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Loneliness Affects How The Brain OperatesSocial isolation affects how people behave as well as how their brains operate, a new shows. The research is the first to use fMRI scans to study connections between perceived social isolation (or loneliness) and activity in the brain. Combining fMRI scans with data relevant to social behavior is part of an emerging field examining brain mechanisms.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 7:00 pm Statistical Analysis Could Yield New Drug Target For Multiple SclerosisAn elaborate statistical analysis of genes from more than 7,000 individuals has identified an amino acid that appears to be a major risk factor for multiple sclerosis, a devastating autoimmune disorder that afflicts 2.5 million people worldwide.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 7:00 pm New Botanical Drug May Silence Peanut Allergies, Animal Study SuggestsA new study finds that a botanical drug could provide the key to new treatments for peanut allergies.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 7:00 pm 'Frozen Smoke:' Ultimate Sponge For Cleaning Up Oil SpillsScientists in Arizona and New Jersey are reporting that aerogels, a super-lightweight solid sometimes called "frozen smoke," may serve as the ultimate sponge for capturing oil from wastewater and effectively soaking up environmental oil spills.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 7:00 pm Fat Synthesizing Enzyme Is Key To Healthy Skin And HairScientists have found that an enzyme associated with the synthesis of fat in the body is also an element in healthy skin and hair.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 7:00 pm Satellite Collisions: What Can Be Done To Prevent Them In The Future?The recent collision involving an active U.S. commercial Iridium satellite and an inactive Russian Cosmos 2251 satellite in low Earth orbit has demonstrated an urgent need to establish a civil space traffic control system.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 7:00 pm Maintaining Balance And Listening At Same Time May Become More Difficult For Older AdultsListening to a conversation or audio book while walking or exercising sounds simple enough for most people, but it may become more difficult for people in their upper 70s and above, according to new research.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 4:00 pm New Method For Screening Thousands of Proteins: Major Step For Drug Discovery And DiagnosticsResearchers have developed a new general method to study membrane proteins. This method can be used to screen several thousand proteins, and it will reduce the way from development to useful drugs substantially.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 4:00 pm Built-in Volume Control Helps Protect Auditory Nerve Against Loud SoundsWhen our ears are exposed to very loud sounds, such as the blast of a firecracker, too much of a neurotransmitter is released, damaging these auditory nerve cells and causing hearing loss. Researchers have found that auditory nerve cells temporarily reduce the expression of a key neurotransmitter receptor on their surfaces when exposed to loud noise.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 4:00 pm Cosmologists Aim To Observe First Moments Of UniverseDuring the next decade, a delicate measurement of primordial light could reveal convincing evidence for the popular cosmic inflation theory, which proposes that a random, microscopic density fluctuation in the fabric of space and time gave birth to the universe in a hot big bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 4:00 pm Search for 'Alien Life' Could Start on EarthIf life arose twice on Earth, it probably exists elsewhere, too. Let the hunt begin.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 17 Feb 2009 | 2:30 pm Drinking Water to Become More CorrosiveAs drinking water becomes more scarce it's also likely to become more polluted.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 17 Feb 2009 | 2:20 pm First carbon-free polar station opens in AntarcticaPRINCESS ELISABETH BASE, Antarctica (Reuters) - The world's first zero-emission polar research station opened in Antarctica on Sunday and was welcomed by scientists as proof that alternative energy is viable even in the coldest regions.Source: Reuters: Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 1:29 pm First carbon-free polar station opens in Antarctica (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 1:29 pm Painful memory? Forget itWouldn't it be nice if we could get rid of unhappy or unsettling memories? A simple memory eraser that would delete the pain of having been mugged, or the sad end to a love affair? Or to erase the guilt of the soldier who kills or rapes civilians? How about going further, and with a simple drug enable the politician to forget that he promised to abolish boom and bust, or take us to war on a lie? George Orwell's 1984 had its memory hole, in which past news was buried and false pasts created. But that involved armies of desk workers. More recently, in Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, erasing memories of a relationship gone sour involved clamping the sad lover's head into a helmet and passing a strong magnetic field across his skull. Actually that might even work, though it didn't in the film; love proved stronger than mere technology. But in the US the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is more than mildly interested in trans-cranial brain stimulation (Darpa, for short, with its inadvertent echoes of Star Wars, has been funding this sort of stuff for decades). Science fiction apart, one reason for wanting to erase memories could be the belief that people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) can have their symptoms relieved by reliving and coming to terms with their traumatic experience and an small army of professional grief and stress councillors has emerged, especially in the US. Now a group of Dutch researchers has hit the media with the suggestion that a commonly available pill, a blood pressure-lowering beta-blocker, might help do the trick. In fact, the idea isn't new. For some decades it has been known that emotional memories engage a region of the brain called the amygdala and a neurotransmitter related to the hormone adrenalin. Blocking the effects of adrenalin with a beta-blocker also impairs the emotional memory (I've even done experiments of this sort myself). But why might one want to do such a thing? The idea is to give a person the drug and then re-invoke the painful memory, in the hope that the drug will erase it. While most memory research has focused on developing drugs that might improve memory – so-called cognitive enhancers – the thought that if one drug improved memory, another that blocked the effect of the first might impair it attracted a number of small start-up biotech companies interested in cashing on the potential PTSD market. But even before the current market collapse at least two such companies, well bankrolled and with scientific luminaries on their boards, went belly-up. So is it even such a good idea? Some psychotherapists argue that it is better to enable people to come to terms with bad memories rather than erase them; others might urge suppression. But for sure, as long as the pharmaceutical industry keeps generating new drugs, some people – and some state agencies – are going to want to mess with the mind. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 17 Feb 2009 | 1:00 pm Cheap food 'damages the environment'The culture of cheap food has damaged public health, farming and the environment, according to the head of Waitrose . Mark Price, the supermarket chain's managing director, attacked aggressive price cutting championed by his larger rivals such as Tesco and Asda. He blamed the government for encouraging a trend of cheap food after the second world war, which consumers "have now got used to". "The headlong rush since the end of the second world war for ever greater quantities of cheap food has not only made us fatter, it has led to fewer, more indebted farms and an impoverished environment," Price told the National Farmers' Union conference yesterday. "Food is seen as a disposable commodity that does not merit more than passing consideration. Food is seen as cheap. Food is neither of these things." With price cutting moving up the agenda after years of rising prices and more recently growing unemployment and job insecurity since the economic downturn, Price defended Waitrose's higher prices. Like-for-like products were less than 5% more expensive than in Tesco or Sainsbury's, and the difference between the cheapest chicken in rival supermarkets and Waitrose was only £1, Price told the Guardian. Waitrose could demand better standards for a relatively small extra cost by making less profit on these products, something the supermarket could afford to do because it had a higher proportion of high-value, high-margin fresh food and top-range produce, said Price. "Despite the recession, on average, Britons are financially and materially better off than at any other point in history," he told the conference in Birmingham. "This is not to say that some families are not suffering very badly. They are. But the fact is that food now makes up a smaller portion of household expenditure than ever before. "This may be good for our pockets, but it isn't good for our farmers, our health, our communities or our attitude to the natural environment – and that means it isn't good for anyone." As well as naming his rival supermarkets, Price made an indirect attack on Tesco's chief executive Terry Leahy, linking him in his introduction to a clip of Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko making his infamous "greed is good" speech in the 1980s film Wall Street. A Tesco spokeswoman said the company did not want to respond directly to Price's speech, but added: "We're wholly committed to British farming, but equally customers need us to be able to offer them great value." Price also criticised the boss of Asda, Andy Bond, for putting down celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Heston Blumenthal. "His [Bond's] criticism centred on a belief that asking consumers to pay a little more for high-quality, ethically reared meat is out of step with public mood," said Price. Peter Kendall, the NFU president, welcomed recognition of the pressures on farmers, which he said had increased during the credit crunch. Methods used by supermarkets included forcing down prices after contracts were signed by changing products from normal to cheap "value" ranges, and demanding more money for marketing and promotions, said Kendall. More education was needed to persuade people that cheap food was not good "value", said Kendall. "A lot of people here have built a good business on the back of [supermarkets], they have got some long-term relationships with them. But there's an air of short-termism which does damage our long-term supply base," he said. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 17 Feb 2009 | 12:05 pm Haemophiliac infected with vCJD from blood donorAn elderly man with haemophilia contracted the human form of BSE after being treated with a blood-clotting agent from an infected donor, experts said today. The patient had shown no symptoms of the disease but a post-mortem revealed evidence of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) in the spleen. The patient, who was over 70 and who died from an unrelated condition, is the first haemophiliac to be identified with vCJD. Investigations are ongoing to work out how the patient contracted the disease, but he was treated with several batches of clotting factors before 1999 that were sourced in the UK. Fears over BSE and its possible transmission in blood transfusions led to tighter rules in 1999 around the supply and testing of blood. The patient had been treated with one batch of Factor VIII – a protein that helps blood clot – taken from the plasma of a donor who went on to develop symptoms of vCJD six months after donating it in 1996. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) said today that investigations were ongoing but that it was working with the UK Haemophilia Centre Doctors Organisation to inform all patients with bleeding disorders of the finding. In 2004, all patients with bleeding disorders, including haemophilia, treated with UK-sourced pooled plasma products between 1980 and 2001 were classed as "at risk" of vCJD due to the possibility of infection. The HPA said today that this latest discovery would not change the "at risk" status. Professor Mike Catchpole, director of the HPA's centre for infections, said: "This new finding may indicate that what was until now a theoretical risk may be an actual risk to certain individuals who have received blood plasma products, although the risk could still be quite low. "We recognise that this finding will be of concern for persons with haemophilia who will be awaiting the completion of the ongoing investigations and their interpretation. "The priority is to ensure that patients are informed of this development and have access to the latest information and specialist advice from their own haemophilia centre doctor as soon as possible." He added: "This finding does not change our understanding of the risk from vCJD for other people in any specific way. "But it does reinforce the importance of the precautionary measures that have been taken over the years. "Since the risk of vCJD transmission through blood was first considered, a number of precautionary measures have been introduced to minimise the risk from the UK blood supply. "UK plasma has not been used for the manufacture of clotting factors since 1999 and synthetic clotting factors are provided for all patients for whom they are suitable." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 17 Feb 2009 | 11:50 am Call for end to USDA's wildlife killing agency (AP)AP - Conservationists argue in a new report that U.S. taxpayers should stop subsidizing a $100 million program that kills more than 1 million wild animals annually, a program ranchers and farmers have defended for nearly a century as critical to protecting their livestock from predators.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 11:49 am Hurricane Season 2008 (weather.com)weather.com -Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 11:05 am Genes That Control Body's Salt Levels Are Identified (HealthDay)HealthDay - MONDAY, Feb. 16 (HealthDay News) -- The largest study of the effects of genetics on blood pressure in humans has linked variant versions of genes that control levels of salt in the body with high blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 17 Feb 2009 | 4:48 am Race for 'God particle' heats upEurope's Cern is losing ground in the race to identify one of the fundamental particles of matter, its US rival claims.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 17 Feb 2009 | 1:30 am Willem KolffIt was in 1943, in Nazi-occupied Holland, that Willem "Pim" Kolff, who has died aged 97, put together the first version of what he preferred to call an artificial kidney, but which the world came to know as the kidney dialysis machine. Later, in the US, Kolff pioneered the artificial heart and the membrane oxygenator for bypass surgery. But in 1943 he was a member of the resistance, materials were in short supply and manufacturers were under orders to deal exclusively with the Germans. To make his machine, Kolff used sausage casing made of cellophane (then a new substance), orange juice tins, part of a water pump he obtained from a Ford dealer, and a revolving drum containing fluid to clean deadly impurities from the blood that the kidneys were failing to remove. At first, his experimental treatments on patients failed to work well, and 16 succumbed to renal illness. Then, in 1945, when he treated a woman - a Nazi collaborator - of 67 at the city hospital in Kampen, who was suffering from acute kidney failure, he finally succeeded. Treatment took a week but the woman survived for another seven years, before dying of an illness unrelated to her kidneys. His invention was not unique, as Kolff was happy to proclaim. He recalled that the idea of dialysis came from three American doctors who described it in 1913, when Kolff was only two, at a medical conference in Groningen, the same city in the Netherlands where he took his PhD at its university, and where he began research on the artificial kidney. He was inspired by having to watch a man of 22 die of kidney failure while he worked as an intern. "I realised that removing 22 cubic centimetres of toxicity from his blood would have saved his life," he said. "I had to do something." Kolff's many inventions were never to make him rich. He said he learned early on that there was little money in artificial organs, mainly because they were risky enterprises that took a long time to develop. At one point he had a share in an artificial heart firm valued at £1.6m, but the company went out of business. He had emigrated to the US with his family in 1950 and, in 1957, he and another doctor became the first western medical researchers to implant an artificial heart in a dog. Then, in 1982, in Salt Lake City, a retired dentist, Barney Clark, became the first human to receive a surgically implanted artificial heart. It had been developed at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Utah, where Kolff had been director since 1967, and where the institute's pioneering work had given him the name of "father of artificial organs". But Clark lived only 112 days and suffered a series of convulsions. He did not die of a heart attack or a stroke, but the implant procedure's ethics became a huge controversy. But Kolff had already found that the very idea of artificial organs offended some people, including doctors. He recalled that once, in the men's lavatory at the US National Institutes of Health, "one of the top men there looked back over his shoulder at me and said: 'I hope the artificial heart will never work.' He thought you shouldn't do a thing like that. That's also why it's difficult to get support. Nobody wants an artificial heart - unless they're going to die two days from now." Despite these problems, Kolff directed research into artificial eyes, hearing, electronically controlled arms, and the membrane oxygenator and, even after he retired at 75, continued researching. Even in his 90s, living as a divorced man in a one-room flat in a home for the elderly in a Philadelphia suburb, he was working on a portable artificial lung with the backing of a German manufacturer. Kolff was born in Leiden, the eldest son of a doctor who ran a TB sanatorium in nearby Beekbergen. The young Willem often accompanied his father to work and soon became fascinated with medicine. He graduated from Leiden medical school in 1938, a year after he got married, and went on to postgraduate work before obtaining his PhD in 1946. When he emigrated to the US, he began working in the research department and the department of surgery of the Cleveland clinic in Ohio to improve the artificial kidney, develop a heart and lung machine, and invent the first total artificial heart. He became the clinic's head of the department of artificial organs and professor of clinical investigation, and this work brought him the invitation to Utah. In his lifetime, Kolff won many awards, one worth $500,000, which he used to develop his portable lung, and he contributed more than 300 articles to journals. In his old age his dialysis machines were estimated to be keeping 1 million people alive around the world. Kolff married Janke Huidekoper in 1937. They divorced in 2000. He is survived by a daughter and four sons, 12 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. • Willem Johan "Pim" Kolff, doctor and inventor, born 14 February 1911; died 11 February 2009 guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 17 Feb 2009 | 12:01 am Defying DarwinThey do it differently in the US. The Creation Museum in Cincinnati (motto: "Prepare to believe!") measures 70,000 sq ft, cost $27m to build, was designed by someone from Universal Studios, and promises "murals and realistic scenery, computer-generated visual effects, over 50 exotic animals, life-sized people and dinosaur animatronics, and a special-effects theater complete with misty sea breezes and rumbling seats". The museum, opened in 2006 by creationist group Answers in Genesis to promote "true history", looks Edenic on its website. By contrast, Britain's creation museum, Genesis Expo, is housed in a former bank next to the bus station on the harbour front in Portsmouth. It does not appear to have any connection with Hollywood, and is an animatronic-free zone. The sign stretching across the front of the building is peeling, an elderly volunteer from a local church is manning the front desk, and the museum is