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Stem-cell projects falter
Ailing economy leaves California struggling to build research labs.
Keeping genes out of terrorists' hands
Gene-synthesis industry at odds over how to screen DNA orders.
Q+A: Top scientist's industry move heralds stem-cell shift
Stephen Minger tells Nature why he is leaving academia.
Posted on behalf of K.S. Jayaraman
India’s planned 2-year moon mission, launched last year, ended 14 months prematurely today. Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) have abruptly lost radio contact with the lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1.
ISRO spokesman S. Satish said that attempts to re-establish contact had failed and that the spacecraft may crash any time on the lunar surface. The end of India's first lunar mission comes four months after the onboard device for determining the orientation of the spacecraft started malfunctioning on 26 April.
An ISRO release said that the spacecraft had made more than 3,400 orbits around the moon, sent more than 70,000 images, and had met most of the scientific objectives of the mission.
Cross-posted from The Niche
Differentiated human cells have been reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state with the addition of only one gene, rather than the standard four. The research, published in Nature, should advance techniques for the efficient production of high-quality patient-specific stem cells.
The ability to make induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells using cells from specific patients could enable unprecedented new ways to study disease and also ease the development of cell therapies. However, such applications have been stymied in part because making induced pluripotent stem cells efficiently requires the introduction of pluripotency genes, which are typically inserted at random sites throughout the genome. This unwanted source of variation stymies rigorous comparisons between cells, and could make them behave in unpredictable, dangerous ways if used for cell therapies. Several techniques to make cells without permanent insertion of the genes have been reported, including some that do not use genetic material at all.
See: Human iPS cells with no genetic integration; Virus free pluripotency for human cells; Integration-free iPS cells; Reprogramming to pluripotency without genetic engineering; Generation of human induced pluripotent stem cells by direct delivery of reprogramming proteins
However, researchers are eager for additional, ‘gentler’ ways to reprogram cells, and one possibility would be starting with cells that are more prone to reprogramming. Evidence in mice suggests that the tissue of origin affects how often and how well differentiated cells reprogram. See: Cell origin and variation in induced pluripotent stem cell lines; Stomach and liver cells reprogrammed
Scholer and colleagues reasoned that neural cells would be a good candidate, since these cells already express high levels of three of the four standard pluripotency factors (Sox2, Klf4 and c-myc). The team had previously shown that this strategy worked in mice. The researchers used viruses to insert copies of the fourth pluripotency factor, Oct4, into the cells. This produced reprogrammed cells that passed all standard tests of pluripotency.
The current study reprogrammed neural stem cells from human fetal tissue. While adult tissues tend to be more difficult to reprogram, and brain biopsies are difficult to obtain, Scholer and colleagues say they are already working out practical solutions. More-accessble cells, such as those found in dental pulp, might also be good candidates.
Posted on behalf of Monya Baker
The culprit responsible for delaying the first-ever clinical trial involving human embryonic stem cells has been identified: microscopic spinal cysts.
Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration put the brakes on Geron Corp's clinical trial in spinal cord injury because of just-completed animal studies that raised red flags. The Menlo, California-based biotech company announced Thursday that the animals developed microscopic cysts in the injury site. These lumps, however, did not spread to other parts of the body and none of the animals developed tumours. A second concluded study showed no cysts in spinal cord injured rats, according to a Geron press release.
“I think it provides people with a reasonable explanation,” said Stephen Brozak, an analyst with WBB Securities LLC in Westfield, New Jersey. “Everybody was afraid of the T- word, teratomas, and it clearly wasn’t that.” (Bloomberg)
Analysts rejoiced at the news. Geron shares rose more than 3% yesterday, closing higher than any day since the clinical hold was announced.
Geron is now working with the FDA to relaunch the stalled trials, the company said. No date was set.
Ruth Francis, Nature’s Head of Press, is reviewing all the entries shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. She’ll be reading one per week and we are posting her thoughts on The Great Beyond every Friday between now and the prize ceremony on 15 September.
What the Nose Knows - The Science of Scent in Everyday Life, by Avery Gilbert
“It is very obvious that we have many different kinds of smells […] but until you can measure their likenesses and differences you can have no science of odour.” Alexander Graham Bell, 1914.
Nearly 100 years on, we still have little ability to measure these likenesses and differences.
The problem with What the Nose Knows is that it neither focuses on what we don’t know, nor on what we do. Gilbert describes some science, breaks down some history, illustrates both with anecdotes, but like a bad perfumer he doesn’t seem to blend the mix particularly well.
In essence the book demonstrates that much of what we know about smell springs from theory rather than science. When we do get trusted with the science, however, it is all too brief and leaves many questions unanswered.
Gilbert colludes with the reader, often switching from a highbrow style to a more tabloid form of address. The result is the lack of a coherent voice as we drift from how many smells there are to the scenting of air in stores to drive sales.
The chapters on scent and cinema, and leading consumers by the nose, are both interesting because they follow a stronger narrative thread than the others. But they also contain little science; this is cultural history.
Much of the rest of the book is like walking through the perfumery in a department store. It is hard to single out strong or weak notes. Gilbert sure knows his scents but fails to convey his greater knowledge.
Fundamentally, my curiosity was not sated by the book and my understanding was unimproved.
Previously on Ruth's Reviews
Ruth’s Reviews: the Drunkard’s Walk
Ruth’s Reviews: Your Inner Fish
Ruth’s Reviews: Decoding the Heavens
The Wildlife Conservation Society has released this camera trap photograph of an endangered snow leopard, photographed in the Sast Valley in Afghanistan.
“WCS researchers are conducting ongoing wildlife surveys in this remote area with the goal of establishing a protected area,” says the group. “They found this endangered cat … willing to strike a pose or two.”
Snow leopards (Panthera uncia) are classified as endangered on the IUCN’s Red List.
The conflict in Afghanistan has opened up a new market for products from the animals, says the IUCN, which are also threatened by habitat degradation, shortages of prey animals and killing by farmers worried about their impact on livestock.
Climate change exacts a high price
Costs of adapting to a warming world could be much greater than expected.
Ozone threat is no laughing matter
Nitrous oxide poses a growing atmospheric problem.
Sunspots stir oceans
Variations in the Sun's brightness may have a big role in Pacific precipitation.
Another day, another new exoplanet acting funny and inspiring headlines that portend the death of physics. This week in Nature, astronomers reported a pretty cool find: WASP-18b is 10 times the mass of Jupiter, 50 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun, and whizzes around its star in less than a day. So how can something so big dart around so close to its star?
There are a few explanations: A) the planet might have been caught "moments" (about a million years) before its plasmatic death; B) the star WASP-18 may exert weaker tidal forces than we'd expect; or C) we need to rewrite the laws of physics.
How about...C? Both the LA Times print edition and the Independent declare that the planet "Defies the Laws of Physics" (the Times' website has a more toned-down version, describing the situation as a "puzzle"), and Scientific American claims the planet "Shouldn't Exist", though to be fair, so did the Nature press release.
On a more scientific note, scenario A seems more likely than B, and a number of news stories provide a fair breakdown of the two (AP, Science, National Geographic). Option B is more tantalizing, and some articles quote the paper's accompanying perspective, where astronomer Douglas Hamilton noted that the odds of discovering a planet at the brink of death was "only about 1 in 1,000". But that really doesn't seem like too long a shot, especially since atronomers have discovered almost 400 planets.
Even if B is true, that just means there's more to learn about tidal interactions — not about the laws of physics.
Another dose of worry has been produced over radiation exposure in America, upping the concerns of those who claim there is too much medical scanning going on.
A study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine suggests that nearly 70% of the population had at least one medical scan that exposed them to radiation. This follows a National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements study from March that concluded Americans living in 2006 were exposed to over seven times more radiation from such scans than those living in 1980.
Both studies attributed much of the radiation to computed tomography scans.
“While the risk to any individual for a single test may be small, the overall risk to the population becomes a concern if one considers the large number of these procedures being performed each year,” says Brahmajee Nallamothu, and author on the NEJM paper and a doctor at the University of Michigan (press release).
The researchers found 18.6 people per 1,000 got high doses of radiation and 1.9 per 1,000 got very high doses. What’s really stoking the fires here though is not the research itself but a strongly worded commentary running alongside it.
A report released by Barack Obama’s 21-strong crew of science advisers (PCAST) on Monday urged that H1N1 vaccines be made available as soon as possible – by mid-September, bearing in mind the start of the new school term.
But although the production line is stuffing bulk vaccines into vials as fast as possible – the recommended ‘fill and finish’ approach – it will not be possible to get them ready (including dose-testing) before October, says Thomas Frieden, acting director for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
"We wish we had new vaccine technology that would allow us to turn on a dime and make new vaccine in terms of weeks or months. It's not possible with today's technology to do that," he told Reuters.
PCAST did praise the US administration’s efforts as ‘truly impressive’. But the Project on Government Oversight isn’t so impressed, citing an AP article that quotes public health expert Mike Osterholm as saying that 80% of the US pandemic vaccine flu supply will be coming from abroad. “What if death rates go up, and the shipment of promised vaccine from abroad is blocked by foreign governments?” it says in a 26 August letter to HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
It’s a question that must concern developing countries even more – with no capability to produce vaccines domestically. South African Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi on Wednesday said his country had no choice but to develop its own H1N1 flu vaccine [Reuters].
A new Health Canada report has found bisphenol A leaching out of the plastic of baby bottles marketed as "BPA-free."
Dr. Brown's Natural Flow bottle, a five-time winner of a "best of the year" award from the parenting magazine American Baby, was the worst offender, showing 0.9 parts per billion of BPA after 238 hours at 60°C. Other brands touted as being free of the toxic chemical ranged from from 0.002 to 0.025 ppb under the same conditions. For comparison, polycarbonate bottles can reach levels of 60 ppb after 238 hours.
"Technically, they're not BPA free," said Pete Myers, chief scientist of the Virginia-based foundation Environmental Health Sciences. "Manufacturers ought to do due diligence to determine whether they're false positives or if there is truly even trace amounts of BPA, how is it getting in there." (Canwest)
It's not just the plastic bottles you have to worry about. Up until last summer, the epoxy liner in SIGG aluminum water bottles contained trace amounts of BPA, Steve Wasik, chief executive of the Swiss bottle manufacturer, announced this week on the company's website. SIGG has since switched to new a "BPA-free EcoCare liner."
BPA-free? I'll believe it when I don't see it.
Image: Dr. Brown's
A five year, $75 million contract to research Gulf War Syndrome has been pulled from the University of Texas Southwestern over allegations of “persistent noncompliance and numerous performance deficiencies”.
The US Department of Veterans Affairs, which commissions research studies on medical issues of relevance to military personnel, has ended the five year contract after just two years.
Gerald Cross, the VA’s Acting Under Secretary for Health, said research on the conditions that afflict Gulf War veterans “remains a priority” but that the department “must make certain that our resources are used to support effective and productive research”.
UT issued a statement expressing surprise at the cancellation and said it strongly disagrees with the Veterans Affair’s take on the matter.
“We thought we were in some productive discussions with them,” Tim Doke, a university spokesman, told the Dallas Morning News. “I don’t know that we see this as an endpoint, but as another of a long series of disagreements with them.”
Continue reading "Gulf War Syndrome research contract cancelled" »
Geo-engineering has been all the rage recently, and yesterday the UK-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers weighed in with their recommendations for how best to engineer the environment.
The report was a mix of the very specific and very vague. On the specific side, the panel recommended three technologies, which they believed represent the cheapest, quickest form of geo-engineering:
*Reflective roofs on buildings in order to cool urban areas (although the panel noted that this, technically doesn't count as geoengineering, since it doesn't actually involve changing the climate).
*Putting algae tanks on the side of buildings. The idea is that this algae would soak up carbon and could then be charred and sequestered.
*Finally came the suggestion that grabbed most of the headlines—fake trees. The trees are basically just carbon dioxide filters that are thousands of times more efficient than the real thing. 100,000 such trees would be able to remove all carbon from transport related CO2 emissions in the UK.
But the engineers were much more vague about how much such proposals might cost, or what their overall influence on carbon dioxide levels could be. This report is more a "case study of what needs to be done," it says. Follow-up work could be done with £10-20 million from a UK contribution to an international research programme. The report comes just days ahead of a second, more comprehensive study by the Royal Society.
A newly released satellite image from NASA shows that nearly nothing remains of one part of the once proud Aral Sea.
Irrigation projects started by the Soviet Union in the 1960s led to the sea shrinking hugely, eventually splitting into northern and southern halves. The latter later split again into an eastern and a western body of water.
Now this 16 August shot from the NASA’s Terra satellite shows that “virtually nothing” is left of the southern sea’s eastern lobe.
“Although the Northern Aral Sea still appears healthy, the Southern Aral Sea consists of two isolated water bodies: an irregular oval shape directly southwest of the Northern Aral Sea, and the long, thin remainder of the Southern Aral Sea’s far western lobe,” says NASA. “Although the faintest glimmers of blue-green appear in the eastern lobe, earth tones predominate, surrounded by a ghostly film of pale beige.”
NASA’s Earth Observatory also has a rather sad video of the shrinking of the Aral sea.
Image: Jesse Allen / NASA
A big hat tip to Jef Poskanzer who’s posted the entire collection of Singing Science Records online. This six-LP series was published in the 1950s and early 1960s.
John Linnell of They Might Be Giants, in a recent interview with Nature (in print and on our podcast) cited the records as part of the cultural stew that has influenced their flamboyant style of geek pop over the decades.
The best evidence is their 1987 cover of “Why Does the Sun Shine?” from the first in that series of records.
That track, Linnell says “has followed us like a golden ray of sunshine through our whole career pretty much.”
Nevertheless, in their newest release, an album for kids called Here Comes Science, They Might Be Giants present their correction to the song.
Old lyrics "The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas"
New lyrics "The Sun is a miasma of incadenscent plasma"
Below the fold: previous songs about science
Continue reading "Songs about science XXIV: Singing Science Records" »
We've got a packed show this week, including gene therapy for mitochondrial mutations, a 'hot jupiter' spinning perilously close to its sun, discussion of a new report about testing toxic chemicals, a science-themed record for kids, and your chance to win a ticket to a private screening of Creation.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the policy-neutral Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has never been shy of speaking his mind on climate policy.
“I feel I have responsibility far beyond being a spokesman for the IPCC. If I feel there are certain actions that can help us meet this challenge, I feel I should articulate them,” he told Nature two years ago (Nature, 450, 1150-1155; 2007; subscription required).
He’s just articulated them again, calling for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to be kept below 350 parts per million. (Current levels are around 387 ppm, and in its 2007 report, the IPCC took 450 ppm as a key target):
"As chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I cannot take a position because we do not make recommendations. But as a human being I am fully supportive of that goal. What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target." (AFP)
The statement was music to the ears of environmental writer Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, whose url explains its mission. In a Guardian blog, he called it "amazing news".
Nature features editor Rich Monastersky wrote in an April 2009 article (Nature 458, 1091-1094; 2009, subscription required): "The difference between 350 and 450 is not just one of degree. It's one of direction. A CO2 concentration of 450 p.p.m. awaits the world at some point in the future that might conceivably, though with difficulty, be averted. But 350 p.p.m. can be seen only in the rear-view mirror."
Here’s McKibben making his point again on the Colbert Report a fortnight ago:
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Bill McKibben | ||||
| ||||
Oops. NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) accidentally burned up most of its extra fuel last Saturday in one of those favored euphemisms of the spaceflight world, an anomaly. 
