Researchers led by Steve Gamblin, of the National Institute for Medical Research in London, used X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of mutants of H5N1. They found that the drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) was not very useful against them, but zanamivir (Relenza) was still good. (Needless to say, Relenza’s producer Glaxo is pretty happy.)

“In order not to be outflanked by the virus, it will be necessary to have stocks of both existing drugs,” says Gamblin (BBC). “There is a huge imperative to develop further drugs and it is likely a future pandemic will need to be tackled using a three or four-pronged approach, much as we tackle HIV today.”

“Well it certainly emphasises greatly that relying on a single drug is somewhat foolhardy when there is more than one drug available, and certainly when these drugs are complementary in terms of one being effective against the viruses that are resistant to another drug,” Alan Hay, another author on the paper, told ABC’s AM radio programme (transcript).

According to Reuters Tamiflu had sales of $1.8 billion in 2007 versus Relenza’s $510 million.

Other bird flu news

Indonesia will share genetic information on the virus in its country, “18 months after strategic adviser Peter Bogner and 77 influential scientists and health experts wrote a letter to Nature magazine calling for information about bird flu to be shared more quickly and openly” (AP).

South Korea is building a plant to mass produce a vaccine in the event of a pandemic (Xinhua).

All poultry in Seoul have been killed after an outbreak of bird flu (AP).

The Chosun Ilbo asks “Has Bird Flu Made a Permanent Home in Korea?”

Image: electron micrograph of H5N1 (brown) grown in MDCK cells (green) / CDC/ Courtesy of Cynthia Goldsmith, Jacqueline Katz, and Sherif R. Zaki

The ants don’t have a proper name yet, due to “confusion regarding the taxonomy of the genus” according to Texas A&M University’s Urban Entomology website. This has left them with the name Paratrechina sp. nr. Pubens [species near: ie a paratrechina ant something like the pubens type].

In the meantime they’re being called ‘crazy’ because they don’t walk straight and ‘rasberry’ after one of their first opponents, a pest controller called Tom Rasberry.

“They’re just running wild,” says Patsy Morphew of Pearland (Houston Chronicle). “... They crawl through the eaves of the house and go into the bathroom. You know what it’s like to sit down on the commode with crazy ants running everywhere?”

Meyers told the Chronicle they can damage plants due to their symbiotic relationship sap-sucking aphids and for some reason they love to nest in electrical equipment. “We’ve already seen them short out pipeline valves two years in a row in Pasadena,” he says.

AP warns:

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet.
...
the ants also like to suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on such beneficial insects as ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small, endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken.

No one seems to have got a quote from E.O. Wilson yet...

Marina Silva said her attempts to protect the forest were meeting with “growing resistance ... in important sectors of the government and society” (Bloomberg).

Reuters believes the resignation is a major blow to the eco-credentials of president Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva. “He is increasingly conservative,” Christopher Garman, head of the Latin America practice at Eurasia Group, told the newswire. “He has caved in to the view that the Amazon has to be developed in some form or fashion.”

“Brazil is losing the only voice in the government that spoke out for the environment,” says Sergio Leitao of Greenpeace in Brazil (AP). “The minister is leaving because the pressure on her for taking the measures she took against deforestation has become unbearable.”

In an editorial the Independent notes:

Five years ago, she was appointed guardian of the Amazon but, in that time, she has fought an uphill battle against the loggers and ranchers of Brazilian agribusiness. Indeed, she often seem a lone voice in the Brazilian government – outvoted on the introduction of genetically-modified grains, on the construction of a new nuclear power plant and on massive infrastructure projects, including two big hydro-electric dams and a major new road in the rainforest. She has finally quit, worn down by ill-health and the appointment of a rival minister to speed the approval of energy projects.

Silva is succeeded as environment minister by Carlos Minc, one of the founders of the Brazilian Green party (Reuters). A poll on the Estadao paper website has 125 people backing the new appointment vs 199 against.

