Weekly Science Headlines

[Iason Ouabache]

If homeopathy ever gets popular in the United States, I swear that I WILL KILL A MOTHERFUCKER!!!   

[Jasper]

If homeopathy ever gets popular in the United States, I swear that I WILL KILL A MOTHERFUCKER!!!  

It can't replace allopathic medicine totally, but it makes people feel well.  Most holistic doctors will recommend exercise and diet before telling you to go lick a flubutu root or something.

[Vene]

If homeopathy ever gets popular in the United States, I swear that I WILL KILL A MOTHERFUCKER!!!  

It can't replace allopathic medicine totally, but it makes people feel well.  Most holistic doctors will recommend exercise and diet before telling you to go lick a flubutu root or something.

Homeopathy is just water.  It doesn't even matter what they started with because it is so diluted that not a single atom of the original substance is left.  It's a damn placebo.

[Iason Ouabache]

The Amazing Randi on Homeopathy:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U

[Jasper]

If homeopathy ever gets popular in the United States, I swear that I WILL KILL A MOTHERFUCKER!!!  

It can't replace allopathic medicine totally, but it makes people feel well.  Most holistic doctors will recommend exercise and diet before telling you to go lick a flubutu root or something.

Homeopathy is just water.  It doesn't even matter what they started with because it is so diluted that not a single atom of the original substance is left.  It's a damn placebo.

Oh, that.  Nevermind, I was referring to naturopathy.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Most "Naturopathic" doctors that I have (extremely unfortunate) experience with have been complete fuckinh DANGEROUS quacks... however, I do have a strong interest in herbal and chiropractic medicine, which is often very legitimate.

[Kai]

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5865/905b

Students, Postdocs and professors dance their PhD's. The dances include "Dynamical and chemical evolution of blue compact dwarf galaxies.", "Transcription factors involved in developmental and growth control: Regulation of human g-globin and fos gene expression.", and "Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, sharing, cooking, and disposal at the Dunefield Midden campsite, South Africa."

Its a bit fun to see them flailing around and realize that its not just improvisation, a choreographer actually worked with them to produce these dances based on dissertations.

[Kai]

October 7, 2008

2 Japanese, 1 American Share Nobel Physics Prize
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Associated Press)—Two Japanese citizens and a Japanese-born American won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries in the world of subatomic physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday.

American Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago, won half of the prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.

Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.

http://snipurl.com/459su


Infertility Patients Caught in the Embryo Debate
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Six years of frustration and heartbreak. That's how Gina Rathan recalls her attempts to become pregnant. Finally, she and her husband, Cheddi, conceived a daughter, now 3, through in vitro fertilization. About a year later, she became pregnant with a second child, naturally. Their family was complete.

Then, a year ago, the Fountain Valley couple received a bill reminding them that their infertility journey wasn't quite over. They owed $750 to preserve three frozen embryos they'd created but hadn't used. "I don't see them as not being life yet," says Gina Rathan, 42, a pharmaceutical sales representative. "I thought, 'How can I discard them when I have a beautiful child from that IVF cycle?'"

Many other former infertility patients also appear to be grappling over the fate of embryos they have no plans to use: An estimated 500,000 embryos are in cryopreservation in the United States.

http://snipurl.com/44gwi


Where the Wild Things Are
from the Economist

Lake Baikal holds a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh water. It is home to thousands of species of plants and animals that are found nowhere else. Its northern shores, as anyone using the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT), a new online database, can easily discover, form part of a World Heritage site.

... If Transneft, a Russian firm that first proposed a few years ago to build an oil pipeline through the Baikal region, had been able to see all this information—including detailed maps of especially biodiverse spots and the threatened species that inhabit them—at the click of a mouse then it might have altered its plans and avoided those spots.

... That, at any rate, is the sort of thing Conservation International, the charity that conceived IBAT, had in mind when it decided to bring together as much data on biodiversity as it could in a single database, to be unveiled at the forthcoming World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.

http://snipurl.com/43cg2


Fewer Male Reptiles Due to Warming—And That's Good?
from National Geographic News

A trend toward more females and fewer males in a type of Australian reptile may actually benefit the species in the short-term, a discovery that's contrary to previous research, a new study says.

