Science Headlines for October 25, 2008

Why Binge Drinking Is Bad For Your Bones

Studies in recent years have demonstrated that binge drinking can decrease bone mass and bone strength, increasing the risk of osteoporosis. Now a new study has found a possible mechanism: Alcohol disturbs genes necessary for maintaining healthy bones. The findings could help in the development of new drugs to minimize bone loss in alcohol abusers and in those who don't abuse alcohol but are at risk for osteoporosis.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Oct 2008 | 12:00 am

Development Puts An End To Evolution Of Endless Forms

Researchers have put forward a simple model of development and gene regulation that is capable of explaining patterns observed in the distribution of morphologies and body plans (or, more generally, phenotypes).
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Oct 2008 | 12:00 am

Research Uncovers New Steps On Pathway To Enlarged Heart

Researchers have new insight into the mechanisms that underlie a pathological increase in the size of the heart. The research may lead to the development of new strategies for managing this extremely common cardiac ailment that often leads to heart failure.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Oct 2008 | 12:00 am

Genetic Explanation For Moles' Poor Eyesight

Due to their underground habitats, moles' eyes have been modified by natural selection in ways very different from those of surface-dwelling animals. New research offers a detailed anatomical and genetic examination of the changes that result from living life in the dark.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Oct 2008 | 12:00 am

High-Dose Hormone Treatment Might Reduce Risk For Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Cortisol helps our bodies cope with stress, but what about its effects on the brain? A new study in Biological Psychiatry, suggests that the answer to this question is complex. In an animal model of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), high doses of a cortisol-related substance, corticosterone, prevented negative consequences of stress exposure, including increased startle response and behavioral freezing when exposed to reminders of the stress. However, low-dose corticosterone potentiated these responses.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Oct 2008 | 12:00 am

First Inhabitants Of Caribbean Brought Drug Heirlooms With Them

Scientists have found physical evidence that the people who colonized the Caribbean from South America brought with them heirloom drug paraphernalia that had been passed down from generation to generation as the colonists traveled through the islands.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Oct 2008 | 12:00 am

Hepatitis C Treatment Is Cost-effective For The US Prison Population

Treating all US prisoners who have hepatitis C with the standard therapy of pegylated-interferon and ribavirin would be cost-effective, says a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 6:00 pm

Caste In Ant Colonies: How Fate Is Determined Between Workers And Queens

In colonies of social insects the struggle for the spoils is embodied by a reproductive division of labor. Some individuals (the queens) reproduce, while large and small workers provide the labor. Larvae become different castes (small workers, large workers, or new queens) based on genetics, nutrition, and environment (colony size). However the relative importance of each factor was different for each caste.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 6:00 pm

Potential Strategy To Eliminate Poisonous Protein From Alzheimer Brains Identified

Scientists discovered that the activity of a potent AB-degrading enzyme can be unleashed in mouse models of the disease by reducing its natural inhibitor cystatin C.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 6:00 pm

Birth Of White Rhino After Artificial Insemination With Frozen Sperm

A world-first: birth of a white rhino after artificial insemination with frozen sperm. The rhino baby, a male, was born at 4:57am in the Budapest Zoo on the 22nd of October 2008. In June 2007, scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin artificially inseminated his mother, the rhino cow Lulu, with frozen bull semen.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 6:00 pm

Researchers: 7 orcas missing from Puget Sound (AP)

AP - Seven Puget Sound killer whales are missing and presumed dead in what could be the biggest decline among the sound's orcas in nearly a decade, say scientists who carefully track the endangered animals.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 2:19 pm

Ohio Woman Gives Birth to Triplet Granddaughters

Not only has a 56-year-old Ohio woman given birth to triplets, but they're her own granddaughters.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Oct 2008 | 12:10 pm

The Biological Clock's Incredible Influence Revealed (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 12:05 pm

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - Saturday's weather was to be characterized by a strong trough of low pressure in the East and a ridge of high pressure in the West.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 11:45 am

OPEC set to meet regularly as world recession looms: analysts (AFP)

