Science Headlines for November 16, 2008

Shuttle approaches space station

Space Shuttle Endeavour is preparing to dock with the International Space Station on an "extreme make-over" mission.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Nov 2008 | 5:25 pm

Should Wildfires Be Fought So Aggressively?

Why do people live in fire-prone areas? And should we just let the fires burn?
Source: Livescience.com | 16 Nov 2008 | 4:36 pm

Endeavour heading for space station rendezvous (AP)

AP - Speeding 17,000 miles an hour around Earth, space shuttle Endeavour aimed for a docking with the international space station Sunday to drop off a new housemate and deliver equipment which will change the outpost into a two-kitchen, two-bath, five-bedroom home.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Nov 2008 | 3:13 pm

Shuttle Soars Toward Space Station

Space shuttle Endeavour hones in on the International Space Station.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 16 Nov 2008 | 1:30 pm

Astronauts inspect space shuttle on way to station (Reuters)

Reuters - The shuttle Endeavour crew scanned the ship's wings and heat shield on Saturday, checking for damage after Friday's launch as it headed for a rendezvous with the International Space Station.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Nov 2008 | 2:42 am

Astronauts inspect space shuttle on way to station

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The shuttle Endeavour crew scanned the ship's wings and heat shield on Saturday, checking for damage after Friday's launch as it headed for a rendezvous with the International Space Station.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 16 Nov 2008 | 2:42 am

North Carolina storm kills 2, destroys homes (AP)

AP - As a tornado ripped through his North Carolina neighborhood, Curt Jernigan huddled in his bathroom, praying for the raging winds to spare him.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Nov 2008 | 2:08 am

Tim Adams reviews some of the most influential social psychology books

2000: The Tipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell

In his first book Gladwell offered a new understanding of how ideas and trends and products spread through society using the example of epidemiology. The Tipping Point is the moment when the momentum for change, for epidemic, becomes unstoppable. All epidemics are spread in the first instance by a contagious or promiscuous few. They require 'stickiness' and advantageous context.

Best illustration: by concentrating resources on graffiti on the subways, New York police sent a message of changed context to criminal groups. Violent crime fell as a result.

2004: The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki

Gladwell's fellow New Yorker guru James Surowiecki suggested that the intelligence of a group as a whole is often a more reliable source of understanding than a single expert voice. Society left to its own devices is more resourceful than you think.

Best illustration: in a guess the weight of a cow competition, the average of all guesses will be more accurate than any expert's guess.

2005: Freakonomics

Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner

Self-styled 'rogue economists' mix cutting-edge behaviouralism with consumer rationalism, along the way discovering why drug dealers are always poor, why good parenting makes no difference, and how to cheat at sumo wrestling.

Best illustration: statistical proof that legalising abortion was the best weapon against crime - it greatly lowered the number of likely vulnerable and therefore criminal kids.

2006: Wikinomics

Dan Tapscott and Antony D Williams

Subtitled 'How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything', Wikinomics examines the ways in which masses of people can participate in the economy in ways they have never done before. It looks at how wikis can create TV news stories, sequence the human genome, remix their favourite music, design software, find cures for disease, edit school books. The last chapter of the book is written by readers... nice work if you can get it.

Best illustration: Gold Corp published all its most sensitive data on the net, and offered a reward for people who could help it find gold - it immediately hugely increased its finds.

2006: The Long Tail

Chris Anderson

Anderson examines how the growth of internet shopping not only allows greater consumer choice, but undermines the traditional one size fits all model of Henry Ford mass marketing. There is a bigger market in catering to infinite individual desires than in serving mainstream needs. A blueprint for Amazon.

Best illustration: 99.7 per cent of available music CDs are not available at Wal-Mart.

2007: The Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The credit cruncher's favourite guru argues that we fail to understand the implications of events that are unpredictable and often inexplicable at the time - the internet, the First World War, 9/11. Because they seem to come out of nowhere and are logical only in hindsight they have especially high impact, like the discovery of a black swan in Australia where all swans had previously been thought to be white.

Best illustration: regular reading of a newspaper decreases your knowledge of how the world works - it makes things seem too logical.

2008: Nudge

Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein

David Cameron's holiday reading. A new political third way, which uses studies in behaviour to influence individual choice without prescribing or legislating. The classic example is donor cards. By replacing an opt-in system with an opt-out one you increase the number of organs available while still giving the individual choice. The increase is irrational: the product of human laziness or bias towards the status quo.

Best illustration: showing people how much energy they are using in comparison to their next-door neighbours dramatically reduces energy use.

