Eight Newly Identified Genes Help Predict A Melanoma Patient's Response To Treatment

Eight newly identified genes help predict a melanoma patient's response to treatment, a new study suggests.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Probing Clouds' Roles In Global Electric Circuit

A semicontinuous current flow has been measured above electrified clouds. Called the Wilson current, this phenomenon has long been considered a critical component of the global electric circuit; however, only a few studies have directly investigated this current, yielding only a few dozen measurements.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Toward Cheap Underwater Sensor Nets

Computer scientists are one step closer to building low cost networks of underwater sensors for real time underwater environmental monitoring. New research highlights the energy conservation benefits of using reconfigurable hardware rather than competing hardware platforms for their experimental underwater sensor nets.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Ballerinas And Female Athletes Share Quadruple Health Threats

Sports medicine researchers have found that young female professional dancers face the same health risks as young female athletes when they don't eat enough to offset the energy they spend, and stop menstruating as a consequence.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Childhood Cancer Survivors Have Persistent High Risk For Cancer Throughout Their Lives

Childhood cancer survivors have a persistent and high risk for a second primary cancer throughout their lives, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

First Complete X-ray View Of A Galaxy Cluster

The joint Japan-US Suzaku mission is providing new insight into how assemblages of thousands of galaxies pull themselves together. For the first time, Suzaku has detected X-ray-emitting gas at a cluster's outskirts, where a billion-year plunge to the center begins.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 1 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Brain Waves: How Neuronal Activity Is Timed In Brain's Memory-making Circuits

Theta oscillations are a type of brain rhythm that orchestrates neuronal activity in the hippocampus, a brain area critical for the formation of new memories. For several decades these oscillations were believed to be "in sync" across the hippocampus, timing the firing of neurons like a sort of central pacemaker. Researchers show that instead of being in sync, theta oscillations sweep along the length of the hippocampus as traveling waves.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

PET Scan Can Non-Invasively Measure Early Assessment Of Treatment For Common Type Of Breast Cancer

Non-invasive imaging can measure how well patients with the most common form of breast cancer -- estrogen receptor positive type -- respond to standard aromatase inhibitor therapy after only two weeks and shows similar findings that more invasive needle sampling identifies, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Why Can We Talk? 'Humanized' Mice Speak Volumes About Evolutionary Past

Mice carrying a "humanized version" of a gene believed to influence speech and language may not actually talk, but they nonetheless do have a lot to say about our evolutionary past, according to a new report.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

Cotton Bests Other Spray-On Erosion Control Mulches

Agricultural engineers have developed the erosion control industry's first cotton hydromulch "spray-on blanket." Hydromulch is the bright-green mulch used in spray-on slurries that cover bare lands at construction sites and roadside projects, to prevent erosion until vegetation can be established. In the past, hydromulches were made mostly from wood and paper byproducts.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 31 May 2009 | 6:00 pm

SAfricans begin removing bodies of beached whales (AP)

AP - Authorities on Sunday began the grim task of removing the carcasses of 55 whales that beached themselves and had to be shot despite the frantic rescue efforts of hundreds of volunteers.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 May 2009 | 2:09 pm

Obama seeks funding cuts for wave, tidal energy research (McClatchy Newspapers)

McClatchy Newspapers - WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has proposed a 25 percent cut in the research and development budget for one of the most promising renewable energy sources in the Northwest — wave and tidal power.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 May 2009 | 10:00 am

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - A strong low pressure system in eastern Canada will pass over northern Maine, creating windy conditions for northern New England on Sunday. Morning showers will give way to dry afternoon conditions.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 May 2009 | 9:24 am

Robots with fins, tails demonstrate evolution (AP)

AP - Robots wag their tail fins and bob along like bathtub toys in a pool at a Vassar College lab. Their actions are dictated by microprocessors housed in round plastic containers, the sort you'd store soup in.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 May 2009 | 4:57 am

Climate change: 'Bali Road Map' seeks compass (AFP)

AFP - Gruelling efforts to craft a pact on climate change enter a crucial phase on Monday when the 192-nation UN forum takes its first look at a draft text for negotiations.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 31 May 2009 | 3:18 am

Why are they trying to gag a top British science writer?

When chiropractors drag a top science writer into the libel courts, the country has lost its backbone

This week, Simon Singh, one of Britain's best science writers, will decide whether to carry on playing a devilish version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? He has already lost £100,000 defending his right to speak frankly. He could walk away. No one would think the worse of him if he did. Or he could go on and risk losing the full million by ensnaring himself in the rapacious world of an English judiciary that seems ever eager to bow to the demands of Saudi oil billionaires, Russian oligarchs and the friends of Saddam Hussein to censor critics and punish them with staggering damages and legal fees.

