Climate Change Reduces Nutritional Value Of Algae

Micro-algae are growing faster under the influence of climate change. However, the composition of the algae is changing, as a result of which their nutritional value for other aquatic life is decreasing. And because algae are at the bottom of the food chain, climate change is exerting an effect on underwater life.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 9:00 pm

Twin Nanoparticle Shown Effective At Targeting, Killing Breast Cancer Cells

Chemists have developed a novel way to treat a class of breast cancer cells. They have created a twin nanoparticle that specifically targets the Her-2 tumor cell and unloads a cancer-fighting drug directly into it. The result: Greater success at eliminating the cancer while minimizing an anti-cancer drug's side effects.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 9:00 pm

Metal Discovered To Become Transparent Under High Pressure

Scientists have discovered a transparent form of the element sodium (Na). They were able to demonstrate that sodium defies normal physical expectations by going transparent under pressure.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 9:00 pm

Silica Algae Reveal How Ecosystems React To Climate Changes

New research examines how rapid climate changes during the most recent ice age affected ecosystems in an area in continental Europe.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 9:00 pm

Can Mental Training Games Help Prevent Alzheimer's?

Loss of thinking power is a fear shared by many aging baby boomers. That fear has resulted in a budding industry for brain training products – exercises such as Brain Age, Mindfit and My Brain Trainer – which in 2007 generated $80 million in the United States alone. The premise of brain training is simple: participants must complete a series of daily exercises such as mental calculation, memorization and enigmas to help increase cognitive ability in an effort to avoid certain neurodegenerative diseases.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 9:00 pm

Protein Helps Immune Cells To Divide And Conquer

Researchers have identified a key protein that is required for immune cells called B lymphocytes to divide and replicate themselves. The rapid generation of large numbers of these immune cells is critical to the body's antibody defense mechanism.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 9:00 pm

Traffic Exposure May Trigger Heart Attacks

Patients who suffer a heart attack are likely to have been exposed to traffic, especially in the hour before the onset of symptoms. In women, elderly males, patients who were unemployed, and those with a history of angina, the effect was larger.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Rearrangements Of Multifunctional Genes Cause Cancer In Children And Young People

Researchers have shown that three genes that lie behind a number of malignant tumor diseases are normally involved in several fundamental processes in the cell. This may be the reason that the tumors arise early in life and principally affect children and young people.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Lobster Traps Going High Tech

New England lobstermen have gone high tech by adding low-cost instruments to their lobster pots that record bottom temperature and provide data that could help ocean circulation modelers better understand processes in the Gulf of Maine, such as how lobster larvae and other planktonic animals and plants, including those that cause harmful algal blooms, drift and settle. This information may also help determine how ocean currents disperse pollutants, invasive species, and food for whales in portions of the Gulf of Maine.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Critical Growth Factor That Stimulates Sperm Stem Cells To Thrive Identified

Researchers have identified for the first time a specific "niche factor" in the mouse testes called colony stimulating factor 1, Csf1, that has a direct effect on sperm stem cell self-renewal.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Hurricane Season 2008 (weather.com)

weather.com -
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 10:05 am

Genes May Decide Which Smokers Get Lung Disease (HealthDay)

HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, March 11 (HealthDay News) -- Genes may be the reason why one-quarter of smokers develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), while the rest aren't afflicted with the serious breathing problem, U.S. researchers conclude.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 6:25 am

Italy dig unearths female 'vampire' in Venice (AP)

AP - An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws — evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be a vampire. The unusual burial is thought to be the result of an ancient vampire-slaying ritual. It suggests the legend of the mythical bloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance of how diseases spread and what happens to bodies after death, experts said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 5:51 am

Poisoned, wounded Calif. condor treated at LA Zoo (AP)

AP - A California condor captured because it appeared sickly was found to not only be suffering from lead poisoning but also had been shot, animal experts said Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 4:36 am

Scientists plan to drive the icy Northwest Passage

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Scientists preparing for the exploration of Mars are planning history's first car drive through the fabled Northwest Passage, a trip they said on Friday will provide data on global warming and man's potential impact on other planets.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 2:56 am

Elephant born at San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park (AP)

AP - An African elephant has been born at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Mar 2009 | 1:16 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 | 14 Mar 2009 | 1:06 am

A medical scumbag's masterclass in fraud

Like you, I've developed a sneaking respect for all the fun and interesting tricks a person can use to distort the scientific evidence, so Dr Scott S Reuben, an anaesthesiologist in Bayside Medical Centre in Massachusetts, is a double scumbag: this week, in the biggest fraud case from recent medical history, he has been caught out, rather unimaginatively, just fabricating his data.

