Scientists have discovered that there are many more species of Australian lizards than previously thought, raising new questions about conservation and management of Australia's native reptiles. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm
Engineers and environmental scientists are developing methods of helping contaminated water to clean itself by adding simple organic chemicals such as vinegar. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm
Scientists have observed particle collisions that produce single top quarks. The discovery of the single top confirms important parameters of particle physics, including the total number of quarks, and has significance for the ongoing search for the Higgs particle at Fermilab's Tevatron, currently the world's most powerful operating particle accelerator. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm
Epstein-Barr virus, the pathogen that causes mononucleosis, appears to play a role in the neurodegeneration that occurs in persons with multiple sclerosis, researchers have shown. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm
Most of us save things -- memorabilia, collectibles, items from our childhood or from our children. But for more than an estimated million Americans, the saving may get out of hand and cross over to a psychiatric condition known as compulsive hoarding. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm
Influenza A viruses (H1N1 subtype) that are resistant to the drug oseltamivir circulated widely in the US during the 2007-2008 influenza season, with an even higher prevalence of drug resistance during the current 2008-2009 influenza season, according to a new study. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm
Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the resulting effects on ocean water are making it increasingly difficult for coral reefs to grow, say scientists. A new study warns that if carbon dioxide reaches double pre-industrial levels, coral reefs can be expected to not just stop growing, but also to begin dissolving all over the world. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm
A researcher has filmed hours of prawn "sex tapes" to find out why prawns bred in captivity did not go on to breed well. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm
A receptor known to be active in bone metastases, but previously unexplored in primary bone tumors, is a potential therapeutic target in osteosarcoma, investigators report in Cancer Research. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm
Male teenagers who ate fish at least once a week at the age of 15 showed a 6 percent increase in intelligence scores at 18 and those who ate it more than once a week showed an 11 percent increase. Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm
Reuters - President Barack Obama signed an order lifting eight years of restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research on Monday as scientists gushed, activists cheered and shares in stem cell companies rose. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Mar 2009 | 12:14 pm
AP - President Barack Obama's decision to lift the contentious Bush-era restraints on stem-cell research came with a larger message for all scientists: Follow the data, not political ideology.
AFP - All conditions are favorable for launching the space shuttle Discovery on a mission to the International Space Station as scheduled Wednesday, officials with NASA's mission management team said.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama signed an order lifting eight years of restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research on Monday as scientists gushed, activists cheered and shares in stem cell companies rose.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA cleared space shuttle Discovery for a Wednesday launch to complete the International Space Station's power system and deliver Japan's first live-aboard astronaut, officials said on Monday.
A meeting of scientists in the Danish capital Copenhagen is expected to reveal further worrying data on global warming. Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Mar 2009 | 2:18 am
LONDON (Reuters) - The anti-malaria drug quinacrine does not appear to extend the lives of people with the human form of mad cow disease, despite encouraging results from experiments with mice, British researchers said on Tuesday.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Men with a higher intake of vitamin C from food or supplements have a lower risk of developing gout, a form of arthritis from uric acid build-up that causes inflamed joints, researchers said on Monday.
AP - Rep. Jim Langevin was 16 years old when a policeman's accidental gunshot severed his spinal cord and left him paralyzed. Though doctors told him he would never walk again, Langevin said he's remained optimistic for a scientific breakthrough that would make it possible.
AP - A canny chimpanzee who calmly collected a stash of rocks and then hurled them at zoo visitors in fits of rage has confirmed that apes can plan ahead just like humans, a Swedish study said Monday. Santino the chimpanzee's anti-social behavior stunned both visitors and keepers at the Furuvik Zoo but fascinated researchers because it was so carefully prepared.
In addition to ending a ban on stem cell research funding, President Barack Obama issued a potentially landmark memo Monday declaring a new era of "scientific integrity" across government.
In no uncertain terms, Obama signaled that the federal government would be guided by science, not the other way around. In offering a repudiation of the previous administration, he also promised a new era of transparency.
"Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or
technological findings and conclusions," Obama wrote in an official memorandum. "If scientific and
technological information is developed and used by the federal government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public."
After the Bush years, during which scientists of many stripes — from former Surgeon General Richard Carmona to a host of climate change scientists — claimed their results had been ignored, misconstrued or downright
changed, the new memo brought cheers from groups dedicated to advancing scientific research.
"[President Obama and this Congress] have already made the choice that they are going to fully support science and invest in science to the solve the big problems — health care, science, and education," said Dr. Stacie Propst, vice president of science policy and outreach at Research!America. "They are going to focus on a science-based economy for us."
Though the memo was released in conjunction with the repeal of a Bush-era ban on stem cells,
many saw a broader significance to the memorandum, which directed the
Office of Science and Technology Policy to "develop recommendations for presidential action designed to guarantee scientific integrity
throughout the executive branch," within 120 days.
The memo also required that "the selection and retention of candidates for science and technology
positions in the executive branch should be based on the candidate's
knowledge, credentials, experience and integrity."
The Bush administration, by contrast, was dogged by allegations that key posts were filled with ideologues or political cronies.
Propst said that this common-sense approach to hiring for science
positions offered "a stark difference from what many considered to be
the more ideological approach" of the Bush administration.
However, some observers said that it's not always easy to separate politics from science, especially on hot-button issues like climate change or stem cell research.
On some issues, following the scientific line might be tougher
than it sounds, said Aaron Levine, a public policy professor at Georgia
Tech who studies how ethical controversy influences science.
