Computer Hackers R.I.P.: Making Quantum Cryptography Practical

Quantum cryptography, a completely secure means of communication, is much closer to being used practically as researchers have now developed high speed detectors capable of receiving information with much higher key rates, thereby able to receive more information faster.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

'Invisibility Cloak' Successfully Hides Objects Placed Under It

Never mind Harry Potter, researchers have made an invisibility cloak of their own. Scientists have taken a major step towards a true invisibility device with the creation of a carpet cloak from nanostructured silicon that conceals the presence of objects placed under it from optical detection.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Emotional Support Leads To Sporting Success

Sportsmen and women could get the edge on their opponents by accepting more emotional support in their personal and professional lives. A study shows the extent to which a sympathetic ear or regular words of encouragement can improve sports performance. Previous studies have linked 'social support' to performance in golf and other sports. Now for the first time, researchers have tested the importance of social support by providing individually-tailored support to sportsmen and then measuring its impact on performance.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Date Palm Genome Drafted

Researchers have mapped a draft version of the date palm genome, unlocking many of its genetic secrets.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Scientists Race To Deliver DNA Swine Flu Test

Genetics experts are working against the clock to produce the world's first DNA test for the Mexican strain of swine flu.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Prostate Cancer Therapy Increases Risk Of Fractures And Cardiovascular-related Death

Prostate cancer patients who undergo therapy to decrease testosterone levels increase their risk of developing bone- and heart-related side effects compared to patients who do not take these medications, according to a new analysis.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Risk Of Leukemia With Multiple Sclerosis Drug Higher Than Thought

The risk of developing leukemia as a side effect of a drug for multiple sclerosis is higher than previously reported, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Folic Acid May Help Treat Allergies, Asthma

Folic acid, or vitamin B9, essential for red blood cell health and long known to reduce the risk of spinal birth defects, may also suppress allergic reactions and lessen the severity of allergy and asthma symptoms, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Storing A Lightning Bolt In Glass For Portable Power

Materials researchers have reported the highest known breakdown strength for a bulk glass ever measured. Breakdown strength, along with dielectric constant, determines how much energy can be stored in an insulating material before it fails and begins to conduct electricity.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Potentially Harmful Chemicals Found In Forest Fire Smoke

Researchers have detected common plant toxins that affect human health and ecosystems in smoke from forest fires. The results from the new study also suggest that smoldering fires may produce more toxins than wildfires - a reason to keep human exposures to a minimum during controlled burns. Finding these toxins -- known as alkaloids -- helps researchers understand how they cycle through earth and air.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Dawkins is more persuasive when he's not god-bashing

His reasoned arguments for the power of natural selection carry more weight than his anti-religious diatribes

It goes without saying that Richard Dawkins has a talent for causing offence to people of a religious persuasion. I'm sure he believes this offence is justified by the noble cause of rooting out dangerous superstition, but a recent comment he left on his own blog RichardDawkins.net, beneath a piece by Jerry Coyne, suggests he is about to take his campaign to a whole new level:

I suspect that most of our regular readers here would agree that ridicule, of a humorous nature, is likely to be more effective than the sort of snuggling-up and head-patting that Jerry is attacking. I lately started to think that we need to go further: go beyond humorous ridicule, sharpen our barbs to a point where they really hurt ... I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven't really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt.

As someone who sat on this very fence for many years, I think contempt probably would have pushed me in the other direction – into the arms of the irredemiably religious. Nothing reinforces tribal identity like the contempt of your rivals. Ask a Glasgow Rangers supporter – or a Celtic supporter for that matter.

It's a shame Dawkins has such a gift for insulting the people he's trying to convert, because he also has an extraordinary gift for lucid argument. This came into full play in his Open University Annual Lecture in March at the Natural History Museum in London, which can now be watched in full on the university's website.

In the lecture he argues that Charles Darwin was the most revolutionary scientist ever. It wasn't that he revolutionised the practice of science, to the extent that Newton and Einstein have, but he utterly revolutionised the world outside science. His was the most seditious idea of all.

Before Darwin the only known alternative to the possibility that there had been an intelligent designer behind the wonders of nature was random chance, which was no alternative at all.

It wasn't even that the concept of natural selection was original when Darwin put his thoughts to paper. A Scottish landowner and fruit farmer Patrick Matthew had written a book in 1831 on Naval Timber and Arboriculture. In an appendix, Matthew recognised that the principles of artificial selection could also apply to natural selection and speculated that "the progeny of the same parents under great differences of circumstance might in several generations even become distinct species incapable of co-reproduction."

But it was Darwin not Matthew who recognised the power of this revelation, says Dawkins.

Matthew's response would seem to have been the Victorian equivalent of big deal, so what else is new. Is this the response of a man who seven years before Darwin and twenty-seven before Wallace found himself in possession of the central unifying idea that dominates all biology and explains everything about life?

