Science Headlines for May 22, 2009

Determining Success Or Failure In Cholesterol-controlling Drugs

Researchers have discovered that a complex network of interactions between drugs and the proteins with which they bind can explain adverse drug effects. Their findings suggest that adverse drug effects might be minimized by using single or multiple drug therapies in order to fine-tune multiple off-target interactions.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 May 2009 | 3:00 am

Genetic Pathway Responsible For Much Of Plant Growth Identified

Researchers have discovered a previously unknown pathway in plant cells that regulates plant growth.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 May 2009 | 3:00 am

Fundamental Flaw In Transistor Noise Theory Discovered

Chip manufacturers beware: There's a newfound flaw in our understanding of transistor noise, a phenomenon affecting the electronic on-off switch that makes computer circuits possible. According to the engineers who discovered the problem, it will soon stand in the way of creating more efficient, lower-powered devices like cell phones and pacemakers unless we solve it.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 May 2009 | 3:00 am

Cosmology's Best Standard Candles Get Even Better

Astronomers discovered an efficient method for standardizing the intrinsic brightness and thus the distance to the cosmic milestones known as Type Ia supernovae. The discovery underlines the crucial importance of excellent supernovae spectra in the quest to understand dark energy.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 May 2009 | 3:00 am

Menopause: Agent Provides Treatment Option For Women With Hot Flashes

A pill used for nerve pain offers women relief from hot flashes, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 May 2009 | 3:00 am

Dying At Home: A Trend That Could Make Hospitals More Efficient

It's a common tale: a grandparent's health begins to fail and, realistically, their death is imminent. Often those older patients are rushed to hospital, taken out of their homes for treatment that will likely only extend their life by a few days. University of Alberta researcher Donna Wilson is hoping this can change and already has seen some drastic changes in where Canadians are choosing to die.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 May 2009 | 3:00 am

New Species of Yeast Discovered in Amazon Jungle

A new species of yeast has been discovered deep in the Amazon jungle. Biologist have identified novel characteristics of Candida carvajalis sp. nov.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 May 2009 | 12:00 am

Heat-tolerant Coral Reefs Discovered: May Survive Global Warming

Experts say that more than half of the world's coral reefs could disappear in the next 50 years, in large part because of higher ocean temperatures caused by climate change. But now scientists have found evidence that some coral reefs are adapting and may actually survive global warming.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 May 2009 | 12:00 am

Gene Therapy Could Expand Stem Cells' Promise

Once placed into a patient's body, stem cells intended to treat or cure a disease could end up wreaking havoc simply because they are no longer under the control of the clinician. But gene therapy has the potential to solve this problem, according to a perspective article.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 May 2009 | 12:00 am

New Understandings In Circadian Rhythms

Geneticists have made new inroads into understanding the regulatory circuitry of the biological clock that synchronizes the ebb and flow of daily activities.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 23 May 2009 | 12:00 am

Libraries, Food Banks Benefit from Transportation Modeling

Instead of helping companies improve manufacturing, Karen Smilowitz uses her experience as an industrial engineer to help non-profits be more effective.
Source: Livescience.com | 22 May 2009 | 1:25 pm

Sweeteners Linger in Groundwater

Artificial sugars end up unchanged in surface waters, making them ideal markers.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 22 May 2009 | 1:22 pm

Stormy weather keeps space shuttle up extra day (AP)

AP - Thunderstorms prevented space shuttle Atlantis and its crew from landing Friday, leaving them to circle the Earth hoping the weather would improve by the following day.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 1:15 pm

World's Meanest Dog: The English Cocker Spaniel?