It seems no choice at all. Any friend Singh phoned would tell him to cut his losses and run. But if he were to turn to the audience, he would hear scientists all but screaming at him to go to the Court of Appeal and challenge a judgment that threatens the robust discussions open societies depend on. A national defence campaign is ready to roll on his command. At a preliminary support meeting, a cheering crowd acclaimed him as a free-speech champion.

In truth, he makes an unlikely warrior. Singh is a serious and amiable man, whose accounts of the solving of Fermat's last theorem and code breaking won high praise and provoked no controversy. Last year, he published Trick or Treatment? with Professor Edzard Ernst on the reliability of "alternative medicine", and devoted a chapter to the strange history of chiropractic treatments. One Daniel David Palmer invented the therapy in Davenport, Iowa, in 1895, when he convinced himself that he had cured a janitor's deafness by "racking" his back.

Inspired by this miracle, Palmer developed the theory that "95% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae", rather than, say, the germs that so bothered conventional doctors of the time. Chiropractic therapy was a new religion, Palmer declared, and he was a successor to Christ, Muhammad and Martin Luther. At home, he practised vigorous racking on his children.

His son, Bartlett, described how he beat them with "straps until we carried welts, for which Father was often arrested and spent nights in jail". Bartlett bought the first car Davenport had seen and paid his father back by running him down on the day of the Palmer School of Chiropractic Homecoming Parade.

Palmer died of his injuries a few weeks later, but his ideas lived on. In 2008, the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) announced that its members could help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying. Writing in the Guardian, Singh said the claim was "bogus". Chiropractic treatments may help relieve back pain, but Professor Ernst had examined 70 trials and found no evidence that they could relieve other conditions.

Singh is hardly a lone sceptic. A few weeks ago, the Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint against a chiropractor who claimed he could treat children with colic and learning difficulties. Nevertheless, the BCA took Singh on and told me it had "numerous documents which demonstrate the efficacy of chiropractic" treatments.

Fair enough, you might think. Reputable medical authorities could test the evidence and decide whether the treatments work or not. Instead of arguing before the court of informed opinion, however, the BCA went to the libel courts and secured a ruling from Mr Justice Eady that made Singh's desire to test chiropractors' claims next to impossible. Because Singh used the word "bogus", the judge said he had to prove that chiropractors knew they were worthless but "dishonestly presented them to a trusting and, in some respects perhaps, vulnerable public".

The learned judge did not seem to understand that the worst thing about the deluded is that they sincerely believe every word they say. On Eady's logic, a writer who condemns as "bogus" a neo-Nazi's claim that a conspiracy of Jews controls American foreign policy could be sued successfully if lawyers jumped up and said neo-Nazis sincerely believed their conspiracy theories to be true.

The consequences of letting the libel law loose on scientific debate are horrendous. Science proceeds by peer review. A researcher's colleagues must submit his or her ideas to scrutiny without fear of the consequences. If they think they could lose their homes and savings in the libel courts, however, they will back off.

For alternative therapists are not the only ones answering their critics with lawyers. NMT, an American health giant, is suing a British doctor for questioning one of its treatments.

After the Singh ruling, the Sense About Science lobby group fears the commercial pressure to rush out new treatments will lead companies to quash doubters with writs in London courts and put public health at risk.

Watching recent libel cases has been like hearing rumours about parliamentary expenses. For years, I have wondered what it will take to turn a neglected scandal into a public outrage. After Eady ordered the censorship of a New York author's book on terrorism, which had not even been published in Britain, the US Congress began drafting a law which will guarantee that English libel judgments have no validity in America. The United Nations has condemned the judges' practice of welcoming rich libel tourists from across the world to their hospitable courts and urged Britain to allow free speech on matters of public interest.

In the Commons, MPs have railed against the absurdity of a legal system which forced a Danish newspaper to pay £100,000 for criticising the shady financial practices of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing, which duly collapsed six months later along with the rest of the Icelandic economy.

None of their despairing pleas has moved the government or persuaded the judiciary to reform itself. Maybe the Singh case will.

If he goes ahead with an appeal this week, bloggers, academics and the massed ranks of the scientific great and good are ready to join him. They have grasped what too many still fail to realise: the greatest threat to freedom of speech in Britain is not the state or the security services or the press barons, but a fusty and illiberal legal system, which has become a public menace.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 30 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

A ladybird is a car's best friend

Tree surgeons are pioneering an eco-friendly solution to the sticky problem plaguing car owners who park in leafy streets. Honey dew, the sugary deposit left by sap-sucking aphids, can leave cars needing a respray as the stubborn residue corrodes paintwork.

