Mechanism Behind Delayed Development Of Antibiotic Resistance Explained

Inhibiting the "drug efflux pumps" in bacteria, which function as their defense mechanisms against antibiotics, can mask the effect of mutations that have led to antibiotic resistance. This can provide clues to how the development of resistance to antibiotics in bacteria can be delayed.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Brain Abnormalities Associated With Social Orienting Ability Found In Toddlers With Autism, According To Imaging Study

Toddlers with autism appear more likely to have an enlarged amygdala, a brain area associated with numerous functions, including the processing of faces and emotion, according to a new article. In addition, this brain abnormality appears to be associated with the ability to share attention with others, a fundamental ability thought to predict later social and language function in children with autism.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

New Universal Breast Cancer Marker Predicts Recurrence And Clinical Outcome

Researchers have implicated the loss of a stromal protein called caveolin-1 as a major new prognostic factor in patients with breast cancer, predicting early disease recurrence, metastasis and breast cancer patient survival.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Low Cost, Dexterous Robotic Hand Operated By Compressed Air

Scientists have developed a unique robotic hand that can firmly hold objects as heavy as a can of food or as delicate as a raw egg, while dexterous enough to gesture for sign language.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Spintronics: Nano-sandwich Triggers Novel Electron Behavior

A lattice of vanadium dioxide molecules just six atoms thick in which electrons appear to be guided by conflicting laws of physics depending on their direction of travel has been modeled by a team of physicists. Its unique properties could open up a new world of possibilities in the emerging field of spintronics technology, which takes advantage of the magnetic as well as the electric properties of electrons in the design of novel electronic devices.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Caves Closed In U.S. To Slow Bat Disease Spread

Caves on many state properties in the U.S. will temporarily close as a precaution against the uncontrolled spread of white-nosed syndrome, which is killing bats in record numbers in the eastern United States.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Physicists Create World's Smallest Incandescent Lamp

Physicists have created the world's smallest incandescent lamp using a filament made from a single carbon nanotube only 100 atoms wide. Invisible to the untrained eye, the filament appears as a tiny point of light when the lamp is turned on. Even with the best optical microscope it is only just possible to resolve the nanotube's nonzero length. The team uses an electron microscope capable of atomic resolution to image the filament's true structure.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Swine Flu Genes Dissimilar To Past Pandemics

Some genetic markers of influenza infection severity have been identified from past outbreaks. Researchers have failed to find most of these markers in samples of the current swine-flu strain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Gel-Based Glue Fastens Snails To Wet Surfaces, Model For Surgical Adhesive

A species of slug produces a defensive gel it can chemically convert into a remarkably strong glue. Similar gel-based glues attach some snails firmly onto slippery rocks; tools are needed to pry them off. The tenacity of these glues on wet surfaces is difficult to match with artificial adhesives.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Where Tumor Cells Boldly Go: Cancer Biologists Shed Light On The Metastatic Niche

A team of cancer researchers is focusing on a new model of the disease: the permissive microenvironment, or the metastatic niche, that forms in particular tissues located far from the primary tumor, well before full metastasis takes hold.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 7 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Domestication Led to Horse Color Explosion

Horses' coats exploded into colors after domestication took off some 5,500 years ago.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 7 May 2009 | 2:05 pm

Studies say 'hobbit' previously unknown species (AFP)

AFP - The tiny ancient humans dubbed hobbits, whose remains were discovered on an Indonesian island in 2003, were a previously unknown species altogether, according to two new studies.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 1:16 pm

Virgin sees space tourism as just the beginning

LONDON (Reuters) - Long-haul trips could be made in spaceships instead of planes in 20 years' time if Virgin's efforts to commercialize space travel succeed, the president of Virgin Galactic told Reuters in an interview.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 12:45 pm

Spark of life

Finding the true value of biodiversity before it is too late
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 12:12 pm

All school Sats tests 'might go'

Science Sats taken by 11-year-olds in England are being scrapped - English and maths could follow.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 12:11 pm

Celestial atlas star of Scottish charity book sale (Reuters)

Reuters - An 1822 celestial atlas by Scottish amateur astronomer Alexander Jamieson is a star item at this year's Christian Aid charity book sale in Edinburgh, one of the largest sales of its kind in the world.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 11:50 am

Monster wave

Film makers reveal secrets of Pacific's massive waves
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 11:44 am

Polar diet

How to survive on 90g of food a day in the Arctic
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 11:16 am

European prepares to command ISS

Franck de Winne is about to become the first European astronaut to command the International Space Station.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 11:06 am

Time limits on innocent DNA data

DNA profiles of innocent people will be wiped after up to 12 years but campaigners say this does not go far enough.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 10:24 am

Wild fruit trees face extinction

Exploitation is threatening the forests in central Asia, home to the fruit trees that could help secure our future food supply.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 9:18 am

Indonesian 'hobbits' were distinct human species, say researchers

Evidence suggests that diminutive people from Indonesian island of Flores were not modern pygmies, as previously thought

New evidence has emerged to show that an extinct, diminutive people known as "hobbits" from the Indonesian island of Flores belonged to a new species of primitive human and not modern pygmies.

The 1 metre (3ft) tall, 30kg (65lb) people are believed to have roamed the Indonesian island of Flores, perhaps up to 8,000 years ago.

The new anatomical evidence, reported in today's Nature magazine, is based on the examination of lower limbs and especially an almost complete left foot and parts of the right. It shows that the species walked upright, like other known hominids, and there were five toes, as in other primates, but the big toe was stubby, more like a chimp's.

Controversy has been rife ever since the discovery of the species, formally named Homo floresiensis, was announced in 2004. The single skull was unusually small, indicating its brain was no bigger than a chimpanzee's. Some scientists argued that the species was nothing more than modern pygmy humans deformed by genetic or pathological disorders.

But in light of the new evidence, scientists believe it is unlikely that traits such as the small brain, primitive shoulders and wrists as previously reported "were simply a consequence of 'island dwarfing'."

A research team led by William Jungers, an American paleoanthropologist concluded that "the foot of Homo floresiensis exhibits a broad array of primitive features that are not seen in modern humans of any body size".

The team raised the possibility that the ancestor of the species was not Homo erectus, as had been the original assumption. Homo erectus is known as the earliest hominid to leave Africa and make its way across Asia. At a symposium two weeks ago, several scientists edged towards the view that the so-called hobbits emerged from another, more primitive hominid ancestor.

In a commentary accompanying the journal report, Daniel Lieberman, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University who was not a member of the team, noted that the initial scepticism over the hominid as a distinct species was understandable.