The doe-eyed cocker spaniel may be the world's most aggressive breed.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 22 May 2009 | 1:00 pm

New worries on Arctic permafrost thaw

OSLO (Reuters) - A rise in concentrations of a powerful greenhouse gas over the Arctic after a decade of stability is stirring worries about a possible thaw of vast stores trapped in permafrost, experts said.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 12:49 pm

New worries on Arctic permafrost thaw (Reuters)

Reuters - A rise in concentrations of a powerful greenhouse gas over the Arctic after a decade of stability is stirring worries about a possible thaw of vast stores trapped in permafrost, experts said.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 12:49 pm

Bad weather cancels shuttle's Friday return (AFP)

AFP - NASA canceled the Friday return of the space shuttle Atlantis to Earth due to bad weather at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and said landing could happen Saturday at the earliest.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 12:35 pm

Bad weather delays space shuttle's homecoming

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Cloudy skies and rain storms prompted NASA to delay space shuttle Atlantis' planned landing in Florida on Friday after a successful mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 12:35 pm

Emirates airline profit plunges on fuel costs (AFP)

AFP - Full-year profit at Emirates, one of the world's fastest growing airlines, plunged 80.4 percent as oil prices sky-rocketed to an all-time high of 147 dollars a barrel, the company said on Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 12:25 pm

Stormy Weather Delays Space Shuttle Landing (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Stormy weather in Florida prevented the shuttle Atlantis from an on-time landing Friday, forcing its seven-astronaut crew to spend at least one more day in orbit following their successful repair of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 12:15 pm

Bad weather delays shuttle return

Nasa delays the return to Earth of space shuttle Atlantis until Saturday because of bad weather at the Florida landing site.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 May 2009 | 12:13 pm

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - A large low-pressure system was expecting to continue dumping heavy rain and strong thunderstorms on the Gulf coast from Florida to Louisiana on Friday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 11:21 am

The approaching 2009 hurricane season (weather.com)

weather.com -
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 10:06 am

Rare deer reveals signs of life

Footprints and scat belonging to the elusive Visayan spotted deer are located deep in the jungle of the Philippines.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 May 2009 | 9:09 am

China: rich nations must cut emissions by 40 pct (AP)

AP - Wealthy nations, as history's biggest polluters, should cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, China says in a policy document on climate change. The government also rolled out fresh help for solar power and other "green energy."

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 6:58 am

Tasmanian devils listed as endangered in Australia (AP)

AP - The Tasmanian devil, a snarling fox-sized marsupial made notorious by its Looney Tunes cartoon namesake Taz, was listed in Australia as an endangered species Friday because of a contagious cancer that has wiped out most of the wild population.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 22 May 2009 | 6:27 am

Tasmanian devils now endangered

Australia's Tasmanian devil is listed as endangered as the marsupial's numbers are decimated by a tumour disease.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 May 2009 | 6:25 am

Food Web, Meet Interweb: The Networked Future of Farms

Silicon Valley thinks the internet can transform anything from car sales to anonymous sex, but the way Americans grow and buy food is rooted in ancient, offline systems.

Now, a Bay Area startup has launched a service to make it easier and cheaper for restaurants to buy food from small, local farms. With a suite of mobile apps for use in restaurants and on farms, FarmsReach wants to create an online food marketplace that would directly connect farms with restaurants.

“The food supply industry is ripe for ‘disintermediation’ because of the internet,” said Alistair Croll, a startup consultant working with FarmsReach. In other words, middlemen beware: Food could undergo a transition like the one that swept through classified ads, air travel and dozens of other industries.

If that happens, it could begin to transform the food system, and that would be welcome news for food activists. The problems of the food system have been well-chronicled over the last few years: environmental degradation, occasional food-borne disease outbreaks and millions of overweight Americans.

While these issues are receiving attention from many organizations, both inside and outside of the agricultural sector, information flow could be the hidden lever inside the food system. The current system does a remarkably good job of concealing how food is grown and by whom. Lettuce planted halfway around the world looks pretty much like lettuce grown around the corner. Farmers have a hard time showing the value they add and being recognized for innovative practices.

The current distribution of edibles works the way it does, though, because it’s brutally effective at reliably delivering low-cost food all over the country. Sysco, the dominant $13 billion American food distributor, works and restaurants know that.

“The big problem in small agriculture is supply chain resiliency,” Croll said. “Chefs order from Sysco because they know, no matter what, they’ll get their orders or there is an account rep they can strangle.”

