Last month staff at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, part of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), were sent fake emails that purported to come from Nicholas Stern, the head of the institute.

“The attacker did not gain access to any e-mail messages. The attack was identified very quickly by members of the school’s IT security team who took steps to prevent it from causing any damage,” says Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the institute.

This is not a computer hacking incident such as some commentators have suggested occurred in the so-called climate-gate theft of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Instead, this is an email spoofing attack where an incoming email is doctored to make it look like it has come from someone other than the real sender.

Further details on the content of the email were not available. Spoofing attacks can be used to trick the recipient into revealing information of use to the spoofer or to get them to open files that may contain computer viruses, among other things.

The fact that the message purported to come from Stern might suggest this was more targeted than a run-of-the-mill ‘phishing’ attack for bank details, perhaps even an incident inspired by the climate-gate theft, which gave succour to climate sceptics.

However Ward says there are “no indications of the motives behind the attack”.

Details of the attack have been passed to the Police Central eCrime Unit.

Researchers Paul Selden and Diying Huang, of the University of Kansas and the Chinese Academy of Sciences respectively, have datee them to around 165 million years ago and identified them as a new species.

They are also, say Selden and Huang, unmistakably members of the modern spider family Plectreuridae. This group is currently only found in southwest USA, Mexico, Cuba, and Costa Rica.

“This new discovery not only extends the fossil record of the family by at least 120 Ma to the Middle Jurassic but also supports the hypothesis of a different distribution of the family in the past than today and subsequent extinction over much of its former range,” they write in Naturwissenschaften.

Arachnophobes may be slightly relieved to learn that these are tiny, with the spider’s body length struggling to reach even 5 mm.

They are, however, stunningly well preserved. “You go in with a microscope, and bingo! It’s fantastic,” Selden told Wired.

For more great pictures of fossil spiders, check out Selden’s recent review paper – co-authored with David Penney of the University of Manchester – in Biological Reviews.

Images: courtesy of Paul Selden.

The team found that mothers over 40 were 51% more likely to have an autistic child than mothers between 25 and 29 (see table for absolute risks).

“This study challenges a current theory in autism epidemiology that identifies the father’s age as a key factor in increasing the risk of having a child with autism,” says study author Janie Shelton, of the University of California, Davis (press release).

What Shelton and her colleagues found is that maternal age consistently increases autism risk but paternal age is only important when the father is older and the mother is under 30. The reason older parents experience these problems is not clear, although genetic, endocrine, immunological and environmental explanations have all been suggested.

“We still need to figure out what it is about older parents that puts their children at greater risk for autism and other adverse outcomes, so that we can begin to design interventions,” paper author Irva Hertz-Picciotto told AFP.

Recent trends for delaying childbearing led to a 4.6% increase in autism diagnoses in California over the 1990s, the researchers say. However the overall increase in autism diagnoses is greater than this, and isn’t just confined to older mothers.

“I don’t think a mom blaming herself is going to help us understand what's causing autism or help prevent further cases,” says Shelton (CNN). “I would urge parents not to blame themselves, regardless of what age they are.”

The study is published in Autism Research.

Table: UC Regents

The problem, says Hugo Destaillats, is that nicotine in tobacco smoke sticks to walls, floors, ceilings, anything it touches basically. In tests at the of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the United States, Destaillats and his colleagues showed that this residue reacts with nitrous acid to form seriously carcinogenic compounds.

“Our study shows that when this residual nicotine reacts with ambient nitrous acid it forms carcinogenic tobacco-specific nitrosamines or TSNAs,” says Destaillats, of Berkeley Lab (press release). “TSNAs are among the most broadly acting and potent carcinogens present in unburned tobacco and tobacco smoke.”

In tests on a smoker’s truck the team found “substantial” amounts of cancer-causing TSNAs. Then in experiments designed to model indoor tobacco smoking they found that these TSNAs were produced in high quantities when residue-laden surfaces are exposed to nitrous acid, which is produced by equipment such as gas cookers.

