Science Headlines for May 9, 2009

Early Detection Of Lung Cancer

New data from several studies are useful in evaluating new techniques for early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Good Genes: Late Motherhood Boosts Family Lifespan

Women who have babies naturally in their 40s or 50s tend to live longer than other women. Now, a new study shows their brothers also live longer, but the brothers' wives do not, suggesting the same genes prolong lifespan and female fertility, and may be more important than social and environmental factors.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Herschel And Planck Share Ride To Space

Two missions to study the cosmos, Herschel and Planck, are scheduled to blast into space May 14 aboard the same Ariane 5 rocket from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

EBay Has Unexpected, Chilling Effect On Looting Of Antiquities, Archaelogist Finds

Archaeologists held their breath more than a decade ago when the launch of eBay theoretically increased the market for looted archaeological treasures. In fact, eBay hasn't increased looting, as originally feared. By creating a market for increasingly sophisticated fakes, eBay has actually had a dampening effect on the market for looted antiquities.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Ultrasonic Communication Among Frogs

Scientists report on the only known frog species that can communicate using purely ultrasonic calls, whose frequencies are too high to be heard by humans. Known as Huia cavitympanum, the frog lives only on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Patients With Excessive Sweating Condition Are More Likely To Develop Skin Infections

People with the excessive sweating condition known as hyperhidrosis already have to deal with a number of life-inhibiting social issues. Sweaty palms or unsightly underarm stains can make simple tasks such as shaking hands or raising an arm extremely embarrassing.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Animals On Runways Can Cause Serious Problems At Small Airports

A study of 10 small Indiana airports found that animals can gain easy access to runways and infield area, increasing the likelihood of planes striking those animals. "Just about every pilot we talked to at these airports said that during a landing they've had to pull up to avoid hitting an animal on the runway," said one of the researchers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2009 | 9:00 am

Way To Cut Cattle Methane, Threat To Environment, By 25 Percent

Beef farmers can breathe easier thanks to researchers who have developed a formula to reduce methane gas in cattle.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2009 | 9:00 am

Memory For Different Smells: Synaptic Memory Found In Olfactory Bulb

Scientists have discovered a form of synaptic memory in the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that processes the sense of smell.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2009 | 9:00 am

First Study Of Combined Dietary Factors Finds Reduced AMD Risks

A diet that includes key nutrients and low-glycemic index foods is likely to reduce risks for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to the first study to analyze these factors in combination.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 May 2009 | 9:00 am

Japan nuke plant restarts two years after quake (AFP)

AFP - The world's largest nuclear power plant resumed part of its operations on Saturday, two years after it was shut down following a strong earthquake off the Japanese coast, the operator said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 May 2009 | 7:45 am

Shuttle Atlantis set for Monday launch: NASA (AFP)

AFP - NASA has announced that conditions are favorable to launch its final shuttle mission to the Hubble space telescope on May 11.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 May 2009 | 2:19 am

Frogs flown from Montserrat to flee deadly fungus (AP)

AP - Scientists are airlifting dozens of one of the world's largest frogs off of Montserrat island to save them from a deadly fungus devastating their dwindling habitat. The dense forest of this tiny British Caribbean territory is the last remaining stronghold of the critically endangered mountain chicken frog, a 2-pound (0.9 kg), frying pan-size amphibian that got its name because locals say its meat tastes like you guessed it chicken.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 9 May 2009 | 1:03 am

Darker Skin Linked to Nicotine Dependence

smokingcrop1

Dark-skinned smokers may be at greater risk for nicotine addiction than their paler counterparts, a new study finds.

Researchers found that in African Americans, darker skin — specifically that acquired by sun exposure, not genetics — is directly linked to smoking frequency and dependence.

“African Americans are known to have a more difficult time quitting and suffer from more tobacco-related diseases,” said Gary King, a medical sociologist at Pennsylvania State University and lead author of the study, published in Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior. “By addressing the connection between biological aspects of skin color and tobacco use, this has global implications for all groups, especially to populations with high levels of UV radiation.”

Melanin pigments, which determine skin color, bind tightly to nicotine. As a consequence, nicotine and tobacco’s cancer-causing agents tend to linger and accumulate in other melanin-containing tissues like the heart, lungs, liver and brain, potentially putting those organs at increased risk for tobacco-related diseases. This study is the first to explore the relationship between skin melanin levels and smoking behavior, said King.

The more melanin, the browner the skin. But there’s more than one way to get there. Melanin levels are genetically determined, but they can also be increased by exposure to the sun or other sources of ultraviolet rays, like tanning beds. Though both kinds of melanin are molecularly indistinguishable, King wanted to know if they had different effects on smoking behaviors.

He evaluated African American smokers from inner city Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He measured the color of the skin on their foreheads, which is controlled by both genes and the sun, and on their inner arms, which should result primarily from genetics. He then quantified the smokers’ average number of cigarettes per day and nicotine dependence.

King’s team found that the darkness of the forehead was positively correlated to the number of cigarettes smoked per day as well as nicotine dependence, while darkness of the inner arm did not demonstrate this link. King says the mechanism is unclear, but he thinks people with higher levels of melanin in the skin would accumulate higher levels of nicotine, which might leach into the bloodstream and travel to nicotine receptors in the brain. Low levels of nicotine constantly coursing through the body might make it easier to develop a dependence.

As skin darkness also has has been shown to have links to racial discrimination, King also surveyed the participants for stress levels, perception of racial discrimination and attitudes toward race and health. He found no links to smoking frequency or dependence, though he acknowledged that other studies have found this correlation.

King hopes the findings will help understand why African American smokers have a more difficult time quitting than Caucasians, and are disproportionately affected by smoking-related diseases.

