Science Headlines for June 8, 2009

Drinking Water From Air Humidity

Not a plant to be seen, the desert ground is too dry. But the air contains water, and research scientists have found a way of obtaining drinking water from air humidity. The system is based completely on renewable energy and is therefore autonomous.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

More Than Just The Tailpipe: Calculating The True Environmental Cost Of Travel

Trains, planes, buses and automobiles do not only effect the environment via their exhaust pipes. There is a full lifecycle of processes associated with getting from A to B that we rarely acknowledge. Researchers have now created a framework to help us calculate the true environmental cost of travel.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Colorectal Cancer Increasing In Young Adults

A new study finds that in sharp contrast to the overall declining rates of colorectal cancer in the United States, incidence rates among adults younger than age 50 years are increasing. The authors theorize that these increases may be related to rising rates of obesity and changes in dietary patterns, including increased consumption of fast food.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Excessive Gaming Associated With Poor Sleep Hygiene And Increased Sleepiness

Computer/console gamers who play for more than seven hours a week, and who identify their gaming as an addiction, sleep less during the weekdays and experience greater sleepiness than casual or nongamers, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Cantabrian Cornice in Spain Has Experienced Seven Cooling And Warming Phases Over Past 41,000 Years

The examination of the fossil remains of rodents and insectivores from deposits in the cave of El Mirón, Cantabria, has made it possible to determine the climatic conditions of this region between the late Pleistocene and the present day. In total, researchers have pinpointed seven periods of climatic change, with glacial cold dominating during some of them, and heat in others.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Gene That Regulates Tumors In Neuroblastoma Identified

Researchers have identified a gene that may play a key role in regulating tumor progression in neuroblastoma, a form of cancer usually found in young children. Scientists hope the finding could lead to an effective therapy to inhibit the expression of this gene.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Prehistoric Whale Discovered On The West Coast Of Sweden

The skeleton of a whale that died around 10,000 years ago has been found in connection with the extension of the E6 motorway in Strömstad. The whale bones are now being examined by researchers who, among other things, want to ascertain whether the find is the mystical "Swedenborg whale".
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

MDCT Angiography Leads To Successful Treatment Of Severely Blocked Arteries In The Legs

MDCT angiography leads to accurate recommendations for successful treatment of patients with critical limb ischemia, sometimes allowing the patients to avoid more complicated surgery, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Nanoscale Zipper Cavity Responds To Single Photons Of Light

Physicists have developed a nanoscale device that can be used for force detection, optical communication and more. The device exploits the mechanical properties of light to create an optomechanical cavity in which interactions between light and motion are greatly strengthened and enhanced.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Lethal Cancer Knocked Down By One-two Drug Punch

Scientists have developed a new approach to treating leukemia, one that targets leukemia-proliferating cells with drugs that are already on the market. The research team identified a gene involved with the inflammatory response that could hold the key to treating or even preventing chronic myeloid leukemia, a lethal cancer.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 8 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Air France Crash Victims Found

The bodies of 17 victims of the Air France plane crash have been recovered.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 8 Jun 2009 | 2:00 pm

Women Poorly Represented in Cancer Studies

Women are under-represented in major clinical trials for cancers that affect both sexes.
Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jun 2009 | 1:18 pm

Large Mammal Migrations Are Disappearing

One-quarter of the world's largest known migratory mammals no longer migrate, according to a new study.
Source: Livescience.com | 8 Jun 2009 | 12:35 pm

Galaxy's Outer Halo Lopped Off

The galaxy Messier 87 has been stripped of its halo of stars. Perpetrator unknown.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 8 Jun 2009 | 12:35 pm

People Choose News That Fits Their Views (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - News readers gorge on media messages that fit their pre-existing views, rather than graze on a wider range of perspectives. In other words, they consume what they agree with, researchers say.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 Jun 2009 | 12:18 pm

Chimps mentally map fruit trees

A chimpanzee's spatial memory is so precise that it can find a single tree among thousands in a forest.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jun 2009 | 12:05 pm

Ageing eagles' new chicks ringed

Scotland's oldest sea eagles have their latest chicks ringed.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jun 2009 | 12:04 pm

Airlines pledge carbon-neutral growth by 2020: IATA (AFP)

AFP - The world's airlines have committed themselves to a global cap on emissions in 2020, even allowing for a return to growth after the worldwide economic slump, the industry body said on Monday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 Jun 2009 | 10:39 am

DC pride festival honors gay rights pioneer Kameny (AP)

AP - Fresh off his doctorate from Harvard, Franklin Kameny had been a government astronomer for just five months when he was asked to meet with federal investigators. They said they had information that he was a homosexual. He was promptly fired.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 Jun 2009 | 9:47 am

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - Ongoing rainfall, thunderstorms and possibly severe weather was expected across the Mid-and Upper Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes on Monday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 Jun 2009 | 9:42 am

Science Weekly podcast: The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker tries to re-balance the nature-nurture debate, arguing that we are born with certain hardwired personality and intelligence traits that no amount of education and social engineering will ever change.

