Dust Detected Around A Primitive Star, Shedding New Light On Universe's Origins

Astronomers have observed dust forming around a dying star in a nearby galaxy, giving a glimpse into the early universe and enlivening a debate about the origins of all cosmic dust.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Bone Marrow Stem Cells Used To Regenerate Skin

A new study suggests that adult bone marrow stem cells can be used in the construction of artificial skin. The findings mark an advancement in wound healing and may be used to pioneer a method of organ reconstruction. The study is published in Artificial Organs.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Paintballs Can Cause 'Devastating' Eye Injuries

Paintballs can cause severe and 'visually devastating' eye injuries, especially when used in unsupervised settings without proper eye protection, reports a study in the American Journal of Ophthalmology.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Biofuel Carbon Footprint Not As Big As Feared, New Analysis Finds

Some researchers have blasted biofuels' potential to increase greenhouse gas emissions, calling into question the environmental benefits of making fuel from plant material. But a new analysis says these dire predictions are based on a set of assumptions that may not be correct.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Molecular Forklifts Overcome Obstacle To 'Smart Dust'

Algae is a livid green giveaway of nutrient pollution in a lake. Scientists would love to reproduce that action in tiny particles that would turn different colors if exposed to biological weapons, food spoilage or signs of poor health in the blood.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

New Tool Could Prevent Needless Stents And Save Money, Cardiologist Says

Doctors may be implanting too many artery-opening stents and could improve patient outcomes -- and ultimately save lives -- if they did more in-depth measurements of blood flow in the vessels to the heart, according to experts.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Now You See It, Now You Don't: Scientists Unraveling The Mystery Of Camouflage

Marine biologists have discovered three broad classes of camouflage body patterns. This study of cephalopod camouflage has implications for analyzing camouflage tactics throughout the animal kingdom.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 4:00 pm

Genetic Mutation, Almost Guaranteed To Lead To Heart Disease, Found In One Percent Of Population

A study of almost 1500 people has uncovered a genetic mutation that is almost guaranteed to lead to heart disease. The mutation is found worldwide, but appears to be restricted to people with an origin in the Indian subcontinent, where 4 percent of the population are carriers. The size and simplicity of the genetic effect is staggering in a disease that has a wide range of causes, many related to lifestyle.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 4:00 pm

New Model System May Better Explain Regulation Of Body Weight

A new mathematical model of the physiological regulation of body weight suggests a potential mechanism underlying the difficulty of losing weight, one that includes aspects of two competing hypotheses of weight regulation.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 4:00 pm

High-tech Solutions Ease Inaugural Challenges

Transportation and security officials on Inauguration Day will have a centralized, consolidated stream of traffic information and other data displayed on a single screen. The Regional Integrated Transportation Information System gives officials a single real-time view far more comprehensive than previously available. The idea is to enhance officials' ability to monitor vehicular traffic, accidents, incidents, response plans, air space, weather conditions and more.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 4:00 pm

British trials to use stem cells for stroke, blindness (AFP)

AFP - Two separate trials are set to begin in Britain utilising cutting edge stem cell research in a bid to help treat victims of strokes and blindness, medical experts announced Monday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 1:57 pm

Ukraine PM heads to Moscow; gas deal to be signed (AP)

AP - The Ukrainian prime minister headed to Moscow on Monday as Russia and Ukraine prepared to sign a deal ending a contentious dispute that cut off Russian natural gas shipments to Europe for nearly two weeks.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 12:15 pm

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - Another round of cold temperatures and winter snow showers greeted those in the East early Monday, while rain was in store for the Southeast and clear skies dawned over the West.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 12:12 pm

The prose style that launched Darwin's revolution

It dawned on me the other day while listening to Radio 4's 87th programme on Charles Darwin this year that I'd never actually read The Origin of Species. Nor, as it transpired, had anyone else I know. Read a lot about it, certainly, but never even cracked the spine on the source text.

Given that I've completed an English degree and somehow found the time to read Ian Botham's autobiography, this seemed a fairly shameful admission. As a non-scientist, I wondered: how does The Origin of Species stand up, not as a theory, but as a piece of writing, 150 years after it was published?

On first impression: not well. In terms of prose style, Darwin was workmanlike: the bulk of Origin reads, it must be confessed, like the transcript of a lecture. There are sporadic moments where – as with first reading Chaucer – you tune into the language and it flows, but these are fleeting. Much of the text is made up of paragraph-length sentences with numerous sub-clauses and reiterations.