See Also:

Image: Flickr/nasrulekram

Citation: “Link between facultative melanin and tobacco use among African American,” by Gary King, Valerie B. Yerger, Guy-Lucien Whembolua, Robert B. Bendel, Rick Kittles and Eric T. Moolchan. Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior. Volume 92, Issue 4, June 2009.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 May 2009 | 12:24 am

The danger of drugs … and data

A fascinating court case in Australia has been playing out around some people who had heart attacks after taking the Merck drug Vioxx. This medication turned out to increase the risk of heart attacks in people taking it, although that finding was arguably buried in their research, and Merck has paid out more than £2bn to 44,000 people in America – however, they deny any fault.

British users of the drug have had their application for legal aid rejected, incidentally: the health minister, Ivan Lewis, promised to help them, but documents obtained by the Guardian last week showed that within hours Merck launched an expensive lobbying effort that convinced the minister to back off.

This is a shame, because court cases can be tremendously revealing.

The first fun thing to emerge in the Australian case is email documentation showing staff at Merck made a "hit list" of doctors who were critical of the company, or of the drug. This list contained words such as "neutralise", "neutralised" and "discredit" next to the names of various doctors.

"We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live," said one email, from a Merck employee. Staff are also alleged to have used other tactics, such as trying to interfere with academic appointments, and dropping hints about how funding to institutions might dry up. Institutions might think about whether they wish to receive money from a company like that in future. Worse still, is the revelation that Merck paid the publisher Elsevier to produce a publication.

The relationship between big pharma and publishers is perilous. Any industry with global revenues of $600bn can afford to buy quite a lot of adverts, and pharmaceutical companies also buy glossy expensive "reprints" of the trials it feels flattered by. As we noted in this column two months ago, there is evidence that all this money distorts editorial decisions.

This time Elsevier Australia went the whole hog, giving Merck an entire publication which resembled an academic journal, although in fact it only contained reprinted articles, or summaries, of other articles. In issue 2, for example, nine of the 29 articles concerned Vioxx, and a dozen of the remainder were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions. Some were bizarre: such as a review article containing just two references.

In a statement to The Scientist magazine, Elsevier at first said the company "does not today consider a compilation of reprinted articles a 'journal'". I would like to expand on this statement: It was a collection of academic journal articles, published by the academic journal publisher Elsevier, in an academic journal-shaped package. Perhaps if it wasn't an academic journal they could have made this clearer in the title which, I should have mentioned, was named: The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.

Things have deteriorated since. It turns out that Elsevier put out six such journals, sponsored by industry. The Elsevier chief executive, Michael Hansen, has now admitted that they were made to look like journals, and lacked proper disclosure. "This was an unacceptable practice and we regret that it took place," he said.

The pharmaceutical industry, and publishers, as we have repeatedly seen, have serious difficulties in living up to the high standards needed in this field, and bad information in the medical literature leads doctors to make irrational prescribing decisions, which ultimately can cost lives, and cause unnecessary suffering, not to mention the expense.

It has been estimated it would take 700 hours a month to read the thousands of academic articles relevant to a GP; doctors skim, they take shortcuts, they rely on summaries, or worse. We could perform better when giving them information, but for now, it will often be "actually, I think I've seen at least two studies on that, and in different journals".

The real tragedy is that the cost of distorted information, and irrational prescribing, is far greater than the cost of the research that could prevent it. Health systems pay for these drugs – state-funded in almost every single developed country – and they largely pay for the journals, too. In a sensible world, countries would band together and pay for comparative research themselves, and the free, open distribution of the results, to prevent all this nonsense.

We do not live in a sensible world.

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 | 8 May 2009 | 11:05 pm

It's a dirty job, but …

From abortion doctors to animal testers, there are many jobs that require those who do them to develop a thick skin – so how do the people who perform controversial jobs justify their work?

Simon Walters has been doing his job for 20 years. "I've always loved animals. I work with dogs, primates, marmosets and rabbits; I feed and water them, train and socialise them and even give them names. How can you not?" he asks. "They are our colleagues, our mates and that's why I really enjoy my work."

Walters has passion, job satisfaction and the realisation of a childhood dream. It sounds perfect, but you might change your mind when you hear that his "colleagues" are also dosed daily as part of toxicology studies. Walters works i n an animal testing laboratory.

Did that hit a nerve? For all of our outward insouciance these days there are plenty of careers that most of us wouldn't touch with a mile-long bargepole. Not only are they an affront to our sense of ethics and social conscience, they are jobs for people who are, well, one degree short of a moral compass. Aren't they?

"I'm no different to an anti-vivisectionist," explains Walters. "I too want to provide animals with the best care and environment. I'd never inflict pain or suffering on an animal because the animal has to be content for us to get good data. My job is about improving the medical requirements of mankind while caring for the animals to the best of our technical ability."

So why is it so hard for us to reconcile the words "animal testing" with such as likeable man? More than that, what is it like to have a job that garners such a conscience-pricking reaction? Imagine it: every time you go to a party, bump into an old friend or even fill in a mortgage application you reveal what you do to wide eyes, a sharp gasp and yet another moral debate. It's about more than doing a controversial job. It's about being a walking litmus test for the morals of wider society too.

Fran Travers knows what that feels like. She is a consultant gynaecologist who carries out an average of 16 abortions a week as well as running a local abortion service in the north of England. Surprisingly, even 40 years after the legalisation of abortion her career remains a controversial one.

"People have been very rude to me about what I do," she admits. "They usually have strong ethical or religious opinions and think they can trample over everyone else's views. But what gives them the right to pass judgment? Social workers, specialists, gynaecologists, patients … I've had it from them all. People think they are liberal but they're not."

Travers recalls phoning her local social services department about an unrelated issue. She asked to speak to someone in particular only to overhear a voice saying that they didn't want to talk to an abortion doctor. She also remembers a patient who required surgery as a result of a miscarriage. "She wanted to make clear that she wasn't like 'those other women' and that she expected to be treated differently because she felt superior to them. That was when I made it clear to her that she could find herself another surgeon.