only slowly converting its stock of creationist videos to DVD. The upside is that Genesis Expo is free to enter. The museum was opened in 2000 by the Creation Science Movement, which claims to be the oldest creationist movement in the world, beginning life in 1932 as the Evolution Protest Movement. In 1935, Sir Ambrose Fleming, one its founders, explained at a public meeting why the movement was necessary: "Of late years, the Darwinian anthropology had been forced on public attention by numerous books in such a fashion as to create a belief that it was a certainly settled scientific truth. The fact that many eminent naturalists did not agree that Darwin's theory of species production ... was generally repressed." The CSM still quotes his words as its credo today, and in Darwin's bicentenary year Fleming's successors think they are finally making progress. The bicentenary has been good for Genesis Expo. David Attenborough extolling the virtues of Darwin on TV - and attacking the vices of militant creationists, who he says have subjected him to hate mail, in the Radio Times - has been bringing in the punters. On the Saturday that I drop by, there is a steady trickle of somewhat bemused visitors - small church groups, a few young foreign tourists and several children eager to play with the dinosaurs. Creationism has surprisingly little difficulty accommodating dinosaurs. Indeed, the first thing you bump into at the museum is Boris, a 20ft model of a tyrannosaurus rex. Conventional scientists think T-rex died out at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65m years ago. Creationists, who argue that the world was created no more than 10,000 years ago, believe dinosaurs and man co-existed in the pre-Flood period (they date the Flood to around 1,600 years after the creation), that there were dinosaurs on the ark, but that they were eventually wiped out by the changes in climate which followed the Flood. The museum itself is a little dusty, with lots of fossils in glass cabinets, the way museums were circa 1935. The high spots are a faux-marble gravestone on which Darwin's picture is engraved, above the caption "Here Lies the Theory of Evolution. RIP", and a batch of "genuine dinosaur eggs". Ross Rosevear, the museum's curator, tells me he has been licking envelopes for the CSM since 1981 and is a convinced "young earther". Almost all Christians used to go along with the idea that Genesis was a bit suspect on dates, and that the six days of the Bible were metaphorical, with each day representing a vast geological age. The majority of Anglicans, theistic evolutionists who have no difficulty in believing in a Darwinian God, would still abide by that. But the publication in 1961 of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood, which set out to give a scientific demonstration of the literal truth of the Bible, emboldened those who refused to accept evolution. "The book was the turning point," says Rosevear. "They were voices in the wilderness at the time, but since then things have moved in that direction." A recent survey, commissioned by the theology thinktank Theos, reported that half of a sample of more than 2,000 people in the UK did not believe in evolution, almost a quarter opted for creationism or intelligent design (the latter presupposes a watchmaker with 20/20 vision who is not the Christian god and may well own a spaceship), and a remarkable 10% accepted young earth creationism. If you believe in young-earth creationism, as an increasing number of evangelical Christians do, virtually all existing science has to be rewritten - and the creationists are ready to do the rewriting. The speed of light, Rosevear argues, used to be 300 times faster than it is now - necessary for creationists to explain cosmology and the distance of other solar systems from our own; the great cataclysm of the Flood explains the formation of sedimentary rock and the distribution of fossils; the division of the land masses occurred when the post-Flood ice melted and sea levels rose; dinosaurs died out because they couldn't adapt to the fall in oxygen levels that followed the Flood. The theories are at best antediluvian, at worst absurd, so creationists feel more comfortable picking generalised holes in Darwinian thinking. "Most scientists believe in evolution because they believe that most scientists believe in evolution," says the evangelical preacher and author Brian Edwards. "We do believe in evolution, that things develop. But there's not a shred of evidence for macro evolution - the jump from one species to another. The fins of a fish can't become the wings of a bird or the arms of a man. All we know of genetics is that you can't have a half-formed eye; you can't have steps towards a fully formed eye. All that we know of the genome system supports creationism, not evolution. It's not just a matter of our faith; it's an intellectual issue. Darwin's had an easy ride. He's not the great hero." "We are forever being told [by evolutionists] that they've got proof of evolution, but they haven't," says Monty White, former head of Answers in Genesis in the UK. "They've got proof of change within species. But the Bible doesn't teach fixity of species; it talks about kinds. You can't extrapolate from change within species to say that an ape-like creature can turn into man." White, who is a chemist, could claim to be the grand old man of creationism in the UK. He became a Christian as an undergraduate in 1964, and initially accepted theistic evolution, but by the early 1970s he had come to believe that evolution was not compatible with Christianity. He admits that his thinking on creation is a "faith position", and wants evolutionists to do the same. "I object to the fact that evolution is taught as fact, rather than as a hypothesis. You're allowed to question everything in this country except evolution." From the 1970s on, White spent much of his time writing on creationism and touring churches lecturing on the subject. His evangelism was important in building the movement - Geoff Chapman, who now runs the Creation Resources Trust in Somerset, says hearing White speak was his inspiration for getting involved in 1981 - and a loose federation of creationists, working through the network of evangelical churches, began to evolve. There are now at least half a dozen active creationist organisations in the UK. The Leicester-based Answers in Genesis, with four full-time staff, is the most visible. Former science teacher Paul Taylor, who took over from White as head of AIG in the UK last year, says it has the largest "reach" of any creationist group in Britain and calls his organisation the "David Attenboroughs of the creationist world". "Creationists are less marginal than we were 20 years ago," he says. "There is greater respect for us than there was, and [as a result] more anger among the 'new atheists'. They want to clamp down on what children can be taught, which is what they accuse us of." Other groups are smaller. The