Oral Contraceptives Impair Muscle Gains In Young Women

Many active young women use oral contraceptives yet the effect on body composition and exercise performance has not been thoroughly studied. A new study finds that oral contraceptive use impairs muscle gains in young women, and is associated with lower hormone levels.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Solar Systems Around Dead Suns?

Astronomers have found that at least 1 in 100 white dwarf stars show evidence of orbiting asteroids and rocky planets, suggesting these objects once hosted solar systems similar to our own.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Chewing Gum Reduces Snack Cravings And Decreases Consumption Of Sweet Snacks

Men and women who chewed Extra sugar-free gum three times hourly in the afternoon chose and consumed less snacks and specifically, less sweet snacks than they did when they did not chew gum. They still reached for a variety of snacks provided but the decrease in overall snack intake was significant at 40 calories and sweet snack intake specifically was significantly lowered by 60 calories.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Blueberries May Help Reduce Belly Fat, Diabetes Risk

Could eating blueberries help get rid of belly fat? And could a blueberry-enriched diet stem the conditions that lead to diabetes? A new University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center study suggests so.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

March 2009 Tenth Warmest On Record For Global Temperatures

The combined global land and ocean surface average temperature for March 2009 was the 10th warmest since records began in 1880, according to an analysis by NOAA.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Urine Test May Determine If A Smoker Is At Risk For Lung Cancer

Researchers may have uncovered why lung cancer afflicts some smokers and not others.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 6:00 pm

Measuring The Immeasurable: Bond Strength Of Materials Linked To Heat Transfer

The speed at which heat moves between two materials touching each other is a potent indicator of how strongly they are bonded to each other, according to a new study. Additionally, the study shows that this flow of heat from one material to another, in this case one solid and one liquid, can be dramatically altered by "painting" a thin atomic layer between materials.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

Biodegradable Gel Being Studied As Treatment For Esophageal Cancer

Gastroenterologists are studying the safety and efficacy of a new system for delivering chemotherapy for patients with esophageal cancer, a rare, but deadly disease that attacks the throat. The unique drug therapy delivers a highly concentrated dose of chemotherapy injected directly on to the hard-to-reach tumors in the esophagus nonsurgically. Researchers are trying to determine if the gel treatment can reduce the size of the cancerous tumors.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

New Drug Achieves Pancreatic Cancer Tumor Remission And Prevents Recurrence, Study Suggests

Pancreatic cancer remains one of the deadliest cancers, but researchers may have found a combination therapy to reduce cancer stem cells and stop pancreatic cancer growth. Treatment with gemcitabine and tigatuzumab resulted in the reduction of pancreatic cancer stem cells, caused tumor remission, and significantly increased time-to-tumor progression in 50 percent of treated cases from a median of 54 days to 103 days.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

How To Deflect Asteroids And Save Earth

You may want to thank David French in advance. Because, in the event that a comet or asteroid comes hurtling toward Earth, he may be the guy responsible for saving the planet. He has determined a way to effectively divert asteroids and other threatening objects from impacting Earth by attaching a long tether and ballast to the incoming object.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 3:00 pm

New delay for European space telescope rocket (AP)

AP - European satellite launcher Arianespace SA on Monday announced a new delay in the launch of a space telescope and a spacecraft meant to gather information about the Big Bang cosmic explosion.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 11:46 am

Unsung heroes

Why local activists are showing us the way forward
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Apr 2009 | 11:09 am

Garden impossible

How to grow trees in one of the driest places on Earth?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Apr 2009 | 10:18 am

Jeremy Paxman pledges to donate brain for Parkinson's disease research

Newsnight presenter hopes to encourage other donors and help search for a cure

Jeremy Paxman has agreed to donate his brain for research into Parkinson's disease after he dies, as part of a new campaign to encourage others to do the same.

The Newsnight presenter said signing up as a donor could help find a cure for the disease, which affects 120,000 people in the UK, or one in 500.

His pledge is aimed at raising awareness of a campaign by the Parkinson's Disease Society to persuade 1,000 other people to sign up as brain donors by the end of the year.