"It's easy to sit on a pink cloud and judge everyone else but every aspect of my work is about doing what is best for individual women and I'm not going to roast in hell because of it."

People such as Walters and Travers are to be respected. After all, they are not only doing what many of us would shrink from, but they do it with enormous self-belief in the face of what can be overwhelming societal pressure. We may not all agree with what they do but can we really be so unforgiving about the rare personal conviction that helps them do it? It could be time to stop judging.

Ever screwed a colleague on a deal, lied on your CV or fumbled with a married colleague at the office party? Then put down that stone. You're still inside your glass house.

"The truth is that the vast majority of people face controversial issues and dilemmas at work," explains Dr Nic Sale of business psychology firm Pearn Kandola. "It's just that those situations arise more frequently in extreme cases. Look at the managers who are making redundancies at the moment. They go through the same process of rationalising what they do with the expectations of others. It's also about weighing up the short-term implications of testing animals, for example, with the long-term implications of this work for humans. How well you do depends on how well you justify what you do."

Sale believes that part of the justification process lies with colleagues. So if your work is recognised and supported, you are able to talk about it and get job satisfaction you're more likely to do it. That applies to every workplace. If your company takes a strong stance against sexual discrimination there's much less chance of you indulging in a little light bum-pinching than when you're working for a company that adorns its walls with saucy calendars. "We all like to think we have a moral line in the sand, but we don't," warns Sale. "Moral lines can be easily crossed when you have the social support to cross them."

One man who knows what life is like on both sides of the line is Julian Young. He has been a criminal defence lawyer for 32 years and his latest success has been in securing the freedom of Sean Hodgkins who spent 27 years in prison for crimes he didn't commit. As Young puts it, "it doesn't take much to go from zero to hero".

"People think we keep criminals on the streets, make up stories for clients and get woken up by drunks asking us to supply them with fags while in custody," he says. "But I'm also one of the few who has had the chance to put right a wrong. To deal with Sean Hodgkins was a privilege and if I died tomorrow I'd do so knowing that I had done something good with my life."

Young has dedicated his career to defending those accused of serious crimes. Yet he is adamant that his duty to the law prevails over any personal moral debate. "It is not for me to judge my clients and there are times when the strength of evidence of their guilt is high," he explains. "Yet everyone is entitled to be represented. I am one person fighting the the state and while I respect the police I also challenge them. After all, if the might of the state can't prove someone guilty have I done anything wrong by defending them?"

Young knows that people think he is a "fat cat sponger". "We're not popular but when people need us they are on the phone all hours of the day and night and expect a great service for little payment. They soon learn why my services are invaluable."

Sale believes that people are attracted to these roles because of their challenging nature. It's what makes work stimulating. Facing moral tests is a chance for us to improve our positive self-identity and when we do that successfully we believe that we are good people as a result. It could be why we shudder at taboo jobs yet love hearing about them. We pass judgment for an ego boost that convinces us that the drudge of our own work, for which we may have neither passion nor belief, isn't so bad after all.

Perhaps that's why Ben Todd, the media relations manager for Sellafield Ltd, recounts: "When people hear about what I do they usually want to know more. It's a conversation starter, not a stopper. Often the most energetic discussions take place at weddings when I sit at a table with people I don't know. They ask me what I do and that's followed by a long discussion over dinner, usually involving the misperceptions of my work. I don't mind because it's invigorating to get involved in defending what we do."

Todd's enjoyment of his work is obvious. He recalls seeing the advertisement for the job and instantly knowing that something this "meaty" was too good to pass up. While working in the nuclear industry might have made most of us wring our hands, Todd faced no such dilemma.

"It was the 'N' word that made me want to do it," he admits. "I thought about it once, not twice, because it's a chance to be at the very heart of a national debate and always draws a reaction. In fact I consider myself a nuclear junkie. The degree of science and skill involved makes Sellafield an enchanting place and I can't imagine ever working on a 'softer' issue again."

Some of the names have been changed

Pride and prejudice

Would you accept a job that pushes your ethical boundaries?

My partner and I both work in defence-related areas and we tend to not tell people who we work for, not because we are ashamed, but because even friends sometimes feel they are justified in having a go at us.

I have just had a row with a friend this weekend – she had a pop at my partner, but her argument was just "I'm against it".

I would maybe accept a pop from someone who lived totally by their principles (be they moral, ethical, environmental, whatever) but I've yet to meet anyone who does. Nixer

I acted in his divorce for a guy convicted of raping his wife: I can't say he was my favourite client, but he was still entitled to legal advice, and in retrospect, I should think the hearings at which I represented him were less difficult for his wife than they would have been were he unrepresented. Her solicitor (years later) berated me for having the temerity to take his instructions. Weird.

I've acted for alleged paedophiles too. The first was at the police station, and I was surprised by how little troubled I was at advising him. He had a station full of police officers hell-bent on seeing him banged up, so it didn't seem all that unfair for him to have one small solicitor on his side. And frankly, I suspect my presence reduced the chances of the police getting all over-zealous and screwing up their own prosecution. Bibberty

talk.guardian.co.uk

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 | 8 May 2009 | 11:05 pm

Science Revises Civilization’s Creation Story

1568512864_6e394634e6_b

The Middle East, near where the Tigris meets the Euphrates, has long been considered the “cradle of civilization,” but a series of new studies indicate that Chinese river valleys represent a second spot for the emergence of agriculture.

Genetic studies, using DNA from charred seeds gathered at the world’s first farms, are slowly rewriting the long-told story of how “civilization” began. In an essay in Science this week, Cambridge archaeologists Martin Jones and Xinyi Liu argue that millet spread west long before the Middle Eastern crops (wheat and barley) spread east.

More generally, they say that the Agricultural Revolution took place so slowly that it was probably imperceptible to those humans experiencing the transition. Early farmers continued to harvest wild rice varieties and the percentage of domesticated rice species that they the percentage of domesticated rice harvested versus wild rice increased just a few percent in a human lifespan.

