Weekly Science Headlines

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It really cheers me up to think that low IQ can be deadly in itself.

I was just thinking something along those lines, only the opposite.

Why's that?

Because I have hypertension and arrhythmia, and it cheers me up to think I might not actually be at higher risk of dying of a heart attack.

[Jasper]

More good news.

[Kai]

February 22, 2010

U.S. Urges Glaxo to Pull Avandia on Heart Risks

from the Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON -- Confidential studies by Food and Drug Administration officials recommend that GlaxoSmithKline's Avandia, a diabetes medicine, get pulled from the market because it is linked to heart attacks.

The studies, released as part of a report on Avandia by staff of Senate Finance Committee members Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Max Baucus (D., Mont.), also say any head-to-head trial where patients get Avandia and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.'s diabetes medicine Actos would be "unethical and exploitative." GlaxoSmithKline is currently sponsoring a study, called TIDE, where patients get either Avandia, Actos or other medicines.

GlaxoSmithKline said in a prepared statement that it has extensively studied Avandia in more than 52,000 patients and none of its reports shows a statistically significant association between Avandia and heart attacks. The company said the TIDE study was mandated by the FDA and "has been approved by an independent review board and appropriate safety boards that are responsible for assessing the safety of conducting the trial."

http://snipr.com/ugsrg


A Base for War Training, and Species Preservation

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

FORT STEWART, Ga. -- Under crystalline winter skies, a light infantry unit headed for Iraq was practicing precision long-range shooting through a pall of smoke. But the fire generating the haze had nothing to do with the training exercise.

Staff members at the Army post had set the blaze on behalf of the red-cockaded woodpecker, an imperiled eight-inch-long bird that requires frequent conflagrations to preserve its pine habitat.

Even as it conducts round-the-clock exercises to support two wars, Fort Stewart spends as much as $3 million a year on wildlife management, diligently grooming its 279,000 acres to accommodate five endangered species that live here. Last year, the wildlife staff even built about 100 artificial cavities and installed them 25 feet high in large pines so the woodpeckers did not have to toil for six months carving the nests themselves.

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Battle of Bosworth Location Finally Uncovered

from the Times (London)

On the morning of August 22, 1485, the last medieval king of England gambled his throne and his life on one desperate cavalry charge.

It must have made for a magnificent spectacle as Richard III hurtled through the smoke and din of the Battle of Bosworth on a mission to kill his upstart rival, Henry Tudor. He nearly reached him but was held up a few yards short of his quarry and then driven back into a marsh, where he and his heavily armoured knights were picked off by Welshmen with halberds and daggers.

In those few frenzied moments the future of England--and by extension much of the world--changed course. Bosworth became the bridge that links the Middle Ages to modern Britain and ushered in the dynasty of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. If Richard had killed Henry there might have been no English Reformation, no Church of England and no Elizabethan golden age to inspire artists, explorers and empire builders.

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Peru Poison Frog Reveals Secret of Monogamy

from BBC News Online

The first monogamous amphibian has been discovered living in the rainforest of South America. Genetic tests have revealed that male and females of one species of Peruvian poison frog remain utterly faithful.

More surprising is the discovery that just one thing--the size of the pools of water in which they lay their tadpoles--prevents the frogs straying.

That constitutes the best evidence yet documented that monogamy can have a single cause, say scientists. Details of the frog's sex life is to be published in the journal The American Naturalist.

http://snipr.com/ugssu


U.S. Turns to Sweden as Model in Nuclear Waste Storage

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

If the United States is at a loss over what to do about nuclear waste, it may be time to check out the Swedish model. A symposium at the annual meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in San Diego last week highlighted the Swedish power industry in gaining public support for a geological repository for high-level radioactive waste.

The Scandinavian success comes in stark contrast to efforts in the U.S., where spent nuclear fuel rods have remained for decades in temporary storage at power plants around the country. Meanwhile, Congress has debated where to bury them, decided on a repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and then changed its mind.

The Obama administration, mindful of the fierce resistance of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), has opposed Yucca and, in the 2011 budget, slashed all funding for the project, which is led by the Department of Energy. Also, President Obama has called for "a new generation of safe, clean nuclear plants" and has budgeted $36 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power.

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Head Case: Can Psychiatry Be a Science?

from the New Yorker

You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o'clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. ... After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?

However you go about making this decision, do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it. ... There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry's direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases. ...

These complaints are not coming just from sociologists, English professors, and other troublemakers; they are being made by people within the field of psychiatry itself. As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good. Between 1988, the year after Prozac was approved by the F.D.A., and 2000, adult use of antidepressants almost tripled. By 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant. ... As a depressed person might ask, What does it all mean?

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IVF May Raise Risk of Diabetes, Hypertension and Cancer in Later Life

from the Guardian (U.K)

People conceived through IVF treatment should be monitored for the early onset of high blood pressure, diabetes and certain cancers before the age of 50, according to a fertility specialist.

While IVF is generally considered to produce healthy babies, doctors have identified subtle genetic changes that may raise the risk of particular medical conditions in later life.

Since the birth of the first test tube baby, Louise Brown, on 25 July 1978, more than three million babies have been born through fertility treatment around the world. The vast majority are still under the age of 30.

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Is a Dolphin a Person?

from ScienceNOW Daily News

SAN DIEGO -- Are dolphins as smart as people? And if so, shouldn't we be treating them a bit better than we do now? Those were the topics of discussion at a session on the ethical and policy implications of dolphin intelligence here today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW).

First up, just how smart are dolphins? Researchers have been exploring the question for three decades, and the answer, it turns out, is pretty darn smart. In fact, according to panelist Lori Marino, an expert on cetacean neuroanatomy at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, they may be Earth's second smartest creature (next to humans, of course).

Marino bases her argument on studies of the dolphin brain. Bottlenose dolphins have bigger brains than humans (1600 grams versus 1300 grams), and they have a brain-to-body-weight ratio greater than great apes do (but lower than humans). "They are the second most encephalized beings on the planet," says Marino.

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Best Science Pictures Announced

from National Geographic News

Fibers cradle a planet-like ball in an award-winning image meant to convey that Earth's future is in our collective hands.

Harvard University's Sung Hoon Kang submerged tiny plastic fibers--each only 1/500 as big as a human hair--in an evaporating liquid, where they spontaneously and cooperatively supported the small green ball.

...The shot was selected as best photograph in the 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The annual contest, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science, awards outstanding artistic efforts to visualize complex scientific concepts.

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Reality Bites: Despite Battles Won, the War Against Malaria Rages On

from the San Diego Union-Tribune

Over the years, medical science has claimed victory, however incomplete, over some of the nastiest, deadliest, infectious diseases to afflict mankind. Bubonic plague, for example, once wiped out an estimated quarter of the Earth's population in a single year--1400. Treated promptly with modern antibiotics, plague patients now usually recover completely. Smallpox annually killed tens of millions of people until global vaccination programs took effect in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1979, the viral disease was declared officially eradicated.

But other infectious scourges endure. They persist and resist. And none, it could be argued, is more problematic than malaria, a parasitical disease that continues to kill more than 1 million people each year--primarily children and pregnant women--while infecting another 300 million to 500 million. The World Health Organization estimates a child dies of the disease every 30 seconds.

In the United States, malaria is perceived as an exotic disease, an unfamiliar affliction of distant, tropical lands. And this is true, to a degree.

http://snipr.com/ugtcf

[Kai]

February 19, 2010

Cancer's Genetic Fingerprint Allows New Blood Test

from the Guardian (UK)

A personalised blood test that monitors cancer in the body and spots when it has returned after treatment has been developed by scientists.

Researchers believe the test will give doctors a way to tailor cancer treatments to individual patients by monitoring how well their tumour has responded to surgery or therapy and picking up the early signs of a recurrence.

In principle, the test could be used to keep watch over any kind of cancer that scientists can collect cells from. Scientists developed the test after deciphering the full genomes of tumour tissue taken from six patients. Most cancers contain large-scale rearrangements of genetic material that aren't seen in healthy tissue, so they can be used as a genetic "fingerprint" for the tumour.

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Study Raises Questions About Supernova Origins

from Science News

New X-ray findings appear to have blown a hole in the leading model for the origin of stellar explosions called type 1a supernovas. Astronomers routinely use these bright supernovas to measure dark energy, a baffling entity thought to rev up the rate of expansion of the universe.

