Weekly Science Headlines

[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.

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.

Okay, a short lesson.

Genes that code for structural proteins tend to be rather conserved. So, keratin is keratin is keratin. Actin is actin is actin. Because the particular structure of that molecule is so important, the gene that codes for the structural part itself doesn't tend to change often.

However, transcription factors, the other genes that determine when and where the gene expresses, are probably the main drivers of evolution. So, there isn't one gene that codes, for example, an insect wing. You've got chitin and melanin and all these other structural proteins, but where and when they are expressed depends on the transcription factors.

Now, transcription factors happen in very intricate networks, but they need to be kick started somehow (see my other thread on transcription factors in Or Kill Me). The kickstarter for the wing patterns in insects are the homeobox or Hox genes Ultrabithorax A and B. When present in the right concentrations (remember, the original start of this comes from the mother), the expression of the second and third thoracic segments leads to the expression of other transcription factors (we'll call this MFG) which pattern the wing.

Now, usually a loss of expression DOES mean some sort of mutation, but in at least one example, the expression of MFG is lost not because it's changed, but because it gets locked up by methylation of chromatin storage of chromosomes. So, in essence for this group (in this case, stick insects) the wing expression gets turned off. Hokay....so, in this rare case, it's believed that MFG (not the real name of the gene but bear with me) was locked up in chromatin storage, and at some point in some lineages MFG became accessable again. So, wings were expressed. HOWEVER, this is not the common case, since loss of expression of a major TF gene in most organisms would mean lowered fitness. In stick insects it was just fine, since flight wasn't necessary for survival.

So yeah. Transfactors change, cause a ratchet effect, and though the enzymatic or structural protein may be easily reversible, all the transcription factors that change with it are not. Thus, Dollo's Law, thus adaptive landscapes. Chickens are never going to be dinosaurs again, although you might get them to LOOK a LITTLE like a dino.

[Kai]

 October 1, 2009

E.P.A. Moves to Curtail Greenhouse Gas Emissions - Basically, Obama isn't going to wait for Congress to do anything, so he's having the EPA set standards.

http://snipr.com/s98pl

Chandra's Ten-year Anniversary -Some photographs from the x ray telescope's ten year history, and thats only so far.

http://snipr.com/s98qf

Padang Lives with Quake Stress - On the Sumatran earthquakes and tectonic fault lines.

http://snipr.com/s98rj

Climate-Change Study Cites Role of Ancient Farming - and of course people will think this makes it just peachy to keep turning up the heat. "the indians did it, so why shouldn't we?"

http://snipr.com/s98t6

Stabilizing the Electric Grid with Megawatt-scale Storage - Finally. It's been battery technology thats been holding back energy advancements for a long time now.

http://snipr.com/s98tu

Protein Reveals How Insects Smell - Been hearing a bunch about this particular study. Olfactory reception isn't that different no matter what organism you go to, but this just confirms the particular protein that binds pheromones.

http://snipr.com/s98ux

Excreted Tamiflu Found in Rivers - This is some major horrormirth right here.

http://snipr.com/s98xu

How Will Climate Change Impact World Food Supplies? - Title says it all. I must be in a horrible mood today because I feel the need to tell all the global warming activists they are full of shit, that there's no global warming, and that they should go back to their steak and teevee. Just a sort of rude, assholish trollish mood.

http://snipr.com/s991a

Galaxy Study Hints at Cracks in Dark Matter Theories - Really don't know what to think about "dark matter". So often I hear the words and cringe, because if I understand correctly it's just matter that doesn't radiate light visible to us, but it feels like people are talking about some mysterious force/energy or some stupid shit.

http://snipr.com/s992e

Call for New Nobel Prizes to Honour 'Forgotten' Scientists argument that the nobel prizes should be revamped to include other areas of science.

http://snipr.com/s9945

[Kai]

October 2, 2009

Fossils Radically Alter Ideas About the Look of Man's Earliest Ancestors - This is on all the articles about 'Albi', or Albipithecus, the new hominid fossil uncovered recently.

http://snipr.com/sa1vj

Best of the Ig Nobel Prizes 2009 - Awesome hilarious science. Some of it horrormirth. If you've never heard of the Ig Nobels, check them out.

http://snipr.com/sa1vz

Swine Flu Vaccine Arrives, and the Scramble Begins Basically, everybody's rushing to get the first batch. Watch as I cool my heels.

http://snipr.com/sa1we

Iranian Ministers in Plagiarism Row - Intellectual property stuff.

http://snipr.com/sa1wj

EPA Announces Plan to Review Six Controversial Chemicals - Including Bisphenol A.

http://snipr.com/sa1x7

Endangered Ugandan Gorillas Join Facebook, MySpace - No comment.

http://snipr.com/sa1xd

A Clean Break: Kidney Machines Go Mobile - Mobile dialysis. Cool

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'Jurassic Treasure Trove' of Eggs Could Reveal Why Dinosaurs Died Out - The site is in southern India. I don't know how exactly they're gonna find out the cause of the K-T extinction from this.

http://snipr.com/sa1y7

Southeast Drought Study Ties Water Shortage to Population, Not Global Warming - The quote below says it all. I've known this since I moved down here. Historical records show the southeast is a dynamic climate landscape, and can handle 'drought' conditions.

"At the root of the water supply problem in the Southeast is a growing population," they wrote.

http://snipr.com/sa1yi

How Earth's Hum Could Help Us Map Mars - Maping mars with the same technology that allowed us to figure out the composition of the earths mantle and core.

http://snipr.com/sa1yx

[Iason Ouabache]

Call for New Nobel Prizes to Honour 'Forgotten' Scientists argument that the nobel prizes should be revamped to include other areas of science.

http://snipr.com/s9945

They also suggest either widening the remit of the medicine award to embrace all the life sciences, or creating further prizes in fundamental biology and behavioural science.

Definitely agree with this part. Having a prize just for medicine is too narrow and excludes too many branches of biology. It would be nice to have a Noble Prize for technology too.

[Kai]

BREAKING NEWS

Just published today in Oncogene.

http://www.nature.com/onc/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/onc2009259a.html

UK researchers have discovered one of the major genes responsible for tumor suppression. This has been hearalded as one of the most important cancer related discoveries in the last 20 years. Tumor supressors cockblock cancer cells from continuing to divide, but when this gene is damaged it can induce tumorigenesis.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6261309/Breast-cancer-gene-discovery-most-important-for-20-years.html for a news synopsis more readable than the paper itself.

[Kai]

 October 9, 2009



Paper Challenges Ideas About 'Early Bird' Dinosaur
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The "early bird" archaeopteryx may not be a bird, after all.