Stylistically, Darwin feels constrained. Almost every point he makes is couched in cautious, caveat-rich language and he shies away from making the grand claims and dogmatic assertions that people still make on his behalf today. It's interesting to compare Darwin's style with the shrilly emphatic tone that most modern writers would take when making such a radical point. (Think Sam Harris.)

But as you plough on – if you plough on – something interesting begins to happen. Darwin's argument builds up – almost imperceptibly – through the addition and repetition of small examples: how beetles attack smooth-skinned fruits; then downy fruits; then purple plums; then yellow plums; then yellow peaches ... In these sections, one can see how he inspired Émile Zola's microscopic analysis of bestial characters driven by their immediate environments and their hereditary urges. Strangely, Darwin's building of tiny details into a wall of evidence also reminded me strongly of the detached, forensic sociology used more recently by Gordon Burn in Happy Like Murderers.

Far from being the broadside against religion that one would expect, Darwin seems – at least on an immediate level – to reserve his critique for his own profession: "The geological record is far more imperfect than most geologists believe … the number of specimens in our museums is absolutely as nothing compared with the countless generations of countless species which have certainly existed." At one stage he states simply that "our ignorance is profound".

Indeed, the character of Darwin that emerges from such observations is an attractively humble one. Generous with his praise towards other scientists whose work he is building on (Aristotle, Lamarck, Saint-Hilaire, Wallace et al), he conveys a sense of boundless wonder at the world around him, constantly questioning his preconceptions to allow connections and patterns to appear to him. In one of my favourite passages he talks of "the black bear … swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water".

And when his writing does relax, it's a joy to read. In Chapter VI ("Difficulties on Theory") he examines the holes in his argument – "so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered" – and argues against himself brilliantly. There are touchingly eccentric recordings of his experiments – tickling aphids with a hair before gradually introducing them to an ant, for example – and a few later passages with something of Seamus Heaney's morbid naturalism about them ("Drones, slaughtered by their sterile sisters … the astonishing waste of pollen…the larvae of ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars.").

Darwin never loses the cautious, hesitant tone of the man who would go on to write that he feared his revelations to be like "confessing a murder". Overall, this hobbles The Origin of Species stylistically, but it makes its flashes of lyricism all the more powerful. And none are more so than his awestruck, awe-inspiring conclusion:

Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 19 Jan 2009 | 11:19 am

Fossil illuminates jaw evolution

A fossil fish is shedding light on the evolution of jawed vertebrates, according to a Swedish study.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Jan 2009 | 11:04 am

From on high

The new satellites keeping tabs on our planet's health
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Jan 2009 | 9:18 am

Runway-loving birds are risk to planes in Antarctica

ROTHERA BASE, Antarctica (Reuters) - The world's most southerly bird has become a threat to planes in Antarctica after developing a love for sitting on warm, snow-free airstrips.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 19 Jan 2009 | 4:34 am

New death from bird flu in China

The deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu claims its second victim this year in China, as a toddler with the disease struggles to survive.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Jan 2009 | 4:14 am

Science Weekly podcast: Robin Murphy tells us how experiments with rats help us understand animal learning

Robin Murphy, senior lecturer from the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience at University College London, joins the pod to discuss rule learning in rats and how that challenges what we think about the human brain.

In the Newsjam, we explore life on Mars, stem cells, clear skies across Europe and Victorian novels.

As ever, science correspondent Ian Sample lends his wisdom.

James Randerson goes behind the scenes at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, home of Britain's biggest radio telescope. Listen to an extended version in the latest Science Weekly Extra podcast.

WARNING: contains strong language.

Feel free to post your comments about this programme on the blog below.

You can also join our Facebook group, where you can scrawl your thoughts on our wall.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 19 Jan 2009 | 12:20 am

Asian heart disease gene found

A gene mutation that almost guarantees the development of heart disease is carried by one in 25 South Asian people.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Jan 2009 | 12:14 am

Many glaciers will disappear by middle of century and add to rising sea levels, expert warns

Most of the planet's glaciers are melting so fast that many will disappear by the middle of the century, a leading expert has warned. Figures from the World Glacier Monitoring Service show that although melt rates for 2007 fell substantially from record levels the previous year, the loss of ice was still the third worst on record.

The total mass left in the glaciers is now thought to be at the lowest level for "thousands of years".