“Rather than a revolutionary shift from hunter-gatherers to farmers in a few human generations, the evidence now suggests that many generations of ‘affluent foragers’ combined the gathering of wild fruits and nuts with the gathering of cultivated cereals,” write co-authors Martin Jones and Xinyi Liu.

Citation: “Origins of Agriculture in East Asia” by Martin K. Jones and Xinyi Liu. Science, Vol. 324, May 8, 2009.

See Also:

Image: Millet growing in northern China. flickr/gin_e

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 | 8 May 2009 | 11:04 pm

Take the ladder test

Fifty per cent of Britons won't walk under one. Would you? Do you touch wood? Psychologist Bruce Hood believes even the most rational among us are more superstitious than we'd like to admit.

The house at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, is no longer there. In October 1996 the city council ordered the removal of all physical traces of the Wests' home where young girls were raped, tortured and murdered by Fred and Rosemary. Fred had used his builder's skills to conceal the bodies at the three-storey family home. Nick, a fiftysomething landlord who owned other houses in the street, told me the council had removed every last brick. These were crushed into dust and scattered across a landfill site in unmarked locations.

Why do we demolish and remove houses associated with appalling murders? The same happened to the Oxford Apartments in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Jeffrey Dahmer lived, and the house where Ian Huntley murdered the two little girls in Soham. Dahmer's place is now a car park and 5 College Close has been laid to turf.

In 2000, Alan and Susan Sykes sat down to watch a Channel Five documentary about Dr Samson Perera, a Leeds University scientist who, 15 years earlier, had murdered and dismembered his teenage daughter. As the programme unfolded, Alan and Susan were shocked to discover that their house in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, was the actual scene of the horrific act, and that police had never recovered all of the 100 body parts. Alan and Susan were distraught. They moved out immediately, selling the house six months later.

Could you live in that house in Wakefield? Even if there were no missing body parts secreted around the building, just the thought of some-thing horrible taking place is enough to keep most away. But not all. Some seek out memorabilia from a murder scene. Less gruesomely, mature adults will pay good money for personal items simply because they once belonged to someone famous: a fragment of bed linen once slept on by Elvis Presley, a swatch of cloth from Princess Diana's wedding dress. The charity website clothesoffourback.com auctions clothes worn by celebrities for the benefit of children's charities. It used to offer a dry-cleaning option to successful bidders, but eventually dropped the service because no one wanted the clothing washed - they wanted to own something intimate and personal to their idols. Memorabilia collectors fetishise physical objects, as if they possess some property inherited from the previous owner. Something supernatural, something susceptible to a "supersense".

The most obvious source of supernatural beliefs is religion, but you don't have to be religious or spiritual to hold a supersense. You might have beliefs about psychic powers or telepathy, or even plain old luck and destiny.

When a group acts upon these superstitions, we call them ceremonial rituals. Otherwise, they are individual quirks. These range from the simple superstitions handed down through cultures, such as knocking on wood, to idiosyncratic personal rituals we engage in to bring us luck. Even the corridors of power are not free from them. Tony Blair always wore the same pair of shoes for Prime Minister's Questions. During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama carried a lucky poker chip. His opponent, John McCain, was open about his catalogue of superstitions, always carrying a lucky feather and a lucky compass from his days as a pilot in the Vietnam war. One wonders why, seeing as he was shot down and spent years as a prisoner of war.

Why do people believe in things that go against natural laws? It cannot simply be ignorance. The answer is evidence. The number one reason given by people who believe in the supernatural is personal experience. In one survey, half the number of spouses of recently deceased partners reported feeling the presence of the dead; a third reported seeing their ghost. Even my late father-in-law, a brain surgeon of eminent status, saw the ghost of his recently deceased wife. Throughout his career, he dealt with patients with brain damage and was very familiar with the peculiar experiences the mind can generate. He knew he was hallucinating, but that did not stop him seeing her. For believers, examples of the supernatural are so plentiful, they are impossible to ignore.

Where do we get our supernatural beliefs from? There are two schools of thought: either they are ideas that we hear from other people, stories we tell each other, especially our children; or they are ideas that partly come from within us.

Children believe what they are told by adults. We tell them about fantasy figures such as Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and the bogeyman, and we encourage them to take part in the archaic ceremonies and rituals associated with Halloween and Christmas. There is a real benefit to believing what others tell you. And who best to learn from but older and wiser members of the tribe?

This is why Richard Dawkins thinks religion is a form of child abuse. He wants a world without God, religion, or any form of supernaturalism. There is room only for science, he asserts, when it comes to understanding nature. Dawkins accuses the churches of indoctrinating our young people with superstitious beliefs.

In fact, most researchers who study the development of the mind do not regard humans as blank slates for any idea or belief. The bulk of the work on young children's thinking shows that, before they are capable of instruction, pre-school children have already formulated for themselves a variety of misconceptions. Like the instinct for language found in every society since the beginnings of civilisation, is it possible that a supersense is also part of the human endowment? Do we all start off with an inclination to the supernatural that only some of us can overcome?

In the public lectures I give on the origins of supernatural thinking, I hand out a black fountain pen dating from the 30s that once belonged to Albert Einstein. OK, I lie to the audience about the provenance of the pen, but the reverence and awe towards this object is palpable. Everyone wants to hold it. Then I ask the audience if they would be willing to wear the cardigan I brought along. They are understandably suspicious. After a moment's consideration, usually around one-third of them raise their hands. So I offer a prize. More hands are raised. I then tell them about Cromwell Street as an image of Fred West rises menacingly from the bottom of the PowerPoint display. Once they are told that the cardigan belonged to Fred West, most hands usually shoot down, followed by a ripple of nervous laughter. People recognise that their change of heart reflects something odd.