The first fossil of the raven-size species was an immediate sensation when it was excavated in 1860, in southern Germany. It had feathers and a wishbone, like birds, but teeth and a long, bony tail, like reptiles. Coming the year after publication of The Origin of Species, the discovery swayed many scientists into accepting Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's staunch ally, recognized the fossil in a limestone slab as a transitional species between dinosaurs and birds. Over time, the 10 known specimens of archaeopteryx became widely regarded as examples of the earliest bird, which lived about 150 million years ago.

http://snipr.com/sextn




Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Linked to 'Cancer Virus'
from New Scientist

Chronic fatigue syndrome, the debilitating condition once dismissed as "yuppie flu," has been linked to a virus that is also common in people with a certain type of prostate cancer.

It's still not clear if the virus, called XMRV, causes chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), or is just more common in people with the disorder. But the discovery is sure to reignite the debate over whether CFS is fundamentally a psychological condition or a physiological one.

"It's a contentious area that lies somewhere between medicine and psychiatry," says Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist at King's College London who has been vilified by patient groups for his scepticism of cut-and-dried explanations for CFS and his assertion that psychological factors may play an important role.

http://snipr.com/sexu7




Petite Pictures: The 20 Microscopic Photo Competition Prizewinners
from Scientific American

Microscopes have been around for some 400 years, and today they are even accessible via customized cell phones. The act of peering into a microscope of any power can open a whole world of life and beauty that exists right under (or in) our noses. And to capture that rare view for reproduction can also prove to be an art form in itself.

The ability to snap an image seen through an optical microscope--whether it's via fluorescence, polarized-light, dark-field, confocal, deconvolution or other techniques--has brought researchers and novices alike to the intersection of art and science. Since 1974 Nikon has recognized the year's best photomicrographs--pictures taken on a miniscule scale. Here are the top 20 winners of this year's Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition.

From thousands of entries, four judges ... selected the 20 winners. A popular winner is also chosen via a vote on the contest Web site.

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Spitzer's Cold Look at Space
from American Scientist

In astrophysical observations, more is more--imaging across multiple wavelengths leads to richer information. One electromagnetic band in which most celestial bodies radiate is the infrared: Objects ranging in location from the chilly fringes of our Solar System to the dust-enshrouded nuclei of distant galaxies radiate entirely or predominantly in this band. Thus, astrophysicists require good visualization of these wavelengths.

The problem, however, is that Earth is a very hostile environment for infrared exploration of space, as the atmosphere also emits in the infrared spectrum and additionally absorbs much of the incoming signal. Even heat produced by a telescope itself can degrade its own clarity.

Starting at the end of the 1950s, a number of pioneering groups confronted this challenge and carried out increasingly exciting infrared investigations from ground-based, airborne and balloon-borne observatories. This work continues in parallel with space-based exploration; infrared capabilities form an integral component of current and planned ground-based telescopes with apertures of 10 to 30 meters in diameter.

http://snipr.com/sey05




Monkey Moms Have Madonna Moments
from ScienceNOW Daily News

It's a look that's been painted and photographed untold times: a mother gazing deep into her infant's eyes while the two smile and kiss. Psychologists believe this interplay helps a child's emotional and cognitive development. The behavior was thought to exist only in humans and to a lesser extent in our closest kin, chimpanzees. Now, scientists have discovered similarly intense shared gazing and facial expressions in monkeys. And that means, the researchers say, that this kind of maternal communication dates back at least 30 million years.

Although scientists have studied rhesus macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta) in the lab and field for more than 50 years, they missed this key behavior. "Previous researchers were looking more at what happens when a mother and infant are separated," says Pier Francesco Ferrari, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma in Italy, not what happens when they're together.

But plenty occurs between the two, as Ferrari and his team observed. In a semi-free-range environment at the Laboratory of Comparative Cognition, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the scientists filmed 14 mother-and-infant pairs during the first 2 months of the youngsters' lives, beginning when the infants were a few hours old.

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U.S. Companies May Look Abroad to Fight Global Warming
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

U.S. companies could save tens of billions of dollars by investing in efforts to combat deforestation in developing nations instead of cleaning up their own domestic carbon dioxide emissions, according to a report released Wednesday.

The report, compiled by a high-powered bipartisan group, backs the use of "forest offsets" in the global effort to curb pollution that is heating up the atmosphere. It was released in advance of the upcoming Senate debate on climate legislation and an international meeting on the issue set for December in Copenhagen.

The burning of tropical forests and their conversion to cattle farms and soybean fields is responsible for about 17% of the emissions that are causing global warming--more than all the world's cars, trucks, trains and planes combined--scientists say.

http://snipr.com/sey1g




Royal Blood Disorder Identified
from BBC News

DNA analysis has revealed the identity of the "cursed blood" disorder that afflicted the British Royal Family in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Scientists say the disease inherited by Queen Victoria's descendants was probably a severe form of the blood clotting disorder haemophilia B.

The scientists examined DNA samples extracted from the skeletal remains of Russia's Romanov family. The research is published in the journal Science.

http://snipr.com/sey2j




Ice Confirmed on an Asteroid
from Science News

FAJARDO, Puerto Rico -- Space rocks may be dead as doornails but some contain ingredients that could have given life on Earth a foothold.

Planetary scientists reported October 7 that they have, for the first time, confirmed that an asteroid contains frozen water on its surface. Evidence of water-ice, along with organic compounds, on the surface of the asteroid 24 Themis supports the theory that asteroids brought both water and organic compounds to the early Earth, helping lay the foundation for life on the planet.

Humberto Campins of the University of Central Florida in Orlando and his colleagues recorded spectra of the asteroid 24 Themis over a seven-hour period, corresponding to 84 percent of the rotational period of the spinning rock. The spectra, taken with NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, revealed the consistent presence of frozen water as different parts of the asteroid's surface came into view, Campins reported at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences.

http://snipr.com/sey32




Giant, Mucus-Like Sea Blobs on the Rise, Pose Danger
from National Geographic News

Beware of the blob--this time, it's for real.

As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says.

And the blobs may be more than just unpleasant. Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season's warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs.

http://snipr.com/sey3f




Fossils Suggest an Ancient CO2-Climate Link
from Time

Some of the best evidence linking rising carbon dioxide levels to a warmer world comes from the coldest places on earth. Samples of ancient air extracted from deep inside the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps make it clear that CO2 is scarce in the atmosphere during ice ages and relatively abundant during warmer interglacial periods--like the one we're in now.

The relationship between CO2 and climate is clear going back about 800,000 years. Before that, however, it gets murkier. That's largely because ice and air that old haven't yet been found. So scientists rely instead on indirect measurements--and these have led to a climate mystery: some episodes of past warming, including a planetary heat wave about 15 million years ago and another about 3.5 million years ago, seem to have happened without a rise in CO2. No one quite understands why. Maybe other greenhouse gases were the cause--methane, for example. Or maybe it had to do with changes in ocean circulation.

But according to a new study just published in Science, there may not be any mystery after all. By looking at the chemistry of fossilized foraminifera--tiny sea creatures no bigger than a grain of sand--a team led by Aradhna Tripati, of University of the California, Los Angeles, has detected a significant CO2 bump during both warming episodes.

http://snipr.com/sey4e

[Kai]

October 8, 2009




Russia Plots Return to Venus
from BBC News Online

Densely clouded in acid-laden mist, Venus used to be the Soviet Union's favourite target for planetary exploration.

