The Great Beyond

While researchers are calling for studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the cholesterol lowering drugs known as statins for reducing influenza-associated deaths, one such study is just getting underway, largely on volunteerism and shoestring funding.

Newspapers reported yesterday (e.g. here, here and here) from the 2009 Infectious Diseases Society of America meeting in Philadelphia that statin use appears to be associated with a lower death rate from influenza. Using data from the 2007-2008 flu season, researchers reviewed charts from 2,800 lab-confirmed influenza-associated hospitalizations. More than 800 of these individuals were taking statins at the time. Meredith VanderMeer of the Oregon Public Health Division and her colleagues found that 2.1% of patients taking statins died within a month of being hospitalized for the flu, while 3.2% who were not taking statins died.

Statins have been suggested before as a potential alternative to antiviral drugs like oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza), which are more expensive and have the potential to run out in a severe pandemic. Statins may reduce the effects of the virus by dampening the immune response.

Continue reading "The statins-for-flu study that the press missed" »

Posted by Brendan Maher
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The UK government has told its independent advisor on drug abuse to resign after he again called for a more scientific approach to drugs.

David Nutt, until now chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), delivered a lecture at King’s College London in July, an edited version of which was published earlier this week reiterating his views on the relative safety of different drugs [Corrected 02/11]. We noted at the time that he “looks set for another row with politicians who continue to ignore researchers’ advice over illegal substances”.

In his lecture he said, “Using the [Misuse of Drugs] Act in a political way to give messages other than those relating to relative harms undermines the Act and does great damage to the educational message. We also have to fully endorse harm reduction approaches at all levels and especially stop the artificial separation of alcohol and tobacco as ‘non-drugs’.” (PDF.)

Nutt had earlier riled a previous home secretary, Jacqui Smith, with his comments regarding the dangers of MDMA (‘ecstasy’), comparing the risks of the drug to horse-riding and calling for a wider debate on society’s approach to risk.

Today Alan Johnson, the current UK Home Secretary, told Nutt to resign.

“In a letter he [Johnson] expressed surprise and disappointment over Professor Nutt's comments which damage efforts to give the public clear messages about the dangers of drugs,” said a Home Office spokesperson. “As chair of the council his actions undermine its role and scientific independence. … [T]he clear role of the chair of the ACMD is to provide independent scientific advice and not to lobby for changes in policy.”

However the sacking of Nutt has already generated a furious response from other UK politicians.

Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat MP and member of Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee, said, “The political sacking of a distinguished scientist, who is the chair of an independent scientific advisory committee, for the ‘crime’ of having different views than the Secretary of State is an enormous blow to the credibility of the Government’s approach to scientific evidence.”

Harris cites a recent response from the government to a committee inquiry on evidence based policy which stated:

The Government agrees that the independence of science advisers is critical. It was precisely for this reason that the GCSA [Government Chief Scientific Adviser] wrote to then-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to express concern over her criticism, in Parliament, of Professor Nutt (Chairman of ACMD) with regard to an article he published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Phil Willis, the chairman of the Science and Technology committee, said, “As Chair of the Science and Technology committee I am writing immediately to the Home Secretary to ask for clarification as to why the distinguished scientist David Nutt has been removed of duties as Chair of Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs at a time when independent scientific advice to government is essential. It is disturbing if an independent scientist should be removed for reporting sound scientific advice.”

UPDATE - Read Nature's interview with Nutt here: Sacked science adviser speaks out
Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies where Nutt gave his lecture in July, has written to the Home Secretary. His letter, distributed by the Science Media Centre, is copied below.

Image: University of Bristol

Continue reading "Government sacks independent drugs advisor" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The words Russia and nuclear always stoke the fires of hacks who hark back to the cold war. But this time the finger hovering over the red button will be launching a rocket to Mars, rather than a missile to end civilisation.

So news that Russia is planning a nuclear-powered rocket to get men to Mars (and back again?) has got widespread attention. The report comes from Russian news agency RIA Novosti who have a short account of Roscosmos head Anatoly Perminov’s address to a meeting of the commission on the modernization of the Russian economy. The spacecraft is still being designed, Perminov is reported as saying, with final plans finished by 2012. The cost will be at least 17 billion rubles, or $580 million.

Beyond that the report is patchy, but thanks to Rachel Courtland over at New Scientist and an AP story we can learn that at the moment rockets can be powered by the heat given off by certain decaying radioactive isotopes, or by using nuclear fission to generate electricity.

The Russian reactor is probably going to produce a megawatt or more of electrical power from a fission reactor. This kind of reactor/engine will be much more efficient once in space, but could kill the crew from exposure to massive doses of radiation on lift off. And according to the NS story, the budget really won’t buy much in terms of fission-reactor-powered-rockets. And the Register suggests that Russia will struggle to gather that 17 billion rubles regardless of whether it will be enough. Does Lada make rockets?

Image: A Lada car, from Wikimedia Commons

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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A parachute failure has left a serious dent in part of the Ares 1-X rocket that NASA test fired on Wednesday.

Although NASA announced the launch as a success, it seems one of three parachutes meant to ensure a stage of the booster rocket drifted slowly back down failed. Although the chute deployed correctly, it later deflated.

“At this point, we don’t know why,” says NASA spokeswoman Jennifer Morcone (Florida Today). “We’ll recover the booster and the hardware and then figure out what went wrong on deployment.”

Divers who recovered the rocket stage took impressive photos of a seriously large dent. They are meant to deliver the stage to NASA today, where analysis of what went wrong will begin.

“So until that point, everything is probably speculation,” says shuttle integration manager Mike Moses (Space.com).

The launch was also slightly marred by the fact that the dummy upper stage of the rocket tumbled rather than continuing gracefully nose first (CNET, WAFF).

Image: United Space Alliance

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Legendary guitarist Toni Iommi is undergoing stem cell therapy in an attempt to keep him rocking.

On October 20th he told a BBC radio show, “I’ve had this problem with my hand and I’ve had this stem-cell treatment on it. The joints [were] rubbing on the joints. It was bone to bone and it was getting a bit painful.”

The admission was noted at the time by music websites and the Daily Telegraph and the Times have followed up with new stories today.

Peter Buckle, of the Robens Centre for Health Ergonomics at the University of Surrey, warning in the Times that, “We have found a whole set of injuries affecting the hand, arms and wrist [of guitarists] which you would normally associate with working on a hard, fast production line. The temptation for younger musicians is to press too hard on the strings and try to force the frets. Holding the instrument away from the body to excite an audience may look good but it can put a huge pressure on the shoulder and upper arms.”

Iommi has already overcome damage sustained to his hand as a youth. We remain confident those who think this will force him to hang up his axe are merely paranoid.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden isn't afraid let feelings and emotions reign at NASA. Speaking at a NASA Advisory Council meeting on Thursday at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, Bolden choked up after viewing a short clip of the Ares 1-X test launch. "You don't launch a new rocket every day," he said, his voice breaking. "That was very special to me." It's not the first time that Bolden's emotions have gotten the best of him. NASA's Captain Kirk is clearly different from former administrator Mike Griffin, who once referred to himself as Spock.
Image: NASA

Posted by Eric Hand
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Aerosols make methane more potent
Air pollution linked more closely to climate concerns.

Amphibians rarely give earliest warning of pollution
Long-standing 'canary in the coal mine' role questioned.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The conventional wisdom these days is that governments should put more money into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. But a new study suggests that better education does not more scientists make.

The research was led by B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University in Washington, DC and Harold Salzmann of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It analyzed several longitudinal data sets to determine how many students were staying in STEM fields between secondary school, college and their careers.

Generally, it's thought that poor incentives have caused many students to leave these fields in recent years, but Lowell et al. found quite the opposite. The number of secondary school students who went on to study STEM fields was relatively unchanged between 1972-1977 and 2000-2005. And students who stayed in STEM fields in college were actually more likely to go on to careers in research in the 1997-2000 time frame than they were in 1977-1980.

But it wasn't all good news. The study found that the most talented STEM students were actually less likely to stay in science throughout their career.

The study's conclusion? Just because you put more money into educating science students doesn't mean you'll end up with more scientists. In fact forces in the job market might be more important. The authors cite anecdotal evidence that suggests many top science students are being lured into other more lucrative careers. The inference here, I suppose, is that governments should think about incentives for retaining working scientists, in addition to worrying about getting young people into STEM fields.

The study's evidence is interesting though not definitive. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing counterpoint to the chorus calling for ever more education in the sciences. There's a raging discussion about it all over on Slashdot.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Earlier this month it looked like the UK government had abandoned plans to keep the DNA of innocent people on its massive police database.

The European Court of Human Rights has already said that data on innocent people should not be retained. Now, however, leaked emails indicate that the government will try to keep hold of their DNA for six years, says the Daily Mail. The previously abandoned position of the government was to keep DNA of innocents for 12 years (see: UK won't be able to store DNA data – 20 October, 2009).

It was also reported today that the profiles of 5.5 million people – over 10% of the population of England and Wales – are now on the database (Daily Telegraph). In addition, over 90,000 innocent people have had their DNA added to the database since that European Court ruling that this shouldn’t be happening (Guardian).

The UK government’s approach seems to be catching on too: the University of Akron in the US is now apparently requiring job applicants to be willing to supply a DNA sample (Inside Higher Ed).

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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GlaxoSmithKline has announced a rosy set of third-quarter financial figures, and is going to be boosted by the ongoing H1N1 outbreak.

The company says it expects further growth in the fourth quarter “including significant sales of influenza products”.

“In Europe, we received approval for Pandemrix, our pandemic H1N1 vaccine. This follows more than 10 years of investment and effort into research of pandemic influenza. To date we have announced orders worldwide for approximately 440 million doses of the vaccine,” says CEO Andrew Witty.

Witty also says the company is beginning to see the outcome of its attempts to move away from “white pill/western markets”. While total sales at GSK were up 3%, emerging market sales were up 25% and now represent 14% of its pharmaceutical turnover versus 12% last year. Under 30% of sales were from white pill and western markets, versus 38% in the second quarter of 2008.

The Daily Telegraph says analysts expect sales of GSK’s Pandemrix to hit £1bn in the fourth quarter and Relenza to reach £180m.

The Financial Times notes:

Upgrading GSK from “hold” to “accumulate”, analysts at Charles Stanley concluded: “The company is evolving much more smoothly than we anticipated from a business dependent on blockbuster products to one based on strong and diversified franchises.”

Gbola Amusa, pharmaceuticals analyst with UBS, was also positive. “It was a solid quarter . . . GSK has turned the corner on a difficult year,” he said in a research note. But, like Bernstein Research in a separate note, he flagged the need to study progress in the company’s pipeline of future patented products.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The head of the UK government’s independent drug advice group looks set for another row with politicians who continue to ignore researchers’ advice over illegal substances.

Earlier this year the UK’s Home Secretary launched an attack on David Nutt, chairman of the government’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and a respected academic.

Nutt’s crime, in the eyes of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and other politicians, was to write an article in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. His article called for a wider debate on the risks of drugs and, in passing, compared the risks of MDMA (‘ecstasy’) to horse riding. (See: Ecstasy advice is a bitter pill.)

Credit to the man though, he has stuck to his guns and come back with another reasoned critique, delivered as a lecture at King’s College London. In it he reiterates his call for improving public understanding of the actual risks of drugs and again recommends a more logical classification of these.

Continue reading "UK government vs its own drugs advisor, Part II" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week we discover a new type of communication between brain cells, hear some ideas about how the Earth became watery, and question the constancy of the speed of light. Plus, a round-up of what's hot elsewhere in Nature.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Rex Dalton

A US project to more precisely chart geological time scales is releasing a new initiative to educate students on deep time in order to challenge religious groups who argue life was divinely made about 10,000 years ago.

Earthtime’s program – downloadable at earth-time.org and available in DVD and CD format – explains the ages back billions of years. It includes teaching methods in math and physics to explain how researchers date sediments through atomic decay.

Sam Bowring, a geochronologist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and an Earthtime leader, described the educational drive last week to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

“I will never forget Kirk Johnson of the Denver Museum of Science and Technology leaning into the camera, saying: ‘Go home and tell your parents the world is 4.567 billion years old’,” says Bowring.

In Denver, Colorado, and Boston, Massachusetts, Earthtime scientists have provided educational material to a total of hundreds of students and teachers. Denver scientists also conduct dialogues with students over district video networks.

In a planned next grant from the US National Science Foundation that previously has funded Earthtime with $1 million, scientists hope to expand the educational outreach.

One major Earthtime science project is to precisely date the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary about 65 million years ago, when most life forms were wiped out by a worldwide catastrophic event. Bowring, Johnson and other researchers are using sediments of the K-T boundary debris outside Denver for the more exact date.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Women scientists who applied for a new high-risk research award from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) had a lower funding success rate than their male counterparts.

The NIH last month announced the winners of more than 100 new awards totalling US$348 million over five years for outside-the-box biomedical research. The grants came in three flavours: Pioneer awards for innovative researchers at any career stage, New Innovator Awards for up-and-coming investigators, and a new category rolled out for the first time: Transformative R01 (T-R01) Awards for bold and uncertain projects.

As Nature reported last month, more than a third of Pioneer and New Innovator awards went to women, but female researchers made up only around 15% of T-R01 awardees. The question at the time was: How did this compare to the gender ratios of the applicants?

Nature has now learned the answer. According to data newly obtained from the NIH under a freedom of information request, 32% of Pioneer Award applicants and 40% of New Innovator Award applicants who listed their gender were women — on par with the gender ratios of the awardees, which were 34.5% and 39% female, respectively, for the two individual-based awards.

Women applicants fared worse, however, for the T-R01 competition, where 21% of grant hopefuls who listed their gender said they were women, yet only 9 of 59, or 15%, of the awardees were women. This difference, though not statistically significant according to Nature's chi-square test statistical analysis (Χ² = 0.99, p = 0.32), does not help realize the NIH's vision of developing "opportunities and programs to support recruitment, retention, re-entry, and advancement of girls and women in biomedical careers".

The NIH is now requesting applications for the 2010 T-R01s.

Image: NIH

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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Most distant gamma-ray burst spotted
Observations suggest the early Universe is ripe for exploration.

An intergalactic race in space and time
A burst of γ-rays lets scientists test quantum theories of gravity.

Ozone protocol squares up to climate - Premium content
Europeans back efforts to amend the Montreal Protocol to address global warming.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine today awarded $230 million in disease team awards, intended to move stem cell therapies into the clinic within four years.

Fourteen teams, including twelve academic institutions and two companies as principal or co-principal investigators, received the awards. Canada's Cancer Stem Cell Consortium will pay an additional $35 million for two of the grants that aim to target cancer stem cells, and the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council will award $8 million for two grants that aim to treat macular degeneration and target leukemia stem cells.

Continue reading "California hands out $230 million to move stem cells into the clinic" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden
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Posted on behalf of Rex Dalton

A delegation of US scientists met with Cuban counterparts in Havana this week to open a broad dialogue on new era of scientific exchange.

The group visit was initiated by the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, DC, which has special permits from the US government for interactions with Cuba. Scientists from Mexico, a long-time intermediary on US-Cuba relations, also participated.

About 30 US scientists and environmental officials held talks with the Cubans on 26-27 October in advance of an international meeting on ocean science issues. This week’s conference includes the 13th Latin American Congress on Marine Sciences – where human impact on coastal zones, biodiversity and weather hazards will be among topics discussed.

"This is a logical, low-risk area in which to begin discussions with Cuba. It is without question in our mutual interest to share science and ideas on our shared resources like the Gulf of Mexico," Environmental Defense Fund senior attorney Dan Whittle told Reuters.

Under the administration of President Barack Obama, there has been considerable thawing in relations between the two nations (Nature). Travel restrictions are being relaxed, and there is substantial movement toward breaking the long-standing US trade embargo with Cuba.

Other non-governmental organizations also are seeking to take advantage of the new political climate to try to increase scientific exchange. The New America Foundation and the American Association for Advancement of Science, both of Washington, DC, are organizing scientific exchange visits, with one expected in near future.

Posted by Alex Witze
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No typo there, they really are shooting for the moon in a balloon. At least that's the plan of the non-profit Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA), which is using an oldie but sort-of-goodie idea for getting something into space: Tie a rocket to a balloon, launch the balloon and then launch the rocket from the stratosphere.

The US briefly tried this strategy in the 1950s, but they eventually abandoned it in favour of more stable launch pads, like the one that the Ares 1-X used. There's a few advantages to the more concrete approach: It's easier to orient your rocket from the ground, you don't have to worry about it blowing away, and critically, it's not going to fall on anybody.

It's in part due to that last safety concern that a Romanian frigate is carrying ARCA's Helen test rocket into the Black Sea. The Helen is a tour-de-force in Transylvanian technology. Rather than launching a rocket with a complicated staging system, they're just tying their stages together with string. When the first stage runs out they'll cut the cord and fire the second, and the third, and onward until they deliver their payload (which appears to be some sort of orange football or rugby ball, depending on your nationality).

The Helen, Romania's third test flight, could launch as soon as tomorrow. Stay tuned moon and vampire lovers alike for all your ARCA coverage!

Credit: ARCA

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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NASA's successor to the space shuttle, the Ares 1, has successfully completed it's first experimental test flight. The Ares 1-X lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 11:30AM local time after a morning of weather delays. Roughly 40 km above the Atlantic ocean the first stage of the rocket successfully separated, marking the end of the test.

The successful test comes at a critical time for NASA, which is under enormous budgetary pressures. Earlier this autumn, an independent presidential panel suggested it might be cheaper to cancel the Ares 1 vehicle and move the money into commercial development.

NASA TV is replaying the launch for anyone who wants a look.

credit: NASA

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

“We think it will get easier to find vaccine in the weeks that come. It is likely also … in the future, we will have significant amounts of vaccine that can’t be used.”
Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says despite a perceived shortage America may actually end up throwing away some of its swine flu vaccine (Reuters).

“Increased demand during a severe pandemic could exceed the capacities of Internet providers’ access networks for residential users and interfere with teleworkers in the securities market and other sectors, according to a DHS study and providers.”
The US Government Accountability Office says H1N1 could crash the internet (large pdf).

“The situation is under control and not significantly different from the usual seasonal flu situation.”
Viktor Maleyev, deputy chief of the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology in Russia, comments on the country’s first swine flu deaths (LA Times).

“Given the extraordinary precautions being taken across the nation to prevent the spread of the H1N1 influenza, the Archdiocese has instituted a series of steps to be followed for the time being during the celebration of the Mass.”
Jonathan Gaspar, of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, says the church will stop offering consecrated wine at Communion and urge people to avoid physical contact during Mass to avoid the spread of H1N1 (Boston Globe).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The El Niño triggers declines in primates in the New World, suggesting an increase in these events caused by global warming could be devastating.

