Weekly Science Headlines

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Read our related editorial: The Obama factor, revealed

HITLER and Mussolini both had the ability to bend millions of people to their fascist will. Now evidence from psychology and neurology is emerging to explain how tactics like organised marching and propaganda can work to exert mass mind control.

Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group. "It makes us feel as though we're part of a larger entity, so we see the group's welfare as being as important as our own," he says.

Wiltermuth's team separated 96 people into four groups who performed these tasks together: listening to a song while silently mouthing the words, singing along, singing and dancing, or listening to different versions of the song so that they sang and danced out of sync. In a later game, when asked to decide whether to stick with the group or strive for personal gain, those in the non-synchronised group behaved less loyally than the rest (Psychological Science, vol 20, p 1).

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics can be used just as well for peace, he stresses. Community dances and group singing can ease local tension, for example - a theory he plans to test experimentally (Journal of Legal Studies, DOI: 10.1086/529447).

Meanwhile, the powerful unifying effects of propaganda images are being explored by Charles Seger at Indiana University at Bloomington. His team primed students with pictures of their university - college sweatshirts or the buildings themselves - then asked how highly they scored on different emotions, such as pride or happiness. The primed students gave a strikingly similar emotional profile, in contrast with non-primed students (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.004).

Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has been renewed by work into mirror neurons - cells that fire when we perform an action or watch someone perform a similar action. It suggests that our brains are geared to mimic our peers. "We are set up for 'auto-copy'," says Haidt.
Interest in the idea of a herd mentality has been renewed by research into mirror neurons

Neurological evidence seems to back this idea. Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward chemical dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus (Neuron, vol 61, p 140). His team asked 24 women to rate more than 200 women for attractiveness. If a participant discovered their ratings did not tally with that of the others, they tended to readjust their scores. When a woman realised her differing opinion, fMRI scans revealed that her brain generated what the team dubbed an "error signal". This has a conditioning effect, says Klucharev: it's how we learn to follow the crowd.

Sauce

[Kai]

http://membracid.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/new-research-on-bedbug-insecticide-resistance/

Time to get paranoid. About bedbugs.

[Kai]

http://catalogue-of-organisms.blogspot.com/2009/02/blinding-me-with-science.html

awesome stuff and commentary on this week's Science journal. plus a radial mouth arthropod with AQUATIC WINGS!

[Kai]

 February 6, 2009

Evolution: Unfinished Business
from the Economist

The miracles of nature are everywhere: on landing, a beetle folds its wings like an origami master; a lotus leaf sheds muddy water as if it were quicksilver; a spider spins a web to entrap her prey, but somehow evades entrapment herself. Since the beginning of time, people who have thought about such things have seen these marvels as examples of the wisdom of God; even as evidence for his existence.

But 200 years ago, on February 12th 1809, a man was born who would challenge all that. The book that issued the challenge, published half a century later, in 1859, offered a radical new view of the living world and, most radical of all, of humanity's origins. The man was Charles Robert Darwin. The book was On the Origin of Species. And the challenge was the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Since Darwin's birth, the natural world has changed beyond recognition. Then, the modern theory of atoms was scarcely six years old and the Earth was thought to be 6,000. There was no inkling of the size of the universe beyond the Milky Way, and radioactivity, relativity and quantum theory were unimaginable. Yet of all the discoveries of 19th- and early 20th-century science ... only evolution has failed to find general acceptance outside the scientific world.

http://snipr.com/beurh



Tamiflu No Longer Works for Dominant Flu Strain
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

A milder than usual U.S. flu season is masking a growing concern about widespread resistance to the antiviral drug Tamiflu and what that means for the nation's preparedness in case of a dangerous pandemic flu.

Tamiflu, the most commonly used influenza antiviral and the mainstay of the federal government's emergency drug stockpile, no longer works for the dominant flu strain circulating in much of the country, government officials said Tuesday.

Of samples tested since October, almost 100% of the strain--known as type A H1N1--showed resistance to Tamiflu. In response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines to physicians in December. Doctors were told to substitute an alternative antiviral, Relenza, for Tamiflu, or to combine Tamiflu with an older antiviral, rimantadine, if the H1N1 virus was the main strain circulating in their communities.

http://snipr.com/beuvz



Dark Days for Green Energy
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Wind and solar power have been growing at a blistering pace in recent years, and that growth seemed likely to accelerate under the green-minded Obama administration. But because of the credit crisis and the broader economic downturn, the opposite is happening: installation of wind and solar power is plummeting.

Factories building parts for these industries have announced a wave of layoffs in recent weeks, and trade groups are projecting 30 to 50 percent declines this year in installation of new equipment, barring more help from the government.

Prices for turbines and solar panels, which soared when the boom began a few years ago, are falling. Communities that were patting themselves on the back just last year for attracting a wind or solar plant are now coping with cutbacks.

http://snipr.com/beuzm



The Genes That Turn 'Three' Red
from the Scientist (Registration Required)

Researchers have completed the first-ever genome-wide scan of synesthesia, a condition in which sensory stimuli cross wires and combine such that people "see" sounds or "taste" shapes, according to a study published online Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Investigators at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford pinpointed four areas of the genome associated with the disorder. Those regions contain genes that have been associated with autism and dyslexia, as well as genes involved in different aspects of brain development, and further analysis could illuminate how genetics drives complex cognitive traits, the authors say.

"It's exciting that we have a study about the genetic basis of synesthesia--finally," said Noam Sagiv, a cognitive neuroscientist at Brunel University in the UK, who was not involved in the research. Until now "we've just been guessing," he said, by "using data based on prevalence estimates."

http://snipr.com/bev24



Auroras: What Powers the Greatest Light Show on Earth?
from New Scientist

A few times a day, a gigantic explosion shakes the Earth's magnetic shield, triggering a chain of events that lights up the polar skies with dazzling auroras. These explosions are substorms, and how they happen has long been a mystery. Until now, no one has been able to explain how they gather the energy to create such spectacular displays, or what happens to trigger them.

Now a flotilla of NASA satellites is finally providing answers. They could help us understand not only one of nature's greatest spectacles, but also help predict more serious space weather, which can endanger satellites and astronauts, and even scramble electrical systems on Earth.

The northern and southern lights have fascinated people throughout human history, and there has been no shortage of attempts to explain them. ... In the late 1600s, Edmond Halley was the first to correctly link the aurora to the Earth's magnetic field, though it wasn't until the 1950s that scientists confirmed that the display is created when electrons are funnelled by magnetic fields into the upper atmosphere.

http://snipr.com/bev5u



Earliest Animals Were Sea Sponges, Fossils Hint
from National Geographic News

Fossil steroids found underground in Oman show that early Earth was the scene of a sea sponge heyday more than 635 million years ago.

The ancient chemicals--similar to modern natural steroids such as estrogen and testosterone--are now the oldest known fossil evidence of animal life, says a new study led by Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside.

Based on chemical signatures inside sedimentary rocks, Love and colleagues think the sponges likely grew in colonies that blanketed areas of the ocean floor. Back then the supercontinent Rodinia, which had been Earth's dominant landmass for at least 350 million years, was in the process of breaking up, and the climate was extremely cold worldwide. Sponges evolved in shallow ocean basins, because the deeper seas did not yet contain oxygen, a necessity for almost all life.

http://snipr.com/bev6u



How Dad's Age Increases Baby's Risk of Mental Illness
from Scientific American

... The idea that a father's age could affect the health of his children was first hinted at a century ago by an unusually perceptive and industrious doctor in private practice in Stuttgart, Germany. Wilhelm Weinberg ... managed to publish 160 scientific papers without the benefit of colleagues, students or grants. His papers, written in German, did not attract much attention initially; most geneticists spoke English. It was not until years later that some of Weinberg's papers were recognized as landmarks.

One of these was a 1912 study noting that a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia was more common among the last-born children in families than among the first-born. Weinberg didn't know why that was so, but he speculated that it might be related to the age of the parents, who were obviously older when their last children were born. Weinberg's prescient observation was confirmed decades later when research showed that he was half right: the risk of dwarfism rose with the father's age but not the mother's.

Since then, about 20 inherited ailments have been linked to paternal age, including progeria, the disorder of rapid aging, and Marfan syndrome, a disorder marked by very long arms, legs, fingers and toes, as well as life-threatening heart defects. More recent studies have linked fathers' age to prostate and other cancers in their children. And in September 2008 researchers linked older fathers to an increased risk of bipolar disorder in their children.

http://snipr.com/bev9o



Commercial Fishing Is Barred in Parts of Arctic
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Federal fisheries managers have voted to bar all commercial fishing in U.S. waters from north of the Bering Strait and east to the Canadian border in light of the rapid climate changes that are transforming the Arctic.

In a unanimous vote yesterday, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council ruled that scientists and policymakers need to better assess how global warming is affecting the region before allowing fishing on stocks such as Arctic cod, saffron cod and snow crab.

"There's concern over unregulated fishing, there's concern about warming, there's concern about how commercial fishing might affect resources in the region, local residents and subsistence fishing and the ecosystem as a whole," said Bill Wilson, a council aide. Environmentalists and fishing interests praised the move as sensible, given the changes to ice cover and other features of the Arctic environment.

http://snipr.com/bevcp



Lack of Sunshine Found to Trigger MS
from the Guardian (UK)

Women who are not exposed to sufficient sunshine in pregnancy may be at risk of giving birth to a child who will get multiple sclerosis in adulthood, research reveals today.

Oxford University researchers have identified a link between a shortage of the "sunshine vitamin"-vitamin D-and a specific gene which appears to be involved in the onset of the devastating and incurable disease.

