The Great Beyond

Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

Seven months after signing into law $10.4 billion in economic stimulus funding for the National Institutes of Health, President Barack Obama visited the Bethesda-based biomedical agency today to announce that...$5 billion of the money has been spent.

Coming as it did on the last day of the government’s 2009 fiscal year, this “major Recovery Act announcement,” as billed by the White House, was in fact considerable testimony to the speed with which the huge agency can shovel money out the door when the pressure is on. After all, only nine days ago, according to the calculations of Patrick Clemins at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a mere $2.67 billion of the windfall had been spent. (All of it needs to be disbursed by one year from today, when the government’s 2010 fiscal year ends.)

The president was received with great enthusiasm by a crowd of several hundred gathered in a packed auditorium at NIH’s Clinical Center, many of whom (this reporter included) had waited 2.5 hours to hear a 15-minute speech in which Obama proclaimed the stimulus funds “the single largest boost to biomedical research in history.”

Continue reading "Obama visits Bethesda for stimulus announcement" »

Posted by Alex Witze
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An earthquake in Indonesia has killed at least 75 people and trapped several thousand under collapsed buildings.

The United States Geological Survey recorded a 7.6 magnitude quake at 10:16 UTC, followed by a 5.5 magnitude quake at 10:38 UTC.

The epicentre of the first was 45 km west-northwest of Padang in Indonesia while the second was 40 km northwest of Padang says the USGS.

“This is a high-scale disaster, more powerful than the earthquake in Yogyakarta in 2006 when more than 3,000 people died,” says the country’s health minister Siti Fadilah Supari (MetroTV via AP).

A number of news sources say 75 people have died and more deaths are expected to be reported as thousands are missing in collapsed buildings.

A tsunami warning for the earthquake has been cancelled.

Image: USGS shake map, key below.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Many Tyrannosaurus rex may have been laid low by a single celled parasite that is still taking down modern birds.

Many tyrannosaurid fossils have multiple smooth holes in their mandibles. These have generally been attributed to either bacterial bone infection or bite wounds.

Now a study published in PLOS One instead points the finger at the trichomonosis parasite. By comparing the lesions seen in fossil dinos to those caused by modern bird maladies and crocodile pox the research team concludes tyrannosaurs were commonly infected with a trichomonas type protozoa.

The population probably became infected through consumption of infected prey, or even through cannibalism, write Ewan Wolff, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and colleagues.

Perhaps the most famous victim may have been ‘Sue’, the huge T. rex now on display at the Field Museum in Chicago. “The lesions we observe on Sue suggest a very advanced stage of the disease and may even have been the cause of her demise,” says Wolff (press release).

“It is a distinct possibility as it would have made feeding incredibly difficult. You have to have a viable pharynx. Without that, you won't make it for very long, no matter how powerful you are.”

Field Museum palaeontologist Peter Makovicky told the Chicago Tribune. “It ... reinforces what I and many others thought, that [the jawbone holes] were the result of some kind of pathogen.

He adds, “The problem with ... making a diagnosis of an animal that old is that we know she had many things going wrong with her health. [Sue] was old and beat up, with a large lesion on her left leg that may have slowed her. She could have died simply of old age or had been so weakened by age or injury that some other disease took over.”

Image: artist’s impression of a T. rex suffering from a trichomonosis / Chris Glen, University of Queensland

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Two more journals, Springer's Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology and the Taiwanese Journal of Mechanics, have told Nature that they intend to retract, on grounds of plagiarism, papers co-authored by Iran's science and education minister Kamran Daneshjou, a professor in the school of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science & Technology (IUST) in Tehran, and his colleague. This follows an investigation by Nature published online this afternoon.

Springer had already indicated last week that they would retract another paper by the same coauthors after Nature drew attention to duplications of the text and figures from an earlier paper by Korean researchers.

Before being appointed science minister in early September, Daneshjou was also head of the interior ministry office overseeing the disputed presidential elections in June that kept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power. This week's story in Nature also calls into question a paper coauthored by Hamid Behbahani, Iran's transport minister.

Meanwhile, visits by Daneshjou to Tehran University on Monday, and Sharif University yesterday, for the start of the academic year, were met with protests by students. Radio Free Europe reported:

"The student said classmates brandished copies of "Nature" magazine, the publication that recently highlighted apparent plagiarism in an article coauthored by Daneshjou. Chants rang out of "Daneshjou the Liar, where are your articles?"

Posted by Declan Butler
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Cellulosic ethanol hits roadblocks - Premium content
How the financial crisis is slowing efforts to commercialize next-generation ethanol.

Climate change will hit developing world harvests hardest
Report quantifies link between global warming and food security.

Exclusive: Iranian ministers in plagiarism row
Nature investigation reveals duplications in papers by science and transport chiefs.

Chinese dam may be a methane menace
Wetlands around Three Gorges produce tonnes of the greenhouse gas.

US agriculture research gets priority plan - Premium content
Federal restructuring aims to lessen the influence of pork-barrel politics.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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First, the good news: A new report cataloguing all the known plants and animals boosts the number of species known to science to 1.9 million — a rise of 114,000 compared to a study published three years ago.

Now, the bad news: A new report cataloguing all the known plants and animals found that almost 10% of all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish are at risk of extinction.

The publication, Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World released by the Australian Biological Resources Study, was part of a major project to document the entire planet's biodiversity.

Continue reading "Mo' species mo' problems" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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Augustus Bozzi Granville’s sensational autopsy of an Egyptian mummy, a study that he presented to Britain’s Royal Society in 1825, was a trail-blazing first in the field, which laid the foundations for the scientific study of ancient mummies. But his conclusion – that the mummy died of ovarian cancer – was wrong, according to a follow-up analysis performed by researchers at University College London (Proc. R. Soc. B, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1484).

Granville did correctly identify a tumour in the unfortunate woman, named Irtyersenu, who died aged 50 in Thebes around 600 BC. But studies in 1976 and 2000 suggest that this tumour was benign. Instead, Irtyersenu likely died of tuberculosis, say Helen Donoghue and her fellow researchers.

New Scientist notes that because the mummy is covered with a waxy substance, it has been particularly hard to extract DNA from. Nonetheless, the team found DNA from Mycobacterium tuberculosis in tissue from the lungs, bone and gall bladder, and also spotted acids specific to that bacterium’s cell wall in lung tissue and thigh bones.

The new findings don’t overshadow Granville’s achievement, Donoghue tells the BBC. “He was remarkably careful and thorough. It was the first time anybody had tried to do a medical autopsy on an Egyptian mummy. Before that it was all about their entertainment value - it was a bit like a circus - and most of the interest was in the jewellery that was wrapped up in the bandages."

More coverage:

“TB the culprit in the great mummy whodunit” (AP)
“Dr Granville’s mummy was killed by TB, not a tumour, researchers reveal” (The Times)
“Fresh autopsy of Egyptian mummy shows cause of death was TB not cancer” (The Guardian)

Image credit Royal Society

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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An independent study by researchers at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has confirmed higher rates of dementia amongst professional (American) football players. The study was commissioned by the National Football League (NFL), which has denied a clear link in the past. The New York Times has a great story on it, here's the bottom line:

Former players between 30 and 49 are 19 times more likely to develop memory-related diseases, including Alzheimer's. Retired players ages 50 or higher appear to suffer these diseases at five times the national average. The study was not peer-reviewed but it appears to match similar findings on the effects of workplace head injuries.

More importantly, it contrasts sharply with previous studies commissioned by the league, including the work of the NFL's concussions committee, which has denied a connection between the sport and dementia.

That's not to say this is the final word on the matter. The study has come under some criticism for using phone surveys to diagnose patients. It contacted 1,063 players and caretakers and asked them questions about a variety of health-related topics, including whether they suffered from memory related diseases. Many of the researchers contacted by the Times said that it would have to be followed up with a more rigorous study.

Credit: USAF

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Not so much following hot on the heels of the recent study on the spread of zombie infections, more shambling slowly and slightly aimlessly in pursuit, we have some new undead science for you.

But Davide Cassi, a physicist at the Università di Parma in Italy, might be slightly surprised to read this morning that he has published a paper about zombies. Cassi’s paper in Physical Review E – entitled Target annihilation by diffusing particles in inhomogeneous geometries – is actually about how long immobile targets will survive when they are being annihilated by “a population of random walkers”.

As he notes, this is of use to researchers exploring subjects such as how surface catalysts become ‘poisoned’ by molecules attaching to the catalysis sites (where your ‘immobile target’ is the catalyst site and your ‘random walker’ is the molecule sticking to it and not letting go).

This paper has now been press released with a zombie spin:

Though the paper itself does not specifically refer to fleeing from zombies, it describes "the survival probability of immobile targets annihilated by random walkers." The conclusions suggest that the people trapped in a mall in "Dawn of the Dead" may be better off than the folks stuck in a farmhouse in "Night of the Living Dead."

This is something of a stretch. First, it assumes that the potential zombie victim is immobile. Second, it assumes the zombies are engaging in a random walk, rather than their more normal behaviour of pursuing directly their next tasty brain. In other words, it’s rather reminiscent of the old joke about physicists assisting with milk production.

Still, if you happen to be chained to a wall and surrounded by randomly walking zombie you should hide in the mall not the farmhouse. Oh wait, you can’t get there: you’re chained to a wall.

Image: Mark Marek Photography.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Quirin Schiermeier and David Cyranoski

A massive earthquake triggered a tsunami that has devastated Samoa and American Samoa killing dozens and perhaps hundreds.

The earthquake, which the Japanese Meteorological Agency measured as a magnitude 8.3, struck at 6:48 local time at a reported depth of 32 kilometres and a distance of 190 kilometres from the Samoan islands. But most of the damage came with the tsunami waves, measuring up to 6 metres in American Samoa, that hit shore shortly afterwards.

Residents in Samoa complained of having little or no warning, some saying they only had 3 minutes. Tide gage records indicate the waves arrived in Pago Pago 8 minutes after the initial warning was issued and in Apia 28 minutes after the warning was issued.

“Clearly, there was very little time for evacuations,” says Costas Synolakis, a tsunami specialist at the University of South California in Los Angeles.

“What is abundantly clear once again is how important public education is for communities at risk, that strong ground shaking IS the warning to evacuate to high ground. The shaking lasted for at least 3 minutes.

“Our mantra is to evacuate if on the coast and if feeling an earthquake that lasts more than 30 seconds, only it is very, very hard to convince local officials to implement public education campaigns, particularly if there hasn’t been a strong event in living memory. With self-evacuation without waiting for warnings, many lives would had been spared.”

Continue reading "Hundreds feared dead after Pacific tsunami" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Climate sizzle could come soon
UK researchers predict 4 °C rise within decades.

Experts draw up ocean-drilling wish list
Researchers seek deeper understanding of crust formation.

Instant climate model gears up
Simulation tool gives rapid feedback on implications of policy changes.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The music just keeps on coming at the moment. From National Geographic via the always awesome Deep Sea News we encounter The Great White Shark Song, by the improbably named Andy Brandy Casagrande IV.

Mr, or should that be Dr, Casagrande assures us “if I were a great white I wouldn’t bite you”. He then goes on to detail how he would in fact bite you as he relates why Carcharodon carcharias might attack humans.

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science.

Continue reading "Songs about Science XXVIII: The Great White Shark Song" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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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.

The head of the UN’s climate change body has attempted to light a fire under international negotiators ahead of the Copenhagen summit.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told those at a meeting in Bangkok, Thailand they would have to speed up the current “painfully slow” negotiations.

“Time is not just pressing. It has almost run out,” he said (Reuters, AP).

The meeting is one of a number scheduled to attempt to thrash out a new international deal to replay the Kyoto treaty, in advance of Copenhagen. Tove Ryding of Greenpeace has a solution to slow progress, as told to Reuters: “What we need to see is late nights and fights. We need to see them sit there, that’s what these people do for a living, they need to smell like sweat and coffee. If they don’t do that, they’re not actually at work.”

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said world leaders had made progress on climate change at a recent meeting in New York. “All leaders said they wanted a deal and are prepared to work for it. This gives the negotiations vital political impetus,” he said (press release).

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

As the 2009 fiscal year comes to a close, the new director of the AAAS R&D budget and policy programme, Patrick Clemins, has put up a timely analysis of how three major science agencies -- DOE, NIH and NSF -- are doing spending the billions they were given in the Recovery Act funding associated with February's economic stimulus package.

Clemins identifies that, of $32.7 billion given to the DOE for everything from weatherization grants to 'smart grid' investment, the agency has only spent $11.2 billion. Within the DOE's office of science, however, the spending is almost complete: $1.3 billion of $1.6 billion has been spent.

At the NIH, $2.7 billion of $10.4 billion has been spent, while the NSF has spent $2.2 billion of its $3 billion in stimulus funding. The NSF seems faster than the NIH, Clemins says, because the NIH made the decision to spread the funding out over two fiscal years, 2009-2010, while the NSF was aiming to finish in one. "They [the NIH] are actually on schedule even though they appear behind the rest of them," says Clemins, who adds that another reason why the NIH is behind in spending is because it established more new grant programmes -- something that takes time -- while the NSF spent most of its money by simply increasing success rates for existing grant programmes.

Posted by Eric Hand
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UPDATE - 30/9:Caron Grainger, joint director of public health for NHS Coventry and Coventry City Council, has released the following statement: “The preliminary post mortem results have revealed a rare serious underlying medical condition which was likely to have caused death. We are awaiting further test results which will take some time. However indications are that it was most unlikely that the HPV vaccination was the cause of death.”

Natalie Morton died on Monday after receiving Cervarix at a school in Coventry.

“The incident happened shortly after the girl had received her HPV Vaccine in the school,” Caron Grainger, joint director of public health for NHS Coventry and Coventry City Council (press statements). “No link can be made between the death and the vaccine until all the facts are known and a post mortem takes place.”

Pim Kon, medical director of Cevarix-manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline, said the batch of vaccine used in this case had been quarantined as a precautionary measure. “We are working with the Department of Health and MHRA to better understand this case, as at this stage the exact cause of this tragic death is unknown,” says Kon (press release pdf).

Continue reading "New vaccine scare following UK death" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Cambridge University has unveiled a panorama of famous alumni commissioned from British illustrator Quentin Blake for its 800 year anniversary.

Blake, famous for his work on Roald Dahl’s books amongst other things, has incorporated a number of scientists into the ‘Cambridge Bayeux Tapestry’. Famous faces include Watson and Crick, Darwin and Newton, as well as other luminaries such as Oli Cromwell and Lord Byron.

“To me, this is a way of saying thank-you for my years as an undergraduate and the honorary degree that the University also gave me,” says Blake (press release). “I feel very privileged to have been given this opportunity to contribute to these 800th anniversary celebrations.”

You can’t please everyone though; the artwork has been criticised from some quarters for omitting Stephen Hawking. “I drew what I was asked to draw by the university,” says Blake (PA).

Now, given the rivalry between Cambridge and Oxford it is surely only a matter of time before the dons of the latter demand their own panorama. But who should they commission? Maybe Gerald Scarfe? Or they could go all out and get Ralph Steadman...

Below the fold: Watson, Crick and Franklin, and Newton and Milton.

Images: University of Cambridge

Continue reading "Quentin Blake’s Cambridge panorama" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Pop, pop, fizz, fizz -- oh, what a release it is.

Bubbles bursting from a glass of sparkling wine release sweet-smelling chemicals that hover above the liquid to tickle your nose as well as your tongue.

A team led by Gérard Liger-Belair, a chemist at the University of Reims in the Champagne region of France, naturally, analyzed the aerosols in champagne using ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry and discovered an abundance of double-ended, aromatic compounds that both cling to and repel water. These chemicals, called surfactants, are dragged upwards in the airy champagne bubbles and are released when the bubbles pop, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study authors argue that the surface of sparkling wine behaves much like the surface of the sea. "By drawing a parallel between the fizz of the ocean and the fizz in Champagne wines, our results closely link bursting bubbles and flavour release — supporting the idea rising and collapsing bubbles act as a continuous lift for aromas in every glass of champagne," Liger-Belair, the author of Uncorked: The Science of Champagne, told the Telegraph.