"All in all, many scientists (myself included) have sat on the fence, waiting for more evidence about the nature and form of Homo floresiensis," Lieberman wrote. "And now we have some."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 7 May 2009 | 8:50 am

World's Smallest Light Bulb Created (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Some bright researchers say they've created the world's smallest incandescent lamp, so teeny it's invisible except when lit.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 4:22 am

Genes Linked to Spread of Breast Cancer (HealthDay)

HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, May 6 (HealthDay News) -- Three genes linked to the spread of breast cancer to the brain have been identified by U.S. researchers, who say the finding could help lead to new treatments.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 3:48 am

Feds to reconsider critical habitat for 2 fish (AP)

AP - A federal judge has ruled the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service can reconsider the critical habitat designation of two threatened fish species in New Mexico and Arizona after a probe found political interference likely affected scientists' findings.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 3:14 am

Britain to remove some DNA profiles from database (AP)

AP - The British government said Thursday it will set up a system to remove details about the DNA of innocent people from its nationwide registry of genetic information, after Europe's top human rights court criticized the way information was held.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 2:28 am

UN 'stunned' by scale of bail-out

If extra money is not found to tackle climate change, bail-outs could be a "waste of money", UN head of environment warns.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 12:47 am

Information outbreak

A web-crawling system is providing vital, up-to-date data on the global spread of disease – including swine flu

Clusters of yellow and orange markers hover over a satellite image of the Earth, each representing a reported outbreak of disease. This is the screen that greets visitors to HealthMap, a near real-time web-crawling system that gathers and organises data from news sources, official alerts, online databases and blogs, overlaying it on to a Google map.

The site is one of a number of initiatives aimed at identifying health, ecological and conflict crises earlier than official monitoring systems. Web crawlers – automated software programs that scour the web for information – are used to find patterns that may signify an emerging threat.

A new alert marker on HealthMap is often the first indication of an outbreak of disease for both health organisations and the general public. Its colour – yellow, orange, or red – denotes the threat level.

Infectious idea

John Brownstein and Clark Freifeld, a physician and software developer at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program in Boston, launched the site in 2006. "It started as a side project," says Brownstein.

The site quickly gained the attention of Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the search giant. Its Predict and Prevent initiative supports efforts to respond to outbreaks of disease before they become global crises. An initial $450,000 (£300,000) grant helped combine HealthMap's detection efforts with those of ProMED-mail's global network of health specialists.

The web crawler combs 20,000 websites every hour, tracking about 75 infectious diseases, including malaria, cholera, Ebola, and now swine flu. An average of 300 reports are collected each day, about 90% of which come from news media sources. Frequent users of the site include the World Health Organisation, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the UK's Health Protection Agency.

The Global Public Health Intelligence Network , a Canadian system, used similar web-crawling software to detect the first signs of the Sars outbreak in 2002, several months before it was officially announced.

HealthMap received its earliest report of the swine flu outbreak on 1 April. Brownstein claims the outbreak had been building for months, but containment is difficult, even with advanced warning. "In reality, what happens in Mexico doesn't stay in Mexico," he says.

It is unclear precisely how far in advance of the traditional monitoring systems HealthMap is with its predictions. "Sometimes we're six months ahead; sometimes we spot something on the same day," says Brownstein. "It depends on the disease, the country, the political situation – all factors contribute to how information flows."

HealthMap monitors news in five different languages – vital for the early detection of an outbreak of disease. "The first reports from a particular region tend to be in the local language," says Freifeld. "For example, with the swine flu outbreak one of our earliest reports of an unidentified respiratory illness in Veracruz, Mexico, came from a local Spanish news site."

Text-processing algorithms are used to determine the relevance of the information, separating articles on actual outbreaks from those covering government vaccination programmes, for instance. The information is then sorted by disease and location, with duplicate articles filtered out before the data is applied to the map.

Researchers from Stockholm Resilience Centre and the University of East Anglia are hoping to apply the pioneering techniques to the field of ecological monitoring. Catastrophic environmental shifts could be missed by official systems due to insufficient data and geographical gaps.

"You may have ecological monitoring tools in place, but not economic or social monitoring, which can give you a much earlier signal that something is happening," says Victor Galaz, lead author of a paper published by the researchers last month in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. "For example, if prices for a certain species of fish increase, or you receive news of heavy investment in high-tech fishing fleets in a particular region, that can give you an early warning that change is occurring."

Conflict resolution

Sifting through the huge amount of information on the web and determining the "signal" from the "noise" is still difficult, even with advanced monitoring tools. Whether web-crawler systems are truly able to extract reliable data on emerging crises from internet chatter, or whether they merely spot patterns in hindsight, is still open to debate.

Gaps also exist in the coverage of developing countries, where news sources are fewer. Although, according to Mark Smolinski, director of Predict and Prevent, the next logical step for HealthMap will be "engaging directly with citizens to report illness, something now entirely possible as mobile technologies permeate the globe".

Predictive monitoring tools may also provide early warning of conflicts – outbreaks of rioting could foreshadow a larger crisis. Veratect Corporation already operates a service called Shadowstream, which identifies emerging civil unrest around the world for corporate clients. "We focused on infectious diseases because of their widespread nature and real-time development," says Freifeld. "But we're looking at where else the technology can be applied, such as conflicts or environmental disasters."

Web crawlers could even predict the next financial crisis. The 2021 credit crunch? You can't say you weren't warned.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 6 May 2009 | 11:09 pm

Innocent to be kept on DNA database

Government accused of flouting court ruling over retention of data

The genetic profiles of hundreds of ­thousands of innocent people are to be kept on the national DNA database for up to 12 years in a decision critics claim is designed to sidestep a European human rights ruling that the "blanket" retention of suspects' data is unlawful.

The proposed new rules for the national DNA databaseto be put forward tomorrow by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, include plans to keep the DNA profiles of innocent people who are arrested but not convicted of minor offences for six years.

The proposal would also apply to children from age 10 who are arrested but never successfully prosecuted.

In cases of more serious violent and sexual crime, innocent people's genetic codes will be kept for 12 years.

It was widely expected that the DNA profiles, samples and fingerprints of 850,000 innocent people kept on the database would be destroyed in response to the ruling by the European court of human rights last December.

But the proposals fall short of those expectations and contrast sharply with the situation in Scotland, where only the DNA profiles of suspects arrested for serious violent and sexual offences are retained for a maximum of five years.

Human rights groups, and opposition politicians united tonightin expressing dismay that the Home Office had rejected that option and predicted a race to the courts to challenge the new policy.

"The government just doesn't get this," said the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling. The Liberal Democrats' Chris Huhne added: "This is an undignified rearguard action designed to give as little as possible."

Liberty's Shami Chakrabarti said: "Wholly innocent people – including ­children – will have their most intimate details stockpiled for years on a database that will remain massively out of step with the rest of the world."

But Home Office ministers say their ­proposals do comply with the landmark S and Marper judgment in Strasbourg which declared unlawful their policy of keeping all unconvicted suspects' DNA profiles indefinitely because of its "blanket and indiscriminate" nature. The police are now to be asked to spend up to two years trawling the existing 850,000 DNA profiles – the numerical digital code recording the individual's DNA – of innocent people on the database to see if any of them have a criminal record for any other offences.