The glitch apparently happened when a sensor that's supposed to detect how the spacecraft is oriented in space malfunctioned, causing the thrusters to burn up a lot of fuel trying to re-position the probe. Mission managers say they've got enough fuel -- but only just -- to accomplish LCROSS's primary goal of smashing into a crater near the lunar south pole, in hopes of kicking up evidence of ice there.
Ames center director Pete Worden (@worden) is occasionally twittering about it, and says that the mission can still reach any of its candidate target craters as long as nothing else goes wrong. "We're still in the black on propellant, but not by a lot," mission manager Dan Andrews told Spaceflight Now. Follow @LCROSS_NASA on Twitter for the perkiest updates of all.
LCROSS is currently looping along a trajectory to put it on course for a lunar impact on 9 October.
Image: Crescent Earth and crescent moon as seen from LCROSS on 17 August
I’ve always wanted a PhD. Working in the Nature office and not having one can make you feel like a bit of a dunce. Now it seems I could have assuaged some of my insecurities by hopping on a plane to Germany with a suitcase full of euros.
According to the German magazine Focus, “many renowned universities” have been caught up in a scandal involving thousands of doctoral candidates paying bribes to gain that precious ‘Dr’ in front of their names*.
Prosecutors in Cologne are now investigating links between a now-defunct consultancy firm and professors across the country. AP notes that the director of the consultancy firm and a Hannover law professor have already been convicted and given jail sentences in relation to the scandal.
It seems some professors may have been accepting payments of between 4,000 and 20,000 euros (£3,500-£18,000) to ‘supervise’ students’ doctorates, with ‘supervise’ meaning little more than ‘rubber stamp APPROVED’.
“We’re talking about honorary professors from all kinds of departments including medical science, law and economic science,” Guenter Feld, the prosecutors’ spokesman told Bloomberg.
* yes, I know that they might not use ‘Dr’ in Germany.
According to a report in SciDev.net a survey in China shoes that a third of workers in science and technology there would rather be civil servants or managers than do their current job.
The survey, undertaken by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) also shows that the number of science and technology workers in China has risen by 74% since 2002, to 52 million.
Part of the problem, apparently is the pressure that comes with the job, especially in the high flying academic ranks. This includes pressure to publish as well as the pressure of constant evaluations.
Amazingly 32% of science and technology workers – and this list includes researchers, engineers, technicians and teachers – earn less than the national average. No wonder then that the civil service is seen as a more attractive career.
For more facts and figures, check out SciDev.net’s article.
NASA has again scrubbed the launch of a shuttle due to problems with hydrogen.
Leaks of the liquid fuel repeatedly pushed back the launch of Endeavour and now Discovery has also encountered the Curse of the NASA Hydrogen.
At 10:12 GMT yesterday the space agency announced that it had begun filling Discovery’s external tank with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. But at 11:01 a problem was encountered with a ‘fill-and-drain valve’ and the planned launch of mission STS-128 was abandoned.
“When launch controllers commanded it to close, they did not receive the ‘closed’ indication,” says NASA. “There is a concern that the valve is either open or partially open, but that needs to be evaluated for confirmation.”
CNET’s Space Shot blog notes that there could be a problem with the valve, or there could just be a problem with the sensor that measures the position of the valve:
If it turns out the position sensor was to blame--and if NASA managers can get comfortable launching Discovery without full instrumentation in a critical system--then a launch attempt Friday at 12:22 a.m. EDT might be feasible.But if engineers are forced to open the shuttle's engine compartment and replace any suspect components, launch could be delayed to around October 17.
There is one small silver lining for the astronauts in this cloud. “Bad luck again, but maybe we can have dinner with the families,” wrote Christer Fuglesang on his twitter feed.
Image: NASA TV
Renewable technologies increase energy sprawl
Biofuels will have the greatest impact on land use and habitat, study finds.
Frog serenade foiled
Amphibians raise their pitch to counter traffic noise.
Fossil protection law comes under fire
Palaeontologists aim to clamp down on illegal trade.
US plans for science outreach to Muslim world
White House to send scientists as envoys.
Nature’s video channel has put out two new short items for your delight.
The first is a film about Sci Foo, a very unusual conference held each summer at Google's headquarters in California. This gathering of geeks is informal and unstructured; there's no agenda until the first evening when the attendees collectively create one.
Nature's Charlotte Stoddart went along to Sci Foo 2009 to capture its unique spirit on film.
The second is a trailer for the Lindau film series, which details an extraordinary meeting between Nobel Laureates and young scientists takes place on Lindau Island in Germany.
The films will be released one a week from 27 August. Watch them here.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents 3 million large and small businesses, wants to put the science of climate change on trial, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The chamber is pushing for the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a public hearing -- with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge to rule on whether humans are causing global warming, the Los Angeles Times reports.
In an alarming escalation on the Korean peninsula, South Korea has demonstrated the ability to launch a satellite into the ocean. The announcement comes just months after North Korea announced that its newest communications satellite had triumphantly plunged into the Pacific.
Ok, obviously I'm being facetious here. South Korea's much-anticipated launch of its Korea Space Launch Vehicle 1 (KSLV-1) ended in failure this morning, much to the disappointment of everyone on that side of the demilitarized zone. There's still no clear answer on what went wrong. The Korean Times reports that the first stage, a brand new Russian engine, burned smoothly, and that a "kick motor" to separate the first and second stages also worked. But after that, all bets were off. Confusingly, the South Korean report says that the rocket appeared flying at 342 km above Australia rather than the expected 306 km.
Whatever the cause of the anomaly, the satellite has yet to be detected in orbit. Russian and South Korean officials are now meeting to discuss the likely cause of the failure.
This launch does appear to put the South slightly ahead of the North in the Korean space race. North Korea's Unha-2 failed to reach orbit in April after the third stage failed to separate from the second. The satellite and stage splashed down several thousand kilometres down range in the Pacific. The KSLV-1, by contrast, made it all the way to the outback.
In all seriousness, what both South and North Korea's launches remind us is that space launches are really difficult—and not just for newcomers. The United States managed to ocean-launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory earlier this year.
Image: KARI
“This is going to be fairly serious. It’s going to stress every aspect of our health system.”
Harold Varmus, co-chair of the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, comments on his council’s estimates that H1N1 could hospitalize 1.8 million people and kill 90,000 this autumn / winter (Washington Post).
“Between 1999 and 2008, the FDA received 32 reports of serious liver injury in patients taking orlistat. … The FDA’s analysis of these data is ongoing, and no definite association between liver injury and orlistat has been established at this time.”
The US Food and Drug Administration announces it is reviewing data on a possible link between weight loss drug orlistat (Xenical, Alli) and liver damage.
“The prevailing wisdom among people who multitask is that they’re skilled and adept and they handle it really well. We thought maybe these multitaskers are gods, information processing geniuses. Instead they’re lousy at what they’re doing a whole lot of.”
Clifford Nass, of Stanford, comments on his new research showing those who multitask are actually quite bad at multitasking (Bloomberg).
“While many people have been loudly celebrating this year's double commemoration of 200 years since Charles Darwin's birth and 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species, another scientific anniversary has crept up relatively quietly, marking an event which arguably changed human thought and the way we see ourselves even more irrevocably.”
The Guardian joins the celebrations for the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope.
Abuse of ADHD medications appears to be rising among American teens.
According to data from poison centres fielding calls on potential teen overdoses, queries regarding attention deficit drugs rose 76%. This rise was more than increases seen generally for teenage substance abuse.
“The sharp increase, out of proportion to other poison center calls, suggests a rising problem with teen ADHD stimulant medication abuse,” write the researchers behind the analysis, published in Pediatrics.
Study author Jennifer Setlik, of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, says there is a “rising problem” with the abuse of ADHD medications, which are sometimes taken as cognitive enhancers, for example to improve exam performance, as well as for more traditional recreational reasons.
In April last year a Nature survey found one in five respondents said they had used drugs such as ADHD treatments to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory (see: Poll results: look who's doping). Later in the year a commentary paper in Nature called for an evidence based approach to evaluating the use of cognitive enhancers by healthy people.
That commentary noted:
Safe and effective cognitive enhancers will benefit both the individual and society. But it would also be foolish to ignore problems that such use of drugs could create or exacerbate.
Setlik et al’s new study shows again how necessary research into this issue is.
Photo: by FGMB via Flickr under creative commons
Robotic fish – probably the best small robotic fish you’ve ever seen – have been made by clever engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You can even see a video of them doing their thing.
The fish, about 30 cm long, are ancestors descendents of robotuna – a giant autonomous robotic fish also made at MIT in the 1990s.
The difference is that these fish are much simpler – they are small and powered by a single motor, unlike robotuna’s six motors, and made from just 10 parts. All these parts are encapsulated in a flexible rubber casing that is moved by a motor sending a wave along the body. They're small size will apparently make them more able to swim into small crevices.
And they can certainly swim well. I’m just a bit concerned about how useful they are. They're being developed apparently to go places where other autonomous robotic fish can’t go. Maybe I’m way out of touch, but I wasn’t aware that this was a major problem.
"The fish were a proof of concept application, but we are hoping to apply this idea to other forms of locomotion, so the methodology will be useful for mobile robotics research - land, air and underwater - as well," said Valdivia Y Alvarado, whose PhD thesis was devoted to the little robotic critters (press release).
But wait a minute, my scepticism may be short lived. I am behind the times after all. Only in March this year, a robotic carp was unveiled by researchers at Essex University, UK. Five of the monstrous 1.5 metre-long robotic carp are scheduled to be released into Spanish waters, equipped with chemical sensors to sniff out pollution.
The MIT group claims that fleets of their robofish could be deployed to inspect pipelines, lakes, rivers and boats. Whatever they’re used for, you can’t escape the fact that robo fish are actually quite cool. Maybe they’ll become the next rubber duckie.
Women with high levels of testosterone are more likely to make risky financial decisions, according to research published this week. The finding, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is another twist to the controversy over ‘traders’ testosterone’.
Women are generally more risk averse than men, says Dario Maestripieri, of the University of Chicago. Maestripieri’s team had 550 MBA students play financial computer games to determine how risky their behaviour was. They also measured the students’ levels of testosterone.
Higher levels of testosterone meant less aversion to risk in women, but not in men, they found. In addition, and perhaps unsurprisingly, testosterone levels and risk aversion appeared to predict career choice with those high in the former and low in the latter being more likely to choose risky careers in finance.
“This is the first study showing that gender differences in financial risk aversion have a biological basis, and that differences in testosterone levels between individuals can affect important aspects of economic behaviour and career decisions,” says Maestripieri (press release).
Previous research has linked testosterone levels to success in trading (see: The testosterone of trading). However, any female traders reading this should be dissuaded from artificially boosting their testosterone levels to compete in the markets; another study in women found that raising their levels of testosterone made no difference to how risky their behaviour was (see: Testosterone boost doesn't fuel risky behaviour in women).
Some papers have inevitably managed to make this research about sex, given testosterone's links to sex drive, and are suggesting that women who are risky may also be risqué.
When published, the PNAS article will be available here.
Image: punchstock
Q+A: The science of Google Wave
How an online application could change research communication.
Canada assumes weighty mantle
Instrument to help redefine the kilogram makes a transatlantic move.
FDA narrows drug label usage
Cancer treatments limited to specific gene variants.
After almost three-and-a-half years, the trial of Korean stem-cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang may be drawing to a close.
In two seminal papers published in Science in 2004 and 2005, Hwang claimed to have created patient-specific embryonic stem cells using cloning techniques. In January 2006, a committee at Seoul National University, where Hwang held a post, found that the results were all fabricated.
On 24 August this year, in a final evidence hearing, prosecutors requested a four-year prison term for Hwang, who is charged with fraud, embezzlement of state funds and violation of the country’s bioethics law. Hwang has continually claimed he was duped.
Korean media report that the court is expected to hand down a decision in mid-October.
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.
New guidelines put out by the World Health Organization last week declared that healthy people who contract H1N1 do not need antiviral drugs. This stance appears to put the WHO at odds with the current policies of a number of countries.
“Worldwide, most patients infected with the pandemic virus continue to experience typical influenza symptoms and fully recover within a week, even without any form of medical treatment,” says the WHO. “Healthy patients with uncomplicated illness need not be treated with antivirals.”
Patients who present with severe illness or who get rapidly worse should be given oseltamivir (Tamiflu), as should children under five, according to the new guidelines.
Many country’s policies appear to differ from the WHO. The US Centers for Disease Control’s website currently states, “CDC recommends the use of oseltamivir or zanamivir for the treatment and/or prevention of infection with swine influenza viruses.”
A spokesperson for the UK government – which currently makes Tamiflu available to all those suspected of having H1N1 – insisted its policy was in line with the WHO. “We have consistently said that many people with swine flu only get mild symptoms, and they may find bed rest and over-the-counter flu remedies work for them,” they told the Daily Telegraph.
Earlier this month a paper suggesting that it might not be necessary to give Tamiflu to children also picked up a lot of coverage (see: Swine flu: Tamiflu for children? - August 11, 2009).
Last week the CDC produced its recommendations on who should receive vaccination against H1N1 when a vaccine does become available.
Amidst all of this, a sizable percentage of informed people seem to not want either drugs or vaccination, even if they do qualify. In the UK two new straw polls of doctors working in primary health care found that only around half would accept a vaccine shot.
Image: word cloud generated from WHO recommendations with Wordle
In December this year, parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will descend on Copenhagen to wrangle over the details of a new global climate deal — a potential successor to the Kyoto Protocol. See Nature’s Road to Copenhagen special for more coverage.
“One single country will not solve its environmental problems on its own, it will need partners and that's why it's very important that there's that unified common position. The development of Africa should not go alongside the same mistakes that the developed world already made - to have these high emissions that are now affecting the whole world.”
Alice Kaudia, Kenya’s environment secretary, explains why ten African countries are meeting in Ethiopia to reach a common position before the Copenhagen meeting (BBC).
“We need to get an agreement that sets the world on a new path of sustainable consumption without getting obsessed with precise percentages.”
Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair says that the important thing is to reach a “realistic and practical” deal (Daily Telegraph).
“Being highly responsible for the survival and long-term development of mankind.”
Xie Zhenhua, China’s vice minister in charge of the National Development and Reform Commission, sets out his country’s negotiating attitude (Xinhua).
“China in the meantime firmly opposes any form of trade protectionism disguised as tackling climate change.”
Xie Zhenhua again.
“Rich nations cannot continue as before, emerging industrial countries must leave the old industrial-based path to prosperity, and the rest of the world may not even embark upon it. Yet the negotiations on emissions limits with each of the 192 signatory countries in the run-up to the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen in December 2009 have so far given no indication of so radical a change.”
Claus Leggewie, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, doesn’t think much of progress to date along the road (Guardian).
Hurricane Bill is currently doing the rounds in the Atlantic. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-14 satellite gathered some great footage that has been put together in a youtube video.
It seems that the hurricane has given GOES-14 a chance to test its capabilities since it launched in June this year as GOES-O. Since responsibility for the satellite passed from NASA to NOAA, the name changed to GOES-14.
The video was taken on August 20, and Bill reached a category 4 storm. It has since subsided to a topical storm.