Ruscena Wideerholf and Eric Post, of Penn State University, looked at how El Niño influences the populations of muriqui (Brachyteles hypoxanthus), woolly monkey (Lagothrix lagotricha), Geoffroy’s spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi), and red howlers (Alouatta seniculus). In Biology Letters, they report that all four experienced either intimidate or one year lagged negative impacts on their populations.

“Our results indicate that global climate change and increased El Niño events could pose a serious threat to ateline primates” they write. “Given that the status of many primate species is already precarious, in the face of continued global change, further studies to quantity the effects of climate and environmental variability on primate species are needed.”

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a change in sea surface temperatures in the Pacific.

“El Niño events are expected to increase in frequency with global warming,” says Post (press release). “This study suggests that the consequences of such intensification of ENSO could be devastating for several species of New World monkeys.”

Image: critically endangered northern muriqui / Carla B. Possamai / K.B. Strier

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Immediate action should be taken to prevent plutonium leaks following a potential future earthquake at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, Energy Secretary Steven Chu was warned this week.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board says an earthquake could trigger a fire inside high-risk gloveboxes where work on plutonium takes place. Los Alamos sits on a fault line, so an earthquake would not be unexpected.

The consequences of an earthquake-induced fire in the lab’s plutonium facility exceed the Department of Energy’s guidelines by over two orders of magnitude, says the board.

“The board believes this situation warrants immediate attention and action,” states a letter to Chu dated 26 October (pdf).

According to the Project on Government Oversight, the energy department has been trying to delay the board’s report in order to deal with the problem before it became public. It claims that a glovebox fire could cause the public to be exposed to 100 times the recommended safe level of plutonium.

In a statement to AP and the LA Times, the lab said it was already taking action to improve fire safety at the Technical Area-55 facility.

“Protecting the health and safety of our employees, the public and the environment while conducting operations all across the laboratory, particularly at the plutonium facility, TA-55, is our primary concern,” it says.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Dark energy rips cosmos and agencies - Premium content
An international space mission to study an astronomical mystery is foundering.

US physicists propose astrophysics goals - Premium content
Dark energy and dark matter prove popular choices for funding.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Months after the House of Representatives passed its historic global warming legislation, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is finally poised to begin moving its own bill. But first, three days of non-stop testimony from dozens of experts representing the Obama administration, academics, environmental groups and business representatives.

Today was reserved for Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who partnered up with California Democrat and committee chairwoman Barbara Boxer, to write the bill, as well as a suite of administration officials led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Despite a steady stream of testimony underscoring the many benefits that could flow from 900-plus page bill, the debate seems to be stuck on basic questions about whether protecting the climate by deploying clean energy will bankrupt the nation. As the New York Times points out, even Democrats who come from energy producing states have reservations.

Chu tried to address the question by pointing out that China "has already made its choice" and is now spending $9 billion per month on clean energy. He went on to talk about how the United States has lost its lead in clean energy manufacturing and must now make up for lost time if it wants to remain competitive.

"When the starting gun sounded on the clean energy race, the United States stumbled," he said in his written testimony, available here. "But I remain confident that we can make up the ground."

Continue reading "US Senate begins climate proceedings " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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Basic research at the US Department of Homeland Security has come a long way since 2002, but disturbing flaws still exist, according to testimony at a House of Representatives hearing today.

The DHS's science and technology directorate, charged with developing gadgets for detecting explosives, dangerous persons, and chemical and biological weapons, has not performed a comprehensive risk assessment of threats, criticized David Wu, who chairs the subcommittee overseeing the directorate for the House Committee on Science and Technology, in his opening statement. As a result, it lacks a proper foundation for determining research priorities.

This is an "area of great concern that has yet to be addressed by the directorate", despite repeated requests by the subcommittee, Wu said.

But Wu also commended the S&T directorate on its progress. The directorate got off to a rocky start, and has been moving in the right direction — recently allocating 20% of its budget to basic research, for example.

Continue reading "Security science still struggling" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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“We disagree about whaling ... but we do not disagree on the importance of safety at sea.”
Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende says his country will respond to request from the Japanese government to clamp down on anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd, whose ship sails under his country’s flag (AFP).

“This is not a real crater. It is artificial.”
Uldis Nulle, of the Latvian Environment, Geology and Meteorology Center, rubbishes claims that a meteorite was responsible for a 9 metre crater in Latvia. It seems the real culprits are men with shovels (AP).

“Since getting new powers and funding in 2007, FDA has completely overhauled its system … This is a problem that’s being fixed.”
Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, says his agency is fixing problems with follow up of drugs approved in the absence of hard clinical evidence (NY Times).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA's test of the Ares 1-X, the prototype space shuttle replacement, has been called off due to weather. Clouds over the site raised the risk of triboelectrification--a build-up of static electricity on the rocket's body as it flies through weather that can lead to communications problems. Winds at the launch pad were also a factor.

Mission planners will try again at 8:00AM Eastern Time tomorrow.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Posted for Quirin Schiermeier

Russia has postponed for another year plans to drill into sub-glacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica. Entry into the uniquely pristine lake 3,750 metres below the Antarctic ice sheet is now planned for the 2010-2011 drilling season, Valery Lukin, director of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, told Nature in an email.

During the 2008-2009 drilling season the Russian crew made an unsuccessful attempt to recover from the borehole bottom at 3,367 metres a drill that had been damaged during an accident in October 2007 (see: Russia delays Lake Vostok drill, 16 July 2008).

“All attempts to extract the drill have failed,” says Lukin. “On 20 January 2009 our drillers have made a decision to change the direction of drilling beginning from a depth of 3,590 metres.”

Seasonal operations at Russia’s Vostok station in East Antarctica will resume in late November, and continue until around early February when temperatures usually drop below levels at which aircraft can safely operate. The Russian drillers hope to reach a depth of around 3,680 metres by the end of the season.

Image: Lake Vostok / NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Canadian Space Agency/RADARSAT International Inc.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Lord Stern, who authored the UK report “The Economics of Climate Change” in 2006 and has long been a climate change stalwart in that country, is upset about the coverage his latest remarks have received.

The Times is running a story under the headline “Climate chief Lord Stern: give up meat to save the planet” . Stern was interviewed by the Times and said some things about meat that those pesky reporters decided was the best quote going, and slapped on their front page. “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases,” he says. In future people will treat eating meat differently, more like smoking or drinking, the article continues. And of course, the point has been picked up in the Brit press (Evening Standard, Spectator, Telegraph).

Farmers are cross. Jonathan Scurlock, stepped up from the National Farmers Union. “Farmers in this country are interested in evidence-based policymaking. We don’t have a methane-free cow or pig available to us,” he says in the same piece.

It seems that Stern was trying to make the point that there is poor understanding of the real consequences of not changing behaviour to try and mitigate climate change. And he might have a point. Stern this morning issued a press release saying that his remarks about meat were given “undue prominence”.

“The debate about climate change should not be dumbed down to a single slogan, such as ‘give up meat to save the planet’. Climate change has broad and profound implications for us and we need a sensible public discussion about the choices and decisions we face,” the statement continues. Stern has arranged a symposium in parliament this afternoon for MPs and members of the House of Lords to “discuss these issues and to encourage them to engage the public about them.”

It does seem, from reading the rest of the interview with Stern later in the paper, that he said a whole lot more than a few comments about meat. Such as calling for president Obama to attend the Copenhagen climate summit in December. But perhaps Stern was naive to think that any threat to the British Sunday roast would be allowed to pass without a furore.

Image: Getty

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Australia’s government has been told to invest more in research on the impact climate change will have on its coastlines.

The House of Representatives committee on climate change warned that “the time to act is now” in its new report on climate and coasts. As well as more research, there is a need for more clarity on legal and insurance issues for those living on the coast and better emergency management arrangements, it says.

“This is an issue of national significance. Some 80% of the Australian population live in the coastal zone, and the concentration of Australia’s population and infrastructure along the coast makes us particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts, including sea level rise,” says Jennie George, the committee chairwoman (press release).

The committee wants more investment in research on sea level rise, ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, erosion and wave climate, and the impact climate change will have on diseases.

Below the fold: media coverage.

Continue reading "Australia frets over coastal impact of climate change" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The possibility that six Harvard researchers were poisoned deliberately has been raised by one of those who fell ill after drinking coffee laced with sodium azide.

Matteo Iannacone, a postdoc at Harvard Medical School, said he doesn’t believe the coffee could have been spiked accidentally or as a joke (AP, ABC).

Experts seem to agree. David Benjamin, a local toxicologist and clinical pharmacologist, told the Boston Herald, “An accident? Sodium azide is a poison. Could it have gotten in the coffee machine inadvertently? Absolutely not.”

Although it has only just been made public, the incident occurred on 26 August, when six researchers who drank from a coffee machine in the HMS New Research Building were taken to a nearby emergency room.

“While we do not yet know how this incident occurred, we have recently learned that sodium azide, a preservative commonly used in laboratories, was present in the coffee consumed by the six employees,” the medical school said in a statement. “As the investigation continues, we are being prudent and taking additional precautionary measures to ensure the well being of our community.”

Police are now investigating the incident and lab security is being toughened up.

See also
Java drinkers detail ordeal – Boston Herald
Experts: Harvard Med School Poisoning Intentional - WBZTV

Image: the New Research Building by cliff1066™ via flickr under creative commons

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

University tightens oversight of sensitive research
Conviction prompts rethink of data rules.

African science feels the pinch
Recession dampens donors' enthusiasm.

Woo Suk Hwang convicted, but not of fraud
Cloning pioneer gets two years for embezzlement and bioethics breach.

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

A single dose of gene therapy greatly improved the vision of 12 patients with a rare, inherited visual disorder. The best results were achieved in the youngest patients, including a 9-year-old boy named Corey Haas, who was considered legally blind before the treatment began and now has the same level of light sensitivity as his normal-sighted schoolmates.

The study "holds great promise for the future" and "is appealing because of its simplicity", Frans Cremers and Rob Collin, of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands, wrote in a commentary accompanying the report, which was published online 24 October in the Lancet.

Leber's congenital amaurosis is an inherited eye disease characterized by severe degeneration of the retina and loss of vision in the first few months of life. The disease, which affects around 1 in 80,000 people, can be caused by mutations in 13 different genes. But all 12 of the patients in the Phase I study, led by researchers at researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, suffered from a defective gene called RPE65, which codes for a vitamin A derivative that is essential for detecting light.

The researchers injected each patient's worse eye with a functional copy of the RPE65 gene inserted into an adenovirus vector. The investigators last year reported success with three adult patients (see 'Gene therapy treats blindness'), and now they've added an additional nine patients, including four children under the age of 11. These youngsters displayed the greatest visual recovery, presumably because their defective retinal cells did not yet have time to completely die off.

Continue reading "Gene fix helps blind boy see" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Butterflies did not mistakenly mate with worm-like animals to give rise to caterpillars, according to a new report that challenges previous claims to the contrary.

"It's a nutbar idea," says study author Michael Hart, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. "There's just nothing to it."

In August, the Proceedings of the National Academy (PNAS) published a paper online by Donald Williamson, a retired zoologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, arguing that at some point in the distant past a larva-less insect hybridized with a velvet worm, and the resulting descendants now develop successively through stages that resemble both parents. The study — which was 'communicated' by academy member Lynn Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, via the soon-to-be-obsolete 'Track I' submission route, which allows academy members to handle the review of a colleague's manuscript — became embroiled in controversy after questions were raised about the peer review process (see 'Row at US journal widens').

The paper's print publication was suspended for more than a month, but it was ultimately given the green light in mid-October by the PNAS editorial board. The journal also plans to publish a short 'letter to the editor' by Gonzalo Giribet, an invertebrate zoologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a response from Williamson. In addition, PNAS today published a full-length counter-argument to Williamson's hypothesis.

Williamson's paper offered little direct evidence for hybridization other than physical resemblances between caterpillars and velvet worms. But he predicted that insects with caterpillar larvae should show genetic similarities to the worm-like invertebrates, and he called on genomicists to test his ideas. Now, two non-academy members — Hart and fellow evolutionary biologist Richard Grosberg, of the University of California, Davis — have taken Williamson to task and turned to published data on genome sizes and contents to rubbish his proposals.

Continue reading "No species mixing to make caterpillars" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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The secret is out: Neanderthals and modern humans had sex, geneticist Svante Pääbo declared Sunday during a conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. But the jury's still out on whether these relations resulted in offsrping and, if so, whether those offspring contributed to humans today. (The Times)

Pääbo led the three-year project to sequence the Neanderthal genome at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. The team completed the draft sequence in February, but the preliminary genetic analysis, announced at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago, was little more than a tease.

It seems Pääbo is continuing to be rather tight-lipped about the findings, disclosing few details to The Times, besides announcing that he's "sure that they had sex". Pääbo will publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome "shortly", The Times reports.

Continue reading "Did Neandermen Roam the Earth?" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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Direct-to-consumer genetic testing can count one more consumer — the director of the US National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins.

Collins announced today at a personalized medicine colloquium in Washington DC that he spat into a set of tubes and sent off his genetic material under a pseudonym to three of the leading personal genetic testing companies. He said that all the companies provided highly accurate genotyping, but with substantial differences in the information that was revealed and the interpretations provided — similar to the conclusions reached by Collins's former human genome sequencing rival, Craig Venter, in a recent opinion article in Nature.

On a more personal level, Collins discovered that he carries two copies of the most common risk factor of type II diabetes. Collins, whose laboratory investigates the underlying genetic basis of adult-onset diabetes, said he was "surprised" by these findings since his family has no history of the disease. Upon learning the test results, Collins got off his Harley-Davidson and instigated a regular exercise regime. The svelter NIH director said he has now lost 20 pounds.

Official NIH photos from before and after Collins became director. Check out those gaunt cheeks!

Posted by Elie Dolgin
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Policy | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A paper published in Nature Geoscience this week is causing consternation for other geologists.

The news, already reported on earlier this year when presented at a conference, comes from Graham Hill, at GNS Science in Wellington, New Zealand, and his colleagues.

Hill is claiming that underneath Mount St Helens Mount Adams, and possibly Mount Rainier in the Cascades – a mountain range in Washington State in the US – lurks a giant magma chamber. The initial news story in New Scientist, based on the AGU meeting in June this year, suggested that this meant a supervolcano was waiting to erupt in this region.

Hill’s work, now published, is based on measurements of electrical conductivity in the rocks under the northern Cascades. This, according to Hill confirmed a widespread layer of high conductivity material under the range. The reason they infer a large molten magma chamber is because molten rock has different conductivity than solid rock. This large magma chamber could link Mt St Helens, Mt Adams and Mt Rainier, leading to the supervolcano links.

Cue ruffled feathers: the volcano blog Eruptions wasn’t pleased, nor was the Oregonian. And now the aforementioned paper based on this presentation has been published, they’re at it again.

What was the cause of their displeasure? The author of Eruptions disputes that the magma chambers under this mountain range could all be linked, and he says that the magma down there is not molten, or at least not much of it is. Judging by the comments thread at that blog, others are similarly sceptical.

In the Miami Herald Seth Moran, a volcano seismologist with the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington is quoted as saying. "Other geophysical studies don't support this theory."

“Moran said the most telling evidence that the theory was wrong was the lack of any surface evidence, such as geothermal vents or hot springs, among the mountains that would indicate the presence of a super-heated underground magma pool,” the piece reads.

Ah, but the Miami Herald piece also asserts that Hill is making no claims about a supervolcano at all. And taking a look at the press release that accompanied the paper, no such bold claims are actually made. It reads: “If confirmed by additional methods, this could be one of most widespread magma-bearing areas of continental crust discovered thus far.”

Over at the Seattle Times, another geologist, George Bergantz from the University of Washington, says that this study is the best yet, and calls the study “provocative” but nevertheless something that warrants further work.

Who is right? I don't know. But I will definitley be keeping an eye out for responses to the paper.

The paper’s conclusions state that their work “raises the possibility that the entire SWCC [Southern Washington Cascades Conductor, a conductive zone known in this region] marks a single laterally extensive zone of partial melt in the mid-crust.” And ends by saying that more work is needed to prove the point. Well, at least on that point I’m sure everyone will agree.

Image: Mount St Helens, by Steve Schilling, USGS

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

“If you ask can I protect the city, the answer is no. Can I reduce the risk? Yes.”
Robert Van Antwerp, chief of the US Army Corps of Engineers, discusses the risk of future flooding in New Orleans (Guardian).

“What is the point of having marine conservation zones to protect fragile species if there is no barrier to damage caused by fishing?”
Melissa Moore, of the Marine Conservation Society, comments on a possible loophole in UK legislation to establish marine conservation zones that could let fishermen continue to catch inside them (Times).

“It would take other work to try and reconstruct the reef so that you can start the process of building up a reef again. That is something that needs to be looked at in detail, but we can definitely store the species and save them in that way.”
Simon Harding, of the Zoological Society of London, comments on plans to create a doomsday vault of corals frozen in liquid nitrogen in case the worst comes to the worst for our reefs (BBC).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A new understanding of one of nature’s most complicated eyes could lead improvements in a huge range of modern electronic devices, according to a paper published in Nature Photonics.

Nicholas Roberts, of the University of Bristol, and colleagues have worked out how the ‘quarter-wave plates’ in the eyes of mantis shrimp work.

As you may have guessed, a quarter-wave plate rotates the plane of polarization of a light wave by a quarter. Crucially, they can convert between linearly polarized light and circularly polarized light, something that makes them useful for DVD players, CD players, and camera filters.

“Our work reveals for the first time the unique design and mechanism of the quarter-wave plate in the mantis shrimp’s eye,” says Roberts (press release). “It really is exceptional, outperforming anything we humans have so far been able to create.”

Shrimp eyes use cleverly designed cell membranes rolled into collections of tubes to make their quarter wave plates and to help them see polarized light (as well as twelve colours as opposed to human eyes, which have a rather paltry three colour palette), the authors report.

Study author Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland says shrimp also reflect circular polarized light off their bodies.

“They have a cuticle on their skin that reflects it,” he told ABC. “They’re talking to each other with a secret light channel.”

Now we’re closer to understanding how shrimp eyes work, we may be able to use their advanced optics to make better electronics, using liquid crystals to mimic them, say the authors.

This is undoubtedly very cool science, but won’t we just be downloading our movies and games by the time they get this working for DVDs?

Image mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) / Roy Caldwell.

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

Trouble's a-brewing at Los Alamos

There's been so much trouble between scientists and the law lately that I've decided to start a new category here on the blog: scientific lockdown. Here's the latest contribution.

