Weekly Science Headlines

[Vene]

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

There's not else for me to say, this is a great use of time and energy.  For some reason, I don't find captchas irritating anymore.

[Kai]

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

There's not else for me to say, this is a great use of time and energy.  For some reason, I don't find captchas irritating anymore.

what books would be considered out of copyright? That is, how far into the past does copywrite extend now, 1920, 1930?

[Vene]

Last time I checked copyrights expire after 75 years.  But, I could be wrong.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#hlc

[Kai]

Or this:

http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/

More comprehensive.

[Adios]

kai
I kind of figured with you being in biology you would have a reasonable take on this. The fear mongering is my pet peeve with environmentalism, being stewards of the earth should be obvious, when i see the fear being spread i suspect ulterior/political motives or people buying the hype spread by those that have them.

on local extinction i agree niche species would be the most vulnerable , it is also true that nature abhors a vacuum better adapted life will always move in.

i don't know exactly how biodiversity works but it seems that bio diversity prospers in warm conditions and struggles in colder ones, the bigger threat to diversity i think may be us directly, pesticide/genetic seed companies, humans dragging life around the globe to environments it doesn't belong, plus all the pollution etc you already mentioned. the threat this in turn poses to us can come in unexpected forms (beehive collapse) and show up quickly


edit to add -- biodiversity also would seem to suffer during times of rapid change and prosper in times of steady or slow change, again i suspect the above mentioned human threats would be more likely to cause rapid change than changes to global temperature.

Biodiversity both initially flounders and then increases during and after times of rapid change. steady and slow change tends to have a gradual effect on biodiversity. Instead of a marked drop and leap, its a gradual curve. There is a hypothesis called punctuated equilibrium, that says that lineages change the greatest at punctuated intervals, usually after a catastrophic event. The Permian-Triassic Extinction event lead way to the age of reptiles. The Cretaceous-Tertiary event lead to the "age of mammals". And then we have the 10-20 million year precambrian diversification (most often more incorrectly called the cambrian explosion), caused most likely by the newly oxygenated conditions. This caused a broad diversification of lineages, but also was the end of the Ediacaran life from the period just before. The post Cambrian extinction event saw the loss of many of the weird body plans you would find in the Burgess Shale fossil beds. The point is, we see life's history on earth as having periods of slow change punctuated by catastrophic upheaval leading to extinction and diversification. The tree of life is more like the bush of life, with a few lineages making it and the rest not.

The reason you see diversification after extinction is as you noted above, open niches do not tend to stay open long. Millions of open niches will soon be filled (over millions of years) by diversification of other lineages that made it. Still, 99% percent of all species that ever existed are nonextant. We're left with the 1% of life that actually made it. And there is nothing to say that diversity used to be higher or is higher now, except possibly in angiosperms and insects (I'd argue that insects have been working their way up since the mid paleozoic and aside from the current human induced extinction event, there seems to be no limit to the diversity that can come out of the insect body plan).

Biodiversty prospers when the greatest number of niches are available. The perfect example of this is tropical rainforests. However, climate change will affect the rainforest in the same way that climate change will affect all ecosystems. I'm not so sure whats going to happen. I do know that humans are screwing diversity to hell right now.

I once heard a lecture in undergraduate about biodiversity. The professor told a story about how he was confronted by a teacher once, a chemistry teacher who believed that it would be okay to destroy all life on the planet if it would keep humans alive for one more moment. He didn't know how to argue this with his teacher, he was stunned. He never wanted us to be left the same way, so he gave us some reasons to value biodiversity, things like for medicinal value, for food, for all the environmental tasks they do that we often take for granted, for aesthetic value, but also for the intrinsic value of live itself. I've been reading Reinventing the Sacred as I've noted elsewhere on this forum, and what strikes me as the most important point in that book is the emergence of agency, will, values that are intrinsic to living organisms, from bacterium to mammals, an unremovable part of the system of life. Free will is apparent, because agency is irreducible to physics.

--

Theres another essay I'm thinking of, by Barbara McClintock, the Nobel prize winner that worked with Corn genetics. It doesn't have so much to do with the above, but it has more to do with respect, and the kind of spiritual bond I see myself having with life. Many people wondered how she could work on such a long living organism as corn, when everyone else was working with bacteria. She said "you have to develop a relationship with your organism, you have to be patient and listen to what it has to say". Her patient and respectful relationship with her organism lead to our modern understanding of how genes move around in the DNA molecule, how they can be turned on and off. I want to see myself as having that bond with Cheumatopsyche as she had with Zea, but I also feel that bond to all insects.

