Science Headlines for December 20, 2008

Ancient Soil Replenishment Technique Helps In Battle Against Global Warming

Former inhabitants of the Amazon Basin enriched their fields with charred organic materials-biochar-and transformed one of the earth's most infertile soils into one of the most productive. These early conservationists disappeared 500 years ago, but centuries later, their soil is still rich in organic matter and nutrients. Now, scientists, environmental groups and policymakers forging the next world climate agreement see biochar not only as an important tool for replenishing soils, but as a powerful tool for combating global warming.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Scans Show Immune Cells Intercepting Parasites

Researchers may have identified one of the body's earliest responses to a group of parasites that causes illness in developing nations and are now infecting US soldiers on patrol in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Shared Survival Mechanism Explains Why 'Good' Nerve Cells Last And 'Bad' Cancer Cells Flourish

Cancer cells and nervous system neurons may not look or act alike, but both use strikingly similar ways to survive, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Whispering Bats Are Shrieking 100 Times Louder Than Previously Thought

Some echo-locating bats seem to be really quiet, appearing to make echo-locating calls that are no louder than 70 decibels. But no one had successfully recorded their volume under natural conditions, until now. When researchers recorded whispering bats they found that some of them are shrieking 100 times louder than thought.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Inflamed Gums Linked To Heart Disease

The next person who reminds you to floss might be your cardiologist instead of your dentist. Scientists have known for some time that a protein associated with inflammation is elevated in people at risk for heart disease. But where's the inflammation coming from? A new research study shows that infected gums may be one place.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Pain Hurts More If Person Hurting You Means It

Psychologists at Harvard University have found that pain hurts more when we think that someone intended to cause hurt. Intentional pain also seems to have a fresh sting every time, whereas we get used to unintentional pain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 21 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Benefits Of Breastfeeding Outweigh Risk Of Infant Exposure To Environmental Chemicals In Breastmilk

A study comparing breastfed and formula fed infants across time showed that the known beneficial effects of breastfeeding are greater than the potential risks associated with infant exposure to chemicals such as dioxins that may be present in breastmilk, according to a new report published in Breastfeeding Medicine.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm

Possible Genetic Causes Of Borderline Personality Disorder Identified

Scientists have found that genetic material on chromosome nine was linked to BPD features, a disorder characterized by pervasive instability in moods, interpersonal relationships, self-image and behavior, and can lead to suicidal behavior, substance abuse and failed relationships.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm

LEDs And Smart Lighting Could Save Trillions Of Dollars, Spark Global Innovation

A "revolution" in the way we illuminate our world is imminent. Innovations in photonics and solid state lighting will lead to trillions of dollars in cost savings, along with a massive reduction in the amount of energy required to light homes and businesses around the globe, researchers forecast.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm

Cancer Treatments Redefined To Reduce Potential Nerve Damage

While radiation treatments deliver precise doses of high-energy X-rays to stop cancer cells from spreading or to shrink tumors, oncologists have become increasingly concerned about inadvertent exposures during head and neck cancer treatments to nerves responsible for upper body mobility.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 7:00 pm

Obama names Holdren, Lubchenco to science posts (AP)

AP - President-elect Barack Obama on Saturday named a Harvard physicist and a marine biologist to science posts, signaling a change from Bush administration policies on global warming that were criticized for putting politics over science.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 2:18 pm

Activists intercept Japanese whalers in Antarctic waters (AFP)

AFP - Militant environmental activists said Saturday they had intercepted the Japanese whaling fleet in Antarctic waters and attempted to attack one of the boats with stink bombs.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 1:10 pm

Researchers probe scat for clues to orca decline (AP)

AP - Using a trained dog to sniff for poop and petri dishes attached to long poles, scientists are analyzing killer whales' scat and breath samples in the hopes of solving the mystery of Puget Sound's dwindling orca population.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 1:05 pm

NY exhibit unveils women's lives in ancient Greece (AP)

AP - A woman's place has never been just in the home not even in ancient Greece.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 11:49 am

Powerful winter storm cuts power, disrupts travel (AP)

AP - A winter storm packing snow, freezing rain and biting wind cut power to tens of thousands of customers Friday, disrupted travel and gave schoolchildren from Iowa to New England an early start on their holiday break. "One thing about it, you're going to have a white Christmas this year," said Lee Longdyke, as he shoveled a sidewalk in Pontiac, Mich., for the third time Friday morning.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 5:14 am

Mozobil Boosts Stem Cells Before Bone Marrow Transplants (HealthDay)

HealthDay - FRIDAY, Dec. 19 (HealthDay News) -- The Genzyme Corp. drug Mozobil (plerixafor) has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to boost a person's blood stem cell count before a bone marrow transplant, the agency said in a news release.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 4:47 am

NASA Astronaut Readapts to Life on Earth (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff is steadily readapting to life on Earth after spending six months floating in weightlessness aboard the International Space Station.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Dec 2008 | 2:03 am

How astronauts went to the Moon and ended up discovering planet Earth

Forty years ago this Christmas the first human beings reached the moon. But their historic feat is better remembered for an image of what they left behind - planet Earth.

