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Cancer: Detecting, Targeting And Disabling Tumor Cells, All In One StepResearchers have developed the basis for a four-in-one agent that can detect, target, and disable tumor cells while also making them macroscopically and microscopically visible.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 May 2009 | 6:00 pm Current Multi-component Vaccines May Need ReworkingCurrent strategies for designing vaccines against HIV and cancers, for instance, may enable some components in multi-component vaccines to cancel the effect of others on the immune system, eliminating their ability to provide protection, according to a new article.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 May 2009 | 6:00 pm 'Gecko Vision': Key To Future Multifocal Contact Lens?Nocturnal geckos are among the very few living creatures able to see colors at night, and scientists' discovery of series of distinct concentric zones may lead to insight into better cameras and contact lenses.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 May 2009 | 6:00 pm How Much Oil Have We Used?Estimates of how much crude oil we have extracted from the planet vary wildly. Now, researchers have published a new estimate in the International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology that suggests we may have used more than we think.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 May 2009 | 6:00 pm 'Star Trek' Warp Speed? Physicists Have New Idea That Could Make It SoWith the new movie 'Star Trek' opening in theaters across the nation, one thing movie goers will undoubtedly see is the Starship Enterprise racing across the galaxy at the speed of light. But can traveling at warp speed ever become a reality?Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 May 2009 | 6:00 pm Spontaneous Activity Found In The Idling BrainResearchers have uncovered new information about portions of the brain that spontaneously activate together when a person is at rest. The latest research demonstrates how the interactions of certain brain regions at rest become more distributed as a person ages. It is believed that an increased understanding of normal brain function will allow researchers to better characterize mental disorders such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 May 2009 | 6:00 pm Pet Therapy Dogs May Carry MRSA And Clostridium Difficile Between PatientsResearchers investigated whether MRSA and C.difficile could be passed between pet therapy dogs and patients. The findings suggested that MRSA and C. difficile may have been transferred to the fur and paws of these canine visitors through patients handling or kissing the dogs, or through exposure to a contaminated health care environment. The dog that acquired C.difficile had politely shaken paws with many of the patients.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 May 2009 | 3:00 pm Small Brain Of Dwarf 'Hobbit' Explained By Hippo's Island LifeAncient Madagascan hippos have shed light on the origins of the small brain of the 1-metre-tall human, known as the hobbit. By examining the skulls of extinct Madagascan hippos, scientists discovered that dwarfed mammals on islands evolved much smaller brains in relation to their body size.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 May 2009 | 3:00 pm Food-Borne Outbreaks: Keeping Lettuce and Other Fresh Produce CleanThe convenience of fresh-cut produce has greatly increased sales despite multiple food-borne outbreaks. To reduce these risks, strict hygiene programs and sanitizers are used for decontamination once the food is harvested. Preventing microbial contamination in the fields is equally important. Researchers experimented with the use of harpin, a substance known to boost plants' resistance to disease, prior to harvest.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 May 2009 | 3:00 pm Hubble Repair Mission On Track For May 11 LaunchA new instrument to probe the evolution of galaxies, stars and intergalactic matter from its perch on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope is on schedule for its slated May 11 launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard NASA's space shuttle Atlantis.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 May 2009 | 3:00 pm Gov't faces weekend deadline on polar bear rule (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 11:13 am Austria to quit CERN particle physics laboratoryVIENNA (Reuters) - Austria plans to pull out of the international particle physics laboratory CERN because its share of the high cost is eating up too much of the country's budget for international research.Source: Reuters: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 11:11 am Obama reviews post-shuttle plansThe Obama administration is taking a fresh look at what humans do in space and how they get there.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 May 2009 | 11:09 am UK swine flu genetics unravelledThe first genetic code of swine flu from European samples has been unravelled by UK researchers.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 May 2009 | 11:05 am 'Babyface' look can help black CEOs, study says (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 9:42 am Beetle, fungus threaten Florida's avocado industry (AP)AP - A little beetle could cause big problems for Florida's multimillion-dollar avocado industry.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 8:03 am China's panda programme struggling after quake (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 7:48 am Pope urged to call for Jordan river clean up (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 6:44 am World's smallest pigs 'thriving'Camera-trap footage reveals pygmy hogs are doing well following their release into the wild last year.