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Cellular Senescence A Double-edged SwordScientists have shown that cellular senescence, the process by which biological cells stop dividing in response to stress or damage to their DNA, triggers the secretion of proteins that cause inflammation in neighboring cells and tissue. Inflammation is linked to almost every major disease associated with aging, including many cancers.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 4:00 am Moon’s Polar Craters Could Be The Place To Find Lunar Ice, Scientists ReportScientists have discovered where they believe would be the best place to find ice on the moon.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 4:00 am Lean Muscle Mass Helps Even Obese Patients Battle CancerLean muscle-mass may give even obese people an advantage in battling cancer, a new study shows.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 4:00 am Scientists Probe Limits Of 'Cancer Stem-cell Model'One of the most promising new ideas about the causes of cancer, known as the cancer stem-cell model, must be reassessed because it is based largely on evidence from a laboratory test that is surprisingly flawed when applied to some cancers, researchers have concluded.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 4:00 am Online Register Created To Flag Scientific Papers That May Be Tainted By Fraud Or MisconductA group of French research students is launching an online register to flag up scientific papers that have been tainted by fraud and other types of scientific misconduct. Once a fraudulent paper has been published it is very difficult to remove it. Journals can retract articles from their online databases but libraries all over the world are stocked with printed journals that cannot be recalled.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 4:00 am Novel Basis Identified For Tamoxifen FailureTamoxifen may worsen breast cancer in a small subset of patients. New research suggests that in patients who show reduced or absent expression of the protein E-cadherin, commonly used anti-estrogen drugs such as tamoxifen may promote more harmful cancer cell behavior.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 4:00 am Autism And Schizophrenia Share Common Origin, Review SuggestsThe first month of pregnancy forms the basis for disrupted development that can have life-long implications. Schizophrenia and autism probably share a common origin, hypothesizes researchers following an extensive literature study. A developmental psychologist has demonstrated that both mental diseases have similar physical abnormalities which are formed during the first month of pregnancy. For example, both autistics and schizophrenics sometimes have protruding ears and peculiar toes.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am New Research Into Fair-weather Clouds Important In Climate PredictionsNew research has led to better understanding of clouds, the unknown quantity in current climate models. Scientists have tackled this issue with a combination of detailed computer simulations and airplane measurements. They have charted data including cloud speed, temperature and the "life span" of clouds.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Tiny Magnetic Crystals In Bacteria Are A Compass, Say ScientistsScientists have shown that tiny crystals found inside bacteria provide a magnetic compass to help them navigate through sediment to find the best food.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am New Papers Offer Insights Into Process Of Malarial Drug ResistanceBiologists offer new insights into the process of malarial drug resistance. Malaria, one of the oldest diseases known to man, has shown no signs of slowing down as it ages. More than 1 million children die from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa each year, and in areas along the Thailand/Cambodian border multiple drug-resistant strains of the disease are becoming commonplace.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am Sketches behind da Vinci painting may be Leonardo'sPARIS (Reuters) - A curator at the Louvre Museum in Paris has stumbled upon some unknown drawings on the back of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci that look like they might be by the Italian master himself, the Louvre said on Thursday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 18 Dec 2008 | 1:46 pm First U.S. patient gets face transplantWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Surgeons have replaced 80 percent of a woman's face, transplanting bone, teeth, muscle and nerve in the first such operation in the United States.Source: Reuters: Science News | 18 Dec 2008 | 1:24 pm Snow snarls California travel, the Vegas Strip (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:38 pm Feds say NJ's wayward dolphins doing just fine (AP)AP - A panel of federal wildlife experts says New Jersey's wayward dolphins are just fine where they are.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:29 pm Space shuttles for sale: one careful owner, starting price $42mIt could be the ultimate Christmas present for anyone who can afford the stellar price tag: Nasa has announced plans to sell off its space shuttles when they stop flying in 2010, at a cost of at least $42m (£27m) apiece – postage and packing included. Selling its remaining shuttles would bring in much-needed dollars to the hard-up American space agency, which is already facing a budget deficit for the next-generation Ares rockets that it is planned will return astronauts to the moon. The advertised price is just the starting figure for any one of the orbiters Discovery, Atlantis or Endeavour, which between them have flown 86 missions into space since 1984. Included is the minimum $6m cost of stripping a shuttle of toxic and other hazardous materials, preparing it for travel and flying it to an airport of the buyer's choosing. As an agency of the US government, Nasa insists it won't be selling its most prized assets to just anybody. So far, it is approaching only educational institutions, science museums and "other appropriate organisations" to gauge interest and