Weekly Science Headlines

[Kai]

February 3, 2010
Journal Retracts 1998 Paper Linking Autism to Vaccines

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

A prominent British medical journal on Tuesday retracted a 1998 research paper that set off a sharp decline in vaccinations in Britain after the paper's lead author suggested that vaccines could cause autism.

The retraction by The Lancet is part of a reassessment that has lasted for years of the scientific methods and financial conflicts of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who contended that his research showed that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine may be unsafe.

But the retraction may do little to tarnish Dr. Wakefield's reputation among parents' groups in the United States. Despite a wealth of scientific studies that have failed to find any link between vaccines and autism, the parents fervently believe that their children's mental problems resulted from vaccinations.

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Leaks Imperil Nuclear Industry

from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

VERNON, Vt. -- The nuclear industry, once an environmental pariah, is recasting itself as green as it attempts to extend the life of many power plants and build new ones. But a leak of radioactive water at Vermont Yankee, along with similar incidents at more than 20 other US nuclear plants in recent years, has kindled doubts about the reliability, durability, and maintenance of the nation's aging nuclear installations.

Vermont health officials say the leak, while deeply worrisome, is not a threat to drinking water supplies or the Connecticut River, which flows beside the 38-year-old plant, nor is it endangering public health. But the controversy is threatening to derail the nuclear plant's bid, now at a critical juncture, for state approvals to extend its operating life by 20 years when its license expires in two years.

... The timing couldn't be worse for the nuclear industry, coming as it attempts a broad rebirth as a green energy source in the battle against global warming; the reactors do not emit greenhouse gases that cause the atmosphere to warm.

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Could Museum's Gold Be From Ancient Troy?

from the Philadelphia Inquirer

The scientist had traveled from Germany to examine the ancient items that lay before him on the University of Pennsylvania laboratory table, and he was dazzled. Earrings with cascades of golden leaves. Brooches adorned with tightly coiled spirals. A necklace strung with hundreds of gold ringlets and beads.

The jewelry bore a striking resemblance to objects from one of the world's great collections--a controversial treasure unearthed long ago from the fabled city of Troy. Were the objects on the lab table also from the city that inspired Homer's epic poem of war?

Ernst Pernicka suspected they were, but he could not be sure. ... Pernicka, one of the world's foremost experts on ancient metals, had come to Penn's archaeology museum last February to rub off microscopic samples from the purported Trojan gold. He would then take them back to Germany for a high-tech analysis.

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Study: Babies' Low Serotonin Levels Cause SIDS

from USA Today

Researchers may have solved the mystery of what makes some babies vulnerable to sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, which kills more than 2,300 babies a year.

Infants who died of SIDS had low levels of serotonin, a brain chemical that helps the brainstem regulate breathing, temperature, sleeping, waking and other automatic functions, according to an autopsy study in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Serotonin normally helps babies respond to high carbon-dioxide levels during sleep by helping them wake up and shift their head position to get fresh air, says senior author Hannah Kinney of Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston. When babies are placed face down, their exhaled carbon dioxide may pool in loose bedding, where it can be breathed back in, Kinney says.

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Climate Scientist 'Hid' Data Flaws

from the Guardian (UK)

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming--a hotly contested issue. On Monday, the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws.

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The Great Electric Car Race of 2010

from the Christian Science Monitor

For Jason Hendler and more than 50,000 others who put their names on an Internet "want list" in hopes of one day owning the Chevrolet Volt plug-in car, the wait is almost over. After more than two years of online debating, wailing, and waiting with each other, Mr. Hendler and his fellow Volt-ophiles could actually have the long-promised hybrid electric-drive vehicle sitting in their driveways this fall--at least in theory.

It may be a long shot to actually get one, he acknowledges, at least this year. Only 7,000 to 10,000 Volts are supposed to be made available this fall. Just a few thousand more competing electric-drive cars will be available for sale this year--such as the Nissan Leaf, BYD e6, and Fisker Karma.

Yet for Hendler and the nation, 2010 is when the rubber hits the road and the electrified next generation of vehicles gets a reality check. Real buyers will be kicking real tires, forking over a slice of their life savings, and gliding off dealer lots in glorious all-electric silence.

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A Push to Find New Ways Into Space

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The ambitious space initiative that President Obama unveiled for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Monday calls for sweeping changes in mission and priorities for the 52-year-old agency, yet it omits two major details: where the agency will send its astronauts and a timetable for getting them there.

If Mr. Obama's proposed budget is implemented, NASA a few years from now would be fundamentally different from NASA today. The space agency would no longer operate its own spacecraft, but essentially buy tickets for its astronauts on commercially launched rockets.

It would end its program to return to the moon and would pursue future missions to deep space by drawing more cooperation and financing from other nations.

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Can a Brain Scan Predict a Broken Promise?

from Scientific American

Last time you told someone "I'll call you," did you mean it? We all make promises in our daily interactions with others. On the one hand, promises such as "I'll return your book next week" or "I won't tell anyone" are not heavily binding, except maybe in a moral sense.

On the other hand, some of the promises we make bind us legally and financially. ... But imagine making a promise when in fact, you know you would benefit from not keeping it. Would you keep it anyway? Could we somehow tell in advance whether you're going to keep it or break it? And finally, could we predict your decision by looking at what happens in your brain?

All these questions are addressed in an exciting new study performed in Switzerland and led by Thomas Baumgartner and Urs Fischbacher. While their findings, published in Neuron, are brand new and thus need to be confirmed by further research, they suggest that it may indeed be possible to detect whether a person is about to break a promise based on brain activity, well before the promise is actually broken.

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Many Minds, One Story

from Seed

Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse opens in opposition, with a fragment of conversation already in progress: "Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," says Mrs. Ramsay to her son James. "But," contradicts his father two paragraphs later, "it won't be fine."

The novel is unbalanced from its first line. Within four paragraphs, points of view shift among mother, son, and father; then an omniscient voice reveals the thoughts of all three members of the Ramsay family, "hat great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that."

... In her diaries, Woolf regularly described a recurrent "madness," referring to the disruptive mood swings that plagued her career and ultimately led to her suicide. As a doctor who has studied neurological disorders for 35 years, I recognize such periodic and cyclical fluctuations as manic-depressive illness, or bipolar affective disorder.

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Astronomers Spot Aftermath of Asteroid Collision

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

An object imaged last week by the Hubble Space Telescope looks at first glance to be a comet, but a closer examination indicates it is something researchers have never seen before--the immediate aftermath of two asteroids colliding.

The scattered debris that looks like a comet's tail is actually the result of two asteroids colliding nearly head-on at more than 11,000 miles per hour, scattering pieces in all directions, NASA announced Tuesday.

The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where the collision occurred, contains the remains of many such events from the distant past, but this is first time that researchers have observed such debris so soon after a collision.

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[Kai]

Mud Volcano Was Man-Made, New Evidence Confirms

from Wired

A new analysis shows that a deadly mud volcano in Indonesia may not have been a natural disaster after all. The research lends weight to the controversial theory that the volcano was caused by humans.

Villagers near Sidoarjo noticed a mud volcano beginning to erupt at 5 a.m. local time May 29, 2006. It was about 500 feet from a local gas-exploration well. Every day since then, the Lusi mud volcano has pumped out 100,000 tons of mud, or enough to fill 60 Olympic-size swimming pools. It has now covered an area of almost 3 square miles to a depth of 65 feet. Thirty thousand people have been displaced, and scientific evidence is mounting that the company drilling the well caused the volcano.

"The disaster was caused by pulling the drill string and drill bit out of the hole while the hole was unstable," said Richard Davies, director of the Durham Energy Institute and co-author of a new paper in the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology, in a press release. "This triggered a very large 'kick' in the well, where there is a large influx of water and gas from surrounding rock formations that could not be controlled."

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What Doesn't Kill Microbes, Makes Them Stronger

from ScienceNOW Daily News

If you are taking antibiotics, your doctor will admonish you not to skip any pills and to continue the treatment even after you start to feel better. That's because failure to kill the bugs making you sick can cause some of them to become resistant to the antibiotics.

Now, a new study explains how nonlethal antibiotic concentrations can lead to resistance. The drugs trigger the release of so-called reactive oxygen species (ROS) inside bacteria, which in turn cause mutations in the bugs' DNA--including some that happen to cause resistance.

Traditionally, the development of antibiotic resistance--a big and growing problem in medicine--has been seen as a passive phenomenon. Haphazard mutations occur in bacterial genomes, and bacteria randomly swap genetic elements. Every now and then, a mutation or a bit of newly acquired DNA enables the microbes to detoxify antibiotics, pump them out of the cells, or render them harmless in another way. When these microbes are exposed to antibiotics, natural selection will allow them to outcompete the ones that aren't resistant.

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The Ultimate Mouthful: Lunge Feeding in Rorqual Whales

from American Scientist

A hungry fin whale dives deep into the ocean to perform a series of rapid accelerations with mouth agape into a dense prey patch. On each of these bouts, or lunges, the whale engulfs about ten kilograms of krill contained within some 70,000 liters of water--a volume heavier than its own weight--in a few seconds.

During a lunge, the whale oscillates its tail and fluke to accelerate the body to high speed and opens its mouth to about 90 degrees. The drag that is generated forces the water into its oral cavity, which has pleats that expand up to four times their resting size. After the whale's jaws close, the sheer size of the engulfed water mass is evident as the body takes on a "bloated tadpole" shape. In less than a minute, all of the engulfed water is filtered out of the distended throat pouch as it slowly deflates, leaving the prey inside the mouth. Over several hours of continuous foraging, a whale can ingest more than a ton of krill, enough to give it sufficient energy for an entire day.

Years ago, Paul Brodie of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography described the feeding method of fin whales as the "greatest biomechanical action in the animal kingdom." This extreme lunge-feeding strategy is exhibited exclusively by rorquals, a family of baleen whales that includes species such as humpback, fin and blue whales. Like all baleen whales, rorquals are suspension filter feeders that separate small crustaceans and fish from engulfed water using plates of keratin--the same protein that forms hair, fingernails and turtle shells--that hang down from the top of their mouths.

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Primordial Giant: The Star That Time Forgot

from New Scientist

At first, there didn't seem anything earth-shattering about the tiny point of light that pricked the southern Californian sky on a mild night in early April 2007. Only the robotic eyes of the Nearby Supernova Factory, a project designed to spy out distant stellar explosions, spotted it from the Palomar Observatory, high in the hills between Los Angeles and San Diego.

The project's computers automatically forwarded the images to a data server to await analysis. The same routine kicks in scores of times each year when a far-off star in its death throes explodes onto the night sky, before fading back to obscurity once more.

But this one did not fade away. It got brighter. And brighter. That's when human eyes became alert.