This Kai is why I respect you so much.

I will not claim a scientific mind but it seems to me both man and nature are working hand in hand (no surprise as mankind is of nature) to enable any climate changes that may occur. One major volcano instill the equivalent of XX years of man polluting. Or some such. It honestly seems change is a natural thing and is going to happen. Does this excuse the human tendency for rushing onto the sword blade? No.

Kai, also if the polar ice caps do melt what are some of the things we could expect? I seriously think the ocean levels would rise. How would this additional weight affect the continental plates? Would volcanos be affected as the geological pressure increases?  There are two Super volcanos I am aware of and those would seem to be the great catastrophic events that COULD occur. If the plates started shifting the landscape is obviously going to change. It is even possible the US could be split in two. I know that is a worst case scenario but there are many sub-worst case scenarios that could occur as well.

This is an interesting topic.

[Kai]

Hawk:

I'm a biologist, and have little background with hydrology, geology and climatology outside the context of freshwater ecosystems. I would expect if the continental icecaps melted, sea level would rise, high tides would be higher and low tides would be not as low, but thats just common sense really. I don't know what sort of effect this would have geologically, if any. If the reduction in ice caps change the temperature regime near the poles, we may see some changes in ocean current, and therefore weather patterns and climate. I don't really know. In fact, I feel a little uncomfortable speculating about it because I know so little about it.

What I do know about this planet goes something like this.

About 250  million years ago, at the end of the Permian era, there was the most massive extinction of life this planet has ever seen. Over 50% of all families and over 80% of all genera we are aware of went extinct. They no longer show up in the fossil record after that point. That includes over 90% of all known marine species, 70% of all terrestrial vertebrate species, and the only known widespread insect extinction event. That was the last time trilobites were seen on this planet. No one is really sure how it happened; there are hypotheses about impacts, volcanic eruptions, oceanic hypoxia, supercontinent formation, or any number of other things.

The surviving species eventually recovered the diversity of this planet. As I have said before, it is doubtful there are many more species now than there were before, at least moving into the triassic era. I talked about insects being the exception, but at the begining of the mesozoic most of the insect orders and families were firmly entrenched.

This, however, is the note to think about:

After the Permian extinction event, recovery of ecosystems and species numbers took 4-6 million years. We know this from the fossil record. Evolution is a slow process, and while life recovers and fills the planet much faster than the first time billions of years ago, it still would take several million years to see some sort of return to stability, or whatever counts as stability on this planet.

So, are we willing to screw this up? The planet and life will survive, but will WE survive? Are we willing to live in meager conditions for several MILLION years, waiting for a clean up on a mess we made?

We don't understand this planet. We don't understand biology, geology, climate, volcanism, the movements of oceans and continents, the ebb and flow of energy in ecology, the relationship of all these things to our parent star. We make believe we get it, that we are the intelligent tinkerers, while at the same time discarding seemingly "useless parts". If we fuck things up enough so we can't live here, there isn't going to be any sort of executive meeting. Thats it, we're done, the planet is borked for at least 4 million years, so we're all FUCKED.

What that says to me is we should be very very careful, unwilling to take short term risks, and very willing to take precautionary action.

[Adios]

I certainly agree we should take precautionary measures, starting from the beginning of the industrial era. 20/20 hindsight which is seemingly beyond the people who prosper from things to see.

I guess this has given me the reason to go digging around now to educate myself.

Damn, ruin a lazy man.

[Vene]

I liked the whole post, but this was just fantastic Kai. 

This, however, is the note to think about:

After the Permian extinction event, recovery of ecosystems and species numbers took 4-6 million years. We know this from the fossil record. Evolution is a slow process, and while life recovers and fills the planet much faster than the first time billions of years ago, it still would take several million years to see some sort of return to stability, or whatever counts as stability on this planet.

So, are we willing to screw this up? The planet and life will survive, but will WE survive? Are we willing to live in meager conditions for several MILLION years, waiting for a clean up on a mess we made?