assess the size of their chequebooks. "Nasa is keenly aware of the essential value of these key assets to the space programme's rich history," an official says in a "request for information" document that seeks ideas for the public display of the shuttles after their retirement. "The agency is therefore committed to making placement decisions that are determined to be in the best interest of the American taxpayer. Special attention will be paid to ensuring they will retire to appropriate places." Only US citizens will be eligible to purchase and display the shuttles, which will be sold with all space-worthy fittings and fixtures except the main engines. Interested parties must promise to display the spacecraft in a climate-controlled indoor location. Six main shuttle engines will be available for separate purchase for up to $800,000 each, excluding transport costs. Previously, Nasa has donated historically important space hardware for free. Saturn rockets, lunar modules and other artifacts from the Apollo era are on display at various locations including the Kennedy Space Centre, in Florida, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, in Washington DC, and the US Space and Rocket Centre, in Alabama. Only two of the shuttles are likely to be sold, with the third expected to remain in government hands, possibly on display in Washington. "Nasa advised Congress that it would begin discussions with the Smithsonian Institution regarding accession of a flown orbiter to the national collection," the agency said in the document. The idea is to "gauge the level and scope of interest of US organisations in acquiring the two other orbiters for public display once Nasa's programmatic requirements for the assets have been satisfied." Nasa's own visitor centres, in Houston and at the Kennedy Space Centre, where all 124 shuttle launches to date have taken place, are among those invited to respond. Five shuttles have flown into space since the programme began in 1981. Two of them, Challenger and Columbia, were destroyed in the disasters of 1986 and 2003 that cost 14 astronauts their lives. The last shuttle mission is scheduled for September 2010, when construction of the international space station is expected to be complete. The incoming US president, Barack Obama, has appointed a team to assess the viability of extending shuttle flights beyond that date, to close the gap until the planned first manned flight of the new Orion crew capsule and Ares rocket in 2015. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:03 pm Japan, Australia sign cooperation pact (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Dec 2008 | 11:25 am Nasa set to launch 'CO2 hunter'The US space agency is planning to launch a satellite that can map where all the carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Dec 2008 | 11:12 am Oil, ignoring record OPEC cut, hovers near $40 (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Dec 2008 | 10:27 am Mont., fed gov't loosen rules on Yellowstone bison (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Dec 2008 | 10:27 am EU faces battle over fish quotasEU ministers meet to set fishing quotas, as arguments rage over whether to raise the North Sea cod catch.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Dec 2008 | 9:12 am Want a retired space shuttle? They're up for grabs (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Dec 2008 | 8:24 am Doctors explain face transplantSurgeons give details of the first almost-total face transplant performed in a 22-hour operation in Cleveland, Ohio.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Dec 2008 | 5:12 am Primate offers missing link to ancestor of the Aids virusA mouse-like primate threatened with extinction has provided the "missing link" in the evolutionary history of the HIV virus, promising to transform the scientific understanding of the family of viruses to which HIV belongs. Research into the Madagascan grey mouse lemur published by a team from Stanford University school of medicine, California, suggests that far from being a relatively recent phenomenon, the family of primate lentiviruses to which HIV belongs may be scores of millions of years old. The study also suggests the endangered lemurs, only found on the Indian Ocean island, may have survived a prehistoric "Aids-like" epidemic before developing an immunity to the disease, promising important insights into how the human epidemic might unfold. It had been believed that the two strains of HIV found in humans had existed in primates for 1m years at most, with some scientists believing that they may have only been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Aids itself is thought to have existed for just over 100 years. The study, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, also raises the possibility that similar viruses, believed to be confined at first to African primates, may have been more widely distributed at one time. The Stanford research suggests that a virus closely related to HIV may have been present in the grey mouse lemur population for at least 14m years, when the last land bridges between Madagascar and the African continent disappeared. Researchers believe it could even be as much as 85m years old, which would make it the oldest ancestor of HIV ever discovered. Robert Shafer, one of the two lead researchers on the project and an expert in drug resistance to HIV at Stanford medical school, described the work as filling "one of the most important missing links" in the history of how the viruses evolved. He said yesterday: "The more understanding there is of the links between different lentiviruses and the genomes of the different primates affected, the more we can understand how the proteins that block infection in some primates work. If we understand how hosts have controlled infection over millennia, then that opens the way to developing new drugs or to other ways of encouraging innate resistance." The discovery of the virus in the saucer-eyed nocturnal animal, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has been the equivalent of a piece of genetic archaeology – piecing together fragments of the virus's DNA