Author Archives: Ananyo Bhattacharya

Researchers urge Spain to stay smoke-free

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{credit}Tomasz Sienicki/Wikimedia Commons{/credit}

Posted on behalf of Nuno Dominguez.

Tobacco-control experts from 14 countries today advised Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy against changing anti-smoking laws to land a multibillion-dollar casino project in the country’s capital.

Reversing current smoke-free legislation would be a “shortsighted” move “with long-term negative consequences for the health and the economy of Spain, and for global tobacco control”, says an open letter to Rajoy by 37 doctors and tobacco control researchers at leading US and European institutions.

The letter is a response to US billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s plan to build a new €17-billion (US$23-billion) casino complex on the outskirts of Madrid. Adelson has said that the development will go ahead only if current legislation is changed to allow smoking at gaming tables. The regional and central government have repeatedly expressed their interest in landing the project, which could create 92,000 jobs in a country that has the highest unemployment rates in the European Union, and in a city that recently lost the race to host the 2020 Olympics. A decision has yet to be made but Spain’s government is currently considering how to defang the current legislation, which bans smoking in bars, restaurants, casinos and any other public establishments.

Allowing smoking in enclosed public spaces could reverse key health gains, including the recent fall in the incidence of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, says the letter, originally published by the science news website Materia. Lifting the smoking ban in Eurovegas will also break the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which Spain has ratified. Spain’s smoke-free law is “recognized by the international public health community as an example of good practice”, says the letter, and diluting it will have an impact on other countries. “The tobacco industry and its allies are always trying to dismantle anti-tobacco laws”, said cosigner Anna Gilmore of the Centre for Tobacco Control Studies of the University of Bath, UK. “A victory in Spain will encourage to keep on pushing in other countries,” she said.

Researcher posts protected Science Curiosity papers on blog

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Posted on behalf of Eliot Barford.

An American scientist and noted blogger has posted copies of newly published papers about NASA’s Curiosity expedition on his personal website, potentially breaking copyright laws.

Michael Eisen, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, reproduced the papers — originally published behind a paywall in the journal Science — on his blog yesterday, claiming he was motivated by public interest in the Curiosity project, which is funded by US taxpayers.

Eisen argues that the papers may not be under copyright as most of their authors work for NASA, and are therefore US government employees, who are whose work is not bound by copyright laws. He writes that “in the interests of helping NASA and Science magazine comply with US law, I am making copies of these papers freely available here”.

US law states that work prepared by “an officer or employee of the United States government” is not subject to US copyright, and can be reproduced and distributed. However, whether this restricts Science’s right to enforce a paywall on its published content is not apparent.

Eisen has previously campaigned in support of open access to scientific findings. He co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit open-access publisher of peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Science does not retain copyright of work it publishes, which remains with authors. Authors are permitted to distribute copies of final versions of articles after they are published by the journal, which also makes all peer-reviewed research content freely available a year after publication.

The papers in question describe findings by Curiosity in Mars’s Gale Crater, including a small proportion of water in a soil sample. For more on the articles, see Nature’s news summary.

Australian science embroiled in government leadership row

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Posted on behalf of Cheryl Jones.

Fears abound that Australian science funding will be vulnerable to cuts after a succession of changes of minister in the science-and-research portfolios amid a protracted battle for the leadership of the minority Labor government.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday appointed Craig Emerson minister for tertiary education, skills, science and research. He will be the fourth cabinet minister covering science and research in less than 16 months.

The science-and-research portfolios cover university research and the science agencies, including the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

Emerson will add science and research to other portfolios, including trade. He will be assisted by Don Farrell, who has been appointed science-and-research minister, a separate position outside the cabinet.

The latest upheaval is the result of leadership tensions since Gillard unseated former prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2010.

Emerson’s appointment followed the resignation last week of science-and-research minister Chris Bowen, a Rudd supporter, after a failed attempt to unseat Gillard. Bowen had been in the position for less than two months.