We don't understand this planet. We don't understand biology, geology, climate, volcanism, the movements of oceans and continents, the ebb and flow of energy in ecology, the relationship of all these things to our parent star. We make believe we get it, that we are the intelligent tinkerers, while at the same time discarding seemingly "useless parts". If we fuck things up enough so we can't live here, there isn't going to be any sort of executive meeting. Thats it, we're done, the planet is borked for at least 4 million years, so we're all FUCKED.

What that says to me is we should be very very careful, unwilling to take short term risks, and very willing to take precautionary action.

[Adios]

30 sites so far and every one seems slanted to their own OPINION and are thereby considered untrustworthy.

Anyone have any decent links for those who want to know?

[Kai]

Opinions are like assholes.

That being said, if you want to know about climate, ask a climatologist. If you want to know about geology, ask a geologist. Continue ad infinitum. A scientist who specializes in a certain field is going to be much more accurate than public interest groups, nonspecialists, and the general public. For example, I know some excellent biologists. I deeply value their opinions in their particular specializations, but I wouldn't, for example, ask them for their opinion on global climate change. They may have allegorical evidence related to their research but its not going to be anything more than that. An ecologist might be better, but still not quite as good as going to a climatologist.

[Kai]

February 25, 2009



From One Genome, Many Types of Cells. But How?
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

One of the enduring mysteries of biology is that a variety of specialized cells collaborate in building a body, yet all have an identical genome. Somehow each of the 200 different kinds of cells in the human body--in the brain, liver, bone, heart and many other structures--must be reading off a different set of the hereditary instructions written into the DNA.

The system is something like a play in which all the actors have the same script but are assigned different parts and blocked from even seeing anyone else's lines. The fertilized egg possesses the first copy of the script; as it divides repeatedly into the 10 trillion cells of the human body, the cells assign themselves to the different roles they will play throughout an individual's lifetime.

How does this assignment process work? The answer, researchers are finding, is that a second layer of information is embedded in the special proteins that package the DNA of the genome. This second layer, known as the epigenome, controls access to the genes, allowing each cell type to activate its own special genes but blocking off most of the rest.

http://snipr.com/cmd7p



Sunshine Vitamin Diminishes Risk of Colds, Flu
from Science News

Getting plenty of vitamin D--more than diet can offer--appears to provide potent protection against colds, flu and even pneumonia, a new study reports. Although the amount of protection varies by season, the trend is solid: As the amount of vitamin D circulating in blood climbs, risk of upper respiratory tract infections falls.

Though that's not too surprising, the researchers found one unexpected trend: "In people with preexisting lung disease, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease--or COPD, low levels of vitamin D act like an effect modifier," says Adit Ginde, an emergency room physician at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine in Aurora who led the study.

The findings appear in the Feb. 23 Archives of Internal Medicine. In people with lung disease, he says, low levels of the sunshine vitamin "magnify many-fold" the apparent vulnerability to infection seen in people with healthy lungs.

http://snipr.com/cmdac



Giant Observatories Augur New Era of Cosmology
from Scientific American

Four centuries ago Galileo pointed his spyglass toward the heavens and astronomy changed forever. As the world celebrates the 400th anniversary of the telescope, another cosmological revolution is coming: The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT)--all expected to see first light by 2020--will dwarf the biggest observatories in use today.

The largest, the 42-meter (138-foot) E-ELT, will gather 15 times more light than today's 10-meter (33-foot) optical telescopes. TMT, with its 30-meter- (98.5-foot-) diameter primary mirror, and GMT, delivering the resolving power of a 24.5-meter (80-foot) reflector, will also outclass any current optical telescope.

Astronomers have always wanted bigger telescopes to resolve ever fainter objects. Large-diameter telescopes, essentially big light buckets, collect more photons for a given amount of observing time. Bigger mirrors also boost a telescope's angular resolution, or its ability to measure the separation between two close objects. This next generation of big telescopes follows the leap in technology achieved with the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in the 1990s.

http://snipr.com/cmdc4



Superhuman: The Secrets of the Ice Man
from New Scientist

Perched on the edge of an Antarctic ice sheet, Lewis Gordon Pugh surveys the waves. At 0°C, water does not get much colder than the sea beneath him. Undeterred, Pugh unzips his jacket, strips down to his swimming trunks and dives in.

