Water stress, ocean levels to unleash 'climate exodus' (AFP)

AFP - Tens of millions of people will be displaced by climate change in coming years, posing social, political and security problems of an unprecedented dimension, a new study said on Wednesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 11:33 am

Not so windy: Research suggests winds dying down (AP)

AP - The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming — the very problem wind power seeks to address.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 11:30 am

The Nation's Weather (AP)

AP - Showers and thunderstorms were expected Wednesday from the Central and Southern Plains through the Tennessee and Ohio valleys

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 10:58 am

Japan targets 8% emissions cut from 1990 levels (AFP)

AFP - Japan said Wednesday it plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of eight percent from 1990 levels by the end of the next decade, a goal attacked as too little by environmentalists.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 10:48 am

Japan sets 'weak' climate target

Japan's prime minister plans to cut greenhouse emissions by 15% by 2020, a target slammed as "appalling" by environmentalists.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Jun 2009 | 10:38 am

BP says global oil consumption fell 0.6% in 2008 (AFP)

AFP - BP said Wednesday that global oil consumption fell 0.6 percent in 2008, the first annual decline since 1993 and the largest drop since 1982, as the downturn slashed demand.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 10:35 am

S.Korea completes space centre for rocket launch (AFP)

AFP - South Korea has completed a space centre which will be used to send a satellite into orbit from its own territory for the first time, officials said on Wednesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 10:06 am

When two bat tribes go to war

Greater spear-nosed bats form maternal tribes that go to war by attacking and kidnapping each other's pups.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Jun 2009 | 9:16 am

Hummingbirds 'faster than jets'

Caught on camera: male hummingbirds dive faster than a jet fighter, and all to try to impress the ladies.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Jun 2009 | 9:12 am

Space station astronauts 'spacewalk' in airlock (AP)

AP - Two international space station crewmen squeezed into a small airlock Wednesday and moved a docking mechanism to accommodate a research module expected to arrive later this year.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 8:53 am

Space Station Gets New Door in Short Spacewalk (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Two spacewalkers replaced an old door on the International Space Station early Wednesday during a rare - and brief - internal service call that primed the outpost for the arrival of a new Russian-built room later this year.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 8:45 am

Critics find NHS's £12m spend on homeopathy hard to swallow

Some doctors and MPs say the health service is squandering money on treatments that one leading complementary medicine expert describes as 'biologically implausible'

Homeopathy, which many doctors argue has an effect only in the mind of the believer, cost the cash-strapped NHS £12m over three years, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Homeopathic treatments have been described as "biologically implausible" by the UK's only professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst of Exeter University. They are highly diluted solutions that may contain no discernible trace of the original ingredients. In 2005, The Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals, published a major review of homeopathy and concluded its cures were no better than placebos. Some doctors have since called for the NHS to stop funding it.

But a response to a freedom of information request by More4 News revealed that the NHS is spending millions on what Professor Ernst and others say are the equivalent of sugar pills. The total cost to the NHS of homeopathic treatment between 2005 and 2008 was £11.89m.

Over the three years, there were 68,647 treatment "episodes" – each episode is treatment for one patient but some patients may have been treated more than once. The average cost per episode was £173, which breaks down to £151 for each outpatient treated and £3,066 for each inpatient.

The biggest spenders on homeopathy are some of the London primary care trusts (PCTs), which may be partly explained by the presence of the Royal London Homeopathic hospital in Camden. The hospital has been part of University College London hospitals trust since 2002, coinciding with a government move to integrate complementary and conventional medicine in the NHS. The hospital also offers other alternative therapies for which there is more robust scientific evidence.

The total spend on homeopathy by Camden PCT was £1.86m, followed by Barnet PCT with £863,625 and Islington with £815,918. Kensington and Chelsea and City and Hackney PCTs both spent more than £500,000 on homeopathic treatments.

Evan Harris MP, a doctor and science spokesman for the Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons, said the NHS should not be spending money on unproven treatments.

"It is fundamentally wrong that a treatment that's known not to be effective, that's known not to work in any meaningful way beyond the placebo effect, is being given some form of stamp of approval, even for the modest claims that are made of this product by an organisation that is founded on scientific tests of effectiveness," he said.