Women are already urged to take folic acid in pregnancy to reduce the chances of a child being born with spina bifida. The research findings suggest that vitamin D could before long be advised for pregnant women as well-especially those who do not get much exposure to sunlight. The researchers think it is possible that vitamin D could play a part in other diseases which affect the immune system too.

http://snipr.com/bevfb



Study: Climate Change May Reshuffle Western Weeds
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

SALT LAKE CITY (Associated Press)--Climate change will likely shuffle some of the West's most troublesome invasive weeds, adding to the burden faced by farms and ranchers in some areas and providing opportunities for native plant restoration in others, according to a new study.

In many cases, a warming climate will provide more welcoming conditions for invasive plants to get a foothold, spread quickly and crowd out native species, the study by Princeton University researchers said.

But some invasives may retreat from millions of acres in the West--at least briefly--and offer an opportunity for land managers to re-establish native plants, the study said. The window for action, though, will probably be limited. "We're going to have to be in the right place at the right time before something else gains a foothold," said Bethany Bradley, a biogeographer at Princeton and lead author on the study.

http://snipr.com/bevhs

[Vene]

Earliest Animals Were Sea Sponges, Fossils Hint
from National Geographic News

Fossil steroids found underground in Oman show that early Earth was the scene of a sea sponge heyday more than 635 million years ago.

The ancient chemicals--similar to modern natural steroids such as estrogen and testosterone--are now the oldest known fossil evidence of animal life, says a new study led by Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside.

Based on chemical signatures inside sedimentary rocks, Love and colleagues think the sponges likely grew in colonies that blanketed areas of the ocean floor. Back then the supercontinent Rodinia, which had been Earth's dominant landmass for at least 350 million years, was in the process of breaking up, and the climate was extremely cold worldwide. Sponges evolved in shallow ocean basins, because the deeper seas did not yet contain oxygen, a necessity for almost all life.

http://snipr.com/bev6u

Considering the way sponges live and how basal their morphology is, them being the first animals isn't a shock.

[Kai]

February 9, 2009



The Tiny, Slimy Savior of Global Coral Reefs?
from the Christian Science Monitor

Coral reefs, already declining in many areas around the world, face even tougher times ahead, say scientists. Warming and increasingly acidic oceans, combined with other stresses could conceivably spell the end for reefs as we know them, they warn.

But Andrew Baker, a scientist at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, has a more optimistic view. He thinks that corals have an innate - if limited - capacity to adapt to rising temperatures. And he theorizes that people may be able to help them along.

Earlier this year, Mr. Baker, a 2008 Pew Fellow, launched a project to study the relationship between reef-building coral polyps (a relative of jellyfish) and their symbiotic algae. ... During a so-called bleaching event, corals lose their algae and, greatly weakened, can die. Baker hopes to preempt such bleaching events, which have become more frequent in the past 50 years as temperatures have risen globally, by "inoculating" corals with a more heat-resistant strain of algae.

http://snipr.com/bksp2



Women Have Hormonal Cues for Baby Cuteness
from Science News

Everyone oohs and ahs over babies. Ironically, new research suggests that young women taking oral contraceptives are especially good at picking out babies with the most adorable little mugs.

Female sex hormones sensitize women to differences in babies' cuteness, propose psychologist Reiner Sprengelmeyer of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and his colleagues. When given choices between computer-manipulated images of a baby's face, premenopausal women discern gradations in the cuteness of the face better than either postmenopausal women or men of all ages, Sprengelmeyer's group reports in the February Psychological Science.

In the new study, young women taking hormone-boosting contraceptive pills outdid those not taking contraceptives, as well as premenopausal women in general, at detecting babies' cuteness.

http://snipr.com/bkssg



Jamming Bacterial Chat Could Yield New Antibiotics
from New Scientist

In the future, the most effective antibiotics might be those that don't kill any bacteria. Instead the drugs will simply prevent the bacteria from talking with one another.

Drug-resistant bugs are winning the war against standard antibiotics as they evolve resistance to even the most lethal drugs. It happens because a dose of antibiotics strongly selects for resistance by killing the most susceptible bacteria first.

If, however, researchers can identify antibiotics that neutralise dangerous bacteria without killing them, the pressure to evolve resistance can be reduced. One way to do that is to target the constant stream of chatter that passes between bacteria as molecular signals.

http://snipr.com/bksum



Egyptian Archaeologists Unveil 30 Mummies from Recently Discovered Tomb
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

CAIRO (Associated Press) -- A storehouse of 30 Egyptians mummies has been unearthed inside a 2,600-year-old tomb, in a new round of excavations at the vast necropolis of Saqqara outside Cairo, archeologists said Monday.

The tomb was located at the bottom of a 36 foot (11-meter) deep shaft, announced Egypt's top archaeologist Zahi Hawass and eight of the mummies were in sarcophagi, while the rest had been placed in niches along the wall.

Hawass described the discovery as a "storeroom for mummies," dating to 640 B.C. and the 26th Dynasty, which was Egypt's last independent kingdom before it was overthrown by a succession of foreign conquerors beginning with the Persians.

http://snipr.com/bksvk



Pentagon Issues 'Credits' To Offset Harm to Wildlife
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

The Pentagon has been funding Texas A&M University to pay landowners near a Texas military post to protect endangered bird species on their land under a secretive program designed to free the military to conduct training activities that would damage the birds' habitats inside the post's boundaries, documents show.

Despite complaints that the program is a boondoggle for the landowners, some federal officials are pushing to replicate it at other military sites and in federal highway projects. The program's effectiveness has been questioned by several military officials, federal wildlife authorities and an independent consulting firm, which recommended that the Army cancel it.

Initially championed by former president George W. Bush and some of his political allies, the "recovery credit system" at Fort Hood in central Texas has so far paid out nearly $4.4 million to contractors and landowners.

http://snipr.com/bksz0



'Silver Sensation' Seeks Cold Cosmos
from BBC News Online

Stare into the curve of Herschel's mirror too long and you get a slightly giddy feeling that comes from not being able to judge where its surface really starts. It is enchanting, spectacular and - at 3.5m in diameter - it will soon become the biggest telescope mirror in space, surpassing that of Hubble.

The great 18th Century astronomer William Herschel would have been astonished by the silver sensation that now bears his name.

The European Space Agency (Esa) is certainly very proud of its new observatory. It has been working on the venture for more than 20 years. "The mirror is an enormous piece of hardware," enthused Thomas Passvogel, Esa's programme manager on the Herschel space observatory.

http://snipr.com/bkt0y



Bushfires and Global Warming: Is There a Link?
from the Guardian (UK)

Scientists are reluctant to link individual weather events to global warming, because natural variability will always throw up extreme events. However, they say that climate change loads the dice, and can make severe episodes more likely.

Some studies have started to say how much global warming contributed to severe weather. Experts at the UK Met Office and Oxford University used computer models to say man-made climate change made the killer European heatwave in 2003 about twice as likely. In principle, the technique could be repeated with any extreme storm, drought or flood - which could pave the way for lawsuits from those affected.

Bob Brown, a senator who leads the Australian Greens, said the bushfires showed what climate change could mean for Australia. "Global warming is predicted to make this sort of event happen 25%, 50% more," he told Sky News. "It's a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change."

http://snipr.com/bktd2



"Noah's Flood" Not Rooted in Reality, After All?
from National Geographic News

The ancient flood that some scientists think gave rise to the Noah story may not have been quite so biblical in proportion, a new study says.

Researchers generally agree that, during a warming period about 9,400 years ago, an onrush of seawater from the Mediterranean spurred a connection with the Black Sea, then a largely freshwater lake. That flood turned the lake into a rapidly rising sea.

A previous theory said the Black Sea rose up to 195 feet (60 meters), possibly burying villages and spawning the tale of Noah's flood and other inundation folklore. But the new study--largely focused on relatively undisturbed underwater fossils--suggests a rise of no more than 30 feet (10 meters).

http://snipr.com/bkt3x



Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
from Wired

Imagine a computer that can process text, video and audio in an instant, solve problems on the fly, and do it all while consuming just 10 watts of power. It would be the ultimate computing machine if it were built with silicon instead of human nerve cells.

Compare that to current computers, which require extensive, custom programming for each application, consume hundreds of watts in power, and are still not fast enough. So it's no surprise that some computer scientists want to go back to the drawing board and try building computers that more closely emulate nature.

"The plan is to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain," says Dharmendra Modha, manager of the cognitive computing project at IBM Almaden Research Center. In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are coming together in a bid to create an entirely new computing architecture that can simulate the brain's abilities for perception, interaction and cognition.

http://snipr.com/bkt50



Great Unknowns
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

With each passing day, we seem a step closer to comprehending the genome, gaining important insights into deadly diseases, and understanding the makeup of our universe.

But for some scientists, knowing what we can't figure out is just as important. A little-known discipline of science called computational intractability studies the boundaries of our understanding - not questions of the philosophical realm (Is there a god? An afterlife?) but of the everyday computational realm.

Think of an airline trying to allocate its planes at airports most efficiently, or a FedEx delivery man trying to deliver hundreds of packages to hundreds of locations using the shortest possible route. We know answers exist, but it turns out that calculating the solutions to such kinds of problems could take too long, even if all the world's most powerful computers were to work together on them.

http://snipr.com/bkt6g

[Kai]

February 10, 2009



Genes Offer New Clues in Old Debate on Species' Origins
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Charles Darwin called it the "mystery of mysteries," a problem so significant and one he was so sure he had solved that he named his world-changing work after it: On the Origin of Species. So he might be surprised to learn that 150 years after the publication of his book, the study of how species originate, a process known as speciation, is not only one of the field's most active areas of study, but also one of its most contentious.