The New York Times, on the other hand, likens the aromatic uplift to an elevator.

Metaphors and analogies aside, the findings could have real implications for wine connoisseurs. "In the past, we thought that the carbon dioxide in the bubbles just gave the wine an acidic bite and a little tingle on the tongue, but this study shows that it is much more than this," Jamie Goode, founder of The Wine Anorak magazine, told BBC News. "Glasses that encourage more bubbles to come up are going to be better." So next time you crack open a bottle of bubbly, make sure you grab a fluted glass.

The Associated Press remarked that the Hawaiian singer Don Ho was on to something when he sang in his 1966 hit that "tiny bubbles in the wine make me feel happy, make me feel fine". You can watch him croon at the 2005 Pro Bowl in Honolulu, Hawaii, here:

Image by quinn.anya via flickr under Creative Commons

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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“From some sources we have learned that it is possible to extend the life of the shuttle beyond 2011. Then the situation would change substantially and it would be possible to work jointly with the Americans, unlike now, when the main burden lies with the Russian side.”
Russian space programme chief Anatoly Perminov says the US may be able to extend the space shuttle programme beyond 2011 in order to service the space station (RIA and Interfax, via Reuters).

“We continue to find new species of fish, primates and mammals, and nowhere else compares to the amount of large mammals that have been discovered in the region. It shows how little we know about species in the region.”
Barney Long, head of the WWF's Asian Species Conservation programme, comments on the discovery of over 160 new species in the Mekong region (CNN).

“Why visit Rome to see ruins or Egypt to see mere piles of stones called pyramids, yet you can go to Bwindi and see your next of kin?”
Uganda’s Minister of Tourism Kahinda Otafiire appeals to tourists to visit and see the country’s gorillas (AP).

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

The latest science song currently making electronic waves on the internet is this ditty, a mix of excerpts from the musings of astronomer and author Carl Sagan set over a downtempo backing track. ‘A Glorious Dawn’ even features a guest spot from Stephen Hawking.

Sadly (from this listener’s perspective) composer John Boswell has insisted on using that plague of modern pop music, the vocoder. Thus, Sagan is rendered sonically similar to Kermit the Frog. While this is not always bad, in this case I find it unnerving.

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science.

Continue reading "Songs about Science XXVII: sing a song of Sagan" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A massive earthquake that killed tens of thousands in the Chinese province of Sichuan last year was a “once in 4,000 years” event, according to a paper published in Nature Geoscience.

The Wenchuan quake in May 2008 “took the local population as well as scientists by surprise”, write Zheng-Kang Shen, of the State Key Laboratory of Earthquake Dynamics, and colleagues. “Although the Longmen Shan fault zone—which includes the fault segments along which this earthquake nucleated—was well known, geologic and geodetic data indicate relatively low deformation rates.”

However, by analysing GPS and radar data the researchers found that three different rock structures between different segments of the fault all failed one after another. “These connecting structures may represent barriers that rarely fail, and would fail only when high stress has accumulated after multiple rounds of smaller events broke the adjoining individual segments,” they write.

These three barrier regions corresponded to the areas of maximum damage at the towns of Yingxiu, Beichuan and Nanba. Such failures should only occur every 4,000 years, the team estimates.

“You really have to accumulate enough elastic energy to have them rupture through – but once rupture starts, it would rupture a series of barriers to get a cascade style,” lead author Shen told AP.

For more on the Sichuan quake, see Nature’s May 2009 news feature: The sleeping dragon.

Image: Alex Witze

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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German science is already feeling the impact of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s victory in the Sunday’s general election.

Merkel is abandoning her previous ‘grand coalition’ with the left-leaning Social Democratic Party and will instead form a government with the more right-of-centre Free Democratic Party.

Nature’s Quirin Schiermeier predicted on 23 September that a new coalition with the FDP could be on the cards, and noted it’s implications for German research:

[The Free Democrats] have a distinctly liberal approach in hot-button areas such as genetically modified crops and stem cells. … If the Free Democrats, led by Guido Westerwelle, succeed in becoming the new coalition partner, they may use their influence to reduce red tape and restrictions in ethically sensitive branches of science.

"The economic situation won't allow excessive increases in science budgets," says Ulrike Flach, the party's spokeswoman for science and technology. "But we are set to increase the general freedom to research, and ease existing restrictions to stem-cell research and genetic engineering."

Chancellor Merkel is a chemist by training, and her reign has been generally seen as pro-science.

Her re-election is already being credited with moving certain science-related markets. The expectation that the new government will back nuclear power and abandon plans to close many reactors sent utility company stocks up today. In contrast, solar power companies fell amid speculation that incentives for renewables could be cut.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Physicists shrink X-ray source
Laser accelerator almost fits on a tabletop.

Sex chromosomes linked to evolution of new species
Questions over conflict of the sexes remain.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Thousands of students, professors and other staff at the 10 University of California (UC) campuses staged mass protests yesterday against deep cuts to budgets that have led to enforced periods of unpaid leave, higher fees and job losses.

The cuts are in response to a gap of about $800 million in the UC budget - just one symptom of the roughly $15 billion of debt faced by the state. Stem-cell researchers have suffered, as have lab construction projects.

AP reports that about 1,200 of UC's roughly 19,000 faculty members signed a letter supporting the walkout.

Berkeley saw the biggest demonstration, with more than 5000 people gathering for a two hour rally. (San Jose Mercury News)

The Guardian likens the protests to the heady days of the 1960s when Berkeley earned a reputation for student activism. Author and scholar at UC Berkeley's geography department Gray Brechin told the Guardian: "California is beyond broke. The wealthiest state in the nation is bankrupt."

Photo:

Posted by Mark Peplow
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“Palau will declare its territorial waters and extended economic zone to be the first officially recognized sanctuary for sharks. … The purpose of this is to call attention to the world to the killing of sharks for commercial purposes, including to get the fins to make shark fin soups, and then they throw the bodies in the water.”
Palauan President Johnson Toribiong discusses his country’s move to set up the world’s first shark sanctuary (AP).

“Capturing the full energy efficiency potential in the state requires more than simply providing rebates to support the installation of the latest and greatest widget.”
California Public Utilities Commission President Michael R. Peevey comments on the approval of a $3.1 billion energy-efficiency programme (WSJ).

“By verifying the production of element 114, we have removed any doubts about the validity of the Dubna group’s claims. This proves that the most interesting superheavy elements can in fact be made in the laboratory.”
Heino Nitsche, head of the Heavy Element Nuclear and Radiochemistry Group, comments on the creation of element 114 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, confirming the work of a Russian group.

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

The European Medicines Agency has recommended the approval of two H1N1 vaccines. Both Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline should shortly see European Union-wide marketing authorisations from European Commission for their products.

The agency follows hot on the heals of the US FDA, which recently approved four vaccines, from CSL, MedImmune, Novartis, and Sanofi Pasteur.

Officials in the US also confirmed this week that the number of vaccine doses likely to be available will be twice as high as previously believed. Between six and seven million doses will be available, rather than 3.4 million (AP).

Now the job is to get people to come and get jabbed, says Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

"Taking the risk and getting sick is probably not a wise roll of the dice,” she says (Reuters). “People can die, and the people who are going to be ill and die are much more likely to be children and young adults.”

Meanwhile, the White House has announced that ‘The H1N1 Rap’ by John Clarke, Medical Director for the Long Island Railroad, was the winning entry in its video contest. Enjoy.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Shrine of Fatima-al-Massumeh, not an enrichment facility

If you find yourself traveling through central Iran, you might want to visit the historic city of Qom. While you're there you should check out the Mar'ashi Najafi Library, with over 500,000 handwritten texts; the Shrine of Fatima-al-Massumeh, one of the holy sites of Shi'a Islam; and of course the Namak Lake, a large salt lake just 100km outside the city.

Or you could skip all that and go see Iran's super-secret underground enrichment plant, which Western intelligence officials believe is located somewhere nearby. America, France and Britain outted the facility today at the opening of the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. According to the New York Times, the plant has room for a cascade of around 3,000 gas centrifuges of the type used to enrich uranium for fuel, or nuclear weapons.

Technically, as a signatory to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has the right to enrich uranium for use in nuclear power plants. That is what it's claimed to be doing with its main enrichment facility at Natanz, ever since an opposition group exposed its existence in 2002.

But the new facility is both undeclared to the international community and perhaps too small to be very useful as a fuel fabrication plant. "The size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program," President Obama said in a brief statement. Obama, together with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French Prime Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, condemned the plant, the existence of which emerged just a day after the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for tough action against those who violate the NPT.

Iran's response to all this has been muted so far. In a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nation admitted to "a new pilot fuel enrichment plant", according to a statement from the agency. No nuclear material has yet been introduced into the facility and inspectors are seeking access as soon as possible.

Given the growing international momentum against Iran, the Islamic Republic should probably let nuclear inspectors come to Qom soon to check out all the sites ASAP.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Hey! There’s ice on Mars!

Just over a year ago the Great Beyond noted the frequency of stories telling us that water existed on Mars. Well, we now have another story saying the same thing. This time, observations from HiRISE, the high resolution camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have shown ice below the surface, revealed after meteorites have walloped into the planet’s surface.

The ice was spotted when it was first uncovered, and monitored for 200 days. Just as was expected, the ice faded away and turned to vapour.

So ok, maybe I’m a bit cynical about being bored hearing about ice on Mars. This one does seem to push our understanding a bit further because this ice is much closer to the equator than would have been expected.

They also found that the ice was purer than expected, only about one percent of it was dirt. This is important because pure ice forms differently to mucky ice, and now gives Mars scientists some more data to work with the try and understand the geology of Mars, and the reasons for ice and water being there below the surface.

The work, by Shane Byrne from the University of Arizona and his colleagues was published in Science. As always, ice on Mars is big news and has been picked up a’plenty (LA times, CSM, Ottawa Citizen which, incidentally finds the news shocking).

It seems this has been a good couple of weeks for NASA and quests for water in non-Earthly bodies.

Image: NASA

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

A newly launched series of Google Earth tours will map out the projected impacts of climate change worldwide and look at mitigation and adaptation options. Here's a brief intro, narrated in the light Tennessee drawl of Al Gore:

The full length intro is here, with more tours to come. Google is also inviting netizens to talk back about climate change on a new YouTube channel.

While you're playing with climate science layers on Google Earth, you may want to check out our interactive map of polar ice coring sites where researchers have extracted hundreds of millennia of climatic history.

By Anna Barnett, cross posted from Nature's Climate Feedback blog.

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

Yesterday was National Postdoc Appreciation Day and we asked our readers: why do you love postdocs?

There seem to be two schools of though out there. In the first camp, postdocs are appreciated for academic reasons:

“They make the lab go round” - mariopinedakrch.

“They mix the passion, curiosity and creativity of phd students w/ the experience and reason of PIs...and add it a drop of red wine” - juicytrouble.

“They bring creativity, excitement, & fantastic writing skills to the lab, esp if Canadian” - abelpharmboy.

Then there are those who (perhaps understandably) see only the bad side of life...

Continue reading "Postdocs: who loves ya?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The US Food and Drug Administration admitted yesterday that political influence led to the agency's decision last year to approve a device to repair damaged knees against the recommendation of its own scientists.

Since 2006, the FDA's scientific reviewers have twice turned down applications for the device, known as Menaflex and manufactured by ReGen Biologics of Hackensack, New Jersey, according to an FDA report. The company did not show "that patients who received the device experienced any benefit", one scientist wrote in a rejection letter. (AP)

But following persistent lobbying from four New Jersey Democratic congressmen — Senators Robert Menendez and Frank R. Lautenberg and Representatives Frank Pallone Jr and Steven R. Rothman — FDA officials overruled the scientists' advice and granted approval for the US$3,000 knee patch last December. All four legislators received significant campaign contributions from ReGen; for example, Rothman alone took in US$13,300 last year, according to OpenSecrets.org.

The director of the FDA's device division who gave the go-ahead, Daniel Schultz, resigned last month following numerous safety concerns and other scandals. (Reuters)

Continue reading "FDA's review process knee-deep in trouble" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A research team from an Israeli university has been thrown out of a solar power competition for being based on the West Bank.

Many in Israel have reacted with anger to the news that Ariel University Center of Samaria has been excluded from the Solar Decathalon, a competition to design solar powered housing.

Although this contest has previously been run by the US Department of Energy the Spanish housing ministry is hosting the 2010 version. The ministry says EU law prevents the West Bank-based university from participating.

“The EU does not recognise the occupation of the West Bank, which is where this university is,” said a spokesman (Guardian).

The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since 1967. The European Union has continually condemned Israel’s illegal building of settlements in the area.

Ariel University claims the decision is “an expression of an illegitimate political struggle” that “blatantly violates international law and charters regarding academic freedom” (Jerusalem Post, World Jewish Congress).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Battery business boost
University spin-out opens trading as a billion-dollar company.

Butterflies' migrational timekeeper found
Monarchs may navigate using clocks in their antennae.

Strawberry pesticide leaves sour taste
Methyl iodide use by Californian farmers up for review.

Vaccine protects against HIV virus
A two-shot combo reduces the risk of HIV infection.

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

A European court injected a fair bit of doubt and confusion into carbon markets Wednesday, ruling that the European Commission exceeded its authority when it imposed tighter caps for greenhouse gas emissions in Poland and Estonia (Reuters, The Times)

At first glance, the ruling could be interpreted to curtail the commission's authority to impose a European cap, which would threaten the integrity of the entire multi-national system and fuel existing tensions among countries. But analysts say the ruling is actually limited to the second commitment period, which runs from 2008 to 2012. The commission's authority moving forward does not appear to be in any danger, which means the impacts, whatever they turn out to be, will likely be temporary.

Milo Sjardin, an expert on carbon markets for the consultancy New Energy Finance in New York, said he isn't expecting any major changes in the overall European cap, in part because the recession has already significantly reduced pressure on European industries. NEF's latest estimates indicate that covered emissions (which include power and major industrial sources) are likely to drop by a whopping 10 percent in 2009 alone.

The result is a 50 percent reduction in the cost of curbing emissions by 20 percent by 2020. In fact, NEF now says it will be cheaper to curb emissions by 30 percent (an EU pledge that is contingent on action by the rest of the world) than original forecast for the 20 percent target, Sjardin says.

For his part, EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas made it clear that the commission isn't about to back down (AFP).

Regardless, the price of carbon allowances in Europe dropped on the news as traders weighed the possibility of the commission losing its battle and granting additional allowances, not only to Poland and Estonia but six other countries that have appealed their caps. That would make compliance easier and thus decrease the likelihood that companies would need to buy additional allowances to cover their emissions.

If all eight countries were to return to their originally proposed CAP, NEF says allowances would increase by 15 percent. And because companies can carry their allowances forward into the third trading period, which runs from 2013 to 2020, such a scenario could theoretically depress prices for years to come. That would be good news for traditional industries, although it might make clean energy technologies less competitive.

"But we regard that as a very unlikely scenario," Sjardin says. "There’s likely to be a compromise somewhere down the road."

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

The United Nations Security Council has passed a resolution from president Barack Obama that would strengthen efforts to slow the spread of nuclear weapons. Plenty in this White House statement, but the long and the short of it is that the resolution endorses strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and improving nuclear security.

It also called for "full compliance" on all Security Council resolutions relating to Iran and North Korea, two trouble states for the non-proliferation regime.

There's some reason to suspect that Obama's announcement of the withdrawal of a proposed missile defence system from Poland and the Czech Republic may have helped to aid the resolution's passage, particularly with Russia—one of the Security Council's permanent members and a long time hold out against sanctions against Iran. The New York Times quotes Russian President Dmitri Medvedev as saying:

“I told His Excellency Mr. President that we believe we need to help Iran to take a right decision,” Mr. Medvedev said, adding that “sanctions rarely lead to productive results, but in some cases, sanctions are inevitable.”

