Scientists Identify Neural Circuitry Of First Impressions

Neuroscientists have identified the neural systems involved in forming first impressions of others. The findings, which show how we encode social information and then evaluate it in making these initial judgments, are reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

Gene Therapy Shows Early Promise For Treating Obesity

With obesity reaching epidemic levels, researchers are studying a potentially long-term treatment that involves injecting a gene directly into one of the critical feeding and weight control centers of the brain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

New Method For Monitoring Volcanoes

Seventeen of the world's most active volcanoes have been supplied with monitoring equipment to measure their emission of sulfur dioxide.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

Air Pollution: Clear Sky Visibility Over Land Has Decreased Globally, Indicative Of Increased Particulate Matter

Scientists have compiled the first decades-long database of aerosol measurements over land, making possible new research into how air pollution changes affect climate change. Using this new database, the researchers show that visibility over land has decreased globally over the past 30 years, indicative of increasing aerosols, or airborne particulates.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

'Mind-reading' Experiment Highlights How Brain Records Memories

It may be possible to "read" a person's memories just by looking at brain activity, according to new research. Scientists show that our memories are recorded in regular patterns, a finding which challenges current scientific thinking.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

Well-known Enzyme Is Unexpected Contributor To Brain Growth

An enzyme researchers have studied for years because of its potential connections to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and stroke, appears to have yet another major role to play: helping create and maintain the brain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

New Aerosol Observing Technique Turns Gray Skies To Blue

Tiny, ubiquitous particles in the atmosphere may play a profound role in regulating global climate. But the scientists who study these particles -- called aerosols -- have long struggled to accurately measure their composition, size, and global distribution. A new detection technique and a new satellite instrument called the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor should help ease the struggle.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Human-generated Sounds May Be Killing Fish

Anthropogenic, or human generated, sounds have the potential to significantly affect the lives of aquatic animals - from the individual animal's well-being, right through to its reproduction, migration and even survival of the species. Marine animals could suffer detrimental effects ranging from a loss of hearing to increased stressed levels as a result of environmental noise - in ways not dissimilar to humans and land animals.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Maternal Exposure To Chemical Used In Manufacture Of Non-stick Surfaces Not Linked To Low Birth Weight Or Preterm Birth

A new study found that maternal exposure to C8, a chemical used in the manufacture of non-stick surfaces, was not associated with either lowered birth weight or increased risk of preterm birth in Little Hocking, Ohio area residents.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Iron Induces Death In Tumor Cells

Tumor cells and healthy cells differ considerably in metabolism intensity. Scientists have now taken advantage of this difference; by releasing cellular iron, they were able to induce death selectively in tumor cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Giant microwaves lock carbon in charcoal

Climate expert claims to have developed cleanest way of fixing CO2 in 'biochar' for burial on an industrial scale

Giant microwave ovens that can "cook" wood into charcoal could become our best tool in the fight against global warming, according to a leading British climate scientist.

Chris Turney, a professor of geography at the University of Exeter, said that by burying the charcoal produced from microwaved wood, the carbon dioxide absorbed by a tree as it grows can remain safely locked away for thousands of years. The technique could take out billions of tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year.

Fast-growing trees such as pine could be "farmed" to act specifically as carbon traps — microwaved, buried and replaced with a fresh crop to do the same thing again.

Turney has built a 5m-long prototype of his microwave, which produces a tonne of CO₂ for $65. He plans to launch his company, Carbonscape, in the UK this month to build the next generation of the machine, which he hopes will process more wood and cut costs further.

He is not alone in touting the benefits of this type of charcoal, known as biochar or biocharcoal. The Gaia theorist, James Lovelock, and Nasa's James Hansen have both been outspoken about the potential benefits of biochar, arguing that it is one of the most powerful potential solutions to climate change. In a recent paper, Hansen calculated that producing biocharcoal by current methods of burning waste organic materials could reduce global carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by 8ppm (parts per million) over the next 50 years. That is the equivalent of three years of emissions at current levels.

Turney said biochar was the closest thing scientists had to a silver-bullet solution to climate change. Processing facilities could be built right next to forests grown specifically to soak up CO2. "You can cut trees down, carbonise them, then plant more trees. The forest could act on an industrial scale to suck carbon out of the atmosphere."

The biochar could be placed in disused coal mines or tilled into the ground to make soil more fertile. Its porous structure is ideal for trapping nutrients and beneficial micro-organisms that help plants grow. It also improves drainage and can prevent up to 80% of greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxides and methane from escaping from the soil.

In a recent analysis of geo-engineering techniques published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry, Tim Lenton, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, rated producing charcoal as the best technological solution to reducing CO₂ levels. He compared it to other geo-engineering techniques such as dumping iron in oceans or seeding clouds to reflect the sun's radiation and calculated that by 2100 a quarter of the effect of human-induced emissions of CO₂ could be sequestered with biochar production from waste organic matter, giving a net reduction of 40ppm in CO2 concentration.

Johannes Lehmann of Cornell university has calculated that it is realistically possible to fix 9.5bn tonnes of carbon per year using biochar. The global production of carbon from fossil fuels stands at 8.5bn tonnes.