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Adoptees Offer Clues on Skills of Language

from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

As Andy Ross learned to speak English, he progressed from simple word combinations like "Andy shoe" to the more complex "my red shoe," just like any toddler.

But Andy was older when he began to learn English, after being adopted from Russia, and his chatter--taped in weekly sessions--has provided scientists important clues about how language develops.

Harvard psychologists are finding that preschool-age children adopted from foreign countries learn English in the same sequence as babies: starting with single words and progressing to word combinations and complex grammar. That means it is not the maturity of the brain but the nature of language itself that dictates how it is learned, the Harvard scientists say.

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Climate Data 'Not Well Organised'

from BBC News Online

Phil Jones, the professor behind the "Climategate" affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.

He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics--a decision he says he regretted. But Professor Jones said he had not cheated over the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process. He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.

But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period.

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World Wide Wait

from the Economist

Ever noticed how long it takes for web pages to load these days? You click on a link and wait and wait, and then wait some more, for the content to trickle in. If nothing has happened after ten seconds or so, your impatient correspondent hits the browser's stop button followed by the reload key.

In desperation, he sometimes loads the link into a second or even a third browser tab as well, and bombards the website's server with multiple requests for the page. If that fails, he gives up in disgust and reads a newspaper instead.

Back in the early days of the internet, when most web users relied on dial-up connections, browsers were crude and web graphics were clumsy GIF files, eight seconds was considered the maximum people would stick around for a page to load. To increase "stickiness," web designers pared their HTML code to the bone, collated their style-sheet data and JavaScripts into single files for more efficient caching elsewhere on the web, used fewer graphics and embraced the PNG and JPEG picture formats, with their smaller file sizes, as soon as they became available. Compared with text, pictures really were the equivalent of 1,000 words, at least when it came to the time taken to transmit them.

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Becoming Vegetarian 'Can Harm the Environment'

from the Guardian

It has often been claimed that avoiding red meat is beneficial to the environment, because it lowers emissions and less land is used to produce alternatives.

But a study by Cranfield University, commissioned by WWF, the environmental group, found a substantial number of meat substitutes--such as soy, chickpeas and lentils--were more harmful to the environment because they were imported into Britain from overseas.

The study concluded: "A switch from beef and milk to highly refined livestock product analogues such as tofu could actually increase the quantity of arable land needed to supply the UK."

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Was Haiti's Ecosystem Disrupted by Quake?

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

It's a small solace, but the terrifying 7.0-magnitude earthquake seems not to have caused any major, immediate damage to Haiti's ecosystem. According to Asif Zaidi, operations manager of the U.N. Environmental Program's Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch, there has been one small spill near a coastal oil terminal, some minor warehouse fires and a few small landslides close to Port-au-Prince, but nothing that requires a significant emergency response.

As the situation stabilizes, clearing away the waste and debris will become an urgent priority. It's too early to estimate just how much rubble must be moved, but considering that 80 to 100 percent of the structures in some areas were destroyed, Zaidi says it's likely to be "a staggering amount." Some of the demolition material, such as steel and iron bars, can be salvaged and recycled; the rest can be crushed and used for rebuilding roads. (Ideally, debris management will also provide employment for many local workers.)

The growing amount of medical waste, particularly from makeshift tent hospitals, is also a concern: At the moment, it's unclear whether there are any safe disposal options for this hazardous material. Public-health experts are also worried about all the human waste generated in survivor camps.

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Measuring Climate Change in Mediterranean Caves

from Spiegel

The underside of the Spanish island of Mallorca is as perforated as Swiss cheese. The rising and falling ocean has worn hollow caves into a soft layer of calcium, and stalactites and stalagmites in these caves bear evidence of prehistoric sea levels. Now a team of scientists around the geochemist Jeffrey Dorale, from the University of Iowa, claims the Mediterranean some 81,000 years ago stood a full meter higher than it does today.

The results were published in the journal Science on Friday. Dorale and his team won't speculate why sea levels were so high back then--or why, in fact, they seemed to surge all of a sudden--but they believe their findings have "major implications for future concerns with sea-level change," according to the Science Web site.

Mallorca is a good place to study these changes because the island barely moves, the scientists say. It's tectonically stable, and the buildup or melting of glaciers hasn't raised or lowered the island. The stalactites and stalagmites, moreover, have collected deposits of calcite from the ocean, and these deposits give up secrets like rings in a tree. Dorale's team dated the deposits by measuring the radioactive decay of uranium traces. "We've reconstructed sea levels with a high degree of precision," Dorale told Spiegel Online.

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[Kai]

Hot and Heavy Matter Runs a 4 Trillion Degree Fever

from Science News

WASHINGTON -- Talk about hot and heavy. Scientists have taken the temperature of a minuscule glob of dense, hot matter formed in the grisly aftermath of collisions between gold atoms traveling near the speed of light. The material reaches an estimated 4 trillion degrees Celsius, about 250,000 times hotter than the sun's interior, and higher than any temperature ever reached in a laboratory, researchers reported February 15 at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

The measurements, which will be published in an upcoming Physical Review Letters, provide a more detailed description of the superhot, superdense soup of matter called quark-gluon plasma, which may mimic the conditions of the infant universe, the researchers say. Other studies of the soup hint that discrete pockets of the matter break special kinds of symmetry.

In the new study, gold ions were smashed inside an underground 2.4-mile-circumference track at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. The messy collisions were so energetic that they caused protons and neutrons to melt, sending their constituent particles, known as quarks and gluons, into the fray.

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Hormone Oxytocin Found to Help People with Autism

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

A nasal spray containing a hormone that is known to make women more maternal and men less shy apparently can help those with autism make eye contact and interact better with others, according to a provocative study released Monday.

The study, involving 13 adults with either a high-functioning form of autism or Asperger syndrome, a mild form of the disorder, found that when the subjects inhaled the hormone oxytocin, they scored significantly better on a test that involved recognizing faces and performed much better in a game that involved tossing a ball with others.

Although more research is needed to confirm and explore the findings, the results are the latest in a growing body of evidence indicating that the hormone could lead to ways to help people with the often devastating brain disorder function better.

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A Good Night's Sleep Study for People Over 65

from USA Today

A good night's sleep is important at any age. But what constitutes a good night's sleep for people over 65?

Some researchers now say the answer may be surprisingly reassuring: Healthy older people may need less sleep than younger people to feel alert during the day.

The idea is not proven, and some experts are skeptical. But it would come as good news to a lot of people, since it's undisputed that older people typically sleep fewer hours, with more awakenings and fewer minutes of deep sleep. And, at a time when many older folks still hold jobs, do volunteer work, care for children and drive cars, it matters.

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Space Rock Contains Organic Molecular Feast

from BBC News Online

Scientists say that a meteorite that crashed into Earth 40 years ago contains millions of different carbon-containing, or organic, molecules. Although they are not a sign of life, such organic compounds are life's building blocks, and are a sign of conditions in the early Solar System.

It is thought the Murchison meteorite could even be older than the Sun. The results of the meteorite study are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We are really excited. When I first studied it and saw the complexity I was so amazed," said Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin, lead researcher on the study from the Institute for Ecological Chemistry in Neuherberg, Germany. "Having this information means you can tell what was happening during the birth of the Solar System," Dr Schmitt-Kopplin told BBC News.

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Regulator Waffles on Bisphenol A

from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Eight days after chemical industry lobbyists met with Obama administration officials, federal regulators delayed action on including bisphenol A in a new effort to better regulate dangerous chemicals.

The move is drawing suspicion, considering how the head of the Environmental Protection Agency had been talking tough in one speech after another last fall about the need to protect the public from such chemicals, particularly BPA.

But when the agency's list came out Dec. 30, identifying four chemicals that would face stricter labeling and reporting requirements, BPA was not among them. While other agencies and governmental bodies are moving to restrict BPA's use because of concerns about its links to health problems, including cancer, the EPA now says it won't develop a tougher regulatory plan for the chemical for at least two years.

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A Tantalizing Hint, but Not Proof, of Elusive Dark Matter

from the Cleveland Plain Dealer

On the night of Aug. 5, 2007, in an abandoned Minnesota iron mine converted into a kind of cosmic burglar alarm center, something whizzed through half a mile of rock and set off a detector. Eleven weeks later, just after lunchtime, it happened again. An invisible particle breached the underground lab's shielding and tripped another sensor.

When researchers analyzing the experiment's data two years later confirmed the twin intrusions, the news lit up physicists' BlackBerries worldwide. Were the tiny pings finally proof of dark matter, the mysterious, long-sought stuff that scientists believe holds galaxies together and makes up most of the matter in the universe?

The answer is a disappointing "maybe," the search team that includes scientists from Case Western Reserve University reported Thursday. While the two impacts bear the hallmarks of stealthy dark matter particles arriving from space, statistics can't eliminate a less exotic explanation, such as cosmic rays or background radiation in the underground cavern.

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Giant Redwoods May Dry Out; Warming to Blame?

from National Geographic News

Declining fog cover on California's coast could leave the state's famous redwoods high and dry, a new study says. Among the tallest and longest-lived trees on Earth, redwoods depend on summertime's moisture-rich fog to replenish their water reserves.

But climate change may be reducing this crucial fog cover. Though still poorly understood, climate change may be contributing to a decline in a high-pressure climatic system that usually "pinches itself" against the coast, creating fog, said study co-author James Johnstone, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

For the new study, scientists measured the cloud ceiling--the height of the lowest level of Earth's cloud layer--at two area airports, as well as examined a long-term record of daily maximum temperatures in the region. The research revealed that fog was 33 percent more common a century ago than it is today.

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Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

It all started with a brawny, tattooed building contractor with a passion for exotic animals. He was taking biology classes at City College of San Francisco, a two-year community college, and when students started meeting informally early last year to think up a project for a coming science competition, he told them that he thought it would be cool if they re-engineered cells from electric eels into a source of alternative energy.

Eventually the students scaled down that idea into something more feasible, though you would be forgiven if it still sounded like science fiction to you: they would build an electrical battery powered by bacteria. This also entailed building the bacteria itself--redesigning a living organism, using the tools of a radical new realm of genetic engineering called synthetic biology.

A City College team worked on the project all summer. Then in October, five students flew to Cambridge, Mass., to present it at M.I.T. and compete against more than 1,000 other students from 100 schools, including many top-flight institutions like Stanford and Harvard.

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Olympic Team Studies Sled Forces in High-Tech Simulator

from Scientific American

In the sport of skeleton, where athletes called "sliders" hurtle face first atop a sled the size of a seat cushion down an iced-over concrete track at speeds upwards of 110 kilometers per hour, the smallest details separate success and failure. Any aspect of a skeleton run that is not completely in sync--including the slider's outfit, helmet, body position or the sled's orientation--can cost hundredths of a second, an eternity in this sport.