from the animal's genome. The significance of the discovery for potential research into a cure for human HIV is to be found in the question of how primates infected with the simian version of the HIV virus developed protection from Aids through several genes that slow or block retroviral reproduction. Over 25 million people across the world have died from Aids-related illnesses since the virus was first identified in the US 27 years ago. Two-thirds of the 33 million people who are at present infected with the virus are in sub-Saharan Africa. Until the Stanford research was disclosed it had been believed that the lentivirus family had emerged too recently to have been part of this evolutionary development of a resistance to retroviruses. But if the Stanford researchers are correct and lentiviruses are many millions of years old, it could change the understanding of the evolution of immune defences against retroviruses, with implications for HIV treatments or vaccines. But that is where the problem lies. Lemurs are rapidly dwindling in numbers, and time is fast running out. Dr Welkin Johnson an expert in primate retrovirology at the Havard medical school, said: "What is surprising is how nicely this fits into the puzzle. It would be a palaeontologist's dream to find data like this that is so unambiguous. It is exciting. What it provides is a distant mirror into how Aids works and the impact it may have on human society in a few thousand years' time. It opens the door to the long-term understanding of how viruses evolve." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 18 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am 'All Hands on Deck' For Obama's New Energy TeamPresident-elect Obama recently announced his new "green dream team."Source: Livescience.com | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:52 am Free-Range Research Could Save Chimps — and Our Conscience
It's part vacation retreat, part blood drive, part zoo — and it could be the future of chimpanzee research, if not the species itself. "You can learn incredible things by not mistreating chimpanzees," said Gagneux, a University of California, San Diego, geneticist. Gagneux, who is noted for both his comparisons of human and chimpanzee genetics and his critical bioethical analysis of chimp research, says it's about time we studied chimpanzees humanely. He'd like to see forest-size chimp-research facilities that would allow scientists to continue studying our closest relative, while protecting the endangered species in something close to its natural habitat. Instead of cages, chimpanzees would roam forested enclosures. Rather than tiny groups, the highly social primates would live in complete communities. They'd also be permitted to breed — establishing a bastion against extinction, and helping researchers understand the difference between humans and our endangered evolutionary cousin. Their peaceful retirement from invasive, often brutal experimentation is long overdue, but the move in some ways poses new dilemmas. Sanctuaries like Chimp Haven and Save the Chimps do not allow breeding — a decision some researchers think should be left to the chimps themselves. And Gagneux feels the 600 chimps now living in government facilities are important to both human science and the species' survival. For the moment, Gagneux's sanctuaries are hypothetical. Some primatologists think they're a bad idea. They would certainly be expensive, complex and ethically tricky — but that's the nature of the relationship between our species. Chimpanzees are, after all, 98 percent identical to humans, and possess qualities — high-level cognition, a sense of self, emotions and a capacity for altruism — that in many ways compare to our own. Some consider chimpanzees to be people; Gagneux equates them with human research subjects incapable of giving informed consent. But bioethical hairsplitting aside, chimpanzees are extraordinary and special creatures. They're also dying out — and preventing any members of a rapidly dwindling species from reproducing may be misguided. Under his compromise, chimps now used in research would live in places resembling zoos more than laboratories. "They'd sleep outside, and build their own nests," he said. Scientists could watch the chimpanzees, who would be trained to give blood samples useful for genetic research — but not, said Gagneux, against their will. When chimps died, researchers would recover and study their bodies. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. "Chimpanzees should be in sanctuaries to live out the rest of their lives without any blood drawing or having their bodies studied after death," said Deborah Fouts, co-director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute. She is renowned for her work with Washoe, the first non-human primate to learn sign language. "Humans can volunteer to have their bodies used for science after death. Chimpanzees cannot." Researchers also caution that captive research populations will never take the place of wild chimpanzees. "Chimps raised in captivity have no knowledge base about dealing with the natural environment," said Linda Brent, director of Chimp Haven, which houses chimpanzees retired from government research. The jungle is no longer their home, and won't ever be again. But if wild chimpanzees go extinct, captive chimps will be better than nothing. And from an ethical perspective, said Gagneux, it may be wrong make the chimpanzees' reproductive decisions for them. Even anthropologist Jim Moore, from University of California at San Diego, opposes captive breeding except as a last resort. He allowed that offspring may be an important part of healthy chimp environments. "The most all-encompassing form of environmental enrichment you can have is babies running around and jumping on your head when you're trying to sleep," he said. "It's a stimulating, natural thing." Of course, chimps could still be kept in sanctuaries and allowed to breed without undergoing research. But even limited invasive experiments — chimps trained to give blood but allowed to refuse — could be extremely valuable. "Chimpanzees are the best model for human origins," said