Charcoal is usually produced by burning wood in high-temperature ovens but this process is dirty and only locks around 20-30% of the mass of the wood into charcoal. Turney's idea to use a microwave, which he found could lock away up to 50% of the wood's mass, came from a cooking accident when he was a teenager, in which he mistakenly microwaved a potato for 40 minutes and found that the vegetable had turned into charcoal. "Years later when we were talking about carbon sequestration I thought maybe charcoal was the way to go," he said.

A number of governments are investing their hopes for sequestering CO₂ from the atmosphere in large-scale carbon capture and storage projects. But Turney said this would not provide a full solution. "It's only for large single sources of emissions like large power stations and that accounts for about 60% of emissions. It doesn't deal with anything up in the atmosphere already which is driving the changes we see today."

Chris Goodall, writer of the Carbon Commentary blog, proposed biochar as a solution to climate change in his recent book, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet. "The only big problem is organising it on a large enough scale," he said. "Organising it so that farmers get paid and put the charcoal in the ground rather than burning it for their own food is a big problem to organise on a global scale."

This could be done if biochar were incorporated into the carbon markets making it more profitable to bury rather than burn. There is an emerging campaign, he said, to get

governments to recognise biochar in the post-Kyoto agreement on climate change that will be negotiated in Copenhagen later this year.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 13 Mar 2009 | 12:07 pm

Japan protests NKorea's rocket launch plan (AP)

AP - Japan strongly protested North Korea's planned rocket launch, warning Friday it could shoot it down after the North said it would fly over Japan and designated a "danger" zone off the country's coast.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 11:50 am

Some fear Navy sonar may harm Fla.'s right whales (AP)

AP - In the blue-green surf, 11 endangered North Atlantic right whales surface, jump and shoot mist high into the air through their blow holes.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 11:35 am

Swiss zoo says celebrity hippo won't be killed (AP)

AP - A Swiss zoo on Friday rejected suggestions that a baby hippopotamus could be killed and fed to the big cats because of lack of space.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 11:32 am

Iran dismisses sanctions, launches gas project (Reuters)

Reuters - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed international sanctions against Iran as a "childish idea" on Friday as he officially launched a natural gas project in the Gulf, Iranian media reported.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 10:51 am

Hurricane Season 2008 (weather.com)

weather.com -
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 10:05 am

'Supermodel' satellite set to fly

Goce has been described as the most beautiful satellite ever built. Now, after three years' delay, its opportunity to launch has finally arrived.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 13 Mar 2009 | 9:00 am

Coating makes scratches on cars disappear

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Scientists have developed a polyurethane coating that heals its own scratches when exposed to sunlight, offering the promise of scratch-free cars and other products, researchers said on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 8:03 am

Growing pollution leads to "global dimming"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Visibility on clear days has declined in much of the world since the 1970s thanks to a rise in airborne pollutants, scientists said on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 7:49 am

Great White Sharks Were Once Shorter, Fossil Shows (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - The most complete fossil of an ancient great white shark has been found in the dry deserts of Peru, including parts of the spinal column and a mouthful of 222 teeth. Great whites are the undisputed king of sharks today, with bodies that can reach more than 20 feet (6 meters) in length. But not much is known about their evolutionary history. Seems they were a bit shorter 4 million years ago. ...
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 12:45 am

Great White Sharks Were Once Shorter, Fossil Shows

Unusually intact shark skeleton fossil informs shark evolution.
Source: Livescience.com | 13 Mar 2009 | 12:35 am

In praise of ... X-phi

X-phi - experimental philosophy - is variously greeted as a watershed in how we understand the world or a blind alley for philosophers seeking quick thrills. It means asking the big questions about life, but with a new appetite for scientific evidence. For years, philosophy has been dominated not so much by university chairs as armchairs, by speculation based on unverified assumptions. X-phi uses the kind of neurological imaging we report on elsewhere today, to understand which part of the brain responds to a dilemma (Do we understand intention by the nature of the outcome? Why do people in Hong Kong understand a name as representative and people in the US as specific?). That, arguably, is high science: but x-phi is also mass observation, researchers watching unnoticed how people respond to particular situations and posing new questions as a result, or out on streets with clipboards trying to find out if their fellow citizens really would make the choices speculative philosophy assumes they would. Achingly contemporary, it has its own blog and a YouTube video featuring the torching of a donnish armchair. It also has plenty of critics, who argue that finding out ordinary people's response to moral dilemmas is not what philosophers do. But understanding more about how we comprehend mind and matter could mean a better designed world, one that promotes cooperative behaviour and one where we are all more confident about making the kind of ethical choices we face everyday.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 13 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

Master of the universe

Christopher Potter's history of the cosmos has been hailed as a popular science masterpiece. But as he tells Stuart Jeffries, it took a complete breakdown to spur him to write it

Christopher Potter was at the peak of his career when it all went wrong. "I had a huge salary, I had an apartment in New York, a house in London, and an enviable, creative job. But almost every day I was having to excuse myself from meetings because I had the most dreadful panic attacks. I went to hospital twice because I thought I was having a heart attack."

Potter was a senior publisher at Fourth Estate, perhaps Britain's most innovative and successful independent publishing house of the 1980s and 90s, celebrated for discovering so-called "sleepers" and transforming them into bestsellers.

At one point, Potter recalls happily, Fourth Estate held the top three places in the Sunday Times bestsellers' list - Longitude by Dava Sobel, Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. All three seemed typical of Fourth Estate's creative acumen: they were all seemingly unpromising non-fiction books, the first two often dealing with ostensibly offputting technical concepts - but they all caught the intelligent reading public's mood. Sobel's page-turning account of the invention of the marine chronometer, for example, sold nearly a million copies.

