Older Adults Control Emotions More Easily Than Young Adults

A research study found that regulating emotions -- such as reducing negative emotions or inhibiting unwanted thoughts -- is a resource-demanding process that disrupts the ability of young adults to simultaneously or subsequently perform tasks.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

It's Raining Pentagons? Novel Ice Structure May Help Seed Clouds And Cause Rain

Scientists have discovered a novel one dimensional ice chain structure built from pentagons that may prove to be a step toward the development of new materials which can be used to seed clouds and cause rain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

New Building Design Withstands Earthquake Simulation

Researchers have simulated an off-the-charts earthquake in a laboratory to test their new technique for bracing high-rise concrete buildings. Their technique passed the test, withstanding more movement than an earthquake would typically demand.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Chicken Manure Biodegrades Crude Oil In Contaminated Soil

It is an unlikely application, but researchers in China have discovered that chicken manure can be used to biodegrade crude oil in contaminated soil. Writing in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution the team explains how bacteria in chicken manure break down 50 percent more crude oil than soil lacking the guano.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Missing Link Between Fructose, Insulin Resistance Found

A new study in mice sheds light on the insulin resistance that can come from diets loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener found in most sodas and many other processed foods.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Moderate Alcohol Intake Associated With Bone Protection

In an epidemiological study of men and post-menopausal women primarily over 60 years of age, regular moderate alcohol intake was associated with greater bone mineral density (BMD). Associations were strongest for beer and wine and, importantly, BMD was significantly lower in men drinking more than two servings of liquor per day.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

The 300-year History of Internet Dating

Internet dating is just the modern version of the first "matrimonial" agencies of the 1700s.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:45 pm

Secret Birth Control Method: The Welcome Dance of the Uterus (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Female reproductive organs, unlike male reproductive organs, are not usually on the move. The ovaries and fallopian tubes mostly just hang out quietly in the pelvis, minding their own business, and the uterus only expands with pregnancy and is happy to shrink back to normal size after the baby is gone. But as David Elad of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tel Aviv University, Israel, has recently discovered, the uterus, like everything else on Earth, is subject to the laws of motion. ...
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:41 pm

BMW aims to put rocket science in your car (Reuters)

Reuters - Germany's BMW wants to use NASA technology to boost the fuel efficiency of its luxury cars and lower emissions of harmful greenhouse gases.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:31 pm

Obama to reverse limits on stem-cell research (AFP)

AFP - US President Barack Obama will on Monday wipe out another contentious aspect of his predecessor George W. Bush's legacy by removing curbs on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:20 pm

Obama to overturn Bush policy on stem cells (AP)

AP - President Barack Obama is ending former President George W. Bush's limits on using federal dollars for embryonic stem cell research, with advisers calling the move a clear signal that science — not political ideology — will guide the administration.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:15 pm

Certain Combined Medications Following Heart Attack May Increase Risk Of Death

Following an acute coronary syndrome such as a heart attack or unstable angina, patients who receive a medication to reduce the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding that may be associated with the use of the antiplatelet drug clopidogrel and aspirin have an increased risk of subsequent hospitalization for acute coronary syndrome or death, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:00 pm

Blood Test Predicts Chance Of Dementia

Researchers have discovered the amount of growth factor progranulin in blood is a predictor of Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Progranulin plays a major role in the survival of brain cells. People producing less progranulin have higher risk of contracting FTD. The researchers developed a test, measuring the amount of progranulin in the blood thus predicting a person's risk. This offers possibilities for early detection.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:00 pm

Why Dreams Are So Difficult To Remember: Precise Communication Discovered Across Brain Areas During Sleep

By listening in on the chatter between neurons in various parts of the brain, researchers have taken steps toward fully understanding just how memories are formed, transferred, and ultimately stored in the brain -- and how that process varies throughout the various stages of sleep.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:00 pm

Transparent Zebrafish A Must-see Model For Atherosclerosis

We usually think of fish as a "heart-healthy" food. Now fish are helping researchers better understand how heart disease develops in studies that could lead to new drugs to slow disease and prevent heart attacks.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:00 pm

Shots of cute polar bears don't work for deniers, so let's hit them with cold facts

Let's talk about global warming in language deniers understand: energy independence and potential for new enterprise

Academics meeting in Bristol at the weekend for Britain's first conference on the psychology of climate change argued that the greatest obstacles to action are not technical, economic or political — they are the denial strategies that we adopt to protect ourselves from unwelcome information.

