up. When I go today and ask that question, I may see three hands. All of them want to go into business." An anecdote which doesn't seem so terrible if space is somehow going to be an entrepreneurial goldmine. Here's Bolden just after the hearing today, as he was being whisked out of the Senate Russell Building.

Posted by Eric Hand
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Photo credit

I’ve an interview in this week’s Nature with Mostafa Moin — pdf here — who was the reformist candidate in Iran’s 2005 presidential elections, following which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president. Moin, a medical researcher, and former minister for higher education and for science, has long argued – see my 2006 interview here — that building a stronger civil and democratic society in Iran is key to the country’s scientific development and it becoming a knowledge-based society. He says that events since the disputed 12 June election mark a turning point in the relationship between the people of Iran and its government.

To read the full print version of the Q&A click here. I’ve also three answers which we didn’t have space for in the print version.

On 2 July, Nature also published a strong editorial, “We are all Iranians.” Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist candidate, has cited the Editorial on his Facebook page, here.

Nature also published a news article 24 June, “Iran diaspora responds to protests”

I've a fuller version of this post on my personal blog here.

Posted by Declan Butler
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Scientists are warning Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that proposed cuts to the University of California's budget would "undermine prospects for economic recovery and damage California's competitiveness for decades."

Continue reading "California scientists protest deep budget cuts" »

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When you’re stuck at a field station in the Arctic you clearly can’t do science all the time. So researchers from the Toolik Field Station in Alaska have constructed what they claim is the “Northernmost Tribute to Michael Jackson”, by recreating his ‘Thriller’ video.

The NJ Star-Ledger proclaims itself impressed given “they only had three rehearsals” and that “Arctic researchers are not generally known for their rhythm”.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Using data from NASA’s ICE-Sat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite), Ron Kwok of the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and colleagues found overall Arctic sea ice thinned by 17 cm a year between 2004 and 2008.

The area of ice that survived the summer shrank by 42% says the team, which has published its work in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The new results match findings from last year, published in Geophysical Research Letters. That paper, by Katharine Giles and colleagues from the UK’s National Centre for Earth Observation, also used satellite data to assess average sea ice thickness and found that, during the 2007/08 winter, thickness was 26 cm below the average thickness of the past six years. (See: Arctic ice is back, but only in the news - October 28, 2008.)

“The new analysis … is the latest of many findings supporting the idea that the region has shifted to a new state in which seasonal ice, which forms in winter and melts in the summer, dominates,” writes Andrew Revkin on the NY Times Dot Earth blog.

Meanwhile, a report from the IUCN says the polar bear is feeling the impact of changes in ice.

“They’ve been weighing and measuring polar bears and they’ve been able to demonstrate there is a clear downward trend in the body mass of adult females,” says Erik Born, chair of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (Canadian Press). “There is also evidence [of] decreased survival of very old bears and younger bears which can be linked to the change in sea ice.”

More
NASA data shows 'dramatically thinned' Arctic ice – AFP
Arctic ice thinned dramatically since 2004 – NASA – Reuters

Images: NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Science courses may soon disappear at the UK’s highly-respected Open University (OU). The country’s largest institution for distance-learning, which is celebrating its fortieth birthday this year, supports around 150,000 undergraduate and 30,000 postgraduate students.

According to Times Higher Education (THE), a briefing paper from the science department says the OU is considering “scrapping its named science degrees and offering just one undergraduate course, a BSc in ‘Natural Science’.” This degree would also require fewer modules; and residential fieldwork schools might also be scrapped (perhaps to be replaced with IT-based practical work).

The paper says the cuts are needed because the OU is receiving a 10% cut in its teaching funds, following the government’s September 2007 announcement that it would cut funding for students studying for a qualification equivalent to, or lower than, a qualification they had already achieved. It warns of further teaching cuts in 2010, as the government looks to cut public spending.

OU dean of science, Phil Potts, said no decision had been made yet. “There is absolutely no suggestion of dumbing down or losing rigour,” he added.