For
instance, if Obama decides to form a bioethics committee, as previous
administrations have, it could be difficult to find the right
composition of technocrats for the job.
With most bioethicists "on the record" about the hot-button issues
of cloning, embryonic stem cell research, genetic modification and
euthanasia, it could be difficult to staff a committee in a balanced
way. Particularly with regard to embryonic-stem-cell research, where
the Obama administration has a clear-cut position, they could run into
political trouble.
"I think you can almost guarantee that there will be criticism of
whoever Obama selects," Levine said, from the left if he appoints
opponents of embryonic stem cells, and from the right if the panel is
too unanimous in support of his policies.
And what about when scientists can't come to a definitive conclusion
about something, such as the impacts of certain types of advanced
biofuel?
"For the hot-button topics, it's going to be tricky," Levine said.
But he held out hope that on more technical, less politicized issues, it would be easier to find clear ground.
"In the more technical topics, levee design, for instance, we'd like
our experts to be fully focused on what can you do to build the levees
you can," he said.
A V2 rocket engineer in Nazi Germany, he later worked on the US programme that took man to the moon
As a postwar scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), Konrad Dannenberg was honoured for his work on propulsion systems for the US 1969 moon landing. As a wartime rocket engineer, Dannenberg was one of those employees of the Nazis whose efforts were illuminated by what Winston Churchill called, in May 1940, the "lights of perverted science". As a survivor, Dannenberg, who has died aged 96, had been one of the last of more than 100 rocket scientists, led by the father of the US moon landing Wernher von Braun, who were despatched by the US Operation Paperclip from ruined Germany, via Le Havre, to the security of Fort Bliss, Texas, in November 1945.
Albert Einstein was among those who protested to the Truman administration about the Germans' arrival. As for their colleagues left behind, many ended up working for the Soviet rocket programme. Five years earlier Dannenberg had been transferred from the Wehrmacht to the Peenemünde missile centre on the Baltic sea island of Usedom. There he worked on propulsion for the V2 rocket, and from 1943 on production drawings. On 3 October 1942, the V2 was successfully tested, and, reaching a height of 53 miles, brushed the edge of space. It provided what Dannenberg saw as the outstanding launch of his life. And, as he said a decade ago, it was "clear that it would be used by the military".
Indeed it was. The "V" was for Vergeltungswaffe, vengeance weapon, and the V2 (the world's first ballistic missile), like the V1 - ancestor of the cruise missile - never had any other practical purpose, as Dannenberg would have well known. But then, recalled the scientist, the Wehrmacht "was the only rich uncle with enough money to pay for the things we wanted to do".
In 1943 an RAF attack on Peene- münde focused production of the V2 and V1 to Mittelwerk (central works), an underground factory, near Nordhausen on the southern border of the Harz mountains and hell on, or rather under, earth. The civilian director of V2 production was Arthur Rudolph, who would become the co-ordinator of the US programme which, in 1969, delivered Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. Mittelwerk's workers comprised 60,000 largely Soviet, Polish and Jewish slave labourers from the adjacent Dora camp complex. "Compared with Dora," a new arrival told Jean Michel, a French Dora inmate in September 1944, "Auschwitz was easy."
Some 5,789 V2s would be produced (and sometimes sabotaged) between August 1943 and liberation by the US 3rd armoured division in April 1945. The first V2s hit Paris, Antwerp and Chiswick, in west London, in early September 1944. Just under 3,000 civilians were killed by V2s in southern England (and more than 6,000 by V1s) before the last V2 hit Orpington, in London, on 27 March 1945. Some say that 20,000 people died producing V-weapons at Mittelwerk; Michel put the figure at 30,000. With the V2, Hitler had told von Braun: "We will force England to her knees." It had been a mistaken investment, von Braun later concluded.
"This slavery, this unspeakable sum of suffering, misery and death, Michel wrote in his book Dora (1979) "... made possible the conquest of space." It was people like Peenemunde-based Dannenburg, (unlike SS Major von Braun, he was not a Nazi party member), who embodied this paradox.
Dannenburg was born in Weissenfels, near Leipzig in Saxony-Anhalt, in eastern Germany. He grew up in Velber, near Hanover, and graduated in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg. The teenager's interest in rocketry had been kindled by a Hanover lecture by the Austrian pioneer Max Valier, who worked with Fritz von Opel on rocket cars and was blown up by a rocket engine in 1930. Valier's protege was the rocket engineer Rudolph.
Dannenburg stayed at Fort Bliss until the late 1940s, as the US military evaluated the V2. He then moved to the Redstone Arsenal, near Huntsville, Alabama to work, under von Braun, on the Redstone and Jupiter missile programmes. Thirteen years after the V2 scientists' arrival in the US the Redstones were deployed - in West Germany.
In September 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite. It was not until January 1958 that a Redstone took the US Explorer satellite into orbit. In the ensuing years, what is now commonly seen as the myth of a Soviet technological lead was fostered by von Braun and exploited by John F Kennedy in his 1960 presidential campaign. In 1960 Dannenburg became deputy manager of the Saturn programme at Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville and, in May 1961, JFK set his "end of the decade" moon-landing deadline. Eight years later it was a Saturn V, the world's largest rocket, which took the Apollo 11 astronauts to land on the moon.