Now, restaurants have two basic options. Call up a dozen local farms to order the ingredients for their salads or use Sysco’s online system and have everything show up, come hell or high water. Perhaps unsurprisingly, only the pickiest chefs at the fancier restaurants choose the local farm route.

FarmsReach wants to make ordering from local, small farms as easy and reliable as ordering from Sysco. Farmers with smartphones would snap quick photos of their produce, then upload their products into their “virtual stalls.” Restaurants could cruise through the vegetables online and pick what they wanted. It’s a classic farmer’s market with a high-tech twist.

And by bringing producers and customers closer together, the internet could cause purchasers to change who they buy their food from. Already, increasing numbers of restaurants and produce buyers demand to know more about the food they are purchasing.

“Buying local or knowing where your product comes from is the biggest revolution in our business,” said Jim Boyce, general manager of Produce Express, a food distributor in Sacramento, who sources up to a third of its produce from within 100 miles of its location during the summer months.

Other startups are trying to put more information in the hands of consumers, too. Three students at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information are trying to create a social network, Squash and Vine, to connect farms, retailers and food consumers. And a handful of activists in Santa Cruz created a service for finding small farms, Local Harvest, that now reaches 4 million people.

These efforts share FarmsReach’s vision of a technology-revised food system. The local food advocates have already begun to envision what that system looks like and it goes beyond labels like organic or simple accounting like food miles, although those can be useful heuristics. The reformed system should incorporate more fresh food, less chemicals and fertilizer use, and smaller farms, they say.

“[The future food system] looks like a lot of small farms,” said Erin Barnett, director of Local Harvest “It looks like really smart distribution for interweaving networks of smaller-scale farms that are distributing much more locally.”

Local Harvest is the largest website connecting local food consumers directly with producers, but it was built on a shoestring budget. They don’t have the resources to come up with an alternative supply chain.

“It would be awesome if people who don’t have an hour and a half to go to the farmer’s market could just log on, place their order from a combined list of what everybody’s got for the week and go pick it up. That would take the availability of that food to a whole group of different people, which would be good,” Barnett said. “But I don’t see us owning a fleet of trucks.”

Some small-scale farmers have tried to band together to act as larger producers, like the Community Alliance for Family Farms Project’s Growers Collaborative, but it’s a tough organizing task just knowing what each of the farms has to offer. This is an industry that spends much of its time outdoors or in kitchens, so inputting information is rarely a priority, even when a farm’s proprietors are Internet-savvy.

Brook Delorne and her brother, Noah Delorne, each spent years in the tech world. But their 130-acre vegetable farm Locally Known in Maine uses old-fashioned personal relationships to sell its products.

“If it doesn’t make perfect sense and it’s too much effort, it’s a distraction almost from what really needs to get done,” Delorne said.

What needs to get done is plowing and planting and harvesting. Updating a Facebook fan page doesn’t really make the list. But there’s something to the idea of taking advantage of network effects to add more information about local food into a system. You just need to build the right tool.

Farms Reach’s Croll said he key is making their suite of tools more useful than the current “handshake and phone call” system that farms and restaurants currently use.

“Once the system is useful enough, and the farms are saying, ‘I don’t want to take your phone order, use the system, it’s easier,’ we’ll know we’ve succeeded,” Croll said.

Squash and Vine’s founders don’t want to supplant the current distribution infrastructure, but they do want to simplify things for consumers and farmers. Their site (still in the concept phase) is based on extensive research carried out by the site’s co-founders Shawna Hein, Hazel Onsrud and Aylin Selcukoglu in completing their master’s degrees at the Berkeley Information School.

Farmers have a hard time updating web pages they found, so they’d create audio updates that could be called in from the field. Consumers don’t always know what’s in season, but someone usually does, and there would be avenues to spread that knowledge. It will combine the feature-rich social networking aspects of Facebook or the recipe-heavy food site, Bakespace, with the ideals that created Local Harvest.

“People want things that are convenient and easy for them,” said Onsrud. “They don’t necessarily want to have to go out of their way. If they knew where more of the information was, it wouldn’t be as big of a hurdle.”