While researchers agree that many of the recent breakthroughs would have come as a huge surprise to the grand old man, they seem to disagree about almost everything else, from what a species is to what exactly is meant by the origin of species and even whether Darwin shed any light on the process at all.

"Speciation is definitely one of the big-picture grand themes of evolutionary biology," said Mary Jane West-Eberhard, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. She described study of the process as "an apparent turmoil that might be misunderstood by an outsider as a caldron of doubts and uncertainties but that in fact is a vitally alive science."

http://snipr.com/bmktk



Drugs Are Found to Block HIV In Monkeys
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

AIDS researchers who were gathered in Montreal yesterday heard encouraging results from studies of three strategies for preventing HIV infection using pharmaceuticals, particularly in women.

Two experiments in monkeys showed that antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, given by mouth or by vaginal gel, were highly effective in blocking infection by the virus that causes AIDS. A third study, in 3,100 women in the United States and Africa, showed a small amount of protection from a vaginal gel that acts by binding up the AIDS virus and preventing it from invading cells.

Many experts believe that, short of a vaccine, a virus-blocking substance that could be inserted in the vagina or rectum before sexual activity would be the most important tool in fighting the AIDS pandemic. Numerous topical microbicides have been tried, but none have worked, and two have actually increased the risk of infection.

http://snipr.com/bmky8



Vitamins Do Older Women Little Good
from U.S. News and World Report

(HealthDay News)--In yet another blow to the dietary supplement industry, researchers find no evidence that multivitamin use helps older women ward off heart disease and cancer, the top two killers of women, respectively.

"Women can be encouraged by the fact that these vitamins seem to do no harm, but they also seem to confer no benefit," said study co-author Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, a professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

"The kind of vitamins you get from diet is quite different, because foods are very complex and have a lot of chemicals we don't know about that interact with each other. [Eating a varied diet] is not the same as distilling it into a pill. The message is to eat a well-balanced diet, exercise and maintain weight."

http://snipr.com/bml0u



'Arctic Unicorns' in Icy Display
from BBC News Online

A BBC team used aerial cameras to film the creatures during their epic summer migration, as they navigated through cracks in the melting Arctic sea ice. They believe the footage, which forms part of the BBC Natural History Unit's new series Nature's Great Events, is the first of its kind.

Narwhal are sometimes called "Arctic unicorns" because of the long, spiral tusk that protrudes from their jaws. The appendages can reach more than 2m (7ft) in length; scientists believe males use them to attract potential mates.

The BBC crew headed to the Arctic in June 2008, to film the tusked animals' summer migration. At this time of year, temperatures begin to rise above freezing and the thick sea ice starts to melt, creating a complex network of cracks that cover the white expanse.

http://snipr.com/bml3v



Large Hadron Collider to Stay Switched Off for a Year
from the Times (London)

The restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the "Big Bang machine" that suffered a catastrophic fault days after it was switched on last September, has been delayed until the autumn.

Officials at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva have postponed the injection of new proton beams into the LHC until late September, meaning that the world's largest atom-smasher will have been mothballed for a year.

The decision to move the restart back by two months from July will allow engineers to install and test early warning and protection systems that should prevent serious damage in the event of further faults. The first particle collisions are now scheduled for late October. CERN will also take the unusual step of running the particle accelerator through most of next winter, to make up for lost time in collecting physics data.

http://snipr.com/bml5s



How Life Has Preserved Its Mystery
from the Telegraph (UK)

"Wonders are there many," observed the Greek dramatist Sophocles, "but none more wonderful than man." And rightly so, for we, as far as we can tell, are the sole witnesses of the splendours of the universe--though consistently less impressed by this privileged position than would seem warranted.

The chief reason for that lack of astonishment has always been that the practicalities of our everyday lives are so simple and effortless as to seem unremarkable. ... We reproduce, and play no part in the transformation of the fertilised egg into a fully formed embryo with its 4,000 functioning parts. We tend to our children's needs, but effortlessly they grow to adulthood, replacing along the way virtually every cell in their bodies.

These practicalities are not in the least bit simple, but in reality are the simplest things we know--because they have to be so. If our senses did not accurately capture the world around us, were the growth from childhood not virtually automatic, then "we" would never have happened.

http://snipr.com/bml8a



Birds Shift North as Globe Warms
from the Seattle Times

WASHINGTON (Associated Press)--When it comes to global warming, the canary in the coal mine isn't a canary at all. It's a purple finch. As the temperature across the U.S. has gotten warmer, the purple finch has been spending its winters more than 400 miles farther north than it used to. And it's not alone.

An Audubon Society study to be released today found that more than half of 305 birds species in North America, a hodgepodge that includes robins, gulls, chickadees and owls, are spending the winter about 35 miles farther north than they did 40 years ago.

The purple finch was the biggest northward mover. Its wintering grounds are now more along the latitude of Milwaukee, Wis., instead of Springfield, Mo.

http://snipr.com/bmld1



Lunacy and the Full Moon
from Scientific American

Across the centuries, many a person has uttered the phrase "There must be a full moon out there" in an attempt to explain weird happenings at night. Indeed, the Roman goddess of the moon bore a name that remains familiar to us today: Luna, prefix of the word "lunatic." Greek philosopher Aristotle and Roman historian Pliny the Elder suggested that the brain was the "moistest" organ in the body and thereby most susceptible to the pernicious influences of the moon, which triggers the tides.

Belief in the "lunar lunacy effect," or "Transylvania effect," as it is sometimes called, persisted in Europe through the Middle Ages, when humans were widely reputed to transmogrify into werewolves or vampires during a full moon. Even today many people think the mystical powers of the full moon induce erratic behaviors, psychiatric hospital admissions, suicides, homicides, emergency room calls, traffic accidents, fights at professional hockey games, dog bites and all manner of strange events.

One survey revealed that 45 percent of college students believe moonstruck humans are prone to unusual behaviors, and other surveys suggest that mental health professionals may be still more likely than laypeople to hold this conviction. In 2007 several police departments in the U.K. even added officers on full-moon nights in an effort to cope with presumed higher crime rates.

http://snipr.com/bmlk9



Salamanders "Completely Gone" Due to Global Warming?
from National Geographic News

Silent and secretive creatures, salamanders are just as quietly falling off the map in tropical forests throughout Central America, a new study says.

Two common species surveyed in the 1970s in cloud forests of southern Mexico and Guatemala are extinct, and several others have plummeted in number, researchers say. The tiny amphibians seem to be on the same downward spiral as their frog cousins, which have been mysteriously declining for years.

Scientists have identified chytrid, a fast-killing fungus that may spread in waves, as responsible for wiping out frogs around the world. But among the Central American salamanders, "there's no way we can attribute the declines we've found to chytrid," said study author David Wake, an biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

http://snipr.com/bmln6



Super Clocks: More Accurate Than Time Itself
from New Scientist

For those physicists and philosophers puzzled by nature's fourth dimension, Patrick Gill has a wry response. "Time," he says, "is what you measure in seconds."

For Gill, that is a statement of professional pride. He is what you might call Britain's top timekeeper. Within the windowless - and largely clockless - cream-brick confines of the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL), near London, Gill and his colleagues are busy developing the next, staggeringly accurate generation of atomic clocks.

These tiny timepieces are the devices that ensure radio, television and mobile-phone transmissions stay in sync, prevent the internet from turning into a mess of missing data packets, make GPS accurate enough to navigate by, and safeguard electricity grids from blackout. They are, in short, the heartbeat of modern life.

http://snipr.com/bmmfb

[Kai]

February 12, 2009



Scientists Wary About Orbital Debris After Satellites Collide
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Associated Press)--Scientists are keeping a close eye on orbital debris created when two communications satellites--one American, the other Russian--smashed into each other hundreds of miles above the Earth. NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the unprecedented crash and whether any other satellites or even the Hubble Space Telescope are threatened.

The collision, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday, was the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft, NASA officials said. "We knew this was going to happen eventually," said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA believes any risk to the international space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course.

http://snipr.com/br4kg



Going Where Darwin Feared to Tread
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

In biology's most famous book, On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin steered clear of applying his revolutionary theory of evolution to the species of greatest interest to his readers--their own.

He couldn't avoid it forever, of course. He eventually wrote another tome nearly as famous, The Descent of Man. But he knew in 1859, when Species was published, that to jump right into a description of how human beings had tussled with the environment and one another over eons, changing their appearance, capabilities and behavior in the process, would be hard for people to accept. Better to stick with birds and barnacles.

Darwin was born 200 years ago today. On the Origin of Species will be 150 years old in a few months. There's no such reluctance now. The search for signs of natural selection in human beings has just begun. It will ultimately be as revelatory as Newton's description of the mathematics of motion 322 years ago, or the unlocking of the atom's secrets that began in the late 1800s.

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Seeing the World in Half-View
from Scientific American

A patient named Sally recently suffered a stroke that damaged her right parietal lobe without affecting other parts of the brain. The left side of her body--controlled by the right hemisphere--was paralyzed. But she was mentally normal and continued to remain the talkative, intelligent woman that she was before the stroke.

Yet Sally's father observed other disturbing symptoms to which--oddly enough--Sally herself seemed oblivious. When she attempted to move around the room in her wheelchair, she would sometimes bump into objects on her left.

Further testing confirmed that Sally was largely indifferent to objects and events on her left, even though she was not blind to them; once her attention was drawn to them, she could see them. Her eyesight was normal; her problem was in attending to the left. For example, when she ate, she would consume only the food on the right, ignoring the left side of the plate. ... Sally's deficits indicate that she suffers from hemineglect (or simply neglect), which can also occur in isolated form, unaccompanied by major paralysis.