Image: NASA Visible Earth

Gonodactylus smithii was already known to see things in the ultraviolet and infrared. Now Sonja Kleinlogel and Andrew White, of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt and the University of Queensland respectively, have shown that the shrimp can detect four linear and two circular polarisations (press release, research paper in PLOS One).

Basically they have some ability to detect the direction in which light waves are oscillating. See here for an explanation of linear and circular polarisation.

“The mantis shrimp is a delightfully weird beastie,” says White. “They’re multi-coloured, their genus and species names mean ‘mouth-feet’ and 'genital-fingers'; they can move each eye independently, they see the world in 11 or 12 primary colours as opposed to our humble three, and now we find that this species can see a world invisible to the rest of us.”

The details of how they did this research are not carried in the press coverage. It’s a bit gory, so if you winced at Un Chien Andalou stop reading now...

Then microelectrodes were “lowered vertically into the retina through a corneal hole cut with a razorblade”. These bionic eyes were then tested with a light source and various filters to establish the polarisation detecting abilities.

I warned you to stop reading...

Detecting polarised light may also help them find dinner as some of their prey are transparent. They’d be hard to see in the water, says White, but they are full of polarising sugars. “I suspect they light up like Christmas trees as far as these shrimp are concerned,” he says.

Freaky Shrimp Species Has Singular Sight – Discover Magazine
Shrimp can see beyond the rainbow – Reuters
Shrimp with super-vision revealed – PA

Image: Gonodactylus smithii / Roy Caldwell

“The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish,” he writes in the 1954 letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind.

Bloomsbury Auctions, which is selling the letter, expects it to go for between £6000 and £8000 (press release). If you don’t have that much spare change, you can always read Einstein’s 1940 Nature article ‘Science and Religion’ (subscription required).

During the youthful period of mankind’s spiritual evolution, human fantasy created gods in man’s own image, who, by the operations of their will, were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. ... The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old conception of the gods.

The Guardian has more extracts of the letter than the press release, and its coverage quotes John Brooke of Oxford University thus:

Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him. It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion.

Are we the only people who expect Richard Dawkins to bid?

More coverage
Einstein letter shows disdain for religion – Daily Telegraph
Einstein describes religion as 'childish' in letter now up for auction – Canadian Press

Image: Bloomsbury Auctions

Following months of bad news on biofuels, a non-profit research institute is injecting a bit of optimism into the public debate by highlighting an old crop that can simultaneously provide both food and fuel: sweet sorghum (Reuters).

The timing couldn’t be better, given the ongoing global food crisis and the now ever-present worries about where our next gallon of fuel will come from. One report went so far as to suggest sweet sorghum might be the perfect bioenergy crop researchers have been looking for.

That might be going a little far, but sweet sorghum would appear to have some promising qualities, not the least of which is its ability to grow in dry climates. Mark Winslow an agronomist with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, more easily known as ICRISAT, went over some of the details this week with Nature.

“There’s a potential to double, triple, quadruple yields in Africa,” Winslow said, simply because the yields there are so low compared to sorghum varieties grown in the United States.

It might make sense in the United States, too. Winslow says sweet sorghum performs on par with sugarcane in terms of the overall energy balance and thus could be a far more efficient option than corn ethanol, which, admittedly, isn’t very difficult.

To make all of this happen, farmers would need to switch from more common grain sorghum varieties to sweet sorghum, but Winslow says the transition is beginning in places like India. Industrial giant Tata Group has already partnered up with ICRISAT on a sweet sorghum ethanol plant there.

A pair of studies looking at the bioenergy potential of sweet sorghum are available here and here (subscription required).

Image: a researcher with sorghum flowers / USDA

One wonders how the ravening press pack, always on the lookout for a controversial story, managed to miss one that hit two of the biggest news buttons — GM and human embryology.

This kind of work will explicitly be made legal under Britain's new draft laws which are currently being debated in parliament. Ultimately, some researchers hope that, instead of just making glowing green embryos, gene modification could be used to imbue stem-cell lines with faulty genes that characterize a host of genetic diseases — thus allowing biomed experts to get a better handle on how cells behave when they have such mutations.

