Magmatic Plumbing Of A Large Permian Caldera Exposed To A Depth Of 25 Kilometers

Large volcanic calderas, aka supervolcanoes, are enormous craters tens of kilometers in diameter produced by giant, explosive eruptions that rank among the most violent geologic events. Geophysical studies of recently active calderas and investigations of their eruption products suggest that their magmatic systems are driven by intrusion of mantle-derived basalt in the deep crust, a process commonly referred to as magmatic underplating.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2009 | 3:00 am

Giant Moa Rebuilt Using Ancient DNA From Prehistoric Feathers

Scientists have performed the first DNA-based reconstruction of the giant extinct moa bird, using prehistoric feathers recovered from caves and rock shelters in New Zealand.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2009 | 3:00 am

Brain Functions That Can Prevent Relapse Improve After A Year Of Methamphetamine Abstinence

Researchers report that it takes at least a year for former methamphetamine users to regain impulse control. The results tell recovering substance abusers, their families and drug-treatment specialists that it can take an extended period of time for the brain functions critical to recovery to improve.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2009 | 3:00 am

Acid-reducing Medicines May Lead To Dependency

Treatment with proton pump inhibitors for eight weeks induces acid-related symptoms like heartburn, acid regurgitation and dyspepsia once treatment is withdrawn in healthy individuals. Data suggests proton pump inhibitors can induce acid-related symptoms in healthy adults.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2009 | 3:00 am

Key To Evolutionary Fitness: Cut The Calories

Charles Darwin postulated that animals eat as much as possible while food is plentiful, and produce as many offspring as this would allow. However, new research shows that, even when food is abundant, intake reaches a limit. One theory for this is that animals actively limit their energy turnover to maintain a higher level of reproductive success over their lifetime.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2009 | 12:00 am

Astronomers Discover Pair Of Solar Systems In The Making

Astronomers have found a binary star-disk system in which each star is surrounded by the kind of dust disk that is frequently the precursor of a planetary system.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2009 | 12:00 am

Keeping Fish in Home Aquariums: Two Is Not Company, As Far As Fish Are Concerned

New research has shown that fish kept alone or in small groups are more aggressive and exhibit fewer natural behaviors such as shoaling.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2009 | 12:00 am

People Sometimes Seek The Truth, But Most Prefer Like-minded Views

We swim in a sea of information, but filter out most of what we see or hear. A new analysis of data from dozens of studies sheds new light on how we choose what we do and do not hear. The study found that while people tend to avoid information that contradicts what they already think or believe, certain factors can cause them to seek out, or at least consider, other points of view.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 3 Jul 2009 | 12:00 am

Possibility Of Vaccine For Ear Infections

Otitis media, more commonly known as an ear infection, is the most frequently diagnosed illness in children less than 15 years of age in the United States and is the primary cause for emergency room visits. More than 80 percent of children will experience at least one ear infection before their third birthday. A new study could introduce a pain-free vaccination strategy that works against ear infections.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 9:00 pm

'Stealth' Herpes Simplex Inflammation Impacts Corneal Transplants

The herpes simplex virus (HSV) can infect the eye and sometimes causes so much damage that the person's cornea must be replaced with a transplant. (The cornea is the clear covering of the front of the eye that helps focus light for vision.) Doctors knew transplants were more likely to fail in people with HSV than in patients with other disorders, such as keratoconus, an abnormal steepening of the cornea.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 9:00 pm

Australia pledges millions for Great Barrier Reef (AFP)

AFP - Australia on Thursday pledged 52 million dollars (42 million US) to improve water quality on the Great Barrier Reef, which is coming under increasing threat from toxic chemicals and climate change.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 2:15 pm

Tropical Rainfall Moving North (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Earth's most prominent rain band, near the equator, has been moving north at an average rate of almost a mile (1.4 km) a year for three centuries, likely because of a warming world, scientists say.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 2:05 pm

'Toy Universe' Could Solve Life's Origins (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The power of computer processing could one day solve the riddle of life's origin. 
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 1:45 pm

Pa. man gets prison over forest oil tank vandalism (AP)

AP - A northwestern Pennsylvania man was sentenced to two to 10 years in state prison for conspiring with his son to cause an oil spill in the Allegheny National Forest because he was upset with his former employer.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 1:23 pm

How Earth Got its Oxygen

The rise of oxygen on early Earth may have been caused by a microbial changing of the guard between methane-producers and oxygen-producers.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2009 | 1:15 pm

Inflatable Tower Promises Easy Access to Outer Space

A nine-mile-high inflatable tower could offer cheap access to outer space.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Jul 2009 | 12:55 pm

The time is now

Building a for a wet but secure future in Bangladesh
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2009 | 12:09 pm

Eco-Friendly Fireworks Offer Safer Pyrotechnics

"Green" fireworks produce less smoke and use fewer toxic metals than other pyrotechnics.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 2 Jul 2009 | 12:05 pm

China blasts US climate bill (AFP)

AFP - China said on Thursday that it was "firmly" opposed to provisions in a new US clean energy bill that will make it easier to impose trade penalties on nations that reject limits to globe-warming pollution.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 11:00 am

Amur tigers on 'genetic brink'

The world's largest cat is down to an effective wild population of fewer than 35 individuals, new research has found.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 2 Jul 2009 | 10:54 am

Where were you when the Eagle landed?