The U.S. Olympic skeleton team, which hits the track this week at the Vancouver games, has their approach down to a science, thanks to some high-tech help from researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, N.Y. Engineering professor Timothy Wei and his team built a custom-made skeleton simulator to study a slider's greatest opponent--wind resistance.

... This simulator mimicked the dimensions of an actual skeleton track, which is about a half of a meter deep and a little over one meter wide. The sled, which can be as wide as 20 centimeters and as long as 120 centimeters, rested on pads equipped with load cells used to measure force exerted downward by the slider, who could also see feeds from two cameras ... on a monitor viewable through a hole cut into the bottom of the track (sliders lie facedown on their sleds).

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Israel Discovers Large Ancient Wine Press

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

JERUSALEM (Associated Press) -- Israeli archaeologists said Monday that they've discovered an unusually shaped 1,400-year-old wine press that was exceptionally large and advanced for its time.

The octagonal press measures 21 feet by 54 feet and was discovered in southern Israel, about 40 kilometers south of both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

"What we have here seems to be an industrial and crafts area of a settlement from the sixth- to seventh century, which was situated in the middle of an agricultural region," said excavation director Uzi Ad of the Israel Antiquities Authority. During this period, the whole area was part of the Byzantine Empire--the eastern half of the old Roman Empire.

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[Kai]

U.S. Is Backing New Nuclear Reactors

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON -- President Obama told an enthusiastic audience of union officials on Tuesday that the Energy Department has approved a loan guarantee intended to underwrite construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia, with taxpayers picking up much of the financial risk.

If the project goes forward, it would be the first nuclear reactor built in the United States since the 1970s. In a speech in Lanham, Md., Mr. Obama announced government approval of an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to help the Southern Company build two reactors in Burke County, Georgia, near Augusta.

The new aid for the nuclear power industry serves many of the Obama administration's objectives, helping broaden support for its energy policy proposals that face obstacles in Congress, helping control emissions of greenhouse gases, and to some extent bolstering employment and domestic energy production.

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Study Sheds Light on 'Teenage Night Owl Syndrome'

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Riding in school buses in the early morning darkness and sitting in poorly lighted classrooms are the main reasons students have trouble getting to sleep at night, according to new research.

Teenagers, just like everyone else, need bright lights in the morning, particularly in the blue wavelengths, to synchronize their circadian rhythms with nature's cycles of day and night. If they are deprived of the light, they go to sleep an average of six minutes later each night, until their bodies are completely out of synch with the school day, researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute reported Tuesday in the journal Neuroendocrinology Letters.

"These morning-light-deprived teenagers are going to bed later, getting less sleep and possibly under-performing on standardized tests," said lead author Mariana G. Figueiro, a sleep researcher at RPI's Lighting Research Center. "We are starting to call this the teenage night owl syndrome."

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Food Safety Rules to Emerge From Fight Over Catfish

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

The whiskered, bottom-feeding catfish is one of the lowliest creatures on Earth. But for months, catfish have been at the center of an intense Washington lobbying effort pitting domestic producers against importers.

At issue is how catfish will be regulated and whether Vietnamese imports pose a health risk to American consumers. U.S. catfish producers used a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to persuade Congress in 2008 to tighten regulation of the single species of fish, a program expected to incur $5 million to $16 million in start-up costs with its launch next year.

The battle has sparked threats of a trade war from Vietnam, which wants its fish excluded from the regulations. The Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, Le Cong Phung, has called Congress hypocritical for changing the rules on catfish to give an advantage to domestic producers.

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Malaria Most Likely Killed King Tut

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

King Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh, was frail, crippled and suffered "multiple disorders" when he died at age 19 in about 1324 B.C., but scientists have now determined the most likely agents of death: a severe bout of malaria combined with a degenerative bone condition.

The researchers said that to their knowledge "this is the oldest genetic proof of malaria in precisely dated mummies." Several other mummies in the study also showed DNA evidence for the presence of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, perhaps not surprising in a place like the Nile Valley.

The application of advanced radiological and genetic techniques to royal Egyptian mummies marks a new step in the ever deepening reach of historical inquiry through science. The study, reported Tuesday, turned up no evidence of foul play, as had been suspected by some historians and popular writers familiar with palace intrigues in ancient Egypt.

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Use Chocolate to Measure the Speed of Light

from Wired

If you're a long-time reader, you may remember the great leftover Easter Peeps microwave experiment. Well, today we're going to be nuking leftover Valentine's Day chocolate to demonstrate one of the constants of physics, the speed of light.

... The demonstration works because microwave ovens produce standing waves--waves that move "up" and "down" in place, instead of rolling forward like waves in the ocean. Microwave radiation falls into the radio section of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Most ovens produce waves with a frequency of 2,450 megahertz (millions of cycles per second). The oven is designed to be just the right size to cause the microwaves to reflect off the walls so that the peaks and valleys line up perfectly, creating "hot spots" (actually, lines of heat).

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Fossils 'Record Past Sea Changes'

from BBC News Online

Fossilised coral reefs in the Great Barrier Reef could help scientists understand how sea levels have changed over the past 20,000 years. An international team of researchers will spend 45 days at sea, gathering core samples from about 40 sites.

Described as the "trees of the sea," coral have growth rings that show seasonal variations. Researchers say the samples will also shed light on past sea temperatures, as well as other changes to the reef.

Alan Stevenson, team leader of marine geology at the British Geological Survey (BGS), which is involved in the project, said the fossilised corals' annual growth rings provided an insight to conditions under waves.

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Astronauts Install 'Room with a View' on ISS

from the Christian Science Monitor

A new countdown has begun on the International Space Station: It's T-minus two days and counting--give or take a few hours--for some of the most stunning views astronauts have ever had of Earth.

By late Wednesday or Thursday, astronauts on the station should be able to open the shutters of a $27-million, seven-windowed cupola, now snugly bolted to its proper spot on a new space-station segment astronauts installed during the past week. Both were delivered by the space shuttle Endeavour and its six-member crew during the shuttle's current mission, now at its halfway point.

The cupola in essence is the station's version of a seven-pane bay window. In its workaday role, it provides a place where crew members inside can provide an extra set of eyes to help colleagues on spacewalks. It also hosts a second set of controls the crew can use to operate the station's robotic arm.

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Bioengineering to Crop Up When AAAS Meets

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

If the titans of agribusiness are right, the world is on the verge of a major breakthrough in the way food is grown. But if history is any indication, genetically modified crops will need to overcome a lot of skepticism to spark a consumer revolution.

That uncertainty is fueled by the mixed record of current bioengineered crops--mainly soybeans, corn, canola--in meeting lofty targets set by backers of high-tech seeds. Vitamin-enhanced foods remain out of reach, it's unclear how much biotechnology has boosted plant production, and a recent study said genetically engineered plants have increased usage of herbicides.

One of biotechnology's leading advocates will hold a presentation at the 176th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which will start Thursday at the San Diego Convention Center and other venues. About 8,000 people from more than 50 countries are expected for the five-day affair, making it the largest general-science conference in the nation.

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Migraines, Memory Loss: Was It All in His Head?

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Karen Hammerman could see that her son was upset, and when he told her why, she was unnerved. Adam Hammerman, then a 16-year-old sophomore at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Montgomery County, had missed a week of school because of a virus and telephoned several classmates to see what assignments he'd missed.

"Something's wrong," he told his mother last May. "All my friends are mad at me. They say I've called them five times already and they're not going to tell me again." But Adam had no memory of making the calls.

The incident, Karen Hammerman soon discovered, was not isolated. One morning as Adam prepared to take a shower, he screamed after seeing himself in the mirror: He said he did not remember getting a haircut the previous day. He called his mother from school to ask what time she was picking him up, then called again five minutes later to ask the same thing. "Basically it was like living with a 16-year-old Alzheimer's patient," Karen Hammerman recalled.

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Stonehenge "Hedge" Found, Shielded Secret Rituals?

from National Geographic News

Stonehenge may have been surrounded by a "Stonehedge" that blocked onlookers from seeing secret rituals, according to a new study. Evidence for two encircling hedge--possibly thorn bushes--planted some 3,600 years ago was uncovered during a survey of the site by English Heritage, the government agency responsible for maintaining the monument in southern England.

The idea that Stonehedge was a shield against prying eyes isn't yet firmly rooted, but it's archaeologists' leading theory. For instance the newfound banks are too low and unsubstantial to have had a defensive role.

"The best [theory] we can come up with is some sort of hedge bank," said English Heritage archaeologist David Field, whose team discovered the two landscape features in April 2009. "We think they served as some sort of screen to filter access to the center [of Stonehenge]."

http://snipr.com/ue9mj

[Kai]

The Writing on the Cave Wall

from New Scientist

The first intrepid explorers to brave the 7-metre crawl through a perilously narrow tunnel leading to the Chauvet caves in southern France were rewarded with magnificent artwork to rival any modern composition. Stretching a full 3 metres in height, the paintings depict a troupe of majestic horses in deep colours, above a pair of boisterous rhinos in the midst of a fight.

... When faced with such spectacular beauty, who could blame the visiting anthropologists for largely ignoring the modest semicircles, lines and zigzags also marked on the walls? Yet dismissing them has proved to be something of a mistake.

The latest research has shown that, far from being doodles, the marks are in fact highly symbolic, forming a written "code" that was familiar to all of the prehistoric tribes around France and possibly beyond.

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New Source of an Isotope in Medicine Is Found

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON -- Just as the worldwide shortage of a radioactive isotope used in millions of medical procedures is about to get worse, officials say a new source for the substance has emerged: a nuclear reactor in Poland.

The isotope, technetium 99, is used to measure blood flow in the heart and to help diagnose bone and breast cancers. Almost two-thirds of the world's supply comes from two reactors; one, in Ontario, has been shut for repairs for nine months and is not expected to reopen before April, and the other, in the Netherlands, will close for six months starting Friday.

Radiologists say that as a result of the shortage, their treatment of some patients has had to revert to inferior materials and techniques they stopped using 20 years ago.

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Have Olympic Athletes Done All They Can?

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

It merited only a few paragraphs inside newspaper sports sections. Crystal Cox, a member of the gold-medal-winning U.S. women's 1,600-meter relay team in the 2004 Athens Olympics, had admitted to using a performance-enhancing drug. Cox would lose her medal and be banned from competition for four years.

On the surface, the announcement last month seemed just another episode of sports doping and its sad consequences. But to many sports scientists, the news was evidence of a broader trend. They believe that human athletic performance has peaked, and only cheating or technological advances will result in a rash of new world records.

