Toothy Sharks Once Ruled Tuscany

Under the Tuscan soil lie the remains of some fearsome ancient residents.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 28 May 2009 | 11:03 pm

Well Water Can Pose Health Risks To Young Children

Private well water should be tested yearly, and in some cases more often, according to new guidance offered by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Assisted Reproduction Increasing: Almost 250,000 Babies Born In One Year

Assisted reproductive technology is responsible for an estimated 219,000 to 246,000 babies born each year worldwide according to an international study. The study also finds that the number of ART procedures is growing steadily: in just two years (from 2000 to 2002) ART activity increased by more than 25 percent.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Sulfur In Just One Hair Could Blow A Terrorist’s Alibi

A team of Spanish and British scientists has developed a "laser ablation" method that makes it possible to detect variations in the sulfur isotopes of a single hair over time. This information shows up changes in a person's eating habits and their movements between different countries, which could help police to undermine the alibis of international terrorists.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

XMM-Newton Takes Astronomers To A Black Hole's Edge

Using new data from ESA's XMM-Newton spaceborne observatory, astronomers have probed closer than ever to a supermassive black hole lying deep at the core of a distant active galaxy.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Dementia Drugs May Put Some Patients At Risk

Effects associated with several commonly-prescribed dementia drugs may be putting elderly people at risk, says a geriatrics professor.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

Statins May Have A Negative Impact In Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Statins, a commonly prescribed class of drugs used by millions worldwide to effectively lower blood cholesterol levels, may actually have a negative impact in multiple sclerosis patients treated with high daily dosages.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 May 2009 | 3:00 pm

China experts say Thailand's new panda cub healthy (AP)

AP - A day-old panda cub whose birth surprised Thai zoo officials is a healthy female that appears to be bonding well with its much larger mother, Chinese experts concluded Thursday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:34 pm

China to launch Mars probe atop Russian rocket

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's first Mars probe is expected to be launched in the second half of this year on top of a Russian rocket, said Xinhua on Thursday, the latest milestone in the nation's ambitious space program.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:21 pm

Peat Bogs Could Offset Sea Level Rise

Absorbent peat bogs could help blunt the impact of sea level rise, research finds.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 28 May 2009 | 12:20 pm

Giant Balloon to Launch Sun-Watching Telescope (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - A telescope lashed to a giant balloon is poised to lift off from Sweden as early as Monday to study the surface of the sun.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:16 pm

Climate health costs: bug-borne ills, killer heat (Reuters)

Reuters - Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:10 pm

Climate health costs: bug-borne ills, killer heat

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:10 pm

OPEC holds output steady, sees economic recovery (AFP)

AFP - The OPEC oil group opted Thursday to keep its output unchanged, with signs of economic recovery and higher crude prices persuading members to maintain their current production levels.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:06 pm

Capturing The Birth Of A Synapse: Mechanism Locking Two Neurons Found

Researchers have identified the locking mechanism that allows some neurons to form synapses to pass along essential information. Mutations of genes that produce a critical cell-adhesion molecule involved in the work were previously linked to autism.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:00 pm

Melting Greenland Ice Sheets May Threaten Northeast United States, Canada

A melting of the Greenland ice sheet this century may drive more water than previously thought toward the already threatened coastlines of New York, Boston, Halifax, and other cities in the northeastern United States and in Canada, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:00 pm

DNA Compounds Could Help Treat Lupus

Scientists have generated DNA-like compounds that effectively inhibit the cells responsible for the most common and serious form of lupus. The findings could eventually lead to new treatments for this difficult disease, which affects up to one million Americans.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:00 pm

Refusing Immunizations Puts Children At Increased Risk Of Pertussis Infection, Study Finds

A new study finds that children of parents who refuse vaccines are 23 times more likely to get whooping cough compared to fully immunized children.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:00 pm

People may be able to taste words

We are all capable of "hearing" shapes and sizes and perhaps even "tasting" sounds, according to a study.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 28 May 2009 | 11:10 am

OPEC decides to keep output steady: Saudi, Libya (AFP)

AFP - Members of oil exporter group OPEC decided Thursday to keep their output target steady, Saudi Arabia's oil minister and Libya's OPEC chief said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 10:34 am

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - Rain, thunderstorms and strong winds gusts were expected across the Northeast on Thursday, with heavy local rainfall and flooding risks across the Great Lakes and New England.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 9:23 am

Hippo popped up on us: BBC presenter's close encounter

A BBC presenter has had a close encounter with a dangerous wild hippo, which cornered him on a river in South Africa.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 28 May 2009 | 8:33 am

Pelosi appeals for China's help on climate change (AP)

AP - U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged Beijing on Thursday to cooperate on climate change, calling a safe environment a basic human right.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 7:23 am

Test Tube Babies On the Rise Worldwide (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - More than 200,000 babies were born worldwide with the help of in vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies in 2002, with a 25 percent increase between 2000 and 2002, according to a new report. However, the "Octomom" aside, multiple births resulting from assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have been on the decline, with Europe and Australia-New Zealand leading the way in the reduction of multiples, say the scientists responsible for the report published online today in the journal Human Reproduction. ...
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 2:15 am