When he's not god-bashing, Richard Dawkins can be very persuasive.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 2 May 2009 | 8:51 am

Helping Christians Reconcile God With Science (Time.com)

Time.com - A new foundation, led by noted geneticist Francis Collins, aims to answer stumpers like: where did Cain's wife come from?
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 May 2009 | 5:30 am

Forest Service closes caves to stop bat fungus (AP)

AP - The U.S. Forest Service is closing thousands of caves and former mines in national forests in 33 states in an effort to control a fungus that has already killed an estimated 500,000 bats.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 May 2009 | 12:06 am

'The future is going to be very exciting'

The head of Google's new university, Ray Kurzweil believes the advance of technology will solve the energy crisis, upgrade the human genome and even lead to everlasting life - no wonder he is so optimistic

Ray Kurzweil has a surrealist's eye for disorientation. The lobby of his offices outside Boston have the quality of a Dadaist art gallery: nothing is quite what it seems. Immediately inside the door is an old metal box that turns out to be a dictation machine built by Thomas Edison. An old man is sitting next to it, with a badge on his lapel that reads: "I'm an inventor". He is George, the receptionist tells me, and he is made of wax. A cabinet along the hall is covered entirely in boxes of vitamin pills, hundreds of them, from acai berry, red yeast rice and milk thistle to a very large jar marked "Anti-ageing multi-pack".

The sensation of strangeness intensifies inside Kurzweil's personal office. Several handwritten placards are stacked against the wall. "NO RIGHTS FOR BOTS!" says one. An oil painting of a white rabbit and a drawing of Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead are propped up against the desk, which is lined with dozens of volumes of the Tom Swift children's adventure series.

Then Kurzweil himself flurries into the room, half an hour late, looking flustered. He starts an instant banter with the photographer, informing him that the white rabbit is a representation of virtual reality and an allusion to the psychedelic song by Jefferson Airplane. The Tom Swift books, he adds, were his favourite reading when he was seven. It's all getting a little too weird, and the interview hasn't even begun yet.

Let's begin with the uncontested facts. Ray Kurzweil is an inventor of considerable repute, an expert on the information technology revolution and the future of artificial intelligence. As a young man he put together some of the earliest electronic keyboards and created a machine that can scan and read printed literature to blind people - the first customer was Stevie Wonder, who has become a lifelong friend. He boasts countless awards, is in the US inventors hall of fame, has written several New York Times bestsellers, and sits on the board of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the subject of a documentary, Transcendent Man, that will be released this year and is completing his own film, The Singularity is Near. And lest any doubt about his standing remains, Bill Gates regards him as the "best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence".

To cap all that, a new university opening next month will be named after one of his key theories. Sponsored by Google, the Singularity University will be housed on the Silicon Valley campus of Nasa. It will bring together some of the biggest names in frontier disciplines such as bio- and nano-technology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. The university will open its doors in July to 40 students paying $25,000 (£17,000) each for a nine-week course. Their challenge will be to come up with new ideas addressing some of the world's most pressing problems. On the agenda: climate change, world poverty and hunger.

Were the story of Ray Kurzweil to end at this point, we would be left with an impressive though not wildly out of the ordinary technology pioneer. But Kurzweil is anything but ordinary. Take what he tells me about the prospects for medical intervention.

With the completion of the human genome, he says, health and medicine have become a branch of information technology. "We have now the software of life - the code that underlines it. We have tools now to change the software. How often do you go without updating the software on your cellphone? Probably not more than a couple of weeks as it updates automatically. When was the last time you updated the software running in your body? It is out of date."

In the land of Kurzweil, the possibility of reprogramming the body is not a dry academic theory, it is a blueprint for how to lead your life.

That's why he has a cabinet covered in vitamin boxes, including those anti-ageing packs. He has turned himself into a living medical experiment with the hope - more than that, the expectation - that it will allow him to live far into the distant future and perhaps forever. Every day he takes about 150 supplements with the aim of reprogramming his biochemistry. Once a week he spends a day at a health clinic having particular compounds fed into him intravenously.

What on earth does he do that for? The answer is that though he turned 61 on Thursday, he believes that physically he is preserving himself to be much younger. "How old am I really? I've stayed around 40. I was 38 biologically when I was 40, and I'm 40 or 41 today. There is a biological ageing test and that's what it registers for me."

White rabbits, Grateful Dead, 61-year-olds with the biology of someone two decades their junior. Is now the time to terminate the interview and run screaming out of the office? He calmly insists that his pursuit of youth is quite logical.

"People ask me whether I think taking all these supplements will allow me to live hundreds of years. No. The point is only to stay in good shape another 15 years or so before we have developed the ability to reprogram our biology through nanotechnology using nanobots - blood-cell sized devices in our bloodstream that will keep us healthy."

Does he really want to live forever? Wouldn't the thrill of life start to fade after a few thousand years or so?

"If the future remained the same and no new ideas or experiences happened then ultimately we'd grow weary. But that is not the case. The future is going to be a very exciting place, and that's why I'd like to stick around to see it."

The burning sense of the future's potential has been with him since a very early age. He decided to be an inventor when he was five, he says. "My parents provided me with all these erector sets and construction toys, and I had the idea that if you put these parts together you could create transcendent effects. I didn't have that vocabulary, but I did have the feeling that you could do magical things and solve problems."