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 May 2009 | 6:04 am Venezuela to nationalize oil service companies (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 4:39 am Constant sun -- too much of a good thing?LONDON (Reuters) - Too much sunlight in places like Greenland where long summer days often cause insomnia appears more likely to drive a person to suicide, Swedish researchers said Friday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 11:19 pm Science's great romantic adventurers brought back to lifeThis month we're pondering The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Join the discussion by adding your comments below As I write, it is 50 years to the day since the novelist and scientist CP Snow delivered his notorious lecture on the divide between the "Two Cultures" of art and science. As I write, European Space Agency engineers at Kourou in French Guiana are preparing to launch an infrared telescope called Herschel and despatch it to a point a million miles from Earth, with its back to the Sun, to peer into clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. I could not have picked a better book for the moment. The 18th century astronomer William Herschel, one of Richard Holmes's subjects, was the first to detect the infrared spectrum. He was the first to observe the Orion nebula. He was also the first to speculate on the shape of our galaxy, the life cycle of the stars, and the motion of the solar system through space. Oh, and he was the first person in written history to see a new planet: Uranus. And he managed to score that triumph while still a career composer, conductor, organist and concert promoter. This intoxicating book is the latest from a man who first made a noise in the literary world in 1976 with a stunning biography of Shelley; and then turned out a masterly two-volume life of Coleridge, the first volume in 1989, the second in 1998. Holmes doesn't rush his subjects: he seems instead to inhabit them, and grow with them. You've heard of slow food? This is slow biography, and all the richer and more nourishing for the painstaking preparation. The Age of Wonder is about some of the contemporaries of the romantic poets, and the light it shines on Joseph Banks and William and Caroline Herschel, on the African explorer Mungo Park, on the heady balloonist-adventurers who first took off during the Enlightenment, and on the effervescent Humphry Davy and his young assistant Michael Faraday, is also reflected by the poets and painters of the same period. The poets responded to the great adventure of science in their different ways. Coleridge claimed to have attended lectures on chemistry "to improve my stock of metaphors". Keats saluted Herschel in his sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. Robert Southey inhaled Humphry Davy's nitrous oxide. Shelley incorporated Davy's chemistry in Queen Mab. Mary Shelley tuned in to contemporary scientific speculation and wrote Frankenstein. But in The Age of Wonder these key figures in Romantic history are, for once, actors with walk-on parts. The leading roles go to those who took up natural philosophy and turned it into science, who followed their curiosity and forged the new disciplines of astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, aeronautics, taxonomy, and so on; and Holmes writes about his scientific adventurers with the same combination of warmth, understanding, grace and, above all, detailed scholarship that he once spent on his poets. The story opens with Banks and Captain Cook on Tahiti in 1769 and it ends with Charles Dickens lampooning a scientific conference, Darwin aboard the Beagle in Cape Town meeting Sir John Herschel, William's son, and an impudent American newspaper hoax about life on the moon. Offstage, the Ancien Régime comes to an end, the Terror stalks France, Bonaparte's empire rises and falls, the British slave trade ends, political reform takes shape. On stage, Banks pioneers anthropological observation, expands the frontiers of natural history and enjoys uninhibited lovemaking under azure Pacific skies. Chemists isolate hydrogen and balloonists take to the heavens in the first lighter-than-air machines; floating libertines pioneer the "mile-high club"; enterprising aeronauts discard ballast and even evacuate their bowels to lighten the load; an Italian diplomat soars over London eating chicken legs and drinking champagne. In his back garden in Bath, and later near Windsor, Herschel advances the reflector telescope, explores the fixed stars and raises questions about the universe that are still being answered. Banks grows old and develops gout, but still dominates British science. Onto this stage stalks the young, handsome, poet and experimenter Humphry Davy, a figure so thrilling that Albemarle Street becomes London's first one-way thoroughfare, such is the press of traffic to his lectures at the Royal Institution. He is honoured by the French and crosses the channel to pick up his award, even though England and France are at war at the time. This is a rich, crowded book, with something luminous, provoking and instructive on every page. The discussions of the challenges of 18th century astronomy, or of the first faltering explorations of chemistry, are as illuminating as any formal scientific history, and twice as readable. Any quibbles stem not from Holmes's lack of knowledge but rather from his complete immersion in the period and the firmness with which he directs his story, so that occasionally there are important historical facts that he fails to pass on. And Holmes's patience with pernickety detail for once deserts him entirely in his cast list at the end of the book: "Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832, German heavyweight boxer, went ten rounds with the ghost of Sir Isaac Newton, referees still out." Eh? It's a measure of the marvels in this book that you can only treasure such a peculiar entry. In our last round of discussion, one or two book club members remarked that (a) this book had yet to be published in the US and (b) it is still only out in hardback and therefore expensive. Well, for once I envy the Americans: they have the joy of this book to look forward to. And if ever there was a work to buy in hard covers and keep forever, this is it. Next month, neuroscience and the newborn child. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker (Penguin, £9.99) 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 | 7 May 2009 | 11:15 pm Swine flu may be more infectious than we thought – health chief• Advice will be reviewed if virus continues to spread Swine flu may be more infectious than so far appears in the UK and the current guidance on catching it may have to be changed, the chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, warned today. The World Health Organisation concurred, saying that if unchecked, swine flu could affect almost a third of the population – 2 billion people. Although currently it is only mild, the attack rate of the strain now affecting 23 countries is around 25-30%, Donaldson said, although he added that it was possible people over the age of 50 might have some immunity to the virus. In the UK, the Health Protection Agency says that only those who have been within one metre of an infected person for more than an hour are considered to be at risk. "I think it will be more transmissible than that when it gets going," said Donaldson. "We may need to look at that advice." Anybody with flu-like symptoms is already being told to stay at home to avoid infecting other people. He said that if flu spreads and becomes more severe, particularly in the winter months, there will be concerns about people working at close quarters in offices and travelling together on tubes, trains and buses. Donaldson, giving a joint briefing in London with Alan Johnson, the health secretary, said the top laboratories in the world were still analysing the flu strain now said to have killed 42 people in Mexico, which also has 1,112 confirmed cases. "We have to wait another few weeks for characterisation of the virus," he said. Last night five swine flu cases were confirmed in Brazil and Argentina. Brazilian Health Minister Jose Gomes Temporao said four young adults contracted the flu outside the country - three in Mexico, and one in Florida. Prior to Thursday, Colombia was the only South American nation to confirm swine flu with its borders. In Mexico and in the USA – which Donaldson said was about a month behind Mexico in the progress of its flu outbreak – the picture looks different to here, with many more cases apparently transmitted from one human to another. Only 10 of the 34 cases confirmed in the UK were actually acquired here. On the possibility that people over the age of 50 might have some immunity to the virus, which is of the H1N1 strain, Donaldson said: "H1N1 has been around a long time. It was a sub-type of the Spanish flu and is in our current seasonal flu vaccine. The optimistic interpretation is that the immune systems of the over-50s might have some memory of the H1N1 of this kind." He and Johnson defended their handling of the flu outbreak against critics who say it should be treated just like a mild seasonal flu, without school closures or the handout of antiviral drugs to contacts of those who are sick. "We don't know enough about the illness at this stage. It is very reassuring that cases so far are not worse. We don't want a situation where a child is admitted to hospital because of the complications of flu. As far as children are concerned, I'm very, very cautious. Simply to allow people to be exposed to it and develop antibodies I don't think is the right approach." Johnson said he would rather have egg on his face than deaths on his hands. "I'd rather be accused of over-hyping something and exaggerating than not be prepared for a general pandemic that seriously affected our citizens," he said. The current strategy of containment justified using "precious antiviral drugs", he said. If it became widespread or more severe, the strategy would change to reduce the numbers of people given drugs on a preventive basis. Patients and their family members would receive drugs, but not others who might have been in contact. School closures, on the advice of the Health Protection Agency, were a necessary part of the containment strategy. Johnson said the public response to the flu threat had been good, but "now the danger is complacency". The government has ordered 227 million face masks and 34 respirators for health workers and has spent between £400m and £500m on its stockpile of flu drugs, which is being expanded to cover 80% of the population from 50% now; £100 million has been committed in contracts to drug companies Baxter and GlaxoSmithKline to produce a vaccine once the strain is understood. 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 | 7 May 2009 | 11:05 pm From the archives: Minister warns smokers over cancer risk8 May 1956 The Minister of Health, Mr R. H. Turton, yesterday confirmed that there are twenty times more deaths from cancer of the lung among heavy smokers than among non-smokers. This statistical evidence, he said, had been collected from this and other countries. Giving as his authority the chairman of a committee of the Medical Research Council which has been investigating the subject, he emphasised what he called "statistically an incontrovertible association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer." The fact that as yet no causal agent had been recognised should not be allowed to obscure this. The Minister's information was part of a statement to the House of Commons on smoking and lung cancer. He repeated what he had said in an earlier statement that two known cancer-producing agents have been identified in tobacco smoke, but added that it is not yet certain whether they play a direct part in producing lung cancer. He promised that when new information becomes available he himself would make it public. He rejected the idea of a national publicity campaign put forward by Mr Donald Chapman. He thought it would not be appropriate "at the present state of our knowledge," but he willingly agreed that that was a decision he would have to review as fresh information came in. Mr Turton felt it important neither to minimise nor exaggerate the size of the problem. He gave a few statistics to make plain the true position. The number of deaths from cancer of the lung has risen to 2,286 in 1931 to 12,271 last year, he said. To place these figures in perspective, he pointed out that in 1954 out of every thousand deaths of men aged between 45 and 74, 77 were from bronchitis, 112 from strokes and apoplexies, and 234 were from cancer, of which 85 were cancer of the lung. He added that the number of women who die from cancer of the lung is still a small fraction of the total. Another point which Mr Turton confirmed was that according to the latest research the risk of lung cancer is "substantially less" among pipe smokers than among heavy cigarette smokers, though pipe smokers do still face a heavier risk than non-smokers. Mr Vaughan Morgan asked him how those who give up smoking are affected, and Mr Turton said cautiously that "there is some evidence that the risks of contracting cancer of the lung decrease when smoking is given up." The Minister was unable to differentiate in his statistics between those smokers who inhale and those who do not. He was afraid that was beyond the capacity of statisticians. 