The Home Office say 350,000 are known to be linked to entries on the police national computer. For the remaining 500,000 it is not yet possible to say whether their arrest led to a conviction or not and their DNA profile will be removed only once this check has been made.

The package proposed by the home secretary to meet the ruling include:

• Retaining indefinitely all DNA profiles and fingerprints of those convicted of an imprisonable offence.

• Keeping for 12 years the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted of serious sexual and violent offences.

• Keeping for six years the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted of minor offences.

• Removing the profiles of children when they reach 18 only if they have been arrested for only one minor offence.

• Adding the profiles of 30,000 more criminals convicted abroad or serving community sentences for serious offences.

• Destroying the genetic DNA samples held by the police once they have been converted into a DNA profile.

The home secretary said the database proposals would ensure that "the right people are on it, as well as considering where people should come off".

The Home Office estimates that even this package will mean 4,500 fewer crimes each year being detected ­compared with the current policy of retaining indefinitely the profiles of all those arrested.

"It is crucial that we do everything we can to protect the public by preventing crime and bringing offenders to justice. The DNA database plays a vital role in helping us do that and will help ensure that a great many criminals are behind bars where they belong," said Smith.

But Grayling said: "Ministers are just trying to get away with as little as they can instead of taking action to remove innocent people from the database." Huhne added that the number of innocent people on the database had risen to 925,000 since December's ruling.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 6 May 2009 | 11:05 pm

'There's a masked man at the door'

One Londoner waits to hear if she has swine flu

Three days after returning from Florida, my husband and I developed sniffles: I immediately assumed it was swine flu. I rang NHS Direct; they were fabulous. The nurse went through our symptoms thoroughly and ruled swine flu out. I was reassured. But then I developed a full-on cold and spent the next couple of days in bed.

Over the bank holiday a friend told me: "Swine flu is in the neighbourhood." There was a suspected case at the local school and her neighbour's daughter was on Tamiflu. By Sunday the sniffling was worse; on Monday afternoon I phoned Camidoc, our GP's out-of-hours service. I ran through my symptoms with the doctor. She asked if I'd like to see a doctor on call, but said it would probably take about six hours.

Ten minutes later the Camidoc doctor rang me back. She had spoken to her supervisor. As a precaution I'd been referred to the Health Protection Agency (HPA) for a swab for the H1N1 virus.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I said I didn't think I had swine flu - no aches or fever. But the doctor explained it was precautionary. The HPA would ring to talk me through the next steps and a doctor would be around to swab me shortly.

Within 10 minutes the HPA woman rang and said the doctor was on his way. Following swabbing, she said, I would be issued with Tamiflu. My husband and son would not be issued it at this stage, and I must look out for any symptoms of fever among "close contacts". I was quarantined and told not leave the house or allow anyone to come in, other than my husband and son, who were free to come and go as they pleased.

Before our conversation finished a masked figure was on my doorstep. "Please keep back," he said, as he struggled to get "fully protected" on my doorstep. What on earth would the neighbours think?

"You're my first one," the doctor said as he came in. He swabbed me and checked me over. Security around Tamiflu is tight, he said - I wouldn't be able to get if from the chemist. He wrote a sick note, jokingly saying he should refer to influenza, rather than swine flu. I felt as if I should have a white chalk cross on my front door.

Picking up the Tamiflu was like an undercover operation: I was given directions on where my husband had to go - he had to take his passport. Now I'm waiting for the swab results, but I've stopped watching the news - I've got my own real-life drama to keep me occupied.

• The author has asked to remain anonymous, to avoid panicking her friends and family.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 6 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

The trouble with Tamiflu

The companies behind the two leading anti-flu drugs are making millions out of the crisis. But just how effective are their products? Sarah Boseley reports

It was a sight that would have gladdened the heart of Dr Severin Shwan, chief executive of Roche, one of the biggest drug companies in the world. A long line of well-heeled parents assembled on a bank holiday weekend at a British private school, Alleyn's in south London, patiently waiting their turn to receive a packet of Roche's drug Tamiflu from staff. Five pupils had been diagnosed with swine flu and the school had been closed. The pills were intended to stave off infection among the children who had been sent home.

The board of Roche, a Swiss-based company which has globalised the name it inherited from its founder, Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche in 1896, must be laughing. It has a drug which has become a household name and been stockpiled by the millions of boxes all over the world, against a potential pandemic that the World Health Organisation (WHO) warns is almost upon us. Roche has supplied governments with 220m courses worldwide. The UK has stored enough to treat half the population. And yet Tamiflu is of limited use.

There are two drug contenders to reduce the impact of a flu pandemic - Tamiflu (oseltamivir) and the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) drug Relenza (zanamivir), which is similar but more complicated to use because it must be inhaled - not easy if people have breathing problems. But Relenza, too, is being stockpiled around the world, to the delight of a small Australian company called Biota Holdings - the company that developed Relenza and licensed it to GSK. Biota's share price leapt 16% last week when GSK announced it had sold $46m-worth of the flu drug, giving Biota $32.3m in licensing fees.

Relenza and Tamiflu are known as neuraminidase inhibitors (NIs). Two other, older flu drugs, amantadine and rimantadine, are now of little use because flu viruses have become resistant to them over the years. Nobody claims Tamiflu and Relenza cure flu, but they were licensed after trials that showed they mitigated its severity and reduced the length of the illness by about a day. Unfortunately, you have to take them within 48 hours of symptoms starting.

The government's contingency plan envisages that any of us who start to cough and splutter would ring a flu hotline, where a nurse would give us a diagnosis over the phone and then prescribe the drugs which our nominated "flu buddy" will pick up from the chemist. But the most important element of this arrangement, some will say, is that it keeps the flu sufferer out of the way of the rest of us. Dr Tom Jefferson, of the Cochrane Collaboration in Rome, headed the most authoritative, non drug-company conducted (and therefore without the vested interests) review yet done on the flu drugs. He is appalled that such drugs could be widely used and relied on as the solution to a flu pandemic at the expense of things that really work - like washing your hands dozens of times a day.

The Cochrane review, carried out in 2006 but regularly updated, most recently this year, says the NIs do not stop people becoming infected, although they do decrease the amount of virus sprayed from people's noses when they sneeze all over you in the bus or office. They can also reduce the complications of flu, such as bronchitis and pneumonia. The review concluded that they might be of some help in a pandemic, but strongly recommended they should not be handed out routinely or used for normal winter flu outbreaks.

To Jefferson's horror, however, the WHO has recommended that the drugs should be used against seasonal flu - the usual forms of flu that hit us every winter - so that doctors get used to giving them, and patients to taking them, ahead of a pandemic. "Wide-scale use of antivirals and vaccines during a pandemic will depend on familiarity with their effective application during the inter-pandemic period," it reasons.