AFP - OPEC could meet regularly over the coming months to announce further cuts in oil output as a worldwide recession weighs on energy demand and crude prices, analysts said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 11:16 am

Depressed astronauts might get computerized solace (AP)

AP - Your work is dangerous and your co-workers rely on you to stay alive. But you can never get far from those colleagues. You can't see your family for months, even years. The food isn't great. And forget stepping out for some fresh air.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 9:02 am

Appeals court to take up GOP effort in Indiana (AP)

AP - A divided Indiana Supreme Court on Friday rejected a effort by Republicans to shutter satellite early voting sites in three largely Democratic cities near Chicago, but an appeals court later agreed to expedite the case and set oral arguments for five days before the general election.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 8:27 am

Italian satellite launched from California (AP)

AP - A rocket carrying an Italian Earth-observation satellite blasted off Friday evening from the California coast.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 6:46 am

2 greenhouse gases on the rise worry scientists (AP)

AP - Carbon dioxide isn't the only greenhouse gas that worries climate scientists. Airborne levels of two other potent gases one from ancient plants, the other from flat-panel screen technology are on the rise, too. And that's got scientists concerned about accelerated global warming.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 4:39 am

Scientists ID 3 New Candidate Genes for Schizophrenia (HealthDay)

HealthDay - FRIDAY, Oct. 24 (HealthDay News) -- American and Dutch researchers believe they may have identified three genes tied to the development of schizophrenia.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 3:48 am

NASA unveils new lunar rover built for endurance

BLACK POINT, Arizona (Reuters) - NASA unveiled a new lunar rover on Friday which aims to transform space exploration by allowing astronauts to roam large distances without cumbersome spacesuits when they return to the moon by 2020.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 1:26 am

Russians, plus American tourist, return from space (AP)

AP - Soon after he touched down Friday, American space tourist Richard Garriott got a pat on the head and an admiring question from his astronaut father. "How come you look so fresh and ready to go?" 77-year-old Owen Garriott asked his son, who was sitting in an armchair on the steppes of Kazakhstan after being pulled from the gumdrop-shaped Soyuz capsule.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Oct 2008 | 1:20 am

Underground Lab Probes How Matter Licked Antimatter

Everything in our universe is made of matter, but a century of physics has revealed that at the beginning of time, an exactly equal amount of antimatter existed. Then, two seconds after the Big Bang, something changed and suddenly there was more matter than antimatter. What we don't know is how matter won and opened the door to existence as we know it.

Now, in a former salt mine next door to a nuclear weapons waste repository, Stanford physicists are completing the installation of a new particle detector, the Enriched Xenon Observatory 200, that they hope will provide the answer to that question.

"We're in the land where the theorists can't really tell us what to expect," said Jesse Wodin, a researcher at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Lab who is working on the EXO-200. "No one has done this at this scale."

When it's fully installed next year, the EXO-200 will be one of, if not the most, sensitive radiation detectors in the world. Located inside the Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico, the new underground lab will be tracking the behavior of neutrinos, mysterious particles that hardly interact with anything. Though fundamental to our understanding of the universe, we know next to nothing about them.

The new detector will try to fill in the picture, determining basic features of the particles, like their mass and whether or not they, unlike almost all other particles, are their own antiparticles.

That quirk is why some scientists believe neutrinos could be the mechanism for the creation of our matter-filled universe. Almost all other particles have an antiparticle twin that, if it comes into contact with the particle, immediately annihilates it. But if neutrinos are their own antiparticles they could conceivably be knocked onto matter's "team," thereby causing the cascading win for matter over antimatter that we know occurred. As the Indian theoretical physcist G. Rajasekaran put it in a speech earlier this year, neutrinos that are their own antiparticles would explain "how, after [the] annihilation of most of the particles with antiparticles, a finite but small residue of particles was left to make up the present Universe."

But to test that theory, they'll need to catch one of the rarest events predicted by particle physics, a particularly strange kind of radioactive decay of purified xenon.