Gigantic jets flow upwards from clouds towards the outer reaches of the atmosphere, rather than down to the ground. They have been captured on film only five times since 2001, says the US National Science Foundation.
Now Steven Cummer, of Duke University in North Carolina, and his colleagues have managed to work out just how much charge these jets transfer from storms to the ionosphere.
“Our measurements show that gigantic jets are capable of transferring a substantial electrical charge to the lower ionosphere,” he says (NSF press release).
“They are essentially upward lightning from thunderclouds that deliver charge just like conventional cloud-to-ground lightning. What struck us was the size of this event.”
In their paper in Nature Geoscience the team reports that the jet carries a current of 730 A and is around 75 km long. The researchers also show that gigantic jets do make contact with the upper atmosphere.
“What we were able to conclusively show is that these are not just sparks that come out of the thunderstorm and travel upward and tickle the upper atmosphere,” says Cummer (BBC). “They actually deliver to the upper atmosphere as much electric charge as the very strong lightning strokes to ground.”
Images: Steven Cummer
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.
With no adverse effects detected of swine flu jabs in adults, the US National Institutes of Health kicked off its testing of H1N1 vaccines for children this week.
The first results from two adult trials launched on 7 August will be available in mid-September, but thus far the only complaints stem from redness and bruising at the injection site, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a press briefing today. "There are no red flags regarding safety."
The adult trials — which are testing two concentrations and two doses — will be fully enrolled by the end of the day, said Fauci, and health officials started signing up children aged from 6 months to 17 years on Wednesday. Testing on pregnant women will begin early next month, and vaccine trials involving adjuvants, which boost the body's immune response to the shot, will be launched in mid- to late-September. The trials will include a combined total of around 4,500 patients.
Full vaccine deployment will follow the trials. Between 45 and 52 million doses will be rolled out by mid-October, and then weekly shipments will provide a total of 195 million doses by year's end, said Jay Butler, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's H1N1 vaccine task force.
As a testament to the popularity of enrollment, Jesse Goodman, chief scientist and deputy commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, noted that his own son was turned away because no more participants were needed.
More details are emerging of lead poisoning from processing plants in China.
More than 1,300 children were poisoned by lead pollution from a year-old manganese processing plant in Wenping township, Hunan province (central China). Xinhua says 60% to 70% of children living nearby had unhealthy levels (over 100mg) of lead in their blood. The factory was closed last week.
Last week in Shaanxi province, northern China, 615 children tested positive for lead poisoning attributed to a smelter, which is due to cease operating this Saturday (The Guardian, Xinhua).
The New York Times notes that although the national government has committed to clean-up measures, the World Bank says 59 percent of the water in China’s seven major rivers is unfit to drink, and the government says the air in about a quarter of cities is unhealthy.
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
The prospect of gigantic, flexible LEDs screens has been raised by a new paper, published this week in Science. The paper describes a process for making ultra-thin LEDs that can simply be stamped onto other materials such as glass, plastics and rubber.
Currently, organic LEDs, so named as they are made out of thin carbon-based materials, are used in cheap portable systems such as mobile phones. Much brighter and more robust inorganic LEDs, made out of made out of gallium arsenide and gallium nitride, are commonly used for video billboards but they cannot flex and are difficult to assemble.
“So what we were trying to do really is combine some of the advantages of the processing of the organic devices, with the robustness and brightness of the inorganic,” says study author John Rogers, of the University of Illinois (press release).
The team has now developed a process that could lead to mass production of tiny inorganic LEDs in such a way to allow them to be embedded onto other, flexible materials – this will allow bright, durable inorganic LEDs to become as cheap and flexible as organic LEDs.
“By printing large arrays of ultrathin, ultrasmall inorganic LEDs and interconnecting them using thin-film processing, we can create general lighting and high-resolution display systems that otherwise could not be built with the conventional ways that inorganic LEDs are made, manipulated and assembled,” says Rogers (press release 2).
Some funding for the research came from Ford, who wanted to make flexible brake lights for their cars, notes Reuters.
Image: Photo by D. Stevenson and C. Conway, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois
Ruth Francis, Nature’s Head of Press, is reviewing all the entries shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. She’ll be reading one per week and we are posting her thoughts on The Great Beyond every Friday between now and the prize ceremony on 15 September.
Decoding the Heavens - Solving the mystery of the world’s first computer by Jo Marchant
A lump of corroded bronze cogs discovered at the bottom of the sea in 1901 has cast a spell over scientists for more than a hundred years. Turning the pages of ‘Decoding the Heavens’ it becomes clear to the reader that that Marchant has joined their ranks.
She joins an awe inspiring list of names obsessed by what is now known as the Antikythera mechanism, currently believed to be an early computer used to predict of eclipses, lunar and solar cycles and a tool to track pan-Hellenic cultural events.
Jacques Cousteau surveyed the wreck on which it was found and Arthur C Clark was fascinated by the device, encouraging others to believe that they could achieve fame by figuring out what it did and how. At the other end of the spectrum, amateur clockwork fanatics attempted to make their names by unpicking the puzzle of gears in the device.
All these lives are covered as Marchant’s book, which begins with the discovery of an unimpressive lump of bronze inside a wreck laden with statues. From here it sweeps onwards through attempted dating and better and better imaging, rigorous counting of cogs and arguments as to how the mechanism actually worked, with the research baton sometimes handed on, sometimes stolen and sometimes prised from the grasp of the previous holder.
Although the scientific research is clearly depicted and simple to follow, it is easy for the reader to feel lost when trying to retain the details of the mechanism. Marchant’s precision is incredible but the book could have done with images, or even pop ups of each section, to help firm this up.
In reference to the handover to the current team who are using amazing modern imaging technology to decipher the encryptions that are no longer visible to the naked eye, Marchant says: “The Antikythera bug had infected its next victim.”
Likewise, her book passes on this infection to the reader.
Disclaimer: As Nature’s Head of Press I have promoted some of the later Antikythera research, and know the author of the book as she was previously Nature’s news editor.
Previously on Ruth's Reviews
Ruth’s Reviews: the Drunkard’s Walk
Ruth’s Reviews: Your Inner Fish
“Shaking hands during an election campaign is key, so this is pretty troubling. It would be bad if I get infected myself and then pass it on to older people with weaker immune systems.”
Democratic Party candidate Denny Tamaki explains why he will not be shaking hands on the campaign trail for Japan’s election (Yomiuri Shimbun, via Reuters).
“We are looking for a device that will help people to pluck the nuts without having to climb; ideally, one that will allow even women and the elderly to harvest the nuts from the ground. Kerala is proud to have broken down caste oppression, but it means young people are just not interested in becoming coconut harvesters these days.”
T. Balakrishnan, the principal secretary for industries in Kerala, explains why his ministry is offering a million rupee prize to anyone who can invent a decent coconut harvesting machine (The Times).
“The brain has different sources of information for almost everything. But all those information sources are kind of relative. They don’t tell you you are moving in the same direction as an hour ago.”
Jan Souman, of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, comments on his research finding that without the Sun or Moon as a guide hikers seem to walk round in circles (NY Times).
Woah! Worms at the bottom of the sea are carrying bombs. Glowing bombs.
Seven new species of deep sea worm have been discovered by Karen Osborn of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California and her colleagues. All strong swimmers, five of these critters have attached to their bodies little balloon structures.
As soon as the worms start to get hassled by predators these balloons are released. Bombs away! And as the bombs are dropped they start to glow.
This has to be the coolest discovery of a new species for a long time. I almost don’t care what’s in the bombs and why, or how they evolved them, they’re so weird.
However, that is not the scientific way as well we all know. Osborn says that the bombs glow for around a minute after release and act to distract predators. The bombs are kind of modified gills, and once released the chemicals held in there come together and react, creating the glow.
The worms have been named Swima bombiviridis and have picked up quite some attention. And quite right too.
(New York Times, National Geographic, MSNBC, AP).
Oh, and if worms with bombs sounds familiar to you, you’re right.
More pictures below the fold for your viewing pleasure...
Continue reading "Worms wiggling with weapons way down beneath the waves" »
BRIEFING: A question of sex
Nature explains the science behind the latest gender row in sport.
Scientists devise new way to modify organisms
Yeast cell surrogate may help scientists to engineer synthetic life.
The resistant rice of the future
Cross-breeding could create rice varieties that can survive flooding and fungi.
Flu shot guidelines criticized
Mathematical model suggests that US experts got their priorities wrong.
Marina Silva has quit Brazil’s ruling party in what is being widely seen as the start of her bid for the country’s presidency in 2010 under a Green Party banner.
Silva previously resigned as environment minister in 2008, saying that “growing resistance ... in important sectors of the government and society” made it impossible for her to protect the Amazon (see: Concern after Brazil loses environment minister - May 15, 2008)
“I am now in talks with the Green Party in this period of transition,” says Silva. Jose Maria Cardoso da Silva, of Conservation International, told Reuters that this would lead to “a real debate about sustainable development”.
On the on the Brazil Political Comment blog, John Fitzpatrick notes:
The fact that Silva, a former environment minister, has no chance of winning is less important than the effect of her announcement This has stirred life into what looked like a two-horse race between President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva´s candidate, Dilma Rousseff, and the likely PSDB candidate, Jose Serra, the governor of São Paulo. It also increases the chances of other candidates, like Ciro Gomes of the PSB, standing and means there is now a greater chance of the election going into a second round.
“Plastics in daily use are generally assumed to be quite stable. We found that plastic in the ocean actually decomposes as it is exposed to the rain and sun and other environmental conditions, giving rise to yet another source of global contamination that will continue into the future.”
Katsuhiko Saido, of Nihon University in Chiba, Japan, comments on new research on how plastic waste breaks down at sea (BBC).
“You can just engineer a crime scene. Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”
Dan Frumkin, of Tel Aviv-based company Nucleix, explains the implications of his research on fabrication of DNA evidence (NY Times).
“It was a very effective review. I think we’re ready to go fly.”
Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, explains that the shuttle Discovery has been cleared for take off next Tuesday (AFP).
“The gap between white and black life expectancy narrowed by 0.4 years, from 78.2 years (white population) and 73.2 years (black population) in 2006 to 78.3 years (white population) and 73.7 years (black population) in 2007.”
The latest mortality statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been released (pdf).
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.
It looks as if the US may face a problem with swine flu vaccine this fall: 45 million doses will be available by mid November, which is not even half of the 120 million doses predicted previously.
The main ingredient of the vaccine is grown in chicken eggs and manufacturers are only getting 30% as much per egg as they do for seasonal flu vaccines. In addition, the final stages of production involve transferring vaccines into individual syringes, and the “finish-and-fill” facilities where this step takes place are limited in number.
But this is not a shortage, just a delay, Bill Hall, the spokesperson for the Health and Human Services cunningly noted (AP).
Adding to potential problems, those supplies might only cover half as many people, if it proves necessary to administer two shots per person.
The percentage of scientific journal articles that are retracted has risen from 0.0007% in 1990 to 0.007% last year.
That's according to an analysis performed by academic-data provider Thomson Reuters, for Times Higher Education (THE). In 1990 just five of the nearly 690,000 journal articles covered by its Science Citation Index Expanded were retracted. Last year, it was 95 out of 1.4 million.
THE quotes James Parry, acting head of the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO), as suggesting that a 'conservative' estimate of actual misconduct might be 1% - in which case, we'd expect to find 15,000 articles retracted a year. So, Parry reckons: "This suggests significant under-detection, which fits with what editors have told UKRIO".
The stat may suggest that editors are increasingly prepared to investigate claims of scientific fraud or error. "Anyone looking at this problem in detail knows of dozens of papers that are frankly fraudulent, but they are never retracted," says Aubrey Blumsohn, a campaigner and blogger for greater openness in research conduct.
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
Every single fish sampled from 291 streams across the United States between 1998-2005 was contaminated with mercury, according to the US Geological Survey.
A quarter of the sampled fish contained levels of mercury higher than those deemed safe for human consumption and more than two thirds contained levels exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency’s level of concern for the protection of fish-eating mammals, says a new report from the USGS.
“This study shows just how widespread mercury pollution has become in our air, watersheds, and many of our fish in freshwater streams,” says Ken Salazar, Secretary of the US Department of the Interior (press release).
Most of the mercury that reaches waterways in the US comes from emissions by coal- power plants. Once in the atmosphere the metal gets precipitated down, and then converted to the more toxic form, methyl mercury, This is easily taken up by fish and other aquatic organisms.
Forest definition comes under fire
Ecologists accuse framework convention of barking up the wrong tree.
Gravity waves 'around the corner'
Sensitive search fails to find ripples in space, but boosts hopes for future hunts.
Paying to save the rainforests
In Brazil, details are emerging for plans to stop deforestation. Can it serve as a model for other nations?
“Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is continuing a Bush-era approach of denying protections to species based on an incomplete and selective interpretation of the science. The decision reads like a laundry list of excuses to avoid acting to protect the ashy storm-petrel rather than a solid evaluation of the science.”
Shaye Wolf, of the Center for Biological Diversity, isn’t happy that the US Fish and Wildlife Service has rejected pleas for nine species to be placed on the endangered species list (LA Times).
“There was a problem in the automatic launch sequence that caused the launch to be called off.”
Lee Joo-jin, head of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, explains why South Korea’s first attempt to launch a satellite was abandoned with 8 minutes on the clock (Xinhua).
“Former CEO Martin Eberhard voluntarily requested that the suit be dropped on Aug. 7, according to his lawyer, Yosef Peretz. Peretz declined to comment further on Tuesday, other than to say that more may become public about the case late in September.”
The San Jose Business Journal reports on the legal case brought by the former head of electric car firm Tesla against the company.
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
That you can extract ink from a 150 million old squid-like fossil and still use it to draw is pretty cool and so it caused a bit of a media frenzy this week.
Phil Wilby, a researcher at the British Geological Survey who is behind the discovery of the fossil and the subsequent drawing, ground the solidified, black ink from a fossil of an ancient squid like animal (Belemnotheutis antiquus) and then mixed it with ammonia to create a paint then used to draw a picture of the animal. This might suggest that the ancient ink has similar properties to modern ink, something that awaits confirmation from Yale University in America where it was sent for an in-depth chemical analysis, after which the results will be published.
Wilby told Nature that “fossil cephalopod ink has been found in even older specimens (more than 300 million years old) and, counter intuitively, appears to be amongst the most frequently fossilised soft tissues.”
France’s national library has been forced to deny rumours that it has sold out to Google over digitization, and thus ended protracted resistance to perceived cultural imperialism.
“Following a news item published Tuesday 18 August in La Tribune, the [Bibliothèque Nationale de France] wishes to clarify that it has not signed an agreement with Google for the digitization of its collection,” says the library (pdf).
However, it adds that, “The Library has never ruled out a private partnership that would be consistent with the strategy of the Ministry of Culture regarding digital content.”
The BNF has been seen as “spearheading resistance” to Google’s digitisation of books and it championed an alternative European digital library that might be more suitable to non-English speaking countries.
The Tribune claimed yesterday that the BNF had capitulated to the American search engine. Other papers in France and abroad have followed up the story, with Le Figaro saying, the BNF had been “seduced by Google”.
French literary blogger Pierre Assouline declared, “It will thus have taken four years for the library to pass from resistance to collaboration.”
A library spokesperson told the Times the library has not abandoned its own digitization project, but would use Google to do the work faster and cheaper than it would be able to do itself.