Clayton State University primatologist Jared Taglialatela, who supports Gagneux's proposal if conducted responsibly. "There are all sorts of questions that only chimpanzees can provide the answers to." In the last few years, chimpanzee studies have helped geneticists discover areas of particular human interest. The first of these so-called Human Accelerated Regions is HAR-1. "It's 118 letters long, and it doesn't have a single change between chickens and chimps," said Gagneux. "And then there's 18 changes in humans." The gene is expressed only in the brains of developing fetuses — and researchers wouldn't have looked for it if they hadn't compared the human and chimpanzee genomes. Genetic insights could be combined with physiological studies conducted after chimpanzees die. Their bodies, said Gagneux, remain a mystery. "More people know about the genome of chimps than what their vasculature is, how their nerves are arranged, and so on," he said. "People looking at soft tissue are finding amazing differences. The architecture of brain cells is not the same." Taglialatela's specialty is chimpanzee communication, which he sees as a forerunner to human language. "They have communicative powers we once said were uniquely human," he said. "The neurobiological structures that support those advances — only chimpanzees, and no other species can provide that for us. It would be a shame to squander this research." But Taglialatela cautioned against undertaking the research lightly. "These are long-lived creatures in complex environments," he said. "The facilities need to provide not just for chimpanzee safety, but for comfort, emotion, stimulation. It will take a lot of money. You need research funds to provide for care and well-being in perpetuity." The responsibilities would be many, and heavy — but people may have invited those responsibilities when they first decided to pull a near-human species out of nature and into our laboratories. "We've created a situation in which we're responsible for sentient beings," said Moore. "It gives us a profound ethical perspective on creatures who are halfway between humans and non-humans. And it bears on how we think about ourselves." Image: Flickr/Shiny Things See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:43 am 5 Surprising Holiday Health Myths (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - Many supposed holiday hazards are as innocuous as a tepid mug of apple cider. A review article in the current issue of the British Medical Journal cites five fears that can officially be crossed off the holiday worry list.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:21 am Hangover cures and other popular mythsNow and again, it's good to take a look at conventional wisdom through the eyes of a scientist. What proof is there to support the things we believe in, but rarely question? To start the ball rolling, two doctors from Indiana University have trawled through scientific papers in search of support for six commonly held beliefs. Among those they tackle are: do hangover cures work; does sugar make kids hyperactive; do we lose most of our heat through our heads; and does eating at night make you fat? All turn out to be modern myths, without a shred of evidence to support them. Writing in the British Medical Journal, the doctors involved, Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll, point out that GPs are far from immune to believing things about our bodies that are simply untrue. It's not the first time Vreeman and Carroll have questioned common beliefs. Last year, they discredited a clutch of other oft-repeated statements, including that our hair and fingernails continue to grow after death; that shaved hair grows back faster; that reading in dim light ruins your eyes; and that we only use 10 percent of our brains. In the same spirit, I thought I'd see if we can gather our own list of mistaken conventional wisdom. Some obvious but nice ones: there's no gravity in space; chickens can live without a head (for a bit); and water spins the opposite way down a plughole in the southern hemisphere. Any more contenders? guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:20 am Scientists debunk myth that most heat is lost through headWhen it comes to wrapping up on a cold winter's day, a cosy hat is obligatory. After all, most of our body heat is lost through our heads – or so we are led to believe. Closer inspection of heat loss in the hatless, however, reveals the claim to be nonsense, say scientists who have dispelled this and five other modern myths. They traced the origins of the hat-wearing advice back to a US army survival manual from 1970 which strongly recommended covering the head when it is cold, since "40 to 45 percent of body heat" is lost from the head. Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll, at the centre for health policy at Indiana University in Indianapolis, rubbish the claim in the British Medical Journal this week. If this were true, they say, humans would be just as cold if they went without a hat as if they went without trousers. "Patently, this is just not the case," they write. The myth is thought to have arisen through a flawed interpretation of a vaguely scientific experiment by the US military in the 1950s. In those studies, volunteers were dressed in Arctic survival suits and exposed to bitterly cold conditions. Because it was the only part of their bodies left uncovered, most of their heat was lost through their heads. The face, head and chest are more sensitive to changes in temperature than the rest of the body, making it feel as if covering them up does more to prevent heat loss. In fact, covering one part of the body has as much effect as covering any other. If the experiment had been performed with people wearing only swimming trunks, they would have lost no more than 10% of their body heat through their heads, the scientists add. The researchers then decided to look at several other widely held beliefs to see if there was any published scientific evidence to support them. In many cases, they found several studies that completely undermined them. "Examining common medical myths reminds us to be