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Super-sensors To Discover What Happened In First Trillionth Of A Second After Big BangWhat happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang? Super-sensitive microwave detectors may soon help scientists find out.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 May 2009 | 6:00 pm Injured Marines At Risk For Abnormal Bone GrowthMarines and other military personnel who are wounded in combat as the result of a high-energy trauma, such as a bomb blast, are likely to develop an abnormality known as heterotopic ossification. In this condition, bone forms within the soft tissues, such as muscle located near a fracture or other bone injury.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 May 2009 | 6:00 pm Why Invasive Plants Take OverNew research shows that two key causes of plant invasion -- escape from natural enemies, and increases in plant resources -- act in concert. This result helps to explain the dramatic invasions by exotic plants occurring worldwide. It also indicates that global change is likely to exacerbate invasion by exotic plants.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 May 2009 | 6:00 pm People Of Higher Socioeconomic Status Choose Better Diets, But Pay More Per CalorieAs people become more educated, studies have demonstrated that they tend to choose foods that are lower in calories but higher in nutrients. They also pay more. Researchers compared the eating habits and food costs of a sample of 164 adults in the Seattle, Washington area.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 May 2009 | 6:00 pm NASA's Electronic Nose May Provide Neurosurgeons With A New Weapon Against Brain CancerAn unlikely multidisciplinary scientific collaboration has discovered that an electronic nose developed for air quality monitoring on Space Shuttle Endeavour can also be used to detect odor differences in normal and cancerous brain cells. The results of the pilot study open up new possibilities for neurosurgeons in the fight against brain cancer.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 May 2009 | 6:00 pm Climate Change Threatens Unique Ecosystems of World's Largest Lake, Lake BaikalThe diverse biota of Lake Baikal, the world's largest lake, will come under severe pressure as the climate becomes warmer and wetter, because the food web relies on a long period of ice cover to shelter microbes that generate the annual production of organic carbon. The lake's top predator is also vulnerable to a reduction in ice cover. Pollution and expected wind changes further threaten the lake's ecology.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 May 2009 | 6:00 pm DNA Barcoding Of Mosquito Species Deployed In Bid To End ElephantiasisResearchers are pioneering the use of DNA "barcodes" to map menacing mosquito species in West Africa that spread lymphatic filariasis, commonly known as elephantiasis. The ability to precisely identify mosquito species is a promising advance in the battle against LF, an often disfiguring disease that today threatens 1 billion people across roughly 80 countries.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 May 2009 | 3:00 pm Urine Screening Test May One Day Predict Coronary Artery DiseaseSeventeen specific protein fragments seem to distinguish people who have coronary artery disease from those who don't. A small study indicates that a newly created urine analysis may identify patients with these proteins and accurately diagnose atherosclerosis in 84 percent of the cases. These data encourage further development of a urine-based screening method for non-invasive diagnosis of atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 May 2009 | 3:00 pm Earth Still Recovering From A Glacial HangoverA new explanation for the cause of changes in the chemical makeup of the oceans through recent Earth history has been put forward. Scientists suggest that adjustments in ocean chemistry through recent geological time are driven by variations in the intensity of chemical breakdown of continental rocks by rain and ground water.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 May 2009 | 3:00 pm Matrix Protein Key To Fighting VirusesA new approach could help scientists to intercept one of the viruses that cause respiratory disease and a third of common colds, before it begins spreading, according to new research.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 4 May 2009 | 3:00 pm China triples wind power capacity goal: report (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 May 2009 | 7:54 am Australia delays emissions schemeThe Australian government says it will push back a planned carbon emissions trading scheme by a year until 2011.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 May 2009 | 4:44 am Beauty in the jungleThis week we trace an incredible human journey. Why did our ancestors leave the warm cradle of humanity in Africa and spread across the world? We are probably all descendants of a very small but fearless bunch of people. Doctor and archaeologist Alice Roberts takes up the story in an exclusive preview of her forthcoming documentary on BBC2 The Incredible Human Journey. Swine flu and how worried you should really be about it. We give you our no-nonsense, hype-free guide. We also hang out with some butterflies at the Natural History Museum and investigate why these beautiful creatures are slowly disappearing. All that plus a gene for autism, a status report on the health of the planet and some risqué pictures in space. Don't keep your opinions to yourself, post them below. We always air a selection on the following week's show. You can also
Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 4 May 2009 | 3:24 am The ice-age baby fresh from the deep freezeBarely a month old, she fell into an ice age muddy river some 40,000 years ago, where a biological twist of fate led to her being almost perfectly preserved. Astonishing pictures show Lyuba, named after the wife of the reindeer herder who discovered her in 2007 on the Yamal peninsula in Siberia. Missing only her hair and toenails, Lyuba is the best discovered example yet of a woolly mammoth spat from its tomb deep in the Russian permafrost. An extinct group of elephants, woolly mammoths emerged some 400,000 years ago and died out perhaps just 10,000 years ago. In an echo of modern concerns about climate change, some blame their fate on a natural upswing in temperature that altered vegetation. Others accuse early human hunters. Because many mammoths became quickly wrapped in frozen sediment after they died, many of their remains have survived in the Siberian deep freeze. Lyuba has