But angry OU geoscience student Kate Allen tells THE that “prospective students are likely to vote with their feet and deny the OU further income as a result of this, to the point at which science degrees in general could become financially unviable.”

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Czech researchers angry over government changes
Reform reshuffles budgets for science and industry.

Sperm-like cells made from human embryonic stem cells
But results are only preliminary, researchers caution.

Q&A: Beyond petroleum?
BP's chief chemist talks about balancing the company's commitment to renewable energies with profit.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A tiny monkey new to science has been named after the ethnic group local to to the remote Amazonian region where it was discovered.

Mura’s saddleback tamarind (saguinus fuscicollis mura) was first seen on a 2007 expedition in the Amazonas state in north-western Brazil. Newly described in the International Journal of Primatology, the 240 mm long monkey is named for the Mura Indians.

“This newly described monkey shows that even today there are still major wildlife discoveries to be made,” says Fabio Röhe of the Wildlife Conservation Society, an author of the new paper on the tamarind (press release).

“This discovery should serve as a wake-up call that there is still so much to learn from the world’s wild places, yet humans continue to threaten these areas with destruction.”

Like other saddlebacks, Mura’s has distinct mottling on its back in the shape of a saddle, hence the name. It is dwarfed by its own tail, which adds 320 mm to its length.

More
New long-tailed monkey discovered in Amazon – MSNBC
New monkey discovered in Brazilian Amazon – Reuters

Image: Stephen Nash.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Among stodgy government agencies, DARPA, the skunkworks within the US Defence Department, has a sleek reputation for producing cool killer apps (and not just for killing -- recent projects include work on improving vaccine effectiveness). The acronym carries so much cachet that other agencies are copying it. In 2008, the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Agency (IARPA) got its first director, in an effort to ramp up the blue-sky research efforts of the US intelligence community. In this year's stimulus package, Congress gave the Department of Energy money to get something called ARPA-E going, since EARPA just didn't quite have the same ring to it.

Now, the National Academies is telling NASA not to miss out. In a review of the US civil space programme released today -- not to be confused with the Augustine Commission review of NASA's human spaceflight programme -- a panel of scientists is calling for NASA to have its own ARPA. But what would it be called? NARPA? ARPA-S, for Space? SARPA? This would be fitting, since DARPA was formed in 1958 as something of a space research agency in response to Sputnik.

Posted by Eric Hand
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Perhaps the biggest question facing the international climate community is how to divvy up the burden of reducing emissions. The arguments tend to centre on historical responsibility in the wealthy world versus future growth in developing countries, but a new study offers up a different metric: wealthy individuals everywhere (see Reuters, CNN).

The Kyoto Protocol requires developed countries to take on mandatory targets while giving developing countries a temporary pass, but international negotiators hope to craft a new agreement this year. This time around wealthy nations say they are willing to take on more substantial cuts but only if developing countries agree to slow, and eventually reverse, the rapid growth in emissions.

They have a point: like it or not, tackling climate change is impossible without the help of developing countries that are now, according to a recent analysis by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, responsible for more than half of the global emissions. On the other hand, poor countries are wary of restricting economic development that could lift billions of people out of poverty.

Continue reading "A new climate proposal: target rich people, not rich nations " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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On only the second legislative day after a historic climate bill squeaked through the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate kicked off hearings to shape its own version of the bill. The legislation, which creates a "cap and trade" system and includes initiatives to encourage renewable and clean fuel sources, will face a much tougher battle in the Senate, where a supermajority of 60 votes is necessary to break an almost-certain filibuster by Republicans.

At the hearing on 7 July, members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, one of six committees that will craft the bill, heard testimony from President Barack Obama's environmental big guns: Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The panel uniformly urged the committee members to follow the House's lead in passing the legislation.

Continue reading "Senate picks up climate bill" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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“McDonald's is enabling a better environment for future generations by supporting zero-emissions transportation infrastructure.”
McDonald's introduces plug-in car chargers. (Hybrid cars)

"The method by which Social Security assigns numbers has been a matter of public record for years. The suggestion that Mr. Acquisti has cracked a code for predicting an S.S.N. is a dramatic exaggeration.”
The news that social security numbers can be predicted using date and location of birth meets with skepticism. (New York Times)

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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I got to hear Al Gore speak today at the close of the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, and I was amazed to be treated to a pop neuroscience lecture.