As temperatures rise due to global warming, so does the proportion of female spotted skinks, reptiles found only on Australia's island state of Tasmania. In recent years researchers have shown concern that climate change will push the reptiles into extinction by causing their young to be born of one gender, thus limiting future reproduction.

Temperature-driven gender also occurs in other reptiles, such as crocodiles and turtles. But an increase in female spotted skinks could lead to larger populations of the reptiles, experts say. The research is described online this week in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

http://snipurl.com/411o8


How White Roofs Shine Bright Green
from the Christian Science Monitor

Can you help save the planet by painting your roof white? Hashem Akbari thinks so. Global warming's complexity and momentum have led to a try-everything approach by scientists. In that spirit, Dr. Akbari offers his simple yet profound innovation for slowing that warming way down.

It has long been known that a white roof makes a dwelling cooler. That saves energy and cuts carbon emissions. But until Akbari, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, picked up a pencil to do the calculations, few realized the major climate effect that millions of white rooftops could have by reflecting sunlight back into space.

It turns out that a 1,000 square foot area of rooftop painted white has about the same one-time impact on global warming as cutting 10 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, he and his colleagues write in a new study soon to be published in the journal Climatic Change.

http://snipurl.com/4211m


One Quarter of World's Mammals Face Extinction
from Scientific American

The baiji dolphin is functionally extinct, orangutans are disappearing and even some species of bats—the most numerous of mammals—are dying out. A new survey of the world's 5,487 mammal species—from rodents to humans—reveals that one in four are facing imminent extinction.

"Mammal species that are just declining, not necessarily near extinction, that's 50 percent," says conservation biologist Jan Schipper of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which keeps the Red List of Threatened Species. "And 836 species—especially rodents and bats—we determined they are threatened but we don't know how threatened, because we don't know enough about them."

Schipper and more than 1,700 scientific colleagues spent the past five years surveying the state of the world's mammals. The results, published in Science to coincide with IUCN's conference on biodiversity this week, reveal that 1,139 mammals around the globe are threatened with extinction and the populations of 52 percent of all mammal species are declining.

http://snipurl.com/44b2l


Top Psychiatrist Didn't Report Drug Makers' Pay
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

One of the nation's most influential psychiatrists earned more than $2.8 million in consulting arrangements with drug makers from 2000 to 2007, failed to report at least $1.2 million of that income to his university and violated federal research rules, according to documents provided to Congressional investigators.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff of Emory University, is the most prominent figure to date in a series of disclosures that is shaking the world of academic medicine and seems likely to force broad changes in the relationships between doctors and drug makers.

... The Congressional inquiry, led by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is systematically asking some of the nation's leading researchers to provide their conflict-of-interest disclosures, and Mr. Grassley is comparing those documents with records of actual payments from drug companies. The records often conflict, sometimes starkly.

http://snipurl.com/44keh


Rock Offers Mirror-Image Clues to Life's Origins
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

For more than 150 years, scientists have known that the most basic building blocks of life—chains of amino acid molecules and the proteins they form—almost always have the unusual characteristic of being overwhelmingly "left-handed." The molecules, of course, have no hands, but they are almost all asymmetrical in a way that parallels left-handedness.

This observation, first made in the 1800s by French chemist Louis Pasteur, is taught to introductory organic chemistry students—until recently with the caveat that nobody knew how this came to be.

But research into the question has picked up in recent years, focusing on a 200-pound chunk of rock found 40 years ago in Murchison, Australia. A meteorite that broke off an asteroid long ago, it brought to Earth a rich collection of carbon-based material from far away in the solar system.

http://snipurl.com/44kid


Chaos May Make You See 'Things'
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

Confusing times make for dangerous times, suggests new research that serves as a caution during the current financial crisis.

The possibility of an economic meltdown is bad enough. Worse might be a hasty response born of little more than the powerful human need to impose order—even false order—on a riotous world.