Over the course of last week, it emerged that a former Los Alamos nuclear weapons physicist says that he is under investigation for espionage. The researcher, P. Leonardo Mascheroni spoke to the Associated Press on 21 October, two days after he says FBI agents raided his home. The FBI has confirmed an "ongoing investigation" into his activities.

Mascheroni worked in the lab's X Division from 1979 until 1987, according to the AP. Since then, he appears to have been working on a laser fusion project, for which he was seeking aid from Venezuela. According to the AP, he approached the Venezuelan government in the fall of 2007 to see about pursuing his work. In February of last year, he says a man from the Venezuelan government contacted him about starting a weapons programme. The two met twice at Los Alamos, according to Mascheroni.

Mascheroni says he supplied the man with a CD that contained unclassified information widely available on the Internet in the hopes that the Venezuelan government would help finance his fusion scheme. He claims he wanted around $800,000 for the information but was never paid. In a later article, he admitted to receiving US$20,000 in cash from his Venezuelan handler.

The whole thing has raised enough of a stink that even Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has weighed in to deny claims that his country wants nuclear weapons.

But proliferation worries aside, real question here is what the heck is going on with scientists these days? Three weeks ago, particle physicist Adlene Hicheur was detained by French authorities on suspicion of terrorism; last week Stewart Nozette was arrested for attempted espionage; and, oh yeah, a South Korean court has just given Woo Suk Hwang a (suspended sentence) of two years.

Of course Los Alamos is home to the original scientific espionage case, the long running drama between Taiwanese-born Wen Ho Lee and the FBI. Lee was accused of spying for China, but after a seven-year legal battle he was exonerated in 2006.

Credit: G. Brumfiel

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

Posted for David Cyranoski

Found guilty of embezzlement and bioethical violations but cleared of fraud, Woo Suk Hwang has been handed a 2-year sentence by the Seoul Central District Court.

The sentence, which is suspended for three years and only half the length that prosecutors sought, pleased supporters of the cloning expert and former Seoul University professor. The prosecutors have pledged to appeal.

Hwang was once feted for creating stem cell lines from cloned embryos of patients suffering from a variety of diseases. The accomplishment, which offered the capability to produce an endless supply of stem cells genetically matched to respective patients, turned out to be bogus and his efforts to get eggs required for the cloning procedure turned out to be unethical. (See Nature’s Woo Suk Hwang special.)

In January 2006, while maintaining that he had the ability to do what he claimed, Hwang admitted to falsifying data. In May 2006, he was indicted on charges of fraud, embezzlement and violation of the bioethics law.

But scientific fraud, while certainly not a way to endear oneself to colleagues, would be illegal only if Hwang had used fraudulent data to gain grants. Prosecutors argued that he did dupe two companies, SKGroup and Nonghyup, into supplying research funds using the fraudulent data. The court reportedly rejected the allegations on the grounds that the two companies provided the funding without expectation of benefit.

The court did however find Hwang guilty of purchasing eggs in violation of the country's bioethics law and of embezzling KRW 590 830 million of government money by filtering it through bank accounts of associates.

Continue reading "Hwang convicted in Korean court" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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There could not have been a more receptive audience for US President Barack Obama than the one that filled MIT’s 1100-seat Kresge auditorium to capacity today. Obama’s 19- minute speech about clean energy was filled with words that would make any American engineer or scientist’s heart -- a Democratic heart, at least -- swell with pride. He spoke of how America has always been a leader in innovation and discovery and how he believes the country’s innovators will once again forge ahead to build a new energy economy.

“From China to India, from Japan to Germany, nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to produce and use energy. The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the world economy. I’m convinced of that. And I want America to be that nation."

Continue reading "Obama’s energy speech at MIT—low in substance, high in inspiration" »

Posted by Corie Lok
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Twitter’s self appointed ‘@sciencegoddess’ – a.k.a. Joanne Manaster, a science educator at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wants to know what your favourite element is. She’s gotten a lot of response, rendered in 140 character ‘tweets,’ which shouldn’t surprise. It’s chemistry week, after all. Moreover, she says “Most people even if they’ve just gotten through high school science have been exposed to the elements – the periodic table of the elements, that is.” Many of the responses reveal, if briefly, people's personal and intellectual connections to the building blocks of the universe.

So far Carbon seems to be winning with Tungsten pulling its weight. Much credit is given to @oliversacks, whose book Uncle Tungsten was inspired by a family member who manufactured light bulbs and had, like Sacks and Manaster, a knack for inspiring a love of science.

Read on for more elemental twestimonials:

Continue reading "Tweet your favourite element" »

Posted by Brendan Maher
Categories: Chemistry | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

All Nature’s pandemic flu coverage is collected on our news special page.

Facing a shortage of vaccines, New York State yesterday dropped its mandate for health care workers to get immunized against swine flu.

Without enough H1N1 vaccine to go around, the Empire State opted to prioritize vulnerable people, such as pregnant women and children, ahead of nurses and doctors. “We had told hospitals that if they had to choose between vaccinating patients or employees to vaccinate patients first,” Richard Daines, New York's health commissioner, said in a statement.

The statement, jointly issued with Governor David Paterson, did not mention that the requirement to vaccinate health care workers had been put on hold anyway after a judge last week issued a temporary restraining order against the measure.

The lack of vaccine, it seems, has defused the conflict.

Posted by Elie Dolgin
Categories: Swine flu | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Two papers in Science yesterday have poured cold water on the promise of second generation biofuels.

Biofuels derived from the cellulosic, woody parts of plants are not having their greenhouse gas emissions properly accounted for, says Jerry Melillo from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Melillo’s study suggests that changes in the way land is used, as a consequence of growing crops for biofuels, is not taken into account, and if it were then those biofuels would be shown to actually cause more greenhouse gases to be released than fossil fuels. Nitrous oxide emissions from increased use of fertilisers are a big part of the problem.

"The problem is, we have a finite amount of land where new crops could be grown. Melillo and colleagues now report that if biofuel crops replace food crops on current farmlands, then the clearing of forested land for additional food crops will release more carbon from the soil there than in the areas where the biofuel crops themselves are being grown," says the press release.

In a related policy forum article, Timothy Searchinger from Princeton University and a bunch of colleagues point out flaws in the ways that carbon emissions are counted for cap-and-trade schemes in both Europe and the US.

They say that the assertion that fuels made from biomass can be counted as carbon neutral is wrong. “Harvesting existing forests for electricity adds net carbon to the air,” the report says. “If bioenergy crops displace forest or grassland, the carbon released from soild and vegetation, plus lost future sequestration, generates carbon debt, which counts against the carbon the crops absorb.”

"In the near-term I think, irrespective of how you go about the cellulosic biofuels program, you're going to have greenhouse gas emissions exacerbating the climate change problem," Melillo is reported as saying in Reuters.

Energy efficiency news says the report is damning for biofuels.

More bad news comes from a UNEP report, highlighted by the New York Times. The report calls for greater debate about biofuels before ploughing headlong into a completely biofuel-powered society, although it focuses mainly on first generation fuels, unlike the Science papers.

Image: Chris Neill, MBL

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Over 200,000 square miles (520,000 sq km) of Alaskan territory could be designated ‘critical habitat’ for polar bears, under new proposals from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. This is the largest area ever proposed for such a designation by the FWS

If the land is designated as critical habitat any “destruction or adverse modification” of it will be prohibited under the Endangered Species Act. This would apply to oil and gas exploration activities which are currently underway in the area says the FWS.

“This Administration is fully committed to the protection and recovery of the polar bear,” says Tom Strickland, Interior Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks (press release pdf). “Proposing critical habitat for this iconic species is one step in the right direction to help this species stave off extinction, recognizing that the greatest threat to the polar bear is the melting of Arctic sea ice caused by climate change.”

The proposed area covers land where bears construct dens and sea ice where bears feed. It is the latest move in ongoing wrangling over protection for the animals, which was a major issue for environmentalists under the Bush administration (see Interior revokes Bush rule on endangered species and Obama backs Bush on polar bear).

The proposal was welcomed by the Center for Biological Diversity, but Brendan Cummings, the CBD’s senior attorney, accused the Interior Department of being “schizophrenic” as earlier this week its Minerals Management Service approved plans for oil exploration in the Beaufort Sea.

Image top: FWS

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Those wonderful people who came up with The Nano Song have done it again.

The Safety Song is sung by The Sounds of Science, who say they are “a small group of graduate students and recent alumni of UC Berkeley that share a common love of science and music. Our aim is to promote awareness of science to the community of all ages through fun music videos available free on the internet.”

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science

Continue reading "Songs About Science XXX: Safety first!" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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America has always had a good line in space rhetoric. Khrushchev may have got their first, but Kennedy said it best.

This hasn’t escaped the notice of the Augustine commission, which has been examining NASA’s human spaceflight programme (see: Presidential panel narrows NASA’s options). Today the commission put out its final report, with the title page stating it was “Seeking A Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation”. There’s even a quote from Kennedy inside.

But this is not a report brimming with hope. This is how it opens:

The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.

It goes on:

It really is rocket science. Space operations become all the more difficult when means do not match aspirations. Such is the case today.

What should be done about this then?

Continue reading "US human spaceflight ‘on an unsustainable trajectory’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Nature reporter Anjali Nayar hiked for 21 days in Northern Bhutan to find out how this tiny Himalayan nation is dealing with rapidly melting glaciers. Read Anjali's full report: When the ice melts.

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

“Mr Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself, and help the planet by dying.”
Rush Limbaugh makes a rather unpleasant suggestion to New York Times environment writer Andrew Revkin (Media Matters).

“This might be funny, in a sad way, if it weren’t for the fact that my mailbox is already heaped with hate mail. And of course there’s the reality that explosive population growth in certain places, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, could be blunted without a single draconian measure, many experts say, simply by providing access to family planning for millions of women who already want it, but can’t get it — whether or not someone gets a carbon credit in the process.”
Revkin responds.

“I think there is a big difference between demonstrating effectiveness in a rabbit and being able to do this in a larger animal or a human.”
Tony Rutherford, chairman of the British Fertility Society, comments on new research on womb transplants (BBC).

“The Russians have accumulated something like five billion units. We have a big problem of hot air in the system.”
An unnamed diplomat comments on Russia’s stockpile of carbon credits (Euractiv).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Tarantulas don’t make silk with their feet, according to a new paper which refutes previous research.

In 2006, Stanislav Gorb of the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, and his colleagues wrote in Nature that zebra tarantulas (Aphonopelma seemanni) could secrete silk from their feet. This, they argued, helps them climb smooth vertical surfaces and “avoid catastrophic falls”. The finding played well with the media.

Now Fernando Perez-Miles, of the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, and colleagues may have disproved this. They took four zebra tarantulas and used paraffin to seal their spinnerets – the abdominal structures spiders make silk with. After 72 hours they found no silk at all in the containers they were keeping the spiders in, they write in Nature.

They also say that the spinneret structures detailed by Gorb on spiders’ feet are actually sensory structures.

“Tarantulas entangle silk threads from the spinnerets with their tarsi. They often use hind legs to entangle silk, but we also observed A. seemanni entangling with their other legs. This behaviour might explain the presence of the thread footprints photographed by Gorb et al.” write the authors.

However Gorb and his team maintain that spiders may be producing foot-silk. Firstly they argue that the silk in question is laid down in parallel tracks, implying it is not a secondary deposition. Additionally they say that examination of this silk shows a broad area at the beginning of the fibre that could be where it was an initial fluid. If the silk had come from an abdominal organ fluid phases would be lost in transference to the feet, they argue.

“We remain satisfied that the most plausible explanation for our observations is the existence of tarsal-silk-producing structures scattered within the setae on tarantula tarsi,” says their response.

Image: tarantula entangling a silk thread with its hind leg, from Perez-Miles et al.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Half-a-dozen British Nobel Prize-winners have added their signatures to a petition protesting a proposal to assess basic science in part by its 'economic and social impact'.

The Research Excellence Framework, or REF, will be an important cog in the machine that doles out money to universities. The Higher Education Funding Council for England will use it to help determine which campuses receive around £2 billion a year in quality-related research funding from 2013.

Under a proposed set of changes to the REF, the council will begin basing 25% of their assessment on the research's 'economic and social impact'.

Those words undoubtedly ring true with the UK's Treasury, which is seeking some economic payback from its generous investment in research over the past decade. But it has rubbed the Nobelists the wrong way. "The REF proposals are founded on a lack of understanding of how knowledge advances," says the petition, which is on the University and College Union website.

This year's Chemistry Nobel prizewinner Venki Ramakrishnan is among the signatories. You hear his view in his own words by watching the Nature Video at the right (comments at 5:15).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Sometimes I think I’m going to get bored of environmental photography competitions. There are, after all, only so many shots of a penguin looking cute or a deer framed against the sky it is possible to take.

Then someone takes a photograph like this. A photograph that makes you say “that can’t be real”.

However José Luis Rodríguez swears this shot isn’t faked and that he took this picture of an Iberian wolf in Spain. You have to feel sorry for the other entrants in this year’s Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition; one imagines that the judges saw Rodríguez's shot and that was it, no one else had a chance. (And that’s not a misspelling, the competition sponsor is called Veolia Environnement.)

That’s not to say the other entries aren’t great. The two shown below are Fergus Gill’s Clash of the Yellowhammers and Thomas Haney’s ‘The lone fir’.

There are even some nice photos of a deer framed against the sky and a cute penguin. But seriously, can this photo of the wolf be real? Really?

See all the images in the online gallery.

The Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is owned by the Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine. All images are credit of the photographer and Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The question of why most animals have sex with other animals is answered today by a paper published in Nature (no snickering at the back).

This issue isn’t as simple as you might think. The real problem is that men are actually rubbish, note the paper’s authors Levi Morran, Michelle Parmenter and Patrick Phillips, who all work at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

Males “do not directly contribute offspring”, they say, so animals that self-fertilize should have numerical advantage over their sexually reproducing relatives. On the flip side reproducing sexually does mean you avoid inbreeding and you can adapt faster to environmental changes.

To get a better understanding of this, the researchers genetically tweaked C. elegans worms to be either sexually reproducing hermaphrodites (‘outcrossing’) or ‘selfing’ animals. They then exposed these animals to a chemical that upped their mutation rate. They also tested how well they adapted to a nasty bacterial pathogen.

Selfing animals showed a decline in fitness and were less good at adapting to the pathogen. The bottom line: animals that don’t do it on their own did better when forced to mutate or adapt to a new environment.

“Many scientists have argued that outcrossing has evolved to avoid the genetic consequences of inbreeding, while others have emphasized the role that outcrossing plays in generating the genetic variation necessary for evolutionary change,” says Morran (press release). “Our work shows that both of these factors are important.”

Image: hermaphrodite nematode C. elegans / Patrick Phillips, University of Oregon

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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On the show this week, the effects of sleep deprivation on memory, 250 years of London's Kew Gardens, watching evolution in the lab, climate change in the Himalayas, and much more.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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HIV vaccine trial under fire
Expert scrutiny casts doubt on 'historic' results.

Probe uncovers Mercury's youthful secret
Latest fly-by reveals planet's recent volcanic activity.

Time running out for climate talks
Rift between developed and developing nations might be too great.

Fossil primate challenges Ida's place
Controversial German specimen is related to lemurs, not humans, analysis of an Egyptian find suggests.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Global immunization rates of children reached an all-time high last year, but millions of youngsters in the world's poorest countries remain vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases, according to a new report released today by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and the World Bank.

The State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunization reports that 4 out of 5 children now have access to life-saving vaccines — a record 106 million infants were immunized in 2008. Yet this still leaves around 24 million children who do not receive the complete round of regular shots before the age of one.

The report calls on the world's wealthy nations to invest an extra US$1 billion annually to raise immunization rates above 90%. This would prevent an additional two million childhood deaths per year, the report says.

Some of this money is also needed to pay for the rising cost of immunization as more vaccines join the standard lot, said Rakesh Nangia, the World Bank's operations and strategy director. By next year, Nangia estimates that routine immunization will cost US$18 per child, up from $3-5 in 1980. Once recently developed vaccines, including those that protect against pneumococcal disease and rotavirus diarrhea, come on board, he expects the price to rise to $30. "All good things cost, and so do these vaccinations," Nangia said at a press briefing today in Washington DC.

Continue reading "Vaccine boom for world's kids" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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“In this case the figures mentioned are, in our view, likely to be used by non-expert observers to judge progress in reducing CO2 Emissions within the UK. For reasons including those set out in your correspondence with the Secretary of State we regard the quoted figures (and particularly the percentage change) as unsatisfactory in the context of that use.”
Michael Scholar, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, takes the government to task over their use of statistics on the reduction of carbon emissions.

“It is not just about the issue of climate change in this particular case. We have had a huge number of complaints about the science but also whether the ad itself is scary for children.”
The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority says it is investigating a government advert designed to promote awareness of climate change. (BBC, for more on the ad see: Worst. Climate. Campaign. Ever.)

“Our work suggests that while West Antarctica is still losing significant amounts of ice, the loss appears to be slightly slower than some recent estimates. So the take home message is that Antarctica is contributing to rising sea levels. It is the rate that is unclear.”
Ian Dalziel, of the West Antarctic GPS Network, says new ‘ground truth’ measurements suggest we may have slightly overestimated the rate of ice loss in Antarctica (press release).

“We conclude that, based on these new data, there is no evidence to suggest any correlation between the transit of our solar system through the spiral arms of our Galaxy and the terrestrial climate.”
Researchers writing in the Astrophysical Journal say they have taken down a theory linking climate to spiral arm transit.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Attempts to free the Mars rover Spirit are getting more realistic. After five months sitting stuck in sticky ground, engineers back on Earth have moved on with their tests, this time going to a different room to practice moving the replica Spirit in its sand box at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.

This means that the team can only move the replica rover based on data and images received back from it – just like as happens with the Mars-bound rover. They’ve been sending Spirit two days of instructions at a time, to do in double-quick time.

Meanwhile, according to the press release, an independent panel has been called for to review the plans to try and drive Spirit out of its sticky situation. This panel will form and deliberate from the end of this month. Within two weeks after the results of the review, Spirit will “probably begin extraction moves”.

We’ll update you as soon as we know more. Let’s hope that this will lead to a decision to try and free the rover. Better to die trying than not try at all I say. It would be unbearable to see Spirit destined to be a Martian weather station for the rest of its days.

Image: Taken by the genuine Spirit, of its arm, credit NASA/JPL-Caltech

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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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 European Union’s environment ministers have reportedly agreed on a negotiation mandate for Sweden for the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen. Sweden currently holds the EU presidency, which rotates every six months (Spiegel).