Rather than climate, Gore opened by talking about human psychology and physiology. Climate change, he said, is "ultimately a problem of consciousness". He went on: "What is being tested is the proposition of whether or not the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable construct on this planet".

That's pretty deep, but Gore got deeper. Evolution, he said, had trained us to to respond quickly and viscerally to threats. But when humans are confronted with "a threat to the existence of civilization that can only be perceived in the abstract", we don't do so well. Citing functional magnetic resonance imaging, he said that the connecting line between amygdalae, which he described as the urgency centre of the brain, with the neocortex is a one way street: emotional emergencies can spark reasoning, but not the other way around.

Gore went on to speak about lots of other stuff: how better management of soil would be critical to solving the climate crisis. How geothermal energy had the potential for enormous development, and how existing technologies, such as coal-fired power plants had to become more efficient.

But in the end, he brought it back to human consciousness. Until the majority of citizens perceive climate change as a true crisis, he said, politicians will be sluggish to act. That's the bad news. The good news, though, is that when we do decide to act, we will be able to do so more rapidly than anyone currently thinks is possible. "Just remember, when we become aware of what we have to do, and when we have the tools available to us to get the job done, it can change", he said. "We ought to approach this challenge with a sense of joy."

I'm not sure what it says about human consciousness, but it certainly is an interesting insight into Mr. Gore's psychology. I'm curious to hear what neuroscientists make of his analysis.

If you want to hear the whole speech, have a listen here (audio quality isn't brilliant, sorry about that).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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The G8 meeting in L’Alquila, Italy kicks off tomorrow, although exactly what the agenda will be is still being debated – and the Italian leadership criticised by some quarters. (For a round up of the trials and tribulations facing Silvio Berlusconi, try here.)

Ahead of the meeting, Oxfam has released a report about climate change and the world’s poorest people. The report, introduced by Diana Liverman, director of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, lists a number of examples where climate change is affecting people’s lives already. “The reality of life under climate change is largely missing from the big debate,” the report says.

The headline of a press release that came out shortly after that to accompany the report outlines Oxfam’s opinion: “More than 3 million face death while Berlusconi and the G8 fiddle”.

The timing is, of course deliberate – the report has been put out to urge the G8 leaders to make serious decisions about tackling climate change. And the exposure has been widespread. The New York Times blog highlights the reports economic warning, which ought to hit home to the G8 leaders. Elsewhere around the world the report has received much coverage, in Canada the Globe and Mail, China’s Xinhua agency, the BBC, to name a few.

Nature News will be keeping you updated on science news from the G8. Watch this space.

Image: Soil in Uganda, James Akena/ OXFAM

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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All Nature’s pandemic 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.

Not a great deal of news from today's World Health Organization (WHO) media briefing on pandemic flu, the first WHO has held subsequent to its declaring of a pandemic on 11 June. The virus has now been officially renamed by WHO and other international agencies as "pandemic (H1N1) 2009" virus. It was initially called 'swine flu' but WHO changed that to A/H1N1 to avoid stigmatising the pig industry, but A/H1N1 wasn't much good either, as that's also the name of one of the currently circulating seasonal flu strains.

WHO also says it will issue in the next few days new surveillance recommendations for countries, recommending lab confirmation of cases to be abandoned, except for the few countries that have not yet reported the disease in their territories, and switch to population-based surveillance of proxies of the amount of disease such as how many people are treated for influenza-like illness or are hospitalized for the same.

Continue reading "Pandemic flu update" »

Posted by Declan Butler
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Chemicals giant BASF is about to get much bigger by acquiring Swiss speciality chemicals firm Ciba. But with that expansion will come an immediate trimming down – the take over will lead to a loss of around 3700 jobs by 2013, saving the company some 400 million Euros. BASF has around 97,000 employees and Ciba around 12,500.