Although the new study, published in the Feb. 18 Nature, is unlikely to change the interpretation of previous dark energy studies, a new understanding of how type 1a supernovas form may be critical for future, more precise dark energy measurements, says study coauthor Marat Gilfanov of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.

Because 1a supernovas are all similarly luminous and can be seen from afar, the explosions serve as ideal cosmic mileposts for measuring the universe's expansion and deducing the presence of dark energy, which accelerates that expansion.

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Protect Your Business from Kneber-Style Botnets

from PC World

A report from security research firm NetWitness about a malicious botnet dubbed Kneber has been the focus of a fair amount of media attention, but mostly sensationalism that misses the real point.

Yes, the Kneber botnet consists of nearly 75,000 computers. Yes, systems at roughly 2,500 different companies around the world have been infiltrated. Yes, government agencies have had data compromised. Sadly, that is just "a day in the life." There is nothing spectacular about those figures.

Some media reports are even comparing the Kneber botnet to the massive threat of last year's Conficker worm and the associated Downadup botnet. There really is no comparison--Kneber is a drop in the bucket compared to Conficker.

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Climate Pact Appears Increasingly Fragile

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Just two months after patching together a climate deal in Copenhagen, the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are trying to figure out how to keep the fragile accord together, while the United Nations, which has played a central part in 15 rounds of climate talks, seems destined for a smaller role in the future.

Nearly 100 nations, including the United States, South Africa and Brazil, have endorsed the Copenhagen Accord. But China and India have yet to formally sign off on it, and sources close to Chinese officials say they are balking at sensitive points dealing with transparency and monitoring, even as they vow to press ahead with limits on the growth of their emissions in the next decade.

Meanwhile, a domestic political stalemate in the United States could make it challenging for the Obama administration to deliver on pledges to cut emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

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Technology, Medical Tests 'Changing the Face of Health Care'

from USA Today

A boom in medical technology over the past decade or two has led to a surge in certain medical tests and increased prescription drug use, say authors of a report that provides a snapshot of Americans' health today.

Imaging, assisted reproductive technologies, prescription drugs and knee replacements have all seen a dramatic rise since the early '90s, says Amy Bernstein, the report's lead author, a health scientist for the National Center for Health Statistics. The center, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released the 33rd annual Report on the Nation's Health Wednesday. It includes a special section on health technology.

"There are newer and better technologies all the time, and they're changing the face of health care and practice patterns," Bernstein says. She points to report findings that show the use of statin drugs, which lower cholesterol, increased almost tenfold from 1994 to 2006 in adults over age 45.

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Remarkable Creatues: Imitators That Hide in Plain Sight

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

In the summer of 1859, an Englishman named Henry Walter Bates returned home after 11 years of roaming the vast Amazon jungle with specimens of more than 14,000 species he had collected.

His timing was uncanny. Just as Bates set about organizing and describing his vast collection, Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" was published, which gave Bates an entirely new way of thinking about all that he had seen in the jungle.

He was able to provide some fresh and very timely evidence in support of natural selection because it explained a phenomenon he had closely observed, one that intrigued him and continues to hold the attention of naturalists today: the close resemblance of some animals to living or inanimate objects.

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NASA Rides 'Bucking Bronco' to Mars

from BBC News Online

It weighs almost a tonne, has cost more than $2bn and, in 2013, it will be lowered on to the surface of Mars with a landing system that has never been tried before.

The Mars Science Laboratory will "revolutionise investigations in science on other planets," says Doug McCuistion, director of Nasa's Mars exploration programme. It will, he says, lay the foundations for future missions that will eventually bring pieces of the Red Planet back home to Earth.

"The ability to put a metric tonne on the surface ... gives us the capability to undertake sample collection," says Dr McCuistion. "To collect and launch samples back into orbit will require that size of a vehicle." But it has been a rather bumpy road to revolution.

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New Role for Robot Warriors

from the Christian Science Monitor

Science fiction sometimes depicts robot soldiers as killing machines without conscience or remorse. But at least one robotics expert today says that someday machines may make the best and most humane decisions on the battlefield.

Guided by virtual emotions, robots could not only make better decisions about their own actions but also act as ethical advisers to human soldiers or even as observers who report back on the battlefield conduct of humans and whether they followed international law.

As militaries around the world invest billions in robotic weapons, no fundamental barriers lie ahead to building machines that "can outperform human soldiers in the battlefield from an ethical perspective," says Ronald Arkin, associate dean at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The result would be a reduction in casualties both for soldiers and civilians, he says.

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Testing Curbs Some Genetic Diseases

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

(Associated Press) -- Some of mankind's most devastating inherited diseases appear to be declining, and a few have nearly disappeared, because more people are using genetic testing to decide whether to have children.

Births of babies with cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs and other less familiar disorders seem to have dropped since testing came into wider use, The Associated Press found from interviews with numerous geneticists and other experts and a review of the limited research available.

Many of these diseases are little known and few statistics are kept. But their effects--ranging from blood disorders to muscle decline--can be disabling and often fatal during childhood. Now, more women are being tested as part of routine prenatal care, and many end pregnancies when diseases are found. One study in California found that prenatal screening reduced by half the number of babies born with the severest form of cystic fibrosis because many parents chose abortion.

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Ancient Filter Feeders Found Lurking in Museums

from Nature News

The first large filter feeders swam in the oceans for much longer than previously thought.

In a study published today in Science, Matt Friedman, a palaeobiologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues identify filter feeders in fossils spanning more than 100 million years and originating in Asia, Europe and North America. The discovery is a result of examining fossils from museums around the world that had either not been studied or had been misinterpreted.

"Given how widespread they were and how long they appear in the geological records, I think it's an important finding that's really going to force us to think about what role these bony fish had," said Nick Pyenson, a fossil marine vertebrate expert at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

http://snipr.com/uf9wu

[Kai]

February 23, 2010

Panel Sounds Alarm on National Hypertension 'Emergency'

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

A federal panel has a familiar prescription for the American people to reduce hypertension, a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke: Eat less salt and more fruit and vegetables, lose some weight and be more active physically.

The incidence of high blood pressure in this country has reached "emergency" proportions, said Dr. David W. Fleming, the health officer for Seattle & King County in Washington and chairman of an Institute of Medicine panel that released a new report on the problem Monday.

Hypertension "is easy to prevent, simple to diagnose and inexpensive to treat," he said at a news conference. "Yet nearly one in three Americans have hypertension and one in six deaths are caused by hypertension."

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When It Comes to Salt, No Rights or Wrongs. Yet.

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Suppose, as some experts advise, that the new national dietary guidelines due this spring will lower the recommended level of salt. Suppose further that public health officials in New York and Washington succeed in forcing food companies to use less salt. What would be the effect?

A) More than 44,000 deaths would be prevented annually (as estimated recently in The New England Journal of Medicine). B) About 150,000 deaths per year would be prevented annually (as estimated by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene). C) Hundreds of millions of people would be subjected to an experiment with unpredictable and possibly adverse effects (as argued recently in The Journal of the American Medical Association). D) Not much one way or the other. E) Americans would get even fatter than they are today.

Don't worry, there's no wrong answer, at least not yet. That's the beauty of the salt debate: there's so little reliable evidence that you can imagine just about any outcome.

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Cal Physicist Helps Confirm Einstein Theory

from the San Francisco Chronicle

A UC Berkeley physicist and a Nobel prize-winning colleague now in President Obama's Cabinet report they have confirmed one of Albert Einstein's most revolutionary theories 10,000 times more accurately than ever before.

Einstein's theory of general relativity has already been tested and confirmed to a degree as a true picture of reality by scores of experimenters, ever since he proposed it to the world nearly a century ago.

... One basic prediction from Einstein's theory is that the tug of gravity makes clocks slow down. Now Holger Müller, a physicist at UC Berkeley, together with Steven Chu, former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now Obama's energy secretary, as well as Achim Peters of Humboldt University in Berlin, report they have developed what is by far the best confirmation yet of Einstein's monumental achievement.

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The Sound of Science

from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

PROVIDENCE -- Seth Horowitz has super hearing. As a toddler, chicken pox invaded his ears, bursting both eardrums. When they healed, his hearing range had shifted higher. Today, he can hear a computer monitor humming three rooms away. He can hear bats chattering.

He also is an insomniac; any slight noise can jolt him awake. This might explain why Horowitz, an assistant research professor of neuroscience at Brown University, has spent years in search of a sound that can put people to sleep.