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Duplication in Genomes May Separate Humans from Apes
from Science News

Although it may not be as dramatic as the Big Bang birthing the universe, an explosion of DNA duplication in the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and gorillas may be responsible for many of the differences among the species, a new study suggests. The big blowup happened 8 million to 12 million years ago, but its effects are still apparent today.

Human and great ape genes are notoriously similar, with few differences in the genetic letters that make up the instruction manual for building each of the primates. But gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and humans are obviously different. A new analysis of the entire genomes of humans and their ape cousins, published in the Feb. 11 Nature, suggests the differences may have roots in DNA duplications.

Researchers led by Evan Eichler, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Washington in Seattle, compared the genomes of macaques, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans. The scientists found that chunks of the genomes had been copied and rearranged, sometimes multiple times, within each of the lineages.

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How Your Looks Betray Your Personality
from New Scientist

The history of science could have been so different. When Charles Darwin applied to be the "energetic young man" that Robert Fitzroy, the Beagle's captain, sought as his gentleman companion, he was almost let down by a woeful shortcoming that was as plain as the nose on his face.

Fitzroy believed in physiognomy--the idea that you can tell a person's character from their appearance. As Darwin's daughter Henrietta later recalled, Fitzroy had "made up his mind that no man with such a nose could have energy." Fortunately, the rest of Darwin's visage compensated for his sluggardly proboscis: "His brow saved him."

The idea that a person's character can be glimpsed in their face dates back to the ancient Greeks. It was most famously popularised in the late 18th century by the Swiss poet Johann Lavater, whose ideas became a talking point in intellectual circles. In Darwin's day, they were more or less taken as given. It was only after the subject became associated with phrenology, which fell into disrepute in the late 19th century, that physiognomy was written off as pseudoscience. Now the field is undergoing something of a revival.

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Evolution Revolution: Pace Is Speeding Up
from the Seattle Times

Blue eyes typically are associated with beauty, or perhaps Frank Sinatra. But to University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks, they represent an evolutionary mystery. For nearly all of human history, everyone in the world had brown eyes. Then, between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, the first blue-eyed baby was born somewhere near the Black Sea.

For some reason, that baby's descendants gained a 5 percent evolutionary advantage over their brown-eyed competitors, and today the number of people with blue eyes tops half a billion. "What does it mean?" said Hawks, who studies the forces that have shaped the human species for the past 6 million years.

Nobody knows. It is one of the unanswered questions about evolution that persist 200 years after the birth of Charles Darwin, whose birthday will be celebrated worldwide Thursday.

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Blood Cells Filmed in Formation
from the Scientist (Registration Required)

Researchers have helped resolved a long-standing debate about which precursors in the developing mammalian embryo give rise to blood cells, after tracking the birth of these cells using in-vivo imaging that lasts for days, according a report in this week's Nature.

The study is one of a handful of papers to come out in recent months to examine the question of hematopoietic cell origin. "I would say the nice thing about the latest paper is that everything is seen live--which hasn't been possible before," said Francoise Dieterlen-Lievre of the Cellular and Molecular Embryology Institute in Nogent-sur-Marne, France, who was not involved in the study.

One challenge with tracking the cells' origin is that blood cells can migrate within the organism quite literally in a heartbeat, said Timm Schroeder of the GSF-Institute of Stem Cell Research in Neuherberg, Germany, the study's main author. "The problem is that we roughly know where these cells appear," he said, adding that "If you don't continuously watch it happen, then you can never exclude that the [blood] cells migrated from a different site."

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In New Procedure, Artificial Arm Listens to Brain
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Amanda Kitts lost her left arm in a car accident three years ago, but these days she plays football with her 12-year-old son, and changes diapers and bearhugs children at the three Kiddie Cottage day care centers she owns in Knoxville, Tenn.

Ms. Kitts, 40, does this all with a new kind of artificial arm that moves more easily than other devices and that she can control by using only her thoughts. "I'm able to move my hand, wrist and elbow all at the same time," she said. "You think, and then your muscles move."

Her turnaround is the result of a new procedure that is attracting increasing attention because it allows people to move prosthetic arms more automatically than ever before, simply by using rewired nerves and their brains. The technique, called targeted muscle reinnervation, involves taking the nerves that remain after an arm is amputated and connecting them to another muscle in the body, often in the chest.

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Two Favorite Galaxies Face One Big Collision
from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies, with their 1.2 trillion stars, are on course to collide at 1 million miles an hour. While humanity eventually might need sunglasses and seat belts for the rocky cosmic ride, there's no immediate need for panic. The smashup won't even begin to occur for another 2 billion years.

But James Lombardi Jr., an associate professor of physics at Allegheny College in Meadville, Crawford County, has worked for years to develop a computer model to explain stellar collisions. That knowledge also has provided him insight into the dynamics of intergalactic collisions.

He and two of his students have used his model to simulate stellar collisions that could occur when the Milky Way and Andromeda sideswipe each other and eventually coalesce into a giant egg-shaped galaxy.

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Prostate Cancer Urine Test Hope
from BBC News Online

US scientists have moved a step closer to a simple urine test to distinguish between the benign and aggressive forms of prostate cancer. Some prostate cancers are slow-growing, while others require rapid treatment.

But telling them apart can be difficult and some patients undergo unnecessary surgery or radiation treatment. The latest study, published in Nature, links a group of small molecules produced by the body to the aggressive form of the disease.

In theory, testing for their presence should enable doctors to determine whether a patient has an aggressive form of prostate cancer--and requires urgent action. In contrast, patients with benign prostate cancer often end up dying of other conditions because their tumours are so slow to develop.

http://snipr.com/br56o

[Kai]

February 13, 2009



Researchers Map Genetic Codes for Cold Virus
from the Baltimore Sun

University of Maryland researchers have mapped the genetic codes for all known strains of the virus that causes the common cold, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Science. Understanding the genetic makeup of the virus could offer scientists clues on how to fight the common cold and possibly discover a cure, scientists said.

"There is real promise now, based on full understanding of this virus, that we have never had before," said Dr. Stephen B. Liggett, director of the cardiopulmonary genomics program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "My goal is to get at the root cause. Let's get, perhaps, a single pill [that] will kill the virus that day, that moment, and within six hours you are cured. And it is possible."

Of course, such a discovery might take time, he said. Until now, fighting the cold was a mystery, because scientists knew little about the genetic makeup of the virus that causes it.

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Tiny Songbirds Log Long Days While Migrating
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Tiny songbirds such as martins and thrushes can travel as far as 311 miles a day in their annual migrations between the Americas -- three times as far as researchers had previously believed -- biologists found in the first study to track the birds to their wintering grounds and back.

The birds fly two to six times as fast heading north in the spring as they do heading south in the fall, perhaps in a competition to reach the best breeding sites and attract the fittest mates, ornithologist Bridget Stutchbury of York University in Toronto reported today in the journal Science, which released the study online Thursday.

One industrious female martin flew the 4,660 miles from the Amazon basin to Pennsylvania in only 13 days -- with four of them spent on stopovers. The new data were obtained using miniature geolocators, about the size and weight of a dime, attached to the birds' backs much like a schoolchild's backpack.

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Big Science Role Is Seen in Global Warming Cure
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON--Steven Chu, the new secretary of energy, said Wednesday that solving the world's energy and environment problems would require Nobel-level breakthroughs in three areas: electric batteries, solar power and the development of new crops that can be turned into fuel.

Dr. Chu, a physicist, spoke during a wide-ranging interview in his office, where his own framed Nobel Prize lay flat on a bookcase, a Post-it note indicating where it should be hung on the wall. He addressed topics that included global warming, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, the use of coal and a proposed repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Dr. Chu said a "revolution" in science and technology would be required if the world is to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and curb the emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.

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First Draft of Neanderthal Genome Unveiled
from New Scientist

The first draft of the genome of a 38,000 year-old Neanderthal is complete, scientists announced Thursday.

Early glimpses of the genome, which was sequenced by Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues, have already cast new light on the ancient human species that went extinct more than 25,000 years ago.

"This will be the first time the entire genome of an extinct organism has been sequenced," Pääbo told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago. Now study of the more complete genome will allow scientists to examine Neanderthals' relationship with modern humans as never before. A preliminary analysis of the sequence suggests that Neanderthals contributed few, if any, genes to humans via inbreeding.

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Obese Moms' Kids at Higher Risk of Birth Defects
from USA Today

Women who are obese when they conceive have an increased risk of delivering babies with birth defects, a report suggests. Obese women's risk of having babies with heart defects, cleft palates, hydrocephaly--a buildup of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain--and other birth defects also increased, but not as much as that of spina bifida.

Obesity is a body mass index, or BMI, of 30 or more. BMI is calculated using weight and height. A 5-foot-4-inch woman at 174 pounds has a BMI of 30. In 2004, a third of U.S. women 15 and older were obese, the authors write in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The report, a review of 39 studies, found that obese women's babies were more than twice as likely to have spina bifida, a failure of the spine to close during early pregnancy. The extra number of cases in obese women vs. normal-weight women was small, about one in 2,000 births.

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Simulation Targets Early Cosmos
from BBC News Online

Scientists have used a supercomputer to simulate what the Universe was like as the first galaxies were forming. The model maps how matter is thought to have been distributed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The work should help astronomers hunt down ancient galaxies using the latest telescope technologies--they will know what to look for. The simulation has been produced by scientists at Durham University's Institute of Computational Cosmology.

"The calculation we've done has predictions for what we should see in a few years' time when the massive telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere are fitted with new instrumentation--cameras and detectors--to observe early epochs, stretching right back to when the Universe was less than a tenth of its present age," said Durham researcher Dr Carlton Baugh.