Even though the resolution is non-binding, meaning nobody's obligated to follow through, the press is already endorsing it as a diplomatic victory for Obama and for non-proliferation. A look at the times:

U.N. Security Council Adopts Measure on Nuclear Arms (NY Times)

Obama wins passage of nuclear nonproliferation resolution at U.N. (LA Times)

Barack "No Bomb" Obama pushes for world without nukes
(Times of India)

Credit: United Nations

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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With less than two weeks to go until the Nobel Prize winners are announced, the soothsayers at Thomson Reuters have rubbed their crystal balls and come up with a shortlist of favourites.

The contenders, as predicted by Thomson Reuters' citation analyst David Pendlebury, are based on the number of citations and high-impact papers published in Nobel-worthy fields of study. Since 2002, 15 'citation' Laureates have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, seven of which were tapped in the same year as their triumph, including last year’s chemistry champ, Roger Tsien of the University of California, San Diego.

This year’s frontrunners for physiology or medicine include the codiscoverers of telomeres, the repetitive DNA add-ons at the ends of chromosomes that have been linked to ageing and cancer as they shrink, the researchers who worked out cellular membrane trafficking, and the Japanese researcher who showed that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could track oxygen flow, making real-time brain scans and functional MRI possible.

Continue reading "Nobel nod" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“It would only be fair to recognize that no other United States president would have had the courage to say what he said.”
Barack Obama’s recent statements on climate change receive praise from Fidel Castro (AP).

“Once again we have proved that we can do the job precisely. The satellites have been placed in the desired orbit at the exact time.”
G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, comments on the launch of seven satellites yesterday (AFP).

“The president left on his own accord. There wasn’t a fight.”
Christopher Kennedy, chairman of the board of the University of Illinois, notes the resignation of President B. Joseph White amid an admissions scandal (NY Times).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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We’ve previously brought to your notice the work of Jonathan Chase, aka Oort Kuiper, in the form of his ‘Astrobiology Rap’.

Now he’s back with a new song about genes…

[Hat tip: pharyngula]

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science.

Continue reading "Songs about Science XXVI: ‘I don’t mean trousers’" »

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

The edges of ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic are thinning faster than we’d thought, thanks to a surprisingly extensive network of fast-flowing and accelerating glaciers, new satellite measurements show (Nature, doi:10.1038/nature08471).

"We were surprised to see such a strong pattern of thinning glaciers across such large areas of coastline – it's widespread and in some cases thinning extends hundreds of kilometres inland. We think that warm ocean currents reaching the coast and melting the glacier front is the most likely cause of faster glacier flow. This kind of ice loss is so poorly understood that it remains the most unpredictable part of future sea level rise," said Hamish Pritchard, of the British Antarctic Survey [press release].

"This report provides a much more ominous picture than we have had, and a depressing prospect of the potential for sea level rise," Inez Fung, an atmospheric scientist at UC Berkeley, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's very much a cause for worry."

Pritchard and other researchers analysed some 50 million laser readings from Nasa’s ICESat (Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite) between 2003 and 2007. 81 of 111 Greenland glaciers surveyed are thinning at an accelerating, self-feeding pace, AP highlights. While in parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003 (though there’s plenty of ice to get through – some of these areas are a mile thick). “To some extent, it’s a runaway effect. The question is, how far will it run?” Pritchard tells them.

That’s what everyone wants to know, and the scientists were careful to point out that it was “too early to determine whether the thinning was a sign that sea level rise would accelerate” (Reuters).

Image credit: British Antarctic Survey

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Nature’s announcement of a new journal has been exciting comment this week, mainly because the new publication will feature an open access route.

Nature Communications will be the first online-only Nature-branded journal, but it is the ability of scientists to pay an ‘article processing charge’ to make their papers open access that has generated most interest.

As Steven Inchcoombe, Nature Publishing Group’s managing director, explained to The Scientist:

Few could have anticipated the scale of upheaval in the global economy over the past twelve months. At the same time, scholarly publishing is on the cusp of yet more radical change with increasing commitment by research funders to cover the costs of open access making experimentation with new business models more viable.

The new journal aims to publish papers in biological, chemical and physical sciences that “represent advances of significant interest to specialists within each field”.

Not everyone is impressed by the NPG announcement though.

On the Science Insider blog, Patrick Brown comments thus:

After brilliant and courageous editors and staff at PLoS had the cojones and vision to make high-quality, truly open-access scientific publication affordable and accessible to any scientist with a constructive contribution to communicate, and in doing so, prove the cynics at Science and Nature wrong, it’s deliciously ironic to see the craven NPG, years later, skulking around the open-access world looking for a way to pick up a few bucks.

Nature Communications starts accepting submissions in October 2009, with a first issue scheduled to go online in April 2010.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Today we hail the most underappreciated people in the world of research. People without whose unstinting and oft-unacknowledged effort the cogs of the science machine would surely seize up.

No, not science news reporters, but the lowly post-doc. For today is the first annual National Postdoc Appreciation Day.

“We are celebrating the significant contribution that postdoctoral scholars make to the US scientific research enterprise and, at the same time, increasing awareness of this contribution,” says the National Postdoctoral Association.

Events celebrating the contribution of post-docs are taking place across the US today. Perhaps reflecting the fact that many of these researchers live something of a hand to mouth existence, many of these events focus on offering food and career advice.

Bonus points to UCSF for having a magician at their event: “And for my next trick, I will make your dreams of tenure disappear.”

Why not join in the appreciation by telling us why you love post docs? Over on the Nature News twitter feed we’re asking you to complete this sentence:

I luv pdocs bcos…(hashtag: #luvpdocs)

And lab-managers, the correct answer is not ‘because they’re cheap’…

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Publisher retracts paper by Iran's science minister
Iranian scientists press for plagiarism inquiry.

BRIEFING: Climate summit fails to address key challenges
Lack of progress threatens global deal.

Plans for UK research assessment revealed
Peer review remains key for determining the distribution of university cash.

SPECIAL REPORT: German science looks to new political players
Coalition change could affect policies, reports Quirin Schiermeier.

Gold rush for algae
The second of four weekly articles on biofuels describes how oil giants and others are placing their bets on algae.

Climate summit fails to address key challenges
Are the global leaders listening?

Protein burns its evolutionary bridges
Mutations can set genetic change on an irreversible path.

Indian ancestry revealed
The mixing of two distinct lineages led to most modern-day Indians.

Buoy damage blurs El Niño forecasts
Missing data from the eastern Pacific Ocean may hinder predictions of this year's event.

Research chief steps down over fake data
Peter Chen's integrity 'undamaged' by incident, says boss.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The first antennae of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) began the array's slow invasion of Chajnantor, a 5000-metre high plateau in the Chilean Andes, aboard a bright yellow crawler yesterday. The final ALMA observatory will link 66 such antennae in changing configurations on the 5000-metre-high plateau. The site's dry, thin air will enable the observatory to make very precise measurements of millimetre-wavelength and submillimetre-wavelength sources in the universe, including "cold clouds of gas and dust where new stars are being born and remote galaxies towards the edge of the observable universe," according to the ESO.

Photo: ESO

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

"The extensive authorship list and comprehensive acknowledgments would imply that the entire peer group is now supportive of the Rodinia [supercontinent] hypothesis."
Geophysicist John D. Piper of the University of Liverpool, who is not (USA Today).

“I realised if I was playing Superman, they'd put me on wires and fly me.“
Paul Bettany on getting over the intimidation of playing Charles Darwin in the film Creation (Metro).

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Quotes of the day | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

European spacecraft Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (Goce) begins its finely tuned gravitational measurements this week.

The BBC explains that the mission will track ocean movement and should improve on existing measurements of the Earth's surface and its gravitational field--known as the geoid. Low solar activity and a calm upper atmosphere this week mean that the ion-powered spacecraft can fly just about 254.75 kilometres above the surface, plus or minus 50 metres, even lower than the 268 kilometres mission planners hoped for. The lower it flies, the more sensitive its measurements, which can detect changes in gravity as small as one 10-trillionth of gravity at the surface.

For Nature's previous coverage, see Gravity mission to launch (Nature News, 11 March 2009) and on GOCE is Go! (The Great Beyond, 17 March 2009) from the time of Goce's launch from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia. In case the science proves overwhelming, the European Space Agency has provided a helpful visual demonstration that Goce, (spacecraft, right) will map the gravity (represented here by apples, center) of the Earth (bottom).

Continue reading "Goce tunes in to geoid" »

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

The US Environmental Protection Agency announced an emissions reporting rule today which will require producers of more than 25,000 metric tonnes of greenhouse gases a year to submit an annual report to the EPA. While the EPA already tracks big emitters this lowers the threshold and should account for about 85% of US greenhouse gas emissions, writes Mother Jones.

Other emissions-related fights are also burbling this week...

Continue reading "To report, or not to report: EPA emissions reporting up in the air" »

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

Sydney has been hit by a dust storm the likes of which it has not seen in decades. Thunderstorms from the Indian and
Southern Oceans have gathered dust and debris from southern and eastern Australia at up to 100 kilometres per hour on their way to Sydney, according to Reuters. Other impressive dust storms date to a 1983 El Niño year, when droughts made topsoil vulnerable.

Many, many videos on The Guardian's website.

Photo: Andy Tyler via Flickr

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

Hydrolagus melanophasma is a slippery customer. It is a new species, in that scientists identified it for the first time this month, but it is also an old species, probably branching off from modern sharks 400 million years ago, and collected in jars by museums since the 1960s, writes National Geographic News.

And it was not easy to classify. “They have some shark characteristics and they have some that are very non-shark,” Doug Long of the California Academy of Sciences and an author on the Zootaxa article classifying the species told Wired News. The creature flaps its fins like a ray, is shaped more like a modern shark, and the males feature what Wired News calls a "most intriguing" retractable sexual organ dangling from its head. In fact, the researchers classified it as a member of the chimera order, also known as ghost sharks.

Continue reading "Ghostly shark no longer dead to science" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Irina Bokova, Bulgaria's ambassador to France, was last night elected director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) in the fifth and final round of voting in Paris by the 58 member states making up Unesco's executive board. She obtained 31 votes, beating Farouk Hosny, 71, Egypt's minister of culture, who won 27 votes – see press release. If, as is expected, the appointment is confirmed by the body's general conference when it meets next month Bokova, 57, would be the first woman, and the first East European, to head the agency. Hosny would have been the first from the Arab world.

Only a few weeks ago Bokova was considered a long shot for the post, with Hosny the longstanding favourite among the initial nine candidates. But Hosny's campaign was dogged in the runup to the election by allegations that he had made antisemitic comments, and concerns over Egypt's poor track record on liberty of expression.

Continue reading "Bulgaria's Bokova wins top Unesco job in photo-finish election" »

Posted by Declan Butler
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The elephant and the neutrino
Conservationists challenge physics observatory in Indian wildlife reserve.

Genomics shifts focus to rare diseases
Disappointing genome-wide studies prompt researchers to tackle single-gene defects.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Large chunks of text, figures, and tables in a 2009 paper co-authored by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran's science minister, are identical to those of a 2002 paper published by South Korean researchers, Nature has learned. Daneshjou served as the head of the interior ministry office which ran the disputed presidential elections in June, which returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Daneshjou is also a former governor general of Tehran.

The paper by Daneshjou and Majid Shahravi from the department of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran is entitled "Analysis of critical ricochet angle using two space discretization methods", and was published in the journal Engineering with Computers in 2009. In many places the text duplicates verbatim that of an earlier paper: "Ricochet of a tungsten heavy alloy long-rod projectile from deformable steel plates", published by South Korean scientists in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics in 2002.

Other sentences in Daneshjou's paper are identical to those in a paper given by other researchers at a 2003 conference.

The scientific credentials of Daneshjou, who was appointed as science minister earlier this month, have been the subject of controversy, with the Los Angeles Times reporting in late August about question marks over his PhD. According to his university webpage at the time, the PhD was awarded by the 'Manchester Imperial Institute of Science and Technology.' The webpage this afternoon has changed and says that the PhD was awarded in 1989 after working at Imperial College in London, but that the defence of the thesis was held in Amirkabir University of Technology in Iran.

Update: for more, see our full news story on this.

Posted by Declan Butler
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Children as young as 10 years old will need just one H1N1 flu jab, according to a US federal study of about 600 children released Monday. The finding is a relief to public health systems, since as recently as early September officials expected that even adults might need 2 shots, writes the Washington Post.

This should lower demand for the vaccine, which is expected to be unusually high this year, since the H1N1 strain of the influenza virus is striking a much younger segment of the population than normal. French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi, one of five which will produce the flu vaccine in the US, announced yesterday that it will release the first batch of its vaccine for the US market in mid-October. It expects to ramp production capacity up to 800 million vaccines a year. US demand is normally less than 100 million a year, according to the Associated Press.

Want the bad news? Keep reading...

Continue reading "Flu vaccines better than expected, surveillance not" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“It doesn’t matter to me if a scientist says it may or may not leak. That’s not going to stop it from leaking when push comes to shove.”
Elisa Young, an anti-coal activist living near Mountaineer coal power plant in West Virginia, set to be the first to capture CO2 and bury it on-site (New York Times).

"This place is literally a bird cemetery."
Andre Raine, conservation manager for BirdLife Malta, on an annual illegal hunt of 150 birds of prey and marsh birds on Malta (BBC).

"We have reasons to believe that people, especially children ... will be instantly drawn into interacting with the numerous games and experiments."
Xu Yanhao, curator of Beijing's 102,000 square-metre Science Museum, which contains exhibits on The Beautifulness of Science and The Glory of China and which opened on 20 September (Global Times via Ali Baba).

"An elaborate conjuring trick, designed to make the public think that BA is serious about climate change while it carries on with business as usual."
Greenpeace spokesperson on British Airways' plan for the air travel industry to halve its 2005 emissions by 2050 (BBC).

"Creating devices that integrate with the human body, which is soft and curvilinear and stretchy."
John Rogers, materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, on what he's doing with his $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship (Chicago Tribune).

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Quotes of the day | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Cassini spacecraft science team is taking advantage of equinox sunlight on Saturn to study its gossamer rings. But they're finding the rings aren't quite as delicate as they expected.

"We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building and instead we've come across walls more than two miles high," Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging chief at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, told NASA's press office. "Isn't that the most outrageous thing you could imagine? It truly is like something out of science fiction."

Continue reading "Equinox glimpse of Saturn's rings dazzles astronomers" »

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

Cross-posted for Monya Baker from The Niche

The Maryland company NeuralStem has the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s permission to test its spinal cord stem cells in twelve patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The approval comes a month after the FDA placed Geron’s planned clinical trial on hold for a second time. NeuralStem’s trial had also previously been placed on hold by the FDA in February before receiving the go-ahead in September.

Though both trials involve placing cells into the spinal cord, NeuralStem’s product is made of cultured neural stem cells derived from a single 8-week fetus; Geron’s product, intended to treat spinal cord injury, is derived from embryonic stem cells that have been differentiated into precursors of neuron-support cells.

“This is certainly the first stem-cell approach for ALS,” says Lucie Bruijn, a scientist at the ALS Association, a patient group that also funds relevant research. Most other approaches for treating ALS are small molecule drugs, she says, and she’s not aware of other cell therapy or other invasive approaches entering human testing in the near future.

Continue reading "FDA green lights stem-cell clinical trial for Lou Gehrig’s disease" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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This giant squid, found by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service scientists during a sperm whale diet study on 30 July, measured 5.9 metres and weighed in at 46.7 kg according to a Reuters report.

See the full post for another photo...

Continue reading "One that didn't get away: giant squid found in Gulf of Mexico" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

All eyes are now on tomorrow's UN Summit on Climate Change in New York and the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh later this week, although it's not yet clear whether either of these meetings is going to produce any meaningful breakthroughs.