He thinks he's found it, along with a sound that makes you nervous, a sound that makes you concentrate, and a sound that makes you sick to your stomach. Now he and a partner, composer Lance Massey, are trying to market sounds as a way to combat insomnia and other maladies. They are developing CDs with sounds they believe can hijack the auditory system and use it to stimulate different parts of the brain.

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Pediatricians Call for a Choke-Proof Hot Dog

from USA Today

Nutritionists have long warned of the perils of hot dogs: fat, sodium and preservatives to name a few.

Now, the American Academy of Pediatrics wants foods like hot dogs to come with a warning label--not because of their nutritional risks but because they pose a choking hazard to babies and children.

Better yet, the academy would like to see foods such as hot dogs "redesigned" so their size, shape and texture make them less likely to lodge in a youngster's throat. More than 10,000 children under 14 go to the emergency room each year after choking on food, and up to 77 die, says the new policy statement, published online today in Pediatrics. About 17% of food-related asphyxiations are caused by hot dogs.

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Anti-Retrovirals Could Halt Aids Spread in Five Years

from BBC News Online

Anti-retroviral treatments (ARVs) and universal testing could stop the spread of Aids in South Africa within five years, a top scientist says.

Dr Brian Williams says the cost of giving the drugs to almost six million HIV-positive patients in the country would be $2-3bn per year. Only about 30% get the life-saving drugs, he said, but early detection and treatment would prevent transmission.

This, he said, should be complementary to the search for an Aids vaccine. An effective vaccine, he said, was still a long way away. Dr Williams, a leading figure in the field of HIV research, is based at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis in Stellenbosch.

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Naps Clear Brain's Inbox, Improve Learning

from National Geographic News

If your brain is an email account, sleep--and more specifically, naps--is how you clear out your inbox. That's the conclusion of a new study that may explain why people spend so many of their sleeping hours in a pre-dreaming state known as stage 2 non-rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep.

For years sleep studies have hinted that shut-eye improves our ability to store and consolidate memories, reinforcing the notion that a good night's sleep--and power naps--is much more conducive to learning than an overnight cram session.

Now scientists may have figured out how, in part, this happens: During sleep, information locked in the short-term storage of the hippocampus--the part of the brain responsible for memories--migrates into the longer-term database of the cortex. This action not only helps the brain process new information, it also clears out space for the brain to take in new experiences.

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Brain at the Breaking Point

from Science News

SAN DIEGO -- Rigid pathways in brain cell connections buckle and break when stretched, scientists report, a finding that could aid in the understanding of exactly what happens when traumatic brain injuries occur.

Up to 20 percent of combat soldiers and an estimated 1.4 million U.S. civilians sustain traumatic brain injuries each year. But the mechanics behind these injuries have remained mysterious.

New research ... suggests exactly how a blow to the brain disrupts this complex organ. The brain "is not like the heart. If you lose a certain percentage of your heart muscle, then you'll have a certain cardiac output," says Geoffrey Manley, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Rather, the brain is an organ of connections. Car crashes, bomb blasts and falls can damage these intricate links, and even destroying a small number of them can cause devastating damage.

http://snipr.com/uh98b


Environmental Advocates Are Cooling on Obama

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON -- There has been no more reliable cheerleader for President Obama's energy and climate change policies than Daniel J. Weiss of the left-leaning Center for American Progress. But Mr. Obama's recent enthusiasm for nuclear power, including his budget proposal to triple federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors to $54 billion, was too much for Mr. Weiss.

The president's embrace of nuclear power was disappointing, and the wrong way to go about winning Republican votes, he said, adding that Mr. Obama should not be endorsing such a costly and potentially catastrophic energy alternative "as bait just to get talks started with pro-nuke senators."

The early optimism of environmental advocates that the policies of former President George W. Bush would be quickly swept away and replaced by a bright green future under Mr. Obama is for many environmentalists giving way to resignation, and in some cases, anger.

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NOAA's New Fisheries Director Faces Familiar Challenges

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Eric Schwaab, the new head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service, will face skeptical fishermen, impatient environmentalists and a host of other cranky constituencies in the job he started Tuesday. It's familiar territory.

Schwaab has spent the bulk of his career at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, where he began as a Natural Resources Police officer 27 years ago. He rose through the ranks to direct three of the department's branches--the Forest Service; the Forest, Wildlife and Heritage Service; and the Fisheries Service. Throughout, he dealt with warring factions on such contentious questions as how to manage the area's blue crab and striped bass fisheries.

In a telephone call with reporters Tuesday, Schwaab said he hopes to "promote management that builds sustainable fisheries and vibrant coastal communities. However, as you look around the country, there are significant challenges in that regard."

http://snipr.com/uh99m

[Kai]

February 25, 2010

For updates on Science in the News and American Scientist, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!
Bloom Energy Unveils 'Power Plant in a Box'

from the San Francisco Chronicle

Bloom Energy Corp., one of Silicon Valley's most secretive startups, unveiled on Wednesday its long-awaited "power plant in a box," a collection of fuel cells that the company says can provide clean electricity to homes, office buildings--even whole villages in the developing world.

The Bloom Energy Server, a smooth metal box the size of a pickup truck, can generate electricity from multiple fuels while producing relatively few greenhouse gas emissions. With government subsidies factored in, power from the server costs less than power from the grid.

Unlike other fuel cells, Bloom's is made mostly of sand, with no platinum or other precious metals thrown in as catalysts. And unlike solar panels and wind turbines, each server can produce the same amount of energy day and night for years on end, according to the company. The process is twice as efficient as burning natural gas.

http://snipr.com/uiedq


DNA's Dirty Little Secret

from Washington Monthly

... Over the past quarter century, DNA evidence has transformed criminal justice, freeing hundreds of innocent people and helping unravel countless crimes that might otherwise have gone unsolved.

It has also captivated the public imagination: the plots of popular TV crime shows often hinge on the power of DNA to crack impossible cases, which has helped to give this forensic tool an air of infallibility--a phenomenon known in criminal justice circles as "the CSI effect."

... But increasingly DNA is being used for a new purpose: to target the culprits in cold cases .... In these instances, where the DNA is often incomplete or degraded and there are few other clues to go on, the reliability of DNA evidence plummets--a fact that jurors weighing such cases are almost never told. As a result, DNA, a tool renowned for exonerating the innocent, may actually be putting a growing number of them behind bars.

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LHC Restarts This Week--Half Power But Full of Potential

from National Geographic News

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is slated to be reawakened Thursday, at the earliest, LHC directors say. The reboot comes after a run at the highest energies yet for any particle accelerator--or atom smasher--and a scheduled winter break.

The Large Hadron Collider will be run at only half power, because equipment upgrades are needed before full-power operation is advisable, LHC scientists decided. But the LHC should still be capable of some stunning discoveries, experts say--perhaps even the detection of extra dimensions or evidence of the Higgs boson, or "God particle."

Particle accelerators use electric fields to channel particles into extremely narrow, fast-moving beams. By colliding some of these beams, the physicists at the Large Hadron Collider hope to recreate the intense conditions just after the big bang and to solve other scientific riddles, such as the nature of dark matter, the invisible material that scientists think makes up most of the universe's mass.

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Alternatives to BPA Containers Not Easy to Find

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Major U.S. foodmakers are quietly investigating how to rid their containers of Bisphenol A, a chemical under scrutiny by federal regulators concerned about links to a range of health problems, including reproductive disorders and cancer.

But they are discovering how complicated it is to remove the chemical, which is in the epoxy linings of nearly every metal can on supermarket shelves and leaches into foods such as soup, liquid baby formula and soda. It is a goal that is taking years to reach, costing millions and proving surprisingly elusive.

Randy Hartnell, whose company, Vital Choice, sells products aimed at health-conscious consumers, switched last year to can linings made without BPA. It was a costly move that he figured would resonate in the niche market that buys his canned wild salmon and low-mercury tuna.

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Target Cancer: A Roller Coaster Chase for a Cure

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

PHILADELPHIA -- His patient, a spunky Italian-American woman in her 60s, was waiting in an exam room down the hall for the answer: Was the experimental drug stopping her deadly skin cancer?

... Dozens of such "targeted" drugs are emerging from the laboratory, rooted in decades of research and backed by unprecedented investment by pharmaceutical companies, which stand to profit from drugs that prolong life even by weeks. But putting them to their truest test falls to a small band of doctors committed to running experimental drug trials for patients they have no other way to heal.