Potter didn't just pluck non-fiction from obscurity. He was also responsible for publishing now-celebrated novelists Annie Proulx and Carol Shields in Britain for the first time.

"I bought up their first books - Annie's Postcards and Carol's Mary Swann for £500 each. Nobody wanted them. Suddenly we had two great novelists on our books," he says.

Potter was a former mathematician and lover of literary fiction whose list of writers reflected his divided interests. But, after 19 years at the top of his profession and a quarter of a century in publishing, he had had enough. "I was miserable and I hated my job," he says. "I kept being given more and more responsibilities and I couldn't bear it. Fourth Estate had been bought up by HarperCollins and I had been given a very good job, but almost every day I had panic attacks. I got absolutely terrified of going on the tube, which made going to work a daily ordeal.

"It turned out that I thought I was having panic attacks because, apparently, I was breathing too shallowly and that was affecting my pH balance, so my doctor told me to take a paper bag everywhere with me so I could breathe in and out of it more deeply. The difficult thing was to find a paper bag. Have you ever tried to find a paper bag these days?

"Looking back, my life had been reduced to a nub. The responsibility was too much and I didn't have the space to be creative. I think, really, I had been doing the job for too long."

What followed, Potter says, was a mental and physical breakdown. "I was such a rationalist and materialist. I always joked with my American friends about how everyone there was in analysis. About two months after I had had a dinner in New York, where I was joking about how sceptical I was of analysis, I was in therapy."

Potter's GP prescribed antidepressants. "I was on Valium and antidepressants for three months but I really didn't want to be. I could feel the changing chemistry of my brain and that made me terrified.

"Eventually I ended up seeing an unorthodox therapist. She said: 'You're never going to be as bad as you are now.' Which, I think, proved to be the most amazingly valuable insight. She did this amazing thing with my feet - what's it called?" Reflexology? "That's it. But it involved using little jars to create vacuums on the soles of my feet."

Potter shrugs at my sceptical look as we sit over coffee in his east London home: "All I can say is that it worked. I'm not going to claim that from a scientific perspective it made sense."

He also took a three-month sabbatical from work. "By the time I came back I was well. But it made me realise that I had to do something different."

He decided to write a book that examined the mysteries of the universe. The result is You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe. It's a book that encompasses relativity theory, quantum theory, evolutionary theory, the mind-boggling nature of antimatter, that reflects on the big bang, and wonders about the nature of being and the destiny of our species.

It is, I think, one of the best popular science books I have ever read. It fully lives up to the hype generated by the pre-publication reviews and by Stephen Fry's blurb on the dustjacket: "A wonderful, miraculous book: the whole universe bottled for your delight."

But one of the reasons, I suspect, the book is so good is that it isn't filled with scientific triumphalism or the kind of smug rationalism that may have been Potter's shtick before his breakdown. Its last three, beautiful but frightening, sentences are: "We want to believe that things last for ever, whether it is love, life, God, or the laws of nature. But death, as Freud continually reminds us, is what certainty looks like. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to live in uncertainty for as long as we can bear it."

Potter, then, has written a book that concludes we are not the centre of the universe - it may well have been the breakdown that gave the book these deeply disturbing resonances.

But before we get to those last sentences, Potter takes us on perhaps the most amazing journeys that any writer has ever taken his readers on. He shrinks us from ordinary human size to a billionth of a billionth of a metre to study sub-atomic quarks and electrons. Then he takes us back in time to the beginning of the universe and slowly forward through the evolution of the primordial soup to the formation of galaxies, the murky advent of biological life, the evolution of our strange species. All in 274 amazingly elegantly written and diverting pages. "For many years," argues Dava Sobel, "I've secretly longed for someone to take me by the hand and walk me through time and space - someone who would marvel with me at every strange thing we encountered and pepper his scientific discourse with lines of poetry." This, Sobel argues, is what Christopher Potter has done.

The idea for the book came from the fears that little Christopher Potter had when sitting in his Cheshire bedroom contemplating the immensity of the universe. He used to write out his full cosmic address: "'Christopher Potter, 225 Rushgreen Road, Lymm, Cheshire, England, The United Kingdom, The World, The Solar System, The Galaxy', my childish handwriting getting larger and larger, as if each part of the address I knew to be bigger and more important than the preceding part, until, with a final flourish, that acme of destinations is reached: the universe itself, the place that must locate everything there is." But what was beyond the edge of the universe? "I used to keep myself awake trying to imagine." If only 50-year-old Christopher could time travel, he could go back and tell his younger self that the visible universe is a region of radiation that evolved and is not contained in anything.

But, as Potter recognises, such answers are even more discombobulating than the original question and may well make non-scientists, as he says, "put the universe back in its box and think about something else instead". Potter wants us to reopen that childhood box. "My hope was to write a book that would make readers confront the rather lovely but troubling questions we set aside as children: what is everything? What is nothing?"