Most of us would start to hyperventilate uncontrollably if we dived into such cold water. Pugh doesn't even gasp in pain but instead starts swimming. In December 2005, when Pugh took this plunge (pictured above), he went on to swim a kilometre in just over 18 minutes. Many ordinary people would drown after just a few minutes in such cold water. Pugh, however, not only survived but went on to make several more long-distance swims in extremely cold water. So what makes him able to keep swimming in such extreme cold?

A study of Pugh published last month has confirmed that his response to cold water is anything but normal. Remarkably, though, while Pugh may have some innate advantages, it seems his near-superhuman ability is largely down to training--so perhaps it could be something we are all able to learn.

http://snipr.com/cmdel



Child Abuse Alters Stress-Fighting Gene, Study Says
from National Geographic News

Childhood abuse can permanently alter the way a key stress-fighting gene works, leaving victims more vulnerable to stressful events throughout their lives, new research reveals.

Scientists compared the brains of suicide victims who had been abused as children with the brains of non-abused suicide victims and people who died of other causes. It seems that we see in the genome the mark of childhood abuse," said study co-author Moshe Szyf of Montreal's McGill University. The finding was published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The genes we inherit are marked with chemicals that help determine how they will perform their functions. In this case, the abuse victims' underlying DNA was not changed. Instead, a particular gene's expression was dampened, causing the brain to produce fewer calming hormones.

http://snipr.com/cmdi4



The Evolutionary Role of Cookery
from the Economist

You are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr. Wrangham's opinion is that its food is so often cooked.

Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body's energy) could not keep running. Dr. Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

In fact ... he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity's "killer app": the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other--and subsequent--changes that have made people such unusual animals.

http://snipr.com/cmdku



A Drink a Day Raises Women's Risk of Cancer, Study Indicates
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

For years, many women have been buoyed by the news about one of life's guilty pleasures: That nightly glass of wine may not only take the edge off a day but also improve their health. Now it turns out that sipping pinot noir might not be such a good idea after all.

A new study involving nearly 1.3 million middle-aged British women--the largest ever to examine alcohol and cancer in women--found that just one glass of chardonnay, a single beer or any other type of alcoholic drink per day increases the risk of a variety of cancers.

"That's the take-home message," said Naomi E. Allen of the University of Oxford, who led the study being published March 4 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. "If you are regularly drinking even one drink per day, that's increasing your risk for cancer." Understandably, the study may leave many women scratching their heads, given all the talk about red wine being something akin to a fountain of youth.

http://snipr.com/cmdpc



The 3 R's? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The best way to improve children's performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.

New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child's academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.

A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics studied the links between recess and classroom behavior among about 11,000 children age 8 and 9. Those who had more than 15 minutes of recess a day showed better behavior in class than those who had little or none. Although disadvantaged children were more likely to be denied recess, the association between better behavior and recess time held up even after researchers controlled for a number of variables, including sex, ethnicity, public or private school and class size.

http://snipr.com/cmdyb



Beauty and the Brain, Women Use More Than Men
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press)--Beauty is in the brain of the beholder. Go to any museum and there will be men and women admiring paintings and sculpture. But it turns out they are thinking about the sight differently. Men process beauty on the right side of their brains, while women use their whole brain to do the job, researchers report in Tuesday's electronic edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They even explain it differently. Novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Essayist David Hume: "Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."

Researchers were surprised by the finding. "It is well known that there are differences between brain activity in women and men in cognitive tasks," said researcher Camilo J. Cela-Conde of the University of Baleares in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. "However, why should this kind of difference appear in the case of appreciation of beauty?"

http://snipr.com/cmdzr



Drug Recommended to Prevent Prostate Cancer in Some Older Men
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Healthy men over 55 who are concerned enough about the risk of prostate cancer to undergo annual PSA screening should consider taking the drug finasteride daily to reduce their risk of developing the disease, according to a new prevention guideline released Tuesday.

"If a man is interested enough in being screened, then at least he ought to have the benefits of a discussion" with his doctor about taking the drug, Dr. Barnett S. Kramer of the National Institutes of Health said at a news conference revealing the guideline.