Even under moderate predictions of global warming, the small glaciers, which make up the majority by number, will not recover, said Prof Wilfried Haeberli, the organisation's director.

The warning will raise concern among those who say that glacier melting is one of the greatest threats of climate change because it raises the risk of sudden avalanches of rocks and soil released from the ice, threatening the livelihoods of more than 2 billion people who depend on melt-water to feed rivers in summer. Glacier melting will also add to rising global sea levels.

"If the climate is not really cooling dramatically, they'll retreat and disintegrate," said Haeberli. "This means many will simply be lost in the next decades - 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

"If you have a realistic, mid-warming scenario, then there's no hope for the small glaciers - in the Pyrenees, in Africa, in the Andes or Rocky mountains. The large glaciers in Alaska and the Himalayas will take longer, but even those very large glaciers will change completely; they will be much, much smaller, and many of them will disintegrate, forming lakes in many cases."

The WGMS, whose backers include UN agencies and scientific bodies, collects annual data for up to 100 glaciers around the world, including 30 "reference" glaciers in nine different mountain ranges on four continents, for which data goes back nearly three decades.

Figures for 2005-06 showed the biggest loss of ice in a single year since those records began, and based on historic reconstructions, it was thought to be the worst year for 5,000 years.

The latest data for 2006-07 shows that 22 of the 27 reference glaciers for which data has been supplied lost mass, as did 55 of a longer list of 74 glaciers. The total losses were half that of the previous year, but still the third largest on record. In Europe it is thought glaciers have lost one quarter of their mass in the last eight years alone, said Haeberli.

Although the mass balance of glaciers would fluctuate with natural changes in temperatures and snowfall, climate scientists believe the sustained losses of recent decades are partly due to man-made global warming, with the 10 hottest years on record coming in the last 11 years.

"The general trend to increased loss rates is continuing," Haeberli said. "The year was a little bit less terrible than [the previous] year ... but still a very heavy loss. It's still two times the average loss rate of the 20th century."

Although the data only covers some of the world's glaciers, its figures are mirrored by reports from experts from around the globe.

Two years ago the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast that if current trends continue, 80% of Himalayan glaciers will be gone in 30 years, although more recent estimates have suggested the 2060s or later.

Last year the UN environment programme and the WGMS jointly published data for 1,800 glaciers on all seven continents, which warned losses had been accelerating globally since the mid-1980s, so that the annual average decline for 1996-2005 was double that of the previous decade, and four times that of the decade before. Last week China Dialogue, a London-based organisation dedicated to debate on China's environment issues, launched a campaign to highlight the same trends in melting in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau.

Those glaciers feed all the main river systems in Asia, depended on by the estimated 40% of the world's population that lives in northern India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, said Isabel Hilton, China Dialogue's editor.

"In a region that is already fractured and unstable, the melting of the 'third pole' glaciers is one of the most important challenges facing humanity in the 21st century," she said.

In December the US Geological Survey also warned that sea-level rise could be even worse than feared, as much as 1.5 metres by the end of this century, partly due to increased melting of the volume of water stored in glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland.

Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for UNEP, said the latest findings should encourage more governments to follow moves by some politicians to invest billions of dollars in clean energy and efficiency as a way of curbing greenhouse gases.

He urged world leaders to agree a treaty to cut emissions. Water experts have also called for more investment in better water management.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 19 Jan 2009 | 12:01 am

Steve Jones explores the obscure chapters of Charles Darwin's life

Charles Darwin, as every schoolchild knows, saw the finches of the Galapagos in the years he spent there while employed as official naturalist on HMS Beagle. Each island had its own species, and Darwin soon worked out that they shared descent from a common ancestor; that they were a product of evolution. On his return to England he at once published his theory in his book The Origin of Species, which went on to prove that men had descended from chimpanzees. Nature, red in tooth and claw, had used the survival of the fittest to weed out the imperfect and, with Homo sapiens at the top of the evolutionary tree, had achieved her desired end. Racked by guilt at replacing the doctrines of the Church with a joyless vision of man as a shaven primate in an amoral universe, Darwin retired into obscurity. He repented his blasphemy on his deathbed and was buried as a venerable and almost forgotten savant whose work - like that of so many famous scientists - had been completed while he was still a young man.