In Carol Shields' last novel, Unless, written as she was dying of cancer, there is a scene in which a character called Colin tries - and fails - to explain the theory of general relativity to the book's protagonist, a novelist. Shields writes: "He took the linen napkin from his lap, and stretched it taut across the top of his coffee cup. Then he took a cherry from the fruit bowl and placed it on the napkin, creating a dimple. He tipped the cup slightly so that the cherry rotated round the surface of the napkin. He spoke of energy and mass, but already I had lost a critical filament of the argument. I worried slightly about his sloshing coffee up on to the napkin and staining it ... Colin talked on and on ... "

Worryingly, Potter thinks that he was the model for Colin, the man whose audience loses the thread halfway through his explanation.

But what did Potter know about such abstruse scientific subjects as relativity, light or quantum mechanics? After all, this is a man who admits early in the book that he was put off science at school, that he studied mathematics at university only to find, disappointingly, that he wasn't genius material, and gave up a doctorate in the philosophy of science after only a year. "I agree, I agree," he says, throwing up his hands. "It was the most amazing hubris."

But his list of non-fiction scientific writers proved a great help: the bibliography of You Are Here teems with books that Fourth Estate published by writers such as Sobel, Singh, Timothy Taylor and Matt Ridley. "When I started research on the book, I was shocked by how little I knew, but I suspect that was one of the pleasures of doing it. It was like going back to university but at an age when you have the time to appreciate it."

What next, I ask Potter. He smiles gently, a man now surely happy with his lot and free to be as creative as he wants. "I had always thought I would write a novel, and perhaps I will, but I'm really enjoying non-fiction. I'm looking for another gap in the market. Perhaps a book about civilisation".

• You are Here By Christopher Potter is published by Hutchinson, £20.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 13 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

Space junk forces astronauts to evacuate space station

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were evacuated to a Russian escape module yesterday after space junk was spotted hurtling towards the orbiting outpost.

Nasa officials noticed the object - thought to be an old part of the ISS itself - too late for the $100bn station to boost itself out of the way, forcing the crew of two Americans and a Russian to shelter in the module until the threat was over.

The space station orbits the Earth at more than 17,000mph, so even small fragments of debris from spent rockets and dead satellites are capable of puncturing the station's hull.

The astronauts were ordered to lock themselves in the Soyuz escape module for 10 minutes to ensure they could leave immediately in the unlikely situation that the debris struck and caused the station to depressurise.

The crew was given the all-clear shortly before 5pm GMT yesterday, Russian space command said.

The debris is thought to have been an old motor that was once a part of the space station, said Laura Rochon, of Nasa.

Space junk is considered a serious threat to about 800 commercial and military satellites. There are more than 18,000 pieces of debris catalogued, which are tracked by military radar.

The risk of the ISS or the shuttle being struck by space debris has increased following the high-speed collision between a US and a Russian satellite last month.

The incident came a day after Nasa was forced to delay the next shuttle flight to the space station after noticing a hydrogen leak during fuelling. The mission has now been rescheduled for Sunday.

The launch is due to see Discovery, now the oldest shuttle in Nasa's fleet, take Japan's first astronaut to live aboard the station. A final set of solar panels for the ISS is part of the cargo.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 13 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

The cuddly side of the Vikings

Academics gathering for a three-day conference on Vikings starting today at Cambridge University will celebrate the gentle side of the invaders: the town planners, ship builders, farmers, coin minters and stone carvers who were forever swapping songs, stories or a better way to rig a mainsail with their Gaelic neighbours.

"The rehabilitation of the Vikings is nothing new to academics, but it is surprising how enduring the myths are," conference organiser Maire Ni Mhaonaigh said. "Of course, initially there were extremely destructive raids, but over the four centuries covered by our conference they became completely integrated, even identifying themselves as the Gall-Gael, the Irish Scandinavians."

Occasional fearsome evidence from excavations supports the traditional view, including skulls split in two by battleaxes. However, the conference will suggest that within 100 years of the 9th century raids the Vikings were beginning to settle and integrate, and by the 12th and 13th centuries they were almost indistinguishable from the locals except for evidence preserved in names and DNA.

In 2007 the Danish culture minister, Brian Mikkelsen, joined the vogue for belated political apologies by saying sorry to the people of Ireland for any slight excesses by his ancestors.

On the evidence of the conference, it may now be time for the people of Britain and Ireland, and generations of cartoonists, to apologise to the Vikings.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 13 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

How to Track Space Junk Online

The growing sphere of space junk surrounding the Earth is a hazard to spaceflight, as International Space Station astronauts found out Thursday when their home was buzzed by a five-inch piece of debris.

As the story about the near miss was unfolding this morning, Twitter users quickly made a provisional claim about where the debris came from by examining space junk data visualized on Google Earth. Given that the space junk problem just continues to get worse, here's a quick guide to tracking our extraterrestrial garbage.   

First, download Google Earth, which is available for free from that search engine company. It allows you to visualize the positions of debris around the old blue marble.

Once you've got Google Earth installed, you can plug different datasets into it. You can simply click on the files — they usually have the extension KMZ — and they'll open up in Google Earth.

• The most general space object dataset is provided by the U.S. Strategic Command, and has been Google Earthified by Analytical Graphics. Download it. Once it opens in Google Earth, open up the sidebar on the left of your screen. You'll see a link that says, "Satellite Database." Click on the arrow to its left. A series of check boxes will appear. Uncheck all of them except "Debris" and you'll see the thousands of objects left in space.
   