Looking back from more than 200,000 miles away, the crew of Apollo 8 saw Earth floating "like a Christmas tree ornament lit up in space, fragile-looking". They pointed their cameras through smeared porthole windows and began snapping. It seems almost incredible now, but nobody thought to take a photo of Earth until they saw it, because nobody had seen it before.

One of those photos, an Earthrise over the grey and inhospitable lunar horizon, has become one of the most reproduced and recognised pictures of our planet. LIFE magazine selected it as one of 100 photographs that changed the world; more recently it featured in an Oscar-winning film about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.

"That one picture exploded in the consciousness of humans," said Al Gore, the film's Nobel prize-winning narrator and campaigner. "It led to dramatic changes. Within 18 months of this picture the environment movement had begun."

There is still some dispute over which of Apollo 8's crew took the first Earthrise photo, but the official version selected by the American space agency, Nasa, was by Bill Anders, who spoke to the Guardian from his home in San Diego, California. "After all the training and studying we'd done as pilots and engineers to get to the moon safely and get back, [and] as human beings to explore moon orbit," he said, "what we really discovered was the planet Earth."

Anders and fellow crew members Frank Borman and Jim Lovell left on December 21 and began orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve. For the first and second loops, Apollo 8's crew faced backwards, but on the third revolution Borman, the commander, turned their capsule around. "Suddenly Borman said something like 'look at that' and here was the Earth coming up," recalled Anders. "There was a mad scramble for cameras: I just happened to have one with colour film in it and a long lens. All I did was to keep snapping.

"It's not a very good photo as photos go, but it's a special one. It was the first statement of our planet Earth and it was particularly impressive because it's contrasted against this startling horizon."

In the following weeks it is estimated that 2 billion people - more than half the humans alive at the time - watched the blurred black and grey TV film of the moon and listened to crackling voices speaking to them across space as Apollo 8's crew read the first 10 verses of the Bible.

In what now seems symbolic of the impact of seeing the whole planet for the first time with human eyes, Borman appeared to cast off the nationalistic cold war fervour surrounding the mission and ended the broadcast saying: "A merry Christmas and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."

The impact of the photo in 1968 was immediate in a world already shaken by Rachel Carson's explosive book on pesticide pollution, Silent Spring. Four decades later, climate change is the great environmental threat and Earthrise is still used by campaigners trying to draw attention to the problem.

Landscape photographer Joe Cornish said he had been haunted by the image: "It's a new perspective from space, but it's a totally new perspective when you see it in relation to another body in space."

For Anders, the fragility of life on Earth is shown even more powerfully by three photos of the Earth alone in space: "Earthrise has a reference - there's the moon and the Earth, you don't get a vastness - whereas the other ones, particularly the smaller one, it's Earth and black to the frame ... it goes on and on."

He added: "I think it's important for people to understand they are just going around on one of the smaller grains of sand on one of the spiral arms of this kind of puny galaxy ... it [Earth] is insignificant, but it's the only one we've got."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 20 Dec 2008 | 12:04 am

Birth due of first baby in UK screened for cancer gene

An unborn baby that has been genetically screened to be free of an inherited form of breast cancer, is due to be born "imminently" in London. The pregnancy is the result of an embryo screening technique, that has never previously been applied in the UK, to prevent parents passing on the disease to their offspring.

If the couple had conceived naturally and the baby had inherited the altered version of the gene, called BRCA1, it would have had an 80% chance of developing breast cancer and a 60% chance of ovarian cancer. By screening embryos during IVF, doctors could be sure the child will be free of the mutation.

Dr Paul Serhal, of University College Hospital, who carried out the screening, said the technique offered hope for families who have suffered repeated cases of inherited breast cancer. "All these couples have a very strong family history of breast cancer," he said, "You have certain couples who have been plagued by this for generations." He refused to give any details about the mother who has requested to remain anonymous, but it is believed that she is aged 27.

The screening technique used by Serhal - called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) - involves creating embryos using IVF, then removing a cell from each of them when they have divided to give eight cells. Genetic analysis of this cell can reveal whether each embryo contains the normal or mutated copy of BRCA1.

The embryos with the mutated copy are discarded, while one or more embryos with the normal BRCA1 are implanted back into the mother's womb to begin the pregnancy.

PGD screening is now fairly routine for some severe inherited conditions such as cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease, but applying it to conditions such as inherited breast cancer has proved controversial. Because there is a chance that carriers of the mutation will not develop breast cancer, screening inevitably means some embryos that are screened out would have led healthy lives.