"It is more than madness," says Jefferson. "Especially as we don't know what the real reasons for that recommendation are." Doctors who work for the drug companies, carrying out their studies or sometimes simply allowing their name to be attached to the paper, also advise the WHO, he points out.

He argues that there is a very real possibility of resistance developing to the drugs if they are handed out like Smarties. Viruses are clever organisms, and evolve super-fast and efficiently. Treat a virus with drugs and you must hit it hard enough and for long enough to eliminate it. If the dose is not strong enough, or the patient stops taking the drugs mid-course, the virus will evolve into a form that can overcome the drug. It is then a resistant strain. This is a major problem with the Aids virus, HIV, for which many new drugs have had to be developed. Bacteria behave the same way - penicillin, once a wonder drug, is now of little use.

Jefferson points out that although Tamiflu is only eight years old, resistance has already set in. Last year a strain of winter flu was circulating in the US that was found to be resistant to Tamiflu. In the South East Asia bird flu outbreak, there was resistance among 16% of children given the drug and among two out of eight Vietnamese people aged between 8 and 35, according to the Cochrane review.

This resistance is inevitable, says Jefferson, if you believe in the theory of natural selection, in which organisms evolve to overcome threats to their survival. "We know that has already happened with Tamiflu. It has happened with amantadine, which has been around since the 60s." Of course, governments and the public want magic bullets. There is a belief that where there is an illness, there must be a cure. Handing out drugs reduces panic. People are more likely to stay put at home where they cannot infect too many people if they feel they are being treated.

And there is is a role for Tamiflu in severe and complicated cases caught early. But Jefferson balks at the idea of drug hand-outs at schools. "The spread will stop, but only because the children have been sent home," he says.

The most important trial in disease prevention of the last 50 years was carried out in 2005 by a US doctor called Stephen Luby. "For that he should receive a Nobel prize," says Jefferson. Luby carried out a randomised trial in squatter settlements in Karachi, promoting hand-washing in half the families. Children under five who regularly washed their hands had half as many episodes of diarrhoea, impetigo and acute respiratory infection. It saved lives. If the big pandemic hits, washing hands will save more lives than Tamiflu, he predicts.

Meanwhile Tamiflu is sought everywhere. In 2005, Roche asked for help in manufacturing enough of the stuff to satisfy world demand and it got 300 offers from other manufacturers. It has now established 19 partners to produce the drug in 10 locations on three continents. It has also given licences to Indian and Chinese generic companies to make it for the developing world. If only it really was a miracle cure ·

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 6 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

Big Solar Flare Portends Sun’s Return to Normal

The sun has a new spot, and it could signal the long-awaited beginning of the next solar cycle.

Solar flares rise and fall on an 11-year cycle, and last year marked what scientists thought was the solar minimum. But through the beginning of 2009, the sun stayed unusually quiet. That changed yesterday, when a major sunspot appeared on the backside of the sun, where it was captured by NASA’s STEREO instrument.

“This is the biggest event we’ve seen in a year or so,” said Michael Kaiser, research scientist with the heliophysics division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “Does this mean we’re finished with the minimum or not? It’s hard to say. This could be it. It’s got us all excited.”

People have been counting sunspots since Galileo first observed one in the early 17th century. Through the 28 cycles that have been well-documented, stretching from 1745 to today, the average cycle length has been 11 years, but shorter and longer cycles have been observed. (The polarity of solar storms also alternates, so technically, a full cycle is 22 years.)

For unknown reasons, the current solar minimum has lasted longer than normal.

“It’s been a long solar minimum, the longest and deepest one through the last hundred years, but not out of the extreme ordinary,” Kaiser said.

Sunspot activity causes magnetic storminess around Earth and is correlated with the total amount of energy we receive from the sun. That connection caused some speculation in the media about the implications of the extended solar minimum on climate change, like yesterday’s FoxNews.com article, “Quiet Sun May Trigger Global Cooling.”

If the new solar flare is indeed a sign of the resumption of the normal cycle, it should put all that to rest.

Kaiser is sure this sunspot is part of the new cycle because it appeared at about 30 degrees of latitude. This is typical early in the solar cycle when sunspots appear closer to the poles. Toward the solar minimum they show up closer to the equator. To date, a few minor sunspots have shown up in the higher latitudes, but none with the intensity or size of the new spots.

“We have seen a few events in the new cycle, but they’ve all been pretty timid compared to this one,” Kaiser said. “In angular size, this one wasn’t spectacularly big, but it was certainly pretty bright.”

STEREO picked up the event around the backside of the sun, but it won’t come fully into view from Earth until May 8. Still, solar photographers are already pointing their telescopes at the sun, hoping to catch a glimpse of the new event.

See Also:

• Prepare for the Worst, Because Solar Storms Are About to Get Ugly
• The Sun Is Acting Up Again
• What Makes the Sun Flare
• The 2012 Apocalypse — And How to Stop It
• Discover the Earth’s Magnetic Personality

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and book site for The History of Our Future; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 6 May 2009 | 9:29 pm

How face transplant taboo was lifted

Five years ago, face transplants were in the realms of the unreal – an impossible and disturbing fantasy. The face is so closely tied to a person's identity that many people were convinced there would be almost insurmountable psychological obstacles for the patient to climb, as well as the ethical doubts. But in November 2005, the partial face transplant carried out on Isabelle Dinoire changed all that.

Dinoire, who had been mauled by a dog, had the courage to confront the cameras so that the entire world could see what a difference a new face made. In medical institutions around the world, a taboo had been lifted. The Chinese performed a similar operation in April 2006 on a farmer who had been attacked by a bear. A third in France operated on a 29-year-old man whose face had been distorted by a tumour. In the UK, a team led by a plastic and reconstruction surgeon, Peter Butler, has had permission from the Royal Free hospital in London to prepare for a series of full face transplants since November 2006. They are moving slowly and carefully, not least because of the initial substantial opposition. Similarly, hand transplants are far from routine. Clint Hallam, the New Zealander who received the first donated hand, found he could not live with it, saying it felt like a dead man's hand attached to his body. It was amputated.

Nine double hand transplants have been performed since 2000. However, foot transplants are not really considered because artificial feet work well. Set against the benefit of any transplant is the price that must be paid in a lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs, which undermine the body's defences against infections.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 6 May 2009 | 9:22 pm

Feds: Mountain-dwelling pika may need protection (AP)

AP - A tiny mammal that can't handle warm weather could become the first animal in the lower 48 states to get Endangered Species Act protection primarily because of climate change.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 May 2009 | 9:06 pm

UK science Sats to be scrapped

• Ruling means Balls faces teaching union boycott
• Move to discourage creation of league tables

A review of Sats commissioned by the schools secretary, Ed Balls, will rule today that formal science tests taken by 600,000 11-year-olds every year should be scrapped.

Every child in England will receive a detailed graduation certificate listing their achievements at the end of primary school, to help ease the transition to secondary school by giving their new teachers details about their accomplishments.