Research published in last week's journal Science doesn't address the pros and cons of any specific economic or political policy. But experiments done by Adam Galinsky, social psychologist and professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, and Jennifer Whitson, professor of management at the University of Texas-Austin, demonstrated that people who can't make sense of an out-of-control situation will trick themselves into seeing patterns or drawing connections that don't exist.

http://snipurl.com/44kx1


Nobel Medicine Prize Row as HIV Scientist Is Excluded
from the Times (London)

Three scientists who discovered the causes of the two most lethal sexually-transmitted infections, Aids and cervical cancer, have been honoured with the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Professor Luc Montagnier and Professor Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, both from France, were awarded the prestigous accolade for identifying HIV, the virus that causes Aids, while Professor Harald zur Hausen was recognised for tracing the human papillomavirus (HPV) as the cause of cervical cancer.

While the prizes have been welcomed as richly deserved, the HIV part of the award has caused controversy because the Nobel Assembly has overlooked the claims of a third scientist who played a pivotal role in the discovery of HIV. Professor Robert Gallo, an American, is widely accepted to have identified the human immunodeficiency virus independently ...

http://snipurl.com/44l48

[Kai]

October 8, 2008

'Glowing' Jellyfish Grabs Nobel
from BBC News Online

A clever trick borrowed from jellyfish has earned two Americans and one Japanese scientist a share of the chemistry Nobel Prize.

Martin Chalfie, Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura made it possible to exploit the genetic mechanism responsible for luminosity in the marine creatures. Today, countless scientists use this knowledge to tag biological systems.

Glowing markers will show, for example, how brain cells develop or how cancer cells spread through tissue. But their uses really have become legion: they are now even incorporated into bacteria to act as environmental biosensors in the presence of toxic materials.

http://snipurl.com/46dy2


Fuming Over Formaldehyde
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failed to act for at least a year on warnings that trailers housing refugees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita contained dangerous levels of formaldehyde, according to a House subcommittee report released Monday.

Instead, the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry demoted the scientist who questioned its initial assessment that the trailers were safe as long as residents opened a window or another vent, the report said.

That appraisal was produced in February 2007 at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had received thousands of complaints about fumes since providing the trailers to families left homeless by the devastating 2005 hurricanes. One year later, FEMA and CDC reversed course and acknowledged that formaldehyde levels in the trailers were five times higher than are typically found in new housing.

http://snipurl.com/45j0t


Firm Says Test Judges Risk For Common Breast Cancers
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

A biotech company today will begin offering the first genetic test to assess a woman's risk for the most common forms of breast cancer, reigniting debate about the growing number of unregulated genetic tests.

The test by Decode Genetics of Reykjavik, Iceland, a respected pioneer in genetic research, promises to determine a woman's risk through a simple blood sample or cheek swab. Previously, the only tests for breast cancer risk were for relatively rare genes, leaving most women with no way to assess their individual genetic predisposition.

"What this does for women is allow them to assess their personal risk for the common forms of breast cancer," said Kári Stefánsson, Decode's chief executive. "That's what you need to do to make early diagnoses or take preventive measures. This test will most definitely save lives."

http://snipurl.com/46dto


Cold-Medicine Makers Issue Warning for Kids Under 4
from the Seattle Times

WASHINGTON—The makers of cold and cough medicines said Tuesday they are voluntarily warning parents not to give their products to children younger than 4, a move negotiated in private with federal drug regulators during the past six months.

Medications with the new warning labels will appear in stores and pharmacies immediately, though experts continue to debate at what age the over-the-counter remedies may be safe and effective. The new labels also advise against using antihistamines to sedate youngsters.

Last winter, the companies agreed to discourage the use of the products in children younger than 2. Each year, drug companies sell 95 million packs of pediatric-cold medicine, generating about $300 million in revenue. More than 7,000 children are taken to hospitals annually because of adverse reactions, primarily due to accidental overdoses.

http://snipurl.com/46e76 


Citizen Enforcers Take Aim
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

... The public urge for punishment that helped delay the passage of Washington's economic rescue plan is more than a simple case of Wall Street loathing, according to scientists who study the psychology of forgiveness and retaliation.

The fury is based in instincts that have had a protective and often stabilizing effect on communities throughout human history. Small, integrated groups in particular often contain members who will stand up and—often at significant risk to themselves—punish cheaters, liars and freeloaders.