The disease is also not necessarily fatal and can be prevented by surgery to remove the breasts, before cancer develops.

The procedure had to be licenced by the government's fertility watchdog the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).

Before granting the licence to Serhal in 2007, it carried out a public consultation on whether screening in this case was morally acceptable. "The outcome of this consultation paper was overwhelmingly positive," said Serhal. He has previously used PGD to screen for a form of inherited bowel cancer and retinoblastoma, an inherited eye cancer.

Prof Peter Braude, director of the centre for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis at Guy's hospital in London, said, "Clearly, the decision as to whether PGD is appropriate for a couple will be made after a thorough discussion with knowledgeable genetic counsellors and clinical geneticists."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 20 Dec 2008 | 12:04 am

Art - the key to unlocking dementia

When elderly people develop dementia their short-term memory fails them: new information is no longer being stored. Things as basic as the place they are in and who is present may fade. This scenario appears insurmountably tragic until you hear about the bucketloads of evidence proving that the long-term memories of people with dementia are often wholly intact. Studies using brain scanners prove that, when consulting old memories, the brain works quite normally in those with dementia.

One area where this is already understood to a certain degree is art therapy. Patients with dementia are often exposed to art. Some studies show that, not surprisingly, whether a trained artist or not, abilities in creating art decline with dementia.

However, until now there has been no study of how the illness affects art appreciation. A new one neatly illustrates the endurance of long-term memory in dementia as well as the potential for continued appreciation of art to contribute to wellbeing. A sample of people with dementia and a control group of unaffected older people were shown 24 postcards with three different kinds of painting on them: representational (of views or people), semi-representational and abstract.

Both samples were asked to order the postcards according to which they liked best, thereby displaying aesthetic preferences. The pictures were not likely to be previously known.

Two weeks later, the same procedure was followed. The object was to find out if the people with dementia would be liable to order the postcards in roughly the same fashion as the first occasion and, indeed, this was the case. It was also found that they were no more likely than the control group to change their order of preference - their aesthetic preferences, stored in their long-term memory, remained constant.

Since one's aesthetics are a significant component of who one is at a deep level, this study is hard evidence that the integrity of this aspect of the personality of people with dementia is every bit as great as the unimpaired. And on a practical plane, here is good reason to persevere in trying to relate to people with dementia through their favoured artistic loves.

It is yet more evidence in support of the Specal (Specialised Early Care for Alzheimers) method developed by my mother-in-law, Penny Garner. She advocates establishing which themes from the old memories are happy ones, and developing a whole care programme organised around them (see my book about her work, Contented Dementia). For me the soundtrack would be a mix of Lou Reed's Berlin and David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, but everyone will have a different list. One key to wellbeing in dementia is to constantly play the soundtrack of your desert island discs to a backdrop of your favourite art.

• Aesthetics study: Halpern, A et al, 2008, Brain and Cognition, 66(1), 65-72. More Oliver James at selfishcapitalist.com

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 20 Dec 2008 | 12:03 am

Bad Science: Bad statistics? The Sunday Times isn't kidding

I was delighted to discover this week that the Times has started an innovative new column titled Bad Statistics. It seems to me to be somewhat lacking in thoroughness. I should like to submit for their consideration an article from the Sunday Times on 14 December. The opening sentence is: "Public opinion has moved sharply in favour of assisted suicide, according to a poll for The Sunday Times." This opening sentence is, I believe, incorrect.

The story is based around a YouGov poll of 2,000 people. "More than two-thirds (69%) think the law should be changed ... most strikingly, by four to one (61% to 15%) people said they would consider assisted suicide for themselves if suffering from a terminal disease."

How do these figures compare with previous population survey data on euthanasia? Luckily my friend William Lee is an epidemiologist who also researches attitudes to physician-assisted suicide in the same building as me (his colleague Annabel Price first spotted this, um, "bad statistic"). They have conducted an extensive literature review. Combining this with appendix 7 from the 2005 House of Lords select committee report on assisted dying for the terminally ill gives a fairly broad sweep of figures to determine whether public opinion really has "moved sharply in favour of assisted suicide" with the new figure of 69%.

In fact, it turns out that euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are supported by around 70%-80% of the general population in the UK, with remarkably similar proportions being found whether the research is funded by supporters of a change in the law, detractors, or disinterested groups. NOP has polled around 2,000 people for the Voluntary Euthanasia Society regularly for many years, with results in favour of a change in the law ranging from 69% in 1976 to 79% back in 1993.

The British Social attitudes survey showed similarly high figures in favour, from 75% in 1984 to 82% in 1994. It's a marginal, slow increase at best, and hard to see how 69% could represent a "sharp rise".

And of course there are the crap media surveys. Viewers of the BBC's Heaven and Earth Show voted by email, text or phone on the question: "Should assisted suicide be made legal?" 73% said yes.