Indeed, if last week's US-sponsored Major Economies Forum is any indication, the outlook isn't particularly good. The meeting ended as quietly as it began, leaving the United States' top climate envoy, Todd Stern, with little to say except that there was a "narrowing of differences" among the globe's top 17 greenhouse gas emitters. Combine that with increasing skepticism that the US Senate is going to be able to squeeze a climate bill out before the UN global warming talks in Copenhagen in December, and things begin to look positively gloomy.

Nonetheless, there are signs of movement at the highest levels, which is what people at the lower levels have been saying was needed for some time. Chinese President Hu Jintao will discuss his country's climate policies during a much-anticipated address on Tuesday. US President Barack Obama plans to do the same, although it's not clear how far he will be able to go given that his hands are tied by Congress.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced that he would be willing to personally attend the talks in Copenhagen if it comes down to that, and The Associated Press has reported that Obama might attend as well. This would certainly qualify as an important gesture of goodwill if the US delegation is unable to sign on to any significant commitments due to slow-moving domestic politics.

And just for kicks, Conservation International reports that out that Guyana President Bharrat Jagdeo and Harrison Ford (who does not lead a country but has appeared in some cool films) will attend an "extraordinary origami event" in New York, calling for the inclusion of tropical forest conservation an eventual climate change pact. Pictures aren't yet available, but keep an eye out for "life-size origami trees and wildlife."

Continue reading "Mixed signals as 'Climate Week' kicks off" »

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

The National Institutes of Health started accepting applications today to evaluate which human embryonic stem cells will be eligible for federal dollars.

A panel of nine scientists, lawyers and ethicists — led by Jeffrey Botkin of the University of Utah — will scrutinize submissions to ensure that they meet the new requirements for informed consent from embryo donors. The working group's "expertise and sound judgment will help NIH move forward in this important effort," NIH director Francis Collins, who will have the final say on the eligibility of particular lines, said in a statement.

The panel will review cell lines made before the guidelines went into effect on 7 July. Fundable lines must be derived from leftover embryos that were created solely for assisted reproduction and donated voluntarily with no financial incentives.

"We're open for business in a new era," Lana Skirboll, director of policy at NIH, told Nature. The working group has not yet appraised any cell lines — including the 21 lines approved under former President George W. Bush, which will need to be reassessed — and will start considering particular cells after scientists submit their petitions on the NIH website. "The speed at which this moves is really in the hands of the scientific community at this point," she said.

Having a mechanism in place to expand the number of eligible cell lines "is what we've been working toward for a very long time," said M. William Lensch, a stem cell researcher at Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard Medical School, who expects to start submitting requests "sooner rather than later."

Image: James Thomson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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"In America, electric cars have the same cachet as golf carts."
Jay Leno, on plans to promote electric vehicles by challenging celebrities such as Tom Cruise to race them on Leno's TV show (Wired).

“The Egyptians are really in a mess.”
Galal Amin on Cairo's rubbish-filled streets, since its street-cleaning pigs were slaughtered during the swine flue scare (New York Times).

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Q+A: The once-quiet scientist
A former animal researcher decides to speak out.

Nuclear test ban back on the table
United States delegation to international summit reignites hope.

Water on the Moon?
Separate lunar missions indicate evidence of ice and hydrated minerals.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Investigators have found a strain of the plague bacteria Yersinia pestis in the body of Malcolm Casadaban, a University of Chicago geneticist who died last week within 12 hours of his arrival at Bernard Mitchell Hospital with "intense flulike symptoms." The autopsy did not identify a cause of death, according to the Chicago Tribune.

No other cases have been reported in Chicago, and none of the other researchers exposed to the strain, used as a vaccine since the 1960s, has fallen ill, but officials gave antibiotics to Casadaban's family, friends, and co-workers. Ken Alexander, head of pediatric infectious disease said that the autopsy did not imply that the strain of the plague was a public health threat. He told the Chicago Tribune that "the more likely possibility, I'd say 999 to 1, is that there was something unusual about him."

Photo: Courtesy University of Chicago

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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NASA seeded a cloud high in the night sky Saturday night using a Black Brant XII rocket. The rocket's 4th stage released exhaust gases at around 278 kilometres, where they created a short-lived artificial cloud which reflected sunlight and was visible for hundreds of kilometres up and down the east coast of the US.

The space agency regularly observes naturally-occurring cases of noctilucent clouds using its AIM satellite, according to Space.com. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Department of Defense's Space Test Program managed this weekend's Controlled Aerosol Release Experiment (CARE), which was the first man-made noctilucent cloud.

Continue reading "Seeded cloud lit the night sky" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Richard Dawkins called for reform of English libel law at a Liberal Democrats party conference Sunday. Dawkins cited the example of physicist-turned-science writer Simon Singh, who is fighting a libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA). His case, still pending, has set off a public campaign in the UK for revision of its libel laws, which some critics deride for attracting libel tourists from other countries for being unusually plaintiff-friendly.

According to The Guardian Dawkins told the Lib Dems that he "and many of my colleagues fear that if Simon loses it will have major implications on the freedom of scientists, researchers and other commentators to engage in robust criticism of scientific and pseudo-scientific work."

Last week the UK Ministry of Justice announced a public consultation on internet defamation law.

Continue reading "Richard Dawkins calls for English libel law reform" »

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Peter Chen, Vice President of Research and Corporate Relations of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, will resign from his post over data falsification concerns in his research group, ETH announced today.

Chen requested an investigation in January 2009 at the same time that he withdrew one of his organic chemistry group's spectroscopy publications, which was inconsistent with results from other groups working on the same topic, according to the ETH press release. The outside investigation board could not find a key lab notebook and did find identical background noise in purportedly independent spectra, so it "concluded that some of the data...were falsified."

The institute has not publicly accused any individuals over the falsification it uncovered, though a second paper was also retracted and a Ph.D. candidate withdrew a dissertation, before retracting the withdrawal. According to ETH President Ralph Eichler, "there is now no legal way of finding out for sure who was responsible for the falsifications."

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Energy-efficiency researcher Arun Majumdar will, if confirmed by the US Senate, take the reins of the controversial new federal agency tasked with coming up with brilliant new insights into energy independence.

Congress allocated money to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) earlier this year in hopes of replicating the success of the Pentagon's own high-risk, high-return research agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Pretty much everyone in government wants a DARPA spin-off these days; there's an intelligence version too, IARPA, and some people want NASA to have one too.

But ARPA-E has both the best shot at actually producing useful breakthroughs, and the highest chance of getting mired in federal bureaucracy. In 2007, for instance, Nature columnist David Goldston pointed out that the ARPA-E approach blithely takes "the technocratic path of assuming that US energy problems are largely the result of an inadequate supply of fresh ideas. But there's ample evidence that a bigger problem is the lack of demand for new ideas in the marketplace."

Others are more optimistic. In a news release announcing Majumdar's nomination, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he works, notes that "ARPA-E’s goals are to create technologies that have the potential to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign energy supplies, reduce energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, and improve energy efficiency."

Few would disagree that sounds like a good goal. The problem is getting there. ARPA-E has reportedly had problems filling its all-important positions of program managers, and Science's Jeffrey Mervis reported in August that researchers were griping about how the first round of grant proposals was handled.

Majumdar has held several key management positions at Berkeley Lab, including serving as associate lab director for energy and environmental sciences. If he makes it through the Senate, those management skills will surely be put to the test.

Image: LBNL

Posted by Alex Witze
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Arctic sea ice levels third-lowest on record
No sign that long-term trend is reversing, scientists caution

Fungus genome boosts fight to save North American forests
DNA sequence could advance efforts to control pine beetle infestations.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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A Yale University animal technician was charged yesterday with murdering the 24-year-old pharmacology graduate student Annie Le, whose body was found behind a wall of an off-campus research facility on Sunday.

The suspect, Raymond Clark III, had been a full-time lab technician since he graduated from high school in 2004, first working in the washing centre and then caring for mice and other animals. In a statement, Yale president Richard Levin said that "nothing in the history of [Clark's] employment at the University gave an indication that his involvement in such a crime might be possible."

But a team leader in the Amistad Street building where Clark worked said otherwise. He told the New York Times that several researchers complained last year to Clark's supervisor that he was rude and overly critical of others. "Everyone enforces rules, but he enforced them in an officious manner," the anonymous man said. Other Yale workers called Clark a "control freak," according to the Associated Press.

Continue reading "Lab tech arrested for Yale murder" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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NASA's Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter team released early maps from the spacecraft's commissioning phase yesterday. Diviner, one of seven instruments aboard the spacecraft, measured surface temperatures as low as -238 Celsius, lower than the surface of Pluto according to the Associated Press and Daily Telegraph. The presence of such permanently cold spots "greatly increases the likelihood that water or other compounds are frozen there."

Also exciting was the tentative finding that "hydrogen is not confined to permanently shadowed craters," according to Project Scientist Richard Vondrak (CNET). The extent and accessibility of hydrogen on the Moon will shape future manned lunar missions because astronauts might use hydrogen to create water, rather than bringing it from Earth.

Continue reading "Early LRO maps show cold Moon may host hydrogen" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Posted on behalf of Kerri Smith

Well, not quite red herrings, but Atlantic salmon. Allow me to explain. Reported on the Neuroskeptic and Neurolaw blogs this week is a study that aimed to demonstrate the risks of finding false positives in brain scanning studies - correlations that aren't really there.

A group of scientists led by Craig Bennett at the University of California at Santa Barbara conducted their study with an unusual participant. From their Methods section:
"Subject: One mature Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) participated in the fMRI study. The salmon was approximately 18 inches long, weighed 3.8 lbs, and was not alive at the time of scanning." Warning: below the fold it gets a bit fishy.

Continue reading "Study warns of red herrings in brain scan data" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Farouk Hosny, Egypt's minister of culture and the favourite to succeed Koichiro Matsuura as director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), failed to win an outright majority in the first round of a secret ballot held last night at a meeting of the agency's executive board in Paris. Hosny won 22 of the 57 votes made – there was one abstention -- giving him a clear lead over other the eight other contenders, but short of the 30 votes needed for election.

Bulgaria's candidate, former foreign minister Irina Gueorguieva Bokova won eight votes, and three other candidates seven – Russia's deputy foreign minister Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko, Ecuador's Ivonne Juez de Baki, a diplomat, and Austria's Benita Ferrero-Waldner, European Commissioner for external relations. The remainder won no votes, or less than three.

Four further rounds of voting will be held this evening, and, if necessary, tomorrow. All nine candidates can rerun. If it goes to a third round, the two winners of this would go head-to-head in a final tiebreaker round. Unesco's general assembly must officially confirm the nomination at a meeting on 15 October.

The 71 year old Egyptian candidate has been widely considered the front-runner in the election, which is highly-political and subject to intense horsetrading. It would be the first time that a director general of Unesco came from an Arab country, and several countries are supporting his candidacy as a bridge between the West and Islamic countries. Hosny also has the united backing of the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the African Union.

But the candidature of Hosny, a painter, and culture minister for two decades, has become steeped in controversy over allegations that he has made antisemitic comments, and criticism of Egypt's poor track record on censorship and press freedom – liberty of expression is one of Unesco's founding principles. His candidature has been opposed by Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace prize winner, and some intellectuals, as well as Jewish, and human rights groups.

Posted by Declan Butler
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T. Rex's notoriously massive head, sharp teeth and piddly diddly arms first evolved in a runty ancestor one hundredth its size, paleontologists reported in Science yesterday. The nine-foot-long Raptorex kriegsteini lived about 35 million years before its multi-ton descendant, but already bore many of its hallmark features.

The findings come as a surprise for paleontologists, who thought these features evolved as the tyrannosaurids grew to become the colossal beasts we see in the movies — the limbs withering as the head and body expanded. Raptorex throws this idea a pretty nasty curve ball, suggesting that the same body plan could have withstood two orders of magnitude of growth.

The Chicago Tribune give some juicy details of the fossil's shady legal history: The specimen was smuggled out of a fossil field in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in northern China, then carted off to an "illegal international black market for fossils." A Massachusetts eye surgeon and amateur paleontologist named Henry Kriegstein (hence the fossil's name) later purchased it (legally) for "tens of thousands of dollars, but well below $100,000", he told the Tribune.

Continue reading "Tiny T Rex ancestor still pretty scary" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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Partisan bickering in Washington has so many bigger things to fight about these days – health-care reform and climate change among them – that it is sad, rather than amusing, to watch the Democrats and Republicans sparring over the notion of administration ‘czars’.

Czars are senior advisors appointed directly by the president. In most cases their appointment does not need to confirmed by the Senate, and they are not subject to Congressional oversight as directors of federal agencies would be. Their background is also apparently not as rigorously fact-checked as it could be; the latest frenzy in Washington peaked when conservative commentators found that Van Jones, Obama’s ‘green jobs czar’, had signed a questionable petition about the Bush administration role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Jones resigned earlier this month (FoxNews).

Republican talk-show hosts such as Glenn Beck have forced the issue of czars onto centre stage. And many of these positions involve key science and technology posts in the Obama administration. Carol Browner is his ‘climate czar’, overseeing cross-agency efforts to deal with energy and climate change – not, of course, to be confused with Todd Stern, who also shows up on lists of czars but whose role is as chief climate envoy to the United Nations climate talks.

Obama’s love of technology has triggered a crop of titles in this arena: Vivek Kundra is his ‘information czar’, and Aneesh Chopra his ‘technology czar’.

Some czar positions have been around for a while; George W. Bush created the ‘faith-based czar’ position, and the ‘science czar’ (a.k.a. presidential science advisor) has been around for decades (although it is a Senate-confirmed position as the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy).

Next up on the target list appears to be David Michaels, a distinguished epidemiologist and Obama’s choice for head of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. The Washington Times minced no words this month in calling Michaels “one [of] the nation's foremost proponents of allowing junk science to be used in jackpot-justice lawsuits.”

The White House has fired back with what it calls "the truth about czars".

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

Nine countries pledged today to share 10% of their swine flu vaccine supplies with developing nations that might need it.

Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, the United States, and the United Kingdom will make the vaccine available through the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO had been asking for such donations. Today's decision was likely buoyed by positive results from ongoing vaccine trials showing that single doses might be sufficient to provide immune protection. Many countries had ordered enough stock for two doses, so they will likely now have extra shots to give away.

Continue reading "Rich countries to share flu jabs" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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A report released today calls on the United States to launch a new interagency, multidisciplinary life sciences scheme aimed at tackling society's most pressing problems.

A national "new biology" initiative that brings together physical scientists, engineers and biologists of all stripes is essential to find solutions in the areas of food production, environmental protection, renewable energies and personalized medicine, the National Research Council's Board on Life Sciences concluded. The report urges that new funding be set aside on a 10-year timescale to establish the interagency effort, with money earmarked for new information technologies and training initiatives as well as scientific research.

Continue reading "New biology initiative to solve world's problems" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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High window on the past
Microbiologists find living stromatolites in the Andes.

Volcanoes stirred by climate change
Impact of global warming on geological hazards 'poorly understood', experts warn.

Wanted: a chief scientist for Europe
Commission president pledges to hire top adviser.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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These blobs are images of the electron clouds around a carbon atom. There’s a radially symmetric blob, and a double-lobed blob with a node in the middle – just like the patterns of electron density that the s and p atomic orbitals give rise to.

The snaps come from Igor Mikhailovskij and colleagues at the Kharkov Institute for Physics and Technology, Ukraine, reporting in a paper to be published in Physical Review B. They cool a chain of carbon atoms to 4 kelvin in a vacuum, and apply a voltage so as to create an electric field which draws some electrons away from the atom on the chain’s tip, towards a phosphor screen. (This is called field emission microscopy). The spatial distribution of that image represents the electron density around the atom. If the round blob looks elliptical, that's perhaps due to interaction with the graphite tip that supports the carbon chain, the researchers think.

More images below the fold...

Continue reading "Electron clouds: seeing is believing" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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The Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force released an interim report on Thursday, calling for a comprehensive national approach to managing oceans, what goes into them and pretty much anything that they contain or affect.

