The Great Beyond

The UK government announced £150 million of investment for small technology firms by way of a venture capital initiative on 29 June, to general approval from venture capitalists, and particularly the biotech industry, who had been lobbying for support.

The newly-created UK Innovation Investment Fund will invest in a collection of other venture capital funds thereby ultimately boosting investment in start-ups and spin-outs - in life sciences, clean technology, digital sciences and advanced manufacturing, according to prime minister Gordon Brown. A private-sector fund manager will choose where the money goes, and first funds are due by the end of the year.

"We need the Google or Genentech of the future and they will only be created if there is the capital to back them," said science minister Paul Drayson (Wall Street Journal).

Continue reading "£150 million ventured, shot-in-the-arm for UK biotech gained?" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on June 30, 2009
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Roche has decided it is tired of having its name prefixed with the words ‘pharma giant’. In response, the company is bailing out of the pharmaceutical industry associations in both the UK and the US.

Instead, it will be signing up with the US Biotechnology Industry Association (BIO). The move follows the company’s merger with biotech firm Genentech earlier this year for around $46 billion.

“As part of the world's largest biotechnology company, Genentech and Roche believe that BIO’s purpose is closely aligned with the direction of the new company and, therefore, can represent the company’s interests in Washington, among policymakers, legislators and the general public,” said the company (AP).

Farewell big pharma, hello big biotech.

Continue reading "Roche: we’re not pharma anymore" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 30, 2009
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deCODE Genetics, a biotechnology company based in Reykjavik, Iceland, has been relisted on the NASDAQ Global Market stock exchange, the company announced last Friday.

deCODE is famous for its aggressive pursuit of DNA sequence variations linked to human disease, and aims to use this information to develop diagnostic tools and uncover new drug targets. Last October, its steadily declining stock price combined with a crashing market to drive the company's market capitalization (a measure of a company's worth, based on share price) below the $50 million minimum required to be listed on the NASDAQ Global Market stock exchange. (See 'Icelandic biotech feels the pinch', subscription required.) At that time, CEO Kari Stefansson said management was restructuring the company. The stakes were high -- in November, one analyst told Nature (subscription required) that if deCODE didn't find a way to boost their financial position, the company had little chance of surviving to see 2009.

But the company has lived on (and continued to crank out high profile genome-wide association studies). The decision to relist deCODE reverses a February decision to bump the company to the NASDAQ Capital Market, which generally lists companies with smaller market capitalization. deCODE hasn't released information about what might have spurred the change of heart -- the company's market capitalization still hovers around $37 million, and that's including the ~33% bump in stock price following last week's announcement.

Posted by Heidi Ledford on June 30, 2009
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Biologic drugs should face the same generic competition as standard pharmaceuticals after seven years, aides of US president Barack Obama have stated.

Be they called bio-similars, bio-generics, follow-on biologics or something else, products derived from biotechnology have been a hot topic in the US recently. Obama has come down somewhere between the extremes currently proposed for these drugs.

Democratic House rep Henry Waxman proposed legislation that would give biotech drugs just five years of exclusivity before other companies could muscle in. Another rep, Republican Anna Eshoo, put forward a proposal offering 12 years.

Now Bloomberg has obtained a letter from Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, and Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, pushing for a “generous compromise” on seven years.

“Lengthy periods of exclusivity will harm patients by diminishing innovation and unnecessarily delaying access to affordable drugs,” they wrote.

Continue reading "Biosimilars: Obama’s seven year pitch" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 29, 2009
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Last year Nature’s Phil Ball wrote about the amazing parrot Snowball, the first animal to be scientifically proven to dance. Earlier this year the research was published, to great media interest.

Now a video has surfaced of Snowball dancing with some of the world’s leading bird biologists at the recent World Science Festival (55 seconds in to the clip below).

The struttin’ scientists (as ID by The Scientist) are: Duke University's Erich Jarvis, University of Cambridge's Nicola Clayton, Brandeis University's Irene Pepperberg, and City College New York's Ofer Tchernichovski.

Personally, I think Snowball has the best moves.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 23, 2009
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This is a drill, actual inventory procedures may vary.

It's a fact of lab life that stuff gets lost in the shuffle. Digging up that old data spreadsheet or lab notebook is probably not too much more than an inconvenience for most researchers. But if you happen to work at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Fredrick, Maryland then it's a lot more serious than that.

At a press conference yesterday Col. Mark Kortepeter, USAMRIID's deputy commander told reporters that a recent inventory had turned up some 9,300 vials of previously uncatalogued pathogens, including serum samples from patients who had contracted hemorrhagic fever during the Korean War. The inventory also turned up Ebola, plague, anthrax, and botulism. Most of the samples were left by researchers who had since retired from the laboratory.

The report was bound to get tonnes of press, in part because USAMRIID is the former employer of Bruce Ivins, a researcher who the FBI named a "person of interest" in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Ivans died of a Tylenol overdose in July of 2008. This February, it emerged that Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus at the lab had gone unaccounted for, and all work was suspended until this inventory was completed.

Officials told reporters that numerous new security measures have been installed at the lab since 2001, and they've instituted an "aggressive" inventory system to ensure that future samples don't go unnoticed. It's clear that USAMRIID hopes to use this event to draw a line under its recently troubled past.

Image: US Army/ArraySarah

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 18, 2009
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Woolly mammoths roamed the UK far later than is normally believed, according to a paper published today in the Geological Journal.

Adrian Lister, of the London Natural History Museum, says new carbon dating of bones first excavated in 1986 also shows climate change, rather than humans hungry for mammoth steak, may have been behind their eventual extinction.

“Mammoths are conventionally believed to have become extinct in North Western Europe about 21,000 years ago during the main ice advance, known as the 'Last Glacial Maximum',” says Lister (press release). “Our new radiocarbon dating of the Condover mammoths changes that, by showing that mammoths returned to Britain and survived until around 14,000 years ago.”

This new date ties in with the takeover of grassy plains by forests. Mammoths preferred plains and were not very good in forests, as their tusks would get tangled in the branches (possibly).

Continue reading "Mammoths around longer than thought" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 18, 2009
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Eli Lilly, the Indiana-based pharmaceutical company perhaps best known for developing Prozac, has offered to conduct preliminary drug screening of compounds developed in academic labs. The company will screen the compounds using in vitro assays against Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, cancer, and osteoporosis -- all for the low, low price of getting the first shot at subsequent licensing deals or collaborations.

Lilly’s latest move is another sign of big pharma’s increasing creativity as it prowls academic labs for new early drug leads. Although broad agreements between universities and industry make some uneasy, pharma’s hunger for pipeline-replenishing drug candidates comes as funding agencies pressure academics to translate their results into therapies that will provide a clinical benefit. (See, for example, ‘Chemical screening centers get funding boost’ and 'Flagship drug-development initiative picks projects'; subscription required). The result: more collaboration between the two sectors.

For Lilly’s latest endeavor, called the Phenotypic Drug Discovery programme (PD2), the company hammered out a universal material transfer agreement that would be signed by institutions, sparing researchers the hassle of negotiating individual agreements. The company also claims that the identity of submitted compounds will be kept secret, even from Lilly’s own researchers, by a special computer algorithm. According to The Scientist, about 65 institutions have already signed up.

Posted by Heidi Ledford on June 17, 2009
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Who can resist a study that shows stress really does make your hair turn grey? Sadly the latest paper from Emi Nishimura has not found a link between, say, your office environment and the number of your colleagues sporting salt and pepper hairstyles.

Rather, in the latest issue of Cell, Nishimura and colleagues report that ‘genotoxic stress’ from ionising radiation damages DNA in the melanocyte stem cells that give mouse hairs their colour.

“It is estimated that a single cell in mammals can encounter approximately 100,000 DNA damaging events per day,” says Nishimura, of Tokyo Medical and Dental University (press release). “Once stem cells are damaged irreversibly, the damaged stem cells need to be eliminated to maintain the quality of the stem cell pools.”

Rather than causing the death of these stem cells, the damage makes them differentiate to form mature melanocytes instead of more stem cells, meaning nothing is left to dye the next growth of hair. So, mice exposed to radiation in their study turned permanently grey.

This may even be a mechanism to prevent damaged stem cells becoming cancerous.

“Greying may actually be a safety mechanism, that’s a cool twist,” David Fisher, of the Massachusetts General Hospital told Bloomberg. “They’ve shown that this mechanism is actually removing damaged stem cells. The good news is if you do find yourself greying, you’re probably better off not having those cells persist.”

Stress watch
“When an aging mouse's lovely brown fur turns grey, she can now officially blame stress — at least, the kind of stress that damages DNA” – CBC
“If you’ve ever blamed your gray hair on stress, you weren’t far from the truth” – Science
“We've all heard that stress causes gray hairs. Now, new research suggests it’s true” – LiveScience

Image: Ken Inomata

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 12, 2009
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Cross-posted for Monya Baker from The Niche

Transplants of a fetal neural stem cell product seem safe, according to a 12-month study on six children with a horrible neurodegenerative disease called neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis or Batten disease. Furthermore, the company reported results from an autopsy of a treated patient who died from the disease. (See Girl dies in stem cell trial for Batten disease ). These indicate that the injected cells engraft and survive in the brain for close to a year.

Whether cells can survive after transplant is considered a crucial requirement for whether many cell therapies can work at all, and StemCells Inc, the company sponsoring the trial, explicitly thanked the child’s parents for allowing the autopsy to be performed.

Batten disease is a progressive neural degenerative disease in which brain cells poison themselves because they lack a crucial enzyme that clears away unnecessary fats and proteins. The hope is that transplanted cells can make enough of the enzyme to stall toxic build-up in the host cells as well.

As is typical in clinical trials, the small study, which lacked a control group, was not designed to assess whether the experimental procedure could help patients, only whether or not it would harm them. A summary of data and results can be found in this press release. Each patient received injections to 8 spots in the brain totaling approximately 500 million or a billion cells. Adverse events were reported, but none could be attributed to the stem cell injections.

Continue reading "StemCells clinical trial results: Cells survive, seem safe" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 10, 2009
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Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski

On Monday 8 June, the Jang Yeong-sil Memorial Foundation wanted to give cloning expert Woo Suk Hwang an award for scientific excellence. But according to The Korea Herald, Hwang had another appointment - with the Seoul district court that is still, after more than 3 years, trying to figure out if his scientific fraud is legally actionable.

An official from the foundation said, "Even though he is on trial, we have made our decision by considering his achievements in the embryonic stem-cell development and his success in cloning dogs." One might contest both those points. Investigation into Hwang’s embryonic stem-cell research left little to believe in after picking away the layers of fabrication.

And the successful dog cloning is largely credited to another scientist, Byeong Chun Lee, who was also at the hearing and, like Hwang, is under investigation for fraud related to their previous experiments.

Lee and Hwang have since ended up on opposite sides of another court case - over the patents related to dog cloning.

Posted by Mark Peplow on June 09, 2009
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Termites and other pests are challenged by microbial invaders like bacteria and fungi. So, why can’t our enemies’ enemies be our friends?

Ram Sasisekharan and his colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked to some termite immune molecules, particularly a gram negative bacteria binding protein tGNBP-2 that is used by the wood chewers to fend off infections, for a way to create new pesticides.

tGNBP-2 recognizes carbohydrates associated with infectious microbes, and also cleaves the structure, alerting the immune system to the pathogen. Termites have the protein in their cells, but also secrete it and infuse their nests with it. The researchers found a modified glucose molecule that can bind to an active pocket of tGNBP-2 and deactivated it. This molecule, D-δ-gluconolactone (GDL) made termites more susceptible to subsequent infection with the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae in lab tests. The insects were also more susceptible to opportunistic infections.

See all the gory coverage at The Scientist, The Telegraph and in National Geographic News.

Kudos to The Scientist (full disclosure: they are my former employers), for getting some needed words of caution from a pathologist/entomologist who has experience in pest control.

Image: Turning Termite from Anauxite under creative commons.