John Vidal remembers making giant leaps for mankind on a beach in Gibraltar

I was 19, doing a summer job washing cars and delivering beer in Gibraltar. We had no money and had to sleep in Moroccan blankets on the beach.

That night was dead calm, the sky was clear but the moon was not full at all. Forty yards down the beach an American hippy couple had a small transistor radio with a failing battery. Sometime before midnight they cheered loudly when the Eagle landed and we ran over and asked to join them.

So there the four of us sat, yards from the quietly lapping waves, straining to hear the commentary on Voice of America. The astronauts stayed in the Eagle for hours, it seemed. The American girl fell asleep and her boyfriend had to keep waking her.

When Aldrin and Armstrong finally climbed out of the lunar lander we could barely hear anything from the radio, but we howled our heads off and all made giant leaps for mankind in the sand.

Within minutes the battery had failed. When we woke up the moon had disappeared too, and we had to pinch ourselves that any of it had really happened. But two days later we bought a Daily Express and saw photographs, so we knew.

What do you remember?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jul 2009 | 10:35 am

The Nation's weather (AP)

AP - The Eastern U.S. was expected to continue seeing severe storm development on Thursday from a slow-moving low pressure system hovering over the Great Lakes region.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 9:27 am

Econ survey: decontrol petrol, diesel prices (Reuters)

Reuters - India should end controls on prices of petrol and diesel and allow entry for private and foreign firms in the energy sector, a finance ministry survey said on Thursday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 7:05 am

Promises of immortality

An English scientist is on a one-man mission to eliminate mortality – but would you like to live in a society without death?

Death is up there with sex on the euphemism scale. When someone breathes their last, they don't simply "die". They pass away, go to a better place, meet their maker, give up the ghost – and more colourfully, bite the dust, push up the daisies or, with a hangman's macabre wit, kick the bucket. Why do people have so much trouble mentioning that unmentionable state? It is, as the morbidly glib never tire of reminding us, as natural as life. In fact, considering that we spend more time dead than alive – we may live to be 100 but we are classified as "dead" forever after – it is perhaps a more natural state.

In addition to the grief and the sense of loss death conjures up, we, as a species, are scared to death of dying and so would rather not talk about it, in case that ancient superstition is true and we tempt fate and draw the unwanted attentions of Death. Well, fingers crossed and hearts crescented that the Grim Reaper or Azrael do not read the Guardian.

Our fear of and fascination with death have been the lifeblood of religion since time immemorial, and have left us with some of human civilisation's most impressive monuments. Religion promises us that death is not the end, but the beginning of a life immortal – if we're good, we go to heaven or are reincarnated as a higher being, and if we're bad … then hell hath no fury like a god scorned!

In the absence of faith, death takes on a whole other dimension. I feel a strange sense of emptiness and humility that, one day, I will only "live on" in the consequences of my actions. Without the prospect of heaven and just an endless, empty void to look forward to, life, at first sight, can seem like hell. But since we're not going to be sentient of it, it's actually a pretty good prospect, especially since we're all likely to suffer eternal damnation according to one religious tradition or another.

After killing God and condemning humanity to death after death, can science fill the heaven-sized void left in our conscience? One scientist, Aubrey de Grey, is on a one-man mission to end the greying of the human condition and herald in the age of immortality. The secret to becoming immortal lies not in some mysterious elixir of life but in the power of regenerative medicine. His "strategies for engineered negligible senescence" (SENS) are based on rather the same concept as renovating or restoring an old house. Perhaps inspired by the religious significance of the number seven, De Grey has identified "seven deadly assassins" in our bodies – including our immune system – which, if combated, will allow us to live indefinitely. Once a treatment for these seven deadly bodily sins has been developed, all that needs to occur is for a patient to spend a couple of months in hospital undergoing stem cell, gene therapies and vaccinations. Once they've checked out, a 60-year-old patient will have, say, the body of a 30-year-old, making them in theory immortal but not indestructible. This means that we would be left with the mind-boggling situation in which my mother could be physically younger than me.

Despite the eccentricity of his dream, De Grey is, in fact, not the first to tread this path. In fact, a humble jellyfish seems to have discovered the keys to eternity. Like an underwater Benjamin Button, the Turritopsis Nutricula is able to turn back its body clock and become a juvenile once it mates. So how long will it be before we can become jellyfish-like immortals? According to De Grey, we will reach what he calls the "human longevity escape velocity" within 25 years. "We have at least a 10% chance that we'll not get there for another 100 years," he also cautioned in an interview with the BBC's Focus magazine. Not surprisingly, much of the scientific community is not impressed with De Grey's pseudo-prophetic promises of immortality.

