Weekly Science Headlines

[Kai]

I'm probably going to dump some this week. Have a whole lot of email to go through.

[Remington]

Hubble's gotchu covered, man!

http://www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/video/hubble-gotchu-42610/1222742/

[Kai]

Today's Headlines - April 7, 2010

For more updates, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!


Building a Better Mouse

from the Scientist (Registration Required)

...Most of the time, in order to test a cancer therapy, researchers simply transplant human cancer tissue into a mouse. But those experiments rarely predict how a human will respond to the same treatment.

In a new trial, however, principal investigator Pier Paolo Pandolfi and others have engineered the mice to develop cancers that carry mutations similar to those seen in cancer patients--mutations scientists suspect may explain why some patients respond to a particular treatment and some don't.

All of this, in the end, is for one purpose: to find a better mouse model for cancer, one that can successfully predict how a human cancer will progress and respond to treatment before the drug is ever tried in humans.

http://snipr.com/vb0mn


Cooling the Planet With Geoengineering

from Public Radio International

The current guest for PRI's Science Forum is economist Scott Barrett of Columbia University's Earth Institute. Chat online with Barrett about the science and politics of geoengineering, the emerging field of science aimed at cooling the planet.

Barrett is an expert on international environmental agreements. He is currently studying the politics and economics of geoengineering. He says countries are more likely to geoengineer climate than reduce their carbon emissions.

Barrett is the author of Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making. He also blogs for Yale Global Online. He's in the forum through April 19.

http://snipr.com/vb0n5


In Syria, a Prologue for Cities

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Archaeologists have embarked on excavations in northern Syria expected to widen and deepen understanding of a prehistoric culture in Mesopotamia that set the stage for the rise of the world's first cities and states and the invention of writing.

In two seasons of preliminary surveying and digging at the site known as Tell Zeidan, American and Syrian investigators have already uncovered a tantalizing sampling of artifacts from what had been a robust pre-urban settlement on the upper Euphrates River. People occupied the site for two millenniums, until 4000 B.C.--a little-known but fateful period of human cultural evolution.

Scholars of antiquity say that Zeidan should reveal insights into life in a time called the Ubaid period, 5500 to 4000 B.C. In those poorly studied centuries, irrigation agriculture became widespread, long-distance trade grew in influence socially and economically, powerful political leaders came to the fore and communities gradually divided into social classes of wealthy elites and poorer commoners.

http://snipr.com/vb0ns


95-Million-Year-Old Bugs Found in African Amber

from Wired

Newly discovered pieces of amber have given scientists a peek into the Africa of 95 million years ago, when flowering plants blossomed across Earth and the animal world scrambled to adapt.

Suspended in the stream of time were ancestors of modern spiders, wasps and ferns, but the prize is a wingless ant that challenges current notions about the origins of that globe-spanning insect family.

"Most specimens represent a unique fossil record of their group from Africa, and some are among the oldest records in the world," wrote researchers in a paper April 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://snipr.com/vb0o4


An Hour of Exercise a Day Fights 'Fatso' Gene in Teens

from USA Today

CHICAGO (Associated Press) -- One hour of moderate to vigorous exercise a day can help teens beat the effects of a common obesity-related gene with the nickname "fatso," according to a new European study. The message for adolescents is to get moving, said lead author Jonatan Ruiz of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

"Be active in your way," Ruiz said. "Activities such as playing sports are just fine and enough." The study, released Monday, appears in the April edition of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

The research supports U.S. guidelines that tell children and teenagers to get an hour or more of physical activity daily, most of it aerobic activity such as running, jumping rope, swimming, dancing and bicycling. Scientists are finding evidence that both lifestyle and genes cause obesity and they're just learning how much diet and exercise can offset the inherited risk.

http://snipr.com/vb0of


Rare Frogs Find a Military Home

from the Charlotte Observer

Amid a daily percussion of artillery fire and munitions explosions, a rare amphibian migration began at Fort Bragg in early March. Carolina gopher frogs emerged from their underground burrows and hopped a mile or so to seasonal ponds.

Their instinct to breed was sparked by several days of rainfall and warm nights. About 100 to 150 Carolina gopher frogs live in Fort Bragg's artillery impact zones, where soldiers train. North Carolina lists the frogs as "threatened."

N.C. State University biologist Nick Haddad studies the frogs, which live in intact sandhill and longleaf pine ecosystems that require periodic burning. With the widespread loss of this habitat--only 5 percent remains, compared with its historic range--the frogs have developed a curious dependency upon military lands such as Fort Bragg.

http://snipr.com/vb0p2


"Sound Bullets" to Zap Off Tumors?

from National Geographic News

A new machine inspired by a common office toy could one day allow doctors to zap cancerous tumors using "sound bullets," scientists say. Dubbed an acoustic lens, the device could also be used to create near photo-quality images of internal organs that surpass the resolution of modern ultrasounds.

The design is based on the Newton's cradle, which features several identically sized metal balls suspended so that the balls barely touch each other. Due to Newton's laws of motion, when an end ball is pulled back and released, the ball at the other end swings outward with the same speed, even though none of the middle balls move.

The toy inspired study co-author Chiara Daraio to invent the acoustic lens, which uses 0.95-centimeter stainless steel spheres aligned in parallel chains. But instead of channeling motion, the new machine manipulates sound.

http://snipr.com/vb0rb


Alaskan Peatlands Expanded Rapidly as Ice Age Waned

from Science News

A rapid expansion of Alaskan peatlands at the end of the ice age was fueled by highly seasonal climate conditions, a new analysis suggests. The finding raises the possibility that future warming could decrease or reverse carbon storage in peatlands and thereby further aggravate climate change.

The study, published online the week of April 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that most of Alaska's peatlands formed at a time when the region experienced warmer summers and colder winters than today.

Paleoecologists Zicheng Yu and Miriam Jones of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., analyzed core samples from peatlands, as well as data collected by other teams, to trace the expansion of peatlands in Alaska since the peak of the most recent ice age.

http://snipr.com/vb0rr


Animals Thrive Without Oxygen at Sea Bottom

from Nature News

Living exclusively oxygen-free was thought to be a lifestyle open only to viruses and single-celled microorganisms. A group of Italian and Danish researchers has now found three species of multicellular animal, or metazoan, that apparently spend their entire lives in oxygen-starved waters in a basin at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

The discovery "opens a whole new realm to metazoans that we thought was off limits", says Lisa Levin, a biological oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

Roberto Danovaro from the Polytechnic University of Marche in Ancona, Italy, and his colleagues pulled up the animals during three research cruises off the south coast of Greece.

http://snipr.com/vb0s5


Scientists Discover Heavy New Element

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

A team of Russian and American scientists has discovered a new element that has long stood as a missing link among the heaviest bits of atomic matter ever produced. The element, still nameless, appears to point the way toward a brew of still more massive elements with chemical properties no one can predict.

The team produced six atoms of the element by smashing together isotopes of calcium and a radioactive element called berkelium in a particle accelerator about 75 miles north of Moscow on the Volga River, according to a paper that has been accepted for publication at the journal Physical Review Letters.

Data collected by the team seem to support what theorists have long suspected: that as newly created elements become heavier and heavier they will eventually become much more stable and longer-lived than the fleeting bits of artificially produced matter seen so far.

http://snipr.com/vb0sg

[Kai]

Today's Headlines - April 8, 2010

For more updates, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!


Chile's Seismic Lessons for U.S. Pacific Coast

from the San Francisco Chronicle

(Associated Press) -- As the Easter earthquake shook Southern California, the state's disaster management chief was thousands of miles away in Chile, examining what experts say is the best case study yet for how a truly catastrophic earthquake could impact the United States.

Chile and the U.S. Pacific Coast have more in common than their geology; they share advanced construction codes, bustling coastal cities, modern skyscrapers and veteran emergency services.

These were all put to the test in Chile, which despite its extensive planning lost 432 lives in the 8.8-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami--lessons that California, Oregon and Washington have yet to learn fully.

http://snipr.com/vbqmw


Controlling Risks From Methane in Mines

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Coal mines will always have methane, often in explosive concentrations, geologists and engineers say. The only question is how diligently miners and mining companies will work to avoid explosions.

Though there is no definitive proof that it was a methane explosion that killed 25 miners in West Virginia on Monday, miners have said the gas has been a constant problem, leading to several evacuations in recent months and a history of violations.

The gas, like coal, is a molecule made of hydrogen and carbon, and it is produced from the same raw material as coal, ancient piles of biological material, by the same processes. Much of the natural gas sold in the United States is drawn from coal seams.

http://snipr.com/vbqo6


Giant Lizard Discovered in the Philippines

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

MANILA, Philippines (Associated Press) -- Researchers have concluded that a giant, golden-spotted monitor lizard discovered in the forested mountains of the Philippines six years ago is a new species, according to a study released Wednesday.

The 6.5-foot (2-meter) -long lizard was first spotted in 2004 in the Sierra Madre mountains on the main island of Luzon when local researchers saw local Agta tribesmen carrying one of the dead reptiles.

But it took until last year to determine it was a new species. After capturing an adult, researchers from the University of Kansas and the National Museum of the Philippines obtained DNA samples that helped confirm the lizard was new to science.

http://snipr.com/vbqrp


Superheavy Element 117 Makes Debut

from Science News

Physicists have reported synthesizing element 117, the latest achievement in their quest to create "superheavy" elements in the laboratory. A paper describing the discovery has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

A team led by Yuri Oganessian of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, reports smashing together calcium-48--an isotope with 20 protons and 28 neutrons--and berkelium-249, which has 97 protons and 152 neutrons.

The collisions spit out either three or four neutrons, creating two different isotopes of an element with 117 protons. Sigurd Hofmann, a nuclear physicist at the GSI research center in Darmstadt, Germany, calls the new work on element 117 "convincing."

http://snipr.com/vbqst


New Earth Epoch Has Begun, Scientists Say

from National Geographic News

The older you get, the faster the time goes. Our 4.57-billion-year-old planet may know the feeling. After all, some scientists are suggesting Earth has already entered a new age--several million years earlier than it should have.

Earth's geologic epochs--time periods defined by evidence in rock layers--typically last more than three million years. We're barely 11,500 years into the current epoch, the Holocene. But a new paper argues that we've already entered a new one--the Anthropocene, or "new man," epoch.