aware of when evidence supports our advice, and when we operate based on unexamined beliefs," they write. Another myth exposed by the study was that sugar makes children hyperactive. At least a dozen high-quality studies have investigated the possibility of a link between children's behaviour and sugar intake, but none has found any difference between children who consumed a lot and those who did not. The belief appears mostly to be a figment of parents' imaginations. "When parents think their children have been given a drink containing sugar, even if it is really sugar-free, they rate their children's behaviour as more hyperactive," the researchers write. The warning that snacking at night makes you fat is on similarly thin ice, Vreeman and Carroll discovered. At first glance, some research suggests there may be a link, with one study showing that obese women tended to eat later in the day than slimmer women. But according to the BMJ article, "The obese women were not just night eaters, they were also eating more meals, and taking in more calories makes you gain weight regardless of when calories are consumed." The researchers also have some unwelcome news for those hoping to survive the festive excesses by turning to hangover cures. After an extensive review of evidence for the curative benefits of bananas, aspirin, vegemite, fructose, glucose, artichoke, prickly pear and the drugs tropisetron and tolfenamic acid, they conclude that none has been proven to cure hangovers. "No scientific evidence ... supports any cure or effective prevention for alcohol hangovers," they state. "The most effective way to avoid a hangover is to consume alcohol only in moderation or not at all." The team went on to show that contrary to popular belief, the Christmas plant poinsettia with it blood-red leaves is not toxic, and that suicides do not rise over the holiday period guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:20 am US proposes protecting 7 penguin species (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:16 am 5 Surprising Holiday Health MythsScientists cite five fears that can officially be crossed off the holiday worry list.Source: Livescience.com | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:15 am Aubergine battleUnease as India ponders approval of GM cropsSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Dec 2008 | 12:00 am World Coal Reserves Could Be a Fraction of Previous Estimates
SAN FRANCISCO, California — A new calculation of the world's coal reserves is much lower than previous estimates. If validated, the new info could have a massive impact on the fate of the planet's climate. That's because coal is responsible for most of the CO2 emissions that drive climate change. If there were actually less coal available for burning, climate modelers would have to rethink their estimates of the level of emissions that humans will produce. The new model, created by Dave Rutledge, chair of Caltech's engineering and applied sciences division, suggests that humans will only pull up a total — including all past mining — of 662 billion tons of coal out of the Earth. The best previous estimate, from the World Energy Council, says that the world has almost 850 billion tons of coal still left to be mined. "Every estimate of the ultimate coal resource has been larger," said ecologist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University, who was not involved with the new study. "But if there's much less coal than we think, that's good news for climate." The carbon dioxide emitted when humans burn coal to create usable energy is primarily responsible for global warming. Leading scientists think that the stability of Earth's climate will be dictated by how the world uses — or doesn't use — its coal resources. And the thinking has been that the world has more than enough coal to wreak catastrophic damage to the climate system, absent major societal or governmental changes. So the new estimate, which opens the slim possibility that humankind could do nothing to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions and still escape some of the impacts of climate change, comes as quite a shock. Rutledge argues that governments are terrible at estimating their own fossil fuel reserves. He developed his new model by looking back at historical examples of fossil fuel exhaustion. For example, British coal production fell precipitously form its 1913 peak. American oil production famously peaked in 1970, as controversially predicted by King Hubbert. Both countries had heartily overestimated their reserves. It was from manipulating the data from the previous peaks that Rutledge developed his new model, based on fitting curves to the cumulative production of a region. He says that they provide much more stable estimates than other techniques and are much more accurate than those made by individual countries. "The record of geological estimates made by governments for their fossil fuel estimates is really horrible," Rutledge said during a press conference at the American Geological Union annual meeting. "And the estimates tend to be quite high. They over-predict future coal production." More specifically, Rutledge says that big surveys of natural resources underestimate the difficulty and expense of getting to the coal reserves of the world. And that's assuming that the countries have at least tried to offer a real estimate to the international community. China, for example, has only submitted two estimates of its coal reserves to the World Energy Council — and they were wildly different. "The Chinese are interested in producing coal, not figuring out how much they have," Rutledge said. "That much is obvious." The National Research Council's Committee on Coal Research,
Technology, and Resource Assessments to Inform Energy Policy actually
agrees with many of Rutledge's criticisms, while continuing to maintain
far sunnier estimates of the recoverable stocks of American coal. "Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have
not been reviewed or revised since their inception in 1974, and much of
the input data were compiled in the early 1970’s," the committee wrote in a 2007 report.