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Secret of Love Boils Down to Chemistry in New Study
from the Seattle Times

WASHINGTON (Associated Press)--Like any young woman in love, Bianca Acevedo has exchanged valentine hearts with her fiancé. But the New York neuroscientist knows better. The source of love is in the head, not the heart.

She's one of the researchers in a relatively new field focused on explaining the biology of romantic love. The unpoetic explanation is that love mostly can be understood through brain images, hormones and genetics. That seems to be the case for the newly in love, the long in love and the brokenhearted.

"It has a biological basis. We know some of the key players," said Larry Young, of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. There, he studies the brains of an unusual monogamous rodent to get a better clue about what goes on in the minds of people in love.

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Mars Mission Has Some Seeing Red
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

PASADENA, Calif.--In a "clean room" in Building 150 of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is something that looks very much like a flying saucer. It's a capsule containing a huge, brawny Mars rover, a Hummer compared with the Mini Coopers that have previously rolled across the Red Planet.

This is the Mars Science Laboratory, the space agency's next big mission to the most Earth-like planet in the solar system. But it's been a magnet for controversy, and a reminder that the robotic exploration of other worlds is never a snap, especially when engineers decide to get ambitious.

The launch has been delayed for two years because of technical glitches. Approved at $1.63 billion, the mission's price tag will be at least $2.2 billion, NASA now estimates. Critics say the cost has really quadrupled since the project was first dreamed up. What no one can doubt is that ambitious missions tend to become costly ones, which jangles the nerves of officials who know how easy it is for a Mars mission to go bust.

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Greenhouse Gases: Accounting from Above
from the Economist

Sometimes it is worth looking at the big picture. That is the idea behind monitoring greenhouse gases from space. In January the Japanese space agency, JAXA, launched Ibuki, the first satellite dedicated to monitoring carbon dioxide and methane. Later this month the American space agency, NASA, is due to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which is also designed to monitor carbon dioxide.

The new satellites will work as carbon accountants by keeping a close eye on how the Earth breathes and returning regular audits. Ibuki, which means "breath" in Japanese, orbits the Earth approximately every 100 minutes at an average altitude of 667km. It will gather data from 56,000 points around the globe with two detectors.

One is a spectrometer that measures sunlight reflected from the Earth's surface. Both carbon dioxide and methane absorb energy from sunlight and both leave a unique signature that can be measured to detect changes in intensity. JAXA says Ibuki can detect carbon-dioxide changes of around one part per million, which is akin to detecting the change in salinity produced by four drops of salt water in a 200-litre bathtub of water. The second detector takes readings of clouds and other aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere that can reflect or absorb radiation.

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Darwin at 200 and the Evolving Cancer Fight
from the Philadelphia Inquirer

Evolution may still provoke controversy in some classrooms, but in the laboratory, Charles Darwin's theories are propelling new research. As the world celebrates his 200th birthday today, Carlo Maley of Philadelphia's Wistar Institute is using the evolutionary prism to understand not a species, but a disease: cancer.

Maley views cancer as an evolutionary process. At the root of the disease is our distant ancestry as single-celled organisms and the tendency for our cells to occasionally revert to their old ways. Our resemblance to organisms such as amoebae might not seem obvious until you examine a human cell in detail. Among other things, we share a system of storing and encoding information in DNA and many of the same genes.

The big difference is that human cells are programmed to cooperate, thus working together to make an organ or a body work, while microbes are selfish, each one competing for better ways to survive and reproduce.

http://snipr.com/btfus

[Kai]

February 16, 2009



Earthlings Try Eavesdropping on a Cosmic Party Line
from the Wall Street Journal

Long Beach, Calif--Radio astronomer Jill Tarter has her ear at the keyhole of the cosmos, listening for a signal from life beyond Earth. For decades, she and her colleagues have surveyed the sky in vain. The recent discovery of so many worlds around other suns, though, has renewed her resolve -- and so has the prospect of greater public support.

In a display of private sector science, her cause -- the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) -- has been embraced by a geek-chic collective of technocrats, info-moguls, activists and wishful thinkers, from Bill Gates to Cameron Diaz, who gathered in Long Beach, Calif., last week at the conclave of an influential enterprise called TED. The acronym stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design."

Now in its 25th year, its invitation-only conference is the nexus of a global talk circuit whose video essays on science, culture, design and economics have been viewed via the web more than 100 million times and translated into 25 languages. It's grown adept at raising the venture capital of idealism.

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Carbon Burial Research Grows as Huge Experiment Begins
from Wired

Chicago--A landmark Energy Department project to bury carbon dioxide produced by humans has begun as workers sunk a huge drill bit into Illinois ground this week, signaling continued support for a climate change mitigation strategy that has fallen out of favor in many circles.

The start of drilling marks the launch a geological sequestration project that will deposit a million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the ground by 2012. While that's nothing compared to the several billion tons of CO2 that humans emit yearly, it's the geology of the site that makes the development exciting. The CO2 will be piped into a geological formation that underlies parts of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky that could eventually hold more than 100 billion tons of CO2.

"This is going to be a large-scale injection of 1 million metric tons, one of the largest injections to date in the U.S." project manager Robert Finley said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting Sunday.

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Why Birds Collide With Airplanes
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

While delivering a lecture at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, years ago, I was asked to address a group of students who had recently lost their fathers in a military airplane crash at nearby Elmendorf Air Force Base. Their jet had been brought down because of a "bird strike" - birds flying into the aircraft's engine. Twenty-four people died.

... A student asked, "Why do birds collide with airplanes, and how can we prevent such collisions?" That is a question that the aviation world has tried to answer for years.

...In the 1980s, before my trip to Alaska, I undertook a biological study of why birds cannot get out of the way of aircraft. My investigation took me from Logan International Airport to a sea gull nesting area on Monomoy Island.

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The Computer as a Road Map to Unknowable Territory
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Last year, as the financial meltdown was getting underway, a scientist named Yaneer Bar-Yam developed a computer model of the economy. Instead of the individuals, companies and brokers that populate the real economy, the model used virtual actors. The computer world allowed Bar-Yam to do what regulators cannot do in real life. It allowed him to change the way actors behaved and then study how those changes rippled through a complex ecosystem.

The fundamental principle behind the model was simple. Human beings regularly solve problems by imagining how particular behaviors can lead to specific outcomes. Regulators, managers and leaders try to do the same thing on a bigger scale. But in a system as complex as the economy, where feedback loops of rumor, fear and misinformation regularly trigger panic and herd behavior, the ability of individuals to forecast outcomes can diminish rapidly.

... Bar-Yam wanted to understand why the economy was so unstable. Commentators were focused on the housing crisis, but Bar-Yam was not sure whether the bursting of the real estate bubble was upstream or downstream of the instability in the economy.

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Dance Duet Helps Male Birds Mate
from BBC News Online

It is the ultimate "gentleman's agreement." Rather than compete for females, male long-tailed manakins co-operate with their friends.

The tropical birds pair up to perform a courtship song and dance, but the alpha male gets the girl every time. Meanwhile his "wingman" spends five years playing second fiddle. But he eventually inherits the mating site.

The dance, dubbed "backwards leapfrog," was filmed in Costa Rica by zoologists from the University of Wyoming. At first glance, it appears like a competitive "dance-off." But in fact it is a co-operative pact between buddies, says Dr David McDonald, of Wyoming University.

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Sponge's Secret Weapon Restores Antibiotics' Power
from Science News

CHICAGO -- A chemical from an ocean-dwelling sponge can reprogram antibiotic resistant bacteria to make them vulnerable to medicines again, new evidence suggests.

Ineffective antibiotics become lethal once again for bacteria treated with the sponge compound, chemist Peter Moeller reported February 13 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. "The potential is outstanding. This could revolutionize our approach to thinking about how infections are treated," comments Carolyn Sotka of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Oceans and Human Health Initiative in Charleston, S.C.

Everything living in the ocean survives in a microbial soup, under constant bombardment from bacterial assaults. Researchers led by Moeller, of Hollings Marine Laboratory in Charleston, found a sponge thriving in the midst of dead organisms. This anomalous life amidst death raised an obvious question, says Moeller: "How is this thing surviving when everything else is dead?"

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Making the Grid Work for Renewable Energy
from Scientific American

The new acting chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants to use "creative mechanisms" within the agency's authority to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy.

As the head of FERC, Jon Wellinghoff said he will prioritize infrastructure efficiency and the integration of renewable energy into the grid, and will support the use of distributed and demand-side resources, which he described as "very underutilized in this country."

"These are very consistent with the new administration's goals," Wellinghoff told reporters at a Platts Energy Podium event yesterday. The acting FERC chief said he would meet with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Carol Browner, the White House coordinator for energy and climate policy, [the] week [of February 15].

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Ocean Survey Reveals Hundreds of 'Bipolar' Species
from New Scientist

Poles apart, but intimately linked. Of the thousands of species that populate Antarctica and the Arctic, it seems hundreds are "bipolar": found at both ends of the 11,000 kilometre span between the poles.

The surveys, part of the international Census of Marine Life, also suggest the Antarctic acts as a cold incubator for species that populate the deep sea around the planet. As ice ages come and go, and the ice shelf advances and retreats, species are isolated, evolve, then released to the global sea floor.

The 235 species that we believe are found at both poles include a great variety of animals, says Julian Gutt of the Alfred Wegner Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany. The easiest ones to explain are the large migrating organisms, such as whales and birds. But the list also includes a large number of animals that are thought to live relatively sedentary lives.