The name isn't brand-new. Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen, a co-author of the paper, coined it in 2002 to reflect the unprecedented changes humans have wrought in the roughly 200 years since the industrial revolution. The report, however, is part of new push to formalize the Anthropocene epoch.

http://snipr.com/vbque


Forests Growing Back in U.S. Face Man-Made Tests

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

PINEY GROVE, VA. -- Here, in a forest of woodpecker-holed pine trees, is one of the rarest things in the American environment. A second chance. The United States can now hit "reset" on one of its greatest environmental mistakes: the destruction of the enormous woodland that once canopied the continent from Maine to east Texas.

By the late 1800s, much of it--including this tract of woods southeast of Richmond--had been cut down for agriculture and timber. Then, farms were abandoned. Old seeds sprouted. Unlike many other environmental mistakes, this one began to fix itself: The forest grew back, though burdened with too many deer, too little fire, and armies of invasive bugs.

Now, new forests like this one in Piney Grove are a test, a practical exam for American environmentalism 40 years into the Earth Day era. In some places, scientists are trying to fix man-made flaws that could eventually destroy forest ecosystems.

http://snipr.com/vbqyv


Even Among Animals: Leaders, Followers and Schmoozers

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

I recently tried taking a couple of online personality tests, and I must say I was disappointed by the exercise. I was asked bland amorphisms like whether I was "someone who tends to find fault" with people (duh), is generally "friendly and agreeable" (see previous response), and always "does a thorough job" (can I just skip this question?).

Nowhere were there any real challenges like the following: Let's say you are very hungry, and you go over to your favorite food dish. Inside you see, in addition to the standard blend of peanuts and insect parts, a bright pink plastic frog.

How long before you work up the nerve to eat your dinner anyway? Or: You have just been ushered into a room that is in every way familiar, except that somebody has put a scrap of old, brown carpet in the middle of the floor. Do you keep your distance from the novelty item, or do you rush over and start pecking at it?

http://snipr.com/vbr03


Lake Union Lab Suddenly a Force

from the Seattle Times

Seattle is home to well-known scientific powerhouses such as the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. But most locals would be hard-pressed to name the upstart that bested all U.S. research labs in a recent ranking of scientific clout: the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB).

"For an institution that's only 10 years old, this is nothing short of remarkable," said Dr. Leroy Hood, the maverick biologist and entrepreneur who split from the UW to form ISB. Hood's ambitious goal is nothing short of a revolution in medicine.

At the institute's complex on the north side of Lake Union, biologists, engineers and computer wizards are working to unravel the intricate web of genes, proteins and biochemical signals underlying human disease.

http://snipr.com/vbr1x


Solar Plane Prototype in First Test Flight

from BBC News Online

A prototype solar-powered plane has made its first full test flight--coming closer to the goal of using solar energy to fly around the world. The Solar Impulse, with a wingspan similar to that of a super-jumbo jet but weighing the same as a saloon car, took off from a Swiss airfield.

The plane's wings are covered by solar cells which power four electric motors. Its designers hope a slightly larger production model will circumnavigate the globe in two years' time.

The test flight was intended to verify that the plane's behaviour tallied with simulations. "With such a large and light plane never having flown before, the aircraft's flight behaviour remains unexplored," the flight team said in a statement.

http://snipr.com/vbr2e


How Science Could Spark a Second Green Revolution

from the Christian Science Monitor

Jonathan Lynch wants to get at the roots of the problem of producing enough food for humanity. Literally.

In projects around the world, the professor of plant nutrition at Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues are trying to develop crops whose root systems can resist drought and take up fertilizer from the soil more efficiently.

With world population expected to grow by nearly 50 percent to more than 9 billion people by midcentury, farmland is going to need to be much more productive. Even today, nearly 1 out of every 6 people in the world--more than 1 billion--are going hungry, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

http://snipr.com/vbr2p

[Kai]

Today's Headlines - April 9, 2010

For more updates, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!


New Hominid Species Discovered in South Africa

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

CRADLE OF HUMANKIND, South Africa -- Nine-year-old Matthew Berger dashed after his dog Tau into the high grass here one sunny morning, tripped over a log and stumbled onto a major archeological discovery. Scientists announced Thursday that he had found the bones of a new hominid species that lived almost two million years ago during the fateful, still mysterious period spanning the emergence of the human family.

"Dad, I found a fossil!" Matthew said he cried out to his father, Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist, who had been searching for hominid bones just a hill-and-a-half away for almost two decades. Fossil hunters have profitably scoured these rolling grasslands north of Johannesburg since the 1930s.

Matthew held in his hands the ancient remains of a 4-foot-2 boy who had been just a few years older than Matthew himself. Dr. Berger, with the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and his fellow researchers have since found much more of the boy's skeleton, including his extraordinarily well-preserved skull, and three other individuals. South Africa's children will compete to name the boy.

http://snipr.com/vclna


These Horses Are Two of a Kind

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

The chestnut stallion was the love of Zarela Olsen's life. A majestic hall-of-fame horse with personality and a copper coat bright as a new penny, Capuchino often greeted his fawning owner with kisses, nuzzling her neck and licking the back of her ears.

"When he died, he took my heart with him," said Olsen, 46, of the Paso Fino horse who died in Ocala, Fla., last year. "I could not stop crying and crying."

But Olsen had planned ahead, investing $160,000 in the replicating services of a biotech company specializing in the controversial practice of animal cloning. Her champion's genetic duplicate, Capuchino Forever, was born in May. His birth--and the increasing number of horses cloned in the U.S.--has spawned debate and wonder among breeders and owners in the equine world, including here in Marion County, the self-proclaimed "Horse Capital of the World."

http://snipr.com/vclox


Test Would Warn Smokers of Lung Cancer Danger

from USA Today

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Scientists may have found a way to tell which smokers are at highest risk of developing lung cancer: measuring a telltale genetic change inside their windpipes. A test based on the research is being developed in hopes of detecting this deadly cancer earlier, when it's more treatable.

And if the work pans out, the next big question is: Might it even be possible to reverse this genetic chain reaction before it ends in full-blown cancer? The researchers found a tantalizing early hint among a handful of people given an experimental drug.

"They're heading toward lung cancer, and we can identify them with this genomic test," said Dr. Avrum Spira of Boston University School of Medicine, who led the research published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

http://snipr.com/vclpd


Eating Fruits and Vegetables Has Little Impact on Cancer

from BBC News Online

Eating more fruit and vegetables has only a modest effect on protecting against cancer, a study into the link between diet and disease has found.

The study of 500,000 Europeans joins a growing body of evidence undermining the high hopes that pushing "five-a-day" might slash Western cancer rates. The international team of researchers estimates only around 2.5% of cancers could be averted by increasing intake.

But experts stress eating fruit and vegetables is still key to good health. In 1990, the World Health Organization recommended that everyone consume at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day to prevent cancer and other chronic diseases.

http://snipr.com/vclpu


Mystery Eclipse Caught in the Act

from Sky and Telescope

... Astronomers have struggled for decades to understand what's going on with the binary star Epsilon Aurigae. It was discovered in 1821 to be an eclipsing double-star system with a period of 27.1 years. In other eclipsing binaries, it usually takes only hours or at most days for one star to cross in front of the other. But Epsilon Aurigae's events take two years to complete--and the most recent one began last August.

... Epsilon Aurigae's central star is a F-type supergiant pumping out 130,000 times the Sun's brightness. This much now seems clear. But there are at least five candidate explanations for the eclipsing component: (1) a huge, nearly spherical nebula that's somewhat opaque; (2) a massive, dark disk of gas and dust; (3) a black hole cocooned inside a disk; (4) a thin, tipped disk with a binary star at its center; and (5) a large, slightly tilted disk surrounding a single hot B star.

As S&T editor-in-chief Bob Naeye described a few months ago, this last scenario has gained favor recently. New observations of Epsilon Aurigae, just announced in the April 8th issue of Nature, show that the Answer Number 5 is likely correct.

http://snipr.com/vclql


Cancer Vaccines May Be on the Verge of Wider Use

from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

One of the persistent frustrations in cancer treatment has been the way that tumors can evade our immune systems as they grow and multiply inside our bodies. Even though cancer cells have special surface markers, known as antigens, the body often doesn't seem to be able to mount a full-fledged attack against the tumors, and the longer they last, the more they seem to suppress the immune response.

Yet it doesn't have to be that way, says a dedicated band of scientists in universities and companies around the globe. In fact, they say, we may be on the verge of being able to vaccinate people against cancer in the same way we do with infectious diseases.

"I think we really are on the cusp of a revolution in cancer immunology," said Andres Salazar, CEO of Oncovir, a Washington, D.C., company that makes an immune system booster for cancer vaccines. "We hope to make patients allergic to their cancers." The first commercial cancer vaccine out of the gate is likely to be sipuleucel-T, a vaccine against advanced prostate cancer being made by Dendreon Corp. of Seattle, Wash.

http://snipr.com/vclry


Scientists Unlock Mystery of Animal Color Patterns

from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In the lab that summer morning, Thomas Werner's heart pounded. The University of Wisconsin-Madison postdoctoral researcher had to sit down and take deep breaths before continuing the crucial experiment. Werner, who had grown up in East Germany hoping to study butterflies, had instead devoted more than three years to a species of the North American fruit fly, Drosophila guttifera.

Focusing on this species of fruit fly, he and the other researchers in the lab of molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll, had made a prolonged assault on one of the key questions in evolutionary biology: how nature endows creatures with their colorful patterns, from a leopard's dark spots to a butterfly's bold swirls. In different species the patterns serve to attract mates, provide camouflage or provide other advantages in the struggle to survive.

But what causes the colors to fall so precisely into place? Werner's hands shook as he removed the fruit fly pupa's wing and placed it under the microscope in the darkroom. Three years of work now came down to a single image. He needed to see green fluorescent light in the places where black spots would one day appear on the wing of the adult fruit fly. That would mean he had discovered the secret of the fly's spots.

http://snipr.com/vclsu


Launch Success for ESA's Cryosat-2 Ice Mission

from BBC News Online

Europe's Cryosat-2 spacecraft has launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan on a mission to map the Earth's ice cover. ... Cryosat's data should help scientists understand better how melting polar ice could affect ocean circulation patterns, sea level and global climate. It is a copy of a spacecraft that was destroyed on launch in 2005.