Test Tube Babies On the Rise Worldwide

More and more individuals seem to be relying on assisted reproductive technologies.
Source: Livescience.com | 28 May 2009 | 2:07 am

Key senator calls for 100 new reactors in 20 years (AP)

AP - Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander called Wednesday for doubling the number of nuclear reactors nationwide, a potentially $700 billion proposal that calls for building 100 more over 20 years.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 1:01 am

Gene for glowing passed along to monkey offspring (AP)

AP - Scientists gave marmosets a gene that made their feet glow green, and one of the animals passed it along to its offspring — the first time that an added gene has been inherited by a monkey. It was a milestone, experts said, that should make it easier to produce animals with versions of human disease for medical research.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:45 am

Green-glowing monkeys have green-glowing babies

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Japanese researchers have genetically engineered monkeys whose hair roots, skin and blood glow green under a special light, and who have passed on their traits to their offspring, the first time this has been achieved in a primate.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 28 May 2009 | 12:09 am

Cuckoo's call becomes rarer in UK

The cuckoo - known for its springtime song - joins a "red-list" of the UK's most threatened bird species.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 27 May 2009 | 11:59 pm

Medical charities call for bailout

• Ministers urged to extend research support fund
• Studies into less common illnesses often worst-hit

Medical research charities demanded government help to survive the recession, amid warnings that new treatments for serious illnesses could fall victim to their dwindling income.

A survey showed 77% of the charities fear the downturn will significantly affect their work, the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC) said.

Some plan to reduce their research spending by between 10% and 40% to help them cope, found the AMRC, which represents 117 health organisations.

The smaller charities, including those conducting research into less common illnesses, are particularly badly hit, said Simon Denegri, the AMRC's chief executive. He urged ministers to extend the life of the charity research support fund, which helps cover the cost of the infrastructure at universities and hospitals needed to support research projects. The government puts £195m a year into it, but the scheme is due to expire in 2011.

In addition, charities want changes to the VAT and gift aid rules, lighter regulation of clinical trials, and a pledge to maintain scientific and medical research funding.

"We want fairly urgent action by government because charities are currently weathering the storm that's been caused by the recession. Although this year is difficult, we are expecting next year and 2011 to be even more uncertain," he said.

Lindsay Boswell, chief executive of the Institute of Fundraising, said the findings tallied with a general drop in income for most charities. Legacies have become less lucrative because of the drop in the value of shares and houses, corporate income "has pretty much imploded" and 90% of trusts and foundations are making fewer grants, he added. But he said public donations were down by just 3% to 4%.

Income has gone up for many cancer charities as a result of a "Jade Goody bounce" after the reality TV star's death, at 27, from cervical cancer, he added. Large numbers of women have signed up to take part in Race For Life runs to raise funds for Cancer Research UK.

The four biggest medical research charities, which between them contribute £800m of the £936m spent annually in the sector, reported different experiences. Peter Hollins, chief executive of the British Heart Foundation, predicted a 5% to 10% drop in income in the next year and said it would pursue "a cautious approach" to maintaining its prevention, care and research activities.

Harpal Kumar, at Cancer Research UK, said it would maintain its investment in scientific research, even though its income and investments had been hit by the downturn and falling share prices.

The Wellcome Trust, the country's biggest medical research charity, said it planned to spend £590m on biomedical research this year, £30m less than 2007-08. However, that is because the value of its assets – originally a £12.2bn endowment from Sir Henry Wellcome in 1936 – fell from £15.1bn to £13.1bn last year. It does not rely on public donations.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 27 May 2009 | 11:05 pm

Obituary: Mats Akerlund

Obstetrician and global authority on the way the womb works

Outside the US, atosiban is the most popular drug for suppressing the contractions of premature labour, still the leading cause of perinatal death. Mats Akerlund, who has died aged 66, was the obstetrician who was instrumental in developing it into one of the most widely used medicines in pregnancy. In the early 1980s Akerlund, working in Lund University in Sweden, was the world's leading authority on myometrial physiology, the way the muscles of the womb work.

Together with the chemist Jerzy Trojnar and the pharmacologist Per Melin, both working for the pharmaceutical company Ferring, Akerlund studied a range of synthetic peptides in the hope that they might block or enhance the actions of similar peptide hormones released by the pituitary gland. He tested their effects on uterine muscle in vitro, in pregnant animals, and eventually in women.

RWJ 22164, later renamed atosiban, and according to myometrial legend the 17th drug Akerlund tested, turned out not only to block oxytocin, a hormone that makes the womb contract, but also to be safer than other options. It remains unique as the only new chemical entity ever to have been successfully developed specifically to treat a pregnancy disease, rather than to just end the pregnancy. Most pharmaceutical companies concentrate on other diseases because of the legal and regulatory risks, and only by chance do some drugs later turn out to work in pregnancy. Under the trade name Tractocile, atosiban has now been administered to many hundreds of thousands of women.