How did he get away with it?

Firstly, if you're planning a career in scientific fraud, then medicine is an excellent place to start.

Findings in complex biological systems - like "people" - are often contradictory and difficult to replicate, so you could easily advance your career and never get caught.

And fraud is not so unusual, depending on where you draw the line. In 2005 the journal Nature published an anonymous survey of 3,247 scientists: 0.3% admitted they had falsified research data at some point in their careers, in acts of outright fraud; but more interestingly, 6% admitted failing to present data if it contradicted their previous research.

They are not alone. Robert Millikan, to take just one example, won a Nobel prize in 1923 after demonstrating that electricity comes in discrete units (electrons) with his oil drop experiment. Millikan was mid-career - the peak period for fraud - and fairly unknown. In his famous paper from Physical Review he said: "This is not a selected group of drops but represents all of the drops experimented on during 60 consecutive days".

That was untrue: in the paper there were 58 droplets, but in the notebooks there are 175, annotated with phrases like "publish this beautiful one" and "agreement poor, will not work out". Chillingly, there is a continuum between this naughtiness and lots of apparently innocent research activity: what should you do with the outliers on the graph? When you drop something on the floor? When the run on the machine was probably contaminated?

Reuben was at the other end of the scale. He simply never conducted various clinical trials he wrote about for 10 years.

In some cases he didn't even pretend to get approval to conduct studies on patients, but just charged ahead and invented the results all the same.

The details haven't come out yet - investigators have asked various academic journals to formally withdraw at least 21 studies - but fabrication is often easier to spot than selective editing, and some people have argued for various fraud detection tools to be used more commonly by academic journals.

But for all our joy at mischief, we should remember that fraud has consequences.

Faking the coin can retard progress, and it can waste the time of big thinkers. Arthur Smith Woodward, one of the 20th century's greatest palaeontologists, burned valuable life at Piltdown every year until he died, trying to find more remains to match the fraudulent Piltdown Man.

And in medicine, data isn't an arbitrary or abstract thing: Reuben's work examined the best way to manage pain after operations, and he provided evidence that non-opiate medications are equally effective.

Now that field is in turmoil. And pain really matters.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 14 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

From science to statesmanship

Acid oceans, rising seas and a planet so parched that half of it ends up being uninhabitable. Science fiction writers have long played with such ideas, but this week they were being set out in the course of science proper. Experts came to Copenhagen to update the projections which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published as recently as 2007. From average temperatures to deforestation, their forecasts show that the news is turning from bad to worse. The few morsels of more heartening analysis - such as the suggestion that the total destruction of the Greenland ice cap might be slightly more remote than we suspected - only served to underline that the dire overall picture was not the product of apocalyptic occultism, but of hard research conducted with open minds.

At the meeting's close, its conclusions were passed to the Danish prime minister - a neat way for the scientists to signify that they have done their bit, and it now falls to the politicians to pick up the agenda. The boffins were sufficiently scared by their findings to breach the usual self-denying ordinance against discussing policy. They insisted that something big must be done urgently; even if that is accepted, though, there is still lots for statesmen and women to talk about at their own Copenhagen summit in December. Their job is to devise a replacement for the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. The task will be shaped by shifts in politics and trade as much as by changes in forecasts about the climate.

Since the haggling over Kyoto, politics has evolved in ways which should expand what is possible. As Beijing starts to grapple with the damage the planet's slow roasting will inflict, it is becoming possible at least to imagine a carbon compact that could meaningfully tie in the developing world, something off-limits at Kyoto. Equally significant is political change in America. The point here is not merely the departure from the Oval Office of a man whose instinctive sympathies were with the deniers. Important though that is, it is as well to recall that even before George Bush's day the Clinton administration proved unable to secure the ratification of Kyoto. No, the real point is the wider collapse of the Bush brand of ultra-conservatism. There are still deniers and isolationists on Capitol Hill but, intellectually beaten and diminished in number, they may no longer be the obstacle to progress they once were.