Posted by Brendan Maher on June 09, 2009
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It’s that time of year again – the annual battle for control of Biogen Idec, one of the grande dames of biotech. And today’s installment did not disappoint.

For those of you who haven’t been glued to the Biogen soap opera, here’s a quick catch-up: Biogen is one of the oldest biotechnology companies and arguably the founder of the Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech cluster. The company chugged along for nearly thirty years until 2007, when billionaire ‘corporate raider’/’shareholder activist’ (depending on whose side you’re on) Carl Icahn became one of Biogen’s largest shareholders. With an eye on the multi-billion dollar prices pharmaceutical companies were paying for biotech firms, Icahn immediately tried to force Biogen executives to sell the company. The execs put the company on the market for a few months, then shrugged and said they couldn’t find any takers. Icahn didn't buy that: he accused Biogen of lying to investors and interfering with the search for a suitor, and then sued the company for access to records pertaining to the failed sales attempt. (More details available here, subscription required.) After that, Icahn riled Biogen executives again when he lobbied for the company to be split into two. “Once again, Icahn and his associates have demonstrated that they fundamentally do not understand our business,” board chairman Bruce Ross and CEO James Mullen wrote in a letter to shareholders.

Which brings us to today. In what promises to become a yearly tradition, Icahn tried to forcefully take hold of Biogen’s board of directors by nominating four of his associates to the board. (He tried this approach last year as well, and failed.) Biogen was to tally voting results today at the annual shareholder’s meeting, which started at 9am, but then Ross unexpectedly announced a recess until 2pm. The delay prompted an outcry from Icahn’s posse, with one of his nominees reportedly protesting, “This isn’t North Korea.” When the meeting rejoined in the afternoon, Ross said votes were still being tallied and winners would not be announced until later this month. Before the afternoon was over, Icahn had called Biogen's behavior "sort of despicable" (Boston Globe), declared victory for two of his nominees (although no official vote tallies have been released) and, of course, filed another lawsuit against the company.

What did the shareholders decide? What will Icahn try next? How long will Biogen survive as an independent company? All of this and more, to be continued…

Posted by Heidi Ledford on June 03, 2009
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Posted for David Cyranoski

Researchers in China have made pluripotent stem cells from a pig. The cells could be useful for making humanized pig organs for transplant to humans, pig models of human disease useful testing drugs, and for improving pig farming productivity and nutritional value.

Lei Xiao, head of the research group at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences where the research was done, admits that none of these will happen for the next several years. But his creation in pigs of induced pluripotent stem (iPS)-cells which share with embryonic stem cells the ability to differentiate into any cell type in the body-is still a huge accomplishment. (Paper).

The isolation and culture of embryonic stem (ES) cells from mice in 1981 revolutionized the use of mice as a developmental and biomedical research model. But it is a difficult process. It took 17 years to culture human iPS
cells. Even now there are ES cells for only four mammals: mice, humans, monkeys, and rats. Pig ES cells, despite many attempts, still do not exist.

Continue reading "Forget swine flu-bring on the humanized pigs!" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 03, 2009
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Deuterium drugs have hit the big time. Concert Pharmaceuticals, a start-up company based in Lexington, Massachusetts, US, which specialises in swapping hydrogen atoms on known drugs for deuterium atoms, (Nature, subscription required) has signed a deal worth potentially $1 billion with pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline.

The company, which was founded in 2006, will develop 3 drugs with GSK: a protease inhibitor to treat HIV, a drug for chronic renal disease and a third mystery product. The company will also do their deuterium magic with 3 of GSKs pipeline products. They get $35 million upfront, with future payments being made for milestones reached and more upfront payments. (Press release).

The news has gone big, with pick up in major news outlets, (AP, Wall Street Journal, FierceBiotech) and GSK’s shares fell slightly after the deal was announced (Reuters).

In future the patent field around deuterating known drugs is likely to get murky, as Derek Lowe points out in The Atlantic but for now it looks like Concert is sitting pretty in its deuterium world.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 02, 2009
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Yesterday Nature published a paper heralding the birth of the first transgenic non-human primates - in other words a genetically modified adult gave birth to offspring that inherited the modification.

Their birth offers to researchers the chance to use more human-like models for disease than the currently-favoured mice, or rhesus macaque (another monkey disease model, but one in which transgenic offspring have never been produced). The marmosets have been born expressing the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP). The neat thing about GFP is that it’s easy to spot – the marmosets have green feet under UV light.

But also, and this might be why they received just quite so much coverage, these marmosets are unbelievably cute.

Favourite headline/standfirst of the day came from WA Today, with “The green Monkeys are coming / They’re monkeys but not as we know them”

Coverage was generally positive, although NPR ran a story about 50 years since monkeys were sent to space, with a disturbing picture.

The cuteness of the animals will undoubtedly give animal activists new ammunition, and this warning is covering in an editorial to accompany the paper.

Continue reading "Marvellous marmosets" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on May 28, 2009
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Rooks can't bend spoons with their minds just yet, but they did bend wires using their beaks to hook food in a recent study (video here, large file).

Led by the appropriately named Chris Bird, this experiment adds rooks, a member of the Corvid family, to the list of animals that create and use tools. Unlike most known tool-using species, such as chimpanzees or other types of crows, rooks do not appear to use tools in the wild. Previous studies have shown that capuchin monkeys are more likely to resort to tool use in labs than in the wild.

Rooks may simply be too lazy to bother making tools in the wild, write the study authors: "Rooks exploit a number of different, readily-available food sources, such as seeds, insects, carrion, and refuse and as such may lack the motivation to use tools in the wild."

The researchers also argue that the tool-making is an example of an original insight, since the birds in the study were hand-raised and had neither seen other birds attempt the task, nor practised the task themselves before solving it.

They add that the finding adds to evidence that birds may have independently evolved a kind of problem-solving intelligence comparable to primate intelligence.

The paper should be available on this link by the end of the week:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0901008106

Headline watch
Rook with a hook proves bird brains are the equal of monkeys' - Daily Mail
Clever rooks have plenty to crow about - Irish Times
Rooks are not so bird-brained - Daily Telegraph
Caw blimey! Rooks can make tools - Cambridge News

Image: PNAS

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 26, 2009
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...and it's not a director's cut of David Attenborough

According to a Nature paper that's receiving some pickup (Reuters, CSM ) the history of life on earth may just have got roughly 15% longer. That may not sound a huge difference, but a 15% extension on life's lease adds up to 600 million years -- roughly equivalent to the time taken for animals to get from creepy little things that couldn’t even crawl to your pet cat.

There were no animals on earth, though, during the 600 million years in question. The paper by Oleg Abramov and Stephen Mojzsis [link fixed] at the University of Colorado is about the earliest life, not the latest. Previous research has suggested that the heavy rain of asteroids, comets and the like that characterised the early solar system would have made the earth too hazardous a place for life to persist until after what is known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment" some 3.9 billion years ago. Impacts by large objects, it was thought, would vapourise whole oceans and wrap the earth in an atmosphere of superheated steam which would sterilise the planet.

The model developed by Abramov and Mojzis tells a different story. Pretty much everywhere on the planet gets zapped by a big rock, often more than once – but there are never any occasions where the whole planet including all the subsurface is simultaneously uninhabitable. If life had got started during this time, they argue, it could have persisted ever since.

At present the first evidence for life comes right after the Late Heavy Bombardment, about 3.8 million billion years ago. The speed with which that life developed after the bombardment has been seen by some as evidence that life is implicit in the way the universe is set up, and will arise spontaneously PDQ wherever it gets the chance. If it took 600 million years, though, then one would have to start thinking that life is relatively unlikely, which obvioulsy has implications for astrobiology.

It may still be the case that life arose as soon as it could, right at the beginning of the earth's history – but it is going to be harder to prove it. While bacteria may have been able to survive the horrible early history of the earth, rocks were not so lucky – there are no major bits of crust left over from back then.

In a related happy accident, this week Nature also has a fine feature on Mike Russell and his research on the metabolism-first approach to the origins of life.

Image: simulation of the state of the Earth at the end of Late Heavy Bombardment. Circles are crater locations; colors show temperature / Oleg Abramov

Posted by Oliver Morton on May 21, 2009
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Yesterday's announcement of a 47-million-year-old primate fossil nicknamed "Ida" has provoked a large, if uneven, media response.

A press release entitled "WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING" got reporters’ attention last week, after a pair of earlier scoops (which Nature blogged) revealed that the finding was an unusually intact primate fossil dating to 47 million years ago, a time when most primates looked more like squirrels than people.

The fossil’s official announcement yesterday came one week ahead of the US premiere of a television documentary unashamedly entitled “The Link”. A book by the same title appeared on US and UK bookshelves today, after waiting Harry Potter-style in sealed boxes, wrote the New York Times. The Times labeled the furore “science for the Mediacene age”.

Scientists and others have expressed admiration for the find and contempt for its reception in many media outlets.

Continue reading "Missing link, evidence thereof - media analysis" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 20, 2009
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Posted for David Cyranoski

Korean newspapers are reporting that Woo Suk Hwang and his research group are trying to get back in the big leagues by doing in pigs what he had once claimed to do in humans.

The once-famed cloner and now famed fraudster has been running the Sooam Biotech Research Centre, funded with private money, outside of Seoul for a couple years now.

On 15 May, Hyun Sang-hwan, identified as "Hwang's key colleague" told the Korea Times that they had succeeded in creating a cloned pig embryo, extracting stem cells from it, and establishing lines of self-reproducing cloned cells from them.

Continue reading "New Hwang cloning claim" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 18, 2009
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With the help of some carefully chosen words to the Daily Mail and a belated "Oops, I've said too much" to the Wall Street Journal, a team of researchers and public relations virtuosos have attracted extraordinary attention to a primate find.

Philip Gingerich, the Director of the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology and Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo will reportedly publish a peer-reviewed article about a new primate skeleton found in Germany with the Public Library of Science tomorrow. The timing coincides with the opening of a related exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York hosted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a BBC documentary hosted by Sir David Attenborough, according to the Wall Street Journal and Daily Mail articles.

Continue reading "Missing link, evidence thereof" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 18, 2009
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The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which regulates animal research in the US, has found animal welfare lapses at the New Iberia Research Centre.

The Humane Society carried out an undercover investigation of the centre, which is run by the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, and filed a complaint to the USDA, according to a statement . The Humane Society investigator claimed to have recorded videos of animal handlers allowing sedated primates to fall to the ground, and video of animals with open wounds.

The USDA confirmed that a March inspection found "evidence of several issues with the facility’s compliance with Animal Welfare Act (AWA) standards" and problems with "review and approval of research protocols." This included a number of African Green Monkeys whose tails had been amputated due to trauma or frostbite, reports The Scientist, in part because their enclosure was inadequately heated.

Violators of the Animal Welfare Act can get warning letters, fines or lose their licenses. In this case, the USDA is working with the centre administrators to improve animal care standards. A follow-up visit in late April found that most of the issues identified on the USDA's March visit had been addressed.

Previous coverage on The Great Beyond: Primate mistreatment allegations at Louisiana research lab - March 05, 2009

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 13, 2009
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Count Lennart Bernadotte of didn’t quite make it to 100. He died in 2004 at the age of 95, but not before ensuring that his life’s great project had a future. Great grandson of King Oscar II who presented the first Nobel awards in Stockholm in 1901, Count Lennart launched, exactly sixty years ago, the Nobel Laureates Meeting in Lindau, a pretty but very provincial town on Lake Constance. The original aim of the weeklong meetings was to encourage isolated and struggling scientists and doctors in post-war Germany by bringing them into social contact with great living scientists from around the world.

Over the next 55 years or so, not a lot changed, even though Germany was no longer isolated or struggling. The meetings – morning lectures, afternoon discussions, evening dances - were popular but remained anachronistically provincial. By the turn of the millennium that had become unsustainable. Laureates were becoming less interested in a long trip to speak with locals at meetings primarily conducted in German, however charming the location.