Belinda Robinson, chief executive of Universities Australia, which covers Australia’s 39 universities, says the high turnover of ministers has been “destabilizing”.

“We’ve had a stop-start approach to funding, particularly around research and research infrastructure,” she says. “As we get closer to the budget, I think that instability has become of quite profound concern to the sector.”

The government will deliver the budget in May.

French scientists protest against research bill

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Posted on behalf of  Barbara Casassus.

A number of higher-education unions and the campaign group Let’s Save Research called a strike today demanding withdrawal of a bill, adopted yesterday by the French cabinet, to reform higher education and research.

The bill is aimed to remedy flaws in a 2007 law (loi relative aux libertés et responsabilités des universités; LRU), but has been described by the protestors as being more of the same. “As in Quebec, Great Britain and Chile, French universities are being deliberately driven to bankruptcy by laws,” they said in a joint statement.

A group of anonymous academy rectors also denounced the bill in an op-ed published on the website of L’Express magazine, saying that the law represented a “race to the bottom” and would turn universities into “ships adrift at sea”.

The bill, which will be presented to parliament on 27 May and should become law by the end of July, has two main priorities, higher-education and research minister Geneviève Fioraso told the cabinet. They are: to raise the student success rate, and to simplify the higher-education and research landscape — which includes research agencies, institutes and universities — and foster cooperation rather than competition between different institutions.

Although the pledge to create 1,000 posts annually during President François Hollande’s five-year term is maintained in the bill, Fioraso acknowledges that France’s huge budget deficit “does not allow [the government] to respond immediately to universities’ preoccupations” with funding since they obtained autonomy under the 2007 law.

The 20-measure bill replaces three advisory bodies with a strategic council for research, which would be chaired by the prime minister and would steer more operating funds away from National Research Agency projects and towards labs for basic research to help ease the annual scramble for cash.

It would replace the much-criticized evaluation agency AERES by a High Council for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education, which would ovesee “rigorous” self-evaluation and conduct evaluation itself only on request. It would also replace the 26 PRES clusters of research agencies, universities and grandes écoles with about 30 regional “communities” with a wider reach, and would foster technology transfer for innovative and exportable products, with a target for this year of creating about 100.

Human-rights court orders world’s last IVF ban to be lifted

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Posted on behalf of Michele Catanzaro.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ordered the only country in the world that completely prohibits in vitro fertilization (IVF) to lift its ban.

The court’s ruling means that Costa Rica must regulate the implementation of IVF, gradually provide it through the social security system and pay compensation to people affected by the ban in the past 12 years. The court is based in Costa Rica’s capital, San José, but rules on human-rights violations throughout Central and South America.

IVF was legal in Costa Rica between 1995 and 2000, but the country’s constitutional court prohibited it in 2000. The ban is based on the right to life since the moment of conception, recognized by article 4 of the American Convention on Human Rights, because not every egg fertilized during the procedure is implanted.

In 2001, nine infertile couples presented a petition against the ban to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, resulting in a hearing at the court in September this year (see ‘Human-rights court to rule on fertility-treatment ban‘). The court’s decision, dated 28 November, was published last week.

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Massive solar flare could have caused eighth century radiation burst

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Posted on behalf of Rick Lovett.

A mysterious spike in atmospheric carbon-14 levels 12 centuries ago might be a sign the Sun is capable of producing solar storms dozens of times worse than anything we’ve ever seen, a team of physicists calculates in a paper published this week in Nature.

Carbon-14 (14C) is created when high-energy radiation strikes the Earth’s upper atmosphere, converting nitrogen-14 into 14C, which eventually makes its way into plants via photosynthesis.

Earlier this year, a team of Japanese physicists discovered a spike in 14C in tree rings of Japanese cedars dating from the 774–75 growing season. But they were unable to explain where that 14C might have come from because all possible explanations appeared unlikely.

But Adrian Melott, a physicist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, who is the lead author of the new study, says that the Japanese team made a miscalculation in ruling out one of these possibilities — a giant solar storm.