To get increased adoption of new food behaviors, though, they’ll need a lot of users from up and down the supply chain. Without obvious monetary or other incentives, they could face the standard Web 2.0 dilemma: Without users, the site isn’t valuable and the site isn’t valuable without users.

But even if it starts small, the efforts could have an outsize effort in demonstrating what how the interwebs could change the food web.

“The potential effect is much bigger than the tons or dollar amounts of food that it impacts because it’s enabling people to know more about where their food comes and rewarding people who are taking those steps,” said Tom Tomich, director of the University of California, Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute.

See Also:

Image: flickr/JimmySmith

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 | 22 May 2009 | 4:00 am

The UK's endangered dormice population showing signs of a possible recovery

Conservationists say they are encouraged by research which suggests that a decline in the numbers of dormice is slowing down.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 May 2009 | 3:13 am

Pancreas cancer drug failure clue

Experts believe they have discovered why pancreatic cancer can be so resistant to drug treatment.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 22 May 2009 | 2:07 am

60 Percent of Teens Text While Driving

Ironically, about 83 percent of the respondents think DWT should be banned.
Source: Livescience.com | 22 May 2009 | 1:34 am

US CO2 goals 'to be compromised'

Energy Secretary Steven Chu says the US will not be able to cut emissions as much as needed due to domestic opposition.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 May 2009 | 11:29 pm

Government only funds research with economic benefits

Lord Drayson (Scientific serendipity, 18 May) argues that the government is committed to funding curiosity-driven research. He needs to talk to the chairman (Peter Warry) and chief executive (Keith Mason) of the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Their message, both to me in person and to the scientific community, has been unambiguous - the government, and the Treasury in particular, are interested only in new projects that have direct economic impact. It doesn't matter if we have the greatest ideas for projects to study the big bang or the properties of fundamental particles; these will fall on deaf ears unless we can articulate clearly the resulting "economic benefits".

Lord Drayson needs to tackle this evident lack of communication between government and the research councils.
Professor George Efstathiou
University of Cambridge

Begging Lord Drayson's patience, but the choice isn't between investing, or not, in science research, but between acknowledging, or not, government's special responsibility to fund research that brings no directly evident economic benefit. A government turn towards heavy prioritisation of utilitarian research objectives has been explicit since Charles Clarke, in an angry letter to this newspaper (12 May 2003) denied having said that "ornamental medievalists" ought not to receive state funding yet did say that the best case for state funding of university research was its relevance to equipping "the student population" to "deal with" contemporary global change. In the bud was a utilitarian worm which, since then, on the watch of Clarke's successors, and a compliant Arts and Humanities Research Council (Letters, 19 May), has been chewing its way towards the heart of humanities research. Will that worm turn?
Emeritus Professor Jinty Nelson
King's College London

Dr James Harris argues (Letters, 19 May) that arts and humanities researchers should not have to state the social and economic impact of their work to receive money from taxpayers, because it has no such impact. It's possible that he has misunderstood the very broad scope of "economic impact": as an environmental economist, I know that skylarks have economic value, so why not sonnets? Much arts and humanities research does benefit society, for example improved knowledge of our past makes us wiser and richer.

That said, some research in the arts and humanities (as in the sciences) is undoubtedly of little benefit to anyone other than the small group of researchers who either produce or read the research. It is not clear to me why academics in any discipline should be in the unique position of being paid and funded to satisfy their own curiosity. Better to treat such research activity as a perk of the job, like company cars and subsidised canteens, and to fund and tax it in the same way as salaries (with which it would trade off). If Dr Harris can't be bothered to explain the importance of his research to the people who pay for it, he should pay for it himself - I wonder whether he would?
Dr Neal Hockley
Bangor University

James Harris rightly expresses concern at excessive demands to justify the impact of specialist research, particularly in the arts and humanities. But his own letter provides an example as to how easily the financial advantages of research can be overlooked. He suggests that work on Chaucer has no social and economic impact. Where I live, associations with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales generate considerable income from foreign visitors.