That is a distortion of the truth. Darwin was not a hired biologist but paid for his own trip as gentleman-companion to the Beagle's captain. He spent but five weeks of the five-year voyage in the Galapagos, with just half that time passed on shore, on only four of the dozen or so members of the group of islands. He had little interest in his collection of finches and lumped their corpses together as a jumbled mass without even making a note of where they came from. Many of the famous birds live on several islands rather than one. Two decades passed before the publication of The Origin of Species (in which the word "evolution" does not appear) and in that time its author wrote several substantial books. The phrase "the survival of the fittest" is not his but was coined by the philosopher Herbert Spencer to summarise the notion of natural selection, the central element of evolutionary theory. The bloody fangs and fingernails of mother nature were themselves thought up by Tennyson a decade earlier not as a philosophy of life but in memory of the death of a friend. Evolution has no end in view and men do not descend from chimps, although the two share a common ancestor. The Church soon accommodated Darwin's ideas, which, as most clerics realised, have no relevance to religion, and the deathbed conversion is a simple falsehood, even if the great naturalist was buried in Westminster Abbey, where he still lies, trampled by tourists.

The most widespread error, however, is to assume that the Beagle voyage marked the end of Darwin's scientific career. In fact, in the four decades that remained to him after he came home in 1836, he worked as hard as or harder than he had in his 20s. After marrying in 1839, just short of his 30th birthday, he purchased Down House, south of London, settled in the land of his birth and never left again, uxorious, paternal and reluctant to abandon his extensive garden except on forays to test his theories and, now and again, to search for better health. So settled was he that he described his profession as "farmer" in the Bagshawe's Directory of the time. Great Britain was the first and last of the 40 islands he visited, and Darwin studied its inhabitants - plant, animal, human - in far more detail than he had those of anywhere else. Even his own family was not immune.

Charles Darwin had worried about his plans for marriage. Perhaps the whole idea was a mistake because of the time that would be wasted on domestic life at the expense of science. His diary records how he agonised over the pros and cons, and his decision to "Marry, marry, marry!" And marry, in the end, he did.

His spouse was his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. In falling for a relative he stuck to a clan tradition. The Darwins, like many among the Victorian upper crust, had long preferred to share a bed with their kin. Charles's grandfather Josiah Wedgwood set up home with his third cousin Sarah Wedgwood. Their daughter, Susannah, chose Robert Darwin, Charles's father. Charles's uncle - Emma's father - had nine offspring, four of whom married cousins. The evolutionist's own marriage was in the end happy, with 10 children (and when his wife was in her 40s he wrote that "Emma has been very neglectful of late for we have not had a child for more than one whole year"). Even so, in Queen Victoria's fecund days the Darwin-Wedgwood dynasty did less well than most, for among the 62 uncles, cousins and aunts (Emma and Charles included) who descended from Josiah, 38 had no progeny that survived to adulthood.

Six years after his wife's last confinement Darwin began to think about the dangers of inbreeding, in particular as they applied to his own choice of spouse. His concern was picked up from another of his cousins, Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, who had pointed out the potential dangers of marriage within the clan.

Darwin was anxious about his children. His 10th and last, Charles the younger, died while a baby; he was "backward in walking & talking, but intelligent and observant". Henrietta had a digestive illness not unlike that of her father, who was prone to stress-induced vomiting, and took to her bed for years, and he feared that his son Leonard was "rather slow and backward" (which did not prevent his later marriage to his own cousin or his acceptance of the presidency of the Eugenics Society), while Horace had "attacks, many times a day, of shuddering & gasping & hysterical sobbing, semi-convulsive movements, with much distress of feeling". His second daughter, Elizabeth, "shivers & makes as many extraordinary grimaces as ever". George's problem was an irregular pulse, which hinted at "some deep flaw in his constitution" and, worst of all, his beloved Annie expired at the age of 10, throwing her parents into despair. As he wrote, "When we hear it said that a man carries in his constitution the seeds of an inherited disease there is much literal truth in the expression." Once he even wrote to a friend that, "We are a wretched family & ought to be exterminated."

Might his own illness and that of his sons and daughters be due to his own and his ancestors' choice of a relative as life-partner? Was inbreeding a universal threat?

His first statement of concern came in 1862 as an afterword to his book On the Various Contrivances By Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised By Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. The last paragraph of that hefty work, most of it devoted to botanical minutiae, ends: "Nature thus tells us, in the most emphatic manner, that she abhors perpetual self-fertilisation ... May we not further infer as probable, in accordance with the belief of the vast majority of the breeders of our domestic productions, that marriage between near relatives is likewise in some way injurious?"

