Weekly Science Headlines

[Kai]

 December 10, 2009



Virgin Galactic Unveils First Tourist Spaceship
from National Geographic News

Aspiring space tourists got a first look at their future ride late Monday, when Virgin Galactic unveiled the first of its long-awaited SpaceShipTwo planes.

After years of teases, the world's only commercial spacecraft rolled out onto the tarmac at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. There, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson christened the Virgin Galactic craft with the customary smashing of champagne bottles.

Virgin Galactic leader Sir Richard Branson's daughter, Holly, announced the first SpaceShipTwo plane's name: V.S.S. Enterprise, short for Virgin Space Ship Enterprise, said Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn.

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Kettleman City Asks: Why So Many Birth Defects?
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Kettleman City, Calif. -- When environmental activists began a survey of birth defects in this small migrant farming town halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the results were alarming.

Approximately 20 babies were born here during the 14 months beginning in September 2007. Three of them died; each had been born with oral deformities known as clefts. Two others born with the defect during that period are undergoing medical treatment.

The 1,500 primarily Spanish-speaking residents of this impoverished enclave just off Interstate 5 want to know what is causing these health problems. Some blame them on a nearby hazardous waste facility--the largest landfill of its kind west of Louisiana and the only one in California licensed to accept carcinogenic PCBs.

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The Big Spill: Flood Could Have Filled Mediterranean in Less Than Two Years
from Science News

A cataclysmic flood could have filled the Mediterranean Sea--which millions of years ago was a dry basin--like a bathtub in the space of less than two years. A new model suggests that at the flood's peak water poured from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin at a rate one thousand times the flow of the Amazon River, according to calculations published in the Dec. 10 Nature.

"In an instantaneous flash, the dry Mediterranean became a normal Mediterranean like we see it today," says lead author Daniel Garcia-Castellanos of Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Barcelona.

He and his colleagues calculate that at the height of the flood, water levels rose more than 10 meters and more than 40 centimeters of rock eroded away per day. The model also shows that 100 million cubic meters of water flowed through the channel per second, with water gushing at speeds of 100 kilometers an hour. Rather than a Niagara Falls-esque cascade from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean, the team's results imply a torrent several kilometers wide at a fairly gradual slope.

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Dirty Babies Get Healthier Hearts
from New Scientist

Affluent, modern babies live in a sanitised world. This has already been blamed for a high incidence of asthma and allergies, but might also up the risk of developing a host of other conditions common in rich countries, such as stroke and heart disease.

According to the "hygiene hypothesis", our immune system evolved to handle a germ-laden world. If we don't encounter many pathogens during infancy, it doesn't learn to keep itself in check, and turns on inflammation--normally a response to infection--in inappropriate situations. This reaction, the hypothesis goes, is responsible for the recent increase in asthma and allergies, both associated with inflammation.

Recently, it has emerged that chronic inflammation may also increase the risk of diabetes, stroke and heart diseases. So might the hygiene hypothesis be implicated here too?

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In Some Bird Species, Even Females Are Pretty
from LiveScience

In many bird species, the males get all the glory with elaborate, colorful plumes, while females' drab appearance keeps them under the radar. This is thought to be the case when females are choosy and males must compete against each other for mates.

That is true in many species. But now scientists have found that when birds live in families, and not every individual gets to breed, females must compete just as hard as males and thus have just as lavish plumage.

The original theory of sexual selection was outlined by Charles Darwin to explain why many species have dull females and flamboyant males. This tends to occur whenever reproduction is shared more equally among females than among males. In this case, the males must strut their stuff and perfect their ornamentation to be noticed, while even the plainest female will still be sought out as a mate, so there is no incentive for her to accessorize.

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Should Wild Animals Become Pets to Ward Off Extinction?
from Time

In February 2009, Australia's Environment Minister Peter Garrett made a depressing announcement. The Christmas Island pipistrelle bat--an inch-long winged creature no heavier than five grams--was about to go extinct. Articles about its imminent demise were accompanied by photos of the bat's minuscule body, barely big enough to embrace the full diameter of a human finger. In February, there were estimated to be just 20 bats left. One was seen fluttering around the island in August, but there have been no sightings since.

If the Christmas Island pipistrelle is truly gone, it will be the 23rd Australian mammal species to have become extinct in the past 200 years. ... The accumulation of tragedies like these has given Australia the shameful distinction of having the worst mammal-extinction record in the world. Half of the mammals that have vanished from the planet in the past two centuries have been in Australia. ...

Mike Archer, a professor at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), has long been a proponent of domesticating Australia's unique wildlife to keep it from disappearing. ... While he concedes that not all native animals make great pets (wombats and koalas come to mind), others do, and Archer is hoping that the government will start to legalize ownership of more native pets.

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Evidence of Water in Sand Mars Rover's Stuck In
from the San Francisco Chronicle

Spirit, the Mars rover with one wheel stuck fast in the planet's soft sand since April, has uncovered some of the best evidence yet that water once existed on the planet, apparently after a time of intense volcanic activity billions of years ago.

The evidence came from sand the rover dug up as its stuck wheel spun, broke through a thin rocky crust and created a tiny crater about 5 feet wide and less than 10 inches deep.

The sand, clearly visible to scientists in photographs taken with the rover's own camera, is filled with sulfates--chemicals that had formed in water.

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Developing Countries Split Over Climate Measures
from BBC News Online

A major split between developing countries has emerged at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Small island states and poor African nations vulnerable to climate impacts laid out demands for a legally-binding deal tougher than the Kyoto Protocol. This was opposed by richer developing states such as China, which fear tougher action would curb their growth.

... The split within the developing country bloc is highly unusual, as it tends to speak with a united voice.

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Hubble Sees to Edge of Universe
from Scientific American

Astronomers have used the Hubble space telescope to discover the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. A new camera fitted to the orbiting observatory in May by shuttle astronauts has captured dim red "star cities" that formed only 600-900 million years after the Big Bang.

The universe is thought to be around 14 billion years old and this new glimpse of them is a look back in time more than 13 billion years. Two teams from the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh picked out the candidates for most remote galaxies in images taken in infrared light by Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3.

It is an incredible photograph, covering a square patch of sky just a 15th the width of the full moon. Yet that tiny bit of the heavens alone is crammed with thousands of whirls and blurs--each one a collection of many millions or billions of stars.

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Rare Words 'Author's Fingerprint'
from BBC News Online

Analyses of classic authors' works provide a way to "linguistically fingerprint" them, researchers say.

The relationship between the number of words an author uses only once and the length of a work forms an identifier for them, they argue.

Analyses of works by Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and DH Lawrence showed these "unique word" charts are specific to each author. The work is published in the New Journal of Physics.

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[Kai]

December 9, 2009





Drugs Change Personality in Depressed, Study Finds
from the Chicago Tribune

Antidepressant drugs taken by some 7 percent of American adults effect profound personality changes in many patients with depression--making them more optimistic, self-confident and outgoing.

The drugs, which increase levels of the chemical serotonin in the brain, reduced neuroticism and increased extroversion, two of the five traits thought to define personality and shape a person's day-to-day thoughts and behavior, according to a study published Monday.

The personality changes were observed for a substantial portion of depressed subjects. The drugs seem, in effect, to relieve depression by reducing the supply of negative thoughts that feed the mental disorder, said Northwestern University psychologist Tony Tang, the lead author of the study.

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UN: 2000-2009 Could Be Earth's Warmest Decade Ever
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

COPENHAGEN -- A leaked Danish document at the U.N. climate conference provoked angry criticism Tuesday from developing countries and activists who feared it would shift more of the burden to curb greenhouse gases on poorer countries.

Negotiators, meanwhile, displayed charts of data that said the current decade is on track to be the hottest on record for planet Earth.

At the heart of Tuesday's clash--stemming from draft texts attributed to Denmark and China--is the determination by the more impoverished states to bear a lesser burden than wealthy, more industrialized countries in the effort to slow global warming.

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Study: Eating Soy Is Safe for Breast-Cancer Survivors
from Time

If you are among the thousands of American women who have survived breast cancer, you probably find yourself thinking twice about everything you do--what you eat, how much you exercise--to ensure that you don't increase your risk of developing another tumor. It's a natural response to a difficult diagnosis, but it can be challenging, especially when it comes to diet: most breast tumors are driven by the hormone estrogen, but estrogen is frequently found in many popular foods, from some types of milk and yogurt to breakfast bars to tofu and those addictive edamame beans.

The common culprit is soy, a plant that contains chemicals with estrogen-like and anti-estrogenic properties--making it a nutritional minefield for breast-cancer survivors. ...Studies on the effect of soy on breast-cancer recurrence and mortality have been conflicting, with some showing that it can reduce risk, while others show an elevated rate of recurrent disease among frequent consumers of soy.

