Many People Misjudge Their Degree Of Cancer Risk

Working with a population of individuals at risk for gastrointestinal cancers, researchers have learned that many people misjudge their actual degree of cancer risk and, therefore, their true need for prevention support.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Peruvian Stalagmites Hold Clues To Climate Change

How will the Netherlands, dominated by water, be affected by future climate change? Dutch researcher Martin van Breukelen hopes to answer that question by analyzing stalagmites from the South American Amazon tributaries in Peru as a way to reconstruct climate changes in the past.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

High Blood Pressure Could Be Caused By A Common Virus, Study Suggests

A new study suggests for the first time that cytomegalovirus, a common viral infection affecting between 60 and 99 percent of adults worldwide, is a cause of high blood pressure, a leading risk factor for heart disease, stroke and kidney disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Sex Life Of Plants Reveals Conflicts Between The Sexes

The pollen grains of male plants live in great competition. A grain of pollen that succeeds in manipulating the flower's pistil can emerge victorious from the struggle, according to new research from Sweden.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Heart Condition? Chewable Aspirin Absorbs Most Readily

For many years, it has been known that aspirin is beneficial to patients suffering heart attacks and near-heart attacks. But which of the many different types of aspirin is likely to help the most?
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

Sweet Deception: New Test Distinguishes Impure Honey From The Real Thing

Here's some sweet news for honey lovers: Researchers have developed of a simple test for distinguishing 100 percent natural honeys from adulterated or impure versions that they say are increasingly being foisted off on consumers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 May 2009 | 9:00 pm

LXR Proteins: New Target In The War On Tuberculosis?

New research has identified a role for LXR proteins in the mouse immune response to airway infection with the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. As treatment of normal mice with molecules that activate LXRs provided substantial protection from both a new infection and established infections, the authors suggest that LXRs might provide a new target for tuberculosis therapeutics.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Ginger Quells Cancer Patients' Nausea From Chemotherapy

People with cancer can reduce post-chemotherapy nausea by 40 percent by using ginger supplements, along with standard anti-vomiting drugs, before undergoing treatment, according to scientists.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

New Imaging Technique Reveals Structural Changes In Tourette's

Magnetization transfer imaging has been used to visualize previously unknown alterations in the cerebral architecture of patients with Tourette's syndrome. The researchers also found a correlation between the extent of some of the structural changes and symptom severity.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Progress Toward Artificial Tissue?

Researchers have developed a novel, highly porous, sponge-like material whose mechanical properties closely resemble those of biological soft tissues.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 16 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Obama hails efforts on clean energy, health care (AP)

AP - President Barack Obama says agreement on an energy bill and a promise by interest groups to squeeze trillions of dollars in savings from the health care system show that change has come to Washington.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 May 2009 | 11:39 am

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - A cold front is expected to plow through the eastern half of the country on Saturday, likely causing rain and thunderstorms from the Southern Plains through the Southeast and Northeast.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 May 2009 | 9:56 am

Complex repairs face weary Hubble spacewalkers (AP)

AP - Astronauts are getting ready for what could be the most complex spacewalking of their mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 May 2009 | 8:35 am

Strong storms stretch from Plains to Midwest (AP)

AP - Strong thunderstorms, heavy rain and powerful wind gusts stretched Friday from western Texas northeastward across Oklahoma, eastern Kansas, northern Missouri and into Illinois and Indiana.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 May 2009 | 5:59 am

Hungry eagles target Maine's coastal seabirds (AP)

AP - Bald eagles, bouncing back after years of decline, are swaggering forth with an appetite for great cormorant chicks that threatens to wipe out that bird population in the United States.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 May 2009 | 5:55 am

European scientists launch new space telescope (AP)

AP - As American astronauts overhauled the aging Hubble, European scientists launched an even larger space telescope toward a far-flung orbit, hoping to help answer two questions: How did the cosmos begin and are we alone in it?

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 May 2009 | 5:45 am

Bots vs. Smugglers: Drug Tunnel Smackdown

Semi-autonomous robots that can navigate and map drug-smuggling tunnels could be the greatest weapon to emerge from the government’s attempt to stamp out the trade in illicit substances across its borders.

Using special intelligence software developed at Idaho National Laboratory that can be mounted on different machines, the iRobot and Foster Miller robots use lasers to situate themselves in the dark tunnels that have been bored beneath the line that divides Mexico from the United States.