The idea that children born to related parents might suffer harm was already in the air. The first study of its risks came in 1851 when Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar) found an increased incidence of deafness among the progeny of cousins. Sir Arthur Mitchell, the deputy commissioner in lunacy for Scotland, had earlier claimed that in the inbred fishing communities of north-east Scotland the average hat size was six and seven-eighths, a quarter-inch less than that of their more open-minded agricultural neighbours: proof, he thought, of the malign effects of the marriage of kin upon the mental powers.

Sex within the household has a venerable history. The Pharaohs lived through generations of the habit in an attempt to preserve the bloodline of a god. Akhenaten, who lived around 1,300BC, first married his cousin Nefertiti, then a lesser wife, Kiya, and then three of his own daughters by Nefertiti and then (perhaps) his own mother. The story is confused by difficulties with sorting out quite who was who (and one of his supposed wives was in fact male), but incestuous affairs were without doubt common in ancient Egypt. Cleopatra herself may have been the scion of 10 generations of brother-sister unions. The practice is condemned in Leviticus, where the Children of Israel were enjoined that, "After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do."

The belief that the children of cousins are bound to be unfit still fuels a jaundiced view of sex within the household. In 2008, a British government minister, in reference to the Pakistani population of Bradford, made the quite unjustified claim: "If you have a child with your cousin, the likelihood is there will be a genetic problem." Many of his fellow citizens share that vague Galtonian sense that inbreeding is harmful. Most of their alarm, however, rests on anecdote rather than on science.

All nations are interested in how their members behave in the bedroom. In the US, for example, every one of the states has some restriction on marriage between relatives. As for England, for years it based its marital rules on those of the Church of England, which descend from those of the Israelites. In 1907, after hundreds of hours of parliamentary discussion, the statutes were at last clarified. The new legislation removed absurd anomalies such as the biologically senseless law that forbade a widower to marry his dead wife's sister, but it also firmed up the prohibition against sex with close kin, be it father with daughter, or brother with sister.

Politicians often act on prejudice. Darwin did not. When faced with a scientific question - about sex or anything else - he set out not to speculate but to discover. To learn more about inbreeding, he turned again to plants.

The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom, which appeared in 1876, when Darwin was 67, chronicles his experiments in the Down House greenhouse, forcing a wide variety of hermaphrodite plants to mate with themselves. With the help of a botanical condom - a fine mesh to keep out insects - and a small paintbrush he could, like a bee, move male cells to the female parts of a flower and arrange for the plant to receive its own genes, or those of another individual.

Certain species failed to self-fertilise, even when obliged to try, but among those that did, he discovered - somewhat to his alarm - that the habit did damage later generations. His initial experiments were on toadflax, a common yellow-flowered weed. When self-pollination occured, Darwin soon found a large, and unexpected, effect upon the next generation. The progeny of such crosses were smaller and less vigorous than were those of plants allowed to mate with another. At first he supposed that his inbred offspring were weak because of some disease, or because they were grown in unsuitable soil. That was not so, for however well they were treated they stayed feeble. Darwin ran through a variety of species - carnations, tobacco, peas, monkey-flowers, morning glory, foxgloves and many other garden and wildflowers. With statistical help from Galton he discovered that, almost without exception, those grown from crossed seed were taller, healthier and more productive than those from self-fertilised. Some experiments went on for several generations, and the effects of sex with a relative got worse with time. The inbreds suffered most of all when life was hard: when they were crowded, had to compete with their "outcrossed" kin or were moved from the greenhouse to the rigours of the open air.

Darwin's verdict was clear: "Cross-fertilisation is generally beneficial, and self-fertilisation injurious." It was "as unmistakably plain that innumerable flowers are adapted for cross-fertilisation, as that the teeth and talons of a carnivorous animal are adapted for catching prey". What was true of plants must, he imagined, apply to animals, men and women included.

More recent research confirms that view. When wild mice are mated, brother with sister, and the offspring released into nature, almost none survive. Inbred animals do not often die of obvious genetic disease, but their parenthood can much weaken them. Song sparrows on a small island off Canada's west coast have been ringed for years and their pedigrees worked out in detail. Those born to close relatives are at more risk of death in bad weather than are other birds. The island of Soay is famous for its native sheep, which have been there since Viking times. The animals are filled with worms, and those with the heaviest burden suffer most of all during a vicious Scottish winter. Lambs born to close relatives have more parasites, and are at more risk of death in storms, than others. The finches on the Galapagos also pay the price for sex with close relatives, as do many other creatures.