By then, Dannenburg was working on space station design; he retired in 1973. With urgency ebbing from the space race, awkward questions about Operation Paperclip were resurfacing. In the early 1980s Rudolph's role in the Dora camp horrors was exposed. A deal was done, Rudolph renounced his US citizenship and resettled in West Germany in 1983. Two years later, Dannenburg was one of more than a score of sometime German scientists who petitioned President Ronald Reagan to have Rudolph's US citizenship restored. Von Braun had died in 1977; Rudolph, who saw the moon landings as a German victory, died 12 years ago.
After his retirement, Dannenberg became a highly respected educator at the US Space and Rocket Centre in Huntsville. "He personally engaged with thousands of young people," Ed Buckbee, a former Nasa spokesperson, told the Huntsville Times, "taking his time to share with them his experiences of flying into space ... He was truly an ambassador for space."
Huntsville's mayor told the paper that: "Dannenburg's leadership and vision lifted our city, our state and our country to heights that had never before been achieved."
Dannenburg's first wife, Ingeborg, predeceased him. He is survived by his wife, Jackie, his son, Klaus Dieter Dannenberg, from his first marriage, and two grandchildren.
• Konrad Dannenberg, scientist, born 5 August 1912; died 16 February 2009
Children born to older men perform worse in intelligence tests than those with younger fathers, researchers have found.
A review of medical records of more than 30,000 children showed that those born to 20-year-old men scored on average three points higher in IQ tests than children whose fathers were 50-years-old when they were born.
The finding is the first to link men's age to impaired cognitive ability in their children and builds on recent work that suggests older men are more likely to have children with congenital heart defects, autism, schizophrenia and childhood cancers.
The same study found that children's IQ was marginally higher if they were born to older mothers, a finding scientists have put down to those women spending more time caring for and nurturing their infants.
The poorer performance of children with older fathers may be due to several factors, including how they interact with their children, but many scientists believe that genetic mutations that build up in the sperm of older men are to blame.
John McGrath at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research in Australia analysed records for 33,437 children born in the US between 1959 and 1965. The data included the children's scores on a variety of intelligence tests at the age of eight months, four years and seven years.
After taking into account differences in the parents' education and financial security, McGrath found a range of subtle impairments among children whose fathers were older, according to a report in the journal Plos medicine.
The differences in IQ scores are of concern because the age of fathers is rising. 25% of 1993 births in England and Wales were to men aged 35 to 54-years-old, but by 2003, that figure had risen to 40%.
As the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust unveiled its portrait of the Bard painted during his lifetime, archaeologists were yesterday claiming to have beaten them to it.
A team working on the site of the long-lost venue known as The Theatre, in Shoreditch, east London, where Shakespeare acted and staged his first plays, unveiled a piece of 16th-century pottery depicting what looks like his face discovered on the site. There is no proof that the face on the fragment of Beauvais pottery is the Bard's, but insiders are excited. "We knew we'd be somewhere near Shakespeare's theatre when we got this site for our new building, and that was thrilling enough," said Penny Tuerk, a director of the Tower Theatre Company. The face may be from an ale mug sold in The Theatre's souvenir shop, she said - and might be reused when the new theatre opens in 2012.
James Burbage, father of Shakespeare's friend and business partner Richard Burbage, built The Theatre in 1576. It was just outside the walls of London among taverns and slum houses. The Burbages fell out with their landlord, and in 1598, supposedly with Shakespeare's help, they dismantled the building and took it across the Thames to Bankside where it rose again as a far more famous theatre: the Globe.
• President revives federal funding for experiments • Harvard hails return of free and open collaboration
Scientists yesterday welcomed a new executive order signed by President Barack Obama ending the nearly eight-year-old ban on federal funding for most stem cell research, saying it ushered in a new era of possibility.
"It is a relief to know that we can now collaborate openly and freely with other scientists in our own university and elsewhere, without restrictions on what equipment, data, or ideas can be shared," Harvard University's stem cell institute co-director Doug Melton said in a statement.
Melton will apply for federal grants to research ways to turn stem cells into heart cells and neurons that could one day yield a cure for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. "Science thrives when there is an open and collaborative exchange, not when there are artificial barriers, silos, constructed by the government," he added.
Obama's repeal of George Bush's August 2001 ban on federal funding for stem cell research will also have dramatic practical effects, according to Harvard spokesman BD Colen. "This will mean the end of the quite onerous bookkeeping and segregation of supplies, equipment and people that were necessary under the Bush executive order," he said. "Literally, you could not pick up a pencil off a bench if you were working with embryonic stem cells."
In signing the executive order, Obama said: "When it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced into what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values. In this case, I believe the two are not inconsistent.
"As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research - and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly."
Obama paid tribute to the late actor Christopher Reeve, who emerged as an advocate for embryonic stem cell research after he was paralysed in a horseriding accident.
He said Reeve dreamed of being able to walk again, adding: "Christopher did not get that chance. But if we pursue this research, maybe one day - maybe not in our lifetime, or even in our children's lifetime - but maybe one day, others like him might."
But the research raises ethical questions, because it uses human embryos - typically conceived in the lab - which are destroyed so that stem cells may be harvested. Critics say it creates human life only to end it.
In a bid to mollify critics, Obama said: "We will never undertake this research lightly. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse."
The research is allowed in Britain, which in the years since Bush's restrictions, has become a world centre of stem cell study. Since the ban, US research has been sustained by private funds that have declined with the economic downturn. The fiscal stimulus bill passed by Congress last month includes $8.2bn for the National Institutes of Health research centres.
Whether or not God exists, thinking about Him or Her doesn't require divinely dedicated neurological wiring.