... Cryosat-2 will measure very precisely the rates of change of sea and land ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic. A key quest for the satellite will be to assess the volume of sea ice in the Arctic--something that has been hard to do from space.

Satellites have long been used to track ice extent (area), but calculating the thickness of the marine floes requires the overflying spacecraft to gauge the difference between the top of the ice surface and the top of the water--a relatively simple calculation then gives the overall volume.

http://snipr.com/vcltw


Lung Function Still Impaired by Dust From World Trade Center

from Science News

Many rescue workers who responded to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York continue to show breathing difficulties that haven't improved in the years since the dust cleared, researchers report in the April 8 New England Journal of Medicine.

The effects go beyond what was first dubbed "World Trade Center cough," although that symptom has lingered in some emergency workers, says study coauthor Thomas Aldrich, a pulmonologist at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City.

Inhalation of the thick dust has caused bronchitis, asthma and symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease such as being short of breath, he says. Passersby have also shown increased asthma rates.

http://snipr.com/vclus


Slowing the Losses

from the Economist

For the first time since the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) started making decade-by-decade surveys of the world's forests, it says it has evidence that efforts to slow the world's rate of deforestation are working.

The total area of forest on the planet is about 4 billion hectares (10 billion acres). In the "key findings" of its Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010 (the full report is not out for a few months) the FAO estimates that, during each of the past ten years, an average of roughly 13m hectares of forest (an area twice the size of Latvia) were either converted to other uses or lost through natural causes such as drought and fire. In the 1990s the figure was 16m hectares.

Reduced rates of deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia form a large part of the story, but the reduction was more broadly based. It was seen on all continents apart from Oceania and forest-free Antarctica--and the increased loss of forest in Oceania was caused largely by drought and fire, rather than by extra logging.

http://snipr.com/vclv7

[Kai]

April 12, 2010

For more updates, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!


Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.

Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.

Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs' potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.

http://snipr.com/vfisg


Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?

from ScienceNOW Daily News

A long time ago, in a universe much larger than our own, a giant star collapsed. Its implosion crammed so much mass and energy together that it created a wormhole to another universe. And inside this wormhole, our own universe was born. It may seem fantastic, but a theoretical physicist claims that such a scenario could help answer some of the most perplexing questions in cosmology.

A number of facets about our universe don't make sense. One is gravity. Scientists can't construct a mathematical formula that unites gravity with the three other basic forces of nature: the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism. Another problem is dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon that seems to be expanding our universe at an accelerating rate, even though gravity should be contracting it or at least slowing the expansion.

These conundrums may be a result of stopping the search for the riddle of the cosmos at the big bang, says Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University in Bloomington. The big bang theory holds that our universe began as a single point--or singularity--about 13.7 billion years ago that has been expanding outward ever since. Perhaps, Poplawski argues, we need to consider that something existed before the big bang that gave rise to it.

http://snipr.com/vfito


World's Deepest Undersea Vents Discovered In Caribbean

from BBC News Online

What are believed to be the world's deepest undersea volcanic vents have been discovered in the Caribbean. The vents, known as black smokers, were located 5,000m (3.1 miles) down in the Cayman Trough. The volcanic chimneys, which spew out water hot enough to melt lead, were caught on film by a British-led team.

Marine biologist Dr Jon Copley said: "Seeing the world's deepest black-smoker vents looming out of the darkness was awe-inspiring." He added: "Super-heated water was gushing out of their two-storey-high mineral spires, more than three miles beneath the waves."

Expedition leader Doug Connelly said: "We hope our discovery will yield new insights into biogeochemically important elements in one of the most extreme naturally occurring environments on our planet."

http://snipr.com/vfiu4


Protein Folding: The Dark Side of Proteins

from Nature News

Of all the ways that proteins can go bad, becoming an amyloid is surely one of the worst. In this state, sticky elements within proteins emerge and seed the growth of sometimes deadly fibrils. Amyloids riddle the brain in Alzheimer's disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. But until recently it has seemed that this corrupt state could threaten only a tiny fraction of proteins.

Research is now hinting at a more unsettling picture. In work reported in February, a team led by David Eisenberg at the University of California, Los Angeles, sifted through tens of thousands of proteins looking for segments with the peculiar stickiness needed to form amyloid. They found, says Eisenberg, that "effectively all complex proteins have these short segments that, if exposed and flexible enough, are capable of triggering amyloid formation."

Not all proteins form amyloids, however. The "amylome," as Eisenberg calls it, is restricted because most proteins hide these sticky segments out of harm's way or otherwise keep their stickiness under control. His results and other work suggest that evolution treats amyloids as a fundamental threat. Amyloids have been found in some of the most common age-related diseases, and there is evidence that ageing itself makes some amyloid accumulation inevitable. It now seems as though the human body is perched precariously above an amyloidal abyss.

http://snipr.com/vfiup


China and West Virginia: A Tale of Two Mine Disasters

from Time

Just as West Virginia families were hit with word of a deadly mine disaster on April 5, relatives of miners missing after a flood in China's coal belt welcomed some unexpected news. After eight days trapped underground, 115 coal miners in Shanxi province were dramatically rescued. In China, where mine disasters are grimly commonplace, the rescue was trumpeted as a miracle. And in the U.S., where mine safety is sometimes seen as a question that was resolved decades ago, the death of at least 25 men is a painful reminder of the risks they face.

The explosion at the Massey Energy company's Upper Big Branch mine was the deadliest U.S. mining disaster in 26 years. The U.S. is one of the safest places for the profession; last year the country recorded 34 fatalities, an all-time low, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

China, one of the world's deadliest places for mining, has seen improvements in the safety of its mines, albeit from the high numbers of accidents in past years. In 2009, 2,631 people died in Chinese mines, down from a peak of 6,995 in 2002.

http://snipr.com/vfivp


Drug Giants Tackle 'Neglected' Effort

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

Scientists at the La Jolla laboratories of Novartis are taking part in an unusual assignment for the pharmaceutical industry--finding drugs for some diseases with little or no moneymaking potential.

Using powerful genetic-analysis tools more commonly targeted to cancer and other diseases prevalent in industrialized nations, researchers are studying patterns that underlie malaria and tuberculosis in developing countries and more obscure conditions such as leishmaniasis and Chagas' disease.

It's part of an increased effort by the pharmaceutical industry to pursue treatments for "neglected" diseases for which drugs either don't exist or don't work well. It also includes diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, for which large numbers of people in developing countries are not being treated.

http://snipr.com/vfiw7


Swirling Dust Shocks Physicists

from Nature News

Scientists have explained how lightning can occur even in the driest deserts. A new theory describes how neutral dust can gain an electrical life of its own.

For centuries, researchers have known that clouds of neutral particles can sometimes gain a net charge. This can cause even the driest sand to generate lightning, and sugar refineries and coal-processing plants can experience unexpected explosions. Most researchers have ascribed such events to static build-up, but Troy Shinbrot, a physicist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, was unconvinced. Under normal conditions, sand and dust don't conduct electricity, he says, so how could they generate fields strong enough to spark massive lightning bolts? ...

Shinbrot sat up at night for months thinking about it, and eventually he developed a theory. He began by visualizing the sand particles as party balloons. In an electric field, he thought, the balloons would polarize: In other words, each balloon would develop a positive and negative hemisphere.

http://snipr.com/vfix0


Laser Nuclear Technology Might Pose Security Risk

from National Public Radio

World leaders have gathered in Washington to talk about how to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. The discussions are mainly about keeping actual weapons, and weapons-grade material, under strict control.

Some researchers are also concerned about the spread of a new technology that could make it much easier to secretly refine uranium for bombs.

Right now, the technology to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons is big and cumbersome. Typically, countries build enormous centrifuge plants. And Francis Slakey, a physicist at Georgetown University, says it's relatively easy to catch wind of a project like that.

http://snipr.com/vfixd


Tipping Point Not Likely for Arctic Sea Ice

from Wired

A late-winter expansion of Arctic sea ice is a good example of ice-forming dynamics that could keep the Arctic from hitting a "tipping point" in the near future.

Some scientists have predicted that rising temperatures could create a runaway feedback loop in the Arctic. Sunlight-reflecting ice sheets would give way to sunlight-absorbing water, driving up temperatures and melting even more ice. The Arctic climate would change so dramatically that winter ice couldn't form again, producing planet-wide ripples in weather patterns.

But some research suggests that other, previously underappreciated forces may stabilize the melt before it's complete. The Arctic will soon be ice-free in summer, and winter ice will decline, but it won't suddenly become permanently ice-free.

http://snipr.com/vfixt


Building a Green Economy

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

If you listen to climate scientists ... it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

But is it possible to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

Like the debate over climate change itself, the debate over climate economics looks very different from the inside than it often does in popular media. The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy. In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change ... can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost.

http://snipr.com/vfiyb

[Kai]

Today's Headlines - April 13, 2010

For more updates, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!


Studying Sea Life for a Glue That Mends People

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

SALT LAKE CITY -- Along one wall of Russell J. Stewart's laboratory at the University of Utah sits a saltwater tank containing a strange object: a rock-hard lump the size of a soccer ball, riddled with hundreds of small holes. ... It's a home of sorts, occupied by a colony of Phragmatopoma californica, otherwise known as the sandcastle worm.

... P. californica is a master mason, fashioning its tube, a shelter that it never leaves, from grains of sand and tiny bits of scavenged shell. ... Using a specialized organ on its head, it produces a microscopic dab or two of glue that it places, just so, on the existing structure. Then it wiggles a new grain into place and lets it set. What is most remarkable ... is that it does all this underwater.

... Dr. Stewart is one of a handful of researchers around the country who are developing adhesives that work in wet conditions, with worms, mussels, barnacles and other marine creatures as their guide. While there are many possible applications ... the biggest goal is to make glues for use in the ultimate wet environment: the human body.

http://snipr.com/vgf30


China Research Hurt by Plagiarism, Faked Results

from the San Francisco Chronicle

(Associated Press) -- When professors in China need to author research papers to get promoted, many turn to people like Lu Keqian. Working on his laptop in a cramped spare bedroom, the former schoolteacher ghostwrites for professors, students, government offices--anyone willing to pay his fee, typically about 300 yuan ($45).

"My opinion is that writing papers for someone else is not wrong," he said. "There will always be a time when one needs help from others. Even our great leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping needed help writing."