Pinker claims that modern psychologists are following an agenda of political correctness by asserting that human nature is a "blank slate" that society can write on.

Our Science Book Club guru Tim Radford has been reading the book and will open online discussions on Friday 19 June.

He talks to Ian Sample about the pre-eminence of science over the past 200 years as a means to interpret the world and the way science books can reveal the wonders of that enterprise to a general readership.

But if you're reading a controversial but rareified book like Pinker's Blank Slate, with whom are you going to share your thoughts? As Tim says, the internet could have been made for a specialist book club like ours.

Science Weekly is taking a summer break, so the next few shows will be leaner and pithier than usual, featuring one item or interviewee apiece. The regular, full-fat podcast will return on 6 July.

Dont forget to ...

• Mail us at science@guardian.co.uk
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• Join our Facebook group

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 8 Jun 2009 | 8:17 am

Video: How to Clean a Skull (Hint: Flesh-Eating Beetles)

BERKELEY, California — If you want to save a biological specimen for science, you can’t just toss it a cabinet. There’s a science to preservation and nowhere practices it better than at the University of California, Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.

Housing hundreds of thousands of specimens, the museum has been at the forefront of preservation techniques since it was founded in 1908. For example, the MVZ pioneered the technique of using flesh-eating beetles to clean the skeletons of small mammals. Depending on how hungry the beetles are, it can take as little as 24 hours for them to strip the meat from the skull of a small mammal.

In this video (which is safe for work but probably not for the squeamish), we take you on a step-by-step tour of the preservation process.

“If you’re going to kill something, you want to maximize the potential use of it, not just for today, but forever,” said Jim Patton, the director emeritus of the museum.

The MVZ isn’t open to the public, but Wired Science toured its hallowed vaults to give you a peek inside a working zoology research facility. In Part 1 of this video series, we present the bone and fur rooms, which store large mammal parts. In the third video, we will look into the significance of the collection and how it has been used as a massive dataset for observing climate change.

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and book site for The History of Our Future; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 8 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am

Steam Tech Gets Less Punk, More Stimulus Money

Take a jet engine hooked up to some big magnets, add some steam pipes, and what do you have? The comeback of some old-school technologies that could help solve our modern energy problem.

The idea is simple — generate both electricity and heat in the same place, but the potential benefits are big.

Unlike a traditional electric power plant, which can convert about 40 percent of its fuel into electricity but wastes the rest as heat, these combination plants capture that heat and use it to warm or cool buildings. The efficiency of combined heat and power plants can reach into the 80 percent range. If you hook up that plant to a network of steam pipes and electrical wires, you’ve got the tools to power an entire campus or community.

Combined heat and power, or CHP, could get a a push from possible climate legislation. And this week, the Department of Energy bet $156 million of stimulus funding on these steam-age ideas. It fits with industrial, commercial and municipal interest in reducing fuel costs and environmental footprints.

“We do a lot of work with large commercial and industrial concerns, both public and private, and CHP is really starting to gain momentum,” said Brian Casey, CEO of SourceOne, the consulting division of environmental services giant, Veolia. “Ultimately as a country, if we get our act together here about how we regulate carbon, CHP will be a tool in that battle.”

The United States could benefit by learning from its past. In fact, the very first central power plant, Edison’s Pearl Street Station, produced both heat and power, but in the era of cheap, abundant energy, that idea was almost abandoned.

Today, most of the time, we make electricity and generate heat in different places. We get our electricity for lighting and power from a central station located far away and transmitted to us through the grid. Heating or cooling, on the other hand, is often accomplished with on-site boilers or electric radiators. Both systems work less efficiently when they stand alone. Together, waste heat generated during the process of making electricity can be scavenged and piped around to provide climate control.

In the early 20th century as our current energy system was being built, Americans “ignored the efficiencies of cogenerating electricity and steam heat at central plants in favor of less efficient oil and coal furnaces in each building,” wrote energy historian David Nye. Heat and power got farther and farther apart.