Driven by faster computers, physicists have been able to build increasingly sophisticated detectors and analysis equipment. They bury them underground to avoid interference from cosmic rays and other less exotic sources. For decades, scientists have been building larger and larger particle detectors with greater and greater sensitivities. But for exceedingly rare events, they run into some hard physical limits.

"If you had a single atom of Xenon 136, you'd have to wait 10²⁵ years for it to have a reasonable probability of decaying," Wodin said. "That's orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe.... The only way to increase your odds of seeing it is to get a lot of atoms."

Getting more atoms requires building bigger detectors. The new experimental rig is composed of 200 kilograms of liquid xenon, made up of an almost unthinkable number of atoms of the noble gas. It is the largest detector purpose-built for catching what scientists call double beta decay.

"You can imagine a big vat of liquid xenon," said Wodin. "This one atom goes and becomes a barium. Basically, you want to have detected that process."

There are two ways that the double beta decay can occur. In the standard version, two electrons and two antineutrinos are sent hurtling out from an atom's nucleus. Scientists were only able to experimentally confirm that type of decay in 1986, after decades of trying.

Now, the search has shifted to the more improbable, neutrinoless radioactive decay, wherein only the electrons are emitted. That would only be possible if the two neutrinos that are normally emitted actually annihilate each other, which would confirm that neutrinos are their own antiparticles.

And with a neutrinoless beta decay observation in hand, the physicists could also determine the mass of the neutrino.

"You combine the results of regular beta decay and neutrinoless beta decay and basically do a kind of subtraction, and you can figure out what the mass is," Wodin said.

Back in 2006, some members of a team running an experiment called the Moscow-Heidelberg made a much-disputed announcement that they'd witnessed the special type of decay, but their claim is not generally accepted within the particle physics community.

At its current size, the EXO-200 team expects to have a shot at observing a few decay events per year. To further increase their odds of catching neutrinoless decay, they are planning an even larger 1-ton detector. The main limiting factor had been finding a place that could purify xenon enough to avoid any bad data sneaking into their experiment.

To enrich their xenon to the experimental levels they wanted, the team had to reach out to our former Cold War opponents.

"We used money available from the U.S. government to keep former Soviet weapons scientists busy," Wodin said. "This was a fantastic partnership. We gave them our Xenon and they purified it to a single isotope. That increases our sensitivity massively."

That relationship, Wodin said, is a key advantage the team of Stanford researchers and their international collaborators has over their competitors in the search to figure out the neutrino's fundamental properties like the fantastically named Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events in Italy, and the Germanium Detector Array and the Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride 0-Neutrino Double Beta Research Apparatus in Germany.

And that's important because with a prize as large as understanding how matter came to persist in the universe, the competition is intense.

"It's basically at the top of the list in terms of rare decays," Wodin said. "It's certainly competition, but it's also friendly and there's a lot of information exchanged."

Images: Courtesy of Jesse Wodin and the Enriched Xenon Observatory, except #2.

1. The underground cavern at WIPP where the detector will be located. 2. An illustration of the situation in the early universe, two seconds after the Big Bang. Courtesy Berkeley Lab. 3. The cryostat for the detector. 4. A piece of the detector 5. Construction underway at WIPP.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 25 Oct 2008 | 12:26 am

Olfactory Hack Tricks Worms Into Living Longer

It's the ultimate fad diet: smell less to live longer!

The possibility is raised by new research on roundworms who lived extra-long when deprived of their sense of smell.

The longevity benefit was comparable to that produced by caloric restriction, which extends animal lifespans by activating cellular protection mechanisms -- but unlike their low-cal brethren, the roundworms ate a standard diet mixed with doses of ethosuximide, an anti-convulsant drug that happens to block their chemical-sensing neurons.

"The neurons are like the worm's nose," said Washington University developmental biologist Kerry Kornfeld in a press release. "That suggests that the worms' sensation of food is critical to controlling their metabolism and life span."

When roundworms sense an abundance of food, their metabolism appears to speed up: this lets them rapidly break food down, but also accelerates their aging. When food is scarce, though, the worms decelerate. Blocking their sense of smell tricked them into living longer.

Whether this works the same in humans is far from certain, but Kornfeld is hopeful.

