Weekly Science Headlines

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Placebos are one of the most potent drugs known to man, probably, and certainly one of the most multipurpose. They just get a bad rap because they don't *do* anything.

The price doesn't help much either.

[Kai]

Wouldn't it just be better to change the way doctors go about post treatment, and their interactions with patients?

I mean, technically, a placebo can be a 5 cent sugar pill.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Technically, a placebo can be a free television program, as long as people think it works. I'm pretty sure the 'you get what you pay for' sentiment is mostly a cultural anomaly that causes cheap working placebos to be generally unknown. Placebos cease to be useful if they need to be twice as expensive as the real drug they replace in order to be half as effective.

[Kai]

http://invertdiary.ebaker.me.uk/2009/03/circus-of-spineless-issue-36.html

One of those blog circuses, this one with a mess of articles about invertebrates.

[Vene]

Protein Structure Determined in Living Cells

"The function of a protein is determined both by its structure and by its interaction partners in the cell. Until now, proteins had to be isolated for analyzing them. An international team of researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University, Goethe University, and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) has, for the first time, determined the structure of a protein in its natural environment, the living cell. Using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, the researchers solved the structure of a protein within the bacterium Escherichia coli."

This astounds me.  I have used NMR in the past, and I never would have thought it would be able to not only be a viable technique on living organisms, let alone good enough to determine the structure in a living organism.  There is just so much noise to remove, not to mention keeping it alive the entire time.  The solvents I've used are all the sort of thing that would be incredibly toxic to anything alive.

[Kai]

Protein Structure Determined in Living Cells

"The function of a protein is determined both by its structure and by its interaction partners in the cell. Until now, proteins had to be isolated for analyzing them. An international team of researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University, Goethe University, and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) has, for the first time, determined the structure of a protein in its natural environment, the living cell. Using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, the researchers solved the structure of a protein within the bacterium Escherichia coli."

This astounds me.  I have used NMR in the past, and I never would have thought it would be able to not only be a viable technique on living organisms, let alone good enough to determine the structure in a living organism.  There is just so much noise to remove, not to mention keeping it alive the entire time.  The solvents I've used are all the sort of thing that would be incredibly toxic to anything alive.

This astounds me, because we still don't know how protein gated channels work, and now maybe we can figure out how.

I remember actually POSTING somewhere on here when I heard that from my professor years ago. That we had no clue how something as basic as a gated channel actually worked mechanically blew me away.

[Vene]

My copy of Molecular Biology of the Cell[/u] actually does describe how some channels work (like the Na⁺ and K[su[]+[/sup] pumps in neurons).  Like the ball and chain model.


But, there is still a lot that is not understood or poorly understood.  For example, the section on peroxisome transport has a lot of handwaving and generalities.  Naturally, this means there is still a lot unknown.

Also, long term potentiation blew my mind.

[Kai]

My copy of Molecular Biology of the Cell[/u] actually does describe how some channels work (like the Na⁺ and K[su[]+[/sup] pumps in neurons).  Like the ball and chain model.


But, there is still a lot that is not understood or poorly understood.  For example, the section on peroxisome transport has a lot of handwaving and generalities.  Naturally, this means there is still a lot unknown.

Also, long term potentiation blew my mind.

As I was explained though, the models are just guesses, we don't REALLY know which one is right.  Theres the ball and chain but theres other ones that do just as good of a job. People like models, but the map isn't the territory.

[Vene]

No arguments here, just commenting based on my limited knowledge.  Actually, from my understanding, science tends to constantly work on limited knowledge and try to zero in on the best model possible.

[Kai]

March 5, 2009

Scientists Discover Potential Tool Against HIV
from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Registration Required)

Scientists at the University of Minnesota reported Wednesday that they found a way to block transmission of the virus that causes AIDS in animals, raising hopes of a potential breakthrough in the battle against the worldwide epidemic.

The scientists were able to prevent infection in a group of female monkeys by treating them with a gel containing a common food additive, known as glycerol monolaurate or GML, before they were exposed to the virus.

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, could lead to a novel and effective way to prevent sexual transmission in women, said Dr. Ashley Haase, who led the study with fellow microbiologist Patrick Schlievert.

http://snipr.com/d5fou



New Saturn Moon: Tiny Gem Found in Outer Ring
from National Geographic News

A faint pinprick of light embedded in one of Saturn's outermost rings is now the 61st moon known to be circling the giant planet, astronomers announced Tuesday.

Images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft over a 600-day stretch revealed the tiny moonlet moving in a partial ring known as a ring arc that extends about a sixth of the way around Saturn's faint G ring.

Based on its brightness, astronomers estimate that the as-yet-unnamed moon is a third of a mile wide. This is tiny as far as moons go, but the object is likely the largest in its neighborhood.

http://snipr.com/d5fs4



Will a Bendable Laser Scalpel Make the Cut?
from Scientific American

Laser technology has proved to be an invaluable surgical tool, be it to improve eyesight, repair torn retinas, zap kidney stones, or to delicately remove spinal tumors. Still, despite more than four decades of use in the operating room, laser surgery has been limited by the fact that its energy travels in straight lines.

This means that a laser works best on areas that can be reached with a straight shot. Maneuvering the beam so that it can reach out-of-the-way areas--without damaging healthy tissue--is sometimes done, using a series of mirrors to guide the laser beam, but this typically dilutes the laser's strength.

An approach to laser surgery on the market for barely more than a year, however, seeks to add a new level of flexibility to optical scalpels by directing the infrared energy of a high-intensity carbon dioxide (CO2) laser through a flexible fiber tube lined with reflective material. This gives the surgeon the ability to snake the laser safely through the body to wherever it is needed without losing any of the beam's strength.

http://snipr.com/d5fwz



Dancing Black Hole Twins Spotted
from BBC News Online

Researchers have seen the best evidence yet for a pair of black holes orbiting each other within the same galaxy.

While such "binary systems" have been postulated before, none has ever been conclusively spotted. The new black hole pair is dancing significantly closer than the prior best binary system candidate.

The work, published in the journal Nature, is in line with the theory of growth of galaxies, each with a black hole at its centre.

http://snipr.com/d5g4c



Out-of-Sync Days Throw Heart and Metabolism Out of Whack
from Science News

Sleeping during the day and staying awake at night can lead to heart and metabolic problems, even after just a few days of the out-of-sync schedule, a new study reports. The results, published online March 2 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help explain the high rates of heart disease, diabetes and obesity among people who work the graveyard shift.

"The problems of shift work affect so many people, but there are very few studies that address the underlying mechanisms," comments Eve Van Cauter, a sleep researcher at the University of Chicago. "This is what [the researchers] have done, and elegantly so."

Based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the researchers estimate that 8.6 million people in the United States are shift workers.

http://snipr.com/d5gao



Bid to Undo Bush Memo on Threats to Species
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

A few weeks before he left office, President George W. Bush told federal officials that, in effect, they did not have to bother getting the advice of wildlife experts before taking actions that might harm plants or animals protected by the Endangered Species Act.

On Tuesday, President Obama said that, in effect, they did. At a visit to the Interior Department marking its 150th anniversary, the president said he had signed a memorandum directing the Interior and Commerce Departments to review a regulation that the Bush administration issued Dec. 16.

The regulation lifted longstanding requirements that agencies contemplating actions that might affect endangered species consult with scientists from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service and to take their guidance into account.

http://snipr.com/d5ge4



The Bark of Love
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

When male wolves feel amorous, they are famously known to howl. When male cheetahs find themselves in the same spot, so to speak, they resort to a more modest bark, a staccato yip that scientists say does much more than simply catch a receptive female's ear.

The so-called "stutter-bark," according to new research, seems literally to turn the female on, triggering a cascade of reproductive hormones that results in the release of eggs for fertilization.

"We think this is the first known case of mammalian ovulation by acoustic inducement," said Matthew Anderson, a researcher in the San Diego Zoo's behavioral biology division who recently documented the discovery with Fred Bercovitch, associate director of the zoo's Conservation Research Department. The cheetah research is part of the zoo's larger experiment in "sensory ecology," an effort to better understand how animals use sound (and other signals) to communicate.

http://snipr.com/d5gjp



Sebelius, DeParle Named to Health-Care Posts
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

President Obama on Monday named Nancy-Ann DeParle as director of the White House Office of Health Reform, rounding out the leadership of the team that will direct his administration's efforts to revamp the nation's ailing health-care system.