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Could 'Liquid Wood' Replace Plastic?
from the Christian Science Monitor

Almost 40 years ago, American scientists took their first steps in a quest to break the world's dependence on plastics. But in those four decades, plastic products have become so cheap and durable that not even the forces of nature seem able to stop them. A soupy expanse of plastic waste - too tough for bacteria to break down - now covers an estimated 1 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean.

Sensing a hazard, researchers started hunting for a substitute for plastic's main ingredient, petroleum. They wanted something renewable, biodegradable, and abundant enough to be inexpensive.

Though they stumbled upon a great candidate early on, many US chemists had given up on it by the end of the 1990s. The failed wonder material: lignin, the natural compound that lends strength to trees. A waste product from paper production, much of the lignin supply is simply burned as fuel. But while many scientists turned to other green options, a German company, Tecnaro, says it found the magic formula. Its "liquid wood" can be molded like plastic, yet biodegrades over time.

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Report Says Federal Salmon Recovery Strategy Needs 'Immediate Change'
from the Oregonian

Next month, U.S. District Judge James Redden will hear oral arguments in the ongoing lawsuit over the operation of federal dams in the Columbia and Snake rivers and their impact on protected salmon. Redden's ruling will have broad implications for a national salmon recovery plan that recently came under harsh criticism from a group of retired wildlife managers and salmon experts calling themselves the Council of Elders.

This month, the Elders weighed in on the federal government's salmon recovery strategy. In a word, it's a mess, they say. "How can a federal agency that's supposed to be following the law here come up with something that's so bad?" asked Jim Martin, salmon adviser to former Gov. John Kitzhaber and one of the report's authors.

The report alleges corruption of the political process, mismanagement and subversion of the Endangered Species Act in the government's salmon recovery effort, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

http://snipr.com/bze3k

[Kai]

February 17, 2009



Perseverence Is Paying Off for a Test of Relativity in Space
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

STANFORD, Calif.--For 46 years, Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist, has promoted the often perilous fortunes of Gravity Probe B, perhaps the most exotic, "Star Trek"-ish experiment ever undertaken in space. Finally, with emergency financial help from a pair of unusual sources, success is at hand.

Conceived in the late 1950s, financed by $750 million from NASA and launched into orbit in 2004, the Gravity Probe B spacecraft has sought to prove two tenets of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

The first, called the geodetic effect, holds that a large celestial body like Earth will warp time the way a rubber sheet stretches when a bowling ball is placed on it. The second, known as frame-dragging, occurs when the rotation of a large body "twists" nearby space and time; turn the resting bowling ball, and the rubber sheet twists.

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Deadly Bacteria Defy Drugs, Alarming Doctors
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

When Ruth Burns had surgery to relieve a pinched nerve in her back, the operation was supposed to be an "in-and-out thing," recalled her daughter, Kacia Warren.

But Burns developed pneumonia and was put on a ventilator. Five days later, she was discharged--only to be rushed by her daughter to the hospital hours later, disoriented and in alarming pain.

Seventeen days after the surgery, the 67-year-old nurse was dead. Burns had developed meningitis--an infection of the fluid that surrounds the spinal cord and brain. The culprit was Acinetobacter baumannii, a bug that preys on the weak in hospitals. Worse, it was a multi-drug-resistant strain.

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Scientists Warn of Persistent 'Dead Zones' in Bay, Elsewhere
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

CHICAGO--Healing low-oxygen aquatic "dead zones" in the Chesapeake Bay and hundreds of other spots worldwide will be trickier than previously imagined, leading scientists on the issue said Sunday.

That's because the low oxygen levels that make it impossible for most organisms to survive also kill bacteria crucial to removing nitrogen from the water. Dead zones are caused primarily by excess nutrients--nitrogen and phosphorus--that feed massive algae blooms.

Those, in turn, soak up most of the water's oxygen and leave little for other life forms--a condition known as hypoxia. In recent years there have been extensive efforts to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus loads in the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico and other areas with dead zones. But those efforts have not yielded the expected results, scientists said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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US Seeks Mercury Reduction Treaty
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

NAIROBI (Associated Press)--The Obama administration reversed years of US policy yesterday by calling for a treaty to cut mercury pollution, which it described as the world's gravest chemical problem.

Some 6,000 tons of mercury enter the environment each year, about a third generated by power stations and coal fires. Much settles into the oceans where it enters the food chain and is concentrated in predatory fish like tuna. Children and fetuses are particularly vulnerable to poisoning by the toxic metal, which can cause birth defects, brain damage, and peeling skin.

Daniel Reifsnyder, the deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and sustainable development, told a global gathering of environmental ministers in Nairobi that the United States wants negotiations on limiting mercury to begin this year and conclude within three.

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Alien Life 'May Exist Among Us'
from BBC News Online

Never mind Mars, alien life may be thriving right here on Earth, a major science conference has heard. Our planet may harbour forms of "weird life" unrelated to life as we know it, according to Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University.

This "shadow life" may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or in boiling deep sea hydrothermal vents, he says. He has called on scientists to launch a "mission to Earth" by trawling hostile environments for signs of bio-activity.

Weird life could even be living among us, in forms which we don't yet recognise, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Chicago. "We don't have to go to other planets to find weird life. It could be right in front of our noses-or even in our noses ..."

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'Super X-ray' to Shed New Light on the Ancient World
from the Times (London)

A scientific instrument is to transform research into the ancient world by using a light ten billion times brighter than the Sun to reveal the secrets of statues, mummies and sarcophagi.

The imaging facility at the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire will allow objects weighing up to two tonnes to be examined in brilliant X-ray light, to expose clues to their construction and contents.

Three Egyptian bronze figurines from the British Museum will be among the first treasures to be investigated by the Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing beamline or Jeep. It uses intense radiation known as synchrotron light, generated by the Diamond Light Source, which allows scientists to see through solid objects and to show structural details that cannot be seen by standard X-rays.

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Treatment for Injury Puts Patient's Blood to Work
from the Seattle Times

Two of the Pittsburgh Steelers' biggest stars, Hines Ward and Troy Polamalu, used their own blood in an innovative injury treatment before winning the Super Bowl.

The early promise of the procedure--commonly called platelet-rich plasma therapy--is reassuring experts in sports medicine that it could eventually improve the treatment of stubborn injuries like tennis elbow and knee tendinitis for athletes of all types.

It "has the potential to revolutionize not just sports medicine but all of orthopedics," said Dr. Allan Mishra, an assistant professor of orthopedics at Stanford University Medical Center and one of the primary researchers in the field.

http://snipr.com/c1qqc



Special Series: Darwin Turns 200
from Science News

Charles Darwin was born February 12, 1809. A Science News special series features an account of Darwin's life and work, the history of the theory of evolution, modern work in evolutionary science, and an interactive timeline of milestones in life's development and the scientific work to understand it.

This special Web edition of Science News includes expanded versions of articles from the magazine's print edition plus two additional features, all commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.

In addition to exploring Darwin's life and science, the series includes five reports from the frontiers of research in evolutionary science.

http://snipr.com/c1qs3



Graphene Electronics Inches Closer to Mass Production
from Scientific American

Silicon has transformed the digital world, but researchers are still eager to find substances that will make integrated circuits smaller, faster and cheaper. High on the list is graphene--planar sheets of honeycomb carbon rings just one atom thick.

This nanomaterial sports a range of properties--including ultrastrength, transparency (because of its thinness) and blisteringly fast electron conductivity--that make it promising for flexible displays and superspeedy electronics. Isolated only four years ago, graphene already appears in prototype transistors, memories and other devices.

But to go from lab benches to store shelves, engineers need to devise methods to make industrial quantities of large, uniform sheets of pure, single-ply graphene. Researchers are pursuing several processing routes, but which approach will succeed remains unclear. "We've seen claims by groups that say that they can coat whole silicon wafers with monolayer sheets of graphene cheaply," reports James M. Tour, a chemist at Rice University. "But so far no one has publicly demonstrated it."

http://snipr.com/c1qy3



Evolution in Black and White
from Smithsonian Magazine

Shortly after he completed his second term as president in 1909, Teddy Roosevelt took a year-long hunting safari in Africa under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. ... Roosevelt's safari experiences, regaled in his book African Game Trails (1910) gave him strong opinions about how animals blended, or did not blend, with their surroundings.

... Roosevelt scoffed at notions of the protective value of coloration for two reasons. First, the horse-mounted hunter extraordinaire had little difficulty spotting, stalking and bagging big game .... Clearly animals' colors did not protect them from him. And second, while at the time the fact of evolution was widely accepted by scientists (and Roosevelt), Darwin's explanation of the primary role of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution was not.

Natural selection had fallen out of favor, in particular over the matter of animal coloration. Many naturalists in the 1890s had criticized Darwinian explanations of coloration as wholly lacking evidence, and offered other explanations. For instance, some suggested that coloration was directly caused by external factors such as climate, light or diet.

http://snipr.com/c1r2c

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

http://membracid.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/new-research-on-bedbug-insecticide-resistance/

Time to get paranoid. About bedbugs.

NOT READING IT!

Just tell me when it's time to move to Alaska.

[Kai]

February 18, 2009



First Carbon-Free Polar Station Opens in Antarctica
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

PRINCESS ELISABETH BASE, Antarctica (Reuters) -- The world's first zero-emission polar research station opened in Antarctica on Sunday and was welcomed by scientists as proof that alternative energy is viable even in the coldest regions.

Pioneers of Belgium's Princess Elisabeth station in East Antarctica said if a station could rely on wind and solar power in Antarctica -- mostly a vast, icy emptiness -- it would undercut arguments by skeptics that green power is not reliable.

"If we can build such a station in Antarctica we can do that elsewhere in our society. We have the capacity, the technology, the knowledge to change our world," Alain Hubert, the station's project director, told Reuters at the inauguration ceremony.

http://snipr.com/c4ajy



The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The cellphone is the world's most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.

