Makeover Shows Correspond With Increased Body Anxiety

"The Swan." "I Want a Famous Face." "Dr. 90210." "Extreme Makeover." "Nip/Tuck." The list goes on. These are a few of the TV shows that have examined, and promoted, the benefits of plastic surgery in recent years. Some experts believe the shows are driving women to go under the knife to conform to a heightened definition of beauty, one that is increasingly difficult to attain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

How Chemotherapy Drugs Block Blood Vessel Growth, Slow Cancer Spread

Researchers have discovered how a whole class of commonly used chemotherapy drugs can block cancer growth. Their findings suggest that a subgroup of cancer patients might particularly benefit from these drugs.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Supermassive Black Holes Not Guilty Of Shutting Down Star Formation

Astronomers have discovered that galaxies stop forming stars long before their central supermassive black holes reach their most powerful stage, meaning the black holes can't be responsible for shutting down star formation.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Children With Inflammatory Bowel Disease Have Surprisingly High Folate Levels, Study Finds

Children with newly diagnosed cases of inflammatory bowel disease have higher concentrations of folate in their blood than individuals without IBD, according to a new study. The findings bring into question the previously held theory that patients with IBD are prone to folate -- also known as folic acid -- deficiency.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Aeroacoustics Study Helps Control Noise From Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing increasingly important roles in many fields. Ranging in size from the huge Global Hawk aircraft to hand-held machines, these remotely controlled devices are growing ever more vital to the U.S. armed forces in roles that include surveillance and reconnaissance.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Sources Of Climate- And Health-afflicting Soot Pollution Over South Asia Identified

A gigantic brownish haze from various burning and combustion processes is blanketing India and surrounding land and oceans during the winter season. This soot-laden Brown Cloud is affecting South Asian climate as much or more than carbon dioxide and cause premature deaths of 100 000s annually, yet its sources have been poorly understood. Now researchers have used a novel carbon-14 method to determine that two-thirds of the soot particles are from biomass combustion such as in household cooking and in slash-and-burn agriculture.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 26 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am

Secrets Of Stradivarius' Unique Violin Sound Revealed, Professor Says

For centuries, violin makers have tried and failed to reproduce the pristine sound of Stradivarius and Guarneri violins, but after 33 years of work put into the project, one professor is confident the veil of mystery has now been lifted.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Slices Of Living Brain Tissue Are Helping Scientists Identify New Stroke Therapies

Slices of living human brain tissue are helping scientists learn which drugs can block the waves of death that engulf and engorge brain cells following a stroke.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Type Of Supporting Cells Resistant To Notch Signaling Discovered

Researchers have shown that by blocking a biochemical pathway called the Notch signaling pathway, most of the supporting cells in the inner ear of juvenile mice are induced to directly change into hair cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

C1XS Catches First Glimpse Of X-ray From The Moon

The C1XS X-ray camera has successfully detected its first X-ray signature from the Moon. This is the first step in its mission to reveal the origin and evolution of our Moon by mapping its surface composition.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm

Mating Game Is a Waiting Game (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - How long do you wait before having sex with a new sweetie? Three dates? 10? A new study suggests that both males and females benefit from extended courtships in which mating is delayed: By holding out, females can more accurately screen for potential providers, while waiting males can prove they're suitable mates. ...
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 4:20 pm

Genetic Tricks of Parasites

Parasites typically don’t have as many genes as their free-living relatives do.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Jan 2009 | 4:09 pm

Female Companionship Extends Sex Lives of Male Mice

When male mice live with female mice, their reproductive years are extended by up to 20 percent.
Source: Livescience.com | 25 Jan 2009 | 3:50 pm

China dams reveal flaws in climate-change weapon (AP)

AP - The hydroelectric dam, a low wall of concrete slicing across an old farming valley, is supposed to help a power company in distant Germany contribute to saving the climate — while putting lucrative "carbon credits" into the pockets of Chinese developers.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 3:36 pm

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - Snow was forecast for much of the West and the central Plains on Saturday, while the Southeast was expected to be wet and bitter cold temperatures were predicted in the Great Lakes region.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 12:39 pm

Last whale stranded in Australia dies (AP)

AP - The last survivor among a group of 45 sperm whales that became stranded on a remote Australian sandbar died Sunday, ending a long and disappointing rescue effort.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 11:13 am

Tasmanian devils threatened by contagious cancer (AP)

AP - Tasmania is trying to save the devil.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 5:08 am

Cautious Optimism for the First Stem Cell Human Trial Approved by the FDA (Time.com)

Time.com - A promising and perilous study could lead to new treatments for spinal cord injury
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 5:05 am

Seattle shows little love for Lucy fossil exhibit (AP)

AP - Who loves Lucy? Far fewer people than a Seattle science center hoped when officials paid millions to show the fossil remains of one of the earliest known human ancestors.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 25 Jan 2009 | 2:29 am

Philip Ball on the evolution of Darwin

It sounds glib to say that every age moulds Charles Darwin to its own preoccupations, but the temptation is hard to resist. To the Victorians, he was an atheistic agitator undermining humankind's privileged moral status. In the early 20th century, he became a prophet of social engineering and the free market. With sociobiology in the 1970s, Darwinism became a behavioural theory, while neo-Darwinist genetics prompted a bleak view of humanity as gene machines driven by the selfish imperatives of our DNA.

