New Device Helps Control Disease-causing Ticks

Spring is finally here, and with it comes tick season. Scientists are reporting the latest in a series of related studies on the effectiveness of a new technology that reduces tick populations.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Whole-brain Circuit Map Could Reveal What Goes Wrong In Autism, Schizophrenia And Other Brain Disorders

Scientists from major research institutions in the U.S. and Europe argue strongly in favor of committing resources to prepare a comprehensive map of neural circuits in the mammalian brain. Along with charting the circuitry underlying brain functions, the map is also expected to provide insights about brain dysfunctions in autism, schizophrenia and various mood disorders.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

First Accurate Test For Arsenic In Soil Developed

If you have a cat or dog who likes to hide under the deck or children who play on equipment made with pressure-treated wood, you'll be glad to hear that analytical chemists recently developed the first-ever accurate test for arsenic compounds in soil, promising a significantly improved environmental and health impact assessment. The method holds some promise for detecting naturally occurring high arsenic levels in Asian rice, as well.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Blood Protein May Hold Key To Stopping Tumor Growth In Cancer Patients

A recent discovery could clear the way for a new drug that inhibits tumor growth in cancer patients and could potentially help in the healing of wounds.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Virus-built Battery Could Power Cars, Electronic Devices

For the first time, researchers have shown they can genetically engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery. The new virus-produced batteries have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries being considered to power plug-in hybrid cars, and they could also be used to power a range of personal electronic devices.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Drug Suppresses The Compulsion To Steal, Study Shows

It appears that a drug commonly used to treat alcohol and drug addiction has a similar effect on the compulsive behavior of kleptomaniacs -- it curbs their urge to steal, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Quails Get Super Fit By Simply Eating Omega-3 Diet

Semi-palmated sandpipers migrate over thousands of miles, but how do they build up for the ultramarathon? By simply eating a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids according to a new study. Researchers fed sedentary bobwhite quails that don't exercise a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids and found that the birds' fitness improved by up to 90 percent. A diet of omega-3 fatty acids can make birds fit by simply eating.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Potential Magic Bullet For MRSA Treatment

Attaching an antimicrobial drug, which is activated by light, to a peptide that binds to bacteria and stops them making toxins, produced a "magic bullet" that was highly effective at killing the superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Transmission Of Drug Resistant HIV-1

Drug-resistant forms of HIV can be spread between individuals who have not received anti-retroviral treatment, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Ice-free Arctic Ocean Possible In 30 Years, Not 90 As Previously Estimated

Summers in the Arctic may be ice-free in as few as 30 years, not at the end of the century as previously expected. The updated forecast is the result of a new analysis of computer models coupled with the most recent summer ice measurements.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Q and A: Who Was the Historical Jesus?

Biblical scholar Rachel Havrelock discusses misconceptions about early Christianity.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 3 Apr 2009 | 1:55 pm

Grapefruit-Heavy Diet Helped Spur Dangerous Clot (HealthDay)

HealthDay - THURSDAY, April 2 (HealthDay News) -- A rare set of interactions involving grapefruit juice, birth control pills and a genetic mutation almost cost a 42-year-old woman her leg, physicians report.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 1:03 pm

We Will Go!: Human/Robot Mergers Explore Space

Our robotic offspring will carry us to the stars. But who, actually, will "we" then be?
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Apr 2009 | 1:01 pm

Bees Brains Morph to Avoid Mid-Life Crisis

Bees change careers, and their brains morph.
Source: Livescience.com | 3 Apr 2009 | 12:50 pm

Bad weather delays return of U.S. space tourist (Reuters)

Reuters - Billionaire U.S. space tourist Charles Simonyi will return to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) one day later than scheduled due to bad weather on earth, a Russian space official said on Friday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 12:36 pm

Bad weather delays return of U.S. space tourist

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Billionaire U.S. space tourist Charles Simonyi will return to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) one day later than scheduled due to bad weather on earth, a Russian space official said on Friday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 12:36 pm

Judge sides with environmentalists in wolf case (AP)

AP - A federal judge says a lawsuit by environmental groups to keep the government from aggressively removing endangered Mexican gray wolves that have attacked livestock can move forward.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 10:42 am

US space tourist's return put off by a day (AP)

AP - A billionaire American space tourist in the middle of his second stay aboard the international space station will return to Earth a day later than originally planned, Russian space officials said Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 10:38 am

Study: False killer whales declining off Hawaii (AP)

AP - The population of false killer whales in waters close to Hawaii appears to have dramatically declined over the past 20 years, a new study says.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 10:31 am