The subterranean passageways are a tough environment for Border Patrol to police. The agents know nothing beyond that there’s a hole in the ground. Some tunnels turn out to be crude holes. Others can reach three-quarters of a mile long and be part of a complex distribution infrastructure.

“They are not places you want to send people, especially ones that are claustrophobic, so it’s a perfect application for robotics,” said INL roboticist David Bruemmer, who has spent a decade developing the software the robots run. “That’s where we’ve really found a niche for the capabilities that we have.”

High-tech border surveillance has taken off since both the Sept. 11 attacks and the surge in illegal immigrants over the last decade. Tech is playing a bigger and bigger part in Border Patrol efforts because it’s simply too expensive to have agents everywhere. But for every high-tech solution, say, the controversial “virtual fence” that will begin construction soon in Arizona, there’s a low-tech countermove: mole tech.

In Arizona, more than 30 tunnels have been discovered just since 2006, when Congress passed the Secure Border Fence Act, which called for the construction of more than 700 miles of fence across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Near San Diego, 32 tunnels have been discovered since Sept. 11, 2001. Before the heightened vigilance that came in the aftermath of the attack, only two tunnels had been discovered in eight years. Now, there’s a special multi-agency task force in the area dedicated to stopping the tunneling operations. In the past, officers have found them more-or-less by chance.

“We’ve discovered people coming out of the ground on camera footage,” said Jerry Conlin, a Border Patrol agent and spokesman for San Diego. “We’ve had others where we had an agent witness someone disappearing into the ground.”

At the end of 2007, a canine unit picked up a scent and followed it to a storage facility near Tecate, Mexico. Agents eventually pulled 13,700 pounds of marijuana out of the tunnel they found on the premises.

“With our increased operational control, it has literally forced them to go underground,” Conlin maintained. “We disrupted the traditional smuggling routes.”

That’s created a new need for ways of fighting the subterranean drug trade. Sophisticated geological techniques for detecting tunnels offer one solution, but once you’ve found a tunnel, you’ve got to figure out what’s down there. That’s where Bruemmer’s bots — running what his lab calls the Robotic Intelligence Kernel — come into play.

In December, they brought a sensor-loaded Talon robot to a tunnel that the Department of Homeland Security had seized. Though it had been entered, the government agents knew little about the space. Victor Walker, another roboticist at INL, accompanied the bot to the border near Arizona.

“They brought us to this warehouse,” Walker said. “There was a grate in the ground around back. Just a drain. I did not expect that. The Talon is a pretty big robot. You pulled it up and it dropped down about 10 feet below the warehouse.”

This anteroom to the tunnel was dark and damp, and about the size of a large bedroom. In the corner, was a shaft that dropped fifty feet down to the tunnel proper, which ran about 90 meters. They lowered the robot down with wires and, after a few technical hiccups, traversed the muddy hole. It output chemical readings, video, and a map like the one you see below, which can be stuck into Google Maps.

“We hooked it up with a chemical sensor. We were able to map those chemicals to the map. You could see as it was going along,” Walker said. “Within a few minutes, we were able to task it down and get the video back so [Homeland Security officials] could look at it.”

The INL robots aren’t the only ones being used by government officials, nor is the border the only place where robotic border inspectors might be used. Canadian robot maker Inuktun specializes in pipe inspecting robots operated by human beings. Most of the more than 1,000 bots they’ve sold are used by utilities checking out their sewer pipes or water mains. In recent years, however, they’ve seen requests from government agencies to repurpose their bots for subterranean inspection.

“I don’t think anyone has ever built a robot to go into a tunnel, but if you’ve built a bot to go into a nasty sewer pipe, it translates fairly well to going into a tunnel,” Dobell said. “There are a lot more of these cross border tunnels than people think.”

The company’s president, Colin Dobell, said that he could not reveal the names of the organizations that he’s working for, but that he knew they’d been deployed.

“I can tell you that they have been used in tunnels and have been used in tunnels that go across borders,” Dobell said.

The INL bots, though, use a fundamentally different control paradigm. Dobell’s bots are teleoperated, meaning there’s a human with a joystick driving them around. Bruemmer’s are a kind of hybrid bot that share control between the operator and the robot. Operators tell Bruemmer’s robots where to go, but the robots drive.

In the tunnel application, the robots use their lasers to locate themselves within the space and help human operators controlling them with a standard joystick or a Wiimote from running them into walls.