• The amount of space debris jumped just a few months ago when two satellites collided over Siberia. The Orbiting Frog blog allows you to see just debris from that collision with this link: KMZ file.
• Another coder developed a beautiful, live-updating visualization of the same satellite collision debris. You'll need to download the Google Earth browser plug-in to see it, though.

See Also:

• Lost in Space: 8 Weird Pieces of Space Junk
• Oh, Hubble, Can This Really Be the End?
• China Wants to Partner on the International Space Station
• Wall-E, Something for Everyone

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 12 Mar 2009 | 11:33 pm

Space station's close call with junk: More to come (AP)

AP - The near-hit of space junk Thursday was a warning shot fired across the bow of the international space station, experts said. There's likely more to come in the future. With less than an hour's notice, the three astronauts were told they'd have to seek shelter in a Russian capsule parked at the space station in case a speeding piece of space junk hit Thursday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 12 Mar 2009 | 11:32 pm

Polyurethane Coating Could Make Self-Healing Car Paint

A few years down the road, you may be able to get that scratch out of your car’s bumper simply by parking in a sunny spot. Researchers have created a polyurethane coating that heals itself when exposed to ultraviolet light.

"This new material will have a lot of practical applications," said study co-author Marek Urban, a chemist at the University of Southern Mississippi. “It could coat anything that can be scratched—electronics, aircraft, cars, you name it."

Self-healing coatings could minimize upkeep and repair on a variety of products, saving consumers money and reducing waste.

“Your car would last for a long time, and it would look new for a long time,” Urban said.

The new compound is not the first man-made self-healing material. In 2001, researchers at the University of Illinois embedded tiny liquid-filled capsules in a polymer coating. When the coating cracked, the capsules ruptured, spilling healing agents into the damaged area and repairing it. 

One of the Illinois scientists, Scott White, founded a company based on this technology in 2005. Autonomic Materials, Inc. could have self-healing coatings on the market in the next couple of months, according to a recent article in the MIT Technology Review.

Other researchers have devised different methods. In 2002, scientists from UCLA and USC created a compound that heals itself quickly when exposed to high temperatures. The new coating is similar in that it requires an external stimulus to work. But the stimulus—UV radiation—should not be difficult to introduce. A few minutes in the sun would do the trick.

“It’s a new healing chemistry for polyurethane,” said Nancy Sottos, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois who was not involved in the new study.

Urban and co-author Biswajit Ghosh, also of the University of Southern Mississippi, created the compound by mixing chitosan—a derivative of chitin, the main component of arthropod exoskeletons—into polyurethane. They made tiny nicks in the new material, then exposed it to UV light about as intense as that given off by the sun. The radiation set off a series of reactions, causing damaged molecules to link up with each other again. The cuts healed in about 30 minutes.

This repair process, described Thursday in the journal Science, is not moisture-sensitive, meaning it should work in all climates. And making the new coating won’t break the bank, according to Urban.

“It’s very economical,” he said. “You can get chitosan for almost nothing.”

The mending reactions don’t seem to work a second time, so each part of the coating can repair itself only once. But Urban doesn’t see this as much of a drawback in the real world.

“Even if you try to hit the same spot, within a couple of microns, statistically the chances of it happening are very small,” he said.

Citation: "Self-Repairing Oxetane-Substituted Chitosan Polyurethane Networks." By Biswajit Ghosh, Marek W. Urban. Science Vol. 323, 13 March 2009.

See Also:

• Plastic, Heal Thy Self: Researchers Make Self-Repairing Polymer

Image: Infrared (top) and optical views of a scratch after 0, 15, and 30 minutes of UV exposure. Courtesy of Marek Urban, via Science/AAAS.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 12 Mar 2009 | 11:26 pm

NASA shooting for Sunday shuttle Discovery launch (AP)

AP - NASA is replacing some space shuttle connections in hopes of plugging a gas leak and launching Discovery to the international space station on Sunday, after delays of more than a month.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 12 Mar 2009 | 11:06 pm

Finger Length Predicts Speed, Aggression, Smarts, Motivation

Boys with ring fingers longer than their index fingers run faster.
Source: Livescience.com | 12 Mar 2009 | 10:23 pm

Debris briefly forces astronauts from space station

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A tiny piece of space junk smaller than a fingertip forced three astronauts to briefly evacuate the International Space Station on Thursday when the debris came too close for comfort.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 12 Mar 2009 | 9:25 pm

Pollution Dimming Skies' Brightness

Satellite and land-based data show pollution has dimmed skies over the past 30 years.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 12 Mar 2009 | 8:30 pm

Tiger Stripes Used to ID Poached Skins

Tiger stripe patterns are used like fingerprints to trace poached skins.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 12 Mar 2009 | 7:45 pm

Female Bird Jams Mate's Flirtatious Signals

A female bird of one species jams her male partner's love messages.
Source: Livescience.com | 12 Mar 2009 | 7:34 pm

Debris Chunk Whizzes by Space Station

The space station crew briefly takes refuge amid concerns of a debris strike.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 12 Mar 2009 | 7:30 pm

Pollution dims skies as well as befouling the air (AP)

AP - The skies are dimming, for most of the world. Increases in airborne pollution have dimmed the skies by blocking sunlight over the past 30 years, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 12 Mar 2009 | 7:27 pm

Climate scenarios 'being realised'

International scientists say the worst-case scenarios on climate change envisaged just two years ago are already being realised.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 12 Mar 2009 | 7:17 pm

Self-Healing Car Coating Repairs Scratches

A new coating can self-heal most paint scratches if exposed to sunlight.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 12 Mar 2009 | 7:02 pm

Brain Scanners Know Where You've Been

The brain's center of memory and navigation, once considered too disorganized to decode, may soon be unlocked. Using a brain scanner, researchers were able to determine the location of people standing in a virtual room from the activity in their brains.