But Dr Peter Fisher of the Royal London Homeopathic hospital defended the use of the treatment, claiming the benefits seen by some patients were not just imaginary. "There is strong evidence that patients benefit in the long term," he said. "There is also an issue of democracy ... I wouldn't do it for two minutes if I thought it was a placebo."

David Peters, director of integrated medicine at the University of Westminster, argued that NHS money was being spent on treatment that patients chose.

"The overarching question is what is the NHS prepared to pay for? The people who go to the homeopathic hospital go there because they want to and they like it. They say it makes them better, it makes them feel better. If they didn't go to the homeopathic hospital, they would go elsewhere. And they cost money to look after. So how do you square that circle?" he asked.

* More4 News will report on the cost to the NHS of homeopathy at 8pm on Wednesday

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 10 Jun 2009 | 8:35 am

China eyes 20 pct renewable energy by 2020: report (AFP)

AFP - China plans to dramatically increase its use of wind and solar power, aiming to generate up to one fifth of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, a senior official told Britain's Guardian newspaper.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 4:11 am

Donor Stem-Cell Transplant Best For Acute Myeloid Leukemia (HealthDay)

HealthDay - TUESDAY, June 9 (HealthDay News) -- For most patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) who come out of remission, donor stem cells appear to offer the best shot at survival, a new analysis shows.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 3:48 am

Insomnia With Objective Short Sleep Duration In Men Is Associated With Increased Mortality

Men with insomnia and sleep duration of six or fewer hours of nightly sleep are at an increased risk for mortality, according to a new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Network Creates Virtual Super-telescope

Vast quantities of data are transferred in real time from telescopes around the world to a supercomputer in the Netherlands, where researchers combine the information to create high-resolution images of distant objects in space.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Genetic Region For Tame Animals Discovered: Horse Whisperers, Lion Tamers Not Needed

In what could be a breakthrough in animal breeding, scientists have discovered a set of genetic regions responsible for animal tameness. This discovery should help animal breeders, farmers, zoologists, and anyone else who handles and raises animals to more fully understand what makes some animals interact with humans better than do others.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Concussion Experts: For Kids -- No Sports, No Schoolwork, No Text Messages

When it comes to concussions, children and teens require different treatment, according to international experts. The new guidelines say children and teens must be strictly monitored and activities restricted until fully healed. These restrictions include no return to the field of play, no return to school, and no cognitive activity.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Muscle Atrophy: When The Body Cannibalizes Itself

During desperate times, such as fasting or muscle wasting that afflicts cancer or AIDS patients, the body cannibalizes itself, atrophying and breaking down skeletal muscle proteins to liberate amino acids. A new study shows that muscle atrophy is a more ordered process than was previously thought.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Newly Discovered Chemical Weapon In Poison Frogs' Arsenal

New research documents a surprising chemical weapon used by some Amazonian poison frogs. The study identified for the first time a family of poisons never before known to exist in these brightly colored creatures or elsewhere in nature: the N-methyldecahydroquinolines. The authors then speculated on its origin in the frogs' diet, most likely ants.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 10 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Microphone to pick up pillow talk

A pillow, which uses speech recognition software to record people's worries when they cannot get to sleep, is unveiled.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Jun 2009 | 11:58 pm

Hummingbirds put fighter pilots to shame

The birds are faster than fighter jets relative to size and withstand g-forces that would make the average human black out

Hummingbirds are the fastest animals on Earth, relative to their body size. They can cover more body lengths per second than any other vertebrate and for their size can even outpace fighter jets and the space shuttle – while withstanding g-forces that would make a fighter pilot black out.

Christopher James Clark, a zoologist at the University of California, Berkeley, took high-speed pictures of male Anna's hummingbirds performing dives as part of their courtship ritual. He measured them moving at up to 385 body lengths per second (blps), which is around 27.3 metres per second.

This is the highest speed ever recorded for a vertebrate, relative to its size. The only animals that can move faster relative to their body size are insects such as fleas.

"Behavioural displays are a common feature of animal courtship," wrote Clark in today's issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "Just as female preferences can generate exaggerated male ornaments [such as the male peacock's tail], female preferences for dynamic behaviours may cause males to perform courtship displays near intrinsic performance limits."

During the dive, the hummingbirds experienced an acceleration force nearly nine times that of gravity, the highest recorded for any vertebrate undergoing a voluntary aerial manoeuvre, with the exception of jet fighter pilots. At 7g, most pilots experience blackouts.