The EU has previously said it will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20% by 2020. At a speech to the European Parliament, Andreas Carlgren, the Swedish environment minister, yesterday reiterated that the EU will agree to 30% cuts only if other parties make sufficient commitments in Copenhagen

“We see the 30% target as a lever to convince other parties to join us in being more ambitious. By 2050 emissions should have dropped by at least 80%,” he said

At today’s talks in Luxembourg, environment ministers of the 27 EU member states also called for the Copenhagen climate talks in December to set targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from ships and airplanes. By 2020, global emissions from aviation should be cut by 10%, and emissions from shipping by 20%, compared with 2005 levels, the group said according to news reports.

Meanwhile, at a meeting yesterday of EU finance ministers, Poland and other eastern EU member countries blocked a decision on climate adaptation aid for developing countries. The group is concerned that their national contribution to the planned adaptation fund will overburden their economies. Andreas Borg, the Swedish finance minister, complained about “a lack of commitment by certain member states”.

The EU’s heads of states will now attempt to resolve the issue at a council meeting next week in Brussels, when the EU’s negotiation position for Copenhagen is to be rubber-stamped.

Posted for Quirin Schiermeier

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

As America faces warnings of a vaccine shortage, Europe is getting underway with the H1N1 jabbing.

In the UK vaccinations start today, with doctors, nurses and pregnant women first in line for shots. “This is the first pandemic for which we have had vaccine to protect people. I urge everyone in the priority groups to have the vaccine,” says Liam Donaldson, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer (press release).

France has also started vaccinating this week, and Germany will begin 26 October, followed by Ireland on 2 November (Independent, Bloomberg).

Last week the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that vaccine production was not going as well as might be hoped. Anne Schuchat told reporters some manufacturers were having difficulties and production was “a bit delayed”.

“We wish that we had more vaccine and there is more vaccine coming out every day,” she said. (See: Swine flu shot shortfall.)

Australia became the first country to begin mass vaccination against H1N1 when it rolled out its programme on 30 September (see: Sky, Brisbane Times).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The world’s largest orb weaver spider has been discovered, lurking malevolently in the jungles of Africa.

Matjaž Kuntner and Jonathan Coddington, of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Smithsonian Institution respectively, describe the giant beastie in PLOS One and name it Nephila komaci. The bodies of females average 3.8 cm while the legs are 10 cm long each. Webs from the spider are likely to be over a metre across, capable of trapping bats, birds and even small humans (maybe).

“The genus Nephila already contained the largest orbweaving spiders, but N. komaci now becomes the largest Nephila species known,” they write.

The animal is named after Kuntner's late friend Andrej Komac.

A specimen of this huge spider was first collected in 1978 from Sodwana Bay in South Africa but two subsequent expeditions to find more were unsuccessful, leading scientists to conclude that either the animal was a hybrid or it had become extinct. Then a second animal, originally hailing from Madagascar, was discovered in a museum in 2003. A search of museums again turned up nothing, adding weight to the extinction theory.

Then something wonderful happened (unless you’re an arachnophobe, in which case something terrible happened): in the authors’ words “two additional females and a male were recently collected in Tembe Elephant Park by South African colleagues, and it is now clear that N. komaci is a valid, new extant Nephila species”.

However Kunter and Coddington appear to have made one shocking error. They don’t have any photos of the animal…

Image: this is acutally Nephila inaurata, not Nephila komaci / M. Kuntner

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Lazy male spiders avoid dinner date
Trespassing redbacks reap the rewards of reproduction without the costs of courting.

Moon scientist arrested on spy charges
Radar expert worked on US and Indian missions.

Darwin's geological mystery solved
Origin of odd South American boulders may have defeated the Origin's author.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“It is an action we do not take lightly and it’s one we do not take very often. This is a pattern of behaviour that is detrimental to our field and not up to our standards.”
Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, explains the decision to expel from the society the doctor who treated ‘Octomum’ Nadya Suleman (LA Times).

“This refinery expansion is clearly going to dump additional pollution on the surrounding communities, and the law requires BP to control it. BP has been playing games with the numbers to try to duck that responsibility, but the jig is up.”
Ann Alexander, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, comments on wrangling over a huge oil refinery in the US (Chicago Tribune).

“We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function.”
Gary Small, of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, has been researching how the internet can change your brain (press release).

“Michael Green has played a leading role in theoretical physics research … since 1993. He is internationally known as a pioneer in string theory which over the last 20 years has become one of the most important and active areas of the field.”
Peter Haynes, Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University, explains why Michael Green has been appointed as the new Lucasian professor, replacing Stephen Hawking (press release).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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In what is being described as a ‘U-Turn’, the UK’s Home Office has dropped its plans to store information of innocent people on its national DNA database.

After a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights last year saying that the UK could not hold onto DNA data of innocent people. The Home Office’s response was that it would only hold onto the information for a limited time, possibly of up to 12 years.

But that decision has now been scrapped and a new version of the Policing and Crime Bill will no longer contain these proposals.

Alex Jeffreys, inventor of DNA fingerprinting has been vocal about his concerns surrounding storing people’s genetic information. But some observers are hinting that this saga is not over yet, Jeffreys may still have reason to worry. Writing on the Guardian’s website, columnist Henry Porter suggests that the bill, including the provision for storing DNA data, will return in a future parliamentary session.

But for now human rights activists are claiming victory. Liberty, a human rights organisation, says that the retreat is “sensible and tactical”. “Stockpiling the intimate details of millions of innocents is bad enough without ducking public and parliamentary scrutiny by sneaking regulations in by the back door,” says Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty.

Image: Getty

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Europe's Galileo project gains ground
Long-troubled satellite-navigation system receives formal backing from European Commission president.

High hopes for Russia's nanotech firms
But an ambitious government initiative has been slow to incubate a domestic high-tech industry.

Major economies meeting struggles with climate
Many hurdles remain on the road to Copenhagen summit in December.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Journal publishers stand accused of using open access to line their coffers this week.

The UK’s leading medical research charity has told publishers they should deal with concerns that they are taking money to make articles open access without reducing their subscription fees. In effect the allegation is publishers are having their cake and eating it and then eating someone else’s cake too.

“We would like to see a commitment from publishers to show the uptake of their open access option and to adjust their subscription rates to reflect increases in income from open access fees,” says Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust.

“Some publishers, for example Oxford University Press, have already done this and we would like to see all publishers behave the same way.”

So how big a problem is this ‘double dipping’? Is it even a problem?

Continue reading "Open access: are publishers ‘double dipping’?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Posted for Meredith Wadman

The chief of neurological research at the US National Institutes of Health resigned abruptly on Saturday (17 October) from a pan-government committee coordinating autism research, after an Internet newspaper, Age of Autism, posted handwritten notes she left behind after a 30 September committee meeting.

Story Landis, the director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, had questioned in the notes whether one parent on the committee, [Lyn Redwood] “is pushing autism as [a] multisystem disorder to feed into vaccine injury”.

In her letter of resignation, first reported by The Huffington Post, Landis apologized for “unprofessional” behaviour and said “I understand how my comments triggered frustration and anger” in the autism community.

Image: NIH

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA has rolled out its Ares I-X rocket in preparation for a planned 27 October launch date.

The rocket – a test flight for vehicle planned to replace the Space Shuttle – is now on the pad.

Will Ares ever actually heave humans into space though? Both the Guardian and the Times suggest that Obama may cut the expensive project.

Nature’s Eric Hand has also looked at the possibility, see: NASA’s Moon goals under review and Presidential panel narrows NASA's options.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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posted on behalf of Geoff Brumfiel

A prominent scientist who led a mission to find water on the Moon has been arrested on charges of espionage by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Stewart Nozette, a 52-year-old former government physicist, allegedly tried to sell details of US missile detection satellites in exchange for cash. Nozette's worked for pretty much every military shop in the US government including the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the Defense Advanced Research Project's Administration (DARPA). He also served on president George H. W. Bush's space council and worked with NASA.

He's well known in scientific circles for conceiving the 1994 Clementine mission, which used a military test satellite to discover some of the first traces of water on the Moon's South Pole. More recently, he has been a co-investigator on Chandrayaan-1, the Indian Moon mission, and on an instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This isn't the first time Nozette has been in trouble with the government. According to press reports, a small non-profit Nozette ran came under investigation by NASA in 2006 for misusing funds to pay for utilities, three mortgages and use of the La Jolla Tennis Club.

This time the charges are more serious. According to a 16th October affidavit signed by FBI agent Leslie Martell, Nozette was contacted last month by an undercover officer posing as an agent working for the Israeli Intelligence Agency, Mossad. According to transcripts reprinted in the affidavit, Nozette agreed to accept money in exchange for his past access to top secret documents.

Work for Israel was nothing new for Nozette, the affidavit says that between 1998 and 2008, an Israeli aerospace company "wholly owned by the Government of the State of Israel" paid Nozette some $225,000. "I thought I was working for you already," Nozette told the agent in a transcript reproduced in the affidavit. "I mean that's what I always thought, the [foreign company] was just a front."

In September and October, Nozette allegedly provided details of a "prototype overhead collection system" to the FBI agent in exchange for cash payments of $2,000 and $9,000 dollars. He will appear later today in United States District court for the District of Columbia to face a single charge of attempted espionage.

UPDATE - read the full story here: Moon scientist arrested on spy charges

NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) decided last week to publish two papers linked to academy member Lynn Margulis, a cell biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. PNAS editor-in-chief Randy Schekman had written Margulis over "apparent selective communication of reviews" of a controversial paper by non-academy member Donald Williamson, a retired zoologist from the University of Liverpool, UK.

Williamson's paper, which was 'communicated' by Margulis under the soon-to-be-defunct 'Track I' submission route that allows academy members to handle the peer review process for their colleagues, was published online in August, but was held up from print publication last month following a report in Scientific American that cited Margulis as saying that she obtained "6 or 7" reviews before receiving the "2 or 3" positive ones that recommended acceptance. The publication of a second paper, co-authored by Margulis, was also suspended because of the controversy (see 'Row at US journal widens').

Both papers will now move forward, says PNAS managing editor Daniel Salsbury. Williamson's paper, however, will be accompanied by a letter to the editor from Gonzalo Giribet, an invertebrate zoologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Williamson's hypothesis that caterpillars arose from an accidental mating between butterflies and velvet worms "is the most stupid thing that has ever been proposed," Giribet told Nature. "It's like if I said that humans had sex with fish and then you get whales. It's nonsense. It's a non-scientific hypothesis."

Williamson, who is writing a response that will be published alongside Giribet's commentary, says that Giribet's letter "missed the point" of the study by focusing on the evolutionary relationship between insects and velvet worms, rather than the possibility of hybridization. Giribet counters that he was short on space, owing to PNAS's limit of 250 words and five references, and so he concentrated on only one of many criticisms.

The fate of a third paper, also communicated by Margulis, which was challenged by an anonymous PNAS editorial board member following acceptance by three anonymous reviewers, remains up in the air. The study's author, John Hall, a computational biologist based in New York City who is an adjunct professor in the same department as Margulis, says he is currently preparing a response to the board member's concerns about his methods used to compare gene sequences. Salsbury declined to comment on the status of Hall's paper.

Image: Velvet worm from Wikimedia Commons

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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A huge haul of exoplanetary treasure has just been revealed. To those of you who’ve read more stories about exoplanets than you’ve had hot dinners, this news is unlikely to send you into throes of excitement. Neverthless, the haul of 32 new exoplanets announced by the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) team is significant (press release).

The planets may not be the biggest, fattest, smallest or Earthiest, but they show that the chances of us finding Earth-like planets are pretty high. Stéphane Udry from the Geneva Observatory, who announced tha findings during a conference in Porto, Portugal, says that the HARPS results show that astronomers are going about this in the right way so far: “We know that close to 40% of solar-type start have low mass planets. Low mass planets are everywhere, basically,” he says.

The search, done by the HARPS team on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6 metre telescope at La Silla, in Chile’s Atacama desert, turned up two candidate planets that are six times the mass of Earth, and two planet candidates that are five times the mass of the Earth. The smallest exoplanet found so far was also by the HARPS team, and was about two Earth masses (see “Exoplanets lighten up“).

Continue reading "Exoplanets, exoplanets, everywhere" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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Posted on behalf of Kerri Smith

The first findings from an ancient Greek town that was swallowed by the sea around 3,000 years ago have come to light.

A joint Greek and British team of archaeologists and divers have been surveying the submerged town of Pavlopetri, just off the coast of southern Greece, and have turned up shards of pottery and other remains dating from as long ago as 3500 BC – which dates the town to the Bronze Age, and makes it over 1000 years older than the team previously thought.

“We got late Neolithic pottery, which dates to about 3500 BC, which is earlier than anything else that was found on the site before,” says Jon Henderson of the University of Nottingham, one of the underwater archaeologists working on the project. “And we’ve got a full sequence [of remains] up until about 1000BC. So it looks like it was occupied for a very long period of time.”

The submerged site was also bigger than it was when originally discovered and mapped by hand in the 1960s. “The sand has moved since the 60s,” says Henderson. “There’s 9000 m2 of new buildings.” The site is now thought to cover an area of around 30,000 m2.

Nature reported on the expedition when it began in May this year.

Since then the team, led by Henderson and his team at Nottingham and a Greek team under the direction of Elias Spondylis from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, have digitally mapped much of the site and lifted some remains from the surface. As the project continues they hope to map the site in more detail and start to excavate some of the buildings.

Image: Jon Henderson

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge got underway in the Southern Hemisphere on Friday last week, with a DC-8 plane flying the first of a series of missions to measure Antarctic ice.

Although ice can and is measured from satellites there will be a gap in NASA’s measurements after ICESat-I comes to the end of its life this year and before the start of ICESat-II in 2014. To plug this gap the space agency is stepping up with a six-year programme of ice-measuring plane flights.

“The DC-8 flew two parallel tracks along the coast, one just offshore over the floating ice shelf, and one just inland. By measuring on either side of the “grounding line” between the floating ice and the ice on land, scientists can determine the rate at which this near-shore part of the ice shelf is melting,” says NASA.

The plane is too large for Antarctic runways so it launched from Chile at 9:11 local time and flew south to the Getz Ice Shelf.

Although Friday’s flight is being reported as the start of Operation Ice Bridge, the very first OIB flights were actually made in April in the Northern Hemisphere.

Image top: OIB logo.
Image lower: view from the plane.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The UK must grow GM crops to avoid food shortages in the future, a report from the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, is expected to say (Telegraph).

The study was commission in July 2008 in response to a prediction from the United Nations that world food production would need to double by 2050 to sustain a global population expected to reach nine billion.

Previous plans to grow GM crops commercially in the UK were withdrawn at the beginning of the decade after protests from green groups and consumers’ rejection of the technology.

The Telegraph says that the report, which is due to be published this week, examines several options to increase crops yields in the UK and around the world, including growing GM crops.

A source told the Sunday Telegraph, “The report will say the right GM crops should be used in the future to alleviate food shortages. This study is going to move the debate forward. The government will have to take notice of this.”

But opponents of GM crops told the Telegraph, “There is no scientific evidence that GM produces huge yields.”

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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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.

“We must frankly face the plain fact that our negotiators are not getting to agreement quickly enough. So I believe that leaders must engage directly to break the impasse. … We cannot compromise with the catastrophe of unchecked climate change; so we must compromise with one another.”
UK prime minister Gordon Brown tries to chivvy along world leaders in the run up to Copenhagen (Daily Telegraph).

“Canada will undertake efforts to meet our global responsibilities in a way that balances environmental protection and economic prosperity for Canadians, and is comparable to the level of effort of other industrialized countries.”
Sujata Raisinghani, spokeswoman for Environment Minister Jim Prentice, says Canada hopes to set itself up as an environmental leader at the Copenhagen talks (AFP).

“We should come out of Copenhagen with a deal that will ensure that everyone will survive.”
Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed comments on the negotiations after emerging from the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting, held on the seafloor to highlight the threat of sea level rise (AFP).

“I am 99.9% sure there will be no harmful creatures. I’m sure there won't be any sharks. The nastiest thing would be a moray eel, but we have checked the reef.”
Nasheed again, with some more immediate concerns before his cabinet meeting (BBC).

“Strong progress has been made in the past few weeks, with Japan, for example, announcing that it will cut its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 25% by 2020 relative to levels in 1990. But there are still major obstacles and some doubt whether a strong global deal can be hammered out in time for the United Nations’s conference on climate change in Copenhagen, now just seven weeks away.”
Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review, writes in the Observer.

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

Healthcare workers in New York have won a temporary reprieve from compulsory swine flu vaccinations.

New York State Public Employees Federation has taken the State of New York to court in an attempt to overturn a policy that requires doctors and other healthcare workers to be vaccinated against H1N1 by 30 November or face disciplinary action. On Friday a judge granted a temporary restraining order on the emergency vaccination regulation.

“Our lawsuit states this regulation is an absolute violation of the separation of powers, as it is an unconstitutional exercise of the legislature’s authority,” says PEF President Kenneth Brynien.

If such forced vaccination is necessary it should come from the legislature, not from the desk of the State Health Commissioner, says Brynien. The PEF says it encourages its members to be vaccinated but opposes enforced vaccination.

Last month, State Health Commissioner Richard Daines wrote, “Questions about safety and claims of personal preference are understandable. Given the outstanding efficacy and safety record of approved influenza vaccines, our overriding concern then, as health care workers, should be the interests of our patients, not our own sensibilities about mandates.”

A spokesperson for the commission said it would defend the lawsuits brought by the PEF and others over the vaccination rules and that “the precedents are very clear about the commissioner’s legal right” (Newsday).

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

US health officials today scaled back the number of swine flu vaccine doses that they expect to roll out this month, even as the numbers of H1N1-associated hospitalizations and deaths, particularly among children, continue to rise.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now expects to have 28-30 million doses of swine flu vaccine by the end of October — down from the 45 million doses predicted in August and previous estimates of 120 million forecast earlier in the summer.

The problem, it appears, is insufficient quantities of antigen — the part of the virus included in the vaccine that prompts the body to generate antibodies and mount an immune response.

Coverage can be found at the NY Times, AFP, Reuters, and Bloomberg, among others.

There may be fewer shots to go around, but the three nurses who sued New York state to stop mandatory immunization of health workers won't be clamouring to get the available stock. Today, a New York judge upheld the nurses' appeal and issued a temporary restraining order. State health officials vowed to fight the move. (NY Times)

Swine flu is also finally living up to its name, in the US at least. Pigs at the Minnesota state fair may have tested positive for the H1N1 virus, the first potential cases of the disease among American domestic livestock. The US Department of Agriculture is conducting further tests. (USDA statement)

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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NASA's LCROSS team -- which sent an empty rocket stage smashing into a lunar crater on 9 October -- says it caught a debris plume on camera. They probably felt the need to cough up some sort of plume -- circled here in red -- after some muttering that the event had been over-hyped. Dozens of professional telescopes -- along with hundreds of amateurs -- had observed the impact to no apparent avail.