From the age of seven he began reading those Tom Swift books, devouring one after another. Each book, with titles like Tom Swift and His Airship and Tom Swift and His Wireless Message, has an identical plot: the world is faced with an existential crisis; Tom goes into the basement of his house and tinkers with some gadgets; Tom emerges with an invention that will save the day.

For Tom Swift read Ray Kurzweil. By the age of 13 he was designing software. While still a teenager he was setting up companies to exploit his ideas, and selling them for large sums. His urge to invent was insatiable, and it led him to an obsession with futurology.

It began mundanely. To maximise the profit from his inventions he started to study technology trends in an attempt to divine the best moment to launch any new product. In the process, he made what he considers an extraordinary discovery: that the trajectory of new technologies was astonishingly predictable.

More importantly, the graph they followed was not linear, as most people thought, but exponential. "Most people's expectation of the future is that the current pace will continue, despite the fact that the power of technology is doubling every year."

This was his eureka moment, and in his view it revolutionises everything. He uses the example of a person walking a certain distance. If the person takes 30 linear steps - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - they travel 30 units. But if those steps are exponential - 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 - they reach 1 billion.

So it is with technology. "When I was an undergraduate at MIT we shared one computer that took up a whole building. The cellphone in your pocket is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. That's a billion times the sales performance - and we'll do it again in the next 25 years."

This identification of the exponential growth in technological firepower, coupled with a fervent belief that there is no problem that cannot be solved through its application, is the key to Kurzweil. It unlocked his predictions of the coming of the internet, the fall of the Soviet Union partly as a result of the spread of communications, and the defeat of the world chess champion by a computer (he was a year out - in the 1980s he predicted 1998; Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997).

Exponential growth also lies at the heart of his aspirations for the new Singularity University. Through it he wants to pursue solar energy as a solution to climate change. "Right now about half a percent of the world's energy needs are from solar, so people say 'Oh, that's not a big deal'. But solar has doubled every two years - and it's only eight doublings away from 100%. In 20 years it could meet all the world's energy needs."

Similarly, Kurzweil detects in the explosion of cellphone use across Africa the opportunity to combat illness and hunger. He wants to design software that could be downloaded on to all African cellphones that would easily diagnose and provide remedial directions for leading local diseases.

Listening to Kurzweil's high-velocity monologue, it's almost shocking how optimistic he is. After the 20th century's disasters with centralised planning, and this century's disasters involving terrorism and the black hole of the financial system, it's not fashionable to talk about the inevitable march of progress.

But Kurzweil is unwavering. "People very often don't realise how far we've come. Think of the improvements that we've seen: human life expectancy was 37 in 1800, 48 in 1900 ..." And in 2035?

His prediction in that regard is that by 2029 computers will be able to pass the Turing test - that is, pass themselves off as human in conversation. Soon after that the "singularity" will have been reached, the point at which artificial intelligence will so far exceed the human brain that ordinary mortals will no longer be able to keep up.

By 2035 the human brain and computers will begin to merge - literally. Those nanobots will be used to vastly extend the reach of human intelligence. They will allow us to control all our senses by computer and enter a full virtual reality in which we could become other people. (Ray tells me that since the age of eight his fantasy has been to become a female rock singer called Ramona.)

Kurzweil predicts looming human protests against the granting of legal rights to human-computer mergers, which explains the "NO RIGHTS FOR BOTS!" placard in his office: it was a prop used in his forthcoming film.

The problem with the more outlandish side of his thinking is that it has earned him a reputation for crankiness that in turn casts a shadow over his genuinely important work. As one critic put it: "It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad."

Surely he resents such comments, and the damage to his overall standing?

"I'm not uncomfortable with the controversy," he replies. "It's part of the process new ideas have to go through."

I leave Kurzweil's cluttered office carrying enough food for thought to last me, oh, at least a couple of hundred years. Is it time to start popping those pills?

On the plane back to New York I open one of his books and read the inscription he has written inside. "To Ed, to a (very) long and healthy life. Ray."

The eureka moments

1963 Aged 15, Kurzweil wrote his first computer program to help alleviate boredom. It was picked up by IBM

1965 Developed a program that wrote music in the style of famous composers

1974-6 Designed the first computer program that could understand letter shapes in any font, wrote a program that converted scanned text into synthesised speech, and then combined the two inventions to create the Kurzweil reading machine. This "read" printed text aloud through a voice synthesiser, for the use of blind people. First customer: Stevie Wonder. The machine was as big as a table; now it fits in the pocket

1984 Perfected the electronic keyboard. Used sampling of the sounds of instruments to produce rich authentic reproductions of the entire orchestra. His Kurzweil K250 is used by Keith Emerson, Herbie Hancock, Eric Clapton and others

1987 Invented a program that does the reverse of his reading machine - converting a person's spoken voice into type

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 1 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

Swine flu virus starting to look less threatening (AP)

AP - The swine flu virus that has frightened the world is beginning to look a little less ominous. New York City officials reported Friday that the swine flu still has not spread beyond a few schools. In Mexico, very few relatives of flu victims seem to have caught the virus.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 May 2009 | 10:27 pm

Is swine flu as deadly as we thought?