Nick Cohen: Darwin's no help on the origins of greed

The posters outside the Natural History museum's Darwin exhibition have a wary feel. They show the old boy shushing at the passers-by with a forefinger over his lips and a worried look in his eyes. Inside, the curators explain how he sat on his theory of evolution for fear of its social consequences with the help of a letter he wrote to his friend, Joseph Hooker. In 1844, 15 years before he found the courage to publish On the Origin of Species, he said: 'I am almost convinced that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.'

Henry Kissinger is meant to have come up with the witticism that 'academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low'. Many contest his claim on the line, but if it was his he was as wrong about intellectual life as about so much else. The stakes in the academic politics of evolution have always been high, and Darwin was right to think of murder.

Rapacious capitalists used Darwinism to justify extremes of wealth. Fascists and racists used it to justify mass murder. In the Sixties the understandable backlash against 'scientific' racism went to the opposite extreme, creating a biology riddled with taboos and no-go areas. To say that humans were as much the product of evolution as any other animal was like announcing you had joined the Nazis. In 1975, the colleagues of EO Wilson shamefully abused the Harvard scientist for daring to argue that biology influenced human behaviour. The American Anthropological Association claimed he had attempted 'to justify genetically the sexist, racist and elitist status quo in human society' (an act of intellectual thuggery Time magazine likened to the Catholic church's denunciation of Galileo).

But Wilson won in the end. Academic policemen could not rule scientific arguments out of bounds indefinitely because they did not like the political consequences. The exercise was pointless as well as unprincipled, because the political uses and abuses of science are so varied. Sociobiology did not necessarily lead to 'racism', 'sexism', 'elitism' or any other 'ism'. It could just as easily prompt the liberal thought that because we had evolved a universal human nature we were all entitled to universal human rights. If the Natural History museum had opened its exhibition at the turn of this century, its staff would have been at one with intellectuals enjoying their freedom to argue without being shouted down. With Marx and Freud discredited, Darwin was the last of the big thinkers whose reputation was undiminished. He had settled the question of how life developed. The sociobiologists of the late Nineties dreamt they could go further and settle just about everything else.

In Philosophers' magazine, Jeremy Stangroom described a euphoric debate on the boundless possibilities for scientific advance. Ian McEwan told the audience: 'I have stood back amazed, as things that were once the preserve of poets, philosophers and fiction writers, have been drawn into the great maws of experimental science: reputation, gratitude, cheating, and on a grander level, human beauty and beyond that, mind, consciousness and human nature. These were once not respectable subjects for scientific enquiry, but in 20 years this has all changed.'

Almost a decade on, and McEwan and the poets have been reprieved. The millennial hopes of finding the biological causes for everything from gratitude to the appreciation of beauty have faded. The trouble with sociobiology was always that you could invent apparently convincing explanations for contradictory forms of human behaviour. Take sex. If men were solely monogamous or serially monogamous, occasionally adulterous or incessantly treacherous, bigamous, polygamous or merely libidinous, there was a superficially plausible account of how their behaviour evolved in pre-history. Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College, London, can make up pseudo-scientific theories off the top of his head. He told me the best thing about playing Darwinian party tricks was that no one could falsify your conclusions in a controlled experiment because no one could travel back in time to study our African ancestors.

Jones and other sceptical biologists dismiss conjectures about the evolution of human behaviour as Just So Stories ... Kipling told us 'How the Camel Got His Hump'; socio-biologists tell the tale of 'Why Humans Get the Hump'. The first is fiction, the second may as well be.

Along with Just So ... I think we need also say: 'So what?' After the freethinkers had faced down the intimidation of the Sixties generation of academics, the results of their research were trite, even when true. For all his doubts about sociobiology, Jones accepts there is an evolutionary explanation for why old men desire beautiful young women and why rich old men are more successful in bedding beautiful young women than poor old men - but, well, the reason is no mystery.

I remember an evolutionary psychologist telling a meeting in the Nineties that step-parents were more likely to murder children than natural parents who shared a child's DNA. One over-wrought speaker bellowed that those who denied the truth of his findings had 'blood on their hands'. Clearly, what he said about comparative murder rates was right. Equally clearly, the overwhelming majority of step-parents do not murder their stepchildren. His sociobiological truth is thus no help to social workers trying to save the life of the next Baby P.

Niall Ferguson ends the book of his TV series The Ascent of Money saying we should see finance as a product of evolution. He explains the boom-and-bust cycle by tapping into research that we are hard-wired not to think logically. It is fascinating, but sceptical economists provide better explanations than biologists for why crowds go mad in a bubble market. Financial and political leaders led us to ruin because they did not understand Keynes, not Darwin.

The cautious old man with the flowing beard outside the Natural History museum is a realistic Darwin for our grim times: rightly nervous and well aware of the dangers of going too far too fast.