Now, after a lull of almost three decades, Russia is making plans for a new mission to the "morning star" and has invited Western scientists to participate.

Last week, Moscow-based space research institute IKI hosted an international conference aimed at luring scientists from Europe and possibly other countries such as the US into the ambitious project, officially scheduled for launch in 2016.

http://snipr.com/se97g




You Can Watch NASA Give the Moon a One-Two Punch
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- NASA will throw a one-two punch at the big old moon Friday and the whole world will have ringside seats for the lunar dust-up.

NASA will send a used-up spacecraft slamming into the moon's south pole to kick up a massive plume of lunar dirt and then scour it to see if there's any water or ice spraying up. The idea is to confirm the theory that water--a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon--is hidden below the barren moonscape.

The crashing spaceship was launched in June along with an orbiter that's now mapping the lunar surface. LCROSS--short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and pronounced L-Cross--is on a collision course with the moon, attached to an empty 2.2-ton rocket that helped get the probe off the ground.

http://snipr.com/se97u




Are You Asleep? Exploring the Mind's Twilight Zone
from New Scientist

Earlier this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

Both had been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder called multiple system atrophy. According to the report's authors, Roberto Vetrugno and colleagues from the University of Bologna, Italy, the disease had damaged the pair's brains to such an extent that they had entered status dissociatus, a kind of twilight zone in which the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down.

That this can happen contradicts the way we usually think about sleep, but it came as no surprise to Mark Mahowald, medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who has long contested the dogma that sleep and wakefulness are discrete and distinct states.

http://snipr.com/se989




An Emotional Response: Using Computers to Analyse Sentiments
from the Economist

The difference between saying what you mean and meaning what you say is obvious to most people. To computers, however, it is trickier. Yet getting them to assess intelligently what people mean from what they say would be useful to companies seeking to identify unhappy customers and intelligence agencies seeking to identify dangerous individuals from comments they post online.

Computers are often inept at understanding the meaning of a word because that meaning depends on the context in which the word is used. For example "killing" is bad and "bacteria" are bad but "killing bacteria" is often good (unless, that is, someone is talking about the healthy bacteria present in live yogurt, in which case, it would be bad).

An attempt to enable computers to assess the emotional meaning of text is being led by Stephen Pulman of the University of Oxford and Karo Moilanen, one of his doctoral students. It uses so-called "sentiment analysis" software to assess text. The pair have developed a classification system that analyses the grammatical structure of a piece of text and assigns emotional labels to the words it contains, by looking them up in a 57,000-word "sentiment lexicon" compiled by people.

http://snipr.com/se99d




Human Variation Revealed
from the Scientist (Registration Required)

Scientists have generated the most comprehensive map of the structural variation that exists among normal, healthy humans, according to a study published online today in Nature. Understanding normal variation between individuals is critical to identifying abnormal changes that may contribute to a wide variety of heritable diseases.

"I think it's considered to be a landmark paper," said geneticist Frank Speleman of the Center for Medical Genetics Ghent at Ghent University Hospital in Belgium, who was not involved in the work. "It's quite important in the complete context of genome wide association studies and genetic predisposition."

Using microarrays that contained more than 42 million probes, genome scientist Stephen Scherer of The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and the University of Toronto and his colleagues searched the genome of 40 healthy individuals for copy number variants (CNVs)--areas of the genome that come in varying quantities as a result of deletions, insertions, or duplications. The researchers identified 11,700 CNVs 443 base pairs or greater in size, with an average of approximately 1,000 CNVs differing between any two individuals.

http://snipr.com/se99t




Baby Bats Imitate Dad's Songs
from ScienceNOW Daily News

A few years ago, researchers discovered that the babies of at least one species of bat make babbling sounds, much like human infants. Now, it turns out those babbling baby bats aren't just mindlessly cooing--they're imitating the songs of the big guys in their colonies: adult males with territories and harems.

Such vocal imitation is rare in the animal kingdom, and it has never been found in nonhuman primates. The discovery should open a new window on the evolution of speech and language, scientists say.

Scientists define complex vocal imitation as the ability to learn a call or song from a tutor--and they regard this talent as a key innovation in the evolution of speech. The rarified list of complex vocal imitators includes birds, elephants, cetaceans, seals, and humans. Researchers had long predicted that bats might also be capable of such imitation because of their extraordinary vocal flexibility; they use echolocation calls to navigate the physical world, for example, and social calls to communicate with their fellow bats.

http://snipr.com/se9ah




Bar Code: Its Origins, Why It's on Google & What's Next
from National Geographic News

The now inescapable bar code celebrates its 57th anniversary Wednesday--a milestone unmissed by Google, which replaced its home page logo with a bar code "doodle" that translates to "Google."

Now used to track just about anything bought and sold in many countries, the standard bar code system was patented in the United States on October 7, 1952, but took about 20 years to go mainstream.

U.S. inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver had devised a way to encode data in a bull's-eye pattern. Their idea didn't immediately take off because the technology to read bar codes wasn't available. That's because at least two required components--lasers and digital-image sensors called charged-coupled devices, or CCDs--hadn't been invented yet.

http://snipr.com/se9b0




Companies Quit U.S. Chamber Over Climate Policy
from National Public Radio

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce bills itself as "the voice of business." But when it comes to climate change, business no longer speaks with one voice.

This week, Apple Inc. announced that it's quitting the chamber in protest of its climate policy. The maker of iPods and Macintosh computers joins a handful of other high-profile chamber defectors.

"Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it's frustrating to find the chamber at odds with us in this effort," Catherine Novelli, Apple's vice president for worldwide government affairs, wrote in a letter to the chamber. "We would prefer that the chamber take a more progressive stance on this critical issue."

http://snipr.com/se9bi




Alligator Swamps Are Lousy With Monogamy
from Wired

Alligators don't seem to be the promiscuous, indiscriminate reptiles scientists once though they were. A new 10-year study of alligator mating habits shows that most female crocodilians prefer to mate over and over with the same male, despite encountering a vast array of eligible alligator bachelors each year.

As the only surviving members of a class of reptiles called archosaurs, which included dinosaurs and the ancient ancestors of birds, alligators are in a unique position to help scientists understand the mating patterns of dinosaurs and birds. For the past 10 years, ecologists have been tracking female alligators at the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana and recording their mate preferences by looking at the DNA of their young. The data, published today in Molecular Ecology, reveals that up to 70 percent of female alligators choose the same partner year after year.

"Given how incredibly open and dense the alligator population is at RWR, we didn't expect to find fidelity," biologist Stacey Lance of the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory in South Carolina said in a press release.

http://snipr.com/se9ci




Taking Aim at Energy-Sucking TVs
from the Christian Science Monitor

Television's high-definition era has done an impressive job of bringing theaterlike experiences to the not-so-small screen. New tube TVs are hard to come by these days, as stores make room for flat-panel models measuring 50 inches or more.