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 | 7 May 2009 | 11:01 pm Astronauts making one last house call to Hubble (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 9:37 pm White House orders review of NASA space plans (AP)AP - The White House has ordered a complete outside review of NASA's manned space program, including plans to return astronauts to the moon.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 9:07 pm Obama orders review of NASA plan to return to moonCAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The Obama administration has ordered a top-level review of the U.S. human spaceflight program that has been focused on returning astronauts to the moon by 2020, officials said on Thursday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 8:35 pm Ban considered for Spice Gold, herbal high as strong as some skunk cannabis• Smoking mixture found to have synthetic additives The government's drug advisers are to consider next week whether to ban Spice Gold, a herbal smoking mixture that is as strong as some strains of skunk cannabis, and other "legal highs". Spice is sold on the internet and in "head shops" as a herbal high and a nicotine-free smoke, and even advertised as an "aromatic potpourri". It comes packaged in small sealed pouches holding 3g (less than an ounce). But the former head of the Forensic Science Service's drugs intelligence unit, Les King, yesterday told a European drugs conference in Lisbon: "Just a few months ago, it was found that a smoking mixture known as Spice was not the innocuous material it purported to be. The claimed constituents, namely various herbs, were a Trojan horse." He said that the substance's real psychoactive constituents were synthetic additives, such as ones that mimic the effects of some of the more powerful active ingredients in cannabis. King told the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction conference that the Spice Gold smoking mixture had been imported first from China and had been around since 2006. It mostly contained an unidentified herbal matter, sold at about £15.50 for 3g and produced a "cannabis-like" effect. There was also a more powerful type, Spice Diamond, on the market, and similar substances were sold as Yucatan Fire. King is to give a presentation next week in London to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, where his colleagues will debate whether to recommend that Spice be banned in Britain. The move follows a request from the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, to look at the availability and harmfulness of a series of "legal highs" including the herb Salvia divinorum, commonly referred to as magic mint or Mexican sage, which has a naturally occurring psychoactive ingredient. But the advisory council, of which King is a member, will consider Spice first. The "Trojan horse" properties of Spice were identified only last December by the THC Pharma laboratory in Germany, which is developing medicinal cannabis as synthetic imitations of the plant's active ingredients. Its research led to Germany and Austria banning Spice in January this year. France decided to take the same action in February. The first batches of Spice were seized in 2006 in Sweden and Jersey, but analysis failed to find any banned substances within them. Early last year the European monitoring centre's early warning system, which links police, customs officials and drug specialists around the EU, identified a dozen online distributors – half based in Britain and a third in the Netherlands – who were promoting Spice. King, in a paper entitled New Drugs Coming Our Way delivered to the monitoring centre's conference, said that many "designer drugs" had been discovered across the EU since the early 1990s. These were psychotropic substances related to amphetamine and MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, and were predominantly stimulants or hallucinogens. As some of the drugs were banned in some EU states but not others, new law enforcement problems arose until a European-wide "joint action" on new synthetic drugs was developed in 1997 and expanded in 2005. "The term 'new' referred to 'newly misused' as in almost all cases the substances had been first synthesised many years ago, often as potential therapeutic agents," said King. "Since 1997, over 80 substances have been reported via the early warning system." He added that in the past few years a much more diverse range of substances had appeared, many of them MDMA-like, or stimulants, or, less commonly, hallucinogens. They included plant products such as Hawaiian Baby Woodrose, Kava and Kratom, unusual stimulants, ecstasy-style drugs such as BZP, which is now banned in four EU countries, and misused medicinal products. They even included Fluorotropacocaine, the first designer drug based on cocaine. King, who is the UK correspondent for the EU's early warning system for new drugs, predicted that synthetic drugs would continue to dominate the "legal highs" market and that herbal products would remain relatively uncommon. He suggested the emergence of these novel substances raised questions about how well placed the European authorities were to detect them. "Event the best-equipped laboratories in the EU can struggle to identify new substances, particularly if, as so often happens, neither pure reference materials nor analytical data are available. We must ask whether we are forever doomed to be reactive. Can new substances be anticipated?" He told delegates the answer to his question was that it should be possible to anticipate new substances given a knowledge of the literature and the use of rules. 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 | 7 May 2009 | 8:31 pm 'Star Trek' Tricorder Scans for Life on Space Station (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - Astronauts on the space station have their own version of the "Star Trek" tricorder to search for signs of life, whether that life is from Earth or of extraterrestrial origin - at least if it's life as we know it. The real device appears to be similar in size and basic purpose to the one in the new movie, which opens Friday in the United States.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 7:43 pm Hubble Telescope to Get Final House CallAstronauts will make final repairs and add key instruments to the Hubble Space Telescope.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 7 May 2009 | 7:25 pm Creationism Dig Violated Student’s Rights