There are always the exceptions, of course. Some people resolutely keep their hand raised. Typically, they are male and determined to demonstrate their rational control. Or they suspect, rightly, that I am lying about the owner of the cardigan. What is remarkable is that audience members sitting next to one of these individuals visibly recoil from them: how could someone even consider touching such an appalling garment?

Last year, this stunt earned me some notoriety in Norwich. I was presenting my theory on the origin of a supersense, and why science and rationality will not easily persuade people to abandon such beliefs. I argued that humans are born with brains that infer hidden forces and structures in the real world, and that some of these inferences lead us to believe in the supernatural. Therefore, we cannot put sole responsibility for spreading supernatural belief on religions and cultures, which simply capitalise on our supersense.

The cardigan demonstration was meant to illustrate to an educated, rational audience that sometimes our beliefs can be truly supernatural but have nothing to do with religious indoctrination. Atheists, too, tend to show revulsion at the idea of touching West's cardigan. If it's true that our beliefs can be supernatural but unconnected to religion, then it must also be true that humans will not necessarily evolve into a rational species, because a mind designed for generating natural explanations also generates supernatural ones.

News of the cardigan stunt and my comments spread across global digital networks. People were infuriated. The "Fred West cardigan" dramatically revealed that my listeners' automatic intuition kicked in before they had time to consider why they would not wear it. Sadistic killers disgust most of us and, without even thinking about it, we would not want to come into physical contact with them or their possessions.

I think the main reason the stunt annoyed critics was that they probably experienced the same clash between intuition and logic that my audience felt. Also, there is simply no correct answer to the question, making it all the more vexing. Would you wear a killer's cardigan for £1? What about £10,000? There is a point at which most people would change their mind, but what is so undesirable in the first place about touching items owned by evil people or living in houses where murders were committed?

Why should a cardigan come to represent the negative association with a killer? If I had chosen a knife or noose, the association would have been clear. A cardigan offers warmth and comfort and, most importantly for my demonstration, intimacy. This combination was meant to jar and shock. The infamous photo of a snarling West taken at his arrest produces a strong association, but personal items such as clothing trigger stronger negative responses. Another study found that more people would rather wear a cardigan that has been dropped in dog faeces and washed than one that has also been cleaned but was worn by a murderer.

It is as if we treat evil as a physical contaminant that could be transmitted by touch. You can't wash away such contamination as though it were dirt. Most of us would treat the cardigan as if it were imbued with evil.

In the same way that some of us revere holy sites, priests and sacred relics, we also shun places, people and objects that are taboo. To do that, however, we have to attribute something more to them than just their physical properties. We may like to think of ourselves as rational people without superstitions, but this is just one area where we stray into the supernatural.

• Bruce Hood is professor of experimental psychology at Bristol University. This is an edited extract from his book SuperSense: Why We Believe The Unbelievable, to be published by Constable at £8.99. To order a copy with free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop, or call 0330 333 6846.

Hilary Mantel, novelist

Ten years ago I bought a bangle in the gift shop at the National Museum of Ireland. It was a copy of a piece of Viking jewellery, a simple doubled hoop of silver. I liked the look of it and wore it a lot. A short time later I taught a writing course in Tobago. The hotel was sordid, the administration chaotic, the group atmosphere poisonous. One morning I was so filled with dread, I didn't want to leave my room. I put on my bracelet and suddenly, from nowhere, there came a huge surge of confidence and power. It was as if a bunch of invisible strangers had lined up behind me - though if they were Vikings, they were very quiet ones.

For a long time, I regarded the bangle as a source of protection. I wore it every time I travelled or spoke in public. Two years ago I lost it. I came home, and it wasn't on my arm. It has never come to light, but I still believe, irrationally, that it will roll back into my life. A friend bought me a replica, but it isn't endowed with the same charisma; it's just a piece of jewellery.

I think that when we are in a situation of threat - particularly a nebulous, complex threat that we don't understand - it's natural, if irrational, to use some object to polarise our fears. We can't hold on to the situation but we can hold on to the object. And because, subsequently, we don't quite know how we got out of trouble - luck or skill? - we endow the object with the power that's really our own. It's neat. It's portable. It encapsulates confidence - which is sometimes all we need to get out of trouble or succeed in our aim.

• Hilary Mantel's latest book, Wolf Hall, is published by Fourth Estate.

The UK's top six superstitions

Touching wood: 74%

Crossing fingers: 65%

Avoiding ladders: 50%

A smashed mirror: 39%

Carrying a charm: 28%

Avoiding the number 13: 26%

• From a survey of 2,068 people, conducted by professor Richard Wiseman, for National Science Week in 2003.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writer

I was raised in a family that was Igbo and Roman Catholic, two remarkably similar world views, both of them immersed in superstitions, both heavy on symbolic figures and actions, both intertwining fear and faith. Perhaps that is why I find superstitions silly. Or so I like to say. Because sometimes when I trip, or nearly slip on the stairs, or painfully bump against furniture, I wonder if it means that God is getting back at me for something, anything; and if the near-accident happens in the morning, I think - fleetingly - that it might mean the day ahead will not go well.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest book, The Thing Around Your Neck, is published by Fourth Estate.

Alain de Botton, writer

I suffer from a basic superstition that you're allowed only so much good fortune before something very bad will happen - and, correspondingly, if things have gone wrong for a while, you'll be due an upswing in your fate soon. This makes me very wary of moments when I should, apparently, be celebrating. Holidays where the view is perfect and the weather ideal really worry me. Scenarios of disaster haunt me: something appalling is bound to happen soon. Professional success can be just as alarming. Storming up the bestseller list can be a reason to hide in bed in despair. I feel that, by being miserable before anyone tells me to be, I will escape the jealousy of higher forces. I am trying to disappoint myself before the world gets a chance to do it rudely for me. As for when things go wrong, I like to wallow and exaggerate the misfortune, for only when I'm at rock bottom can I have a sense that now something or someone will smile more benevolently on me.