Arctic diary

Spirits rise as the Arctic summer approaches
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Apr 2009 | 9:34 am

Russia to unveil spaceship plans

The Russian space agency is expected to unveil development plans for a next-generation manned spacecraft on Monday.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Apr 2009 | 9:17 am

Iraq presidency approves slashed budget (AFP)

AFP - Iraq's presidency has rubber-stamped a 58.9 billion-dollar budget for 2009, after billions were wiped off spending plans because of a sharp fall in oil prices, a government spokesman said on Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 8:53 am

Albanian jewel

Bringing an ancient gem into 21st Century
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Apr 2009 | 8:12 am

'Eureka machine' puts scientists in the shade

The machine, which took only a few hours to come up with Newton's laws of motion, marks a turning point in the way science is done

Scientists have created a "Eureka machine" that can work out the laws of nature by observing the world around it – a development that could dramatically speed up the discovery of new scientific truths.

The machine took only hours to come up with the basic laws of motion, a task that occupied Sir Isaac Newton for years after he was inspired by an apple falling from a tree.

Scientists at Cornell University in New York have already pointed the machine at baffling problems in biology and plan to use it to tackle questions in cosmology and social behaviour.

The work marks a turning point in the way science is done. Eureka moments, which supposedly began in Archimedes' bath more than 2,000 years ago, might soon be happening not in the minds of geniuses, but through the warm hum of electronic circuitry.

"We've reached a point in science where there's a lot of data to deal with. It's not Newton looking at an apple, or Galileo looking at heavenly bodies any more, it's more complex than that," said Hod Lipson, the computer engineer who led the project.

"This takes the grunt out of science by sifting through data and looking for the laws that govern how something behaves."

Details of the machine are described in the US journal Science. The study appears alongside a report from scientists at the universities of Aberystwyth and Cambridge describing the first discovery of new scientific knowledge by a laboratory robot.

The robot, called Adam, devised and performed experiments to investigate the genetics of bakers' yeast. When scientists did their own experiments, they came to the same conclusions. Ross's team is already working on a second robot called Eve.

Together, the papers raise the question of how the role of scientists will change over the coming decades. For now, scientists believe the new technology will work alongside them rather than relegate them to technicians who tap in data and perform maintenance tasks, but leave the real thinking to the machines.

The Cornell machine uses a computer program that can search through huge amounts of data and look for underlying patterns. For example, a falling apple will abide by Newton's second law, which is often stated as F=ma, where F is the force acting on an object, m is its mass, and a is its acceleration. When fed information on the mass of the apple and its velocity as it falls, the machine would be able to work out the equation.

Lipson tested the machine by giving it information from basic lab experiments, such as swinging pendulums and tiny cars that moved up and down tracks on a cushion of air. After crunching through the data, the machine pinged and displayed several laws of motion and conservation of momentum.

The system runs its own checks to decide whether the laws it has found are likely to be interesting. In the pendulum test, for example, the tip of the pendulum is always the same distance from the pivot, but this does not shed any light on the underlying physics.

After proving that the machine worked, Lipson's team set it to work on the complex problem of metabolism in biological cells. The computer produced some equations, which the scientists are still trying to make sense of.

"It's like going to an oracle and asking what's going on. You are given an equation, but you need to work out what it means before you can understand what's really going on," said Lipson.

The team say they also plan to look at problems in cosmology and even social behaviour, which could reveal the underlying laws at play when people form social networks on the internet.

"The real test now is whether it can discover new laws of nature and I believe it will. There's no way forward in a lot of sciences without tools like this," Lipson said.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 3 Apr 2009 | 7:52 am

The man who conjured laws of nature from pure thought

A fellow quantum physicist has said his discoveries were like 'exquisitely carved statues falling out of the sky, one after another'. In The Strangest Man, Graham Farmelo gets under the skin of one of the most baffling geniuses the world has seen

Discussion of next month's book, The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, starts on Friday 8 May

Here's a puzzle. Bristol boy – slightly older contemporary of Bristol's other boy Cary Grant – has an unhappy childhood, but doesn't mention it for 50 years; learns to speak French, German and Russian, but becomes famous for his long silences; embarks on the wrong career; gets interested in mathematics and ends up at Cambridge, where he becomes famous for his even longer silences; hears about Einstein and gets into advanced physics; and then goes to Copenhagen to meet Niels Bohr, who grumbles to Ernest Rutherford, "This Dirac, he seems to know a lot of physics, but he never says anything."