Obama also formally named Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his secretary of health and human services during a ceremony in the White House East Room. Sebelius and DeParle will be charged with helping to craft and sell the administration's ambitious effort to revamp the nation's health-care system and extend access to the 46 million people in the country who lack coverage, while attempting to rein in runaway costs.

In brief remarks, Obama reaffirmed his plans to push ahead on the initiative, despite warnings from some Republicans and others, who say that it will prove too costly and politically perilous, especially given the nation's severe fiscal problems.

http://snipr.com/d5goi



Vatican Signals Its Embrace of Science
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

ROME (Associated Press)--The Vatican sought Tuesday to show that it isn't opposed to science and evolutionary theory, hosting a conference on Charles Darwin and trying to debunk the idea that it embraces creationism or intelligent design.

Some of the world's top biologists, paleontologists and molecular geneticists joined theologians and philosophers for the five-day seminar marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin's "The Origin of Species."

Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the Catholic Church doesn't stand in the way of scientific realities like evolution, saying there was a "wide spectrum of room" for belief in both the scientific basis for evolution and faith in God the creator.

http://snipr.com/d5gql



A Bizarre Universe May Be Lurking in the Shadows
from New Scientist

It is 3.30am on 26 December 2007 in McMurdo, Antarctica. The crew at the long-duration balloon facility have stayed up all night in sub-zero temperatures, waiting for the winds to subside. Finally, the gigantic balloon lifts off. Filled with about a million cubic metres of helium, it soars high into the stratosphere carrying an experiment called ATIC.

For 19 days, ATIC circled the South Pole, studying cosmic rays coming from space. Then, nearly a year later, the ATIC team made a stunning announcement: they found that more high-energy electrons had left their mark on the experiment than expected.

That might not sound like much, but the result is remarkable because it might be a telltale sign of dark matter, the invisible stuff thought to make up about 85 per cent of matter in the universe.

http://snipr.com/d5gt9

March 6, 2009




Real-time Flood Forecasting
from American Scientist

When geography teachers instruct their students about the great rivers of the world, the Amazon, Nile, Yangtze, Mississippi and Yellow usually head the list. Those are truly large rivers, but they earn their distinction by length. ... When it comes to flood control and prediction, peak discharge per unit area of watershed (specific peak discharge) is the essential criterion, because it describes a river's volatility.

The five rivers that lead in this category may be unfamiliar to you. All are found on the island of Taiwan. ... The explanation for their singular flows is relatively simple: Taiwan is very steep and very wet.

... In Taiwan the floods originate in the mountains as huge amounts of water channel toward the river basins. The channels converge in the race to the ocean. The changes in the volumes of flow in just a few moments can be spectacular. Can these flows be predicted? The question is a critical one for the millions of people who live in Taiwan's lowlands. Between 2001 and 2005, researchers worked on a project to create a real-time flood-forecasting model for complex river systems, with the specific and immediate goal of forecasting the torrents that arrive in the Tamsui River Basin.

http://snipr.com/d8qen



Yucca No Longer Option for Waste Site
from the Nevada Appeal

WASHINGTON (Associated Press)--For two decades, a ridge of volcanic rock 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas known as Yucca Mountain has been the sole focus of government plans to store highly radioactive nuclear waste. Not anymore.

Despite the $13.5 billion that has been spent on the project, the Obama administration says it's going in a different direction. It slashed funding for Yucca Mountain in its recently announced budget.

And on Thursday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate hearing that the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste, brushing aside criticism from several Republican lawmakers. Instead, Chu said the Obama administration believes the nearly 60,000 tons of used reactor fuel can remain at nuclear power plants while a new, comprehensive plan for waste disposal is developed.

http://snipr.com/d8qwj



Horses Tamed a Millennium Earlier than Previously Thought
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

The horse, its four slender legs accomplishing astonishing feats of strength and endurance, has provided humans with far more than transportation from point A to point B.

It has allowed us to travel long distances for trade, carry heavy loads, move our societies around more freely and, inevitably, conduct more efficient warfare. Arguably the most important domesticated animal, the horse also has provided humans with meat and milk. Now we have a better idea of when this complex and vital human-horse relationship began.

New evidence, including more slender leg bones, bit-pitted teeth and mare's milk residue in pottery, indicate that the horse was domesticated on the steppes of Central Asia at least 5,500 years ago, more than 1,000 years earlier than previously believed and 2,000 years before it appeared in Europe.

http://snipr.com/d8r1b



When Perfectionism Becomes a Problem
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

By the time Jared Kant was 12, he had to stop doing his homework with a pencil because the eraser was too tempting.

If he made a mistake on one word, he would feel compelled to erase a whole sentence. If one letter was not shaped and spaced just so, the whole word had to go. He would sometimes erase right through homework papers. The same with tests.

Kant, now 26 and working as a research coordinator in Boston, learned firsthand what a growing body of psychological research has recently begun to document: The line between admirably high standards and painful pathology can be exceedingly thin. "The dividing line," says Kant, "is distress."

http://snipr.com/d8r4i



Marital Woes May Harm Her Heart
from the Salt Lake Tribune

Ladies: A rocky relationship may do more than just break your heart. A new University of Utah study shows the more strained a woman's marriage is, the more likely she is to suffer depression--and that can lead to a higher risk for "metabolic syndrome," a group of risk factors for heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

And your husbands? Anger, conflict and hostility can lead to depression for them, too, they reported in questionnaires. But unlike women--and for reasons researchers are still exploring--it doesn't translate into hypertension, obesity around the waistline, high blood sugar, high triglycerides and low levels of HDL, or "good" cholesterol.

One explanation for the difference may be chalked up to women's heightened sensitivity to relationship problems--an observation borne out in a growing body of research on marriage and health.

http://snipr.com/d8skc



Obama Goes 'All In' for Science
from New Scientist

Never has so much money been pumped into science so quickly and with so much hanging on a successful outcome. The full scope of President Barack Obama's agenda to revitalise the ailing US economy has now been revealed, and it is arguably the biggest bet on science and technology in history.

The Obama administration's latest attempt to tackle the problems facing the US is a record $3.6 trillion budget request for 2010. This has come hard on the heels of a $787 billion "stimulus package" designed to give the US economy a shot in the arm.

Both are packed with funding for science and technology ventures, from healthcare research to an electricity supergrid. The stimulus alone hands out more than $20 billion for basic research and about $50 billion to support renewable power and energy efficiency.

http://snipr.com/d8rhe



Nanotechnology Goes to War
from the Guardian (UK)

Wouldn't it be handy if everything we needed to build the next generation of portable devices and robots were available on a microchip? You could just plug in a navigation system, a radar sensor, cryogenic cooling system, or even a miniature power unit.

For laboratory applications, there would be micro versions of everything from mass spectrometers to magnetic sensors. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon's extreme science wing, aims to provide all this, and more, in handy "matchbook size" electronic packages.

... We have come to expect devices to get smaller, cheaper and more powerful over time. Now the revolution is spreading to other types of device. The development of mems (microelectromechanical systems) has already paved the way for "lab-on-a-chip" chemical analysis. Such breakthroughs tend to come from the military rather than industry.

http://snipr.com/d8rki



'No Proof' of Bee Killer Theory
from BBC News Online

Scientists say there is no proof that a mysterious disease blamed for the deaths of billions of bees actually exists, the BBC has been told.

For five years increasing numbers of unexplained bee deaths have been reported worldwide, with US commercial beekeepers suffering the most. The term Colony Collapse Disorder was coined to describe the illness. But many experts now say that the term is misleading and there is no single, new ailment killing the bees.

... The unexplained nature of the affliction, with empty hives and no clearly defined infection, has stumped scientists. Since the 1980s a rising tide of ailments has assaulted the honeybee, including the varroa mite and many deadly viruses.

http://snipr.com/d8rnj



Boston Globe Kills Health/Science Section, Keeps Staff
from the Columbia Journalism Review

It is the end of an era that began more than 25 years ago, when test-tube babies and compact discs were new. This week, the Boston Globe stopped running its highly regarded Monday Health/Science section and began placing its content in the paper's trendy new "g" lifestyle tabloid, as well as its business section.

It is the latest casualty at the struggling but storied New England paper, located in what is arguably the center of the health, science, and technology universe. According to health and science editor Gideon Gil, the Globe's nine-person specialty staff is expected to stay intact--at least for now--and coverage of everything from stem cells to climate change will still have high priority in the paper.

"I don't see it as a serious retreat," said Gil. "The content is all running in the paper, but going in different places. ... It's entirely occasioned by the need to cut costs. We have found a way to continue to provide essentially the same level of coverage while saving money. To me that shows a continuing commitment to covering health and science in a major way out of recognition that those are crucial topics for our community, areas that make Boston distinctive."

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Heaters Might Stave Off Doom for Bats
from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

ALBANY, N.Y. (Associated Press)--Bats afflicted with a mysterious and deadly disorder might be able to make it through winter with the help of heated boxes placed in hibernation caves, a pair of researchers say.

The biologists stress that the boxes being tested this winter are not intended to cure "white-nose syndrome," which has killed upward of a half million bats in three winters from New England to West Virginia.

But, in an article published online Thursday in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, they suggest the little heated havens could help stricken bats preserve enough precious energy to survive hibernation season.

http://snipr.com/d8s9b

[Kai]

March 4, 2009



In a Lonely Cosmos, a Hunt for Worlds Like Ours
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Someday it might be said that this was the beginning of the end of cosmic loneliness.

Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around the Sun. There the spacecraft's mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places--that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot, Goldilocks zones around stars where liquid water can exist.

The job, in short, is to find places where life as we know it is possible.

http://snipr.com/d2u5c



What a Dinosaur Handprint Reveals
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Steven Spielberg got it wrong. In his classic 1993 film "Jurassic Park," the director showed Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor and other carnivorous dinosaurs walking with their forearms hanging down like a monkey's and their palms more or less parallel to the ground--a posture derisively referred to by paleontologists as the "bunny position."

A growing body of evidence, however, has suggested that the creatures were physically unable to assume this position because their wrist bones would not turn in such a fashion.

Now, the first unequivocal handprint of a 198-million-year-old crouching carnivore confirms the speculation, providing clear evidence that the front limb struck the ground on its side, like a karate chop, and thus would have been of little use for walking.

http://snipr.com/d2ua0



Popular Acid Blockers, Anticlotting Drug Don't Mix
from Science News

In a finding sure to cause many cardiac patients some old-fashioned heartburn, researchers report that a commonly prescribed class of acid-blocking drugs interferes with anticlotting medications routinely given to heart patients discharged from the hospital.

The study, coupled with two earlier reports that have recently led to a stern warning from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about mixing the drugs, might change doctors' practices.

"A lot of us just prescribe things out of habit," says study coauthor P. Michael Ho, a cardiologist at the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center. "My hope is that this study makes physicians think twice."

http://snipr.com/d2ubx



Future TV Screens Seen in Coffee Stains
from New Scientist

The rings left behind by spilled coffee have inspired a new way to make ultrathin coatings for LCD and plasma flat-screens.

In LCDs, transparent conductive coatings are used to form an electrode on the surface of the screen, while in plasma TVs they provide a shield that prevents electromagnetic fields from straying. The traditional techniques for making such coatings include sputtering a fine layer of indium tin oxide onto the surface. ITO is highly conductive and transparent to visible light, but the process is expensive, requiring clean rooms and vacuum chambers.

Ivan Vakarelski at the Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences in Singapore realised that coffee stains could point the way to a cheaper alternative. Spill coffee and the evaporating liquid drives coffee particles to the edges of the spill, which ultimately produces the circular stain. ... Vakarelski and his colleagues figured that if they could mimic the process in a controlled fashion, they could create a pattern of granules of other materials to form a nanoscale conductive coating.

http://snipr.com/d2ueg



Dolphin-Inspired Man-Made Fin Works Swimmingly
from Scientific American

The human body does many things well, but swimming isn't one of them. We're embarrassingly inefficient in the water, able to convert just 3 or 4 percent of our energy into forward motion. ... But a new, dolphin-inspired fin promises to fuel the biggest change in human-powered swimming in decades, putting beyond-Olympian speeds within reach of just about anyone.

Culminating decades of research, engineer and inventor Ted Ciamillo, an inventor and engineer in Athens, Ga., who made his name (and fortune) building high-performance bicycle brakes, created what he has dubbed the Lunocet, a 2.5-pound (1.1-kilogram) monofin made of carbon fiber and fiberglass that attaches to an aluminum foot plate at a precise 30-degree angle.

With almost three times the surface area of conventional swim fins, the semiflexible Lunocet provides plenty of propulsion. The key to the 42-inch- (one-meter-) wide fin's speed: its shape and angle, both of which are modeled with scientific precision on a dolphin's tail. These sprinters of the sea can swim up to 33 miles (53 kilometers) per hour and turn up to 80 percent of their energy into thrust.

http://snipr.com/d2ugn



Space Rock Makes Close Approach
from BBC News Online

An asteroid which may be as big as a ten-storey building has passed close by the Earth, astronomers say. The object, known as 2009 DD45, thought to be 21-47m (68-152ft) across, raced by our planet at 1344 GMT on Monday.

The gap was just 44,750 miles; a fifth of the distance between our planet and the Moon. It is in the same size range as a rock which exploded over Siberia in 1908 with the force of 1,000 atomic bombs.

The object was first reported on Saturday by the Siding Spring Survey, a near-Earth object search programme in Australia. It was confirmed by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Centre (MPC), which catalogues Solar System objects.

http://snipr.com/d2uih



Going Green: Entire Swedish City Switches to Biofuels
from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)

KALMAR, Sweden--Though a fraction of Chicago's size, this industrial city in southeast Sweden has plenty of similarities with it, including a long, snowy winter and a football team the town's crazy about.

One thing is dramatically different about Kalmar, however: It is on the verge of eliminating the use of fossil fuels, for good, and with minimal effect on its standard of living.

The city of 60,000--and its surrounding 12-town region, with a quarter-million people--has traded in most of its oil, gas and electric furnaces for community "district heat," produced at plants that burn sawdust and wood waste left by timber companies. Hydropower, nuclear power and windmills now provide more than 90 percent of the region's electricity.

http://snipr.com/d2uli



All Systems Go
from The Scientist (Registration Required)

On April 22, 2006, Nitin Baliga, a microbiologist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, was spending a lazy Saturday afternoon at home, when he noticed an enticing email in his inbox from his ISB collaborator Richard Bonneau. The subject line: "woooooohoooooo!"

Baliga's team had just constructed a new model that could predict the molecular-level responses of a free-living cell to genetic and environmental changes. That cell, however, was not Escherichia coli or yeast. It was the little-known archaeon Halobacterium salinarum, a tiny extremophile that thrives in highly saline lakes such as the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea.

The model was accurately predicting Halobacterium's dynamics at the genome scale. But could it predict new molecular-level responses to changes in environmental conditions not tested in the initial data used to construct the model? Yes, Bonneau had just found out, and he was so thrilled that he couldn't wait to share his findings--or finish his sentences.

http://snipr.com/9kzks



Oldest Fossil Brain Found in "Bizarre" Prehistoric Fish
from National Geographic News

Digital x-ray images of a "bizarre" 300 million-year-old shark relative have revealed the oldest known fossilized brain, researchers announced Monday.

The unusual discovery raises hopes that scientists will find other ancient brains and use them to study how gray matter has evolved, said John Maisey, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. "The brain ... is remarkably soft tissue--brain tissue is mostly water," Maisey said. "To preserve anything is quite remarkable."

The fossil was found in an iniopterygian, an extinct ancestor of modern ratfishes, which are distant relatives of sharks and rays. Maisey said the ancient fish, which swam in an ocean that once covered the midwestern U.S., would have fit in the palm of a human hand.

http://snipr.com/d2uqa



Birth Control for Animals
from Popular Science

"Mother Goose" might soon be an anachronism. In wildlife biology, concerns about animal populations often stem from unnatural declines; in a few cases, however, that concern can be a result of too many animals, not too few, as some once-threatened species have returned with a vengeance.

Now a group of researchers is fighting back with a familiar (to humans, at least) tactic: birth control. Deer and Canada geese, in particular, have overtaken parts of North America in such magnitude that they're wreaking havoc on the environment, on human sanity and on public safety.

... "A lot of the problems are occurring in urban areas, but people don't necessarily want the animals shot, so we're trying to be responsive to those kinds of issues," said Dr. Kathleen Fagerstone, research program manager at the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colo., where the contraception programs were developed.

http://snipr.com/d2usz

February 23, 2009



Search for Life Heads to the Outer Solar System
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Europa vs. Titan. They're two moons in the outer solar system, both circling gas giants but otherwise as alien from each other as alien can be. One orbits Jupiter and is a crusty iceball with signs of a very deep subsurface ocean. The other orbits Saturn and has a thick atmosphere, dramatic weather, lakes of liquid hydrocarbons, methane rain, and sand dunes of organic material the color of coffee grounds.

Both have long been celebrated in film and fiction... In real life, both are prime targets in the search for life beyond Earth. The problem is that it is neither simple nor cheap to send a probe to these distant worlds. NASA has faced a bureaucratic quandary: Which moon should have priority?

For many months and years, two scientific camps polished their proposals, each hoping that its moon would get official sanction as NASA's next "flagship" mission to the outer solar system. The answer finally arrived last week: Europa, and by extension the whole Jupiter system, will be first.

http://snipr.com/chhe0



UCLA Class Project: Find Bin Laden
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

UCLA geographers think they have a good idea where Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been hiding.

Using standard geographical tools routinely employed to locate endangered species and fugitive criminals, the group said there is a high probability that Bin Laden has been hiding in one of three buildings in the northwestern Pakistani city of Parachinar, a longtime hide-out for mujahedin fighters.

"He may be sitting there right now," said UCLA biogeographer Thomas W. Gillespie, who led the study published online Tuesday in the MIT International Review, an interdisciplinary journal of international affairs.

http://snipr.com/chhi4



These Toes Were Made for Running
from Wired

If you've ever wondered why humans don't have long, prehensile toes that would turn our feet into extra hands, here's an answer: stubby toes may be custom-made for running.

Biomechanical analysis shows that long toes require more energy and generate more shock than short toes, making them one of many adaptations that may have helped our savannah-dwelling ancestors chase their prey.

"Longer toes require muscles to do more work, and exert stronger forces to maintain stability, compared to shorter toes," said University of Calgary anthropologist Campbell Rolian. "So long as we were engaged in substantial amounts of running, natural selection would favor individuals with shorter toes."

http://snipr.com/chhjq



Closing the Net on Illegal Fishing
from BBC News Online

"The problem of illegal fishing is enormously widespread," observes Michael Lodge, an OECD fisheries expert. "We have estimated the problem as being as much as 20% of the global catch."

Since 2000, the UN has been warning about the grave consequences of overfishing in the world's seas. However, the impact of illegal fishing is adding to the strain on the already overexploited oceans.

The skippers of the illegal fishing boats tend to favour the waters of some of the poorest nations, which are often inadequately policed as a result of a lack of resources.

http://snipr.com/chhmb



One-Shot Jab for Every Type of Flu 'Ready in 5 Years'
from the Times (London)

A universal therapy or vaccine for every type of flu is "within our grasp", according to scientists who have identified proteins that can neutralise most strains of the virus that affect humans.

The discovery of three immune proteins that are effective against a broad range of influenza viruses promises to provide a new line of defence against a pandemic, and could prevent many of the 250,000 deaths from seasonal flu that occur worldwide every year.

A treatment based on the research is expected to begin patient trials during the winter of 2010-11, and could be ready for widespread use within five years.

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Satellite Will Track Carbon Dioxide
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide waft into the air from the burning of fossil fuels each year. About half stays in the air. The other half disappears. Where it all goes, nobody quite knows.

With the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a NASA satellite scheduled to be launched on Tuesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, scientists hope to understand better the comings and goings of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas behind the warming of the planet.

The new data could help improve climate models and the understanding of the "carbon sinks," like oceans and forests, that absorb much of the carbon dioxide.

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Flexible Electronic Books to Hit Market Soon
from New Scientist

GADGET-makers have long promised us a flexible electronic book, but actually producing a robust, bendy screen has proved tough - until now.

Plastic Logic, a display technology company based in Cambridge, UK, says it will launch the first flexible electronic book in January.

The two most popular e-books on the market, the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle, are paperback book-sized devices that use first-generation black and white electronic "ink" displays. ... The problem is, the transistors that [control the ink display] sit on a layer of glass, making the displays fragile.

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Chimp Attack Highlights Increased Drug Use among Pets
from National Geographic News

Minutes before a pet chimp attacked a woman in Connecticut last weekend, he may have been given the anti-anxiety medication Xanax because he was agitated, according to statements by his owner that she later retracted.

The chimp attack raises questions about increased use of anti-anxiety medications among more common pets.

Demand for anti-anxiety medications for pets is growing, in part because of increased public awareness of the drugs' potential benefits, said animal-behavior expert Bonnie Beaver of Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine. It's not known, however, exactly how many pets are taking such drugs, Beaver said.

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Fermilab, European Accelerator Race for Glory
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

CHICAGO (Associated Press)--So, does the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Tevatron accelerator have a shot against the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland? It may not be the question all the boys at the end of bar are asking -- but it gets particle physicists psyched.

After all, they're racing to find evidence of a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, better known as the "God Particle" because it is believed to give mass to the matter that makes up the universe.

"This has been the holy grail of high energy physics for the last 30 years," Joe Lykken, a senior scientist at Fermilab in the Chicago suburb of Batavia, said Wednesday.

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Rescue Flight
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

People started gathering at the Lighthouse Missionary Baptist Church in southwestern Kentucky before sunrise. ... It was the first Friday in December, 23 degrees at dawn and nearly windless. Everyone was looking up.

Operation Migration's four ultralight planes floated into view over some oak and maple trees, then passed over the small, white chapel. ... At 200 feet, the first pilot, Chris Gullikson, was perfectly visible in his [plane's] open cockpit.

...Gullikson and the other trike pilots were going to pick up the 14 juvenile whooping cranes that they were, little by little, leading south for the winter. Traditionally, and for many millenniums, cranes learned to migrate by following other cranes. But traditions have changed.

http://snipr.com/chhxw

[Kai]

March 2, 2009

Researchers Find Safer Way to Produce Stem Cell Alternative
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Scientists have developed what appears to be a safer way to create a promising alternative to embryonic stem cells, boosting hopes that such cells could sidestep the moral and political quagmire that has hindered the development of a new generation of cures.

The researchers produced the cells by using strands of genetic material, instead of potentially dangerous genetically engineered viruses, to coax skin cells into a state that appears biologically identical to embryonic stem cells.

"It's a leap forward in the safe application of these cells," said Andras Nagy of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, who helped lead the international team of researchers that described the work in two papers being published online by the journal Nature. "We expect this to have a massive impact on this field."

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What Happens When a Language Dies?
from National Geographic News

India is extraordinary for its linguistic and cultural diversity. According to official estimates, the country is home to at least 400 distinct tongues, but many experts believe the actual number is probably around 700.

But, in a scenario replicated around the globe, many of India's languages are at risk of dying out. The effects could be culturally devastating. Each language is like a key that can unlock local knowledge about medicinal secrets, ecological wisdom, weather and climate patterns, spiritual attitudes, and artistic and mythological histories.

In rural Indian villages, Hindi or English are in vogue with younger generations, and are often required travelling to larger towns for work. In big cities, colonization, as well as globalization, has also spurred a switch to English and other popular languages.

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Revealed: Scientific Evidence for the 2001 Anthrax Attacks
from New Scientist

Key forensic evidence in the US anthrax attacks of 2001 has been revealed. The FBI had previously prevented the scientists involved from speaking publicly about their findings in case this interfered with court proceedings, but last August, after chief suspect Bruce Ivins committed suicide, the case collapsed and the FBI lifted many of the restrictions.

Last week, some of the scientists involved revealed their results at a scientific meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.

These show how the FBI traced the spores used in the attacks to a single flask at a US government lab, but they don't explain why the FBI made Ivins—who worked at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID)—the chief suspect.

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Black Hole Constant Makes Unexpected Appearance
from Science News

If you were orbiting a rotating black hole, you might be in for a wild ride of dizzying and seemingly unpredictable gyrations. Yet more than 40 years ago, a physicist found a mathematical constant that revealed regularity in that ride.

Now a similar constant has been discovered in a mild-mannered Newtonian system, reports a paper in the Feb. 13 Physical Review Letters.

The findings could be mere coincidence, nothing more than a mathematical curiosity, comments astrophysicist Saul Teukolsky of Cornell University. But, he says, they could shed light on the mysterious conditions of rotating black holes, which are predicted to exist by Einstein's general relativity equations.

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How HIV Stays One Step Ahead of Immune System

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is one of the fastest-evolving entities known. That's why no one has yet been able to come up with a vaccine: The virus mutates so rapidly that what works today in one person may not work tomorrow or in others.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature confirms that dizzying pace of evolution on a global scale.

"It's very clear there's a battle going on between humans and this virus, and the virus is evolving to become unrecognized by the immune system," said Dr. Bruce Walker, one of the researchers and director of the Ragon Institute, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "It does make clear what a huge challenge making a vaccine is."

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Explorers Begin Epic Arctic Trek
from BBC News Online

A British team has begun a gruelling trek to the North Pole to discover how quickly the Arctic sea-ice is melting.

Renowned Arctic explorer Pen Hadow and two companions were dropped onto the ice by plane some 1,700km (670 miles) north of Canada on Saturday night.

During their 1,000km journey, they plan to take measurements of the thickness of the ice. It will be the most detailed survey of its kind this season, and should be completed in late May.

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Car Seat Tests Reveal 'Flaws'
from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)

In a government crash-test video, the infant car seat flies off its base, smashing the baby dummy—still strapped into the carrier—upside down and face-first into the back of the driver's seat. Think what could happen in a real crash.

This seat was one of 31 that either flew off their bases or exceeded injury limits in a series of frontal crashes conducted by federal researchers using 2008 model year vehicles, a Tribune investigation found. The test results were never publicized, and even some infant-seat makers were unaware of their existence.

The Tribune found the results buried in thousands of pages of test reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These tests are used to rate the safety of cars, not the child restraints in them. What the newspaper unearthed calls into question the rigor of safety standards for such seats.

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Vatican Conference a Sign Church, Evolution Co-exist
from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A conference on evolution to be held this week at the Vatican is a sign that for many devout Christians, there is no conflict between the ideas of Charles Darwin and faith in God.

Devout Christians often are portrayed as if they view evolutionary biology as an attack on the Bible's account of creation, and scientists are portrayed as atheists. While there are high-profile examples of both, a truce was reached long ago in most major Christian traditions, including some streams of evangelicalism.

The Vatican conference, which marks the 150th anniversary of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," is one example of scientists and theologians working together to transcend the culture wars and forge a lasting peace.

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Fossil Skull of Giant Toothy Seabird Found in Peru
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

LIMA, Peru (Associated Press)—The unusually intact fossilized skull of a giant, bony-toothed seabird that lived up to 10 million years ago was found on Peru's arid southern coast, researchers said Friday.

The fossil is the best-preserved cranium ever found of a pelagornithid, a family of large seabirds believed to have gone extinct some 3 million years ago, said Rodolfo Salas, head of vertebrate paleontology at Peru's National History Museum.

The museum said in a statement that the birds had wingspans of up to 20 feet and may have used the toothlike projections on their beaks to prey on slippery fish and squid. But studying members of the Pelagornithidae family has been difficult because their extremely thin bones—while helpful for keeping the avian giants aloft—tended not to survive as fossils.

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Big Job Awaits Kansas Gov. Sebelius as Health Chief
from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press)—As President Barack Obama's health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius immediately will face a host of difficult policy issues that touch the lives of every family.

Obama planned to introduce Sebelius, the Democrat governor of Kansas, on Monday as his nominee to lead the Health and Human Services Department. The announcement would come before the president this week hosts lawmakers of both parties and representatives of major interest groups, from insurers to drug companies to consumers, at a White House summit on health care reform.

If confirmed by the Senate, Sebelius will play a leading role in Obama's ambitious effort to overhaul the health care system. But critical problems await her at the department, a vast bureaucracy that handles everything from Medicare to cancer research and food safety.

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February 24, 2009



Politics in the Guise of Pure Science
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

... Dr. [Roger] Pielke, a professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado, is the author of The Honest Broker, a book arguing that most scientists are fundamentally mistaken about their role in political debates. As a result, he says, they're jeopardizing their credibility while impeding solutions to problems like global warming.

Most researchers, Dr. Pielke writes, like to think of themselves in one of two roles: as a pure researcher who remains aloof from messy politics, or an impartial arbiter offering expert answers to politicians' questions. Either way, they believe their research can point the way to correct public policies, and sometimes it does--when the science is clear and people's values aren't in conflict.

But climate change, like most political issues, isn't so simple. While most scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is a threat, they're not certain about its scale or its timing or its precise consequences .... And while most members of the public want to avoid future harm from climate change, they have conflicting values about which sacrifices are worthwhile today.

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Simple Elixir Called a 'Miracle Liquid'
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

It's a kitchen degreaser. It's a window cleaner. It kills athlete's foot. Oh, and you can drink it. Sounds like the old "Saturday Night Live" gag for Shimmer, the faux floor polish plugged by Gilda Radner. But the elixir is real. It has been approved by U.S. regulators. And it's starting to replace the toxic chemicals Americans use at home and on the job.

The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water--hardly as catchy as Mr. Clean. But at the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, some hotel workers are calling it el liquido milagroso--the miracle liquid.

That's as good a name as any for a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment.

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New Safety, New Concerns in Tests for Down Syndrome
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

A handful of biotech companies are racing to market a new generation of tests for Down syndrome, a development that promises a safer way to spot the most common genetic cause of mental retardation early in pregnancy even as it weaves a thicket of moral, medical, political and regulatory concerns.

Doctors recommend that all pregnant women be offered screening for Down syndrome, and about half of women undergo the tests. But the current tests often produce confusing, ambiguous results, unnecessarily alarming couples or falsely reassuring them. The new tests are designed to offer more definitive results early in the pregnancy.

But with the first new approach due to become available this spring, the tests are renewing questions about why regulators do not require such innovations to be proved reliable before being offered to the public.

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New Tactics in the Fight against Tuberculosis
from Scientific American

Bubonic plague, smallpox, polio, HIV--the timeline of history is punctuated with diseases that have shaped the social atmospheres of the eras, defined the scope of science and medicine, and stolen many great minds before their time. But there is one disease that seems to have stalked humanity far longer than any other: tuberculosis.

... Today TB ranks second only to HIV among infectious killers worldwide, claiming nearly two million lives annually, even though existing drugs can actually cure most cases of the disease. The problem is that many people lack access to the medicines, and those who can obtain the drugs often fail to complete the lengthy treatment regimen.

Additionally, TB is evolving faster than our therapies are. In recent years, investigators have observed a worrying rise in the number of cases resistant to more than one of the first-line drugs used to treat the illness. Even more alarming, we have begun to see the emergence of strains that are resistant to every last one of the antibiotic defenses. ... As bleak as this state of affairs is, we have reason to be hopeful.

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Cod in the Act of Evolution
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution are getting a lot of attention this month, the 200th anniversary of his birth. Much has happened over those two centuries.

Evolution still brings to mind the kind of change that happens over millions of years, such as humans evolving from forerunners of apes. But there is increasing evidence that species can evolve quite quickly, within our lifetimes, and that human intervention in the natural world is speeding up that process. Take, for example, the cod fish, a New England icon.

Cod, once plentiful in the region's waters, are increasingly rare because of overfishing. But perhaps more important is the fact that large cod are especially rare. The reason: Decades of intense fishing for the largest cod have meant the species has evolved along the lines of the survivors, which is to say, smaller cod.

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Failure Hits Nasa's 'CO2 Hunter'
from BBC News Online

Nasa's first mission to measure carbon dioxide (CO2) from space has failed following a rocket malfunction. Officials said the fairing--the part of the rocket which covers the satellite on top of the launcher--had failed to separate properly.

Officials said the satellite had now crashed in Antarctica. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) was intended to help pinpoint the key locations on our planet's surface where the gas is being emitted and absorbed.

Nasa officials confirmed the launch had failed at a press conference held at 1300 GMT. The $270m mission was launched on a Taurus XL--the smallest ground-launched rocket currently in use by the US space agency.

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Researchers Hope Dallas Inmates Can Help Unlock Medical Mystery
from the Dallas Morning News (Registration Required)

The Dallas County Jail is the site of one of the most comprehensive studies ever undertaken of a dangerous, drug-resistant bacterial infection that has alarmed health officials across the nation.

Last month, the Parkland Memorial Hospital staff began handing out medicated cleansing cloths to hundreds of participating inmates to see whether the cloths will stop the spread of the infectious, flesh-eating bacteria methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

It's part of a three-year University of Chicago study of the spread of staph infections in the jail that began last year. The medical research team selected Dallas County's jails over the Los Angeles County jail system--the nation's largest. ...The Chicago research team hopes to publish its results next year.

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Beaker-Ready Projects? Colleges Have Quite a Few
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON--The acting director of the National Institutes of Health begged university administrators to avoid even applying for stimulus money unless the universities planned to hire people almost immediately.

... Not a problem, the administrators said, in interviews. After working under flat federal research financing for years, scientists are ecstatic. "This is a miracle, I think," A. J. Stewart Smith, the dean for research at Princeton, said. "It is redressing this terrible problem where the success rate for excellent proposals was very low."

From proposed animal research laboratories at the University of Arizona, the University of Nebraska and the University of Pennsylvania to empty floors in laboratory buildings at the University of California, Irvine, Ohio State University and Southern Illinois University, colleges across the country have hundreds of shovel- and beaker-ready projects in the sciences that could collectively cost tens of billions and begin within weeks.

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Report: U.S.-Funded Family Planning "Pays for Itself"
from the Seattle Times

NEW YORK (Associated Press)--Publicly funded family planning prevents nearly 2 million unintended pregnancies and more than 800,000 abortions in the United States each year, saving billions of dollars, according to new research intended to counter conservative objections to expanding the program.

The data is in a report being released today by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health think tank whose research is generally respected even by experts and activists who don't share its advocacy of abortion rights.

Report co-author Rachel Benson Gold called the family-planning program "smart government at its best," asserting that every dollar spent on it saves taxpayers $4 in costs associated with unintended births to mothers eligible for Medicaid-funded natal care. Despite such arguments, federal funding for family planning is a divisive issue.

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Research Finds Anger Ultimately Can Kill You
from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press)--How the heart handles anger seems to predict who's at risk for a life-threatening irregular heartbeat. Negative emotions like hostility and depression have long been considered risks for developing heart disease, and deaths from cardiac arrest rise after disasters such as earthquakes.

But research released Monday goes a step farther, uncovering a telltale pattern in the EKGs of certain heart patients when they merely recall a maddening event--an anger spike that foretold bad news.

In already vulnerable people, "anger causes electrical changes in the heart," said Dr. Rachel Lampert, a Yale University cardiologist who led the work. When that happens even in the doctor's office, "that means they're more likely to have arrhythmias when they go out in real life."

http://snipr.com/ck0lf

[Kai]

March 9, 2009


Science of Time: What Makes Our Internal Clock Tick
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

In warp-speed modern America, time has become one of our most precious resources. We manage it, and we expend it carefully.

Ironic, then, that a resource as precious as seconds, minutes and hours is so poorly understood and so routinely misestimated by modern humans—by 15% to 25% in either direction, depending on the individual and the acuity of his or her time perception.

But understanding our ability to perceive time—and to use time to make sense of our world—is one of the newest and most sweeping frontiers of neuroscience. Says UCLA neuroscientist Dean Buonomano: "In order to understand the nature of the human mind, we must unravel the mystery of how the brain tells time, in both normal and pathological states."

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Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.

The three-day International Conference on Climate Change — organized by the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit group seeking deregulation and unfettered markets — brings together political figures, conservative campaigners, scientists, an Apollo astronaut and the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus.

Organizers say the discussions, which began Sunday, are intended to counter the Obama administration and Democratic lawmakers, who have vowed to tackle global warming with legislation requiring cuts in the greenhouse gases that scientists have linked to rising temperatures.

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Bionic Eye Gives Blind Man Sight
from BBC News Online

A man who lost his sight 30 years ago says he can now see flashes of light after being fitted with a bionic eye. Ron, 73, had the experimental surgery seven months ago at London's Moorfield's eye hospital.

He says he can now follow white lines on the road, and even sort socks, using the bionic eye, known as Argus II. It uses a camera and video processor mounted in sunglasses to send captured images wirelessly to a tiny receiver on the outside of the eye.

In turn, the receiver passes on the data via a tiny cable to an array of electrodes which sit on the retina—the layer of specialised cells that normally respond to light found at the back of the eye.

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New Life for 'Clean Coal' Project
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Deep inside the economic stimulus package is a $1 billion prize that, in five short words, shows the benefits of being in power in Washington.

The funding, for "fossil energy research and development," is likely to go to a power plant in a small Illinois town, a project whose longtime backers include a group of powerful lawmakers from the state, among them President Obama.

They were unable to prevent the "clean coal" research project known as FutureGen from being abruptly killed last year by the Bush administration, which had created it and promoted it across the world as an environmentally sound way to produce power. But now those same Illinois legislators ... control the White House and hold key leadership positions in Washington, and FutureGen is on the verge of resurrection.

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Carbon Capture and Storage: Trouble in Store
from the Economist

A recent American television advertisement features a series of trustworthy-looking individuals affirming their faith in the potential of "clean coal." ... The idea that clean coal, or to be more specific, a technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS), will save the world from global warming has become something of an article of faith among policymakers too.

CCS features prominently in all the main blueprints for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The Stern Review, a celebrated report on the economics of climate change, considers it "essential." It provides one of the seven tranches of emissions cuts proposed by Robert Socolow of Princeton University. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reckons the world will need over 200 power plants equipped with CCS by 2030 to limit the rise in average global temperatures to about 3°C—a bigger increase than many scientists would like.

...Despite all this enthusiasm, however, there is not a single big power plant using CCS anywhere in the world. Utilities refuse to build any, since the technology is expensive and unproven. ... In short, the world's leaders are counting on a fix for climate change that is at best uncertain and at worst unworkable.

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Obama Aims to Shield Science from Politics
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

When President Obama lifts restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell research today, he will also issue a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence, officials said yesterday.

"The president believes that it's particularly important to sign this memorandum so that we can put science and technology back at the heart of pursuing a broad range of national goals," Melody C. Barnes, director of Obama's Domestic Policy Council, told reporters during a telephone briefing yesterday.

Although officials would not go into details, the memorandum will order the Office of Science and Technology Policy to "assure a number of effective standards and practices that will help our society feel that we have the highest-quality individuals carrying out scientific jobs and that information is shared with the public," said Harold Varmus, who co-chairs Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

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Six Firms Stop Sales of Hard-Plastic Baby Bottles
from the San Francisco Chronicle

Bending to growing public and legal pressure that began in San Francisco, six major companies have agreed to stop selling hard-plastic baby bottles containing bisphenol A, an industrial chemical suspected of harming human development.

The purveyors of baby-care products—Playtex Products Inc., Gerber, Evenflo Co., Avent America Inc., Dr. Brown and Disney First Years—said they no longer will market the shatter-proof polycarbonate bottles and some other baby products in the United States.

Polycarbonate is made of bisphenol A, widely used in hundreds of commercial applications, including the inside lining of metal food and drink containers, epoxy resins and polyvinyl chloride plastics. ... Health officials cautious about possible ill effects believe that infants and children are at the greatest risk because of their quickly developing bodies and sensitive systems.

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Kitchen Pest Is a Hero to Scientists Meeting in Chicago
from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)

Buzzing with excitement, the "fly people" swarmed into Chicago last week to hear the latest news about an unsung hero of science: the humble fruit fly.