“In the Arizona tunnel, there was less than an inch involved on each side,” Bruemmer said. A teleoperator without some guided motion couldn’t do it.”

Most importantly, though, they can go exploring and mapping autonomously. Inside tunnels, you can’t always communicate via the standard means with the robots. If they go deep and far enough away from the operator, they’ll lose communications contact. In that case, the operator can set a time limit for autonomous exploration, which, when it expires, will send the robot back into communications range to phone home the data it’s found. That information is integrated into the operator’s heads-up display, and then the robot can be sent a-roving again.

Robots might not be serving us drinks yet, but they are evolving to suit our real needs. And slowly but surely we’re learning how to take advantage of robots’ potential.

“It’s all about the man-machine interface. Like Windows just provided this simple user-understood interface, I think that’s what we’re really trying to do with robots,” he said. “Forget about trying to make robots massively intelligent.”

See Also:

• Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself
• Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses
• Advertising Transforms Lab Machine Into Killer Ninja Robot
• Honda’s Robolegs Help People Walk
• I, Nanny: Robot Babysitters Pose Dilemma
• Toy Robot Intended to Save Humans From Evil, Future Bots
• Grasshopper-Inspired Robot Can Jump Rocks on Other Planets
• How to Train Your Rat Neuron-Controlled Robot

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 | 16 May 2009 | 4:00 am

Gene Screen May Predict Colon Cancer's Return (HealthDay)

HealthDay - THURSDAY, May 14 (HealthDay News) -- The first genomic test aimed at predicting colon cancer recurrence may help individualize treatment for patients, leading to less toxic and more targeted therapy choices, scientists say.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 May 2009 | 3:49 am

Spacewalkers replace Hubble steering system

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Struggling with balky hardware, spacewalking astronauts on Friday replaced gyroscopes that will allow the Hubble Space Telescope to steady its gaze on distant galaxies.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 16 May 2009 | 1:12 am

Spacewalkers replace Hubble steering system (Reuters)

Reuters - Struggling with balky hardware, spacewalking astronauts on Friday replaced gyroscopes that will allow the Hubble Space Telescope to steady its gaze on distant galaxies.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 May 2009 | 1:12 am

Happiness Is ... Being Old, Male and Republican

Older people are generally happier, and that's true during the recession, too.
Source: Livescience.com | 16 May 2009 | 12:26 am

Astronauts Have Trouble Upgrading Hubble Telescope (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - HOUSTON - A pair of spacewalking astronauts enhanced the Hubble Space Telescope's sense of direction with some new gyroscopes Friday, but had trouble during the grueling upgrade because of a stubborn part.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 16 May 2009 | 12:18 am

Pic: Space Shuttle Crosses the Sun

In the 0.8 seconds the Space Shuttle Atlantis took to cross the sun, French astrophotographer Thierry Legault snapped this picture with a five-inch telescope and a digital camera. The photo was taken on May 12, the day before the Shuttle grappled the Hubble Space Telescope.

The next day Legault got a stunning shot of the two spacecraft together, right before Atlantis reached out to grab Hubble:

Image credit: Thierry Legault, via SpaceWeather.com

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 15 May 2009 | 11:56 pm

Bear Necessity (Investor's Business Daily)

Investor's Business Daily - Environment: Once again, the president finds it's not so easy to scrap the policies of his much-maligned predecessor. As with Gitmo and military tribunals, so it goes with offshore drilling and even Arctic wildlife.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 May 2009 | 11:29 pm

Barack Obama Drafted to Fight Aliens

It's not enough that he has to rescue the free world from the usual ills.
Source: Livescience.com | 15 May 2009 | 11:16 pm

Ultimate Fridge Magnets Could Save Energy

Magnetic refrigeration technology could use 20-30 percent less energy.
Source: Livescience.com | 15 May 2009 | 11:07 pm

Cheap Plastic Could Improve Electronic Devices

Plastic used in CDs and DVDs could one day improve the integrity of electronics.
Source: Livescience.com | 15 May 2009 | 10:58 pm

Hubble gyros fixed after struggle

Astronauts from the shuttle Atlantis struggle with the most crucial spacewalk to upgrade the Hubble telescope.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 May 2009 | 10:35 pm

Speculation, hypothesis and ideas. But where's the evidence?

You will be familiar with the work of Professor Baroness Susan Greenfield. The Oxford University professor is head of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, where she has charged herself with promoting the public's understanding of science, of what it means for there to be evidence for a given proposition. This is important work.