The second of three boys, Akerlund was the opposite of premature. He weighed 5kg when he was born at Leksand vicarage in Dalarna, in the north of Sweden. He studied medicine in Lund from 1962 to 1968 and, apart from a short spell in general practice, worked at Lund university hospital for the rest of his life. He completed his doctoral thesis on uterine contractility and blood flow in 1976 under the mentorship of Lars Philip Bengtsson, and soon became a world authority on myometrial physiology. He later claimed he was lucky to have picked atosiban so early - pharmaceutical companies typically test thousands of compounds for every one that reaches clinical use - but this was false modesty. He had carefully chosen which peptides to test.

Akerlund was a brilliant scientist who also worked on drugs to help the uterus contract after delivery to prevent bleeding, to help the embryo implant after in vitro fertilisation and to treat menstrual cramps. He was a shrewd entrepreneur who founded a number of companies to market his discoveries. Although he never developed another drug with quite the impact of Tractocile, he contributed hugely to the speciality of obstetrics and gynaecology. He was also a dedicated doctor and an inspiring teacher, loved and admired by generations of patients and students.

Sadly, Tractocile was not the billion-dollar blockbuster that early enthusiasts hoped for. It was never licensed in the US, partly because the human trials were unable to prove for certain that the baby benefited from the extra time in the womb. None of the other options was ever proved to help the baby either, but Tractocile remains controversial.

Meanwhile Akerlund faced other troubles. In his 30s he had noticed numbness in his little finger and joked that he must have multiple sclerosis. He was correct. He started using a stick in the early 1990s and by the middle of that decade, required a motorised wheelchair. He continued to travel internationally, so frequently that he was recognised by the porters at Heathrow who met him from the aeroplane steps. His final years were complicated by a number of near-fatal chest infections. His recovery from an episode three years ago, after the family had assembled at his bedside to say farewell, occurred, appropriately, on Easter Day. Despite all this he continued working until a few days before he died. Earlier this year, he was awarded a SEK2.1m (£170,000) grant to continue his studies of oxytocin.

Akerlund held a private pilot's licence and was a keen hunter. He owned a large tract of forest near Lake Siljan in Dalarna. He was a founder member of the Amanda male voice double quartet, specialising in the songs of the Nordic composers Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen. He is survived by his wife Eva, two daughters and a son. A few weeks before his death, he introduced himself to a sixth, as yet unborn, grandchild, through abdominal palpation.

• Mats Akerlund, obstetrician and gynaecologist, born 20 November 1942; died 30 March 2009

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 27 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

The joy of dinosaurs' necks

Apart from tortoises, the hippy on The Young Ones and me, no living creature has a neck that sticks straight out in front

I used to have a certain amount of sympathy for dinosaurs. You see, I too have a problem with the way my neck comes out of my body. Rather than sitting proudly upright on top of my shoulders like a normal person's neck, mine sticks out more or less horizontally from the middle of my chest. When I try to swim front crawl, therefore, I say "glub glub glub" and promptly sink to the bottom of the pool. My friend Nic, on the other hand, has excellent posture because when he was a child, if he wasn't sitting up straight enough to see over the cornflake box at breakfast, his granny would scream "CORNFLAKES!" and hit him very hard over the knuckles with a steel ruler. Nic is great at swimming, but getting him into cars is an awkward process.

Once I thought that dinosaurs - the long-necked mooey ones, not the short-armed bitey ones - were on my side. But now I discover they may have been on Nic's side after all. New research suggests that, rather than looking like big hummocks with children's slides at either end, the front ends might have looked more like meerkats.

A team of palaeontologists has conducted a study into necks not belonging to dinosaurs - the necks in question belonged to cats, rabbits, turtles and crocodiles - and discovered that all of them form a natural, upright, S-shaped curve. So why do we assume, they ask, that sauropods were different?

When you think about it, it's a very good question. Apart from tortoises, the hippy on The Young Ones and me, there is no creature on earth that has a neck that sticks straight out in front. (Well, pigs, possibly, come to think of it - but it's quite hard to tell under all that pink stuff.) And tortoises, the hippy and me don't have necks that are 30ft long and therefore subject to the punishing exactions of the law of the lever.

Aha! say opponents of the upright-neckists. What about gravity? If the dinosaur stuck 30ft of neck in the air, all the blood would fall out of its brain. One straight-neckist has just published a paper arguing that, to keep the blood circulating, an upright-necked sauropod would need a two-tonne heart, which would only just fit in its ribcage. Then where would it put its lungs? Eh? (How giraffes manage is a discussion for another day.)

Pacifist-inclined middle-grounders suggest that dinosaurs might have moved their necks. Sometimes upright; sometimes down. They had to drink, after all, and in the absence of prehistoric birdbaths, water tended to be at foot level. Another good point.

The Natural History Museum's Paul Barrett, who presumably doesn't want to have to build an extra storey on his museum to accommodate upright dinosaurs, is among those rooting for agnosticism. "We just can't tell with the sauropods," he says, putting it in layman's terms. "Because they're all dead."