At a time when cancer still kills one in four Americans, it is a job that requires as much hubris as heart. To chronicle the trial of the drug known as PLX4032 is to ride a roller coaster of breakthroughs and setbacks at what many oncologists see as a watershed moment in understanding the genetic changes that cause cancer.

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Giant Shark Fossil Unearthed in Kansas

from BBC News Online

The fossilised remains of a gigantic 10m-long predatory shark have been unearthed in Kansas, US. Scientists dug up a gigantic jawbone, teeth and scales belonging to the shark which lived 89 million years ago. The bottom-dwelling predator had huge tooth plates, which it likely used to crush large shelled animals such as giant clams.

Palaeontologists already knew about the shark, but the new specimen suggests it was far bigger than previously thought. The scientists who made the discovery, published in the journal Cretaceous Research, last week also released details of other newly discovered giant plankton-eating fish that swam in prehistoric seas for more than 100 million years.

But this new fish, called Ptychodus mortoni, is both bigger and more fierce, having a taste for flesh rather than plankton. It may even have been the largest shellfish-eating animal ever to have roamed the Earth.

http://snipr.com/uieh5


Should Bone Marrow Donors Be Paid?

from USA Today

Should people be paid to donate bone marrow? About 20,000 bone marrow transplants are performed annually in the USA to treat blood disorders such as leukemia and anemia, and in up to 30% of cases, the donor is a relative, usually a sibling.

The remaining transplants use marrow from volunteer donors, who are strangers to the recipients. Worldwide, 14 million potential donors have signed up with bone marrow registries, including 8 million Americans.

Although millions have registered to donate bone marrow, a lawsuit filed in federal court in California argues that too many patients are dying for want of a match. To encourage more prospective donors to sign up, the plaintiffs propose compensating bone marrow donors, a violation of the National Organ Transplant Act, which bans buying donor organs, including bone marrow. Violating the law carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

http://snipr.com/uiehy


UN Weather Meeting Agrees to Refine Climate Data

from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

GENEVA (Associated Press) -- World weather agencies have agreed to collect more precise temperature data to improve climate change science, officials said Wednesday, as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged environment ministers to reject efforts by skeptics to derail a global climate deal.

Britain's Met Office proposed that climate scientists around the world undertake the "grand challenge" of measuring land surface temperatures as often as several times a day, and allow independent scrutiny of the data--a move that would go some way toward answering demands by skeptics for access to the raw figures used to predict climate change.

... The proposal was approved in principle by some 150 delegates meeting under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization this week in Antalya, Turkey.

http://snipr.com/uieif


'Miracle' Second Baby for Ovarian Transplant Woman

from the Telegraph (UK)

A woman has hailed her 'miracle' after giving birth to her second child following an ovarian transplant in a world first. Mrs Stinne Holm Bergholdt, from Denmark, gave birth after fertility treatment in 2007 but then conceived again naturally the following year. She had gone through the menopause early at age 27 following treatment for cancer.

The breakthrough is important as it was not known how long ovarian transplants would continue to work and if women could have a family normally afterwards. The new procedure could allow women to put off the menopause indefinitely and conceive children 'naturally' much later in life.

Doctors said the ovarian tissue could remain viable in the freezer for 40 years with women coming back to 'top-up' their ovarian function periodically. The technique, which is still considered experimental, offers hope for women born without functioning ovaries or those who have normal fertility which may be destroyed through medical treatments for life threatening diseases.

http://snipr.com/uieip


Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Psychologists have long studied the grunts and winks of nonverbal communication, the vocal tones and facial expressions that carry emotion. A warm tone of voice, a hostile stare--both have the same meaning in Terre Haute or Timbuktu, and are among dozens of signals that form a universal human vocabulary.

But in recent years some researchers have begun to focus on a different, often more subtle kind of wordless communication: physical contact. Momentary touches, they say--whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm--can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.

"It is the first language we learn," said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of "Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life" (Norton, 2009), and remains, he said, "our richest means of emotional expression" throughout life.

http://snipr.com/uieja

[Kai]

February 26, 2010

For updates on Science in the News and American Scientist, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!
Little Lizard Inspires a New Adhesive Tape

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Keep your eye on the shelves of your local hardware store, where in the next few years you may be able to find new tape from an unlikely source: the gecko.

"Geckos have millions of microscopic hairs on their toes, each with hundreds of tips that adhere to surfaces, with no residue left behind," said Kellar Autumn, a biology professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. "Their hairs can stay attached indefinitely."

Mr. Autumn and scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, were responsible for the research that enabled Mark Cutkosky, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford, to develop a prototype for a tape based on gecko adhesion.

http://snipr.com/uizcq


Huge New Dinosaur Found Via Skulls

from National Geographic News

Four skulls of a giant new species of plant-eating dinosaur may give scientists a head start on understanding the biggest animals ever to have walked the Earth, a new study says.

The 105-million-year-old skulls of Abydosaurus mcintoshi were discovered between the late 1990s and 2003 in a sandstone quarry in eastern Utah's Dinosaur National Monument. Although the site is known as for fossil bonanzas, the newfound skulls are extremely rare, paleontologists say.

That's because the new species--part of a group of ancient four-legged lumberers called sauropods--had long necks capped with tiny, delicate heads, which disintegrated quickly after death.

http://snipr.com/uize4


Inflaming the Dangers of a Fat-Laden Meal

from Science News

In the heavyweight division, immune cells embedded in fat pack some extra disease-causing punches, a new study shows.

Those punches involve potentially dangerous proteins linked to inflammation, heart disease and diabetes. Something in the adipose tissue, or fat, of overweight people primes immune cells called macrophages nestled within the tissue to release the proteins when the cells sense high levels of fat in the bloodstream, researchers report in the Feb. 24 Science Translational Medicine.

The discovery may lead to treatments that could block disease formation in overweight or obese people. Blood levels of free fatty acids, such as triglycerides, rise after a high-fat meal and, in obese people, are often constantly elevated to levels two to three times higher than normal ...

http://snipr.com/uizf0


How Google's Algorithm Rules the Web

from Wired

Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world's most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter.

This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. ... You might think that after a solid decade of search-market dominance, Google could relax.

After all, it holds a commanding 65 percent market share and is still the only company whose name is synonymous with the verb search. But just as Google isn't ready to rest on its laurels, its competitors aren't ready to concede defeat.

http://snipr.com/uizfg


Do Ocean-Bottom Bacteria Make Their Own Power Grids?

from ScienceNOW Daily News

Deep on the ocean floor, colonies of bacteria appear to have connected themselves via microscopic power grids that would be the envy of any small town. Much remains unknown about the process, but if confirmed the findings could revolutionize scientists' understanding of how the world's smallest ecosystems operate.

Oxygen-breathing bacteria that live on the ocean bottom have a problem. Those sitting atop the sediment have ready access to oxygen in the water but not to the precious mineral nutrients that lie out of reach a centimeter or so below the ground.

Meanwhile, those microbes that live in the sediment can access the nutrients, but they lack oxygen. How do both groups survive? Microbial ecologist Lars Peter Nielsen of Aarhus University in Denmark figured the surface and subsurface bacteria were somehow exchanging oxygen and nutrients with one another.

http://snipr.com/uizfx


Plastic Rubbish Blights Atlantic Ocean

from BBC News Online

Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates. The region is said to compare with the well-documented "great Pacific garbage patch."

Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association (SEA) told the BBC that the issue of plastics had been "largely ignored" in the Atlantic. She announced the findings of a two-decade-long study at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, US.

The work is the conclusion of the longest and most extensive record of plastic marine debris in any ocean basin. Scientists and students from the SEA collected plastic and marine debris in fine mesh nets that were towed behind a research vessel.

http://snipr.com/uizgg


FDA Creates Partnership to Boost Regulatory Science

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Washington - The Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday announced a plan to help the FDA make swifter decisions about the safety and effectiveness of new products and procedures that flow from advanced research.

The new partnership will promote the development of testing and other tools that FDA regulators need in order to assess drugs and other products coming from fields such as genomics, nanotechnology and stem cell therapy.

Officials from both agencies said laboratory science leading to treatments had vastly outdistanced regulatory science, which develops the methods to evaluate the safety and quality of those treatments.

http://snipr.com/uizhl


Experts: Lactose Intolerance Misunderstood

from USA Today

Many Americans avoid dairy products, an important source of calcium, vitamin D and other nutrients, because they mistakenly think they're lactose intolerant, a panel of experts concluded Wednesday at a National Institutes of Health conference.