Of course, there is a certain appeal to the idea of turning back your biological clock for real and having a second stab at youth but with the experience of age. But even if it were possible, would such an "Everland" be a utopia or a dystopia? Well, at first, such expensive technology is only likely to be available to the very rich and will act as a futuristic substitute for Botox and cosmetic surgery. Imagine what it would do to the class struggle if the more arrogant members of the upper crust not only acted like gods but lived like demigods?

Even if such treatment eventually becomes available on the NHS, it raises profound questions. Should people's lives be extended indefinitely? If not, should society or the individual choose when to pull the plug? Should a 250-year-old physical teen be treated as an adult and served alcohol or not? Would society take long-term threats, such as the environment, more seriously because people will actually live to see the consequences? Does living so long rob future generations of their right to life? Would you like to live in a society without death?

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 2 Jul 2009 | 7:00 am

European rocket hoists biggest-ever telecoms satellite (AFP)

AFP - A European rocket placed the world's biggest commercial telecommunications satellite into geostationary orbit, launch operator Arianespace said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 6:45 am

Master Stem Cell for Human Heart Identified (HealthDay)

HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, July 1 (HealthDay News) -- For the first time, researchers have identified a single "master" stem cell in humans that is capable of differentiating into all three major cell types that make up the human heart.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 3:49 am

Tropical Rainfall Moving North

Earth's most prominent rain band, near the equator, has been moving north at an average rate of almost a mile (1.4 km) a year for three centuries.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2009 | 2:57 am

Ants Form Global Mega-Colony

The invasive creatures form a mega-colony that spans Europe, the United States and Japan.
Source: Livescience.com | 2 Jul 2009 | 12:21 am

More than 800 wildlife species now extinct

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than 800 animal and plant species have gone extinct in the past five centuries with nearly 17,000 now threatened with extinction, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reported on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 12:05 am

Idaho F&G plan to kill pelicans hits obstacles (AP)

AP - Federal officials have told the Idaho fish and game officials that their plan to halve the number of pelicans nesting in southern and eastern Idaho by 2013 to boost fisheries is an "eradication program" that needs more work.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 2 Jul 2009 | 12:03 am

Regenerated legs no big trick for salamanders

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mexican salamanders who can re-grow amputated legs are not pulling off quite as big a biological trick as scientists had first thought, which may help doctors trying to regenerate human limbs.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 1 Jul 2009 | 11:39 pm

Gene clues to schizophrenia risk

A team of scientists identifies thousands of tiny genetic variations which raise the risk of schizophrenia.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Jul 2009 | 11:04 pm

Win tickets to hear Buzz Aldrin speak

Win tickets to hear the Apollo 11 astronaut speak in London about his memories of the moon

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 1 Jul 2009 | 11:02 pm

They put a man on the moon

The landing was a moment of intense human drama, played out with fragile, gleaming technology against a backcloth of infinity

Even at the time, we understood that our world had changed and that we could pinpoint this change to almost the second. We didn't have to wait for Neil Armstrong to get out of the lunar module and fumble a portentous remark about a small step for a man. When we heard the words "Houston, Tranquillity Base here, the Eagle has landed," it didn't quite sink in, but then after a short, eerie pause the man at Houston, known only as Capcom, choked a bit and stumbled and then said: "We copy you on the ground. You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again." That was the moment a hundred million people around the world also started breathing again.

Apollo was momentous in a way that Yuri Gagarin's first, heroic orbit could never have been. Gagarin had circled the Earth in 92 minutes in 1961. He had travelled 24,000 miles in an hour and a half; he had made history; he had confirmed Soviet space supremacy; he had done a thing that many thought could never be done. But two things separated him from the Apollo team eight years later.

One was that Gagarin had done all these things before anyone in the world knew about them, or could have known about them. We cheered his triumph, but missed the drama. The other was that he never really left the Earth; he flew higher than anybody had ever done, but he was still a prisoner of the planet's tug. He was never much further from Earth than Manchester is from London.

Everything about the Apollo landing, though, was high adventure. It was the climax of a space race that had been so tightly contested that, right up to that moment on the Sea of Tranquillity, it had seemed possible that the Russians might get there first. This race had developed, although we could not know the details at the time, from a duel of wits between two men.

One was Wernher von Braun, the former Waffen-SS officer who had devised, built, tested and deployed what, in 1944, had been the ultimate weapon: the Vergeltungswaffe-2, the vengeance weapon, the V2 . He pioneered the American technocracy. His Soviet opponent was a figure so shadowy that even in the USSR he was known only as "the Chief Designer". In fact, Sergei Kolorev was an even more remarkable man who had lost his teeth, his health and very nearly his life in Stalin's prison camps, but most of us knew nothing about him, not even his name, until 1990.

The decision to finance a moon race was a dramatic manoeuvre in cold war politics, the ultimate in one-upmanship, a seizure of the commanding heights of space, begun by President Kennedy as a riposte to the Soviet Union's boastful Nikita Khrushchev.