The problem, Melott says, is that the Japanese team treated solar storms as if they shone like light bulbs, radiating energy uniformly in all directions. But actually, they produce ‘blobs’ of energetic plasma that explode outwards unevenly. Adjusting for that, he says, reduces the size of the solar storm needed to produce the observed 14C spike from 1,000 times larger than anything known, to only 10–20 times larger — meaning that a giant solar storm is suddenly back on the table as a reasonable explanation.

Furthermore, observations by NASA’s Kepler space telescope have found that Sun-like stars are capable of generating superstorms of this type every few hundred to 1,000 years. This doesn’t mean the Sun does the same, “but it suggests it’s reasonable”, Melott says.

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UK Chancellor Osborne throws his weight – and a little money – behind science

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{credit}Source: EUROSTAT{/credit}

The British economy is in shtook, as the island’s residents might say. Recovering slowly from a double dip recession, policy experts agree that the answer is to shift its economy away from its reliance on finance to high tech services and manufacturing. Do that, and the UK has some hope of competing with the emerging economies of India and China in the future.

The problem – and it’s a doozy – is that spending on research and development by UK businesses has been in decline for around 30 years and while successive governments have funded basic science decently (though public spend on science as a proportion of GDP is lower than every G7 country except Italy), spending on applied research has seriously lagged. Add to that a long-standing reluctance for politicians to come up with an industrial strategy that provides stable support to nascent high tech businesses or the investment required to get industry and researchers working together, and the outlook for the UK economy looks gloomy. For researchers, the lack of a plan that puts research at the heart of the UK’s economic future dooms the science budget to being regarded by the Treasury as a frill – one that is susceptible to cuts if political fashions change.

All of that goes some way to explaining the stir of excitement among science policy wonks and researchers alike this morning when George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, arrived at the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science with science minister David Willetts, to talk about industrial policy. It wasn’t so much what Osborne said – but the fact that he was there at all.

Much of what he did say was nice enough, though to most pundits, largely motherhood and apple pie. Continue reading →

Golden sweet potato shows success

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Posted on behalf of Katherine Rowland.

A variety of sweet potato, bred to contain more vitamin A, could prove a useful tool in tackling nutrient deficiency in parts of Africa, following a successful trial of the tuber among malnourished women and children in Uganda.

HarvestPlus, part of the international agricultural research organization CGIAR, cross-bred Africa’s white and yellow sweet potatoes to produce an orange-fleshed variety that is higher yielding with improved drought tolerance, and rich in beta-carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A. The researchers distributed the fortified orange sweet potato vines to more than 10,000 farming families in Uganda between 2007 and 2009, in the hope that the villagers would grow the crop and incorporate the strange-coloured sweet potato into their diets.

The results, published this week in the Journal of Nutrition, show that 61% of households grew the crops, and that the biofortified tubers replaced one-third of conventional white- and yellow-sweet-potato consumption. This substitution, the researchers say, was sufficient to ensure that a significant number of children and women obtained their daily vitamin A requirements.

Vitamin A deficiency affects as many as 250 million children worldwide and is a leading cause of preventable blindness, disease and premature death. In Africa, more than one-third of children under the age of 5 are affected. Aid organizations have programmes to deliver micronutrient tablets in several African countries, but reaching remote villages is expensive and difficult.

As an alternative, researchers have been creating varieties of high-calorie, climate-hardy crops that are rich in essential nutrients such as vitamin A, iron and zinc. Scientists are working on fortified peanuts (groundnuts) and cassava, for example, using conventional breeding techniques or genetic modification to create food crops that address nutrient deficiency in poor countries.

HarvestPlus has also distributed the biofortified orange sweet potato in Mozambique, and 2011 data show that adoption of the crop is higher than in Uganda. The organization plans to release more nutritionally enhanced varieties in the near future, including iron-biofortified beans in Rwanda and vitamin A-biofortified maize in Zambia.