Kramer was co-chairman of the panel that developed the recommendation for the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Urological Assn. It will be published in the March issues of the Journal of Clinical Oncology and the Journal of Urology. The most likely initial candidates to take the drug would be men who are African American or who have a father or brother with the disease, factors which sharply increase risk [of cancer]...

http://snipr.com/cme1y

[Kai]

February 26, 2009



Polar Year 'Hailed as a Success'
from BBC News Online

Scientists and policymakers marked the official end of the International Polar Year (IPY) Wednesday at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. The 60-country, $1.2bn effort has seen knowledge about the poles--and their influence on the rest of the planet--increase hugely.

That knowledge is not just about ice and polar bears, but also about Arctic peoples and global climate systems. The WMO has released its preliminary report "The State of Polar Research."

The summary of results outlines what has been learned so far from IPY projects: sea level rises due to the melting of ice sheets, sea-ice decreases in the Arctic, anomalous warming in the Southern Ocean, and the storage and release of methane in permafrost. The IPY effort is the largest international science collaboration since the International Geophysical Year, which took place 50 years ago--and comes at a critical time.

http://snipr.com/couo8



Placebo Effect: A Cure in the Mind
from Scientific American

A man whom his doctors referred to as "Mr. Wright" was dying from cancer of the lymph nodes. Orange-size tumors had invaded his neck, groin, chest and abdomen, and his doctors had exhausted all available treatments. Nevertheless, Mr. Wright was confident that a new anticancer drug called Krebiozen would cure him ...

Mr. Wright was bedridden and fighting for each breath when he received his first injection. But three days later he was cheerfully ambling around the unit, joking with the nurses. Mr. Wright's tumors had shrunk by half, and after 10 more days of treatment he was discharged from the hospital. And yet the other patients in the hospital who had received Krebiozen showed no improvement.

Over the next two months, however, Mr. Wright became troubled by press reports questioning the efficacy of Krebiozen and suffered a relapse. His doctors decided to lie to him: an improved, doubly effective version of the drug was due to arrive the next day, they told him. Mr. Wright was ecstatic. The doctors then gave him an injection that contained not one molecule of the drug--and he improved even more than he had the last time.

http://snipr.com/coutz



After NASA's Carbon Observatory Crashes, Scientists Ask, 'What's Next?'
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Nine years of work disappeared in five minutes Tuesday when a NASA satellite crashed into the icy, black waters near the South Pole. Now climate scientists who worked on the ambitious effort to map the world's carbon dioxide are trying to figure out what comes next.

The $278 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory was designed to monitor how CO2 enters and exits the Earth's atmosphere--hoping to yield a picture of a rhythm that is much like taking a breath. Forests and oceans absorb the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, while burning fossil fuels and decaying plant and animal life send more back.

There is a delicate balance between the two processes that shifts with seasons and weather patterns--plants, for example, pull in more CO2 in spring than in winter, when many lose their leaves. But while scientists have a basic understanding of the carbon cycle, they can't account for all the CO2 humans produce, said Scott Denning, a professor at Colorado State University who worked on the NASA project's science team.

http://snipr.com/couwy



Ancient Shipwreck's Stone Cargo Linked to Apollo Temple
from National Geographic News

For a few days back in July 2007, it was hard for archaeologist Deborah Carlson to get any work done at her site off the Aegean coast of western Turkey. She was leading an underwater excavation of a 2,000-year-old shipwreck, but the Turkish members of her crew had taken time off to vote in national elections. So things were quiet at her camp on an isolated cape called Kizilburun.

The shipwreck's main cargo was 50 tons of marble--elements of a huge column sent on an ill-fated journey to a temple, Carlson thought. But she didn't know which temple, so she used all her days off to drive around the area looking at possibilities.

There were a lot--western Turkey, once part of ancient Greece and later in the Roman Empire, is home to sites like Ephesus and Troy. But Carlson had narrowed down her choices to a list of nearby temples that were in use in the first century BC--the likely date of the shipwreck's column.

http://snipr.com/cov46



FDA Says Firm Faked Generic-Drug Tests
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

India's largest drugmaker has falsified laboratory tests for generic drugs that had been approved for sale in the United States, officials at the Food and Drug Administration say.

The FDA cited the fraudulent laboratory tests yesterday as it took the unusual step of stopping its review of all pending applications from Ranbaxy Laboratories. Federal investigators said the problems centered on the company's plant in Paonta Sahib, which has produced 25 drugs that have been approved by the FDA. Most of those medications are not thought to be on U.S. pharmacy shelves; since September, Ranbaxy has been prevented from exporting more than two dozen drugs to the United States.