Instead, religious thoughts run on brain systems used to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling.
The findings, based on brain scans of people contemplating God, don't explain whether a propensity for religion is a neurobiological accident. But at least they give researchers a solid framework for exploring the question.
"In a way, this is a very cold look at religious belief," said National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist Jordan Grafman, co-author of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We're only trying to understand where in the brain religious beliefs seem to be modulated."
Though scientific debate about God's existence has transfixed the public, Grafman's findings fit into a lesser known argument over why religion exists.
Some scientists think it's just an accidental byproduct of social cognition. They say humans evolved to imagine what other people are feeling, even people who aren't present — and from there it was a short step to positing supernatural beings.
Others argue that religion is too pervasive to be just a byproduct. Historically, at least, it must have provided believers and their communities some sort of advantage, or else it would have disappeared.
The argument breaks down into the so-called byproduct and adaptation camps. Of course, they might both be right.
"Religious beliefs might have arisen as a byproduct," said Justin Barrett, an Oxford University specialist in the cognitive neuroscience of religion, "but once in place, they're pretty handy."
Grafman started by interviewing 26 people of varying religious
sentiments, breaking down their beliefs into three psychological
categories: God's perceived level of involvement in the world, God's
perceived emotions, and religious knowledge gained through doctrine or
experience. Then they submitted statements based on these categories to
40 people hooked to fMRI machines.
Statements based on God's involvement — such as "God protects one's
life" or "Life has no higher purpose" — provoked activity in brain
regions associated with understanding intent. Statements of God's
emotions — such as "God is forgiving" or "the afterlife will be
punishing" — stimulated regions responsible for classifying emotions
and relating observed actions to oneself. Knowledge-based statements,
such as "a source of creation exists" or "religions provide moral
guidance," activated linguistic processing centers.
Taken together, the neurological states evoked by the questions are
known to cognitive scientists as the Theory of Mind: They underlie our
understanding that other people have minds, thoughts and feelings.
The advantages of a Theory of Mind are clear. People who lack one are
considered developmentally challenged, even disabled. Anthropologist
Scott Atran, a proponent of the byproduct hypothesis, has suggested
that it let our ancestors quickly distinguish between friends and
enemies. And once humans were able to imagine someone who wasn't
physically present, supernatural beliefs soon followed.
But just as a Theory of Mind provided benefits, so might its supernatural byproducts and the religions that grew from them.
Unlike other animals, humans can imagine the future, including their
own death. The hope given by religious beliefs to people confronting
their own mortality might provide motivation to care for their
offspring.
Supernatural beliefs may also have produced group-level advantages that then conferred benefits to individuals.
"You get some selective advantages, such as inter-group cooperation and
self-policing morality," said Barrett. "And maybe the entire network of
belief practices, and whatever is behind them, gets reinforced."
According to Barrett, religion may even have created a feedback loop, refining the Theory of Mind that produced it.
"It could be that when you're in a religious community, it improves
what psychologists call perspective-taking," he said. "Exercising your
Theory of Mind could be good for developing it, making your reasoning
more robust."
David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University,
said the findings fit with the idea that religion started as a
cognitive byproduct and became a cultural adaptation, but cautioned
against over-interpreting them.
"It's tremendous to see religious belief manifested at the neurological
level," he said. "But there's a sense that when you bring things down
to that level, that trumps other kinds of understanding. That's not
true in this case."
Grafman declined to speculate, instead concentrating on what he hopes
to achieve with future research: studying other kinds of religions than
were represented in his small sample size, and comparing religious
cognition to legal and political certainties.
"The differences and nuances between these types of belief systems
will be important to understanding the deliberation that goes on," he
said.
Grafman also stressed that the study examined only the
nature of religion, not the existence of God.
"He, or She, didn't come in for the evaluation," he said.
Citation: "Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief." By Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron Barbey, Michael Su, Giovanna Zamboni, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 10, March 9, 2009.
Image: Neural activation produced by God's perceived love (left) and anger (right)/PNAS
Obama signed an Executive Order on stem cell research and a Presidential Memorandum on scientific integrity. Source: Livescience.com | 9 Mar 2009 | 10:16 pm
According to Hughes, using reproductive technologies — in this case, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), in which doctors screen embryos before implanting them — for cosmetic purposes is just an old-fashioned parental impulse, translated into 21st century technology.
If nobody gets hurt and everybody has access, says Hughes, then genetic modification is perfectly fine, and restricting it is an assault on reproductive freedom. "It's in the same category as abortion. If you think women have the right to control their own bodies, then they should be able to make this choice," he said. "There should be no law restricting the kind of kids people have, unless there's gross evidence that they're going to harm that kid, or harm society."
Hughes' views are hardly universal. "I'm totally against this," said William Kearns, the medical geneticist who developed the techniques used by the Fertility Institutes for cosmetic purposes, in a newspaper interview. In the same article, Mark Hughes, one of the inventors of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, called its non-therapeutic use "ridiculous and irresponsible."
Wired.com talked to James Hughes and to Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, about genetic selection.
Wired.com: What do you think about using reproductive technologies to pick cosmetic traits?
James Hughes: It's inevitable, in the broad context of freedom and
choice. And the term "designer babies" is an insult to parents, because
it basically says parents don't have their kids' best interests at
heart.
The only people who are consistent about this are the Catholics.
They say that you have to accept whatever pops out of your procreative
unions. But if you think that people have a right to choose how many
children they have, or the partners they have them with — "I love you,
but you're just too short, or too ugly" — that's a procreative choice.
