Ultimate In 'Green' Energy: Plants Inspire New Generation Of Solar Cells

The ability of plants to turn sunlight into energy through photosynthesis has been successfully mimicked by scientists to produce a new generation of solar cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm

Health Campaigns That Promote Exercise May Cause People To Eat More

New research suggests that weight-loss campaigns that promote exercise may actually cause people to eat more. People who viewed posters suggesting that they "join a gym" or "take a walk" ate more food after looking at the posters than people who saw similarly designed posters prompting them to "make friends" or "be in a group," the researchers found.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm

Evidence Appears To Show How And Where Brain's Frontal Lobe Works

An expert in cognitive and linguistic sciences has mapped parts of the brain that control abstract or concrete decision making by studying stroke patients.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm

How Microscopic Changes To Brain Cause Schizophrenic Behavior In Mice

Disrupting the function of a key molecule in the brain leads to microscopic brain abnormalities and schizophrenia-like behavior in mice. These abnormalities are similar to those seen in the autopsied brains of people who diagnosed with schizophrenia in life, according to a scientists.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm

Dentistry Of Future? Gene Responsible For Formation Of Enamel Discovered

Scientists have identified a gene responsible for the formation of enamel, which is the key component of the teeth. The experiments were accomplished in mice carrying a deletion of the transcription factor Tbx1, a gene that plays a principal role in several human malformations (heart, thymus, parathyroid, face, and teeth) associated to the DiGeorge syndrome.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm

New Safer Way Developed To Reprogram Stem Cells

Exciting recent developments in stem cell research have revealed how specialized cells, such as skin cells, can be reprogrammed into pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) that can form all the body's tissues. But the reprogramming techniques currently in use rely on potentially harmful viruses to deliver the reprogramming factors required for this change. Now stem cell scientists report a new and safer way to generate such stem cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm

Gamma Ray Burst Captured In Early Stages

UK astronomers, using a telescope aboard the NASA Swift Satellite, have captured information from the early stages of a gamma ray burst -- the most violent and luminous explosions occurring in the Universe since the Big Bang.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm

Frequency Of T-cells Determines Severity Of Asthma, Study Finds

According to a new study, the frequency of regulatory T-cells (Treg) correlates to the severity of inflammation in allergic asthma, suggesting that Treg may play an important role in asthma pathogenesis.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm

Oceanic Seesaw Links Northern And Southern Hemisphere During Abrupt Climate Change During Last Ice Age

Very large and abrupt changes in temperature recorded over Greenland and across the North Atlantic during the last Ice Age were actually global in extent, according to new research. The research supports the idea that changes in ocean circulation within the Atlantic played a central role in abrupt climate change on a global scale.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm

Naturally Produced Estrogen May Protect Women From Parkinson's Disease

Women who have more years of fertility (the time from first menstruation to menopause) have a lower risk of developing Parkinson's disease than women with fewer years, according to a large, new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm

Portrait of Peter Higgs unveiled

A painting of the British physicist whose work triggered the worldwide hunt for the "God particle" went on display in Edinburgh yesterday

There are a few phrases that are guaranteed to unify scientists in uproar, and "God particle" is one of them. But let's put that to one side for a moment.

Yesterday saw the unveiling of a new portrait of Peter Higgs, the eminent physicist who worked on a concept called spontaneous symmetry breaking in the 1960s. The painting – on display at the School of Informatics, Edinburgh University – is by Ken Currie, one of Scotland's leading artists. I quite like it, but hope Professor Higgs didn't have to stand up for much of the, erm, sitting. In May he will celebrate his 80th birthday.

When Higgs first published his theory, it was arcane even for the world of theoretical particle physics. But over the past 40 years, it has endured as the prevailing explanation for how elementary particles acquire mass. It's a big deal. Without it, quarks and electrons would zip about at the speed of light and never combine to form atoms ... or planets ... or us. At least that's how the theory goes.

Higgs and others, notably the Anglo-American group of Gerry Guralnik, Richard Hagen and Tom Kibble, plus two Belgian theorists, Robert Brout and Francois Englert, put forward the idea almost simultaneously. Together, they suggest there's an invisible field pervading the entire universe that drags on particles and makes them heavy. Just as electromagnetic fields come with a particular particle, the photon, so the Higgs field comes with its own, the Higgs boson.

Finding the boson is now the focus of a frenzied hunt. Right now, the only machine with a chance of finding it is the Tevatron, the world's most powerful particle collider, at Fermilab on the outskirts of Chicago. It was a former director of the lab, the Nobel prizewinner Leon Lederman, who dubbed it the God particle. Come September, it will become the prime target of Europe's most expensive broken toy, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern near Geneva.

For the latest on the Higgs race, there's a nice summary on the Cosmic Variance blog.

I know scientists hate the name God particle, and it's hard to disagree with any of their reasons for objecting. But I can't help thinking they should lighten up a little. The name has stuck for a reason. At the very least, Lederman boosted the chances of particle physics being written about by the lay media. That has to be good news for the public, who pay for these giant machines to be built, and for the wages of many of those working on them.

Moving on. The other night I was kicking around on Vimeo, a site where I've found some truly brilliant movies, when I stumbled upon the Colliding Particles project. It's run by particle physicists Gavin Salam, Jonathan Butterworth and Adam Davison, who looks remarkably like that bloke out of Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Mummy.

It's testament to the team's passion for science, their film-making skills and real knack for storytelling that I watched all three episodes back to back. At least I hope that's the explanation.

You can watch the movies below, but I'd recommend you also check out their website, which has a wealth of extra material, and you can sign up for future instalments. It's a great project.