Creation Science Movement in Portsmouth says it has a mailing list of 1,500; Creation Research UK - an offshoot of an organisation set up by another former science teacher, John Mackay, in Australia more than 20 years ago - has 2,000. But names are duplicated across organisations, and some are anti-creationists keen to keep tabs on the enemy. As for the number of frontline creationists, involved in evangelising on a day-to-day basis, a delegate at a recent creationist conference at High Leigh in Hertfordshire told me there were about a hundred, in regular contact with each other via a subscriber-only internet site called Creation Link. British creationism is surprisingly independent from the far bigger, better funded, more vocal, highly politicised movement in the US, where creationists and intelligent design organisations (often a front for Christian creationists) are fighting perpetual legal battles to get creationist teaching into the classrooms of state schools. George Bush and Sarah Palin both appeared to give succour to the creationists. "Teach both," said Palin when she was running for the governorship of Alaska. "You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important and it's so valuable in our schools." So far the courts have treated creationism as a branch of religion and legislated to keep it out of the classroom on the grounds of the separation, enshrined in the constitution, between state and church. That is the official position, but the reality is fuzzier. A survey last year suggested that 16% of American science teachers are creationist, and there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that creationism is taught, or at least discussed, in US schools. When we met recently, John Mackay, the founder and international director of Creation Research, told me he had lectured in many state schools in the US. Moreover, there is a large Christian school and university sector in the US, as well as a burgeoning home education sector which is to a large extent religiously oriented. So, whatever the American judicial system may decree and the science lobby may wish, creationism is being taught to children, in accordance no doubt with the wishes of the 45% of those who in a Gallup poll in the US in 2001 identified themselves as creationist (choosing, from several options, the statement "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so" as the one closest to their own view). Whether creationism or intelligent design should form part of science teaching is also the most controversial aspect of the debate in the UK. AIG's Taylor, a Christian since he was 17, says that when he was a teacher, "I didn't see it was part of my job to teach creationism, but if discussion came up it was possible to discuss creationism." That accords with government guidelines on how to treat creationism in the classroom. "Creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science national curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science," state the guidelines. "However, there is a real difference between teaching 'x' and teaching about 'x'. Any questions about creationism and intelligent design which arise in science lessons, for example as a result of media coverage, could provide the opportunity to explain or explore why they are not considered to be scientific theories and, in the right context, why evolution is considered to be a scientific theory." Much is left to the discretion of individual teachers, and a spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families says it is the job of headmasters to monitor what is being taught. He also encourages parents to report teachers they believe to be overstepping the mark. "If you are teaching evolution and a child raises his hand and says, 'But I've heard we were created by God', there's nothing wrong with having a discussion about it. That's common sense. But teachers can't teach creationism, and Christian teachers have to follow the rules." Last year, Michael Reiss, professor of science education at the Institute of Education, lost his job as director of education at the Royal Society when members of the society objected to his call for creationism to be discussed in science lessons. It was a bizarre episode because Reiss is a theistic evolutionist and he was arguing for no more than the government guidelines already permit. What did for him was his suggestion that "creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a worldview", which was misconstrued as an argument for giving creationism and evolution equal weight. Reiss is wary of re-igniting the controversy and prefers not to talk about the way in which he was ousted. But he does tell me that he feels creationism is becoming stronger, and that it is better to engage with it rather than ignore or show contempt for it. "It is growing, both in the UK and in many other countries," he says. "As Christianity has become less important in the west, it has sometimes become more extreme. That is a common phenomenon. The rise of creationism makes teaching more challenging. In the US a lot of pressure has been brought to bear by local school boards, and as a result the state system in the US teaches no evolution at all, or else teaches a very eviscerated, attenuated form of it. My hope is that we can avoid the extreme politicisation of the US." It may be a vain hope. Attenborough says he has received hate mail from creationists, though all the organisations declare they would never resort to such tactics. But the creationists, too, complain of hate mail, and Randall Hardy of Creation Research UK sent me a copy of a recent exchange in which the term most frequently resorted to by his correspondent was "religious parasite". I suspect if anyone could be bothered to trawl through a good sample of emails and discussion board messages where these issues are being debated, I am confident that they would find a much higher percentage of abuse is aimed at Christians by atheists, than vice versa," he says. The viciousness reflects the fact that, at its heart, this is not a scientific debate but a moral, cultural and political one. John Mackay, the founder of Creation Research, is frank about his agenda and admits this is really a battle of worldviews. "All scientific research, whether we like it or not, has moral overtones and implications and applications," he says. "This issue is fundamental to the whole of life. When your government is making decisions about stem-cell research, sooner or later you have to address the issue of, 'Well, did God make us or didn't he make us?' When you're funding abortions, are we going to be held accountable after the grave? It's not an issue you can just shove aside as if it doesn't matter. If life came from nature, it doesn't matter; we're just hydrogen recycled; we'll come back again maybe. Science is not just test tubes. There's always a wider worldview, and that's where the bitterness comes from." One of the most corrosive arguments creationists deploy - and I heard it many times - is that Darwinism made possible eugenics, Nazism, communist materialism. "If we come from slime and revert to slime, it's not surprising that life is slimy," is one mantra. "If you realise what Darwin gave rise to, you would realise what a pernicious system it was," says Brian Edwards. "Eugenics and Nazism applied biological evolution quite logically." Creationists like to point to the original title of Darwin's life-redefining book: "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". Favoured races! QED, they say with satisfied expressions. Darwin as the godfather of Hitler and Stalin. No wonder this debate degenerates into vicious blogs and hate mail, and a reasonable man like Michael Reiss gets submerged in the flood. The US and UK creationist movements have many points of difference, so at the High Leigh conference - seven lectures grouped under the banner "Genesis Kinds: Creationism and the Origin of Species" - it is interesting to see the two genuses side by side. Todd Wood, director of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College (motto: "Christ above all") in Dayton, Tennessee, and the prime mover in the event, doesn't want to talk to me. He won't even let me record his lecture on Darwin, about whom he evidently has mixed feelings. During the talk, he shows a slide of himself outside Down House, Darwin's home in Kent, and his concluding remarks are affectionate, if condescending: "Darwin's was a sad life. He was a brilliant man who ignored the Lord's pursuit of him. God was after him, but he allowed the hardships he faced [Wood is thinking principally of the death of Darwin's young daughter] to harden him." The conference's co-organiser, Paul Garner, a geologist who works full time for Biblical Creation Ministries, is also initially reluctant but explains why standing up for the literal truth of Genesis is so important to him: "Many people have the mistaken impression that it's Genesis, chapter one that drives young earth creationism - a rigid understanding of the word 'day' in the creation. But that isn't it at all. It's Genesis three; it's the introduction of death and suffering and what you might call natural evil into the creation. If those things pre-date Adam, there's a big theological problem for me, because it undermines the foundation of the gospel. The young-earth position is the only one that has a coherent understanding of the history that doesn't have suffering, death and bloodshed before Adam's fall." It is, in other words, a life-or-death issue for Christianity: if evolution is true, the creation is founded on competition, suffering and mortality; there never was a paradise; a theistic evolutionist God is an accessory to eternal crime. Sylvia Baker, another veteran creationist, biologist, former teacher and author of the anti-evolutionary bestseller, Bone of Contention, is a rare female creationist. "The first time I'd come across evidence for evolution was in A-level zoology," she says, "and it had struck me as rather weak. It seemed circumstantial, and I thought there must be more evidence than this because all of these things are vague and capable of different interpretations. I assumed that when I got to university all the vagueness would disappear and there'd be lots of overwhelming evidence. But there wasn't. I still didn't query it, but a turning point came towards the end of my degree when in a seminar on the supposed evolution of the eye it suddenly seemed to me an impossibility that the vertebrate eye could have evolved from other sorts of structures [eyes of invertebrates]. The two things run on completely different principles. There's just no connection. So I said, 'Maybe it didn't happen.' What happened next really taught me a lesson, which the subsequent 40 years have substantiated. There was a shocked silence, somebody started mocking me for my belief in God and the seminar leader said, 'Quiet. I will not have this. I refuse to get involved in any controversy. We will not discuss this.'" That moment governed the rest of Baker's life, which has been spent teaching in private Christian schools, writing on creationism, and working with the Biblical Creation Society, another of the mosaic of similar-sounding organisations which articulate creationism in the UK. She seems genuinely questioning, but what worries me about many of her fellow creationists is that they begin with the Bible and then start looking for scientific evidence to back up what their faith tells them is true. "I am guided ultimately by the parameters that the Bible lays down," admits John Peet, travelling secretary of the Biblical Creation Society. He estimates that 90% of the congregation at the Chertsey Street baptist church in Guildford, where he worships and where I hear him address the "creation club", are young earthers. The theme of pastor John Benton's sermon in the evening is "Genesis and Evolution: Do They Fit Together?" He holds up a recent New Scientist cover, headlined "Darwin was wrong," as evidence that the scientific base for evolution is crumbling, that the Darwinian tree of life can be uprooted. Mackay, too, is clutching a copy of that issue of New Scientist when I meet him. This is manna from heaven - the science establishment offering up gifts to the creationists. They also claim that the aggression of the new atheists is helping them. They paint Dawkins as a "recruiting sergeant" for creationism because he links evolutionary thinking with atheism. "He has been a real help to the ministry, " says Randall Hardy. Creationists argue that the new atheists are fuelling the dogmatism; Richard Harries, the former Bishop of Oxford and a theistic evolutionary, last week threw that accusation back at them. "Creationists totally misunderstand the Bible," he said. "Genesis is in the business of story, myth, poetry, metaphor. They [creationists and atheists] feed off one another. The debate has an unreality about it. Those of us who are not fundamentalists can't find a place." But Greg Haslam, pastor at Westminster Chapel in central London, says a lot of people don't understand what is lost by compromising. "[Jesus] seems very clearly to have believed in the historicity of Adam and Eve. If you don't believe those early chapters [of Genesis], you end up saying, 'Well, Jesus was wrong,' and where does that leave you? What can we believe of what Jesus said?" If, like Haslam, you take the biblical beginning literally, you must also go along with the biblical end - apocalypse, the second coming of Christ, the final judgment, eternal damnation for non-believers, perpetual bliss for the lucky few. It was this that really turned Darwin off Christianity: inherent in creationism is destructionism. It strikes me, too, as a hideous doctrine, and over dinner at High Leigh I ask Kurt Wise, professor of science and theology at the Southern Baptist Theological College in Louisville, Kentucky, whether I've understood it correctly. Wise is a twinkling 50-year-old with a