You will also be aware of her more prominent activity on the terrifying risks of computers, exemplified in the Daily Mail headline "Social websites harm children's brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist", "Computers could be fuelling obesity crisis, says Baroness Susan Greenfield" in the Telegraph, and so on.

These stories arise from a string of lectures, public meetings, pronouncements and articles in the popular press, generated by Greenfield over the past few years. They are never set out as a clear hypothesis with the accompanying evidence and a clear suggestion of what research programmes might be planned to clarify any uncertainties. She has explained, when criticised for a lack of clarity, a lack of evidence and an excess of panic, that these are merely ideas, speculations, hypotheses.

But with her repeated experience of being the engine behind such scare stories over many years, she should be able to predict that her "speculations" and "hypotheses" will inevitably result in scare stories in the press.

This week, we learn about her concerns on obesity through the Telegraph and Daily Mail. "Computer games, the internet and social networking sites may be fuelling the obesity crisis" is the theory. By encouraging kids to sit around? No – "by changing the workings of the brain, an eminent scientist has warned."

Do Greenfield's ideas have any substance? Let's see. "While a child who falls out of a tree will quickly learn not to repeat the mistake, someone who goes wrong on a computer game will just keep playing." It seems to me that experimenting in a safe environment is one of the key, enduring, almost definitive features of all play. "Computer use could be cutting attention spans, stifling imagination and hampering empathy," she said. "As a result, the parts of the brain involved in these traits will not develop properly."

With the best will in the world, this seems slightly foolish, simply because there are so many different things you could do with a computer, some of which would probably enhance attention span, imagination, and empathy.

Let us be clear. It is possible that much of the Baroness's output on this topic is speculative flim flam, dressed up in a science-y "gloss". And perhaps it is dangerous and unhelpful for one of our most prominent science communicators to appear repeatedly in the media making wild headline-grabbing claims about the dangers of computers, with minimal evidence. Is Greenfield unhelpfully misrepresenting what it is that scientists do, and indeed the whole notion of what it means to have empirical evidence for a clearly stated claim, thus undermining the public's understanding of science?

I don't know. I am merely raising it as a hypothesis. We need to examine these questions in more detail. I am very, very happy to do so.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 15 May 2009 | 10:14 pm

Space Shuttle, Hubble Spotted Crossing the Sun

Stunning new NASA images reveal the space shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope as the two spacecraft were silhouetted by the sun earlier this week.
Source: Livescience.com | 15 May 2009 | 10:07 pm

New Technique’s Gonna Find Out Who’s Spammy or Nice

You are how you e-mail: A new technique can tell people apart using only the timestamps in their Sent folders.

In the interactive, real-time world of Twitter, blogs and World of Warcraft, timing is one of the most salient aspects of social behavior. Now, researchers at Northwestern University and Yahoo Research in New York show that they can distinguish and categorize people based solely on the timestamps of their e-mails, paving the way for smarter advertisements, spam filters and social networking sites.

“You can’t track everything an individual is doing at every hour of the day,” said Dean Malmgren of Northwestern University, lead author of the study posted May 11 on the pre-publication physics repository, arXiv. “But this shows that with just a snapshot of what they’re doing — knowing what time they send their e-mails — you can actually get meaningful information.”

Of particular interest to Yahoo is a more effective way to catch spammers. Between 80 and 90 percent of all e-mail in the world is spam. Spam isn’t just obnoxious, it also uses up bandwidth, storage space and time. In 2009, spam may cost $42 billion in the United States and $130 billion worldwide — and that doesn’t include the money scammed from gullible internet users like Citigroup.

Spam filters and spammers are engaged in a perpetual arms race, with spammers constantly changing their domains and IP addresses and disguising dirty words. But spammers have a major limitation: In order to send their millions of e-mails, they need bots. If a temporal model of e-mail behavior can distinguish between different people, it can also distinguish people from nonpeople.

“Any novel way to identify spammers makes a huge contribution,” said Jake Hofman of Yahoo Research. “Even if you just reduce it by a small percent, that’s a big win.”

Malmgren and Hofman tested their model using data from two groups of college students: European students from a few years ago, when home internet access was rare, and American students when home internet access was much more common. They focused on how frequently the students were sending e-mails and when the e-mail sessions begun and ended.

