Science Headlines for August 5, 2009

Tumors Effectively Treated With Use Of Nanotubes

By injecting man-made, microscopic tubes into tumors and heating them with a quick, 30-second zap of a laser, scientists have discovered a way to effectively kill kidney tumors in nearly 80 percent of mice. Researchers say that the finding suggests a potential future cancer treatment for humans.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 12:00 pm

Brain Difference In Psychopaths Identified

Scientists have found differences in the brain which may provide a biological explanation for psychopathy.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 12:00 pm

Thinking Crickets: 'Cognitive' Processes Underlie Memory Recall In Crickets

Activation of two different kinds of neurons is necessary for appetitive and aversive memory recall in crickets. Researchers blocked octopaminergic (OA-ergic) and dopaminergic (DA-ergic) transmission and found that this resulted in the inability to recall pleasant and unpleasant memories, respectively.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 12:00 pm

Mars Dust Devil Has Colorful Effect In Image Series

Scientists have combined a trio of shots taken seconds apart through different colored filters to create a special-effects portrait of a moving dust devil on Mars.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 12:00 pm

Does This Avatar Make Me Look Fat?

Creating a Second Life avatar, or virtual representation of oneself, that is thin and physically fit may encourage individuals to become healthier and more physically fit in their real lives, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 12:00 pm

Maternal Immunity Not All Good For A Fetus

New research has determined an immune mechanism responsible for graft failure in a mouse model of in utero blood cell transplantation, a procedure that could be used to treat human congenital blood disorders. As fetal immune cells were triggered to eliminate the transplanted blood cells by immune molecules obtained from the mother's breast milk, the authors suggest that it should be possible to develop approaches to insure this approach is successful in the clinic.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 12:00 pm

Plastics That Convert Light To Electricity Could Have A Big Impact

Researchers have found a way to measure exactly how much electrical current is carried by tiny bubbles and channels that form inside nanoscale solar cells, paving the way for development of more efficient materials.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 9:00 am

Heart Disease Patients With Previous Blockages More Likely To Die

Compared to patients without prior heart disease, those who previously had blocked arteries were more likely to die in the hospital. Patients with previous heart disease also received three guideline-recommended treatments -- cholesterol-lowering drugs, anti-smoking counseling and ACE inhibitors -- less frequently than patients who had not had heart disease. Two treatments -- aspirin and beta blockers -- were prescribed the same across the board.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 9:00 am

Promising Candidate Protein For Cancer Prevention Vaccines

Researchers have learned that some healthy people naturally developed an immune response against a protein that is made in excess levels in many cancers, including breast, lung, and head and neck cancers. The finding suggests that a vaccine against the protein might prevent malignancies in high-risk individuals.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 9:00 am

Lead-based Consumer Paint Remains A Global Public Health Threat

Although lead content in paint has been restricted in the United States since 1978, environmental health researchers say in major countries from three continents there is still widespread failure to acknowledge its danger and companies continue to sell consumer paints that contain dangerous levels of lead.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 9:00 am

Keep bees, conservation body urges England's city dwellers

People in English towns areas are being encouraged to keep bees to help declining populations.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Aug 2009 | 4:29 am

Orangutan ruse misleads predators

Wild orangutans use leaves to lower their voices in a ruse to ward off predators, a study shows.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Aug 2009 | 4:26 am

Florida Bay's ecology on the brink of collapse (AP)

AP - Boat captain Tad Burke looks out over Florida Bay and sees an ecosystem that's dying as politicians, land owners and environmentalists bicker.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 3:53 am

Climate change deal crucial for Pacific: Rudd (AFP)

AFP - Striking a new global deal to reduce the impact of climate change is crucial to the future of vulnerable Pacific island nations, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Wednesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 3:49 am

Fishermen attack Amazon dolphins

Cultural taboos and fear for their livelihoods are driving fishermen to kill freshwater boto and tucuxi dolphins.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Aug 2009 | 3:24 am

The Nation's weather (AP)

AP - The large low pressure system over eastern Canada along with its cold front extending southwestward across the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley and central Great Plains were forecast to be the focus for active weather Wednesday as it progresses eastward and southward.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Aug 2009 | 2:53 am

Green failures 'may hit taxpayer'