In 2005, the meetings were internationalised and thrust into the modern world (Nature 436, 170-1). Now 600 hand-picked students from all around the world mingle, discuss and dance with 20 or more Nobel laureates during summer.

To commemorate the centenary of Count Lennart’s birth on 8 May, the Meetings organisers set up a science-history project to digitalise selected lectures from their archives and make them openly available on their webpage (www.lindau-nobel.de). The first eleven selected lectures are now live, more will follow in phases throughout the summer.

The cleaned up voice recordings, accompanied by an introduction and charming black-and-white photos taken in Lindau, bring legendary scientists to life – be it Rita Levi Montalcini (Physiology or Medicine, 1986) pushing her human-rights agenda, Rosalyn Yalow (Physiology or Medicine, 1977) appealing to women to help solve social problems or simply the extraordinary plumminess of the British tones of Lawrence Bragg (Physics 1915) and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964). A particular treasure is the lecture on the gravitational constant by Paul Dirac (1933, Physics). Dirac was renowned for being almost pathologically socially withdrawn. Despite this, he showed up to the first ten meetings in Lindau, where, they say, he remained almost silent aside from his lectures.

Coming soon – Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Lorenz, James Watson and other stellar personalities.

Image: Nobel Laureate Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964) and young researchers at
the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting 1986.

Posted by Alison Abbott on May 11, 2009
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Last year the European Court of Human Rights told the UK government it couldn’t keep the DNA of innocent people on its police database. Today the UK government announced how it would deal with the ruling, in a response that basically amounts to two fingers to the court.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who has already been beset by controversy this year, wants to keep DNA profiles of innocent people arrested but not convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes for 12 years. Innocent people arrested but not convicted of other crimes would be kept for six years.

Opposition party shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said, “The government just doesn’t get this. People in Britain should be innocent until proven guilty.” (Reuters.)

Civil liberties groups and opinion writers have also reacted with outrage to the proposals.

Continue reading "UK will retain DNA of innocent accused" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 07, 2009
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The UK’s charming Royal Botanic Garden at Kew in London is 250 years old.

To celebrate this anniversary our hereditary ruler the Queen and her consort the Duke of Edinburgh are visiting, and the former will be presented with a new specially bred thornless rose called the Kew Gardens.

In an event the UK’s republican types will doubtless consider symbolic, the pair will also plant two living fossils at the gardens, according to the Daily Telegraph:

The Queen will plant a Ginkgo, an ancient tree known as a "living fossil" which is now native only to a small area of central China. Prince Philip will plant a Wollemi pine, also known from fossil records. It was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered in Australia in 1994 and it is now part of an international conservation programme.

It is to be hoped that these planting go better than the royal couple’s last additions to the gardens, as the Times notes:

The royal couple’s last official visit to Kew Gardens was 50 years ago for its 200th anniversary when they both planted trees. The swamp cypress planted by the Duke in front of Kew Palace is doing extremely well, but it is understood that the Queen will learn only today that the walnut tree she planted was a victim of the 1989 storms.

Even Google is getting in on the celebrations, with a special graphic on its UK homepage.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 05, 2009
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Back in June last year Nature’s own Philip Ball reported on new research showing that a male sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball really can dance:

Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues say that Snowball’s ability to shake his stuff is much more than a cute curiosity. It could shed light on the biological bases of rhythm perception, and might even hold implications for the use of music in treating neurodegenerative disease.

Patel and colleagues videoed Snowball’s movement to music and slowly altered the tempo of his tunes. Statistical analysis showed that he was synching to the beat. Now Patel’s research has been published in Current Biology, and the world’s media has gone predictably crazy.

“People are not the only ones who've got rhythm – birds can also get into the groove claim scientists,” says the Daily Telegraph. “Parrots join humans on the dance floor,” says NPR. The Daily Mail says Snowball’s musical taste is “questionable” as he generally dances to the Backstreet Boys, a fact that has led the Sun to brand him “Beakstreet Boy”.

Here’s what you all want to see:

See: Birds that boogie, 25 June 2008, for more.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 01, 2009
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Posted for Rex Dalton

The plankton record doesn’t lie. And again it is showing that the meteor that created the Chicxulub impact crater in Mexico didn’t cause the Cretaceous/Tertiary [KT] mass extinction, says Gerta Keller – the Princeton University paleontologist whose group has been a primary questioner of the widely accepted theory that the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and most life 65 million years ago.

As researchers were wrapping up last week’s European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria, the Keller group is publishing an article April 27 online in the Journal of the Geological Society, London, [JGSL 166, 393-411 2009 doi: 10.1144/0016-76492008-116] on its latest data in support of its view that the impact occurred 300,000 years before the KT mass extinction. Keller’s work also is among research discussed last weekend at a post-EGU workshop on Austrian geological sections of the KT.

The article focuses on stratigraphy in northeastern Mexico, in particular a site called El Penon outside Monterrey in the state of Nuevo Leon that is about 1,200 kilometres from the impact location on the Yucatan Peninsula. At El Penon, Keller and colleagues located a line of the spherules reflecting blast material from the Yucatan impact. Looking above and below this spherule-laced section, Keller checked the fossil record of foraminifera that are used to chart life around mass extinctions.

Below the spherule line, they found 52 foraminifera species – and above the line after the impact the same 52 species were abundant. “We found not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” says Keller. This means the Chicxulub impact couldn’t have been the sole event causing the extinction, she says.

Continue reading "Plankton undermine dino extinction theory" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 27, 2009
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Researchers and students staged a rally on the UCLA campus yesterday in support of animal research.

The rally was organised by the new University of California, Los Angeles branch of Pro-Test, a UK group founded in Oxford which supports animal research. A group of about 40 animal rights protesters held a rally opposite the Pro-Test event, which attracted over 400 people, according to the Los Angeles Times.

UCLA neuroscientist David Jentsch, the victim of a car bombing last month, founded UCLA Pro-Test. The North American Animal Liberation Press Office posted a 'communiqué' from a group calling itself the Animal Liberation Brigade taking credit for the attack and threatening to harm Jentsch.

"I hope this rally lessens the sense of helplessness and fear that has pervaded our community," Jentsch said (UCLA newsroom). "We’re just not going to take the harassment anymore."

Nature also interviewed him last week.

A member of UCLA's Animal Law Society told a Science reporter that violence gave other animal rights activists "a bad name."

No arrests have been made in the car bombing case yet, though the FBI did report arrests in other animal rights-related cases this week and in February. The FBI is offering a reward of $75,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the Jentsch case.

Video below the fold.

Continue reading "California animal researchers protest protesters" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on April 23, 2009
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A potential ‘missing link’ in the evolution of seals has been discovered. A new fossil described in Nature shows features suggesting it was semi-aquatic, but had not yet fully accepted the sea as its home.

Named Puijila darwini, the animal has the long tail and limbs of a terrestrial carnivore but other features, such as indications of webbing on the feet, suggest an affinity for water. Previously the earliest pinniped – the group that includes seals, sea lions and the walrus – was an animal that already had flippers.

According to Natalia Rybczynski, of the Canadian Museum of Nature, interviewed on the Nature Podcast, the animal was “something like a river otter, but much more muscular” and was “almost a wolverine that could hunt on land and also in water” around 21 and 24 million years ago.

“The remarkably preserved skeleton of Puijila had heavy limbs, indicative of well developed muscles, and flattened phalanges which suggests that the feet were webbed, but not flippers,” says paper author Mary Dawson, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (press release). “This animal was likely adept at both swimming and walking on land.”

Continue reading "Flippin’ heck! Proto-seal discovered" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 23, 2009
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Panayiotis Zavos does not shy away from media attention. The fertility specialist has told The Independent that he has been trying to implant human embryos using material cloned from living individuals. Everybody from the Indy's local competition to outraged scientists and sober wire services have weighed in.

Zavos has attempted to implant 11 human embryos in four women since 2003 according to The Independent, and a Discovery Channel film-maker who has witnessed the process and whose television programme premieres tonight at 9pm:

The cloning was recorded by an independent documentary film-maker who has testified to The Independent that the cloning had taken place and that the women were genuinely hoping to become pregnant with the first cloned embryos specifically created for the purposes of human reproduction.

Zavos has previously attempted controversial cloning-related treatments and attracted the ire of other fertility researchers in 2004, when he announced a result ahead of academic publication. Zavos, born on Cyprus but a naturalized US citizen, reportedly carries out his cloning attempts in the Middle East to avoid anti-human cloning laws in other countries.

He also claims to have spliced tissue from a dead child with an embryo from a cow as a learning exercise, though he has not attempted to implant the hybrid embryo. The child's mother reportedly wouldn't mind if he did. While none of these attempts with living cloned material have succeeded, his group plans to try again with 10 younger couples, according to the Indy.

Posted by Lucas Laursen on April 22, 2009
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An animal rights activist has been added to the FBI’s Most Wanted list, ranking him among terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

Daniel Andreas San Diego is wanted for allegedly bombing two biotechnology facilities near San Francisco, says the FBI. He is the first US ‘domestic terrorist’ to make the Most Wanted list.

Both of the buildings bombed were apparently targeted for doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company that has long been targeted by animal rights extremists.

“San Diego is a known San Francisco Bay-area animal rights extremist, involved with the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign, commonly referred to as SHAC,” says Michael Heimbach, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division (statement). “We continue to make great strides in dismantling animal rights and environmental extremists, like Daniel Andreas San Diego.”

According to Heimback, animal rights and environmental extremists have committed over 1,800 criminal acts and caused over $110 million in damages. A reward of up to $250,000 is on offer for information leading to the location and arrest of San Diego, who is considered armed and dangerous.

Coverage
Animal rights activist on FBI terror list – SF Chronicle
In defense of people – Chronicle editorial
Vegan Daniel Andreas San Diego who tried to close British animal lab is put on FBI list – (London) Times
Wanted: FBI Adds Environmental Terrorist to Most-Wanted List – WSJ Environmental Capital blog

Image: detail from FBI wanted poster

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 22, 2009
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Rock ants refuse to live in any old hole in the ground, and researchers from the University of Bristol have been finding out how they choose between a des res and a hovel.

Temnothorax albipennis have been previously shown to pick the better of two potential nest sites even when it is nine times further away from their current abode than the less salubrious residence. If ants decide a nest site is a good place to settle down they often return to their soon-to-be former home and recruit friends.

A nest is chosen by the number of ants in a potential nest reaching a quorum, but most ants appear not to visit both sites, say Elva Robinson and her colleagues.

They fitted micro-transmitters to every worker ant in nine colonies housed in artificial nests. Each colony contained between 100 and 200 workers and larvae. The team destroyed the ants' homes and gave them a choice of a good, far-away site and a worse, closer site to move to. Chip readers on both potential nests recorded ant coming and goings.

“Each ant appears to have its own ‘threshold of acceptability’ against which to judge a nest individually,” says Robinson (press release). “Ants finding the poor nest were likely to switch and find the good nest, whereas ants finding the good nest were more likely to stay committed to that nest.”

This contrasts with previous assumptions that ants compare nests, the team write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Ant house hunting isn’t perfect though, in this study only four of the nine colonies chose the far-away, ‘good’ nest, with three putting up the 'home sweet home' signs in the poor site and two splitting in half and moving into both.

Coverage
Tracking bugs so tiny they fit an ant – Sun
Transmitters show house-hunting ants have gift for locating a des res – Times
Ants 'go further for better nest' – PA
Ants' home search habit uncovered – BBC

Photo: Elva Robinson

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 22, 2009
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The Union of Concerned Scientists has released a report attacking big farma's claims that genetically modified crops produce a higher yield per cultivated acre than traditional crops.

The report [pdf] examines academic reports of crop yields over a 20-year period, including 13 years of real-world commercial results in the US. Author Doug Gurian-Sherman attributes most yield gains in most crops to technique, not genes:

Overall, corn and soybean yields have risen substantially over the last 15 years, but largely not as result of the GE traits. Most of the gains are due to traditional breeding or improvement of other agricultural practices.