Comparing the results from different surveys is a minefield at the best of times, but overall it seems to me you would be rather hard-pressed to claim that 69% shows "public opinion has moved sharply in favour of assisted suicide, according to a poll for The Sunday Times". Especially as it seems you may have to go back to 1976 to find a single poll that gives a result so low.

As a festive gift to me, you may wish to take up the eerily familiar request at the bottom of the "Bad Statistics" column. "Please send your bad statistics to badstatistics@thetimes.co.uk". Merry Christmas.

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

Sunday Times

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 20 Dec 2008 | 12:02 am

American Indian cremation pit found on Ga. island (AP)

AP - Exposed by erosion at the edge of a crumbling bluff, the pit discovered beneath 2 feet of sandy dirt at first appeared to be a grave just long and deep enough to bury a human body.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 10:55 pm

Surfers, Rejoice: Some Extreme Waves Getting Bigger

SAN FRANCISCO — The largest waves in the Pacific Northwest are getting higher by seven centimeters a year, posing an increasing threat to property close to the shore. And the strange part is: Scientists aren't sure why.

Oregon State researchers found that the danger to property from these larger extreme waves will outweigh the impacts of rising sea levels caused by global warming over the next several decades.

"Over a decadal scale, the increases in wave height ... have significant impacts on both erosion hazards and coastal flooding hazards and those currently exceed the influences of sea level rise," said Peter Ruggiero, "And they probably will over the next decade or two unless something drastic happens."

The world's oceans are in serious turmoil. Fisheries have collapsed across the globe and scientists predict that rising global temperatures — particularly nearer the poles — will melt the polar ice caps and cause sea levels to rise. Waves, however, are the bringers of this bad oceanic news onto human-inhabited shores and evidence that extreme wave heights are increasing in some regions has remained relatively under the radar.

"This is the first time I've seen a comparison between wave height and sea level," said Sultan Hameed, an atmospheric scientist at Stony Brook University, who organized the American Geophysical Union annual meeting session at which Ruggiero presented. "That was excellent analysis."

Unlike sea level, the current data suggests that wave heights are not increasing uniformly across the globe. However, many regions lack the right data to do proper analysis. Bigger wave heights off the coast of Oregon were first discovered just a few years ago by other OSU scientists. They had the advantage of working with the unique dataset created by the Pacific coast's longest-floating buoy; it's been gathering data on wave heights for over 30 years.

"This is high quality data and you didn't have enough data to do this kind of analysis until very recently," Ruggiero said.

Despite the clear wave-height increase in the data, particularly of the largest waves, Ruggiero and his colleagues still can't explain it.

"I don't think we do know exactly why wave heights are rising," Ruggiero said. "Some people have linked it to global warming and changes in the storm tracks. Others have linked it to dust from China. I don't have a great answer."

If it is linked with global climate change, rising sea levels could combine with increasingly big waves to wreak havoc on coastal areas around the middle-latitudes where the wave height effect seems to be strongest.

That's why it's become imperative to figure out what has driven the changes in the wave patterns along the northwest coast of North America over the last thirty years.

Hameed said that linking the wave height increases to wind velocity changes in the global climate could give the work international impact — particularly in places where detailed wave data isn't available.

"Wind data are available over a much larger domain," he said. "If you find coherence between changes in wind speed or direction and wave height, you can extend the analysis [to other areas]."

Image: dennis/Flickr. A surfer at Mavericks, where the waves are already plenty big.

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 | 19 Dec 2008 | 10:34 pm

Oil prices mixed; New York contract expires below 34 dollars (AFP)

AFP - Oil prices were mixed Friday, with the New York contract expiring below 34 dollars a barrel, as weak global demand weighed on the market.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 10:01 pm

Swiss glaciers 'in full retreat'

Glaciers in Switzerland are melting away at an accelerating rate and many will vanish this century, two new studies suggest.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Dec 2008 | 9:54 pm

A Different Take on Great Ape Personhood

It's an uncomfortable sight, experienced by most anyone who's ever been to a big-city zoo: chimpanzees or gorillas behind a window, captive in a patch of semi-artificial forest where their every gesture is cheered by a hooting crowd.

Never mind that the animals are well-treated and, by their presence, teach humans to care about their precarious survival in an ever-shrinking wild. There's just something so human about them. It's an unscientific but compelling sentiment, tied up in their interactions, their physiques, and most of all the way they look back at us.

Separated from Homo sapiens by an evolutionary eyeblink of eight million years or less, great apes — chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos — often seem a bit too much like us for our comfort. One wonders exactly what — or who — one is looking at. Are they aware of their circumstances? Are they any happier than you would be as captive entertainment? And though they're obviously not human, are they people?

This question has guided much of my primate research coverage in the last year, culminating in two recent articles on chimpanzee personhood and research ethics. When I started, I felt that the great apes ought to be considered people. Now I wonder if the question itself, as it's usually framed, is misleading.