Whether this approach will be acceptable to the French public after the sensationalist headlines die down remains to be seen...
Image: Getty
Global ocean surface temperatures last month were the warmest since records began in 1880, according to data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last Friday. July's update hasn't received much coverage (perhaps because an identical temperature high was seen in June), but the New York Times noted the trend.
In both June and July ocean surface temperatures were measured at 16.99°C, 0.59°C above the 20th century average. The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the fifth warmest on record, said officials at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.
Not all regions felt the heat. Across the eastern US, central Canada and southern South America, conditions were 2-4°C cooler than average, while parts of Asia also dipped below par. (See map).
If El Niño conditions continue to mature, as now projected, global temperatures are likely to exceed previous record highs, NOAA added.
Image: NCDC/NOAA/NESDIS
Potentially vital information on the prevalence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the UK is still not being collected, as coroners believe they are unable to test for it.
In a story now getting wide pickup, the BBC this morning reported that coroners are refusing to routinely test for CJD during post mortems, arguing that their job is only to discover the cause of death and not to collect such data.
The government wants routine tests but Michael Powers, a coroners’ law expert, told the Today programme, “This is a function which is outside the coroner’s statutory authority, because they are not – those tests – directed to ascertaining the [cause of] death in an individual case. If you step outside the coroner’s authority different considerations apply, most particularly of course consent.”
To date there have been 168 ‘definite and probable’ cases of vCJD in the UK, according to the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (pdf).
John Collinge, of University College London, told Today, “There is a concern that what we’ve seen so far may be the first wave … and that there may be more people silently infected in the community than the number of clinical cases would suggest.”
Powers said he would welcome a change to the law to enable testing and the Department of Health is running a pilot project to obtain samples from post-mortem examinations later this year (Daily Mail).
The issue is not entirely a new one however. In February last year the Guardian reported on the same issue, and was told by coroners’ society secretary André Rebello that “Coroners want to avoid any misapprehension that they might be ordering a post-mortem examination for access to research material rather than our statutory function ... Even if this was not inappropriate, coroners have neither the resources nor the time to be involved."
Cross posted for Monya Baker from The Niche, Nature's stem cell blog
Six months after giving it the green light, the US Food and Drug Administration has told Geron to put plans for a clinical trial in spinal cord injury on hold. The company has differentiated embryonic stem cells into precursors of cells known as oligodendrocytes, which help keep neurons alive. Geron hopes this cell product could promote healing in people who have recently severed their spinal cords.
In a press release, Geron said that the hold was placed after the company submitted data on animal studies done to support delivery of increased doses of its cell product and on animal studies applying the cell product to other neurodegenerative diseases. (See the story from the San Jose Mercury News; here’s the Nature story when trial won approval)
I asked Evan Snyder, who directs the stem cell program at the Burnham Institute and is not privy to the confidential information, to speculate what might have been in the preclinical data that prompted teh FDA's action. It’s possible that the FDA just wanted more time to review newly submitted data, he said. Or on the other end of the extreme perhaps some sort of tumour or adverse reaction had been observed in the animals. Most likely, he thought, given that the company is trying to make larger doses of the cells, is that undifferentiated or non-neural cells have been observed in the cell product.
Clinical holds are not unusual particularly for innovative therapies. The FDA issued a clinical hold for NeuralStem in February on a trial in Lou Gehrig’s disease (the company uses neural stem cells derived from fetal cells)
At a large FDA advisory committee meeting in April last year, experts discussed the risks and benefits of products derived from embryonic stem cells. They were particularly concerned about uncontrolled cell growth. Even if the cells are not cancerous, tumours in the contained spaces of the brain and spinal cord could be devastating. Committee members were particularly concerned for diseases that are debilitating but not immediately deadly, since adverse events caused by experimental procedures could mean that people with years to live die early or end up suffering more. Patient advocates protested that they should be allowed to decide whether to take that risk.
Previous posts
Overview of FDA meeting (includes links to transcripts)
Nitty-gritty questions for making safe products
Nanoparticle safety in doubt
Lung damage in Chinese factory workers sparks health fears.
China cuts methane emissions from rice fields
But global warming could raise greenhouse gases produced by paddies elsewhere.
Environmental concerns delay seismic testing
Lawsuit puts research voyage on hold.
After years of analysis, the spacecraft that flew through a comet and brought its dust back to earth has given us the news we wanted – the building blocks of life, amino acids, are out there in space.
Stardust set off to encounter comet Wild-2 in 1999, returning with its bounty – comet grains trapped in an aerogel – in early 2006. The scientist involved got busy, beavering away to work out what was in the grains, ruling out contamination and trying to assess what molecules existed in space.
At the time of the first swathe of papers, published in Science in December 2006, including this one, there were hints that amine molecules were present. This is a tantalising link to the presence of amino acids, the building blocks of life.
So the latest results from the Stardust team confirms the presence of glycine, an amino acid, in the Stardust data. This was presented at the American Chemical Society meeting currently happening in Washington, DC by Jamie Elsila of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Our discovery supports the theory that some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts,” says Elsila (press release).
Now some three years ago I recall talking to an excited Stardust team member, Jason Dworkin also from Goddard. He was pretty sure, although not certain, even then that he was going to see glycine. His caveat at the time was that it wouldn’t be clear whether this was cometary or not.
The news now is that Dworkin, who is on the same team as Elsila, can be happy that he was right. Glycine was not a contaminant, but part of the comet. The consequences of this discovery? Well, the researchers say that this could suggest life, or at least the ingredients to make life, are common, not rare. We are not alone…
This news has caused some press excitement, see Information Week, Christian Science Monitor, LA Times, Examiner (check out that headline).
Image: NASA
Rapidly-emptying oil and gas fields under the North Sea used to signify only depressing news for industry: precious fossil fuel resources, and the profits they provided, were running out.
No longer: that increasingly empty graveyard is being viewed as a fresh commercial opportunity – a new kind of natural resource, even, supporting what still seems a bizarre new industry: that of capturing, piping and storing carbon dioxide deep underground.
Offshore (under-sea-bed) storage is particularly attractive. It involves geological structures that are known to hold carbon dioxide underground, thanks to decades of experience in the oil and gas industry. (A Geology paper published in January says natural carbon dioxide stored in reservoirs under the North Sea has moved 12 metres upwards in 70 million years). And it doesn’t attract the kind of public resistance that accompanies schemes to, say, inject carbon dioxide under a shopping mall.
This offshore ‘oil industry in reverse’ could mean boom-time for Scotland, the FT notes today in a summary of latest developments.
Continue reading "Scotland the grave (for carbon dioxide)" »
Yale University Press has been forced onto the defensive, amid accusations that it is unfairly curtailing a social scientist’s ability to publish her research.
The publisher has refused to print 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a book discussing the controversy these images created when they were first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005.
Yale press is due to publish an analysis of these events by Jytte Klausen, professor of politics at Brandeis University, but is being attacked over its decision to omit the controversial material and any other images of Mohammed from the book.
Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Publishers Professors, was one of many expressing their outrage at this perceived censorship of an academic publishing their research.
“‘We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.’ That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press,” he said last week.
Continue reading "University press caught up in censorship row" »
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
We’ve previously praised the Swiss government for their frankly bizarre swine flu awareness video. But the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam has come up with a worthy rival for the award of best H1N1 public campaign, with their game The Great Flu.
In the game, people have the task of containing an unknown flu virus that is spreading throughout the world. Early warning systems, face masks and anti-viral drugs are all available to players, as well as options to close public places such as schools and airports and quarantine people.
"The game is based on the need to increase public awareness to the threat posed by a pandemic and the measures in place to contain it," said Albert Osterhaus, of Erasmus Medical Centre (BBC). "In no way is it intended to be a substitute for any advice given by the medical authorities. Its purpose is simply to create another avenue of information."
Osterhaus’s game is the best of a small field, with its main rivals being the Wellcome Trust and Channel 4’s online game Sneeze and the cooperative board games Pandemic, and Pandemic 2: on the Brink.
The Financial Times is reporting with excitement that senior Chinese climate change officials have set a date for emissions cuts: 2050.
Let's hope that's not what was meant in statements by Su Wei, director general of the National Development and Reform Commission's climate change division, because experts are hoping for much sooner cuts than that.
FT quotes Su as saying: "China's emissions will not continue to rise beyond 2050."
Judging from a report released this week, 2050 China Energy and CO2 Emissions Report, Su's comments are a throw-away. The report, co-authored by China's top climate think tanks, the Energy Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission and the State Council's Development Research Centre, gives 3 scenarios for emissions. Even in the "business as usual" scenario, in which economic gain continues to dominate, China's carbon emissions peak in 2040.(Reuters)
So China's emission will likely fall before 2050. The question is when.
In international climate change debates, China continues to balk at suggestions that it put a time table on its emissions peak date and play hardball with the rich western countries. (Business Green)
But the Energy Research Institute report indicates that a more amenable position is emerging. They highlight an "enhanced low carbon" scenario" which shows emissions leveling off after 2020 and dropping after 2030. By 2050, they hit 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon - China's 2005 emission levels. This would be "difficult but doable," according to Jiang Kejun of the Environment Research Institute.
The report notes impact scenarios and discusses what emissions control measures would be needed to hit the enhanced low carbon targets. These targets still wouldn't be enough for China to hit the "2 degrees by 2050" goal that experts have advanced as a tolerable level of warming - that might require China to peak in 2015 or 2020. But it proves that, however much it refuses to acknowledge emissions targets at international meetings, at home, China is thinking hard about these matters.
In December this year, parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will descend on Copenhagen to wrangle over the details of a new global climate deal — a potential successor to the Kyoto Protocol. See Nature’s Road to Copenhagen special for more coverage.
Published on behalf of David Cyranoski
Irrigation reform needed in Asia
Farms must feed a growing population with a minimal impact on the environment.
India upgrades its disease surveillance network
Microbiologist Udaiveer Rana talks about the country's revamped disease institute.
World's smallest laser unveiled
The spaser promises ultrafast nanocircuits.
Ugly bats are built to bite
A face that only a mother could love conceals a skull with a surprisingly powerful jaw.
UN climate talks at Bonn, from 10-14 August, turned out to be a bust on progress towards a meaningful climate treaty at Copenhagen. A doleful selection of quotes gives the flavour of meeting reactions:
“If we don’t have more movement and more consensus than we saw here, we won’t have an agreement.”
Jonathan Pershing, US lead climate negotiator [New York Times].
“The best likely outcome in Copenhagen may be an interim agreement nailing down the basic architecture.”
Elliot Diringer, vice-president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Washington [AFP].
“My fear is that we sign another agreement that doesn’t have any teeth ... we may just get another document that environment ministers nod and say is a great thing, but it doesn’t actually practically achieve much.”
Kevin Conrad, delegate from Papua New Guinea [Bloomberg].
"If we continue at this rate, we're not going to make it. IIt would be incomprehensible if this opportunity were lost.”
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [AP].
de Boer also pointed out that there were only 15 negotiating days to Copenhagen. "We seem to be afloat on a sea of brackets," he said, referring to the bracketed statements in the negotiating text indicating areas of disagreement [New York Times].
Get your skates on, negotiators! Next up, it's Bangkok from 28 September.
Another standoff between climate scientists and those who are trying to use freedom of information laws to access their data has emerged.
Last week Nature reported on attempts by Steve McIntyre, editor of the Climate Audit blog, to obtain monthly global surface temperature data from Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK. In the course of a month, Jones and his unit have received 58 freedom of information requests from Climate Audit.
Now Douglas Keenan has written about his attempts to obtain tree-ring data from Queen’s University Belfast, on the Watts Up With That blog.
“Some people have asked why QUB does not want to release the data. In fact, most tree-ring laboratories do not make their data available: it is not just QUB and Gothenburg that have been reluctant,” writes Keenan. “… [E]ven if the research and the researcher’s salary are fully paid for by the public—as is the case at QUB—the researcher still regards the data as his or her personal property.”
On his website, Keenan writes “I used to do mathematical research and financial trading on Wall Street and in the City of London; I now study independently.” Keenan has previously been praised on the Climate Audit blog for his work, including his criticism of research published in Nature.
In a statement to Nature, Queen’s said, “The University’s decisions on this matter have been upheld by the Information Commissioner’s Office. Freedom of Information requests for raw data from University researchers are dealt with on their merits in accordance with the provisions of the FoI Act.”
Image: photo by lawmurray via Flickr under creative commons
“These articles contributed to widespread prescription of hormones to women who did not need them, but who were put at risk of blood clots, breast cancer, and other adverse effects.”
Adriane Fugh-Berman, of Georgetown University Medical Center, comments on the latest pharma industry ghost-writing story (Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel).
“The bottom line is that the authors of the articles in question exercised substantive editorial control over the content of the articles and had the final say, in all respects, over the content - all of which was scientifically accurate.”
Doug Petkus, of Wyeth, puts his side of the argument (Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel).
“We had 11 management levels in research and development and you had to dig down quite a few before you found anyone doing research. We need to reconfigure. We’ve just been tweaking things. We have to change how people think and interact.”
Chris Viehbacher, chief executive of Sanofi-Aventis, explains some of the changes he’s been making (Financial Times, via Pharmagossip).
“Of course there are extra costs. But if we want to preserve Antarctica as pristine as possible, we need to take [on] the costs.”
Fredrik Gröndahl of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, comments on his research highlighting deficiencies in the sewage systems of Antarctic research bases (The Scientist).
NASA test launched a new inflatable heat shield today at its Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
“Our inflation system, which is essentially a glorified scuba tank, worked flawlessly and so did the flexible aeroshell,” says Neil Cheatwood, the project’s principal investigator (press release). “We’re really excited today because this is the first time anyone has successfully flown an inflatable re-entry vehicle.”
The project concept is to use an inflatable shell as a heat shield for probes entering the atmosphere of planets like Mars. As Nature’s Eric Hand noted in his piece previewing the Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment, the next generation of probes are reaching the limits of size that can be protected by a rigid heat shield.
Inflatable shields might be the way forward and today’s mission is a technology demonstration for such systems. Succumbing to RAS Syndrome, Wallops tweeted today that: “The IRVE experiment deployed and preliminary reports indicate all systems performed nominally,”
With its 20 minute flight up beyond the atmosphere and back down, IRVE may produce data to help protect future missions from burning up. The experiment itself has been consigned to a watery grave.
“After its brief flight IRVE will fall into the Atlantic Ocean about 90 miles down range from Wallops,” says NASA. “No efforts will be made to retrieve the experiment or the sounding rocket.”
Image: testing of IRVE / NASA/Sean Smith
It has been an exciting week or two for Saturn, our planetary next-door-neighbour-but-two.
Last week a paper in Nature reported that in the otherwise balmy tropics of Titan, Saturn’s moon, a storm was brewing. Emily Schaller at the University of Hawaii and colleagues have images from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility and the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. These show clouds forming a huge storm about the size of India. The existence of storm clouds in these tropical latitudes could finally help explain the presence of streams and rivers on the moon (press release).
Meanwhile on Saturn itself it is the equinox, where the Sun passes over the equator of Saturn and this has given Cassini, the spacecraft currently travelling around out near Saturn, the chance to gather some intriguing data. The equinox means that the rings cast long shadows, and from those shadows new bodies are emerging, like the small object seen in Saturn’s B ring on the main image to this post (press release).