When a high school history teacher told his students that creationism was “superstitious nonsense,” he violated a student’s First Amendment rights, a Federal judge ruled this week. Christian conservatives are celebrating the decision by U.S. District Court Judge James Selna that high school teacher James Corbett violated the establishment clause, which courts have interpreted to mean that the government should neither promote nor disparage any religion. But it’s not the big win for creationism that it might seem at first glance. Judge Selna was careful to circumscribe the applicability of his decision. The student, Chad Farnan, sought no financial reward. Farnan filed the suit in 2007 and the Capistrano School District in Orange County, California, where Corbett teaches, was not held liable. “The ruling today protects Farnan, but also protects teachers like Corbett in carrying out their teaching duties,” the judge wrote. The teacher got into hot water because the creationism statement came outside the context of his AP European History class. In making the statement during a discussion of another teacher’s views on evolution, the court could not find any “legitimate secular purpose in [the] statement.” However, Judge Selna found a second statement that Corbett made about creationism did not violate the student’s First Amendment rights, although it’s an equally pointed critique. “Contrast that with creationists,” Corbett told his class. “They never try to disprove creationism. They’re all running around trying to prove it. That’s deduction. It’s not science. Scientifically, it’s nonsense.”
That statement was OK because it came in the context of a discussion of the history of ideas and religion. Thus, its primary purpose wasn’t just to express “affirmative disapproval” of religion, but rather to make the point that “generally accepted scientific principles do not logically lead to the theory of creationism.” One might expect that if creationism came up in the context of evolutionary biology, it would be similarly OK to say, “Scientifically, it’s nonsense.” The nuanced decision prompted the judge to append an afterword. Selna explains his thinking a basic right is at issue, namely, “to be free of a government that directly expresses approval of religion.” Just as the government shouldn’t promote religion, he writes, the government shouldn’t actively disapprove of religion either. “The Court’s ruling today reflects the constitutionally-permissible need for expansive discussion even if a given topic may be offensive to a particular religion or if a particular religion takes one side of a historical debate,” Selna writes. “The decision also reflects that there are boundaries. In this case, the Court has found that a single statement transgresses Farnan’s First Amendment rights.” See Also:
Image: flickr/williac 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 | 7 May 2009 | 7:15 pm Shrimp tuned to ocean temperatureSensitive shrimp stocks could plummet if the north Atlantic ocean warms up as predicted, say researchers.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 7:13 pm Infrared Proteins Give Deep View Inside Living Animals
A fluorescent protein found in an extremophile bacteria could give scientists an unprecedented view inside living animals. The proteins, which glow with tissue-penetrating infrared light, could be used to tag cells in living animals, allowing researchers to watch real-time biological processes that have until now been hidden. “Because their wavelengths penetrate tissue well, infrared-fluorescent proteins are suitable for whole-body imaging,” write University of California at San Diego biochemists Roger Tsien and Xiaokun Shu in a paper published Thursday in Science. Tsien’s laboratory is best known for its work with green fluorescent protein, or GFP, which helped make it possible to observe cellular activity in detail as never before. GFP was originally discovered in jellyfish by Japanese biologist Osamo Shimomura and first used to illuminate cell activity by Columbia University neurobiologist Martin Chalfie. Tsien pioneered the next step in GFP’s refinement, engineering tens of thousands of markers that could be attached to any gene in the body. Nearly every paper now written on gene or cell function involves GFP, either directly or by building on GFP-lit research. Its harnessing is considered one of the great advances of modern science, arguably on par with the development of the microscope — another tool that allowed researchers to investigate a previously invisible world. Tsien, Shimomura and Chalfie got the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work. But for all its acclaim, GFP has its limits. The wavelengths of light it emits and light used to observe this emission are quickly absorbed by cells, making it difficult to study living cells except in laboratory tissue cultures, microbes and extremely tiny animals. Those studies reveal little of what might be discovered by watching living tissues in complex organisms in real-time. “The use of fluorescent proteins in intact animals, such as mice, has been handicapped,” write Tsien and Shu. Because infrared wavelengths pass easily through tissue, the new protein could change that. Tsien and Shu found the protein in Deinococcus radiodurans, an extremophile microbe, that emits infrared light. The original protein was relatively dim, but they tweaked its amino acid content to make it brighter. They then injected mice with infrared proteins that attached to genes in their liver cells. Using a specialized microscope called a fluorescence molecular tomograph, which assembles three-dimensional images from two-dimensional scans taken at different depths in a target specimen. The liver shells showed up, glowing through layers of living tissue. Infrared protein imaging isn’t nearly as refined as GFP imaging, but according to Tsien and Shu, another 1,500 proteins similar to their own have already been identified. These could provide researchers with raw material for further refinements, with infrared proteins lighting up entire organisms as completely as GFPs have individual cells. See Also:
Citation: “Mammalian Expression of Infrared Fluorescent Proteins Engineered from a Bacterial Phytochrome.” By Xiaokun Shu, Antoine Royant, Michael Z. Lin, Todd A. Aguilera, Varda Lev-Ram, Paul A. Steinbach, RogerY. Tsien. Science, Vol. 324 Issue 5928, May 7, 2009. Image: Science Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 7 May 2009 | 6:06 pm Visionary or plane crazy? Airbus contest to decidePARIS (Reuters) - Tourists heading south for the winter may be transported to their dream destination in windowless airliners flying in formation like geese if Airbus accepts the advice of tomorrow's potential aircraft engineers.Source: Reuters: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 5:42 pm Fears of 'Lights Out' for Malaysian FirefliesA dazzling firefly population in Malaysia faces destruction due to tree clearing.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 7 May 2009 | 5:05 pm Sinai fort may hold clues to ancient Egypt defensesQANTARA, Egypt (Reuters) - A military garrison of mud-brick and seashells unearthed in Egypt's Sinai desert may be key to finding a web of pharaonic-era defenses at the northeast gateway to ancient Egypt, archaeologists said on Thursday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 7 May 2009 | 4:53 pm Basking Sharks' Hiding Places FoundBasking sharks hide out and scientists have finally tracked where they go.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 7 May 2009 | 4:05 pm Fuel for Deep Space Missions Running LowNASA is running out of nuclear fuel needed for its deep space exploration.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 7 May 2009 | 4:04 pm Enormous Shark’s Secret Hideout Finally Discovered
After half a century of searching, scientists have finally discovered what happens to the world’s second largest shark every winter: It has a Caribbean hideout.
Basking sharks, which can grow up to 33 feet long and weigh more than a Hummer H1, spend the late spring, summer and early fall in the temperate regions of the world’s oceans. But then they pull their great disappearing act, eluding scientists throughout the winter months. “It’s been a big mystery for the past fifty years,” said Greg Skomal, an aquatic biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and lead author of the study in Current Biology May 7. “For a while people thought they were hibernating on the sea floor, even though hibernating is not really something sharks do.” Skomal tagged the giant fish off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts and tracked them by satellite, piecing together their mysterious winter wanderings. He discovered the beasts were absconding to the depths of the Caribbean, some voyaging as far as the Brazilian coast, though the attraction of these destinations poses yet another mystery. The findings have implications for conserving the sharks, whose fins are much-desired delicacies in Chinese cuisine. The basking shark is a benign behemoth. It swims at about three miles per hour with its four-foot-wide mouth gaping open, filtering through almost 500,000 gallons of water every hour for its plankton sustenance. Like most large fish, they’re difficult to keep track of because they rarely come to the surface, where tags need to be to transmit information to satellites. Skomal got around this hurdle by harpooning the fish with special tags that tracked and stored depth, temperature and light level, which then popped off at a pre-programmed date and rose to the surface. Once a tag hits the surface, it transmits the entire archive of the fish’s journey via satellite. Skomal used a novel analysis technique that could determine the sharks’ locations at every time point, allowing him to retrospectively track them to their secret hiding places. He found the sharks were traveling well-outside their known range, spending months in the warm waters of the Caribbean and even deep into the southern hemisphere. They also periodically dove to more than 3,000 feet, and often stayed at those depths for months at a time. One shark remained at a depth of nearly 600 feet for upward of five months. “What they’re doing there — therein lies the mystery,” said Skomal. “If you’re a basking shark you can go to Georgia in the wintertime and be at the right temperature and depth and have plenty of food, so that’s optimal. So why travel three to four times that distance?”
“No one has ever seen a baby basking shark, no one’s found a pregnant shark, knows when they reproduce or what their gestation period is,” said Skomal. One possibility, he said, is that the sharks mate in the waters further north, where food and potential mates are plentiful. Then the females may migrate to the deep waters down south, which provide a stable and predator-free environment for the young sharks to grow. “It’s really hypothetical,” he acknowledged. “We don’t know the genders of the sharks we tagged because we tagged them from the boat. Next time we’ll jump into the water so we can pull down their fly.” The extended range of the sharks suggests that the different Atlantic subpopulations — near the east and west coasts of both hemispheres — may actually be the same population. “They might even be crossing into other oceans,” he said, “meaning there might actually be one population in the entire world.” This possibility has implications for conservation biologists. The sharks are currently listed as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, due to the high value of their fins which are the key ingredient for shark fin soup, a tasteless but symbolic Chinese delicacy. The sharks’ livers, which can make up 25 percent of their total body weight, also fetch a high price for their oil. “This tells us that if we allow sharks off British Columbia to be harvested, we might be impacting the entire population,” said Skomal. “We can’t just save the fish off of New England, we have to coordinate with all the fisheries. We have to divide up the pie instead of each having our own pie.” Images: 1) Chris Gotshalk. 2) Tim Voorheis. Click through for more amazing basking shark photos from the scientists.