"That closeness, the biological and behavioral continuity, makes it a lot easier to look into the eyes of a chimp and see a reflection of yourself," said Jared Taglialatela, a Clayton State University primatologist who studies chimpanzee communication. "But in the same way, humans should take a look around and say, we're not so different than all the other animals out there."

To Taglialatela, chimpanzee "personhood" is a judgment that falls on a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics — a spectrum of subtle gradations, one that doesn't place humans above and outside the animal kingdom, but within it. Calling great apes "people" is arbitrary and, in any case, not a black-and-white judgment.

That's quite a different approach than mine had been. Personhood struck me as black-and-white: one decided on measurements that defined the condition, and great apes either qualified or didn't. In many ways, they satisfied my criteria. To varying degrees they feel joy and grief, are capable of empathy, think abstractly and can learn basic language. There are biological similarities as well, with the latest addition to the literature published Thursday in Current Biology: chimpanzees use the same part of their brains to recognize faces as humans do. That similarity hasn't been found in any other creature.

These characteristics are, of course, expressed more coarsely in great apes than human societies — or so we like to think, given the many ways in which humans often fail to act like people. And adult sophistication is not demanded of infants or the mentally disabled, who we still consider people.

Such arguments were made last year by advocates for Hiasl, an orphaned chimpanzee, for whom activists demanded from Austria's highest court the legal protections afforded by human rights law. They lost, but were more successful in Spain, where in July the parliament passed a resolution granting human rights to great apes.

But for Tagliatela and Pascal Gagneux — a University of California, San Diego primate geneticist who advocates more-humane chimpanzee research — granting human rights reveals the paradoxes inherent to a binary version of personhood. They can't be treated like mice or dogs, but however person-like they may appear, they can't be held accountable as people.

"Would you punish chimps that commit infanticide or eat humans or castrate their neighbors?" asked Gagneux. "A chimpanzee can be sick, and the others will check on them, but they don't care to the extent that they go find some food and bring it to a sick animal. Why not? They are a different species. They are not us."

He described watching chimpanzees in the wild torture a forest antelope for fun, nearly killing it before — in a breach of research etiquette — he intervened. "That was a total ethical misstep. I'd just had enough. These chimpanzees didn't even eat it. It was clear from the get-go: this was going to be a sentient, living toy," he said.

Gagneux does, however, want to grant research chimpanzees the protections afforded human subjects incapable of giving informed consent to participation in a study. Like Taglialatela, he sees personhood debates as masking the spectrum of sentience — and to Taglialatela, this tendency is part of a mistaken view of humanity as existing separately from nature.

"We've spent a lot of modern history building up walls that place us outside the natural world, and what we should do is see ourselves smack-dab in the middle of it," he said. "In some ways, chimpanzees give us this gateway. And when you actually develop a relationship with chimpanzees, you see so much humanity reflected in their behavior, that it crosses you into their realm."

Humans become just another species — and one tasked, by our own capacity for action and reflection, with responsibilities towards our animal kin. "Once we put ourselves in nature, we see that habitat destruction and population decline isn't just happening in the Ivory Coast, but in our backyards," said Taglialatela.

He said that zoo-bound primates are essential for winning the sympathies of a public who would otherwise ignore their looming demise. And for Gagneux, captive animals are — well — themselves.

"Researchers who know chimpanzees from the field can't help but feel when they see a chimp in a cage that it's lost its dignity. There's a profound dignity they have in the field," he said. "People see them as animals, scary and brutish. But if you've walked past them, taken a nap next to a big alpha male, fallen asleep with them — you know they're not brutes."

Citation: "Face Processing in the Chimpanzee Brain." By Lisa A. Parr, Erin Hecht, Sarah K. Barks, Todd M. Preuss and John R. Votaw. Current Biology 19, Dec. 18, 2008.

Image: A lowland gorilla at the Bronx Zoo / Flickr/Brandon Keim

See Also:

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 19 Dec 2008 | 9:38 pm

U.S. Teens Portrayed as Violent, Unethical (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - More than a quarter of all U.S. teenagers think violent behavior is at least sometimes acceptable, and one in five say they behaved violently toward another person in the past year, according to a new poll.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 8:56 pm

First U.S. patient gets face transplant

WASHINGTON (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 | 19 Dec 2008 | 8:25 pm

HD Eruption Video Gives Clues to How Volcanoes Work

SAN FRANCISCO — High-definition video has given scientists an unprecedented view of the forces driving volcanic eruptions.

Stepping through video frame-by-frame and correlating it with seismic data, University of North Carolina seismologist Jonathan Lees and his colleagues noticed that they could actually see the way Guatemala's Mt. Santiaguito dome was lifting up and out. These movements, too fast to be seen by the naked eye, became clear in the recording.