But it takes a lot of energy to power those millions of pixels--enough that the US Environmental Protection Agency suggested in September that perhaps there is such a thing as a television that's too big.

As picture quality improves, television sets are sucking down an increasing share of home-energy costs. America's TVs consume "4 percent of all households' electricity use," reports the federal energy-efficiency program, Energy Star. "This is enough electricity to power all the homes in the state of New York for an entire year."

http://snipr.com/se9dt

[Kai]

October 7, 2009




Three Win Nobel for Ribosome Research
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Three chemists whose work delves into how the information encoded on strands of DNA is translated by the chemical complexes known as ribosomes into the thousands of proteins that make up living matter will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Swedish Academy of Sciences said Wednesday.

The trio are Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England; Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University; and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

Each scientist will get a third of the prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronors in total, or $1.4 million, in a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

http://snipr.com/sdkz0




Vaccines for Drug Addiction Show Promise
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Vaccines to help people recover from such addictions as nicotine, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines now appear scientifically and medically achievable after doctors reported Monday that a vaccine to treat cocaine dependence had produced a large enough antibody response to reduce cocaine use in 38% of addicted individuals.

Those results come on the heels of last week's announcement that the federal government would fund a large clinical trial of a nicotine vaccine based on earlier promising studies.

Neither the nicotine nor the cocaine vaccine prevents addiction the way traditional vaccines prevent diseases, nor do similar vaccines in development.

http://snipr.com/sdkzp




Mystery Solved: The Dark Side of a Moon
from ScienceNOW Daily News

Iapetus has a dirty face, and it's getting dirtier every day. That's the conclusion of astronomers studying Saturn's oddest moon, a sort of yin-yang symbol in space that's almost pitch black on one side and icy bright on the other.

Iapetus's bizarre coloration has been a mystery since Giovanni Cassini discovered it in 1671, but now scientists have fingered the source: a newly discovered gigantic dust ring encircling Saturn--the largest ring in the solar system. Fed by dust from embedded moons, the ring steadily deposits dirt on Iapetus's once-clean façade. "It's nice to finally see a smoking gun that tells us exactly what happened," says ring specialist Joseph Burns of Cornell University.

Planetary scientists announced their discovery today at the Division for Planetary Sciences annual meeting in Fajardo, Puerto Rico. Anne Verbiscer and Michael Skrutskie of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park, reported that images taken by the infrared Spitzer satellite orbiting Earth revealed the giant dust ring.

http://snipr.com/sdkzw




Radical Shift Proposed for Funding European Research
from Nature News

Responsibility for managing and allocating funding for European research should be devolved from the European Commission to independent agencies, including the European Research Council (ERC), an advisory board has suggested.

The ERC was set up in 2007 as a pan-European initiative to fund frontier research judged solely on excellence. It allocates €7.5 billion (US$11 billion) out of the €50-billion pot for research in the European Union's (EU's) Seventh Framework Programme, which began in 2007 and runs until 2013.

In a report presented to the commission today, the European Research Area Board (ERAB), which advises the commission, says: "A new governance model for arms-length agencies to deliver research and innovation in Europe is essential for our global position."

http://snipr.com/sdl17




FDA Orders Cleanup of Plane Water
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Bloomberg) -- US airlines must regularly monitor and cleanse aircraft drinking-water systems under new rules prompted by tests five years ago that found some failed to meet quality standards.

The carriers will have two years to meet requirements for things like routine disinfection and flushing, the Environmental Protection Agency said. Airlines in the meantime must honor agreements they made with the EPA after the 2004 failures.

"This rule is a significant step forward in protecting people's health when they travel," said Peter Silva, an EPA assistant administrator.

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Albatross Cam for Bird's Eye View
from BBC News

Albatrosses associate with killer whales out in the open ocean, tiny cameras attached to the birds reveal.

Unique pictures retrieved from the cameras placed on the albatrosses' backs show the birds feeding alongside the killer whales, also known as orcas.

The birds are thought to feed on food scraps left by the marine mammals. The discovery may explain how black-browed albatrosses find their prey in an apparently featureless open ocean, say the researchers.

http://snipr.com/sdl32




In Rural Africa, a Fertile Market for Mobile Phones
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

BUSHENYI, Uganda -- Laban Rutagumirwa charges his mobile phone with a car battery because his dirt-floor home deep in the remote, banana-covered hills of western Uganda does not have electricity.

When the battery dies, Mr. Rutagumirwa, a 50-year-old farmer, walks just over four miles to charge it so he can maintain his position as communication hub and banana-disease tracker for his rural neighbors.

In an area where electricity is scarce and Internet connections virtually nonexistent, the mobile phone has revolutionized scientists' ability to track this crop disease and communicate the latest scientific advances to remote farmers.

http://snipr.com/sdl4n




Biggest Ever Dinosaur Footprints Found in France
from the Guardian (U.K.)

An "exceptional" collection of the biggest dinosaur footprints ever recorded has been found by two amateur enthusiasts on an expedition near France's Jura mountains, palaeontologists said today.

Imprints measuring up to 2 metres (6ft 6in) in diameter and stretching over a vast area of land have been uncovered near the village of Plagne, 30 miles west of Geneva, according to the National Centre of Scientific Research.

In a statement, the centre said the significance of the prints could not be overestimated. "According to the researchers' initial work, these tracks are the biggest ever seen," it said.

http://snipr.com/sdl55




Find: Stonehenge Could Be Part of Funeral Complex
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

LONDON (Associated Press) -- The discovery of a small prehistoric circle of stones near Stonehenge may confirm the theory that the mysterious monument in southwest England was part of a massive funeral complex built around a river, researchers said Tuesday.

The new find shows that the second stone circle--dubbed "Bluehenge" because it was built with bluestones--once stood next to the River Avon about 1.75 miles (2.8 kilometers) from Stonehenge, one of Britain's best loved and least understood landmarks.

The find last month could help prove that the Avon linked a "domain of the dead"--made up of Stonehenge and Bluehenge--with an upstream "domain of the living" known as Durrington Wells, a monument where extensive signs of feasting and other human activity were found, said Professor Julian Thomas, co-director of the Stonehenge Riverside Project.

http://snipr.com/sdl7a




Behind the Scenes, System Sniffs for Biological Attacks
from USA Today

A ringing telephone startled Tom Slezak from a sound sleep. It was 1 a.m. on Oct. 6, 2001. The caller gave Slezak three hours to pack for a chilling, top-secret mission: to protect Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities from a major bioterror attack.

For all Slezak knew, an attack had begun. Hours earlier, a Florida photo editor named Bob Stevens had died after inhaling anthrax powder sent by mail, jolting a nation that was still reeling from the 9/11 hijackings. At the time, the scope of the anthrax attacks that eventually killed five people and sickened 17 others wasn't clear.