While the politics are more propitious than last time the world got round the table to discuss climate, the globalisation of economic life ensures that there is now an awful lot more to thrash out. Kyoto held countries responsible for the carbon pumped out within their own borders. That principle had the great merits of simplicity and transparency, but now that so much pollution is being churned out in the poor world to service the needs of the rich it is an approach that will no longer do. Only last year China officially knocked the US off the top spot in the CO2 league table, and yet a new study this month has established that half of the rise in its emissions are down to its manufacturing of goods for export. Morally, there can be no doubt that where the west is consuming the polluting products, the west must face the consequences. A consumption-based system would, however, be too complex for the weak global institutions that currently exist to monitor and enforce.

The mismatch between economic globalisation and a political world still fragmented on national lines has just been exposed by the banking crisis. When the risk is physical rather than financial meltdown, the stakes are higher still. Either economic integration must be complemented by stronger global governance or else the only way to save the planet will be to put globalisation into reverse. The former is the better option, but it will take leadership. If that emerges in Copenhagen, the city will go down in the history books as wonderful indeed.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 14 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

Slide Show: The Week's Top Stories

From hamster power to sharks aplenty, take a visual tour of the week in news.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 13 Mar 2009 | 11:40 pm

For Space Commander, Birthday Wishes From Earth (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - For most of us on Earth, a birthday typically means another year older and maybe some cake with friends. But on Saturday, NASA astronaut Michael Fincke will celebrate his birthday without such luxuries aboard a $100 billion space station 220 miles (354 km) above Earth.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 10:45 pm

U.S. museums cutting back due to recession

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Museums in New York and Philadelphia are cutting jobs, slashing salaries and closing stores because their endowments have been pounded by declines in donations, government aid and investment returns.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 10:35 pm

OPEC could cut production on weekend (AP)

AP - Slash oil output to boost revenues but risk deepening the world's economic woes? Rarely have OPEC oil ministers faced a tougher choice.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 10:25 pm

Open Data: Shuttle Impacts From Space Junk

Orbital debris has become acknowledged as a major threat to present and future NASA missions, but little data has been publicly released about the history of space junk's impact on previous missions.

Being hit by tiny chips of paint, aluminum, steel, and other types of space garbage is a regular part of Shuttle missions, according to data maintained by Johnson Space Center's Hypervelocity Impact Technology Facility. In 54 missions from STS-50 through STS-114, space junk and meteoroids hit the Shuttle's windows 1,634 times necessitating 92 window replacements. In addition, the Shuttle's radiator was hit 317 times, actually causing holes in the radiator's facesheet 53 times.

The database detailing 1,951 impacts has been publicly-available on a NASA server but is reported in the press for the first time here.

The full Shuttle Hypervelocity Impact Database with updates through April 2006 is available in Excel format. We've also uploaded the key datasheets to Google Documents, as part of our continuing effort to make government data available in formats that enable easy reuse.

Wired Science has contacted NASA to get data from STS 115 to STS 124 and will post it when we're able to get a hold of it.

See Also:

• Shuttle to Launch at Night Next Week Amid "Flashes of Light ...
• While 'Awesome,' Shuttle is a 'Flawed Craft'
• Diary Survived Shuttle Accident, Goes On Display
• Panoramic Views of Shuttle Facilities

Image: A scanning electron microscope image of a window impact from this STS 115 debris impact overview.