This post has been corrected since publication. An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the Mozambique research had yet to be published. The post also implied that the pearl millet and maize mentioned were biofortified using breeding or GM techniques. In-fact they were simply fortified with synthetic vitamins or minerals. Thanks to Yassir Islam for reporting the errors below.

Prisoners pitch in to save endangered butterfly

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Prisoners are helping in efforts to conserve the Taylor's checkerspot butterfly.{credit}U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Aaron Barna{/credit}

Posted on behalf of Ed Yong.

At the Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women in Belfair, Washington, inmates are helping to save the endangered Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha taylori). Under the supervision of guards and graduate students, a small group of prisoners is breeding the beautiful orange-and-white insects in a greenhouse outside the prison. They have even carried out research to show what plants the butterfly prefers to lay its eggs on — information that will be crucial for boosting its dwindling numbers.

These efforts are part of the Sustainability in Prisons Project (SPP), the brainchild of Nalini Nadkarni of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “A lot of her work is about coming down from the ivory tower and involving under-served audiences in science,” says Dennis Aubrey, a student who works in the checkerspot initiative. He spoke about the project at the 2012 Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon.

The SPP works with prisons throughout Washington, and treats the inmates as collaborators rather than labourers. They apply for the positions and get training, education and a small wage. Together, they have helped to conserve endangered butterflies, frogs, flowering plants and moss.

Prisons may seem to be an unorthodox location for conservation work, but Carri LeRoy, project co-director of the SPP, says: “There’s a lot of clean, controlled space, and people with time on their hands, looking to do something valuable and change their lives.”

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Numbers trump genetic diversity in survival stakes

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Posted on behalf of Ed Yong.

As a species tumbles towards extinction, populations with few members are more likely to die off than those with low genetic diversity. At least that’s the message from a 12-year-long experiment by husband-and-wife team Tim Wootton and Cathy Pfister of the University of Chicago in Illinois.

Understanding the relative importance of these two factors is key to designing effective conservation strategies. It may be common sense to focus on boosting numbers if demographics matter more, and to put together breeding programmes that expand the remaining gene pool if genetics rule, but accurately pointing the finger at the primary cause of decline is rarely a simple task.

The cheetah is the poster child for this problem, Wootton told attendees of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, on 6 August. Africa’s most at-risk cat species has lost much of its habitat and its former genetic diversity. Consequently, no one knows which factor will more strongly influence its fate.

He and Pfister wanted to do experiments in which they could manipulate both the genetic structures and the sizes of populations. Cheetahs being impractical subjects, they opted instead for the sea palm, Postelsia, a type of kelp that occurs along the western coast of North America. Postelsia barely disperses at all. It grows in clumps on wave-swept rocky shores, reproducing by dribbling spores onto rocks directly below it. Waves remove the adult plants each year, leaving room for spores to grow. As a result, each clump is often genetically isolated from those just metres away.

Wootton and Pfister bred sea-palm populations with varying degrees of genetic diversity. They transplanted them onto rocky patches of shoreline in batches of different sizes. After 12 years, smaller populations were less likely to have survived than larger ones, and, among the populations that did disappear, smaller ones did so more quickly. Crucially, genetic diversity did not influence the odds of a population’s survival.

Wootton found a cut-off point, between 10 and 100 individuals, where the risk of becoming locally extinct changed dramatically. “The rule of thumb when I was a student was that 50–100 individuals was a viable population size,” he says. “Our experiments support that.”

How widely applicable are the findings? The sea palm is edible and heavily harvested, so the results have direct implications for its management. But it is also stationary, whereas many vulnerable species — speedy cheetahs especially — are mobile.

“It’s hard to know [how broadly applicable the results are] because it’s the first experiment of its kind,” Wootton points out. Meanwhile, Robert Paine, an ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who has worked with Wootton and Pfister, praises the new study, describing it as dealing with a very real question with broad application.

Some other studies have claimed that genetic diversity is the more important factor, but these typically report only a correlation between low diversity and species endangerment, Wootton says. “I’d say if you have a limited budget, you should probably study the ecology and the demographics first rather than doing molecular analysis.”