Canadian satellite system

Hannah Hoag reports in the News Blog that missed deadlines and an underfunded Canada Space Agency (CSA) may scuttle plans to build the next generation of earth observing satellites:

In 2010, the CSA selected MacDonald, Detwillier and Associates Ltd. to design the successor to Radarsat-2, the agency’s current earth observing satellite. The company came up with a three-satellite system that would provide information for maritime surveillance, disaster management and ecosystem monitoring. But Dan Friedman, the company’s president and chief executive officer, says the federal government missed a target deadline for awarding the building contract in January, according to a story in the Globe and Mail and the CSA may not have enough money for the project.

Find out more information by continuing to the post.

Cancer 

Rebecca Hersher reporting in The Spoonful of Medicine Blog, explains that according to a recent study, one in six cancer cases are caused by preventable infection:

…in a study published online in The Lancet Oncology,which estimates that of the 12.7 million new cases of cancer in 2008, fully 16% were caused by infections. The vast majority of those cancer cases were caused by one of four pathogens: HPV,Helicobacter pylori and the hepatitis B and C viruses. Although infections by all these pathogens can be prevented with vaccines or treated with simple antibiotics, they nonetheless caused close to 2 million cases of gastric, liver and cervical cancer.

Continue to the post to read more about these new findings.

Queen’s case study

Does your university make provision for maternity leave in its PhD studentships? Does it insist onfemale representation on all committees, or run a buddy system linking female postdocs to female PhD students? These are just some of the initiatives in place at Queen’s University Belfast, which was recently named as the lead university in the United Kingdom for tackling the unequal representation of women in science, reveals Rachel Bowden in Nature Jobs Blog:

Queen’s has been given a ‘Silver University’ award by the Athena SWAN Charter, a recognition scheme that rewards UK universities committed to advancing and promoting the careers of women working in science, engineering and technology (SET). It’s the highest level of award currently held in the United Kingdom, and Queen’s is the only university with the accolade. Tom Millar, dean of the faculty of engineering and physical sciences, says the university’s gender-equality initiatives are “part and parcel” of the regular business of the institution. “It is this integration, or mainstreaming, of an equal opportunities focus that has made our efforts sustainable,” he says.

You can find more about other initiatives at Queen’s in Rachel’s report.

Batmobile

Scitable’s Khalil A. Cassimally, in his latest post, Bat-Robot: From Batman To Reality, explains that in two months’ time Batman will grace movie theatres around the globe and viewers will once again have a chance to see his car, the Batmobile. Khalil quips that while the sight of the super-car will make many salivate, engineers are currently working on something that Batman himself would envy:

Sponsored by the US Air Force, a group of engineers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain and Brown University in the US, used smart materials to develop a bat-like micro aerial vehicle (MAV). The device, weighing a mere 80 grams, comprises artificial muscles made of shape-memory alloys (SMA), a new group of material that remembers their original shapes when distorted. Distinct to the group’s bat-like MAV is its morphing wing motion which closely mimics that of a real bat.

Learn more about this feat of engineering in Khalil’s post.

Tobacco Control

In her latest post, Suzi Gage reflects on a seemingly biased article in the media that questions tobacco control research and policy:

Yesterday an article in the Daily Mail was brought to my attention by Ben Goldacre, and Transform Drug Policy Foundation. There have been a few articles along a similar line to this one, questioning tobacco control research and policy. This one seemed particularly one-sided, so it’s made me decide to go through the arguments, and discuss.
The very first sentence of this article riled me, I have to say:

There are few industries to have come under such sustained attack as big tobacco.It’s almost too ridiculous to know where to start. I may be arguing semantics here, but I would say it’s not the tobacco industry under attack so much as the disease and death caused by smoking cigarettes. Other industries that sell harmful products (alcohol, pharma) are regulated. This is such a strange way to frame this article, the ‘poor’ tobacco companies are getting picked on by the ‘mean old’ government. Tobacco is the only product, legal at present, which, if used as intended, kills half of its users. Poor tobacco industry indeed.

You can hear more of  Suzi’s thoughts in the post, or join in the online conversation in her comment thread.

Podcast

Elie Dolgin links out in The Spoonful of Medicine Blog to May’s issue of the Nature Medicine podcast, where the discussion looks at the many faces of asthma, why hospital staph infections are so deadly and the latest on treatments for sudden-onset hearing loss:

Neurozone

In Pete Etchells’s latest post he is talking about neuropolitics, the idea that political viewpoints and standings are somehow tied to the fundamentals of human biology, and brain imaging techniques can provide a means through which we can figure out what parts of the brain are politically relevant:

There’s a problem with this idea. Well, actually there are quite a few problems, but I’ll concentrate on one for now. Imaging studies that look at political viewpoints tend to look for neural correlates in the brain. In other words, they’ll do something like this study, and get a bunch of left-wingers, a bunch of right-wingers, and see if there are any differences in the size of, or activation in, various parts of the brain. If it’s a good study, the researchers will try and make the two groups as similar as possible on other variables (the basics would be things like gender and age, socioeconomic status and education level, but the list could go on), so that you can be more sure that any differences can be attributed to political viewpoints and not something else. For example, in the above study, the authors found that people who considered themselves to be more liberal showed more grey matter in an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, and those who considered themselves to be more conservative had larger right amygdalae.

Continue to the post to find out more.

Double collision theory

Subhra Priyadarshini discloses in the Indigenus Blog that a new theory has been proposed on how India and Asia collided, geographically speaking, in the ‘Cenozoic’ era. It suggests that the collision happened in two stages – one about 50 million years ago and the other about 25-20 million years ago to give a final shape to the present day continent:

Using paleomagnetic data, researchers have shown that this continental and oceanic “Greater India” resulted from around 2,675
km of North–South extension, accommodated between the Tibetan Himalaya and cratonic India. This happened between 120 and 70 million years ago.

The researchers suggest that approximately 50 million years ago  the India–Asia collision was actually a collision of the Tibetan-Himalayan microcontinent with Asia, followed by subduction of the largely oceanic Greater India Basin. According to them, the “hard” India–Asia collision occurred around 25–20 million years ago. This happened alongside deformation in central Asia and rapid exhumation of Greater Himalaya crystalline rocks. All this could have a link with intensification of the Asian monsoon system, the researchers say.

 The world’s smallest mammoth

GrrlScientist links out to a video where Dr Herridge shows us the fossils that led to her discovery of the world’s smallest mammoth discovered on Crete – it’s the size of a newborn baby elephant!

The four worlds of carbon

Anne Pichon highlights in The Sceptical Chymist Blog that this month’s element is carbon:

Carbon is so ubiquitous, with its various allotropes and as part of the many, many compounds and living organisms it makes up, that it’s hard to know where to start. Well, why not in New York City? As Simon Friedman from the University of Missouri Kansas City — interviewed here in Reactions — puts it in his article (subscription required) “The organic chemist’s view of carbon can be like the New Yorker’s view of the world, which to them ends at the edge of Manhattan.” And so he goes on to explain. 

If you want to learn more about carbon you can continue to Anne’s post.

Ancient poster sections

Viktor Poór explains why poster sections did not trend in ancient times in his latest cartoon: