Weekly Science Headlines

[Kai]

http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2009/09/science-versus-politics-in-germany.html More on this issue, from German research this time.

[Kai]

Don't have time for the comments right now, so I'm just posting these.

September 1, 2009

At 40, Internet Grows Stodgier
from the (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer

NEW YORK (Associated Press) -- Goofy videos weren't on the minds of Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA when they began tests 40 years ago on what would become the Internet. Neither was social networking, for that matter, nor were most of the other easy-to-use applications that have drawn more than a billion people online.

Instead, the researchers sought to create an open network for freely exchanging information. That openness ultimately spurred the innovation that would later spawn the likes of YouTube, Facebook and the World Wide Web.

There's still plenty of room for innovation, yet the openness may be eroding. Though the Internet is more widely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threaten to constrict its growth. Call it a midlife crisis.

http://snipr.com/riq7w




After the Transistor, a Leap Into the Microcosm
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. -- Gaze into the electron microscope display in Frances Ross's laboratory here and it is possible to persuade yourself that Dr. Ross, a 21st-century materials scientist, is actually a farmer in some Lilliputian silicon world.

Dr. Ross, an I.B.M. researcher, is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics. Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster and more powerful than today's transistors.

The reason that many computer scientists are pursuing this goal is that the shrinking of the transistor has approached fundamental physical limits.

http://snipr.com/riqen




Glyptodonts Were Savvy Batters
from ScienceNOW Daily News

What do ancient armored mammals have in common with Babe Ruth? They both took advantage of the "sweet spot."

New research suggests that some species of giant mammals called glyptodonts swung their hefty tails like baseball bats, landing powerful blows with the spot on their tails that minimizes potentially harmful vibrations for the slugger.

... Relatives of modern-day armadillos, glyptodonts arose in South America some 20 million years ago and lived until about 10,000 years ago. They sported a turtlelike shell and heavy armor on their heads and tails. The largest species were massive.

http://snipr.com/riqfa




Environmentalists Slow to Adjust in Climate Debate
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

ATHENS, Ohio -- The oil lobby was sponsoring rallies with free lunches, free concerts and speeches warning that a climate-change bill could ravage the U.S. economy. Professional "campaigners" hired by the coal industry were giving away T-shirts praising coal-fired power.

But when environmentalists showed up in this college town--closer than ever to congressional passage of a climate-change bill, in the middle of the green movement's biggest political test in a generation--they provided ... a sedate panel discussion. And they gave away stickers.

Next month, the Senate is expected to take up legislation that would cap greenhouse-gas emissions. ... It seems that environmentalists are struggling in a fight they have spent years setting up.

http://snipr.com/riqg8




'Synthetic Biology' Holds Promise, but Doubts Simmer
from USA Today

"Plastics" may have been the Baby Boomer watchword, but "synthetic" rules today. That's "synthetic" as in synthetic biology, the hottest biomedical buzzword, promising new drugs, new fuel and someday, new life.

"If we can make life, then we understand it," says molecular biologist Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla. Starting with the building blocks of animal and plant cells, synthetic biologists are reengineering living things today and hope to create synthetic life tomorrow. The ultimate goal, Benner says, is "synthesizing life from scratch."

That makes experts ... hopeful and cautious at the same time about the promise and peril of the field.

http://snipr.com/riqi8




Single Molecule's Stunning Image
from BBC News Online

The detailed chemical structure of a single molecule has been imaged for the first time, say researchers. The physical shape of single carbon nanotubes has been outlined before, using similar techniques--but the new method even shows up chemical bonds.

Understanding structure on this scale could help in the design of many things on the molecular scale, particularly electronics or even drugs. The IBM researchers report their findings in the journal Science.

It is the same group that in July reported the feat of measuring the charge on a single atom. In both cases, a team from IBM Research Zurich used what is known as an atomic force microscope or AFM.

http://snipr.com/riqj3




Scientists Search for Signs of Climate Calamity
from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)

MACKENZIE RIVER DELTA, Northwest Territories (Associated Press) -- Only a squawk from a sandhill crane broke the Arctic silence--and a low gurgle of bubbles, a watery whisper of trouble repeated in countless spots around the polar world.

"On a calm day, you can see 20 or more 'seeps' out across this lake," said Canadian researcher Rob Bowen, sidling his small rubber boat up beside one of them. A tossed match would have set it ablaze. "It's essentially pure methane."

Pure methane, gas bubbling up from underwater vents, escaping into northern skies, adds to the global-warming gases accumulating in the atmosphere. And pure methane escaping in the massive amounts known to be locked in the Arctic permafrost and seabed would spell a climate catastrophe. Is such an unlocking under way?

http://snipr.com/riqjl




Ecosystems Not as Fragile as They Look
from the Economist

Conventional wisdom is often a poor guide. For one thing it suggests that human damage to the world's species, habitats and ecosystems is terminal: that when things are lost, they are lost for ever.

But oil spills of the sort that now threaten the Timor Sea, forest fires like those that recently afflicted Greece, and other man-made and man-assisted threats to wildlife are transient. Except in those cases in which a species is driven to extinction, the Earth's ability to shrug such things off is often underestimated.

Alan Weisman shows this in his book, The World Without Us, which illustrates nature's great capacity to recover. Have mankind abducted by aliens or wiped out by some Homo sapiens-specific virus, and nature, Mr. Weisman reckons, would reclaim its territory with surprising speed ...

http://snipr.com/riqk0




Controversial Hemoglobin Substitutes on Life Support
from Scientific American

Efforts to develop blood substitutes that could be used to treat soldiers or trauma victims in remote settings have held great promise as a way to infuse oxygen-carrying liquids into patients, thereby saving their lives when real or safe blood is in short supply.

Biotech companies have even come up with long shelf life replacements that would work for all blood types without the need for refrigeration.

The companies developing these hemoglobin-based blood substitutes, however, are now fighting for their own lives--enduring failures and financial hardships in order to stay in business long enough to see their creations come to market.

http://snipr.com/riqkl




Booming Middle-Class Diet May Stress Asia's Water Needs
from National Geographic News

The beefed-up diets of Asia's expanding middle class could lead to chronic food shortages for the water-stressed region, scientists said at a global water conference in Sweden last week.

Asia's growing economy and appetite for meat will require a radical overhaul of farmland irrigation to feed a population expected to swell to 1.4 billion by 2050, experts warned at Stockholm's World Water Week.

The threat was highlighted in a study by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which estimate that Asian demand for food and livestock fodder will double in 40 years.

http://snipr.com/riql5

[Kai]

September 4, 2009



A Manifesto for the Planet
from Seed

Stewart Brand is a rare breed of environmentalist: in his own words, "an ecologist by training, a futurist by profession, and a hacker (lazy engineer) at heart." In the 60s, Brand campaigned against nuclear power and staged a "Hunger Show" to dramatize the global famine predicted by his mentor, Paul Ehrlich, but he also began printing a decidedly pro-technology handbook for saving the planet.

Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, was premised on the notion that given the right information, tools, and awareness, people could--and would--create a more sustainable world. It was, many have said, the beginning of environmentalism.

Since that time, Brand's own views on core "green issues," from atomic energy to genetic engineering, have shifted under the weight of scientific evidence. Rather than quietly backpedal, Brand has now issued a bold challenge to the very movement he helped create: Can you forsake ideology for the good of the planet? Whole Earth Discipline contains every reason why they should ...

http://snipr.com/rlo92



Many Colleges Reporting Swine Flu
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

More than half of the nation's colleges and universities tracking swine flu cases are reporting infected students, with more than 1,600 cases within the first weeks of classes, a medical group said Wednesday.

The American College Health Association, in the first of what will be weekly reports on swine flu activity, said 55 percent of 165 institutions surveyed counted a total of 1,640 cases as of the week of Aug. 22-28. So far, one student has been hospitalized and no deaths have been reported, the group said. The 165 institutions represent more than 2 million students.

... "Fortunately, it appears that at this early stage the illness remains relatively mild among college students," said James C. Turner, the health association's president and executive director of the Department of Student Health at the University of Virginia.

http://snipr.com/rlobg



Vast Shift in Bird Species Expected from Warming
from the San Francisco Chronicle

Birds of a feather will no longer flock together, and some California species will face extinction as a result of global warming, according to a study released Tuesday by PRBO Conservation Science.

The study, which predicts how birds in California will adapt to changing climatic conditions, says there will be a dramatic change in the pecking order of the avian world over the next 60 years.

In one fell swoop, the changes in bird habitats and behavior between now and 2070 will equal the evolutionary and adaptive shifts that normally occur over tens of thousands of years, according to researchers with PRBO, also known as the Point Reyes Bird Observatory.

http://snipr.com/rlocu



Global Warming Could Forestall Ice Age
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The human-driven buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere appears to have ended a slide, many millenniums in the making, toward cooler summer temperatures in the Arctic, the authors of a new study report.

Scientists familiar with the work, to be published Friday in the journal Science, said it provided fresh evidence that human activity is not only warming the globe, particularly the Arctic, but could also even fend off what had been presumed to be an inevitable descent into a new ice age over the next few dozen millenniums.

The reversal of the slow cooling trend in the Arctic, recorded in samples of layered lakebed mud, glacial ice and tree rings from Alaska to Siberia, has been swift and pronounced, the team writes.

http://snipr.com/rloed



Scientists Seek Warning Signs for Catastrophic Tipping Points
from Wired

Tipping points are found in ecosystems, economies and even bodies. But they're usually recognized in retrospect, when it's too late for anything but regret. Now a growing body of research suggests there are telltale mathematical signals. If scientists can figure out how to detect them, they may be able to forecast tipping points ahead of time.

... In 1982, physicist Kenneth Wilson won a Nobel Prize for developing equations to describe transitions that don't happen in a linear, easily predictable way, but are sudden and massive, such as fluids becoming turbulent and metals becoming magnetized.

Since then, scientists have noticed similar shifts elsewhere. The theory provides the only models that make sense of the Sahara's sudden flip from fertile grassland to sandy wastes some 5,500 years ago. Exploited fish populations fluctuate wildly. Futures prices on the S&P 500 displayed telltale skewing in the year preceding the 1987 stock market crash. The proposition is by no means certain, but the possibility of being able to predict these sorts of events is tantalizing.

http://snipr.com/rlofd



Reboot for UK's 'Oldest' Computer
from BBC News Online

Britain's oldest original computer, the Harwell, is being sent to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley where it is to be restored to working order.

The computer, which was designed in 1949, first ran in 1951 and was designed to perform mathematical calculations; it lasted until 1973. When first built the 2.4m x 5m computer was state-of-the-art, although it was superseded by transistor-based systems.

The restoration project is expected to take a year. The system was built and used by staff at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire.

http://snipr.com/rloga



Royal Society Warns Climate Engineering 'Could Cause Disaster'
from the Times (London)

Giant engineering schemes to reflect sunlight or suck carbon dioxide from the air could be the only way to save the Earth from runaway global warming, according to a group of leading scientists. But they say that these schemes could have their own catastrophic consequences, such as disrupting rainfall patterns, and should be deployed only as a last resort if attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fail.

The Royal Society, a fellowship of 1,400 of the world's most eminent scientists, published a report Tuesday on the feasibility and possible dangers of technologies for cooling down the Earth, known as geoengineering.

The ideas include artificial trees that draw CO2 from the air and mimicking volcanoes by spraying sulphate particles a few miles above the Earth to deflect the Sun's rays. The most far-fetched would would be to launch trillions of small mirrors into space to act as a sunshield.

http://snipr.com/rloh7



Israeli Archaeologists Find Ancient Fortification
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

JERUSALEM (Associated Press) -- Archaeologists digging in Jerusalem have uncovered a 3,700-year-old wall that is the oldest example of massive fortifications ever found in the city, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Wednesday.

The 26-foot-high wall is believed to have been part of a protected passage built by ancient Canaanites from a hilltop fortress to a nearby spring that was the city's only water source and vulnerable to marauders.

The discovery marks the first time archaeologists have found such massive construction from before the time of Herod, the ruler behind numerous monumental projects in the city 2,000 years ago, and shows that Jerusalem of the Middle Bronze Age had a powerful population capable of complex building projects, said Ronny Reich, director of the excavation and an archaeology professor at the University of Haifa.

http://snipr.com/rlohx



When Does Consciousness Arise in Human Babies?
from Scientific American

... How do we know that a newly born and healthy infant is conscious? There is no question that the baby is awake. Its eyes are wide open, it wriggles and grimaces, and, most important, it cries. But all that is not the same as being conscious, of experiencing pain, seeing red or smelling Mom's milk.

It is well recognized that infants have no awareness of their own state, emotions and motivations. Even older children who can speak have very limited insight into their own actions. Anybody who has raised a boy is familiar with the blank look on your teenager's face when you ask him why he did something particularly rash.

... Although a newborn lacks self-awareness, the baby processes complex visual stimuli and attends to sounds and sights in its world, preferentially looking at faces. The infant's visual acuity permits it to see only blobs, but the basic thalamo-cortical circuitry necessary to support simple visual and other conscious percepts is in place. And linguistic capacities in babies are shaped by the environment they grow up in. ... But when does the magical journey of consciousness begin?

http://snipr.com/rlojn



Andromeda Galaxy Is Cosmic Cannibal
from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Our nearest major galactic neighbor is a cosmic cannibal. And it's heading this way eventually.

Astronomers have long suspected Andromeda of being a space predator, consuming dwarf galaxies that wander too close. Now, cosmic detectives are doing a massive search of the neighborhood and have found proof of Andromeda's sordid past: They've spotted leftovers in Andromeda's wake.

Early results of a massive telescope scan of Andromeda and its surroundings found about half a dozen remnants of Andromeda's galactic appetite. Stars and dwarf galaxies that got too close to Andromeda were ripped from their usual surroundings. ... The report was published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.

http://snipr.com/rlolg

[Kai]

 September 9, 2009

 


Scientists Begin Census of Microbes That Live in or on Us
from the Miami Herald (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Scientists are beginning a large-scale effort to identify and analyze the vast majority of cells in or on your body that aren't of human origin.

Only about 10 percent of the trillions of cells that make up a person are truly human, researchers say. The other 90 percent are bacteria, viruses and other microbes swarming in your gut and on your skin.

... Most of these microbes are harmless, researchers say. Many are necessary to life and health. A troublesome minority, however, can cause everything from teenage acne and obesity to autism and cancer.

http://snipurl.com/rpevv


How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
from the New York Times Magazine (Registration Required)

It's hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes -- or so they believed -- were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession.

On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. ... And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the "central problem of depression-prevention has been solved," declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association.

... Last year, everything came apart. Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field's problems. More important was the profession's blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.

http://snipurl.com/rpey5


NASA's Goals and Budget Not in the Same Orbit, Report Says
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

A special advisory committee on the future of America's manned spaceflight program delivered a report to the White House on Tuesday that could help launch the country on an Apollo-style adventure to Mars, but which also warned that any ambitious program of exploration would require big infusions of cash.

Without a significant boost in NASA's budget, not only will it be impossible to return to the moon by the goal of 2020, but astronauts might not be able to go at all, according to the report by the Human Space Flight Plans Committee. "Under the current budget, you'd never get there," said committee chairman Norman Augustine, a former chief executive at Lockheed Martin.

The panel, made up of former astronauts and space entrepreneurs, was appointed by President Obama this spring to review the Bush administration's Vision for Space Exploration, analyze NASA's agenda and come up with alternatives. The present plan, outlined in 2004, called for a return to the moon by 2020, the establishment of a lunar outpost and, decades later, human travel to Mars.

http://snipurl.com/rpezs


From Three to Four Chambers
from Science News

Lizards and turtles are not warm and cuddly, but they do have hearts -- and interesting ones, at that. One molecular difference in reptile hearts may have divided single ventricles into two, creating four-chambered hearts from three-chambered ones as species evolved, a study published in the Sept. 3 Nature finds.

"The major question has been, what drove the evolution of the four-chambered heart?" comments James Hicks, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine. Results from the new study "could lead to a deeper understanding of the fundamental factors involved in heart development," he says.

Amphibians have three-chambered hearts made up of two top chambers, atria, and one bottom chamber, the ventricle. Mammals and birds have two atria and two ventricles, with ventricles separated by a muscular ridge called a septum.

http://snipurl.com/rpf0h


Cow Manure, Other Homegrown Energy Powering U.S. Farms
from National Geographic News

From wind to sun to cow pies, farm-based natural resources are supplying an increasing number of U.S. farmers with homegrown sources of renewable energy.

Farm-based energy can save money and even become a new source of income by powering nearby homes, for instance. Traditional energy sources are expensive: In 2008 fuel and fertilizers--which are largely made from natural gas--accounted for 12.5 percent of all farm expenses.

Homegrown energy may also lessen the impact on the environment by avoiding fossil fuels. Food production--not counting factors such as processing and shipping--accounts for one to 3 percent of U.S. energy consumption and about 7 percent of its direct greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the nonprofit National Center for Appropriate Technology.

http://snipurl.com/rpf21


Diamonds Are for Softies - Boron Is Harder
from New Scientist

You don't often break a diamond. So when in 2003 Dave Mao cracked a tooth of his diamond anvil, he knew something extraordinary must have happened. Together with his daughter Wendy and other colleagues at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, he was using the device to test materials at pressures many millions of times higher than those at the Earth's surface - higher even than in our planet's core - by squeezing them between two tiny diamond jaws.

Behind the glitz, diamond is just a form of carbon. It is, however, by common consent the hardest material known. The substance in the Maos' test cell had also begun as pure carbon. It was plain old graphite - the soft, slippery stuff that is used for pencil leads and lubricants. Clearly, something had happened in the anvil cell to make it awesomely hard.

It seemed the Maos might accidentally have succeeded where many before had failed. Had they made the first superhard material that matched or even surpassed diamond? Probably not, as it turned out. Six years and several twists later, though, that feat might at last have been achieved, though not with pure carbon. If the latest reports are right, the hardness crown has changed hands at last.

http://snipurl.com/rpf3b


Can a Computer Be Programmed to Be Cunning Yet Fallible?
from the Economist

If a computer could fool a person into thinking that he were interacting with another person rather than a machine, then it could be classified as having artificial intelligence. That, at least, was the test proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, a British mathematician. Turing envisaged a typed exchange between machine and person, so that a genuine conversation could happen without the much harder problem of voice emulation having to be addressed.

More recently, the abilities of computers to play games such as chess, go and bridge has been regarded as a form of artificial intelligence. But the latest effort to use machines to emulate the way people interact with one another focuses neither on natural languages nor traditional board and card games. Rather, it concentrates on that icon of modernity, the shoot-'em-up computer game.

At a symposium on computational intelligence and games organised in Milan this week by America's Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, researchers are taking part in a competition called the 2K BotPrize. The aim is to trick human judges into thinking they are playing against other people in such a game.

http://snipurl.com/rpf4p


Hanging on, Bearly
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

Unlike some of its ursine cousins, the Andean bear is not one to make a spectacle of itself. It is not particularly big. A male adult rarely gets much heavier than 400 pounds and 6 feet in length, and females are considerably smaller. By comparison, an adult male polar bear typically exceeds 1,000 pounds in weight and 8 feet in length.

Nor do Andean bears necessarily inspire fear or immediate awe. Unlike, say, the grizzly bear, which is too large to escape perceived threats and so tends to defend itself aggressively, Andean bears are extremely capable climbers, preferring to run from danger and hide in treetops.

... Nonetheless, Andean bears (Tremarctos ornatus) are singular creatures. They are the last surviving member of the subfamily Tremarctinae and the only indigenous bear species in South America. But maybe for not much longer.

http://snipurl.com/rpf6o


Implant Gives New Hope to the Blind
from the Philadelphia Inquirer

At first, sitting in church one Sunday, Michael Adler couldn't tell what the whitish glow in front of him was. Adler, 49, had been legally blind since childhood, and his vision eventually deteriorated to pretty much zero.

But now, on the back of the pew in front of him, he saw something. And then he realized: It was the pages of a hymnal. His new "eye" was starting to work.

Two months earlier at Wills Eye Institute, surgeons had implanted a small array of electrodes in the back of Adler's left eye - a speck of metal no bigger than the word eye on this page. In the last few weeks - with the aid of a small video camera in his sunglasses that transmits images to his retinal implant - he has begun to gain some limited vision.

http://snipurl.com/rpf7z


A Clash of Polar Frauds and Those Who Believe
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

In September 1909, Dr. Frederick A. Cook and Robert E. Peary each returned from the Arctic with a tale of having reached the North Pole. Neither provided any solid proof or corroborating testimony; both told vague stories with large gaps. They couldn't even convincingly explain how they had plotted their routes across the polar ice.

Yet each explorer's claim immediately attracted its supporters, and no amount of contradictory evidence in the ensuing years would be enough to dissuade the faithful. A century later, the "discovery" of the North Pole may qualify as the most successful fraud in modern science, as well as the longest-running case study of a psychological phenomenon called "motivated reasoning."

The believers who have kept writing books and mounting expeditions to vindicate Cook or Peary resemble the political partisans recently studied by psychologists and sociologists. When the facts get in the way of our beliefs, our brains are marvelously adept at dispensing with the facts.

http://snipurl.com/rpf9f

[Kai]

September 8, 2009


Study Finds Risk to Some Birds Nesting Near Oil Fields in Alaska
from New York Times (Registration Required)

As oil and gas companies press to tap new deposits in remote places, scientists are trying to gauge and limit the ecological impact of pipes and other structures in otherwise wild lands.

Nowhere is that effort more intense than on the Arctic coastal plain of the North Slope of Alaska -- a Maine-size stretch of open lands that is snow-blown and ice sheathed in winter, but a verdant breeding ground for caribou and millions of birds in summer.

Since oil was discovered 40 years ago, 1,000 square miles of the plain have become peppered with wells and laced with pipes. In response to research on caribou, pipelines were elevated 10 feet in hundreds of places so herds could pass unimpeded.

http://snipurl.com/ro15k


Where Did All the Flowers Come From?
from New York Times (Registration Required)

Throughout his life, Charles Darwin surrounded himself with flowers. When he was 10, he wrote down each time a peony bloomed in his father's garden. When he bought a house to raise his own family, he turned the grounds into a botanical field station where he experimented on flowers until his death. But despite his intimate familiarity with flowers, Darwin once wrote that their evolution was "an abominable mystery."

Darwin could see for himself how successful flowering plants had become. They make up the majority of living plant species, and they dominate many of the world's ecosystems, from rain forests to grasslands. They also dominate our farms. Out of flowers come most of the calories humans consume, in the form of foods like corn, rice and wheat. Flowers are also impressive in their sheer diversity of forms and colors, from lush, full-bodied roses to spiderlike orchids to calla lilies shaped like urns.

The fossil record, however, offered Darwin little enlightenment about the early evolution of flowers. At the time, the oldest fossils of flowering plants came from rocks that had formed from 100 million to 66 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. Paleontologists found a diversity of forms, not a few primitive forerunners.

http://snipurl.com/ro2sh


H1N1 Flu Unlikely to Recombine with Seasonal Flu
from Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

A new study eases fears that the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus will recombine with seasonal flu to mutate into a more lethal form. The study, reported in the online journal PLoS Currents, shows that the pandemic virus, commonly known as swine flu, grows much faster than seasonal flu viruses and is thus less likely to exchange genetic material with them.

Virologist Daniel Perez of the University of Maryland and his colleagues grew the virus in ferrets, which are considered the best animal model for influenza because their respiratory system is very similar to that of humans. They co-infected the animals with the pandemic H1N1 virus and one of two seasonal flu viruses circulating now (a different H1N1 virus or an H3N2 virus). The animals were sickened by both the viruses, but only the swine flu virus went on to infect other ferrets.

"The H1N1 pandemic virus has a clear biological advantage over the two main seasonal flu strains," Perez said. "I'm not surprised to find that the pandemic virus is more infectious, simply because it is new, so hosts haven't had a chance to build immunity yet."

http://snipurl.com/ro2gj


Women's Weight-loss Surgery May Help Kids
from Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

An overweight woman who has weight-loss surgery before becoming pregnant may help break the cycle of obesity in her family, according to a new study.