Episode one is here:

Episode two is here:

And episode three is here:

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 3 Mar 2009 | 12:29 pm

Friendflation

Should you keep just five friends and cull the rest?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Mar 2009 | 11:27 am

Hurricane Season 2008 (weather.com)

weather.com -
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 11:06 am

Sex drug hope over rotten egg gas

The gas responsible for the foul odour of rotten eggs could hold the key to a new impotence drug, experts believe.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Mar 2009 | 11:01 am

Space rock gives Earth a close shave (AFP)

AFP - An asteroid of a similar size to a rock that exploded above Siberia in 1908 with the force of a thousand atomic bombs whizzed close past Earth on Monday, astronomers said on Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 10:54 am

We must shake off this inertia to keep sea level rises to a minimum

Björn Lomborg's claim that sea levels are not rising faster than predicted are unfounded and used by those wanting to downplay climate change

Global sea level is rising, and faster than expected. We need to honestly discuss this risk rather than trying to play it down.

Measurements from tide gauge stations around the world show that the global sea level has risen by almost 20cm since 1880. Since 1993, global sea level has been measured accurately from satellites; since 1993 figures have shown leves rising at a rate of 3.2cm per decade.

The two main causes of this rise are extra water entering the ocean from melting land-ice and the expansion of ocean water as it gets warmer. Both are inevitable physical consequences of global warming. Both contributions can be estimated independently from satellite and other data, and their sum is consistent with the observed rise. Depending on the time period considered, 50% to 80% of the rise is due to melting ice.

Despite knowing the causes, we cannot predict future sea level rise very well. Particularly uncertain is how ice sheets will respond to warming, as this involves complex flow processes. For example, warming ocean waters destroy the floating tongues of ice that form when glaciers meet the sea. These ice tongues are pinned to rock outcrops and hold back the glacier behind them. When the ice tongue goes, the glacier speeds up its flow. This has happened to the Jakobshavn Isbrae and other glaciers in Greenland as well as many outlet glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula.

The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that sea level has been rising 50% faster since 1961 than its computer models predict. We published a similar conclusion for 1990 to 2006 in Science in 2007.

Björn Lomborg has recently claimed in The Guardian that sea level rise is "spot on" compared with IPCC projections. That is a debating trick frequently used by those wanting to downplay climate change: Lomborg compares the observed past rise with average projections for the coming century. However, in all projections sea level rise accelerates over time, so it is of some concern that rates of rise only expected to occur in several decades are already being observed now. Measurements since 1880 confirm that the warmer it gets, the faster sea levels rise. This is likely to continue in future, so that Lomborg's assumption of a constant rate of rise until 2100 is unfounded.

Lomborg cites the IPCC projection of sea level rise (18 to 59cm by 2100) without telling his readers the full story: that the IPCC says this range "excludes future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow" of the kind mentioned above. Several studies since the IPCC report have attempted to estimate how much the total rise will be, including the part left out by IPCC. They all have arrived at substantially higher numbers.

A commission of 20 international experts, called on by the Dutch government to help plan its coastal defences, has recently given a high-end estimate of 55cm to 110cm by 2100. Equally important, this commission has highlighted the fact that sea level rise will not stop in the year 2100. By 2200, they estimate a rise of 1.5 to 3.5m unless we stop the warming. This would spell the end of many of our coastal cities.

Even after we have stopped global warming, sea level rise set in motion by our emissions of the coming decades will continue for centuries. Such is the inertia in the response of the deep ocean and the ice sheets to warming. While we can bail out banks, there is no way to turn back sea level — our only chance is to stop the warming soon enough to keep it within manageable limits. In its report The Future Oceans, the German government's Advisory Council on Global Change has proposed to limit long-term sea level rise to a maximum of one meter, as a policy goal along-side the European Union's goal to limit warming to 2C.

Lomborg's mindset becomes clear when he told us last October that "over the past two years, sea levels have not increased at all — actually, they show a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?". As a trained statistician, he must surely have known that he was fooling the public with the "noise" of short-term variability rather than discussing a meaningful trend. And his claim was not even up-to-date when he made it: sea level had long resumed its rise, reaching a record high in the first half of 2008.

From 10 to 12 March hundreds of climate scientists will gather in Copenhagen to discuss their latest data. Let's hope that politicians, journalists and the public will use this opportunity to listen directly to the scientists working in the field, rather than to the distortions promoted by spin-doctors like Lomborg.

• Stefan Rahmstorf is a climate scientist and oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He contributed to all three reports mentioned above: IPCC, the Dutch Delta Commission and the German Advisory Council on Global Change. He will present latest data on sea level rise at the Copenhagen Climate Congress.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 3 Mar 2009 | 10:24 am

Let's drop the charade

It's right we comes to terms with the fact that free will, just like the sense of a higher power, is an illusion

The question: Could science abolish personalities along with God?

Since people can learn about Darwin and still believe that God created them, I am sure they can go on believing in God whatever science finds out about human nature. So I am not as optimistic as Colin Blakemore.

As the giant combine harvester of science continues to round up the mousy believers in God, they will always find a way out – so, to stretch Colin's delightful metaphor, they will sprout wings, dig tunnels, or get crunched to bits by whirring blades and still come out squeaking "God did all this for a purpose, to test our faith, and we are stronger for it."

Leaving metaphors aside, determined believers may claim that God designed our brains to look as though natural selection designed them for religious belief; that God, not natural selection, made us social creatures; and that God endowed us with altruism and kindness.

Among the last defences, as Blakemore realises, are those central human capacities of consciousness and free will. Surely God gave them to humans (and to humans alone?) so that they could freely choose between good and evil, didn't he?

Well no. As Blakemore implies, the latest scientific theories suggest that both are more akin to visual illustions than powerful forces.

How can this be? It certainly feels as though I am conscious; as though I am some kind of inner self who looks out through my eyes at the world around me, and inhabits my body like a driver inside a magnificent machine that does my bidding by the power of thought. But this feeling is completely misleading. When neuroscientists look inside brains they do not find what Dan Dennett calls the Cartesian Theatre – that magical place where decisions are made and consciousness happens. There is no such place. The brain is simply not organised that way. Instead there are multiple parallel processes going on, no central headquarters, and no place where a self could lurk even if there were one.

For example, if a flying field mouse suddenly heads your way, you will probably either duck or catch it deftly. These actions have to be fast, so they are coordinated by one part of the visual system, the dorsal stream, that completes its job well before the much slower ventral stream whose job it is to work out what that flying object is. Brains are like this. They do lots of things at once.

