Science Headlines for November 15, 2008

Iran wants OPEC to cut output (Reuters)

Reuters - Iran wants OPEC to cut oil output by a further 1 to 1.5 million barrels per day when it meets in Cairo later this month, the Islamic Republic's representative to the cartel was quoted on Saturday as saying.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Nov 2008 | 11:59 am

Space shuttle Endeavour races toward space station (AP)

AP - Space shuttle Endeavour raced toward the international space station on Saturday for a home makeover job after a brilliant moonlit launch that had NASA managers in awe.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Nov 2008 | 11:22 am

India celebrates planting its flag on moon (AP)

AP - India rejoiced Saturday at joining an elite club by planting its flag on the moon as the country's space agency released the first pictures of the cratered surface taken by its maiden lunar mission.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Nov 2008 | 10:03 am

Shuttle blasts off on space station mission

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The U.S. space shuttle Endeavour soared off its seaside launch pad on Friday on a mission to upgrade the International Space Station for an expanded six-person crew.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 15 Nov 2008 | 10:01 am

After 'Remarkable' Night Launch, Complex Shuttle Flight Ahead (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The brilliant blaze of NASA's space shuttle Endeavour as it rocketed into orbit under the light of a nearly full moon late Friday is just the beginning of a challenging, but vital, flight to the International Space Station (ISS) , mission managers said.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Nov 2008 | 8:02 am

Hawaii island bans genetically modified coffee (AP)

AP - The Hawaii County Council has overriden a veto by the Big Island's mayor to ban genetically modified taro and coffee.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Nov 2008 | 5:18 am

Biofuel Startup Strives to Meet Obama's Green Ambitions

EMERYVILLE, California — "We have 203 employees — and we're growing," John Melo, CEO of alt-fuel startup Amyris, said as he stepped jauntily through the glass doors at his company's gorgeous new digs just down the street from Pixar in this industrial town outside Oakland.

In the worst financial climate in decades, the company is pushing ahead with its audacious plans to make 200 million gallons of fuel a year at $2 per gallon by 2011.

So, amidst the economic gloom, Amyris had a modest party — cheese, bread, and wine in the not-quite-Google building cafeteria — to celebrate the completion of a new pilot plant with 2.4 million gallons of annual capacity.

"From beginning to end, it's commercial process," Melo said. "On a pilot plant scale, it's the first time you put all the pieces together and you let it go."

The synthetic biology startup, which uses genetically engineered yeast to rearrange the molecules in sugars to create higher-value products like diesel or malaria medication, is a very bright, very green story amongst the torrent of bummer headlines. More than 500,000 people filed jobless claims last week, the highest number since 9/11. The well-regarded International Energy Agency released a new report last Thursday declaring that "current trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable." And the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average are down almost 40 percent this year.

The company has become a corporate face, or a beacon on the hill, for the green revolution that President-elect Barack Obama and his administration hope will pull the U.S. economy out of recession.

Amyris, in short, could disrupt the energy marketplace the way Google sent the media world into disarray. By staying a step ahead of the rest of the world through science and engineering, America could recreate the living-wage jobs that have left the country over the last two decades and recharge the economy.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory spin off has been talked up and invested in by uber-V.C. Kleiner Perkins as the model for green growth. John Doerr and Al Gore have used the company in their clean-energy stump speeches for years. Indeed, the Amyris offices, a refreshingly open set of high-design rooms and hallways that look out on a lush courtyard garden, seem like the very incarnation of renewal.

Packing powerful science that allows the company to turn any carbon-containing sugar into liquid transportation fuel, Amyris sidesteps the energy intensive crude-oil refining process. They claim that allows them to reduce the "well-to-wheel" greenhouse gas emissions of their fuel by 80 percent. Though emission accounting for biofuels is notoriously difficult — particularly calculating the secondary effects of land use changes — it's safe to say that Amyris is better for the environment than petroleum. And if the company can really make $2-a-gallon diesel, there is little doubt that they'll find a market, even if the price of a barrel of oil stays under $100.