Now, though, the century-old trend that accompanied the rise of electricity is being reversed. Many industrial and commercial entities are choosing to build their own combined heat and power generating facilities. In 1998, there were only 46 gigawatts of CHP facilities in the United States. By the end of 2008, 85 gigawatts of CHP capacity had been built.

A DOE report released late last year found that CHP was already responsible for reducing American emissions by 248 million metric tons of CO2, which is equivalent to taking 45 million cars off the road. That’s a lot more than wind, solar or any of the other renewables. They have such a big impact because they effectively double the amount of work that we get from burning the same amount of fossil fuel.

With the extra impetus to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to combat global warming, these electric plants that also use their excess heat could experience a lot more growth over the next 30 years. To do so, though, they have substantial challenges to overcome.

For one, many of the regional benefits of CHP are not recognized by existing environmental and utility regulations. Utilities resist CHP systems because they complicate their transmission infrastructure and they say that’s costly. And people have grown used to having their power generated in some far off place and often object to the installation of a power plant nearby.

Despite these hurdles, CHP proponents push on. Casey’s team worked with Biogen Idec, a biotech firm in Cambridge, Massachussets, to install a plant at the company’s new building. After protracted negotiations with the local utility, they are now on good terms, but it was no easy task.

The plant itself is a mini-technological marvel that will pay for itself with energy savings in just four years. It’s essentially a jet engine (see photo above) hooked up to magnets located in the basement of an office building.

“It’s subterranean, 30 feet underground. There’s a beautiful mezzanine and atrium above it and the research scientists in offices,” Casey said. “In the footprint of about 20,000 square feet is a combustion turbine…. It turns a generator to make electricity and then we grab all the waste heat we can with a heat recovery steam generator.”

The electricity lights the building and the steam is used directly for heat or converted by absorption chillers for refrigeration. It doesn’t produce all its own electricity, tapping into the local grid when extra power is needed. But that’s not the only legacy network to which it’s connected.

“This specific project is blessed that it stayed connected not just to the electric network but stayed connected to the district steam network,” Casey said.

Though they are rarely noticed now, most of the big cities in America have some kind of subterranean steam system in place, a relic of the time when steam infrastructure was still being built. And heating whole chunks of cities together, in what are known as district energy systems, has environmental benefits of its own.

“By combining the thermal needs of hundreds of buildings, district energy systems deliver economies of scale for employing equipment and technologies that are far more efficient and versatile than for individual buildings providing their own cooling and heating equipment,” argued Veolia CEO Oliver Barbaroux in a Forbes editorial. (Veolia operates more district energy systems in the United States than does any other company.)

The systems are basically a series of huge underground steam pipes connected to boilers at a central station. They can be a perfect complement for CHP systems when custom-built for an university like M.I.T. or the University of Florida or when a local steam system is available to tap into.

San Francisco is a great candidate for a CHP facility. A set of boilers is already located near Mint Plaza, a newly remodeled and trendy area of town. Around the corner from the nation’s fanciest coffee shop (Blue Bottle’s flagship store), two smokestacks rise 100 feet into the sky. They’re part of a steam power system that stretches back 100 years.

On the map, you can see the steam distribution system as it existed in 1917. It’s nearly the same today, except for a small, new line that runs to the enormous Westfield mall on Fifth and Market.

“There’s still some of the original piping,” said Wayne Wong, marketing manager for the plant, which is operated by Minneapolis-based NRG Thermal, a division of one of the nation’s largest utilities.

The inside of the plant is probably 100 degrees and louder than an AC/DC show. The boilers are clanging away, supplying energy to 170 buildings with 37 million square feet of space in the city’s downtown core. The photo below shows one of the main pipes that connects the plant to the underground system.

Right now, the plant only generates heat, but Wong said they’d like to put in a CHP plant that could produce 50 megawatts of electricity and continue to supply steam to their existing customers. It turns out, though, that hooking up the CHP system with the district energy system won’t be easy.

“You know how it is, folks don’t want power plants in their backyards,” Wong said. “Even if the money was OK, just to get permitting would take years and years and years to overcome the opposition to it.”

Perhaps, with the new emphasis on carbon emissions and local systems, more environmentally minded Americans will be willing to allow innovative fossil fuel power plants into their communities. Even though they burn fossil fuels, CHP and steam plants hooked up to district energy systems are more efficient than other solutions. They might use brown fuels, but they should make greens happy.