Gurian-Sherman also distinguishes between intrinsic yield, which is an idealized measure, and operational, or real-world yield. Genetic engineering only improved operational yields for corn modified with genes from Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacteria which helps the corn resist certain pests, he writes.

An industry group has responded with its own release claiming that "marker-assisted breeding has nearly doubled the rate of yield gain when compared to traditional breeding alone" and pointing out that a growing number of farmers are adopting genetically modified strains of crops.

Gurian-Sherman concedes that farmers may find certain modified crops easier to work with, but that this does not directly translate into an improved yield or a wider benefit to society.

Related in Nature News: Germany banned a breed of genetically-modified corn yesterday, joining a handful of other European countries in contradiction of EU law.

Photo: Seabamirum on Flickr

Posted by Lucas Laursen on April 15, 2009
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In January, an in-press article criticizing the statistical methodology of social scientists using fMRI to back their hypotheses caused a major stir. The no-holds-barred paper claimed that many published papers are worthless because brain imaging data have been inappropriately analysed.

Those scientists personally attacked were not only upset by the content. They were also offended by the title which referred to ‘voodoo correlations’. Many argued that they were not only well aware of the importance of good statistical practice, but also used it.

The editor of the journal in question, Perspectives in Psychological Research, has now said the final version to be published in May will appear with a more circumspect title: ‘Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality and Social Cognition’. The authors, Edward Vul from MIT and Harold Pashler from the University of California, San Diego and their colleagues also answer the specific criticisms they received in response to the widely circulated original version in an accompanying paper.

Posted by Alison Abbott on April 14, 2009
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US scientists today report preliminary data on a brain imaging study they say may help lead to the identification of a ‘footprint’ of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the brain. Rajendra Morey, director of the neuroimaging lab at Durham Veterans Administrative Medical Centre, and his colleagues are presenting results of their study on 42 US soldiers who had recently served in Iraq or Afganistan at the World Psychiatric Association International Congress on Treatments in Psychiatry in Florence. Journalistically speaking, the group of probands is attractive, and so the study has been press-released in advance.

One group of 22 suffered from PTSD while a second group of 20 did not. Using an experimental paradigm designed to indicate how easily distracted the soldiers were, the neuroscientists showed that there were differences between the two groups of soldiers in activation of a brain area called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, a region they say is associated with the ability to maintain vigilance. The scientists say this concords with established understanding of the underlying psychology of PTSD. Sufferers are hypervigilant, and fail to stay focussed because they are always on the look-out for unexpected threats.

They also saw also saw differences in activation in brain areas previously shown to be associated with PTSD - the medial prefrontal cortex, a large slab of tissue onto which scientists have tentatively projected many possible functions, and the amygdala, which reproducibly indicates the emotional saliency of a signal (ie ‘is what I am seeing or hearing truly appalling, or is it not quite so bad?’)

What do the results tell us? Primarily that it is possible to see group differences in brain activation patterns between people with PTSD and those without it. It is a solid piece of information, but the hope of eventually finding a useful and reliable way of predicting an individual’s susceptibility to PTSD, or to diagnosing it – as expressed in the meeting abstract – is still just a hope. This is part of a body of work which is very much in progress. Seeing group differences is a long way from being able to predict syndromes from an individual’s brain scan. For many reasons, individual brain scans are still highly variable.

Posted by Alison Abbott on April 03, 2009
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The rights and wrongs of ‘dwarf tossing’, where a large human attempts to hurl a smaller human as far as they can, have been debated by bodies as august as the United Nations. However, according to a paper published this week, careful consideration of the issue can also help us deal with ethical issues in science.

“While admittedly unusual, the case of dwarf tossing illuminates several themes central to the field of bioethics including the issues of human dignity, autonomy, and the protection of vulnerable people,” write Carlo Leget, Pascal Borry and Raymond De Vries in the latest edition of Bioethics.

Their paper explores the relationship between empirical approaches to ethics (assessing how things are) and normative approaches (assessing how things ought to be).

Paper author Raymond De Vries, of the University of Michigan Bioethics Program told Nature, “I assure you that we are serious about dwarf tossing, and if you can’t have fun while being serious, well then, count me out of this business.”

Continue reading "‘Nobody tosses a dwarf!’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 01, 2009
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Posted on behalf of K.S. Jayaraman

A leading Indian biotechnologist has demanded that a review article in Annals of Botany be retracted because his work was not cited in it. The journal’s chief editor, Pat Heslop-Harrison of the University of Leicester, has denied the charge and rejects the allegation that the journal suppressed novel ideas coming from scientists in developing countries.

Vetury Sitaramam, former head of biotechnology at the University of Pune, has nevertheless filed a formal complaint with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in Guildford, UK. The Indian watchdog agency, Society for Scientific Values, says it will voice its concern if the journal refuses to publish Sitaramam’s rebuttal without giving a good reason.

The article in question is a review of research on the role of mitochondrial respiration in drought and crop yield. In his complaint to COPE, Sitaramam alleges that his papers were left out because they challenged the need for genetic modification to create drought-tolerant plants. He also says the issue at stake is more than a simple argument over citation. “The whole point is why are alternate views to molecular breeding, especially from developing country scientists, becoming difficult to publish?” he asks. “This is an example of a growing trend of West marginalizing novel work from the East,” says Nandula Raghuram of GGS Indraprastha University in New Delhi and managing editor of the journal Physiology and Molecular Biology of Plants.

Heslop-Harrison refutes any allegation that Annals of Botany suppresses ideas, and in particular does not publish ideas coming from developing country scientists. “There is no evidence whatsoever for this damaging statement,” he told Nature. “Indeed I expect we publish more important science from developing countries than many other journals.”

Posted by Alex Witze on March 31, 2009
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Europe’s proposed new rules on animal experiments have come under renewed fire today.

When they were first proposed last year many researchers complained that they could stifle vital work, especially on non-human primates. They also warned the proposed rules could drastically increase the cost of experiments, without increasing animal welfare.

Now the umbrella group European Medical Research Councils and the European Science Foundation have issued a report detailing the changes they believe are needed to the draft rules (pdf).

“We certainly welcome the opportunity to standardize animal care on a Europe-wide basis,” says Roger Lemon, a researcher University College London and chair of the ESF’s animal research expert group (The Scientist). “But where we have some difficulty is where some types of research would just be stopped all together.”

Continue reading "European animal research ‘threatened by new rules’ " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 26, 2009
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Details of Charles Darwin’s student days have been revealed by a selection of bills from his time at Cambridge. The University has just released six record books detailing much of Darwin’s time at Christ’s College.

“Before this we didn’t really know very much about Darwin’s daily life at Cambridge at all,” says John van Wyhe, who heads a project which puts all Darwin’s works online. “It had been assumed that there were no significant traces of his time here left to discover, which meant that we were ironically short of information about one of the most formative parts of his life.”

The books show that Darwin enjoyed, says the Cambridge press release, “all the trappings one would expect of a 19th century gentleman, paying service-people to carry out tasks such as stoking his fire and polishing his shoes”. In addition to his fees, Darwin paid a bed-maker, a chimney-sweep, someone to polish his shoes, and various other traders.

All in all, Darwin paid £636 over his three years at Cambridge, plus £14 for his BA and £12 for his MA. The Sun newspaper notes, “Naturalist Charles Darwin spent more money on designer shoes and plush drapes than he did on books while at university, documents reveal.”

Darwin's student bills at Christ's College, Cambridge are available at the The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online website.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 23, 2009
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The rush to manufacture drugs in living organisms continues. Hot on the heals of the drug-goat, a team of European researchers have created transgenic tobacco plants that produce a potential treatment for diseases such as diabetes.

Mario Pezzotti, of the University of Verona, and colleagues successfully engineered the plant to produce anti-inflammatory compound interleukin-10, they report in BMC Biotechnology. Now they are going to feed these tobacco leaves to mice with autoimmune diseases to see if they are an effective treatment.

“Transgenic plants are attractive systems for the production of therapeutic proteins because they offer the possibility of large scale production at low cost, and they have low maintenance requirements,” says Pezzotti (press release). “The fact that they can be eaten, which delivers the drug where it is needed, thus avoiding lengthy purification procedures, is another plus compared with traditional drug synthesis.”

The press release, with considerable understatement, notes that tobacco “isn’t famous for its health benefits”. However, Pezzotti says it has many advantages for genetic modifiers such as himself.

“Tobacco is a fantastic plant because it is easy to transform genetically and you can easily regenerate an entire plant from a single cell,” he told Reuters.

Surely though it’s time to start considering the end user of any of these products.

The drug-laced milk from GM goats didn’t make it past the regulators in the US, but would consumers rather drink milk or eat tobacco leaves? The scientist who can make a GM chocolate that contains drugs is going to make a killing…

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 19, 2009
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The most surprising science story of 2008 has returned to the news today, with a follow up to the study that appeared to show cows have a magnetic sense.

As we reported last year:

An analysis of more than 8,000 cows claims they have a statistically significant preference to align themselves in a north-south direction. The team behind this study has also found a similar preference in deer, and believes the animals must be sensing the Earth's magnetic field.

Of course the researchers realised a claim like this would likely meet with some scepticism. So they decided to look at cows that happened to live near power lines, and the magnetic fields that come with them. As Nature’s story from last year noted, at-the-time-unpublished work seemed to show that cows near power lines were not aligned north-south.

This work, utilising satellite and aerial photographs of cows - and field observations of deer - near power lines has now been published.

“Whatever the underlying mechanism, our results provide further evidence that the recently described spontaneous directional preference in grazing and resting cattle and deer represents a case of magnetic alignment,” write Hynek Burda, of the University of Duisburg-Essen, and colleagues in PNAS. “The fact that animals grazing under or near high-voltage power lines were not commonly aligned but exhibited distinct alignment patterns beneath or in the vicinity of power lines trending in various magnetic directions clearly rules out a role of the sun compass in alignment behaviour of ruminants.”

The article will be available here later this week.

Headline watch
How Udderly Odd - TinySci
Power lines spark interest over effect on animals – Yorkshire Post
High-voltage power lines short-circuit cows' satnav – Scotsman
No bull: High voltage power lines can affect which direction grazing cows choose to face - KFSM

Image: paper author J. Cerveny

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 17, 2009
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We have two ancient beasts for your delectation today, one large, one small.

Let’s start with the big one, and it really is a monster. Researchers from the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum have uncovered the skull of a 147 million year-old marine reptile that measured 15 metres in length.

The pliosaur would have weighed in at 45 tonnes, say the researchers. That’s fifteen times the (fictional) weight of Jaws!

“There is nothing really comparable in the sea today,” says Jorn Hurum, one of the team behind the find (NY Times). “Thank God for that,” says I.

Continue reading "Little and large" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 17, 2009
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Times are not good for the biotech industry, a whole host of people are warning this week.

According to the European industry trade group, one in five small bio-tech firms could go to the wall this year. Interviews with industry figures conducted for the European Biopharmaceutical Enterprises group suggest that over 50 % of small and medium sized firms are under threat.

The major problem is that many of these companies are still in the early loss making stages of their development and credit is in short supply, says Reuters.

EBE president Carlo Incerti says one solution could be a bailout from the European Investment Bank. “This is not just about saving jobs in the short term, it’s about protecting Europe’s capacity to drive medical innovation,” he says (press release).

Things are no better in the US...

Continue reading "Bye-bye-biotech industry?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 17, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Financial Crisis | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The recent rash of songs about science continues, with this example reaching us via Deep Sea News. At this rate I’m going to have to expand my knowledge of Roman numerals.

The New York Times informs us that, “The rapper on the left is Derrick Davis, a junior at Stanford. The rapper on the right is Tom McFadden, an instructor in the human biology program there.”

This is not the only example from these rapping researchers. Check out the awesome song about cane toads, I Just Want a Function.

Equally good are I'm going going back back to plasma membrane, Wanna be a... Scholar?, and Hi, Meiosis.