“The combined businesses can be successful in the long term only if we optimize them and exploit the full potential for synergies,” said CEO Juergen Hambrecht (Bloomberg).

Hambrecht also admitted that this in “unfortunately not good news” for some of his employees (C&EN).

As well as job losses, the company is now deciding the fate of 23 of Ciba’s plants – which could be sold, or closed or restructured within BASF.

Meanwhile in China, BASF and the China Petroleum and Chemical Corp (Sinopec) are set to spend an extra $500 million on their joint petrochemicals venture in Nanjing (Bloomberg), a move that is broght about by increased costs, and which triggered a jump in BASF’s share price (Reuters).

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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President Obama has been in Russia for two days and has so far given a key note speech to the New Economic School in Moscow, “exchanged pleasantries” with prime minister Vladimir Putin and met with president Dmitry Medvedev to talk about nuclear arms cuts.

The meeting with Medvedev has got people talking. The two presidents signed a deal that will see both countries agreeing to cut its nuclear weapons arsenal. According to AP, “The declaration called for a reduction in the number of nuclear warheads in Russian and US strategic arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 within seven years and the number of ballistic missile carriers to between 500-1,100.” This is a reduction on the previous levels of 2,200 warheads and 1600 carriers (FT).

The press conference where this was announced is transcribed on the White House’s website. The new agreement will replace the old START (strategic arms reduction treaty) set to expire in December of this year, after being in place since 1991.

The move, along with Obama’s speech looking to “reset” relations between the US and Russia has been declared by one UK tabloid as a thaw in the Cold War, (I’m pretty sure the cold war ended a few years ago, actually).

Not everyone is happy, though. This op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Keith Payne, a professor of defense and strategic studies at Missouri State University, argues that the agreement will compromise US security, and that Russia’s aging weapons mean that their arsenal would naturally be reduced to these newly agreed levels by retirement of their stash.

And the deal isn't done yet - the treaty hasn't been signed, and the nuances of the agreement have not been fully agreed, with some reports suggesting that things are not quite as amiable as they might appear (Guardian).

Image: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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It’s not every day that an addictive and/or psychoactive substance is heralded in the press as potentially healthy — wait, yes it is (see also chocolate, red wine, nicotine). Everyone loves it when the scientific community supposedly endorses their vices. In most cases, the compounds of scientific interest (resveratrol in wine, flavonoids in chocolate, nicotine in cigarettes) indeed may show promise in a laboratory setting, but claims about the foods containing them are usually confined to headlines.

This weekend, coffee got the press bump. The CBS Early Show announced “Coffee May Lower Alzheimer's Risk”, while the Daily Mail was even bolder with “How two strong coffees a day can ‘reverse’ Alzheimer’s”. The print version of the paper apparently led with “Coffee beats Alzheimer’s”. The Times of India and the Telegraph were both bold enough to use the word “cure” (the Telegraph at least had the decency to throw quotes around the word, though it’s unclear what or whom they were actually quoting).

Continue reading "This is your brain on coffee ... or is it?" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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Space.com is reporting that the United States Department of Defense (DOD) is rethinking a decision that cut off astronomers from access to data on incoming meteors.

The DOD has collected the data with a network of satellites and sensors designed to detect atmospheric nuclear detonations. The same sensors can spot a meteor streaking across the sky, and for over a decade, the military has provided astronomers with some of that data on an ad-hoc basis.

As we reported, that relationship came to a screeching halt earlier this year, when in March, a memo from Air Force Space Command, which operates the satellites, cautioned against sharing data with scientists. The decision was apparently made because DOD officials were worried that the data could reveal details of the US monitoring system.

But now, Brigadier General Robert Rego, the space command's mobilization assistant to the director of air, space and nuclear operations, says that the organization is considering once again sharing data with scientists, albeit in a more carefully vetted way. The new process will be faster, more systematic, and it in compliance with classification procedures, he says. It could begin within the next few months.

Image: USAF

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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The Planck telescope, which launched in May with another telescope Herschel, has reached its destination – the second Lagrangian point 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth. It has also reached its working temperature – a chilly 0.1 degrees above absolute zero, making the craft officially the coldest thing in space.