It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.

"The map underlies man's ability to perceive," said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world.

http://snipr.com/c4ame



GM Battles Rage down on the Farm
from BBC News Online

Pressure is mounting from some scientists for Europe to end its resistance to genetically modified (GM) crops but fears remain about the impact of such technology on the rights of farmers.

Many American farmers like the ease of operating a GM system which involves regular spraying of chemicals which kill weeds but don't hurt their crops.

The problem is that GM pollen can blow across fields and anti-GM campaigners say the fear of being prosecuted for growing GM accidentally leads many farmers to give up traditional methods and take the GM route for a quiet life.

http://snipr.com/c4ao2



A Green Visitor Makes its Approach
from Science News

A first-time visitor to the inner solar system -- already spotted with the naked eye from some locales -- could make a spectacle of itself when it comes closest to Earth on February 24.

First spotted by a young Chinese astronomy student Quanzhi Ye in 2007, Comet Lulin will pass within 61 million kilometers of Earth, about 41 percent of the Earth-sun distance. Named for the observatory in Taiwan where it was discovered, Lulin has a greenish cast because sunlight illuminates two gases -- cyanogen and diatomic carbon -- in its Jupiter-sized atmosphere.

Astronomers estimate that the comet will reach a maximum brightness of 4th or 5th magnitude, which means that it may be dimly visible to the naked eye from some dark-sky locales at closest approach. With binoculars or a small telescope, it should be an easy target.

http://snipr.com/c4aov



Semiconductor Tech Diagnoses Eye Disease over the Internet
from Wired

An imaging analysis technique developed to find defects in semiconductors is being used to diagnose the eye problems associated with diabetes over the internet.

Pictures of a diabetic patient's retina, the inner surface of the eye, are uploaded to a server that compares them to a database of thousands of other images of healthy and diseased eyes. Algorithms can assign a disease level to the new eye image by looking at the same factors, mainly damage to blood vessels, that an eye doctor would.

Right now, ophthalmologist Andrew Chaum of the University of Tennessee double checks the system's work, but he expects the algorithm to be diagnosing patients on its own within three months. "At that point, the system becomes completely automated with just oversight from me," Chaum said. "That's unique. There isn't anything like that going on anywhere in the world."

http://snipr.com/c4aqz



First Liquid Water May Have Been Spotted on Mars
from New Scientist

NASA's Phoenix lander may have captured the first images of liquid water on Mars - droplets that apparently splashed onto the spacecraft's leg during landing, according to some members of the Phoenix team.

The controversial observation could be explained by the mission's previous discovery of perchlorate salts in the soil, since the salts can keep water liquid at sub-zero temperatures. Researchers say this antifreeze effect makes it possible for liquid water to be widespread just below the surface of Mars, but point out that even if it is there, it may be too salty to support life as we know it.

A few days after Phoenix landed on 25 May 2008, it sent back an image showing mysterious splotches of material attached to one of its legs. Strangely, the splotches grew in size over the next few weeks, and Phoenix scientists have been debating the origin of the objects ever since.

http://snipr.com/c4ats



Can America's West Stay Wild?
from the Christian Science Monitor

In 1993, Washington State classified its Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, a burrowing one-pound resident of sagebrush thickets, as endangered. Farming and other human activity had greatly limited the deep-soil habitat available to the bunny.

...By 2003, fewer than 30 rabbits lived in the wild, down from 250 in 1995. By 2004, they were all gone. For many, the disappearance of this tiny denizen of sagebrush thickets is a cautionary tale. Captive breeding programs are a noble last resort, they say. But in this case, not enough was done to save the wild population, they charge.

...Here, the tale of the pygmy rabbit intersects with a long-raging acrimonious debate in the US West. Just over half the land in the West is public land. And what are public lands for - the preservation of "pristine" nature or resource extraction? Historically, management of these lands by state and federal agencies has favored resource extractors far more than conservationists would like. But as western economies change and demographics shift, this emphasis on extraction makes less and less sense, economists say.

http://snipr.com/c4avm



Report: Fetal Stem Cells Trigger Tumors in Ill Boy
from the Richmond Times Dispatch

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- A family desperate to save a child from a lethal brain disease sought highly experimental injections of fetal stem cells - injections that triggered tumors in the boy's brain and spinal cord, Israeli scientists reported Tuesday.

Scientists are furiously trying to harness different types of stem cells - the building blocks for other cells in the body - to regrow damaged tissues and thus treat devastating diseases. But for all the promise, researchers have long warned that they must learn to control newly injected stem cells so they don't grow where they shouldn't, and small studies in people are only just beginning.

Tuesday's report in the journal PLoS Medicine is the first documented case of a human brain tumor - albeit a benign, slow-growing one - after fetal stem cell therapy, and hammers home the need for careful research.

http://snipr.com/c4axv



Museum Secrets Unmasked by "Museomics" Technologies
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

from National Geographic News

In museum display cases and dusty drawers worldwide, a burst of new technologies is now unlocking otherwise hidden secrets from fossils, fur, and other relics of a vanished past.

The phenomenon, called museomics, gives new life to musty old objects. Stephan Schuster, a molecular biologist and biochemist at Pennsylvania State University, coined the term. With colleague Webb Miller, Schuster last year reconstructed most of the mammoth genome using hair that had been sitting in a Russian museum for 200 years.

"No effort was made to freeze it or dry it. It's just hair in a drawer. And [our attempts to recover DNA] worked. This is what gave us the idea for trying to attempt something like museomics," Schuster said.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/02/090217-museomics.html



Major Cache of Fossils Unearthed in L.A.
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Workers excavating an underground garage on the site of an old May Co. parking structure in Los Angeles' Hancock Park got more than just a couple hundred new parking spaces. They found the largest known cache of fossils from the last ice age, an assemblage that has flabbergasted paleontologists.

Researchers from the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits have barely begun extracting the fossils from the sandy, tarry matrix of soil, but they expect the find to double the size of the museum's collection from the period, already the largest in the world.

Among their finds, to be formally announced today, is the nearly intact skeleton of a Columbian mammoth -- named Zed by researchers -- a prize discovery because only bits and pieces of mammoths had previously been found in the tar pits.

http://snipr.com/c4ag8

[Kai]

February 19, 2009



Drugs Can Save Hearts and Cash
from the (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer

It's much cheaper and just as effective to treat some heart attacks with drugs instead of also trying to snake a stent into a clogged artery, scientists at Duke University report today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The findings could prompt significant savings for many of the estimated 1.2 million Americans who suffer heart attacks each year. Wire mesh stents open clogged arteries and can save lives when used within a few hours of a heart attack, but they're no more beneficial than clot-busting drugs alone if the attack occurred a day or so before the patient sought treatment.

Forgoing stents in those cases could save an average of $7,000 per patient--or $700 million for the estimated 100,000 U.S. heart attack patients who don't need them.

http://snipr.com/c6roz



Study Calls for Oversight of Forensics in Crime Labs
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Crime laboratories around the country are grossly underfunded, lack a scientific foundation and are compromised by critical delays in analyzing physical evidence, according to a broad study of forensic techniques published Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's premier scientific body.

Among its many criticisms, the study counted a backlog of 359,000 requests for forensic analysis in 2005, a 24 percent increase in delays since 2002. A survey of crime laboratories found 80 percent of them to be understaffed.

A new federal agency is needed to regulate these laboratories, standardize forensic techniques and pay for research, according to the report, which was financed by Congress in 2005.

http://snipr.com/c6rrh



Brain Scans "Read Minds" With Surprising Accuracy
from National Geographic News

Could MRI someday stand for Mind Reading Imagery? Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology can tell what people are thinking with startling accuracy, a new study found. Volunteers were shown two different patterns, then asked to picture one or the other.

Using fMRI brain scans, the researchers predicted--at better than 80 percent--which of the two patterns each person was actively holding in memory 11 seconds later. By measuring blood flow, fMRI images reveal which groups of neurons are active.

Some of the visual cortex's neurons are associated more with vertical visual patterns, and others with horizontal or angled patterns, explained neuroscientist Frank Tong of Vanderbilt University, who led the study. That distinction allowed the team to predict which pattern volunteers had in mind, even well after the images were removed from the screen.

http://snipr.com/c6rt8



It's All Systems Go for Europa
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

NASA announced plans Wednesday to embark on a mammoth 20-year project to send a spacecraft to Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa as its next flagship mission to search for life elsewhere in the solar system.

The mission, which could cost as much as $3 billion, will be managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. It will focus on the possibility that in the gigantic ocean thought to be hidden under the moon's thick cover of ice is a habitable zone where rudimentary forms of life could exist.

The probe will launch in 2020 in tandem with another orbiter built by the European Space Agency that will focus on Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede.

http://snipr.com/c6rv9



Are Bad Sleeping Habits Driving Us Mad?
from New Scientist

Take anyone with a psychiatric disorder and the chances are they don't sleep well. The result of their illness, you might think. Now this long-standing assumption is being turned on its head, with the radical suggestion that poor sleep might actually cause some psychiatric illnesses or lead people to behave in ways that doctors mistake for mental problems.

The good news is that sleep treatments could help or even cure some of these patients. Shockingly, it also means that many people, including children, could be taking psychoactive drugs that cannot help them and might even be harmful.

No one knows how many people might fall into this category. "That is very frightening," says psychologist Matt Walker from the University of California, Berkeley. "Wouldn't you think that it would be important for us as a society to understand whether 3 percent, 5 percent or 50 percent of people diagnosed with psychiatric problems are simply suffering from sleep abnormalities?"

http://snipr.com/c6rx5



Galaxy Mix: No Dark Matter Required
from Science News

Darth Vaders of astronomy, step aside. Purveyors of theories of dark matter--the invisible, as-yet-undetected material supposedly needed for galaxy formation--have a seat. Astronomers say they have found evidence that the gravitational collapse of visible, swirling gas may suffice to make some dwarf galaxies.