Researchers found that children born to women who had weight-loss surgery before pregnancy have improved heart health and a lower risk of obesity compared with their siblings who were born before the mother had surgery. The study was published last week in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Previous research shows a woman's weight and her tendency to develop diabetes and heart disease can influence the long-term health of her fetus, predisposing the child to metabolic problems related to obesity. Obese young women who are planning to have children some day should try to lose weight through weight-loss surgery or behavioral changes, said the lead investigator, Dr. John Kral, a professor of surgery and medicine at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn.

http://snipurl.com/ro2i8


Heart Study Finds Key Gene to Warm-bloodedness
from San Francisco Chronicle

A San Francisco researcher investigating a rare but serious heart defect in newborns has discovered a major genetic factor that makes us the warm-blooded creatures we are.

Finding the genetic factor meant studying the cardiac systems of turtles and lizards, engineering the genes of specially bred mice, and investigating a congenital disorder known as "holes in the heart," or, in medical terms, ventricular septal defect.

The research by Benoit G. Bruneau of the Gladstone Institute for Cardiovascular Disease was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

http://snipurl.com/ro2j2


Once Worthy of Shakespeare, The Starling Becomes a U.S. Pest
SALT LAKE CITY -- The next time the sky darkens with a flock of noisy, unwelcome starlings, blame Shakespeare -- or, better yet, a few of his strangest fans.

Had the Bard not mentioned the starling in the third scene of "Henry IV," arguably the most hated bird in North America might never have arrived. In the early 1890s, about 100 European starlings were released in New York City's Central Park by a group dedicated to bringing to America every bird ever mentioned by Shakespeare.

Today, it's more like Hitchcock. About 200 million shiny black European starlings crowd North America, from the cool climes of Alaska to the balmy reaches of Mexico's Baja Peninsula. The enormous flocks endanger air travel, mob cattle operations, chase off native songbirds and roost on city blocks, leaving behind corrosive, foul-smelling droppings and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage each year.

http://snipurl.com/ro2ky


Scientists Discover 3 More Genes With Links to Alzheimer's Disease
from The Washington Post (Registration Required)

Two European research teams have identified three genes that affect a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, the most common cause of dementia in the elderly.

The new genes appear to have at least as big a role as four others discovered in the last 15 years that are known to play a role in Alzheimer's.

...The new findings, reported Sunday in the journal Nature Genetics, will have no immediate consequence in either diagnosis or treatment of the disease. However, they will help illuminate a process that goes on for years or even decades before memory loss, the cardinal symptom of the disease, becomes apparent.

http://snipurl.com/ro2mc


Post-wildfire Worries: Floods, Damaged Ecosystem
from Yahoo News

LOS ANGELES (Associated Press) - Southern California's huge wildfire has turned nearly a quarter of the 1,000-square-mile Angeles National Forest into a moonscape of barren mountains looming above thousands of homes that now face the threat of flash floods and mudslides.

Experts are already evaluating the extent of risk to lives and property as well as the impacts of the wildfire on a forest ecosystem that in some areas may not have burned in at least a century.

Sprawled across the San Gabriel Mountains, the Angeles is both a playground for millions in greater Los Angeles and a true wilderness ranging from arid desert to alpine forests and peaks topping 10,000 feet. Skiers dare its steeps in winter; bears wander out of its chaparral cloak in summer for dips in suburban pools.

http://snipurl.com/ro2pi


Vaccine hope after animal leukaemia virus linked to prostate cancer
from The Times (London)

A virus known to cause leukaemia in animals has been linked to human prostate cancer, suggesting that the disease may have a viral origin.

If correct, the finding may lead to more effective screening and vaccination to prevent men from developing the disease.

The main known risk factors for prostate cancer are genetic susceptibility, old age and poor diet. But research suggests that men infected with XMRV, the xenotropic murine leukaemia virus-related virus, may also be more likely to develop the cancer.

http://snipurl.com/ro2qa


Girl Brain, Boy Brain?
from Scientific American

Sex differences in the brain are sexy. As MRI scanning grows ever more sophisticated, neuroscientists keep refining their search for male-female brain differences that will answer the age-old question, "Why can't a woman think like a man?" (and vice-versa).

Social cognition is one realm in which the search for brain sex differences should be especially fruitful. Females of all ages outperform males on tests requiring the recognition of emotion or relationships among other people. Sex differences in empathy emerge in infancy and persist throughout development, though the gap between adult women and men is larger than between girls and boys. The early appearance of any sex difference suggests it is innately programmed--selected for through evolution and fixed into our behavioral development through either prenatal hormone exposure or early gene expression differences. On the other hand, sex differences that grow larger through childhood are likely shaped by social learning, a consequence of the very different lifestyle, culture and training that boys and girls experience in every human society.

At first glance, studies of the brain seem to offer a way out of this age-old nature/nurture dilemma. Any difference in the structure or activation of male and female brains is indisputably biological. However, the assumption that such differences are also innate or "hardwired" is invalid, given all we've learned about the plasticity, or malleability of the brain. Simply put, experiences change our brains.

http://snipurl.com/ro2qx

[Kai]

September 14, 2009




Norman Borlaug, Father of Green Revolution, Dies at 95
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Norman Borlaug, the father of the "Green Revolution" who is widely credited with saving millions of lives by breeding wheat, rice and other crops that brought agricultural self-sufficiency to developing countries around the world, died Saturday in Texas. He was 95.

Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and was hailed by Time magazine in 1999 as one of the 100 most influential minds of the 20th century, died at his home in Dallas from complications of cancer, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman said.

In the 1940s, when the specter of famine was stalking much of the world, Borlaug collected thousands of strains of wheat from around the globe and tediously crossbred them to produce varieties that were much higher yielding and resistant to the diseases that were destroying crops.

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Better World: Learn to Love Genetic Engineering
from New Scientist

By 2040 there could well be 9 billion people on the planet. The challenge, as oil runs out and climate change kicks in, is not just to grow enough food to feed so many people but to do it without wreaking more havoc on the planet.

It won't be easy. Farming causes more global warming than all the world's cars, trains, ships and planes put together. The worst culprit is a greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide, a breakdown product of nitrogen fertilisers (including organic ones). Next in line is methane from livestock and manure. ...

Genetic engineering could make matters far worse. For instance, Craig Venter's Synthetic Genomics and other companies are trying to develop microbes that turn coal, tar shale and oil into methane. This could greatly increase greenhouse emissions ... Like any technology, however, genetic modification could also be put to positive use.

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Python "Nightmare": New Giant Species Invading Florida
from National Geographic News

Already squeezed by the invasion of the giant Burmese python, Florida now faces what one scientist calls one of the U.S. state's "worst nightmares."

Africa's largest snake--the ill-tempered, 20-foot-long (6.1-meter long) African rock python--is colonizing the U.S. state, new discoveries suggest. Six African rock pythons have been found in Florida since 2002. More troubling, a pregnant female and two hatchlings have been found, which means the aggressive reptiles have set up house.

More dangerous than even Burmese pythons--which are known to eat alligators--the African pythons are "so mean, they come out of the egg striking," said Kenneth Krysko, senior herpetologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

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Apollo Moon Rocks Lost in Space? No, Lost on Earth
from the San Diego Union-Tribune

AMSTERDAM (Associated Press) -- Attention, countries of the world: Do you know where your moon rocks are?

The discovery of a fake moon rock in the Netherlands' national museum should be a wake-up call for more than 130 countries that received gifts of lunar rubble from both the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 and Apollo 17 three years later.

Nearly 270 rocks scooped up by U.S. astronauts were given to foreign countries by the Nixon administration. But according to experts and research by The Associated Press, the whereabouts of some of the small rocks are unknown.

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Science Was a Muse to Inspire Romantic Art
from NPR

In a letter dated 1800, the great Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, "I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark." John Keats' famous 1816 sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" celebrated the recent discovery of Uranus--the first new planet to be found in more than a thousand years. In fact, says author Richard Holmes, the scientific discoveries of the Romantic age inspired generations of great artists and their work.

Holmes is the author of the book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. He says the book is constructed as a "relay race" of scientific stories that span the years between botanist Joseph Banks' voyage to Tahiti in 1769 and Charles Darwin's journey to the Galapagos in 1831.

"For most people, this period really is the great Romantic period in literature, which we associate with Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley and Byron and Keats," Holmes [says]. "But it gradually became clear to me that the scientific breakthroughs in this period had a major effect on how people saw the world and the universe and also how people wrote about it."