Wired.com: What do you think of the "right to choose" argument?
Marcy Darnovsky: Reproductive freedom doesn't mean that anything goes. A woman's fundamental right to continue a pregnancy is apples; choosing the characteristics of a child is bowling balls.
Wired.com: Why is it any different from taking a dietary supplement during pregnancy?
Darnovsky: Because it's an extreme technology. We'll never really be able to tell if it's safe without doing unethical human experimentation. And if it does work, the idea that it could be accessible to everyone is specious. We can't even get universal childhood vaccinations. We hope now that we're going to get expanded coverage and health care, but to think we'll supply fertility treatments to everyone, not just people with infertility problems — that's going to break the bank in a hurry.
Wired.com: But is it different from, say, refusing to conceive with someone who has traits you don't want to pass to your kids?
Darnovsky: If you go 30 miles per hour, why not go 50 mph? Why have speed limits at all? Why not go 200 mph on this small residential street?
Wired: But what is actually wrong with it?
Darnovsky: It's the question of equality. We'd endorse a set of societal and commercial dynamics that would lead us into a new world of inequality and discrimination. Just as privilege accrues to those with privilege, the same would be true of genetically modified children of existing elites. Wired.com: So the human race would bifurcate into modified superiors and unmodified inferiors.
Darnovsky: That's a catchy way of putting it, but many bioethicists who've looked at this think it's the most likely scenario.
If I've got a dozen embryos I could implant, and the ones I want to
implant are the green-eyed ones, or the blond-haired ones, that's an
extension of choices we think are perfectly acceptable — and restricting them a
violation of our procreative autonomy.
I want to see a society in which parents can say, I want my kids to
have the best possible options in life. That might include getting rid
of obesity genes. Every child should be a loved child, but there is no virtue in
accident.
Wired.com: But one could argue that obesity is a health problem, not a cosmetic issue.
Hughes: So parents are only allowed to have preferences about health
conditions? What if we discovered that eating fish oil while pregnant
increases intelligence, which it does? We're not going to say that you
can't make certain dietary choices. In fact, we encourage them.
And would we say it was morally inappropriate for parents to stand
on their head during copulation, if it made their children blond? I
doubt it. The only reason this is different is because it involves
embryo selection.
Wired.com: But isn't this going to produce a super-race of children
born to people wealthy enough to afford artificial reproduction?
Hughes: Insofar as the choices are eye color and hair color, that's not
going to exacerbate inequalities in society. It's a minor way in which
greater wealth allows more reproductive choice, but it shouldn't be a
reason to override reproductive freedom.
If PGD had the ability to double the IQs of children — which it doesn't
— then that would be the sort of inequality that warranted a social
policy against it. I'm worried about that situation, not hair and eye
color.
Gross exacerbation of social inequality is a grave social harm. That's
why we need universal health care, and universal access to any
technology which provides profound enablement.
Wired.com: It's hard to imagine these ever being universally available.
Hughes: Medicaid has considered the provision of fertility services.
Some say fertility isn't a health issue — but I think that's B.S. Having
a saline breast implant put in after a mastectomy isn't a health issue,
but we pay for it, because it improves quality of life.
Wired.com: Some ethicists say that non-therapeutic reproductive
technologies shouldn't be used until the industry is better-regulated.
Hughes: Fertility clinics and reproductive medicine need a complete
revamping of their regulatory structures. Many of the procedures are
not being monitored for safety and efficacy. But those are the only two
grounds on which to base a legitimate societal regulation.
Wired.com: Where do you draw the line? What if I want disabled children?
Hughes: We've been debating that for five or six years, ever since a
deaf lesbian couple in Chicago wanted to use PGD to choose among the
embryos they'd fertilized for one that inherited a form of deafness.
They said that deafness is a perfectly benign condition, and that
living in the hearing world is like living in the white world as a
black person.
I argue in Citizen Cyborg that I wouldn't want to see a law saying you
can't do this, but I'd want to see strong moral sanctions.
The reproductive autonomy of parents should be protected at a high
level — and that even includes decisions that impose a degree of harm
on children.
Wired.com: But what if I wanted to have a child who was deformed?
Hughes: I think a principle developed by Peter Singer is useful: If you
think parents should be punished for taking that ability away from a
child who's already born, that's probably harm.
LiveScience.com - Science can't say
whether God represents a loving, vengeful or nonexistent being. But researchers
have revealed for the first time how such religious beliefs trigger different
parts of the brain. Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 Mar 2009 | 9:41 pm
Police in the Indian state of Haryana say two white rats are protecting official documents from a mice infestation. Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Mar 2009 | 8:10 pm
A strange and confused chapter in the history of American medical research ended Monday morning, when President Obama signed an executive order ending a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell lines that were developed after August 9, 2001.
The ban has been roundly denounced as hypocritical and destructive, stunting advances in one of the most exciting fields of medical research. Some restrictions will still apply, and whether research will provide much-anticipated cures is an open question — but at least the question will be answered by science, with the government's full weight behind it.
"This is a momentous occasion for anyone who believes in the pursuit of biomedical knowledge for the betterment of human health," said Harvard Stem Cell Institute researcher George Daley.
Embryonic stem cells may be used to replace diseased and failing tissues, and treat now-incurable diseases, from cancer to Parkinson's. Though most stem cell–based treatments are probably a decade away, some advances, like universal blood made from stem cells, could become available much sooner. And now, with the ban lifted, money from the the National Institutes of Health's
$29 billion budget is likely to pour into the coffers of stem cell scientists across the nation, speeding up the pace of the research.