The company's continuing march towards commercialization represents the maturation of the first-generation of venture-backed companies in the recent clean tech boom. But it's not just the sector's scientific potential that excites people in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. Because clean tech companies compete in industrial sectors, they could generate lots of real factory jobs where people are employed making actual products.

Or at least that's the story that green-tech investors and savvy politicians have sold to the laid-off workers of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

"It's not clear, in the absence of the concerted effort to make investments in the clean-tech sector, what geographies or sectors are going to pull the U.S. out of the recession," Eric Janszen, a prominent investor and author, told Wired.com earlier this year. "What tends to happen is that policymakers survey this scene and say: 'What are we going to do to get people working?' They focus on the one sector of the economy that can drag us out."

Obama's energy plan calls for five million new jobs in the low-carbon and alternative energy sector. That would mean creating 20 new General Motors-size companies, each employing 250,000 people. But just 200 jobs is a lot in Silicon Valley's startup landscape. Green tech companies are nowhere near the scale of the economy they are supposed to replace, no matter how fast they're growing.

The pilot plant, after all, isn't that big. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to play a game of half-court basketball in it. Unlike a real fuel plant, it's not dirty or industrial-looking. Liquids gurgle inside bulbous silver tanks. Surfaces gleam. Rows of empty folding chairs face a podium at the front of the room, the leftovers from a press conference earlier in the week.

"We actually had a harvest yesterday that made the place smell and look great," Melo said, pointing out the steel 300-liter fermenters that grow the fuel-producing yeast. The heady brewery smell lingers.

In the full-size plant the company plans to build next year, the fermenters — and everything else — will need to be ten times larger. And to make an impact on climate change or the world's liquid fuels ledger, there would need to be thousands of similar plants.

Still, the pilot plant is a major step towards commercialization. While it might seem trivial to turn in-lab discoveries into real-world products, the engineering process is fraught with challenges. It's like the difference between cooking for your family and cooking for five hundred or ten-thousand people; it's rare that the food in the school lunch line tastes good.

Melo's team, happily, has found that their yield — the amount of fuel they get out per unit of sugar put in — has actually increased using the commercial process. But they have a long way to go before their process is profitable.

"We have a four-fold improvement year to date and we have a three-fold improvement to go," Melo said.

Scaling up green technologies to power businesses that will replace the jobs lost in the old-line, rust belt industries takes time and money — both of which the American economy seems short on. In addition, the price of oil, which drove much of the biofuel investment over the last couple of years, has fallen in response to a slowing world economy. Add it up, and just as politicians have latched onto the green collar job meme, investors are getting cold feet, particularly about the big, expensive commercial operations that provide large amounts of jobs.

At a clean tech conference last week, more than 60 percent of a group of investors surveyed said they did not expect financing to be available for companies "looking to commercialize or scale" their projects. But the problems that inspired the science — climate change and rapidly-depleting oil fields —remain in play.

"The number of projects I've seen fall off, both because of the debt markets and because of the economics, the price of oil, is pretty significant," Melo said. "We're setting ourselves up for a bigger problem," Melo added.

The International Energy Agency report painted a grim picture of oil fields declining faster than expected while demand for crude has only slightly decelerated, not actually stopped.

"Despite all the attention that is given to demand growth, decline rates are actually a far more important determinant of investment needs," Nobuo Tanaka, the IEA's executive director said in a release. "Even if oil demand was to remain flat to 2030, 45 [million barrels a day] of gross capacity – roughly four times the current capacity of Saudi Arabia – would need to be built by 2030 just to offset the effect of oilfield decline."

Though Melo said his company had taken enough money — about $120 million to date — for the next 18 months, his original plan to take the company public after that period has been backburnered.

With the pilot plant complete, Amyris will now focus on building a similar plant in Brazil, where they've established a joint-venture with SantalisaVale, the second-largest ethanol producer in that country. SantalisaVale has promised two million tons of sugar cane crushing capacity, which will provide the feedstock for their full-size facilities.