It is true that nearly 80% of people claim to be concerned about climate change. However, delve deeper and one finds that people have a remarkable tendency to define this concern in ways that keep it as far away as possible. They describe climate change as a global problem (but not a local one) as a future problem (not one for their own lifetimes) and absolve themselves of responsibility for either causing the problem or solving it.

Most disturbing of all, 60% of people believe that "many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change". Thirty per cent of people believe climate change is "largely down to natural causes", while 7% refuse to accept the climate is changing at all.

How is it possible that so many people are still unpersuaded by 40 years of research and the consensus of every major scientific institution in the world? Surely we are now long past the point at which the evidence became overwhelming?

If only belief formation were this simple. Having neither the time nor skills to weigh up each piece of evidence we fall back on decision-making shortcuts formed by our education, politics and class. In particular we measure new information against our life experience and the views of the people around us.

George Lakoff, of the University of California, argues that we often use metaphors to carry over experience from simple or concrete experiences into new domains. Thus, as politicians know very well, broad concepts such as freedom, independence, leadership, growth and pride can resonate far deeper than the policies they describe.

None of this bodes well for a rational approach to climate change. Climate change is invariably presented as an overwhelming threat requiring unprecedented restraint, sacrifice, and government intervention. The metaphors it invokes are poisonous to people who feel rewarded by free market capitalism and distrust government interference. It is hardly surprising that political world view is by far the greatest determinant of attitudes to climate change, especially in the US where three times more Republicans than Democrats believe that "too much fuss is made about global warming".

An intuitive suspicion is then reinforced by a deep distrust of the key messengers: the liberal media, politicians and green campaign groups. As Jeremy Clarkson says, bundling them all together: "...everything we've been told for the past five years by the government, Al Gore, Channel 4 News and hippies everywhere is a big bucket of nonsense." Michael O'Leary, the founder of Ryanair, likens "hairy dungaree and sandal wearing climate change alarmists" to "the CND nutters of the 1970s". These cultural prejudices, however simplistic, align belief with cultural allegiance: "People like us," they say, "do not believe in this tripe."

However much one distrusts environmentalists, it is harder to discount the scientists… depending, of course, on which scientists one listens to. The conservative news media, continues to provide a platform for the handful of scientists who reject the scientific consensus. Of the 18 experts that appeared in Channel 4's notorious sceptic documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, 11 have been quoted in the past two years in the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, five of them more than five times.

Dr Myanna Lahsen, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Colorado, has specialised in understanding how professional scientists, some of them with highly respected careers, turn climate sceptic. She found the largest common factor was a shared sense that they had personally lost prestige and authority as the result of campaigns by liberals and environmentalists. She concluded that their engagement in climate issues "can be understood in part as a struggle to preserve their particular culturally charged understanding of environmental reality."

In other words, like the general public, they form their beliefs through reference to a world view formed through politics and life experience. In order to maintain their scepticism in the face of a sustained, and sometimes heated, challenge from their peers, they have created a mutually supportive dissident culture around an identity as victimised speakers for the truth.

This individualistic romantic image is nurtured by the libertarian right think tanks that promote the sceptic arguments. One academic study of 192 sceptic books and reports found that 92% were directly associated with right wing free market think tanks. It concluded that the denial of climate change had been deliberately constructed "as a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism".

So, given that scepticism is rooted in a sustained and well-funded ideological movement, how can sceptics be swayed? One way is to reframe climate change in a way that rejects the green cliches and creates new metaphors with a wider resonance. So out with the polar bears and saving the planet. Instead let's talk of energy independence, and the potential for new enterprise.