Now the largest study to date on soy's effect on breast cancer suggests that eating soy, even in large amounts, may not be harmful after all, and may even reduce recurrence and death from the disease. But while the findings are intriguing, not all doctors are ready to tout the benefits of tofu.

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Hungry Amoebas Spawn Biggest Viruses Ever
from Wired

Made from a hodgepodge of genetic bits and pieces, the newly discovered Marseillevirus is the world's largest virus.

But fame is fleeting: It's almost sure to be supplanted by another, even bigger virus. What's really special about Marseillevirus is where it comes from. Like other giant viruses, it was found inside amoebas--lowly, single-celled organisms that devour anything they can absorb. Their voracious appetites make them incubators of genetic remixing among their prey, and may hint at processes that spawned complex life.

"What we find is that inside the amoeba, a virus can meet bacteria, archaea and prokaryotes. A whole new repertoire of an organism can be composed," said Didier Raoult, a microbiologist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France.

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It's Natural to Behave Irrationally
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

To a psychologist, climate change looks as if it was designed to be ignored.

It is a global problem, with no obvious villains and no one-step solutions, whose worst effects seem as if they'll befall somebody else at some other time. In short, if someone set out to draw up a problem that people would not care about, one expert on human behavior said, it would look exactly like climate change.

That's the upshot of a spate of new research that tries to explain stalled U.S. efforts to combat greenhouse-gas emissions by putting the country on the couch.

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I'm Too Sexy for My Species
from ScienceNOW Daily News

It's hard out there for a sexy female fruit fly. All she wants is a nice meal and a little sperm to fertilize her eggs, but male fruit flies harass her so much, according to a new study, that she lays fewer eggs than normal. And that, researchers say, could be bad for the evolution of the entire species.

When it comes to choosing a mating partner, females are usually the more picky sex. Female peacocks like the boys with the most colorful feathers, for example, and female deer go for big antlers. In the fruit fly world, however, males are the choosy ones. They prefer fatter females--they dance around them and constantly try to mate with them--probably because these females lay more eggs.

Evolutionary biologist Tristan Long of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and colleagues wondered if all of this attention was bad for the females. The team sorted female fruit flies by knocking them out with carbon dioxide and sifting them through a series of sieves, each with holes a little smaller than the level above. In some experiments, males were given a choice between large-bodied females and randomly chosen females...

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Exoplanet Claim Bites the Dust
from Nature News

Strike one planet from the list of 400-odd found around stars in other solar systems: a proposed planet near a star some 6 parsecs from Earth may not exist after all.

The finding is also a strike against a planet-seeking strategy called astrometry, which measures the side-to-side motion of a star on the sky to see whether any unseen bodies might be orbiting it. Ground-based astrometry has been used for more than a century, but none of the extrasolar planets it has detected has been verified in subsequent studies.

In May, Steven Pravdo of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and his colleagues raised fresh hopes for the technique when they announced an exoplanet, six times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting VB10, a star about one-thirteenth the mass of the Sun, using a telescope at the Palomar Observatory in southern California. But now a group led by Jacob Bean at the Georg-August University in Gottingen, Germany, has used a different approach, and found nothing. "The planet is not there," says Bean.

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Testosterone Link to Aggression 'All in the Mind'
from BBC News Online

Giving women more of the male hormone testosterone can turn them into fairer and more amiable game players, according to tests.

A single dose of testosterone was enough to have this effect, European scientists found, but only if the woman was oblivious to the treatment. If she realised she had received the hormone and not a dummy drug, she turned to greed and selfishness.

The work in Nature magazine suggests the mind can win over hormones. Testosterone induces anti-social behaviour in humans, but only because of our own prejudices about its effect rather than its biological activity, suggest the authors.

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Russia Reigns Over its Weather
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Moscow -- In the snow-hushed woods on Moscow's northern edge, scientists are decades deep into research on bending the weather to their will. They've been at it since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin paused long enough in the throes of World War II to found an observatory dedicated to tampering with climatic inconveniences.

Since then, they've melted away fog, dissipated the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl and called down rains fierce enough to drown unborn locusts threatening the distant northeastern grasslands.

Now they're poised to battle the most inevitable and emblematic force of Russian winter: the snow.

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The Circular Logic of the Universe
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Circling my way not long ago through the Vasily Kandinsky show now on display in the suitably spiral setting of the Guggenheim Museum, I came to one of the Russian master's most illustrious, if misleadingly named, paintings: "Several Circles."

Those "several" circles, I saw, were more like three dozen, and every one of them seemed to be rising from the canvas, buoyed by the shrewdly exuberant juxtapositioning of their different colors, sizes and apparent translucencies. I learned that, at around the time Kandinsky painted the work, in 1926, he had begun collecting scientific encyclopedias and journals; and as I stared at the canvas, a big, stupid smile plastered on my face, I thought of yeast cells budding, or a haloed blue sun and its candied satellite crew, or life itself escaping the careless primordial stew.

I also learned of Kandinsky's growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is "the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally." It is "simultaneously stable and unstable," "loud and soft," "a single tension that carries countless tensions within it." Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse.

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[Kai]

December 23, 2009

Happy Holidays! Science in the News will resume on January 4.



Tennessee Coal-Ash Spill Only One EPA Hurdle
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

When the dam broke-- ayear ago Tuesday, a little after midnight--Sandy Gupton thought she was hearing two trains colliding. It wasn't until morning that she saw what had really happened near Kingston, Tenn. It looked, Gupton said, "like a volcano had erupted."

An earth-and-ash dam holding back 1 billion gallons of waterlogged ash from a nearby power plant had failed, and the slurry flowed out to choke the Emery River and cover 85 acres of land.

One year later, most of the ash on the land is still there. And the problem of similar coal-ash ponds still sits on the long and fast-expanding to-do list of President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency. Now--after a year in which a climate-change summit in Copenhagen fell short of most expectations, and with a climate bill stalled in the U.S. Senate--the EPA might shoulder more of the burden for an administration with historic environmental ambitions.

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Whatever Doesn't Kill Some Animals Can Make Them Deadly
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Have you ever tried to think up the worst meal you could imagine? How about blue-ringed octopus, floral egg crab, basket shell snails and puffer fish.

Sure, some people may think these are delicacies, and puffer fish is certainly treated as such in parts of Asia. But each dish has something more important in common: they are all deadly. Each of these animals is chock full of a powerful neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin.

First isolated from the puffer fish, tetrodotoxin is among the most potent toxins known. It is 100 times as toxic by weight as potassium cyanide--two milligrams can kill an adult human--and it is not destroyed by cooking. Just half an ounce of the fish liver, known as fugu kimo in Japan and eaten by daring connoisseurs, can be lethal. When ingested, the toxin paralyzes nerves and muscles, which leads to respiratory failure and, in some cases each year, death.

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Study: With Cardiac Rehab, More Is Better
from USA Today

Cardiac rehabilitation sessions for elderly people with heart disease can lower their risk of heart attack and help them live longer, new research finds, but fewer than one in five eligible patients bothers to go.

Researchers looked at medical records of more than 30,000 Medicare patients aged 65 and older who attended at least one cardiac rehabilitation session from 2000 to 2005. The findings: More sessions are better.

"We were not surprised that patients who attended more rehabilitation had better outcomes," study author Bradley G. Hammill said in a statement. "We need to encourage physicians to recommend cardiac rehabilitation to eligible patients, and we need to encourage those patients to attend and stay with it."

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Jurupa Hills Oak May Be California's Oldest Plant
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Nestled between two boulders on a low rise in the Jurupa Hills of Riverside County, a good 30 miles from its nearest living relative, lies the ultimate survivor--an oak bush that researchers believe is 13,000 years old.

That's 1,000 years older than a previously identified Palm Springs creosote bush that was thought to be the oldest plant in California, 8,000 years older than bristlecone pines and 10,000 years older than the redwoods.

While it is one of the world's oldest living plants, it is probably not the oldest. That distinction may belong to a quaking aspen in Utah that is thought to be as old as 80,000 years or a holly in Tasmania that may be 43,000 years old.

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Taking Mental Snapshots to Plumb Our Inner Selves
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Psychologists have many ways to get inside our heads: they can give us questionnaires, track our eyes, time how long we take to respond to cues and measure the blood flow to our brains. But how close can these methods get to the texture of our inner lives?

Russell T. Hurlburt a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has spent decades refining another way to study the mind. Dr. Hurlburt, a former aeronautical engineer, took up the study of psychology while playing trumpet at military funerals during the Vietnam War.

Frustrated by the lack of attention to everyday experiences in the field of psychology, he arrived at the university in 1976 with an unconventional plan to investigate the mental lives of his subjects: ask them for descriptions.