Amyris has its critics. Some environmental organizations are opposed to biofuels generally, and others, like the Ottawa-based ETC Group, target the techniques and business models that synthetic biology companies employ. They take aim at what they see as the emergence of a "sugar economy," in a report released last week, that will be as environmentally destructive as the system it replaces.

"Advocates of converging technologies promise a greener, cleaner post-petroleum future where the production of economically important compounds depends not on fossil fuels – but on biological manufacturing platforms fueled by plant sugars," the group writes. "It may sound sweet and clean, but the so-called 'sugar economy' will also be the catalyst for a corporate grab on all plant matter – and destruction of biodiversity on a massive scale."

Groups like ETC argue that biofuels, of any type, will eventually cause serious environmental damage, merely shifting the world's energy problem from "Peak Oil" to "Peak Soil".

"Can massive quantities of biomass be harvested sustainably without eroding/degrading soils, destroying biodiversity, increasing food insecurity and displacing marginalized peoples?" the report's authors asked.

It doesn't help Amyris' case with hardcore environmentalists that Melo was brought in from British Petroleum to scale up the company.

Liquid fuels, though, underpin the world's transportation system. They are useful because they are their own storage. Electric vehicles need batteries to store energy and batteries are expensive, said Ron Cogan, editor of Green Car Journal.

"What is the answer? There is no single answer," said Cogan, who has been following alternative energy for cars since the early 1990s. "I think we're in a position where we can't afford to ignore any fuel or technology."

The financial doctors holding the economic defibrillators face a similar situation. The head of Barack Obama's transition team, John Podesta, co-authored a report earlier this year through the Center of American Progress detailing a plan to spend $100 billion on a green stimulus package.

But whether all the green green will get there in time remains to be seen. With deep recession looming, the calvary could arrive too late, finding only a room of empty chairs a bit too small for the ambitions of the people pushing a new, clean economy.

See Also:

Image: Flickr/johnmcq

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 15 Nov 2008 | 1:38 am

Shuttle Endeavour Blasts Into Night Sky

Shuttle Endeavour and its crew are en route to refurbish the space station.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 15 Nov 2008 | 1:30 am

Endeavour space shuttle lifts off

The Nasa space shuttle Endeavour launches on a mission to refit the International Space Station.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 Nov 2008 | 1:24 am

Malcolm Gladwell asks is there such a thing as pure genius?

In an extract from Outliers: The Story Of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell questions the idea of natural genius
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 15 Nov 2008 | 12:17 am

Ben Goldacre: We're all losers in the numbers game

We're all suckers for a big number, and you'll be delighted to hear that the Journal of Consumer Research has huge teams of scientists eagerly writing up their sinister research on how to exploit us.

One excellent study this month (DOI: 10.1086/593947) looked at how people choose a camera. The researchers took a single image and made two copies: one where the colours were more vivid, and one where the image was sharper. They told participants each image came from a different camera, and asked which they wanted to buy. A quarter chose the one with the more colourful image.

Then researchers piled it on. They said the other camera had more pixels, using a figure derived from the diagonal width of the sensor. Suddenly more than half picked this camera. Then they told them the other camera had more pixels, but this time they used the number of pixels as evidence: a figure measured in millions. Suddenly, three quarters chose the supposedly better camera.

This week you'll have noticed the news on rosuvastatin, or Crestor. The Jupiter trial on rosuvastatin reported months early, and most papers called it a "wonder drug". "Heart attacks were cut by 54%, strokes by 48% and the need for angioplasty or bypass by 46% among the group on Crestor compared to those taking a placebo or dummy pill," said the Daily Mail. Dramatic stuff. The Guardian said: "Researchers found that in the group taking the drug, heart attack risk was down by 54% and stroke by 48%".

Is this true? Yes. Those are the figures on risk, expressed as something called the relative risk reduction. It is the biggest possible number for expressing the change in risk. But 54% lower than what? The trial was looking at whether it is worth taking a statin if you are at low risk of a heart attack or a stroke, as a preventive measure: it is a huge market - normal people - but these are people whose baseline risk is already very low.