"Sensory pathways might also be fairly universal," he said. "In an ancient common ancestor, these pathways might have caused metabolic adjustments that affect lifespan. That could be reflected in our own biology."

The study was published in Public Library of Science Genetics.

The anticonvulsant ethosuximide disrupts sensory function to extend C. elegans lifespan [PLoS Genetics]

Image: Washington University

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 25 Oct 2008 | 12:15 am

Hypnosis Lets Regular People See Numbers as Colors

Psychologists have used hypnosis to give people the ability to see numbers as colors.

That form of synesthesia is naturally possessed by roughly one in 1,000 people, among them such historical luminaries as physicist Richard Feynman and writer Vladimir Nabokov, who saw "q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl."

Observations like these, long dismissed as extravagant fantasy, are now considered a window into the mysteries of perception. But despite a surge of scientific interest, synesthesia's mechanisms remain unknown.

Researchers have settled on two possible explanations. Each begins with a human infant born with connections between different sense-related brain regions. According to one hypothesis, these are lost during development, with synesthetics somehow hanging on to them or growing new connections. According to the other, the synesthetic connections merely atrophy, but can be accessed under the right conditions.

The latest findings, published in Psychological Science, support the atrophy explanation — and though caveats remain as to whether hypnosis-induced synesthesia is equivalent to the natural kind, they raise the possibility that the potential for synesthesia is actually quite common.

"The fact that they induced it so quickly means that the brain's not sprouting new neurons or making new connections," said Lawrence Marks, a Yale University psychologist and synesthesia researcher who was not involved in the study. "Maybe the connectivity always exists."

The researchers, led by Roi Kadosh of University College, London and Luis Fuentes of Spain's University of Murcia, put three women and one man under hypnosis, then instructed them to perceive digits in color: one as red, two as yellow, three as green, and so on.

Upon waking, the subjects found it difficult to find numbers printed in black ink against correspondingly colored backgrounds. The numbers seemed to blend in — a telltale sign of synesthesia. When the hypnosis was removed, the ability vanished.

How the synesthesia formed so suddenly isn't clear, but the researchers said that new neural connections are probably not responsible. "Such new anatomical connections could not arise, become functional, and suddenly degenerate in the short time scale provided by the current experiment," they wrote.

Instead they suggest that hypnosis broke down neurological barriers between sensory regions. Marks agreed, but cautioned against extrapolating the findings too broadly: Many different varieties of synesthesia exist, from seeing emotions to tasting sounds, and may have different neurological and psychological origins.

Further attempts at inducing synesthesia are required, said Marks, who suggested that people may someday be able to synesthetize themselves through hypnosis. There is, however, a catch.

"In theory, anybody could — but only if they were hypnotizable," he said.

Induced Cross-Modal Synesthetic Experience without Abnormal Neuronal Connections [Psychological Science] (not yet online)

Image: Lady Orlando

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 24 Oct 2008 | 11:54 pm

Obesity drug withdrawn over depression link

Sales and prescriptions of Acomplia suspended because 'benefits no longer outweigh risks'
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 24 Oct 2008 | 11:07 pm

We have a problem, Houston, but also an onboard therapist

To astronauts, it will sound uncannily like Hal, the soft-voiced computer that turns nasty in Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. But to Nasa, it could make the difference between a successful mission and failure.

Known as the Virtual Space Station, a new project aims to give astronauts an onboard therapist for long-duration missions, either in Earth orbit or on longer journeys to the moon and Mars.

Astronauts suffering from depression, arguing with colleagues, or wrestling with their workload, will be able to receive video counselling from recordings by Mark Hegel, a psychologist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

"Astronauts are in an unusual situation, having to live in space for months at a time. If they run into psycho-social problems, it's not as though they can go for a walk, meet new people or quit," said James Cartreine at Harvard Medical School.

The $1.74m project (£1m), funded by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, will start trials next month to see if volunteers with mild depression improve after advice from the virtual therapist.

Depression and personal conflicts do not affect most space missions, and rarely become public. But some psychological problems are inevitable, particularly on longer assignments. In 1985, a mission on Russia's Salyut 7 space station was scrapped because the commander was spending hours looking out of portholes.