The failure of UK government departments to cut their carbon emissions could hit taxpayers, MPs warn.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 5 Aug 2009 | 12:06 am

Organic vs. Local: Which Food Is Best? (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Last week the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a report stating that organic food is not nutritionally superior to conventional food, and now the "insert-the-crass-word-for-a-common-organic-fertilizer" has hit the fan.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Aug 2009 | 6:17 pm

Cash for Clunkers Might Be Working

Average fuel mileage increase so far is 9.4 mpg, or 61 percent.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Aug 2009 | 6:04 pm

Ancient spiders yield 3D secrets

Striking 3D images of 300 million-year-old fossilised spiders reveal their hunting and defensive adaptations.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Aug 2009 | 6:02 pm

Baby emissions fuel global warming

Estimates of the carbon legacy of bringing a child into the world suggest that the green choice may be to stop at two kids

There are already 6.8 billion people living on this crowded planet and the figure is expected to rise to 9 billion by 2050. How can we expect to reduce global carbon emissions by 50 per cent or more if populations continue to grow exponentially? Family planning is often regarded as taboo by environmentalists, but many are now coming round to the view that curbing population growth will be crucial to combat climate change.

The Optimum Population Trust (patron, David Attenborough) runs a campaign urging parents to "Stop At Two". Gordon Brown's green adviser Jonathon Porritt and Science Museum director Chris Rapley have also spoken of the environmental importance of tackling population growth.

Ed Miliband, the UK's secretary of state for energy and climate change, addressed the issue recently at a town hall meeting in Oxford. "There's no question that population growth is part of the reason why we have growth in carbon emissions ... but I'm not sure that there's an easy or necessarily desirable solution once you've stated that fact."

There are plenty of reasons why reducing birth rates might not be desirable. No country wants to end up with a situation in which the workforce is too small to support the elderly – as Japan and China are experiencing.

Most of the projected global population increase will happen in the developing world, but the impact of each extra person on the climate is less in poor countries because emissions per capita are lower. Can we quantify the extra emissions that result from each child born?

Statisticians at Oregon State University have done just that. Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax calculated that every child in the US adds 9,441 tonnes to each parent's carbon footprint. This is assuming that emissions per capita continue at today's levels. Compare that with 1,384 tonnes of carbon dioxide for each child in China, or 56 tonnes in Bangladesh.

To arrive at their estimates, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, Murtaugh and Schlax started with the basic premise that a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of their descendants, weighted by their relatedness. So a mother and father are each apportioned half of their child's emissions, a quarter of each grandchild's emissions and so on. The researchers used UN projections of fertility to simulate 10,000 family lineages in each of the world's 11 most populous countries, and estimated what the "carbon legacy" of an individual would be in different scenarios of future emissions levels.

"Many people are unaware of the power of exponential population growth," Murtaugh said. "Future growth amplifies the consequences of people's reproductive choices today, the same way that compound interest amplifies a bank balance."

The perceived right to start a family is a sensitive topic, so it's hardly surprising that some have reacted badly to Murtaugh's research. "However new-sounding the language about 'carbon footprints' may be, what we have here is the same old Malthusian view of people breeding themselves to destruction," wrote William McGurn, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, in an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal. The Baltimore Reporter went further, calling the authors "reproduction Nazis".

Needless to say, Murtaugh and Schlax are not advocating eugenics. They "simply want to make people aware of the environmental consequences of their reproductive choices".

So now that you know that becoming a parent could lead to a legacy of 262 times more carbon emissions than failing to convert to energy-saving light bulbs, are you still keen to start a family?

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

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 4 Aug 2009 | 5:05 pm

Ocean coral 'offers pain therapy'

A compound harvested from soft coral off Taiwan could provide a new treatment for intractable nerve pain, experts say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 4 Aug 2009 | 5:01 pm

Pterosaur Features Defy Comparison

The pterosaur's wings, claws and hair are unlike any creature found on Earth today.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 4 Aug 2009 | 5:01 pm

John Quincy Adams Entries Get Digital Makeover

John Quincy Adams' Twitter-friendly journal entries are converted into Tweets.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 4 Aug 2009 | 4:30 pm

Plague Vaccine for Prairie Dogs Could Save Endangered Ferret

prairie-dogs

Wild prairie dogs may soon get a dose of something extra in their daily diet: an oral vaccine against the plague.