It is both an honorable goal and an enormous challenge. Achieving it would mean seamless management of everything from freshwater resources, stormwater runoff and coastal ecosystems to fisheries, aquaculture, commercial shipping, offshore energy, military activities and global warming (not to mention coordination with state and local governments).

Perhaps the biggest initiative would be the creation of a National Ocean Council to coordinate federal policy, although it's not entirely clear what kind of authority that council might have. Administration officials largely offered up broad statements without going into details about how the new policy, once finalized, might actually impact these activities.

"For the first time, we as a nation say loudly and clearly that healthy oceans matter," said Jane Lubchenco, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Today as never before, we better comprehend the connections between healthy oceans and people."

Appointed by President Barack Obama in June, the task force includes representatives from the full suite of federal agencies and departments. Its interium report will be available for public comment for 30 days, and a final report will be issued in December.

Just as a reminder, this is actually the second major ocean policy review in as many administrations, although the last one was not limited to federal agencies. As directed by Congress, President George W. Bush appointed 16 people to the US Commission on Ocean Policy, which finalized its report and closed up shop in 2004.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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"If neg, results can bury."
Bonnie Rossello in a 1997 memo on what GlaxoSmithKline should do with results from studies on whether antidepressant Paxil caused birth defects (Bloomberg).

"Yes, there is a nuanced shift. But this shift is not in our negotiating stand."
India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, conceding that India may declare emissions targets, but would not accept foreign legally binding limits (AFP).

"The quality of research university news releases is quite high. They are rather reliable, but they are completely absent any skepticism or investigative side."
Knight Science Journalism Tracker Charlie Petit on the spread of straight-to-consumer institutional science information services (San Jose Mercury News).

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Oil trading company Trafigura announced a potential settlement of a legal case brought by 31,000 residents of Ivory Coast, who alleged the firm caused environmental and health damage by paying a contractors to dispose of oil byproducts in Abidjan. In a compensation claim led by UK lawyer Martyn Day of Leigh Day & Company, residents said the sludge caused diarrhea, nosebleeds, stomach pain, vomiting, and headaches. Trafigura sued the BBC for libel after a programme on the compensation claims in May, writing in a statement that "Trafigura has always denied that the slops caused the deaths and serious health consequences presented by the BBC."

Continue reading "Why clean up when you can cover up?" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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The European Space Agency released images from Planck's 2-week test run today. The results of this test will help astronomers calibrate the spacecraft, which contains instruments cooled to 0.1 degrees Kelvin, for its upcoming 15-month observing run.

Planck began its first-light test run on 13 August, measuring 15-degree strips of the sky in nine different frequencies. It is tasked with making two all-sky maps of the cosmic microwave background, which is the background noise left over from the early universe.

Continue reading "Planck tunes in to cosmic noise" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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The makers of Creation, a British film about the life of Charles Darwin, have attracted as much attention for saying it won't be shown in the US as they might have hoped to get from a creationist protest at a hypothetical US premiere. Today, Nature hosted a screening of the film at the Science Museum in London with members of the production team.

The film, which opened the Toronto Film Festival over the weekend, premiered in the UK Sunday. It was adapted from the book Annie's Box, a novel by Randal Keynes, Darwin's great-great-grandson, about Darwin's personal life. But rumors that it won't reach the US have set off a cascade of debate, ranging from blaming religious conservatism to simply guessing that the film wouldn't sell. The Daily Telegraph led Friday with a quote from the film's producer, Jeremy Thomas: "It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it's because of what the film is about."

Continue reading "Creating a controversy" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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North American coalition pushes for refrigerant curb
Greenhouse gases closer to Montreal Protocol regulation

Colour blindness corrected by gene therapy
Treated monkeys can now see in technicolour.

Why opposites don't always attract
A lucky lab accident helps to explain the mystery of bouncing droplets.

Climate change warning from Greenland
Small rise in temperature thousands of years ago caused rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

Obama proposes greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles
US move is the first national regulation on carbon emissions.

Israeli immigrant scientists protest threat to jobs
Budget cuts freeze researchers out of Israel's KAMEA programme.

Q&A: Greenland project drills down to record depths
Researchers read our climate record from a mile-long core of ice.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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"The peculiar demands of our granting system have favoured an upper class of skilled scientists who know how to raise money for a big group. They have mastered a glass bead game that rewards not only quality and honesty, but also salesmanship and networking."
Cambridge researcher Peter A. Lawrence, in PLoS Biology, on the costs of funding science in fits and starting grants.

"The higher incidence is mainly because diagnostic techniques and monitoring capability have improved, as well as more and more women are delaying having children."
Anonymous Beijing health officer, quoted in Beijing Daily story on the doubling birth defect rates in the last decade in China.

"The government must find these other two ships."
Silvestro Greco, the head of Calabria's environment agency on the next step in an Italian investigation that revealed a sunken ship containing toxic waste, buried at sea by the Mafia (Al Jazeera).

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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EU Health Commissioner, Androulla Vassiliou. yesterday released a 12-page "EU strategy on Pandemic (H1N1) 2009," as well as five Commission working documents – on vaccine development, vaccination strategies, joint procurement, communication with the public and media, and support for third countries.

It's difficult to see much new in the package, however. The Commission press release says that "A joint procurement mechanism is proposed to support the Member States that are still in the process of ordering vaccines." This echoed a proposal the incoming Swedish presidency of the EU made in July.

That seemed a bit odd. With incoming surveillance data signaling an uptick in the spread of pandemic flu in European countries, which could herald the imminent onset of the peak phase in the pandemic, it seems a bit late in the day to start discussing ordering vaccine at the EU level, in particular given that it's been obvious since early May that a pandemic was underway.

The text of the policy itself agrees, however, and notes that "Given the stage of development of the pandemic, and the advance purchase orders already concluded by several member states, it is not considered reasonable or efficient at this stage to launch a joint procurement procedure at EU level between interested member states for vaccine procurement." Instead, it argues for considering launching "a bundle of national calls for tender by the interested Member States to be carried out simultaneously or as a whole."

I've checked with the media people at the Commission's health directorate. It seems there was some confusion in the wording of the press release – finally there will be no joint procurement scheme. The Commission will basically try to "help different countries to help themselves," says a spokesperson. Many European countries have already ordered vaccine to cover large proportions of their populations, and so the scale of the problem the Commission is seeking to address is not clear either. "It is a problem," in some countries, according to the spokesperson, but couldn't say more, or in which countries, as the Commission apparently doesn't have "a table of who has ordered what." "Member states aren't obliged to inform us."

Continue reading "Europe's pandemic flu response: who's in the driving seat?" »

Posted by Declan Butler
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Astronomers from a major European planet-hunting team announced improved measurements of the density of a small exoplanet at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany, confirming earlier guesses that CoRoT-7b is more Earth-like than Jupiter-like.

The zippy little planet, previously estimated at 5-10 times the Earth's mass with a radius less than twice the Earth's, was first announced in February 2009 (Tiniest exoplanet found, Nature News, 3 February 2009). Today's more complete analysis appears in Astronomy and Astrophysics, in which the authors report that CoRoT7-7b's mass is likely just about five times that of the Earth. The study relies on 70 hours of spectroscopic observations over several months to more firmly establish the relative masses of the host star CoRoT-7 and its planetary companions, and also reveals the presence of a second rocky planet.

Continue reading "Exoplanet's BMI hints at rocky surface" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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RIKEN scientist arrested
Japanese researcher allegedly misused institutional funds.

Q+A: Choon Fong Shih
The first president of Saudia Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology talks.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Hoping to curb costs and accelerate their drug pipeline, Pharma giant Eli Lilly and Company announced yesterday that it plans to reorganize into five business units by year's end and slash 5,500 jobs over the next two years.

"We will soon enter the most challenging period in our company's history," said John Lechleiter, Lilly's chairman and chief executive officer. "This calls for strong measures to speed our output of new medicines, better meet the changing needs of our customers and reduce our costs," (press release).

Continue reading "Eli Lilly jumps on restructuring bandwagon" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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At a press conference at the Royal Society this morning, three of the shortlisted authors for this year’s Royal Society Book Prize discussed whether science can be made more accessible through biography before the winner was announced.

How appropriate then, after such intense debate, that a historical biography won.

Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder (see my review) won the prize for his profile of the great scientists of the Romantic era. In his tome, the lives of greats such as Joseph Banks, William and Caroline Herschel and Humphry Davy are the means of understanding their science.

The discussion before the announcement stemmed from a question about what makes a good book. Although the authors in the room, former Nature News editor Jo Marchant, Richard Holmes and Ben Goldacre, agreed that stories are key, but they disagreed on whether focusing on the human element works as a way in, or if that is somewhat contemptuous towards science.

Continue reading "Ruth’s Reviews: The Result....Beauty and terror. The Age of Wonder wins Royal Society book prize " »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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A private prototype built by Armadillo Aerospace completed a mock lunar mission in Texas yesterday. The 850-kilogram craft took off, flew 50 metres, landed, and returned, completing the 180-second flight time required by NASA's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. So far, Armadillo Aerospace is the only company to have claimed any money ($350,000) from the 2-tier prize system, for completing a shorter flight on easier terrain, which Nature reported on The Great Beyond last year.

The prize for the second tier will be $1 million, but two other private companies will also attempt the challenge this autumn, according to NASA. Several science and tech news outlets are carrying the story (Best title: "Flying armadillo has the power to escape the moon" New Scientist. Cool photo: Space Fellowship). To get the story from the horse's mouth: check out Armadillo Aerospace's news page. More pretty pictures at their gallery.

Photo: Looks like Sputnik. Armadillo Aerospace via Popular Science.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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"Think about a future where thanks to smart tags we will not have waste anymore," said Mr Ratti. "Everything will be traceable."
Carlo Ratti, of MIT's Trash Track project, which will tag 3,000 pieces of trash from Seattle, New York, and London with GPS trackers and create visualizations so consumers see where their trash ends up (BBC).

"One of the most profound actions I can take personally is to donate my brain to help ensure the safety and welfare of active, retired, and future athletes for decades to come."
American football player Sean Morey of the Arizona Cardinals joins over 150 National Football League players in leaving their brains to science (Fox News).

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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Maori legends told of a giant predatory bird called the Te Hokioi, whose wingspan approached the length of a full-grown man and whose prey included human beings. Now Kiwi scientists are adding to the legend by claiming that a skeleton found in the 1870s shares some of the legendary bird's traits.

"We don't think it carried off men and women but it could well have carried off children," says Paul Scofield, who along with colleagues at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch published a report in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology indicating that the extinct Harpagornis moorei swiftly evolved wings 3 metres across and weighed in at 18 kilograms, twice the size of today's largest living eagle, soon after its arrival on New Zealand's South Island.

Continue reading "Kiwi scientists add to Maori man-eating bird legend" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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A blind listening test at a forestry conference suggests that foresters, at least, prefer a modern violin made from fungus-treated wood to an original Stradivarius.

Last year Francis Schwarze of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research in St Gallen published results suggesting that treating wood with fungus might help recreate the unusually low density that prevailed when Antonio Stradivari carved his legendary instruments.
(Nature News, 16 June 2008)

Schwarze teamed up with luthiers (violin-makers) to build violins with the treated wood, along with some control copies made from untreated wood. At a blind competition in the German city of Osnabrück on 1 September this year, 180 attendees of a German forestry conference (Osnabrücker Baumpflegetagen) rated the test violins and an original Stradivarius played by British violinist Matthew Trusler (World Radio Switzerland, 1 September 2009). One of the fungus-treated violins, called "Opus 58" garnered 90 votes for the best sound, with the Strad second at 39, according to a press release.

Blind violin identification is notoriously difficult: In a BBC test in 1974, experts were only able to correctly identify 2 of 4 instruments, and confused a modern instrument with a Stradivarius. Schwarze noted that the fungus treatment might make violins which sound like Strads, at least to foresters, for as little as 25,000 Swiss francs (World Radio Service, 10 September 2009).

Photo: The 5 violins in the competition. By Egmont Seiler.

Posted by Lucas Laursen
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In the latest salvo in a legal row between the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) – an international group created by leading flu researchers in August 2006 to promote data sharing – and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) in Geneva, GISAID today launched its own version of the Epiflu database.

GISAID announced a contract with the SIB in December 2006 to build the first EpiFlu database, an international database which opened last year, and which scientists have since used to help monitor the spread and evolution of influenza viruses and to select the strains used to makes flu vaccines. In July, however, SIB made EpiFlu unavailable via the GISAID website, and available only to users redirected to a SIB website (Nature).

At the time, SIB and GISAID officials declined to discuss the details because of the ongoing legal dispute. But, in short, the SIB alleged that GISAID has breached its contract by failing to pay its bills on time, and that, under Swiss law, a default on payment renders a contract null and void, giving the SIB the rights to the database it built. GISAID claimed that SIB had "misappropriated" the database.

That Epiflu database remains accessible to users on the SIB site, but today GISAID launched its own independent version on the EpiFluDB tab on its own website. The new database was built by the the computational biology department of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics near Saarbrücken in Germany, and a3systems GmbH.

Continue reading "Flu database row escalates" »

Posted by Declan Butler
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Atomic agency rescues 'dirty bomb' material
Radioactive cobalt cleared from Lebanese lab.

Publication bias continues despite clinical-trial registration
Fewer than half of registered trials publish their results.

France unveils carbon tax
Nature talks to climatologist Jean Jouzel about the plans.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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One of the first researchers to clone animals and another who first reprogrammed skin into stem cells have been awarded the 2009 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award — a $250,000 accolade that is often seen as a prelude to a Nobel Prize.

John Gurdon, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, was the first to show that the vast majority of the body's cells retain the ability to become any other cell type even after they have committed to a particular developmental fate. In 1962, Gurdon, then at Oxford University, transferred the nucleus of an adult intestinal cell into a hollowed out egg cell of the South African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, to create the first cloned animal. This work paved the way for the cloning of other animals including Dolly the sheep by the technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer.

More than four decades later, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan and the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco, California, showed that the developmental clock could be turned back on cells even without the use of eggs. In 2006, Yamanaka introduced four genes — which have come to be known as the "Yamanaka factors" — into mouse skin cells to transform them into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which are almost indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells. A year later, Yamanaka achieved the same feat in human cells.

Continue reading "Stem cell pioneers take home Lasker" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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The genuinely rather good They Might Be Giants have released their science for kids album, Here comes science, previewed in Nature, and on the podcast.

Here is the lovely song "Meet the elements".

You should also check out "Science is real" (thanks Bad Astronomy) and show it to everyone you know. Especially kids.

Below the fold: Previous songs about science.

Continue reading "Songs about science XXV: Meet the elements" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Norman Borlaug, the U.S. agricultural scientist who won the 1970 Nobel peace prize for his role in tackling world hunger has died on Saturday at the age of 95. (Texas A&M University, Reuters, Washington Post, Guardian)

Borlaug developed high-yielding, disease-resistant wheat kick-starting the “green revolution” in the 1960’s that dramatically increased food production in the developing world.

Borlaug served as a distinguished professor of international agriculture at Texas A&M University, in College Station, Texas.

Continue reading "Nobel-winning agricultural scientist dies" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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Harvard, Yale and other elite US universities announced this week just how many billions of dollars they lost from their endowments last year.

Harvard's endowment tumbled 27.3%, shedding nearly $11 billion — an amount that exceeds the total endowment of every other university except for Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Texas System. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school's decline was the first loss in seven years and the biggest in four decades. Harvard's portfolio now sits at around $26 billion. (NYTimes)

Yale saw its endowment plummet 30% — worse than the 25% forecast — to $16 billion in the fiscal year that ended on June 30. The drop means that the New Haven, Connecticut, university will face annual deficits of $150 million for the next four years. On top of 7.5% reductions in staff and non-salary expenses already announced for the current academic year, Yale plans to push for another 5% in non-salary cuts. (Wall Street Journal)

"With the exception of financial aid, no area of expenditure will be immune from close scrutiny," Yale President Richard Levin and Provost Peter Salovey wrote in a statement. The administrators singled out faculty recruitment and building construction as two areas that are expected to slow down.