Somehow this silent, solemn, young beanpole earns the enthusiastic friendship and admiration of vibrant and merrymaking geniuses such as Bohr himself, Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, George Gamow, Peter Kapitza and so on, without, apparently, initiating reciprocal entertainment or conversation. His discoveries are in quantum mechanics, a subject that remains opaque even after 80 years of continuous exposition.

These discoveries involve no experiment, no apparatus and no observation that ever spontaneously troubled a layman. When quizzed about his achievements and their significance, he declines to explain, saying that quantum theories are built up "from physical concepts which cannot be explained in words at all".

His responses to the most ordinary pleasures have a semi-detached air. He relaxes by climbing trees in a three-piece suit. Dirac once asked Heisenberg why he danced and got the unsurprising answer that it was a pleasure to dance with nice girls. Farmelo reports: "After about five minutes of silence, he said: 'Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?'"

Dirac sounds like an unlikely candidate for a biography, let alone a "hidden life". And yet this book races along. In the foreground, a lonely boy who becomes a lonely man driven by the concept of mathematical beauty (not an obsession you tend to volunteer in the pub). In the middle distance, there is university snobbery and economic privation, a difficult father, a smothering mother and a suicidal brother, along with the rise of the Nazi party in Europe, the repressions of Stalinist Russia, the second world war, the devastation of a continent, the atomic bomb, the McCarthy era, and the cold war.

Embracing both foreground and background is the intellectual ferment of physical theory that begins with puzzles about the electron, and comes to a climax with the debate about the nature of matter and the commencement of space and time.

The story is dizzying: the unlikely hero is widely declared the second greatest scientist of the 20th century, and most people have still never heard of him. He proposes anti-matter not on the basis of physical observation, but because his own mathematical logic tells him that it must exist. He shares a Nobel Prize and writes a textbook that becomes an instant and peerless classic (you can read a similar but differently accented response to the man, the discovery and the textbook in Frank Close's highly readable Antimatter, Oxford, £9.99, coincidentally published within a few weeks of The Strangest Man).

And then the mystery deepens. This apparently unfeeling, probably autistic man somehow learns to become politically opinionated, and even warmly responsive, at least to a few friends. He marries, becomes a good husband and father, takes up gardening, learns to tell jokes, develops lecturing skills that make him part of the landscape of scientific show business, and emigrates to America, all without becoming a whit less taciturn to most of his associates.

When I introduced this book club, I wondered if a biography counted as a science book. That is because life is what we make of it; but science goes its own sweet way. Farmelo makes the same point in chapter 31: "If Marie Curie and Alexander Fleming had never been born, radium and penicillin would have been discovered soon after the dates now in the textbooks." The science would have happened anyway: the story of the people who made the science tells us more about history than science.

Dirac might, however, be an exception. He addressed mysteries, and solved them mysteriously. "His discoveries were like exquisitely carved statues falling out of the sky, one after another," says Freeman Dyson in the same chapter. "He seemed to be able to conjure laws of nature from pure thought."

Books such as these tell us as much about the why, as about the how of science. Farmelo has already had enthusiastic reviews and quite rightly, too. This is a rich book: it pinpoints the moment, the milieu, the excitement of discovery and the mystery of matter, and it provides an alternative social history of the 20th century as well. And all of this is held together by a figure simultaneously touching and mysterious, capable of leaps of the imagination on the scale of Einstein and Newton and Darwin, but also capable, when his wife exploded "What would you do if I left you?" of thinking for a while and then answering "I'd say, 'Goodbye, dear.'"

Next month's book is The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes (Harper Press)

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 3 Apr 2009 | 7:21 am

Study: Arctic sea ice melting faster than expected (AP)

AP - Arctic sea ice is melting so fast most of it could be gone in 30 years. A new analysis of changing conditions in the region, using complex computer models of weather and climate, says conditions that had been forecast by the end of the century could occur much sooner.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 5:03 am

U.S., satellite operators discuss better tracking

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - U.S. military officials and commercial satellite operators Thursday discussed better tracking of satellites to avert collisions like the one that destroyed a Russian and U.S. satellite in February, creating more space debris.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 3:18 am

New storm barrage causes train to hit fallen tree (AP)

AP - Another barrage of storms hit the Southeast on Thursday, spawning possible tornadoes, causing a passenger train to hit a fallen tree and sending at least one person to the hospital after lightning struck a home.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 Apr 2009 | 12:55 am

US to be 'pragmatic on climate'

America's lead climate negotiator tells the BBC that the US will only do what is politically and technologically achievable.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 Apr 2009 | 12:22 am

10 Gory Surgical Triumphs on YouTube

Who needs medical school anymore? You can now watch the world's surgeons do their thing from the comfort of your parents' basement.