If you express the same risks from the same trial as an absolute risk reduction, they look less exciting. On placebo, your risk of a heart attack in the trial was 0.37 events per 100 person years; if you were taking rosuvastatin it fell to 0.17. Woohoo. And if you express the risk as numbers needed to treat, probably the most concrete way of expressing a benefit from an intervention, then a couple of hundred people need to take the pill to save one life.

So is it a good idea for you to take rosuvastatin? That's not my job to say, but the way figures are presented can have a huge impact on the decisions we make. This phenomena has been studied in many groups for many years.

In 1993, Malenka et al recruited 470 patients, and gave them details of a hypothetical disease, and a choice of two hypothetical treatments. In fact, it was the same treatment, with the risk expressed in two different ways: 56.8% chose the medication whose benefit was expressed as a relative risk reduction, while only 14.7% chose the medication whose benefit was in absolute terms.

Are patients uniquely stupid? Joy, no. The same result has also been found in experiments looking at doctors' prescribing decisions. We're all fooled by big numbers, because we're all idiots. That's why it's important to think clearly, and ignore all newspapers.

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

Martians Would Think John McCain Won

County-by-county election results can make it look like a Republican landslide.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Nov 2008 | 11:58 pm

EPA Coal Decision Levels Playing Field for Wind, Solar

Building an alt-energy power plant is risky and expensive, but thanks to a new ruling by an Environmental Protection Agency panel, building a coal plant may become riskier and more expensive.

The Environmental Appeals Board blocked the EPA from issuing a permit to a proposed coal plant addition near Vernal, Utah, about 150 miles east of Salt Lake City.

Perhaps more importantly, the quasi-independent board, composed of four highly regarded, experienced judges, ruled that the EPA needs to develop a single nationwide standard for dealing with carbon dioxide.

"I don't want to understate its significance. I think it's very significant," said Bob Graham, chair of Jenner & Block’s Environmental, Energy and Natural Resources Law Practice, a noted environmental law expert who was not involved with the case. "In the long run, it advances the ball on climate change issues and that's positive."

On Thursday, the EPA panel blocked the Bonanza Coal Power Plant's bid for a permit, reversing an earlier decision, and placing over 100 coal plants into regulatory limbo. The rulemaking process will likely yield greater CO2 emissions regulation and will take more than a year, say lawyers familiar with the EPA process. That puts prospective coal power-plant builders in a tough spot, especially with financing already in short supply thanks to the credit crunch. The ruling introduces more risk into the coal industry, which could drive away investors and their limited cash.

And that, said the Sierra Club's chief climate counsel, David Bookbinder, is good news for new clean tech companies.

"Where do you think that money is going to go? It's going to go to wind. It's going to go to solar. It's going to go to something that's going to get built," Bookbinder said. "This is incredibly good for green energy."

Following a landmark 2007 decision by the Supreme Court that carbon dioxide could be regulated as a pollutant under the 1970s-era Clean Air Act, environmental groups have been pushing the EPA to stop issuing permits to coal plants, which produce massive amounts of CO2. But under the Bush administration, the EPA had resisted taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources.

Still, the Sierra Club persisted, using a relatively small addition to Deseret Power Electric Cooperative's preexisting Bonanza Power Plant in Utah, to make a stand against the permitting process. They lost the first round, when the Denver regional EPA office issued a permit, saying they need not consider greenhouse emissions. On appeal, however, the Sierra Club appears to have won a much wider-reaching victory.

The Board did not actually side with the Sierra Club's interpretation of the Clean Air Act, but in deciding to send the decision back to the EPA with the instruction to come up with a nationwide plan for regulating greenhouse gases, the Sierra Club effectively stopped new coal plants in their tracks.

"It's punting in a technical, legal sense but what it does is give us everything we wanted," Bookbinder said. "This plant is dead and every other one is going to have to sit around."