Solid estimates of the prevalence of lactose intolerance are lacking, because medical studies have different interpretations of the condition, the experts write in their concluding statement, which is published at consensus.nih.gov.

"I think that there are huge gaps in knowledge," panel chairman Frederick Suchy, a pediatric liver specialist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said at a news briefing after the 2½-day conference in Bethesda, Md.

http://snipr.com/uizhq


Two Huge Icebergs Let Loose Off Antarctica's Coast

from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

SYDNEY (Associated Press) -- An iceberg about the size of Luxembourg that struck a glacier off Antarctica and dislodged another massive block of ice could lower the levels of oxygen in the world's oceans, Australian and French scientists said Friday.

The two icebergs are now drifting together about 62 to 93 miles (100 to 150 kilometers) off Antarctica following the collision on Feb. 12 or 13, said Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist Neal Young.

... The new iceberg is 48 miles (78 kilometers) long and about 24 miles (39 kilometers) wide and holds roughly the equivalent of a fifth of the world's annual total water usage, Young told The Associated Press. Experts are concerned about the effect of the massive displacement of ice on the ice-free water next to the glacier, which is important for ocean currents.

http://snipr.com/uizi5


Younger People Suffering Strokes

from the San Antonio Express-News

Long considered an old person's disease, a new study finds younger people are suffering from strokes--a trend that's likely related to growing rates of diabetes in the young, a researcher says.

The study, which looked at patients from Ohio and Kentucky, also found fewer older people suffering strokes as the average age of stroke patients dropped by three years over about a decade.

And since stroke patients often suffer impairments that limit their ability to work, such a trend toward younger stroke patients could have big social and economic consequences, said Dr. Brett Kissela, lead author of the study and associate professor of neurology at the University of Cincinnati.

http://snipr.com/uizil

[Kai]

March 1, 2010

For updates on Science in the News and American Scientist, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!
Chile Quake in 'Elite Class' Like 2004 Asian Quake

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

LOS ANGELES -- The huge earthquake that struck off the coast of Chile belongs to an "elite class" of mega earthquakes, experts said, and is similar to the 2004 Indian Ocean temblor that triggered deadly tsunami waves.

The magnitude-8.8 quake was a type called a "megathrust," considered the most powerful earthquake on the planet. Megathrusts occur when one tectonic plate dives beneath another. Saturday's tremor unleashed about 50 gigatons of energy and broke about 340 miles of the fault zone, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center.

The quake's epicenter was offshore and occurred about 140 miles north of the largest earthquake ever recorded--a magnitude-9.5 that killed about 1,600 people in Chile and scores of others in the Pacific in 1960.

http://snipr.com/ukwz4


Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Foiling E.P.A.

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Thousands of the nation's largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act's reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.

http://snipr.com/ukx05


Playing Along With the Mozart Effect

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Five months after we are conceived, music begins to capture our attention and wire our brains for a lifetime of aural experience. At the other end of life, musical memories can be imprinted on the brain so indelibly that they can be retrieved, perfectly intact, from the depths of a mind ravaged by Alzheimer's disease.

In between, music can puncture stress, dissipate anger and comfort us in sadness.

As if all that weren't enough, for years parents have been seduced by even loftier promises from an industry hawking the recorded music of Mozart and other classical composers as a means to ensure brilliant babies.

http://snipr.com/ukx0t


Forum: How the Hidden Brain Controls Our Lives

from PRI's The World Science

We like to think of ourselves as conscious, rational beings. But human behavior is largely driven by unconscious attitudes. These attitudes reside in the deep recesses of the brain, and we ignore them at our own peril. So says Washington Post journalist Shankar Vedantam.

Vedantam is the author of a new book, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives. Vedantam explores how the workings of the unconscious mind explain everything from genocide and injustice to the rise of suicide bombers.

The World's science reporter Rhitu Chatterjee spoke with Vedantam about the role of the hidden brain in our lives and actions.

http://snipr.com/ukx1k


Taking Root: The Spread of GM Crops

from the Economist

A decade ago, after European activists whipped up lots of negative coverage about the perils of toying with nature, the future of genetically modified (GM) crops seemed uncertain. The technology was adopted by farmers in the rich world outside Europe, but poor countries seemed likely to be left behind.

However, according to a report released on February 23rd by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), a non-profit outfit that monitors the use of GM crops, the sector is blossoming, especially in the developing world, where poor and unproductive farmers have the most to gain from such advances.

Despite the decline in food prices and the global economic downturn last year, the use of GM technology increased by about 7%, according to ISAAA. More than three-quarters of the soyabeans grown around the world are now genetically modified, as is roughly half the cotton and over a quarter of the maize (corn). Crucially, developing countries now account for nearly half of the world's 134m hectares of transgenic crops, with Brazil, Argentina, India and China in the vanguard. Of the 14m or so farmers now benefiting from the technology, perhaps 90% live in poor countries.

http://snipr.com/ukx1y


Sex Addiction Divides Mental Health Experts

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Tiger Woods, who recently admitted to multiple extramarital affairs, said he is receiving treatment. David Duchovny, who plays a sex-obsessed professor on the TV show "Californication," underwent rehab in 2008. Dr. Drew Pinsky has launched a reality series dealing with the subject.

Sex addiction talk seems to be everywhere. But mental health experts are split on what underlies such behavior.

The American Psychiatric Assn. has proposed that out-of-control sexual appetites be included as a diagnosis in the next edition of the psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, to be published in 2013.

http://snipr.com/ukx2d


Ants Are First Animal Known to Navigate by Stereo Smell

from BBC News Online

Desert ants in Tunisia smell in stereo, sensing odours from two different directions at the same time. By sniffing the air with each antenna, the ants form a mental 'odour map' of their surroundings. They then use this map to find their way home, say scientists who report the discovery in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Pigeons, rats and even people may also smell in stereo, but ants are the first animal known to use it for navigation.

Dr Markus Knaden and colleagues Dr Kathrin Steck and Professor Bill Hansson of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany investigated how the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis navigates around its surroundings.

http://snipr.com/ukx2s


Are Pesticides from Plants Dangerous to Humans?

from Scientific American

Chemicals derived from flowers may sound harmless, but new research raises concerns about compounds synthesized from chrysanthemums that are used in virtually every household pesticide.

For at least a decade, pyrethroids have been the insecticide of choice for consumers, replacing organophosphate pesticides, which are far more toxic to people and wildlife. But evidence is mounting that the switch to less-toxic pyrethroids has brought its own set of new ecological and human health risks.

About 70 percent of people in the United States have been exposed to pyrethroids, with children facing the highest exposure, according to a study published this month. Although the human health threats are unknown, animal studies have found evidence of damage to neurological, immune and reproductive systems.

http://snipr.com/ukx3b


Electric Avenue: Riding the Electromagnetic Wave of the Future

from Spiegel

Christian Förg devoted his student thesis to solving the distance problem in driving electric cars. At the same time he developed a whole new concept for freeways. The project, called "Speedway," earned him a top grade from his polytechnic university. But there's lots of work to be done.

... Förg wanted to remove the problem of [the distance an electric car can travel], but for him it was also important to let drivers of old-fashioned cars share the road with his new-fangled vehicles. "My approach will persuade drivers that (the future) is not about confrontation," he says.

"Speedway," as he calls the project, is simple. In city and local traffic, his cars will move under their own power, propelled by electric motors built for lower speeds. On one charge these vehicles could travel 200 kilometers--more than enough for a short trip. For longer trips Förg envisions a system of highways outfitted with so-called linear induction motors, where his electric cars can link up quietly with an electromagnetic field, cruise for long distances, then exit again under their own power.

http://snipr.com/ukx43


Study: Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?

from Time

The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club.

But are liberals actually smarter? A libertarian (and, as such, nonpartisan) researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has just written a paper that is set to be published in March by the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. The paper investigates not only whether conservatives are dumber than liberals but also why that might be so.

The short answer: Kanazawa's paper shows that more-intelligent people are more likely to say they are liberal. They are also less likely to say they go to religious services. ... What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values--that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire.

http://snipr.com/ukx50

[Kai]

Today's Headlines - March 2, 2010

For updates on Science in the News and American Scientist, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!
Chile Earthquake Tsunamis Smaller Than Expected--But Why?

from National Geographic News

The giant earthquake in Chile that struck Friday--one of the most powerful ever recorded--killed more than 700 people and leveled cities. Yet the tsunamis spawned by the earthquake were smaller than expected, leaving experts speculating as to why.

