Human Adult Testes Cells Can Become Embryonic-like

Using what they say is a relatively simple method, scientists have extracted stem/progenitor cells from testes and have converted them back into pluripotent embryonic-like stem cells. Researchers say that the naïve cells are now potentially capable of morphing into any cell type that a body needs, from brain neurons to pancreatic tissue.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

Slimmer, Stickier Nanorods Give Boost To 3-D Computer Chips

Researchers have developed a new technique for growing slimmer copper nanorods, a key step for advancing integrated 3-D chip technology. These thinner copper nanorods fuse together, or anneal, at about 300 degrees Celsius. This relatively low annealing temperature could make the nanorods ideal for use in heat-sensitive nanoelectronics, particularly for "gluing" together the stacked components of 3-D computer chips.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

'Ice That Burns' May Yield Clean, Sustainable Bridge To Global Energy Future

In the future, natural gas derived from chunks of ice that workers collect from beneath the ocean floor and beneath the arctic permafrost may fuel cars, heat homes, and power factories. Government researchers are reporting that these so-called "gas hydrates," a frozen form of natural gas, show increasing promise as an abundant, untapped source of clean, sustainable energy.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

Biological Clue In Brain Tumor Development

Scientists have uncovered a vital new biological clue that could lead to more effective treatments for a children's brain tumor that currently kills more than 60 percent of young sufferers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

Suicide Bombings: Exact Location Where A Person Stands Makes A Difference

Researchers have determined that where a person is standing in a room or other location during a suicide terrorist attack can have a great bearing on survival and injuries.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

Synthesizing The Most Natural Of All Skin Creams

New research could help millions of people with skin problems. Even after nine months soaking in the womb, a newborn’s skin is smooth – unlike an adult’s in the bath. While occupying a watery, warm environment, the newborn manages to develop a skin fully equipped to protect it in a cold, dry and bacteria-infected world.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 6:00 pm

Human Genes Required For Hepatitis C Viral Replication Identified

Researchers are investigating a new way to block reproduction of the hepatitis C virus -- targeting not the virus itself but the human genes the virus exploits in its life cycle. They report finding nearly 100 genes that support the replication of HCV and show that blocking several of them can suppress viral replication in cultured cells.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Cancer Breakthrough: Tales Of 'Trojan Horse Drug' And 'Miracle Dogs'

Scientists are reporting promising results with a drug called nitrosylcobalamin (NO-Cbl) in battling cancer in dogs without any negative side effects. While it gives profound hope to dog owners, NO-Cbl also points to a powerful new cancer treatment for humans -- one that infiltrates cancer cells like a biological Trojan horse.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Fuzzy Logic And Grey Science

Identifying cancer cells in a medical image and altering the trajectory of airplanes at take-off and landing to reduce noise pollution are just two of the goals of new research projects based on the use of fuzzy logic. This mathematical technique, which emerged in the 1960s and is now widely used in industrial control systems and electrical appliances, is central to the development of artificial intelligence and can also be used to quantify the vagueness of qualitative concepts.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

Heightened Level Of Amygdala Activity May Cause Social Deficits In Autism

An increased pattern of brain activity in the amygdalas of adults with autism that may be linked to the social deficits that typically are associated with the disorder. Previous research has shown that abnormal growth patterns in the amygdala are commonly found among young children diagnosed with autism.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 3:00 pm

NKorea reasserts right to satellite launch (AP)

AP - North Korea warned the United States, Japan and their allies not to interfere with its plan to launch a satellite into space next month, saying Tuesday any intervention could doom already stalled talks on ending its nuclear weapons program.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 12:03 pm

Shuttle, station astronauts relax before parting (AP)

AP - The astronauts aboard the linked shuttle-station complex are getting some time off before parting company.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 11:25 am

Holy photons

Five answers to the age-old science + God dilemma
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Mar 2009 | 10:59 am

AP source: EPA closer to global warming warning (AP)

AP - The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the first step on the long road to regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 10:26 am

Hurricane Season 2008 (weather.com)

weather.com -
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 10:05 am

BG Group acquires 90% of Pure Energy (AFP)

AFP - British oil and gas group BG now controls more than 90 percent of Pure Energy of Australia after another Australian company, Arrow Energy, agreed to sell its 20-percent stake, BG and Arrow said in a statement.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 9:11 am