Ghostwriting, plagiarizing or faking results is so rampant in Chinese academia that some experts worry it could hinder China's efforts to become a leader in science. The communist government views science as critical to China's modernization, and the latest calls for government spending on science and technology to grow by 8 percent to 163 billion yuan ($24 billion) this year.

http://snipr.com/vgf59


New Atlas Aims to Show State of World's Ecosystems

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

What does it take to determine which of the world's 9,800 bird species depend on fresh water for survival? Try devoting two months' worth of evenings and weekends to reading the descriptions of every known avian species, which is what Timothy Boucher did.

"Being a fanatic birder, I decided this could be really fun," recalled Boucher, a senior conservation geographer at the Nature Conservancy who has personally seen and identified 4,257 species of birds in his life. So his "life list," as birders say, covers 43 percent of the bird species that exist. The result of Boucher's work--a map showing the wetlands and rivers on which 828 freshwater bird species depend--is part of the Atlas of Global Conservation, a new publication that shows how nature is faring across the globe.

Environmental researchers evaluate the state of nature in a number of ways--by listing the most imperiled species, focusing on particular habitats or detailing the pace of human activities that transform the planet. But mapmaking, which provides a visual account of how different ecological regions are faring, provides one of the most easily accessible ways of depicting of the global environment.

http://snipr.com/vgf67


Aerospace Business Has Its Doubts About Plans to Revamp NASA

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the aerospace giants with decades of experience working on America's space program, will happily sell rockets to carry astronauts into space, but the companies are leery about taking a leading role in President Obama's vision for a revamped National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The prospect of NASA relying on smaller companies--unproven upstarts in the view of critics--could create yet another hurdle in convincing an already skeptical Congress of the idea of relying on commercial companies to provide taxi transportation to the International Space Station.

"I don't think there is a business case for us," John Karas, vice president and general manager of human spaceflight at Lockheed Martin, said about space taxis.

http://snipr.com/vgf9q


Ancient City Yielding New Clues in Michoacan, Mexico

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Colorado researchers have discovered and partially mapped a major urban center once occupied by the Purépecha of Mexico, a little-known people who fought the Aztecs to a standstill and who controlled much of western Mexico until diseases brought by the Spanish decimated them.

The "proto-urban center," which researchers have not yet named, sat on volcanic rock on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro in the central Mexican state of Michoacan, now a tourist destination. It supported as many as 40,000 people until the consolidation of the Purépecha empire about AD 1350 led most of its inhabitants to relocate to the new capital of Tzintzuntzan, six miles away.

"What's really interesting about the site is that it gives us a window into the pre-state period when social complexity was increasing and people were congregating together and starting to modify the landscape," said archaeologist Christopher Fisher of Colorado State University, who will present the findings this week at a St. Louis meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

http://snipr.com/vgfa6


A Whale-Watch of Vital Significance

from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

OFF THE COAST OF PROVINCETOWN -- Charles "Stormy" Mayo descends from a long line of men who have made their living on the sea, but with one big difference. His forebears sometimes hunted the whales that appear off the shores of Cape Cod each spring. He is trying to save them.

Mayo leads a small crew of scientists who are studying the North Atlantic right whale to learn more about the habitat and habits of one of the most endangered animal species on the planet, to better understand and protect the rare leviathans. And here on the research vessel Shearwater, about 5 miles southwest of Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown, is one of the best places in the world to do it.

Some 25 to 40 of the great marine mammals, which can grow 55 feet long and weigh more than 70 tons, have come here to feed, and yesterday the tiny animals that draw them to these waters were teeming on the surface in billowing pink clouds. About a dozen of the giants glided just feet from the Shearwater's busy deck, skimming zooplankton from the water with the great baleen filters that line their mouths instead of teeth.

http://snipr.com/vgfak


Is It Fair to Patent Genes?

from USA Today

For Lisbeth Ceriani, news that a judge had invalidated the patent on the gene that almost killed her was a victory. Gene patents, she says, are "turning our bodies into commerce." Ceriani, of Newton, Mass., developed an aggressive form of cancer in both breasts at age 42. She wanted to be tested for mutations in the BRCA gene, which would tell her whether she was also at high risk for ovarian cancer.

But it took an agonizing year and a half, because the company that makes the tests and owns the patent on the gene had chosen not to contract with her insurance provider, MassHealth, a form of Medicaid, because the rate of reimbursement wasn't high enough. Only when the company, Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City, donated 200 tests to the state was she able to be tested, she says.

"I didn't want to just go ahead and have my ovaries removed if I didn't necessarily have to," Ceriani says. The results showed she had the mutation. Ceriani had her ovaries removed prophylactically in December. In the interim, her cancer went into remission, and she joined a lawsuit to overturn Myriad's patent.

http://snipr.com/vgfc1


'Life As We Don't Know It' in the Universe?

from the Christian Science Monitor

Scientists studying the Saturn's largest moon, Titan, are beginning to challenge perhaps the most commonly repeated five words in the search for life in the universe. "Life as we know it."

From the dun plains of Meridiani on Mars to the "cool Jupiter" exoplanet CoRoT-9b circling a distant star in the constellation Serpens, scientists have put a premium on finding worlds that have the potential for liquid water, which enables life on Earth.

But in Titan, scientists have found a world that, some suggest, could point to an exception to the rule. Might life exist without liquid water? Increasingly, Titan is becoming the focus of a movement to consider the possible existence of "life as we don't know it."

http://snipr.com/vgfcx


Mapping the Fruit Fly Brain

from Science News

WASHINGTON -- A new computer-based technique is exploring uncharted territory in the fruit fly brain with cell-by-cell detail that can be built into networks for a detailed look at how neurons work together. The research may ultimately lead to a complete master plan of the entire fly brain.

Mapping the estimated 100,000 neurons in a fly brain, and seeing how they interact to control behavior, will be a powerful tool for figuring out how the billions of neurons in the human brain work.

The program has already found some new features of the fruit fly brain, said study coauthor Hanchuan Peng of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Va. "We can see very beautiful and very complicated patterns," said Peng, who presented the results April 9 at the 51st Annual Drosophila Research Conference. "If you look at neurons at a better resolution, or look at regions you've never looked at before, you'll find something new."

http://snipr.com/vgfdi


Near-Death Experiences Explained?

from National Geographic News (Registration Required)

Near-death experiences are tricks of the mind triggered by an overload of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream, a new study suggests.

Many people who have recovered from life-threatening injuries have said they experienced their lives flashing before their eyes, saw bright lights, left their bodies, or encountered angels or dead loved ones.

In the new study, researchers investigated whether different levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide--the main blood gases--play a role in the mysterious phenomenon. The team studied 52 heart attack patients who had been admitted to three major hospitals and were eventually resuscitated. Eleven of the patients reported near-death experiences.

http://snipr.com/vgfel

[Kai]

Today's Headlines - April 14, 2010

For more updates, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!


Maternal Deaths Decline Sharply Across the Globe

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

For the first time in decades, researchers are reporting a significant drop worldwide in the number of women dying each year from pregnancy and childbirth, to about 342,900 in 2008 from 526,300 in 1980.

The findings, published in the medical journal The Lancet, challenge the prevailing view of maternal mortality as an intractable problem that has defied every effort to solve it. "The overall message, for the first time in a generation, is one of persistent and welcome progress," the journal's editor, Dr. Richard Horton, wrote in a comment accompanying the article, published online on Monday.

The study cited a number of reasons for the improvement: lower pregnancy rates in some countries; higher income, which improves nutrition and access to health care; more education for women; and the increasing availability of "skilled attendants"--people with some medical training--to help women give birth. Improvements in large countries like India and China helped to drive down the overall death rates.

http://snipr.com/vh8q8


Distant Planets Rattle Theories With Their Orbit

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Some highly unusual planets orbiting other stars are calling into question current theories about how solar systems are formed and suggesting that more complex theories must be developed.

European researchers reported Tuesday that some of the recently observed extrasolar planets are revolving around their stars in the opposite direction from the stars' spin. That finding is inconsistent with the view that planets are formed by the condensation of dust from a disk surrounding a newly formed star.

Some other planets were found to have highly tilted orbits that are also at odds with conventional theory. The findings also suggest that planets with such eccentric orbits would destroy any smaller, rocky planets, eliminating the chance that an Earth-like planet could be orbiting around that same star.

http://snipr.com/vh8rx


Ancient Human-Like Creature's Skull Probed

from BBC News Online

X-rays show in stunning detail the interior of the skull of a new human-like creature found in South Africa. The hominid Australopithecus sediba was presented to the world last week. The X-ray images reveal information about the ancient animal's brain and tantalising evidence of the insects that may have fed on the dead body.

Its discoverers say it fills a key gap between older creatures and the group of more modern species known as Homo, which includes our own kind. The work was conducted at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, which has developed expertise in the non-destructive study of fossils.

Probing such artefacts with a brilliant light source is the only way to see inside the specimens without actually breaking them apart. South African researchers took the skull of the juvenile, 1.9-million-year-old creature, and many other parts of its skeleton, to the European facility for a two-week investigation.

http://snipr.com/vh8sh


Obama Revives Capsule From Canceled Moon Program

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- President Barack Obama is reviving the NASA crew capsule concept that he had canceled with the rest of the moon program earlier this year, in a move that will mean more jobs and less reliance on the Russians, officials said Tuesday.

The space capsule, called Orion, still won't go to the moon. It will go unmanned to the International Space Station to stand by as an emergency vehicle to return astronauts home, officials said.

Administration officials also said NASA will speed up development of a massive rocket. It would have the power to blast crew and cargo far from Earth, although no destination has been chosen yet. The rocket would be ready to launch several years earlier than under the old moon plan. The two moves are being announced before a Thursday visit to Cape Canaveral, Fla., by Obama. They are designed to counter criticism of the Obama administration's space plans as being low on detail, physical hardware and local jobs.

http://snipr.com/vh8td


Panel to Take Broad View of Bioethics

from Nature News

US President Barack Obama last week announced the full membership of his bioethics advisory council, unveiling a more diverse body and one that is likely to have a greater impact on policy than its predecessor.

In the past decade, ethical questions in science have made headlines on issues such as the patenting of human genes, financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research and risk assessments related to environmental exposure to chemicals. These issues were largely ignored by the bioethics commission established by former president George W. Bush, which maintained a relatively narrow focus on stem cells, cloning and abortion.