Tsunamis reached only 4 feet in Japan and 6.5 feet in the South Pacific island of Tonga, according to scientists. Tsunamis can often become monster waves of more than 100 feet. Furthermore, despite a massive evacuation of Hawaii, tsunamis in Hawaii measured only about three feet, too small to do any damage.

But this doesn't mean the tsunamis in Hawaii fizzled, said Costas Synolakis, director of the Tsunami Research Center at the University of Southern California. Rather, he said, the tsunamis were only slightly smaller than the 4-foot waves predicted by computer models. "The main story here, I think, is that the full evacuation of Hawaii was unnecessary," Syolakis told National Geographic News by email.

http://snipr.com/ulkhm


Studies Examine Electrocardiograms for Young Athletes

from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

Two studies published yesterday are expected to reignite an emotionally charged debate about whether young athletes should be screened with a heart test to reduce the small risk of sudden death from an undiagnosed heart problem.

In the first, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University added an electrocardiogram, known as an ECG, to a routine physical for students. This strategy doubled the number of students with heart disease who were detected, compared with those who did not receive an ECG with their physical.

... In the second study, scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine concluded that adding an ECG to the traditional sports physical would tack on roughly $89 per athlete, a cost that is considered feasible compared with other routine medical interventions. Both studies were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

http://snipr.com/ulki1


Ice Deposits Found at Moon's Pole

from BBC News Online

A radar experiment aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar spacecraft has identified thick deposits of water-ice near the Moon's north pole. The US space agency's (Nasa) Mini-Sar experiment found more than 40 small craters containing water-ice.

But other compounds--such as hydrocarbons--are mixed up in lunar ice, according to new results from another Moon mission called LCROSS. The findings were presented at a major planetary science conference in Texas.

The craters with ice range from 2km to 15km (one to nine miles) in diameter; how much there is depends on its thickness in each crater. But Nasa says the ice must be at least a couple of metres thick to give the signature seen by Chandrayaan-1.

http://snipr.com/ulkif


Stroke Study Puts Two Procedures on Equal Footing

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

For patients with a hardening of the neck arteries that can lead to a stroke, balloon angioplasty and stenting are virtually as effective and safe as the long-used gold standard of surgical removal of the plaque, according to the largest comparison of the two procedures ever conducted.

Results from the CREST trial on more than 2,500 patients in the United States and Canada, reported Friday at the International Stroke Conference in San Antonio, suggest that either procedure is a good way to limit the risks of having a stroke and that the choice between the two could be more a matter of patient preference than scientific certainty.

Stroke was "a bit more common" in patients who underwent stenting, and heart attacks were a bit more common in those who had surgery, said lead investigator Dr. Thomas G. Brott of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. "Unfortunately, there is not a lot of scientifically valid information that tells us which is more important to the patient."

http://snipr.com/ulkim


A Closer Look at Evolutionary Faces

from Smithsonian Magazine

To recreate the faces of our early ancestors, some of whom have been extinct for millions of years, sculptor John Gurche dissected the heads of modern humans and apes, mapping patterns of soft tissue and bone. He used this information to fill out the features of the fossils. Each sculpture starts with the cast of a fossilized skull; Gurche then adds layers of clay muscle, fat and skin.

Seven of his finished hominid busts will be featured at the National Museum of Natural History's David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, which opens March 17. They are perhaps the best-researched renderings of their kind.

Gurche, a "paleo-artist," even molds the hominids' eyes out of acrylic plastic, eschewing pre-fabricated versions. "If you want the eyes to be the window to the soul," Gurche says, "you have to make them with some depth."

http://snipr.com/ulkj2


Scientists Observe Protein Folding in Living Cells

from Scientific American

Even in sleep, the human body is rarely still--and within it, there is the constant motion of the contents of our cells and the proteins within.

Until now, scientists have had to estimate the speed of complex but common actions such as protein folding (which turns an unorganized polypeptide strand into a complex and useful three-dimensional protein). They could watch the action unfold, so to speak, in a test tube but weren't sure how close the pace conformed to real life.

A group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, however, have developed a system to move the observation out of in vitro and into in vivo. "This is the first experiment that allows us to observe the dynamics of a protein folding in a live cell," Martin Gruebele, a chemist at Illinois and co-author of the study, said in a prepared statement. "Now we have the capability of looking at how fast biological processes occur as a function of time."

http://snipr.com/ulkjk


Depression's Upside

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

... The mystery of depression is not that it exists--the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead, the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence. While most mental illnesses are extremely rare ... depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold.

... The persistence of this affliction--and the fact that it seemed to be heritable--posed a serious challenge to Darwin's evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction--it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide--to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we've now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself.

The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection ... depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer--we suffer terribly--but we don't suffer in vain.

http://snipr.com/ulkjs


Study: Herbicide Upsetting Some Animals' Hormone Systems

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

A new study shows that male frogs exposed to the herbicide atrazine--commonly found in U.S. rivers and streams--can make a startling developmental U-turn, turning female so completely that they can mate with other males and lay viable eggs.

The study will focus new attention on concerns about atrazine, which is applied to an estimated 75 percent of American cornfields. Its manufacturer, the Swiss agricultural giant Syngenta, says the product is safe for wildlife, and for the people who are exposed to small amounts of it in drinking water. In recent years, however, some studies have seemed to show that atrazine can drive natural hormone systems haywire in fish, birds, rats and frogs. In some cases, male animals exposed to the chemical developed female characteristics.

The study led by Tyrone Hayes, a professor at the University of California, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It showed an even starker transformation: Among a group of male African clawed frogs raised in water tainted with atrazine, he said, a fraction grew up to look and act like females.

http://snipr.com/ulkkh


How the Men Reacted as the Titanic and Lusitania Went Under

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Records from two nearly 100-year-old shipwrecks, the Titanic and the Lusitania, have given researchers new insight into human selfishness--and altruism.

On one boat, it seems, the men thought only of themselves; on the other, they were more likely to help women and children. This occurred for one key reason, researchers said: time. The Lusitania sank in about 18 minutes, while the Titanic took nearly three hours. Women and children fared much better on the Titanic.

"When you have to react very, very fast, human instincts are much faster than internalized social norms," said Benno Torgler, an economics professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and one of the authors of the study, published in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://snipr.com/ulkkv


Vaccine Advice Outweighs Autism Fear, Study Finds

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Chicago (Associated Press) -- One in 4 U.S. parents thinks some vaccines cause autism in healthy children, but even many of those worried about vaccine risks think their children should be vaccinated.

Most parents continue to follow the advice of their children's doctors, according to a study based on a survey of 1,552 parents. Extensive research has found no connection between autism and vaccines.

"Nine out of 10 parents believe that vaccination is a good way to prevent diseases for their children," said lead author Dr. Gary Freed of the University of Michigan. "Luckily, their concerns don't outweigh their decision to get vaccines so their children can be protected from life-threatening illnesses."

http://snipr.com/ulknd

[Kai]

March 3, 2010

For updates on Science in the News and American Scientist, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!
USA Pays Price for Food-Borne Illness: $152B a Year

from USA Today

Food-borne illnesses cost the United States $152 billion a year, a tab that works out to an average cost of $1,850 each time someone gets sick from food, a report by a former Food and Drug Administration economist says.

"A lot of people don't realize how expensive food-borne illnesses are," says Robert Scharff, a former FDA regulatory economist and now a professor of consumer science at Ohio State University. "It's important for the public to understand the size of this problem."

Scharff worked with government estimates that there are 76 million food-related illnesses a year, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. The costs include medical services, deaths, lost work and disability. They are based on data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA.

http://snipr.com/um30n


Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-Shifting Net

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

SAN FRANCISCO -- In a dimly lit chamber festooned with wires and hidden in one of California's largest data centers, Tim Pozar is changing the shape of the Internet.

He is using what Internet engineers refer to as a "meet-me room." The room itself is enclosed in a building full of computers and routers. What Mr. Pozar does there is to informally wire together the networks of different businesses that want to freely share their Internet traffic.

