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Soybean Component Reduces Menopause EffectsSoy aglycons of isoflavone (SAI), a group of soybean constituent chemicals, have been shown to promote health in a rat model of the menopause. The research shows how dietary supplementation with SAI lowers cholesterol, increases the antioxidative properties of the liver and prevents degeneration of the vaginal lining.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm New Drug Shows Promise In Treating Drug-resistant Prostate CancerA new therapy for metastatic prostate cancer has shown considerable promise in early clinical trials involving patients whose disease has become resistant to current drugs. Chemists and biologists have created a new drug to treat a particularly lethal form of prostate cancer: castration resistant prostate cancer.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm Ancestors Of African Pygmies And Neighboring Farmers Separated Around 60,000 Years AgoAll African Pygmies, inhabiting a large territory extending west-to-east along Central Africa, descend from a unique population who lived around 20,000 years ago, according to a new study. The research concludes that the ancestors of present-day African Pygmies and farmers separated ~60,000 years ago.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm How Tumor Cells MoveIf cancer cells lack a certain protein, it could be much easier for them to penetrate healthy body tissue, the first step towards forming metastases. Scientists have discovered the previously unknown cell signal factor SCAI (suppressor of cancer cell invasion).Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm Red-Hot Research Could Lead To New MaterialsRecent experiments to create a fast-reacting explosive by concocting it at the nanoscopic level could result in more spectacular firework displays. But more impressive to the researchers, the method used to mix chemicals at that tiny scale could lead to new strong porous materials for high temperature applications, from thermal insulation in jet engines to industrial chemical reactors.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm Process By Which Cells 'Hide' Potentially Dangerous DNA Segments ExplainedHeterochromatin is the super-condensed portion of the cell's genetic material that hides unneeded genes and potentially dangerous DNA sequences such as transposons from the cell's DNA-activating machinery. Scientists have now identified a critical requirement for heterochromatin assembly. They show that it depends on the strength with which a protein called Chp1 binds to a specific site on a histone protein that is attached to the DNA double helix.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm Scientists Test System To Steer Drivers Away From Dangerous WeatherScientists are testing an innovative technological system in the Detroit area this month that ultimately will help protect drivers from being surprised by black ice, fog, and other hazardous weather conditions.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 9:00 am Test Predicts Who Will Develop End-stage Renal DiseaseMeasuring kidney function by assessing two different factors -- glomerular filtration rate and urinary albumin levels -- helps determine which patients with chronic kidney disease will develop end-stage renal disease, according to a new study. This combination test could help physicians identify patients at high risk of serious kidney trouble and allow them to intervene at an early stage.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 9:00 am Some Massive Galaxies May Be Relatively New: Discovery Challenges Galaxy Formation TheoriesAstronomer have found a sample of massive galaxies with properties that suggest that they may have formed relatively recently. This would run counter to the widely-held belief that massive, luminous galaxies (like our own Milky Way Galaxy) began their formation and evolution shortly after the Big Bang, some 13 billion years ago.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 9:00 am HIV Treatment: Early Administration Of Antiretroviral Therapy Can Improve SurvivalThe first antiretroviral treatments appeared in 1996. Since then, new and better drugs have been discovered that have almost turned AIDS into a chronic disease. Nevertheless, there is still room to improve the performance of the the therapeutic strategies used in clinical practice. A new study suggests that early administration of antiretroviral treatment reduces the rate of AIDS development and death in HIV-positive patients by 28%.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 9:00 am NASA to announce module name on `Colbert Report' (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 5:30 am Pa. forest drilling procedure suit settled (AP)AP - The U.S. Forest Service will review and allow public comment on gas and oil drilling projects in the Allegheny National Forest under a settlement reached with environmental groups.