Behind such absurd ideas, there's an even stranger faith in the interconnectedness of events. So I believe - without admitting to myself that I'm doing this - there is some connection between the disappointment I suffer at the hands of a publisher at 11am one morning and the piece of good news that comes the following evening. I feel as if I have "earned" the positive event in the eyes of something or someone who is keeping a giant ledger in the sky.

Even more striking is that I am, on the surface, entirely committed to atheism, with a mocking scorn for those who would have a moment's patience for such things.

• Alain de Botton's latest book, The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work, is published by Hamish Hamilton.

How do you score on supernatural belief?

Listed are 13 statements designed to measure paranormal beliefs. For each opinion, indicate:

1 = strong disagreement

2 = moderate disagreement

3 = mild disagreement

4 = mild agreement

5 = moderate agreement

6 = strong agreement

a) It is probably true that certain people can predict the future quite accurately.

b) For the most part, people who claim to be psychics are in reality very good actors.

c) It is quite possible for planetary forces to control personality traits.

d) Contrary to scientific opinion, there is some validity to fortune-telling.

e) In spite of the laws of science, some people can use their psychic powers to make objects move.

f) As a general rule, a fortune-teller's predictions that come true are a result of coincidence.

g) Regardless of what you might read in the magazines, people who actually believe in "magical" ritual ceremonies are just wasting their time.

h) As a general rule, UFO sightings can best be explained as overreactions by people to naturally occurring events.

i) For the most part, most fortune-tellers' predictions are general and vague.

It is just the situation that makes them believable.

j) In spite of what people think, card reading - for example, tarot cards - can tell a lot about a person and their future.

k) Cosmic forces (such as astrology) can still influence people's lives even though they don't believe in them.

l) Although some people still believe there are people who can actually put a hex on or cast a love spell on someone, such belief is only superstition.

m) Contrary to scientific belief, some people can make contact with the dead.

Take your score for items b), f), g), h), i) and l), then reverse the value so that 1=6, 2=5, 3=4, 4=3, 5=2 and 6=1. Now add together all your scores. What is your total?

The higher your score, the more supernatural your beliefs. Research among students using this scale showed an average score of 38 in the US and 32 in the UK.

Julie Myerson, novelist

I think all parents - consciously or unconsciously - make deals with themselves about keeping their children safe. When our three were small, I took a first-aid course, and although my main reason for doing it was practical, I know there was also a sliver of superstition there. If I make this effort, if I do this thing, "bad things" won't happen. I'm not sure what I feel about that now.

My strongest superstitions are about people. Since I was little, I've known what I feel from the first moment I meet someone. It's a judgment made by a part of me that I don't begin to understand. I went through a phase, long ago, of not trusting it, of dismissing first impressions and trying to bring in some logic and objectivity, but in the end I'd go full circle; my original instinct was right.

I don't really touch wood or cross my fingers, and I do walk under ladders, but I really don't like peacock feathers. When I was a child, someone - it might have been me - had some in a jar and our granny said they brought bad luck. Later, when our parents divorced and unhappiness followed, Granny reminded me about the peacock feathers. Things had gone wrong from the moment they entered the house, she said.

If I see a peacock feather now, I am back in our kitchen in 1972. She's standing in her stockings and slippers, doing the ironing with tears falling down her face as she tells me why our luck and our lives have changed for ever. I am 12 years old and frozen to the spot, horrified and ashamed, wondering if I should believe her and, if so, whose fault it all was.

• Julie Myerson's latest book, The Lost Child, is published by Bloomsbury.

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 | 8 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

The origin of Origin

Steven Rose enjoys a tale of the anxious strategising behind a great idea

Charles Darwin's bicentenary has generated such an armada of books, conferences and TV programmes that it may be hard to find anything new to say. Nonetheless, Iain McCalman, an Australian cultural historian, has made a brave try. Darwinian evolution by natural selection rests on three indisputable axioms: like breeds like, with minor variations; all organisms can produce more offspring than can survive to adulthood; the best adapted variants are the most likely to survive to reproduce in turn. Therefore, species change with time - that is, evolve. There is nothing in these principles that Darwin could not have deduced from his observations of the English countryside, from his work with pigeon breeders, and from rereading Reverend Malthus, all of which he pursued assiduously. Furthermore, evolution was not a new idea; it had been a matter of common discussion among European biologists since the late 18th century.

Yet Darwin's evolutionary epiphany came during his five-year voyage as a naturalist on the Beagle, the small vessel chartered in 1831 to chart the waters and coastline of South America, New Zealand and Australia. Such expeditions had been a routine part of British Admiralty policy since the 17th century, and it had become common practice to include on board someone with expertise in the emerging sciences of geology and biology to identify novel species and collect specimens. Naturalists making these arduous trips would be, as Darwin was, exposed for the first time to an abundance of living forms alien to European eyes.

As a young man of means, Darwin travelled as a companion to the ship's captain. The more usual practice was to employ a suitable person directly, as happened on the slightly later voyages of two rather less wealthy young men. The self-made zoologist Thomas Huxley was later to become "Darwin's bulldog", a ferocious advocate of natural selection; the botanist Joseph Hooker was a scion of the Hookers who were for decades to direct the botanical gardens at Kew. The fourth member of Darwin's armada was Alfred Russel Wallace, who for many years eked out a living as a collector and seller of tropical specimens. It was Wallace's independent formulation of the axioms of natural selection, sent by him to Darwin in 1858, that precipitated Darwin's long-ruminated publication of On the Origin of Species, as an abstract of the much longer book he had postponed writing for two decades.