So why do we feel as though we are having a single stream of conscious experiences? Perhaps it was useful for our past survival to have a false model of ourselves, to attribute our body's actions to an inner self, and to see the world in terms of spiritual forces and non-physical agents, when there are no such things. Perhaps it is possible to give up these illusions by practising watching the mind.

Where I disagree with Blakemore is that these misconceptions are "no more significant than a visual illusion". I think that belief in the illusion of free will is highly significant and becomes more so the more science learns.

For example, our legal system is largely based on belief in free will, which leads us into all kinds of tangles. For example, we accept that people who are too young or mentally disturbed are not responsible for their actions and should not be punished, while everyone else is. But then along comes evidence that, for example, Mr G carries the "murderer gene", or Ms T's kleptomania was caused by pre-natal trauma, or that Mr F couldn't resist the advertisements for sweet foods that made him violent. What do we do? We try to protect the idea of free will, while the possible space for its operation shrinks. The combine harvester comes round again and the terrified field mice squeal "But you can't take away our consciousness and our free will! The world will fall apart, our legal system will be destroyed, all hell will break loose."

Like many naturalists, I say it won't, and it is high time we faced up to the changes we need to make. We can do this personally by practising not thinking in terms of free will. We can do it communally by realising that our legal system can punish wrongdoers not because they could have done otherwise and freely chose to be bad, but because some punishments are effective. Indeed, I believe this approach would be better. Instead of asking how much punishment someone deserves, we should ask what actions we can take to make this person behave better in the future, and others not follow this bad example. More constructive use of prison and other kinds of sentences might even result.

So we should not despair. I am sorry the field mice are so frightened of losing what they hold so dear. I understand why they are, and why many will never give up their beliefs, but we are far better off taking scientific discoveries as our guide and finding out the truth about human nature and its origins.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 3 Mar 2009 | 9:00 am

Scientists make HIV strain that can infect monkeys

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have created a strain of the human AIDS virus able to infect and multiply in monkeys in a step toward testing future vaccines in monkeys before trying them in people, according to a new study.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 7:11 am

Thai zoo in fresh panda insemination bid (AFP)

AFP - A Thai zoo has again resorted to artificial insemination of its giant pandas after pornography, low-carb diets and even a spell out in the cold failed to inspire the celibate pair.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Mar 2009 | 6:12 am

Plant diseases threaten woodland

The government is to spend £25m in a bid to eradicate plant diseases spreading across the country.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Mar 2009 | 12:58 am

HIV Hack Lets Scientists Study Human AIDS in Monkeys

A genetically engineered strain of HIV will allow scientists to study a human version of the disease in monkeys.

Until now, AIDS researchers used monkeys infected with simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV. The virus is similar to ours, but it's far from a perfect research tool.

"The lack of a primate model that utilizes HIV-1" — the strain that causes human AIDS — "is an impediment to research," write researchers led by Paul Bieniasz and Theodora Hatziioannou of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center.

The new HIV strain, described Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could eventually make it easier to test drugs and vaccines for the incurable virus.

Though SIV and HIV wreak similar havoc on their hosts' immune systems, drugs affect them differently. While that makes SIV useful for studying how the disease progresses, it's less useful for studying potential treatments. It's impossible to quantify how much this has slowed the search for cures to a disease that kills nearly three million people every year, but it certainly hasn't helped.

Carolyn Williamson, principal investigator of the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative, said that existing monkey models are "not ideal" for testing vaccines and drugs. She was not involved in the study.

"This model is a real step forward in HIV research," said Williamson.

Monkey immune systems normally beat back HIV with the help of two cellular proteins that prevent retroviruses from replicating.

Pigtail macaques, however, lack a gene variant that codes for one of those proteins. By swapping a key gene from SIV into HIV, the researchers produced a strain that evaded the other protein defense.

When the macaques were infected with the engineered HIV, the virus developed slowly, at rates comparable to humans who keep the disease at bay for decades. 

"If your drug was developed for HIV-1, it doesn't necessarily work for monkey viruses," said Hatziioannou. "In this model, you know it's going to work the same way as in humans."

Researchers will be able to study the mechanisms of so-called long-term non-progression — and that's just the start. The next step, said Bieniasz, is the development of an HIV strain that produces full-blown AIDS in the macaques, allowing researchers to test treatments for that stage of the disease.

Citation: "A macaque model of HIV-1 infection." Theodora Hatziioannnou, Zandrea Ambrose, Nancy P.Y. Chung, Michael Piatak, Jr., Fang Yuan, Charles M. Trubey, Vicky Coalter, Rebecca Kiser, Doug Schneider, Jeremy Smedley, Rhonda Pung, Mercy Gathuka, Jacob D. Estes, Ronald S. Veazey, Vineet N. KewalRamani, Jeffrey D. Lifson, and Paul D. Bieniasz. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 9.

Image: Names Project Wien / Flickr/zorro-art

See Also:

• HIV Evolution Outpaces Vaccines
• Endangered Lemurs Survived Ancient AIDS Epidemic
• Gene Editing Could Make Anyone Immune to AIDS
• Cellular 'Bullets' Destroy HIV, Raise Vaccine Possibilities
• Genes Don't Explain African AIDS Epidemic
• Parasites May Fuel AIDS Epidemic
  
• Did Merck Bring AIDS to America? No.

Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 Mar 2009 | 12:37 am

Calm? Why should I be calm?

There's far too much emphasis on being happy these days. Anger is vital too. It could even, say scientists, help our careers. Julian Baggini on the emotion that has changed the world for the better

'I wish I could think of a positive point to leave you with," Woody Allen once said at the end of a standup routine. "Will you take two negative points?"

Life isn't quite like mathematics. Two wrongs do not make a right, just as two of Allen's recent films don't add up to one of his earlier ones. None the less, the gag gets something very right: sometimes you can be positive by being negative.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School have now shown this to be the case with anger in the workplace. They found that people who tried to repress frustration at work were more likely to feel trapped under a glass ceiling than those who found ways to let it all out.