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Apr 2009 | 2:44 am Soya can reduce bowel cancer risk• Study shows 'significant' effect, notably for over-50s Women who drink soya lattes, eat tofu sausages and prefer soy to cows' milk may be helping to reduce their risk of getting bowel cancer, new research suggests. Those, especially over-50s, who consume a lot of soy can "significantly" cut their risk of developing the disease, according to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Researchers who studied the diet and health of 68,412 women aged 40-70 in Shanghai concluded: "After adjustment for age, birth calendar year and total energy intake, consumption of soy foods was significantly associated with a decreased risk of colorectal cancer. We found that risk of colorectal cancer decreased with increasing soy food intake, primarily among postmenopausal women. "The risk decreased more than 30% among women who were in the top tertile [third] of soy food intake compared with women in the bottom tertile of soy food intake," said the authors, from the Vanderbilt University school of medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, led by Gong Yang. Bowel cancer is the second most lethal form of the disease affecting women in the UK after breast cancer, killing 16,600 each year and accounting for just over one in 10 of all cases of cancer among females, according to Cancer Research UK figures. The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF), global experts in preventing the disease, said the results were exciting. Dr Panagiota Mitrou, its science programme manager, said: "These findings are exciting because this is a well designed study carried out where a lot of soy food is eaten and it is consumed at different levels. This means it is a good place to find out how soy affects cancer risk. The study shows that the risk of bowel cancer is decreased with increasing soy intake and this is especially the case for postmenopausal women." The findings may help explain why many fewer people in countries such as China and Japan, where soy is a staple part of the diet, develop bowel cancer compared with Western countries, where soy consumption is low. Soybeans are eaten whole boiled with salt, while soya is widely used, for example as an alternative to dairy produce in products such as milk, yogurt and cream cheese. There is also a niche market in soy supplements for those convinced of its healthy properties. It has also been credited with helping to reduce levels of cholesterol. However, the WCRF would like to see the findings repeated among non-Asian women, who have a different genetic background and different lifestyles from those in the study, before it could give any public health advice based on the new research, added Mitrou. "If we were able to repeat these findings in this country, it would mean that including things like tofu and soya beans in their diet would be something positive that women could do to reduce their risk of bowel cancer." The best ways to prevent cancer were to eat a plant-based diet without much salt or alcohol, be physically active and maintain a healthy weight, she added. Separate research last week, in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism, suggested that soybean chemicals called soy aglycons of isoflavone may help reduce the effects of the menopause. The researchers, from Taiwan, said dietary soy supplementation could ultimately prove to be an effective alternative to hormone replacement therapy, which has been linked to increased cancer risk. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 10 Apr 2009 | 11:01 pm Two EDF executives suspended in Greenpeace affair (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Apr 2009 | 10:42 pm NASA to unveil space station name on Colbert show (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Apr 2009 | 10:23 pm The Messy Future of Memory-Editing Drugs
The development of a drug that controls a chemical used to form memories sparked heady scientific and philosophical speculation this week. Granted, the drug has only been tested in rats, but other memory-blunting drugs are being tried in soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. It might not be long before memories are pharmaceutically targeted, just as moods are now. Some think this represents an opportunity to eliminate the crippling psychic effects of past trauma. Others see an ill-advised chemical intrusion into an essential human facility that threatens to replace our ability to understand and cope with life's inevitabilities. Oxford University neuroethicist Anders Sandberg spoke with Wired.com about the future of memory-editing drugs. In some ways, said Sandberg, our memories are already being altered. We just don't realize it. Anders Sandberg: A lot of discussion is based on the false premise that they'll work as well as they would in a science fiction story. In practice, well-studied, well-understood drugs like aspirin have side effects that can be annoying or even dangerous. I think the same thing will go for memory editing. Wired.com: How selective will memory editing be? Sandberg: Current research seems to suggest that it can be pretty specific, but there will be side effects. It may not even be that you forget other memories. Small, false memories could be created. And we're probably not going to be able to predict that before we actually try them. Wired.com: What's the right way to test the drugs? Sandberg: The cautious approach works. Right now, there are small clinical trials using propranolol to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a good start. We should also find better ways of doing the trials, because we don't really know what we're looking for. When testing a