The stories of all four men have been well told previously, so there is little new material here. What McCalman does is to link them together by way of their voyages. He provides an antipodean perspective on the time spent in Australia by Hooker, and especially by Huxley. As his subtitle suggests, McCalman is using the concept of an armada in a second sense: the alliance of three old sea salts, later to be joined by Wallace. The "battle" was to make natural selection not just a theory, but a universally accepted mechanism for evolutionary change. When Darwin received Wallace's letter, seemingly establishing primacy in developing the theory, he summoned Hooker and Huxley to his country retreat, where the three anxiously strategised. Propriety demanded they acknowledge that Wallace had anticipated Darwin, whose heterodox ideas had been buried for decades in his notebooks. The solution was to publish short notes from Darwin and Wallace simultaneously and let Darwin work at full pelt on the "abstract" that was published as Origin a year later. Wallace seems to have taken it all in good part, but he remained an outsider, a Christian socialist who was never to accept that human intelligence could have evolved by entirely natural causes.

Rather like Wallace, McCalman knows he is an outsider to mainstream Darwin studies, but he tells his story well. It reads as a combination of Boy's Own travellers' tales stretching from the Amazon to Antarctica, and a scientific adventure as racy as any historical novel.

• Steven Rose's The 21st Century Brain is published by Vintage.

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 | 8 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

Buffett's Berkshire has first loss since 2001 (Reuters)

Reuters - Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc posted its first quarterly loss since 2001, hurt by losses on derivative contracts, a big investment in the oil company ConocoPhillips, and the weakening economy.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 10:49 pm

NASA begins launch countdown for Hubble mission (AP)

AP - NASA began the countdown for its final trip to the Hubble Space Telescope on Friday as the astronauts who will attempt the daunting repairs arrived at the launching site.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 10:39 pm

Obama won't fight global warming with bear rules (AP)

AP - The Obama administration, which promised a sharp break from the Bush White House on global warming, declared Friday it would stick with a Bush-era policy against expanding protection for climate-threatened polar bears and ruled out a broad new attack on greenhouse gases.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 9:43 pm

Rare prehistoric pregnant turtle found in Utah (AP)

AP - Paleontologists say a 75-million-year-old turtle fossil uncovered in southern Utah has a clutch of eggs inside, making it the first prehistoric pregnant turtle found in the United States.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 9:24 pm

5 Scientific Reasons Mom Deserves Mother's Day (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - If you haven't yet planned the brunch or picked out the flowers or at least mailed the card, then consider what follows the only motivation you should need. In short, mothers have it tough.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 8:55 pm

Visionary or plane crazy? Airbus contest to decide

PARIS (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 | 8 May 2009 | 8:02 pm

Warning: Sunspot Cycle Beginning to Rise

As the sun moves into a busier part of its cycle, engineers on Earth stand guard.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 8 May 2009 | 7:55 pm

Obama keeps Bush polar bear rules

The US government opts to keep a Bush-era rule that limits protection for polar bears from the effects of global warming.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 May 2009 | 7:16 pm

SLIDE SHOW: The Week's Top Stories

Browse through images from the week's top stories in Discovery News.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 8 May 2009 | 6:15 pm

Why Your Baby’s Name Will Sound Like Everyone Else’s

3007657354_25cbbfe6ef_o

Emma was the most popular baby girl name of 2008, the Social Security Administration announced today, supplanting Emily, which had held the slot for the past 12 years.

Both names, though, reflect a much deeper and largely unnoticed naming trend, which has played out over decades. At the beginning of the last century, names beginning with vowels, like Amanda, dominated the name popularity charts. But slowly their usage fell, bottoming out in the middle of the century as the consonant names, like David or Donna, rose to prominence. Recently, the vowels have been creeping back up to dominance.

Looking at the Baby Name Wizard Voyager charts, we had to wonder: What happened? Theories leapt to mind. Perhaps names beginning with consonants were “stronger” sounding? Perhaps it had something to do with the civil rights movement or immigration or biblical names or something that had some obscure connection to the Soviets? Surely, this pattern had to mean something, this mid-century preference for Bill (and Biff) and Sally over Ethan and Allison.

Maybe not, say sociologists and psychologists. In aggregate, the popularity of baby names are merely driven by the rules of fashion. By a process known as the “ratchet effect,” the names change slowly, as millions of individuals just happen to like names that sound kind of, but not too much, like ones they know.

letter-comp “Parents are really bad at knowing why we like certain names,” said Laura Wattenberg, who built The Baby Name Wizard, which allows users to visually manipulate Social Security Administration name data. “I’ve never heard a parent say, ‘I’m looking for a name that starts with a vowel.’”

Yet, unbeknownst to them, the naming zeitgeist seeps into their minds. Even culturally linked naming changes, like the terrifying rise of the name Miley (after the Disney star Miley Cyrus), occur within the framework of the larger cultural preferences for certain types of names, said Cleveland Evans, an expert in onomastics (the study of naming) at Bellevue University in Nebraska.

“You can see individual names that a pop culture thing did, but they are able to do these things because it fit into the ratchet effect already,” Evans said. “If a celebrity has a name that fits in with the ‘different, but not too different’ thing, then it booms.”

And the name’s internal poetics, the way it sounds — the toughness of Tommy versus the rounded Owen, the music of Marissa versus the Betty’s bounciness?

“It has no meaning,” says Harvard sociologist, Stanley Lieberson, who authored an authoritative work on the subject, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change. “It’s a chance factor.”

Lieberson’s data shows that real substantive changes occur, but simply as a function of varying parental preference for just how different their children’s names should be. Over time that preference has shifted toward more novel names. Fewer and fewer people are picking the very most popular names. In the early part of the century, one in four babies were given one of the top 10 most popular names. Now, the most popular name (Emma) will be attached to barely one percent of the year’s babies.

Whether or not this basic variable in the ratchet effect has a cultural basis or is yet another chance variation in American naming conventions is a matter of debate.

Psychiatrists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell argue in their recent book, The Narcissism Epidemic, that the decrease in preference of the most popular names “says a lot about our culture.”