On the Planck science website, the temperature 0.1K is written in big red letters and the feeling is one of jubilation: “This is a very big milestone for Planck... Hurrah !”

Of course, this news isn’t exactly unexpected – the real news would have been if Planck’s coolers had failed to cool the instrument sufficiently, because this would have made it impossible to carry out the mission to measure the cosmic microwave background.

But any excuse to write corny headlines like “ESA’s Planck is Truly Too Cool” (Errr, actually, it isn’t *too* cool, rather it is just cool enough), or "ESA’s Planck Telescope is One Cool Spacecraft" (technically correct) . We also get a nice analogy from the press release about the trouble Planck has picking out the tiny variations in the CMB. Seeing the tiny changes in temperature, that might be remnants of the big bang, is comparable to measuring from Earth the heat produced by a rabbit sitting on the Moon.

Image: ESA – D. Ducros

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Normally when world leaders meet at their summits these days they like to wrangle about climate change before setting a target that doesn’t go as far as many scientists think is needed. Equally normal is a storm of media coverage with various unnamed sources speculating about what is going to happen.

According to the BBC at the G8 summit in Italy, which starts Wednesday, leaders may break from their bickering routine. The Beeb reports that a target to cut greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050 is to be set, with leaders also to “call for any human-induced temperature rise to be held below 2 degrees Celsius”.

The Guardian says US President Barack Obama is also ready to back the ‘no more than 2 degrees’ target at the meeting in L’Aquila, according to “a draft communiqué”.

This is a bit of a change from 23 June when Reuters was reporting that the US was having less-than-none of European attempts to push the <2 target, “according to a draft summit text”. Reuters also said then that the target would be for a 50% reduction by 2050, rather than 80%.

The Australian is playing safe, telling its readers that unnamed negotiators told it that “progress had been slow and even the framework for a possible deal last night remained unclear”. It does note that Kevin Rudd, prime minister of Australia, is behind the <2 target.

To drive home how important all this is, Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives gave an exclusive interview to The Times (who repaid the favour by misspelling his name, but that’s by-the-by).

“We feel that climate change is not an environmental issue, it’s a security issue, it’s a human rights issue,” he said at a meeting in Oxford. “If you thought that defending Poland was important [from Nazi Germany], defending the Maldives is important. If you can’t save the Maldives today you can’t save yourself tomorrow.”

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

The UK has decided that it cannot contain swine flu, and has moved its health service onto a treatment footing instead.

Health minister Andy Burnham told the House of Commons yesterday that over the last week a “considerable rise” in H1N1 with several hundred new cases every day.

“Cases are doubling every week, and on this trend we could see more than 100,000 cases per day by the end of August—although I stress that that is only a projection,” he said. “As cases continue to rise, we have reached the next step in our management of the disease.”

A fourth person in the country died from the virus today.

Continue reading "Swine flu update UK" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“We plan to use the sequence to establish a breeding programme for bluefin tuna as most aquaculture farmers presently use wild juveniles. We want to establish a complete aquaculture system that will produce fish that have good strength, are resistant to disease, grow quickly and taste delicious.”
Kazumasa Ikuta, director of research at the Yokohama-based Fisheries Research Agency, says he expects to have sequenced the bluefin tuna genome within two months (Daily Telegraph).

“The dinosaurs have been nicknamed after characters created by poet Banjo Paterson who is said to have written Waltzing Matilda in Winton in 1885.”
Anna Bligh, premier of Queensland, announces the discovery of three new dinosaurs in Australia: Australovenator wintonensis, Diamantinasaurus matildae and Wintonotitan wattsi (Brisbane Times).

“This is a pattern that we hadn’t really recognized before.”
Chris Landsea, atmospheric scientist at the hurricane research division of NOAA in the US, comments on a new paper about El Niño and hurricanes (Science News).