Alaska braces for ashfall after volcano erupts (AP)

AP - Rita Jackson said she was taking a sip of coffee when she tasted something funny on her lips — ash.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 9:00 am

Malaria map shows where to target the disease

LONDON (Reuters) - Eliminating malaria in many parts of the world where risk of the disease is high may be less difficult than previously thought, international researchers said on Tuesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 8:00 am

2 Komodo dragons kill man in eastern Indonesia (AP)

AP - Two Komodo dragons mauled a fruit-picker to death in eastern Indonesia, police and witnesses said Tuesday, the latest in a string of attacks on humans by the world's largest lizard species.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 7:15 am

Scientists: Less ice on Great Lakes during winter (AP)

AP - Ice cover on the Great Lakes has declined more than 30 percent since the 1970s, leaving the world's largest system of freshwater lakes open to evaporation and lower water levels, according to scientists associated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 3:44 am

Robot Madness: Emotional Disasters (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - If Hollywood movies such as "WALL-E" have showed anything, it's that humans are willing to believe that robots have feelings. But creating a robot which can truly understand and respond to emotions remains tricky for researchers.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 3:11 am

Notre Dame sticking with Obama for commencement (AP)

AP - The University of Notre Dame is sticking with its invitation to President Obama to speak at its May 17 commencement despite criticism from some Roman Catholics that his views on abortion and stem cell research run counter to Catholic teachings.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 1:03 am

RSPB calls for more UK wind farms

The UK can significantly increase the number of wind farms built onshore without harming wildlife, the RSPB says.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 24 Mar 2009 | 12:34 am

Spacewalkers stymied by jammed station platform

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Two astronauts used pry bars and brute force but failed to free jammed equipment outside the International Space Station on Monday during a spacewalk to prepare the outpost for its last phase of construction.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 24 Mar 2009 | 12:13 am

Charles Simonyi buys return ticket to space for $35m

Recession or no, billionaire Charles Simonyi couldn't pass up another shot at space, even if it meant paying $35 million more.

Besides, it may one of the last times the Russian government allows tourists to ride to the international space station.

"It's now or never," said Simonyi, from Seattle, who has spent $60m for two space vacations. The first cost $25m.

A computer genius who helped build Microsoft, Simonyi will become the world's first two-time space tourist when he leaves Earth behind on Thursday. He'll be accompanied by two professional astronauts ... a Russian and an American ... who will be going up for a six-month stint.

His own trip will last under two weeks, and it will be his last. "I'm not getting any younger," the 60-year-old told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. Former US astronaut John Glenn is the oldest man to fly into space, at age 77.

Simonyi has promised his new wife, Lisa Persdotter, a 28-year-old Swedish socialite, that this will be his final spaceflight. He told her about his plans when they got engaged and "she was very supportive". He is taking one of their engagement rings with him into orbit.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 24 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

Big pharma urged to create patent pools

A government minister will today challenge drug companies to help the developing world by giving up their patent rights to compounds that could be used in cures for neglected diseases and medicines for children with HIV.

Ivan Lewis, the minister for international development, said it was reasonable to expect the drug giants to do more. "Now is the time for industry to step up to the mark," he said.

"We're all concerned about the economic circumstances we're living in and the danger that that will push an increasing number of people into poverty," he added. "Challenging pharma to do their bit ... is entirely legitimate."

Lewis plans to meet executives of leading drug companies to ask them whether they will participate in two patent pool initiatives. He wants to know whether they will respond to the invitation of the British company GlaxoSmithKline, which a few weeks ago said it would put all relevant patents into a pool designed to facilitate research into drugs for neglected diseases, and invited other companies to do the same.

GlaxoSmithKline's chief executive, Andrew Witty, told the Guardian at the time: "I can't tell you how many speeches I've heard about, you know, 'I wish we could make progress on TB' or 'Why haven't we got treatments for these things?' We all sit there saying well yes, it's terrible isn't it, instead of actually trying to do something about it. So ... what I really hope this does is stimulate people to start engaging with us, and maybe other people to say, look, actually, if you did it this way it could really work."

Witty said he knew other chief executives worried about this too, adding: "Who knows, maybe somebody has to move before many people move." So far, however, there has been no similar declaration from other drug companies.