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Science News Highlights of 2009
from BBC News Online

It was the year we learned of a spectacular smash-up in space, and scientists working on the world's biggest physics experiment delighted at collisions of an entirely different sort.

There were shockwaves, too, in Copenhagen, as the summit failed to reach a consensus on tackling climate change, instead merely noting a deal struck by major powers including the US and China.

The BBC's science reporter Paul Rincon looks back at the twists and turns of a year in science and the environment.

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Stem Cell Eye Treatment Restores Sight
from the Times (London)

A man who was partially blinded after intervening in a fight has had his vision restored by a new stem-cell therapy.

Russell Turnbull, 38, lost most of the sight from his right eye in 1994 when he was sprayed in the face with ammonia while trying to break up an altercation on a bus in Newcastle upon Tyne. The chemical burnt his cornea, leaving him with cloudy vision, pain on every blink and extreme sensitivity to light.

He has now become one of the first people to benefit from a treatment developed at the North East England Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle, in which stem cells from his good eye were used to repair his damaged one.

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First Case of Swine Flu in Dog Confirmed
from the Seattle Times

(LA Times and Associated Press) -- Veterinarians in White Plains, N.Y., have identified the first known case of pandemic H1N1 influenza in a dog--a 13-year-old mixed-breed male who is now recovering. The dog was tested because his owner previously had swine flu.

The virus has been found before in other pets, including at least three ferrets, several cats and pigs, and a cheetah named Gijima at a wildlife preserve in Santa Rosa, Calif.

A couple of the cats died, but most of the animals recovered. In each case, the virus is thought to have been transmitted to the animal by its owner or handler, and there is no evidence of the virus being passed back to a human.

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When Fire Approaches, Chimps Keep Their Cool
from ScienceNOW Daily News

When primatologist Jill Pruetz found herself threatened by wildfires in the savannas of Fongoli, Senegal, in 2006 she had two options: stay with the chimpanzees she was studying, or run.

She chose the chimps. The primates were calm, and--with her in tow--they carefully made their way around the blaze. "I was very surprised at how good they were at judging the threat and predicting the behavior of fire," says Pruetz.

The chimps' actions, she would later report, set them apart from other nonhuman animals--and they may reveal the evolutionary origins of how we came to master fire.

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Hormones in Concert
from the Scientist (Registration Required)

Multiple hormones act in concert to regulate blood sugar and food intake. The idea has already led to a new diabetes therapy; will it also yield new strategies for obesity?

... In the clinical setting, it was not uncommon for doctors to advise their patients to try harder and be more disciplined. After all, with adequate willpower and meticulous tracking of blood sugars and ingested calories, there had to be a way to do better.

From a scientific perspective, however, it was quite evident that the root of the problem was far more complex.

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[Kai]

 January 4, 2010




Assessing Risks From Bisphenol A
from American Scientist

The industrialized world produces an immense amount of plastic, more than 45 billion kilograms annually in the United States alone. But what is it made of, and is it all safe?

Some reusable water bottles sold in Wal-Mart and other retail stores in the United States now display stickers proudly marketing themselves as "BPA-free." The labeling results from consumer concern over scientific evidence that bisphenol A (BPA), a common ingredient in many hard plastics, may be harmful to the human reproductive system because it interferes with hormones.

The plastics industry and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration say BPA is not dangerous at the levels people are currently exposed to. In contrast, in September of 2008, the U.S. National Toxicology Program concluded that there is "some concern" for adverse effects on the "brain, behavior and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and children." This concern prompted members of Congress to pressure the FDA to take another look, a process that is now underway.

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Cell Phone Safety Studied
from the (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK -- John Bucher, a reserved scientist who will play a key role in the public debate over the health risks posed by cell phones, doesn't like to discuss his own calling habits.

His reticence is understandable: The 5-year, $25 million health study is meant to settle the question of whether long-term exposure to radiation from cell phones can cause cancers. The study overseen by Bucher, associate director of the National Toxicology Program in Research Triangle Park, is the U.S. government's response to rising concerns about the ubiquitous phones.

Some scientists and public health advocates are calling for restrictions on cell phone use. ... More than 100 studies have been devoted to the subject of cell phone safety worldwide, but the results have been "all over the map," Bucher said.

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Tasmanian Devil Facial Cancer Origins 'Identified'
from BBC News Online

Researchers believe they have identified the source of fatal tumours that threaten to wipe out the wild population of Tasmanian devils.

Writing in Science, an international team of scientists suggest cells that protect nerves are the likely origin of devil facial tumour disease (DFTD).

The disease is a transmissible cancer that is spread by physical contact, and quickly kills the animals. DFTD has caused the devil population to collapse by 60% in the past decade.

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Scientists Start a Genomic Catalog of Earth's Abundant Microbes
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

If you want to appreciate the diversity of life on earth, you will need a microscope.

There are about 5,400 species of mammals on the planet, but just a spoonful of soil may contain twice as many species of microbes. They can dwell in habitats where so-called higher life forms like us would quickly die, including acid-drenched mines and Antarctic deserts. By one rough estimate, there may be, all told, 150 million species of microbes.

"Microbes represent the vast majority of organisms on earth," said Hans-Peter Klenk, a microbiologist for the German Collection of Micro-organisms and Cell Cultures, a government microbiology research center.

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Hushing the Intruders in Her Brain
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

It was a little more than a year ago that January Schofield, at age 6, began to drift from reality. Suicidal, violent and plagued by hallucinations of rats and cats who conversed and played with her, she began the first of seven psychiatric hospitalizations.

As of today, Jani, 7, has been out of the hospital for 56 days, the longest period in 15 months. Together with her parents, Michael and Susan, and brother, Bodhi, 2, Jani is living a fragile existence--haunted by delusions that sometimes tell her to hurt herself or others, even the people she loves.

But despite the family's dire financial and emotional circumstances, that existence is not completely devoid of hope.

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H1N1 Pandemic Tops List of Health Stories
from USA Today

Global health experts worried that if the virus began spreading from person to person, it could spark a human chain of infection and death worse than anything seen since 1918. They ramped up flu surveillance and bolstered vaccine production. No one predicted that the next pandemic would be launched by an entirely different flu virus in Mexico.

Unlike avian flu, the new virus, H1N1, came from pigs. H1N1 also had an "extraordinary capability to spread explosively from person to person," says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fortunately, it is far less lethal to humans.

The first wave began in the spring, targeting unusual risk groups: young people, children with neuromuscular diseases, pregnant women and the obese. A summer lull in the Northern Hemisphere was balanced by a wave of cases in the south. When schools reopened, the virus came roaring back.

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Dog Genes May Hold Secrets to Human Disease
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

Scientists scouring the genome to better understand complex human diseases are looking to an unlikely ally for guidance: our pets.

Dogs have been an integral part of human life for centuries. It is precisely because of that intertwined history that dogs are a potentially powerful tool for researchers seeking the genetic roots of everything from psychiatric disorders to cancer--just two of the ailments that are similar in both humans and dogs.

Last month, scientists studying Doberman pinschers with a compulsive behavior disorder similar to human obsessive-compulsive disorder found a gene associated with the condition. The genetic hit is now being followed by other researchers, who are studying the same gene in human patients with OCD, in hopes the clue from man's best friend may help explain the disease in people.

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North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due to Core Flux
from National Geographic News

Earth's north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) a year due to magnetic changes in the planet's core, new research says.

Now, newly analyzed data suggest that there's a region of rapidly changing magnetism on the core's surface, possibly being created by a mysterious "plume" of magnetism arising from deeper in the core.

And it's this region that could be pulling the magnetic pole away from its long-time location in northern Canada, said Arnaud Chulliat, a geophysicist at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France.

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Warming Has Already Boosted Insect Breeding
from Science News

Summertime and the insect breeding is easy.

That old song rings especially true for 44 species of moths and butterflies in Central Europe, according to an analysis by ecologist Florian Altermatt of the University of California, Davis. As the region has warmed since the 1980s, some of these species have added an extra generation during the summer for the first time on record in that location.

Among the 263 species already known to have a second or third generation there during toasty times, 190 have grown more likely to do so since 1980, Altermatt reports online December 22 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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The Top 10 ScienceNOWs of 2009
from ScienceNOW Daily News

Every year, ScienceNOW publishes hundreds of breaking science news stories, from the discovery of Earth-like planets to new insights into how the brain works. Picking our Top 10 is never an easy task, so we've relied on you to help us out. Most of the stories below were our most popular of 2009, as judged by reader clicks. And we've thrown in some of our staff favorites as well.

10) Closer Look at Einstein's Brain. Ever wondered what made Albert Einstein so smart--and such a good violin player to boot? The answers may lie in a new analysis of the famed physicist's brain, which is unusual in several ways.