Slezak got the call because he helped pioneer the genetic analysis of biological agents at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Today, eight years after the anthrax attacks, the system Slezak's research team started, known as BioWatch, is quietly operating in more than 30 cities.

http://snipr.com/sdl7r

[Kai]

October 6, 2009




3 Americans Share 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

STOCKHOLM (Associated Press) -- Three scientists who created the technology behind digital photography and helped link the world through fiber-optic networks shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday.

Charles K. Kao was cited for his breakthrough involving the transmission of light in fiber optics while Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith were honored for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit known as the CCD sensor.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said all three have American citizenship. Kao also holds British citizenship while Boyle is also Canadian.

http://snipr.com/scud7



Unrevealed Analysis Weakens Claim of AIDS Vaccine "Success"
from Science Insider

When the U.S. Army and its collaborators in Thailand announced at press conferences on 24 September that a large clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine had lowered the rate of new HIV infections by about one-third, researchers were surprised and encouraged. Although it was only a modest reduction, it was the first positive result from any AIDS vaccine trial.

Now some researchers who have seen more of the data in confidential briefings are complaining that a fuller analysis undermines even cautious claims of success, and they are raising questions about the way the results were announced.

The press conference and press releases discussed an analysis that included all 16,000 people who participated in the trial, except for seven who were infected before receiving any doses of the two vaccines that were used in combination. Seventy-four people in the placebo arm of the study became infected with HIV, while the similarly sized vaccinated group only had 51 infections--a 31.2% efficacy. The analysis indicated that there was about a 96% level of confidence that the effect was real and not due to chance--just above the 95% cutoff that is widely used as a measure of statistical significance.

http://snipr.com/scue3



A High-Tech Hunt for Lost Art
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

If you believe, as Maurizio Seracini does, that Leonardo da Vinci's greatest painting is hidden inside a wall in Florence's city hall, then there are two essential techniques for finding it. As usual, Leonardo anticipated both of them.

First, concentrate on scientific gadgetry. After spotting what seemed to be a clue to Leonardo's painting left by another 16th-century artist, Dr. Seracini led an international team of scientists in mapping every millimeter of the wall and surrounding room with lasers, radar, ultraviolet light and infrared cameras. Once they identified the likely hiding place, they developed devices to detect the painting by firing neutrons into the wall.

"Leonardo would love to see how much science is being used to look for his most celebrated masterpiece," Dr. Seracini said, gazing up at the wall where he hopes the painting can be found, and then retrieved intact. "I can imagine him being fascinated with all this high-tech gear we're going to set up."

http://snipr.com/scuev



For the First Time, a Census of Autistic Adults
from Time

Among the many great mysteries of autism is this: Where are all the adults with the disorder? In California, for instance, about 80% of people identified as having an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are 18 or under. Studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Protection indicate that about 1 in 150 children in the U.S. have autism, but despite the fact that autism is by definition a lifelong condition, the agency doesn't have any numbers for adults. Neither has anyone else. Until now.

On Sept. 22, England's National Health Service released the first study of autism in the general adult population. The findings confirm the intuitive assumption: that ASD is just as common in adults as it is in children. Researchers at the University of Leicester, working with the NHS Information Center found that roughly 1 in 100 adults are on the spectrum--the same rate found for children in England, Japan, Canada and, for that matter, New Jersey.

This finding would also appear to contradict the commonplace idea that autism rates have exploded in the two decades. Researchers found no significant differences in autism prevalence among people they surveyed in their 20s, 30s, 40s, right up through their 70s. "This suggests that the factors that lead to developing autism appear to be constant," said Dr. Terry Brugha, professor of psychiatry at the University of Leicester and lead author of the study. "I think what our survey suggests doesn't go with the idea that the prevalence is rising."

http://snipr.com/scug4



Flashy Fungi: Researchers Still in the Dark over Glowing Jungle Mushrooms
from Scientific American

It might sound like the opening to a trippy fairy tale, but there are now 71 known species of bioluminescent mushrooms that glow night and day amidst the leaf litter of tropical jungles across the globe.

Seven new species of these fungi are described in an early online report from the journal Mycologia's March/April 2010 issue, four new to science and three previously described--sans the shimmer. This news was published online today.

It was a surprise to find so many new mushrooms that give off this glow, says lead paper author Dennis Desjardin, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, given the tens of thousands of fungi species that do not gleam. Hunting for these tiny beacons can be treacherous, too, as researchers tromp out into tropical forests in disorienting darkness. Indeed, "some environments are a little too dangerous to [collect] them in," Desjardin says. In those locations, he notes, mushrooms are gathered in the daylight and taken back to the lab to observe in darkness and test for light with a photometer.

http://snipr.com/scuiu



8-Horned T. Rex Cousin Found--Dinosaur Was "Ballerina"
from National Geographic News

A sleek cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex has been unearthed in Asia's Gobi desert. The discovery reveals that the fearsome "tyrant lizards," or tyrannosaurids, were much more diverse than thought.

"Instead of [its] big bad boy ... relatives, this one is more like a ballerina," said study co-author Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

A well-preserved skull and a near-complete skeleton from the new species of eight-horned, long-snouted carnivore--dubbed Alioramus altai--were unearthed in 2001 in Mongolia.

http://snipr.com/scuj5



Phantom Storms: How Our Weather Leaks Into Space
from New Scientist

Whether it's showering spacecraft with lethal radiation, filling the sky with ghostly light, or causing electrical surges that black-out entire cities, space weather is a force to be reckoned with.

Thankfully, all is calm in space on the day that I speak to Bill Murtagh at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. "Last week we saw a moderate storm, and that was about the most interesting event in months," he reassures me. "It's pretty quiet today."

And Murtagh should know--his job is to forecast space weather, which comprises any disturbance in near-Earth space, including the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere where satellites roam. Many of the serious events involve disturbances in the charged portion of the atmosphere, known as the ionosphere, which stretches from 80 to 1000 kilometres above sea level. The finger of blame has always been pointed at the sun, which bombards the Earth with a stream of charged particles in the form of the solar wind. During the last three years, though, the sun's cycle of activity has hit a trough, and as Murtagh observes, space weather is temporarily calm.

http://snipr.com/scukl



How Do Marathons Affect Your Heart?
from the New York Times Magazine (Registration Required)

Last year the European Heart Journal published a study that continues to prompt discussion among researchers who work with marathoner runners and those, many of them the same researchers, who run marathons. In the study, German scientists scanned the hearts of 108 experienced, male distance runners in their fifties, sixties and seventies.

The runners had completed a minimum of five marathons in the prior three years. By standard measures, the group's risk for heart problems was low. But when the researchers studied the runners' scan results, they found that more than a third of the men showed evidence of significant calcification or plaque build-up in their heart arteries. Several also had scarring of some of the tissue in their hearts.

"In our study," the researchers concluded dryly, "regular marathon running seems not to protect runners" from coronary artery disease. "In fact," they continued, "we even cannot exclude the possibility that exercise to this degree has deleterious effects on coronary arteries."

http://snipr.com/sculh



War Injury Leads to Advances at Home
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

A world away from the roadside bombs and combat injuries of Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans are suffering the same type of brain injury seen in troops coming home from those war-torn countries. On American roads, at workplaces and on playing fields, more than 11 million have been hurt since the fighting overseas started.