Aerial dives are part of the courtship behaviour of many birds, including nighthawks, snipes and other hummingbirds. Falcons, kingfishers and many seabirds use dives to attack prey. By diving, birds can achieve extremely high speeds.

Clark wrote that maximising speed is an important component of the courtship display of Anna's hummingbirds, because of the loud sound generated as they dive. In previous research, Clark showed that male Anna's hummingbirds spread their outer tail feathers during dives and these vibrate like the reed in a clarinet. The dive produces a loud, brief chirping sound.

Its maximum dive speed of 385blps is faster than peregrine falcons (200blps) and swallows (350blps) diving in pursuit of prey.

"Incidentally," wrote Clark, "it is also greater than the top speed of a fighter jet with its afterburners on, 150blps (885 metres per second), or the space shuttle during atmospheric re-entry, 207blps (7,700metres per second)."

This article was amended on Wednesday 10 June. The original headline was in violation of the Guardian's editorial code. This has been corrected.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Jun 2009 | 11:12 pm

X-ray and rocket

What are the top 10 most significant science objects?
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Jun 2009 | 11:09 pm

Obituary: Rajeev Motwani

Brilliant computer scientist who mentored the founders of Google

The influence of the Stanford University computer scientist Rajeev Motwani, who has been found dead in the swimming pool of his California home, at the age of 47, stretched beyond Silicon Valley to affect the lives of millions of people around the world.

Known among his peers as having a brilliant mind, Motwani was an award-winning professor whose work in data mining and algorithms scooped a string of accolades, including the prestigious Gödel prize (2001). But it was in his role as a mentor and adviser to some of the world's most powerful technology companies - including his pivotal part in the development of the internet search engine Google - that he made the greatest impact. He had a critical role in assisting the graduate research of the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, encouraging the duo and helping them develop the systems that made them billionaires, so kickstarting what has probably become the pre-eminent company of the 21st century.

Like many of America's pioneering technologists, Motwani was an immigrant, born in the Indian border city of Jammu to a military family. With his father in the army, the family moved regularly, but the young Rajeev was soon sent to the St Columba's boys' school in New Delhi. He showed an aptitude for numbers at an early age, and soon expressed a desire to become a mathematician, inspired partly by the family's collection of biographies of famous scientists, including his hero, the 19th-century German genius Carl Gauss.

When the time came to consider university, however, Motwani's family encouraged him to study computer science, which was a sideways move that they saw as more stable and lucrative than pure mathematics. Despite his protestations, Motwani enrolled at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur and swiftly discovered that computer science was, after all, a highly mathematical discipline.

By the time he graduated in 1983, the home-computer explosion was in full swing, and he moved continents to conduct research for a PhD (1988) at the University of California, Berkeley. Within a few years he became a professor at Stanford, the institution that spawned companies including Hewlett- Packard, Cisco and Sun Microsystems and has a unique role at the heart of California's hi-tech industry.

Thus Motwani was at the academic summit of technology, and over the years oversaw the work of many students as director of graduate studies in the computer science department, and became involved in fields such as robotics, data manipulation and even drug design. However, his most profound impact came when he played a role in guiding the work of Brin and Page. As an expert on data mining and algorithms, Motwani saw an incredible opportunity in the worldwide web, and helped start a number of classes and groups at Stanford aimed at investigating how to apply the mathematical principles he had worked on to the online world.

When approached by Brin for advice, he was initially sceptical that a new web search engine could make a difference in a crowded market. However, he saw something different in their work and co-authored several papers that developed their strategy for finding information online - taking on the role of informal adviser to Google as a result. In return for his involvement, Motwani was rewarded with a stake in the company, a relationship that paid off when Google reached the stockmarket in 2004, making Page and Brin billionaires and reaping great rewards for himself.

Although Motwani did not get the mainstream recognition that his former students achieved, the experience turned him even further towards helping nascent technologists and he found entrepreneurial zest intoxicating. As an adviser and investor to a string of other companies, including the internet payments service PayPal and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, he quickly became one of the best-connected figures behind the scenes in Silicon Valley.

Motwani gained a reputation for never turning away a question and going out of his way to help any entrepreneur who asked him for advice. Confident but not brash, unlike many of his peers, he was described by his friend Ron Conway, another technology investor, as "one of the smartest people who has ever existed in Silicon Valley". By the time he was interviewed by Business India in 2007, Motwani had a different way to describe himself: a "startup junkie".