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 | 13 Mar 2009 | 9:25 pm

Coming Monday: Robot Madness

Robots have not taken over the world. Yet.
Source: Livescience.com | 13 Mar 2009 | 8:28 pm

Bad Biology: Girls Should Not Get Pregnant (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Many women in the United State delay marriage to jump-start their careers, but women in numerous other countries tend to follow ancient traditions and marry young, sometimes too young. A recent report by Boston University School of Public Health researcher Anita Raj and colleagues claims that half of Indian women aged 20 to 24 had been brides when they were under 18, the legal age for marriage in India; and more than 22 percent were married before age 16. ...
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 8:15 pm

Tiger Shark Encounter Spotlights Spearfishing

Could a brutal fight between a spear-fisherman and a tiger shark have been prevented?
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 13 Mar 2009 | 7:40 pm

Debris near space station was bigger than reported

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The piece of orbital space junk that forced three astronauts to briefly evacuate the International Space Station on Thursday was bigger than originally reported, NASA officials said on Friday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 7:15 pm

Q and A: Fisherman Recounts Tiger Shark Battle

Four fishermen survive a two-hour battle with a 12-foot shark in the Gulf of Mexico.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 13 Mar 2009 | 6:40 pm

Earth's Dimming Skies: Before and After

Earth's skies have dimmed since the mid-1970s, as airborne pollutants scatter the sun's rays and turn blue skies into a milky haze.

The effect was quantified in a study published on Thursday in Science, and widely covered by the press. But the study explained the effect with graphs, and stories only described a phenomena for which words aren't enough. 

Enter Photoshop and the guidance of study co-author Kaicun Wang, a University of Maryland, College Park atmospheric scientist. The resulting visualization takes the worst dimming, experienced in southeast Asia, and applies it to a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Apologies for the geographical mashup, but in all the commercially available pictures I could find of the Taj Mahal, skies were gray and hazy. There is, however, another way to think of the image: what Bay Area dwellers might see had the Clean Air Act not been passed.

Skies have dimmed only slightly in the United States, said Wang. In heavily populated areas around the developing world, it's about half as bad as what's seen above. Western Europe is the only region where skies are not darker. In fact, thanks to restrictions on the sulfur content of coal, European skies have actually grown brighter.

Citation: "Clear Sky Visibility Has Decreased over Land Globally from 1973 to 2007." By KaicunWang, Robert E. Dickinson and Shun lin Lian. Science, Vol. 323 No. 5921, March 13, 2009.

Image: Flickr/TheGreenMan2010 (Photoshopping by Wired Science)

See Also:

• Cleaner Air Worth Five Months of Life
• Feds Investigate EPA's Rejection of California's Clean Air Standards
• Everyday Air Pollution May Cause Stroke, Say Researchers
• Beijing Leads in Race for Most Polluted Olympics
• Air Pollution Could Shrivel Sperm's DNA
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to Light Pollution
• A New Push to Turn Off the Lights in 2009

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 13 Mar 2009 | 6:21 pm

Urban Sprawl, Climate Change Fueled Atlanta Tornado

A freakish tornado that ripped a $250 million path through Atlanta last March could be a sign of storms to come, if modern land use and climate change combine to produce man-made extreme weather events.

Using state-of-the art satellite data to model the storm in reverse, climatologists found it was likely fueled by a recent drought and unstable microclimates formed by the city's vast sprawl.

"The conditions that brought in the storm were the hammer," analogized Purdue University climatologist Dev Niyogi, "but local features were the chisel. They pinpointed the severe weather."

As the storm approached Atlanta on March 14, 2008, nobody expected more than a much-needed rainfall. The southeast United States was locked in a severe drought, a condition not usually associated with tornadoes. And as a rule, densely populated urban spaces are usually spared. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration counts only 23 so-called downtown tornadoes in the last 130 years.

But as it crossed the city, the storm turned into a tornado, killing one person and causing $250 million in damage. NASA was so surprised that they asked Niyogi and University of Georgia climatologist Marshall Shepherd, two specialists in urban weather modeling, to figure out what happened.

Only in the last few years have researchers been able to simulate weather in specific urban areas, allowing them to study the interaction of cities and climate. Using advanced computer models the latest data from NASA's extensive satellite network, Niyogi and Shepherd simulated the storm again and again, changing variables to see how they affected it. As with any tornado, the causes were many, but the prime culprits were the drought, and the nature of the city itself. The findings are preliminary but disturbing. Atlanta is an archetypal modern sprawl city, and droughts are expected to become more common as Earth's climate changes.