Rounding out most of the rest of the Ivy League schools: Columbia University in New York’s endowment declined in value by 21%, to $5.7 billion (Wall Street Journal); Providence, Rhode Island-based Brown's endowment investments dropped 23%, while the total fund dipped 27%, leaving the school with $2 billion (Bloomberg); and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia announced last month that its endowment lopped off 15.7%, falling to $5.3 billion (Bloomberg).

Image: Wall Street Journal

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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The drama over NASA's future continues. Just a few days after the Augustine commission delivered a report that puts the agency's new moon rockets in doubt, Alliant Techsystems conducted an Earth-rattling test of the booster that would power one of those rockets, known as the Ares 1. The ground test of the five stage booster, which spewed the exhaust of 1.4 million pounds of fuel across the Utah desert, is a prelude to the Ares 1-X flight test that is supposed to go up this autumn. In the wake of the Augustine report, which said that the Ares 1 plan is dead without more money, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin sent around an impassioned email, exhorting leaders to give credit to the actual hardware that's being built for Ares 1. Its "technical problems are on display because actual work is being accomplished, whereas other options have no problems because no work is being done," Griffin wrote.
Image: NASA, Walt Lindblom

Posted by Eric Hand
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One year after Hurricane Ike slammed into the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, flooding the island campus with anywhere from six inches to six feet of water and causing $710 million in damages, the medical school's diagnosis looks good.

Within months of the storm, UTMB was ready to handle dangerous biological agents again, but the same could not be said about patients. The John Sealy Hospital, the school's main source of income, was shuttered after the storm. It eventually reopened, but at only a fraction of its initial capacity. Now, the Texas legislature has earmarked $150 million in direct funds to increase John Sealy's capacity back to its pre-Ike levels of 550 beds. (Houston Press)

Continue reading "A year after Ike, Texas school on the upswing" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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“The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. … [W]e’re sorry, you deserved so much better.”
UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologises for the mistreatment of mathematician Alan Turing, who was prosectuted for being gay after his work helped break the German Enigma codes in WWII.

“I’m anxious to try green. You get a little bored with blue.”
Paul Karason, who turned blue due to consumption of silver, is seeing the lighter side of his condition (Today).

“The 38-year-old Perth man, who has a weakened immune system, initially responded to the drug but developed a resistant strain of the virus when his illness relapsed.”
The Western Australia Department of Health confirms tamiflu resistant H1N1 has reached the country (Reuters).

“The brains would be ‘freaky observers’, they’d perceive a universe much more chaotic and difficult to define than ours.”
Writer Jim Kakalios has decided to make villains for his comic book out of nothing more than theoretical physics (Bad Astronomy).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Good news from UNICEF, the United Nations children’s fund. Child mortality rates are continuing to fall: since 1990 there has been a 28% drop in the under-five mortality rate.

The latest figures show that there has been some progress to making Millenium Development Goal 4: to reduce child mortality. The target, set in 2000, was to cut child mortality by two thirds the under-five mortality rate of 1990 by 2015.

The goal is still a long way from being reached, despite the success of a measles vaccination drive.

The rate of improvement has increased, though. The average rate of decline from 2000 to 2008 is 2.3 per cent, compared to a 1.4 per cent average decline from 1990 to 2000, the press release says.

Successes have been seen in particular in Niger, Mozambique and Ethiopia where under-five mortality has been reduced by more than 100 per 1000 live births since 1990.

But still 93% of all under-five deaths in the developing world happen in Africa and Asia. “A handful of countries with large populations bear a disproportionate burden of under-five deaths, with forty per cent of the world’s under-five deaths occurring in just three countries: India, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo,” said UNICEF executive director Ann Veneman. “Unless mortality in these countries can be significantly reduced, the MDG targets will not be met.”

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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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.

Ruth’s Reviews: The Age of Wonder – How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes.

Back in 1831 the science writer David Brewster emphasised the importance of biography in our understanding of the scientific process. The powerful mind he chose to illustrate major progress was Newton’s and his publication is cited by Richard Holmes as, "the first ever major scientific biography in Britain".

So it is not surprising that Holmes’s 500-page tome follows this mantra, giving its reader more than a glimpse at the men (for it was predominantly men) behind the major scientific developments during the Romantic era. The age of wonder is less a popular science book and more a history of the science of the Romantic period, by a master of biographies of that age.

At the book’s core are the lives of astronomer William Herschel and chemist Humphrey Davy, their childhoods and forming of great minds. The science of the time is illuminated by biography as we learn of the process, challenges, and adventures faced by these two and a supporting cast of other characters.

As if this weren’t enough of an endeavour, Holmes intertwines scientific ideas and research with contemporary literature and philosophy that was inspired by these people, introducing another layer of context.

Continue reading "Ruth’s Reviews: The Age of Wonder" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The last sector of the Large Hadron Collider, the worlds biggest, baddest particle accelerator, is beginning its slow cool down to near absolute zero.This is the final step before recommissioning of the broken accelerator can finally begin.

For those who don't obsessively follow particle accelerators, the LHC uses superconducting magnets to steer protons around the machine. Those magnets must be kept at just 1.9 degrees above absolute zero to work. Getting anything that cold takes a lot of refrigerant: 10,000 tonnes of liquid nitrogen and 120 tonnes of liquid helium are used over the entire machine. It also takes time, and the cooling process will take weeks to complete.

When it's all done though, LHC physicists can pick up where they left off last September. Hopefully we'll see collisions by Christmas!

Credit: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Japan successfully launched its space station resupply ship today*, aboard a new rocket.

“We would like to express our profound appreciation for the cooperation and support of all related personnel and organizations that helped contribute to the successful launch,” said the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in a statement.

The Japanese resupply vehicle is, says CNET, “a critical milestone for the post-shuttle space station program”. While Russia and Europe have their own space station resupply vehicles, the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle has a pressurized section, meaning it can carry things they cannot.

Equally, as AFP points out, this HTV can be modified to carry human beings. Along with the new and more powerful rocket used in this launch, the success strengthens Japan’s position in the space race.

[* At 2:01:46 am Japan Standard Time, so technically yesterday for many time zones.]

Image: JAXA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Italian quake analysis rumbles in
Satellite data pinpoints fault at heart of L'Aquila earthquake.

Physicists propose 'Schrödinger's virus' experiment
Laser technique could put virus in two overlapping quantum states.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The United States' climate envoy, Todd Stern, appeared on Capitol Hill Thursday to deliver what has become a depressingly familiar update. Yes, the chasm between the developed and developing worlds remains wide and deep; yes, talks are progressing with key players like China and India; yes, all sides are taking the issue seriously; no, there are no details to report; but yes, yes, of course, there is hope.

For more detail, check Bloomberg and Reuters, but suffice it to say that reporters in the room were generally left scratching their heads as to why Stern had been called to testify in the first place. And perhaps lawmakers felt the same way: Only seven members of the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming showed up; three stuck it out for the duration.

Indeed, there's no particular reason why anyone would expect Stern to have any major progress to report at this point. The most likely venues for breaking news come later this month, when the United Nations holds its Summit on Climate Change in New York and the G20 convenes on Pittsburgh. Moreover, Congress has just returned to town after a lengthy August recess, and pretty much everybody, including President Barack Obama, is talking about health care, not climate.

Continue reading "Stern talks; Congress flounders; EPA gears up?" »

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

Early clinical data indicates that two different swine flu vaccines are safe and effective, according to papers published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Twenty-one days into one trial involving 240 subjects aged 18 to 64, a vaccine composed of a single antigen developed by CSL Biotherapies, a flu shot manufacturer based in Parkville, Australia, appears to significantly boost antibody levels in more than 93% of people at both normal and double doses. No serious adverse effects have yet been found, the authors report.

In another three-week trial of 175 adults aged 18 to 50 run by clinicians at the University of Leicester, UK, Novartis' adjuvanted swine flu vaccine yielded protective levels in at least 80% of participants at half the normal dose and more than 90% of subjects given a full dose. Many people experienced pain and muscle ache, and two participants became feverish. The study confirms early reports of success announced last week.

Continue reading "Swine flu jabs look A-OK" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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The American Chemical Society’s Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has recorded its 50 millionth small molecule in its CAS registry, a database of chemical information.

"Reaching the 50 million mark so quickly is an indicator of the accelerating pace of scientific knowledge," according to a press release, which notes that the 40 millionth substance was registered 9 months ago.

Number 50 million's chemical name is (5Z)-5-[(5-Fluoro-2-hydroxyphenyl)methylene]-2-(4-methyl-1-piperazinyl)-4(5H)-thiazolone, and it's a potential reliever for neuropathic (nerve) pain.

On Sciencebase, David Bradley notes that the predominant source of this new chemical substance information is the global patent literature. Several years ago, patents accounted for approximately 20 percent of the substance information added to the registry. WIth the explosion of patent literature today, that number is closer to 70 percent. "If they’re scraping patents on such a vast scale, is the addition of a few extra million entries actually representative of technological advance?" he wonders.

Chart: CAS/wikipedia

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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“The ultimate engine of all scientific and technological evolution.”

Alec Jeffreys, the discoverer of DNA fingerprinting, speaking about curiosity driven research and why it must be protected on the 25th anniversary of his blue skies discovery. (Telegraph, Science Business)

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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US regulators accused a stem cell biotech company on Tuesday of inflating claims about an early stage cell therapy.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Bothell, Washington-based CellCyte Genetics Corporation, along with its former chief executive and former chief scientific officer, with duping investors into believing that its experimental stem cell technology was nearing human trials.

"CellCyte and its senior officers knew that it would take years of research to determine whether the stem cell discovery could be developed into a viable product," said Marc Fagel, director of the SEC's San Francisco office, in a statement. "In their rush to cash in on the promise of stem cell research, they concealed the true facts from investors."

Continue reading "Stem cell company charged with hype" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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The European Commission has abandoned plans for an EU-managed scheme to buy swine flu vaccines due to a lack of support from member states, reports the European Voice.

In July, Androulla Vassiliou, the European commissioner for health, said the Commission was considering a joint EU procurement scheme for the vaccines. But the proposal now looks likely to not be included in the EU’s swine flu strategy to be published next week. Instead the Commission will offer countries “technical advice” on procurement, the report says.

Jo Leinen, a German Socialist MEP who chairs the European Parliament's environment and public health committee, said the omission is a mistake.

“We know some countries are well prepared and others are less well prepared. There must be a mechanism for shifting the vaccine... The added value of the EU is to show solidarity,” he says.

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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ARCA stands on the eve of lunar domination

The Indian moon probe has failed; the future of the US space programme is in question; low-earth orbit is littered with junk. But at a time when there are so many reasons to say "no" to space, Romania is saying "da!" (that's yes in Romanian).

The brave members of the non-profit Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA) are determined to get to the moon in a balloon. Yep, a balloon. According to Xinhua (sadly about the only non-Romanian outfit to cover the story), they are planning a test launch next month!

Regular readers of the blog already know of my moon-balloon obsession. It sounds insane but it's not: The idea is to launch a balloon with a rocket hanging from the bottom. Once at altitude, the rocket will fire, carrying a bizarre beach-ball probe on its glorious mission of seleno-Carpathian conquest.

This rocket-balloon trick was briefly tried by the Americans in the 1950s, but it was eventually abandoned in favor of other kinds of rockets that couldn't be blown off the test range by a strong gust (not kidding!).

ARCA is too bold to be deterred by these problems. Yesterday they announced that their first moon-balloon prototype will launch in October. Once again, they're bristling with innovation: Rather than working with costly staging systems of the sort that keep causing Korean satellites to crash, the Romanians have a plan. They're going to tie the second and third stages to the first with a bit of cable. Once the first stage is done, they'll cut the cable and fire the second. When that runs out, they'll cut the cord and fire the third! If you're in doubt about whether this can work, ARCA has created another incredible video for you to watch that shows just how it will happen (see below).

Once again, there is some method to this madness: The team hopes that the dangling weight of the second stage and payload behind the first will help to stabilize the rocket and keep it pointing straight away from the earth. Assuming all goes well the Romanians will launch a suborbital probe from the Black Sea next month.

Joking aside, there is something about the wacky sincerity of ARCA's plans that makes me really hope this works. I'm very excited to see what will happen!

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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“The school takes every kids temperature every day.”
Glenn Zhou, a parent of school children in China on the country’s initiative to tackle swine flu. China has said it will vaccinate 65 million people, including school children, by the end of the year. (BBC)

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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Switzerland has this year become the world’s most competitive economy overtaking the United States, new figures show.

The country moved up one place from its ranking in 2008 to come top out of 133 others in the 2009/2010 Global Competitiveness Report, released by the World Economic Forum on 8 September. The US slipped from the top spot in 2008 taking second this year, the figures show.

Continue reading "US slips from the top of competitiveness ranking " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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NASA has released the first images from the upgraded Hubble telescope. Looks like the iconic orbiting observatory is working just fine after its May upgrade which saw it get new batteries, gyroscopes and and a thorough overhaul of its instruments.

It also got a new camera and a new spectrograph from the astronauts who spent five days under Hubble's hood. The upgrade, almost certain to be Hubble's last, should keep it producing tip-top images until 2014. It's taken a few months to focus, test and calibrate the instruments, but by the looks of this snap of the Butterfly Nebula, it's been worth the wait.

Still, while everyone is slapping each other on the back, it's worth remembering that it took a hell of a lot of fighting to get the repair done. Over time, a series of glitches had taken their toll on the telescope, and back in 2003, astronomers were already lobbying for Hubble to be serviced to help it live beyond its original decommissioning date of 2010.

The following year, President George W. Bush gave NASA a sweeping new vision for human space exploration which left Hubble as an unfortunate budget casualty - at that stage it was likely to be dead by 2007.

But scientists would not give up on their prized 'scope. The NASA administrator at the time, Sean O'Keefe, said that a manned repair mission was too risky in the wake of the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, so there was a huge effort to work out whether a robotic servicing mission could do the job.

Nope, said a National Academies panel at the end of 2004 - you need astronauts to do the job. But the NASA budget unveiled the following year had no cash for a manned mission, effectively signing Hubble's death warrant.

It was October 2006 before Hubble's fortunes improved and a manned servicing mission was finally approved.

One key player in the campaigning for Hubble was Barbara Mikulski, Democrat senator for Maryland, now chairwoman of the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA. Today, Mikulski gloried in her victory by declaring, "I fought for the Hubble repair mission because Hubble is the people's telescope". Goodness me. Meanwhile, Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said that the telescope is "significantly more powerful than ever, well-equipped to last into the next decade."

According to NASA, future observations will range from "studying the population of Kuiper Belt objects at the fringe of our solar system to surveying the birth of planets around other stars and probing the composition and structure of extrasolar planet atmospheres."

Posted by Mark Peplow
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Chromium isotopes track oxygen's rise
Early debut for essential gas was followed by an unexpected dip.

Potato blight's gene weaponry revealed
Jumping genes may hold key to defeating mould that caused Irish famine.

How green is your campus?
Universities are working to bring sustainability to their campuses and classrooms, and could serve as a model for other institutions looking to go carbon-neutral. But there's no single way to grade the initiatives.

Export-control laws worry academics
US researchers hope planned reforms will reduce the risk of prosecution.

Darwin Centre takes doors off museum
Scientists are on display at a new Natural History Museum facility.

Stem-cell drug fails crucial trials
Experimental treatment does not halt fatal complication of bone-marrow transplant.