perpetual smile, a contrarian spirit and a born (or born-again) preacher's style of delivery. Wise imagines creation as "a beautiful painting or tapestry where each individual brushmark or thread is one aspect of the creation". But on the apocalypse that awaits us he is unbending. "The Bible warns us: 'As it was in the days of Noah, so it shall be - my coming.' People are going to be wandering around on the planet when the Flood comes and they're blown away. People are going to be eating and drinking and marrying and doing their thing, and the judgment is going to come." Then he returns to his apple pie and custard, smiling at the thought of the world's imminent demise. God vs Darwin: Do creationists have a case?In the 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin's opponents have tried numerous angles of attack to discredit the man and spear his theory. He was lampooned in Victorian caricature as a bearded monkey, his critics have misrepresented his theory by likening it to a whirlwind in a junk yard assembling a jumbo jet by chance and they drone on endlessly about gaps in the fossil record between one group of creatures and another – even though numerous such transitional fossils have been found. Most Darwin-sceptics, of course, hold up the Bible as "proof" that the great biologist can't be right. A more subtle ploy is to damn the man with faint praise. In a letter in the Telegraph to coincide with Darwin's birthday last week, 10 authors conceded that "evolutionary adaptation, modification and variation within species – which is what Darwin actually discovered – is secure" but that the evidence for how complex organisms developed is "modest in the extreme". What they seem to be saying is that a finch's beak can change over generations to allow it to eat a different type of food, for example, but where did the finch come from in the first place? By accepting the carefully worded "variation within species" they are implicitly rejecting speciation – the process by which one species becomes two that cannot interbreed. In reality there is now stacks of evidence for how speciation can occur. Scientists have studied it in great detail happening in the lab – for example in fruit flies. There are still scientific debates to be had about the details of how natural selection operates – for example, to what extent characteristics acquired during life can be passed on to off spring via chemical modifications to DNA – but there is no serious disagreement in the scientific community about the fundamentals of Darwin's theory. A century and a half of science from fossils to DNA has turned up nothing that would bring Darwin's theory down. In fact, it has made his defences stronger. Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 17 Feb 2009 | 12:01 am Study raises hopes of Anthrax vaccine pillLONDON (Reuters) - An oral vaccine packed into bacteria found in dairy products like milk and cheese protected mice from the anthrax bacteria, suggesting a pill could replace injections for humans, researchers said on Monday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 16 Feb 2009 | 10:18 pm Leukemia patients treated with arsenic, vitamin AHONG KONG (Reuters) - Doctors appear to have safely and successfully treated patients with cancer of the blood and bone marrow with a combination of arsenic and vitamin A, according to long-term study in China.Source: Reuters: Science News | 16 Feb 2009 | 10:06 pm Obama to lift ban on stem cell research soon: aideWASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will soon issue an executive order lifting an eight-year ban embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, a senior adviser said on Sunday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 16 Feb 2009 | 8:40 pm Missing dinosaur link found in Argentina (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Feb 2009 | 6:41 pm Alien life 'may exist among us'Alien life-forms may be thriving right here on Earth, a physicist tells a major science conference in the US.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Feb 2009 | 6:35 pm Fireball of space debris seen across USEyewitnesses across America have reported debris falling from the sky, following last week's unprecedented crash between two satellites orbiting earth. Wreckage was seen falling from the sky as far apart as New Mexico, Texas and Kentucky yesterday, with some eyewitnesses even reporting sightings of a fireball blazing across the sky. The reports come just days after the two communications satellites – one American and the other Russian - collided in space, creating a huge cloud of fragments. Texas resident Brian Vaniceck told the Waco Tribune-Herald that he saw a streak of light pass across the sky as he was driving yesterday morning. "We just happened to look in that direction, and at first it looked liked a falling star," he said, "But then it flared and got really big, I guess that's what some people might describe as a fireball." Vanicek - who lives near Zabcickville, around 120 miles south of Dallas - said he watched the vapour trails for around 10 minutes. The reports followed the federal aviation authority's alert to US pilots warning that "a potential hazard may occur due to re-entry of satellite debris into the earth's atmosphere". Roland Herwig, a spokesman for the FAA's south-west region, said that similar sightings had been reaching officials across the southern states. "Late this morning, people started reporting to law enforcement there was a fireball, and some people reported an explosion which we suspect was probably a sonic boom," he told CNN yesterday. The two spacecraft smashed into each other over Siberia last Tuesday, the first time two vehicles of such size had ever crashed together while orbiting earth. With a combined weight of 1.5 tonnes, and a speed of more than 22,000 miles per hour, the collision created a dust cloud consisting of up to 600 fragments. Nasa officials had previously said the cloud was not a danger to the Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 16 Feb 2009 | 6:15 pm EU experts clash over France, Greece GM maize bansBRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU biotech experts failed to muster enough consensus on Monday to approve an order for France and Greece to lift their bans on growing genetically modified maize, sending the decision to ministers, the EU executive said.Source: Reuters: Science News | 16 Feb 2009 | 6:10 pm Mars Craters Tell Story of Water and IceNew theory proposes ice fields responsible for sulfate deposits of Meridiani Planum.Source: Livescience.com | 16 Feb 2009 | 5:13 pm Pill Could Erase Bad Memories (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - Scientists have discovered a drug that could erase fearful memories in humans.