The FDA is not seeking a recall, because regulators do not believe the drugs pose a health risk.

http://snipr.com/covdm



Geoducks: Happy as Clams
from Smithsonian Magazine

Craig Parker popped his head above the surf, peeled off his dive mask and clambered aboard the Ichiban. We were anchored 50 yards offshore from a fir-lined peninsula that juts into Puget Sound. Sixty feet below, where Parker had spent his morning, the seafloor was flat and sandy--barren, to unschooled eyes, except for the odd flounder or orange sea pen. Parker's eyes, though, were well trained.

Wearing a neoprene dry suit, he stood in the boat surrounded by the morning's haul: a glistening payload of an absurdly proportioned shellfish defined by a mass of pudgy, lolling flesh. Buried in the muck beneath Puget Sound lives the Pacific Northwest's most profitable marine creature, a mollusk so valuable that gangsters have traded it for narcotics: the geoduck (pronounced "gooey duck"), the world's largest burrowing clam.

... Forty years ago this mollusk was virtually unknown outside the Northwest. Today Puget Sound fishermen sell four million pounds of it each year, or about two million clams' worth.

http://snipr.com/covg6



Study: Change Lifestyle, Cut Cancer Risk
from CBS News

Authors of a joint American-British study say about a third of the cancer cases reported every year in the United States could be prevented, "through lifestyle."

The researchers claim to have crafted the most systematic policy report ever on cancer prevention, using data already available from existing research on cancer risk and prevention.

Aside from avoiding smoking, which is still the best way to statistically reduce your chances of a cancer diagnosis, CBS News correspondent Richard Roth reports that, according to the study, maintaining a healthy lifestyle is the most important thing you can do. The research, based on data collected in Brazil, China, Britain and the U.S., suggests that about a third (34 percent) of all cancer cases in America could be prevented simply by people eating better, exercising more and maintaining healthier weights.

http://snipr.com/covia



Study: Antarctic Glaciers Slipping Swiftly Seaward
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

GENEVA (Associated Press)--Antarctic glaciers are melting faster across a much wider area than previously thought, scientists said Wednesday--a development that could lead to an unprecedented rise in sea levels.

A report by thousands of scientists for the 2007-2008 International Polar Year concluded that the western part of the continent is warming up, not just the Antarctic Peninsula.

Previously most of the warming was thought to occur on the narrow stretch pointing toward South America, said Colin Summerhayes, executive director of the Britain-based Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and a member of International Polar Year's steering committee. But satellite data and automated weather stations indicate otherwise.

http://snipr.com/covk3



Study of Diets Shows What Truly Counts: Calories
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Two decades after the debate began on which diet is best for weight loss, a conclusion is starting to come into focus. And the winner is ... not low-carb, not low-fat, not high protein but ... any diet.

That is, any diet that is low in calories and saturated fats and high in whole grains, fruits and vegetables--and that an individual can stick with for a lifetime--is a reasonable choice for people who need to lose weight. That's the conclusion of a study published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, research that represents the longest, largest and most rigorous test of several popular diet strategies.

In light of another highly regarded study published last year that reached a similar conclusion, medical experts are embracing the back-to-basics idea that the simple act of cutting calories is most important when it comes to losing weight.

http://snipr.com/covln



Prions Complicit in Alzheimer's Disease
from Science News

Prion protein, notorious for causing the brain-wasting mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases, may also be a coconspirator in Alzheimer's disease, a new study in mice suggests.

In mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases, misshapen prion proteins do the damage. But the new paper, appearing February 26 in Nature, offers evidence that the harmless version of the prion protein assists the amyloid-beta protein responsible for brain cell death in Alzheimer's disease.

"It's pretty sensational," comments Adriano Aguzzi, a neuropathologist at the University of Zurich. "What's tremendously electrifying is that prion protein may be a genetic sensor for extremely toxic, small concentrations of A-beta."

http://snipr.com/covnb

[Kai]

February 27, 2009



Roll-Up Solar Cells Printed Like Money
from National Geographic News

Printing presses normally used to make Australian dollar bills produced solar power cells in a trial near Melbourne last week. The giant machines arranged and stamped flexible solar panels onto plastic film.