Despite the dramatic chronological differences between these students — at least in the e-mail world — Malmgren found they fell into one of two categories: “day laborers,” who sent the bulk of their e-mails during the working day, or “e-mailaholics,” who sent e-mails from morning deep into the night.

“It was pretty amazing,” said Malmgren. “It didn’t have to be two categories. There could have been a continuum.”

The researchers also found that e-mail behavior was stable within individuals, with fewer than 20 percent of American students deviating from their e-mailer categories over two years. This stability could allow an e-mail service to recognize when an account is being commandeered by a spambot, at which point it can alert the user or freeze the account.

Hofman imagines numerous applications for analyzing time-related aspects of internet usage, beyond e-mail, and says this ability to robustly categorize people shows how powerful their model can be.

“This is just our toy demonstration,” he said. “There’s a lot of temporal data from e-mails and website visits out there, but they haven’t been leveraged for any meaningful analysis. The argument we’re making here is that these data can be a surprisingly useful source of information about individuals.”

Hofman says the technique could also allow websites to tailor their services to individuals, as the activity pattern of websites visits may be indicative of a user’s taste.

“It might turn out that I should market Blackberries and iPhones to users who visit sites more frequently, scattered throughout the day, like you and me” he said, “while I should market books and newspapers to users with lighter usage patterns, like my dad. This could influence what display or text ads I show these users when they’re on my site.”

A detailed description of activity patterns could also be useful for heavily trafficked sites, like Twitter, which could optimize how their servers allocates resources, and internet services that depend on real-time interactions, like Aardvark.

Citation: “Characterizing Individual Communication Patterns” by R. Dean Malmgren, Jake M. Hofman, Luís A. N. Amaral, and Duncan J. Watts. arXiv:0905.0106v1

Image: Dean Malmgren. The probability of sending an e-mail during a particular time of the week represented by a ribbon wrapped around a torus. Daytime is illuminated; weekend is in the foreground; both the color of the ribbon and the distance between the ribbon and the torus represent the probability.

See Also:

• Not All Asian E-Mail Is Spam
• Artist Draws Inspiration From Spam Cluttering Her Inbox
• Your E-Mail Is Alive And It Looks Like The Plague
• Bye Telemarketing, Hi More Spam?

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 15 May 2009 | 9:30 pm

SLIDE SHOW: The Week's Top Stories

From animal joy to rogue black holes, see images from the week's news here.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 15 May 2009 | 7:35 pm

The Origin of Origin of Life in a Jar

On this day, 56 years ago, Stanley Miller published his milestone work in study of the origins of life, reporting on the production of amino acids from primordial soup in a flask zapped by electricity.

Miller published the paper in the journal Science at the tender age of 23 while working under the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago. We wrote up the story over on our sister blog, This Day in Tech, “Cookin’ Up Some Primordial Soup.”

Here’s a snippet:

The experiment was simple. Miller and his advisor at the University of Chicago, Harold Urey, built the apparatus you see at the right to “duplicate a primitive atmosphere of the earth.” They combined ingredients they believed were part of Earth’s primordial soup — circulated water, ammonia, methane, and hydrogen — and zapped the concoction with electricity as a stand-in for lightning flashes.

“During the run the water in the flask became noticeably pink after the first day, and by the end of the week the solution was deep red and turbid,” Miller wrote.

When he took the water out and analyzed it, sure enough, half of the amino acids used to make proteins in living cells appeared, as you can see from the hand-labeled chromatograph above.

See Also:

• Farewell, Stanley Miller, Creator of Life
• Forgotten Experiment May Explain Origins of Life
• Proof That Meteors Could Have Sparked Life on Earth

Image: Science.

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 | 15 May 2009 | 7:16 pm

Involved Dads Lower Their Kids' Sex Risks

A new study finds that the involvement of fathers lowers risky sexual behavior in teenagers.
Source: Livescience.com | 15 May 2009 | 6:59 pm

Taxing Bad Behavior

Congress is looking at a range of sin taxes.
Source: Livescience.com | 15 May 2009 | 6:21 pm

Food Wrapper Coating Found in Human Blood

Chemicals used to make food wrappers grease-proof are found in human blood.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 15 May 2009 | 6:15 pm

Space Tomato Packs Nutritional Super-Punch

A NASA-developed tomato flops in space but could succeed on Earth.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 15 May 2009 | 5:35 pm

Wow! Venus Dazzles in Morning Sky

Truly dazzling, a world so close to ours that it outshines every star in the sky, save the sun.
Source: Livescience.com | 15 May 2009 | 5:34 pm