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Feb 2009 | 5:10 pm Pill Could Erase Bad MemoriesScientists have discovered a drug that could erase fearful memories in humans.Source: Livescience.com | 16 Feb 2009 | 5:04 pm NKorea defiant as Clinton arrives on Asian tour (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Feb 2009 | 4:05 pm European Space Agency hopes to clean up space junk (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Feb 2009 | 3:21 pm Research shows why some soldiers are cool under fireCHICAGO (Reuters) - Soldiers who perform best under extreme stress have higher levels of chemicals that dampen the fear response, a finding that could lead to new drugs or training strategies to help others cope better, a U.S. researcher said on Sunday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 16 Feb 2009 | 2:34 pm Farm wildlife cash 'could return'Farmers could be paid once again to set aside uncultivated land for wildlife, the government says.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Feb 2009 | 2:04 pm Pictures shift men's view of womenMen are more likely to think of women as objects if they have looked at sexy pictures of females beforehand, psychologists said yesterday. Researchers used brain scans to show that when straight men looked at pictures of women in bikinis, areas of the brain that normally light up in anticipation of using tools, like spanners and screwdrivers, were activated. Scans of some of the men found that a part of the brain associated with empathy for other peoples' emotions and wishes shut down after looking at the pictures. Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, said the changes in brain activity suggest sexy images can shift the way men perceive women, turning them from people to interact with, to objects to act upon. The finding confirms a long-suspected effect of sexy images on the way women are perceived, and one which persists in workplaces and the wider world today, Fiske said. "When there are sexualised images in the workplace, it's hard for people not to think about their female colleagues in those terms. It spills over from the images to the workplace," she said. Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago yesterday, Fiske said the findings called into question the impact of sexualised images of women that might be pinned on workplace walls or sent around offices where there was a strong locker-room culture. "I'm not saying there should be censorship, but people need to be aware of the associations people will have in their minds," Fiske said. In the study, Fiske's team put straight men into an MRI brain scanner and showed them images of either clothed men and women, or more scantily clad men and women. When they took a memory test afterwards, the men best remembered images of bikini-clad women whose heads had been digitally removed. The brain scans showed that when men saw the images of the women's bodies, activity increased in part of the brain called the premotor cortex, which is involved in urges to take action. The same area lights up before using power tools to do DIY. "It's as if they immediately thought to act on theses bodies," Fiske said. In the final part of the study, Fiske asked the men to fill in a questionnaire that was used to assess how sexist they were. The brain scans showed that men who scored highest had very little activity in the prefrontal cortex and other brain regions that are involved with understanding another person's feelings and intentions. "They're reacting to these women as if they're not fully human," Fiske said. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 16 Feb 2009 | 1:42 pm Natural born heroes?People who stay cool in a crisis may be natural born heroes, according to psychiatrists investigating how soldiers behave in stressful situations. Blood tests on war veterans showed that a minority were almost oblivious to stress and were able to think clearly in spite of the dangerous situations they found themselves in. The research has led to a test that can predict which people will respond well in a stressful situation and those who are more likely to panic. Deane Aikins, a psychiatrist at Yale University, said the remarkable composure of US Airways Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who made an emergency landing on the Hudson river last month, showed how well some people can cope with extremely stressful situations. The pilot's actions led to headlines referring to "grace under pressure" – Hemingway's description of heroism. "I think some people are born with it," Aikins said. "We would all be ready to scream in our chairs, but there are certain individuals who just don't get as stressed." In a study, Aikins took blood samples from soldiers before and after they took part in survival training exercises designed to test their skills at evading capture and enduring interrogation. In the majority of men, levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, increased sharply during the exercise. But Aikins found a few men whose stress levels hardly changed during the exercise. They performed best because they were able to stay calm, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago yesterday. Interviews with the soldiers after the exercise showed that while all of them found the experience unpleasant, only those with low cortisol levels said they did not find it particularly distressing. "Certain people are cooler under pressure and they perform very, very well during these periods of time," Aikins said. Further tests revealed the men who coped best with stress had higher levels of a substance called neuropeptide Y, which reduces levels of cortisol in the body and blocks feelings of stress. The ability to cope with stress is linked strongly to soldiers' risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, which can cause them to experience anxiety attacks and flashbacks for years after the event. Aikins said his next goal was to identify mental exercises or drugs, such as the steroid DHEA, that could protect people from high levels of stress. If that can be done, it might reduce levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, which affects between 15% and 20% of active servicemen and women. Stephanie Bird, an ethics consultant, said that medicating people to dampen their stress reactions raised serious issues. "We clearly don't want to create a population of people who act without thinking," she said. Other research by Karestan Koenen at Harvard School for Public Health found people's risk of suffering post-traumatic stress disorder was influenced by their childhood. Children with a low IQ, a difficult temperament, or who came from a poor family or had a depressed mother were significantly more likely to report the disorder later in life than other children, she said. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 16 Feb 2009 | 12:59 pm Fusion futureThe possibility of using star power on EarthSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 16 Feb 2009 | 12:41 pm Study: 'Astonishing richness' in polar sea species (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 Feb 2009 | 12:39 pm
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