From open-heart surgery to amputations, sex-change operations to autopsies, the operating rooms of the world have gone online. One website, OR-Live, regularly broadcasts live from the O.R.  For example, tune in next week to watch a hysterectomy. These broadcasts, and dozens of other videos posted to YouTube, draw hundreds of thousands of viewers. We've got four words for you: advertising-supported health care.

And to jump-start the movement, we've curated 10 of the best surgical videos we could find. Be forewarned, though, be very forewarned: Some of these are grisly, and all of them are graphic. The autopsy and sex-change operation, in particular, are very not-safe-for-work and not-safe-for-the-squeamish.

A few other helpful suggestions we've compiled from personal research. Don't watch while eating a hamburger or steak. Don't send this link to your mom, even if she's a doctor. And do not, under any circumstances, send one of these to your co-workers with the subject line, New From Zooborns, as a joke. It's not funny.

See Also:

• Old, Brutal Surgeries Inspire Elegant Modern Devices
• Teenage Pitchers Volunteer for Tommy John Surgery
• Video: To Fight Diabetes, Vacuum-Seal the Stomach
• Human Surgeon Questions Robotic Surgery
• Teach Yourself Open-Heart Surgery
• Developing Force-Feedback Technology for Robot-Assisted Surgeries
• Investing in the Robotic-Surgery Monopoly

Image: flickr/kubina.

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 | 2 Apr 2009 | 11:21 pm

Poverty raises the risks of heart surgery

• Narrowing health gap relies on 'good start' in life
• Smoking, obesity and diabetes not only factors

People who live in deprived areas of the country are more likely to die after heart surgery than those from more affluent places, even after allowing for the effects of smoking, obesity and diabetes, a new study shows today.

The research suggests that health inequalities have deeper roots than lifestyle choices. An editorial that accompanies the study in the British Medical Journal says poverty needs to be tackled if the health of the entire nation is to improve.

"Poverty is commonly understood to be a financial problem, but it can also cause social, familial, cultural, educational, environmental, emotional and aspirational problems," say cardiologist Martin Denvir and cardiothoracic surgeon Vipin Zamvar from Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

"Narrowing the gap between the health of the rich and the poor can be achieved only by dealing with the root causes early on in life, and continuously throughout life. A good start - including decent education, adequate housing and employment opportunities - is most important. Health will follow."

The study was led by Domenico Pagano, consultant in cardiac surgery at the University Hospital Birmingham foundation trust.

The team which analysed data on 44,902 patients, with an average age of 65, who had heart surgery between 1997 and 2007 at five hospitals in Birmingham and north-west England. They based their assessment of each patient's social deprivation on their postcode in the 2001 census.

They found that 1,461 patients (3.25%) died in hospital after surgery, and 5,563 more (12.4%) died within five years. The chances of dying were closely linked to the patient's level of social deprivation.

Smoking, obesity and diabetes were all higher in socially-deprived areas, and increased a patient's chances of dying after heart surgery. Diabetes increased the risk by 31% and smoking by 29%.

However, when the researchers made allowance for these three complicating factors, they still found that people from deprived areas were more likely to die. Their findings indicate, they say, "that some additional factors related to deprivation might influence outcome".

They add: "In the face of easy access to effective health care, the real challenge lies in developing a coherent health-conscious approach to education and to the environment. This is essential to maximise the benefits of expensive and complex healthcare interventions such as cardiac surgery."

"Despite 10 years of progress, people from deprived areas still disproportionately shoulder the burden of cardiovascular disease. We should be aiming to reduce the level of deaths across the country to the current level in south-east England or below," said Dr Mike Knapton, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 2 Apr 2009 | 11:01 pm

UFO Hoax Was a Social Experiment (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Strange lights appeared over Morris County, New Jersey, on Jan. 5 this year. The bright red lights were first noticed in the night sky by an eleven-year-old girl, who pointed out three lights grouped together, and another pair some distance away.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Apr 2009 | 10:30 pm

Humor Wins Women Over

Guys like Seinfeld and Dudley Moore have a leg up on the rest of us.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2009 | 10:18 pm

The Great New Jersey UFO Hoax

When residents of Morris County, NJ saw bright lights in the night sky Jan. 5, many thought it was a UFO. But Joe Rudy and Chris Russo perpetrated the hoax with helium balloons and flares as part of a social experiment to create a media event.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2009 | 10:16 pm

Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics

In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum's swings.