"Recent programs to assess reserves in limited areas using updated
methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated
reserves are actually mineable reserves.” And don't look to technology to bail out coal miners. Mechanization
has actually decreased the world's recoverable reserves, because huge
mining machines aren't quite as good at digging out coal as human
beings are. With Rutledge's new numbers, the world could burn all the coal (and other fossil fuels) it can
get to, and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would only end up around 460
parts per million, which is predicted to cause a 2-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures. For many scientists, that's too much warming. A growing coalition is calling for limiting the CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, down from the 380 ppm of today, but it's a far cry from some of the more devastating scenarios devised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Coal emissions really need to be phased out proactively — we can't just wait for them to run out — by the year 2030," said Pushker Kharecha, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "There is more than enough coal to keep CO2 well above 350 ppm well beyond this century." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses economic models that assume that the world will not run out of coal. Some IPCC scenarios show 3.4 billion tons of coal being burned just through 2100. That's more than five times what Rutledge thinks will be possible — and a good deal higher than the WEC's estimate for recoverable coal reserves, too. On the other hand, if the world were really to encounter a swift and steep decline in accessible coal resources, it's unclear how humans could retain our current levels of transportation, industry and general energy-usage. So, even if coal were to run out and the most dangerous climate change averted, the imperative to develop non–fossil-fuel energy sources would remain. "Peak Oil and peak gas and peak coal could really go either way for the climate," Kharecha said. "It all depends on choices for subsequent energy sources." Image: An abandoned coal pit in Indiana. qchristopher/flickr See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 17 Dec 2008 | 11:29 pm Calif. university gets $25M for stem cell research (AP)AP - Billionaire philanthropists are donating $25 million to the University of California, San Francisco toward building a new stem cell research center.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Dec 2008 | 10:25 pm Flaw theory over Mars Beagle lossThe loss of the UK-led Mars probe Beagle 2 could have been due to a flawed calculation that led to it burning up, says a new report.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 Dec 2008 | 9:58 pm Giant, meat-eating raptor dinosaur discovered in Argentina (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Dec 2008 | 9:47 pm Male circumcision lowers cervical cancer risk: studyWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three studies published on Wednesday add to evidence that circumcision can protect men from the deadly AIDS virus and the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.Source: Reuters: Science News | 17 Dec 2008 | 9:41 pm Spectacular Space Photo of the Christmas Tree Cluster
Known as the Christmas Tree cluster, this colorful collection of stars lies 2,600 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Monoceros, the unicorn. The cluster was first discovered in the 18th century but was captured anew in this stunning image by by the 2.2-meter Max Planck Society/ESO telescope at La Silla observatory in the Atacama Desert. The telescope was outfitted with a specialized astronomical camera called the Wide Field Imager and a series of filters, and then aimed at the cluster for 10 hours to get the full-color image above. The swirling gas clouds appear red because of ultraviolet light emanating from the young, hot stars that look like blue ornaments on a Christmas tree. The triangular feature near the bottom of the photo is an area of gas called the Cone Nebula. The brightest star, at the top of the image, can be seen by the naked eye. The furry texture of the light to its right earned that area the name Fox Fur Nebula. The whole cluster is in a star-forming molecular cloud, and the area between the brightest star and the tip of the cone is a great place for studying how stars are born. See Also:
Image: ESO Source: Wired: Wired Science | 17 Dec 2008 | 9:35 pm Nation's First Face Transplant Done in ClevelandA woman has undergone the nation's first near-total face transplant, the Cleveland Clinic announced.Source: Livescience.com | 17 Dec 2008 | 9:12 pm One in Six Use Only Cell Phones at HomeOne-sixth of Americans forego landlines in favor of cell phones, alone.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 17 Dec 2008 | 8:10 pm Oil Is Not the Climate Change Culprit — It's All About Coal