Scientists debate how common these citizen enforcers are, and whether an urge to punish infractions amounts to an overall gain or loss, given that it is costly for both parties. But recent research suggests that in individuals, the fairness instinct is a highly variable psychological impulse, rising and falling in response to what is happening in the world.

http://snipurl.com/45jc7


'Deepest Ever' Living Fish Filmed
from BBC News Online

The "deepest ever" living fish have been discovered, scientists believe. A UK-Japan team found the 17-strong shoal at depths of 7.7km (4.8 miles) in the Japan Trench in the Pacific—and captured the deep sea animals on film.

The scientists have been using remote-operated landers designed to withstand immense pressures to comb the world's deepest depths for marine life.

Monty Priede from the University of Aberdeen said the 30cm-long (12in), deep-sea fish were surprisingly "cute." The fish, known as Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis, can be seen darting about in the darkness of the depths, scooping up shrimps.

http://snipurl.com/45ji2


The Long, Wild Ride of Bipolar Disorder
from Science News

Children who grow up with the psychiatric ailment known as bipolar disorder rarely grow out of it. Almost half of youngsters who suffered from bipolar's severe, rapid-fire mood swings at around age 11 displayed much of the same emotional volatility at ages 18 to 20, even if the condition had improved for a while during their teens, according to the first long-term study of children diagnosed with the disorder.

Bipolar disorder took off with a vengeance in these kids. Initial episodes, often periods of frequent, dramatic mood swings, lasted for up to three years. Second episodes lasted for slightly more than one year, while third episodes continued for roughly 10 months.

During these periods, youngsters can veer back and forth several times a day between a manic sense of euphoria and a serious, even suicidal depression, say psychiatrist Barbara Geller of Washington University in St. Louis and her colleagues. Manic euphoria typically includes grandiose delusions or hallucinations.

http://snipurl.com/45jm0


Nanotech Comes Alive
from Nature News

Molecular nanostructures—the basic architectural elements of nanotechnology—have been replicated in bacterial cells. The research proves that nature's cellular machinery can be commandeered to mass-produce complex structures and devices for molecular-scale engineering.

Together with their colleagues, Nadrian Seeman of New York University and Hao Yan of Arizona State University in Tempe speculate that their method might lead to the merging of nanotechnology and Darwinian natural selection, in which such molecular devices could be created and improved by some artificial evolutionary pressure.

The technique, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, relies on the fact that the nanostructures in question are made from DNA, the genetic material of living cells.

http://snipurl.com/45jo6


No Nobel for You: Top 10 Nobel Snubs
from Scientific American

Every year, the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden, announces up to three winners each in the scientific disciplines of chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine. ... And every year, there are murmurings—some louder than others—about the Nobel-worthy scientists who were overlooked. In 1974, when Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left out of the physics prize, her fellow astronomer and Nobel reject, Fred Hoyle, told reporters it was a "scientific scandal of major proportions."

Physician-inventor Raymond Damadian famously took out full-page newspaper ads protesting his omission from the 2003 Nobel for MRI technology. This year, some will be asking questions about Robert Gallo, who did not share today's Nobel for medicine or physiology with Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi.

Nobel committee proceedings are notoriously shrouded in secrecy, so it's impossible to know all the details behind how each prizewinner is chosen, especially the more recent ones. But, according to Nobel historians, most award exclusions seem to relate to one or more of these criteria: limited slots available (Nobel rules limit the number of recipients to three for each category); ambiguity over who made the crucial contribution; and lack of experience and/or reputation within one's research community.

http://snipurl.com/45jum


Task Force Says Those Over 75 Don't Need Colon Cancer Screening
from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)

PHILADELPHIA (Associated Press)—Most people over 75 should stop getting routine colon cancer tests, according to a government health task force that also rejected the latest X-ray screening technology.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—in a break with other medical and cancer organizations—opted not to give its stamp of approval to the newest tests: CT colonography, an X-ray test known as virtual colonoscopy, and a stool DNA test. The panel said more research is needed.