Jay Buckey, a former astronaut on the Space Shuttle Columbia, said: "You're depending on each other for survival. So you want to make sure you're working together well and trust each other."

Interview: Richard Dawkins - 'People say I'm strident'

One evening in 2006, at a colleague's house, I met a friend of her teenage daughter. He was intellectually curious, and obviously bright - but implacably loyal to his parents' born again Christian faith. We spent pretty much the whole evening arguing with the poor boy, appealing to his logic and reason - all to no effect. There must, we despaired, be some seminal atheist text we could refer him to. We just couldn't think of one.

But lo - ask, and ye shall receive. Not a month later, Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, a scorching manifesto for secularism. Even by the standards of Dawkins' 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene, it was a spectacular success, with sales exceeding 1.5m.

This week, as Dawkins retires from the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science, the Oxford post he has held for 12 years, you might expect him to feel that the secular, scientific cause to which he has devoted his career is winning. On Tuesday, campaigners announced plans for an atheist advertising campaign to appear on the side of buses with the message: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." The campaign, which was launched by TV comedy writer Ariane Sherine, blogging on Commentisfree.co.uk, hoped to raise £5,500 from supporters, which Dawkins had pledged to match with his own money, but by yesterday public donations had already raised more than £96,000.

In the same week, immigration minister, Phil Woolas, predicted that constitutional reforms would banish bishops from the House of Lords within the next 50 years, and record numbers of new maths and science undergraduates were reported. Even in America, the religious right seemed to be losing its grip.

But when I ask Dawkins, now 67, if he feels that public understanding of science has improved during his career, he looks doubtful. "I would say that when my academic career began there was probably just as much ignorance - but less active opposition [to science]. If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to."

Does he attribute that to lower standards of scientific education, or to the rise of religious fundamentalism? "Oh," he says without hesitation, "I think it's due to greater religious influence."

In Dawkins' view, there is a battle taking place in Britain between the forces of reason, and religious fundamentalism and it is far from won. He is one of its most famous and prolific combatants - but the question might be whether he is among its most effective. The God Delusion's stated aim was to "convert" readers to atheism - but he admits that as a proselytising tool it has broadly failed. "Yes," he smiles. "I think that was a bit unrealistic. A worthwhile aim, but unrealistic."

In fact, Dawkins has been described as "the biggest recruiter for creationism in this country". Critics accuse him of an imaginative failure when it comes to human nature's susceptibility to the comfort of irrational thought. They say his intellectual intolerance alienates people, and have questioned his wisdom in attacking a target such as the comedian Peter Kay, for admitting to finding faith comforting. "How can you take seriously," Dawkins notoriously scorned, "someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?"

When Sherine approached him about funding for the atheist bus, the wording he preferred for the advert was "There is almost certainly no God". Wouldn't this just infuriate believers, and put off potentially sympathetic agnostics? In the end they agreed on "probably".

"Yes, yes, I know," Dawkins interrupts. "I know. People say I'm shrill and strident."

Dawkins has a theory about this, which is very persuasive. "We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticise it. And therefore, if you offer even a fairly mild criticism, it really does sound strident, because it violates this expectation that religion is out of bounds."

But even so, from a purely strategic point of view, why doesn't he therefore take more care to be ...

"Conciliatory?"

Well, yes. If people find the certainties of his intellectual style off-putting, why doesn't he try and make himself seem a little less intimidating

"Well, this is a thing that worries me," he says earnestly. "Yes. And I meet it all the time. And it's by far the most intelligent criticism that I meet. I suppose there are two different ways of doing it, and I'm extremely happy if other people do it that way. Dan Dennett's Breaking The Spell at least sets out to do that, to be seductive - is that the word? Not quite, but to seduce the reader in. And I can do that. I know how to do it." He pauses to reflect. "But I seem - I seem to have lost patience."