cancer drug, we look at side effects in terms of toxicity. Here we might want to look at all aspects of thinking, which is really hard, because you can't test for all of them. In the future, since we're getting more technological forms of recording and documenting our lives, those will have a bigger part in testing the drugs. We'll be able to ask, How does this help in everyday life? How often do you get "tip of the tongue" phenomena? Does it increase in relation to the drug? Wired.com: It seems that it would be easy to test "tip of the tongue" drug effects on the sorts of small things one recalls on an everyday basis. But what if it's old, infrequently recalled but still-important memories that are threatened by side effects? Sandberg: It's pretty messy to determine what is an important memory to us. They quite often crop up, but without us consciously realizing that we're thinking of the memory. That's probably good news, as every time you recall a memory, you also tend to strengthen it. Wired.com: How likely is the manipulation of these fundamental memories? Sandberg: Big memories, with lots of connections to other things we've done, will probably be messy to deal with. But I don't think those are the memories that people want to give up. Most people would want to edit memories that impair them. Of course, if we want to tweak memories to look better to ourselves, we might get a weird concept of self. Wired.com: I've asked about memory removal — but should the discussion involve adding memories, too? Sandberg: People are more worried about deletion. We have a preoccupation with amnesia, and are more fearful of losing something than adding falsehoods. The problem is that it's the falsehoods that really mess you up. If you don't know something, you can look it up, remedy your lack of information. But if you believe something falsely, that might make you act much more erroneously. You can imagine someone modifying their memories of war to make them look less cowardly and more brave. Now they'll think they're a brave person. At that point, you end up with the interesting question of whether, in a crisis situation, they would now be brave. Wired.com: You use another example of memory-editing drugs for soldiers in your article with S. Matthew Liao, that if the memory of a mistaken action is erased, a soldier might not learn from his remorse. Sandberg: To some extent, we already have to deal with this. My grandfather's story of having been in the Finnish winter war as a volunteer shifted over time. He didn't become much braver from year to year, but there was a difference between the earlier and later versions. We can't trust our memories. But on the other hand, our memories are the basis for most of our decisions. We take it as a given that we can trust them, which is problematic. Wired.com: But this fluidity of memory at least exists in an organic framework. Might we lose something in the transition to an abrupt, directed fluidity? Sandberg: There's some truth to that. We have authentic fake memories, in a sense. My grandfather might have made his memories a bit more brave over time, but that was affected by his personality and his other circumstances, and tied to who he was. If he just went to the memory clinic and wanted to have won the battle, that would be more jarring. If you do that kind of jarring change, and it doesn't connect to anything else in the personality, it's probably not going to work that well. Wired.com: In your article, you also bring up forgiveness. If we no longer remember when someone has wronged us, we might not learn to forgive them, and that's an important social ability. Sandberg: My co-author is more concerned than I am, but I do think there's something interesting going on with forgiveness. It's psychological, emotional and moral — a complex can of worms. I can see problems, not from a moral standpoint, but legal. What if I hit you with my car, and to prevent PTSD you take propranolol, and afterwards in court think it wasn't too serious? A clever lawyer might argue that the victim's lack of concern means the crime should be disregarded. I'm convinced that we're going to see a lot of interesting legal cases in the next few years, as neuroscience gets involved. People tend to believe witnesses. Suppose a witness says, "I'd just been taking my Ritalin" — should we believe him more, because we've got an enhanced memory? And if a witness has been taking a drug to impair memory, is that a reason to believe that her account is not true? With this kind of neuroscientific evidence, it's very early to tell what we can trust. We need to do actual experiments and see measure how drugs enhance or impair memory, or more problematically, introduce a bias. Some drugs might enhance emotional memories over unemotional, or vice versa. Wired.com: Is it paranoid to worry that someday people will be stuck drifting in a sea of shifting and unreliable memories? Sandberg: I think we're already in this sea, but we don't notice it most of the time. Most people think, "I've got a slightly bad memory." Then they completely trust what they remember, even when it's completely unreliable. Maybe all this is good, because it forces us to recognize that the nature of our memory is quite changeable. See Also:
Image: Stanford University/National Institutes of Health Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 10 Apr 2009 | 10:10 pm Study: Biofuel Threatens Water Supplies (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - The production of bioethanol may use up to three times as much water as previously thought, a new study finds, becoming the latest work that could burst the biofuel bubble.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Apr 2009 | 9:11 pm Before Memory Science, There Was Science Fiction
Scientists "are now poised to alter the understanding of human nature in ways artists and writers have not," wrote Benedict Carey earlier this week in a New York Times feature on the quest for memory-erasing drugs. Carey clearly never read much science fiction. Scientists have made extraordinary strides on how memories are stored and activated, and developed techniques that could someday be used to alter them. But authors like Stanislaw Lem and Bruce Sterling anticipated and in some ways outpaced their work, using fiction to explore how memory alteration might change our lives. "I think artists and writers are much more aware of the problems of memory than most people are," said Anders Sandberg, an Oxford University neuroethicist with whom I spoke yesterday about the future of memory science. Here are some of his favorite fictional treatments of the subject, and a few of my own. Add yours below. The Golden Age by John Wright: The novel's posthuman protagonist has deleted the last 300 years of his memories — including, of course, the memory of doing so. As he tries to reconstruct why, he learns that everyone else deleted their memories of him as well. It's his choice to restore them — but as Sandberg explained, "there's hell to pay." "Fuenes, the Memorious" by Jorge Luis Borges: Appearing in the collection Ficciones, the story features the opposite of memory erasure: the acquisition of a hyper-powerful memory, making unnecessary the need for generalization or the suppression of details. Stories and novels by Philip K. Dick: From "Paycheck" to A Scanner Darkly and We Can Remember it for you Wholesale, many of Dick's efforts involved the implications of memory's fluidity. "Whenever we do something weird to brains, he's been there long before," said Sandberg of the soft-hearted dystopian. Kallocain by Anita Boye:
This little-known piece of Swedish sci-fi was written in 1940 and
combined truth-modifying chemicals with totalitarian forces seen in
Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. A full English translation is available online. Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson: In the third book of the Mars trilogy, humans have managed not only to terraform the no-longer-Red Planet, but radically extend their own lifespans. But it's easier to preserve bodies than minds, and a few centuries of memories can be a burden. The Artificial Kid by Bruce Sterling: The protagonist of the now-famous futurist's second novel must negotiate between who he was and what he could become. See Also:
Video: CBS Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 10 Apr 2009 | 7:22 pm Students Venture into Hearts of Violent StormsResearchers brave the wind, rain, and hail, to set up instruments to collect valuable data for understanding extreme weather events.Source: Livescience.com | 10 Apr 2009 | 7:18 pm 7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs
You might think of nuclear weapons as just the most fearsome weapon ever invented by humans, but that would be seriously underplaying their versatility. Nuclear weapons aren't only good for leveling cities, they've also been used throughout the last 50 years for a variety of civilian purposes like stimulating natural gas production — and all kinds of innovative proposals have been slapped on the table to harness the awesome power of the nuclear blast for economic benefit. The U.S. government sponsored Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to come up with and research ideas for what was known as Project Plowshare (see video). While Livermore scientists tested new ideas through about a dozen explosions, Soviet scientists had a much larger program known as "Program No. 7 — Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy" which detonated more than 120 nukes to aid civilian aims. Here's a rundown of ideas, both tried or just proposed, for how we could put nuclear weapons to work outside war. After all, the world's got at least 23,000+ warheads just laying about.
Creating a Harbor, or Just a Hole If there is one thing nuclear weapons have been proven to do, it's make big holes, and some scientists realized that could be a business proposition. As Livermore Lab physicist Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb and a backer of Plowshare, wrote in 1963: "The discussion of the peaceful applications of nuclear explosives has produced some concrete ideas that surely can be realized and it has also produced some promising possibilities which for the time being we must consider as dreams. First, we shall mention those applications about which we can feel quite sure. They boil down to a single fact: We can make a hole in the earth — if anybody wants to do that." And, as Teller continues, "as a matter of fact, there are some important reasons why one should want to move big quantities of earth." Great big holes could be useful for mining, reservoir creation, or even creating, say a new Panama Canal.