Evolution

Patients who pay for cancer care still face NHS costs

The government's policy change over 'top-up' treatment is not all it seems, writes Jon Robins
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 16 Nov 2008 | 12:03 am

Darwin art strikes wrong note

It is the ultimate, infallible tribute to a Briton: placing their portrait on a banknote alongside images of their life and work. But now a leading UK biologist has announced that pictures on the £10 note, which commemorates the achievements of Charles Darwin, are 'little better than fiction'.

Professor Steve Jones, of University College London, said putting a hummingbird on the current £10 note was a blunder. 'The note is supposed to encapsulate Darwin's trip to the Galapagos, with him looking at a hummingbird as a source of inspiration. But there are no hummingbirds on the islands,' said Jones at last week's opening of the Natural History Museum's exhibition, Darwin.

'Mockingbirds and finches were important in getting Darwin thinking about evolution, but hummingbirds played no role at all. Presumably the artist just happened to like them.' Jones said he had written to the Bank of England but had received no answer. A spokesman for the Bank referred The Observer to its website which insists the hummingbird was of 'the type characteristically found in the region of the Galapagos Islands'.

But hummingbirds are not even mentioned in On the Origin of Species, said Jones. 'So why depict them? This is not a trivial issue. We are surprised by the numbers of people who believe in creationism and rubbish like that only to find the currency in which we place our trust is telling us lies about evolution.'

Major science award goes to British woman 'role model'

Athene Donald's work could improve hip replacements and early tests for Alzheimer's
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 16 Nov 2008 | 12:02 am

Fruit and veg boom needed to feed Britain

It is an image worthy of a Keats poem or a Constable landscape: great orchards bursting with fruit, fields crammed with ripening vegetables and hillsides covered with sheep and cattle.

But this is no dream of long-gone rural glories. It is a vision of the kind of countryside that Britain may need if it is to survive the impact of climate change and higher oil prices, according to leading agricultural experts.

They have warned that only a total revolution in the nation's food industry can save Britain from serious shortages of staples as world oil production peaks, the climate continues to heat up, the population grows and our dietary needs continue to evolve.

In turn that means a complete shake-up in the way we farm the countryside. At present Britain imports more than 90 per cent of the fruit it consumes.

'We face some awesome changes in the way we deal with food production,' said Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London. 'For the past century we have relied on oil to produce more and more food for ourselves - mainly through the use of petroleum products to make cheap fertilisers.'

The problem is that oil is becoming more and more expensive and is also linked to dangerous emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

As a result, food experts such as Lang have been pressing the government to develop a proper strategy for ensuring that Britain is able to supply itself with food for the rest of the century, but in a way that fits in with the nation's goals on climate change.

It is simply not acceptable for Britain to continue to import foodstuffs such as beans from countries like Kenya, they say. The nation needs to be self-sustaining and to do this in an environmentally friendly manner.

One key approach relies on a return to past methods of food production. The nation needs to re-learn the gardening skills it lost a century ago and to change its diet to one that includes less meat, fewer dairy products and more fruit and vegetables, said Lang. 'This country produces less than 10 per cent of the fruit it eats. That has to change. We need to consider orchard planting on a massive scale as well as encouraging people to eat more fruit and vegetables.'

Nor is it acceptable that 40 per cent of the grain produced in Britain is used to feed the cattle and sheep that provide us with meat and dairy products. Growing grain which is then fed to animals is an inefficient way to deliver protein to the populace.

Instead cattle and pigs should be confined to hillsides where they can graze and not use up grain that has required oil-based fertilisers for its growth. Prime land should be used to feed people directly, Lang insisted.

This point was backed by Dr David Barling of City University's Centre for Food Policy.

'The debates around what and how much food the UK should produce and import should be based upon the priorities of providing a vibrant food economy that is socially just, environmentally benign and provides for a healthy population. This is not the case currently,' he said.

Such changes in the use of the countryside have other implications, however. More people will be required to work this altered landscape while productive land will have to be protected from development. 'We are going to have to revolutionise the way we use the countryside,' said Lang.

That transformation will require a return to old ways that might be welcome but equally there could be changes that might cause upset, such as the building of more rural homes to house those needed to work there.

'We will have to face up to these challenges as well,' Lang concluded.

Scotland sells star therapy to stressed out city dwellers

Plan to create new 'dark-sky parks' to promote Highlands as world-class stargazing spot for tourists
Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 16 Nov 2008 | 12:02 am

Invisible bear makes cyclists safer in London

A video clip featuring an 'invisible' moonwalking bear that has stealthily grown to be an internet hit has been revealed as a subtle road safety campaign planted by London transport officials.