But in an accompanying press release, NASA says that the plume rose between 6 and 8 kilometres in the air, after an impact scoured out a crater 28 metres wide. If the plume rose so high, then why have so few spotted it? In its guide to amateurs, NASA said anything above three kilometres would have risen above crater walls and been illuminated by the Sun.

New Scientist has a story that quotes lunar scientist Paul Spudis, who says that even if LCROSS did find water, it was more of a "PR stunt" than anything else. Even if LCROSS finds water in its spectral analysis of the plume, he says, it will only be from one spot, even though it now appears that there is evidence for water distributed all around the Moon's poles, albeit in a spotty way.
Image: NASA

Posted by Eric Hand
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The massive bubble of influence for the Sun, within which the Earth and the rest of the Solar System whirl around the galaxy, has an unexpected shape, say scientists for NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), who report their first results today in Science.
The heliosphere is the space created by a steady stream of particles from the Sun, called the solar wind, that slam into galactic particles and reach a standstill. Here's Nature's kitchen-sink analogy. IBEX measures the neutral particles created at this collisional boundary.
Most thought the heliosphere had a raindrop shape, with the nose of the drop pointing in the direction of the Sun's galactic velocity. Instead, IBEX detected a strange, unexpected ribbon-like shape. It is also interesting that Voyager 1 and 2 -- which measured the heliosphere's boundary as they burst through the bubble 30 years after their launch -- just barely missed this snaking feature on the sky.

Posted by Eric Hand
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Bird of paradise plant seed Credit: Annie Cavanaugh, Wellcome Images

From captivating cancer cells to stunning sensory nerve fibres, the winners reveal "the ability of the picture to communicate the wonder and fascination of science", according to the Wellcome Trust's press release.

To view all the selected images, head over to the Wellcome Collection in London before Spring 2010, or just click through the Image Awards Website, which details how the images were captured and why they were tapped by the judges.

Over at the BBC, there's also a video of Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, discussing his top three picks.

Summer plankton
Credit: Spike Walker, Wellcome Images

Mouse liver with blood cells
Credit: EM Unit, UCL Medical School, Royal Free Campus, Wellcome Images

Posted by Elie Dolgin
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Research ministers from across Europe spent the last day and a half discussing how best to organise themselves so they can have more effective discussions. While this may seem like procrastination, it’s actually no small task when you are trying to forge out a path that is agreeable to 27 countries and the European Commission.

One of the main talked about issues was how to reform the scientific and technical research committee (CREST), a body through which member states advise the Europe Commission in its development of research policy proposals. Currently, a member of the Commission chairs the group. But the member states would like to be in the drivering seat so that they can take more ownership over the direction that EU research policy develops. After some wrangling with the Commission, a compromise was settled upon where both the Commission and the member states would chair the body. The research ministers were sanguine that their attempt at simplifying and giving more direction to their discussions would not in fact make things more complicated.

Continue reading "Talking shop" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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“These big acquisitions don’t do a thing for research. I don’t think anyone should be fooled into thinking these big acquisitions have anything to do with innovation or increased research and development capacity.”
Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, comments on suggestions that Pfizer could cut its research spend by up to $3 billion after merging with Wyeth (Bloomberg).

“At the input end, we need to figure out how the tongue knows what it’s tasting – what are the basic tastes, how are the cells organized, and what are the encoding properties for taste and flavour. At the other end, we need to understand how the cortex takes information from our peripheral senses and transforms it into a percept, an internal representation of the outside world.”
Charles Zuker, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has just published a paper explaining how we taste carbonation in drinks (press release).

“Even a small amount of exposure to second-hand smoke can increase in blood clotting, constrict blood vessels and can cause a heart attack. Short-term exposure can make a big difference.”
Neal Benowitz is a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of a panel from the Institute of Medicine which has just issued a report calling for smoking bans in all restaurants, offices and public buildings (NY Times).

“Although febrile reactions significantly decreased, prophylactic administration of antipyretic drugs at the time of vaccination should not be routinely recommended since antibody responses to several vaccine antigens were reduced.”
Researchers writing in the Lancet say that the children should not be given paracetamol to control fever after vaccinations as the drug may reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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China’s Premier Wen Jiabao today issued an apology. For making a basic error in his geology.

When visiting a classroom earlier this month Wen referred to the three types of rock as “sedimentary, magmatic and volcanic”. This is a schoolboy error, as he has now acknowledged in a letter to state news agency Xinhua, which reported his original comments.

“The three main types of rocks should be sedimentary rocks, magmatic rocks (also called igneous rocks) and metamorphic rocks. Please correct my mistake and send my apology to all readers,” he wrote.

The Danwei website notes:

Needless to say, the apology burnishes the established reputation of Wen as a humble, down-to-earth, grandfatherly leader, even if, as a graduate of the Beijing Institute of Geology, he really ought to have known such basic information.

Another reason, perhaps a more important one, is that for the Communist Party, which has been touting "scientific" as its top claim to power (as in "the scientific concept of development" associated with president Hu Jintao), scientific rigor is definitely a quality it would like to be associated with.

The Times says Wen’s “unprecedented” apology has “caused a sensation”.

Xinhua quotes Wang Wei, of the National School of Administration, who says, “Everybody makes mistakes. My respect for our premier is stronger after this.” The news service also notes that “Wen has gained a reputation as a man of the people over the years.”

Headline watch
With apology, China's Premier wins praise as rock of responsibility – Xinhua
Premier's candor on rock error rocks China – China Daily

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera which is currently whizzing round the Red Planet aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned this rather awesome picture of sand dunes on the surface.

‘Bad Astronomer’ Phil Plait had a chat with HiRISE’s Alfred McEwen and has a nice explanation of what is actually going on here:

…what [makes] this picture so spectacular are the graceful blue-gray swirls arcing across the dunes. These are caused by dust devils, which are a bit like mini-tornadoes.
…
The important thing to note here is that the sand in the craters of Mars is actually dark grey in colour, since it’s made of basalt. The reason it looks red in pictures is because covering the sand is a thin layer of much finer dust, and the dust is what’s red. When a dust devil moves over the Martian surface, it can pick up the very light dust particles, but not the heavier sand grains. So those blue-grey swirls are tracks where the dust devil has vacuumed up the dust, revealing the darker sand underneath.

Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It's time for big number madness here on the Great Beyond.

The first number is 2^43,112,609-1. If you crunch that out you'll get a 12 million digit prime. Primes that can be written as a power of two (minus the one) are called Mersenne Primes, and this one was discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a UCLA project to pin down the Mersennes. It was discovered last year, but this week it spontaneously generated a smaller but more useful number: $100,000. That's the money awarded to the GIMP's team by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as part of their cooperative computing award.

The second, even larger number, comes from a new paper on the arXiv preprint server (and via the always helpful arXiv blog):

That's the number of universes that could exist if a theory known as inflation is correct. According to inflation, the universe began as a frothy foam of different quantum states that, during a period of rapid expansion, became "frozen" in space. Andre Linde and Vitaly Vanchirum of Stanford University estimated the number of frozen states that could have been created. Since each state is now a separate region of space with its own laws of physics, they argue that they can now be thought of as "separate" universes.

Even if we could see other universes, and there's no reason to think that we can, the authors believe we couldn't take it all in. Our brains could only "observe" 10¹⁰¹⁶ universes in a normal lifetime.

Want more numbers? Watch this:

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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That ruling gave permission to Singh to appeal an earlier ruling defining the meaning of an article he wrote for the Guardian in 2008 which the BCA claims is defamatory (see: Simon Singh vs the British Chiropractic Association, redux).

Responding to the ruling, the BCA posted a statement, part of which read “the BCA was maliciously attacked by Dr. Singh”. Later, a new statement appeared which said instead that “the BCA was libelled by Dr. Singh”.

Is there an argument that Simon Singh could now countersue or start a fresh claim over the BCA suggestion that he acted maliciously?

When contacted by Nature, Simon Singh’s lawyer Robert Dougans of Bryan Cave said he could not comment on the issue at this stage.

A spokesman for the BCA said “the wrong statement was posted and that has now been corrected”.

As this blog post went to press both statements were still available on the BCA website, although only the most recent one was linked to from the news page.

Old statement
New statement

Image: extracts from both statements / BCA

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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EU research programme weighed up and found wanting
Audit criticizes lack of sustainability of EU-funded projects.

Flies get fright from false memories
Scientists use light activation to pinpoint where learning happens in fruit flies.

Researchers create portable black hole
Mini-hole made of metamaterials ensnares microwave light.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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I was at the newly formed House of Commons Science and Technology Committee meeting yesterday for the inaugural hearing. It was a pretty wide-ranging discussion, and I have to admit that my eyes started to glaze over a bit as they sometimes do at these hearings.

But then I heard the letters S-T-F-C and my ears perked up. STFC stands for Science and Technologies Facilities Council, which is the UK's main funder for particle physics and astronomy. The STFC also administers some of the most important user facilities in Europe, such as the Diamond light source and the ISIS neutron source, both at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

It was the MP from Oxfordshire, Evan Harris, who was asking some tough questions about the STFC's funding situation to Paul Drayson, the minister of state for science and innovation. Harris wanted to know why Diamond and ISIS were cutting back their operating times this year.

"The issue relating to STFC is a difficult one," Drayson told him. One issue Harris quickly focused on was the exchange rate. The weakness of the pound against the euro means that STFC basically has to pay more for physicists to participate in the Large Hadron Collider and astronomers to use the giant telescopes of the European Southern Observatory.

But Drayson told the committee that the STFC had been compensated for the currency exchange rates for the past two years. "If it's not exchange rates that's causing the pressure, then it must be the flat cash allocation," Harris said. Drayson denied that too.

"Do you accept that there are pressures that are not fully met in the budget?" an obviously frustrated Harris asked Drayson.

"Um… no…," the minister replied.

So what is the problem?

"This particular research council has projects where the budgets of these projects are getting significantly over spent," Drayson finally said.

Drayson didn't elaborate further at the time, but I collared him after the meeting to ask which projects he meant. "The ITER project is putting huge pressure overall," he said.

ITER of course, is the massive fusion project in the south of France. By coincidence I just did a story about how the Europeans hope to pay for it. You can read it here (with a subscription).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Posted for Brendan Maher

Yesterday, Nature published a map of human DNA methylation at singe base pair resolution, basically the precise location of millions of methyl groups hanging on the cytosine bases in the genome.

For the ‘omics’ lovers, this is the methylome, a subset of the epigenome which presumably also includes the extent of different modifications made to histone proteins and the attachment of other molecules known to influence gene expression.

No doubt journalists around the world had a difficult time wrapping their nut grafs around this one.

Defining what makes something “epigenetic” has been a prickly practice (one briefly outlined in a Nature news feature last year).

Purists say that it has to do with modifications to gene expression that do not involve mutation but are inherited at least from cell to cell during division,if not through sexual reproduction as well. The NIH, which funded the current work, defines it a bit more loosely, not tying the modifications down to inheritance.

Metaphors are helpful in explaining the importance of the epigenome, but they can be equally sticky.

Continue reading "On methylome metaphors" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The French public prosecutor and the police's white collar crime squad have opened a preliminary investigation of 17 charities, including several medical research charities, and humanitarian ones, the newspaper Le Parisien revealed yesterday. Under the French judicial system this is an information gathering probe, and no formal investigation of the charities or any individuals has been made.

The medical charities include one working on diabetes, another on age-related macular degeneration, two on Alzheimer's disease, and two on cancer. A key question investigators will be addressing is what proportion of the millions of euros collected by the charities was spent on their stated charitable aims. Perhaps complicating the investigation, it's reported that several of the charities are French nodes of ones based in the United States, or of international networks.

The France charity scene was rocked in the 1990's by the discovery of a major financial fraud in the country's biggest medical charity, L'Association pour la Recherche contre le Cancer, which resulted in the late Jacques Crozemarie, it's president being sentenced in 2000 to four years imprisonment, along with paying heavy fines, and damages to the charity. Researchers associated with the charity, including beneficiaries of its research funding, came under fire at the time for having turned a blind eye to longstanding rumours of wrongdoing at the charity.

Posted by Declan Butler
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China’s got ample space underground to store the carbon dioxide it pumps into the sky, according to a recently publicised study by Chinese and US researchers (Dahowski et al, Energy Procedia 1, 2009; doi:10.1016/j.egypro.2009.02.058). It has 2,300 Gt/CO2 of theoretical capacity spread generally across the country, and not too far from the powerplants that are large point sources of the greenhouse gas – meaning that transport and storage costs can be kept down to less than $10 per ton of CO¬2, the study finds.

Lump this in with other capacity estimates, such as the US Department of Energy’s Carbon Sequestration Atlas, and it’s clear that the world is generally not short of space, and could likely store hundreds of years of carbon dioxide output.

The IEA has more capacity estimates in its CCS roadmap [pdf], released on Tuesday to coincide with political support for carbon capture and storage (see Nature’s news story, ‘Urgency’ needed on carbon capture).

But (there’s always a but).

Continue reading "Carbon storage: searching for space" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Posted for Rex Dalton

A new front in the environmental battle over bluefin tuna was opened yesterday to try to protect the dwindling populations facing commercial wipe out in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.

On the last day possible before a conference next year, Monaco nominated Atlantic bluefin tuna to be added to the list of species that can’t be traded internationally under CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and Wild Fauna and Flora. This sets the stage for a high-stakes battle in March, when the next Conference of the Parties to the convention will meet to consider nominations.

Environmental groups criticized the Obama Administration for failing to formally endorse Monaco’s nomination. In response US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrator Jane Lubchenco issued a statement saying the administration “strongly supports” Monaco’s nomination but wants an 11th hour-attempt to work within another international conservation framework to reduce fishing quotas and improve regulation.

Continue reading "Monaco continues push for bluefin fishing ban" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Chemical keeps male sex drive in check
A single pheromone ensures a male fruitfly's urge to mate targets the right sex.

Gene therapy could remedy Parkinson's
Introducing three genes corrects motor defects in monkeys.

Cell invasion caught on camera
Videos show T cells breaching the central nervous system's defences.

Ocean science goes deep
A global mission to wire up sea-floor observatories gets under way.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Plans for a new multi-million pound science park in the UK were unveiled earlier this week by the UK government, the Wellcome Trust and GlaxoSmithKline.

The park, which will be located at GSK’s existing site in Stevenage, could eventually serve as a base for 1,500 scientists working for early-stage biotech companies.

“It will leverage our existing strengths as a world leader in the sector, helping it to grow and reinforcing our international competitiveness,” said UK business secretary Lord Mandelson (press release). “And ultimately it will help us build towards a stronger UK economy coming out of the global downturn.”

Initial funding for the park comes from the government (£16.7m), The Wellcome Trust (£6m), the East of England Development Agency (£4m) and GSK (£11m). The Daily Telegraph says the park could eventually cost £170m.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The US Geological Survey today warned that introduced species of gigantic snake “constitute an exceptional threat to the integrity of native ecosystems”.

A new report from the USGS also warns that the largest examples of these animals are “probably capable of killing an adult human”. Luckily, “most seem disinclined to do so”.

More likely the snakes will end up – as we have already seen – in face offs with native wildlife. “Large alligators and panthers would be capable of eating the occasional giant constrictor, but large constrictors will likely eat alligators and panthers,” warns the report.

The report says the “overall organism risk potential” – the sum of the likelihood a snake population could be established and the consequences if it did – is high for the Indian or Burmese Python, Northern African Python, Southern African Python, Boa Constrictor, and the Yellow Anaconda.

The risk potential was deemed medium for the Reticulated Python, Green Anaconda, DeSchauensee’s Anaconda, and Beni Anaconda. At the moment only three species are known to be reproducing in the US: the Burmese Python, the Northern African Python, and the Boa Constrictor.

Don’t think that these snakes are nasty though, the authors of the report (Robert Reed and Gordon Rodda) are at pains to point out this is not the case. They write:

We can testify to these snakes’ attraction personally, as we both have kept pet giant constrictors. We can attest to these snakes’ beauty, companionability, and educational value. The love of nature is often originally fostered in one’s own arms, where close contact with living things engenders a connection not otherwise possible. And size does impress.

Image: Skip Snow of the National Park Service measures a Burmese python captured in the Everglades / photo by Lori Oberhofer, NPS.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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This week, we're impressed by video game-playing mice, go in search of a magnet with only one pole, meet Nobel Prize-winner Elizabeth Blackburn, and hear how Columbian guerrillas are helping scientists study reading.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff.”
Apolinario Chile Pixtun, a Mayan Indian elder, says there is no truth to rumours that the Mayan calendar predicts an apocalypse on 21 December, 2012 (AP).

“Once hospitals have made that multimillion dollar commitment of buying a robot, they want to market it. Patients intuitively perceive minimally-invasive procedures to be better because of the new technology and the wow factor that goes into it.’’
Jim Hu, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the US, comments on his study suggesting that robot-assisted prostate cancer surgery might produce worse outcomes than traditional surgery (Boston Globe).

“Look at all the paper and trees, he said, that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years — not to mention the human labor and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes.”
The New York Times notes that Tim Berners-Lee wishes he’d left the // out of web addresses.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck.”
Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, outlines the intriguing theory that the LHC is being sabotaged by a time travelling Higgs Boson (NY Times).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“Fire up the B-movietron!” exlaims University of Portsmouth paleontologist Mark Whitton, musing on the discovery of fossils of a weird flying reptile (which he’s also pictured in action, below). The fossils were found in northeastern China, and have been christened Darwinopterus, in honour of the great man’s multiple anniversaries this year.

Why so weird? Well, as Junchang Lu and colleagues report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1603) the crow-sized fossil is a kind of pterosaur (or pterodactyl), one of the flying reptiles that cruised around the sky 220-65 million years ago. It’s a transitional fossil, but transitional in a strangely disjointed way: its head and neck look like they belong to advanced, short-tailed pterosaurs, and the rest of the skeleton is similar to more primitive forms.

“It’s as if someone said, ‘Let’s nail these two together and make a sort of chimera, that’ll really confuse everybody,’” says Dave Unwin of the University of Leicester in England [Science News].

Unwin adds (press release): “The head and neck evolved first, followed later by the body, tail, wings and legs. It seems that natural selection was acting on and changing entire modules and not, as would normally be expected, just on single features such as the shape of the snout, or the form of a tooth. This supports the controversial idea of a relatively rapid "modular" form of evolution.”

