Science Headlines for January 18, 2009

How We Are Tricked Into Into Giving Away Our Personal Information

We human beings don’t always do as we have been taught, and organizations are poorly prepared for IT security attacks that target human weaknesses. Since it is difficult to change people’s behavior, it doesn’t help to provide training about how to behave securely. Scientists are studying attacks that are considered social engineering in IT contexts.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Game Theory Explains Why You Can’t Hurry Love

Scientists have developed a mathematical model of the mating game to help explain why courtship is often protracted. The study shows that extended courtship enables a male to signal his suitability to a female and enables the female to screen out the male if he is unsuitable as a mate.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Slight Changes In Climate May Trigger Abrupt Ecosystem Responses

Slight changes in climate may trigger major abrupt ecosystem responses that are not easily reversible. Some of these responses, including insect outbreaks, wildfire, and forest dieback, may adversely affect people and ecosystems and their plants and animals.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Intake Of Certain Fatty Acid Appears To Improve Neurodevelopment For Preterm Girls, But Not Boys

Preterm infant girls who received a high amount of dietary docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid) had higher measures of neurodevelopment than preterm girls who received a standard amount of DHA, but this effect was not seen among preterm boys, according to a study in the Jan. 14 issue of JAMA.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Novel Use For Old Compound In Cancer Treatment Found

Scientists have found a potentially beneficial use for a once-abandoned compound in the prevention and treatment of neuroblastoma, one of the most devastating cancers among young children.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Largest-to-date Genetic Snapshot Of Iceland 1,000 Years Ago Completed

Scientists at deCODE genetics have completed the largest study of ancient DNA from a single population ever undertaken. Analyzing mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to offspring, from 68 skeletal remains, the study provides a detailed look at how a contemporary population differs from that of its ancestors.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Busted Spine-Discs? Researchers Are Growing New Ones, Bioengineering Intervertebral Discs

Each year, 40 to 60 percent of American adults suffer from chronic back pain. For patients diagnosed with severe degenerative disc disease, neurosurgeons must perform surgery called discectomy — removing the IVD — followed by a fusion of the vertebrate bones to stabilize the spine. Even after all that effort, the patient's back will likely not feel the same as before their injury.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Abnormal DNA Repair Genes May Predict Pancreatic Cancer Risk

Abnormalities in genes that repair mistakes in DNA replication may help identify people who are at high risk of developing pancreatic cancer, scientists report in Clinical Cancer Research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Scientists Resolve Mystery Of How Massive Stars Form

New research has shown how a massive star can grow despite outward-flowing radiation pressure that exceeds the gravitational force pulling material inward.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Lack Of Thermoelectric Effect Is Cool Feature In Carbon Nanotubes

Metallic carbon nanotubes have been proposed as interconnects in future electronic devices packed with high-density nanoscale circuits. But can they stand up to the heat?
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 18 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

In Tough Times, Nature Favors Female Brains (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Scientists have known that male and female mammals respond differently to starvation, with male cells tending to conserve protein while female calls lean toward fat conservation.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Jan 2009 | 2:46 pm

Russia, Ukraine reach gas deal; Europe still waits (AP)

AP - Russia and Ukraine announced a deal Sunday to end the bitter dispute that has blocked Russian natural gas from Europe for nearly two weeks and deeply shaken Europeans' trust in the two as reliable energy suppliers.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Jan 2009 | 1:29 pm

Beekeepers fear sting of imported Australian hives (AP)

AP - Beekeepers who are battling a mysterious ailment that led to the disappearance of millions of honeybees now fear the sting of imported Australian bees that they worry could outcompete their hives and might carry a deadly parasite unseen in the United States.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Jan 2009 | 1:44 am

Darwin's theory turned bosses into dinosaurs

There's a case for saying that the credit crunch is all down to Charles Darwin.

Keynes wrote: "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist."

Now, technically Darwin is a defunct biologist rather than political philosopher or economist. But his interest in economics was keen, and equally keenly reciprocated. One perceptive interpreter of On the Origin of Species, 150 years old this year, saw it as "the application of economics to biology". As the crowning expression of Victorian individualism, continental writers argue, the theory of natural selection, with its underlying theme of competition and struggle, could only have originated in the laissez-faire England of the period.

Bastardised and coarsened, the concept of "the survival of the fittest" (a phrase only later adopted by Darwin from Herbert Spencer) has powerfully shaped modern business. The robber barons of the early 20th century quickly latched on to the self-serving idea that "might is right" - cut-throat economic competition was the normal state of affairs and the rise to the top of the strongest was part of natural law and the inevitable outcome of history.

This mentality persists, especially in the US, and indeed the idea of the inevitability, and desirability, of individual struggle in weeding out the strong from the weak is what distinguishes Anglo-American from Rhine capitalism. It perfectly informs the ethos of the financial sector over the last two decades, as well as the rise of the Russian oligarchs and the development of the virulent Chinese strain of capitalist competition.

Darwinism endows such phenomena with a veneer of scientific rationale. Republican senators' reluctance to intervene to prolong the lives of US banks; the chilling belief of City traders in their own superiority, as uncovered in interviews by the Guardian's Polly Toynbee and David Walker; the self-justifying arguments in favour of stratospheric pay rises for chief executives and cutbacks for the less fortunate - all have uncomfortable echoes of the crude social Darwinism that influenced not only the robber barons but also the far greater 20th-century monsters, Hitler and Stalin.