The current EPA, for its part, was none too happy that they must reconsider their policies, even if it will ultimately give the organization wider powers.

"While we are disappointed that the issue was remanded, EPA looks forward to the opportunity to consider this issue on remand," the agency said in a statement. "EPA is firmly committed to taking sensible action to address the long-term challenge of global climate change."

The definition of "sensible action," however is likely to change under Barack Obama, who many policy watchers anticipate will grant the EPA far more leeway to deal with greenhouse gas regulation.

"Do I think that the Obama administration would pursue this further? Yes, I think they will," Graham said.

The American Petroleum Institute filed a brief opposing the Sierra Club, arguing that the Clean Air Act, a version of which first passed in 1963 long before climate change became an environmental issue, is the wrong vehicle for reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

"Overall, API does not support regulating greenhouse gases under the current Clean Air Act because it would be a mess," said Lee Hayden, the American Petroleum Institute's Washington, D.C., representative. " It's not designed for greenhouse gas emissions."

But the Appeals Board decision combined with the Supreme Court ruling makes it likely that the EPA will begin using the Clean Air Act in just that way, which will have implications that will reverberate through the economy.

The stricter the EPA limits on carbon dioxide, the more money coal plant operators will have to throw at technologies to reduce their CO2 emissions. That will eventually make coal power more expensive, which climate-change action advocates hope will make solar, wind, nuclear and other low-carbon technologies more competitive.

"I'm feeling pretty damn good today," said Bookbinder.

See Also:

Image: flickr/steev

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Nov 2008 | 9:20 pm

New Spin Record Set: 1 Million rpm (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Industrial motors can spin at a head-spinning 250,000 revolutions per minute. But a new matchbook-sized motor runs circles around the competition.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Nov 2008 | 9:05 pm

New Spin Record Set: 1 Million rpm

A new matchbook-sized motor runs circles around the competition.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Nov 2008 | 8:58 pm

Bacteria, fungus problems? Try copper socks

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Copper socks? Copper towels? How about copper subway poles? These are only a few of the uses Chile, the world's biggest copper producer, is applying to the red metal now used more in the construction and auto sectors.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Nov 2008 | 8:48 pm

Ancient Greeks pre-empted Dead Parrot sketch

ATHENS (Reuters) - "I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it."

Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Nov 2008 | 7:55 pm

ABCs Plus Play Equal Pre-K Smarts

Should preschool be more about books or learning to play with others?
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Nov 2008 | 7:48 pm

The Energy Debates: Can We Change?

Lower oil prices are lowering motivation to invest in alternative energy sources.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Nov 2008 | 6:57 pm

BLOG: Spittlebugs Beat Fleas at High Jump

Spittlebugs jump proportionately higher than any other creature, researchers find.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Nov 2008 | 6:48 pm

SLIDE SHOW : Images From the Week's News

A look back at images from Discovery News headlines Nov. 10-14.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Nov 2008 | 6:48 pm

Young Britons 'shy from science'

A survey commissioned by the European Commission has shown that young Britons are among the least likely in Europe to consider studying science subjects
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Nov 2008 | 6:43 pm

Tech Puts JFK Conspiracy Theories to Rest

A new investigation into the JFK assassination debunks theories with hi-tech.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Nov 2008 | 6:30 pm

Indian probe lands on Moon

India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft sends a probe to crash land on the surface of the Moon.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Nov 2008 | 5:08 pm

Copying keys from photos is child's play

You have memorised your passwords and your PIN is secret, now it is the house keys that must be hidden from prying eyes.

Using only a camera, a computer and a key-cutting machine, scientists have duplicated sets of keys after taking snaps of them from more than 60 metres away.

Computer experts at the University of California in San Diego set out to show how easily keys could be copied from a digital image to highlight the potential security risk of leaving keys on display.

At a computer conference in Alexandria, Virginia, Stefan Savage, a computer security expert who led the "Sneakey" project, surfed the photo-sharing website Flickr and found pictures that clearly showed peoples' keys, even if personal information in the shots had been blurred out.