He is survived by his wife, Asha Jadeja, and daughters Naitri and Anya.

• Rajeev Motwani, computer scientist, born 26 March 1962; died 5 June 2009

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Jun 2009 | 11:01 pm

Being sociable is good for your health – if you're a baboon

Female baboons that form strong social bonds have longer-lived offspring. The need to maintain such relationships may be one of the factors that drove the evolution of bigger brains in humans

Baboons that live in close social groups are healthier and have longer-lived children, according to scientists. The research supports the idea that close human groups are good for mental and physical wellbeing and sheds light on when group-living might have evolved among our ancestors.

The conclusions come from a 15-year study of a group of baboons in the Moremi Game Reserve of the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Led by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania, the observations were carried out for seven hours a day, six days a week between 1992 and 2007. The observers monitored the reproductive lives of 66 adult females during this time.

The analysis, published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was led by Joan Silk, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. It shows that the offspring of females with the strongest social bonds were about 1.5 times as likely to be alive at 5 years of age as the offspring of females with the weakest social bonds.

"Being sociable means that you spend more time close to others, and this makes you safer from predators," said Silk. "Females with strong social bonds may be shielded from social conflict and competition, and they might be able to forage more efficiently and nourish their offspring better."

Previous work has shown that females with strong social bonds are also better able to cope with stressful events in their lives and it is possible that the short-term benefits are translated into long-term differences in health or evolutionary fitness. "It's also possible that sociable females and their offspring are better protected against predators because there is safety in [numbers]," said Silk.

Females are the core of any group in baboon society. "Females stay in their group their whole lives and inherit their rank from their mother, whereas the males, once they get to adulthood, disperse to a new troop where they are unrelated to all the other individuals," said Andrew King, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Cambridge and the Zoological Society of London who studies baboons but was not involved in the latest research.

Silk's researchers measured the strength of social bonds within the baboon group using an index of friendshiop that took into account several factors including the frequency and duration of grooming others, how often a baboon requested grooming from others and approaches between animals.

"Grooming and proximity are the way baboons build social relationships – females show very strong preferences for close kin, particularly their mothers and daughters," she said. "We do not have many females who don't have any close relatives in the group, so it's hard to tell whether these effects are completely independent of kinship. But we do know that the number of close kin in the group is not as important as the quality of social bonds that females form. And for females whose mothers have died before they reached adulthood and don't have any adult daughters, social bonds with sisters become important predictors of offspring survival."

She said her results paralleled well-established findings in humans demonstrating that social ties have important effects on mental and physical health and welfare. "But we cannot extrapolate directly from baboons to humans – it's possible that different causal processes generate what look like similar outcomes in baboons and humans."

King said the research supported the idea that the role of social bonds for primates goes back millions of years, to at least the common ancestor of baboons and humans. The need to maintain social relationships, he said, may be one of the factors that drove the evolution of big brains in humans. "One way to improve your fitness is to make lots of friends, but then you need to keep tabs on everyone so if you're better at doing that, there will be selection pressure for bigger brains and higher cognitive ability."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Jun 2009 | 11:00 pm

Cosmic Cloud Poised to Birth Massive Star

Cold gas cloud that could give rise to massive stars found in Milky Way.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Jun 2009 | 9:41 pm

Popular Giant Star Shrinks Mysteriously

Betelgeuse is shrinking.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Jun 2009 | 9:41 pm

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 | 9 Jun 2009 | 9:41 pm

Ignored cholesterol blamed for heart attacks

LONDON (Reuters) - Danish researchers said on Tuesday they have found the strongest evidence yet that an often ignored form of cholesterol can cause heart attacks.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 9:31 pm

Forgotten Drug Helps Stem Cells Repair Bone Marrow

A drug originally developed to fight stomach ulcers is the key component of a stem cell therapy that could help patients who need bone marrow transplants after aggressive chemotherapy.

A clinical trial is underway at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston to evaluate the new medical procedure, which could potentially help some terribly ill people recover from the collateral damage from cancer treatment.

“One of the treatments for leukemia is to give high doses of chemotherapy, which gets rid of the leukemia, but it also gets rid of the immune system,” said oncologist Leonard Zon of Children’s Hospital in Boston. “And I need to replace the immune system, otherwise the patient will die.”