What is the significance of the first person-to-person transmission of the H1N1 virus?

This is the point at which the virus could, theoretically, start to spread exponentially through the population. But it has been taken into account already by officials; because the new H1N1 virus has already jumped the species barrier into humans, scientists knew the bug would become transmissible between humans at some stage.

Dr Mark Fielder, a medical microbiologist at Kingston University, says it should not be a major cause for concern. "It's a fairly mild disease really. Its ability to spread between people, while there, is not enormous."

He adds that maintaining good standards of hygiene and following the Health Protection Agency's advice about regular handwashing and sneezing into tissues would halt the ability of the virus to spread quickly.

"The one thing to recognise is that we haven't had that many deaths yet. We've had far more deaths from other diseases going on in the world than we have had from this form of influenza. I really don't see it becoming a major mortality event. I see a number of people getting ill, but I'll hazard it will be no greater than normal seasonal flu."

Have the deaths in Mexico been hyped?

Robert Booy, head of clinical research at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance based at the University of Sydney, believes there is a simple explanation for the concentration of more than 100 deaths in Mexico. "It's likely that this outbreak has been running for not one month or even six weeks, but more than eight weeks [in Mexico]. Influenza tends to, on average, infect two people for every one case. The doubling then occurs every three days, which is the serial interval. This means that from day one to day 30 you go to about 1,000 cases, but in the next month, you go to a million."

This means that, if there have been hundreds of thousands of cases already in Mexico, then about 100 deaths gives a mortality rate of 0.1%.

"So the disease may not be nearly as severe as people thought," says Booy. "If the disease has been around for two months and infected so many people, many of them must be mildly infected and we haven't heard about them."

Again, this shows that H1N1 is, at the moment, not as lethal as most people might think.

What are scientists doing now?

Samples of the H1N1 virus arrived at the National Institute for Medical Research in north London this week and scientists there will now grow the virus structure and see how it might evolve. Working with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, the research will help develop a vaccine for the virus in the coming months.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 1 May 2009 | 9:51 pm

Cute Little Spacecraft Will Take Amazing Pictures of the Sun

The Mars Phoenix lander had enough personality to write a lively twitter feed, and now the Solar Dynamics Observatory seems to be ready for its own Hollywood movie.

To promote the upcoming mission, Chris Smith, made this Pixar-esque video clip in his spare time while working at NASA Goddard Flight Center.

“It’s a really fun little piece,” says Wade Sisler, a television producer for the space agency. “And we’re hoping to use it as a way of waking some kids and folks up to solar science.”

An Atlas 5 rocket is scheduled to carry the satellite to space in mid-October. The observatory will reach a geosynchronous orbit above New Mexico, and gather data that could help scientists understand solar flares and other phenomena that cause extreme weather conditions in space while disrupting radio communications on Earth.

“You’re going to be getting an HD image of the sun every second when that puppy goes up there,” says Sisler.

See Also:

• Mars Phoenix Tweets: “We Have ICE!”
• Exclusive Video: Meet the Spacecraft That Could Save NASA a …
• Wired Science Scores Exclusive Twitter Interview with the Phoenix …
• The Real Value of Twitter To NASA’s Space Missions

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 May 2009 | 9:38 pm

NASA Begins Job Cuts for Shuttle Retirement (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - NASA on Friday began the first wave of layoffs that will ultimately eliminate 900 jobs by September as the space agency resumes plans to retire its space shuttle fleet next year.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 May 2009 | 8:46 pm

Swine Flu Ancestor Born on U.S. Factory Farms

Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic.

The new findings challenge recent protests by pork industry leaders and U.S., Mexican and United Nations agriculture officials that industrial farms shouldn’t be implicated in the new swine flu, which has killed 176 people and on Thursday was formally declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

“Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses,” said Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, and a long-time critic of the so-called “contained animal feeding operations.”

As Wired.com reported on Tuesday, geneticists studying the composition of viruses taken from swine flu victims described it as the product of a DNA swap between North American and Eurasian swine flu strains.

On Wednesday, Columbia University biomedical informaticist Raul Rabadan added new information on the virus’ family history in a posting to ProMed, a public health mailing list. His description paralleled that of other researchers who had analyzed the new strains, but with an extra bit of detail. Six of the genes in swine flu looked to be descended from “H1N2 and H3N2 swine viruses isolated since 1998.”

Experts contacted by Wired.com agreed with Rabadan’s analysis. For researchers who track the evolution of influenza viruses, the news was chilling.

H3N2 — the letters denote specific gene variants that code for replication-enhancing enzymes — is the name of a hybrid first identified in North Carolina in 1998, the tail end of a decade which saw the state’s hog production rise from two million to 10 million, even as the number of farms dropped. H3N2 originated in a relatively benign swine flu strain first identified in 1918, but had absorbed new genes from bird and human flus.

These new genes provided replication advantages that allowed the hybrid to permeate densely packed pig farms whose inhabitants were routinely shipped across the United States. That rapid replication rate also increased the chances of strains evolving in ways that allowed them to evade hog immune systems.