The cells were only 3 percent efficient, meaning they could convert only a small amount of solar energy into electricity.

But Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) project leader Gerry Wilson told Australian ABC News he expects the output to more than double by next year and top 10 percent after that. He said he hoped the solar cells would be ready for mass production in five years.

http://snipr.com/cr8nw



Obama's Budget Would Boost Science
from Science News

In his not-exactly-State-of-the-Union address to Congress Tuesday night, President Obama promised that his administration would boost support for science. ... The official "outline" of the first Obama budget ... asks Congress to fatten the National Science Foundation, for example, with an extra $7 billion--a hefty 16 percent increase over last year's funding.

The new budget document argues that "investments in science and technology foster economic growth, create millions of high-tech, high-wage jobs that allow American workers to lead the global economy" and more. For that reason, the budget document says, the president's proposed budget for fiscal year 2010 is aimed at beginning to move toward a doubling of federal funding for basic research over the next 10 years. The actual increase in the coming year would be $950 million, it says.

The Energy Department would see lots of boosts. Most of the dollar figures mentioned in today's budget document reflect money already targeted to be spent from the stimulus. This includes $3.4 billion for low-carbon coal technologies, including the carbon sequestration.

http://snipr.com/cr8ru



Prints Are Evidence of Modern Foot in Prehumans
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Footprints uncovered in Kenya show that as early as 1.5 million years ago an ancestral species, almost certainly Homo erectus, had already evolved the feet and walking gait of modern humans.

An international team of scientists, in a report Friday in the journal Science, said the well-defined prints in an eroding bluff east of Lake Turkana "provided the oldest evidence of an essentially modern humanlike foot anatomy" and added to the picture of Homo erectus as the prehumans who took long evolutionary strides--figuratively and, now it seems, also literally.

Where the individuals who made the tracks were going, or why, is beyond knowing by the cleverest scientist. The variability of the separation between some steps, researchers said, suggests that they were picking their way over an uneven surface, muddy enough to leave a mark as an unintended message from an extinct species for the contemplation of its descendants.

http://snipr.com/cr8ur



Salt Solution: Cheap Power from the River's Mouth
from New Scientist

Stand on the banks of the Rhine where it flows into the North Sea, near the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and you'll witness a vast, untapped source of energy swirling in the estuary. According to Dutch engineer Joost Veerman, it's possible to tap this energy without damaging the environment or disrupting the river's busy shipping.

For rather than constructing a huge barrage or dotting the river bed with turbines, Veerman and his colleagues at Wetsus, the Dutch Centre for Sustainable Water Technology in Leeuwarden, believe they can tap energy locked up in the North Sea's saltwater by channelling it, along with fresh water from the Rhine, into a novel kind of battery.

... "Salinity power" exploits the chemical differences between salt and fresh water, and this project only hints at the technology's potential: from the mouth of the Ganges to the Mississippi delta, almost every large estuary could produce a constant flow of green electricity, day and night, rain or shine, without damaging sensitive ecosystems or threatening fisheries.

http://snipr.com/cr8wa



Tools Unearth 13,000 Years of History
from the Denver Post

It turns out that the first people to get in on Boulder real estate were the Clovis--a nomadic people who lived 13,000 years ago. We know this from a cache of Clovis tools buried beneath the lawn of biotech entrepreneur Patrick Mahaffy.

The 83 stone implements--including bi facial knives and a tool resembling a double-bitted ax--were unearthed in May by a landscaping crew. It is one of only two known Clovis caches. The other is in Washington state.

"There is a magic to these artifacts," said Mahaffy, who backed a $7,000 analysis of the knife and ax blades. Mahaffy said landscapers were digging out a space to build a fish pond when their shovels struck stone, unearthing the space where the tools had been buried. Reporting of the find was delayed until the analysis was complete, officials involved in the venture said.

http://snipr.com/cr8yq



Study of Fossils Shows Prehistoric Fish Had Sex
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

BANGKOK, Thailand (Associated Press)--The fossilized remains of two pregnant fish indicate that sex as we know it--fertilization of eggs inside a female--took place as much as 30 million years earlier than previously thought, researchers said Thursday.