The advice isn't quite "if you want to get ahead, lose it first". It's important that the anger is channelled constructively. "Individuals who learn how to express their anger while avoiding the explosive and self-destructive consequences of unbridled fury have achieved something incredibly powerful in terms of overall emotional growth and mental health," said Professor George Vaillant, lead author of the study.

As is often the case, science has been slow to confirm what most people already know. Anger clearly has its proper place at work, which is neither wholly absent nor ever present. The manager who is an emotional blank is just as hard to work for as the volcanic boss, and both can do great harm by setting an unhelpful example for what kind of emotional expression is expected and accepted.

When some people are not pulling their weight, for example, isn't it quite right and proper to get more than a little peeved? Throwing things around the office isn't going to help, but showing a bit of anger is the only way of truly reflecting the importance of what is going on.

The alternative view would have us believe that the emotionally mature can achieve the same results without the need for primal emotions; calm talk will do just as well. That's not just wrong, it's creepy.

When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning, or changes for the worse.

Take the disciplining of children, for example. The parent who never shows any anger and simply dishes out punishment in cold blood comes across not as a caring guardian, but as frightening, heartless automaton. When we show emotion we show that we care, and without that, many of our actions and reactions become meaningless.

Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued in the 18th century, intellect alone is insufficient to motivate any caring for ourselves and others. As he colourfully put it, "Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." Cold-hearted ethics is an oxymoron.

Repression is slightly more complicated. It's just another bit of psychobabble to think that it is always bad to try to control our feelings. People sometimes talk as though negative emotions are like fully formed objects that have to be expelled from the body. But emotions are not simply there: how we deal with them affects how they are. For instance, deal with a relatively minor irritant well at an early stage, and it will simply go away. Deal with it badly, by getting into an unnecessary row, for example, and it grows into a many-headed hydra of hatred.

The Harvard anger report is a timely reminder that emotions are in themselves neither good nor bad. What makes them so is how appropriate they are to the situation, and how we deal them. Anger, for instance, may be rehabilitated by the study, but that does not make it an unqualified good. Indeed, a report last December by a team at Ohio State University suggested that a half-hour row with a spouse can add a day to the time it takes for a wound to heal.

This doesn't contradict the Harvard study, but backs it up. The point about a protracted domestic row is that is a prime example of anger boiling over uncontrollably rather than being dealt with properly.

The famous British reserve perhaps makes it harder for us to do this. Compare us, for example, with southern Europeans. Often you will see a group of them in a bar arguing so vigorously that you're convinced a fight is going to break out. But it rarely does. Low-level anger is not just expressed, it's almost exaggerated, with the result that the full-blown variety is usually not needed.

Evidence for the benefits of this can be seen by comparing the city streets of Bristol and Bilbao on a Friday night. In both cities, young people in particular get drunk. But whereas Bristol's A&E departments are filling up by midnight with fight injuries, you rarely see as much as a scuffle in Bilbao. Alcohol disinhibits, whatever your nationality, so the most likely explanation for the difference is that the Basques bottle less anger up while the Brits use the bottle to get it out.

In other times and places, anger is seen not just as part and parcel of life, but even as a virtuous emotion. The Greek Gods were forever erupting and the God of the Old Testament is famously furious. "God judgeth the righteous," it says in Psalms 7, "and God is angry with the wicked every day." Nor is the New Testament exactly relaxed. "Be ye angry, and sin not," advised Paul to the Ephesians, "let not the sun go down upon your wrath." Jesus also showed anger, at the people in the synagogue who remained silent when he asked if it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath, and when he threw a wobbly at the money changers in the temple.

In all these cases, anger is seen as a justified and proportionate response to wrongdoing. And so it should be. Progress on social justice requires the evocation of anger and guilt even more than it does love and hope. Slavery was abolished because people were enraged by its injustice and prepared to make supporters of it feel very guilty indeed. Love of thy master and hope for a better future certainly didn't do it. Nor would Emmeline Pankhurst have been more effective if she had learned to get rid of her anger and thought calm thoughts about the paternalist ruling classes. Even hatred, a generally destructive emotion, can sometimes have a place, if directed against systems and ideologies rather than peoples.

One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking. Armed with such pop-psychology, it's easy to convince ourselves we are emotionally literate when in fact we're just using crude rules of thumb to gloss over the complexities of the human psyche. We become like botanists who think that being able to label a specimen means we know all we need to know about it.

In this sense, a little learning about psychology can be a dangerous thing. Whatever the merits of positive thinking, its prevalence has oversimplified the way we conceptualise our emotional lives. "Bad" emotions have an important role to play, while sometimes "positive thinking" leads us away from uncomfortable truths into the realms of wishful thinking.

I would not want to go as far as Woody Allen and suggest that two negative points are as good as a positive one. But negative thoughts about positive thinking should not be taboo. More than that, the universal injunction to think more positively should make us just a little bit angry.
Physical signs

Taking out stress on inanimate objects is a classic indication of stress building to unconstructive levels. Watch for signs such as slamming down a phone at work, thumping a steering wheel or slapping a wall or your own leg.

Are you too cross, too often?
Anger-management expert Mike Fisher spots the signs

Physical signs

Taking out stress on inanimate objects is a classic indication of stress building to unconstructive levels. Watch for signs such as slamming down a phone at work, thumping a steering wheel or slapping a wall or your own leg.

Pointless vocalisation

If you find yourself muttering (or even yelling) to yourself about other drivers while in the car, say, or criticising them to fellow passengers, you are creating a toxic atmosphere that can lead to rash decisions. The same goes for colleagues at work.

Hyperactive impatience

A supermarket-queue classic: someone has pushed in or is taking an age, and you start shifting from foot to foot, jittering your hands and muttering. All these reactions will do is perpetuate stress rather than dissipate it.