"The dome is uplifting prior to the plume coming out," said Lees. "We never knew this until we did this experiment."

The nature of volcanic eruptions makes them very hard to study, and scientists have had to rely primarily on indirect measurements, such as seismic recordings. The new technique could allow scientists to better understand eruptions by linking seismograph signals with what can be seen on video.

Lees presented the work at this week's American Geophysical Union annual meeting. The main thrust of the work is contained in the still image at top. The ball-head pins are vectors showing the speed and direction at which particles on the volcano's dome are being blasted outwards. The unprecedented detail of this work — and its ability to explain how a certain type of eruption-associated earthquake is created — landed the group in the journal Nature last month.

Now, in just two weeks, Lees and his team are heading back to Guatemala to do similar experiments with more cameras and instrumentation.

Image and Video: Jonathan Lees

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 | 19 Dec 2008 | 7:45 pm

Vote: The Best Alternative Energy Idea

In The Energy Debates, we examined the pros, cons, policy debates, myths and facts related to 15 alternative energy ideas.
Source: Livescience.com | 19 Dec 2008 | 7:23 pm

U.S. Teens Portrayed as Violent, Unethical

A new poll finds 27 percent of U.S. teenagers surveyed think violent behavior is at least sometimes acceptable.
Source: Livescience.com | 19 Dec 2008 | 7:03 pm

GPS Guidance to Help Land More Planes

Newark Liberty airport installs satellite technology to help in air traffic control.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 19 Dec 2008 | 6:47 pm

Indonesia's "tree man" faces new operations

TANJUNG JAYA, Indonesia (Reuters) - An Indonesian man dubbed the "tree man" because of the gnarled warts all over his body said on Friday his condition had worsened again although he still hoped to recover and find a job.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 6:23 pm

The tricky relation between religion and IQ

OK, it's a naughty headline, but no less true than the one put on this survey at the aggressively atheist Sandwalk blog, which said "Atheists are smarter than agnostics". Both readings are justified. A large-scale analysis of the religious allegiance and measured IQ of a representative sample of 3,742 American adolescents found a clear trend: the more fundamentalist denominations had the more stupid believers, so that the bottom four places were occupied, from the bottom, by Pentecostalists, Baptists, Holiness churches and "Personal Philosophy", which I presume means a new-age-ish syncretism, while the top four places, again in ascending order, were taken by agnostics, atheists, Jews, and Episcopalians (Anglicans). So, atheists are smarter than agnostics, Jews are smarter than atheists, and Anglicans the smartest of the lot ...

But we should always be careful about science which tells us what we think we already know.

The research was done by a retired Danish professor of psychology, Helmuth Nyborg, and he really does believe that he has found the explanation for the persistence of religious belief in the modern world: believers are measurably more stupid than atheists. His tone of elevated scorn will be familiar:

The study begins with two sets of a priori assumptions. First, [intelligent] people have a brain based biological capacity for solving complex problems, and for acting rationally when confronted with fundamental questions about existence, human nature, underlying causes, or the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Second, [unintelligent] people lack this protection and are therefore unfairly ordained to live in a pre-rational world based on poorly validated evidence and little accumulated insight. They accordingly often ﬁnd themselves in cognitively, emotionally, or morally challenging situations and have to use plan B, that is, to call upon easily comprehensible religious authoritative guidance and to submit more or less uncritically to culturally given stereotyped rituals. Frustration with their life may also make them seek redemption or faith in an after life.
High-IQ people are able to curb magical, supernatural thinking and tend to deal with the uncertainties of life on a rational-critical-empirical basis, and to become prosperous servants of society, whereas low-IQ people easily become trapped in religious magical thinking, in addition to achieving, earning and serving less well.

How nice to have this intuition validated by modern science and the results published in a respectable, peer-reviewed journal (Intelligence).

But is there not an overtone perhaps distressing to progressive opinion in professor Nyborg's thought? Should we really be quite so smug at his scientific discovery that Baptists make rotten servants? Should we really be quite so confident about the conclusions of a man who puts so much weight on IQ and its hereditary nature?

So I did a little digging around. I downloaded the paper, which costs, alas, $37.50 with VAT, and read it carefully through. It turns out that Nyborg is an enthusiast for scientific racism. It's not just believers who are more stupid, in his world: it's black people and women, too. In a collaboration with Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, he measured religiosity against IQ in 137 countries, and concluded that low IQ countries always had higher rates of religion. It's not religion that makes you stupid, he told a Christian paper at the time: but if you live in a very religious country, you are very likely to be stupid. And of course the correlation of religion and poverty is in global terms very clear, while the most religious continent of all is Africa.