A French researcher who analyzed a century's worth of world records concluded in a recent paper that the peak of athletic achievement was reached in 1988. Eleven world records were broken that year in track and field. Seven of them still stand.

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War Game Reveals U.S. Lacks Cyber-Crisis Skills

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Scene: The White House Situation Room. Event: A massive cyber attack has turned the cellphones and computers of tens of millions of Americans into weapons to shut down the Internet. A cascading series of events then knocks out power for most of the East Coast amid hurricanes and a heat wave.

Is the assault on cellphones an armed attack? In a crisis, what power does the government have to order phone and Internet carriers to allow monitoring of their networks? What level of privacy can Americans expect?

A war game, sponsored by a nonprofit group and attended by former top-ranking national security officials, laid bare Tuesday that the U.S. government lacks answers to such key questions.

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Report Compares Health County-by-County

from USA Today

For the first time, a new report reveals how counties across America stack up when it comes to health.

Today, whether you live in Malibu or Atlanta, you can learn if your community is holding its own in health. "County Health Rankings: Mobilizing Action Toward Community Health," a health report card for almost every one of the nation's more than 3,000 counties, is being released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin's Population Health Institute.

"This is a complicated story about what makes a community healthy and another not so healthy," says report author Pat Remington, the associate dean for public health at the University of Wisconsin.

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Aspirin May Reduce Breast Cancer Death Risk

from ABC News

A provocative new study suggests that aspirin reduces the odds of death in breast cancer survivors, although doctors caution it is too soon to know if women should start taking the drug as soon as they are diagnosed.

The research, part of the long-running Nurses' Health Study, followed 4,164 female nurses who had been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. Harvard investigators found that nurses who took aspirin--usually to protect against heart disease--were 50 percent less likely to have their cancer spread and 50 percent less likely to die from breast cancer.

"This is a very interesting and exciting study that suggests aspirin may reduce the recurrence of breast cancer," said Dr. Richard Besser, senior health and medical editor for ABC News. "However, the design of the study does not allow for definitive conclusions. Hopefully, there will be randomized trials of aspirin use to answer this question."

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Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Genome Health Study

from BBC News Online

Scientists have analysed the genomes of five southern Africans, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to study their genetic diversity and health. The research, published in the journal Nature, compared genes of the Archbishop with San people.

"I am excited by the results," Archbishop Tutu told BBC News. "Without these tests, I would not have known my bloodline... I am related to the San people, the first people to inhabit Southern Africa," he explained.

... The team of researchers from Africa, America and Australia hope that the study will help redress the geographic imbalance in disease susceptibility studies based on genetics. Southern Africans have often been poorly represented in drug trials and it will now be possible to include them in genome based studies on disease.

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Primitive Humans Conquered Sea, Surprising Finds Suggest

from National Geographic News

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Two years ago a team of U.S. and Greek archaeologists were combing a gorge on the island of Crete in Greece, hoping to find tiny stone tools employed by seafaring people who had plied nearby waters some 11,000 years ago.

Instead, Boston University archaeologist and stone-tool expert Curtis Runnels came across a whopping surprise--a sturdy 5-inch-long hand ax. ... The discovery of the hand ax suggests that someone besides technologically modern humans--perhaps Neanderthals, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, or primitive Homo sapiens--island-hopped across the Mediterranean for tens of millennia.

It's been thought that the early humans of this time period were not capable of devising boats or even simple rafts--technology considered an expression of modern behavior.

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Is the Recovery Act Stimulating Science and the Economy?

from Scientific American

Most of the National Science Foundation's $3 billion from the stimulus package has been distributed, but hardly any of it has been spent.

So far, $9.3 million for researchers building robotic bees, $1.3 million to hunt for viruses that infect single-celled organisms, and $845,000 to study past climate change in Russia has been doled out.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been able to fund thousands of new research projects with money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), aka the economic stimulus package, which was passed a year ago today. But has this money been as much of a boon to the economy has it has been to science?

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Engineering Cellular Synchrony

from the Scientist (Registration Required)

Scientists have engineered bacteria that can communicate with each other in a synchronized manner, lighting up in waves of fluorescent green, according to report in this week's Nature. The advance paves the way for developing environmental sensors and drug delivery systems that can time the release of medicines in periodic bursts.

"I think [the study] represents the state of the art of our ability to create synthetic gene networks," said James Collins of Boston University. "It was really brilliant that they were able to pull it off."

Jeff Hasty and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, engineered a very simple positive feedback loop using just two genes, plus the green fluorescent protein gene as a reporter. "The beauty of this thing is its simplicity," said Hasty.

http://snipr.com/uepua

[Kai]

February 4, 2010
Haiti Debates Moving Its Capital

from Spiegel

Haiti's official seismologist, who predicted the recent earthquake, has warned that an even stronger one is likely to hit Port-au-Prince within the next 20 years. Now the Haitian government is debating how and if the capital should be rebuilt--or if it should be moved elsewhere.

Claude Prépetit had seen it coming in his figures. He had done the calculations, in millimeters and in centuries, he had calculated the pressure that was building up beneath his feet, and he had estimated the energy that would eventually be discharged. And when the earth finally did shake, and falling concrete ceilings, stone walls and wooden beams killed at least 170,000 people within the space of 40 seconds, that was when Prépetit thought to himself: "This is it--this has to be a seven."

He had predicted an earthquake with a magnitude of about 7.2 points on the Richter scale, and the actual quake measured 7.0. For years, he had taken precise measurements and performed careful calculations, and he had done his job exceedingly well. When the earthquake struck, he was sitting at home in front of his computer.

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Sea Level Rise May Sink Island Nations

from Discovery News

Sea level rise from anthropogenic global warming could erase some island states from the face of the Earth--but those nations could survive even without land, say researchers.

Governments and people of lost islands could survive "in exile," build structures to mark their submerged territory, retain their status in the eyes of other states and await the day when their islands emerge again when global cooling drops sea levels.

The trouble is current international agreements, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, don't address the issue, said international law professor Rosemary Rayfuse of the University of New South Wales in Australia. Just what to do about the possibility of nations being lost, and how to do it, is very much on the frontiers of the legal thinking.

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Researcher on Climate Is Cleared in Inquiry

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON -- An academic board of inquiry has largely cleared a noted Pennsylvania State University climatologist of scientific misconduct, but a second panel will convene to determine whether his behavior undermined public faith in the science of climate change, the university said Wednesday.

The scientist, Dr. Michael E. Mann, has been at the center of a dispute arising from the unauthorized release of more than 1,000 e-mail messages from the servers of the University of East Anglia in England, home to one of the world's premier climate research units.

While the Pennsylvania State inquiry, conducted by three senior faculty members and administrators, absolved Dr. Mann of the most serious charges against him, it is not likely to silence the controversy over climate science. New questions about the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to which Dr. Mann was a significant contributor, have arisen since the hacked e-mail messages surfaced last November.

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Study Finds Cognition in Vegetative Patients

from the Wall Street Journal

In a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, four of 23 patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state showed signs of consciousness on brain-imaging tests.

Even more significantly, one patient was able to answer yes and no questions using the researchers' technique--indicating the potential for communication with people previously considered unresponsive.

Researchers at two centers, in England and Belgium, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tests on 54 patients with severe brain injury. Of these patients, 31 were diagnosed as being in a minimally conscious state, meaning they showed intermittent signs of awareness such as laughing or crying. The other 23 were diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, meaning they were considered unresponsive and unaware of their surroundings.

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Smart Power Grid Promises Efficiency, Consumer Options

from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

Imagine an electrical power network that talks to customers--and listens to them.

Or one that practically heals itself, that can sense when a fallen tree has severed a power line and reroute power so the fewest number of customers possible lose electricity.

Or one that gives customers control of their own energy use through the Internet, remotely turning off appliances or running the washing machine at night, when demand is low. Those are the promises power companies and the state are exploring in new technologies known collectively as the "smart grid."

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Plants' Quantum Secret to Boost Photosynthesis

from Scientific American

In less than one billionth of a second, plants from algae to redwoods transform 95 percent of the sunlight that falls on them--1017 joules per second bathe the planet--into energy stored chemically as carbohydrates. The quantum key to doing that lies in a phenomenon known to physicists as quantum coherence, according to new research published in Nature on February 4.

Quantum coherence describes how more than one molecule interacts with the same energy from one incoming photon at the same time. In essence, rather than the energy from a particular photon choosing one route to pass through the photosynthetic system, it travels through multiple channels simultaneously, allowing it to pick the quickest route.

"The energy of the absorbed light is finding more than one pathway to move along at any one time," explains physical chemist Greg Scholes of the University of Toronto, leader of the research group that highlighted the effect. "We can't pinpoint the energy of that light. It's shared in a very special way."

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China Set for Global Lead in Scientific Research

from Financial Times (Registration Required)

China has experienced the strongest growth in scientific research over the past three decades of any country, according to figures compiled for the Financial Times, and the pace shows no sign of slowing.

Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters, said China's "awe-inspiring" growth meant it was now the second-largest producer of scientific knowledge and was on course to overtake the US by 2020 if it continued on its trajectory.

Thomson Reuters, which indexes scientific papers from 10,500 journals, analysed the performance of four emerging markets countries--Brazil, Russia, India and China--over the past 30 years. China far outperformed every other nation, with a 64-fold increase in peer-reviewed scientific papers since 1981, with particular strength in chemistry and materials science.

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Reaching for Answers

from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

For two years, Pamela Hottenstein swallowed her pride and left collection jars in restaurants and stores around Beloit, her hometown. She held fund-raising car washes on rainy days and sent letters to churches. She watched her husband's roofing co-workers labor 10 hours on their day off just so they could donate all their earnings to the cause.

Late in 2009, she took the $32,300 raised and wired every penny to a company in China that arranged for her teenage daughter to be injected with stem cells.

The procedure, an attempt to treat the daughter's severe developmental disorder, is unproven, and American scientists were skeptical it would make any difference. The company offering it is one of dozens overseas that have sidestepped Western standards of medicine by selling treatments before they have been vetted in clinical trials and respected scientific journals. Despite all of the fund raising, the stem cell injections would leave Pamela and James Hottenstein $7,000 in debt.

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Lost Roman Codex Fragments Found in Book Binding

from National Geographic News

Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books. The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition of collecting Roman emperors' laws in a single manuscript.

The Codex Gregorianus covered the laws of Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138, to those of Diocletian, ruler from A.D. 284 to 305.

Later codices excerpted the laws that were still relevant and added new ones, so only parts of the first codex survived as passages in other editions. All copies of the original collection of laws were thought to have been lost. Luckily, in the 16th century it was common to use scraps of paper to reinforce the bindings of new books.