The usual way to treat a damaged immune system is a bone marrow transplant, but suitable donors are often hard to find. So, for the last five years, oncologists have been treating some patients with an infusion of blood from umbilical cords, which is easier to match.

“You rely on the stem cells in that cord blood unit to find their way to the bone marrow, and essentially take hold, engraft, and start generating red cells, white cells, and immune cells,” said Pratik Multani of Fate Therapeutics, which is sponsoring the trial.

But cord blood also has problems. Each dose contains enough stem cells to rebuild the immune system of a child, but not enough to heal an adult. Older patients require at least two units of blood, and that can cause some serious problems.

“Two cords go into a person and their immune systems are different, because they come from two different babies,” said Zon. “The immune systems start fighting each other, and then over a three month period one of them usually wins out. And nobody thinks that this fighting of the immune systems is a good thing.”

So Zon’s team began hunting for chemicals that would encourage stem cells to multiply and then migrate into bone marrow, so that adult cancer patients would only need one dose of cord blood to recover.

They tested 2,500 different chemicals on zebrafish embryos and found that one of the chemicals , which had previously been tested for treating ulcers, made the zebrafish stem cells divide and collect in the bone formation areas.

“In the early 80’s the chemical had been given to patients who have high stomach acid,” said Zon. “There were five clinical trials with this chemical, and it actually worked and had a good safety profile.”

The drug never made it to market because more effective antacid treatments got there first.

In the first experiment, which started last month, the scientists thawed two units of cord blood, incubated one of them with the almost-forgotten chemical and gave a patient both the treated and untreated infusions. Eleven more patients will undergo a similar procedure.

Months later, they will check to see which set of stem cells stood their ground. If the treated cells win out, and the patients are healthy, there is a good chance that the chemical does give stem cells a boost.

Image: Fate Therapeutics.

See Also:

• Video of Tissues Forming in Zebrafish Embryo
• Zebrafish Embryos Could Provide Toxin Detection System
• Trial Begins for HIV Gene Therapy
• Making Skin Cells Into Stem Cells Minus the Cancer
• Skin Cell-to-Stem Cell Pioneer Driven by Ethical Concerns
• From Mice to Men: Tracing the Skin Cell to Stem Cell Path

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Jun 2009 | 9:24 pm

The Great Shampoo Sham

There's a movement afoot called the no-poo movement advocating for the end of shampooing.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Jun 2009 | 9:11 pm

Thinnest Superconducting Metal Ever Created

A superconducting sheet of lead only two atoms thick, the thinnest superconducting metal layer ever created, has been developed by physicists.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Common Chemotherapy Drug Can Trigger Fatal Allergic Reactions

A chemotherapy drug that is supposed to help save cancer patients' lives, instead resulted in life-threatening and sometimes fatal allergic reactions. A new study identified 287 hypersensitivity reactions and 109 deaths in patients who received Cremophor-based paclitaxel, a solvent-administered chemotherapy. Two patients who died from an allergic reaction had highly curable early-stage breast cancer. The allergic reactions are believed to be caused by the solvent, and the actual number of deaths is likely higher.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Defeating Nicotine's Double Role In Lung Cancer

A lung cancer treatment that inhibits nicotine receptors was shown to double survival time in mice, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-bird Links

Researchers have made a fundamental new discovery about how birds breathe and have a lung capacity that allows for flight -- and the finding means it's unlikely that birds descended from any known theropod dinosaurs.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 9:00 pm

WHO on Flu: Prepare for Pandemic, Not Panic

Swine flu is about to be called a pandemic, but officials want to make sure people don't panic.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Jun 2009 | 8:47 pm

Study Shows How Snakes Slither

Snakes can slither across flat surfaces without legs, but not entirely without help. That's because snake scales act as friction hooks which catch in rough points on surfaces, a new study shows.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Jun 2009 | 7:55 pm

BLOG: El Nino: It's Back...

Ocean temperatures in the Pacific show signs that El Nino is about to pay a visit.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Jun 2009 | 7:45 pm

SLIDE SHOW: Top 10 Advances in Television

Take a visual tour on how television tech has evolved over the last century.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Jun 2009 | 7:41 pm

Low Doses May Help Cure Food Allergies

Researchers have found some success using low-dose exposure to treat food allergies.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Jun 2009 | 7:21 pm

A Cloning Breakthrough — In Plants

In a development with potentially profound implications for agriculture, just three genetic mutations could change the way most crop plants reproduce.