Continue reading "Songs about science XVII: gene regulators mount up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 11, 2009
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A captive chimpanzee in Sweden has exhibited a remarkably human trait: detailed planning for a future act of violence.

Santino the chimp carefully collects concrete and stones in weapons caches to throw at visitors to his Furuvik zoo home. Mathias Osvath, of Lund University, says this is the first unambiguous demonstration of future planning by a non-human.

While other primates are known to fashion tools, Osvath says that previous examples could always be seen as responses to immediate needs, such as breaking a stick to fish in a termite nest due to hunger. In this case, he writes in Current Biology, “The chimpanzee has without exception been calm during gathering or manufacturing of the ammunition, in contrast to the typically aroused state during [throwing] displays. The gathering and manufacturing has only been observed during the hours before the zoo opened, excluding potential triggering from the presence of zoo visitors.”

Osvath told AP that, while he may be a very good forward planner, Santino’s execution is a little lacking. The animal is a poor shot who rarely manages to hit visitors. Still, he says, “It is very special that he first realizes that he can make these and then plans on how to use them.”

Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the Washington Post, “People always assume that animals live in the present. This seems to indicate that they don't live entirely in the present.”

De Waal, told ABC News that similar behaviour has been observed in other apes. “I have seen apes line up faeces as future ammunition,” he says.

Sadly for Santino, CanWest reports that his aggressive behaviour “earned him a date on the surgeon’s table for castration last fall” in the hope that lower testosterone levels might curb his enthusiasm for stone throwing.

Headline watch
Arrest That Chimp! – Science Now
'Hail' from the chimp: zoo ape stockpiles stones to throw at visitors – CBC
Stone the crows! Santino the rock-throwing ape proves chimps plan ahead – Daily Mail

Image: stock photo / Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 10, 2009
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At a meeting last weekend featuring Harvard University’s Origins of Life Initiative, synthetic biologist/systems biologist/sequencing guru/technobiology polymath George Church announced that his lab had taken an important step towards the creation of synthetic life by assembling a functional ribosome.

Ribosomes are molecular machines that read strands of RNA and translate the genetic code into proteins. They are exquisitely complex, and previous attempts to reconstitute a ribosome from its constituent parts – dozens of proteins along with several molecules of RNA – yielded poorly functional ribosomes, and even then succeeded only when researchers resorted to “strange conditions” that did not recapitulate the environment of a living cell, Church said.

In addition to applications in synthetic biology, creating a synthetic ribosome could improve industrial methods for making proteins without relying on cells. Having a tailor-made ribosome could also make it easier to chemically label proteins in situations where researchers don’t want to label the entire cell and all proteins in it.

And for Church, making a ribosome is a critical step in one of his pet projects: creating a “mirror image cell" by altering the stereochemistry of the molecules within.

Continue reading "Synthetic biologists prepare to leap through the looking glass" »

Posted by Heidi Ledford on March 10, 2009
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The oldest brain ever found was officially unveiled this week, in the journal PNAS.

Researchers at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility were using X-rays to image the inside of an ancient fish skull fossil when they discovered what they call “a strikingly brain-shaped structure” (press release, research paper - link live soon). They suggest the 300 million year old brain of the iniopterygian fish was mineralised due to microbes.

[This story may seem very familiar to those who were paying close attention to the recent AAAS conference.]

“Soft tissue has fossilized in the past, but it is usually muscle and organs like kidneys because of phosphate bacteria from the gut that permeates into tissue and preserves its features,” says paper author John Maisey, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (LiveScience). “Fossilized brains are unusual, and this is by far the oldest known example.”

Continue reading "The world’s oldest brain" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 03, 2009
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The clever people at MIT have come up with rather excellent video of DNA transcription utilising one of the greatest inventions of the last 100 years: the humble Lego brick.

Another video along similar lines has been made for translation.

Of course, one Lego-based science video is never enough. Below the fold are some more internet Lego-science hits.

[Thanks to Mike for pointing us to this.]

Continue reading "Video: Lego DNA" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 03, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Neat technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“I’m ecstatic – I feel as if Austria has become the European Cup winner in soccer,” enthused Austria’s environment minister Nikolaus Berlakovich yesterday, after European Union environment ministers voted overwhelmingly in favour of allowing both Austria and Hungary to keep their national bans on cultivation of the genetically-modified maize Mon810. The Wiener Zeitung headlined: ‘Triumph for Austria’.

The European Commission, on the other hand, was humiliatingly relegated. It had proposed that the two countries lift their bans which contravenes an EU directive to which all 27 EU member states are signed up. The directive allows only scientific arguments to exclude GM crops from cultivation, and allows no opt-outs. The Commission had rejected the two countries’ portfolios of scientific concerns as insufficient.

Continue reading "European nations win right to ban GM crops" »

Posted by Alison Abbott on March 03, 2009
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There is much excitement – and no small number of puns – greeting the news that ancient footprints found in Kenya show our distant ancestors were striding around on feet very like ours some 1.5 million years ago.

Writing in Science, researchers report that after laser scanning the sets of prints, they concluded these are “the oldest evidence of an essentially modern human–like foot anatomy”. While the famous Laetoli prints from Tanzania are substantially older, at 3.75 million years, those prints showed a more ape-like foot.

Study leader Matthew Bennett, of Bournemouth University in the UK, notes the importance of the find in the Times:

Now we know that 1.5 million years ago, Homo erectus had feet with an anatomy very similar to modern humans. It could essentially walk with the same biomechanical efficiency as you or I.

Continue reading "Ancient footprints make a big impression" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 27, 2009
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If you’re enlisting the help of scientists to write a guide explaining genetically modified (GM) crops for the general public, should you declare in detail all their industrial interests?

Sense About Science (SAS), a UK charity, is being criticised for failing to do this in its recently published booklet, Making Sense of GM [pdf]. Anti-GM campaigners and academics, the Times Higher Education (THE) reports, say the guide’s potted biographies of its contributors don’t disclose fully their links to research institutes that receive biotech cash.

But the charity doesn’t think it’s done anything wrong.

Continue reading "Everything to declare? " »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on February 20, 2009
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This is a viral coat, all 5 million atoms of it. To be precise, it is a capsid, used to protect a virus from the defences of the cells it invades. It took three years to get the picture of the structure, by layering hundreds of x-ray diffraction images (press release). The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

"Because many viruses use this type of capsid, understanding how it forms could lead to new approaches for antiviral therapies," lead researcher Jane Tao said. "It could also aid researchers who are trying to create designer viruses and other tools that can deliver therapeutic genes into cells."

The image has hit the mainstream thanks to Wired’s blog and ShortNews.com ran the story with no image. Weird.

Image: J Pan & Y J Tao / Rice University

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on February 18, 2009
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A massive haul of fossils has been unearthed from a car park near Los Angeles by the mysteriously named Project 23.

These fossils have been excavated from the famous the La Brea Tar Pits. The Page Museum, which oversees pit research, says the find is “so enormous that it could potentially rewrite the scientific account” of the area. ‘Project 23’ has so far produced over 700 specimens, including horse, bison, coyotes, dire wolves, and saber-toothed cats (press release).

As these are from the last ice age around 40,000 – 10,000 years ago, they are obviously not really a ‘Jurassic Car Park’. That headline was irresistible though.

The mysterious moniker comes from the fact that these animals were all carted out of the car park in 23 giant crates, weighing up to 56 tonnes.

Continue reading "Jurassic Car Park" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 18, 2009
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If you’ve not had too much Darwin by now, here are some more stories that caught our collective Nature eyes.

In the Guardian, palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris writes:

[P]erhaps now is the time to rejoice not in what Darwin got right, and in demonstrating the reality of evolution in the context of entirely unexceptional natural processes there is no dispute, but what his inheritance is in terms of unfinished business.

Isn't it curious how evolution is regarded by some as a total, universe-embracing explanation, although those who treat it as a religion might protest and sometimes not gently. Don't worry, the science of evolution is certainly incomplete.

The New York Times profiles Richard Milner, the singing Darwin. “Officially, he is a science historian named Richard Milner, but he regularly turns into his hero on stage — complete with white beard, bowler and cape — in a one-man musical, ‘Charles Darwin: Live & In Concert’,” says the Times, which also has a video profile. Here him sing here.

Also in the Times, Carl Safina writes that “Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live”:

By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.

Darwin has also popped up on an internet site I’m told is very popular with young people at the moment. ‘Twitter’ lets you post short messages, similar to the ‘txts’ you can send via a cellular telephone.

“Thanks to all my well-wishers on my birthday,” says ‘cdarwin’.

“Happy Birthday to my co-discoverer,” says ‘arwallace’. Samuel Wilberforce is less magnanimous.

More
Secularist group posts 'Praise Darwin' billboards – USA Today
Google has a special Darwin’s 200th Birthday graphic (if it’s gone from the homepage, see here).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 12, 2009
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A burst of genetic changes occurred around 10 million years ago in one of the ancestors we share with chimpanzees, with consequences that are being felt today.

A new analysis of the genomes of macaques, orang-utans, chimpanzees and humans shows that DNA segments in this ancestor began to make duplicate copies at a very high rate around ten million years ago, even though other mutation processes such as single letter changes were slowing.

“There’s a big burst of activity that happens where genomes are suddenly rearranged and changed,” says Evan Eichler, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

He adds, “Because of the architecture of the human genome, genetic material is constantly being added and deleted in certain regions. These are really like volcanoes in the genome, blowing out pieces of DNA.”

In Nature the team reports that this duplication spree occurred before humans and chimpanzees diverged, around 6 million years ago, but after the divergence from orang-utans 12-16 million years ago and the divergence from macaques prior to that. (See also this week’s news feature on human evolution: The other strand.)

Continue reading "‘Volcanoes in the genome’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 12, 2009
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Don’t forget to check out this week’s Nature, which is the second of our three Darwin 200 special issues. Highlights include:

Editorial: Humanity and evolution
Charles Darwin's thinking about the natural world was profoundly influenced by his revulsion for slavery.

News Feature: The other strand
Geneticists looked to the human genome to understand human evolution. But it's hard to interpret without considering the inheritance of culture, finds Erika Check Hayden.

Commentaries: Should scientists study race and IQ?
In the first of two opposing commentaries, Steven Rose argues that studies investigating possible links between race, gender and intelligence do no good. In the second, Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams argue that such research is both morally defensible and important for the pursuit of truth.

Essay: A flight of fancy
Henry Nicholls wonders how things would be different had Charles Darwin given in to pressure from his publisher to rewrite Origin of Species into a popular book about pigeons.

Books and Arts: Poems from Darwin's descendant
Amid the many analyses of Darwin's life and work, a more intimate literary portrait emerges from the poetry of his great-great-granddaughter, Ruth Padel. Her series of poems on his life — six of which are reproduced here — evokes the emotion and drama of the naturalist's discoveries.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 12, 2009
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The UK’s Royal Mail is getting in on the Darwin 200 celebrations by issuing its own set of ten stamps.

Of the ten, six are jigsaw shaped, supposedly to symbolise the different areas that came together in his work. There are stamps for zoology, botany, geology, ornithology and anthropology, plus one of the great man’s head (below the fold).

There’s also this very pretty set of four, that comes together to make a map of the Galapagos.

Rather brilliantly, the Royal Mail sent giant versions of the stamps to the Zoo, where the animals were able to have a look.

“The distinctive jigsaw design of the stamps is a great way to link Darwin’s vast areas of research, while the special sheet is a beautiful representation of the Galapagos Islands,” says Julietta Edgar, head of Special Stamps at the Royal Mail (press release).

Darwin honoured on new British stamps – AFP
New stamps marking Darwin's birth – BBC

Continue reading "Darwin in stamps" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 12, 2009
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Posted for Declan Butler.

Today's newspapers are full of the supposed ‘news’ that the Vatican has reconciled Darwin and evolution as being compatible with Christian faith – see for example Vatican buries the hatchet with Charles Darwin and The Vatican claims Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with Christianity, or search for “Vatican” AND “evolution” on Google News.