And then there is peer pressure, probably the most important influence of all. So, when dealing with a sceptic, don't get into a head to head with them. Just politely point out all the people they know and respect who believe that climate change is a serious problem — and they aren't sandle-wearing tree huggers, are they?

• George Marshall is founder of the Climate Outreach Information Network and the author of Carbon Detox and the blog climatedenial.org.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 9 Mar 2009 | 11:03 am

Hurricane Season 2008 (weather.com)

weather.com -
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 10:05 am

Obama is to reverse stem cell ban

President Barack Obama is to lift restrictions on US federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Mar 2009 | 9:44 am

'Portable lung' could ease the need for transplants

Lung disease patients could one day have an alternative to a transplant after scientists develop a 'portable lung'.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Mar 2009 | 7:02 am

Conn. man is cited for owning an endangered ape (AP)

AP - A man already accused of keeping a collection of wild animals including a river otter and a two-toed sloth has been cited for owning an endangered ape.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 5:05 am

Engineered cell engine is step to artificial life

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. scientists said they have taken an important step toward making an artificial life form by making a ribosome -- the cell's factory.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 1:07 am

Teachers pair up for Wednesday night space shot (AP)

AP - Two science teachers who have spent the past five years under NASA's tutelage are about to graduate with high-flying honors.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:26 am

Countdown begins for shuttle launch on Wednesday

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Countdown clocks began ticking down on Sunday for NASA's first space shuttle launch of the year, a mission meant to complete the International Space Station's power system and exterior beams.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:12 am

Stem cell 'scaffold' for stroke

Scientists claim to have developed a tiny scaffold of stem cells to fill holes in the brain caused by stroke damage.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:02 am

Six legs good

They developed architecture and built farms millions of years before we did. They work together so seamlessly that colonies are known as 'superorganisms'. And they could hold the secret to working out how our brains evolved. Alok Jha investigates the extraordinary world of ants

Without ants, the world would be a mess. Soil would be unable to sustain much life. Dead leaves, insects and small animals would litter the Earth's surface. Invertebrate pests would bloom, killing many of the food plants we need to survive. Thousands of species of flowering plants would disappear into extinction, robbed of a vehicle for their pollen.

Those mobile dots that can suddenly appear in sugar bowls, crawl in neat lines over shoes or ruin an otherwise perfect picnic are a silent, if annoying, pointer to one of the most successful forms of life on Earth. Here is a set of 14,000 species (with probably an equal number yet to be found) whose combined weight is equal to that of the world's entire population of humans. They have perfected life that is more collegiate than anything achieved by humans, and had developed architecture and built farms millions of years before our primate ancestors had even considered walking on two legs.

Ants have fascinated philosophers, writers and naturalists for thousands of years. But the last decade has seen a flurry of detail emerge about the natural history of the insects. Scientists have filled in huge amounts of detail on how the insects survive, communicate and, most importantly, how the thousands (sometimes millions) of individuals make collective decisions without any central leadership. That study has put ants at the centre of what many leading biologists say is a new phase of biology - understanding how groups of individuals can behave as a single "superorganism".

Edward O Wilson, sociobiologist at Harvard University and the world's leading authority on social insects, has studied ants for more than 50 years and says he finds it difficult to overestimate the importance of them to life on Earth. "They are the main turners of the soil - more important than earthworms - the main predators of small insects and the principal scavengers and garbage collectors," he says. "They capture insects and help keep things in balance and they are also the principal movers of small animals such as fallen sparrows and small rodents."

Since the first ants emerged more than 150m years ago, the insects have made it to every continent except Antarctica, filling every ecological niche as hunters, scavengers or farmers, and evolving into thousands of shapes and sizes. Leptanilline ants are less than 1mm in length and look like a dusting of pepper; the bulldog ants of Australia can grow to 5cm and each one packs a lethal sting for its victims.

To a greater or lesser extent, ants eat the same resources as other solitary insects but they have been far more successful. Why? "That's easy," says Wilson. "They live in groups."