There is considerable scope to expand tourism in East Kent by increasing our knowledge of the area's rich history. The same is true of other areas of the UK.
Frederic Stansfield
Canterbury, Kent

In the 1970s physicists were criticised for wasting time playing with "toys" that had no obvious application instead of tackling important problems. Those toys were lasers; under Drayson's policy they might never have been developed. New Labour has, on balance, been good for science and the likely alternative is likely to be worse, but no party can foresee where valuable breakthroughs will occur.
Dr Matthew Wright
University of Southampton

Research

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 | 21 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

Major provisions of House climate and energy bill (AP)

AP - The major provisions of the House climate and energy bill call for:
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 21 May 2009 | 11:00 pm

Data.gov Launches to Mixed Reviews

Data.gov launched today with 47 datasets from across the government.

That’s a tiny fraction of the Feds’ gargantuan information stores, and the site is clearly in beta, but open-government advocates see the new site as a sign of good things to come for government transparency.

“Data.gov says that our information is your information,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation. “It bothers me less that there are 50 feeds available today because it represents this enormous change in attitude about what public means. It means it’s online. It’s means it’s available. I think it’s a dramatic breakthrough in the role of government.”

The sheer scale of government data presents many problems, as we’ve noted in the Open Up Government Data wiki. More than 100 government agencies collect data and statistics. Though some agencies have done a great job of getting data and documents online, the accessibility and usability of government data overall can be improved and standardized. With impressive attention to detail and metadata, Data.gov appears to be a step in that direction, but not everyone is satisfied with the new effort.

While ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick noted that the effort was “exciting,” he criticized the lack of datasets available at launch.

“There are many, many sets of data available from the federal government but the Data.gov site says it was selective about quality and standards when choosing what to include,” Kirkpatrick wrote. “It’s hard not to compare other sources of government data and feel disappointed, though.”

USGovXML.com, for example, was coded by Robert Loftin from his New Jersey home office beginning just last July. Loftin managed to include far more data than the official effort.

“When I was pulling this stuff together for personal enrichment,” Loftin told Wired.com, “I began to feel frustrated that there were so many places I had to go to, to get the information I was looking for.”

Lofton’s experience, though, provides some insight into why the task is harder than it first appears. In December of 2008, he sent setters to two dozen chief information officers at different government agencies asking them for a simple list of their “publicly available web services and XML data sources.”

After all that effort, he received three responses from Homeland Security, NASA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In all cases, the responses were cursory, less than a page, and 23 other agency CIOs did nothing with his requests. That said, Loftin notes that many lower-level technical-support people have proven very helpful at a variety of agencies. Given that he was developing a publicly available source of information, he was dismayed by the lackluster response.

“It sort of shocked me,” Loftin said. “I even wrote to senators and congressmen.”

But to no avail. He aggregated his dozens of sources on his own.

Loftin’s experience shows how hard it can be to extract information from agencies. And even the new federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, who was celebrated for the data policies he implemented in his last gig as CIO of Washington, D.C., probably faces an uphill battle making government data more open.

Miller of the Sunlight Foundation said she thinks Kundra wanted to play it safe politically by showing government agencies that opening up their data wasn’t “threatening,” so he went after the easy, uncontroversial data.

“I suspect that they asked nicely and said, ‘What do you got?’ And this is what they got,” she said. “It’s a toe in the water.”

She expects that over the next year or two, more and more data will flow onto the site. Data.gov highlights its “Suggest Other Datasets” form prominently. It’s clear that they plan to iterate.

In the meantime, the data that is there, from residential energy consumption surveys to the US Geological Survey’s mineral resource database, is already useful. And Sunlight Labs has launched a mashup contest, Apps for America 2, that will award $10,000 to the developer who comes up with the best app using Data.gov sources. Their last contest netted more than 45 entries.