The same “Black Death” that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages is still alive and well in wild rodents across the western United States. Although only a few Americans get plague each year, small outbreaks like the one reported Tuesday in Ziketan, China are not uncommon. The disease also regularly wipes out whole colonies of black-tailed prairie dogs and kills one of the most endangered mammals in North America, the black-footed ferret.

Now researchers have developed a vaccine cocktail that can be mixed with food and given to wild prairie dogs. In lab testing, the oral vaccine protected prairie dogs against plague better than a vaccine given by shot. And it was certainly a lot easier to administer.

“An oral vaccine will allow us to deliver it much more efficiently to larger number of animals,” said wildlife biologist Tonie Rocke of the US Geological Survey, who will present the work Wednesday at the Wildlife Disease Association Annual Conference. “We couldn’t capture enough prairie dogs to vaccinate them individually, but because we are putting it in bait, we can broadcast it widely from vehicles or perhaps even planes.”

black-footed_ferret_in_wind_cave_national_park_low_res Scientists want to vaccinate prairie dogs not just to protect the cute, furry rodents, but also to save their endangered predator, the black-footed ferret. Once the most abundant mammal in North America, the black-footed ferret population has declined to 2 percent of its former size because of habitat loss, disease and intentional poisoning. A captive breeding program started in the 1980’s rescued the ferret from the verge of extinction, but scientists estimate only about 1,000 black-footed ferrets are now living in the wild. The animals are highly susceptible to plague and depend on prairie dog colonies for food and shelter: When plague destroys prairie dogs, it also kills endangered ferrets.

Last year, an outbreak of plague decimated more than 9,000 acres of prairie dog habitat in southwestern South Dakota, which was also home to around 300 black-footed ferrets. Researchers tried to protect the ferrets by capturing them and giving them a shot of plague vaccine, but Rocke says individual vaccination isn’t a good long-term strategy.

“Black-footed ferrets only eat prairie dogs,” she said. “So if the prairie dogs die from plague, even if the ferrets are vaccinated, they are left without their food supply.”

Wildlife biologists hope mass immunization of prairie dogs with an oral vaccine will be more effective than trying to capture and give each ferret a shot. Field trials are still needed to test the oral vaccine in large populations of prairie dogs, but lab experiments showed promising results: After getting the oral vaccine, 95 percent of prairie dogs survived infection with Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes plague. That’s an impressive success, given that the disease usually has a greater than 90 percent mortality rate.

For the lab experiment, the researchers mixed the vaccine with mashed sweet potato, and the prairie dogs gobbled it up. “But that’s not the kind of bait that we’ll use in the field,” Rocke said. “In the field we’ll need a bait that’s not like Jell-O, that’s a little more resistant to the elements. That’s what we’re working on right now.”

The researchers are also testing the vaccine in other wild animals, including pregnant ones, to make sure that the vaccine won’t have any harmful effects if accidentally ingested by a hungry passer-by.

Although the main goal is to protect ferrets, the plague vaccine might have side benefits for people, Rocke said. Humans usually catch plague from fleas living on infected wild animals, so if fewer animals get the plague, Rocke said, fewer people will be exposed to it. Mass vaccination may also cut down on pesticide use on public lands, because park rangers won’t have to dust prairie dog colonies with flea killer.

Only five about a dozen people catch plague in the United States each year, mostly because we have minimal contact with rodents and their fleas. But worldwide, several thousand people contract the disease every year.

“There are parts of the world where it causes disease,” Rocke said. “The plague is still out there.”

See Also:

Image 1: Flickr/Slambo_42. Image 2: Dan Foster/National Park Service.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Aug 2009 | 4:19 pm

Collectible COLBERT Space Patch Sells Out (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - Nearly a month before the payload it celebrates is scheduled to launch to space, a collectible embroidered patch has sold out, with no plans for it to be produced again.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Aug 2009 | 4:00 pm

Fly Me to ... Wait. Wow.