“[We need a] network of people involved in intelligence-gathering to be able to deal swiftly with even the faintest hint of revolution.”
An un-named vice-chancellor at a UK university reveals his paranoia (The Times Higher).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Just in case the world’s public were growing inured to tales of rising sea level, drought and crop failure, scientists have come up with a new reason climate change is bad. It makes sheep shrink.

Despite the fact that larger sheep are more likely to survive when young, the Soay sheep (Ovis aries) on the Scottish island of Hirta have been shrinking in size over the last 20 years. Tim Coulson, of Imperial College London, UK, and his colleagues have been working out which of the myriad of possible factors is most responsible for this change.

In Science they report their analysis of the body-weights and life-history of female sheep from Soay. They found that the animals are not growing as quickly as they once were and that more of the smaller sheep were surviving their early years.

“In the past, only the big, healthy sheep and large lambs that had piled on weight in their first summer could survive the harsh winters on Hirta,” says Coulson (press release).

“But now, due to climate change, grass for food is available for more months of the year, and survival conditions are not so challenging – even the slower growing sheep have a chance of making it, and this means smaller individuals are becoming increasingly prevalent in the population.”

Continue reading "Scotland’s shrinking sheep shocker" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back its first pictures since it went into orbit round the Moon.

“Our first images were taken along the moon’s terminator – the dividing line between day and night – making us initially unsure of how they would turn out,” says Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe. principal investigator for the probe’s camera (press release).

“Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is exaggerated, suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface. In reality, the area is similar to the region where the Apollo 16 astronauts safely explored in 1972.”

The pictures, he says, show that LRO is nearly ready to get on with its mission of looking for potential landing sites and resources for any future return of humans to the Moon.

More
New focus on the Moon – Arizona State
Hi def Moon shots from 2007 Japanese Moon mission – The Great Beyond
From 2008: a newly processed 42-year-old Moon image taken in 1966 by the Lunar Orbiter 1 (LO1) – The Great Beyond

Image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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2010 marks a fairly ambitious deadline for the globe: no more species going extinct. With six months to go, and human activities continuing their tear through wildlife-rich habitats like rainforests and oceans, it’s pretty clear that we’re going to need an extension. Now the world’s authority on species conservation, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is waving the latest assessment of its venerable Red List around to raise the alarm.

The 2010 biodiversity target originated in 2001, when the European Council concluded that “biodiversity decline should be halted with the aim of reaching this objective by 2010”. In 2002, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) softened the goal to “a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss”, and a few months later the World Summit on Sustainable Development echoed the CBD’s pledge. In celebration, the UN declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity.

But despite the nominal unity, things are looking pretty grim. On 2 July the IUCN released its assessment of threatened species, which looked at whether the statuses of threatened species were improving or deteriorating. In a laborious analysis, described by its authors as “a labour of love”, the group assessed 1,500 randomly selected species from each species group (e.g. dragonflies, freshwater crabs, gymnosperms). The conclusion: 2010 isn’t going to happen.

The lack of progress doesn’t come as a surprise, considering that the primary driver of species extinction — habitat destruction — continues to charge along, albeit at a slower clip in temperate regions. But the CBD notes that “this may not necessarily translate, however, into lower rates of species loss for all taxa because of the nature of the relationship between numbers of species and area of habitat, because decades or centuries may pass before species extinctions reach equilibrium with habitat loss, and because other drivers of loss, such as climate change, nutrient loading, and invasive species, are projected to increase".

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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Phoenix has been incommunicado since the end of October, the Mars mission ending just before a shell of carbon dioxide ice would entomb the three-legged lander. But the legacy of this little lander that sort of could keeps on living. A suite of papers published today in Science rounds up the lander's greatest hits, all of which had been published as the mission went along. In summary:

Continue reading "Phoenix: A life" »

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

The World Health Organisation yesterday announced it has now confirmed 77,201 cases of swine flu and 332 deaths.

Roche pledged to make it easier for developing countries to buy its Tamiflu drug at reduced prices. However, a patient in Denmark was recently discovered to have the first case of Tamiflu-resistant swine flu.

“The goods news is they just found one,” says Carolyn Bridges, from the US Centers for Disease Control (AP). Shortly after that Japan reported its first case of Tamiflu resistant H1N1 (Reuters).