Within a year, exposures topped 90 percent in several heartland states. A retrospective news account in Science said that “after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus had jumped on an evolutionary fast track.”

At the genetic level, the years that followed remain a mystery — hog flus are poorly monitored, compared to human influenza. But eventually an H3N2 spawn merged with a strain of Eurasian pig flu, producing the swine flu variant that’s now infecting humans.

At an environmental level, the conditions which shaped H3N2 and H1N2 evolution, and increased the variants’ chances of taking a human-contagious form, are well understood. High-density animal production facilities came to dominate the U.S. pork industry during the late 20th century, and have been adopted around the world. Inside them, pigs are packed so tightly that they cannot turn, and literally stand in their own waste.

Diseases travel rapidly through such immunologically stressed populations, and travel with the animals as they are shuttled throughout the United States between birth and slaughter. That provides ample opportunity for strains to mingle and recombine. An ever-escalating array of industry-developed vaccines confer short-term protection, but at the expense of provoking flu to evolve in unpredictable ways.

The Pew commission concluded that this system created an “increased chance for a strain to emerge that can infect and spread in humans.” Scientists and public health experts have said the same thing for years, in even starker terms.

In 2003, the American Public Health Association called for a ban on contained animal feeding operations. One year later, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital virologist Richard Webby, one of the original chroniclers of H3N2’s emergence, called the U.S. swine population “an increasingly important reservoir of viruses with human pandemic potential.” United States Department of Agriculture researcher Amy Vincent reportedly said that vaccine-driven evolution created a “potential for pandemic influenza emergence in North America.”

Officials and the pork industry argued this week that a direct link hadn’t been found to pigs, and that the new flu strain had yet to be found in farm animals or workers, both in the United States and at a giant hog factory near the outbreak’s epicenter in La Gloria, Mexico. Owned by a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, the largest U.S. pork producer and a notorious polluter, the factory processes one million hogs each year.

As of now, neither swine flu nor its close relatives have been found anywhere. But “that probably says more about the lack of sampling in pig flu than anything else,” said Andrew Rambaut, a University of Edinburgh viral geneticist who has studied swine flu. “We don’t sample nearly the complete diversity of pig flu around the world. Most outbreaks go unstudied.”

On Thursday, Reuters called concern with “evil factory farms in Mexico” one of many “wild theories,” on a par with a conspiracy between Al Qaeda and Mexican drug cartels. Indeed, the location may yet prove coincidental. But absence of evidence at the factory and elsewhere is not evidence of absence.

The new swine flu could have emerged in a myriad number of ways, passing between any number of birds and pigs and people, at locations across North America, during its evolutionary journey. It may well prove impossible to pinpoint exactly where it first emerged or became infectious to people. But most of its genes are almost certainly part of a North American industrial virus lineage long expected to produce pandemic variants like this one.

“We haven’t found evidence of infected pigs,” said Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist and member of the World Health Organization’s surveillance network. “But even if we never find that smoking pig, we can surmise that this is probably where it came from.”

The circumstances “are certainly enough to warrant asking questions,” said Lipkin. “The question, then, is how deeply do you want to look to try to find the evidence?”

See Also:

• Swine Flu Genes From Pigs Only, Not Humans or Birds
• Tracking Internet Chatter Helps Spot Swine Flu Outbreak
• Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early

Image: USDA

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 May 2009 | 8:29 pm

Come the pandemic, the drugs do work

Look I don't want to freak you out, since Tamiflu is the one thing which everyone believes will save us from Parmageddon, but I've been reading through the published trial data on the drug, and I'm not sure it's all that great.

The Cochrane Library is one of the greatest inventions of modern humankind. It's all very well to do a trial, or lots of little trials, but one trial, simply by chance, might give a false negative, incorrectly missing a true benefit from an effective treatment; or one trial might falsely find a benefit from an ineffective treatment, either by chance, or because the study was designed so badly that it not longer represented a "fair test" of the intervention, against whatever you were comparing it to.

The Cochrane Library is an international non-profit collaboration of academics that brings together all the evidence on a given question, using a predetermined standard method for seeking out information, assessing its quality and combining it into one giant report. They're slightly turgid, and they are considered by medics and academics to be pretty much the best quality evidence available.

Handily, there is a Cochrane review on Tamiflu, and a similar drug called Relenza. In reality the drugs' names are oseltamivir and zanamivir, but for some reason the media always use the original manufacturers' brand names instead of the generic, a bit like calling all ibuprofen tablets Nurofen, or all aspirin tablets Disprin. After a few years all medicines come out of copyright, at which point anyone can manufacture them, but if everyone is used to the brand name rather than the generic then the original company has an advantage.

The review on oseltamivir and zanamivir was done several years ago, but reviews are frequently updated in the Cochrane Library because evidence changes. This review was redone in 2006, and again in May 2008. The reviewers asked two questions: do these drugs treat flu? And do they prevent it?

The time in which flu symptoms were alleviated was assessed by nine trials. The group treated with zanamivir were 24% more likely to have their flu symptoms alleviated than the placebo group, at a given time point. For oseltamivir the figure was 20%. It's alright. I'd take it. It's just not amazing.