Third-hand smoke, they write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, “represents an unappreciated health hazard”.

And don’t think you can get away with smoking outside either.

“Smoking outside is better than smoking indoors but nicotine residues will stick to a smoker’s skin and clothing,” says study author Lara Gundel (press release). “Those residues follow a smoker back inside and get spread everywhere.

“The biggest risk is to young children. Dermal uptake of the nicotine through a child’s skin is likely to occur when the smoker returns and if nitrous acid is in the air, which it usually is, then TSNAs will be formed.”

Are any smokers out there actually going to quit as a result of this finding though?

Image: Punchstock

“What our study suggests is that some people are genetically programmed to age at a faster rate,” says co-author Tim Spector (AFP). “The effect was quite considerable in those with the variant, equivalent to between three-to-four years of ‘biological ageing’.”

Chronological age is measured in years, but the pace of biological ageing varies. This age has a lot to do with smoking, unhealthy diets, and the length of your telomeres—the little caps at the end of chromosomes that shorten every time cells copy themselves. Shorter telomeres means biologically older. When telomere length reaches a critical value, the result is cell death.

“I see patients in their 80s with high blood pressure who have healthy coronary arteries and I see people in their 40s who don’t seem to have any risk factors yet have advanced heart disease,” says co-author Nilesh Samani (Guardian).

After studying 500,000 genetic variations, the researchers find that a variant near the gene TERC determines how long telomeres are and how quickly they shorten. This variant may make people more vulnerable to many age-related maladies, including some types of cancer.

“It is the first step to understanding why people age,” Samani says (Telegraph). “Once we have a full understanding we should be able to manipulate it in a manner to influence how someone ages.”

People carrying this genetic sequence probably make less telomerase, an enzyme that repair telomeres, when they are growing in the womb. However, simply “introducing telomerase might protect you from heart disease, but if you turn it on willy nilly you could cause cancer instead,” Samani warns (Guardian).

Still, the discovery paves the way for screening programmes and raises the best hope yet for drugs that prevent the biological wear and tear behind common age-related conditions (Guardian).

“I did reflect one day when I saw the way the Government was being criticised for the absence of salt on the roads for the snow that comes once every decade and then in the same breath being criticised for over-preparing for influenza, which comes once every 20 years.”
Andrew Witty, chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, talks to the Telegraph.

“Entirely separate from love graffiti, sex graffiti reaches its one and only peak in December, before declining for the rest of the school year. Perhaps students also ‘get lucky’ in the summer— but if so, the luckiest part is that they’re not in the library to write about it.”
Quinn Dombrowski, has been constructing a ‘pseudo-scientific analysis’ of graffiti left in the main library at the University of Chicago (Inkling Magazine).

Nature’s Geoff Brumfiel noted at the end of January that the UK’s runaway debt (£800 billion and counting) was set to trigger serious cuts in public spending. Now the Guardian has weighed in, warning that universities are planning to “axe thousands of teaching jobs, close campuses and ditch courses”.

Strike action is already being considered at some universities and the University and College Union is warning today that 15,000 jobs could be at risk.

The Guardian quotes business secretary Peter Mandelson saying universities have to do “no more than their fair share of belt-tightening”.

The Times notes that more students will be disappointed in their search for university places. Numbers from umbrella group Universities UK indicate there could be 1.5 applicants per place, up from 1.3 last year.

On Saturday, Mike Baker at the BBC played down claims that the UK’s higher education sector faced a meltdown.

“It is likely that the universities we know today will have to change considerably over the next five to 10 years as they adapt to a very different financial climate than the one they have known for the past 15 years,” he wrote. “It is going to be a challenge. There will be victims. But if the higher education system is adaptable it should avoid ‘meltdown’.”

Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia scientist whose stolen emails caused the worldwide ‘climate-gate’ kerfuffle, has told The Sunday Times he contemplated killing himself.

“I did think about it, yes. About suicide,” he says. “I thought about it several times, but I think I’ve got past that stage now.”