Ant colonies range from a dozen individuals to millions of insects, mostly consisting of sterile females in specific jobs as workers, soldiers or caretakers, with one or sometimes a few reproductive females presiding over the entire brood. Any males are usually there temporarily, relatively useless drones kept long enough to inseminate the queen, then driven out of the nest or killed quickly afterwards. A queen can store the sperm from a male for a decade or more, using it over time to fertilise millions of eggs.

This system has worked well for them. "They really did, through the powers of evolution, discover the major principles in industrial revolution - but their revolution came tens of millions of years before ours," says Nigel Franks, a zoologist at the University of Bristol who specialises in studying social insects.

One of the most iconic industrial species is the Atta, commonly known as the leafcutter ant, found in the Americas. A typical colony contains up to 8m individuals, with the biggest around 200 times heavier than the smallest and each caste specialised for a specific task. The biggest ants cut the leaves from a tree or shrub with powerful jaws that can vibrate thousands of times a second. Another caste takes the fragments back to the nest and a third cuts up the leaf still further. The smallest ants then use the bits of leaves to make compost for the fungus that the colony farms for food. These ants also weed the fungus gardens and use antibiotic-producing bacteria to ensure their crop remains free from disease.

Their work rate is astonishing. A nest of Atta leafcutter ants can defoliate an entire citrus tree in a day and, in the South American rainforest, the ants typically harvest around a fifth of the annual growth - more vegetation than any other animal. In a single lifetime, a leaf-cutter colony turns over and aerates 40 tonnes of soil.

The farms can include livestock, too. Many ant colonies keep aphids, tranquillising them with drugs to keep them docile and "milking" them with their antennae for a sugary honeydew to use as food. Ants also disperse seeds, particularly in the desert regions of Africa and Australia, and several species of plants are so reliant on the insects that they have evolved special structures on the outsides of their seeds, called elaiosomes, that ants can use as food.

All day, every day, the world's ant nests are active: scouting, processing food, fighting and tending to the young. This cohesive working is so important for the wellbeing of the ants that any individuals removed from a colony quickly die.

Studying these co-operative societies has revealed many other fascinating details. In 2007, Franks found that certain species of army ants use their bodies to plug potholes in the forest floor, thus creating a flatter surface for columns of foraging ants from their colony to run back to their nest. Different ants fill holes of different sizes and two or more ants band together if there is a particularly big hole.

This complex group behaviour is organised using chemicals called pheremones. Around two dozen different chemicals guide the instincts of each insect, telling them which way to turn out of the nest to find food, which of their nest mates is dying and needs to be removed from the colony, which ants need feeding, which are the soldiers, which is the queen and which ones process the colony's rubbish. Rub these chemicals out and the ants get lost and colonies fall apart. Put a pheremone in the wrong place, or remove it from a trail to food, and the ants get confused.

The chemicals are also at the root of how a colony makes sophisticated group decisions. Take the example of finding a site for a new nest. When a scout discovers a potential site, she will measure attributes such as floor area, light levels and the size of the entrances. If it is a suitable site, she will return to the colony and teach fellow scouts the way to the new site, using a process called tandem running. "In this way, a number of ants can build up a new nest site and if that number exceeds a threshold, which we call the quorum threshold, they'll switch from tandem running, which is excruciatingly slow, to picking up their nest mates and carrying them," says Franks.

Ants decide what to do individually and also on the basis of pheremones, but when the number of ants that have made a particular decision reaches tipping point (which is flexible), the entire colony is then committed to the decision. "They have thresholds for doing things - one for leaving the old nest if it's not particularly good, one for accepting a new nest if they encounter it and begin tandem running. They then have a threshold for switching from tandem running to carrying if they encounter a quorum in the new nest," says Franks.