But the sprint for the moon also united an implacably divided world. It gave us our first sense of the loneliness and the beauty of our planet, seen from a distance of a quarter of a million miles. And it was the first direct step in the search for extraterrestrial life. We forget this now, but in 1969, the fear of global infection by alien lunar organisms seemed real enough to ensure that the three astronauts went straight into biological isolation when they came home.

Above all, it was a moment of human drama, played out with fragile, gleaming technology against a backcloth of infinity. Like a billion other people, I listened, on an old junkshop radio with an improvised antenna, in the small parlour of a two-up, two-down railwayman's cottage in Kent, while my wife, son and daughter slept overhead. I wasn't, at the time, a science reporter, but I had joined a newspaper at 16 in 1957, just in time for Sputnik 1 and, like millions of others, I had followed every step of the drama that, on the night of 20 July 1969, reached its highest point.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins had left the Earth altogether. They had travelled a quarter of a million miles, and then two of them had climbed into a little module that looked then, and still looks now, implausible, and descended to leave their footprints in the dust of an alien world, and they did these things while almost the whole of the human race watched and listened and, yes, held its breath. Eagle's touchdown on the moon was the unforgettable moment: one in which we might eavesdrop on triumph or tragedy. We knew that astronauts could get out of a spacecraft and walk in space; it would be no problem to get out and walk on the moon. That much was a formality, a performance for the cameras they carried with them. What was not certain was that the Eagle could land at all.

Consider the problem: Eagle had to detach itself from the mothership Apollo at the right moment, and begin a precise descent that had to be completed while still on the side of the moon always facing Earth: radio transmission was impossible from the far side. Although Aldrin and Armstrong were astronauts, test pilots and history-makers, they were also the agents of the most ambitious peacetime co-operative enterprise ever: they were emissaries from Earth, touching down on another world. They were part of a corporate journey into the unknown that could go terribly wrong at any point, and they had to do it while mission control at Houston could monitor the technology, and while the world watched.

"Apollo 11 was a half-a-million-mile daisy chain draped around the moon, a chain that was as fragile as it was long," Collins wrote afterwards. "I figured our chances for a successful landing and return were not much better than 50-50." Nasa's safety chief during the Apollo 8 mission, the one that flew round the moon in 1968, had calculated that the spaceship had 5,600,000 moving parts and "even if all functioned with 99.9% reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects".

But how much more potentially calamitous was the flight of the Eagle, the module that landed on the moon. There were no circumstances in which anyone could really complete a test flight of the ungainly little vehicle with its ridiculous legs. You could not simulate lunar gravity on Earth; you could not simulate a 60-mile journey in a vacuum anywhere here; and you could not mock-up the fine detail of a lunar surface - the dust, stones, boulders, crags, crevices, chasms and craters - because until the touchdown, nobody had ever seen the fine detail.

Could Eagle find a level surface? Or might it land on a slope, on unstable ground, on a protruding rock, and topple over, so much expensive wreckage on a hostile shore? And even if it could land safely upright, might it not sink into the dust, to be trapped in lunar quicksand, never to escape? There was no precedent, no information and almost no room for error at any point in the landing, that night of 20 July, and everybody in the world knew it.

We knew that the entire endeavour was hazardous then; but its magnitude, variety and unpredictability became even more starkly clear years later, as astronauts began to tell, and sell, their stories. The mission lasted eight days, and everything had to go right.

First, they had to get there. It meant taking off at the pinnacle of a Saturn rocket: a controlled incendiary device that would accelerate the trio to a speed of 25,000 miles per hour and allow them to scramble above the well of terrestrial gravity and then begin the long fall towards the alien embrace of the moon.

They had to be on exactly the right course. In the 1960s, the world marvelled at Nasa's state-of-the-art computers, but one forgets how new this art was. Any household washing machine now has greater memory, more sophisticated programming and faster processing power than the entire sum of Nasa's computing resources at the time. Like Captain Cook and other 18th-century mariners before them, the astronauts had to back up their computer-guided navigation system by making star sightings with a sextant. Essentially, the whole $24bn operation rested on Newtonian mechanics, slide-rule mathematics, the watchfulness of 60,000 Nasa chiefs, scientists and engineers, and the labour of 400,000 men and women employed by 20,000 private contractors.

This enormous army of achievers had to work as one and yet at the same time think of everything, including the temperature of space through which Apollo and Eagle, locked together, made the journey. Space is very cold, but sunlight is very hot: the difference between light and shade in high orbit is more than 200C. If one side of the spacecraft got too hot, while the other got too cold, the electrical wiring that maintained the guidance system and the oxygen supply might collapse. So Apollo had to rotate at intervals all the way to the moon and back. The astronauts had to worry about how they moved: sudden lunges might send the fluid in their inner ears sloshing about, inducing giddiness and nausea. Nausea meant vomiting - it has happened often enough in space - but floating vomit inside a space helmet would be catastrophic.