For those of us with inquiring minds and nothing to do all afternoon, this opens a wonderful world of possibilities. The question is, as Barrett points out, academic. We really aren't likely to find out. And apart from those of us with horizontal museums to curate or the aspect ratios of Hollywood films to think about, it doesn't make a hoot of difference to our lives. Yet here we are: fascinated. We find ourselves wondering about how it worked with balancing the tail: while walking along, would a diplodocus have to make the shape of a lyre to avoid tipping over backwards? And who knew that 50 years ago the upright-neckists were in the ascendency? Straight-neckism is actually a relatively recent invention - yet to most of us, it is as natural as breathing. All this seems to say something about our peculiar relationship with knowledge.

In the first place, it's a good reminder of how profoundly and unthinkingly we adopt orthodoxies: it took a scientist to make us realise that straight-neckism shouldn't be intuitive at all. As David Wootton's fascinating history Bad Medicine shows, that tendency towards the orthodox has consequences when evidence is interpreted in light of the existing theory. A whole series of discoveries that should have led to a germ theory of disease and entirely overhauled medical practice were ingeniously adduced in support of the old Galenic orthodoxies.

In the second place, it's a reminder of the pleasure and wonder there is to be had in pondering undecidable propositions whose outcome has little bearing on anything. "Angels dancing on the head of a pin" is usually held up as the apex of futile inquiry, but I bet the medieval scholars who looked into the matter were enraptured by it.

Our hearts leapt in just the same way to see Ida, the fossilised lemur-thing with her opposable thumb and her telltale ankle-bone. Could she be an ancestor? What would it mean if she was? And, while we are about it, what colour were dinosaurs?

I learned something today. I learned that millions of years ago, dinosaurs might have had vertical necks, and might have had horizontal ones, but that we'll probably never know. And that has made all the difference.

• This week Sam went to Mothercare: "Have you seen the amount of stuff they've got? And how hard can it be to make an item that doesn't have the word 'cuddle' written on it?" Sam read Clive James's new collection of essays, The Revolt of the Pendulum: "Did you know why Peter Mandelson sounded a plonker with 'I'm a fighter, not a quitter'? Clive explains. Fascinating."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 27 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

Screw the electricity bill, we've got to find that damned particle

Simon Singh visits the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, where physicists will pull out all the stops in the autumn to beat their American rival to the Higgs boson

Earlier this month I took my wife to Cern, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva and home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It was my idea of a romantic weekend away.

I completed my PhD while working on one of the Cern experiments (UA2), so it was a good opportunity to show Anita the sort of thing that I did during my brief life as a particle physicist. It was also a chance to contrast the reality of Cern with the sinister way it is portrayed in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons.

The only part of the novel that I approve of is a joke based on a Woody Allen quip. One character explains that physicists are trying to prove that neutrinos have mass, which provokes the reply: "Neutrinos have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic!"

The highlight of the trip was a visit to Atlas, one of the LHC detectors, which is being prepared for this autumn's relaunch of the LHC. As we entered the underground cavern that houses the experiment, the physicists who accompanied us started reeling off dozens of incredible facts and figures. The most memorable piece of triva is that Atlas weighs 7,000 tonnes but is so large it would float if it were dropped in Lake Geneva. One of the Atlas physicists pointed out with pride that the rival LHC experiment, CMS, is much denser and would sink.

The week before our visit, the final replacement magnet was lowered into position in the accelerator tunnel. It is part of the upgrade that became necessary after last year's catastrophic magnet failure. If everything goes to plan, the LHC will be fired up at the end of September. It is a tight schedule, but an entire year will have been lost so everyone at Cern is anxious to do whatever is necessary to start gathering data as soon as possible.

One of the primary reasons for the urgency is that physicists at Fermilab's Tevatron collider in the US have been boasting that they may beat the LHC in the race to find the Higgs boson, the Holy Grail of particle physics. When disaster struck at the LHC, the PopSci Predictions Exchange (which runs a stock market based on scientific predictions) suggested that it was equally likely that the Tevatron or the LHC would discover the Higgs. However, the Exchange is gradually beginning to favour the LHC as the European collider gets closer to starting up again – at the moment the odds are 60:40 in favour of the LHC.

Cern's colliders usually shut down for a winter break, because the cost of electricity increases as the temperature drops and the Swiss turn on their heaters and tuck into their fondue. However, this year the LHC will continue running through the coldest months in order to gather as much data as quickly as possible. In short, the LHC physicists are desperate to maximise their chances of discovering the Higgs boson before the Tevatron. Running the collider this winter will add some £7m to Cern's energy bill, but on the plus side the particle physics lab should earn plenty of Nectar points.

The energy bill would be even higher except for the fact that there will be a two-week break over Christmas. Formally, this has been described as a "technical stop" to allow the physicists and collider engineers to make tweaks to their equipment, but Sergio Bertolucci, director for research and computing at Cern, gave a more important reason for the planned LHC pause: "To allow people not to get divorced."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 27 May 2009 | 11:00 pm

Greenland ice could fuel severe U.S. sea level rise

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New York, Boston and other cities on North America's northeast coast could face a rise in sea level this century that would exceed forecasts for the rest of the planet if Greenland's ice sheet keeps melting as fast as it is now, researchers said on Wednesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 9:36 pm

The climate change debate is not a simple battle of good and evil

These issues are more complicated than some would have us believe, says Thomas Crowley

Your list of key members of the US committee considering Barack Obama's global warming legislation included a number from conservative districts (2,500 lobbyists, $45m on PR – but just 12 views count, 13 May). Some readers may be inclined to stereotype the attitudes of such people. But is it really wrong for a person to reflect the interests of his or her voters?