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Leaf Veins Loopy for a Reason

from Science News

Tree branches have inspired efficient transit networks, but a new study finds inspiration in leaves. The curvy, connected leaf veins found in some plants are an efficient way to circumvent damaged areas and channel nutrients, report researchers led by Eleni Katifori of the Rockefeller University in New York City.

"It's obvious that if you look at leaves, they have a lot of loops," Katifori says. To find out how the looped networks may be beneficial for the plants, the researchers created a computer model to compare how efficiently different branching patterns could do the job of leaf veins, which move water and nutrients around. "The question we're asking is, what's the best network we can build?" Katifori says.

In the simulations, the looped network performed better than nonlooped ones in several important ways, the team reported January 29 in Physical Review Letters. Damage from hungry insects, cold weather or parasites can interrupt leaves' normal venation patterns. Connected circular veins allowed the flow of water and minerals to circumvent areas where veins were destroyed, the team shows.

http://snipr.com/u9rl8

[Kai]

February 5, 2010
Collider to Operate Again, Though at Half Power

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The world's biggest and most expensive physics experiment will finally be going into regular operation later this month, but it is going to operate at only half power for the next two years, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said Thursday.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider was built over 15 years and at a cost of $10 billion to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts apiece and then bang them together in a search for primordial forces and new laws of physics. But the machine has been plagued with problems.

In the fall of 2008, after the collider was first turned on, an electrical splice between two of the superconducting magnets that guide the proton beams exploded during a test, casting doubt on the integrity of thousands of such splices in the collider, which is 18 miles around.

http://snipr.com/ua2mx


Pluto Images Show a Dynamic World

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Newly computer-processed images of Pluto taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show that it is not simply a ball of ice and rock, but a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes produced by its seasons, NASA said Thursday.

The images show an icy and dark molasses-colored world that is highly mottled and whose northern hemisphere is now getting brighter.

The images show that the body--once considered the ninth and most distant planet but now reduced to the status of dwarf planet--also turned noticeably redder in the two years after the turn of the millennium for reasons that are not clear, and that its equator features a large bright spot whose origin remains a mystery.

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The Counterfeiter

from the Scientist (Registration Required)

... Drugs can pass through a dozen or more hands on the way to the pharmacy and a consumer's medicine cabinet. The patchiness of the drug distribution network and the absence of a proper paper trail ... has allowed unscrupulous middlemen to launder counterfeit medications within the legitimate supply chain that leads to a local pharmacy. Foreign-produced drugs are also illegally "diverted" into the domestic supply chain.

In the last 10 years, counterfeit pharmaceuticals have become big business. According to the World Health Organization, counterfeit drugs are any medication that is deliberately and fraudulently mislabeled with respect to its true identity or source.

For instance, counterfeits may have packaging that matches a brand-name drug but were produced under appalling sanitary conditions, and may contain no active ingredient or a completely different ingredient. By some estimates, 15-25% of malaria drugs in sub-Saharan Africa are counterfeit or substandard.

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Giant Meteorites Slammed Earth Around A.D. 500?

from National Geographic News

Pieces of a giant asteroid or comet that broke apart over Earth may have crashed off Australia about 1,500 years ago, says a scientist who has found evidence of the possible impact craters.

Satellite measurements of the Gulf of Carpentaria revealed tiny changes in sea level that are signs of impact craters on the seabed below, according to new research by marine geophysicist Dallas Abbott. Based on the satellite data, one crater should be about 11 miles wide, while the other should be 7.4 miles wide.

For years Abbott, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, has argued that V-shaped sand dunes along the gulf coast are evidence of a tsunami triggered by an impact.

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Florida's Big Chill May Have Hammered Corals

from Science News

Rough weather is slowing efforts to survey the extent of Florida's first cold-weather coral bleaching event in 33 years. But reports so far find heavy damage in parts of reefs near shore.

A cold snap in January stressed corals in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary so much that many lost their colorful, live-in algal partners and turned bleached white, according to reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Corals sometimes recover, but divers are already reporting dead patches from the event.

Cold bleachings in this region are very unusual, says Billy Causey, Southeast regional director of NOAA's marine sanctuary office. "It's a benchmark event for us."

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Exoplanet Gas Spotted from Earth

from BBC News Online

Astronomers have used a new ground-based technique to study the atmosphere of a planet outside our Solar System.

The work could assist the search for Earth-like planets with traces of organic, or carbon-rich, molecules. Gases have previously been discerned on exoplanets before, but only by using space-based telescopes.

Astronomers reporting in Nature say their method of spotting methane gas on exoplanets could be extended to many other, ground-based telescopes. Methane was first spotted on an exoplanet named HD 189733b in 2008 by a group led by Mark Swain of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US.

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Strict Ban on Medical Ghostwriting Proposed

from Scientific American

When students pawn someone else's work off as their own, they get expelled. But when some professors do the same thing, they get a "pat on the back," and maybe even a few extra bucks. Scientists credited for research articles that were secretly penned by ghostwriters from pharmaceutical companies often are not reprimanded for their misrepresentations; rather, their ranks and career trajectories often improve.

Although this practice of undisclosed authors (with undisclosed commercial interests) writing articles under the pretense of unbiased scientific inquiry raises serious concerns about academic integrity, few institutions have policies to discourage it. The authors of a new study published in PLoS One hope to make medical ghostwriting a faux pas on par with plagiarism and data falsification.

After the results from their survey on ghostwriting prohibition policies revealed that 37 of the top 50 academic medical centers in the U.S. have none, Jeffrey Lacasse of Arizona State University's School of Social Work and Jonathan Leo of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., took the opportunity to propose an unambiguous policy on the matter in their article.

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How Sleepy Are Sloths?

from Smithsonian Magazine

Hoots, chirps and the guttural wails of howler monkeys fill the humid, earthy air as we trek deeper. From floor to canopy, the tropical forest is crawling with creatures, and my guide, Robert Horan, keeps a running commentary. Spider monkeys flounce in the tree branches. Two bats cling to the inside of a hollow tree. Stingless bees swarm around a honey-like goop oozing from a freshly cut log.

... With all the wildlife vying for my attention, I just about pass the 130-foot radio tower, when Horan calls it out. I tilt my hat back, wipe the sweat from my brow and look up. The tower, like the soaring trees surrounding it, is the first evidence of the island being wired.

An aerial view of the six-square-mile research island in the Panama Canal would reveal six other towers poking through the treetops--all part of a cutting-edge animal surveillance system scientists call the Automated Radio Telemetry System, or ARTS. Atop each tower is an array of antennas that, every few minutes, receives signals from up to 20 radio-tagged animals roaming the forest. The towers then communicate real-time information on the locations and activity levels of the animals to an on-site laboratory.

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The Strangest Liquid: Why Water Is So Weird

from New Scientist

We are confronted by many mysteries, from the nature of dark matter and the origin of the universe to the quest for a theory of everything. These are all puzzles on the grand scale, but you can observe another enduring mystery of the physical world--equally perplexing, if not quite so grand--from the comfort of your kitchen. Simply fill a tall glass with chilled water, throw in an ice cube and leave it to stand.

The fact that the ice cube floats is the first oddity. And the mystery deepens if you take a thermometer and measure the temperature of the water at various depths. At the top, near the ice cube, you'll find it to be around 0°C, but at the bottom it should be about 4°C. That's because water is denser at 4°C than it is at any other temperature--another strange trait that sets it apart from other liquids.

Water's odd properties don't stop there, and some are vital to life. Because ice is less dense than water, and water is less dense at its freezing point than when it is slightly warmer, it freezes from the top down rather than the bottom up. So even during the ice ages, life continued to thrive on lake floors and in the deep ocean. Water also has an extraordinary capacity to mop up heat, and this helps smooth out climatic changes that could otherwise devastate ecosystems.

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Psychiatric Diagnosis: That Way, Madness Lies

from the Economist

On February 10th the world of psychiatry will be asked, metaphorically, to lie on the couch and answer questions about the state it thinks it is in. For that is the day the American Psychiatric Association (APA) plans to release a draft of the fifth version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V).

Mental illness carrying the stigma that it does, and the brain being as little-understood as it is, revising the DSM is always a controversial undertaking. This time, however, some of the questions asked of the process are likely to be particularly probing.

The DSM, the first version of which was published in 1952, lists recognised psychological disorders and the symptoms used to diagnose them. In the United States, what is in it influences whether someone will be diagnosed with an illness at all, how he will be treated if he is so diagnosed, and whether his insurance company will pay for that treatment.

http://snipr.com/ua2oz

[Kai]

Study: Eastern Trees in the Midst of a Growth Spurt

from Time

Basic biology suggests that plants might grow faster in a world with more carbon dioxide, and field experiments bear that out: when you pump extra CO2 into a field or a forest, trees and other vegetation tend to get bigger.

There are plenty of caveats attached: without other nutrients, the size and health of CO2-enriched plants can be compromised, and in some cases noxious weeds like poison ivy do better than the greenery you might prefer. But perhaps the biggest question of all is how closely such artificial situations translate in the real world.

That question is a long way from being answered, but a study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences takes a small step in that direction. A team of researchers used 22 years' worth of carefully accumulated measurements of hardwood forests in and near the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, in Edgewater, Md., to show that their growth has accelerated significantly. On average, the stands were expanding at a rate of two extra tons of mass per acre per year, by the end of the study--the equivalent of a single two-foot-diameter tree, if you could grow a tree that big in a year.

http://snipr.com/uay51


Evidence Builds on Color of Dinosaurs

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Until last week, paleontologists could offer no clear-cut evidence for the color of dinosaurs. Then researchers provided evidence that a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx had a white-and-ginger striped tail. And now a team of paleontologists has published a full-body portrait of another dinosaur, in striking plumage that would have delighted that great painter of birds John James Audubon.

"This is actual science, not Avatar," said Richard O. Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and co-author of the new study, published in Science.

Dr. Prum and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that feathers contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes. In 2009, they demonstrated that melanosomes survived for millions of years in fossil bird feathers. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes help produce the color of feathers, so the scientists were able to get clues about the color of fossil feathers from their melanosomes alone.

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Is It Time to Throw Out 'Primordial Soup' Theory?

from National Public Radio

Is the "primordial soup" theory--the idea that life emerged from a prebiotic broth--past its expiration date? Biochemist Nick Lane thinks so. The University College London writer and his colleagues argue that the 81-year-old notion just doesn't hold water.

Lane [says] there's another possible explanation for the emergence of life. But before we get to that, why toss out the soup theory? Lane says the idea of a primordial soup goes back to 1929, and great biologists like J.B.S. Haldane.