Now, 200 years after Darwin's birth and 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, whose doorstop 1991 biography seemed to leave nothing more to be said, offer a new vision of the architect of evolution by natural selection. In Darwin's Sacred Cause (Allen Lane £25), they say that Darwin's work on the common ancestry of all living things was motivated not by abstract curiosity, but by a determination to show that African slaves have the same roots as their white masters. They claim that the foundational text of modern biology was spurred by Darwin's repugnance of the slave trade.

In this view, Darwin's championing of the "brotherhood" of all men might even be considered one of the enabling factors in the election of a black man as US president. There will no doubt be sneers at this "politically correct" Darwin, but it is hard to dispute Desmond and Moore's contention that Darwin aimed to overturn the notion, conveniently adopted by slavers, that blacks and Europeans (and other races) were separate species.

Besides, there was little that was PC about Darwin: he concurred with the prevailing belief in the superiority of whites, and of men over women. None the less, the Darwin who emerges from this meticulous analysis is profoundly humanitarian, despising slavery because he abhorred cruelty to any creature.

Others may be dismayed by the new portrait because it threatens to undermine the supposed "purity" of his quest. If Darwin had sociopolitical reasons to insist on the unity of races, was he a reliable judge of the evidence? Certainly, the many-species view of humankind was not then as nonsensical as it now appears. Data on the long-term fertility of progeny from cross-race unions was scant and often distorted. The fossil record was still silent on human origins, and genomics was more than a century away. Many of Darwin's scientific contemporaries held reservations about the one-species picture, including Darwin's friend Charles Lyell, the geologist who helped give geological time the reach that Darwinian evolution required. But if Darwin had an agenda for his theory, this makes it all the more admirable that he didn't leap to conclusions; he agonised over the data when others would have been content to paper over the cracks.

Desmond and Moore's account does, all the same, highlight the extraordinary degree to which Darwin's science has become encumbered by a cult of personality. It's as though evolution by natural selection still seems so challenging that we are forced back on to the man himself. In Darwin's Island (Little, Brown £20), a survey of his lesser-known works on such topics as insect-eating plants and earthworms, Steve Jones explains how mistaken the conventional narrative of Darwin's life is.

His journey on the Beagle, lavishly documented in James Taylor's The Voyage of the Beagle (Conway £20), contributed only modestly to his evolutionary theory - the Galápagos finches created "inexplicable confusion" rather than enlightenment - and his scientific journey was just beginning, not concluding, as the ship returned to Falmouth.

His theory of evolution didn't transform natural history at a stroke. As Bill Price says in his primer, Charles Darwin: Origins and Arguments (Pocket Essentials £9.99), its first brief airing at the Linnaean Society in 1858, alongside the parallel hypothesis of Alfred Russel Wallace, excited barely a ripple. Neither did it immediately mobilise the church in opposition. After all, evolution - the mutability of organisms - was an old idea.

As Jones neatly puts it, Darwinian evolution is a kind of engineering: "Natural selection is a factory that makes almost impossible things." It shows how to design without a designer and requires two elements: random variation and a means of selecting the "best" outcomes. The latter - selective pressure, as biologists call it - comes from the competition for limited resources, an idea inspired by the Malthusian view of population growth. Darwin came to believe that a key aspect of this filtering lay not in who could run fastest, but who got the most sex. He had no qualms about extending this sexual selection hypothesis beyond the peacocks' clumsy yet dazzling tails to the question of adornment and beauty in human populations, giving him a nascent theory of aesthetics.

Wallace, who Darwin came to see more as hindrance than ally, never accepted this idea; he considered animal displays to be primarily forms of camouflage or warning. Indeed, while a new collection of Wallace's works, Natural Selection and Beyond (OUP £30), makes a brave attempt to redeem his also-ran reputation, he emerges as something of a well-meaning gadfly, prone to the mysticism and spiritualism of his age.

Darwin himself could not explain the other ingredient of his theory: how attributes vary in a population. But genomics now does so in terms of the random mutations that occur in copying and combining DNA between generations. The resulting blend of Darwinism and genetics, called the modern synthesis, offers so apparently beautiful a means of generating biological complexity from simple origins that until very recently it blinded biologists to just how complicated, subtle and messy the transmission of our genes is.

Where much of the problems lay, and still lie, however, was in the concept of the "best" outcome. Even Darwin struggled with that. To biologist Ernst Haeckel, his champion in Germany, it implied an almost mystical path towards some pre-existing ideal form, invoking notions of racial perfection that were later blended into Nazism. Herbert Spencer, who coined the misleading term "survival of the fittest", saw implications for society, and soon enough class-based hierarchies and oligarchies were considered the "natural" state of affairs.