"Turn on the radio in a blighted town in America's rust belt, and a new advertisement paid for by a lobbying group with close ties to oil industry giants claims that ordinary families could be worse off by thousands of dollars," you report. I despise the distortions of science by some groups resisting the proposed law changes, but economic concerns are by no means trivial.

The push to reduce fossil fuel consumption is effected in part by artificially increasing the price of fossil fuel. This can have an adverse effect on economies because of inflation. The reader need only recall the recent problems in Britain, when rocketing fuel prices had an immediate impact on a large number of people. The issue is doubly complicated when applied to the US, the primary engine of the world economy.

You report that "environmental groups accuse [Thomas Pyle, the president of the lobbying firm American Energy Alliance] of recycling long-refuted studies about costs to industry of climate legislation". Long-refuted? Are they referring to cost-benefit calculations that gloss over the fact that most benefits take decades to realise? Or to carbon trading, where EU trials showed that businesses often developed clever ways to make money out of the arrangement, and with little impact on greenhouse gas reductions?

The article further states that "unlike the past battles over the science of climate change and the role of human activity, the core of the arguments on both sides is now economic"; but this is not quite true. There are unfortunately also distortions from the left on global warming. James Lovelock-style statements regarding a massive collapse of civilisation are vastly overblown. Invocations of global extinctions are highly questionable, as are claims of a disastrous rise in sea level (I am not disputing a rise – only the uncertainty in the amount). Such claims can muddy the waters just as much as misstatements from the right.

There are also some scientific uncertainties that can affect negotiations on fossil-fuel reduction. For example, should we count reductions in black carbon (soot) towards a country's emission-reduction efforts, when there are so many questions as to how potent their warming effect really is? Similarly, models suggesting that some of China's carbon emissions are absorbed by its own vegetation are too uncertain.

Maybe all these inconvenient issues can be addressed, and a good agreement reached in Copenhagen. Regardless, the situation is much more tangled than its normal portrayal – particularly in Britain and parts of the EU, where sometimes one might think this whole matter is a simple battle between good and evil.

• Thomas Crowley is a climate scientist and professor of geosciences at the ­University of Edinburgh thomas.crowley@ed.ac.uk

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 27 May 2009 | 9:12 pm

Permafrost 'Time Bomb' Ticking, But Slowly

Greenhouse gases trapped in Arctic permafrost may be released gradually.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 27 May 2009 | 8:43 pm

Brazil to debut rust-resistant soy

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazil is set to begin commercial planting of a soybean variety with a gene that makes it resistant to the devastating Asian rust fungus, which is beginning to develop tolerance to conventional fungicides.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 8:33 pm

To Survive Cancer, Live With It

For all the weapons deployed in the war on cancer, from chemicals to radiation to nanotechnology, the underlying strategy has remained the same: Detect and destroy, with no compromise given to the killer. But Robert Gatenby wants to strike a peace.

A mathematical oncologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center, Gatenby is part of a new generation of researchers who conceive of cancer as a dynamic, evolutionary system. According to his models, trying to wipe cancer out altogether actually makes it stronger by helping drug-resistant cells flourish. Rather than fighting cancer by trying to eradicate its every last cell, he suggests doctors might fare better by intentionally keeping tumors in a long-term stalemate.

It’s an unorthodox notion. But nearly 40 years after Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, orthodox approaches have produced little in the way of treatment. Cancer death rates have fallen by 20 percent in the last 15 years, but experts say that much of the improvement comes from lifestyle changes, especially drops in smoking, and early detection. Most new cancer drugs provide just a few extra weeks or months of life — a welcome delay, but all too brief.

“It’s hard to convince doctors or patients not to give the maximum dose of chemotherapy and kill as many cells as possible, because that seems like the right thing to do. But the models suggest that it’s the wrong thing to do,” said Gatenby. “The models suggests that we have to go against what’s intuitive.”

Gatenby’s models of long-term cancer stability are scheduled to be published next week in Cancer Research, and he describes his approach in an essay published Wednesday in Nature. He spoke to to Wired.com about a different approach to cancer.

Wired.com: Where do we stand now in the war on cancer?

Robert Gatenby: We’ve learned enormous amounts about the disease, but it hasn’t translated into therapy. My proposal isn’t necessarily right, but it’s an alternative way of thinking.

We’re coming at cancer with a paradigm in the tradition of Paul Ehrlich and magic bullets, which was successful in treating bacterial infections in the mid-20th century. The conscious or unconscious analogy is that we’d like to find antibiotics in cancer. We’d like to find a cure.

Wired.com: Are the dynamics of fighting cancer so very different than fighting bacteria?

Gatenby: Bacterial cells are so fundamentally different than our normal mammalian cells. Finding something that works on bacteria, but not our own cells, is much easier than finding something that distinguishes between normal and non-normal cells.

