In her latest post, “Would I eat that?” Nature Network blogger, Eva Amsen, has a frank discussion about being a vegetarian and about lab-grown meat.
Mark Post of the University of Maastricht has been optimizing the process of growing meat in the lab, and he will unveil the first lab-grown burger later this year.
Would you eat lab-grown meat? Feel free to join the growing online discussion.
Faster-than-light neutrino
Eugenie Samuel Reich reporting for the News blog reveals that the OPERA collaboration, which made headlines in September with the revolutionary claim to have clocked neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, has identified two possible sources of error in its experiment:
OPERA had collected data suggesting that neutrinos generated at CERN near Geneva and sent 730 kilometers to its detector Gran Sasso National Laboratory were arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than a light beam would take to travel the same distance. Many physicists were skeptical but the measurement appeared to be carefully done and reached a statistically significant level. But according to a statement OPERA began circulating today, two possible problems have now been found with its set-up. As many physicists had speculated might be the case, both are related to the experiment’s pioneering use of Global Positioning System (GPS) signals to synchronize atomic clocks at each end of its neutrino beam. First, the passage of time on the clocks between the arrival of the synchronizing signal has to be interpolated and OPERA now says this may not have been done correctly. Second, there was a possible faulty connection between the GPS signal and the OPERA master clock.
Continue to their post to find out more.
Drug shortages
Good news for the US drug shortages came this week when the country’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it had found alternative sources for the cancer drugs methotrexate and doxorubicin. Rebecca Hersher reporting for the Spoonful of Medicine blog reveals that these are two of the 220 drugs currently in short supply in the US:
But the two shortages addressed are far from the whole story. In the past two years, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists has documented an increasing number of shortages of other medications, many of them for cancer or rare fatal diseases. To remedy the situation, US President Barack Obama issued an executive order in October calling on the FDA to address drug shortages farther in advance and with greater urgency. Today, Hamburg insisted that the FDA had made strides since then, preventing 114 drug shortages since the President’s decree. And she pointed to a six-fold increase in voluntary reports to the FDA by drug manufacturers about potential shortages as evidence that the system is working better than it has in the past.
You can find out more about this story and the drug shortage crisis in the blog post.
Soapbox Science
This week’s Soapbox Science post is by philosopher Jerry Ravetz, who considers ignorance in climate science. To what extent should we incorporate ignorance, as distinct from tameable uncertainty, into our reasonings about science and science policy?
There is evidence that, particularly in climate science, ignorance is something of a taboo idea, even when it might seem to be most relevant. I have two illustrative examples from the climate science area. The first relates to a proposed scale of uncertainty, designed by James Risbey and Milind Kandlikar [1], and adopted by the IPCC [2]. This has the merit of providing a single robust scale of degrees of uncertainty, based on the notations for expressing it in numerical form. It could be of great use in resolving the confusing variety of schemes that are employed in the various special fields that contribute to climate science. The scale includes five degrees of increasing uncertainty, concluding with a sixth category for ignorance. The authors were pleased to see the scale adopted by the IPCC, but then surprised to see that the category for ignorance had been deleted in the IPCC version [3].
Do you agree with Jerry’s take on this controversial subject? Leave your thoughts below.
Layer magic
On the Action Potential blog, I-han Chou explains that for over a century we have known the sensory cortex is arranged into distinct layers, each containing a different make up of neuronal types and projection patterns, but we don’t actually know very much about the computations performed in each layer.
Today a paper from Massimo Scanziani’s lab takes a big step towards cracking the function of the bottom layer (layer 6) in mice. Layer 6 neurons project both to upper cortical layers and to the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus, which itself is the primary input to cortex, and so are primed to play a large modulatory role. Using a monumental combination of optogenetics, intracellular recording, and behavioral testing, the paper convincingly makes the case that layer 6 controls the gain of visual responses of upper layer neurons (i.e. changes the size of their responses without altering their selectivity). Gain control is a fundamental computation in cortex, and has been invoked as a mechanism for attention, perception, spatial processing, and more. The cellular mechanism here is worked out in primary visual cortex, but it could potentially operate throughout layered cortex.
Layers of human cortex drawn by Ramon y Cajal, Image from Wikimedia Commons
You can find out more about this research in I-han Chou’s write up.
Jurassic Park
Grrlscientist asks in her latest post whether Jurassic Park got it right. Did dinosaurs hold their tails up and move swiftly ?
They did, according to professor Robert Full, a biomechanical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. And the reason that dinosaurs held their tails aloft provides a glimpse into their natural history. This elegant research shows that the evolution of a tail provides control over body rotation when moving abruptly or at speed. But more than providing support for a scientific hypothesis about the mechanics of animal movement and behaviour, these findings could have important implications for the design of manoeuvrable robots, too.
You can watch this video where Professor Full tells us more about his latest research:
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Google Search Engine Software goes ‘Chemistry’
Paige Brown asks: What if medical and environmental researchers could harness the power of internet search engine software like Google’s PageRank software, which provides a detailed picture of all the links between the trillion-plus webpages on the internet.
Aurora Clark, an associate professor of chemistry at Washington State University, and her graduate students have adapted Google’s PageRank software to model how molecules are shaped and organized in a fluid network – in your glass of water, for example. The new software, called moleculaRnetworks, uses Google’s PageRank mathematical algorithm “to determine molecular shapes and chemical reactions without the expense, logistics and occasional danger of lab experiments.” (WSU) With this new software, for example, environmental researchers could design better clean-up chemical agents used to remove heavy metals including lead, uranium, and plutonium from nuclear waste or groundwater – without ever handling these dangerous substances in the lab.
Find out more about the new software in her post.
Limbless amphibian!
Daniel Creasey from the News Blog has reported that an entirely new family of amphibians has been discovered hiding in the soils of north eastern India. In total, seven new species of these limbless, soil-dwelling and rather ugly creatures were unearthed by a team of researchers digging for over 1,000 man-hours:
“The discovery adds a major branch to the amphibian tree of life,” notes Sathyabhama Das Biju of the University of Delhi, and his colleagues in their paper, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
These creatures are members of the caecilian order of amphibians, which look more like earthworms than their better-known classmates the frogs and toads, and can grow to be more than a metre long. They build nests underground and brood their young there, as shown above with Chikila fulleri. More than 500 examples of the new family of caecilians were found in 58 locations in northeastern India.
Find out more about this new species in their report.