In the paper under review, he writes,

The ultimate causal level presumes that geographically separated peoples were subjected to different evolutionary pressures over extended time-periods. Those living under the hardest of evolutionary pressures, in cold or arctic areas, were gradually and over many generations selected for enhanced g (for details of the Climate Theory, see Lynn, 2006; Rushton, 2000). They had to replace ancient pre-rational supernatural beliefs with more effective rational approaches in order to survive under the harsh conditions given. People living in warm or tropical areas enjoyed in general more relaxed selective conditions, and low g individuals were not severely punished, as their survival was not seriously compromised by uncritical reference to ancient supernatural thinking, irrational beliefs in souls, invisible worlds, Gods, forces, angels, devils, hell, or holy spirits. A contemporary belief that supernatural forces control behavior, feelings and thinking is accordingly seen as a reminiscence of pre-historic animism and magical thinking.

Oops!

(In case anyone is tempted to take this seriously, it's worth pointing out that one of the most demographically successful populations in human history were the New England puritans, many of them descendants of Vikings, who managed to combine life in a very cold climate with fervent religiosity.)

But Nyborg is entirely serious. He argues – in the spirit of Murray and Herrnstein's Bell Curve – that intelligence is IQ; IQ is biological, and biology is destiny:

High g individuals will gravitate towards atheism or science, will discard supernatural phenomena, and will learn fast and prosper. Average g individuals will ﬁnd one of several moderate liberal denominations more to their taste, will display average learning, and will accordingly assume an intermediate socio-economic standing. Low g individuals will to submit to one of the many dogmatic denominations, will be slow learners, and will attain a low socio-economic status that accord with their limited cognitive
complexity and closed mind. Variations in disbelief, denominational complexity, educability and income are accordingly expected to follow from essentially heritable g differences, and to manifest themselves as today's mainly biologically brain based religious class differences.

By now I imagine that you are recoiling from these ideas. The belief that religion can simply be explained by stupidity suddenly looks a lot less attractive when it is presented scientifically by an intelligent man who also believes that poverty, too, can be explained by stupidity, and stupidity in its turn by race.

All of a sudden, people start remembering that IQ doesn't measure anything at all except IQ, and so on.

The trouble with this is that IQ, whether or not it measures intelligence, does measure qualities that are important for success in the modern world. Scientific racism is wrong and wicked, but to prove it so is not as simple as one might like.

The Flynn Effect

Just about a year ago, I went to a lecture in Cambridge by James Flynn, the American-born New Zealand psychologist who discovered the "Flynn effect", which shows that IQ scores everywhere have risen astonishingly throughout the 20th century. He is one of the most interesting and passionate social democratic thinkers I have ever come across. He does not think that IQ scores are meaningless. But his careful unpicking of the possible reasons for the Flynn effect – essentially that modern, urban life rewards and stimulates the kind of thinking which some components of a modern IQ test measure – offers another way to look at these correlations.

The thing that I found really fascinating in Flynn's lecture was his discussion of what makes for very low IQ scores. It is one of the paradoxes of the Flynn effect that it implies not only that our children will be smarter than we are, but that our recent ancestors were extremely stupid. Extrapolating back to 1900 on the two fastest-improving components of the IQ tests suggests that schoolchildren then would have had a mean IQ of either 50 or 70. "How did Englishmen play cricket in 1900" asked Flynn. "Taking their mean IQ at face value, most of them would need a minder to position them in the field, tell them when to bat, and tell them when the innings was over."

The answer, he says, is that one of the things that IQ tests measure is "post-scientific operational thinking". This is not the same as scientific thinking. But it is thinking about the world in terms of the categories by which science understands it. For instance, if you ask, "What do dogs and rabbits have in common", the post-scientific answer, that we would now regard as evidence of intelligence, is that they are both mammals. The pre-scientific answer is that you use a dog to hunt a rabbit. That's what matters about the two animals, not what class they belong to.

It is that kind of difference in reasoning which accounts for the huge measured IQ differences between urban and rural Brazil, and, of course, the fantastically low IQs measured in African countries.

But could something similar be true of religion? In particular, could dogmatic and fundamentalist religion be more useful to the poor and wretched? Could it lift them to the stage where they could experiment with doubt, with nuance, with novelistic thinking? The history of the early Methodists suggests exactly this. Remember John Wesley's reflection on his own success:

The Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.

This was a very much longer post than I set out to write. But I have been ill all week, and have not the strength right now to make it shorter. It might provide at least some matter for reflection.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 19 Dec 2008 | 6:13 pm

Does thinking about sex make you sneeze?

Two UK doctors believe that uncontrolled sneezing triggered by erotic thoughts is an under-diagnosed problem. Prompted by a middle-aged patient who described suffering bouts of sneezing whenever he thought about sex, the pair tried to get to the bottom of the phenomenon.