The answer, according to a group of Oxford-based arboriculturalists, lies in an army of ladybirds and lacewing larvae. Tom Wilson, 26, a climbing arborist with Jenks Group, colonises problem trees with these "aphid lions" to exterminate the woolly aphid, blackfly, greenfly and whitefly that excrete the honey dew.

The battle against the aphids also takes on another foe, one that loves honey dew. "Ants actively care for aphid colonies, to the extent of rescuing fallen greenfly and other aphids and carrying them back up the trunk," said Wilson. A band of glue around the base of the trunk prevents the ants scaling it. The cost of treatment is about £100 a tree.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 30 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

Forecasts of 'barbecue summer' for UK come with health warning

Cancer experts yesterday issued a health warning as the country continues to enjoy several days of strong sunshine.

Temperatures could today reach their highest so far this year and Britain can expect to bask in the heat until Wednesday, say forecasters.

But doctors have warned that the spell of hot weather - which is likely to return throughout much of the summer, according to meteorologists - could ultimately trigger a rise in numbers of skin cancer cases unless care is taken by sunbathers.

"Most melanoma skin cancers are caused by over-exposure to ultraviolet rays given off by the sun," said Sara Hiom, Cancer Research UK's director of health information. "However, if people are careful not to redden or burn, especially if they have fair, freckly or moley skin, then most cases of malignant melanoma could be prevented."

The cancer research group has warned sunbathers to enjoy the sun safely by spending time in the shade in the middle of the day, covering up with appropriate cool clothing and sunglasses and applying plenty of sun cream of at least factor 15.

Yesterday, the Met Office said it expected temperatures would reach at least 23C (73F) throughout most of Britain.

"There is just a chance that it could top 26 degrees, which we experienced on Friday, and so make Sunday the hottest day of the year so far," added forecaster Andy Hobson.

Hobson said the good weather that has gripped Britain has been caused by a region of high pressure that has settled over the country, which was preventing changeable, cloudy weather from moving in from the Atlantic.

"The high temperatures and sunshine should last until Wednesday, when clouds will begin to build up over Britain," Hobson added.

Yesterday bookies were offering 6-1 that today would be the hottest day of the year while Ladbrokes have cut their odds from 4-1 to 3-1 that the mercury would rise above 100F (37.7C) in 2009 and from 7-1 to 5-1 that the UK record of 101.3F (38.5C) would be beaten this year. The Met Office says that it is now odds on that Britain will experience "a barbecue summer", according to its long-range forecasts.

Chief meteorologist at the Met Office Ewen McCallum said: "After two disappointingly wet summers, the signs are much more promising this year.

"We can expect times when temperatures will be above 30C, something we hardly saw at all last year."

Burning issue

If you do get burnt, you should:

• Take anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen (Nurofen), naproxen (Aleve) or aspirin, which will reduce inflammation and pain.

• Apply cool compresses and moisturisers.

• Avoid hot showers. Instead, take a lukewarm bath.

• Avoid any additional sun exposure.

• Not peel off blisters or dead skin.

• Not apply butter or oil.

• See your doctor if you have extensive burns or blistering.

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 30 May 2009 | 11:01 pm

GOP says Democrats' climate proposal does little (AP)

AP - The climate change proposal developed by congressional Democrats and endorsed by President Barrack Obama does little to reduce global warming and saddles Americans with high energy costs, Republicans said Saturday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 May 2009 | 10:46 pm

Island marks eclipse experiment

The anniversary of a landmark test of Einstein's general relativity theory is celebrated on the island where it happened.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 May 2009 | 10:16 pm

Severe Storms (weather.com)

weather.com -
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 May 2009 | 10:05 pm

Hurricane barriers floated to keep sea out of NYC (AP)

AP - When experts sketch out nightmare hurricane scenarios, a New York strike tends to be high on the list.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 May 2009 | 6:24 pm

Border calm as tensions rise on Korean peninsula (AP)

AP - The thin North Korean guard shuffles around in his dull green uniform, a pair of binoculars fixed to his eyes, while a squad of South Koreans in black helmets glare back silently from their positions across the border.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 May 2009 | 3:35 pm

'Lost' music instrument recreated

New software has enabled researchers to recreate a long forgotten musical instrument called the Lituus.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 May 2009 | 1:10 pm