The NICE review from February 2009 looks at similar data, and analyses it in a different way, giving you the absolute time to recovery, which is a little easier to understand. Overall, oseltamivir reduced the average time to alleviation of symptoms by 0.68 days. For zanamivir, the figure was 0.71 days.

The prevention studies are a bit more exciting. Although patients had less of the virus on board, neither drug stopped patients from being infectious. In fact, neither had a protective effect at all against influenza-like illness, or asymptomatic influenza, even at higher doses.

For preventing someone catching symptomatic influenza, the results were more impressive. A 75mg daily dose of oseltamivir was 61% effective compared with a placebo, and 73% effective when the daily dose was 150mg, while Relenza was 62% effective. In trials where researchers were looking at the prevention of influenza in households where someone was already infected, the drugs were also pretty good.

I would take these drugs. Things might be different in a pandemic, and the Cochrane review recommends them in such circumstances. If they make my symptoms less severe then I'm guessing I'm less likely to die, and they might reduce the spread of the disease throughout a whole country.

But they're not a miracle cure, and if this is worrying to you, that just shows how ill-equipped we are to consider the risk. For the question of whether we'll see a pandemic, things are so up in the air that it's not possible to quantify the probability of such an event occurring. We do have numerical risk data which gives an indication of the chances of getting better, but we have to accept that modern medicine is all about cutting the risks and probabilities to achieve the best possible outcome. And after all that, if you got swine flu, you might still die. Which would be seriously rubbish.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 1 May 2009 | 8:04 pm

Kentucky Derby Horses More Fragile, But Not Faster (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Imagine trying to walk on all fours using just your big toes and your middle fingers. That is similar to what modern thoroughbred racehorses endure when racing around a track at up to 30 mph.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 May 2009 | 7:19 pm

SLIDE SHOW: The Week's Top Stories

There was more to the news this week than swine flu. See what you may have missed.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 May 2009 | 7:00 pm

Extreme Ultraviolet Laser Challenges Einstein

Super-intense lasers can boot bunches of electrons from the inner region of atoms, according to a new study.

This extension of the photoelectric effect, in which one photon knocks one electron off the edge of an atom, could make physicists reconsider when light is a wave and when it’s a particle.

“The photoelectric effect was the most famous effect to demonstrate that light can have particle character,” said Mathias Richter of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesansalt in Berlin, and lead author of the study published Monday in Physical Review Letters. “Now we come and say, even the photoelectric effect is better described in the wave picture of light if you apply these high intensities.”

Light has been caught kicking electrons out of atoms since the 1830s. The photoelectric effect is responsible for early video cameras, digital cameras, solar cells, night vision goggles and Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize in Physics.

Physicists expected the energy of the electrons would depend on the intensity of the light, or how much energy it transfers to a given area in a certain amount of time. They were startled in 1902 when a German physicist showed that the electrons’ energy depended instead on the color (or the frequency) of the light. Einstein solved the puzzle three years later by suggesting that light is both a wave and a particle at the same time. Light particles — called photons — carry a packet of energy that depends on their frequency.

But Einstein didn’t do the experiment with extremely intense light. In the original version of the photoelectric effect, one photon kicks out one electron, like one pool ball smacking into another. The first electrons to go are the outermost ones, because the atom holds them less tightly.

In the new study, the physicists shot xenon atoms with FLASH, an x-ray laser that uses intense photons in the extreme ultraviolet energy range, about forty times the energy of visible light. The xenon atoms lost a whopping 21 electrons at once, which indicates that it was hit by 50 photons simultaneously. Not only that, but the first electrons to pop off were from an inner region of the atom, like if you peeled an onion starting with the second layer.

“What we normally do when we put an atom in one of these intense laser beams is we start stripping the electrons from the outside inward,” said Louis DiMauro, a physicist at The Ohio State University working on the Linac Coherent Light Source, a high-energy x-ray laser in California. “If what they’re saying is correct, which I believe it is, things like the light source are going to strip atoms from the inside out.”

Richter thinks that rather than acting like a billiard ball, the incoming photons acted like a wave. “This is beyond describing it by individual photons,” he said. “It would be better to think about the idea that these photons interact as a collective, that they act together like a good team.”

The bundle of light energy made the inner electrons shudder so violently they broke out of their atomic prisons. Their flight left holes for outer electrons to fall into, and the energy they released in moving between layers freed still more electrons.

“This is a nice extension of Einstein’s photoelectric effect,” Richter said. “It’s the photoelectric effect under so extreme conditions that it’s better to describe it in the wave picture of light than the particle picture.”

“It’s a pretty exciting result,” DiMauro said, though he cautioned that the idea needs to be tested more rigorously. “I think their speculation has some legs to it, but these are the first type of experiments that have looked at this fundamental process. There’s a need for some more evidence.”