The space shuttle Discovery rolled out to its launch pad slowed by brilliant lightning flashes and soggy mud.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Aug 2009 | 3:39 pm

Salazar again urges climate action in Senate (AP)

AP - Standing inside a solar energy plant, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar vowed Tuesday that the health care debate in Washington won't slow progress on a sweeping climate change bill.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Aug 2009 | 3:09 pm

Experts predict quieter Atlantic hurricane season (AFP)

AFP - Weather experts on Wednesday reduced the number of projected hurricanes in the north Atlantic this season to four, two of them major hurricanes with winds above 178 kilometers (111 miles) per hour.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Aug 2009 | 1:59 pm

Fingertip Force

Animation of a human finger performing a rubbing task that requires the combined control of fingertip motion and force. This task was the subject of a recent study that explored what factors place limits on dextrous tasks.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Aug 2009 | 1:25 pm

Scientists Sail to Pacific Plastic Garbage Patch

Scientists ship out to study huge patch of plastic debris in middle of Pacific Ocean.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Aug 2009 | 1:21 pm

Lightning Slows Space Shuttle's Launch Pad Trek (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The space shuttle Discovery rolled out to its Florida launch pad Tuesday in an arduous, slow trek made even slower by brilliant lightning flashes and soggy mud.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 4 Aug 2009 | 1:02 pm

Pneumonic Plague: Should We Worry?

An outbreak of pneumonic plague in China has killed three
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Aug 2009 | 12:41 pm

A Brief History of U.S. Innovation

It was simply homegrown ingenuity that turned America into a world leader.
Source: Livescience.com | 4 Aug 2009 | 12:21 pm

Satellite Data Could Overturn Plankton Bloom Hypothesis

Every year, the north Atlantic ocean turns green with plankton, and for more than fifty years, scientists thought they knew why. Now, a decade’s worth of satellite measurements suggest they were wrong.

The common-sense idea that in the spring, the sun warms up the water column until it hits a key threshold and suddenly comes alive was formalized in 1953 by Norwegian oceanographer Harald Sverdrup. But the true beginning of the plankton blooms probably begins in the dark of winter.

“We found that the north Atlantic bloom was starting much earlier than we thought and it didn’t coincide with an improvement in the growth conditions from the phytoplankton,” Michael Behrenfeld, an phytoplankton ecologist at Oregon State University. “It started in January.”

Plankton blooms are a hot topic in the earth sciences because they are one determinant of how big a carbon reservoir the oceans can be. That’s important for climate science generally, and for would-be geoengineers specifically. A new fundamental understanding of plankton blooms could change the way we model our climate now and long into the future.

Phytoplankton harness the energy of the sun and draw on nutrients in the ocean like nitrogen, iron, and other elements that land plants get from soil. So, Sverdrup and others focused on solar and nutrient availability as the key to their growth. But Behrenfeld found that the phytoplankton’s growth rate started to accelerate in mid-winter, when the conditions for their growth were presumably the worst.

“When we said [the blooms] are beginning in the middle of winter, it meant that the basic understanding of what causes the blooms was wrong,” he said.

He floated an alternative thesis at a NASA event last month, which he says squares better with the new data. During the winter months, cold winds blowing across the water cool the top surface layers. Cold water sinks, pushing up some warmer water, which gets cooled itself and drops. The process creates convection and carries the tiny plankton through a much larger volume of the ocean, diluting them.

When the phytoplankton are spread out, it’s harder for the zooplankton that eat them to find them. Suddenly, the phytoplankton can breed like crazy without as much interference by predators. As spring arrives, the temperature of the surface water and the layers underneath it equalize. The convection stops. The water stops mixing.

Behrenfeld says that it’s at that moment — when the phytoplankton get stuck at the top of the ocean — that we notice the blooms.

“The decoupling between predators and prey occurred before but you start seeing the effect when the mixing stops,” he said.

If he’s right, the new model would have dramatic implications for ocean health in a warming world. If a warmer ocean is all that’s needed to spark plankton blooms, then global warming would lead to larger and larger blooms. With Behrenfeld’s model, a warming ocean would hurt the blooms. Considering that the blooms are the base of the oceanic food chain, that would hurt species ranging from the tiniest fish to the largest whales.