Researchers engineered a version of Arabidopsis thaliana, a favored test organism of plant biologists, that produced genetically identical pollen and ova.

In most major crops, pollen and ova become genetically shuffled during their formation through meiosis, in which a single cell splits into four cells, each containing one-half of its parent’s genetic legacy. Though useful for creating vigorous hybrids, the process frustrates breeders who wish to duplicate prize plants.

But a few plant species, including apple and mango and orange trees, reproduce asexually by generating seeds through mitosis, which results in two cells with matching genes. Their offspring are clones of the parent.

In a study published Monday in Public Library of Science Biology, French biologists found that this form of reproduction is linked to a gene mutation that stops sex cell division after the first parent cell split. When they added this and two other meiosis-regulating mutations to A. thaliana, the plant produced genetically matched pollen and ova through mitosis rather than meiosis.

It remains to be seen whether the same mutations will work in crops like wheat and corn, and a few more steps will be required before such crops become capable of fully asexual reproduction, technically known as apomixis. The possibility, however, is tantalizing.

In the 2007 mystery thriller Day of the Dandelion, the agricultural advantages of apomixis are sufficient to give the corporation who patents it control over the world’s food supply. That’s more than a little hyperbolic, but apomixis would certainly be useful for cultivating only the best crops.

See Also:

• Plant Tweak Could Let Toxic Soil Feed Millions
• Drought-Resistant Grass Genes Could Spur 21st Century Crops …
• Frankenfood Gets Supersized

Citation: “Turning Meiosis into Mitosis.” By Isabelle d’Erfurth, Sylvie Jolivet, Nicole Froger, Olivier Catrice, Maria Novatchkova, Raphael Mercier. PLoS Biology, Vol. 7 Issue 6, June 8, 2009.
Image: PLoS Biology

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Source: Wired: Wired Science | 9 Jun 2009 | 7:11 pm

'Lucy' Fossil Coming to Times Square

The 'Lucy' fossil has been on display in Houston and Seattle, and now she is hitting Times Square.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Jun 2009 | 6:49 pm

Bacteria Cells Programmed to Count

Scientists have programmed bacteria to count in a feat that could help measure toxins.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Jun 2009 | 6:41 pm

Video Shot into the Eye of a Tornado

A twister tilted over on its side and the crew got video looking into the tornado from the top.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Jun 2009 | 5:59 pm

Experiments with 'static friction' show snakes' slithers in a new light

Experiments showing how much snakes' bellies grip in different directions has shed light on how they slither.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Jun 2009 | 5:52 pm

Road particles pose 'higher risk'

Children may be at greater risk from the microscopic particles in traffic pollution than previously thought.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Jun 2009 | 5:31 pm

Cosmic Rays May Reveal Why Lightning Strikes

By measuring cosmic rays pulses, scientists hope to learn what sparks lightning.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Jun 2009 | 5:15 pm

Year Without Summer? Don't Believe It

If you've seen headlines today on the web about a this being "year without a summer," don't believe it.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Jun 2009 | 5:14 pm

NASA Looks for Partnership in Mars Exploration

Budget cuts force NASA to reach out to other countries for Mars exploration support.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Jun 2009 | 4:15 pm

Defence job for science minister

Science minister, Lord Drayson, will oversee UK military research spending in addition to his civil responsibilities.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Jun 2009 | 4:04 pm

Not fair game: Afghanistan issues its first list of protected species

Afghanistan publishes its first list of protected species that are illegal to hunt or harvest.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Jun 2009 | 3:52 pm

Stellar Egg Reveals Organic-Rich Shell

The shell of an egg-shaped dying star is found to be unusually rich in organic molecules.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Jun 2009 | 3:30 pm

Flu origins

Why some link swine flu to intensive farming
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 9 Jun 2009 | 3:13 pm

Look Out! Computer Injuries Spike

Computer injuries are on the rise.
Source: Livescience.com | 9 Jun 2009 | 2:52 pm

Too little sleep raises blood pressure risk: study

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Middle-aged adults who get too little sleep are more likely to develop high blood pressure, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 2:36 pm

Bird Flu Survives in Landfills

Bird flu can survive for up to two years in dumped bird carcasses, research shows.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 9 Jun 2009 | 1:20 pm

Science as a tool for generating profit

It's difficult to see the assimilation of science into Peter Mandelson's new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills as anything but bad news

As the dust settles following Gordon Brown's cabinet shuffle on Friday, it's clear that the landscape of British science has been transformed. Where the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills once stood, now only a vacant lot and several skips filled with DIUS-branded stationery remain. If the forwarding address is oddly familiar – 1 Victoria Street – it's because this was the home of the Department for Trade and Industry, from whose malign influence the science escaped just two years ago.