See Also:

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 | 21 May 2009 | 10:05 pm

Doctor Uses Household Drill on Boy's Skull

An Australian doctor used a household drill to relieve pressure on a boy with a brain injury, thereby saving his life.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 May 2009 | 10:02 pm

Revisiting Spirituality and AIDS

An HIV-positive woman says prayer replaces medicine for her, but research remains less certain.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 May 2009 | 9:21 pm

Dead Star Reborn Fast and Furious

A fading pulsar star is "recycled" into a fast-spinning astronomical whiz kid.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 21 May 2009 | 9:15 pm

'Turbines wind up my goats'

After three years of intrigue and confusion, not to mention a death toll of 400, the great Penghu archipelago goat mystery may finally have been solved.

Officials investigating the unexplained deaths of scores of the animals on the windy island chain in the Taiwan strait believe that the introduction of noisy wind turbines could have given the unfortunate goats a fatal case of exhaustion.

After the eight turbines were installed on the archipelago, a farmer told the authorities that his livestock were beginning to die for no apparent reason, according to Council of Agriculture inspection official Lu Ming-tseng.

It now appears that the turbines' high-volume, late-night, spinning was more than just an aural nuisance and could have induced terminal insomnia in the animals.

Lu pointed out that there was no reason why goats should react differently to humans when it came to the turbines' attendant noise pollution.

"If noise at night can keep people awake, then it could also keep the goats awake, and when the wind kicks up it makes a louder noise," he said.

He said that the agricultural authorities would do more tests to rule out any other causes of death, adding that if the giant power-generating turbines proved to be at fault, Taipower might help the farmer with moving costs. But a spokesman for Taipower said the firm doubted the goats had died from the noise.

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 | 21 May 2009 | 9:14 pm

Jacqui Smith to ban 'legal high' drugs

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is to ban two "legal highs" and a range of anabolic steroids in preparation for the London 2012 Olympics.

The Home Office published proposals today to ban the personal use of GBL, an industrial solvent also used as paint stripper, which has become a drug of choice on the club scene. It follows the death of a Sussex University medical student, Hester Stewart, 21. Her body was found with a container of GBL close by.

The second drug to be banned is BZP, a stimulant that started life as a worming treatment for cattle but is now marketed as a "legal herbal high" that can act as an MDMA or ecstasy substitute. A recent report by the European monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction identified the health risks of BZP. They included vomiting, headaches and stomach pains lasting for up to 24 hours.

The government's advisory council on the misuse of drugs is expected to recommend action against a third "legal high" known as Spice when it reports to the home secretary by July.

"It is absolutely right that we continue to adapt our drug policy to the changing environment of substance misuse," Smith said.

Smith is also proposing to add 24 anabolic steroids to the list of banned drugs. At present 54 anabolic steroids and five growth hormones are banned in Britain.

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 | 21 May 2009 | 8:54 pm

Twitter: This Era's Hula Hoop

When it was first available, it seemed ingenious and amazing.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 May 2009 | 8:27 pm

Need Satellite Repairs? Don't Call NASA

NASA's Hubble repair mission will be its last servicing call to a satellite.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 21 May 2009 | 8:15 pm

Biotech Can Survive the Recession, But It Won’t Be Easy

ATLANTA, Georgia — There’s plenty of money available for biotech researchers with big ideas, but that funding is harder to get than ever before, and some of it may come from strange places.

Stem cell companies could be running on bailout money, and gene therapy firms may be fueled by cash from the Russian government. Only the strongest startups will pry funds out of American investment firms.

“I think that there is money available for new companies, but they have to come with a perfect business plan, perfect area to innovate in and a very strong management team,” says Karl Handelsman, a managing director at CMEA Capital.

Long gone is the golden age of biotech research, when venture capital firms would give any biologist with a business plan carte blanche in exchange for a small stake in their company. In 2007, venture investors poured more than $5 billion into the sector, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, including $1.5 billion in the first quarter of that year. Nowadays, investors are clinging to their money. Over the first three months of 2009, biotech firms only grabbed $576 million, the worst quarter since fall 2001, after the September 11 terrorist attacks. But even in the midst of a recession, some emerging technologies shine so bright that investors can’t resist. You can do a lot of research with $576 million.

Handelsman is cautiously optimistic about next-generation vaccines and is thrilled about the long-range potential of synthetic biology. He gushed over Intellikine, a San Diego startup that is taking advantage of some very intense biological research to find new drugs for cancer, autoimmune disorders and inflammation.