It is, of course, impossible to carry out planned crosses with men and women, but Darwin came up with another way to test the dangers of inbreeding. First, he tried to get questions about cousin matrimony included in the 1871 census. The Commons threw out the request as "the grossest cruelty", for it would cause children to be "anatomised by science" (and from a parliamentary point of view the issue was almost traitorous, for the Queen had wed her cousin). A query about "lunatics, imbeciles and idiots" was allowed but dropped for the next census a decade later as most people refused to answer it. Darwin was annoyed by his failure to persuade parliament to ask a scientific question and complained about "ignorant members of our legislature". His son George was even more caustic about "the scornful laughter of the House, on the ground that the idle curiosity of philosophers was not to be satisfied".

George Darwin set out to build on his father's work. From the records of Burke's Landed Gentry and the Pall Mall Gazette, together with a circular sent to lunatic asylums, he worked out the frequency of cousin marriage in various groups. Such unions transpired to be twice as common among noblemen as the proletariat. His inquiry to the superintendents of asylums as to how many of those in their care were the scions of related parents was, as they pointed out, unlikely to pay off because of the mental state of their charges. Even so, George found no increase in the level of inbreeding among the patients compared with that of the general population (even if the deputy commissioner in lunacy for Scotland did assure him that most of his nation's idiots were the children of relatives).

After his mixed success with lunatics, the young man went on to study the inmates of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. He chose the boat-race crews - "a picked body of athletic men" - and asked how many had been born of cousins. After a correction for a falsified answer from the stroke of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, he found that there was indeed a slight shortage of such inbred individuals among top oarsmen compared with the general population. The same was true among sporting boys in the principal schools for the upper and middle classes. In both cases the numbers were small and the evidence not altogether persuasive.

The failure with the census, and his son's ambiguous results, suggested to Darwin that perhaps the effects of human inbreeding were less dire than he had feared. He removed his comment on its harmful effects from the second edition of the orchids book.

By then he had also revealed some of the ways in which nature reduces the chances of interbreeding. The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, published a year after the volume on self-fertilisation, tells the story of the children of Darwin's home village of Downe, who made necklaces from cowslips. They could, they told him, use just a few of the plants, those with a long "pin" that protruded from the flower, through which they could thread the plants together. Other flowers, instead of a pin, had no more than a short protrusion called a "thrum" and were of no use as juvenile jewellery. The cowslip's close relative, the primrose, was much the same.

Female "pin" flowers were, Darwin found, much happier to accept pollen from male "thrums" than they were from males of their own kind. The same applied in the opposite direction. The flower's form is inherited - which means that the plants decide whether or not to accept another's pollen advances on genetic grounds. With pins and thrums, Nature has come up with a trick to reduce the proportion of individuals with whom genes can be shared. She has, in effect, invented more and more sexes - or at least, added more and more papers to the sexual exam.

Darwin's experiments on cowslips have grown into a science that shows how, in both primroses and people, partners are chosen in unexpected ways and the choice may reduce the prospects of successful mating between those who have recent ancestors in common. In human families, for example, the idea of sex with a brother or sister is generally less repellent to a younger sibling than to an older. The degree of kinship is the same, but the older child can be almost certain that the junior members of the household are the products of their own mother, for they saw them cared for as babies. A younger sibling, on the other hand, knows only that an older individual lives under the same roof - which could happen for other reasons. They are less appalled by the idea of sex with somebody who might not, after all, be a relative.

Where close inbreeding does occur, studies have confirmed Darwin's belief that it can impose a real burden. Even in places without high levels of inborn disease, children born to cousins die younger than usual. Such unions in Utah Mormons - not themselves an unusually inbred population - from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries led to a notable increase in ill health. The effects became worse as the infants grew older, perhaps because death in old age has a stronger genetic component than do the accidents of infection or starvation that killed the pioneers' babies. Heart disease is also more frequent among the children of cousins. A study of half a million pregnancies in modern America suggests that the death rate of the sons and daughters of cousins rises by about 5% above average. The products of uncle-niece marriages, a pattern frequent in India and elsewhere, do even worse and while incest - sex between siblings, or parents and children - is rare, the offspring pay a high price. A German brother and sister, adopted at birth and strangers until they met as adults, had four children, two of whom were severely affected. A study of 30 or so Canadian children born to such parents also suggests that almost half inherit some abnormality, and the same was true in the recent case of father-daughter incest in Sheffield.

