Traditional Risk Assessment Tools Do Not Accurately Predict Coronary Heart Disease

The Framingham and National Cholesterol Education Program tools do not accurately predict coronary heart disease, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2009 | 5:00 am

New Evidence That Humans Make Aspirin's Active Principle -- Salicylic Acid

Scientists in the United Kingdom are reporting new evidence that humans can make their own salicylic acid (SA) -- the material formed when aspirin breaks down in the body. SA, which is responsible for aspirin's renowned effects in relieving pain and inflammation, may be the first in a new class of bioregulators, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2009 | 4:00 am

Unique Skeletal Muscle Design Contributes To Spine Stability

The novel design of a deep muscle along the spinal column called the multifidus muscle may in fact be key to spinal support and a healthy back, according to researchers. Their findings about the potentially important "scaffolding" role of this poorly understood muscle has been published on line in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2009 | 4:00 am

Contrary To Earlier Predictions, Older Driver Fatal Crashes Trend Down

Despite growing numbers on the road, fewer older drivers died in crashes and fewer were involved in fatal collisions during 1997-2006 than in years past, a new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study reports. Crash deaths among drivers 70 and older fell 21 percent during the period, reversing an upward trend, even as the population of people 70 and older rose 10 percent.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2009 | 4:00 am

Few DNA Repair Genes Maintain Association With Cancer In Field Synopsis

Variants of numerous DNA repair genes initially appeared to be statistically significantly associated with cancer risk in epidemiological studies. When the data from individual studies are pooled, however, few DNA repair gene variants appear truly associated with increased cancer risk, according to a new field synopsis.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2009 | 4:00 am

Early Childhood Diet May Influence Future Health

Surprising new research published in the Journal of Physiology, indicates a direct connection between an adult's propensity to put on weight and our early childhood diet.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2009 | 4:00 am

Structural Defects Introduced Into Carbon Nanotubes Could Lead The Way To Carbon Nanotube Circuits

Structural defects introduced into carbon nanotubes could lead the way to carbon nanotube circuits, new research shows.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2009 | 4:00 am

Primate Culture Is Just A Stone's Throw Away From Human Evolution, Study Finds

For 30 years, scientists have been studying stone-handling behavior in several troops of Japanese macaques to catch a unique glimpse of primate culture. By watching these monkeys acquire and maintain behavioral traditions from generation to generation, the scientists have gained insight into the cultural evolution of humans.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Midlife Coffee And Tea Drinking May Protect Against Late-life Dementia

Midlife coffee drinking can decrease the risk of dementia/Alzheimer's disease later in life. The study found that coffee drinkers at midlife had lower risk for dementia and AD later in life compared to those drinking no or only little coffee. The lowest risk (65% decreased) was found among moderate coffee drinkers (drinking 3-5 cups of coffee/day).
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Why Bladder Cancer Is Deadlier For Some

Bladder cancer is much more likely to be deadly for women and African-Americans, but the reasons long believed to explain the phenomenon account for only part of the differences for such patients compared to their white and male counterparts, according to new results.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Human Hair: The Next Green Fertilizer?

Scientists test the claim that human hair helps plants grow. Guess what? It works.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 15 Jan 2009 | 2:20 pm

Go-ahead for new Heathrow runway

Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon tells MPs that the government has approved plans for a third runway at Heathrow.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 Jan 2009 | 2:18 pm

Lightning Helps Predict Hurricane Fury

Lightning patterns near the cores of storms, can help predict hurricane intensity.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 15 Jan 2009 | 2:10 pm

Why Were Great Cities Built in Quake Zone? (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - The seats of ancient civilizations were great meeting places. Trade routes, ideas, and cultural currents converged there-as did tectonic plates, says archaeological geologist Eric R. Force of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Jan 2009 | 1:52 pm

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - The eastern half of the nation was in a deep freeze, with snow, blasts of icy air and temperatures stuck far below freezing. The Pacific Coast, on the other hand, was enjoying unseasonably mild weather.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Jan 2009 | 12:35 pm

Ukraine rejects Russia's latest gas request (AP)

AP - Ukraine rejected Russia's latest request to pipe natural gas westward to increasingly frustrated EU consumers on Thursday, deepening the bitter economic and political dispute that has paralyzed energy shipments to Europe.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Jan 2009 | 12:13 pm

Has Nasa found life on Mars?

Scientists have detected methane on Mars before, but until now the evidence has been shaky. Nasa's work is impressively thorough and clearly shows vast clouds of methane emanating from the planet's north during the summer months.