Developed by Cornell researchers, the program deduced the natural laws without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry.

The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age, where computers try to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big and complex for the human mind. (See Wired magazine's July 2008 cover story on "The End of Science.")

"One of the biggest problems in science today is moving forward and finding the underlying principles in areas where there is lots and lots of data, but there's a theoretical gap. We don't know how things work," said Hod Lipson, the Cornell University computational researcher who co-wrote the program. "I think this is going to be an important tool."

Condensing rules from raw data has long been considered the province of human intuition, not machine intelligence. It could foreshadow an age in which scientists and programs work as equals to decipher datasets too complex for human analysis.

Lipson's program, co-designed with Cornell computational biologist Michael Schmidt and described in a paper published Thursday in Science, may represent a breakthrough in the old, unfulfilled quest to use artificial intelligence to discover mathematical theorems and scientific laws:

• Half a century ago, IBM's Herbert Gelernter authored a program that purportedly rediscovered Euclid's geometry theorems, but critics said it relied too much on programmer-supplied rules.
• In the 1970s, Douglas Lenat's Automated Mathematician automatically generated mathematical theorems, but they proved largely useless.
• Stanford University's Dendral project, was started in 1965 and used for two decades to extrapolate possible structures for organic molecules from chemical measurements gathered by NASA spacecraft. But it was ultimately unable to assess the likelihood of the various answers that it generated.
• The $100,000 Leibniz Prize, established in the 1980s, was promised to the first program to discover a theorem that "profoundly effects" math. It was never claimed.

But now artificial intelligence experts say Lipson and Schmidt may have fulfilled the field's elusive promise.

Unlike the Automated Mathematician and its heirs, their program is primed only with a set of simple, basic mathematical functions and the data it's asked to analyze. Unlike Dendral and its counterparts, it can winnow possible explanations into a likely few. And it comes at an opportune moment — scientists have vastly more data than theories to describe it.

Lipson and Schmidt designed their program to identify linked factors within a dataset fed to the program, then generate equations to describe their relationship. The dataset described the movements of simple mechanical systems like spring-loaded oscillators, single pendulums and double pendulums — mechanisms used by professors to illustrate physical laws.

The program started with near-random combinations of basic mathematical processes — addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and a few algebraic operators.

Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very familiar: the law of conservation of momentum, and Newton's second law of motion.

"It's a powerful approach," said University of Michigan computer scientist Martha Pollack, with "the potential to apply to any type of dynamical system." As possible fields of application, Pollack named environmental systems, weather patterns, population genetics, cosmology and oceanography. "Just about any natural science has the type of structure that would be amenable," she said.

Compared to laws likely to govern the brain or genome, the laws of motion discovered by the program are extremely simple. But the principles of Lipson and Schmidt's program should work at higher scales.

The researchers have already applied the program to recordings of individuals' physiological states and their levels of metabolites, the cellular proteins that collectively run our bodies but remain, molecule by molecule, largely uncharacterized — a perfect example of data lacking a theory.

Their results are still unpublished, but "we've found some interesting laws already, some laws that are not known," said Lipson. "What we're working on now is the next step — ways in which we can try to explain these equations, correlate them with existing knowledge, try to break these things down into components for which we have clues."

Lipson likened the quest to a "detective story" — a hint of the changing role of researchers in hybridized computer-human science. Programs produce sets of equations — describing the role of rainfall on a desert plateau, or air pollution in triggering asthma, or multitasking on cognitive function. Researchers test the equations, determine whether they're still incomplete or based on flawed data, use them to identify new questions, and apply them to messy reality.

The Human Genome Project, for example, produced a dataset largely impervious to traditional analysis. The function of nearly every gene depends on the function of other genes, which depend on still more genes, which change with time and place. The same level of complexity confronts researchers studying the body's myriad proteins, the human brain and even ecosystems.

"The rules are mathematical formulae that capture regularities in the system," said Pollack, "but the scientist needs to interpret those regularities. They need, for example, to explain" why an animal population is affected by changes in rainfall, and what might be done to protect it.

Michael Atherton, a University of Minnesota cognitive neuroscientist who recently predicted that computer intelligence would not soon supplant human artistic and scientific insight, said that the program "could be a great tool, in the same way visualization software is: It helps to generate perspectives that might not be intuitive."

However, said Atherton, "the creativity, expertise, and the recognition of importance is still dependent on human judgment. The main problem remains the same: how to codify a complex frame of reference."

"In the end, we still need a scientist to look at this and say, this is interesting," said Lipson.