Bacteria also tend to be exquisitely sensitive to antibiotics. They develop resistance, but that occurs over a long period of time. The sensitivity of tumor cells to therapy is nowhere near as great, and they’re much more heterogeneous. You have resistant phenotypes present before you even start treatment.

Wired.com: In your article, you say that drug-resistant cancer cells are actually less reproductively fit than non-resistant cells. Why doesn’t killing off the non-resistant cells leave behind a weaker population?

Gatenby: Being drug-resistant costs cells energy. Even when you’re not giving a drug, cells are still using energy to maintain their resistance mechanisms. So drug-resistant cells don’t have that energy available for proliferation. They’re not as fit as the drug-sensitive cells, and are only present in small numbers.

That balance completely changes when you give high-dose therapy. What you’ve done then is kill their drug-sensitive competitors, and left the field open to drug-resistant cells.

Wired.com: What’s the alternative?

Gatenby: How people treat invasive species can provide an analogy for thinking about cancer therapy. In treating a field for a pest, for example, you might treat three-quarters of it with a pesticide, and leave the other quarter untreated. Pesticide-sensitive pests remain there, and they spread out into the field after treatment, preventing pesticide resistance from becoming dominant.

Using pesticides on an entire field is like what we’re doing with cancer now. And we all agree that we’d rather get rid of the pests altogether, but if you can’t do it, if every time you have an infestation you treat it and get resistance, then you try a different strategy. The alternative is to try to reduce the pest population so that it doesn’t damage your crop, and accept the fact that they’re going to be there. That’s what I’m talking about with cancer.

Wired.com: What type of treatment would that involve?

Gatenby: Instead of fixing the dose of the drugs, you fix the size of the tumor. Your whole goal is to keep the tumor stable. You continuously alter the drug, the dose, the timing of the dose, with that goal in mind.

Wired.com: Outside of your mathematical models, is there evidence to suggest that this might work?

Gatenby: With a mouse ovarian cancer model, if you treat it with a very high dose, the tumor goes away. It looks like you’ve cured it. But a couple weeks later it comes back and starts killing animals. This is a standard outcome.

What we did is use smaller doses of drugs and applied them when necessary. We were able to keep tumors stable and mice alive indefinitely.

Wired.com: So we don’t need new drugs, just different ways of applying them?

Gatenby: Of course we need to keep looking for new drugs and more effective therapies. But the lesson we can learn is that the judicious use of drugs can be more effective than the intuitive approach of killing as much as you can.

See Also:

• Glowing DNA that Sticks to Cancer Cells
• Experimental Drug Makes the Immune System Revolt Against Cancer …
• Top 5 Viable New Cancer Treatments

Citation: A change of strategy in the war on cancer. By Robert Gatenby. Nature, Vol. 459 No. 7246, May 27, 2009.

Image: WikiMedia Commons

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 27 May 2009 | 6:41 pm

Gauging Natural and Human Impacts on New Zealand

Tree rings and seafloor sediment cores can show the effects of both climate and human impacts on coastal ecosystems of New Zealand over the past 1,000 years.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 6:26 pm

Extreme sports fan aims to be Iraq's first man in space

He has been hailed as Iraq's superman: a role model for the nation's youth who flies, glides, dives and races motor­cycles. He has already made the Guinness World Records by taking part in the first ever skydive above Mount Everest. But last week Fareed Lafta, a Dubai-based extreme sports fanatic, returned to Baghdad to seek backing for his ultimate ambition – to be the first Iraqi in space.

"I want to represent my country, and to be one of the men like Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin, who showed with all humility what it is to be a good human," said Iraq's pioneer cosmonaut. In his badged blue flightsuit and cap, he cut a curious figure as he lobbied for support among the suits, robes and turbans in Iraq's parliament.

"I don't know the mechanisms, I am not a politician, and I don't want to be. I just need help to send me into space," he said as he dropped in to the office of a leading MP from the Sadrist bloc. Before he leaves the earth's atmosphere, Fareed, 30, plans to become the first civilian to skydive above Baghdad since the war – a mark of the improved security environment. He has brought his rig and parachute with him and is ready to go as soon as he can get clearance from the authorities.

"Diving over a city that has suffered from war is recognized in the skydiving community as a symbol that the war is over. Because I want to say to all the world that we are now in peace, and it's not war any more," he said.

Fareed's growing fame in Iraq is timely. "Iraqi youth need a role model like Fareed to take their mind off guns and violence," said Ammar Shaabandar of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting in Iraq.

Fareed has been addicted to adventure since he was a boy. "I would climb to the top of the cupboard in my bedroom and jump off. My mum got mad and punished me because I made a mess of my room. But it was the informal start of my career, aged five. My parents still think I'm crazy."

Raised in Baghdad, he left with his family for Dubai at the outbreak of war in 2003. There he continued a boyhood passion for motorcycle racing, quickly turning professional. He also became a scuba diving instructor and started freediving, achieving a lung-busting depth of 80 metres. He then took to the air, hang-gliding and paragliding to an international standard and gaining a private pilot's licence.

But it was the decision to take up skydiving that really changed his life, he said. He moved to Russia last year as part of an international team planning a record-breaking jump over the Himalayas. In Nepal they spent 21 days acclimatising before the jump, in October 2008.