Those searching for extraterrestrial life get excited about methane because on Earth it is often a sign of living organisms. Most creatures release methane when they break down food and turn it into energy. Sheep and cows burp it out. Lots of microbes do the bug equivalent.

But methane can be made by geological processes too. Huge amounts of the gas seep from deep ocean vents and from volcanoes without the help of life. What is intriguing is that for similar processes to do this on mars, the planet must be far more geologically active than scientists thought.

So far Nasa has no way of knowing whether its methane plumes are the collective emissions of billions of microbial Martians, or some more mundane process involving rocks and moisture. As ever, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and Nasa's methane plumes are not it.

To find out for sure, Nasa scientists must train their telescopes on the methane plumes once more and look for other chemicals that truly indicate life.

Martian microbes could live just below the permafrost of the planet, but could be ancient and hardy organisms living at the base of the permafrost, some 8km beneath the surface. The prospect is tantalising and will surely spur fresh efforts to explore our most intriguing celestial neighbour.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 15 Jan 2009 | 12:11 pm

Adam Rutherford: To stop embryonic and stem cell research would be immoral; it has enormous potential for alleviating human suffering

The question: Should we allow research using human-animal hybrid embryos?

Zealots on both sides often overemphasise the dichotomy between faith and reason. Yes, faith is inherently irrational, but empirically we know that faith and rationality are not mutually exclusive: there continue to be terrific scientists who believe in gods. People are funny like that.

The relationship between science and the church will always have a loggerheaded base. Organised religion is by its very nature conservative, concerned primarily with homeostasis: trying to maintain things as they are. Science is the opposite: an ever-changing continuum seeking potentially temporary truths. That's not capricious, it's a virtue of how knowledge is acquired.

So when science provides the advent of progress that upset the status quo, often churches reacts badly. It took almost 400 years before the pope apologised to Galileo for dissing his obviously correct observations of our heliocentric solar system. Religions of all flavours have historically and continue to oppose vaccination for myriad preventable diseases for all manner of ideological reasons.

This year, research will flourish using embryonic stem cells, human-animal hybrid cells and other newish systems that prompt some religious folk to get their panties truly in a bunch. Expect bounding leaps in these fields in coming months, as president-elect Obama in all likelihood lifts George Bush's ideological ban on federal funding of aspects of stem cell research in the US. Basic research focuses on understanding how cells work, while this information kicks open the doors for treating fertility problems and many terrible diseases including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Opposition to this research centres on arbitrary definitions of what constitutes life and the notion of "playing God".

It goes beyond the diktats of old men who lead churches. One doesn't have to be a Catholic to feel uncomfortable with human-animal hybrids or embryonic stem cell research. These are emotive and ambiguous questions and often the arguments against are not founded in reason or up-to-date information. The loudest voice though is that of the Vatican, (though sections of other Abrahamic faiths contribute) and this year we will again see religion resisting scientific advance. Nothing new there.

Is it more justified now? It is my belief that we are approaching an Oppenheimer moment for biology. The acceleration of discovery in the study of cells and genetics in recent years is enabling us to do things with living tissue previously inconceivable. Last week a baby girl was born who had been selected to be free of a breast cancer susceptibility gene. It's possible that later this year Craig Venter will do something that has only occurred once before in 3bn years: he will generate a new life form from scratch. We are not far from being able to create any cell type from any other. Our ability to control and direct cells to our beck and call is stronger than ever. Are we equipped to meet the ethical questions posed by the speed of discovery?

I believe that we are. Scientific research, in principle, occurs in a moral vacuum. Quite rightly though, research is actually incredibly tightly regulated and controlled to align with the prevailing ethical considerations. It is my contention that scientists these days are amongst the most ethically aware strata of society: every grant application, every experiment, is subject to strict ethical committee approval. And I don't know any scientists who bemoan this.

To stop embryonic and hybrid stem cell research would be immoral because of the enormous potential that these lines of inquiry have for alleviating human suffering. I recognise, but strongly disagree with religious ideological opposition to scientific progress. I do not believe in ensoulment, and do not believe that asserting opinion devoid of evidence pushes forwards knowledge. Human-cow hybrid cells are not "monstrous", as Cardinal Keith O'Brien once foolishly declared, and the legislation that regulates this research specifically prevents the hybrids from being allowed to develop into anything recognisably human.