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NASA Chooses Moon Crater for Crash of Rocket
from the San Francisco Chronicle

NASA scientists have chosen a spot inside a small and deeply shadowed crater on the moon for the programmed crash of a spacecraft they hope will reveal quantities of water ice locked in the lunar depths.

Mission scientists at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View announced Friday that they plan to aim a rocket carried by the unmanned spacecraft named LCROSS at a single, flat "sweet spot" inside a 25-mile-wide crater called Cabeus A near the moon's South Pole.

LCROSS is orbiting the moon, carrying the upper-stage Centaur rocket that sent it into space less than four months ago. On Oct. 9 at 4:30 a.m., the Ames team will send that 2-ton rocket crashing precisely into the target to send up a cloud of dust and debris more than 6 miles high.

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Citation Amnesia: Not Good for Our Health
from Science News

VANCOUVER, B.C. -- Researchers today (September 12) reported uncovering a type of latent epidemic amnesia among certain biomedical scientists.

The at-risk population: researchers testing new therapies on large groups of people. The chief symptom: Affected researchers write up their findings but neglect to put them into context by mentioning earlier human trials on the same topic.

Implications: Studies exhibiting this citation amnesia (a term apparently coined decades ago by Robert Merton of Columbia University) risk diminishing the apparent "weight of evidence" that's already accumulated on how good, bad or limited a therapy is.

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Xbox Speeds Up Research Results
from BBC News Online

Researchers have harnessed the powerful silicon chips used in the Xbox 360 console to solve scientific conundrums.

Academics at the University of Warwick believe they are the first to use the processors as a cheap way to conduct "parallel processing." Parallel computing is where a number of processors are run in tandem, allowing a system to rapidly crunch data.

Researchers traditionally have to book time on a dedicated "cluster" system or splash out setting up a network of PCs. Instead, the Warwick team harnessed a single Xbox 360 Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). The chip was able to perform parallel processing functions at a fraction of the cost a traditional systems.

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Surgical Robots Operate With Precision
from Wired

Dread going the doctor? It could be worse. Your next physician could have the bedside manner of a robot. In fact, your next physician could be a robot. Scared yet?

Surgeons and medical engineers have been trying to create machines that can assist in surgery, increase a surgeon's dexterity and support hospital staff. These aren't humanoid robots but computer controlled systems that have been optimized for use in sensitive situations. An exhibition called Sci-fi Surgery: Medical Robots, opening this week at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, shows a range of robots used in medicine.

"Industrial robots appeared in factories in the early 1960s and robots have become an important part of space exploration," says Sarah Pearson, curator of the exhibition. "But robots have been comparatively slow to be used in medicine because surgeons haven't felt comfortable with them."

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Wall Street's Math Wizards Forgot a Few Variables
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

In the aftermath of the great meltdown of 2008, Wall Street's quants have been cast as the financial engineers of profit-driven innovation run amok. They, after all, invented the exotic securities that proved so troublesome.

But the real failure, according to finance experts and economists, was in the quants' mathematical models of risk that suggested the arcane stuff was safe.

The risk models proved myopic, they say, because they were too simple-minded. They focused mainly on figures like the expected returns and the default risk of financial instruments. What they didn't sufficiently take into account was human behavior, specifically the potential for widespread panic. When lots of investors got too scared to buy or sell, markets seized up and the models failed.

http://snipr.com/rtwvm

[Kai]

 September 11, 2009



Rocket Test in Northern Utah Goes Off Problem-Free
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

PROMONTORY, Utah (Associated Press) -- The first test of NASA's powerful moon rocket went off without a problem Thursday as more than a million pounds of propellant ignited in a split second, sending a towering plume of sand and dust high into the Utah sky.

For more than two minutes, flames roared out the end of the 154-foot Ares I rocket, which was anchored horizontally to the ground on a hill above the Great Salt Lake.

"That was something, wasn't it?" said a grinning Charlie Precourt, a former shuttle astronaut and vice president of Alliant Techsystems Inc.'s space launch systems.

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One Dose of Swine Flu Vaccine May Be Enough
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

To the surprise of many scientists, preliminary results from a clinical trial of a vaccine for pandemic H1N1 influenza in Australia suggest that one dose of vaccine might be sufficient to provide protective antibodies, a finding that could double the number of available doses and greatly reduce the logistical problems associated with giving two doses.

The results, reported online Thursday by the New England Journal of Medicine, confirm results from a Chinese study of a similar vaccine.

Unlike the Chinese vaccine, however, the Australian one will be used in the United States, accounting for about 20% of the domestic supply.

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Two Bird Species Sing as One
from ScienceNOW Daily News

Talk about a common tongue. Even though two species of South American antbirds have been evolving independently for more than 3 million years, they sing nearly identical territorial songs. "It's almost the equivalent of humans and chimpanzees using the same language to settle disputes over resources," says Joseph Tobias, an ornithologist at the University of Oxford in the U.K. But rather than causing confusion, the identical songs actually serve a valuable purpose.

One wouldn't expect the two antbirds to have much in common. Although they both live in the southwestern Amazon, one species, the yellow-breasted antbird (Hypocnemis subflava), prefers bamboo patches whereas the other, the Peruvian antbird (H. peruviana), likes tall and dense forests. The birds also look different: H. subflava males sport yellow chests and buff-colored flanks, for example, whereas the males of H. peruviana have white chests and reddish-brown flanks.

Yet the songs the males of each species use to defend their turf are indistinguishable to people: In previous studies, researchers showed that neither human ears listening to the songs nor human eyes studying spectrograms of the songs could identify any notable differences.

http://snipr.com/rr4nn



Can You See Time?
from BBC News Online

Imagine if you could see time laid out in front of you, or surrounding your body. And you could physically point to specific dates in space.

Important dates might stand out--birthdays, anniversaries. And you could scan a visible timeline--to check if you were available--whenever you made plans. No actual diary necessary.

According to Julia Simner, a psychologist from the University of Edinburgh, there is a reasonable chance you can. And that you may use the experience, unconsciously, every day.

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German Geothermal Project Leads to Second Thoughts After the Earth Rumbles
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

LANDAU IN DER PFALZ, Germany -- Government officials here are reviewing the safety of a geothermal energy project that scientists say set off an earthquake in mid-August, shaking buildings and frightening many residents of this small city.

The geothermal plant, built by Geox, a German energy company, extracts heat by drilling deep into the earth. Advocates of the method say that it could greatly reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels by providing a vast supply of renewable energy.

But in recent months, two similar projects have stirred concerns about their safety and their propensity to cause earthquakes. In the United States, the Energy Department is scrutinizing a project in Northern California run by AltaRock Energy to determine if it is safe. ... Another project, in Basel, Switzerland, was shut down after it generated earthquakes in 2006 and 2007 and is awaiting the decision of a panel of experts about whether it can resume.

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Killer Whales Strain to "Talk" Over Ship Noise?
from National Geographic News

Killer whales raise their voices to be heard over boat noise, and the effort may be wearing the whales out as they try to find food amid dwindling numbers of salmon, new research says.

The killer whales of Puget Sound make more calls and clicks while foraging than while traveling, suggesting that such mealtime conservations are key to coordinating hunts, the work reveals.

Several types of vessels, from small whale-watching boats to large cruise ships, also traverse the coastal waters off Washington State and neighboring British Columbia, Canada.

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Toad "Fraud" May Have Been Ahead of His Time
from Smithsonian Magazine

Before Charles Darwin, there was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French naturalist who proposed that an organism could pass to its offspring characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime. ...

One proponent of Lamarckism in the 1920s was Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer, who undertook a series of experiments on amphibians, including the midwife toad. These toads are special because they copulate on land and then the male keeps the eggs out of the water by carrying them around, on land, stuck to his own legs.

By placing the toads in an arid, hot environment, Kammerer induced the toads to mate in the water. Under these conditions, the toads simply deposited the eggs into the water--the male did not carry them--and only a few hatched into tadpoles. But later generations who grew up under normal conditions preferred to copulate in the water ... Kammerer believed that this was evidence that Larmarckian evolution was real.

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U.S., Canada Map Edges of Continent on Seafloor
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

A joint American-Canadian cruise exploring the frigid Arctic Ocean has mapped broad swaths of the extended continental shelf for the first time, scientists reported Thursday.