"He proposed that the Earth's early atmosphere was composed of simple gases like methane and ammonia. And they would react together under the influence of ultraviolet rays or lightning to produce a thin 'soup'--which became thicker over time--of organic molecules," Lane says.

http://snipr.com/uay6a


Protein Clumps Like a Prion, But Proves Crucial For Long-term Memory

from Science News

Sea slugs make memories with a twist. Screwing a normal nerve cell protein into a distorted shape helps slugs, and possibly people, lock in memories, new research shows.

Notably, the shape change also brings a shift in the protein's behavior, leading it to form clumps. That kind of behavior is the sort seen in prions, the misshapen, infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease, scrapie and other disorders. But the new study, published February 5 in Cell, shows a possible normal function for the shape-shifting, suggesting that twists and clumps don't necessarily make prions monsters.

In one sense, prions are machines of "molecular memory," says Yury Chernoff, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and editor in chief of the journal Prion. The proteins remember what happened to them--changing shapes--and then transmit that change to other proteins. "But the notion of these machines being used for cellular, and therefore organismal, memory is truly amazing," he says.

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Is Climate Change Hiding the Decline of Maple Syrup?

from Nature News

The burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide that alters the balance of carbon isotopes naturally found in the environment--an effect that is now being found in food, reveals a US study.

Modern methods for tracking the origins of processed foods use isotopes--atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons. Of the most common naturally occurring isotopes of carbon ... the heavier carbon-13 isotope is rarer.

... As part of an undergraduate project intended to show how isotope analysis works, geochemist William Peck at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, got his students to analyse maple syrup from different parts of the northeastern United States. "Our intent was really just to see if isotope values varied by geography or if anyone was putting in sweeteners," says Peck.

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Challenges Posed by Bt Brinjal

from the Times of India

The cutting-edge technology of Bt brinjal [eggplant] has had an unintended consequence. The public outrage that followed the regulatory clearance of the first ever GM food crop has forced environment minister Jairam Ramesh to adopt an innovation in public administration.

No minister has ever before crisscrossed the country to hold a series of public consultations, that too on a policy matter already approved by a statutory regulator. Ramesh has announced that he would present his findings to the prime minister shortly following the last of the seven consultation meetings due in Bangalore on February 6.

Ramesh came up with the device of public consultations on October 15, 2009, just a day after the regulator in his ministry, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), had given its go-ahead to the commercial cultivation of Bt brinjal. The series of consultation meetings chaired by him, starting in Kolkata on January 13, have turned out to be as dramatic, given the manner in which pro and anti-GM lobbies sought to demonstrate not only the strength of their arguments but also their lung power.

http://snipr.com/uay8y


Flying Through the Water: America's Cup Technology

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

The basic physics of sailing seem obvious: A sail catches the wind. The energy is transferred to the hull. The boat is pushed forward.

Of course, any sailor worth his salt knows it's not that simple, and sailing the boats of this year's America's Cup, scheduled to begin today off the coast of Valencia, Spain, may be something akin to rocket science.

By all reports, both vessels in this year's 33rd staging of the America's Cup (racing began in 1851, making it the world's oldest active sports trophy) are capable of sailing two to three times faster than the wind, so fast in fact that "they make their own wind," said Bryon Anderson, a physicist at Kent State University and a longtime sailor.

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Even If You're Careful, Drugs Can End Up in Water

from the News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)

PORTLAND, Maine (Associated Press) -- The federal government advises throwing most unused or expired medications into the trash instead of down the drain, but they can end up in the water anyway, a study from Maine suggests.

Tiny amounts of discarded drugs have been found in water at three landfills in the state, confirming suspicions that pharmaceuticals thrown into household trash are ending up in water that drains through waste, according to a survey by the state's environmental agency that's one of only a handful to have looked at the presence of drugs in landfills.

That landfill water--known as leachate--eventually ends up in rivers. Most of Maine doesn't draw its drinking water from rivers where the leachate ends up, but in other states that do, water supplies that come from rivers could potentially be contaminated.

http://snipr.com/uay9m


Insects Migrate in Wind Highways

from BBC News Online

Migrating insects use highways in the sky to speed their journey, according to a study published in Science magazine.

Researchers say moths and butterflies use sophisticated methods to find winds that will take them in certain directions for thousands of kilometres. The little creatures travel on winds of up to 100km (60 miles) per hour.

They use internal compasses to find these fast moving winds to carry them to their journey's end.

http://snipr.com/uay9u


Living Fast? Scientists Show Lifespan Is Linked to DNA

from the Guardian (U.K.)

Scientists have isolated a gene sequence that appears to determine how fast our bodies age, the first time a link between DNA and human lifespan has been found.

The discovery could have a profound impact on public health and raises the best hope yet for drugs that prevent the biological wear and tear behind common age-related conditions such as heart disease and certain cancers.

The work is expected to pave the way for screening programmes to spot people who are likely to age fast and be more susceptible to heart problems and other conditions early in life. People who test positive for the gene variant in their 20s could be put on cholesterol-lowering statin drugs and encouraged to exercise, eat healthily and avoid smoking.

http://snipr.com/uaya4

[Kai]

February 10, 2010
'Third-Hand Smoke' Could Damage Health

from BBC News Online

Lingering residue from tobacco smoke which clings to upholstery, clothing and the skin releases cancer-causing agents, work in PNAS journal shows. Berkeley scientists in the US ran lab tests and found "substantial levels" of toxins on smoke-exposed material.

They say while banishing smokers to outdoors cuts second-hand smoke, residues will follow them back inside and this "third-hand smoke" may harm. Opponents called it a laughable term designed to frighten people unduly.

The scientists say nicotine stains on clothing, furniture and wallpaper can react with a common indoor pollutant to generate dangerous chemicals called tobacco-specific nitrosamines or TSNAs. In the tests, contaminated surface exposed to "high but reasonable" amounts of the pollutant nitrous acid--emitted by unvented gas appliances and in car exhaust--boosted levels of newly formed TSNAs 10-fold.

http://snipr.com/ubtcy


Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It's Awesome

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Sociologists have developed elaborate theories of who spreads gossip and news ... but they've had less success measuring what kind of information travels fastest. Do people prefer to spread good news or bad news? Would we rather scandalize or enlighten? Which stories do social creatures want to share, and why?

Now some answers are emerging thanks to a rich new source of data: you, Dear Reader. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

... People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics. ... In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles ...

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FDA Aims to Rein in Radiation-Based Medical Scans

from ABC News

(Associated Press) -- The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday it will work with doctors and manufacturers to reduce unnecessary radiation exposure from medical scans, a problem that has been growing for decades.

The agency says it will require manufacturers of CT scanners and other imaging machines to include safety controls that prevent patients from receiving excessive radiation doses. A public meeting to discuss the requirements is scheduled for late March.

Regulators are also developing best-practice measures that hospitals and imaging centers will have to meet to retain their scanning accreditation. The proposal is part of a multipronged effort to rein in excessive radiation-based medical scanning, which has mushroomed in recent years.

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"Super Earth" May Really Be New Planet Type

from National Geographic News

Oceans of lava might bubble on its surface. Hot pebbles may rain down from the sky. But the extrasolar planet CoRoT-7b is considered to be the most Earthlike world yet found outside our solar system.

A recent study, however, suggests that Earth might not be the best basis for comparison. Instead, the authors argue, CoRoT-7b is the first in a new class of exoplanets: a super-Io.

Like Jupiter's moon Io, CoRoT-7b could easily be in the right kind of orbit to experience what's known as tidal heating, according to study co-author Rory Barnes of the University of Washington in Seattle.

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Revising the Book on Mental Illness

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

After years of research, professional infighting and maneuvering from various interest groups, the nation's psychiatrists Tuesday unveiled proposed changes to the manual used to diagnose and treat mental disorders around the world.

The draft document, released by the American Psychiatric Assn., for the first time calls for binge-eating and gambling to be considered disorders, opening the way for insurance coverage of these problems. But it refrains from suggesting a formal diagnosis for obesity, Internet addiction or sex addiction, as some professionals had proposed.

The document also recommends a single category for autism spectrum disorders, unifying what has been a multifaceted and complicated diagnostic scale. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will be published in 2013.

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The Advantages of Being Helpless

from Scientific American

At every stage of early development, human babies lag behind infants from other species. A kitten can amble across a room within moments of birth and catch its first mouse within weeks, while its wide-eyed human counterpart takes ... years to learn even simple tasks ....

... In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Michael Ramscar and Evangelia Chrysikou make the case that this very helplessness is what allows human babies to advance far beyond other animals.

They propose that our delayed cortical development is precisely what enables us to acquire the cultural building blocks, such as language, that make up the foundations of human achievement.

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Testing Time for Stem Cells

from Nature News

The drug industry is keener on stem-cell technologies than ever before--and not just as a source of new treatments. A wave of new partnerships aims to use stem cells as a way to screen other potential drug candidates.

In the latest such example, Roche last week announced a deal worth some US$20 million with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Roche, based in Basel, Switzerland, will use cell lines and protocols developed by academic researchers to screen for drugs to treat cardiovascular disease and other conditions.

Because relevant human cell types are often unavailable, current screens tend to use cells from rodents or human tissues other than the ones researchers want to target. The hope is that stem cells could provide exactly the type of cells relevant for an assay.

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Have Gray Wolves Found a Home in Colorado?

from High Country News

Last April, in a narrow mountain valley in northwestern Colorado, Cristina Eisenberg was searching for scat. The diminutive, dark-haired biologist and two members of her field crew had set up a kilometer-long transect through elk habitat, and the trio was walking slowly along the line.

... Then, on the edge of an aspen grove, one of the biologists saw something unusual: a scat roughly as long and wide as a banana, tapered at the ends, perhaps two months old. When Eisenberg examined it, she saw that it contained hair from deer or elk and shards of bone, some almost as long as a fingernail.

... In the course of her research, Eisenberg had seen and handled thousands of scats just like this one, but not here, not in Colorado. Everything about it--the size, the shape, the smell, the contents--indicated a creature that had been extirpated from the state more than 70 years ago. Everything about it said wolf.

http://snipr.com/ubtgm


Scientists Try to Measure Love

from the Baltimore Sun

Leave it to science to take all the fun out of something as cosmically pure as love. Theories about love's purpose range from the biologically practical to the biologically complicated. Anthropologists have said it helps ensure reproduction of the species; attachment theorists maintain it's a byproduct of our relationship with our childhood caregivers.

And now researchers are exploring what happens physiologically as a romantic relationship progresses. The more we understand it, they say, the better our chances of making love last and of harnessing its potential to improve our emotional and physical well-being.

... Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University in New York, has done brain scans on people newly in love and found that after that first magical meeting or perfect first date, a complex system in the brain is activated that is essentially "the same thing that happens when a person takes cocaine."

http://snipr.com/ubtgw


$78.5 Million Effort to Keep Carp Out of Great Lakes

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

CHICAGO -- Federal authorities on Monday presented a $78.5 million plan intended to block Asian carp, a hungry, huge, nonnative fish, from invading the Great Lakes.

The threat has grown increasingly tense throughout the region in recent months as genetic material from the fish was found near and even in Lake Michigan.

In a meeting in Washington with leaders of some Great Lakes states, officials from the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies laid out an "Asian Carp Control Strategy Framework" to ensure that the fish, known to take over entire ecosystems, do not establish themselves in the lakes.

http://snipr.com/ubth8

[Kai]

February 9, 2010
U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Just over two years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri seemed destined for a scientist's version of sainthood: A vegetarian economist-engineer who leads the United Nations' climate change panel, he accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the panel, sharing the honor with former Vice President Al Gore.

But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri's resignation last week.

Critics, writing in Britain's Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, have accused Dr. Pachauri of profiting from his work as an adviser to businesses, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York investment firm--a claim he denies.

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First Results From Large Hadron Collider Published

from BBC News Online

The results from the highest-energy particle experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in December have begun to yield their secrets.

Scientists from the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid detector has now totted up all of the resulting particle interactions.

They wrote in the Journal of High Energy Physics that the run created more particles than theory predicted. However, the glut of particles should not affect results as the experiment runs to even higher energies this year.

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Study Links Mother's Age to Child's Risk of Autism

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Women who give birth after age 40 are nearly twice as likely to have a child with autism as those under 25, but it is unlikely that delayed parenthood plays a big role in the current autism epidemic, California researchers reported Monday.

The findings were expected to draw widespread attention because of the intense public interest in autism, but their true impact was expected to be simply in suggesting further avenues of research.

Surprisingly, the age of the father plays little role unless the mother is younger than 30 and the father is over 40, according to the analysis of all births in California in the 1990s.

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U.S. Proposes New Climate Service

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

The Obama administration proposed a new climate service on Monday that would provide Americans with predictions on how global warming will affect everything from drought to sea levels.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Service, modeled loosely on the 140-year-old National Weather Service, would provide forecasts to farmers, regional water managers and businesses affected by changing climate conditions.

The move is essentially a reorganization of NOAA, and would bring the agency's climate research arm together with its more consumer-oriented services. It would not come with a boost in funding. A Web portal launched Monday at www.climate.gov provides a single entry point to NOAA's climate information, data, products and services.

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New Methods Aim to Keep E. coli in Beef Lower

from USA Today

The dead of winter may not be the time when most people's thoughts turn toward the allure of a hamburger on the grill. But from a food safety standpoint, it's probably the safest time there is to eat ground beef.

"The theory is that animals are carrying higher levels of E. coli during the summer months, and sometimes they may overwhelm the systems in place to control pathogen contamination in (processing) plants," says James Marsden, a professor of food safety and security at Kansas State University.

... So industry and researchers are turning their sights to new technologies being deployed on the farm, the feedlot and at the slaughterhouse to knock E. coli O157:H7 down to winter levels all year round.

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Soft Drinks Could Boost Pancreatic Cancer Risk

from BusinessWeek

People who down two or more soft drinks a week may have double the risk of developing deadly pancreatic cancer, compared to non-soda drinkers, new research suggests.

But the overall number of people developing the malignancy remains low, with the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimating 42,470 new cases last year.

"Soft drinks are linked with a higher risk of pancreatic cancer," said Noel Mueller, lead author of a study appearing in the February issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. "We can't speculate too much on the mechanism because this is an observational study, but the increased risk may be working through effects of the hormone insulin."

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Saving Tiny Toads Without a Home

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

This is a story about a waterfall, the World Bank and 4,000 homeless toads. Maybe the story will have a happy ending, and the bright-golden spray toads, each so small it could easily sit on a dime, will return to the African gorge where they once lived, in the spray of a waterfall on the Kihansi River in Tanzania.

The river is dammed now, courtesy of the bank. The waterfall is 10 percent of what it was. And the toads are now extinct in the wild. But 4,000 of them live in the Bronx and Toledo, Ohio, where scientists at the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Toledo Zoo are keeping them alive in hopes, somehow, of returning them to the wild. This month, the Bronx Zoo will formally open a small exhibit displaying the toads in its Reptile House.

Meanwhile, though, the toads embody the larger conflicts between conservation and economic development and the complexity of trying to preserve and restore endangered species to the wild. Their story also raises questions about how much effort should go to save any one species.

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Turkeys: So Good People Tamed Them Twice

from ScienceNOW Daily News

Americans love turkeys, so it's surprising how little researchers know about the birds' early relationship to humans.

Many archaeologists credited Mesoamericans--who lived in the area extending from present-day Mexico to Honduras--with bringing domesticated turkeys to North America sometime between 200 B.C.E. and 500 C.E., much like they brought maize, beans, and squash.

But a new study shows that Native Americans in what is now the southwestern United States likely tamed turkeys on their own.

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Oldest Land-Walker Tracks Found

from National Geographic News

The first vertebrates to walk the Earth emerged from the sea almost 20 million years earlier than previously thought, say scientists who have discovered footprints from an 8-foot-long prehistoric creature.

Dozens of the 395-million-year-old fossil footprints were recently discovered on a former marine tidal flat or lagoon in southeastern Poland.

The prints were made by tetrapods--animals with backbones and four limbs--and could rewrite the history of when, where, and why fish evolved limbs and first walked onto land, the study says.

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City Dwellers Drive Deforestation in 21st Century

from Scientific American

Globally, roughly 13 million hectares of forest fall to the blade or fire each year. Such deforestation has long been driven by farmers eking out a slash-and-burn living or loggers using new roads to cut inroads into pristine forest.

But now new data appears to show that, at least for the first five years of the 21st century, big block clearings that reflect industrial deforestation have come to dominate, rather than smaller-scale efforts that leave behind long, narrow swaths of cleared land.

Geographer Ruth DeFries of Columbia University and her colleagues used satellite images from Landsat, along with the MODIS instrument on Aqua to analyze tree-clearing in countries ringing the tropics, representing 98 percent of all remaining tropical forest.

http://snipr.com/ubdvb

[Kai]

February 12, 2010
Denmark's Case for Antibiotic-Free Animals

from CBS News

They call it the "Danish Experiment"--a source of pride for the country's 17,000 farmers. CBS Evening News Anchor Katie Couric reports how unlike industrial farms in the U.S., which use antibiotics to promote growth and prevent disease, farmers in Denmark use antibiotics sparingly, only when animals are sick.

The experiment to stop widespread use of antibiotics was launched 12 years ago, when European studies showed a link between animals who were consuming antibiotic feed everyday and people developing antibiotic resistant infections from handling or eating that meat.

"We don't want to use more medicine than needed, and a lot of the medicine that is given is not needed," said Soren Helmer. Helmer is a second-generation pig farmer whose sows produce more than 30,000 pigs a year. When the ban started, he and his father thought the industry would suffer. "We thought we could not produce pigs as efficient as we did before," Helmer said. "But that was proven wrong."

http://snipr.com/uchk6


Child Obesity Risks Death at Early Age, Study Finds

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

A rare study that tracked thousands of children through adulthood found the heaviest youngsters were more than twice as likely as the thinnest to die prematurely, before age 55, of illness or a self-inflicted injury.

Youngsters with a condition called pre-diabetes were at almost double the risk of dying before 55, and those with high blood pressure were at some increased risk. But obesity was the factor most closely associated with an early death, researchers said.

The study, published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed data gathered from Pima and Tohono O'odham Indians, whose rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes soared decades before weight problems became widespread among other Americans. It is one of the largest studies to have tracked children for several decades after detailed information on weight and risk factors like high cholesterol were gathered.

http://snipr.com/uchkv


Pompadours in the Palms

from Natural History

A full-grown chapil palm tree can reach 110 feet tall, its corona of forty-foot fronds stretching skyward above the surrounding canopy. Competition for space and light can be intense among rain forest trees, and every mature, fruit-producing chapil that towers overhead had countless less-fortunate siblings that perished during the long journey from seed to adult.

But what determines the winners and losers in that lottery? In the case of the chapil, part of the answer may lie in the social behavior of a curious endangered species known as the long-wattled umbrellabird.

The chapil (Oenocarpus bataua) is widely distributed--and widely consumed--throughout the South American tropics. ... But on the other side of the Andes from the Amazon Basin the chapil palm serves the long-wattled umbrellabird--perhaps its most unusual avian patron--and benefits in return.

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Errors in Climate Report Prompt a Push for Reform

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Washington -- A steady drip of unsettling errors is exposing what scientists are calling "the weaker link" in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning series of international reports on global warming.

The flaws--and the erosion they've caused in public confidence--have some scientists calling for drastic changes in how future United Nations climate reports are done. A push for reform is being published in Thursday's issue of the scientific journal Nature. The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is often portrayed as one massive tome. But it is four separate reports on different aspects of global warming, written months apart by distinct groups of scientists.

No errors have surfaced in the first and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas are man-made and incontrovertible. Four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to explain how global warming might affect daily life around the world.

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Bouncing Sands Explain Mars' Rippled Surface

from Science News

Once Martian sand grains hop, they don't stop. That's the conclusion of a new study that finds sand can move on Mars without much windy encouragement. Mars' sandy surface has clearly been shaped by wind.

Its characteristic dunes and ripples are the kind formed by sand particles taking short wind-borne hops, a process called saltation. But atmospheric simulations and landers' direct measurements of wind speed have found that the Martian wind hardly ever blows hard enough to kick sand grains off the ground in the first place.

The new paper, to appear in an upcoming Physical Review Letters, suggests a solution to this paradox: a kind of billiard-ball effect in which one sand particle knocks the next one into motion.

http://snipr.com/uchnh


Unearthing Anthrax's Dirty Secret

from Scientific American

NEW YORK -- Using a pipette as a makeshift rolling pin, Raymond Schuch spent some of his lab time last summer pressing the guts out of earthworms that he had collected, fresh from Manhattan soil. For his efforts, The Rockefeller University microbiologist extracted what looked like just a small pile of dirt, but was actually a microcosm teeming with phages--viruses that infect bacteria.

Schuch was on the hunt for phages that could kill anthrax and become anti-anthrax therapies, but what he discovered were viruses that enable this deadly bacteria to grow and survive when the going gets tough.