Over the last seven years, as the therapeutic promise grew,
research on embryonic stem cells became a front in the culture wars,
with lines drawn between religious fundamentalists and everyone else. Thirteen states established state-funded stem cell research institutes
like the mammoth $3 billion California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, but they couldn't provide the same level of backing as the national government.
"This marks a new era for stem cell research. It will not only
impact research in the laboratory, but perhaps more
importantly, it finally lifts the black cloud that has hovered over
this research for so long. We have been operating for the last decade
with one hand tied behind our back," said Robert Lanza, science
director of Advanced Cell Technologies. "For the first time in almost a
decade, we can now apply for government grants to use our cells to
treat human diseases. Rather than keeping the cells in the freezer, now
we can use them to help people."
Though President Bush's ban has received most of the attention, the
political battle over embryo destruction and stem cell research
actually dates to the Clinton administration, when Congress passed the
little-known Dickey-Wicker amendment. The law denies taxpayer money for research that creates or destroys embryos.
Creating and destroying embryos is central to a procedure called
somatic-cell nuclear transfer, or therapeutic cloning: A nucleus is
taken from one cell and put inside a hollowed-out embryo, which is
allowed to divide for several days, producing embryonic stem cells that
can become any other type of cell in the body.
Under Dickey-Wicker, however, the federal government could still
fund research on the resulting cells — just not the original embryo
creation and destruction. President Bush banned government support for
all therapeutic cloning research, from inception to application, and
prevented research on cells manufactured in other ways. Scientists
could not use embryos discarded by fertility clinics, or from cells
taken from embryos without destroying them.
This restricted government-funded research to exactly 21 embryonic
stem-cell lines developed in the field's early days. Few are useful for
anything but basic research.
Obama's decision was criticized by opponents of embryonic stem cell
research, who say that the cells' medical promise is overhyped, and
made unnecessary by advances in research on adult stem cells. These
develop into one cell type rather than a full range, and are relatively
better understood than their embryonic counterparts.
"Human
embryonic-stem cell-research is now passé," said James Sherley, a
Boston Biomedical Research Institute biomedical engineer. In 2007,
Sherley was denied tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
a decision resulting, he alleged, from his scientifically unpopular
opposition to ESC research. "The most advertised property of human
embryonic stem cells, their potential to produce any tissue type in the
body, is also their worst failing. The tissue types that they always
produce are tumors."
President Obama's decision, he said, "will
not promote human embryonic stem cell research. However, it will put
more resources in the hands of scientists who have been selfishly
promoting dead-end research since 2001."
But most scientists and
medical experts say that research is justified on all types of stem
cells: The insights generated in one type can inform another, just as
breakthrough cell reprogramming research — driven, in part, by concerns
over embryo destruction — required the identification of genes
activated in embryonic stem cells. Different diseases may also require
different treatments; a single type of stem cell may not suffice.
Comparing
adult and embryonic stem cell research is also unfair, wrote University
of Pennsylvania bioethicist Art Caplan in an MSNBC editorial.
"After
eight years of zero-budget funding of embryonic stem cell research, it
is hardly fair and completely disingenuous for critics to point to the
practice and wonder why it lags four decades behind government-funded
adult stem cell research," he wrote.
Accidental discovery of the elusive "memristor" electronic component. It could soon replace both RAM and hard drives with devices 10x smaller. Cell phones might become sensors, protecting planet Earth. Credit: Richard Hart - The Next Step Source: Livescience.com | 9 Mar 2009 | 7:19 pm
President Barack Obama lifts restrictions on US federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells. Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Mar 2009 | 5:58 pm
Assembling ammunition in advance reveals ape's unsuspected ability to plan for future
The loutish behaviour of a stone-throwing chimpanzee at a zoo near the Arctic circle has challenged scientists' beliefs about human beings.
Santino, a 31-year-old male at Furuvik zoo in Sweden, may be the first animal to exhibit an unambiguous ability to plan for the future, a behaviour many scientists argue is unique to humans. Forward planning takes considerable cognitive skills, because it requires an animal to envisage future events it will have to deal with.
Santino would get agitated when the first groups of visitors arrived at his enclosure in the morning, and would start hurling stones at the spectators. When the zookeepers investigated, they found that, while the zoo was closed, Santino had been busy making piles of ammunition, and returned to them to resupply.
To catch the chimp in action, one zookeeper hid in a room overlooking the enclosure and observed the ape's behaviour before the zoo gates opened each morning. She saw Santino dragging stones from a protective moat that surrounded his island home, before placing them in piles. Further covert surveillance of the ape revealed he spent some time tapping areas of concrete floor with his fist. Occasionally, the animal would thump harder, releasing chunks of concrete that he broke into rough discs.
A survey of the enclosure showed that Santino made piles of ammunition only on the quarter of the island's shore that faced the visiting crowds.
Since becoming aware of the issue, zookeepers have removed hundreds of caches of stones from the island and have observed Santino gathering stones and putting them in piles at least 50 times. Santino's attempts to fashion concrete discs has been recorded 18 times, according to a report in Current Biology.
Staff at the zoo coped with Santino's antics by warning visitors when he was getting agitated, and erected a fence to try to contain the projectiles. Cognitive scientist Mathias Osvath, the author of the study, believes that such complex forward planning suggests Santino can anticipate future events and is able to devise ways of dealing with them. In this situation, he is trying to get the crowds to move on.