That sort of enthusiasm may be rare right now. Even the most promising businesses will find that venture capital is coming at a remarkably high price.

“I’ll get 90 percent of your company for $5 million,” said Steven Burrill, an investor who has started countless biotech companies. “I used to be able to get 10 or 20 percent of your company for $5 million. So power is clearly on the side of the people with capital, against the side of people without it.”

In a packed auditorium at the Biotech Industry Association convention in Atlanta, he explained that entrepreneurs can’t do things the way they’ve been doing them for the past 30 years. If someone tried to start a company today, using the same tactics that made Genentech a drug-discovery powerhouse, they would fail.

Burrill added that it’s much easier to commercialize drugs outside the United States, so his home country will be getting new medical technology far later than other parts of the world.

“I think a lot of people, today, are writing the obituary for our industry, talking about how tough it is” said Burrill, before explaining why he has a brighter outlook.

Smart companies will adapt to the dark financial climate, he says. They will find unusual sources of funding, like government money and foreign investors, and eventually the biotech industry will be stronger than ever.

See Also:

Image: Steven Burrill gives a state of the biotech industry address during the annual meeting of the biotech industry association. Credit: Daniel Levine

Image on Wired.com homepage: Flickr/meneertuur

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 May 2009 | 8:11 pm

New light shed on pulsar puzzle

Astronomers have shed light on the mysterious origins of the fastest spinning stars known to science.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 May 2009 | 8:08 pm

Study Warns of Future Mobile Phone Viruses

There have been no major virus outbreaks among mobile phone. Yet.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 May 2009 | 7:47 pm

U.S. to rely more on scientists for air rules: EPA

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government will reverse a Bush administration policy and increase the role of scientists in setting air standards for criteria pollutants harmful to human health, Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Thursday.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 21 May 2009 | 6:47 pm

Birds Under Stress Become Better Singers

Male birds sing more elaborately under stress to prove they're good survivors.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 21 May 2009 | 6:45 pm

Innards of H1N1 Virus Resemble 'Flu Sausage'

Pigs cough up a mish-mash of flu viruses, which is why the swine flu outbreak was something that scientists saw coming for years
Source: Livescience.com | 21 May 2009 | 6:43 pm

Total eclipse

Celebrating the test that proved Einstein's theory
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 21 May 2009 | 6:38 pm

Entire Region of Mars Likely Shaped by Water

Opportunity finds evidence of water acting at Victoria crater; Mars could have had liquid water and still been cold.
Source: Livescience.com | 21 May 2009 | 6:13 pm

Missing Link in Pulsar Evolution Is a Cannibal

j1023-double-en-captions

A dying star has been caught in the act of resurrecting itself by eating its neighbor.

Together, the stars represent a previously unseen stage in the lifecycle of millisecond pulsars, the fastest-spinning objects in the universe.

“It’s really a missing link in the chain from young pulsar to old pulsar,” said Anne Archibald, a McGill University graduate student and lead author of the study published in Science Thursday.

Pulsars are a special class of neutron stars, the corpses of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. They’re born spinning quickly, up to tens of times per second, and sweep the sky with a beam of radio energy as they rotate. Eventually, they slow down to the point where they can no longer emit radio waves and die a second death.

But until now, scientists couldn’t explain how some old, dead pulsars become millisecond pulsars, which rotate hundreds of times a second. The new discovery of an intermediate step between the two appears to be the missing link.

Astronomers have long theorized that these superfast stars share their orbit with a companion star from which they leech extra material. The material settles around the pulsar’s middle in a so-called accretion disk. As material from the disk falls onto the surface of the pulsar, it imparts enough angular momentum to spin back up into what scientists call a ”recycled pulsar.”

“We mean it in the same sense as recycling your plastics,” Archibald said. “These pulsars have died and become invisible and useless to us, but they get brought back to life by getting fed from a companion.”