"Hard to imagine anyone might want your old brain, isn't it? But it's not as if you'll be needing it yourself," said Paxman, who is also the quizmaster of University Challenge.

He added: "There's currently no cure for Parkinson's, which affects 120,000 people. If you register to donate your brain, you can help to find a cure."

The actor Jane Asher, who is president of the society, and the broadcaster John Stapleton have also pledged to donate their brains after death.

A new poll carried out for the society found 27% of people have not thought about donating their brain and only 7% were comfortable with the idea. More than 60% said they would be comfortable about donating their heart or kidneys.

The Parkinson's Disease Society runs a brain bank at Hammersmith hospital in west London.

Asher, whose brother-in-law has been diagnosed with Parkinson's, said: "I've visited the Parkinson's brain bank and seen what fantastic work is going on there.

"Now we need a greater awareness of the benefits of brain donation so that more people come forward to register with us. Scientific research on brains both with and without Parkinson's is essential.

"It's vital that we secure more potential donors as this will help us move closer to a cure for what can be a debilitating and distressing condition."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 20 Apr 2009 | 9:54 am

Grizzly bears spreading through yellowstone region (AP)

AP - Hunters are killing grizzly bears in record numbers around Yellowstone National Park and researchers say the once-endangered predator is expanding across the region.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 9:41 am

AP IMPACT: Tons of released drugs taint US water (AP)

AP - U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water — contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated Press investigation.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 20 Apr 2009 | 8:45 am

Switch-on success for superscope

One of the world's most powerful telescope arrays, which will provide a new view of the Universe, gets under way.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Apr 2009 | 4:43 am

Why human and planetary doctors are urging a return to the 1970s

Getting back to the slim, trim days of the 1970s would help to cut carbon emissions and tackle climate change, researchers say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 20 Apr 2009 | 12:28 am

Orion hides busy star "nursery": astronomers

LONDON (Reuters) - The constellation Orion hides a busy stellar nursery, crowded with young stars blasting jets of gas in all directions, astronomers reported on Sunday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 19 Apr 2009 | 11:20 pm

Learning disability genes found

A group of genes that cause learning disabilities in boys has been discovered in a survey of families known to have a history of mental impairment.

Scientists linked nine genes to poor brain development in young men after analysing the genetic makeup of more than 200 families. The findings could help in the development of screening programmes for couples that are at risk of passing on faulty genes to their children.

All of the abnormal genes found in the study were on the X chromosome, which boys always inherit from their mothers. Girls inherit two copies of the X chromosome, one from each parent.

Poor brain development causes learning disabilities in 2% to 3% of the population, but the problem is more prevalent in males. In women, a faulty gene on one X chromosome is counteracted by a healthy copy. The research, led by scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, adds to 70 other genes on the X chromosome that have already been linked to abnormal brain development in boys.

The team recruited 208 families for the study. The families were chosen because they had at least two related males who were affected by learning disorders.

In the majority of cases, the men who took part in the study showed no other signs of developmental problems apart from their learning disability, according to a report in Nature Genetics.

Men who carry the faulty genes can only pass them on through their X chromosome to their daughters. These girls are unlikely to be affected themselves, but will be carriers and so at risk of passing them on to their own children.

"Although there is no obvious cure for these conditions, knowing more about the genes involved will lead to better screening and much more informed counselling," said Patrick Tarpey, a geneticist and lead author on the study.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 19 Apr 2009 | 11:01 pm

Obesity bumps up carbon emissions

High rates of obesity in richer countries cause up to 1bn extra tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year, compared with countries with leaner populations, according to a study that assesses the additional food and fuel requirements of the overweight. The finding is particularly worrying, scientists say, because obesity is on the rise in many rich nations.

"Population fatness has an environmental impact," said Phil Edwards, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "We're all being told to stay fit and keep our weight down because it's good for our health. The important thing is that staying slim is good for your health and for the health of the planet."