"We jumped from 30,000 feet, only about 1,500 feet or so above the peak of Mount Everest," recalled Fareed, who sports the Iraqi flag on his jumpsuit. "It was amazing, truly amazing, to be soaring above Mount Everest. For a few minutes, I was emperor of world. I reached nirvana, absolute happiness."

The kick from his Everest exploits was not enough, however. So last March, the restless Fareed returned to Russia to train as Iraq's first cosmonaut. His fitness and skill levels meant that he completed the training in two months. Usually it takes trainees six months to learn how to breathe properly and cope with the G-forces, he said.

He specialised in space video and photography, and he wants to film while doing a walk outside the space shuttle.

For all his achievements, Iraq's lone superman confesses to being lonely. Iraqi girls do not want to come near a man who lives life at such a breathless pace, it seems. "Look at my hair," said the 30-year-old, who is visibly greying. "That's the result of all the adrenalin."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 27 May 2009 | 6:12 pm

Australian Fisheries Underwent Steep Decline

Researchers find that certain fish species have almost vanished since heavy fishing started in the waters of southeast Australia the 20th century.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 6:12 pm

How Environment and Technology Impact Fish in the Baltic Sea

Marine historians track the impact of fishing technologies such as trawling on herring and cod fisheries in the Baltic Sea.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 6:11 pm

Neuroscience arms race could lead to guilt-free soldiers

The science of the brain is poised to play a major role in the wars of the future, according to Jonathan Moreno at Penn State University

Military strategists grasped the importance of the mind on the battlefield when people first crossed clubs. But advances in modern day neuroscience and pharmaceuticals could transform the way wars are fought in coming decades.

In a recent defence intelligence agency report, leading scientists were asked to cast their minds forward 20 years and describe how neuroscience might be used by the military. They described "pharmacological land mines", performance boosting drugs and electronic devices that make it impossible to lie.

The issue has now been picked up by Jonathan Moreno, an expert on the ethics of neuroscience and national security, in a new series of video interviews at Penn State.

Moreno kicks off talking about psychological operations. How do you make your adversary feel defeated, and how does the brain contribute to the sense that you can win or have already lost?

So far so familiar. But later on in the interview, Moreno gets on to issues of interrogation and waterboarding; whether we want guilt-free soldiers, and the prospect of a neuroscience arms race.

Moreno draws an interesting comparison between groups of physicists in the early 1940s and today's neuroscientists. While the physicists knew their work was to be used by the military, he argues that neuroscientists working in labs today might be blissfully unaware of how their research could be used in war.

You can see the whole interview here.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 27 May 2009 | 5:43 pm

Monkeys Pass on Inserted Gene

Transgenic monkeys are shown to pass newly acquired genes to their offspring.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 27 May 2009 | 5:43 pm

Close-up Look at Black Hole Reveals Feeding Frenzy

Hefty black hole can devour two Earths worth of material per hour.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 5:32 pm

Exoplanet Phases Seen in Optical Light

Optical observations show night and day sides of tidally locked exoplanet.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 5:32 pm

Glowing monkeys 'to aid research'

Genetically modified primates that glow green and pass the trait on to their offspring could aid the fight against human disease.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 27 May 2009 | 5:20 pm

Glowing Monkeys Make More Glowing Monkeys the Old-Fashioned Way

The first genetically modified primates that can pass their modifications to their offpsring have been created by Japanese scientists.

The marmosets, pictured above, express a green fluorescent protein in their skin. The gene for producing the glow was delivered to the first marmoset embryos via a modified virus. But now that modification method could become unnecessary. One male marmoset, number 666, fathered a child (pictured at right) that also contained the transgenes.

“The birth of this transgenic marmoset baby is undoubtedly a milestone,” developmental biologists Gerald Schatten and Shoukhrat Mitalipov at the Pittsburgh Development Center and Oregon Stem Cell Center, respectively wrote in a commentary accompanying the study Thursday in Nature. “The cumbersome and often frustrating process of making a transgenic animal from scratch need now only occur with founder animals.”

Transgenic animals are a key tool in the biomedical researchers’ toolbox. They allow scientists to model the function of genes and the efficacy of treatments. Many transgenic mice lines exist, but often the small rodents are too different from humans to effectively extrapolate their responses to human beings. Primates, on the other hand, are far closer biologically to humans, but before the new technique, creating primate models had proven difficult and expensive.

Now, biologists may be able to produce whole groups of marmosets that mimic humans with genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis.

“Subsequent generations can be produced by natural propagation, with the eventual establishment of transgene-specific monkey colonies — a potentially invaluable resource for studying incurable human disorders, and one that may also contribute to preserving endangered primate species,” Schatten and Shoukhrat continued.

Instead of using bonobos or chimps, the research team led by Erika Sasaki at the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Japan picked the common marmoset because its “size, availability, and unique biological characteristics” make it a potentially useful animal, particularly in tough fields like neuroscience and stem cell research.

See Also:

• Frankenfood Gets Supersized
• Bioartists Create Sculptures from Living Human Tissue
• FDA to Evaluate Drugs Made by Genetically Modified Goats
• Nobel Prize Goes to Gene Knockout Scientists

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 | 27 May 2009 | 5:18 pm

Space Station: Boon or Boondoggle?