Leader of Cassini’s imaging team Carolyn Porco told the BBC that we should expect more. “Over the next week or two, the [Cassini] imaging team will be poring over these precious gems to see what other surprises await us,” she said, with an assurance that any news would be announced as soon as possible.
Image: NASA
You can pretty much kiss civilisation goodbye in the event of a zombie outbreak, according to a new mathematical modelling study by Canadian researchers.
Led by Robert Smith?, of the University of Ottawa, the team modelled a variety of scenarios using techniques that would be familiar to those studying more plausible pandemics. (And yes, the question mark is part of his name.)
A basic model using three classes of person – zombies, susceptible to infection, and ‘removed’ – found coexistence with the undead was impossible and following a short outbreak, “zombies will likely kill everyone”.
The researchers went on to model for a cure and quarantine, as well as the potential for counterattacks to eradicate the zombie threat. Things still do not look good for humanity, they report in their paper When Zombies Attack!
“A zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly,” they write in the new book Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress.
“While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often. As seen in the movies, it is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”
This research paper is not a totally academic exercise; Smith et al note that their models may seem unlikely (as the dead can return to life), but they could have applications for those modelling allegiance to political parties or diseases that lie dormant for some time.
“If you look at it in a more realistic way, zombies are about the same as any other major infectious disease, they get out and we try to eliminate them,” study author Joe Imad told Canwest News. “Modelling zombies would be the same as modelling swine flu, with some differences for sure, but it is much more interesting to read.”
Given our worldwide success in acting quickly and in a unified manner to stop the spread of swine flu, I’m going to redouble work on that bunker under the Nature office.
Image: photo by rumikel via Flickr under creative commons
Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a hub -- of scientific commercialization. Cellular Dynamics International (CDI), a Madison, Wisconsin-based company founded by stem cell pioneer James Thomson, announced this week that it has recruited two of the world's most prominent biologists to its scientific advisory board: genomics guru George Church and systems biology trailblazer Leroy Hood. Church and Hood are not generally known for an interest in the fast-moving field of stem cell research, but they are jumping on-board the personalized medicine bandwagon.
“Stem cells have the potential to transform 21st century medicine -- perhaps in a manner similar to antibiotics in the 20th century,” said Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, in a statement.
“The commercial opportunity associated with human iPS cells is rapidly becoming complementary and/or competitive,” said Harvard University's Church in a statement.
Nature News has completed ApolloPlus40, a Twitter project which re-visited the Apollo 11 mission in real time, 40 years later.
The project, conceived by former Chief News & Features Editor Oliver Morton, attracted around 5,000 followers in the weeks leading up to and after the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing.
Feedback from ApolloPlus40 followers ranged from encouraging to humbling, via downright odd:
Jun 17th: Snufkin @ApolloPlus40 - my dad worked on this mission & one of my first memories was him feeding me @ night while watching it on TV.Jun 24th: industwetrust @ApolloPlus40 - Tweeting the Apollo 11 Mission - welcome to a brand new kind of narrative poem http://2dl84.tk
Jul 16th: Fek_Lar @ApolloPlus40 I think you'll find that Dr. Aldrin was technically a scientist when he walked on the moon. Schmitt was the only geologist.
Jul 20th: giagia Come on! Come on! @ApolloPlus40
Aug 13th: mikemietlicki RIP @ApolloPlus40 is now space trash.
Thanks to our re-tweet-happy followers, ApolloPlus40 echoed throughout the internet. CNET called the project "a real-time news report, forty years later," in its Apollo 11 commemoration roundup and plenty of bloggers passed it along. We got mentions in Portuguese and Russian. An editor at Forbes.com asked me to write a personal take on the experience and I gave an interview for BBC Radio 5 [audio, 4:18].
For the Nature News team, producing ApolloPlus40 gave us a taste of the training, protests, technical glitches and tension that must have gone on in the real mission control back in the 60s. It's a shame there's no audio recording of my editor's voice when he called me right before the real-time launch countdown.
On that note we leave you with this suggestion from one follower:
Aug 13th: cdbarker@ApolloPlus40 Thanks for the great work. Please please please consider a relaunch next April for Apollo 13?
Image: Screenshot from ApolloPlus40
Sad news today about vaccine-triggered polio outbreaks in Nigeria. The AP reports that this year, 124 children have been paralyzed by polio caused by mutated oral vaccine, up from 62 in all of 2008. Science magazine reported the news on 7 August, leading with the scary fact that the polio strain used to make the vaccine, type 2, had been declared eradicated in 1999 by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Now, due to the mutated vaccines, it’s “back from the dead”.
The news is particularly meaningful in Nigeria, which has had a prickly relationship with polio eradication campaigns. They suspended polio vaccinations in 2003, believing they were part of "the Western world's plan to sterilize Africans or give them AIDS” (AP). They resumed vaccinations in 2004, and one year later the vaccine had mutated and began giving children polio.
Though such mutation was feared, it wasn’t wholly unexpected. “Experts have long believed epidemics unleashed by a vaccine's mutated virus wouldn't last since the vaccine only contains a weakened virus strain” (AP), but after it “limped along in characteristic [vaccine-derived poliovirus] fashion for a few years”, it took off in January 2009, Science says.
Ruth Francis, Nature’s Head of Press, is reviewing all the entries shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. She’ll be reading one per week and we are posting her thoughts on The Great Beyond every Friday between now and the prize ceremony on 15 September.
Your Inner Fish – A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
In the 1980s molecular biology posed a threat to whole organism research: anatomists were out of date, and palaeontologists positively behind the times, according to fossil hunter Neil Shubin.
Twenty years on Shubin straddles the disciplines; uncovering new specimens and investigating the role of DNA in development. His well-paced book describes this and more with a wide-eyed wonder that cannot fail to captivate the reader.
Shubin cuts to the chase from the off; detailing his rookie fossil hunting and the later planning and breathy excitement of expeditions to Alaska where the famous fossil fish Tiktaalik roseae was discovered.
Using Tiktaalik as a window, each chapter takes us deeper into anatomy – from fins and limbs to eyes and ears via the cells that make up the body, or in early cases cells that make no body. Each example illustrates the changes through time and similarities across the animal kingdom.
“This is unprecedented in this area of Antarctica. We’ve known that it's been out of balance for some time, but nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
Andrew Shepherd, of Leeds University, comments on his research showing the surface of Pine Island glacier in Antarctica is dropping 16 metres a year (BBC).
“If we can understand this biological pathway, perhaps we can come up with a therapeutic compound. Maybe we can help people sleep less in a safe way.”
Ying-Hui Fu’s research team has identified a gene related to the amount of sleep humans appear to need (Times).
“I don’t know that the program makes a whole lot of environmental sense. There is not a whole lot of justification for the classic car industry to block older vehicles from being traded in.”
Lena Pons, of the Public Citizen group, discusses why cars deemed ‘too old’ cannot be traded in under the cash-for-clunkers programme designed to get the most polluting vehicles off American roads (LA Times).
Just a day after the first discovery of a planet with an orbit that goes in the direction opposite to the spin of its star – a gas giant WASP-17b – a second such planet has been reported.
Two teams of scientists, one led by Joshua Winn of MIT and another by Norio Narita at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, picked out a previously known planet HAT-P-7b, that is, like WASP-17b, around 1000 light years away from Earth. It also orbits its star in the direction opposite to star’s own rotation. Both teams have submitted papers for peer review but have not yet been accepted. [New Scientist].
Winn avoided the temptation to make any "you wait ages for a retrograde orbit planet and then two come along at once" comments, instead observing that the coincidence of discoveries was "funny".
"We're catching so many planets these days, we're bound to see some of the oddballs. These aren't going to be the last ones," Adam Burrows of Princeton University told New Scientist.
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
Humans harnessed fire to improve their tools much earlier than we’d thought, according to a new report in Science (doi:10.1126/science.1175028).
Though our forebears cooked with fire some 800,000 years ago, the consensus so far was that people hadn’t used fire to heat-treat materials until around 25,000 years ago. The new finding pushes that back at least 45,000 years.
“Our illumination of the heat treatment process shows that these early modern humans commanded fire in a nuanced and sophisticated manner," says the lead author Kyle Brown, from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. [Press release from Arizona State University, Brown's other affiliation]. “We’ve shown that, at least 72,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier, modern humans had an understanding of how fire and heat could transform the materials around them to suit their needs.” [Science News].
Researchers spent six years looking for the same type of silcrete rock that they found in tools at Pinnacle Point, a Middle Stone Age site on the South African coast. It wasn’t until they happened across such a piece of silcrete embedded in ash that they realised that they could get the deep red, glossy and brittle silcrete such as the one found in tools by putting regular silcrete in fire. They estimate that stones were heated to around 300 degrees Celsius, probably by cooking them under fire in a process that could last for up to 40 hours. This resulted in stones that were easier to shape into tools by using other rocks, and that could be used as knives, hunting weapons or for exchange for other goods.
"I think heating stones is the dawn of human engineering. One of the things that makes us uniquely human is that we can take the things in our landscape and adapt them. We can engineer them to fit our needs." Brown told the BBC.
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
Image: Kyle Brown/South African Coast Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment, Paleoecology, Paleoanthropology Project
Canada’s Globe and Mail indulges in an orgy of self-flagellation today with a front-page piece entitled 'How Canada let the world down'.
The hand-wringing is over the worldwide shortage of medical isotopes – the radioactive elements injected into patients during medical imaging procedures.
Nature has been following this story ever since the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor located in Chalk River, Ontario, was shut down on 18 November 2007 for maintenance. It’s been on and off ever since, causing patient procedures to be delayed or canceled and raising the prices of remaining isotope supplies. The Globe has doggedly followed every single twist and turn of this sorry tale – dwindling supplies, soaring costs, potential brain drain …
Chalk River was expected to reopen late 2009, but the latest news is that it will remain shut until spring 2010 (Reuters).
The genomics blogosphere is abuzz over allegations that a purchasing decision of next-generation sequencing machines was politically motivated. In a November 2008 letter sent to a UK House of Lords select committee, Kevin McKernan, senior director of scientific operations at Applied Biosystems (ABI), cried foul at the Sanger Centre's decision to return five of ABI's SOLiD System machines in favour of the platform developed by Illumina/Solexa.
The letter accused Sanger researchers of bearing a grudge against ABI because of its Craig Venter-tinged connections in the race to sequence the human genome. McKernan also asserted that the institute leadership took "a more historical approach" in its decision to go with more Illumina Genome Analyzer sequencers, noting that many Sanger staff members have close ties with the rival company.
Nick Loman of the University of Birmingham ridiculed this claim. "Calling the approach historical is slightly ironic given that ABI used to be the only show in town and the Sanger had over a hundred ABI machines running during the [Human Genome Project]," he wrote on the blog Pathogens: Genes and Genomes. Moreover, Solexa, which Illumina acquired in January 2007, was headquartered in Cambridgeshire, and many of their former workers turned Hinxton, UK-based Sanger staff stayed close to home, Loman noted.
The UK’s Natural History Museum has been targeted by thieves after an unusual prize: tropical bird skins.
It is not clear exactly when or how the bird remains were removed. Some reports say a branch of the museum in Tring was burglarised in June but the removal of nearly 300 skins was apparently not noticed for over a month. There are also suggestions the birds could have been stolen in batches by someone with legitimate reasons to access the collection.
“The birds that were stolen formed part of the nation’s natural history collection, painstakingly assembled over the last 350 years,” says Richard Lane, Director of Science at the Museum (press release). “It is very distressing that we should have been deliberately targeted in this manner.”
Those responsible for the crime are unlikely to have been motivated by the skins’ potential use in biodiversity, evolution or anatomy research. Speculation as to their purpose involves breaking up the specimens for use in jewellery, clothing or fly-fishing lures.
Let us hope the miscreants behind this outrage are swiftly caught and spend some time doing bird.
Anyone offered some dodgy bird skins should call Detective Inspector Fraser Wylie on 0845 33 00 222, citing crime reference number D3/09/450.
Image: Natural History Museum
Child DNA donors should have their say
Bioethicists argue for stricter rules at genetic repositories.
A screen for cancer killers
Method identifies drugs that target the cells behind cancer growth.
A study in this week’s Natureshows that mountain height is limited by climate, rather than just by plate tectonics and the strength of the underlying crust. The study shows that when mountains reach heights where it is cold enough for the snow to form permanently, further growth is capped by the moving glaciers.
"Glaciers are very effective at destroying mountains," said David Engholm, a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark and lead author of the study. (AFP)
Researchers used radar images of Earth’s surface at different latitudes and found that mountains generally do not rise more than 1,500 metres above the snowline. "So once plate tectonics pushes the surface of the Earth above the snowline altitude, a glacier starts to accumulate, and then basically you reach sort of a steady state where the mountains really do not get any higher," Egholm told LiveScience.
The idea that moving ice can shaves off layers from a mountain is not new – but this study claims to be the first to demonstrate this is in a single model containing data from all the world's major mountain ranges. The model shows that “differences in the height of mountain ranges mainly reflect variations in local climate rather than tectonic forces” say the researchers.
This also explains why mountain ranges tend to be higher in the low latitudes closer to the equator, than they are closer to the poles. At lower latitudes, warmer climate means that the snow line is higher, allowing the mountains to grow taller before they start getting eroded. "So we've basically explained why there is a link between the presence of glaciers, climate, and the height of mountains," says Egholm.
High-latitude mountains also tend to have flatter tops than the low altitude ones. “What you see there is that glaciers have basically completely removed the part of the mountains that were above the snowline," Egholm explains.
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
Image: David Lundbek Egholm
Researchers have discovered the first planet that orbits its star in the direction opposite to the star’s own spin. The planet, dubbed WASP-17b, is also the lowest density exoplanet known so far: it is only 6-14% as dense as the gas giant Jupiter, and with twice the volume of Jupiter it might also be the largest planet found to day.(ArXiv
Most planets orbit their star in the same direction as the star’s own spin – all are thought to have formed from the same initial cloud of gas and dust. But orbits can be tilted by the gravitational pull of passing objects - some asteroids’ and comets’ orbits are tilted so much that they end up orbiting the sun in the opposite direction, for example. Although planets with tilted orbits have been detected before, this is the first one that is titled so much (by 150%) that the planet actually orbits its star in the opposite direction.
"All the others have been going in more or less the right direction, just tilted at crazy angles," says Andrew Collier Cameron of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and co-author of the paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal, adding that the WASP-17b, which lies 1000 light years away from Earth "really throws the cat among the pigeons." (New Scientist)
It remains unclear what tilted this planet’s orbit so much. Two contending theories are that a gravitational pull from either a passing object or a still-undetected companion star have caused the tilt (BBC).
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
Image: ESA/C. Carreau
As widely expected, Australia's carbon emissions trading scheme was defeated in the Senate (the parliament's upper house) on Thursday.
Though Rudd has diluted the bill significantly from its initial introduction in March - the scheme will now be phased in from July 2011 (rather than 2010) and will not have a ‘cap’ on total emissions introduced until July 2012 - it has been subject to fierce criticism from opposition mindful of its effect on the cost of coal and other energy-intensive exports.
“The government should now put this damaging bill in the deep freeze and wait until after we see the outcome of the Copenhagen conference and the US Senate debate on emissions trading before resurrecting its discredited legislation," said Nick Minchin, leader of the Senate's Liberal party which has the largest voting bloc in the chamber (FT).
In the end, the legislation went down 42 votes to 30. So Rudd needs to find a swing of seven votes to get the legislation passed. And his team have gone straight back on the offensive.