9) Ancient Virus Gave Wasps Their Sting. A virus that infected wasps millions of years ago has given the insect the ability to paralyze caterpillars and turn them into nests for their young. Experts say the discovery could improve gene therapy techniques for humans.

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[Kai]

And, after that huge dump, some articles from Science and Nature about the happenings in 2009.

The Breakthroughs of 2009
Bruce Alberts

Bruce Alberts is Editor-in-Chief of Science.

Every December, the editors of Science face the challenge of reviewing what Science has accomplished around the world in the past 12 months, so as to select our "breakthroughs of the year." The task is an invigorating one, providing a powerful reminder of both the enormous scope and the continual advance of science. For this year's selections, the range is staggering. From the discovery of pulsars created by neutron stars that are many thousands of light-years distant, to the production of a new single-atom–thick material such as graphene, the same natural laws and logic have generated new understandings over a more than 1030-fold difference in scale. And there is usually special excitement when an advance directly concerns humans, as in the discovery of an ancient ancestor or a successful application of gene therapy to cure disease.

This year's selection for the Breakthrough of the Year is the reconstruction of the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton and her environs, published in Science as a major series of 11 articles in October. This choice does not come easily, given the distaste of our editors for self-promotion. But this work changes the way we think about early human evolution, and it represents the culmination of 15 years of highly collaborative research. Remarkably, 47 scientists of diverse expertise from nine nations joined in a painstaking analysis of the 150,000 specimens of fossilized animals and plants [see Science 326, 62 (2009) for photos and locations of each author].

The 11 Ardipithecus papers, requiring 89 pages of text plus 295 pages of supporting online material, provide an enormous amount of data for scientists around the world to reexamine. As described on p. 1598 in the current issue, some of those scientists are certain to challenge some of the findings, as further advances are built on those already published. With time, we will come to understand much more, and some current conclusions will probably be modified. This is both to be expected and hoped for: Science can only advance as a highly collaborative global endeavor, through which new knowledge improves on old knowledge based on logic and confirmable evidence.

Our Runner-Up Breakthrough of the Year is "opening up the gamma-ray sky," as represented by the discovery of gamma-ray pulsars with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Astrophysicist Michael Turner, a member of our Senior Editorial Board, emphasizes the telescope's astounding capability to scan the entire sky in less than 3 hours, with a sensitivity orders of magnitude better than its predecessors, superior angular resolution and energy coverage, and time coverage ranging from milliseconds to months. The Fermi Telescope has thereby revealed, with unprecedented detail, a very restless high-energy universe, and it is solving old mysteries while making new, unexpected discoveries.

A glance at the remaining eight breakthroughs on our list similarly reveals a heavy dependence of new science on remarkable engineering feats. Most obvious are the Hubble Telescope repair and the giant x-ray laser created at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. But it would be hard to overestimate the benefits to modern science from the development of sophisticated new technologies in essentially every discipline. Indeed, new understandings of the natural world derived from science are constantly being used to generate new techniques and instruments that greatly speed the next scientific discoveries, helping to explain the accelerating pace at which science advances.

To take an example from my field of biology, advances in the techniques for sequencing DNA will soon have moved us from a $3 billion human genome to a $3000 human genome in less than 20 years—a reduction in cost of a million-fold, attributable to collaborations of scientists with engineers.

Today, more than ever, scientists and engineers across the globe need each other if we are to continue to achieve the remarkable advances in human understanding that we celebrate in Science's final issue every year: the kind of breakthroughs that the world will always require to improve the welfare of human beings.

[Kai]

And, Rapidshare link to News 2009 from Nature:

http://rapidshare.com/files/330915139/462962a.pdf.html

[Triple Zero]

Trusting Nature as the Climate Referee
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Imagine there's no Copenhagen. Imagine a planet in which global warming was averted without the periodic need for thousands of people to fly around the world to promise to stop burning fossil fuels.

Imagine no international conferences wrangling over the details of climate policy. Imagine entrusting the tough questions to a referee: Mother Earth.

That is the intriguing suggestion of Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario who ... is virtuously restricting his carbon footprint by staying away from Copenhagen this week.

http://snipr.com/tp8uw

reading this article ... is this a good idea? it sounds like a good idea, but maybe I'm missing the catch here.

[Kai]

January 5, 2010

Use of Potentially Harmful Chemicals Kept Secret Under Law
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Of the 84,000 chemicals in commercial use in the United States--from flame retardants in furniture to household cleaners--nearly 20 percent are secret, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, their names and physical properties guarded from consumers and virtually all public officials under a little-known federal provision.

The policy was designed 33 years ago to protect trade secrets in a highly competitive industry. But critics--including the Obama administration--say the secrecy has grown out of control, making it impossible for regulators to control potential dangers or for consumers to know which toxic substances they might be exposed to.

At a time of increasing public demand for more information about chemical exposure, pressure is building on lawmakers to make it more difficult for manufacturers to cloak their products in secrecy. Congress is set to rewrite chemical regulations this year for the first time in a generation.

http://snipurl.com/tz01p



C.I.A. Is Sharing Data With Climate Scientists
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The nation's top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government's intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests.

The collaboration restarts an effort the Bush administration shut down and has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends, and they have had images of the ice pack declassified to speed the scientific analysis.

The trove of images is "really useful," said Norbert Untersteiner, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice and is a member of the team of spies and scientists behind the effort.

http://snipurl.com/tz05o



NASA's Kepler Planet-Hunter Detects Five Worlds
from BBC News Online

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has detected its first five exoplanets, or planets beyond our Solar System.

The observatory, which was launched last year to find other Earths, made the discoveries in its first few weeks of science operations. Although the new worlds are all bigger than our Neptune, the US space agency says the haul shows the telescope is working well and is very sensitive.

The exoplanets have been given the names Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b. They were announced at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington DC. The planets range in size from an object that has a radius four times that of Earth, to worlds much bigger than even our Jupiter.

http://snipurl.com/tz06q



Study Bolsters Concerns that Disinfectants Create Superbugs
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Disinfectants, be they hand sanitizers or industrial-strength cleaners, present a hospital's first blockade against bacterial infection. But this same weapon may be helping create stronger microbial enemies: superbugs that are resistant to disinfectants and commonly used antibiotics, scientists report in the January issue of the journal Microbiology.

Researchers from the National University of Ireland in Galway studied lab cultures of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which lives in soil and water. The bacterium, which can colonize catheters and other medical equipment, accounts for 8% of infections acquired in hospitals, according to a 2008 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Though it does not seriously hurt healthy people (it's been implicated in such quaintly named afflictions as "hot tub itch" and "swimmer's ear"), the bacterium can infect the lungs, joints, burn wounds, urinary tracts and blood of people whose defenses have been weakened by conditions such as chemotherapy, diabetes, cystic fibrosis or AIDS.

http://snipurl.com/tz071 - A note about this one. Soap, all by itself, is antibacterial and antimicrobial. It's a sulfactant, and it destroys cell membranes, killing 99% of all microorganisms it comes into contact with. There is no reason to add antibacterials to soap, since it is in base already antibacterial. Molecular biologists use soap to cut up cells to extract nucleic acids. So, just use soap, all by itself, it's more than good enough.



Melting Glaciers Nourishing Oceans With Ancient Carbon
from National Geographic News

Alaska's marine animals have an unexpected nutrient in their diets: ancient carbon from glacier melt, a new study says. Glaciers that naturally melt each summer along the Gulf of Alaska flush out huge amounts of organic material, made up mostly of dead microbes.

Those microbes had feasted on ancient carbon from boggy forests, which lined the Alaska coast between 2,500 to 7,000 years ago and were later trapped under glaciers.

Once released via glacial melt, the dead microbes provide a tasty treat for living microbes, which are at the base of the marine food web, researchers say.

http://snipurl.com/tz09f



Going Smoke-Free May Raise Diabetes Risk
from the Baltimore Sun

No one doubts that quitting smoking is one of the best ways to improve your health. But a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers suggests that, in the short term, tossing the cigarettes might actually increase the risk of developing diabetes.

People who quit smoking tend to gain weight, and those extra pounds can put a person at increased diabetes risk. In fact, the diabetes risk was higher for people who gave up cigarettes than for those who continued to smoke--but only within the first couple of years of quitting, according to the research appearing in today's Annals of Internal Medicine.

After that, the diabetes risk decreased and almost disappeared after 10 years, researchers found.

http://snipurl.com/tz09x



Are Engines the Future of Solar Power?
from Scientific American

Nearly 200 years after their invention, and decades after first being proposed as a method of harnessing solar energy, 60 sun-powered Stirling engines are about to begin generating electricity outside Phoenix, Ariz., for the first time. Such engines, which harness heat to expand a gas and drive pistons, are not used widely today other than in pacemakers and long-distance robotic spacecraft.