The reports stem from remarks made this morning by archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, at a press conference in Rome detailing a conference to be held in Rome 3-7 March – Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories: A critical appraisal 150 years after ‘The Origin of Species’ – on the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. The meeting intended to boost dialogue between religion and science on evolution.

Ravasi, however, had already made similar statements last September, when the conference was first announced – see for example Evolution fine but no apology to Darwin: Vatican. Moreover, Roman Catholic Church theology has long cohabited comfortably with the science of evolution, with the church itself endorsing evolution in 1950, although with the theological rider that it should be a hypothesis and not a doctrine. And in 1996, pope Jean John Paul II – the man who rehabilitated Galileo – fully embraced evolution (see Nature’s new piece from back then, Papal confession: Darwin was right about evolution).

Continue reading "The Origin of the Scoops" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 11, 2009
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Last Friday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved its first drug produced by a genetically engineered animal. The drug, called ATryn, is produced by goats engineered to make the protein in their milk.

The approval ends a long struggle by… well several parties. The so-called “pharming” industry -- which aims to produce drugs in animals – struggled to convince investors to continue investing despite the absence of guidance on whether or how their drugs would eventually be approved. The FDA struggled to come up with a way to regulate the industry. And activists struggled to hold off the guidelines. (Europe, by the way, got its act together and approved ATryn over two years ago.)

ATryn is designated for use in patients with specific blood clotting disorders and its market will be relatively small. But although the drug itself is not likely to be a big money maker, the approval of ATryn brought a sigh of relief from pharming companies. “[It] really takes away one of the biggest issues that have always been on the table, which is how do regulatory agencies view this kind of technology,” Samir Singh of Pharming, a pharming company headquartered in Leiden, told The New York Times.

How about those investors? “Investors shrugged,” wrote Forbes' Matthew Herper in his beautifully titled blog post “Goats Make Drugs, World Doesn’t Change”. Stock in Massachusetts-based GTC Therapeutics, the company that produces ATryn, actually fell on Friday and is now trading at around $0.60 a share.

Posted by Heidi Ledford on February 09, 2009
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If you haven't had enough Darwin yet, here are some more tidbits.

“I think in many respects Wallace was as talented, if not more talented, than Darwin.”
David Grimaldi, curator of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, sings the praises of the poor man who has been forgotten in all this Darwin worship (Washington Post).

Previously
Darwin 200 - February 02, 2009
Darwin 200 redux

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 09, 2009
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Here’s another selection from the ongoing Darwin 200 celebrations.

Everyone has a blog these days. This one is a novelty though: Emma Darwin – wife of Charles – has started blogging for the snappily titled UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology.

“On the occasion of my dear husband’s 200th birthday, and in response to the prodigious quantity of material and events marking the year, I am compelled to add my voice, soft though it may be, to the loudening din,” writes Emma (who may or may not be Karen James, of the Natural History Museum).

“… It grieves me to learn that some in these modern times think of him as a cold, hard man failing in – or even actively shunning – the preciousness of human life, for it was in its very cause that my husband worked so painstakingly to demonstrate that the bond of common descent is shared by all living things.”

Continue reading "Darwin 200 redux" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 06, 2009
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In case you hadn’t noticed yet, we’re rapidly approaching the 200th birthday of Charlie Darwin. As the Darwin 200 celebrations become ever more frenzied, the Great Beyond will be rounding up the best of the world’s Darwin coverage, starting now.

Continue reading "Darwin 200" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 02, 2009
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The discovery of a fossil Asian turtle in the Canadian Arctic is leading some scientists to reconsider how these animals got to America.

According to researcher John Tarduno, of the University of Rochester, the fossil suggests that tropical turtles may have reached the New World from Asia not via Alaska but by coming directly over the poles.

“We’ve known there’s been an interchange of animals between Asia and North America in the late Cretaceous period, but this is the first example we have of a fossil in the High Arctic region showing how this migration may have taken place,” he says (press release).

“We’re talking about extremely warm, ice-free conditions in the Arctic region, allowing migrations across the pole.”

James Parham, who works at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and was not involved in the work, told Wired, “This paper is actually providing a route of dispersal for some of these animals. The story’s starting to slowly get pieced together.”

Continue reading "Tropical turtle’s Arctic travels" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 02, 2009
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One of the researchers behind last year’s pioneering stem cell windpipe transplant has revealed an early interest in medicine.

Anthony Hollander, of the University of Bristol, has revealed that as a child in 1973 he wrote to British children’s TV programme – and national institution – Blue Peter to request help, with better spelling than mine at age nine:

This may seem very strange, but I think I no how to make people or animals alive. Why Im teling you is because I cant get the things I need.

A list of what I need.
1. Diagram of how evreything works (inside youre body)
2. Model of a heart split in half, (both halvs)
3. The sort of sering [syringe] they yous for cleaning ears (Tsering must be very very clean)
4. Tools for cutting people open
5. Tools for stiches
6. Fiberglass box, 8 foot tall, 3 foot width.
7. Picture of a man showing all the arteries.

Continue reading "‘This may seem very strange, but I think I no [sic] how to make people or animals alive.’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 30, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Triceratops went head to head with their kin in prehistoric fights, according to new research.

Andrew Farke, of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Palaeontology in California, says exactly how the dinosaurs put their three horns to use has been a matter of some debate. But by comparing damage on triceratops skulls to a related species, centrosaurus, he may have provided an answer.

Writing in PLOS One, Farke and colleagues report that triceratops have significantly more damage to their squamosal bone, part of the frill, than centrosaurus.

“Paleontologists have debated the function of the bizarre skulls of horned dinosaurs for years now. Some speculated that the horns were for showing off to other dinosaurs, and others thought that the horns had to have been used in combat against other horned dinosaurs,” says Farke (press release).

“Our findings provide some of the best evidence to date that Triceratops might have locked horns with each other, wrestling like modern antelope and deer.”

Continue reading "Triceratops tête à tête" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 28, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok

The Texas State Board of Education appears to be of two minds over whether the merits of evolution should be debated in schools. On the one hand, board members got rid of a 20-year-old line in the science curriculum last week requiring that teachers cover the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories. On the other hand, that decision was immediately followed by a successful proposal to teach arguments "for and against" the idea that all organisms evolved from a common ancestor.

"How that differs from the old language of 'strengths and weaknesses' is not readily apparent," notes a New York Times editorial, which says the board "fumbled" the decision.

We've heard these arguments before. But Texas, the latest battleground state in the evolution curriculum controversy, is a bigger fish than most because it's so, well, big. The state has 4.7 million public school students (Houston Chronicle), making it one of the top textbook buyers in the country (New York Times). A Texas board decision could affect what publishers include in science textbooks nationwide.

The amendment to include arguments against common ancestry in the curriculum "could provide a small foothold for teaching creationist ideas and dumbing down biology instruction in Texas," says Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit that campaigned against the "strengths and weaknesses" requirement (Dallas Morning News). The other side begs to differ: "This isn't about religion," says board member Barbara Cargill, who supported the proposal to cover arguments against common descent (Houston Chronicle). "It's about science. We want to stick to the science."

A final vote on the curriculum is scheduled for March.

Image: Nature

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 27, 2009
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Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) is returning its HQ to the UK after being forced to move to Delaware in the US eight years ago. “We are an English company – we shouldn’t be based in America,” Andrew Baker, chairman and CEO is reported saying in the Telegraph.

HLS has survived despite being the subject of ongoing attacks from animal rights activists. The company does contract research for testing pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals, among other things, on animals. HLS was forced to relocate its headquarters to the US in 2001 after the Royal Bank of Scotland (now in a whole load of unrelated trouble) cut ties with the company because their staff were threatened. A list of shareholders in the company was obtained by animal rights activists, and many of those shareholders got rid of the shares. Unable to raise funds or hold a bank account in the UK apart from with the Bank of England, HLS moved to the US where shareholders were given more anonymity.

But recent trials of some of the activists have made the atmosphere in the UK better for HLS to return, although the economic climate is still pretty hostile.

Continue reading "Homecoming for Huntingdon Life Sciences" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on January 21, 2009
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Posted for Heidi Ledford

Our DNA sequence may not be the only ‘genetic’ information that we inherit from our parents, according to a study published online this week by Nature Genetics. An analysis of identical and fraternal twins shows that epigenetic changes – in the form of a chemical modification to DNA called methylation – are also passed on to the next generation.

DNA methylation can affect gene expression, and changes in DNA methylation have been linked to everything from normal developmental changes to illnesses including cancer. Zachary Kaminsky at the University of Toronto and his colleagues analyzed DNA methylation in different cells types taken from 114 identical twins and 80 fraternal twins. The researchers found that identical twins were more likely to share DNA methylation patterns.

Now, it’s still possible that these DNA methylation patterns are more similar in identical twins simply because the underlying DNA sequence is more similar. (Methylation typically occurs where a ‘C’ lies next to a ‘G’ in the DNA sequence.) But the authors argue that their results, combined with previous data from animal models, suggest that DNA methylation is inherited.

Continue reading "The same, but different" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on January 20, 2009
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Posted for Heidi Ledford

Watch out, woolly mammoth: the Tasmanian tiger is hot on your heels. Using DNA samples culled from museum specimens, researchers have sequenced DNA from the long-extinct Tasmanian tiger. The results were published online this week by Genome Research.

The ‘tiger’ – not really a tiger but a dog-like marsupial with charming stripes – has been extinct since 1936, but it’s not the first time that researchers have decided to muck around with its DNA. Last May, scientists in the United States and Australia plucked a DNA sequence from preserved Tasmanian tiger tissue and inserted it into transgenic mice.

Now, a different team has sequenced the full mitochondrial genome using samples from two ‘tigers’. The results hint at a high degree of inbreeding in the Tasmanian tiger population, a sad but common scenario for a species heading for extinction. The work has generated lots of media coverage (eg. The Scientist; Reuters) and the usual speculation about possible resurrection of the species. (They’ll be “freak shows”, worries The Examiner.)

Pennsylvania State University researcher Stephan Schuster has worked on both the ‘tiger’ and the woolly mammoth genome projects, and has referred to his approach of sequencing from museum specimens as ‘museomics’. There was a time, years ago, when a new ‘omics’ word would often be met with rolled eyes and a groan in the lab break room. Since then, I feel like many of us have come to accept increasingly contrived ’omics as just a fact of life in an era of high-throughput biology. But Jonathan Eisen (who himself coined the term ‘phylogenomics’) is not so complacent -- check out this posting on his latest award, “Worst New Omics Word Award”, and his list of new proposed ’omics.

Image: wikipedia

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 15, 2009
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Reports in the British media that grant applications to create hybrid human – animal embryos for research were turned down on moral grounds, have been rejected by the funding bodies and scientists involved.

The story broke in the Independent newspaper on Monday, which claimed Stephen Minger, a leading stem cell scientist at King’s College London, said that the grant applications may have been blocked by scientists on the funding committees who are morally opposed to the creation of cloned hybrid embryos.

But when Nature spoke to Minger he said the Independent misinterpreted his comments, adding he did not have any evidence that moral objections led to his proposal being rejected.

“I was not saying that religious or moral opposition to the proposal led to its rejection,” he said.

Continue reading "Moral objections to hybrid embryo research claims rejected " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on January 14, 2009
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The impact of human hunting on wildlife populations doesn’t end with the individual animal deaths — it also forces harmful evolutionary changes on animal populations, according to new research.

Although previous research has shown that hunted species evolve in response to predation, it was unclear whether hunting affects the rate of evolution.

Thus, evolutionary biologist Chris Darimont of the University of California, and his colleagues assessed how morphological characteristics of 29 species — including fish, limpets, snails, bighorn sheep, and two plants — changed over time.

Their findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that human-hunted species have undergone the most rapid change, and that this has forced dramatic shifts in features such as average size and age of reproductive animals.