But the expert group behind the review will stop short of recommending that all national tests be abolished – leaving the government to face a showdown with two teaching unions, which say they will boycott next year's tests if they are not reformed. The Guardian understands the group will recommend that the controversial system of testing all 11-year-olds in English and maths should continue.

Tests could be replaced by "single level tests" in years to come based on the model of music grade exams, for which pupils are entered when their teachers think they are ready to sit them, instead of as a cohort once a year. But pilots in 400 schools have raised concerns that teachers will be tempted to enter pupils repeatedly, leading to more stressful testing. This has prompted the expert group to ask for an extension of the pilots.

Balls is expected to accept the recommendations of the expert group. Pupils will still be assessed on their scientific knowledge and understanding, but through practical work in the classroom instead of in formal tests, after the group ruled that the science Sats were failing to test children on what they were learning in the classroom. The decision follows plans to remove science from the core of the primary curriculum and replace it with information and communication technologies – ICT – a move which prompted concerns that science teaching for younger pupils would be undermined.

The report will also announce changes to the system of publishing schools' results to create league tables. The group was asked to investigate versions of the American "report card", which would give richer detail on schools' achievements, including the quality of sports provision and standard of pupil behaviour, as well as test results. Details of those plans are expected next month in a white paper but options being considered include scrapping the system of publishing school-by-school results on one day to discourage the creation of league tables.

The group, which includes the author of last week's review of the primary curriculum, Sir Jim Rose, the former London schools commissioner Tim Brighouse, and headteachers, was set up by Balls after the collapse of last summer's Sats marking and Sats for 14-year-olds were scrapped.

The report will reject the position of the National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Head Teachers, which oppose national testing altogether and are threatening a boycott next year. Some 600,000 pupils are due to take Sats tests in every state primary in England next week.

Last night, Christine Blower, the general secretary of the NUT, said: "All of the arguments about getting rid of tests for 14-year-olds apply to 11-year-olds as well. We really think there is no point in testing every single 11-year-old in the country. Even if there is a will to change the league tables, it won't happen unless you get rid of the tests. We're saying we're happy to do sampling and teaching assessments but get rid of tests in all three subjects at key stage 2."

The review comes as the government's strategy for maths in primary schools was attacked in a report by the Commons public spending committee, which said it was disgraceful that more than a fifth of 11-year-olds were leaving primary school in England without a firm grasp of the subject and urged ministers to rethink their strategy for raising performance.

The report identified 38,000 pupils who started school at the top of the class but by the time they left primary school had dropped to the bottom. Low achievers were significantly more likely to be from the poorest homes, it said.

The report said that in 2006–07, £2.3bn of the £10bn primary teaching budget was spent on teaching mathematics. Despite this, improvements in the mathematics results of primary pupils have levelled off since 2000. In 2008, 79% of pupils met the government's expected standard at 11 in national tests – the highest recorded results, but well short of the department's ambitions of 85% by 2006, it said.

Edward Leigh MP, chairman of the public accounts committee, said: "It is disgraceful that over one fifth of all primary school children reach the end of their primary education without a secure grasp of basic mathematical skills. This can have serious long-term consequences, for many then continue through secondary school without acquiring basic numeracy skills, impairing their chances in life and leaving them later in need of expensive remedial education."

Sarah McCarthy-Fry, the schools minister, said: "Last year over 100,000 more children achieved a level four in their maths at the age of 11 than in 1997. This is a tremendous achievement, of which our pupils and teachers should be rightly proud. We continue to make progress."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 6 May 2009 | 8:50 pm

Ford invests $550M to bring new Focus to market (AP)

AP - Ford Motor Co. stripped "truck" from the name of one its Detroit-area plants Wednesday as it announced plans to build its next-generation Focus here, including a battery-electric version Ford expects will run up to 100 miles without using gas or emitting greenhouse gas.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 May 2009 | 8:39 pm

Hobbits May Belong on New Branch of Our Family Tree

Evidence continues to mount that Homo floresiensis, the controversial hominids better known as hobbits, were a distinct member of our ancestral family, rather than pathologically shrunken misfits.

According to analyses published Wednesday in Nature, the big toes of H. floresiensis are disproportionately longer than those of either modern humans, formally known as Homo sapiens, or Homo erectus, the original out-of-Africa hominid.

The exceptionally tiny brain of H. floresiensis, which some researchers thought could not be explained by natural evolutionary pressures, also fits with brain development seen in ancient species of hippos who evolved in island isolation, just like the hobbit.

The papers are the latest salvos in a battle that’s raged since 2003, when anthropologists found one semi-complete skeleton and fragments of six others in an Indonesian island cave. The skeletons appeared to come from hominids who stood just three feet tall and were anatomically distinct from H. sapiens.

Anthropologists who believed the fossils represented a new species named it after its home island of Flores, where local folk tales described a race of diminutive jungle dwellers. They hypothesized a direct-line descent from H. erectus, the last common ancestor of all human species, who left Africa 2.5 million years ago.

But other researchers were unconvinced. They said the hobbits’ brains were too small to have made the sophisticated stone tools found with their skeletons. The skeletons probably belonged to pathologically stunted locals who’d been ritually buried by their fully H. sapiens tribe, said the skeptics.

Since 2003, researchers on both sides of the divide have produced interpretations supporting their arguments. But as described in a recent New York Times article, “The research community is definitely trending towards the hobbits.” Richard Leakey, a preeminent anthropologist who originally refused to take sides in the debate, told the Times that recent research “greatly strengthened the possibility” that H. Floresiensis was real.

The latest studies strengthen the possibility even more. In the first, State University of New York at Stony Brook biomechanicist William Jungers reports that H. floresiensis could move its big toes from side-to-side, just like modern humans, but the toes are so disproportionately long that they resemble the toes of apes rather than our own.

This suggests that H. floresiensis may belong to an as-yet-unknown branch of the human family tree, possibly even an evolutionary brother of Homo erectus. “These new findings raise the possiblity that the ancestor of H. floresiensis was not Homo erectus but instead some other, more primitive hominin whose dispersal into southeast Asia is still undocumented,” wrote Jungers’ team.

In the second paper, Eleanor Weston and Adrian Lister of London’s Natural History Museum looked at fossil skulls from several species of long-extinct hippos that evolved into dwarfish form on the island of Madagascar. The brains of the hippos were unexpectedly small, even given the diminution of their bodies.

“Our findings … suggest that the process of dwarfism could in principle explain small brain size, a factor relevant to the interpretation of the small-brained hominin found on the island of Flores,” they wrote.

The papers raise interesting possibilities for the hobbit, writes Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman in an accompanying commentary. Perhaps it comes from a pre-H. erectus species, such as Homo habilis. Or maybe H. erectus was “more diverse and anatomically primitive than we thought.”

Lieberman suspects the latter, he wrote, “But the only way to test these and other hypotheses is to find more fossils, especially in Asia. Get out your shovels!”