Lewis will also be asking chief executives whether they will support a patent pool for HIV medicines being designed by Unitaid, an international organisation launched by France, Brazil, Chile, Norway and the UK that buys medicines for the developing world.

"There's never been a better time for other companies to make their position known," he said.

The minister also intends to press Unitaid to move faster. He will write to the agency "urging them to speed up their work specifically on the question of child-friendly HIV treatments".

New medicines for TB are among those needed as the global epidemic grows, fuelled by HIV and complicated by resistance to old drugs. Today, which is World TB Day, Lewis will announce £18m research funding for the TB Alliance to develop a shorter course of treatment.

The UK is making the grant against a background of concern that recession may cause donors to cut back on funding for poor countries.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 24 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

Red alert

Many of us turn crimson when embarrassed. But some people blush so often that they avoid social contact. Tom Nolan on a new treatment that could change their lives

Most of us go red when, for example, we receive a compliment or have to give an impromptu speech - it's perfectly normal. But what would you do if you blushed so often that you ended up avoiding people? It's a problem that Enrique Jadresic, professor of psychiatry at the University of Chile, is all too familiar with. Now, having had an operation to relieve his condition, he has written a book, When Blushing Hurts (IUniverse), both to encourage patients to seek help and to educate doctors in how to treat the problem.

Jadresic started noticing his blushing at 14 and the problem grew steadily worse. "When I was working in a hospital I was in a constant state of alert because of the possibility of meeting either one of my students or one of my patients, and that meant almost invariably turning red. For a figure of authority it's a torment to blush in front of students or patients for no reason."

If he had to give a presentation, rather than worrying about what to say, he was anxious about the colour his cheeks would turn. He could improve his symptoms by taking beta blockers but he would still frequently receive comments from patients and friends such as, "There you go up the cherry tree again, doctor". Worse, it was impacting on his career. He was offered the chance to become president of the Chilean Society of Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery, but was reluctant to take such a high-profile post because of his condition.

Then one day, he read about an operation that could help stop blushing. The operation, called an endoscopic transthoracic sympathectomy, involves cutting or clamping part of the sympathetic nerve - the nerve that causes sweating and blushing when stimulated. It runs from the belly button to the neck, but the easiest way to reach it is by making incisions beneath the armpit. "After the operation," says Jadresic, "I no longer turned bright red whenever I heard someone say my name."

Most experts think the cause of severe blushing, also known as pathological blushing or erythrophobia, is psychological. Once someone begins to get embarrassed about going red they enter a vicious circle: they notice that they blush in embarrassing situations so begin to get anxious about blushing in the future. The more they worry, the more easily they blush; this leads to blushing in "normal" situations, which can appear strange to others (why are they blushing? Do they fancy me? What have they been up to?). Many people with this problem develop social anxiety disorder and, indeed, blushing is a recognised symptom of this condition.

"Blushing is assumed to peak during adolescence," says Robert J Edelmann, professor of forensic and clinical psychology at Roehampton University and author of Coping With Blushing (Sheldon Press). "However, this has more to do with embarrassment potential being higher during adolescence (not yet a grownup but no longer a child means plenty of scope for social failings) rather than blushing propensity. Embarrassment potential is then assumed to decline with age. Because of this, fear of blushing can actually increase with age." As the years go by, it becomes less socially acceptable to blush, which only adds to the embarrassment and fear.

But if it's a purely psychological problem, why would an operation work? "The most likely explanation is that people have the surgery and say, 'Thank goodness I'm all right now,'" says Edelmann. "You remove the need for the person to worry that they might blush." In other words, having an operation might act like a placebo. However, there is also a physical explanation for why the operation can succeed. The sympathetic nervous system is usually activated in dangerous or frightening situations, causing the pupils to dilate, the heart to beat faster, and the blood vessels in the skin to fill up causing sweating and blushing. Therefore, cutting the part of the sympathetic nerve that supplies the skin in the face should stop the face turning red when embarrassed.