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 7 May 2009 | 4:01 pm Virgin sees space tourism as just the beginningLONDON (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 | 3:26 pm The prescience of CP Snow, 50 years onThe novelist's warning of cultural fragmentation has come to fruition; but now we face a worse deterioration than he feared Fifty years ago exactly the scientist and novelist CP Snow gave a lecture that has rung down the decades. Science and the humanities, claimed Snow, have become "two cultures", deeply divided and alienated. Literary intellectuals sneer at cultureless scientists while scientists look down on the soft humanities. Today, claims the thinktank Civitas in a collection of essays published to mark the 50th anniversary of Snow's lecture, we face a far worse crisis than the one Snow outlined. In the end, he was talking about a difference in tone and style among groups of highly educated people. Now, say the authors of From Two Cultures to No Culture, the very survival of serious education is at stake. English literature students reach university without having read a Shakespeare play and science is being betrayed by the combined science GCSE. The very assumption of an educated elite on which Snow's argument rested is no longer a given. Scientific understanding, historical memory and literary sophistication are all on the edge of the abyss as education becomes increasingly feeble and surrenders to the tyranny of mass culture. It's easy to take issue with the essayists in From Two Cultures to No Culture. They might at least have started by taking Snow's original argument seriously. He worried that science and the arts were drifting ever further apart in a Britain mired in outmoded literary snobbery. Let's give our age credit for one thing. Science and the humanities are no longer enemies. It would be exhausting to list all the contemporary novels that take modern science seriously or to name all the recent works of well-written scientific literature. The great breakthrough in fiction was Primo Levi's novel The Periodic Table; as for science writers, you only have to consider a work such as Richard Fortey's Trilobite!, which begins with an essay on Thomas Hardy. The eloquence and clarity of the best writing in both the sciences and humanities today makes expertise accessible across boundaries. To learn about, say, the history of the 17th century revolution, you can start with any number of admirable biographies written by both scientists and historians, delve into synthetic works by Richard Holmes, Lisa Jardine, John Gribbin ... how, exactly, is this a cultural decline since the 1950s, when you'd have been hard-pressed to find an accessible work of science history? In the arts, I know from experience that people will give up a Saturday, and pay good money, to attend, say, a seminar on art and philosophy. Amazing. In many ways, the weary, disdainful complaint that we've gone from two cultures to no culture is pessimistic tosh. But that's enough liberal defending of democracy. In truth I agree with much these cultural pessimists are saying. If science and the arts flourish and communicate themselves well at the high end, the bigger picture is terrifying. Sending your child to school seems almost an act of betrayal when so many indicators suggest even the most basic standards of literacy are slipping. The mass media have become the enemies of all knowledge, the destroyers of all seriousness: the news that ITV is to cancel the South Bank Show is just one more piece of evidence that no ambitious cultural material will get through on popular television in the future. The scariest thing you can do, if you care about literacy, is to look at the people around you on a train or a plane. Count how many are reading books and what proportion of the books appear to be serious works. This is mysterious, because bookshops flourish and, as I've said, there are many good works of popular intellectual worth being published. But the power of the electronic image is becoming so devastating in its fragmentation of experience that real reading is increasingly rare. History books have never been better written. And yet despite this, in mainstream culture the past has become the 1970s, history a documentary about Lego. Even saying these things is considered "rightwing", as if the right ever had a monopoly of seriousness. The tragedy of New Labour is its educational failure. As a parent of a child soon to enter the school system I am horrified by the wasteland of British education and damned if I will pretend it is all right just because it's somehow "elitist" to say otherwise. If the left is ever to regain a voice in Britain it will now be necessary to face the truth about mass culture and its tyranny. Reality TV shows, celebrity "culture", inane pop groups and sport are not, and never have been, the hope of democracy. There is high culture today, and it is better in many ways than it was in Snow's day. But it is time for the cultured to stand up for the better world that only education can bring. 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 | 7 May 2009 | 3:00 pm Giant Trilobites in Portugal Could Be BiggestA newly discovered cluster of trilobite fossils could include the largest ever found.