See Also:

• World’s Largest Laser Ready to Fire Up
• From Nuke Bomb Tests, Evidence of New Hearts
• Texans Build World’s Most Powerful Laser
• MIT Backs Free Access to Scientific Papers
• 7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs
• Video: Amazing Liquid Changes Color in UV Laser Beam
• A Rover with a Frickin’ Laser
• Next-Gen Atom Smashers: Smaller, Cheaper and Super Powerful

Image: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron desy.de

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 May 2009 | 5:48 pm

U.S. Swine Flu Cases Pass 100, Vaccine Pending

Authorities pledge to produce enough H1N1 swine flu vaccine for everyone.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 May 2009 | 5:20 pm

Government 'missing own CO2 goal'

The UK government is not on course to meet its own targets for reducing carbon emissions, an advisory body warns.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 May 2009 | 4:31 pm

Mexico shuts down to control flu

Mexico starts a five-day shutdown of parts of its economy in a bid to curb swine flu, as the virus reaches China.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 May 2009 | 4:08 pm

Mercury Flyby Reveals Active Inner Planet

The solar system's smallest planet is far more active than previously thought.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 May 2009 | 4:00 pm

Cambridge team makes quantum cryptography practical

Making quantum cryptography practical has been a holy grail for some physicists - but it's proved elusive. Now a British team of researchers think they have discovered a way to make it accessible to anybody.

Unlike traditional cryptography (where the data itself is encrypted using complicated mathematical functions) in quantum encrypted communications a key is sent by beaming a string of photons, representing a code, from the source to the target. If it gets to the other end and matches what the target expects, then the data gets unencrypted. If anyone tries to intercept or break it? Well, thanks to the laws of quantum physics, the mere act of observing the stream of photons changes it - and so it fails. That means that with enough photons in play, data can be made essentially hacker-proof.

All very good - and known for some time. But the problem so far has been trying to transmit the data over the sort of distances we're used to seeing in communications - over tens of miles down telephone lines, for example. With quantum encryption you can get great transfer rates over very short distances, but it degrades as you try and transmit the data further: meaning that scientists have so far been playing with data rates of around 10 kilobits per second over a distance of 20km.

Now a team consisting of Toshiba's Cambridge Research Lab and Cambridge academics have come up with a new system that can achieve much greater speeds at a lower cost.

In a paper published in the New Journal of Physics, the team explain how they've improved the efficacy of quantum communications a hundredfold - so that they can now achieve speeds of 10Mbps to a target 20km away. That's much more like a useable speed - and, crucially, it was achieved using lower cost components.

One of the researchers, James Dynes, told me that the development "now opens the door to potentially new high speed secure applications" - even allowing to become commonplace. That's good news for all sorts of people who want to conduct totally secure communications over the network - particularly banks, for example.

"In particular, the high bit rate could support a multi-user network," said Dynes. "In the past, quantum cryptographic bit rates have been too low to allow this, as the bit rate has to be shared between many pairs of users. Now with Mbit/s key rates, many users over a network can securely communicate with each other."

And how much would a system like this cost?

"If mass manufactured, the system would have a cost comparable to a high-end firewall," he said. "The most expensive components are typically the very sensitive single photon detection devices. Our system uses cheap semiconductor devices, which gives it a considerable cost advantage."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 1 May 2009 | 3:58 pm

US officials recall weight loss pill

Popular dietary supplement recalled after reports of liver damage and other health problems

US government health officials are announcing the recall of a popular weight loss pill, after reports of liver damage and other health problems.

Food and Drug Administration officials said today the manufacturer of Hydroxycut has launched a recall of the dietary supplement, used by people trying to shed weight, and by body builders to sharpen their muscles.

Hydroxycut is advertised as being made from natural ingredients. It accounts for about 90% of the market for weight loss supplements, with sales of about 1m bottles a year.

Dietary supplements are not as tightly regulated by the government as medications. Manufacturers do not need FDA approval ahead of time before marketing their products.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 1 May 2009 | 3:42 pm

WHO says existing vaccine little use against new flu

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization said on Friday that tests had shown the current seasonal vaccine against flu would have little effect against the new H1N1 strain.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 1 May 2009 | 3:28 pm

Ozone Recovery Could Thaw Antarctica

The ozone hole may explain why Antarctica's ice is more resilient than the Arctic's, for now.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 May 2009 | 3:26 pm

Texas wind farm pioneers radar technology to protect migrating birds

US wind farms kill about 7,000 birds a year but radar systems developed for Nasa can prevent fatal collisions by detecting approaching birds and analysing weather conditions

It could be considered an air traffic control system for birds who have flown perilously off course. A wind farm in southern Texas, situated on a flight path used by millions of birds each autumn and spring, is pioneering the use of radar technology to avoid deadly collisions between a 2,500lb rotating blade and bird.

US wind farms kill about 7,000 birds a year, according to a recent study. Other studies of individual wind farms suggest a higher toll on bats and birds, who crash into towers, blades, power lines and other installations. Estimates from a single wind farm in Altamont, California showed as many as 1,300 birds of prey killed each year – or about three a day.

Such direct threats to wildlife, and concerns for habitats, have increasingly pitted conservationists against the renewable energy industry. A handful of wind power projects in the US have been shelved because of wildlife concerns.