When it reached the moon, the mother ship had to go into a precise circular orbit around the new world, because Armstrong and Aldrin had to take their little lifeboat down there and then back again. It was one thing to touch down on the Moon - they could hardly miss. But it would be quite another thing to take off in what was little more than a tent wrapped in foil and perched on stilts, and make a rendezvous with something the size of a small caravan moving at thousands of miles an hour. So everything had to go right.

And of course, things went wrong. The alarm systems on board Eagle started complaining as it began its descent: engineers and mission controllers and the astronauts themselves had to make a terrible calculation. Was it just the warning technology playing up, or was there something really wrong? Should they abort? And could they successfully abort? Collins, the man who stayed behind aboard Apollo, whirling round and round the moon, had a checklist of 18 different rescue scenarios clipped to his pressure suit, in case things went wrong. Some of these had to be executed immediately, and flawlessly, to avert tragedy.

Collins, too, while waiting for the touchdown, the moon walk, the show for an estimated billion television viewers, and the take-off, had more time than the others to think about things that might go wrong. If the ascent engine wouldn't fire, then Armstrong and Aldrin would be marooned with just a day's supply of oxygen. "How would Nasa handle that? Would Nasa pull the plug or keep broadcasting their final words to the world? What would I say or do?" he wrote years later in his memoir Liftoff.

The duo made it safely, in a cliff-hanger landing. They also began their 2½-hour extra- vehicular activity (EVA) and stepped from Eagle to the dust of the moon seven hours earlier than planned, because, as Aldrin put it in his book Men from Earth, "Whoever signed off on that plan didn't know much psychology ... Telling us to try to sleep before the EVA was like telling kids on Christmas morning they had to stay in bed till noon."

They stepped down, Armstrong said the bit that everybody in the world can quote, and then he said what he really felt: he turned to Aldrin and said: "Isn't that something?" What followed happened according to a script already arranged, with an awkward few minutes of improvisation when President Nixon telephoned from the White House: "Neil and Buzz ... this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made." The pair planted a flag and left a plaque ("We came in peace ...") and a medal for the late Yuri Gagarin. They walked no more than 60 metres from the lander, gathered 40lb of moon rocks, and set up two experiments, one of which failed in the harsh lunar climate and one of which worked for 40 years. After that they prepared for the return journey.

It was then that they discovered something that very few others knew about at the time: one of them, in turning inside the lunar module while wearing the oxygen pack and helmet, had snapped off a little plastic circuit breaker. It was the circuit that would send electrical power to the engine to fire the rockets that would get them off the moon. Both men were by this time suffering from severe fatigue - they had barely slept at all in 36 hours - but, as Aldrin put it afterwards, "this got our attention". They shoved a felt-tip pen into the slot, and luckily, it fitted. They consulted mission control, began the countdown and took off. This time everything went right: four hours later, they had docked with Apollo.

The return journey had its dangers. They had to hit the Earth's atmosphere at a very precise angle at 25,000mph. The capsule had to survive friction that would generate several thousand degrees of heat. The parachutes had to open. And the splashdown had to be sufficiently near to the waiting naval craft and its frogmen.

But by 1969, US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts had survived many such landings. They could do it. The real heart-in-mouth moments had been when Eagle skimmed low over the surface of the moon, looking for somewhere it could safely land, and when it did, we all understood that an epoch had begun. A new era was to begin: there would one day be huge satellite cities in space, colonies on the moon, an outpost on Mars, and all before 2001.

A few days later Senator Teddy Kennedy, brother of the late John Kennedy, was trying to explain the mysterious death of a girl off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, Nixon was talking again about the war in Vietnam and Britain abolished the halfpenny. Somehow, we were back to business as usual.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 1 Jul 2009 | 11:01 pm

Could Michael Jackson Have Been Revived?

It would have trumped Elvis and Hoffa, for sure, if the King of Pop could have risen from the dead.
Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jul 2009 | 10:24 pm

3-foot Worm Has Fans

The giant Palouse earthworm needs federal protection, they say.
Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jul 2009 | 9:39 pm

New Class of Black Holes Discovered

Only two sizes of black holes have ever been spotted: small and super-massive. Scientists have long speculated that an intermediate version must exist, but they’ve never been able to find one until now.

Astrophysicists identified what appears to be the first-ever medium-sized black hole, pictured in an artist’s rendition above, with a mass at least 500 times that of our Sun. Researchers from the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France detected the middling hole in a galaxy about 290 million light-years from Earth.

The discovery may shed some light on the origins of super-sized black holes like the one at the center of our own galaxy. These astral heavyweights top out at several million to several billion times the mass of the Sun, but their origin remains a mystery.

Small black holes, between three and 20 times the mass of the sun, are created when big stars collapse and leave behind a gravitational pull strong enough to block nearby light rays. Researchers have speculated that super-massive black holes result from the successive fusion of many smaller black holes. But without finding evidence of a medium-size hole, it was a tough theory to prove.