While the researchers divulged few details, saying it will take time to analyze the data, they said they had discovered a massive seamount and what could be an extinct underwater volcano during the 41-day mission.

Debbie Hutchinson, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey still aboard the Canadian Coast Guard's Louis S. St-Laurent, said the group used advanced technology to precisely map unexplored territory.

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Cannabinoid Controversy
from the Scientist (Registration Required)

Switching on a subtype of the receptor that binds cannabis, the active ingredient in marijuana, can suppress inflammation--suggesting a new and particularly promising target to treat autoimmune problems such as multiple sclerosis and the damage caused by immune cells after a stroke.

But hotly contested evidence for whether or not this cannabinoid receptor is expressed on neurons may limit the potential for pursuing that target in the search for new medicines. ...

It's commonly accepted that marijuana's "high" stems from cannabis binding to one type of cannabinoid receptor--called the CB1 receptor--which is widespread on neurons in the brain. Scientists have tied CB1 receptors to a host of health problems, from depression to obesity to cardiovascular disease, as well as therapeutic benefits such as pain and nausea relief.

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UK Climate Scepticism More Common
from BBC News Online

The British public has become more sceptical about climate change over the last five years, according to a survey.

Twice as many people now agree that "claims that human activities are changing the climate are exaggerated". Four in 10 believe that many leading experts still question the evidence. One in five are "hard-line sceptics."

The survey, by Cardiff University, shows there is still some way to go before the public's perception matches that of their elected leaders.

http://snipr.com/rr4sw

[Kai]

September 10, 2009



After Hubble Repair, New Images From Space
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The cosmic postcards are back. Astronomers on Wednesday unveiled new pictures and observations from the Hubble Space Telescope.

With the exception of a picture last month of the bruise on Jupiter caused by a comet, they were the first data obtained with the telescope since a crew spent 13 days in orbit last May replacing, refurbishing and rebuilding its vital components.

"This is truly Hubble's new beginning," Edward Weiler, the associate administrator for science at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said at a news conference in Washington. The event ... was a mix of science and celebration of the human spirit and innovation.

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In Tiny 'Tuk,' They Man Climate's Front Line
from the (Oregon) Mail Tribune

TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories (Associated Press) -- Caught between rising seas and land melting beneath their mukluk-shod feet, the villagers of Tuktoyaktuk are doing what anyone would do on this windy Arctic coastline.

They're building windmills. That's wind-power turbines, to be exact--a token first try at "getting rid of this fossil fuel we're using," said Mayor Merven Gruben.

It's a token of irony, too: People little to blame, but feeling it most, are doing more to stop global warming than many of "you people in the south," as Gruben calls the rest of us who fill the skies with greenhouse gases.

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Borderline Personality Disorder Grows as Healthcare Concern
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

They have the thinnest skin, the shortest fuses and take the hardest knocks. In psychiatrists' offices, they have long been viewed as among the most challenging patients to treat. They are the kind of people who drive a friend away for interfering and subsequently berate that friend for abandonment.

But almost 20 years after the designation of borderline personality disorder as a recognized mental health condition, some understanding and hope have surfaced for people with the condition and their families.

Borderline personality disorder was center stage in May at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Assn.--with multiple sessions and speakers devoted to the topic. And the message from the meeting was clear: After years during which they threw up their hands, leaders in psychiatry now want to convey a more positive message about the condition and what can be done to help those who have it.

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Quietest Room in the World Opens Its Doors
from the Telegraph (UK)

The world's "quietest" room opened its doors for the study of nanotechnology in Bristol. The "ultra-low vibration suite," which cost £11 million, allows scientists to manipulate atoms and molecules without the interference of environmental vibrations interrupting their work.

There is virtually no air movement inside the cutting edge laboratory, which is anchored to the rock foundation in the basement of the Nanoscience and Quantum Information Centre in Bristol.

The building's architecture prevents the penetration of echo and sound waves inside the building, despite its location in the Bristol city centre. Meanwhile, its exterior panels are made from 'self-cleaning' glass, that uses nano-particles to break down dirt. The Centre will be used for a range of experiments, from looking for solutions to greener power production to better ways to battle cancer.

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Liver Cells May Aid Drug-Safety Studies
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

Potential new drugs sometimes fail because they damage the liver, but the problem may not turn up until companies have embarked on expensive clinical trials--or until the medicine is on the market. Now, three teams of Boston-area scientists are seeking a faster, safer way to screen out drugs with toxic effects, by modeling the human liver in a lab dish.

Massachusetts General Hospital researchers recently reported a faster way to cultivate liver cells, which they say could potentially reduce the cost and time to screen drugs. MIT researchers are building three-dimensional microscale livers, using cells and a silicon disc the size of a dime.

And a Medford start-up, Hepregen Corp., founded by a different MIT team, is taking yet another approach, engineering "microlivers" that are stable for weeks.

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How Charities Harness Social Media for a Social Impact
from the Christian Science Monitor

Scott Harrison's new media revolution started by accident. Mr. Harrison is the founder of Charity: Water, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing clean water to impoverished villages in Africa.

In January, he got an e-mail from a British woman who wanted to test Twitter as a fundraising tool. Amanda Rose thought the microblogging site, with its 30 million users, might have some cash power, and if it did, she wanted to put the cash in Harrison's wells.

Ms. Rose organized the first-ever "Twestival," an event whose name blends "Twitter" and "festival." Using this instant-messaging power, Rose organized a series of 200 off-line charity events around the globe ... that raised a combined $250,000 from 10,000 new donors. ... Harrison's nonprofit is one of many using social media in surprising new ways.

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ADHD Brain Chemistry Clue Found
from BBC News Online

US researchers have pinned down new differences in the brain chemistry of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They found ADHD patients lack key proteins which allow them to experience a sense of reward and motivation.

The Brookhaven National Laboratory study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It is hoped it could help in the design of new ways to combat the condition.

Previous research looking at the brains of people with ADHD had uncovered differences in areas controlling attention and hyperactivity. But this study suggests ADHD has a profound impact elsewhere in the brain too.

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Hawaii Researchers Explore Previously Unseen Coral
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

HONOLULU (Associated Press) -- Scientists over the past month explored coral reefs in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands that until recently were considered too deep for scuba divers to reach.

Divers swam among previously unseen reefs as deep as 250 feet during a monthlong research trip to the islands by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessel Hiialakai. They unexpectedly found nursery grounds for juvenile reef fish like parrotfish and butterflyfish. They also were able to collect specimens that may help them identify new species.

"We were seeing reefs that no human has ever laid eyes on before," Randall Kosaki, the research mission's lead scientist and diver, said Tuesday. "We literally have better maps of the moon than we do of coral reefs in the Hawaiian archipelago."

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Liposuction Fat Turned Into Stem Cells, Study Says
from National Geographic News

Using leftovers from liposuction patients, scientists have turned human fat into stem cells, a new study says. The new method is much more efficient than a previous practice that used skin cells, researchers say.

The discovery may also help avoid the controversy spawned by the use of stem cells from human embryos. Human fat is "an abundant natural resource and a renewable one," said Stanford University plastic surgeon Michael Longaker, whose liposuction patients donated the fat for the study.

Longaker envisions a future in which doctors will be able to use fat from a patient to grow, in a lab, new tissues and organs for that patient. The opportunity wouldn't be limited to the obese.

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50 Million Chemicals and Counting
from Science News

Bring out the helium balloons, confetti and a noisemaker or two. Today, researchers the world over have reason to raise a toast. This afternoon, the Chemical Abstracts Service--an American Chemical Society subsidiary--identified the 50 millionth compound known.

Arylmethylidene heterocycle--the molecule that qualified for the momentous spot during the long holiday weekend--is a future candidate for reducing neuropathic pain.

Since 1907, the Columbus, Ohio-based Chem Abstracts has maintained a registry of all publicly disclosed chemicals. Over the years, this registry has become the definitive one-stop shopping site for tracking down any and every known compound, including the names for each (as some compounds have as many as 1,000 monikers,) a compound's structure and any general characteristics (such as melting point).

http://snipr.com/rqbz1

[Kai]

September 15, 2009




Researchers Reveal New Weapon in Flu Fight
from the Seattle Times

SAN FRANCISCO (Associated Press) -- Researchers on Sunday delivered a double dose of good news in the fight against flu: successful tests of what could become the first new flu medicine in a decade, and the strongest evidence yet that such drugs save lives, not only shorten illness.