Astronomers base the surprising claim, reported in the Feb. 19 Nature, on new ultraviolet observations of the Leo ring--a vast cloud of hydrogen and helium gas that orbits two massive galaxies in the constellation Leo.

The cloud may be a pristine leftover from the formation of these galaxies, essentially unchanged since the early universe. Indeed, since the ring was discovered some 25 years ago, astronomers have scrutinized it with state-of-the art radio and visible-light telescopes and found no evidence of stars, nothing except the gas.

http://snipr.com/c6rya



Study Suggests How Alzheimer's Attacks Brain
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

CHICAGO (Reuters)--U.S. scientists proposed a new theory Wednesday of how Alzheimer's disease kills brain cells they said opens new avenues of research into treatments for the fatal, brain-wasting disease.

They believe a chemical mechanism that naturally prunes away unwanted brain cells during early brain development somehow gets hijacked in Alzheimer's disease.

"The key player we're focusing on is a protein called APP," said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, executive vice president of research drug discovery at the U.S. biotechnology company Genentech Inc , whose study appears in the journal Nature. Tessier-Lavigne said amyloid precursor protein, or APP - a key building block in brain plaques found in Alzheimer's disease - is the driving force behind this process.

http://snipr.com/c6rzs



Scientists Await Action on Stem Cells
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

At the National Institutes of Health, officials have started drafting guidelines they will need to start funding human embryonic stem cell research that has been off-limits for nearly eight years.

At the University of California at San Francisco, scientists are poised to dismantle the cumbersome bureaucracy they created to segregate experiments that were acceptable under the federal restrictions from studies that were not.

... But in the month since Inauguration Day, the moment they have been awaiting has not come, prompting some to ask: When will President Obama deliver on his campaign promise to lift one of the most contentious policies imposed by his predecessor?

http://snipr.com/c6s2c



A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity
from Scientific American

Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock--or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them.

...Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition--say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)--it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.

We term this intuition "locality." Quantum mechanics has upended many an intuition, but none deeper than this one. And this particular upending carries with it a threat, as yet unresolved, to special relativity--a foundation stone of our 21st-century physics.

http://snipr.com/c6s3k



A Protein May Detect Colon Cancer's Spread
from the Philadelphia Inquirer

A study led by Philadelphia researchers shows that an intestinal protein can be used to find colon cancer's early, normally undetectable spread to nearby tissue, an advance that may help early-stage patients decide whether they need chemotherapy after surgery.

The study is a coup for lead author Scott A. Waldman, the Thomas Jefferson University scientist who has spent 16 years studying the remarkable molecule, guanylyl cyclase 2C, or GCC.

But the findings, published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association, also illustrate the increasingly blurry line between experimental tests and commercialized versions. With the advent of new ways to analyze the abnormal activity of genes and proteins in diseased tissue, novel molecular tests are being rushed to market, despite little oversight and unanswered questions about how to ensure safety and reliability.

http://snipr.com/c6s5b

[Kai]

February 20, 2009



ReCaptcha: How to Turn Blather into Books
from the Christian Science Monitor

When you buy a concert ticket on Ticketmaster, post something for sale on Craigslist, or poke an old friend on Facebook, you may not know it, but you're helping to put millions of books online in a vast free library.

To access these websites, you must decipher two squiggly words to prove that you're not a computer program designed to spam the site. Once it knows you're human, the website lets you continue.

Those two decoded words don't disappear, however. In fact, your brain has deciphered words that had baffled the scanning software used for an enormous project to digitize every public domain book in the world.

http://snipr.com/cav6d



Hope over Peanut Allergy 'Cure'
from BBC News Online

A group of children with peanut allergies have had their condition effectively cured, doctors believe.

A team from Cambridge's Addenbrooke's Hospital exposed four children to peanuts over a six-month period, gradually building up their tolerance.

By the end the children were eating the equivalent of five peanuts a day. It is the first time a food allergy has been desensitised in such a way, although a longer-term follow up is now needed to confirm the findings.

http://snipr.com/cav7x



Into Space with a Camcorder - Kepler Prepares to Find ET's Home
from the Times (London)

A telescope likened to a giant camcorder will be launched into space early next month in an attempt to find where extra terrestrials live.

The findings of the Kepler mission are predicted to define mankind's place in the universe by establishing whether planets that can sustain life are common or if Earth is an accidental freak. Discoveries provided by the space telescope will, astronomers maintain, determine the direction of space exploration for many years to come.

Nasa's Kepler telescope will investigate thousands of stars within the Milky Way over 42 months in the expectation of detecting planets like our own. Among the myriad it locates are expected to be about 50 that are similar enough to Earth to sustain life, however outlandish a form it takes.

http://snipr.com/cav8q



Anti-Aging: A Little Stress May Keep Cells Youthful
from Science News

A lot of stress can turn your hair gray, but a little stress can actually delay aging. A protein tied to protecting cells from stress also helps slow aging, a new study finds.

The research, published February 20 in Science, identifies a key regulator of a mechanism cells use to prevent protein damage from stress.

Exposure to heat, cold or heavy metals can damage proteins and unravel them from their usual conformations -- trauma that can cause cell death. But cells have a damage-limiting mechanism called the heat shock response to combat these and other stresses.

http://snipr.com/cavae



Are We about to Eliminate AIDS?
from New Scientist

What if we could rid the world of AIDS? The notion might sound like fantasy: HIV infection has no cure and no vaccine, after all. Yet there is a way to completely wipe it out - at least in theory. What's more, it would take only existing medical technology to do the job.

Here's how it works. If someone who is HIV positive takes antiretroviral-drug therapy they can live a long life and almost never pass on the virus, even through unprotected sex. So if everyone with HIV were on therapy, there would be little or no transmission. Once all these people had died, of whatever cause, the virus would be gone for good.

It's a simple idea, but the obstacles to implementing it worldwide are enormous. ... Yet the idea of eliminating HIV is so appealing, and the benefit to humanity so huge, that scientists and policy-makers are seriously considering the concept, albeit on regional scales.

http://snipr.com/cave5



Scientists Make Advances on 'Nano' Electronics
from Wired

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Two U.S. teams have developed new materials that may pave the way for ever smaller, faster and more powerful electronics as current semiconductor technology begins to reach the limits of miniaturization.

One team has made tiny transistors -- the building block of computer processors -- a fraction of the size of those used on advanced silicon chips. Another has made a film material capable of storing data from 250 DVDs onto a surface the size of a coin.

Both advances, published on Thursday in the journal Science, use nanotechnology -- the design and manipulation of materials thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. Nanotechnology has been hailed as a way to make strong, lightweight materials, better cosmetics and even tastier food.

http://snipr.com/cavfx



The E.P.A.'s Move to Regulate Carbon: A Stopgap Solution
from Time

On the long list of things that keep coal industry executives awake at night is the possibility that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will begin to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Now it seems that nightmare is at hand.

On Feb. 17, E.P.A. Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that the agency would reconsider a Bush Administration decision not to regulate CO2 emissions from new coal power plants. The next day, she backed up that statement by telling the New York Times she was considering acting on an April 2007 Supreme Court decision that empowers the EPA to regulate CO2 as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

If the E.P.A. exercises that authority as expected -- a process that would likely play out over months -- it could potentially be one of the farthest-reaching regulations in U.S. history, affecting the way we use electricity, the way we drive and more.

http://snipurl.com/caz3j



FDA Approves Brain-Zapping Device to Relieve OCD
from USA Today

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Patients suffering from obsessive, distressing thoughts have a new treatment option: a pacemaker-like device that relieves anxiety with electrical jolts to the brain.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved Medtronic's Reclaim device as the first implant to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, which causes uncontrollable worries, such as fear of germs or dirt.

Patients suffering from the disorder try to relieve their anxiety with obsessive behavior, such as washing their hands or checking locks repeatedly. ... While about 2.2 million Americans have the disorder, the new device would only be available to a small group of patients who don't respond to other treatments, such as antidepressant drugs and therapy.

http://snipr.com/cavjr



Scientists Find Genes to Protect Wheat from Rust
from the Boston Globe

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have pinpointed two genes that protect wheat against devastating fungal diseases found worldwide, potentially paving the way to hardier wheat strains, international researchers reported on Thursday.

New research published in the journal Science showed how the genes provide resistance to leaf rust, stripe rust and powdery mildew, diseases responsible for millions of hectares of lost wheat yield each year.

"Improving control of fungal rust diseases in cereals through breeding varieties with durable rust resistance is critical for world food security," Simon Krattinger of the Institute of Plant Biology in Zurich and colleagues, wrote in one of the studies.

http://snipr.com/cavll



Bird-Like Lungs Powered Giant Pterosaur Flight
from New Scientist

Scans of fossils have cracked the mystery of pterosaur power. The biggest animals ever to fly drew their energy from bird-like lungs that they evolved 70 million years before the first birds took to the air.

Leathery-winged pterosaurs evolved 220 million years ago, from the same group of reptiles that gave rise to crocodiles, dinosaurs, and later birds. Yet how pterosaurs powered their flight had been a mystery because their ribcages were thought to be inflexible, making their breathing inefficient.

Leon Claessens of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, realised that view might be mistaken after pterosaur specialist Dave Unwin at the University of Leicester, UK, showed him a fossil Rhamphorhynchus with a beautifully preserved ribcage.

http://snipr.com/cavml