Science Headlines for June 6, 2009

New System Monitors Fetal Heartbeat

Tiny fluctuations in a fetus's heartbeat can indicate distress, but currently there is no way to detect such subtle variations except during labor, when it could be too late to prevent serious or even fatal complications. Now, a new system could allow much earlier monitoring of the fetal heartbeat.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Controlling Heat In Large Data Centers With Improved Techniques

Approximately a third of the electricity consumed by large data centers doesn't power the computer servers that conduct online transactions, serve web pages or store information. Instead, that electricity must be used for cooling the servers, a demand that continues to increase as computer processing power grows.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Carbon Monoxide Reverses Diabetic Gastric Problem In Mice, Study Suggests

Researchers have shown that very low doses of inhaled carbon monoxide in diabetic mice reverses the condition known as gastroparesis or delayed stomach emptying, a common and painful complication for many diabetic patients.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Most Common Brain Cancer May Originate In Neural Stem Cells

Scientists have found that a deficiency in a key tumor suppressor gene in the brain leads to the most common type of adult brain cancer. The study, conducted in mice that mimic human cancer, points the way to more effective future treatments and a way to screen for the disease early.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Bats Recognize The Individual Voices Of Other Bats

Bats use echolocation for more than just spatial knowledge. Bats can use the characteristics of other bats' voices to recognize each other, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Students Who Get Stuck Look For Computer Malfunctions

When students working with educational software get stymied, they often try to find fault with the computer or the software, rather than look to their own mistakes, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Scientists Use Bed Bugs' Own Chemistry Against Them

Scientists here have determined that combining bed bugs' own chemical signals with a common insect control agent makes that treatment more effective at killing the bugs. The researchers found that stirring up the bed bugs by spraying their environment with synthetic versions of their alarm pheromones makes them more likely to walk through agents called desiccant dusts, which kill the bugs by making them highly susceptible to dehydration.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm

Newly Discovered Reactions From An Old Drug May Lead To New Antibiotics

A mineral found at health food stores could be the key to developing a new line of antibiotics for bacteria that commonly cause diarrhea, tooth decay and, in some severe cases, death. Selenium is found in a number of proteins. New research shows that interrupting the way selenoproteins are made can halt the growth of the super bug Clostridium difficile and Treponema denticola, a major contributor to gum disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm

One In Four Nursing Home Residents Carry MRSA, UK Study Suggests

MRSA is a major problem in nursing homes with one in four residents carrying the bacteria, a new study has found.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm

'Shock And Kill' Research Gives New Hope For HIV-1 Eradication

Latent HIV genes can be "smoked out" of human cells. This so-called "shock and kill" technique might represent a new milestone along the way to the discovery of a cure for HIV/AIDS.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 3:00 pm

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - A low pressure system sweeping through the Rockies into Northern Plains was expected to bring heavy rains and some flooding on Saturday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 9:07 am

Still Valuable: WWII Ration Coupons

The coupons, smaller than postage stamps, were for staples like sugar, gas, coffee and milk.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jun 2009 | 2:00 am

Peru finds human sacrifices from Inca civilization

LIMA (Reuters) - Researchers at an archeological site in northern Peru have made an unusually large discovery of nearly three dozen people sacrificed some 600 years ago by the Incan civilization.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 1:36 am

America's Loch Ness Monster? Or a Swimming Deer? (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - New footage of Champ, the monster said to inhabit Vermont's Lake Champlain, was recently released. Allegedly taken about a week ago in the early morning hours, the two-minute cell phone video shows the silhouette of some object - probably an animal - moving toward the eastern shore. (Video is here.)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 1:20 am

EPA sued over claims of air pollution in West (AP)

AP - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was sued Friday by an environmental group that claims the agency has failed to safeguard public health in the West by not limiting the transmission of air pollution across state lines.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 1:03 am

America's Loch Ness Monster? Or a Swimming Deer?

New footage of Champ, the monster said to inhabit Vermont's Lake Champlain, was recently released.
Source: Livescience.com | 6 Jun 2009 | 12:54 am

Moon to Block Bright Star Antares June 6 (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - As the moon makes its monthly circuit around the sky it often passes in front of stars, blotting them out for as much as an hour or so. Such an occultation can be a startling spectacle, especially if the star is bright. The star appears to creep up to the moon's limb, hang on the edge for a minute or two, and then, without warning, wink out. Later it flashes back into view just as suddenly on the moon's other side.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 12:50 am

Mexico promises CO2 cuts, activists urge consistency (AFP)

AFP - President Felipe Calderon has promised to dramatically reduce Mexico's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as activists slammed the government for inconsistent energy policies.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Jun 2009 | 12:48 am

Cell Phones Allow Everyone to Be a Scientist (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Cell phones let you chat with friends, send emails and even guide you to the nearest pizza joint. But now these toys are acquiring more serious roles: They're turning into personal and environmental sensors useful for health and science.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2009 | 10:44 pm

Gross overestimates of the cost of illegal downloading

You are killing our creative industries. "Downloading costs billions," said the Sun. "MORE than 7 million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, government advisers said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material."