Scientists from Australia and Britain studying 380 million-year-old fossils of the armored placoderm fish, or Incisoscutum richiei, said they were initially confused when they realized that the two fish were carrying embryos. They originally thought the fish laid their eggs before fertilization.

"Once we found embryos in this group, we knew they had internal fertilization. But how the hell are they doing it?" said John Long, the head of sciences at the Museum Victoria in Melbourne who wrote a paper on the discovery that appeared in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

http://snipr.com/cr92p



The Kindness of Crowds
from the Economist

According to a much-reported survey carried out in 2002, Britain then had 4.3m closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras--one for every 14 people in the country. That figure has since been questioned, but few doubt that Britons are closely scrutinised when they walk the streets. This scrutiny is supposed to deter and detect crime. Even the government's statistics, though, suggest that the cameras have done little to reduce the worst sort of criminal activity, violence.

That may, however, be about to change, and in an unexpected way. It is not that the cameras and their operators will become any more effective. Rather, they have accidentally gathered a huge body of data on how people behave, and particularly on how they behave in situations where violence is in the air.

This means that hypotheses about violent behaviour which could not be tested experimentally for practical or ethical reasons, can now be examined in a scientific way. And it is that which may help violence to be controlled.

http://snipr.com/cr94u



'Oldest English Words' Identified
from BBC News Online

Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say. Reading University researchers claim "I," "we," "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage. The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct--citing "squeeze," "guts," "stick" and "bad" as probable first casualties.

"We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. "We fit a wide range, so there's a lot of computation involved; and that range then brackets what the true answer is and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time."

http://snipr.com/cr96u



Indonesia's Psychedelic Fish Named a New Species
from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

JAKARTA, Indonesia (Associated Press)--A funky, psychedelic fish that bounces on the ocean floor like a rubber ball has been classified as a new species, a scientific journal reported.

The frogfish--which has a swirl of tan and peach zebra stripes that extend from its aqua eyes to its tail--was initially discovered by scuba diving instructors working for a tour operator a year ago in shallow waters off Ambon island in eastern Indonesia.

The operator contacted Ted Pietsch, lead author of a paper published in this month's edition of Copeia, the journal of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, who submitted DNA work identifying it as a new species. The fish--which the University of Washington professor has named "psychedelica"--is a member of the antennariid genus, Histiophryne, and like other frogfish, has fins on both sides of its body that have evolved to be leg-like.

http://snipr.com/cr99p



Scientists Meet to Save Lascaux Cave from Fungus
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

PARIS (Associated Press)--Geologists, biologists and other scientists convened Thursday in Paris to discuss how to stop the spread of fungus stains--aggravated by global warming--that threaten France's prehistoric Lascaux cave drawings.

Black stains have spread across the cave's prehistoric murals of bulls, felines and other images, and scientists have been hard-pressed to halt the fungal creep.

Marc Gaulthier, who heads the Lascaux Caves International Scientific Committee, said the challenges facing the group are vast and global warming now poses an added problem.

http://snipr.com/cr9e3

[Iason Ouabache]

Placebo Effect: A Cure in the Mind
from Scientific American

A man whom his doctors referred to as "Mr. Wright" was dying from cancer of the lymph nodes. Orange-size tumors had invaded his neck, groin, chest and abdomen, and his doctors had exhausted all available treatments. Nevertheless, Mr. Wright was confident that a new anticancer drug called Krebiozen would cure him ...

Mr. Wright was bedridden and fighting for each breath when he received his first injection. But three days later he was cheerfully ambling around the unit, joking with the nurses. Mr. Wright's tumors had shrunk by half, and after 10 more days of treatment he was discharged from the hospital. And yet the other patients in the hospital who had received Krebiozen showed no improvement.

Over the next two months, however, Mr. Wright became troubled by press reports questioning the efficacy of Krebiozen and suffered a relapse. His doctors decided to lie to him: an improved, doubly effective version of the drug was due to arrive the next day, they told him. Mr. Wright was ecstatic. The doctors then gave him an injection that contained not one molecule of the drug--and he improved even more than he had the last time.

http://snipr.com/coutz

I'm glad that more people are putting research into placebos.  The healing power of the mind is fascinating.  It's strange how just a slight change in attitude can have such a huge effect on your health.  I know that there's only so much that placebos can do but we need to see how far we can push them. At the very least for the shits and giggles.