But all fall within the remit of the new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, as outlined by the executive order which established it in November 2009. Obama had already broken with the past by not appointing a bioethicist to chair the commission, instead selecting Amy Gutmann, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

http://snipr.com/vh8uc


New Force Behind Agency of Wonder

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

ARLINGTON, Va. -- The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is different from other federal agencies. For one thing, the agency, known as Darpa, created the Internet (really). For another, it is probably the only agency ever to offer a $40,000 prize for a balloon hunt, a contest that was inspired by Regina Dugan, a 47-year-old expert in mine detection, who took over last summer as its director.

Dr. Dugan, who has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, is the first woman to be the director of Darpa, and those who know her say she has a knack for inspiring, and indeed insisting on, creative thinking.

Last December's balloon hunt, otherwise known as the Darpa Network Challenge, is a good example. In marking the 40th anniversary of the connecting of the first four nodes of the Internet in 1969, the agency offered a $40,000 prize to the first team of volunteers able to locate 10 large red balloons hidden around the country. The task only sounds frivolous. It was actually something that experts agreed was impossible using traditional intelligence techniques. The challenge was designed to test new methods, involving the use of social networks.

http://snipr.com/vh8v8


Earth-Like Planets May Abound in the Milky Way

from ScienceNOW Daily News

Maybe Frank Drake was right. Nearly half a century ago, the American astronomer postulated that, based on pure statistical probability, the Milky Way could be teeming with Earth-like planets.

Now observations of formerly sunlike stars called white dwarfs suggest that the overwhelming majority of them once harbored at least one rocky world. And because sunlike stars could account for up to half of the Milky Way's population of several hundred billion suns, that means hundreds or even thousands of civilizations might inhabit our galaxy.

The question of how many rocky worlds exist in the galaxy has perplexed astronomers for the better part of a century. Even now, technology hampers the search. Astronomers are years away from being able to image another Earth directly.

http://snipr.com/vh8vp


A Fresh Look at Mount St. Helens

from Science News

Just a stone's throw north of Mount St. Helens, the oddly hummocky terrain is covered with a patchwork of vegetation and small ponds. Sediment-rich rivers thread through and meander across floodplains once hidden beneath lush, tall forests. Although harshly pruned in the recent past, the region's tree of life is beginning to sprout with vigor.

It has been nearly 30 years since the largest volcanic eruption ever observed in the lower 48 states pulverized the top of Mount St. Helens into a roiling cloud of rock and ash. A 550-square-kilometer swath of the Pacific Northwest--an area about three times the size of the District of Columbia--was almost immediately transformed from vibrant ecosystem to denuded wasteland.

In the decades since, the region has been a natural laboratory for studying the processes that bring life back in the aftermath of devastation. Ecological recovery has proceeded more quickly than many scientists thought possible, but has nevertheless been a slow and halting affair.

http://snipr.com/vh8w5


Does Stress Feed Cancer?

from Scientific American

A little stress can do us good--it pushes us to compete and innovate. But chronic stress can increase the risk of diseases such as depression, heart disease and even cancer. Studies have shown that stress might promote cancer indirectly by weakening the immune system's anti-tumor defense or by encouraging new tumor-feeding blood vessels to form.

But a new study published April 12 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that stress hormones, such as adrenaline, can directly support tumor growth and spread. For normal cells to thrive in the body, "they need to be attached to their neighbors and their surroundings," says the study's lead author Anil Sood from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Cells that detach from their environment undergo a form of programmed cell death called anoikis. "But cancer cells have come up with way to bypass this effect--they avoid anoikis," Sood says. ... So Sood wondered: Could stress affect anoikis? "It surprised us that this biology hadn't been studied before," he notes. "Stress influences so many normal physiological processes. Why wouldn't it be involved in tumor progression?"

http://snipr.com/vh8zn


Rethinking Internal Combustion Engines

from New Scientist

It may seem dirty and outdated compared with the batteries that power electric vehicles, but the internal combustion engine is set for a makeover that could halve its greenhouse gas emissions.

Today's engines are pretty inefficient, converting only around a quarter of the energy contained in fuel into motion; the remaining three-quarters is lost as heat. So efforts are under way to recover some of this lost energy in the hope of reducing fuel consumption and emissions.

Up to 40 percent of an engine's potential output is lost in its exhaust, says Guy Morris, engineering director at Controlled Power Technologies based in Laindon, UK. The company plans to recover some of this energy by fitting a turbine inside the tailpipe: the fast-moving exhaust gases coming straight from the engine drive the turbine, generating electricity.

http://snipr.com/vh90b

[Kai]

oday's Headlines - April 15, 2010

For more updates, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!


Research Offers Promise for Diabetics

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Boston researchers have made a major step toward the development of an artificial pancreas that overcomes the bugaboo of most previous such attempts--dangerously low blood sugar caused by injection of too much insulin.

Their experimental device secretes two hormones normally produced by the pancreas--insulin and its counterbalancing hormone, called glucagon--and has been shown to control blood sugar levels in about a dozen people for at least 24 hours, they reported Wednesday. The team is now planning longer trials as they gear up for what they hope will be approval by the Food and Drug Administration in as little as seven years.

"This is a very important proof-of-concept study," said Dr. Irl B. Hirsch, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research. "It was becoming obvious that if we were ever going to get [an artificial pancreas], we would have to use both hormones. ... The fact that they have been able to do so successfully is very big and very exciting news."

http://snipr.com/vi38t


Bill Seeks to Overhaul U.S. Chemical Laws

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

After a year of working with environmental groups, government regulators and the chemical industry, a leading advocate for chemical regulation has devised a plan to remake the nation's chemical laws--a 34-year-old set of regulations that all players agree is outmoded and ineffective.

The plan, contained in legislation that Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) is set to file Thursday, would require manufacturers to prove the safety of chemicals before they enter the marketplace. That would be a significant departure from current laws, which allow chemicals to be used unless the federal government can prove they cause harm to health or the environment.

"We're saying those who make the chemicals--and there are 700 new ones that come to market each year--ought to be responsible for testing them first before they're released to the public, instead of having the EPA play detective to search and try to find problems," Lautenberg said. The bill would also mandate that manufacturers submit health and safety data to the EPA for 84,000 chemicals in use. The agency would review the information to determine whether the chemicals are safe enough to remain on the market.

http://snipr.com/vi3fk


"Biggest" Comet Measured

from National Geographic News

The Great Comet of 2007 made an even bigger impression on the solar system than anyone realized, according to a new study that measured the size of the comet's wake.

In January 2007 people around the world watched comet McNaught streak across the sky. It was the brightest comet seen since 1965 and, in some places, was visible to the naked eye in broad daylight. The visible tail was about 35 degrees long, or roughly the same apparent size as 70 full moons lined up in the night sky.

By chance, the European Space Agency's Ulysses spacecraft plowed through the width of the comet's tail in February 2007. Designed to study the sun's atmosphere, the probe was able to record information on how the comet's passage affected the solar wind, which is actually charged particles constantly streaming from the sun.

http://snipr.com/vi3gi


Physicists Untangle the Geometry of Rope

from Science News

Researchers have unraveled the mathematics that keeps ropes from unwinding. The trick lies in the number of times each strand in a rope is twisted, say Jakob Bohr and Kasper Olsen, physicists at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby. Their paper was posted online April 6 at arXiv.org.

In a traditional rope, each individual strand is twisted as much as possible in one direction. The twisted strands are then wound together in a spiral shape called a helix, which itself rotates in the opposite direction. The interlocking of these twists and countertwists gives the rope strength so that when yanked, it does not unwind.

By plotting a rope's length against the number of twistings in each strand, Bohr and Olsen discovered that there is a maximum number of times each strand can be twisted--resulting in what they call the "zero-twist point" for the overall rope. A good rope is always in the zero-twist configuration.

http://snipr.com/vi3hc


The Cost of Scientific Misconduct

from Seed

... How does the research community respond to a retraction? Janet Stemwedel, an ethicist at San Jose State University, discusses one such study at her blog, Adventures in Ethics and Science. A team led by Anne Victoria Neale examined 102 cases where published research articles involved fraud or misconduct.

Their study was published in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics in 2007. While nearly every article was either retracted or corrected, Neale's team wanted to know if the articles had an influence on other research. They found that an astonishing 5,393 articles cited those reports!

Stemwedel points out that Neale and her fellow researchers didn't analyze those articles for context: It could be that citations of the fraudulent or unethical work were made in order to show that the research couldn't be replicated.

http://snipr.com/vi3i6


Researchers ID Alzheimer's Risk Gene

from the Miami Herald (Registration Required)

University of Miami researchers have identified a gene that appears to double a person's risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer's disease. They called the finding a small step toward understanding and fighting the debilitating disease, which affects five million Americans.

"I hope that in the next five to 10 years we can see major improvements--a combination of therapies and prevention through exercise, both physical and mental, diet and other things," said Margaret Pericak-Vance. She is director of the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics at the UM Medical School and principal investigator in the study.

The study was presented Tuesday at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Toronto. Finding the gene "will help us better understand how this disease develops and potentially serve as a marker for people who may be at increased risk," said Adam Naj, an author of the report, who also works at the Hussman Institute.

http://snipr.com/vi3j5


Newfound Neighbor to Solar System Is a Cool Slacker

from Science News

The solar system is surrounded by a bunch of abject failures, a new discovery suggests. Astronomers have found the nearest known brown dwarf, or failed star, residing about 9 light-years from Earth.

That places this brown dwarf among the 10 closest stellar or substellar systems to the solar system, researchers report in an article posted online April 5. Its temperature, about baking temp in a home oven, makes it the coolest brown dwarf known.

... Astronomers calculate, based on the percentage of stars that fail to develop in young star clusters, that brown dwarfs should be at least as common in the Milky Way as stars. The new finding, combined with recent discoveries of other nearby brown dwarfs, suggests that the solar neighborhood is rife with these dim, hard-to-detect bodies.

http://snipr.com/vi3jy


Panel Clears Researchers in 'Climategate' Controversy

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Climate change researchers accused of manipulating or hiding data in last year's "Climategate" affair were guilty of sloppy record-keeping but not bad science, an independent panel in Britain concluded Wednesday.

Allegations that the researchers deliberately misrepresented data to promote the idea of human-caused global warming rocked the scientific community in November, just as world leaders were preparing for an international environmental summit.