In actual fact, though, he does take enormous care throughout the interview to be patient. Although he regards it as "clearly wicked" to call the child of Catholic parents "a Catholic child", he quickly adds, "it's equally wicked to say this is an atheist child. I would never say that." He can't help adding, "Of course, some people would say all babies are atheist, because they don't believe in anything." But when I ask if he'd say that, he considers for a moment before replying, "Well, I'm not sure that's a very sensible way of putting it actually."

Does he worry that the calibre of undergraduates is falling, as access to university is extended? "I've got to be terribly careful not to sound like an old fogey here. When I first started tutoring in the 1960s it was a great joy to me, to get enthusiastic pupils who were really keen and interested and a tutorial would be a real meeting of minds and a real conversation. That good feeling about it seemed to gradually disappear. But I would hesitate to blame the students for that, it could be that I was just growing jaded."

Like most rationalists, Dawkins tends to invoke people's innate intelligence, and attribute their flawed ways of thinking to ignorance rather than stupidity. "But I don't have any evidence," he concedes. "I could be wrong. It's a kind of ideal. It's a sort of bending over backwards." People might just be stupid, I suggest. "They might be, yes," he agrees cautiously. "But at least my saying that ignorance is no crime is my defence against the charge of arrogance. Because if you tell people they're stupid, that certainly isn't the way to win friends and influence people."

Dawkins once described the British Airways employee dismissed for wearing a gold cross to work as having "the stupidest face". Did he regret saying it? A slightly naughty smile flickers over his face.

"Well ... well ... yes, I do really. Yes. That was an unguarded moment. Although I think I said stupid-looking. Did you see the photograph of her? I think if you look up the story, and they've got the photograph ... " He checks himself, and stops. "But this is unkind."

Before meeting Dawkins, I'd worried that he might be so intellectually impatient as to be crushing. The impression instead is more like that of a lion who has given himself strict instructions to behave like a pussy cat - which is both a relief, and just slightly disappointing.

Does he ever, I ask, envy people who believe in God?

"No." He shakes his head firmly. Even though faith is said to be so famously comforting?

"You see," he says, "I'm so eager to say well maybe it is comforting but so what? I suspect that for every person who is comforted by it, there will be somebody else who is in mortal fear of it." Does he not envy those who manage not to find God mortally fearful?

"If I envied them that, then I'd have to envy people who are on some drug, which just makes them feel good. So to the extent that religion's comforting, it's probably not ..."

Dawkins likes to joke that old people go to church because they're "cramming for the final". He never worries that one day in old age he may wake and find himself feeling drawn towards faith, though. If he did, he would put it down to senile dementia. He seems much more worried about spurious reports of a fictitious deathbed conversion being put about by his enemies after he dies. He is probably not joking at all when he says "I want to make damn sure there's a tape recorder running for my last words."

Bad Science: Listen carefully, I shall say this only once

Welcome to nerds' corner, and yet another small print criticism of a trivial act of borderline dubiousness which will lead to distorted evidence, irrational decisions, and bad outcomes in what I like to call "the real world".

So the ClinPsyc blog (clinpsyc.blogspot.com) has spotted that the drug company Lilly has published identical data on duloxetine - a newish antidepressant drug - twice over, in two entirely separate scientific papers.

The first article is from the January 2008 edition of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, a study which concludes that the "switch to duloxetine was associated with significant improvements in both emotional and painful physical symptoms of depression". The second concluded the same thing.

ClinPsyc went through both papers and checked all the numbers in the data tables, finding that they were essentially identical. A few different subscales were reported in each paper, and the emphasis in the second is more on pain than depression, but other than that, this is identical data.

There are several reasons why this is interesting. Firstly, duplicate publication distorts a reader's impression of how much evidence is out there. If you think there are two trials showing that something works, then obviously that's much more impressive than if there's just one. "Of course I prescribe it," you can hear the doctors say. "I've seen two trials showing that it works."

I got on to the lead author of the paper, who explained that the second paper expanded more on the "pain" aspects of the results. That is slightly fair enough. He also claimed that the second paper referenced the first.