Darren Naish fills in all the gory details at Tetrapod Zoology.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Apparently black bears, soccer moms and Chief Justice John Roberts have something in common: a preference for minivans.

As with most pudgy animals, black bears are committed to energy efficiency, eating only the fattiest portions of their prey (the skins, eggs and brains) and even selecting the plumpest ants. A new analysis published in the Journal of Mammalogy reveals that this dedication even translates to their anthroprogenic food sources.

A group from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Service took a close look at the bear-jack records at Yosemite National Park. They found that between 2004 and 2005, bears chose to break into minivans 29% of the time, even though the only made up 7% of the cars. And while 28% of the cars in the parking lot were sedans, bears were only tempted by them 14% of the time.

Every year between 2001 and 2007, minivas were either the most or second most popular cars, according to the black bears.

Continue reading "Choosy Bears Choose Minivans" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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GlaxoSmithKline has been ordered to pay out $2.5 million in a lawsuit over birth defects allegedly associated with its antidepressant Paxil.

Bloomberg reports that 599 similar cases are in the pipeline (personally I wonder how many potentially $2.5m a year grossing drugs are in GSK’s pipeline).

“The first win is always huge, especially when you get a jury saying the drug caused the injury,” says Sean Tracey, the lawyer for the family of Lyam Kilker, who was born with heart defects and whose mother was using Paxil.

The Philadelphia Inquirer notes:

By a 10-2 margin, jurors said Glaxo officials had “negligently failed to warn” the doctor treating [Kilker's mother Michelle] David about Paxil's risks and concluded the medicine was a “factual cause” of the child's heart defects.

But the jury also found that Glaxo’s handling of the drug was not “outrageous”, meaning the family could not seek punitive damages against the drugmaker.

Continue reading "GSK hit with $2.5m ruling in antidepressant case" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Lord Justice Laws today gave British science writer Simon Singh leave to appeal in the libel case brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association.

Earlier this year High Court judge Mr Justice Eady ruled on the meaning of an article Singh wrote for the Guardian newspaper in 2008. He decided that part of the article could be taken to mean that the BCA knowingly promotes treatments that do not work.

Today’s ruling means that Singh can try to convince the court of appeal of his interpretation of the meaning of the article.

“It’s a fantastic result,” Singh told Nature, “but all we have got now is permission to appeal. We now have to go to the court of appeal. There’s still a long battle ahead.”

Singh’s lawyer Robert Dougans said, “This was encouraging news but there are an awful lot of hills still to climb.”

The case has attracted much attention in the UK and abroad, and led to the creation of a ‘Keep Libel Laws Out of Science’ campaign, run by the campaign group Sense About Science. (Nature has backed this campaign. See: Unjust burdens of proof.)

Nature has asked for a statement from the BCA on today’s ruling. UPDATE: The BCA has issued a statement responding to the decision.

SEE ALSO: Simon Singh vs the British Chiropractic Association, a new development

Previous stories on this topic
Chiropractors get litigious, again – 19 August 2008
Simon Singh loses first round in chiropractic fight – 08 May 2009
Court setback for science writer - 13 May 2009
Science writer waits on legal advice in libel case – 19 May 2009
Science writer will appeal libel case ruling - 3 June 2009
Petition, press release follow libel campaign – 08 June 2009
Complaints converge on chiropractors – 15 June 2009

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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EXCLUSIVE: Particle physicist 'falsely accused', claims brother
As Adlène Hicheur is investigated for terrorist links, his brother speaks out.

EXCLUSIVE: Fusion delays sow concern
Construction on ITER won't begin until 2010.

Cancer metastasis scrutinized
Researchers shift focus to catch secondary tumours.

Japan to slash huge grant scheme
Upstart government brings fresh priorities to science.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Researchers have long noted that journals’ conflict-of-interest reporting requirements can be bewilderingly various, and commensurately confusing and time-consuming to comply with.

Thye need worry no more when they submit their manuscripts -- at least if they are submitting to the gang of 12 journals belonging to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. In simultaneous editorials like this one in the New England Journal of Medicine, those journals are announcing their adoption of a new, uniform format for financial interest reporting by manuscript authors. You can take a look at the form they are requiring authors to complete here; and a sample of a form completed by Kermit the Frog (no kidding) is available here. It should be noted that Kermit, while required to describe qualitatively his financial ties, was not obliged to spell out the dollar amounts he collected.

The editors say that, for the next six months, the form will be in a beta-testing stage; they will meet again to tweak it according to comments they get from users between now and 10 April 2010.

Meantime, a new group of specialists have captured the limelight for the anemic rate at which they reported their conflicts at their 2008 annual meeting. This study, published last week in NEJM, reported that just 71.2% of speakers who received payments from five makers of total hip and knee prostheses in 2007 told their audience at the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons meeting that they had received those payments.

Posted by Alex Witze
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“The availability of personalised bone grafts engineered from the patient’s own stem cells would revolutionise the way we currently treat these defects.”
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, of Columbia University, comments on what her team's creation of a new bone from stem cells might mean for people suffering from joint problems (BBC).

“Why should the tobacco company be mucking around in private thoughts? They can see it when it is finished.”
Robert Proctor, history of science professor at Stanford University, explains why the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company shouldn’t get to see his unfinished book in order to cross examine him as a witness against them in a law suit (The Chronicle of Higher Ed).

“Because they run so fast they create a bubble as their feet hit the water and then they push off from this bubble before it bursts.”
Simon Blakeney, BBC television producer, has been filming the ‘Jesus lizards’ that run on water (film on BBC).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A sad story has led to the confirmation of a long-standing hypothesis: in very, very rare cases, a pregnant woman’s cancer cells can sneak through the placenta, evade the developing foetus’ immune system and proliferate in the child.

Since 1866 there have been some 17 documented cases (including the present study) of a baby developing the same cancer as its mother, suggesting that the mother’s cancer cells had metastasized to the developing foetus. This speculation had strong support — for example, three infant boys who developed leukaemia like their moms' had bone marrow cells with two X chromosomes — but had never been backed by good old genetic evidence. One reason for doubt was that the mother's cancerous cells, even if they had slipped through the placenta, should have been destroyed by the foetus' immune system.

Researchers from Japan and the UK have finally demonstrated that mother-to-fetus metastasis can indeed happen, and published their findings online 12 October in PNAS. They focused on a baby who developed a tumour at the age of 11 months. The father then revealed that the mother had been diagnosed with leukaemia a month after giving birth to the child and had died.

Continue reading "Mom passes cancer to baby " »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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After Venkatraman Ramakrishnan learnt he'd shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with Ada Yonath and Thomas Steitz), NatureNews went to meet him at the UK Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in Cambridge. Here he is, describing the thrill of seeing atomic-resolution structures of the ribosome - and his surprise at winning a chemistry Nobel: a subject in which, he admits, he'd flunk an undergraduate degree.

For more videos from Nature, go to http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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US billionaire George Soros, founder of the hedge fund Soros Fund Management, has announced plans to invest $1 billion in clean-energy technologies to help stave off global warming.

Speaking at a climate conference in Copenhagen on 12 October, Soros also said he plans to establish - with $100 million of his own money - a new environmental policy group called Climate Policy Initiative.

“I want to apply rather stringent criteria to the investments,” Soros told Bloomberg in an email. “They should be profitable but should also actually make a contribution to solving the problem.”

Soros – estimated to be worth $11 million billion by Forbes – said to reporters in Copenhagen that he lacked scientific expertise, but “the one thing I have is the ability to put money to work” (Guardian).

The Climate Policy Initiative will be headed up by Stanford University Law School professor Thomas Heller, says Bloomberg.

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.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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A nearly totally vegetarian spider has been discovered in a remarkable ecological niche in Central America.

While most spiders dine on tasty insects and the like, the new species lives on acacia shrubs. These provide shelter and food for ants that in turn protect them from predators, in theory at least.

The new spider – named Bagheera kiplingi after the panther in the Jungle Book – lives on the plants, eating the nectar produced for the ants and the leaf tips that produce it.

It is not totally veggie, as it occasionally snacks on ant larvae and flies that try to dine on the nectar. However it is, say its discoverers, “the first report of a spider that feeds primarily and deliberately on plants”.

The spider was discovered independently by two research teams; Eric Olson, of Brandeis University in Massachusetts, found it in Costa Rica in 2001 and Christopher Meehan, of Villanova University, Pennsylvania, found it in Mexico in 2007.

“What surprised us most about discovering this spider's extraordinary ecology was to find it on the ant-acacias,” says Robert Curry, also of Villanova University. (press release).

“This well-known mutualism has been studied by tropical ecologists for nearly 50 years, yet the spider's role was not noticed until Olson's discovery in 2001. We were lucky to find in Mexico an area where the spider is both exceptionally abundant and even more herbivorous than in Costa Rica.”

This is, as the comment piece from Duncan Jackson, of the University of Ulster in the UK, running alongside the paper in Current Biology notes remarkable for a number of reasons:

This is wholly remarkable, because all other known spiders are carnivorous predators, and unlike most other nutritional mutualism exploiters, jumping spiders are specialized hunters rather than generalized foragers.
...
It is truly remarkable that a spider should thrive on a vegetarian diet, because all spiders are constrained by their narrow gut, specialized mandibles and a solids filtration system to consume a liquid diet.
...
It seems that the transition from hunter to gatherer in this uniquely vegetarian spider has facilitated a suite of additional behavioural changes which might suggest an alternative route to sociality. One wonders how many more surprises await us in this remarkable system.

Image: adult female Bagheera kiplingi eats Beltian body harvested from ant-acacia / R. L. Curry

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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North America comet theory questioned
No evidence of an extraterrestrial impact 13,000 years ago, studies say.

Protein-design papers challenged
Reanalysis does not find same results as key 2003 study.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Practicing a task like juggling that requires you to focus your vision and your movement actually increases the amount of white matter in your noggin.

This is the result of research from the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, UK. They used a technique known as diffusion MRI to test for changes in the brain before and after a group of 24 young people learned to juggle over six weeks, and the paper is published in Nature Neuroscience.

Changes in grey matter of the brain had already been seen in similar studies, but the white matter is the stuff that matters – it passes the information between bits of grey matter. Increases in white matter are a previously unobserved phenomena, the authors claim. In their study, white matter increased by 5% after the juggling novices had mastered their task.

Juggling isn’t important other than to illustrate the point Heidi Johansen-Berg, who led the team, tells the BBC, the changes they see might apply to any other task that needs to be learned. The AFP suggest the work proves that juggling rewires the brain and the excitement has spread to the British tabloids, (Daily Mirror) which are advocating juggling to increase brain power, which isn’t necessarily the message to take from the study, rather that white matter changes were spotted.

Anyway, I'm off to join the circus.

Image: Photo by dpadua via Flickr under creative commons.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson
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By Geoff Brumfiel and Declan Butler

The arrest by French police last Thursday of a particle physicist on allegations that he has links with Al Qaida has generated some potentially misleading statements and headlines.

Although French police have not officially released a name, the suspect is widely reported to be Adlène Hicheur, a 32-year-old physicist from the Swiss Federal Technical Institute de Lausanne (EPFL), who since 2003 had worked at LHC beauty (LHCb), one of four major particle experiments at CERN. According to French law Hicheur will be charged later today.

But wait? Did we hear the word "nuclear" and "al-Qaeda"? Cue the press. Coverage has been wide and varied, but for the best of the best, you have to the UK:

He's the “AL QAEDA-LINK NUCLEAR EXPERT,“ according to the Daily Express .

Well from what we can see, he appeared to specialize in the alignment of particle detectors and the complex theoretical physics surrounding the B-quark. That makes him kind of a subatomic expert, really.

The Daily Mail threw nuclear fusion into the mix, saying that “MI5 had been warned that the suspects are outstanding scientists who had been honing their techniques in nuclear fusion across the world.”

Again, we're a bit perplexed. Surely if al-Qaeda wanted to "hone their techniques" in nuclear fusion they could have sent their "nuclear expert" to ITER, the giant fusion experiment in the South of France.

But the prize goes to the Express, which boldly belted out the headline: AL-QAEDA SCIENTIST HELD AT NUCLEAR BASE

That makes CERN sound like some sort of criminal lair located beneath Antarctica (he wasn't arrested at CERN, by the way).

Honorable mention to the Daily Star for just running a picture of Tom Hanks and bigging up the Angels and Demons reference.

In a weird sort of way, that could be the most accurate angle on the story--LHCb is hoping to understand the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the Universe. But they're not, so far as we're aware, trying to use this knowledge to destroy the Vatican.

To be fair, a lot of the UK press didn't go quite so over the top. The Guardian and the Times had pretty reasonable coverage (although he was a physicist, not an engineer).

Credit: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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Lidia Brito is set to be the new head of science policy at UNESCO, according to SciDevNet. Brito, Mozambique’s former science minister, will take up the post in December, it says.

“She is well known as a knowledgeable and passionate advocate for science-based development in poor countries,” Mohamed Hassan, executive director of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, told the website. “We can think of no better person to build on UNESCO’s recent efforts to develop capacity in science policy in the developing world and especially in Africa.”

Brito follows Irina Bokova who was elected director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in September.

Both Bokova and Brito have a lot of work to do. As Nature noted in a 24 September editorial, little has changed since a damming 2007 report on the agency’s science portfolio which labelled it “fragmented, over-ambitious, unfocused” and lacking a clear vision.

As the editorial said:

The history and culture of UNESCO do not bode well for serious change. But business as usual is not an option if UNESCO is to have a scientific raison d'être.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Given that they occupy a position on the scientific credibility spectrum that could charitably be characterised as ‘fringe’, it is no surprise that those who deny climate change have to take their victories where they find them.

Hence the glee following the BBC’s recent story ‘What happened to global warming?’

The BBC quotes Piers Corbyn from weather forecasting company Weatheraction and Don Easterbrook of Western Washington University. Both cast doubt on the widely held consensus view that human activity is driving changes in climate.

Corbyn and Easterbrook are both global warming deniers / sceptics and both have been publicising their doubts for some time (see the references on their Wikipedia entries for more). Without commenting on the merits of their arguments, it is clear that it is slightly disingenuous to use the views of these two men to claim as the BBC does that “It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.”

Nevertheless, the anti-global warming movement is celebrating. Leading the charge is the Daily Telegraph which has a news story and an opinion piece from Damian Thompson which says:

I think the BBC wanted to slip this one out quietly, but a Matt Drudge link put paid to that. The climate change correspondent of BBC News has admitted that global warming stopped in 1998 – and he reports that leading scientists believe that the earth’s cooling-off may last for decades.

Many in the blog-world have followed up with similar items.

To summarise then: two scientists who have previously said they didn’t believe in global warming still don’t believe in global warming.

The main scientific point of the BBC article – that “for the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures” – is discussed in detail on this blog post at Real Climate.

If you don’t wish to follow the link here are a couple of extracts:

Even under conditions of anthropogenic global warming (which would contribute a temperature rise of about 0.2 ºC over this period) a flat period or even cooling trend over such a short time span is nothing special and has happened repeatedly before (see 1987-1996).
…
It is highly questionable whether this “pause” is even real.

UPDATE - See also, 'Nature' attacks the BBC for its U-turn over climate change, Daily Telegraph, 12 October.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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“I think it’s wonderful.”
US Energy Secretary Steven Chu praises companies that have left the US Chamber of Commerce in protest at the chamber’s stance on climate change (Reuters, for back story see: Chamber of Commerce defends climate stance).

“Of course it’s sad that a key person in the climate negotiations has chosen to resign his position. However, it is a purely administrative matter which I therefore do not have any comments to.”
Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s Minister for Climate and Energy and incoming president of the Conference of Parties 15 climate conference, comments on the resignation of Denmark’s chief climate negotiator (DR via COP15 blog).

“If you come down from four to three boats then you have to be sure that each of the three submarines is ‘gold-plated’ and can never suffer a serious breakdown In the end, that may not reduce costs very much and may even increase them.”
An unnamed Whitehall official comments on suggestions that the UK may reduce the number of nuclear missile submarines and nuclear warheads it owns or is planning to build by 25% (Financial Times).

“We can’t say anything right now. The picture would be clear after the scientists' statements are recorded.”
Manohar Verma, a police superintendent in Gwalior, India, refuses to comment on allegations that two scientists at the Defence Research and Development Establishment tried to kill a colleague in a ritual human sacrifice (Times of India).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Climate talks stumble in Bangkok
UN negotiators clash over how to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

Physicist working at CERN arrested
Postdoc faces terrorism charges in France.

Row at US journal widens
Three papers caught up in journal probe of review process.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Harvard University in the US has retained its title as the world’s top academic powerhouse for the sixth year running, in a ranking of the top 200 universities in the world. But in the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings, published on 8 October, Yale University slipped to third place, being overtaken by the UK’s University of Cambridge.

The UK claimed four of the top six spots, with University College London moving up from 7th place in 2008 to 4th this year. The University of Oxford and Imperial College London jointly took fifth place. US universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in ninth place, fill the next ten places.

The best performing university outside the US and UK was the Australian National University, which dropped one place to 17th from last year.

Continue reading "US still dominates university rankings" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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A physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider was yesterday arrested in Vienne, France on suspicion of terrorist links.

Europe’s premier high energy physics lab CERN issued a statement today saying the researcher was not a CERN employee but was working on analysis projects associated with the LHCb experiment, and had been doing so since 2003.

“His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism: CERN is a particle physics research laboratory whose research addresses fundamental questions about the universe,” says CERN. “None of our research has potential for military application, and all our results are published openly in the public domain.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The Nikon-sponsored ‘Small World’ photography competition has unvield another set of truly stunning images of the world.

In first place is this shot, by Heiti Paves of Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia. It shows the male sex organ of the thale cress.

Continue reading "Small World: Big pictures" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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NASA has come over all violent for today’s Moon mission, where a rocket stage has smashed into the surface of our satellite, hopefully sending up a plume of scientific goodness.

“This marks the end of the LCROSS flight mission,” NASA broadcast just moments ago. A shepherding spacecraft observed the impact of a proceeding spent rocket stage and then itself smashed into the Moon.

The actual live impact was a bit of a bust, with nothing very clear on the video feed. Still, the Moon has been well and truly hit.

Previous missions have also used ‘impactors’ to kick up Moon dust and help us see what the Moon is made of (hint: not cheese), but today’s LCROSS impact has been characterized by a bombastic tone. This is not an impact, according to the media. Instead, NASA has BOMBED THE MOON.

This tone hasn’t been helped by incidents such as the software lead for LCROSS tweeting, “Red Leader, this is Gold Leader. We’re starting our attack run now.”