The 1.5 megawatt (MW) demonstration site, known as Maricopa Solar, is set to begin operations early January 2010, with units provided by the Arizona-based Stirling Energy Systems (SES). While 1.5 MW is only a fraction of the power that may be generated at sites SES has contracted to develop in California and Texas, spokesperson Janette Coates says this is a necessary first step in the technology's commercialization.

"It's important for our industry to see—and our partners and investors—that we can take a small-scale plant and get it operational before we break ground on larger ones," she says.

http://snipurl.com/tz0ab



New-Found Galaxies May Be Farthest Back in Time Yet
from Science News

By pushing the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope to its very limits as a cosmic time machine, astronomers have identified three galaxies that may hail from an era only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The faint galaxies may be the most distant starlit bodies known, each lying some 13.2 billion light-years from Earth.

Detecting galaxies at such a distance is at the very edge of what current technology can accomplish, comments Richard Ellis of Caltech, who was not part of the new study. It's uncharted territory, he says.

If the researchers are correct in the preliminary determination, then Hubble is seeing light that reveals the galaxies as they first appeared just 480 million years after the birth of the universe.

http://snipurl.com/tz0bd



In New Way to Edit DNA, Hope for Treating Disease
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Only one man seems to have ever been cured of AIDS, a patient who also had leukemia. To treat the leukemia, he received a bone marrow transplant in Berlin from a donor who, as luck would have it, was naturally immune to the AIDS virus.

If that natural mutation could be mimicked in human blood cells, patients could be endowed with immunity to the deadly virus. But there is no effective way of making precise alterations in human DNA.

That may be about to change, if a powerful new technique for editing the genetic text proves to be safe and effective. At the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Carl June and colleagues have used the technique to disrupt a gene in patients' T cells, the type attacked by the AIDS virus. They have then infused those cells back into the body. A clinical trial is now under way to see if the treated cells will reconstitute a patient's immune system and defeat the virus.

http://snipurl.com/tz0dy - Did I predict cure for prostate cancer? Wait, I meant cure for AIDS.



The Call of the Panama Bats
from Smithsonian Magazine

...Since 2000, [Elisabeth] Kalko, who is jointly appointed as the head of the experimental ecology department at the University of Ulm in Germany and a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, has been making two trips a year, usually for a month each time, to Panama's Barro Colorado Island (BCI).

...The bats are what draw Kalko. Around 120 bat species—a tenth of the species found worldwide—live in Panama, and of those, 74 can be found on BCI. Kalko has worked closely with a quarter of them and estimates she has observed about 60 in an effort to better understand the various behaviors that have allowed so many species to coexist.

...The greater bulldog bat, as it's more commonly known, is the only bat on the island with fish as its primary diet. Using echolocation to locate swimming fish making ripples in the water's surface, it swoops down over the water, drags its long talons and snatches its prey. In flight, it curls its head down to grab the fish, then chews it and fills its cheek pouches like a hamster.

http://snipurl.com/tz0eu - fish hunting bats are cool.

[Kai]

Trusting Nature as the Climate Referee
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Imagine there's no Copenhagen. Imagine a planet in which global warming was averted without the periodic need for thousands of people to fly around the world to promise to stop burning fossil fuels.

Imagine no international conferences wrangling over the details of climate policy. Imagine entrusting the tough questions to a referee: Mother Earth.

That is the intriguing suggestion of Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario who ... is virtuously restricting his carbon footprint by staying away from Copenhagen this week.

http://snipr.com/tp8uw

reading this article ... is this a good idea? it sounds like a good idea, but maybe I'm missing the catch here.

The catch is it's all talk.

Plus, we should be setting carbon limits anyway, regardless of climate change. Pollution control doesn't need a reason like climate change to make sense.

[Kai]

January 6, 2010

Why Atom-Size Gadgets Must Shape Up
from the Christian Science Monitor

For engineers who measure their gizmos in atom-size dimensions, getting size and shape just right is the key to success. A few nanometers (billionths of a meter) off that right size or a misplaced wrinkle can ruin an exquisitely designed nano "tool." Mastering these poorly understood design principles will have big practical payoffs.

For example, food scientist Yuan Yao at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., has found a way to reshape nanoparticles derived from sweet corn that transforms them into a powerful food preservative. Meanwhile, chemist Scott Anderson at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City has shown that size directly affects the electrical properties of metal nanoparticles used as catalysts to make certain chemical reactions happen. "People had speculated this should be happening but no one has ever seen it [before]," he says.

If that sounds like something only a chemist would whoop about, consider this. Because chemists don't really know how to design a catalyst, they use expensive metals like gold or platinum that they know from experience will work. Think of a car's catalytic converter. Yet as Dr. Anderson notes, 90 percent of the particles in a gold catalyst are too big to be active. Only nanoparticles with about 10 atoms each seem to do the work. "If you could make a catalyst with only the right size particles, you could save 90 percent of the cost or more," he says.

http://snipr.com/tzbti




Should Baby Screenings Include More Rare Gene Diseases?
from USA Today

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- At his first birthday, John Klor couldn't sit up on his own. A few months later, he was cruising like any healthy toddler -- thanks to a special diet that's treating the North Carolina boy's mysterious disease.

What doctors initially called cerebral palsy instead was a rare metabolic disorder assaulting his brain and muscles, yet one that's treatable if caught in time.

Urged by John's family, Duke University researchers are working on a way to test newborns for this disease, called GAMT deficiency. It's part of a growing movement to add some of the rarest of rare illnesses -- with such names as bubble-boy disease, Pompe disease, Krabbe disease -- to the battery of screenings given to U.S. babies hours after birth.

http://snipr.com/tzbtr




Time Marches on, Measured in Billionths of a Second
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

When you're having the time of your life, time doesn't matter. So when the big ball in Times Square hit bottom on New Year's Eve, you probably didn't much care if it was precisely midnight, especially if you were engaged in the annual ritual epic smooch.

The rest of your life, however, depends on timekeeping that is almost unimaginably exact. Telecommunications systems, such as your cellphone service, need timing signals that are correct to within a millionth of a second per day. Ditto for the devices that synchronize all the sources feeding the nation's electric power grid. Global Positioning System signals, as readers of this column know, have to be accurate to within a billionth of a second per day, and some kinds of research demand time scales a million times finer. Or more.

As a result, civilization now tracks the passage of time with an accuracy of three or four parts in 10 million billion, equivalent to gaining or losing no more than one second in 100 million years or so. That's pretty good. But not close enough for government work--or for a host of urgent purposes from fundamental physics to neuroscience and defense applications.

http://snipr.com/tzbtx - cause we all have connections to atomic clocks in our back pockets, essentially.




Future Uncertain for Stuck Mars Rover
from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

LOS ANGELES (Associated Press) -- Spirit has always been the unluckier of NASA's twin Mars rovers. Just weeks after landing in a Martian crater in 2004, it went haywire and transmitted gibberish to Earth. Engineers eventually nursed it back to health.

As if the near-death experience wasn't enough, Spirit was upstaged early on by its twin Opportunity, which landed in a geologic gold mine and was the first to determine that the frigid, dusty planet possessed a wetter past.

Bad luck has fallen again on Spirit. As the workhorse rover marks its sixth year on the red planet on Sunday, it finds itself stuck in a sand trap, perhaps forever. The six-wheel robot geologist has been in jams before, but this is the worst predicament yet.

http://snipr.com/tzbuc - Awww. Well, it was nice while it lasted. At least we still have Opportunity, and we've been on Mars for 6 years now.




Down on the Farm, an Endless Cycle of Waste
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

GUSTINE, Tex. -- Day and night, a huge contraption prowls the grounds at Frank Volleman's dairy in Central Texas. It has a 3,000-gallon tank, a heavy-duty vacuum pump and hoses and, underneath, adjustable blades that scrape the surface as it passes along.

In function it is something like a Zamboni, but one that has crossed over to the dark side. This is no hockey rink, and it's not loose ice being scraped up. It's cow manure. ... Proper handling of this material is one of the most important tasks faced by a dairy operator, or by a cattle feedlot owner, hog producer or other farmer with large numbers of livestock.

... But as the increasing incidence of environmental and health problems linked to agriculture makes clear, when manure is mismanaged the nutrients in it can foul streams, lakes and aquifers; the pathogens in it can contaminate food products; and the gases it produces, including ammonia, methane and bad-smelling volatile compounds, can upset neighbors and pollute the atmosphere.

http://snipr.com/tzbun




Biological Cells Reveal Brain Chemistry Secrets
from BBC News Online

Scientists have developed biological cells that can give insight into the chemistry of the brain. The cells, which change colour when exposed to specific chemicals, have been used to show how a class of schizophrenia drug works.