The task force for the first time did endorse three tests and said everyone age 50 to 75 should get screened with one of them: a colonoscopy of the entire colon every 10 years; a sigmoidoscopy of the lower colon every 5 years, combined with a stool blood test every three years; a stool blood test every year.

http://snipurl.com/45k72

[Kai]

October 9, 2008

Mercury Flyby Reveals Bright Craters, Long Rays
from National Geographic News

A new look at the solar system's innermost planet is revealing bright young craters and an extensive pattern of rays, suggesting that Mercury undergoes weathering processes like those on the moon.

NASA's MESSENGER ... spacecraft turned toward Earth in the wee hours of Tuesday morning and began transmitting images and data from its second planetary flyby.

A previous flyby in January was the first in a series of maneuvers designed to position MESSENGER in orbit around Mercury in 2011. That encounter imaged 20 percent of the planet's surface that had never been seen before. The latest images represent the first spacecraft views of the northern portion of Mercury, encompassing another 30 percent of the surface missed during previous missions.

http://snipurl.com/46lml


A Gift From the '70s: Energy Lessons
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The presidential candidates claim to see America's energy future, but their competing visions have a certain vintage quality. They've revived that classic debate: the hard path versus the soft path.

The soft path, as Amory Lovins defined it in the 1970s, is energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants—the technologies that Senator Barack Obama emphasizes in his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. Senator John McCain is more enthusiastic about building nuclear power plants, the quintessential hard path.

As a rule, it's not a good idea to revive anything from the 1970s. But this debate is the exception, and not just because the threat of global warming has raised the stakes. The old lessons are as good a guide as any to the future, as William Tucker argues in "Terrestrial Energy," his history of the hard-soft debate.

http://snipurl.com/46ltt


Blood Test Finds Coronary Disease
from the (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer

A simple blood test could soon replace expensive and invasive exams to detect coronary artery disease. The test, announced Wednesday by doctors at Duke, is being developed after the discovery of genetic markers that show the presence and intensity of blockage in coronary artery disease, said a Duke cardiologist who co-authored research on the link.

Such a blood test could save millions of dollars annually by allowing some patients to avoid risky procedures in which catheters are inserted into patients' arteries.

"I think it is a big deal," Dr. William E. Kraus, a Duke cardiologist, said in an interview Wednesday. "What we want is a test that tells us the status of your disease today and if what you have is heart disease." Kraus' research was published in the medical journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics.

http://snipurl.com/47jpz


Plunge in Markets Brings Another Kind of Depression
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

A Porter Ranch man who murdered his family and killed himself last weekend as he faced financial ruin is the latest and most extreme case of a wave of distress washing over the American psyche.

... The tragic case of the Rajaram family is at the bleakest edge of the economic turmoil that is rattling Americans' emotional well-being. Worries about home foreclosures, job losses and plunging stock prices have sparked a surge in mental health problems.

"The closest I have seen to this in the last 10 to 20 years is the spike after 9/11," said Richard Chaifetz, chief executive of ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based company that coordinates mental health referrals for employers. "But this is more geographically dispersed and is not going to get better in a month."

http://snipurl.com/46lwo


Studies Lift Hopes for Great Lakes Wind Turbine Farms
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

CHICAGO—Picture 100,000 wind turbines rising from the Great Lakes off Michigan's shores, casting spinning shadows on the water and producing electricity for the entire Upper Midwest.

This surreal image is conjured by a study released last Tuesday by the Michigan State University Land Policy Institute. It analyzed wind potential in the Great Lakes and found that 100,000 turbines off Michigan's coasts could produce 321,000 megawatts of energy.

That scenario, however, is highly unlikely because of the cost and environmental and other considerations. But wind power advocates hope it is a starting point for development of the world's first freshwater, offshore wind farms—in the Great Lakes.

http://snipurl.com/46m20


Pentagon Researches Alternative Treatments
from USA Today

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon is seeking new ways to treat troops suffering from combat stress or brain damage by researching such alternative methods as acupuncture, meditation, yoga and the use of animals as therapy, military officials said.

"This new theme is a big departure for our cautious culture," Dr. S. Ward Casscells, the Pentagon's assistant secretary for health affairs, told USA TODAY.

Casscells said he pushed hard for the new research, because "we are struggling with" post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) "as we are with suicide and we are increasingly willing to take a hard look at even soft therapies."