Wired has picked up the baton and is now asking readers to debate the ethical merits (or otherwise) of the advance, under the strapline "Advance or abomination?", which just shows what an emotive issue this is.

We misspelled a number of elements in the periodic table printed in part VI of the Science Course supplement distributed with the paper on May 1. We meant Iron (not Irone); Praseodymium (not Praseodynium); Neodymium (not Neodynium); Neptunium (not Neptuniam); Americium (not Americum); Seaborgium (not Seoborgium); and Darmstadtium (not Darmstadium).

Oh how we chortled. Then someone suggested I check if Nature has ever made similar boobs...

But we have been guilty of using ‘Neodynium’, eight times to be exact, versus the Guardian’s two.

This looks bad. But wait, surely what’s more important is how often you misspell a word?

With that in mind, the Great Beyond is proud to present the first ever Neodymium misspelling league. The graph below shows the number of times a publication has printed the word ‘Neodymium’ versus the number of times it has printed ‘Neodynium’ (based on Google site searches for both words).

So what can we take from all this? Well the numbers for the Guardian are probably too small to draw any robust conclusions from. It looks like the New York Times has won the day again though.

Researchers in Germany asked 16 people to rate the perceived loudness of the sound of an accelerating car played through headphones. Noises were accompanied by one of four pictures of an Aston Martin V8 coloured red, blue, dark-green or light green.

In the latest issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America they report that “it seems that in most cases the sounds associated with images of red or dark-green vehicles were rated louder than those combined with light-green or blue ones”.

The differences are small: around 1 dB and with a maximum observed difference of 3 dB. But they were statistically significant, which supports similar previous findings with trains, say Daniel Menzel, of the Technische Universitat Munchen, and colleagues.

They suggest in their paper, fairly reasonably, that people probably associate some colours with sports cars – such as red and dark (“British racing”) green – and so subconsciously expect them to be louder. They do not say that this will now lead to the of-so-boyish pranksters who present the BBC’s Top Gear devising a competition for the loudest paint job. But you just know that it will…

Image: Getty

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” says Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (press release).

This product has been in the works for a while. Way back in 2001, Jim Gray of the Microsoft Bay Area Research Center wrote in Science, “Our goal is to make the Internet act as the world's best telescope--a World-Wide Telescope.”

Microsoft is releasing the WorldWide Telescope as a tribute to Gray, who went missing while sailing off the coast of California last year (SF Chronicle, Reuters, or see Wired's definitive piece on the search for Jim Gray).

In the meantime, here’s what the NY Times makes of the differences:

The WorldWide Telescope results from careful planning and lengthy development in a research division. It has the richer graphics and it created special software to present the images of spherical space objects with less polar distortion. WorldWide Telescope requires downloading a hefty piece of software, and it runs only on Microsoft Windows.

Google Sky started as a Google “20 percent” project, in which engineers can spend time on anything they choose. Google Earth, where Google Sky began, requires a software download, but its Web-based version, which came out in March, does not. The Google culture encourages engineers to put new things onto the Internet quickly and keep improving them, a philosophy geared to constant evolution instead of finished products.

Image: the great Orion Nebula

As creator Richard Grillotti told ShackNews in an interview last year, “I started sketching and I sketched dinosaurs. ... All of a sudden that sprung up. ‘Dinosaurs! And you’ve got to escape this wall of doom! Cool, that sounds fun.’”

It is fun. Can you outrun the extinction while munching on pesky mammals seeking to overthrow your cold-blooded (probably) dynasty?

Apologies for the headline, I couldn’t resist.

Image: screen grab of Dino Run

Republican Presidential candidate John McCain made his first major climate address on Monday, largely reaffirming a position on climate change that has long separated him from his Republican colleagues.