Astronomers suspect that another type of pulsar-star pair is a way station between normal pulsars and millisecond pulsars. Called a low-mass X-ray binary, such a system is also made up of a neutron star and an accretion disk, but it doesn’t emit radio waves. While the neutron star feeds off its neighbor, the gas flowing between them blocks low-energy radio waves from escaping the system. But when the accretion disk runs out, the radio waves come back, and astronomers can recognize it as a pulsar.

Until recently, this was only a theory. But Archibald and an international team using radio telescopes on four continents, stumbled on just such a pulsar right in the middle of this metamorphosis.

The system, called J1023, was discovered in 2007 when the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia was down for repairs. The radio telescope couldn’t be steered to different points in the sky, but resourceful astronomers took data anyway, observing whatever happened to pass overhead. That survey uncovered a millisecond pulsar about 4,000 light years away, spinning 592 times per second.

But this wasn’t the first time this system caught astronomers’ attention. Another survey in 1999 missed the pulsar but identified its companion as a sun-like star. When they looked again with radio telescopes in 2000, they saw evidence for an accretion disk around a neutron star. By 2002, the accretion disk had disappeared, but the neutron star was still not emitting radio waves as would be expected of a pulsar.

It was only the 2007 observations that pinned it down as a millisecond pulsar. Astronomers had managed to catch the system changing over the course of 10 years, an eye blink on astronomical timescales.

“This is a completely new thing, seeing it go from one state to another,” said co-author Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University. “We’ve never seen that before, ever.”

Aside from proving that recycled pulsars form through cannibalism, J1023 provides a living laboratory for studying how these systems evolve.

“Studying this system will teach us an awful lot about the recycling process,” McLaughlin said. “We may see the radio pulsations disappear and come back again a year from now. There are lots of neat things we can do.”

“It’s a bit of a landmark in tying together what we think happens in these dead stars,” said Don Backer, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the discoverers of the first millisecond pulsar. “You can see the transitions and understand more about how both of these stars work. That’s a great deal of fun.”

Image: Anne Archibald

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 21 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Spacemen say cheers with recycled wee

Astronauts toast Nasa after switching on space station's new urine and sweat-based water supply

At the international space station, it was one small sip for man and a giant gulp of recycled urine for mankind. A first for space was celebrated yesterday with astronauts drinking water that had been recycled from their urine, sweat, and water condensed from exhaled air.

The crew, aboard the space station, said "cheers," clicked drinking bags and toasted Nasa workers on the ground who were sipping their own version of recycled drinking water.

"The taste is great," said the American astronaut Michael Barratt. Then as Gennady Padalka, the Russian, tried to catch little bubbles of the clear water floating in front of him, Barratt called the taste "worth chasing". He said the water came with labels that said: "Drink this when real water is over 200 miles away."

The urine recycling system is intended to serve outposts on the moon and Mars. It also will save Nasa money cutting down on shipping so much water to the station by space shuttle or cargo rocket. And the space station is about to house six rather than three people.

The recycling system was brought up to the space station in November by the space shuttle Endeavour, but it could not be used until samples were tested, and a valve fixed on Monday.

"This is something that had been the stuff of science fiction," Barratt said before taking his sip.

Nasa's deputy space shuttle manager, LeRoy Cain, called it "a huge milestone".

The system moves urine to a tank, where the water is boiled off and the vapour collected. The contaminants are then thrown away, said Marybeth Edeen, the space station's national lab manager, who was in charge of the system.

The water vapour is mixed with water from air condensation, and filtered.

With six crew aboard the system can make about 22 litres (six gallons) from urine in about six hours, Edeen said.

The notion of drinking recycled urine could be viewed as distasteful, but normal sewerage systems do this, providing a longer time period between urine and tap, Edeen said. In space, it takes about a week, she added. The technology Nasa developed for the space system had been used for rapid water purification after the 2004 Asian tsunami.

Wednesday's urine celebration included some toilet humour. "We are happy to have this water work through the system – we're happy to have it work through our systems," Barratt said.

Meanwhile, on Russia's side of the space station, moisture in the air – and not urine – was being turned into drinking water.

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 | 21 May 2009 | 5:58 pm

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