What makes ants far more than a scientific curiosity is that this extraordinary collective behaviour from what are, at heart, chemical-sensing automatons, hints at lessons for similar systems in humans too. Neurons are individually relatively dumb but, with billions of them working together in our brains reacting to levels of neurotransmitter chemicals, something creative and remarkable emerges. "Maybe our own brains are using these thresholds," says Franks. "When you model ants and when you model the brain, there are some great similarities. When our brains are deciding, from visual input, whether to move our eyes to the right or the left, populations of neurons and thresholds are obviously involved."

His colleague at Bristol, computer scientist James Marshall, recently used computer models to show that groups of neurons in the primate brain seem to make decisions in roughly the same way as an ant colony. The results, published recently in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, drew the first formal parallels between decision-making brain circuits in the primate brain and colonies of social insects.

The parallels are not exact, however: ants are more amazing still. As well as using chemicals, ants also communicate by clicking and singing to each other, creating sound by rubbing together their body parts. Jeremy Thomas of the University of Oxford has just shown that these communications are often used against ants by other species: some ants will take care of impostors in their nest - caterpillars, say - if the impostors simply make the right sounds. By playing the sounds of a queen into a colony, Thomas showed that worker ants stood to attention and even greeted the miniature speakers from which the sounds came out. Scientists knew that ants made sounds when in distress, but Thomas's work, published in the journal Science, showed the sounds were more sophisticated and could convey a wider range of messages than previously thought.

For scientists such as Franks, ants are an ideal model species to test out ideas of evolution. "Ants are the Meccano or Lego of biology - you can take them apart and put them back together. The colony is built out of organisms and, without any ethical qualms, you can vivisect a colony and rebuild it without stressing the ants or hurting them in any way. They're an exquisite model system for asking questions about how biological systems are organised."

Bert Hoelldobler, a biologist at Arizona State University and long-time research collaborator of Wilson's, says ant colonies provide scientists with an invaluable way to gain empirical data around how living in societies developed. Compare the biological blueprint of an ant society with that of humans, he says, and you quickly see that much of human society is built on culture rather than genetics. The basic blueprints for society in our genes are much simpler than those coded within the ant's.

It is the sophisticated genetic blueprint hidden within ants that led Wilson and Hoelldobler to propose a new class of life: the superorganism. "A superorganism is a closely knit group that divides labour among its members altruistically," says Wilson. "There are individuals who reproduce in the group and are promoted to be reproducers, and those that do not reproduce and are workers. This allows the group to function as a giant organism."

All of which is a neat description of an ant colony. Think of a superorganism as a dispersible creature that can stretch out limbs to be in many places at once, going out to forage for food and then withdrawing into the nest after raking up whatever is around. In their recent book, Superorganism, Wilson and Hoelldobler describe their idea by comparing each ant in a colony with a cell in, say, the human body, each one specialised for a task and working (to its own probable death) for the good of the organism as a whole.

Superorganisms can outcompete individuals because they can summon a group that can oust anything trying to take over the food source. A solitary insect might be cautious about risking its life in defending a piece of food it has found and is likely to back off - that is not true of ants. "They're willing to fight to the death right on the spot," says Wilson. "And it doesn't affect the colony much at all - they lose a little strength when workers die that way but not much, they just keep on going. The queen can just produce more workers."

Extending the analogy further, Hoelldobler says a superorganism has a sort of intelligence where an ant colony acts as a problem-solving unit (or even a simple brain). "When you look at the incredible nest structures of these leaf-cutter ants - 8 metres down, an area of 50 sq metres - no single ant could do that, or even has the concept of it, but the interaction, the behaviour of millions of individuals that react to particular stimuli that are created by other workers, leads to these fantastic structures. An ant colony is a problem-solving instrument, in a way."

As more details of the lives of ants has poured in during recent years, the concept of the superorganism, and its importance, has gained traction. The next big step in biology, according to Wilson, is to find out how individuals groups of social creatures organise themselves into superorganisms. "We live in a world of ants," he says, "and it's time we woke up to our little six-legged neighbours."