Commuting stress

Stress is the root of almost all anger, and a bad commute exacerbates this for many people. Watch for building irritation with train or tube passengers who make too much noise or encroach on your personal space. Be aware that it is a danger sign and take steps to separate this bad experience from the working day ahead, or from dinner with your partner. Sit on a bench, or take the dog out for a walk.

Drinking tea and coffee

Stress makes you tired. Many people react by drinking endless tea and coffee; if you find yourself drinking significantly more than usual, or feel as if you urgently need to eat chocolate to boost energy levels, simply to keep yourself going, it's counterproductive. Caffeine and sugar make tiredness and stress worse once the boost wears off.

Other people's reactions

Be aware of anyone behaving abnormally around you. They often see you more clearly than you see yourself. Workmates will avoid someone angry. Children will often exploit anger and wind up a parent simply because they can. Irritating though any answering back or food throwing may be, don't ignore these signs.

Making mistakes

Someone stressed and angry will make small mistakes, drop the ball, lose things and so on. If you find yourself making an unusual number of little errors, either at work or at home, even such small things as burning food, be aware that this is a danger sign.

Catastrophising

Be very wary of overreaction. If someone makes a mistake and your response is instantly overdramatic ("We'll lose the client!"; "We'll never catch the plane!") take steps to try to relax.

Blame and shame

When your instant reaction to a problem is not to try to solve the problem but to look for someone to blame, you are in an irrational and pressured state of mind that is very conducive to anger.

"I can't handle this!"

The ultimate cause of stress is feeling unable to cope. If you think you can't handle a problem and this is equally applicable to a child's demands on your time as it is to a work problem, you are ripe for the spiral of stress that leads to anger.

First, take a deep breath
How to control and channel that rage

Breathe

Taking deep breaths reduces physical signs of anger and, by calming the body, helps calm the mind. Inhale for a count of seven, exhale for 11. Repeat several times.

Wait

Wait until you are physically calm. If you are still angry on a rational level, then you can consider what action to take in terms of desirable personal outcomes. Shouting at a colleague, or sending a vitriolic email, might be momentarily satisfying but can make your overall situation worse.

Don't deny your anger

Understand the differences between appropriate and inappropriate anger. It can be appropriate if you use it rather than letting it use you. If someone has genuinely mistreated you, use your anger as part of an attempt to achieve positive outcomes: if a waiter is rude to you, don't shout at them, complain to manager.

Consider the consequences

Someone else might be driving terribly, but what action can you take? If you get angry in a car, you might kill or be killed. If you get angry at work, what impact will this have on your job? Anger can have long-term consequences. Making an effort to bring them to mind can help calm you.

Eat properly

Eating healthily, resting properly and drinking plenty of water reduces tiredness and stress and so controls irrational emotion.

Control your environment

Anger thrives in a toxic environment, feeding on itself. If you manage to stay calm at work or in a car, other people will be less stressed and angry, which will in turn help you control your anger.

Join a support group

If you need to let out what you feel, do so to someone you know and trust, who can talk through the causes and consequences of any action. Understanding and learning from anger is a crucial part of controlling it.

Take responsibility

As soon as you start to blame others, focus on your own responsibility for any mistakes at home or in the workplace. This will help you build up the self-awareness that underpins anger-management.

Recognise tiredness and stress

These are part of self-awareness, but they are specific skills, and everyone will have individual signs they should recognise, be they irritability or making mistakes.

Get help

If anger is really blighting your life, do seek professional help.

• Mike Fisher is the author of Beating Anger and director of the British Association of Anger Management. He was talking to Robbie Hudson

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 3 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

Obituary: Donald Gleason

Pathologist who gave his name to a prostate cancer test procedure

Most men with prostate cancer know their Gleason score, a measure of malignancy. The scoring system was invented by Donald Gleason, a pathologist at Minnesota University medical school, who has died aged 88. A medley of unsatisfactory methods preceded it, as dozens of researchers tried and failed to grade the malignant cells. This made communication difficult, and made it harder still to evaluate new therapies. Gleason's system worked, because he involved statisticians to test his observations.

In 1962 Gleason was a young, unknown head of pathology at the Minneapolis Veterans Association medical centre, with three publications in learned journals to his name. The head of urology, Dr George Mellinger, was running a cooperative research project on prostate cancer. It involved 14 hospitals and needed a standardised scoring system to communicate effectively. Mellinger asked Gleason to construct one. He took inspiration from a psychological test, the Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory, devised at the university for organising "soft" psychological data.

In a memoir filed at the university, Gleason described how he was aware that the course of prostate cancer varied considerably, from rapidly fatal to extremely slow progression. A number of schemes had been proposed, showing promising correlations between microscopic appearance and clinical behaviour. He said: "I felt that the way to develop a histological [tissue] classification was to forget anything I thought I knew about the behaviour of prostate cancer and simply look for different histological pictures, which could then be recognised repeatedly and taught to others."

He found nine different pictures that included the full range of histopathology in 300 patients already in his own hospital's study. Many tissue samples had two different types of malignant cells, and a few had more. He numbered them and sent the score numbers to the statisticians at the US National Institutes for Health, who had the patients' follow-up details.

The statisticians found strong correlations between Gleason's histological pictures and death rates. They simplified his nine pictures into five. With him, they then combined the two different patterns from any patient into what is now known as their Gleason score. He published it in 1966 in the journal Cancer Chemotherapy Reports. If the most common cell in a sample was type 4 and the next most common was type 2, then the patient had a score of 6. Scores of 2-4 are low grade, 5-7 intermediate, and 8-10 high grade.

Gleason was asked to extend the study to 4,000 patients, and to teach the system to other pathologists in the Veterans Administration (VA) service. He prepared simplified drawings of the different grades of malignant cells.

Pathologists tend to think in pictures, and quickly grasped this graphic approach. "The grading system," he wrote, "spread rapidly through the urological/pathologic world and many reports have appeared, confirming the results." Gleason's drawings were reproduced repeatedly.

Twenty years later, in 1987, seven leading urological specialists, including pathologists, wrote to the Journal of Urology recommending that the Gleason grading system be applied uniformly in all publications on prostate cancer and The recommendation caught on and the system persists to this day.