“The existence of such intermediate-mass black holes is in dispute,” the French scientists wrote Wednesday in Nature, “and though many candidates have been proposed, none are widely accepted as definitive.”

The new discovery is the most convincing evidence to date that medium black holes exist. Using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope, the researchers identified a radiation source that gives off X-rays 260 million times brighter than the radiation of the Sun.

Called “Hyper-Luminous X-ray Source 1,” the structure sits on the edge of galaxy ESO 243-49. Because of the source’s physical characteristics and the pattern of its radiation, the researchers conclude it must be a black hole more than 500 times the mass of the sun: not too big, not too small, and the first of its kind.

See Also:

• Yo Galaxy’s Mama Is a Black Hole
• Black Holes at Boston’s Museum of Science
• Spectacular New Image of Black Hole Jets
• Hubble Monitors Spectacular Black Hole Flare
• Mysterious Gamma-Ray Bursts May Have Ties to Failed Black Holes …

Image: Heidi Sagerud

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 Jul 2009 | 9:32 pm

Mars Mysteries: Little Big Planet

How did the small red planet manage to make some of the largest features in the Solar System? Scientists Peter Smith, Jeff Plaut and Roslay Lopes follow the dry trail of Mars' wet past.
Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jul 2009 | 9:03 pm

How Salamanders Regrow Limbs

They regrow amputated limbs by producing tissue-specific progenitor cells, scientists have learned.
Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jul 2009 | 9:02 pm

Will Obama Save America’s Giant, Smelly Earthworm?

Environmentalists have asked the Obama administration to declare the three-foot-long, highly aromatic Palouse earthworm an endangered species, reversing the Bush administration’s mystifying refusal to protect them.

Scientifically known as Driloleirus americanus, or “lily-smelling American worm,” the Palouse earthworm was once abundant in the prairies of eastern Washington and northern Idaho. But sightings became less common as accidentally-imported European earthworms tunneled under their grassland habitat, which now covers just two percent of its historic range.

By 2005, when a University of Idaho researcher accidentally dug one up, the Palouse earthworm was thought to be extinct. It was the first seen in seven years, and one of a handful seen in the last several decades. Environmentalists asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the Palouse earthworm endangered. In a conservation twist on Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” the agency declined, saying that not enough information existed to justify the decision. The agency then refused to study the worms any further.

Local environmental groups and the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity hope that the Obama-era Fish and Wildlife Service will prove more receptive to their petition, which was formally filed with the agency yesterday.

Since the original decision, several Palouse earthworms were found in north-central Washington, well outside the worms’ expected range. The findings have excited researchers, who hope to exchange their shovels for better worm-finding tools. One proposed method involves saturating ground around suspected burrows with hot mustard and vinegar, thus flushing them into the open.

Maybe they should call in some worm grunters.

Image: Yaniria Sanchez-de Leon/University of Idaho

See Also:

• Darwin, Earthworms and the Importance of Individuality
• Giant Earthworms Could Become the New Spotted Owl

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 Jul 2009 | 8:02 pm

Ariane lofts biggest 'space bird'

TerreStar-1, the world's biggest commercial telecommunications satellite, is put in orbit by an Ariane 5 rocket.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Jul 2009 | 7:23 pm

Trees Buffered Earth From Iceball Fate

Greenery likely helped save Earth from runaway cooling, research concludes.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Jul 2009 | 7:00 pm

BLOG: Ancient Game Solves Genetic Mysteries

A 2,000-year-old logic puzzle is tapped to speed up genetic sequencing.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Jul 2009 | 6:20 pm

Gene variations hinder mental illness tests: study

LONDON (Reuters) - As many as 30,000 different gene variations may underlie schizophrenia and bipolar disease, meaning any kind of quick test to predict either disease is a long way off, scientists said on Wednesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 1 Jul 2009 | 6:19 pm

Mississippi Leads Growing Obesity Problem

Mississippi remains atop the pile of obesity statistics. Alabama is running a close second and and, um, gaining.
Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jul 2009 | 6:16 pm

Astronomers Identify New Class of Black Hole

A new class of black hole may help to explain how supermassive black holes develop.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Jul 2009 | 6:15 pm

Are Democrats Too Liberal?

A new Gallup Poll finds more Americans describe the Democratic Party's views as being too liberal.
Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jul 2009 | 5:41 pm

Feathers Revealing Extinct Moa's True Colors

A stash of fossil feathers from the extinct Moa reveal a wealth of information.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Jul 2009 | 5:20 pm

Human heart master cells identified

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers have identified the early master cells that make up the human heart and said on Wednesday they could someday be used to make patches to fix damaged hearts.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 1 Jul 2009 | 5:19 pm

Salamander Discovery Could Lead to Human Limb Regeneration

By tracking individual cells in genetically modified salamanders, researchers have found an unexpected explanation for their seemingly magical ability to regrow lost limbs.