A single intravenous dose of the experimental drug, peramivir (purr-AM-uh-veer), cleared up flu symptoms as well as five days of Tamiflu pills did, a large study in Asia found. An IV treatment is badly needed because many sick people can't swallow pills and because illness hinders the body's ability to absorb oral medicines.

Several other studies, meanwhile, confirmed the value of treatment with Tamiflu. In one study of hundreds of people stricken with bird flu, half of those given Tamiflu survived, while nearly 90 percent of those not given flu medicines died. Other research showed Tamiflu improved survival from seasonal flu, too.

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Leukemia, Stem Cell Scientists Get Lasker Awards
from USA Today

One of the most prestigious prizes in medicine is being awarded this year to scientists working on stem cells and leukemia--and to New York's mayor for his fight to cut tobacco use.

... The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award goes to three scientists who turned a fatal cancer, myeloid leukemia, into a manageable condition with their discovery of the drug Gleevec (imatinib mesylate). Brian Druker, 54, of Oregon Health & Science University, Nicholas Lydon, 52, formerly of the Novartis pharmaceutical company, and Charles Sawyers, 50, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center did the work in the 1990s.

... The Lasker Basic Medical Research Award goes to John Gurdon, 76, of Cambridge University and Shinya Yamanaka, 47, of Kyoto University and San Francisco's Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. Their work has helped pave the way for the possibility of made-to-order stem cell treatments for individual patients.

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Is Happiness Catching?
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

... By analyzing the Framingham data, social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors--like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy--pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses.

The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another's health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors--clusters of friends appeared to "infect" each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn't just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems.

Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people. By keeping in close, regular contact with other healthy friends for decades, Eileen and Joseph had quite possibly kept themselves alive and thriving. And by doing precisely the opposite, the lone obese man hadn't.

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Water Measured From the Sky
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Water management is serious business in the American West, where precipitation is scarce, irrigated agriculture is a major industry, new housing subdivisions spread across arid landscapes and water rights are allocated in a complicated seniority system.

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it," water officials are fond of saying. ... Now a tool developed by the Idaho Department of Water Resources and the University of Idaho is changing the face of water management and conservation by efficiently offering specific measurements of the water consumed across a large region or single field.

Using surface temperature readings from government satellites, air temperature and a system of algorithms, the new method lets officials measure how much water is "consumed" on a certain piece of land through evapotranspiration.

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Key Gene 'Controls Disease Fight'
from BBC News Online

A master gene that helps mobilise the immune system to fight disease has been discovered by UK scientists. It causes stem cells in the blood to become disease-fighting "Natural Killer" (NK) immune cells. It is hoped the discovery will lead to new ways to boost the body's production of these frontline cells--potentially creating a new way to kill cancer.

The Nature Immunology study may also help development of new treatments for type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. These conditions are caused by a malfunctioning immune system turning against the body's own tissues, and it is suspected that faulty NK cells play a key role in this process.

The researchers, from Imperial College London, University College London and the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research have created mice that lack the key gene--E4bp4.

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Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

... When Mrs. Hall-Massey and 264 neighbors sued nine nearby coal companies, accusing them of putting dangerous waste into local water supplies, their lawyer did not have to look far for evidence. As required by state law, some of the companies had disclosed in reports to regulators that they were pumping into the ground illegal concentrations of chemicals--the same pollutants that flowed from residents' taps.

But state regulators never fined or punished those companies for breaking those pollution laws. This pattern is not limited to West Virginia. Almost four decades ago, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to force polluters to disclose the toxins they dump into waterways and to give regulators the power to fine or jail offenders.

States have passed pollution statutes of their own. But in recent years, violations of the Clean Water Act have risen steadily across the nation, an extensive review of water pollution records by The New York Times found.

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Defogging Titan's Methane Mystery
from Science News

Methane fog hovering above Saturn's moon Titan has cleared away any doubt that the hydrocarbon cycles between the moon's surface and its atmosphere, planetary scientists say.

Titan is the only solar system body other than Earth known to have large quantities of liquid--in this case methane and ethane--on its surface. Scientists have speculated that these liquids may serve as a prebiotic brew, offering a snapshot of the chemistry of the early Earth.

Methane acts on Titan the way water does on Earth, notes Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. On Titan, methane can form clouds and is likely to produce rain. But it's less certain, says Brown, whether methane is truly part of a cycle, in which methane rain "makes it to the surface and pools into ponds or streams that then evaporate back into the atmosphere." The discovery of fog would settle this question.

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Global Warming Could Cool North America in a Few Decades?
from National Geographic News

Global warming could actually chill down North America within just a few decades, according to a new study that says a sudden cooling event gripped the region about 8,300 years ago.

Analysis of ancient moss from Newfoundland, Canada, links an injection of freshwater from a burst glacial lake to a rapid drop in air temperatures by a few degrees Celsius along North America's East Coast.

This event created a colder year-round climate with a much shorter growing season for about 150 years, from northern Canada to what is now Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The results suggest that North America's climate is highly sensitive to meltwater flowing into the ocean, said lead study author Tim Daley of Swansea University in the U.K.

http://snipr.com/rv6ds




Waste of Breadth
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

If nothing else, the recent return of scientists from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a terrific and terrible reminder that we're drowning in the stuff. The patch is roughly the size of Texas, swirling 1,000 miles off the coast of California. For the most part, it's a soupy broth of degraded bits of plastic, with the occasional larger blob of coagulated debris.

The multitudinous bits of microscopic plastic are particularly perplexing. Experts says they outweigh the local surface zooplankton by a factor of 6 to 1 and extend downward 100 feet or more. The exact environmental impact of the plastic--or the patch--is not known, but it's not likely to be good.

A mortality rate study of threatened Laysan albatrosses, whose range includes the garbage patch, found that 90 percent of the albatross chicks that die each year contained plastic. The chicks die by the tens of thousands.

http://snipr.com/rv6gk




The Patuxent's Hidden Treasure
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Aboard a pontoon boat chugging past the marshland of Maryland's upper Patuxent River on a recent Saturday, Ralph Eshelman pointed to the spot where the muddy brown water hides a shipwreck nearly two centuries old, part of the American flotilla that defended the Chesapeake Bay when the British burned Washington during the War of 1812.

Nearly 30 years ago, Eshelman helped direct a team of marine researchers who discovered the wreck, one of the war's most significant artifacts. After a limited, month-long excavation of the site east of Upper Marlboro in 1980, the wreck was reburied under four feet of mud and sediment to protect it from decay.

The hope was that archaeologists with more funding could one day return to excavate the 75-foot vessel, tentatively identified as the Scorpion, flagship of Commodore Joshua Barney's Chesapeake Flotilla. Now, supporters are hoping the time is ripe.

http://snipr.com/rv6jn

[Kai]

http://snipr.com/rwlps - SWIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNE FLUUUUUUUUU. BTW, the vaccines are pretty much ready.

http://snipr.com/rwlqe - steel types and car manufacturing

http://snipr.com/rwlr5 - This one gets two things from me: a huge YES and a huge DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH. This isn't rocket science folks.

http://snipr.com/rwlrg - Lou Gehrig's diseased caused by cyanobacterial toxins? This is an interesting development. Something to follow.

http://snipr.com/rwlst - Centromeric location of Y chromosomes a possible reason for sexual spectrum of conditions in males.

http://snipr.com/rwlue - Te Hokioi a giant New Zealand flightless bird confirmed. It's only natural predator was a giant eagle. Both went extinct over 500 years ago. IOW, humans suck again. 

http://snipr.com/rwlv0 - Murray Gell-Mann on Particle physics.

http://snipr.com/rwlvd - Yes, now we must fear with great fear....SHOWERHEADS! No troll, people.

http://snipr.com/rwlvt - animal counting abilities. A quote: "Under certain conditions, monkeys could sometimes outperform college students." Who is surprised by this? 

http://snipr.com/rwlw6 - What the hell is a MEMRISTOR? Is this some of that "dictionaries are for the bourgeois" crap?