Almost 1 in 5 of these civilians will struggle with lingering, often subtle symptoms--headaches, dizziness, concentration difficulties and personality changes--for a year, and often longer. As their memories falter, their work suffers and their relationships fray, many victims of brain trauma don't realize that their cognitive struggles are related to a blow to the head.

In what has been called a silent epidemic, about 2% of the U.S. population--5.3 million people--cope with long-term disabilities from such accidents.

http://snipr.com/scuod

[Kai]

October 5, 2009




Chromosome Researchers Win Medicine Nobel
from the Wall Street Journal

STOCKHOLM (Associated Press) -- Americans Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak won the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

It was the first time two women have been among the winners of the medicine prize.

The trio, working in the late 1970s and 1980s, solved the mystery of how chromosomes, the rod-like structures that carry DNA, protect themselves from degrading when cells divide.

http://snipr.com/sc4vr



Understanding the Anxious Mind
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Jerome Kagan's "Aha!" moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. ...

He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive.

No high-reactors among the first 18. They gazed calmly at things that were unfamiliar. But the 19th baby was different. She was distressed by novelty--new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells--and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying. Here was what Kagan was looking for but was not sure he would find: a baby who essentially fell apart when exposed to anything new.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html?ref=magazine



Herschel Scans Hidden Milky Way
from BBC News Online

A remarkable view of our Galaxy has been obtained by Europe's billion-euro Herschel Space Observatory.

The telescope was put in a special scanning mode to map a patch of sky. The images reveal in exquisite detail the dense, contorted clouds of cold gas that are collapsing in on themselves to form new stars.

Herschel, which has the largest mirror ever put on an orbiting telescope, was launched in May as a flagship mission of the European Space Agency. It is tuned to see far-infrared wavelengths of light and is expected to give astronomers significant insights into some of the fundamental processes that shape the cosmos.

http://snipr.com/sc4wn



Global Study Examines Toll of Preterm Birth
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Around the world, about one in 10 babies are born prematurely each year, and more than one-quarter of the deaths that occur in the month after birth are the consequence of preterm birth.

Those are among the findings of a new study of the burden of preterm birth by the World Health Organization and the March of Dimes.

The global health community is focusing renewed attention on maternal-child illness and mortality. The new study, which will be followed by a country-by-country assessment next year, looks at the specific role of prematurity in the problems of newborns.

http://snipr.com/sc4wx



School Lab Health and Safety Rules 'Could Stop Future Scientists'
from the Times (London)

It is a scientific fact, tested and proven by generations of pupils, that experiments in school laboratories win young people to the cause of science. White coats, goggles and the chance to set fire to things foster a passion for chemistry that even years of examinations do not extinguish.

But government advisers and eminent scientists are warning of a disturbing development that could endanger generations of future scientists: pupils are no longer allowed to experiment.

Health and safety concerns are preventing students--including those taking A levels--from performing vital and exciting investigations into what happens when one sets fire to magnesium ribbon, or drops a small glob of sodium into a dish of water.

http://snipr.com/sc4xr



Science and Art: Fragile Flu, Siliciferous Smallpox
from the Scientist

A virus has a relatively easy time replicating itself. It's just a matter of hijacking a cell to generate the necessary components and in minutes, the capsid shell proteins self-assemble around a coil of viral genome. But for the glassblowers working with British artist Luke Jerram replicating a virus wasn't so easy.

Jerram and his assistants created glass genomes, carefully placing them on tiny pedestals within what would become viral envelopes. Then they closed up the tops before adding final touches of spikes and glycoproteins, which were shaped and melted on while keeping the whole work at roughly the same temperature.

Though the natural process of viral replication is seemingly effortless, some viruses do slip up. Dengue virus, for example, creates one properly assembled particle in every 4,000 tries. In comparison, Jerram's glassblowers were relative experts.

http://snipr.com/sc4yg



Evening Breast Milk Means a Good Sleep
from New Scientist

Mothers who use a breast pump to express milk during the day and then bottle-feed it to their baby at night may be letting themselves in for a sleepless night.

Naturally occurring chemicals called nucleotides that have previously been linked to sleepiness only reach their highest concentrations in human breast milk that is expressed at night.

Nucleotides are the building blocks of DNA, but they also participate in cellular signalling and metabolic processes within cells. Several of them have also been implicated in sleep.

http://snipr.com/sc4zb



Industrial Hemp Supporters Wait on Federal OK to Grow
from the Oregonian (Registration Required)

Supporters had high hopes--sorry--when the 2009 Oregon Legislature legalized industrial hemp, but it appears the crop is growing nowhere fast.

Even though Oregon made it legal to grow and possess industrial hemp and to buy and sell hemp commodities and products, the federal government hasn't yet signed on. The feds still equate hemp with pot, and no one can grow it until they say so.

"It's rolled into the definition of marijuana at the federal level," said state Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. David Nelson, R-Pendleton. That may change. Hemp activists--including the CEO of a Portland company that makes food from the oil-rich hemp seeds--are lobbying Congress this month to legalize the crop.

http://snipr.com/sc50j



Driven to Distraction
from the Economist

The price Americans pay for belonging to the most mobile society in the world is a stubbornly high number of road deaths. On average (when not in recession) 42,000 Americans die in traffic accidents each year. The figure for Britain is 3,200.

Factor in the fivefold difference in population and the United States still comes out with over two-and-a-half times more road deaths. Even allowing for the fact that Americans drive more, and comparing annual deaths per billion vehicle-miles, America still finishes up with one-and-a-half times more fatalities than Britain.

It is difficult, though, to say why. Cultural traditions probably account for part of the difference. Driver training and behaviour are doubtless factors, too. Historical differences in road layout may also contribute. Then there are differences in demographics and disposable income--with American teenagers owning more cars, and driving disproportionately more miles, than their peers elsewhere in the world.

http://snipr.com/sc50q



Religious Experience Linked to Brain's Social Regions
from Wired

Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence.

In other words, whether or not God or Gods exist, religious belief may have been quite useful in shaping the human mind's evolution.

"The main point is that all these brain regions are important for other forms of social cognition and behavior," said Jordan Grafman, a National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist.

http://snipr.com/sc513

[Kai]

October 21, 2009


NASA Puts New Rocket on Launch Pad for Test Flight
from the San Diego Union-Tribune

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Associated Press) -- NASA's lofty new rocket arrived at the launching pad Tuesday for a test flight next week that comes at a time when the future of the country's spaceflight program is up in the air.

It's the first time in 34 years that a rocket other than the space shuttle has stood at Launch Pad 39-B. NASA modified the pad for this rocket, which is supposed to eventually carry astronauts to the moon.