"This bill may be going down today, but this is not the end. We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because if we don't, this nation goes to Copenhagen with no means to deliver our targets," climate change minister Penny Wong told the senate (The Telegraph).
Continue reading "Australia carbon trading blocked: what next?" »
“It’s like a message in a bottle cast out into the stars. What’s interesting is not just whether there’s anyone listening, but what the public will say to intelligent life on another planet.”
Wilson da Silva, spokesman for the HelloFromEarth website, explains why the project is enabling people to text messages into space (Daily Telegraph).
“Why do we sometimes bite the insides of our own mouths?”
The latest message on the site.
“Professor Stephen Hawking was a brilliant man and a mediocre student … His work in theoretical physics -- which I will not attempt to explain further here -- has advanced our understanding of the universe.”
US President Barack Obama awards a Medal of Freedom to a very much alive Stephen Hawking.
“Some of Fera’s staff work on long-term wildlife research projects, looking at the relationship between badgers and cattle in the spread of bovine TB. Fera is therefore treating the case seriously, as it may represent infection by Mycobacterium bovis, the organism which causes bovine TB.”
Alison Wilson, head of executive support at the UK’s Food and Environment Research Agency, confirms one of the agency’s scientists may have caught TB from an infected badger (Times).
A deep sea photography machine built by undergraduates for £1,800 is the star of today’s image, the winner of Cambridge University’s Department of Engineering photo competition.
Shown here is ‘Project Pebble’ undergoing tests in a swimming pool. The idea was to use relatively cheap off the shelf parts to build a vessel capable of carrying a camera and some bait to the bottom of the sea and find some deep sea beasties.
Sadly, things did not end well for the intrepid craft when it was put into the sea in May.
“Unfortunately, Pebble was accidentally picked up by a passing fishing vessel during deployment, and could not be recovered,” says the project team. The search for Pebble was formally abandoned in June.
Pebble may live on though. Future undergraduates at Cambridge will try to improve the design and bring the cost down to under £1,000.
See all entries in the photo competition here.
You knew it was just a matter of time before Fermilab -- the American counterpart to CERN -- provided a rap riposte to the Large Hadron Rap, the first particle accelerator rap (and, we were kinda hoping, the last). But on Tuesday, Funky49 dropped his 'Particle Business' rap for the first time, extolling the virtues of Fermilab's Tevatron with lyrical gems like "quarks, bottom to the top, they don't stop" and the catchy refrain, "Where the Higgs at?" I was hoping for some more trash talk between the two particle accelerator facilities, but Funky49 had his own nice-guy take on situation: "This be competitive collaboration baby." Nothing on YouTube yet, so you'll just have to imagine what his performance was like.
Below the fold: Previous songs about science.
Continue reading "Songs about science XXIII: The Fermilab rap" »
Hurricane peak not unique
Historical estimates suggest that global warming could boost the number of hurricanes.
Flu database rocked by legal row
Dispute over ownership raises concerns among flu scientists.
Climate data spat intensifies
Growing demands for access to information swamp scientist.
Satellite data show Indian water stocks shrinking
Groundwater depletion raises spectre of shortages.
Ensuring safe landings on Mars
NASA to test inflatable shells for space craft.
The upper echelons of the FDA are getting a lot of unwanted attention today. Yesterday, the top regulator of the medical devices division, Daniel Schultz, announced his resignation, and now the head of drug approvals is under investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services, reports the Wall Street Journal.
For months, the medical devices division has been on the list of Margaret Hamburg, whom Obama appointed to whip the controversy-plagued FDA into shape. At the center of the division's current mess are products that were approved despite the safety and efficacy concerns of agency scientists. The approval of such products — including a brain-zapping depression-treating device and a knee surgery device — led to allegations of being a bit too friendly with industry.
The criticism isn't just from outsiders. In a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee last October, nine employees alleged that some scientists had been pressured to approve the devices.
Schultz has some company. Janet Woodcock is the director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which approves drugs, and is also accused of being too cozy with industry. (Back in November, she was a drug maker hopeful for FDA commissioner but didn't get it).
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is still snapping away as it orbits the red planet, and here’s its latest picture. We’ve seen stunning views of Victoria Crater before, I admit, but this is from a slightly different angle and … well, dammit, it’s just beautiful, isn’t it?
The Mars rover Opportunity spent 2 years from September 2006 exploring in and around Victoria, particularly looking at the geology of the steep, rugged walls of the 800-metre-wide crater. If you look really close at the hi-res images, you can just make out the rover’s tracks around the crater’s edge.
Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
The Australian government has announced AUS$19 million (£9.5 million) in funding for a mass cull of the country’s wild camels, most likely done by chasing and shooting the beasts from helicopters. The announcement has caused a stir, with people objecting to the waste of leaving shot camels to rot in the outback and others calling it inhumane (The Guardian).
Camels were introduced to Australia in the 19th century to help transport heavy goods to the remote interior of the country, but since being released into the wild they have since become a major pest (New Zealand Herald).
“The scientific evidence suggests they'll eat anything up to 80 per cent of the plants available," Murray McGregor, research general manager of Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre, which is involved in planning the cull, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Jan Ferguson, managing director of the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre, says there are more than a million camels in desert regions. "Australia has long accepted that we've got a problem with rabbits,” she says, “because they are in everybody's country. Camels tend to be isolated in the bush, so they're not so visible." The population is doubling in size every nine years.
But camel exporter Paddy McHugh might have a point when he says, "What happens in 15 years when the numbers come back again? Do we waste another AUS$20 million?" He suggests catching and exporting the animals for entertainment and food. Animal Liberation New South Wales animal welfare group instead proposed providing the camels with birth control
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also got it in the neck from Erin Burnett, a newsreader on CNBC. She said during a broadcast: "There is a serial killer in Australia and we are going to put a picture up so we can see who it is.” A photo of Rudd appeared on the screen. "That would be the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd," Burnett told viewers. "Okay, well do you know what he is doing? He has launched air strikes - air strikes - against camels in the outback." Burnett later called her announcement a “deadpan joke”.
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Disease-carrying mosquitoes from tourist planes landing to the Galapagos could be a threat to the biodiversity on these islands. Arnaud Battaile from Leeds University and his colleagues report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that the southern house mosquito, Culex quinquefasciatus is being constantly introduced to the island via tourist planes. Scientists had previously thought that this mosquito was introduced to the islands only once, in the 1980s (see press release).
The southern house mosquito has a dark history of infecting pristine island environments, carrying various diseases such as avian malaria, avian pox and West Nile fever. When it was introduced to Hawaii in the late 19th century, it is thought to have caused extinction of many endemic bird species..
The unique fauna of the Galapagos islands played an important role in Charles Darwin’s Beagle journey. Because of its isolated position 600 miles away from the mainland it has escaped many of the diseases present in South America and as a result Galapagos animals are susceptible because they have built up no resistance through exposure, Simon Goodman, a co-author of the paper told the Daily Telegraph. "You only need a single infectious mosquito to initiate a disease cycle," Goodman says.
The team found about one mosquito in every 10 planes arriving at the Galapagos between October 2006 and September 2007. The mosquitoes that arrived on planes can survive and breed on islands, and can also island-hop by hitching a ride on boats. Although none of the mosquitoes captured on the planes in this study carried dangerous viruses, it is possible that they could bring viruses such as the West Nile Virus from the mainland that could spread across the archipelago’s 200 or so islands by these hitchhikers. “West Nile virus also affects reptiles and mammals, and so could impact other iconic Galapagos species such as marine iguanas and sea lions," Goodman told New Scientist.
Posted on behalf of Mico Tatalovic
Stanford University engineer Stephen Quake has added his name to the growing list of people who have had their individual genomes sequenced.
Quake did it using a machine made by a company he co-founded, Helicos Biosciences of Cambridge, Mass. J. Craig Venter was the first scientist to sequence his own genome; six other individual human genomes have been published and others have been sequenced by private companies.
Quake describes his achievement in a paper in Nature Biotechnology, in which he reports that he sequenced his genome with the help of two other scientists and read out 90 percent of his genome, or 2.5 billion base pairs. Quake estimated that it cost $48,000, not including the cost of the sequencing machine itself, which approaches nearly $1 million. Stanford University purchased a Helicos sequencing machine last year at an undisclosed price.
Continue reading "Live nude genes: another scientist bares his genome to the world" »
Last week's major fire on the Canary Island of La Palma, off the west coast of Africa, left the local telescopes unscathed. 
This image was taken by the Terra satellite on 2 August and shows the smoke plume drifting off the island's southeastern coast. The Associated Press reported that it had burned some 3,000 hectares and destroyed 50 homes. Roughly 4,000 people were evacuated.
The Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, which hosts a number of world-class telescopes, is in the north-central portion of the island. Javier Mendez, a spokesman for the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, says that observing time was not affected. Last month the Grand Canary Telescope, the world's largest single optical telescope, was inaugurated at the observatory to much fanfare (Nature).
Fires are a hazard of life at many observatories; in 2003, for instance, most of Mt. Stromlo Observatory in Australia was wiped out by flames.
Image: NASA Earth Observatory
Return of the rat
European investment could see knock-out rats catching up with mutant mice in medical research.
Science advisers mull priorities
Climate change and energy are high on the agenda for Obama's panel.
Ice-core researchers hope to chill out
Fresh freezers needed to preserve ancient gas, scientists say.
Mystery of missing carbon cracked
Earth's mantle seems to be depleted in carbon, but chemical processes might explain why.
Nanowires get biological impulses
Primitive hybrid device controls protein ion channels.
"W.C. Fields said: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There’s no use in being a damn fool about it.’ However, as yet I don’t think I am anywhere close to giving up and I don’t think I am behaving like a ‘damn fool’."
Science writer Simon Singh explains why he's continuing the fight in his libel case with the British Chiropractic Association (statement and details at Sense About Science; Nature's previous coverage)
"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless"
An editorial in Investor's Business Daily, railing against the UK's health-care system, destroys its own credibility. (Multiple sources - Jay Bookman from the AJC is one. The editorial has now been corrected - by removing the absurd sentence).
We do love a good health scare in the UK press, so the current H1N1 outbreak has been a boon to journalists. The latest stir concerns a new study that suggests giving Tamiflu to children could be a bad move.
Researchers at the University of Oxford reviewed all the available evidence on oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza) in the treatment of seasonal influenza. Writing in the BMJ they note:
It is difficult to know the extent to which these findings can be generalised to children in the current A/H1N1 pandemic. At present, most cases in children have been mild, but recommendations in several countries encourage treatment of children with suspected or confirmed A/H1N1 flu.While morbidity and mortality in the current pandemic remain low, a more conservative strategy might be considered prudent, given the limited data, side effects such as vomiting, and the potential for developing resistant strains of influenza.
Natural phenomena have been wreaking havoc in East Asia. This morning a magnitude 6.5 earthquake ripped from the subducting Philippine plate at a depth of 23 kilometers in the middle of the Suruga bay off the east coast of Japan (BBC). Besides the immediate damage - at least 100 people were injured - there were two main concerns.
The first was that it would impact the nearby Hamaoka nuclear facility. But this worry was put to rest by reports that an early warning system had automatically stopped operations. So far no damage and no leakage of any radioactive material have been reported, a sharp contrast to the fear and frenzy resulting from an earthquake near a nuclear facility on the opposite coast two years ago.
The second fear was that this quake would trigger the magnitude 8 Tokai earthquake that scientists say will occur with a roughly 80% probability within the next 30 years. A committee of the Japan Meteorological Administration met today and judged from the pattern of crustal deformation that it would not initiate the Tokai earthquake.
The quake set off the earthquake warning system in the greater Tokyo area, and also set my phone squawking its earthquake alert at least 5 seconds before the trembling started (causing me much confusion, because I didn’t know my phone had that function and I usually only hear the calming instrumental version of Captain and Tennille’s Do that to me one more time, which for some reason is the outdated factory preset for incoming calls on my otherwise ultramodern Sony Ericsson W64S)
There was another magnitude 6.9 earthquake on Sunday night, also off the Pacific coast of Japan. But at a depth of 340 kilometers, it caused widespread shaking but little damage.
Japan was also hit on Sunday by a typhoon, Etau, that killed at least 14 and left 17 missing in landslides, mostly in western Hyogo province. Typhoon Morakot has been even deadlier, causing landslides and flooding that claimed at least 50 lives in the Phillipines and Taiwan, where it buried an entire village leaving hundreds still missing before moving on to mainland China (Bloomberg).
Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski
How to breathe on the Moon
Moon rock can be processed directly to produce oxygen.
Immortality improves cell reprogramming
Knocking out genes with a role in cancer prevention helps produce stem cells.
Geoengineering schemes under scrutiny
Researchers divided over the wisdom of climate manipulation.
LHC hopes for collisions by Christmas
But particle physicists will have to scale back the energies of their experiments for years.
Staving off ecological disaster in lungs
Protecting the lung's 'ecosystem' may help cystic fibrosis patients.
Cambrian's fiercest hunter defanged
Computer modelling hints that Anomalocaris didn't have the chops to chew up trilobites.
Europe prepares for drugs from GM plants
Guidelines for pharmed medicines compare favourably with US rules.
"One of the movie bad-girls, the Baroness — because she’s married to a French baron — forces her physicist husband to activate some nano-bot missiles using a “particle accelerator in France" ... anyway, the scene involves the ninja assassin Storm Shadow slicing up some innocent particle physicists (experimentalists, no doubt)."
Particle physicist grad student Flip Tanedo assesses the role of the Large Hadron Collider in G.I. Joe, the latest big-screen summer blockbuster (US/LHC blogs).
"Suddenly, North America is awash in natural gas."
Rosemary Boulton, president of Canadian company Kitimat LNG, which is building a natural gas export terminal in British Columbia to export gas to Asia (WSJ). A 30 July Nature editorial has more on North America's gas bonanza.
"Today, NASA's investment in advanced concepts and long-term technological solutions to its strategic goals is minimal."
The US National Research Council released a report on Friday recommending that NASA revive its Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), closed in 2007.
Who needs fancy journals anyway? That's the conclusion of a recent study, which looked at the advantages of ArXiv, the open-access preprint server, to the high-energy physics community. The study is published, naturally, on Arxiv, and the implications were reported on the Symmetry Breaking blog.
The authors found that articles submitted to the Arxiv and eventually published in a journal had an impact factor five times that of articles that were either just published on the Arxiv or in a journal alone. Since this could be a selection effect (i.e., a fair bit of wacky science gets thrown up on the ArXiv), the authors looked at the citations a bit more carefully. They found that the main advantage of the ArXiv is its immediacy. Some 20% of an article's total citations are accumulated before the paper is published in a journal. Even once both references -- to the Arxiv preprint, and to the journal publication -- exist side by side in the main high-energy physics database, more than 80% of scientists click-through to the ArXiv version of the paper. Journals may add the varnish of peer-review, but for scientific discourse, they are completely unnecessary, the authors conclude.
Climate change may need a military response from America, according to a story from the New York times which is getting a lot of pick up in the world media.
While most policy discussions around climate change focus on energy wonks, the Times says that military analysts are increasingly of the view that “climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions”. Food and water shortages or huge floods could push vulnerable regions over the edge into crises that could “demand an American humanitarian relief or military response”, it says.