"The public knows we often harvest far too many fish, but the threat goes above and beyond numbers," Darimont said in a press release. "We're changing the very essence of what remains, sometimes within the span of only two decades. We are the planet's super-predator."

Continue reading "Human hunting speeds up evolution of prey" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 13, 2009
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Drug regimes that increase the production of stem cells may circumvent some present limitations to a stem cell therapy, a new study suggests.

Stem cells have been hailed of late as the cures of disease and the saviours of patients. Yet researchers still face many obstacles before these new therapeutic tools can be put to work. For instance, what is the best way to generate stem cells, and how do you get them into the patients who need them? A study in Cell Stem Cell now shows that we may be able to side-step both of these issues by spurring bone marrow to boost stem cell production.

Previous studies have shown that treatment with granulocyte colony stimulating factor followed by recently approved Genzyme Corporation drug Mozobil can increase blood stem cell production. Sara Rankin, of Imperial College London, and her colleagues now show in mice that a different regime — endothelial growth factor followed by Mozobil — induces bone marrow to pump out two other types of stem cell.

Continue reading "Drug combo boosts stem-cell production" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 09, 2009
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Mosquitoes looking for love adjust the sound of their whine to woo partners, researchers report.

Male and female mosquitoes both have distinctive flight tones, which they make be beating their wings at different speeds. Whereas female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes beat at 400 Hz, males beat at 600 Hz. Surprisingly, Ronald Roy of Cornell University in Ithaca and his colleagues now report in Science that love struck males and females increase their wing beat frequency to a 1,200 Hz — a shared harmonic (or multiple) — when they are brought near one another.

Because mosquitoes normally zip around, unusual measures were taken for the study, Hoy told NPR.

First, the insects were anesthetized. "You make them a little bit chilly," Hoy says, "then they don't fly or walk around." Next, he and his colleagues applied a small amount of superglue to the backs of the test mosquitoes, then affixed them to a tiny tether and suspended them in the air.

Once the mosquitoes began to beat their wings and produce their gender-specific flight tones, the scientists moved the insects close to each other.

The authors also found that mosquitoes’ Johnston’s organs — their equivalent of ears — are sensitive up to 2,000 Hz. These findings challenge previous conceptions that mosquitoes can’t hear anything above 800 Hz, and might even be deaf.

Continue reading "Amorous mosquitoes make sweet harmonious whine" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 09, 2009
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Giant flying reptiles took off by running along on all four limbs rather than using a bird-like method to get airborne, according to a new study by Michael Habib.

“Using all four legs, it takes less than a second to get off of flat ground, no wind, no cliffs,” says the Johns Hopkins scientist (press release). “This was a good thing to be able to do if you lived in the late Cretaceous period and there were hungry tyrannosaurs wandering around.”

Habib thinks pterosaurs – which are definitely not dinosaurs – had much stronger ‘arms’ than ‘legs’. Comparing the bone strength of birds and pterosaur species he suggests that the reptiles folded their wings and hobbled around on their knuckles and did what would probably have been a highly comical series of “leap-frogging long-jumps” before sticking out their wings and taking off.

“They kind of pitch forward at first, the legs kick off first, then the arms take off,” he says (AP).

Not everyone is convinced. Sankar Chatterjee, of Texas Tech, told MSNBC he still believes they either jumped off cliffs or ran down and incline on two legs to get flying. However Mark Witton, of the University of Portsmouth, says he’s behind Habib:

The idea that pterosaurs were weather- or topography-dependent for takeoff and that they weren't strong flapping fliers - being essentially giant gliders - just doesn't make any sense. For one thing, the biggest pterosaurs, like the 500-pound critters Mike's been playing with, are often found miles and miles and miles from the nearest cliff:

… In fact, Mike's research was a big relief to me: My own research was pointing to the very controversial conclusion that some of the biggest pterosaurs were massing in the 250-kilogram / 500-pound ballpark, so when he told me that he'd found a way to get such a critter into the air I was very happy.

The research has been published in Zitteliana, but doesn’t appear to be online.

Image: Mark Witton.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 08, 2009
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Following last year’s woolly mammoth genome in Nature and the raft of coverage about the potential for Jurassic Park-style resurrections, the British press is getting in a tizzy over a list of 10 extinct animals we could see again.

The list – which includes Neanderthals and the dodo – has been produced by New Scientist, which says:

Assuming that we will develop the necessary technology, we have selected 10 extinct creatures that might one day be resurrected. Our choice is based not just on feasibility, but also on each animal's "megafaunal charisma" - just how exciting the prospect of resurrecting these animals is.

Even those quoted in the article are not entirely convinced by the choices. “I find the idea of resurrecting the Neanderthal so ridiculous that any speculation on surrogate mothers is superfluous,” says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Sadly the magazine has not attempted to factor in another key consideration, namely how tasty these things might be to eat.

Full list and coverage below the fold.

Continue reading "The Lazarus list " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 08, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Like the cast of a cheap zombie movie, British scientists want your braaaaaaains.

At a press conference in London, researchers said a lack of healthy and diseased brains was holding back work on Alzheimer's, autism and other conditions.

“There’s a great opportunity to facilitate important research to discover cures and treatments which would go unfulfilled if we don't increase the number of brains available for research,” Paul Francis, from King’s College London (Daily Telegraph).

Payam Rezaie, of the Neuropathology Research Laboratory at the Open University, says the situation is dire (BBC):

For autism, we only have maybe 15 or 20 brains that have been donated that we can do our research on. That is drastically awful. We would need at least 100 cases to get meaningful data. But that is just one example. A lot of research is being hindered by this restriction.

Only the Guardian seems to have noticed that a special “telephone helpline” will be set up to help people donate their brains to science. Always willing to lead by example, I will be offering up my brain to journalism researchers, provided that the helpline doesn’t have one of those awful systems which asks you to, “Press one to donate your brain to a chemist, press two to donate your brain to a biologist, press three to donate your brain to a medical researcher.”

More
Nature's Kerri Smith visited a brain bank at UCL for last month’s NeuroPod.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 07, 2009
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Researchers have discovered the first vertebrate to use mirrors rather than lenses to focus light in its eyes.

In this month’s Current Biology, Hans-Joachim Wagner, of Tübingen University in Germany, reports that the deep-sea spookfish (Dolichopteryx longipes) focuses light onto its retina using a multilayer stack of reflective plates.

“This is the first report of an ocular image being formed in a vertebrate eye by a mirror,” the research team write.

The paper was published early online in December when New Scientist noted that the fish appears to have four eyes – two looking up and two looking down. However, “It turns out that the spookfish actually has just two eyes, but each eye has two parts, one looking upwards and the other down. … The spookfish is the only deep-sea fish with eyes that have been shown to produce a focused image when looking both up and down.”

In a new press release, research member Julian Partridge, of the University of Bristol, says, “In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes - how to make an image - using a mirror.”

Of course, as the paper notes, invertebrates have been known to use mirrors for ages.

Image: Tammy Frank, Habor Branch Oceanographic Institution

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 07, 2009
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Pink Iguana discovered on Galapagos Islands, say the headlines. What the stories only get to later, if at all, is that they were discovered over 20 years ago.

Park rangers first spotted the land-based rosada (pink in Spanish) iguana in 1986. Now, Gabriele Gentile, of Rome's University Tor Vergata, and his colleagues report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that these reptiles represent a “unique” species of iguana.

On the basis of genetic analysis, the researchers show that the pink iguanas are genetically distinct from the two known species of land iguana found on the Galapagos — Conolophus pallidus and Conolophus subcristatus — and estimate that they diverged some 5.7 million years ago.

Continue reading "Newly discovered iguanas not so newly discovered" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on January 06, 2009
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The main suspect behind the US anthrax attacks is back in the news again. Bruce Ivins killed himself last year as authorities were building a case against him over the 2001 attacks that left five dead.

The New York Times has taken an extended look at Ivins:

That examination found that unless new evidence were to surface, the enormous public investment in the case would appear to have yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch, based on a pattern of damning circumstances, that Dr. Ivins was the perpetrator.

Focused for years on the wrong man, the [FBI] missed ample clues that Dr. Ivins deserved a closer look. Only after a change of leadership nearly five years after the attacks did the bureau more fully look into Dr. Ivins’s activities. That delay, and his death, may have put a more definitive outcome out of reach.

AP has, like the Times, been poring over documents from the case. It says records from the Frederick Police Department show Ivins “tormented his wife with rudeness and behaved erratically in the weeks before the Army scientist took his own life by overdosing on Tylenol”.

Previously from Nature
Did anthrax mailer act alone? - US senator Patrick Leahy says he does not believe the FBI theory that researcher Bruce Ivins acted alone in carrying out the 2001 anthrax attacks in the US, 19 September 2008.
Too close for comfort - Nancy Haigwood, director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, describes her encounters with anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins, 21 August 2008.
FBI to reveal anthrax data - Science of case will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals, 19 August 2008.
Anthrax: the FBI's case - The US Department of Justice today released a set of documents describing how its investigators linked Bruce Ivins, who died last week (Los Angeles Times), to the 2001 anthrax mailings, 06 August 2008.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 06, 2009
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Buzzing bees protect plants from pesky caterpillars, providing yet another example of the intricate and often unexpected linkages that make up food webs.

Leaf-eating caterpillars are the bane of gardeners and farmers. However, while these pesty predators search for tasty plants, they are hunted by carnivorous wasps. Consequently, caterpillars keep bristling sensory hairs alert for attacks from above and drop to the ground when they sense danger.

Biologist Jurgen Tautz of Biozentrum University in Bavaria, Germany, realized that the caterpillars' defence mechanism was not “fine-tuned" and suspected that “caterpillars cannot distinguish between hunting wasps and harmless bees." Thus, Tautz wondered whether bees might affect pest foraging behaviour (press release).

As reported in Current Biology, Tautz and his colleague Michael Rostas set up small tents that contained pepper and soya plants and voracious beet armyworm caterpillars. Unsurprisingly, the insects climbed the plants and devoured the foliage. When bees were introduced into the tents, however, the caterpillars stayed grounded, and hungry.

Continue reading "Buzz off, caterpillars!" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 23, 2008
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Cedric the Tasmanian devil has developed cancer, leaving researchers scrambling to find new strategies to save the endangered species.

Tasmanian devils are being decimated by a fatal and infectious cancer that spreads when one animal bites another. Wild population sizes have plummeted by 60% in the past 10 years, and experts predict that these feisty marsupials may be extinct within 20 years if no solution is found.

Researchers suspected earlier this year that one lucky devil, Cedric, was immune to the cancer, spurring hope that the “devil’s could be their own saviours”. A breeding programme, which would have seen Cedric’s cancer-resistant progeny repopulating the wild, was initiated.

Cedric has now developed two cancerous tumours on his face, however.

“It was very deflating, very, very disappointing,” cancer researcher Greg Woods from the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, told ABC news.

The tumours have been surgically removed and Cedric is expected to make a full recovery. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the breeding programme, which has been put on hold.

Top image: a Tasmanian devil (not Cedric)/ Getty.

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 22, 2008
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Dinosaur dads used to guard the nest and look after the kids, researchers have concluded, after comparing the sizes of dinosaur clutches with those of modern-day reptiles and birds.

While studying Troodon formosus, Oviraptor philoceratops and Citipati osmolskae — three species of bird-like dinosaurs — David Varricchio, a paleontologist at Montana State University in Bozeman, and his colleagues made a curious observation. "By volume, these dinosaurs were laying clutches that were two to three times larger than what would be expected for their adult body size," Varricchio told National Geographic.

They examined the sizes of clutches from 400 species of reptiles and birds. Clutches that were cared for by dads were the largest, followed by clutches that were cared for by mothers. Clutches that were cared for by mother–father pairs were the smallest. These findings, they report in Science, suggest that because Oviraptor, Citipati and Troodon clutches were so large, males may have been the primary care providers.

While journalists delight in the “softer side” of dinosaur culture (Reuters, Globe and Mail), these findings have implications for today’s bird watchers — they suggest that the primary paternal care system of some modern-day birds might be an evolutionary relic from ancestral dinosaurs.