Bird Flu Dies in Our Cold Noses

A new study blames humans' cold noses for preventing a bird flu pandemic.
Source: Livescience.com | 15 May 2009 | 4:33 pm

Hubble Gets 'Like-New' Gyroscopes

Astronauts install refurbished gyroscopes when the new ones don't fit on Hubble.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 15 May 2009 | 4:05 pm

The age of expeditions is over

Times have moved on since the days of colonial exploration, and so should the way the Royal Geographical Society funds and organises its research

What began as a petition by a group of younger Fellows, demanding that the Royal Geographical Society return to its traditional role of funding major overseas expeditions, threatens to bloom into a far more damaging dispute over the future of geographical research itself. It is important this not be allowed to happen, because geographical research is many things – it is certainly much more than the carrying out of expeditions – and in these global times, we need the full breadth of understanding that geography offers more than ever.

The dispute culminates this coming Monday in a ballot to determine whether the society should be forced to return to its charter obligations and resume the regular organisation of its own sponsored multidisciplinary research projects, as last carried out in the 1990s. It is, on the surface, an eminently plausible – and for some, doubtless a rather admirable – resolution. It has certainly gained considerable traction. But for professional geographers, such as myself, it is clear that this is a flawed resolution and it threatens to do much damage.

It is flawed, first of all, because the society is under no such obligation to fund major overseas expeditions of the sort that once saw Shackleton charge to the pole and, more recently, have been carried out in countries such as Jordan and Brazil. It is required merely to "advance geographical science" as it sees fit. The fellows who have forced Monday's meeting disagree with this. They point to the fact that the society, initially founded as a gentleman's dining club, once presided over the heyday of British exploration (neglecting to mention that this same heyday of exploration also helped us reach the high watermark of imperialism). Times have, thankfully, moved on since then, and the way we promote, fund and organise our research has moved on as well.

Which brings me to the second reason the proposed resolution is flawed. Understanding the nitty-gritty of today's research frameworks and funding streams may not have the romantic appeal of heading off into the unknown, but it is far more important for ensuring top-rate research gets done. Professional academics, with full teaching and administrative commitments, today have to operate within a far more competitive climate, which they are best able to do through their own managed and collaborative research projects funded by bodies such as the RGS, but organised from the bottom up.

Recognising this, and entirely in keeping with its charter obligations, the RGS itself has recently carried out two major reviews (in 2001, chaired by Ron Cook and 2004, by Ray Hudson). These wide, cross-society consultations, endorsed by members of the society's research and expedition committees, have determined that the best way the society can support geographical research in the 21st century is through the establishment of a major grant programme, bid for in open competition across the full breadth of the subject. As a result of this policy, more than £500,000 has been made available to support the work of professional scientists since 2001. The system works well within the modern research climate and we take a step backwards if we try to change it.

Lest all this sound like a dispute between the demands of professional academic geography and the possibilities of exploration, however, let me make clear that it is not. This is about those who want to look forward to the real challenges of the 21st century, and those who are looking back in the hope that the solutions to our problems lie at the farthest reaches of the four corners of our planet.

What geographers – all geographers – do matters, and it matters now more than ever. In times of growing population and ever-increasing food shortages; with the threat of conflict based not only on access to oil, but to water; with climate change (and the failure properly to manage our responses to it); with international conflict and migration, and with economic inequalities; and with much of this right under our noses in the United Kingdom, we need the means to study these issues, and to connect up and share our knowledge afterwards. That requires a culture of research based not on conflict but on co-operation and productive competition.

The outcome of this ballot will be an early straw in the wind for the future of geographical research in this country. Geography is one of the disciplines to have fared less well than, say, engineering, in the current round of government allocation of higher education (Hefce) funds. Right now, all who profess an interest in geography need the RGS (with the Institute of British Geographers) – their official representative body – to be fighting battles with the government on geographers' behalves. We cannot afford to get bogged down in internal disputes such as this resolution presents. Those fellows voting on Monday who truly support geographical education and who believe that the continual advancement of geographical knowledge is more important now than ever, must say no to what is being tabled.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 15 May 2009 | 3:31 pm

Excuse Me. Please Don't Smoke

Low-key PSAs work better than hard-hitting ads.
Source: Livescience.com | 15 May 2009 | 3:17 pm