The study, carried out by Edwards and Ian Roberts, is published today in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

In their model, the researchers compared a population of 1 billion lean people, with weight distributions equivalent to a country such as Vietnam, with 1 billion people from richer countries, such as the US, where about 40% of the population is classified obese.

The fatter population needed 19% more food energy for its energy requirements, they found. They also factored in greater car use by the overweight. "The heavier our bodies become the harder it is to move about in them and the more dependent we become on cars," they wrote.

The greenhouse gas emissions from food production and car travel for the fatter billion people were estimated at between 0.4bn and 1bn extra tonnes a year. That is a significant amount in comparison with the world's total emissions of 27bn tonnes in 2004.

Last September the world's leading authority on climate change suggested the people should eat less meat, because meat production causes 20% of global emissions. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said consumers should begin with one meat-free day a week.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 19 Apr 2009 | 11:01 pm

Obituary: Olivia Harris

Anthropologist notable for outstanding work in Bolivia's highlands

Olivia Harris, who has died suddenly of cancer aged 60, was professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and one of the finest anthropologists in Europe. A specialist in highland Bolivia, she published studies on gender, kinship, feminist theory, law, work, money, death and, most recently, time.

Olivia worked for most of her career at Goldsmiths College, London University, where in 1986 she co-founded the anthropology department. Much sought after as a teacher - Olivia held visiting positions at Chicago and Oslo universities - she became chair of the LSE's department of anthropology in 2005.

Her early death deprives us of the work she might have done, but To Make the Earth Bear Fruit: Ethnographic Essays on Fertility, Work and Gender in Highland Bolivia (2000) provides a selection of her essays. A remarkable work of ethno-history, which she co-authored with Tristan Platt and Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne and which was published in La Paz, is Qaraqara Charka: Mallku, Inka y Rey en la provincia de Charcas (2006).

This Anglo-French collaboration of 20 years shows her to be an outstanding social scientist and yielded a text of 1,000 pages, including annotated transcripts of documents and interpretative essays on the Inca and Spanish colonisation of what is today Bolivia. Rich in its revisionist approaches to ethno-history and methodology, it sold out within weeks. Its full intellectual impact has yet to be felt.

The fourth child of Sir Ronald Harris, then a senior civil servant in the Cabinet Office, and his wife Julia, Olivia spent her childhood in the greenbelt comfort of Stoke D'Abernon, Surrey. At seven, she lost her mother to cancer, which, together with her father's second marriage and the expansion of the household's complement of children to six, sharpened her powers of observation and reflection.

Her love of music and gifts as a violinist can be traced to her early childhood. She continued to play quartets throughout her life, albeit with intervals caused by absences in the Andes, where compensation was found in the folk-dances that she gleefully joined even as the ethnographer in her was deconstructing them symbolically.

Olivia was educated at Benenden public school in Kent. She then read greats (classics) at St Anne's, Oxford. She also engaged fully with the late 1960s spirit of liberation. Her feminism included a sensibility towards the wider dynamics of gender relations which was present in much of her later writing.

Perhaps an even sharper existential rupture with her background came with her registration as a postgraduate at the LSE anthropology department, and two years of fieldwork (1972-74) in a very poor region of Potosí, Bolivia. As well as the rigours of participant observation in Aymara-speaking communities, often warring with each other over seemingly valueless tracts of wilderness, Harris had to contend with the threats faced by foreign democrats under General Hugo Banzer's dictatorship. At the same time, she found many of the paradigms of British anthropology inapplicable to the highly complex peasant society in which she was living.

What emerged from that experience was not the standard PhD monograph. Instead there were a series of spirited and sophisticated collaborative studies that bore the imprint of Harris's teachers, particularly Maurice Bloch, her colleagues in the field, especially Xavier Albó and Tristan Platt, and the Cornell-based anthropologist John Murra.

In her obituary of Murra - published in this paper in November 2006 - Harris wrote that his research on the Inca state was not attuned "to the exotic cosmology, but to the far more pragmatic question of how this unique polity was organised". She shared Murra's (still unfashionable) view that the Spanish "Conquest" never amounted to a comprehensive subjugation of pre-Columbian civilisation. "For him," she wrote, "what had happened was an invasion - conquest implied a legitimisation of the new order."