How did the winter plankton blooms not show up in previous data? Well, mostly because very few research vessels want to be bobbing around the north Atlantic in January. Behrenfeld thinks that introduced a bias in the data that seemed to show that the blooms began suddenly in the spring, when more researchers were out looking for them.

Sadly, the excellent satellite that’s provided Behrenfeld’s data — the SeaWIFS — has been on the fritz for the last year. While new fixes keep it working in fits and starts, full datasets don’t seem likely to get beamed down from on high. While the MODIS satellite provides some of the SeaWIFS functionality, it won’t provide the exact same data as older satellite, making long-term studies more difficult. No replacement for SeaWIFS is on the horizon.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Aug 2009 | 12:01 pm

Six Degrees of Nolan Ryan: Network Science Ranks Baseball Greats

Arguing over who’s the better player is as much a pastime as baseball itself.

Pedro Martinez or Sandy Koufax? Barry Bonds or Mickey Mantle? Of course it’s impossible to say. You can’t compare players from different eras. Heck, it’s hard enough to compare them between teams, in the same season.

But that doesn’t stop stat junkies from trying. They use equations only slightly less complex than credit derivatives formulas, and no more comprehensible to outsiders than the nose-tapping, ear-tugging, cap-pulling signals of a third base coach.

The latest entry to this field of Monte Carlo simulations and regression analyses and optimization algorithms was posted last Thursday in arXiv, an informal online repository of papers devoted to high-energy physics and self-organizing systems and other such knuckle-balling disciplines.

The study’s authors used network science to crunch the results of every single at-bat between 1954 and 2008 — and thanks to a baseball version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” it’s possible to compare players who never faced each other.

“The time frame of baseball history we studied is connected, and those connections in principle could be leveraged to compare players across eras,” said Peter Mucha, a University of North Carolina mathematician. “There is at least one path between every pair of players in the network.”

The model begins with a statistic called Runs Until End, according to which the outcome of every at-bat is assigned a score derived from the expected number of runs a team would score before an inning’s end. The total RUE score of every pitcher-batter pair over the course of a season is calculated.

Then the model gets interesting. The final value for how Albert Pujols fared against Tim Lincecum is affected by how Lincecum matched up with Hanley Ramirez, which in turn is affected by how Ramirez did against Jamie Moyer, and so on down the line for every last at-bat in a season. Once those numbers are calculated, any two players can be compared.

And then the same process can be applied between seasons. Hank Aaron can be set beside Barry Bonds — not just according to how they each did against Nolan Ryan, though that would be part of the score, but according to how each did against every pitcher they ever faced, and how each of those pitchers did against every hitter, so long as some series of links connected the two sluggers.

So what are the results? The researchers have only released a few, preferring to wait until their model’s ready for the show. It’s still rough around the edges, having not yet learned to handle stolen bases, injuries and differences between ballparks. (Todd Helton, his numbers accumulated in the thin air and vast gaps of Denver’s Coors Field, currently surpasses Mickey Mantle.) Many contemporary stars benefit from having their numbers not yet reflect the performance decline of age, and the defensive side of the game is ignored.

Another factor that’s not accounted for is the number-skewing effects of performance-enhancing drug use. “I don’t think we can say anything at all about PEDs, other than where the impact is that might be quantified. If I have a match up between Pedro Martinez and Rafael Palmeiro, maybe that value would have been different,” said paper co-author Mason Porter, an Oxford University mathematician.

But for all those caveats, the proof-of-principle numbers are fun. Barry Bonds is indeed best hitter. His godfather, Willie Mays, is sixth-best, and beats out Alex Rodriguez. Frank Viola won the Cy Young award in 1988 despite being the season’s 24th-ranked pitcher. And Pedro Martinez is the best pitcher of the modern era.

The model also ranks Bert Blyleven, considered the greatest pitcher not elected to the Hall of Fame, ahead of Hall members Steve Carlton, Phil Niekro and Don Sutton.

“In my opinion, Blyleven got robbed,” said Porter.

See Also:

Citation: “Mutually-Antagonistic Interactions in Baseball Networks.” By Serguei Saavedra, Scott Powers, Trent McCotter, Mason A. Porter, Peter J. Mucha. arXiv, July 30, 2009.

Image: Bryce Edwards/Flickr

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 4 Aug 2009 | 11:39 am

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