They found just one similar case in the medical literature – a case reported in 1972 of a 69-year-old man who suffered severe sneezing after orgasm. But a trawl of online chatrooms threw up lots of people who claimed to experience the problem. "It may also be seen as embarrassing and people perhaps don't want to talk about it," said Mahmood Bhutta a surgeon at Wexham Park Hospital near Slough and one of the authors.

They point out that other seemingly unconnected stimuli can trigger sneezing, such as bright light, plucking eyebrow hairs and having a full stomach.

So does sex, or even just thinking about sex, make you sneeze? Or maybe other odd things set you off?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 19 Dec 2008 | 5:23 pm

Men Flirt with Risk to Score Women

Men make up most of the world’s skydivers and rock climbers. It’s likely not just for thrills.
Source: Livescience.com | 19 Dec 2008 | 5:15 pm

Bizarre condition triggers sneezing after sex

Thinking about sex or experiencing an orgasm sends some people into an uncontrolled bout of sneezing, and according to two researchers the problem may be more common than the medical profession had realised.

The doctors who investigated the link are not yet sure why sex and sneezing are linked in some people, but they suspect it is due to a faulty connection in the autonomic nervous system – the system that exercises unconscious control of, among other things, heart rate, digestion and pupil dilation.

Dr Harold Maxwell, a consultant psychiatrist at West Middlesex University Hospital in London, was first alerted to the condition when a middle-aged male patient described uncontrollable fits of sneezing whenever he thought about sex. When Maxwell and his colleague Mahmood Bhutta, a surgeon at Wexham Park Hospital near Slough set out to investigate how common the problem is they could find only one similar case in the medical literature – a case reported in 1972 of a 69-year-old man who suffered severe sneezing after orgasm. "It may also be seen as embarrassing and people perhaps don't want to talk about it," said Bhutta.

To get some indication of how common the problem is he searched internet chatrooms for people discussing the issue. This highly unscientific survey identified 17 men and women who reported sneezing immediately after having sexual thoughts and three people who sneezed after orgasm. In four of the chatroom threads, respondents also said they had suffered the same problems, but in no case did people say they sneezed not only after sexual thoughts but also after orgasm. Bhutta believes the seemingly bizarre phenomenon may be more common than doctors had previously thought.

There are other examples of unrelated events triggering sneezing. According to a large Swedish study, 25% of people sneeze in response to bright light. Bhutta said that people who have the condition simply don't see it as unusual. "They think that everybody does that," he said. Much rarer are people who sneeze after a meal when they have a full stomach. This has been identified by scientists in just two families. "Possibly that is much more common that we think as well," said Bhutta.

Both phenomena are genetically inherited.

Sneezing and sex may be linked by a faulty connection in the autonomic nervous system that controls both the sneeze reflex and sexual responses. A similar mechanism is thought to underlie the observation that in some people massaging an eyeball can dramatically slow their heart rate.

"Further investigation in this field may help us to understand the sneeze reflex in more depth, and also allow us to give explanation and reassurance to the possibly significant number of people affected by this curious phenomenon," Bhutta and Maxwell wrote in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 19 Dec 2008 | 4:40 pm

The Truth Behind Global Jellyfish Swarms

A "jellyologist" explains the mysteries of large swarms of jellyfish that can cover hundreds of square miles of ocean.
Source: Livescience.com | 19 Dec 2008 | 4:14 pm

First Commercial Spaceport Gets Green Light

Spaceport America gets approval to create a facility for commercial space launches.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 19 Dec 2008 | 4:09 pm

EU agrees deal on fishing quotas

EU ministers raise next year's quota for North Sea cod, but tighten limits on other catches as many stocks are at risk.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Dec 2008 | 3:56 pm

Safety probe of plastics chemicals urged

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. regulators should examine whether a controversial class of chemicals found in many plastic products including children's toys can hurt people, a panel of experts said on Thursday.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 3:42 pm

The Energy Debates: Nuclear Power

The Energy Debates is a LiveScience series about the pros, cons, policy debates, myths and facts related to various alternative energy ideas.
Source: Livescience.com | 19 Dec 2008 | 3:20 pm

Santa Likely Pulled by All-Female Reindeer Team

The antlers on Santa's reindeer suggest they're all females, say researchers.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 19 Dec 2008 | 3:20 pm

Gorilla diary

Joy as rangers find gorilla survivors of 2007 'massacre'
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Dec 2008 | 3:11 pm

Switching the Sun - How to Convert Solar Energy

Where photovoltaic cells come from, who made that first ones, why they make power, and what you get for your investment in solar electric systems. It all starts with a silicon sandwich.
Source: Livescience.com | 19 Dec 2008 | 2:32 pm

Daddy day care: dinosaur fathers guarded the eggs

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - You can call it dino daddy day care. Scientists who examined the fossilized remains of three types of medium-sized dinosaurs found with large clutches of eggs have concluded that the males rather than the females seem to have guarded the nests and brooded the eggs.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 19 Dec 2008 | 2:31 pm

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