Posted by Mark Peplow
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So the blue-ribbon panel reporting to President Barack Obama on the future of human spaceflight at NASA finally turned in the executive summary of their report. It was only about a week past their 31 August deadline, pretty good considering all the options they had to digest -- thousands of permutations of different rocket designs, destinations and budget scenarios. The gist of the report is essentially what we reported for this week's print issue: NASA's existing mission and plans for the future are dead, without more money.
But one of my editors pointed out the wonderful and interesting range in headlines surrounding the report:
* The BBC's way with words: Underfunding shackles Nasa vision
* The NYTimes' slightly more staid approach: Panel Calls Program of NASA Unfeasible
* The Orlando Sentinel's overarching concern with rocketry: Ares may look dead but keeps kicking
* And, a personal favorite, from the local DC satire site, Wonkette: It's Like Barack Obama Doesn't Even Think Mars Is That Awesome
But there is very little awesomeness for Obama to work with here. As the panel insisted over and over again, they weren't making recommendations, they were just laying out 'options'. It will be up to Obama to make some tough decisions.
Image: NASA

Posted by Eric Hand
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The pharmaceutical industry cannot rely on increasing sales to drive its profits, a leading executive warned this week.

Speaking at the British Pharmaceutical Conference in Manchester, Brent Vose, vice president of Global Drug Development at AstraZeneca, said that the world financial situation makes it even more important to be smart about drug research.

“Over time sales have continued to go up in dollar terms. I have little doubt that that will not continue,” he said. “As GDP and tax revenues reduce, the pressures on healthcare budgets will increase.”

The financial crisis comes at a bad time for major pharmaceutical companies, which are also bracing for the patents on a number of big selling drugs to expire, opening them up to generic competition.

Speaking at another conference session, Steve Wicks, vice president of Worldwide Pharmaceutical Sciences at Pfizer, noted that it is normal for a drug to lose 60% of its market share in the first year of generic competition. Wicks cautions that new big sellers are not coming on to the market in time to fill the gaps from the big blockbusters about to lose their patents.

“We are beginning to move into the unsustainable cycle,” he said.

Continue reading "Hard times ahead for big pharma" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The European Commission is expected to publish a proposal today that would offer €15 billion a year in aid to developing nations so that they can combat climate change. The Financial Times has a nice piece outlining the promise and problems with the plan. The good news is that it may help to bridge the gap between developed and developing nations at the upcoming Copenhagen talks in December. The bad news is that the proposal's is based on an estimated need of just €100 billion between now and 2020, a third of China's estimated cost for controlling just its own emissions over that same period. The plan would also allow the EU to repurpose development money for climate, something aid groups aren't too happy about.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom (which is part of Europe as far as everyone but the UK is concerned) a series of reports is calling for more action on climate change. The first, by the government's independent advisory Committee on Climate Change calls for caps on global air travel to cut aviation-related emissions. A second report by the Institute for Public Policy Research looks at a scheme known as personal carbon trading that would allocate a carbon cap to individual citizens. The conclusion is that personal carbon trading is "politically risky", but may be necessary if other policies fail.

All these proposals come at a time of great uncertainty for the future of a global climate agreement. At a press luncheon yesterday, David Milliband, the UK's Foreign Secretary, warned that there was about a 50/50 chance that the Copenhagen talks would reach any sort of reasonable conclusion. You can see more of his fairly dire predictions by watching the video at right (courtesy of ITV).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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After yesterday’s scientific poll, the result is in: Chandrayaan-1’s loss has not dented the reputation of ISRO. This is rocket science after all, as has been pointed out by commenters.

Despite the miscalculation of how hot it is on the moon, then, the mission is being seen as a positive experience for India by some. Unfortunately, more bad-sounding news has reached us today via Aviation Week, which has looked at a joint project with Chandrayaan-1 and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). This tandem experiment would help look for ice at the Moon’s poles. The first attempt in August wasn’t successful, according to Stewart Nozette, principal investigator on the LRO's Mini-RF, who tells AW that this was because of a pointing problem.

The second attempt for the chance to make use of the two craft at once was about to start when Chandrayaan-1 went silent, scuppering any chance to use the two missions in tandem.

Nozette is not bitter, “ISRO should be congratulated," he told AW. "They did a good job, but the moon is somewhat of a harsh environment."

Image: NASA

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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The British Science Festival is on this week at the University of Surrey. The festival provides an opportunity for British researchers to show their stuff. And it gives the media something to write about. Here's what's grabbed headlines today:

1. Conservationists are reintroducing short-haired bumble bees (Bombus subterraneus) to the British countryside. The bees were once commonplace in some parts of the UK, but none have been spotted since 1988. Now researchers are going to bring the bees back from New Zealand, where they were introduced in the 1800s to pollinate clover. Plenty of coverage to read here.

2. Chimpanzee babies are less whiny than human ones, according to a study out of the University of Portsmouth. Baby chimps apparently only cry when they have something to complain about, and they stop crying when their problem is dealt with. Actually it's more about a new way of understanding chimp facial expressions. But you can read the feed here.

3. Finally, there was plenty of coverage of a new, green Formula 3 car being developed at the University of Warwick. The car uses recycled carbon fiber and a steering wheel made of carrot bits. A lot of outlets picked up on the fact that the car ran on old wine and chocolate (aka biodiesel). You can read all about it from this Wawrick press release (from May).

Credit: D. Goulson/Bee Conservation Trust

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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The UK news sites are reporting that a French truck (lorry) driver may have been the first human casualty of Ulva lactuca, otherwise known as sea lettuce.

Let me explain. For years lactuca has been growing along the coastline of Brittany in France. Researchers suspect that nitrogen-rich runoff from farms and untreated sewage are fueling the explosive growth. The seaweed washes ashore, where it decays and releases hydrogen sulfide, the gas that makes rotten eggs stink.

Normally the mess is smelly. This year, however, it's turned deadly. A study of one beach by France's National Institute for Environmental Technology and Hazards (Ineris) revealed hydrogen sulfide concentrations of up to 1,000 parts per million—enough to kill in minutes.

The concentrations were strong enough to kill a horse and incapacitate its rider. Now it's emerged that hydrogen sulfide may have also killed the 48-year-old truck trucker. The driver had been carrying truckloads of the seaweed off the beach in July, when he fell unconscious and swerved into a wall. Initially medical examiners ruled that a heart attack was the likely cause of death, but now the local prosecutor wants a more thorough investigation.

The driver's family has so far refused to allow an autopsy.

Credit: K. Peters/Wikipedia

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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The British non-profit science lobby Sense About Science has unveiled the findings from its survey of 4,000 peer-reviewers. No need for suspense, I'll give you the bottom line now: Peer review is hardly perfect, but nobody's got a better idea. Interestingly though, researchers seem to think that more secrecy in the peer-review process could help to improve it.

Now the details. Overall, 69% of those surveyed said that they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with peer review. Another 22% could care less, and only 9% were "dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied" (see graph right).

But that hardly means that these researchers thought peer review as it stood was the best possible system. Only a third of researchers thought that the current peer review system was the best that could be achieved by scientists.

The surveyors were also asked to weigh in about what they thought could make peer review better. The idea of "open peer review," where reviewers names are made public, scored just 20% on the survey, while a whopping 76% of researchers thought that "double blind" peer review, where the names of authors and reviewers are hidden from each other, was a good idea. That contrasts with the last time the survey was done in 2007. Back then, 27% of survey participants supported open peer review, while just 71% wanted the reviews to be done double-blind. Incidentally, most Nature-brand journals don't use double-blind peer review.

Final thought, 41% of those surveyed thought monetary compensation would make them more likely to peer-review papers. Of those wanting benjamins for their time, almost all thought societies or publishers should pony up. There's lots more in the survey, so take a look and see what you think.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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The saga of India’s ill-fated Moon probe, Chandrayaan-1 continues. We learned in July this year that it took the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) three months to admit some serious instrument failures, and then at the end of August the mission was declared over, when communication with the satellite was lost ten months into a two year mission.

Now, according to the Times of India, the problems with Chandrayaan-1, which was meant to produce a topological and mineralogical map of the Moon, began way before launch. T K Alex, director, ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore, told the TOI “We assumed that the temperature at 100km above the Moon's surface would be around 75 degrees Celsius. However, it was more than 75 degrees and problems started to surface. We had to raise the orbit to 200km."

So, when in May this year Chandrayaan’s orbit of the Moon was raised from 100 kilometres to 200 kilometres it wasn’t as was explained at the time, to get a better view of the Moon. It was actually to try and cool things down. The temperature problems that arose from not knowing the temperature of the Moon started to cause problems as long ago as November last year, a month after launch.

Chandrayaan-1 must be now seen as a learning experience for ISRO. But a costly experience of $80 million.

Another ISRO official is quoted by the Press Trust of India saying the mission ended because of a bus management problem – a piece of hardware that performs “vital control functions”. This, the official claims could have led to the severing of the radio link between the satellite and Earth.

There is apparently a meeting taking place with scientists involved in the mission to review the performance of the mission (Hindustan Times) and ISRO director S Satish is quoted as being happy with the data that has been collected.

The legacy of this mission is unclear – a second Chandrayaan craft is planned to launch in 2013 and will include a rover to sample lunar rocks and send the data back to an orbiting spacecraft. But surely the failure will have damaged ISRO’s reputation in the eyes of the international space science community. Or not? What do you think?

Image: NASA

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Three new genes associated with Alzheimer’s have been discovered, to the delight of researchers in the field.

In two papers published in Nature Genetics, two teams describe how they compared the genomes of sufferers to healthy controls to identify potential gene variations leading to the disease. Philippe Amouyel’s team identified variants within CLU and CR1, while Julie Williams and her team also identified CLU and added PICALM to the mix.

“If we were able to remove the detrimental effects of these genes through treatments, we could reduce the proportion of people developing Alzheimer’s by 20%,” Williams, of Cardiff University in Wales, told a press conference. “In the UK alone this would prevent just under 100,000 people developing the disease. So the significance of these results in truly meaningful.”

Continue reading "Alzheimer’s genes identified" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A giant rat of a species previously unknown-to-science has been captured on an extinct volcano in Papua New Guinea.

Found by a tracker from a local tribe, the Bosavi Wooly Rat is 82 cm from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail and it weighs in at a 1.5 kilos. And of course it has a lot of fur, hence ‘wooly’ (pictured right).

“I had a cat and it was about the same size of this rat,” says wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan (press release). “This rat was incredibly tame. It just sat next to me nibbling on a piece of leaf.”

The question I really want answered is who would win in a face-off between the new giant rat and the recently discovered rat eating plant.

Buchanan was part of a BBC team filming on Mount Bosavi for TV programme ‘Lost Land of the Volcano’. The team have found around 40 possible new species in addition to the rat, including a subspecies of the strange marsupial cuscuses.

Continue reading "Giant rat found in extinct volcano" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Mote Marine Laboratory has lost its robotic submarine, Waldo. The sub was on a routine patrol in the Gulf of Mexico for "red tide," a periodic algal bloom that can devastate local fish populations. For five days it scanned the seas, reporting back every two hours to the scientists running the lab.

Then, without warning, the sub vanished. Researchers aren't quite sure what happened: Waldo may have sprung a leak, or been picked up by an unsuspecting boater. Regardless, Mote would like it back, says Gary Kirkpatrick, a scientist at the lab. "We're hoping that if anyone has seen Waldo, they will call and let us know so we can pick it up," Kirkpatrick said in a press statement.

The laboratory is offering a US$500 no-questions-asked reward for anyone with information leading to the capture of the missing sub. Given the fact the subs cost over $100,000 each, you'd think Mote could pony up a little more cash.

Predictably, the press are having a field day with "Where's Waldo?" references. But the Florida Sun Sentinel blog wins hands down for corny headlines with:

Missing: Where in the world is a yellow submarine named Waldo?

Not only do they hit Waldo, but they manage to work in a Beatles reference and a completely gratuitous nod to Carmen Sandiego ! This one's for you guys:

credit: NOAA

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is the keystone text for evolutionary theory; now you can see how the book itself evolved, thanks to Ben Fry.

Fry is the director of information design company Seed Visualization and he has constructed a rather wonderful graphic that shows the changes in the book over its six editions.

“We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished,” writes Fry. “In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime.”

Fry’s other scientific information design projects include a redesign of genetic code diagrams and illustrations of the relationships between different genomes. He was also behind the rather cool Nature HapMap cover.

His Traces graphic allows to you not just to watch the changes accumulate as time passes – and editions are published – but also to see where words and passages have been added into the text (image left).

“The idea that we can actually see change over time in a person’s thinking is fascinating,” says Fry. “Darwin scholars are of course familiar with this story, but here we can view it directly, both on a macro-level as it animates, or word-by-word as we examine pieces of the text more closely.”

Traces uses text from The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, run by John van Wyhe.

Hat tip: Flowing data

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Nations commit to share climate information
But proposed international service will face scientific and political hurdles.

Ethics scrutiny needed for Chinese–European projects
Panel calls for joint advisory body to monitor research.

Cells go fractal
Mathematical patterns rule the behaviour of molecules in the nucleus.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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African leaders are threatening to boycott the global warming summit in Copenhagen this December if negotiations come up short. Of course it's not yet clear whether they have the collective will to do so, at least as a unified block, but the message came through in no uncertain terms.

Speaking at a meeting of the Africa Partnership Forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared that African leaders are prepared to "walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent.”

Though least responsible and most at risk due, Meles said, Africans have largely been locked out of the already small transfer of wealth created to help poor nations cope and develop along a cleaner path. "But we have no intention to a free ride," he added, suggesting that Africa is prepared to protect and expand forests and remains a "green field" for clean energy investments.

African has been trying to formulate a unified position since making a decision to negotiate as a block earlier this year. Environment ministers were able to collectively call on industrialized nations to reduce emissions by a whopping 25-40 percent by 2020 earlier this summer, but many details were left unresolved. This week's meeting represented the latest attempt to consolidate positions.

Press reports indicate that they made some progress, although verifying details proved difficult. More than one story (see here and here) suggested that Africans planned to call on developing nations to provide some $200 billion, presumably annually, to developing countries by 2020, although it was not clear what that money would cover.

Lim Li Lin, who works on developing country issues for the Third World Network, says Africa has always more or less negotiated as a group. The question moving forward, she says, is whether leaders will be able to settle on a concrete position and then stick to it in the negotiations. "What is clear is that all this has not impacted the negotiations yet," she says.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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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.

Bad Science – Ben Goldacre

Bad Science is gloriously shouty and hugely entertaining, but it comes with a serious message. Goldacre takes the reader through a series of lessons and brings you out able not only to understand but to question and re-examine scientific claims.

The UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, John Beddington, said recently, “everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts”. Goldacre obeys this mantra. The facts are presented straight, but the entertainment comes in the form of his opinions. And he certainly is not short of those.

Goldacre’s use of homeopathy and nutritionists to teach how evidence based medicine should work are well documented, as are his issues with nutritionist Gillian McKeith and alternative medicine guru Patrick Holford. Much of this will be familiar to readers of his blog, which shares its name with this book. By exploring what he sees as Bad Science the good doctor conveys the flipside: how science should be done.

Personally, I take some issue with his thoughts on science journalism and PR because this is my industry. But these chapters are no less entertaining as a result and remind me of the reasons why I try to get it right.

His key point is that we have to examine the facts that are presented to us, and trust no one. I do fear some readers may confuse his opinions with facts though.

If you haven’t already consumed and digested this book it comes highly recommended. But as you read it, remember Beddington’s wise words.

Previously on Ruth's Reviews
Ruth’s Reviews: the Drunkard’s Walk
Ruth’s Reviews: Your Inner Fish
Ruth’s Reviews: Decoding the Heavens
Ruth’s Reviews: What the nose knows

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Greenhouse gas emissions have helped reverse the Arctic's 2,000-year (at least) cooling streak, suggests a new report in Science.

The authors reconstructed the past two millennia of Arctic temperatures based on records from lake sediments, ice cores and tree rings, and found that the Arctic had been cooling throughout the data set — until this century, when the trend halted and reversed. Four of the five warmest decades in the past 2,000 years between 1950 and 2000, with the most recent decade the hottest of them all. The Arctic had been cooling due to a wobble in its orbit, causing less summer sunshine to hit its surface.

According to first author Darrell Kaufman, "the 20th century stands out in strong contrast to the cooling that should have continued. The last half-century was the warmest of the 2,000-year temperature record, and the last 10 years have been especially dramatic." (BBC)

The authors' model shows that the Arctic temperatures should have kept cooling for another 4,000 years before the trend reversed — had greenhouse gas emissions in the latter half of the 20th century not overwhelmed the natural cycle (MongaBay).