Should this research continue? The answer is emphatically that it must. These avenues are the best routes to that most Christian virtue of caring for the sick. I hope that the rapid advance to curing disease will prompt established religions to reconsider their dogma a little quicker than they did for Galileo.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 15 Jan 2009 | 10:13 am

Asian telescopes to kick-start stargazing marathon (AFP)

AFP - Radio telescopes across Australia, China and Japan will Thursday launch a global 33-hour stargazing marathon to mark the start of the UN's International Year of Astronomy, scientists said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Jan 2009 | 5:11 am

Government makes decision on gray wolf protection (AP)

AP - The Bush administration on Wednesday announced plans to remove gray wolves in the western Great Lakes and northern Rocky Mountains regions from the federal endangered species list.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Jan 2009 | 2:22 am

Alaska plans to sue over beluga whale protection (AP)

AP - The state will sue over increased federal protections for beluga whales in Cook Inlet, officials announced Wednesday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Jan 2009 | 2:01 am

Eye study shows how deadly form of malaria kills

LONDON (Reuters) - The human eye can help doctors understand how an acute form of malaria attacks the brain, researchers said on Wednesday, opening the way to new and better treatments for one of Africa's biggest killers.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 15 Jan 2009 | 12:27 am

Response: You can't label eco-lights as dim, ugly and expensive any more

Stuart Jeffries' romantic eulogy to the common lightbulb, which he described as "the perfect union of technology and poetry", also noted that incandescent lightbulbs are much better at inefficiently burning your hands than efficiently producing light (Why the end of the lightbulb is a dark day for us all, 5 January).

But he then spoilt this observation by saying that this was a good thing. And, bizarrely, he then went on to say that a world without 100W lightbulbs - which would help Europe to avoid "30m tonnes of CO2 yearly, nearly half the 2006 greenhouse emissions of Sweden" - would be "dreary".

Supermarkets voluntarily decided to stop replacing their existing stock of 100W lightbulbs after New Year's Day. But despite the best efforts of the majority of the world's scientists, Jeffries has somehow managed to remain totally oblivious to, or unconcerned by, the hidden financial costs and environmental harm associated with keeping tens of millions of wasteful incandescent lightbulbs alight.

Lighting accounts for roughly 10% of the UK's electricity use, and represents one of the quickest and simplest ways of saving energy. Across Europe, wasteful lightbulbs keep the equivalent of 10 large power stations pumping out up to 50m tonnes of CO2 each year. Given the repeated failure of the UK and many other European countries to reduce their carbon emissions, the decision to phase out incandescent lightbulbs is, in fact, an exciting and vital first step.

Jeffries complained that eco-lights were "dimmer, colder, uglier and often more expensive". While this certainly used to be the case in the 1970s, and perhaps even the early 2000s, this is not a fair reflection of the smaller bulbs - giving better value and brighter, warmer and quicker light - now available. Energy-saving compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) are not perfect, but the best designs can cost as little as 81p - and each save £9 per year in electricity and £60 to £140 over their lifetime.

Fortunately, lighting manufacturers now understand that change is inevitable and have started to produce far better products. I've recently started using a 4W LED table lamp to replace a 40W lightbulb, which is dimmable, instantly bright and contains zero mercury - and I look forward to other brighter LED-based lamps becoming cheaper and more widely available.

Of course, compact fluorescent lamps should be made 100 times easier to recycle, and medical exemptions should be offered to those who are visually impaired or suffer migraines; but these issues are totally solvable and shouldn't be used to delay necessary change.

So there is absolutely no scope for Jeffries's final slur of "eco-triumphalism", as there is still so much to do: phasing out lightbulbs is not nearly enough on its own.

Unlike Jeffries, I'm pretty sure that Archimedes would have considered the decision to phase out lightbulbs a real "eureka moment" for humankind, and I sincerely hope it will provide a firm launch pad for all the other, much bigger, improvements that we need to make to our gadgets, cars and homes.

• Matt Prescott is director of Ban the Bulb
matt.prescott@gmail.com

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 15 Jan 2009 | 12:01 am

A galaxy of helpful people

When Dr Chris Lintott, a researcher in the department of physics at the University of Oxford, first considered launching a website to ask the public to help classify photographs of 1m galaxies, he assumed it would probably take three or four years to complete. Galaxy Zoo (galaxyzoo.org), launched in July 2007, was supposed to be a side project; instead it has turned into the biggest citizen-science experiment on the web.

Galaxies can be classified as spiral, elliptical or merging (when two come together). The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS (www.sdss.org), has images of nearly a million galaxies; what those images don't have in their raw form is the information about what class of galaxy is pictured.