As yet, there aren't any reliable clinical studies to confirm the effectiveness of surgery and the procedure can have some unpleasant side effects. The sympathetic nervous system is needed for the body to regulate its temperature through sweating. If you are unable to sweat from the face, the rest of the body has to compensate, leading to excessive sweating elsewhere. "I've had people who say they have to change their shirt six times a day because of sweating," says Edelmann. While Jadresic says that he sweats more than he did before his operation, he feels the benefits outweigh the side effects. These symptoms occur in more than half of all cases. Surgery can also lead to chronic pain and damage to the nerve supply to the eye (in around one in a hundred operations).

Despite these side-effects, surgery may seem like a magical cure for many. "The operation is so simple - it takes no more than 20 minutes," says Jadresic. He does, however, have concerns about it becoming the standard treatment for pathological blushing." Satisfaction rates among his patients is high but they undergo psychiatric screening before being operated on, and if the procedure becomes more widely available people may be tempted to have surgery before trying other ways of reducing their anxiety. "Other treatments should be used first - psychotherapy, drugs or both. Surgery should be a last resort."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 24 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

Death in the family

The news that Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath, has killed himself is shocking - but does it suggest that suicide is hereditary? By Ian Sample

The early death of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes's son, Nicholas, is so much more shocking because it was suicide. His mother famously gassed herself a year after he was born. And yesterday, his sister announced that Nicholas, aged 47, had hanged himself last week at his home in Alaska.

High-profile suicides always get attention, but when there has already been one such tragedy in the family already, questions over how much depression and suicidal tendencies are inherited are inevitably raised. It seems that in any family where there has been a suicide, it is likely that it will have happened before, and will happen again.

The Hemingway family has been one of the most severely affected. Ernest's father killed himself in 1928. In 1961, Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring, and succeeded in the summer. Two of his siblings and his granddaughter also took their own lives.

When Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994, a lot was made of his comments that he felt he had inherited "suicidal genes". It is entirely possible. Two of his uncles took their own lives. As often with men, both used guns.

The apparent inheritance of depression genes has not gone unnoticed by scientists. Studies on twins have allowed researchers to tease apart how large a role is played by our genes, and what we can put down to our environment. In this case, environment could be the state of your life, the hard knocks you have had to take, and more unusual factors, including infections.

One of the most stark insights into depression and suicide comes from scientists studying bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression. People with the condition experience periods of intense mania, and will often feel themselves compelled to attempt grandiose tasks and projects, but fall into a deep depression once they are completed. The condition is thought to be strongly linked to specific genes.

"If you look at a population of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a fifth of them will attempt or succeed in committing suicide," said David Porteous, professor of human molecular genetics at Edinburgh University. "Also, if you look at families where someone has committed suicide, the chances are that you will find another case in the not-too distant family," he added.

Serious depression, which requires medical treatment, is thought to be 70% genetic, with the rest a hodgepodge of environmental effects. Peter McGuffin, professor of psychiatric genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, is currently working through the results of a large study aimed at discovering the genetics of depression. In the study, scientists have taken genetic material from 3,500 patients, and will compare them against genetic markers from a large, healthy population.

The results, which are expected within a month or so, are likely to reveal a spread of new genes that ratchet up our susceptibility to becoming depressed. "Everybody is somewhere on a spectrum of susceptibility to depression," says McGuffin.

One of the most interesting questions the study may answer is why twice as many women experience recurrent depression as men. So far, no genes for depression have been found on the X chromosome, of which women have two.

Once we have inherited our deck of genetic cards, it is often life expereience that will determine whether or not we go on to have depression. "The most obvious non-genetic cause is just bad things happening to you, so-called severe life events," said McGuffin. "On average, you see people have more severe life events before the onset of depression," he says.

Strikingly, it could be the suicide of a family member that itself becomes a serious enough blow to nudge someone closer to depression. How Nicholas Hughes was affected by his mother's death when he was tiny is unknown. But we do know he had had depression for a long time and had left his position as professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to focus on pottery at home.

"There is a lot of controversy about the impact of very early trauma on later depression," says McGuffin.

Some evidence of particular depression genes is already emerging. Porteous's recently discovered a gene called Disc1, which is associated with schizophrenia. Subsequent studies by McGuffin show the same gene may also play a role in depression. Understanding the underlying genetics of depression is unlikely to lead directly to new treatments, but it will shed light on the neurobiology at work. Getting a better grasp on that may then in turn open doors to new treatments, and explain how some of today's most popular drugs for the condition work.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 24 Mar 2009 | 12:01 am

MIT Backs Free Access to Scientific Papers

Scientific publishing might have just reached a tipping point, thanks to a new open access policy at MIT.