Humans are, in other words, still important.

Citations: "Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data." By Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson.  Science, Vol. 324, April 3, 2009.

"Automating Science." By David Waltz and Bruce Buchanan. Science, Vol. 324, April 3, 2009.

See Also:

• Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself
• Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science
• I See Your Petaflop, and Raise You 19 More
• Humans No Match for Go Bot Overlords
• Open-Source Biomodels: Molecules First, Then the World
• Biologists Take Evolution Beyond Darwin — Way Beyond

Image: Science

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Apr 2009 | 10:09 pm

Scientists prove human heart can regenerate cells

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists said on Thursday they had shown the human body regenerates heart cells at a rate of about one percent a year, a discovery that could one day reduce the need for transplants.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Apr 2009 | 9:57 pm

Gene-engineered viruses build a better battery

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who have trained a tiny virus to do their bidding said on Thursday they made it build a more efficient and powerful lithium battery.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Apr 2009 | 8:25 pm

UFO Hoax Was a Social Experiment

Strange lights appeared over Morris County, New Jersey, on Jan. 5.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2009 | 8:14 pm

From Nuke Bomb Tests, Evidence of New Hearts

Twentieth-century nuclear bomb tests had an unexpected side effect: revealing the resilience of the human heart.

By measuring heart tissue levels of a carbon isotope absorbed by all living creatures after above-ground atom bomb tests during the 1950's, researchers found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, heart cells slowly replace themselves over the course of a lifetime.

Regeneration rates fall from about 1 percent per year at age 25 to .45 percent at age 75 — incremental, but sufficient over a lifetime to replace about half the cells in a heart. Though children and adolescents constantly produce new heart cells, researchers didn't know whether replenishment continued in adults, or how rapidly it might occur.

The turnover, described Thursday by Swedish researchers in Science, is enough to justify investigations into amplifying heart cell production in people with damaged hearts, rather than trying to inject new tissue.

"Stimulating endogeneous regenerative processes is attractive," write the researchers, "as it potentially could provide a non-invasive therapy" and avoid problems caused when immune systems reject tissue transplants.

The researchers' approach, write cardiologists Charles Murray and Richard Lee in an accompanying commentary, was clever. They measured levels of carbon-14, an isotope released during nuclear bomb testing, in heart tissue taken from people born between the end of World War II and the 1963 signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. 

"This unfortunate episode provides a unique opportunity to test cell population dynamics in human tissues," wrote Murray and Lee.

Correlating ages with isotope levels revealed the regeneration rate.

Let's just hope such studies are never possible again.

Citations: "Evidence for Cardiomyocyte Renewal in Human." By Olaf Bergmann, Ratan D. Bhardwaj, Samuel Bernard, SofiaZdunek, Fanie Barnabé-Heider, Stuart Walsh, Joel Zupicich, Kanar Alkass, BruceA. Buchholz, Henrik Druid, Stefan Jovinge, Jonas Frisén. Science, Vol. 324, April 3, 2009.

Turnover After the Fallout." By Charles E. Murray and Richard T. Lee. Science, Vol. 324, April 3, 2009.

See Also:

• Sea Cucumber Sheds Light on Healing Mechanisms
• Google Maps Mashup Combines Your Address, Nuclear Blast
• 'Regional' Nuclear War Would Cause Worldwide Destruction
• Artist Wants Nuke Waste Dump to Make New Universes
• Soviet Doomsday Device Still Armed and Ready

Image: Science/Mattias Karlen

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Apr 2009 | 7:31 pm

Robo-scientist's first findings

A UK team unveils the first machine to have independently discovered new scientific knowledge.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Apr 2009 | 7:23 pm

Virus battery could 'power cars'

Scientists genetically engineer viruses to build the crucial components of batteries.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Apr 2009 | 7:20 pm

Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself

For the first time, a robotic system has made a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input.

Scientists designed "Adam" to carry out the entire scientific process on its own: formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data, and deciding which experiments to run next.

"It's a major advance," says David Waltz of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University. "Science is being done here in a way that incorporates artificial intelligence. It's automating a part of the scientific process that hasn't been automated in the past."

The demonstration of autonomous science breaks major ground. Researchers have been automating portions of the scientific process for decades, using robotic laboratory instruments to screen for drugs and sequence genomes, but humans are usually responsible for forming the hypotheses and designing the experiments themselves. After the experiments are complete, the humans must exert themselves again to draw conclusions.

Meanwhile, some software programs can analyze data to generate hypotheses or conclusions, but they don't interact with the physical realm. Adam is the first automated system to complete the cycle from hypothesis, to experiment, to reformulated hypothesis without human intervention.