Continue reading "Swine flu round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A former University of Tennessee professor has been sentenced to four years in prison for sharing sensitive technologies with his Chinese and Iranian graduate students.

J. Reece Roth, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering, was sentenced yesterday by U. S. District Court, Eastern District of Tennessee for violating the Arms Export Control Act. Roth and a now bankrupt company had been developing ways to reduce the drag on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (pictured right) and improve their take-off and landing capabilities. Roth employed two graduate students, a Chinese and an Iranian national, without obtaining the required license.

Roth, 71, maintained he did nothing wrong when I spoke to him in 2006, and he was unrepentant at sentencing. According to the Knoxville Sentinel he did not admit guilt or apologize for his actions. He told the judge that his wife and he both have health problems. "I would like to respectfully request the court take these into account when passing sentence, and that's all I have to say," Roth said.

He plans to appeal the verdict.

Image: USAF

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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There’s no shortage of reading material on the genes behind schizophrenia this morning. In addition to three papers in Nature announcing the identification of key genetic glitches responsible for increasing the risk of the disease there are at least five different press releases and well over a hundred news articles at the time of writing.

This new research combines DNA data from tens of thousands of people to identify the genetic variations behind schizophrenia risk. It also shows some links between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

“Our findings are a real scientific breakthrough since they tell us a lot more about the nature of the genetic risk of schizophrenia than we knew as little as a year ago,” says a co-author of one of the studies, David St Clair, of the University of Aberdeen (press release).

Here comes the caveat: “However this is not a breakthrough that is going to change clinical practice any time soon,” he adds. “It will still be many years before our findings can be translated into new drug treatments.”

Continue reading "The genes behind schizophrenia" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA has finally worked out how to put fuel in the tank of its space shuttle.

After multiple launch attempts for Endeavour were abandoned due to hydrogen fuel leaking from the external tank the space agency announced that yesterday’s 'tanking test' has been successful.

“There were absolutely no leak indications whatsoever noted on the two leak detectors,” says Launch Director Pete Nickolenko (statement).

“We’ll continue to look at the data, and our next step is to move toward launch.”

All this should mean that Endeavour is good to go on 11 July. As CNET notes though, all this faffing with the fuel means NASA has only a four day window to launch, before having to delay to 27 July in order to make way for a Russian space station resupply mission launch on the 24th.

More coverage
NASA: Fuel test a success, shuttle launch day set – AP
No leaks in Endeavour's fuel tank: NASA – AFP
Shuttle ready for launch after fuel tests, NASA says – Xinhua

Image: work on the Ground Umbilical Carrier Plate of the external fuel tank, suspected source of the fuel leak, on 24 June / NASA - Jack Pfaller

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week, making stem cells for therapy, how salamanders regrow their limbs, three huge studies of genetic variation and schizophrenia, and how plants keep carbon dioxide above a certain level in the atmosphere.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted on behalf of Lizzie Buchen

Six weeks ago, a 47-million-year-old, beautifully-preserved primate fossil named Ida swamped headlines in a media blitz, generating harsh criticism of the scientists’ publicizing strategies and the lemming-like media.

But before Ida’s fame tumbles too far, a new primate’s fossils are swooping in to ride in her media wake. And though the remains are no more than jaws and a handful of teeth, they’re bent on trumping the notorious Ida’s perch on our primate tree.

Continue reading "The latest fossil frenzy" »

Posted by Alex Witze
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Funding boost for African science
Wellcome Trust grants £30 million to help build research capacity.

Salamander cells remember their origins in limb regeneration
Cell tracking shows that axolotl cells in a regrowing leg retain distinct roles.

African science drops down G8 agenda
Researchers lament poor progress on commitments to developing nations.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“The agreements will reduce Indonesia’s debt payments to the United States by nearly $30 million over the next eight years. In return, the Government of Indonesia has committed these funds to support grants to protect and restore the country’s tropical forests.”
The US Department of State announces a ‘debt-for-trees’ deal with Indonesia.