Fast jaws and fantastic noses: A close-up on three ant species

Ponerines are the most diverse families of ants, with more than 1,000 species. They are also the most ancient, providing an insight into how the earliest ants lived before they evolved the highly social societies seen today. Ponerines live in relatively small groups and comprise some of the biggest individual ants. They specialise in hunting just a few types of prey and most of the members of a colony can reproduce, leading to a a lot of competition (and therefore low numbers) within a nest.

Trap-jaw ants have the fastest mandibles in the animal kingdom; they can snap shut at speeds of more than 140mph, killing or maiming prey so that it can be brought back to the nest. The mandibles of larger army ants are used in some parts of the world as surgical stitches: ants are placed along a wound and the insects bite into the sides, pulling the skin together. The bodies are cut away, leaving the mandibles in place along the wound.

Desert ants navigate outside the nest using visual landmarks and also smell. Ants normally excrete pheremones to lay trails to interesting objects or to find their way home, but these volatile chemicals would degrade quickly in arid desert conditions. Instead, desert ants, which roam 100 metres or more from their nests, learn the smell of their nest entrance and use it to get home whenever there are too few visual clues.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

Obama to lift restrictions on funding stem cell research

Stem cell research in the US will receive a major boost today when Barack Obama lifts restrictions on federal funding that were imposed eight years ago by the Bush administration, scientists say.

The long-awaited announcement will overturn a ban that prohibits scientists from using taxpayers' money to study embryonic stem cells created after 2001.

The ban has meant scientists working in the US can use government grants only when working on some of the oldest embryonic stem cells available. Many centres have been forced to divide their labs in half, to keep projects paid for by private money separate.

The seemingly unique ability of embryonic stem cells to grow into any type of tissue in the body has led scientists to believe they could transform medicine through treatments that replace and regenerate damaged or diseased organs.

Lifting the ban will unleash a flurry of collaborations between scientists who had been barred from working together.

John Gearhart, director of regenerative medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has made more than 100 trips to Washington to protest against the ban and has been invited to the White House for today's announcement.

"Better use of space and resources will have a great and immediate effect. That to me is the biggest benefit of this," he said.

Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, said he planned to begin collaborations with publicly funded scientists immediately. The research will investigate treatments for diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease using freshly made embryonic stem cells.

"The removal of a barrier that has stood in our way for eight years will open important new areas of research, and move the field forward more rapidly," he said.

Scientists are still unclear how quickly the change will take effect. Some expect Obama to look for legislative backing from Congress, and to ask the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to draft documents outlining how embryonic stem cells could be used. Both processes would take time and could be held up by religious groups who strongly oppose lifting the ban.

"The conservatives will rally support to slow this down, so on one hand we're celebrating, but there's a way to go yet. This is not a slam-dunk," said Gearhart.

The timing is particularly critical for researchers hoping to benefit from the $10bn (£7bn) awarded to the NIH through the president's stimulus package.

The Bush administration's unfavourable stance on stem cells drove some US scientists to leave for Britain, where laws on stem cell research are more liberal. By overturning the ban, Obama may trigger a brain drain back to the US.

Stephen Minger, a US stem cell scientist at King's College London said: "It's unlikely we'll see a mass exodus to the US, but funding for embryonic stem cell research in the UK is low and extremely competitive."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

Science Weekly: How the brain decides

On this week's show, there's talk of emotions and irrationality – no, not the Science Weekly team meeting – we talk to Jonah Lehrer, author of "The Decisive Moment", which tells us not only how our brains make decisions, but how we can learn to make better ones. Jonah reveals how our brains work when it comes to buying things, and why we feel less guilt when we spend on our credit cards.

Cosmic inflation might sound like something the Chancellor of the Exchequer should be dealing with, but Professor Alan Guth explains why it actually means the universe is still expanding. According to Guth's theory, the early universe went through an initial phase of exponential expansion before condensing into the universe we see today.

Olivia Judson joined us on last week's show to argue that scientists need to take more risks with their experiments. In a lecture last week, she expanded on those thoughts and discussed the ethics of experimentation. We have highlights from her talk.