"We could read their spatial memories, so to speak," said study co-author Eleanor Maguire, a University College, London, cognitive neuroscientist. "There must be a structure to how this is coded in the neurons. Otherwise we couldn't have predicted this."

Maguire's team focused on the hippocampus, a region of the forebrain responsible for processing spatial relationships and short-term memories. As people move, hippocampal activation helps them know where they are. In Alzheimer's patients, disorientation and memory loss go hand in hand.

But animal studies haven't been able to link specific hippocampal activities with memories, and rat studies suggested that spatial memories were actually stored randomly. There seemed to be no pattern, at least not a pattern that scientists could decipher and apply.

Maguire's study, published Thursday in Current Biology, challenges that notion. And though it's far too soon to pull memories directly from a brain, the findings suggest future avenues of research on Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.

"How these millions of hippocampal neurons work is a fundamental question in neuroscience," said Maguire. "We still don't know how the hippocampal neural code is organized to support memory and activation."

The researchers used an fMRI machine to measure hippocampal blood flow in four subjects who navigated a room in virtual reality. They focused on groups of neurons identified by Maguire in an earlier study of London taxi drivers, whose hippocampi were hyperdeveloped by years of mental navigation through the city's mazelike streets.

After analyzing activation patterns and correlating them with a record of test subjects' movements, Maguire's team found that patterns could actually be used to predict location.

The results "are an intriguing first step toward using fMRI to read out information about visuo-spatial scenes," said Arne Ekstrom, a University of California at Los Angeles cognitive neuroscientist who was not involved in the study.

Ekstrom cautioned that the findings, relying on a bird's-eye fMRI view of just one part of the hippocampus, don't explain what's happening in individual neurons or across the entire structure.

Further studies will incorporate more test subjects than the four men included in this study, and involve other types of memory than spatial.

Though the findings fit with earlier demonstrations of visual memory's reconstruction from visual cortex activation patterns, study co-author Demis Hassabis, a London-based artificial intelligence researcher, cautioned that full-blown mind reading is still decades away.

More relevant, said Hassabis and Maguire, are potential insights into how memory deteriorates.

"We're learning more and more about how memory is laid down," said Maguire. "We can begin to understand how pathological processes erode memories, and think about how we might help patients in a rehabilitation context, to make the most of what memories they have left."

Citation: "Decoding neuronal ensembles in the human hippocampus." By Demis Hassabis, Carlton Chu, Geraint Rees, Nikolaus Weiskopf, Peter D. Molyneux, Eleanor A. Maguire. Current Biology, Vol. 19, Issue 6, March 12, 2009.

Images: Current Biology

See Also:

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• Scientists Link Brain Symmetry, Sexual Orientation
• Harvard Scientists Build a Device to Smoke Weed During Brain Scan

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 12 Mar 2009 | 7:01 pm

"Class, SHUT-UP!" - Computer Modeling Misbehavior

Is this the beginning of real-time teacher performance monitoring? Interaction maps show order and disorder in teacher-student relationships.
Source: Livescience.com | 12 Mar 2009 | 6:44 pm

Coatings that 'self-heal' in sun

University of Southern Mississippi researchers devise a new type of coating that uses sunlight to automatically heal scratches.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 12 Mar 2009 | 6:15 pm

Warming Impacts Antarctic Food Chain

Antarctic warming causes phytoplankton decline, with impacts on rest of food chain.
Source: Livescience.com | 12 Mar 2009 | 6:05 pm

Space Station Narrowly Misses Collision With Space Debris

The crew of the International Space Station spent this morning taking cover in a Soyuz capsule, ready to evacuate in the event of a collision with fast-moving space debris spotted by a tracking system.

According to NASASpaceflight.com, a collision with the object was originally considered to be low risk, but a fresh set of calculations put the astronauts on red alert shortly before it passed them by.

Nancy Atkinson, a Writer for Universe Today, covered the tense evacuation from her twitter feed, "Some people are tracking debris on Google Earth, say it looks like a piece of Iridium satellite."

Last month, two satellites collided in orbit, giving the world a wake-up call that space is becoming crowded with man-made objects. In the summer before that accident, the International Space University released a report calling for better traffic control in space.

In the last decade, the ISS has had to make eight "collision avoidance maneuvers" to avoid being hit by large debris, according to a NASA paper on the space station and the orbital debris environment.

See Also:

• Lost in Space: 8 Weird Pieces of Space Junk
• SpaceX Did It -- Falcon 1 Made it to Space
• Oh, Hubble, Can This Really Be the End?

Image: NASA

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 12 Mar 2009 | 5:29 pm

"Vampire" unearthed in Venice plague grave

By Daniel Flynn ROME (Reuters) - Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female "vampire" in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 12 Mar 2009 | 5:24 pm

Science as Search: Sergey Brin to Fund Parkinson's Study

The ideal combination of the internet and science is to put data (lots of data) into a readily searched database. The hypothesis becomes a search: Want to know what people are prone to which disease? Want to know what genetic backgrounds compel certain behaviors? Run a search.