SAN FRANCISCO — Maybe your old truck isn't responsible for destroying the planet after all. New climate change scenarios quantify the idea that oil is only a small component of the total global warming problem — the real problem is coal. If the world replaced all of its oil usage with carbon-neutral energy sources, ecologist Kenneth Caldeira of Stanford University calculated that it would only buy us about 10 years before coal emissions warmed the planet to what many scientists consider dangerous levels. "There's an order of magnitude more coal than oil. So, whether there is a little more oil or a little less oil will change the details in, say, when we reach two degrees warming, but it doesn't change the overall picture," Caldeira said Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting. Many of the efforts to "green" our world's infrastructure have focused on the importance of changing the world's transportation systems. Indeed, one of the images of environmental destruction is the car-choked freeways of Los Angeles — and hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius have become a badge of environmental pride. But as the latest projections show, when it comes to global warming, oil is a bit player on a stage dominated by the massive amounts of coal burning, particularly in the United States and China. "If we want to change the overall shape of the global warming curve and instead of having it go up, stabilize and eventually go down, we need to deal with coal," Caldeira said. The real global warming culprit — as James Hansen and his colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies have long argued — is burning coal to generate electricity. "Oil and gas by themselves don't have enough carbon to keep us in the dangerous zone [of global warming] for very long," said Pushker Kharecha, a scientist and colleague of Hansen at NASA GISS. While both Kharecha and Caldeira stopped short of saying that the world's oil usage didn't matter, Caldeira seemed to capture their joint sentiment when he called the combustion of oil a "second-order effect." Liquid fuels are so relatively insignificant that no matter what, nothing we put in our cars is likely to change the basic story of climate change. Even if oil ran out tomorrow and humans began converting coal in its solid form to a liquid you could put in a car — a worst-case scenario for environmentalists — the global warming contribution of that fuel is almost negligible. Caldeira calculated that swapping out oil for liquified coal would only push the world to dangerous levels of global warming two years
earlier than the world's best business-as-usual estimates. Either one is dwarfed by the carbon dioxide emissions from traditional coal burned for electrical generation and industrial production. "I don't want to say it's not important what we do to replace oil. And this is where I'm being policy prescriptive: It would be far better to replace it with renewables than with coal liquefaction," Caldeira said. "But
the big problem is the huge amounts of coal that we're likely to burn
this century and release into the atmosphere in the absence of policy." It's clear: The King of Global Warming Problems is King Coal. Image: identity chris is/Flickr See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 17 Dec 2008 | 7:54 pm WiSci Event Tonight: Fossil Cities in the Distant Future
That's the central theme of an exciting new book by geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, from Oxford University Press. And in a Wired Science first, I'm going to be interviewing Zalasiewicz live in San Francisco with my good friend and the brilliant author of BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh. This event, which we're calling Fossil Cities, will run from 7 to 9 p.m. TODAY, Wednesday, December 17. The good people of Swissnex, a Swiss-supported innovation embassy and gallery space, have been kind enough to donate their high-design downstairs for our event. You can/should RSVP over at their site. (It's located at 730 Montgomery Street; check the map.) We'll be giving away five free copies of the book based on some as-yet-undetermined methodology. If you're an out-of-towner, don't feel too bad because we'll be taping it for inclusion in a Wired Science video podcast. Zalasiewicz's book is the very best kind of fascinating science writing. The book's conceit is that new explorers come to the Earth in 100 million years and try to puzzle out our strange planet's history. Though it details all the complex hieroglyphics that geologists have used to deduce the deep history of our planet, it places special emphasis on the bizarre mark that humanity is likely to leave. "Seemingly with the stratigraphic thickness of a piece of cigarette paper, [the interval of human civilization] will be caught between the ancient past and the substantial future. Yet, I would hazard a guess that our future investigators will discover it. And marvel," Zalasiewicz writes. In a week filled with geology because of the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting, I think it's safe to say that this evening will be one of the most fascinating moments and definitely the most Wired. Also, if you haven't check out BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh's site, you should jump on the bandwagon now before his book comes out next year and he gets all famous. Image: Joe Alterio for BLDGBLOG. WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 17 Dec 2008 | 7:39 pm Soggy Universe: Astronomers Find Most Distant Water Yet
Astronomers report they have found water in a galaxy 11 billion light-years from Earth, the most distant water ever detected. Until now, the farthest water ever found was glimpsed about 7 billion light-years from Earth. The new discovery suggests that water was common in galaxies in the early universe. We can see parts of such galaxies when we look at objects so distant that their light has taken billions of years to reach us. Astronomers used the 100-meter radio telescope in Effelsberg, Germany, and the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to detect the chemical signature of water molecules in a galaxy called MG J0414+0534. The water molecules seem to be located in the galaxy's center, where a supermassive black hole called a quasar is spewing out tons of radiation as material falls into it. The water molecules lie in clouds of dust and gas that feed the black hole, and appear to be amplifying radio waves at a specific frequency, forming what's called a "maser," or the radio equivalent of a laser. Though finding water in a distant