Now that the space station will soon become fully-staffed, can NASA deliver the science?
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 27 May 2009 | 5:00 pm

Genetically modified monkeys give birth to designer babies

Controversial work paves way for scientists to breed primates that are born with the genetic faults responsible for human conditions such as Parkinson's and motor neurone disease

Genetically modified monkeys that glow in ultraviolet light and pass the trait on to their young have been created by scientists in Japan in controversial research that "raises the stakes" over animals rights.

The work paves the way for scientists to breed large populations of primates with genetic faults responsible for incurable human conditions, but could also spark an ethical backlash for introducing harmful genes into the primate population.

Researchers hailed the feat as a major step towards understanding the development of inherited diseases, such as Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, from the cradle to the grave. But the work is likely to dismay animal rights groups as it could lead to a rise in the number of primates used in research labs.

The work also raises the possibility of genetically modifying humans, although such work is outlawed in most countries, including Britain.

In a proof of principle experiment, Erika Sasaki and her team at the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Kawasaki, Japan, added a gene to marmoset embryos that made them glow green under ultraviolet light. The embryos were transferred into surrogate females, which led to five live births.

All of the newborn monkeys carried the green gene somewhere in their bodies, and two were able to pass the gene on to their own offspring. In April, a male GM marmoset was born using sperm from one of the monkeys, called Kou, and two more glowing marmosets have been born since. One died after being bitten by its mother.

All the monkeys are healthy and do not glow under normal lighting conditions.

The scientists now plan to create families of monkeys that develop neurodegenerative diseases similar to those seen in humans.

"Our method for producing transgenic primates promises to be a powerful tool for studying the mechanisms of human diseases and developing new therapies," the authors write in the journal Nature.

An editorial accompanying the study, however, warned that it "promises to raise the stakes in the long-standing controversy over animal rights", by "intentionally introducing a harmful gene into the primate gene pool".

Scientists commonly use GM mice to learn about human diseases, but in some cases recreating diseases in primates will be more informative.

"This is potentially very exciting for the future of research into the causes of Parkinson's disease," said Kieran Breen at the Parkinson's Disease Society. "Because non-human primates are much closer to humans than mice, the successful creation of transgenic marmosets means that we will have a new animal model to work with."

There are major hurdles ahead, however. Scientists still need to prove that the technology can recreate human diseases in GM monkeys, and that they are more effective models than other animals. In addition, a European directive on the use of animals in research may prohibit the technique by blocking the use of primates in basic research.

"It is too early to tell whether it will lead to a rise in the use of monkeys," said Vicky Robinson, chief executive of NC3Rs, an organisation that campaigns for the reduced use of animals in research.

"We cannot assume that a transgenic marmoset will be better for disease research than, for example, a transgenic mouse," she said. "Any researcher proposing to take this approach will need to demonstrate that the added scientific value of using a monkey outweighs the significant ethical considerations that accompany their use. This is true whether the monkey is transgenic or not, but the genetic transformation can raise additional welfare concerns."

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 27 May 2009 | 5:00 pm

Map Shows Where War Casualties Died

Also reveals their home town, photos, and how they died.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 4:53 pm

'Cool Toys' Help Scientist Make Geological Predictions

José Andrade of Northwestern University studies liquefaction, a process that causes buildings to sink during earthquakes.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 4:43 pm

Dormant Sun Spills Secrets in Its Sleep

Scientists are taking advantage of an unusually quiet period for the sun.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 27 May 2009 | 4:41 pm

NYC, Boston Could See Higher Sea Level Rise

Melting of Greenland ice could cause more sea level rise for northeastern United States, Canada.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 4:12 pm

Deadly best

Gallery of the Earth's "top 10" deadliest creatures
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 27 May 2009 | 4:10 pm

The Goode Family

The Goode Family is a new animated series from Mike Judge (King of the Hill, Beavis and Butt-Head) about an obsessively "green" vegan family who live a politically correct lifestyle. The show premieres tonight, May 27 on ABC.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 May 2009 | 3:58 pm

Sperm Whale Caught Stealing Fish on Video

Video of a sperm whale stealing fish reveals how these marine giants foil fishermen.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 27 May 2009 | 2:01 pm

Skeleton Reveals Oldest Case of Leprosy

A 4,000-year-old skeleton from India shows traces of leprosy.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 27 May 2009 | 2:01 pm

Mark Easton

The Painted Ladies that are migrating to Britain
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 27 May 2009 | 1:38 pm

Russian rocket to double space station crew

KOROLYOV, Russia (Reuters) - A Russian spacecraft blasted off on Wednesday on a mission that will double the permanent crew of the International Space Station (ISS) to six for the first time.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 27 May 2009 | 1:04 pm

Desert Tortoises Get Real Estate Map

Predicting where displaced animals could live may become a conservation tool.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 27 May 2009 | 1:00 pm

Prince urges action over climate

Hesitation over tackling climate change could be catastrophic, Prince Charles tells global warming experts.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 27 May 2009 | 12:24 pm