See Also:

• Were Fossil ‘Hobbits’ Just Little Humans?
• Finding Common Ground in the Hobbit Controversy

Citations: “Homo floresiensis from head to toe.” By Daniel Lieberman. Nature, Vol. 459, May 6, 2009.

“The foot of Homo floresiensis.” By W. L. Jungers, W. E. H. Harcourt-Smith, R. E. Wunderlich, M. W. Tocheri, S. G. Larson, T. Sutikna, Rhokus Awe Due & M. J. Morwood. Nature, Vol. 459, May 6, 2009.

“Insular dwarfism in hippos and a model for brain size reduction in Homo floresiensis.” By Eleanor M. Weston & Adrian M. Lister. Nature, Vol. 459, May 6, 2009.

Image: Nature/William Jungers

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 6 May 2009 | 8:08 pm

'Hobbit' New Species After All, Says Study

Analysis of the feet of ancient hobbit-like fossils suggest they were their own species.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 6 May 2009 | 7:55 pm

Three genes help breast cancer spread to brain

* Two genes may make cancer cells more mobile and invasive
Source: Reuters: Science News | 6 May 2009 | 7:45 pm

Another Swine Bug Raises Scientists’ Concerns

Public health experts worry that another potentially lethal pig-borne disease could establish itself among farmworkers in the United States.

Unlike the new swine flu virus, Streptococcus suis doesn’t pass from person to person. But it’s also more virulent, killing about one in 10 people in whom infection progresses to full-blown disease.

“There’s potential for that pathogen to cause serious human disease,” said Gregory Gray, a University of Iowa specialist in animal-borne disease epidemiology.

Since its identification in 1969, S. suis has been found in pigs throughout the world. Fatal to piglets, the disease spreads to people only through close contact with infected pigs. This has largely limited its human toll to Asia, where the daily proximity of small farmers to their livestock and a tradition of eating ill animals makes infection more likely.

The disease strikes North American pigs, but American humans were assumed to be safe. Only two human cases have been reported in the United States, where farmers keep a greater distance from their livestock, and dispose of meat known to come from sick animals.

Nevertheless, the assumption of safety may be false. In a study published last year in Emerging Infectious Diseases, Gray and fellow University of Iowa epidemiologist Tara Smith described the first search for S. suis in a U.S. population. Seven out of 73 Iowa hog-farm workers tested positive for exposure, compared to just one positive test in a 67-person control group.

Smith and Gray didn’t extrapolate national exposure levels from those geographically limited findings, but it’s not unreasonable to think a comparable ratio of pig farmers are affected nationwide. The S. suis microbe is common, able to live in the tonsils for years without causing symptoms, difficult to eradicate with antibiotics and spread by the cross-country transportation of millions of pigs every year.

“You could say that between 5 and 10 percent of workers in the U.S. might be infected,” said Marcelo Gottschalk, a University of Montreal veterinary pathologist and one of the world’s foremost S. suis researchers. “I don’t know if it’s true, but the extrapolation is fair enough.”

The researchers may even have under-counted exposure in Iowa. Workers in the study came from relatively small farms, rather than the big facilities that dominate the U.S. meat industry. “They typically have 100 to 500 pigs,” said Smith of her study’s farms. “Confinement facilities ramp that up another notch. Instead of 500 pigs, there’s 5,000. There’s a potential for more disease.”

How many of those workers will become ill is difficult to foretell. In some infected people, S. suis microbes lurk for years until a moment of immunological weakness. In other cases, the microbes stay in the tonsils without ever causing problems. In other cases, they wreak immediate havoc. But even if the current generation of S. suis-infected farm workers escape unscathed, the disease will almost certainly evolve.

A cautionary story comes from rural China, where an outbreak of S. suis three years ago sickened 200 people. Thirty-eight people died, and scores of others were wracked by meningitis, a crippling inflammation of brain and spinal-cord tissue coverings that is a common S. suis complication. Several other complications, such as septic shock and comas, were seen for the first time. Researchers say the unprecedented size and severity of the outbreak likely reflected the evolution of strain of a S. suis into a more virulent form.

Researchers next hope to determine exactly how many people have S. suis, and make sure that health workers know to look for it. According to Smith and Gottschalk, many cases may now be misdiagnosed as meningitis or a different Streptococcus bug, such as the microbe that causes Streptococcal pneumonia.

Unfortunately, the most at-risk human population barely registers on the public-health radar.

“Disease surveillance, especially in rural agriculture workers, is minimal,” said Gray. Workers may face multiple barriers to health care, from language to immigration status to poor employer coverage, and hog companies don’t always want researchers snooping around their operations. “We need to figure out a way to include these people.”

Publicity generated by the swine flu, linked ancestrally to farm-evolved virus strains, may prompt health officials to pay closer attention to diseases like Streptococcus suis.

“It’s something we’re keeping an eye on. In China, it came out of the blue,” said Smith.

See Also:

• Swine Flu Ancestor Born on U.S. Factory Farms
• 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: PLoS Medicine

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 6 May 2009 | 7:28 pm

Op-Ed: Stop Trying to Save the Planet

Nature is gone. It was gone before you were born, before your parents were born, before the pilgrims arrived, before the pyramids were built. You are living on a used planet.

If this bothers you, get over it. We now live in the Anthropocene ― a geological epoch in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces.

Yes, nature is still around ― back-seat driving, annoying us with natural disasters from time to time, and everywhere present in the background ― but definitely in no position to take the wheel. That’s our job now. Don’t blame nature for global warming, sea level rise, invasive species, mass extinctions, crop failures and poverty. That’s our thing.

Society needs to learn from recent scientific efforts to explain changes in greenhouse gases and the biosphere during the Anthropocene. Three lines of evidence demonstrate that we live on a planet reshaped by humans for thousands of years.

The first evidence dates back to the beginnings of science itself, when amateur scientists stumbled across the bones of massive, long-extinct mammals like the mastodon, giant ground sloth and saber-toothed tiger. The last glaciation can’t explain their disappearance 10,000 years ago, because they survived many preceding glaciations.

Current theory holds that prehistoric hunters drove these species to extinction. A few human-driven extinctions might seem like just a sad historical footnote, but it’s far more than that. The species that humans eliminated were keystone species whose lifestyles, like those of elephants in Africa today, tended to profoundly shape and sustain ecosystem form and function by their feeding habits.

Nature just hasn’t been the same since well-armed hunters came on the scene.

And what of the wild forests of Amazonia and North America that we think of as pristine? Think again. The second line of evidence — from archaeology, paleo-ecology and even epidemiology — that humans lived all over these lands is growing. Man burned down the forests millenniums before Columbus, first to enhance hunting for the wild species attracted to the regrowth, and later for agriculture.

While probably never cleared in their entirety, areas long believed to be the wildest places on Earth are almost certainly still recovering from human alterations that are evident from earthworks, artifacts, anthropogenic charcoal and the sediment record.