Jones also told the paper he is now on beta blockers and taking sleeping pills in the aftermath of the email theft. He continues to receive death threats.

The issue of how climate researchers deal with freedom of information requests has become a big part of ‘climate-gate’. Now the Daily Telegraph has opened a new front in this campaign, attacking the Met Office for refusing to release correspondence between its director of climate science and colleagues on the IPCC.

It says the Met Office initially claimed the correspondence had been deleted and then later said they existed but could not be disclosed.

“It was an important event,” said Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency. “… A very beautiful launch.”

Among the cargo is the European-made Cupola, a collection of seven windows that will allow space station dwellers to look directly out into space. The Cupola will attach to the Tranquility node, which Endeavour is also carting up into orbit.

Once Tranquility is installed, astronauts will move in air purifiers, urine converters and a bathroom which are currently cluttering the station’s Destiny science laboratory.

Image: NASA/Jim Grossmann

"Criticise any field of science these days and you grow accustomed to such gentilities of academic discourse from the laboratory cloister as, 'How dare you', 'Get off our patch' and 'Jenkins, you are a grade-one ­arsehole'."
Simon Jenkins of The Guardian prompts scientists to get off their pedestals and be more self-critcal in the aftermath of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Himalayan glacier claim and the University of East Anglia email affair. Annoyance and discussion on Nature Network.

"Radioactive material from a military base in Latvia is thought to have been thrown into Swedish waters. For many the biggest shock is that the Swedish government may have known at the time and done nothing about it," the BBC says.

A former commander of the Russian navy's Baltic fleet today denied the reports. "This is complete nonsense and a clear provocation, propagated at an international level," Admiral Vladimir Yegorov told the Interfax news agency (AFP).

The Baltic Sea at Darłowo/wikimedia commons

New pictures of Pluto taken by the Hubble space telescope show that the dwarf planet became significantly redder between 2000 and 2002. The images are the most detailed pictures taken of Pluto and are made up from a suite of images taken in 2002 and 2003. Comparing these images with those from 1994 reveals that Pluto’s northern hemisphere has brightened and its southern hemisphere has darkened.

Indian Premier Manmohan Singh has backed the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, who has come under fire for his dealing with a recently discovered error and a number of other alleged inaccuracies in the last IPCC report.

The IPCC had mistakenly stated in its 2007 report that all Himalayan glaciers are likely to melt away by 2035 as a result of global warming. The error, and allegations of conflict of interest against Pachauri, who also acts as director of The Energy Research Institute (TERI) in Delhi, have resulted in calls for Pachauri to resign as chairman of the IPCC.

Addressing a TERI-hosted meeting in Delhi on sustainable development Singh acknowledged that "some aspects of science reflected in the work of the IPCC have faced criticism".
But he said that "India has full confidence in the IPCC process and its leadership and will support it in every way."
Pachauri conceded last month that the IPCC's Himalayan estimates were wrong, but asserts that he was not personally responsible for the error.

Posted on behalf of Quirin Schiermeier

Cross posted from Spoonful of Medicine

The US Patent and Trademark Office granted its first license related to induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to a California biotech, Fate Therapeutics, the company announced today. The decision comes hot on the heels of the UK Intellectual Property Office awarding a similar patent in Britain to a rival California firm, iPierian.

The new, US patent credits the Whitehead Institute's Rudolf Jaenisch, a scientific founder with Fate Therapeutics who licensed the technology to the company, and his former postdoc Konrad Hochedlinger, now at the Massachusetts General Hospital, with inventing a method for reprogramming cells in 2003 — three years before Kyoto University 's Shinya Yamanaka reported the first bona fide iPS cells, in mice.

The patent, however, is fairly limited in scope. It only covers methods that involve introducing one or more reprogramming genes into an adult cell that has been genetically engineered to carry another pluripotency gene in its genome. Although Yamanaka did genetically modify the mouse skin cells used to create the first iPS cells, this technique has since become obsolete*.