Following a more limited open-access mandate at Harvard, the legendary school's faculty voted last week to make all of their papers available for free on the web, the first university-wide policy of its sort.

Hal Abelson, who spearheaded the effort, said that these agreements went beyond providing a repository for papers, they changed the power dynamics between scientific publishers and researchers.

"What's important here is that it's giving the University a formal role in how publications happen," Abelson said. "Some of the faculty said, 'You're calling this an open access resolution but actually the way to think of it is as a collective bargaining agreement.'"

Many scientists and researchers have pushed for open access policies, but publishers have been reluctant to give up control of the informational resources they have. Big companies like Wiley John & Sons, The McGraw Hill Company's Nature Publishing Group, and Reed Elsevier argue that they provide valuable and expensive peer-review, and that there's no way to ensure quality without the subscription fees that they charge libraries and universities.

But open access advocates say the current scientific publishing paradigm is broken because publishers control the scientific record, not academics.

"Who actually should be controlling the scholarly record?" Abelson asked. "Universities have a mission that has something to do with producing and disseminating knowledge. These publishers, whatever their good intentions may be, have a mission to make money for their stockholders. The system is a little out of whack."

That's a major reason that Congress approved an open access policy for National Institutes of Health-funded research. Under the NIH public access policy, papers are made public twelve months after publication.

The scientific publishing system, which developed long before the Internet, doesn't allow for scientific information to be accessed freely like most Web content is. This creates data silos within individual publisher's journals and prevents the sharing and data mining of scientific information, open access advocates argue.

Paul Ginsparg, who created the physics pre-print server known as arXiv, summarized the problem back in 2000.

"If we were to start from scratch today to design a quality controlled distribution system for research findings," he wrote, "it would likely take a very different form both from the current system and from the electronic clone it would spawn without more constructive input from the research community.

The latest step from MIT is a sign that an increasing number of faculty members are beginning to think the publishing paradigm has to change, but it's not going to be easy. 

"This is big," wrote Peter Suber, an open access advocate with Public Knowledge, a Washington DC non-profit.

But he also noted that the faculty resolution included a clause that allowed researchers to opt-out of the open access system for specific publications. This could mean that the most important papers — the big Science and Nature publications — don't end up freely available to the public.

"I certainly expect it to be used. Harvard's has been used," Abelson said. "The fact is that in the current climate, you have to give people the ability to opt out."

Still, Abelson said that he expected that the limitations of the new policy would be overcome in time.

"This is a nice step but it is the beginning of what's got to be a five year process," said Abelson. "There will be some other kind of equilibrium."

To track those developments, keep an eye on Dspace, where the MIT papers will soon be published.   

See Also:

• Mandated Open Access Bill Stalled in Senate
• New Science Editor Skeptical of Open Access Publishing
• Nature Launches Closed-Access Scientific Time Machine
• Report Pushes Open Access to Improve Healthcare
• Traditional Journal Publishers' Anti-Open-Access PR Plan Revealed ...
• Science Belongs to You: Bush Okays Open-Access Research Law
• Public Funds Mean Public Access: Open Research Bill Set to Pass

Image: flickr/iwouldstay

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 | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:47 pm

Wet wonder

Liquid water on Mars just a million years or so ago
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:42 pm

Brain differences mark those with depression risk

CHICAGO (Reuters) - People who have a high family risk of developing depression had less brain matter on the right side of their brains on par with losses seen in Alzheimer's disease, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 23 Mar 2009 | 10:53 pm

A Yogurt a Day May Keep the Ulcers Away

SALT LAKE CITY — Antibodies in two yogurt products could protect people from a common bacterium that causes ulcers.

Both products have been on the market in Asia for years, but scientists did not have much evidence that they can fight Helicobacter pylori — until now.

"Our data indicates that the suppression of H. pylori infection in humans could be achieved by taking functional yogurt," Hajime Hatta, an antibody expert who led human trials of the yogurt at Kyoto Women's University, said here at the American Chemical Society meeting on Sunday.