seen quite a bit of action since her discovery. She was immediately carted off to be sold for two snowmobiles and a year's supply of food, and ended up leaning against a wall being gnawed by stray dogs. Since her recovery, she has been scraped, drilled and sliced by a series of bewitched experts and sent to Japan for a CT scan. Her story and the pictures appear in the May issue of National Geographic magazine. Could Lyuba help scientists recreate her lost kin? It's unlikely. While she looks well preserved, on a molecular level Lyuba is in tatters. Her cells - and crucially her DNA - will be battered by 40,000 years of steady damage. The lack of an intact nucleus makes cloning à la Dolly the sheep impossible. There is another way. Last autumn, scientists in the US published a first draft of the woolly mammoth's genome, which is thought to be about 80% complete. Such genetic sequences could, in theory, be used to assemble enough DNA from scratch to clone the beast. One problem is that scientists do not know how to arrange it as chromosomes, or even how many chromosomes mammoths had. Lyuba took that secret to her freezing grave. • The May issue of National Geographic is on sale now. 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 | 3 May 2009 | 11:01 pm Swine flu outbreak 'stabilising', but MP warns of second wave• London school closed after virus infects pupil A north London school has been closed after one of its year 9 pupils was confirmed as being infected with the swine flu virus. The case was one of three infections announced by British public health officials today, taking the total to 18. The cases came to light as public health officials around the world were suggesting that the H1N1 flu outbreak was stabilising. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, said health agencies in the UK had the virus largely under control and the country should instead be preparing itself for the inevitable second wave of infections in the autumn. South Hampstead high school will be closed until Thursday on advice from the Health Protection Agency (HPA). The infected pupil, a 14-year-old from Barnet, had come into contact with someone recently returned from Mexico. "A pupil in year 9 has just been confirmed as having influenza A type H1N1 this weekend; the pupil is at home and well," wrote the headteacher, Jenny Stephen, in a letter to parents published on the school's website. "I want to reassure you that the school has taken all the necessary steps today and all the relevant agencies have been involved." She added: "The [HPA] has advised that the school should close with immediate effect and reopen on Thursday 7 May in the first instance. This is to reduce any potential spread of the infection." At the school, the upper 6th leavers' ball was cancelled and all further sports events, concerts and field trips planned for later this week have also been called off. Special arrangements were being made to accommodate pupils taking GCSE and A-level exams but Stephen wrote "the important message is that any students who have any symptoms of a flu-like illness must not attend school". The second case confirmed was an 11-year-old from Wandsworth, south London, who had recently returned from the US. The third case confirmed was of a man from Ayrshire, who had flown back from the US to Birmingham last Monday. Johnson said the spread of the H1N1 virus had largely been contained in the UK, though this might only stem the outbreak until the autumn. "Our evidence from all previous pandemics is that you get two phases," he said. "You get a first wave that is often very mild and then you get a much more serious wave that comes along in the autumn and the winter." Although the World Health Organisation (WHO) raised its global alert level to phase 5 last week, which means it thinks a pandemic is imminent, Johnson said the response by UK public health authorities had proved effective in limiting the spread of the flu virus here. At present, 716 people are undergoing tests for the virus across the UK, with 14 infections confirmed in England and four in Scotland. Across the world, the WHO has now confirmed 787 cases of swine flu across 17 countries, with Mexico continuing to have by far the largest number, at 506. But the confirmed deaths remain low at 20 — 19 in Mexico and one, a 21-month-old boy, in Texas. Yesterday Mexico's health secretary, José Ángel Córdova, said the epidemic appeared to "in its declining phase". In the US, Dr Richard Besser, acting director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said: "We're seeing encouraging signs that this virus so far is not looking more severe than a strain that we would see during seasonal flu." In Mexico the flu epidemic has tapped the country's deep religious sentiment, but to avoid spreading infection the Catholic church has suspended masses. "It pains us a lot not to have mass on Sunday, but we have taken this decision in solidarity with the health authorities." 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 | 3 May 2009 | 10:35 pm Austrian 'breakthrough' in quantum cryptography (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 May 2009 | 7:01 pm Wolves no longer protected in Northern Rockies (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 May 2009 | 6:49 pm Culture May Be Encoded in DNA
Disco, Mother’s Day and even Lolcats may have been a biological inevitability, according to a new study that suggests culture is written in our genes. Zebra finches, which normally learn their complex courtship songs from their fathers, spontaneously developed the same songs all on their own after only a few generations. “We found that in this case, the culture was pretty much encoded in the genome,” said Partha Mitra of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, co-author of a study in Nature on Sunday. Birds transmit their songs through social interactions, as humans do for languages, dances, cuisine and other cultural elements. Though birds and humans have clearly followed different evolutionary paths, birdsong culture can still inform theories of human culture. Normally, male finches learn their complex courtship songs (MP3) from their uncles and fathers. But if there are no vocal role models around, the song will deviate from the traditional song and be harsh to female finch ears (MP3). Each bird, then, must learn from his father or uncles, as they learned from their fathers, and so on — but this can only take us so far down the lineage. “It’s the classic ‘chicken and the egg’ puzzle,” Mitra said. “Learning may explain how the son copies its father’s song, but it doesn’t explain the origin of the father’s song.”