That’s the ideal — and though this idea has been hashed about for a few years, we're a long way from there now. No such database exists — an ongoing research project that combines enough data and enough flexibility in interrogation and enough variety in populations that it might adequately reflect a broad enough pool of data to be meaningfully searched.

Until, perhaps, today.

On Thursday, 23andMe will announce a project with the Michael J. Fox Foundation and the Parkinson's Institute and Clinical Center to enroll up to 10,000 people with Parkinson's Disease, get them genotyped using the 23andMe platform, and issue them a survey to fill in the phenotypic information. That physical "end result" correlation to their genotypic information should make for a rich and fruitful database, ripe for interrogation. With members' permission, it will be searched and probed for possible correlations and implications.

Ten thousand is a big number for Parkinson's disease, and researchers hope such a large population will allow them to draw meaningful inferences. (Linda Avey, 23andMe cofounder, describes the effort here).

The idea is to create a genetic database around one disease — Parkinson's — that is robust enough to answer lots of questions that get into minutiae: If this isn't a "genetic disease" (typically brought on purely by genetic cause), then what are the fractions of effects caused by our genomes? It's a complicated question, but if we're really going to apply predictive medicine, we need to understand all the possible inputs that have ramifications in a multitude of outputs.

This is, in effect, the thing that's been talked about for about five years now: Googling our genomes. And it's not surprising that behind this landmark endeavor is Google, or at least its co-founder, Sergey Brin. Brin, who has said he has a genetic risk for Parkinson's, has funded the study and promised to give 10,000 people their genomic data for just $25 each (the 23andMe service regularly costs about $400). So that's at least a $4 million commitment, at least at the going rate of genotyping — and that's not counting the backend research that will take place. Brin will participate in the study.

start the race to be the first to squat on this with some snide remark, starting … now!) And sure, I acknowledge that 23andMe is good at publicity. But I think there's a fundamental shift in science here that should not go unnoted.

This is an endeavor to create an apparatus for answers; answers not just to the questions we have today, but the questions science will have or 10 years from now. This is, indeed, science by search. And I'm thrilled that somebody's actually trying to make it happen. And here's what’s especially cool: 23andMe co-founders Ann Wojcicki and Linda Avey know this is what they’re doing. They talk about this as a "research platform," and they have a host of diseases that they want to hit next: Autism, Alzheimer's and so on. Expect more this year.

Again, this isn't a research study — this is a new way to study research. Make the costs of research recruitment (finding populations to study, recruiting individuals, taking samples and repeating every time you have a new question to ask) a backend function, and prioritize the questions, not the apparatus. It's how to do science in the petabyte age.

— Thomas Goetz

See Also:

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 12 Mar 2009 | 5:03 pm

Junk alert for space station crew

The crew of the International Space Station are forced to shelter in the Soyuz capsule after a close call with space debris.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 12 Mar 2009 | 4:56 pm

Researchers use brain scans to read people's memories

Scientists have used brain scans to read people's memories and work out where they were as they wandered around a virtual building.

The landmark study by British researchers demonstrates that powerful imaging technology is increasingly able to extract our innermost thoughts.

The feat prompted the team to call for an ethical debate on how brain imaging may be used in the future, and what safeguards can be put in place to protect people's privacy.

The study was part of an investigation aimed at learning how memories are created, stored and recalled in a part of the brain called the hippocampus.

By understanding the processes at work in the brain, scientists at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London hope to get a better grasp of how Alzheimer's disease and strokes can destroy our memories and find ways to rehabilitate patients.

In the study, volunteers donned a virtual reality headset and were asked to make their way between four locations in a virtual building. Throughout the task, their brain activity was monitored using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Eleanor Maguire and Demis Hassabis then used a computer program to look for patterns in the volunteers' brain activity as they stood on virtual rugs in the four different locations. They found that particular collections of brain cells encoded the person's location in the virtual world, and they were able to use this to predict where each volunteer was standing.

"Remarkably, using this technology, we found we could accurately predict the position of an individual within this virtual environment, solely from the pattern of activity in their hippocampus," said Maguire.

"We could predict what memories a person was recalling, in this case the memory for their location in space," she added.

The study overturns neuroscientists' assumption that memories of our surroundings are encoded in the brain in an unpredictable way. The latest research suggests that this is not the case, and that the information is stored in our neurons in a very structured way that can be picked up by scanners.

The scientists could not tell where somebody was from a single brain scan. Instead, they had to perform several scans of volunteers in each location. Only afterwards were they able to find differences in brain activity that betrayed the person's location.

"We can rest easy in terms of issues surrounding mind reading. This requires the person to be cooperative, and to train the algorithms we use many instances of a particular memory," said Maguire. "It's not that we can put someone in a brain scanner and suddenly read their thoughts. It's quite an invovled process that's at a very early stage."

Though preliminary, the research raises questions about what may be possible with brain scanners in the future. Future advances in technology may make it possible to tell whether a person has ever been in a particular place, which could have enormous implications for the judicial system. Information from brain scans has already been used in court in India to help judge whether defendants are telling the truth or not.