Finally, the geologic evidence. About 7,000 years ago, levels of carbon dioxide and methane began rising. During every previous similar interglacial period, of which there are at least seven, greenhouse-gas levels fell.

To explain this, palaeoclimatologist Bill Ruddiman formulated the “early anthropogenic hypothesis,” which holds that the source of these gases was land clearing and flooding for rice production by prehistoric farmers beginning 8,000 years ago. While this hypothesis still ruffles the feathers of many a climatologist, there remains no better evidence explaining the Holocene greenhouse-gas anomaly.

It is even possible that global warming caused by prehistoric farmers has delayed the onset of the next ice age, which is due right about now.

So there you have it: Ours is a used planet. Thanks to us, Earth has become warmer, less forested and less biodiverse for millenniums.

So what now? First of all, we’ve got to stop trying to save the planet. For better or for worse, nature has long been what we have made it, and what we will make it.

And it’s time for a “postnatural” environmentalism. Postnaturalism is not about recycling your garbage, it is about making something good out of grandpa’s garbage and leaving the very best garbage for your grandchildren. Postnaturalism means loving and embracing our human nature, the nature we have created to feed ourselves, the nature we live in. What good is environmentalism if it makes you depressed about the future?

This is about recognizing that our farms, and even our backyards and cities, are the most important wildlife refuges in the world and should be managed as such. We can keep people out of places we want to think of as wild, but these places will still be changing because of global warming and the alien species we introduce without even trying.

If we want these places to look like they did before us, we will have to constantly recreate them. It will be a huge job for us humans to keep nature “wild.”

Instead, it’s high time we saved ourselves — and not from nature. It’s true that prehistory is littered with the remains of failed civilizations, but Homo sapiens is not going away. Indeed, we humans can totally trash the planet and still survive. We already have in many ways.

Don’t like it? Stop trashing it!

Use renewable energy. Clean it up. Repair it. Get to work. There is plenty more mileage left in this spaceship Earth. Think about that while enjoying a trip to your local zoo or arboretum — the most biodiverse places that ever existed on Earth.

See Also:

• Wired Science’s Complete ‘From the Fields’ Series
• Op-Ed: What Marmots Teach Us About Terrorism
• Op-Ed: Reversing the Congressional Science Lobotomy

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 6 May 2009 | 6:40 pm

Hydrogen Fuel Made Using Green Energy

NASA designs a green-powered fueling system for buses that run on hydrogen.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 6 May 2009 | 6:20 pm

Hobbits 'are a separate species'

Scientists have found more evidence that the Indonesian "Hobbits" are a new species - not modern pygmies.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 May 2009 | 6:04 pm

U.S. Air Force eyes way to help space industry

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force is exploring ways to shore up a declining U.S. space industrial base, including working with other government agencies to aggregate orders for space-related equipment, Gen. Robert Kehler, head of Air Force Space Command said on Wednesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 6 May 2009 | 5:54 pm

Video: Biomotion Lab Turns Bodies Into Data

PALO ALTO, California — Eight video cameras and two fast computers are all it takes to turn a human being’s motions — a walk, a back flip — into clinical data.

Like a more accurate version of the motion capture technology that makes your Grand Theft Auto character’s movements more realistic, researchers here at the Stanford Biomotion Laboratory have perfected a system that allows them to quantify how humans move.

“Each camera cuts out a silhouette in 3-D space,” said Tom Andriacchi, the head of the lab and a mechanical engineer and orthopedic surgeon at Stanford University. “It’s like doing slices. And the more slices you have of the three-dimensional statue in time, the more accurately we can fit that model.”

A pair of NBA center Adonal Foyle’s supersize shoes hanging by the door testifies to the occasional visits that high-level athletes pay to the lab. But most of the time, lab employees use their extremely accurate knowledge of the human body to study injury and disease.

The biomotion facility has the standard marker-based systems, which rely on reflective dots about the size of a bottle cap. The prize of the lab, though, is the camera-based system, which doesn’t impede subjects’ movements. The motion-capture technology has been six years in the making because it requires such a high level of accuracy.

“A lot of this technology has been developed for the development of gaming to get realistic motion and there’s a few companies that are starting to try and develop similar technology, but none put the demands on accuracy that we require,” Andriacchi said. “Our applications are clinical. For them, as long as it looks OK, they think it’s OK. We do a lot of validation against the marker-based methodology to make sure we’re getting the accuracy we need.”

Now, the lab will now embark on two projects that take advantage of the new system. In the coming months, they’ll study how anterior cruciate ligaments tear, a common sports injury, and how the gait of obese people might increase their risk of developing osteoarthritis.

And maybe, along the way, another athlete will drop by to see themselves instantly turned into an avatar. Andriacchi, a tennis player, has an athlete in mind.

“I’d love to capture Federer’s movements,” he said.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and book site for The History of Our Future; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 6 May 2009 | 5:07 pm

WHO to weigh flu vaccine switch next week

GENEVA (Reuters) - World Health Organization experts will meet next week to consider whether drug makers should switch from seasonal to pandemic flu production in response to the new H1N1 strain, an official said Wednesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 6 May 2009 | 4:49 pm

Scientists find 200 new frog species in Madagascar

PORT LOUIS (Reuters) - Scientists have found more than 200 new species of frogs in Madagascar but a political crisis is hurting conservation of the Indian Ocean island's unique wildlife, a study shows.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 6 May 2009 | 4:30 pm

Biofuel Makers Try to Settle ‘Cars vs. Cows’ Debate

SAN FRANCISCO — Farmers in America grow two things, mostly: animal feed and corn for ethanol.

In fact, Michigan State University agriculture researcher Bryan Bals noted the feed requirements for animals are an order of magnitude larger than Americans’ food requirements. That insight has led an MSU team to propose getting more out of the same amount of American farmland by increasing the amount of animal feed that farmers can harvest from an acre, thereby creating more land for biofuel crops.

By treating corn stalks and leaves (called corn “stover”) with an ammonia treatment, they can increase their digestibility and accessible protein content for beef cattle. This will allow them to cut the amount of land needed for animal feed in half, opening up more farmland for fuel crops.

It’s an unusual solution to the food-versus-fuel debate, but one that could conceivably keep the biofuel industry from sucking up environmentally sensitive land.

“We could replace every drop of gasoline used in the United Sates while still maintaining the same amount of animal feed and exports,” Bals said at the Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals. “But we believe this is a realistic scenario. This is no new technology and no unproven technology.”

Scaling up production of next-generation fuels made from things other than corn hasn’t been easy, but Bals’s talk came on the day that the Obama Administration threw its weight — and $787 million — behind the biofuel industry.

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and Department of Interior will collaborate on accelerating biofuel production. Of particular note, $480 million is marked to help build next-generation biofuel pilot and demonstration plants across the nation.