This is true in the strictest sense of the phrase: it did indeed make reference to its existence as a previous experiment, but it gave no indication that this was the same experiment, and for the reader, without going forensic on the numbers, there was no way to know that the data here was all from that previous study, and largely, simply, reproduced. It looked like two studies. It just did.

Duplicate publication can also distort the results of "meta-analyses", big studies where the results of lots of trials are brought together into one big spreadsheet.

Because then, if you can't spot what's duplicated, some evidence is actually counted twice in the numerical results. This is why it is more acceptable to publish duplicates if you at least acknowledge that you have done so. By way of example, I am being clear that I will now rehash a paragraph I wrote several years ago on the work of Dr Martin Tramer.

Tramer was looking at the efficacy of a nausea drug called ondansetron, and noticed that lots of the data seemed to be replicated: the results for many individual patients had been written up several times, in slightly different forms, in apparently different studies, in different journals.

Crucially, data which showed the drug in a better light were more likely to be duplicated than the data which showed it to be less impressive, and overall this led to a 23% overestimate of the drug's efficacy.

But the other thing to notice about this duloxetine experiment is that its design made the Durham fish oil "trial" look like a work of genius. There was no control group, and it simply looks at whether pain improves after swapping to duloxetine from a previous antidepressant (either instantly, or with a gradual crossover of prescriptions, which might induce a vague sense that one thing is somehow being compared with another).

You don't need to be a professor of clinical trial methodology to recognise that some people's pain will improve anyway, under those conditions, regardless of what's in the pill (and regardless of whether prescriptions are tapered into each other), through a combination of the placebo effect, and the fact that sometimes, in fact quite often, things like pain do just get better with time.

And this might have been a worthwhile study to do if you had good grounds to believe that duloxetine really did improve physical pain in depression - as Lilly has claimed for a while - and you just needed to work out the best dosing regime. But a meta-analysis published earlier this year looked at all the evidence for that claim. Its title is Duloxetine Does Not Relieve Painful Physical Symptoms in Depression: A Meta-Analysis.

Nobody knows how common duplicate publication is in academia. Two days after ClinPsyc published its story The MacGuffin (chekhovsgun.blogspot.com) found an identical story around a different drug. Just from mentioning this story I've picked up another from my friend Will in the next room. These are afterthoughts by academics, water cooler comments, but once posted on the internet they become searchable, and notable, and slightly embarrassing.

• Please send your bad science to bad.science@guardian.co.uk

South Africa pioneers HIV-positive transplants

Groundbreaking operation sees patients receive infected kidneys in surgery set to save thousands
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 24 Oct 2008 | 11:04 pm

Meteor 'Fireball' Caught on Video

Early Wednesday morning, Oct.15, a network of all-sky cameras captured a bright, slow fireball in the sky near Guelph, Ontario.
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Oct 2008 | 9:11 pm

Warming Cools Chances for Skating Marathon

A 120-mile skating race across Holland will become rarer with warming.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 24 Oct 2008 | 7:47 pm

Ancient Sea Predators Shed Skin Secrets

Predatory reptiles called ichthyosaurs cruised the oceans between 230 million and 90 million years ago.
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Oct 2008 | 7:45 pm

Near Miss at $2-Million Lunar Lander Challenge

A team of rocket-vehicle designers came tantalizingly close to winning the $2-million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge this morning.

The lunar lander built by Armadillo Aerospace managed to lift off vertically from a lunch and land on a second pad 100 meters away, but it was unable to make the return jump within a 90-minute window.

The team will have a second chance this afternoon to win the NASA-funded X Prize, which is designed to spur private industry to design and build viable lunar vehicles. No team has passed the test since the competition began in 2006.

This week's attempts have the extra challenge of completing the test in 1.5 hours, instead of the usual 2.5 hours, because of constraints set by the FAA.

To win, a lander needs to liftoff, hover at 50 meters for 90 seconds and then land at a second pad 100 meters away, and then do the same in reverse.

During its allotted time, Armadillo Aerospace made a first attempt that landed too soon. They then successfully made the first leg of the test, but couldn't get the return flight done in time. The shorter time for the challenge was imposed because airport airspace has to be closed during each attempt, and the FAA would only agree to 90-minute windows. The Armadillo team will make another attempt at 1:00 p.m. PDT. You can watch all the action live on the X Prize webcast.