That's about a tenth of our GDP. No wonder the Daily Mail was worried too: "The network had 1.3 million users sharing files online at midday on a weekday. If each of those downloaded just one file per day, this would amount to 4.73bn items being consumed for free every year." Now I am always suspicious of this industry, because they have produced a lot of dodgy figures over the years. I also doubt that every download is lost revenue since, for example, people who download more also buy more music. I'd like more details.

So where do these notions of so many billions in lost revenue come from? I found the original report. It was written by some academics you can hire in a unit at UCL called Ciber, the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (which "seeks to inform by countering idle speculation and uninformed opinion with the facts"). The report was commissioned by a government body called Sabip, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. On the billions lost it says: "Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10bn (IP rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs."

What is the origin of this conservative figure? I hunted down the full Ciber documents, found the references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a one-page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed "background", among five other points, it says: "Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10bn and 4,000 jobs." An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release. Genius.

But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73bn items downloaded each year, worth £120bn. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. This already seems rather high. I am not an economist, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value.

In any case, that's £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or students, and even if not, that's still about a third of the average UK wage. Before tax.

Oh, but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473m items and £12bn (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist.

I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of 10 and were reported around the world. Sabip refused to answer questions in emails, insisted on a phone call, told me that they had taken steps but wouldn't say what and explained something about how they couldn't be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after 10 minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the call was off the record. I think it's OK to be confused and disappointed by this. Like I said: as far as I'm concerned, everything from this industry is false, until proven otherwise.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 5 Jun 2009 | 10:09 pm

U.S. Shark Attack Capital Named

The now-infamous beach is in a county that has logged 210 attacks on humans.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Jun 2009 | 10:07 pm

Child Prodigy Can Kick Butt, Too

Moshe Kai Cavalin is 11 and gets out of college this week. But that's not all.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:58 pm

Why Some Scientists Never Give Up

Eberhard Voit uses mathematics and microbes to uncover the inner workings of biology.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:50 pm

Bionics Gives Blind Woman Partial Vision

A camera is built into a pair of glasses that sends signals to a tiny chip implanted in the back of the retina and stimulates nerves that lead to the vision center of the brain, helping seeing impaired people see again.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Jun 2009 | 8:49 pm

Wide Angle: Air France Plane Crash

Get information on the Air France Flight 447 plane crash in this Wide Angle package.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 5 Jun 2009 | 7:55 pm

Titanic-Exploring Sub to Aid Flight 447 Search

A mini-sub that explored the Titanic will search for Flight 447's flight recorders.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 5 Jun 2009 | 5:55 pm

Does First Goal in Hockey Raise Odds of Winning?

Statistics suggest maybe, but other findings are even more compelling.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Jun 2009 | 5:47 pm

Universities merged into business

Dius, England's department for higher and further education has been scrapped, two years after its creation.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Jun 2009 | 5:20 pm

Delayed spacewalk ends successfully (AP)

AP - Two international space station crew members wrapped up a successful spacewalk Friday, the first since the size of the station's crew expanded from three to six last month.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Jun 2009 | 5:02 pm

Bats 'recognise others' voices'

Bats are able to tell each other apart by their "echolocation" calls, according to researchers.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Jun 2009 | 4:58 pm

Boys with 'Warrior Gene' More Likely to Join Gangs

They are also more likely to be among the most violent members.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Jun 2009 | 4:54 pm

Video Tour: The Library of Dead Animals

BERKELEY, California — Jim Patton walks to a cabinet and pulls open a drawer. Out slide two neat rows of chipmunks, impeccably preserved. Officious handwritten tags tell the story of each and every animal’s capture. In a screwtop container on the tray, a half-dozen chipmunk skulls rattle, picked clean of all their tissue by a beetle colony housed downstairs

Patton is director emeritus of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and he clearly relishes guiding people through the bewilderingly and impressive collection. The MVZ is a premiere research institution with a broad, deep set of well-preserved specimens ranging from tiny shrews to huge bears.

But, don’t pack your bags for California just yet, though, the MVZ is not open to the public.

But this video is the next best thing. Wired Science takes you on a behind-the-scenes tour of this amazing instituion. You’ll visit the bone room and the fur room, where the big mammals are kept. You’ll see capybara furs, komodo dragon skins, and whale skulls.

We were more than content to just stare at the wonder of biodiversity, but scientists use the specimens to provide baselines for environmental contamination by testing the amount of lead, say, in a wolverine’s skin. By comparing it with modern samples, they can determine how much humans have mucked up the biosphere.

They can even extract genetic material and analyze how ecological change has affected the genetic diversity of many types of mammals. Of course, when some of the specimens were collected, the technology necessary to do those experiments wasn’t even on the horizon. With that in mind, Patton and his team tried to future-proof the new specimens they bring into the museum.

“One of the goals of maintaining a collection like this is to maintain as much as you can,” Patton said, “not just for the purpose that it can be used today but trying to anticipate what purposes it might be used for as techniques become available in the future.”

See Also:

Images: Betsy Mason/Wired.com

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 | 5 Jun 2009 | 4:40 pm

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