He showed that some people who consume the dessert regularly are immune to the bacterium.

Roughly half of the world's population is carrying H. Pylori, which can cause gastric pain or ulcers.

Antibiotics can kill it, but the widespread bug can spring right back. So keeping it at bay with an enhanced food might be a good idea.

"Eradication treatment can reduce the risk of developing ulcers." said Hatta." However, more than fifty percent of patients will relapse within a year."

To keep the bugs away, each yogurt product contains a substance called Immunoglobulin Y, or IgY, an antibody extracted from egg yolks. Those molecules stick to, and inactivate, a protein called uricase that the bacteria use to protect themselves from stomach acid.

According to Hatta, the treatment works. In many cases, the antibody-laden yogurt banished H. pylori from their guts.

Hatta said that the same trick could be used to make foods that fight rotavirus, a disease that kills countless children in the developing world.

See Also:

• Stinky Soy Goo Could Fight Alzheimer's
• Strange but Edible: Black Licorice with Ammonium Chloride
• The Ingredients in Trendy Tart Frozen Yogurt

Photo: PharmaFood International Co., Ltd.
Video: American Chemical Society

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 23 Mar 2009 | 10:05 pm

Obama's Energy Plan Faces Tough Road, History Suggests

Tackling an energy crisis remains more difficult than building an atomic bomb or going to the moon.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Mar 2009 | 10:04 pm

Teen Brains Clear Out Childhood Thoughts

Adolescents show a significant reduction in brain waves while they sleep.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Mar 2009 | 9:01 pm

Oldest Sea Creatures Have Been Alive 4,000 Years

Deep-sea corals older than thought, has implications for conservation.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Mar 2009 | 9:00 pm

The Kenny Rogers Effect: Music Helps Stroke Victims

Music was the best medicine for four stroke victims whose cognitive impairments lessened while listening to songs they loved.

The music stimulated neurological pleasure centers adjacent to damaged brain regions, apparently producing a therapeutic crossover effect.

"There seems to be a strong coupling in the brain between emotional and attentional areas," said study co-author David Soto, an Imperial College London neuroscientist. "When emotional areas light up and are activated, the attentional system seems to be more effective as well."

The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, resonates with earlier research on the general benefits of music for cognitive deterioration and its specific benefits for stroke victims.

In a prominent paper published last year in Brain, Finnish researchers measured the cognitive recoveries of 60 stroke victims who listened to music, audio books or nothing at all while undergoing standard therapy. Patients in the music group fared best, but mechanisms underlying the improvements remained uncertain.

It seemed possible that the music, which was chosen without regard for patients' musical preferences, produced a beneficial state of heightened mental arousal: patients' ears, and thus their brains, perked up. But it was also possible — as suggested by Soto's findings — that patients happened to like the music, and that benefits were connected to pleasure derived from favorite songs.

"Our ability to select information and perceive information and be aware of what's going on in the world depends on how we feel," said Soto.

Participants in Soto's study had suffered lesions to their brains' parietal cortex, a region central to visual and spatial processing. This left them with a condition called visual neglect, in which people lose half their spatial awareness. Victims will sometimes eat food from only one side of their plate, shave one side of their faces, or — as tested in the study — fail to perceive visual prompts on one side of a computer screen.

When Soto's patients listened to music they didn't like, their brains were highly aroused, but they performed poorly on tests of their weakened perceptual side. When listening to their favorite songs, they performed far better, even though their mental arousal was relatively low.

Among the artists favored by the patients were the Flying Burrito Brothers Band, Frank Sinatra and Kenny Rogers. Songs from the latter artist provided the greatest benefits.

"We were thinking of calling this the Kenny Rogers Effect," said Soto.

The results, said Soto, suggest that something other than sheer activation produced the therapeutic effects. A brain scan of one patient found increased activity in the brain's pleasure centers, which happened to be located beside his damaged parietal cortex.

Soto said that increased releases of dopamine, an emotion-regulating neurotransmitter, may be responsible. "It may lead to an increase of neural resources in these critical damaged brain regions," he said.

The dopamine-boosting drug Levodopa has been used experimentally to treat strokes, but results have been mixed and its side effects are severe. Music is ostensibly a less-toxic source.