The researchers hope they will also help shed light on how many other drugs work on the brain. The study, by the University of California - San Diego, is published in Nature Neuroscience.

Schizophrenia is most commonly associated with symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations. But people with the illness also struggle to sustain attention or recall information. A class of drugs called atypical neuroleptics has become commonly prescribed, in part because they seem to improve these problems. However, the way they altered brain chemistry was uncertain.

http://snipr.com/tzbus




Evidence Lacking for Special Diets in Autism
from the Seattle Times

CHICAGO (Associated Press) -- An expert panel says there's no rigorous evidence that digestive problems are more common in children with autism compared to other children, or that special diets work, contrary to claims by celebrities and vaccine naysayers.

The report's lead author, Dr. Timothy Buie of Harvard Medical School, said pain or discomfort because of bloating or stomach cramps can set off problem behavior, further complicating diagnosis, especially if the child has trouble communicating--as is the case for children with autism.

Autism is a spectrum of disorders affecting a person's ability to communicate and interact with others. Children with autism may make poor eye contact or exhibit repetitive movements such as rocking or hand-flapping. About 1 in 110 U.S. children has autism, according to a recent government estimate.

http://snipr.com/tzbvj




Giant Carbon "Vault" Proposed Near New York City
from National Geographic News

Several new underwater "vaults" that could stash the potent greenhouse gas carbon dioxide have been found--and one of them is right outside New York City, a new study says.

Such close-in vaults would be convenient, but could pose an earthquake risk, experts say.

Some of Earth's largest ancient lava flows lie below the Atlantic Ocean seafloor not far from the Big Apple. The vault regions include rubble-filled, fractured, and otherwise porous volcanic layers in which massive amounts of liquid CO2 could be safely stored, the research found.

http://snipr.com/tzbvz - Interesting.




Music Therapy 'May Help Cut Tinnitus Noise Levels'
from BBC News Online

Individually designed music therapy may help reduce the noise levels experienced by people who suffer from tinnitus, say German researchers.

They altered participants' favourite music to remove notes which matched the frequency of the ringing in their ears. After a year of listening to the modified music, individuals reported a drop in the loudness of their tinnitus.

The researchers said the "inexpensive" treatment could be used alongside other techniques to relieve the condition.

http://snipr.com/tzbwb - Also interesting.




The Curious Thing About Alan Alda
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

For a new three-part PBS special called "The Human Spark," actor and science lover Alan Alda visits a number of far-flung places--Germany, a Caribbean island, the home of the Lascaux cave paintings--in pursuit of just what it is that makes us different from the Earth's other creatures.

...Jared Ipworth, executive producer for "The Human Spark," which airs tonight and the next two Wednesdays, calls Alda a perfect fit for the show's approach. "His immense curiosity about science and his ability to get scientists to speak about the ways their field relates to others" was crucial to making it work.

Most of the issues in the program--the diversion of humans from chimpanzees 6 million years ago, the gradual replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans, development of young children--had been covered in other places, Ipworth said, but not brought together properly.

http://snipr.com/tzbwp - I'd really like to see this show, but I don't have a television. :/

[Reginald Ret]

we(humans) produce about a mountain of carbondioxide every year. (if it were made liquid/solid)
how much space did they say there was?

[Kai]

we(humans) produce about a mountain of carbondioxide every year. (if it were made liquid/solid)
how much space did they say there was?

I just thought it was interesting that such an option was being considered. I have no idea if there is enough room or if it would even work.

[Kai]

January 7, 2010


Fossil Tracks Record 'Oldest Land-Walkers'

from BBC News Online

The oldest evidence of four-legged animals walking on land has been discovered in southeast Poland. Rocks from a disused quarry record the "footprints" of unknown creatures that lived about 397 million years ago.

Scientists tell the journal Nature that the fossil trackways even retain the impressions left by the "toes" on the animals' feet. The team says the find means that land vertebrates appeared millions of years earlier than previously supposed.

"This place has yielded what I consider to be some of the most exciting fossils I've ever encountered in my career as a paleontologist," said team member Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University, Sweden. "[They are] fossils of footprints that give us the earliest record of how our very distant ancestors moved out of the water and moved on to the land and took their first steps."

http://snipr.com/tzqxi - Pretty cool. But Poland? I don't usually think Poland when it comes to cool fossils.


White House Announces $250M Effort for Science and Math Teachers

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

The White House announced a $250 million public-private effort Wednesday to improve science and mathematics instruction, aiming to help the nation compete in key fields with global economic rivals.

With funding from high-tech businesses, universities and foundations, the initiative seeks to prepare more than 10,000 new math and science schoolteachers over five years and provide on-the-job training for an additional 100,000 in science, technology, engineering and math.

...The initiative effectively doubles, to more than $500 million, a philanthropic campaign for so-called STEM education that Obama launched in November. Separately, the government spends about $700 million a year on elementary and secondary education in the STEM fields through agencies such as NASA, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Education Department. But it's unclear how much federal spending can grow in a time of rising budget deficits.

http://snipr.com/tzqxx - Good. And bad. And whatever.


North America's Cooling Due to Natural Causes in 2008?

from National Geographic News

Average temperatures across North America dropped in 2008--which may seem to contradict global warming theory. Not so, scientists say. The cooling, caused by natural changes in global air circulation, temporarily masked the effects of global warming, which is getting worse, a new study says.

New computer-model simulations suggest that the continent-wide dip resulted from an unusually long cooling of the Pacific Ocean, driven by the La Niña phenomenon. During a La Niña, event, the sea-surface temperature in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean drops, sometimes as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit below normal.

La Niña conditions recur every few years and typically last about one year. The one that began in 2007, however, lasted about two years, said study leader Judith Perlwitz of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The two-year La Niña affected the patterns of jet streams and so-called storm tracks across North America.

http://snipr.com/tzqy5 - Yes. Climatologists know what they are talking about, so lay off.


Medication of Little Help for Mild, Moderate Depression

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Antidepressant medications probably provide little or no benefit to people with mild or moderate depression, a new study has found. Rather, the mere act of seeing a doctor, discussing symptoms and learning about depression probably triggers the improvements many patients experience while on medication.

Only people with very severe depression receive additional benefits from drugs, said the senior author of the study, Robert J. DeRubeis, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor. The research was released online Tuesday and will be published today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Hundreds of studies have attested to the benefits of antidepressants over placebos, DeRubeis said. But many studies involve only participants with severe depression. Confusion arises, he said, "because there is a tendency to generalize the findings to mean that all depressed people benefit from medications."

http://snipr.com/tzqyk - of course, this doesn't take into account anxiety.


For F.D.R. Sleuths, New Focus on an Odd Spot

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt died unexpectedly on April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Ga., the White House lost no time announcing a cause of death. The 63-year-old president, the shocked and grieving nation was told, had died of cerebral hemorrhage.

... That Roosevelt died of a stroke is undisputed. But what caused it is a medical mystery that has persisted to this day, a mystery heightened by the secrecy in which he, his aides and his doctors always insisted on shrouding his health. Now a new book -- "F.D.R.'s Deadly Secret," by a neurologist, Dr. Steven Lomazow, and a journalist, Eric Fettmann (PublicAffairs) -- revives an intriguing theory.

Look closely at Roosevelt's portraits over his 12-year presidency. In his first two terms, there is a dark spot over his left eyebrow. It seems to grow and then mysteriously vanishes sometime around 1940, leaving a small scar. Was the spot a harmless mole? Or a cancerous melanoma that spread to contribute to, or even cause, his death?

http://snipr.com/tzqys


No More Power Lines?

from the Christian Science Monitor

Abundant solar and wind power lies across America's vast plains and deserts, but getting that distant renewable energy to cities without wrecking vistas and raising lawsuits over transmission lines is a sizable hurdle for green-leaning utility companies. Thousands of miles of towering electrical lines will be needed before big alternative-energy projects can take hold. Yet such power lines portend years of legal snarls over the not-in-my-backyard problem.

Into this fray come Phil Harris and his pioneering plan to use underground superconducting cables that will be both hidden from view and more efficient than traditional lines. Mr. Harris wants to build a virtually invisible network that would create a national renewable-energy hub located in the Southwest.

Today, the nation's power grid is in three disconnected pieces - Eastern, Western, and Texas. Harris's project, called Tres Amigas, would use superconducting cable to provide the first large-scale commercial trading link between those big grids - opening up new markets for renewable wind and solar power in the American East and West.

http://snipr.com/tzqyx


Even Without DNA, Prions Can Evolve Like Organisms

from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Although they are believed to be "lifeless," the infectious agents known as prions that cause a variety of fatal brain diseases in people and animals, including chronic wasting disease in deer, are capable of evolving like living organisms, according to a new study.