Adam's British designers, led by Ross King at Aberystwyth University in Wales, acknowledge that the robot's discoveries have been "of a modest kind" thus far. Its proving ground as a scientist has been the genome of baker's yeast, a popular laboratory species. Baker's yeast is one of the best understood organisms, but 10 to 15 percent of its roughly 6,000 genes have unknown functions. The scientists hoped Adam could shed light on some of these mystery genes.

They armed Adam with a model of yeast metabolism and a database of genes and proteins involved in metabolism in other species. Then they set the mechanical beast loose, only intervening to remove waste or replace consumed solutions. The results appear Thursday in Science.

Adam sought out gaps in the metabolism model, specifically orphan enzymes, which scientists think exist, but which haven't been linked to any parent genes. After selecting a desirable orphan, Adam scoured the database for similar enzymes in other organisms, along with the corresponding genes. Using this information, it hypothesized that similar genes in the yeast genome may code for the orphan enzyme.

The process might sound simple — and indeed, similar "scientific discovery" algorithms already exist — but Adam was only getting started. Still chugging along on its own, it designed experiments to test its hypotheses, and performed them using a fully automated array of centrifuges, incubators, pipettes, and growth analyzers.

After analyzing the data and running follow-up experiments — it can design and initiate over a thousand new experiments each day — Adam had uncovered three genes that together coded for an orphan enzyme. King's group confirmed the novel findings by hand.

Waltz thinks Adam will inspire other scientists. "They'll realize they can automate more of the process than they currently have. They can explore a wider range of possibilities without doing it all by hand."

King is already expanding his Robot Scientist fleet by producing Eve, which will autonomously design and screen drugs against malaria and schistosomiasis.

"Most drug discovery is already automated," says King, "but there's no intelligence — just brute force." King says Eve will use artificial intelligence to select which compounds to run, rather than just following a list.

If robotic scientists made their way into other labs, their human counterparts would not be out of a job anytime soon. If anything, they may find their work more exciting.

"There may be teams of humans and machines," says King. "Robots will be doing more and more of actual experimental work and simple cycles of hypothesis generation. Humans would migrate to more strategic and creative positions. How can we waste trained post-docs by making them pipette things in labs? It's crazy."

But with advances in artificial intelligence, it's conceivable that the role of robots would, in the more distant future, creep deeper into the human realm, progressing from lab technician to lab head. Robots may even be capable of performing supposed acts of genius, such as Einstein's conception of special relativity.

"There isn't any intrinsic reason why that wouldn't happen," says King. "I think there's a continuum between the really basic types of science that you'd get from Adam, and the things I can do, and then Einstein-type science. A computer can make beautiful chess moves, but it's not doing anything special. It's just doing more of the same thing. In my view that's what's going to happen in science."

King may already have a head start: Deep Blue could never have beaten Garry Kasparov without engineer Feng-Hsiung Hsu moving the pieces on its behalf.

See Also:

• Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses
• I, Nanny: Robot Babysitters Pose Dilemma
• "Autonomous" Heart Surgery Robot Mystery Solved
• Military AI Could Rule the Internet
• Humans No Match for Go Bot Overlords
• Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

Image: Jen Rowland

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 2 Apr 2009 | 7:15 pm

Robot scientists can think for themselves

LONDON (Reuters) - Watch out scientists -- you may be replaced by a robot.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Apr 2009 | 6:30 pm

Robot Scientist Makes Discovery

A robot named Adam carried out tests, interpreted results and made new discoveries.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Apr 2009 | 6:15 pm

Fear Erased in Rat Brains

Researchers develop technique that overwrites fearful memories, at least in rats.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2009 | 6:04 pm

Surprise! Adult Hearts Grow New Cells

Scientists have found the first evidence that new heart cells are made throughout a person's life.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Robo-Scientist Automates Understanding

Up 'til now, robots have only been good at generating data for humans to interpret. Aberystwyth University's new Biology Robot Scientist can do both, saving researchers a lot of time and headaches.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2009 | 5:48 pm

Europeans Urge Cleaning Up Space Junk

Sharing data on space junk will be a key first step in cleaning it up, Europeans say.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Apr 2009 | 4:35 pm

Birds Read Human Eyes

Jackdaw birds can read human eye cues and even follow gestures such as pointing.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2009 | 4:01 pm

Wild Jaguar's Euthanization Raises Ire

After a wild jaguar is accidentally captured and later euthanized, many cry foul.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Apr 2009 | 3:49 pm