Rather than having their cellular clocks fully reset and reverting to an embryonic state, cells in the salamanders’ stumps became slightly less mature versions of the cells they’d been before. The findings could inspire research into human tissue regeneration.

“The cells don’t have to step as far back as we thought they had to, in order to regenerate a complicated thing like a limb,” said study co-author Elly Tanaka, a Max Planck Institute cell biologist. “There’s a higher chance that human or mammalian cells can be induced into doing the same thing.”

Thinkers from Aristotle to Voltaire and Charles Darwin have been fascinated by salamander regeneration, though they barely understood it. (Aristotle even confused salamanders with snakes, attributing to the latter the power of growing new eyes.) But only in the last few decades have scientists been able to study the phenomenon at high resolution.

They found that salamander regeneration begins when a clump of cells called a blastema forms at the tip of a lost limb. From the blastema come skin, muscle, bone, blood vessels and neurons, ultimately growing into a limb virtually identical to the old one.

Researchers, many of whom hoped their findings could someday be used to heal people, hypothesized that as cells joined blastemas, they “de-differentiated” and became pluripotent — able to become any type of tissue. Embryonic stem cells are also pluripotent, as are cells that have been genetically reprogrammed through a process called induced pluripotency.

Such cells have raised hopes of replacing lost or diseased tissue. They’re also difficult to control and prone to turning cancerous. These problems may well be the inevitable growing pains of early-stage research, but could also represent more fundamental limits in cellular plasticity.

If Tanaka’s right that blastema cells don’t become pluripotent, then the findings raise another possibility — not just for salamanders, but for people. Rather than pushing cellular limits, perhaps researchers could work within nature’s parameters.

“People working on stem cells are trying to de-differentiate cells in an artifical fashion,” said Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute stem cell biologist who was not involved in the study. “It will be very important for the regenerative-medicine community to take stock of what’s going on in the salamander, because they’ve been doing it for 360 million years, and found a natural way to de-differentiate their tissues.”

Having first added a gene that makes a fluorescent protein into the genomes of axolotl salamanders, Tanaka’s team removed from their eggs the cells that would eventually become legs. They fused the cells into new eggs; when these matured into adult salamanders, cells in their legs glowed under a microscope.

After the researchers amputated their salamanders’ legs, the legs regrew. Cells in the new legs also contained the fluorescent protein and glowed under a microscope, so the scientists could watch blastemas form and legs regrow in cell-by-cell detail.

Contrary to expectation, skin cells that joined the blastema later divided into skin cells. Muscle became muscle. Cartilage became cartilage. Only cells from just beneath the skin could become more than one cell type.

“People didn’t know if the salamanders were special because they forced adult tissues to become pluripotent, and whether we should look for factors that did that — or if, as we find now, we actually shouldn’t try to force cells back to a pluripotent state,” said Tanaka.

Whether this striking absence of pluripotency is universal is still unknown. The experiment needs to be replicated independently in other salamander species.

Experiments underlying the pluripotency hypothesis “have been reproduced by multiple labs,” said Sánchez Alvarado. “There’s clearly something to them. But the results from Elly’s lab seem solid. There’s clearly a paradox here.”

According to Sánchez Alvarado, those earlier experiments labeled cells with dyes that may have bled into other cells, creating the illusion of pluripotency. It’s also possible that the axolotl’s mechanisms are different from other salamanders.

If Tanaka’s findings hold, they suggest a relatively new avenue for stem cell research. Bodies might find it easier to accept cells that have been only partially reprogrammed, like those in the axolotl’s blastema, than embryonic or fully reprogrammed cells.

“The salamanders are dialing the timeline back a few steps,” he said. “They don’t go all the way back and ask a cell to catch up,” said Sánchez Alvarado.

This approach has shown promise in the lab of Harvard Stem Cell Institute co-director Douglas Melton, who last year used partial reprogramming on pancreas cells that subsequently formed other pancreas cell types.

“This represents a parallel approach for how to make cells in regenerative medicine,” said Melton at the time. “If you’ve got extra cells of one type and need another, why go all the way back to a stem cell?”

Tanaka next hopes to decipher the genetic instructions governing blastema formation. But however the pluripotency–versus–partial-reprogramming debate turns out, her team’s development of a genetically modified axolotl as a model organism for regenerative research is significant.

“We’ve known about this since Aristotelian times, and it’s only now, this week, that a paper gets published telling us what the cellular dynamics are,” said Sánchez Alvarado. “It’s the really early days. This is the first of many discoveries.”

See Also:

• Going From One Cell Type to Another Without Using Stem Cells …
• Skin Cells Reprogrammed As Heart Cells Beat in a Dish
• Turning Skin Cells to Stem Cells, Without Cancer
• Scientists Search Starfish For Key to Human Regeneration

Citations: “Cells keep a memory of their tissue origin during axolotl limb regeneration.” By Martin Kragl, Dunja Knapp, Eugen Nacu, Shahryar Khattak, Malcolm Maden, Hans Henning Epperlein & Elly M. Tanaka. Nature, Vol. 460 No. 7251, July 1, 2009.