Ariane rocket launches two space observatories

CAYENNE, French Guiana (Reuters) - An Ariane rocket launched two scientific space observatories Thursday that will help scientists better understand the formation of the universe, space officials said.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 15 May 2009 | 2:36 pm

Lithium in Water Shown to Curb Suicide

Communities drinking water with naturally high levels of lithium have fewer suicides.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 15 May 2009 | 2:26 pm

Monkeys Learn From Their Mistakes

After a disappointing experience, monkeys ponder what might have been.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 15 May 2009 | 1:05 pm

Astronauts take space walk to keep Hubble pointing in right direction

Atlantis shuttle crew to install new gyroscopes and batteries in orbiting telescope

Astronauts from the Atlantis space shuttle today are to take their second of five space walks 350 miles above Earth to repair and upgrade the Hubble space telescope.

Their first task is to install six new gyroscopes that help point the telescope point in the right direction - three of the current gyroscopes are broken.

In their second job, astronauts Mike Massimino and Mike Good will also replace three batteries. The new batteries weigh 125lb each and will power the telescope during the night portion of its orbit, when the solar arrays stop generating electricity.

All of the existing batteries on Hubble are original equipment from 19 years ago, which were designed to operate for five years.

The crew will install new batteries in another bay of the Hubble during the fifth and final spacewalk.

Yesterday, they replaced a nearly 16-year-old camera for a new one the size of a baby grand piano, as well as the science instrument command and data handling unit.

Nasa says the telescope can now see farther into space and across a wider spectrum of colours, thanks to the work done during the first space walk.

Nasa hopes that Hubble, which has cost about $10bn (£6.2bn) so far, will last until at least 2014 when its replacement, the James Webb space telescope, should be in orbit.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 15 May 2009 | 12:56 pm

Man flu: a triumph, or a defeat?

Is the welcome news that men have weaker immune systems just a sign of evolution's disregard for our sex?

When I learned earlier this week that man flu is real, or that at least men suffer the ravages of seasonal bugs to far greater an extent than the fairer sex, I celebrated. At last, this slur on men as malingerers – perpetrated no doubt by the international female conspiracy and makers of television adverts that screen in the winter months – would now be ended.

The more I thought about it, I couldn't decide: was this news a triumph or a defeat? On the triumph side, men are now free to recuperate in peace from what is, actually, quite a debilitating condition thank you very much. There is no longer any need for us to be bullied when laid low, thwacked with accusations of snivelling self-pity, told that we deserve nothing better than being locked in the cupboard under the stairs with nothing but a copy of the sports pages and a solitary cocktail sausage for company. That doesn't happen to me by the way, no. It's a friend of mine.

The aspects which linger longer in the mind, however, are those that whiff of defeat. First, there's the headline fact that our immune systems are weaker than those of women. (Explained one of the researchers behind the study, Maya Saleh, "Women have a more powerful inflammatory response than men." Doctor, you're telling me.) But it's the reason behind this comparative weakness which is, to me, far more concerning; apparently women have stronger immune systems because evolution wants them alive.

Apologies if that statement makes evolution sound like something that should be fighting the Fantastic Four rather than a process that slowly removes the tails from monkeys, but needs must. Evolution wants women robust, to stay alive so that they can bear children for the purposes of regenerating the human race. At the same time it is quite happy to leave men hovering precariously between life and death, propped up solely by an intravenous feed of Lemsip. That is how evolution rolls.

Damn you evolution! Or, if one is so inclined, damn you Mrs God! But the question remains: if evolution doesn't care whether men are whisked Lethe-wards by any of the billions of bugs that hurtle round the planet every nanosecond, why did it bring us here in the first place? Why did it not simply make do with fashioning little sperm sacs that could sit handily in the fridge ready for their moment? What is it that us men bring to the world that has made our fragile existence worthwhile? Surely it couldn't simply be our prowess at mowing the lawn. Or our instinctive ability to orientate ourselves in foreign cities. Heaven forfend that we were plonked on this planet simply to explain how to work the remote control – "Yes darling, that is how you find the freeview channels. Forgive me, I must now shuffle off this mortal coil."

This news has hit me like a hammer blow, I must confess, and indeed I may need to take to my bed for a couple of days to recover. But when I do recover, and by goodness I will, there will be a reckoning. I will demand from evolution an explanation as to man's ultimate uselessness and until I hear back I will withdraw all services as a freelance alphabetiser of CDs. For real.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 15 May 2009 | 12:30 pm

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