There's also news of the discovery of bomb-grade plutonium in an abandoned safe; how leading figures in industry are denying the existence of climate change; and how the east of England is the most godless part of Britain.

Leave us your thoughts below or on our Facebook wall, and do try out our new twitter feeds – guardianscience and scienceweekly.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

'Richard Fortey takes us on a journey towards the light'

Life: An Unauthorised Biography reminds us what good books must be – informing our ignorance while sympathising with our failures of understanding

Share your impressions of the book in the comments, below

It was Mr Magoo that did it for me. "Dr Rousseau H. Flower was an eccentric in the grand manner … he always wore hand-tooled cowboy boots with elaborate curlicues in the stitching and a hat and jacket to match. He was very shortsighted, and tended to stumble along in the purposeful way adopted by the cartoon character Mr Magoo, while mumbling vigorously to himself."

The Magoo lookalike also carries a whip and a six-shooter, but that is not what matters most about him: what matters is that he was an expert on the nautiloids of the Ordovician.

The nautiloids are now turned to stone: little fossilised inscriptions that spell out an enigmatic narrative. The world around us is a text, a memoir, a record of its own history. Its condition is rather battered, lots of pages are missing, the script is barely legible, the language incompletely understood and the storyline uncertain. Science provides the basic grammar, a rudimentary lexicon and a series of provisional attempts to fill in the gaps.

Richard Fortey's Life: An Unauthorised Biography, the Guardian Science Book Club's inaugural title, is a big read in every sense: its 400 pages span four billion years of planetary existence and 400 years of systematic scientific investigation. Its very ambition makes it a good candidate for interesting questions. What, exactly, is a science book? And to be a good book, does a science book have to be well-written, in the sense that a literary novel has to be well-written?

The answer to the first question is a slippery one: a science book can only be as good as the science in its pages. Science, however, is not a static thing. Research moves on, paradigms shift, fresh discoveries open new approaches so swiftly that what was once the last word on the subject can become little more than science fiction in a decade or two.

The answer to the second question is not straightforward either: clarity is a minimum requirement, followed by a serving of scholarship phrased in language that does not patronise, but does not confuse. A book that starts with slimy things in the pre-Cambrian oceans and continues to the dawn of human civilisation in the Fertile Crescent must offer more than just a procession of challenging concepts and unfamiliar words, and accordingly up pops Mr Magoo, with whom Fortey (himself big on the trilobites of the Ordovician) once shared a hotel room.

Magoo is a digression, a little eddy in the mainstream of the narrative. He crops up in a discussion of fossil eccentricity: Fortey uses Rousseau H. Flower to illustrate success within a life of eccentricity. The weird creatures from the peculiar world of the Cambrian, says Fortey, would also have seemed appropriate to their environment. So Mr Flower Magoo becomes a casual, unforced little object lesson in life's improbable procession.

The book is full of affectionate touches and gentle concessions to anthropomorphism, even during extended lectures on scientific objectivity and scholarly honesty. As animal life begins to colonise the continents, Fortey invites us to "imagine ourselves as that first doddering tetrapod, to feel the need for breath, or to imagine ourselves sliding beneath dark, damp vegetation to escape the worst of the Sun's intentions."

But, of course, that's not the way to think. Fortey admits that it is almost "impossible to filter out the idea of will to succeed from my narrative of life's changes …" This digression ends with a reflection of scientific fraud and a reminder of the stony message from the silent Earth. "In Nature … there is no sin. Nor can Nature cheat."

Books like this are a reminder of what good books must be: texts that inform our ignorance, and at the same time sympathise with our failures of understanding. They are companionable journeys towards the light. They address us as friends, not pupils. Fortey's book is a journey in four dimensions: across the Oman desert, in an alehouse at Church Stretton, on a beach off Spitzbergen, but always in pursuit of some mysterious, improbable, distant past. So it is a travel book, a personal memoir, a reflection, and a history as well as a sustained and compelling lecture on yesterday's planet and today's biodiversity.