The Times piece quotes from a recent report prepared by retired Marine general Anthony Zinni for private research company CAN. Zinni says:
We will pay for this [climate change] one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll. There is no way out of this that does not have real costs attached to it. That has to hit home.
Although the Times says the Pentagon is “for the first time” looking seriously at national security and climate change, the idea that global warming could heat up things other than temperatures has been around for a while. Back in July 2008, for example, Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson attended one of the first war games on the subject of global warming. You can read his blog posts from the games in our archive.
Image: frigate USS Doyle in the Pacific Ocean earlier this year / US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Patrick Grieco
Just a month after being tapped by the White House, the physician and geneticist Francis Collins was unanimously confirmed today by the US Senate as the new director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Collins, who headed the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993-2008, will return to the institutes' Bethesda, Maryland, headquarters with a full plate on his hands. His first duties will include getting the NIH's $10.4 billion stimulus windfall out the door and working on the new registry of approved human embryonic stem cells.
"Dr. Collins will be an outstanding leader," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. "Today is an exciting day for NIH and for science in this country."
Collins, though widely praised for his scientific accomplishments, which include leading the Human Genome Project and discovering many disease genes, has been criticized for his openly religious views. The author of the The Language of God, Collins recently launched the BioLogos Foundation, which aims to reconcile Christain faith and science. BioLogos officials said that the new director would step down from its leadership once confirmed. (USA Today)
A round-up of early accolades follows the jump.
Posted for David Cyranoski
A Chinese company is offering a test that can, it claims, reveal a child's abilities in areas like memory, speed, thinking, comprehension, emotion, adventure, braveness, focus, perseverance, vigour and physical strength. But amid disquiet about the claims, one of the testers has told Nature they are unhappy about the way the tests are marketed.
Shanghai Biochip's Healthcare division promises the tests will have 99% accuracy, although company representatives quoted by CNN said that the genes will only decide 30%-60% of the child's future, while the rest is up to upbringing, nutrition, education, and other environmental factors.
The company, which told Nature the test would cost RMB2000, says the tests will help direct children to pursuits that match their natural talents.
Continue reading "Testing times ahead for Chinese children" »
Ruth Francis, Nature’s Head of Press, is reviewing all the entries shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. She’ll be reading one per week and we are posting her thoughts on The Great Beyond every Friday between now and the prize ceremony on 15 September.
The Drunkard’s Walk – How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow
Much of what happens in life is a result of random factors. Talent and persistence may be factors in success, but many more ingredients are involved. So begins Leonard Mlodinow’s exhilarating ramble through probability, randomness and uncertainty.
The book is broken into ten bite-sized chapters, each on a single topic split into digestible examples. These take us from an overview of randomness to more developed discussions of chance and causality, via truths and half-truths, the laws of large and small numbers, measurement, and statistics.
Along the way it is not theory alone that is depicted; Mlodinow beautifully illustrates both the history of theories and the theorists themselves.
Of one minor mathematician we learn he had his own son tossed out of the Swiss Academie of Sciences by plagiarizing the boy’s book and faking the publication date so that his own text appeared to have been published first. Perhaps unsurprisingly this charmer “has been variously described in historical texts as jealous, vain, thin-skinned, stubborn, bilious, boastful, dishonest and a consummate liar”.
Stories may be first and foremost, but in Mlodinow’s hands they are a tool rather than a stumbling block, intertwined with the numbers in order to elucidate his points. Often we flick from tale to theory, delaying the gratification of a more complete answer to the question posed, or the satisfaction of hearing the end of a story - but this serves to draw the reader on to the reveal.
Mlodinow reminds us that lots of great and popular books were rejected by publishers multiple times before going on to become bestsellers and the final pages of his own treatise neatly return to the opening idea of the randomness of success.
We are not told if or how many times The Drunkard’s Walk was rejected. But if that was the case I am glad that he persisted and that chance favoured him, for he certainly has talent in abundance.
Spinning around in space, Kepler, the telescope launched in March this year to go and seek out extrasolar planets, is working just fine. And to prove it, the researchers running the mission have a paper in Science.
The data was all taken during ten days of the craft’s commissioning phase, and shows that it is sensitive to measuring the atmosphere of planets around other stars. There are the pictures – light curves of the planet HAT-P-7b, a planet about 1000 light years away from us. The measurements mean that Kepler can do what it set out to do – and that is to see a planet transiting, or passing in front of its star (MIT press release).
This bodes well for the future of the mission, and maybe, just maybe, it will bring us news of another world like ours before the year is out.
The University of California has agreed to lend the Golden State nearly $200 million for the state to give back to the university at a premium.
Confused? Read on.
California is in quite a state. The spiraling budget crisis has forced the state government to make huge cuts, including hacking $2 billion in funding to the campuses of the University of California (UC), California State University, and community colleges. The UC — the best public higher education system in the world, according to rankings by China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University — alone took a $813 million hit. To plug the gap, the cash-strapped university raised tuition fees, slashed enrollment, reduced course options, and introduced mandatory unpaid furlough days for its employees.
But as bad as things are, they could be worse. Just ask Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unable to borrow money by selling bonds, his government's credit rating has plummeted well below that of the UC's. So the university plans to borrow $199.8-million that it will then offer the California taxpayers for the state to lend back at 3.2% interest over the next three years. This will allow the universities to restart stalled building projects at eight of its 10 campuses and the state to get its money at a better rate than it would on the open market, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Continue reading "A creative fix for the University of California's budget woes" »
The US Geological Survey released an updated report yesterday on three glaciers which it’s tracked since 1957. Unsurprisingly, it was bad news all round.
Gulkana and Wolverine, in Alaska, and South Cascade, in Washington, are ‘benchmark’ glaciers – the poster boys representing the trends of many other US glaciers. The South Cascade Glacier has lost nearly half of its volume and a quarter of its mass since 1958. The two others in the study, the Wolverine and Gulkana glaciers in Alaska, have both lost nearly 15% of their mass. (LA Times).
"All three of them have a different climate from the other two, yet all three are showing a similar pattern of behaviour, and that behaviour is mass loss," said Shad O'Neel, a USGS glaciologist in Anchorage (Reuters).
What ‘s more, the rate at which they’re losing mass and volume thanks to melting ice has only increased over the last 15 years. In the 1970s and before, the maritime glaciers gained or lost net mass in synchrony with the oscillations of Pacific ocean surface temperatures and pressures. Now, it’s a straight dwindling for all three.
“There is no doubt that most mountain glaciers are shrinking worldwide in response to a warming climate,” added USGS scientist Edward Josberger, in a statement put out by the Department of the Interior.
Image: Retreat of South Cascade Glacier, Washington/USGS
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
Rooks can figure out how to use tools to get the food floating at the bottom of a long tube, just like their relative does in Aesop’s ancient fable The Crow and the Pitcher, according to a new study published in Current Biology. Zoologists report that rooks, which do not usually use tools in the wild, were able to size up the problem and solve it by using stones as tools.
The experiments echo Aesop’s fable, published more than 2,000 years ago, where a crow drops stones into a pitcher to raise the water level so it can quench its thirst. The experiment here involved a bird figuring out how to get to its favourite food item – the larvae of a wax moth, because the researchers couldn’t deprive the birds of water for ethical reasons.
Nathan Emery, co-author of the paper, from Queen Mary University of London, said: "The rooks have to put multiple stones in the tube until the worm floats to the top." And when they were presented with rocks of different sizes, they went for the larger ones that get the worm out quicker. "They are being as efficient as possible," Emery told the BBC.
Emery’s co-author is the appropriately named Christopher Bird, who has previously featured on the Great Beyond for his 2008 paper ‘Using video playback to investigate the social preferences of rooks’.
This study adds to the growing evidence that corvids, like great apes, have evolved a problem-solving intelligence requiring a general understanding of physical rules.
More videos below the fold.
Denial, mistrust and uncertainty are among the key psychological reasons that the American public is still resistant to serious action on climate change, according to psychologists.
A task force set up by an American Psychyological Association has been looking at the ‘psychological barriers’ to action on climate change and has presented its findings at the APA’s annual meeting in Toronto.
“What is unique about current global climate change is the role of human behaviour,” says task force head Janet Swim, Pennsylvania State University (press release, report pdf). “We must look at the reasons people are not acting in order to understand how to get people to act.”
The itch without the pain
A special set of neurons may be dedicated to sensing itchiness.
New site for Berkeley energy institute
Environmental campaigners force a change of plan for Californian University.
Presidential panel narrows NASA's options
Augustine commission outlines seven key scenarios for space exploration.
“I can say that as a Chinese, there is no one in the world who hopes more sincerely than we ourselves to see China's emissions peak as early as possible. Because this is in the Chinese national interest, and it is also in the interest of the people of the world.”
Yu Qingtai, China’s special representative for climate change talks, comments on emissions cuts (Financial Times).
“It’s pretty discouraging. It raises serious issues about how widespread this could be.”
Arnold Kriegstein of the University of California, San Francisco, comments on an inquiry opened by the the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis regarding questions over papers published by researchers at its Stem Cell Institute (New Scientist).
“But we can be pretty sure of something: someone in Merck's legal department has had a very bad day of it within the past couple of weeks…”
Chemist Derek Lowe comments on the fact that a patent filed by Merck was released into the world with legal department comments that should have been kept secret (In the Pipeline blog).
UPDATED 6/8/09 – Since this post was originally published, another grave belonging to a member of Novartis Chief Executive Daniel Vasella’s family has been desecrated (Reuters).
“There have been a series of terrorist-like attacks on individuals and company buildings. Last week, the graves of [Novartis CEO Daniel] Vasella’s parents were desecrated and the urn with the ashes of his mother was stolen,” a company spokesman told Reuters.
This is not the first time animal activists have resorted to grave robbing in support of their utterly moronic campaign. In 2004 the owners of a guinea pig farm had the body of a relative exhumed and stolen. It was later recovered.
According to the new reports, Vasella has also seen his hunting lodge in Austria burned down by those who want his company to sever ties with the company Huntingdon Life Sciences. Activists have sprayed “Drop HLS Now” on gravestones (AP).
A Novartis spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal the company “does not work with HLS and has not for many years”.
“It is important that people realize that it is not possible to discover novel products...which save thousands of human lives every year without some use of animal data, which is required by regulatory authorities,” she added.
Swiss newspaper Blick has a number of disturbing stories about these attacks on Novartis employees and other incidents.
US plans to build a new all-singing, all-dancing dangerous-pathogens lab suffered a slight setback last week, with a report from the Government Accountability Office saying the risks of building a biosafety level-four facility on the mainland haven’t been adequately looked at.
But there is still no place for poor old Plum Island, New York, in government research plans. Plum Island currently hosts a relatively small bio-safety level three research facility. As the government wants a new, huge level four-rated set of labs, Plum Island is up for sale.
“My hope of hopes is that it continues to be used as a Biolevel-3 facility. It has all of the infrastructure to support research - perhaps we could get a university program over there,” local official Scott Russell said recently (Northfork.com). “But I can’t suggest that my idea is anything but a pipe dream.”
All this leads The Scientist to suggest that anyone looking for a nice property near the Hamptons should consider the island. One recent valuation puts the property’s worth at about $2 million.
But what else could you do with the site? The Great Beyond presents: 101 uses for a Plum Island.
Chinese state media reported on Wednesday that the chief of China’s civilian and military nuclear programmes has been placed under investigation for alleged “grave violations of discipline”.
That usually means corruption, in the language of the Communist Party’s Central Committee for Discipline Inspection.
Kang Rixin, 56, is president of the state-owned China National Nuclear Corp., which is the country’s largest nuclear power developer and operator. It is responsible for nuclear power generation, nuclear weapons production, uranium mining, and nuclear waste disposal, and also conducts research and development.
Billions are currently being spent on China’s nuclear industry. It has six nuclear power plants – all on the coast – and plans to build five more this year (The Guardian).
The Wall Street Journal notes that the investigation into Kang is the latest in a high-profile crackdown on government and corporate corruption, ahead of China's 60th anniversary in October.
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
Pterosaurs may have been able to fly just as well as birds, thanks to their complex wing fibres, according to a paper published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
An international team of scientists used a new technique involving shinning ultra-violet light on fossils of the pterosaur Jeholopterus ningchengensis to study in detail the fossilised tissue structure. They found that their wings contained several layers of fibres to control movement, and not just a single layer as previously thought.
“The configuration observed in Jeholopterus might have allowed subtle changes in the membrane tension during flight, resulting in more control of flight movements,” write the authors in their paper.
They also found that hair-like fibres covered pterosaurs’ body and wings. “They are different from other furs we find in mammals and they provide us another hint that these animals were able to control their body temperature, they were hot-blooded animals,” says Alexander Kellner, a palaeontologist at Brazil's National Museum in Rio (Reuters).
The finer aspects of pterosaur flight are still a mystery. Some of these animals weighted 250kg and scientists have previously suggested they had to run on all four legs to get off the ground. Others were tiny creatures (with wing span of just 25 cm), likely living in trees and hanging on with their claws.
But new fossils of pterosaurs are still being found (http://blogs.nature.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi) and although some have already inspired biomechanical flying robots it looks like we’ve still got a lot to learn about these extinct animals.
Image: Jeholopterus ningchengensis under natural and UV light / Xiaolin Wang
The complex shapes that the HIV genome twists itself into have been totally mapped by the first time by a team of US researchers.
RNA viruses such as HIV like to fold themselves up and a proper picture of the shapes they form has been lacking, with researchers generally confining themselves to looking at small sections. In this week’s Nature, Joseph Watts, of the University of North Carolina, and his colleagues set out to look at the bigger picture.
In a News and Views article accompanying the research paper, Hashim Al-Hashimi of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, notes that structural biologists usually “cut out” the motifs formed by RNA and then “zoom in to determine their three-dimensional structures in an attempt to further understand their function. … However, Watts et al. zoom out and provide an ‘aerial view’ of the secondary structure of the entire HIV-1 genome.”
What they produced is, in Wired’s words, “the cellular equivalent of a rough wiring diagram”.
“What this may reveal is some of the proteins operating at a level below the structures, which may have all sorts of functions within the virus,” says David Robertson, of the University of Manchester (BBC). “More generally, if we can unpick the structures then we can compare the systems of different viruses and gain new understanding of how they work.”
Study author Kevin Weeks says the technique used here with HIV could also be applied to other virus such as influenza and might open up new opportunities for drug treatments (press release).
Stimulus money unveiled for green cars
But a boost for established manufacturers leaves innovative companies out in the cold, critics say.
Crystals grown in a flash
A nanopulse of laser light is enough to trigger crystallization.
Who speaks for science in Europe? - Premium content
Questions remain over whether researchers have a coherent enough voice to influence European science policy. Natasha Gilbert reports.
This week South Korea sketched out several options for reducing greenhouse gases in the coming decade, inching closer to a national commitment before the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen this December.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, only industrialized "Annex I" nations were required to take on specific emissions targets.
Seoul has already announced massive investments in clean energy technologies, earning a place among a core group of developing nations that are taking significant action to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. If it moves forward, South Korea would join the ranks of Mexico, South Africa and Brazil in volunteering quantifiable pledges as world leaders negotiate a follow-on treaty.
Government officials say they are considering three emissions trajectories for 2020, all using a 2005 baseline: an 8 percent increase, a return to the 2005 level or a 4 percent decrease; that compares to a projected 30 percent increase under a "business-as-usual" scenario. The 2005 baseline is revealing because South Korea's emissions have increased by 95 percent since 1990, the baseline used in the Kyoto Protocol, according to the World Resources Institute in Washington.