"Forward planning like this is supposed to be uniquely human; it implies a consciousness that is very special, that you can close your eyes you can see this inner world," he said. "Many apes throw objects, but the novelty with Santino is that he makes caches of these missiles while he is fully calm and only throws them much later on.
"We are not alone in the world within. There are other creatures who have this special consciousness that is said to be uniquely human."
Osvath interviewed zookeepers at Furuvik and examined records of the chimp's behaviour. He found that Santino only gathered rocks and made concrete missiles when the zoo was closed. He gave up the behaviour completely when the zoo was shut over the winter.
The zookeepers recently decided that an operation was the best way of controlling Santino's behaviour.
"They have castrated the poor guy. They hope that his hormone levels will decrease and that will make him less prone to throw stones. He's already getting fatter and he likes to play much more now than before. Being agitated isn't good for him," said Osvath.
AFP - Two-time Grammy winner Pink, in Paris on Monday for Fashion Week, said she would never befriend a designer who used fur as she joined Stella McCartney in the launch of a new PETA animal rights campaign.
AP - After suffering through a month's delay, NASA enjoyed a trouble-free countdown for space shuttle Discovery, all set to blast off on a space station construction mission Wednesday night.
Obama signed an executive order reversing a Bush ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Source: Livescience.com | 9 Mar 2009 | 4:41 pm
Four of clubs Sammy Wilson Northern Ireland environment minister
Sammy Wilson's appointment as Northern Ireland environment minister appears to have been conceived as some sort of practical joke. It's no longer very funny. He fills the same role as the former South African health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who claimed that Aids could be treated with beetroot and lemon juice.
But the minister for hysterical pseudo-religion intends to cling onto his brief come hell or high water.
Six of diamonds Václav Klaus President of Czech Republic
Klaus is the rightwing president of the Czech Republic, criticised by Vaclav Havel as a promoter of "gangster capitalism". He describes himself as "the most important 'denier' in the world", though Viscount Monckton (see below) might take issue with this.
He told the US Congress that "manmade climate change has become one of the most dangerous arguments aimed at distorting human efforts and public policies in the whole world … Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism." Climate change, he says, is caused "not by human behaviour but by various exogenous and endogenous natural processes (such as fluctuating solar activity)".
He describes concern about climate change as a "new wave of dangerous indoctrination of the whole world" and says that "global-warming alarmism is challenging our freedom, and Al Gore is a leader of that movement."
Seven of hearts Steve Milloy Fox News columnist
Steve Milloy writes a weekly "Junk Science" column for Fox News, which he uses, among other topics, to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of secondhand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Fox describes his credentials thus: "Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and manages the Free Enterprise Action Fund. He is a junk science expert, and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute".
His website has been the main entrepôt for almost every kind of climate change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press. Milloy claims to be campaigning against "faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special and, often, hidden agendas", which seems to be a pretty good summary of his own activities.
Eight of spades Prof Pat Michaels Cato Institute
Michaels played a starring role in Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle and is regularly used by the US media, largely because he is one of the very few deniers who has any relevant scientific credentials.
He maintains that: "When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And it's not just Gore's movie that's fiction. It's the rhetoric of the Congress and the chief executive, too."
Nine of diamonds Christopher Monckton Former adviser to Margaret Thatcher
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, whose academic qualification is a classics degree, maintains that "politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science." He came to public notice with a long paper published on the website of the Sunday Telegraph, accusing the UN of scientific fraud. His paper was filled with sciencey equations and calculations, which were rapidly dismissed as bunkum by real scientists.
He has threatened several of those who have challenged his scientific claims with libel suits, but they have not yet materialised. Though he has never held a seat in the Lords, he maintained in a threatening letter to two US senators that he was "a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature".
He has also claimed that, among other unlikely feats, he was responsible for winning the Falklands war. His grand statements about climate science and his own credentials have earned him the nickname among some environmentalists of Viscount Monckhausen.
During her vice-presidential campaign, she embarrassed John McCain by maintaining: "I'm not one though who would attribute it [climate change] to being manmade." She has refused to classify the polar bear as an endangered species on the grounds that the sea ice is here to stay, but is making plans for opening up the Arctic Sea to oil drilling, on the grounds that the ice is due to disappear. Could her ambivalence towards climate change have anything to do with the fact that Alaska is a major oil state? You betcha.
In 2003 he delivered a speech to the Senate called The Science of Climate Change, in which he said: "The claim that global warming is caused by manmade emissions is simply untrue and not based on sound science … With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."
Seeking to characterise environmentalists, he says: "I could use the Third Reich, the Big Lie ... You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it, and that's their strategy." He has also compared the US Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo. Terrifyingly, until 2006 Inhofe chaired the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Queen of diamonds Melanie Phillips Daily Mail columnist
Mel P (Genuinely Scary Spice) appears to believe that half the scientists on earth are engaged in a series of giant conspiracies. Like Christopher Booker (below), she dismisses not only climate change but also the entire canon of evolutionary science. She also stoutly defends the thesis that MMR injections cause autism.
She claims that "the theory that global warming is all the fault of mankind is a massive scam based on flawed computer modelling, bad science and an anti-western ideology … The majority of well-meaning opinion in the Western world believes a pack of lies and propaganda". She has also maintained that "carbon dioxide forms a relatively small proportion of the atmosphere, most of which consists of water vapour."
If this were the case, we would need gills.