The practice is known as peering, and it goes back to the earliest days of the Internet, when organizations would directly connect their networks instead of paying yet another company to route data traffic. Originally, the companies that owned the backbone of the Internet shared traffic. In recent years, however, the practice has increased to the point where some researchers who study the way global networks are put together believe that peering is changing the fundamental shape of the Internet ....

http://snipr.com/um33p


Chile Earthquake Altered Earth Axis, Shortened Day

from National Geographic News

Saturday's Chile earthquake was so powerful that it likely shifted an Earth axis and shortened the length of a day, NASA announced Monday.

By speeding up Earth's rotation, the magnitude 8.8 earthquake--the fifth strongest ever recorded, according to the USGS--should have shortened an Earth day by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to new computer-model calculations by geophysicist Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

For comparison, the same model estimated that the magnitude 9 Sumatra earthquake in December 2004 shortened the length of a day by 6.8 millionths of a second. Gross also estimates that the Chile earthquake shifted Earth's figure axis by about three inches.

http://snipr.com/um34c


Early Polar Bear Discovered in Arctic Tundra

from ScienceNOW Daily News

Digging in the frozen tundra of Norway's Svalbard archipelago, scientists have uncovered the remains of the most ancient polar bear ever found. DNA analyses reveal that the bear--a mature male--lived about 120,000 years ago, at a time when wooly mammoths were also roaming the land. The work also shows that this bear represents something very rare in the fossil record: an evolutionary snapshot of one species turning into another.

"This is the most exciting new development in polar bear research in recent years," says biologist and polar bear expert Ian Stirling of the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

The discovery of the fossil is a major breakthrough. Polar bears, which can weigh nearly 700 kilograms, spend most of their lives in the open ocean above the Arctic Circle, hiding atop ice floes and waiting for an unfortunate seal to take a break from swimming. When they die, polar bears are either torn apart by their comrades for food or sink to the sea bottom, where marine animals and microbes quickly dispose of their remains.

http://snipr.com/um35q


Hydrothermal Vents Sometimes Colonized From Afar

from Science News

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Field studies at a hydrothermal vent system where all life was snuffed out by a massive undersea volcanic eruption reveal that these habitats can be repopulated in a matter of months by larvae from distant vents.

In late 2005 and early 2006, a swarm of earthquakes rocked a 15-kilometer-long portion of the East Pacific Rise, a deep submarine ridge south-southwest of Acapulco, Mexico. That portion of the rise, which in turn is part of a network of mid-ocean ridges that encircle the globe, hosts hydrothermal vent systems that many researchers have long studied.

When scientists returned to the area four months after the quakes, cameras sent to the seafloor revealed that a volcanic eruption had smothered spots as far as two kilometers from the ridge with lava. "All of the organisms in the region were eradicated," said Lauren Mullineaux, a biological oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. That devastation provided a natural laboratory to see how long it would take for organisms to recolonize the vent systems....

http://snipr.com/um378


Woolly Mammoths Resurfacing in Siberia

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

The beasts had long lain extinct and forgotten, embedded deep in the frozen turf, bodies swaddled in Earth's layers for thousands of years before Christ.

Now, the Russian permafrost is offering up the bones and tusks of the woolly mammoths that once lumbered over the tundra. They are shaped into picture frames, chess sets, pendants. They are gathered and piled, carved and whittled, bought and sold on the Internet.

The once-obscure scientists who specialize in the wastelands of Siberia have opened lucrative sidelines as bone hunters, spending the summer months trawling the northern river banks and working networks of locals to gather stockpiles of bones. They speak of their work proudly, and a little mystically.

http://snipr.com/um38x


Etched Ostrich Eggs Illustrate Human Sophistication

from BBC News Online

Inscribed ostrich shell fragments found in South Africa are among the earliest examples of the use of symbolism by modern humans, scientists say.

The etched shells from Diepkloof Rock Shelter in Western Cape have been dated to about 60,000 years ago. Details are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers, who have investigated the material since 1999, argue that the markings are almost certainly a form of messaging--of graphic communication. "The motif is two parallel lines, which we suppose were circular, but we do not have a complete refit of the eggs," explained Dr Pierre-Jean Texier from the University of Bordeaux, Talence, France.

http://snipr.com/um39f


He's Had Work: Preserving the Face of a Revolution

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

It's an old Soviet joke. Three Russians are in the gulag. The first one says, "What are you in for?" The second one replies, "I called Zbarsky a revolutionary." "That's funny," the first one says. "I called Zbarsky a counterrevolutionary." "That's funny," the third one says. "I'm Zbarsky."

Vern Thiessen's new play, "Lenin's Embalmers," which starts on Wednesday at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Clinton, opens with the ghost of Lenin telling this joke as a parable of the mordant doom pervading the Communist state he created.

In real life the joke wasn't specifically about Zbarsky. You could insert any of Stalin's thousands of lackeys turned victims. Certainly Zbarsky would do. Boris Zbarsky was a real person, one of the two biochemists who, after Lenin died in 1924, were ordered by the Kremlin to devise a way of preserving his body forever.

http://snipr.com/um3aq


Fossil of Dinosaur-Eating Snake Found

from the Guardian (UK)

Even dinosaurs may have been afraid of snakes, a discovery suggests. Scientists have unearthed the almost complete fossil skeleton of a prehistoric snake that preyed on baby dinosaurs. The creature, which was three metres long, was "caught in the act" of pursuing a meal 67m years ago.

Its body was found in a dinosaur nest coiled around a hatched and crushed egg, and next to it was a 50cm fossil hatchling titanosaur--a small version of a plant-eating giant that as an adult weighed up to 100 tonnes. The remains of two other snakes were also found paired with eggs at the same site in Gujarat, western India.

The snake, named Sanajeh indicus, lacked the wide-open jaws of modern snakes such as pythons and boa constrictors and would not have been able to swallow a whole dinosaur egg. But baby dinosaurs would have been just the right size, according to researchers.

http://snipr.com/um3cs


Fat Rats Skew Research Results

from Nature News

Failure to recognize that many laboratory animals live unhealthy lives may be leading researchers to misinterpret their findings, potentially misdirecting efforts to develop theraputic drugs.

The problem, reports a group at the US National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland, is that many rats and mice used in experiments are so overweight that they are glucose intolerant and heading for an early death. As a result, data from the animals--about, for example, the effects of an anti-cancer drug--may not apply to normal-weight animals.

"The vast majority of investigators who use rats and mice don't recognize that their normal conditions are relatively unhealthy," says Mark Mattson, chief of the National Institute on Aging's Laboratory of Neurosciences and a co-author on the paper. "The most logical way to extrapolate is to say any data we obtain in the animal model would be more relevant to overweight, sedentary humans than normal-weight, active individuals."

http://snipr.com/um3ee

[Kai]

An amphipod was video recorded 600 feet down in an Antarctic ice bore hole, 12.5 miles from open water, by NASA scientists.

http://dailypostal.com/2010/03/16/lyssianasid-amphipod-nasa-video-shrimp-under-antarctic-ice/

Sympagic environments are rather cool. By sympagic, I mean ecological regions which are mostly solid ice, usually associated with the polar ice caps and what Russians call the polynya, the region of open water between ice caps and sea ice. The organisms in these regions must be specifically adapted so that their proteins and cell membranes function at such low temperatures and all have some form of antifreeze. Most are planktonic feeders, or algal scrapers on the underside of the ice.

Discovery of an amphipod that far from the polynya indicates there may be a whole ecosystem underneath the ice, yet undiscovered.

[Telarus]

Who needs nanobots when you can control a swarm of bacteria to do your bidding? I for one welcome our new nano-Illuminati Overlords.

http://technoccult.net/archives/2010/03/29/computer-controlled-swarm-of-bacteria-builds-tiny-pyramid/



    Researchers at the NanoRobotics Laboratory of the École Polytechnique de Montréal, in Canada, are putting swarms of bacteria to work, using them to perform micro-manipulations and even propel microrobots.

    Led by Professor Sylvain Martel, the researchers want to use flagellated bacteria to carry drugs into tumors, act as sensing agents for detecting pathogens, and operate micro-factories that could perform pharmacological and genetic tests.

    They also want to use the bacteria as micro-workers for building things. Things like a tiny step pyramid. [...]

    The bacteria, of a type known as magnetotactic, contain structures called magnetosomes, which function as a compass. In the presence of a magnetic field, the magnetosomes induce a torque on the bacteria, making them swim according to the direction of the field. Place a magnetic field pointing right and the bacteria will move right. Switch the field to point left and the bacteria will follow suit.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/medical-robots/032510-swarm-of-bacteria-builds-tiny-pyramid

[Kai]

April 1, 2010

For more updates, follow @AmSciMag on Twitter!


Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

The proposal--a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations--would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

Under the plan, the coastline from New Jersey northward would remain closed to all oil and gas activity. So would the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border.

http://snipr.com/v70vn - Drill baby, DRILL!

Drought and Flooding Led to Collapse of Angkor

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

A prolonged drought punctuated by intense monsoons that partially destroyed the city's water-preservation infrastructure led to the 15th century collapse of the ancient city of Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire, U.S. and Asian researchers reported.

Researchers had suspected that water scarcity played a role in the city's demise, and the first tree-ring chronology in Asia provides strong support for that speculation. It shows that the drought persisted for decades, which would have severely strained the city's ability to survive.

Monsoons then inundated Angkor's extensive canal system with mud and other debris--which other researchers had previously discovered--impairing its ability to provide adequate water for the nearly 1 million residents sprawled over an area similar to that of modern-day Los Angeles, the team reported this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://snipr.com/v70vs - Sounds like the story of the Anasazi

To Scientists, Laughter Is No Joke

from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- So a scientist walks into a shopping mall to watch people laugh. There's no punchline. Laughter is a serious scientific subject, one that researchers are still trying to figure out.

Laughing is primal, our first way of communicating. Apes laugh. So do dogs and rats. Babies laugh long before they speak. No one teaches you how to laugh. You just do. And often you laugh involuntarily, in a specific rhythm and in certain spots in conversation.

You may laugh at a prank on April Fools' Day. But surprisingly, only 10 to 15 percent of laughter is the result of someone making a joke, said Baltimore neuroscientist Robert Provine, who has studied laughter for decades. Laughter is mostly about social responses rather than reaction to a joke. "Laughter above all else is a social thing," Provine said. "The requirement for laughter is another person."

http://snipr.com/v70vz - This is cool, read it.

FDA Pressured to Combat Rising 'Food Fraud'

from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

The expensive "sheep's milk" cheese in a Manhattan market was really made from cow's milk. And a jar of "Sturgeon caviar" was, in fact, Mississippi paddlefish. Some honey makers dilute their honey with sugar beets or corn syrup, their competitors say, but still market it as 100 percent pure at a premium price.

And last year, a Fairfax man was convicted of selling 10 million pounds of cheap, frozen catfish fillets from Vietnam as much more expensive grouper, red snapper and flounder. The fish was bought by national chain retailers, wholesalers and food service companies, and ended up on dinner plates across the country.

"Food fraud" has been documented in fruit juice, olive oil, spices, vinegar, wine, spirits and maple syrup, and appears to pose a significant problem in the seafood industry. Victims range from the shopper at the local supermarket to multimillion companies, including E&J Gallo and Heinz USA. Such deception has been happening since Roman times, but it is getting new attention as more products are imported and a tight economy heightens competition. And the U.S. food industry says federal regulators are not doing enough to combat it.

http://snipr.com/v70w8 - But COI mitocondrial DNA can be used to detect food fraud now, the tequila bottle and fish market experiment of late show this pretty clearly.

Study: Chocolate May Reduce Heart Risk

from USA Today

LONDON (Associated Press) -- The Easter Bunny might lower your chances of having a heart problem. According to a new study, small doses of chocolate every day could decrease your risk of having a heart attack or stroke by nearly 40%. German researchers followed nearly 20,000 people over eight years, sending them several questionnaires about their diet and exercise habits.

They found people who had an average of six grams of chocolate per day--or about one square of a chocolate bar--had a 39% lower risk of either a heart attack or stroke. The study is scheduled to be published Wednesday in the European Heart Journal.

Previous studies have suggested dark chocolate in small amounts could be good for you, but this is the first study to track its effects over such a long period of time. Experts think the flavonols contained in chocolate are responsible.

http://snipr.com/v70wg - I hope that these food stories go die a slow and painful death. Maybe it's because these people are overall healthier in general?

Bulging Mutant Trout Created

from National Geographic News

Scientists have created hundreds of mutant fish with "six-pack abs" and bulging "shoulders" by beefing them up with new genes. While the fish aren't going to win any beauty contests, the genetically engineered rainbow trout could hold some appeal at market, because they each provide 15 to 20 percent more flesh than standard trout, researchers say.

Developed with fish farming in mind, the genetically modified trout is the result of ten years of experimentation by a team led by Terry Bradley of the University of Rhode Island's Department of Fisheries, Animal, and Veterinary Sciences.

The team injected 20,000 rainbow trout eggs with different types of DNA from other species, making them transgenic. The added DNA was intended to suppress a protein called myostatin, and it apparently worked in about 300 of the eggs, turning them into the muscle-bound superfish.

http://snipr.com/v70wp - Ugh. Sounds like those muscle cows.

Gene Flaw Found in Induced Stem Cells

from Nature News

Stem-cell researchers have puzzled over why reprogrammed cells taken from adult tissues are often slower to divide and much less robust than their embryo-derived counterparts.

Now, a team has discovered the key genetic difference between embryonic and adult-derived stem cells in mice. If confirmed in humans, the finding could help clinicians to select only the heartiest stem cells for therapeutic applications and disease modelling.

Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells are created by reprogramming adult cells, and outwardly seem indistinguishable from embryonic stem (ES) cells. Both cell types are pluripotent--they can form any tissue in the body. Yet subtle distinctions abound.

http://snipr.com/v70xf

The Bigger Menace: Asteroid Impact or Climate Change?

from Scientific American

If you ask the average person whether in the long run it is climate change or an asteroid/comet impact that's expected to kill more people annually, you'll undoubtedly get some confused replies. Those asteroid movies are scary, but there are no verified instances of an asteroid strike killing any humans, are there? Meanwhile, the science of climate change is currently being overshadowed by a media-driven public debate, mainly in the U.S.

In fact, the expected annual fatality rate due to climate change is estimated to be far higher than that due to an asteroid or comet impact--150,000 versus 91, per the World Health Organization (WHO) and Alan Harris of the Space Science Institute, respectively.

You won't, however, see that 150,000 figure in the main body of the Washington, D.C.-based National Research Council report on near-Earth object (NEO) surveys and mitigation strategies. (The report was written by a total of 42 scientists.)

http://snipr.com/v70y9 - And yet another article about catastrophe.

First Songbird Genome Arrives With Spring

from Science News

Zebra finches have something to tweet about. The little songbirds' genetic instruction book has just been deciphered.

An international team of scientists announced the accomplishment in the April 1 Nature. Zebra finches are the first songbirds and the second bird, after the chicken, with a completely decoded genetic blueprint. Contained within the finch's DNA could be clues to how songbirds learn vocal information and use songs in social situations, a model for human language and communication.

Whales, dolphins, some bats and several other species of birds also learn vocally, but the mouse-sized zebra finch has become a model system for studying the process in the laboratory. Male zebra finches memorize their fathers' songs and practice singing the song for a month or two. Once learned, a male's song is his signature. Unlike other songbirds that can change their songs, he sings his for life.

http://snipr.com/v70ys - Now that 3rd generation sequencing technology has cut the time for genome sequencing and the cost significantly, we'll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing. However, it's important to remember that this sort of sequence doesn't work on all the DNA, only the portions that are open to copying, it doesn't tell us where and when genes are expressed and it doesn't tell us the interactions between genes. Thats why there are things like transcriptomics, interactomics, proteomics, etc.

Climate Science Must Be More Open, Say MPs

from BBC News Online

MPs investigating the climate change row at the UK's University of East Anglia (UEA) have demanded greater transparency from climate scientists. The Commons Science and Technology Committee criticised UEA authorities for failing to respond to requests for data from climate change sceptics.

But it found no evidence Professor Phil Jones, whose e-mails were hacked and published online, had manipulated data. It said his reputation, and that of his climate research unit, remained intact. The e-mails were hacked from the university's computer network and were published on the internet just before the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009.

Climate sceptics claimed that the e-mails provided evidence that scientists at the university's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were hiding data and falsifying scientific evidence on global warming. The committee said much of the data that critics claimed Prof Jones had hidden, was in fact already publicly available. But they said Prof Jones had aroused understandable suspicion by blocking requests for data.

http://snipr.com/v70z9 - We're all fucked, lets just go with that. Works regardless.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

Awesome thread is awesome.

[Jasper]

"The requirement for laughter is another person."

This worries me.  I probably laugh at least half as much when I'm alone.