The second team to compete, True Zer0, failed when their vehicle fell out of the sky 10 seconds into its 50 meter hover. True Zer0 was formed just 10 months ago, and was considered the "underdog of underdogs." The Illinois team, which includes a father-son duo, named their vehicle Ignignokt after a cartoon character from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Today was their very first untethered flight.

Armadillo Aerospace, based in Mesquite, Texas, is run and financed by video game Doom and Quake creator John Carmack, has an all-volunteer crew and has been building and flying vehicles at X Prize events since 2006. Their armadillo mascot, Widget, is featured in their online videos documenting some of their dramatic crashes. You can even buy pieces of bent metal that are recovered from the crash site, called Widget droppings, to help fund the program.

So Close Again [Personal Spaceflight]

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Image: Jeff Foust

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Text messages combat HIV in South Africa

It is a problem that has taxed the world's leading scientific minds and its greatest doctors; some of the richest people on the planet have pumped billions of pounds into finding a solution.

But a new project aimed at curbing the spread of HIV in Africa has discovered that one of the most effective weapons is the humble text message.

Faced with 1,000 HIV-related deaths in South Africa every day, a global group of organisations has teamed up to create Project Masiluleke, which aims to increase HIV awareness, testing and treatment across Africa using mobile phones.

The first stage of the project – which has already shown remarkable results in early trials – involves sending out free text messages to millions of people every day urging them to call a confidential phone line if they have any concerns about HIV and Aids.

Pilot projects have seen immediate results, with a four-fold increase in the number of calls to the country's National AIDS Helpline and a significant response from target groups.

Future plans still under development include offering free home HIV testing kits, and using text messages to remind patients about their hospital appointments and keep them informed about their medical treatment.

"This is a critical effort," said Dr Krista Dong, an HIV and tuberculosis specialist and director of education group iTeach, which is one of Masiluleke's backers.

Speaking at the launch of the project at the Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine, Dong said that the need for innovative approaches to the crisis was urgent.

"With hundreds of thousands of people suffering and dying, it's no longer a question of 'should we do this?' or even 'how should we do this?'. It's 'how fast can we do this?'."

Finding new ways to educate the public about HIV and Aids is an important issue for a country that has failed to stem the rapid growth of infection.

South Africa has a huge problem, with infection rates averaging almost 11% across the country. In areas such as the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, where Project Masiluleke is based, the numbers are even more shocking: one in six people has HIV, and up to 40% of pregnant women carry the virus.

Despite the high prevalence of Aids, only 5% of people in the country have ever been tested for the virus – mostly when they were already in the advanced stages and close to death. Men in particular are a problem group, because the powerful social stigma associated with being found HIV positive means they refuse to visit clinics.

The organisations backing Project Masiluleke said text messaging was being used because mobile technology is so pervasive in South Africa and remains private. At least 90% of people carry a mobile there, and phone adoption is also growing rapidly across the rest of the continent, potentially allowing similar schemes to be rolled out easily in other Aids-affected countries.

"Because there's a phone in almost every family, we really have almost universal coverage, so it's an ideal opportunity for us to drive testing." said Gustav Praekelt, director of the Praekelt Foundation, a South African non-profit organisation involved in the scheme.

"The other important thing is because of the scarcity of other services in Africa and South Africa, it's become a central component for people to get access to information, entertainment, medical care and banking services."

The scheme has support from a wide group of organisations, including the Pop!Tech conference organisers, American innovation group Frog Design and African phone network MTN. The scheme's backers hope that Masiluleke, which means "lend a helping hand" in Zulu, will eventually start to have a noticeable effect on infection rates because it offers a combination of intimacy and privacy.

"In a country where it is so obvious that we are challenged by HIV, you would think there would be enough knowledge to help people to either access care or change behaviour," said Zinny Thabete, an HIV campaigner with iTeach.

"But people do not want to go to their clinics to access care … People fear who's going to see them and what's going to be said about them."

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