Top image: Bill Parsons.

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 19, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Anna Petherick

Cambridge University opened a big black Physics of Medicine centre this week, inviting Nobel Prize winner Sir Aaron Klug along for the plaque-revealing ceremony.

The swish new centre is in the rapidly developing West Cambridge site, which also houses the William Gates Building computing laboratory. The Physics of Medicine building makes the next door Cavendish laboratory—where most of the university’s physics research happens—look rather short and 1970s-shabby.

Athene Donald, deputy head of physics, will run the new center. She was recently profiled in The Observer and on BBC Radio 4 after being made a laureate of the UNESCO/L’Oreal-sponsored Women in Science awards.

The centre aims to become the place to go if you want to research anything biophysical, from tissue scaffolds to the properties of the eye’s optical fibres.

Top image: The new centre, with Sir Aaron Klug in the far left. University of Cambridge/Philip Mynott.

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 19, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Via the Panda’s Thumb blog, here comes another science song for your delectation.

Tiktaalik (Your Inner Fish), by the Indoorfins, concerns the strange ‘fishapod’ fossil that is halfway between the gutter and the stars fish and land-dwellers. It was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania’s reading project on Neil Shubin’s book Your Inner Fish.

Shubin discovered the Tiktaalik fossil, and is commemorated in this song:

From the water to the land I;
Learn to swim and learn to stand I'm;
Found here by the hands of Neil Shubin.
Carry me home;
To find the Inner fish unknown

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists
Songs about science part VI: ‘Don’t go messing with our telescope’
Songs about science VII: ‘It’s a long way from Amphioxus’
Songs about pseudo-science
Songs about science part VIII: the astrobiology rap
Songs about science IX: Rollin’ to the Future
Songs about science X: drilling’s killer songs
Songs about science XI: Charlie Darwin

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 16, 2008
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Sad news from the squid world. The awesome, though slightly terrifying, Humboldt squid is not going to do well as the oceans acidify.

Driven by increased emissions of carbon dioxide, the world’s oceans are likely to be increasingly acidic in the next 100 years. When researchers Brad Seibel and Rui Rosa exposed Humboldt (Dosidicus gigas) to these levels the animals got lazy, with metabolic rates down 31% and activity levels down 45%, they report in PNAS.

The squid spend their days in the deep ocean where there isn’t much oxygen, but they recover in well-oxygenated near-surface waters at night, explains University of Rhode Island researcher Seibel (press release). But low oxygen levels in deep waters could expand to shallower depths and increased temperatures and carbon dioxide levels of surface waters could mean trouble

“In the future, the habitable window between low oxygen at depth and acidified and warmer waters at the surface will grow narrower,” says Rosa (BBC). “The net result will be that the squid may become more susceptible to predators, less able to capture prey, or may be forced to migrate elsewhere, altering the oceanic food web.”

More squid news below

Continue reading "Super squid special" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 16, 2008
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Seven genes have been newly linked to obesity in humans, thanks to two big sequence-sifting studies published in Nature Genetics this week (Times, Financial Times). The Icelandic company deCODE Genetics has the list of seven genetic variants in their paper, and six - including one the deCODE team says was already known - were found by an academic consortium with the happy acronym of GIANT.

The results sound as though 'mind over matter' applies even in the biologically big-boned: five of these genes are expressed in the brain.

"Until 2007, no genetic associations had been found for 'common obesity', but today almost all those we have uncovered are likely to influence brain function,” says Ines Barroso of GIANT (press release on Science Daily). Her colleague Joel Hirschhorn concludes, “Inherited variation in appetite regulation may have something to do with predisposition to obesity.”

Continue reading "Genes found for thinking yourself thin" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 15, 2008
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An ancient amphibian that roamed the earth and its lakes 210 million years ago may have had the world's most bizarre bite — rather than opening its mouths by lowering its bottom jaw, like other vertebrates, Gerrothorax pulcherrimus would raise its upper jaw.

Or, according to Reuters, “it lifted the top of its head in a way that looked a lot like lifting the lid of a toilet seat”.

Palaeontologist Farish Jenkins, of Harvard University, and his colleagues published their finding on this abnormal amphibian's upside-down bite in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“It’s the ugliest animal in the world,” Jenkins told Reuters.

Continue reading "Amphibian's upside-down bite bites" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 15, 2008
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A European court has fined France 10 million Euros ($12.9 million) for failing to amend its laws on genetically modified crops and foods.

European Union passed a directive in 2001 that regulates the use of GM crops, including how GM crops are grown for crop and seed production and how GM crops are imported. Individual European governments were supposed to integrate the law into their own national legislation by 2002, but France has repeatedly dragged its feet.

The European Court of Justice has now issued a statement saying that the "unlawful conduct repeatedly engaged in by France in the GMOs sector is of such a nature as to require the adoption of a dissuasive measure, such as a lump sum payment".

Continue reading "France fined over GM law" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 10, 2008
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Dogs get jealous when given unequal rewards for their faithful obedience, according to a new PNAS paper being mediafied with gusto.

In solo dog-on-human tests, pooches trained to ‘shake hands’ will offer a paw gratis, say researchers at the University of Vienna’s Clever Dog Lab. But if a nearby dog gets a treat for each shake while they go unrewarded, they’ll act upset and refuse to comply.

"Animals react to inequity; to avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently," said study leader Friederike Range (AP).

The Independent, which clearly spares no expense for doggie mind-reading, concludes: “Canines are capable of withdrawing their co-operation and friendship if they see another dog get tasty sausage morsels that they feel they deserve.” New Scientist goes for the clever-but-inaccurate headline “Jealous dogs don’t play ball”.

The study seems less important for sociobiology than for dinner conversation fodder (watch out for biased distribution of under-table scraps). But the doggy envy is being compared to that of capuchin monkeys, the only other non-humans found to have a sense of equity – Scientific American summarizes this nicely.

The researchers are now rearing wolf pups for further research, to see if domestication causes jealousy. But could there be other influences? “[T]he green-eyed monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on” sounds like more of a cat thing to me.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 09, 2008
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A waterproof rice that can survive more than 2 weeks of total submersion has aced field tests and is nearly ready for official release, it was announced recently.

Researchers discovered 13 years ago that the gene sub1A makes rice plants flood resistant — rather than extending stems and leaves to try to escape a flood, plants with sub1a become dormant and conserve energy during flooding and then thrive when the floodwaters recede.

Annual flooding currently results in losses of US$1 billion worth of rice in South and South-East Asia. In Bangladesh and India, up to 4 million tonnes of rice, enough to feed 30 million people, is lost each year to flooding.

Continue reading "Waterproof rice coming soon" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 08, 2008
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Posted for Asher Mullard

A European agency has rejected an appeal for a patent on developing human embryonic stem cells.

The proposed patent, submitted by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, sought to protect a method used to culture embryonic stem cells, developed by stem cell pioneer James Thomson.

“Decisive in the [appeal board] ruling was the application's claim regarding human stem cell cultures,” says a statement from the European Patent Office. “The [board] decided that under the European Patent Convention it is not possible to grant a patent for an invention which necessarily involves the use and destruction of human embryos.”

Continue reading "European stem cell patent fails, again" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 28, 2008
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It was with a heavy heart that this correspondent read yesterday (BBC report by Sarah Mukherjee) that numbers of fungi experts (mycologists) in the UK are dwindling. Within ten years, according to scientists from the Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International, in Oxfordshire, all our fungi experts will be gone, never to be replaced.

The news has also reached the ears of Steve Connor at the Independent and was deemed so important to Sarah Mukherjee at the BBC that she wrote two stories about it.

Mushroomers have an amazing job. I honestly have no idea why young people wouldn’t be inspired to research fungi. New species are still being discovered, and you can make very funny jokes. Like calling yourself a “fungi to be with”.

For a rather bizarre round up of why fungi are important check out this article from the BBC.

Nature News reported on an historical line of fungi experts, beginning with Edward Gange, the fungal recorder for the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, whose son is also a fungus expert – see this news story from last year, and John Whitfield’s take on his own story. Let’s hope that the UK’s expertise in fungi is not reliant only on the Gange family in future.

Image of the fly agaric fungus: Wellcome library, London

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on November 28, 2008
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The Great Beyond has sniffed out some great science news for dog lovers.

First up: New Scientist reports from an American Physical Society meeting in Texas that canines’ amazing sense of smell is all down to the slime on their noses. Apparently the mucus layer on wet dog noses absorbs some molecules faster than others. Now Brent Craven of Pennsylvania State University has used MRI images and computer models to show some molecules are detected at different points in the doggy airways.

“We’ve shown that the sorting out of the different odorants before they even get to the receptors is ... important,” says Craven.

All that super-smell-sense comes in handy when you’re a dog like Tucker, who works for researchers from the University of Washington. Tucker has the glamorous job of standing in the bows of a research boat and sniffing out whale excrement, it was reported last week.

The Seattle Times says:

When Tucker finds what researchers are looking for, he gets to play with his ball. So he is a highly motivated tracker — and in the summers of 2006 and 2008, he helped track down some of 130 samples of scat from orca whales in Puget Sound's J, K and L pods.

Hormone levels in the excrement show that Puget Sound’s resident orcas are nutritionally deprived, says Sam Wasser, director of the UW’s Center for Conservation Biology.

Finally, spare a thought for Matthew Marcum, whose dog blasted him with a shotgun. “He’s a good dog. It’s just one of those things. It’s an accident,” Marcum told The Oregonian.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 27, 2008
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The theory that the huge ancient cave bear died off around 15,000 years ago has been challenged by a new paper.

Martina Pacher and Anthony Stuart claim that Ursus spelaeus likely went extinct around 27,8000 years ago, and its problem was an ice-age triggered food shortage, not nasty men with pointy sticks.

“Its highly specialised mode of life, especially a diet of high-quality plants, and its restricted distribution left it vulnerable to extinction as the climate cooled and its food source diminished,” says Pacher, of the University of Vienna (press release).

Continue reading "Humanity off the hook for cave bear extinction" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 26, 2008
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Amphibian experts gathered today at the Zoological Society of London to hear about the sorry state of the world’s frogs, toads, newts, salamanders and caecilians.

“I can hardly think of a more important subject for us to be covering today,” ZSL’s director general Lesley Dickie Ralph Armond* told the gathered scientists. “Human intervention is essential for the survival of a vast range of amphibian species.”

While much has been made of the nasty infectious disease chytridiomycosis, Angus Carpenter of the University of East Anglia told the symposium of another problem: the global amphibian trade.

Data on species imported into countries and declared under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species between 1985 and 2008 show that over 100 million frogs were traded for meat, making over 26,000,000 kg of meat in total.

In the same timeframe 617,000 individual frogs were traded, mostly for the pet trade.

Continue reading "The international amphibian trade blues" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 20, 2008
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This week’s copy of Nature contains a paper that may far in the future help with the return of a woolly face from the past.

“Here we describe 4.17 billion bases (Gb) of sequence from several mammoth specimens, 3.3 billion (80%) of which are from the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) genome and thus comprise an extensive set of genome-wide sequence from an extinct species,” write Webb Miller of Penn State University, and his colleagues.

It’s only the genome of a woolly mammoth!

So does this mean the lumbering beasts could soon be roaming a zoo near you? In another part of this issue of Nature, as part of our Darwin 200 coverage, Henry Nicholls says ‘Let's make a mammoth’:

It would be a huge undertaking ... . Perhaps the whole idea will remain too strange, too expensive, too impractical, even too unappealing for anyone to take seriously.

But the fact that just 15 years ago cloning mammals was confidently ruled out by many as being impractical should give people pause before saying any such thing is impossible. On Darwin's 200th birthday in 2009, reoriginating extinct animal species will still be a fantasy. By 2059, who knows what may have returned, rebooted, to walk the Earth?

More tusk-tastic coverage below the fold

Continue reading "Researchers complete mammoth task" »