Arctic Summers Could Be Ice-Free in 30 years

Arctic could be ice free during the summer in just30 years, new research suggests.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Apr 2009 | 3:27 pm

Stem cells may offer cure for deafness

LONDON (Reuters) - Stem cells may help deaf people hear again, according to early stage research by British scientists.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Apr 2009 | 3:21 pm

Executives concerned about U.S. dominance in space

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (Reuters) - The United States may lose its competitive edge in space unless it improves how it buys equipment, shores up its industrial base, and makes a firm commitment to human spaceflight, industry executives warned at a conference this week.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Apr 2009 | 3:07 pm

'Gore-Sat' Climate Probe May Get Second Chance

An Earth-monitoring satellite, nicknamed "Gore-sat," may get another chance at space.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Apr 2009 | 2:25 pm

Mud and Boulder Flows to Threaten Northwest

The peaks of Mt. Hood and Rainier could unleash dangerous flows as the climate warms.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Apr 2009 | 1:45 pm

Simon Singh's guide for the perplexed

What is a climate change numpty? What should you do if you come across one? Here are some simple guidelines

Having been a fan of Franny Armstrong's previous film, McLibel, I was keen to see her latest documentary, The Age of Stupid. While Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a rather dry and semi-academic look at climate change, The Age of Stupid is an emotional attempt to rally the troops. The fact that it preaches largely to the converted is not necessarily a bad thing if it encourages those who believe in climate change to become more vocal and more active.

But what about those who still do not believe in climate change? Who are they and how can they be persuaded to see sense?

I suspect that climate numpties (numpty (noun): a reckless, absent-minded or unwise person) are far more common than we might think, and they can be found in the most surprising of places.

This became apparent to me when I was having lunch one day with five physics undergraduates from a London college. They were clearly bright, devoted to physics and fully paid-up fans of the scientific method. However, not one of them was committed to the notions that climate change was happening, that it was largely caused by human activity (eg the burning of fossil fuels) and that there would be trouble ahead unless something changed.

I was baffled – why would little versions of me (for I was a physics undergraduate over two decades ago) not accept manmade climate change when it was backed by overwhelming evidence and endorsed by the vast majority of climate experts, Nobel Laureates and even David Attenborough?

Some of the students were simply suspicious of the media and seemed to think that the most sensible option was to take a contrary view to everything that appeared in the press. After all, the same press caused distress and spread misinformation about the MMR vaccine. Other students were suspicious of the government, believing that ministers always have an ulterior motive, such as finding a pretext to raise taxes.

In short, these students believed that it was smart to take the opposite view being pushed by the press, the government and the establishment in general. I suggested that the truly smart approach would be to examine the science and base their conclusions on the best available evidence, at which point I was astonished to learn that none of the students had seriously looked at the evidence for and against climate change.

After a short speech of admonishment that started with 'When I was your age …', I urged them to get up to speed on arguably the most important scientific issue of our age and pointed them to a few sources of information. My recommendations included The Hot Topic by Sir David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the UK government) and Dame Gabrielle Walker (well, she should be a dame, and she is certainly a brilliant science journalist). I also pointed them towards the New Scientist's special issue 'Climate change: a guide for the perplexed'.

And, as they were part of the YouTube generation, I encouraged them to devote nine and half minutes to watching Greg Craven's Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See, which is much more reasoned than it sounds. In fact, Craven, a high school physics teacher from Oregon, has created an entire library of witty and informative videos discussing climate change, which have been watched by millions of people around the world. I am now looking forward to his book What's the Worst That Could Happen? which will be published in the summer.

If these students looked at the evidence from these and other reliable resources, then I assume that they would see that severe manmade climate change is indeed a reality.

However, those who continue to deny this conclusion (confirmed climate numpties) may wish to consider my revised version of an observation made by the technology journalist Kenneth Cukier in a different context. I would suggest that people who take part in the climate change debate are all intelligent, honourable and reject manmade climate change, but they never possess more than two of these qualities at once.

For example, columnists who regularly reject climate change possess the third quality, which means they cannot be both intelligent and honourable. Next time you read a climate numpty columnist you might want to think about whether he or she is dishonourable or unintelligent. The divide is probably 50/50.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 2 Apr 2009 | 12:52 pm

Earth Watch

G20 climate puts protesters and sceptics in the cold
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Apr 2009 | 12:23 pm

Scientist to study plant stress

A Dundee scientist is given £1m to study plant stress and how they can survive things like climate change.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Apr 2009 | 11:46 am