Compared to a 1990 baseline, the proposals seem decidedly less ambitious, and the government has not spelled out exactly how it plans to meet such a commitment. Nonetheless, says Remi Moncel, an energy and climate expert at the institute, "it’s a good sign of leadership from a developing country."
When astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper lost her toolbag while working outside the International Space Station last year she must have known it might return to haunt her.
Now it has: the $100,000 bag likely met a fiery death up in the atmosphere on Monday, according to the US Air Force's Joint Space Operations Center.
"Based on its size and composition, we expect the object to completely burn up before hitting the Earth," officials said (Space.com).
On ABC News, Ned Potter writes:
Astronaut Heidimarie Stefanyshyn-Piper may accidentally have committed the most high-tech act of littering in history. But the Earth's atmosphere has cleaned up after her.
Image: the toolbag drifts away in November 2008 / NASA
Wyeth, maker of the leading drugs for hormone replacement therapy, paid ghostwriters to help produce scientific papers lauding, yes, hormone replacement therapy, reports the NY Times.
The scandal’s been brewing since late 2008, when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) started prodding the company to cough up documents detailing its relationship with medical-writing company DesignWrite Inc. On 27 July, upon request from PLoS Medicine and the New York Times Company, a federal judge ordered the public release of the records, effective 31 July.
The NYTimes says the documents show that, between 1998 and 2005, Wyeth paid DesignWrite to help produce 26 scientific papers that “emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks” of hormone replacement therapy. The articles "were typically review articles, in which an author weighs a large body of medical research and offers a bottom-line judgment about how to treat a particular ailment".
Continue reading "Wyeth's ghostwriting skeletons yanked from the closet" »
It’s every American energy analyst’s favourite parlour game: how much is the climate bill currently moving through the US Senate going to cost the national economy?
"We can move to a clean energy future at a cost of less than a postage stamp per family per day," said energy secretary Steven Chu on the latest estimates from the Energy Information Administration (which provides statistics and analysis for the Department of Energy).
The EIA said the measures – due to higher energy costs – would reduce household consumption between $26 and $362 annually (7-99 cents a day) by 2020; and between $157 and $850 annually by 2030.
Chu also pulled out the trusty postage-stamp line after earlier reports by the Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency. The CBO reckons that implementing the legislation would cost US families an average $175 a year (48 cents a day); the EPA goes for between $80 and $111 a year on average.
Meanwhile, studies by the Heritage Foundation have projected that the average family’s energy bill would rise $1,241 a year by 2035 – there are also plenty more numbers in that range from groups such as the American Petroleum Institute and consultants CRA International.
The analyses don't pick up all the savings enabled by the bill such as through energy-efficiency regulations. (The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has tagged these per household at $750 annually by 2020 and $3,900 annually by 2030.)
Most of the low estimates assume that US factories will be able to meet their bill-imposed carbon emission limits by paying foreign governments – cheaply – to offset their emissions. The higher estimates generally predict that won’t happen. A 26 June article in the New York Times sums up the “quagmire” of “dartboard projections”: “There are too many critical unknowns in the equation, from the amount of forest land in developing nations that the United States can ransom from clear-cutting to the costs and timing of massive investments to capture and store coal-fired power plant carbon emissions.”
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
Arachnophobes may want to think twice before checking out the new 3D models of “scary ancient spiders” released today.
Russell Garwood, of Imperial College London, and his colleagues, used a new technique called high-resolution X-ray micro-tomography to scan two fossilised specimens of 300 million old arachnids called Cryptomartus hindi and Eophrynus prestvicii to produce the 3D computer models of what these creatures would have looked like. The aim of their study, soon to be published in Biology Letters, was to use the physical traits of these extinct animals to reveal how they lived (press release).
For example, from seeing that C. hindi's first two legs were angled towards the front of the body, they deduced that it used these limbs to grab prey, suggesting it was an ambush predator. It may have been much like modern day crab spiders, which wait for insect prey at the edge of the flowers before grabbing them with similarly positioned legs.
The study also indicates that many of the morphological features seen in these ancient animals still exist in modern day relatives and some could even be used to provide evidence for evolutionary relatedness of some of these organisms. This new X-ray technique could be used to re-analyse already studied fossils to provide a clearer picture of how ancient extinct species lived and has “the potential … to revolutionise the study” of many fossils, Garwood’s team write.
Image: Cryptomartus hindi / Natural History Museum and Imperial College London
Drowned tundra emits more carbon
Work in Alaska looks at life in a warmer, wetter world.
Greek scientists fight research shake-up
Protests greet plans to dismantle multidisciplinary institutions.
Grant scores leave applicants in limbo
Top-rated research must wait until September for NIH funding decision.
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.
More sad news regarding swine flu spread today, with the first deaths in India and Sub-Saharan Africa confirmed.
India’s health ministry has confirmed that one patient with H1N1 has died in the city of Pune. According to news sources in the country 14-year old Rida Shaikh died at the Jehangir Hospital two weeks after contracting swine flu. Her family are now threatening to sue the hospital, with some reports alleging there were delays in diagnosis (Indian Express, Times of India, Voice of America).
South Africa has also confirmed the first death from swine flu in that country, a 22 year old university student who died on the 28 July.
In Europe a Russian health official has blamed the UK for being the source of most of Russia’s swine flu and said it is “absolutely inappropriate” for Russian citizens to travel there (Times).
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NASA’s Opportunity rover has discovered what appears to be the largest meteorite ever found on Mars. Dubbed ‘Block Island’ the rock measures 60 cm across (press release).
Opportunity first stumbled across the rock on 18 July, before snapping pictures to send to Earth and motoring calmly on. "The images came down after we had already passed," says planetary scientist Albert Yen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (Space.com).
Scientists then instructed the rover, which was on its way to examine Endeavour Crater some 15km away, to backtrack and have a closer look.
Using its onboard spectrometer to assess the rock's chemical composition, Opportunity confirmed the rock was indeed a meteorite, probably a fragment of the rock responsible for blasting out the 800m wide Victoria Crater Opportunity had been exploring for a year until it climbed out last August.
Investigating such meteorites may help scientists better understand the asteroid belt, as well as providing clues about climate on Mars; signs of weathering, including rust, could provide important clues to the presence of liquid water. Using the size of the meteorite in models could also shine light on the Red Planet’s atmosphere at the time of the impact.
"We didn't drive Opportunity to Endeavour Crater to find meteorites, but we found one that's pretty darn big," Ray Arvidson, a member of the rover team from the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri told New Scientist. "It might tell us more about the meteorite, and more importantly, it might tell us more about Mars."
Image: close up image of "Block Island" taken on July 28 / NASA/JPL-Caltech
"Compared with developed countries, the targets may look mild. But these are utmost, sincere efforts, reflecting Korea's capabilities."
Sang-hyup Kim, secretary to the president for national future and vision at the presidential office in South Korea, comments on his government's decision to choose one of three options for a 2020 carbon emissions target - either slightly above, level with, or below 2005 levels (Reuters India).
"Like grabbing the tail of a tiger, the IPCC has gotten the world’s attention, but now the challenge is to get the tiger to head in the right direction."
Michael MacCracken, a report contributor to the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), adds his views to an article on whether the organisation is losing its Nobel halo (Andy Revkin, New York Times).
"People are going to have to be more careful out here, because it if keeps getting damaged, we're going to lose it."
Laura Thielen, chairwoman of Hawaii's state Board of Land and Natural Resources, justifies its decision to fine tour companies - and to sue the US Navy - when their boats injure coral. One Maui tour company will pay the state more than $400,000 for a sunken boat (AP).
Posted for Mico Tatalovic
Malaria was originally a chimp disease that jumped to humans sometime between 3 million and 10,000 years ago, a new study suggests. This cross from chimps to humans might even have been down to a single infected mosquito.
Of the 500 million people malaria infects each year, 85% of cases are down to the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, whose closest known relative is a chimpanzee parasite Plasmodium reichenowi. Until now scientists thought that both parasites evolved from a common ancestor that then diverged separately into human and chimp lineages (press release).
In the new study, published in PNAS, researchers analysed genes from eight new strains of P. reichenowi, from wild and wild-born captive chimpanzees in Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire, and compared them to human P. falciparum. They found that human malaria descended directly from the chimp malaria, and that this jump likely happened only once. A lack of genetic variations between different examples of the human parasite further suggests the species barrier could have been crossed as recently as 10,000 years ago.
"For me, this is the microbiological equivalent of discovering the origins of HIV," says study author Nathan Wolfe, of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (CNN). "It jumped over just like SARS did, just like avian flu did, just like HIV did. What is really crucial, what is significant, is it continuing to jump over?"
Human agriculture and closer contact with wild animals as agriculture impinges on the wild habitats can create conditions for a species jump.
"Today, human encroachment into the last forest habitats has further extended, leading to a higher risk of transfer of new pathogens, including new malaria parasites" Wolfe says. "What this finding demonstrates is that the kinds of jumps we're having right now—HIV, SARS, etc.—could very well be the beginning of something that lasts for thousands of years." [BBC, National Geographic]
As if to back up Wolfe’s warning, the first case of a new strain of HIV was recently reported, this time found to come from gorillas.
Image: Nathan Wolfe, Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.
The spread of pneumonic plague in a remote part of China has been gathering huge amounts of press coverage since Beijing notified the World Health Organization of the outbreak on Saturday 1 August.
The town of Ziketan and the surrounding part of Qinghai province has been quarantined, with three deaths now confirmed (see AP).
Pneumonic plague is a lung disease caused by the same bacterium, Yersinia pestis as bubonic plague, believed to be the bug behind the Black Death which killed about half of Europe’s population in the 14th century.
"This is not new," Beijing-based WHO spokeswoman Vivian Tan told Reuters. "There have been sporadic cases reported [in China] over the years. We're not surprised that it's come up. We're in constant contact with the authorities to make sure things are under control."
One reason for the rash of stories may simply be that the Chinese authorities are being much more open about how they are handling the situation than in the past, suggests the BBC’s correspondent in Beijing, Michael Bristow.
Meanwhile, the Times points out that untreated pneumonic plague has a mortality rate of almost 100%.
And although plague may sound like something from the Dark Ages, 2,118 cases worldwide were reported to WHO in 2003, more than 90 per cent of them in Africa.
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They went to war over Himalayan territory in 1962, but India and China are now set to work together to save the mountain range’s glaciers, which are crucial to both countries’ water supplies.
“We are talking to the Chinese about monitoring the Himalayan glaciers,” Jairam Ramesh, Indian environment minister has told the Financial Times. But he also warned that India would not allow Chinese scientists “to climb all over India’s glaciers”. Instead Ramesh wants a collaborative research programme.
As they are of strategic military importance, countries have been secretive about information regarding their parts of Himalayas. Pakistan considers all aerial photos from the area to be state secrets and India is wary of sharing any oceanographic and land-survey data with Pakistan.
Such policies have made the state of Himalayan glaciers “a blind spot, a big scientific question mark”, geographer Mats Eriksson, programme manager for water and hazard management at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development based in Kathmandu, told Nature back in 2008.
Eriksson helped organize a three-day international workshop in 2008 bringing together Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan in a collaborative effort to map glacial retreat in the area.
Now the FT reports that Ramesh is visiting China this month to strike a deal with Beijing ahead of the Copenhagen talks on climate change in December. However the paper also reports that India is skeptical about scientific claims that climate change is melting the region’s glaciers.
Image: "Glacier trails in the Ladokh and Zaskar Ranges (32.0N, 77.5E) of the Great Himalayan Mountain Range on the border of India and China" / NASA
According those ever-loquacious unnamed ‘intelligence sources’, Iran could have a nuclear bomb within a year.
Speaking this time to The Times, the sources say Iran’s nuclear scientists are merely waiting on their country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to give the word.
“If the Supreme Leader takes the decision, we assess they have to enrich low-enriched uranium to highly-enriched uranium at the Natanz plant, which could take six months, depending on how many centrifuges are operating. We don’t know if the decision was made yet,” they told the Times.
After enrichment it would take another six months to assemble a warhead, says the paper.
“People who study diet and evolution have pointed out most of the high sugar–containing plants like sugarcane are tropical plants. So in northerly latitudes, you have to be more sensitive to sugar to find calories.”
Dennis Drayna, of US national deafness institute, explains his research showing that those with European relatives are more sensitive to sweet tastes (ScienceNOW).
“It’s astounding. At first, we couldn’t believe the numbers. I think it’s very worrisome.”
Michal Melamed, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, comments on research showing that 7.6 million children and young people in the US are deficient in Vitamin D (Washington Post).
“Bad body odour will affect fellow colleagues in the narrow confines of a space shuttle.”
Shi Bing Bing, a doctor at the 454th Air Force Hospital in Nanjing, explains why one of the rules for would-be Chinese astronauts bans body odour. Others ban bad breath and scars, which “might burst and bleed when spaceships are accelerating” (BBC, Xinhua).
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin appears to have developed a taste for marine science. In the last week he has assisted a whale research project and taken a spin around the bottom of the world’s deepest lake, according to state news source RIA Novosti.
On Friday he paid a visit on scientists researching whale behaviour and migration and affixed a satellite transmitter to a “white whale named Dasha”, likely a Beluga. Putin apparently expressed concern that Dasha might eat him.
“She won’t eat us but could splash us with cold water,” he was told. “Probably if she gets angry,” said Putin, before adding after attaching the transmitter, “Don’t be angry anymore.”
On Saturday Putin spent four hours in a Mir submarine diving in Lake Baikal. Speaking to journalists from under the lake’s surface he expressed surprise at the water’s lack of clarity (story, picture here).
“The water, of course, is clean from an ecological point of view but in fact it’s a plankton soup, or so I called it,” he said (AFP).
Asked if he would now be going into space Putin echoed the feelings of many marine scientists in saying, “There’s enough work on Earth.” (Guardian.)
Image: Lake Baikal / NASA
A new form of HIV from gorillas has been identified in a woman from Cameroon.
The 62-year old woman, who is now living in Paris, appears to have a new human lineage of HIV virus type 1 and is the first definite human infection of HIV-1 from a non-chimpanzee ape source.
Jean-Christophe Plantier, of the University of Rouen in France, and his colleagues found the new virus to be highly similar to gorilla simian immunodeficiency virus but not to have undergone recombination with chimpanzee SIV. They propose the new lineage be labelled P as it is distinct from the currently known types M, O, and N.
“Our findings indicate that gorillas, in addition to chimpanzees, are likely sources of HIV-1,” write the authors in Nature Medicine (paper, press release). “The discovery of this novel HIV-1 lineage highlights the continuing need to watch closely for the emergence of new HIV variants, particularly in western central Africa, the origin of all existing HIV-1 groups.”
The current prevalence of the new HIV in humans is unknown. The researchers say that the woman detailed in the new paper currently shows no signs of AIDS and probably caught the virus from another person as she has not had contact with apes or bushmeat (AP, Reuters).
Paul Sharp, of the University of Edinburgh, believes the new strain probably transferred from chimpanzees to gorillas before arriving in humans. He also says it will probably not spread widely, which is fortunate as he adds, “the medical implication is that, because this virus is not very closely related to the other three HIV-1 groups, it is not detected by conventional test” (BBC).
Image: computer model of HIV by Richard Feldmann / NIH