But the White House may scrap those plans. A panel of aerospace experts that provided President Barack Obama with a list of possible exploration options is issuing its final report later this week.

http://snipr.com/smr75




AIDS Vaccine Study Reassures Skeptics
from Science Insider

PARIS--The fog around the largest AIDS vaccine study ever conducted began to lift today, as Thai and U.S. researchers for the first time publicly presented a detailed analysis of their data to over 1000 scientists gathered here at an annual meeting.

The study results, also published online by The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) today, received widespread attention 3 weeks ago, when researchers touted them during press conferences in the United States and Thailand as the first success in a real-world test of an AIDS vaccine. But that pronouncement came under intense scrutiny because of concerns that it omitted negative analyses that challenged the upbeat conclusions.

After seeing a more thorough presentation of the data, even some scientists who were initially skeptical about the trial believe the vaccine does offer modest protection from infection with HIV.

http://snipr.com/smr7l




Defining Line Between Man and Woman
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

What's the difference between a man and a woman? The question seems too silly to be science: Its answer is so obvious that every stand-up comic has a different way of saying it. ...

But the difference is only obvious most of the time. In some unusual cases, resulting from sex-change operations or medical conditions, the usual indicators of male and female can contradict each other in the same body. The best-known recent example is South African runner Caster Semenya, who has been put through "gender verification" amid suspicion about her muscular physique and low voice.

But the same confusion has cropped up in legal battles over who can be married to whom, and when the "M" on a driver's license can be changed to "F." It can also intrude painfully into the lives of ordinary people, when medical diagnoses reveal that their hormones, chromosomes or anatomy don't sit entirely on one side of the line.

http://snipr.com/smr81




People Can Control Their Halle Berry Neurons
from Science News

CHICAGO -- The Halle Berry fan club is expanding one brain cell at a time. By eavesdropping on the activity of single neurons in the human brain, scientists have figured out which brain cells go wild for superstars such as the popular actress. And the newest research shows that people can activate those cells selectively.

"This study is the first demonstration of humans' ability to control the activity of single neurons," the researchers wrote in a summary of their study. The results, presented October 19 at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting by Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, may help researchers understand how each cell in the brain sees and responds to the world.

"This type of work gives us some clues about what's going on in the brain," comments Christoph Weidemann of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies how the brain processes information. "It's quite an amazing feat for the brain to make sense of its input and reliably recognize people and objects."

http://snipr.com/smr8b




The Deadly Mamba as a Lifesaver
from the Wall Street Journal

Mother Nature has provided a rich source of raw materials for a host of important drugs: aspirin comes from willow tree bark; the blood pressure drug captopril from the venom of a pit viper; warfarin, the widely used blood thinner, was derived from moldy sweet clover.

Now researchers think that desperately ill heart failure patients may find relief with the help of the eastern green mamba snake.

That's the hope, at least, of John Burnett, a heart failure expert at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. He and his colleagues have fashioned an experimental drug based in part on the venom of the snake, a tree-dwelling relative of the cobra that is found in eastern Africa.

http://snipr.com/smr8r




Electric Promise
from BBC News Online

[Chinese Car Maker] BYD says that its new E6 electric car due out before the end of the year will do 250 miles (400km) on a single charge.

This is a very big number. The Tesla electric sports car does almost as much, but has little room for anything else in the car but the battery. The E6 is roomy with space for five passengers and a good-sized boot. The battery tucks under the back seat.

It needs 7-8 hours with a domestic plug to charge the car but BYD--it stands for Build Your Dreams--says a specially developed fast charging point with a lead the diameter of a fire hose will fill up the car in just one hour.

http://snipr.com/smr98




Electric Cars Don't Deserve Halo Yet: Study
from Reuters

NEW YORK -- Electric cars will not be dramatically cleaner than autos powered by fossil fuels until they rely less on electricity produced from conventional coal-fired power plants, scientists said on Monday.

"For electric vehicles to become a major green alternative, the power fuel mix has to move away from coal, or cleaner coal technologies have to be developed," said Jared Cohon, the chair of a National Research Council report released on Monday called "Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use."

About half of U.S. power is generated by burning coal, which emits many times more of traditional pollutants, such as particulates and smog components, than natural gas, and about twice as much of the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

http://snipr.com/smr9g




Scientist Arrested on Spy Charges Worked for Department of Defense
from the Huffington Post

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- A scientist credited with helping discover evidence of water on the moon was arrested Monday on charges of attempting to pass along classified information to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence officer.

Stewart David Nozette, 52, of Chevy Chase, Md., was charged in a criminal complaint with attempting to communicate, deliver and transmit classified information, the Justice Department said.

Nozette was arrested by FBI agents and is expected to make his initial appearance in federal court in Washington on Tuesday. Law enforcement officials said Nozette did not immediately have a lawyer.

http://snipr.com/smrba




Even-More-Gigantic Giant Orb Spider Discovered
from Wired

Scientists have found the world's largest species of golden orb-weaver spider in the tropics of Africa and Madagascar. The discovery marks the first identification of a new Nephila spider since 1879.

Females of the new species, Nephila komaci, measure a whopping 4 to 5 inches in diameter, while the male spiders stay petite at less than a quarter of their mate's size. So far, only a handful of these enormous arachnids have been found in the world.

"We fear the species might be endangered, as its only definite habitat is a sand forest in Tembe Elephant Park in KwaZulu-Natal," ecologist Jonathan Coddington of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History said in a press release. "Our data suggest that the species is not abundant, its range is restricted, and all known localities lie within two endangered biodiversity hotspots: Maputaland and Madagascar."

http://snipr.com/smrbk




For Decades, Puzzling People With Mathematics
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

For today's mathematical puzzle, assume that in the year 1956 there was a children's magazine in New York named after a giant egg, Humpty Dumpty, who purportedly served as its chief editor.

Mr. Dumpty was assisted by a human editor named Martin Gardner, who prepared "activity features" and wrote a monthly short story about the adventures of the child egg, Humpty Dumpty Jr. Another duty of Mr. Gardner's was to write a monthly poem of moral advice from Humpty Sr. to Humpty Jr.

At that point, Mr. Gardner was 37 and had never taken a math course beyond high school. He had struggled with calculus and considered himself poor at solving basic mathematical puzzles, let alone creating them. But when the publisher of Scientific American asked him if there might be enough material for a monthly column on "recreational mathematics," a term that sounded even more oxymoronic in 1956 than it does today, Mr. Gardner took a gamble.

http://snipr.com/smrci

[LMNO]

People Can Control Their Halle Berry Neurons
from Science News

CHICAGO -- The Halle Berry fan club is expanding one brain cell at a time. By eavesdropping on the activity of single neurons in the human brain, scientists have figured out which brain cells go wild for superstars such as the popular actress. And the newest research shows that people can activate those cells selectively.

"This study is the first demonstration of humans' ability to control the activity of single neurons," the researchers wrote in a summary of their study. The results, presented October 19 at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting by Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, may help researchers understand how each cell in the brain sees and responds to the world.

"This type of work gives us some clues about what's going on in the brain," comments Christoph Weidemann of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies how the brain processes information. "It's quite an amazing feat for the brain to make sense of its input and reliably recognize people and objects."

http://snipr.com/smr8b

This could get really cool.