[Kai]

http://snipr.com/ryokb - HELP, I'VE GOT A EARACHE IN MY EYETOOTH! More seriously, this is really cool.

http://snipr.com/ryolr - New awesome distant galaxy searching from the Hubble Space Telescope. THIS is what we should put our space money in, not sending people to the moon to play golf.

http://snipr.com/ryom7 - "Like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives." Probably the coolest movie quote ever about a huge extinct shark, now believed to be the ancestor of modern Great White Sharks.

http://snipr.com/ryoq6 - First images from Plank Telescope. Remember, this one is looking at microwave background radiation.

http://snipr.com/ryoqq Pint sized ancestor of T. rex.

http://snipr.com/ryosm - Anything about "tricorder" developments is super specialawesome. Seriously.

http://snipr.com/ryot0 - Comet having little comet babies. Its a world destroying family!

http://snipr.com/ryotc - But I can do all of this IN MY BRAIN! Okay, I guess it is a little cool.

http://snipr.com/ryotu - trash mark/recapture study. Yes, I know I'm using population dynamics terms for human garbage. 

http://snipr.com/ryoud - I for one AM SHOCKED. Really. No, srsly. SHOCKED, I tell you.

[Kai]

Stressed out week. Stressed out month, really.

Here's one article, probably the most important thing published on evolutionary biology in the last 10 years.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/nature08249.html

If you can't see that due to not being on a campus, here are some quotes:

An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution

The extent to which evolution is reversible has long fascinated biologists. Most previous work on the reversibility of morphological and life-history evolution has been indecisive, because of uncertainty and bias in the methods used to infer ancestral states for such characters. Further, despite theoretical work on the factors that could contribute to irreversibility there is little empirical evidence on its causes, because sufficient understanding of the mechanistic basis for the evolution of new or ancestral phenotypes is seldom available. By studying the reversibility of evolutionary changes in protein structure and function, these limitations can be overcome. Here we show, using the evolution of hormone specificity in the vertebrate glucocorticoid receptor as a case-study, that the evolutionary path by which this protein acquired its new function soon became inaccessible to reverse exploration. Using ancestral gene reconstruction, protein engineering and X-ray crystallography, we demonstrate that five subsequent 'restrictive' mutations, which optimized the new specificity of the glucocorticoid receptor, also destabilized elements of the protein structure that were required to support the ancestral conformation. Unless these ratchet-like epistatic substitutions are restored to their ancestral states, reversing the key function-switching mutations yields a non-functional protein. Reversing the restrictive substitutions first, however, does nothing to enhance the ancestral function. Our findings indicate that even if selection for the ancestral function were imposed, direct reversal would be extremely unlikely, suggesting an important role for historical contingency in protein evolution.

We have examined the sufficiency of selection to drive direct evolutionary reversal. There may be other potentially permissive mutations, of unknown number, that could compensate for the restrictive effect of group W and allow the ancestral conformation to be restored. Reversal by such indirect pathways could be driven by selection, however, only if these other mutations, unlike those we studied, could somehow relieve the steric clashes and restore the lost stabilizing interactions that make the ancestral position of helix 7 intolerable in AncGR2, and also independently restore the ancestral function when helix 7 is in its radically different derived conformation. Whether or not mutations that could achieve these dual ends exist, reversal to the ancestral conformation would require a considerably more complex pathway than was necessary before the ratchet effect of W evolved.

The extent to which our observations concerning the evolutionary reversibility of glucocorticoid recpetors can be generalized to other proteins requires further research. We predict that future investigations, like ours, will support a molecular version of Dollo's law4: as evolution proceeds, shifts in protein structure–function relations become increasingly difficult to reverse whenever those shifts have complex architectures, such as requiring conformational changes or epistatically interacting substitutions. Phenotypes at higher levels of genetic organization may also display ratchet-like modes of evolution if optimization of a derived phenotype involves changes in one gene, regulatory element, morphological structure, or developmental process that epistatically undermine the conditions that enabled the ancestral state at other such 'loci'. In contrast, phenotypic shifts caused by single or additive genetic changes are likely to be readily reversible.

Our observations suggest that history and contingency during glucocorticoid receptor evolution strongly limited the pathways that could be deterministically followed under selection. The 'adaptive peak' represented by the promiscuous AncGR1 is a relatively close neighbour in sequence space to the more specific AncGR2. This peak was occupied in the ancestor of jawed vertebrates—indicating that no intrinsic constraints prevent its realization—but it became far more difficult to access just 40 million years later because of intervening epistatic mutations. Selection is an extraordinarily powerful evolutionary force; nevertheless, our observations suggest that, because of the complexity of glucocorticoid receptor architecture, low-probability permissive substitutions were required to open some mutational trajectories to exploration under selection, whereas restrictive substitutions closed other potential paths. Under selection, some kind of adaptation will always occur, but the specific adaptive forms that are realized depend on the historical trajectory that precedes them. The conditions that once facilitated evolution of the glucocorticoid receptor's ancestors were destroyed during the realization of its present form. The past is difficult to recover because it was built on the foundation of its own history, one irrevocably different from that of the present and its many possible futures.

Emphasis mine. This article is discussing something we've known on a macroscopic level for quite a while now, called Dollo's Law, that as evolution proceeds, reversals to ancestral conditions becomes increasingly difficult. Now we know that proteins for sure are probably a large part of this, not because of the protein itself, but because of the layer of regulating transcription factors that cause a specific what and where aspect. This is like a ratchet: as one part of the network opens a little to change and the other closes a little, theres a directionality that takes place, and its very hard to move those back because you can't change them back one at time, or the function will be lost. Evolution takes place in whats known as adaptive landscapes. Imagine the ratcheting direction as a valley leading down from a mountain. Since the probability "slope" of going back to the previous condition is low, and the valley probability is high, the lineage changes it's phenotype over time directionally, with an extreme unlikelyhood of reversal. It also means we can /predict/ what condition an organism may next evolve towards, since the direction isn't, CAN'T be, largely random without loss of functionality.

Like I said, most important evolution paper in the last 10 years.

[Precious Moments Zalgo]

Unless these ratchet-like epistatic substitutions are restored to their ancestral states, reversing the key function-switching mutations yields a non-functional protein. Reversing the restrictive substitutions first, however, does nothing to enhance the ancestral function.

Does that part mean that this experiment is doomed to failure?

Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.  Larsson believes by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken embryo's development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy, he told AFP in an interview.

[Kai]

Unless these ratchet-like epistatic substitutions are restored to their ancestral states, reversing the key function-switching mutations yields a non-functional protein. Reversing the restrictive substitutions first, however, does nothing to enhance the ancestral function.

Does that part mean that this experiment is doomed to failure?

Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.  Larsson believes by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken embryo's development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy, he told AFP in an interview.

Yes. There are no "genetic levers", or if there are there are very few of them. This person obviously doesn't understand the complexity of transcription factor cascades and networks. He would have to change the genetic state back all at once, and he has no clue what the original state was. He MAY be able to engineer the birds in a forward direction to develop more scales, teeth, etc, and slowly cause convergence so they LOOK similar to dinosaurs, but he'll never reproduce the dinosaur anatomy and more importantly, physiology, as it once was.

[Precious Moments Zalgo]

Unless these ratchet-like epistatic substitutions are restored to their ancestral states, reversing the key function-switching mutations yields a non-functional protein. Reversing the restrictive substitutions first, however, does nothing to enhance the ancestral function.

Does that part mean that this experiment is doomed to failure?

Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.  Larsson believes by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken embryo's development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy, he told AFP in an interview.

Yes. There are no "genetic levers", or if there are there are very few of them. This person obviously doesn't understand the complexity of transcription factor cascades and networks. He would have to change the genetic state back all at once, and he has no clue what the original state was. He MAY be able to engineer the birds in a forward direction to develop more scales, teeth, etc, and slowly cause convergence so they LOOK similar to dinosaurs, but he'll never reproduce the dinosaur anatomy and more importantly, physiology, as it once was.

Thanks for that.  My simplified pop-science understanding was that organisms have ancestral genes that are "turned off", so it sounded plausible that one could turn simply them back on.  Of course, it's highly likely that the article I cited was a grossly distorted pop-science version of what Larsson is actually planning to do.  

Which is too bad, because I want a rooster with activated dinosaur genes so I can enter it in cock-fights.