The public may see the insect mainly as a kitchen pest, but to the 1,500 scientists attending the 50th annual Drosophila Research Conference, Drosophila melanogaster is one of the most important research animals in genetics, an encyclopedia of knowledge packed into a critter a tenth of an inch long.

By breeding fruit flies, early 20th Century scientists figured out the location of genes controlling certain traits, creating the first crude genetic map. In 2000, Drosophila was one of the first multicellular organisms to have its genome fully sequenced, providing a full blueprint of the organism.

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"Nuclear Archaeologists" Find World War II Plutonium
from National Geographic News

A plutonium sample recently found at a U.S. waste dump is leftover from a batch used in 1945 for the world's first nuclear bomb test, a team of chemists has announced.

A nuclear waste cleanup team unearthed the 13.5-ounce (400-milliliter) sample in a waste pit at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, where it was sealed in a glass jar and enclosed in a safe.

The discovery highlights new techniques in the emerging field of nuclear archaeology that could become key factors in nuclear deterrence. Although the mysterious material was unearthed in 2004, its origins were unknown until the researchers used state-of-the art methods to identify its age and history.

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Food Problems Elude Private Inspectors
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

When food industry giants like Kellogg want to ensure that American consumers are being protected from contaminated products, they rely on private inspectors like Eugene A. Hatfield. So last spring Mr. Hatfield headed to the Peanut Corporation of America plant in southwest Georgia to make sure its chopped nuts, paste and peanut butter were safe to use in things as diverse as granola bars and ice cream.

... Mr. Hatfield, 66, an expert in fresh produce, was not aware that peanuts were readily susceptible to salmonella—which he was not required to test for anyway. And while Mr. Hatfield was inspecting the plant to reassure Kellogg and other food companies of its suitability as a supplier, the Peanut Corporation was paying for his efforts.

... With government inspectors overwhelmed by the task of guarding the nation's food supply, the job of monitoring food plants has in large part fallen to an army of private auditors like Mr. Hatfield. And the problems go well beyond peanuts.

http://snipurl.com/dg46q

[Kai]

March 17, 2009



Blobs in Photos of Mars Lander Stir a Debate: Are They Water?
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Several photographs taken by NASA's Phoenix Mars spacecraft show what look like water droplets clinging to one of its landing struts.

Some of the scientists working on the mission are asserting that that is exactly what they were. They contend that there are pockets of liquid water just under the Martian surface even though the temperatures in the northern plains never warmed above minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit during the six months of Phoenix's operations last year.

The scientists believe that salts may have lowered the freezing temperature of the Martian water droplets to perhaps minus 90 degrees, or more than 120 degrees colder than the usual freezing temperature of 32 degrees for pure water. Nilton O. Renno, a professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the University of Michigan who proposed the hypothesis, was careful to say, "This is not a proof."

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North America's Smallest Dino Predator
from Science News

Paleontologists rummaging through museum drawers in Canada have discovered the remains of North America's smallest carnivorous dinosaur--a theropod about the size of a chicken.

The first fossils of the 1.9-kilogram Hesperonychus elizabethae, which lived about 75 million years ago, were actually unearthed in southern Alberta in 1982, says Nicholas Longrich, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Calgary in Canada.

But they lay forgotten and unstudied until Longrich and colleague Phil Currie of the University of Alberta in Edmonton rediscovered them, along with the fragmentary remains of several other specimens, the team reports online March 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Therapy to Suppress Peanut Allergies Is Reported
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

After years of frustration, allergists meeting in Washington proclaimed a small but significant victory against life-threatening peanut allergies.

Five children, long urged to avoid peanuts like the plague, today tote peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in their lunch boxes, blithely share candy with friends and accept snacks at other people's homes without quizzing their hosts on the treats' ingredients.

The children appear to have lost their allergies, said Dr. Wesley Burks, a Duke University pediatric allergist who presented the results of two clinical trials Sunday at a meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.

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Twenty Years of the World Wide Web
from the Economist

"Information Management: A Proposal." That was the bland title of a document written in March 1989 by a then little-known computer scientist called Tim Berners-Lee who was working at CERN, Europe's particle physics laboratory, near Geneva.

Mr Berners-Lee is now, of course, Sir Timothy, and his proposal, modestly dubbed the World Wide Web, has fulfilled the implications of its name beyond the wildest dreams of anyone involved at the time.

In fact, the Web was invented to deal with a specific problem. In the late 1980s, CERN was planning one of the most ambitious scientific projects ever, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. ... As the first few lines of the original proposal put it, "Many of the discussions of the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question--'Yes, but how will we ever keep track of such a large project?'' This proposal provides an answer to such questions."

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Close Call Puts Focus on Traffic Jam in Space
from the Christian Science Monitor

Two Space Age surprises--a close encounter between the International Space Station and a speeding piece of space junk, and an earlier collision between a US and a Russian satellite--are adding urgency to the efforts to improve collision alerts and reduce risks from space debris.

Earlier this month, the US Air Force announced that it is designing a pilot program to extend a suite of satellite tracking and debris-related services to include civilian US and foreign satellite operators. The goal is to help operators reduce the possibility that their hardware could end up as space junk.

At the UN Conference on Disarmament, currently meeting in Geneva, the European Union offered a draft voluntary "code of conduct" for reducing the risk of collisions and lowering the likelihood of adding more junk to the spent rockets, dead satellites, paint chips, a tool bag and other detritus already orbiting Earth. Private groups have already been building and linking data from their own space-surveillance networks to provide information to satellite operators.

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The Fall and Rise of the Right Whale
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga.--The biologists had been in the plane for hours, flying back and forth over the calm ocean. They had seen dolphins, leatherback turtles, a flock of water birds called gannets and even a basking shark--but not what they were looking for.

Then Millie Brower, who was peering with intense concentration through a bubblelike window fitted into the plane's fuselage, announced "nine o'clock, about a mile off." The plane made a stomach-churning lurch as the pilots banked left and began to circle. And there, below, were a right whale mother and her new calf, barely breaking the surface, lolling in the swells.

The researchers, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Georgia Wildlife Trust, are part of an intense effort to monitor North Atlantic right whales, one of the most endangered, and closely watched, species on earth. As a database check eventually disclosed, the whale was Diablo, who was born in these waters eight years ago.

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Color Vision: How Our Eyes Reflect Primate Evolution
from Scientific American

To our eyes, the world is arrayed in a seemingly infinite splendor of hues, from the sunny orange of a marigold flower to the gunmetal gray of an automobile chassis, from the buoyant blue of a midwinter sky to the sparkling green of an emerald. It is remarkable, then, that for most human beings any color can be reproduced by mixing together just three fixed wavelengths of light at certain intensities.

This property of human vision, called trichromacy, arises because the retina, the layer of nerve cells in the eye that captures light and transmits visual information to the brain, uses only three types of light-absorbing pigments for color vision. One consequence of trichromacy is that computer and television displays can mix red, green and blue pixels to generate what we perceive as a full spectrum of color.

Although trichromacy is common among primates, it is not universal in the animal kingdom. ... How did it evolve? Building on decades of study, recent investigations into the genetics, molecular biology and neurophysiology of primate color vision have yielded some unexpected answers as well as surprising findings about the flexibility of the primate brain.

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Russia to Approve New Moon Rocket
from BBC News Online

Russian space officials are to select the winning proposal for a new rocket intended to carry cosmonauts on missions to the Moon.

This will mark the first time since 1964 that the Russian space programme has made the Moon its main objective. It will be only the second time since the collapse of the Soviet Union that Moscow has endorsed the development of a new space vehicle.

The rocket is expected to fly its first test mission in about 2015. According to the objectives given by the Russian space agency (Roscosmos) to industry, a future rocket should be able to hoist a payload three times heavier than Russia's veteran Soyuz spacecraft, including twice the number of crew, and use environmentally friendly propellants.

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Italy Dig Unearths Female 'Vampire' in Venice
from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

ROME (Associated Press)--An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws--evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be a vampire. The unusual burial is thought to be the result of an ancient vampire-slaying ritual. It suggests the legend of the mythical bloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance of how diseases spread and what happens to bodies after death, experts said.

The well-preserved skeleton was found in 2006 on the Lazzaretto Nuovo island, north of the lagoon city, amid other corpses buried in a mass grave during an epidemic of plague that hit Venice in 1576.