Her own work embodied a keen interest in metaphysical phenomena. The analysis of the concept of pachakuti (time-shift) undertaken with Bouysse-Cassagne reveals much about the cosmology underlying popular support for Evo Morales and his presidency in Bolivia today, and it provided a springboard for a methodological critique of the work of Fernand Braudel.

For some, this work emerged too slowly. Olivia happily admitted that her own timekeeping was lamentable, but, once she joined Goldmsiths in 1979, it was justified by the stream of administrative meetings and teaching responsibilities that augmented an array of extra-curricular political and social commitments.

Steeled by her experience promoting the discipline - she served as vice-president of the Royal Anthropology Society and on the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise - Olivia deftly managed the academic jargon required to secure scholarships for a rising number of research students; at her death she had supervised more than a dozen PhDs to completion with an equal number under way. Many, one senses, were attracted not just by the sharpest of minds but also by that warm, almost girlish register that entered her voice when curiosity was piqued and she was working up an idea in company. The professorship awarded in 2000 coincided with publication of To Make the Earth Bear Fruit by the University's Institute of Latin American Studies, where she taught on a popular master's course. It was when the composition of Qaraqara Charka was finishing that Olivia returned to the LSE.

Olivia's home in north London was a place of great conviviality. Harry Lubasz, the historian with whom she shared her home for the last two decades and whom she married days before her death, enriched her life with a love that feigned wry bemusement to veil adoration. The arrival of Marina into that household 14 years ago fulfilled a long-held desire for a truly intergenerational family and spread joy well beyond the confines of Pyrland Road.

Harry and Marina survive her.

• Olivia Jane Harris, anthropologist, born 26 August 1948; died 9 April 2009

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 19 Apr 2009 | 11:01 pm

Gene discovery sheds light on childhood cancer (Reuters)

Reuters - Researchers have found an unexpected genetic mutation that causes a rare type of early childhood cancer, and said on Sunday it represents a whole new mechanism for the development of cancer.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Apr 2009 | 9:09 pm

Agreement reached on common plug for electric cars (AFP)

AFP - Leading automotive and energy companies have reached agreement on a common "plug" to recharge electric cars, a spokeswoman for German energy company RWE said Sunday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Apr 2009 | 8:54 pm

Archaeologists hunt for Cleopatra's tomb in Egypt

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt (Reuters) - High on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, buried deep under the crumbling limestone of a temple to the goddess Isis, archaeologists believe the body of Queen Cleopatra may lie.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 19 Apr 2009 | 8:43 pm

Bone drugs may protect against radiation exposure

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Drugs commonly used to strengthen bones to prevent osteoporosis may protect people exposed to radiation against developing leukemia, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 19 Apr 2009 | 7:09 pm

Cancer brake 'could halt disease'

Genetic "brakes" which could slow down or stop diseases like MS and cancer are found by scientists in Edinburgh.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Apr 2009 | 5:02 pm

In pictures

Campaigner wins Goldman Environmental Prize
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Apr 2009 | 4:04 pm

'Green Nobel' for forest champion

A campaigner who fought a mining deal in the Gabonese rainforest receives an international environmental prize.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Apr 2009 | 3:57 pm

Alien Abduction: Looking Back at America's First Case (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - The University of New Hampshire today is hosting a public forum surrounding a new exhibition called the "Betty and Barney Hill Collection." The Hills were an interracial couple in the 1960s, and the exhibit discusses Barney Hill's civil rights activism. However, the couple is best known for giving the first reported incident of an alleged alien abduction in America.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Apr 2009 | 2:25 pm

China to build new panda breeding center (AP)

AP - China will begin building a new panda breeding center next month to replace a world-famous preserve badly damaged in last year's devastating earthquake in southwestern Sichuan province, state media reported Sunday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Apr 2009 | 1:18 pm