In addition, the space agency has had to contend with conspiracy theories about today’s impact, including that it is ‘bombing the Moon’ to destroy evidence of a secret base.

A full news story on the impact will be up later today on Nature News. In the mean time I shall leave you with these words from Rush Limbaugh:

If there are smarter people than us out there -- and, of course, goes without saying they would have to be -- and they have brought peace throughout the universe except for earth and we're bombing the moon, this could set up a retaliatory attack! You know, wait 'til the meteorites organize when they hear about this, folks.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The UK government has decided to convince us all that climate change is real. To this end it is spending £6 million on a prime time advertising campaign featuring a father reading a bedtime story about the evil carbon dioxide monster created by grown ups which is making rabbits cry.

In perhaps the worst advert for stopping climate change I’ve ever seen, the cringe worthy short has the father telling his child how scientists found that global warming “was being caused by too much CO2, and it was the children of the land who’d have to live with the horrible consequences” (transcript).

When the child asks plaintively “is there a happy ending?” a disembodied voice proclaims, “It’s up to us how the story ends.”

Well in that case I want Al Gore to ride in on an IPCC dragon and slay the carbon monster with his sword of Inconvenient Truth.

The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change says a recent poll found less than 20% of citizens think climate change will impact their children. “The survey results show that people don’t realise that climate change is already under way and could have very severe consequences for their children's lives,” says climate change minister Joan Ruddock (Reuters).

It’s a worthy cause, but an awful advert.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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You can exhale now. The near-Earth asteroid Apophis has even less of a chance of hitting Earth than before, NASA has announced. The new calculations lower the chances of doomsday, for a 2036 close approach, by a factor of five for the 270-metre asteroid: from 1 in 45,000 to 1 in 250,000. The calculations were based on observations from a Hawaiian telescope and were announced at a conference in Puerto Rico -- the location of that famous asteroid super-spotter, the Arecibo radio telescope, which also factored into the new probability estimate.
Initially, Apophis was thought to have a 2.7 percent chance of impacting Earth in 2029. Though that has been ruled out, the asteroid will still swing closer than some Earth-orbiting satellites, and that whip-around may end up altering its course. That's why the Planetary Society sponsored a contest to a design a small tracking spacecraft which would allow more precise measurements of its path.
Image: UH/IA

Posted by Eric Hand
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Developing countries have more than doubled spending on science over a 5 year period, from US$134 billion in 2002 and to US$272 billion in 2007, new figures show.

The number of researchers in developing nations jumped from 1.8 million to 2.7 million over the same time period, according to data release from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) on 6 October. During the same period, the number of researchers in developed countries increased by only 8.6% to 4.4 million.

Continue reading "Science spending up in developing countries" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert
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The US Chamber of Commerce has hit back at Apple, after the computer company joined the list of members who have left the group over its views on climate change.

In a letter to Apple, the chamber’s president Thomas Donohue writes:

It is unfortunate that your company didn’t take the time to understand the Chamber’s position on climate and forfeited the opportunity to advance a 21st century approach to climate change.
…
While we do support legislation to address climate change, we oppose legislation such as the Waxman-Markey bill that numerous studies show will cause Americans to lose their jobs and shift greenhouse gas emissions overseas, negating potential climate benefits.
(Full letter on Under the Influence blog.)

Earlier this week Apple said it was leaving the chamber, with VP Catherine Novelli saying, “Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the Chamber at odds with us in this effort.” (Various sources, eg ARS Technica.)

Earlier this month the not-insignificant energy companies Exelon, the Public Service Company and Pacific Gas and Electric also left the chamber over climate change differences. In August the chamber called for a public trial of climate change.

Image: Thomas Donohue. Photo by Ian Wagreich / © U.S. Chamber of Commerce

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

CSIRO is Australia’s national research organisation. But in a new claim to fame, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is also the inspiration for this Backstreet Boys-inspired science song.

Which one of these likely lads is your favourite?

The CSIRO Song was filmed as part of the University of Sydney’s Science Revue, which also included When Semester Ends. We’d be very grateful if someone could tell us where to get this necklace one of the singers is wearing:

[Hat tip: Pharyngula]

Below the fold: Previously on Songs about Science.

Continue reading "Songs About Science XXIX: See-Ess-Eye-Are-Oh" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Those from the most privileged backgrounds have come to dominate British science and will continue to do so, according to new report.

Researchers from the Sutton Trust, which campaigns for educational equality, analysed the school and university backgrounds of 1,700 fellows of the Royal Society and the British Academy. They found 42% of them were educated in private schools.

“This report is yet more evidence of the uneven life chances in Britain,” says Peter Lampl, chairman of the trust (press release). “Students from the independent sector, which educates just seven percent of children, are substantially more likely to reach the top of our most coveted professions and succeed in influential walks of life.”

A small number of elite individual schools are also overrepresented, with list of schools contributing the most fellows having the recognisable names of Eton, Winchester, and St Paul’s at the top. The report also found that of those educated in the UK, 68% of British Academy fellows and 47% of Royal Society fellows went of either Oxford or Cambridge university.

Continue reading "Privately educated dominate UK science" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The European Commission has proposed investing an additional €50 billion into a new research and development programme for low-carbon energy over the next decade, ramping up annual investments from the current €3 billion to €8 billion annually.

The proposal lays out funding goals in six sectors - wind, solar, nuclear, bio-energy, electricity grids and carbon capture and storage, while creating a new "Smart Cities Initiative" focusing on urban energy efficiency. Solar came out on top with €16 billion, followed by CCS at €13 billion. For a quick summary of investments, check Reuters.

The plan sounds good but is missing one thing: Money. The commission readily acknowledges that it can't foot the entire bill itself, meaning "public and private sectors at national and EU level" will need to step up to make it a reality. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reports EU Commissioner Janez Potocnik saying that most of the money will need to come from the private sector.

Response to the plan has generally been positive, despite some questions about priorities. The European Wind Energy Association wonders why CCS and nuclear received more money than wind, which is ready to go. Along similar lines, the European Photovoltaic Industry Association suggests the commission would be wise to put more resources into clean energy deployment.

Policymakers, researchers and business representatives will discuss the proposal later this month at the European Energy Technology Summit in Stockholm.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson
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The American scientific elite found itself in a rare place this afternoon: the White House.

Hours before a high-stakes meeting on the US stance in Afghanistan and Pakistan, President Barack Obama took a little break by handing out this year's crop of National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and Innovation. In a packed ceremony in the White House's East Room, with cabinet secretaries including Kathleen Sebelius (health), Steve Chu (energy), and Gary Locke (commerce) looking on, Obama seemed to enjoy riffing on the joys of science. (Plus an obligatory opening joke about how his daughter Sasha has a science fair coming up, "and I was thinking that you guys could give us a few tips".)

"We see the promise -- not just for our economy but for our health and well-being -- in the human capacity for creativity and ingenuity," he told the audience, which included presidential science advisor John Holdren and National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone. "And we are reminded of the power of free and open inquiry, which is not only at the heart of all of your work, but at the heart of this experiment we call America."

Two of the awardees shared what might even be interpreted as warm glances at each other before receiving their medals from Obama. Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter, once heads of the competing teams in the race to sequence the human genome, both now have identical gold medals on red, white and blue ribbons. Collins, of course, is the recently appointed director of the National Institutes of Health (see Nature Q&A with him here), an agency that marked a sad moment today with the news of the death of Ruth Kirschstein, who served as the first female head of an NIH institute when she assumed directorship of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in 1974.

The other winners of this year's science medals are:

Berni Alder, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Joanna Fowler, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Elaine Fuchs, The Rockefeller University
James Gunn, Princeton University
Rudolf Kalman, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich
Michael Posner, University of Oregon
JoAnne Stubbe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Next up on the Obama Science Fair Tour: a star party on the White House's south lawn tonight.

Image: Collins, seated at far left, while Venter waits to receive his medal

Posted by Alex Witze
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“According to the researchers’ preliminary inspections, the footprints appear to be the biggest seen so far. The prints are very big, reaching 1.20 to 1.50 metres across, which corresponds to animals exceeding 30 or 40 tonnes in weight and measuring more than 25 metres in length.”
The French National Centre for Scientific Research comments on some huge dinosaur footprints found near Lyon (AFP).

“They are increasingly identified as a stumbling block for the negotiations and it’s up to them to dispel this perception and to show the real leadership we’re expecting from them.”
Fernando Tudela, head of the Mexican delegation to the climate change meeting in Bangkok, says the United States is shaping up as the biggest problem in negotiations (Reuters).

“Thousands of fish have already died. The warning to stay out of the river applies to everyone, including farmers, anglers, dog walkers, boaters and anyone using the river for work or pleasure.”
The UK’s Environment Agency issues a warning after cyanide and sewage leak into the River Trent (Times).

“It seems obvious that it makes sense from a self-interested point of view to accept the Cryonic Wager. If you’re wrong, you’ve wasted a bit of money but you won’t ever be able to regret it. If you’re right, you will certainly live longer, and might well live forever.”
Bioethicist David Shaw, of the University of Glasgow, applies a modified version of Pascal’s Wager to the issue of cryogenic suspension (Bioethics).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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It is sometimes said in academic circles that you’re not a proper researcher until you’ve got your first rejection letter from Nature or Science. But does it really make sense to submit your paper to the most highly cited journals and work your way down?

Martin Heintzelman and Diego Nocetti, two economists at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, aimed to find out. Their latest paper in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy is entitled “Where Should we Submit our Manuscript?”

“The journal submission process is a controversial and stressful part of academia. There are many dimensions of uncertainty, and bad decisions could greatly delay publication of important results and harm one’s career,” they write.

They constructed models of increasing complexity, starting with just the journal’s characteristics (fees, time taken to decide) and the impatience of the author and moving on to include factors such as the quality of the manuscript, flaws in the reviewing process and how impatient authors are to get their work published in economics journals.

Applying mathematics to this question proves common sense correct: “This paper provides new evidence that, on the whole, the advice supplied to young faculty members by veterans of academia is correct. Authors largely have an incentive to submit to the best journals and then subsequently, work their way down a schedule of journals.”

However, there is an exception to this: “particularly impatient or risk-averse” researchers should begin their submission ordeal further down the chain.

Finally, Heintzelman and Nocetti discuss the implications of their work for journals themselves. They conclude that the best thing for journals to do would be to review papers faster and charge higher submission fees. This would reduce the impact of time lags on impatient authors and reduce the number of lower-quality paper submissions trying their luck with an imperfect reviewing system.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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X-ray free-electron lasers fire up
California's project has the lead as its facility goes live, but Europe aims for its own rapid-fire device.

Huge 'ghost' ring discovered around Saturn
Spitzer Space Telescope reveals a supersized dust belt.

Global warming may worsen locust swarms
Ancient records link a hotter climate to more damaging infestations.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Mere hours after a Nobel Prize was awarded for an invention that allowed the modern digital camera to come into being, a tiny example of this technology has flown into the news on the back of an albatross.

Writing in Plos One, Akinori Takahashi, of Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research, and colleagues report the first recordings of the birds using killer whales as unwitting food providers.

Using data from cameras and depth gages mounted on the backs of black-browed albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophrys) the researchers report that the birds appear to follow Orcinus orca and probably scavenge from the scraps they leave behind

“A close association with foraging killer whales would help albatrosses to find food more efficiently in the apparently ‘featureless’ sea, especially in a year when the availability of aggregative prey species, such as Antarctic krill in South Georgia, is low,” they write.

Richard Phillips, of the British Antarctic Survey, suggests that the whales may also be driving prey to the surface where they are easier for the birds to catch. Phillips was not involved in the research but another BAS researcher was (press release).

You may not think the photo to the right is that impressive, but keep in mind it was recorded in the open ocean on a device the size of a lipstick.

Image: BAS

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry has gone to Thomas Steitz, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Ada Yonath for “studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”. They take a third of the prize home each.

The new laureates used X-ray crystallography to reveal the structure of the ribosome, the factories in cells that turn DNA blueprints into the the finished products of proteins.

Contacted by Nature News, Ramakrishnan said “I’m in a bit of shock at the moment. So many people contributed, and the ribosome is so important, that I am just pleased to be one of the three.” (Read the full story later today.)

The prize committee notes that Ramakrishnan, Steitz and Yonath “showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.”

Understanding the ribosome is also of importance to those designing antibiotics, which can work by blocking bacterial ribosomes.

Of course you can’t please everyone. One member of the Nature office who is rather purist about his science was heard muttering, “they gave it to biologists again”.

Ramakrishnan works at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. Steitz is at Yale University, USA. Yonath is at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Congratulations to all!

Continue reading "Nobels 09: Chemistry" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Computer giant IBM is the latest company to say it will try to build a DNA sequencing machine. IBM appears to be years behind other companies that are taking similar approaches, but the company's announcement has caused quite a stir among tech journalists.

PC World says that IBM will "expand the life span of humans," while the New York Times' John Markoff predicts that the company will cut the cost of DNA sequencing to under $100, "making a personal genome cheaper than a ticket to a Broadway play."

Sequencing a whole human genome currently costs tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum.

Continue reading "IBM dips toe into DNA sequencing; tech press swoons" »

Posted by Erika Check Hayden
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A vaccine that takes the “yay” out of llello has shown some success in decreasing use in cocaine addicts, researchers reported 5 October in Archives of General Psychiatry. But the reduction was short-lived and only occurred in a subset of patients.

Similar to your standard vaccine, the cocaine vaccine induces the body to produce antibodies to cocaine. When a person snorts, smokes, chews or injects cocaine and it enters the bloodstream, the antibodies sop some of it up before it can make it to the brain and give the user an addictive, euphoric high. Then, while it’s trapped in the blood, an enzyme called cholinesterase finishes the job by degrading the chemical. The idea is that the vaccine, used in conjunction with other treatments like cognitive behavioural therapy, would help curb relapses and ultimately break dependency.

The Phase IIb study focused on people who were addicted to cocaine and opiates and were enrolled in an outpatient methadone treatment programme. These patients were ideal because people on methadone maintenance tend to show up for treatment fairly reliably, so the participants could be followed throughout the entire course of study (24 weeks, including the follow-up period).

Continue reading "A neutralizer for nose candy?" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
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Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to light pioneers
Advances in fibre optics and digital imaging are rewarded.

Radical shift proposed for funding European research
Half of EU research budget should be spent on frontier science, say science advisers.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The International Energy Agency is urging us to remember that there's a good side to the global economic crisis - it's causing the sharpest plunge in carbon dioxide emissions for 40 years. In a teaser document extracted from its upcoming World Energy Outlook 2009 report, the IEA forecasts that emissions will drop by 3% worldwide this year. The excerpt was released today to coincide with United Nations climate talks in Bangkok, though the full report isn't out until next month.

The IEA will actually broadcast its silver-lining message three times - it made the same point when its headline statistics were partially leaked to the media last month, and it will do so again when the full World Energy Outlook report appears on 10 November.

Continue reading "The IEA's take on carbon emissions" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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This year’s physics prize has been awarded to Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith.

Kao takes half the prize for “groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication”. Boyle and Smith share the other half for inventing the CCD sensor.

“This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies,” says the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prizes. “They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration.”

Kao, who works at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, discovered how light can be transmitted over optical glass fibres, paving the way for today’s information to flow through fibre optic cables.

Boyle and Smith, both of Bell Laboratories, in New Jersey, USA, invented the Charge-Coupled Device, a digital sensor found in just about every digital camera you might care to examine.

Collectively, the Nobel press release has dubbed them ‘the masters of light’.

The scores so far:

By country of residence
USA – 5
China – 1/2
UK – 1/2

By country of birth
USA – 2
UK – 1
Australia – 1
China – 1
Canada - 1

By journal paper
Cell – 2
Nature – 1
Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers-London – 1
Bell System Technical Journal – 1

Nobels 09
The first Nobel of 2009: Physiology or Medicine - Great Beyond
Chromosome protection scoops Nobel - Nature News

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The UK’s Conservative party has appointed James Dyson as their technology tsar.

Speaking at the party’s annual conference in Manchester, Dyson called for more support for science, via avenues such as tax breaks for high tech industry. He also called for education, saying Britain had 58,000 engineering vacancies but produced only 20,000 engineering graduates a year.

“More than ever, we need to value our scientists and engineers. Our future wealth depends on it,” said Dyson (Guardian).

In a suggestion that may not go down well in the financial services sector – where employees are traditionally viewed as Conservative voters – he added that the UK could “make money from money – or money from making things” (Daily Telegraph).

Dyson will be heading up a taskforce aiming to see how Britain can be made a high-tech exporter. UK policy addict and founder of Research Fortnight William Cullerne Bown posts this joke (although he claims not to be its originator):

re Dyson Review - how much is he going to Hoover up?

As the Guardian notes, self-styled champion of engineering Dyson has already had to admit that his high tech products are actually manufactured overseas. But the R&D, patents, and profits remain British, says the Guardian.

Dyson is most famous for inventing a widely used bag-less vacuum cleaner and his appointment sets up an intriguing clash with Amstrad founder and Labour ‘enterprise tsar’ Alan Sugar.

There’s only one route left for the UK’s third party, the Liberal Democrats: hire Clive Sinclair, and quickly!

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Five carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects across Europe look set to receive on the order of €180 million each from the European Union; and another project will get €100 million, after making it through to a whittled-down list of CCS projects deemed worthy of €1.05 billion in EU stimulus funding. The money must be used by 2010.

The Wall Street Journal reports EU sources revealing that the European Commission will approve funding applications from the Hatfield power plant in northern England (operated by Powerfuel); Vattenfall's Jaenschwalde plant in Germany; Spain's Endesa for its Compostilla plant; the Massvlakte plant owned by Germany's E.ON and Belgium's Electrable near the Dutch port of Rotterdam; and a scheme in Poland, run by Polska Grupa Energetyczna, or PGE SA. An Italian scheme should get €100 million, the paper says. Remember these names, there'll be a quiz later.

Continue reading "Carbon capture funding rumours: every little €180 million helps" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Ok so normally we'd just defer to Danger Room on all things defensive, but this was so cool we had to put it up.

For a couple of years now Boeing has been working on its Advance Tactical Laser. In a nutshell this thing is supposed to fit on a C-130 aircraft and be able to burn a 10cm hole in a target up to ten kilometres away.

What kind of laser could do that? It's called a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL), and according to this nifty US Patent by Boeing, it basically works by combining excited oxygen molecules with iodine. When the oxygen collides with the iodine, it excites the atom's outer electrons, causing them to emit light at 1.315 mu.m (infrared).