So far this year, the Pentagon is spending $5 million to study the therapies. In the previous two years, the Pentagon had not spent any money on similar research, records show.

http://snipurl.com/46m9d


Great Balls of Fire
from Nature News

A space rock a few metres across exploded over northern Sudan early in the morning of Tuesday 7 October. The small asteroid mostly disintegrated when it collided with Earth's atmosphere, but fragments may have reached the surface.

Such an event happens roughly every three months. But this is "the first time we were able to discover and predict an impact before the event," says Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) programme at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The story began on Sunday evening, when astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona, discovered the incoming object, dubbed 2008 TC3. By the next morning, three organizations—NASA's NEO office, the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and NeoDys in Pisa, Italy—confirmed that the asteroid was racing towards Earth.

http://snipurl.com/46mfy


University: Stem-Cell Study Used Falsified Data
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

MINNEAPOLIS (Associated Press)—The University of Minnesota has concluded that falsified data were used in a 2001 article published by one of its researchers on adult stem cells. The school is asking that the article be retracted.

The conclusion follows an 18-month investigation into research published by stem-cell expert Dr. Catherine Verfaillie. The investigation clears Verfaillie of misconduct but points to a former graduate student, Dr. Morayma Reyes, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Washington.

The university blames Verfaillie for "inadequate training and oversight," and says it has asked for a retraction of the published article, which appeared in the journal Blood. Reyes said it was an honest error and there was no intent to deceive.

http://snipurl.com/46pzh


Newly Discovered Fungus Strips Pollutants from Oil
from New Scientist

A humble fungus could help oil companies clean up their fuel to meet tightening emissions standards. The fungus, recently discovered in Iran, grows naturally in crude oil and removes the sulphur and nitrogen compounds that lead to acid rain and air pollution.

Worldwide, government are imposing increasingly severe limits on how much of those compounds fuels can contain. Oil producers are searching for more efficient ways to strip sulphur and nitrogen from their products.

The standard way to "desulphurise" crude oil involves reacting it with hydrogen at temperatures of 455°C and up to 204 times atmospheric pressure (roughly 21 million pascals or 3000 psi). It achieves less than perfect results. Micro-organisms able to metabolise sulphur and nitrogen have the potential to achieve the same endpoint under more normal conditions.

http://snipurl.com/46qc5


St. Louis Festival Brings Out Science's Cool Side
from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Registration Required)

ST. LOUIS (Associated Press)—From medicine cabinets to the fermented beer in the fridge, Americans are surrounded by science all the time. The St. Louis Science Center is launching a festival this week to help people better understand, and enjoy, the ways that science plays a role in everyday lives. St. Louis was chosen from about 20 American cities to host SciFest, which is based on a popular English gathering called the Cheltenham Science Festival.

"There's this potpourri for the intellectually stimulated," said Doug King, president and chief executive of the St. Louis Science Center. Most presentations are an hour long, and scientists will tackle topics from the latest developments in stem cell science to the physics of rock guitar—using riffs from Vivaldi to Queen to illustrate points.

... Presentations will be interactive, with scientists giving demonstrations, engaging audiences in the conversation and keeping their talks at a relatable level, he said. Topics include everything from University of Texas professor and author Diandra Leslie-Pelecky on the "Physics of NASCAR" to Harvard physicist Giovanni Fazio on the birth and death of stars.

http://snipurl.com/47k1s

[Kai]

October 10, 2008

Scientists Explore New Source of Stem Cells
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Scientists have converted cells from human testes into stem cells that grew into muscle, nerve cells and other kinds of tissue, according to a study published Wednesday in the online edition of Nature.

The stem cells offer another potential alternative to embryonic stem cells for researchers who aim to treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's by replacing damaged or malfunctioning cells with custom-grown replacements.

Scientists have also derived flexible adult stem cells from skin, amniotic fluid and menstrual blood. The new cells were created from sperm-making cells obtained from testicular biopsies of 22 men. They are theoretically superior to traditional embryonic stem cells because they can be obtained directly from male patients and used to grow replacement tissue that their bodies won't reject, Sabine Conrad of the University of Tuebingen in Germany and her colleagues wrote.

http://snipurl.com/47q4x


Venus Flytraps Caught in Shrinking Natural Habitat
from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

GREEN SWAMP PRESERVE, N.C. (Associated Press)—Laura Gadd pauses at the edge of a pristine savanna, delicately lifting her feet to avoid trampling any venus flytraps hidden underfoot.