Scientists have suspected for decades that some phages have a hand at helping the growth of anthrax, Bacillus anthracis, and its less deadly cousins in the Bacillus genus. Then, four years ago, Schuch, along with Vincent Fischetti, a professor of bacteriology at Rockefeller, found a direct link--a type of phage that made anthrax resistant to an antibiotic commonly produced by other bacteria in soil, such as Streptomyces.

http://snipr.com/uchnq


Solar Observatory Launches From Cape Canaveral

from BBC News Online

The US space agency (Nasa) has launched its Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) from Cape Canaveral in Florida. It was the second lift-off attempt for the mission after Wednesday's effort was postponed due to high winds.

The observatory is designed to acquire detailed images of our star to explain variation in its activity. An active Sun can disrupt satellite, communication, and power systems at Earth--especially when it billows charged particles in our direction. Scientists want to see if they can forecast this "space weather" better.

... The Solar Dynamics Observatory will investigate the physics at work inside, on the surface and in the atmosphere of the Sun. "SDO is the solar variability mission," said Lika Guhathakurta, the SDO programme scientist at Nasa Headquarters. "It is going to revolutionise our view of the Sun and it will reveal how solar activity affects our planet, and help us anticipate what lies ahead. It will observe the Sun faster, deeper and in greater detail than any previous observations, breaking barriers of time, scale and clarity that have long blocked progress in solar physics."

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Holy Surgical Side Effect

from ScienceNOW Daily News

People of many religious faiths share the belief that there is a reality that transcends their personal experience. Now, a study with brain cancer patients hints at brain regions that may regulate this aspect of spiritual thinking. The researchers found that some patients who had surgery to remove part of the parietal cortex became more prone to "self transcendence."

Scientists have grown increasingly interested in the origins and neural underpinnings of religious faith. Yet, contrary to some overenthusiastic media reports, brain scans of people of various faiths asked to ponder their relationship with God have so far failed to turn up a "God spot," suggesting instead that many regions of the brain are involved.

In the new study, psychologist Cosimo Urgesi of the University of Udine in Italy and colleagues took a different approach, asking 88 brain cancer patients to fill out a widely used personality questionnaire before and after surgery to remove their tumors. One section of the test measures "self transcendence." It asks respondents, for example, about their tendency to become so absorbed in an activity that they lose track of time and place and whether they feel a strong spiritual connection with other people or with nature.

http://snipr.com/uchp2


Swedish Environmental Lessons

from the Christian Science Monitor

Falls Church, Va. -- Gathered around a dining room table in a typical home in this suburban Virginia community, four people are talking about the lifestyle changes they've made in order to live more sustainably.

"I don't think we've had beef since July 1," says Nolan Stokes, a financial planner. In addition, "we all eat smaller portions of meat." Angela Ulsh, a teacher, chimes in: "You don't miss it."

"We got a digital thermostat and cut our electricity use in half because of it," says Isaiah Akin, a Senate staffer, as his wife, Mya, a teacher, nods and adds, "The changes don't have to be a burden." A woman wearing a purple suit and stylish glasses listens to this recitation of changes undertaken to benefit the environment and smiles. ... She's Maud Olofsson, Sweden's deputy prime minister. During a November visit to the United States she visited the group, whose members are part of a Swedish-sponsored environmental initiative that teaches people how to reduce their carbon footprints.

http://snipr.com/uchpf


Hives Stayin' Alive

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

SAN DIEGO -- Scientists have spent decades studying waggling bees, individuals in every colony that dance and vibrate to tell others where food can be found.

As it turns out, the bees butting heads with the wagglers to make them stop dancing may be just as important. The interruption is a "stop signal"--a warning to steer clear of a place with predators or competing bees. Why is this significant?

Studies of bee waggling have led to profound discoveries about the complex communication patterns of some highly social insects, helped beekeepers improve their operations and earned an Austrian zoologist a 1973 Nobel Prize. The anti-waggling discovery, by UCSD professor James Nieh, also may be historic: It's only the second known example of a sophisticated insect society using "negative feedback"--signals that tell others to stop a behavior.

http://snipr.com/uchpk

[Kai]

February 11, 2010
Animal Antibiotic Overuse Hurting Humans?

from CBS News

Two years ago, 46-year-old Bill Reeves, who worked at a poultry processing plant in Batesville, Arkansas, developed a lump under his right eye. "It went from about the size of a mosquito bite to about the size of a grapefruit," he said.

CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric reports doctors tried several drugs that usually work on this potentially deadly infection: methicillin resistant staph or MRSA--before one saved his life.

... This is not an isolated incident and chickens aren't the only concern. A University of Iowa study last year found a new strain of MRSA in nearly three-quarters of hogs (70 percent), and nearly two-thirds of the workers (64 percent) on several farms in Iowa and Western Illinois. All of them use antibiotics, routinely. On antibiotic-free farms no MRSA was found.

http://snipr.com/uc5bl


Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON -- As millions of people along the East Coast hole up in their snowbound homes, the two sides in the climate-change debate are seizing on the mounting drifts to bolster their arguments.

Skeptics of global warming are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change--this looks more like global cooling, they taunt.

Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events. But some independent climate experts say the blizzards in the Northeast no more prove that the planet is cooling than the lack of snow in Vancouver or the downpours in Southern California prove that it is warming.

http://snipr.com/uc5bw


Being Bored Could Be Bad for Your Health

from USA Today

LONDON (Associated Press) -- Can you really be bored to death? In a commentary to be published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in April, experts say there's a possibility that the more bored you are, the more likely you are to die early.

Annie Britton and Martin Shipley of University College London caution that boredom alone isn't likely to kill you--but it could be a symptom of other risky behavior like drinking, smoking, taking drugs or having a psychological problem.

The researchers analyzed questionnaires completed between 1985 and 1988 by more than 7,500 London civil servants ages 35 to 55. The civil servants were asked if they had felt bored at work during the previous month.

http://snipr.com/uc5cc


Genes Linked to Stuttering Identified

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Government researchers have discovered the first genes linked to stuttering--a complex of three mutated genes that may be responsible for one in every 11 stuttering cases, especially in people of Asian descent.

Studies of stuttering in both families and twins had long suggested that stuttering has a significant genetic component. But until now, scientists had not been able to identify specific genes that might cause the disorder.

The finding is important, experts said, because it shows that stuttering, which affects as many as 1% of all adults worldwide, is biological in origin and not the result of poor parenting, emotional distress or other nebulous factors that many physicians have cited as causes.

http://snipr.com/uc5cq


Feds Pass on Surest Solution to Asian Carp Advance

from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (Associated Press) -- With marauding Asian carp on the Great Lakes' doorstep, the federal government has crafted a $78.5 million battle plan that offers no assurance of thwarting an invasion and doesn't use the most promising weapon available to fight it off.

The surest way to prevent the huge, hungry carp from gaining a foothold in the lakes and threatening their $7 billion fishing industry is to sever the link between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River basin, created by engineers in Chicago more than a century ago.

The strategy released by the Obama administration this week agrees only to conduct a long-range study of that idea, which could take years. The government also refuses to shut down two navigational locks on Chicago waterways that could provide an easy pathway for the carp into the lakes, although it promises to consider opening them less often.

http://snipr.com/uc5hc


A New VISTA on Stellar Birthplace

from Science News

Using its infrared eyes to peer into the dusty center of the Milky Way's Orion star-forming region, the world's largest panoramic telescope has produced a revealing new portrait of this familiar stellar nursery. The image was taken at the Paranal Observatory in northern Chile by the new 4.1-meter VISTA (for Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) telescope, which records large sections of sky in a single exposure.

Orion lies about 1,350 light-years from Earth. Like previous images taken of the region in visible light, the center of the new picture shows the four hot, young stars known as the Trapezium, which blast ultraviolet light into surrounding space and set the Orion region aglow.

But VISTA's view also shows many other newborn stars, which in visible light are hidden by dust. Because infrared light penetrates dust, VISTA was able to record these youngsters and the high-speed streams of gas they eject.

http://snipr.com/uc5iq


Whole Genome of Ancient Human Is Decoded

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The genome of a man who lived on the western coast of Greenland some 4,000 years ago has been decoded, thanks to the surprisingly good preservation of DNA in a swatch of his hair so thick it was originally thought to be from a bear.

This is the first time the whole genome of an ancient human has been analyzed, and it joins the list of just eight whole genomes of living people that been have been decoded so far. It also sheds new light on the settlement of North America by showing there was a hitherto unsuspected migration of people across the continent, from Siberia to Greenland, some 5,500 years ago.

The Greenlander belonged to a Paleo-Eskimo culture called the Saqqaq by archaeologists. On the basis of his genome, the Saqqaq man's closest living relatives are the Chukchis, people who live at the easternmost tip of Siberia.

http://snipr.com/uc5j5


Are You Too Smart to Have a Heart Attack?

from ABC News

How well a person does on a standardized intelligence test--in other words, their IQ score--may be related to his or her risk for having a heart attack, according to a team of researchers who have been investigating the potential link between the brain and the heart.

In a study of more than 1,100 middle-aged Scottish men and women who were followed for 20 years, a low score on an IQ test was a better predictor of death from heart disease than traditional risk factors such as systolic blood pressure--the first number in a blood pressure reading--income, and lack of exercise.

Only smoking topped low IQ as a predictor of death, according to G. David Batty, a researcher at the University of Glasgow. Batty and his colleagues ... found a similar link when they studied Vietnam veterans.

http://snipr.com/uc5ji


Universe 20 Million Years Older Than Thought

from National Geographic News

If you want to celebrate the universe's birthday, you might need to add a few more candles to the cake. That's because our universe is about 20 million years older than thought, according to the most accurate measurement yet made of the universe's age.

The data are the latest from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a satellite launched in 2001 that has been mapping what's known as the cosmic microwave background radiation. This "afterglow of creation" is believed to be radiation emitted as matter began to cool 400,000 years after the big bang created the universe.

The faint, almost uniform radiation is coming from every direction in the sky, and it can be picked up from billions of light-years away. By mapping the cosmic microwave background, WMAP is literally creating a picture of the early years of the cosmos.

http://snipr.com/uc5k1


First Video of Clouded Leopard

from BBC News Online

The Sundaland clouded leopard, a recently described new species of big cat, has been caught on camera. The film, the first footage of the cat in the wild to be made public, has been released by scientists working in the Dermakot Forest Reserve in Malaysia.

The Sundaland clouded leopard, only discovered to be a distinct species three years ago, is one of the least known and elusive of all cat species. Two more rare cats, the flat-headed cat and bay cat, were also photographed.

Details of the discoveries are published in the latest issue of Cat News, the newsletter of the Cat Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

http://snipr.com/uc5kc

[Jasper]

It really cheers me up to think that low IQ can be deadly in itself.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It really cheers me up to think that low IQ can be deadly in itself.

I was just thinking something along those lines, only the opposite.

[Jasper]

It really cheers me up to think that low IQ can be deadly in itself.

I was just thinking something along those lines, only the opposite.

Why's that?