Mysterious creatures with suitably daunting labels (such as chemolithoautotrophic hyperthermophiles) may begin life's dance, to be followed 120 pages later by eurypterids – frisson-inducing water scorpions that grew up to six feet long and lay in the Devonian mud, waiting for unwary prey. At every level, the scholarship is spiced with sympathy.

Which brings us back to my original and not-quite-idle question: if it is all these things, in what sense is it a science book, rather than just a really good book?

In the coming month the Science Book Club tackles something completely different: Graham Farmelo's new biography of the British physicist Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man (Faber). Dirac is noted for his work applying relativity to quantum mechanics and his prediction of the existence of antimatter. But, as the title says, he was also a profoundly odd human being ... That discussion kicks off on Friday 3 April.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 9 Mar 2009 | 12:00 am

Obama to let health institute decide on stem cells

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will lift his predecessor's restriction on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research on Monday and will give the National Institutes of Health four months to come up with new rules on the issue, officials said on Sunday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 8 Mar 2009 | 11:02 pm

U.S. gasoline prices continue steady rise: survey (Reuters)

Reuters - U.S. average retail gasoline prices edged up in the past two weeks as oil prices rose and demand increased after motorists' lengthy aversion to sky-rocketing pump prices, according to the latest nationwide Lundberg survey on Sunday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 Mar 2009 | 7:58 pm

Growing Acid Problem Thins Shells of Ocean Creatures

Study shows ocean acidification is affecting shell-building marine animals.
Source: Livescience.com | 8 Mar 2009 | 6:21 pm

Brain circuit found that judges people on first impressions

'It's almost instantaneous and you can't stop doing it': neuroscientists match scans to human decision making

Scientists have recorded the gentle flicker of activity that lights up the brain when we form our first impressions of people. The study shows how age-old brain circuitry that evolved to make snap decisions on the importance of objects in the environment is now used in social situations.

Brain scans taken while volunteers formed opinions of new acquaintances found activity surged in an ancient neural circuit that helps us make a rapid assessment of a person's character.

"Humans have always been engaged in making decisions on what's important and what's not, and social decision making is taking advantage of these primary systems in the brain," said Daniela Schiller, who led the study at New York University.

"Whenever you need to assign value to something, you use the same mechanism, whether it's an inanimate object or a person. It's like there's one common currency in the brain."

Previous work by neuroscientists has shown we form our first impressions well within 30 seconds of meeting people. Often, our opinion changes very little after knowing them for longer.

"When you meet a person, they might say something, or look a certain way, or behave a certain way, but you have very little information on which to form an opinion, but it is almost instantaneous and you can't withhold from doing it," said Schiller.

In the study, published in Nature Neuroscience, Schiller and scientists from Harvard University took brain scans of 19 volunteers who were asked to form a first impression of a series of fictional characters.

The volunteers were shown faces of men on a computer screen, followed by six sentences that described a mix of good and bad aspects of their character. For example, the person might have picked up his room mate's post on the way home from university, or told a fellow student they were stupid. After reading all of the sentences, the participants were asked to rate how much they liked the person on a scale from one to eight, with eight being the most likable.

Schiller's team then looked through the images from the scanner to see what brain regions had been most active while people formed their first impressions.

The scans showed that two brain regions were involved in opinion-forming, the almond-shaped amygdala, which is linked to regulating emotions, and the posterior cingulate cortex, which is active in making financial decisions and putting values on the outcomes of situations.

"Even when we only briefly encounter others, brain regions that are important in forming evaluations are engaged, resulting in a quick first impression," said Elizabeth Phelps, a co-author on the study at New York University.

Understanding the biological circuits involved with opinion forming might help scientists learn what happens when they are disrupted or fail to activate properly. "It might affect the impressions you have of others, and that could feed into the basis of your relationship with them from then on," said Schiller.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 8 Mar 2009 | 6:01 pm

Secret Birth Control Method: The Welcome Dance of the Uterus

The uterus plays a role in make sure sperm are in the right place at the right time.
Source: Livescience.com | 8 Mar 2009 | 2:42 pm