The COIL laser is designed to deliver hundreds of kilowatts of power—enough juice apparently to burn a hole in (or at least singe) the top of this truck (see right). This video isn't so hot, but if you watch the longer version on DR, you can see that the laser was fired from the air. So basically this thing is close to being operational.

By the way, a larger version of a the same kind of laser is being put into Boeing's Airborne Laser, which, sooner or later, is going to be used to shoot down ballistic missiles as they launch.

Danger Room has pointed out just how incredible (and creepy) this sort of weapon is. As you can see, the infrared laser light is invisible to the human eye. Special operations is envisioning all sorts of clever ways to use it to secretly knock out distant targets, or even immolate individual insurgents. It's the ultimate in stealthy, surgical strike capability.

But don't hold out hope for a hand held version. The COIL takes up a lot of room. And because it's chemical, it can only used about a hundred times before it has to be reloaded. Finally, the laser releases a toxic mix of gases like iodine, chlorine, fluorine, and hydrogen. All-in-all, it's not something you'd probably want to carry in your pocket, even if it would fit.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
Categories: Neat technologies | Permalink

“It has become self-evident and actually clear that the intention of the developed countries is to kill off the Kyoto Protocol.”
Lumumba D’Aping, chair of the G77 plus China climate negotiating group, comments on rich nations’ approach to the current climate negotiations (Reuters).

“As a researcher (or a patient), it’s important to remember that we tend to get what we think we’re going to get. And we need to be aware of that, and be ready to correct for it if we have to.”
Chemist Derek Lowe comments on a new paper in Pain detailing a “particularly neat example” of the ‘nocebo’ effect where those taking placebos in a trial experience some of the side-effects of the real drug.

“The disconnect between what clinicians do and what science has discovered is an unconscionable embarrassment. [There is a] widening gulf between clinical practice and science.”
Walter Mischel, of Columbia University, says psychologists are increasingly out of step with science in their treatment of patients (Newsweek).

“Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz issued here today a royal order relieving Sheikh Dr. Saad bin Nasir bin Abdulaziz Alshithri, member of the Senior Ulema (Islamic Scholars) Commission and the full time member of commission-affiliated Standing Committee of Research and Fatwa, from his job.”
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia removes a prominent cleric who criticised his university KAUST for allowing researchers of different sex to work together (Saudi Press Agency).

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Animal-human hybrid embryo research has been “driven out of Britain”, according to the front page of today’s Independent. However, one of the scientists involved has already cast doubt on the paper’s story.

The paper claims that “all research involving the controversial creation of animal-human ‘hybrid’ embryos has been refused funding in Britain”. It also says that “every one of the three projects to develop embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos created by fusing human cells with animal eggs has now been abandoned”.

Earlier this year the UK bodies responsible for funding (or not funding) such research were forced to deny that moral objections played a part in the rejection of funding applications (see: Moral objections to hybrid embryo research claims rejected).

The three holders of licences for animal-human hybrids in the UK were Stephen Minger, Lyle Armstrong, and Justin St John.

Minger recently departed King’s College London to work in industry (see: Top scientist’s industry move heralds stem-cell shift). When this issue reared its head earlier this year Minger claimed he was misinterpreted by the Independent, which claimed he suggested moral factors were an issue in funding rejections.

Armstrong, says the Independent, has departed Newcastle University for Spain (although no-one at the university’s Institute for Human Genetics was immediately available to confirm this).

Finally, and the apparent trigger for the story, Justin St John is leaving the UK for Australia. In a statement distributed by the Science Media Centre, St John says:

The MRC [Medical Research Council] funded me to make mouse-pig hybrids and I am grateful to them for their support for my work. Hybrid work will continue in the UK. However my hybrid work was a spin off from my main research interest which I will be pursuing at Monash [University in Australia].

Both the Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council also released statements defending their use of peer-review as the best way to approve or reject grant applications. “Having a HFEA licence and legislative approval to conduct certain research does not give an area special treatment,” said Colin Miles, BBSRC’s Head of Integrative and Systems Biology.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Nature's full news story on this prize is now live: Chromosome protection scoops Nobel

The prize committee notes:

The long, thread-like DNA molecules that carry our genes are packed into chromosomes, the telomeres being the caps on their ends. Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak discovered that a unique DNA sequence in the telomeres protects the chromosomes from degradation. Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn identified telomerase, the enzyme that makes telomere DNA. These discoveries explained how the ends of the chromosomes are protected by the telomeres and that they are built by telomerase.

The work of these three, says the prize committee, has added a “new dimension” to our understanding of cells and disease and provided a new avenue for treatments (more here).

The committee references three papers for this newly-Nobel winning work: two in Cell and one in Nature.

Congratulations to all, and to the University of California, San Francisco, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Harvard Medical School [corrected 10/5] in Massachusetts which all now have one more laureate on their staff.

This year’s Physiology or Medicine prize is the 100th ever awarded. A full news story on this prize will appear shortly on Nature News. Tune in tomorrow for the physics prize.

The scores so far:

By country of residence
USA - 3

By country of birth
USA – 1
UK – 1
Australia – 1

By journal paper
Cell – 2
Nature – 1

See also
Elizabeth Blackburn - Nature Medicine 7, 520 (2001)

Image top: Alfred Nobel, via wikipedia
Image lower, left to right: Blackburn, Greider, Szostak all by Gerbil, Licensed by Attribution Share Alike 3.0

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Artificial ionosphere creates bullseye in the sky
Auroral experiments make glowing plasma patch.

Q+A: A Conservative approach to British science
How would research change under a centre-right government?

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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US President Barack Obama is having a star party at the White House on Wednesday, the same day he awards the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

A White House advisory says that Wednesday evening, " the President and First Lady will host an event at the White House for middle-school students to highlight the President’s commitment to science, engineering and math education as the foundation of this nation’s global technological and economic leadership and to express his support for astronomy in particular—for its capacity to promote a greater awareness of our place in the universe, expand human knowledge, and inspire the next generation by showing them the beauty and mysteries of the night sky."

Organizers of the International Year of Astronomy helped push this event through. If you know of other sitting presidents who participated in astronomical events -- other than the ever-popular chat-with-astronauts-in-space -- please leave them in the comments thread below. Bill Clinton did go to the Arecibo telescope in June 2008, but of course long after he was out of office.

Posted by Alex Witze
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Last night Cambridge’s clown school gave the world’s best and brightest the awards they deserved. Harvard University hosted its 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, where its Annals of Improbable Research recognized the usual combination of mad scientists and asinine leaders.

Pulling in the biology prize was a Japanese team that discovered pandas are more than just cuddly tax dollar vacuums — their poop packs a potent punch. The group isolated bacteria in panda feces that can reduce kitchen waste by more than 90 percent in mass. Good news, given that pandas produce about 40 pounds of poop a day — and as one might expect, it doesn’t stink.

The Ig Nobel prizes also continued their fascination with skivvies. Back in 2001 the biology prize went to the inventor of panties that filter out flatulence with a replaceable charcoal filter, and this year the public health prize went to the inventors of a bra that can be “quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander” — in this case that needy bystander was Wolfgang Ketterle, 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Continue reading "Panda poop, panties and more at the Ig Nobels" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Financial Crisis, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Over on New Scientist's website, Rachel Courtland has done a nice piece about some big trouble for the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) project atop Mount Haleakala in Hawaii.

Pan-STARRS is an ambitious project to digitally survey the night sky. When it's completed, four mirrors will scan the sky for killer asteroids, distant planets, and all sorts of stuff. The massive digital database it produces will also be able to provide insights into big cosmological questions, like the distribution of dark matter in the Universe. In many ways, it will compete with a much larger project known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). According to the Pan-STARRS website, it hopes to do "some" of LSST's science before the larger telescope came online and at a quarter of the cost.

The two projects couldn't be more different. The LSST is a giant 8.4 meter survey telescope planned for Cerro Pachón in Chile at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. It has been peer-reviewed and is being methodically developed through a public-private funding consortium.

By contrast, Pan-STARRS is funded through a budget earmark from Senator Dan Inouye (Democrat-Hawaii). For those unschooled in the ways of Washington, an earmark is essentially a giveaway by a member of congress to their constituency and in this case it means that the Air Force is required to provide the project with around US$10 million each year. While LSST hums and haws over its design, Pan-STAARS has been slapping together a 1.4-billion-pixel digital camera and optics for a prototype telescope. The astronomers involved use whatever they can find, including parts from E-Bay.

For the moment, it seems that the Pan-STAARS approach isn't working—the telescope is taking images that are about half as sharp as they should be. The team has just begun taking their prototype apart in hopes of fixing the problem. According to Courtland's article, the main problem seems to be with the joints holding up the telescope's secondary mirror.

That doesn't mean that Pan-STAARS won't beat LSST in the end. The latest repairs should only take a few weeks, and the larger telescope is not expected to come online until 2017.

Image: Brett Simison

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel
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A study published today in the Lancet suggests that if the increases in life expectancy seen over the last 200 years continue babies born since 2000 in North America, Japan and much of Europe are likely to reach 100.

“A key question is: are increases in life expectancy accompanied by a concurrent postponement of functional limitations and disability?” write Kaare Christensen, of the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, and colleagues. “The answer is still open, but research suggests that ageing processes are modifiable and that people are living longer without severe disability.”

Christensen says that data from 30 developed countries shows no “looming limit” to lifespan (BBC). Of course, as has often been pointed out, living longer means people are going to have to work longer to fund their extended retirements.

“I guess it’s good news for individuals and a challenge for societies,” says Christensen (ABC News). “If you’re going to retire when you are 60 or 65, it looks quite different when your life expectancy is 75 or 80 than when it’s 100.”

Meanwhile, in Science, researchers have shown that stopping production of a particular protein in mice increased life span and reduced age-related diseases. In AFP’s words: Scientists find path to fountain of youth.

“We are suddenly much closer to treatments for aging than we thought,” David Gems of UCL told the wire service.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The European Space Agency has released this bubbling snap from performance testing on its Herschel spacecraft. The SPIRE (Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver) and PACS (Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer) instruments trained their eyes in parallel on the Southern Cross constellation in our Milky Way galaxy. Each uses slightly different wavelengths of light, and their views are overlaid in this composite image. It reveals cold interstellar material "condensing in a continuous and interconnected maze of filaments and strings of newly-forming stars in all stages of development," says ESA.

Herschel's third instrument, the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HiFi), is still out of action, though the mission is due to start routine operations next week.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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Produced by Evidence for the government, the performance report compares papers and citations for UK researchers with other players, such as the USA, Germany, Japan and China.

“Once again, we have outperformed other nations in the G8 and secured our position as second in the world in scientific productivity,” says UK science minister Lord Drayson (press release).

While UK output fell to 7.9% of world papers, down from 9.3% in 1999, citations rose very slightly to 11.8% in 2008. Only the USA did better in citations for clinical, health, biological, environmental, and social sciences. In mathematics Germany pipped Blighty to second while China nosed ahead in engineering. Physical scientists need to pull their socks up though: you’re in fifth, behind Germany, China, Japan and the research behemoth that is the USA.

As ever, a picture is worth a thousand blog posts, so below the fold are the ‘research footprints’ for various nations in 2008 (previous figures for comparison can be found in the previous report).

Continue reading "Research footprints of the G8" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Future of HIV vaccine unclear
Puzzling hints of success require explanation before trials can move forward.

BRIEFING: US Senate gears up for climate debate
Cap-and-trade bill largely mirrors legislation passed in the House of Representatives.

Oldest hominid skeleton revealed
At 4.4 million years, Ethiopian fossil clarifies human–chimp relationships.

Q+A: The new head of the NIH
Francis Collins talks about his priorities for the agency.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Yesterday’s earthquakes in the Pacific and Indian Ocean have caused death and destruction in Samoa and Indonesia. In Samoa, a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 8.3 quake off Tonga killed at least 114 people and left thousands homeless. The death toll of the magnitude 7.6 earthquake which hit just a few hours later off the western coast of the Indonesian province of Sumatra may exceed 4,000, local authorities fear. Nature asks whether the double disaster was coincidence.

Is there a link between the Tonga and Sumatra quakes?

Although both quakes occurred on the boundaries of the Australian Plate, there is no known causal link between the two events. Normal physical interaction between earthquake zones doesn’t apply at that range. The ruptures also had quite different seismic characteristics, which is why the Tonga quake generated a tsunami but the Sumatra quake luckily didn’t.

However, a paper in Nature today suggests that seismic waves from earthquakes might indeed have an effect on distant fault lines, increasing the risk of earthquakes far away. Whether this long distance-effect was involved in yesterday’s events is not known.

Continue reading "Briefing: Earthquakes in Sumatra and Samoa" »

Posted by Ananyo Bhattacharya
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How would you improve the Nobel Prize system? In this week’s issue of New Scientist 10 scientists present their suggestions.

Firstly, they want to see two new Nobel prizes for Global Environment and Public Health. Secondly, they suggest expanding or adding to the physiology or medicine prize “to recognise contributions from across the life sciences” (letter PDF).

Signatories of this open letter to the Nobel Prize committee include E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker.

“When Alfred Nobel signed his will in 1895, he could not have anticipated threats such as climate change and HIV/AIDS. Nor could he have known of the new scientific disciplines that are generating results that will transform our world for the better,” they write.

“Many of these fields, as well as these challenges, do not fit well into the remit of the prizes that he created.”

Of course the actual boundaries on the Nobels are already fuzzy. Witness, for example, Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Peace prize in 2007.

Are new categories in any way likely? According to the Nobel website:

The prizes, as designated in the Will of Alfred Nobel, are in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. Only once during these years has a prize been added – a Memorial Prize – the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, donated by the Bank of Sweden to celebrate its tercentenary in 1968. The Board of Directors later decided to keep the original five prizes intact and not to permit new additions.

The actual Nobels kick off next week. Tune into Nature for all your Nobel needs…

Image: by codepo8 via Flickr

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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The journal Transport today retracted a 2006 paper co-authored by Hamid Behbahani, Iran's transport minister, and two other scientists. In a news article published yesterday, Nature had drawn attention to the fact that the paper ("Providing a decreasing congestion probability model for urban streets network") contained large amounts of text identical with that of three earlier articles by other researchers. The retraction statement can be found here.
In a response yesterday that was attributed to Behbahani, he defended the article --- see statement (in Persian) on the Iranian news site Alef.ir.

As also reported by Nature yesterday, over the past week other journals have said they intend to retract, on grounds of plagiarism, three papers co-authored by Iran's science minister Kamran Daneshjou.

Posted by Declan Butler
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Worrying levels of Tamiflu are detectable in rivers during flu season, report researchers in Japan, raising questions about the use of this drug and the possibility of drug resistance emerging.

Gopal Ghosh, of Kyoto University, and colleagues looked for oseltamivir carboxylate in river water. This is the anti-influenza molecule that the body converts Tamiflu into.

Ghosh found the compound in sewage treatment plant effluent in Kyoto at concentrations likely to be “high enough to lead to antiviral resistance in waterfowl” he told Wired. Once resistance emerged in birds it might come back to haunt humans.

The paper in Environmental Health Perspectives detailing this research suggests treating effluent with ozone during influenza epidemics, when use of Tamiflu and the potential for resistance will sky-rocket.

Wired notes:

Once ingested, virtually all Tamiflu will end up in the environment in the active form, notes environmental chemist Jerker Fick of Umeå University in Sweden. … Two years ago, Fick’s team published data showing that most sewage-treatment technologies will remove “zero percent” of any OC present. And ducks love hanging out around warm, nutrient-rich outflows of treated water during winter-flu season. While sampling for waterborne OC last year in Japan, “I saw it myself,” he says.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Critics from all sides have been queuing up for years to kick the US’s legislation for regulating toxic chemicals, the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Now Lisa Jackson, administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has outlined how the Obama administration would put the poor old TSCA out of its misery.

In a 29 September presentation, Jackson outlined principles for much-needed reform of the act, which, she said, had “proven an inadequate tool for providing the protection against chemical risks that the public rightfully expects.” Congress will take up these ideas in legislation expected in coming months – probably introduced by Sen Frank Lautenberg (Democrat, New Jersey).

One of the main changes will be that chemical manufacturers must provide EPA with toxicity data on chemicals so that the agency can evaluate risks. At the moment EPA can only begin asking manufacturers for toxicity data after it has already got evidence that a chemical poses a risk. That may seem astonishing to Europeans, whose chemical manufacturers are gearing up to provide bundles of toxicity data under the new sweeping chemicals legislation REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals).

Jackson also wants to strengthen the EPA’s authority to clamp down on chemicals it judges dangerous. The agency has only taken action against five chemicals to date, and in one of those cases, asbestos, a federal appeals court struck down the ban. (AP) Jackson added that the EPA would immediately launch a review of six ‘priority’ chemicals that have raised concerns, including bisphenol A and perfluorinated chemicals.

Most chemical manufacturers agree the law needs to be modernized. But as Chemical and Engineering News notes, they are worried about a new concept floated by Jackson – that manufacturers help ‘support the costs associated with implementation’ of safety assessments. In Europe, industry’s costs for complying with REACH have been estimated at anything from €1.6 billion to a worst case €9.5 billion.

Image: Lisa Jackson / EPA via wikipedia

Posted by Richard Van Noorden
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NASA’s Mercury probe Messenger suffered a glitch during its third and final fly-by of the planet yesterday, meaning it was unable to collect all the data researchers had hoped for.

The probe’s mission team are being upbeat about the flyby though, saying Messenger did gain the vital gravity assist it needs to enter orbit around Mercury in 2011.

“With more than 90 percent of the planet’s surface already imaged, Messenger’s science team had drafted an ambitious observation campaign designed to tease out additional details from features uncovered during the first two flybys,” says a statement. “But an unexpected signal loss prior to closest approach hampered those plans.”

Apparently, a glitch in the probe’s power systems tripped a fault management system and the spacecraft went into safe mode. Messenger still managed to grab data on its approach to the planet, says Eric Finnegan of the Johns Hopkins University.

Everything now appears to be back to normal on board.

Of course, things being what they are, Messenger has its own first-person twitter feed, where it noted, “Just in case you were wondering, I’m OK. There was a slight hiccup, but I’m doing well. All of my data has been downloaded.”

Images (left to right): four days out, 55 hours out, 44 hours out, uh oh! All images: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington except blue screen of death, via Wikipedia

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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Q+A: Driven out of research - Premium content
A virologist describes how stringent biosecurity regulations caused her to drop one line of work.

Rutherford Building cancers a "coincidence"
Independent inquiry finds cancer connection to historic radiation experiments "unlikely".

Past quakes cause future shocks
Seismic waves from earthquakes might make distant fault lines more slippery.

Posted by Daniel Cressey
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