University of Helsinki cognitive scientist Teppo Särkämö, a co-author of the Brain study, lauded Soto's methodology, but noted that the small number of patients involved means that "no firm conclusions can yet be drawn about the robustness of the music effect."

Because patients were tested while listening to the music rather than afterwards, he said, "there is no evidence about the possible long-term effects of music-induced positive emotions" on recovery.

Soto next hopes to study the effects of music on more patients, and other stroke-related problems.

Citation: "Pleasant music overcomes the loss of awareness in patients with visual neglect." By David Soto, Marıa J. Funes, Azucena Guzman-Garcıa, Tracy Warbrick, Pia Rotshtein, and Glyn W. Humphrey. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No. 12, March 23, 2009.

See Also:

• Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains
• Seeing Red: Tweak Your Brain With Colors
• Memory Switch Could Enable Brain Hacks
• A Sketchy Brain Booster: Doodling
• Baby Got Beat: Music May Be Inborn
  

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 23 Mar 2009 | 9:00 pm

Nanotube Tech Transforms CO2 Into Fuel

Why sequester CO2 when you could use sunlight to convert it back into energy?
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Mar 2009 | 8:51 pm

Discarded Embryos to Generate Blood for Transfusions

Researchers plan to make blood for transfusions from discarded human embryos.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:49 pm

Team Tornado: Chasing Twisters for Science

Ride with Reed Timmer and his colleagues on their quests to photograph and video-capture dangerous weather phenomena at frighteningly close distances.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:20 pm

Team Tornado: Meet Team Tornado

Reed and Joel say why they fall victim to their curiosity. Reed Timmer, self-described "extreme weather fanatic" spends every tornado season as close as he can to dangerous "supercell" thunderstorms.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:16 pm

Team Tornado: Stones From The Sky

Team Tornado hit by baseball-sized hail. Warning: Strong Language. Reed Timmer, self-described "extreme weather fanatic" spends every tornado season as close as he can to dangerous "supercell" thunderstorms.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:15 pm

Team Tornado: Wild Chase

Wild ride toward Tulia, Texas, as a tornado wreaks havoc on the town. Reed Timmer, self-described "extreme weather fanatic" spends every tornado season as close as he can to dangerous "supercell" thunderstorms.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:14 pm

Team Tornado: Supertwister's Scream

Supertwister chases the Team, devours a house; then poses before a rainbow. Reed Timmer, self-described "extreme weather fanatic" spends every tornado season as close as he can to dangerous "supercell" thunderstorms.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:14 pm

Team Tornado: Too Close!

Supertwister forms near Manchester, SD, way too near Team Tornado. Reed Timmer, self-described "extreme weather fanatic" spends every tornado season as close as he can to dangerous "supercell" thunderstorms.
Source: Livescience.com | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:13 pm

SLIDE SHOW: Top 10 Volcanoes, Ever

History shows that the biggest, baddest volcanoes can erupt anywhere, anytime.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Mar 2009 | 5:51 pm

Space Station, Shuttle Dodge Debris

Discovery and the International Space Station maneuver to avoid space junk.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Mar 2009 | 5:51 pm

Setback for climate technical fix

The idea of curbing climate change by seeding the seas with iron gets a knock-back from the biggest investigation so far.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 23 Mar 2009 | 5:18 pm

Cold fusion debate heats up again

Researchers at a meeting in the US claim renewed evidence for the long-discredited idea of fusion at room temperature.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 23 Mar 2009 | 4:35 pm

New DNA test gives cold case hope

A new technique which can decipher previously unintelligible DNA samples is made available to all police forces in England and Wales.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 23 Mar 2009 | 3:56 pm

Cold fusion raises its head above the parapet again

20 years after bringing ignominy and academic exile to its founding scientists, the idea of free energy at room temperature is making a comeback

American scientists claim to have discovered fresh evidence for "cold fusion", the controversial and discredited process that was once touted as the answer to the world's energy problems.

Pamela Mosier-Boss, a researcher at the US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Centre in San Diego, said her group had detected telltale signs that nuclear fusion reactions normally found in the centre of the sun were afoot in a simple bench-top device.

The results were announced today at a meeting of the American Chemical Society to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the first enthusiastic – and ultimately doomed – claims for cold fusion at the University of Utah.