Current Arctic temperatures are about 1.4 degrees Celsius higher than they would have been had the 2,000-year cooling trend continued, leading to the suggestion that "this era really is the Anthropocene — a geological period of our own making, either by accident or design" (NY Times Dot Earth blog). The blog also quotes climate scientist Thomas Crowley, who notes that this "strengthens the argument that humans are now capable of preventing the onset of a future ice age". That quote prompted an update on the blog, where the author noted the concern that these implications "might be abused by folks fighting restrictions on greenhouse gases".

Other coverage:
Arctic reverses trend, is warmest in two millennia - AP
Warmest Arctic temperatures for 2,000 years, says new study - CNN
Abrupt reversal detected in Arctic cooling trend - SF Chronicle
Arctic Warming Overtakes 2,000 Years of Natural Cooling - NCAR press release

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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Turkey has indicated it may be willing to allow Iraq and Syria to have more water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, after both nations complained they were not being given their fair share.

“We have only received eight billion cubic meters of water from the Euphrates between August 2008 and August 2009. That means a decrease of 30 percent,” Latif Rashid, Iraq’s water minister said earlier this week (AFP).

“The situation in Iraq has never been as dire as it has been in the past two years. Iraq needs more water from both Syria and Turkey.”

Before a meeting on Thursday Turkey said it could not increase the rivers’ flow. But on Thursday environment minister Veysel Eroglu said attempts would be made to release more water.

“There is a serious water crisis in Iraq, we are taking this into account,” he said (AP). “But our own capabilities are limited.”

More
Turkey, Syria, Iraq discuss water resource of Euphrates, Tigris rivers - Xinhua
Turkey, Iraq and Syria in water crisis summit - CNN

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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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.

Japan’s new ruling party has warned that its election pledges on climate change are contingent on other countries’ moves.

Before the recent election in Japan, the Democratic Party of Japan was calling for a cut in greenhouse-gas emissions to more than 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 (see: Japan election sparks science pledges).

Now Katsuya Okada, the party’s secretary-general, has told Reuters, “This is not something Japan will do on its own. The premise is an agreement that includes other countries such as China and India.”

Okada dodged the question of whether the DJP would change its target if an international agreement couldn’t be reached. “We are trying to reach an agreement so we are not discussing what to do in the absence of an agreement,” he said.

Japan’s largest business group, Keidanren, has already come out against the 25% target (Yomiuri Shimbun, via Reuters).

Okada’s caveat of the party’s target may also deflate some of the hopes about the DJP’s climate stance, which was noticeably tougher than their rival Liberal Democratic Party.

Earlier this week – after the election but before the Reuters interview – Andreas Carlgren, Sweden’s environment minister said of the target, “That could create momentum in the climate-change negotiations. That is very close to the European ambitions.” (Bloomberg.)

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

With flu season looming, crunch-time is rapidly approaching for Northern hemisphere countries' pandemic planning. It seems likely that the pandemic H1N1 virus will be the predominant strain seen in the upcoming flu season, as data from the Southern hemisphere show that it is out-competing and displacing seasonal strains. The big question mark is when the flu season will start – although some vaccine is already beginning to flow, substantial amounts sufficient to vaccinate large parts of the population won't become available until October/November onwards.

The pandemic H1N1 virus has continued to circulate out-of-season throughout the summer, and with schools reopening and colder weather on the way, one possibility is that peak flu season may occur as soon as this month, rather than in the more typical mid-winter window. If it does come earlier, countries will be faced with tackling the pandemic with one hand tied behind their backs, as little vaccine would be available.

The challenges of handling the pandemic should not be underestimated. I have an article in this week’s Nature surveying researchers from a selection of countries worldwide, describing the scientific and public-health challenges they face in battling the H1N1 virus – see Pandemic flu: from the front lines . A recurring theme is that even if the severity of the virus remains moderate, public health systems and particularly intensive care units, risk being overwhelmed.

Continue reading "Pandemic flu - latest update" »

Posted by Mark Peplow
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India says no to HIV drug patents
Patent office rejects applications from two US drug companies.

'Overwhelming' evidence for monopoles
Multiple experiments reveal materials with single points of north and south.

Fresh targets give hope for HIV vaccine
Two antibodies that stop the virus in its tracks could hold the key to broad immune protection.

Europe's oldest axes discovered
Sophisticated tool-making skills more widespread than previously thought.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Doctors employed by the US Central Intelligence Agency may have used detainees as “human subjects” to try to improve the effectiveness of waterboarding and other forms of torture, alleges the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). The group has rifled through the heavily-redacted copy (pdf) of the CIA’s report on detention and interrogation practices, and this week released a report (pdf) of apparent health professionals’ ethical and human rights violations.

It's no surprise that doctors have been involved in "enhanced" interrogations — they needed to make sure the detainee wasn't about to die or suffer from organ failure or long-term psychological damage. This has already irked PHR, the Red Cross (who called it "a gross breach of medical ethics"), and other human rights groups, who assert the monitoring doctors are essentially complicit in torture.

But the new report alleges the doctors were more than just safety monitors. PHR says health professionals "participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA's secret 'torture programme'."

The most severe accusation is that doctors gathered data to try to improve the technique's effectiveness, "essentially using the detainees as human subjects, a practice that approaches unlawful experimentation."

Continue reading "Hippocratic loath" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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BP announced on Wednesday it had struck a ‘giant’ oil-field nearly 11 kilometres under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a region of increasing importance in the oil world. The find underlines the impressive – or, as you could see it, desperate – depths to which oil producers are now drilling to find black gold.

Continue reading "How deep is your well?" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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“This historic settlement will return nearly $1bn to Medicare, Medicaid and other government insurance programmes."
Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, after Pfizer agreed to pay $2.3 billion to settle allegations brought by federal prosecutors that the company had promoted four of its drugs for unapproved uses. (FT)

“Our per-capita emissions will never exceed the per capita emissions of developed countries.”
Jairam Ramesh, India’s minister of environment and forests, after releasing a report predicting that India’s carbon emissions will triple in the next 20 years. (Dot Earth)

“It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the Universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the Sun.”
University of Hawaii astronomer Tomotsugu Goto, who has discovered a giant galaxy surrounding the most distant black hole ever found. The find suggests that both must have formed surprisingly quickly in the early Universe. (press release)

Posted by Mark Peplow
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Thousands of new images snapped over the past few months by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe have just been unveiled.

It’s a treat for those of you who, like me, could spend a happy half-hour just goggling at the beauty of these geological forms, while marvelling at the technical achievement of photographing them and beaming them back to Earth.

Here’s a couple to get you going: ‘Possible Evaporites Near Fan in Coprates Region’ (left) and ‘Crater with Light-Toned Floor and Ejecta Material Near Iani Chaos’ (right).

The rest are here.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Posted by Mark Peplow
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Astronomers have found what they say is the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth. The 4,053 metre high-up site, known as Ridge A, has average winter temperatures of -70 degrees Celsius. The air is almost completely free of water, and there is nearly no turbulence in the air-- making for perhaps the best telescope observing conditions on Earth. Astronomers have said before that they want to build telescopes at other plateau sites known as Dome A and Dome C, where a telescope could compete with ones two to three times larger at the existing top sites in Hawaii and Chile. This is all well and good, but you're still going to have to convince astronomers to put on the parkas, go down there and build the things. There are reasons why astronomers like to wear Hawaiian shirts.

Posted by Eric Hand
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With the Copenhagen climate summit just three months away, the global warming community is starting to crank out numbers. Last week it was adaptation, and this week it's mitigation.

The United Nations' latest estimates indicate that the developing world will need $500 to $600 billion annually to leapfrog industrialized nations and chart a sustainable energy future (AFP). That's roughly equal to 1 percent of the global gross domestic product. Toss in the investments that will be needed in the industrialized world, and you get a figure of roughly $1 trillion annually. The UN report assumes a goal of keeping atmospheric carbon dioxide levels below 450 parts per million, thus increasing the likelihood of averting more than 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

For an eye-popping estimate of an entirely different magnitude, we will now turn to China. The Financial Times got its hands on an economic analysis that is apparently making the rounds as China considers the costs of cleaning up its act such that emissions peak in 2030. Their numbers suggest that costs could reach $438 billion annually by 2030 - for China alone.

Continue reading "Calculating costs: the United Nations on clean energy commitments " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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Pandemic flu: from the front lines
Researchers describe the scientific and public-health challenges they face in battling the H1N1 virus.

Q+A: Forging a future for South African science
The country's science minister talks about her priorities in lean times.

Knockout rats made to order
Customized disease models made by deleting rat embryo genes may be on sale soon.

Climate-control plans scrutinized
The Royal Society reviews options for fighting global warming with geoengineering.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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The Biogen Idec boardroom battle continues to rage on. Mere months after billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn succeeded in getting two of his endorsed directors elected to the board, two of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company's scientific directors have resigned. In July, Phillip Sharp, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-founder of Biogen, relinquished his spot on the board after serving for 27 years. And last month, Cecil Pickett, president of research and development, announced that he would retire from both his full-time day job and the board on 5 October. Both men were not due to step down until 2011.

Nature spoke with Pickett about his decision to resign prematurely. (Sharp declined to be interviewed.)

Did Carl Icahn's attempted takeover of the board influence your decision to retire early?

Not really, the plan all along was just a four-year tenure. That's how I went into it. I cut my job short because I just thought I had accomplished everything I could in the timeframe I had actually given it. We did a lot to build up the mid-stage pipeline and the small molecule discovery efforts, we did some licensing deals, and I did some significant recruiting where there were some weak spots. And given all the flux in the industry I thought it might be a good time to go out and recruit my successor.

Continue reading "Biogen Idec R&D head talks" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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It's the big bang, in pop-up form! "7000 tonnes of metal, glass, plastic, cables and computer chips leap from the page in 3D pop-up, to tell the story of CERN’s quest to understand the birth of the universe," explains the facebook page of this little gem, devised by paper engineer Anton Radevsky, CERN writer Emma Sanders, and scientists at the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector.

Aside from a pop-up peek at the birth of the universe, readers also get to build ATLAS - much as the CERN engineers did, Sanders notes, since the outer shell comes first before the detectors slide inside. Hat tip: Symmetry Breaking.

Voyage to the Heart of Matter: The ATLAS Experiment at CERN is out from November (published by Papadakis).

Images: CERN/Claudia Marcelloni

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Climate activists in the UK had a day of protests at their week-long Camp for Climate Action, but didn’t meet with the aggressive police tactics seen at last year’s event and at the G20 meeting in May.

On Tuesday, activists stripped off to protest inside the front window of Edelman (a PR company whose clients include energy firm E.ON, which is planning a new coal-fired power station in the country). Others superglued themselves together on the trading floor of the Royal Bank of Scotland, in objection to its investment in fossil fuel projects. Groups also marched towards the head offices of BP and Shell, against the mining of tar sands in Canada – led by indigenous Canadian activists chanting: “When I say ‘BP’, you say ‘criminal’” (BBC).

The government was a target too: on Wednesday, fifteen be-goggled and arm-banded activists sat in kayaks at the headquarters of the UK’s department for energy and climate change, highlighting rising sea levels, they said, and protesting against carbon trading and carbon capture and storage technology (The Guardian).

Media reports characterize the camp in Blackheath, London – where a thousand or so have gathered for the week – as good-natured, chilled-out and, with environmental workshops, quite educational. With the watching police in equally relaxed mode (there has been only one arrest), media attention is turning to the next promised direct action: the 'great climate swoop', an attempt to shut down the UK’s second-largest coal-fired power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, on 17th and 18th October.

Image: The Blackheath camp/SallyB2, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Yesterday the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific body, delivered its official view on geoengineering. Scientists analyzed a dozen different approaches and weighed their pros and cons. Then, being scientists, they plotted their results in a bizarre phase space that nobody could understand. Many a reporter, myself included, were scratching our heads when co-author Ken Caldeira popped this little gem up onto the screen:

(Note: error bars are purely symbolic. Huh?)

Now I want to be fair, the Royal Society report is actually very well written and it contains a lot of good information about the geoengineering proposals out there. But it's a nuanced take on a complex issue. So it's not surprising that you saw a range of headlines. The most inaccurate enthusiastic one by far, came from those lovely folks at the Register:

Boffins: Give up on CO₂ cuts, only geoengineering can work

The Financial Times landed on the other end of the spectrum:

Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions

And in between came everybody else:

Study says 'geoengineering' to flight climate likely, but risky (USA Today)

Royal Society warns climate engineering 'could cause disaster' (the Times)

World must plan for climate emergency-report (Reuters)

Investment in geo-engineering needed immediately, says Royal Society (the Guardian)

These headlines make the report look like a Kurosawa film, but most of the actual stories are pretty accurate in my opinion. The bottom line is that the Royal Society felt that the only sure way to save the planet is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in the event of a global climate emergency, we should at least know the consequences of geoengineering.

You can read our coverage here.

Update: I've included the updated diagram off the Royal Society website.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has staked out a larger government claim on newly discovered offshore oil reserves, promising to funnel proceeds into poverty reduction, education, science and technology.

Located off Brazil's southeast coast near Rio de Janeiro, the deep-water fields (the blue area in the Petrobras map) represent some of the biggest discoveries in the world in recent decades. The "pre-salts" are technically challenging, trapped below a thick layer of salt several thousand metres below the sea, but they could thrust Brazil into the major leagues of oil production - albeit at a time when the world is desperately seeking cleaner alternatives.

The plan has been on ice for more than a year (Nature), due in part to the global economic crisis. In making the announcement on Monday, Lula proclaimed an "independence day" of sorts. It stops well short of the kind of nationalization that has been seen in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, but many see it as a step in that direction.

Continue reading "Lula reasserts Brazilian control over new oilfield " »

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

JAXA, Japan's space exploration agency, has created a strange little applet on its Web site called "Moonbell". It takes topographic data gathered by the agency's Kaguya orbiter, and translates them into patterns of ascending and descending musical notes. You can either follow a pre-ordained orbit through the lunar hills and hollows, or, in "free scratch" mode, carve out your own route across the Moon. Now if only the music wasn't so awful -- it sounds like a drunk knocking his head against a piano keyboard, though I suppose it does reflect the ups and downs of the terrain. Maybe there's a way to link to music a bit more appropriately astral -- something like Brian Eno's Bloom iPhone app?
Image: JAXA

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

So are two of Southern California’s premier scientific institutions doomed by the wildfires currently ravaging the Los Angeles basin?

In the case of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the answer appears to be no. The massive Station Fire, which so far has torched more than 105,000 acres in the mountains north of Los Angeles, has been dancing with the fringes of the municipality of La Cañada Flintridge. That’s where JPL – despite its official mailing address of Pasadena – is actually physically located. But according to city officials, the fire has moved out of the area and is no longer a threat. JPL is reopening today, and mission engineers will start re-operating the NASA rovers on Mars.

The situation is far more dire for the historic Mount Wilson Observatory, which the Station Fire is approaching from the west. Staff there are no doubt remembering the 2003 firestorm that obliterated the major research telescopes on Mt. Stromlo, Australia.

Continue reading "California wildfires creep closer to observatory" »

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

There were probably some champagne corks popping over at AstraZeneca this weekend as the company unveiled results showing its new drug for thinning blood performs better than one of the world’s current best sellers.

Zeneca’s ticagrelor (marketed as Brilinta) was better at reducing cardiovascular events such as death and stroke than clopidogrel (Plavix). To put this in context: Plavix places as the world’s second or third best selling drug, with annual sales of $6 billion.

Results from a trial of over 18,000 patients were presented at the European Society of Cardiology meeting and also published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death from vascular causes, myocardial infarction, or stroke occurred in 9.8% of patients on ticagrelor versus 11.7% of those on clopidogrel.

Continue reading "Zeneca swells on Brilinta thinner news" »

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