“Naming rituals are central to cultures around the world and always have been. The names we choose for our children reveal our deepest wishes and desires,” they write. “We now wish so fervently that our children will stand out from the crowd that we equip them with unique labels from birth.”

While that’s a compelling narrative, Evans says it could just be that, thanks to sites like Wattenberg’s, parents know what the most popular names are now. Perhaps parents of the past thought they were picking less popular names, but were, in fact, unintentionally following the fashions of the time.

Now that everyone relentlessly Googles baby names, parents have no excuse if they saddle their kids with the most popular names. But Wattenberg says they still want names that sound popular, so they end up choosing endless variations on phonetic schemes that happen to be popular: Ava, Emma, Ella, Bella.

“What’s hard for parents is that what feels like your own personal taste, it’s everybody’s taste,” Wattenberg says. “It’s a no win situation - if you pick a name you like, probably everybody else will like it too.”

And that’s what’s fascinating about watching the nation-level trends in baby naming. The national nomenclature is transformed living room by living room as one frazzled couple after another makes a seemingly personal decision for underlying phonetic reasons they haven’t considered.

“People may think they named a child after great, great grandma Olivia, but they have a lot of great, great grandmas, and they picked Olivia because it fits the popular sounds,” Wattenberg says.

And that’s how a country’s culture changes: People cherry-picking from the past as they look for a name to call the future.

Wired Science editor Betsy Mason contributed to this report.

See Also:

Image: Baby Emma. Flickr/momboleum

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 | 8 May 2009 | 6:09 pm

'Mixed results' from EU R&D funds

The EU's main R&D funding scheme has delivered mixed results, says Science Commissioner Janez Potocnik.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 May 2009 | 4:12 pm

The making of a Hubble image

Technicians demonstrate how they create a coloured image using data from the Hubble Space Telescope

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 8 May 2009 | 4:04 pm

Polar Bear Protection Won't Be Broadened

Polar bear protection will not be expanded to include nation-wide emissions limits.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 8 May 2009 | 3:50 pm

Earthly Cave Bacteria Hint at Mars Life

Earth's first cave dwellers show how life on Mars may be possible today.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 8 May 2009 | 3:40 pm

British scientists crack swine flu code as tally rises to 2,384

• Mapping of genetic code will aid creation of vaccine
• Five new cases diagnosed in the UK today

The World Health Organisation (WHO) today increased its global tally of confirmed swine flu cases to more than 2,300, as British scientists announced they had worked out the full genetic code for the virus.

Five new cases were diagnosed in the UK today – four schoolchildren and an adult linked to Alleyn's School in Dulwich, south London, which has been closed all week after six pupils were diagnosed with the illness. There are now 39 confirmed cases in the UK.

Mexico remains the worst affected country, with more than 1,100 laboratory-confirmed human cases of H1N1 virus influenza, including 42 deaths. The United States has reported nearly 900 laboratory-confirmed human cases, including two deaths. Another 22 countries have confirmed cases but no deaths.

The latest figures came as the health secretary, Alan Johnson, said the Health Protection Agency, which monitors infectious diseases, had fully mapped the genetic code of the virus.

He said this would help scientists to understand how the virus operates and to identify the parts that can be used to manufacture a vaccine.

On a visit to a laboratory in Hertfordshire, he was told that researchers hope European manufacturers will be able to take delivery of prototypes in the coming months to enable mass production of a vaccine to begin.

Johnson said: "A significant step towards protecting the world's health against swine flu has been taken. We now look to the vaccine industry to produce the required quantities of vaccine as quickly as possible."

The entire genetic fingerprint and sequence of the swine flu virus will now be analysed to learn how the virus behaves as it infects individuals.

At a meeting of Asian health ministers in Bangkok today, the WHO director general, Dr Margaret Chan, said the world was "better prepared for an influenza pandemic than at any time in history", largely because of precautions taken over the threat of bird flu.

She said: "Years of alert and expectation mean that most countries now have preparedness plans. Vaccine manufacturing capacity has increased sharply. Large stocks of antiviral drugs have been produced and procured.

"Right now, treatment courses from the WHO stockpile are being shipped to more than 70 countries in the developing world."

Mexico's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva said he would raise concerns at the WHO annual meeting later this month about "discriminatory" measures imposed against the country, its people, and its exports because of the flu. China has placed dozens of Mexicans in forced quarantine as a protective measure against the spread of the virus.

Around the world, public opinion seems to be shifting from fear of a pandemic to scepticism as to whether the virus poses a significant threat.

Half of 2,000 Britons surveyed yesterday said they believe the government over-hyped the threat of swine flu, and are now less worried about it spreading.

The research by online polling centre Toluna found two-thirds of respondents thought the government had coped well with the outbreak, while more than half (54%) thought the NHS was well prepared to cope with a possible pandemic.

The report noted a decline in public worry about the virus spreading, with 40% worried about the virus, compared with 50% last week.

Public health officials around the world acknowledge their worst fears about the new virus have yet to materialise. But many experts worry that people will become too complacent and fail to heed warnings if the virus returns in a more dangerous form in the autumn.

"People are taking a sigh of relief too soon," said Dr Richard Besser, acting director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

"The measures we've been talking about – the importance of hand-washing, the importance of covering coughs, the real responsibility for staying home when you're sick and keeping your children home when you're sick – I'm afraid that people are going to say, 'Ah, we've dodged a bullet. We don't need to do that,'" he said.

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 | 8 May 2009 | 3:29 pm

Cytori signs stem cell deal with GE Healthcare (Reuters)

Reuters - Shares of Cytori Therapeutics Inc jumped as much as 24 percent after it said it entered into a deal with General Electric Corp's healthcare unit for commercialization of its StemSource stem cell product in North America.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 May 2009 | 3:26 pm

Blogs : Humor pages | Norkay's Blog | Kids Stories | Indian Recipes | Database Tech Blog

Sundries : World Video Clips | Songs Clips | Indian Video Clips |