Science has had a tough time fitting into the Westminster scene. Batted between various business and education departments for decades, it finally came to rest as the Office of Science and Innovation within the Department for Trade and Industry. In 2007, the DTI became the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform, and science was turfed out again, this time combining with fragments of the Department of Education to form DIUS.

On Friday, the Downing Street website carried the official announcement that the DIUS and BERR would be glued together to form the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, headed by Peter Mandelson. It's difficult to see this as anything but bad news for science in Britain.

The first wholly new government department in 20 years, the DIUS struggled to find its feet. It was criticised by the House of Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee for scoring poorly in several areas, and we had to wait 18 months just for a fully-functioning website. However, the committee also noted that the staff and management were working hard under difficult circumstances to respond to these problems. Phil Willis, the IUSS chairman who oversaw the DIUS, writes of its dissolution:

We have recognised the disparate nature of the DIUS portfolio but making the task even more complex by combining the whole of its remit with BERR will only make scrutiny even more difficult. There is now an opportunity to at least give science and engineering its own scrutiny committee and I will be writing to the Leader of the House asking for consideration to be given to the creation of a Committee on Science and Engineering

During their previous cohabitation, the DTI provoked outrage by lifting £68m from the Office of Science and Innovation's budget to solve its own crisis, the ailing MG Rover firm. It is therefore essential that we have a strong committee to defend science from corporate raids such as this, and to guide and protect science policy.

At the time of writing, however, oversight of science policy in the UK depends entirely on business minds. This is an unfortunate development, but not an unexpected one. There has been a growing consensus among ministers (including John Denham, who previously headed the DIUS) that funding for science should be directed at the most commercially profitable areas.

In February, Chancellor Alistair Darling's 2009 Budget went as far as to force the research councils to re-allocate over £100m of funding to areas with "predicted economic potential", sparking an outcry from scientific groups. Nick Dusic of the Campaign for Science and Engineering commented:

There needs to be an urgent review of this decision as it completely destroys the idea the research councils operate at arm's length from government.

It's clear that there are few politicians in the upper levels of government who value science as anything more than a tool for profit generation. Indeed, it's particularly telling that the decision has not been taken to reunite universities with other education departments, suggesting the government prefers to view these as business enterprises rather than research institutions.

As discussed previously on these pages, party manifestos brim with references to science's role in a knowledge-based economy, with scant mention of the inherent value of research.

This reductionist view is misguided for two reasons. First, the nature of science is one of discovery, and it's not always possible to predict the outcome of research. Many of the world's greatest scientific discoveries – penicillin, Viagra, Teflon, microwave ovens, inkjet printing, safety glass, X-rays – have been serendipitous. And as Martin Robbins points out, it's not easy to assess the qualities of a science without having experts on hand.

Second, it's a wholly uneconomic approach to carry out research that private institutions would be willing to invest in anyway – especially when the fruits of research may not be obvious from the outset. When lasers were first demonstrated in 1960, they were derided as "a solution looking for a problem", yet today it's hard to imagine life without them. Public funding, like public broadcasting, should exist to support areas ignored by commercial bodies.

It's too early to know how drastic the effects of these changes will be, but with a general election looming on the horizon, we have the opportunity to push this issue to the forefront of political discussion. Science needs to be a guiding force in UK politics, not a footnote in its business ledger.

Frank Swain is a freelance writer and blogger. He runs SciencePunk.com

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 9 Jun 2009 | 1:01 pm

Caribbean system has low chance to develop: NHC

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Monday that cloudiness, showers and thunderstorms over the southwestern Caribbean Sea were associated with a surface trough, but there was less than a 30 percent chance the system would develop into a tropical cyclone over the next 48 hours.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 9 Jun 2009 | 12:56 pm