The allegations, by skeptics of climate change, were based on e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia in eastern England, including one in which a scientist wrote of using a "trick" to mask an apparent decline in recent global temperatures. But a panel of experts tasked with examining the underlying science said it "saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work" by the university's Climatic Research Unit.

http://snipr.com/vi3kh


'Very Little Progress' Made Against Hospital Infections

from USA Today

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- The nation's hospitals are failing to protect patients from potentially fatal infections despite years of prevention campaigns, the government said Tuesday.

The Health and Human Services department's 2009 quality report to Congress found "very little progress" on eliminating hospital-acquired infections and called for "urgent attention" to address the shortcomings--first brought to light a decade ago.

Of five major types of serious hospital-related infections, rates of illnesses increased for three, one showed no progress, and one showed a decline. As many as 98,000 people a year die from medical errors, and preventable infections--along with medication mixups--are a significant part of the problem.

http://snipr.com/vi3la


Japanese Whale Meat 'Being Sold in US and Korea'

from BBC News Online

Scientists say they have found clear proof that meat from whales captured under Japan's whaling programme is being sold in US and Korean eateries. The researchers say they used genetic fingerprinting to identify meat taken from a Los Angeles restaurant as coming from a sei whale sold in Japan.

They say the discovery proves that an illegal trade in protected species still exists. Whale meat was also allegedly found at an unnamed Seoul sushi restaurant. Commercial whaling has been frozen by an international moratorium since 1986.

But a controversial exemption allows Japan to kill several hundred whales each year for what is termed scientific research. The meat from these whales is then sold to the public in shops and restaurants in that country.

http://snipr.com/vi3mk

[NotPublished]

Thank you soo much for that Kai!

[Kai]

Sorting email backlogs takes time. You're welcome.

[Kai]

Gulf Oil Now in Powerful Loop Current

from BBC News Online

The first oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill has entered an ocean current that could take it to Florida and up the east coast of the US, scientists say. The European Space Agency said satellite images suggested oil could reach the coral reefs of the Florida Keys within six days.

"We have visible proof that at least oil from the surface... has reached the current," said Dr Bertrand Chapron.

Meanwhile, the US said it was having talks with Cuba over the spill. Observers say the talks demonstrate a concern that the oil may be carried by currents far from the site of the Deep Horizon disaster.

http://ow.ly/1NBsx

House GOP Stops Major Science, Technology Bill

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- It was strike two for a major science funding bill Wednesday as House Republicans again united to derail legislation they said was too expensive.

Going down to defeat was the COMPETES Act, which would have committed more than $40 billion over three years to boost funding for the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies involved in basic and applied science, provided loan guarantees to small businesses developing new technologies and promoted science and math education.

Congress enacted a first version of the legislation in 2007 with a large majority in the House and a unanimous vote in the Senate. But in this election year, with Republicans out to show their anti-spending credentials and intent on disrupting the Democratic agenda, things are different.

http://ow.ly/1NBt7

Argonauts Use Shells as Flotation Devices

from Science News

After centuries of speculation, biologists have documented one way a strange group of octopuslike creatures use their seashell-shaped cases.

Female argonauts, a group of four species that are close cousins of octopuses, grow delicate white shell-like cases. Biologists have found argonauts with air bubbles in their cases, and now it turns out the animals use the trapped air to float at a comfortable depth, says Julian Finn of Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

In the first reports from scuba observations of wild argonauts, Finn maneuvered Argonauta argo females so air escaped from their cases. The animals flailed as if struggling to maintain their orientation and quickly jetted to the water surface.

http://ow.ly/1NBvO

Neglected Diseases: Teach or Treat?

from the Scientist (Registration Required)

Scientists are taking the debate over how to address neglected tropical diseases to the pages of [the journal] PLoS Medicine, with one camp arguing in favor of more drug development, and another pushing for more funding and research on public health strategies such as sanitation and education.

In 2005, researchers coined the term "neglected tropical diseases" to refer to thirteen diseases primarily occurring in rural, poor areas that have been largely ignored by policymakers and public health officials. These diseases, including sleeping sickness, river blindness, hookworm infection and more, traditionally fall second in attention and funding to "the big three"--HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

In the last five years, however, neglected tropical diseases have experienced a hike in funding from private and government sources, including a recent boost from the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama. But there is disagreement about how that money should be used.

http://ow.ly/1NBym

Scientists Urge Carbon Tax or Cap-and-Trade

from the Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Ditching its past cautious tone, the nation's top scientists urged the government Wednesday to take drastic action to raise the cost of using coal and oil to slow global warming.

The National Academy of Sciences specifically called for a carbon tax on fossil fuels or a cap-and-trade system for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, calling global warming an urgent threat.

The academy, which advises the government on scientific matters, said the nation needs to cut the pollution that causes global warming by about 57 percent to 83 percent by 2050. That's close to President Barack Obama's goal.

http://ow.ly/1NBAo

The Expanding Mind

from Seed

Scarcely a decade has passed since scientists painstakingly sequenced the first bacterial genome, yet today automated human genome sequencing is becoming routine, heralding a new era of medicine. Replacement tissues and even organs can now be grown from a patient's own cells and used without risk of immune rejection. Genetic therapies for a plethora of debilitating conditions are on the horizon; brain and body imaging technologies allow early discovery of potentially harmful pathologies.

But as these developments have unfolded, another area of research has simultaneously matured to rival them in its dramatic potential to help people. It's called neuroengineering.

My colleagues and I have expected these events for years, but we are still awed by the results; some things are so powerful that, even if you know they are coming, they remain breathtaking when they actually arrive. Watching a person move a robotic limb or control the functions of a computer, through thought alone, we have little choice but to stare in amazement. These breakthroughs were made possible by prototype brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which allow direct communication between the brain and external devices.

http://ow.ly/1NBCx

Female Damselflies Prefer Hot Males

from BBC News Online

Female damselflies prefer hot males, scientists have revealed.

Male damselflies perform elaborate courtship displays, attracting females with high-speed flying manoeuvres. Now a new imaging study reveals that males that warm their bodies by flying in the sun are indeed 'hot stuff' and attract more females.

Hot-bodied males may benefit females by having access to the warmest territories, which in turn are optimal sites to lay eggs, the scientists say.

http://ow.ly/1NBFJ

Malaria May Not Rise as World Warms

from Nature News

Of the many climate-change catastrophes facing humankind, the anticipated spread of infectious tropical diseases is one of the most frequently cited--and most alarming. But a paper in this week's Nature adds to the growing voice of dissent from epidemiologists who challenge the prediction that global warming will fuel a worldwide increase in malaria.

On the surface, the connection between malaria and climate change is intuitive: higher temperatures are known to boost mosquito populations and the frequency with which they bite. And more mosquito bites mean more malaria.

Yet when epidemiologists Peter Gething and Simon Hay of the Malaria Atlas Project at the University of Oxford, UK, and their colleagues compiled data on the incidence of malaria in 1900 and 2007, they found the opposite: despite rising temperatures during the twentieth century, malaria has lost ground.

http://ow.ly/1NBIM

Exploding Stars May Be New Type of Supernova

from ScienceNOW Daily News

There's more than one way to blow up a star--in fact, scientists know of two. But could there be a third? A team of astronomers has identified two supernovae that don't seem to fit into established categories, though another team claims that there's not much new about them. If the first team is right, it could solve a longstanding mystery about the origins of one of the basic elements needed for life.

The first type of supernova occurs when one star in a binary pair explodes. A white dwarf star, roughly the mass of our sun, keeps snatching excess gas from its close-orbiting stellar companion. At a certain point, the extra gas renders the consuming star unstable, like a balloon filling with too much air, and the accumulated gas triggers a thermonuclear explosion so powerful that the star blows itself completely out of existence.

This class of supernovae include what are called Type Ia, the brightness and duration of which are so precise that astronomers use them to gauge distances to other galaxies and to track the rate of acceleration of the universe.

http://ow.ly/1NBLD

Wine's Anti-Aging Ingredient: Can It Spawn New Drugs?

from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

For years, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals grabbed headlines for its scientific success in pursuit of a tantalizing goal: drugs that could fight aging itself.

The Cambridge company, built on the discovery that an ingredient found in red wine had life-lengthening effects in yeast, sparked the public imagination and became a biotech success story. In 2008, it was purchased by GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million.

But even as Sirtris and others have published results showing the promise of the ingredient, resveratrol, against diseases of aging, several groups of researchers have questioned whether the original findings that led the company to create a new class of pharmaceuticals really explain why the drugs work.

http://ow.ly/1NBMV

[Kai]

May 19, 2010
Fishing Ban Is Expanded as Spill's Impact Becomes More Evident

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON -- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration greatly expanded the fishing ban in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday in response to spreading oil from the BP well blowout. The prohibited area now covers 19 percent of the gulf, nearly double what it was, according to the agency.

Officials are already seeing some impact on fish and wildlife in the region. Rowan W. Gould, the acting director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said 156 sea turtle fatalities had been recorded in the gulf since April 30, about 100 more than usual at this time of year.

Mr. Gould also said that a small number of oily birds, 35, had been recovered, including 23 dead birds directly linked to the spill.

http://ow.ly/1N3o9


Oldest Mesoamerican Pyramid Tomb Found in Mexico

from the San Francisco Chronicle

MEXICO CITY (Associated Press) -- Archaeologists in southern Mexico announced Monday they have discovered a 2,700-year-old tomb of a dignitary inside a pyramid that may be the oldest such burial documented in Mesoamerica.

The tomb held a man aged around 50, who was buried with jade collars, pyrite and obsidian artifacts and ceramic vessels. Archaeologist Emiliano Gallaga said the tomb dates to between 500 and 700 B.C.

Based on the layers in which it was found and the tomb's unusual wooden construction, "we think this is one of the earliest discoveries of the use of a pyramid as a tomb, not only as a religious site or temple," Gallaga said.

http://ow.ly/1N3pk


NASA Wants Mission to Bring Martian Rocks to Earth

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

MONROVIA, Calif. (Associated Press) -- If NASA's exploration of Mars were summed up in a bumper sticker, it would read: "Follow the water." Well, we've found the water--ice was discovered by the Phoenix lander in 2008. Now what?