"Vampires don't exist, but studies show people at the time believed they did," said Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist at Florence University who studied the case over the last two years. "For the first time we have found evidence of an exorcism against a vampire."

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An Entertaining Chemist Proves Science Can Be Fun
from the Philadelphia Inquirer

Grand Hank--self-proclaimed world heavyweight champion of science--is donning his funky green safety goggles, bouncing from foot to foot, nodding as his assistant explains why it's important to keep safe in the lab. "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Science Lab of Grand Hank!" the champ says over a thumping rap beat, scratching invisible records.

And, via live television, Tyraine Ragsdale, better known by his DJ name, Grand Hank, is off. He's rapping, performing experiments, throwing out terms like centrifugal chromatography, and generally exhorting his audience of high school students to love science.

"You, too, can be a scientist!" he shouts. "Everybody can be a scientist!" Ragsdale, 43, a burly, gregarious chemist, knows the lines by heart. For the last two decades, he has been reaching out to students around the region, combining his two loves--music and science--to inspire young people to dream big.

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[Kai]

March 16, 2009



Fermilab Provides More Constraints on the Elusive Higgs Boson
from Scientific American

The Higgs particle, the last piece of the Standard Model of particle physics menagerie that has yet to be observed, is running out of places to hide--if, that is, it exists at all. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., today narrowed the range of mass where the Higgs might be found.

The Higgs boson, named for British physicist Peter Higgs, is believed to give other elementary particles, such as the heavy W and Z bosons, their mass, so finding it or proving it does not exist would have major implications in ground-up interpretations of how the world works.

"This is a very interesting time in particle physics, because we have this Standard Model, which explains everything we've observed and everything we know about for the last 30 years with no significant deviations. And, yet, we know that the Standard Model can't be the whole story of nature," says John S. Conway, a physicist at the University of California, Davis, and a member of the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration, one of two teams involved in the new mass-range results. ... "Whatever we discover," Conway adds, "it's going to be astounding."

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Concept of 'Hypercosmic God' Wins Templeton Prize
from New Scientist

Today the John Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the annual Templeton Prize of a colossal £1 million ($1.4 million), the largest annual prize in the world.

This year it goes to French physicist and philosopher of science Bernard d'Espagnat for his "studies into the concept of reality". D'Espagnat, 87, is a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Paris-Sud, and is known for his work on quantum mechanics. The award will be presented to him by the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace on 5 May.

D'Espagnat boasts an impressive scientific pedigree, having worked with Nobel laureates Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr. De Broglie was his thesis advisor; he served as a research assistant to Fermi; and he worked at CERN when it was still in Copenhagen under the direction of Bohr. He also served as a visiting professor at the University of Texas, Austin, at the invitation of the legendary physicist John Wheeler. But what has he done that's worth £1 million?

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Biochar: Is the Hype Justified?
from BBC News Online

Green guru James Lovelock claims that the only hope of mitigating catastrophic climate change is through biochar - biomass "cooked" by pyrolysis.

It produces gas for energy generation, and charcoal - a stable form of carbon. The charcoal is then buried in the ground, making the process "carbon negative".

Researchers say biochar can also improve farm productivity and cut demand for carbon-intensive fertilisers. There's a flurry of worldwide interest in the technology, but is the hype justified?

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Shuttle Discovery Lifts Off for Space Station
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. -- After a month of delays, the space shuttle Discovery and its crew of seven had a spectacularly uneventful liftoff on Sunday evening, rising into a cool, clear Florida twilight en route to the International Space Station.

The Discovery is carrying a last set of solar arrays for the space station and a replacement part for a water recycling system, needed to transform urine into drinkable water. NASA would like the recycling system fully functional before the station crew is expanded to six members from three, a move planned for late May.

The mission is commanded by Col. Lee J. Archambault of the Air Force. Also aboard are Cmdr. Dominic A. Antonelli of the Navy as pilot and Joseph M. Acaba, Richard R. Arnold II, John L. Phillips, Steven R. Swanson and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency as mission specialists.

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Airborne Pollution Dimming Skies around Much of the World
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON - The skies are dimming, for most of the world. Increases in airborne pollution have dimmed the skies by blocking sunlight over the past 30 years, researchers report in [Friday's] edition of the journal Science.

While decreases in atmospheric visibility - known as global dimming - have been reported in the past, the new study compiles satellite and land-based data for a longer period than had been available.

"Creation of this database is a big step forward for researching long-term changes in air pollution and correlating these with climate change," Kaicun Wang, assistant research scientist in the University of Maryland, said in a statement. "And it is the first time we have gotten global long-term aerosol information over land to go with information already available on aerosol measurements over the world's oceans."

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Preserving Languages Is about More Than Words
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

The traditional Irish language is everywhere this time of year, emblazoned on green T-shirts and echoing through pubs. But Irish, often called Gaelic in the United States, is one of thousands of "endangered languages" worldwide. Though it is Ireland's official tongue, there are only about 30,000 fluent speakers left, down from 250,000 when the country was founded in 1922.

Irish schools teach the language as a core subject, but outside a few enclaves in western Ireland, it is relatively rare for families to speak it at home.

"There's the gap between being able to speak Irish and actually speaking it on a daily basis," said Brian O'Conchubhair, an assistant professor of Irish studies at the University of Notre Dame who grew up learning Irish in school. "It's very hard to find it in the cities; it's like a hidden culture."

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Migraine Headaches Linked to the Weather
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

A variety of headache triggers are relatively well-known: red wine, chocolate, soft cheese and the beginning of the menstrual cycle. But although weather, especially changes in air pressure, is frequently cited as a headache trigger, the connection has not been shown in a large, well-designed study.

Now researchers have found that high temperatures and low air pressure can indeed trigger migraines but that there doesn't seem to be a clear association between such severe headaches and air pollution.

In a large study published online March 9 in the journal Neurology, researchers from Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Harvard School of Public Health decided to explore the role of pollution in headaches, because fine-particulate pollutants cause or complicate other health problems, such as heart attacks, stroke, congestive heart failure and asthma.

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Artificial Trees and Brightened Clouds May Help to Cool Us down
from the Times (London)

The threat of devastating climate change is now so great that some scientists say it is time to investigate a Plan B -- geo-engineering on a planetary scale.

Such methods of altering the world's climate may become necessary, they say, unless emissions of greenhouse gases fall within five years.

Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction -- such as creating artificial trees to absorb carbon dioxide, or reflecting sunlight away from the Earth -- are coming under serious scrutiny as temperatures and CO2 emissions continue to rise. The issue has become so pressing that the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, is preparing a report on the feasibility of geo-engineering.

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Google-Backed 23andMe Seeks Parkinson's Patients' Spit
from Bloomberg.com

23andMe, the gene-testing company backed by Google Inc., wants to collect DNA from the spit of 10,000 people with Parkinson's disease to hunt for common genes that may cause the illness or predict patients' response to drugs.

To entice patients to participate, the Mountain View, California-based company will offer to test them for $25, a fraction of the normal $399 fee. The quest is personal for Ann Wojcicki, who helped start 23andMe in 2006. Her husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has a gene variant that increases his risk of developing the neurological condition, which afflicts his mother.

One million North Americans and more than 4 million people worldwide have Parkinson's, which causes people to tremble, shake and lose control of their body's movements. The condition comes in different forms, and its causes are poorly understood, with a handful of genes known to increase the risk. 23andMe hopes to uncover others.

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Pushing back an Oxygen-Rich Atmosphere
from Science News

Tiny crystals of iron oxide in ancient Australian rocks offer evidence that the Earth's atmosphere held significant amounts of oxygen far earlier than previously thought, a new study suggests.

Large quantities of oxide minerals in rocks around the world indicate that the atmosphere had at least small amounts of oxygen by 2.2 billion years ago. And the presence of certain biomarkers in Australian rocks has been hailed as evidence that oxygen-making bacteria had evolved by 2.7 billion years ago, but recent studies have cast some doubt on that earlier date.

Now, analyses of rocks laid down 3.46 billion years ago in what is now Australia push back the oxygen era even further, Hiroshi Ohmoto, a geochemist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, and his colleagues contend online March 15 in Nature Geoscience.

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