The sprawl "caused the storms to intensify, and that came to a final punch in the urban area," said Niyogi. "All of this is consistent with our understanding of the physical processes of tornadoes."

Like other twisters, the tornado that struck Atlanta was caused when moist air rose high into the atmosphere and was then torqued by winds of different speed and direction, causing the air pocket to rotate.

Just a few days earlier, a few mild storms had doused parts of northeast Georgia and Atlanta. Evaporation from that rainfall produced the initial pocket of warm air. As it traveled towards Atlanta, it encountered areas of turbulence formed by the collision of warm- and cold-air fronts that form over the metropolitan area's concrete-and-soil mosaic.

These collisions, explained Niyogi and Shepherd, drove the warm air higher into the atmosphere. When it reached the city's center, where heat-retaining concrete had produced a typical urban heat island, it rose even higher, turning into a full-fledged thunderstorm. Coincidentally, atmospheric winds were circling strongly that day. They captured the storm and twisted it into a tornado.

"The combination of wet-dry patterns and urban land cover gave these storms an additional boost that may have seen them become supercells," said Shepherd.

When they subtracted the wet-dry mosaic from the simulations, said Niyogi, "the storm continued to build up, but it didn't have that much energy. And then, if there is no urban area, the storm continues to build up and move by itself, but it doesn't become a concentrated energy source over the downtown region."

That cities can affect and even create their own weather is already documented, especially in the case of weekend-centric clouds. But Niyogi and Shepherd are among the first researchers to model city-weather dynamics in detail, and the first to study the Atlanta tornado this way. Though careful not to generalize the findings, they warn that urban sprawl and weather extremes could have unexpected effects.

"Atlanta is a classically sprawling city," said Shepherd. "As we move towards more smart-use, mixed-use and dense urban development, we should explore how it impacts the weather system."

An earlier study co-authored by Niyogi found that a storm in Mumbai, India, which dropped 37 inches of rain in a single day was exacerbated by the city's microclimate. The storm literally could not escape.

"One way we can start developing a resilience to some of these climate changes is by thinking how we should plan our urban and non-urban landscapes, and what environmental setup could help buffer us from some of these extremes," said Niyogi. "It's the very initial stages of the science, but we're going to hear more."

Video: NOAA

Images: 1. Fredo/Flickr  2. NOAA  3. Cerolene/Flickr

See Also:

• Too Late for Cloud Seeding in the Southeast
• MIT: Your Meteorologist Needs an Army of Drones
• Surfers, Rejoice: Some Extreme Waves Getting Bigger
• Genomics Could Help Wine Grapes Survive Global Warming
• Climate Change Destroying Walden Pond's Flowers

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 13 Mar 2009 | 6:05 pm

Earth Watch

Fast words on warming; snail's pace on whales
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 13 Mar 2009 | 5:58 pm

NASA: Good shot at Sunday shuttle launch (AP)

AP - NASA feels it has a good shot at sending shuttle Discovery to the international space station on Sunday following repairs out at the launch pad.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 13 Mar 2009 | 5:18 pm

Great White Sharks Had Humble Beginnings

An ancient shark fossil suggests great whites belong to a rather mild-mannered family.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 13 Mar 2009 | 4:30 pm

Space Station's Close Call: More Junk to Come

A near collision between the space station and debris could be a sign of things to come.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 13 Mar 2009 | 3:50 pm

Brain Scans Can Read Memories

Brain scans show how humans create memories of different locations.
Source: Livescience.com | 13 Mar 2009 | 3:31 pm

Diamonds: USAF's Best Friend?

The Air Force could be getting some serious bling, in the form of diamond-based windows.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 13 Mar 2009 | 2:50 pm

Bad Biology: Girls Should Not Get Pregnant

U.S. women often delay marriage to jump-start careers, but in other countries, women tend to marry young, sometimes too young.
Source: Livescience.com | 13 Mar 2009 | 2:44 pm

US closes in on the Higgs particle

While major repairs continue at Europe's broken particle collider in Switzerland, scientists at Fermilab near Chicago are cornering the elusive God particle

This is turning out to be quite a race.