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 | 8 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am

Back from brink

Kashmir's hangul deer defies extinction
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 8 Jun 2009 | 12:11 am

Think twice about 'green' transport, say scientists (AFP)

AFP - You worry a lot about the environment and do everything you can to reduce your carbon footprint -- the emissions of greenhouse gases that drive dangerous climate change.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 8 Jun 2009 | 12:02 am

Natural gas explosion at megachurch pastor's home (AP)

AP - Authorities say they are investigating a natural gas explosion at the Fort Worth, Texas, home of megachurch pastor T.D. Jakes.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 7 Jun 2009 | 11:30 pm

Is the daddy-longlegs doomed?

Is the humble daddy-longlegs in trouble? The RSPB thinks so, at least in the uplands. Its research suggests that, because of hotter summers, that is to say, because of global warming, the peat bogs are drying out. It is suggested that, since the larvae prefer moist conditions, their numbers are falling, which in turn spells trouble for those birds, such as golden plover, that feed on them.

My first memories of daddy-longlegs, or crane flies, are from school: Redcar in the 60s, a gang of us huddled next to the brick wall of the playground, and several daddy-longlegs blundering against the wall. Suddenly, Paul Thomas scooped one up in his chubby hand and - lo - its leg came off. So, he pulled off another leg and looked as if he was going for a third. The girls screamed.

Forty years on. The corners of the garden shed are choked with cobwebs, and - now I look closely - legs. Jointed, in angles obtuse and acute. There is also an uneaten fuselage. And what Ted Hughes once described as the "colourless church windows" of a wing. This wreckage is as close as I care to come to a daddy-longlegs. The schoolgirl scream is still lurking within. Not so much horror as sheer responsibility.

I learn now that the leg business doesn't really matter. (It is thought that such long legs enable them to land on grass; they are expendable so they can escape predators.) All that matters to a crane fly is mating and laying eggs. After a season underground in the form of a grub called a leatherjacket, consuming the roots of grasses, they transform into a "wide-winged, stiff, weightless basket-work of limbs" (Hughes again, in A Crane Fly in September), and emerge to flit around the upperworld for a short while.

Adulthood, for them, is a last hurrah. They don't have to stay intact, or even eat. They look calamitous but it is just a front: crane flies are a success story. They have been around for 50m years, which is somewhat longer than we have. I am tempted to think if they survived that long, and even the notorious pollution of 60s Teesside, they would manage everything. But can they?

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Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 7 Jun 2009 | 11:01 pm

Rogue protein 'spreads in brain'

Scientists show a rogue protein thought to cause Alzheimer's can spread through the brain, turning healthy tissue bad.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 7 Jun 2009 | 9:33 pm

Mice injected with Alzheimer's cast new light on dementia

Scientists have found that harmful tangles of proteins that cause diseases such as Alzheimer's can be transmitted from one brain to another, spreading and causing damage after being injected into the brains of mice. The researchers stressed, however, that Alzheimer's was not contagious and said it could not be caught, for example, through blood transfusions.

Alzheimer's and similar neurodegenerative diseases can be caused by the build-up in the brain of tangled masses of a type of protein called tau. They destroy brain function and, when they damage large amounts of tissue, can lead to dementia.

In experiments on mice, researchers found that the tau tangles could spread in the brain, as though they were an infectious agent, and be injected in tissue from the brain of an affected mouse into the brain of a healthy one. The research is published tomorrow in the journal Nature Cell Biology, and gives scientists a much better idea of how to target therapies for neurodegenerative diseases.

Michel Goedert of the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, who took part in the study, said the work opened up new avenues in understanding and allowing scientists to experiment with the causes of dementia.

"This research in mice does not show that tau pathology is contagious or it can spread easily from mouse to mouse – what it has revealed is how tau tangles spread within brain tissues of individual mice," he said. "It suggests that tangles of proteins that build up in the brain to cause symptoms could have some contagious properties within brain tissue but not between mice that haven't been injected with tissue from another mouse and certainly not between people." Though they are also bits of protein, tau tangles do transmit in the same way as prions, the proteins that cause diseases such as vCJD and mad cow disease by destroying brain tissue, because they cannot be passed easily between individuals.

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, said: "This greater understanding of how tangles spread in Alzheimer's may lead to new ways of stopping them and defeating the disease." Abnormal tangles build up in the brain during Alzheimer's and other diseases of the brain. It's not clear how that happens - but it is clear that Alzheimer's itself is not contagious. We desperately need more research like this to find answers to dementia, a cruel condition that affects 700,000 people in the UK."

There is still much unknown about the changes in tau protein that lead to tangle formation in humans and, eventually, widespread brain cell death. But

Susanne Sorensen, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society, said: "Each new piece of knowledge helps build a better picture and takes us closer to the point where we can stop loss of brain tissue and dementia for good."