Gleason was born in Spencer, Iowa, and grew up in Litchfield, Minnesota, where his mother was a teacher and his father ran a hardware shop. He won a pre-med BA degree with distinction and graduated in medicine in 1944, earning his MD a year later. He did military service as an army reservist medical student in Minnesota and intern in Maryland.

When he was demobbed, he moved to Paris, hoping to become an artist. But he soon took a boat home when offered a job at the VA hospital.

He qualified as a pathologist, and was awarded a PhD in pathology in 1966. He was chief anatomical pathologist at Minneapolis VA hospital from 1950 to 1960. He spent a further 15 years as chief of laboratories, retired at 55 and worked at Fairview hospital, Minneapolis, for a further 10 years. He spent his last 20 years sailing, baking bread and playing bridge. He died of heart failure, and is survived by his wife of 62 years, Nancy, their three daughters, Donna, Sue and Ginger, and his sister, Barbara.

• Donald Floyd Gleason, pathologist, born 20 November 1920; died 28 December 2008

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 3 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

Children who spend hours in front of the TV are more likely to get asthma

Children who spend hours in front of the television are at greater risk of developing asthma than those who are more active, a study has found.

Youngsters who watched more than two hours of TV a day were twice as likely to get the respiratory condition as children who watched less, according to research by British scientists.

The greater risk of asthma was not directly caused by watching television, which was used only as an indicator of how sedentary the children's lifestyles were.

The finding builds on recent work that points to a link between asthma and low levels of physical activity. Some scientists believe that inactive children do not inhale deeply and regularly enough, which helps to stretch the airways and may make them less prone to asthma.

The condition develops when small airways called bronchioles become inflamed and swollen, restricting how much air can enter and leave the lungs. More than five million people in Britain take asthma medications, including around a million children.

The study by researchers at Glasgow University drew on the medical records of 14,000 children who were followed from birth until the age of eleven-and-a-half years. Throughout, the parents were asked whether their children had shown signs of wheezing, and if their GP had diagnosed asthma.

Andrea Sherrif and her team found that overall 6% of children whose breathing was healthy at 39 months went on to be diagnosed with asthma by the age of eleven-and-a-half. But children who watched more than two hours of TV a day at 39 months were twice as likely to have developed the condition. The study appears today in the journal Thorax.

Doing little exercise caused an equal increase in asthma in boys and girls, and was not related to their weight.

Elaine Vickers at the charity Asthma UK said: "The findings add to a wealth of evidence linking a lack of exercise and being overweight with an increased risk of asthma, but this study is the first to directly link sedentary behaviour at a very young age to a higher risk of asthma later in childhood.

"We have one of the highest rates of childhood asthma in the world so it is especially important that parents in the UK try to prise their kids away from the TV and encourage them to lead an active lifestyle. This includes children with asthma, who can also greatly benefit from regular exercise."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 3 Mar 2009 | 12:00 am

Night Shift Makes Metabolism Go Haywire

By closely monitoring people with disrupted sleep patterns, researchers have documented the metabolic disarray produced by working at night and sleeping during the day.

As soon as their circadian rhythms became separated from a day-night cycle, test subjects' levels of key metabolic hormones went haywire — the most compelling evidence yet that shift work isn't just an inconvenience, but an occupational hazard.

"Normally, the body clock prepares the body for certain activities at a certain time of day," said study co-author Frank Scheer, a Harvard Medical School neuroscientist. "But when it's out of synchronization, it doesn't prepare it properly."

For years, scientists have known that people who work night shifts — about 15 million people in the United States — are unusually prone to heart disease, bone fractures, cancer, diabetes and obesity.

The patterns were initially explained as a function of poor nutrition and low exercise, but night workers don't necessarily live less healthy lives than their day shift counterparts. Risks remained high even when lifestyle was removed from the equation.

That left hypotheses about links between biological clocks and metabolic hormone regulation. Studies on animals suggest a connection, but relatively little research has been conducted on people engaged in shift work.

The latest findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, chart a clear path from work-sleep cycles to metabolic disregulation to disease.

"It's an excellent study," said University of Chicago endocrinologist Eve Van Cauter, who was not involved in the research. "It's groundbreaking in some ways."

To create circadian disruption, Scheer's team put test subjects on a 28-hour cycle for eight days, each day waking them four hours later than on the previous day. The researchers took hourly blood samples when test subjects were awake, and monitored their blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature and oxygen consumption around the clock.

The subjects' bodies soon produced less leptin, a hormone secreted from fatty tissue that signals a body to stop eating by triggering feelings of satiety. They experienced increases in blood glucose and insulin, which are linked to diabetes. Levels of cortisol, a hormone released during periods of stress and linked to nearly every disorder in which night work has been implicated, shot up. Test subjects' blood pressure also rose. 

"The surprising finding for us is that even so brief a misalignment caused quite impressive changes," said Scheer.

Night shift workers often attempt to keep semi-normal hours on their off days, said Scheer, preventing their circadian rhythms from ever becoming settled. Van Couter added that even a small exposure to daylight while commuting could continually re-set their biological clocks.

Scientists are not yet certain how circadian rhythms regulate metabolism, said Van Cauter, but animal studies have found circadian machinery in the hypothalamus — a brain structure linking the nervous and endocrine systems — and other parts of the body, including the glucose-regulating pancreas and leptin-releasing fatty tissue.

But Scheer cautioned that the experiment only approximated shift work.

"The future question is whether changes in these mechanisms would be maintained after chronic exposure and observed in a more lifelike situation," he said. "Our study was highly controlled and mechanistic. Now it's time to do something less controlled and more realistic."

If the findings are replicated, researchers will try to find therapies capable of restoring metabolic order. The best therapy of all, said Van Cauter, would be a permanent move to night work. 

"That's better than shifting between day and night work constantly," she said, "but very few people want to always be a night worker."

Citation: "Adverse metabolic and cardiovascular consequences of circadian misalignment." By Frank A. J. L. Scheer, Michael F. Hilton, Christos S. Mantzoros, and Steven A. Shea. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 9, March 2, 2009.