The minute-long film called simply Awareness Test has caught out millions of viewers on the video-sharing website YouTube and other sites. It has been watched more than 10 million times. It begins by asking the viewer to count the number of passes in a short basketball game, relying on the fact that as the eye concentrates on the ball moving quickly between the players it can completely miss a man dressed in a bear suit who moonwalks across the screen. The viewer is told about the bear and shown the clip again, followed by the road safety message 'Look out for Cyclists'.

'The point is that we shock people. They're shocked to realise they would miss a great bear walking right across the screen in front of them; sometimes they miss it the second time too, and it makes them think how easy it can be to miss a cyclist on the road when you're watching for other things like cars or road signs,' said a Transport for London (TfL) spokesman. 'It's a compelling message and we're delighted at the number of hits.'

The clip was played in cinemas across the UK for a week before being transferred to the internet eight months ago to let 'viral marketing' take its course. 'The idea is to reach new people with new messages. We want to make sure that we're promoting road safety to the audiences we need to reach and that's not just TV and newspapers any more but networking sites and digital media,' the spokesman said.

London has seen road safety for pedestrians and motorists improve dramatically over the past decade, but cycling accidents remain high with one cyclist killed or seriously injured every day on the capital's roads. Road safety experts believe drivers still don't look out for bikes. Psychologist Professor Cary Cooper, of the University of Lancaster, said: 'If you are encouraged to concentrate on detail, you tend to miss the periphery.

'In this case, if you just sit back and watch the whole screen you will see the moonwalking bear, but if you are counting the passes you cannot pick it up. This is a common psychological phenomenon. It's quite possible that if you are concentrating very hard on what someone is saying, for example, afterwards you will have no recollection of what they were wearing.

'This concept is particularly relevant for drivers if you are focusing too much on certain aspects and can't see cyclists - when driving you have to be aware of everything around you. Of course, it's particularly surprising when you miss something as profound as a moonwalking bear. People just can't believe that, and of course they are rightly shocked.'

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, a keen cyclist, said he was pleased at the apparent success of the campaign: 'London is a terrific city for cycling and is generally safe, but the greatest danger to cyclists is complacency and that is why such safety campaigns are so important,' he explained.

'I want our city to be a cyclists' paradise. That is why reducing accidents is a priority and I hope this campaign will contribute to that aim.'

With so many people now aware of the trick behind the moonwalking bear, TfL has moved on to another clip that is just starting to take off with a few thousand hits since it arrived on YouTube last week. This time we will leave it to you to spot the trick in the film - a short video in the style of an Agatha Christie whodunnit.

Both clips were made for TfL by advertising agency WCRS. Fergus Adam of WCRS said that, while they were delighted at the phenomenal success of the moonwalking bear, this was not the future of advertising.

'This kind of viral marketing has really peaked already and is on the decline, for all sorts of reasons; people are far less likely to pass on funny or interesting clips to friends or colleagues and there are fewer and fewer things that can get this kind of worldwide spread through the web,' he said. 'Only 5 per cent of web users are actively spreading these things. YouTube is littered with videos just sitting there.'

• To view the videos, go to youtube.com and search for 'Awareness Test' and 'Test Your Awareness: Whodunnit?'

Meet the Arab Agency for Science News

Although there are many universities in the Middle East, reports about research in that region of the world seem to be quite sparse. So I was thrilled to learn that a popular science website for the Middle East went live last month.

"The Arabic website, called the Arab Agency for Science News, will collect stories from around the Arab region through an extensive network of reporters," said Mohammed Yahia, in an article for SciDev. "Its main aim will be to communicate research news to the public."

According to Yahia, it is the first of its kind.

If that is the case, students who only speak Arabic must find it very hard to stay informed.

So far, most of the articles on AASN seem to be about commerce and technology, rather than science. One article describes Google gears and another spells out a code of ethics for engineers. The website has an environment and climate section, but it does not seem to contain any stories about those topics.

Since the Middle East has a tremendous influence upon our environment, and enough wealth to make countless scientific breakthroughs, the people there deserve a better source of information.

If you know of any other science websites that serve the Arab world, please tell us about them.

Image: Google translation of arabsn.net

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 15 Nov 2008 | 10:26 pm

Unhappy People Watch Lots More TV (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Unhappy people glue themselves to the television 30 percent more than happy people. The finding, announced on Thursday, comes from a survey of nearly 30,000 American adults conducted between 1975 and 2006 as part of the General Social Survey.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Nov 2008 | 6:34 pm

Unhappy People Watch Lots More TV

Avid television watchers make for grumpsters.
Source: Livescience.com | 15 Nov 2008 | 6:27 pm

Natural gas rush stirs environmental concerns (AP)

AP - Advanced drilling techniques that blast millions of gallons of water into 400-million-year-old shale formations a mile underground are opening up "unconventional" gas fields touted as a key to the nation's energy future.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Nov 2008 | 4:45 pm

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