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 7 May 2009 | 2:25 pm Domestication Led to Horse Color ExplosionHorses' 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 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 | 1:47 pm Spark of lifeFinding the true value of biodiversity before it is too lateSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 12:12 pm Monster waveFilm makers reveal secrets of Pacific's massive wavesSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 11:44 am Polar dietHow to survive on 90g of food a day in the ArcticSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 May 2009 | 11:16 am European prepares to command ISSFrank 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 DNA pioneer condemns plans to retain data on innocentAlec Jeffreys describes government response to court ruling as 'minimal and disappointing' The DNA fingerprinting pioneer Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys today condemned government plans to keep the genetic details of hundreds of thousands of innocent people for up to 12 years. Jeffreys – whose discoveries have been used to establish what has become the world's largest national DNA database – said he was "disappointed" with the proposals, which came after a European court ruled that the current policy breaches people's right to privacy. "It seems to be as about as minimal a response to the European court of human rights judgment as one could conceive. There is a presumption not of innocence but of future guilt here … which I find very disturbing indeed. "I do not see this as balanced and proportionate. It still places England, Wales and Northern Ireland as the only jurisdictions in the world, to my knowledge, to retain such large amounts of innocent DNA information." The proposed new rules include keeping the DNA profiles of innocent people who are arrested for serious offences, but not convicted, for 12 years and those arrested for minor offences for six years. Innocent people's profiles are currently kept until their 100th birthday. Jeffreys dismissed a Home Office prediction that 4,500 fewer crimes will be detected if the proposals go ahead. "There is an unspoken assumption in here that these thousands of crimes that will not be detected by not having the DNA will remain undetected and that simply isn't the case. A significant number of these will be detectable through conventional police work, including the obtaining of fresh police DNA samples." He demanded that the government release further details of its concerns about poorer detection rates. "We have been told some very cursory figures. One would like to know a great deal more. Are these serious crimes? Are they a relatively small number of individuals, for example serial burglars? We don't have that information at all. And we need that information to be able to balance the improved ability to detect these crimes against the right to a private life." Jeffreys's genetic discoveries at Leicester University in the mid-1980s enabled the establishment of the national DNA database 10 years later. It is now the largest in the world, storing details on more than 5 million people. Jeffreys said he supported the plan to dispose of the original hair, blood or other sample once the DNA profile had been obtained. "I absolutely welcome that because the original samples contain all the information embodied in the DNA profile plus the rest of your genetic information. Now the police have no particular plans to go into that but there is always concern that access to those original DNA samples could lay bare far greater amounts of genetic information than is exploited in DNA profiling. "This is all part of a right to a private life and retention by the state of genetic samples of innocent people is not appropriate." The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said the new proposals, which are out to public consultation, would ensure that the right people were on the database, as well as considering when people should come off it. "We will ensure that the most serious offenders are added to the database, no matter when or where they were convicted," she said. The proposals come after the ECHR found that the current legal framework amounted to a violation of human rights. In one of the harshest ever condemnations of UK law, the court's grand chamber of 17 judges said it had been "struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature" of the government's powers to take and keep DNA samples. The ruling came after two innocent people from Sheffield, Michael Marper and a boy known in court as S, complained that their human rights were being violated by the government keeping their DNA profiles. Their solicitor, Peter Mahy, today described the Home Office plans as "a let-down for the hundreds of thousands of people who are innocent but remain on the database". "We fought a long, hard legal battle on this issue for over seven years which resulted in the spectacular 17-0 victory in European court of human rights. Unfortunately the government is still not proposing to destroy DNA profiles of innocent people when they have been cleared of any crime but instead keep them for up to 12 years," Mahy said. "Innocent people should be treated as if they are innocent, not as suspects for years after they have been cleared. Innocent should mean innocent. If the proposals do not change there will undoubtedly be more cases brought by innocent people arguing that keeping their DNA profiles is disproportional and a breach of their human rights. "I believe that the European court ruling and the change in UK policy will be looked at in years to come as truly defining moments in the UK's history of human rights. The judgment and policy change will not only affect hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the UK but millions of citizens worldwide. It is important that people respond to the consultation." Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights group Liberty, said the new proposals were disproportionate and could lead to abuses of the system. "These proposals are not quite two fingers to the European court of human rights but they come pretty close," she said. "They don't distinguish between people who are under suspicion, people who are wholly innocent and those who are guilty. "The government is still trying to get away with the largest database possible, including holding the details of people who are wholly innocent of anything. "If they do not budge in consultation, then we will see them in court." Last month, Jeffreys told the Guardian that the current system left innocent people "branded as criminals". The proposals contrast sharply with the situation in Scotland, where only the DNA profiles of suspects arrested for serious violent and sexual offences are retained, and for a maximum of five years. 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 | 7 May 2009 | 10:56 am
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He hypothesizes the trip may have to do with reproduction, another area that has long baffled basking shark researchers.