The research, which has implications for eventual treatments for such diseases, is one of the first studies to suggest that something devoid of DNA or other genetic material can evolve in a Darwinian manner. ... The new paper, which was published online in the journal Science Express, adds another complicated twist to the prion concept ...

Prions are abnormal versions of proteins made in the brain. Although they are believed to contain no genetic material, they are able to replicate in the brain by causing normal prion protein to misfold. That misfolding can turn the normally harmless prion protein into infectious prions that cause incurable, fatal brain disorders ...

http://snipr.com/tzqze - PRIONS. Also, there is no such thing as a normal prion. You know what they call normal prion proteins? Proteins


A Step Beyond Anthropology

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Most people see sustainability as pertaining to the physical environment, and the need to preserve it for coming generations. But in academe, sustainability can have as much to do with social science as science science.

Goucher College, the liberal arts college in Baltimore, is extending the concept: to preserving the traditional values, as well as the arts, dress, customs and cuisines, of communities threatened by globalization and modernization, whether inner-city neighborhoods or third-world villages.

Goucher calls it cultural sustainability, and is offering a Master of Arts. ... Though students are required to attend Goucher for two one-week residencies, most of the curriculum, drawn from ethnography, anthropology and social entrepreneurship, is online.

http://snipr.com/tzqzh - Interesting.


The Top Four Sites to Land on Mars

from Popular Mechanics

Call it the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's version of the Final Four. Scientists at the Pasadena, Calif.-based NASA research center will decide within the next two years where to send the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover after it launches in the fall of 2011. MSL's mission is to scour the Red Planet for environments that may once have harbored, or may still harbor, microbial organisms. Such an environment would have to contain the basic ingredients of life--including water, organic carbon and a source of energy to sustain the microbes' metabolism.

After several years of painstaking research and debate, NASA scientists whittled down their initial list of over 50 sites to four-- Eberswalde Crater, Holden Crater, Mawrth Vallis, and Gale Crater.

When it arrives on Mars in 2012, the MSL will bring one of NASA's most sophisticated toolkits, including high-resolution imagers that will beam back data about the planet's rock and soil textures and a suite of instrumentation to carry out in situ sample analysis.

http://snipr.com/tzqzm - Hey, at least they aren't talking about sending people.


Obama to Honor S.F. State Science Professor

from the San Francisco Chronicle

In 1992, Frank Bayliss was teaching biology at San Francisco State University when he realized that none of the minority science students were going on to graduate school.

Bayliss realized that many of them were underprivileged and had no time for essential laboratory work because they had to hustle jobs to stay in school. So he founded San Francisco State's Student Enrichment Opportunities Office and began raising funds to make it easier for students with less means to do the time-consuming lab work their science courses demanded. Today, the project provides mentoring and enough money to send 20 to 25 "underrepresented minorities" a year on to doctoral programs.

At a White House reception in Washington yesterday, President Obama presented Bayliss with a special award for "Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring." It's a national award that recognizes teachers who have made distinguished efforts to bring underprivileged college students into the mainstream of the advanced sciences.

http://snipr.com/tzqzt

[Kai]

January 8, 2010
Stricter New Smog Limit Would Hit Rural Areas, Too

from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Hundreds of communities far from congested highways and belching smokestacks could soon join big cities and industrial corridors in violation of stricter limits on lung-damaging smog proposed Thursday by the Obama administration.

Costs of compliance could be in the tens of billions of dollars, but the government said the rules would save other billions--as well as lives--in the long run.

More than 300 counties--mainly in southern California, the Northeast and Gulf Coast--already violate the current, looser requirements adopted two years ago by the Bush administration and will find it even harder to reduce smog-forming pollution enough to comply with the law. The new limits being considered by the Environmental Protection Agency could more than double the number of counties in violation and reach places like California's wine country in Napa Valley and rural Trego County, Kan., and its 3,000 residents.

http://snipr.com/u0hke


Warp-Speed Algebra

from Scientific American

Quantum computers can do wondrous things: too bad they do not exist yet. That has not stopped physicists from devising new algorithms for the devices, which can calculate a lot faster than ordinary computers--in fact, exponentially faster, in quite a literal sense. Once quantum computers do become available, the algorithms could become a key part of applications that require number crunching, from engineering to video games.

The latest quantum algorithm is generating excitement among physicists. It tackles linear equations: expressions such as 3x + 2y = 7 and typically written with unknowns on one side and constants on the other.

Many high schoolers learn the trite mechanics of solving systems of such equations by eliminating one unknown at a time. Speed becomes crucial when systems contain billions of variables and billions of equations, which are not unusual in modern applications such as simulations of weather and other physical phenomena.

http://snipr.com/u0hl6 - QUANTUM!


Bornavirus Genes Found in Human DNA

from Science News

People may not be quite the humans they think they are. Or so suggests new research showing that the human genome is part bornavirus.

Bornaviruses, a type of RNA virus that causes disease in horses and sheep, can insert their genetic material into human DNA and first did so at least 40 million years ago, the study shows.

The findings, published January 7 in Nature, provide the first evidence that RNA viruses other than retroviruses (such as HIV) can stably integrate genes into host DNA. The new work may help reveal more about the evolution of RNA viruses as well as their mammalian hosts.

http://snipr.com/u0hlr - My body is a chimera of ancestors, making the tree of life more like a twisted bank of roots.


Climate Change: No Hiding Place?

from the Economist

It may seem implausible at the moment, as northern Europe, Asia and parts of America shiver in the snow, but 2010 may well turn out as the hottest year on record.

Those who doubt that greenhouse gases are quite the problem they have been cracked up to be by most of the world's climatologists have taken comfort from the fact that the Hadley Centre, part of Britain's Meteorological Office, reckons the warmest year since records began was 1998.

Twelve years without a new record would, the sceptics reckon, be rather a large lull in what is supposed to be a rising trend. Computer modelling by the Met Office, though, gives odds-on chances of the lull being broken.

http://snipr.com/u0hlx


Yearlong Star Eclipse May Help Solve Space Mystery

from National Geographic News

While relatively few people were looking, an unusual eclipse darkened New Year's Day.

On January 1 a giant space object blotted out our view of Epsilon Aurigae, a yellow supergiant star about 2,000 light-years from Earth. Based on studies of Epsilon Aurigae's previous eclipses, astronomers expect the star won't fully regain its bright shine until early 2011.

Normally the star is so bright it can be seen with the naked eye even by city dwellers. For all but the most rural star-gazers, though, the mystery object that eclipses the star causes it to vanish for about 18 months every 27.1 years. Ever since the star's periodic eclipses were first recorded in 1821, astronomers have been puzzling over how Epsilon Aurigae pulls off its lengthy disappearing act.

http://snipr.com/u0hm3


Pi Calculated to 'Record Number' of Digits

from BBC News Online

A computer scientist claims to have computed the mathematical constant pi to nearly 2.7 trillion digits, some 123 billion more than the previous record.

Fabrice Bellard used a desktop computer to perform the calculation, taking a total of 131 days to complete and check the result. This version of pi takes over a terabyte of hard disk space to store.

Previous records were established using supercomputers, but Mr. Bellard claims his method is 20 times more efficient. The prior record of about 2.6 trillion digits, set in August 2009 by Daisuke Takahashi at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, took just 29 hours. However, that work employed a supercomputer 2,000 times faster and thousands of times more expensive than the desktop Mr. Bellard employed.

http://snipr.com/u0hmc


Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Attacked Again

from ScienceNOW Daily News

Here we go again. Late last year, scientists seemed to be homing in on the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)--excessive tiredness and other symptoms that have no known biological cause--by finding a supposed viral link. But a new paper challenges that link, a development that may plunge the field back into the same confusion and acrimony that has characterized it for years.

Many CFS patients report that their symptoms began after an acute viral infection. Yet scientists have been unable to pin CFS on common viruses such as the Epstein-Barr virus. As a result, patients have faced skepticism for years that CFS might not be a real disease, or that it is perhaps a psychiatric disorder.

A team of American researchers thought it finally struck pay dirt last October when it reported in Science that it found DNA traces of a virus in the blood cells of two-thirds of 101 patients with CFS, compared with 4% of 218 healthy controls. XMRV is a rodent retrovirus also implicated in an aggressive prostate cancer, though why it might cause or be associated with CFS remains unclear.

http://snipr.com/u0hmm


Engineering Class Shows Girls Male-Dominated Field

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

While students at an all-girls school in Montgomery County were laboring one day last month to build bridges out of popsicle sticks, their teachers were trying to build bridges for them into the male-dominated field of engineering.

The popsicle-stick bridges shattered under 60 pounds of pressure. Teachers at the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda hope their seemingly unique engineering course will make girls' interest in the field last longer.