Lintott had hoped that each image would get 10 classifications, or "clicks", and that the public would prove able to classify galaxies accurately according to their features. Three weeks and 10m clicks later, he was proved right: the public is capable of classifying galaxies as well as, or even better than, professional astronomers. And quickly, too. "It was like being hit by a tidal wave," says Lintott.

The images have now had more than 70m clicks in total, allowing Lintott and his team to go beyond simply sorting galaxies into spiral, elliptical or merging categories, into further research. "You can have confidence, as we can say, '100% of people think that's a spiral galaxy, so it's really, really spirally'," says Lintott.

Human zoo

His team was allocated precious time on the IRAM 30m radio telescope in southern Spain, and was easily able to select just 40 galaxies from the original sample to study, safe in the knowledge that the scientists had exactly what they needed.

After Galaxy Zoo's initial success, Lintott wanted to take a closer look at merging galaxies. At 5pm one Tuesday he posted a spreadsheet listing a selection to the forums and asked members to take a look and email him the best. Then he went to the pub.

One "Zooite", Richard Proctor, a telecoms consultant, spotted the spreadsheet and thought: "I can build a webpage to do that!" By the time Lintott logged back in, the web interface was already in use.

"What was going to be a quick little study turned into a much larger study of about 45,000 images," says Proctor. Each image has now had more than 25 clicks, with four particularly committed souls having seen every single one. The first academic paper about those merging galaxies has been submitted, and Proctor is listed as a co-author.

It's not the first time collaborative astronomy has proved a hit online. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) project created the most powerful distributed computer ever with its Seti@home project launched in May 1999, which used spare processing power on home computers to process data collected from a specific wavelength to see if aliens were trying to get in touch. It was used by 5.2 million people and offered, at its peak, 265 teraflops (a trillion calculations a second) of processing power.

Similarly, Nasa's Clickworkers project in 2000-01, found that ordinary people were just as good as astronomers at identifying craters on Mars in photos.

The biggest influence on Galaxy Zoo, however, is Stardust@home, where users search for tiny interstellar dust particles within images returned by the 2006 Stardust mission. Thousands of users have logged on to the site.

"Stardust@home was a real inspiration for us," says Lintott. "We thought, 'If 20,000 people will look for dust grains in their spare time, surely they will look at beautiful pictures of galaxies?'"

But unlike those projects, where the task is set from the top down, the Galaxy Zoo community has its own ideas about what can be done with the SDSS data.

"Up until now," says Proctor, "the professional astronomers have come up with things that want classifying and we've classified them." But there are thousands of irregular galaxies - neither spiral nor elliptical - that the professionals don't have time to examine. So the community decided to do it themselves, drafting a list of questions and building a web interface to make classification easier.

"Once we've got some results," promises Proctor, "we'll publish them for everybody to use, and then see if we can find out anything useful. Given that the biggest study of irregular galaxies to date looked at around 150, and we've got 9,000, we must find something!"

Lintott is supportive of the irregulars project: "They are doing everything professional astronomers would do," he says. "It's up there with any work I've done."

It's not just the volume of research that can be done by collaborating with the public that's important to Lintott, but also the opening up of scientific research to anyone with a browser and a little time.

"By making the data available to everyone," he says, "whatever stage you are in your learning, you can do research."

And a surprising cross-section of people are doing just that. Hanny van Arkel is a Dutch primary school teacher who discovered a strange object, now called Hanny's Voorwerp (Dutch for "object"), near a spiral galaxy. "I thought it was fun," she says of Galaxy Zoo, "but I didn't expect that it would become such a big part of my life. I've learned a lot and it's a good way of participating in science."

Elisabeth Baeten, a Belgian secretary, is one of only four people who has seen every image in the galaxy merger project. "I also classify the irregulars," she says, "and in between I cruise the universe looking for asteroids and gravitational lenses."

In future, it will be much easier for both scientists and enthusiasts to take part in such projects. Not only are Lintott and his colleagues finalising Galaxy Zoo 2, which will examine galaxies in much more detail, they are also building a platform that will allow any scientist to upload data and tap into the vast potential of the internet.

"Our users are clamouring for stuff to do," says Lintott. "The problem of having too much data to pay close attention to is not just an astronomical problem. It's astronomical in scale, but it's not just us."

The new project will allow scientists to upload their videos of elephants, pictures of galaxies, or chemical structures, then specify what they want done with them. They can either use the provided templates, or customise their project. Lintott describes it as the scientific version of the popular blogging software WordPress.