Mitra’s team wanted to find out what would happen if an isolated bird raised his own colony. As expected, birds raised in soundproof boxes grew up to sing cacophonous songs. But then scientists let the isolated birds give voice lessons to a new round of hatchlings. They found that the young males imitated the songs — but they tweaked them slightly, bringing the structure closer to that of songs sung in the wild. When these birds grew up and became tutors, their pupils’ song continue to conform, with tweaks. After three to four generations, the teachers were producing strapping young finches that belted out normal-sounding songs. You can listen to the progression below, but keep in mind that the elements that are important to female finches — duration of beats, rise and fall of pitch — can be difficult for the untrained human ear to pick up on. (QuickTime works best for these)
“It all happened so fast, and there was so little difference between the colony and in the one-to-one tutoring environment,” said lead author Olga Fehér of City College of New York. “So the process is pretty much hardwired. And the interesting thing was also that they could only get so close in a single generation, so the three to four generations were necessary for the phenotype to emerge.” “Song culture can emerge ‘from the egg,’ as it were, if one allows for multiple generations to elapse,” Mitra said. ”In a similar way, we may ‘grow’ our languages.” Though there are approximately 6,000 different languages in the world, they all share certain structural and syntactic elements. Even when a language arises spontaneously, as it did in the 1970s among deaf school children in Nicaragua, it adheres to these stereotypical human language features. The study’s findings might have implications beyond language to other culturally-transmitted systems, said evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch, at the University of St. Andrews. “We can think about both birdsong and human culture — especially language but including other aspects of human culture, like music, cuisine, dance styles, rituals, technological achievements, clothing styles, pottery decoration and a host of others — in similar terms,” he said. These culturally-transmitted systems must all pass through the filter of biology. “Look at all the different human cultures,” said Mitra. “They’re different, but they’re all within certain constraints, so those differences aren’t genetic. But now compare with the chimp culture — there are key differences. The possibilities between those cultures are constrained by biology.” Mitra admits that the analogies between bird culture and human culture are tenuous. “But there are resemblances. Culture is just learned behaviors. The motivating scenario is, if you isolate human babies from culture, put them on an island and come back after a few generations, what would their culture be like? What sort of language would they have? What sort of politics would evolve?” That experiment probably won’t take place in the near future. In the meantime, Fitch says we can learn valuable lessons about human culture from songbirds, both at theoretical and mechanistic levels. “Social learning is shared between the two, and songbirds are a well-understood and experimentally tractable system,” he said. “These biologically-grounded studies will lead us beyond the tired ‘nature versus nurture’ or ‘biology versus culture’ dichotomies which dominate the social sciences today.” See Also: Citation: Olga Fehér, Haibin Wang, Sigal Saar, Partha P. Mitra & Ofer Tchernichovski. “De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch.” Nature, published online ahead of print May 3, 2009. Image: Flickr/NeilsPhotography
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 3 May 2009 | 6:10 pm Scientists to Resurrect Ancient Gene to Replay Evolution (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - The movie "Jurassic Park" was a lesson in how resurrecting extinct organisms can go awry. A new project plans to take a safer route: resurrect a single gene from an extinct species of bacteria. This tiny snippet of DNA will be implanted in modern-day bacteria, with the goal of seeing whether evolution can be replayed in the lab.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 May 2009 | 3:10 pm How satellites could 'sail' homeSatellites and spent rocket stages could soon deploy "sails" to guide them back to Earth to help clear the sky of space junk.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 May 2009 | 2:28 pm Ethanol test for Obama on climate change, science (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 3 May 2009 | 2:11 pm Catacombs in 3DRome's ancient burial sites as never seen beforeSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 May 2009 | 11:03 am Mexico plea as virus 'stabilises'Mexico appeals for fair treatment towards its citizens and products, as its officials say the flu outbreak could be stabilising.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 May 2009 | 10:57 am Ancient tsunami 'hit New York'Evidence is building to support the notion that a huge wave crashed into the New York City region 2,300 years ago.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 3 May 2009 | 10:48 am
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