[Kai]

People Can Control Their Halle Berry Neurons
from Science News

CHICAGO -- The Halle Berry fan club is expanding one brain cell at a time. By eavesdropping on the activity of single neurons in the human brain, scientists have figured out which brain cells go wild for superstars such as the popular actress. And the newest research shows that people can activate those cells selectively.

"This study is the first demonstration of humans' ability to control the activity of single neurons," the researchers wrote in a summary of their study. The results, presented October 19 at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting by Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, may help researchers understand how each cell in the brain sees and responds to the world.

"This type of work gives us some clues about what's going on in the brain," comments Christoph Weidemann of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies how the brain processes information. "It's quite an amazing feat for the brain to make sense of its input and reliably recognize people and objects."

http://snipr.com/smr8b

This could get really cool.

LMNO, I have a suggestion. Do you know about electronic Table of Contents? I just see how you and other people here are interested in the top new stories in science. Most of those stories are covered in one of two places: Nature Journal, or Science Magazine, both being the most prestigeous and widely read peer reviewed journals in the world.

http://www.nature.com/nams/svc/myaccount/save/ealert?list_id=1

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/alerts/etoc

You can't read the journals unless you have a subscription (and I would actually buy one for myself if it wasn't offered through my university), but you can at least get the titles and abstracts. I'm serious when I say the top science news for the week is in one of those two journals, 9/10 times.

[LMNO]

Good suggestion.  I'll look into it.

[Kai]

Headlines, The Science - November 12, 2009

Missing Link Dinosaur Discovered
from BBC News Online

Researchers have discovered a fossil skeleton that appears to link the earliest dinosaurs with the large plant-eating sauropods. This could help to bridge an evolutionary gap between the two-legged common ancestors of dinosaurs and the four-legged giants, such as diplodocus.

The remarkably complete skeleton shows that the creature was bipedal but occasionally walked on all four legs. The team reports its discovery in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

"What we have is a big, short-footed, barrel-chested, long-necked, small-headed dinosaur," explained Adam Yates, the scientist from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who led the research.

http://snipr.com/t78kw




Deadliest Lung Cancer Breakthrough
from the Telegraph (UK)

British researchers have found that a drug destroys tumours in a form of inoperable lung cancer that kills more than nine out of 10 sufferers. The treatment works by blocking the growth of the cancer cells and eventually causing them to self destruct.

In more than 50 percent of the trials, the treatment, which appears to have no side effects, killed all traces of the disease. "We are very excited about it," said Professor Michael Seckl, the molecular oncologist who led the study at Imperial College London.

... The researchers behind the new study, published in the journal Cancer Research, have identified a drug that, in half of the mice treated, was able to completely shrink tumours away. It was also able to stop tumours from growing back and it helped other forms of chemotherapy to work more effectively.

http://snipr.com/t78mw




Vatican Looks to Heavens for Signs of Alien Life
from the Tampa Tribune

VATICAN CITY (Associated Press) -- E.T. phone Rome. Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.

"The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.

Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results Tuesday of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology--the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos.

http://snipr.com/t78no




Medical Marijuana Gets a Boost
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.

The nation's largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.

In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.

http://snipr.com/t78qz




High BPA Levels Linked to Male Sexual Problems
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Exposure to high levels of a controversial chemical found in thousands of everyday plastic products appears to cause erectile dysfunction and other sexual problems in men, according to a new study published Wednesday.

The study, funded by the federal government and published in the journal Human Reproduction, is the first to examine the impact of bisphenol A, or BPA, on the reproductive systems of human males. Previous studies have involved mice or rats.

The research comes as government agencies debate the safety of BPA, a compound that is found in thousands of consumer products ranging from dental sealants to canned food linings and that is so ubiquitous it has been detected in the urine of 93 percent of the U.S. population.

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Elephant Seals Sleep While Diving, Study Suggests
from National Geographic News

Migrating northern elephant seals slowly drift downward to rest in the ocean depths, according to a new study of the animals' dive patterns. Moving from their breeding colonies in California to their wintering areas in the mid-Pacific and around Alaska, the seals spend two to eight months at sea without a single pit stop.

There's no land to climb on along the roughly 2,000- to 3,000-mile voyage, and the seabed is often miles below the surface. The marine mammals' grueling trek had many researchers wondering: When and how do elephant seals sleep?

It's long been known that, during the seals' epic migrations, the animals engage in repetitive dives down to depths of 984 feet or more. Now a study of young elephant seals has revealed that during some of these dives, elephant seals roll on their backs and allow themselves to sink.

http://snipr.com/t78sh




Breast Cancer Pain Can Last for Years
from USA Today

Nearly half of breast cancer survivors suffer from persistent pain, even two to three years after surgery, a study shows. Almost 60% of the 3,253 women surveyed experience other symptoms of nerve damage, such as numbness or tenderness, according to a study of all Danish women treated for breast cancer in 2005 and 2006.

Women under 40 and those who have more extensive surgery, such as a mastectomy, and radiation are the most likely to report pain, says the University of Copenhagen's Henrik Kehlet, senior author of the report in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Women also have more pain if surgeons remove many of the lymph nodes in their armpits, a common place for breast cancer to spread, the study says. Fortunately, most breast cancer patients can ease their symptoms with over-the-counter pain relievers, says Loretta Loftus of Tampa's H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, who co-wrote an accompanying editorial.

http://snipr.com/t78to




The Mind Is a Mirror
from Scientific American

The discovery of mirror neurons in the brains of macaques about ten years ago sent shockwaves through the neuroscience community. Mirror neurons are cells that fire both when a monkey performs a certain task and when it observes another individual performing that same task.

With the identification of networks of similarly-behaving cells in humans, there was much speculation over the role such neurons might play in phenomena such as imitation, language acquisition, observational learning, empathy, and theory of mind.

Several research groups have observed the activity of mirror neuron networks indirectly in humans through the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). ... Experiments using fMRI have demonstrated that there is more activation in the human mirror system when people observe movements with which they are familiar. ...

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Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii -- In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.

Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas.

But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one--an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.

http://snipr.com/t78v5




Hub Lab Writing the Book on Face-Reading
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

Pity the Boston car salesman who negotiated across the table from Charles A. Nelson III, a Harvard neuroscience professor who runs the nation's top laboratory studying how people learn to decode facial expressions.

As the two men faced off in the showroom last month, the salesman insisted to Nelson that he had just offered the absolute lowest price for the German car in question, declaring, "This is it."

Then the salesman's eyes darted to a vacant corner, his nose and mouth taking on a configuration that shouted "Bluff." The professor ultimately left the dealership smiling, holding a contract to buy the car at a far lower price, a bargain in his estimation. Such is one ancillary benefit of Nelson's exhaustive research, which unfolds every day in his $1.5 million cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Children's Hospital Boston, where he studies just when and how humans learn to read faces.

http://snipr.com/t78vm