And there are many uses of such a platform. Nasa has high-quality images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, most of which are simply filed. And study of the pictures produced by this year's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will allow scientists to build a history of asteroid bombardment of the inner solar system.

"It's like Nasa does the map and we'll write the guide book," says Lintott.

Indeed, it would be possible for anyone to upload data, including amateur astronomers. "More than a million separate observations a year are recorded by amateurs," says Lintott. "That's a huge pile of data that, at the minute, professionals slowly sort through, but we can hand that back to the amateurs to analyse.

"We may," he jokes, "just be putting ourselves out of a job."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 15 Jan 2009 | 12:01 am

Europe expects busy year in space

Europe will launch two flagship space telescopes this year, and three satellites that will acquire key data about ice, gravity and soils on Earth.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Jan 2009 | 11:51 pm

Mistaken Identity: Texas State Dinosaur Needs Name Change (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Not every state in the nation has a state dinosaur, but Texas does. Now, however, the extinct creature could get a new official name.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Jan 2009 | 10:21 pm

Report: Older Drivers in Fewer Deadly Crashes

Reports shows that while number of older drivers is up, they are involved in fewer crashes.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Jan 2009 | 10:14 pm

Why Were Great Cities Built in Quake Zone?

11 of 13 great ancient cities were near a major earthquake fault.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Jan 2009 | 10:14 pm

USDA unable to weed out unapproved modified foods (Reuters)

Reuters - The U.S. food supply is at risk of being invaded by unapproved imports of genetically modified crops and livestock, a USDA internal audit report released Wednesday said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Jan 2009 | 9:49 pm

USDA unable to weed out unapproved modified foods

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. food supply is at risk of being invaded by unapproved imports of genetically modified crops and livestock, a USDA internal audit report released Wednesday said.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Jan 2009 | 9:49 pm

Space shuttle is moved to Florida launch pad

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA moved space shuttle Discovery to its launch pad on Wednesday for a planned February 12 launch that will kick off the U.S. space agency's last full year of shuttle missions before the fleet is retired in 2010.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Jan 2009 | 9:03 pm

Exoplanet Atmospheres Detected from Earth

Ground-based telescope detect thermal emission from exoplanet atmosphere.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Jan 2009 | 8:07 pm

New Survey Finds More than 600 Asian Elephants

A new survey of dung has turned up a population of endangered Asian elephants living in a Malaysian park.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Jan 2009 | 7:48 pm

Possible Mammoth Tusk Found on SoCal Island

A complete tusk believed to belong to a mammoth is uncovered off the Calif. coast.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Jan 2009 | 7:29 pm

Avian Dino Ancestor Heard Like an Emu

A new 3-D image of Archaeopteryx's inner ear suggests it heard like modern-day emu.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Jan 2009 | 7:08 pm

Bendy gadget future for graphene

One-atom-thick layers of carbon look set to permit ultra high-speed computers and flexible, transparent electronics.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Jan 2009 | 7:05 pm

Changing times

What would the US make of a stem cell U-turn?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Jan 2009 | 6:22 pm

History Corrected by 400-year-old Moon Map

Englishman Thomas Harriot made the first drawing of the Moon through a telescope several months before Galileo.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Jan 2009 | 6:16 pm

Oddball 'Blue Stragglers' Are Stellar Cannibals

Relationships between globular cluster mass and number of binary star systems points to stellar cannibalism as source of 'blue stragglers'.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Jan 2009 | 6:14 pm

The Next Step with Richard Hart

Join Richard Hart and his crew across the US and around the world as they get their hands - and camera lenses - on fascinating and disruptive technologies.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Jan 2009 | 6:12 pm

Roll Your Own Gadget: Electronic "Legos"

Inventor-incubating think tank takes a building block approach to building just about anything.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Jan 2009 | 6:06 pm

Sexual Pheromones: Myth or Reality?

The jury is still out on whether humans can communicate via chemical signals.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Jan 2009 | 6:01 pm

Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people, say psychologists

The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending selflessness of Dorothea in Middlemarch and Mr Darcy's personal transformation in Pride and Prejudice helped to uphold social order and encouraged altruistic genes to spread through Victorian society, according to an analysis by evolutionary psychologists.

Their research suggests that classic British novels from the 19th century not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals' hunger for power and dominance. For example in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke turns her back on wealth to help the poor, while Bram Stoker's nocturnal menace, Count Dracula, comes to represent the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.

The team of evolutionary psychologists, led by Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri in St Louis, applied Darwin's theory of evolution to literature by asking 500 academics to fill in questionnaires on characters from 201 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, rate their personality traits, and comment on their emotional response to the characters.