King of diamonds Christopher Booker Sunday Telegraph columnist
His most famous contention was made in a column in February 2008. The previous September, he noted, "sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. … Its graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13,000m sq km to just 4m from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost back to 13m sq km."
He maintains that "since I said I didn't believe human beings caused global warming I've not been allowed to make a TV programme." This is odd because he stopped making TV programmes in 1994. He was making public statements in support of mainstream climate science until at least 2000, and his first public statement to the contrary was in 2004. But the conspiracy extends even further. "Have you noticed there is a wind turbine on Teletubbies?", he asked in the Daily Express. "That's subliminal advertising, isn't it?"
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.
Archaeologists in London believe they have unearthed the remains of the theatre where Romeo and Juliet had its premiere. Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Mar 2009 | 2:48 pm
From Richard Dawkins to the atheist bus, critical thinking has made an unexpected return to popularity. Chris French, editor of the Skeptic magazine, wonders why
In his bestseller, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the psychological and sociological factors that make some ideas an overnight success, while others simply crash and burn. Many appear out of the blue, such as new novels that move rapidly from cult status to international bestsellers. Happily for him, this was the fate of his own book. Other examples he gives are even more curious: those objects or ideas that have been around for a long while, but suddenly and unexpectedly become cool. Gladwell opens his book with the story of Hush Puppies, which became must-haves in the 1990s, after having first been adopted by the ultra-cool of Manhattan.
In Britain we are in the early stages of one of these tipping points right now. It relates to something that until about 18 months ago was seen as an uncool minority interest, but suddenly seems to have become the new rock'n'roll. It is the collection of ideas, interests and attitudes that fall within the general remit of scepticism. The umbrella term includes a commitment to critical thinking and science, a questioning of all forms of dogma and, ideally, a genuine open-mindedness and willingness to be guided by empirical evidence. Sceptics tend to be atheists or agnostics, humanists, and politically left of centre, but none of those attributes are compulsory.
Evidence for the rise of scepticism is clear. Last April, two projects I am involved with, Skeptic magazine and Skeptics in the Pub, organised An evening with James Randi and Friends in London. If you didn't know already, James Randi would be the patron saint of scepticism if sceptics were allowed to have patron saints. The support acts that evening included Richard Wiseman, Sue Blackmore and Ben Goldacre. Tickets sold out within a few days – around 450 of them. I suspect the success of that evening was an important factor in persuading Randi to hold his next Amazing Meeting in London in early October this year.
Then there is the runaway success of last year's Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People: A Rational Celebration for Christmas organized by Robin Ince. Featuring a stellar cast of Richard Dawkins, Ricky Gervais, Tim Minchin, Mark Thomas and Ince himself, tickets for the first event sold out so fast that two additional shows had to be arranged to meet demand. There is a real sense of community at these events. You feel like you are among your own kind of people. It's probably the nearest many of us will get to a sense of religious belonging.
This sense of an active sceptical community is building. We all read about the unexpected success of the atheist bus campaign. With it came a sense of belonging, a sense that at last atheists and agnostics had a voice. Meanwhile Skeptics in the Pub events are cropping up around the UK, from Leicester and Edinburgh to Leeds and Birmingham and internationally are springing into existence almost by the hour.
What might be behind this sudden rise of scepticism? A number of possible triggers spring to mind, but I'd be interested to hear what others think. First, there is no doubt that religion is a hot topic, and has brought prominent arguments against it from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Recent atrocities committed in the name of religion have led those of little or no faith to openly question why religious views have traditionally been granted some sort of special protected status as being beyond criticism.
More broadly, a band of highly articulate and entertaining commentators, such as Gervais, Charlie Brooker, Minchin, and Ince now actively advocate a sceptical agenda in their work. The use of humour in presenting their arguments is very effective in pointing out some of the more absurd aspects of religion, the paranormal, and the New Age. As HL Mencken once famously remarked, "One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent."
Once the sceptical community reached a critical mass, events could be organised in the confident knowledge that enough people would turn up to ensure their success. If such events appeal to you, you might want to sign up to the APRU's Psychology of the Paranormal email list. It's free and we'll keep you informed of events of interest, including our own Invited Speaker Series, with forthcoming talks by Nick Pope, Bernard Carr, and Simon Singh, and some interesting events organised by the London Centre for Inquiry, including one-day events dealing with God in the Lab and Science and Religion.
Whatever factors may have combined in sociologically interesting ways to produce the rise of modern scepticism, it is to be welcomed. It is not just about giving previously isolated geeks a sense of community, it is about promoting critical thinking as widely as possible throughout society. We live in an age where companies advertise products on the basis of fake science, alternative therapists sell pseudoscientific and unproven treatments to uninformed consumers and, arguably, human greed and irrationality has brought the world to the brink of environmental and financial disaster. Not only that, but alienated religious fanatics yearn for nothing more than the death of as many non-believers as possible in their quest for personal martyrdom. Have we ever needed critical thinking more?
So where will this newfound scepticism end? Are we on the verge of a new age of enlightenment? Or is the rise in scepticism just another Hush Puppies fad that will have its moment and pass? Human beings are in many ways inherently irrational and almost certainly always will be. But we can only hope that the sceptical message continues to spread more widely and grow in influence for at least some time yet. Rationality is not our natural mode of thought. We are ruled by our emotions and by self-serving cognitive biases. But it is not overstating the case to say that our very survival may depend upon our ability to rise above that and to think differently – to address the difficult problems that we face as rationally as we possibly can.