"It's about taking risks and getting them over the anxiety of always having to be right all the time," said physics teacher Chris Lee, who designed the course four years ago and wears a tie-dyed lab coat and goatee. The students, who range from sophomores to seniors, study such new technologies as artificial limbs; they research bridge disasters, something Lee guarantees will annoy parents when the teens spout dire predictions during the next family road trip; and they also build bridges and robots.

http://snipr.com/u0hn3


Using a Virus's Knack for Mutating to Wipe It Out

from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Evolution is a virus's secret weapon. The virus can rapidly slip on new disguises to evade our immune systems, and it can become resistant to antiviral drugs.

But some scientists are turning the virus's secret weapon against it. They hope to cure infections by forcing viruses to evolve their way to extinction.

Viruses can evolve because of the mistakes they make when they replicate. All living things can mutate, but viruses are especially prone to these genetic errors. In fact, some species of viruses mutate hundreds of thousands of times faster than we do.

http://snipr.com/u0hnh


Professors Search for Cures in Polar Regions

from the Tampa Tribune

TAMPA -- From the waters of a melting Antarctic glacier, a University of South Florida researcher has found an organism with the potential to fight malaria and other diseases that plague people in the tropics.

It's one of several minute creatures that Bill Baker, a professor in the USF Department of Chemistry, has gathered from the freezing water and brought to the university for study.

He discovered the malaria-fighting compound with Dennis Kyle, of USF's Department of Global Health. Their findings were recently published in the Journal of Natural Products. Baker doesn't see great commercial application in the compound, found in a bright red sponge. It doesn't improve on existing tropical disease drugs. But he said its discovery has strengthened his belief that the Antarctic waters are filled with potential cures for a variety of ailments.

http://snipr.com/u0hnu

[Kai]

January 11, 2010
The Americanization of Mental Illness

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Americans, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country's blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald's near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad.

For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world's understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places.

http://snipr.com/u1ny0 - Cf. the thread posted about this.


Experts Urge Officials to End Mountaintop Mining

from National Public Radio

A team of scientists says the environmental damage from mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia is so widespread, the mining technique should be stopped.

The scientific review of research on the effects of the practice, which dumps coarse rock down the mountainsides into nearby valleys, states that harmful chemicals such as sulfate and selenium are pervasive in streams below.

Mountaintop removal is a pretty efficient and cheap way to mine coal. But when the rock or "overburden" above coal seams is blasted away and pushed over the side of the mountain, says Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, "you expose material that, when it rains and water percolates through that, it dissolves a lot of chemicals, and those are very persistent in the streams below valley fill sites."

http://snipr.com/u1nyh


Grant Money Could Speed Stem Cell Cures

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Dr. Karen Aboody estimates that she has cured several hundred mice of a cancer of the central nervous system called neuroblastoma.

First she injected them with specialized neural stem cells that naturally zero in on the tumors and surround them. Then she administered an anti-cancer agent that the cells converted into a highly toxic drug. In her tests, 90% of the animals were rid of their tumors while healthy brain tissue remained undamaged.

To hear Aboody tell it, that was the easy part. "People are curing mice right and left," said the City of Hope neuroscientist. The real challenge is convincing the Food and Drug Administration to let her try this on people with brain tumors.

http://snipr.com/u1nzb


The Ultimate Eco-Friendly Ride

from Spiegel

Carbon fiber and aluminum are so 2009. This year's best bicycling model is made out of bamboo and hemp. A new generation of manufacturers is coming up with some of the most environmentally friendly transport yet. Lighter, stronger, more comfortable and these bikes have also got a much smaller carbon footprint.

Craig Calfee is known as the Zen master of bamboo-bike builders. In his workshop on the Californian coast, only a hundred meters from the tumultuous waves of the Pacific Ocean, the frame designer builds breathtaking bikes out of the fast-growing plant, the largest member of the grass family.

But the American, who has become well known for making bikes out of plant materials, has some competition. The number of experts who are making bicycles out of renewable raw materials is growing. Among them are Brano Meres, an engineer from Slovakia and professional cyclist Nick Frey also from California. German engineer Nicolas Meyer is also working along this line, but not with bamboo. Instead he has built a triathlon bike out of hemp.

http://snipr.com/u1nzi


Egyptian Eyeliner May Have Warded Off Disease

from ScienceNOW Daily News

Clearly, ancient Egyptians didn't get the memo about lead poisoning. Their eye makeup was full of the stuff. Although today we know that lead can cause brain damage and miscarriages, the Egyptians believed that lead-based cosmetics protected against eye diseases. Now, new research suggests that they may have been on to something.

Previous work indicates that the Egyptians added lead to their cosmetics on purpose. When analytical chemist Philippe Walter and colleagues at CNRS and the Louvre Museum in Paris analyzed the composition of several samples of the Egyptians' famous bold, black eyeliner in the Louvre's collection, they identified two types of lead salt not found in nature. That means that ancient Egyptians must have synthesized them. But making lead salt is a tricky, delicate process that requires tending for weeks--and unlike other common makeup components, the salts are not glossy. So why did they bother?

Ancient manuscripts gave the scientists a clue. It turns out that in those days, people made lead salts and used them as treatments for eye ailments, scars, and discolorations. When Walter told analytical chemist Christian Amatore of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris about the findings, Amatore says he was intrigued because lead is now known to have so many toxic effects.

http://snipr.com/u1nzn


Sea Slug Steals Genes for Greens, Makes Chlorophyll Like a Plant

from Science News

SEATTLE -- It's easy being green for a sea slug that has stolen enough genes to become the first animal shown to make chlorophyll like a plant.

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

http://snipr.com/u1nzx -- HOLY SHIT. No really, HO-LY SHIT.


Rude Awakening: Media Frenzy Haunts Doctors

from Newsweek

Late last year, the world was captivated by the story of Rom Houben, a Belgian man who suffered a traumatic brain injury and was misdiagnosed for 23 years as being in a vegetative state. In fact, media outlets reported breathlessly, Houben had been conscious the whole time, trapped inside his motionless body, until a heroic doctor used cutting-edge scans to find normal brain activity. What's more, that doctor discovered a way for Houben to communicate, allowing the "locked-in" man to tell his harrowing tale to visiting reporters...

It was a fantastic story that ruled the headlines for a few days, but unfortunately, it was only partly true, and the resulting media circus distorted the work of Houben's doctor, Steven Laureys. In reality, Laureys didn't need advanced technology to diagnose Houben, who doesn't meet the definition of a locked-in patient.

Laureys actually can't verify that the patient was fully conscious for all those 23 years. Nor did Laureys acquaint Houben with "facilitated communication," a controversial aided-speech method that has Houben reliant on the hand of a therapist to peck out letters on a keyboard. ...

http://snipr.com/u1o04


Chernobyl Nuclear Accident: Figures for Deaths and Cancers Still in Dispute

from the Guardian (U.K.)

At the children's cancer hospital in Minsk, Belarus, and at the Vilne hospital for radiological protection in the east of Ukraine, specialist doctors are in no doubt they are seeing highly unusual rates of cancers, mutations and blood diseases linked to the Chernobyl nuclear accident 24 years ago.

But proving that infant mortality hundreds of miles from the stricken nuclear plant has increased 20-30% in 20 years, or that the many young people suffering from genetic disorders, internal organ deformities and thyroid cancers are the victims of the world's greatest release of radioactivity, is impossible.

The UN's World Health Organisation and the International Atomic Energy Agency claim that only 56 people have died as a direct result of the radiation released at Chernobyl and that about 4,000 will die from it eventually.

http://snipr.com/u1o0c


Neanderthal 'Make-Up' Containers Discovered

from BBC News Online

Scientists claim to have the first persuasive evidence that Neanderthals wore "body paint" 50,000 years ago. The team report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that shells containing pigment residues were Neanderthal make-up containers.

Scientists unearthed the shells at two archaeological sites in the Murcia province of southern Spain.

The team says its find buries "the view of Neanderthals as half-wits" and shows they were capable of symbolic thinking.

http://snipr.com/u1o0h - not sure I believe this, considering the stuff that's been allowed publication recently in PNAS. Hybridogenesis, anyone?


Male Fish Punish Unruly Females--and Benefit, Study Says

from National Geographic News

Cheaters may not prosper--but punishers do, according to a new study. Male cleaner fish will chase and pester female fish if they interfere with the male's mealtime--the first evidence of a species benefiting from third-party punishment.

If you're a cleaner fish, it's bad table manners to nibble on the mucous layer of "client" fish, which are generally bigger than the cleaners. Clients stop by multifish cleaning "stations" to get rid of their parasites, which become food for the cleaners.

But biting off a chunk of tasty mucous means the larger fish may flee--so one mischievous cleaner can deprive another from a meal.

http://snipr.com/u1o0p - $10 on some radio statio believing you can apply this to humans.