When university researchers Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann first claimed to have created a "star in a jar" in 1989, scientists were wide-eyed in amazement. If they were right, they had re-created the reactions that power the sun. In a beaker on a lab bench sat the key to almost free and inexhaustible energy. Or so the world of science thought.

As researchers rushed to harness cold fusion for themselves, it became clear there was more than a little problem. No one could get it to work. What had been touted as one of the greatest discoveries of the century fell to pieces. The field of cold fusion lost almost all of its funding and is now so tainted by the farce that scientists have been forced to rename it. It is now called "low-energy nuclear reactions".

Mosier-Boss's team set up a simple experiment in which a gold wire was dunked into a beaker of palladium chloride mixed with deuterium, or heavy water. Heavy water is the same as normal water, except each hydrogen atom in each water molecule contains a neutron as well as the usual proton.

The scientists passed an electric current through the solution and used a plastic detector to pick up neutrons being emitted from the beaker. At the end of the experiment, they found what they believe are three track marks caused by particles released as neutrons smashed into the detector. Mosier-Boss believes the neutrons were thrown out of fusion reactions in the device.

"Our finding is very significant," she said. "To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a low-energy nuclear reaction device."

"If you have fusion going on, you have to have neutrons. We now have evidence that there are neutrons present in these LENR reactions," she added.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 23 Mar 2009 | 3:25 pm

Animal Inbreeding Leads to Poor Sperm Quality

The inbreeding of endangered species could reduce their chances of survival.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Mar 2009 | 3:09 pm

Stimulus Funds Fuel 'Smart' Power Grid

A chunk of stimulus cash will promote a "smart grid" that fosters renewable energy.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Mar 2009 | 2:20 pm

Alaska Volcano Erupts

Alaska's Redoubt Volcano is erupting explosively for a fifth time since 10:38 p.m. local time Sunday evening (2:38 a.m. Eastern time).

The U.S. Geological Survey's Alaska Volcano Observatory estimates the initial explosion sent ash up to 50,000 feet in the air. The ash appears to be heading north away from Anchorage.

Alaska Airlines has canceled flights, according to the Associated Press.

Redoubt Volcano last erupted over a four-month period from 1989-1990. It began showing signs of unrest earlier this year, and the USGS first warned of a potential eruption in January. The alert level has wavered between yellow and orange since then.

The level of seismicity increased dramatically on March 20, a sign of a potential impending eruption. The seiemicity increased further two hours before the first eruption Sunday evening.

USGS geophysicist John Power said the current eruption could last for weeks or months.

Follow the latest eruption updates on Twitter with @alaska_avo.

See Also:

• 8 Hot Volcanic Eruptions
• HD Eruption Video Gives Clues to How Volcanoes Work
• Pink Iguana That Darwin Missed Holds Evolutionary Surprise
• Unbelievable Pictures of Chilean Volcanic Eruption at Night
• Video: Kilauea's Latest Explosive Eruption
• Massive Volcanic Eruptions Could Have Killed Off the Dinosaurs

Image: Redoubt Volcano March 20, before erupting. Game McGimsey, AVO/USGS

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 23 Mar 2009 | 2:12 pm

Dust Bowl Had Human Fingerprint

Farming practices in the 1930s had a hand in leading to the Dust Bowl conditions.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Mar 2009 | 1:50 pm

Odd Supernova May Revise Star Evolution Theory

Strange before and after photos of an exploded star are stumping scientists.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Mar 2009 | 1:50 pm

Alaska's Mount Redoubt Volcano Erupts Overnight

Anchorage is spared as Alaska's Mount Redoubt erupts four times.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 23 Mar 2009 | 1:10 pm

Wildlife flee Kenyan forest fires

Hundreds of thousands of flamingos and other wildlife are at risk after five forest fires erupted in Kenya, officials say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 23 Mar 2009 | 12:58 pm

Study finds 10 genes that raise sudden death risk

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Researchers have found nine new gene variations that can make a person vulnerable to sudden cardiac death and confirmed the role of another, international researchers said on Sunday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 23 Mar 2009 | 12:52 pm

Synthetic blood from embryos bid

UK scientists plan trials to see if embryonic stem cells can be used as a viable way of making synthetic blood.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:24 am