“Toyota’s patent-filing strategy has made it far too risky to copy the Prius without Toyota’s blessing.”
Justin Blows, patent attorney at Griffith Hack Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys in Australia, says the car company holds all the cards in the race to develop and sell hybrid cars (WSJ).

“The climate change is happening, it’s coming quicker and earlier than we thought and our way of living is just not sustainable.”
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt says the European Union should be better, faster and stronger in tackling climate change (BBC).

“We’re to blame — we should have done this earlier but everything was done in a hurry.”
K. Sankar, a Wildlife Institute of India tiger expert, tells the Times that three Bengal tigers placed in an empty reserve in Rajasthan last year could be siblings, meaning inbreeding problems in the long term.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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US President Barack Obama controversially decided to spend a billion dollars on ‘comparative effectiveness’ research, as part of the huge stimulus package announced earlier this year. Now the Institute of Medicine has brought out the list he asked for suggesting where the money should go.

Comparing difference between different treatments is hugely controversial in the US, where some see it as an outrageous attempt to bring cost as a factor into the health system.

Others disagree. In a statement Harold Sox, co-chair of the committee behind the new IOM list, said, “Health care decisions too often are a matter of guesswork because we lack good evidence to inform them. For example, we spend a great deal on diagnostic tests for coronary heart disease in this country, but we lack sufficient evidence to determine which test is best.”

His committee whittled down 1,268 suggestions for comparative effectiveness research topics into a 100 item list. It will come as no surprise to find out that coronary heart disease is on it. The best suggestion though has to be this one:

Compare the effectiveness of dissemination and translation techniques to facilitate the use of CER [Comparative Effectiveness Research] by patients, clinicians, payers, and others.

So the committee carefully considering controversial comparisons concluded comparing clinician communication criteria could create crucial clarity? Crikey!

Stand by for more fighting. “Because the committee's work was requested by Congress and the resulting portfolio is so broad in scope, the recommendations may be more influential than they might otherwise have been, but the report is unlikely to quell the controversy surrounding CER,” opines the New England Journal of Medicine.

More coverage
Candidates Aplenty for Spending on Comparative Effectiveness – WSJ health blog
Panel Suggests U.S. Medical Priorities – NY Times

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The editor of a respected diabetes journal has admitted he rushed an article on a Sanofi-Aventis drug into print in response to the company’s plunging share price.

Rumours about the results of the study on Lantus (insulin glargine) are perceived to be behind a 14% tumble in Sanofi shares last week.

“The market was falling and there were rumours about papers that we assumed were ours,” says Edwin Gale, editor of the Diabetologia journal and a researcher at the University of Bristol (Bloomberg).

“Because we were aware there were leaks, we felt there would be an alarmist, uncontrolled statement coming out in the press, so we did a rush job on it, coming out a week earlier than expected. We’ve never had to do that before.”

Bloomberg notes that Ralph DeFronzo, a diabetes researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center, warned in an 11 June conference call that an “earthquake” might put doctors off Lantus.

Continue reading " Share price tumble prompted ‘rushed publication’ of drug study " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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New images of the Great Beyond’s volcano of the year (to date): Sarychev Peak in the Russian Kuril Islands.

Although not quite on a par with the awesome shot from last week (see: Picture post: BOOM!) this double act show the impact of an eruption like the one that Sarychev experienced beginning 12 June. The ‘before’, top, was taken 26 May while the ‘after’, below, is from 30 June.

Acquired by the ASTER instrument that graced this blog yesterday, these false-colour images show vegetation as red, water as dark blue, and bare rock as brown / gray. The white patches are either ice or clouds.

NASA notes:

The most striking difference between these two images is the cap of new volcanic rock coating the northwestern half of the island in June 2009. While vegetation on the rest of the island appears lush, little or no vegetation remains on the northwestern end. A close look at the top image also reveals that the recent volcanic activity appears to have expanded the island’s coastline on the northwestern end.

Hat tip: Eruptions blog

Image: created by Jesse Allen, using data from NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS/ASTER Science Team

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