It’s no wonder that symposium attendees from around the world crowded into sessions on topics from wheat-straw ethanol to life-cycle assessment. The scientists seem kind of stunned: Suddenly, there’s money (and lots of it!) in microbial chemistry.

But as high-tech as it sounds, many of the problems with biofuels are enmeshed in the industrial infrastructure of the country. The vice president of Verenium, a company specializing in building custom “enzyme cocktails” for industrial processes, devoted close to five minutes of a 30-minute talk to discussing the relative merits of storing feedstock on site or having it delivered “just in time.” The industry is still learning what its nuts and bolts are, not just how to tighten them.

The Michigan State strategy appealing, partly because it outsources to cows some of the difficult part of breaking down cellulose — and cows are pretty good at it.

President Obama, in announcing the new interagency biofuel agreement said, “We must invest in a clean-energy economy that will lead to new jobs, new businesses and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

Every president and presidential candidate has declared a desire to end our dependence on foreign oil — and yet we import more than 12 million barrels of petroleum each day.

Obama’s words are more modern, but the idea he’s promoting echoes Richard Nixon’s back in 1974 when he declared, “Let this be our national goal: At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need to provide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep our transportation moving.”

While Nixon’s Project Independence didn’t do much to stimulate domestic liquid-fuel production, the renewable-fuel standard instituted by the Bush administration requires that 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel be circulating through the American economy a year by 2022, including 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol. And even that is just a month’s worth of U.S. oil consumption. Given that the largest cellulosic-fuel plants currently produce at best a couple million gallons a year, can biofuels really step up to replace a large percentage of our liquid-fuel needs?

Gregor Macdonald, an independent energy analyst, doesn’t think so, outside of a limited set of regions. Macdonald’s problem with biofuels is that, unlike oil, ethanol doesn’t provide a great return on energy invested, which makes it difficult to keep the production chain from breaking.

“Because the energy profit margin is thin, the capital profit margin is also thin,” Macdonald wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “In the oil production chain, where the energy profit margin is fatter, each player in the chain will have to spend less time near zero or negative profit margins. Thus, that chain is less likely to break. But it’s essentially because of the rich energy content.”

Indeed, ethanol refiners had a tough couple of years in 2007-2008, despite high gasoline prices. One green-tech blog, Earth2Tech, even started a “Biofuels Deathwatch Map” with a disturbing amount of pins.

UPDATE 5/6, 2:34: Fixed units of US oil imports.

See Also:

• One Billion Gallons Of Algae-Biofuel Could Flowing By 2025
• Tiny Flower Turns Pig Poop into Fuel
• Obama Voices Biofuel Doubts
• Biofuel Solution at Sea, not on Land
• Biofuel Startup Strives to Meet Obama’s Green Ambitions
• Investors Pump Biofuel Bonanza

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and book site for The History of Our Future; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 6 May 2009 | 4:16 pm

Dating Sites ID the Smell of Love

Two dating companies turn to science and odor to help couples find their match.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 6 May 2009 | 4:00 pm

Smuggler Tries to Conceal Birds in Socks

A man tried smuggling songbirds into the country by hiding them in a pair of leggings.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 6 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Is this really a breakthrough in male contraception?

Men will not be falling over themselves to have monthly testosterone injections in a tender part of their anatomy. Fortunately a more acceptable form of male contraception is in the pipeline

If you're a heterosexual man in a long-term relationship but would rather not hear the patter of tiny feet just yet, would you willingly submit to a monthly contraceptive jab in the buttocks?

The front page of yesterday's Daily Express trumpeted the development of a "male pill" – a hormone injection that renders men temporarily infertile and is "as effective as the female pill in preventing pregnancy". The story reported a phase III clinical trial in China of a testosterone jab involving 1,045 fertile men which found that the treatment caused no significant side effects (apart from increased libido) and almost completely suppressed sperm production. Better still, the men got their fertility back when the injections were stopped.

What the story failed to mention was that out of 1,045 men recruited into the trial, only 733 completed the 30 monthly injections and follow-up. That's quite a high drop-out rate, but perhaps not all that surprising given that the men had to present themselves at a clinic every month and drop their trousers to receive the jab. It probably stung, just a bit. On top of that, it took several months after the injections began before the men could safely be considered infertile.

To monitor their declining sperm counts the men would also have had to submit regular semen samples.

Around 5% of the volunteers who made it to the end of the trial never achieved "azoospermia". In other words their partners continued to risk unwanted pregnancy, in the absence of another form of contraception. For them, it had all been a complete waste of time. All those indignities for nothing.

Two of the men failed to regain their full fertility when the injections were stopped. The injections may not have been to blame, but it might give a man pause for thought before embarking on such a course of contraception.

The development of a male version of the contraceptive pill is a noble goal, but hormone injections have severe practical and psychological drawbacks for men. In 2004 I wrote an article for New Scientist magazine detailing some of the alternatives to hormone injections. Some of them looked very promising. One of the principal advantages over using testosterone was that they targeted the later stages of sperm production, so their effect kicked in much more quickly.

Unfortunately they were all a long way from reaching the shelves of your local pharmacy, partly because major pharmaceutical companies – whose financial muscle would be essential to take them through hugely expensive clinical trials, without any guarantee of success – wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. Very little has changed in the past five years.

What's a guy to do? Amazingly, there did seem to be a highly effective, reversible form of male contraception on the brink of worldwide adoption. It was a type of vasectomy called RISUG (Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance) involving the injection of a gel into the vas deferens. The gel sets to form a loose polymer that allows the passage of seminal fluid but knocks out sperm.

The procedure is fast, doesn't require general anaesthetic and apparently prevents conception for at least 10 years without further maintenance. The only reported side effect is a slight scrotal swelling and tenderness that resolves after a few weeks. Flushing the polymer out with sodium bicarbonate immediately restores fertility.

RISUG was invented by an Indian biomedical engineer, Sujoy Guha, and is undergoing phase III clinical trials in India. Its progress to market was delayed by years when the reliability of earlier toxicology tests in animals was called into question, but it looks as though it's back on track.

The development of a popular form of male contraception that rivals condoms for effectiveness would be a triumph for sexual equality. Whether it would match the effectiveness of condoms in preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections like HIV is another question entirely.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 6 May 2009 | 2:55 pm

Robot submarine prepares for deepest ocean dive

Robotic submarine undergoes the final preparations before its dive to the deepest-known part of the oceans.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 May 2009 | 2:40 pm

Oil prices jump to new high for the year (AP)

AP - Oil prices hit a new high for the year Wednesday ahead of a government report on the levels of crude in storage that have neared 19-year highs recently.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 May 2009 | 2:28 pm

Disease Strikes Great Barrier Reef

Black band disease, which kills coral as it eats tissue, has infected the Great Barrier Reef.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 6 May 2009 | 2:00 pm

Seahorses 'Stood Up' 25 Million Years Ago

Seahorses adopted their upright posture to take advantage of grassy habitats.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 6 May 2009 | 1:16 pm