Creating a New Panama Canal There's long been a problem with that engineering marvel of the early 20th century, the Panama Canal: It's just too small. For decades, people floated plans to build a bigger, better canal that could accommodate supertankers and our other outsize transportation vehicles. No less a leader than President John F. Kennedy called for looking into the feasibility of using nuclear explosions to excavate such a canal. A declassified letter (.pdf) between Atomic Energy Commission employees reads:
Natural Gas Exploration One of the most extensive Plowshare programs was an attempt to increase natural gas production. Beginning in the mid-1960s, scientists used targeted nuclear explosions to stimulate natural gas production by fracturing the rocks in which the gas was locked to make them more permeable. It worked well enough to warrant progressively larger tryouts. In 1967 Time described the first demonstration, Project Gasbuggy in New Mexico, like this:
The natural gas work culminated in 1973 with the explosion of three 33-kiloton bombs thousands of feet underground in Rio Blanco, Colorado. The key problem was that the gas this produced had measurable amounts of radioactivity. Not surprisingly, that created political problems for the method, even though the scientists involved in the experiments claimed the radiation would not be detrimental to public health.
Any time energy prices go up, people start talking about transforming the carbon-rich sedimentary rocks of the intermountain West, known as oil shale, into liquid fuels. The problem is it costs a lot of energy and money to move all that rock and extract the useful stuff (kerogen). Solution: thermonuclear explosions. In 1970, Milo Nordyke, a Livermore physicist in the Plowshare program, filed a patent for a Nuclear Explosive Method for Stimulating Hydrocarbon Production from Petroliferous Formations. "It never went into the field, but we actually did experiments filling up a large chamber with oil shale and seeing how you could get the oil out," Nordyke said.
Disposing of Nuclear Waste One of the most incredible proposed applications of a nuclear explosion is to help store nuclear waste itself. The idea was detailed in a 1973 article in Science:
What could possibly go wrong with setting off a nuclear explosion underneath a nuclear waste processing plant? Ultimately, despite its creativity, the plan was abandoned. Building such a cavity, though, was quite possible, as you can see in this video from the early operation Project Gnome in New Mexico. Nordyke actually walked the cavern in the video. "I was one of the lucky people who got to go into that cavern," he said. "The week after I went in there, they shut the place down." Why was it possible for people to walk around a few months after the explosion? Nordyke said the Plowshare team designed a series of weapons that contained very little fissionable material, which is what makes radioactivity dangerous to humans. "For excavation, we put a lot of time and effort and money into developing nuclear explosives which had minimal fissionable material so that you could carry out a 100-kiloton cratering explosion and release the radioactivity equivalent to a 20-ton explosive of fissionable material," Nordyke said. But despite the technical success of the Plowshare program, Nordyke doesn't see nuclear weapons being used for excavation or mining anytime soon because it doesn't seem politically feasible. "I think its time came and went," he said. "I think reconciling it with the enhanced environmental concerns today and the inherent association with weapons is difficult."
Human Spaceflight The large version of the ship could have housed a city full of people and would have disposed of 1,000 nuclear bombs in one go. All sorts of declassified documents about the project are now available online at the NASA Technical Reports Server.
Defending Earth From an Asteroid Many scientists aren't so sure that nuclear weapons are the best way to defend Earth from a close call with a world-ending asteroid, but NASA maintains that in some circumstances, nuclear weapons could save the Earth.
See Also:
Image 1: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Video 1: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Video 2: Nevada Test Site video collection. 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 | 10 Apr 2009 | 6:31 pm Today's Pirates Hearken to 'Golden Age'Sophisticated pirates who hijack trade ships cause billions of dollars in losses every year.Source: Livescience.com | 10 Apr 2009 | 5:12 pm US-Russian crew says no disputes on space station (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Apr 2009 | 3:26 pm Who Was Jesus, the Man?His story is perhaps the most famous on Earth, yet how much is known about Jesus of Nazareth?Source: Livescience.com | 10 Apr 2009 | 1:03 pm Losing It: Why Self-Control Is Not NaturalIt takes a lot to live with people day after day and not kill them.Source: Livescience.com | 10 Apr 2009 | 1:02 pm Water monitor eyes farm runoff in Gulf of Mexico (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Apr 2009 | 12:07 pm
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