Buried below wisps of wire grass, a few of the plants advertise their presence with a single white flower—perched atop a long stem like a flag of surrender. Gadd finds a half-dozen this day, enough to warrant a spray of glue and inconspicuous powder used to identify the plants and track down poachers who pluck them.

... One of nature's most recognized wonders, the venus flytrap's ability to snatch living prey makes it a favorite of elementary school science classes everywhere. ... Booming growth and development along the coast threatens to overrun the few sensitive and thin populations of venus flytraps that still exist in the wild.

http://snipurl.com/44ltu


Malaria Parasites Use "Cloaking Devices" to Trick Body
from National Geographic News

Malaria parasites use elaborate forms of deception, such as molecular mimicry, to fool the human immune system, new gene studies say. The discovery could lead to new vaccines for the disease, which kills millions and is rapidly becoming resistant to treatment.

Gene sequencing of two parasites, Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium knowlesi, comes six years after researchers unraveled the genome of Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite that causes the most fatal infections worldwide. Gene sequencing determines the order of chemical building blocks in a species's DNA.

While P. vivax is rarely fatal and causes less severe infections, it accounts for more than a third of about 500 million infections, most of them in Asia.

http://snipurl.com/46qfy


Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

George Soros, the prominent financier, avoids using the financial contracts known as derivatives "because we don't really understand how they work." Felix G. Rohatyn, the investment banker who saved New York from financial catastrophe in the 1970s, described derivatives as potential "hydrogen bombs."

And Warren E. Buffett presciently observed five years ago that derivatives were "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal."

One prominent financial figure, however, has long thought otherwise. And his views held the greatest sway in debates about the regulation and use of derivatives—exotic contracts that promised to protect investors from losses, thereby stimulating riskier practices that led to the financial crisis. For more than a decade, the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has fiercely objected whenever derivatives have come under scrutiny in Congress or on Wall Street.

http://snipurl.com/47ku8


Goldmine Bug DNA May Be Key to Alien Life
from New Scientist

A bug discovered deep in a goldmine and nicknamed "the bold traveller" has got astrobiologists buzzing with excitement. Its unique ability to live in complete isolation of any other living species suggests it could be the key to life on other planets.

A community of the bacteria Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator has been discovered 2.8 kilometres beneath the surface of the Earth in fluid-filled cracks of the Mponeng goldmine in South Africa. Its 60°C home is completely isolated from the rest of the world, and devoid of light and oxygen.

Dylan Chivian of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, studied the genes found in samples of the fluid to identify the organisms living within it, expecting to find a mix of species. Instead, he found that 99.9% of the DNA belonged to one bacterium, a new species. The remaining DNA was contamination from the mine and the laboratory.

http://snipurl.com/47vm0


Scientific Journals: Publish and Be Wrong
from the Economist

In economic theory the winner's curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to cluster around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much.

The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false.

This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished. In Public Library of Science (PloS) Medicine, an online journal, John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece, and his colleagues, suggest that a variety of economic conditions, such as oligopolies, artificial scarcities and the winner's curse, may have analogies in scientific publishing.

http://snipurl.com/47v8v


Only One Person Has Survived Rabies without Vaccine—But How?
from Scientific American

Four years after she nearly died from rabies, Jeanna Giese is being heralded as the first person known to have survived the virus without receiving a preventative vaccine. But Giese (pronounced Gee-See) says she would gladly share that honor with others if only doctors could show that the treatment used to save her could spare other victims as well.

"They shouldn't stop 'till it's perfected," said Giese, now 19, during a recent interview about physicians' quest to refine the technique that may have kept her alive. Giese's wish may come true. Another young girl infected with rabies is still alive more than a month after doctors induced a coma to put her symptoms on hold, just as they did with Giese.