But new radar technology now in use at the Peñascal wind farm in Texas claims to have found a balance between competing environmental concerns – taking action against global warming and protecting wildlife – by protecting migrating birds at times of peak danger.

The 202MW farm, operated by the Spanish firm, Iberdrola Renewables, is the first in the world to use radar systems to enable it to shut down automatically if bad weather hits in peak migration times.

The installation, which opened late last month, uses radar systems originally developed for Nasa and the US Air Force to detect approaching birds from as far as four miles away, analyse weather conditions, and then determine in real time whether they are in danger of flying into the rotating blades.

If they are, the turbines are programmed to shut down, restarting once the birds are safely on their way, said Gary Andrews, the chairman of DeTect, Inc, the Florida company that developed the technology.

The system spots the birds and assesses their altitude, numbers and the visibility. "With all these pieces coming together properly ... the turbines will shut down," said Andrews.

Conservationists however are sceptical of such an easy fix. They argue that wind farms should still be sited away from migration routes in the first place, and that the technology does nothing to solve the problem of installations that disturb bird and animal habitats and nesting grounds.

"The bottom line with wind energy is that it has great potential but it must be done correctly," said Doug Inkley, a senior scientist at the National Wildlife Federation. "The windiest site may not be the most suitable and one may have to live with having less windy conditions and less impact on wildlife."

Even in Texas – where there are virtually no environmental restrictions on wind farms – there was controversy when the Peñascal project was first proposed and local conservationist organisations tried to block the project in the courts.

The Peñascal wind farm is located on the Central Flyway, a main route for migratory birds in the Americas.

Millions of birds funnel through the narrow air corridor during the semiannual migration. A study in the autumn of 2007 found 4,000 birds an hour passing overhead.

More than 30 species of warbler alone fly the route, along with waterfowl, raptors, and hawks. The area is also known as a nesting ground for reddish egret, which the Audubon Society views as threatened, terns and pelicans.

In ordinary circumstances, the birds would be thousands of feet above the wind farm, passing the turbines without incident. But that can change dramatically in a sudden storm.

A sudden cold snap, like the legendary Texan "Blue Northern", can prove fatal for migrating birds, bringing strong head winds and fog. The birds, which typically fly at night, become disoriented and exhausted, elevating the risk they will lose altitude and crash into 400ft wind towers along their route, wildlife experts say.

"If inclement weather hits the birds that are aloft at that point may be very vulnerable," said Christopher Shackleford, an ornithologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Andrews says his radar systems can avoid such consequences – and at relatively little cost to the wind farm. Forecasts suggest the wind farm would be forced to close only between 40 to 60 hours during peak migration times.

The US Air Force has been using similar technologies for more than a decade. Nasa also turned to such systems after a turkey buzzard flew into the Discovery shuttle moments after its launch in 2005.

The radar sets developed by DeTect draw on a network of 148 weather radar to provide real-time information about bird activity. It is updated every six minutes.

The wind power industry has used such data before when planning wind farms, Andrews said. It is illegal, under US law, to kill migratory birds or damage their nesting areas. But this is the first time that a wind farm will use such data in real time.

Andrews's company is also working on a variation that will allow wind farms to detect raptor if they start diving to close to the turbines as they chase down their prey.

Conservationists are reserving judgment. "The wind energy industry makes bold claims, and they need to prove them," said Andrew Kasner, director of bird conservation for Audubon Texas.

He added: "It's possible for them to do [switch off the turbines], but I don't know whether they would do it during peak wind time."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 1 May 2009 | 2:40 pm

Officials: Arrest in Azerbaijan bloodbath (AP)

AP - Police in Azerbaijan have arrested a former neighbor of the gunman who killed 12 people and committed suicide at an oil industry academy, prosecutors said Friday, but they did not reveal how they suspect former neighbor was linked to the shooting.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 May 2009 | 2:05 pm

New flu virus may be a real mongrel: study

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The new virus that has killed as many as 177 people and spread globally is a mongrel that appears to have mixed with another hybrid virus containing swine, bird and human bits, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 1 May 2009 | 1:46 pm

BLOG: 1918 Flu Linked to H1N1 Swine Flu

The H1N1 swine flu may share an evolutionary tie with the deadly 1918 strain.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 May 2009 | 1:46 pm

Comet Dust Collected by NASA Predates Sun

An excursion to collect comet dust yields a surprise: the dust is older than the sun.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 May 2009 | 1:46 pm

Swine flu

What the scientists know about the virus so far
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 May 2009 | 1:17 pm

Mummified Puppy Found in Egyptian Tomb

A tiny body found at the feet of an Egyptian mummy was probably his beloved pet.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 May 2009 | 12:46 pm

Forest Service tries to halt spread of bat fungus (AP)

AP - The U.S. Forest Service is preparing to close thousands of caves and former mines across the eastern United States in an effort to control a bat-killing fungus.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 May 2009 | 12:43 pm

Bardot slams planned pig cull in Egypt (AFP)

AFP - French animal rights activist and former actress Brigitte Bardot has written to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, slamming the decision to slaughter the country's pig population in the wake of swine flu.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 1 May 2009 | 12:35 pm