In one demonstration, the team cut duplicate keys after analysing images taken on a mobile phone. In another, they used a telephoto lens to take pictures of a set of keys on a cafe table from the roof of a university building.

The software re-orients images of keys and determines the dimensions of the peaks and notches that connect with a lock's mechanism. Then the information can be plugged into a key-cutting machine to produce an exact replica.

"We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret," Savage said. "Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone's keys from a distance without them even noticing."

Experts have been able to copy keys by hand from high-resolution photographs for some time, but Savage believes that cheap digital cameras and computer software mean almost anyone with basic technological know-how could do it.

"If you go onto a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, you will find many photos of people's keys that can be used to easily make duplicates. While people generally blur out the numbers on their credit cards and driver's licences before putting those photos on-line, they don't realise that they should take the same precautions with their keys," Savage said.

Andrew Brown: Charles Darwin was not an enemy of the Christian faith

Would Christianity have been in better shape today if Darwin had never been born? It suits both many atheists and millions of believers to suppose that the answer is obviously "yes" – but if the answer is obvious at all, then theirs is the wrong one. Obviously Christianity today much less credible among intellectuals than it was in 1600, and this is largely a result of the growth of our knowledge about the world since then. But when you look at the thinkers whose contributions did most to make literalist faith in the Bible incredible, Darwin was really not one of the most important: in fact, as the welcome extended to his ideas by many Victorian Christians showed, his theory offers a way around the difficulties raised by others.

In any atheist pantheon, the credit for pulling down the house of faith needs to be shared quite widely, but at least half of it belongs to devout Christians. It is simply not the case that "science" showed "religion" was incredible. Neither science nor religion are single, simple entities like that; in any case the slow decay of Christianity's credibility was a result of developments in philosophy, in history, in physics and in geology long before Darwin.

By the time that Darwin published the On the Origin of Species in 1859, it was already obvious that the God of the Bible was being squeezed right out of the educated world view. The physical world was increasingly revealed as law-bound; and Hume had argued that miracles (pdf)had to be understood as breaches of these natural laws, to be credited only when no other explanation was possible. The belief in the workings of providence in history could not among intellectuals easily survive the study of Gibbon and Voltaire. The literal truth of the Biblical narratives and even the credibility of their perspective on history had already been destroyed by the geologists' discovery of the unimaginable age of the earth.

All this was true – and fatal to traditional Christianity – before Darwin published a line. The only theist argument that his work destroyed was the argument from design. But the argument from design is of interest only to nerds, whether atheist or believers. Most people just don't have the kind of systematising imaginations which make the question of design in nature look compelling; other forms of imagination, while they marvel at the complexities of living things, don't see why this should not be the work of a God responsible for the laws of natural selection.

If you concede – as the majority of Christians do without trouble – that God may express his purposes through the laws of the evolution, then Darwin's discoveries do nothing to diminish the fervour of the believer: as his son Francis wrote:

Asa Gray observed that if the orchid book "had appeared before the Origin, the author would have been canonised rather than anathematised by the natural theologians."

What made Darwin threatening to Christianity was not that he abolished the argument from design, but that he threatened – and threatens – human uniqueness. Against this, though, two points can be raised. The first is that Darwinian explanations of humanity end up with accounts of us which are much more compatible with the Christian view of human beings as inherently sinful and "fallen" than is the simple faith in human moral progress that was a powerful alternative to Christianity. The second is that Darwin lets God off the hook for much of the suffering of the natural world.

The more we understand about the workings of biology, the more horrible much of life appears. Most of it is parasitic; most of it is unremittingly ruthless; all of it is doomed. Tennyson called nature "red in tooth and claw" in 1843, 16 years before Darwin published the Origin of Species. If God had personally designed every last parasitic wasp and tapeworm: if some celestial watchmaker had carefully sculpted the HIV virus to make it so effective, and had shaped Eve to make her die so often in childbirth, then the case against him would be morally quite unanswerable, as Voltaire saw.