galaxy doesn't tell us whether planets in that galaxy also have water, when searching for hints of life beyond Earth, it's always a good sign to find life's favorite molecule. The galaxy is so far away, we see it as it was when the universe was roughly one-sixth its current age. At this distance, it would normally be too dim to see, if it weren't for the help of a cosmic magnifying glass called a gravitational lens. This trick of gravity, first predicted by Einstein, occurs when a massive foreground galaxy between Earth and a distant object bends the light of what lies behind it, creating multiple magnified images of the distant object so that we can see it. "We were only able to discover this distant water with the help of the gravitational lens," Violette Impellizzeri, an astronomer at the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, Germany, said in a press release. "This cosmic telescope reduced the amount of time needed to detect the water by a factor of about 1,000." The finding, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, shows that the conditions necessary for water molecules to form and survive already existed only 2.5 billion years after the Big Bang. "Because water masers arise close from the cores of galaxies, our result opens new interesting possibilities for studying supermassive black holes at a time when galaxies were forming," Impellizzeri said. "It will also generate further searches for water in other distant galaxies with the telescopes we have at our disposal today and with the next generation of radio telescopes; we now know water is out there." Citation: "A gravitationally lensed water maser in the early Universe," C.M. Violette Impellizzeri, John P. McKean, Paola Castangia, Alan L. Roy, Christian Henkel, Andreas Brunthaler, & Olaf Wucknitz, 2008, Nature (18 December issue). See Also:
Graphics: Milde Science Communication. Background Image: HST Archive data, Inset: CFHT, J.-C. Cuillandre, Coelum. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 17 Dec 2008 | 6:53 pm Giant Dinosaur Fossil Found in Sahara DesertPaleontologists claim to have unearthed a new type of pterosaur and a previously unknown sauropod.Source: Livescience.com | 17 Dec 2008 | 6:33 pm The Energy Debates: Hybrid VehiclesThe Energy Debates is a LiveScience series about the pros, cons, policy debates, myths and facts related to various alternative energy ideas.Source: Livescience.com | 17 Dec 2008 | 4:51 pm Bright Future: LEDs Revolutionize LightingLED lights (light emitting diodes) save energy, cut the risk of fire, and last up to 15 years.Source: Livescience.com | 17 Dec 2008 | 4:11 pm "Death map" shows heat a big hazard to AmericansWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Heat is more likely to kill an American than an earthquake, and thunderstorms kill more than hurricanes do, according to a "death map" published on Tuesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 17 Dec 2008 | 3:36 pm What are you looking at? Japan scientists find outTOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese researchers have reproduced images of things people were looking at by analyzing brain scans, opening the way for people to communicate directly from their mind.Source: Reuters: Science News | 17 Dec 2008 | 3:26 pm Earth's Magnetic Field FlawedBreaches in Earth's magnetic field may be the norm during the coming solar cycle.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 17 Dec 2008 | 3:18 pm Sea changeScots in troubled waters over EU fish decisionSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 Dec 2008 | 2:37 pm Saturn Moon Revealed as Watery WorldEnceladus hosts vents that open and close and jets that eject water vapor and ice.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 17 Dec 2008 | 2:32 pm Asteroid Hunt Goes GranularNew telescope system will look for asteroids, comets that could hit Earth.Source: Livescience.com | 17 Dec 2008 | 2:30 pm U.S. 'Death Map': Heat Deadlier Than StormsExtreme heat is among the worst natural threats in the United States.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 17 Dec 2008 | 2:20 pm Holes in Earth's magnetic cloak let the sun inSAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The Earth's protective magnetosphere has two large holes that are letting in disruptive solar winds, scientists said on Tuesday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 17 Dec 2008 | 2:19 pm How Green Gifts Could Power the FutureA few holiday ideas that can spread cheer by reducing energy consumption.Source: Livescience.com | 17 Dec 2008 | 1:48 pm "Safer" cigarette smoke just as harmful to embryosNEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Smoke from so-called harm-reduction cigarettes is just as dangerous to developing embryos as smoke from standard cigarettes, and may be even more toxic, new experiments with mouse embryo stem cells show.Source: Reuters: Science News | 17 Dec 2008 | 1:45 pm New Theory: How Advertisers Get Inside Your HeadAds work on our unconscious mind to steer our purchases.Source: Livescience.com | 17 Dec 2008 | 1:24 pm King Tut's Father ID'd in Stone InscriptionAn ancient Egyptian stone bears an inscription revealing King Tut's father.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 17 Dec 2008 | 1:10 pm Euro MPs seal major climate dealThe European Parliament backs a far-reaching package to combat global warming, seen as a key EU initiative.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 Dec 2008 | 12:58 pm Astronomers get a closer feel for the Universe's dark forceObservations of the effect of dark energy on galaxy clusters suggest general relativity is alive and well.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 Dec 2008 | 12:42 pm
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