“A cellular view of regeneration .” By Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado. Nature, Vol. 460 No. 7250, June 25, 2009.

Image: D.Knapp/E.Tanaka. Green nerve cells cluster around a growing nerve in this cross-section of a regenerating limb.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 1 Jul 2009 | 5:14 pm

Giant, Spitting Worms Garner Protection Plea

Supporters of the Palouse earthworm file a petition to protect this rare, giant worm.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Jul 2009 | 5:00 pm

Sea Ice Lowest in 800 Years

Sea Ice is at its lowest level in 800 years
Source: Livescience.com | 1 Jul 2009 | 3:53 pm

Here's one I made earlier: chimps learn tool-making from video demo

Copycat chimps build their own tools after watching a video demonstration, says a team of British scientists.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Jul 2009 | 3:38 pm

BLOG: Radio Waves Faster than Light?

A new gadget allegedly speeds radio waves faster than light. Is it for real?
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Jul 2009 | 3:25 pm

First byte

The Californian origins of home computing
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 1 Jul 2009 | 3:15 pm

Landing on the moon rocks

The moon landings did not mark the end of our space dreams. Such exploration is our destiny – and inspires science careers

"The moon landings marked not the beginning, but the end, of our space dreams," wrote the Observer's science correspondent, Robin McKie, last week. Well, apart from being very obviously factually a load of toss… actually, that sentence can end right there.

It is all too easy to knock the Apollo missions. They were extraordinarily expensive. There is little doubt and plenty of understanding that the motivation for the moon landings was political dickswinging. Kennedy's Apollo was a surrogate battlefield for nuclear war that couldn't be fought, rather than a specific programme of scientific discovery. That's why it cost a bomb.

Nevertheless, the scientific legacy is often criticised: Apollo cost a gazillion dollars without so much as velcro as a spin-off. But in truth, as a result of the Yanks doing the whole flags and footprints thing, nearly 500lbs of moon rock was brought home. That mass of alien rock continues to be studied today and has revealed, among many other things, the nature and origin of the Earth-moon system. It may yet yield clues to the origin of life on Earth. Not too shabby for a mission whose goals were military and political, not scientific.

The moon turned out to be barren, a dead planet. This is often cited as an argument that we have no call to be there. But it's as weak as the lunar atmosphere. Antarctica could have been described in the same way circa 1909. But by the end of that century the environmental science derived from the exploration of the poles had become central to our efforts to save the planet. You can't discover if you don't explore.

But that's not important right now. These two bloggers display a child-like awe about the Apollo missions, about which we are unashamed. Cynicism leads one to make practical assertions about cost versus value judgements on the endeavour to ground humans off-world and return them home. Could the money have been spent in more obviously useful ways? No doubt. But we need the bread of medical research as well as the roses of pure black skies exploration. As ever, the satirical newspaper the Onion got the sentiment bang on with its faux 1969 headline "Man walks on fucking moon" and accompanying redux video.

Fully independently of its original context, Apollo has had a lasting and positive impact upon the world. Chief among these benefits is the fact that, for a while at least, it made science, engineering and tech cool (and well-funded enough) for great swaths of people to pursue as careers. The scandal is not that it cost a bomb and left us with nothing, but rather that this, its true legacy, is so often roundly ignored. Great science careers were embarked upon as a direct result of the space race.

The derivative spin-offs from Apollo are certainly not to be sniffed at, despite what curmudgeons might assert. But, more than that, Apollo 11 was a fulfilment of the pure positivity of human nature, our desire to explore. It's that unique human attribute that caused our deep ancestors to cross the oceans that resulted in our conquering this planet. For better or worse, it is our nature. There will come a time when we will be unified in recognising 19 July 1969 as the first small step towards humanity's destiny: to live on other planets. It will not happen in our lifetimes, but it will in our kids', and their children will know no different. Whatever the motivations, landing on the moon was the most awesome realisation of that destiny. That is why we, humankind, should commit not only to going back, but to seek out other strange new worlds.

Ultimately, this is not a subject that lends itself easily to objective debate. You can march through the arguments, for and against, factual, economical, scientific or emotional, and people tend not to budge one way or the other. Recent polls suggest that the majority of the public are still in favour of human space exploration. It is because planetary exploration is an idea so big and a concept so bold that it spans the boundaries between scientific disciplines and spills over to engage the wider public. And heaven help us we need that. It appeals to people as human beings at a visceral and emotional level, and in so doing helps to inspire and deliver the next generation of scientists. It is in that benefit, not just to science but to our society and culture, that the true legacy of Apollo lies. Unless you're some miserable git who sat on the sofa in the summer of '69 trying to look really unimpressed by some bloke walking on the moon for the first time in the history of the universe.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 1 Jul 2009 | 2:30 pm

Cancer: Another Threat to Wildlife

Wild animals get cancer too and the disease is another conservation threat.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 1 Jul 2009 | 2:05 pm