Demis Hassabis, who co-authored the study in the journal Current Biology, said: "The current techniques are a long way away from being able to do those kinds of things, though in the future maybe that will become more possible. Maybe we're about 10 years away from doing that."

"It might be useful to start having those kinds of ethical discussions in the near future in preparation of that," he added.

Previous work in rats identified the hippocampus as a region of the brain that stores spatial memories. But experiments that measured the activity of handfuls of neurons in the animals' brains suggested there was no predictable pattern in how those memories were stored.

The discovery that spatial memories are encoded in a predictable way in our brains will give scientists confidence that other memories might be readable using brain scanners.

In the near term, Maguire said the research will shed light on some of the most debilitating neurodegenerative diseases of old age. "By using techniques like this we're learning more and more about how memories are laid down. If we can understand the processes involved in how you form and store and recollect memories, we can begin to understand how these pathological processes erode memories, and much further down the line, how we might help patients in a rehabilitation context," she said.

In a previous study, Maguire used brain scans to show that a brain region at the rear of the hippocampus known to be involved in learning directions and locations is enlarged in London taxi drivers.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 12 Mar 2009 | 4:35 pm

Roche's $46.8 billion Genentech deal outshines others (Reuters)

Reuters - It is buying up less than half of Genentech Inc for a whopping $46.8 billion, but Switzerland's Roche Holding AG may have clinched the best of this year's three big drug deals.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 12 Mar 2009 | 4:34 pm

For Better or Worse, 'Resident Evil 5' Exposes Racism

A survival horror video game focuses attention on issues of racism.
Source: Livescience.com | 12 Mar 2009 | 4:17 pm

5 Facts About Friday the 13th

If Friday the 13th is unlucky, then 2009 is an unusually unlucky year.
Source: Livescience.com | 12 Mar 2009 | 4:17 pm

Scientists move a step closer to reading a person's mind

Scientists say for the first time they have understood someone's thoughts by looking at what their brain is doing.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 12 Mar 2009 | 4:08 pm

Modern scanners bring "mind reading" a step closer

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have shown for the first time that it may be possible to "read" a person's mind simply by looking at brain activity.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 12 Mar 2009 | 4:02 pm

MY TAKE: Time to Clean Up Space

The space station gets a space debris scare and one scientist says it's time to act.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 12 Mar 2009 | 4:02 pm

Monkeys 'teach infants to floss'

A group of monkeys has been observed by researchers showing their young how to floss their teeth - using human hair.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 12 Mar 2009 | 3:57 pm

'Resident Evil 5' Story Trailer

A trailer for the game "Resident Evil 5" which hints at a more complex story that goes beyond white and black.
Source: Livescience.com | 12 Mar 2009 | 3:51 pm

Controversial 'Resident Evil 5' Trailer

A storm of controversy followed the debut of this first "Resident Evil 5" game trailer at E3 2007, one of the largest game conventions.
Source: Livescience.com | 12 Mar 2009 | 3:50 pm

'Resident Evil 5' Action Trailer

A trailer for the game "Resident Evil 5" which focuses on action and combat between the main characters and their infected, zombie-like enemies.
Source: Livescience.com | 12 Mar 2009 | 3:49 pm

7C rise will render half of world's inhabited areas uninhabitable

Parts of China, India and the eastern US could all become too warm in summer for people to lose heat by sweating, expert warns

Severe global warming could make half the world's inhabited areas literally too hot to live in, a US scientist warned today.

Parts of China, India and the eastern US could all become too warm in summer for people to lose heat by sweating - rendering such areas effectively uninhabitable.

Steven Sherwood, a climate expert at Yale University, told a global warming conference in Copenhagen that people will not be able to adapt to a much warmer climate as well as previously thought.

The physiological limits of the human body will begin to render places impossible to support human life if the average global temperature rises by 7C on pre-industrial levels, he said.

"There will be some places on Earth where it would simply be impossible to lose heat," Sherwood said. "This is quite imaginable if we continue burning fossil fuels. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't end up there."

The 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that average temperatures could rise by 6C this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates. Scientists at the Copenhagen Climate Congress this week said the IPCC may have underestimated the scale of the problem, and that emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than expected.

Sherwood told the conference: "Seven degrees would begin to create zones of uninhabitability due to unsurvivable peak heat stresses and 10C would expand such zones far enough to encompass a majority of today's population."

He said air temperature measurements were a poor guide to the true impact of global warming on people. A better assessment is "wet bulb" temperature, which combines temperature and humidity. "A warming of only a few degrees will cause large parts of the globe to experience peak wetbulb temperatures that never occur today."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 12 Mar 2009 | 3:35 pm

Space Shuttle Launch Delayed Further

A hydrogen leak delays space shuttle Discovery's launch until possibly next week.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 12 Mar 2009 | 3:35 pm

Heavy Metal Pollution Hits Wildlife Hardest

Lead levels in the hair of wild animals suggest they are at higher risk than humans.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 12 Mar 2009 | 3:02 pm

Add Erosion to Alaska's Climate Woes

The rate of erosion has doubled along Alaska's Beaufort Sea in just a few decades.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 12 Mar 2009 | 2:02 pm

Device turns pink before you do

Scientists develop a thin film device that changes colour to give advance warning of sunburn.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 12 Mar 2009 | 12:46 pm

Coral lab

Underwater 'coral lab' offers ocean acidification insight
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 12 Mar 2009 | 12:16 pm