Image: Flickr/nicksarebi

See Also:

• Stem Cell Activity Follows Circadian Rhythyms
• Longevity Drug Could Affect Biological Clock
• Clock Gene Goes Tick-Tock With Rise and Fall of Day

Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Mar 2009 | 11:44 pm

Oldest fossilized brain found in fish from Midwest (AP)

AP - A 300-million-year-old fossilized brain has been discovered by researchers studying a type of fish that once lived in what is now Kansas and Oklahoma.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Mar 2009 | 11:16 pm

How the Smell of Rotten Eggs Could Lead to a New Viagra

Viagra. Levitra. Hydrogen sulfide?

The compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs could be a new way to treat erectile dysfunction, based on an early study in rats by a team featuring the UCLA Nobel laureate pharmacologist, Louis Ignarro.

Ignarro's team injected the penile smooth-muscle of rats with hydrogen sulfide, which relaxed them,  allowing more blood to flow in — just like Viagra.

"In the future, that could help humans have an erection," said Jim Cummings, a urologist at St. Louis University and expert in erectile dysfunction, who was not involved in the new research.

Though it smells extremely bad, hydrogen sulfide is a bizarre chemical that has some strange and unexpected effects on living things. In mice, it's been shown to induce a state like "suspended animation" while other scientists say that H₂S was responsible for a mass extinction on Earth several hundred million years ago. It could eventually help soldiers survive blood loss resulting from war injuries.

And now, just maybe, it could help impotent men for whom Viagra and similar drugs haven't helped. Pfizer has reported that half the men taking Viagra don't refill their prescriptions, suggesting that it doesn't work for everyone. A meta-review of the drug's clinical trials found that even when it works generally, it doesn't work during every sexual attempt.

Viagra works by stimulating the production of nitric oxide, which usually relaxes the penile tissue. The physical result of the hydrogen sulfide treatment appears to be the same — relaxing the smooth-muscle in the penile tissue known as the corpus cavernosum, but it exploits a different chain of molecular tools.

"This is a completely different pathway," Cummings said. "If it were to work out in humans, it would be a way to help out people that aren't responding to Viagra and drugs like it."

To turn this animal research into a human therapy will likely take years, if not decades. The goal would probably be to develop a formulation that could be taken as a pill, just like Viagra, Cummings said.

"What I would foresee is not that we'd inject the gas into our own penises, we'd look for a drug that would make you generate more of this compound in your own tissues," he said.

The early results published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest that this could be possible, although no one knows what the side effects might be. Their data "strongly support the case" for a role for hydrogen sulfide as a key component in the human erection process.

The team secured human penile tissue from men having male-to-female sex-change operations. They found that the human penis tissue expressed measurable amounts of hydrogen sulfide, which raises the hope that some drug could be found to cause more H₂S production.

"These observations may help to unravel the complex mechanisms underlying the pathophysiology of human penile erection and may lead to the development of therapeutic approaches in the treatment of ED and sexual arousal disorders," the authors wrote in PNAS.

Author's Note, 9:16 pm: This post has been updated to correct the description of the corpus cavernosum in the 7th paragraph.

See Also:

• Hydrogen Sulfide May Kill Us, Bring Us Back to Life
• Be More Than You Can Be
• Suspended Animation Without the Freezing
• Primordial Earth Echoed in Arsenic-Eating Bacteria
• To Smell, Perchance to Dream
• Japanese Websites Make Suicide a Breeze

Image: sonya/Flickr

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Faceboo

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Mar 2009 | 10:36 pm

Aquatic Animals Emit Laughing Gas (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Aquatic animals that feed on lake and stream bottom sediments burp out small amounts of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, a new study finds.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Mar 2009 | 10:10 pm

Scientists snare 3-D image of oldest fossil brain (AFP)

AFP - Scientists on Monday revealed the 300-million-year-old brain of an extinct relative of today's sharks, the first time that soft tissue from such an ancient fossil has ever been seen.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Mar 2009 | 10:10 pm

Oldest Fossil Brain Find Is 'Really Bizarre'

A 300-million-year-old fish fossil contains a preserved brain.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Mar 2009 | 10:06 pm

Aquatic Animals Emit Laughing Gas

Bottom-feeding aquatic animals found to emit nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Mar 2009 | 10:00 pm

Ancient tomb rediscovered under sands of Egypt (AP)

AP - Belgian archaeologists have unearthed a 3,500-year-old pharaonic official's tomb that had disappeared under sand in southern Egypt after it was first discovered about 130 years ago. Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement Sunday that the Belgian team in Luxor uncovered the tomb of Amenhotep, the deputy seal-bearer for King Thutmose III who ruled Egypt in the 18th Dynasty.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Mar 2009 | 8:33 pm

The Challenge of Pizza Box Recycling

Most pizza boxes have recycling symbols on them. But ...
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Mar 2009 | 7:12 pm

Asteroid Flies Past Earth

An asteroid named 2009 DD45 flew past Earth today.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Mar 2009 | 6:43 pm

SLIDE SHOW: Preventing Bird Strikes

From falcons to binoculars to radar, a look at all the ways to prevent bird strikes.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Mar 2009 | 6:37 pm

Hundreds rally for legislation on climate change (AP)

AP - Hundreds of demonstrators are urging Congress to pass legislation to reduce greenhouse gases, and they're using the Capitol power plant as a symbol of the problem.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Mar 2009 | 6:28 pm

Gorilla diary

A new baby sees hands join across borders
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Mar 2009 | 5:14 pm

Mars had 'recent' running water

Mars appears to have had running water on its surface about one million years ago, according to new evidence.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Mar 2009 | 5:06 pm

Experts fight H5N1 bird flu using smallpox vaccine

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Scientists in Hong Kong and the United States have developed an experimental H5N1 bird flu vaccine for people by piggybacking it on the well-tested and highly successful smallpox vaccine.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Mar 2009 | 4:47 pm

SLIDE SHOW: Evolution in Fast Forward

Charles Darwin wasn't always right about evolution. Sometimes it takes off.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Mar 2009 | 4:28 pm

Global Warming: On Hold?