Natural selection may be, as some argue, the most important idea in human history - the nearest thing to a "theory of everything" to exist. Richard Dawkins, among others, has proposed a "universal Darwinism" - a process of variation, selection and retention that applies to business, social and cultural phenomena as well as biology. In recent years, evolutionary versions of economics, psychology and ecology have all burgeoned.

But while such ideas are genuinely attractive and interesting, as the evolution of evolution ironically demonstrates, for practical purposes natural selection is a devious and treacherous taskmaster. If companies have no inevitable life cycle - some last for months, others for centuries - and don't reproduce, how does the process work? Darwin himself, as cautious in his research as he was bold in his thesis, would no doubt be aghast at some of the wilder application of his ideas. His version of evolution is blind; mutation is random, and outcomes determined by functional improvement.

Companies, on the other hand, are intentional entities, able to strategise towards long-term purpose - taking one step back to take two steps forward in the future, for example. What's more, no one studying management could possibly argue that "progress" was historically inevitable: indeed, the reverse argument can be made, that bad management is driving out good. As Ricardo Semler, the iconoclastic head of the free-form Brazilian company Semco, observes, most corporate forms are colossally inefficient as well as environmentally disastrous - an evolutionary nightmare. In this situation, there's no time left for painstaking improvement on an evolutionary scale; only disruptive innovation will do.

Meanwhile, the simplistic "might is right" case has been blown apart by the force of events. However it originated, the credit crunch is the meteorite that is causing the mass extinction of what now can be seen as financial dinosaurs. Suddenly the once mighty are so no longer - in the new credit-starved world investment banks are extinct, by the end of the year most hedge funds will have gone out of business, and even Russian oligarchs are finding food hard to come by.

As Darwin cautioned: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." Or in the words of Orgel's second law (after Leslie Orgel, an eminent biochemist of the 1960s - history doesn't record his first law), "Evolution is cleverer than you are."

simon.caulkin@observer.co.uk

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Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 18 Jan 2009 | 12:01 am

Why we can never recover from first love

First relationships can be intense, passionate and inspire a great deal of bad poetry. But, according to new research, if you want to find happiness in later life, it is best to avoid puppy love altogether.

The claim comes in a book called Changing Relationships, a collection of new research papers by Britain's leading sociologists, edited by Dr Malcolm Brynin, principal research officer at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.

Brynin found that the euphoria of first love can damage future relationships. "Remarkably, it seems that the secret to long-term happiness in a relationship is to skip a first relationship," said Brynin. "In an ideal world, you would wake up already in your second relationship."

While researching the components of successful long-term partnerships, Brynin found intense first loves could set unrealistic benchmarks, against which we judge future relationships. "If you had a very passionate first relationship and allow that feeling to become your benchmark for a relationship dynamic, then it becomes inevitable that future, more adult partnerships will seem boring and a disappointment," he said.

Adults in successful long-term partnerships are those who have taken a calm, pragmatic view of what they need from a relationship, Brynin found. "The problems start if you try not only to get everything you need for an adult relationship, but also strive for the heights of excitement and intensity you had in your first experience of love. The solution is clear: if you can protect yourself from intense passion in your first relationship, you will be happier in your later relationships."

Dr Gayle Brewer, a lecturer in social psychology at the University of Central Lancashire, agreed: "If you judge adult relationships against your first relationship, you are using a single benchmark: that of an intense and unrealistic passion," she said. "Adult relationships need all sorts of other virtues to survive, many of which are not compatible with that level of intensity. For example, you might have felt passionate about your first love because their spontaneity was breathtakingly exciting.

"Adult relationships, however, require people to be committed and reliable. Someone who excels in spontaneity is unlikely to also have those characteristics. So you're caught in a bind: the characteristics that excite you are the ones that lead to the failure of an adult relationship. If you emotionally fixate on having the excitement, while knowing you need the reliability, you're making demands that no relationship can satisfy," she added.

But Professor Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, believes that striving for that initial intensity of emotion can help relationships to survive. Using MRI scans, Fisher observed similar brain activity among those who had been happily married for more than two decades with those who had been in relationships for less than six months.

"I found incontrovertible, physiological evidence that romantic love can last," she said. "It appears that romantic love exists not only to initiate pair-bonding but to maintain and enhance long-term relationships."

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Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 18 Jan 2009 | 12:01 am

President Obama 'has four years to save Earth'

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added.

Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford to put off change any longer," said Hansen. "We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."

Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.

Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead as the world's greatest carbon emitter and the planet's largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.

Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of the WWF's top conservation award - first warned Earth was in danger from climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several unsuccessful attempts by the White House administration of George Bush to silence his views.

Hansen's institute monitors temperature fluctuations at thousands of sites round the world, data that has led him to conclude that most estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric temperatures are too low and too conservative. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says a rise of between 20cm and 60cm can be expected by the end of the century.

However, Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of ice sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim backed last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists who said studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far more likely figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres, enough to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations.

As a result of his fears about sea-level rise, Hansen said he had pressed both Britain's Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences to carry out an urgent investigation of the state of the planet's ice-caps. However, nothing had come of his proposals. The first task of Obama's new climate office should therefore be to order such a probe "as a matter of urgency", Hansen added.

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