It is more than 40 years since the Edinburgh-based physicist Peter Higgs and other scientists came up with the idea that an invisible field permeates space and confers mass on elementary particles, such as the quarks that make up protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei, and leptons like the electron that form clouds around the nucleus and keep atoms electrically neutral.

Just as a photon is a particle of light, the Higgs boson is a particle associated with what has come to be known as the Higgs field. Without the field, the basic building blocks of nature would have no mass, and so the matter we see today that makes up planets, stars and even us, would not exist.

In the 1990s, scientists at Cern working with an older particle collider called LEP searched long and hard for the Higgs boson. They ruled out a wide range of masses that the particle could have, and may have seen a glimpse of it before the machine shut down to make way for the Large Hadron Collider.

When LEP closed at the end of 2000, scientists knew the Higgs particle must weigh more than 114GeV, where 1 gigaelectron volt (GeV) is something like 1/6000 billion billion grams.

Finding the Higgs particle could be the first major discovery in 21st century physics, but Cern is not the only lab looking for it. We've just had news that scientists working on Fermilab's Tevatron – the most powerful working particle collider in the world – are closing in on the Higgs.

Their latest hunt has ruled out a Higgs particle between 160 and 170GeV, meaning the particle is now expected to be found somewhere within two windows: 114GeV to 159GeV and 171GeV to 185GeV. The hunt goes on, and the longer it takes Cern to get the Large Hadron Collider up and running, the better Fermilab's chances of taking the prize.

In a statement put out by the lab, Robert Roser, a co-spokesman for one of the detectors on the experiment, said:

A particle collision at the Tevatron collider can produce a Higgs boson in many different ways, and the Higgs particle can then decay into various particles. Each experiment examines more and more possibilities. Combining all of them, we hope to see a first hint of the Higgs particle.

So perhaps we won't have much longer to wait. The nature of the Higgs, when and if it is discovered, will hopefully open the door to a new era of physics.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 13 Mar 2009 | 2:28 pm

Galileo: Heavenly instruments

Florence pays tribute to one of its greatest sons as part of 400th anniversary celebrations of his earliest discoveries

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 13 Mar 2009 | 1:40 pm

In Arctic and Antarctic, a Species Overlap

Hundreds of species live in both poles despite the 8,000-mile distance. But how?
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 13 Mar 2009 | 1:30 pm

Homeland Security seeks Bladerunner-style lie detector

Do our eyes betray us when we lie? The US government hopes to find out

In Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi classic, Bladerunner, the police have a problem. The wayward androids they are pursuing behave so much like humans, they have a tough time telling them apart.

They turn to the Voight-Kampff test, a futuristic version of the age-old polygraph, to help them out. During the test, subjects are grilled with a list of questions, while their physiology is monitored. In particular, the test looks for abnormal eye responses that might indicate the subject isn't human.

The test is far from perfect, and no doubt there will be teething troubles that beset the development of a similar test the US department of homeland security is looking for help in making.

Under the Small Business Innovation Research programme, the department has asked tech companies to bid for contracts to kick-start research in the area. Such a system, if it works, would undoubtedly be useful at airports and other high-security points.

The call for proposals states:

Security screening is conducted to evaluate the risk of individuals entering transportation and other critical infrastructure and requires efficient, rapid and accurate examination of a person. Persons involved in or planning to be involved in possible malicious or deceitful acts will show various behavioral or physiological abnormalities.

Early research has shown that pupil size varies with changes in a person's cognitive processing load. Current but unproven studies suggest that a cognitive decision to deceive or practise deception will result in an increased pupil size due to the greater cognitive processing required in comparison to truthful recall.

It is likely that eye scanning security measures would work alongside other systems.

Presumably the technology could become standard and automated at airports, though it would have to pick up on overly-dilated pupils or shifts in gaze after only a few questions - otherwise the queues will be even longer. I wonder how often a system might raise a false alarm, since a lot of people are pretty stressed going through airports even when they're not up to anything mischievous.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 13 Mar 2009 | 1:25 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

Flossing monkeys

Monkeys in Thailand keep their teeth clean by flossing with human hair

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 13 Mar 2009 | 11:44 am