It's time to search again for signs of life, scientists say, something they haven't done since 1976. This time, they want to bring Martian rock and soil samples back to Earth. Here, they could be analyzed for fossilized traces of alien bacteria, or chemical or biological clues that could only be explained by something that was alive.

Such a venture as now outlined would be a three-part act, cost as much as $10 billion and take several years to complete. NASA can't afford it on its own so it recently joined the European Space Agency to map out a shared project.

http://ow.ly/1N3sq


Creatures of Cambrian May Have Lived On

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Ever since their discovery in 1909, the spectacular Burgess Shale outcrops in the Canadian Rockies have presented scientists with a cornucopia of evidence for the "explosion" of complex, multicellular life beginning some 550 million years ago.

The fossils, all new to science, were at first seen as little more than amazing curiosities from a time when life, except for bacteria and algae, was confined to the sea--and what is now Canada was just south of the Equator. In the last half century, however, paleontologists recognized that the Burgess Shale exemplified the radiation of diverse life forms unlike anything in earlier time. Here was evolution in action, organisms over time responding to changing fortunes through natural experimentation in new body forms and different ecological niches.

But the fossil record then goes dark: the Cambrian-period innovations in life appeared to have few clear descendants. Many scientists thought that the likely explanation for this mysterious disappearance was that a major extinction had wiped out much of the distinctive Cambrian life. It seemed that the complex organisms emerging in the Cambrian had come to an abrupt demise, disappearing with few traces in the later fossil record.

http://ow.ly/1N3tU


Postpartum Depression Strikes New Fathers Too

from Time

Postpartum depression is a familiar rite of new parenthood. Feelings of emptiness, sadness and anxiety settle in after the birth of a child, and in severe cases last for months. It turns out that this common condition, once considered the province of the mother, may affect many new fathers too.

Researchers at Eastern Virginia Medical School, publishing an analysis of 43 past studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday, report that up to 10% of fathers may experience postpartum depression (PPD) after the birth of a child.

That figure comes as a surprise, even to the authors, who had been studying paternal PPD for several years, especially because it doubles the average risk of depression found in the male population in general--which is only about 5%. "It is surprising and novel that the rate is much higher than most people would guess or expect," says study author James Paulson. "This is a condition that is not recognized by many folks. Postpartum in men is an alien concept to most people."

http://ow.ly/1N3x8


Scientists Question Safety Of New Airport Scanners

from NPR

After the "underwear bomber" incident on Christmas Day, President Obama accelerated the deployment of new airport scanners that look beneath travelers' clothes to spot any weapons or explosives.

Fifty-two of these state-of-the-art machines are already scanning passengers at 23 U.S. airports. By the end of 2011, there will be 1,000 machines and two out of every three passengers will be asked to step into one of the new machines for a six-second head-to-toe scan before boarding.

About half of these machines will be so-called X-ray back-scatter scanners. They use low-energy X-rays to peer beneath passengers' clothing. That has some scientists worried.

http://ow.ly/1N3zW


Russian Module Added to Station

from BBC News Online

Astronauts have succeeded in attaching a new Russian module to the International Space Station (ISS). The 7m-long unit known as Rassvet was put in place in a delicate manoeuvre by the platform's robotic arm.

The module, brought up by the Atlantis shuttle, is a docking and storage facility.

As well as being packed with over a tonne of stores, it carries equipment for a Russian science lab which will join the ISS in 2012.

http://ow.ly/1N3BI


Behavioral Therapy Can Help Kids With Tourette Disorder

from Science News

An intensive course of behavioral therapy can limit the verbal and physical tics that plague some children with Tourette disorder, a new study finds. This form of therapy, in which a child learns simple ways to derail tics, led to improvement in more than half of children treated, scientists report in the May 19 Journal of the American Medical Association.

"I think this is groundbreaking," says clinical psychologist Martin Franklin of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who didn't participate in the trial. "Clinically, we now have pretty powerful evidence of the efficacy of a behavioral treatment in this disorder."

Tourette disorder is characterized by short, rapid physical or vocal tics that can take the form of jerking motions, blinking, grimacing, blurting out words or throat clearing. These tics are brought on by urges. And much as a cigarette satisfies a smoker's need for nicotine, the tics seem to resolve these urges, but at a cost. People with Tourette disorder, which starts in childhood and affects about six in 1,000, can face isolation and social stigmatization.

http://ow.ly/1N3Eg


Study Links Coral Growth to Sound

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Coral larvae, tiny hair-covered sacs of cells, can "hear" reefs and actually swim toward them, researchers report. The finding suggests that sound is far more important in underwater ecosystem development than previously thought.

Further, marine biologists say, human noise pollution has the potential to block the larvae's ability to seek out nearby reefs and settle there, ultimately harming other marine life.

Coral are tiny sea creatures that build the rocky, often colorful structures associated with them; these structures ring islands and can span thousands of miles. In doing so, they provide an important ecological backbone for the world's marine life.

http://ow.ly/1N3Gz


The Climategate Chronicle

from Spiegel

To what extent is climate change actually occuring? Late last year, climate researchers were accused of exaggerating study results. SPIEGEL ONLINE has since analyzed the hacked "Climategate" e-mails and provided insights into one of the most unprecedented spats in recent scientific history.

Is our planet warming up by 1 degree Celsius, 2 degrees, or more? Is climate change entirely man made? And what can be done to counteract it? There are myriad possible answers to these questions, as well as scientific studies, measurements, debates and plans of action. Even most skeptics now concede that mankind--with its factories, heating systems and cars--contributes to the warming up of our atmosphere.

But the consequences of climate change are still hotly contested. It was therefore something of a political bombshell when unknown hackers stole more than 1,000 e-mails written by British climate researchers, and published some of them on the Internet. A scandal of gigantic proportions seemed about to break, and the media dubbed the affair "Climategate" in reference to the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of US President Richard Nixon. Critics claimed the e-mails would show that climate change predictions were based on unsound calculations.

http://ow.ly/1N3HK

[Kai]

May 21, 2010
Genome From a Bottle

from Science News

Using a made-from-scratch genome, scientists have breathed a new kind of life into a bacterium. The feat, published May 21 in Science, holds great promise for creating designer organisms that might do things like produce vaccines, synthesize biofuels, purify water or eat spilled oil.

In the new study, researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute carefully stitched together the entire genome of the bacteria Mycoplasma mycoides and put it into a different kind of bacteria, Mycoplasma capricolum. This unprecedented wholesale genome swap caused the M. capricolum cell to switch species. The newly converted cell was nearly identical to the natural M. mycoides.

"This was a proof of concept experiment showing that we could take the sequence out of a computer, build it and boot it up to make a synthetic cell," says study leader Daniel Gibson of the Venter Institute's campus in Rockville, Md.

http://ow.ly/1O7pT

Studies Link Infertility Treatments to Autism

from Time

Every parent of a child with autism wonders what might have caused the disorder. Does it secretly run in the family? Was there a toxic exposure during pregnancy? An infection in early infancy? Was the mother or father too old?

Amy Sawelson Landes of Tarzana, California, has asked herself all of these questions, plus one more: Could the fact that she had taken an infertility drug to get pregnant have contributed to her son Ted's autism? "It was one of the first things I wondered about," says Landes, who was 37 when Ted was born 18 years ago.

A study presented Wednesday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Philadelphia provides some of strongest evidence to date that Landes might be onto something. The study, conducted by a team at the Harvard School of Public Health, found that autism was nearly twice as common among the children of women who were treated with the ovulation-inducing drug Clomid and other similar drugs than women who did not suffer from infertility, and the link persisted even after researchers accounted for the women's age.

http://ow.ly/1O7s7

EPA Demands a Less Toxic Dispersant in Gulf Spill

from the Miami Herald

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- The Environmental Protection Agency directed BP PLC on Thursday to use a less toxic form of chemical dispersants to break up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one of several steps the government took to crack down on the oil giant.

The moves come amid a growing sense of frustration with the company's failure to stop the spill and allow independent reviews of its work.

The Obama administration asked BP to make public all detailed information about the Gulf spill--including all measurements of the growing leak. A live video feed that shows oil gushing from the blown-out well was put online.

http://ow.ly/1O7t1

Vibrating Frogs Are Ready to Fight

from ScienceNOW Daily News

How do frogs demonstrate their bravery? By quivering like a coward. New research reveals that male red-eyed treefrogs (Agalychnis callidryas) shake a branch with their hind legs to signal a willingness to brawl with a rival. It's the first time researchers have seen this form of communication in tree-dwelling animals, and they say birds, lizards, and other creatures may similarly send signals through the branches.

Late at night in the wet jungles of Central America, red-eyed treefrog males sit on the branches of thin saplings and produce a sound called a "chack" to attract females. But when a rival homes in on a calling site, the two males pose aggressively and sometimes engage in fearsome wrestling matches. The fights can last hours, and, in some cases, both males end up locked in a grueling embrace, dangling by their hind legs from a branch.

During one of these fights, behavioral ecologist Michael Caldwell of Boston University observed an odd performance: the frogs briskly wiggling their butts up and down. Using a small accelerometer set on a tree branch, he and colleagues found that the victors in wrestling contests had vibrated more often and for longer than losers during the battle, and they were more likely to produce the final vibration....

http://ow.ly/1O8K2

One Day Your Pants May Power Up Your iPod

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Need juice for a dying iPod? You may soon be able to plug the gadget into a shirt, dance the electric slide and be good to go.

Researchers at UC Berkeley are perfecting microscopic fibers that can produce electricity from simple body motions such as bending, stretching and twisting. The filaments, which resemble tiny fishing lines, may soon be woven into clothing and sold as the ultimate portable generators.

It could take three years or more before it hits the store shelves, but the technology is already being hailed as a breakthrough. The so-called nanofibers "will have very significant implications," said Mihail Roco, senior advisor for nanotechnology with the National Science Foundation, which recently gave a $350,000 grant to the project.

http://ow.ly/1O7yI

Can a Black Hole Have an 'Aurora'?

from Discovery News

As our telescopes become more powerful, we are able to see more exotic cosmic objects. Eventually, we may even be able to take a snapshot of the supermassive black hole living in the center of our galaxy, but what will we see? According to two Japanese researchers, we might be able to spot a black hole 'aurora.'

But this isn't your average aurora. When the solar wind slams into the Earth's atmosphere, the solar plasma (made up mainly of high-energy protons) hits air molecules, kicking off some light. When you have a lot of these collisions in the upper atmosphere, the sky will light up as an aurora.