Yolanda Caicedo, an infectious disease specialist at Hospital Universitario del Valle in Cali, Colombia, who is treating the latest survivor, confirmed reports in the Colombian newspaper El País that the victim is an eight-year-old girl who came down with symptoms in August, about a month after she was bitten by an apparently rabid cat.

http://snipurl.com/47vgk


Nearly 300 New Marine Species Found Near Australia
from National Geographic News

Scientists have found 274 new species of corals, starfish, sponges, shrimps, and crabs 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) beneath the surface of Australia's Southern Ocean.

"We know very little about the deep sea," said lead scientist Nic Bax, a marine biologist with Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Hobart, Tasmania. "Finding out how much live coral is down there, and how large those communities are, is very exciting." 

Some of the corals were found to be about 2,000 years old, said Bax. CSIRO made the discoveries in two separate voyages to marine reserves located 100 to 200 nautical miles off the southern coast of Tasmania, Australia.

http://snipurl.com/47vso


'Unbreakable' Encryption Unveiled
from BBC News Online

Perfect secrecy has come a step closer with the launch of the world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna.

The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables. Quantum cryptography is completely different from the kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today.

These are typically based on complex mathematical procedures which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack, but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time. But quantum systems use the laws of quantum theory, which have been shown to be inherently unbreakable.

http://snipurl.com/47vwo


Cosmic Eye Telescope Used to Spot Distant Galaxy
from the Telegraph (UK)

Scientists have used a "cosmic eye" to "look back in time" and glimpse a galaxy formation similar to the Milky Way which could give clues to the formation of the Universe. Using a technique that employs gravity from a galaxy in the foreground as an enormous zoom lens, researchers were able to see into the distant Universe.

The cosmic eye allowed scientists to observe a young star-forming galaxy, which lies about 11 billion light years from Earth, as it appeared just two billion years after the Big Bang.

Teams from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the US and Durham and Cardiff Universities in the UK believe their findings show for the first time how the galaxy might evolve to become a spiral system like the Milky Way.

http://snipurl.com/47wfk

[Iason Ouabache]

I was going to post something about "the bold traveller" story.  It's amazing the different environments we are finding life in.  I'd love to know how it got that far down in the earth in the first place.

Also, do we actually have quantum computers now?  I thought that they were still 2-5 years away.

The rabies story was interesting too, but I don't have anything interesting to add to it.

[Kai]

I was going to post something about "the bold traveller" story.  It's amazing the different environments we are finding life in.  I'd love to know how it got that far down in the earth in the first place.

Also, do we actually have quantum computers now?  I thought that they were still 2-5 years away.

The rabies story was interesting too, but I don't have anything interesting to add to it.

About the bold traveler story, I think people see something cool, but then they go off and become idiotic about it. They find this organism that can live in complete isolation, in anoxic conditions and chemosynthetically. Then they go off and talk about it being the key to life on other planets. I look at this organism, and say who cares about other planets, we may have found a relic organism from one of the earliest periods of earths history, leading us ever closer to the supreme question of biogenesis, "How the hell did life come about, anyway?" I feel the same way about the deep ocean vents.

I've heard the rabies story before. If this ends up working, its a confirmation that the earlier cure was not just a fluke. It reminds me of a story I read a couple years ago, about doctors using slow revival methods to bring heart attack patients back from the dead without severe neural trauma.

[Jasper]

Also, do we actually have quantum computers now?  I thought that they were still 2-5 years away.

http://www.physorg.com/news11087.html

[Iason Ouabache]

Also, do we actually have quantum computers now?  I thought that they were still 2-5 years away.

http://www.physorg.com/news11087.html

"It seems absolutely bizarre that counterfactual computation – using information that is counter to what must have actually happened – could find an answer without running the entire quantum computer," said Kwiat, a John Bardeen Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Illinois. "But the nature of quantum interrogation makes this amazing feat possible."

Sometimes called interaction-free measurement, quantum interrogation is a technique that makes use of wave-particle duality (in this case, of photons) to search a region of space without actually entering that region of space.

Utilizing two coupled optical interferometers, nested within a third, Kwiat's team succeeded in counterfactually searching a four-element database using Grover's quantum search algorithm. "By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm," said graduate student Onur Hosten, lead author of the Nature paper. "We also showed theoretically how to obtain the answer without ever running the algorithm, by using a 'chained Zeno' effect."