Darwin's cousin Francis Galton took that further, arguing that efforts to care for "the imbecile, the maimed and the sick" hindered the weeding process that maintains society's vitality. Galton's eugenics were promoted by Darwinists such as Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin's bullish supporter Thomas Henry Huxley. Churchill was another enthusiast, drafting what became the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act which aimed to prevent "mental defectives" from having children.

It is often said that Darwin cannot be held accountable for these excesses, but their seeds are obvious in his works, most notably The Descent of Man (1871), in which he finally explained what his evolutionary theory meant for humankind. The book echoes the concerns of Galton and others about overbreeding in "the reckless, degraded and often vicious members of society", such as the "squalid, unaspiring Irishman" who "multiplies like rabbits". There is a clear natural order of class, rank and race and only Darwin's insistence on a moral duty to help the weak partly redeems him.

All this, and not least Darwin's provocative talk of "favoured races in the struggle for life", seems now to be a residue not only of the chauvinism of the times but of a reluctance to abandon belief in abstract "fitness peaks" that natural selection seeks to scale. In fact, evolution can have no targets; races and species cannot be "perfected". That was one of the main objections to Darwinism, for it seemed to knock Homo sapiens off our pinnacle. We have yet to come to terms with our (highly successful) occupation of a evolutionary niche, rather than embodying a supreme destination. Darwin was equally troubled at how descent from non-humans left God no opportunity to invest us with morality. Evolutionary psychology and game theory now offer accounts, persuasive to varying degrees, of how morality itself is a product of natural selection.

If a principled stance on slavery did motivate Darwin's theory, it would be a curiously inapt stimulus, however noble. The separate-species line peddled by slave-trade apologists needed debunking, but it seems highly unlikely that a failure to do so would have altered Darwin's humane convictions on the matter. Likewise, no one would relinquish slavery for that reason - it took a civil war, not a book. That the pro- and anti- camps divided very much along traditional lines - Whig versus Tory, progressive versus reactionary - indicates that science was never really the issue.

All of which is a timely reminder, in these times of creationism, fundamentalism and climate-change denial, of a truth that scientists continually have to struggle with: in human affairs, battles are rarely won by evidence and logic.

Charles Darwin
A life

Born
12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury. Died 19 April 1882 in Downe, Kent.

Personal life
Married his cousin Emma Wedgewood. They had 10 children.

Education
Studied medicine at Edinburgh before dropping out and transferring to Christ's College, Cambridge with the intention of becoming a priest.

Career
1831 Invited by John Stevens Henslow to join HMS Beagle on a survey of South America commissioned by the Crown.

1838-1843 Edited and contributed to The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle. Consolidated his theory of natural selection, helped by reading TR Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

1859 On the Origin of Species

1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

He said
"We must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that a man with all his noble qualities ... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origins."

They said
"Evolution offers a far richer and more spectacular vision than any religion." - Richard Dawkins

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 25 Jan 2009 | 12:01 am

MRI boost gives view into lungs

British scientists have boosted the power of an MRI scanner 1,000,000%, giving doctors a window into living, breathing lungs for the first time. The technique, called hyperpolarisation, makes the signal detected by a standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner so strong it reveals details that could only be seen previously by slicing the patient open.

Researchers at Sheffield University have tested the new technique on 150 volunteers and used it to examine their lungs. In this way they have detected early signs of emphysema and revealed obstructions caused by cystic fibrosis and asthma.

Until now the best way to see inside lungs was with a CT (computed tomography) scan built up from x-rays. "But that's just a black-and-white picture without any functional information," added project leader Dr Jim Wild. "You don't see any of the micro-structure." And because x-rays can themselves damage tissues, doctors are reluctant to use them too often.

MRI scanners were invented in 1973 by Nottingham University's Sir Peter Mansfield, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work, and rely on the way atoms spin like tops.

Using powerful magnets, atoms in a patient are aligned. Then a radio wave is passed through their body, bending the atoms away from the magnetic axis. When the signal is turned off, the atoms release a burst of energy that is picked up by detectors.

Usually the scanners are tuned to work with the hydrogen atoms in the water that makes up most of our bodies. But only one in 100,000 hydrogen atoms stay lined up long enough for a scan, resulting in a weak signal. So Wild has concentrated on using lasers to hyperpolarise xenon or an isotope called helium-3. Both agents remain magnetised so well that one in 10 atoms can be kept in alignment for days.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 25 Jan 2009 | 12:01 am

Taiwan children get sneak preview of pandas (AFP)

AFP - Around 500 deprived Taiwanese children were on Saturday treated to a special preview of two giant pandas presented to the island as a gift from China.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Jan 2009 | 4:30 pm

Waste-To-Energy System Could Mean Big Savings

IST Energy Corp. system converts trash into electricity and gas heat.
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Jan 2009 | 3:05 pm

Sneaky Fish Love Caviar

This cannibal fish regularly eats eggs of its own species.
Source: Livescience.com | 24 Jan 2009 | 2:47 pm