However, a black hole doesn't have an atmosphere like ours, so how can an aurora be generated?

http://ow.ly/1O7BL

Homeland Security Wants to Turn Your Cell Phone into a Smell Phone

from the Christian Science Monitor

Who needs a bloodhound--or even a nose? The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is hoping that soon your cell phone will sniff out poisonous gases. It's funding three companies to create a small chip--about the size of a dime--that would sit inside of cell phones and alert users to potentially deadly smells.

Michael Sailor, whose research team at the University of California, San Diego works for Rhevision Technology, Inc. to create the chip, says the chips are most useful for first responders or other emergency workers. Firefighters and police could track the location of, say, a noxious cloud in a subway, by monitoring GPS signals from the passengers' cell phones. They could then use the information to better coordinate a response.

...The technology is similar to that of a computer chip. Scientists start with a silicon wafer, which they fill with billions of nano-sized holes that reflect different colors depending on their size. If poisonous gas molecule such as sarin enters the hole, it displaces the air inside it, and causes the color that the hole reflects to change.

http://ow.ly/1O7Ei

Arctic Drilling Proposal Advanced Amid Concern

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

A proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean as early as this summer received initial permits from the Minerals Management Service office in Alaska at the same time federal auditors were questioning the office about its environmental review process.

The approvals also came after many of the agency's most experienced scientists had left, frustrated that their concerns over environmental threats from drilling had been ignored.

Minerals Management has faced intense scrutiny in the weeks since the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. An article in The New York Times reported that it failed to get some environmental permits to approve drilling in the gulf and ignored objections from scientists to keep those projects on schedule.

http://ow.ly/1O7GX

Quantum Crack in Cryptographic Armour

from Nature News

Quantum cryptography isn't as invincible as many researchers thought: a commercial quantum key has been fully hacked for the first time.

In theory, quantum cryptography--the use of quantum systems to encrypt information securely--is perfectly secure. It exploits the fact that it is impossible to make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it in some way. So, if two people--Alice and Bob, say--produce a shared quantum key to encode their messages, they can be safe in the knowledge that no third party can eavesdrop without introducing errors that will show up when they compare their keys, setting off warning bells.

In practice, however, no quantum cryptographic system is perfect and errors will creep in owing to mundane environmental noise. Quantum physicists have calculated that as long as the mismatch between Alice's and Bob's keys is below a threshold of 20%, then security has not been breached. Now, however, quantum physicist Hoi-Kwong Lo and his colleagues at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, have hacked a commercial system released by ID Quantique (IDQ) in Geneva, Switzerland, while remaining below the 20% threshold.

http://ow.ly/1O7JO

Turtle 'Super Tongue' Discovered

from BBC News Online

One type of turtle possesses an extraordinary organ that allows it to breathe underwater and stay submerged for many months.

The common musk turtle has a tiny tongue lined with specialised buds, scientists have discovered. Rather than use this tongue for eating, the turtles use it to exchange oxygen, solving a mystery of how these reptiles can remain submerged for so long.

Details are published in journal The Anatomical Record.

http://ow.ly/1O7LU  THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME.

[Kai]

May 18, 2010
Oil Piped to Surface May Be Refined

from the New Orleans Times-Picayune

A mile-long tube inserted into a broken pipe spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico is capturing about 1,000 barrels of oil daily, or about 20 percent of the oil leaking from the site, a BP official said Monday.

The tube began transferring leaking oil and natural gas onto a waiting ship Sunday. The gas that is being collected is being burned in a process called flaring. BP is testing the oil to determine if it can be refined or if it should be discarded, chief operating officer Doug Suttles said.

It is BP's first successful attempt at containing oil, which is leaking both from a pipe called a riser on the ocean floor as well as from an apparatus called a blowout preventer. The tube was inserted into a gash in the riser, the larger of the two leaks.

http://ow.ly/1Mwt0


U.S. Clears Test of Bioengineered Trees

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Federal regulators gave clearance Wednesday for a large and controversial field test of genetically engineered trees planned for seven states stretching from Florida to Texas.

The test is meant to see if the trees, eucalyptuses with a foreign gene meant to help them withstand cold weather, can become a new source of wood for pulp and paper, and for biofuels, in the Southern timber belt. Eucalyptus trees generally cannot now be grown north of Florida because of occasional freezing spells.

The Agriculture Department, in an environmental assessment issued Wednesday, said no environmental problems would be caused by the field trial, which could involve more than 200,000 genetically modified eucalyptus trees on 28 sites covering about 300 acres.

http://ow.ly/1Mwun


Eyewitness Account of 'Watershed' Brain Scan Legal Hearing

from Wired

The very first federal admissibility hearing for fMRI lie-detection evidence wrapped up May 14 in a Tennessee courtroom. The decision, expected in a couple weeks, could have a significant influence on the direction that brain scan evidence takes in the courtroom.

A special session was held to determine whether brain scans that were generated by the company Cephos could be entered as evidence in the federal court case of Lorne Semrau, whom the government has accused of defrauding Medicare and Medicaid.

FMRI brain scan evidence has yet to be admitted for lie detection in court, and this case is the most serious consideration yet of the technique in an American court.

http://ow.ly/1MwxM


Golden Years Truly Are Golden

from ScienceNOW Daily News

It doesn't matter whether you're employed, whether your children still live at home, or even whether you're married. Life gets better after age 50. A new phone survey of hundreds of thousands of Americans confirms that people tend to be happier, less anxious, and less worried once they pass the half-century mark.

The main measure of well-being is called global well-being, which involves asking people how good they feel about their life in general. "That's been the standard in survey research," says psychologist Arthur Stone of Stony Brook University in New York state. But, he says, "this kind of question requires people to make a lot of judgments." For example, who should you be using for comparison: Your peers? Bill Gates? Victims of famine? The life you thought you'd have? It's also difficult to measure logistically: Scientists often ask people to wear pagers, and researchers beep them several times a day to remind the volunteers to record their feelings.

Stone took a different, easier approach. Thanks to his work as a senior scientist with the Gallup Organization, which conducts a huge, ongoing telephone survey in the United States with questions on topics such as how well the president is doing his job and how confident consumers are in the economy, he was able to help write questions about specific emotions people felt the day before they took the survey. The survey reached more than 350,000 people in 2008 from all regions of the United States.

http://ow.ly/1MwAf


Invasive Plant Poisons Our Air

from Discovery News

It's not only invading more landscapes with the help of global warming, but invasive kudzu vines might also someday increase ozone pollution by more than a third, say soil researchers.

"It's an impressive and dramatic plant," said Jonathan Hickman of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. "But there a lot of things you can't see. ... Air pollution hasn't really been a part of the conversation when it comes to invasion."

Hickman is the lead author on a study, which appears in the May 17 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looking at what could happen to both urban and rural air quality if the kudzu invasion continues unabated.

http://ow.ly/1MwF6


Science Forum: Going Mad the American Way

from PRI's The World Science

Journalist Ethan Watters is author of the book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. "America is homogenizing the way the world goes mad," Watters writes. He contends that Americans are exporting their view of mental illness to the rest of the world.

Watters says culture influences not only how people deal with mental disorders but how mental disorders manifest themselves. Yet those cultural differences are disappearing as Western notions of mental health become popular worldwide.

Watters cites numerous examples in his book: Anorexia nervosa, the eating disorder, is now common in countries with no history of the disease. Modern biomedical notions of schizophrenia are replacing the idea of spirit possession in places like Zanzibar. By selling pills for depression, pharmaceutical companies have caused a rise in the diagnosis of depression in Japan.

http://ow.ly/1MwGW


Demand for Ivory Soars, Threatens African Elephants

from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

PUTIAN, China (Associated Press) -- Carefully, the Chinese ivory dealer pulled out an elephant tusk cloaked in bubble wrap and hidden in a bag of flour. Its price: $17,000.

"Do you have any idea how many years I could get locked away in prison for having this?" said the dealer, a short man in his 40s, who gave his name as Chen.

A surge in demand for ivory in Asia is fuelling an illicit trade in elephant tusks, especially from Africa. Over the past eight years, the price of ivory has gone up from about $100 per kilogram ($100 per 2.2 pounds) to $1,800, creating a lucrative black market.

http://ow.ly/1MwQ8


A New Clue to Explain Existence

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence.

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab's Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

http://ow.ly/1MwQS


Ancient Fish Extinction May Have Paved Way for Modern Species

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Modern-day lizards, snakes, frogs and mammals--including us--may owe their existence to a mass extinction of ancient fish 360 million years ago that left the oceans relatively barren, providing room for marginal species that were our ancestors to thrive and diversify, paleontologists said Monday.

The report, by University of Chicago researchers, focused on events at the end of what is commonly called the Age of Fishes, which lasted from 416 million years ago to 359 million years ago. That age was followed by a 15-million-year period of relative silence in the fossil record.

Paleontologists had tended to ignore the rarity of fossils from that period, which is known as Romer's gap--assuming that the fossils just had not been found, or shrugging it off as an unusual period of low diversity. But in a paper published online Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors proposed that Romer's gap is a sign that the world's marine vertebrates were recovering from a global-scale extinction event.

http://ow.ly/1MwLj


The Little Owls That Live Underground

from Smithsonian

It's almost midnight and a lone white pickup truck sits atop a grassy hill on a remote tract of government land near Dublin, California that is used as a military training base. In the driver's seat, biologist Jack Barclay hunkers down over a night-vision scope that amplifies light 30,000 times....

Barclay sees a flicker of movement. Now. He presses a remote-control button, and a spring-loaded net arcs over the owl. Barclay sprints to the net and slips the owl headfirst into a plastic-coated can that once held frozen grape juice. The bird inside the can is still; only its legs protrude. Slits in the can's side allow Barclay to examine the owl, and he records that this is a female.... Barclay attaches identifying bands to the owl's legs and within minutes releases her.

Barclay began his career working with the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology on an innovative program to reintroduce the peregrine falcon to the Eastern United States.... Barclay eventually moved to California and joined an environmental consulting group. In 1989, he began monitoring birds at the San Jose International Airport, where a burrowing owl colony had set up housekeeping near the tarmac. The owls fascinated him and became his passion; he has devoted the past 20 years to working on burrowing owl conservation.

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