Researchers argue that global warming may have actually slowed since around 2001.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Mar 2009 | 4:07 pm

Swampy Expansion Spurred Mini Ice Age

The Little Ice Age may have been brought about by the spread of wetlands.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Mar 2009 | 3:50 pm

Kids Prefer Veggies With Cool Names

The study suggests the influence of cool names might persist.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Mar 2009 | 3:14 pm

Radar Could Help Reduce Bird Strikes

A new radar and software system allows planes to detect and then avoid flying birds.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Plastic Bottle Recycling Increases

Plastic bottle recycling by consumers increased 115 million pounds in 2007.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Mar 2009 | 2:35 pm

Case Closed on Murders of Last Russian Czar’s Family

Forensic science confirms final two graves of last Russian Imperial family.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Mar 2009 | 2:34 pm

Cellular 'Computer' Built in Live Yeast

Scientists have engineered a cellular "computer" within the genetic material of living yeast cells
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Mar 2009 | 2:19 pm

Gullies Mark Most Recent Water Flow on Mars

Using craters to date gully system, scientists find possible most recent water flow on Mars.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Mar 2009 | 2:14 pm

NI tops survey of people who do not believe in evolution

Northern Ireland has the highest percentage of people who believe human beings did not evolve but were created by God in the last 10,000 years, according to a UK survey.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Mar 2009 | 2:05 pm

Celebs on high

Really, how hard is it to climb Kilimanjaro?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Mar 2009 | 2:04 pm

Going Gray? Blame Catalase

Scientists figure out why we go gray, raising hopes of finding a way to stop the process.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Mar 2009 | 2:00 pm

US nuclear relic found in bottle

A bottle discarded at a waste site in the US contains the world's oldest sample of bomb-grade plutonium, scientists say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:54 pm

Why Evidence for the Paranormal Doesn't Improve

Final evidence is always in sight but never obtained.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:49 pm

Football fans take their rivalries into hyperspace

Practitioners of the beautiful game can now be found kicking symmetrical objects around in other dimensions

It has been a bad week for Tottenham Hotspur. Having been knocked out of the UEFA Cup on Thursday, the team then lost to Manchester United in the Carling Cup Final yesterday. However, supporters can console themselves with the knowledge that Spurs is the only football team in the world to have gained honours in mathematical hyperspace: two of its players have symmetry groups named after them.

The worlds of maths and science have a long history of naming important objects after people. For example, when astronomers discover new asteroids they often name them in honour of famous individuals, including pharaohs (2436 Hatshepsut), popes (8661 Ratzinger) and musicians (1815 Beethoven, 3834 Zappafrank and 15092 Beegees).

Similarly, every time a biologist discovers a new species, there is the opportunity to honour someone or something. In 2007, Joe McHugh discovered a new species of Peruvian slime mould beetle and named it Genisphindus roxannae after his wife Roxanne.

Less kindly, researchers at Cornell University had a batch of new beetles to name and dubbed them Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi, Agathidium rumsfeldi and Agathidium vaderi.

Realising that naming a new species could be lucrative, some biologists initiated a bidding war over the right to name a Central American monkey. The Golden Palace Casino won the auction and handed over $650,000 to help protect the monkey's habitat, and in return the species was named Callicebus aureipalatii.

Joe Cavelli, who works for the casino, prefers to call it the GoldenPalace.com monkey.

In a similar vein, the Oxford mathematician and professor for the public understanding of science Marcus Du Sautoy decided to offer naming rights over symmetrical objects in hyperspace – abstract mathematical entities that are infinite in number and linked to so-called elliptic curves. Over the last year he has raised $3,000 for Common Hope, a charity working with street children in Guatemala.

Most people who have bought symmetry groups have named them after sons, daughters, spouses and friends, but on 4 November 2008 the British mathematician Tony Mann asked Du Sautoy to name a group in honour of the Tottenham player David Bentley, who had scored one of the most remarkable goals of the year against Arsenal the previous week.

Technically, the group is labelled Set [C[1], C[2], C[3], C[4]]=[40, 13, 4, 4]. I suspect that this particular group was chosen because the final two digits correspond to the 4-4 result of the match in which Bentley scored.

A few weeks later, Mann paid for a symmetry group to be named after Jermaine Defoe when the player rejoined Spurs. He explained that he wanted to mark the occasion because Defoe would be "the star who will make Spurs the best team in north London".

But why does Mann, a mathematician based at the University of Greenwich in south London, support a north London team like Spurs? When I spoke to him, he revealed that he doesn't actually support Spurs but merely loves winding up Professor Du Sautoy, who is an ardent Arsenal fan.

In other words, Mann is more than willing to donate a few pounds to a good cause in order to pursue a sporting spat in mathematical hyperspace.

Arsenal supporters may wish to fight back by buying symmetry groups to honour their own players, but I am going to name a group in honour of the only world class footballer who was also a world class mathematician: Harald Bohr, brother of the physicist Niels Bohr.

While Niels was a very respectable goalkeeper, Harald played half-back for the Danish national team and competed in the 1908 London Olympics, at which where football was an official event for the first time. The Danes beat France 17-1 in the semi-final, but lost 2-0 to Great Britain in the final.

Nevertheless, Harald Bohr was hailed as a hero when he returned to Denmark. When he defended his doctoral dissertation at a public event at the University of Copenhagen in 1910, there were more soccer fans in the audience than mathematicians.

Nobody in the past 100 years has done so much to unite the worlds of mathematics and football.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:33 pm

Researchers find safer way to make stem cells

LONDON (Reuters) - Researchers said on Sunday they had found a safer way to transform ordinary skin cells into powerful stem cells in a move that could eventually remove the need to use human embryos.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:18 pm

Mechanical mother whirrs in to help new-born monkey

A hand-reared monkey is provided with a mechanical surrogate mother to help keep her company.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Mar 2009 | 11:53 am