Darwin's theory allows Christians – whether they want to or not – to understand the hideous and constant cruelties of the world as part of the mechanisms necessary to produce any kind of intelligent life. Disease, decay and death need no longer be exhibitions of gratuitous cruelty on the part of a creator. This isn't by any means a knock-down argument for belief. But it is a conclusive argument against one kind of morally outrageous god.

Without Darwin this defence would not have been possible – but there is one final twist in the argument. It was not his personality, but his discovery which changed the rules of the world, and since natural selection is a fact about the world, and not a theory, it would have been discovered if he had never been born; in fact it was discovered, quite independently, by Alfred Russell Wallace – and Wallace was a spiritualist in his old age.

India's lunar probe lands on the moon, sends images

MUMBAI (Reuters) - A lunar probe from India's first unmanned moon mission Chandrayaan-1 has landed on the moon and started sending its first images, officials at the Indian Space Research Organization said on Friday.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Nov 2008 | 4:21 pm

Shoppers Willing to Pay More for Green Gifts

Survey: 44 percent of consumers are willing to pay extra for "green" gifts.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Nov 2008 | 4:05 pm

Which Came First? Eggs Before Chickens, Scientists Now Say (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - A rare fossilized dinosaur nest helps answer the conundrum of which came first, the chicken or the egg, two paleontologists say.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Nov 2008 | 3:52 pm

Which Came First? Eggs Before Chickens, Scientists Now Say

Scientists discover a nest of bird-like eggs belonging to a meat-eating dinosaur.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Nov 2008 | 3:39 pm

First 'exoplanets' photographed from Earth

Astronomers have taken the first pictures of planets orbiting a distant star using telescopes on the Hawaiian island of Mauna Kea.

Three giant planets were snapped around a star known as HR 8799 in the constellation of Pegasus, 130 light years from Earth. Until now, images of "exoplanets" beyond our solar system have only been taken from space, or inferred indirectly.

"We've been trying to image planets for eight years with no luck and now we have pictures of three planets at once, " said Bruce Macintosh an astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The planets are several times the mass of Jupiter.

The astronomers used the Keck and Gemini telescopes on the island, according to a study in the journal Science. In the same issue, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope reveal pictures of another planet, called Fomalhaut b, 25 light years from Earth in the constellation of Piscis Australis. It is the first exoplanet to be discovered purely visually.

"I nearly had a heart attack at the end of May when I confirmed that Fomalhaut b orbits its parent star," said astronomer Paul Kalas at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's a profound and overwhelming experience to lay eyes on a planet never before seen."

None of the planets are likely to host life, but astronomers believe at least some of the solar systems also have smaller, rocky planets like Mars or Earth that are much harder to spot.

Video - Life Rocks the Earth: Biologic & Mineral Evolution

Biology plays a role in the evolution of minerals - and vice versa.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Nov 2008 | 3:35 pm

Ancient Celtic Coin Cache Found in Netherlands

Coin collector with metal detector finds ancient coin cache.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Nov 2008 | 3:16 pm

Modern cancer drugs more likely to get to market

LONDON (Reuters) - Nearly one in five cancer drugs entering development now reach the market, a remarkably good success rate given the high level of failures in other disease areas, British researchers said on Friday .

Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Nov 2008 | 3:12 pm

Unusual Saturn Aurora Stumps Scientists

Scientists struggle to explain a unique aurora above Saturn's polar cap.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Nov 2008 | 3:00 pm

Nasa's taste test

Astronauts will soon drink their recycled urine
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Nov 2008 | 2:48 pm

Elusive Microbe Fertilizes Oceans

Scientists zero in on a cryptic microbe that appears key to the ocean food chain.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Nov 2008 | 2:40 pm

Confusing creation with creationism

Intelligent design and young Earth creationism are both false, but that does not discount the notion of creation, writes Michael Poole
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 14 Nov 2008 | 2:29 pm

Video: Alok Jha examines Britain's drug classification system

In the light of disturbing YouTube footage of teenagers experimenting with legally obtained but unregulated and untested 'herbal highs', science correspondent Alok Jha examines Britain's drug classification system