A more subtle, but more marked, effect of within-family sex has emerged in Iceland. Among 150,000 couples born between 1800 and 1965, partners who were close relatives had more, rather than fewer, children than average. Even so, the proportion of the children of first and second cousins who themselves reproduced (and hence the number of grandchildren born to the pair of relatives) was well below average, in part because many of those first-generation progeny died young. Charles Darwin and his cousin Emma may have been testimony to that effect, for seven of their 10 sons and daughters expired before their time or lived on but stayed childless. Close mating may be more harmful to a family's prospects than was once supposed.

And yet the great man's concern about his children was not entirely justified. Of his sons, William became a banker and Leonard an army major. George was elected professor of astronomy and Francis reader in botany at Cambridge, while Horace set up as a scientific-instrument maker and was for a time mayor of that fair city. The naturalist's offspring married into several eminent clans including those of Keynes and Huxley. And, in spite of their progenitor's concerns about inherited feebleness, they have produced dozens of descendants eminent in science, medicine and the professions.

Inbreeding certainly has an effect on human health, but in parts of India the children of cousins are actually healthier than others because cousin marriages are more common in families with at least some money. They are anxious to keep it in the family line, whereas the destitute have nothing to pass on. In just the same way the success of Darwin's descendants depends much more on their intellectual heritage than on their DNA. As so often in evolution, the simple rules that drive the world of nature are confused or suspended when we try to apply them naively to ourselves.

© Steve Jones 2009. Extracted from Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England by Steve Jones, published by Little, Brown on 29 January at £20. To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 19 Jan 2009 | 12:01 am

UK firm to launch pioneering stem cell trial

LONDON (Reuters) - A British biotechnology company, working with a team of doctors in Scotland, is to launch a pioneering clinical trial to assess whether stem cell therapy can help patients left disabled by stroke.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 18 Jan 2009 | 9:14 pm

Heart disease gene affects one in 100, say scientists

A gene that almost guarantees serious heart disease in middle age is carried by an estimated 60 million people around the world, a team of scientists has found.

The one in 100 who inherit the mutation usually show few, if any, symptoms before their 40s, but become ill as they get older, with many later dying from heart failure.

The discovery marks the strongest link yet that scientists have made between a person's genetic make-up and their risk of succumbing to heart disease.

The risk of being born with the abnormal gene is substantially higher in people who can trace their ancestry back to the Indian subcontinent, where one in 25 inherit the mutation. "The bad news is that many of these mutation carriers have no warning that they are in danger," said Perundurai Dhandapany at Madurai Kamaraj University, a co-author of the study published in Nature Genetics.

The mutation was originally identified in two Indian families with heart disease five years ago, but only after studying almost 1,500 people from different regions of India did the importance of the abnormal gene become clear.

Researchers compared the genetic make-up of 800 patients with heart disease and 699 healthy volunteers. They found those with heart problems often carried the mutation, in which 25 letters of genetic code needed to make heart muscle proteins are missing.

"The mutation leads to the formation of an abnormal protein. Young people can degrade the abnormal protein and remain healthy, but as they get older it builds up and eventually results in the symptoms we see," said Kumarasamy Thangaraj at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, who led the study.

Chris Tyler-Smith, a co-author at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge, said the mutation probably arose in India around 30,000 years ago and was able to spread because it usually only affects people after they have had children.

With genetic screening it would be possible to identify people with the gene at an early age, though in the near term, doctors could only advise them to improve their lifestyle to reduce their risk of heart disease. In the longer term, scientists hope to develop a treatment using a drug to boost the body's ability to break down the abnormal heart protein.

"This is a genetic finding of great importance," said Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust. "Heart disease is one of the world's leading killers, but now that researchers have identified this common mutation, carried by one in 25 people of Indian origin, we have hope of reducing the burden that the disease causes. This research should lead to better screening to identify those at risk and may ultimately allow the development of new treatments."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 18 Jan 2009 | 6:00 pm

Stem cell stroke therapy assessed

A Glasgow team is to launch a major trial to assess whether stem cells can be used to treat stroke patients, the BBC learns.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Jan 2009 | 5:00 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