The speech was widely interpreted as an effort to distance himself from President George W. Bush and “woo” independent voters. McCain endorsed cap-and-trade regulation and called for a return to 2005 emissions levels by 2012, a return to 1990 levels by 2020, and a reduction of “at least” 60 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050.

That puts McCain roughly in the same neighbourhood as the leading climate legislation in the Senate, which would reduce emissions by roughly 19 percent by 2020 and 70 percent by mid-century, compared to 2005. That bill is expected to come up for a vote in June, but McCain didn’t say which way he’ll go. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both called for an 80 percent reduction by mid-century.

Some environmentalists gave McCain due credit, but others refused to cede ground. The Sierra Club said McCain’s climate policies, “like President Bush,” offer “more of the same.”

No objective analysis could bring a reasonable person to such a conclusion, of course, given that President Bush has yet to outline a plan of any kind. But perhaps facts are malleable when the White House is at stake.
At least the Climate Progress blog ignored his speech and focused on the location: a training facility for Vestas Wind Systems.

Citing McCain’s multiple votes against renewable energy legislation, the blog suggested that “Conservatives like McCain … are the main reason McCain has to go to a Danish wind turbine manufacturer to give a climate speech.”

Image: stock photo / John McCain 2008

In a new paper in Current Biology Iain Couzin and colleagues suggest that mass locust migrations are driven by “abdominal biting and the sight of others approaching from behind”. Basically, when they get hungry young locusts start to bite each other, those bitten start to run away. Others get spooked and the sight of another locust approaching sets them off (paper abstract, BBC coverage).

In their paper the researchers report that ‘abdominal denervation’ reduces the probability that individuals will start moving and increases cannibalism. Occluding their rear vision has similar impacts.

"Cannibalism is rife within marching bands of locusts," says Couzin (press release). "No one knew until now that cannibalistic interactions are directly responsible for the collective motion exhibited by these bands."

As young locusts often precede flying swarms of adults, which are harder to kill, knowing what causes their movements could help in controlling them he says.

Image: USFWS

“There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a ‘war on science’,” he wrote.

He goes on to accuse liberals of playing politics:

Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science." Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.

Liberal views are "objective" while traditional moral convictions are "biased." Public scrutiny of scientific practices is "politicizing" important decisions.

Cue an online bunfight...

Then on Sunday in the Dallas Morning News he set out the evidence for a ‘war on science’ again, concluding: “science is under political attack ... The only question is how long researchers are going to sit and take it.”

Over at Washington Monthly Kevin Dunn argued of Gerson’s piece: “The disingenuousness here is breathtaking. Yes, liberals and conservatives have different views about sex education and stem cells, but those aren't even close to being the core issues in the liberal critique of the Republican war on science.”

Meanwhile, the Campaign for America’s Future blog has a breakdown of the arguments, accusing Gerson of setting up strawmen and highlighting his allusions to Nazi Germany.

Not everyone is anti-Gerson. The Heritage Foundation declares:

There is a war on science all right. And it is being waged by liberals so that they can scare the public into granting them the extensive government control of the entire economy that they have always wanted.

Bond has just named a new species of arachnid after musician, and greatest living Canadian, Neil Young. Actually he seems to have named it in December last year and there’s no obvious reason it’s only just been press released. Nevermind, it’s a cool looking spider,

“With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice,” says Bond (press release).

Different species of trapdoor spiders are apparently differentiated based on differences in their genitalia, but Bond also checked with DNA that Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi is a distinct species. Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi has already been added to the sizeable list of ‘animals named after celebrities’ on wikipedia.

Earlier this year Roy Orbison had an insect named after him. And University of Aberdeen researcher Nikki King named a new fish she discovered after her fiancé.

The first entry on Jason Bond’s lab blog implies that he has a wife called Kristen. He had better hope she doesn’t find out that Neil Young got the species name in advance of her... [UPDATE - see comment below.]

Neil Young gets new honor -- his own spider – Reuters
Sneaky Spider Named for Rocker Neil Young – LiveScience

Image: ECU news services