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 14 Nov 2008 | 2:25 pm

Video - Unlocking the Great Pyramid

Years of study have yielded the most comprehensive view of the pyramid to date, and an exciting new theory. Show airs Sunday, Nov. 16, at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Nov 2008 | 2:24 pm

Lab Tests Show Wind Turbine’s Air Flow

Smoke and lasers are used in wind tunnel to unravel airflow mysteries of wind turbines.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Nov 2008 | 2:22 pm

Earliest NASA Moon Images Restored

NASA and a private company restore humankind's first images of the moon.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Nov 2008 | 2:20 pm

Human ancestors born big brained

Reconstruction of skeletons from Ethiopia suggests ancient humans may have been born with larger brains than previously thought.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Nov 2008 | 2:20 pm

Grandma Is Better Babysitter Than Mom

Grandma might be the best daycare available, better even than a child’s mother.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Nov 2008 | 2:20 pm

Images captured of 4 planets outside solar system (AP)

AP - Earth seems to have its first fuzzy photos of alien planets outside our solar system, images captured by two teams of astronomers. The pictures show four likely planets that appear as specks of white, nearly indecipherable except to the most eagle-eyed experts. All are trillions of miles away three of them orbiting the same star, and the fourth circling a different star.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Nov 2008 | 1:45 pm

Babylon dreams

Can the ancient city regain its lost heritage status?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Nov 2008 | 1:43 pm

Centrica says reviewing new wind farm economics

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Centrica is reviewing the economic viability of planned wind farms due to soaring costs and the credit crunch, the owner of British Gas said.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Nov 2008 | 1:27 pm

Moving on

The gorilla rangers' families begin move to UN refugee camp
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Nov 2008 | 1:17 pm

Climate change 'to halt ice age'

The Earth's next ice age may be postponed or stopped entirely by the effects of human-induced climate change, scientists suggest.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Nov 2008 | 12:48 pm

Young Britons among least likely to study science

Young Britons are among the least likely in Europe to consider studying science subjects, a European poll has found.

The Young People and Science study for the European Commission surveyed nearly 25,000 15- to 25-year-olds across the 27 countries of Europe.

When asked how they felt about studying science-based subjects, 86% of young Britons said they would probably or definitely not consider natural sciences, while 76% would consider neither engineering nor mathematics.

But the findings for young people in Britain were echoed by those in other European countries, where a minority said they would consider studying sciences.

When asked about natural sciences, the Netherlands (81%), Ireland (80%), France (75%) and Germany (78%) had similar results to the UK.

Young people in the newer European members in eastern Europe are somewhat more keen on studying science subjects - in Slovenia 53% were not considering natural sciences, and 62% in Romania.

Those surveyed were most likely to say that they would study social sciences, followed by economics and business studies. Mathematics was selected by the smallest group.

When it came to careers, the most popular options were engineers and health professionals (both 22%).

Next in line were those who wanted to study natural sciences or mathematics to become teachers.

The smallest group of respondents wanted to become technicians (9%).

Young women were more likely to study natural science or mathematics in order to become a health professional, teacher or public sector researcher.

Young men, however, were more liable to select engineer, technician or private-sector researcher as a career.

Despite their study preferences, the respondents were in agreement that an interest in science was essential for their country's future prosperity: half agreed strongly and 39% tended to agree.

The findings will raise fears that recent government claims that young people in Britain are coming round to science subjects are misplaced.

The English funding council, Hefce, claimed a turnaround in the number of students taking up science, maths and language subjects at A-level and university last month.

Last week, the Science Council said not enough young people knew about the career advantages that come with taking science subjects.

The commission's poll found young Britons were among the most optimistic of their European peers.

They had the highest levels of expectation of future improvements in air quality (30%), food quality (62%) and communication among people (73%).

They were also among the least likely to see health threats from GM foods (11%), pesticides (15%), new epidemics (19%) or fertilisers in the water supply (23%).

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