They found that leading characters fell into groups that mirrored the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth were suppressed for the good of the community.

The effect of such moralistic literature was to uphold and instil a sense of fairness and altruism in society at large, the researchers claim in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. "By enforcing these norms, humans succeed in controlling 'free riders' or 'cheaters' and they thus make it possible for genuinely altruistic genes to survive within a social group," they write.

Jonathan Gottschall, a co-author at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, told New Scientist magazine that in Victorian novels, dominant behaviour is stigmatised. "Bad guys and girls are just dominance machines, they are obsessed with getting ahead, they rarely have pro-social behaviours," he said. But the more cooperative a group became, the more likely it was to survive and spread its values.

A few characters were judged to have both good and bad traits, such as Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen's Mr Darcy. The conflicts they demonstrate reflect the strains of maintaining such a cooperative social order, Carroll said.

Stoker's Dracula and many of George Eliot's characters were more black and white. "Dracula is a nobleman and represents aristocracy at its most brutal. He's not just asserting prestige, he's actually taking people over and absorbing their life blood," he said.

The researchers believe that novels have the same effect on society as oral cautionary tales of old. "Just as hunter-gatherers talk of cheating and bullying as a way of staying keyed to the goal that bad guys must not win, novels key us to the same issues," said Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the Unversity of Southern California. "They have a function that continues to contribute to the quality and structure of group life."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 14 Jan 2009 | 6:00 pm

Mistaken Identity: Texas State Dinosaur Needs Name Change

New research could give one state dinosaur a name change.
Source: Livescience.com | 14 Jan 2009 | 5:40 pm

Space shuttle Discovery readies for Feb. launch (AP)

AP - NASA has moved space shuttle Discovery to its launch pad for a February supply run to the international space station.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Jan 2009 | 5:39 pm

Neanderthal Weaponry Lacked Projectile Advantage

An early human invention may have sealed the fate of Neanderthals.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Jan 2009 | 4:47 pm

Obama Makes NASA Pick

A retired Air force General has reportedly been asked to lead NASA.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Jan 2009 | 4:47 pm

SLIDE SHOW: Clues to a Brutal Culture

Despite archaeological finds, the ancient Nazca people remain an enigma.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Jan 2009 | 4:33 pm

Earliest bird 'heard like an emu'

The earliest known bird, the magpie-sized Archaeopteryx lithographica, had hearing like a modern emu.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Jan 2009 | 4:19 pm

Did an Englishman beat Galileo to the first moon observation?

Thomas Harriot, a wealthy but publicity-shy astronomer and mapmaker, produced a series of exquisite lunar drawings, one of which is dated 26 July 1609 (above), pre-dating Galileo's much-celebrated observations of the moon by six months.

A composite drawing of the moon dating to 1612 or 1613 (below) is considered by some experts to mark the birth of modern cartography. The lunar drawings by Harriot will form part of an exhibition at West Sussex Record Office in Chichester in July to mark the International Year of Astronomy.

"Crucially one of his maps is dated, which proves Harriot pre-dated Galileo, who has always been thought to have done the first observation of the moon through a telescope," said Alison McCann, an archivist at the West Sussex Record Office. "Galileo was very good at self-publicity but Harriot wasn't interested. He didn't publicise his work and this is why few have heard of him."

Galileo was hard up and in search of fame and fortune, but Harriot, who had money but also two friends in the Tower of London for political crimes, had no wish to draw attention to himself.

The maps belong to Lord Egremont of Petworth House in West Sussex and are looked after by the West Sussex Record Office. Lord Egremont is a descendant of the Earl of Northumberland, who was Harriot's first employer. A further exhibition of the drawings will take place at the Science Museum in London from July.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 14 Jan 2009 | 4:11 pm

Ancient bird dung gives clues to pre-human New Zealand

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Researchers have managed to get a peek into pre-human New Zealand after finding feces of giant extinct birds buried in caves and rock shelters in remote areas across southern New Zealand.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Jan 2009 | 3:13 pm

NASA Wants in on Suborbital Space Rides

NASA is taking proposals from researchers for rides on commercial suborbital ships.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Jan 2009 | 2:56 pm

Nazca's Trophy Heads Culled From Own Culture

Analysis of heads recovered from the Nazca culture show they were taken as sacrifices.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 14 Jan 2009 | 2:25 pm

Elephant troubles

No-one wins when humans and elephants fight
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Jan 2009 | 12:51 pm